‘Sanctum Sepulchrum…’ Men’s voices on the parvis relay the chant. ‘Sanctum Sepulchrum adjuva!’ They’re proud to be men with a taste for war bred in them – trained into them from childhood. The irony of using a religion born of opposition to one military culture to fuel another is lost on the crucesignati. Gentle Jesus urges them to battle for the right to re-erect His cross and cleanse His tomb; invites them to see violence as a virtue.
‘Sanctum Sepulchrum adjuva! Holy Sepulchre assist us!’ Their paean rises to the vaulted roof of the basilica, spreads as ripples from a stone flung into water, resounding and rebounding round the hills and through the twilit valleys.
Dawn breaks over Vézelay. Its townsfolk wake from dreams of thunder to the reality of trembling earth and rank on rank of tramping feet. Platters rattle on their shelves. The sentries on their walkways feel the town walls tremble. Others who have risen early to stand at first light on the valley slopes, watch forests of raised spears move steadily along the Moulins road. Wood creaks, harness jingles, metal shoes strike sparks from stone. Dogs bark. Commanders bellow orders. Excitable young riders crow like the roosters as by degrees the sun penetrates the dust of their departure to paint colours onto fields of banners. Pennons buckle in the breeze, and from the hill behind the town the bells of the basilica ring out in noisy celebration. Cue for black cats to cross the road ahead and bats to leave their belfries. The great folly of the Kings’ Croisade is underway at last.
Some few days before, the marshals of provision have ridden ahead to commandeer supplies. Now in the darkness of the early hours the highest échelons of kings and prelates leave their lodgings in the town.
Now the first French contingent begin to move preceded by two bishops, the Counts of Nevers, Fontigny, Clermont and Blois. Each with his own battalion. Each jewelled and perfumed, barbered to the ears and signed with a bright cross of scarlet silk. Behind on leading reins prance destriers in tasselled housings, with hooded gyrfalcons, peregrines on perches, smaller birds in cages and dogs in couples – greyhounds, lymers, tracking dogs and pacing dogs for running down gazelle. Behind the dogs come chamberlains and pages, clerks, heralds, surgeons and physicians, astrologers, cartographers, and chroniclers to record the valour of the enterprise and set down the history of its conquests. Then swarms of common fletchers, farriers, fewterers, smiths, scullions and pastrycooks. Packhorses and hide-covered wagons bear plate and coffers, battle helms in pinewood cases. Documents on parchment. Raiments layered with lavender against the moth in solid cedar chests. Marching in their tracks come companies of soldiers – squires on foot and knights on horseback. All faces stamped with eager smiles. All bodies branded with red crosses.
Behind the French are men of Burgundy; brothers in Christ who also wear red crosses on their shoulders to strengthen their right arms. Then Mosans and Brabançons out of Flanders, riding six-abreast on Flemish horses under the green standard of their leader, Jacques d’Avenses. Then black-crossed Teutons from the Rhineland who missed their chance to leave with Barbarossa. Then cavallieres and troops of crack Italian routiers – rank on rank, with crossbows on their shoulders and yellow crosses on their cloaks. Until at last all cruciforms are drained of colour; lily-white.
More numerous than those of France, of Burgundy and Flanders, Germany and Italy all set together – too many to be counted as they pass, or calculated later for the annals – few in the white-crossed army of the English King have any clear idea of where Jerusalem might be or what Muslims believe. Within their ranks they speak eight languages and twice as many dialects. A third perhaps are mercenaries. The rest are believing Christians who are convinced they’re in the right – that Saracens are in the wrong and bound for hellfire and damnation.
Then naturally the greatest Christian hope since Charlemagne rides as you might expect well to the fore; his reputation vitally enhanced by what is borne before him. For on a sumpter in a specially constructed casket bound with bands of brass, King Richard carries nothing less than Arthur’s elf-made sword, Escalibor. Not as it happens handed to him from the surface of a lake, but risen from the earth.
His heralds spread the story up and down the lines that prophesy foretells the coming of a worthy king, within whose hand an ancient sword, cast all of bronze in a stone mould, will guide his Christian force to victory. By curious and happy chance the very sword, Escalibor, has recently been found within the grave of King Arthur and his Queen at Glastonbury, and sent across the Narrow Sea by Abbot Hugh de Sulli for Richard to take with him en croisade. An inscription and a tress of Gwenevere’s exquisite golden hair confirm the blade’s identity, or so the criers claim. And clearly when it comes to omens of success or failure – Escalibor or Melusine’s black bat? – there is no contest. The legendary weapon wins hands down.
Unhelmeted, the King of England’s dressed much less for comfort than effect. Mounted on a milk-white Spanish stallion, dazzling in silver linkmail with his lightest, brightest golden crown set on his tawny head, he rides beneath the heraldic lions – the leopardés guardant of Normandy and Maine Anjou unsheathing claws across the scarlet waves of his royal banner. Chin up, chest out, with all his soft parts under iron control, he looks more than magnificent. He looks the very image of a hero.
The King of France, by way of contrast, is slightly built with small squint eyes and thinning hair. Philippus Rex Francorum looks commonplace and doesn’t care. Crowned at fourteen and not yet twenty-five, his serious perceptions make him seem older than his years. Attended by a single page, bareheaded, dressed like a penitent in a plain black surcoat astride a hackney mare, he moves almost unnoticed up the line to take his place at Richard’s side.
‘Well now, Philippe, have you come to see how differently the road looks from an English point of view?’ King Richard beams and reaches with a large gloved paw to slap the King of France on his thin thigh. ‘Or are you going to tell me that you’ve changed your mind about Jerusalem, and want to spend the summer interviewing for another queen?’
‘You know that I’m in mourning still,’ the younger man says coldly.
‘Which means?’
‘Which I should say means that it’s you, not I, who needs a wife.’
‘Quite so,’ Richard concurs. ‘But is that your suggestion, Philippe? Or your sister’s?’
‘If you will recall, your contract with my sister has brought you, amongst other things, the territories Gisors and Châteauroux.’ King Philippe shrugs his narrow shoulders looking less than pleased. ‘So if it’s true as we have heard that you are looking elsewhere for a queen – that land must be returned to France the day that you break faith with Alys, along with Issoudun and Graçay.’
‘I’ll grant you that her dower lands are one of Alys’s best features. But don’t ye think our noble houses deserve a little respite now and then from fucking one another?’ The English King turns in his saddle and smiles to see the colour drain from Philippe’s face. ‘God’s blood, I swear ’tis hard to tell when you are bedding France if you’re performing a dynastic duty, or committing incest.’
As both of them and all the world’s aware, for years the political and copulatory affairs of France and Acquitaine-Anjou have been hopelessly entangled. King Richard’s mother, Eléanore, has been both Queen of France and England; married at fifteen to King Philippe’s father and after their divorce to Richard’s father, Henry. What’s more, at around the time that Richard’s brother consummated his marriage to Philippe’s sister Marguerite, their father bedded Marguerite’s sister and his fiancée, Alys, to get a child on her.
But there was more… in Paris three years earlier the princely cousins, Richard and Philippe, have also shared a naked bed – and if no one outside the sheets that night can say what happened underneath them, it’s known that in his taste for adolescents of both sexes, Richard shares the carnal habits of other military commanders. Of Alexander and of Caesar. A big hairy man himself, he has a penchant for unripened flesh.
Some people, like t
he King of France, blanch with emotion. Others, like the King of England, darken; and only they know if it’s righteous indignation or an unwelcome memory that accounts for Philippe’s sickly shade.
‘If you want France’s support in this campaign,’ he speaks between clenched teeth. ‘I’d recommend you save your insults for the Turks!’
King Richard laughs. ‘I’ll bear the point in mind.’
Thereafter the kings ride in studied silence, knee to knee, acknowledging the cheers of those who leave the fields to see them pass, or run to kiss their stirruped feet. Both bowing from the saddle. Both smiling affably in all directions but the one that brings them face to face.
Later in the afternoon, to cries of admiration, the King of England with his guard moves past the sumpter carrying Escalibor to take his rightful place as he perceives it at the very forefront of the cavalcade. He rides beneath his lion standard, his long cloak rippling across the haunches of his Spanish stallion.
The King of France, who’s had enough of riding for the day, returns to rest and to reflect upon his litter.
A living mass of men and beasts snakes backward to the far horizon. The riders’ long forked pennons stream and flutter in the wind like vanes of sea-kelp in a current. Some sewn with verses from the Bible. Not all of them the right way up.
Between the military divisions, herds of goats and grunting pigs and red and white milch cows keep drovers busily employed. Vans made to look like gabled hutches house the old laundresses with their washtubs and their soap. Long trains of mules and donkeys carry lighter freight. Wains hired from local carters for the journey south are stacked with camp equipment – horseshoes, chests of nails, with provender for livestock, cheeses, sides of salted pork and sacks of beans and grain. Others large enough to bear the main beams and components of siege engines and their missiles, are dragged by teams of oxen whose slow progress sets the pace for all the rest. Indeed so ponderous is their advance, that Richard at the head of the migration has crossed the winding River Nivernais three times to pitch his cloth of gold pavilion on its western bank, before the final remnants of his English army strike tents at Vézelay some six leagues to the rear.
Archbishop Baldwin, who’s declined an invitation to ride forward with the Archbishop of Rouen and his avant garde of jewelled grandees, climbs painfully onto his mule to await the marshals’ signal for departure. He’s had a tiresome, tiring day including more than he can take of fussing chaplains and purposeless complaints. The journey east from Chinon has worsened his old troubles with his joints – and if he’s honest with himself, as Baldwin almost always is, he feels no relish for the trials ahead. It isn’t that he doubts the need for the croisade. God only knows how fervently he’s advertised it as a bellum sacrum to Christians from Wales to the Touraine.
‘It’s simply, I’m sorry – but it’s simply that I’m getting old, Monète,’ he tells his riding mule; an animal that’s busily employed stripping a sallow of its shoots and at the other end in making an unpleasant smell.
‘I am too old in body for a military adventure.’
Adventure? Baldwin glances back to see if anyone beside Monète has heard him use that word. ‘A just and holy war. A service to all Christendom. An enterprise to win back the Holy City for Christ’s own greater glory!’ is what he should have said, and how he’d always put it in his sermons.
Just then his eye alights on a small group of men and sumpter beasts led by a mounted knight; a group advancing to the line exactly like a thousand others, except for the squire’s red hair. So typical, so much the same as all the others, chattering like starlings on a roost, excited to be on the move, bright-eyed with expectation.
God bless them for their simple faith, their Primate thinks benignly stifling a yawn. The tall knight with the malformed ear looks strong and energetic. But young, so young – why hardly out of boyhood; his ardent face the face of all such innocents. The face of the croisade.
As Baldwin stoops to rub his aching knee, he thinks of Richard’s face in Anjou and Westminster. Alight with pride. Consumed by greed. At Fontevraud Duke Richard spoke of guarding trade routes, building a new empire great as Alexander’s, boasting he’d annex the Latin Kingdom for himself. There is a rumour circulating in the camp that in despite of his betrothal to Ays of France, Richard plans to wed the Palestinian Queen’s younger sister, Isabella.
And if that’s true, thinks Balwin, it would suggest we’ve all been duped – me in my sermans, the crucesignati in their faith and trust. To make of us tools in the hands of those intent on gain, not for Christ’s glory but their own.
The Kings’ Croisade is on the move, unstoppable in its intent. But is it God’s design or that of an avaricious prince? Am I naive to think that Christ is with the enterprise, the old archbishop asks himself. Or even (terrible suspicion) that He is here at all?
With a feeling of dismay Baldwin acknowledges a lapse of faith; one of those abrupt descents from firm belief to honest doubt which all too frequently assail him. Sometimes he feels that he knows less about himself and his relationship to God than when he was a novice no older than that tall young knight, with a full head of hair still and a young man’s embarrassingly carnal inclinations.
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa…
Baldwin signs the cross, puts up his cowl and takes a breath; a little ritual that he’s evolved which sometimes seems to help. ‘Oh Lord, sustain me in my faith!’ he cries fervently, to the surprise of all in earshot and the flat-eared consternation of Monète the mule.
CHAPTER TWO
‘Oh Lord, sustain me in my faith!’ You’d have thought a man who was first-cousin to a saint could never doubt his calling. But if what the old archbishop cried surprised us, I’ve learned since then that faith can be stretched – stretched until it breaks.
Our journey south to the seaport of Marseille took us four weeks including the delay at Lyons. On the first day we covered less than a league, which hardly seemed to justify the effort. ‘If you and I had lain abed to Vespers an’ then doddled on at a slow snail’s gallop,’ I overheard Jos telling Bertram, ‘we’d still have caught the yellow-crosses at their breakfast.’
We none of us saw either of the kings that side of Lyons. Nor any of the preux chevaliers of Christendom, save for the old archbishop on his mule. What we saw chiefly were a line of horses’ arses moving through a pulp of mud and dung and trampled vegetation. Smashed copses. Flattened fields of rye and buckwheat. Ruined harvests. Wasted hamlets. Mutilated cats and dogs. Every poultry house was silent by the time we reached it, every barn stripped of its hay. The fields of Burgundy were empty of their cattle, its woods of game and swine. We saw our Christian armies cut a swathe of devastation through the land, yet all the time thought only of ourselves. It’s true. To be a part of that great enterprise, to make a gift to it of everything we had, was all we wanted in the world. That’s what I told myself. I told myself that anything I still felt for the wife I’d left behind was no more than a distraction from my destiny to serve. They say that absence strengthens bonds. But with each league I put between us, I could feel Elise’s hold loosen. Away from the sight and smell of her my feelings ebbed and slackened like a watercourse in want of rain. Even the guilt I felt for what I’d done on our last night had dwindled to a trickle.
Horns sounded night and morning up and down the line, to tell us when to halt and when to rise, and most days we sang as we broke camp the best of all the croisade hymns, bellowed high into the summer morning air:
‘Wood of the True Cross before
Royal gonfanons of war!
Christian trumpets proudly sound;
Never have they given ground,
By their oaths of honour bound,
Strengthened in God’s Holy Law!’
God smiled upon the enterprise. Or so it seemed to His believers.
My forty days’ knight service ran out while we were still at Chinon. So from thenceforth, like the men I led, I was paid as an archbishop’s
soldier.
My little Manor Squad were on the whole a cheerful band who belted out the verses of the hymn as readily as I did. Along with other ruder songs in Engleis. They trusted me and I was proud to be their leader, finding tasks for each of them that met my expectations. Beyond his duties as a squire, Jos shared the cooking with John Hideman and helped him with the horses. The ploughman’s natural gift, his reassuring whistle, made him the best groom for Raoul – a thing decided after my high-tempered destrier had bitten Albie and stamped on Jos’s toes more times than anyone found helpful. Alberic and Bertram pitched the tents and picketed the mules. The elder giving orders, the younger doing most of the hard swearing. It also fell to Bertram as the senior man to guard our coffer of four-hundred shillings, all in silver pennies, marching beside the mule that carried it with one hand on the coffer-lid, the other on his dagger.
When was it that it rained so hard?
I think it must have been on the third or fourth day of the march that the heavens opened – and opened wide enough as Jos would have it to wash away our sins twice over! The dyes ran in the nobles’ priceless garments, to stain them underneath we all supposed, all sorts of interesting colours. Our own were plastered to our bodies. Water trickled down our necks, sucked at our horses’ hooves. Ruts cut into ruts, and in no time the way was churned into a mire that forced us into detours through the fields.
It was on the outskirts of the town of Nevers that we happened on a laundry van embedded axle-deep in mud. While John and Alberic and Bertram set shoulders to the wheels to push it back into the road, the old laundresses shouted their encouragements from beneath its looped-up canvas. The stoutest of the sisterhood came from the port of Deal in Kent, where fifty years before she told us she’d been baptised Guillemette. In addition to a hairy mole on her flat nose and grey brows thick as ropes, she had three chins – one hammocked in a tight barbette with two more underneath. To call the woman pot-bellied would do the pot a favour. But she had some good features – two of them, a massive pair of breasts networked with purple veins, and resting on the tailboard of the cart like pumpkins on a shelf.
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