The address was too long for the duke’s faithful comrade, William Fitz-Osborn. “My lord,” said he, “we dally; let us all to arms and forward, forward!” The army got in motion, starting from the hill of Telham or Heathland, according to Mr. Freeman, marching to attack the English on the opposite hill of Senlac. A Norman, called Taillefer, “who sang very well, and rode a horse which was very fast, came up to the duke. ‘My lord,’ said he, ‘I have served you long, and you owe me for all my service: pay me to day, an it please you; grant unto me, for recompense in full, to strike the first blow in the battle.’ ‘I grant it,’ quoth the duke. So Taillefer darted before him, singing the deeds of Charlemagne, of Roland, of Oliver, and of the vassals who fell at Roncesvalles.” As he sang, he played with his sword, throwing it up into the air and catching it in his right hand; and the Normans followed, repeating his songs, and crying, “God help! God help!” The English, intrenched upon a plateau towards which the Normans were ascending, awaited the assault, shouting, and defying the foe.
The battle, thus begun, lasted nine hours, with equal obstinacy on both sides, and varied success from hour to hour. Harold, though wounded at the commencement of the fray, did not cease for a moment to fight, on foot, with his two brothers beside him, and around him the troops of London, who had the privilege of forming the king’s guard when he delivered a battle. Rudely repulsed at the first charge, some bodies of Norman troops fell back in disorder, and a rumor spread amongst them that the duke was slain; but William threw himself before the fugitives, and, taking off his helmet, cried, “Look at me; here I am; I live, and by God’s help will conquer.” So they returned to the combat. But the English were firm; the Normans could not force their intrenchrnents; and William ordered his men to feign a retreat, and all but a flight. At this sight the English bore down in pursuit: “and still Norman fled and Saxon pursued, until a trumpeter, who had been ordered by the duke thus to turn back the Normans, began to sound the recall. Then were seen the Normans turning back to face the English, and attacking them with their swords, and amongst the English, some flying, some dying, some asking mercy in their own tongue.” The struggle once more became general and fierce. William had three horses killed under him; “but he jumped immediately upon a fresh steed, and left not long unavenged the death of that which had but lately carried him.” At last the intrenchments of the English were stormed; Harold fell mortally wounded by an arrow which pierced his skull; his two brothers and his bravest comrades fell at his side; the fight was prolonged between the English dispersed and the Normans remorselessly pursuing; the standard sent from Rome to the duke of Normandy had replaced the Saxon flag on the very spot where Harold had fallen; and, all around, the ground continued to get covered with dead and dying, fruitless victims of the passions of the combatants. Next day William went over the field of battle; and he was heard to say, in a tone of mingled triumph and sorrow, “Here is verily a lake of blood!”
There was, long after the battle of Senlac, or Hastings, as it is commonly called, a patriotic superstition in the country to the effect that, when the rain had moistened the soil, there were to be seen traces of blood on the ground where it had taken place.
Having thus secured the victory, William had his tent pitched at the very point where the standard which had come from Rome had replaced the Saxon banner, and he passed the night supping and chatting with his chieftains, not far from the corpses scattered over the battle-field. Next day it was necessary to attend to the burial of all these dead, conquerors or conquered. William was full of care and affection towards his comrades; and on the eve of the battle, during a long and arduous reconnoissance which he had undertaken with some of them, he had insisted upon carrying, for some time, in addition to his own cuirass, that of his faithful William Fitz-Osbern, who he saw was fatigued in spite of his usual strength; but towards his enemies William was harsh and resentful. Githa, Harold’s mother, sent to him to ask for her son’s corpse, offering for it its weight in gold. “Nay,” said William, “Harold was a perjurer; let him have for burial-place the sand of the shore, where he was so madly fain to rule.” Two Saxon monks from Waltham Abbey, which had been founded by Harold, came, by their abbot’s order, and claimed for their church the remains of their benefactor; and William, indifferent as he had been to a mother’s grief, would not displease an abbey. But when the monks set about finding the body of Harold, there was none to recognize it, and they had recourse to a young girl, Edith, Swan’s-neck, whom Harold had loved. She discovered amongst the corpses her lover’s mutilated body; and the monks bore it away to the church at Waltham, where it was buried. Some time later a rumor was spread abroad that Harold was wounded, and carried to a neighboring castle, perhaps Dover, whence he went to the abbey of St. John, at Chester, where he lived a long while in a solitary cell, and where William the Conqueror’s second son, Henry I., the third Norman king of England, one day went to see him and had an interview with him. But this legend, in which there is nothing chronologically impossible, rests on no sound basis of evidence, and is discountenanced by all contemporary accounts.
Before following up his victory, William resolved to perpetuate the remembrance of it by a religious monument, and he decreed the foundation of an abbey on the very field of the battle of Hastings, from which it took its name, Battle Abbey. He endowed this abbey with all the neighboring territory within the radius of a league, “the very spot,” says his charter, “which gave me my crown.” He made it free of the jurisdiction of any prelate, dedicated it to St. Martin of Tours, patron saint of the soldiers of Gaul, and ordered that there should be deposited in its archives a register containing the names of all the lords, knights, and men of mark who had accompanied him on his expedition. When the building of the abbey began, the builders observed a want of water; and they notified William of the fact. “Work away,” said he: “if God grant me life, I will make such good provision for the place that more wine shall be found there than there is water in other monasteries.”
It was not everything, however, to be victorious, it was still necessary to be recognized as king. When the news of the defeat at Hastings and the death of Harold was spread abroad in the country, the emotion was lively and seemed to be profound; the great Saxon national council, the Wittenagemote, assembled at London; the remnants of the Saxon army rallied there; and search was made for other kings than the Norman duke. Harold left two sons, very young and not in a condition to reign; but his two brothers-in-law, Edwin and Morkar, held dominion in the north of England, whilst the southern provinces, and amongst them the city of London, had a popular aspirant, a nephew of Edward the Confessor, in Edgar surnamed Atheliny (the noble, the illustrious), as the descendant of several kings. What with these different pretensions, there were discussion, hesitation, and delay; but at last the young Edgar prevailed, and was proclaimed king. Meanwhile William was advancing with his army, slowly, prudently, as a man resolved to risk nothing and calculating upon the natural results of his victory. At some points he encountered attempts at resistance, but he easily overcame them, occupied successively Romney, Dover, Canterbury, and Rochester, appeared before London without trying to enter it, and moved on Winchester, which was the residence of Edward the Confessor’s widow, Queen Editha, who had received that important city as dowry. Through respect for her, William, who presented himself in the character of relative and heir of King Edward, did not enter the place, and merely called upon the inhabitants to take the oath of allegiance to him and do him homage, which they did with the queen’s consent. William returned towards London and commenced the siege, or rather investment of it, by establishing his camp at Berkhampstead, in the county of Hertford. He entered before long into secret communication with an influential burgess, named Ansgard, an old man who had seen service, and who, riddled with wounds, had himself carried about the streets in a litter. Ansgard had but little difficulty in inducing the authorities of London to make pacific overtures to the duke, and William had still less difficulty in convincing the messenger of the moderation of his designs. “The king salutes ye, and offers ye peace,” said Ansgard to the municipal authorities of London on his return from the camp: “‘tis a king who hath no peer; he is handsomer than the sun, wiser than Solomon, more active and greater than Charlemagne,” and the enthusiastic poet adds that the people as well as the senate eagerly welcomed these words, and renounced, both of them, the young king they had but lately proclaimed. Facts were quick in responding to this quickly produced impression; a formal deputation was sent to William’s camp; the archbishops of Canterbury and York, many other prelates and laic chieftains, the principal citizens of London, the two brothers-in- law of Harold, Edwin and Morkar, and the young king of yesterday, Edgar Atheling himself, formed part of it; and they brought to William, Edgar Atheling his abdication, and all the others their submission, with an express invitation to William to have himself made king, “for we be wont,” said they, “to serve a king, and we wish to have a king for lord.” William received them in presence of the chieftains of his army, and with great show of moderation in his desires. “Affairs,” said he, “be troubled still; there be still certain rebels; I desire rather the peace of the kingdom than the crown; I would that my wife should be crowned with me.” The Norman chieftains murmured whilst they smiled; and one of them, an Aquitanian, Aimery de Thouars, cried out, “It is passing modest to ask soldiers if they wish their chief to be king: soldiers are never, or very seldom, called to such deliberations: let what we desire be done as soon as possible.” William yielded to the entreaties of the Saxon deputies and to the counsels of the Norman chieftains but, prudent still, before going in person to London, he sent thither some of his officers with orders to have built there immediately, on the banks of the Thames, at a point which he indicated, a fort where he might establish himself in safety. That fort, in the course of time, became the Tower of London.
When William set out, some days afterwards, to make his entry into the city, he found, on his way to St. Alban’s, the road blocked with huge trunks of trees recently felled. “What means this barricade in thy domains?” he demanded of the abbot of St. Alban’s, a Saxon noble. “I did what was my duty to my birth and mission,” replied the monk: “if others, of my rank and condition, had done as much, as they ought to and could have done, thou hadst not penetrated so far into our country.”
On entering London after all these delays and all these precautions, William fixed, for his coronation, upon Christmas-day, December 25th, 1066. Either by desire of the prelate himself or by William’s own order, it was not the archbishop of Canterbury, Stigand, who presided, according to custom, at the ceremony; the duty devolved upon the archbishop of York, Aldred, who had but lately anointed Edgar Atheling. At the appointed hour, William arrived at Westminster Abbey, the latest work and the burial-place of Edward the Confessor. The Conqueror marched between two hedges of Norman soldiers, behind whom stood a crowd of people, cold and sad, though full of curiosity. A numerous cavalry guarded the approaches to the church and the quarters adjoining. Two hundred and sixty counts, barons, and knights of Normandy went in with the duke. Geoffrey, bishop of Coutanees, demanded in French, of the Normans, if they would that their duke should take the title of King of the English. The archbishop of York demanded of the English, in the Saxon tongue, if they would have for king the duke of Normandy. Noisy acclamations arose in the church and resounded outside. The soldiery, posted in the neighborhood, took the confused roar for a symptom of something wrong, and in their suspicious rage set fire to the neighboring houses. The flames spread rapidly. The people who were rejoicing in the church caught the alarm, and a multitude of men and women of every rank flung themselves out of the edifice. Alone and trembling, the bishops with some clerics and monks remained before the altar and accomplished the work of anointment upon the king’s head, “himself trembling,” says the chronicle. Nearly all the rest who were present ran to the fire, some to extinguish it, others to steal and pillage in the midst of the consternation. William terminated the ceremony by taking the usual oath of Saxon kings at their coronation, adding thereto, as of his own motion, a promise to treat the English people according to their own laws and as well as they had ever been treated by the best of their own kings. Then he went forth from the church King of England.
We will pursue no farther the life of William the Conqueror: for henceforth it belongs to the history of England, not of France. We have entered, so far as he was concerned, into pretty long details, because we were bound to get a fair understanding of the event and of the man; not only because of their lustre at the time, but especially because of the serious and long-felt consequences entailed upon France, England, and, we may say, Europe. We do not care just now to trace out those consequences in all their bearings; but we would like to mark out with precision their chief features, inasmuch as they exercised, for centuries, a determining influence upon the destinies of two great nations, and upon the course of modern civilization.
As to France, the consequences of the conquest of England by the Normans were clearly pernicious, and they have not yet entirely disappeared. It was a great evil, as early as the eleventh century, that the duke of Normandy, one of the great French lords, one of the great vassals of the king of France, should at the same time become king of England, and thus receive an accession of rank and power which could not fail to render more complicated and more stormy his relations with his French suzerain. From the eleventh to the fourteenth century, from Philip I. to Philip de Valois, this position gave rise, between the two crowns and the two states, to questions, to quarrels, to political struggles, and to wars which were a frequent source of trouble in France to the government and the people. The evil and the peril became far greater still when, in the fourteenth century, there arose between France and England, between Philip de Valois and Edward III., a question touching the succession to the throne of France and the application or negation of the Salic law. Then there commenced, between the two crowns and the two peoples, that war which was to last more than a hundred years, was to bring upon France the saddest days of her history, and was to be ended only by the inspired heroism of a young girl who, alone, in the name of her God and His saints, restored confidence and victory to her king and her country. Joan of Arc, at the cost of her life, brought to the most glorious conclusion the longest and bloodiest struggle that has devastated France and sometimes compromised her glory.
Such events, even when they are over, do not cease to weigh heavily for a long while upon a people. The struggles between the kings of England, dukes of Normandy, and the kings of France, and the long war of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries for the succession to the throne of France, engendered what historians have called “the rivalry between France and England;” and this rivalry, having been admitted as a natural and inevitable fact, became the permanent incubus and, at divers epochs, the scourge of French national existence. Undoubtedly there are, between great and energetic neighbors, different interests and tendencies, which easily become the seeds of jealousy and strife; but there are also, between such nations, common interests and common sentiments, which tend to harmony and peace. The wisdom and ability of governments and of nations themselves are shown in devoting themselves to making the grounds of harmony and peace stronger than those of discord and war. Anyhow common sense and moral sense forbid differences of interests and tendencies to be set up as a principle upon which to establish general and permanent rivalry, and, by consequence, a systematic hostility and national enmity. And the further civilization and the connections between different people proceed with this development, the more necessary and, at the same time, possible it becomes to raise the interests and sentiments which would hold them together above those which would keep them asunder, and to thus found a policy of reciprocal equity and of peace in place of a policy of hostile precautions and continual strife. “I have witnessed,” says M. Guizot, “in the course of my life, both these policies. I have seen the policy of systematic hostility, the policy practised by the Emperor Napoleon I. with as much ability and brilliancy as it was capable of, and I have seen it result in the greatest disaster France ever experienced. And even after the evidence of its errors and calamities this policy has still left amongst us deep traces and raised serious obstacles to the policy of reciprocal equity, liberty, and peace which we labored to support, and of which the nation felt, though almost against the grain, the justice and the necessity.” In that feeling we recognize the lamentable results of the old historic causes which have just been pointed out, and the lasting perils arising from those blind passions which hurry people away, and keep them back from their most pressing interests and their most honorable sentiments.
In spite of appearances to the contrary, and in view of her future interests, England was, in the eleventh century, by the very fact of the conquest she underwent, in a better position than France. She was conquered, it is true, and conquered by a foreign chieftain and a foreign army; but France also had been, for several centuries previously, a prey to conquest, and under circumstances much more unfavorable than those under which the Norman conquest had found and placed England. When the Goths, the Burgundians, the Franks, the Saxons, and the Normans themselves invaded and disputed over Gaul, what was the character of the event? Barbarians, up to that time vagabonds or nearly so, were flooding in upon populations disorganized and enervated. On the side of the German victors, no fixity in social life; no general or anything like regular government; no nation really cemented and constituted; but individuals in a state of dispersion and of almost absolute independence: on the side of the vanquished Gallo-Romans, the old political ties dissolved; no strong power, no vital liberty; the lower classes in slavery, the middle classes ruined, the upper classes depreciated. Amongst the barbarians society was scarcely commencing; with the subjects of the Roman empire it no longer existed; Charlemagne’s attempt to reconstruct it by rallying beneath a new empire both victors and vanquished was a failure; feudal anarchy was the first and the necessary step out of barbaric anarchy and towards a renewal of social order.
It was not so in England, when, in the eleventh century, William transported thither his government and his army. A people but lately come out of barbarism, conquered, on that occasion, a people still half barbarous. Their primitive origin was the same; their institutions were, if not similar, at any rate analogous; there was no fundamental antagonism in their habits; the English chieftains lived in their domains an idle, hunting life, surrounded by their liegemen, just as the Norman barons lived. Society, amongst both the former and the latter, was founded, however unrefined and irregular it still was; and neither the former nor the latter had lost the flavor and the usages of their ancient liberties. A certain superiority, in point of organization and social discipline, belonged to the Norman conquerors; but the conquered Anglo- Saxons were neither in a temper to allow themselves to be enslaved nor out of condition for defending themselves. The conquest was destined to entail cruel evils, a long oppression, but it could not bring about either the dissolution of the two peoples into petty lawless groups, or the permanent humiliation of one in presence of the other. There were, at one and the same time, elements of government and resistance, causes of fusion and unity in the very midst of the struggle.
We are now about to anticipate ages, and get a glimpse, in their development, of the consequences which attended this difference, so profound, in the position of France and of England, at the time of the formation of the two states.
In England, immediately after the Norman conquest, two general forces are confronted, those, to wit, of the two peoples. The Anglo-Saxon people is attached to its ancient institutions, a mixture of feudalism and liberty, which become its security. The Norman army assumes organization on English soil according to the feudal system which had been its own in Normandy. A principle of authority and a principle of resistance thus exist, from the very first, in the community and in the government. Before long the principle of resistance gets displaced; the strife between the peoples continues; but a new struggle arises between the Norman king and his barons. The Norman kingship, strong in its growth, would fain become tyrannical; but its tyranny encounters a resistance, also strong, since the necessity for defending themselves against the Anglo-Saxons has caused the Norman barons to take up the practice of acting in concert, and has not permitted them to set themselves up as petty, isolated sovereigns. The spirit of association receives development in England: the ancient institutions have maintained it amongst the English landholders, and the inadequacy of individual resistance has made it prevalent amongst the Norman barons. The unity which springs from community of interests and from junction of forces amongst equals becomes a counter-poise to the unity of the sovereign power. To sustain the struggle with success, the aristocratic coalition formed against the tyrannical kingship has needed the assistance of the landed proprietors, great and small, English and Norman, and it has not been able to dispense with getting their rights recognized as well as its own. Meanwhile the struggle is becoming complicated; there is a division of parties; a portion of the barons rally round the threatened kingship; sometimes it is the feudal aristocracy, and sometimes it is the king that summons and sees flocking to the rescue the common people, first of the country, then of the towns. The democratic element thus penetrates into and keeps growing in both society and government, at one time quietly and through the stolid influence of necessity, at another noisily and by means of revolutions, powerful indeed, but nevertheless restrained within certain limits. The fusion of the two peoples and the different social classes is little by little attaining accomplishment; it is little by little bringing about the perfect formation of representative government with its various component parts, royalty, aristocracy, and democracy, each invested with the rights and the strength necessary for their functions. The end of the struggle has been arrived at; constitutional monarchy is founded; by the triumph of their language and of their primitive liberties the English have conquered their conquerors. It is written in her history, and especially in her history at the date of the eleventh century, how England found her point of departure and her first elements of success in the long labor she performed, in order to arrive, in 1688, at a free, and, in our days, at a liberal government.
France pursued her end by other means and in the teeth of other fortunes. She always desired and always sought for free government under the form of constitutional monarchy; and in following her history, step by step, there will be seen, often disappearing and ever re-appearing, the efforts made by the country for the accomplishment of her hope. Why then did not France sooner and more completely attain what she had so often attempted? Amongst the different causes of this long miscalculation, we will dwell for the present only on the historical reason just now indicated: France did not find, as England did, in the primitive elements of French society the conditions and means of the political system to which she never ceased to aspire. In order to obtain the moderate measure of internal order, without which society could not exist; in order to insure the progress of her civil laws and her material civilization; in order even to enjoy those pleasures of the mind for which she thirsts so much,— France was constantly obliged to have recourse to the kingly authority and to that almost absolute monarchy which was far from satisfying her even when she could not do without it, and when she worshipped it with an enthusiasm rather literary than political, as was the case under Louis XIV. It was through the refined rather than profound development of her civilization, and through the zeal of her intellectual movement, that France was at length impelled not only towards the political system to which she had so long aspired, but into the boundless ambition of the unlimited revolution which she brought about and with which she inoculated all Europe. It is in the first steps towards the formation of the two societies, French and English, and in the elements, so very different, of their earliest existence, that we find the principal cause for their long-continued diversity in institutions and destinies.
“In 1823, forty-seven years ago, after having studied,” says M. Guizot, “in my Essays upon a Comparative History of France and England, the great fact which we have just now attempted to make clearly understood, I concluded my labor by saying, ‘Before our revolution, this difference between the political fates of France and England might have saddened a French-man: but now, in spite of the evils we have suffered and in spite of those we shall yet, perhaps, suffer, there is no room, so far as we are concerned, for such sadness. The advances of social equality and the enlightenments of civilization in France preceded political liberty; and it will thus be the more general and the purer. France may reflect, without regret, upon any history: her own has always been glorious, and the future promised to her will assuredly recompense her for all she has hitherto lacked.’ In 1870, after the experiences and notwithstanding the sorrows of my long life, I have still confidence in our country’s future. Never be it forgotten that God helps only those who help themselves and who deserve his aid.”
Amongst the great events of European history, none was for a longer time in preparation or more naturally brought about than the Crusades. Christianity, from her earliest days, had seen in Jerusalem her sacred cradle; it had been, in past times, the home of her ancestors, the Jews, and the centre of their history; and, afterwards, the scene of the life, death, and resurrection of her Divine Founder. Jerusalem became, more and more, the Holy City. To go to Jerusalem, to visit the Mount of Olives, Calvary, and the tomb of Jesus, was, in their most evil days, and in the midst of their obscurity and their martyrdoms, a pious passion with the early Christians. When, under Constantine, Christianity had ascended from the cross to the throne, Jerusalem had fresh attractions for Christian faith and Christian curiosity. Temples covered and surrounded the Holy Sepulchre; and at Bethlehem, Nazareth, Mount Tabor, and nearly all the places which Jesus had consecrated by His presence and His miracles were seen to rise up churches, chapels, and monuments dedicated to the memory of them. The Emperor Constantine’s mother, St. Helena, was, at seventy-eight years of age, the first royal pilgrim to the holy places. After the Pagan revival, vainly attempted by the Emperor Julian, the number and zeal of the Christian visitors to Jerusalem were redoubled. At the beginning of the fifth century, St. Jerome wrote, from his retreat at Bethlehem, that Judea overflowed with pilgrims, and that, round about the Holy Sepulchre, were heard sung, in divers tongues, the praises of the Lord. He, however, gave but scant encouragement to his friends to make the trip. “The court of heaven,” he wrote to St. Paulinus, “is as open in Britain as at Jerusalem;” and the disorder which sometimes accompanied the numerous assemblages of pilgrims became such that several of the most illustrious fathers of the Church, and amongst others St. Augustine and St. Gregory of Nyssa, exerted themselves to dissuade the faithful. “Take no thought,” said Augustine, “for long voyages; go where your faith is; it is not by ship, but by love, that we go to Him who is everywhere.”
Events soon rendered the pilgrimage to Jerusalem difficult, and for some time impossible. At the commencement of the seventh century, the Greek empire was at war with the sovereigns of Persia, successors of Cyrus and chiefs of the religion of Zoroaster. One of them, Khosroes II., invaded Judea, took Jerusalem, led away captive the inhabitants, together with their patriarch, Zacharias, and even carried off to Persia the precious relic which was regarded as the wood of the true cross, and which had been discovered, nearly three centuries before, by the Empress Helena, whilst excavations were making on Calvary for the erection of the church of the Holy Sepulchre. But fourteen years later, after several victories over the Persians, the Greek emperor, Heraclius, retook Jerusalem, and re-entered Constantinople in triumph with the coffer containing the sacred relic. He next year (in 629) carried it back to Jerusalem, and bore it upon his own shoulders to the top of Calvary; and on this occasion was instituted the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. Great was the joy in Christendom; and the pilgrimages to Jerusalem resumed their course.
But precisely at this epoch there appeared an enemy far more formidable for the Christians than the sectaries of Zoroaster. In 622 Mahomet founded Islamism; and some years after his death, in 638, the second of the khalifs, his successors, Omar, sent two of his generals, Khaled and Abou-Obeidah, to take Jerusalem. For to the Mussulmans, also, Jerusalem was a holy city. Mahomet, it was said, had been thither; it was thence, indeed, that he had started on his nocturnal ascent to heaven. On approaching the walls, the Arabs repeated these words from the Koran: “Enter we the holy land which God hath promised us.” The siege lasted four months. The Christians at last surrendered, but only to Omar in person, who came from Medina to receive their submission. A capitulation concluded with their patriarch, Sophronius, guaranteed them their lives, their property, and their churches. “When the draft of the treaty was completed, Omar said to the patriarch, ‘Conduct me to the temple of David.’ Omar entered Jerusalem preceded by the patriarch, and followed by four thousand warriors, followers of the Prophet, wearing no other arms but their swords. Sophronius took him, first of all, to the Church of the Resurrection. ‘Be-hold,’ said he, ‘the temple of David.’ ‘Thou sayest not true,’ said Omar, after a few moments’ reflection; ‘the Prophet gave me a description of the temple of David, and it tallieth not with the building I now see.’ The patriarch then conducted him to the Church of Sion. ‘Here,’ said he, ‘is the temple of David.’ ‘It is a lie,’ rejoined Omar, and went his way, directing his steps towards the gate named Bab-Mohammed. The spot on which now stands the Mosque of Omar was so encumbered with filth that the steps leading to the street were covered with it, and that the rubbish reached almost to the top of the vault. ‘You can only get in here by crawling,’ said the patriarch. ‘Be it so,’ answered Omar. The patriarch went first; Omar, with his people, followed; and they arrived at the space which at this day forms the forecourt of the mosque. There every one could stand upright. After having turned his eyes to right and left, and attentively examined the place, ‘Allah alchbar!’ cried Omar; here is the temple of David, described to me by the Prophet.’”
He found the Sakhra (the rock which forms the summit of Mount Moriah,) and which, left alone after the different destructions of the different temples, became the theme of a multitude of traditions and legends, (Jewish and Mussulman) covered with filth, heaped up there by the Christians through hatred of the Jews. “Omar spread his cloak over the rock, and began to sweep it; and all the Mussulmans in his train followed his example.” (Le Temple de Jerusalem, a monograph, pp. 73-75, by Count Melchior de Vogue, ch. vi.) The Mosque of Omar rose up on the site of Solomon’s temple. The Christians retained the practice of their religion in their churches, but they were obliged to conceal their crosses and their sacred books. The bell no longer summoned the faithful to prayer; and the pomp of ceremonies was forbidden them. It was far worse when Omar, the most moderate of Mussulman fanatics, had left Jerusalem. The faithful were driven from their houses, and insulted in their churches; additions were made to the tribute they had to pay to the new masters of Palestine; they were prohibited from carrying arms and riding on horseback; a girdle of leather, which they might not lay aside, was their badge of servitude; their conquerors brooked not even that the Christians should speak the Arab tongue, reserved for disciples of the Koran; and the Christian people of Jerusalem had not the right of nominating their own patriarch without the intervention of the Saracens.
From the seventh to the eleventh century the situation remained very much the same. The Mussulmans, khalifs of Egypt or Persia, continued in possession of Jerusalem; and the Christians, native inhabitants or foreign visitors, continued to be oppressed, harassed, and humiliated there. At two periods their condition was temporarily better. At the commencement of the ninth century, Charlemagne reached even there with the greatness of his mind and of his power. “It was not only in his own land and his own kingdom,” says Eginhard, “that he scattered those gratuitous largesses which the Greeks call alms; but beyond the seas, in Syria, in Egypt, in Africa, at Jerusalem, at Alexandria, at Carthage, wherever he knew that there were Christians living in poverty, he had compassion on their misery, and he delighted to send them money.” In one of his capitularies of the year 810 we find this paragraph: “Alms to be sent to Jerusalem to repair the churches of God.” “If Charlemagne was so careful to seek the friendship of the kings beyond the seas, it was above all in order to obtain for the Christians living under their rule help and relief. . . . He kept up so close a friendship with Haroun-al- Raschid, king of Persia, that this prince preferred his good graces to the alliance of the sovereigns of the earth. Accordingly, when the ambassadors whom Charles had sent, with presents, to visit the sacred tomb of our divine Saviour, and the site of the resurrection, presented themselves before him, and expounded to him their master’s wish, Haroun did not content himself with entertaining Charles’s request; he wished, besides, to give up to him the complete proprietorship of those places hallowed by the certification of our redemption,” and he sent him, with the most magnificent presents, the keys of the Holy Sepulchre. At the end of the same century, another Christian sovereign, far less powerful and less famous, John Zimisces, emperor of Constantinople, in a war against the Mussulmans of Asia, penetrated into Galilee, made himself master of Tiberias, Nazareth, and Mount Tabor, received a deputation which brought him the keys of Jerusalem, “and we have placed,” he says himself, “garrisons in all the district lately subjected to our rule.” These were but strokes of foreign intervention, giving the Christians of Jerusalem gleams of hope rather than lasting diminution of their miseries. However, it is certain that, during this epoch, pilgrimages multiplied, and were often accomplished without obstacle. It was from France, England, and Italy that most of the pilgrims went, and some of them wrote, or caused to be written, an account of their trip,—amongst others the Italian Saint Valentine, the English Saint Willibald, and the French Bishop Saint Arculf, who had as companion a Burgundian hermit named Peter, a singular resemblance in quality and name to the zealous apostle of the Crusade three centuries later. The most curious of these narratives is that of a French monk, Bernard, a pilgrim of about the year 870. “There is at Jerusalem,” says he, “a hospice where admittance is given to all who come to visit the place for devotion’s sake, and who speak the Roman tongue; a church, dedicated to St. Mary, is hard by the hospice, and possesseth a very noble library, which it oweth to the zeal of the Emperor Charles the Great.” This pious establishment had attached to it fields, vineyards, and a garden situated in the valley of Jehosaphat.
But whilst there were a few isolated cases of Christians thus going to satisfy in the East their pious and inquisitive zeal, the Mussulmans, equally ardent as believers and as warriors, carried Westward their creed and their arms, established themselves in Spain, penetrated to the very heart of France, and brought on, between Islamism and Christianity, that grand struggle in which Charles Martel gained, at Poitiers, the victory for the Cross. It was really a definitive victory, and yet it did not end the struggle; the Mussulmans remained masters in Spain, and continued to infest Southern France, Italy, and Sicily, preserving even, at certain points, posts which they used as starting-points for distant ravages. Far then from calming down and resulting in pacific relations, the hostility between the two races became more and more active and determined; everywhere they opposed, fought, and oppressed one another, inflamed one against the other by the double feelings of faith and ambition, hatred and fear. To this general state of affairs came to be added, about the end of the tenth and beginning of the eleventh century, incidents best calculated to aggravate the evil. Hakem, khalif of Egypt from 996 to 1021, persecuted the Christians, especially at Jerusalem, with all the violence of a fanatic and all the capriciousness of a despot. He ordered them to wear upon their necks a wooden cross five pounds in weight; he forbade them to ride on any animal but mules or asses; and, without assigning any motive for his acts, he confiscated their goods and carried off their children. It was told to him one day that, when the Christians assembled in the temple at Jerusalem to celebrate Easter, the priests of the church rubbed balsam-oil upon the iron chain which held up the lamp over the tomb of Christ, and afterwards set fire, from the roof, to the end of the chain; the fire stole down to the wick of the lamp and lighted it; then they shouted with admiration, as if fire from heaven had come down upon the tomb, and they glorified their faith. Hakem ordered the instant demolition of the church of the Holy Sepulchre, and it was accordingly demolished. Another time a dead dog had been laid at the door of a mosque; and the multitude accused the Christians of this insult. Hakem ordered them all to be put to death. The soldiers were preparing to execute the order when a young Christian said to his friends, “It were too grievous that the whole Church should perish; it were better that one should die for all; only promise to bless my memory year by year.” He proclaimed himself alone to blame for the insult, and was accordingly alone put to death. It is from this story of the historian William of Tyre, that Tasso, in his Jerusalem Delivered, has drawn the admirable episode of Olindo and Sophronia; a fine example, and not the only one, of an act of tyranny and an act of virtue inspiring a great poet with the idea of a masterpiece. “All the deeds of Hakem were without motive,” says the Arab historian Makrisi, “and the dreams suggested to him by his frenzy are incapable of reasonable interpretation.”
These and many other similar stories reached the West, spread amongst the Christian people and roused them to pity for their brethren in the East and to wrath against the oppressors. And it was at a critical period, in the midst of the pious alarms and desires of atonement excited by the expectation of the end of the world a thousand years after the coming of the Lord, that the Christian population saw this way opened for purchasing remission of their sins by delivering other Christians from suffering, and by avenging the wrongs of their creed. On all sides arose challenges and appeals to the warlike ardor of the faithful. The greatest mind of the age, Gerbert, who had become Pope Sylvester II., constituted himself interpreter of the popular feeling. He wrote, in the name of the Church of Jerusalem, a letter addressed to the universal Church: “To work, then, soldier of Christ! Be our standard-bearer and our champion! And if with arms thou canst not do so, aid us with thy words, thy wealth. What is it, pray, that thou givest, and to whom, pray, dost thou give? Of thine abundance thou givest a small matter, and thou givest to Him who hath freely given thee all thou possessest; but He will not accept freely that which thou shalt give; for he will multiply thine offering and will pay it back to thee hereafter.” Some years after Gerbert, another great mind, the greatest among the popes of the middle ages, Gregory VII., proclaimed an expedition, at the head of which he would place himself, to go and deliver Jerusalem and the Christians of the East from the insults and the tyranny of the infidels.
Such being the condition of facts and minds, pilgrimages to Jerusalem became, from the ninth to the eleventh century, more and more numerous and considerable. “It would never have been believed,” says the contemporary chronicler Raoul Glaber, “that the Holy Sepulchre could attract so prodigious an influx. First the lower classes, then the middle, afterwards the most potent kings, the counts, the marquises, the prelates, and lastly, what had never heretofore been seen, many women, noble or humble, undertook this pilgrimage.” In 1026, William Traillefer, count of Angouleme; in 1028, 1035, and 1039, Foulques the Black, count of Anjou; in 1035, Robert the Magnificent, duke of Normandy, father of William the Conqueror; in 1086, Robert the Frison, count of Flanders; and many other great feudal lords quitted their estates, or, rather, their states, to go and—not deliver, not conquer, but—simply visit the Holy Land. It was not long before great numbers were joined to great names. In 1054, Liedbert, bishop of Cambrai, started for Jerusalem with a following of three thousand Picard or Flemish pilgrims; and in 1064, the archbishop of Mayence and the bishops of Spire, Cologne, Bamberg, and Utrecht set out on their way from the borders of the Rhine with more than ten thousand Christians behind them. After having passed through Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, Thrace, Constantinople, Asia Minor, and Syria, they were attacked in Palestine by hordes of Arabs, were forced to take refuge in the ruins of an old castle, and were reduced to capitulation; and when at last, “preceded by the rumors of their battles and their perils, they arrived at Jerusalem, they were received in triumph by the patriarch, and were conducted, to the sound of timbrels and with the flare of torches, to the church of the Holy Sepulchre. The misery they had fallen into excited the pity of the Christians of Asia; and, after having lost more than three thousand of their comrades, they returned to Europe to relate their tragic adventures and the dangers of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.” (Histoire des Croisades, by M. Michaud, t. i. p. 62.)
Amidst this agitation of Western Christendom, in 1076, two years after Pope Gregory VII. had proclaimed his approaching expedition to the Holy Land, news arrived in Europe to the effect that the most barbarous of Asiatics and of Mussulmans, the Turks, after having first served and then ruled the khalifs of Persia, and afterwards conquered the greater part of the Persian empire, had hurled themselves upon the Greek empire, invaded Asia Minor, Syria, and Palestine, and lately taken Jerusalem, where they practised against the Christians, old inhabitants or foreign visitors, priests and worshippers, dreadful cruelties and intolerable exactions, worse than those of the Persian or Egyptian khalifs.
It often happens that popular emotions, however profound and general, remain barren, just as in the vegetable world many sprouts appear at the surface of the soil and die without having grown and fructified. It is not sufficient for the bringing about of great events and practical results that popular aspirations should be merely manifested; it is necessary, further, that some great soul, some powerful will, should make itself the organ and agent of the public sentiment, and bring it to fecundity by becoming its personification. The Christian passion, in the eleventh century, for the deliverance of Jerusalem and the triumph of the Cross was fortunate in this respect. An obscure pilgrim, at first a soldier, then a married man and father of several children, then a monk and a vowed recluse, Peter the Hermit, who was born in the neighborhood of Amiens, about 1030, had gone, as so many others had, to Jerusalem “to say his prayers there.” Struck disconsolate at the sight of the sufferings and insults undergone by the Christians, he had an interview with Simeon, patriarch of Jerusalem, who “recognizing in him a man of discretion and full of experience in affairs of the world, set before him in detail all the evils with which the people of God, in the holy city, were afflicted. ‘Holy father,’ said Peter to him, ‘if the Roman Church and the princes of the West were informed, by a man of energy and worthy of belief, of all your calamities, of a surety they would essay to apply some remedy thereto by word and deed. Write, then, to our lord the pope and to the Roman Church, and to the kings and princes of the West, and strengthen your written testimony by the authority of your seal. As for me, I shrink not from taking upon me a task for the salvation of my soul; and with the help of the Lord I am ready to go and seek out all of them, solicit them, show unto them the immensity of your troubles, and pray them all to hasten on the day of your relief.’” The patriarch eagerly accepted the pilgrim’s offer; and Peter set out, going first of all to Rome, where he handed to Pope Urban II. the patriarch’s letters, and commenced in that quarter his mission of zeal. The pope promised him not only support, but active co-operation when the propitious moment for it should arrive. Peter set to work, being still the pilgrim everywhere, in Europe, as well as at Jerusalem. “He was a man of very small stature, and his outside made but a very poor appearance; yet superior powers swayed this miserable body; he had a quick intellect and a penetrating eye, and he spoke with ease and fluency. . . . We saw him at that time,” says his contemporary Guibert de Nogent, “scouring city and town, and preaching everywhere; the people crowded round him, heaped presents upon him, and celebrated his sanctity by such great praises that I remember not that like honor was ever rendered to any other person. He displayed great generosity in the disposal of all things that were given him. He restored wives to their husbands, not without the addition of gifts from himself, and he re-established, with marvellous authority, peace and good understanding between those who had been at variance. In all that he did or said he seemed to have in him something divine, insomuch that people went so far as to pluck hairs from his mule to keep as relics. In the open air he wore a woollen tunic, and over it a serge cloak which came down to his heels; he had his arms and feet bare; he ate little or no bread, and lived chiefly on wine and fish.”
In 1095, after the preaching errantry of Peter the Hermit, Pope Urban II. was at Clermont, in Auvergne, presiding at the grand council, at which thirteen archbishops and two hundred and five bishops or abbots were met together, with so many princes and lay-lords, that “about the middle of the month of November the towns and the villages of the neighborhood were full of people, and divers were constrained to have their tents and pavilions set up amidst the fields and meadows, notwithstanding that the season and the country were cold to an extreme.” The first nine sessions of the council were devoted to the affairs of the Church in the West; but at the tenth Jerusalem and the Christians of the East became the subject of deliberation. The Pope went out of the church wherein the Council was assembled and mounted a platform erected upon a vast open space in the midst of the throng. Peter the Hermit, standing at his side, spoke first, and told the story of his sojourn at Jerusalem, all he had seen of the miseries and humiliations of the Christians, and all he himself had suffered there, for he had been made to pay tribute for admission into the Holy City, and for gazing upon the spectacle of the exactions, insults, and tortures he was recounting. After him Pope Urban II. spoke, in the French tongue, no doubt, as Peter had spoken, for he was himself a Frenchman, as the majority of those present were, grandees and populace. He made a long speech, entertaining upon the most painful details connected with the sufferings of the Christians of Jerusalem, “that royal city which the Redeemer of the human race had made illustrious by His coming, had honored by His residence, had hallowed by His passion, had purchased by His death, had distinguished by His burial. She now demands of you her deliverance . . . men of France, men from beyond the mountains, nations chosen and beloved of God, right valiant knights, recall the virtues of your ancestors, the virtue and greatness of King Charlemagne and your other kings; it is from you above all that Jerusalem awaits the help she invokes, for to you, above all nations, God has vouchsafed signal glory in arms. Take ye, then, the road to Jerusalem for the remission of your sins, and depart assured of the imperishable glory which awaits you in the kingdom of heaven.”
From the midst of the throng arose one prolonged and general shout, “God willeth it! God willeth it!” The Pope paused for a moment; and then, making a sign with his hand as if to ask for silence, he continued, “If the Lord God were not in your souls, ye would not all have uttered the same words. In the battle, then, be those your war-cry, those words that came from God; in the army of the Lord let nought be heard but that one shout, ‘God willeth it! God willeth it!’ We ordain not, and we advise not, that the journey be undertaken by the old or the weak, or such as be not suited for arms, and let not women set out without their husbands or their brothers; let the rich help the poor; nor priests nor clerks may go without the leave of their bishops; and no layman shall commence the march save with the blessing of his pastor. Whosoever hath a wish to enter upon this pilgrimage, let him wear upon his brow or his breast the cross of the Lord, and let him, who, in accomplishment of his desire, shall be willing to march away, place the cross behind him, between his shoulders; for thus he will fulfil the precept of the Lord, who said, ‘He that doth not take up his cross and follow Me, is not worthy of Me.’”