His audience chanted ‘
Princes and peasants alike awoke to this frenzy, rushing to take the Cross – the promise to undertake the ‘pilgrimage’ to conquer Jerusalem. The word crusade was not used until later. The numbers were astonishing. In the first wave, led by a barefoot preacher known as Peter the Hermit, 80,000 peasants, princes and priests surged across Europe towards Constantinople, where they hoped with all the vagueness of fanatical believers that they would somehow reach Jerusalem. Princes mustered armies of knights and soldiers, led naturally by the Normans. William the Conqueror’s eldest son Robert, demeaningly known as Curthose – Shortpants – who had inherited Normandy (while his brother William II Rufus received England), immediately joined a movement that was inspired by a mix of faith, ambition and adventure, stimulated by the energy released by economic and population growth. There was no need to choose between motives: zealotry, plunder, travel, opportunism dovetailed precisely with religious salvation and violent adventure.
Roger’s fart notwithstanding, Bohemond, prince of Taranto, son of Wily Robert, now forty years old, had seven Hautevilles in his retinue including his nephew Tancred, whose ‘powers were roused, boldness set in motion, eyes opened’. Like so many thousand others, ‘His soul was at a crossroads. Which of the two paths to follow? The Gospels or the world?’ Now he could have both.
It must have seemed doubtful the pilgrims would ever reach Jerusalem and kill ‘the accursed race’ of Muslims, so they turned on the infidels in their midst: the Jews. One of the crusading princes, Godfrey of Bouillon, the Franco-German count of lower Lorraine, who was accompanied by his two brothers, announced he was ‘avenging the blood of the crucified one by completely eradicating any trace of those bearing the name “Jew”’. In May 1096, Jews were massacred in Trier, Mainz and Speyer, the first spasm of anti-Jewish racism that would become a bacterium within European culture.
‘The whole of the west living between the Adriatic and Gibraltar migrated in a body to Asia, marching from one end of Europe to the other,’ recalled Anna Komnene, then awaiting the pilgrims in Constantinople. After a decade of war against rebels, Alexios had stabilized the empire. But Anna hoped to succeed him.
Alexios had left his mother in charge when he was fighting the Hautevilles, and he had initially planned to leave the empire to his eldest daughter Anna, who had been born into the purple with both parents present: ‘This signified even in the womb the love I was destined to have for my parents.’ As a child betrothed to her father’s early co-emperor, then almost married to a Seljuk sultan’s son, she grew up believing she would rightfully rule, and when she was later married to an aristocrat she and her mother believed the couple would succeed. Instead Alexios crowned his son Joannes as co-emperor. Anna was disappointed.
Alexios was alarmed by the pope’s populist war: all wars led by Roman emperors were holy by definition and his experiences with the Hautevilles had taught him that the Franks – as he called all westerners – were brutes of ‘uncontrollable passion, erratic character, unpredictability and avarice’.
When the ragged mob of Frankish pilgrims arrived outside Constantinople, Alexios fed them and hurried them on their way into the sultanate of Rum. Then Bohemond de Hauteville and the princely armies arrived. Receiving them in the Great Palace, Alexios did not rise to greet them, confident of his Roman superiority. He was friendly even to his old enemy Bohemond, though the Giant suspected his food might be poisoned. Anna called him ‘a born perjurer’, but couldn’t lift her gaze from this brutish blond, ‘a marvel for the eyes … so perfectly proportioned’. And he was no dumb blond: ‘His wit was manifold and crafty … he was well informed.’ Bohemond, who had so much to gain and nothing to lose, was persuaded by the princes to take the oath of friendship to Alexios, meaning that he would be their lord, a humiliation eased by roomfuls of gold.
