The Deeds of God Through the Franks

by Abbot of Nogent-sous-Coucy Guibert

When this king left his noble life for a more blessed future life, the inhabitants of Jerusalem, mindful of his temperance and mildness, and afraid of losing his nobility of lineage, sent ambassadors to his brother, the duke of Edessa, to take control of the kingdom. He lived in splendor in his realm; whenever he went out he had a gold shield carried before him, which bore the image of an eagle, in the Greek manner. Like the pagans, he went about in a toga, let his beard grow, accepted bows from his worshippers, and ate on rugs laid on the ground. If he entered one of his towns or cities, two knights blew two trumpets before his chariot. Baldwin then yielded to the ambassadors and set off for Jerusalem. But when the neighboring pagans heard what he proposed to do, and saw him depart, they embarked in their ships, with a favoring wind, although in vain, since the duke was hurrying along the sandy banks of the sea, accompanied by a small group of men, while they rowed furiously, their prows plowing the waves, striving to intercept him, hurrying to bring their ship to the shore. But the duke, with all of his mortal strength gone,[261] in his great anguish called upon the Most High, promising that he would always obey Him and that he would rule the kingdom in accordance with Christian faith. And lo, the ships which had been moving as though they had wings now stood still as though stuck in mud, and the more each man struggled to sweep the sea with his oars, the more the hope was ridiculed by the steady backward movement of their boats. Thus the efforts of the unjust were confounded, and the duke remained deservedly free, seeing in this auspicious event a sign that heaven favored his assuming the purple. I have omitted mentioning the fact that Daimbert, the bishop of Pisa, had already set out for Jerusalem, together with group of his people, accompanied by the bishop of Apulia, by Bohemund, and by this very Duke.

After he accepted the kingdom, it is said that his first expeditions were undertaken against the Arabs. When he reached the slopes of Mount Sinai, he found a barbaric group of people, who resembled the Ethiopeans. He spared their lives because of their untamed behavior and ugliness. There, in the church which is called Saint Aaron, where God had given his oracles to our fathers, he prayed, and the army drank from the fountain of refutation, where, because Moses had drawn a distinction with his lips, and did not sanctify the Lord in the presence of the sons of Israel,[262] the Lord kept him from the promised land. Here the opinion of my priest has faltered, for it is is known that not Sinai, but the mountain Or, which forms the border of the ancient city of Petra in Arabia, was the place where Aaron lost his life, and water emerged from the depths of the rock which he struck.

In that holy city of Jerusalem, an ancient miracle renewed itself, and I call it ancient because the Latin world does not know when it begun. Our conjecture is that it began when, after the city had begun to be trampled by pagans, before our times, the Lord granted it both to those who lived there, and to those who happened to be there at that time. Every year, on the Sabbath of Easter, the lamp of the Lord's tomb seemed to be kindled by divine power; it was the custom in that city that the pagans went through everyone's house, extinguishing every fire, leaving only ashes in the hearths; the pagans made such a search, because they thought that the miracle was the product of the fraud, and not of the faith of the faithful. When Vulcan had been turned out by this means from the city, at the hour at which our religion's law has determined that the Catholic people are to be present at the service of the solemn resurrection and baptism, you would have seen pagans moving throughout the basilica with their swords drawn, threatening to kill our people. You would also have seen those natives who worshipped our faith entrusting their profound grief to God, both those whose prayers had drawn them from the furthest reaches of the world, and those who had come because of the miracle, all to pray singlemindedly for the gift of light. Nor was there any unsuitable delay, but the passionate request was granted swiftly. I have heard from some old men who went there that the papyrus or wick (I don't know which of them was used) was once removed by a pagan's trick, and the metal remained empty, but, by means of a miracle from heaven, when light shone from the metal, he who wanted to defraud the heavenly powers learned that natural forces fight even against their own natures for their God.

In the year that Baldwin accepted the sceptre from his predecessor, it is said that the miracle was obtained with such difficulty that night was almost upon them before their prayers and tears were answered. The priest mentioned above delivered a sermon to the people, asking for sinners to confess; the king and the priest urged them to make peace among themselves, and they promised to remedy whatever was contrary to faith and to virtue. Meanwhile, because of the urgency of the matter, so many hideous crimes were confessed that day, that if penitence did not follow, it would have seemed correct for the sacred light to have been removed without delay; however, soon after the reproof, the lamp was lit. The next year, when the time came for the celestial flame to make the tomb glorious, all men lifted up their prayers from deep within. Greeks and Syrians, Armenians and Latins, each in his own language, called upon God and his saints. The king, the leaders, and the people, with penance and grief in their hearts, marched behind the priests; all men were racked with pain, because, since the day that the city was won by the Christians, things had happened there that they had never heard of happening under the pagans. Fulker of Charters, however, taking with him the chaplain of the patriarch Daimbert, went to the Mount of Olives, where the lamp of God used to appear when it did not come to Jerusalem. When they returned, bringing nothing to please the ears of the expectant Church, many sermons were delivered to the people, which gave no solace to those who were suffering, but rather cause for anguish. That day, when the miracle did not happen, everyone returned home; there was a double night, with bitter sadness tormenting their breasts. The next day they decided to make a procession, with appropriate mourning, to the Temple of the Lord. They went, without the joy of Easter, dressed no differently from the day before, when suddenly, behind them, the keepers of the temple proclaimed that the lamp of the sacred monument was lit. Why do I delay? On that day such grace shone, augmented abundantly by the delay, that the brilliance of God illuminated, although not simulataneously, but sequentially, approximately fifty lamps. Not only during the sacred mysteries, but even when the king, after services were over, ate in the palace, messengers came frequently to summon him to leave the table to see the lights newly lit. One cannot describe how much grief was changed to relief when, on that day, he agreed to what he never had consented to before, to be crowned king in that city, in the house of the Lord, in acknowledgement of the Lord's gift.

Then the Franks, who had redeemed the city with their blood, eager to see their parents, sons, and wives, and perhaps confident in their number and bravery, decided to return to their own sweet home by the same land route they had taken when they came. Although they thought that they would be able to pass freely through the land surrounding Nicea, which they had seized earlier, the Turks, who had been placed there by the emperor once the city had been turned over to him to impede the Franks when the occasion arose, put up strenuous resistance to them. Unless I am mistaken, my priest[263] says that they cut to pieces 100,000 men, but I fear that the man is wrong in offering such a number, because it is the case that he is eager to offer such guesses elsewhere. For example, he dares to estimate that those who set out for Jerusalem numbered 6,000,000.[264] I would be surprised if all the land this side of the Alps, indeed if all the kingdoms of the West, could supply so many men, since we know for a fact that at the first battle before the walls of Nicea scarcely 100, 000 fully-equipped knights are reported to have been present. And if he was concerned with including all those who had gone on the journey, but who died, on land and on the sea, of sickness or hunger, in the various regions through which they passed, they still would not amount to such a great number of men. After the Franks, then, had suffered hideous carnage, most of those who had survived returned to Jerusalem, having lost what they owned. The generous king genuinely commiserated with them, gave them many gifts, and persuaded them to return to their homeland by sea.

But the prince of Babylon, less concerned with the loss of Jerusalem than with the proximity of the Frankish settlement, set out to launch a heavy offensive against the new king, often striving to attack the port city of Acre. Count Robert of Normandy had besieged Acre when the army of the Lord was advancing to besiege Jerusalem, but duke Godfrey had brought him away, in expectation of a more successful undertaking. The Babylonian then gathered a vast army and challenged the Christian king to battle. He gathered his small band, to whom the Lord said, "Fear not,"[265] and, setting his troops in order as well as he could, he attacked the impious ones. Killing them swiftly, like brute beasts, he scattered them, like a hurricane driving dust. A second time he sent his 9000 knights forward, supported by 20,000 Ethiopean common foot-soldiers. The pious king assembled against him scarcely 1000 knights and foot-soldiers, forming seven battalions out of them, and he sent them with great confidence directly at the thickest ranks of the enemy. When the prince saw far off a pagan knight, he rushed at him with such force that he drove his spear, together with its standard, into the man's breast, and when he pulled the spear from the wound, the standard remained in the man's breast. Frightened by the courage of the prince and his men, the enemy retreated at first, but their courage returned, because of the strength of their numbers, and they united to attack our men, compelling them to think of fleeing. They said that this misfortune had happened to them because, in their foolishness, they had not brought the cross of the Lord to this battle. They said that, guided by a Syrian or some Armenian, they found this cross, which, like the Lance, had lain buried somewhere. They drew a lesson from this incident, which was more blemish of a victory in the process of being won than defeat, and when the army of the Babylonian prince, as strong as the previous one, came forward to fight for the third time, the splendid king, together with what forces he could gather, deriving his confidence from God, went up against them. After he had drawn up his troops as well as he could, the clash of men was so great that, although the armies were unequal, both sides suffered severe losses, as 6000 pagan soldiers, and 100 Christians, lay dead. And because they had no prideful concern for banners with eagles and dragons, they raised aloft the sign of the humiliating Crucifixion, the Cross, and as praiseworthy conquerors drove their enemies to flight.

When they had been driven off, as was right, he assembled as much of a larger army as he could, and surrounded the extraordinary city of Palestinian Caesarea, with no concern for the number of men, but instead for their might. Siege engines were quickly built, many ballistic machines were drawn up around the walls, and a beam with a metal front, which was called a battering ram, was put in place. Towers were prepared and moved forward at different times, whose armed men not only rained down torrents of various kinds of missiles on the Saracens who were standing on the battlements of the walls, but who also struck and slew them with their swords. There you would have seen catapults with huge rocks not only striking the external walls, but delivering the weight of harsh blows to the city's lofty palaces. As they smashed the building and walls, they also used sling-shots to scatter sticks burning with liquid lead, to set the town on fire. Meanwhile the battering-ram crashed against the walls; as it began to open a hole in the lower part of the wall, all the surrounding structures began to crack. Then, while the Franks struggled to enter, and eagerness to attack drove the Saracens to come forth, blood was shed on both sides. When one of our machines fell, killing many of our men, both sides became more courageous, for the Saracens, who do not like fighting in open combat, were remarkably competent when on the defensive. On the twentieth day of the siege, the king, supported by the best of his young knights, attacked the inhabitants fiercely, suddenly leaping from an assault tower, with one knight behind him, onto the wall, and driving the enemy into flight. The Franks swiftly followed the king, annihilating multitudes throughout the city, sparing no one, except the young women who could become slaves. Treasure was sought everywhere; they cut open not only chests, but the throats of the silent Saracens. When they were struck by a fist, their jaws yielded the besants that had been poured into them. They found pieces of gold in the wombs of the women who had used these areas for purposes other than the ones for which they were intended. A contingent of Franks was promptly left to guard the captive city, and shortly thereafter the king marched to Acre, wore it down with daily attacks, until it submitted to his authority. He is known to have captured many other cities, but since they were located in the middle of the insane pagans, he could not be sure that our colonists would be safe there. The series of battles and victories made the Saracens increasingly contemptible to the Christians; For example, here is something that we learned happened last year.

A certain knight,[266] whom the king had made prefect of the city of Tiberias, behaved insolently towards the king. Angry at the man's insolence, the king ordered him to leave the land he had been given. He hastened to leave, taking with him as his retinue two armed knights, and soon encountered a large troop of pagans. Putting his trust not in the number of his own men, but in God, he tore his shirt, which they call an undertunic, placed it as a banner on his spear, and commanded his companions to do the same. They did so, cried out loudly, spurred their horses forward, and charged headlong at their enemies. Frightened by the sudden attack, and thinking that a large army was following these men, they fled, leaving themselves mortally vulnerable to these three men. Many were killed, and more booty was taken than they could carry. Returning after this event, grateful to God, he was moved to prostrate himself before the king and he promised that he would faithfully obey him from that point on.

Once, when the king was suffering from a great lack of money, and did not have enough to pay the monthly stipend to his knights, divine mercy suddenly and miraculously granted aid. Things had become so difficult that the servants and knights were thinking of leaving, when the young men of Joppa, washing themselves, or rather enjoying a swim in the sea, on a certain day found in the swirling sand and water sacks filled with large amounts of gold, which the Venetians had lost here in a shipwreck. Brought to the king, they offered solace to everyone, an amazing miracle, both to the king, who had been close to despair, and to the new Christian community.

But since the charge has been spread about that the king repudiated his wife, here is what is said about it. His wife was descended from the finest pagans in the land, and in obedience to him, she followed her husband to Jerusalem, arriving by ship at the port of Saint-Simeon. There she was transferred to a faster ship, in an attempt to make the trip more quickly, but she was brought by unfavorable winds to certain island inhabited by Barbars. The islanders seized her, killed a bishop of her retinue, together with some other officials, and, after holding her captive for some time, finally released her. When she reached her husband, the king, suspicious, and not unreasonably, of the Barbars' sexual incontinence, banished her from his bed, changed her mode of dress, and sent her to live with other nuns in the monastery of Anne, the blessed mother of the virgin mother of God. He himself was glad to live the celibate life, because, "his struggle was not against the flesh and blood, but against the rulers of the world"[267]