The Crusades: Iron Men and Saints E-Book

Harold Lamb

• Herausgeber: Reading Essentials
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

In this volume is told the genuine true story of the first crusaders. It begins with their setting out, and it ends with the death of the last survivor. Almost a thousand years have passed since then, and the lives of these men are known to us only by the chronicles of their days. Upon these original chronicles the story in this book is based. It does not deal with the legends that grew up after the crusades. It is not history revised and re-written. It is the real firsthand account story of a dozen men, most of them leaders, who started out on that long journey - what they saw on the road, and what they did, and what befell them.

Leseprobe

The Crusades: Iron Men and Saints

by Harold Lamb

First published in 1930

This edition published by Reading Essentials

Victoria, BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany

[email protected]

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except in the case of excerpts by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

MUHAMMAD THE CONQUEROR

FROM THE PAINTING BY BENJAMIN CONSTANT

 THE CRUSADES: Iron Men and Saints

BY 

HAROLD LAMB

DEDICATED

FOREWORD

AT THE end of the night of the Dark Ages a multitude of our ancestors left their homes. They started out on what they called the voyage of God.

It was a migration, and a journey, and war. All kinds of people joined the marchers, lords and vagabonds, weapon men and peasants, proud ladies and tavern drabs. “A thing unheard of,” said a chronicler of the day, “that such divers people and so many distinguished princes, leaving their splendid possessions, their wives and their children, set forth with one accord and in scorn of death to seek the most unknown regions.”

They were marching out of the familiar, known world into Asia to set free with their own hands the Sepulcher of Christ. They wanted to live there, in the promised land, ruled by no king but by the will of God. On the shoulders of their jackets they wore a cross, sewn out of cloth, and because of this they were called the cruciati, or cross-bearers. So we, to-day, call them the crusaders.

Most of them died on the way. But they went on, and after three years some of them reached their destination, Beyond the Sea. Here their journey ended, but other cross-bearers came out to join them. For the first time all the peoples of Christendom, speaking different languages and separated from each other until now, were united in a common enterprise. Christendom had taken up the sword against Islam, and the war went on for more than three centuries and some two million human beings perished in it.

Historians have picked out six of the crises of this conflict and have named them the six crusades. In reality it was all just the ebb and flow of the conflict begun by these crusaders.

In this volume is told the story of the first crusaders. It begins with their setting out, and it ends with the death of the last survivor. Eight hundred and thirty-five years have passed since then, and the lives of these men are known to us only by the chronicles of their day.

Several of these chronicles were written by men who marched with the crusaders, by two chaplains and an unknown soldier. Two other narratives were finished in Beyond the Sea after the march, and we have the accounts of others who saw the crusaders pass, a princess of Byzantium, an Armenian patriarch. There is also the testimony of Arab travelers and historians of the period, and the notes of Genoese sea traders, and the saga of a Norse king.

Upon these original chronicles the story in this book is based. It does not deal with the legends that grew up after the crusades. It is not history rewritten.

It is the story of a dozen men, most of them leaders, who started out on that long journey—what they saw on the road, and what they did, and what befell them at the Sepulcher of Christ.

H. L.

CONTENTS

PAGE

Foreword

vii

PART I

CHAPTER

I

Barbarians

3

II

Darkness

7

III

The Iron Men

11

IV

Chivalry

16

V

The Robed Men

24

VI

The Servant of the Servants

29

VII

Urban’s Summons

38

VIII

The Response

44

IX

The Gonfanons

51

X

What Peter Did

61

PART II

XI

Byzantium

77

XII

The Coming of the Iron Men

84

XIII

Alexis and Bohemund

94

XIV

The Oath of the Barons

100

XV

The March of the Provençals

105

XVI

The Kneeling Tower

112

XVII

Doryleum

120

PART III

XVIII

The Anonymous

131

XIX

The Road to Antioch

136

XX

Loot

140

XXI

The Sign in the Sky

148

XXII

The Key to the Gate

156

XXIII

The Tower of the Two Sisters

165

XXIV

Adhemar and Bartholomew

173

XXV

The Lance Goes Forth

181

XXVI

The First Foothold

188

XXVII

The Walls of Maara

195

XXVIII

Raymond’s Path

201

XXIX

Tancred Rides to Bethlehem

211

XXX

The Valley of the Damned

220

XXXI

The Bridge of Fire

230

PART IV

XXXII

Godfrey

241

XXXIII

The City

251

XXXIV

What Fulcher Saw

261

XXXV

The Path of Glory

270

XXXVI

March of the Barons

278

XXXVII

Bohemund’s Crusade

288

XXXVIII

The Last Comer

297

XXXIX

Beyond the Sea

301

Afterword

311

NOTES

I

The Numbers of the Crusaders

325

II

Urban and the Crusade

326

III

The Case Against the Basileus

329

IV

Greek Fire

334

V

The Belfroi at Jerusalem

336

VI

The Legends

337

VII

The First and the Third Crusades

341

VIII

Bohemund and the Lion Heart

344

IX

The White Mantle and the Black

345

X

The Tales of Ousama

347

Selected Bibliography

351

Index

361

ILLUSTRATIONS

Muhammad the Conqueror

Urban II

Robert Duke of Normandy

The Land Walls of Constantinople

The Narrative of Albertus Aquensis

Battle Scene in Asia

Antioch

Bohemund’s Tomb

The Sepulcher Within Jerusalem

The Unknown’s Narrative

A Prince of Byzantium

The Basilica of St. John the Baptist

Jerusalem

Krak Des Chevaliers

The Emperor Manuel

PART I

I

BARBARIANS

OME was dead. A white-faced boy emperor had seen his crown handed to a bearded chieftain, standing on the marble steps of the Ravenna palace, in the year of our Lord 476.

For centuries Rome had rotted, growing impotent. The last scene passed almost without notice. By then the old civilization had vanished. The future belonged to the young peoples thronging in from the north.

They came from ice-filled fiords and wind-swept steppes, but always from the north, pressing toward sunny lands and fertile soil. Some of them arrived overseas in dragon ships, and others in the covered wagons of the nomads, driving their cattle. They made camp along the marble road posts of the Caesars. The Mediterranean was their objective, for here Rome had gathered its wealth.

Wandering and fighting, they bred chaos among the ruins of imperial cities. Untaught, they fared badly. In time they were scattered or harried along by new waves of barbarians from the north and the east. Roman law was forgotten, the strongest held power. Clan traditions governed the masses, and the priests of Odin filled bowls with steaming blood, while horsemen watched who had been weaned in the barren Gobi.

For five centuries the Mediterranean world became a wandering ground of the clans. The barbarians had forsaken the old clan life, and as yet they had learned little from the ruins of Greek-Roman culture.

There were two interludes. An orphan of the Khoraish Clan in the desert near the Red Sea preached a new faith. He harangued the Arabs, telling them that there was no more than one God—they had worshiped until then many gods and demons and a great black stone—and they believed him. His name was Muhammad, son of Abdullah, and he made a multitude tremble at his description of the day of judgment. When Muhammad died the multitude accepted Islam—submission—and the Koran—the recitation. There was one God, and Muhammad, the son of Abdullah, had been His Prophet.

What this man of the Khoraish had not accomplished in his life came to pass after his death. Desert men wearing motley helmets, mounted on little horses and thin camels, went out to conquer. The fire of fanaticism burned in them, and spread from land to land with amazing speed.

Under the Companions, who had been the comrade-disciples of the Prophet, the rush of conquest began. In less than a century the banners of Islam had been carried east as far as the Indus and the outposts of Cathay. The swords of Islam were flashing in the deep gorges of the Caucasus. Egypt had fallen to them, and all the north of Africa, and Andalus—modern Spain.

Almost at its outset, the tide had swept over the rock-strewn valleys of Jerusalem, and the sepulcher of Christ.

Two obstacles checked the rush of the Muhammadans upon Europe. A certain Charles the Hammer, king of the Franks, withstood them in the west. And in the east they were flung back from the walls of Byzantium. But the real reason for the ebbing of the tide was that the Muhammadans had split up into different factions, each holding to its portion of the conquered lands.

Their conquests brought them face to face with the barbarians who had quartered themselves on the ruins of the Roman Empire and had become Christians. Europe became the neighbor of near-Asia. The front line of Christendom could look across at the advanced posts of Islam. No-man’s land had disappeared.

In the west, where Spain was the battleground, the Christian Franks retook the passes of the Pyrenees and gained ground steadily. In the east the Muhammadans gradually edged across Asia Minor.

It was in the center that the Muhammadans held the upper hand—in the sea itself. The Arabs took kindly to the sea. They built ships and changed slowly from warriors to warrior-merchants. They made themselves at home on the islands, especially Sicily, and they sailed up the Tiber almost to the walls of Rome.

Meanwhile the Arabs and the conquered peoples of Islam gained in culture. Caravans came over the passes from India; the riches of Cathay appeared in the serais of Aleppo and Alexandria. Academies and palaces made Córdoba and Cairo beautiful, and Haroun al-Raschid reigned in Baghdad.

The long frontier quieted down, but the Muhammadans were now more intelligent as well as more powerful than the barbaric Christian peoples.

About this time, in the beginning of the Ninth Century, the second interlude held the stage of Europe. Charles the Great—Charlemagne—king of the Franks, played the chief part in it. Downright hard fighting and simple one-man rule established a brief empire for a generation. Charlemagne and his peers rode from the Pyrenees to the east, almost within sight of Byzantium.

To the wiser heads this seemed the beginning of order and law. The only government they knew was what they remembered of the Roman Empire. Only an emperor could rule. Charles died, and the sturdy dominion broke up.

And with its passing the real darkness of the ages settled down upon western Europe. The nations lived apart, without knowledge of how to do otherwise. They fought as their ancestors had done, like wolves. And new barbarians came raiding from the north, this time by sea. Danes and Northmen—as the Normans were called at first.

They emerged from the mist-shrouded seas with a thirst in them for the fertile green lands of the south. Untamed, clad in wolfskin and sealskin, wearing gleaming gold, wielding their long swords and axes, they harried and burned and then settled themselves along the coasts.

A good many credulous fellows believed, after this, that the world would come to its end in the year 1000. They sat up all night to await the sounding of the horn that would summon them to judgment. But the sun rose again in silence, and the earth had not changed.

Nor had that part of it known as western Europe changed very much in the year of our Lord 1095.

II

DARKNESS

HE damp forests were there as before, and the gray ruins where owls glided from the vines. The wolves hunted in packs as usual. Only small patches of land were cultivated, in stony ground, near the hamlets. Clay and stone huts, roofed with thatch, clustered below the hewn logs of a lord’s hall and a stone tower.

Cow-herders slept by the beasts in the outer fields, and sheep crowded the narrow forest trails. Here and there could be seen the white dust and broken stones of a Roman road. Sometimes a Jew passed along the highroad with his pack horse, or a merchant with his guard of spearmen. More rarely the cavalcade of a baron—a master—raised the dust, and the men in the fields thronged around to stare at the powerful chargers and the dark, oiled chain mail and the fur-edged cloaks.

Few of them ever saw more than this—except perhaps the great cross where the roads met at the end of their valley. What lay beyond the hills was unknown, and hostile. Only the black-robed monks, wandering barefoot from abbey to abbey, could give them news of the outer world, or a rare troubadour, hastening to the hall for his dinner.

The men of the Dark Age often were buried in the valley of their birth without having seen any other. And they labored without ceasing.

When day breaks I go out at once [these words of a ploughman have come down to us] driving the oxen to field, to yoke them to the plough. I must plough a whole field as a day’s work. I have a boy who is now hoarse with cold and shouting. After that I fill the bins with hay, water the cattle and carry out the dung. Yea, truly, this is great labor, because I am not free.

Famine took toll of them. Rain at seed time—smothering crops, and rotting wheat in the ear—drought or war might bring on a time of hunger. The four horsemen of the Apocalypse rode with a loose rein over the land at such times.

Chalk was taken from the earth and mixed with flour to make bread. Their faces grew lean, and they had not strength to drag themselves around. Pits were dug in the ground, and the dying were dragged into them. Another calamity followed. Wolves, finding so many bodies on the roads, began to grow bold and to attack living men. Nourishment was kept for the strongest, in order that the fields might be cultivated.

A man was seen in the market place of Tonnere carrying cooked flesh to sell. He pretended it was the meat of an animal. He was taken and judged, and did not deny his crime. They burned him, and the human flesh he had brought to sell was buried by order of justice. But another man went and dug it up and ate of it. He also was condemned to flames.

At such times plague visited the living. Crowded in the hamlets, whole families were stricken, until the survivors often fled in terror from the buildings. The sick were carried to the churches in the hope of a cure, and contamination spread to the throngs who had come to pray.

Death raged [said Ordericus Vitalis, a priest-chronicler] and emptied many homes of inhabitants, and great hunger troubled the sufferers. When fire and waste devastated the land, many were driven out, and, the parishes being obliterated, they fled from the empty churches of the Presbytery.

They had the patience of sufferers, and they had their joys. A juggler might wander in, leading a bear upon which sat a strange and amusing animal, a monkey. The good people of the hamlets would watch merrymaking by the hour, when tumblers balanced cartwheels on their shoulders, or daggers upright on their palms. When two blind men, armed with wooden swords, belabored each other, the crowd roared its appreciation.

When the lord’s courtyard was opened to them, upon rare feast days, they fed hugely from spiced pigs’ heads, washed down by honey mead or beer. They climbed the rafters to watch pirouette dancers who circled slowly to the twanging of a viol. And they stared at tumblers with red beards and wigs, who stood on their hands upon the table and forked their legs in the air.

They were insatiably curious, these people of the hamlets, and restless. In them lurked a craving to wander, as their ancestors the Northmen had roved along the edges of the sea. They would walk, carrying their young children, to the yearly gathering of the nobles at a town. Although the towns were poor affairs—an abbey or a lord’s castle on the height, both fortified and garrisoned by armed men, and a straggling of skinners’ and carpenters’ and silver workers’ shops.

The homestead of the barbarians had grown into this feudal fief. It was larger, but still the same abiding place of the clan. The head of the clan was the chieftain of the fighting men, the master—the baron. He belonged to the class of gentils hommes, gentle men. Below him existed the prud’ hommes, the stout fellows, the fighting men. And then the bonhommes, the good men—merchants, or well-to-dos.

These last were also the residents of the slopes that led up to the castle, upon the height, or bourg. So they were known as bourgeoisie. But all power and all responsibility lay in the hands of the lord. He might be a liege lord, if the men had done homage to him—pledged their bodies to his service. Or a land lord, if they held their lands from him.

In this age of unceasing war, the fighting man held the mastery. His household lived in a stone or wooden citadel, built to stand siege. More often than not he kept his horse and arms in the room where he slept with his wife.

He rode abroad in chain mail, with a long shield ready to hand, and sword and ax hanging from his belt. Helmeted, skilled in arms, he was a match for a dozen common men on foot, and that was his title of nobility. He was justice-in-chief, counselor, and tax assessor for his people—and plunderer extraordinary.

Their quarrels were decided at his pleasure; he might seize their cattle for his table, or require their daughters to be sent to his bed on their first bridal night; at other times he would open his granaries to relieve their hunger, or carry fire and sword through a neighboring fief to supply them with goods. He plundered for them as well as for himself. Money—silver—was rare indeed, and his men paid their taxes to him in grain, meat, woven cloth or leather, or such-like. All this went to the people of his household and his armed men. Real wealth, fine cloth, gold tissue, silver, he was forced to pillage afield, and he did so.

So feud was built up on feud. The lord of the manor saw his sons die in a cattle raid, or in the great wars. There was no truce in the struggle, when famine came on the heels of pestilence. Hard as were the ties that held bondsmen and serfs to the will of their lord, life itself was harsher: the stagnation of the forests and fallow land—the misery of isolation, when men could only gain advantages by the deaths of others.

The age of iron, we have christened it. Untaught, scarred by hidden lusts, unthinking, and cruel beyond our conception, it was ruled by iron weapons and the arms of mighty men. But in this night of the Middle Ages men were already laboring at the stones that would build the great cathedrals. It was an age of blind, unreasoning faith.

III

THE IRON MEN

HIVALRY was still young. Even so, it dominated the lives of the men. It was an order, to enter which a man need be qualified; and it bound him to lifelong duties.

He was required to abide by his spoken word, to say nothing that he was not ready to maintain at risk of his body, to keep faith with his lord, to protect the weak, and to fight against injustice. His courage must be proof. A baron—a master of land and dwellings—did not necessarily become a knight. Likewise a knight did not always own property, although he was usually given sufficient to support himself, a few horses, and his esquire, with some men at arms.

He could not inherit knighthood. He had to acquire it by long service. A boy of six or eight years would be sent away from his home to be reared and trained by another lord. In his new household he was dismissed at once to the kitchen, to be ordered about and cuffed by the older esquires and attendants. He could not eat white bread or sweets, and he had to clean the spits and watch the fires.

These youthful bachelors, as they were called, had few diversions. They played with sticks and dogs in the courtyards around the donjon tower, where sentries always kept watch. They listened to the smiths and bowyers singing interminable chants in the penthouses.

When they were nine years of age they devoted themselves to the horses and the play of wooden weapons. Staging mimic hunts, followed by their motley dogs, cleaning out the stables, riding to neighboring hamlets with a letter from their mistress, they longed for the day when they would be recognized as esquires and shield-bearers.

And when this came, it proved to be an arduous day. No longer, after vespers, could they sit by the hearth in the vaulted hall and watch the master of the castle finishing his wine upon the raised platform, or playing at chess with his guests.

They were no longer curly-headed bachelors, bent on mischief. The esquire was armiger—arms-bearer, attendant and pupil of his master. He rose early in the day, to groom and feed the horses. Then to the armory, to clean, oil, and wipe the helmets, weapons, and mail of his lord. Perhaps in the forenoon he had the joy of riding to hunt, to attend the older men.

Returning, he looked to the horses, and hastened to the hall where, silent and watchful, he served bread and meats and poured the wine. After the evening he must needs make his lord’s bed and undress him. Before he could sleep the stables must be visited again, and the round of the castle made with the guardsmen.

Colts were given him to break in, until he became “steady on a horse, and fit to carry knightly arms.” Fit, but forbidden that most-longed-for privilege. For the long sword was sacrosanct—only to be borne by a belted man—its hilt the shape of a cross, its pommel enclosing a holy relic.

The esquire might be a master of sword play, with wooden weapons, or skilled in handling the ten-foot lance. He might be able to spring in full armor from a running horse, or to leap ditches with the weight of mail upon him; but even when he followed his lord to battle, he was not permitted such weapons. Bare-headed and unarmed, he watched the paladin, his master, throughout the turmoil of hand-to-hand fighting, ready to help him off the field if he was hurt, or to lead up a fresh charger. Often these headstrong young ones cast off restraint and plunged into the battle empty-handed—to come out bleeding, flushed, and triumphant, a captured sword in hand.

Youth and mighty sinews made light of obstacles. This was before the time of mincing pages and sanctimonious heralds, and all the peerages. A great name must be won by deeds, and a strong fief had to be held by courage and watchfulness.

Esquires and young girls alike hung upon the talk of their elders, to glean the tidings of events—who had gone forth against the Moors?—what lands had been won?—what gentlemen had fallen? Their mothers, mistresses of the castles, governed a milder world within the dark walls. They managed the maids at the spinning, and watched the slow progress of the embroidery looms. They heard the seneschal’s tale of wine stocked in, and white flour brought up from the mill. And when the men rode out, upon a summons to arms, the women must needs smile and cry good fortune to them—and turn back to manage a masterless fief, with its poor and its sick and its garrison idle upon their hands.

Stout-hearted women, these, of the feudal years, pent up and shut off from the outer world no less than the serfs who labored for them.

The tapestries they wove made clear their story—of hunting and armed men, banquet and siege. The crude paintings on the chimney pieces, the illuminations of the few manuscripts treasured in a chest, told the same story of long-dead saints or warriors. Rare indeed was the jongleur who could sing of love in the gay Andalusian way—the favorite song of the time was the “Song of Roland,” with its melody of ivory horns and the neighing of horses and clash of armed hosts.

To these youths of Normandy—or France, or Burgundy, or Saxony—only two careers were possible, knighthood or the Church. Other professions did not exist for them. A merchant’s counting house opened its doors to them in vain.

One boy, manor-born, was fostered by a trader who tried to teach him the virtues of calculation and the arts of buying. The lad had eyes only for passing horses until the worthy bourgeois determined to try him in his new profession and gave him several marks of silver—a large sum—to go to the market and purchase stock-in-trade. And the protégé came back without the silver but with a pair of hunting dogs.

“Thou hast been defrauded,” the merchant cried, “and I have lost my silver.”

“Not so,” the boy maintained stoutly, “for these dogs are skilled at worrying boars or tracking wolves.”

For such as he, only one course lay open, and one hour, when he would remain prostrated with his arms extended as if upon a cross, before the altar, and would rise to take up a sword for the first time and go forth as a man among warriors.

At dawn, after the end of his watch at the altar, friends came in and greeted the knight-to-be. He bathed and clothed himself in white. Then, after making confession and taking the sacrament of communion, he was led before the seigneur who awaited him with other knights.

Women came forward and put on him the pieces of armor: the heavy mesh shirt of iron chain-work—this he had been privileged to wear as an esquire—the coif, or hood, of similar mesh, and, for the first time, the sleeves and gloves and hose of mail. So he stood encased in iron, and the seigneur asked if he was ready to give obedience to the Church and to the laws of chivalry.

Then he knelt, after making his vow, to be struck upon the base of the neck with the flat of a sword, and to hear:

“In the name of God, I make thee knight.”

The seigneur lifted him to his feet and said, “Be proud!” With that the lord who had given the accolade girdled him with a belt and thrust his new sword into its sheath. Others fitted gold spurs upon his heels, presented him with the long kite shield that he would carry henceforth and the conical steel cap with the nasal piece, that was called a helm.

So equipped, he was conducted out to where a powerful charger waited, and the ten-foot lance was put into his hand. He rode a few courses with the lance, and the ceremony was ended, except for the feasting.

The new knight was now privileged to take his place in the tournaments. And these were not the ceremonious affairs of later centuries. In fact, only the Franks—now called the French—and the Provençals and Normans held them.

They made grim test of the strength and hardihood of novice knights. The combatants formed on two sides, several score strong, and rode against each other in an open field. Their weapons might be seasoned wood or blunted iron, but that did not save the riders from broken bones and blood-letting. When they bore weapons of sharpened steel, some of them would die. The lists, instead of housing a colorful assembly to watch the conflict, were in reality spaces fenced off, whither wounded or wearied fighters could withdraw and be safe. So, outside the lists, the tournament was actual combat.

IV

CHIVALRY

N WAR the knights formed the heart of the army, the shock division. The men at arms, the sergeants, who accompanied them might carry crossbow or long bow, but not they. The sergeants were liegemen, who had been given homesteads or pay by the knight, in return for military service. Skilled fighters, often more experienced than the young lords they followed, they made up the bulk of the combat division.

The rest of the army was recruited from the peasantry and masterless men. These levies were equipped with the long bow,[1] the javelin, and the pike. They formed the infantry and their task was to annoy the enemy cavalry and to follow up a charge of their own mailed riders.

Skilled workmen served in the engineer’s division of the army, to put together siege engines, when required—catapults for shooting iron darts, ballistae, and mangonels for casting the heavier barrage of great stones. These “gyns,” as the men called them, were constructed out of beams of seasoned wood, a long arm with a counterweight giving the propelling force.

Sometimes the engineers had to build “sows” or rams, swinging from ropes attached to a framework of beams, and covered by a shed to protect the men working them. Rarely—because the walls of that day in western Europe were crude affairs of wood and dirt with some stonework—did the besiegers find it necessary to construct one of the great wooden towers called belfrois, mounted on wheels so that they could be pushed up to a city or castle wall and the armed men could pass over planks from the summits of the towers to the ramparts. Still more rarely did they resort to sapping, or tunneling, beneath the walls.

The knights planned the engines and directed the siege work. They made the attack on foot when they had opened a breach in the walls, and they manned the moving towers.

In later centuries, when men were somewhat less powerful physically and wore defensive armor of elaborate steel plates, a knight dismounted or thrown from his horse was practically helpless. The horses also carried plate armor then, so that a man and his mount went into battle like a small, animated tank, which was out of action as soon as anything overturned either horse or rider. Weapons as well differed then, being adapted to smash steel plates—massive lances, sledge hammers.

But in this Eleventh Century, at the dawn of knighthood, men had the immense physical strength needed to bear the weight of their iron mesh through a battle. The pliant iron rings allowed them freedom of movement. And they favored the long sword. In their hands the three-foot steel blade, almost as broad near the point as at the hilt, became a thing of terror.

It had a ball of iron for a pommel, to balance the weight of the blade. Few men, to-day, could lift such a sword from the ground without using both arms. The iron men could swing the swords like staves, and a single stroke might cut a foeman’s arm and shoulder from his body, or slash his body in halves. When the impetus of a charging horse was added to the blow, the effect was terrible. Dismounted, the knight would be little less dangerous, as long as he had his sword.

The knights were the officers of the army and the shock division, and the inspiration of all the others. The tactics of the day sought for one end, the most effective charge of the mailed riders. No arrows or crossbow bolts could check them, and rare indeed was the infantry that dared stand their charge. Usually the archers and javelin throwers remained on the wings, while the knights and mounted men at arms advanced in the center. Sometimes they charged in a solid wedge, sometimes in double or triple ranks with intervals between.

The only effective answer was a countercharge of the hostile chivalry.[2] Maneuvering played its part then, and a battle was often won or lost by the skill with which the mounted divisions were thrown into the conflict. Unless one side gave way under the first shock, the fighting changed in a moment to a mêlée of individual combats wherein the prowess of the leaders and champions might decide the issue.

In the end, everything depended upon the individual. A matchless champion might disable twenty men of less power in as many minutes. A single swordsman might hold a bridge or the gut of a breach against the attack of fifty inferior fighters. Naturally, foemen often drew back before the onset of a well-known champion who could lick the lives from their bodies with a slash of his sword. And the death of such a leader disheartened in equal measure the men who followed him.

These champions of the iron men had been trained to war almost from their birth, as were the Spartans. The battlefield was their place of work, and the charger—the great horse equally trained to conflict—became their companion, to be groomed and tended and nursed as carefully as any woman. Such war horses were chosen for their courage and size and strength. If possible, they were never mounted except in the tournament or battle. On the march, or in hunting, their masters would ride other less cherished mounts, sometimes called palfreys.

Tales have come down to us of great chargers who fought with teeth and hoof in a mêlée, to aid their masters.

The iron man, their master, was also schooled in courtesy. He must stint not, in his love of God and of his lady. He passed from the field of war to the chapel; he washed his hands of blood, and prayed. His life became one of conflict, with his foes and with his inward conscience. The legendary Galahad, never failing in courtesy, spends his life in search of the Grail. Happy is the one who has made his peace with God. Roland, dying, takes the gantlet from his right hand and holds it toward the sky: “God, I confess me guilty. I ask Thy power, to cleanse me of the sins from the hour in which I was born, to this day when death comes to me.” Not in mockery were the best of them called gentle men—because they had such power that it behoved them to be mild in speech and courteous in action. No law court had control over them because they themselves were judges and executors; nothing could very well bind them except their own pledged word.

The ideal of chivalry was the fearless man who gave the benefit of his strength to others and who kept his word.

To distinguish them in the mêlée of battle, the leaders of the armed hosts sometimes had gold-work on their helms, or crests. They also had a war shout, known as the battle cry. This helped a leader to make his position known to his men, to rally them or lead them where he wished.

The great leaders, kings or powerful barons, had their different standards—poles bearing a lion’s head in effigy, a raven, or even a complete dragon. Often these devices were painted or embroidered on banners which were called gonfanons. And the standard bearer must needs be a man of proved courage. Usually picked knights rode around him, forming the standard guard, behind the leader. These banners or devices received more care and honor than any regimental stand of colors to-day. They were the visible sign of the presence of the king or baron. Common men regarded them with superstition mixed with awe.

So the fall of a standard or banner in battle meant not only ill-luck; it usually signified the capture or death of the leader who fought before it. And three times out of four the loss of the leader meant the loss of the battle. Likewise the advance of the gonfanon to the enemy’s position was a token of victory at hand. The common soldiers always had half an eye on the gonfanon. They listened, too, for the roaring blast of the chieftain’s horn—the olifant.

Beneath the king or baron in rank was the constable—the second in command. He carried a baton as emblem of his office, and transmitted the orders of his lord. He had personal charge of justice in the army, and the keeping of discipline, and was privileged to kill any man not of gentle blood, or to slay the horse beneath a gentle man, as punishment.

The constable ranked the marshal, who combined the duties of adjutant-general and leader of the shock division. Inspection and pay and division of the spoil fell to his hand, also selection of camp sites and routine. In battle he carried the gonfanon when the constable did not, and always charged at the head of the chivalry.

The seneschal had charge of the service of supply, being overseer of the home castle and lands and food.

Such was the army of a king or baron—the only army known in western Europe. It might number five hundred men or five thousand, seldom more than that. Rarely did the barons league themselves together, and then their hosts of armed men fought as separate units. These hosts were the barbarian clans of yesterday; they felt bound by ties of loyalty only to their own chieftains.

As in the army, so at home. The serf worked the lands of his lord, who in turn protected the serf; this lord had been given his lands by a great baron. To the baron he had rendered homage, the pledge of his body in the other’s defense, and fealty or faith, the pledge of his conscience, to the other’s benefit. He was then the liegeman or vassal of the baron, who could call upon him for military service. At this call the lord, or knight, must arm himself and ride to the appointed meeting place with a certain number of followers—so many men at arms, so many archers and horses.

In their turn the barons had done homage to some sovereign—king or duke or prince. Like the lesser lords, they were expected to come at call with their hosts of liegemen to form the sovereign’s army. They did not always do so. A baron with a strong castle, difficult to take by siege, crowning some steep hill, could do about as he liked.

The king could actually control no more than the castles he held in his own right—where he was baron as well as king.

That, in brief, was the scheme of things called the feudal system, by which men protected themselves from being despoiled and slain by others. The king of France was master only for about two days’ ride from Paris. Beyond that, to the north, lay Flanders with its own young count for master. Along the sea lay Normandy, serving its duke, and Brittany. The heart of France rested in the hand of the duke of Aquitaine, and the south of it had long been shared among the Provençals, whose leader was the count of Toulouse. Neither in nor out of France lay Burgundy with its Teutonic swordsmen.

England proper had been conquered a little while ago by William the Bastard, but its Norman barons were occupied with their own troubles under his son, William the Red. Beyond the North Sea the Danes and Northmen prowled the coasts. Only in middle Europe, where the German peoples had spread from Lorraine to Bohemia, did an emperor hold power.

Rome had left to the world two ideals of government—the emperor, who would rule the lands, and the pope, who would rule the consciences of men. So the emperor of the great German Reich was more than only the overlord of the day—he was the candidate for the throne of the Caesars, and universal dominion. He pacified the predatory Danes, and his eastern marches formed a bulwark against the semi-pagans of the Prussian forests and the Lithuanian swamps. He also came down and entered Rome, by dint of sword-strokes.

The lands of Italy were occupied by peoples of all sorts, the most powerful being the Lombards—the now tamed Long-beards—in the north, and the Normans in the south. These Normans had come in as adventurers, to pillage, and had remained to settle in the sun-warmed hills. They had just made themselves masters of the Arabs in Sicily, and were looking for new worlds to conquer.

So western and middle Europe had become a checkerboard of lands peopled by the descendants of the barbarian clans, ruled by the iron hands of the great barons. These in turn looked for the emperor to become the successor of the Caesars of Rome. Meanwhile they recognized, willingly or grudgingly, only the authority of the Church of God.

Law and order did not exist. Men who had a generous lord fared well, while those who had a mean master fared badly. There were penalties, of course—so much to be paid for slaying a common man, so much for cutting out an eye, or mutilating a hand. But who was to enforce the penalties?

Gentle men were subject only to the judgment of their peers and they could appeal from any judgment to the ordeal by combat. In that case the accused met the accuser clad in red, armed with similar weapons, before witnesses. The victor was vindicated; the loser—if he did not die in the combat—was often hung, or stripped and scourged.

An accused could claim the right to defend himself by champion—that is, to have another man take his place in the combat. But he himself had to be present and to suffer if his champion were worsted.

Like the ordeals by fire or water—in which a man accused of wrong-doing took heated iron in his hands, or walked through flames or was thrown, bound by ropes, into deep water—the ordeal by combat sought to determine the will of God in any controversy among men.

To cleanse themselves of sin, they did penance—fasted or flogged themselves, or went on pilgrimages. These journeys might be to neighboring shrines, or to Rome, but the great pilgrimage was to Jerusalem. That often took from two to three years. A company of pilgrims disappeared upon the Great Sea in ships, and entered the dominion of the Moslems. They were harassed and humiliated, and if they survived to return home with their staff and palm branches and perhaps a precious relic from the Holy City, they were greeted joyfully and hailed as men who had sanctified themselves.

The iron men felt that they must do penance, to make their peace with God. Often they laid aside the sword for the pilgrim staff, or entered the silence of the cloisters.

[1] The five-foot long bow of the English archers did not become destructive until two centuries later. Sir Walter Scott and many other writers err when they place it in the time of Cœur de Lion. Their mistake is due to the fact that the early chroniclers speak of the “long” bow meaning merely the plain bow, as distinguished from the crossbow. The European archers of the Eleventh Century carried three-foot bows, much less effective than the Moslem bows. And they used few crossbows.

The levy of infantry was known as the posse and its character may be judged from the fact that the word survives in our sheriff’s posse. The word “sergeant” comes from the Latin servientes—helpers—which was altered to sergents.

[2] The word “chivalry” is derived from cheval, horse. The chroniclers of this day used the word to signify the mailed horsemen, led by the knights—the cavalry (chevalerie). Not until later did it come to mean an abstract ideal of courtesy.

V

THE ROBED MEN

HE brother of the warrior became the follower of the Church. Perhaps his father had carried him, in years gone by, to the door of the near-by monastery.

“I now offer this my son to omnipotent God and to the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, for the salvation of my soul. I promise for him that he shall follow the monastic life in this monastery, according to the rule of St. Benedict, and that from this day forth he shall not withdraw his neck from the yoke of this service. I promise also that he shall not be tempted to leave by me or by anyone with my consent.”

Robed and girded with a cord, the monk passed his hours in the throng of those who had forsaken life with its riches and tumult. His worldly garments had been laid away, never to be put on again, unless he should fail in his service and be cast out. He had the solace of quiet, and the security of ordained hours.

Within the walls he became a laborer, part of a multitude where the lord of twenty towns had less authority than an elder monk. He worked in the gardens, or strained his eyes over the illumination of written parchments. Sleeping in his robe, rising at vigils to add his voice to the low chorus of praise in the first hour of morning—receiving only a rare letter or token from outside, through the hand of his father superior, the abbot, he drew further into isolation, sinking into the silence of the dark cloisters.

If by some chance—perhaps the monastery had become too poverty-ridden to shelter him longer, or he had served so long that he was trusted to carry a missive to a distant abbey—he were sent outside the walls, the brothers of the monastery prayed for his preservation from evil. And, indeed, the unarmed wayfarer went in peril. Packs of dogs worried him, bands of masterless men stopped and searched him for silver. Only in the monasteries on the heights or in peasants’ sheds in the lowlands could he find a bed at night. Unless he carried food he had to beg his meals.

Maps of any value were unknown; beyond the crossroads at the valley’s end the traveler entered unknown country. Inns were no more than wine shops, and only the bolder merchants or powerful barons or determined pilgrims undertook the journey from Paris to Rome—two months would barely bring them to their destination. To leave western Europe and go by ship or highroad to Byzantium (Constantinople) or Jerusalem would be a mighty undertaking. Only a few curt records of such journeys have come down to us. Not for two centuries would the brothers of the Polo family with young Marco make the great journey to Cathay.

But the doors of the monasteries stood open:

Everyone who knocks, regardless of his station, shall be greeted in the name of God, and thanked for his coming.

Within the doors human beings existed only upon one level, and rigid was the discipline of their hours:

If the brother is ordered by his superior to do a difficult or impossible thing, he shall do his best to obey. If he finds it beyond human strength, he shall explain to the one in authority why it cannot be done. But if, after humble explanation, the superior still insists, he shall still do his utmost to carry out the order, relying upon God, to whom all things are possible.

The monastic rule as to wine drinking is interesting:

“Each one has his own gift from God, the one in this way, the other in that.” So we hesitate to determine what others shall eat or drink. But we believe that a half-measure of wine a day is enough for anyone, making due allowance of course for the needs of the sick. If God has given to some the strength to endure abstinence, let them use that gift, knowing that they shall have their reward. And if the climate, the nature of the labor, or the heat of summer, make it advisable to increase this amount, the superior may do so at his own discretion, always guarding however against indulgence and drunkenness. Some hold, indeed, that monks should not drink wine at all. We have not been able in our day to persuade monks to agree to this; but all will admit that drink should be used sparingly, for “wine maketh even the wise to go astray!” Where wine is scarce or is not found at all, let those who live there bless God and murmur not. In any case, let there be no murmuring because of the scarcity or the lack of wine.

Strangely enough, these men of the Eleventh Century did not murmur. Life might be a veritable hostelry of pain, but the records they have left us bear witness to their faith in relief to come. We find the traces of rejoicing rather than tears between the lines so carefully inscribed on the hard old parchments. They were young, and they labored and died at an early age. And they hungered for learning. Some of the pages are worn through by the fingers that turned them year after year.

The illuminations of the manuscripts are crude patches of color: red, yellow-gold, and faded blue—stiff figures of well-remembered scenes. Every monastery had gathered together a library. Men thirsted for knowledge. And it needs an effort of the imagination to realize how pitifully meager were the sources of knowledge.

Latin texts on the rules of rhetoric, the dictums of logic. Here, perhaps a Greek volume of Aristotle that no one could rightly comprehend. Everywhere patrologies and hagiologies—lives of the fathers of a day long past.

Not yet had the leavening of Arab culture quickened the minds of the searchers. Not for a century and a half would Marsilius of Padua write his summary of human events, or the wanderer, Dante, write: “Lo, now is the acceptable time wherein are rising the signs of consolation and peace. For a new day glows and reveals in the east the dawn that is to banish the shadows of long-drawn-out calamity.”

The exact sciences remained mysteries. How could a man calculate with numbers in the Latin numerals that would serve only up to a hundred? The sign for a million was an adaptation of the Egyptian hieroglyphic—a figure of a man looking upward in astonishment. Astrology formed part of the stock-in-trade of mountebanks or mock priests.

How could disease be studied, when it was the indubitable work of demons entered into the human body? To be sure, there were disciples of Hippocrates, and some who knew of Galen—but medicine could be found only in herbs and concoctions that savored of black magic.

Clerics—priests who served the churches of the outer world—were at the same time the students and dispensers of knowledge. They were summoned to attend the sick, to write letters and read them—to draw up deeds, to give counsel. They listened to the quarrels of kings, and heard the confessions of troubled men. Because travelers frequented the hospitals and guest rooms of the churches, the robed priests learned much of distant lands and kept a record of what they knew. This power of knowledge belonged to them alone.

The Church was in touch with what went on in the various kingdoms and counties. Her servants held the outposts of the Northlands; her bishops often owned domains as large as reigning princes; her messengers crossed the seas. Within her doors a universal language, Latin, was spoken.

The Church had become the only great and centralized force in Europe. Universal spiritual leadership lay in her hands—because her servants were the visible representatives of the Apostles of Christ.

But in these eleven centuries the Church had acquired vast properties. And these must be administered. So, in her other aspect, the Church had become a temporal power, with interests at stake upon the chessboard of politics. Bishops often kept small standing armies, and waged war heartily. Many monasteries were as strongly fortified as the castles of the barons. Some abbots owned slaves.

At the head of the Church there was one man, the Father, the pope. And upon the shoulders of him who called himself servant of the servants of God rested unceasing responsibility and endless care. Never, in the history of the Church, had a leader faced such responsibility as now, at the end of the Eleventh Century.

VI

THE SERVANT OF THE SERVANTS

O UNDERSTAND what followed, it is necessary to remember what the pope was—servant of the servants of God, in very truth. He was the judge, perpetually in the chair—the counselor, who must decide all problems. The tiara weighed upon him, the pallium burdened his shoulders. Himself, as a human being, he must not aid. He should not, for instance, take up the sword on his own behalf. In fact, he was the leader of the new struggle against war.

Some three generations before this the Church had tried to enforce what it called the Peace of God. This decreed that clerics, monks, and nuns were inviolate and must not be harmed. Then shepherds, school children, merchants, and travelers were added to the list. At first asylums were named, places where men could not enter with weapons—the great crosses upon the highroads, and the ground around bell towers, for a distance of thirty to sixty paces. Then, on Sundays, all churches and people going to them and returning were to be inviolate. The Peace of God failed.

After a while a new effort was made, and it took the form of a Truce of God. In the earliest record of it we find this:

All Christians, friends and enemies, neighbors and strangers, shall keep true and lasting peace one with another from vespers on Wednesday to sunrise on Monday, so that during these four days and five nights, all persons may have peace, and, trusting in this peace, may go about their business without fear of their enemies.

All who keep the truce of God shall be absolved from their sins. . . . Those who have promised to observe the truce and have wilfully violated it, shall be excommunicated.

Later on, the truce appears in this fashion:

During those four days and five nights no man or woman shall assault, wound, or slay another, or attack, seize, or destroy a castle, burg, or villa by craft or by violence.

If anyone violates this peace and disobeys these commands of ours, he shall be exiled for thirty years as a penance, and he shall make compensation. Otherwise, he shall be excommunicated and excluded from all Christian fellowship.

In addition you should observe the peace in regard to lands and animals and all things that can be possessed. If anyone takes from another an animal, a coin, or a garment during the days of the truce, he shall be excommunicated unless he makes satisfaction.

If anyone has been accused of violating the peace and denies the charge, he shall take the communion and undergo the ordeal of hot iron.

Some places observed the truce; elsewhere matters went on as before. Councils were assembled in the bishoprics to enforce the decree, and here and there a kind of peace-militia, called pacata, was organized. Almost at once the pacata found itself fighting with the feudal men at arms.

The Truce of God was failing, in spite of the pope’s leadership.

In addition, the apostolic lord had to deal with an internal struggle. Not long ago the papacy had fallen to the lowest level in its history. “As soiled,” men said, “as was the loincloth of Jeremiah.”

Rome had infected it. Rome, where the night mist hung like a shroud and beggars filled the alleys under the shadow of yellow marble palaces. Rome, a meeting place of all peoples, a journey’s end of pilgrims—turbulent, lawless, and greedy. Robbers haunted the empty cellars of the Forum, the nobles waged their feuds from hill to hill, and armed priests guarded the Lateran—the residence of the popes. The once-proud city had become an open sore that contaminated the Church within it.

Dogs and men at arms idled in the monastery courtyards; many nunneries were whore-infested. Trundling wagons carried in wine casks. “Not a priest could be found,” said a chronicle of the time, “who was not ignorant and given to women, and a buyer and seller of his rights.”

Some of the late popes had passed their lives in luxury that would not have disgraced an emperor. Some built palaces for their women. Young boys were installed as abbots. Finally a youthful pope, Benedict IX, sold the papacy for cash paid down, at the Latin gate of the city in the year 1046.

Then the German emperor used his power to select new popes. They came from outside, and especially from the great monastery of Cluny, from which pure blood was pulsing through the diseased arteries of the churches. They were zealous men of high ideals and they threw themselves into the struggle on behalf of the Truce of God and the cleansing of the clergy.

But they were faced by a third problem. The high prelates of the Church had, in most cases, become virtually sovereigns, heirs to vast properties—lands, serfs, toll rights and revenues, even cities and trade concessions. Thus, these spiritual lords had become temporal lords as well. Church offices, in consequence, were bought and sold. One of the new popes with immense courage tried to end the evil by a stroke of the pen. He decreed that all such possessions be abolished.

Naturally, many of the prelates refused to give up their personal property. Instead, they defied the pope. This conflict soon merged into a greater one.

The mighty German emperor became the open foe of the new popes.

It was a tremendous thing, this breaking apart of pope and emperor. Until then, each had ruled in a separate sphere. The spiritual empire of the apostolic lord, Father of the Church, had embraced the souls of men; the temporal empire of the German[3] monarch had ruled the property of men. The pope had been shepherd of the flock, the emperor had been, as it were, the owner of the same flock.

But now the churches possessed lands of their own. Were these new lands to be administered by the Church—whose head was the pope—or by the empire—whose head was the monarch? One emperor, Henry IV, took the matter for granted and began to appoint bishops for the new lands, without consulting the pope. He gave them their rings and staffs, the symbols of office.

The pope objected. Only the Church itself, he said, could appoint bishops.

Henry maintained, in effect, that the lands and the church buildings lay within his authority. But the pope could not yield the point. He was shepherd of all the flock; the lands belonged to the Church itself, and so formed part of his universal, spiritual dominion.

Nor would the emperor yield. He was overlord of all