[491] Foucher of Chartres, “Hic fuit repertus ibidem quando Godefridus ... ceperunt eandem.” He died on September 3, 1120 A. D. The Xenodochium of Geraud (“Regesta,” No. 71) was “prope ecclesiam S. Johannis Baptistæ.” In 1118 A. D. (“Regesta,” No. 86) Roger of Antioch gave houses in Jerusalem and three villages to the hospital: “sitam quam Hierosolymis moratus Guiraldo dederat.”

[492] See Röhricht, “Regesta Regni Hierosolymitani,” 1893, Nos. 71, 86; Albert of Aix, vi. 25; William of Tyre, xviii. 4, 5.

[493] “Acta Sanctorum,” iv. p. 39; see Robinson, “Bib. Res.,” 1838, i. p. 394.

[494] Roderick Glaber, iii. 7, iv. 6; “Bib. Res.,” i. pp. 396–400; Besant and Palmer, “Jerusalem,” 1871, p. 133; Geof. de Vinsauf, “Itin. Ric.,” II. v.

CHAPTER XIII
THE LATIN KINGDOM

Peter the Hermit was a knight of gentle birth from Picardy: “dwarfish, of mean figure, quick-witted, and with a sharp but kindly eye, he was free spoken, and not wanting in eloquence”[495]—a man better fitted for the cloister, in which the shy and sensitive found refuge in those rough times, than for the shock of battle. At the age of forty-four he left his monastery at Huy, near Liége, in the year 1094 A. D., and went as a pilgrim to Jerusalem, which was then in the power of the Turk. The misery which Eastern Christians and Western pilgrims had suffered for seventeen years from the wild Tartars and Kharezmians who formed the Seljuk garrison was approaching its culmination. It is said that the Turks often invaded the churches, dancing on the altars, treading under foot the sacred chalices, wrecking their fury on the marble of the sepulchre, and dragging the patriarch from his throne by the beard.[496] The only hope for Christians lay in help from Europe. “When the cup of tribulation is full,” said the patriarch Simeon to Peter, “God will send the Christians of the West to help the Holy City.” The time and the man were at hand; and as the little hermit knelt before the sepulchre there came to him a voice that said, “Arise, Peter; the time is come. Go forth and tell the tribulations of My people. The time is come that My servants should be succoured, and that My holy places should be free.”

We all know what was the effect on the history of the world that followed Peter’s determination to obey the Voice: how his passionate faith and “eloquence” set Western Europe on fire; how at the Council of Clermont, in November 1095, the “truce of God” was proclaimed among princes; how the letters from the Eastern Christians were read; how Peter testified to their wrongs; how Pope Urban II. sanctioned his mission; and how the assembly rang with the shout of “Diex el volt.” I have devoted another volume to the story of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, and it is here proposed to treat only the history of the city itself under its Latin kings.[497] A few words are, however, needed to give the thread of events preceding the conquest.

Like all great popular movements, the Crusade was due to many motives affecting various classes of men. Faith, and sympathy with the wronged, roused the enthusiasm of those who listened to the passionate appeals of Peter, who was known to have served bravely in 1071 under the Count of Boulogne in Flanders. He was a selfless man; for after his day of triumph, when he was acclaimed as the saviour of Jerusalem by five years of suffering, he returned to his cell at Huy, where he died on July 7, 1115 A. D. But besides outraging Christianity, the Turks had endangered the trade of Italy, which, as we have seen, had prospered under the Egyptian Moslems; and the merchant class had a vital interest in the pacification of the East. To the statesmen of Europe it was also known that the time was favourable for an attempt to crush Turkish power, which threatened the West, because the Seljuk princes were engaged in internecine quarrels, and were the enemies of the Arab and Egyptian Moslems. Pope Urban II. saw also in this popular excitement the means of uniting all Catholic princes under himself, and of extending the power of the Roman Church over the whole of Christendom by reuniting the various Churches of the East. He had been made a cardinal by the great Hildebrand, and was elected Pope on March 12, 1088, but in the struggle with the empire he had been driven out of Rome, in 1091, by Guibert the Anti-pope who was called Celestin III., and he had only regained possession of the sacred city in December 1093, after crowning Conrad, the rebel son of the emperor Henry IV., at Milan. He lived to carry out, in part, the dream of Hildebrand, and died in the year that saw the conquest of Jerusalem.

THE NORMANS

The ambition of the Normans in Italy was not satisfied with the capture of the south from the Greeks, or of Sicily from the Moslems. They aimed at conquest of far lands, where the younger sons of their princes might carve out kingdoms. Robert Guiscard (“the wily”), a valvassour (or gentleman) of Hauteville in Normandy, had crossed the Alps in 1053, with five knights and thirty men, to join his brothers who were among the mercenaries invited (as early as 1017) by the Pope to conquer Apulia. He became the feudal overlord of the barons of Calabria and Apulia, as duke, in 1058 A. D. He became also the Pope’s master, but the champion of Hildebrand against the German emperor. His brother Roger reigned in Sicily till 1090, and he himself died warring in Greece five years earlier. His eldest son Bœmund was now fighting for possession of Amalfi, when the opportunity arose for winning a new kingdom in Asia. He and his cousin Tancred agreed to lead a force of 10,000 knights and 20,000 foot soldiers to the East. Bœmund became Prince of Antioch, which he left in 1104, and died in Italy seven years later. Tancred became Prince of Galilee, and died at Antioch a year after his cousin.