In their attempt to establish this new world order, the Gregorian reformers employed an army of legists who elaborated a new canonical legal system to supersede customary feudal laws. Almost all popes between 1100 and 1300 were jurists, and they transformed the papacy into a huge international judicial machine.139 The “Donation of Constantine,” a forgery made in a pontifical scriptorium, constitutes the centerpiece of the legal basis they needed for their formidable claims. By this document, the Emperor Constantine supposedly transferred his authority over the western regions of the empire to Pope Sylvester I, making the pope the supreme sovereign of all western kings.
The false donation also bestowed on the papacy “supremacy over the four principal sees, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem and Constantinople, as also over all the churches of God in the whole earth.” So it also served in the pope’s struggle with the patriarch of Constantinople, which ultimately led to the Great Schism of 1054. Other arguments used in support of the pope’s pretense at world supremacy included the claim to be sitting on the throne of Saint Peter, Christ’s first disciple, supposed to have been martyred in Rome. The origin of this tradition is disputed; the New Testament says nothing of Peter’s travel to Rome, and assumes that Peter simply remained the head of the Jerusalem church. And the earliest sources mentioning Peter’s presence in Rome, the writings of Peter’s supposed immediate successor Clement of Rome, are today recognized as forgeries.
There is something Levitical in the papal authoritarian legalism of the Gregorian Reform, its fraudulent international law, and its transformation of articles of faith into binding laws. The whole theocratic papal ideology appears to be directly inspired by the political project of the Deuteronomic school: a world order placed under the supreme authority of a caste of priests. The Roman church’s vision of sin, penance, and salvation is likewise legalistic, but also monetary in essence, in sharp contrast to the original conception of the Greek fathers that stressed man’s potential for deification (theosis), rather than his need to extirpate himself from sin.140 With his associates, Pope Gregory VII, a former financier (born Hildebrand, a family of bankers to this day) turned the Church into an institution of spiritual credit. Their accounting conception of sin would lead to the traffic of indulgences, which would later revolt Martin Luther and launch the Reformation.
The Schism of 1054 was the starting point of a geopolitical offensive that started with the pope’s support of the conquest of southern Italy and Sicily in 1061 by the troops of Norman warrior Robert Guiscard, and developed into the crusades. In the last decade of the eleventh century, Pope Urban II found an innovative method of colonizing the Near East: the militarized pilgrimage. The spiritual reward traditionally promised to the unarmed pilgrim was now granted to the heavily armed killer of heathens, in addition to the promise of plunder. The crusades were the direct outcome of the Gregorian Reform: by imposing himself as the sovereign of kings, who were therefore made his vassals, the pope claimed for himself the right to order them to make war under his supreme command. Thus the papal authority, after having repressed private wars in Western Europe in the tenth century under the movement of the “Peace of God,” started a world war that would last two centuries in the Holy Land and environs. After having proclaimed that even tournaments were a mortal sin, and that dying in the course of one of those festive chivalric jousts would send you straight to hell, the Vatican declared that dying in its allegedly holy wars would erase all your sins and propel you to heaven.
Until recently, it was believed that the crusades were a response to a desperate call for help from Byzantine Emperor Alexios Komnenos, because this is how Western contemporary chroniclers such as Ekkehard of Aura and Bernold of St Blasien presented it. The emperor sent an embassy to Rome, writes Ekkehard, and “deplored his inability to defend the churches of the east. He beseeched the pope to call to his aid, if that were possible, the entire west.” This is today considered a grossly misleading picture of the tone and nature of Alexios’s request, backed by forgeries such as a doctored version of a letter to the count of Flanders, in which Alexios purportedly confessed his powerlessness against the Turks and humbly begged for rescue. In fact, the emperor was in no desperate situation, and his request was just for mercenaries to fight under his command; the Byzantines had always drawn in warriors from foreign nations to serve under their banner in return for imperial largesse. An army of crusaders under the order of a papal legate was never what Alexios had called for, and Byzantines were deeply worried and suspicious when they saw it coming. “Alexios and his advisers saw the approaching crusade not as the arrival of long-awaited allies but rather as a potential threat to the Oikoumene,” writes Jonathan Harris. They feared that the liberation of the Holy Sepulcher was a mere pretext for some sinister plot against Constantinople.141
The Holy City had recently been taken from the Egyptian Fatimids by the intolerant Seljuq Turks. The news of the Turks’ desecration of the tomb of Christ, and semi-imaginary stories of their cruel treatment of Christians, served to inflame the Western population, and masses set off toward Jerusalem under the slogan “avenge Jesus.” Some realized along the way that they did not need to go to the Orient, “while we have right here, before our eyes, the Jews,” in the words of chronicler Raoul Glaber.142 When they reached Jerusalem, the Holy City had just been reconquered by the Fatimids, who immediately promised to restore the rights of Christians and offered to the crusaders’ leaders an alliance against the Seljuqs. The crusaders rejected the offer. Inspired by the biblical story of Jericho (Joshua 6), they started with a procession around the walls of Jerusalem, led by priests praying and singing at the top of their voices, before dashing forward against the walls, expecting a miracle. Then, resorting to their sophisticated siege machinery, they entered the city on July 15, 1099, and committed a mass slaughter. “In the temple and portico of Solomon [the al-Aqsa Mosque],” writes chronicler Raymond of Aguilers, “men rode in blood up to their knees and the bridle reins. Indeed, it was a just and splendid judgment of God, that this place should be filled with the blood of the unbelievers, since it had suffered so long from their blasphemies.”143 This unheard of massacre left a traumatic memory in the Muslim world, from which the Christian-Muslim relationship would never recover.144
The crusaders succeeded in establishing four new Christian states in Syria and Palestine, which formed the basis of a Western presence that was to endure until 1291: the kingdom of Jerusalem, ruled by Frankish knight Godfrey of Bouillon, then by his brother Baldwin of Boulogne, who took on the title of king; the principality of Antioch, seized by the Norman Bohemond of Tarento (son of the above mentioned Robert Guiscard) who refused to honor his promise to hand it over to the Byzantine emperor; the county of Edessa, formed by Baldwin of Boulogne; and the county of Tripoli, conquered by Raymond of Toulouse.
At the end of the twelfth century, Jerusalem having been recovered by Saladin (in conditions of humanity that contrast sharply with the capture of Jerusalem by the crusaders in 1099), Pope Innocent III solemnly proclaimed a new crusade, the fourth in modern numbering. This time, the Byzantines’ fear of a hidden agenda proved fully justified. Instead of going to Jerusalem via Alexandria, as officially announced, the Frankish knights, financed by the Venetians, moved toward Constantinople. The huge army of the crusaders penetrated into the city in April 1204 and sacked it during three days. “Since the creation of this world, such great wealth had neither been seen nor conquered,” marveled the chronicler Robert de Clari.145 Palaces, churches, monasteries, and libraries were systematically pillaged. “Nuns were ravished in their convents. […] Wounded women and children lay dying in the streets. For three days the ghastly scenes of pillage and bloodshed continued, till the huge and beautiful city was a shambles.”146
After having appropriated the best residences in the city, the conquerors elected and crowned as new emperor of Constantinople the Frank Baldwin of Flanders, and as new patriarch the Venetian Thomas Morosini, who impo
sed the exclusive religious authority of Rome. As for the great mosque of Constantinople, it was burnt down by the crusaders—and the fire spread to a third of the city. Innocent III immediately placed the new emperor under his protection, and commanded that the crusading army stay to protect Constantinople from any attempt by the Byzantines to retake the city, rather than fulfill their original vow to liberate Jerusalem. “Surely, this was done by the Lord and is wondrous in our eyes. This is truly a change done by the right hand of the Most High, in which the right hand of the Lord manifested power so that he might exalt the most holy Roman Church while He returns the daughter to the mother, the part to the whole and the member to the head.”147
The new Franco-Latin Empire built on the smoking ruins of Constantinople lasted only half a century. The Byzantines, entrenched in Nicaea (Iznik), slowly regained part of their ancient territory, and, in 1261, under the command of Michael VIII Palaiologos, chased the Franks and Latins from Constantinople. But the city they took back was but the shadow of its own past glory: the Greek population had been slaughtered or had fled, the churches and the monasteries had been profaned, the palaces were in ruins, and international trade had come to a stop.
Moreover, as soon as news arrived that Constantinople had “fallen,” Pope Urban IV ordered that a new crusade be preached throughout Europe to retake Constantinople, promising that those who joined the expedition would enjoy the same remission of sin granted to those who went to the Holy Land.148 There were few volunteers. But in 1281 again, Pope Martin IV encouraged the project of Charles of Anjou (brother of King Louis IX) to take back Constantinople and establish a new Catholic empire. It failed.
But Byzantine civilization had been fatally weakened. It collapsed a century and a half later, after one thousand years of existence, when the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II took Constantinople in 1453. All specialists admit that the Fourth Crusade had inflicted on Byzantium a mortal wound, and exhausted its capacity to resist the Muslim expansion. The renowned medieval historian Steven Runciman wrote: “There was never a greater crime against humanity than the Fourth Crusade. Not only did it cause the destruction or dispersal of all the treasures of the past that Byzantium had devotedly stored, and the mortal wounding of a civilization that was still active and great; but it was also an act of gigantic political folly. It brought no help to the Christians in Palestine. Instead it robbed them of potential helpers. And it upset the whole defense of Christendom.”149 The crusades had also contributed to the fall of the Shiite caliphate of Egypt, a prosperous and tolerant civilization that had been on friendly terms with Eastern Christians, ultimately furthering the domination of the Sunni Turks with their more radical brand of Islam.
However, for the West, and Italy in particular, the sack of Constantinople kicked off astounding economic growth, fed initially by the vast quantities of plundered gold. In the early thirteenth century the first gold coins appeared in the West, where only silver coinage had been previously issued (except in Sicily and Spain).150 The cultural benefits of the Fourth Crusade were also impressive: in subsequent years, whole libraries were pillaged, which Greek-speaking scholars would then start to translate into Latin. This was how most of the Ancient Greek heritage, which had been preserved by Constantinople, reached Europe—and not through the Arabs, as has been wrongly imagined.151 The rise of pre-Renaissance humanism and classical studies in Italy was a direct result of the Fourth Crusade.152 And when the last bearers of Constantinople’s high culture fled Ottoman rule in the fifteenth century, they contributed to the blooming of the Italian Renaissance. Throughout this period, the notion of Translatio Imperii promoted by the Roman church, that is, the claim of a translation of Roman civilization from West to East in Constantine’s time, disguised the very real translation of Byzantine culture from East to West that had started in the late twelfth century and lasted through the fifteenth century.
In the final analysis, there is something Sethian in the fratricide committed by Rome against Constantinople by the trickery of the crusades, and in Rome’s determination to erase the memory of her defrauded and murdered elder sister. Yet like Osiris, Byzantium has been resurrected. Her spirit moved to the far northeast, in the great plains of Russia. As John Meyendorff tells it in Byzantium and the Rise of Russia: “Since the adoption of Christianity as the state religion of the Kievan principality (988), the influence of Byzantine civilization upon Russia became the determining factor of Russian civilization.”153 At the end of the tenth century, Russian king Vladimir the Great received baptism and married a sister of Byzantine emperor Basil II, and his son Iaroslav made Orthodox Christianity the religion of his subjects. The Greek alphabet was adapted to the Slavic tongue by Byzantine monks. During the schism of 1054 and throughout the vanishing years of Byzantium, Russia remained faithful to Constantinople’s religious leadership, and to this day still carries its spiritual legacy, as symbolized by the Byzantine double-headed eagle on the Russian flag.
Chapter 5
THE WANDERING CRYPTO-JEW
“Rebekah took her elder son Esau’s best clothes, which she had at home, and dressed her younger son Jacob in them. […] Jacob said to his father, ‘I am Esau your first-born.’”
Genesis 27:15–19
The Jews and Europe in the Middle Ages
The rise of European Jewish communities in the Middle Ages is shrouded in mystery, as are many other aspects of medieval civilization until the twelfth century. What emerges from the chronicles most clearly is the fact that, although excluded from Christian society, Jews had a virtual monopoly on the practice of lending at interest—an economic power that the Church denied Christians for moral reasons. By contrast, the practice of usury as a weapon of domination over “the nations” is promoted by the laws of Deuteronomy (15:6), by the “heroic” legends in the Hebrew Bible (Joseph in Egypt), by the Talmud, and even by Maimonides, now considered the greatest Jewish thinker of the Middle Ages.
The interest rates imposed on the rural poor generally were around 65 percent and could reach more than 150 percent. In France, they were legally capped at 43 percent in 1206. Under such conditions, usurious lending did not stimulate economic development. On the contrary, it led to the impoverishment of ordinary people and the enrichment of a financier class. Debt often put farmers in a desperate situation, forcing them to sell themselves into virtual slavery. Throughout medieval Europe, from France to Russia passing through Germany and Poland, the Jews were hated; they were perennial victims of popular anger for their ruthless usury, alongside their aggressive commercial practices such as client-hunting, predatory pricing, and other violations of the codes of the guilds and corporations from which they were excluded.154 Even the bourgeois would complain about these practices and petition or even pay princes to put an end to them.
Kings and princes, however, granted Jewish usurers protection whenever Judeophobia arose among the people. The tax on interest made Jews an important source of contributions to the royal treasury. Additionally, the kings and princes would themselves fall under the control of the moneylenders. Indeed, usury allowed Jews, operating in a network, to concentrate in their hands an ever-greater share of the money supply. Jews became the king’s creditors whenever he ran out of money, especially in wartime. It was these Jewish bankers, says Abraham Leon, who “allowed the kings to maintain the costly armies of mercenaries that begin to replace the undisciplined hordes of the nobility.”155
The powerful used Jews as intermediaries for collecting taxes, in kind and in cash. “Tax farming” and lending at interest are activities that combine into a formidable power, since it is often taxes that force producers into debt. Occupying powers have always been able to count on the collaboration of the Jews as an intermediate class to exploit, and force into submission, the population of the occupied country; such was already the case in Egypt under Persian rule in the fifth century BCE, and again under the Ptolemies. Jewish elites, it seems, felt no solidarity with oppressed people, but re
mained loyal to the monarch who granted them privileged status and protected them from the vengeful mob.
England offers a good illustration of this phenomenon. The first Jews, mostly from Rouen, arrived there with William the Conqueror in 1066.156 They were soon in all major cities of England, serving as intermediaries between the new elite and the Norman Anglo-Saxon population. The king and his barons, who had decimated and replaced the Anglo-Saxon nobility, granted the Jews a monopoly on tax collection, which at the time was a profession akin to racketeering under royal protection. According to historian Edward Freeman, a specialist in the Norman Conquest, “They came as the king’s special men, or more truly as his special chattels, strangers alike to the Church and the commonwealth, but strong in the protection of a master who commonly found it his interest to protect them against all others. Hated, feared, and loathed, but far too deeply feared to be scorned or oppressed, they stalked defiantly among the people of the land, on whose wants they throve, safe from harm or insult, save now and then, when popular wrath burst all bounds, when their proud mansions and fortified quarters could shelter them no longer from raging crowds who were eager to wash out their debts in the blood of their creditors.”157
Despite these violent episodes, the economic clout of the Jews quickly rose. The king became obliged to his Jewish bankers and made them his advisers. In the second half of the twelfth century, Henry II owed the Jewish financier Aaron of Lincoln alone a sum equivalent to the kingdom’s annual budget. Aaron died as the richest man in England, but the king then seized his property.
From Yahweh to Zion Page 17
