Armies of Heaven (39 page)

Save Bohemond, the armies had now all reassembled, and they were all tired of or unimpressed with Arqa. The siege dragged on interminably, with no progress and with no apparent purpose beyond enriching Raymond or whoever else might happen to enter the city first. The voices of the doubters grew sharper as heroic and popular knights began to die. The learned Anselm of Ribemont, who had written at least two letters home to discuss progress on the crusade, was hit in the head with a stone flung by a catapult and died instantly. The warrior Pons of Balazun, who had been Raymond of Aguilers's collaborator for the first half of his chronicle, died in the same way. By April 1 even the chaplain Raymond was
turning against his count. “God did not wish this siege to succeed,” he wrote, “since we obviously undertook it for reasons that ran against justice and God, and He disposed that all things ran against us there.”
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Whatever practical motives might have driven the princes to continue the siege, soldiers and clerics like Raymond did not believe their explanations. Arqa was about greed and about the corruption of the crusaders' mission. A new vision was needed to galvanize the army, to enable it to reclaim the initiative from the princes. That vision came from Peter Bartholomew. But Peter had to speak with care and in measured tones when announcing his latest apostolic mandates. Already at Ma‘arra, Bohemond's followers had begun to mock Peter and his Lance and his sponsor, Raymond of Saint-Gilles. If Peter phrased his message at all indelicately, he might undermine his own visionary authority and his patron's credibility with it. But instead of words of clemency and unity, framed around the image of the Holy Lance and the memory of Antioch, Peter this time advocated social revolution and an all-out civil war.

It happened on April 5, 1099. That night Peter Bartholomew was alone in a makeshift chapel set up by Count Raymond. He was thinking, as he rested there, about the original vision of Stephen of Valence at Antioch, who had been allowed not only to speak with Christ but also to see his cross, and Peter wondered, a bit petulantly, why he had never known a similar blessing. Almost instantly four men stood next to him. Three were familiar: Christ, Andrew, and Peter. The fourth was heavyset and partly bald—probably St. Paul, though he was never explicitly identified.
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“Christ said to me, ‘What are you doing?'

“I answered, ‘Lord, I'm standing.'

“And the Lord said, ‘You almost drowned with the others [what Christ refers to is unclear, but Peter apparently had suffered another near-death experience, as often happened before his visions], so now what do you think?'

“And I answered, ‘Lord Father, I was thinking about that priest you appeared to with the Cross.'

“And the Lord said, ‘I know that. And henceforth believe that I am the Lord on Whose behalf you have all come here, and Who for the sake of sinners suffered at Jerusalem on the Cross, as you will now see.'”
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There appeared before Peter two planks of black wood, rounded but not carved or worked over in any way, except that the midsections had been cut so that they might fit easily together. Christ called out, “Behold the cross, which you desired!” Then suddenly the Cross was before Him and He was stretched out upon it, with Peter and Andrew holding either arm as Paul supported the Cross from behind. And the Lord ordered Peter (in a way typical of later medieval mystics like St. Francis, but still unusual in the eleventh century) to gaze upon His wounds and meditate on them and then preach to the whole army about what he saw.

“You see these five wounds of mine,” Christ said, “just as all of you stand in five orders.” The mystical vision of the wounds was turning into a metaphor for the entire Frankish army. The first order of pilgrims, Christ told Peter, consisted of those who feared neither spear nor sword nor any weapon. They were like Christ, who entered Jerusalem without hesitation, despite the lances, clubs, and even the Cross that threatened Him. Did Christ intend to say that these people were the bravest members in the army, the men who were most ready to fight and least likely to flee? Or was He saying that the first order was composed of people who followed his example and entered Jerusalem peacefully, humbly, and unarmed? In other words, was the first order composed of soldiers or of the army's poor, unarmed pilgrims? The answer became clear only when He described the second order. They were the ones who supported the first group, guarding their backs and providing shelter for them—perhaps the “knights of the people” and the “poor foot soldiers” described in another section of Raymond's chronicle. If they were the men who defended and sheltered the first group, then the members of that group, by implication, did not fight; they were the poor pilgrims, who would enter Jerusalem as Christ had done on Palm Sunday more than one millennium before the crusade.
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Each of the other ranks, by turns, was further removed from the action of holy war. The ones in the third order provided logistical support to the second group, giving them stones and spears to use in combat. Christ compared them to the people who witnessed the Crucifixion and grieved
the injury done to Him. The fourth group comprised “those who see battle and hide themselves in their homes.” They were like the witnesses to the Crucifixion who just barely believed it. The fifth order included those who heard the roar of battle, looked into the reasons for it, and then hid, offering examples of cowardice, not prowess. “They refuse to undergo dangers not only for me, but also for their brothers.” They hid, and they encouraged others to run away, to watch the battle from a distance. “They are similar to the traitor Judas and to Pontius Pilate.”
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Interpreting this vision is not easy. The five orders that Peter described do not represent cultural groups since they are neither linguistic nor geographic. The second and third orders (fighters and servants) serve military functions, but the first, fourth, and fifth (the fearless, the deserters, and the cowards) do not. They certainly do not correspond to the usual military divisions within the crusade army: horsemen, foot soldiers, and noncombatants. They seem to be based on something else altogether—the unknowable content of the crusaders' character. How to make this analogy conform to the wounds of Christ defies any coherent program of allegory since it implies that some wounds are better than others, or perhaps that some wounds are more efficacious than others.

How to make these secret divisions reveal themselves, however, was easy. When Peter Bartholomew protested, as he often did, that people would not believe him, Christ ordered him to tell Count Raymond to call together all the princes and the people and attack Arqa. Let the army's best-known criers shout three times “God help us!” and then the divisions described by Christ would visibly form. The group who charged forward would be the army's true pilgrims—a category that overlapped with the people who believed Peter Bartholomew's visions and trusted in the Holy Lance. When Peter asked Christ what to do about the unbelievers in the last two ranks, the Lord answered, “Do not spare them. Kill them. For they are my traitors, brothers of Judas Iscariot.” Their property would be redistributed to the people in the first order. “If you do these things,” Christ concluded, “you will have found the right path, around which you have so far only drifted.”
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What Christ was proposing was a bloody purge—a massacre of the cowardly. The survivors would constitute the Frankish elect, divided into three parts: true pilgrims, their warrior guardians, and the squires
and servants who could attend to practical needs. If the crusaders followed Peter's instructions, they would march straight to Jerusalem, the last several miles barefoot, and quickly capture the city, regardless of how many or few siege ladders, catapults, and battering rams they possessed. For it was characteristic of the traitors in the fourth order to think like Kerbogah—to see victory as something attainable only through the cunning of man and not through the power of God.
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If Peter's vision had stopped here, most of the army would have turned against him. But Christ added one other set of instructions that demonstrated just how radical a transformation He was advocating. The problem that had so often hobbled the crusade's progress, in the eyes of Peter, was a lack of concord among the leaders. After the purges, therefore, judges would be appointed to represent households and larger families. If anyone suffered any sort of injury, the accuser was to approach the offending party and inform him that he was bringing the case to trial. If the malefactor did not make things right, a judge would intervene with the proper authorities to confiscate all of the accused person's property. Half the goods would go to the plaintiff, with the other half going to the “sovereign.” If the judge refused to act at all in the case, or delayed unnecessarily, then it would be at his own spiritual peril. Someone (the princes? the other judges? Peter Bartholomew?) would inform the accused of the dangers he faced at Judgment Day. Any act of injustice, Christ explained, was like Adam's original sin. But as always the Lord's thoughts and Peter's were with the poor, since He concluded, “About giving tithes, some are doing quite well, because they offered as I commanded. I shall magnify them and make them known amongst the others.”
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This program of reform was both sweeping and dangerous. Peter Bartholomew was proposing to remake the army, violently, in order to create something church doctrine had long recognized as impossible: a pure City of God on earth. The ranks and distinctions within this army would be determined not by social status or family position but by a willing embrace of poverty, by the quality of a person's character, and by practical considerations such as who was best equipped to fight and who best equipped to serve. At the head of the army would be the true pilgrims, those who, if they should die, “will be raised up on the right hand of God, when, at the resurrection, ascending into heaven, I have taken my seat.”
Peter's reform brings to mind another vision—Chapter 20 of the book of the Apocalypse: “And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and the power of judgment was given to them. And I saw the souls of those who had been decapitated because of their witness for Jesus and the word of God. . . . The rest of the dead did not live until 1000 years had passed. This is the first resurrection.” After the victory of the heavenly army in the Apocalypse, a government of saintly judges—the souls eligible for resurrection before Christ takes His final seat of judgment—shall rule alongside God for a millennium. What Peter Bartholomew and Raymond of Aguilers were now advocating was unadulterated millenarianism, created through a purge of nonbelievers, through purity of heart, and through military victory. [Plate 6]

Whether Count Raymond embraced this ideology, too, or, as seems more likely, found himself uncomfortably associated with it because of his enthusiasm for the Holy Lance, we cannot say. But such was the situation in April 1099 when the other leaders finally began to speak against Raymond, his prophet, and his relic.
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Such a vision was sure to divide the army, and indeed after reports of Peter Bartholomew's latest proposals began to spread, his critics finally spoke out loudly and forcefully against him. All of the aristocratic warriors would have had a stake in quashing his ideas, but the ones who took the lead in doing so were Norman. Duke Robert of Normandy must have played a major role in discrediting Peter, as did his chaplain, a man named Arnulf of Choques. Our best evidence for the antimillenarian case, however, comes from the biography of Bohemond's nephew Tancred, the Norman leader from southern Italy, written by the cleric Ralph of Caen some twenty years after the fact.

Ralph, as a Norman partisan, was hardly an objective observer. The case he made against Peter Bartholomew was composed less of historical analysis and more of raw invective. As such it probably provided an accurate portrayal of what the Normans were saying about the Provençals and their eccentric visionary in the spring of 1099.

The Holy Lance was, Ralph said, not a relic at all. It was instead an exotic-looking Arab weapon whose strange appearance struck European observers as fabulous. Peter Bartholomew had managed to hide it in a dark church and then faked its discovery amid the crowds summoned to dig for it. But belief in the Lance was strong, especially after the victory over Kerbogah. Its fiercest support came, naturally, from the Provençals, whose leader Count Raymond was using the Lance to promote his own status. In Ralph's version of the history, Bohemond, “a man not lacking in wisdom,” conducted a formal investigation into the character of Peter Bartholomew and then presented a lawyerly case against him to the army. In reality, Bohemond had withdrawn from the crusade a month earlier. The likely prosecutor was Arnulf, Robert of Normandy's chaplain. Why Ralph did not credit the speech to him is a mystery, but we can hazard a guess—that belief in the Lance years later was still strong enough in Jerusalem, where Arnulf would eventually settle, and that he preferred not to be associated with its debunking.
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In any case Bohemond's presentation, as Ralph imagined it, was a mixture of character assassination and logical argumentation. First, Bohemond wondered, why would the apostle Andrew appear to a man like Peter, a frequenter of brothels, a keeper of loose company, and a generally unreliable fellow? Surely the saint would have chosen a more honorable man if he wished to reveal the secrets of heaven? Next, on a historical level, why was the Lance buried at all? If a Christian man had brought it to Antioch, then surely he would have placed it inside the altar. If a pagan or a Jew had done so, then obviously he would have never brought it into a church in the first place. More damningly, how did the Lance ever travel to Antioch? It was supposed to have belonged to one of Pilate's soldiers, and no historian told of Pilate visiting Antioch after the Crucifixion. (Another crusade writer tried indirectly to answer this charge by saying that Saints Andrew and Peter had themselves sent the Holy Lance to Antioch.) Bohemond finally noted that it was Peter Bartholomew who had found the Lance after everyone else had failed (he was apparently unaware of Raymond of Aguilers's initial sexually charged encounter with the relic's tip). If Peter were a true messenger from God, then someone else should have made that discovery.
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