But at Antioch, the third largest city of the Roman empire, frequented by Caesars and adorned by them, that sainted city where the word Christian was first used, Gunter proved himself a valiant general. The siege of this tremendous fortress-city, whose thick walls never did surrender to the machines of the Crusaders, was initiated on October 21, in 1097, and it continued with battle and brutality until June of the next year, when the impregnable walls still mocked the invaders. The painful siege was marked by three critical periods, and in each Gunter distinguished himself.
As the Crusaders drew their forces into a knot about the walls an unforeseen emissary approached from the south—a Muslim from Egypt whom Volkmar leaped forward to kill. But Gunter stayed his brother-in-law and led the Egyptian to the leaders, where the Muslim proposed an alliance between his people and the Crusaders to smash the Turkish upstarts, and Gunter argued warmly that the Crusaders should accept the offer and bind themselves to the Egyptians.
“With infidels?” Volkmar stormed.
“With anyone who has an army,” Gunter countered.
“It would profane the Crusade,” Volkmar reasoned.
“When we have won,” Gunter proposed, “then we can cleanse ourselves of profanation.”
He worked with the Egyptians, evolving a plan whereby they would capture Jerusalem from the Turks while the Crusaders took Antioch, breaking the back of Turkish power along the chain of seaports, but the proposed union accomplished little, for when the Egyptians, true to their part of the bargain, proceeded to capture Jerusalem from the Turks—so that the Crusaders could have occupied the city without a battle had they been partners in a true alliance—the Christian part of the bargain was not pursued, because bitter men like Volkmar who had seen Muslims kill their families could not believe that other Muslims might have other interests; and the momentary promise of a powerful eastern alliance vanished.
Of Gunter’s second accomplishment, Wenzel of Trier wrote:
My Lord Gunter met with great good fortune when the fate of our crusade hung in the balance. As our knights stood facing the bleak walls of Antioch powerless and near starvation, General Babek decided that the moment was proper for him to move in and revenge his defeat, so he sped down upon us from the east with near fourteen thousand, and our captains decided, “If we wait, we die. Let us therefore ride out to see what can be done,” and my Lord Gunter rode forth with only seven hundred knights, singing as they approached the enemy, where victory was deemed impossible. But with the aid of God the seven hundred crushed the fourteen thousand and Gunter rode back to Antioch singing once more and sharing his saddle with the mistress of the Turkish general, the dark-eyed girl who taught him the Arabic.
And finally, when it became apparent that the ancient Roman walls of Antioch, now strengthened by the engineers of Byzantium, could not be pierced in any manner, it was Gunter who established contact with a Turkish spy who for the proper amount of gold arranged to open the gates for Count Bohemond of Taranto. It was an unlikely offer, one which Gunter had been able to arrange through his knowledge of Arabic, but which he himself scarcely believed. On the night of June 3, 1098, the spy made good his deal, swung open the impregnable gates and admitted the Franks to the city, where an unparalleled slaughter took place.
At one point Volkmar, surging through the fallen city with his men, held back his sword just in time to keep from killing two girls in Arab dress who knelt pitifully before him making the sign of the cross. To his surprise he found that they were Christians, faithful to Rome, and he shouted to his men to wait, but before he could act the girls were slain—as were thousands of their fellow worshipers.
It was at this senseless point, when all were being killed indiscriminately, even Christian girls the same age as his daughter, that Volkmar withdrew from the mighty surge of the movement. He leaned against a mosque which was being gutted by his own men and deadened his ears to the screams of the dying. He thought of the distant days when he had planned his march in the cool castle of Gretz, and he longed for that uncomplicated German sanctuary.
And in those hours [wrote Wenzel of Trier] while others were gaining the riches for which we struggled, the jars of incense and the chests of gold, my Lord Volkmar wandered empty-handed through the streets of Antioch until he came to what had once been the Church of Peter and Paul but was now a mosque, and he entered there and took his place on the stones before the spot where the altar had stood before the Muslims tore it down, and he prayed that God would lead him in peace to Jerusalem, for he was sick unto death of killing. But even as he prayed, men from Gunter’s army chased three Turks into the mosque, cut them open and threw their entrails over the carvings sacred to their god Mahmoud.
When the great, twisting, tumbling Crusade resumed its march toward Jerusalem, Count Bohemond was left behind as Prince of Antioch, while Baldwin of Bouillon, an ordinary knight, was sent to distant Edessa with the title of count; and from these developments all men like Gunter of Cologne who had intended carving their kingdoms from the Holy Land gained encouragement, looked hopefully toward the next battle and discussed their dreams with their associates. But Volkmar of Gretz rode alone. He was now an old man of fifty-one and his sandy-red hair showed signs of white. His neck was still stocky, but his arms moved more slowly and sometimes in battle he felt that he lacked the strength to ride forward. Three of his mounts had died in battle and in his loneliness he had premonitions that a fourth would go down and take him along, cutting him short of Jerusalem, which he no longer expected to see. The armies were bogged down in Syria and typhus raged through the camps, so that the future was obscure.
But then, in the spring of 1099, as the end of his third year at war approached, events began to move with startling speed. The Arab town of Ma’arrat fell, and when the squat fortress of Arqah gave signs of proving even more difficult than Antioch the Crusaders discovered the simple expedient of letting it stand. Leaving a small siege group they by-passed the thorny fort, then did the same with the lovely chain of ancient Arab seaports: Tripoli, Bairut and Tyr. All were by-passed with their Turkish armies intact; and the Crusaders found themselves poised for the final dash to Jerusalem. “If we win the city,” Gunter of Cologne insisted, “we can come back and pick off the seaports one by one, like grapes,” and the original allure of the Crusades revived. It was of this exhilarating period that Wenzel wrote:
On that May afternoon when we marched south from Tyre toward the city that was to become St. Jean d’Acre, leaving the inhospitable lands of the north and entering upon those sacred grounds of Palestine, where our Lord Jesus Christ had lived and died, a great exultation seized our men, and each spurred his horse forward so that he might be the first to cry, “We have come to the land of our sweet Lord Jesus.” And in this spirit we came to a small hill from which we could look down upon the pagan spires of Acre, nestling within tremendous walls, and I feared that this formidable place would dampen our spirits, but our leaders cried, “We shall not war against that seaport, we shall leave it as we did the others. On to Jerusalem.” And right willingly did we by-pass those enormous walls.
My Lord Volkmar and I were in the left, or eastern flank, riding midway toward the Sea of Galilee, when we chanced to see some Turks in the distance. We spurred our horses up a small hill, thinking to give them chase, when Gunter of Cologne swept past us on a French horse he had acquired, shouting, “Let us enter the Holy Land of Jesus,” and he so excited us with his movement, urging us on to follow him, that we forgot the Turkish soldiers, and rode furiously southward until we came to the crest of a hill from which we saw the most pleasing sight to greet us since the day we left Gretz. To the west rose the pagan spires of Acre, shimmering beside the sea, and there the great lords were parleying, agreeing to spare the city. To the east we saw the rich and wooded hills, leading down to the Sea of Galilee, where our blessed Lord had lived and taught.
But straight ahead, on a small mound, with gray olive trees to the south, stood the little town of Makor,
its mosques bright in the sun and the holy cross of our Lord rising from the steeple of the basilica. My Lord Volkmar cried, “Behold that sweet town and its green fields.” But before we could move forward Gunter shouted, “This town is mine!” And he galloped his horse down the hill madly, riding up to the town and shouting for all to hear, “This town is mine! It shall be the capital of my kingdom!”
Among the infidels of Makor who had been watching for some months the southward progress of the Crusaders, none was more shrewd in estimating their final victory than the current head of the great Family of Ur. Shaliq ibn Tewfik was a hawk-eyed man of forty-two who could calculate success and failure with all the skill of his Arab training; but whether he was entitled to be called an Arab remained a moot point, not always agreed upon by the people of Makor when they sat together discussing their dealings with him. Shaliq was a Muslim, as all had to admit, and for the past four centuries his family had been Muslim too; but small-town memories are long and it was not forgotten in Makor that Shaliq’s family had once been pagan, then Jewish, and for a while Christian, so that at best his heritage was spotted. On the other hand, of a hundred men in Makor who termed themselves Arabs, not many had ridden in from the desert with the true faith; most had sprung from Hittite and Egyptian and Canaanite stock, but today all were good Muslims and they passed as Arabs, so it ill behooved any to question Shaliq ibn Tewfik.
Regardless of his ancestry, sharp-eyed Shaliq traded wisely and listened well, and he had discovered that as the Crusaders moved down through Asia from Antioch to Ma’arrat it became a matter of chance whether a local resident survived or not. As Shaliq explained to his frightened family: “When a town is taken the Crusaders are so embittered that they slaughter Jew, Christian, Muslim alike. But as soon as the heat of battle ends—let’s say the third day—any local citizens who have survived are treated well.” He paused. “So well, in fact, that the knights will begin picking their wives from the very women that three days earlier they were spitting on their lances.” He looked at his trembling family and said harshly, “Our job is to survive for three days. But where?”
He scouted the town, working alone so that no other family could profit from what he might discover. For a few hours he thought he might choose the cellar under the hay, but he rejected this because he had heard that the Crusaders always set fire to hay, worrying later about food for their horses. The shed hidden behind the wheat stacks was surely a trap, for the soldiers would be hungry and would haul the bags away. But in his anxiety he remembered an abandoned shaft, now almost filled with rubble, which he guessed might once have led to some well deep inside the town, and this was a cool place not known to other citizens, for the ancient tunnel to which it had once led was no longer remembered; and it was in this shaft, on May 21, 1099, that Shaliq ibn Tewfik dug a small cave and hid his wife Raya and his sixteen-year-old daughter Taleb bint Raya and his sons, taking with him water and food for three days. Pressing themselves into the cramped refuge they heard the first shock of troops in the streets, the brief fighting and the surge of feet across the square. There were screams, as Shaliq had foretold, and the smell of smoke. But the Family of Ur held fast while their father counted, “One day, then two days, then three.”
When Gunter captured Makor—not a difficult task, for the Turks were not defending the city and there were no walls to protect it—he put to the death every visible inhabitant. Christians and Muslims alike went down, and in a pocket near the ruins of the eastern wall he cornered the last Jews ever to live within the walls of Makor—the final descendants of Joktan and Zadok and Jabaal—and he slew them all, man and woman and child. His men wanted to keep one young girl for themselves, but Gunter would not have it so. “Let there be no traffic with the enemies of Christ!” he bellowed, and the eradication was complete.
But during this final slaughter a dismal thing occurred. One Jew, a farmer, decided not to surrender his life easily and grabbed an axe, so that when Count Volkmar of Gretz came by, this Jew leaped at him and cut a deep gash down the German’s left leg. As the blood spurted out the Jew tried to swing the axe again, but men from Gunter’s group saw the assault and killed him. That night, when it looked as if the white-haired Count of Gretz must die, Wenzel wrote sorrowfully:
The great perfidy of Jews was proved once more when, the subjection of the city having been assured, one crafty fellow nevertheless armed himself with an axe and lay unjustly in wait for my Lord Volkmar, and sprang at him most fiendishly, near severing his left leg. We took the count to a clean room where we lay him on a bed, and his eyes came to rest on a local crucifix, for unfortunately that day we had killed many Christians, which can be forgiven, for they looked much like Arabs and in the heat of battle we could not tell saved from damned, and when Count Volkmar saw the crucifix and knew that once more we had slain Christians, he would have died, but I stayed with him that night, binding the leg and praying for his soul. On the morrow Gunter of Cologne came to see us and to say, “Brother, I must join the others lest they take Jerusalem without me and I am not present to claim my kingdom.” I said, “Dare you leave your brother so?” and Gunter answered, “I marched from Cologne to capture Jerusalem, and not the devil himself shall keep me from the Holy City.” I begged him not to desert his brother, who was dying, but he replied, “His leg will have to be cut away and he will surely die, but I will leave him six good men.” And Count Volkmar heard these words and cried from his bed, “Go to hell with your men and your kingdom,” but Gunter grew not angry and said softly, “Brother, it is this land that I intend taking for my own, and if you live you may share it with me,” and he rode off, with all his soldiers, leaving not even the six that he had promised. And I thought that my lord would die, except that on the third day from a cave appeared a man named Shaliq who had wisely escaped the slaughter, and he claimed to be a doctor and showed me how to cut off Count Volkmar’s leg and when the putrid thing was hauled away the count grew better, and the mysterious doctor said to me, “I and my family are truly Christians, but the Muslims forced us into infidel ways, and we would like to be again baptized.” And with tears in our eyes we baptized him and his wife and three sons and daughter. His name was infidel, and I said to him, “In the name of the Lord, drop thy infidel ways,” and because he was a doctor who knew how to cut a leg I told him that henceforth his name was to be Luke and he ended his baptism by repeating his new name many times, with approval from his family. His appearance and signs of saintliness I declared a true miracle, and judged it a good omen for our occupation of this city.
But while Wenzel and Luke, the merchant-turned-doctor, were hacking away at his leg, and cursing Jews for their perfidy in striking a Christian knight with an axe, Count Volkmar lay in a delirium of pain, biting the handle of a dagger and seeing before him Simon Hagarzi, and he could hear again the Jew predicting, “Of a hundred men who leave Gretz, nine will be lucky if they get back,” and he knew in his madness that he would not be one of those. He would see the Rhine no more, and thinking of the Jews his men had slain along that river he forgave the solitary Jew who had attacked him. “It was God’s revenge,” he mumbled to himself as the Arab sawed on his leg bone. “May God forgive us for the things we have done.” And the leg was gone.
For several years the re-established settlement at Makor did not see Gunter of Cologne, for he rode on to help capture Jerusalem, then participated in the siege of Ascalon, continuing to the protracted wars against Tripoli and Tyr and finally, in 1104, to the subjugation of the critical port city of Akka itself. When the solid walls of that fortress were reduced through siege and the town renamed, Gunter finally returned to Makor, where Luke, serving as bailiff-judge-treasurer of the town, welcomed him on behalf of the governor, Count Volkmar.
“Where is my brother?” the now-slim warrior asked, and Luke led the way to a large house which served as the rude palace from which Volkmar ruled the surrounding territory.
Gunter rushed through the door to greet his brother-in-law, wh
o stood an old, white-haired man of fifty-six, one-legged and frail. “The fighting is ended,” Gunter announced, “and I did what I said. The fief is mine.”
“What fief?” Volkmar asked.
“This one. The land between Acre and Galilee.”
Carefully choosing his words Volkmar said, “But here I rule.”
“And so you shall!” Gunter cried expansively, shocked by his brother-in-law’s general feebleness. “And you shall continue to rule on my behalf until you die—I’ll be out extending our borders.”
“But when I die this land passes on to my son Volkmar.” The old count signaled to Luke, who fetched an attractive dark-haired boy of three. The child ran to his father, who balanced himself on his one leg so as to catch the boy, swinging him in the air.
“They told me you were married,” Gunter said, evading for the moment the question of inheritance. “Where’d you find a Christian girl?”
“Here,” Volkmar replied. “One that you missed killing.” Again the count motioned to Luke, and the bailiff disappeared to return shortly with his daughter Taleb, now an attractive woman of twenty-one. Bowing to Gunter she said in lilting German, “Welcome to Makor, brother.”
The battle-worn knight bowed and replied, “It is I who welcome you to my fief, sister.”
This time it was Volkmar who chose to evade the question. He directed Luke to prepare a welcoming feast, and Luke, clever as always, managed to find a sheep, some good wine from the local grapes and lesser items from as far away as Damascus. “The caravans have resumed,” Volkmar explained, passing his brother-in-law fresh dates and honey from the Muslim capital. “It’s true that Damascus remains in Arab hands,” he continued ruefully, “but we both need the trade.”
The Source: A Novel Page 83
