Global events played their part, too. In 1074, Gregory wrote a series of letters calling for the liberation of the Eastern Orthodox Christians, who had suffered a major military defeat three years before at the hands of the Muslim Turks at Manzikert, in eastern Asia Minor. Establishing a clear link between fighting for the church and the practice of indulgence, Gregory promised “eternal reward” for those who took part.8 The West’s anxieties were further heightened by reports—largely untrue but widely accepted as fact—that the modest but steady flow of Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem was being systematically impeded, or worse, by the strict Seljuk Turks, who had taken control of the holy city in 1070 from the more relaxed Fatimids of Egypt.
Peter the Hermit himself may have been manhandled by the local Muslims as he attempted without success to reach Jerusalem on a personal pilgrimage some years before the Crusades. Anna Comnena, the Byzantine princess, says Peter “suffered much at the hands of the Turks and Saracens,” before making his way back to Europe only “with difficulty.”9 In some versions of the story, Jesus appears to Peter in a dream and commands him to return home, gather an army of believers, and liberate the Church of the Holy Sepulcher from Muslim control; in others, the patriarch of Jerusalem deputizes Peter to make his way to Europe to summon help for embattled eastern Christians. The late twelfth-century Song of Antioch depicts Peter, “whom God made messenger,” as the sole survivor of an earlier campaign who then returns to Europe to raise a great army and lead the Crusade.10
Peter’s exact role in launching the Crusade remains uncertain, although later medieval chronicles are notable for the increasing prominence they give the hermit as inspiration and even prime mover behind the entire enterprise. Popular accounts celebrate Peter for aiding the poor and providing dowries for prostitutes so that they might marry. One twelfth-century text, The Rosenfeld Annals, says the hermit’s arrival on the scene was foreshadowed by an impressive celestial display: “One evening … with not a cloud in the air, balls of fire, as it seemed, shone forth in different places and reconstituted themselves in another part of the sky. It was observed that this was no fire but angelic powers which, by their migration, were signifying the movement and foreshadowing the departure of people from their places, which later seized nearly all the Western world.”11
With Urban II, protégé of the bellicose Gregory VII, on the throne of St. Peter, there was no more holding back the disparate forces pulling the church toward war. Reformers grouped around the pope were locked in battle for influence and power with both internal and secular rivals. A long and varied history of Christian teachings on permissible war in defense of the faith and the growing popularity of martial metaphors in religious writings eased the way. As those around the pontiff recognized, the call to Christian arms would allow the pope to exercise enormous personal authority and help unite his fractious flock in a sacred mission; it seemed like the answer to their prayers. The result was Christian holy war on a massive scale, an attempt by an atavistic West to remake a changing world in its own image. Although they would ultimately end in failure, the Crusades nonetheless paid significant dividends by bringing the Latin world face-to-face with the scientific and technological prowess of the Arab East. They also fired the imagination regarding things Eastern among many in Europe, including Adelard, who was in his teens at the time of Urban’s momentous appeal.
The pope had envisioned a long, careful buildup to a proper military campaign under the command of his appointed lieutenant, the papal legate, and backed by the ruling families of the West. But the tide of humanity that quickly fell in behind Peter the Hermit and a handful of other populist leaders had no interest in the prelate’s cautious timetable, or the church’s broader political, social, and theological goals. This People’s Crusade, a prelude to the main military effort, would wait for no man. “Deus vult!” the crowds had chanted in Clermont in response to the pope’s fighting words. “God wills it!” The faithful, eager to escape lives of degradation, violence, and disease, soon set off by the tens of thousands without waiting for their betters. “Therefore, while the princes, who felt in the need of many expenses and great services from their attendants, made their preparations slowly and carefully, the common people who had little property, but were very numerous, joined … Peter the Hermit, and obeyed him as a master while these affairs were going on among us,” says the account of Guibert of Nogent.12
The majority comprised simple peasants, but there were townspeople, too, and even some impoverished knights, renegades, debtors, and outright criminals. For many, the quest for the Holy Land was guided more by superstition and popular frenzy than by any true understanding of the faith or the goals of church leaders. “They asserted that a certain goose was inspired by the Holy Spirit, and that a she-goat was not less filled by this same Spirit,” records Albert of Aix, clearly mortified by the very words he is writing. “These they made their guides on this holy journey to Jerusalem; these they worshipped excessively; and most of the people following them, like beasts, believed with their whole minds that this was the true course.”13 Sexual license also ran rampant among the crusaders. “These people … joined up in one force, but did not abstain at all from illicit unions and the pleasures of the flesh; they gave themselves up to gluttonous excess without interruption and amused themselves without interruption with women and young girls who had also emigrated from their homes to give themselves to the same follies.”14
By the spring of 1096, the ill-disciplined mobs that constituted this People’s Crusade were sweeping through the unfamiliar lands of Central and Eastern Europe with predictably disastrous results. The Jews of the Rhineland, forewarned by their brethren in France who had successfully bribed Peter and other leaders to leave them alone, braced for the worst. “At this time arrogant people, a people of strange speech, a nation bitter and impetuous, Frenchmen and Germans, set out for the holy city, which had been desecrated by barbaric nations, there to seek their house of idolatry and banish the Ishmaelites [the Muslims] and other denizens of the land and conquer the land for themselves,” recounts The Chronicle of Solomon bar Simson, left behind by a little-known Jewish writer. “Their ranks swelled until the numbers of men, women and children exceeded a locust horde covering the earth.”15 Another account, written by an anonymous Jewish author from Mainz, then a center of learning, was recorded shortly after the events. It tells us that Jews all along the Rhine began to fast, to repent their sins, and to beseech God for help. Some sought the protection of the local Catholic bishops, while others tried to emulate their French brethren and pay the crusaders to go away. Their appeals, sacred and profane, went unheeded.
The worst depredations were carried out by the forces under the local German count Emicho as they marched eastward up the Rhine. At Worms, in May 1096, they killed five hundred Jews who had sought the protection of local Catholic leaders. Another thousand were killed in Mainz, amid anti-Jewish rioting in the city. Again, the local church leadership failed to restrain its flocks or honor earlier promises to the Jews of sanctuary.16 Jewish leaders organized mass suicides rather than let their charges fall into the hands of the attacking crusaders and face the prospect of forced conversion. “They all cried out together in a loud voice, … ‘Whoever has a knife, come kill us for the honor of the unique eternal God, and then pierce himself with his sword in the neck or belly, slaughter himself,’ ” the anonymous chronicler reports. “And the pure women were throwing money out [the windows] to delay the enemies a bit, until the women could slaughter their own children; the hands of merciful women were strangling their own children, to do the will of the Creator, and were turning their children’s tender faces to the Gentiles.”17
Pope Urban’s call to crusade had fired the religious zeal of Christians across Europe with its appeal to battle the “enemies” of Christ. This was a dangerous development at a time of growing tensions in the Rhineland between Jews, long seen in the European imagination as Christ’s tormentors, and non-Jews over access to expan
ding trade and commerce.18 Popular Christian tracts accusing the Jews of scheming with the far-off Muslims, often in fantastic ways, only aggravated matters further. “Emicho the wicked, enemy of the Jews, came with his whole army against the city gate, and the citizens opened it up for him. Emicho, a German noble, led a band of plundering German and French crusaders. The enemies of the Lord said to each other: ‘See, they have opened the gate for us; now let us avenge the blood of the crucified one,’ ” writes Solomon bar Simson.19 Volkmar, another populist leader, attacked the Jews of Prague at the end of June, while more massacres took place near the Hungarian border. By the summer, the crusaders had left the Rhineland and were headed for Constantinople, much to the relief of the local Christian rulers who wanted them out of their lands as quickly as possible.20
No wonder Anna Comnena recounts with awe the fanatical tide of humanity—dirty, ill fed, sick, and exhausted—that poured into the realm in the summer of 1096, on the way to battle the Muslim infidel to the south. It was, she notes gravely, “a matter greater and more terrible than famine.”21 Most of Peter’s loyal followers were slaughtered by the Turks on October 2I at Civetot, not far from Constantinople. They had set off against the counsel of Emperor Alexius—Anna’s father—and without the protection of the organized armies of Christendom that were still in transit from Europe. The hermit, however, was not present at the disastrous end to this People’s Crusade. Contemporary European accounts are contradictory: Either he remonstrated unsuccessfully with his followers not to take on the well-trained Turkish forces, or he cowered in the safety of Constantinople to avoid the slaughter he knew was inevitable. Anna’s version has him whisked to safety by Byzantine forces. In any event, Peter eventually reached his beloved Jerusalem with the main contingent of knights three years later. One of Peter’s chief lieutenants was less fortunate. His coat of mail pierced by seven arrows, he died at Civetot at the head of his fanatical army.
Along the eastern Mediterranean and into the Syrian heartland, the arrival of the crusaders appeared to confirm the worst fears of the local Arabs and their Jewish and Christian subjects. Medieval Arab geography customarily divided the world into seven zones, or climates. The central third and fourth zones—the Arab world, North Africa, Iran, and parts of China—enjoyed the greatest balance and harmony. The northerly sixth zone was home to the Slavs, the Turks, and the European Christians, the latter known among the Arabs simply as al-Ifranj, or the Franks. All three were warlike, filthy, and inclined toward treachery.22 In the case of the Franks, their northerly provenance also made them unstable. Other notable qualities included profligate sexuality, a lack of jealousy, and a general propensity for violence.23
The Arab geographer al-Masudi blamed the absence of sunlight for these personal shortcomings. At the same time, his assessment betrayed a grasp of astronomy—if not, perhaps, of meteorology—that was well beyond that of his subjects, the crusading Franks:
As regards the people of the northern quadrant, they are the one for whom the sun is distant from the zenith … The power of the sun is weak among them because of their distance from it; cold and damp prevail in their regions, and snow and ice follow one another in endless succession. The warm humor is lacking among them; their bodies are large; their natures gross, their manners harsh, their understanding dull, and their tongues heavy … Their religious beliefs lack solidity, and this is because of the nature of cold and the lack of warmth.24
The debacle of Peter and his populist campaign was soon eclipsed by the arrival outside Constantinople of the main Christian fighting force. Here were trained military men, led by members of Europe’s royal houses and subject to both the new religious zeal of the day and more traditional political and economic interests of their own. This jumble of kings, princes, and other nobility from across Europe often left the fortunes of the First Crusade hostage to internal rivalries, personal ambition, and the lack of a single recognized authority or commander. At first Emperor Alexius successfully exploited these differences and used the crusaders’ military prowess and enthusiasm to reestablish his own grip over western Asia Minor, which he had lost earlier to the Muslims. In one such campaign, Raymond of Saint-Gilles, Count of Toulouse, captured the Syrian port of Latakia from the Arabs and then handed it to the Byzantine ruler in line with an oath he and other crusader lords had taken at Alexius’s insistence.
But the princes of western Christendom were not all so pliable. Many were intent on performing their religious and military duty as quickly as possible before hurrying back to their dominions at home. But a select handful, including some of the leading lights of the First Crusade, such as Godfrey of Bouillon and the wily Norman commander Bohemond of Taranto, had ill-disguised territorial designs of their own. Pope Urban had, at least in part, used the First Crusade to export the endless bickering and warring of such minor princelings from an exhausted and violence-racked Europe. He had said as much at Clermont. Both the church’s higher ambitions for the Crusades and Alexius’s own dream of restoring Constantinople’s hold over Asia Minor and the eastern Mediterranean with the help of the zealous arrivals had to compete with the more mundane and secular concerns of the individual crusaders.
Almost immediately, fissures opened in the Latin ranks. The push south from Constantinople to the Holy Land—the stated objective of the entire venture, after all—was threatened by the decision of Baldwin of Boulogne, a prominent French nobleman, and a handful of others to split off temporarily from the main body in search of territory they could call their own. Baldwin had carefully studied the social and political complexities of the Armenian lands along the nearby Euphrates. He and his men, accompanied by Armenian political advisers, headed eastward to make their fortune. They may have taken some comfort in the notion that such a campaign would further the crusaders’ mission by protecting the eastern flank of the drive for Jerusalem. But it was clear that Baldwin, as astute a diplomatic and military operator as any of the crusader commanders, had sensed opportunity amid the traditional political and religious intrigues of the region, particularly in Edessa, then a predominantly Armenian town in what is today southern Turkey. He was not about to let the demands of Christian holy war stand in his way.
As Baldwin and his aides had been led to expect, the local Armenian Christian population at once welcomed the crusading Franks with open arms. They had grown tired of constant Turkish military raids and were restive under the rule of the former Byzantine official Thoros, a fellow Armenian who followed the Eastern Orthodox Church of hated Byzantium rather than the national rite. Unpopular at home, increasingly unsuccessful at war, and childless in marriage, the aging Thoros offered to adopt the popular Baldwin as his heir and immediately made him coruler. The pair even underwent an adoption ritual, clearly designed for young children, in which they both wriggled into a single oversize shirt or tunic and rubbed their chests together; Baldwin then repeated the process with Thoros’s wife, now his adoptive “mother.” The Chronicle of Matthew of Armenia reports that a plot to remove Thoros was soon hatched and that Baldwin was informed, although his overt role as instigator, if any, remains murky. On March 7, 1098, the conspirators whipped the population into a frenzy of rioting and brought down the hapless Thoros. Three days later, the town notables invited Baldwin to take his place. Thoros, we are told, was caught trying to escape and was torn to pieces by the mob.25
Edessa, the first territory to fall to the crusaders and the first to slip from their grasp again, was little more than a sideshow to the West’s campaign for control of the Holy Land. Yet it played an outsize role in the early history of the so-called Latin East. First, it showed how skillful diplomacy and a healthy dose of intrigue could easily tip the region’s fragile balance among competing ethnic, linguistic, and sectarian factions, groups, and nations. Second, it created a powerful if fleeting example of what an ambitious prince and a handful of knights—Baldwin’s initial force was said to number just sixty horsemen—could accomplish, inspiring acquisitive rivals to strike out
on their own rather than struggle on toward the holy city.
Most important, it saw the emergence under Baldwin, who had proclaimed himself Count of Edessa, of a model of state and society for the rest of the Latin East, one that the irrepressible Norman would later implement more widely as king of Jerusalem. According to this approach, Frankish princes and their vassals were allocated the top positions of government, but plenty of room was left for the talents and ambitions of the locals, whether Christian or Muslim. This would prove a successful system, well adapted to the ethnic and sectarian mosaic of the Middle East, but it stood at odds with the militant notions of crusading as preached by Pope Urban two and a half years earlier.
Like the future Count of Edessa, Bohemond of Taranto seemed more concerned with immediate earthly pursuit than future heavenly reward. One of the ablest commanders of the First Crusade, this Norman adventurer from southern Italy took no direct role in the march to Jerusalem in 1099. Instead, he overrode the objections of his colleagues and ignored his own oath to Emperor Alexius by setting out to take Antioch, gateway to the Holy Land, from the Muslims and keep it for himself and his heirs. Once outside its walls, he repeatedly thwarted joint crusader efforts to seize the city, whose defenders soon recovered from their initial dismay at the arrival of the large Christian army. Bohemond’s tactic cost the crusaders the chance to seize the city immediately and forced many months of delay in the main host’s push for Jerusalem, but it successfully ensured that the spoils of victory would ultimately accrue to him alone.
The House of Wisdom Page 2