The Dream and the Tomb (19 page)

Baldwin, King of Jerusalem, Count of Edessa, Lord of Jaffa, Arsuf, and Caesarea, was now a fugitive hiding in the hills north of Ramleh, with a price on his head. For two days and two nights he evaded Egyptian patrols. Traveling at night, he made his way safely to Arsuf.

On that same day, Hugh of Saint-Omer arrived at Arsuf with eighty knights; so from being a fugitive one day, Baldwin became the commander of a small army the next. An Englishman called Goderic offered to take the king through the Egyptian blockade to Jaffa. Baldwin accepted the invitation, and flew his royal standard from the mast of the fast-sailing ship to spite the Egyptians, whose ships were too slow and cumbersome to catch up with him. In Jaffa, he found the remnants of his army, and broke his way out of the siege to join forces with Hugh of Saint-Omer. Then he returned to Jaffa, sent messengers to Jerusalem for more knights, and was about to hurl himself on the Egyptians again when one of the largest armadas ever seen in the eastern Mediterranean came sailing into Jaffa harbor—two hundred English ships filled with soldiers and pilgrims, with stores of weapons and provisions. These pilgrims and soldiers came from all over Europe, but mostly they were English. They came at a providential time, breaking the Egyptian blockade by their sheer numbers. With this new army, only about fourteen days after his escape from Ramleh with a squire and three knights, Baldwin drove the Egyptians once more back to Ascalon.

He was determined to safeguard his kingdom, and he realized that it was above all necessary that the coastal cities should be in his possession. A master of warfare by land and sea, his general plan was to attack these cities
both ways, his own knights fighting on land, while ships from Genoa, Pisa, Venice, Constantinople, England, Flanders, and Norway were used to keep the Egyptian fleet at bay, blockade the harbors, and fire flaming arrows into the cities.

Tortosa fell in 1102, Acre fell in 1104, and Tripoli in 1109. An English and Danish fleet took part in the siege of Sidon in 1107, but the siege was called off against a huge ransom because the king was in desperate need of money. Three years later he captured Beirut, and in the same year, with the help of a fleet commanded by the youthful King Sigurd of Norway, who brought fifty ships to the Holy Land, he returned to Sidon and captured it. Tyre held out. So did Ascalon. There were wars on all the frontiers. Baldwin exulted in them.

In 1115, he returned to the land he appears to have loved most, the wild and savage land below the Dead Sea, the rocks looking as though they were still heaving after volcanic explosions. On a steep, wooded hill near the village of Shobak, a hundred miles from Jerusalem in the north and Aqaba in the south, he built a castle called Montreal, the Royal Mountain, which dominated the country for miles around, and was to become in time the single most powerful castle in the region known as Beyond the Jordan or Oultrejourdain.

He was so pleased with Montreal that he visited it again the following year and then marched to Aila on the Red Sea. Having reached so far, he decided to reach farther. A little island, which the Arabs called the Island of Pharaoh, lay just off the coast. Baldwin crossed over in one of the boats abandoned by the people of Aila, and ordered the construction of a small castle on the island, which the Crusaders called the Island of Graye. He built another castle at Aila. Both castles were provided with small garrisons. The empire of the Crusaders now stretched from Edessa in northern Syria to the Island of Graye in the Red Sea, a distance of 550 miles. It was an unwieldy empire, made up of bits and pieces of territory, flourishing coastal cities, vast deserts, and princedoms. For sustenance it depended upon the charity of strangers, for without the fleets that came from western Europe at irregular intervals it could not have sustained itself. Baldwin, who spent most of his reign on the move, conducted himself like an army.

By building castles from the Island of Graye northward, and manning them with some of his best troops, he was preventing the armies of Cairo and Damascus from going to one another's assistance. The Kingdom of Jerusalem lay like a double-edged sword between them.

It would have been difficult enough to maintain the kingdom if its separate parts were at peace, but the separate parts were often intriguing against one another. Princes sometimes arrested princes. Thus the Count of Toulouse, very early in Baldwin's reign, was arrested by Tancred, who was acting as Prince of Antioch while Bohemond was the prisoner of the emir of Danishmend. The count was kept in honorable confinement and
released without too much difficulty. Bohemond, released from captivity in the spring of 1103, quarreled immediately with Tancred, who felt cheated because Bohemond claimed territories that Tancred had conquered without his assistance. But in the end it was the intrepid Tancred who, while titular Prince of Galilee, inherited the princedom of Antioch.

Bohemond had conceived a new plan. He would travel to the West, build up a new Crusading army in France and Italy, and throw the whole weight of it not against the Turks but against Byzantium. In October 1107, he attacked the great Byzantine fortress of Dyrrhachium with an army that included Turkish mercenaries. Unlike Baldwin, he had no understanding of seapower, and after a long siege he was himself besieged, captured, and brought before the emperor. In defeat he remained for a while superbly insolent. Anna Comnena speaks of the radiance shining from him, as though he were a god standing among mortals, able to dominate everyone around him.

Alexius knew how to deal with him. Coldly, he drew up the instrument of surrender by which Bohemond would be made to submit to the Byzantine emperor. Bohemond returned to Apulia, where he lived out the rest of his life on his estates, never returning to the East. Baldwin was the beneficiary of his absence.

Baldwin was no more modest than Bohemond, but he possessed human qualities that made him loved by his people. There was a genuine warmth in him, a genuine delight in fighting, and a genuine simplicity of manner.

In the spring of 1118 he led an expedition to Egypt, plundered Pelusium and Tanis, and was hoping to penetrate deeper into the country. One day he was walking along the banks of the Nile and came upon some knights spearing fish with their lances. He joined them, ate some of their fish, and immediately felt ill. They carried him in a litter as far as al-Arish and there he died. They cut out his intestines, salted them, and placed them in his coffin, which they carried to Jerusalem. On Palm Sunday, he was buried beside his brother Godfrey in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Godfrey's short reign gave him little time for the study of kingship. Baldwin studied kingship minutely, with a cleric's passion and a soldier's courage. He had a sense of order, extraordinary courage, a feeling for the drama essential to kingship, and a flair for diplomacy. If he loved women too much, it is at least possible that they helped him remain human. Though married three times, he left no children, and the crown passed to his nephew Baldwin of Le Bourg, who happened to arrive from Edessa on the day of his funeral.

On Baldwin's tombstone it was written that he was “a second Judas Maccabaeus, whom Kedar and Egypt, Dan and Damascus dreaded.” This was true, but it would have been more appropriate to say that he gave confidence to the fledgling kingdom at a time when confidence was most needed. He was the most kingly among the kings of Jerusalem.

WE shall not understand the Crusaders until we realize that they were different from us. They were closer to the earth, and the smells of the earth. They were closer to the brute facts of the earth; very often they were near starvation. For the most part they were peasants with a peasant's knowledge of the seasons and the rituals of the Church. They believed with a firm and intimate faith, with a medieval directness, and a rough-hewn stubbornness, that it was in their power to safeguard forever the Holy Sepulchre, which they regarded as the place of the Resurrection, offering the promise of eternal life. They knew that Christ died and rose again in the flesh; that they belonged to the kingdom of Christ; to him, they owed their ultimate allegiance.

The most enviable Crusaders were the knights, who were often only two generations removed from the peasantry. With their grooms and esquires, and their pompous trappings, they were the elite of the army, always on parade. Their horses were much heavier than those of the Saracens. Well-trained and strictly disciplined, the Crusaders were armored front-line troops with sufficient weight and power to punch holes in the enemy lines and then to wheel back and punch more holes. Their weapons were lances, which sometimes reached the length of ten feet, and a heavy double-edged sword, which they carried in a scabbard on the left side. The sword was used for hand-to-hand fighting; the lance possessed a wider range and flexibility.

From neck to waist, and from thighs to feet, knights were enclosed in chain mail made of iron links on a foundation of leather. They wore very sharp spurs and round shields with iron rims and iron bosses. Their helmets were round, flat-topped boxes of steel covering the whole head, with slits in front of the eyes and perforations in front of the mouth and nose. They were intended to look terrifying.

Once established in the Holy Land, the Crusaders had three main armies. There was the army in the service of the king, and there were the
auxiliary armies of the Templars and the Hospitallers. These auxiliary armies, which became enormously powerful, grew up haphazardly, yet there were times when they became the real rulers of the kingdom.

The Order of the Knights of the Temple was a military order founded by Hugh of Payens, a knight from Champagne. He appears to have been sweet-tempered, totally dedicated, and ruthless on behalf of the Faith. The Knights of the Temple were soldiers of Christ, ascetic almost to fanaticism, single-minded to the exclusion of all ideas except the worship of God and the annihilation of the Saracens. In 1118, Hugh of Payens with nine other knights sought the permission of Baldwin I to found the order. The king of Jerusalem was so delighted with the idea that he gave them part of the royal palace believed to be the Temple of Solomon. This became their headquarters and from then on they were known as Templars.

Ostensibly, the purpose of the Templars was to safeguard the lives of the pilgrims who flocked to Jerusalem and other holy places. But from the beginning, Hugh of Payens appears to have had a larger aim. The Templars quickly became an independent fighting arm of the Church, having allegiance only to the pope and the grand master. They were armed monks, priestly swordbearers, chivalrous only on behalf of God, shock troops to be thrown into every righteous battle. Their courage became legendary.

Safeguarding the comings and goings of pilgrims was difficult. How difficult we learn from the Anglo-Saxon traveler Saewulf who came to Jerusalem in 1102 and left this account of the tortuous road that leads up from the coast to Jerusalem:

. . . the Saracens . . . lie in wait in mountain caves to surprise the Christians, watching both day and night to pounce on those who came in small numbers and were therefore less capable of resistance or those who were worn out with fatigue and therefore lagged behind their companions. At one moment you can see them everywhere, at another moment they are invisible, and everyone who travels in this region has observed this. . . .

Saewulf, with his Anglo-Saxon companions, arrived at a time when the Kingdom of Jerusalem had only just come into existence, when the government was still disorderly and inefficient, and when it was impossible to spare soldiers to police the road. Because the government could not guarantee the safety of the pilgrims, hundreds died even before they saw Jerusalem's golden gates.

At first, the Templars enjoyed a modest organization. Over the course of two centuries a vast body of rules and regulations would come into existence, legislating for every possible eventuality, but at the beginning they
were merely monks on horseback, armed with swords and lances, sometimes so poor that two would ride on a single horse.

Hugh of Payens infused the Templars with the energy of chastity and obedience. No women might enter the Temple; they were not permitted to embrace any woman, not even their sisters or their mothers. A lamp burned in their dormitories all night; their breeches were tightly laced; they were never permitted to see each other naked. They were permitted no privacy, and letters addressed to individual Templars had to be read aloud in the presence of the grand master or a chaplain. They never shaved their beards. Their spartan lives were directed toward the single end of protecting the pilgrims and the Kingdom of Jerusalem by killing the enemy.

Since they were obedient only to the pope, who was far away, they often acted independently of the king of Jerusalem. They became sophisticated soldiers, administrators, builders of castles, and owners of vast estates, not only in the Holy Land but all over Europe, for kings and princes and common people soon recognized that they possessed to an extraordinary degree the military power to secure the safety of the kingdom. They possessed, too, a vast intelligence system, sometimes working in close association with the royal government, but sometimes against it. Their own spies reported regularly from Cairo, Baghdad, Aleppo, and the other Arab capitals of the Middle East.

The headquarters of the Templars still stands in Jerusalem, for the building then known as the Temple was in fact the al-Aqsa Mosque, believed by Christians to be on the site of the Temple of Solomon. In these spacious quarters with their underground stables lived the grand master, the marshal, and the high command. Reverence was paid to the grand master as the representative of the pope. The master of the Templars was often a man who had entered the order as a youth and had spent his whole life in it. He knew no other world and was interested only in the advancement of the Templars at all costs, and if it was necessary for him to form a temporary alliance with the Saracens, he would do so without a qualm. The Templars always had the best intelligence system in the Holy Land, and very often the Saracens learned what they wanted to know through the Templars. Those hard and silent men, wearing voluminous white cloaks derived from the Cistercian robe, adorned with a large blood-red cross, played dangerous games. They brought the Crusaders some of their greatest triumphs and some of their greatest defeats.