to the East to keep it from the West, just as Charlemagne had invaded and conquered the country of the Saxons to put an end to their inroads upon the Franks. And this prudent plan availed not only to give the Christians of the West a hope of security, it afforded them the pleasure of vengeance. They were about to pay back alarm for alarm, and evil for evil, to the enemy from whom they had suffered in the same way; hatred and pride, as well as piety, obtained satisfaction.
There is moreover great motive power in a spirit of enterprise and a taste for adventure. Care-for-nothingness is one of man-kind’s chief diseases, and if it plays so conspicuous a part in comparatively enlightened and favored communities, amidst the labors and the enjoyments of an advanced civilization, its influence was certainly not less in times of intellectual sloth and harshly monotonous existence. To escape therefrom, to satisfy in some sort the energy and curiosity inherent in man, the people of the eleventh century had scarcely any resource but war, with its excitement and distant excursions into unknown regions. Thither rushed the masses of the people, whilst the minds which were eager, above everything, for intellectual movement and for knowledge, thronged, on the mountain of St. Genevieve, to the lectures of Abelard. Need of variety and novelty, and an instinctive desire to extend their views and enliven their existence, probably made as many crusaders as the feeling against the Mussulmans and the promptings of piety.
The Council of Clermont, at its closing on the 28th of November, 1095, had fixed the month of August in the following year, and the feast of the Assumption, for the departure of the crusaders for the Holy Land; but the people’s impatience did not brook this waiting, short as it was in view of the greatness and difficulties of the enterprise. As early as the 8th of March, 1096, and in the course of the spring three mobs rather than armies set out on the crusade, with a strength, it is said, of eighty or one hundred thousand persons in one case, and of fifteen or twenty thousand in the other two. Persons, not men, for there were amongst them many women and children, whole families, in fact, who had left their villages, without organization and without provisions, calculating that they would be competent to find their own way, and that He who feeds the young ravens would not suffer to die of want pilgrims wearing His cross. Whenever, on their road, a town came in sight, the children asked if that were Jerusalem. The first of these mobs had for its head Peter the Hermit himself, and a Burgundian knight called Walter Havenought; the second had a German priest named Gottschalk; and the third a Count Emico, of Leiningen, potent in the neighborhood of Mayence. It is wrong to call them heads, for they were really nothing of the kind; their authority was rejected, at one time as tyrannical, at another as useless. “The grasshoppers,” was the saying amongst them in the words of Solomon’s proverbs, “have no king, and yet they go in companies.” In crossing Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the provinces of the Greek empire, these companies, urged on by their brutal passions or by their necessities and material wants, abandoned themselves to such irregularities that, as they went, princes and peoples, instead of welcoming them as Christians, came to treat them as enemies, of whom it was necessary to get rid at any price. Peter the Hermit and Gottschalk made honorable and sincere efforts to check the excesses of their following, which were a source of so much danger; but Count Emico, on the contrary, says William of Tyre, “himself took part in the plunder, and incited his comrades to crime.” Thus, at one time taking the offensive, at another compelled to defend themselves against the attacks of the justly irritated inhabitants, these three immense companies of pilgrims, these disorderly volunteers, with great difficulty arrived, after enormous losses, at the gates of Constantinople. Either through fear or through pity, the Greek emperor, Alexis (or Alexius) Comnenus, permitted them to pitch their camp there; “but before long, plenty, idleness, and the sight of the riches of Constantinople brought once more into the camp license, indiscipline, and a thirst after brigandage. Whilst awaiting the war against the Mussulmans, the pilgrims pillaged the houses, the palaces, and even the churches in the outskirts of Byzantium. To deliver his capital from these destructive guests, Alexis furnished them with vessels, and got them shipped off across the Bosphorus.”
Whilst the crusade was commencing under these sad auspices, chieftains of more sense and better obeyed were preparing to give it another character and superior fortunes. Two great and real armies were forming in the north, the centre, and the south of France, and a third in Italy, amongst the Norman knights who had founded there the kingdom of Naples and Sicily, just before their countryman, William the Bastard, conquered England. The first of these armies had for its chief, Godfrey de Bouillon, duke of Lorraine, whom all his contemporaries have described as the model of a gallant and pious knight. He was the son of Eustace II., count of Boulogne, and “the lustre of nobility,” says Raoul of Caen, chronicler of his times, “was enhanced in his case by the splendor of the most exalted virtues, as well in affairs of the world as of heaven. As to the latter, he distinguished himself by his generosity towards the poor, and his pity for those who had committed faults. Furthermore, his humility, his extreme gentleness, his moderation, his justice, and his chastity were great; he shone as a light amongst the monks, even more than as a duke amongst the knights. And, nevertheless, he could also do the things which are of this world, fight, marshal the ranks, and extend by arms the domains of the Church. In his boyhood he learned to be first, or one of the first, to strike the foe; in youth he made it his habitual practice; and in advancing age he forgot it never. He was so perfectly the son of the warlike Count Eustace, and of his mother, Ida de Bouillon, a woman full of piety, and versed in literature, that at sight of him even a rival would have been forced to say of him, ‘For zeal in war, behold his father; for serving God, behold his mother.’ The second army, consisting chiefly of crusaders from Southern France, marched under the orders of Raymond IV., count of Toulouse, the oldest chieftain of the crusade, who still, however, united the ardor of youth with the experience of ripe age and the stubbornness of the graybeard. At the side of the Cid he had fought, and more than once beaten the Moors in Spain. He took with him to the East his third wife, Elvira, daughter of Alphonso VI., king of Castile, as well as a very young child he had by her, and he had made a vow, which he fulfilled, that he would return no more to his country, and would fight the infidels to the end of his days, in expiation of his sins. He was discreet though haughty, and not only the richest but the most economical of the crusader-chiefs: “Accordingly,” says Raoul of Caen, “when all the rest had spent their money, the riches of Count Raymond made him still more distinguished. The people of Provence, who formed his following, did not lavish their resources, but studied economy even more than glory,” and “his army,” adds Guibert of Nogent, “showed no inferiority to any other, save so far as it is possible to reproach the inhabitants of Provence touching their excessive loquacity.”
Bohemond, prince of Tarento, commanded the third army, composed principally of Italians and warriors of various origins come to Italy to share in the exploits and fortunes of his father, the celebrated Robert Guiscard, founder of the Norman kingdom of Naples, who was at one time the foe, and at another the defender, of Pope Gregory VII., and who died in the island of Cephalonia just as he was preparing to attempt the conquest of Constantinople. Bohemond had neither less ambition nor less courage and ability than his father. “His appearance,” says Anna Comnena, “impressed the eye as much as his reputation astounded the mind; his height surpassed that of all his comrades; his blue eyes gleamed readily with pride and anger; when he spoke you would have said he had made eloquence his study; and when he showed himself in armor, you might have believed that he had never done aught but handle lance and sword. Brought up in the school of Norman heroes, be concealed calculations of policy beneath the exterior of force, and, although he was of a haughty disposition, he knew how to be blind to a wrong when there was nothing to be gained by avenging it. He had learned from his father to regard as foes all whose dominions and riches he coveted; and he was not restrained by fear of God, or by man’s opinions, or by his own oaths. It was not the deliverance of the tomb of Christ which fired his zeal or decided him upon taking up the cross; but, as he had vowed eternal enmity to the Greek emperors, he smiled at the idea of traversing their empire at the head of an army, and, full of confidence in his fortunes, he hoped to make for himself a kingdom before arriving at Jerusalem.”
Bohemond had as
