The House of Wisdom (3 page)

The worst depredations were carried out by the forces under the local German count Emicho as they marched eastward up the Rhine. At Worms, in May 1096, they killed five hundred Jews who had sought the protection of local Catholic leaders. Another thousand were killed in Mainz, amid anti-Jewish rioting in the city. Again, the local church leadership failed to restrain its flocks or honor earlier promises to the Jews of sanctuary.
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Jewish leaders organized mass suicides rather than let their charges fall into the hands of the attacking crusaders and face the prospect of forced conversion. “They all cried out together in a loud voice, … ‘Whoever has a knife, come kill us for the honor of the unique eternal God, and then pierce himself with his sword in the neck or belly, slaughter himself,’ ” the anonymous chronicler reports. “And the pure women were throwing money out [the windows] to delay the enemies a bit, until the women could slaughter their own children; the hands of merciful women were strangling their own children, to do the will of the Creator, and were turning their children’s tender faces to the Gentiles.”
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Pope Urban’s call to crusade had fired the religious zeal of Christians across Europe with its appeal to battle the “enemies” of Christ. This was a dangerous development at a time of growing tensions in the Rhineland between Jews, long seen in the European imagination as Christ’s tormentors, and non-Jews over access to expanding trade and commerce.
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Popular Christian tracts accusing the Jews of scheming with the far-off Muslims, often in fantastic ways, only aggravated matters further. “Emicho the wicked, enemy of the Jews, came with his whole army against the city gate, and the citizens opened it up for him. Emicho, a German noble, led a band of plundering German and French crusaders. The enemies of the Lord said to each other: ‘See, they have opened the gate for us; now let us avenge the blood of the crucified one,’ ” writes Solomon bar Simson.
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Volkmar, another populist leader, attacked the Jews of Prague at the end of June, while more massacres took place near the Hungarian border. By the summer, the crusaders had left the Rhineland and were headed for Constantinople, much to the relief of the local Christian rulers who wanted them out of their lands as quickly as possible.
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No wonder Anna Comnena recounts with awe the fanatical tide of humanity—dirty, ill fed, sick, and exhausted—that poured into the realm in the summer of 1096, on the way to battle the Muslim infidel to the south. It was, she notes gravely, “a matter greater and more terrible than famine.”
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Most of Peter’s loyal followers were slaughtered by the Turks on October 2I at Civetot, not far from Constantinople. They had set off against the counsel of Emperor Alexius—Anna’s father—and without the protection of the organized armies of Christendom that were still in transit from Europe. The hermit, however, was not present at the disastrous end to this People’s Crusade. Contemporary European accounts are contradictory: Either he remonstrated unsuccessfully with his followers not to take on the well-trained Turkish forces, or he cowered in the safety of Constantinople to avoid the slaughter he knew was inevitable. Anna’s version has him whisked to safety by Byzantine forces. In any event, Peter eventually reached his beloved Jerusalem with the main contingent of knights three years later. One of Peter’s chief lieutenants was less fortunate. His coat of mail pierced by seven arrows, he died at Civetot at the head of his fanatical army.

Along the eastern Mediterranean and into the Syrian heartland, the arrival of the crusaders appeared to confirm the worst fears of the local Arabs and their Jewish and Christian subjects. Medieval Arab geography customarily divided the world into seven zones, or climates. The central third and fourth zones—the Arab world, North Africa, Iran, and parts of China—enjoyed the greatest balance and harmony. The northerly sixth zone was home to the Slavs, the Turks, and the European Christians, the latter known among the Arabs simply as al-Ifranj, or the Franks. All three were warlike, filthy, and inclined toward treachery.
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In the case of the Franks, their northerly provenance also made them unstable. Other notable qualities included profligate sexuality, a lack of jealousy, and a general propensity for violence.
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The Arab geographer al-Masudi blamed the absence of sunlight for these personal shortcomings. At the same time, his assessment betrayed a grasp of astronomy—if not, perhaps, of meteorology—that was well beyond that of his subjects, the crusading Franks:

As regards the people of the northern quadrant, they are the one for whom the sun is distant from the zenith … The power of the sun is weak among them because of their distance from it; cold and damp prevail in their regions, and snow and ice follow one another in endless succession. The warm humor is lacking among them; their bodies are large; their natures gross, their manners harsh, their understanding dull, and their tongues heavy … Their religious beliefs lack solidity, and this is because of the nature of cold and the lack of warmth.
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The debacle of Peter and his populist campaign was soon eclipsed by the arrival outside Constantinople of the main Christian fighting force. Here were trained military men, led by members of Europe’s royal houses and subject to both the new religious zeal of the day and more traditional political and economic interests of their own. This jumble of kings, princes, and other nobility from across Europe often left the fortunes of the First Crusade hostage to internal rivalries, personal ambition, and the lack of a single recognized authority or commander. At first Emperor Alexius successfully exploited these differences and used the crusaders’ military prowess and enthusiasm to reestablish his own grip over western Asia Minor, which he had lost earlier to the Muslims. In one such campaign, Raymond of Saint-Gilles, Count of Toulouse, captured the Syrian port of Latakia from the Arabs and then handed it to the Byzantine ruler in line with an oath he and other crusader lords had taken at Alexius’s insistence.

But the princes of western Christendom were not all so pliable. Many were intent on performing their religious and military duty as quickly as possible before hurrying back to their dominions at home. But a select handful, including some of the leading lights of the First Crusade, such as Godfrey of Bouillon and the wily Norman commander Bohemond of Taranto, had ill-disguised territorial designs of their own. Pope Urban had, at least in part, used the First Crusade to export the endless bickering and warring of such minor princelings from an exhausted and violence-racked Europe. He had said as much at Clermont. Both the church’s higher ambitions for the Crusades and Alexius’s own dream of restoring Constantinople’s hold over Asia Minor and the eastern Mediterranean with the help of the zealous arrivals had to compete with the more mundane and secular concerns of the individual crusaders.

Almost immediately, fissures opened in the Latin ranks. The push south from Constantinople to the Holy Land—the stated objective of the entire venture, after all—was threatened by the decision of Baldwin of Boulogne, a prominent French nobleman, and a handful of others to split off temporarily from the main body in search of territory they could call their own. Baldwin had carefully studied the social and political complexities of the Armenian lands along the nearby Euphrates. He and his men, accompanied by Armenian political advisers, headed eastward to make their fortune. They may have taken some comfort in the notion that such a campaign would further the crusaders’ mission by protecting the eastern flank of the drive for Jerusalem. But it was clear that Baldwin, as astute a diplomatic and military operator as any of the crusader commanders, had sensed opportunity amid the traditional political and religious intrigues of the region, particularly in Edessa, then a predominantly Armenian town in what is today southern Turkey. He was not about to let the demands of Christian holy war stand in his way.

As Baldwin and his aides had been led to expect, the local Armenian Christian population at once welcomed the crusading Franks with open arms. They had grown tired of constant Turkish military raids and were restive under the rule of the former Byzantine official Thoros, a fellow Armenian who followed the Eastern Orthodox Church of hated Byzantium rather than the national rite. Unpopular at home, increasingly unsuccessful at war, and childless in marriage, the aging Thoros offered to adopt the popular Baldwin as his heir and immediately made him coruler. The pair even underwent an adoption ritual, clearly designed for young children, in which they both wriggled into a single oversize shirt or tunic and rubbed their chests together; Baldwin then repeated the process with Thoros’s wife, now his adoptive “mother.”
The Chronicle of Matthew of Armenia
reports that a plot to remove Thoros was soon hatched and that Baldwin was informed, although his overt role as instigator, if any, remains murky. On March 7, 1098, the conspirators whipped the population into a frenzy of rioting and brought down the hapless Thoros. Three days later, the town notables invited Baldwin to take his place. Thoros, we are told, was caught trying to escape and was torn to pieces by the mob.
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Edessa, the first territory to fall to the crusaders and the first to slip from their grasp again, was little more than a sideshow to the West’s campaign for control of the Holy Land. Yet it played an outsize role in the early history of the so-called Latin East. First, it showed how skillful diplomacy and a healthy dose of intrigue could easily tip the region’s fragile balance among competing ethnic, linguistic, and sectarian factions, groups, and nations. Second, it created a powerful if fleeting example of what an ambitious prince and a handful of knights—Baldwin’s initial force was said to number just sixty horsemen—could accomplish, inspiring acquisitive rivals to strike out on their own rather than struggle on toward the holy city.

Most important, it saw the emergence under Baldwin, who had proclaimed himself Count of Edessa, of a model of state and society for the rest of the Latin East, one that the irrepressible Norman would later implement more widely as king of Jerusalem. According to this approach, Frankish princes and their vassals were allocated the top positions of government, but plenty of room was left for the talents and ambitions of the locals, whether Christian or Muslim. This would prove a successful system, well adapted to the ethnic and sectarian mosaic of the Middle East, but it stood at odds with the militant notions of crusading as preached by Pope Urban two and a half years earlier.

Like the future Count of Edessa, Bohemond of Taranto seemed more concerned with immediate earthly pursuit than future heavenly reward. One of the ablest commanders of the First Crusade, this Norman adventurer from southern Italy took no direct role in the march to Jerusalem in 1099. Instead, he overrode the objections of his colleagues and ignored his own oath to Emperor Alexius by setting out to take Antioch, gateway to the Holy Land, from the Muslims and keep it for himself and his heirs. Once outside its walls, he repeatedly thwarted joint crusader efforts to seize the city, whose defenders soon recovered from their initial dismay at the arrival of the large Christian army. Bohemond’s tactic cost the crusaders the chance to seize the city immediately and forced many months of delay in the main host’s push for Jerusalem, but it successfully ensured that the spoils of victory would ultimately accrue to him alone.

The city and its surrounding lands were a rich prize. It sat at the crossroads of lucrative East-West trade and had periodically changed hands among the Arabs, Byzantines, and Seljuk Turks. The Arab physician Ibn Butlan, far from his native Baghdad, found the bazaars of Antioch overflowing with goods, while residents enjoyed civic water supplies and other conveniences, including a public clepsydra, or water clock, near one of the city gates.
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Now, with the Byzantine emperor helpless back in Constantinople and the local Muslims deeply divided, Antioch’s impressive defenses were all that stood between the ambitious Bohemond and his dream of establishing his own royal line. “So fortified was it with walls and towers and barbicans, that it had no need to fear assault of any machine or the attack of any man, not even if all mankind were to come together against it,” says the Frenchman Raymond of Aguilers in his firsthand account of the First Crusade.
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After a long and ineffectual siege, Bohemond’s agents managed to bribe a disgruntled tower guard to look the other way as a small force of crusaders climbed one of the walls and then threw open Antioch’s massive gate. The local garrison fled to the city’s impressive citadel, while a considerable Muslim relief force under the command of the Turkish general Kerbogha approached menacingly from the east. The crusaders, by now tired and suffering from a lack of supplies, mounting desertion, and general low morale, found themselves unable to take the citadel and faced with the mortal threat of Kerbogha’s looming counterattack. Food supplies soon ran low, and the depleted countryside had little left to offer the hordes of scavenging crusaders. Fulcher of Chartres, loyal chaplain to Baldwin of Edessa, describes how many were reduced to subsisting on barely cooked thistles, bean shoots, and the meat of horses, donkeys, dogs, and rats. “We believed that these misfortunes befell the Franks, and that they were not able for so long a time to take the city, because of their sins. Not only dissipation, but also avarice or pride or rapaciousness corrupted them.” An army council resolved to send the women away “lest they, stained by the defilement of dissipation, displease the Lord.”
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It is emblematic of the Crusades that a religious vision, even one doubted by almost all of the prominent figures present, saved the day for the Christians. Peter Bartholomew, a lowly pilgrim, claimed divine inspiration had revealed the location in the city of the Holy Lance, which tradition said had pierced Christ’s side as he hung from the cross. The pilgrim directed the increasingly desperate crusaders to the local cathedral of St. Peter, patron saint of Antioch and its first bishop. Sure enough, a little digging in the floor of the cathedral uncovered what the searchers were convinced was the tip of this valued relic. The discovery transformed the morale in the crusader camp, inspiring a remarkable victory on June 28, 1098, against the much larger attacking force of Kerbogha, which had already been weakened along the way by a failed attempt to retake Edessa from Baldwin. The Muslim armies fled in disgrace.