Crusader by horse to jer.., p.6
Crusader: By Horse to Jerusalem, page 6
Chapter 4 - The Peasants' Crusade
What a sweet and wonderful sight it was for us to see all those shining crosses, whether of silk or gold or other stuff that at the Pope's order the pilgrims, as soon as they had sworn to go, sewed on the shoulders of their cloaks, their cassocks or their tunics,' wrote an enthusiastic priest, Fulcher of Chartres. He is a key figure in the story of the Crusade because he actually heard the Pope speak at Clermont and himself decided to 'take the cross'. Starting out with the army corps forming in Northern France, he marched with them to what is now central Turkey. There he switched to the entourage of Baldwin, Godfrey's younger brother, and eventually became his chaplain. A small-town priest of modest education, Fulcher was an excellent eyewitness and, most important, he had a kindly sympathy for the experiences endured by the common people on the crusade. Through his vivid account of experiences on the way to Jerusalem, we realise how the great journey often became a nightmare for the ordinary folk. Some were to call it 'the new way of penance'.
These commoners reacted even more fervently to the crusade message than the nobility. In their thousands the peasantry also began to sell off their possessions to raise money for the trip. Guibert, Abbot of Nogent who had also been at the Council of Clermont but stayed behind in France and later wrote a history of the Crusade, noted how 'the poor were soon inflamed with so burning a zeal that none stopped to consider the slenderness of his means, neither whether it was wise for him to leave his house, his vines and his fields; and each set about selling the best things he had for a price much less than if he had found himself cast into the most cruel captivity.' The result was a crash in commodity prices as the markets were flooded with peasants' goods for sale. The value of a sheep dropped to under a denier, less than a sixth of its usual price. Guibert was sarcastic:
Truly astonishing things were to be seen, things which could not but provoke laughter; poor people shoeing their oxen as though they were horses, harnessing them to two wheeled waggons on which they piled their scanty provisions and their small children, and which they led along behind them.
This was not at all what the Pope had intended. He wanted trained fighting men to take the road to Jerusalem, not parties of civilians with their families. The papal secretariat had drafted letters carefully setting out a sensible plan for the crusade and sent them to responsible authorities such as city councils, assemblies of nobles, and bishops. Thus, monks and priests were not to go unless 'authorised by the bishop or abbot to whom they are subordinate', while 'newly married men may not take the cross without their wives' consent.' Other categories to be discouraged were the very old, men unfit to carry weapons, and women without husbands or guardians. By extension, it seems that family women were expected to join the march. Many did so, and were to play a prominent role in the later tribulations (as well as becoming scapegoats to the fire-and-brimstone priests who blamed them for causing the same sufferings). The truth was that once Pope Urban had preached his sermon, the matter was no longer under his control. The crusading message was taken up by all manner of fanatics, and self-appointed heralds began to spread their own version of his call among the lay people.
Chief of these was an itinerant preacher known as Peter the Hermit. He seems to have been one of the swarm of holy men who normally wandered from village to village, preaching to the simple peasants and attending to their spiritual needs. Runciman described him as 'a man of short stature, swarthy and with a long, lean face, horribly like the donkey that he always rode and which was revered almost as much as himself. He went barefoot, and his clothes were filthy. He ate neither bread nor meat, but fish, and he drank wine. Despite his lowly appearance he had the power to move men.'
This bizarre figure, wandering through northeast France, dressed in a long homespun cloak with a cowl, preached the Crusade in terms that the lay people could understand at once. Peter brandished a letter that he claimed had fluttered down from heaven, a missive direct from God that gave him authority to lead a host to the Holy Land. He asserted that he had already made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem and seen the shrines in all their defilement and neglect. In the Church of the Holy Sepulchre he had fallen into a sleep of despair and dreamed that Christ was standing over him and saying 'Rise, Peter, make haste and do without fear the tasks which have been entrusted to you, for I shall be with you. It is time that the holy places were purged ...' This story was false. Peter had never been to Jerusalem. But his yarn was precisely the right approach to sway his credulous audience. They came to believe that Peter the Hermit, not the Pope, had devised the idea of the Crusade. Common folk flocked to him in droves, and followed him as he moved across Picardy and into Lower Lotharingia. He was so respected, observed Guibert sourly, that the ignorant plucked the hairs from his mount and kept them as sacred relics. By the time Peter reached Cologne to preach his Easter message there, he was leading a crusading force in its own right.
So while the great lords were still making their calculations about the amount of bullion they would need, drafting wills, deciding whom to appoint as guardians for their estates and children while they were away, and salving their consciences at the last minute by making gifts to religious foundations they had wronged during the earlier civil troubles, Peter and his followers stole a march on them. In April 1096 he was ready to set out for the Holy Land, three months before the nobles' contingents, and there was no one to restrain him. A handful of knights were equally soon prepared, and they provided a military core to stiffen the Peasants' Crusade, as it would come to be known. But the humble vanguard's real driving force was its fervour. They spoke of heavenly signs and manifestations, and interpreted them as divine portents that something strange and wonderful was going to happen. A great shower of meteorites had fallen in the spring of 1095, and the following February, while Peter was crossing Picardy, the moon turned red during an eclipse. The next month a great aurora appeared around the sun and the sight sent panicky congregations into the churches to pray. Seers and mystics dreamed visions of the New Jerusalem, of the millennium, and bloody conflagration. There were rumours that the sign of the cross was mysteriously appearing, etched into men's skins. In one village the population followed a goose, saying it was divinely inspired and would lead to the Holy Land. In another hamlet the pathfinder was a goat. The harvest, which had been bad for some years promised to be exceptionally good, a bumper crop. The Lord was already rewarding the faithful.
The atmosphere was ripe for hysteria, and when the crusading zeal boiled over the first victims were the Jewish populations. Why go all the way to Jerusalem to revenge oneself on Christ's enemies, the firebrands asked. The Jews had been responsible for the death of Christ and could be punished nearer to home. Jew-baiting was soon followed by robbery of Jewish homes and then by outright massacres in France. In Germany sundry war bands roamed the countryside, pillaging and looting, with the excuse of the crusade as their cover. Gradually they passed southward across the country like a wandering nightmare and reached Regensburg, the great trading city on the upper Danube and the gateway to the main corridor leading to Constantinople. There the Jewish population, cowed by reports of the atrocities further north, agreed to a mass conversion to Christianity.
One Jewish source accuses a 'duke of Lower Lotharingia' of abetting the pogroms. This could well have been Godfrey, although other Jewish sources say nothing on the subject. Godfrey seems to have been more interested in Jewish money, not deaths, for he arranged loans from the Jews of Mainz and Cologne to help pay his crusading costs. During most of the winter Godfrey dropped out of view as he made his preparations such as settling some minor matters with the monks of the abbey of Saint Hubert nearby Chateau Bouillon. Ida had given them land, and Godfrey had to confirm his mother's gift before he set out for Constantinople. In these legal and business matters younger brother Baldwin would have been a help. Extremely intelligent, he had originally been destined for a career in the church. He had therefore received a clerical training and could read and write. Whether Godfrey was literate we do not know, but under the circumstances this was not as important as his skill with languages. He spoke both French and German, and needed to be bilingual because his army corps was thoroughly polyglot. It included Walloons, Germans, French and Flemish, and they were to be joined by men from Swabia and Bavaria. The babel of tongues and dialects must have caused chaos in the military council, run by the chief nobles, that directed the endeavour.
Many of the leading warriors came from Godfrey's own duchy or the surrounding countries. Some of them did undoubtedly set out because they were bored and craved excitement or they had thoughts of material gain, to profit by lands and plunder. But the pious Godfrey was no freebooter, and many of Godfrey's knights must have joined up because they believed in the papal mission and were obeying their feudal instincts. Here, in company they knew and respected, was a cause worth fighting for, and here already was the first glimmer of the notion of chivalry, the ideal of knightly self-sacrifice in God's service. For a century the Church had castigated the knights for their unruly violence, begging them to turn their swords to a higher cause, and now it promised them rewards in heaven if they went on the mission to Jerusalem. There was a romantic streak, too. Minstrels and troubadours were beginning to eulogise the selfless deeds of warriors, often borrowing and adapting material from early folk tales, and here now was a great and real adventure. It offered all the scope of a major war epic overlaid with the colour and glamour of travel to foreign lands. It would need a hero, and one candidate was the noble duke who rode at the head of the contingent from the north.
No one knows precisely how many people were in Godfrey's army. The only figures we have are wild exaggerations, ranging into the hundreds of thousands. More realistic calculations suggest that he may have started with 1000 knights and 7000 foot, plus several times that number of non-combatants who were taking advantage of the presence of the warriors to go on the pilgrimage. Certainly the numbers were never stable. Additional groups joined up along the route, others dropped out, civilian elements were rarely taken into account and, besides, it was difficult to define whether a sturdy peasant armed with, say, a billhook was a foot soldier or a non-combatant. Normally the foot soldiers were armed with spears and axes and wore padded protective clothing. Archers carried the newfangled crossbow unknown in the distant lands, but there was no siege train. The striking arm of host, the element which held pride of place in every tactical discussion, was the cavalry. The mounted knight, as far as Godfrey's war council was concerned, was the sole arbiter of the battlefield.
Yet the knight's war equipment was still very crude. Elegant plate armour had not yet evolved, and an ordinary knight of Godfrey's household was prepared to ride into battle dressed simply in a long, supple shirt of chain mail, which reached down to his thighs. His helmet was a conical steel cap to deflect the downward slicing cut of a sword aimed at the head, with a long metal bar to guard the nose. Padded garments under the mail shirt absorbed the worst of a blow, but in general the knight was scarcely better protected than a well-equipped foot soldier. The cavalry weapon was great sword, a massive, plain iron, slashing weapon that needed a big, strong man and the height and balance of a well-seated horseman to swing it properly. His long-reach weapons, lance or even the throwing spear, were relatively ineffective. In the push and shove of battle the horse was the real weapon. Cavalry against cavalry, the quality of the horse was crucial. A fast animal was more manoeuvrable, but at close quarters killing range the advantage lay with the knight on the more stable platform, and that meant the bigger, sturdier Heavy Horse which would shoulder aside the opponent's animal, even knocking it off its feet, while the rider used both hands to swing his heavy sword and literally bludgeon his opponent to death or surrender. Infantry stood little chance. Nearly a ton of horse gave the knight the height advantage to hack downwards with his heavy sword; the horse could bring the knight quickly to the weakest point of the enemy's battle line and carry him away from the field when he was losing, so he could return to fight another day. No wonder the commoners loathed and feared the horse, called curses on the 'knights and all their horses', and in the language of the Crusaders, whether French or Italian or German, the words used for horseman or rider denoted a member of the ruling class in a society where might meant right.
In the summer of 1096, as Godfrey's army set out, every well-to-do baron or knight would have had his quota of squires and pages and retainers. Some were accompanied by their wives — Baldwin for instance took along his wife Godehilde of Tosny — others, such as the nobleman Henry d'Esch of Godfrey's household, had brothers in the same company. For the nobility it must have been a most agreeable progression, the column strung out over several days journey as it wound its way through the pleasant rolling German countryside. It was mid-August and the bumper harvest meant there was plenty of food for people and animals. The route passed through friendly lands where the aristocratic travellers could expect hospitality from the castellans, several of whom were waiting to join up. At the larger castles important leaders, such as Godfrey, would have been invited to stay. He and his barons had brought along their hawks and hounds, and there must have been much hunting and feasting along the way. The first steps of Godfrey's crusade must have felt more like a fete than a penance.
The travellers knew precisely where they were going. Indeed the army council could have consulted reasonably accurate maps of the route had they wished. Their path for the first three months had been trodden by generations of pilgrims and soldiers and merchants before them, and was described in a number of route guides. Schematic itineraries drawn out on long scrolls. At a glance the reader could see instantly how many miles lay ahead to the next city or way station, where the mountains would be met, where and when to expect to find the next river. Their road began by following the valley of the Rhine and its tributaries to the watershed with the Danube. Then it took the Danube corridor to a place called Vindabon, modern Vienna, where it cut across the Hungarian plain to rejoin the river near its junction with the Sava. Continuing to follow the Danube almost due south, the road did not branch off until it could use the corridor of its tributary, the Morava, to penetrate the Balkan mountains, and then strike southeast directly to Constantinople. Albert of Aix, the chronicler of Godfrey's army, didn't even bother to specify the route. It was so well known that he called it merely simply 'the way' or 'the right way'. (A canon of the church, Albert wanted to join the army, but for some reason had to stay behind. Perhaps he was refused his bishop's permission. He had to content himself with interviewing the returnees who gave up because they were sick, tired or disillusioned, or were despatched with messages and letters to the families waiting at home. Later he also included information from the veteran crusaders who stormed Jerusalem.)
Chapter 5 - Chateau Bouillon
With a lopsided horsebox Sarah and I arrived in Bouillon on 30 April, a grey and overcast day with occasional drizzle. Carty caused the slant as he weighed twice as much as Mystery. The jeep hauling the horsebox was tail down with an overload of camping gear, spare horse shoes, farrier's tools, emergency medicines for the horses, maps, buckets, coils of rope, historical reference books, and other paraphernalia. It was, I realised, all far too cumbersome and unwieldy. Even the file of veterinary documents with its multitude of certificates, customs forms, declarations of the health of the horses, results of laboratory tests on blood samples, made a book nearly three inches thick. But at that stage I had no idea of what equipment and papers would be necessary and what we could discard. I had written ahead to various riding clubs in Germany, Austria and Hungary, asking what to expect. But the answers had been inconclusive and, with the help of the Irish Veterinary Service and a local Irish vet, I had tried to cover all eventualities by assembling an impressive collection of affidavits, asserting that the horses were free from a galaxy of equine disease which I was sure few frontier officials would ever have encountered.
The plan was to spend the first month learning the techniques of cross-country travel as we rode through Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany. In the light of our experience, we would then trim our equipment. I anticipated that it was going to be difficult to find overnight stabling in the first sector of our journey as we would be crossing densely populated areas where the farming was highly intensive, and few farmers would have spare pasture or empty stables. To solve that problem, a second-hand lightweight moped was perched on a rack on the rear of the jeep. In theory I would drive forward every morning along our path with the jeep and locate a place for the horses at about twenty miles distant along the old Roman road. There I would arrange the overnight accommodation, leave the moped and return to where Sarah was preparing the horses. At the end of the day's ride I would collect the moped, ride back to the jeep where we had left it, and come forward with the equipment. It meant that I would have to cover every section of the road five times, once by horse, once by moped, and three times in the jeep. Clearly it was going to be very cumbersome and time-consuming, but I could see no other solution. A third person, just to drive the vehicle, would have had a very boring job and I wanted to keep our team as small as possible against the time when we were confident enough to leave behind the jeep and trailer and ride on alone.
