Armies of Heaven (45 page)

At the Holy Sepulcher, Godfrey shed tears, prayed, and gave thanks to God. Perhaps he also paused to consider the Prophet Isaiah, whose words were being fulfilled around him: “And his Sepulcher will be made glorious.”

Others soon followed his example. They cleaned the gore from their hands but walked barefoot through the still bloody streets, making their way to Christ's tomb, tracking in red footprints and offering sacrifices of peace in the church they believed to mark the center of the world. It was, Raymond of Aguilers believed, a day that would be celebrated annually forevermore with similar processions throughout the world, the day when Christendom was raised up, the pagan world brought low, and the true faith everywhere strengthened. Raymond, perennially disillusioned and unhappy though he may have been, surely must have looked joyfully and expectantly toward the skies in the direction of the Mount of Olives. Prophecy had been fulfilled. The Apocalypse had begun, or perhaps it had ended. How much longer, he and others asked themselves, would Christ's triumphant return be deferred?
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J
erusalem had fallen. What to do now?

The question seems not to have come up before the crusaders' victory in July 1099. The chances that they would actually succeed had probably looked so remote that no one bothered to think beyond the next battle.

Should Jerusalem become a European outpost? A city with a king? A fiefdom of the pope? Some had the impulse to look to Urban II for an answer, but that turned out to be impossible. Back in Europe, he was on his deathbed even as the last battle occurred. He would never hear the news of the grotesque glories wrought because of his pronouncements at Clermont.

In leading a barefoot procession to the Sepulcher of Christ, treading through gore-filled streets, Godfrey may have been trying to give an answer. After “shedding more blood on that day than can be believed,” he struck the pose of a penitent pilgrim and encouraged others to follow his example, to forget plunder, to forget about taking hostages or prisoners, and to meditate for a time on their singular achievement. Godfrey was offering himself as the conscience of the crusade, revealed in the last days of the campaign—if not in the last days of time—as God's own instrument for the advancement of history.

Few other leaders were willing to take control of the apocalypse they had started. Of the original princes, three were gone—Bohemond,
Stephen of Blois, and Hugh the Great. Neither of the two Roberts—Flanders and Normandy—seems to have wanted to stay in the East. They might be kingmakers at Jerusalem, but they would not themselves be kings. Raymond of Saint-Gilles, despite all his missteps and the many failures at Arqa, was one of a very small group who still remained viable as a ruler. The only other contender, in the absence of Bohemond, was Tancred, whose several important military contributions to the crusade (not to mention a few sly political maneuvers) made him an unlikely but credible candidate to govern Jerusalem.

A final struggle for Jerusalem would follow. Of the three men—Godfrey, Raymond, and Tancred—the one to prevail would need to balance the humility of a true Christian with the ferocity necessary to repel Antichrist. For the simple act of accepting the crown of Jerusalem was to invite the onset of the Last Days. Up to this point, Godfrey had not been particularly adept at manipulating prophecy. His public procession around Jerusalem, however, was a brilliant first step in that direction.
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Godfrey's rivals had not performed nearly so well. While Godfrey was weeping at the heart of Jerusalem and the heart of the world, Raymond and Tancred were doing what they would have done in an ordinary war: collecting hostages. They were not alone. Despite the massacre, several hundred Saracens had survived, taken into custody by princes and petty warlords. To do so was an act of both mercy and greed—mercy because the knight had somehow curbed his instinct for killing, greed because hostages would pay ransoms to save their lives and escape the city. Seen from that perspective, to spare an enemy was little different from a practice common among the poor pilgrims—disemboweling Saracen corpses in the hopes of finding gold hidden in their guts. The honorable slaughtered. The avaricious spared.
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Raymond and Tancred were the worst offenders on this front. In the early stages of the battle on July 15, Raymond concentrated his followers at the citadel on the western side of the city, known as the Tower of David. Many high-value hostages had taken shelter inside, including Iftikhar-ad-Daulah, the Fatimid governor of Jerusalem. These men sought a pledge
of security from Raymond, and in return they offered him possession of the citadel, along with a huge sum of money. Raymond, “corrupted by greed,” accepted. He not only let these Saracens leave safely; he even arranged for an escort to accompany them all the way to the Egyptian city of Ascalon. He also began to stock the tower with all of the food and weapons and money he had managed to plunder, as if in preparation for another war—this time against either Tancred or Godfrey for control of the city.
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Tancred, too, took prisoners. Along with another knight named Gaston of Béarn, he spotted a crowd of Saracens atop al-Aqsa mosque (or as the Franks called it, the Temple of Solomon). There were about three hundred men, women, and children, who had made their way to the roof, all now begging for their lives. Benevolently (or avariciously), Tancred and Gaston gave them assurances and Tancred's standard as a sign of protection.

The prisoners stayed there throughout the night, but the next morning a few pilgrims, enraged at the sight of Muslims on what seemed to them a sacred Christian building, “attacked the Saracens, both men and women, cutting off their heads with drawn swords. Some of the Saracens threw themselves headlong from the Temple.” All of them died. Tancred had lost his prizes and was furious, both at his hostages' deaths and at Raymond's success in the same enterprise. Tancred demanded justice, presumably in the form of monetary compensation, and if not justice, revenge.
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The dissensions created by this second, smaller massacre threatened to open new, unbridgeable rifts within the army. That is, until some of the “greater and wiser men” shared their counsel: Rather than allow the Franks to fail through “avarice or sloth or mercy,” they should kill all of the prisoners, regardless of whether they were being held for ransom or even if the ransom had already been paid.
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And so on the third day of the conquest, the final stage of the Jerusalem massacre began. Albert of Aachen was the only writer to describe it. As with his account of the pogroms along the Rhine, he showed a startling degree of empathy for the victims: The Franks “were beheading or striking down with stones girls, women, noble ladies, even pregnant women, and very young children, paying attention to no one's age. By
contrast, girls, women, ladies, tormented by fear of imminent death, and horror-struck by the violent slaughter, were embracing the Christians in their midst even as they were raving and venting their rage on the throats of both sexes, in the hope of saving their lives. Some were wound about the Christians' feet, begging them with piteous weeping and wailing for their lives and safety. When children five or three years old saw the cruel fate of their mothers and fathers, of one accord they intensified the weeping and wretched clamor. But they were making these signals for pity and mercy in vain. The Christians gave over their whole hearts to the slaughter, so that not a suckling little male child or female, not even an infant of one year would escape alive the hand of the murderer. The streets of the whole city of Jerusalem are reported to have been so strewn and covered with the dead bodies of men and women and the mangled limbs of infants, not only in the streets, houses, and palaces, but even in places of desert solitude numbers of slain were to be found.”
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Just enough Saracens were spared so that the Franks might have slaves charged with removing the bodies. Rather than giving a formal burial, these few survivors piled their friends and family in heaps outside the gates. “They made mountains from the bodies. They were as big as houses.” Six months later at Christmas, the bodies were still there. Fulcher of Chartres, the historian who had settled at Edessa, traveled to Jerusalem as a pilgrim for the holiday, and he wrote, “Oh, how great was the stench at that time, both inside and outside the city walls, because of the Saracen corpses, still rotting there, killed when our comrades captured the city! It was so bad that we had to stop up our noses and mouths.”
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During the same meeting when the princes decided to execute all of their prisoners, they also treated another vexed question: Who would rule Jerusalem? And how? On July 17, the day of the third massacre, they did little more than offer prayers and charity, hoping that God would show them the right answer. For the next five days, they argued among themselves, as the various pretenders to the throne made their cases, each trying to present himself as best suited for the job while maintaining due humility.

The topic had been broached only once before, around July 1, when some of the army's clerics had discussed the possibility of making a king. It would be no light undertaking. Kings were semidivine incarnations of secular authority, enforcers of God's will in earthly affairs. The trappings of office dated back to the Old Testament, and all European kings to a degree would have seen themselves as partaking in a form of government created by David in Jerusalem. The Israelite kings were effectively the founding fathers of medieval Europe, their images celebrated in, among other places, the western façade of Notre-Dame, the royal cathedral in Paris. A king of Jerusalem—like a king of France, England, or Germany—would be David's heir, too, only doubly so since he would actually sit in David's city in a direct line of succession to his rule. [Plate 9] To restore a king in Jerusalem, like the crusade itself, was to tinker with the fundamental patterns of history, and not everyone was ready for that.

The chaplain Raymond of Aguilers was especially opposed. His millennial program had failed, and without Peter Bartholomew or an equally visionary prophet—Peter Desiderius does not seem to have captured the army's imagination—he was not sure how to proceed. In fact, given the prophetic implications of crowning someone in Jerusalem, he earnestly believed that there shouldn't be a king there at all. When the topic was first broached during the siege, he said, the bishops and clerics argued that “they ought not elect a king where the Lord had suffered and was crowned, that if the king were to say in his heart, ‘I sit on the throne of David and I hold his kingdom,' his faith and virtue might decline from David's. Perhaps the Lord would bring him to ruin and grow angry at the place and the people.” These clergymen preferred instead to have someone who “would be an ‘advocate,' to guard the city and distribute the tributes and rents collected from the area to the city's guardians.” Others simply wanted a king, and there could be no compromise between these groups, except to delay a decision.
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When the topic came up again after Jerusalem fell, no one heeded Raymond's arguments. There was a strong movement to create a king, though his duties were essentially the same as what the chaplain had envisioned for an advocate: “The princes came together to elect someone as king, who might take care for all, who might collect the tributes in the area, someone to whom the people might run and someone who would
take care lest anyone's land suffer destruction.” Some of the clergy spoke up against the procedure and demanded that the army follow the natural order of things—that is, elect a “spiritual vicar,” a patriarch, first, and then a king who might look after secular affairs. But most everyone rejected this idea, including many priests, and they pushed for an immediate royal election. How greatly had clerical authority diminished, the chaplain Raymond mused, since the death of Adhémar, that second Moses.

Without dwelling on voting procedures, the leaders first offered the crown to Raymond of Saint-Gilles. It was a surprising choice. Even more surprising, Raymond refused. Perhaps he had found his chaplain's arguments about the need for an advocate convincing. Maybe at this juncture his authority was so bound up with the Holy Lance and Peter Bartholomew's millenarianism that he could not accept a crown—the new Jerusalem should be ruled by Christ and saintly judges, not by a man wearing a crown.

More likely, Raymond was trying to emulate Godfrey's July 15 public display of humility. By refusing a crown, he would show that he was, in fact, the only man worthy to wear one. Raymond of Aguilers said only that the count “felt horror at the name of kings in that city.” Another writer suggested that Raymond refused because he “was truly worn down with age and had only one eye.” Whatever his rationale, the barons and priests next turned to Godfrey, who on July 22, 1099, accepted.
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What office he accepted on that day is somewhat unclear. According to historical tradition, he matched Raymond's humility by refusing the title of king, preferring instead to call himself “Advocate of the Holy Sepulcher.” So venerable is this tale, still related earnestly by the Franciscans who today maintain Godfrey's sword and spurs in Jerusalem, that it seems rude to question it. But the tradition is wrong.

Raymond of Aguilers had originally proposed that Jerusalem should not have a king but an advocate. If Godfrey had accepted this title, surely Raymond would have trumpeted the decision? It would have been, for him, a rare victory. Instead, Raymond left the impression that Godfrey, unlike Count Raymond, felt no horror at the name of king and took upon himself all the burdens and privileges of monarchy. Even the writers who did not call Godfrey king, like Fulcher of Chartres or the author of
Deeds of the Franks
, called him “prince” or, in Fulcher's case, “prince of the kingdom.”
Chroniclers writing in Europe in the early twelfth century, by and large, just called Godfrey “king.”
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