The Forge of Christendom (62 page)

Such a question, even for those secure in the righteousness of their own cause, even for those fighting beneath a banner of St. Peter, had never been a simple one to answer. No matter, for instance, back in 1066, that William’s men had been following their duke to war against a usurper, and with the full blessing of the Pope himself: they had still been obliged, in the wake of the slaughter at Hastings, to undertake
penance or else to remain filthy with the sin of murder. A great and excruciating tension, then: for it had set the desperation for salvation against the need – and perhaps the longing – to fight. Now, however, with a single sermon, a single ordinance, that tension appeared resolved. No wonder, then, as news of what had been decreed by Urban spread, that there should have been “a great stirring of heart throughout all the Frankish lands”
¹³¹
– and far beyond. A whole new road to the City of God had suddenly opened up before the Christian people. The heroic labour of buttressing the world against Antichrist, and of preparing for the dreadful hour of Judgement, had all of a sudden become one in which the great mass of them could share. Not a pilgrim but he could know, as he set off for the Holy Sepulchre, that he was helping to set the universe to rights.

“Then will appear the sign of the Son of Man in heaven.”
¹³²
Sure enough, five months after the Council of Clermont, and even as the Pope was celebrating Easter in central France, a mysterious cross mat erialised in the sky. Just as it had done many centuries before, during the fabled reign of the first Christian Caesar, now it struck those who saw it as a certain portent of victory. Yet as thousands upon thousands of pilgrims set to sewing the image of it upon their clothes, or branding it on their flesh, or, as Guiscard’s eldest son would do, ripping up their cloaks to fashion crosses out of the shredded fabric, they were preparing for war unprompted by any Constantine. The crusaders, as they would come to be known, followed no emperor.
¹³³
Henry, still an excommunicate, still cooped up haplessly in northern Italy, would hardly have deigned to set himself at the head of anything summoned by Urban – even had he not been impotent to do so. Alexius, informed to his consternation that “the whole of the West was on the march”
¹³⁴
and descending directly on Constantinople, worked hard to bribe and browbeat the leaders of the pilgrimage into a nominal obedience to himself – but hardly with the intention of leading them onwards to Jerusalem. Better than anyone else, he knew what such a venture would demand.

True, Alexius was careful not to wallow openly in pessimism. He
even went so far as to float the odd rumour, hinting mysteriously that it was his destiny to lay down his crown before the Holy Sepulchre.
¹³⁵
Conspiratorial whisperings such as this, however, were intended exclusively for Western consumption. In reality, the beleaguered
Basileus
had not the slightest desire to play at being the last emperor. The preservation of Constantinople, not the liberation of Jerusalem, was his true responsibility. Fortunately, once the crusaders had all been transported across the Bosphorus, safely away from the Queen of Cities, it proved possible, albeit briefly, for the two ambitions to be squared. In June 1097, Nicaea was brought to capitulate, and the banner of the Second Rome fluttered once again over the birthplace of the Christian creed. Then, the following month, in a bloody and desperate struggle, the crusaders broke a formidable Turkish army in open battle. For the remainder of the year, even as they lumbered on their way through increasingly bleak and hostile territory, the Turks shrank from confronting them head on.

The following spring, taking full advantage of his enemies’ reverses, Alexius dispatched his brother-in-law to mop up in the crusaders’ wake. Then, in the summer, he led out a second army himself. By June, perhaps half of the territories lost to the Turks in the wake of Manzikert had been restored to imperial rule. Meanwhile, of the crusaders themselves, the news was grim in the extreme. Alexius, who had been pondering whether to join forces with them, was reliably informed by a deserter that the entire expedition stood on the verge of utter destruction. Accordingly, rather than risk his gains, the
Basileus
opted to consolidate them. He withdrew to Constantinople, leaving the crusaders to their fate.

A decision that had been, by all objective standards, the only rational one. The reports brought to Alexius that the crusade faced certain ruin were only marginally exaggerated. The odds against the winning of the Holy Sepulchre, always steep, had become, by the summer of 1098, astronomical. The Sultan of Baghdad, resolved to annihilate the invaders once and for all, had dispatched an immense army, “swarming everywhere from the mountains and along different
roads like the sands of the sea.”
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Against this prodigious task force, the crusaders, who had numbered perhaps one hundred thousand the previous spring as they streamed towards Constantinople, could muster at best a threadbare twenty thousand – non-combatants included.
¹³⁷
Disease, starvation and casualties in battle; the loss of virtually the entire expedition’s supply of horses and mules, so that even dogs had ended up being employed as pack animals; the lack of anything approaching a unified leadership: all these factors, as the crusaders themselves freely acknowledged, should have spelled their doom. “For certainly, in my opinion,” as one contemporary put it, “what they went through was an ordeal without precedent. Never before had there been among the princes of the world men who exposed their bodies to such suffering, solely in the expectation of a celestial reward.”
¹³⁸

No wonder, then, when the ferociously outnumbered crusaders succeeded in yet again shattering the Turks upon their steel, when they continued to win famous cities long lost to Christendom, and when, on 7 June 1099, they finally arrived in triumph before the walls of Jerusalem, there were few among them who doubted that they had arrived as well at a turning point in the order of heaven and earth. No one could know for certain what wonders might follow their capture of the Holy Sepulchre – but merely to win it would rank as wonder enough. Ambition, greed and ingenuity: all these qualities, honed by the three long and terrible years of the pilgrimage, had served to bring the crusaders to the very brink of a miracle. Yet in the mingled sense of urgency and brutality that they had displayed, and in their conviction that there was nothing in the world that might not be changed and improved by their own labours, there lay the proof of a revolution long pre-dating their taking up of the Cross. For better and for worse, the previous century had seen Christendom, and the Christian people, transformed utterly. The arrival of the crusaders before the walls of the Holy City was merely a single – albeit the most spectacular – manifestation of a process which, since the convulsive period of the
Millennium, had made of Europe something restless, and dynamic, and wholly new. Nor would it be the last.

A thousand years had passed now since an angel, parting the veil which conceals from mankind the plans of the Almighty for the future, had given to St. John a revelation of the last days. And the saint, writing it down, had recorded how a great battle was destined to be fought; and how the Beast, at its end, would be captured and thrown into a lake of fire. But before that could be brought about, and the world born anew, Christ Himself, “clad in a robe dipped in blood,” was destined to lead out the armies of heaven. “From his mouth issues a sharp sword with which to smite the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron; he will tread the wine press of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty.”
¹³⁹

On 15 July, the crusaders finally broke into Jerusalem and took possession of the object of all their yearnings. The wine press was duly trodden: the streets were made to flow with blood. And at the end of it, when the slaughter was done, and the whole city drenched in gore, the triumphant warriors of Christ, weeping with joy and disbelief, assembled before the Sepulchre of the Saviour and knelt in an ecstasy of worship.

Meanwhile, on the Temple Mount, where it had been foretold that Antichrist would materialise at the end of days enthroned in fearsome and flame-lit glory, all was stillness. The slaughter upon the rock of the Temple had been especially terrible, and not a living thing had been left there to stir. Already, in the summer heat, the corpses were starting to reek.

Antichrist did not appear.

All dates are
anno Domini
.