The Greek and Eastern Churches/Part 1/Division 2/Chapter 7

by Walter Frederic Adeney

 

CHAPTER VII

THE CRUSADES

 

(a) Official reports and letters from individual Crusaders; Fulcher, Gesta Peregrinantium Francorum, the diary of a witness; Albert of Aix, Chronicle, second-hand, from eye-witnesses, with masses of details uncritically handled; William of Tyre, Historia Rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum, also in touch with eye-witnesses, and using written sources, a book composed with discrimination and literary skill, but mingling legend, toned down, with historical fact—the Herodotus of the Middle Ages; Anna Comnena, Alexias; Nicetas, Historia; Chronicles of the Crusades (Bohn); The Chronicle of Morea (14th century; ed. Schmidtt).

(b) Gibbon, chaps. lviii.–lxi.; Michaud, History of the Crusades (Eng. trans.), popular, rich in incident, untrustworthy; H. von Sybel, History and Literature of the Crusades (Eng. trans., edited by Lady Duff Gordon), a valuable critical study; Archer and Kingsford, The Crusades ("Story of the Nations"); S. Lane Poole, Saladin, and the Fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

 

For the most part the Crusades have been studied from the standpoint of Western Europe, since it was there that they originated. Instigated by the Latin Church, they were carried on by swarms of devotees, fanatics, penitents, and adventurers from France, Germany, Italy, England. While the goal of their enterprise was in the East, and while the people most seriously affected by their achievements were Orientals, the Eastern Church and Empire took but a small part in the actual movement, which was a great upheaval and eruption of Western Christendom. Nevertheless, it falls in with the object of the present volume to study the Crusades from the novel standpoint of that half of Christendom which was the witness of the romantic feats of chivalry that adorned these quaint wars fought on its own soil. Too often it was the victim of their disastrous consequences. What did the Crusades mean to the Eastern Church? Did they bring it liberation, security, prosperity? That is the question which forces itself upon us when we plant ourselves in imagination at Constantinople or Antioch, at Tyre or Jerusalem, and watch the sanguinary fights of Latins and Teutons with Turks and Saracens.

If we would take a broad view of the situation, we must not be satisfied to regard the Crusades either as mere freaks of fanaticism, or as only European police manoeuvres for the protection of pilgrims. Their immediate object was recovery of the sacred sites of Palestine from desecration by the infidels, and their direct provocation was the ill-treatment at times endured by people who visited those sacred sites. Palmers' tales told by the fireside and in the market-place stirred the minds of men in the towns and villages of Europe. But when we orientate the whole movement we see that these wars take their place in the age-long conflict between Islam and Christendom. That conflict began in the seventh century when Mohammed started on his conquering career; it will not cease till the cross is seen again on the dome of St. Sophia in place of the usurping crescent, till the last Turkish sultan is dethroned, and the last Turkish pasha dismissed. Nevertheless these strange enterprises had their own peculiar features, which happily are without parallel in history; for the world has never seen less wisdom or greater incompetence, attended by more waste of life and deeper misery, in proportion to the purpose pursued and the end accomplished.

In their actual inception the Crusades sprang from the pilgrimages. As early as the fourth century a continuous stream of immigrants from Western Europe was pouring into Palestine. Some came and went, like the modern tourists; others remained to live and die in the Holy Land. When Jerome settled down for life in a cave at Bethlehem, the fame of so eminent a man induced many to follow his example. Under his influence Paula came from Rome, and being a woman of social position and religious reputation, she induced many other Roman ladies to join her. There were two colonies of ascetics from Italy—one of men, and the other of women—settled in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem. These processes—the settling of immigrants and the pilgrimages of temporary visitors—continued without intermission except in times of war. Thus Western Europe was always in touch with the East. In the breakup of civilisation and the consequent deepening ignorance of the Dark Ages, the value of relics as fetishes rose; and then those primary but untransferable relics, the scenes of our Lord's birth at Bethlehem, and death and burial at Jerusalem, came to be adored pre-eminently.

The Persian occupation in the sixth century only put a temporary check to the pilgrimages; and the Mohammedan conquest of the country, which followed so soon after its recovery by Heraclius, hindered them much less than might have been expected, for the early caliphs were more tolerant of unbelievers than the Christian emperors of heretics. Especially was this the case with the enlightened and mild caliphs of the Fatimite line who resided in Egypt, and it was a good thing for the pilgrims that Jerusalem came under their authority and protection. One short interval of fearful persecution occurred under the mad caliph, El-Hakim, who ended by outraging the principles of his fellow-Mohammedans, in proclaiming himself the creator of the universe, and was slain by order of his sister as a menace to Islam. This terrible man had most cruelly oppressed both the Jews and the Christians under his power. It is said that in the year 1010 he ordered the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre; if so, his order could not have been effectually executed.

A far worse calamity was soon to follow. The Turks swarmed over Syria and Asia Minor, defeating the effeminate Arab caliphs of the Abbasside line. Toghrul, the grandson of Seljuk, had adopted Mohammedanism,^[1] and in the year 1055) after conquering Persia and regions farther west, he was appointed sultan, or vice-regent for the caliph. This man was succeeded by his nephew, Alp Arslan, who conquered Armenia and defeated the Emperor Romanus Diogenes at the battle of Manzikert (a.d. 1071). All Anatolia was now at the mercy of the Turks, who continued to press north and west till they threatened Constantinople. In the year 1081 the sultan fixed his headquarters at Nicæa, the sacred centre of Christian orthodoxy. Happily for the world the confusion into which the Byzantine Empire had been thrown by the defeat of Romanus was now subsiding, and a strong prince, Alexius Comnenus, was on the throne. But he could do little to stem the spreading flood of barbarism. A ghastly peril threatened the remnant of the empire of the Cæsars. The Arabs had received culture from Greeks and Persians; and their policy had become pacific and moderately liberal. But the Turks were fierce, brutal Mongols from Central Asia, little better than savages, spreading destruction and ruin in their path. Their capture of Syria and Asia Minor threatened the ruin of civilisation throughout those regions which for centuries had been in the van of human progress. Happily they soon came to some extent under Persian civilising influences, or all would have been lost.

In his despair the emperor sent urgent requests to Europe for assistance. Doubts have been thrown on a letter he is said to have addressed to Robert, Count of Flanders—a brother-in-law of William the Conqueror, especially for the reason that in it Alexius mentions the beauty of the women of Constantinople as an inducement for the warriors of the West to come to the rescue of his city. The letter exists in several forms, and therefore manifestly it has been tampered with. While we cannot be sure of its original features in every particular, there can be no reasonable doubt that the emperor did write some such letter, appealing for aid in his desperate need. "From Jerusalem," he says, "to the Ægean, the Turkish hordes have mastered all; their galleys, sweeping the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, threaten the imperial city itself, which, if fall it must, had better fall into the hands of Latins than of pagans."^[2]

Here then was a new motive for the Crusades unexpectedly sprung upon the Western world. Had Constantinople fallen into the hands of the Turks nearly four centuries earlier than the actual time of that fate, and this when the Asiatic invaders were flushed with their recent victories in Asia Minor, and before the kingdoms of Europe had become consolidated and strengthened as great national powers, it is difficult to see what could have prevented the westward rush of the devastating flood from sweeping over all Christendom, and reducing Italy and France to the condition of Syria and Anatolia. From this threatened doom of Christianity and civilisation the world was saved by the earlier Crusades. That, and not the sentimental glory of the recovery of the sacred sites, or the pitiable achievement of the temporary establishment of the little, shadowy kingdom of Jerusalem, is their supreme, their one solid result. Yet, stupendous as this task was and momentous as its consequences were, the thought of it was by no means uppermost in the minds of the Crusaders. They were jealous of the Greeks, as uneducated people commonly are jealous of their more cultivated neighbours, especially when the latter display the airs of superior persons, as the Greeks were only too ready to do. Besides, were not these Byzantine heretics excommunicated and cursed by the holy pope? The behaviour of the Crusaders at Constantinople and other Eastern cities was scarcely that of a lifeboat crew saving the victims of a shipwreck; nor did the people they rescued evince much gratitude towards their deliverers. The character and conduct of many of the Crusaders rendered them perfectly odious to the men and women on whom they were billeted. The whole matter is very complicated. Still, when we consider the course of events, we must come to the conclusion that for history the supreme significance of the Crusades lies in the fact that they put a check on the Turkish advance, and so effectually broke its power that the fatal consequences momentarily threatened were for ever prevented. He who believes that God is in history will see the fanaticism of relic worship overruled for the deliverance of Christendom from total destruction.

While the appeal of Alexius and the thundercloud in the East to which it pointed may have furnished the motives of statesmen, it was the maltreatment of holy pilgrims and the desecration of holy sites that roused the passion of the multitude. In this age of relic worship it was intolerable that infidels should hold the most sacred of all relics—the cave in which the Saviour was born, the Cross on which He had died, and the tomb in which He was buried. A practical age will smile at the fanaticism of such a thought rousing Europe to a war fever. But it has been justly observed that we have here a rare instance of warfare waged for an idea. For this reason we may perceive in the inception of the Crusades the poetry of chivalry, as we see in the legends that followed them its romance; unhappily, when we come to study the grim story of the actual events, poetry and romance vanish in horrors of carnage.

The popes have the credit of originating the Crusades and of being their chief promoters. The earliest effort of the kind has been sought in a letter ascribed to Pope Sylvester ii., about the year 1000, in the midst of the crisis of gloom and terror when people were expecting the end of the world. This letter is addressed to all Christians in the name of the church at Jerusalem, beseeching them to pity the miseries of the Holy City and come to its rescue with money if not with arms; but its genuineness cannot be sustained.^[3] Gregory vii., the great Hildebrand (a.d. 1073–1085), seriously purposed inaugurating a crusade, and was only hindered from doing so, after 50,000 pilgrims had agreed to follow him, by the complication of affairs in Europe that demanded his attention. He said, "He would rather expose his life to deliver the holy places than live to command the entire universe." Had this remarkable man devoted his genius and energy to the enterprise, no doubt great results would have been achieved. But the actual origination of the first Crusade was the work of Urban ii. (a.d. 1088-1099), who held a council at Piacenza, in which he broached the scheme, and then, crossing the Alps, convened a larger and more representative council at Clermont (November 1095), where, after the settlement of French affairs, he called upon the people of Europe to aid him in rescuing the Holy Sepulchre. The popular imagination has seized on Peter the Hermit, who came from Amiens, as the real inspirer of the Crusades, and Michaud has written a dramatic description of the interview between this strange person and Urban at Clermont, in which the pope takes quite the second place; but that conversation is wholly imaginary. Peter was not even present at the council. The organisation and spread of the movement through Europe must be attributed to the pope. On the other hand, we should beware of the modern tendency to undervalue Peter's influence. An enthusiast of intense fervour, he set all the northern parts of France on fire with his passionate eloquence as he rode about from town to town, bareheaded and barefooted, carrying a huge cross before him, and preaching in churches and streets and highways. Everywhere his proposal was entertained with enthusiasm as from the call of heaven. Deus vult, Deus vult, cried the educated ecclesiastics in the council; Dieu la volt, Dieu la volt, echoed the rustics in their vernacular. The council freed the Crusaders from taxes, and ordered that debtors who joined their ranks should not be pursued. An extraordinary assortment of people rushed into the enterprise, including old men, women with children, prostitutes.

Peter and his horde of peasants were too impatient to wait for the lords and knights who were coming together in military array. Without any organisation or commissariat the simple multitude set out for their tremendous walk in the spring of the year 1096. After they had crossed Austria and passed the confines of civilisation, they still had 600 miles of forest and wilderness to traverse in Hungary and Bulgaria before they could reach Constantinople. They came on like a swarm of locusts eating up the countries they passed through. We can neither blame them nor the people of these lauds when we see that raids of hunger provoked retaliation and slaughter. The multitude was divided into two parts for better provisioning—half under Peter, and half under another leader, Walter the Penniless. They were in a pitiable plight when they reached Thrace, and all might have perished if the Emperor Alexius had not sent to rescue them.

We can understand with what disgust the citizens of Constantinople viewed the approach of the ragged host. Alexius was glad to ship them across the Bosphorus as quickly as possible. There they would have been killed outright, if it had not been for the dissentions that had broken out among the Turks. But even as things were, a great number—Gibbon accepts the figure at "three hundred thousand"—perished before a single city was rescued from the infidels.

In August a more regular army followed, under Hugh the Great, Count of Vermandois; Robert of Normandy, the eldest son of William the Conqueror; Stephen of Chartres, said to own as many castles as there are days of the year; Raymond of many titles; Bohemond, son of Robert Guiscard; Tancred, the perfect knight of chivalry celebrated in Tasso's poem; but, above all, Godfrey of Bouillon, Duke of Lorraine, a man who combined a spirit of genuine, unselfish religious devotion with the talents of a great general. Even this army was ill-organised under its several leaders, and the undisciplined footmen immensely outnumbered the knights on horseback. Like the ragged regiments of their precursors, these troops also came through Germany and Hungary, and were admitted into Constantinople with fear and suspicion. Crossing the Hellespont, they defeated the Turks at Nicæa. Then they divided. One body struck off east under Baldwin and conquered Edessa. The main army proceeded to Antioch, which fell after a fearful siege, both sides having suffered very heavily.^[4] At length Jerusalem was surrounded, besieged, and taken (July 15, 1099).^[5] Then, with lighted torches, but still among scenes of blood, the Crusaders made their way to the goal of their difficult undertaking—the Holy Sepulchre. Part of the supposed cross, still contained in its silver casket, was recovered and borne with singing in procession to "the temple." "And all the people went after, which wept for pitie, as much as if they had seen the Saviour Jesus Christ still hanging on the Cross. They all held them for much recompense of a great treasure that our Lord had thus discovered."^[6]

Godfrey of Bouillon was elected king of Jerusalem; and, though he declined the honour of the title as unworthy to hold it, he accepted the actual rule.^[7] Godfrey died the next year, and his brother Baldwin, when summoned from Edessa to succeed him, being less scrupulous, allowed himself to be crowned at Bethlehem (a.d. 1100). Thus there was founded the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem.

The sequel is an anti-climax. Having accomplished the end of their vow, the mass of the surviving Crusaders returned home, and the leaders who remained in charge of the chief cities that had been captured—Jerusalem, Antioch, and Edessa—found to their dismay that they were left stranded, like shipwrecked sailors on three desert islands. Both politically and ecclesiastically their position was altogether anomalous. They had formally submitted to the Greek emperor as the condition of being permitted to pass through his territory; but in reality they showed him no fealty whatever, but behaved as foreign princes colonising a land that they had won by the sword. This was the political position. The ecclesiastical was not more satisfactory. They were now in the region of the Eastern Church; yet they owned allegiance to the pope, whose supremacy that Church did not recognise and who had denounced it as heretical. In the eyes of the patriarch of Constantinople the Crusaders were both schismatics and heretics. Their subsequent conduct did not lead the Greek Church to view them with favour; for they abandoned themselves to the pleasures and luxuries of Oriental life. A Latin patriarchate was founded at Jerusalem, with Dagobert, a haughty, ambitious prelate, as its first occupant, having four archbishoprics and a number of bishoprics under him.

The kingdom of Jerusalem lasted for nearly a century; but during much of this time it was in a state of degeneration and decay. The descendants of the Crusaders, called Pulleni, were for the most part a weak and worthless race, rendered effete by luxury and self-indulgence. Damascus was still unconquered. In the year 1146 Edessa was recaptured by the Saracens. Then Europe was alarmed, and a second Crusade was projected and inspired by a much greater man than any of the originators of the first—Bernard of Clairvaux, the reformer of monasticism and restorer of the papacy to its power and dignity. The earlier Crusade had not seen any sovereign at its head. But this new movement was led by both Louis vii., king of France, and the German emperor, Conrad iii. It proved to be a dismal failure. The Greeks were now more than timorous and suspicious: they actually opposed the defenders of Christendom. There is good reason to believe that the Emperor Manuel, a warrior of gigantic personal prowess, entered into secret communications with the sultan and treacherously misled the Crusaders. Be that as it may, the siege of Damascus failed, and the princes returned home having effected nothing.

Nevertheless for two ceuturies the idea of the Crusades was kept alive in Europe, and every spring saw fresh bodies of men sewing the cross in gold, or silk, or cloth on to their garments, and setting out for the holy war. It was a great calamity that originated the next extensive movement of this kind—known as the third Crusade. In October 1187, Jerusalem fell into the hands of the Sultan Saladin. This roused the old Emperor Frederick Barbarossa to go himself to recover the Holy City. He defeated the sultan at Iconium, but was drowned in attempting to ford the river Calycadnus (a.d. 1190). Richard i. of England now became the chief leader of the Crusade, amid great difficulties caused by the jealousies of other princes and his own inconsiderate eagerness, for he was but a glorified schoolboy. Richard and Saladin—who was neither a Turk nor an Arab, but a Kurd, and therefore, like the Crusaders themselves, of the Aryan stock—came to terms, which left Jerusalem in the hands of the courteous Moslem, but allowed the Christians possession of the Holy Sepulchre and the right of pilgrimage there.

The story of the fourth Crusade might well be told with tears of shame and humiliation for the disgrace which it was to Christendom. In the year 1217 Innocent iii. summoned the nations to yet another attempt to rescue the holy sites from the possession of the infidel. No emperor or king now responded. There was no great Bernard to inspire enthusiasm. But a preacher of a distinctly lower type, Fulco of Neuilly, succeeded in obtaining support from a number of French nobles, who involved themselves in unworthy obligations to blind Dandolo, the patriotic doge of Venice. He would supply them with ships if they would do his business for him. Venice was now quarrelling with Constantinople, and the Crusaders consented to begin their expedition with an attack on their fellow-Christians, the Greeks. They first took Zaras and then sailed up to the very walls of Constantinople, gazing with wonder on the gilt domes and spires of its 500 churches. The Crusaders—we should say, the invaders— were accompanied by young Alexius, son of the Emperor Isaac, who had been blinded and imprisoned by his brother Alexius Angelus, now usurping the throne. Thus their expedition might be compared to the French aid offered to the Pretender in England. But while this gave some face to the invasion, the sequel showed that it was really an outbreak of the long smouldering enmity between the East and the West.

At the approach of the Latins the timid Greek troops and their emperor fled from the camp where they had assembled with a view of opposing the Crusaders. After an easy siege the gates were thrown open, and the Latins entered the city in triumph. They so far carried out their programme as to release the imprisoned ex-Emperor Isaac and crown the young Alexius, together with his father, at St. Sophia. The junior emperor had promised that when his father and he were restored he would put an end to the schism which separated the Greeks from the Latin Church. Isaac was obliged to consent to this and other humiliating conditions—namely, a money payment of 200,000 silver marks, and the rescue of the Holy Land. But the difficulties in the way of fulfilling his promises were very great. A considerable sum of money was paid over at once to the Crusaders; but no serious steps were taken to unite the divided churches. Before long the Latin visitors became very unpopular. They were pressing their demands with imperious insolence, forcing their way into the palace, and threatening the timorous Alexius that they would no longer recognise his sovereignty if he did not comply. But that was beyond his power. When the people perceived his helplessness, they besieged the Senate clamoming for another emperor. A time of confusion followed, in which young Alexius was strangled, and his father, blind Isaac, died of fright. The Latins then took Constantinople by storm under the Marquis of Montferrat. The city was sacked. Many of its priceless treasures were carried off to Europe; more were destroyed. The patriarch tied on an ass without a single attendant. The sacred vessels in the churches were turned into drinking cups. Icons, even portraits of Christ, were used as gaming tables. At St. Sophia the splendid altar was broken in pieces, and a harlot, whom Nicetas calls "a minion of the furies," seated herself on the patriarch's throne, and sang and danced in the church, ridiculing the Greek hymns and processions. It was a scene of outrage and profanity anticipating Paris at the Revolution.^[8]

A Latin Empire was now set up at Constantinople with Baldwin of Flanders as its first emperor (a.d. 1204). The Pope Innocent iii. at first expressed strong disapproval of the perversion of a Crusade against the infidels into a war of conquest fought with Christians. But these Greek Christians were heretics and schismatics, and when he saw the great city of Constantinople brought under Latin authority he sent the pallium to the new patriarch, Thomas Morosini, a Venetian, and boasted that at last Israel, after destroying the calves at Dan and Bethel, was again united to Judah. Of course this was no real end to the separation of the two churches. Among the Greeks the Latin patriarch was regarded as an intruder; he was only recognised by the dominant invaders from Europe. The rule of the Franks at Constantinople lasted for about sixty years; but it was no credit to its unscrupulous founders. At length, with the aid of the Genoese, Michael viii. (Palæologus) expelled them and restored the Greek Empire (a.d. 1261).

Meanwhile the Crusades went on as an intermittent stream of warriors pouring over from Europe into Egypt and Syria. In the year 1228 the German emperor, Frederic ii., driven to make good his word by threats of excommunication from Pope Gregory ix., after much procrastination, set off for the Holy Land, where by good fortune he found that the Sultan Camel of Egypt was engaged in war with his nephew, and therefore willing to make terms with the Franks. This Mussulman ruler granted them a considerable part of the Holy Land, including Jerusalem. Frederic claimed the kingdom through Iolanthe, whom he had recently married, and placed the crown on his own head in the church of the Holy Sepulchre. But his troubles with the pope compelled him to return home the next year.

The last Crusade of importance was undertaken by Louis ix. of France, a man of deep personal piety, who deservedly earned the name of Saint Louis. Jerusalem had been conquered and the inhabitants most horribly treated by a rude tribe from the steppes of Asia, the Chowaresmians, who, having fled before the Mongols, were lured by the Egyptian Sultan Ayoub to serve as his mercenaries. The Christian dominion was now restricted to Acre. Louis landed in Egypt in a.d. 1249, suffered defeat, and was taken prisoner. Ransomed at a great price, he sailed for Acre the next year; but he could do little, and he was compelled to return home in the year 1254. A later attempt by St. Louis to break the Mohammedan power at Tunis proved also to be a failure. Acre fell in the year 1291, and with its fall the last remnant of the Latin power in the East vanished. Henceforth all Palestine remained under the rule of Islam.

 

1. Michael the Syrian gives three reasons for the ready amalgamation of the Turks with the Arabs and their speedy adoption of Islam—(1) their own earlier Monotheism; (2) the fact that they found Turkish immigrants already settled in Persia, which had been won over by the Mohammedan power some time previously; (3) the service of Turks as mercenaries in the army of the caliph, Chronicle (ed. Chabot), vol. iii., p. 156.
2. Martene, Thesaur. p. 266 ff. Cf. for the Abbott Guilbert's account of this celebrated letter, "Lappenberg" in Pertz. Archiv. vi. p. 630.
3. Ep. cvii. in Bouquet, x. 426.
4. See William of Tyre, pp. 84–143.
5. Ibid. pp. 167-188.
6. Ibid. p. 194.
7. Ibid. pp. 192, 193.
8. Nicetas, p. 757 ff.