Europe on the Eve of the Crusades

There is an essay  in Setton, A History of the Crusades, Volume I: The first hundred years. With title "Western Europe on the eve of the Crusades". Here we will treat with the same historical event in different method.

    The once luxuriant civilization of Rome had been swept away by the Northern invaders as completely as a freshet despoils the fields when it not only destroys standing vegetation, but carries with the debris the soil itself. The most primitive arts, those associated with agriculture, were forgotten, and the rudiments of modern industries were not thought of. Much of the once cultivated land had, as has elsewhere been noted, reverted to native forest and marsh, and in places was still being purchased by strangers on titles secured by occupancy and first improvement, as now in the new territories of America. But even nature's pity for man was outraged; the bounty she gave from half-tilled acres was despoiled by men themselves, as hungry children snatch the morsels of charity from one another's hands. What was hoarded for personal possession became the spoil of petty robbers, and what was left by the neighborhood marauder was destroyed in the incessant baronial strife. To these devouring forces must be added the desolating wars between the papal and imperial powers, the conquest and reconquest of Spain by Moors and Christians, and the despoiling of Saxon England by the Normans. Throughout Europe, fields, cottages, castles, oftentimes churches, were stripped by the vandalism which had seemingly become a racial disposition. To this ordinary impoverished condition was added the especial misery, about 1195, of several years' failure of crops. Famine stalked through France and middle Europe; villages were depopulated. Cruel as they were, men grew weary of raiding one another's possessions when there was nothing to bring back but wounds. Even hatred palled when unsupported by envy and cupidity.

­    The crusades gave promise of opening a new world to greed. The stories that were told of Eastern riches grew, as repeated from tongue to tongue, until fable seemed poor in comparison with what was believed to be fact. All the wealth of antiquity was presumed to be still stored in treasure-vaults, which the magic key of the cross would unlock. The impoverished baron might exchange his half-ruined castle for some splendid estate beyond the iEgean, and the vulgar crowd, if they did not find Jerusalem paved with gold like the heavenly city, would assuredly tread the veins of rich mines or rest among the flowers of an earthly paradise. The Mohammedan's expectation of a sensual heaven after death was matched by the Christian's anticipation of what awaited him while still in life.

­    They who were uninfluenced by this prospect may have seized the more warrantable hope of opening profitable traffic with the Orient. The maritime cities of Italy had for a long time harvested great gains in the eastern Mediterranean, in spite of the Moslem interruptions of commerce. Would not a tide of wealth pour westward if only the swords of the Christians could hew down its barriers ?

    The church piously, but none the less shrewdly, stimulated the sense of economy or greed by securing exemption from taxation to all who should enlist, and putting a corresponding burden of excise upon those who remained at home, whose estates were assessed to pay the expenses of the absent. The householder who found it difficult to save his possessions while keeping personal guard over them was assured that m all his family and effects would be under the watchful protection of the church, with anathemas already forged against any who should molest them. If one were without means he might borrow to the limit of his zeal, with exemption from interest. It was understood that the Jews were still under necessity of paying back the thirty pieces of silver with which they had bought the Christians' Lord, the interest on which, compounded through the centuries, was now equal in amount to all there might be in the vaults of this accursed race.

 

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Chronicle of Ernoul

Bohadin (1145-1234)

Ansbert

Epistolae Cantuarienses

Pipe Rolls
 

The Feudal System and the Crusade

In accounting for the crusades we must consider the governmental condition of Europe at the time. Under no other system than that of feudalism would it have been possible to unify and mobilize the masses for the great adventure. Had Europe then been dominated by several great rulers, each with a nation at his control, as the case has been in subsequent times, even the popes would have been unable to combine the various forces in any enterprise that was not purely spiritual. Just to the extent in which the separate nationalities have developed their autonomy has the secular influence of the Roman see been lessened. Kings and emperors, whenever they have felt themselves strong enough to do so, have resented the leadership of Rome in matters having temporal bearings.

¬Nor would the mutual jealousies of the rulers themselves have allowed them to unite in any movement for the common glory, since the most urgent calls have never been sufficient to unite them even for the common defense, as is shown by the supineness of Catholic Europe when, in the fifteenth century, the Turks crossed the Marmora and assailed Constantinople.

But in the eleventh century there was no strong national government in Europe ; kingship and imperialism existed rather in name than in such power as we are accustomed to associate with the words. At the opening of the tenth century France was parcelled out into twenty- nine petty states, each controlled by its feudal lord. Hugh Capet (987-996) succeeded in temporarily combining under his sceptre these fragments of Charlemagne's estate; but his successors were unable to perpetuate the common dominion. In the year 1000 there were fifty-five great Frankish lords who were independent of the nominal sovereign. Indeed, some of these nobles exercised authority more weighty than that of the throne. Louis VI. (1108) first succeeded in making his lordly vassals respect his kingship, but his domain was small. " fie de France, properly so called, and a part of Orliannais, pretty nearly the five departments of the Seine, French Vexin, half the count ship of Sens, and the countship of Bourges — such was the whole of it. But this limited state was as liable to agitation, and often as troublous and toilsome to govern, as the very greatest of modern states. It was full of petty lords, almost sovereign in their own estates, and sufficiently strong to struggle against their kingly suzerain, who had, besides, all around his domains several neighbors more powerful than himself in the extent and population of their states " (Guizot).

In Spain much of the land was still held by the Moors. That which had been wrested from them was divided among the Christian heroes who conquered it, and who, though Feudal System rules were not formally recognized, held it with an aristocratic pretension commensurate with the leagues they shadowed with their swords.

¬In Germany, though imperialism had been established firmly by Otho the Great, the throne was forced to continual compromise with the ambition of its chief vassals, like the dukes of Saxony, Bavaria, Swabia, and Franconia. A papal appeal to such magnates was sufficient at any time to paralyze, or at least to neutralize, the imperial authority.

¬The Norman holdings in the south of Italy, the independence of the cities of Lombardy in the north, the claims of the German emperor and of the popes to landed control, were typical of the divisions of that unhappy peninsula.

¬Later than the age we are studying, Frederick Barbarossa (1152-90) enjoined that "in every oath of fealty to an inferior lord the vassal's duty to the emperor should be expressly reserved." But it was not so elsewhere. When Henry II. (1154-89) and Richard I. (1189-99) claimed lands in France, their French vassals never hesitated to adhere to these Knglish lords, nor " do they appear to have incurred any blame on that account. St. Louis (1226-70) declared in his laws that if 'justice be refused by the king to one of his vassals, the vassal may summon his own tenants, under penalty of forfeiting their fiefs, to assist him in obtaining redress by arms ' " (Hallam).

The extent to which the French barons were independent of the throne will be evident from a glance at their privileges. They possessed unchallenged :

(1) The right of coining money. In Hugh Capet's time there were one hundred and fifty independent mints in the realm.

¬(2) The right of waging private war. Every castle was a fortress, always equipped as in a state of siege.

¬(3) Immunity from taxation. Except that the king was provided with entertainment on his journeys, the crown had no revenue beyond that coming from the personal estates of its occupant.

¬(4) Freedom from all legislative control. Law-making ceased with the capitularies of Carloman in 882. The first renewal of the attempt at general legislation was not until the time of Louis VIII. in 1223. Even St. Louis declared in his establishments that the king could make no laws for the territories of the barons without their consent.

¬(5) Exclusive right of original judicature.

¬But if such was the independence of the feud-holder in his relations to the sovereign, those beneath him were in absolute dependence upon their lord. This is seen in the following obligations of feudal tenants to their superior :

¬(1) Reliefs: sums of money due from every one coming of age and taking a fief by inheritance ; fines upon alienation or change of tenant ownership.

¬(2) Escheats : reversion to the lord of all property upon a tenant's dying without natural heirs, or upon any delinquency of service.

¬(3) Aids : contributions levied in special emergency, as the lord's expedition to the Holy Land, the marriage of his sister, eldest son, or daughter, his paying a " relief " to his overlord, making his son a knight, or redeeming his own person from captivity.

(4) Wardship of tenant during minority. This involved on the part of the lord the right to select a husband for a female dependent, which alliance could be declined only on payment of a fine equal to that which any one desiring the woman could be induced to offer for her.

If the feudal system pressed so harshly upon those who were themselves of high rank, it need not be said that the common people were utterly crushed by this accumulation of graded despotisms, whose whole weight rested ultimately on the lowest stratum. The mass of the lowly was divided into three orders :

(1) Freemen possessing small tracts of allodial land, so called because held by original occupancy and not yet merged in the larger holdings. There were many freemen in the fifth and sixth centuries, but in the tenth century nearly all the land of Europe had become feudal. The freemen, whose possessions were small, soon found it necessary to surrender land and liberty for the sake of protection by some neighboring lord.

¬(2) Villains or serfs, who were attached to the land and transferable with it on change of owners.

¬(3) Slaves. The degradation of the servile class was limitless, the master having the right of life and death, entire use of the property and wages of his people, and absolute disposal of them in marriage. Slavery was abolished in France by Louis the Gross (1 108-37) so f ar as respected the inhabitants of cities ; but it took nearly two centuries more to accomplish the abolition of servitude throughout the kingdom.

The cities were, indeed, rising to assert their communal, if not manhood, rights. The communes, as they were called, demanded and received privilege in certain places of electing any persons to membership as citizens who were guaranteed absolute ownership of property. But the communes were far from even suggesting anything like the modern democratic systems, and were opposed by clergy and nobility. " So that," says Guizot, " security could hardly be purchased, save at the price of liberty. Liberty was then so stormy and so fearful that people conceived, if not a disgust for it, at any rate a horror of it." Men had not evolved the morality which could make a commonwealth. Law was bound on men only by forcq. The wall of the castle, grand and impressive as wealth could build it, or only a rude addition to the natural rock, was the sole earthly object of reverence. To the strong man came the weak, saying, " Let me be yours ; protect me and I will fight for you."

It will be evident that under the feudal system patriotism, in the modern sense of attachment to one's national domain, can scarcely be said to have existed. While we may not believe recent French writers who assert that the love of their country as such was born with the Revolution a hundred years ago, it is certain that the mediaeval attachment was no wider than to one's immediate neighborhood. The crusading Count of Flanders, on viewing the desolate hills about Jerusalem, exclaimed, " I am astonished that Jesus Christ could have lived in such a desert. I prefer my big castle in my district of Arras/' The love of the peasant seems to have been only for his familiar hills and vineyards, and his loyalty was limited by the protecting hand of his lord.

Yet generous spirits could not remain forever so narrowly bounded in their interests. Men were ready to hear the call to a wider range of sympathies and actions. The summons for the crusades thus furnished the lacking sentiment of patriotism; but it was a patriotism that could not be bounded by the Rhine or the Danube, by the Channel or the Pyrenees. Europe was country ; Christendom was fatherland.

¬At the same time the compactness of each feud, the close interdependence of lord and vassal, furnished the condition for the organization of bands of fighting men, ready to move at once, and to continue the enterprise so long as the means of the superior should hold out. There was needed to start the crusading armies no council of parliament or alliance of nations, hazarded and delayed by the variant policies of different courts. If the baron was inclined to obey the call of his ghostly superior, the successor of St. Peter, his retainers were ready to march. And the most brawling of the barons was superstitious enough to think that the voice of the Pope might be the voice of God. If he did not, his retainers did, and disobedience to the papal will might cost him the obedience of those subject to him. Besides, many of the feudal lords were themselves in clerical orders, with their oath of fealty lying at the feet of the Holy Father.

Thus Europe, though divided into many factions, and, indeed, because the factions were so many, was in a condition to be readily united. We shall see in a subsequent chapter that it was in the interest of the holy see to apply the spring which should combine and set in motion these various communities as but parts of that gigantic piece of ecclesiastical and military mechanism invented by Hildebrand.

The Grave of Saladin

They buried him that day in the garden house in the Citadel of Damascus, at the hour of the "asr العصر" prayer. The sword which he had helped through the Holy War was laid adjacent to him : " he brought it with him to Paradise." He had given away everything, and the cash for the internment must be acquired, even to the straw for the blocks that made the grave. The service was as basic as a poor person's burial service. A striped material secured the undistinguished coffin. No artist was permitted to sing a lament, no evangelist to make speech. At the point when the huge number, who thronged about the gate, saw the bier, a great wailing went up, and so distraught were the people that they could not form the words of prayer, but only cried and groaned. All eyes were wet, and there were few that did not weep aloud. Then every man went home and shut his door, and the empty silent streets bore witness to a great sorrow. Only the weeping secretary and those of the household went to pray over the grave and indulge their grief. The next day the people thronged to the tomb, praying, lamenting, reciting the Koran, and invoking the blessing of God upon him who slept beneath.

It was not till the close of a second year that the body of the Sultan was interred by a son's loving care in the oratory on the northern side of the Kellasa, beside the great Omayyad mosque, where it lies now. Over it the faithful chancellor, who was soon to follow his master, wrote the epitaph: “O God, accept this soul, and open to him the gates of heaven, that last victory for which he hoped.

“ I entered into this oratory,” says a later biographer, “ by the door which gives on the Kellasa, and after reciting a portion of the Koran over the grave, I invoked God’s mercy on its dweller. The warden showed me a packet containing Saladin's clothes, and I saw among them a short yellow vest with black cuffs, and I prayed that the sight might be blessed to me."

The savvy doctor Abd el Latif composed, to some degree pessimistically, that as far as anyone is concerned this was the main occurrence of a King's demise that was genuinely grieved by the general population. The mystery of Saladin's energy lay in the affection for his subjects. What others tried to accomplish by dread, by seriousness, by magnificence, he accom plished by generosity. In the paramount words which he talked, not well before his demise, to his best dearest child, ez Zahir, on rejecting him to his common government, he uncovered the wellspring of his own quality.

“My son,” he said, “ I commend thee to the most high God, the fountain of all goodness. Do His will, for that way lieth peace. Abstain from the shedding of blood; trust not to that; for blood that is spilt never slumbers. Seek I0 ruin I/ze luarts of tlzy people, and watch over their prosperity ; for it is to secure their happiness that thou art appointed by God and by me. Try to gain the hearts of thy emirs and ministers and nobles. I have become great as I am because I have won men's hearts by gentleness and kindness”.

Death of Saladin

At the point when Saladin was guaranteed that King Richard of England had truly taken ship and left the nation to Europe, Saladin started an advance through the land which had been won and held at so incredible cost. He went by every one of the fortresses "and boss urban areas, looking at their guards, giving requests for fortications, and putting in each a solid army of stallion and foot. At Beyrut, on the Ist of November, he got the Prince of Antioch, Bohemond the Stammerer, who taken an interest in the arrangement of peace; the meeting was heartfelt, and the Prince was given terrains in the plain of Antioch to the estimation of 15,000 gold pieces a year. At Kaukab—at no time in the future to be called Belvoir—he discovered his antiquated worker of early days, Karakush the developer of the dividers of Cairo, who had grieved in jail at Acre as far back as the surrender. There were no censures, yet just the welcome because of old and attempted commitment. On the fourth of November Damascus yet again acclaimed its Sultan. He had not been inside its doors for a long time, and his open levee the following day was thronged with old companions and glad subjects. The artists had no words uncommon and sufficiently rich for the considerable event.

Once more Saladin was at home among his child ren. We see him sitting in his summer house in the castle grounds, with his younger children about him. Envoys from the Franks were announced, but when they came into his presence, their shaven chins, cropped hair, and strange clothes frightened little Abu Bekr, who began to cry. The father, thinking only of the child, dismissed the ambassadors with an excuse, before they had even delivered their message. Older sons were there, grown men who had fought in his battles, and with these and his brother, el Adil, he went day after day hunting the gazelle in the spacious plains about Damascus. He had thoughts of going to Mekka on pilgrimage, the supreme duty of the pious Moslem; he wished to visit again that Egypt which had been_ his stepping stone to power; but the time passed, and the pilgrims came back from Arabia, and Saladin was still at Damascus, revelling in the delights of a peaceful home.

On Friday the 20th of February, he rode out with Baha d din to meet the caravan of the Hajj. He had not been well of late, and it was the wet season; the roads were streaming after heavy rains, and he had imprudently forgotten to wear his usual quilted gambeson. That night he had fever. The next day he could not join his friends at dinner, and the sight of the son sitting in the father's seat brought tears to many eyes—they took it as an omen. Each day the Sultan grew worse, his head was racked with pain, and he suffered internally. On the fourth day the doctors bled him; and from that time he grew steadily worse. The fever parched his skin, and he became weaker and weaker. On the ninth day his mind wandered; he fell into a stupor and could no longer take his draught. Every night Baha ed din and the chancellor el Fadil would go to see him, or at least to hear the doctors’ report; and sometimes they would come out streaming with tears, which they strove to command, for there was always a multitude outside the gates waiting to learn from their faces how the Master was. On Sunday, the tenth day of the illness, medicine gave some relief, the sick man drank a good draught of barley water, and broke into a profuse perspiration. “We gave thanks to God . . . and came out with lightened hearts." It was but the last effort. On Tuesday night the faithful secretary and chancellor were summoned to the castle, but they did not see the Sultan, who was sinking fast. There was a divine with him, repeating the confession of faith and reading the Holy Word; and when he came to the passage “He is God, than whom there is no other God,—who knoweth the unseen and the seen,—the Compassionate, the Merciful," the Sultan murmured, “True "; and when the words came, “ In Him do I trust," the dying man smiled, his face lighted up, and he rendered his soul to his Lord.

Saladin died on Wednesday, the 4th of March, 1193, at the age of fty ve.