Armies of Heaven

by Jay Rubenstein

  This lesson formed one of the fundamental tenets of Christianity. Literally speaking, Jerusalem was a city on earth. But in the structures of medieval Christian thought, such literal meanings were inconsequential. The earthly city in the Middle East is just that: a city. Read allegorically, Jerusalem is God’s church. Spiritually, it is a soul at peace. Prophetically, it is the kingdom of God that shall appear at the end of time. Higher truths are in the mind and in the soul, not in a pilgrimage destination.3

  By the seventh century, however, Western Christians had more practical reasons to lose interest. Travel into the old province of Judaea was becoming dangerous. In 614 Jerusalem fell to the Persian ruler Khosrau II, who took the True Cross back to his capital city of Ctesiphon, near Baghdad, as plunder. According to a later version of the story, Khosrau then declared himself a god and kept the cross in a throne room atop a bronze tower. The cross sat on his right; to his left he kept a statue of a golden rooster. Encircling the throne were models of the sun, moon, and stars, and he had further rigged up the tower with a secret irrigation system that enabled him to pretend to be a rain god.

  Fifteen years later the Emperor Heraclius managed to recapture Jerusalem and the True Cross, but this second era of Christian Jerusalem lasted less than a decade. In 638 the city fell again, this time to Muslim armies. In the face of Islam’s astonishingly rapid expansion, the frontiers of the Eastern Roman Empire collapsed. The Western Roman Empire was already in ruins. Jerusalem, a Muslim city, had become for Latin Christians a dangerous, out-of-the-way destination. In the centuries that followed, there seemed little reason to go.4

  The rediscovery of this tangible, earthly city seemed to happen suddenly around 1000, owing to changes in both piety and politics. In terms of the former, European Christians began to look for Jerusalem at home, within their own churches, not within their own souls, as St. Jerome had encouraged them to do. That is to say, in the 900s ordinary believers developed an enthusiasm for “local pilgrimages,” visits to nearby churches where they might pray before saints’ shrines and seek forgiveness for sins, healing for a disease, or release from chains. It was the beginning of a golden age in pilgrimage. But there are obviously differences between visiting the Cloak of Our Lady of Chartres or the reliquary of Sainte Foy at Conques or the shrine of St. Léonard of Noblat, on the one hand, and attempting the long and arduous pilgrimage to Jerusalem, on the other. The latter was infinitely more holy, just as it was almost inaccessible.

  Around the year 1000, however, as this new enthusiasm for pilgrimage was reaching a sort of zenith, a new road to the Holy Land became suddenly traversable. The land route through Hungary opened after Stephen I established himself as that country’s first Christian king. Intrepid pilgrims who wished to attempt this most dangerous and glamorous devotional act now had a viable opportunity to do so.5

  The timing was fortuitous, or perhaps portentous, since it occurred at the end of the first millennium, a time of increased apocalyptic expectation. Just as pilgrims started looking more and more toward earthly Jerusalem, so did Christian thinkers and theologians begin searching the stars and their libraries for signs of the advent of Antichrist and the eventual return of Christ in majesty. The roads to the heavenly and earthly Jerusalems were opening all at once.

  What pilgrims saw when they visited the earthly city was disturbing: Barbarous, unbelieving tribes governed Jerusalem and controlled access to the holy sites. To the pilgrims, these were a people whose language, culture, and religion were entirely incomprehensible. Christian travelers brought back from the Middle East, with an ever-increasing frequency and shrillness, tales of shoddy and profane treatment meted out to Christians and their shrines by these enemies whom their own faulty grasp of history and prophecy could not fully explain. The situation required a violent, if not apocalyptic, response.

  The Sacking of the Holy Sepulcher in 1009

  The first major confrontation—the first near crusade, or the first mini-apocalypse—occurred in the year 1009. At that time the caliph of Egypt, al-Hakim bi Amr Allah, who also controlled Jerusalem, ordered his followers to destroy the Holy Sepulcher. He may have done so out of simple irritation at the crowds of Christians flocking to Jerusalem during the Easter season, or maybe he was angry about what the Christians were doing once they reached Jerusalem. According to a later Arab historian, when al-Hakim asked an advisor named Qutekin al-Adudi why the Christians bothered with their pilgrimages, he learned about the miracle of the Holy Fire. The lamps in the Aedicule—the small building inside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher that actually contained the tomb—were all extinguished on Good Friday and then miraculously relit themselves the next day and burned with a remarkably pure white light. But the miracle was a fake: Through the mixing of particular types of oil, the advisor explained, the lamps became especially combustible and burned with an unusual intensity. News of such fakery so infuriated al-Hakim that he ordered the entire church knocked to the ground.

  How important the Easter services were in triggering this reaction we cannot be sure. But an outraged sense of piety does seem to have played a part in al-Hakim’s decision. The destruction of the Holy Sepulcher fit into a larger program of persecution aimed at both Jews and Christians, who in normal times were regarded as dhimmi, inheritors of the early stages of the divine revelation of which Islam represented the final chapter. As such, they were considered protected religious minorities, subject to certain taxes and restrictions but otherwise free from direct persecution.

  Al-Hakim reversed this policy of tolerance. Besides the Holy Sepulcher, he ordered many other churches and synagogues destroyed, outlawed Christian ceremony, had Torah scrolls desecrated, and required Christians and Jews to identify themselves with special clothing on the streets and badges when visiting the baths.

  This drive to create a pure space for the practice of Islam points to a deeper eccentricity in al-Hakim’s character. Agitated by dissenters and heretics within his own faith, by the end of his life he began actively promoting a belief in his own divinity. Not all of his followers were willing to follow him on this path. One February night in 1021, while riding alone on a donkey in the hills outside of Cairo, as he often did, al-Hakim disappeared. His bloody clothes were discovered, but his body had vanished. Though he was probably murdered, loyal followers remained hopeful that he had been taken up to heaven, his mysterious disappearance apparently evidence of his messianic status. A solar eclipse the next day lent some credence to the belief.6

  Regardless of the facts on the ground in Egypt and Palestine, Christians in southern France had a remarkable and peculiar reaction to the destruction of the church. They blamed the Jews, particularly French Jews. “There were a great many of that race at Orléans, the royal city of Gaul,” contemporary historian Rodulfus Glaber wrote, “and they are notorious for being even more arrogant, envious, and insolent than the rest of their brethren.” Rumor spread that these Jews, inspired by the devil, had hired a serf to travel to Cairo and to deliver to al-Hakim a letter written in Hebrew and hidden inside his staff. The letter warned the caliph—in what was, in hindsight, a startlingly accurate prediction—that the Christians wished to inhabit all his lands and would do so if he did not immediately destroy the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, thus robbing them of any reason to travel to Jerusalem. Enraged and a little frightened, the caliph ordered his followers to tear down that building and all other Christian holy places throughout Palestine.7

  French Christians rose up in anger against the Jews. “They became objects of universal hatred; they were driven from their cities, some were put to the sword, others were drowned in rivers, and many found other deaths.” Given the option of death or baptism, a few “preferred to slit their own throats” rather than receive the sacrament. The man accused of carrying the secret Hebrew message to the caliph in Cairo was burned at the stake. Those Jews who escaped Christian fury went into hiding for five years and then, little by little, returned to their old lives in the cities. Some Jews who
had converted subsequently renounced their faith. Their apostasy disappointed Rodulfus Glaber, our source for these events, but he found it nonetheless fitting that a few Jews would survive, bearing witness to their own wickedness and continuing guilt for having shed Christ’s blood.8

  It is remarkable how easily contemporary observers associated Islamic violence in the Middle East with Jewish perfidy at home. Indeed, the whole incident seems, at first glance, just another dismal chapter in the long saga of Christian violence against Jews. But it is not another chapter in a story. It is instead the first chapter—the first of the medieval pogroms against the Jews, inspired by rumors of events in Jerusalem. The second pogrom would occur some eighty-five years later as a result of the preaching inspiring the First Crusade, with sequels to follow at the calling of the Second and the Third Crusades. For medieval Christians there existed some profound historical and psychological connection between Christian concerns for the Holy Land and Christian hatred for the Jews, even though the more obvious villains in this story were Muslims, who, after all, controlled Jerusalem and who had in fact destroyed the church.

  In the Middle East, the events in 1009 were not as momentous as they had first appeared. A new modus vivendi was established between Christians and Egyptians, and repairs to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher began almost immediately. A more ambitious program of reconstruction would commence in 1037, although the final product would be on a much smaller scale than the first basilica of Constantine. The pilgrims who visited this church seem to have been blissfully unaware that it was not the original. One well-informed historian writing in the early twelfth century even claimed that the structure had never suffered any damage since Constantine the Great had first overseen its building.

  In the East and the West, the events of 1009 all but vanished from memory. A pattern, however, had been set—a combination of apocalyptic expectation, anti-Jewish violence, and terrors inspired by news from Jerusalem—that would repeat itself at the time of the First Crusade, though no one alive in 1095 knew they were following precedents.9

  Pilgrims’ Progress, 1064–1065

  Reconstruction of the Holy Sepulcher began, and pilgrimages resumed. To judge from the historical record, most were relatively peaceful—or at least not eventful enough to be of interest to historians. Only if a celebrity happened to go to Jerusalem would someone think it worth taking note. Count Fulk Nerra of Anjou, for example, made at least three pilgrimages to Jerusalem, two before and one after the Sepulcher’s destruction. Duke Robert I of Normandy would go as a penitent to Jerusalem in 1034 and die on his way home, leaving a bastard son named William (later, “the Conqueror”) as heir to his duchy. Some of the pilgrimages comprised large groups. These numbered into the hundreds and possibly thousands and included great pilgrimages in 1026 and 1033 as well as the failed pilgrimage of Bishop Lietbert of Cambrai in 1054. The largest and most famous of these expeditions commenced in 1064, when thousands of Germans gathered together to visit the Holy Land, many of them expecting, apparently, to arrive just in time for the Apocalypse.10

  A lot would have changed along the land route to Jerusalem in the 1050s. Pilgrims might have recognized the differences, but they would have had difficulty identifying the causes. From the Christian traveler’s perspective, the roadways had grown more dangerous. The behavior of the Muslim lords had become more erratic, for reasons that seemed inexplicable in the eyes of the pilgrims. The reality was that the cultural and political frontiers of the Islamic world were shifting as the tenuous peace of the previous half-century was undermined by the arrival of Seljuk Turks. A nomadic tribal group from Central Asia, they had begun to settle in on the lands of the Abbasid caliphs in the 1030s, eventually establishing themselves as the dominant political power and seizing the capital city of Baghdad in 1055. The Turks had readily adopted the Ab-basids’ practices of Sunni Islam, indeed adhering to a more orthodox line than had their predecessors. They also adopted a policy of expansion, at the expense of both the Greek Christians and the Fatimid caliphate in Egypt. This program was still in its infancy in 1064, as German pilgrims by the hundreds prepared to travel to Jerusalem. But the Turks had begun to make incursions into enemy territories through a series of small-scale raids, with independent amirs seeking to establish lordships for themselves along the frontiers of the Islamic and Byzantine worlds.

  Rumor of this increased level of danger would have reached the German pilgrims, but it did not discourage them. Contemporaries estimated that somewhere between 7,000 and 12,000 people participated in the 1064 journey—likely an exaggeration, though not an outrageous one. All levels of society were represented: commoners, lords, soldiers, clerics, and a handful of bishops in full episcopal regalia, including Siegfried of Mainz and the formidable Gunther of Bamberg. Such a disparate group would have left with a variety of motives, including a simple desire to visit Christ’s tomb. But many of them had a specific reason for going: They expected the world to end on Easter the following year, and they wanted to be in Jerusalem to see it.

  The year 1065 had no obvious chronological significance, as did, for example, the year 1000. These pilgrims were responding instead to a somewhat obscure tradition according to which the Apocalypse would occur on Easter during a year when two important religious celebrations fell on the same day: the Annunciation and Good Friday. The former, marking the day when Mary learned that she would give birth to Christ, always occurred on March 25. The latter, commemorating the day Christ died, varied according to the Easter calendar. It was a relatively rare occurrence for the two anniversaries to coincide. The last time it would have happened before 1064 was seventy-two years earlier in 992, though it would occur again relatively quickly, in 1076.

  How many of the German pilgrims accepted this idea, and how fervently they believed it, we cannot know, but the liturgical anomaly does help to explain why such a large number of pilgrims decided to go to Jerusalem during an otherwise unremarkable and even unpropitious year. All of them would have speculated about the likelihood of portentous events occurring on March 25. As the day grew nearer and as the journey grew harder, more and more of them must have begun to think that they were indeed living in apocalyptic times, that this pilgrimage would be unlike any other that had gone before.11

  About this last point, at least, they were correct. For as the pilgrims neared their destination, apparently on Maundy Thursday—three days before the predicted end of the world on Easter—an army of Turks suddenly came upon them, riding quickly, firing arrows, and screaming bloody murder in the terrifying and unfamiliar Turkish style. The pilgrims had likely stumbled onto one of the small Seljuk armies seeking to make inroads against Fatimid power, but far as the Germans could tell, this was just another band of pagans, apparently attracted by the bishops’ finery and showy wealth. Whatever the case, the Turks had caught the Christians completely off-guard. Many of them had not bothered to carry weapons. Indeed, as pilgrims they were supposed to travel unarmed—though it is difficult to believe that the bishops and nobles accompanying this pilgrimage had not hired a band of retainers to keep them safe, whatever religious etiquette might dictate.

  The Christians who had weapons fought back. Others resisted as best they could, perhaps fighting with rocks or branches or whatever else happened to be on hand, thus preventing an immediate massacre. The Turks could easily encircle the Germans, but as long as the latter maintained discipline and stuck close together, they stood some chance of survival. Acting quickly, a significant number of the pilgrims managed to make their way to an abandoned town to hide behind its walls.12

  A makeshift siege began. The Turks surrounded the city and tried to starve the Christians into submission. According to one particularly lurid account, the Turks tried to break the pilgrims’ will by bringing forth “a most noble abbess” whom they had captured during the fight and raping her repeatedly just within sight of the walls but out of the range of any archers. They eventually killed her, but the pilgrims maintained their discipline,
holding out, perhaps hoping to catch a glimpse of Christ in the sky as that ominous Easter Day, March 27, approached. They were living through the Last Days, many surely believed, trapped in a destroyed city set against an endless desert, besieged by the servants of Antichrist.

  By Easter Sunday, with the end of the world no longer offering a potential escape, some of the priests suggested an alternative route. Rather than continue to fight, they should instead offer the Turks money and thus buy their safety. This counsel pleased everyone.13

  The pilgrims extended an offer of surrender, and an “Arab duke,” along with seventeen of his most important advisors, agreed to meet with them. They entered the city, eight of them separating from the other ten and climbing a ladder to an upper room. There, the bishops of Mainz and Bamberg waited. But the Turks did not intend to negotiate. Their leader instead boasted that he would take as plunder everything the Christians had and “eat their flesh and drink their blood.” To add visual insult, he unwound his turban and tied it, as if a chain, around the bishop of Bamberg’s neck. Normally a restrained man, Gunther threw one punch and knocked the duke unconscious. Before his followers could react, the Germans wrestled them all to the ground and tied them up so tightly that their wrists bled, doing the same to the seven others in the upper room and to the ten down below. The pilgrims then boldly paraded their captives along the city’s ramparts in clear view of the enemy camp, for a time discouraging any fresh assaults.

  Escape remained impossible until, miraculously, a small Egyptian army attacked the Turks and rescued the Christians. The prince of Babylon was grateful to those who had inflicted such a wound against his enemies. To the Germans, unfamiliar with the confessional differences of Islam, it seemed a miracle: “Satan had cast out Satan.”14