by Jay Weidner
The early Fatimid caliphs became fabulously wealthy after conquering Egypt in the latter half of the tenth century. Al-Hakim ibn Aziz, who became caliph in 996, the same year Otto III became emperor, inherited tremendous wealth and power. In the end it was, along with other pressures perhaps, more than he could bear. He went mad, declared himself a god, and died, disappeared, or was assassinated sometime after 1021. But during his reign, far-reaching changes occurred.
Al-Hakim supported the Al Azhar Mosque and its growing university. He founded the Hall of Wisdom (see fig. 5.5), hired Mohammed ibn al-Haitham (Alhazen), the probable inventor of the telescope, and helped Ali ibn Yunus publish his astronomical tables. As much as diplomacy, it was these subjects that Sylvester wanted to discuss. Al-Hakim, a ninth-degree Ismaili initiate,11 might just have had something to share with the brilliant pope.
In 1001, Sylvester arranged with the Fatimid caliph for a group of clerics and knights from his various chronicling orders to make an expedition to Syria and the Holy Land. Various historians have from time to time pointed to this as the first wave of Crusaders, and just as quickly remarked on their lack of aggressive zeal. Pope Sylvester’s Chroniclers, we are told in a twelfth-century papal sermon by John XIX, disappeared without accomplishing anything, except to serve as vassals of the caliph. This implies, of course, that they converted to Islam.
Al-Maqqari, the foremost Muslim historian of the thirteenth century, tells us that al-Hakim greeted the pope’s entourage with honor and spent many weeks in Jerusalem discussing with them the virtues of Islam versus Christianity. He was so impressed by their sincerity that the caliph gave them, in September 1002, the use of a Byzantine Greek church on the outskirts of Jerusalem for their chapter house and library. Unfortunately, al-Maqqari doesn’t name the entourage or the location of their order, merely that they were there as chroniclers or historians.12 By the time of the First Crusade, they were established in a Greek basilica on Mount Zion, with the name of The Order of Our Lady of Mount Zion. (See appendix C.)
Figure 5.5. The Hall of Wisdom at Al Azhar Mosque, from an eighteenth-century engraving.
These were hardly Crusaders. The Muslim authorities do not record that they converted to Islam, but rather that al-Hakim honored them as Christians. They came not to conquer Jerusalem but to do research. We can only speculate on what subjects they researched.
By the time his delegation had established itself in Jerusalem, Sylvester himself had been forced out of Rome by political terrorism. From northern Italy, Sylvester and Otto III struggled with a crumbling political situation. In 1003 they both, within a few months of each other, died under suspicious circumstances. The dream of a united Roman Empire, as some kind of universal world-state, appeared to die with them.
But, in fact, the dream merely went underground for a few generations. To see this, we must look at Sylvester’s legacy and his legend. Combining these perspectives allows us to glimpse the outlines of an ambitious plan and even to note the shuffling of ideas and events behind the official explanations. Sylvester died before the plan began to bear fruit, but the harvest would eventually bring a Christian king of Merovingian descent to the throne of Jerusalem.
The most significant of Sylvester’s legacies was the Peace of God movement, which would inspire both the First Crusade and the newly emerging popular heresies, such as those professed by the Cathars and the Bogomils. Church councils and lay preachers spread the idea throughout the West in the century after Sylvester’s death, preparing the way for the call to crusade. Both the Peasants’ Crusade and its leader, Peter the Hermit, had their origins in the Peace of God movement. Peter the Hermit may, in fact, have had a direct connection with Sylvester’s shadowy group of monks and chroniclers.
One of these monks, Richer, of the Order of Saint Remy (the saint who converted Clovis I to Christianity), has left us a portrait of Sylvester’s teachings that contains the spark of the legend. Richer tells us, among a list of Gerbert’s accomplishments, that he had long studied the hermetic arts. From this remark grew the legend of an alchemist pope.
The most persistent story, first told in the thirteenth century, has Gerbert, while still archbishop of Rheims, constructing a magical bronze “head” that foretells the future. The “head,” of course, announces that Gerbert will indeed be pope, which, considering his shaky position as archbishop, was a bold prediction. A similar story of a bronze head would be told about other medieval magicians, including Roger Bacon and Albertus Magnus. It also suggests, in an indirect way, the “head” the Templars were supposed to have worshipped, the mysterious Baphomet.
These similarities are not accidents, but glimpses of the design behind the symbols. Richer, in his Histories, gives us the clue. In the sentence after he mentions Gerbert’s hermetic accomplishments, we are told that Gerbert had also designed an armillary sphere with which he could determine the location of the sun and the planets in relation to the celestial sphere. Interestingly enough, the earth in this model was round, five hundred years before Columbus.
Later, as pope, Sylvester designed and commissioned a new armillary sphere, a kind of small-scale planetarium, incorporating the information in Ali ibn Yunus’s tables. The new sphere showed the plane of the ecliptic, the Milky Way, and the ecliptic and planetary poles (fig. 5.6). It was, in simple terms, a bronze machine for calculating the secret of time, alchemy’s third component. In symbolic terms, this sphere of knowledge became the “head” possessed by all famed students of the art in the Middle Ages.
The mysterious name of the Templar’s “head,” to briefly jump ahead of our story, confirms this assumption. Baphomet, phonetically in Arabic, Aramaic, and Hebrew, is simply bet’amet, or “place of truth.” The root ba or bet is the same as the ba in Baal, and can signify a house, a place, or the action of filling space. The “place of truth” used as a title could well be meant to signify the space-filling “house” of the Cube of Space in the celestial sphere and the value of its prophetic insight. Over time, the simple phrase became a code word for the secret itself. The Templars did not worship their bronze head; they meditated on it and studied it closely for clues about the secret of time and the timing of their alchemical operations.
Figure 5.6. An eighteenth-century engraving of Pope Sylvester’s armillary sphere, the prototype of the Templars’ bet’amet, or Baphomet.
Another of Sylvester’s chronicling monks, Rodulphus Glaber, jump-started the pilgrimage movement with his fanciful account of the millenarian activities surrounding the year 1033, the one thousandth anniversary of Christ’s death. While not completely true—we might call it propaganda today—Glaber’s tale of cosmic portents and massive pilgrimages to Jerusalem gave voice to the anxieties of its age. A great desire arose in all classes of society to participate in the upcoming millennium, not just wait passively for its arrival. It was this feeling that animated the First Crusade. Conquering Jerusalem brought the millennium one step closer.
The tale of the pope, the emperor, and the caliph remains largely hidden in the fragments strewn through a thousand years of secrecy and internal strife among the holders of various pieces of the secret. Pope Sylvester started a ball rolling that, in a few hundred years, would change beyond recognition the face of European culture. The Crusades opened the East directly to the West, and the hand of Sylvester’s design played a part in all of it. Without Sylvester, there might never have been a Crusade. And without Sylvester’s Fatimid connections and his chroniclers in Jerusalem, there would certainly never have been an Order of the Knights of the Temple.
The Templars are the point where the political current started by the alchemist pope surfaces into the historical record. The history of the Templars, particularly their mysterious origins and their unaccountedfor wealth, provides for myriad suggestive connections. Without the Templars, there would have been no cathedral-building movement, nor the money to pay for it. From the point of view of our research, without the Templars, there might not have been any such thing as “a
lchemy” to investigate.
PETER THE HERMIT, THE FIRST CRUSADE, AND THE ROCK OF ZION
Our word crusade comes from the Spanish word cruzada, meaning “marked with the cross.” The Crusaders were indeed marked by the cross in more than just the design emblazoned on their tunics. They were inflamed by a new vision of Christianity, one in which there was work to do—the kind of work the semibarbarian kings of the West understood best, warfare. The First Crusade stands as a kind of human monument to belief in the end of the world.
Sylvester and Otto III had tried to build a new unified world-state from the fragments of the ancient world. They saw this state, which perhaps was meant to include the Fatimids as well, as a bulwark against the rising tide of refugees from eastern Europe and western Asia. In central Europe, these refugees were Kazars, or what would become the Ashkenazi Jews; in Asia Minor, they were known as the Seljuks. These migratory pressures threatened the Byzantine Empire at Constantinople as well the Fatimid control of Palestine. The Western Empire, reviving under Otto III and Sylvester, created the Christian kingdoms of eastern Europe—Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary—as a barrier to further invasions from the East.
United, the three parts of the early medieval world, the two Romes—Constantinople being the second Rome—and the Fatimids, could have resisted not just the pressure of the Turks but also that of the later Mongol invasions. As it happened, however, the Seljuk Turks conquered Palestine in 1071 and threatened the stability of the entire world when they turned on Constantinople. After a disastrous defeat, the Byzantine Empire made a humiliating peace and was left with very little of Asia Minor. The Empire had been saved, but the way to Constantinople was open to the next wave of Turkish invaders.
At this point, a mysterious figure surfaces to begin his career as one of the principle movers and shakers of the First Crusade. In 1088, Peter the Hermit was an unknown monk belonging to one of the clerical or chronicling orders. Curiously, its name has not come down to us, but his appearance on the scene suggests connections at the highest level. That year, Peter the Hermit traveled from Jerusalem to deliver an impassioned plea from Simeon, the patriarch of Jerusalem, to the newly elected pope Urban II (see fig. 5.7). This plea for aid from the West and its offer of reconciliation between the churches would certainly not have been entrusted to a simple itinerant preacher. The patriarch’s letter caused years of intense discussion within the Church and set the tone for Urban’s papacy.
In early 1095, Alexius I, the Byzantine emperor, sensing weakness in the current Seljuk infighting, sent an envoy to Pope Urban II and the council at Piacenza asking for military aid from the West. Urban II was intrigued by the opportunities these entreaties provided, for perhaps the old Sylvestrian scheme of a united world-state could actually be achieved. Urban departed on a six-month tour of northern Italy and southern France collecting support. In August, from Le Puy in southern France, a Church council was called for November at Clermont in Auvergne, not far from the small monastery of Aurillac.
Figure 5.7. Peter the Hermit preaching the Crusade. (From a fifteenth-century manuscript illustration, Bridgeman Art Library)
Exactly what Urban had in mind and what he expected from the Clermont council is unclear. He seems to have intended a military expedition, not unlike those he had already sanctioned in Muslim Spain. What he got was something entirely different.
Urban II, born Odo of Chatillon-sur-Marne and a former prior of Cluny, was a man of broad views, an experienced organizer, and a skilled diplomat dedicated to the program of reforms of his predecessor, Gregory VII. Unlike Gregory, whose fiery intensity seemed to leave no one untouched, Urban was supremely human, a medieval pop star of a pope, tall, handsome, socially at ease, and aristocratically distinguished. His overall goal was to reform the Western Church and reunite it with the Eastern Church to create a truly catholic, or universal, Christianity.13 Toward that end, Alexius I’s request for military aid looked like a major breakthrough. Urban was also influenced by the Peace of God movement, which attempted to curtail violence and warfare on certain days of the week and on feast days of the saints, and saw the call to arms against the “accursed race, wholly alienated from God,” as he called the Turks in his speech to the crowd at Clermont (see fig. 5.8), as a way to mitigate and channel the violence of the European nobility.
Figure 5.8. Eighteenth-century engraving of the Council of Clermont.
On Tuesday morning, November 27, 1095, thousands had gathered to hear the pope’s pronouncement. Itinerant monks and lay preachers had spread the word of the public session for months. When the day arrived, the crowd was far too great for the cathedral, so the meeting was held outdoors, in a field near the eastern gate of the city. After the multitude had gathered, Urban II climbed up on a raised platform and addressed them.
Four contemporary chroniclers reported Urban’s words. One of them, Robert the Monk, claimed to have been there and heard the words as Urban spoke them. It is his version that we will paraphrase. He tells us that Urban began by calling on the Franks—“O race of Franks! race beloved and chosen by God!” Robert records—to come to the aid of their brethren in the East. Eastern Christendom had appealed for aid; the Turks were advancing into Christian territory, killing and desecrating as they came. Urban stressed the holiness of Jerusalem and the suffering of the pilgrims who journeyed there. Having painted a somber picture of conditions in the East, Urban made his appeal: Let Western Christendom march to the rescue. Let rich and poor march together and leave off killing each other for the greater good of killing the godless Turks. This was the work of God, Urban declared, and there would be absolution and remission of sins for those who died in this most holy of causes. There must be no delay; let everyone be ready to march by the summer. God will be their guide.14
Urban, speaking in French to his fellow Frenchmen, rose to levels of eloquence that the Latin of the chroniclers cannot convey.15 The enthusiasm, however, was beyond anything that even Urban had expected. A roar of “Dieu li volt,” or God wills it, swept through the crowd even before Urban finished his speech. At its conclusion, the bishop of Le Puy fell to his knees, begging permission to join the expedition. Thousands followed his example.
The pope was caught off guard. No plans had yet been made, certainly no arrangements for a mass movement such as erupted over the winter of 1095–96. While Urban reassembled his bishops to make the political arrangements, a group of wandering evangelists began to spread the word. Foremost among them was Peter the Hermit.
The shadowy figure of Peter the Hermit, an enigma even to his contemporaries, haunts the story of the First Crusade. We have seen him in 1088 delivering a message from the patriarch of Jerusalem to Pope Urban. Later, historians would doubt this story because of Peter’s humble background and apparent insignificance. And yet there is something about the mysterious rabble-rousing monk that suggests powerful connections and important supporters. Piecing together his career gives us a glimpse of the hidden machinations behind the Crusades.
Peter was born around the middle of the eleventh century in Picardy, possibly near Amiens. Before becoming a monk, Peter was a minor noble who owed his fief to Eustace de Boulogne, father of Godfroi de Bouillon, the future king of Jerusalem. Sometime after 1070, Peter joined a monastery in the Ardennes, where for a few years he served as tutor to the young Godfroi. Sometime after 1080, he departed on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, where he apparently stayed until his mission to Rome in 1088. Nothing is known of his whereabouts until the winter of 1095, when he began to preach the new crusade at Bourges, in the province of Berry. He apparently did not attend the Church council at Clermont.
Keeping in mind the work of Pope Sylvester II and his various chronicling orders, a pattern emerges from the shadows of Peter’s story. Peter joined the only group of monks in the Ardennes, at Orval, near Stenay, a site with rich Merovingian connections, whose patron was Godfroi’s aunt and foster mother. This group of monks was part of a mysterious order of chroniclers from Calabria, i
n northern Italy, who seemed mostly concerned with researching the bloodline of the duke of Lorraine, Godfroi’s family.
If these monks were among the chroniclers established by Pope Sylvester, then it is easy to understand the many curious twists in Peter’s career, such as his long sojourn in Jerusalem. He could have been transferred to the order’s chapter there, the one established outside the city in a basilica given to them by the mad caliph al-Hakim. This makes sense in light of Peter’s later diplomatic mission, for only a high-ranking member of a clerical order, founded by the pope himself, would be a fitting enough representative to deliver messages from the patriarch of Jerusalem and the Eastern Church.
Peter’s silence between 1088 and 1095 may have been enforced by the dictates of his order. Only after the Church council, and its demonstration of mass approval, was Peter the Hermit given permission to begin his own crusade.
Before the year was out, Peter was in Berry, in central France, preaching his own version of the Holy War, one in which the poor and the pious in Christ would sweep ahead of the nobles and conquer Jerusalem with only God’s assistance. Guibert of Nogent, who knew him personally, gives us a glimpse of Peter’s authority: “Everything he said or did, it seemed like something half-divine.”16 This unkempt, fiery-tempered monk, who habitually went about barefoot and in filthy rags, was also a spellbinding orator capable of moving masses of people to extremes of emotion. They took the cross by the thousands and followed this Rasputin-like character down the long road to the East.
In January, Peter left Berry and traveled through Orleans and Champagne, gathering crowds whenever he stopped. In Lorraine, he visited his old monastery near Orval and discussed the crusade with his old pupil Godfroi de Bouillon. No record remains of their conversations, but something convinced Godfroi to join the crusade. By spring, as Peter collected his people’s army in Cologne, Otto III’s old capital, Godfroi took the cross at Amiens. Unlike the other nobles who participated in the First Crusade, Godfroi renounced his fiefs, sold his goods, and moved with his brothers to the Holy Land. Godfroi did not intend to return; perhaps he already saw himself as the chief candidate for king of Jerusalem.
