Armies of Heaven (46 page)

The best way to resolve these contradictory reports is to conclude that Godfrey compromised: He accepted the office of king but refused to wear a crown. “Never in the city of Jerusalem did he bear the crown of kings, out of reverence for Jesus Christ, the author of our salvation, who because of human mockery there wore a thorny crown.” “Though elected a king,” an epitaph from Godfrey's tomb read, “he preferred not to be so titled, nor to be crowned, but rather to serve Christ.” He preferred not to wear a crown, and the evidence on this point suggests that he did not. He preferred not to be called king, but the evidence on this point is at best ambiguous. The one thing he absolutely did not call himself was “Advocate of the Holy Sepulcher.”
¹¹

Despite the absence of a crown and the ambiguous title, Godfrey's office seemed no less splendid or royal. If anything, it was imperial. As a descendant of Charlemagne, he could make a plausible case to have fulfilled the rumors that had circulated through Lotharingia in 1096 that the first Holy Roman Emperor had returned from the grave and would liberate Jerusalem. More importantly, he could also make a case that he was fulfilling the predictions about the Last World Emperor, the “King of the Greeks and Romans.” As Charlemagne's descendant, he could be king of the Romans. As Alexius's adopted son, he could be king of the Greeks. It might seem a dubious claim, but Godfrey's brother Baldwin had used a similar adoption ceremony to make himself prince of Edessa. In this light, Alexius's words to Godfrey at the time of the supposed ceremony would have seemed portentous: “I am accepting you as my adopted son, and everything that I possess I place in your power, so that through you my empire and my land shall be safe and free from the forces here now and from those still to come.”
¹²

It was a title confirmed by visions, many of them related around the time of Godfrey's election. The first one had occurred ten years before the march to Jerusalem when a knight named Hecelo, after spending a day hunting with Godfrey, dreamed that he saw the duke standing atop Mount Sinai, a new Moses to the Christian people. Mount Sinai was the place where God had handed down the law to Moses and with it the authority to govern, as the Children of Israel wandered through the deserts,
searching, like the Franks, for the Promised Land. In the dream two unnamed men in ecclesiastical garb rushed forward, hailing Godfrey as the “duke and guide for his Christian people,” praying that he might find blessing and grace in the eyes of God, just as Moses had done. Of all the princes to liberate Jerusalem, Albert of Aachen explained, Godfrey was the only one to do so in the spirit of Moses, “preordained by God as spiritual leader of Israel.” Albert did not point out the obvious difference between Godfrey and Moses: that the duke actually did complete his journey and took his people to the Promised Land.
¹³

In another precrusade vision, one of Godfrey's servants, Stabelo, dreamed of a golden ladder stretching from earth to heaven. Godfrey attempted to climb the ladder with another servant named Rothard, who carried a lamp in his hand. Halfway up the ladder, Rothard's lamp went dark. At the same moment, the rung under his foot broke, causing him to retreat down the ladder in fear—unable to arrive safely with the duke at “the heavenly gate” and thus reach “the throne of heaven.” Stabelo then climbed the ladder himself, and he and Godfrey together entered “the court of heaven.” Rothard was a deserter, as Albert of Aachen explained, but Stabelo completed the pilgrimage (and remained a political player in Jerusalem for many years). The ladder was made of gold to signify free will and a pure heart. It reached heaven to demonstrate that Godfrey's entire mind was focused on the city of Jerusalem, “which is the gate to the heavenly homeland.” Earthly and heavenly Jerusalems once more melded together, and our dream interpreter, Albert, did not even mention the obvious royal symbolism here: a heavenly court and a heavenly throne welcoming Godfrey, the new king.
¹⁴

Finally, seven months after the Lotharingians had departed for the East, a cleric named Giselbert, from Aachen, learned in a vision that Godfrey would be “head of all and prince of Jerusalem, foreknown and established by God.” Giselbert saw the duke seated upon the sun, surrounded by innumerable birds. Many of the birds suddenly took flight, for a time obscuring both Godfrey and the light of day. The sun, Albert explained, symbolized Jerusalem, which “surpasses all the cities in the world because of its name and sanctity, just as the sun by its brightness surpasses all the stars of heaven.” To sit upon the sun was to sit “on the throne of the kingdom of Jerusalem.” The birds symbolized the army, some of whom stayed
in the Holy Land out of love for their leader, many of whom returned home upon his death. The choreography of the scene seems deliberately reminiscent of Revelation 19, where an angel standing upon the sun commands the birds of the air to feast upon the kings of the earth.
¹⁵
[Plate 5]

We might add to this list of stories a series of miracles associated with Ida of Boulogne, Godfrey's mother. She developed a reputation during her life for sanctity, based in large part on the achievements of her sons in the Holy Land. In one of her biographies we read that she, too, had a dream of the sun. It appeared to descend from heaven to settle in her lap: a sign of the auspicious lives prepared for her children, including Godfrey, “predestined to be the first King of Jerusalem by a new dispensation.” Revelation 12:5 speaks of a woman clothed in the sun and about to give birth to a child who is to rule the nations of God. [Plate 10] In an imaginative variation on this story, Ida, while pregnant with Godfrey, saw herself standing inside the Holy Sepulcher. She noticed a crucifix suspended from the ceiling, and she wished to abase herself before it. Instead of receiving her worship, however, the image of Christ came to life and lowered itself to pay homage to her womb since the child therein would liberate the city where He had died.
¹⁶

Godfrey may not have a worn a crown, but he was still a figure of royal and imperial dignity—just what Jerusalem needed as it prepared for the next confrontation with the minions of Antichrist and perhaps with Antichrist himself.

Soon after the election, Godfrey demanded that Raymond turn over the Tower of David. Raymond, naturally, refused. He explained that he and his men intended to stay in the region until Easter 1100 and needed a suitable place to live. His feud with Bohemond over Antioch seemed destined to replay itself in Jerusalem. This time, however, he was to be even less successful in staking out a position in the city.

Godfrey was a more formidable adversary than Bohemond. He was also more popular. The two Roberts sided with him, and several of Raymond's own men, who wished to return to Occitania as soon as possible, secretly opposed the count. Under pressure, Raymond agreed to give
over the tower to his new right-hand man, Bishop Peter of Albara, in anticipation of a trial. Peter, however, handed it directly to Godfrey, claiming later that he had been threatened with violence if he did not do so and hinting as well that Raymond's own men had been the ones who had threatened him. His honor lost, Raymond and his entourage left the city. As the chaplain Raymond bleakly summed up the affair, “And so the feuds multiplied.”
¹⁷

Once a likely candidate for kingship, now unwelcome in Jerusalem, Raymond had only one stratagem left. He and his few remaining men one last time paid homage to their fallen prophet. For Peter Bartholomew had given the count one set of instructions he had yet to fulfill. When Peter had first approached him and Bishop Adhémar with news of the Holy Lance, he had described how they ought to behave at the end of the crusade. From Jerusalem Raymond was to go to Jericho. There he would cross the Jordan, but he must do so in a boat and not on foot. On the other side, he would clothe himself in a shirt and a pair of linen breeches and allow himself to be sprinkled with water from the river. Once his clothes had dried, he would set them aside, thenceforth to be preserved with the Holy Lance.
¹⁸

When Raymond arrived at Jericho, his retinue could not find a boat. He therefore ordered them to build one from tree branches so that he might cross the river while staying dry. The chaplain Raymond exhorted everyone to pray for the lives of the count and of the other princes. Raymond of Saint-Gilles then stepped forward, wearing only a shirt and a new pair of breeches as ordered, and Raymond of Aguilers baptized him at the same place and in the same fashion as John the Baptist had baptized Christ. But the chaplain's patience was wearing thin: “Why the man of God would have ordered these things, I still don't know.” When they returned to Jerusalem in early August, they would learn that Arnulf of Choques, chaplain to Robert of Normandy, Peter Bartholomew's prosecutor, and chief of the doubters of the Holy Lance, had been elected patriarch of Jerusalem.
¹⁹

Two months later, perhaps still puzzling over the judgments of God and wondering just what that last bit of pantomime at the Jordan had meant, the two Raymonds, count and chaplain, were staying in Latakia, a Syrian port city under the control of Byzantium. There they had met a
man named Daimbert, Archbishop of Pisa, now acting as papal legate, sent from Rome to fill the void left by Adhémar's death. Daimbert was delighted to encounter veterans of the crusade. They could help him compose a letter to send to the new pope, Paschal II, to update him on the situation in Jerusalem. Based on the letter's style and content, Raymond of Aguilers appears to have written the entire document in Daimbert's name, and with a few strokes of the pen, he managed to reshape the history of the end of the crusade. He did it not so much with the letter's content but with its salutation, signed on behalf of Archbishop Daimbert, Count Raymond of Saint-Gilles, and Godfrey, now styled “Advocate of the Holy Sepulcher.”

The letter circulated widely. Over time it became one of the most frequently read descriptions of the crusade in medieval Europe. Godfrey had had no input into its content—he had long since parted company with Raymond—which explains why in this one instance he bore the title “Advocate,” the office that the chaplain Raymond and his party had tried to force upon him at Jerusalem but that Godfrey had refused. And thanks to the wide circulation of this letter, the title stuck. Historians, clerics, and tourists to Jerusalem embraced the idea of Godfrey the Advocate, too humble to be a king. For the first time perhaps since the discovery of the Lance, Raymond had won an argument. He had never liked the idea of a king in Jerusalem, and in history, if not in life, the millenarian had his revenge.
²⁰

 

 

 

 

T
he crusade was not yet ended. Near the beginning of August, at about the same time Raymond was bathing in the River Jordan, Tancred and Godfrey's older brother Eustace learned that a massive Egyptian army—Turks, Persians, Syrians, Agarenes, Arabs, and “the rest of the infidel people from Eastern nations”—was coming together to attack the Franks. Unbelievably, the exhausted soldiers—their numbers greatly reduced by battle, starvation, famine, and desertion—having just secured an astonishing, near unimaginable triumph at Jerusalem, still had one more battle to fight.

Tancred and Eustace sent warnings back to Godfrey. The Franks, under the king's leadership, decided to ride out to face the enemy rather than risk being caught in an intractable siege. It was by this point a venerable strategy: Catch a numerically superior foe by surprise while it is still on the march and while its leaders were anticipating a later battle at a fixed location. The Franks would meet the Egyptians at Ascalon, the port city where less than a month earlier Raymond had escorted his ransomed prisoners from the Tower of David. Devising a strategy at this point was relatively easy. The more difficult task would be to re-create the apocalyptic fervor that had driven the crusade to those earlier victories. The pilgrim-warriors had captured their prize. They were ready to go home.
¹

For this problem Godfrey, or perhaps his patriarch, Arnulf, employed another well-worn strategy: the discovery of a miraculous relic. Sources
in the local Christian community maintained that they had recently possessed a small fragment of the True Cross but that it had been lost. Such a prize would do nicely.

This time there was no Peter Bartholomew to reveal its whereabouts. Godfrey and Arnulf had to rely on more conventional methods: putting out inquiries among the locals and asking if anyone knew where the relic might be. After several denials a Syrian gentleman reluctantly admitted where to find the True Cross. “It is clear that God has chosen you and delivered you from every tribulation, and that He has bestowed upon you this city and many others, not because of your virtue or strength, but because of His own fury. Your Lord and Leader has opened for you extraordinarily well-fortified cities and through Him you have won fearsome battles. Since we see that God is on your side, by what stubbornness should we hide from you His treasures?” He then led Arnulf to an abandoned house and showed him a darkened corner where the Syrian had a year earlier buried away the sacred treasure out of fear that the Egyptians would destroy it.
²

What they unearthed was a cross-shaped reliquary made of wood and decorated in gold and silver. Inside was a smaller piece of wood—a particle of the True Cross, a
particula
—also shaped like a cross. There were similar fragments scattered throughout the world—not enough to build a battleship, as conventional wisdom held, but probably enough to build one very big cross. Compared with more significant portions at Rome and Constantinople, this particle must have seemed unremarkable. Because of its location, however, and because of its nearly miraculous delivery from the Saracens, the Franks believed it especially valuable. Quickly, instinctively, they organized a procession to carry it to Mount Calvary and the Holy Sepulcher and then to the Temple Mount, under the leadership of Arnulf and Peter the Hermit, who was now working closely with the new regime.
³