The age of the crusades

by James M. Ludlow

The penalties under law also revealed the hardness of men’s hearts. Criminals were hung by their feet, by their necks, or by their thumbs, with burning matter fastened upon some part of the body; they were put into dungeons with snakes, and into cages too small to allow the full motion of the limbs; they were made to wear wooden or iron collars of enormous weight, so arranged that the culprit could take no position without feeling the burden.

In battle the soldier was to despise the bow, his delight to face the enemy at point of sword, his glory the blood that bespattered him from the gurgling arteries of the foe, or that trickled from his own wounds. No Fabian policy gave éclat to the warrior; victory was measured by the heaps of the slain, not by the progress of the cause. No quarter was ordinarily given or expected on the capture of strongholds; and not infrequently the entire surviving population of conquered cities paid with their lives the penalty for having permitted themselves to be defended by the vanquished. Raymond of Toulouse we shall learn to admire as our story advances. He was one of the most self-restrained and chivalric of the early crusaders; yet he put out the eyes and cut off the noses of his captives, and sent them thus mutilated to their homes, as a warning to their neighbors not to molest the march of the “soldiers of the cross.” Of this act of atrocity the chronicler of the day remarks: “It is not easy to do justice to the bravery and wisdom conspicuously displayed by the count here.” Too commonly the innocence of childhood, the venerableness of age, and the sacredness of sex were indiscriminately outraged by the license of conquest.

The love of war for its own sake was the dominant passion of such people. When no plausible pretext could be urged for declaration of hostilities, it burst out between neighborhoods as by spontaneous combustion. Raids and counter-raids took the place of the commercial rivalries of later times.

From the days of Charlemagne it had been the custom to signalize entrance upon manhood by buckling about the loins the sword, the investment with “virile arms.” The church, in hopeless inability to check the universal passion for fight, sought only to direct it to the suppression of ecclesiastical enemies. Pope Paschal (1099) exhorted Count Robert of Flanders to persecute to the utmost the Emperor Henry, saying, “By such battles you shall obtain a place in the heavenly Jerusalem.” Bernard, without dispute the holiest man of the next century, offered no excuse or palliation for his harangue to the faithful: “Let them kill the enemy or die. To submit to die for Christ, or to cause one of His enemies to die, is naught but glory.”

Very characteristic is the story of the death of the youthful Vivien, as told in the famous “Chansons de Geste,” composed about this time, though its alleged events belong to an earlier date. Vivien was the nephew of that William of Orange whose name is associated with the rise of knighthood, as that of the later William of Orange is with a nobler patriotism. There had been a fearful fight. Vivien was mortally wounded, and lay dying ere he had partaken of his first sacrament. The older warrior bent over him on the corpse-strewn field:

“You must confess to me, because I am your nearest relative and there is no priest here.”

The failing lips of the lad began the confession of the sins of his brief lifetime. He could think of but a single offence against God or his own nature; so heinous was his conception of the greatness of this one crime that it blotted out the memory of all else. What was this monstrous iniquity?

“I made a vow that I would never retreat one step before an enemy, and this day I have failed to keep my oath.”

William raised the head of the dying boy, placed the consecrated wafer, which he was accustomed to carry for such emergencies, between the eager lips of Vivien, and watched the young soul as, without fear or misgiving, it went to the judgment of Him who is preëminently the God of battles.

In the wars of this period a common sight was that of bishops and archbishops, clad in coats of mail, riding through the streets of their episcopal towns on fierce chargers, and returning to their palaces clotted with dirt and blood. That was a deserved rebuke, as well as a fine sarcasm, with which Richard Cœur de Lion sent the blood-stained armor of the Bishop of Beauvais to the Pope, as the garment of Joseph to Jacob, asking the Holy Father if he recognized his son’s coat.