the crusading armies were recruited in France, or that they were led by men of the stock of the d’Hautevilles. Meanwhile newly-conquered England had its own problems to solve; and Germany, torn by civil war, and not naturally quick to kindle, could only deride the “delirium” of the crusader.[1]
3. Course of the First Crusade.—The First Crusade falls naturally into two parts. One of these may be called the Crusade of the people: the other may be termed the Crusade of the princes. Of these the people’s Crusade—prior in order of time, if only secondary in point of importance—may naturally be studied first. The sermon of Urban II. at Clermont became the staple for wandering preachers, among whom Peter the Hermit distinguished himself by his fiery zeal.[2] Riding on an ass from place to place through France and along the Rhine, he carried away by his eloquence thousands of the poor. Some three or four months before the term fixed by Urban II., in April and May 1096, five divisions of pauperes had already collected. Three of these, led by Fulcher of Orleans, Gottschalk and William the Carpenter respectively, failed to reach even Constantinople. The armies of Fulcher and Gottschalk were destroyed by the Hungarians in just revenge for their excesses (June); the third, after joining in a wild Judenhetze in the towns of the valley of the Rhine, during which some 10,000 Jews perished as the first-fruits of crusading zeal, was scattered to the winds in Hungary (August). Two other divisions, however, reached Constantinople in safety. The first of these, under Walter the Penniless, passed through Hungary in May, and reached Constantinople, where it halted to wait for the Hermit, in the middle of July. The second, led by Peter himself, passed safely through Hungary, but suffered severely in Bulgaria, and only attained Constantinople with sadly diminished numbers at the end of July. These two divisions (which in spite of good treatment by Alexius began to commit excesses against the Greeks) united and crossed the Bosporus in August, Peter himself remaining in Constantinople. By the end of October they had perished utterly at the hands of the Seljuks; a heap of whitening bones also remained to testify to the later crusaders, when they passed in the spring of 1097, of the fate of the people’s Crusade.
Meanwhile the knights had already begun to assemble in March 1096. In small bands, and by divers ways, they streamed gradually southward and eastward, in a steady flow, throughout 1096. But three large divisions, under three considerable leaders, were pre-eminent among the rest. Godfrey of Bouillon, with his brother Baldwin, led the crusaders of Lorraine along “the road of Charles the Great,” through Hungary, to Constantinople, where he arrived on the 23rd of December. Raymund of Toulouse (the first prince to join the crusading movement) along with Bishop Adhemar, the papal commissary, led the Provençals down the coast of Illyria, and then due east to Constantinople, arriving towards the end of April 1097. Bohemund of Otranto, the destined leader of the Crusade, with his nephew Tancred, led a fine force of Normans by sea to Durazzo, and thence by land to Constantinople, which he reached about the same time as Raymund. To the same great rendezvous other leaders also gathered, some of higher rank than Godfrey or Raymund or Bohemund, but none destined to exercise an equal influence on the fate of the Crusade. Hugh of Vermandois, younger brother of Philip I. of France, had reached Constantinople in November 1096, in a species of honourable captivity, and had done Alexius homage; Robert of Normandy and Stephen of Blois, to whom Urban II. had given St Peter’s banner at Lucca, only arrived—the last of the crusaders—in May 1097 (their original companion in arms, Count Robert of Flanders, having left them to winter at Bari, and crossed to Constantinople before the end of 1096).
Thus was gathered at Constantinople, in the spring of 1097, a great host, which Fulcher computes at 600,000 men (I. c. iv.), Urban II. at 300,000, and which was probably some 150,000 strong.[3] Before we follow this host into Asia, we may pause to inquire into the various factors which would determine its course, or condition its activity. On the Western side, and among the crusaders themselves, there were two factors of importance, already mentioned above—the aims of the adventurer prince, and the interests of the Italian merchant; while on the Eastern side there are again two—the policy of the Greeks, and the condition of the Mahommedan East. We have already seen that among the princes who joined the First Crusade there were some who were rather politiques than dévots, and who aimed at the acquisition of temporal profit as well as of spiritual merit. Of these the type and, it may almost be said, the inspirer of the rest was Bohemund. From the first he had an Eastern principality in his mind’s eye; and if we may judge from the follower of Bohemund who wrote the Gesta Francorum, there had already been some talk at Constantinople of Antioch as the seat of this principality. Bohemund’s policy seems to have inspired Baldwin, the brother of Godfrey of Bouillon to emulation; on the one hand he strove to thwart the endeavours of Tancred, the nephew of Bohemund, to begin the foundation of the Eastern principality for his uncle by conquering Cilicia, and, on the other, he founded a principality for himself in Edessa. Raymond of Provence, the third and last of the great politiques of the First Crusade, was, like Baldwin, envious of Bohemund; and jealousy drove him first to attempt to wrest Antioch from Bohemund, and then to found a principality of Tripoli to the south of Antioch, which would check the growth of his power. The political motives of these three princes, and the interaction of their different policies, was thus a great factor in determining the course and the results of the First Crusade. The influence of the Italian towns did not make itself greatly felt till after the end of the First Crusade, when it made possible the foundation of a kingdom in Jerusalem, in addition to the three principalities established by Bohemund, Baldwin and Raymond; but during the course of the Crusade itself the Italian ships which hugged the shores of Syria were able to supply the crusaders with provisions and munition of war, and to render help in the sieges of Antioch and Jerusalem.[4] Sea-power had thus some influence in determining the victory of the crusaders.
In the East the conditions were, on the whole, favourable to the crusaders. The one difficulty—and it was serious—was the attitude adopted by Alexius. Confronted by crusaders where he had asked for auxiliaries, Alexius had two alternative policies presented to his choice. He might, in the first place, have frankly admitted that the crusaders were independent allies, and treating them as equals, he might have waged war in concert with them, and divided the conquests achieved in the war. A boundary line might have been drawn somewhere to the N.W. of Antioch; and the crusaders might have been left to acquire what they could to the south and east of that line. Unhappily, clinging to the conviction that all the lands which the crusaders would traverse were the “lost provinces” of his empire, he induced the crusaders to do him homage, so that, whatever they conquered, they would conquer in his name, and whatever they held, they would hold by his grant and as his vassals. Thus Hugh of Vermandois became the man of Alexius in November 1096; Godfrey of Bouillon was induced, not without difficulty, to do homage in January 1097; and in April and May the other leaders, including Bohemund and the obstinate Raymond himself, followed his example. The policy of Alexius was destined to produce evil results, both for the Eastern empire and for the crusading movement. The West had already its grievances against the East: the Greek emperors had taken advantage of their protectorate of the Holy Places to lay charges
- ↑ Ekkehard, Chronica, 214.
- ↑ Later legend ascribed the origin of the First Crusade to the preaching of Peter the Hermit. The legend has been followed by modern historians; but in point of fact Peter is a figure of secondary importance. (See Peter the Hermit.)
- ↑ Godfrey’s army numbered some 30,000 infantry and 10,000 cavalry (Röhricht, Erst. Kreuzz. 61): Urban II. reckons Bohemund’s knights as 7000 in number (ibid. 71, n. 7).
- ↑ The Genoese had been invited by Urban II. in September 1096 “to go with their gallies to Eastern parts in order to set free the path to the Lord’s Sepulchre.”
