Armies of Heaven (19 page)

It is not difficult to fill the gaps in this story. Urban II had forbidden monks, and by inference, nuns, to travel to Jerusalem without the permission of their superiors. Monks, many of them confined to monasteries since childhood, likely saw in the crusade a great chance to escape the life that had been imposed on them. Nuns would have felt the same, only more so. In any case, it is likely that this nun—a young woman whose family mixed with nobility and who had broken her conventual vows to travel East—had never wanted to join a nunnery in the first place. Whatever the circumstances of her liaison with the Turkish man, she had found it a preferable life to what she had known in Europe. When she thought that her husband—for that is surely a better label for what he was than “rapist” or “kidnapper”—would be killed or imprisoned after the fall of Nicea, she returned to the Frankish army. The other prisoners who had been released with her likely knew that she had fared well in captivity and perhaps had not been a captive at all. For this reason she had asked Henry of Esch to intervene at the highest levels of the army on her behalf. But as soon as she knew that her husband was alive and that Alexius was not executing his prisoners but rather treating them with fairness and generosity, she returned, leaving the pilgrims confused and more than a little bitter, for they had earnestly believed that they had saved her life.
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Like Nicea as a whole, the Franks had fought hard to rescue this woman and to give her the opportunity to rid herself of the godless Turks, but neither the city nor the woman wanted their company or the brand of liberty they offered.

W
ith the victory at Nicea, the crusaders had had their first direct experience of fighting the Turks. But the conflict had been relatively limited, and the siege had ended through negotiations mediated by the Greeks rather than in an apocalyptic river of blood. The crusade was for a time just the proxy war that Alexius had imagined. After Nicea, however, the farther the Franks marched from Constantinople, the more the campaign became one of simple religious conflict—more akin to the holy war that Peter the Hermit and Emicho of Flonheim had preached. The crusade was entering a new, purely anti-Islamic phase, and the Franks would now have to confront an enemy they barely understood.

Ideas are often no less inspiring or powerful for being wrong, and the Franks on crusade had bought into fantastical misconceptions about their enemy. Not everyone in the army, of course, was equally ill informed about Islam. Bohemond and his followers, and some of the Provençals, too, had been fighting against Muslims in less spiritually charged locations, southern Italy and Spain, for years. But when faced with a choice between myth and reality, most medieval historians, presumably like many of the warriors, preferred to imagine the crusade not as a war fought against a rival faith but as one fought against figures of legend, villains of myth.

Eleventh- and twelfth-century fiction about Muslims offers the best portrait of what the crusaders actually believed about their opponents. Of particular use is
The Song of Roland
, an epic eleventh-century French poem about a war in Spain between Christians and Saracens. Composed
by an unknown author, the story is loosely based on a historical event from the reign of Charlemagne in 778. After a brief and largely unsuccessful incursion across the Pyrénées and after a failed attempt to take the city of Zaragoza, Charlemagne decided to retreat to Francia. As his historical army (as opposed to the literary army in the
Song
) crossed the Pass of Roncesvalles, a band of Basque Christians ambushed the rearguard and killed everyone in it, including the famous warrior Roland.

As reimagined in 4,000 lines of poetry, Charlemagne agrees to accept the surrender of the Saracen King Marsilla after a seven-year campaign fought against Marsilla's Saracen armies. But as the Christians withdraw from Spain, because of the machinations of a traitor named Ganelon, Muslim armies attack their rearguard. Though they are outnumbered, Roland, his best friend Oliver, and the renowned Archbishop Turpin of Reims valiantly hold their ground. Roland, as leader, elects not to call to Charlemagne for help by sounding his horn Oliphant until almost all of his followers are dead. When Charlemagne later discovers their mangled, bloody bodies littering the field of Spain, he prepares for one last war against a vast army led by Baligant, the amir of Baghdad—the Saracen equivalent of an emperor. Charlemagne and Baligant, the two imperial figures, inevitably face each other in combat, each man determined to destroy the other and to prove that his religion is right. Charlemagne nearly fails. But with the help of God, and with the Archangel Gabriel coming down from heaven to inspire the weary old emperor to one last feat of valor, he manages to strike a deathblow against Baligant and secure a new triumph for Christ.

Such a story would obviously appeal to an audience of warriors. Skulls are split in two, brains ooze out of ears, and so much blood is shed that the green fields of Spain turn an eerie red. The poem's imagery would have been especially compelling for a Christian army going off to fight Islam. Did the First Crusaders know of the song? Probably. It was a well-known and often retold story. An English historian writing in the 1120s, for example, imagined that William the Conqueror's army together sang
Roland
before the 1066 Battle of Hastings. The poem would have likely inspired individual crusaders to see themselves as Roland or Charlemagne returned to life, and at least one contemporary historian, Ralph of Caen, said as much. Writing about Hugh the Great and Robert of Flanders
plunging into the fray against the Saracens in a 1097 battle, he wrote, “You would have seen Roland and Oliver reborn, as you watched this count strike with his spear, and the other count with his sword.”
¹

The enemies whom the crusaders imagined themselves facing, based on
The Song of Roland
, bore little connection to actual Muslims. Rather, as presented in the poem, they are distorted reflections of the Christian world. The similarities between the two worlds can be mathematical in their precision. Both sides in the poem, Christian and Muslim, have kings who hold meetings while seated beneath trees, and each king tugs pensively at his beard to indicate thoughtfulness. Surrounding and advising each king are twelve peers. Each side fights passionately for its religion, though it is never clear from the poem what either side believes. We learn mainly that the Saracen god is wrong and the Christian God is right, that the Saracens follow the path of heresy and error and the Christians cleave to truth. Christians worship Christ and the Holy Trinity; Muslims venerate three idols dedicated to Muhammad, Apollo, and Tervagant. When Christians die on the battlefield, angels descend from heaven and escort their souls back to paradise. When Muslims die, demons appear and gleefully drag their souls to hell. So finely balanced are the comparisons between the two worlds that of the 112 named characters in
The Song of Roland
, 56 are Muslim and 56 are Christian.
²

This sort of imaginative structure, with its artistic and numerical rigor, is easy for modern readers to grasp. Like a photographic negative, Muslim characters perfectly reflect their Christian counterparts; in terms of shading, they are wicked and dark, whereas the Christians are virtuous and light. Medieval thinkers, however, did not have the luxury of a photographic allegory. Even “the concept of a distorted reflection” would not have come easily to them: Given the primitive state of mirror technology, all reflections were distorted, or “through a glass darkly,” to quote the apostle Paul.

What medieval readers did have ready at hand were eschatological principles of death, judgment, damnation, and salvation. The two worlds of heaven and hell existed in perfect equilibrium to the extent that the structure of one world could be learned by meditating upon the shape of the other: “As the blessings of the saints, when they attain the vision of God, continue to grow in inestimable sweetness, so the souls of the
wicked, united to their head the devil, in the most savage torment burn all the more vehemently with their desire to sin, and their will is in perfect concord with him who feeds on enticing others to sin (the devil). And just as the saints, once they have seen the glory of God, are ashamed that they did not expend more labor to acquire that glory, so do the impious grieve most bitterly, as they come into these tortures, that they were not more enslaved to their wicked wills during their lives.” Heaven was like hell, but different; angels were like devils, but different; and Christians were like Muslims, but different. Indeed, they opposed and complemented each other with exactitude.
³

Put another way: Whenever Christians wanted to understand or explain Islam, they thought about themselves and about the end of days. Christians and Muslims existed in perfect opposition to each other, just like angels and devils, and in the Last Days the former group would necessarily overcome the latter. This sort of worldview is not rooted in ignorance or superstition. To speculate about the Last Days is to look for the deep patterns and rhythms of history. From an apocalyptic perspective, historical actors do not just “make history.” Nor do they, as with the modern proverb, “repeat history.” Rather, they re-create and relive some of the key moments in history—the Exodus of the Israelites, the crowning of King David, the founding of Rome, and the Crucifixion, to take a few of the more popular historical road markers. These great moments from the past are precursors to current events, but they are also connected to current events. To enter apocalyptic time for the Frankish pilgrims meant that they needed, in some way, like their modern literary namesake Billy Pilgrim, to come unstuck in time.

The Muslims against whom the Crusaders fought existed in this timeless, nonhistorical world. Like the Jews, the Muslims were inseparable from events described in the Old Testament, forever re-creating the dramas in which siblings vie with one another for the status of favored son in hopes of earning for their offspring the title “Chosen People.” This conflict surfaces in the Christians' preferred name for their enemies. As far as they knew, they were not fighting Muslims who practiced Islam. It is doubtful that most of the crusaders had even heard those words. The name they preferred instead was “Saracen”—a label born not of reality or experience but of apocalyptic time and Old Testament history. In a
story most Christians would have known, Abraham and his wife Sarah had for years failed to produce a child. With Abraham in his eighties, Sarah suggested that he sleep with her maidservant Hagar so that he might at least have an heir. He did, and Hagar gave birth to a son named Ishmael. Later, when Abraham had passed his hundredth year, Sarah did finally, miraculously, give birth to a boy named Isaac, and at her prompting, Abraham disinherited Ishmael and drove the boy and his mother from their household.

According to prophecy, each of these children would found a great people—Isaac the Jews and Ishmael the Arabs. As the book of Genesis says, Ishmael “will be a savage man, his hand against all men and the hands of all men against him.” In the fourth century, before the advent of Islam, St. Jerome was able to apply this passage to a nomadic ethnic group whom he labeled “Saracens”: “These words signify that [Abraham's] seed will inhabit the desert—that is, they are the wandering Saracens with no fixed abodes, who attack all people who live beside the desert and whom all people there resist.” By the twelfth century, Western scholars had linked Jerome's interpretation to Islam, making the connection between Ishmael and Muslims a historical and a theological commonplace.
⁴

Western scholars did not invent this connection. The ancestry is an important point of Arabic culture and history, too. The application of the blanket term “Saracen,” however, is a product of Western imagination. The Ishmaelites, Latin authors believed, desperately wished to conceal their base heritage. They wanted to pretend that they were not the illegitimate children of a slave. Hence, they called themselves the “Saracens,” the descendants of Sarah, rather than, more properly, the “Hagarenes.” One twelfth-century writer cautioned, “You should know and you ought never to doubt that these people, who take pride in their name, are not and never should be called Saracens. They are ‘Agarenes,' and rightly named such.” Despite this warning, European writers by and large rejected “Agarene.” “Saracen” was simply too useful—by itself evidence of that faith's base ancestry (Muslims were born of a slave), its illegitimacy (they were bastards), and its mendaciousness (they used their name to lie about it).
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The origins of the Saracen faith, however, were almost a complete mystery to Europeans. Because none of the early Church Fathers had
written a polemic against it or its founder—“Mathomus, if I'm spelling that correctly,” one writer specified—they reasoned that the Saracen religion was “of no real antiquity.” If it had been, surely some prominent thinker—Jerome or Augustine certainly—would have attacked it. The only reliable information about the faith's origins could be found, perhaps predictably, not in history books or in theological treatises but in prophecy—specifically in a series of popular prophetic manuals that were reaching something like the apogee of their popularity in the late eleventh century.
⁶

Saracens, we learn from these books, first appeared in history around 4,000 years after the creation of the world (according to most respected chronologists, the crusade was occurring in the year of the world 6300). These Saracens were nomadic warriors who moved like locusts, traveled nude, ate raw meat stored in skins and drank the blood of oxen mixed with milk, desolated cities, and spread their destructive influence all around the Mediterranean. They had first attacked the Israelites in Old Testament times, but Gideon's armies defeated them. They disappeared for a while, but the prophecies warned that the Ishmaelites would return, fiercer than ever: “And their yoke will be double upon the necks of all people, and there will be no people or kingdom under heaven capable of defeating them.”
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