CHAPTER V CRUSADER

To tell even in barest outline the long story of the Crusades would be a task as impossible as it would be thankless. The magic of Sir Walter Scott’s Talisman is happily not yet dead, and in some degree the Crusader still lives as an actual and human figure in our imagination. Many Christians who had come as pilgrims had settled in the land as its inhabitants, and for four centuries after the Arabian conquest these continued both their trade and their worship under the tolerably mild Mohammedan rule. In the eleventh century all was changed by the Saracen invasion. Pilgrims were extortionately taxed at the gates of Jerusalem; their lives were imperilled, their persons and their devotions insulted. The old commerce, which had grown to considerable proportions, was ruined, and pilgrimage, from being a lucrative and pleasant service, became an almost certain martyrdom.

It was this state of affairs which sent Peter the Hermit through Europe on his great campaign in 1093, and those extraordinary wars that raged in Syria{158} through two centuries bore the complex character of the motives which had prompted them. From the departure of that motley rabble which followed the Hermit to the East in the first Crusade, down to the pitiful expedition of French children who started 30,000 strong from Vend?me in 1212, there stretches perhaps the most picturesque period in all history.[28]

The mass of paradox and contradiction which that period presents is no less striking. It was an invasion by the West, whose purpose was to rehabilitate an Eastern faith. It was a religious war carried on by the jealousies and ambitions of rival nations. It was the occasion of some of the most statesmanlike government that the world has seen, and it was accompanied from first to last by frequent outbursts of treachery, massacre, and lust. It was the most airy dream and at the same time the most effective practical force of its time. It was the expression of the most ascetic severity and the most reckless luxury. Utterly futile, commercially and socially disastrous, often wholly irreligious, it was yet everywhere a massive and purposeful conception, in which the determination and forcefulness of the West thrust their iron wedge clean to the centre of this sleepy land. Its high idealism, curiously alloyed with grosser elements both sensual and brutal, was yet able{159} to preserve through all the genuine spiritual fire of chivalry and of faith.

Our task is simply to ascertain what all this stands for in the history of Palestine, and what it has left behind it there as its memorial. In two words, it stands for the contact of the East and West, and for their separateness. Into Europe the Crusades brought much from the East. It was due to them more than to all other causes that there was so immense an increase of Eastern merchandise in Western markets—not of Jerusalem relics only, but of Damascus ware and of Persian and even Indian produce from beyond the great rivers. Their influence on architecture, too, is a well-known fact of Western history. The Mosque of Omar rose on at least three European sites, and the plan of many another piece of Byzantine building and Arabesque decoration was brought home by the Crusaders from the wars. Into the East, again, the Crusades brought much from the West. From north to south of Palestine one meets with the remains and memorials of that invasion. Theirs are the footprints most visible throughout the land. Everything in Syria has felt the touch of them and retained its mark. At every turn one finds something recognisable and homely to Western ears and eyes—the name of a castle, the chiselling of a stone, the moulding of metal—they are strangely familiar as they are met so far away from home. Yet they survive as wreckage, and as wreckage only. He who hopes to westernise the East is attempting a task in which all must fail, whether they be soldiers or priests, missionaries or statesmen.{160} The ancient Eastern life has long ago flowed back over the relics of the Western occupation of Syria.

The surviving traces are of many kinds. There are the descendants of Crusaders, sprung of intermarriages with Eastern women, and still preserving a distinctively European type in little suggestive details of feature or of hair. Names such as Belfort, Belvoir, Mirabel, Blanchegarde, or Sinjil (St. Giles), coming without apology next to the Hebrew and Arabic names of villages in Palestine, strike one with very much the same shock as old Scottish place-names do, alternating with incorporated aboriginal ones, on the railway stations of the Australian bush. Relics like the sword and spurs of Godfrey de Bouillon may, like most other relics, be discounted, but not so the wonderful masonry of castles and of churches which everywhere overawes the man accustomed to modern walls. Winding our way with tight rein along the narrow and crooked streets of Tyre, we suddenly plunged into the darkness and foul air of the Bazaar. At the other end of it, emerging under a Gothic archway, we found ourselves in the courtyard of a khan, a very dirty and unpleasant place. Seeing nothing but unclean stables, we imagined that our horses were to be put up here and perhaps fed, and we pitied them. Then, to our astonishment, we discovered that this was the old Crusader Church, where these broken and discoloured arches had once echoed the hymns and prayers of European chivalry; and that somewhere among them lay the bones of the great emperor so famous in{161}

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ENTRANCE TO THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE.

history and legend—“Der alte Barbarossa, der Kaiser Friederich.” Not less affecting in its way was the discovery of a little patch of snapdragon flowers on the ruined walls of Belfort Castle. We were informed that the plant is not elsewhere found in Syria, and the likelihood is that some Crusader’s lady brought it from the garden of a far-off French or English home.

The Crusader was at once the dreamer, the worshipper, and the fighter of the Middle Age. The knight was not indeed the sort of man whom at first sight we would suspect of dreaming. Could we see him riding down the street to-day, we should probably be reminded of some village blacksmith on a Clydesdale horse. Yet he had been dreaming dreams and seeing visions. He was a gentleman and a man of feeling, though he had his own rough ways of shewing it. Part of what had set him dreaming was the instinct of travel and the literature of travel which in those days was so quaint and picturesque. No doubt this travel literature was largely due to pilgrims, but there were others then who could play no tune but “Over the hills and far away.” Travellers’ half-remembered and exaggerated adventures conspired with the fantastic imaginings of the untravelled rustic to create that magic land beyond the horizon where giants, monsters, and devils had their home. All the wistfulness, the dream, and the desire of the ancient days are there. The chroniclers of the time before the Norman Conquest are the most fascinating of geographers, and the singers of Arthurian romance in the later days of the{162} Crusades arrived at a geography which was an utter bewilderment, the result of ages of vague travel and rumours from the Syrian seat of war. Babylon and Wales and places with names wholly unpronounceable are in sublime confusion, and the geography in general is that of Thackeray’s Little Billee, who saw from his mast-head “Jerusalem and Madagascar and South Amerikee.”

Jerusalem always came first. “The Crusades,” as Sidonia says in Tancred, “renovated the spiritual hold which Asia has always had upon the North.” The spell of the East had come upon the West, and in that there lay a reason for the Crusades deeper than any commercial or even military attraction. The West was waiting for it. Behind the British men of the twelfth century lay a heredity of patriotic legend connected largely with the battle of Christianity against Paganism under Arthur. There lay the foundation of much that was best in the crusading enthusiasm. On their own soil they had followed the King and fought under him for Christ. But to satisfy the hearts of these rough men it needed more than all such practical life could yield them, even when that life was so exciting as it was then. There is an infinite pathos in the dream that was coming to clearness through those years. Discontented with the glories even of Arthur’s court, longing for a spiritual something which might give to chivalry its finest meaning, they sought the Holy Grail. Until, well on in the twelfth century, the shadowy figures of Walter Map and Robert de Borron{163} formulate the romance,[29] we see it growing out of old pagan legends baptized by Christian missionaries and blended with Bible stories. It emerges at last in the romances of the French Trouvères, the summit and flower of all past idealisms, the spiritual secret and gist of life, and the chief end of noble men. This is all well known to those who interest themselves in that spiritual search which is the main business of choice souls in all ages, and which in that age took literary form in the Grail Quest. But to us it is specially interesting to note that the century whose later years received the Trouvère legend from Chrétien de Troyes began with an event but for which that legend would never have assumed the form in which it appeared. In 1101 C?ssarea was besieged and taken by Baldwin I. “It yielded a rich booty. Among other prizes was found a hexagonal vase of green crystal, supposed to have been used at the administration of the sacrament, and now preserved in Paris. This vase plays an important part in medi?val poetry as the Holy Grail.” The visionary aspect of the Crusades is that which continually obtrudes itself as one reads their history. Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata is full of it. Even so rough and boisterous a hero as Richard is obviously a dreamer also. Nothing in all this history is more striking than that fateful day when, after marching to within seven leagues of Jerusalem, Richard commanded his army to halt, and courted their murmurs during a{164} month’s unaccountable inaction. Performing unheard-of feats of valour in minor sallies, he could only weep when he beheld the towers of the Holy City, and after routing Saladin’s army in a great battle at Joppa, negotiated a truce and wandered off to shipwreck and imprisonment, commending the Holy Land to God, and praying that it might be granted him to return again and recover it.[30]

As worshippers, the Crusaders are famous figures in the Holy Land. It is hard to reconcile the tales of wild debauchery which followed almost all their victories, with the obviously genuine religious enthusiasm that swept the hosts down weeping on their knees when they caught first sight of Jerusalem. Yet the worship was sincere, and there were pure and gentle spirits among them whom victory did not demoralise. They are always, indeed, armed worshippers—at first a religious soldiery, afterwards a military priesthood, as Stebbing puts it. This composite character is well brought out in the two orders of knights, the Hospitallers and the Templars. The former, working for the sick in the Holy City, wore a black robe with a white cross upon the breast of it, but when there was fighting to be done they covered this with a surcoat of scarlet on which a silver cross was embroidered. They lived simply, contenting themselves with such lodging and fare as were offered them, and they were bound to keep themselves provided with a light which must always be kept burning while they slept. The Templars{165} pledged themselves in even stricter vows, and were warrior-priests in the most literal sense of the term. On the summit of Mount Tabor there is the ruin of a Crusader church, whose broken walls still enclose the sacred space where once men worshipped. Spacious and strongly built, the ruin has a severe grandeur of its own. In the chancel an altar has been rebuilt, and an upturned Corinthian capital set upon it, in the centre of which is fixed a heavy iron cross. That iron cross seems to sum up in its grave symbolism the very spirit of the Crusades. Many of their churches were reconstructions of older Christian edifices, and most of them have been transmuted into mosques, so that their ecclesiastical architecture still remaining is as composite as their character and their enterprise. Yet enough remains of what is distinctively their own to show at once the massive strength and the decorative beauty of their buildings. Its strength is that of men who were accustomed to build fortresses; the buttressed walls are of immense thickness, and the mortar is sometimes harder than the stone. Its beauty has been defaced by the mutilation of much fine work, but from what is left we know how well they carved; and there is a certain high solemnity about their arches and columns which tells of men whose minds were large, strong, and real.

One curious fact, to which Conder often directs attention, is constantly perplexing the traveller. Their identifications of sacred sites are those of men whose enthusiasm far exceeded their knowledge. Had they{166} taken time to consult the Scriptures, or to read them with any thoughtfulness, countless errors would have been avoided. But the soldier instinct is very far from the critical, and they were impatient to find the sites they wished to see. Anything was sufficient for a clue. The name Jibrin suggested “Gabriel,” and a great church arose in honour of the Archangel. Athlit was near the sea-shore, and the Crusaders who lived there found Tyre and Capernaum in its immediate neighbourhood. For reasons equally cogent, Shiloh was brought within a mile or two of Jerusalem, Shechem became Sychar, and the heights of Ebal and Gerizim were recognised as the Dan and Bethel of Jeroboam’s calves. Most curious of all, the little hill of Jebel Duhy, on whose summit you look down across the valley from the top of Tabor, was named Hermon, for no other reason than that a psalm places the two together in its promise that “Tabor and Hermon shall rejoice in Thy name.” Altogether, these worshippers were in too great haste. “Crusading topography is more remarkable than reliable.”

Great as the Crusaders were in dream and in worship, it is their fighting that remains for ever most impressive and most characteristic. Of no men in history is the verse truer, in spite of all their extravagances—
Know that the men of great renown
Were men of simple needs:
Bare to the Lord they laid them down
And slept on mighty deeds.

Looked at from a distance, the Crusades very generally wear the aspect of a stream of vivid colour—a{167} spectacular progress of Europe through a corner of Asia, whose main feature is its brilliant picturesqueness. On the spot the quality in them which is by far the most impressive is their stern reality and fighting weight. The Crusader was doubtless one who in his time played many parts, but whatever else he was, no one who has seen the remains of his work will question that he was at least “a first-class fighting man.” The figure of Richard, as it is preserved for us in the records of the older historians, may be more or less apocryphal, but it is at least true enough to crusading ideals, which must have found many an actual realisation in these strong and fearless soldiers of the Cross. We read of amazing captures of booty; of single combats in which “the King at one blow severs the head, right shoulder and arm of his opponent from the rest of his body”; of a conflict in which only one Christian perished, while “the Turks lost seven hundred men and above fifteen hundred horses.” At Joppa the king leaps out of his ship before it can reach land, and rushes on the enemy. Three days later he and his knights are surprised and have to fight half-naked, some in their shirts and some even barefoot; yet they win. At another time we see Richard plunging alone into the midst of the hostile army, and fighting until Saladin’s brother sends him a gift of two Arab war-horses to enable him to fight it out. Altogether such a hero was he, that the Moslems asserted “that even the horses bristled their manes at the name of Richard.” No wonder if in the popular imagination he became for England hardly distinguishable from that{168} St. George who had already been identified with Perseus, who on these same sands had fought the dragon for Andromeda.

The grandeur of crusading warfare lingers in the mighty ruins of their castles. Nothing could surpass the impressiveness of these castles, seen on hill-tops from below, combing the sky with the sharp broken teeth of their ruined towers, or rearing a black “mailed head of menace” against the stars. Many of them are on the sites of older fortresses, and actually stand on Jewish or Roman foundations. By far the most imposing of such castles is that of Banias, which crowns that spur of Hermon at which “Dan leaped from Bashan” long ago. It must have been capable of quartering a small army, and the quantity of broken vessels confirms the impression. Cisterns, vaulted and groined archways, mosaic floors, dungeons, and every other luxury of their European homes had been imported hither.

The Crusaders ran a line of fortresses along that western edge of the Jordan valley where Israel, as we saw, failed to protect the mouths of her gorges. Belvoir, “the Star of the Wind,” guards from its lofty promontory the passes immediately south of the Sea of Galilee. Bethshan itself, where the Canaanites lingered to the standing shame of Israel, shows the well-preserved remains of a crusader bridge and fortress. Not less striking is the sea-board line of castles. Not only in such old localities as Tyre and Sidon, C?sarea and Joppa, did fortresses arise, but on at least two quite new sites—those of Athlit and Acre.{169}

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INTERIOR OF THE DOME OF THE CHAIN, LOOKING NORTH.

Athlit is unmentioned in Scripture, and only the eye of seafaring soldiers could have discovered how its little crease in the long straight line of coast might be utilised for defence. Acre is “the Key to Syria”; but it was left for the Crusaders to discover that fact.

Yet with all this might and purpose and strategic instinct manifest in every mile of Syria, failure is written broad across the land in these ruins. At two points the sense of it becomes especially acute. One is the battlefield below the very mountain which tradition has assigned to the preaching of the Sermon on the Mount. The horrors of that field were such that even yet it is impossible to look without shuddering upon the flattened top of Hattin, where the black basalt stands out from the green slopes below. The Crusaders were rushed into the open plain, near which Saladin’s cavalry were waiting for them, and they met his assault unfed, unrested, and without even water to quench their thirst. Throughout a long hot day they perished round the banner of the Cross, a final element of horror being added when the Saracens set fire to the scrub, and unhorsed knights were roasted alive in their armour. That was the decisive battle of the Crusades, and Saladin marched after it straight upon Jerusalem.

The other point at which the failure of the Crusades has set up its monument is at their own Athlit. The creation of their genius, and for solidity and massive strength perhaps the most characteristic ruin in Syria, it is also the saddest thing of all they have left for a memorial. Near its rocks King Louis IX. of France{170}—most unfortunate and yet most saintly of all crusading kings—was shipwrecked. Here, too, at the end of the thirteenth century, the Knights Templars made their last retreat after the fall of Acre, and it was from its castle that they departed—the last to abandon the last Crusade. Seen from the sea, the compact and rounded promontory of Athlit presents the appearance of a clenched fist menacing and defiant. Its history grimly corroborates the imagination that here through centuries of decay the land as it were gathers itself together, and thrusts out this grim headland in perpetual defiance of the Western world.

The Crusades stand for more in Palestine than it is easy to realise. The comprehensiveness of their historical significance is by no means exhausted when we have stated it in such paradoxes as those with which our chapter began. They were indeed the greatest sham and at the same time the greatest reality of Syrian history, but they were far more than that. They were heirs to all the past of the country, and they did much to perpetuate that past and to carry it on into the time to come. Even from the Moslem life they wrestled with, they borrowed something. They, and the chivalry which they fostered, are the most spectacular part of Western history, and give a dash of brilliant colour to the grey life of the Middle Ages. That brilliance is in part the splendour of the East. The Crusader has borrowed from the Saracen at least a scarf for his sword.

It is chiefly as builders that the Crusaders remain in Syria exposed to modern eyes, and in their{171} building they have perpetuated and utilised the other three invasions. From the first Christians they took over their churches and rebuilt them, retaining something and adding more. From the older Jewish architects they had almost as great an inheritance. There seems no incongruity in the heavy stone mangers and far-driven iron rings which they fixed in the walls of those tremendous vaults on which the Temple area rests; and it is by a not unnatural transference that tradition has given to these the name of Solomon’s Stables. Solomon’s vaults they may have been, but as stables they were of crusading origin. Their own building is a rough imitation of the drafted stones of the Jews. The rustic work is much the same, only rougher, but the plain chiselling is very far from the minute fineness of the older workmanship. Altogether, they were fighters first and builders second. Like the men of Nehemiah’s time, “every one with one of his hands wrought in the work, and with the other hand held a weapon.... Every one had his sword girded by his side, and so builded.” Nor did they fail to utilise the work of Roman builders. At C?sarea there is the most striking instance of this, and one of the most suggestive facts in the whole story of the Crusaders. C?sarea was the most Roman of all Syrian towns. Built as the seaport for Sebaste by Herod, it was the part of Syria which travellers and governors sailing from Italy first sighted, and it was designed to give them the impression of a land Romanised. Herod’s delight in pillars is attested by the colonnades{172} of Sebaste, and the wealth of shaft and capital which marks the ruins of all his cities. But in C?sarea he seems to have excelled himself. The Roman mole which forms the northern side of the harbour “is composed of some sixty or seventy prostrate columns lying side by side in the water like rows of stranded logs.”[31] On the long promontory south of the mole stands the Crusader Castle, notable for the circumstance that the Crusaders built hundreds of lighter and shorter columns into their walls to thorough-bind them, so that, in Oliphant’s exact and graphic words, “the butts project like rows of cannon from the side of a man-of-war.” Which thing is for an allegory; and one of the most eloquent of all sermons in stone it is. Rome did more for Christianity than all its friends, while she was as yet its enemy. Without her courts of justice Paul would have had short shrift from his countrymen. Her roads and her citizenship gave to the first missionaries of the Cross their exit upon the world and their opportunity. Her laws gave them not protection only, but a groundwork for much that entered into that theology which conquered the thought of the world. Paul appealed unto C?sar, and he wrote to the Romans his gospel expressed in the forms with which they were most familiar. And it was at C?sarea that he made his appeal, doing in flesh and blood what his disciples a thousand years later did in stone—thorough-binding the walls of the building of Christian faith with Roman columns.