Armies of Heaven (20 page)

According to this prophet, the Ishmaelites would return from deserts in the East about 2,000 years after Gideon's victory and after the Romans had finally triumphed over Persia. Their arrival would be for the whole world “a punishment without pity.” They would attain power not because God loved them, but because He wished to punish sinners. On account of sexual crimes committed by Christians, “God shall hand them over to the barbarians. Because of the barbarians they will fall into every sort of impurity and filth and pollution, and women will be contaminated by polluted barbarians, and the sons of Ishmael shall cast lots over their sons and daughters.”

Ishmaelites would mock the poor and the infirm. They would stab pregnant women in their bellies, at a stroke killing both mother and child. They would murder priests in sanctuaries in order to defile the holy places. Not content with this crime, the Ishmaelites would burn the priests' bodies, along with the bodies of women, in the very holiest places where the sacred and “uncontaminated mystery” ought to be performed.
They would steal priestly vestments and use them to clothe their women and children. According to a later version of the prophecy, Jerusalem would find itself full of slaves driven there by Saracens. And as the final insult, they would bring beasts of burden into the tombs of the saints and there shelter them as if in a stable.
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The similarities between these images and the ones used in the sermons attributed to Urban II at Clermont are remarkable—enough to suggest that either Urban or the historians who composed sermons in his name drew upon prophetic histories in order to craft their stories of Saracen atrocities. Even the very last image of sheltering animals in the tombs of saints found its way into some of the propaganda circulating around the time of the First Crusade: “About churches that the pagans hold, having uprooted Christianity from them, there is a grievance because they have built in them stables for horses and mules and other animals.” When preachers wanted to motivate soldiers, or when historians wanted to understand what the crusade was all about, the language they used was apocalyptic.
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These same apocalyptic instincts also shaped what Christians knew, or believed they knew, about “Saracen religion” and in particular about its founder, “Mathomos.” Since Latin authors had no written evidence about his life, they relied on hearsay. The information was inaccurate, and they knew it, but there was no real harm in making mistakes. With a man as wicked as “Mathomos,” the historian Guibert of Nogent wrote in 1108, “whoever sings evil things about him does so securely.” Guibert may have chosen his words here with special precision. Two verse biographies of Muhammad survive from the crusade era. When writing about Muhammad, Guibert and other writers thus could have literally been basing their stories about Muhammad on a song. And as we might expect, the character of Mathomos in all of these biographies is a perfect parody, a negative image, of a Christian saint or of Christ. Latin writers thus did not seek the historical prophet Muhammad. Rather, they found Mathomos by looking at Christ through a glass darkly.
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The various biographies of Mathomos tell roughly the same story. They usually begin with a heretic: an embittered, failed Christian leader who, because of theological missteps, has been exiled to the land of the Agarenes. Angry and ambitious, eager to spread his doctrine and undermine true
Christianity, the heretical old man takes on a pupil, an impoverished youth named Mathomos. He trains the boy in the ways of his faith—essentially, a complete surrender to libidinous pleasure. According to twelfth-century writers, that was indeed the secret to Islam's rapid expansion and popularity: free love. Mathomos's followers called Christian moral strictures “cruel and bitter.” They believed instead that God allowed only one thing: “liberty.” It was forbidden to forbid. Or as a twelfth-century German summarized Mathomos's teaching, “Let food abound and let love be set free!”
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But giving free rein to the libido was not enough. The new religion needed miracles if it were to compete with Christianity. Thus, the cunning old heretic and his disciple grow practiced in the art of fakery. During one particularly important sermon, for example, a cow seems magically to appear, bearing on its head stone tablets that contain new divine revelations (not unlike the woman whose goose would lead her to Jerusalem). Unbeknown to a rapturous congregation, Mathomos had carefully trained the animal to respond to his voice and earlier attached the law code to its horns. The prophet also takes a wife, a wealthy widow in one version or the queen of the Agarenes in another, whose husband recently died at Babylon. The marriage nearly falls apart when Mathomos develops epilepsy, but his mentor, the old hermit, successfully convinces the woman that her new young husband is not suffering from a disease. Rather, angelic visitations are sending him into divine ecstasies. “I experience the conversation of the Archangel Gabriel,” the prophet explains to his wife with precision, “and as a carnal being I am unable to bear his glorious visage. Hence, I fail; I fall!”
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According to most accounts, this same epilepsy kills Mathomos. While wandering alone, he suffers an acute seizure and falls to the ground. Wild pigs stumble onto his supine, trembling figure and consume his flesh, leaving behind only the feet, which, Guibert of Nogent said, Saracens still venerate. Because of the memory of this horrible death, Mathomos's followers abstain from eating pork. In another version of the story, Mathomos's body remains intact after his death, and his followers take his body to Mecca—Muhammad was laid to rest in Medina, but in the midst of such wildly inaccurate diatribes, this error is impressively close to the truth—and store his body inside a metal coffin. This coffin they then cunningly place inside a house constructed entirely of magnets so that the casket floats mysteriously
in the air, one more faked miracle to deceive his regularly misled devotees. And as a poetic “Life” of the prophet reminds us, the name of the burial place, Mecca, is “not without hidden meaning” since Mathomos was a
mechus
, or “philanderer.”
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However deliberately grotesque or inaccurate these stories might seem, they were not wholly products of ignorance. Their core elements (a law code given to a prophet through the Angel Gabriel, abstention from pork, an obligation to undertake the Hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca) indicate some familiarity with the realities of Islam. But the method for constructing these tales has nothing to do with historical observation or analysis. It is instead another example of eschatological thought. Writers take a traditional element of Christianity, in this case a saint's biography, and invert it, applying this new negative characteristic to Muhammad.
¹⁴

Crusade historians used the same technique. In their telling, Saracens were like Christians, but the opposite. They were “a people quite degenerate, despicable, and enslaved to demons.” They worshipped idols. They hated Christianity, and they hated Christ. They venerated a man called Mathomos as if he were a god (rather than a man called Christ who
was
God). This Mathomos may have been an epileptic, or he may have been, one writer darkly hinted, a Canaanite god from the Old Testament. And what theologians knew about the Canaanites was similar to what historians believed they knew about Saracens. Among the Canaanites, “it was thought permissible to lust, to fornicate, and to commit all manner of debauchery.” Just as Christians were members of the body of Christ, Saracens were parts of demons and servants of Antichrist, destined to battle against “Christ and all his limbs.”
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Saracens were timeless villains, cut from an apocalyptic mold. They stood outside the normal rules of history. When the crusaders went to fight them in the Holy Land—a “real-world” landscape that existed also in heaven and eternity—they had to step outside of history and, to a degree, outside of reality as they had known it. Around Nicea the Emperor Alexius and the crusade princes managed to keep themselves and their armies in check, anchored very much in this world. The farther they marched from Nicea, however, and the more they engaged with this otherworldly enemy, the less bound by the old-fashioned rules of time and morality the Franks believed themselves to be.

As the crusade left Nicea behind, the campaign became what Peter the Hermit had long ago promised it would be. Still present in the army, Peter could now begin to remind everyone that he had been right. The Franks were not just battling for an earthly Jerusalem. They were not only struggling to save their souls. They also were fighting for heaven. They were waging an apocalypse.

 

 

 

 

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obbed of plunder at Nicea and cheated of the satisfaction of their bloodlust by Alexius's diplomacy, the more fervent pilgrims were probably anxious to leave that city behind as quickly as possible. A few soldiers stayed with the emperor to tidy up negotiations about what help he might continue to provide. The rest of the Frankish army mustered at the nearby Göksu River, and on June 29 they began their march into Central Anatolia.

The immediate target was Antioch. Stephen of Blois mentioned the city in his letter to his wife, Adela, written on the eve of this departure: “I say to you, sweetheart, that from Nicea we will arrive at Jerusalem in five weeks, provided that Antioch does not slow us down.” The siege of Antioch would wind up lasting nearly nine months, and the crusaders would not reach Jerusalem for another two years. In light of the enormity of the task the army would confront at Antioch, this passage brims with enough dramatic irony to call into question whether Stephen's letter is a genuine communication or else a witty forgery.

At the very least, if the letter is genuine, Stephen was badly misinformed about geography. The trek to Antioch was six hundred miles long at best, and the crusaders would follow a roundabout course to get there. The territory along the way would be complex and unpredictable, characterized by bewildering ethnic diversity and by shifting, kaleidoscopic patterns of religious and political alliances. The Franks' survival and the
success of the crusade depended on their ability to fend off Saracen attacks while at the same time striking up alliances with local Christian groups, whose customs and languages they did not understand and who were themselves justly suspicious of the Franks. However much the armies might have wanted to fight and plunder, diplomacy would remain the order of the day.
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But it all began with a grand battle.

Kilij-Arslan, the destroyer of Peter the Hermit's armies, had not ceded all his territories to the Franks and the Greeks, nor had he been vanquished by his own armies' defeat at Nicea on May 16. Instead, he had formed an alliance with the Danishmend amir, one of his Turkish rivals. Together they planned to ambush the Franks during the next phase of their march near the ancient Roman trading post of Dorylaeum. Unlike the land around Nicea, the relatively level ground by Dorylaeum would allow the Turks to take advantage of their cavalry's speed and mobility.

The crusaders had unwittingly helped the Turks' cause. During the first two days of the march, their armies divided into two groups. Why they did so is a mystery. Some thought it a deliberate decision generated by the difficulties in provisioning such a large army. Others thought it an accident caused by darkness and disorganization. Whatever the case, about one-third of the army, led by Bohemond, Robert of Normandy, and Stephen of Blois, separated, broke off well ahead of the rest of the army, and proceeded directly into Kilij-Arslan's ambush.
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On the night of June 30, only two days after the rendezvous at the Göksu, rumor reached the Franks' vanguard that Kilij-Arslan had mustered another army against them and was preparing to spring a trap. Alexius had coached many of the princes about how to handle this situation. Very likely Tetigus was with them as well and able to give advice. The next morning, July 1, imagining themselves a grand Roman legion (as Fulcher of Chartres described it), “weapons taken up, trumpets sounding, arranged against the enemy in wings, centurions leading cohorts and centuries, standards raised, in an orderly fashion we began to set forth.”

In about two hours, the Franks found the Turks waiting for them. Eyewitnesses estimated around 360,000 horsemen, a figure likely born of the crusaders' own bedazzlement at the speed and elegance of the enemy cavalry and terror at what they were about to experience. Bohemond and the other princes, however, kept their heads. They had already sent messengers to the rest of the army—the Lotharingians and the Provençals—to request help, telling them, “If they wish to fight today, they should come like men.” The key to victory (or perhaps the only hope for survival) was to hold off the Turks until the others arrived. So rather than order an immediate attack, Bohemond directed the soldiers, in the face of imminent hostility, to set camp. They put their packs aside, pitched their tents near a marsh—or at least an area full of reeds—and prepared for combat.
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As the battle of Dorylaeum began, the Turks employed the same tactics Kilij-Arslan had tried at Nicea. His cavalry “encircled us on all sides, engaging at close quarters and throwing darts and spears and firing arrows wondrously far and wide.” The Frankish soldiers had never experienced anything like this attack—full of clamor, speed, and savage beauty. “There was no pause, no respite before the army began slaughtering and fighting. As they rushed through the camps, some were struck with arrows, some beheaded by swords, with many others taken captive by so cruel an enemy. Everywhere a great shouting and shaking spread amongst the people, as women married and unmarried together with their husbands and children were beheaded.”