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.