The Tragedy of the Templars (14 page)

While Adhemar and the princely armies of knights were still preparing for their expedition, Peter's preachings had roused fifteen thousand French men and women, who left their homes to follow him into Germany, where the numbers continued to swell. Many among this multitude of peasants, artisans and other ordinary people took the cross in the belief that the apocalypse was at hand. The atmosphere was heightened by the very real fear of Turkish aggression, fuelled by the stories of returning pilgrims and of terrified refugees whose lands and towns had suffered devastation and whose people had been killed or sold into slavery. European Jews had become the victims of these fears already at the time of al-Hakim's outrages, and over fifty years later, in 1063, Pope Alexander II found it necessary to condemn the identification of Jews with Muslims, declaring that war was permissible against the latter, who were attacking Christians everywhere, but that Jews were loyal subjects and must be protected.
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But now Christians turned on Jews again.

The worst violence came when Peter's crusade appeared along the Rhine, one of Europe's major trade routes, where Jews had lived for centuries in large numbers, their economic usefulness recognised by the encouragement and protection they had always received from the bishops in the cathedral towns. During May and June 1096 Jewish quarters were attacked, synagogues were sacked, houses were looted and entire communities were massacred. The bishops and the burghers did what they could to protect the Jews but were often overwhelmed. At Worms, for example, the bishop sheltered Jews in his castle, but he could not resist the combined force of Peter's mob and his own poorer townsfolk, who demanded their death or conversion; and when the bishop offered to baptise the Jews to save their lives, the entire Jewish community chose suicide instead. During that May and June as many as eight thousand Jews were massacred or took their own lives as the crusading rabble marched through Germany.

Far removed from the spirit and the intentions of Clermont, tributaries of this popular crusade passed across Europe, through France, Germany and Hungary, but only the chaotic stream led by Peter the Hermit and known in history as the People's Crusade got as far as Asia Minor, where in October 1096 it was annihilated by the Seljuks, although Peter, who had hung behind in Constantinople, lived to preach another day.

The official crusading army led by Adhemar and the great secular lords had no part in these massacres. Assembling their forces in the West, in France especially, they made their preparations. Setting off in groups after the summer harvest, the army arrived at Constantinople between October 1096 and April 1097. But of the forty thousand crusaders who approached the city, no more than four thousand five hundred were nobles or knights. Travelling in their wake was yet another mass of poor and humble people, artisans and peasants, not unlike the rabble that had caused so much death and devastation the previous year along the Rhine. This untrained and undisciplined horde, which included women and other non-combatants, filled the leaders of the crusade with anxiety, as they did Alexius, the Byzantine emperor, because they were unpredictable and needed to be fed. But as the crusade was also a pilgrimage, there was little that could be done to prevent them joining in the march, and now their numbers were increased by Greeks and Armenians, refugees from the Muslim occupation of their lands.

Alexius ferried the crusaders across the Bosphorus, and in May they had laid siege to Nicaea, the Seljuk capital. Making clear what he saw as their purpose in Asia Minor, the emperor had the crusader leaders swear an oath that ‘whatever cities, countries or forts he might in future subdue, which had in the first place belonged to the Roman [Byzantine] Empire, he would hand over to the officer appointed by the emperor for this very purpose';
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and when Nicaea fell, in June 1097, Alexius took care that his imperial forces and not the crusaders received the surrender.

From Nicaea the First Crusade marched southwards to Dorylaeum (present-day Eskisehir). The crusaders had taken the precaution of dividing their forces in two, Bohemond and several other nobles leading the first group, while Godfrey of Bouillon and Raymond of Toulouse followed with the second group a day behind. This tactic proved itself when the Seljuks under the command of Kilij Arslan, the sultan of Rum, attacked the advance force, thinking it was the entire army. Bohemond was able to hold out until Raymond and Godfrey arrived, catching the Turks unaware. Faced with the full force of the crusader army, the Turks fled the field of battle in a panic. The crusaders had won a great victory, and as they advanced towards Philomelion (Aksehir) and on to Iconium (Konya), it seemed that all Asia Minor lay open before them.

But it was not an easy march, for Kilij Arslan opposed the crusaders with a ruthless campaign of destruction that took no account of the lives or welfare of the native Christian population, destroying their crops and poisoning their wells to deny succour to the relieving army. Fulcher describes the terrible conditions the crusaders endured as they advanced eastwards through the punishing summer heat:

Fulcher then goes on to describe the remarkable variety of the crusader army, composed of peoples from the farthest reaches of Europe, from the Mediterranean and from the beleaguered East, all marching as one against the alien oppressor.

The crusade was beginning to redefine itself through its own remarkable successes. For many the conviction grew that they were under divine protection; in the eyes of contemporary chroniclers, the crusade became ‘a military monastery on the move'.
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Whatever the strategic objectives originally envisioned by Urban, the crusaders were after all pilgrims, for whom Jerusalem was now their goal.

After traversing Asia Minor the crusaders turned southwards into Syria, marching along the eastern flanks of the Amanus mountains. By autumn they stood before the walls of Antioch, founded by one of Alexander's generals and later famous as the place where the followers of Jesus were first called Christians. The population of the city was almost entirely Greek and Armenian but was garrisoned by the Turks; throughout the bitter winter months and well into 1098 the crusaders laid siege to Antioch, which finally fell in June, when Bohemond and his men, after bribing one of the guards, clambered over the walls and opened the gates of the city to the crusaders.

Meanwhile Baldwin of Boulogne, who had taken a different route, found himself warmly welcomed by Armenians who had settled in Cilicia, and was urged to continue eastwards to the Armenian city of Edessa, which had been reduced to vassalage under the Turks. Entering the city among cheering throngs of people, Baldwin established himself as ruler of the county of Edessa, the first crusader state founded in the East.

But the taking of Antioch and Edessa marked the parting of the ways between the crusaders and the Byzantines. Under their oath to Alexius the crusaders were obliged to hand over to Alexius any cities and lands that had previously been under Byzantine rule. But the Armenians, who had a long history of theological and territorial disputes with the Byzantines, preferred to remain under Frankish rule. As for Antioch, after it was captured by Bohemond it was invested in turn by Kerbogha, the Turkish atabeg, or governor, of Mosul; but when the crusaders sent to Constantinople asking for help against the siege, Alexius ignored them, convinced that theirs was a lost cause. Relying on their own force of spirit, the crusaders emerged from the city, threw themselves against the Turks and sent them fleeing in panic. From that moment the crusaders repudiated their oaths to Alexius, whom they branded a faithless coward, and Bohemond made Antioch a principality of his own, the second state established by the crusaders in the East.

The knights and the nobility may have thought that they were leading the crusade, but the poor who marched in their wake regarded themselves as the elite, a people chosen by God. Most of the common people who had joined the first wave of the crusade perished on the long journey across Europe or were cut to ribbons by the Seljuks no sooner than they had crossed the Bosphorus. Many of those who survived and had joined the second wave of the crusade, the one led by Adhemar, bishop of Le Puy, and the great French, Norman and Provençal lords, were known as Tafurs.

A modern historian has described the Tafurs as ‘a hard-core of poor men organised under their own leaders, whose name may be derived from the big light wooden shield which many of them carried, the talevart or talevas. These desperadoes seem to have been pre-eminently North French and Fleming in origin and to have represented a quasi-autonomous force within the army.'
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Stories describe them as barefoot, wearing sackcloth, being covered in sores and filth, and living on roots and grass and sometimes the roasted corpses of their enemies. Wherever they went, they left a trail of devastation. Too poor to afford swords, they fought with clubs, knives, shovels, hatchets, catapults and pointed sticks. Although the Tafurs made a virtue of their poverty, they looted cities captured by the crusaders; they also raped Muslim women and committed massacres. Their ferocity was legendary; the leaders of the crusade were unable to control them and never went among them without being armed.

After Antioch, as the crusaders advanced deeper into Syria, the Tafurs were said to have resorted to cannibalism at the siege of Ma'arra, according to Raymond of Aguilers, although other chroniclers of the crusade make no mention of the incident and modern scholars have their doubts. ‘It is tempting to deduce that they were accused of this crime because they were poor warriors, even peasants, despised and feared by the more noble warriors who regarded them of being capable of any depravity. In other words, the accusation reflects fear and distrust between classes, rather than what actually happened.'
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Certainly the Muslims were terrified of the Tafurs, but that may have been the point. The Tafurs may have invented the story of cannibalism themselves to so terrify their enemies that they would fear to fight them and instead would flee.

The pilgrim army marched along the coast as far as Jaffa, which they reached on 3 June. Taking the inland road that wound into the Judaean Hills, they were welcomed as liberators at Bethlehem, which they entered on the 6th, the whole town turning out in celebration with relics and crosses from the Church of the Nativity and to kiss the crusaders' hands. That night the crusaders were amazed to see a lunar eclipse, which they took as a sign from God that the crescent of Islam was on the wane. Early the next morning, on 7 June 1099, after journeying nearly three years and over 2,000 miles, the pilgrims climbed the hill which they named Montjoie and gained their first sight of Jerusalem. Many of them wept. It seemed a miracle that they had survived. They had fought and beaten the Seljuks and had restored Asia Minor to the Byzantine Empire, and they had liberated Antioch and Edessa from Muslim rule. But they had suffered greatly along the line of march; many had fallen in battle, and many more had succumbed to starvation and disease, among them the papal legate Adhemar, bishop of Puy, who died during an epidemic, probably typhoid, at the siege of Antioch. Yet now, as in a vision, the earthly Jerusalem rose before them; for many it was the key to the heavenly city.

The Fatimids had lost Jerusalem to the Seljuks in 1073, but in July 1098 they had recovered it once more. Marching up from Cairo, the Fatimid vizier al-Afdal had laid siege to the city, ‘bombarding it from forty catapults during forty days', according to the Arab chronicler Ibn Khaldun. The vizier then returned to Cairo, leaving a large garrison of well-trained Arab and Sudanese troops in Jerusalem.
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With the destruction done to the city and the killing and menacing of its population by Atsiz and then al-Afdal, it is a wonder it had any inhabitants at all.

Nevertheless Jerusalem was one of the great fortresses of the medieval world, and despite everything its population is estimated to have been between twenty and thirty thousand.
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The Fatimid governor prepared for the arrival of the crusaders by augmenting his forces with four hundred elite cavalrymen from Egypt and by strengthening the city walls. After extorting all the money and goods in the possession of the Christian inhabitants, he expelled them from the city, fearing that, as at Edessa, Antioch, Bethlehem and elsewhere, they would welcome the approaching army as liberators; then, after bringing the Muslim inhabitants of the outlying villages within the walls, he poisoned all the surrounding wells, secure that within Jerusalem's formidable defences he could rely on its numerous underground cisterns for good water. He knew that the crusaders were hundreds of miles from any relief from Antioch, and in their haste they had not even attempted to take the port of Jaffa. Moreover, as both he and the crusader leaders knew, an army was mustering in Egypt. Isolated and unsupplied in the face of a gathering enemy, the crusaders' complete destruction seemed just a matter of time.