by Simon Winder
Boulogne boy makes good
Bouillon is a strange little town. It is entangled in a very small version of the Grand Canyon, its geology created by a river which over millions of years carved a looped meander, leaving a great hump of rock in the middle, and high hills around it. When the first humans arrived, the security this rock gave meant that it was in effect a prefabricated fortress. Ever since, great piles of stone have been dragged up to the top to create layer upon gnarled layer of walls and towers. The town spreads over the surrounding hills, themselves so steep that it feels it would take only a very small earthquake to tumble all the clinging houses down into the river. On the heavily wooded border between Belgium and France it has been fought over often (a wonderfully vainglorious proclamation from Louis XIV has been mockingly left on one of the many castle gateways), and last saw action in the early nineteenth century as one of the Dutch strongholds created to keep post-Napoleonic France from breaking out again. After the Belgian Revolution of 1830 it found itself ruled by Brussels, yet another random outcome for its helpless inhabitants.
Bouillon’s fame is over nine hundred years old, through its association with Godefroy of Bouillon, the leader of the homicidal outing later known as the First Crusade. This ascetic knight-pilgrim is everywhere. At one point I lined things up so that I was in a pub drinking Godefroy lager sitting next to a vaguely heavy-metal statue of Godefroy, looking out at the Godefroy Hotel. I could potentially have enjoyed with my lager a Godefroy cigarillo made from Bouillon-region tobacco and a hunk of loaf spread with pâté de Godefroy, decorated with red bell-pepper to make it look a bit Levantine. Sadly, Godefroy, however much he might have appreciated a cooling glassful during the rigours of the Battle of Ascalon, lived several centuries too early for lager to exist, and the ingredients of both the cigarillos and pâté were still safely tucked away in the undiscovered Americas. All this fraudulent promotion of the town’s hero gives Bouillon an air of daft perfection.
Godefroy is a key nationalist hero both for France and for Belgium. His massive statue is the centrepiece of the royal quarter of Brussels and in the nineteenth century he became the focus of a rather dank Catholic cult, a sort of boy Joan of Arc, but with a colonial conquest flavour. Inside the castle complex there is a statue of him with a large crucifix shape on the floor at his feet that can be filled with candles to create a suitably spiritual-militarist atmosphere. In one of those too-good-to-be-true moments, the local museum has a series of superb 1930s aerial photos of crusader castles, taken by French army flyers, who would have themselves been involved in the ferocious suppression of the Great Syrian Revolt – an undertaking certainly in line with Godefroy’s thinking. Sadly though, it is in practice not clear that Godefroy ever even visited Bouillon – he was ‘of’ quite a lot of things, Bouillon just being one of them.
There are many mysteries around the crusades and why they happened at all. They had a staggering impact on the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries – but were in the end a total dud, with the Fall of Acre in 1291 ending the entire fighting-in-the-footsteps-of-Jesus aspect. The years before Pope Urban II gave his great speech in 1095 which launched the whole project had seen successful seaborne invasions of England and Sicily, the growth of Castile, the spread of Italian (Genoese, Pisan, Venetian) naval strength across the Mediterranean and the neutering of the Viking threat. There must have been a general sense of restlessness and enterprise in the air. Many of those who answered Urban’s call for a great expedition to take the Holy Places from the Muslims were companions or siblings of those who had made themselves rich and famous from these other recent feats of derring-do. The crusade quite quickly mutated into a general movement to destroy pagan, heretic or Muslim elements across Europe and successfully did this from Lisbon to Riga, becoming an exciting rite of passage for young knights until the final Central European crusades of 1395 and 1443, which resulted in such totally crushing victories for the Ottoman Empire that everyone suddenly remembered that they had something else urgent to do back home instead.
The convulsions that racked Western Europe in the wake of Urban’s sermon resulted in tens of thousands of pilgrims and soldiers marching eastwards. North-eastern Europe seemed to empty out much of its population. It was undoubtedly a religious movement, although a fair number of chainmail-clad rascals lurked among the pious. The distances involved were prodigious. A grim start was made by Peter the Hermit, a compelling orator from Amiens, and the sinister visionary Count Emicho, who drew to them a huge mixed bag of pilgrims and set out to glory ahead of the Pope’s ‘official’ crusade. As they passed down through the Rhineland, communities of Jews were massacred at Trier, Mainz, Cologne, Worms and Metz. Exact numbers are unclear, but it seems probable that around eight hundred were killed just at Worms. As these were the very first military actions of the entire crusade movement, they tend to be passed over quickly by historians simply because the rest of the story is so long and complex, but in themselves they were a total catastrophe – the worst single recorded event in these communities, many of which had roots going back to the Roman Empire, until the Holocaust. The Heiliger Sand, the old Jewish cemetery in Worms, was in constant use from at least the eleventh century until it was superseded before the First World War. It is, as one would expect, a powerful place. The disasters of 1096 have left no visible mark – but the oldest identifiable gravestone is for someone called Yaakov ha-bahur, who was buried there in 1076/77. This worn, lichen-pocked stone extraordinarily takes us back to just before the world in which recorded violent anti-Semitism was born. The perpetrators were in fact inadvertently punished: as they marched across Central Europe, many were captured by local rulers and wound up in Balkan slave markets. When the survivors reached Constantinople they rushed across to the Asian side to continue to Jerusalem only to be massacred there by Turkish forces. A chastened Peter the Hermit stayed behind and slunk around in the baggage of the main forces of the First Crusade before disappearing from history.
At the heart of this crusade lay three remarkable brothers – the sons of Eustace II, Count of Boulogne, one of William the Conqueror’s companions at the Battle of Hastings and a man who must have created a suitably predatory and devil-may-care atmosphere within the family circle. One of the sons was Godefroy, who was beyond his associations with Bouillon also the Duke of Lower Lotharingia; the second, Eustace, who would inherit his father’s lands; the third, Baldwin, who would ultimately scoop the pool, becoming first the ruler of part of Armenia and then, on Godefroy’s death, the first King of Jerusalem. An extraordinarily dynamic and brutal figure, without him the kingdom might have been snuffed out before it even began.
The almost unprecedented nature of these brothers’ journey is hard to convey: from hanging around Boulogne in a howling gale, watching the seagulls and munching on bits of salted fish, to finding yourself face to face with minarets, bananas and hot sand. Godefroy provided the ascetic, soldier-of-Christ inspiration, Eustace and Baldwin the reckless and ingenious violence. The curious counterfactual about the First Crusade is to think about what would have happened if it had failed. Unknown to the thousands of troops worrying about tummy trouble and being ripped off by Levantine trinket-salesmen, the First Crusade just happened to be marching into a uniquely favourable environment, with their principal adversaries, their bases scattered from Baghdad to Cairo, at odds with one another and therefore defeated one by one. The region of the Holy Places was significant, but not central to the concerns of these gigantic civilizations based on the Tigris and the Nile. Later crusades never really came close to threatening the cores of these Islamic states.
Baldwin himself, whose luck, relentlessness and relish for his grand position had more or less willed the kingdom into existence, died of disease on a quixotic raid to the mouth of the Nile. One serio-comic shambles (the Fifth Crusade) resulted in the death of innumerable Dutch and Rhineland troops mired in the mouth of the Nile to no great purpose and the shaming of William I, Count of Holland who somehow, unl
ike most of his men, managed to get back. Given that the crusaders were never strong enough to take these capital cities, it was just a question of time before everything else ended in tears. Even the nearby city of Damascus was impregnable, with King Conrad III of Germany (he was never crowned Emperor by the Pope) and his young nephew, the future Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa, totally humiliated in a failed siege during the Second Crusade. In old age Frederick tried to relaunch the crusading movement by bringing together all his warring vassals to a great ceremony of reconciliation, a ‘Feast of Love’ at Mainz Cathedral. He then marched an army thought to be some one hundred thousand strong through Hungary and defeated a major Turkish army, but drowned in a Cilician river.
The ‘Lotharingian’ element in the crusades varied but the initial importance of the three brothers created its own tradition whereby, however disastrous things got, there were always fresh volunteers (sometimes carrying out further pogroms en route down the Rhine), either for the major crusades themselves, or, just as important, contributing to the constant drift of adventurers and the devout as colonists or as members of the new military monastic orders, such as the Templars and the Hospitallers. Throughout the following two centuries it was common for younger sons simply to disappear for years on end and quite often never return. It was a throw of the dice as to whether you ended up wearing perfumed robes in some top new castle, married to an Armenian heiress and tucking into a pomegranate breakfast, or chained up in a Seldjuk atabeg’s dungeon trying to lick moisture off the walls.
It is rare for the sources to give a sense of the emotional reality of the crusades – and so much of what we think is in fact shaped by the many hundreds of gigantic, vivid oil paintings, sculptures and frescoes created by nineteenth-century artists for whom these ancient events in the Levant were founding moments in the irrepressible birth of the uniquely (delete as applicable) Belgian, French and German national and religious spirit. Some odd ancient scraps survive that give a sense of the harshness and uncertainty of families parted by the near-lemming-like need for men to head to the Holy Land. The searing text of a song from the Third Crusade has somehow come down to us – a woman lamenting:
I will sing to comfort my heart,
For I do not want to die or go mad …
… He sent
me the shirt that he was wearing
that I might hold it in my arms. At
night when my love for him torments
me, I take it into bed and hold it
close to my naked body to soothe my suffering.
A moving and surprising monument is tucked away in the Museum of Lorraine in Nancy. When Bernard of Clairvaux, the most powerful and prestigious religious figure of his era, marched down the Rhine in 1146, proclaiming what turned out to be the wholly futile Second Crusade, one of those he swept up with his rhetoric was Hugues de Vaudemont, a nobleman who went as part of Louis VII’s doomed army. We do not know who commissioned the carving or why, but here is a statue showing a gaunt, bearded Hugues on his return six years later, staff in hand and cross around his neck. He is being embraced by his wife, Aigeline of Burgundy, who wears an elaborate cloak and has a braid hanging down to her waist. He is patently at the end of his tether; she shows relief and pride.
The Cistercians
I had originally planned to start this book by returning to one of my favourite places – the old Cistercian abbey of Altenberg, about twelve miles north-east of Cologne. I saw myself standing, solitary and tiny in the vast building, light pouring through the clear glass, as I contemplated the battered tombs of the once-great counts and the implacable cruelty of passing time. And so, aching with self-consciousness, I arrived there at the beginning of January, the mood of inward rue already a bit messed up after a long chat with a witty and scornful Tunisian taxi driver from Leverkusen.
Everything at my chosen location seemed near ideal to start with: very cold, plenty of snow, stark trees and one of Germany’s most beautiful valleys looming above my small inn. Feeling very Caspar-David-Friedrich, I skipped over to the abbey. This was where things began to misfire. The solitude remembered from a previous visit was replaced by a jammed car park and great crowds of people pouring in and out of the abbey, a restaurant and a near-bursting religious knick-knack shop. It was festive and fun, but I was having to recalibrate my own levels of pretension at great speed and entered the abbey somewhat baffled. The crowds were there, it turned out, to see a herculean Nativity scene. It seemed extraordinarily large not least because my own sense of scale was set by having just come from several days’ exposure to our own Nativity scene at home, which consists of a tiny set of simplified wooden shapes of the usual suspects but enlivened by the addition of some plastic Asterix characters and a decaying marzipan lamb, bought in Lüneberg many years ago, discussed in my book Germania and now looking positively ghoulish with age. It was easy to see why so many people would drive over to see such bravura gigantic angels, oxen and magi, all topped off by great branches of pine needles framing the entire montage.
But it was at this point really everything went wrong. The wistfully disregarded tombs of the family of the Counts of Berg were not there – I had imagined the whole thing. Where were the ascetic Bruno, Gerhard killed in a joust, the long-lived Margaret of Ravensberg, the fighting Archbishop Friedrich? I panicked that I had got Altenberg mixed up perhaps with Marburg and began wondering if there was some Swiss clinic I could check into where the doctors could draw on many years of experience in cleansing the minds of people whose brains have slid too far into the intricacies of the Holy Roman Empire. The only clue to my continuing sanity was a superb great flag of Berg hanging inside the abbey, just as I remembered, with its blue lion rampant, its tongue and claws red. With a chill of horror the message of the flag suddenly sunk in – it was directly above the Nativity. The platform that supported the weirdly rouged angel, the lugubrious ox, Baby Jesus and their friends was built on the tombs of the Counts of Berg, used as mere handy platform supports. Now the original conception for this book’s opening collapsed completely: there was too cruel a gulf between the pleasingly Romantic silent reproach of the battered stone tomb boxes in a deserted church, and the active humiliation of their being covered in planks and interlaced with electric flex for fairy lights.
The abbey was built by a Count of Berg as a home for the Cistercians in the twelfth century. Like many such places it has at intervals been severely smashed up and it was finally decommissioned after the French Revolution, being left a ruin until it caught the eye of the mystical Christian Prussian monarch Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who had it renovated in the same spirit that involved him in the building of the spires and nave of Cologne Cathedral.
In some moods I really think that these Cistercian abbeys should lie at the centre of all teaching of European history and that they are far more significant and interesting than most, merely ephemeral political events. We are so used to thinking of the Middle Ages in terms of men covered in sheets of metal clopping about on horses and hitting one another, whereas the true image of the period should be a monk writing. Many suits of armour are still around today just because they are made from a relatively non-reactive metal, but the work of the monks has survived in everything we think, know and believe.
The Cistercian order was founded at the end of the eleventh century, with their first abbey built in a ‘wilderness’ outside Dijon. This ‘wilderness’ is hard to imagine now in a region so closely associated with greedy eating and drinking, but wilderness (like that of John the Baptist, or the Desert Fathers) was then central to the Cistercian ideal. It is essential to recognize the importance over centuries of the Cistercian role in clearing and shaping land across Europe. Each abbey was a polyp of an earlier abbey with monks sent out to a fresh location, ideally Deuteronomy’s ‘place of horror and vast solitude’, to build, work and pray. During the Middle Ages these abbeys marched east, their lay-brothers clearing woods, redirecting streams and generating Christianity, fresh villages, roads and
economic change from the Rhine to Poland.
It is odd to think of an area just east of the Rhine as ‘wilderness’, but even today Altenberg’s valley, the Odenthal, is a dank, atmospheric and sullen place with only a scatter of houses. There is an almost ideal walk past the Cistercian fishponds (still there and functioning eight hundred years later), and up onto a ridge where along the horizon as far as the eye can see there is a surreal, continuous wall of distant factories and chimneys glinting in the winter sun. This focus on ‘wilderness’ allowed the Cistercians to think of themselves as the latest in a direct line from the first Christians and the entire history of the order was a battle to maintain this harshness in a world of temptations, to throw yourself into a lifelong battle to maintain focus on prayer alone: in the words of the greatest Cistercian, St Bernard, to ‘leave behind you that tepidity which God vomits from his mouth’.
Altenberg, however beautiful, is a mere shell, with a handful of rebuilt or surviving buildings around it. For the full Cistercian experience the only place to go is the simply astounding Maulbronn, some two hundred miles to the south. One of Europe’s greatest building complexes, Maulbronn had the extraordinary luck once it had been shut down during the Reformation of being converted almost immediately into a school by the new owner, the Duke of Württemberg. Despite numerous setbacks it has kept its buildings, even some of its battlements and an atmospheric tower where Faust was supposed to have carried out some unnatural experiments. Hermann Hesse was a pupil there and he used it as the monastery in his spectacular medieval fantasy Narcissus and Goldmund. The gigantic, charismatic barn alone shows the monasteries’ central role in making the economy work, with Cistercian lay-brothers drying and pickling, weaving and grinding, while the monks themselves devoted themselves to prayer in the solemn, almost unbelievably beautiful church buildings.
