Armies of Heaven (8 page)

Another Robert, Count of Flanders (also Robert of Normandy's cousin), took the cross at the same time. His motives are easier to divine. In 1089 his father, Robert the Frisian, had gone as a pilgrim to the Holy Land, where he experienced firsthand the erratic governance of the Seljuk Turks. On his return, he stopped at Constantinople and upon meeting with the Emperor Alexius II agreed to send five hundred Flemish warriors to fight for the Greeks. Through his father's experiences, the younger Robert would have been well acquainted with the needs of both Byzantium and Jerusalem. Urban II would have known about these connections, and in December 1096 he sent Robert a letter describing the plans he had outlined at Clermont and exhorting Robert to allow his subjects, if they so desired, to take the cross. Robert answered with more enthusiasm than expected and vowed to join the crusade himself. Perhaps he had already caught Jerusalem fever from Peter the Hermit or else from memories of his father's stories.

As near as we can tell, Robert was not driven by any unusual fears about his own salvation. On the contrary, he was proud of his track record of good and charitable deeds. If pressed for a motive, he departed because of a general “Christian rage burning against the perfidious Persians, who, in their pride, attacked the church of Jerusalem and laid low Christian worship everywhere.” Not just about Jerusalem or salvation, the crusade was about historical mission—about the need to put the world right, starting with the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and then, possibly, working back toward Europe.
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Another, more intriguing case is that of Godfrey of Bouillon, who would complete the crusade and become ruler of Jerusalem. Godfrey was the younger brother of Eustace, Count of Boulogne (who also went to Jerusalem, but in the retinue of Robert of Flanders). As a younger son, Godfrey enjoyed no claim to his family's holdings. Fortunately for him, at the age of fifteen he had inherited the estates and title of his uncle, Godfrey the Hunchback, Duke of Lower Lotharingia. The hunchbacked Godfrey was a loyal ally of Henry IV in his wars against Pope Gregory VII (despite the fact that his wife, Mathilda of Tuscany, was Gregory's staunchest supporter). While on campaign in the Low Countries and encamped near Antwerp, Godfrey the Hunchback arose in the middle of the night “to answer the call of nature. An assassin waited outside his resting place, and stabbed him hard between the buttocks. Leaving the sword in the wound, he hurried away.” So the Hunchback was found, blade in rectum, bleeding profusely, and, one would think, almost certainly dead. But he lingered for a week, and in his last moments named his teenage nephew Godfrey as heir. The man behind the assassination was rumored to be none other than Robert the Frisian, Count of Flanders, who ten years after the murder would make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in penance for his many crimes, this one among them, and who would inspire his son Robert to join the hunchback's nephew Godfrey on crusade.
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The young Godfrey's fortune, however, proved fleeting. Henry IV of Germany confiscated his ducal title and the lands that went with it and granted them instead to his own two-year-old son, Conrad. Godfrey had to content himself with the less significant title of Marquis of Antwerp. But he does not seem to have held a grudge. Rather, Godfrey continued his uncle's policies and fought alongside the German king against the pope. The two of them eventually took the war to Gregory VII's doorstep and laid siege to Rome in 1083–1084, ultimately placing the blockheaded antipope, Clement III, on the throne. After this campaign Henry declared himself Roman emperor and, as such, promoted his son Conrad to the kingship of Germany. Perhaps in recognition of loyal service, he restored Godfrey to the title of Duke of Lower Lotharingia.

After ten years, then, Godfrey had finally returned to the office that he had briefly held as a teenager. In doing so, he must have recognized
that his status as duke would never be secure. Like Robert of Normandy, he had little reason to stay at home.

Still, as a German magnate who had never heard Urban II preach and who had fought against Urban's predecessor, he does not seem a likely candidate for the crusade—unless, like Peter the Hermit, Godfrey did not see the crusade as a papal expedition. Modern observers naturally imagine that Rome and its pope lay at the spiritual center of the medieval world. But for actual medieval Christians, piety happened at home, on a local level. The most important church for Godfrey was not the Vatican or the Church of the Lateran at Rome but the abbey of Saint-Hubert in modern-day Belgium, located about twenty-five miles northeast of Godfrey's famous castle of Bouillon. St. Hubert was a legendary figure in Lotharingia—the first bishop of Liège and the man credited with evangelizing dangerous pagan tribes who lived in the forests of the Ardennes. Later known as a patron of hunters, Hubert enjoyed in Godfrey's day a reputation for being especially adept at curing rabies. Godfrey acted as “advocate” for Hubert's monastery—that is, he was its patron and protector, offering military muscle when the community's spiritual weapons proved inadequate. During the performance of these duties, Godfrey must have worshipped before the altar of St. Hubert—receiving the Eucharist, giving thanks, taking oaths, praying for the souls of his dead relatives. Especially striking to Godfrey would have been a round chapel—an increasingly familiar architectural form in eleventh-century Europe, but still unusual enough to be noteworthy—modeled on the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. The monks of Saint-Hubert called it “To Holy Jerusalem,” meaning that Jerusalem and the tomb of Christ had been an important part of Godfrey's spiritual outlook for most of his adult life.
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At the time when Peter was preaching near Lotharingia, Godfrey had entered into a convoluted political fight between the monks of Saint-Hubert and their bishop, Otbert of Liège, over the abbey's leadership. Otbert had exiled Abbot Thierry, whom the monks had elected, and replaced him with his own candidate. Urban II became involved in the dispute, too, firing off a blistering letter in which he described Otbert as the standard-bearer of Antichrist and Satan's mule. Godfrey vacillated for a time about what to do, but he ultimately sided against the bishop and with the monks, helping to maneuver Thierry back into office.

Perhaps in the midst of this wrangling, which involved some sort of contact with papal emissaries, Duke Godfrey would have heard rumor of the call to liberate Jerusalem. It is equally likely that he had heard descriptions of Peter the Hermit's thrilling sermons. Whatever the case, as soon as the dispute with Otbert was settled, Godfrey decided that he ought to visit the real Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem and give to it the same kind of service he had so long offered to its model in Belgium.

To pay for this hugely expensive endeavor, he turned to none other than the same Bishop Otbert. In an arrangement similar to the treaty struck between Robert of Normandy and his brother William, Godfrey gave Otbert the lordship of his castle of Bouillon in exchange for 1,300 pounds of silver. Thus, the only man whom Urban II would formally label as “a servant of Antichrist” was also the man who made possible the crusade of the future king of Jerusalem, Godfrey of Bouillon. For the church Saint-Hubert, the irony cut closer still. To help pay for his new castle, Otbert sent men to plunder the church, strip its altars, and tear the jewels from its gold crosses. Saint-Hubert thus lost a great deal of its wealth because of its patron's sudden and impulsive commitment to Jerusalem. (And within a year, Abbot Thierry would be forced into exile again, his position made untenable by Godfrey's absence.) Before leaving, however, Godfrey made one final gift to Saint-Hubert, offering to its saint a fine set of crystal dice. Perhaps he was symbolically giving up games of chance—one of the aristocratic pastimes that came under heavy ecclesiastical criticism. Or perhaps, like Caesar at the Rubicon, Godfrey was recognizing that there could be no turning back: The die had been cast, and he would never return home.
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In 1099 Godfrey would take charge of the crusade. But in 1096 the man who seemed most likely to do so was Hugh of Vermandois, usually called “Hugh the Great,” the younger brother of King Philip of France. Despite the bad blood between king and pope, Hugh caught crusading fever immediately after the Council of Clermont. He must have been making tentative plans to participate during the 1095 Christmas court, for two months later, in February 1096, he was leading a council in Paris to discuss the logistics and goals of the mission. Imbued with the sacred blood of kingship, Hugh was a logical choice to take over the expedition. Though not as wealthy as Raymond of Saint-Gilles, he was royalty
nonetheless, and that counted for a lot. His followers believed so: Many decided to accompany him, expecting that, at journey's end, Hugh would be crowned king and in return for their support would grant them lands and lordships around Jerusalem—a point of business likely discussed at Paris that February.

But it was a ludicrous idea: a handful of two-bit warriors spinning fantasies of world domination when in reality their own king's authority barely extended fifteen miles beyond the walls of Paris. Some of those in attendance must have expressed such skepticism, the excommunicate king among them. On the night of Tuesday, February 11, however, God intervened.

That night the moon went slowly into eclipse, and what little remained gradually took on a soft red glow. As Hugh and the others watched with fascination, and perhaps fear, the moon turned into a steadily darker, richer color until finally, terrifyingly, it had become the color of blood. The gathered knights and clerics stayed up all night and watched the skies, wondering at the meaning of it all and then marveling even more at dawn, as the moon, now restored to its proper color and shape, suddenly wore a ring of bright light, as if crowned with a heavenly diadem. That morning nobles lined up to join Hugh on the road to Jerusalem, with Philip's blessing.

We can easily imagine the excited hum among the knights and clerics. In Christian prophecy the moon would turn blood-red during the Last Days, after the angel of the Lord had opened the sixth seal: “The sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood, and the stars of the sky fell to the earth as the fig tree drops its winter fruit when shaken by a gale.” This passage in turn grew out of the language of Old Testament prophet Joel: “And I will give portents in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and columns of smoke. The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. And it shall come to pass that all who call upon the name of the Lord shall be delivered; for in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there shall be those who escape, as the Lord has said, and among the survivors shall be those whom the Lord calls.” Eclipses, a bloody moon, cries to the Lord from Mount Zion, and destruction to be wrought at Jerusalem—the words of prophecy had become the language of current events.
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Outside Paris the day of the Lord was truly at hand. Regardless of the careful plans and schemes of the princes, their followers had worked themselves into a frenzy. Stories of atrocity in Jerusalem shocked them. Mysterious signs in the sky and on earth filled them with terror. And they responded to these fears, as had Christians in 1009 when they heard of al-Hakim's destruction of the Holy Sepulcher, by killing Jews.

To take a few examples of the signs: A comet whose tail looked like a sword blazed through the skies. Clouds the color of blood rolled in from both the east and west and then clashed together in the heavens. A priest called Siggerius saw two celestial horsemen charge at one another to do battle; one of the warriors carried an enormous cross with which he beat his opponent to death. Another priest and two of his friends, while walking in the woods, saw a sword of wondrous length raised into the air by an unknown hand until it disappeared in the heavens. Others still, as they cared for horses, saw the shape of a city in the sky, and diverse, ethereal crowds from various directions, on horseback and on foot, strove to enter it. A woman, pregnant for two years, finally gave birth, and to a talking baby. Another baby was born with twice the usual number of limbs, and still another with two heads. Some people said that the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne, after nearly three hundred years, had come back from the dead, ready to lead his people into Jerusalem. “According to the prediction in the gospel, people everywhere rose up against people, and kingdom against kingdom. There were great earthquakes in all places, and plague and famine, terrors from the sky, and great signs. For because at that time the gospel trumpet sounded the arrival of the just judge, and behold! Everywhere the universal church could see the world bringing forth portents and prophetic signs.”
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These phenomena were “apocalyptic” in the most technical sense: the enactment of events foretold in the book of the Apocalypse, the last book in the Bible, normally called “Revelation” in English. Not just fire and brimstone, though it contains plenty of both, the Apocalypse was the revelation of history's end, the culmination of mankind's endeavors on earth.