Fields of Blood (40 page)

The Crusades made anti-Semitic
violence a chronic disease in Europe: every time a Crusade was summoned,
Christians would first attack Jews at home. This persecution was certainly inspired by religious conviction, but social, political, and economic elements were also involved. The Rhineland cities were developing the market economy that would eventually replace agrarian civilization; they were therefore in the very early stages of modernization, a transition that always strains social relations. After the demise of the
Roman Empire, town life had declined, so there was virtually no
commerce and no merchant class.
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Toward the end of the eleventh century, however, increased productivity had given aristocrats a taste for luxury. To meet their demands, a class of specialists—masons, craftsmen, and merchants—had emerged from the peasantry, and the consequent exchanges of money and goods led to the rebirth of the towns.
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The nobility’s resentment of the
vilain
(“upstart”) from the lower classes who was acquiring wealth that they regarded as theirs by right may also have fueled the violence of the German Crusaders, since Jews were particularly associated with this disturbing social change.
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In the episcopally administered Rhineland cities, the townsfolk had been trying for decades to shake off feudal obligations that impeded commerce, but their bishop-rulers had particularly conservative views on
trade.
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There was also tension between rich merchants and poorer artisans, and when the bishops tried to protect the Jews, it appears these less affluent townsfolk joined the Crusaders in the killing.

Crusaders would always be motivated by social and economic factors as well as by religious zeal. Crusading was especially appealing to the
juventus,
the knightly “youth,” who completed their military training by roaming freely around the countryside in search of adventure. Primed for violent action, these knights errant were free of the restraints of settled existence, and their lawlessness might account for some of the crusading
atrocities.
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Many of the first Crusaders came from regions in northeastern
France and western Germany that had been devastated by years of flooding, plague, and
famine and may simply have wanted to leave an intolerable life.
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There were also inevitably adventurers, robbers, renegade monks, and brigands in the Crusading hordes, many doubtless drawn by dreams of wealth and fortune as well as a “restless heart.”
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The leaders of the First Crusade, which left Europe in the autumn of 1096, also had mixed motives for joining the expedition.
Bohemund, count of Taranto in southern
Italy, had a very small fief and made no
secret of his worldly ambitions: he left the Crusade at the first opportunity to become Prince of
Antioch. His nephew
Tancred, however, found in the Crusade the answer to a spiritual dilemma. He had “burned with anxiety” because he could not reconcile his profession of fighting with the gospel and had even considered the monastic life. But as soon as he heard Pope
Urban’s summons, “his eyes opened, his courage was born.”
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Godfrey of Bouillon, meanwhile, was inspired by the Cluniac ideal that saw fighting the Church’s enemies as a spiritual vocation, but his brother
Baldwin merely wanted fame, fortune, and an estate in the East.

The terrifying experience of Crusading soon changed their views and expectations.
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Many of the Crusaders had never left their villages; now they were thousands of miles from home, shut off from everything they had known, and surrounded by fearsome enemies in alarming terrain. When they arrived at the
Ante-Taurus range, many were paralyzed by terror, gazing at these precipitous mountains “in a great state of gloom, wringing their hands because they were so frightened and miserable.”
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The
Turks operated a scorched-earth policy, so there was no food, and the poorer noncombatants and soldiers died like flies. Chroniclers report that during the siege of Antioch:

The Crusaders soon realized that they were badly led and inadequately provisioned. They also knew that they were massively outnumbered. “Where we have a count, the enemy has forty kings; where we have a regiment, the enemy has a legion,” wrote the bishops who accompanied the expedition in their joint letter home; “where we have a castle, they have a kingdom.”
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Even so, they could not have arrived at a more opportune moment. Not only was the
Seljuk Empire disintegrating, but the sultan had recently died, and the emirs were fighting one another for the succession. Had the Turks preserved a united front, the Crusade could not have succeeded. The Crusaders knew nothing about local politics, and their
understanding was derived almost entirely from their religious views and prejudices. Onlookers described the Crusading armies as a monastery on the march. At every crisis there were processions, prayers, and a special liturgy. Even though they were famished, they fasted before an engagement and listened as attentively to sermons as to battle instructions. Starving men had visions of
Jesus, the saints, and deceased Crusaders who were now glorious
martyrs in Heaven. They saw angels fighting alongside them, and at one of the lowest moments of the siege of Antioch, they discovered a holy relic—the lance that had pierced
Christ’s side—which so elated the despairing men that they surged out of the city and put the besieging
Turks to flight. When they finally succeeded in conquering Jerusalem on July 15, 1099, they could only conclude that God had been with them. “Who could not marvel at the way we, a small people among such kingdoms of our enemies, were able not just to resist them but survive?” wrote the chaplain,
Fulcher of Chartres.
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War has been aptly described as “a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships.”
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The First Crusade was especially psychotic. From all accounts, the Crusaders seemed half-crazed. For three years they had had no normal dealings with the world around them, and prolonged terror and malnutrition made them susceptible to abnormal states of mind. They were fighting an enemy that was not only culturally but ethnically different—a factor that, as we have found in our own day, tends to nullify normal inhibitions—and when they fell on the inhabitants of Jerusalem, they slaughtered some thirty thousand people in three days.
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“They killed all the
Saracens and Turks they found,” the author of the
Deeds of the Franks
reported approvingly. “They killed everyone, male or female.”
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The streets ran with blood.
Jews were rounded up into their synagogue and put to the sword, and ten thousand Muslims who had sought sanctuary in the
Haram al-Sharif were brutally massacred. “Piles of heads, hands and feet were to be seen,” wrote the Provençal chronicler
Raymond of Aguilers: “Men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins. Indeed, it was a just and splendid judgment of God that this place should be filled with the blood of unbelievers.”
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There were so many dead that the Crusaders were unable to dispose of the bodies. When Fulcher of Chartres came to celebrate Christmas in Jerusalem five months later, he was appalled by the stench from the rotting corpses that still lay unburied in the fields and ditches around the city.
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When they could kill no more, the Crusaders proceeded to the Church
of the Resurrection, singing hymns with tears of joy rolling down their cheeks. Beside the
Tomb of
Christ, they sang the Easter liturgy. “This day, I say, will be famous in all future ages, for it turned our labors and sorrows into joy and exultation,” Raymond exulted. “This day, I say, marks the justification of all Christianity, the humiliation of paganism, the renewal of faith.”
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Here we have evidence of another psychotic disconnect: the
Crusaders were standing beside the tomb of a man who had been a victim of human cruelty, yet they were unable to question their own violent behavior. The
ecstasy of battle, heightened in this case by years of terror, starvation, and isolation, merged with their religious mythology to create an illusion of utter righteousness. But victors are never blamed for their crimes, and chroniclers soon described the conquest in Jerusalem as a turning point in history.
Robert the Monk made the astonishing claim that its importance had been exceeded only by the creation of the world and
Jesus’s crucifixion.
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As a consequence, Muslims were now regarded in the West as a “vile and abominable race,” “despicable, degenerate and enslaved by demons,” “absolutely alien to God,” and “fit only for extermination.”
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This holy war and the ideology
that inspired it represented a complete denial of the pacifist strain in Christianity. It was also the first imperial venture of the Christian West as, after centuries of stagnation, it fought its way back onto the international scene. Five Crusader states were established, in Jerusalem,
Antioch, Galilee, Edessa, and Tripoli. These states needed a standing army, and the Church completed its canonization of warfare by giving monks a sword: the Knights Hospitaler of St. John were founded originally to care for poor and sick pilgrims, and the Knights Templar, housed in the Aqsa Mosque on the Haram, policed the roads. They took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience to their military commander, and because they were far more disciplined than ordinary knights, they became the most professional fighting force in the West since the Roman legions.
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Saint Bernard, abbot of the new Cistercian abbey of Clairvaux, had no time for regular knights, who with their fine clothes, jeweled bridles, and delicate hands were motivated only by “irrational anger, hunger for empty glory, or hankering after some earthly possessions.”
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The Templars, however, combined the meekness of monks with military power, and their sole motivation was to kill the enemies of Christ. A Christian, Bernard said, should exult when he saw these “pagans” “scattered,” “cut away,” and “dispersed.”
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The ideology of these first Western colonies was permeated through and through with religion, but although later Western imperialism was inspired by a more secular ideology, it would often share the ruthlessness and aggressive righteousness of Crusading.

The Muslims were stunned by the Crusaders’ violence. By the time they reached Jerusalem, the Franj (“
Franks”) had already acquired a fearsome reputation; it was said that they had killed more than a hundred thousand people at Antioch, and that during the siege they had roamed the countryside, wild with hunger, openly vowing to eat the flesh of any
Saracen who crossed their path.
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But Muslims had never experienced anything like the Jerusalem massacre. For over three hundred years they had fought all the great regional powers, but these wars had always been conducted within mutually agreed limits.
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Muslim sources reported in horror that the Franks did not spare the elderly, the women, or the sick; they even slaughtered devout ulema, “who had left their homelands to live lives of pious seclusion in the holy place.”
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Despite this appalling beginning, not only was there no major Muslim offensive against the Franks for nearly fifty years, but the Crusaders were accepted as part of the political makeup of the region. The Crusader states fitted neatly into the
Seljuk pattern of small, independent tributary states, and when emirs fought one another, they often made alliances with Frankish rulers.
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For the
Turkish commanders, the ideals of classical jihad were dead, and when the Crusaders had arrived, no “volunteers” had rushed to defend the frontiers. No longer poised to resist foreign invasion, the emirs had been lax in their defense of the borders; they were unconcerned about the “infidel” presence, since they were too intent on their campaigns against one another. Even though the Crusading ideal resonated with
ahadith that saw jihad as a form of monasticism, the first Muslim chroniclers to record the Crusade completely failed to recognize the Franks’ religious passion and assumed that they were driven simply by material greed. They all realized that the Franks owed their success to their own failure to form a united front, but after the Crusade there was still no serious attempt to band together. For their part, the Franks who stayed in the
Holy Land realized that their survival depended on their ability to coexist with their Muslim neighbors and soon lost their rabid prejudice. They assimilated with the local culture
and learned to take baths, dress in the Turkish style, and speak the local languages; they even married Muslim women.