by Robert Payne
This mindless looting, although most ferocious during the first three days, continued for years. The libraries of Constantinople contained great collections of the literary works of the Golden Age of ancient Greece; all, or nearly all, went up in flames. There were no Greek scholars among the Crusaders, no one to recognize the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Sappho in the libraries. What we have now is merely a small part of the wealth of Greek literature that existed up to the sack of Constantinople.
What was most terrible of all was the mindless cruelty of the invaders. They murdered for fun, or to provide a spectacle, or for no reason at all. When Murzuphlus, the emperor, was finally captured, the new emperor, Baldwin, the former count of Flanders, wondered about a suitable punishment. The doge observed that he was too tall a man to be hanged. “I will tell you what to do with him,” he said. “In this city there are two high columns, each of which is at least fifty or sixty toises in height. Let us make him climb to the top of one of them and throw him down to the ground.” The barons agreed, and accordingly Murzuphlus climbed up the column, and was thrown down; his body was dashed to pieces.
Not all the Crusaders went in search of conventional treasure; relics were another much sought-after acquisition. The chronicler Robert of Clari was among the notable collectors of relics. He was on the staff of Peter of Amiens, a nobleman attached to the army of Hugh, Count of Saint-Pol, and his book La Conquête de Constantinople is an official history written with the aid of official documents. His search for relics was aided by his high connections. He amassed a considerable treasure, including a piece of the True Cross measuring four inches by three inches together with four smaller fragments, some thorns from the Crown of Thorns, the Sudarium, the Sponge, half of the girdle of the Blessed Virgin, the arm of St. Mark, and the finger of St. Helena. He also brought back to Corbie a part of the loincloth worn by Christ on the Cross. Altogether he acquired more than forty relics, which he gave to the church of St. Peter at Corbie.
Thus the Fourth Crusade came to an end, with nothing to show for it except the devastation of a great and once-proud city. Though quite properly counted by historians among the Crusades, since many who took part in it believed they were sailing to the Holy Land, the Fourth Crusade was little more than a successful effort to overthrow an empire and to gather its spoils. If the doge or Baldwin or Boniface had thought they had taken possession of the Byzantine empire on behalf of Venice and the West, if they had thought they could build up a wall against the encroachments of the Turks, there might have been some reason in their lunacy; but they did not think in these terms. They thought of plunder, toll gates, commercial privileges. They were colonizers who sought to extract the utmost from their colonies. They offered nothing in return for the bondage and enslavement of the local population.
Even Innocent III, who had no tender conscience, was aghast at their actions. There came from him, in letter after letter, cries of helpless rage. How was it possible that anyone could be so unreasonable, so inept, and so absurd as to conquer Constantinople? Were not the Turks on the march, and was it not certain that Byzantium served as a bastion against them? They had professed to be Crusaders who would march into Palestine had protect the Holy Sepulchre, and they were no more than thieves and robbers who had put aside the holy mission entrusted to them for the sake of lucre. Innocent anathematized the Venetians, who shrugged their shoulders and wondered why anyone should be disturbed by the distant echoes of papal thunder.
The sack of Constantinople was a disaster of the first magnitude. At a time when help was desperately needed by the Kingdom of Jerusalem, a great invasion fleet had been diverted from its proper course to serve the ambitions of the Venetians, who henceforth called themselves masters of “a half and a quarter of the Roman empire.” They gained great wealth by plunder, but it was not to gain great wealth that the Crusades had come into existence. The inexhaustible rapacity of the Venetians harmed the Crusaders as nothing else had harmed them. The Muslims saw once more that the Crusaders were treacherous and never more treacherous than when they fought among themselves.
VIII
THE WASTING OF THE TREASURE
The Children’s
Crusades
THE moral force that brought the Crusades into existence ultimately derived from something very simple: the worship of Christ. A Crusade was a many-tongued act of prayer. It answered the need to come close to Christ, to be intimately aware of his abiding presence. While he was present as a living force in every church and cathedral, he was all the more present in the open spaces of the Holy Land, where men could walk where he had walked and see the landscapes he had seen. To go on pilgrimage or to take up arms in defense of the Holy Sepulchre were acts without ambiguity, and their very simplicity shaped the course of the adventure. Ambiguities came about when the leaders sought to take possession of new principalities and when merchants sought profits. Still, the great majority of the Crusaders went to the Holy Land for the glory of God. In them a pure flame burned brightly. But sometimes the flame bent backward and burned them, destroying them utterly.
Such was the Children’s Crusade of 1212, when everything went wrong. The Crusade arose from the same impulses as the other Crusades: the rituals of pilgrimage were obeyed; the ceremonies of the Catholic Church accompanied the children; the leader, even though he was a child, was strong-minded and eloquent. The children were unarmed because they had no intention of fighting the Saracens: they hoped to convert the heathen by the force of their example, perhaps by their very youthfulness. Like the soldiers of the First Crusade they were exalted and determined, strangely remote from the ordinary affairs of the world. They believed that they would take possession of the Holy Sepulchre.
The leader was a boy of about fifteen called Stephen, born in the village of Cloyes, which is only a short walk from Fréteval, where King Philip of France was defeated by Richard Coeur de Lion in 1194. A boy wandering over the fields would find rusted helmets, swords, lances, and chain mail lying about, and the unburied skeletons of dead soldiers. In that wide valley of green meadows and shady willows a boy would feel the presence of their ghosts, and dream.
When Stephen came to Paris in May 1212, he had a strange story to tell. While he was tending his sheep at Cloyes, a stranger had come to him in the fields, saying that he had come from the Holy Land. He asked for food; Stephen gave it to him and listened to his stories; as the stories continued, Stephen became convinced that he was talking with Christ. The stranger at last announced that he was Christ and gave him a letter to deliver to the king of France. He also urged the boy to lead a Children’s Crusade, which would succeed where mailed warriors and proud barons had failed. In Paris Stephen was regarded as a true visionary; the king received him; the children flocked to his banner, which was a copy of the sacred oriflamme given to the reigning king by the abbot of the Abbey Church of Saint-Denis whenever the kingdom was at war. Stephen was known as “the Prophet,” and those who joined him were known as “minor prophets.” With his clear, compelling voice Stephen soon had hundreds of children enthralled by the thought of embarking on a Crusade.
Processions formed through the streets of Paris with the Prophet or one of the minor prophets holding up the gold cross to which the oriflamme, a banner made of red silk with a scattering of golden flames, was attached. As more and more children came to listen to Stephen and take part in the processions, the king realized that steps would have to be taken to bring order to the city. He ordered the children to return to their parents; they refused; and he was confronted with the difficulty of rounding them up. He appears to have thought that their enthusiasm would soon melt away in the heat of summer. Instead, it increased. Now, all over France and Flanders, children were preparing to go on the Crusade; and the movement had spread to Germany where a boy called Nicholas, born near Cologne and even younger than Stephen, was calling upon children to follow him to the Holy Land.
Stephen disappeared from Paris. Having chosen Vendôme, which was not
far from Cloyes, as the place of assembly for all the children, he returned to the Orléanais and set about the organization of the Crusade. Everything was happening very quickly. By the end of June the children, probably eight or nine thousand strong, were on the march. Their destination was Marseilles. Stephen rode in a cart provided with a canopy to protect him from the sun, with a bodyguard of armed youths riding with him. Many young priests accompanied the long procession, which arrived in Marseilles in the middle of August. The people knew of their coming and prepared provisions for them. They were accepted by the community, although they were kept outside the walls.
At first Stephen may have believed that the sea would open for him and that he would be carried in some mysterious way with all his followers to Jerusalem, but it soon became evident that the sea was indifferent to their prayers.
A certain Hugh Ferreus, who is known to have had a trading post in Acre, together with William of Posquères, who was in business with him, offered to carry the children to the Holy Land. They owned their own ships; they were widely known in Marseilles; they were apparently trustworthy. Seven ships were placed at the disposal of the children. When they were two days out, a storm blew two of the ships onto the island of Recluse and all the children on these ships were drowned. The five remaining ships were taken to Bougie, on the African coast directly south of Marseilles, and to Alexandria. Bougie and Alexandria had large slave markets and the children were sold into slavery.
About the same time that Stephen was leading his flock to Marseilles, the ten-year-old boy called Nicholas was leading a flock of children through Germany and Switzerland and over the Alps into Italy. According to the chronicler, an infinite multitude of boys and girls and young women with babes at their breasts followed Nicholas during his expedition, believing that they had been summoned by an angel and that when they had arrived in the Holy Land they would rescue the Holy Sepulchre from the detested hands of the Saracens. The “infinite multitude” was perhaps seven thousand. We know that some of them were lost while climbing the Alps. The survivors reached Genoa on August 25. Here they asked to be allowed to rest for a week, but were permitted to remain only for a single day. Then they were off again, marching south through Pisa and Rome, and the remnant of them finally reached Brindisi, where the expedition ended in squalor and terror. No shipowners offered to take them to the Holy Land. Instead, a certain Friso the Norwegian took charge of them. He sold the girls into brothels and the boys into slave markets.
The Children’s Crusades were not legendary. They were recorded briefly by more than thirty chroniclers. They happened quickly, and the children vanished just as quickly, almost before the world knew of them.
The Plagues
of Egypt
AMONG those who took part in the Crusades there are only five who wrote with a sense of mastery over their material. They were Raymond of Aguilers, William of Tyre, Geoffrey of Villehardouin, James of Vitry and John of Joinville. Although James of Vitry was perhaps the least of these five chroniclers, he was the one whose character emerges most clearly in his works. His was not an altogether pleasant character, for he was moralistic to a fault, pompous, self-assured, and apoplectic. His hatred bordered on biting contempt. Heretics, schismatics, half-castes, lawyers, usurers, and women dressed in finery received violent tongue-lashings from him. He raged so much against the vices of his time that he sometimes became incoherent. He had reason to rage in the Holy Land, for he was among the first to detect the fatal flaw of the Crusaders in the thirteenth century: the deadening of the soul.
James of Vitry was born in Argenteuil, outside Paris, about 1175. He became a canon regular in the monastery near Liège. His preaching attracted the attention of the bishops who were directing the Crusade against the Albigenses; and he accompanied the armies that invaded the Languedoc with fire and sword at the direct invitation of Pope Innocent III. The fame of his preaching grew. It reached Acre, where the bishopric was vacant, and the canons wrote to the pope, urging that James of Vitry be appointed Bishop of Acre. In 1216 he was solemnly inducted. He seems to have accepted the appointment as a duty, without too much enthusiasm, and he found very little to please him in the Holy Land. Twelve years later, he abandoned his see abruptly, and returned to the obscurity of his monastery at Oignies in Belgium. Although James’s virtues as a chronicler are erratic and elusive, they include a warm humanity and a sense of place. In the intervals between raging against corruption a sentence or a page of his History of the Crusades brings the Holy Land to life. He is quirky, loves marvels, adores miracles and old wives’ tales. When he talks of what he saw with his own eyes, he is completely convincing, as when he describes the Christian army setting out from Acre in November 1217 under the command of the kings of Jerusalem, Cyprus, and Hungary, for none of whom had he any use. He reserved his admiration for Duke Leopold VI of Austria with his martial bearing and his obvious competence.
This was the largest army seen in the Holy Land since the time of the Third Crusade, numbering at least fifteen thousand knights and three or four times as many foot soldiers. Its purpose was to engage the Saracen forces in the region of the Sea of Galilee. It was a motley army, lacking in discipline, and ill led, for each of the three kings regarded himself as the sole commander. John of Brienne, King of Jerusalem, led the Frankish forces; King Andrew II of Hungary commanded the Austro-Hungarian forces; King Hugh of Cyprus led his Cypriots. The masters of the Temple and of the Hospitallers led their own forces, and there were therefore at least five command centers. James of Vitry says of the kings, “No divine gifts having been given to them, it is unnecessary to relate their accomplishments.” Here James of Vitry describes two expeditions in which he took part:
The scouts were sent ahead, and soon we saw the great cloud of dust raised by the enemy. We had no way of knowing whether they were coming toward us or going away from us. On the following day as we were marching among the mountains of Gilboa, the mountains on our right and the marshes on our left, we came to Bethany, where the enemy had pitched their tents, but when they saw the coming of the army of the living God marching in good order and apparently in vast numbers they fled after folding their tents, leaving to Christian horsemen the ravaging of the land.
. . . we made two stops along the shores of Lake Galilee to see the sights associated with our Lord who deigned to work miracles and to converse with men, whom He honored with his bodily presence. We came to Bethsaida, the town of Andrew and Peter, now reduced to a pathetically small village. We saw the places where Christ summoned the disciples, and walked on water, and fed the multitude in the desert, and where He climbed up in the mountain to pray, and the place where He ate with the disciples after the Resurrection; and then we came to Capharnaum and we returned to Acre, mounting our sick and poor on beasts of burden.
During our second cavalry expedition we came to the foot of Mount Tabor. We thought at first there was no water there, but we dug deep and found water in abundance. Our leaders thought there was no way we could climb the mountain. They deliberated, and a Saracen boy told them how the castle could be taken. And so on the first Sunday after our arrival, while the Gospel was being read aloud: “Ite in castellum quod contra vos est: Go into the village over against you,” the Patriarch marched ahead, bearing the Cross, followed by the bishops and the priests all praying and singing, and we made our way according to the slope of the mountain; and although it was very high and steep, and although it was nearly impossible to climb except by way of a narrow path, the knights and the foot soldiers, and all those who rode on horseback or walked, all of them made the ascent with enthusiasm.
John, King of Jerusalem, followed by the army of the Lord, overwhelmed the castle’s governor and an emir with the first onslaught. The castle guards who poured out of the gates with intrepidity in order to defend the approaches, fled ignominiously, being seized with terror. King John behaved admirably as he raced up the mountain but he came down ingloriously. While the enemy remained shut up within the cast
le, the kings of Jerusalem and of Cyprus together with the Master of the Hospital and the other barons retired shamefully on one side of the mountain to decide on the proper course to take. The noble Duke of Austria, who took no part in these deliberations, was fighting the infidels on the other side of the mountain, and he could not find us, for we were already at the top. . . .
The castle on Mount Tabor fell to the Christian army; large numbers of prisoners were taken, and James of Vitry, the Bishop of Acre, had the pleasure of baptizing many Saracen children who fell into his hands either by gift or because he paid for them with gold coins. What is remarkable in his account of the expedition is its casualness, the sense of things happening haphazardly, without order and without logic. We see the clouds of dust—are they coming or going? The duke of Austria vanishes around the other side of the mountain, and it appears that no one is attempting to find out what happened to him. The first expedition disintegrates into a sightseeing tour.
Yet there were deeply serious purposes in these marches through the Galilee. The Crusaders were testing the enemy’s mettle; they were gathering intelligence; they were deciding on the next point of attack. The Templars were the chief strategists, and their opinions on military matters were always listened to with respect. The master of the Temple hoped to attack Nablus, as a stepping stone to the recapture of Jerusalem. At some time in the winter or the early spring, the attack on Nablus was abandoned and it was generally agreed that an attack on Damietta would be more rewarding.