The Dream and the Tomb (7 page)

They survived because the siege of the fortress became quickly known in Constantinople, because the old fortress was on the seacoast, and because Peter the Hermit urged immediate assistance. The emperor ordered part of his fleet to go to their rescue. At midnight, while the fleet was on its way, the Turks quietly lifted the siege and stole away.

The army of Peter the Hermit was a flame that had been blown out. Of the vast numbers who set out there remained only the three thousand who were taken off the coast of Asia Minor by the emperor's ships. The Crusade of the Poor was a total disaster.

If Peter the Hermit had shown himself to be incompetent militarily, he was nevertheless a legend in his own time. He went on to become a leader of the peasant militia that accompanied the army of the princes to Jerusalem, and was among the first to enter the city, although he returned to France soon afterward.

A few days after the disaster at Civetot, there arrived in Constantinople the first contingent of the army of the princes. Although the princes inevitably quarreled among themselves, they led armies that were disciplined, with clear lines of command, well trained and capable of dealing with the Turks on their own terms. To the princes went the victory denied to Peter the Hermit's rabble army.

WHEN the medieval chroniclers set out the names of the great lords who led their armies on the Crusade, they usually began with Hugh, Count of Vermandois, who was the brother of the king of the Franks. William of Tyre calls him Hugh the Great, but he was a totally ineffective warrior, great only in his boasting, his presumption, and his love of finery. This caricature of a prince was placed first on the list only because he was the brother of a king who ruled over a large and important fragment of northern and central France.

He was not, however, the only brother of a king to set forth on the First Crusade. Robert, Duke of Normandy, was the son of William the Conqueror and the brother of King William Rufus, who ruled England ineffectively until the day when he was struck down by an unknown assailant in the New Forest. Robert was the first-born, but so exasperated his father by his rebelliousness and hot temper that he was denied the throne. He was called “Curthose,” which means “Short Boots,” an affectionate nickname for a man who was gregarious and mischievous and liked his creature comforts. He became grotesquely fat in his later years, but at the time of the Crusades he kept himself in good physical condition and on a few occasions he is known to have distinguished himself in battle, although he was far from being a natural leader.

Among the men who found their true vocation in the Crusades, and possessed a determination to carry through to the end, was Raymond IV, Count of Toulouse. He was also the most deeply committed. The Emperor Alexius I Comnenus, who grew very fond of him, regarded him as a man of great probity and even sanctity, vastly more intelligent and understanding than any of the other Western Europeans he encountered.

The Count of Toulouse was about fifty-six when he embarked on the Crusade. He felt he would soon die, and he hoped to die in the Holy Land, a wish that was fulfilled. He had fought against the Almoravides in Spain, and he was proud of the fact that he had lost an eye in single combat while fighting the Moors. His mother was Almodis, Princess of Barcelona. The last of his many wives—for he married often and was twice excommunicated by the Church for marriages of consanguinity—was Elvira, the natural daughter of Alfonso VI, King of Leon and Castile, one of the greatest Spanish kings, who had fought implacably against the Moors.

We shall not understand the half-Spanish Count of Toulouse unless we remember that he had already waged war against the Moors and throughout his life maintained his connections with Spain. Just as Alfonso VI vanquished the Moors at one end of the Mediterranean, so the Count of Toulouse intended to vanquish them at the other end. The count was a great womanizer while remaining deeply religious: he had a Spanish gravity and a Spanish sensuality. He was by far the richest of the Crusader leaders and he was the first of the princes to take the Cross.

Bohemond, Prince of Otranto, was a man of another color and of a more barbaric character. He was about forty years old when he set out on the Crusade, but he had retained a young man's fierce ambitions and ferocious temper. He was a pure Norman, with a Norman's cruelty and a Norman's belief that the whole world was ripe for conquest. His consuming ambition was the conquest of the Byzantine empire, and he had already made a serious attempt to conquer it before he embarked on the Crusade. The Byzantine emperor had reason to distrust him, realizing that he was a man who was totally unscrupulous and dangerous, capable of all manner of stratagems to accomplish his aims. Anna Comnena, the emperor's eldest daughter, who saw him when she was fourteen, described him in a famous passage in her history of her father's life and times:

Never before had anyone set eyes on a man like this in our country, whether among the Greeks or the barbarians, for he was a marvel to behold and his reputation was terrifying. Let me describe this barbarian's appearance more particularly—he was so tall in stature that he overtopped the tallest by nearly one cubit, narrow in the waist and loins, with broad shoulders and a deep chest and powerful arms. And in the whole build of the body he was neither too slender nor overweighted with flesh, but perfectly proportioned and, one might say, built in conformity with the canon of Polycleitus. . . .

. . . His skin all over his body was very white, and in his face the white was tempered with red. His hair was yellowish, but did not hang down to his waist like that of the other barbarians; for the man was not inordinately vain of his hair, but had it cut short to the ears. Whether his beard was reddish, or any other color I cannot say, for the razor had passed over it very closely and left a surface smoother than chalk. . . . His blue eyes indicated both a high spirit and dignity; and his nose and nostrils breathed in the
air freely; his chest corresponded to his nostrils and his nostrils explained the breadth of his chest. For by his nostrils nature had given free passage to the high spirit that bubbled up from his heart. A certain charm hung about this man but was partly marred by a general air of the horrible. For in the whole of his body the entire man showed implacable and savage both in his size and glance, or so I believe, and even his laughter sounded like roaring. He was so made in mind and body that courage and passion reared their crests within him and both inclined to war. His wit was manifold and crafty and able to find a way of escape in every emergency. In conversation he was well-informed, and the answers he gave were quite irrefutable. This man, who was of such a size and such a character, was inferior to the emperor alone in fortune and eloquence and other gifts of nature.

Anna Comnena provided no comparable portrait of the other Crusader princes. She was evidently fascinated by Bohemond, by the
terribilità
which he wore like a garment and by his extraordinary beauty. She had studied him at length, and knew him to be a merciless marauder. What, she wondered, was such a man doing on a Crusade?

It was a question which many people asked during the course of the Crusade. The Count of Toulouse asked it, and came to the same conclusion as Anna: that Bohemond was there for all the mischief he could create, and all the territory and glory he could acquire. As a result the count exerted a great deal of energy in attempting to neutralize Bohemond. They were at odds with one another throughout the campaign.

There remained the Lotharingian princes, led by Godfrey of Bouillon, and his brothers Baldwin and Eustace. They were the sons of Eustace II, Count of Boulogne, and Ida, the daughter of Duke Godfrey II of Lower Lorraine, and through their mother they were descended from Charlemagne, and it was this more than anything else that distinguished them from the other princes. To have royal blood signified a great deal at a time when kings were regarded as nearly divine. Godfrey, the second son, possessed enormous strength: once in Cilicia he wrestled with a huge bear, and when an Arab sheikh invited him to slaughter a camel, he sliced off its head with a single sword-stroke. He was deeply religious, and it was related that he accompanied the German King Henry IV on his march through Italy. He was so horrified by the sack of Rome in 1082 that he fell into a fever; when he had recovered he promised himself he would take part in no more fighting in the West; he would reserve his strength for fighting against the Saracens. He sometimes prayed for so long before a meal that his entourage complained their meals were cold by the time they were permitted to eat. He had his mother's piety and he had Charlemagne's sense of the lord's proper humility in the face of his subjects.

Once when some Arab dignitaries came to visit him in his tent, they found him sitting on the ground, resting against a tawdry sack of straw. There were no carpets, no curtains, no silk hangings, and no furniture. The dignitaries asked him why he lived like this, and he answered, “The earth serves well enough for a seat in life as it does in death.”

Godfrey of Bouillon was about thirty-five years old when he set out on the Crusade, his younger brother Baldwin about thirty-two. Baldwin was originally intended for the Church and became a prebendary in various churches in Rheims, Cambrai, and Liege. Suddenly he abandoned the Church, became a soldier, married a high-born Englishwoman called Godehilde, who accompanied him on the Crusade. Baldwin gave every sign of remaining a soldier for the rest of his life. Unlike Godfrey, he enjoyed finery and never appeared in public without a mantle hanging from his shoulders. He was very grave in manner, so that they said of him that he looked more like a bishop than a warrior. His chief vice was venery; he loved women passionately. But he was also something of a scholar, and a man of exquisite manners.

Baldwin loved his older brother almost to excess. He modeled himself on Godfrey, studying his brother's every act. To the chaste and handsome Godfrey, so it seemed to him, all the virtues had been granted in double measure, and Baldwin tended to regard himself as a sinner who never came up to his own expectations for himself. Eustace, the third brother, played only a minor role in the Crusades and soon returned to manage his vast estates.

Of the three great princes who led the Crusade, one came from the south of France, another from what is now the region of Belgium and Flanders, and the third from southern Italy. They had never met and knew very little about each other. The eldest was the Count of Toulouse, the youngest was Godfrey. In the end both the Count of Toulouse and Godfrey would be offered the crown of Jerusalem and both would refuse it.

On August 15, 1097, Godfrey set out at the head of his small army for Constantinople, the staging ground for the attack on the Holy Land. No reliable figures are available, for the medieval chroniclers let their imaginations loose whenever they contemplated the size of an army. Anna Comnena, for example, says that Godfrey had ten thousand knights and seventy thousand foot soldiers when he reached Constantinople. It is more likely that he set out with about one thousand knights and gathered another five hundred during the journey along the Rhine and the Danube. There were probably about seven thousand pikemen and archers, and in addition three thousand or four thousand grooms, carters, fletchers, ironsmiths, cooks, tentmen, servants, and camp followers. Both Godfrey and Baldwin took their wives with them, and many of the knights were accompanied by their families. In medieval wars women traveled with their men, and there was always an abundance of female camp followers.

These small armies were well organized: supply problems had been worked out; there was an adequate intelligence system, and the military police saw to it that the foot soldiers obeyed orders. The army was priest-ridden: Every nobleman of substance had his private chaplain, and every company of soldiers its attendant priest.

A large number of noblemen joined Godfrey's army, among them Baldwin of Le Bourg, his kinsman, who would in time become king of Jerusalem.

In those days a count was a very important personage indeed, and the noblemen who attached themselves to the great lords could expect commensurate deference. Between the noblemen and the soldiers there was a vast gap. We shall hear very little about the deeds of the individual soldiers, for the history of the Crusades was very largely recorded by chaplains and knights.

Godfrey's army followed the Charlemagne Road, said to be the road taken by Charlemagne during his pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In fact, Charlemagne never went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and the road bearing his name was simply a tribute to his legendary qualities. It was a road for heroes to travel on. Peter the Hermit had followed it, and his ragtag army had suffered severely at the hands of Hungarians and Pechenegs. Godfrey was luckier. He was well armed, he was well known, and he had complete control over his men. At some time in the beginning of October, he crossed the border between Germany and Hungary, having previously sent Godfrey d'Esch, one of his noblemen, ahead on a mission to seek the king of Hungary's permission to enter the country. Godfrey d'Esch knew the king and had previously rendered him some service. He conducted his embassy intelligently, there were protracted negotiations, and soon Godfrey of Lorraine and his brother Baldwin and three hundred knights were invited to meet King Coloman at Sapron, his capital, and it was agreed that the Crusader army would be permitted to pass through Hungary on condition that they left Baldwin, his wife, and children as hostages for their good behavior. Godfrey, for his part, issued an order that anyone who committed violence of any kind on a Hungarian would immediately be put to death and all his goods would be confiscated. The order was delivered to everyone in the army by means of a herald. At all costs Godfrey was determined to pass through Hungary peacefully. “In this way, by the grace of God,” wrote William of Tyre, “they traveled across the whole country without giving offence with the slightest word.”