Armies of Heaven (4 page)

The man who exploited these emotions and stories most effectively was a priest named Peter. Once a hermit, he may have been a pilgrim to Jerusalem in the early 1090s, or he may have simply invented stories after listening to other pilgrims' tales. Among modern historians, Peter has not enjoyed an enthusiastic reception, on the basis of either integrity, courage, or importance. From the perspective of some contemporary writers, however, particularly those who lived in German-speaking lands, Peter was the inventor of the crusade.

According to a highly respected historian named Albert of Aachen, writing around 1108, Peter was inspired to preach the crusade because of his own experience in the Holy Land. While visiting the Lord's Sepulcher for the sake of prayer, “he saw with a sad heart things wicked and unmentionable, and trembled in spirit, and called down on these sights God the avenger.” Peter took his complaints to the spiritual leader of Jerusalem, the patriarch, who lamented his own powerlessness in the face of the Turks, saying that the strength of the Christians in that city was “to be reckoned as no more than that of a tiny ant, against the pride of so many.”

Help had to come from the West. The patriarch instructed Peter to carry home news of Jerusalem's plight and beg for help. No less a figure than Christ Himself reiterated this message, appearing to Peter in a vision at His own Sepulcher and ordering Peter to obtain patriarchal letters sealed with the sign of the cross. It was not Peter's personal calling, Christ said, but rather “our mission,” and He enjoined Peter to hurry home and lift the hearts of the faithful “for cleansing the holy places of Jerusalem.” Peter then went to Rome and informed the pope of the situation in the Holy Land and of Christ's instructions for the liberation of His tomb. The pope had no choice but to obey these heaven-sent commands.
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Peter probably never met with Pope Urban II, and he may never have gone to the Holy Land. But in 1095 and 1096, he did begin traveling around France, Normandy, and Germany, telling of the horrors being perpetrated in Jerusalem and describing the desperate need there for military aid from the West. Not just a preacher of war, he adapted the persona of an ascetic hermit, drawing on many of the burgeoning religious ideals of his day. He sometimes rode a mule, always traveled barefoot, and avoided eating bread and meat, though he did, strangely, drink wine and eat fish, “thus seeking in the midst of delicacy a reputation for abstinence,” according to one twelfth-century critic.

His mission attracted numerous followers. Some were impressed by his unusual approach to the eremitical life, by his forceful calls to repentance, and by the liberality with which he redeemed prostitutes. These once fallen women must have formed a substantial part of Peter's retinue, no doubt causing scandal for many. But others would have recognized something more fundamentally pious in his demeanor. His ragged clothing, his connection to Jerusalem, the redeemed sinners in his entourage, perhaps even his preference for fish—all of these signs together would have shown how Peter followed the example of Christ, who had also walked barefoot, avoided handling money, and taken as companions one prostitute and at least two fishermen.

Peter's message made ecclesiastical authorities nervous, but they could not deny its effectiveness. He was “greatly esteemed by those who know worldly things,” said one writer, “and he was raised above even bishops and abbots in the practice of religion, because he ate no bread or meat.” “I don't remember anyone ever being so honored,” observed another one, who saw Peter preach in person. With wondrous authority he could bring warring parties together and force them to make peace. His followers, or perhaps simply his fans, would pathetically pluck hairs from the mule that he rode, preserving them as if they were holy relics.
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While preaching forgiveness and poverty, Peter also told stories about Jerusalem, reaffirming what veterans of the 1064 German pilgrimage and their friends would have long known: Jerusalem was in the hands of pagans who every day were preventing Christians from worshipping at the tomb of their Lord. If the Christians there did not get help, and soon,
their religion and Jerusalem itself might not long survive. Already the pagans had transformed the “Temple of the Lord” into a “Mahomerie,” or, as we might say, a mosque (he was specifically referring to the Dome of the Rock). It would clearly be a good and righteous service to God if those warring knights, whose conflicts had at last achieved some sort of resolution through Peter's oratory and his very demeanor, would now turn their weapons against a real enemy, against the unbelievers who every day were defiling the sacred sanctuaries of Jerusalem.

But Peter added just a little bit more incendiary material to his message of peace and war. Based on what Albert of Aachen said, he must have carried with him a sealed letter from the patriarch of Jerusalem. By itself that document would have proved a powerful talisman. But at some point in his itinerary, he turned it into something else altogether—a charter that had fallen from heaven. On it was a mandate that “instructed all Christendom from all parts of the world to take up arms and journey to Jerusalem to fight against the pagans and to claim eternal possession of the city with all its pertinent lands.” He added a line of prophecy: “Jerusalem will be downtrodden by gentiles until the times of nations are fulfilled.” This line was the conclusion of Christ's instruction to His disciples about how to recognize the Last Days.
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The nuances of Peter's message are lost, but its general tenor is clear: The Last Days were at hand, and Jerusalem needed to be conquered. Peter's followers were to create peace at home, to follow the literal examples of Christ, and to journey to Jerusalem in anticipation of the Last Days. Simple as it was, the message was powerful. Armies of believers assembled in response, some of them departing with Peter as early as March 1096. Many of the men who had heard Peter's message and answered his challenge reached conclusions similar to those drawn by the French in 1009, when they, too, heard of crises in Jerusalem. “Do we need to travel to distant lands in the East to attack the enemies of God, when there are Jews right before our eyes, a race that is the greatest enemy of God? We've got it all backwards!”
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Thus did the First Crusade begin, at least in the eyes of many contemporaries. It was the result of the highly combustible ideas and images proclaimed by one extremely charismatic hermit. To others, the crusade seemed simply to come from nowhere, a heaven-sent miracle. About the
formation of Peter's armies in 1096 one writer recalled, “And then from every part of the earth, but especially from the western kingdoms, infinite crowds of kings and nobles and of commoners, of either sex, came together in armed bands to seek out Jerusalem, roused into a fervor by the many reports about the suffering of the Holy Sepulcher and the destruction of all the churches that the Turks, a most vicious people, had subjected to their lordship and laid low for many years with unimaginable hardships.”
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But as the same writer noted elsewhere, this sudden uprising was inevitable. Indeed, long foretold, it should have been obvious. Four years earlier, “there were seen through many territories small worms previously unknown. They flew not far from the ground, that is, you could have touched them with a hand or a staff. In width they were about the same size as flies, but a bit longer. Their numberless armies were so great that one of them was almost a mile wide and two or three miles long. They were so dense that they truly blocked sunlight from the earth. Some people interpreted this portent to signify the ones who took the road to Jerusalem, just four years later.” In such a fashion did the crusade appear to those who witnessed its call and felt its draw.

It was a plague of flying worms, like something out of the Book of Exodus, one of the supernatural disasters sent to punish the Egyptians, wreaking destruction on behalf of God's chosen people. The crusade defied nature, came from nowhere, and moved apparently without guidance, though it always headed relentlessly toward the East.
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U
rban II would publicly preach the crusade on November 27, 1095, at a church council held in the French city of Clermont. He had been considering the idea of a great war in the East for at least eight months, and he must have had some sense of the Jerusalem-based madness that he was tapping into. The sermon, he knew, would receive an enthusiastic response, but the plan was still risky. He was in effect staking the prestige of his office on a highly improbable military expedition. And in 1095 his ability to preserve even his own hold on power was no sure thing. He was one of two men claiming to be pope, the result of a war that had begun in 1075 and showed no signs of ending any time soon. As Urban considered an attack on Jerusalem, it was not even safe for him to enter Rome. Whether he saw war in the East as a way to solve his problems at home is unclear. What is certain is that the imprimatur of a papal approval transformed the movement of Peter the Hermit from being, at best, a somewhat grander reenactment of the German pilgrimage of 1064 into a real military campaign.

Urban had no word for “crusade.” It would take a century before Latin writers felt the need to invent a term to describe this phenomenon. What he would urge upon warriors at Clermont was simply to follow the
iter
, or “the road”—a bland description of a war that would transform Europe and spark an apocalypse.

The pope's main problem, as he pondered the fate of Jerusalem, was his war against the German emperor Henry IV (1056–1106). At stake was the question of who had the right to invest bishops with their offices—secular rulers or churchmen, kings or popes. Hence, the most common name for this struggle was the “Investiture Contest.”

Early on Henry IV had responded to the policies of Urban's predecessor, Gregory VII (1073–1085), by appointing his own pope, Wibert, Archbishop of Ravenna, or, as he is better known to history, the Antipope Clement III, or, as he was known to one of the crusaders, “that blockheaded pope.” Clement was still alive in 1095 (he would outlive Urban by a year), and he still enjoyed significant support. His followers and Urban's had literally divided the Vatican between them, with Clement's men occupying the main body of the church and Urban's supporters holed up inside a tower. The building remained open for prayer, but Clement's men were known to hide in the rafters and throw rocks on any of Urban's friends who dared enter. No one could say in 1095 which pope would prevail, let alone whether the reform papacy, in the person of Urban II, could raise an army and carry out an impossible mission some 2,000 miles from home.
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Urban's problems were not confined to Italy and Germany. He faced serious political difficulties in France, too, where he was engaged in a battle of wills with King Philip I (1060–1108). One year earlier Philip had been excommunicated at a synod in Autun owing to irregularities in his recent marriage. In 1092 he had repudiated his first wife, Bertha of Holland, in order to marry Bertrada of Montfort, who was herself already married to Count Fulk of Anjou. Neither Philip nor Bertrada could secure a divorce, and neither marriage offered sufficient grounds for annulment. Their union was therefore bigamous on two counts. Part of Urban's urgent business at Clermont was to reaffirm this excommunication, a move unlikely to endear him to either the French king or any of the nobles loyal to him.

The dispute, however, did not cut the pope off from all, or even most, French-speaking territories. In the 1090s French kings exercised direct control over only a small collection of lands around Paris known as the
Île-de-France, allowing Urban some freedom of movement. Still, apart from a brief sojourn in Anjou, ruled by the jilted Count Fulk, Urban was effectively stuck south of the River Loire. Any recruiting to the north (the eventual source of most of the crusading armies) would have to occur through letters and envoys.
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There was one other significant problem for the pope that he perhaps hoped to address: the schism between the two great branches of the Christian faith. The Greek Orthodox and Latin Catholic churches, based in Constantinople and Rome, respectively, had for centuries taken different spiritual and liturgical paths. Only recently had they formalized their separation, when a papal mission sent by Pope Leo IX to Constantinople in 1054 ended in mutual recriminations and anathemas. Leo's successors dreamed of ending this schism between Greek and Latin Christianity, and in the 1090s, during the papacy of Urban II, reunification suddenly became a real possibility.

This diplomatic opening grew out of a military threat. At almost exactly same time that the Great Schism of 1054 occurred, armies of Seljuk Turks began to encroach upon Byzantine territories in Syria and Asia Minor. Their military advance reached something of a crescendo in 1071 when the Greeks, fighting against the armies of the Sultan Alp Arslan, suffered a catastrophic defeat at the battle of Manzikert. The Emperor Romanus Diogenes, who had been present at the battle, was captured and imprisoned. Though the emperor was released quickly, and under generous terms, later tradition held that Alp Arslan forced him to grovel before him and pretend to be a footstool. “Hearing these things, the princes of the empire put someone else over themselves, judging unworthy to hold the scepter and to exercise the Augustan honor him who had allowed so many indignities to be inflicted on his body; and they removed his eyes.” An era of civil war in the Byzantine Empire ensued, as the frontier of Asia Minor collapsed.
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