Armies of Heaven Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 - Jerusalem, on Earth as It Is in Heaven

  The First Thousand Years

  The Sacking of the Holy Sepulcher in 1009

  Pilgrims’ Progress, 1064–1065

  The Sermons of Peter the Hermit, 1095–1096

  Chapter 2 - The Pope’s Plan

  The Pope’s Problems: War with Germany, an Oversexed French King, and Greeks in Crisis

  The Lost Sermon

  The Crowd Roars

  Chapter 3 - The Response: The Princes, the Prophets, the People

  Papal Failures

  Accidental Successes: The Princes Respond

  Bloody Moons and Blazing Stars: The People Respond

  Chapter 4 - The Road to Constantinople

  The Hermit’s Armies

  The Princes on the March

  Chapter 5 - Deals with Devils: The Crusaders at Constantinople

  The Hermit and His Army

  The Emperor’s New Son

  Alexius and Bohemond: A Meeting of the Minds

  Chapter 6 - The Nicene Deal

  The Siege

  A Troubling Victory

  Chapter 7 - “Saracens,” Through a Glass Darkly

  Chapter 8 - Enemy Country

  Dorylaeum

  The Slow Road to Antioch

  Reassembling the Troops

  Chapter 9 - Starvation and Nightmare: The Siege of Antioch Begins

  Cannibals and Severed Heads

  The Crusade in Winter

  A Visionary’s First Nightmare

  An Apocalyptic Failure

  Chapter 10 - A Brief Account of Baldwin of Boulogne’s Adventures in Syria

  Chapter 11 - Reversal of Fortune and a River of Blood: The Battle for Antioch Continues

  Bohemond Becomes a Genius

  Diplomacy

  The River Battle

  Aftermath

  Chapter 12 - Truce and Consequences: The Fall of Antioch

  The Truce

  Consequences

  Chapter 13 - Violent Men

  Chapter 14 - Kerbogah and the Lance

  A Worthy Villain: The Character of Kerbogah

  In the Real World: The Crusade Forsaken

  The Heavens Open

  The Prophets’ Crusade

  The Battle with Kerbogah

  Chapter 15 - Feasting on the Fallen: Antioch to Ma‘arra

  Aftermath

  Frustrated Desire: The Crusaders Scatter

  Ma‘arra: Those Belonging to Jeroboam

  Peter Bartholomew’s Crusade

  Chapter 16 - Trial by Fire

  Rendezvous at Arqa

  A Dangerous Vision

  Burning the Messenger

  Chapter 17 - Seeking a New Apocalypse

  A New Vision

  New Visionaries

  Chapter 18 - Jerusalem

  Jerusalem Syndrome

  Preparations for the Final Battle

  Apocalypse 14:20

  Chapter 19 - The Last Emperor

  The Merciful and the Greedy

  The Election of a King

  The Millenarian Strikes Back

  Chapter 20 - Ascalon, the Sixth Battle

  Conclusion - The Never-Ending Apocalypse

  Acknowledgments

  Abbreviations

  A Note on Sources

  Notes

  Index

  Copyright Page

  More Advance Praise for Armies of Heaven

  “Rubenstein’s book is a thrill to the casual reader and to the scholar alike. His prose carries the reader along with the extraordinary events of the First Crusade, effortlessly integrating the bloody realities of the battlefield, astute portraits of the leaders, and a convincing historical argument about the nature of the First Crusade. Armies of Heaven shows how easily piety, violence, and political scheming intermesh, but also warns against facile comparisons of medieval crusades to contemporary conflicts, the rhetoric of al-Qaeda notwithstanding. Steven Runciman’s account of the First Crusade provided a standard of eloquence for the last fifty years; Jay Rubenstein’s matches Runciman for style, and surpasses with a discerning eye and a sly but scathing wit.”

  —Christopher MacEvitt, author of Crusades and the

  Christian World of the East: Rough Tolerance

  “The First Crusade has been a source of fascination from the late eleventh century down to the present. Recent historians have analyzed this epochal event in terms of demography, economics, secular politics, ecclesiastical politics, and ecclesiastical theory. Jay Rubenstein asks a refreshing question: How did the thousands and tens of thousands who joined the sacred undertaking view it? His fascinating answer is that most of these crusaders were convinced that they were living at the cusp of the end of days, at the point in time when the world order would change dramatically. Rubenstein’s insights will profoundly enrich our understanding of the First Crusade, its glories, and its horrors.”

  —Robert Chazan, New York University

  This book is for Meredith

  The world of the First Crusade

  Introduction

  In 1096 approximately 100,000people—warriors, priests, women, poor folk, bishops, prophets, and a few children—left homes in France, Italy, and Germany and marched to Jerusalem. They intended to worship at Christ’s tomb and, in the process, to reclaim the city for the Christian world. Three years later, on July 15, 1099, a fraction of that group broke through Jerusalem’s defenses, killed the city’s garrison and residents, and transformed the ancient Middle Eastern city into the capital of a European principality. This long campaign became known as the First Crusade. Contemporaries, not realizing that it would be the first of several such expeditions and not yet having invented the word “crusade,” simply called it “the pilgrimage” or “the movement.” Sensing its importance, they began documenting it almost immediately, in part to celebrate the army’s achievement but also to try to understand it. Something profoundly important had happened, not just in the history of Europe or even in the history of the world. It was a new phase in God’s plan. At the very least, the armies had set in motion events prophesied for centuries. The work begun with Christ’s crucifixion a millennium earlier might now be drawing to a close, the apocalyptic clock started due to the actions of modern men.1

  Even with centuries of hindsight, this sense of cataclysmic upheaval seems appropriate. Most immediately, the crusade led to the creation of French-speaking settlements in the Middle East, governments that would endure in some form for nearly two centuries. Because of the crusade, Western Europeans grew more familiar with Greek civilization and came into closer contact with Arab civilization than ever before. The crusade also fostered the development of military technology, such that war at home and abroad occurred on a scale previously unimaginable. War also became an honorable profession. Prior to the crusade, violence on the battlefield was a sinful act, as it would be in any other setting. Now warriors had the option of practicing their art while adding to their store of virtues—not in spite of their brutality but because of it.

  More fundamentally, the crusade helped to fashion a broader sense of Christian identity in an otherwise divided European homeland. Pilgrims came from different cultures and spoke different languages—German, Flemish, Norman, French, Provençal, and Italian—but their shared experiences instilled in them a common identity: Now all were Franks. The most frequent title for contemporary histories of the era celebrated this new sense of brotherhood: Deeds of the Franks or, as one historian preferred, God’s Deeds Through the Franks. It would be no exaggeration to say that the economy, spirituality, technology, and morality—the foundat
ions of Western culture—would be remade because of the First Crusade.

  But even this list of historical transformations fails to capture how precisely apocalyptic the First Crusade was, both for the people who marched to Jerusalem and for those who stayed home and celebrated. In the 1090s, as far as anyone could tell, God (or Satan) had loosed Antichrist on the world. The armies of Gog and Magog had broken through the gates behind which Alexander the Great had imprisoned them. And Christian armies were preparing to make a stand at Jerusalem, to fight around Mount Calvary, where Christ had died, and before the Mount of Olives, where He would soon return—not merely to follow in the footsteps of saints but to wield swords alongside them in battles against a demonic foe. When Jerusalem fell to the Franks and when Christ did not appear, apocalyptic enthusiasm did not die. Rather, historians in Europe and in the Middle East continued to write books about the crusade for decades, asking not just whether the end of the world was nigh. They wondered instead, had the Apocalypse already happened?

  This book will retell these tales of Jerusalem’s conquest and the apocalypse that accompanied it. The former story, the military history, has been written often and well. But it has not been told in a way that engages the grand ideas behind the First Crusade—the beliefs that helped to create it and that helped to drive the armies forward toward their goal.

  On a fundamental level, the First Crusade was a holy war, a style of combat that was, in the 1090s, altogether new: a war fought on behalf of God and in fulfillment of His plan. It did not just provide soldiers with a new path to salvation, a way to use martial prowess to perform good deeds. It also enabled them to fight in battles longer and bloodier than any they had ever imagined. So full of pageantry and gore were the sieges of Nicea (May–June 1097), Antioch (October 1097–June 1098), Ma‘arra (November–December 1098), and Jerusalem (June–July 1099) that they surpassed earthly conflict, pointing soldiers toward heaven as well as giving them some experience of hell. When the survivors returned to Europe and relived their memories, cooler and more educated heads could only agree: They had witnessed the Apocalypse.2

  Despite an abundance of evidence, the apocalyptic crusade has not received its due, in part because historians mistrust our best and most abundant evidence for it: a collection of chronicles written by churchmen in France and Germany starting around the year 1107. Apocalyptic language permeates these books, but among all the available evidence, they have usually held a position of secondary importance. The normal goal of history is to peel away myths that accumulate with the passage of time and focus on whatever nuggets of authenticity remain—hence our preference for “eyewitness” evidence and for the more staid and sedate passages in certain eyewitness texts—particularly in Deeds of the Franks. For the crusade, however, this intellectual winnowing, sifting through myth and prejudice to focus on the small grains of demonstrable truth, has distracted us from the war’s original meaning. Through the efforts of modern, eleventh-century men, an event of apocalyptic proportions, if not the Apocalypse itself, had just occurred.

  An examination of this imaginative world will help explain why 100,000 people charged recklessly into a conflict fought nearly 2,000 miles from their homes and why their victory inspired such intense celebration and speculation. The typical aspects of medieval piety—a desire to undertake pilgrimages to Jerusalem, the need to perform penance acutely felt among warriors, and a simple longing for adventure—take us a long way toward answering this question, but they do not go far enough. There was nothing typical about the First Crusade. To understand this extraordinary event, we must take seriously those passages that are most extraordinary, for what is most unusual (and ubiquitous) in First Crusade histories is the belief that men were living in prophetic time, their every deed advancing God’s designs.

  Woven into this history, then, more thoroughly than in any previous telling of the First Crusade saga, are all of the dreams, visions, and miracles that occurred during the expedition. As often as possible, I have placed the progress of the army alongside the apparent progress of the Apocalypse. The further crusaders descended into their journey, the more detached from earthly reality they seemed to become. The closer they got to Jerusalem, the more in tune their activity seemed to be with the plans of God and the movements of angels. Fundamentally, this is what an apocalyptic event is—a sudden leap forward in salvation history, when the story of man as written by God approaches its climax.

  The First Crusade was neither the first time nor the last that Christians would believe themselves on the verge of Armageddon. But in all other cases (and for obvious reasons), these moments of expectation ended in disillusionment. What is remarkable about the First Crusade is that observers on the ground, even with twenty years’ hindsight, continued to see in it signs not of an imminent apocalypse, but of an apocalypse fulfilled.

  1

  Jerusalem, on Earth as It Is in Heaven

  (1009, 1064–1065, and 1095–1096)

  Jerusalem. Anyone who reads history books, even just a little, anyone who, avid for learning, pays attention to men who calculate the passages of years knows Jerusalem, capital of all Judea, a city of no small nobility and no small fame, raised to the heights of royal dignity as often as it has suffered the conquests of tyrants, razed to the earth and deprived of her own children, led off into captivity, suffering so many historic upheavals until the coming of the Savior.

  —BAUDRY OF BOURGUEIL, 1107

  In 1095 Jerusalem was the center of the earth, the site of Christ’s death and resurrection, where God had trumped the devil and worked salvation for humanity. Men and women across Europe dreamed of visiting that city, of praying before the tomb of Christ, of catching, if only for a moment, a direct glimpse of heaven. Out of such dreams and desires the First Crusade was born. It seemed the most natural thing, barely in need of explanation. “There was a great movement throughout all parts of France,” wrote one anonymous historian around 1100, “so that if anyone truly wished to follow God, with a pure heart and mind, and wanted faithfully to carry his Cross, he did not hesitate to take the fastest road to the Holy Sepulcher.”1 [Plate 1]

  Whatever Christians believed in 1095, there was no rational explanation or single event that triggered this sudden desire to possess Jerusalem. Various Muslim factions had held it for over four hundred years. The few pilgrims capable of undertaking such an ambitious journey did so, with varying degrees of difficulty and success. The urge to incorporate a far-flung Middle Eastern city into the Christian world was thus a wholly new ambition. It was also an idea with little theological justification. As any second-rate preacher would have known, Christianity had made the physical trappings of Judaism and the Old Testament—the sacrifices, the legal code, and, yes, the city of Jerusalem—irrelevant. The journey to salvation was a journey of the heart, a story that could be lived anywhere: Jerusalem in a nearby cathedral or parish church, the River Jordan in a baptistery. But by the end of the eleventh century, European Christians were not content with these allegorical Jerusalems. They wanted the real city, too.

  This is the story of that transformation and its consequences—the war that was to become the First Crusade and the Apocalypse that it unleashed.

  The First Thousand Years

  Jerusalem, the city of Christ, had ceased to exist by 1095. Roman legions sacked it in 70 AD while suppressing a Jewish revolt. In the process they destroyed most of the important religious monuments and left the city as a whole in ruins.

  In 135 AD, during another rebellion, the Emperor Hadrian ordered Jerusalem destroyed completely, building in its place a Roman outpost called Aelia Capitolina (taken from Aelius, Hadrian’s own family name). The traditional site of the crucifixion, called “Golgotha,” or “place of the Skull,” Hadrian had covered in earth and concrete and then built on top of it a temple to Venus. The city thus disappeared for nearly two hundred years.

  The Emperor Constantine, newly converted to Christianity, took a sudden interest in the city in 325. He disp
atched—at the risk of anachronism—a crack team of archaeologists to recover the sites where Christ had died, had been buried, and had risen from the grave. By 327 his men had made significant progress: The temple of Venus had been destroyed, and the sites of the crucifixion and of the Holy Sepulcher had been located (or else chosen, since no real evidence would have, or could have, survived). On Constantine’s order, construction work also began on a magnificent new basilica that would incorporate both places into its architectural scheme.

  A little later Constantine’s mother, Helena, visited the city. According to some traditions, Helena engaged in some archaeological work of her own, discovering the remains of the True Cross—some of which she took back to Constantinople, some of which she left in the Holy Land. For the next three centuries, thousands of Latin Christians would follow in her footsteps, traveling as pilgrims to Jerusalem, now a thoroughly Christian city, to pray at the tomb of Christ and to venerate the relics of His Passion.2

  But not everyone celebrated these developments, including the Roman Christians who decided to live there. St. Jerome, writing in 395 from his hermitage in Bethlehem, famously argued that there was no special benefit to be gained in the Holy Land. Sacred places by themselves—even Jerusalem—had no real virtue. “What is praiseworthy,” he wrote, “is not to have been to Jerusalem, but to have lived a good life while there.” The heavenly court was no more accessible in the city where Christ had lived, he went on, than it was in, say, Britain, since the true kingdom of God lies in the heart of every believer.