“You come here,” the sharp-witted Arab suggested one day, “because when you stand among the date palms and the pillars you can imagine yourself living with the Arabs. Confess. Isn’t that right? Well, I created quite a stir at Oxford in my second year with a scatterbrained theory I think you ought to consider. I developed—half daydream, half history—the theme that the Crusaders doomed themselves when they failed to establish an alliance with the Arabs. Everybody at Oxford was like you, Cullinane. They thought that Richard the Lion Heart fought his battles against gallant Arabs from the desert. They were quite hurt when I had to tell them Saladin wasn’t even one tenth of one per cent Arab.”
“I thought he was.”
“Pure Kurd,” Tabari said with no further comment. He argued in Arabic with the caretaker of the mosque, who finally admitted the two archaeologists to the minaret, inside whose tightly twisting innards they climbed in darkness until Tabari broke free onto a platform from which they could see the timeless beauty of this remarkable city, and Cullinane had nothing to say. He could only stand and look down at the scarred land. The Turkish walls, so wide that in spots ten chariots could have stood side by side, had in Crusader times contained twenty-two towers, some of whose roots were still visible. Squares and docks and ancient buildings dating back nearly a thousand years stretched in all directions, while to the east rose the silent tell of prehistoric Akka, from which Napoleon had tried in vain to capture the city … a tell as yet unexcavated but containing the mysteries of at least five thousand years. Farther to the east lay Makor, with two gaping wounds in its flanks through which inquisitive men were peering into its secrets, while to the west lay the immortal Mediterranean across whose stormy bosom had come the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Romans and later the English.
Cullinane was about to make the kind of extravagant statement that archaeologists should avoid, like, “This is my favorite town in Israel,” when Tabari joined him and, pointing down at the vast walls, said, “When King Richard the Lion Heart camped by that tell, trying to capture St. Jean d’Acre, there were damned few Arabs inside the walls trying to stop him.”
“I’m surprised,” Cullinane said, for although he knew the history of the Holy Land better than most, he had not previously heard this thesis advanced, and he suspected that Tabari was wrong.
“Let’s go down to the café,” the Arab proposed, and he led the way to a spot where drinks had been served for some twenty centuries and asked the waiter to fetch a bottle of arrack. As Tabari poured two glasses of the clear anise-flavored stuff, he said, “The Crusaders held Acre for about two hundred years, but in that time they rarely fought Arabs, because just before the Christians arrived the Turks had moved in and had crushed us pretty badly. So it was always Turks you fought, never Arabs. As a matter of fact, except for that minor matter of religion, we Arabs were always much closer to you than we were to the Turks. The sensible alliance, of course, should have been the humiliated Arabs plus the resurgent Christians against the upstart Turks.” He shook his head mournfully over the lost chances of history, then surprised Cullinane by saying, “I suppose you know that we Arabs tried time and again to effect such an alliance.”
“I never gave much credence to that thesis.”
“We tried. Repeatedly.”
Cullinane poured a few drops of water into his arrack, watching with pleasure as the clear liquor turned a milky white. Tabari summoned the waiter, explaining in the exaggerated simplicity he would have used with a retarded child, “My friend’s an American. And as you know, Americans must have ice. Don’t stand there like a fool. Fetch some ice for the American.”
“We have no ice,” the waiter protested.
“Find some!” Tabari cried. “He’s an American.”
Then he returned to Cullinane. “When your men finally captured Antioch they were surprised to find Arab ambassadors there, proposing an alliance against the Turks.”
“What queered it?”
Tabari strummed his fingers on the ancient table top, then suggested tentatively, “When you once describe a venture as a holy war you surrender all capacity to judge honest alternatives.” He stopped and looked up at the clean and beautiful mosque etched against the palm trees.
At this point there were many avenues into which Cullinane might have taken the conversation: Was Tabari saying that in October, 1097, when the Crusaders reached Antioch they were too imbued with Christian zeal to weigh the actual situation confronting them, just as the Arabs in 1964 in the nations surrounding Israel were so infatuated by the concept of jihad that they could not rationally accept the fact that Israel existed as a sovereign state? Or was he slyly charging the Jews with an error of which they were not yet guilty: constructing a religious state with such enormous blinkers that the world’s reality was prevented from shining through? Or did he perhaps refer to the larger religious war which he had sometimes discussed, in which the United States and Russia were ideologically engaged, each subject to the same infirmity that had struck the Crusaders: an inability to see through the heat waves which they themselves were generating? These were not matters which Cullinane wished to explore at this moment, for he was concerned only with the actual history of Acre during the Crusades and not with what might have been. He was gratified, therefore, when the waiter returned with a piece of ice, but it was very dirty.
“My God!” Tabari cried. “You can’t put a thing like that in the glass of a hygienic American.” He took the filthy ice and started washing it with water, then brushing it with his coat sleeve, but no amount of cleansing would make that ice acceptable, and in frustration he put it in his own glass. Addressing a group of amused Arabs sitting on their haunches outside the mosque he cried, “This will never be a first-class country until a self-respecting American can get ice for his arrack. What kind of people are we?”
Turning to Cullinane he said provocatively, “My point is this. The first nine thousand men your Crusaders killed in Asia were Christians. Your gallant Frenchmen and Germans would kiss their crosses, storm into some town, shouting, ‘Death to the infidel!’ and meet there a bunch of Arabs wearing turbans. When the slaughter was over they found that they had killed perfectly good Nestorians and Byzantines and Egyptian Copts who had wanted to help them. It must have been confusing. When this was finally straightened out your boys did get around to killing real Muslims, but this time unfortunately you killed only the Arabs who wanted to join you as allies. Only very late in your invasion did you kill any Turks, who were always your real enemies.”
“How do you explain it?”
“The fundamental unfairness of life,” he laughed. “How dare a Christian look like an Arab? Or today, how dare so many Jews look like Arabs? Or you could ask it another way. Why does that damned pipe-smoking Eliav look so much like a Christian German while I look so much like an Israeli Jew?”
This lively nonsense Cullinane was willing to explore, but toward the end of the morning Tabari returned to his main theme: “The real tragedy of the Crusades has always been the fact that the Turkish barbarians could have been eliminated … They were nothing but a gang of murderers, you know, surging out of Asia …”
“You sound as if you didn’t like them,” Cullinane suggested.
“I despise them. They ruined our Arab civilization and it may never recover.” For some minutes Tabari reviewed with sadness the eight-hundred-year Turkish domination of the Arabs, concluding, “And the hell of it is that all the while you Crusaders battled these Turks, we Arabs were waiting on the sidelines, willing to patch up some kind of alliance with you, but your leaders lacked the imagination to achieve it. So the moment passed. And in the end you Christians were defeated. And we Arabs went down the drain with you.”
Mournfully he sipped his arrack, adding a final point that Cullinane had not heard before: “How do you explain, John, that in the final days even the Mongol descendants of Genghis Khan offered to become Christians if the Pope would allow them to enlist in the Crusade and attack the T
urks from the rear? That’s right. And no one in Europe even answered the Mongol letters.” He shook his head reflectively, then stooped to pick up three small pebbles which he tossed one by one into the plaza. “So we were all lost together. Christians, Arabs, Mongols. Because when men ignite in their hearts a religious fury, they inflict at the same time a blindness upon their eyes.”
• • •
If Count Volkmar wanted to engage the true enemy, he would not have long to wait, for from the east came Babek, the mighty spearhead of the Turks, driving in from the plains of Central Asia where the horde had gathered strength for its assault some decades ago upon the Arabs and now upon the Christians who had intruded upon the area. He was a violent general, willing to fight on any terrain, but preferring to pick his battleground with the delicate precision of a lady choosing the right thread for an embroidery. He watched with amusement as the Crusaders stupidly assaulted one Christian settlement after another, killing the bearded converts in the mistaken idea that they were infidels.
They’re destroying their own allies, he thought, shaking his head at the folly.
He intended setting the same trap for the Frankish knights that he had used to destroy the little priest on the brown donkey, and from a distance he followed the great army as it stumbled its massive way into the same danger. But then his spies warned him of a significant difference: “This time there are many armed knights,” and he decided not to attack frontally. Instead, he waited until the captains of the force separated their troops and sent a detachment of some ten thousand to ride eastward to protect that flank, and for three days Babek remained hidden from this smaller army until he judged it to be so far removed as to provide an isolated target which the main army would not be able to rescue.
At the head of this eastern force rode Count Volkmar of Gretz, and at the rear, obeying the advice he had given others, roved the captain-in-charge, Gunter of Cologne, with a cadre of picked knights whose job it was to protect the wagons containing French and German women. Ponderously the caravan groaned forward—one hundred and eighty tested knights, twice that number of mounted squires and freemen, seven thousand well-armed foot soldiers, and some two thousand stragglers, including Priest Wenzel and the Countess Volkmar. A wind puffed the dunes of Asia Minor and grass on the barren hilltops quivered.
On July 1, 1097, Babek was satisfied that his trap had been properly set, so when the day’s heat was approaching its apex he signaled his sixty thousand hard-trained troops to attack Gunter’s outnumbered Crusaders. With paralyzing speed and fury the Turkish hordes swept out from their hidden positions, dashing in on swift horses and loosing as they rode a blizzard of iron-tipped arrows which began to strike the Frankish horses. There was a wild whinnying, the harsh ories of the disorganized European knights, and the frenzied shrieks of the Turks as they struck at the soft middle of the army, hoping to demoralize all and to effect a complete rout in the first few moments of the battle.
But the Turk Babek had not foreseen that he would be encountering Gunter of Cologne, who took one sweeping look at the developing battle and made an immediate decision which would be long debated: he calculated accurately the number and power of the approaching Turkish army; he saw that if it followed its present trajectory it must overrun the wagons and thus cut the Crusader line in two, whereupon the superior numbers of the enemy could encircle first Volkmar’s forward group, then his own rear contingent, cutting each to pieces at leisure; but he also saw that if the two groups of knights were able to join now, this instant, they could present a front which not even Babek could penetrate. With no further calculation and with no wavering Gunter of Cologne shouted to his men, “To Volkmar! Now! Now!” And he led a furious charge through the first of the Turkish riders, bringing nine tenths of his force into union with Volkmar’s.
Of course, his decision left the women, the children and the baggage train exposed to the Turks, who, infuriated by the escape of the knights, swarmed into the abandoned wagons and launched a massacre which would forever haunt the Crusaders. Horses were lanced, old men were chopped down by a dozen swords, while from a distance the Crusaders had to watch as their women were carefully inspected. Any who might bring even a bezant in the slave markets of Damascus were shoved aside. The rest—the old, the not-so-old—were mercilessly slaughtered. Knives and hands ran red as heads were chopped off. The Countess Matwilda was stood against a wagon while five Turkish foot soldiers used her as a target for their arrows. She fell grotesquely.
The younger women, who for their fairness would bring prize money from men seeking to improve their harems, were stripped in the sunlight and raped repeatedly. Fulda, the daughter of Count Volkmar, was among them, and of her father’s agony Wenzel of Trier wrote in his chronicle:
My Lord Volkmar, seeming to hear the screams of his naked daughter as the Turks dragged her from man to man, went as one crazy and would have ridden alone into the heart of the Turkish army, wreaking death, but the strong hand of Gunter restrained him and others argued, “Sir Volkmar, there is nothing we can do.” And Gunter said, “Save your fury for the Turks. They will be here for many days.” And so my Lord Volkmar was imprisoned by his own, and when the afternoon was upon us, Gunter led forth a foray of only forty knights, and the Turks thinking to overwhelm them launched pursuit; and when all was confusion my Lord Volkmar gave the signal and we who were left rode among the Turks like reapers in August rushing through a yellow field, and we killed and we killed until the end of day, and at night we counted only a few of our men dead but endless numbers of the infidel. And for the pity of my Lady Matwilda and her fair daughter I myself took a great mace and like the others I killed and killed.
General Babek reeled back from this crushing defeat. He could not understand how the blond knight at the rear had been so quick to appraise the situation nor how the German had succeeded in effecting a consolidation of the two halves of his army. He was similarly perplexed by the cunning strategy of the two leaders who later in the day had willfully separated their troops a second time, thereby operating a pincers which had crushed his demoralized footmen. Surveying the battle he found that he had annihilated the old men and the women but had not harmed the effective fighting force, whereas he had lost more than ten thousand of his best men. For the better part of an hour he considered launching a surprise attack at the still outnumbered Crusaders, but he decided against this and was about to order a retreat when his lookouts shouted that the Crusaders were attacking yet again. “They must be idiots!” he cried, hastily forming his men to meet the insane charge.
For we had decided [wrote Wenzel of Trier] that the Turks would be trying to understand what had occurred in our victory, and Gunter argued, “Let us destroy them now, for they will not think we would dare,” and my Lord Volkmar, like one demented, shouted, “Aye! Aye!” and the charge was formed, but before we started down the hill toward the Turks, Sir Gunter took me aside and said, cunningly, “You must see that your master does not reach the Turks, for if he does we shall not stop him,” and it was my duty to hold the count back, but this I could not do, for as we launched the charge he sped to the fore and was first among the enemy, swinging his mighty arm and taking his black helmet into the very heart of the Turkish camp. That he was not killed was a miracle, and at the conclusion of our mighty victory we found a remarkable thing: my Lord Volkmar sitting alone on his horse, his sword dropped in the dust and his hands folded in his lap as he wept.
Babek retreated to the east, from whence he reported to his superiors: “These men are much different from what we were told,” and the Turks, who had been misled by their first easy victory over the peasantry that followed Peter the Hermit, began to consider seriously the new war that confronted them.
Between Volkmar and Gunter there could never again be peace, for Gunter had knowingly sacrificed the women to the infidels; but the leaders of the Crusade, Godfrey, Hugh, Baldwin and wild Tancred, listened to reports of the stirring battle and properly concluded that only the d
aring action of Gunter in the first moments accounted for the victory. And when they reviewed the manner in which he had organized the feint and the final charge, they announced that he was the hero of the day and that henceforth he must ride with them and help them plan their assault on the infidel. But Volkmar would never forget the sight of Gunter willfully abandoning his own sister. “To reach us,” Volkmar swore, “he had to gallop directly through the women’s camp. He almost ran down my daughter, his own niece, as he sped to us.” Nor could the Count of Gretz erase from his memory the vision of his wife standing against the broken wagon, nor of Fulda dragged from man to man.
A sullen bitterness took possession of the German leader. He stayed alone, would talk only with Wenzel, and then only of religious matters, and when his brother-in-law found some extra women in the entourage of Baldwin and brought Volkmar a fifteen-year-old French girl, advising him, “Go to bed and forget,” Volkmar rose in fury and would have killed him but for Wenzel’s interposing himself and sending the girl away. Some days later Volkmar saw the child, already a brazen, riding behind Gunter, her arms clasped over the blue cross, and he felt ashamed of the Crusade. How many women has this monster delivered to the enemy? he mused in disgust. In Hungary, in Bulgaria and in the first two great battles Gunter had succeeded in losing something like two thousand women, many of whom had been his temporary mistresses, but he was always hungry for more and always he found more.
The Source: A Novel Page 82
