Armies of Heaven (2 page)

On a fundamental level, the First Crusade was a holy war, a style of combat that was, in the 1090s, altogether new: a war fought on behalf of God and in fulfillment of His plan. It did not just provide soldiers with a new path to salvation, a way to use martial prowess to perform good deeds. It also enabled them to fight in battles longer and bloodier than any they had ever imagined. So full of pageantry and gore were the sieges of Nicea (May–June 1097), Antioch (October 1097–June 1098), Ma‘arra (November–December 1098), and Jerusalem (June–July 1099) that they surpassed earthly conflict, pointing soldiers toward heaven as well as giving them some experience of hell. When the survivors returned to Europe and relived their memories, cooler and more educated heads could only agree: They had witnessed the Apocalypse.
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Despite an abundance of evidence, the apocalyptic crusade has not received its due, in part because historians mistrust our best and most abundant evidence for it: a collection of chronicles written by churchmen in France and Germany starting around the year 1107. Apocalyptic language permeates these books, but among all the available evidence, they have usually held a position of secondary importance. The normal goal of history is to peel away myths that accumulate with the passage of time and focus on whatever nuggets of authenticity remain—hence our preference for “eyewitness” evidence and for the more staid and sedate passages in certain eyewitness texts—particularly in
Deeds of the Franks
. For the crusade, however, this intellectual winnowing, sifting through myth and prejudice to focus on the small grains of demonstrable truth, has distracted us from the war's original meaning. Through the efforts of modern, eleventh-century men, an event of apocalyptic proportions, if not the Apocalypse itself, had just occurred.

An examination of this imaginative world will help explain why 100,000 people charged recklessly into a conflict fought nearly 2,000 miles from their homes and why their victory inspired such intense celebration and speculation. The typical aspects of medieval piety—a desire to undertake pilgrimages to Jerusalem, the need to perform penance acutely felt among warriors, and a simple longing for adventure—take us a long way toward answering
this question, but they do not go far enough. There was nothing typical about the First Crusade. To understand this extraordinary event, we must take seriously those passages that are most extraordinary, for what is most unusual (and ubiquitous) in First Crusade histories is the belief that men were living in prophetic time, their every deed advancing God's designs.

Woven into this history, then, more thoroughly than in any previous telling of the First Crusade saga, are all of the dreams, visions, and miracles that occurred during the expedition. As often as possible, I have placed the progress of the army alongside the apparent progress of the Apocalypse. The further crusaders descended into their journey, the more detached from earthly reality they seemed to become. The closer they got to Jerusalem, the more in tune their activity seemed to be with the plans of God and the movements of angels. Fundamentally, this is what an apocalyptic event is—a sudden leap forward in salvation history, when the story of man as written by God approaches its climax.

The First Crusade was neither the first time nor the last that Christians would believe themselves on the verge of Armageddon. But in all other cases (and for obvious reasons), these moments of expectation ended in disillusionment. What is remarkable about the First Crusade is that observers on the ground, even with twenty years' hindsight, continued to see in it signs not of an imminent apocalypse, but of an apocalypse fulfilled.

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n 1095 Jerusalem was the center of the earth, the site of Christ's death and resurrection, where God had trumped the devil and worked salvation for humanity. Men and women across Europe dreamed of visiting that city, of praying before the tomb of Christ, of catching, if only for a moment, a direct glimpse of heaven. Out of such dreams and desires the First Crusade was born. It seemed the most natural thing, barely in need of explanation. “There was a great movement throughout all parts of France,” wrote one anonymous historian around 1100, “so that if anyone truly wished to follow God, with a pure heart and mind, and wanted faithfully to carry his Cross, he did not hesitate to take the fastest road to the Holy Sepulcher.”
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[Plate 1]

Whatever Christians believed in 1095, there was no rational explanation or single event that triggered this sudden desire to possess Jerusalem. Various Muslim factions had held it for over four hundred years. The few pilgrims capable of undertaking such an ambitious journey did so, with varying degrees of difficulty and success. The urge to incorporate a far-flung Middle Eastern city into the Christian world was thus a wholly new ambition. It was also an idea with little theological justification. As any second-rate preacher would have known, Christianity had made the physical trappings of Judaism and the Old Testament—the sacrifices, the legal code, and, yes, the city of Jerusalem—irrelevant. The journey to salvation was a journey of the heart, a story that could be lived anywhere: Jerusalem in a nearby cathedral or parish church, the River Jordan in a baptistery. But by the end of the eleventh century, European Christians were not content with these allegorical Jerusalems. They wanted the real city, too.

This is the story of that transformation and its consequences—the war that was to become the First Crusade and the Apocalypse that it unleashed.

Jerusalem, the city of Christ, had ceased to exist by 1095. Roman legions sacked it in 70 AD while suppressing a Jewish revolt. In the process they destroyed most of the important religious monuments and left the city as a whole in ruins.

In 135 AD, during another rebellion, the Emperor Hadrian ordered Jerusalem destroyed completely, building in its place a Roman outpost called Aelia Capitolina (taken from Aelius, Hadrian's own family name). The traditional site of the crucifixion, called “Golgotha,” or “place of the Skull,” Hadrian had covered in earth and concrete and then built on top of it a temple to Venus. The city thus disappeared for nearly two hundred years.

The Emperor Constantine, newly converted to Christianity, took a sudden interest in the city in 325. He dispatched—at the risk of anachronism—a crack team of archaeologists to recover the sites where Christ had died, had been buried, and had risen from the grave. By 327 his men had made significant progress: The temple of Venus had been destroyed, and the sites of the crucifixion and of the Holy Sepulcher had
been located (or else chosen, since no real evidence would have, or could have, survived). On Constantine's order, construction work also began on a magnificent new basilica that would incorporate both places into its architectural scheme.

A little later Constantine's mother, Helena, visited the city. According to some traditions, Helena engaged in some archaeological work of her own, discovering the remains of the True Cross—some of which she took back to Constantinople, some of which she left in the Holy Land. For the next three centuries, thousands of Latin Christians would follow in her footsteps, traveling as pilgrims to Jerusalem, now a thoroughly Christian city, to pray at the tomb of Christ and to venerate the relics of His Passion.
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But not everyone celebrated these developments, including the Roman Christians who decided to live there. St. Jerome, writing in 395 from his hermitage in Bethlehem, famously argued that there was no special benefit to be gained in the Holy Land. Sacred places by themselves—even Jerusalem—had no real virtue. “What is praiseworthy,” he wrote, “is not to have been to Jerusalem, but to have lived a good life while there.” The heavenly court was no more accessible in the city where Christ had lived, he went on, than it was in, say, Britain, since the true kingdom of God lies in the heart of every believer.

This lesson formed one of the fundamental tenets of Christianity. Literally speaking, Jerusalem was a city on earth. But in the structures of medieval Christian thought, such literal meanings were inconsequential. The earthly city in the Middle East is just that: a city. Read allegorically, Jerusalem is God's church. Spiritually, it is a soul at peace. Prophetically, it is the kingdom of God that shall appear at the end of time. Higher truths are in the mind and in the soul, not in a pilgrimage destination.
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By the seventh century, however, Western Christians had more practical reasons to lose interest. Travel into the old province of Judaea was becoming dangerous. In 614 Jerusalem fell to the Persian ruler Khosrau II, who took the True Cross back to his capital city of Ctesiphon, near Baghdad, as plunder. According to a later version of the story, Khosrau then declared himself a god and kept the cross in a throne room atop a bronze tower. The cross sat on his right; to his left he kept a statue of a golden rooster. Encircling the throne were models of the sun, moon, and
stars, and he had further rigged up the tower with a secret irrigation system that enabled him to pretend to be a rain god.

Fifteen years later the Emperor Heraclius managed to recapture Jerusalem and the True Cross, but this second era of Christian Jerusalem lasted less than a decade. In 638 the city fell again, this time to Muslim armies. In the face of Islam's astonishingly rapid expansion, the frontiers of the Eastern Roman Empire collapsed. The Western Roman Empire was already in ruins. Jerusalem, a Muslim city, had become for Latin Christians a dangerous, out-of-the-way destination. In the centuries that followed, there seemed little reason to go.
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The rediscovery of this tangible, earthly city seemed to happen suddenly around 1000, owing to changes in both piety and politics. In terms of the former, European Christians began to look for Jerusalem at home, within their own churches, not within their own souls, as St. Jerome had encouraged them to do. That is to say, in the 900s ordinary believers developed an enthusiasm for “local pilgrimages,” visits to nearby churches where they might pray before saints' shrines and seek forgiveness for sins, healing for a disease, or release from chains. It was the beginning of a golden age in pilgrimage. But there are obviously differences between visiting the Cloak of Our Lady of Chartres or the reliquary of Sainte Foy at Conques or the shrine of St. Léonard of Noblat, on the one hand, and attempting the long and arduous pilgrimage to Jerusalem, on the other. The latter was infinitely more holy, just as it was almost inaccessible.

Around the year 1000, however, as this new enthusiasm for pilgrimage was reaching a sort of zenith, a new road to the Holy Land became suddenly traversable. The land route through Hungary opened after Stephen I established himself as that country's first Christian king. Intrepid pilgrims who wished to attempt this most dangerous and glamorous devotional act now had a viable opportunity to do so.
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The timing was fortuitous, or perhaps portentous, since it occurred at the end of the first millennium, a time of increased apocalyptic expectation. Just as pilgrims started looking more and more toward earthly Jerusalem, so did Christian thinkers and theologians begin searching the stars and their libraries for signs of the advent of Antichrist and the eventual return of Christ in majesty. The roads to the heavenly and earthly Jerusalems were opening all at once.

What pilgrims saw when they visited the earthly city was disturbing: Barbarous, unbelieving tribes governed Jerusalem and controlled access to the holy sites. To the pilgrims, these were a people whose language, culture, and religion were entirely incomprehensible. Christian travelers brought back from the Middle East, with an ever-increasing frequency and shrillness, tales of shoddy and profane treatment meted out to Christians and their shrines by these enemies whom their own faulty grasp of history and prophecy could not fully explain. The situation required a violent, if not apocalyptic, response.

The first major confrontation—the first near crusade, or the first mini-apocalypse—occurred in the year 1009. At that time the caliph of Egypt, al-Hakim bi Amr Allah, who also controlled Jerusalem, ordered his followers to destroy the Holy Sepulcher. He may have done so out of simple irritation at the crowds of Christians flocking to Jerusalem during the Easter season, or maybe he was angry about what the Christians were doing once they reached Jerusalem. According to a later Arab historian, when al-Hakim asked an advisor named Qutekin al-Adudi why the Christians bothered with their pilgrimages, he learned about the miracle of the Holy Fire. The lamps in the Aedicule—the small building inside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher that actually contained the tomb—were all extinguished on Good Friday and then miraculously relit themselves the next day and burned with a remarkably pure white light. But the miracle was a fake: Through the mixing of particular types of oil, the advisor explained, the lamps became especially combustible and burned with an unusual intensity. News of such fakery so infuriated al-Hakim that he ordered the entire church knocked to the ground.

How important the Easter services were in triggering this reaction we cannot be sure. But an outraged sense of piety does seem to have played a part in al-Hakim's decision. The destruction of the Holy Sepulcher fit into a larger program of persecution aimed at both Jews and Christians, who in normal times were regarded as
dhimmi
, inheritors of the early stages of the divine revelation of which Islam represented the final chapter. As such, they were considered protected religious
minorities, subject to certain taxes and restrictions but otherwise free from direct persecution.