by Robert Payne
When Alexius Comnenus came to the throne, the empire was in disarray. Although the Balkan provinces had been recaptured from Robert Guiscard, the Norman-Sicilian adventurer who founded his own kingdom in southern Italy and Sicily, he was confronted with dangers along the long Danube border from the Oghuz, Kuman, and Pecheneg Turks, half brothers to the Turks in Asia Minor, and from Slavs and Bulgars. Only a few coastal cities in Asia Minor remained in his hands. It was necessary at all costs to push back the frontiers of the sultanate of Roum. He appealed for military assistance to the pope and to the Western princes who might be sympathetic to his cause. They were asked to raise armies, to march to Constantinople and to join forces under the banner of Christendom against the infidels. He recounted the atrocities committed by the enemy and pointed to the peculiar sanctity of Constantinople as the guardian of so many relics of Christ. Constantinople and the Byzantine empire must be saved, Jerusalem must be reconquered, and the pax Christiana must be established in the Near East. A copy of his letter to Robert, Count of Flanders, a cousin of William the Conqueror, has been preserved. The emperor speaks with mingled anguish and pride, despair and humility, and from time to time there appears a faint note of humor.
EXCERPTS FROM A LETTER FROM THE EMPEROR ALEXIUS COMNENUS TO ROBERT, COUNT OF FLANDERS, WRITTEN FROM CONSTANTINOPLE IN A.D. 1093.
TO THE LORD AND GLORIOUS COUNT, Robert of Flanders, and to the generality of princes of the kingdom, whether lay or ecclesiastical, from Alexius Comnenus, Emperor of Byzantium.
O illustrious count and great consoler of the faith, I am writing in order to inform Your Prudence that the very saintly empire of Greek Christians is daily being persecuted by the Pechenegs and the Turks. . . . The blood of Christians flows in unheard-of scenes of carnage, amidst the most shameful insults. . . . I shall merely describe a very few of them. . . .
The enemy has the habit of circumcising young Christians and Christian babies above the baptismal font. In derision of Christ they let the blood flow into the font. Then they are forced to urinate in the font. . . . Those who refuse to do so are tortured and put to death. They carry off noble matrons and their daughters and abuse them like animals. . . .
Then, too, the Turks shamelessly commit the sin of sodomy on our men of all ages and all ranks . . . and, O misery, something that has never been seen or heard before, on bishops. . . .
Furthermore they have destroyed or fouled the holy places in all manner of ways, and they threaten to do worse. Who does not groan? Who is not filled with compassion? Who does not reel back with horror? Who does not offer his prayers to heaven? For almost the entire land has been invaded by the enemy from Jerusalem to Greece . . . right up to Thrace. Already there is almost nothing left for them to conquer except Constantinople, which they threaten to conquer any day now, unless God and the Christians of the Latin rite come quickly to our aid. They have also invaded the Propontis . . . passing below the walls of Constantinople with a fleet of two hundred ships . . . stolen from us. They forced the rowers against their will to follow the sea-roads chosen by them, and with threats and menaces, as we have said, they hoped to take possession of Constantinople either by land or by sea.
Therefore in the name of God and because of the true piety of the generality of Greek Christians, we implore you to bring to this city all the faithful soldiers of Christ . . . to bring me aid and to bring aid to the Greek Christians. . . . Before Constantinople falls into their power, you should do everything you can to be worthy of receiving heaven’s benediction, an ineffable and glorious reward for your aid. It would be better that Constantinople falls into your hands than into the hands of the pagans. This city possesses the most holy relics of the Saviour [including] . . . part of the True Cross on which he was crucified. . . .
And if it should happen that these holy relics should offer no temptation to the pagans, and if they wanted only gold, then they would find in this city more gold than exists in all the rest of the world. The churches of Constantinople are loaded with a vast treasure of gold and silver, gems and precious stones, mantles and cloths of silk, sufficient to decorate all the churches of the world. . . . And then, too, there are the treasuries in the possession of our noblemen, not to speak of the treasure belonging to the merchants who are not noblemen. And what of the treasure belonging to the emperors, our predecessors? No words can describe this wealth of treasure, for it includes not only the treasuries of the emperors but also those of the ancient Roman emperors brought here and concealed in the palace. What more can I say? What can be seen by human eyes is nothing in comparison with the treasure that remains concealed.
Come, then, with all your people and give battle with all your strength, so that all this treasure shall not fall into the hands of the Turks and Pechenegs. . . . Therefore act while there is still time lest the kingdom of the Christians shall vanish from your sight and, what is more important, the Holy Sepulchre shall vanish. And in your coming you will find your reward in heaven, and if you do not come, God will condemn you.
If all this glory is not sufficient for you, remember that you will find all those treasures and also the most beautiful women of the Orient. The incomparable beauty of Greek women would seem to be a sufficient reason to attract the armies of the Franks to the plains of Thrace.
In this way, mingling allurements and enticements with intimations of the final disaster that would overwhelm the community of Christians if the Turks and Pechenegs succeeded in conquering what was left of the Byzantine empire, Alexius Comnenus appealed to Robert of Flanders to come to his aid. The letter contained admissions of terrible defeats and was sustained by a vast pride, but it also provided a picture of the world as he saw it, with its pressing dangers and wildest hopes. Two images prevailed: the atrocities committed by the enemy, and the spiritual and material wealth of Constantinople, last bastion against the Turks.
The letter was addressed not only to Robert of Flanders but to Western Christendom. Pope Urban II read it and was deeply moved. Robert of Flanders would eventually take part in the Crusade. And now very slowly and with immense difficulty there came into existence the machinery that would bring the armies of the West to Constantinople and later to Jerusalem.
In the Fields
of Clermont
THE most powerful force in Western Europe at this time was the Church, which asserted its power in open and subtle ways. In every village there was a priest, in every large city a bishop, in every princedom a legate representing the pope. The work of the Church was intertwined with the work of the government, and there were many places where the bishop was both an earthly and spiritual ruler. Charlemagne had called upon the clergy as well as his soldiers to create an empire. The Church was everywhere: in men’s thoughts and prayers, in the judgment halls, in the prince’s court. It was in the way men addressed one another, in the rhythms of their writing and their speech, and it was present at their births, their marriages and deaths. It was the all-pervading sea in which the principalities and kingdoms swam.
The Church possessed its own momentum: it persisted even when the popes were weak or incompetent. Between A.D. 896 and A.D. 904 eight popes succeeded one another. But the monk Hildebrand, who reigned as Pope Gregory VII from 1073-1086, restored the papacy to full authority. He, too, received appeals from Constantinople to mount a Crusade against the Turks, but he was too busy reorganizing the Church to spend his energy on Byzantine affairs. The time was not yet ripe for the Crusade.
Then, with the coming of Urban II to the throne in 1088, the Crusade became eminently possible. The new pope was practical, and he possessed a peculiarly French sense of reaching to the heart of a problem. He was by birth a French nobleman. His original name was Eudes de Lagery, and he was born in the family castle near Châtillon-sur-Marne in about A.D. 1042. He rose rapidly in the church hierarchy to become a canon of St. John Lateran in Rome. Suddenly he abandoned Rome, and we next see him wearing the habit of a simple monk at Cluny, then the intellectual center of French Catholicism. T
he abbot of Cluny made him a prior and sent him on missions to Rome. Gregory VII admired him, made him bishop of Ostia, and then a cardinal. Cardinal Eudes was sent as a papal legate to Germany, where he acquitted himself well. An ancient portrait shows him in his cardinal’s robes, bald except for tufts of hair above his ears but with a long beard and an unusually heavy mustache. He looks singularly robust and determined. This was the man who would become Pope Urban II. This was the man who would call the Crusade into existence.
It was not by any means a sudden call based upon an emotional sympathy for the Christians who had suffered in Asia Minor and the Holy Land. It was more, and it was less. Urban II was asserting the pope’s leadership in the West, he was attempting to dominate the quarreling princes of Europe by declaring a holy war in the East and the Truce of God in the West, and he was trying to give direction to a divided Europe at a time when the quarrels were becoming dangerous not only to the papacy but to the very survival of Christendom. Although Charles Martel had effectively stopped the advance of the Muslims into France, the possibility of a Muslim breakthrough from Spain was very real. To ensure that France remained free of Muslim influence, Urban II called upon the French nobility to arm themselves and attack Islam in the Near East. In the most limited sense he was concerned that French noblemen should give a good account of themselves, for he was himself a French nobleman and his chief sympathies were with France.
Thus, the character of the pope gave color to the Crusade, which remained essentially French and aristocratic throughout its two-hundred-year history. When he proclaimed the necessity of the Crusade at a general gathering of the clergy and the laity at Clermont on November 27, 1095, he was speaking as a Frenchman to Frenchmen concerning a matter of peculiar relevance to France.
“Frenchmen!” he began. “You who are chosen and beloved by God, as is shown by your many achievements, you who are set apart from all other peoples by the particular situation of your country, and also by your catholic faith and the honor of Holy Church.”
The pope spoke in French, standing on a podium in the midst of an immense field crowded with people of all classes from poor peasants to princes, and around the podium stood an army of archbishops, bishops, abbots, prelates and priests. He had already spent many days in council, discussing a host of important matters concerning the machinery of the Church, the morals of princes, the right of sanctuary, and that Truce of God which was very close to his heart. By the Truce of God he meant to outlaw fighting of any kind from Sunday to Wednesday, and to put an absolute ban on fighting involving priests, monks, women, laborers, and merchants on any day of the week. At Clermont the pope was able to impose a further ban on fighting on certain religious holidays. There was some irony in the fact that the pope who called so strenuously for peace in France was also calling for a holy war in the Holy Land.
In fact, the two ideas were closely, even intimately, connected. He was aware that a war against the Turks would divert the energies expended by Christians in killing other Christians. It was a time when the princes and princelings of France were bristling with new-found powers, invading each other’s territory, sacking towns, relentlessly skirmishing. There were endless dynastic disputes, and to become a prince or count meant waging war against one’s own relatives. Urban II hoped to establish the principle that the Church was the supreme arbiter over earthly kingdoms with the power to authorize wars and to prevent wars, especially the wars in France.
When he spoke on that cold November day, he was about fifty-three years old, but he had the vigor of a much younger man. He had a resounding voice, which was heard across the field by thousands of people. His speech was evidently prepared with great care, and copies of it would be made available to ecclesiastical officials and the princes who attended; it was the pope’s intention that his words should be heard all over France and that they should be studied and remembered. While his essential message was that the time called for a holy war against the Turks, he was also concerned with the intellectual and spiritual underpinnings of the adventure.
Urban II was deeply moved by St. Jerome’s interpretation of the Prophet Daniel, and wanted his listeners to be roused by it. As St. Jerome saw it, the time would come when the Antichrist would set up his tents on the Mount of Olives and sit in Jerusalem on a throne in Solomon’s Temple, “as though he were God.” His first task would be to kill the three kings of Egypt, Africa, and Ethiopia, all expected to be Christian kings. Their deaths would encourage the soldiers of Christ to arise against him, and the Christians would supplant him when Jerusalem was surrendered to them. Then the Antichrist would die and the reign of Christ would be established over the earth.
But the visions of the Prophet Daniel, as interpreted by St. Jerome, were of less importance to his audience, who were instead whipped into a state of excitement by the thought of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre being in the possession of the Turks, and that Christians attempting to go there on pilgrimage were being molested and killed. Urban II referred to the Turks as Persians, and in fact the Turks had conquered Persia and had spilled over its borders to conquer vast territories in the Near East. At the beginning of his sermon he declared that the enemy was everywhere committing atrocities against the Christians, and it was necessary to put an end to these atrocities. He said:
Distressing news has come to us . . . that the people of the Persian kingdom, an accursed race, a race utterly alienated from God, a generation that set not their heart aright and whose spirit was not steadfast with God, has invaded Christian lands and devastated them with sword, pillage and fire. Some of these Christians have been made captive and taken to Persia, and some have been tortured to death. Many of God’s churches have been violated and others have been made to serve their own religious rites. They have ruined the altars with filth and defilement. They circumsized Christians and smeared the blood on the altars or poured it into the baptismal fonts. It amused them to kill Christians by opening up their bellies and drawing out the end of their intestines, which they then tied to a stake. Then they flogged their victims and made them walk around and around the stake until their intestines had spilled out and they fell dead on the ground. Others were tied to stakes and shot through with arrows, and still others were held down with necks extended, and they would see whether it was possible to cut off a head with a single blow of a naked sword. What shall I say about the abominable rape of women? On this subject it may be worse to speak than to remain silent. . . .
Who shall avenge these wrongs, who shall recover these lands, if not you? You are the race upon whom God has bestowed glory in arms, greatness of spirit, physical energy, and the courage to humble the proud locks of those who resist you.
Rise up, then, and remember the virile deeds of your ancestors, the glory and renown of Charlemagne, of his son Louis, and all your other kings who destroyed the kingdoms of the pagans and planted the holy church in their lands. You should be especially aroused by the knowledge that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is now in the hands of unclean nations and that the holy places are shamelessly misused and sacrilegiously defiled with their filth. Oh, most valiant knights, descendants of unconquerable ancestors, remember the courage of your forefathers and do not dishonor them!
Urban II was like another Moses, proclaiming that the knights of France were the true inheritors of the land of milk and honey, the only people deserving to be the guardians of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
Near him, in that vast audience, were the princes who had come to him because he had summoned them, and now he addressed them with a special vehemence. They were the men who commanded armies and were continually fighting against other Frenchmen, and he was determined that their fighting should cease in the Truce of God. He did not mince his words. He said:
Christian warriors, who continually and vainly seek pretexts for war, rejoice, for you have today found a true pretext. You, who have so often been the terror of your fellow men, go and fight against the barbarians, go and fight for the deliver
ance of the holy places. You, who sell for vile pay the strength of your arms to the fury of others, armed with the sword of the Machabees, go and merit an eternal reward. If you triumph over your enemies, the kingdoms of the East will be your reward. If you are conquered, you will have the glory of dying in the very same place as Jesus Christ, and God will never forget that he found you in the holy battalions.
This now is the time to prove that you are animated by true courage, the time to expiate the violence committed in the bosom of peace, the many victories purchased at the expense of justice and humanity. If you must have blood, bathe in the blood of the infidels. I speak to you with harshness because my ministry obliges me to do so. Soldiers of Hell, become soldiers of the living God!
His words were intended to shock, and also to heal. Christ’s words sustained his argument. In the mythology he was developing throughout his sermon, he was relying on all those cryptic and well-known words where Christ demands that his followers should abandon their fathers, mothers, wives, and children, and for this abandonment they would be rewarded a hundredfold and enter eternal life. Significantly, it was when he was reciting these words that the crowd suddenly roared back at him: “God wills it!” “Dieu li volt!” cried the northerners, and the southerners cried, “Diex le volt!” It was at that very moment that the Crusade came into existence.