Armies of Heaven

by Jay Rubenstein

  But at about this time more messengers from Constantinople arrived, along with envoys that Raymond himself had dispatched, carrying with them further promises of peace from Alexius. This time they carried news, too. The emperor was hosting at his palace Bohemond, Godfrey of Bouillon, and Robert of Flanders, among other princes. He was no longer keeping them prisoner; he was discussing with them whether to join the Latin army on the road to Jerusalem.

  Important decisions were thus being made about the organization and financing of the crusade army. Raymond’s presence was required if he did not wish losing, despite his wealth and his great number of followers, control of the crusade. Setting aside his grievances, he departed with a small escort, leaving the rest of his army to complete the journey to Constantinople without him. Up until this point, chaplain and writer Raymond observed, his tale had been pleasant to tell. But from the moment that Raymond left for Constantinople, the story became suffused with grief and anguish. The thought of Alexius made the chaplain regret ever having taken up his pen.25

  IN THIS WAY THE CRUSADERS, little by little, reached Constantinople or else turned back, unable to maintain discipline and order while crossing Hungarian and Greek lands. The early armies—which historians have previously called “the popular crusade,” “the people’s crusade,” or even “the peasants’ crusade”—clearly had a less aristocratic character than did the later, “princely” armies, but as recent scholarship has demonstrated, a significant number of nobles did join their movement. What ultimately seems to have distinguished these early groups from the later ones is the character of their leaders. Among the commanders of the early armies were two priests, one lapsed monk, and a fanatical layman. They believed themselves divinely appointed, and one of them even had a letter from heaven to prove it. Many of their followers were also visionaries, men and women who claimed that God had branded them with the sign of the cross or else that He had inspired an animal to lead the way to the Holy Land. If we presume that these characteristics were more widely shared among their followers (and it seems a safe presumption), then we can observe that these armies were also more overtly apocalyptic than were the princes’. Their first acts were to massacre Jews because the pilgrims wanted to avenge Christ’s death and to bring about the prophetic conditions necessary to enable the advent of the Last Days. Little surprise, then, that the leaders of these impatient armies had difficulty maintaining control over such large, disparate, and visionary gatherings during the one-thousand-mile march to Constantinople.

  The princely armies were more successful because of better planning and finance and superior military discipline. Were these armies also less apocalyptic in outlook? Perhaps, but the leaders of the second wave of crusaders also struck a better balance between the ideals of holy war and the simple realities of war. In open battle it would be useful for soldiers to believe that they were carrying out God’s will, bringing to fruition His designs for world history, but in the negotiating of truces and supply lines in unfriendly territories, such an overweening sense of divine mission could prove ruinous. Emicho of Flonheim’s warriors discovered just that when they decided that Hungarians were false Christians and, like the Jews, deserved to be destroyed.26

  The more explicitly apocalyptic vision of the crusade did not stay confined to the first wave of pilgrims. Peter the Hermit and a relatively small number of his followers, as we shall see, stuck with the expedition, and Peter continued to preach—not just to his original followers, but also to the rest of the crusading host. Emicho’s chief lieutenants joined Hugh’s armies and were waiting to greet Godfrey at Constantinople. Did Emicho’s failures in Hungary dampen their own apocalyptic expectations? Probably not. They had seen the Danube run red with blood, and they had walked through fields littered with their friends’ dismembered bodies. And all of the armies, as they closed in on the glittering city of Constantinople, had spent months trudging through unfamiliar landscapes, facing exotic and unfamiliar enemies, and living through what must have been previously unimaginable levels of privation and physical exertion. Now, with their homes far behind them and everything that had seemed familiar suddenly lost, the crusaders would have had every reason to believe that they were on a mission whose importance transcended the ways of men. All of them might justly believe that they were stepping into the Apocalypse.

  MEANWHILE, almost forgotten because so long delayed, the armies of Robert of Normandy and Stephen of Blois finally began boarding ships in Italy on Easter Day to cross the Adriatic for Durazzo, on April 5, 1097. Some of the foot soldiers, unable to afford the long winter camp and fearing future deprivation, had sold their bows and returned home—proving themselves vile before God and man, Fulcher of Chartres assured his readers. The others gathered in Brindisi, ready for the short trip into Byzantine waters, the winds and the seas at last, presumably, in their favor. “But,” Fulcher exclaimed, “deep and hidden are the judgments of God!” One of the first ships to leave port, for no apparent reason, broke apart and sank. All four hundred pilgrims on board drowned. It seemed that God had cursed the campaign, and indeed still more pilgrims grew fainthearted at the thought of crossing the sea and returned home in shame. But then “there was joyful cry of praise raised up to God.” For as the bloated and bluing bodies washed up on the shore or were picked out of the waves, many of them, like Walter of Poissy months before, were found to have crosses branded on their flesh, just above their shoulders, exactly like the ones that they had worn on their garments. The message was obvious, as Fulcher read it. It was a sign of victory given in return for the pilgrims’ faith. God had called them home. They had justly attained the rest of eternal life.27

  It is unlikely that any of the witnesses drew from this incident another lesson—that even within this most princely and patient of armies, lurking just below the surface, just below the fabric of their cloaks, the spirit of Peter the Hermit and the apocalyptic crusade was thriving.

  5

  Deals with Devils: The Crusaders at Constantinople

  (August 1096–April 1097)

  Alexius Comnenus, the emperor who ruled the Eastern Roman world, did not anticipate the crusade. To hear his biographer and daughter Anna Comnena tell it, he had no idea that the Franks (or “Kelts,” as she generally labeled all Europeans) were marching toward Byzantium at all until rumor of Peter the Hermit’s approach reached him in the summer of 1096. The emperor “dreaded their arrival, knowing as he did their uncontrollable passion, their erratic character and their irresolution, not to mention the other peculiar traits of the Kelt, with their inevitable consequences: their greed for money, for example, which always led them, it seemed, to break their own agreements without scruple for any chance reason.”

  Anna’s framing of these events is disingenuous. Because of the endless troubles that the crusaders would later cause the Greeks, she wished to protect her father’s reputation from any direct association with them. But as we have seen, Alexius had been soliciting help from European leaders throughout the 1090s, and his request to Urban II before the Council of Piacenza may have helped to inspire the pope’s own decision to preach the crusade at Clermont.

  But Anna’s characterization is correct in at least one important respect. Alexius had not wanted a religious war. He did not view conflicts in the Middle East in purely confessional terms. He had struck alliances with the Turks in the past, and no matter what happened with the crusade, he and his successors would have to live with the Turks in the future. Instead of driving the Saracens out of the Christian world, he wanted only to restore a balance of power between his kingdom and the Turks. To do so, he was probably hoping only for a more substantial version of the military aid he had gotten five years earlier when Robert of Flanders had sent five hundred mercenaries to fight on his behalf. He certainly did not expect as many as 200,000 soldiers, preachers, and pilgrims—men, women, and children—to march toward Constantinople, intent on striking a blow for God by liberating Jerusalem and laying low “Persian perfidy.”1r />
  Nonetheless, the character of the army, especially its religious fanaticism, could not have come as a complete shock. After all, Alexius himself had framed his request for military help in religious terms—to save Eastern Christians from the unbelieving Turks—and he had requested that the pope act as one of his key military spokesmen. The decision to mix religion and war had thus been Alexius’s own. Alexius had also known in advance the significance that relics and pilgrimage held in the hearts of Western Christians, and he must have suspected that a call to save the holy places of the East would kindle intense passions within the hearts of the great numbers of believers. If Alexius did not mention the Holy Sepulcher in his original plea, it was only because he didn’t think to do so. If the Franks arrived at Constantinople with Jerusalem as their ultimate goal, Alexius could use them to inflict a few serious defeats against his Turkish adversaries and then send the crusaders on their way, no doubt to perish in the deserts between Antioch and Jerusalem. From a practical perspective, a great religious army might have been volatile and unpredictable, but it was not necessarily a bad thing. If five hundred seasoned mercenaries had proved helpful against the Turks in 1091, then a few thousand well-armed fanatics would be more useful still. Alexius himself did not want to fight a religious war, but he could have hoped to manipulate religious warriors to serve his own ends. A gathering of 100,000 zealots, however, was surely too much of a dangerous thing.

  Anna Comnena’s account does in general support this conclusion. In her eyes, “the Kelts” were easily manipulable. As a people, they were good at action but not so capable when it came to forethought or, for that matter, to any kind of thought at all. She saw them as “an exceptionally hotheaded race, and passionate.” Once they had decided to invade a country, “neither reason nor force” could restrain them. In open warfare they were irresistible, almost unconquerable, but they were singularly inept at military strategy, for “if their foes chance to lay ambushes with soldier-like skill and if they meet them in a systematic manner, all their boldness vanishes.” The Kelts’ holy men were as belligerent as their warriors. Anna recalled one priest armed with a bow who nearly shot down a Greek naval commander called Marianus. When the priest ran out of arrows, he threw rocks at the Greeks, and when he ran out of rocks, he hurled bread cakes as if they were Eucharistic weapons. Christian though the Kelts might have been, they were also, in Anna’s eyes, barbarians—not very bright and, again, easy to deceive and to control.

  The Franks were also, as Anna Comnena styled them, a plague of locusts. Indeed, these insects preceded the arrival of each of the Frankish contingents, and “everyone, having observed the phenomenon several times, came to recognize locusts as the forerunners of Frankish battalions.” These locusts avoided wheat but destroyed vines—a sign that the Kelts would not interfere in the affairs of Christians but would inflict severe injury on the Saracens, who were slaves to the pleasures of drunkenness.2 [Plate 3]

  Or at least that was Alexius’s hope: to whip up a Frankish apocalypse and to inflict it on the Turks while ensuring that his own people suffered no ill consequences. When first Walter of Sansavoir and then Peter the Hermit arrived at Constantinople, Alexius must have realized that the last part of his plan would be more difficult than expected.

  The Hermit and His Army

  Peter arrived at Constantinople in August 1096, even as the first of the princely armies, led by Hugh the Great and Godfrey, respectively, were still preparing to depart from Europe. The day after his followers set camp, Peter was ushered into the emperor’s residence in the Blachernae palace, where Alexius received him in full imperial majesty. The hermit apparently showed no disquiet in the face of Byzantine ceremony. Instead, he stood confidently before the emperor and explained his purpose and the ordeals that he and his followers had suffered. When Alexius asked what Peter wished to receive from him, the hermit replied, simply, food and money—requests to which Alexius, perhaps surprisingly, assented. He reportedly told Peter, along with Walter of Sansavoir, to remain outside Constantinople and to wait for the rest of the armies to arrive. By itself this group of pilgrims was too poorly trained to be of much use to Alexius’s professional army, but in the context of a larger contingent of Latin zealots, they might prove their worth against the Saracens. Neither side probably expected that more than four months would pass before another group of Franks would reach Constantinople.3

  But Peter and Walter’s followers were incapable of waiting out the week, let alone the rest of the year. They grew bored in the suburbs and perhaps angry as well, since they were not allowed to enter Constantinople to pray in its rich churches and before its splendid relic collections. The latter included remains of several apostles and martyrs, the head of John the Baptist (on which some of the hair and beard still grew), and all of the relics of the Passion that the Empress Helena had collected during her pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 327. After all, the opportunity to pray before Christ’s relics had attracted them to Jerusalem in the first place. Impatience and frustration soon turned to rage. “And so the Christians behaved abominably. They sacked and burned palaces of the city and stole the lead from church roofs so that they could sell it back to the Greeks.” The emperor lost his patience in turn and ordered Peter and Walter and their followers to leave the suburbs and cross the straits of St. George into Asia Minor.4

  At this point the two surviving armies numbered around 20,000 people, and perhaps more, including a few hundred knights, a few thousand foot soldiers, and an unknown number of unarmed women, children, clerics, and simple pilgrims. In a little over ten weeks, after they had left the relative safety of Constantinople, they would almost all be dead or enslaved.

  The story of the destruction of Peter the Hermit’s armies is well known, though much of what is known was no doubt invented by medieval historians who, lacking eyewitness testimony, were free to make embellishments. These historians also needed to resolve what ought to have been a difficult historical problem: Why did God allow an army of Christians, largely untainted by the worst excesses of Emicho’s armies, to fail so miserably? It was largely a question, these writers concluded, of discipline. “They were a people without a king, without a duke, gathered from various locations, living without discipline, rapaciously attacking other people’s property.”5

  True to this description, once these armies had reached Anatolia, they kept good order for barely a month. Peter and Walter first settled their troops in the port cities Civitot and Nicomedia, where, as promised, merchant ships regularly arrived laden with goods for sale at fair prices. But after a month, the army’s resources were wearing thin, and Greek merchants were not interested in functioning as charitable institutions. Some of the Franks started looking inland for plunder, toward the city of Nicea, to fill out their supplies. Alexius had warned them not to do so—to stay close to the shoreline and to avoid engaging the Turks at all cost. “If you do otherwise,” he had said, “the savage gentiles will fall on you and crush your ineffectual legions.”

  Peter the Hermit sensed the growing restlessness among his followers and around October 1 returned to Constantinople. He may have been attempting to negotiate an increased level of supplies at lower prices or perhaps just to ask for charity. But while he was gone, a few of the knights began striking off on their own, leading raids into the East and plundering the flocks of Greek Christians living under Turkish rule. The success of these first sorties inspired other warriors to more ambitious adventures, particularly the Germans and Italians, who were, anyway, finding the French pilgrims unbearable. Rather than wait for Peter to return or to share dwindling resources, they abandoned Civitot altogether and headed inland, against the emperor’s advice, toward Nicea.6

  Nicea was a capital of the Sultanate of Rûm, its name literally meaning “Rome” because the lands had been taken from the Roman Empire. It was ruled in 1096 by a still-seminomadic Seljuk leader called Kilij-Arslan. The Italians and Germans who entered Kilij-Arslan’s territory in October 1096 found it lar
gely unguarded. They marched for four days, coming within sight of Nicea itself, where, according to Anna Comnena, they engaged in behaviors that by both eleventh-century and modern standards were akin to war crimes: “They cut in pieces some of the babies, impaled others on wooden spits and roasted them over a fire; old people were subjected to every kind of torture.”

  The Niceans charged outside the city and attacked the German and Italian pilgrims but were quickly forced back behind its walls. The army next attacked a nearby castle called Xerigordos, which they quickly captured, sparing the Greek Christians but killing or expelling the entire Turkish garrison. Xerigordos was full of grain, meat, and wine, and flushed with victory, the pilgrims discussed how they might use the castle as a base to attack Nicea and, eventually, to drive the Turks out of Anatolia.7

  But the ease of these raids had given the Italians and Germans a false sense of confidence. By entering into a major military engagement so close to Nicea, they had drawn too much attention to themselves. Kilij-Arslan quickly organized a counterattack. He marched on Xerigordos three days after the Germans and Italians had taken it. Overcoming an initial attempt by the Italians to set an ambush, he unleashed a fierce assault on the fortress. When the defenders did not immediately surrender, he established a formal siege around it (he also may have convinced one of the German leaders that the only way to survive was to surrender and betray the city—details are murky). According to one source, the siege lasted for eight days, with the defenders quickly running out of water. As the week dragged on, they drank blood from horses and pack animals, dipped cloths into sewers and squeezed out the liquid into their mouths, or else tried pathetically to suck moisture from damp earth until—with or without the collaboration of pilgrims’ leaders—Kilij-Arslan’s men set fire to Xerigordos’s gates. The heat inside the castle became unbearable. Some of defenders, already dying of thirst, rushed out of the gates to surrender. Others hoped to escape by leaping through the flames, only to be burned alive. The survivors were used for target practice or, if pretty and young, were enslaved. “These men were the first ones happily to accept a martyr’s fate,” an anonymous historian, who likely saw the aftermath of the siege of Xerigordos, concluded.8