A Criminal History of Mankind (44 page)

In the south, the threat still came from the Muslims, now known as the Saracens, who now occupied Sicily. The Abbasid Empire was falling apart, but the Muslims had learned the art of seafaring and were the chief pirates of the Mediterranean. Like the Vikings, they raided and plundered far from home - although, being in the slave trade, they were less likely to slaughter their victims. In 846 they even reached Rome and sacked St Peter’s. They established themselves a base on the coast of Provence and even became a menace on the Alpine passes, taking particular pleasure in seizing Christian prelates on their way to Rome and demanding large ransoms. The pilgrimage to Rome, which had been popular since the seventh century, became more dangerous than ever before. The Church tried to forbid women pilgrims to go, since males who put them up for the night were likely to demand payment in kind and the lady usually ended as the local prostitute in some remote part of France or Italy. The Arab pirates made the sea more dangerous than it had been since the days of the Cilician pirates. They practically strangled trade between Rome and Byzantium. In northern Italy, the pirates had established a fortified camp on the river Garigliano and raided as they felt inclined, from Rome to the Alps. Finally, the warrior pope John X formed alliances with various princes and persuaded the Byzantine fleet to bottle up the river mouth. They besieged the impregnable fortress, starved the Arabs into submission, then went in and slaughtered every one of them. It must have been a satisfying moment, and princes and counts all over Europe must have daydreamed grimly about doing the same to the Slavs or Magyars or Vikings on their own doorsteps. In fact, the German emperor Otto the Great did succeed in inflicting a crushing defeat on the Magyars at the battle of the Lechfeld, in 955. The Magyars then decided to settle down, occupied the land we now call Hungary, and became a nation of peaceful farmers and horsebreeders.

All this explains why, when we think of the Middle Ages, we think of castles and towers and walled cities with battlements. Walls were the only defence against the raiders. Yet gradually the raids ceased as Vikings, Magyars and Slavs settled down to farming. The Normans continued to raid all over the Mediterranean, although even they settled down after William the Conqueror became king of England - not, however, before they had retaken Sicily from the Arabs and sacked Rome (1084).

The Arabs were also in retreat. By the year 1000 - the year the early Christians believed the world would end - their power was coming to an end in Spain; in 1034 and the following year, the Byzantine fleet, manned by Scandinavian mercenaries, decimated the Arab pirates and raided Moslem strongholds in north Africa. Yet, oddly enough, this downfall of the Arabs was not particularly beneficial to Byzantium. As Baghdad grew less important, the trading routes from the east into Europe began to pass it by; and since Byzantium had been on the trading route to Baghdad, it also suffered. Besides, a new and dangerous power was arising to the east of Byzantium: the Turks. They were swiftly becoming the Vikings - or the Huns - of the Mediterranean. The reason, as usual, was the growing population. The Turks were a tough nomadic people who had few towns; but in the late tenth century they overthrew their Persian overlords and, by the year 1000 Turkestan was ruled by the ‘mighty Mahmud, the victorious lord’ (as he is called in the
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
), who extended his empire as far as India. After the death of Mahmud in 1030, a strong clan called the Seljuks made a bid for power. They took over Baghdad, conquered Armenia from the Greeks, and finally controlled all of Asia Minor - so that the land that had been the home of Helen of Troy, and the refuge of the Cilician pirates, finally became Turkey. The clash with Byzantium was inevitable, and in 1071 the Turks inflicted total defeat on the Byzantine army at the battle of Manzikert, in Armenia. The Byzantine emperor, Romanus, was captured and ransomed, but was murdered later that year; the great Turkish leader, Alp Arslan, was also assassinated in the following year. By that time, Jerusalem had fallen to the Turks without a struggle; Damascus and Antioch followed. The Byzantine emperor, Michael IV, saw the Turks at his gates and made an agonised appeal to the pope in Rome for help. Meanwhile, Spain was again under attack, this time from a fanatical Muslim sect, the Almoravids. So, just as the Christian world was getting used to the idea that the Saracens were on the run, they learned that things were worse than ever.

Two men were chiefly responsible for bringing the news to Europe (for in those days of poor communication, it might have taken years). One was the pope himself Urban II, a Frenchman. He hurried to France in 1095, asked many bishops to meet him at Clermont, and there, in a great open field, stood on a platform and told the vast crowd of Turkish atrocities against Christians in the Holy Land. In fact, there is little evidence that the Turks mistreated Christians; they were far harsher against their own dissident sects. But it was undoubtedly true that pilgrimages to the Holy Land had now become much more dangerous. When the pope called for a crusade, hundreds of noblemen fell on their knees and dedicated themselves and their property to the service of God.

The other great preacher of the crusade was a dirty, flea-infested monk called Peter the Hermit, a short, dark-haired man who rode around on a donkey. But he possessed what we would now call ‘charisma’, that curious power of swaying a crowd that was later to be Hitler’s most remarkable asset. Men were doubly eager to listen to him since life was hard and miserable, and the idea of a visit to the Holy Land seemed a welcome alternative to ploughing for sixteen hours a day.

What followed was something of a grim farce. Most of these ignorant peasants were not quite sure who they were supposed to fight; they had a vague idea that all foreigners were heathens. In the Rhineland, thousands of men set out to join a certain Count Emich, who claimed to have wakened up one morning and found a cross branded on his flesh. Some of the pilgrims had apparently decided to follow a god-inspired goose, although it is not clear how they recognised its inspiration. Count Emich felt that butchery may as well begin at home, and ordered his followers to attack the Jews of Spier - they were to become Christians on pain of death (or, in the case of women, rape). They went on to Worms and massacred the Jews there for two days, then on down the Rhine, slaughtering Jews wherever they found them. Many now decided that they had done their Christian duty and returned home. In Hungary, other crusaders obtained permission of the king to revictual, provided they behaved themselves. They took this to be permission to pillage the countryside; a young Hungarian boy was impaled to teach him a lesson. The king declared that if the crusaders wanted to pass through his domain they must agree to be temporarily disarmed. Then the Hungarian army got its own back by massacring them. Emich himself was refused permission to enter Hungary, so the crusaders fought the Hungarians until they were all routed and massacred - Count Emich managed to escape and went back home.

Peter the Hermit’s army reached Constantinople in August 1096, having stormed a town in Hungary on the way and killed four thousand inhabitants. The emperor Alexius looked at this undisciplined rabble with dismay and recognised that the pope had made a mistake in calling the crusade. His guests proceeded to loot, steal and remove the lead from church roofs. Alexius shipped them across the Bosphorus as quickly as he could. Once in enemy territory, they decided that it was time to begin converting the heathen. They stormed into several villages of Greek Christians and began torturing the inhabitants and roasting babies on spits. Another group captured a castle and discovered, to their delight, that it was full of provisions. It seemed an ideal headquarters from which to raid the countryside. A Turkish army surrounded them and made them aware that their only source of water was a spring below the castle. The crusaders were finally forced to drink the blood of their own horses, and one another’s urine. Then they surrendered. Many of them agreed to become Muslims; the others were killed. The other crusaders - the ones who had successfully converted the Christian Greeks - marched off to avenge their colleagues, were ambushed in a valley and virtually wiped out. Since they had their women and many children with them, they were at a disadvantage. The Turks spared pretty girls and boys, who were carried off into slavery. Only three thousand of the twenty-thousand army managed to fight their way into a disused castle, and held out against besieging Turks while a Greek sailed back to Constantinople for help. The emperor sent several men o’ war and rescued them; but once back in Constantinople their arms were taken from them. That was virtually the end of the ‘first crusade’.

It was obvious that something more organised was required, and the following year an army led by Godfrey of Bouillon arrived in Constantinople. The crusaders, accustomed to the discomfort of their draughty, smoke-filled castles and rat-infested villages, surveyed this magnificent city with envious suspicion, concluded that its inhabitants must be effete and corrupt, and were with difficulty dissuaded by their leaders from trying to seize it for themselves. After some mutual hostility, the crusaders were made to swear loyalty to the emperor and were packed off across the Bosphorus. With constant skirmishes, and many deaths from heat and thirst, they struggled across Syria and laid siege to Antioch. It fell after seven months, and the crusaders massacred every Turk in the town. Then - their original army of thirty thousand reduced to a mere twelve - they marched on Jerusalem and besieged it in the heat of July. Siege towers enabled them to climb the walls. They poured into the city and began a massacre that lasted for several days. No one was spared. The Jews of the city had taken refuge in their synagogue; it was set on fire and they all burned. As Salomon Reinach says, with mild irony, in
Orpheus, a History of Religions
: ‘It is said that seventy thousand persons were put to death in less than a week to attest the superior morality of the Christian faith.’

In the light of history, we can see that the success of that first crusade was actually a disaster for Europe. It convinced Christendom that the Holy Land could be turned into a kind of Papal State. The result was that over the next two centuries there were eight more crusades, most of which failed miserably. The original success was never repeated; but it inspired all the later efforts. When Turks captured Edessa in 1144, Louis VII of France led a disastrous Second Crusade. In 1174, a brilliant Arab leader named Saladin preached a jehad, or Holy War, against the Christians, and Jerusalem was retaken in 1187. A third crusade failed to retake it, but King Richard I of England succeeded in negotiating a truce allowing Christians access to the Holy Sepulchre - which had been available in any case before the first crusade. The most absurd and pathetic of all the crusades was the Children’s Crusade of 1212. A twelve-year-old shepherd boy named Stephen, from the town of Cloyes, went to King Philip of France and handed over a letter which he claimed had been given to him by Christ, who had appeared to him as he was tending his sheep. The king was understandably suspicious of a letter written in modern French by a first-century Hebrew, and probably recognised the boy as an exhibitionist or a liar; at all events, he sent him away. Undeterred, Stephen began to preach, declaring that the sea would turn into dry land as the children approached, and that children, supported by God, would overthrow the Saracen army. Thirty thousand children under twelve years of age gathered at Vendöme - girls as well as boys - and, surrounded by crowds of sorrowing parents, marched off triumphantly towards Marseilles, preceded by Stephen in a gaily-painted cart. The weather was hot; many died of thirst on the way. Those who arrived safely rushed to the harbour to see the sea divide; when nothing happened, some denounced Stephen and turned back towards home. Most stayed on, hoping for a miracle. After two days, two kindly merchants offered to provide ships to take them across to Palestine. Seven vessels set sail, and the children vanished forever. Eighteen years later, a priest who had accompanied the expedition told what had happened. Two of the ships were wrecked in a storm. The other five were met by arrangement by Saracen merchants, who handed over a large sum of money to their French colleagues and carried off their purchases to the slave markets of Alexandria and Baghdad.

A German children’s crusade, led by a boy named Nicholas, was slightly luckier. Fifteen thousand of the twenty thousand children died on their journey to Italy; when the sea failed to open, they were received by the pope, who told them to go home. Very few survived the return journey, and Nicholas was among those who disappeared. When the survivors straggled back to the Rhineland, angry parents demanded the arrest of Nicholas’s father, who was hanged. The story deserves a place in this criminal history of mankind largely on account of the criminal stupidity of the parents in allowing the children to go.

The Children’s Crusade inspired a fifth crusade. ‘The very children shame us...’ the pope declared. So an army embarked for Egypt, rejected excellent terms from the Saracens, including the surrender of Jerusalem - the Christians wanted money too - and forced the sultan to fight them. His army proved stronger than the Christians, so the crusaders were forced to make terms and go back to Europe. And sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth crusades were equally abortive. Far from freeing the Holy Land from the Saracen, the crusades ended with the Turks entrenched in the Danube Basin.

The Saracens conquered in another way. Those ignorant peasants and equally ignorant nobles who left their homes in 1096 had never looked beyond the boundaries of their own villages. When they were not fighting with the heathen, they were now learning that the Muslims were as honourable and courteous as good Christians, and a great deal more cultivated than most. For thousands of country-bred louts, the crusades were a kind of university. When they came to an end, Europe had ceased to be a provincial backwater.

ASSASSINS AND CONQUERORS