LVII. CHAP. and the divine worship in the church of the resurrection was often disturbed by the savage rudeness of its masters. The pathetic tale excited the millions of the West to march under the standard of the cross to the relief of the holy land: and yet how trifling is the sum of these accumulated evils, if compared with the single act of the sacrilege of Hakem, which had been so patiently endured by the Latin Christians! A slighter provocation inflamed the more irascible temper of their descendants: a new spirit had arisen of religious chivalry and papal dominion: a nerve was touched of exquisite feeling; and the sensation vibrated to the heart of Europe. CHAP. crusade, A. D. 1095.... 1099. CHAP. LVIII. Origin and Numbers of the First Crusade.... Characters of the Latin Princes....Their March to Constantinople....Policy of the Greek Emperor Alexius....Conquest of Nice, Antioch, and Jerusalem, by the Franks....Deliverance of the Holy Sepulchre ...Godfrey of Bouillon, First King of Jerusalem...Institutions of the French or Latin Kingdom. ABOUT twenty years after the conquest of Jerusalem by the Turks, the holy sepulchre was visited by an hermit The first of the name of Peter, a native of Amiens, in the province of Picardy' in France. His resentment and sympathy were excited by his own injuries and the oppression of the Christian name; he mingled his tears with those of the patriarch, and earnestly enquired, if no hopes of relief could be entertained from the Greek emperors of the East. The patriarch exposed the vices and weakness of the successors of Constantine. "I will rouse," exclaimed the hermit," the mar"tial nations of Europe in your cause;" and Europe was obedient to the call of the hermit. The astonished patriarch Peter the 1 Whimsical enough is the origin of the name of Picards, and from thence of Picardie, which does not date earlier than A. D. 1200. It was an academical joke, an epithet first applied to the quarrelsome humour of those students, in the university of Paris, who came from the frontier of France and Flanders (Valesii Notitia Galliarum, p. 447. Longuerue, Description de la France, p. 54). LVIII. dismissed him with epistles of credit and complaint, and no CHAP. sooner did he land at Bari, than Peter hastened to kiss the feet of the Roman pontiff. His stature was small, his ap. pearance contemptible; but his eye was keen and lively; and he possessed that vehemence of speech, which seldom fails to impart the persuasion of the soul. He was born of a gentleman's family (for we must now adopt a modern idiom), and his military service was under the neighbouring counts of Boulogne, the heroes of the first crusade. But he soon relinquished the sword and the world; and if it be true, that his wife, however noble, was aged and ugly, he might withdraw, with the less reluctance, from her bed to a convent, and at length to an hermitage. In this austere solitude, his body was emaciated, his fancy was inflamed; whatever he wished, he believed; whatever he believed, he saw in dreams. and revelations. From Jerusalem, the pilgrim returned an accomplished fanatic; but as he excelled in the popular madness of the times, pope Urban the second, received him as a prophet, applauded his glorious design, promised to support it in a general council, and encouraged him to proclaim the deliverance of the Holy Land. Invigorated by the approbation of the pontiff, his zealous missionary traversed, with speed and success, the provinces of Italy and France. His diet was abstemious, his prayers long and fervent, and the alms which he received with one hand, he distributed with the other: his head was bare, his feet naked, his meagre body was wrapt in a coarse garment; he bore and displayed a weighty crucifix; and the ass on which he rode, was sanctified in the public eye by the service of the man of God. He preached to innumerable crowds in the churches, the streets, and the highways: the hermit entered with equal confidence the palace and the cottage; and the people, for all was people, was impetuously moved by his call to repentance and arms. When he painted the sufferings of the natives and pilgrims of Palestine, every heart was melted to compassion; every breast glowed with indignation, when he challenged the warriors of the age to defend their brethren 2 William of Tyre (1. i. c. 11. p. 637, 638.) thus describes the hermit: pusillus, persona contemptibilis, vivacis ingenii, et occulum habens perspicacem gratumque, et sponte fluens ei non deerat eloquium. See Albert Aquensis, p. 185. Guibert, p. 482. Anna Comnena in Alexiad, 1. x. p. 284, &c. with Ducange's notes, p. 349. VOL. VII. C c LVIII. CHAP. and rescue their Saviour: his ignorance of art and language was compensated by sighs, and tears, and ejaculations; and Peter supplied the deficiency of reason by loud and frequent appeals to Christ and his Mother, to the saints and angels of paradise, with whom he had personally conversed. The most perfect orator of Athens might have envied the success of his eloquence: the rustic enthusiast inspired the passions which he felt, and Christendom expected with impatience the counsels and decrees of the supreme pontiff. Urban II. in the March. The magnanimous spirit of Gregory the seventh had alcouncil of ready embraced the design of arming Europe against Asia; Placentia, the ardour of his zeal and ambition still breathes in his A. D. epistles: from either side of the Alps, fifty thousand Catho1095, lics had enlisted under the banner of St. Peter; and his successor reveals his intention of marching at their head against the impious sectaries of Mahomet. But the glory or reproach of executing, though not in person, this holy enterprise, was reserved for Urban the second, the most faithful of his disciples. He undertook the conquest of the East, whilst the larger portion of Rome was possessed and fortified by his rival Guibert of Ravenna, who contended with Urban for the name and honours of the pontificate. He attempted to unite the powers of the West, at a time when the princes were separated from the church, and the people from their princes, by the excommunication which himself and his predecessors had thundered against the emperor and the king of France. Philip the first, of France, supported with patience the censures which he had provoked by his scandalous life and adulterous marriage. Henry the fourth, of Germany, asserted the right of investitures, the prerogative of confirming his bishops by the delivery of the ring and crosier. But the emperor's party was crushed in Italy by the arms of the Normans and the countess Mathilda; and the long quarrel had been recently envenomed by the revolt of his son Conrad and the shame of his wife,5 who, in the synods of Con 3 Ultra quinquaginta millia, si me possunt in expeditione pro duce et pontifice habere, armata manû volunt in inimicos Dei insurgere et ad sepulchrum Domini ipso ducente pervenire (Gregor. vii. epist. ii. 31. in tom. xii. p. 322. concil). 4 See the original lives of Urban II. by Pandulphus Pisanus and Bernardus Guido, in Muratori, Rer. Ital. Script. tom. iii. pars i. p. 352, 353. 5 She is known by the different names of Praxes, Eupræcia, Eufrasia, and LVIII. stance and Placentia, confessed the manifold prostitutions to CHAP. which she had been exposed by an husband regardless of her honour and his own. So popular was the cause of Urban, so weighty was his influence, that the council which he summoned at Placentia' was composed of two hundred bishops of Italy, France, Burgundy, Swabia, and Bavaria. Four thousand of the clergy, and thirty thousand of the laity, attended this important meeting; and as the most spacious cathedral would have been inadequate to the multitude, the session of seven days was held in a plain adjacent to the city. The ambassadors of the Greek emperor, Alexius Comnenus, were introduced to plead the distress of their sovereign and the danger of Constantinople, which was divided only by a narrow sea from the victorious Turks, the common enemies of the Christian name. In their suppliant address they flattered the pride of the Latin princes; and, appealing at once to their policy and religion, exhorted them to repel the Barbarians on the confines of Asia, rather than to expect them in the heart of Europe. At the sad tale of the misery and perils of their Eastern brethren the assembly burst into tears: the most eager champions declared their readiness to march; and the Greek ambassadors were dismissed with the assurance of a speedy and powerful succour. The relief of Constantinople was included in the larger and most distant project of the deliverance of Jerusalem; but the prudent Urban adjourned the final decision to a second synod, which he proposed to celebrate in some city of France in the autumn of the same year. The short delay would propagate the flame of enthusiasm; and his firmest Adelais; and was the daughter of a Russian prince, and the widow of a margrave of Brandenburgh. Struv. Corpus Hist. Germanicæ, p. 340. 6 Henricus odio eam cœpit habere: ideo incarceravit eam, et concessit ut plerique vim ei inferrent; immo filium hortans ut eam subagitaret (Dodechin, Continuat. Marian. Scot. apud Baron. A. D. 1093, No. 4). In the synod of Constance, she is described by Bertholdus, rerum inspector: quæ se tantas et tam in inauditas fornicationum spurcitias, et a tantis passam fuisse conquesta est, &c. and again at Placentia: satis misericorditer suscepit, eo quòd ipsam tantas spurcitias non tam commississequam invi am pertulisse pro certo cognoverit papa cum sanctâ synodo. Apud Baron. A. D. 1093, No. 4. 1094, No. 3. A rare subject for the infallible decision of a pope and council. These abominations are repugnant to every principle of human nature, which is not altered by a dispute about rings and crosiers. Yet it should seem, that the wretched woman was tempted by the priests to relate or subscribe some infamous stories of herself and her husband. 7 See the narrative and acts of the synod of Placentia, Concil. tom. xii. p. 821, &c. LVIII. CHAP. hope was in a nation of soldiers, still proud of the pre-eminence of their name, and ambitious to emulate their hero Charlemagne, who, in the popular romance of Turpin,1o had achieved the conquest of the Holy Land. A latent motive of affection or vanity might influence the choice of Urban: he was himself a native of France, a monk of Clugny, and the first of his countrymen who ascended the throne of St. Peter. The pope had illustrated his family and province; nor is there perhaps a more exquisite gratification than to revisit, in a conspicuous dignity, the humble and laborious scenes of our youth. Council of It may occasion some surprise that the Roman pontiff should erect, in the heart of France, the tribunal from whence he hurled his anathemas against the king. But our surprise will November vanish so soon as we form a just estimate of a king of France of the eleventh century." Philip the first was the great-grandson of Hugh Capet the founder of the present race, who, in the decline of Charlemagne's posterity, added the regal title to his patrimonial estates of Paris and Orleans. In this narrow compass, he was possessed of wealth and jurisdiction; but in the rest of France, Hugh and his first descendants were no more than the feudal lords of about sixty dukes and counts, of independent and hereditary power," who disdained the control of laws and legal assemblies, and whose disregard of their sovereign was revenged by the disobedience of their 8 Guibert himself, a Frenchman, praises the piety and valour of the French nation, the author and example of the crusades: Gens nobilis, prudens, bellicosa, dapsilis et nitida .... Quos enim Britones, Anglos, Ligures, si bonis eos moribus videamus, non illico Francos homines appellemus? (p. 478.) He owns, however, that the vivacity of the French degenerates into petulance among foreigners (p. 483), and vain lequaciousness (p. 502) 9 Per viam quam jamdudum Carolus Magnus mirificus rex Francorum aptari fecit usque C. P. (Cesta Francorum, p. i. Robert. Monach. Hist. Hieros. 1.i. p. 33, &c.).* 10 John Tilpinus, or Turpinus, was archbishop of Rheims, A. D.773. After the year 1000, this romance was composed in his name, by a monk of the borders of France and Spain and such was the idea of ecclesiastical merit, that he describes himself as a fighting and drinking priest! Yet the book of lies was pronounced authentic by pope Calixtus II. (A. D. 1122), and is respectfully quoted by the abbot Suger, in the great Chronicles of St. Denys (Fabric. Bibliot. Latin. medii Avi, edit. Mansi, tom. iv. p. 161) 11 See Etat de la France, by the Count de Boulaiavilliers, tom. i. p. 180... 182. and the second volume of the Observations sur l'Histoire de France, by the Abbé de Mably. 12 In the provinces to the south of the Loire, the first Capetians were scarcely allowed a feudal supremey. On all sides, Normandy, Bretagne, Aquitain, Burgundy, Lorraine, and Flanders, contracted the name and limits of the preper France. See Hadrian Vals. Notitia Galliarum. |