Bible and Sword (9 page)

He was not, of course, the only king of England to go to Palestine as either pilgrim or Crusader. Twice the throne fell empty while its claimant was in the Holy Land. Richard’s great-great-uncle, Robert Curthose, Duke of Normandy, eldest son of the Conqueror, lost the English crown to his younger brother Henry I while away on the First
Crusade. Richard’s great-nephew Edward Longshanks had better luck. Though absent in Palestine leading the Seventh Crusade when the king his father died, he was able to succeed to the crown on his return and reigned for twenty years as Edward I, the “English Justinian.”

Richard’s father Henry II, his brother John, and John’s son Henry III all took the vow to go on the Crusades, but the first two were too busy fighting at home and the last too disinclined to fight at all to make good the vow. Others in the royal family substituted. William Longsword, whose father was a bastard brother of Richard the Lion-Heart, cut a great figure in the Crusade of St. Louis; so did Richard, Earl of Cornwall, brother of Henry III. Perhaps the greatest English figure of the thirteenth century, Simon de Montfort, who led the barons’ revolt against Henry III, commanded a Crusade to Palestine earlier in his career. Countless others set out with their companies of knights, squires, and foot soldiers, some even with their wives, on the ever-fruitless quest to conquer “our right heritage,” “God’s land,” whose title they had appropriated yet were never able to make good.

It may be that the Bible would never have been able in a later time to take such deep root in the English body had not English blood been shed in the land of the Bible over so many years.

The English share in the First Crusade has commonly been overlooked. Yet, according to the eyewitness chronicler Raymon of Aguelers, an English fleet of thirty vessels manned by English mariners played a vital role by supporting the Crusaders from the sea until they gained their first base with the capture of Antioch. Although William of Malmesbury, writing a generation later, says that “but a faint murmur of Asiatic affairs reached the ears of those who dwelt beyond the British ocean,” the murmur must have been louder than he thought. Whether the English naval force was fired by enthusiasm for the Holy War or was simply a group of dispossessed Saxons escaping from
William’s conquest, at any rate it was collected in England, sailed under its own leadership, and seized and held Seleucia, the port of Antioch, until the main body of the Crusaders came down from Constantinople by land. Until Antioch was taken the English ships, co-operating with the Genoese, held off attacks by the Saracen fleet and kept open the supply lines to Cyprus. When the Crusaders were ready to march on Jerusalem the English, having by then lost all but nine or ten of their ships, burned the remainder and joined with the land forces, at which point they disappear from history. Perhaps it was their example, though all but ignored in the histories of the time, which determined Richard a hundred years later to go by sea rather than follow the disastrous land march of his predecessors. If so, these nameless men made a contribution, unhonored and unsung, to the development of the sea power that eventually carried England to empire.

Meanwhile Robert Curthose marched with the land army. Though Norman by birth and title, he was, as a member of the newly established royal family, what might be called a first-generation Englishman. In fact, by the time he died William of Malmesbury was speaking of him as “Robert, the Englishman.” His followers on the Crusade were chiefly Normans, Bretons, and Angevins. The anonymous “men from England” said to have accompanied him were probably foot soldiers, for among the three hundred and sixty named knights in his train only a handful were defeated Saxon lords or disaffected Anglo-Normans already at odds with the king.

But if the English did not go with Robert, they paid willy-nilly for his share in the Crusade. In order to equip a force he mortgaged the duchy of Normandy to his unpleasant brother William Rufus for five years in return for ten thousand marks. Rufus, to raise this huge sum, imposed heavy taxes on every person in England “so that the whole country groaned.”

Yet it was not so bad a bargain, for in Palestine Robert,
a footling fellow at home, pushed around by his father and brothers, turned here, snatched the victory at Antioch from near-defeat, and himself slew the “Red Lion,” Kizil-Arslan, the Turkish chief. Though hardly the warrior type, being short, fat, and smiling, yet according to a contemporary account Robert split a Turk in two from head to chest with one stroke of his sword. His valor and his generosity in sharing food, arms, and mounts with other Crusaders in time of famine and penury were acknowledged by all. Indeed, he seems to have been too openhanded and easygoing for those hard-bitten times, for he could not even rule his duchy effectively. “If a weeping criminal was brought to him for justice he would weep with him and set him free.” Only in Palestine did Robert’s career have its brief moment of glory. He came home only to be victimized again by another of his sterner-purposed family.

Jerusalem was taken by the Crusaders in 1099, and Robert, as the only king’s son among them, was the first to be offered the throne. He refused, for he still hoped to wear the crown of England. He left Palestine for home in the year 1100, but while he was still on the way an unknown hand shot the arrow that felled Rufus in the New Forest and rid England of a ruler for whom not one good word has ever been said. Henry I was firmly seated in Rufus’ place before Robert could get back. He promptly disposed of his elder brother’s claim by shutting the returned Crusader up in prison for the rest of his life and consoled him for the crown, so the chronicles say, by giving him a king’s castoff clothes.

One other English group is said to have participated in the first Crusade, though under rather vague circumstances. Odericus Vitalis, whose chronicle is invaluable for this period, states that Edgar Atheling, last of the royal Saxon line, came to Laodicea in Syria, a town under Byzantine rule, at the head “of almost twenty thousand pilgrims … from England and other islands of the ocean” and persuaded the populace of the place to name his friend, Duke
Robert, their commander. Who these pilgrims were, what part they played in the further development of the Latin kingdom, and what eventually became of them is nowhere further told.

Poor Robert, always just short of a crown, at least achieved a brief posthumous glory in the only English drama composed on the subject of the Crusades, Thomas Heywood’s
Four Prentices of London
. A rampaging fantastical play, it was performed several times about the year 1600 to delighted Elizabethan audiences at the Red Bull. Godfrey of Bouillon and other leading personages of the First Crusade, together with a company of imaginary knights, ladies, bandits, dragons, hermits, and prentices, each generally appearing disguised as someone else, are tossed up in a series of purely fictional events. At the climax before the Holy City “English Robert” speaks words that are as much an anachronism in the mouth of a Crusader as if he had appeared on the stage carrying a gun:

Here is no mention of the Holy Sepulcher or the Cross. Instead the holy symbols are “Jehovah’s house,” the Temple, and the Ark; for already, under the influence of the English Bible, Jerusalem was thought of in terms of the Old Testament rather than the New. But Heywood, it is well to
remember, was farther away in time from the First Crusade than we are from Heywood.

In fact, so far were the Crusaders from thoughts of Jehovah’s house that it was from their throats that there first rang the sinister “Hep, hep!”
(Hierosolayme est perdita)
that became the signal for Jewish pogroms from their day through Hitler’s, or such is the Jewish tradition. Though armed with the “sword of the Maccabees,” in the words of Pope Urban, the Crusaders struck their first blows at the people of the Maccabees before they ever left Europe. Every Jewish community on their path was put to the sword by the Christian warriors, who could not wait for the end of the journey to bathe their hands in blood. In part these mass massacres were an anticipatory lunge at the infidel in the person of the Jews who were the most convenient victims, the more so as it was rumored that they had devilishly inspired the Turkish persecution of Christians in the Holy Land. Partly also the pogroms were an opportunity for loot, always a powerful motive among the Crusaders.

Popular hatred of the Jews was not a particularly active sentiment until inflamed by the Holy Wars. Medieval man’s almost superstitious dread and detestation of the “heretic,” the person outside the church, was one component. Another was the common feeling against the person to whom money is owed. Usury, the lending of money at interest, was practiced by the Jews in the Middle Ages because the guild system excluded them from other forms of livelihood, because their own law, while forbidding usury among themselves, permitted it toward non-Jews, and because usury, although Christian law forbade it among Christians, was necessary to the community. Ultimately, when the rise of capitalism and a money economy made it even more necessary, Christian scruples relaxed sufficiently to permit the practice of usury by themselves. But during the Middle Ages it was largely confined to the Jews, and through them it provided the Crown with a lucrative
source of revenue. Only practical considerations against milking the cow dry limited the share that the Crown could take from the Jews. In theory they had property rights, but in practice these meant nothing, for the Jew was not allowed to bring a charge against a Christian, and thus his position depended solely on the pleasure and protection of the sovereign.

The more the sovereign encouraged Jewish usury, the more the people hated the Jews. During the crusading era they learned that violence practiced under the banner of the Cross was a simple way to wipe out debt and to seize Jewish gold with impunity. By the time of the Second Crusade in 1146 its preachers were inveighing against the Jewish race in general, and the first recorded accusation of ritual murder was brought in 1144 against the Jews of Oxford. By the time of the Third Crusade in 1190 the association of Crusade and pogrom was automatic, and the killings began immediately on Richard’s coronation, though not at his order. Once started, they spread in waves from London to all the cities in which Jews lived, until the final ghastly climax at York, where the only Jews to escape slaughter by the mob were those who slew their wives and children and then died by their own hand. Crusaders preparing for departure and friars who incited the mob against the enemies of Christ were, according to all accounts, the leaders in these attacks, which must have made a deep impression, for the chroniclers describe them at length and with genuine horror. Some of the perpetrators were punished by Richard’s ministers, and though there were no further attacks, feeling against the Jews was fed by the episode. Eventually, a century later, another Crusader king, Edward I, preferring to take everything at once instead of continuing to squeeze a source that was drying up, expelled the Jews from England and sequestered to the Crown the property that they were forced to leave behind.

In some way men of the Middle Ages were able utterly
to dissociate in their minds the contemporary Jews from the ancient Hebrews. The archetype of warrior patriot to whom both Richard the Lion-Heart and Robert Bruce were compared by their admirers was Judas Maccabaeus. In fact, it was the great captains and kings among the Hebrews, not their prophets, who particularly appealed to the mailed mentality of the age of “chivalry.” Among the “Nine Worthies” of history, “three paynim, three Jews and three Christian men” whose figures so often appear carved over church doors or embroidered in tapestry, the three Jews were represented by Joshua (not Moses), David, and Judas Maccabaeus.

Richard may have been a Maccabee in valor, strength, and strategy, but not in motive. He fought for fun, not for liberty; that is, in Palestine. The rest, perhaps ninety per cent, of his adult life he spent fighting up and down France against his father or the French King or some other feudal rival, but all this is forgotten in the brighter memory of his Crusade. The fable agreed upon as regards Richard is of a sort of second King Arthur, which he was anything but. However, he provided England with a legend and with a feeling for the Holy Land as the locus of his legend, so that for his time and the hundred years that followed many an Englishman could have said: “When I am dead and opened ye shall find Palestine lying in my heart,” in paraphrase of what Queen Mary said of Calais.

Of the Second Crusade little need be said. It was an ignominious failure, which, according to a contemporary judgment, “though it did not at all relieve the Holy Land, yet could not be called unfortunate as it served to people heaven with martyrs.” Few English joined it, because most of the population were engaged in the seventeen years’ oscillating battle between Matilda and Stephen and their partisans. When their successor, Henry of Anjou, succeeded to the throne in 1152 the immediate task of bringing order to the unsettled kingdom absorbed all his energies. He contented himself with placing alms boxes in all
the churches for contributions in aid of the Templars, and later he imposed a levy
ad sustentationem Hierosolyem terrae
amounting to twopence in the pound for the first year and a penny in the pound for each of four years thereafter.

After Becket’s murder in 1170 Henry himself had to vow a three years’ Crusade as the price of absolution for his share of guilt in the century’s most celebrated crime. But the greater task of consolidating the sovereignty of England while constantly harassed by dynastic feuds in France caused him to put off his departure from year to year. He took a Crusader’s vow, but it is doubtful if he ever seriously intended going, for Henry was a working king whose real interest was at home rather than in dashing off after glory in the East.