Armies of Heaven (48 page)

None fell harder than Robert of Normandy, the hero of the battle of Ascalon. He returned home to great fanfare and nearly to a great stroke of fortune as well. In August 1100 his younger brother King William of England, to whom he had mortgaged his duchy in order to pay for his crusade, died in a hunting accident on the eve of Robert's return from the East. Before Robert could lay claim to both kingdom and duchy, however, his youngest brother, Henry, established himself in William's place as king of England. Five years later Henry would defeat Robert at the battle of Tinchebrai and would hold his brother, the crusade hero, a prisoner for the remaining twenty-eight years of his life, a man largely forgotten by the time of his death.

Siding with Henry in this conflict was none other than Robert of Flanders. In 1103, in a treaty negotiated between the two rulers, he pledged to provide one thousand warriors to the English king should he choose to invade Normandy. So fleeting and fragile did the ties formed on the road to Jerusalem prove to be. It was just one of many shrewd decisions made by Count Robert upon his return to his increasingly prosperous and urbanized homeland. Until his death in 1111, he proved himself a capable and effective ruler. He also drew upon the mystique of the crusade, occasionally styling himself “the Jerusalemite” on legal proclamations. From time to time, though, during the last five years of his life, as he thought about his pilgrim comrade imprisoned in an English castle, he must have questioned the decisions he had made after 1101 in the name of political expediency.
³

Unlike Robert, Stephen of Blois and Hugh the Great were never able to settle comfortably back into Europe. These two men, who at varying times had harbored pretensions of leading the crusade, both returned home in disgrace, having abandoned the armies during and just after the siege of Antioch, respectively. Both men faced intense public pressure to return to the Holy Land and make right their cowardice. Stephen in particular became a popular figure of ridicule. A later poet writing an epic poem of the crusade chose to present Stephen as a pitiable weakling, trembling visibly before every battle and constantly trying to desert. A Norman monk named Orderic Vitalis, writing around 1120, liked to imagine Stephen's wife, Adela of Blois, calling him a coward in the midst of their conjugal embraces. In 1101 both Hugh and Stephen joined a new
crusade intended to shore up the gains of the first expedition. Hugh died of battle wounds in October 1101 in the city of Tarsus. Stephen at least made it to Jerusalem, but he died a few weeks later fighting alongside Baldwin I at Ramla. Despite their good endings, most knights in Europe never forgave them their character failures or the abandonment of their friends at Antioch.
⁴

Some of the princes never returned to Europe, Count Raymond of Saint-Gilles among them. His reputation had obviously suffered toward the end of the crusade, owing to his connection with Peter Bartholomew, his constant wrangling with Bohemond over Antioch, and his inability to match the political and spiritual savvy of Godfrey of Bouillon at the fall of Jerusalem. Still, he might have gone home to Toulouse a hero had not the allure of a Middle Eastern principality maintained a hold on his imagination. After his encounter with Daimbert of Pisa at Latakia in 1099, where his chaplain wrote a letter proclaiming Godfrey “Advocate of the Holy Sepulcher,” Raymond sailed to Constantinople and stayed for a time with the Emperor Alexius. When word reached him in 1101 that a new crusade was coming from Europe, he decided to join it and spent the next two years sometimes fighting against Turks, sometimes fighting against Tancred, now based in Antioch. In 1102 Raymond's attentions returned to Tripoli, the city whose wealth and prestige had first drawn his attention in 1099 in the final stages of the original crusade. In 1103, after capturing a couple of nearby coastal cities, he built a castle on a hill outside Tripoli and dug in for a long siege. It lasted six years before the city finally fell. Raymond himself died in 1105, his dreams of a new principality still unrealized.

Most puzzling of all is the case of Bohemond. The great hero of the crusade, the military genius who had led the Franks to a series of improbable or impossible victories over the Seljuk Turks, he withdrew from the campaign before its final chapter in the name of establishing a Frankish state around Antioch. It was to be an enduring political creation, lasting for 170 years. But Bohemond himself played little part in securing its survival. In August 1100, just two years after the defeat of Kerbogah, he made an ill-advised expedition to the north and was captured by a Turkish amir. He would spend the next three years in prison and would escape only by paying a massive ransom and promising military support to his captors
against their Muslim rivals. A year later he would sail for Europe and with the blessing of the pope would begin organizing a new crusade, this one to be fought against his traditional enemy, the Emperor Alexius. As part of this new campaign, Bohemond traveled all over France and Flanders delivering sermons that condemned the Greeks, that celebrated the crusade, and that placed himself squarely at the center of things—securing his reputation to this day as the greatest hero of the First Crusade. The new expedition, however, fizzled. After a months-long siege of the Byzantine port city of Durazzo, through which so many of the Frankish armies had passed in 1096 and 1097, Bohemond surrendered to Alexius almost unconditionally, returning in quiet disgrace to his homeland in southern Italy. His remains lie today in the Italian town of Canosa di Puglia, just outside the cathedral. The mausoleum, which Bohemond surely designed for himself, was built in the style of a Greek imperial tomb. From the grave he thus continues to threaten the empire, long after it had finally, decisively, defeated him.

Of all the major crusade leaders, only Godfrey left this world with his reputation intact—perhaps because he died in 1100, less than a year after the victory at Ascalon. Like a medieval JFK, his followers were free to imagine the long reign that he might have had and to paint him as whatever sort of hero they wished him to be.

The lesser lords, Godfrey's brother Baldwin and Bohemond's nephew Tancred, were the only ones who put together truly lengthy and impressive careers as crusading princes. Baldwin, of course, established the first crusader state around the city of Edessa. Two years later, in 1100, he claimed the throne of Jerusalem immediately after his brother's death. Within a year he also overcame whatever scruples his brother had felt about wearing a crown in the Holy City, proclaiming himself defiantly king of Jerusalem and governing from the Aqsa Mosque, or as he preferred to call it, the Temple of Solomon.

Tancred, meanwhile, beginning in 1100, ruled Antioch as regent after Bohemond's imprisonment. His effective administration probably helps to explain why his uncle abandoned the Levant for Europe shortly after his release from captivity in 1103. The giant was a fine battlefield commander and an inspirational figure, but when it came to managing the
day-to-day affairs of a principality, his nephew seems to have been better suited for the job. Tancred continued to rule Antioch, albeit as regent in the name of Bohemond's infant son, until his death from ill health in 1111.

It is remarkable, and probably no coincidence, that the two men who first broke from the main armies in 1097 in order to explore political opportunities in Armenia were also the most successful rulers in the Latin East. Working in the shadows of more famous relatives, they learned the ruthlessness and cunning needed to survive in the frontier societies of eleventh-century Syria and Palestine. When the apocalypse finally calmed in 1100, Baldwin and Tancred were the men best prepared to impose a new order onto the madness they had helped create.

 

BALDWIN AND TANCRED'S careers also serve as a fitting symbol for the First Crusade's historical legacy: a two-hundred-year saga of continual warfare, increasingly disastrous for Europe, a dark chapter in Western history that most would rather forget but that recent events in what we call the “war on terror” suggest we ought to remember. Given what we know of the eventual scope of the crusades, of their political importance, of the poisonous effect that their memory continues to exert on relations between adherents of Christianity and Islam, why should we concern ourselves with the failed and eventually forgotten prophetic dreams of those first unfortunate souls who set their culture onto this nightmarish path?

Apocalypses and history are, from any perspective, uncomfortable bedfellows. History is the study of what happened, and the Apocalypse, by definition, hasn't happened. At least not yet. When it does, there will be no more history. People still believe in apocalypses. They still think one to be imminent. They have done so interminably, and they will probably always do so. Historians are only now learning to appreciate the importance of this recurring phenomenon. Thanks to the work of my colleague Richard Landes, for example, most historians now admit that some, and perhaps many, European men and women looked expectantly, either hopefully or fearfully, toward the year 1000 and then 1033 as likely times for the Apocalypse. We have seen in this book how thousands of German pilgrims felt similarly about the year 1064. In all three cases, the years passed, Christ did not return, and memory of those expectations largely, but not completely, faded from historical memory.

The First Crusade is different. It was an apocalypse that for a time worked. The grandest predictions were fulfilled. Christian armies marched east, they witnessed miracles, they bathed in rivers of blood, and they remade history. The crusade then became part of an ongoing Apocalypse. As late as 1120, many highly educated people still believed that they were witnessing the Last Days. Theirs was a shared Apocalypse, a lived Apocalypse, an Apocalypse without end.

History had been transformed, these educated observers would have sworn. And they would have been correct. Their world was in the process of being remade, although perhaps not because of what had happened in Jerusalem.

Every facet of life around the year 1100 was in the midst of some sort of transformation. Medieval historians have long written about the years 1050–1200 in these terms. It was the time of the twelfth-century renaissance, the age of medieval humanism, the era of the discovery of the individual. As tempting as it is to say otherwise, the First Crusade did not cause all of these changes associated with “the Long Twelfth Century.” In many respects it was a product of the early phases of this movement—a product of the economic, political, and intellectual revivals just gaining traction in the later eleventh century. But the First Crusade was a catalyst for all of the social, intellectual, and economic changes that followed. Western European Christians in the twelfth century believed themselves not just to be witnessing history but also to be remaking history, working in concert with the divine plan, serving as instruments of God's will rather than suffering through life as objects of His wrath. And they believed this, I am suggesting, because for a time—in fact, for decades—they were living with an ongoing Apocalypse. They were God's agents remaking the world in preparation not for history's end but for its culmination. Let us consider for a few moments what some of the effects of this continuing Apocalypse were.
⁵

One of the most famous, if troubling, formulations of what happened in the twelfth century is that of Colin Morris, who defined it as the time of “the discovery of the individual.” It is an esoteric idea, but one not without bases in the sources. As even a cursory reading of twelfth-century history will indicate, it was an era that developed a new fascination with questions of psychology, motivation, and internal spiritual life.

For these widespread concerns we ought to consider the First Crusade a primary cause. The application of the crusade indulgence as proclaimed by Urban II required confessors all across Europe to sort through the intentions and personalities of warriors who had accomplished great things in the East but who were, on the face of it, wholly irredeemable. To understand the erratic violence of a man like Raimbold Croton (who lost a hand while trying to scale the walls of Jerusalem and who would later castrate a monk at home), the inexplicable cowardice of Stephen of Blois, or the myriad contradictions that together created Bohemond of Antioch required speculation and investigations of intention and psychology on a grand scale. If anything necessitated a discovery of the individual, interpreting the First Crusade did.
⁶

The apocalyptic First Crusade could also be seen as playing a part in the establishment of national identities, particularly in France. The argument grows in part out of a habit of thought that by now is easily recognizable : the tendency to conflate the Israelites of the Old Testament with the Franks. This association was one of the “revealed truths” contained in Revelation. The new Judah, the true Chosen People, would step out of the allegorical shadows of the Jews and claim their rightful inheritance. The Franks, in this case, were the new Jews, but they also saw themselves as better than the Jews. It was a theological point that even Saracen characters—specifically, Kerbogah's mother—understood: “What had been with the Jews was transferred to these nations by the gift of adoption.” And this idea could help to justify some of the crusaders'most questionable actions, such as the massacres at Jerusalem, which according to one observer did not grow from tactical necessity but from a desire not to repeat the mistakes of King Saul: “They spared neither women nor children, remembering, I think, King Saul, who spared Agag and thus incurred the wrath of God and perished.” For God had ordered Saul, the first king of Israel, to destroy the Amalekites completely, “man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.” Saul, however, spared their king, Agag, and preserved some of their most valuable possessions. As a result, God rejected Saul as king and promoted David in his place. Godfrey's army avoided that error.
⁷