XII. THE PRINCIPLES OF LAW IN ISLAM
WRITTEN SPECIALLY FOR THE PRESENT WORK
BY DR. I. GOLDZIHER
Professor in the University of Vienna, etc.
In studying the lines along which Islam has developed we are confronted with a singular antithesis within the faith itself. It is the outcome of a revolutionary movement which arose to declare war against the past of the Arab nation and of all other nations which it subdued by the ruthless sword of Islam. Yet it had scarcely taken the first step in its career, before investing with little short of sacramental importance an idea so wholly alien to the spirit of subversion and revolution that it seems to us rather a palladium of the most rigid conservatism. This is the idea of the sunna.
Sunna means traditional usage, or custom hallowed by ancestral use, by practice transmitted through past generations. He who violates this custom trespasses against the Holy of holies, against something far above any article of a legal code drawn up with all the mature consideration and cool deliberation of the judicial mind; he had sinned against the pious reverence due to the days of old. This is the view which underlies the sanctity of the sunna. Translated into legal phraseology sunna might accordingly be denominated right by custom, but a better idea of its meaning may be gained by comparing it with the mores majorum or usus longævus of the Romans. For the determining factor in it is not its established character but the high esteem in which it has been held from remote antiquity.
All this (to return to the proposition from which we started) is little in accord with a system which originated with a prophet of revolution who could not say, as Jesus said of himself, that he was “not come to destroy but to fulfil”--at least, not as far as the traditional institutions of the Arabs were concerned. Mohammed does, indeed, represent himself as restoring what has been lost, as bringing back the golden age of religion to man, the rule of the din Ibrahim (the religion of Abraham) which had been lost by corruption and wickedness, and obscured by gross heathenism on its own native soil (for according to Mohammed the Kaaba at Mecca is the temple of Abraham and Ishmael). But it is not this pretension which will enable us to grasp the significance of the idea of the sunna in Islam.
Amazing as it may sound, and accustomed as we are to associate the idea of the sunna with the sheikhs who keep jealous watch over the holy places of Islam, sunna is not primarily an Islamite word, nor is the idea it expresses peculiar to Islam. It is deeply rooted in the ethical sentiment of the very heathenism which the prophet arose to overthrow. Sunna is an idea which Islam adopted from Arab heathenism, and which, in the change of meaning it underwent in this new sphere, became one of the main pillars of the new system.
The conception involved in the sunna, as defined at the beginning of this essay, represents the heathen Arab’s ideal of life and the primitive idea of laws and morals in tribal life. In this respect there was no difference between the two classes which went to make up the sum total of the Arab world, between the Bedouins and the dwellers in towns. The mores majorum were their law and their religion. The customs of their forefathers were their dogmas; the practices that had come down to them from the remote past were their sacraments. To infringe these was criminal sacrilege. If the cult of tribal fellowship and regard for the duties arising out of this association constitute the sum total of morality, how much more imperatively did the principle apply to the maintenance of a supersensual fellowship with the generations of the past.
Hence, in the persecution with which the world of Arab heathenism received his preaching, Mohammed was not confronted by opponents who defended the old state of things by arguments based on religion, or wielded the weapons of serious controversy to refute his doctrines. The heathen Arabs had but one argument against the message proclaimed to them by the visionary of Mecca--it was an innovation. He represents his heathen fellow-countrymen as putting forward this argument against himself in exactly the same manner as he represents the heathen nations of old as hurling it at their prophets. “If one saith to them, ‘Obey the laws which Allah sends you,’ then they say, ‘We follow the customs of our fathers.’ If one saith to them, ‘Come and adopt the religion which Allah hath revealed to his ambassador,’ they answer, ‘We are satisfied with the religion of our fathers.’ When the evil-doers commit an evil deed they say, ‘Thus we saw it done by our fathers, it is Allah who commands such things.’ But they say, ‘We found that our fathers were on this road and we tread in their steps.’ Speak and say--do I not proclaim to you a better thing than that whereat ye found your fathers?”
This plea, which constitutes, so to speak, the methodology of the struggle of the heathen against the prophet, is, as it were, a constant element that pervades all the laments of the Koran over the stubbornness of the heathen. They hate the prophet because he insults their forefathers, who were likewise his own. He is lacking in filial piety. And the touchstone of his error is his antagonistic attitude towards the remote past. To the heathen his idols are dear as “heritages from the worthies who have bequeathed this inheritance.”
Only a few decades elapsed before Islam had its own sunna. The element of antiquity in this case was, of course, a figment; it anticipated for its justification the generations yet to be born, who should look up to this new standard as to something hallowed by tradition. It had no warrant in the actual experience of successive generations which had already regarded it as inviolable.
The Koran, the oldest and most authoritative document of the Islamite movement, is not a book which offers to the believer a comprehensive body of religious instruction sufficient to satisfy all inquiries. What it pre-eminently does is to predispose religious sentiment to the acceptance of the religion which arose on this foundation. Nor is it more complete if regarded as a statutory guide in questions of law, since it takes note of only a small and very limited department of juridical needs. What it does is to predispose ethical sentiment in favour of the new aspects in which social life and the legal relations it involves are to be considered.
While these sentiments gave precision to the form of these new standards, investing them with the character of divinely instituted laws, their substance drew its nourishment from alien sources, from new views, which were a consequence of the great career in history upon which the new Islamite community entered soon after it came into existence. Much fresh territory was conquered. It was impossible that contact with foreign elements should fail to implant fresh ideas in the Semitic mind, singularly receptive as it is--ideas which were destined to give its final shape to the faith of Islam with which its adherents had embarked on their conquering career.
Without the effect produced on the religious sentiment of Mohammedans by questions that arose under the influence of Greek philosophy, there would have been no formulated system of Mohammedan dogmatics, and in like manner the first impulse towards the creation of a Mohammedan system of law was given by contact with two great spheres of civilisation--the Romaic and the Persian, the former in Syria and the latter in Mesopotamia. It has already been remarked that the influence of Roman law on the sources of a legal system in Islam is attested by the very name given to jurisprudence in Islam from the beginning. It is called al Fikh, reasonableness; and those who pursue the study of it are designated Fukaha (singular Fakih). These terms, which, as we cannot fail to see, are Arabic translations of the Roman (juris) prudentia, and prudentes, would be a clear indication of one of the chief sources of Islamite jurisprudence, even if we had no positive data to prove that this influence extended both to questions of the principle of legal deduction and to particular legal provisions.
The positive laws of the Koran, and the few legal decisions made in particular cases by the first caliphs and other companions of the prophet at Medina in the early days of Islam, together with all the legal customs retained from heathen days, were inadequate to serve for the state of things brought about by the great conquests and immense expansion of the Moslem empire. Even if all elements which had previously and all which had come into being to meet the primary requirements of the new Mohammedan society had sufficed for an Arab commonwealth on an Islamite basis, the sum total of it all would nevertheless have been inadequate to the needs of the new political fabric of Islam in countries subject to entirely different economic and social conditions, and amidst conquered peoples whose lives were ordered on a systematic legal basis. When Islam subdued such ancient civilised peoples with the edge of the sword, it could not impose upon them the primitive conditions of life under which it had come forth into the wide world from the steppes and oases of Arabia. It could mould the results of the historic past into harmony with its own religious sentiment; but it could not destroy it, if for no other reason than that it had nothing to put in its place. Hence it had to leave many institutions in the conquered countries substantially as it found them. The problem first presented itself in Syria, the first halting-place of the victorious advance of Islam. The Koran and its earliest applications in practice made provision for family and matrimonial rights and rights of succession, but proved worse than meagre when applied to the privileges attaching to landed property in a great agricultural state, or to the laws of contract and obligation which, in the countries conquered by Islam, were ordered by the fixed standards of Roman law. In this department the heads of the new government had to take over very many ordinances of Roman law.
But, even apart from the adoption of legal standards, Roman law exercised a notable influence upon the legal thought of the new intruders into a country whose jurists had been trained in the scientific jurisprudence of the school of Berytus. The influence exercised by the Roman legal methods on the system of legal deduction in Islam is a more important factor in the history of Moslem civilisation than even the direct adoption of particular points of law. By what systematic rules or what devices can deductions be drawn from positive laws, written or traditional, which shall apply to newly arising cases at law and to the decision of legal questions for which the positive written law provides no answer? In dealing with this juridical problem the Arab Fukha took their stand entirely upon the instruction they had gained from circles familiar with the work of Rome in the domain of law. The dualism of written law (Arabic, nazz) and unwritten law is a mere reflection of the dualism of leges scriptæ (chakhamim), and leges non scriptæ. Just so, about half a century before, the Jewish jurists (a word which in its legal application is likewise a translation of the Roman term jurisprudentes) had been moved by their intercourse with the Romans to make the hitherto unrecognised distinction between the tora she-bitche-thab, or written law, and the tora she-be’al-peh, or oral law.
The application of principles and rules borrowed from the methodology of Roman jurisprudence first made it possible to extend the limited legal material supplied by the Koran and the old decisions which were accepted as the basis of the law, to other departments of juridical activity, of which these authorities had had no prevision. The ratio legis (illa), the principle of presumption was applied to analogies (kyas) in words and things; nay, just as Roman legal practice gave great weight to the opinio prudentium in legal deduction, so the Islamite prudentes assumed the prerogative of an authoritative subjective opinio; for ra’j, as it is called in Arabic, is a literal translation of the Latin term. Of all these principles (which are not exhausted by the examples just cited) none more strikingly demonstrates the profound influence of Roman law on the development of legal opinion in Islam, than that which is known in Arabic as maclaha or istilah,--i.e., the public weal and regard for the same. The significance of this principle lies in the license it grants to the interpreter of the law to apply the legal standard in the manner best fitted to serve the public weal and interests. Here we recognise the Roman standard of the utilitas publica, which gives the interpreter of the law the right, by interpretation, an application to wrest a plain and unambiguous law into something quite different from its original meaning, in the interests of the public weal.
Such principles, derived from foreign instructors, served for the deduction of Mohammedan law, as soon as the teachers of the people felt the necessity of withdrawing the domain of law from the capricious action of the sovereign and his instruments in the administration and judicature, which had free play by reason of the meagreness of positive legal matter based upon generally recognised authority. The Islamite jurists declared that the conclusions at which they had arrived on the basis of these principles (which, as we have seen, were no part of Islam) were in harmony with the true spirit of Islam, the rightful outcome of its original character. This phenomenon, which early came to maturity and was widely accepted in Mohammedan theological circles as legal and of indubitable authority, is of profound importance to our historic estimate and judgment of Islam. Whatever the ignorant men who stood by its cradle may have thought to be the meaning of the new word which they were charged to proclaim to the oriental world, the first step which conquering Islam took on its victorious career taught it to accommodate itself to an alien spirit, and to mould its own intellectual heritage by influences which seem absolutely heterogeneous to a superficial observer.
In more than one point of its doctrinal fabric, Islam in its early days was a borrower. Its founders were anxious, it is true, to avoid the appearance of appropriating other men’s property. But loudly as they trumpet the principle, “Be different from them in all things” (Chalifuhum) the reference here being chiefly to Jews and Christians, their documents are crammed with borrowings from the Scriptures of the very confessions which, on their own assertion, it was their leading principle to oppose. The stubborn antagonism of Islam to the rest of the world, its inflexible protest against the influence of foreign elements, is an illusion which historical study of the movement must dissipate if it is to rise to a scientific comprehension of this great historic phenomenon.
Though contact with the Romæi was the influence which caused the first seeds of law in Islam to germinate, we must not overlook another side upon which Islam in its early days came into direct contact with a foreign national element, the influence of which was very important in the development of its legal system. We refer to its contact with the people and the religion of Persia. This can be traced back to pre-Islamite times, and even Mohammed himself was not absolutely free from the influence of the religious ideas of the Parsees (madjus, magians), whom he classes in the Koran with Jews and Christians, and contrasts with the heathen as confessors of more favoured religions.
But Persian nationality did not become a formative element in Islam until the latter subjugated the geographical sphere of the old Parsee religion, and by the right of conquest imposed the faith of the prophet of Mecca and Medina upon the followers of Zoroaster. The Mohammedan occupation of ’Irak is one of the most telling factors in the religious and juridical development of Islam.
Persian theologians carried their inherited views into the new religion they had adopted, the conquering power enriched the poverty of its own religious store with elements supplied by the experience of a profound religious life, such had been a native growth among the conquered Persians from of old. Hence it is hardly possible to overestimate the importance of the part played in the development of Islam by the spiritual movement which came to birth in ’Irak and is associated with the schools of Bacra and Kufa. In analysing the elements of which Islam is composed we are not surprised to find many of Persian origin, the outcome of this connection.[43]
These influences are brought into fullest play by the great revolution which befel the Moslem empire in about the hundred and twenty-eighth year of its existence--the fall of the Omayyads and the usurpation of the sceptre of the caliphs by the Abbasids. The worldly spirit which had guided the policy of the fallen dynasty--a spirit genuinely Arab, devoid of any real comprehension of the religious aims and the transcendental interests of Islam--now makes way for a theocratic bias, which drew its ideas in the main from the character of the Persian “divine monarchy.” It is the Sassanid spirit in an Islamite garb. The indifferentism of the ruling powers gives place to the encouragement of religious tendencies. The religious tolerance of earlier days is at an end. Sectarianism, pietism, harsh dogmatism, and, linked with them, the persecuting spirit--are the dominant notes of public life. Disputations concerning matters of religion impress their characteristic stamp upon the intellectual tendencies which find favour in high places. Opposing religious parties come into the field and frame their subtlest arguments.
Moreover, this was the opportune moment for working up into practical juridical systems the suggestions in the department of jurisprudence derived in earlier days from Roman law. In the second century of the Hegira, Islamite jurisprudence enters upon the classic period of its efflorescence and completion. The scene of its glory is the scholarly world of Mesopotamia, which sheds its rays upon every quarter of the Mohammedan empire. Even such advances in the sphere of law as come to light outside this birthplace of systematised jurisprudence are the fruit of the intellectual movement on the soil of the ancient empire of Persia. And even the demonstrations of antagonism to the aspirations which took shape there (for it aroused tremendous opposition) are affected by its influence.
Abu Hanifa (699-767) of Kufa, the grandson of a Persian, is recognised in Islam as the father of that jurisprudence which, by the employment of the free speculative method already described, found ways and means to make provision for the whole vast sphere of legal activity (which includes both law and religious ceremonial) out of the scanty stock of positive legal documents. This completion of the legal system of Islam was arrived at by laborious development along the lines of its main principles, by modification of the method evolved in some particular school, by open contravention of the fundamental ideas of some particular tendency, and, lastly, by deliberate compromise between antagonistic lines of thought. It was reached with a rapidity which is characteristic of all the intellectual creations of Islam. It is a singular feature of the whole literature of Islam that everything reaches its prime with amazing rapidity, only to decline as rapidly. In the fourth century of the Hegira every branch of Arabic literature had come to full maturity, to flourish for a brief while, and enter upon its period of decadence about the beginning of the sixth.
By the end of the third century (ninth century A.D.) jurisprudence had reached its classic prime. Leaving out of account some other heads of schools who soon retire from the scene, there are four men in particular to whom it does honour as to its founders and fathers, four men whose disciples represent the main currents which flow side by side through the construction of Islamite law: (1) Abu Hanifa (died 767), the true representative of the ’Irak method; (2) Malik b. Anas (died 795), the most celebrated imam in the prophet’s city of Medina; (3) Mohammed b. Idris al-Shafii, a pupil of the latter (died 820), most famous for his educational work in Egypt, where his sepulchral chapel (in the Karafa at Cairo) is reverenced by the natives as a place of pilgrimage; and (4) Akhmed b. Hanbal (died 855), the pious teacher of Baghdad, the principal champion and valiant apostle of the old conservative views in religion, whose tomb in the Harbiah graveyard at Baghdad has, in the phrase of Guy l’Estrange, the writer of the monograph on the ancient city of the caliphs, “become the object of a devotion savouring of idolatry.”
The views which have been enumerated, borrowed from the method of legal deduction in Roman law, were not employed to the same extent by all schools of jurisprudence. While in that of Abu Hanifa the validity of the opinio goes so far as to accord recognition to the personal inclination of the administrator of the law, other schools were not disposed to give such free scope to the subjective judgment. The principle of istiçhab (præsumptio) was most fully recognised in the school of Shafii; that of regard for the public weal (istiçlah) in that of Malik.
In the erudite world which busied itself with the theoretical exposition of the law there were, however, large bodies of scholars, who took up their parable to proclaim that, generally speaking and on principle, they could not profess to recognise principles of method which depended for their authority on the subjective work of the human reason. They would recognise two things only as the sole basis of legal deduction--Scripture and tradition; that is to say, the Koran and the traditions or positive decisions of the prophet, his companions and their successors, of whom it could be safely assumed that they had acted and given judgment in the spirit of the founder of the faith. Only in cases of extreme necessity, and when these authoritative sources obstinately refused to yield an answer, was it lawful to admit the authority of ra’j (opinio), or more particularly, of kiga (analogy). These latter were “like the vulture, the eating of which was permitted as an exception in time of dearth when other food could by no means be obtained.” Under normal circumstances it was not permissible to reason; the only right course was to abide by the letter of tradition, since nothing outside of that could be set on a par with it. Truth manifests itself not in answer to the question “What is reasonable?” but in answer to “What did the prophet say and how did he act?”
Here we find ourselves face to face with the idea of the sunna which had come down from the Arabs of old (the idea explained at the beginning of this article), in its most rigid form, but with this difference--that the sunna, as now understood, does not look back to a remote antiquity but to a very recent past. The genuine sunnist only feels solid ground beneath his feet when he can base his judgment and conduct on the authentic text, or on well-accredited tradition concerning the words and deeds of the earliest authorities recognised by the Islamite world. Of all the four schools, the Hanoblalite, the one founded by the youngest teacher, was that in which this rigid view found most favour. In modern times it has been brought into prominence as a principle of government by the puritanical state of the Wahabees, the “Tempelstürmer von Hocharabien,” as they are called by Karl von Vincenti in a historical novel in which he describes their proceedings.
It is, however, an easy thing to say, “Tradition and nothing but tradition!” But what if, with the best will in the world, no answer can be wrung from tradition to the most pressing questions of ordinary life? The judge must give judgment; the shepherd of souls must lay down rules for his flock on questions which hourly crop up for decision in a state of life ordered by religious laws in even the most trifling details; and in doubtful cases the mufti must be able to expound the meaning of the divine law with no uncertain voice. What, then, if Scripture and tradition be dumb, and no effort can draw forth the least enlightenment from them? Where all the sources of tradition ran dry, men had to make concessions, whether they would or not, to individual opinion and the right of speculative interpretation. This led to the rise of a school of thought which endeavoured to reconcile the two sharply antagonistic tendencies. It was absolutely necessary to discover a middle course between excessive subjectivism and rigid traditionalism, and to define accurately the juridical spheres of the two conflicting elements. It was necessary to discover rules, in accordance with which speculative methods might be used to supplement tradition in the work of legal deduction, and to set up standards for the right use of traditional data in the correct formulation of the law. This work of reconciliation was done by the founder of the second school on the list, at Shafii.
Moreover there was another point of view from which the systemisation of the use of speculation as a source of law on the one hand and of tradition on the other proved an imperative necessity. If, in the one case, it was requisite to curb the arbitrary exercise of the subjective reason, it was no less necessary to check the rank growth of traditional matter, which, as it increased, hampered more and more the use of authentic tradition. The one-sided partisans of the sunna needed traditional matter for the establishment of such a legal system as they desired to see. Nor was any refutation of their theses, nor any opinion advanced against them, in their eyes worth discussing unless it could appeal to the authority of tradition. As a result, where no traditional matter was to be had, men speedily began to fabricate it. The greater the demand, the busier was invention with the manufacture of apocryphal traditions in support of the respective theses.
For the verification of didactic records, whether sacred or profane, Islam has adopted a singular form, which imparts to Islamite tradition a character altogether peculiar to itself, to which we can find no parallel (at least in such a mature and consistent shape) in any other literature. This is the hadith. The word hadith means simply communication, or narrative. If any such narrative is to be put forth with pretensions to authenticity the actual text must be preceded by what is called the sanad or isnad (literally, ‘support’). This enumerates in correct and unbroken sequence the authorities who have handed the narrative down from mouth to mouth, from the last person responsible for its circulation up to its original author. The examination of this sanad allows free and unbiased criticism the opportunity of judging whether these men on whose authority any particular narrative has been passed from mouth to mouth and from generation to generation, and set down as an actual occurrence, were persons deserving of full credit.
From this point of view an unbroken chain of oral tradition constitutes a surer and more valuable guarantee of authenticity than any written document, whether contemporary or based upon contemporary records. Even if a written document bears all the outward tokens of authenticity, it must be able to show a consistent sanad reaching in uninterrupted sequence from the first author to the last teller of the tale, if its claim is to be admitted. Every narrative and every matter of tradition, without regard to its quantitative or qualitative importance, must be set forth with its “genealogy.” This genealogy is the sanad. In theological matters, more particularly, it is the backbone without which no record can stand upright.
The literature of historic research also avails itself of this form of verification. Readers of the classic work of Muhammed Jarir al-Tabari, the “father of Islamite history” are familiar with this method of historic authentication. Each record takes the form of an appendage to a chain of tradition which reaches back to some direct authority, and to this chain the record is appended in the very words of the first narrator. It sometimes happens that a record of the same event occurs in narratives that are traced back to different authorities, and not merely in different words and with trifling variations. The facts themselves are represented in a totally different fashion, or the narratives of different authorities set them or their accompanying circumstances in a different light. All these divergent narratives are simply placed side by side, in a manner which cannot be compared with the different authorities for the narratives of the Pentateuch; for, unlike the latter, the traditional records of Arab history are not anonymous. On the contrary, they owe their distinctive character to this circumstantial system of authentication and the enumeration by name of the successive vouchers for their truth. Again, they show no trace of an attempt on the part of any editor to reduce conflicting accounts to harmony; they are simply set side by side, instead of being welded together. This circumstance has greatly facilitated the critical study of the periods from which such parallel narratives date. Wellhausen has recently given to the world a masterly study, in which he skilfully discriminates between the various points of view, and the particular bias of each of the authorities for the narrative of the victory at Tabari (Skizzen und Vorarbeiten, VI).
The same state of things prevails in the statements of tradition in matters of law and religion. Each statement, cast into the traditional form, and relying for authentication in the first instance upon the testimony of an actual eye-witness, professes to show the practice of the prophet at certain times of prayer, or what judgment was given by him or his companions in certain legal questions. During the first century of Islamism divergencies of practice in minor details of law and worship had grown up in different congregations of believers. Every one of these divergent forms can appeal to the authority of a formal and well-attested traditional account, with a sanad in which the names of the most trustworthy witnesses are adduced in support of theses diametrically opposed to one another.
In order to obviate this incongruity, there soon developed in Islam a science of textual criticism, a study in which Islamite erudition outstripped that of Europe by several centuries. Its object was to decide the claims of the various authorities, to judge of the degree of credit to be given to each, to weigh the possibility that sectarian or party tendencies might have vitiated the bona fides of men otherwise above reproach. The climax of this work of criticism is to be found in certain systematised compilations of traditions, the editors of which start with the definite object of sifting what appears to them authentic out of the vast body of obviously spurious material. The most famous of these compilations are those of Buchari (died 870) and Muslim (died 875). The general consent of Islam presently invested these compilations with canonical authority.
Other works of the same kind were also held in great honour. In course of time other compilations from among those made in the ninth century were added to the first two, and in these the sifting of tradition was carried out upon the most liberal principles. From the thirteenth century onward, six codices have been recognised as the sources of authentic traditional records. Out of these theological science gathers the evidence of tradition in questions of law, and with the Koran, they constitute the canonical literature of Islam.
Judged by a scientific criterion, only a very small part, if any, of the contents of these canonical compilations can be confidently referred to the early period from which they profess to date. Minute study soon reveals the presence of the tendencies and aspirations of a later day, the working of a spirit which wrests the record in favour of one or other of the opposing theses in certain disputed questions.
What we gather from these traditional authorities is by no means a homogeneous system of instruction. The voice of thoroughly well-attested tradition can be quoted in support of the most diverse, nay, of the most contradictory teachings on certain points of ritual and law. This is one of the principal causes of divergences of practice in minor details of religious usage and of the law. These differences, together with the vexed question of the use of the subjective factor in legal deduction, lie at the root of the controversies between the four great schools of law (the founders of which we have already enumerated) which occupy the whole field of orthodox Islam. These schools are in accord upon the great fundamental doctrines of religion, and the outward differences in practice are not regarded as elements of division. The Islamites consider them of equal validity, with equal claims to pass for orthodox.
Sunnite Islam early formulated and put into the mouth of Mohammed the doctrine that “Differences of opinion in my congregation are to be regarded as tokens of the mercy of God.” Like Lessing, the Islamites think that all trees cannot have the same bark. It is therefore a great error, and one which leads to a total misunderstanding of the whole character of Islam, to describe these four currents of thought, or madsahib, as the Mohammedans call them, as “sects,” or use such language as recently appeared in a widely circulated journal, which said: “We need only recall the question which resulted in a schism in Islam, as to whether ablutions should be begun at the elbow or at the wrist.” (Münchener Allgemeine Zeitung, Beilage No. 209, Sept. 12th, 1901.) The fact that these differences of ritual exist cannot be denied. But schisms take their rise from dogmatic and juridical questions of a far more radical character, and lie far beyond the sphere of the points in controversy between the four schools of the law.
On the other hand, in the present state of the Islamite world, orthodoxy is wholly confined to these four main schools of thought, which rank as the right and recognised modalities of correct religious usage and of the practical interpretation of the law. To borrow an image from philology, they and they alone are legitimate dialects of the one fundamental language of Islam. Quintum non datur. Zealous religious associations, which take their stand on the fundamental principles of Islam, yet cannot be classed in either of these four categories, are looked upon as dissenters of dubious character, although they themselves regard it as their one object in life to purify Islam and imbue it with fresh vigour. They are styled chums or chawamis, from a word meaning “fifth,” to mark their independence of the four parallel streams of orthodoxy. Such, for example, are the Senussis, a religious association in north Africa, whose proceedings are at present engaging the serious attention of the leaders of French colonial policy. They are not adherents of the school of Malik, which predominates in north Africa, and are therefore regarded as chawamis by the Moslem “high churchmen” of the locality.
One of the cardinal points of orthodox Islam in every sphere of religion and law is the “general consent and practice of the whole body of believers” (consensus ecclesiæ). The Arabic name for this mighty principle is ijma. The general consent of the whole body of believers on certain points of faith and law is of binding force, no less than Scripture and tradition. Nay, even the authority of all the primary sources of the Islamite religious system, as historically developed, derives its force from this consensus, which constitutes its principal title to recognition. The acceptance of such compilations of tradition as are received as canonical, and subsequently of the standard juridical codes, rests on no other legal basis than this general consent of the whole body of believers, by which they have been invested with binding authority. This great principle--which, if any man fail to realise and rightly appreciate the development of Islam and Islamite institutions, must remain a sealed book to him--was in process of time defined as the doctrine accepted alike by all the four orthodox schools of thought. This definition of the idea of ijma is the result of the self-imposed limitation of the principle itself in practical application. In process of time it was found impossible to verify this general consent by any other method than by confining it to the well-defined sphere of the schools of the law. Thus this free intellectual outlook lost the vital force which might have made it an element of far-seeing and liberal development.
The recognition of the principle of the ijma as a fundamental element is a point on which all schools of orthodox Islam are at one. The schi’itic branch of Islam, however, has not adopted it as one of its fundamental doctrines. It takes its stand on blind obedience to authority. In its eyes the visible and invisible heads of the whole body of true Islamites are the successors of ’Ali, the infallible imams. They alone are the legitimate rulers of the faithful, both as the rightful chiefs of the state, and as the true organs of the divine will in matters of law and doctrine. To this sect every historical and political development of Islam, which derives its title to authority from the consensus, is a usurpation and an impiety which the last imam, the Mahdi who is yet to come, will bring to a terrible end. From their point of view the recognition of the consensus is mere error and heresy, and the sentiment and will of the whole body of believers is not entitled to be recognised as a criterion. In its stead they set the word of the infallible imams, the lawful successors of the prophet and the interpreters of his will, which is one with the divine will. Thus perishes the last remnant of the autonomous authority which the body of orthodox Islamites have assumed by the recognition of the principle of the consensus.
FOOTNOTES
[43] I have treated this subject more fully in the address delivered before the meeting of the Congrès d’Histoire des Religions at Paris (Sept. 6th, 1900) and entitled Islamisme et Parsisme, Actes I, pp. 119-147 and Revue de l’Histoire des Religions, XXII, pp. 1-29.
BRIEF REFERENCE-LIST OF AUTHORITIES BY CHAPTERS
[The letter [a] is reserved for Editorial Matter.]
I. THE PARTHIAN EMPIRE
[b] JUSTIN, History of the World abridged from Trogus (translated by J. Turnbull).
[c] A. VON GUTSCHMID, Geschichte Irans.
II. THE EMPIRE OF THE SASSANIDS
[b] TH. NÖLDEKE, Aufsätze zur persischen Geschichte.
[c] DION CASSIUS, History of Rome.
[d] A. VON GUTSCHMID, op. cit.
III. EARLY HISTORY OF THE ARABS
[b] HERODOTUS, The History of.
[c] ARTEMIDORUS, Geographica.
[d] DIODORUS, The Historical Library.
[e] PLINY, Historia Naturalis.
[f] AMMIANUS MARCELLINUS, History of Rome.
[g] ERATOSTHENES, Chronographia.
[h] The Holy Bible, according to the authorised version of King James I.
[i] Inscriptions of Tehutimes and Ramses I.
[j] Inscriptions of Tiglathpileser III, Sargon, Asshurbanapal, etc.
[k] MAX DUNCKER, Geschichte des Alterthums.
[l] W. G. PALGRAVE, article on “Arabia” in the Encyclopædia Britannica.
IV. MOHAMMED
[b] L. A. SÉDILLOT, Histoire générale des Arabes.
[c] The Koran.
[d] E. GIBBON, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
[e] SIR WILLIAM MUIR, The Life of Mahomet.
[f] GEORG WEBER, Weltgeschichte.
[g] IBN SAAD, Sirat or Biography of Mohammed.
V. THE SPREAD OF ISLAM
[b] S. OCKLEY, History of the Saracens.
[c] EL-MAKIN, History of.
[d] ABULFEDA, Life of Mohammed.
[e] GUSTAV WEIL, Mohammed der Prophet, sein Leben und seine Lehre.
[f] W. C. TAYLOR, The History of Mohammedanism and its Sects.
[g] E. GIBBON, op. cit.
[h] ABUL-FARAJ, Dynasties.
[i] EUTYCHIUS, Annales.
[j] H. H. MILMAN, Notes to Gibbon’s Rome.
[k] AL-LATIF, Historiæ Ægypti, Compendium Arabice et Latini.
[l] JOSEPH WHITE, Ægyptiaca.
[m] MAKRIZI, Histoire des Sultans Mamlouks de l’Égypte.
[n] IBN KHALDUN, History of the Beginnings of Nations.
[o] HAJI KHALFA, Takwim al-Tawarikh (“Revision of History”).
[q] J. A. ST. MARTIN, various articles.
[r] JOSEPH VON HAMMER-PURGSTALL, History of the Assassins (translated from the German by O. C. Wood).
[s] A. L. SILVESTER DE SACY, various writings.
[t] F. A. NEALE, Islamism.
VI. THE OMAYYADS
[b] F. A. NEALE, op. cit.
[c] STANISLAS GUYARD, article on “The Eastern Caliphate” in the Encyclopædia Britannica.
[d] G. WEBER, op. cit.
VII. THE ARABS IN EUROPE
[b] “Ben-Hazil of Granada” in Bibliothèque Arabico-Hispanica.
[c] E. GIBBON, op. cit.
[d] S. A. DUNHAM, History of Spain and Portugal.
[e] R. DOZY, Essai sur l’histoire de l’Islamisme.
VIII. THE ABBASIDS
[b] L. A. SÉDILLOT, op. cit.
IX. THE DECLINE OF THE MOSLEMS IN SPAIN
[b] SAMPIRO, Bishop of Astorga, in “Regno Ordonii II,” etc. (in Florez, España Sagrada).
[c] S. A. DUNHAM, op. cit.
[d] L. A. SÉDILLOT, op. cit.
X. ARAB CIVILISATION
[b] SIMON OCKLEY, op. cit.
[c] R. DOZY, op. cit.
[d] ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT, Cosmos.
[e] GIRAULT DE PRANGEY, Monuments Arabes et Mauresques.
[f] EUSEBIUS OF CÆSAREA, Life of Constantine.
[g] L. A. SÉDILLOT, op. cit.
[j] HAURÉAU, Philosophie scholastique.
[k] J. E. MONTUCLA, Histoire des Mathématiques.
[l] J. S. BAILLY, Histoire de l’astronomie.
[m] L. VIARDOT, Histoire des Arabes et des Maures d’Espagne.
[n] KIESEWETTER, Die Musik der Araber.
Part XIII
THE HISTORY OF THE CRUSADES AND OF THE PAPACY
BASED CHIEFLY UPON THE FOLLOWING AUTHORITIES
ABULFEDA, CHOISEUL D’AILLECOURT, BOHA AD-DIN, JAMES BRYCE, WILLIAM DENTON, JOHN WM. DRAPER, EINHARD, EDWARD GIBBON, J. C. L. GIESELER, HENRY HALLAM, HENRY C. LEA, J. F. MICHAUD, CHARLES MILLS, H. H. MILMAN, J. L. VON MOSHEIM, LEOPOLD VON RANKE, O. J. REICHEL, GEOFFREY DE VILLEHARDOUIN
TOGETHER WITH A BRIEF STUDY OF
THE VALUE OF THE CRUSADES IN THE LIGHT OF MODERN HISTORY
BY
THE REV. WILLIAM DENTON
WITH ADDITIONAL CITATIONS FROM
C. BARONIUS, PHILIPPE DE BEAUMANOIR, STEPHEN DE BOURBON, J. BURCARDUS, P. A. BAMBINO, CIACCONIUS, F. B. CORBO, RICHARD DEVIZES, J. J. I. DÖLLINGER, VICTOR DURUY, K. F. EICHORN, C. FLEURY, OTTO VON FREISING, THOMAS FULLER, GREGORY OF TOURS, GREGORY THE GREAT, RICHARD GARNETT, THOMAS GREENWOOD, G. W. F. HEGEL, J. G. VON HERDER, IMAD AD-DIN, S. INFESSIORA, INNOCENT THE THIRD, JEAN DE JOINVILLE, A. JOURDAIN, CHARLES KINGSLEY, LIUTPRAND, ANSELMO DI LUCCA, MAKRISI, MATTHEW OF PARIS, J. BASS MULLINGER, MURATORI, GUIBERT DE NOGENT, B. PLATINA, MARTINUS POLONUS, ROGER OF HOVEDEN, PAUL VON ROTH, MARIANUS SCOTUS, SIGEBERT OF GEMBLOURS, CARL SPANNAGEL, HENRY STEBBING, J. ADDINGTON SYMONDS, ANDREAS THIEL, GEOFFREY DE VINSAUF, FR. WILKEN AND WILLIAM OF TYRE
COPYRIGHT, 1904, BY HENRY SMITH WILLIAMS.
All rights reserved.
THE HISTORY OF THE CRUSADES AND THE PAPACY
I. THE CRUSADES
PREFATORY ESSAY
THE VALUE OF THE CRUSADES IN THE LIGHT OF MODERN HISTORY
BY THE REV. WILLIAM DENTON, M.A.[44]
The interest with which we continue to regard the Crusades is, in its way, as significant as the enthusiasm which led to their being undertaken. It is easy now to underrate the dangers which they averted, and to forget the obligations which the civilised world is under to Charles Martel, to the crusaders, to Don John of Austria, and to John Sobieski; yet to these men we owe it that Europe is not now Bulgaria; and that Italy, France, and England--that the whole of the countries from the Black Sea to the Atlantic, from Archangel to Sicily, are not trampled upon and desolated as Syria is at this moment. It is not easy for us to comprehend how recently the terror once inspired by the Turk has ceased. We need to be reminded that down to the time of the Stuarts the English and Irish channels were infested with Turkish corsairs, and our ports blockaded by Turkish ships of war in quest of slaves.
It is only indeed since the eighteenth century that collections of money to redeem English captives from the intolerable evils of Turkish slavery have ceased to be made in our churches. That such captivity is not national, and only occasional and individual, is one of the inestimable fruits of the Crusades. At the time when these were undertaken, the whole of Asia, from the borders of China to the Bosporus, was subject to the Turks; and had these people been able to cross into Europe, and to hold the countries on the south of the Danube as a basis for military operations four hundred years earlier than they succeeded in doing, or indeed at any time whilst the Moors of Spain and of Sicily were in their full career of victory, the whole of Europe would inevitably have fallen under the dominion of the Moslems, and industrial progress had been stayed and civilisation extinguished. So recently has this danger disappeared that, at the close of the seventeenth century, a statesman as calm and unenthusiastic as Richelieu seriously meditated the renewal of the Crusades, in order to avert the evil which even then threatened to overwhelm the civilised world. That he did so is sufficient to remove from the leaders and projectors of the Crusades the charge of being moved by blind, unreflecting fanaticism.
In the eighteenth century, indeed, the school of historians represented by Voltaire and Gibbon, which discredited all great efforts of past times when prompted by religious zeal, treated the Crusades with unphilosophical ridicule. It was an easy task to do this. We are arrested in every page of their history with the lamentable consequences of popular ignorance, with the selfishness of many of the leaders, with the record of personal ambition and unworthy jealousy which too frequently hindered the success of these expeditions. The whole, however, is not heard when we have listened to accounts of popular fanaticism, of royal insincerity, of military ambition, and of papal selfishness, which chequer the history of the crusaders, as these faults chequered the history of Europe at the time when the Crusades were undertaken. The great, the imminent danger of Turkish conquest inspired the minds of the people with fear before it induced the chieftains to combine in averting the danger. The anarchy which pervaded Europe in the ages of feudalism was, indeed, the chief source of danger in any advance of the Turkish forces, and this was in a great measure cured by the enthusiasm communicated from the people to the great landed proprietors, who, more jealous of their independence than careful of their obligations to their sovereign, yet felt the necessity of union and of submission to military discipline in the hour of peril.
The First Crusade was one undertaken without sufficient leaders, with but little preparation, and with smaller knowledge of the countries to be traversed and the difficulties to be overcome. It was a spontaneous effort of terror and of zeal, in which we can at least satisfy ourselves of the reality of the fear which pervaded all men, and which we know to have been warranted by the merciless character of the horde which, having subjugated Asia, was on its way to attempt the subjugation of Europe. Men have come to see that the Turk is now what he always has been; it is well to bear in mind the correlative truth that essentially he always was what he is now; and when we recall the massacres of the last century, the bloody scenes of Scio and Aleppo, of Jiddah and of Lebanon, of Bosnia and Bulgaria, we may without effort understand what he was when Asia lay at his feet, and Europe was terrified at the rumours of his attempt to cross the Bosporus.
It is too much the practice of those who would deprecate our obligation to those who strove to arrest the progress of the Turks, to dwell upon some instances of magnanimity or of mercy, of justice or chivalrous conduct which lighten up the pages of the history of the Saracens, and to insinuate from these instances that the Turks possess the same claim to our admiration. The Turks, however, are not Arabs, neither have they ever manifested any of that care for intellectual pursuits which has thrown a lustre on the career of the Saracens of Asia and the Moors of the Spanish peninsula. On the contrary, the career of the Osmanli has been marked by deeds of savage atrocity, by an indifference to the obligations of oaths, as well as by his brutal ignorance and hatred of all intellectual progress; and at the present day his inferiority to the Arab in statesmanship, in honesty, and in intelligence is acknowledged.
In estimating the effects of the Crusades the reader will do well to consider the calm judgment and weighty words of a modern historian, who thus expresses our obligation to the devotion and bravery of those men whose deeds are here briefly recorded. “By arresting the progress of the Turks,” says Mr. Sharon Turner, “by stunning them with blows which a less hardy, fanatic, and profuse population could not have survived, and by protracting their entry into Europe until its various states had grown up into compacted kingdoms--until the feudal system had been substantially overthrown; until free government and humanising law had blended and concentrated individual energy and self-will into national unity and co-operating strength; until polity had begun to be a science, and that order of men whom we both venerate and revile (statesmen and politicians) had everywhere arisen--the crusaders preserved Europe from Turkish desolation, if not from conquest. And when the Ottoman power, recovering from its alarms by their discontinuance, arose in renovated vigour to a new struggle for the sovereignty of Europe in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries--though it conquered Greece, overran Hungary, Transylvania, Moldavia, and Wallachia, attempted Russia and Poland, and endangered Vienna--yet the rest of Europe had then become prepared to resist its further progress; and has hitherto successfully kept it at bay, notwithstanding its mighty population and desperate fanaticism, until its political infirmity has become decided, the period of its decrepitude arrived, and its political dissolution has commenced.”
Since these words were written the decrepitude of the Turks has increased, though their cruelty has not diminished; nay, in some instances, the periodical massacres of their Christian subjects, which have ever marked the rule of this race, have been carried out more systematically and with circumstances of greater horror than of old. We are, indeed, no longer alarmed at the progress of their arms, and have no fear for our own safety. We may gather, however, from the accounts of the suffering of the Christians dwelling in our own days among the Turks, how natural it was for Europe to be terrified at the prospect of their invasion; and from the generous indignation which thrilled the heart of England at the time of the Armenian massacres, we may faintly understand why it was that Europe was so moved at the rude eloquence of Peter the Hermit, as he detailed the sufferings of the Christians of Asia Minor when first subjected to the yoke of the Turk.
FOOTNOTES
[44] [Reprinted by permission from A History of the Crusades by W. E. Dutton, to which work it is an introduction.]
HISTORY IN OUTLINE OF THE CRUSADES
[Sidenote: [1096-1291 A.D.]]
Pilgrimages to Jerusalem, which were in use from the earliest ages of Christianity, had become very frequent about the beginning of the eleventh century. The opinion which then very generally prevailed, that the end of the world was at hand, induced vast numbers of Christians to sell their possessions in Europe, in order that they might set out for the Holy Land, there to await the coming of the Lord. So long as the Arabs were masters of Palestine, they protected these pilgrimages, from which they derived no small emoluments. But when the Seljukian Turks, a barbarous and ferocious people, had conquered that country (1075), under the caliphs of Egypt, the pilgrims saw themselves exposed to every kind of insult and oppression. The lamentable accounts which they gave of these outrages on their return to Europe excited the general indignation, and gave birth to the romantic notion of expelling these infidels from the Holy Land.
Gregory VII was the projector of this grand scheme. He addressed circular letters to all the sovereigns of Europe, and invited them to make a general crusade against the Turks. Meantime, however, more pressing interests, and his quarrels with the emperor Henry IV, obliged him to defer the projected enterprise; but his attention was soon recalled to it by the representation of a pilgrim, called Peter the Hermit, a native of Amiens in Picardy. Furnished with letters from the patriarch of Jerusalem to the pope and the princes of the West, this ardent fanatic traversed the whole of Italy, France, and Germany; preaching everywhere, and representing, in the liveliest colours, the profanation of the sacred places, and the miserable condition of the Christians and poor pilgrims in the Holy Land. It proved no difficult task for him to impart to others the fanaticism with which he was himself animated. His zeal was powerfully seconded by Pope Urban II, who repaired in person to France, where he convoked the council of Clermont (1095), and pronounced, in full assembly, a pathetic harangue, at the close of which they unanimously resolved on the Holy War. It was decreed that all who should enrol their names in this sacred militia should wear a red cross on their right shoulder; that they should enjoy plenary indulgence, and obtain remission of all their sins.
From that time the pulpits of Europe resounded with exhortations to the Crusades. People of every rank and condition were seen flocking in crowds to assume the signal of the cross; and, in the following year, innumerable bands of crusaders, from the different countries of Europe, set out, one after another, on this expedition to the East. The only exception was the Germans, who partook but feebly of this universal enthusiasm, on account of the disputes which then subsisted between the emperor and the court of Rome. The three or four first divisions of the crusaders [comprising about 273,000 men, under the leadership of Peter the Hermit, Walter de Pexejo, and Walter the Penniless] marched without order and without discipline; pillaging, burning, and wasting the countries through which they passed. Most of them perished from fatigue, hunger, or sickness, or by the sword of the exasperated nations whose territories they had laid desolate. [The four thousand that crossed the Bosporus were annihilated by Kilidj Arslan, the sultan of Rum, or Iconium.] To these unwarlike and undisciplined troops succeeded regular armies, commanded by experienced officers, and powerful princes: the Crusades proper were inaugurated.[45]
THE FIRST CRUSADE (1096-1099 A.D.)
1096 A well-organised military force of 200,000-300,000 men sets out by different routes. Its leaders are:
(1) Godfrey de Bouillon--Duke of Lower Lorraine, with his brothers (2) Baldwin, (3) Eustace.
(4) Robert, Duke of Normandy, son of William the Conqueror.
(5) Robert, Count of Flanders.
(6) Stephen, Count of Chartres.
(7) Raymond IV, Count of Toulouse.
(8) Hugh of Vermandois.
(9) Bohemond, Duke of Tarentum.
(10) Tancred, his nephew.
Arriving at Constantinople, all except Raymond do homage to Alexius Comnenus, the emperor. Crossing the Bosporus they invade the territory of Kilidj Arslan, sultan of Rum, or Iconium.
1097 With the help of the crusaders, Alexius recovers Nicæa. Victory of the crusaders at Dorylæum. Siege of Antioch is begun. Baldwin and Tancred attempt a private war over question of precedence of their banners. Baldwin withdraws his troops from the army, and answering an appeal for help from the Greek or Armenian ruler of Edessa, marches thither, makes himself its master, and founds the Latin county Edessa (q.v.).
1098 Surrender of Antioch, betrayed to Bohemond by the Armenian, Firuz. Kerboga, emir of Mosul besieges the crusaders in Antioch but is defeated and driven off. The crusaders rest in Antioch and quarrel among themselves.
1099 Siege and capture of Jerusalem. Foundation of the kingdom of Jerusalem (q.v.). The county of Antioch founded (q.v.) with Bohemond at its head.
THE KINGDOM OF JERUSALEM (1099-1291 A.D.)
1099 =Godfrey de Bouillon= elected king of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem. He makes laws for its government. The military order of the Knights Hospitallers founded. He defeats the Fatimites at Askalon.
1100 Death of Godfrey. His brother, =Baldwin I=, summoned from Edessa and made king.
1101 A large body of crusaders, headed by Welf of Bavaria and William of Aquitaine arrives in Asia Minor, but is destroyed and dispersed by Kilidj Arslan before it can reach Jerusalem, together with another one that arrived the previous year. Death of Stephen of Chartres at Ramla.
1104 Baldwin captures Acre (Ptolemais) from the Turks. The Turks fail in an attempt to regain Jerusalem. Death of Raymond of Toulouse.
1109 Baldwin, with the assistance of a Venetian fleet, captures Tripolis. He afterwards takes Berytus and Sidon.
1118 Death of Baldwin. His cousin, =Baldwin (II) de Bourg=, of Edessa succeeds. The order of Knights Templar founded by Sir Hugh de Pagano.
1119 Baldwin defeats the Turks at Antioch. The Emperor Joannes Comnenus wins a victory over the Knights Hospitaller on the Mæander.
1122 The Saracens take Baldwin prisoner.
1124 Conquest of Tyre by the crusaders, assisted by the Venetians. The latter have a third of the city allotted them.
1127 Baldwin ransomed. He attacks Aleppo and is defeated.
1131 Death of Baldwin, after being defeated near Damascus. He bequeaths the kingdom to his son-in-law, Fulk of Anjou.
1144 Death of Fulk, by accident. His young son, =Baldwin III=, succeeds, under the regency of Queen Melusina.
1148 The Second Crusade besieges Damascus and Askalon, but is unable to take them.
1149 Defeat of the Christians by Nur ad-Din, near the Orontes.
1153 Capture of Askalon by Baldwin III. Nur ad-Din takes Jerusalem.
1162 Death of Baldwin. His brother, =Almeric= or =Amaury I=, succeeds.
1168 Almeric invades Egypt. Capture and sack of Heliopolis. He is defeated by the generals Shirkuh and Saladin.
1173 Death of Almeric. His young son, =Baldwin IV=, a leper, succeeds under the guardianship of Count Raymond III, of Tripolis.
1183 Baldwin IV is compelled by his disease to resign his crown in favour of his infant nephew, =Baldwin V=, still under regency of Raymond.
1186 Death of Baldwin V. His mother, =Sybilla=, sister of Baldwin IV, inherits the crown, which she shares with her husband, =Guy de Lusignan=.
1187 Saladin attacks the kingdom of Jerusalem. Great defeat and capture of Guy at Tiberias. Saladin takes Jerusalem and then besieges Tyre, whence he is repelled by Conrad of Montferrat.
1188 Liberation of Guy, who renounces his title to Saladin. Conrad defends Tripolis.
1189 The Third Crusade arrives. Guy besieges Acre, assisted by a fleet of Danes, Frisians, and Flemings.
1191 Conquest of Cyprus by Richard Cœur de Lion, on his way to the Holy Land. He adds it to the kingdom of Jerusalem. Surrender of Acre. Defeat of Saladin at Azotus. Joppa and Askalon surrender to the Christians. Murder of Conrad of Montferrat, who by marriage with Sybilla’s sister, Isabella, has acquired right of succession to the kingdom. Foundation of the order of Teutonic Knights.
1192 Isabella marries =Henry of Champagne=, to whom Guy relinquishes his title, retaining that of king of Cyprus.
1193 On death of Saladin, his sons give Acre to the Knights of St. John--hence called St. John d’Acre.
1194 Death of Guy de Lusignan. His brother, Almeric succeeds as king of Cyprus.
1196 Death of Henry. His widow marries =Almeric (II) de Lusignan=, who reunites the kingdoms of Cyprus and Jerusalem.
1206 Death of Almeric. His son, Hugo I, succeeds in Cyprus. Jerusalem falls to =Mary=, daughter of Isabella and Conrad of Montferrat.
1210 Mary marries =Jean de Brienne=, who becomes king of Jerusalem.
1217 The Turks take Jerusalem from the Saracens.
1218 Jean de Brienne leads the Christians into Egypt and
1219 captures Damietta.
1221 Destruction of the Christian army in Egypt. The Turks regain Damietta.
1225 The emperor Frederick II declares that Jean de Brienne has, since Mary’s death, no claim to his title, and that it belongs to himself, since he has married Yolande, the daughter of Mary.
1228 After many delays, Frederick starts for the Holy Land.
1229 =Frederick II= makes a treaty with the sultan Malik al-Kamil, by which he recovers Jerusalem and other cities. He is the recognised king of Jerusalem.
From this time on (see Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Crusades) the Christian kingdom in Palestine may be considered a part of the Holy Roman Empire until 1291, when the sultan Khalil takes Acre and drives the last of the Christians out of Syria.
THE COUNTY OF ANTIOCH (1099-1268 A.D.)
A vassal state of the kingdom of Jerusalem founded 1099 by the crusaders with =Bohemond of Tarentum= at its head. Bohemond is captured by the Turks (1105) and Tancred goes to Antioch to govern. Bohemond released the following year. The emperor Alexius claims Antioch, but Bohemond successfully resists him. He goes to Europe, and after various adventures dies there in 1111. Tancred dies the following year. For eight years the principality is united to the kingdom of Jerusalem, but in 1126 Baldwin II of Jerusalem gives it to =Bohemond II=. =Bohemond III= rules 1162 to 1201. Some of the princes of Antioch rule in virtue of their wives’ right to the throne. In 1268 Bibars, the sultan of Egypt, captures Antioch and the principality comes to an end.
THE COUNTY OF TRIPOLIS (1109-1289 A.D.)
A vassal state or county of the kingdom of Jerusalem from 1109, when the city of Tripolis is captured by the crusaders and =Raymond of Toulouse= placed at its head. The Christians rule until 1289, when it falls into the hands of Kalaun, the sultan of Egypt, who destroys the city.
THE COUNTY OF EDESSA (1097-1146 A.D.)
In 1097 =Baldwin I=, brother of Godfrey de Bouillon, in consequence of a quarrel with Tancred, leaves the main body of the crusaders, conquers Edessa, and founds the vassal state of that name.
1100 Baldwin, made king of Jerusalem, gives Edessa to his cousin, =Baldwin (II) de Bourg=.
1118 Baldwin II is made king of Jerusalem and =Jocelyn (I) de Courtenai= takes his place in the county of Edessa. He wins many victories over the Saracens.
1131 =Jocelyn II= succeeds.
1144 Capture of Edessa by Zenki, emir of Mosul.
1146 Jocelyn regains Edessa, but the same year Nur ad-Din, Zenki’s son and successor, retakes and destroys it. End of the county of Edessa. On account of this event Bernard of Clairvaux preaches.
THE SECOND CRUSADE (1147-1149 A.D.)
1146 In the council of Vézelay, Louis VII of France assumes the cross; the emperor, Conrad III, follows his example some months later.
1147 The armies of Conrad and Louis start from Ratisbon and Metz respectively, marching through Hungary to Asia Minor. The German army in advance is nearly annihilated in Phrygia through the treachery of the Byzantine emperor, Manuel, by Masud I, the sultan of Rum. Conrad, with the remnant of his force, joins the French army along the seacoast.
1148 Unsuccessful attempt of the Second Crusade to capture Damascus and Askalon. Conrad, in ill health, returns to Constantinople and thence to Germany.
1149 Louis returns to France. Bernard is reproached for the failure of the crusade.
THE THIRD CRUSADE (1189-1192 A.D.)
The disastrous defeat and capture of Guy de Lusignan at Tiberias by Saladin, and the latter’s capture of Jerusalem (1187), reawakens the crusading spirit. Gregory VIII urges a new crusade.
1188 William, archbishop of Tyre, induces Henry II of England and Philip Augustus of France to assume the cross.
1189 Death of Henry. Richard (I) Cœur de Lion eagerly pursues his father’s project. The emperor, Frederick (I) Barbarossa, sets out with an army through Hungary. He spends the winter at Hadrianopolis.
1190 Frederick reaches Asia Minor with assistance of Isaac Angelus, and takes Iconium. Sudden death of Frederick. His son, Frederick of Swabia, leads the crusaders to Acre, which Guy de Lusignan, having regained his liberty, is besieging. Richard and Philip Augustus start by sea for the Holy Land. They spend the winter in Sicily, quarrel and are reconciled.
1191 Richard stops at and conquers Cyprus on his way to the Holy Land. Richard and Philip arrive at Acre. Death of Frederick of Swabia during the siege. Surrender of Acre. Compact with Saladin, binding him to surrender the true cross and pay a large sum. Philip quarrels with Richard and returns to France.
1192 Richard makes unsuccessful attempt to take Jerusalem. He relieves Joppa and makes truce with Saladin entitling pilgrims to visit Jerusalem unmolested, for a short time. Richard sails for England. Is shipwrecked near Aquileia. Seized near Vienna by Leopold, duke of Austria, who surrenders him (1193) to the emperor, Henry VI. Henry imprisons him, and he is released for a large ransom in 1194 and returns to England.
THE FOURTH CRUSADE (1195-1198 A.D.)
The Knights of St. John start in 1193 to organise a crusade. They are encouraged by Pope Celestine III, who hopes that the troublesome emperor Henry VI will be induced to take part in it. Henry also promotes the project, but has no idea of taking part in it.
1195 Henry makes use of one division of the crusaders to conquer the kingdom of Sicily. Two other divisions proceed to Syria.
1196 Defeat of the Turks between Tyre and Sidon.
1197 The crusaders besiege the fortress of Thoron, but make a disgraceful retreat on hearing of the approach of an army from Egypt.
1198 The Saracens capture Joppa. The count of Montfort concludes a three years’ truce with the Saracens. The crusade leaders return to Europe.
THE FIFTH CRUSADE (1201-1204 A.D.)
Pope Innocent III, on his elevation (1198), with the assistance of Fulk of Neuilly, preaches a new crusade.
1201 The company is organised by Simon de Montfort, Walter de Brienne, and Geoffrey de Villehardouin. Boniface of Montferrat chosen leader. The party proceeds to Venice. Treaty between Venice and the leaders for transportation. Unable to pay sum demanded, the doge, Dandolo, agrees to remit the sum lacking if the crusaders will capture for him the town of Zara, taken from Venice by the king of Hungary.
1202 Arrival at Venice of Alexius, son of the deposed emperor Isaac, with whom the crusaders agree to restore Isaac. In spite of Innocent’s protests the fleet sails for Zara, which is taken and handed over to Venice.
1203 The crusaders proceed to Constantinople. Alexius III, the reigning emperor, tries in vain to treat with them. Flight of Alexius. The crusaders enter Constantinople. Isaac II and Alexius IV restored. Constant friction between the emperor and crusaders leads
1204 to the second capture of Constantinople. The reigning family driven out. Foundation of the Latin Empire of Romania and other states. (See “History of the Eastern Empire.”)
THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE (1212 A.D.)
Seems to have arisen from the idea that the main cause of the failure of the Crusades was the sinfulness of the pilgrims. None but the innocent and pure could accomplish the mission. In 1212, thirty thousand boys and girls set out under the boy, Stephen, and twenty thousand from Germany, under Nicholas, a peasant boy. Most of them perish on the way; and others are sold into slavery.
THE SIXTH CRUSADE (1217-1229 A.D.)
When Innocent III crowns Frederick II emperor, in 1215, he extracts a promise from Frederick to conduct a crusade, but the latter, seeing in the pope’s action a plan to outwit him in the then imminent struggle between emperor and pope, defers his departure.
1217 Andrew II of Hungary, incited by Honorius III, Innocent’s successor, sets out for Jerusalem. He is joined by the king of Cyprus. The crusaders visit Tyre, Sidon, Acre, and Tripolis, but the Saracens make such havoc in their numbers that Andrew returns to Hungary.
1218-1221 Jean de Brienne’s expedition to Damietta. (See “Kingdom of Jerusalem”).
1228 Frederick II, after many disputes with the pope, sets out for Jerusalem, the throne of which he claims through his marriage to Yolande.
1229 Frederick makes treaty with the sultan Kamil, receiving Jerusalem and other places. Frederick crowns himself king of Jerusalem, and returns to Europe.
THE SEVENTH CRUSADE (1239-1240 A.D.)
Gregory IX preaches a new crusade (1238). The sultan Kamil dies that year.
1239 King Thibaut of Navarre leads an army to Palestine to break the truce made between Kamil and the Templars. The sons of Kamil defeat him and capture Jerusalem.
1240 Richard, earl of Cornwall, proceeds to Acre, and receives offers of peace from the sultan of Egypt. Jerusalem, and other places in Palestine, are restored to the Christians. Richard returns to England.
THE EIGHTH CRUSADE (1248-1254 A.D.)
In 1244, Jerusalem is taken by the Khwarizmians, who have been driven from their own country by Jenghiz Khan. This leads to a new crusade. Louis IX of France, in a fit of illness, vows to lead an army against the Khwarizmians.
1248 Departure of Louis and his crusaders. He winters in Cyprus.
1249 Louis proceeds to Egypt, and takes Damietta. He then sets out for Cairo.
1250 Battle of Mansura. Defeat and capture of Louis by Turan Shah, sultan of Egypt. Louis is released by the restoration of Damietta, and the promise to abstain from further hostilities. The crusaders return to St. Jean d’Acre. Louis remains four years in Syria, fortifying Acre and other cities, and
1254 returns to France.
THE NINTH CRUSADE (1270-1272 A.D.)
In 1260, the mamelukes, on the death of their sultan, Ibeg, choose Bibars as his successor. This vigorous warrior at once drives the Khwarizmians out of Syria, and takes Damascus and Jerusalem from them. He then proceeds to exterminate the Christians in Syria; in consequence of which, by 1267, a new crusade has been planned. Louis IX of France, and Prince Edward of England, are among those who assume the cross.
1268 Antioch surrenders to Bibars without a siege.
1270 After many difficulties in raising an army, the crusaders sail for the Holy Land. Stopping at Sardinia, Louis changes his plans, and proceeds against the king of Tunis. Shortly after reaching there, the plague breaks out, and Louis dies. King Charles of Naples arrives and makes a truce with the Tunisians, who pay him tribute. The whole fleet returns to Europe, and is wrecked on the Sicilian coast. Charles plunders the French and Genoese vessels. Prince Edward leaves the French in Tunis, and proceeds to Acre.
1271 Edward besieged at Acre by Bibars. Edward drives the mamelukes away and seizes Nazareth. An attempt is made to assassinate Edward.
1272 Edward concludes a ten years’ truce with Bibars, and returns to Europe.
1274 Gregory X fails in an attempt to start a new crusade. Bibars and his successors, Kalaun and Khalil, continue the process of exterminating the Christians.
1289 Tripolis is taken. Acre is the last important possession of the Christians. The mamelukes make a treaty with the king of Cyprus.
1291 Capture of Acre by Khalil. Tyre, Berytus, and other towns, submit. The last possessions of the Christians in the Holy Land are abandoned. Other crusades are planned, but they are never carried to execution. The military orders are eventually suppressed.
FOOTNOTES
[45] [From The Revolutions of Europe: being an historical view of the European nations from the subversion of the Roman Empire in the West to the abdication of Napoleon. By Christopher W. Koch, formerly professor of Public Jurisprudence at Strasburg. Translated from the French by Andrew Crichton. Second edition, London, 1839.]
I. ORIGIN OF THE CRUSADES
“God willeth it,” the whole assembly cry; Shout which the enraptured multitude astounds! The Council roof and Clermont’s towers reply;-- “God willeth it!” from hill to hill rebounds, And, in awe-struck countries far and nigh, Through “Nature’s hollow arch” that voice resounds.
--WORDSWORTH.
[Sidenote: [306-1096 A.D.]]
The history of the Middle Ages presents no spectacle more imposing than the Crusades, in which are to be seen the nations of Asia and of Europe armed against each other, two religions contending for superiority, and disputing the empire of the world. After having been several times threatened by the Moslems, and a long time exposed to their invasions, all at once the West arouses itself, and appears, according to the expression of a Greek historian (Anna Comnena), to tear itself from its foundation, in order to precipitate itself upon Asia. All nations abandon their interests and their rivalries, and see upon the face of the earth but one single country worthy of the ambition of conquerors. One would believe that there no longer exists in the universe any other city but Jerusalem, or any other habitable spot of earth but that which contains the tomb of Jesus Christ. All the roads which lead to the Holy City are deluged with blood, and present nothing but the scattered spoils and wrecks of empires.
In this general confusion we may contemplate the sublimest virtues mixed with all the disorders of the wildest passions. The Christian soldiers have at the same time to contend against famine, the influence of climate, and enemies the most formidable; in the greatest dangers, in the midst of their successes and their constant discords, nothing can exhaust either their perseverance or their resignation. After four years of fatigue, of miseries, and of victories, Jerusalem is taken by the crusaders; but as their conquests are not the work of wisdom and prudence, but the fruit of blind enthusiasm and ill-directed heroism, they create nothing but a transient power.
The banner of the cross soon passes from the hands of Godfrey de Bouillon into those of his weak and imbecile successors. Jerusalem, now a Christian city, is obliged again to apply for succour to the West. At the voice of St. Bernard, the Christians take arms. Conducted by an emperor of Germany and a king of France, they fly to the defence of the Holy Land; but they have no longer great captains among them, they have none of the magnanimity or heroic resignation of their fathers. Asia, which beholds their coming without terror, already presents a new spectacle. The disciples of Mohammed awaken from their apathy; they are at once seized with a frenzy equal to that which had armed their enemies; they oppose enthusiasm to enthusiasm, fanaticism to fanaticism, and in their turn burn with a desire to shed their blood in a religious war.
[Sidenote: [1147-1532 A.D.]]
The spirit of discord which had destroyed their power is no longer felt but among the Christians. Luxury and the manners of the East weaken the courage of the defenders of the cross, and make them forget the object even of the holy war. Jerusalem, which had cost the crusaders so much blood, falls again into the power of the infidels, and becomes the conquest of a wise and warlike prince, who had united under his banner the forces of Syria and Egypt.
The genius and fortune of Saladin inflict a mortal blow upon the ill-assured power of the Christians in the East. In vain an emperor of the West, and two kings celebrated for their bravery, place themselves at the head of the whole powers of their states to deliver Palestine; these new armies of crusaders meet everywhere with brave enemies and invincible barriers, and all their united efforts produce nothing but illustrious disasters. The kingdom of Jerusalem, for whose ruins they contend, is no longer anything but a vain name; soon even the captivity and the miseries of the Holy City cease to inspire the sentiments of piety and enthusiasm that they had given birth to among the Christians. The crusaders, who had taken up arms for its deliverance, suffer themselves to be seduced by the wealth of Greece, and stop short to undertake the conquest of Constantinople.
From that time the spirit of the crusaders begins to change; whilst a small number of Christians still shed their blood for the deliverance of the tomb of Jesus Christ, the princes and the knights are deaf to everything but the voice of ambition. The popes complete the corruption of the true spirit of the crusaders, by urging them on, by their preaching, against other Christian people, and against their own personal enemies. The holy wars then degenerate into civil wars, in which both religion and humanity are outraged.
These abuses of the Crusades, and the dire passions which had mixed themselves with them, plunge Europe in disorder and anarchy; when a pious king undertakes once more to arm the powers of the West against the infidels, and to revive among the crusaders the spirit which had animated the companions of Godfrey. The two wars directed by this pious chief are more unfortunate than all the others. In the first, the world is presented with the spectacle of a captive army and a king in fetters; in the second, that of a powerful monarch dying in its ashes. Then it is that the illusion disappears, and Jerusalem ceases to attract all the attention of the West.
Soon after, the face of Europe is changed; intelligence dissipates barbarism; the Crusades no longer excite the same degree of enthusiasm, and the first effect of the civilisation it begins to spread is to weaken the spirit of the fanaticism which had given them birth. Some few useless efforts are at times made to rekindle the fire which had burned so fiercely in Europe and Asia. The nations are so completely recovered from the pious delirium of the Crusades, that when Germany finds itself menaced by the Mussulmans who are masters of Constantinople the banner of the cross can with difficulty gather an army around it; and Europe, which had risen in a mass to attack the infidels in Asia, opposes but a feeble resistance to them on its own territories.
Such is, in a few words, the picture of the events and revolutions which the historian of the Crusades has to describe.
We do not now require much sagacity to discover in our ancient chronicles what is fabulous and what is not. A far more difficult thing is to reconcile, upon some points, the frequent contradictory assertions of the Latins, the Greeks, and the Saracens, and to separate, in the history of the Crusades, that which belongs to religious fanaticism, to policy, or to human passions.
In an age in which some value is set upon an opinion of the Crusades, it will be first asked if the wars of the Crusades were just. Upon this head we have but little to answer. Whilst the crusaders believed that they were obeying God himself by attacking the Saracens in the East, the latter, who had invaded a part of Asia possessed by Christian people, who had got possession of Spain, who threatened Constantinople, the coasts of Italy, and several countries of the West, did not reproach their enemies with making an unjust war, and left to fortune and victory the care of deciding a question almost always useless.
We shall think it of more importance here to examine what was the cause and the nature of these remote wars, and what has proved to be their influence on civilisation. The Crusades were produced by the religious and military spirit which prevailed in Europe during the Middle Ages. The love of arms and religious fervour were two dominant passions which, mingling in some way, lent each other a mutual energy. These two great principles, united and acting together, gave birth to the holy war; and carried, among the crusaders, valour, resignation, and heroism of character to the highest degree of eminence. Some writers have seen nothing in these great expeditions but the most deplorable excesses, without any advantage to the ages that succeeded them; others, on the contrary, maintain that we owe to them all the benefits of civilisation. It is not, at present, our business to examine these two conflicting opinions. Without believing that the holy wars have done either all the good or all the harm that is attributed to them, it must be admitted that they were a source of bitter sorrow to the generations that saw them or took part in them; but, like the ills and tempests of human life, which render man better and often assist the progress of his reason, they have forwarded the experiences of nations; and it may be said that, after having for a time seriously agitated and shaken society, they have, in the end, much strengthened the foundations of it. This opinion, when stripped of all spirit of exaggeration or system, will perhaps appear the most reasonable.
EARLY CHRISTIAN PILGRIMAGES
[Sidenote: [306-335 A.D.]]
From the earliest ages of the church, a custom had been practised of making pilgrimages to the Holy Land. Judea, full of religious remembrances, was still the promised land of the faithful; the blessings of heaven appeared to be in store for those who visited Calvary, the tomb of Jesus Christ, and renewed their baptism in the waters of the Jordan. Under the reign of Constantine, the ardour for pilgrimages increased among the faithful; they flocked from all the provinces of the empire to worship Jesus Christ upon his own tomb, and to trace the steps of their God in that city which had but just resumed its name, and which the piety of an emperor had caused to issue from its ruins. The Holy Sepulchre presented itself to the eyes of the pilgrims surrounded by a magnificence which redoubled their veneration. An obscure cavern had become a marble temple, paved with precious stones and decorated with splendid colonnades. To the east of the Holy Sepulchre appeared the church of the Resurrection, in which they could admire the riches of Asia, mingled with the arts of Greece and Rome. Constantine celebrated the thirty-first year of his reign by the inauguration of this church, and thousands of Christians came, on occasion of this solemnity, to listen to the panegyric of Christ from the lips of the learned and holy bishop Eusebius.
[Sidenote: [335-493 A.D.]]
St. Helena, the mother of the emperor, repaired to Jerusalem, at a very advanced age, and caused churches and chapels to be built upon Mount Tabor, in the city of Nazareth, and in the greater part of the places which Christ had sanctified by his presence and his miracles. From this period, pilgrimages to the Holy Land became much more frequent. The pilgrims, no longer in dread of the persecutions of the pagans, could now give themselves up, without fear, to the fervour of their devotion; the Roman eagles, ornamented with the cross of Jesus Christ, protected them on their march; they everywhere trampled under foot the fragments of idols, and they travelled amidst the abodes of their fellow-Christians.
When the emperor Julian, in order to weaken the authority of the prophecies, undertook to rebuild the temple of the Jews, numerous were the prodigies related by which God confounded his designs, and Jerusalem, for that attempt even, became more dear to the disciples of Jesus Christ. The Christians did not cease to visit Palestine. St. Jerome, who, towards the end of the fourth century, had retired to Bethlehem, informs us in one of his letters that pilgrims arrived in crowds in Judea, and that around the holy tomb the praises of the Son of God were to be heard, uttered in many languages. From this period, pilgrimages to the Holy Land were so numerous that several doctors and fathers of the church thought it their duty to point out the abuses and danger of the practice. They told Christians that long voyages might turn them aside from the path of salvation; that their God was not confined to one city; that Jesus Christ was everywhere where faith and good works were to be found; but such was the blind zeal which then drew the Christians towards Jerusalem that the voice of the holy doctors was scarcely heard. As soon as the people of the West became converted to Christianity, they turned their eyes to the East. From the depths of Gaul, from the forests of Germany, from all the countries of Europe, new Christians were to be seen hastening to visit the cradle of the faith they had embraced.
[Sidenote: [493-750 A.D.]]
When the world was ravaged by the Goths, the Huns, and the Vandals, pilgrimages to the Holy Land were not at all interrupted. Pious travellers were protected by the hospitable virtues of the barbarians, who began to respect the cross of Christ, and sometimes even followed the pilgrims to Jerusalem. In these times of trouble and desolation, a poor pilgrim who bore his scrip and staff often passed through fields of carnage, and travelled without fear amidst armies which threatened the empires of the East and the West.
Illustrious families of Rome came to seek an asylum at Jerusalem, and upon the tomb of Jesus Christ. Christians then found, on the banks of the Jordan, that peace which seemed to be banished from the rest of the world. This peace, which lasted several centuries, was not troubled before the reign of Heraclius. Under this reign, the armies of Chosroes, king of Persia, invaded Syria, Palestine, and Egypt; the Holy City fell into the hands of the worshippers of fire; the conquerors bore away into captivity vast numbers of Christians, and profaned the churches of Jesus Christ. All the faithful deplored the misfortunes of Jerusalem, and shed tears when they learned that the king of Persia had carried off, among the spoils of the vanquished, the cross of the Saviour, which had been preserved in the church of the Resurrection. Heraclius, after ten years of reverses, triumphed, and brought back to Jerusalem the Christians whose chains he had broken. Then was to be seen an emperor of the East, walking barefooted in the streets of the Holy City, carrying on his shoulders to the summit of Calvary the wood of the true cross, which he considered the most glorious trophy of his victories.
But the joy of the faithful was not of long duration. Towards the beginning of the seventh century there had arisen, in an obscure corner of Asia, a new religion, opposed to all others which preached dominion and war. Mohammed had promised the conquest of the world to his disciples, who had issued almost naked from the deserts of Arabia. By his passionate doctrine he was able to inflame the imagination of the Arabs, and on the field of battle knew how to inspire them with his own impetuous courage. His first successes, which must have greatly exceeded his hopes, were like so many miracles, increasing the confidence of his partisans and carrying conviction to the minds of the weak and wavering. After the death of the prophet of Mecca, his lieutenants and the companions of his first exploits carried on his great work.
JERUSALEM UNDER THE SARACENS
[Sidenote: [750-860 A.D.]]
Amidst the first conquests of the Saracens, they had turned their eyes towards Jerusalem. According to the faith of the Moslems, Mohammed had been in the city of David and Solomon; it was from Jerusalem that he set out to ascend into heaven in his nocturnal voyage. The Saracens considered Jerusalem as the house of God, as the city of saints and miracles. The Christians had the grief of seeing the church of the Holy Sepulchre profaned by the presence of the chief of the infidels. Although Omar had left them the exercise of their worship, they were obliged to conceal their crosses and their sacred books. The caliph ordered a mosque to be erected on the spot whereon the temple of Solomon had been built. In the meantime, the presence of Omar, of whose moderation the East boasts, restrained the jealous fanaticism of the Moslems. After his death the faithful had much more to suffer; they were driven from their houses, insulted in their churches; the tribute which they had to pay to the new masters of Palestine was increased, and they were forbidden to carry arms or to mount on horseback. A leathern girdle, which they were never allowed to be without, was the badge of their servitude; the conquerors would not permit the Christians to speak the Arab tongue, sacred to the disciples of the Koran; and the people who remained faithful to Jesus Christ had not liberty even to pronounce the name of the patriarch of Jerusalem, without the permission of the Saracens.
All these persecutions could not stop the crowd of Christians who repaired to Jerusalem, the sight of the Holy City sustaining their courage as it heightened their devotion. There were no evils, no outrages, that they could not support with resignation, when they remembered that Christ had been loaded with chains and had died upon the cross in the places they were about to visit. The Christians of Palestine, however, enjoyed some short intervals of security during the civil wars of the Mussulmans. The dynasty of the Omayyads, which had established the seat of the Moslem empire at Damascus, was always odious to the ever-formidable party of the Alids, and employed itself less in persecuting the Christians than in preserving its own precarious power. Merwan II, the last caliph of this house, was the most cruel towards the disciples of Christ; and when he, with all his family, sank under the power of his enemies, the Christians and the infidels united in thanks to heaven for having delivered the East from his tyranny.
The Abbasids, established in the city of Baghdad which they had founded, persecuted and tolerated the Christians by turns. The Christians, always living between the fear of persecution and the hope of a transient security, saw at last the prospect of happier days dawn upon them with the reign of Harun ar-Rashid, the greatest caliph of the race of Abbas. Under this reign the glory of Charlemagne, which had reached Asia, protected the churches of the East. His pious liberality relieved the indigence of the Christians of Alexandria, of Carthage, and Jerusalem. The two greatest princes of their age testified their mutual esteem by frequent embassies: they sent each other magnificent presents; and, in the friendly intercourse of two powerful monarchs, the East and the West exchanged the richest productions of their soil and their industry. There was no doubt policy in the marks of esteem which Harun lavished upon the most powerful of the princes of the West. He was making war against the emperors of Constantinople, and might justly fear that they would interest the bravest among Christian people in their cause. To take from the Franks every pretext for a religious war, which might make them embrace the cause of the Greeks, and draw them into Asia, the caliph neglected no opportunity of obtaining the friendship of Charlemagne; and caused the keys of the Holy City and of the Holy Sepulchre to be presented to him.
Whilst the Arabians of Africa were pursuing their conquests towards the West, whilst they took possession of Sicily, and Rome itself saw its suburbs and its churches of St. Peter and St. Paul invaded and pillaged by infidels, the servants of Jesus Christ prayed in peace within the walls of Jerusalem. To the desire of visiting the tomb of Jerusalem was joined the earnest wish to procure relics, which were then sought for with eagerness by the devotion of the faithful. All who returned from the East made it their glory to bring back to their country some precious remains of Christian antiquity, and above all the bones of holy martyrs, which constituted the ornament and the riches of their churches and upon which princes and kings swore to respect truth and justice. The productions of Asia likewise attracted the attention of the people of Europe.
[Sidenote: [860-1050 A.D.]]
In short, the Christians of Palestine and the Moslem provinces, the pilgrims and travellers who returned from the East, seemed no longer to have any persecutions to dread, when all at once new storms broke out in the East. The children of Harun soon shared the fate of the posterity of Charlemagne, and Asia, like the West, was plunged into the horrors of anarchy and civil war. The gigantic empire of the Abbasids crumbled away on all sides, and the world, according to the expression of an Arabian writer, was within the reach of him who would take possession of it. The Greeks then appeared to rouse themselves from their long supineness, and sought to take advantage of the divisions and the humiliation of the Saracens. Nicephorus Phocas took the field at the head of a powerful army, and recaptured Antioch from the Moslems. Deprived of the powerful stimulus of fanaticism, Nicephorus found among the Greeks more panegyrists than soldiers, and could not pursue his advantages against the Saracens. His triumphs were confined to the taking of Antioch, and only served to create a persecution against the Christians of Palestine.
Zimisces resolved to avenge the outrage inflicted upon religion and the empire. On all sides preparations were set on foot for a fresh war against the Saracens. The nations of the West were no strangers to this enterprise, which preceded, by more than a year, the first of the Crusades. After having defeated the Mussulmans on the banks of the Tigris, and forced the caliph of Baghdad to pay a tribute, Zimisces penetrated, almost without resistance, into Judea, took possession of Cæsarea, of Ptolemais, of Tiberias, Nazareth, and several other cities of the Holy Land.
After this first campaign, the Holy Land appeared to be on the eve of being delivered entirely from the yoke of the infidels, when the emperor died poisoned. His death at once put a stop to the execution of an enterprise of which he was the soul and the leader. The Christian nations had scarcely time to rejoice at the delivery of Jerusalem, when they learned that the Holy City had again fallen into the hands of the Fatimite caliphs, who, after the death of Zimisces, had invaded Syria and Palestine. Hakim, the third of the Fatimite caliphs, signalised his reign by all the excesses of fanaticism and outrage. Unfixed in his own projects, and wavering between two religions, he by turns protected and persecuted Christianity.
The inconstancy of Hakim, in a degree, mitigated the misfortunes of Jerusalem, and he had just granted liberty to the Christians to rebuild their churches, when he died by the hand of the assassin. His successor, guided by a wiser policy, tolerated both pilgrimages and the exercise of the Christian religion. The church of the Holy Sepulchre was not entirely rebuilt till thirty years after its destruction; but the spectacle of its ruins still inflamed the zeal and the devotion of the Christians. In the eleventh century the Latin church allowed pilgrimages to suffice instead of canonical penitences; sinners were condemned to quit their country for a time, and to lead a wandering life, after the example of Cain. There existed no crime that might not be expiated by the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Even the weak and timid sex was not deterred by the perils of a long voyage.[b]
CHARACTER OF THE PILGRIMS
[Sidenote: [1000-1050 A.D.]]
Though pilgrimages were generally considered acts of virtue, yet some of the leaders of the church accounted them useless and criminal. Gregory, bishop of Nyssa, in the fourth century, dissuades his flock from these journeys. They were not conscientious obligations, he said, for in the description of persons whom Christ had promised to acknowledge in the next world the name of pilgrim could not be found. A migratory life was dangerous to virtue, particularly to the modesty of women.
The necessity of making a pilgrimage to Rome and other places was often urged by ladies, who did not wish to be mewed in the solitary gloom of a cloister, “chaunting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon.” In the ninth century, a foreign bishop wrote to the archbishop of Canterbury, requesting, in very earnest terms, that English women of every rank and degree might be prohibited from pilgrimising to Rome. Their gallantries were notorious over all the continent. “Perpaucæ enim sunt civitates in Longobardia, vel in Francia, aut in Gallia, in qua non sit adultera vel meretrix generis Anglorum: quod scandalum est, et turpitudo totius ecclesiæ.” Muratori, Antiquitates Italiæ Med. Ævi, Dissert. 58, vol. V., p. 58. “There are few cities in Lombardy, in France, or in Gaul, in which there is not an English adultress or harlot, to the scandal and disgrace of the whole church.” Morality did not improve as the world grew older. The prioress in Chaucer, demure as she is, wears a bracelet on which was inscribed the sentence, “Amor vincit omnia.” The gallant monk, in the same pilgrimage, ties his hood with a true-lover’s knot.
Horror at spectacles of vice would diminish with familiarity, and the moral principle would gradually be destroyed. Malice, idolatry, poisoning, and bloodshed disgraced Jerusalem itself; and so dreadfully polluted was the city that, if any man wished to have a more than ordinary spiritual communication with Christ, he had better quit his earthly tabernacle at once than endeavour to enjoy it in places originally sacred, but which had been since defiled. Some years after the time of Gregory, a similar description of the depravity at Jerusalem was given by St. Jerome, and the Latin father commends a monk who, though a resident in Palestine, had but on one occasion travelled to the city. The opinions of these two venerable spiritual guides could not stem the torrent of popular religion. The coffers of the church were enriched by the sale of relics, and the dominion of the clergy became powerful in proportion to the growth of religious abuses and corruptions. Pilgrims from India, Ethiopia, Britannia, and Hibernia went to Jerusalem; and the tomb of Christ resounded with hymns in various languages. Bishops and teachers would have thought it a disgrace to their piety and learning if they had not adored their Saviour on the very spot where his cross had first shed the light of his Gospel.
The assertion, that “the coffers of the church were enriched by the sale of relics,” requires some observations; because the sale of one relic in particular encouraged the ardour of pilgrimages, and from the ardour the Crusades arose. During the fourth century, Christendom was duped into the belief that the very cross on which Christ had suffered had been discovered in Jerusalem. The city’s bishop was the keeper of the treasure, but the faithful never offered their money in vain for a fragment of the holy wood. They listened with credulity to the assurance of their priests that a living virtue pervaded an inanimate and insensible substance, and that the cross permitted itself every day to be divided into several parts, and yet remained uninjured and entire. Thus Erasmus says, in his entertaining dialogue on pilgrimages, that “if the fragments of the cross were collected, enough would be found for the building of a ship.” It was publicly exhibited during the religious festivities of Easter, and Jerusalem was crowded with pious strangers to witness the solemn spectacle. But after four ages of perpetual distribution, the world was filled with relics, and superstition craved for a novel object. Accordingly, the Latin clergy of Palestine pretended that on the vigil of Easter, after the great lamps in the church of the Resurrection had been extinguished, they were relighted by God himself. People flocked from the West to the East in order to behold this act of the Divinity, and to catch some portion of a flame which had the marvellous property of healing all diseases, mental as well as bodily, if those who received it had faith.[c]
[Sidenote: [1050-1076 A.D.]]
The inclination to acquire holiness by the journey to Jerusalem became at length so general that the troops of pilgrims alarmed by their numbers the countries through which they passed, and although they came not as soldiers they were designated “the armies of the Lord.” In the year 1054, Litbert, bishop of Cambray, set out for the Holy Land, followed by more than three thousand pilgrims from the provinces of Picardy and Flanders.
Ten years after, seven thousand Christians set out together from the banks of the Rhine. This numerous caravan, which was the forerunner of the Crusades, crossed Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Thrace, and was welcomed at Constantinople by the emperor Constantine Ducas. After having visited the churches of Byzantium, the pilgrims of the West traversed Asia Minor and Syria without danger; but when they approached Jerusalem, the sight of their riches aroused the cupidity of the Bedouin Arabs, undisciplined hordes, who had neither country nor settled abode, and who had rendered themselves formidable in the civil wars of the East. The Arabs attacked the pilgrims of the West, and compelled them to sustain a siege in an abandoned village; and this was on a Good Friday. The emir of Ramala, informed by some fugitives, came happily to their rescue, delivered them from the death with which they were threatened, and permitted them to continue their journey. After having lost more than three thousand of their companions, they returned to Europe, to relate their tragical adventures, and the dangers of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
THE TURKS IN POWER
[Sidenote: [1076-1088 A.D.]]
New perils and the most violent persecutions at this period threatened both the pilgrims of the West and the Christians of Palestine. Asia was once again about to change masters, and tremble beneath a fresh tyranny. During several centuries the rich countries of the East had been subject to continual invasions from the wild hordes of Tatary. The Turks, issuing from countries situated beyond the Oxus, had rendered themselves masters of Persia. Palestine yielded to the power of the Turks. The conquerors spared neither the Christians nor the children of Ali, whom the caliph of Baghdad represented to be the enemies of God. The Egyptian garrison was massacred, and the mosques and the churches were delivered up to pillage. The Holy City was flooded with the blood of Christians and Mussulmans.
Other tribes of Turks, led by Suleiman, penetrated into Asia Minor. They took possession of all the provinces through which pilgrims were accustomed to pass on their way to Jerusalem. The standard of the prophet floated over the walls of Edessa, Iconium, Tarsus, and Antioch. Thousands of children had been circumcised. Everywhere the laws of the Koran took the place of those of the Evangelists and of Greece. The black or white tents of the Turks covered the plains and the mountains of Bithynia and Cappadocia, and their flocks pastured among the ruins of the monasteries and churches. The Greeks had never had to contend against more cruel and terrible enemies than the Turks. In the midst of revolutions and civil wars, the Greek Empire was hastening to its fall.
Whilst the empire of the East approached its fall and appeared sapped by time and corruption, the institutions of the West were in their infancy. The empire and the laws of Charlemagne no longer existed. Nations had no relations with each other; and mistaking their political interests, made wars without considering their consequences or their dangers, and concluded peace without being at all aware whether it was advantageous or not. Royal authority was nowhere sufficiently strong to arrest the progress of anarchy and the abuses of feudalism. At the same time that Europe was full of soldiers and covered with strong castles, the states themselves were without support against their enemies, and had not an army to defend them.
Ten years before the invasion of Asia Minor by the Turks, Michael Ducas, the successor of Romanus Diogenes, had implored the assistance of the pope and the princes of the West. He had promised to remove all the barriers which separated the Greek from the Roman church, if the Latins would take up arms against the infidels. Gregory VII then filled the chair of St. Peter. The hope of extending the religion and the empire of the holy see into the East made him receive kindly the humble supplications of Michael Ducas. Excited by his discourses, fifty thousand pilgrims agreed to follow Gregory to Constantinople, and thence to Syria; but the affairs of Europe suspended the execution of his projects.
Every day the power of the popes was augmented by the progress of Christianity, and by the ever-increasing influence of the Latin clergy. Rome was become a second time the capital of the world, and appeared to have resumed, under the monk Hildebrand, the empire it had enjoyed under the cæsars. Armed with the two-edged sword of Peter, Gregory loudly proclaimed that all the kingdoms of the earth were under the dominion of the holy see, and that his authority ought to be as universal as the church of which he was the head. These dangerous pretensions, fostered by the opinions of his age, engaged him immediately in violent disputes with the emperor of Germany. He desired also to dictate laws to France, Spain, Sweden, Poland, and England; and thinking of nothing but making himself acknowledged as the great arbiter of states, he launched his anathemas even against the throne of Constantinople, which he had undertaken to defend, and gave no more attention to the deliverance of Jerusalem.
After the death of Gregory, Victor III, although he pursued the policy of his predecessor and had to contend against the emperor of Germany and the party of the anti-pope Guibert (Clement III), did not neglect the opportunity of making war against the Mussulmans. The Saracens, inhabiting Africa, disturbed the navigation of the Mediterranean, and threatened the coast of Italy. Victor invited the Christians to take arms, and promised them the remission of all their sins if they went to fight against the infidels. The inhabitants of Pisa, Genoa, and several other cities, urged by their zeal for religion and their desire to defend their commerce, equipped fleets, levied troops, and made a descent upon the coasts of Africa, where, if we are to believe the chronicles of the time, they cut in pieces an army of one hundred thousand Saracens.[b]
PETER THE HERMIT
[Sidenote: [1088-1095 A.D.]]
The true story of the first Crusade is, as Kugler[d] says, sufficiently marvellous. It was a vast awakening in which religion, adventure, and design forced the European peoples out of their narrow lines of life and brought the West and East again in contact, and it grows in strangeness as we trace the story in detail. But monkish, uncritical writings which record the vague traditions of that great uprising have not rested satisfied with the marvellous truth: they have added much that is legendary. Among the legends that have failed to stand the test of recent scholarship, is the famous one which made Peter the Hermit the originator of the first Crusade. We may now feel sure that it was not Peter but Urban II who set going the great impetus; but the legend of Peter the Hermit has grown into the story of the first Crusade, and won its place in history from the belief of centuries. The reader must, however, be aware, as he reads it, that we have no authentic account of Peter’s preaching before the Council of Clermont. He was probably one of the preachers who scattered the enthusiasm of that council in northeastern France. His preaching was likely limited to the land where he could be understood in the vernacular, and his real influence is rather to be estimated by the rabble that followed him and Walter the Penniless, to leave their bones by the Danube or Bosporus. So much prefaced, let us turn to the story.
As the legend runs, Peter, an obscure hermit, came from his retreat, and followed into Palestine the crowd of Christians who went to visit the holy places.[a] The sight of Jerusalem excited him much more than any of the other pilgrims, for it created in his ardent mind a thousand conflicting sentiments. In the city, which exhibited everywhere marks of the mercy and the anger of God, all objects inflamed his piety, irritated his devotion and his zeal, and filled him by turns with respect, terror, and indignation. After having followed his brethren to Calvary and the tomb of Christ he repaired to the patriarch of Jerusalem. The white hairs of Simeon, his venerable figure, and above all the persecution which he had undergone, bespoke the full confidence of Peter, and they wept together over the ills of the Christians. The patriarch resolved to implore, by his letters, the help of the pope and the princes of Europe, and the hermit swore to be the interpreter of the Christians of the East and to rouse the West to take arms for their deliverance.
After this interview, the enthusiasm of Peter knew no bounds; he was persuaded that heaven itself called upon him to avenge its cause. One day, whilst prostrated before the Holy Sepulchre, he believed that he heard the voice of Christ, which said to him: “Peter, arise! hasten to proclaim the tribulations of my people; it is time that my servants should receive help, and that the holy places should be delivered.” Full of the spirit of these words, which sounded unceasingly in his ears, and charged with letters from the patriarch, he quitted Palestine, crossed the seas, landed on the coast of Italy, and hastened to cast himself at the feet of the pope. The chair of St. Peter was then occupied by Urban II, who had been the disciple and confidant of both Gregory and Victor. Urban embraced with ardour a project which had been entertained by his predecessors; he received Peter as a prophet, applauded his design, and bade him go forth and announce the approaching deliverance of Jerusalem.
[Sidenote: [1095-1096 A.D.]]
Peter the Hermit traversed Italy, crossed the Alps, visited all parts of France, and the greatest portion of Europe, inflaming all hearts with the same zeal that consumed his own. He travelled mounted on a mule, with a crucifix in his hand, his feet bare, his head uncovered, his body girded with a thick cord, covered with a long frock, and a hermit’s hood of the coarsest stuff. The singularity of his appearance was a spectacle for the people, whilst the austerity of his manners, his charity, and the moral doctrines that he preached caused him to be revered as a saint wherever he went.
He went from city to city, from province to province, working upon the courage of some and upon the piety of others; sometimes haranguing from the pulpits of the churches, sometimes preaching in the high-roads or public places. His eloquence was animated and impressive, and filled with those vehement apostrophes which produce such effects upon an uncultivated multitude. He described the profanation of the holy places, and the blood of the Christians shed in torrents in the streets of Jerusalem. He invoked, by turns, heaven, the saints, the angels, whom he called upon to bear witness to the truth of what he told them. He apostrophised Mount Zion, the rock of Calvary, and the Mount of Olives, which he made to resound with sobs and groans. When he had exhausted speech in painting the miseries of the faithful, he showed the spectators the crucifix which he carried with him; sometimes striking his breast and wounding his flesh, sometimes shedding torrents of tears. The people followed the steps of Peter in crowds. The preacher of the holy war was received everywhere as a messenger from God.
THE APPEAL OF THE EMPEROR ALEXIUS
In the midst of this general excitement, Alexius Comnenus, who was threatened by the Turks, sent ambassadors to the pope, to solicit the assistance of the Latins. “Without the prompt assistance of all the Christian states,” he wrote, “Constantinople must fall under the most frightful domination of the Turks.” He reminded the princes of Christianity of the holy relics preserved in Constantinople, and conjured them to save so sacred an assemblage of venerated objects from the profanation of the infidels. After having set forth the splendour and the riches of his capital, he exhorted the knights and barons to come and defend them; he offered them his treasures as the reward of their valour, and painted in glowing colours the beauty of the Greek women, whose love would repay the exploits of his liberators. Thus, nothing was spared that could flatter the passions or arouse the enthusiasm of the warriors of the West.
COUNCILS OF PLACENTIA AND CLERMONT
In compliance with the prayers of Alexius and the wishes of the faithful, the sovereign pontiff convoked a council at Placentia, in order there to expose the dangers of the Greek and Latin churches in the East. The preachings of Peter had so prepared the minds and animated the zeal of the faithful, that more than two hundred bishops and archbishops, four thousand ecclesiastics, and thirty thousand of the laity obeyed the invitation of the holy see. The council was so numerous that it was obliged to be held in a plain in the neighbourhood of the city. The Council of Placentia, however, came to no determination upon the war against the infidels. The deliverance of the Holy Land was far from being the only object of this council: the declarations of the empress Adelaide, who came to reveal her own shame and that of her husband, anathemas against the emperor of Germany and the anti-pope Guibert, occupied, during several days, the attention of Urban and the assembled fathers.
A new council assembled at Clermont, in Auvergne. Before it gave up its attention to the holy war, the council at first considered the reform of the clergy and ecclesiastical discipline; and it then occupied itself in placing a restraint upon the license of wars among individuals. In these barbarous times even simple knights never thought of redressing their injuries by any other means than arms. It was not an uncommon thing to see families, for the slightest causes, commence a war against each other that would last during several generations; Europe was distracted with troubles occasioned by these hostilities. In the impotence of the laws and the governments, the church often exerted its salutary influence to restore tranquillity; several councils had placed their interdict upon private wars during four days of the week, and their decrees had invoked the vengeance of heaven against disturbers of the public peace. The Council of Clermont renewed the Truce of God, and threatened all who refused “to accept peace and justice” with the thunders of the church. One of its decrees placed widows, orphans, merchants, and labourers under the safeguard of religion. They declared, as they had already done in other councils, that the churches should be so many inviolable sanctuaries, and that crosses, even, placed upon the high-roads, should become points of refuge against violence.
Humanity and reason must applaud such salutary decrees; but the sovereign pontiff, although he presented himself as the defender of the sanctity of marriage, did not merit the same praises when he pronounced in this council an anathema against Philip I. But such was then the general infatuation, that no one was astonished that a king of France should be excommunicated in the very bosom of his own kingdom. The sentence of Urban could not divert attention from an object that seemed much more imposing, and the excommunication of Philip scarcely holds a place in the history of the Council of Clermont. The faithful, gathered from all the provinces, had but one single thought; they spoke of nothing but the evils the Christians endured in Palestine, and saw nothing but the war which was about to be declared against the infidels. Enthusiasm and fanaticism, which always increase in large assemblies, were carried to their full height. Urban at length satisfied the impatience of the faithful--impatience which he, perhaps, had adroitly excited, and which was the surest guarantee of success.
The council held its tenth sitting in the great square or place of Clermont, which was soon filled by an immense crowd. Followed by his cardinals, the pope ascended a species of throne which had been prepared for him; at his side was Peter the Hermit, clad in that whimsical and uncouth garb which had everywhere drawn upon him the attention and the respect of the multitude. Urban, who spoke after Peter, represented, as he had done, the holy places as profaned by the domination of the infidels.
As Urban proceeded, the sentiments by which he was animated penetrated to the very souls of his auditors. When he spoke of the captivity and the misfortunes of Jerusalem, the whole assembly was dissolved in tears; when he described the tyranny and the perfidy of the infidels, the warriors who listened to him clutched their swords, and swore in their hearts to avenge the cause of the Christians. Urban redoubled their enthusiasm by announcing that God had chosen them to accomplish his designs, and exhorted them to turn those arms against the Moslems which they now bore in conflict against their brothers. They were not now called upon to revenge the injuries of men, but injuries offered to divinity; it was now not the conquest of a town or a castle that was offered to them as the reward of their valour, but the riches of Asia, the possession of a land in which, according to the promises of the Scriptures, flowed streams of milk and honey.
“Christian warriors,” he exclaimed, “who seek without end for vain pretexts for war, rejoice, for you have to-day found true ones. You who have been so often the terror of your fellow-citizens, go and fight against the barbarians, go and fight for the deliverance 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 Maccabees, go and merit an eternal reward. If you triumph over your enemies, the kingdoms of the East will be your heritage; if you are conquered, you will have the glory of dying in the very same place as Jesus Christ, and God will not forget that he shall have found you in his holy ranks. This is the moment to prove that you are animated by a true courage; this is the moment in which you may expiate so many violences committed in the bosom of peace, so many victories purchased at the expense of justice and humanity. If you must have blood, bathe your hands 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! When Jesus Christ summons you to his defence, let no base affections detain you in your homes; see nothing but the shame and the evils of the Christians; listen to nothing but the groans of Jerusalem, and remember well what the Lord has said to you: ‘He who loves his father and his mother more than me, is not worthy of me; whoever shall abandon his house, or his father, or his mother, or his wife, or his children, or his inheritance, for the sake of my name, shall be recompensed a hundredfold, and possess life eternal.’”
At these words the auditors of Urban displayed an enthusiasm that human eloquence had never before inspired. The assembly arose in one mass as one man, and answered him with a unanimous cry, “It is the will of God! It is the will of God!”[46] Pity, indignation, despair, at the same time agitated the tumultuous assembly of the faithful; some shed tears over Jerusalem and the fate of the Christians; others swore to exterminate the race of the Moslems; but, all at once, at a signal from the sovereign pontiff, the most profound silence prevailed. Cardinal Gregory, who afterwards occupied the chair of St. Peter under the name of Innocent II, pronounced, in a loud voice, a form of general confession, the assembly all fell upon their knees, beat their breasts, and received absolution for their sins. All the faithful decorated their garments with a red cross. From that time, all who engaged to combat the infidels were termed “bearers of the cross,”[47] and the holy war took the name of “Crusade.” The faithful solicited Urban to place himself at their head; but the pontiff, who had not yet triumphed over the anti-pope Guibert, who was dealing out at the same time his anathemas against the king of France and the emperor of Germany, could not quit Europe without compromising the power and the policy of the holy see. He refused to be chief of the crusade, and named the bishop of Puy apostolic legate with the army of the Christians.
THE FRENZY OF EUROPE
He promised to all who assumed the cross the entire remission of their sins. Their persons, their families, their property, were all placed under the protection of the church and of the apostles St. Peter and St. Paul. The council declared that every violence exercised upon the soldiers of Christ should be punished by anathema, and recommended its decrees in favour of the bearers of the cross to the watchful care of all bishops and priests. It regulated the discipline and the departure of those who had enrolled themselves in the holy ranks, and for fear reflection might deter any from leaving their homes, it threatened with excommunication all those who did not fulfil their vows.
It might be said that the French had no longer any other country than the Holy Land, and that to it they were bound to sacrifice their ease, their property, and their lives. This enthusiasm, which had no bounds, was not long in extending itself to the other Christian nations; the flame which consumed France was communicated to England, still disturbed by the recent conquest of the Normans; to Germany, troubled by the anathema of Gregory and Urban; to Italy, agitated by its factions; to Spain, even, although it had to combat the Saracens on its own territory.
The devotion for pilgrimages, which had been increasing during several centuries, became a passion and an imperative want for most Christians; everyone was eager to march to Jerusalem, and to take part in the crusade, which was, in all respects, an armed pilgrimage. The situation in which Europe was then placed no doubt contributed to increase the number of pilgrims. “All things were in such disorder,” says William of Tyre, “that the world appeared to be approaching to its end, and was ready to fall again into the confusion of chaos.” Everywhere the people groaned under a horrible servitude; a frightful scarcity of provisions, which had during several years desolated France and the greater part of the kingdoms of the West, had given birth to all sorts of brigandage and violence; and these proving the destruction of agriculture and commerce increased still further the horrors of the famine. Villages, towns even, became void of inhabitants, and sank into ruins. The people abandoned a land which no longer nourished them, or could offer them either repose or security: the standard of the cross appeared to them a certain asylum against misery and oppression. According to the decrees of the Council of Clermont, the crusaders were freed from all imposts, and could not be pursued for debts during their voyage. At the name of the cross the very laws suspended their menaces, tyranny could not seek its victims, nor justice even the guilty, amidst those whom the church adopted for its defenders. The assurance of impunity, the hope of a better fate, the love of license, and a desire to shake off the most sacred ties, actuated a vast proportion of the multitude which flocked to the banners of the crusade.
Many nobles who had not at first taken the cross, and who saw their vassals set out, without having the power to prevent them, determined to follow them as military chiefs, in order to preserve some portion of their authority. It was known that two or three hundred Norman pilgrims had conquered Apulia and Sicily from the Saracens. The lands occupied by the infidels appeared to be heritages promised to knights whose whole wealth consisted in their birth, their valour, and their sword.
We should nevertheless deceive ourselves if we did not believe that religion was the principle which acted most powerfully upon the greater number of the crusaders. In ordinary times men follow their natural inclinations, and only obey the voice of their own interest; but in the times of the Crusades, religious fever was a blind passion which spoke louder than all others. Religion permitted not any other glory, any other felicity to be seen by its ardent defenders, but those which she presented to their heated imagination. Love of country, family ties, the most tender affections of the heart, were all sacrificed to the ideas and the opinions which then possessed the whole of Europe. Moderation was cowardice, indifference treason, opposition a sacrilegious interference. The power of the laws was reckoned as nothing amongst men who believed they were fighting in the cause of God. Subjects scarcely acknowledged the authority of princes or lords in anything which concerned the holy war; the master and the slave had no other title than that of Christian, no other duty to perform than that of defending his religion, sword in hand.
They whom age or condition appeared to detain in Europe, and whom the council had exempted from the labours and perils of the crusade, caused the heaven which called them to the holy war to speak aloud. Women and children imprinted crosses upon their delicate and weak limbs, to show the will of God. Monks deserted the cloisters in which they had sworn to die, believing themselves led by a divine inspiration; hermits and anchorites issued from forests and deserts, and mingled with the crowd of crusaders. What is still more difficult to believe, thieves and robbers, quitting their secret retreats, came to confess their crimes, and promised, whilst receiving the cross, to go and expiate them in Palestine.
Europe appeared to be a land of exile, which everyone was eager to quit. Artisans, traders, labourers, abandoned the occupations by which they subsisted; barons and lords even renounced the domains of their fathers. The lands, the cities, the castles, for which they had but of late been at war, all at once lost their value in the eyes of their possessors, and were given up, for small sums, to those whom the grace of God had not touched, and who were not called to the happiness of visiting the holy places and conquering the East.
Contemporary authors relate several miracles which assisted in heating the minds of the multitude. Stars fell from the firmament; traces of blood were seen in the heavens; cities, armies, and knights decorated with the cross were pictured in the clouds. We will not relate all the other miracles reported by historians, which were believed in an age in which nothing was more common than prodigies, in which, according to the remark of Fleury, the taste for the wonderful prevailed greatly over that for the true. Our readers will find quite enough of extraordinary things in the description of so many great events for which the moral world, and even nature herself, seemed to have interrupted their laws. What prodigy, in fact, can more astonish the philosopher, than to see Europe, which may be said to have been agitated to its very foundations, move all at once, and like a single man march in arms towards the East?
The Council of Clermont, which was held in the month of November, 1095, had fixed the departure of the crusaders for the festival of the Assumption of the following year. During the winter nothing was thought of but preparations for the voyage to the Holy Land. As soon as the spring appeared, nothing could restrain the impatience of the crusaders, and they set forward on their march to the places at which they were to assemble. The greater number went on foot; some horsemen appeared amongst the multitude; a great many travelled in cars; they were clothed in a variety of manners, and armed, in the same way, with lances, swords, javelins, iron clubs, etc. The crowd of crusaders presented a whimsical and confused mixture of all ranks and all conditions; women appeared in arms in the midst of warriors, prostitution not being forgotten among the austerities of penitence. Old age was to be seen with infancy, opulence next to misery; the helmet was confounded with the frock, the mitre with the sword. Around cities, around fortresses, in the plains, upon the mountains, were raised tents and pavilions; everywhere was displayed a preparation for war and festivity. Here was heard the sound of arms or the braying of trumpets; whilst at a short distance the air was filled with psalms and spiritual songs. From the Tiber to the ocean, and from the Rhine to the other side of the Pyrenees, nothing was to be seen but troops of men marked with the cross, who swore to exterminate the Saracens, and were chanting their songs of conquest beforehand. On all sides resounded the war-cry of the crusaders: “It is the will of God! It is the will of God!”
Families, whole villages, set out for Palestine, and drew into their ranks all they met with on their passage. They marched on without forethought, and would not believe that he who nourishes the sparrow would leave pilgrims clothed with the holy cross to perish with want. Their ignorance added to their illusion, and lent an air of enchantment to everything they saw; they believed at every moment they were approaching the end of their pilgrimage. The children of the villagers, when they saw a city or a castle, asked if that was Jerusalem. Many of the great lords, who had passed their lives in their rustic donjons, knew very little more on this head than their vassals; they took with them their hunting and fishing appointments, and marched with their falcons on their wrists, preceded by their hounds. They expected to reach Jerusalem enjoying themselves on the road, and to exhibit to Asia the rude luxury of their castles.
In the midst of the general delirium, no sage caused the voice of reason to be heard; nobody was then astonished at that which now creates so much surprise. These scenes so strange, in which everyone was an actor, could only be a spectacle for posterity.[b]
FOOTNOTES
[46] Dieu le veut was pronounced in the language of the times Dieu le volt, or Diex le volt.
[47] The cross which the faithful wore in this crusade was of cloth, and sometimes even of red-coloured silk. Afterwards they wore crosses of different colours. The cross, a little in relief, was sewed upon the right shoulder of the coat or mantle, or else fastened on the front of the helmet, after having been blessed by the pope or some bishop. The prayers and ceremonies used on this occasion are still to be found in the Romish ritual. On returning from the Holy Land, they removed this mark from the shoulder and placed it on the back, or else wore it at the neck.
II. THE FIRST CRUSADE
There, armed and mounted, goes the pilgrim knight, To meet the Saracen on Acre’s field: The Cross is on his shoulders and his shield, And on his banner and his helmet bright: He knoweth not to truckle or to yield, But valiantly for his dear Lord to fight; For on his heart is this high purpose sealed,-- To see Jerusalem; O glorious sight! To quench his thirst at Siloa’s sacred fount; To bathe in Jordan’s stream without control; To stand on Calvary’s thrice honoured mount, And there the standard of the Cross unroll; On that blest spot those sufferings to recount Which He endured who died to save his sinful soul.
--JOHN HOLLAND.
[Sidenote: [1096-1147 A.D.]]
The 15th of August had been fixed in the Council of Clermont for the departure of the pilgrims; but the day was anticipated by the thoughtless and needy crowd of plebeians. Early in the spring, from the confines of France and Lorraine, above sixty thousand of the populace of both sexes, flocked round the first missionary of the Crusades, and pressed him with clamorous importunity to lead them to the Holy Sepulchre. The hermit, assuming the character, without the talents or authority, of a general, impelled or obeyed the forward impulse of his votaries along the banks of the Rhine and Danube. Their wants and numbers soon compelled them to separate, and his lieutenant, Walter the Penniless, a valiant though needy soldier, conducted a vanguard of pilgrims, whose condition may be determined from the proportion of eight horsemen to fifteen thousand foot.
The example and footsteps of Peter were closely pursued by another fanatic, the monk Godescal [or Gottschalk], whose sermons had swept away fifteen or twenty thousand peasants from the villages of Germany. Their rear was again pressed by a herd of two hundred thousand, the most stupid and savage refuse of the people, who mingled with their devotion a brutal license of rapine, prostitution, and drunkenness. Some counts and gentlemen, at the head of three thousand horse, attended the motions of the multitude to partake in the spoil; but their genuine leaders (may we credit such folly?) were a goose and a goat, who were carried in the front, and to whom these worthy Christians ascribed an infusion of the divine Spirit. Of these, and of other bands of enthusiasts, the first and most easy warfare was against the Jews, the murderers of the Son of God. In the trading cities of the Moselle and the Rhine, their colonies were numerous and rich; and they enjoyed, under the protection of the emperor and the bishops, the free exercise of their religion. At Verdun, Trèves, Mainz, Speier, Worms, many thousands of that unhappy people were pillaged and massacred; nor had they felt a more bloody stroke since the persecution of Hadrian. A remnant was saved by the firmness of their bishops, who accepted a feigned and transient conversion; but the more obstinate Jews opposed their fanaticism to the fanaticism of the Christians, barricaded their houses, and precipitating themselves, their families, and their wealth into the rivers or the flames, disappointed the malice, or at least the avarice, of their implacable foes.
PETER THE HERMIT AND HIS RABBLE
Between the frontiers of Austria and the seat of the Byzantine monarchy the crusaders were compelled to traverse an interval of six hundred miles--the wild and desolate countries of Hungary and Bulgaria. Both nations had imbibed the rudiments of Christianity: the Hungarians were ruled by their native princes, the Bulgarians by a lieutenant of the Greek emperor; but on the slightest provocation their ferocious nature was rekindled, and ample provocation was afforded by the disorders of the first pilgrims. Agriculture must have been unskilful and languid among a people whose cities were built of reeds and timber, which were deserted in the summer season for the tents of hunters and shepherds. A scanty supply of provisions was rudely demanded, forcibly seized, and greedily consumed; and on the first quarrel, the crusaders gave a loose rein to indignation and revenge. But their ignorance of the country, of war, and of discipline exposed them to every snare. The Greek prefect of Bulgaria commanded a regular force; at the trumpet of the Hungarian king, the eighth or the tenth of his martial subjects bent their bows and mounted on horseback; their policy was insidious, and their retaliation on these pious robbers was unrelenting and bloody. About a third of the naked fugitives, and the hermit Peter was of the number, escaped to the Thracian Mountains; and the emperor, who respected the pilgrimage and succour of the Latins, conducted them by secure and easy journeys to Constantinople, and advised them to await the arrival of their brethren.
For awhile they remembered their faults and losses; but no sooner were they revived by the hospitable entertainment than their venom was again inflamed; they stung their benefactor, and neither gardens, nor palaces, nor churches were safe from their depredations. For his own safety, Alexius allured them to pass over to the Asiatic side of the Bosporus; but their blind impetuosity soon urged them to desert the station which he had assigned, and to rush headlong against the Turks who occupied the road of Jerusalem. The hermit, conscious of his shame, had withdrawn from the camp to Constantinople; and his lieutenant, Walter the Penniless, who was worthy of a better command, attempted without success to introduce some order and prudence among the herd of savages. They separated in quest of prey, and themselves fell an easy prey to the arts of the sultan. By a rumour that their foremost companions were rioting in the spoils of his capital, Suleiman tempted the main body to descend into the plain of Nicæa; they were overwhelmed by the Turkish arrows; and a pyramid of bones informed their companions of the place of their defeat. Of the first crusaders, three hundred thousand[48] had already perished before a single city was rescued from the infidels, before their graver and more noble brethren had completed the preparations of their enterprise.
THE LEADERS OF THE FIRST CRUSADE
[Sidenote: [1096-1097 A.D.]]
None of the great sovereigns of Europe embarked their persons in the First Crusade. The religious ardour was more strongly felt by the princes of the second order, who held an important place in the feudal system. The first rank both in war and council is justly due to Godfrey de Bouillon; and happy would it have been for the crusaders, if they had trusted themselves to the sole conduct of that accomplished hero, a worthy representative of Charlemagne, from whom he was descended in the female line.
In the service of Henry IV, he bore the great standard of the empire, and pierced with his lance the breast of Rudolf the rebel king; Godfrey was the first who ascended the walls of Rome; and his sickness, his vow, perhaps his remorse for bearing arms against the pope, confirmed an early resolution of visiting the Holy Sepulchre, not as a pilgrim but a deliverer. His valour was matured by prudence and moderation; his piety, though blind, was sincere; and in the tumult of a camp he practised the real and fictitious virtues of a convent. Superior to the private factions of the chiefs, he reserved his enmity for the enemies of Christ; and though he gained a kingdom by the attempt, his pure and disinterested zeal was acknowledged by his rivals. Godfrey de Bouillon was accompanied by his two brothers--by Eustace the elder, who had succeeded to the county of Boulogne, and by the younger, Baldwin, a character of more ambiguous virtue.
In the parliament that was held at Paris, in the king’s presence, about two months after the Council of Clermont, Hugh, count of Vermandois was the most conspicuous of the princes who assumed the cross. But the appellation of “the great” was applied, not so much to his merit or possessions (though neither were contemptible) as to the royal birth of the brother of the king of France. Robert, duke of Normandy, was the eldest son of William the Conqueror; but on his father’s death he was deprived of the kingdom of England by his own indolence and the activity of his brother Rufus. For the trifling sum of ten thousand marks he mortgaged Normandy, during his absence, to the English usurper; but his engagement and behaviour in the holy war announced in Robert a reformation of manners, and restored him in some degree to the public esteem. Another Robert was count of Flanders; he was surnamed the Sword and Lance of the Christians; but in the exploits of a soldier he sometimes forgot the duties of a general. Stephen, count of Chartres, of Blois, and of Troyes, was one of the richest princes of the age; and the number of his castles has been compared to the 365 days of the year. His mind was improved by literature; and in the council of the chiefs, the eloquent Stephen was chosen to discharge the office of their president. These four were the principal leaders of the French, the Normans, and the pilgrims of the British Isles; but the list of the barons who were possessed of three or four towns would exceed, says a contemporary, the catalogue of the Trojan War.
In the south of France, the command was assumed by Adhemar, bishop of Puy, the pope’s legate; and by Raymond, count of St. Giles and Toulouse, who added the prouder titles of duke of Narbonne and marquis of Provence. The former was a respectable prelate, alike qualified for this world and the next. The latter was a veteran warrior, who had fought against the Saracens of Spain, and who consecrated his declining age not only to the deliverance but to the perpetual service of the Holy Sepulchre. A mercantile, rather than a martial spirit prevailed among his provincials--a common name which included the natives of Auvergne and Languedoc--the vassals of the kingdom of Burgundy or Arles. From the adjacent frontier of Spain, he drew a band of hardy adventurers; as he marched through Lombardy, a crowd of Italians flocked to his standard, and his united force consisted of one hundred thousand horse and foot. If Raymond was the first to enlist and the last to depart, the delay may be excused by the greatness of his preparation and the promise of an everlasting farewell.
The name of Bohemond, the son of Robert Guiscard, was already famous by his double victory over the Greek emperor; but his father’s will had reduced him to the principality of Taranto and the remembrance of his eastern trophies, till he was awakened by the rumour and passage of the French pilgrims. It is in the person of this Norman chief that we may seek for the coolest policy and ambition with a small alloy of religious fanaticism. His conduct may justify a belief that he had secretly directed the design of the pope, which he affected to second with astonishment and zeal. At the siege of Amalfi, his example and discourse inflamed the passions of a confederate army; he instantly tore his garment to supply crosses for the numerous candidates and prepared to visit Constantinople and Asia at the head of ten thousand horse and twenty thousand foot. Several princes of the Norman race accompanied this veteran general; and his cousin Tancred was the partner, rather than the servant, of the war. In the accomplished character of Tancred we discover all the virtues of a perfect knight--the true spirit of chivalry, which inspired the generous sentiments and social offices of man, far better than the base philosophy, or the baser religion, of the times.
Between the age of Charlemagne and that of the Crusades, a revolution had taken place among the Spaniards, the Normans, and the French, which was gradually extended to the rest of Europe. The service of the infantry was degraded to the plebeians; the cavalry formed the strength of the armies, and the honourable name miles, or soldier, was confined to the gentlemen who served on horseback and were invested with the character of knighthood. The dukes and counts, who had usurped the rights of sovereignty, divided the provinces among their faithful barons; the barons distributed among their vassals the fiefs or benefices of their jurisdiction; and these military tenants, the peers of each other and of their lord, composed the noble or equestrian order, which disdained to conceive the peasant or burgher as of the same species with themselves. The dignity of their birth was preserved by pure and equal alliances; their sons alone who could produce four quarters or lines of ancestry without spot or reproach, might legally pretend to the honour of knighthood: but a valiant plebeian was sometimes enriched and ennobled by the sword and became the father of a new race. A single knight could impart, according to his judgment, the character which he received; and the warlike sovereigns of Europe derived more glory from this personal distinction than from the lustre of their diadem.
Such were the troops, and such the leaders, who assumed the cross for the deliverance of the Holy Sepulchre. As soon as they were relieved by the absence of the plebeian multitude, they encouraged each other, by interviews and messages, to accomplish their vow and hasten their departure. Their wives and sisters were desirous of partaking the danger and merit of the pilgrimage; their portable treasures were conveyed in bars of silver and gold; and the princes and barons were attended by their equipage of hounds and hawks to amuse their leisure and to supply their table. The difficulty of procuring subsistence for so many myriads of men and horses engaged them to separate their forces; their choice or situation determined the road; and it was agreed to meet in the neighbourhood of Constantinople, and from thence to begin their operations against the Turks.
ALEXIUS COMPELS HOMAGE
[Sidenote: [1097 A.D.]]
In some oriental tale there is the fable of a shepherd, who was ruined by the accomplishment of his own wishes: he had prayed for water; the Ganges was turned into his grounds, and his flock and cottage were swept away by the inundation. Such was the fortune, or at least the apprehension, of the Greek emperor Alexius Comnenus. In the Council of Placentia, his ambassadors had solicited a moderate succour, perhaps of ten thousand soldiers; but he was astonished by the approach of so many potent chiefs and fanatic nations. The promiscuous multitudes of Peter the Hermit were savage beasts, alike destitute of humanity and reason; nor was it possible for Alexius to prevent or deplore their destruction. The troops of Godfrey and his peers were less contemptible, but not less suspicious, to the Greek emperor. Their motives might be pure and pious; but he was equally alarmed by his knowledge of the ambitious Bohemond, and his ignorance of the Transalpine chiefs; the courage of the French was blind and headstrong; they might be tempted by the luxury and wealth of Greece, and elated by the view and opinion of their invincible strength; and Jerusalem might be forgotten in the prospect of Constantinople.
After a long march and painful abstinence, the troops of Godfrey encamped in the plains of Thrace; they heard with indignation that their brother, the count of Vermandois, was imprisoned by the Greeks; and their reluctant duke was compelled to indulge them in some freedom of retaliation and rapine. They were appeased by the submission of Alexius; he promised to supply their camp; and as they refused, in the midst of winter, to pass the Bosporus, their quarters were assigned among the gardens and palaces on the shores of that narrow sea. But an incurable jealousy still rankled in the minds of the two nations, who despised each other as slaves and barbarians. Ignorance is the ground of suspicion, and suspicion was inflamed into daily provocations; prejudice is blind, hunger is deaf; and Alexius is accused of a design to starve or assault the Latins in a dangerous post, on all sides encompassed with the waters. Godfrey sounded his trumpets, burst the net, overspread the plain, and insulted the suburbs; but the gates of Constantinople were strongly fortified; the ramparts were lined with archers; and after a doubtful conflict, both parties listened to the voice of peace and religion. The gifts and promises of the emperor insensibly soothed the fierce spirit of the western strangers; as a Christian warrior, he rekindled their zeal for the prosecution of their holy enterprise, which he engaged to second with his troops and treasures. On the return of spring, Godfrey was persuaded to occupy a pleasant and plentiful camp in Asia; and no sooner had he passed the Bosporus than the Greek vessels were suddenly recalled to the opposite shore. The same policy was repeated with the succeeding chiefs, who were swayed by the example and weakened by the departure of their foremost companions. By his skill and diligence Alexius prevented the union of any two of the confederate armies at the same moment under the walls of Constantinople; and before the feast of the Pentecost not a Latin pilgrim was left on the coast of Europe.
The same arms which threatened Europe might deliver Asia, and repel the Turks from the neighbouring shores of the Bosporus and the Hellespont. The fair provinces from Nicæa to Antioch were the recent patrimony of the Roman emperor; and his ancient and perpetual claim still embraced the kingdoms of Syria and Egypt. In his enthusiasm, Alexius indulged, or affected, the ambitious hope of leading his new allies to subvert the thrones of the East; but the calmer dictates of reason and temper dissuaded him from exposing his royal person to the faith of unknown and lawless barbarians. His prudence, or his pride, was content with extorting from the French princes an oath of homage and fidelity, and a solemn promise that they would either restore, or hold, their Asiatic conquests, as the humble and loyal vassals of the Roman Empire. Their independent spirit was fired at the mention of this foreign and voluntary servitude; they successively yielded to the dexterous application of gifts and flattery; and the first proselytes became the most eloquent and effectual missionaries to multiply the companions of their shame.
The ceremony of their homage was grateful to a people who had long since considered pride as the substitute of power. High on his throne, the emperor sat mute and immovable; his majesty was adored by the Latin princes; and they submitted to kiss either his feet or his knees, an indignity which their own writers are ashamed to confess, and unable to deny.
NUMBERS OF THE CRUSADERS
The conquest of Asia was undertaken and achieved by Alexander, with thirty-five thousand Macedonians and Greeks; and his best hope was in the strength and discipline of his phalanx of infantry. The principal force of the crusaders consisted in their cavalry; and when that force was mustered in the plains of Bithynia, the knights and their martial attendants on horseback amounted to one hundred thousand fighting men, completely armed with the helmet and coat of mail. The value of these soldiers deserved a strict and authentic account; and the flower of European chivalry might furnish, in a first effort, this formidable body of heavy horse. A part of the infantry might be enrolled for the service of scouts, pioneers, and archers; but the promiscuous crowd were lost in their own disorder; and we depend not on the eyes or knowledge, but on the belief and fancy of a chaplain of Count Baldwin, in the estimate of six hundred thousand pilgrims able to bear arms, besides the priests and monks, the women and children, of the Latin camp. The reader starts; and before he recovers from his surprise, we shall add, on the same testimony, that if all who took the cross had accomplished their vow, above six millions would have migrated from Europe to Asia. Under this oppression of faith we derive some relief from a more sagacious and thinking writer, who, after the same review of the cavalry, accuses the credulity of the priest of Chartres, and even doubts whether the Cisalpine regions (in the geography of a Frenchman) were sufficient to produce and pour forth such incredible multitudes. The coolest scepticism will remember, that of these religious volunteers great numbers never beheld Constantinople and Nicæa. Of enthusiasm the influence is irregular and transient; many were detained at home by reason or cowardice, by poverty or weakness; and many were repulsed by the obstacles of the way, the more insuperable as they were unforeseen to these ignorant fanatics. The savage countries of Hungary and Bulgaria were whitened with their bones; their vanguard was cut in pieces by the Turkish sultan; and the loss of the first adventure, by the sword, or climate, or fatigue, has already been stated at three hundred thousand men. Yet the myriads that survived, that marched, that pressed forwards on the holy pilgrimage, were a subject of astonishment to themselves and to the Greeks. The copious energy of her language sinks under the efforts of the princess Anna Comnena; the images of locusts, of leaves and flowers, of the sands of the sea, or the stars of heaven, imperfectly represent what she had seen and heard; and the daughter of Alexius exclaims, that Europe was loosened from its foundations and hurled against Asia. The ancient hosts of Darius and Xerxes labour under the same doubt of a vague and indefinite magnitude; but we are inclined to believe that a larger number has never been contained within the lines of a single camp than at the siege of Nicæa, the first operation of the Latin princes. Their motives, their characters, and their arms, have been already displayed. Of their troops the most numerous portion were natives of France; the Low Countries, the banks of the Rhine, and Apulia sent a powerful reinforcement; some bands of adventurers were drawn from Spain, Lombardy, and England, and from the distant bogs and mountains of Ireland or Scotland issued some naked and savage fanatics, ferocious at home, but unwarlike abroad.
THE SIEGE OF NICÆA
We have expatiated with pleasure on the first steps of the crusaders, as they paint the manners and character of Europe; but we shall abridge the tedious and uniform narrative of their blind achievements, which were performed by strength, and are described by ignorance. From their first station in the neighbourhood of Nicomedia, they advanced in successive divisions; passed the contracted limit of the Greek Empire; opened a road through the hills, and commenced, by the siege of his capital, their pious warfare against the Turkish sultan. His kingdom of Roum extended from the Hellespont to the confines of Syria, and barred the pilgrimage of Jerusalem; his name was Kilij-Arslan, or Suleiman, of the race of Seljuk, and son of the first conqueror; and in the defence of a land which the Turks considered as their own, he deserved the praise of his enemies, by whom alone he is known to posterity. Yielding to the first impulse of the torrent, he deposited his family and treasure in Nicæa; retired to the mountains with fifty thousand horse; and twice descended to assault the camps or quarters of the Christian besiegers, which formed an imperfect circle of above six miles.
The lofty and solid walls of Nicæa were covered by a deep ditch, and flanked by 370 towers; and on the verge of Christendom, the Moslems were trained in arms, and inflamed by religion. Before this city, the French princes occupied their stations, and prosecuted their attacks without correspondence or subordination; emulation prompted their valour; but their valour was sullied by cruelty, and their emulation degenerated into envy and civil discord. In the space of seven weeks, much labour and blood were expended, and some progress, especially by Count Raymond, was made on the side of the besiegers. But the Turks could protract their resistance and secure their escape, as long as they were masters of the lake Ascanius, which stretches several miles to the westward of the city. The means of conquest were supplied by the prudence and industry of Alexius; a great number of boats was transported on sledges from the sea to the lake; they were filled with the most dexterous of his archers; the flight of the sultana was intercepted; Nicæa was invested by land and water; and a Greek emissary persuaded the inhabitants to accept his master’s protection, and to save themselves, by a timely surrender, from the rage of the savages of Europe. In the moment of victory, or at least of hope, the crusaders, thirsting for blood and plunder, were awed by the imperial banner that streamed from the citadel; and Alexius guarded with jealous vigilance this important conquest. The murmurs of the chiefs were stifled by honour or interest; and after a halt of nine days, they directed their march towards Phrygia, under the guidance of a Greek general, whom they suspected of a secret connivance with the sultan. The consort and the principal servants of Suleiman had been honourably restored without ransom; and the emperor’s generosity to the miscreants was interpreted as treason to the Christian cause.
BATTLE OF DORYLÆUM
Suleiman was rather provoked than dismayed by the loss of his capital; he admonished his subjects and allies of this strange invasion of the western barbarians; the Turkish emirs obeyed the call of loyalty or religion; the Turkoman hordes encamped round his standard; and his whole force is loosely stated by the Christians at 200,000, or even 360,000 horse. Yet he patiently waited till they had left behind them the sea and the Greek frontier; and hovering on the flanks, observed their careless and confident progress in two columns beyond the view of each other. Some miles before they could reach Dorylæum in Phrygia, the left, and least numerous, division was surprised and attacked and almost oppressed, by the Turkish cavalry. The heat of the weather, the clouds of arrows, and the barbarous onset, overwhelmed the crusaders; they lost their order and confidence; and the fainting fight was sustained by the personal valour, rather than by the military conduct, of Bohemond, Tancred, and Robert of Normandy. They were revived by the welcome banners of Duke Godfrey, who flew to their succour with the count of Vermandois and sixty thousand horse; and was followed by Raymond of Toulouse, the bishop of Puy, and the remainder of the sacred army. Without a moment’s pause, they formed in new order, and advanced to a second battle. They were received with equal resolution; and, in their common disdain for the unwarlike people of Greece and Asia, it was confessed on both sides, that the Turks and the Franks were the only nations entitled to the appellation of soldiers.
As long as the horses were fresh and the quivers full, Suleiman maintained the advantage of the day; and four thousand Christians were pierced by the Turkish arrows. In the evening, swiftness yielded to strength; on either side, the numbers were equal, or at least as great as any ground could hold, or any generals could manage; but in turning the hills, the last division of Raymond and his provincials was led, perhaps without design, on the rear of an exhausted enemy, and the long contest was determined. Besides a nameless and unaccounted multitude, three thousand pagan knights were slain in the battle and pursuit; the camp of Suleiman was pillaged. Reserving ten thousand guards of the relics of his army, Suleiman evacuated the kingdom of Roum, and hastened to implore the aid, and kindle the resentment, of his eastern brethren. In a march of five hundred miles, the crusaders traversed the Lesser Asia, through a wasted land and deserted towns, without either finding a friend or an enemy. The geographer may trace the position of Dorylæum, Antioch of Pisidia, Iconium, Archelais, and Germanicia, and may compare those classic appellations with the modern names of Eskishehr the old city, Akshehr the white city, Cogni, Erekli, and Marash.
PRINCIPALITY OF EDESSA FOUNDED
To improve the general consternation, the cousin of Bohemond and the brother of Godfrey were detached from the main army with their respective squadrons of five, and of seven, hundred knights. They overran in a rapid career the hills and sea coast of Cilicia, from Cogni to the Syrian gates; the Norman standard was first planted on the walls of Tarsus and Malmistra; but the proud injustice of Baldwin at length provoked the patient and generous Italian; and they turned their consecrated swords against each other in a private and profane quarrel. Honour was the motive, and fame the reward, of Tancred; but fortune smiled on the more selfish enterprise of his rival. He was called to the assistance of a Greek or Armenian tyrant, who had been suffered under the Turkish yoke to reign over the Christians of Edessa. Baldwin accepted the character of his son and champion; but no sooner was he introduced into the city than he inflamed the people to the massacre of his father, occupied the throne and treasure, extended his conquests over the hills of Armenia and the plain of Mesopotamia, and founded the first principality of the Franks or Latins, which subsisted fifty-four years beyond the Euphrates.
SIEGE OF ANTIOCH
[Sidenote: [1097-1098 A.D.]]
Before the Franks could enter Syria, the summer, and even the autumn, were completely wasted. The siege of Antioch, or the separation and repose of the army during the winter season, was strongly debated in their council. At the head of the Turkish emirs, Baghi Sian, a veteran chief, commanded in the place; his garrison was composed of six or seven thousand horse, and fifteen or twenty thousand foot. Notwithstanding strong fortifications, the city had been repeatedly taken by the Persians, the Arabs, the Greeks, and the Turks; so large a circuit must have yielded many previous points of attack; and in a siege that was formed about the middle of October, the vigour of the execution could alone justify the boldness of the attempt. Whatever strength and valour could perform in the field was abundantly discharged by the champions of the cross; in the frequent occasions of sallies, of forage, of the attack and defence of convoys, they were often victorious; and we can only complain that their exploits are sometimes enlarged beyond the scale of probability and truth. The sword of Godfrey divided a Turk from the shoulder to the haunch; and one half of the infidel fell to the ground, while the other was transported by his horse to the city gate. But the reality or report of such gigantic prowess must have taught the Moslems to keep within their walls; and against those walls of earth or stone, the sword and the lance were unavailing weapons.
Indolence or weakness had prevented the Franks from investing the entire circuit; and the perpetual freedom of two gates relieved the wants and recruited the garrison of the city. At the end of seven months, after the ruin of their cavalry, and an enormous loss by famine, desertion, and fatigue, the progress of the crusaders was imperceptible, and their success remote, if the Latin Ulysses, the artful and ambitious Bohemond, had not employed the arms of cunning and deceit. The Christians of Antioch were numerous and discontented; Firuz, a Syrian renegado, had acquired the favour of the emir and the command of three towers. A secret correspondence was soon established. Bohemond declared in the council of the chiefs that he could deliver the city into their hands. But he claimed the sovereignty of Antioch as the reward of his service; and the proposal which had been rejected by the envy, was at length extorted from the distress, of his equals. The nocturnal surprise was executed by the French and Norman princes, who ascended in person the scaling ladders that were thrown from the wall; their new proselyte, after the murder of his too scrupulous brother, embraced and introduced the servants of Christ; the army rushed through the gates; and the Moslems soon found, that, although mercy was hopeless, resistance was impotent.
But the citadel still refused to surrender, and the victors themselves were speedily encompassed and besieged by the innumerable forces of Kerboga, prince of Mosul, who with twenty-eight Turkish emirs advanced to the deliverance of Antioch. Five-and-twenty days the Christians spent on the verge of destruction; and the proud lieutenant of the caliph and the sultan left them only the choice of servitude or death. In this extremity they collected the relics of their strength, sallied from the town, and in a single memorable day annihilated or dispersed the host of Turks and Arabians, which they might safely report to have consisted of six hundred thousand men. Their supernatural allies we shall proceed to consider; the human causes of the victory of Antioch were the fearless despair of the Franks, and the surprise, the discord, perhaps the errors, of their adversaries.
In the eventful period of the siege and defence of Antioch, the crusaders were alternately exalted by victory or sunk in despair; either swelled with plenty or emaciated with hunger. A speculative reasoner might suppose that their faith had a strong and serious influence on their practice; and that the soldiers of the cross, the deliverers of the Holy Sepulchre, prepared themselves by a sober and virtuous life for the daily contemplation of martyrdom. Experience blows away this charitable illusion; and seldom does the history of profane war display such scenes of intemperance and prostitution as were exhibited under the walls of Antioch. The grove of Daphne no longer flourished; but the Syrian air was still impregnated with the same vices; the Christians were seduced by every temptation that nature either prompts or reprobates; the authority of the chiefs was despised; and sermons and edicts were alike fruitless against those scandalous disorders, not less pernicious to military discipline, than repugnant to evangelic purity. In the first days of the siege and the possession of Antioch, the Franks consumed with wanton and thoughtless prodigality the frugal subsistence of weeks and months; the desolate country no longer yielded a supply; and from that country they were at length excluded by the arms of the besieging Turks. Disease, the faithful companion of want, was envenomed by the rains of the winter, the summer heats, unwholesome food, and the close imprisonment of multitudes. The pictures of famine and pestilence are always the same, and always disgustful.
The remains of treasure or spoil were eagerly lavished in the purchase of the vilest nourishment; and dreadful must have been the calamities of the poor, since, after paying three marks of silver for a goat, and fifteen for a lean camel, the count of Flanders was reduced to beg a dinner, and Duke Godfrey to borrow a horse. Sixty thousand horses had been reviewed in the camp; before the end of the siege they were diminished to two thousand, and scarcely two hundred fit for service could be mustered on the day of battle. Weakness of body and terror of mind extinguished the ardent enthusiasm of the pilgrims; and every motive of honour and religion was subdued by the desire of life. Among the chiefs, three heroes may be found without fear or reproach: Godfrey de Bouillon was supported by his magnanimous piety; Bohemond by ambition and interest; and Tancred declared, in the true spirit of chivalry, that as long as he was at the head of forty knights he would never relinquish the enterprise of Palestine. But the count of Toulouse and Provence was suspected of a voluntary indisposition; the duke of Normandy was recalled from the sea shore by the censures of the church; Hugh the Great, though he led the vanguard of the battle, embraced an ambiguous opportunity of returning to France; and Stephen count of Chartres basely deserted the standard which he bore, and the council in which he presided. The soldiers were discouraged by the flight of William, viscount of Melun, surnamed the Carpenter from the weighty strokes of his axe; and the saints were scandalised by the fall of Peter the Hermit, who attempted to escape from the penance of a necessary fast.[49]
A TYPICAL MIRACLE
In such a cause, and in such an army, visions, prophecies, and miracles were frequent and familiar. In the distress of Antioch, they were repeated with unusual energy and success; St. Ambrose had assured a pious ecclesiastic that two years of trial must precede the season of deliverance and grace; the deserters were stopped by the presence and reproaches of Christ himself; the dead had promised to arise and combat with their brethren; the Virgin had obtained the pardon of their sins; and their confidence was revived by a visible sign, the seasonable and splendid discovery of the holy lance. The policy of their chiefs has on this occasion been admired, and might surely be excused; but a pious fraud is seldom produced by the cool conspiracy of many persons; and a voluntary impostor might depend on the support of the wise and the credulity of the people. Of the diocese of Marseilles, there was a priest of low cunning and loose manners, and his name was Peter Bartholemy. He presented himself at the door of the council-chamber to disclose an apparition of St. Andrew which had been thrice reiterated in his sleep, with a dreadful menace, if he presumed to suppress the commands of heaven. “At Antioch,” said the apostle, “in the church of my brother St. Peter, near the high altar, is concealed the steel head of the lance that pierced the side of our Redeemer. In three days, that instrument of eternal, and now of temporal salvation, will be manifested to his disciples. Search and ye shall find; bear it aloft in battle, and that mystic weapon shall penetrate the souls of the miscreants.” The pope’s legate, the bishop of Puy, affected to listen with coldness and distrust; but the revelation was eagerly accepted by Count Raymond, whom his faithful subject, in the name of the apostle, had chosen for the guardian of the holy lance.
The experiment was resolved; and on the third day after a due preparation of prayer and fasting the priest of Marseilles introduced twelve trusty spectators, among whom were the count and his chaplain; and the church doors were barred against the impetuous multitude. The ground was opened in the appointed place; but the workmen, who relieved each other, dug to the depth of twelve feet without discovering the object of their search. In the evening, when Count Raymond had withdrawn to his post, and the weary assistants began to murmur, Bartholemy in his shirt, and without his shoes, boldly descended into the pit; the darkness of the hour and of the place enabled him to secrete and deposit the head of a Saracen lance; and the first sound, the first gleam of the steel, was saluted with a devout rapture. The holy lance was drawn from its recess, wrapped in a veil of silk and gold, and exposed to the veneration of the crusaders; their anxious suspense burst forth in a general shout of joy and hope, and the desponding troops were again inflamed with the enthusiasm of valour. Next day the gates of Antioch were thrown open; the battle array was marshalled; the holy lance was carried by Raymond’s chaplain; and the hosts of the enemy were annihilated or scattered.
In the season of danger and triumph, the revelation of Bartholemy of Marseilles was unanimously asserted; but as soon as the temporary service was accomplished, the personal dignity and liberal alms which the count of Toulouse derived from the custody of the holy lance provoked the envy, and awakened the reason, of his rivals. A Norman clerk presumed to sift, with a philosophic spirit, the truth of the legend, the circumstances of the discovery, and the character of the prophet; and the pious Bohemond ascribed their deliverance to the merits and intercession of Christ alone. For a while, the provincials defended their national palladium with clamours and arms; and new visions condemned to death and hell the profane sceptics who presumed to scrutinise the truth and merit of the discovery. The prevalence of incredulity compelled the author to submit his life and veracity to the judgment of God. A pile of dry fagots, four feet high, and fourteen long, was erected in the midst of the camp; the flames burned fiercely to the elevation of thirty cubits; and a narrow path of twelve inches was left for the perilous trial. The unfortunate priest of Marseilles traversed the fire with dexterity and speed; but his thighs and belly were scorched by the intense heat; he expired the next day; and the logic of believing minds will pay some regard to his dying protestations of innocence and truth. Some efforts were made by the provincials to substitute a cross, a ring, or a tabernacle, in the place of the holy lance, which soon vanished in contempt and oblivion.
The prudence or fortune of the Franks had delayed their invasion till the decline of the Turkish Empire. Under the manly government of the first three sultans, the kingdoms of Asia were united in peace and justice; and the innumerable armies which they led in person were equal in courage, and superior in discipline, to the barbarians of the West. But at the time of the crusade the inheritance of Malik Shah was disputed by his four sons. The twenty-eight emirs, who marched with the standard of Kerboga, were his rivals or enemies; their hasty levies were drawn from the towns and tents of Mesopotamia and Syria; and the Turkish veterans were employed or consumed in the civil wars beyond the Tigris. The caliph of Egypt embraced this opportunity of weakness and discord, to recover his ancient possessions; and his sultan Afdal besieged Jerusalem and Tyre, expelled the children of Ortok, and restored in Palestine the civil and ecclesiastical authority of the Fatimites. They heard with astonishment of the vast armies of Christians that had passed from Europe to Asia, and rejoiced in the sieges and battles which broke the power of the Turks, the adversaries of their sect and monarchy. But the same Christians were the enemies of the prophet; and from the overthrow of Nicæa and Antioch, the motive of their enterprise, which was gradually understood, would urge them forwards to the banks of the Jordan, or perhaps of the Nile. An intercourse of epistles and embassies, which rose and fell with the events of war, was maintained between the throne of Cairo and the camp of the Latins; and their adverse pride was the result of ignorance and enthusiasm. The ministers of Egypt declared in a haughty, or insinuated in a milder, tone, that their sovereign, the true and lawful commander of the faithful, had rescued Jerusalem from the Turkish yoke; and that the pilgrims, if they would divide their numbers, and lay aside their arms, should find a safe and hospitable reception at the sepulchre of Jesus. In either fortune the answer of the crusaders was firm and uniform; they disdained to inquire into the private claims or possessions of the followers of Mohammed; whatsoever was his name or nation, the usurper of Jerusalem was their enemy; and instead of prescribing the mode and terms of their pilgrimage, it was only by a timely surrender of the city and province, their sacred right, that he could deserve their alliance, or deprecate their impending and irresistible attack.
JERUSALEM BESIEGED
[Sidenote: [1098-1099 A.D.]]
Yet this attack, when they were within the view and reach of their glorious prize, was suspended above ten months after the defeat of Kerboga. The zeal and courage of the crusaders were chilled in the moment of victory; and instead of marching to improve the consternation, they hastily dispersed to enjoy the luxury of Syria. The causes of this strange delay may be found in the want of strength and subordination. In the painful and various service of Antioch, the cavalry was annihilated; many thousands of every rank had been lost by famine, sickness, and desertion; the same abuse of plenty had been productive of a third famine; and the alternation of intemperance and distress had generated a pestilence, which swept away above fifty thousand of the pilgrims. Few were able to command, and none were willing to obey; and Count Raymond exhausted his troops and treasures in an idle expedition into the heart of Syria. The winter was consumed in discord and disorder. In the month of May, the relics of this mighty host proceeded from Antioch to Laodicea; about forty thousand Latins, of whom no more than fifteen hundred horse, and twenty thousand foot, were capable of immediate service. Their easy march was continued between Mount Libanus and the sea shore; their wants were liberally supplied by the coasting traders of Genoa and Pisa; and they drew large contributions from the emirs of Tripolis, Tyre, Sidon, Acre, and Cæsarea, who granted a free passage and promised to follow the example of Jerusalem. From Cæsarea they advanced into the midland country; their clerks recognised the sacred geography of Lydda, Ramla, Emmaus, and Bethlehem, and as soon as they descried the Holy City, the crusaders forgot their toils and claimed their reward.
Jerusalem has derived some reputation from the number and importance of her memorable sieges. It was not till after a long and obstinate contest that Babylon and Rome could prevail against the obstinacy of the people, the craggy ground that might supersede the necessity of fortifications, and the walls and towers that would have fortified the most accessible plain. By the experience of a recent siege, and a three years’ possession, the Saracens of Egypt had been taught to discern, and in some degree to remedy, the defects of a place, which religion as well as honour forbade them to resign. Aladin, or Iftikhar, the caliph’s lieutenant, was entrusted with the defence; his policy strove to restrain the native Christians by the dread of their own ruin and that of the Holy Sepulchre. His garrison is said to have consisted of forty thousand Turks and Arabians; and if he could muster twenty thousand of the inhabitants, it must be confessed that the besieged were more numerous than the besieging army. Their siege was more reasonably directed against the northern and western sides of the city. Godfrey de Bouillon erected his standard on the first swell of Mount Calvary; to the left, as far as St. Stephen’s gate, the line of attack was continued by Tancred and the two Roberts; and Count Raymond established his quarters from the citadel to the foot of Mount Zion, which was no longer included within the precincts of the city. On the fifth day, the crusaders made a general assault. By dint of brutal force, they burst the first barrier, but they were driven back with shame and slaughter to the camp; the influence of vision and prophecy was deadened by the too frequent abuse of those pious stratagems; and time and labour were found to be the only means of victory. The time of the siege was indeed fulfilled in forty days, but they were forty days of calamity and anguish. On a Friday, at three in the afternoon, the day and hour of the passion, Godfrey de Bouillon stood victorious on the walls of Jerusalem. His example was followed on every side by the emulation of valour; and about 460 years after the conquest of Omar, the Holy City was rescued from the Mohammedan yoke. In the pillage of public and private wealth, the adventurers had agreed to respect the exclusive property of the first occupant; and the spoils of the great mosque, seventy lamps and massy vases of gold and silver, rewarded the diligence, and displayed the generosity, of Tancred.
A bloody sacrifice was offered by his mistaken votaries to the God of the Christians; resistance might provoke, but neither age nor sex could mollify, their implacable rage; they indulged themselves three days in a promiscuous massacre; and the infection of the dead bodies produced an epidemical disease. After seventy thousand Moslems had been put to the sword, and the harmless Jews had been burned in their synagogue, they could still reserve a multitude of captives, whom interest or lassitude persuaded them to spare. Of these savage heroes of the cross, Tancred alone betrayed some sentiments of compassion; yet we may praise the more selfish lenity of Raymond, who granted a capitulation and safe conduct to the garrison of the citadel.
The Holy Sepulchre was now free; and the bloody victors prepared to accomplish their vow. Bareheaded and barefoot, with contrite hearts, and in a humble posture, they ascended the hill of Calvary, amidst the loud anthems of the clergy; kissed the stone which had covered the Saviour of the world, and bedewed with tears of joy and penitence the monument of their redemption.[b]
THE ARAB ACCOUNT
It is well in a moment of such historic import as this to see how the other side accepts the crisis. The Arab historian Ibn Guzi[d] wrote as follows: “The Franks, when they set out from Antioch, numbered one million men, of whom five hundred thousand were fit for war. The rest consisted of workmen and those employed on the swivel-guns and other instruments of war. They marched along the sea shore. Jerusalem at that time belonged to the Egyptians. Their commander was named Iftikhar ad-Daulah, or ‘the glory of the empire.’
“The siege lasted forty days. The Franks built two towers to command the walls of the town, one in the direction of the gate of Sidon, the other in that of the gates of Asbat and Amud, or the gates of the Tribes and of the Column. The besieged succeeded in burning the tower near the gate of Sidon; the second was brought up close to the walls. Then the Franks set all their machines to work at the same time; attacking like one single man, they put the Moslems to flight and entered the town by force. The inhabitants took refuge in the mosque Alacsa and its dependencies; the Franks, following them there, killed it is said one hundred thousand persons, and made an equal number prisoners. They did not even spare the aged of both sexes.
“In this spot immense riches were stored. They found seventy lamps, twenty of which were of gold and the others of silver; they also carried off a tennur or large silver lamp, weighing forty Syrian pounds. The Jews they shut up in their synagogue, and burned them there. Jerusalem had been in the power of Islam without a break since the reign of Caliph Omar, in the sixteenth year of the Hegira (637 A.D.). A Moslem author named Ibn Zulak,[d] thinking no doubt to give greater importance to this event, declares that at the moment when the Christians entered the Holy City the sun was eclipsed, the earth was hidden in darkness, and the stars appeared in broad daylight.”[d]
The Moslem poets describe the horrors of massacre in vehement terms, bewailing the butchery of the women and the children and the fate of their fathers who “but lately masters of Syria, now found no other refuge than the backs of swift camels or even the entrails of the vultures!”[a]
GODFREY ELECTED KING (1099 A.D.)
[Sidenote: [1099-1147 A.D.]]
Eight days after this memorable event, which Pope Urban did not live to hear, the Latin chiefs proceeded to the election of a king to guard and govern their conquest in Palestine. The jealousy and ambition of Raymond were condemned by his own followers; and the free, the just, the unanimous voice of the army proclaimed Godfrey de Bouillon the first and most worthy of the champions of Christendom. His magnanimity accepted a trust as full of danger as of glory; but in a city where his Saviour had been crowned with thorns, the devout pilgrim rejected the name and ensigns of royalty; and the founder of the kingdom of Jerusalem contented himself with the modest title of Defender and Baron of the Holy Sepulchre. His government of a single year, too short for the public happiness, was interrupted in the first fortnight by a summons to the field by the approach of the vizir or sultan of Egypt, who had been too slow to prevent, but who was impatient to avenge, the loss of Jerusalem. His total overthrow in the battle of Askalon sealed the establishment of the Latins in Syria, and signalised the valour of the French princes, who in this action bade a long farewell to the holy wars.
After suspending before the Holy Sepulchre the sword and standard of the sultan, the new king (he deserves the title) embraced his departing companions, and could retain only, with the gallant Tancred, three hundred knights and two thousand foot soldiers, for the defence of Palestine. His sovereignty was soon attacked by a new enemy, the only one against whom Godfrey was a coward. Adhemar, bishop of Puy, who excelled both in council and action, had been swept away in the last plague of Antioch; the remaining ecclesiastics preserved only the pride and avarice of their character; and their seditious clamours had required that the choice of a bishop should precede that of a king. The revenue and jurisdiction of the lawful patriarch were usurped by the Latin clergy; the exclusion of the Greeks and Syrians was justified by the reproach of heresy or schism; and, under the iron yoke of their deliverers, the oriental Christians regretted the tolerating government of the Arabian caliphs. Daimbert, archbishop of Pisa, had long been trained in the secret policy of Rome; he brought a fleet of his countrymen to the succour of the Holy Land, and was installed, without a competitor, the spiritual and temporal head of the church. The new patriarch immediately grasped the sceptre which had been acquired by the toil and blood of the victorious pilgrims; and both Godfrey and Bohemond submitted to receive at his hands the investiture of their feudal possessions. Nor was this sufficient; Daimbert claimed the immediate property of Jerusalem and Joppa; instead of a firm and generous refusal, the hero negotiated with the priest; a quarter of either city was ceded to the church; and the modest bishop was satisfied with an eventual reversion of the rest, on the death of Godfrey without children, or on the future acquisition of a new seat at Cairo or Damascus.
Without this indulgence, the conqueror would have been almost stripped of his infant kingdom, which consisted only of Jerusalem and Joppa, with about twenty villages and towns of the adjacent country. Within this narrow verge, the Mohammedans were still lodged in some impregnable castles; and the husbandman, the trader, and the pilgrim were exposed to daily and domestic hostility. By the arms of Godfrey himself, and of the two Baldwins, his brother and cousin, who succeeded to the throne, the Latins breathed with more ease and safety; and at length they equalled, in the extent of their dominions, though not in the millions of their subjects, the ancient princes of Judah and Israel. After the reduction of the maritime cities of Laodicea, Tripolis, Tyre, and Askalon, which were powerfully assisted by the fleets of Venice, Genoa, and Pisa, and even of Flanders and Norway, the range of sea coast from Scanderoon to the borders of Egypt was possessed by the Christian pilgrims. If the prince of Antioch disclaimed his supremacy, the counts of Edessa and Tripolis owned themselves the vassals of the king of Jerusalem; the Latins reigned beyond the Euphrates; and the four cities of Hems, Hamah, Damascus, and Aleppo were the only relics of the Mohammedan conquests in Syria.
The laws and language, the manners and titles, of the French nation and Latin church, were introduced into these transmarine colonies. The whole legal militia of the kingdom could not exceed eleven thousand men, a slender defence against the surrounding myriads of Saracens and Turks. But the firmest bulwark of Jerusalem was founded on the knights of the Hospital of St. John, and of the Temple of Solomon; on the strange association of a monastic and military life, which fanaticism might suggest, but which policy must approve. The flower of the nobility of Europe aspired to wear the cross, and to profess the vows of these respectable orders; their spirit and discipline were immortal; and the speedy donation of twenty-eight thousand farms, or manors, enabled them to support a regular force of cavalry and infantry for the defence of Palestine. The austerity of the convent soon evaporated in the exercise of arms; the world was scandalised by the pride, avarice, and corruption of these Christian soldiers. But in their most dissolute period, the knights of the Hospital and Temple maintained their fearless and fanatic character; they neglected to live, but they were prepared to die, in the service of Christ; and the spirit of chivalry, the parent and offspring of the Crusades, has been transplanted by this institution from the Holy Sepulchre to the Isle of Malta.
No sooner had Godfrey de Bouillon accepted the office of supreme magistrate, than he solicited the public and private advice of the Latin pilgrims, who were the best skilled in the statutes and customs of Europe. From these materials, with the counsel and approbation of the patriarchs and barons of the clergy and laity, Godfrey composed the Assize of Jerusalem--a precious monument of feudal jurisprudence.
The justice and freedom of the constitution were maintained by two tribunals of unequal dignity, which were instituted by Godfrey de Bouillon after the conquest of Jerusalem. The king, in person, presided in the upper court, the court of the barons. Of those the four most conspicuous were the prince of Galilee, the lord of Sidon and Cæsarea, and the counts of Joppa and Tripolis, who, perhaps with the constable and marshal, were in a special manner the compeers and judges of each other. But all the nobles who held their lands immediately of the crown were entitled and bound to attend the king’s court; and each baron exercised a similar jurisdiction in the subordinate assemblies of his own feudatories. The trial by battle was established in all criminal cases which affected the life, or limb, or honour, of any person; and in all civil transactions, of or above the value of one mark of silver.
Among the causes which enfranchised the plebeians from the yoke of feudal tyranny, the institution of cities and corporations is one of the most powerful; and if those of Palestine are coeval with the First Crusade, they may be ranked with the most ancient of the Latin world. Many of the pilgrims had escaped from their lords under the banner of the cross; and it was the policy of the French princes to tempt their stay by the assurance of the rights and privileges of freemen. It is expressly declared in the Assize of Jerusalem, that after instituting, for his knights and barons, the court of peers, in which he presided himself, Godfrey de Bouillon established a second tribunal, in which his person was represented by his viscount. The jurisdiction of this inferior court extended over the burgesses of the kingdom; and it was composed of a select number of the most discreet and worthy citizens, who were sworn to judge, according to the laws, of the actions and fortunes of their equals. In the conquest and settlement of new cities, the example of Jerusalem was imitated by the kings and their great vassals; and above thirty similar corporations were founded before the loss of the Holy Land. Another class of subjects, the Syrians, or oriental Christians, were oppressed by the zeal of the clergy, and protected by the toleration of the state. Godfrey listened to their reasonable prayer, that they might be judged by their own national laws. A third court was instituted for their use, of limited and domestic jurisdiction; the sworn members were Syrians, in blood, language, and religion; but the office of the president (in Arabic, of the rais) was sometimes exercised by the viscount of the city. At an immeasurable distance below the nobles, the burgesses, and the strangers, the Assize of Jerusalem condescends to mention the villeins and slaves, the peasants of the land and the captives of war, who were almost equally considered as the objects of property. The relief or protection of these unhappy men was not esteemed worthy of the care of the legislator; but he diligently provides for the recovery, though not indeed for the punishment, of the fugitives. Like hounds, or hawks, which had strayed from the lawful owner, they might be lost and claimed; the slave and falcon were of the same value; but three slaves, or twelve oxen, were accumulated to equal the price of the war-horse; and a sum of three hundred pieces of gold was fixed, in the age of chivalry, as the equivalent of the more noble animal.[b]
RESULTS OF THE FIRST CRUSADE
As if obeying the impetus it had received, the new state continued the spirit of conquest under Godfrey’s first two successors--Baldwin I (1100-1118) and Baldwin II of Bourg (1118-1131). But after these two reigns decadence began in discord. The atabegs who ruled at Mosul and Damascus took Edessa and massacred its people in 1144. There needed nothing less than this bloody disaster, which left Palestine exposed, to drive Europe to the renewal of crusade.
The First Crusade was very different from the seven others. It kindled all Europe, profoundly stirred the masses, both people and peers, and was the symptom of a great upheaval of sentiments and ideals. Those of the two following centuries had not the same motive. They were almost all conducted by kings who had kept aloof from the first; and even if faith were never absent, politics was often superior.
The Second Crusade felt still a vivid reflection of the spirit of devotion that animated the First; but it was no longer the work of the people but of princes--the emperor Conrad III and King Louis VII of France, who took the cross in spite of the prudent counsels of his minister, Abbé Suger. This Crusade was preached in France and Germany by St. Bernard; but already the zeal was somewhat chilled. A general tax levied on the whole kingdom of France, and on every class--nobles, priests, or peasants--roused much protest; at Sens the people killed the abbé of St. Pierre le Vif, ruler of part of their city, because of an impost he had wished to collect. “The king,” said a contemporary, “started on his way in the midst of curses.” St. Bernard had been offered the command of the expedition, but remembering Peter the Hermit, he refused.[e]
This Peter the Hermit, who for all his meek and lowly manner had unhinged all Europe and led a huge rabble to the slaughter in Asia Minor, had received an address of thanks in Jerusalem when the city had been taken; and then retiring to his native France had built a monastery at Huy on the Maas, where he lived quietly and died obscurely in 1115, recking nothing of the series of bloody wars that were to follow as the aftermath of his perfervid oratory and fanatic frenzy.[a]
FOOTNOTES
[48] [The reader will be cautious in giving some of these numbers his full credence, but there are often no existing documents on which to base a modification or substitution, and we can only quote the old chronicler and take his figures with a liberal pinch of salt.]
[49] Peter and William fled, during the night, from the distress which prevailed in the camp of the crusaders before the capture of Antioch. In the morning they were pursued by Tancred, brought back, and obliged to swear publicly that they would never again desert the army.--WILKEN,[c] I, p. 184.