About seventy-five miles farther down the coast, Raymond again became distracted. It began with an offer of friendship from the amir of Tripoli, which lay near the end of the Seljuk sphere of authority. An alliance with this amir could open up the road for immediate access to Jerusalem. Raymond therefore sent a delegation to finalize the agreement. The amir not only accepted his proposal but also agreed to let Raymond fly his banner above the city walls, just as the count had managed to do for only a moment at Antioch. But for some reason—probably for many reasons—Raymond decided to renege on the deal. His formal excuse was that he would not negotiate with “the king of Tripoli” unless the king first accepted baptism. The chaplain Raymond was more suspicious of his count’s intentions, and rightly so. After all, the army had now been making pacts of friendship with amirs all along the Mediterranean. There must have been another reason for the sudden change of heart, and the chaplain Raymond settled on the obvious explanation: money. The negotiators who had gone to Tripoli had been astonished by the city’s extraordinary wealth, and they impressed upon their count the great treasure he might win if he captured it. A slightly later historian echoed the charge: “The count of Saint-Gilles desired that land and its government very much, because it was rich and because it was more celebrated than the others.”2
Strategic factors likely played into Raymond’s decision, too. As Tancred had pointed out, the crusade’s numbers had grown thin, and Raymond and Robert must have recognized, even if Tancred did not, that by themselves they lacked the manpower to take Jerusalem. Raymond’s legates in Tripoli may also have delivered to him some remarkable news: Jerusalem had already fallen.
About six months earlier, in August 1098, the Egyptians had driven out the Seljuk Turks and regained control of the city. The Franks, as we have seen, had opened diplomatic channels to Cairo as early as the summer of 1097. Once allies against the Seljuk armies, they were now set to become enemies. In venturing past Tripoli, then, the crusade was entering into a new sort of hostile country—out of frontier regions dominated by the Turks and into frontier regions under the Fatimids’ influence. At the very least, this turn in Cairo’s fortunes required careful consideration. And Raymond was happy to bide his time with a potentially profitable war against Tripoli—provided he could hold his army together. Even then, he did not attack Tripoli itself but rather the fortified town of Arqa, just a little to the north, beginning on February 14, 1098, barely a month after he had left Ma‘arra.3
News of Raymond’s rapid progress did yield results from the other princes. Around the beginning of February, Godfrey, Robert of Flanders, and Bohemond met together at Antioch. They were hearing complaints similar to the ones Raymond’s men had raised at Ma‘arra: “They were being held up in the city of Antioch only for the sake of delay and were not making any progress to Jerusalem, out of desire for which they had abandoned their homes and suffered so many things.” Desertions were growing so common that the princes had to forbid their followers from boarding ships lest they try to return home. To restore a sense of order and purpose, Godfrey, Robert, and Bohemond held a public meeting on March 1 and announced that all of the soldiers who were not already with Raymond would rendezvous at the Byzantine port city of Latakia, about fifty miles to the south of Antioch. And from there, “thinking nothing of the dangers to their own lives,” they would delay no longer the road to Jerusalem.4
The armies met at Latakia as planned, but the resolve to cease procrastinating lasted barely a day. Setting camp just a few miles to the south of Latakia, they laid siege to Jabala, the same city that had tempted Raymond but that Tancred had convinced him to pass by. Bohemond wasn’t interested. According to Albert of Aachen, he was worried that there was a plot afoot to steal Antioch from him. Upon arriving at Jabala, he may also have realized that the army would not be leaving for Jerusalem anytime soon and that his time and money were better spent preserving the city he had already won. There would be other opportunities to pray at the Holy Sepulcher.
Whatever his true motives, Bohemond left the crusade and this time did not return. Why? Perhaps (contemporaries would have said if they had had the phrase) because biology is destiny: “From Bohemond’s father, who was a Frank, he had the best of beginnings, but of his mother, who was Southern Italian, there were still traces.”5
At any rate the siege of Jabala was to be short-lived. About ten days after it began, a panicked message arrived from Raymond of Saint-Gilles, borne by Bishop Peter of Albara. Word had reached the Provençals that “the pope of the Turks” had organized “the numberless Turkish people” for war and that they were about to attack the pilgrims en masse to drive them away from Arqa. The Saracen armies had gathered at Damascus and were now just a few days away. If the other barons did not come soon, half of the crusading army might be destroyed and Jerusalem never attained, and the army at Jabala could expect to suffer a similar, swift martyrdom.
Godfrey and Robert of Flanders thus had no choice. They pulled up their tents and marched down the coast to Arqa. “Meanwhile,” the chaplain Raymond wrote, “the story turned out to be false, the Saracens having composed it to put us off for a little bit so that they might gain some relief from the siege.”
Godfrey and Robert were furious. The whole story about Damascus, they believed, had been a fraud. More to the point, Raymond had invented it as a favor to the amir of Jabala, in exchange for a hefty bribe, to draw the Franks away from that siege. So angry were Godfrey and Robert that they set camp two miles from Arqa and for the next several days refused to cooperate with Raymond at all. Tancred, by this time, had begun to weary of Raymond, too, though for a different reason. Specifically, he hadn’t been paid enough. As quickly as he was able, he broke with the Provençal count, symbolically returning to him a staff of lordship, and then joined Godfrey’s army.6
Save Bohemond, the armies had now all reassembled, and they were all tired of or unimpressed with Arqa. The siege dragged on interminably, with no progress and with no apparent purpose beyond enriching Raymond or whoever else might happen to enter the city first. The voices of the doubters grew sharper as heroic and popular knights began to die. The learned Anselm of Ribemont, who had written at least two letters home to discuss progress on the crusade, was hit in the head with a stone flung by a catapult and died instantly. The warrior Pons of Balazun, who had been Raymond of Aguilers’s collaborator for the first half of his chronicle, died in the same way. By April 1 even the chaplain Raymond was turning against his count. “God did not wish this siege to succeed,” he wrote, “since we obviously undertook it for reasons that ran against justice and God, and He disposed that all things ran against us there.”7
Whatever practical motives might have driven the princes to continue the siege, soldiers and clerics like Raymond did not believe their explanations. Arqa was about greed and about the corruption of the crusaders’ mission. A new vision was needed to galvanize the army, to enable it to reclaim the initiative from the princes. That vision came from Peter Bartholomew. But Peter had to speak with care and in measured tones when announcing his latest apostolic mandates. Already at Ma‘arra, Bohemond’s followers had begun to mock Peter and his Lance and his sponsor, Raymond of Saint-Gilles. If Peter phrased his message at all indelicately, he might undermine his own visionary authority and his patron’s credibility with it. But instead of words of clemency and unity, framed around the image of the Holy Lance and the memory of Antioch, Peter this time advocated social revolution and an all-out civil war.
A Dangerous Vision
It happened on April 5, 1099. That night Peter Bartholomew was alone in a makeshift chapel set up by Count Raymond. He was thinking, as he rested there, about the original vision of Stephen of Valence at Antioch, who had been allowed not only to speak with Christ but also to see his cross, and Peter wondered, a bit petulantly, why he had never known a similar blessing. Almost instantly four men stood next to him. Three were familiar: Christ, Andrew, and Peter. The fourth was heavyset and partly bald—
probably St. Paul, though he was never explicitly identified.8
“Christ said to me, ‘What are you doing?’
“I answered, ‘Lord, I’m standing.’
“And the Lord said, ‘You almost drowned with the others [what Christ refers to is unclear, but Peter apparently had suffered another near-death experience, as often happened before his visions], so now what do you think?’
“And I answered, ‘Lord Father, I was thinking about that priest you appeared to with the Cross.’
“And the Lord said, ‘I know that. And henceforth believe that I am the Lord on Whose behalf you have all come here, and Who for the sake of sinners suffered at Jerusalem on the Cross, as you will now see.’”9
There appeared before Peter two planks of black wood, rounded but not carved or worked over in any way, except that the midsections had been cut so that they might fit easily together. Christ called out, “Behold the cross, which you desired!” Then suddenly the Cross was before Him and He was stretched out upon it, with Peter and Andrew holding either arm as Paul supported the Cross from behind. And the Lord ordered Peter (in a way typical of later medieval mystics like St. Francis, but still unusual in the eleventh century) to gaze upon His wounds and meditate on them and then preach to the whole army about what he saw.
“You see these five wounds of mine,” Christ said, “just as all of you stand in five orders.” The mystical vision of the wounds was turning into a metaphor for the entire Frankish army. The first order of pilgrims, Christ told Peter, consisted of those who feared neither spear nor sword nor any weapon. They were like Christ, who entered Jerusalem without hesitation, despite the lances, clubs, and even the Cross that threatened Him. Did Christ intend to say that these people were the bravest members in the army, the men who were most ready to fight and least likely to flee? Or was He saying that the first order was composed of people who followed his example and entered Jerusalem peacefully, humbly, and unarmed? In other words, was the first order composed of soldiers or of the army’s poor, unarmed pilgrims? The answer became clear only when He described the second order. They were the ones who supported the first group, guarding their backs and providing shelter for them—perhaps the “knights of the people” and the “poor foot soldiers” described in another section of Raymond’s chronicle. If they were the men who defended and sheltered the first group, then the members of that group, by implication, did not fight; they were the poor pilgrims, who would enter Jerusalem as Christ had done on Palm Sunday more than one millennium before the crusade.10
Each of the other ranks, by turns, was further removed from the action of holy war. The ones in the third order provided logistical support to the second group, giving them stones and spears to use in combat. Christ compared them to the people who witnessed the Crucifixion and grieved the injury done to Him. The fourth group comprised “those who see battle and hide themselves in their homes.” They were like the witnesses to the Crucifixion who just barely believed it. The fifth order included those who heard the roar of battle, looked into the reasons for it, and then hid, offering examples of cowardice, not prowess. “They refuse to undergo dangers not only for me, but also for their brothers.” They hid, and they encouraged others to run away, to watch the battle from a distance. “They are similar to the traitor Judas and to Pontius Pilate.”11
Interpreting this vision is not easy. The five orders that Peter described do not represent cultural groups since they are neither linguistic nor geographic. The second and third orders (fighters and servants) serve military functions, but the first, fourth, and fifth (the fearless, the deserters, and the cowards) do not. They certainly do not correspond to the usual military divisions within the crusade army: horsemen, foot soldiers, and noncombatants. They seem to be based on something else altogether—the unknowable content of the crusaders’ character. How to make this analogy conform to the wounds of Christ defies any coherent program of allegory since it implies that some wounds are better than others, or perhaps that some wounds are more efficacious than others.
How to make these secret divisions reveal themselves, however, was easy. When Peter Bartholomew protested, as he often did, that people would not believe him, Christ ordered him to tell Count Raymond to call together all the princes and the people and attack Arqa. Let the army’s best-known criers shout three times “God help us!” and then the divisions described by Christ would visibly form. The group who charged forward would be the army’s true pilgrims—a category that overlapped with the people who believed Peter Bartholomew’s visions and trusted in the Holy Lance. When Peter asked Christ what to do about the unbelievers in the last two ranks, the Lord answered, “Do not spare them. Kill them. For they are my traitors, brothers of Judas Iscariot.” Their property would be redistributed to the people in the first order. “If you do these things,” Christ concluded, “you will have found the right path, around which you have so far only drifted.”12
What Christ was proposing was a bloody purge—a massacre of the cowardly. The survivors would constitute the Frankish elect, divided into three parts: true pilgrims, their warrior guardians, and the squires and servants who could attend to practical needs. If the crusaders followed Peter’s instructions, they would march straight to Jerusalem, the last several miles barefoot, and quickly capture the city, regardless of how many or few siege ladders, catapults, and battering rams they possessed. For it was characteristic of the traitors in the fourth order to think like Kerbogah—to see victory as something attainable only through the cunning of man and not through the power of God.13
If Peter’s vision had stopped here, most of the army would have turned against him. But Christ added one other set of instructions that demonstrated just how radical a transformation He was advocating. The problem that had so often hobbled the crusade’s progress, in the eyes of Peter, was a lack of concord among the leaders. After the purges, therefore, judges would be appointed to represent households and larger families. If anyone suffered any sort of injury, the accuser was to approach the offending party and inform him that he was bringing the case to trial. If the malefactor did not make things right, a judge would intervene with the proper authorities to confiscate all of the accused person’s property. Half the goods would go to the plaintiff, with the other half going to the “sovereign.” If the judge refused to act at all in the case, or delayed unnecessarily, then it would be at his own spiritual peril. Someone (the princes? the other judges? Peter Bartholomew?) would inform the accused of the dangers he faced at Judgment Day. Any act of injustice, Christ explained, was like Adam’s original sin. But as always the Lord’s thoughts and Peter’s were with the poor, since He concluded, “About giving tithes, some are doing quite well, because they offered as I commanded. I shall magnify them and make them known amongst the others.”14
This program of reform was both sweeping and dangerous. Peter Bartholomew was proposing to remake the army, violently, in order to create something church doctrine had long recognized as impossible: a pure City of God on earth. The ranks and distinctions within this army would be determined not by social status or family position but by a willing embrace of poverty, by the quality of a person’s character, and by practical considerations such as who was best equipped to fight and who best equipped to serve. At the head of the army would be the true pilgrims, those who, if they should die, “will be raised up on the right hand of God, when, at the resurrection, ascending into heaven, I have taken my seat.” Peter’s reform brings to mind another vision—Chapter 20 of the book of the Apocalypse: “And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and the power of judgment was given to them. And I saw the souls of those who had been decapitated because of their witness for Jesus and the word of God. . . . The rest of the dead did not live until 1000 years had passed. This is the first resurrection.” After the victory of the heavenly army in the Apocalypse, a government of saintly judges—the souls eligible for resurrection before Christ takes His final seat of judgment—shall rule alongside God for a mille
nnium. What Peter Bartholomew and Raymond of Aguilers were now advocating was unadulterated millenarianism, created through a purge of nonbelievers, through purity of heart, and through military victory. [Plate 6]
Whether Count Raymond embraced this ideology, too, or, as seems more likely, found himself uncomfortably associated with it because of his enthusiasm for the Holy Lance, we cannot say. But such was the situation in April 1099 when the other leaders finally began to speak against Raymond, his prophet, and his relic.15
Burning the Messenger
Such a vision was sure to divide the army, and indeed after reports of Peter Bartholomew’s latest proposals began to spread, his critics finally spoke out loudly and forcefully against him. All of the aristocratic warriors would have had a stake in quashing his ideas, but the ones who took the lead in doing so were Norman. Duke Robert of Normandy must have played a major role in discrediting Peter, as did his chaplain, a man named Arnulf of Choques. Our best evidence for the antimillenarian case, however, comes from the biography of Bohemond’s nephew Tancred, the Norman leader from southern Italy, written by the cleric Ralph of Caen some twenty years after the fact.
Ralph, as a Norman partisan, was hardly an objective observer. The case he made against Peter Bartholomew was composed less of historical analysis and more of raw invective. As such it probably provided an accurate portrayal of what the Normans were saying about the Provençals and their eccentric visionary in the spring of 1099.
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