Armies of Heaven (11 page)

Upon their arrival there about two weeks later, the Franks received a surprisingly civilized reception from their former enemy Nicetas. He quickly agreed to open the city markets to Peter, and Peter in turn agreed to hand over hostages as pledges of his army's good conduct. But at this point, either Peter had begun to lose control of his followers or perhaps the Bulgarians had begun to weary of the Franks. This was, after all, the second major army in less than two weeks to have stopped at Nish in order to replenish its supplies. Whatever the case, haggling between some soldiers and a merchant turned ugly, and the soldiers set fire to several mills and a handful of houses outside the city. The citizens immediately took complaints to Nicetas, observing to him, with admirable understatement, that “Peter and all his followers were false Christians—thieves, even—and not peaceful men.” The governor ordered a punitive raid against the back of Peter's slow-moving forces, where the weak and unarmed were concentrated, walking alongside the wagons and the supplies. The Bulgarians seized whatever food and cattle they could find, killed and beheaded the old and the infirm, and enslaved some of the women and children.

By the time Peter had heard of the troubles, the attack had ended. Perhaps he should have pushed on at this point, but a Frankish sense of honor demanded either that they retaliate against Nicetas or else that they seek some other form of justice from him. Peter therefore turned the army around, and negotiations began anew. Some of his followers, however,
had no patience for further talk. Around 2,000 “hard-headed and thoughtless young men, a wild and undisciplined sort of people,” attacked the city in the hopes of undermining any potential peace talks. Then once negotiations had begun, they started loading up their wagons to press the crusade back into motion, hoping to force Peter to abandon what seemed pointless debate and deliberation.

Their activity did not pass unnoticed. When Nicetas saw what must have seemed inexplicable movements within Peter's armies, he ordered a full-fledged assault. The crusaders panicked. Men and women fell into the river and drowned. They were shot down with arrows fired from the ramparts of the city walls. They were cut down or imprisoned. All of their money and supplies, including a wagon full of gold and silver, were captured. Peter himself with only a few companions ran into the woods that surrounded Nish. They wandered without direction on the thickly forested hills. As far as they knew, all of their companions had been killed, their crusade ended in disaster.
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Peter himself managed to work his way up a mountain near the city, and by the time he had reached the top, he had gathered together about fifty of his followers, including Godfrey Burel and Walter of Breteuil, both of whom had been offered as hostages to Nicetas. Unsure how many, if any, of their companions, once as numerous as the sands of the sea, had survived, Peter ordered his men to sound trumpets and to make as great a noise as possible. By the time the sun had set, as Albert of Aachen told it, 7,000 pilgrims, dazed and groggy, emerged from the forest. They marched to a nearby deserted town (its citizens had probably left out of fear of what Peter might do to them) and camped outside its walls, living on whatever grains they could scavenge, waiting to see how many more of their companions had escaped and might yet return to them. Miraculously, a full three-quarters of the army found their way to Peter's camp.

In the meantime, unknown to Peter, Nicetas had written to the Emperor Alexius II to warn him about the latest Frankish army and to ask for advice. The emperor, who now would have known about Walter's army as well, took the situation in hand, sending envoys to Peter. They found him near the city of Sophia, a little over one hundred miles from Nish, and brought both a stern message and welcome news. Alexius, they informed
Peter, was displeased because “your army has plundered and created chaos throughout his territory.” Nonetheless, Alexius forgave Peter his trespasses and instructed the governors in all his cities to open their markets to him provided that Peter did not disturb any one place for more than three days, kept the peace, and made his way to Constantinople as quickly as possible. Once more, and for the first time since Zemun, Peter rejoiced at his good fortune.
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It was a remarkable achievement. A charismatic hermit, who had embraced poverty and believed that God had sent him a message from heaven, had raised an army of several thousand Christians and had managed to hold it together on a long and dangerous march. That discipline broke down outside of Nish, after more than two months and one thousand miles of marching, is less remarkable than that the apocalyptic doctrine Peter had espoused was powerful enough to keep his followers so focused and organized that most of them safely reached Constantinople.

Five days after leaving Sophia, Peter stopped at Philippopolis, where Walter's army had been just ten days earlier. There, Peter, “insignificant in stature but great in voice and in heart,” told crowds of locals about his sufferings and his adventures. Though he undoubtedly needed to speak through an interpreter, many were moved to tears, and listeners lined up to give him and his followers money, food, horses, and mules. No doubt a few listeners pledged themselves to his cause, too. Peter also would have taken a moment to visit the grave of the cross-decorated Walter of Poissy, whom he had recruited just to the north of Paris while traveling with his entourage of beggars and redeemed prostitutes.
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IN THE MEANTIME, three other armies, organized by preachers and at least one prophet, were closely following Peter's footsteps. All of them seem to have departed around the end of April 1096. One, estimated at over 10,000 men and women, was led by a monk named Folkmar, who had given up his vows and abandoned his monastery to pursue dreams of Jerusalem. Folkmar chose a slightly different path from Walter and Peter, leading his followers into Bavaria and, apparently, through Prague. There, around June 1, his message inspired yet another pogrom against the Jews. His army also seemed to have had fewer aristocrats among its leaders; an
observer in Prague wrote that, in the wake of the army's departure, “hardly any farmers remained in the towns and villages in German lands, particularly in East Francia.”

Folkmar had the misfortune to enter Hungary shortly after King Coloman had ordered his attack against Peter the Hermit at Zemun. Coloman had by now repeatedly given the Frankish armies the benefit of the doubt. For Folkmar's warrior band, composed largely of agricultural laborers, neither the king nor his subjects had any patience. During negotiations for markets at the city of Nitra, “trouble was stirred up.” The locals responded swiftly: They put part of Folkmar's army to the sword and enslaved many of the rest. A few crusaders managed to escape and make their way back to Europe. To save face for having abandoned the cause, they explained that a cross had appeared in the sky to guide them away from Nitra and save them from immediate destruction.
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FURTHER DETAILS on Folkmar's experiences in Hungary are vague. The story of another army, led by a priest called Gottschalk, might help fill some of the gaps.

Gottschalk heard Peter the Hermit preach the liberation of Jerusalem and took inspiration from his message to raise his own army. According to Albert of Aachen, it numbered around 15,000 people, who, like Peter's army, took the land route into Hungary toward the end of April. They arrived at Moson, Coloman's capital, around June 20, just about the time Coloman began to hear rumors of trouble all along the pilgrimage route and involving all three of the Frankish armies that he had welcomed into his kingdom. Perhaps this is why Coloman held Gottschalk's men up a little longer around Moson. Or perhaps Coloman was just beginning to recognize what an economic crisis the pilgrims might represent. In any case, the delays led to restlessness among the pilgrims, who began to plunder wine, grain, and livestock for their own use. One market deal turned particularly sour, and a group of pilgrims—to express their displeasure as vividly as possible—drove a spear through a young Hungarian man's anus. Word traveled back to the king, and he ordered all the pilgrims slaughtered to a man. It is probably then that Coloman ordered similar attacks against Peter's armies at Zemun and Folkmar's at Nitra.

Battle lines were drawn near a church dedicated to St. Martin about thirty miles southeast of Moson. But neither side was terribly anxious to engage the other. The pilgrims must have recognized that they were outnumbered and outarmed. The Hungarian generals suspected that the pilgrims were willing to fight to the very end—they were far from home and desperate and as soldiers of God believed that death in this alien land would ensure them a welcome into heaven.

The Hungarians therefore proposed a truce. King Coloman, they announced, would restore the pilgrims to favor and freely open his markets to them provided that the pilgrims temporarily surrendered their weapons. “If, indeed, you surrender them to the king with all the money you have, you might soothe his anger and find grace in his eyes. But if you do otherwise, not one of you will stand before his face or go on living, since you have committed such contumacy and calumny in his kingdom.” Gottschalk agreed to this proposition, likely recognizing it as his only hope of survival. He would have been inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to Coloman. The pilgrims turned over their weapons and money.

As soon as pilgrims had been disarmed, the royal army killed almost all of them in a merciless slaughter. A few crusaders escaped the chaos and made their way back to Germany. The field outside of St. Martin's, they swore to anyone who would listen, was left covered “with dead and butchered bodies and blood”—newly crowned martyrs of Christ, though their killers were fellow Catholics whom the pilgrims themselves had persecuted.
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BY THE TIME THAT Emicho of Flonheim and his army arrived in Hungary, Coloman had lost any inclination to cooperate with the crusade. Like the citizens at Nish, he had learned to see the pilgrims as false Christians, thieves, and violent men. With Emicho, this analysis was appropriate.

Emicho had led the most brutal pogroms against the Jews in the Rhine Valley, stirring up such a frenzy that the killings continued well into the summer, after his own men had turned toward Hungary. The size of his army is difficult to gauge. Albert of Aachen gave the outlandish figure of 200,000 soldiers, including 3,000 knights (another contemporary offered the more likely figure of 12,000 soldiers). It would have been well financed,
not only because of the plunder Emicho had taken but also because he counted several prominent nobles among his followers. These included Thomas of Marle, Drogo of Nesle, Clarembald of Vendeuil, and William of Melun, nicknamed “the Carpenter” because of the way he hewed his enemies in two as if they were lumber. Albert characterized Emicho's men as a frivolous group, given to revelry and fornication. But as their ruthless treatment of the German Jews demonstrates, they were dangerously fanatical, their leader proclaiming himself an apocalyptic emperor intent upon wiping Judaism from the face of the earth and making himself king of all true Christians.

When Emicho and his band arrived at Moson, Coloman refused to deal with them: His kingdom was now closed to the Franks. The last battle with Gottschalk was recent enough that the neighboring fields were still littered with stinking corpses. Emicho, the mad emperor, consulted with his leading men about how to respond, and together they chose to lay siege to Moson and to devastate the Hungarian kingdom.
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The siege lasted for several weeks. Emicho's armies tried to seize control of the region by building bridges that would allow them to cross the River Leitha outside of Moson and to traverse the swamps in the area more easily as well. The Hungarians did their best to disrupt these maneuvers, resulting in several minor skirmishes. In one encounter, William the Carpenter, earning his nickname, cleaved off the head of one of Coloman's chief advisors. The pilgrims celebrated around his severed head that evening, admiring in particular its long and flowing gray hair. But eventually food began to run short, and Emicho realized that more aggressive measures were called for.

On August 15, 1096, in a final push again Moson, his men moved two catapults close to the city and broke through the walls in two separate places. As the Franks poured through the breach, the Hungarians offered one last desperate defense (King Coloman, however, was preparing to flee into Russia along a secret network of bridges he had had constructed in the swamps around the city). Victory was seemingly within Emicho's grasp. Perhaps he might have crowned himself king of Hungary—presumably asserting his right as Last World Emperor. We shall never know because just as quickly as his men had penetrated the city, they turned around and retreated in a fright. Why they did so is unclear. Albert of
Aachen reckoned it a judgment of God, and it must have looked like one since according to eyewitnesses the Danube and Leitha rivers both ran red with blood. The better-equipped knights with faster horses managed to escape. All others presumably perished or were enslaved. The crusade's first great acts of slaughter thus occurred in battles that pitted Catholic Christians against other Catholic Christians.

As for Emicho, he was one of the fortunate few who escaped. But his credibility had been badly damaged, and rather than continue the crusade, he thought it best to return to Flonheim. But some of his companions—including Thomas of Marle, Drogo of Nesle, Clarembald of Vendeuil, and William the Carpenter—were not ready to give up. Rumor had it that other pilgrims were gathering in Italy to cross the sea and thus avoid Hungary altogether, entering the Byzantine Empire directly. These few survivors therefore broke away from the pilgrims' land route and met up with another potential king of Jerusalem in September: Hugh of Vermandois, called “Hugh the Great,” brother of King Philip of France, leading a small but wealthy army of knights confidently toward the center of the earth.
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