Armies of Heaven (14 page)

Anna's framing of these events is disingenuous. Because of the endless troubles that the crusaders would later cause the Greeks, she wished to protect her father's reputation from any direct association with them. But as we have seen, Alexius had been soliciting help from European leaders throughout the 1090s, and his request to Urban II before the Council of Piacenza may have helped to inspire the pope's own decision to preach the crusade at Clermont.

But Anna's characterization is correct in at least one important respect. Alexius had not wanted a religious war. He did not view conflicts in the
Middle East in purely confessional terms. He had struck alliances with the Turks in the past, and no matter what happened with the crusade, he and his successors would have to live with the Turks in the future. Instead of driving the Saracens out of the Christian world, he wanted only to restore a balance of power between his kingdom and the Turks. To do so, he was probably hoping only for a more substantial version of the military aid he had gotten five years earlier when Robert of Flanders had sent five hundred mercenaries to fight on his behalf. He certainly did not expect as many as 200,000 soldiers, preachers, and pilgrims—men, women, and children—to march toward Constantinople, intent on striking a blow for God by liberating Jerusalem and laying low “Persian perfidy.”
¹

Nonetheless, the character of the army, especially its religious fanaticism, could not have come as a complete shock. After all, Alexius himself had framed his request for military help in religious terms—to save Eastern Christians from the unbelieving Turks—and he had requested that the pope act as one of his key military spokesmen. The decision to mix religion and war had thus been Alexius's own. Alexius had also known in advance the significance that relics and pilgrimage held in the hearts of Western Christians, and he must have suspected that a call to save the holy places of the East would kindle intense passions within the hearts of the great numbers of believers. If Alexius did not mention the Holy Sepulcher in his original plea, it was only because he didn't think to do so. If the Franks arrived at Constantinople with Jerusalem as their ultimate goal, Alexius could use them to inflict a few serious defeats against his Turkish adversaries and then send the crusaders on their way, no doubt to perish in the deserts between Antioch and Jerusalem. From a practical perspective, a great religious army might have been volatile and unpredictable, but it was not necessarily a bad thing. If five hundred seasoned mercenaries had proved helpful against the Turks in 1091, then a few thousand well-armed fanatics would be more useful still. Alexius himself did not want to fight a religious war, but he could have hoped to manipulate religious warriors to serve his own ends. A gathering of 100,000 zealots, however, was surely too much of a dangerous thing.

Anna Comnena's account does in general support this conclusion. In her eyes, “the Kelts” were easily manipulable. As a people, they were good
at action but not so capable when it came to forethought or, for that matter, to any kind of thought at all. She saw them as “an exceptionally hotheaded race, and passionate.” Once they had decided to invade a country, “neither reason nor force” could restrain them. In open warfare they were irresistible, almost unconquerable, but they were singularly inept at military strategy, for “if their foes chance to lay ambushes with soldier-like skill and if they meet them in a systematic manner, all their boldness vanishes.” The Kelts' holy men were as belligerent as their warriors. Anna recalled one priest armed with a bow who nearly shot down a Greek naval commander called Marianus. When the priest ran out of arrows, he threw rocks at the Greeks, and when he ran out of rocks, he hurled bread cakes as if they were Eucharistic weapons. Christian though the Kelts might have been, they were also, in Anna's eyes, barbarians—not very bright and, again, easy to deceive and to control.

The Franks were also, as Anna Comnena styled them, a plague of locusts. Indeed, these insects preceded the arrival of each of the Frankish contingents, and “everyone, having observed the phenomenon several times, came to recognize locusts as the forerunners of Frankish battalions.” These locusts avoided wheat but destroyed vines—a sign that the Kelts would not interfere in the affairs of Christians but would inflict severe injury on the Saracens, who were slaves to the pleasures of drunkenness.
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[Plate 3]

Or at least that was Alexius's hope: to whip up a Frankish apocalypse and to inflict it on the Turks while ensuring that his own people suffered no ill consequences. When first Walter of Sansavoir and then Peter the Hermit arrived at Constantinople, Alexius must have realized that the last part of his plan would be more difficult than expected.

Peter arrived at Constantinople in August 1096, even as the first of the princely armies, led by Hugh the Great and Godfrey, respectively, were still preparing to depart from Europe. The day after his followers set camp, Peter was ushered into the emperor's residence in the Blachernae palace, where Alexius received him in full imperial majesty. The hermit apparently
showed no disquiet in the face of Byzantine ceremony. Instead, he stood confidently before the emperor and explained his purpose and the ordeals that he and his followers had suffered. When Alexius asked what Peter wished to receive from him, the hermit replied, simply, food and money—requests to which Alexius, perhaps surprisingly, assented. He reportedly told Peter, along with Walter of Sansavoir, to remain outside Constantinople and to wait for the rest of the armies to arrive. By itself this group of pilgrims was too poorly trained to be of much use to Alexius's professional army, but in the context of a larger contingent of Latin zealots, they might prove their worth against the Saracens. Neither side probably expected that more than four months would pass before another group of Franks would reach Constantinople.
³

But Peter and Walter's followers were incapable of waiting out the week, let alone the rest of the year. They grew bored in the suburbs and perhaps angry as well, since they were not allowed to enter Constantinople to pray in its rich churches and before its splendid relic collections. The latter included remains of several apostles and martyrs, the head of John the Baptist (on which some of the hair and beard still grew), and all of the relics of the Passion that the Empress Helena had collected during her pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 327. After all, the opportunity to pray before Christ's relics had attracted them to Jerusalem in the first place. Impatience and frustration soon turned to rage. “And so the Christians behaved abominably. They sacked and burned palaces of the city and stole the lead from church roofs so that they could sell it back to the Greeks.” The emperor lost his patience in turn and ordered Peter and Walter and their followers to leave the suburbs and cross the straits of St. George into Asia Minor.
⁴

At this point the two surviving armies numbered around 20,000 people, and perhaps more, including a few hundred knights, a few thousand foot soldiers, and an unknown number of unarmed women, children, clerics, and simple pilgrims. In a little over ten weeks, after they had left the relative safety of Constantinople, they would almost all be dead or enslaved.

The story of the destruction of Peter the Hermit's armies is well known, though much of what is known was no doubt invented by medieval historians who, lacking eyewitness testimony, were free to make
embellishments. These historians also needed to resolve what ought to have been a difficult historical problem: Why did God allow an army of Christians, largely untainted by the worst excesses of Emicho's armies, to fail so miserably? It was largely a question, these writers concluded, of discipline. “They were a people without a king, without a duke, gathered from various locations, living without discipline, rapaciously attacking other people's property.”
⁵

True to this description, once these armies had reached Anatolia, they kept good order for barely a month. Peter and Walter first settled their troops in the port cities Civitot and Nicomedia, where, as promised, merchant ships regularly arrived laden with goods for sale at fair prices. But after a month, the army's resources were wearing thin, and Greek merchants were not interested in functioning as charitable institutions. Some of the Franks started looking inland for plunder, toward the city of Nicea, to fill out their supplies. Alexius had warned them not to do so—to stay close to the shoreline and to avoid engaging the Turks at all cost. “If you do otherwise,” he had said, “the savage gentiles will fall on you and crush your ineffectual legions.”

Peter the Hermit sensed the growing restlessness among his followers and around October 1 returned to Constantinople. He may have been attempting to negotiate an increased level of supplies at lower prices or perhaps just to ask for charity. But while he was gone, a few of the knights began striking off on their own, leading raids into the East and plundering the flocks of Greek Christians living under Turkish rule. The success of these first sorties inspired other warriors to more ambitious adventures, particularly the Germans and Italians, who were, anyway, finding the French pilgrims unbearable. Rather than wait for Peter to return or to share dwindling resources, they abandoned Civitot altogether and headed inland, against the emperor's advice, toward Nicea.
⁶

Nicea was a capital of the Sultanate of Rûm, its name literally meaning “Rome” because the lands had been taken from the Roman Empire. It was ruled in 1096 by a still-seminomadic Seljuk leader called Kilij-Arslan. The Italians and Germans who entered Kilij-Arslan's territory in October 1096 found it largely unguarded. They marched for four days, coming within sight of Nicea itself, where, according to Anna Comnena,
they engaged in behaviors that by both eleventh-century and modern standards were akin to war crimes: “They cut in pieces some of the babies, impaled others on wooden spits and roasted them over a fire; old people were subjected to every kind of torture.”

The Niceans charged outside the city and attacked the German and Italian pilgrims but were quickly forced back behind its walls. The army next attacked a nearby castle called Xerigordos, which they quickly captured, sparing the Greek Christians but killing or expelling the entire Turkish garrison. Xerigordos was full of grain, meat, and wine, and flushed with victory, the pilgrims discussed how they might use the castle as a base to attack Nicea and, eventually, to drive the Turks out of Anatolia.
⁷

But the ease of these raids had given the Italians and Germans a false sense of confidence. By entering into a major military engagement so close to Nicea, they had drawn too much attention to themselves. Kilij-Arslan quickly organized a counterattack. He marched on Xerigordos three days after the Germans and Italians had taken it. Overcoming an initial attempt by the Italians to set an ambush, he unleashed a fierce assault on the fortress. When the defenders did not immediately surrender, he established a formal siege around it (he also may have convinced one of the German leaders that the only way to survive was to surrender and betray the city—details are murky). According to one source, the siege lasted for eight days, with the defenders quickly running out of water. As the week dragged on, they drank blood from horses and pack animals, dipped cloths into sewers and squeezed out the liquid into their mouths, or else tried pathetically to suck moisture from damp earth until—with or without the collaboration of pilgrims' leaders—Kilij-Arslan's men set fire to Xerigordos's gates. The heat inside the castle became unbearable. Some of defenders, already dying of thirst, rushed out of the gates to surrender. Others hoped to escape by leaping through the flames, only to be burned alive. The survivors were used for target practice or, if pretty and young, were enslaved. “These men were the first ones happily to accept a martyr's fate,” an anonymous historian, who likely saw the aftermath of the siege of Xerigordos, concluded.
⁸

A few of the Germans, however, must have escaped the fires of battle, because they returned to Peter's camp with news of the army's destruction.
The Franks—true to Comnena's caricature—wished for immediate revenge. The only leader present, Walter of Sansavoir, counseled patience, advising his fellow crusaders to wait until Peter had returned. Unfortunately, Peter's negotiations were taking longer than expected. And after a week, the pilgrims heard rumor that a Turkish scouting party had just captured and decapitated several more pilgrims.

The news set off a bitter debate as to whether to retaliate at once or to continue waiting for Peter. The knights, including Walter, by and large urged caution. The foot soldiers—or at least their leader, Godfrey Burel, who had led the attack on Zemun in Hungary—preferred immediate action. Pride entered into the equation, too, or so the story goes, with Godfrey Burel insulting the cautious, saying that “these distinguished knights were cowards and very little good in war.” Unable to bear this mockery, the knights caved to Godfrey's demands, ordering their followers to set out in six divisions, each marching under a different banner, to attack Nicea. Only women, the unarmed, and the sick were left behind in the city.
⁹

It seems a foolhardy maneuver, but the pilgrims may have had little choice. If Kilij-Arslan had sent out a scouting party, then he was likely preparing an attack. Time and again on crusade, the Franks would elect to take the battle to the Turks rather than become trapped in a prolonged siege. The danger was especially grave at Civitot, which apparently lacked adequate defenses to protect against a large army. And no help seemed to be forthcoming from Constantinople. The battle, fought on October 21, 1096, was therefore the first time the Franks attempted to take the fight directly to the enemy, rather than to hold a defensive position. It was not a hasty or disorganized operation, as modern historians have tended to paint it. But whatever their strategy, the Franks never had a chance to test it. They had scarcely marched three miles from Civitot when they ran directly into Kilij-Arslan's army, ordered and ready to attack. Kilij-Arslan had expected to ambush the Franks in their camps, but he was equally prepared for an open field engagement.