THE FIRST CRUSADE
Until the mechanical arts have advanced far enough to cause the attack
in war to predominate over the defence, centralization cannot begin;
for when a mud wall can stop an army, a police is impossible. The
superiority of the attack was the secret of the power of the monied
class who controlled Rome, because with money a machine could be
maintained which made individual resistance out of the question, and
revolt difficult. Titus had hardly more trouble in reducing Jerusalem,
and dispersing the Jews, than a modern officer would have under similar
circumstances.
As the barbarians overran the Roman provinces, and the arts declined,
the conditions of life changed. The defence gained steadily on the
attack, and, after some centuries, a town with a good garrison, solid
ramparts, and abundant provisions had nothing to fear from the greatest
king. Even the small, square Norman tower was practically impregnable.
As Viollet-le-Duc has explained, these towers were mere passive
defences, formidable to a besieger only because no machinery existed
for making a breach in a wall. The beleaguered nobles had only to watch
their own men, see to their doors, throw projectiles at the enemy if he
approached too near, counter-mine if mined, and they might defy a great
army until their food failed. Famine was the enemy most feared.[100]
By the eleventh century these towers had sprung up all over the West.
Even the convents and churches could be defended, and every such
stronghold was the seat of a count or baron, an abbot or bishop, who
was a sovereign because no one could coerce him, and who therefore
exercised all the rights of sovereignty, made war, dispensed justice,
and coined money. In France alone there were nearly two hundred mints
in the twelfth century.
Down to the close of the Merovingian dynasty the gold standard had
been maintained, and contraction had steadily gone on; but, for reasons
which are not understood, under the second race, the purchasing power
of bullion temporarily declined, and this expansion was probably one
chief cause of the prosperity of the reign of Charlemagne. Perhaps the
relief was due to the gradual restoration of silver to circulation,
for the coinage was then reformed, and the establishment of the silver
pound as the measure of value may be considered as the basis of all the
monetary systems of modern Europe.
The interval of prosperity was, however, brief; no permanent addition
was made to the stock of precious metals, and prices continued to fall,
as is demonstrated by the rapid deterioration of the currency. In this
second period of relapse disintegration reached its limit.
During the tenth and eleventh centuries the Northmen infested the
coasts of France, and sailed up the rivers burning and ravaging, as
far as Rouen and Orléans. Even the convents of Saint Martin of Tours
and Saint Germain des Près were sacked. The Mediterranean swarmed with
Saracenic corsairs, who took Fraxinetum, near Toulon, seized the passes
of the Alps, and levied toll on travel into Italy. The cannibalistic
Huns overran the Lower Danube, and closed the road to Constantinople.
Western Europe was cut off from the rest of the world. Commerce nearly
ceased--the roads were so bad and dangerous, and the sea so full of
pirates.
The ancient stock of scientific knowledge was gradually forgotten, and
the imagination had full play. Upon philosophy the effect was decisive;
Christianity sank to a plane where it appealed more vividly to the
minds of the surrounding pagans than their own faiths, and conversion
then went on rapidly. In 912 Rollo of Normandy was baptized; the Danes,
Norwegians, Poles, and Russians followed; and in 997 Saint Stephen
ascended the throne of Hungary and reopened to Latin Christians the way
to the Sepulchre.
Perhaps the destiny of modern Europe has hinged upon the fact that
the Christian sacred places lay in Asia, and therefore the pilgrimage
brought the West into contact with the East. But the pilgrimage was
the effect of relic-worship, and relic-worship the vital principle of
monasticism. In these centuries of extreme credulity monasticism had
its strongest growth. A faculty for scientific study was abnormal, and
experimental knowledge was ascribed to sorcery. The monk Gerbert, who
became pope as Sylvester II., was probably the most remarkable man of
his generation. Though poor and of humble birth, he attracted so much
attention that he was sent to Spain, where he studied in the Moorish
schools at Barcelona and Cordova, and where he learned the rudiments of
mathematics and geography. His contemporaries were so bewildered by his
knowledge that they thought it due to magic, and told how he had been
seen flying home from Spain, borne on the back of the demon he served,
and loaded with the books he had stolen from the wizard, his master.
Sylvester died in 1003, but long afterwards anatomy was still condemned
by the Church, and four separate councils anathematized experimental
medicine, because it threatened to destroy the value of the shrines.
The ascendency of Cluny began with Saint Hugh, who was chosen abbot in
1049, the Year Leo’s election. The corporation then obtained control
of Rome, and in another twenty-five years was engaged in its desperate
struggle with the remains of the old secular police power. But though
Hildebrand crushed Henry, the ancient materialism was too deeply
imbedded to be eradicated in a single generation, and meanwhile the
imagination had been brought to an uncontrollable intensity. A new and
fiercer excitement seethed among the people--a vision of the conquest
of talismans so powerful as to make their owners sure of heaven and
absolute on earth.
The attraction of Palestine had been very early felt, for in 333 a
guide-book had been written, called the _Itinerary from Bordeaux to
Jerusalem_, which gave the route through the valley of the Danube,
together with an excellent account of the Holy Land. In those
days, before the barbaric inroads, the journey was safe enough; but
afterwards communication nearly ceased, and when Stephen was baptized
in 997, the relics of Jerusalem had all the excitement of novelty.
Europe glowed with enthusiasm. Sylvester proposed a crusade, and
Hildebrand declared he would rather risk his life for the holy places
“than rule the universe.”
Each year the throngs upon the road increased, convents sprang up along
the way to shelter the pilgrims, the whole population succoured and
venerated them, and by the time Cluny had seized the triple crown, they
left in veritable armies. Ingulf, secretary to William the Conqueror,
set out in 1064 with a band seven thousand strong.
In that age of faith no such mighty stimulant could inflame the human
brain as a march to Jerusalem. A crusade was no vulgar war for a
vulgar prize, but an alliance with the supernatural for the conquest
of talismans whose possession was tantamount to omnipotence. Urban’s
words at Clermont, when he first preached the holy war, have lost their
meaning now; but they burned like fire into the hearts of his hearers
then, for he promised them glory on earth and felicity in heaven, and
he spoke in substance thus: No longer do you attack a castle or a town,
but you undertake the conquest of the holy places. If you triumph, the
blessings of heaven and the kingdoms of the East will be your share; if
you fall, you will have the glory of dying where Christ died, and God
will not forget having seen you in His holy army.[101]
Urban told them “that under their general Jesus Christ ... they, the
Christian, the invincible army,” would march to certain victory. In
the eleventh century this language was no metaphor, for the Cluniac
monk spoke as the mouthpiece of a god who was there actually among
them, offering the cross he brought from the grave, and promising them
triumphs: not the common triumphs which may be won by man’s unaided
strength, but the transcendent glory which belongs to beings of another
world.
So the crusaders rode out to fight, the originals of the fairy knights,
clad in impenetrable armour, mounted on miraculous horses, armed with
resistless swords, and bearing charmed lives.
Whole villages, even whole districts, were left deserted; land lost its
value; what could not be sold was abandoned; and the peasant, loaded
with his poor possessions, started on foot with his wife and children
in quest of the Sepulchre, so ignorant of the way that he mistook each
town upon the road for Zion. Whether he would or no, the noble had
to lead his vassals or be forsaken, and riding at their head with his
hawks and hounds, he journeyed towards that marvellous land of wealth
and splendour, where kingdoms waited the coming of the devoted knight
of God. Thus men, women, and children, princes and serfs, priests and
laymen, in a countless, motley throng, surged toward that mighty cross
and tomb whose possessor was raised above the limitations of the flesh.
The crusaders had no commissariat and no supply train, no engines of
attack, or other weapons than those in their hands, and the holy relics
they bore with them. There was no general, no common language, no
organization; and so over unknown roads, and through hostile peoples,
they wandered from the Rhine to the Bosphorus, and from the Bosphorus
to Syria.
These earlier crusades were armed migrations, not military invasions,
and had they met with a determined enemy, they must have been
annihilated; but it chanced that the Syrians and Egyptians were at
war, and the quarrel was so bitter that the caliph actually sought the
Christian alliance. Even under such circumstances the waste of life
was fabulous, and, had not Antioch been betrayed, the starving rabble
must have perished under its walls. At Jerusalem, also, the Franks were
reduced to the last extremity before they carried the town; and had it
not been for the arrival of a corps of Genoese engineers, who built
movable towers, they would have died miserably of hunger and thirst.
Nor was the coming of this reinforcement preconcerted. On the contrary,
the Italians accidentally lost their ships at Joppa, and, being left
without shelter, sought protection in the camp of the besiegers just in
time.
So incapable were the crusaders of regular operations, that even
when the towers were finished and armed, the leaders did not know how
to fill the moat, and Raymond of Saint Gilles had nothing better to
propose than to offer a penny for every three stones thrown into the
ditch.
On July 15, 1099, Jerusalem was stormed; almost exactly three years
after the march began. Eight days later Godfrey de Bouillon was elected
king, and then the invaders spread out over the strip of mountainous
country which borders the coast of Palestine and Syria, and the
chiefs built castles in the defiles of the hills, and bound themselves
together by a loose alliance against the common enemy.
The decentralization of the colony was almost incredible. The core of
the kingdom was the barony of Jerusalem, which extended only from the
Egyptian desert to a stream just north of Beyrout, and inland to the
Jordan and the spurs of the hills beyond the Dead Sea, and yet it was
divided into more than eighteen independent fiefs, whose lords had all
the rights of sovereignty, made war, administered justice, and coined
money.[102]
Beside these petty states, the ports were ceded to the Italian cities
whose fleets helped in the conquest. Venice, Genoa, and Pisa held
quarters in Ascalon, Joppa, Tyre, Acre, and Beyrout, which were
governed by consuls or viscounts, who wrangled with each other and with
the central government.
Such was the kingdom over which Godfrey reigned, but there were three
others like it which together made up the Frankish monarchy. To the
north of the barony of Jerusalem lay the county of Tripoli, and beyond
Tripoli, extending to Armenia, the principality of Antioch. To the east
of Antioch the county of Edessa stretched along the base of the Taurus
Mountains and spread out somewhat indefinitely beyond the Euphrates.
Thus on the north Edessa was the outwork of Christendom, while to the
south the castle of Karak, which commanded the caravan road between
Suez and Damascus, held a corresponding position among the hills to the
east of the Dead Sea.
Beyond the mountains the great plain sweeps away into Central Asia,
and in this plain the Franks never could maintain their footing. Their
failure to do so proved their ruin, for their position lay exposed to
attack from Damascus; and it was by operating from Damascus as a base
that Saladin succeeded in forcing the pass of Banias, and in cutting
the Latin possessions in two at the battle of Tiberias.
A considerable body of Europeans were thus driven in like a wedge
between Egypt and the Greek Empire, the two highest civilizations of
the Middle Ages, while in front lay the Syrian cities of the plain,
with whom the Christians were at permanent war. The contact was the
closest, the struggle for existence the sharpest, and the barbaric mind
received a stimulus not unlike the impulse Gaul received from Rome; for
the interval which separated the East from the West, at the beginning
of the twelfth century, was probably not less than that which divided
Italy from Gaul at the time of Cæsar.
When Godfrey de Bouillon took the cross, the Byzantine Empire was
already sinking. The Eastern trade which, for so many centuries, had
nourished its population, was beginning to flow directly from Asia
into Italy, and, as the economic aristocracy of the capital lost its
nutriment, it lost its energy. Apparently it fell in 1081, in the
revolution which raised Alexius Comuenus to the throne. Because Alexius
sacked Constantinople with a following of mongrel Greeks, Slavs, and
Bulgarians, he has been called the first Greek emperor, but in reality
the pure Greek blood had long since perished. The Byzantine population
at the end of the eleventh century was the lees of a multitude of
races,--a mixture of Slavs, Armenians, Jews, Thracians, and Greeks;
a residuum of the most tenacious organisms, after all that was higher
had disappeared. The army was a mixed horde of Huns, Arabs, Italians,
Britons, Franks; of all in short who could fight and were for sale,
while the Church was servile, the fancy dead, and art and literature
were redolent of decaying wealth.
Nevertheless, ever since the fall of Rome, Constantinople had been the
reservoir whence the West had drawn all its materialistic knowledge,
and therefore, it was during the centuries when the valley of the
Danube was closed, that the arts fell to their lowest ebb beyond the
Alps and Rhine. After pilgrimages began again in the reign of Stephen,
the Bosphorus lay once more in the path of travel, and as the returning
palmers spread over the West, a revival followed in their track; a
revival in which the spirit of Byzantium may yet be clearly read in the
architecture of Italy and France. Saint Mark is a feeble imitation of
Saint Sophia, while Viollet-le-Duc has described how long he hesitated
before he could decide whether the carving of Vézelay, Autun, and
Moissac was Greek or French; and has dwelt upon the laborious care with
which he pored over all the material, before he became convinced that
the stones were cut by artists trained at Cluny, who copied Byzantine
models.[103]
But the great gulf between the economic and the imaginative
development, separated the moribund Greek society from the
semi-childhood of the Franks; a chasm in its nature impassable because
caused by a difference of mind, and which is, perhaps, seen most
strikingly in religious architecture; for religious architecture,
though always embodying the highest poetical aspirations of every
civilization, yet had in the East and West diametrically opposite
points of departure.
Saint Sophia is pregnant with the spirit of the age of Justinian. There
was no attempt at mystery, or even solemnity, about the church, for the
mind of the architect was evidently fixed upon solving the problem of
providing the largest and lightest space possible, in which to display
the functions of a plutocratic court. His solution was brilliantly
successful. He enlarged the dome and diminished the supports, until,
nothing remaining to interrupt the view, it seemed as though the roof
had been suspended in the air. For his purpose the exterior had little
value, and he sacrificed it.
The conception of the architects of France was the converse of this,
for it was highly emotional. The gloom of the lofty vaults, dimly
lighted by the subdued splendour of the coloured windows, made the
interior of the Gothic cathedral the most mysterious and exciting
sanctuary for the celebration of the miracle which has ever been
conceived by man; while without, the doors and windows, the pinnacles
and buttresses, were covered with the terrific shapes of demons and the
majestic figures of saints, admonishing the laity of the danger lurking
abroad, and warning them to take refuge within.
But if the Greeks and the Franks had little affinity for each other,
the case was different with the Saracens, who were then in the full
vigour of their intellectual prime, and in the meridian of their
material splendour.
In the eleventh century, when Paris was still a cluster of huts
cowering for shelter on the islands of the Seine, and the palace of
the Duke of Normandy and King of England was the paltry White Tower of
London, Cairo was being adorned with those masterpieces which are still
the admiration of the world.
Prisse d’Avennes considered that, among the city gates the Bab-el-Nasr
stands first in “taste and style,” and the famous Bab-el-Zouilyeh is
of the same period. He also thought the mosque of Teyloun a “model of
elegance and grandeur,” and observed, when criticising the mosque of
the Sultan Hassan, built in 1356, that though imposing and beautiful,
it lacks the unity which is only found in the earlier Arabic monuments,
such as Teyloun.[104] Indeed, the signs are but too apparent that, from
the twelfth century, the instinct for form began to fail in Egypt, the
surest precursor of artistic decay.
The magnificence of the decoration and furnishing of the Arabic palaces
and houses has seldom been surpassed, and a few extracts from an
inventory of a sale of the collections of the Caliph Mostanser-Billah,
held in 1050, may give some idea of its gorgeousness.
_Precious Stones._--A chest containing 7 _Mudds_ of emeralds;
each of these worth at least 300,000 dynars, which makes in all
at the lowest estimation, 36,000,000 francs.
A necklace of precious stones worth about 80,000 dynars.
Seven _Waïbah_ of magnificent pearls sent by the Emir of Mecca.
. . . . . . . . . .
_Glass._--Several chests, containing a large number of vases ...
of the purest crystal, chased and plain.
Other chests filled with precious vases of different materials.
. . . . . . . . . .
_Table Utensils._--A large number of gold dishes, enamelled or
plain, in which were incrusted all sorts of colours, forming
most varied designs.
. . . . . . . . . .
One hundred cups and other shapes, of bezoar-stone, on most of
which was engraved the name of the Caliph Haroun-el-Raschid.
Another cup which was 3 1⁄2 hands wide and one deep.
_Different Articles._--Chests containing inkstands of different
shapes, round or square, small or large, of gold or silver,
sandal wood, aloe, ebony, ivory, and all kinds of woods,
enriched with stones, gold and silver, or remarkable for beauty
and elegance of workmanship.
. . . . . . . . . .
Twenty-eight enamel dishes inlaid with gold, which the Caliph
Aziz had received as a present from the Greek emperor and each
of which was valued at 3000 dynars.
Chests filled with an enormous quantity of steel, china, and
glass mirrors, ornamented with gold and silver filagree; some
were bordered with stones, and had cornelian handles, and
others precious stones. One of them had quite a long and thick
handle of emeralds. These mirrors were enclosed in cases made
of velvet or silk or most beautiful wood; their locks were of
gold or silver.
. . . . . . . . . .
Four hundred large cases, ornamented with gold and filled with
all sorts of jewels.
Various silver household goods, and six thousand gold vases, in
which were put narcissus or violets.
Thirty-six thousand pieces of crystal, among them a box
ornamented with figures in relief, weighing 17 roks.
A large number of knives which, at the lowest price, were sold
for 36,000 dynars.
. . . . . . . . . .
A turban enriched with precious stones, one of the most curious
and valuable articles in the palace: it was said to be worth
130,000 dynars. The stones which covered it, and whose weight
was 17 roks, were divided between two chiefs, who both claimed
it. One had in his share a ruby weighing 23 mitqâls, and in the
share which fell to the other were 100 pearls each of which
weighed 3 mitqâls. When the two generals were obliged to fly
from Fostat, all these valuables were given up to pillage.
A golden peacock enriched with the most valuable precious
stones: the eyes were rubies, the feathers gilded enamel
representing all the colours of peacock feathers.
A cock of the same metal, with a comb of the largest rubies
covered with pearls and other stones; the eyes also were made
of rubies.
A gazelle whose body was covered all over with pearls and the
most precious stones; the stomach was white and composed of a
series of pearls of the purest water.
A sardonyx table, with conical feet of the same substance; it
was large enough for several people to eat there at the same
time.
A garden, the soil made of chased and gilt silver and yellow
earth. There were silver trees, with fruits made of precious
materials.
A golden palm-tree enriched with superb pearls. It was in
a golden chest and its fruit was made of precious stones
representing dates in every stage of ripeness. This tree was of
inestimable value.[105]
About the time the monk Gerbert was accused of sorcery because he
understood the elements of geometry, the Caliph Aziz-Billah founded the
university of Cairo, the greatest Mohammedan institution of learning.
This was two hundred years before the organization of the university
of Paris, and the lectures at the mosque of El-Azhar are said to have
been attended by twelve thousand students. Munk was of opinion that
Arabic philosophy reached its apogee with Averrhoës, who was born about
1120.[106] Certainly he was the last of a famous line which began at
Bagdad three centuries earlier; and Hauréau, in describing the great
period of Saint Thomas at Paris, dwelt upon the debt Western learning
owed to the Saracens.
The splendour of Haroun-al-Raschid is still proverbial. The tales of
his gold and silver, his silks and gems, almost surpass belief, and
even in his reign the mechanical arts were so advanced that he sent a
clock to Charlemagne.
Humboldt considered the Arabs as the founders of modern experimental
science, and they were relatively skilful chemists, for they understood
the composition of sulphuric and nitric acid, and of aqua regia,
beside the preparation of mercury and of various oxides of metals. As
physicians they were far in advance of Europe. While the Church healed
by miracles, and put experimental methods under her ban, the famous
Rhazes conducted the hospitals of Bagdad, and in the tenth century
wrote a work in ten books, which was printed at Venice as late as 15
10. Practitioners of all nations have used his treatise on small-pox
and measles; he introduced mild purgatives, invented the seton, and was
a remarkable anatomist. He died in 932.
William of Tyre stated that the Frankish nobles of Syria preferred
the native or Jewish doctors; and though Saladin sent his physician to
Richard, Richard never thought of sending an Englishman to Saladin when
afterwards attacked by illness.
Even as late as the middle of the thirteenth century little advance
seems to have been made in Europe, for one of the most curious
phenomena of the crusades was the improvement in the health of the
army of Saint Louis after it surrendered. During the campaign various
epidemics had been very fatal; but when the soldiers were subjected
to the sanitary regulations of the Egyptian medical staff, disease
disappeared.
The Arabs had a strong taste for mathematics, and were familiar with
most of the discoveries which have been attributed to astronomers of
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
As early as 1000 spherical trigonometry was in use, and Aboul-Hassan
wrote an excellent treatise on conic sections. In 833 the Caliph
El-Mamoun, having founded observatories at Bagdad and Damascus, caused
a degree to be measured on the plain of Palmyra. By the thirteenth
century the Arabic instruments were comparatively perfect. They had
the astrolabe, the gnomon, the sextant, and the mariner’s compass,
and Aboul-Wafa determined the third lunar variation six hundred years
before Tycho Brahe.
To enumerate all the improvements in agriculture and manufactures which
came from the mediæval pilgrimage would take a separate treatise. A
French savant thought of writing a book upon the flora of the crusades
alone. The mulberry and the silkworm were brought from Greece, the
maize from Turkey, the plum from Damascus, the eschalot from Ascalon,
and the windmills with which, down to the present century, corn was
ground, were one of the importations from the Levant.
It might almost be said that all the West knew of the arts was learned
on the road to the sepulchre. The Tyrians taught the Sicilians to
refine sugar, and the Venetians to make glass; Damascus steel was a
proverb, Damascus potters were the masters of the potters of France;
the silk, brocades, and carpets of Syria and Persia were in the twelfth
century what they have been down to the present day, at once the
admiration and despair of Western weavers, while there can be little
doubt that gunpowder was the invention of the chemists of the East.
All the evidence tends to prove that the ogive came from the
Levant, and without the ogive Gothic architecture could never have
developed.[107] Prior to the council of Clermont the pointed arch was
practically unknown west of the Adriatic; but the Arabs had long used
it, and it may still be seen in the ninth century mosque of Teyloun.
In Palestine the Franks were surrounded by Saracenic buildings, and
employed Saracenic masons, and the attention of Western architects
seems no sooner to have been drawn to the possibilities of the ogive,
than they saw in it the solution of those problems which had before
defied them. An arch formed by two intersecting segments of a circle
could be raised to any height from any base, and was perfectly adapted
to vaulting the parallelograms formed by the columns of the nave.
Therefore, contemporaneously with the building of the church of the
Holy Sepulchre, the period of transition between the Romanesque and the
Gothic opened in France. The two most important transition buildings
were the abbey of Saint Denis and the cathedral of Noyon, and, while
the Holy Sepulchre was dedicated in 1149, the abbey was completed in
1144, and the cathedral was begun almost immediately after.[108]
Thenceforward the movement was rapid, and before the year 1200,
Christian sacred architecture was culminating in those marvels of
beauty, the cathedrals of Paris, of Bourges, of Chartres, and of Le
Alans. Yet, though sacred architecture tells the story of the rise of
the imagination as nothing else can, if it be true that centralization
hinges on the preponderance of the attack in war, the surest way of
measuring the advance toward civilization of rude peoples must be by
military engineering.
In the eleventh century, north of the Alps, this science was
rudimentary, and nothing can be more impressive than to compare the
mighty ramparts of Constantinople with the small square tower which
William the Conqueror found ample for his needs in London.
When the crusaders were first confronted with the Greek and Arabic
works, they were helpless; nor were their difficulties altogether those
of ignorance. Such fortifications were excessively costly, and a feudal
State was poor because the central power had not the force to constrain
individuals to pay taxes. The kingdom of Jerusalem was in chronic
insolvency.
The life of the Latin colony in Syria, therefore, hung on the
development of some financial system which should make the
fortification of Palestine possible, and such a system grew up through
the operation of the imagination, though in an unusual manner.
Fetish worship drew a very large annual contribution from the
population in the shape of presents to propitiate the saints, and
one of the effects of the enthusiasm for the crusades was to build up
conventual societies in the Holy Land, which acted as standing armies.
The most famous of the military orders were the Knights of the Temple
and the Knights of Saint John. William of Tyre has left an interesting
description of the way in which the Temple came to be organized:--
“As though the Lord God sends his grace there where he
pleases, worthy knights, who were of the land beyond the sea,
proposed to stay for ever in the service of Our Lord, and
to live in common, like regular canons. In the hand of the
patriarch they vowed chastity and obedience, and renounced all
property.... The king and the other barons, the patriarch and
other prelates of the Church, gave them funds to live on and
to clothe themselves.... The first thing which was enjoined
on them in pardon for their sins was to guard the roads by
which the pilgrims passed, from robbers and thieves, who did
great harm. This penance the patriarch and the other bishops
enjoined. Nine years they remained thus in secular habit,
wearing such garments as were given them by the knights and
other good people, for the love of God. In the ninth a council
was assembled in France in the city of Troyes. There were
assembled the archbishops of Rheims and Sens and all their
bishops. The bishop of Albano especially was there as papal
legate, the abbots of Citeau and Clairvaux, and many other of
the religious.
“There were established the order and the rules by which they
were to live as monks. Their habit was ordered to be white, by
the authority of Pope Honorius and the patriarch of Jerusalem.
This order had already existed nine years, as I have told
you, and there were as yet only nine brothers, who lived from
day to day on charity. From that time their numbers began to
increase, and revenues and tenures were given them. In the time
of Pope Etigenius it was ordered that they should have sewn
upon their copes and on their robes a cross of red cloth, so
that they should be known among all men.... From thence have
their possessions so increased as you can see, that the order
of the Temple is in the ascendant.... Hardly can you find on
either side of the sea a Christian land where this order has
not to-day houses and brethren, and great revenues.”[109]
The council of Troyes was held in 1128, and in the next fifty years,
in proportion as the feudal organization of the Latin kingdom decayed,
the military orders increased in wealth and power. The Hospital held
nineteen thousand manors in Europe, the Temple nine thousand, and each
manor could maintain a knight in the field.
At Paris the house of the Temple filled a whole quarter; its donjon was
one of the most superb buildings of the Middle Ages; at a later period,
when the corporation took to banking, it served as a place of deposit
for both public and private treasure, and in times of danger the king
himself was glad to take shelter within its walls.
The creation of this monastic standing army was evidently due to the
inferiority of the attack to the defence, which made the civil power
incapable of coercing the individual who refused to pay taxes. The
petty barons who built the castles throughout Palestine were too poor
to erect fortifications capable of resisting the superior engines used
in the East. Therefore the whole burden of the war was thrown upon the
Church, and in all modern history nothing is more wonderful than the
way in which this work was done.
Within fifty years after the conquest the feudal machinery was in
ruin, and the strategic points, one after another, passed into the
hands of the strongest force of the age, the force which was incarnate
imagination.
The fortresses built by the monks were the ramparts of Christendom,
and among the remains which have survived the past, perhaps none are
more impressive than the huge castles of the crusaders in the gorges
of the Syrian mountains; nor do any show so clearly whence came the
rationalistic stimulus which revolutionized Europe, shattered the
Church, and brought in the economic society which has ruled Europe
since the Templars passed away.
Twenty-five miles due west of Homs, at the point where the Lebanon
melts into the Ansarieh range, the mountains open, and two passes
lead by easy descents to the sea. Through the southern runs the road
to Tripoli, through the northern that to Tortosa. Between them, on a
crag a thousand feet above the valleys, still stands the castle of the
Krak des Chevaliers, ceded by Count Raymond of Tripoli to the Hospital
in 1145. Towering above the plain it can be seen for miles, and no
description can give an idea of its gigantic size and power. Coucy and
Pierrefonds are among the largest fortresses of Europe, and yet Coucy
and Pierrefonds combined are no larger than the Krak.
Compared with it, the works then built in the West were toys, and
the engineering talent shown in its conception was equalled by the
magnificence of its masonry. The Byzantine system was adopted. A double
wall, the inner commanding the outer, with a moat between; and three
enormous towers rising from the moat, formed the donjon. There were
stone machicoulis and all the refinements of defence which appeared in
France under Saint Louis and his son, and a study of this stupendous
monument shows plainly whence Europeans drew their military instruction
for a century to come.
The Krak was the outwork dominating the plain where the Christians
never made their footing good, and stood at the apex of a triangle
of fortresses as remarkable as itself. From its ramparts the great
white tower of Chastel-Blanc can be seen, midway between the outpost
commanding the mountain passes and the base upon the sea held by the
Temple; and from that tower the troop of Templars rode to relieve
the knights of Saint John, on the day when the crusaders routed the
conqueror Nour-ed-Din, and cut his army to pieces as it fled toward the
Lake of Homs, which lies in the distance.
But the white tower is unlike the donjons of other lands, and bears the
imprint of the force which built it, for it is not a layman’s hold, but
a church, whose windows are cut in walls thirteen feet thick, whence
the dim light falls across the altar where the magicians wrought their
miracles.
Within easy supporting distance lay Tortosa, a walled town, the outwork
of a donjon at least as strong as the Krak, and built with a perfection
of workmanship, and a beauty of masonry, which proves at once the
knowledge and the resources of the order. No monarch of the West could,
probably, at that time have undertaken so costly an enterprise, and
yet Tortosa was but one of four vast structures which lie within a few
miles of each other. The place was ceded to the Temple in 1183, just
at the beginning of the reign of Philip Augustus, before men dreamed of
the more important French fortifications.
At Margat, a day’s journey to the north, the Hospital had their
base upon the sea: a stronghold whose cost must have been fabulous,
for it is perched upon a crag high above the Mediterranean, and so
inaccessible that it is not easy to understand how the materials for
building were collected. Viollet-le-Duc, who was lost in admiration at
Coucy, declared that it was colossal enough to befit a race of giants,
and yet Coucy could have stood in the courtyard of Margat.
The Arabs, who were excellent engineers, deemed it a masterpiece, and
the Sultan Kalaoun could not endure the thought of injuring it. After
he had mined the great tower and was sure of victory, he proved to the
garrison his power to destroy it, in order to induce them to accept
most liberal terms of surrender, and let him have the prize. Perhaps
the best description ever given of the work is in a letter written by
the Sultan of Hamah to his vizier to announce its fall:
“The devil himself had taken pleasure in consolidating its
foundations. How many times have the Mussulmans tried to reach
its towers and fallen down the precipices! Markab is unique,
perched on the summit of a rock. It is accessible to relief,
and inaccessible to attack. The eagle and the vulture alone can
fly to its ramparts.”[110]