Armies of Heaven (40 page)

Ultimately, Peter's claim about the Lance foundered on two basic points, one cultural and the other economic. Culturally, the Lance had become too much a Provençal relic and too obviously a political tool of Count Raymond. The Provençals, Bohemond said, wanted to usurp for themselves the victory at Antioch, instead of allowing all the army to share in it. In this respect Bohemond's argument resembles many modern interpretations of this story: that by April 1099 the Lance was a Provençal symbol and thus no longer had the widespread support that it had once enjoyed.
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But that argument is only half true. Whatever local pride Peter may have felt, he had no hesitation about attacking Raymond for delaying his march to Jerusalem or, as noted, reminding the count about his secret, unconfessed sin. But this argument also ignores the other half of Bohemond's argument as Ralph presented it: “Oh, the rustic stupidity! Oh, the gullible rusticity!” It was poverty that stigmatized Peter Bartholomew, just as he had always feared it would.
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The attack against Peter and the Lance set off something of a firestorm among visionaries. A priest named Peter Desiderius stepped forward, saying that he, like Peter Bartholomew, had spoken with Adhémar of le Puy after his death and could confirm that the bishop had spent time in hell for his doubts about the Holy Lance's authenticity, which, the dead Adhémar admitted, “I ought to have accepted enthusiastically.” Fortunately, by the time Peter Desiderius saw him, Adhémar was standing with St. Nicholas, singing in a heavenly choir. Much of his hair had burned off his head and face because of the hellfire. “Although I am not in pain,” Adhémar explained, “I nevertheless can't see God clearly until my hair and beard grow back as they used to be.”

The bishop of Apt next described how a man visited him in his sleep and asked him three times whether he believed in the Lance. The bishop admitted he had doubted it in the past, but in part because of being browbeaten in his dreams, he now accepted its authenticity.

A priest named Evrard described how before the final battle of Antioch he had met a Syrian Christian who told him about meeting the evangelist Mark. Mark had informed the priest that, just as Peter Bartholomew had described, God was ordering all saints to converge on Antioch to support the pilgrims. The Syrian man added that he had read in an apocryphal
gospel of Peter that one day Christian men and women would become trapped in Antioch and would not be able to escape until they had first discovered the Holy Lance hidden there.

Stephen of Valence recalled his own vision of Christ and the Virgin and how five days later the army had discovered the Holy Lance, as predicted. And, finally, Bertrand of le Puy described how Adhémar and his dead standard-bearer both appeared in a vision to reprove him about doubts in general, though apparently not for doubting the Lance.
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These visions were not all relevant to Peter's case, but the speed and the passion with which the visionaries stepped forward, along with the outrage they created, must have given the Norman priest Arnulf, chief of the doubters, pause about pressing his case. He agreed to withdraw his accusations and do penance for doubt. But at the appointed time, Arnulf did not confess. He asked for a postponement. Peter Bartholomew sensed trickery, and rather than wait for the Norman's next move, he demanded that he be allowed to prove his own innocence, as well as the authenticity of the Holy Lance, by undergoing an ordeal by fire.
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The notion of a “trial by fire” sounds terribly dramatic, but in the eleventh century it was a relatively common procedure. As the historian Robert Bartlett has summarized it, “A man accused of a crime, or a man seeking to claim or defend his rights, would, after a solemn three-day fast, pick up a hot iron, walk three paces, and put the iron down. His hand would be bandaged and sealed, then, after three days, inspected. If it was ‘clean'—that is, healing without suppuration or discoloration—he was innocent or vindicated; if the wound was unclean, he was guilty.” This procedure would have required both a waiting period and heads calm enough to judge the condition of Peter's burns, but the stakes were too high to wait three days or to allow anyone other than God to determine the outcome. Not only the authenticity of the Holy Lance but also the leadership of the army were in doubt. We don't know what Count Raymond thought about the proceedings, but he must have recognized that he would walk away from the affair either badly humiliated or unchallenged as the leader of crusade. The ordeal also had the potential to reshape the meaning of the crusade, to transform it into the millenarian venture that Peter Bartholomew and perhaps Peter the Hermit before him had imagined. And, of course, there was always the possibility that Peter, in victory, could
ignite the bloodletting that Christ had ordered, the nonbelievers having revealed themselves through their opposition to the Lance. A special ordeal was therefore created: a massive bonfire, built on two mounds of dried olive branches, separated from one another by only one foot, each pile four feet high and thirteen feet in length.
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It happened just three days later, on April 8, 1099—by coincidence, Good Friday. Raymond estimated that a crowd of 60,000 men gathered for the spectacle. He exaggerated, but probably not by much. The drama would have engulfed all the Franks at Arqa (and perhaps intrigued the city's Muslim defenders, too).

The ceremony began with Peter of Narbonne, the bishop of Albara, leading the priests of the army, barefoot but clad in their finest vestments, three times around the woodpile, singing psalms and carrying crosses in their hands. After the third time around, the bishop and the priests set fire to the branches, and then they all circled it three more times, sprinkling holy water around it and praying loudly to Christ over the roar of the flames. Raymond of Aguilers was one of them: “When the fire was raging, I myself, Raymond, said to all the multitude, ‘If omnipotent God spoke to this man, face to face, and if blessed Andrew showed him the Holy Lance while he kept vigil, let him walk through the fire unhurt. If it was a lie, let him burn, along with the Lance he shall carry in his hand.'” Another chronicler attributed a similar speech to Peter the Hermit. Probably both men—and several others—delivered nearly identical sermons to educate and incite onlookers. In the absence of public address systems, several preachers all offering the same message would have been necessary to reach such a large audience.
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In the meantime Peter Bartholomew had shed his clothing and put on a simple black tunic. He fell to his knees before the bishop of Albara and accepted charge of the Lance, now wrapped in a white cloth. He made the sign of the cross, rose to his feet, and, Raymond the chaplain said, “walked boldly toward the fire,” which had now risen to unbelievable heights—about fifty feet. No one could bear to stand near the pyre, let alone to step into it. Arrows could not have passed quickly enough through the flames to escape incineration.

According to two accounts, Peter ran quickly through the fiery corridor. Raymond, however, remembered him pausing halfway through before
continuing to the other side. When later asked why, Peter explained that Christ had stopped him and said, “Since you hesitated about the discovery of the Lance when blessed Andrew showed it to you, you will not cross unhurt; but you will not see hell.”
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A knight, delightfully named William Badboy, supported Peter's story. William spotted another man in priestly raiment, he said, entering the flames just ahead of the prophet. When only one man emerged at the other side, Badboy burst into tears, thinking Peter dead. At least two other people—a priest named Evrard and another knight named, more sedately, William Goodson—saw a bird swoop into the flames, perhaps another sign of divine protection. However it happened and whatever supernatural forces intervened, Peter did emerge at the other end of the corridor of fire, alive, though injured and understandably exhausted.
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Twelve days later he was dead. When Raymond of Aguilers thought on the circumstances, he broke dramatically into the present tense, “But now I am so caught up in care and anxiety that I cannot write further on these things.” His explanation for what happened is almost pitiable. Peter would have survived the ordeal, he argued, if only the riotous crowd had not closed so tightly about him and injured him in its raucous celebration. They sought relics from his clothes and even tore at his flesh.

Peter nearly died on the spot, but the knight Raymond Pilet gathered him up and took him to Raymond of Aguilers's residence. In his chronicle Raymond then slips into the third person, when speaking of himself, saying that Peter called to “the count's chaplain, by the name of Raymond” and demanded to know why he had wanted Peter to go through this ordeal. “I know well enough,” Peter continued, “that you have thought this and this, too.” Raymond denied those thoughts—whatever they were—and Peter snapped at him that the Blessed Virgin and Bishop Adhémar had told the truth. “Raymond recognized himself as guilty before God and burst into bitter tears. Peter replied, ‘Do not despair, for the pious Virgin Mary and St. Andrew have obtained indulgence for you from God.'”

Later, worn out by illness, Peter called Count Raymond and the other Provençal leaders to his bedside, swore once more to the truth of everything he had said, and charged them in good faith to preserve his words. And then he died in peace, being buried at the place where he had undergone
the ordeal, either as a sign of victory over the fire or as a reminder of his failure.

The millenarian crusade had come to an end. All its hopes for a recast social and economic order, with Christ the King and His saintly judges ruling in Jerusalem, were burned and beaten to death during the pointless siege of Arqa.
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P
eter Bartholomew's spectacular failure and death outside of Arqa left a void in both the leadership of the crusade and the meaning of the expedition. Without him, Count Raymond of Saint-Gilles had lost significant prestige. With Peter alive, he had successfully manipulated all of the leaders into joining his siege of Arqa. Through the Holy Lance of Antioch, he had won symbolic prestige and miraculous assistance, punctuated by occasional spectral visits from St. Andrew, Adhémar of le Puy, and even Christ. But the overreaching of Peter Bartholomew had undermined all of Raymond's careful planning. Fortunately, he still had enough followers and money to credibly reclaim control of the expedition. Indeed, in the weeks following Peter Bartholomew's ordeal, he managed, with judicious bribes, to win back the friendship of all the important leaders except Tancred.

Yet barring the sudden conquest of Arqa, military and financial prestige alone would not suffice to assert control of the expedition—the crusade lacked meaning. Peter Bartholomew's apocalyptic vision had provided much of the army with a sense of unity and purpose. After his death the Franks needed not just a new commander to fill the void left by Bohemond's desertion and Raymond's failures. They also needed a new vision—or perhaps a new apocalypse altogether.

An apocalyptic mind-set, as we have seen, had shaped much of the action of the First Crusade. Preachers had proclaimed it. The first waves of soldiers had tried to eradicate the Jews in fulfillment of its prophecies. A vision of the enemy as servants of Antichrist had shaped crusader understanding of the Saracens. And the scale and brutality of warfare would have called to mind stories from the Old Testament and prophecies from Revelation. When Peter Bartholomew revealed the location of the Holy Lance, he was perfectly poised to seize this furor and channel it in whatever direction his passion and his meager knowledge of Scripture suggested.

But with his emphasis on poverty and his desire to remake the social order, Peter subscribed to a very particular type of apocalypticism known as “millenarianism.” It is a very old idea that grows out of Revelation 20, where John describes events following the first defeat of Satan. At that time the beast and his prophet will be cast into a lake of fire, and an angel will consign the dragon, who is the devil, to hell, the doors to be locked for one thousand years. Then there will be a time of peace on earth and government by saints. After the dragon's release at the end of the millennium—John does not say why it must be released, observing only that “it is proper”—the enemy will call together the peoples of Gog and Magog and make one last stand against heaven. It will be short and violent. Fire will consume the devil's armies, and God at last will cast the dragon forever into the lake of fire. Peter Bartholomew perhaps believed or hoped that the crusade was the first of these battles and that the judges he would help to appoint to rule the army and then Jerusalem would inaugurate the era of peace that the Bible had proclaimed.
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Most educated readers in the Middle Ages did not accept this literal interpretation of Revelation 20. At least since the time of St. Augustine in the early fifth century, churchmen had learned to read it allegorically. The age in which they were living, after the Crucifixion, was itself the time of the saints, a symbolic millennium in which the church would gradually expand to fill the entire earth before the advent of Antichrist. Christ would then appear to strike down Satan and to judge the quick and the dead. In
other words, according to Augustine, the millennium was now. Christians were living in the age of peace, the age of the church, awaiting final judgment. Yet the force and popularity of Peter Bartholomew's message showed that a literal interpretation of Revelation 20 remained possible. As Peter himself discovered, however, its vision of peace and perfect justice was dangerous, particularly when applied to a society dominated by a military aristocracy.
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