Armies of Heaven (38 page)

The people still put their hope in Count Raymond and recruited Bishop Peter of Albara (whose interests Raymond was claiming to defend against Bohemond) as spokesperson. Peter, surrounded by an entourage of commoners and knights, approached Raymond to express their frustrated longing for Jerusalem. The laypeople all knelt around the bishop as he spoke. Count Raymond, Peter said, should depart immediately. God had chosen him as His special instrument by giving him the Holy Lance. He had no need of the other princes. If, however, he preferred to stay at Ma‘arra, he should at once hand the Lance over to the people, who, leaderless, would march on to Jerusalem without him.

Bishop Adhémar's worst fears had been realized. The eccentric vision of Peter Bartholomew had taken hold of the Provençal contingent. Count Raymond had put too much trust in him. Despite all his military achievements and money, he was about to lose his army to a peasant. He had one last chance to stem the tide of deserters and to regain control of his followers: a council to be held at nearby Rugia, midway between Antioch and Ma‘arra, on January 4, called to try yet again to settle his dispute with Bohemond. The people were willing to give him that much time, but again, at Rugia, neither side was willing to budge. Bohemond returned to Antioch, planning to forcibly expel the Provençals from the city. Raymond hired more knights and headed back to Ma‘arra. With the help of his new subjects, or mercenaries, he would begin to fortify the city as the new capital of his own Syrian principality—a rival and enemy to Bohemond's capital at Antioch.
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But even before Raymond's return, the army's poor took control of the situation. They had either heard how badly the council at Rugia was going or they simply didn't care. They said among themselves, “Huh. Quarrels because of Antioch and quarrels because of Ma‘arra, and in every other place that God would give us, our princes fight and the army grows smaller. Certainly there will no more be a fight about this city.” And they began to dismantle the walls. As the demolition progressed, it seemed yet another miracle. The weak and the infirm pushed away rocks so large that three or four pairs of oxen could not have moved them. The bishop of Albara, recoiling at the forces he had let loose, ran among the people trying
to convince them to stop. The vandals hid when they saw him approach with his guards, but as soon as he had departed, they left their hiding places and returned to methodically destroying the city.

Once Raymond arrived, he flew into a new rage at what was happening. When he had heard how the bishops and the nobles had been unable to deter the people from their purpose, however, “he understood that there was something godly there,” and he ordered the men who had come with him, originally to fortify the place, instead to destroy the walls completely. He had given up, temporarily, dreams of a Syrian principality and was now embracing anew his mission to guide and protect the poor. In preparation for leaving, he announced that he would lead one more foraging expedition through Syrian territory for the benefit of his starving people—food other than the rotten bodies of the dead, upon which the Franks had continued to dine, with varying degrees of secrecy.
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During this series of raids around Ma‘arra, the Provençals killed many Saracens, though on their return a Turkish raiding party dispatched six or seven of the poor. Remarkably, the chaplain Raymond observed, each of these poor men was found to have a cross branded onto his right shoulder. Word of this sign spread back to the garrison in the city, but not everyone believed it. Another faked miracle? To prove the story true, the count sent to the city “one of the dead who was still breathing.” His body was so battered and torn that “he had barely enough of it left to cover his soul.” But he survived for several days and convinced the doubters of the miracle: Christ alone had burned this sign onto his body.

The crusade was still on track. Raymond had maintained the goodwill of his followers, though he had now tied his prestige even more closely to the poor and to the dreams of Peter Bartholomew. At last, on January 13, 1098, the Provençal army processed solemnly out of Ma‘arra, believing that Jerusalem was only a few days ahead. Count Raymond was a barefoot penitent. It was still his army, but it was Peter Bartholomew's crusade. And the crusaders' sense of purpose had, if anything, grown stronger from having slaughtered and feasted on the enemy.
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R
aymond had no intention of going to Jerusalem without the other princes. Indeed, the next three months of the crusade would look very much like the previous three. The armies stayed divided, and the princes continued to pursue their own ends, sometimes in competition with each other. The armies did move more deliberately to the south, keeping close to the coast, but the focus of the leaders remained on acquiring cities and territories in Syria rather than making a quick advance on Jerusalem.

This seemingly aimless period grew out of an ongoing crisis in leadership. Without Adhémar of le Puy, no one could effectively unite the different regional and linguistic divisions within the army. But another struggle was occurring at the same time. It grew out of the princes' personalities and the increasingly conspicuous rifts between the Provençals and the northern Europeans, but it also transcended politics and regional identity. At heart it was a debate about what the crusade meant. This conflict had dogged the expedition from its beginnings, with Pope Urban II and Peter the Hermit offering competing visions about Jerusalem and why Christians needed to go there. The more radical ideas of Peter the Hermit and Emicho of Flonheim had survived the disasters that befell the first wave of crusaders and perhaps had helped inspire the increasingly frenetic followers of Raymond of Saint-Gilles. In the months between the cannibalism of Ma‘arra and the final march on Jerusalem, the number of
visionaries would increase, and the content of their visions would grow ever more radical until—finally—the leaders would force Peter Bartholomew, the most extreme of these visionaries, to undergo, quite literally, a trial by fire, where the Franks would turn directly to God and ask for an immediate verdict as to the truth of the apocalyptic crusade.

The day after Raymond left Ma‘arra, his followers crossed paths with a contingent of Normans led by Duke Robert and Tancred. For a brief moment, it must have seemed to everyone that all parts of the crusading host were finally reassembling after the long winter of 1098, ready for Jerusalem. And, indeed, Raymond, Robert, and Tancred did make quick progress. Supplies had suddenly become, if not abundant, sufficient, and even the perpetually dour Raymond of Aguilers noted with approval how the nobles actually were sharing their wealth with the poor. The health of everyone in the army improved markedly. Rumor of the brutalities at Ma‘arra had spread throughout northern Syria, and most cities were now willing to offer terms rather than risk a siege and the attendant consequences. The roads to Jerusalem were opening.

But a minor disagreement arose as the armies marched near the coastal town of Jabala. Raymond's inclination was to change course and lay siege to it. The rest of the army wanted to press on, and the ordinary soldiers found a surprising spokesperson in Tancred. “God has bestowed his presence on the poor people and us. Should we now stray from the path?” It was impossible, Tancred argued, for so few soldiers to conquer all of the Saracen towns between Antioch and Jerusalem. There were, apparently, only 5,000 men left from the original—as he estimated it—200,000 warriors who had departed Europe. They needed reinforcements. “Do we really expect people to come from our homeland when they hear that we have conquered Antioch and Jabala and the rest of the Saracen cities? But let us go to Jerusalem, our reason for setting out, and surely God will give it to us.” Once Jerusalem fell, the other places would surrender out of fear and awe at what the Franks had done, and then tens of thousands of reinforcements would surely follow, to see the Holy Sepulcher,
if nothing else. Tancred's argument carried the day for a time. The armies continued south.
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About seventy-five miles farther down the coast, Raymond again became distracted. It began with an offer of friendship from the amir of Tripoli, which lay near the end of the Seljuk sphere of authority. An alliance with this amir could open up the road for immediate access to Jerusalem. Raymond therefore sent a delegation to finalize the agreement. The amir not only accepted his proposal but also agreed to let Raymond fly his banner above the city walls, just as the count had managed to do for only a moment at Antioch. But for some reason—probably for many reasons—Raymond decided to renege on the deal. His formal excuse was that he would not negotiate with “the king of Tripoli” unless the king first accepted baptism. The chaplain Raymond was more suspicious of his count's intentions, and rightly so. After all, the army had now been making pacts of friendship with amirs all along the Mediterranean. There must have been another reason for the sudden change of heart, and the chaplain Raymond settled on the obvious explanation: money. The negotiators who had gone to Tripoli had been astonished by the city's extraordinary wealth, and they impressed upon their count the great treasure he might win if he captured it. A slightly later historian echoed the charge: “The count of Saint-Gilles desired that land and its government very much, because it was rich and because it was more celebrated than the others.”
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Strategic factors likely played into Raymond's decision, too. As Tancred had pointed out, the crusade's numbers had grown thin, and Raymond and Robert must have recognized, even if Tancred did not, that by themselves they lacked the manpower to take Jerusalem. Raymond's legates in Tripoli may also have delivered to him some remarkable news: Jerusalem had already fallen.

About six months earlier, in August 1098, the Egyptians had driven out the Seljuk Turks and regained control of the city. The Franks, as we have seen, had opened diplomatic channels to Cairo as early as the summer of 1097. Once allies against the Seljuk armies, they were now set to become enemies. In venturing past Tripoli, then, the crusade was entering into a new sort of hostile country—out of frontier regions dominated by the Turks and into frontier regions under the Fatimids' influence. At the very
least, this turn in Cairo's fortunes required careful consideration. And Raymond was happy to bide his time with a potentially profitable war against Tripoli—provided he could hold his army together. Even then, he did not attack Tripoli itself but rather the fortified town of Arqa, just a little to the north, beginning on February 14, 1098, barely a month after he had left Ma‘arra.
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News of Raymond's rapid progress did yield results from the other princes. Around the beginning of February, Godfrey, Robert of Flanders, and Bohemond met together at Antioch. They were hearing complaints similar to the ones Raymond's men had raised at Ma‘arra: “They were being held up in the city of Antioch only for the sake of delay and were not making any progress to Jerusalem, out of desire for which they had abandoned their homes and suffered so many things.” Desertions were growing so common that the princes had to forbid their followers from boarding ships lest they try to return home. To restore a sense of order and purpose, Godfrey, Robert, and Bohemond held a public meeting on March 1 and announced that all of the soldiers who were not already with Raymond would rendezvous at the Byzantine port city of Latakia, about fifty miles to the south of Antioch. And from there, “thinking nothing of the dangers to their own lives,” they would delay no longer the road to Jerusalem.
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The armies met at Latakia as planned, but the resolve to cease procrastinating lasted barely a day. Setting camp just a few miles to the south of Latakia, they laid siege to Jabala, the same city that had tempted Raymond but that Tancred had convinced him to pass by. Bohemond wasn't interested. According to Albert of Aachen, he was worried that there was a plot afoot to steal Antioch from him. Upon arriving at Jabala, he may also have realized that the army would not be leaving for Jerusalem anytime soon and that his time and money were better spent preserving the city he had already won. There would be other opportunities to pray at the Holy Sepulcher.

Whatever his true motives, Bohemond left the crusade and this time did not return. Why? Perhaps (contemporaries would have said if they had had the phrase) because biology is destiny: “From Bohemond's father, who was a Frank, he had the best of beginnings, but of his mother, who was Southern Italian, there were still traces.”
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At any rate the siege of Jabala was to be short-lived. About ten days after it began, a panicked message arrived from Raymond of Saint-Gilles, borne by Bishop Peter of Albara. Word had reached the Provençals that “the pope of the Turks” had organized “the numberless Turkish people” for war and that they were about to attack the pilgrims en masse to drive them away from Arqa. The Saracen armies had gathered at Damascus and were now just a few days away. If the other barons did not come soon, half of the crusading army might be destroyed and Jerusalem never attained, and the army at Jabala could expect to suffer a similar, swift martyrdom.

Godfrey and Robert of Flanders thus had no choice. They pulled up their tents and marched down the coast to Arqa. “Meanwhile,” the chaplain Raymond wrote, “the story turned out to be false, the Saracens having composed it to put us off for a little bit so that they might gain some relief from the siege.”

Godfrey and Robert were furious. The whole story about Damascus, they believed, had been a fraud. More to the point, Raymond had invented it as a favor to the amir of Jabala, in exchange for a hefty bribe, to draw the Franks away from that siege. So angry were Godfrey and Robert that they set camp two miles from Arqa and for the next several days refused to cooperate with Raymond at all. Tancred, by this time, had begun to weary of Raymond, too, though for a different reason. Specifically, he hadn't been paid enough. As quickly as he was able, he broke with the Provençal count, symbolically returning to him a staff of lordship, and then joined Godfrey's army.
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