by Robert Payne
Baldwin loved his older brother almost to excess. He modeled himself on Godfrey, studying his brother’s every act. To the chaste and handsome Godfrey, so it seemed to him, all the virtues had been granted in double measure, and Baldwin tended to regard himself as a sinner who never came up to his own expectations for himself. Eustace, the third brother, played only a minor role in the Crusades and soon returned to manage his vast estates.
Of the three great princes who led the Crusade, one came from the south of France, another from what is now the region of Belgium and Flanders, and the third from southern Italy. They had never met and knew very little about each other. The eldest was the Count of Toulouse, the youngest was Godfrey. In the end both the Count of Toulouse and Godfrey would be offered the crown of Jerusalem and both would refuse it.
On August 15, 1097, Godfrey set out at the head of his small army for Constantinople, the staging ground for the attack on the Holy Land. No reliable figures are available, for the medieval chroniclers let their imaginations loose whenever they contemplated the size of an army. Anna Comnena, for example, says that Godfrey had ten thousand knights and seventy thousand foot soldiers when he reached Constantinople. It is more likely that he set out with about one thousand knights and gathered another five hundred during the journey along the Rhine and the Danube. There were probably about seven thousand pikemen and archers, and in addition three thousand or four thousand grooms, carters, fletchers, ironsmiths, cooks, tentmen, servants, and camp followers. Both Godfrey and Baldwin took their wives with them, and many of the knights were accompanied by their families. In medieval wars women traveled with their men, and there was always an abundance of female camp followers.
These small armies were well organized: supply problems had been worked out; there was an adequate intelligence system, and the military police saw to it that the foot soldiers obeyed orders. The army was priest-ridden: Every nobleman of substance had his private chaplain, and every company of soldiers its attendant priest.
A large number of noblemen joined Godfrey’s army, among them Baldwin of Le Bourg, his kinsman, who would in time become king of Jerusalem.
In those days a count was a very important personage indeed, and the noblemen who attached themselves to the great lords could expect commensurate deference. Between the noblemen and the soldiers there was a vast gap. We shall hear very little about the deeds of the individual soldiers, for the history of the Crusades was very largely recorded by chaplains and knights.
Godfrey’s army followed the Charlemagne Road, said to be the road taken by Charlemagne during his pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In fact, Charlemagne never went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and the road bearing his name was simply a tribute to his legendary qualities. It was a road for heroes to travel on. Peter the Hermit had followed it, and his ragtag army had suffered severely at the hands of Hungarians and Pechenegs. Godfrey was luckier. He was well armed, he was well known, and he had complete control over his men. At some time in the beginning of October, he crossed the border between Germany and Hungary, having previously sent Godfrey d’Esch, one of his noblemen, ahead on a mission to seek the king of Hungary’s permission to enter the country. Godfrey d’Esch knew the king and had previously rendered him some service. He conducted his embassy intelligently, there were protracted negotiations, and soon Godfrey of Lorraine and his brother Baldwin and three hundred knights were invited to meet King Coloman at Sapron, his capital, and it was agreed that the Crusader army would be permitted to pass through Hungary on condition that they left Baldwin, his wife, and children as hostages for their good behavior. Godfrey, for his part, issued an order that anyone who committed violence of any kind on a Hungarian would immediately be put to death and all his goods would be confiscated. The order was delivered to everyone in the army by means of a herald. At all costs Godfrey was determined to pass through Hungary peacefully. “In this way, by the grace of God,” wrote William of Tyre, “they traveled across the whole country without giving offence with the slightest word.”
During the journey across Hungary the Crusaders were well provisioned and well guarded, for they were accompanied by Hungarian troops who had orders to see they were given everything they asked for and that none strayed from the path. This was the only uneventful part of the journey.
They paused in Belgrade to set their baggage trains in order and to regroup. King Coloman had given them extra provisions and they were in no clanger of starving. Halfway between Belgrade and Nish, the Crusaders were met by envoys sent by the provincial governor to act as escorts throughout the rest of the journey to Constantinople. Thus, the army was preserved, losing no one along the way.
The towns and villages they passed through were all poverty-stricken. The poverty on the Byzantine frontiers startled the Crusaders, who knew little about the endless Bulgarian wars. It was Byzantine policy to make a wasteland of the frontiers. The Crusaders reached Philippopolis, in Thrace, a city founded by Philip of Macedon, built on three hills in the midst of a vast plain, and there at last they saw a Greek city in its splendor, with its high walls, Greek temples and Christian churches. Philippopolis was a small foretaste of Constantinople, a well-ordered city run by Byzantine officials long trained in government.
It was here at Philippopolis that Godfrey received some startling information, which boded ill for the future. He learned that Hugh, Count of Vermandois, had already reached Constantinople, the first of the Crusader princes to arrive there. In a few days came rumors that Hugh had been thrown into prison. Godfrey believed the rumor and sent Henry d’Esch and Baldwin of Mons, Count of Hainault, to intercede with the emperor. Godfrey’s troops marched to Adrianople and beyond. No message came from the emperor. Fearing that they, too, would be arrested and disarmed when they reached Constantinople, the leaders of the army decided upon a show of strength. They had camped in a rich pastureland and fanned out in murderous raids on the surrounding villages. The raids lasted for eight days and were called off only when Byzantine officials came hurrying to the camp with the news that Hugh the Great had been released from prison.
The Lotharingian princes continued their march to Constantinople, expecting trouble. They had no high opinion of the Byzantine officials and distrusted the emperor. They were in a foreign country where the people spoke a language they could not understand, where customs were very different, and where they were at the mercy of an army far greater than theirs. They did not know the rules of the game, but in the following months they would learn to play it well. Godfrey reached Constantinople on December 23, and he would remain there for four hectic months, waiting for the other Crusader armies to reach the staging ground.
At the emperor’s orders Godfrey’s army encamped on the northern bank of the Golden Horn. The high officers were billeted in monasteries and private houses, while the soldiers lived in tents. It was a bitter winter with cold winds blowing in from the Black Sea, sudden snowstorms, and it rained nearly every day. Hugh the Great came to the camp, Godfrey embraced him, and they swore to march together to Jerusalem. Hugh, now living well at the Emperor Alexius Comnenus’s expense, brought a message: the emperor had invited Godfrey to visit him at the Blachernae Palace. Godfrey rejected the invitation in high dudgeon. He was Duke of Lower Lorraine, a descendant of Charlemagne, and he did not need either the brother of a French king or a Byzantine emperor to tell him what to do. Least of all was he prepared to swear allegiance to Alexius. He knew that this would be demanded of him just as it would be demanded of all the other princes coming from the West. He regarded himself as a temporary guest on Byzantine soil, and he had no intention of being overly friendly with the landlord. He sent his trusted ambassador Henry d’Esch together with Conon de Montaigue and his own kinsman Baldwin of Le Bourg to the emperor with his excuses. The emperor was unimpressed. He was determined to exact an oath of loyalty from all the Crusader princes. Who was Godfrey that he dared to defy an emperor?
Alexius had a fair idea of what Godfrey was up to. He suspected that wh
en all the princes reached Constantinople they would turn their weapons against him. It was not an unfounded suspicion. He knew from his officials that Godfrey was stubborn, proud, and resentful. The émeute below Adrianople showed that the Crusaders were capable of sudden violence. He stationed a small army of his own behind Godfrey’s. One day, towards the end of March, the emperor, incensed by Godfrey’s continued refusal to meet him, ordered that his food supplies be cut off, first the fodder for the horses, and then fish, and then bread. For the second time the Crusaders went on a rampage. For six days they invaded neighboring villages, capturing vast amounts of food and fodder, returning in triumph to their camp with wagonloads of provisions. They fought the troops who were guarding them, captured sixty, and put many to death. They had tasted blood and taken, as they thought, the measure of the Byzantines.
Godfrey and the Lotharingian leaders held a council of war. They decided that the time had come to attack the city in force. They were camped near the bridge that crosses the headwaters of the Golden Horn, and not more than a few hundred yards beyond the bridge, enclosed within the high city walls, lay the Blachernae Palace where the emperor was in residence. The Lotharingian army streaming across the bridge was not merely attempting to put pressure on the emperor; it was out for conquest, hoping or half-hoping to capture the palace and the emperor. With the emperor in their power, they could take possession of the empire. The attack came on Good Friday, a day when the emperor and the people of Constantinople normally observed the most solemn rites. It was unthinkable to them that men should shed blood on the day when Christ’s blood was shed.
The emperor behaved in character. He had been a capable soldier and, although he was the son of an emperor, he had fought his way to power. He came from a long line of landed gentry in Cappadocia, and Cappadocians were renowned for their cunning and their patience. Wearing his jeweled robes, enthroned in a palace courtyard, surrounded by his ministers and courtiers, he waited out the Lotharingian onslaught. He would let them attack—up to a point. The movements of the Lotharingian troops could be observed from the watch towers. He sent messages to Godfrey, “Do not attack now. If you must attack, wait until the day after the Resurrection.” Godfrey appears to have regarded the messages as a sign of weakness and pressed on with the attack. A shower of metal-tipped arrows came over the high walls. An official standing beside the throne was struck in the chest. Some of these attendant officials ran for cover, but the emperor remained unmoved, sitting very straight on the throne, consoling and chiding them. His role was to resist by the sheer weight and pressure of his authority. But the Lotharingians continued to advance in the direction of the Blachernae Palace, and at last the emperor gave orders to station bowmen along the walls, adding that they should not try to kill but rather that they should shoot without taking aim, so that the enemy would be terrified by the multitude of arrows. And then, when he heard they were approaching the Romanus Gate, he ordered that a company of his nobles armed with bows and long lances should suddenly throw the gate open and advance slowly on the Lotharingians, the slow and steady march of the imperial guards which had often inspired terror in the enemies of the empire. These nobles too were ordered not to take aim at the Lotharingians, only at their horses. The emperor was desperately attempting to avoid bloodshed. At nightfall, when he gave the order for a general advance, the Lotharingians knew better than to fight. They fled back to their tents.
On the following day Hugh the Great was sent to Godfrey with another message from the emperor. He spoke of the dangers of continued resistance and the horrors of a full-scale battle. What was wrong with giving an oath of loyalty to the emperor? Godfrey answered that Hugh, from being a great prince of France, had been transformed into a slave and that there was nothing to be gained by being obedient to the emperor. To these arguments Hugh replied that indeed there was everything to be gained: the emperor could offer protection, provisions, friendship, treasure. “Matters will turn out ill for us if we disobey him,” Hugh said. Godfrey, still licking his wounds from the affray of the previous day, replied stubbornly that he expected nothing from the emperor and would act as he saw fit. Hugh gave the message to the emperor, who ordered a general attack the day after Easter Sunday. For the second time Godfrey’s army was in full flight.
The decision to attack Godfrey was forced on the emperor because news had come that the armies of Raymond of Toulouse and Bohemond, Prince of Otranto, were about to arrive in Constantinople. Though he had shown himself in the past to be a determined enemy of the Byzantine empire, Bohemond presented no immediate danger, for his army was pathetically small, numbering perhaps no more than two or three hundred knights and less than two thousand foot soldiers. The Count of Toulouse’s army was about ten times as large, and Godfrey’s was about half as large as the Provençal army. Since the new armies were coming, the emperor decided that two things must be done immediately: Godfrey’s army must cross over to Asia and Godfrey himself must take the oath of allegiance. Twice defeated in battle by the Byzantines, Godfrey at last realized that all further resistance was in vain and that he would face complete destruction if he continued to make war against the emperor.
Godfrey’s army was ferried across the straits. He set up his camp in Pelecanum, and in a day or two the emperor sent a ship to bring Godfrey to the Bucoleon Palace, a vast and ornate palace on the southern shore of Constantinople. This palace was sometimes known as the Great Palace, not only because it was quite simply the largest of all the palaces in the Western world, but also because it enshrined the traditions of the emperors and the relics of Christ. Here, in one of the many throne rooms, Godfrey knelt before the emperor and recited the oath of loyalty, swearing to be the emperor’s vassal and promising to restore to the emperor all the cities and lands he conquered on his way to Jerusalem, those cities and lands that belonged properly to Byzantium. It was a very solemn moment as the emperor leaned forward and embraced the man who had been his enemy and was now an ally and a vassal.
There was now peace between Byzantium and the Crusaders. How long it would last no one knew, nor did the parties know exactly what was meant by peace between the Greeks and the Latins. It was a precarious peace, an armed truce, a truce in which no side trusted the other, although both sides had a common aim—the preservation of the Holy Land in Christian hands. The tragedy of the Crusades was that the Greeks and Latins never worked together wholeheartedly. If they had, the Byzantine empire and the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem might have lasted to the present day.
Under the Walls
of Constantinople
WHEN the Crusaders rode up to the honey-colored walls of Constantinople, there was scarcely one of them who could have guessed at the glories within. They knew it by repute as Midgard, the center of the world. It was a city of gleaming wealth and far-reaching influence, with a dozen splendid palaces and three hundred churches, with great gardens and vast public places where the paving stones were slabs of marble and hundreds of bronze statues stood on marble pedestals. Both the palaces and the churches were decorated with sheets of mosaic. Sometimes the doors of palaces and churches were made of solid silver.
Long ago the Arabs had conquered Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, and recently the Seljuk Turks had conquered Asia Minor, but the Byzantine empire in its diminished condition was still a power to be reckoned with. The honey-colored walls, with their 370 towers, were so well designed that the city was virtually impregnable. Along the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmora the walls went straight down to the water. The Byzantine army at full force numbered about 100,000 men, and in addition, there were multitudinous mercenaries whose chief purpose was to protect the lives of the emperor and the imperial family.
If he could have peered over the walls, the Crusader would have seen a city as busy as a beehive, throbbing with urgent life, noisy with church bells and the hammering of metal, with factories next to the churches and with the workers’ tenements next to the palaces. The crowning glory of the city was Justinian’s C
hurch of Sancta Sophia, or Holy Wisdom, a church so vast, so brilliantly colored with mosaics, and so full of shimmering perspectives that a man standing under the dome could believe himself in heaven. On the south shore, facing the Sea of Marmora, stood the Great Palace, a vast complex of a hundred buildings and at least twenty chapels, set amid gardens and poplars, where the emperors had always lived in great state. This palace was also known as the Bucoleon, because a statue of a bull and a lion had stood there from earliest times. In a corner of the palace was the small church of the Virgin of the Pharos, which served as a reliquary for the grave-clothes of Christ, the Veronica, the Crown of Thorns, the Holy Lance, the Nails, and a considerable portion of the True Cross.
Constantinople was shaped like a triangle, its sides about four miles long. At the apex of the triangle stood the Blachernae Palace, the favorite palace of the Emperor Alexius I Comnenus. Within its walls was the church of the Virgin of Blachernae, and here the Mantle and the Robe and other relics of the Virgin were preserved.
In the north were the relics of the Virgin, in the south were the relics of Christ. To the Byzantines this divine symmetry afforded divine protection, or so they hoped.
At the heart and center of the city there stood, like a powerful generator of vast and imponderable forces, the figure of the emperor, whose power was absolute in a very special way. He had many titles but the one most commonly used was en Christo Autocrator, meaning “Autocrat in Christ.” He was more than the representative of Christ on earth: in the eyes of Orthodox believers he was very nearly an incarnation of Christ. He walked and talked in a special Christlike way; and when he was enthroned he was more especially like Christ than at any other time. He wore stiff brocaded gowns said to be copied after gowns given by the angels to Constantine, the first Christian emperor. He wore a cross in his crown, from which there dangled ropes of jewels and pearls, and there were more ropes of jewels and pearls dangling from his arms and shoulders. These ropes were intended to signify the radiance of Christ. All his public acts took on the form of ritual. Since there were rituals for every hour of the day, and on nearly every day there were public ceremonies to be performed, the wonder is that he had any time to conduct affairs of state. He possessed executive, legislative, judicial, military and religious power, and he was answerable to nobody except Christ. In theory everything that happened within the Byzantine empire took place with his permission or consent.
