Armies of Heaven (33 page)

It was perhaps at this moment that one of the poor pilgrims, fighting courageously alongside the knights, became crushed between two horses. What happened next he could never say. As if waking from the dead, he found himself lying on a rock outside the city at twilight. The battle was winding down, and so with the rest of the survivors, he scurried back into Antioch. The poor pilgrim was Peter Bartholomew, the man whom St. Andrew had visited months earlier to tell of the Holy Lance. By this point Peter had come completely unstuck in time and disconnected from reality, moving easily between this world and the next. Once awake outside the walls of Antioch, he was ready to tell his tale, but over the next five days hardly anyone would hear of it.
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For the rest of the army, trapped in the hell that was Antioch, the most intense fighting of the siege began the next morning around the citadel as Kerbogah, securely in control of the land outside the walls, began trying to funnel his men directly into the city. At the end of the first day, a Frankish warrior called Hugh the Insane became trapped at the top of a tower, fighting alone against several Turks. Realizing that he could not escape, he struggled valiantly for as long as he could stand. “Finally, his body burned with a thousand arrows, as he saw that he could not avoid death, he hastened the moment for himself by leaping with shield and weapons
into a thick crowd he had seen, and made himself into a missile against his killers”—one of the first instances in history of suicide, martyrdom, and murder combined in a single gesture.
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At about the same time and near the same place, Bohemond was hit in the leg by an arrow. “Blood flowed copiously from the wound, and the noble prince's heart began to decline from its former courage.” Besides the physical effects, the injury seems to have made him skittish. At the very least, he was losing his touch. A day or two later, when his men were reluctant to leave the houses they'd commandeered and risk their lives outside the citadel, Bohemond attempted to force them into action by setting fire to the city. It was an act born of frustration. Simply put, Bohemond had not anticipated this fight—he had not expected there to be a battle against Kerbogah at all. When he had agreed to the other leaders' terms about his possession of the city, he did so thinking that Alexius had, at best, only a few days to reach Antioch before the fighting would end and the agreement about surrendering the city to the emperor would expire. The city, including the citadel, would fall into Bohemond's hands. Kerbogah would arrive with his army, but he would find Antioch as daunting a challenge as the Franks had done. The relief force would then disperse in short order. But when the citadel did not fall, giving Kerbogah nearly direct access into the city, Bohemond must have realized that his genius had failed him. The flames born of his anger spread rapidly, destroying about 2,000 houses and, reportedly, devouring temples that would have made a Greek painter or an Arab goldsmith or an Irish metalworker weep.
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As bad as the fighting was, the hunger was worse. Over the previous eight months, the Turks had exhausted almost all of the city's useful supplies. Soon the army would be experiencing levels of starvation beyond anything that had happened the previous winter. Already the pilgrims were picking through soil with trembling fingers, chewing on branches and roots, hoping to find a little nourishment. They cooked the skin of long-dead horses and oxen or else just chewed leather shoes vainly trying to suck out some protein. A mother held a baby to her breast, but her milk had run dry, and she knew that her child would die.

Food was available, but only at unattainable prices. Some survivors kept a list: “A hen cost 15 shillings; an egg, 2 shillings; a walnut, a penny;
3 or 4 beans, a penny; a small buck, 16 shillings; the buck's stomach, 2 shillings; a ram's tail, 3 shillings and 8 pennies. A camel's tongue, which is small, cost 4 shillings.” A similar but shorter list appears in the Old Testament in a description of the siege of Samaria. It “lasted for so long that a donkey's head sold for 8 shekels of silver, and a quarter of a cab of seed pods for 5 shekels.” This biblical famine had been so bad that one mother had eaten her own child. Similarly in Antioch, the hunger grew so fierce that the Franks could barely restrain themselves from “human banquets.” Perhaps not all of them did.
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The starvation, hopelessness, and constant danger were all more than most of the crusaders could bear. After one day of fighting around the citadel, a large group of warriors, including many prominent men (Bohemond's brother-in-law among them) met in secret and agreed that they could never prevail. And so in the dead of night, they hung ropes from the ramparts and quietly slid down the walls—earning for themselves at home the nickname “Secret Ropedancers.” Outside the walls, they picked a stealthy path around the periphery of Kerbogah's camp and made their way to the port of Saint-Simeon. There they found several European ships and informed their crews that “Antioch had been captured by the Turks and the pagans had annihilated the Christians.” Some of the ships immediately cut anchor and started home. One of them stopped at Alexandretta along the way, where the same deserters told a convalescing Stephen of Blois that he had been right to flee. Sadly, Stephen joined them, and together they sailed to Constantinople.
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But even as the Secret Ropedancers fled and while most of the army was starving, the crusaders' fortunes began to turn. The heavens were opening up, and Christ once more smiled on His warriors, sending them clear signs of His affection and consolation.

Near the citadel of Antioch, a group of soldiers wearied by the fight were wondering, for obvious reasons, what had been the point of it all. Why had they traveled so far in the name of Christ, now to die while defending a city captured through treachery? In answer, a priest from Lombardy told a remarkable story. “Don't think that you are suffering in this
way for nothing,” he said, “but hear and think about the reward that Lord Jesus will give to all those who are going to die on this road for his love and grace.” He had it on good authority that two years earlier another Italian priest had met a strange pilgrim who eventually identified himself as St. Ambrose of Milan. Ambrose had died seven hundred years earlier, but even so, there he was. He told the priest that God had approved of the crusade and that anyone who kept faith and died on the journey would immediately receive a crown of martyrdom. Lest anyone doubt the vision, Ambrose added, “When three years have passed from this day, know that the surviving Christians, after many struggles will reach the holy city of Jerusalem and there gain victory over all the barbarian nations.” With that, the saint vanished. Two years after the vision, the men at the makeshift ramparts around Antioch's citadel took heart. Burning with hope and longing for eternal life, they set aside fear of death and resumed the struggle.
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AT THE SAME TIME, a priest named Stephen of Valence ran away from the citadel, believing himself about to die, and entered the church of the Virgin Mary. There he found several clerics gathered together, praying and preparing for death. Stephen confessed his sins, as did the others, and then they sang psalms late into the night. After everyone else had fallen asleep, Stephen maintained a vigil.

The next morning he breathlessly hurried back. Many of the leaders, including Adhémar, Raymond, and Bohemond, had gathered there, shaking their heads at the impossible battle before them. “Gentlemen!” Stephen said. “If it please you, listen to this thing that I just saw in a vision!”

That night, after his friends had fallen asleep, an extraordinarily handsome man approached him. “Do you know me?” the man asked.

“I don't know you at all,” Stephen answered, “except that I can see a cross on your head like our Savior.”

He said, “That is who I am.”

Christ was angry. The Franks had forgotten all of the help He had already given them and had begun to satisfy their lusts “with Christian women and pagan tramps.” Their sin was creating a veritable stench unto heaven. The Lord's rage, boiling over, could be mollified only through the intervention of His mother, Mary, and St. Peter, who threw themselves at
His feet and pleaded that He spare the Christians. Peter was particularly eloquent: “Lord, through so many years the pagan people have held my house and have performed there many inexpressible evils. If they are driven out, the angels in heaven will rejoice!”

Christ turned to Stephen. “Who is leader of the army?”

The priest answered, “Lord, there has never been one leader”—at this stage everyone wanted to forget Stephen of Blois—“but for the most part they trust the bishop.”

Christ therefore ordered Stephen to carry His message of repentance directly to Bishop Adhémar. If the crusaders followed His directions, they would receive unexpected help within five days. Stephen tried to wake his friends. He wanted to introduce them to Christ, Mary, and Peter, but the heavenly visitors disappeared before he could.

Stephen finished his story in the shadow of the citadel, but Adhémar did not entirely believe him. He asked the priest to swear to the truth of his words on a Bible. Stephen offered instead to walk through fire or to throw himself from a tower. So electrifying was this answer that all of the leaders on the spot used the proffered Bible to swear that they would never dance down ropes to escape Antioch. They would see the siege through to the end. And Tancred went a step further. As long as he had forty knights, he would not quit the pilgrimage until he had seen Jerusalem.
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THE MOST REMARKABLE VISIONARY of them all was Peter Bartholomew. When he had spoken with Andrew outside the walls of Antioch during the ferocious struggle with Kerbogah, when so many of the Franks had entered into a trance, he learned that the apostle was losing his patience. He threatened serious consequences to Peter if he did not finally tell Adhémar and Count Raymond the secret of the Holy Lance. And finally Peter worked up his courage to do so—perhaps convinced by his miraculous delivery on the field of battle.

By then this was the fifth time that Andrew had appeared to Peter. On the first occasion, of course, the earth had trembled and the skies had turned blood-red. The second, third, and fourth visions all happened while Peter was on the road. Once, on February 10, Peter was near Edessa begging for food (before Baldwin arrived there). The other two times he was at the ports of Saint-Simeon and Mamistra, on March 20 and May 4,
respectively, looking for ships on which to stow away and thus escape the nightmare that Antioch had become. At Mamistra when St. Andrew stopped Peter and ordered him to return to the army with news of the Lance, he “burst into the bitterest tears,” thinking of the impossibility of survival. And he disobeyed Andrew, boarding a ship for Cyprus. It sailed on calm seas and with favorable winds. But at night the weather turned ugly, and the crew returned to Mamistra. Two more times the ship set out and turned back, the third time going to Saint-Simeon, where Peter fell deathly ill. He had recovered and gone back to Antioch just before the city was captured.
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Born of disasters where it seemed the very earth around him was coming apart, the dreams of Andrew returned at times of intense hunger, disorientation, and despair. Peter probably found comfort in them. Not only did his ghostly, apostolic friend promise eventual relief, but he also hinted that Peter might yet prove to be the hero of the crusade. Peter hesitated to tell others about the visions, however, not because he doubted their truth or feared they were “the mere distraction of dreams, which affects us almost constantly.” Rather, he stayed quiet because he believed people would not take a poor man seriously. He again and again imagined his own “impoverished garb” set alongside the ecclesiastical and secular “magnificence” of Bishop Adhémar and Count Raymond and feared to approach his lords.
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But for eleventh-century Christians, poverty could also be a source of authority, so much so that Peter pretended to be illiterate even though he did have some learning. In a later vision, Saints Andrew and Peter would make the point explicitly. While asleep in the chapel of Count Raymond, Peter saw the apostles before him, “clad in poorly cut and filthy clothes, standing near the coffers where the relics were kept, and he thought them poor men who were intending to steal something from the tent. St. Andrew indeed was wearing an old cloak torn at the shoulders, with a patch sewn over the opening on the left shoulder, and nothing on the right, and he wore the meanest of shoes. St. Peter was wearing a long and baggy shirt that went down to his ankles. Then Peter Bartholomew said to them, ‘Who are you, lords, or what do you want?' And blessed Peter answered, ‘We are legates of God. I am Peter, and this is Andrew. But we want you to see us in this dress so that you might know how useful it is for devoted
servants of God. In this condition and dress, as you see us, we went to God, and so we are now.'And at these words they changed so that nothing was brighter, nothing more beautiful.” The message that the apostles—and Peter Bartholomew—wished to convey was clear: The poor were closer to God. It was because of Peter's frayed clothing, not in spite of it, that his message ought to seem credible.
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And so as the fighting raged around the citadel, the poor Provençal visionary finally told his prince and his bishop about the Holy Lance and where they might find it. Adhémar, as expected, did not believe him. Count Raymond, however, was hopeful, and he handed the ragged visionary over to his chaplain, Raymond of Aguilers, for safekeeping and perhaps also to make a formal record of his testimony.
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This vision needs to be set in context with the other two—the priest who had told how St. Ambrose had endorsed their cause and Stephen of Valence, who brought reassuring words from Christ. At this point in the never-ending siege, the army's leaders had decided to cast their lot with the miraculous. Claiming total confidence in Stephen's words, they took a public oath intended to inspire and motivate the ordinary soldiers. They also made a conscious decision, whatever their doubts about Peter Bartholomew, to connect his vision to Stephen of Valence's.