The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 5

E >> Edward Gibbon >> The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 5

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[Footnote 58: Our best fund for the history of Jerusalem from
Heraclius to the crusades is contained in two large and original
passages of William archbishop of Tyre, (l. i. c. 1 - 10, l.
xviii. c. 5, 6,) the principal author of the Gesta Dei per
Francos. M. De Guignes has composed a very learned Memoire sur
le Commerce des Francois dans le de Levant avant les Croisades,
&c. (Mem. de l'Academie des Inscriptions, tom. xxxvii. p. 467 -
500.)]

[Footnote 59: Secundum Dominorum dispositionem plerumque lucida
plerum que nubila recepit intervalla, et aegrotantium more
temporum praesentium gravabatur aut respirabat qualitate, (l. i.
c. 3, p. 630.) The latinity of William of Tyre is by no means
contemptible: but in his account of 490 years, from the loss to
the recovery of Jerusalem, precedes the true account by 30
years.]

[Footnote 60: For the transactions of Charlemagne with the Holy
Land, see Eginhard, (de Vita Caroli Magni, c. 16, p. 79 - 82,)
Constantine Porphyrogenitus, (de Administratione Imperii, l. ii.
c. 26, p. 80,) and Pagi, (Critica, tom. iii. A.D. 800, No. 13,
14, 15.)]

[Footnote 61: The caliph granted his privileges, Amalphitanis
viris amicis et utilium introductoribus, (Gesta Dei, p. 934.) The
trade of Venice to Egypt and Palestine cannot produce so old a
title, unless we adopt the laughable translation of a Frenchman,
who mistook the two factions of the circus (Veneti et Prasini)
for the Venetians and Parisians.]

[Footnote 62: An Arabic chronicle of Jerusalem (apud Asseman.
Bibliot. Orient. tom. i. p. 268, tom. iv. p. 368) attests the
unbelief of the caliph and the historian; yet Cantacuzene
presumes to appeal to the Mahometans themselves for the truth of
this perpetual miracle.]

[Footnote 63: In his Dissertations on Ecclesiastical History, the
learned Mosheim has separately discussed this pretended miracle,
(tom. ii. p. 214 - 306,) de lumine sancti sepulchri.]

[Footnote 64: William of Malmsbury (l. iv. c. 2, p. 209) quotes
the Itinerary of the monk Bernard, an eye-witness, who visited
Jerusalem A.D. 870. The miracle is confirmed by another pilgrim
some years older; and Mosheim ascribes the invention to the
Franks, soon after the decease of Charlemagne.]

[Footnote 65: Our travellers, Sandys, (p. 134,) Thevenot, (p. 621
- 627,) Maundrell, (p. 94, 95,) &c., describes this extravagant
farce. The Catholics are puzzled to decide when the miracle
ended and the trick began.]

[Footnote 66: The Orientals themselves confess the fraud, and
plead necessity and edification, (Memoires du Chevalier
D'Arvieux, tom. ii. p. 140. Joseph Abudacni, Hist. Copt. c. 20;)
but I will not attempt, with Mosheim, to explain the mode. Our
travellers have failed with the blood of St. Januarius at
Naples.]

The revolution which transferred the sceptre from the
Abbassides to the Fatimites was a benefit, rather than an injury,
to the Holy Land. A sovereign resident in Egypt was more
sensible of the importance of Christian trade; and the emirs of
Palestine were less remote from the justice and power of the
throne. But the third of these Fatimite caliphs was the famous
Hakem, ^67 a frantic youth, who was delivered by his impiety and
despotism from the fear either of God or man; and whose reign was
a wild mixture of vice and folly. Regardless of the most ancient
customs of Egypt, he imposed on the women an absolute
confinement; the restraint excited the clamors of both sexes;
their clamors provoked his fury; a part of Old Cairo was
delivered to the flames and the guards and citizens were engaged
many days in a bloody conflict. At first the caliph declared
himself a zealous Mussulman, the founder or benefactor of moschs
and colleges: twelve hundred and ninety copies of the Koran were
transcribed at his expense in letters of gold; and his edict
extirpated the vineyards of the Upper Egypt. But his vanity was
soon flattered by the hope of introducing a new religion; he
aspired above the fame of a prophet, and styled himself the
visible image of the Most High God, who, after nine apparitions
on earth, was at length manifest in his royal person. At the
name of Hakem, the lord of the living and the dead, every knee
was bent in religious adoration: his mysteries were performed on
a mountain near Cairo: sixteen thousand converts had signed his
profession of faith; and at the present hour, a free and warlike
people, the Druses of Mount Libanus, are persuaded of the life
and divinity of a madman and tyrant. ^68 In his divine character,
Hakem hated the Jews and Christians, as the servants of his
rivals; while some remains of prejudice or prudence still pleaded
in favor of the law of Mahomet. Both in Egypt and Palestine, his
cruel and wanton persecution made some martyrs and many apostles:
the common rights and special privileges of the sectaries were
equally disregarded; and a general interdict was laid on the
devotion of strangers and natives. The temple of the Christian
world, the church of the Resurrection, was demolished to its
foundations; the luminous prodigy of Easter was interrupted, and
much profane labor was exhausted to destroy the cave in the rock
which properly constitutes the holy sepulchre. At the report of
this sacrilege, the nations of Europe were astonished and
afflicted: but instead of arming in the defence of the Holy Land,
they contented themselves with burning, or banishing, the Jews,
as the secret advisers of the impious Barbarian. ^69 Yet the
calamities of Jerusalem were in some measure alleviated by the
inconstancy or repentance of Hakem himself; and the royal mandate
was sealed for the restitution of the churches, when the tyrant
was assassinated by the emissaries of his sister. The succeeding
caliphs resumed the maxims of religion and policy: a free
toleration was again granted; with the pious aid of the emperor
of Constantinople, the holy sepulchre arose from its ruins; and,
after a short abstinence, the pilgrims returned with an increase
of appetite to the spiritual feast. ^70 In the sea-voyage of
Palestine, the dangers were frequent, and the opportunities rare:
but the conversion of Hungary opened a safe communication between
Germany and Greece. The charity of St. Stephen, the apostle of
his kingdom, relieved and conducted his itinerant brethren; ^71
and from Belgrade to Antioch, they traversed fifteen hundred
miles of a Christian empire. Among the Franks, the zeal of
pilgrimage prevailed beyond the example of former times: and the
roads were covered with multitudes of either sex, and of every
rank, who professed their contempt of life, so soon as they
should have kissed the tomb of their Redeemer. Princes and
prelates abandoned the care of their dominions; and the numbers
of these pious caravans were a prelude to the armies which
marched in the ensuing age under the banner of the cross. About
thirty years before the first crusade, the arch bishop of Mentz,
with the bishops of Utrecht, Bamberg, and Ratisbon, undertook
this laborious journey from the Rhine to the Jordan; and the
multitude of their followers amounted to seven thousand persons.
At Constantinople, they were hospitably entertained by the
emperor; but the ostentation of their wealth provoked the assault
of the wild Arabs: they drew their swords with scrupulous
reluctance, and sustained siege in the village of Capernaum, till
they were rescued by the venal protection of the Fatimite emir.
After visiting the holy places, they embarked for Italy, but only
a remnant of two thousand arrived in safety in their native land.

Ingulphus, a secretary of William the Conqueror, was a companion
of this pilgrimage: he observes that they sailed from Normandy,
thirty stout and well-appointed horsemen; but that they repassed
the Alps, twenty miserable palmers, with the staff in their hand,
and the wallet at their back. ^72

[Footnote 67: See D'Herbelot, (Bibliot. Orientale, p. 411,)
Renaudot, (Hist. Patriarch. Alex. p. 390, 397, 400, 401,)
Elmacin, (Hist. Saracen. p. 321 - 323,) and Marei, (p. 384 -
386,) an historian of Egypt, translated by Reiske from Arabic
into German, and verbally interpreted to me by a friend.]

[Footnote 68: The religion of the Druses is concealed by their
ignorance and hypocrisy. Their secret doctrines are confined to
the elect who profess a contemplative life; and the vulgar
Druses, the most indifferent of men, occasionally conform to the
worship of the Mahometans and Christians of their neighborhood.
The little that is, or deserves to be, known, may be seen in the
industrious Niebuhr, (Voyages, tom. ii. p. 354 - 357,) and the
second volume of the recent and instructive Travels of M. de
Volney.

Note: The religion of the Druses has, within the present
year, been fully developed from their own writings, which have
long lain neglected in the libraries of Paris and Oxford, in the
"Expose de la Religion des Druses, by M. Silvestre de Sacy." Deux
tomes, Paris, 1838. The learned author has prefixed a life of
Hakem Biamr-Allah, which enables us to correct several errors in
the account of Gibbon. These errors chiefly arose from his want
of knowledge or of attention to the chronology of Hakem's life.
Hakem succeeded to the throne of Egypt in the year of the Hegira
386. He did not assume his divinity till 408. His life was
indeed "a wild mixture of vice and folly," to which may be added,
of the most sanguinary cruelty. During his reign, 18,000 persons
were victims of his ferocity. Yet such is the god, observes M.
de Sacy, whom the Druses have worshipped for 800 years! (See p.
ccccxxix.) All his wildest and most extravagant actions were
interpreted by his followers as having a mystic and allegoric
meaning, alluding to the destruction of other religions and the
propagation of his own. It does not seem to have been the
"vanity" of Hakem which induced him to introduce a new religion.
The curious point in the new faith is that Hamza, the son of Ali,
the real founder of the Unitarian religion, (such is its boastful
title,) was content to take a secondary part. While Hakem was
God, the one Supreme, the Imam Hamza was his Intelligence. It
was not in his "divine character" that Hakem "hated the Jews and
Christians," but in that of a Mahometan bigot, which he displayed
in the earlier years of his reign. His barbarous persecution,
and the burning of the church of the Resurrection at Jerusalem,
belong entirely to that period; and his assumption of divinity
was followed by an edict of toleration to Jews and Christians.
The Mahometans, whose religion he then treated with hostility and
contempt, being far the most numerous, were his most dangerous
enemies, and therefore the objects of his most inveterate hatred.

It is another singular fact, that the religion of Hakem was by no
means confined to Egypt and Syria. M. de Sacy quotes a letter
addressed to the chief of the sect in India; and there is
likewise a letter to the Byzantine emperor Constantine, son of
Armanous, (Romanus,) and the clergy of the empire. (Constantine
VIII., M. de Sacy supposes, but this is irreconcilable with
chronology; it must mean Constantine XI., Monomachus.) The
assassination of Hakem is, of course, disbelieved by his
sectaries. M. de Sacy seems to consider the fact obscure and
doubtful. According to his followers he disappeared, but is
hereafter to return. At his return the resurrection is to take
place; the triumph of Unitarianism, and the final discomfiture of
all other religions. The temple of Mecca is especially devoted
to destruction. It is remarkable that one of the signs of this
final consummation, and of the reappearance of Hakem, is that
Christianity shall be gaining a manifest predominance over
Mahometanism.

As for the religion of the Druses, I cannot agree with
Gibbon that it does not "deserve" to be better known; and am
grateful to M. de Sacy, notwithstanding the prolixity and
occasional repetition in his two large volumes, for the full
examination of the most extraordinary religious aberration which
ever extensively affected the mind of man. The worship of a mad
tyrant is the basis of a subtle metaphysical creed, and of a
severe, and even ascetic, morality. - M.]

[Footnote 69: See Glaber, l. iii. c. 7, and the Annals of
Baronius and Pagi, A.D. 1009.]

[Footnote 70: Per idem tempus ex universo orbe tam innumerabilis
multitudo coepit confluere ad sepulchrum Salvatoris Hierosolymis,
quantum nullus hominum prius sperare poterat. Ordo inferioris
plebis .... mediocres .... reges et comites ..... praesules
..... mulieres multae nobilis cum pauperioribus .... Pluribus
enim erat mentis desiderium mori priusquam ad propria
reverterentur, (Glaber, l. iv. c. 6, Bouquet. Historians of
France, tom. x. p. 50.)

Note: Compare the first chap. of Wilken, Geschichte der
Kreuz-zuge. - M.]

[Footnote 71: Glaber, l. iii. c. 1. Katona (Hist. Critic. Regum
Hungariae, tom. i. p. 304 - 311) examines whether St. Stephen
founded a monastery at Jerusalem.]

[Footnote 72: Baronius (A.D. 1064, No. 43 - 56) has transcribed
the greater part of the original narratives of Ingulphus,
Marianus, and Lambertus.]

After the defeat of the Romans, the tranquillity of the
Fatimite caliphs was invaded by the Turks. ^73 One of the
lieutenants of Malek Shah, Atsiz the Carizmian, marched into
Syria at the head of a powerful army, and reduced Damascus by
famine and the sword. Hems, and the other cities of the
province, acknowledged the caliph of Bagdad and the sultan of
Persia; and the victorious emir advanced without resistance to
the banks of the Nile: the Fatimite was preparing to fly into the
heart of Africa; but the negroes of his guard and the inhabitants
of Cairo made a desperate sally, and repulsed the Turk from the
confines of Egypt. In his retreat he indulged the license of
slaughter and rapine: the judge and notaries of Jerusalem were
invited to his camp; and their execution was followed by the
massacre of three thousand citizens. The cruelty or the defeat
of Atsiz was soon punished by the sultan Toucush, the brother of
Malek Shah, who, with a higher title and more formidable powers,
asserted the dominion of Syria and Palestine. The house of
Seljuk reigned about twenty years in Jerusalem; ^74 but the
hereditary command of the holy city and territory was intrusted
or abandoned to the emir Ortok, the chief of a tribe of Turkmans,
whose children, after their expulsion from Palestine, formed two
dynasties on the borders of Armenia and Assyria. ^75 The Oriental
Christians and the Latin pilgrims deplored a revolution, which,
instead of the regular government and old alliance of the
caliphs, imposed on their necks the iron yoke of the strangers of
the North. ^76 In his court and camp the great sultan had adopted
in some degree the arts and manners of Persia; but the body of
the Turkish nation, and more especially the pastoral tribes,
still breathed the fierceness of the desert. From Nice to
Jerusalem, the western countries of Asia were a scene of foreign
and domestic hostility; and the shepherds of Palestine, who held
a precarious sway on a doubtful frontier, had neither leisure nor
capacity to await the slow profits of commercial and religious
freedom. The pilgrims, who, through innumerable perils, had
reached the gates of Jerusalem, were the victims of private
rapine or public oppression, and often sunk under the pressure of
famine and disease, before they were permitted to salute the holy
sepulchre. A spirit of native barbarism, or recent zeal,
prompted the Turkmans to insult the clergy of every sect: the
patriarch was dragged by the hair along the pavement, and cast
into a dungeon, to extort a ransom from the sympathy of his
flock; 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.

[Footnote 73: See Elmacin (Hist. Saracen. p. 349, 350) and
Abulpharagius, (Dynast. p. 237, vers. Pocock.) M. De Guignes
(Hist. des Huns, tom iii. part i. p. 215, 216) adds the
testimonies, or rather the names, of Abulfeda and Novairi.]

[Footnote 74: From the expedition of Isar Atsiz, (A. H. 469, A.D.
1076,) to the expulsion of the Ortokides, (A.D. 1096.) Yet
William of Tyre (l. i. c. 6, p. 633) asserts, that Jerusalem was
thirty-eight years in the hands of the Turks; and an Arabic
chronicle, quoted by Pagi, (tom. iv. p. 202) supposes that the
city was reduced by a Carizmian general to the obedience of the
caliph of Bagdad, A. H. 463, A.D. 1070. These early dates are
not very compatible with the general history of Asia; and I am
sure, that as late as A.D. 1064, the regnum Babylonicum (of
Cairo) still prevailed in Palestine, (Baronius, A.D. 1064, No.
56.)]

[Footnote 75: De Guignes, Hist. des Huns, tom. i. p. 249 - 252. ]

[Footnote 76: Willierm. Tyr. l. i. c. 8, p. 634, who strives hard
to magnify the Christian grievances. The Turks exacted an aureus
from each pilgrim! The caphar of the Franks now is fourteen
dollars: and Europe does not complain of this voluntary tax.]

Chapter LVIII: The First Crusade.

Part I.

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 a hermit of the name of
Peter, a native of Amiens, in the province of Picardy ^1 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 inquired, 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 martial nations of Europe in your cause;" and Europe was
obedient to the call of the hermit. The astonished patriarch
dismissed him with epistles of credit and complaint; and no
sooner did he land at Bari, than Peter hastened to kiss the feet
of the Roman pontiff. His stature was small, his appearance
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. ^2 He was born of a gentleman's family,
(for we must now adopt a modern idiom,) and his military service
was under the neighboring 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 a 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 wrapped 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, and rescue their Savior: 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.

[Footnote 1: Whimsical enough is the origin of the name of
Picards, and from thence of Picardie, which does not date later
than A.D. 1200. It was an academical joke, an epithet first
applied to the quarrelsome humor 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.)]

[Footnote 2: William of Tyre (l. i. c. 11, p. 637, 638) thus
describes the hermit: Pusillus, persona contemptibilis, vivacis
ingenii, et oculum habeas perspicacem gratumque, et sponte fluens
ei non deerat eloquium. See Albert Aquensis, p. 185. Guibert,
p. 482. Anna Comnena in Alex isd, l. x. p. 284, &c., with
Ducarge's Notes, p. 349.]

[Footnote *: Wilken considers this as doubtful, (vol. i. p. 47.(
- M.]

[Footnote !: He had seen the Savior in a vision: a letter had
fallen from heaven Wilken, vol. i. p. 49. - M.]

The magnanimous spirit of Gregory the Seventh had already
embraced the design of arming Europe against Asia; the ardor of
his zeal and ambition still breathes in his epistles: from either
side of the Alps, fifty thousand Catholics had enlisted under the
banner of St. Peter; ^3 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,
^4 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 honors 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
Constance and Placentia, confessed the manifold prostitutions to
which she had been exposed by a husband regardless of her honor
and his own. ^6 So popular was the cause of Urban, so weighty was
his influence, that the council which he summoned at Placentia ^7
was composed of two hundred bishops of Italy, France, Burgandy,
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 succor. 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 hope was in a
nation of soldiers ^8 still proud of the preeminence of their
name, and ambitious to emulate their hero Charlemagne, ^9 who, in
the popular romance of Turpin, ^10 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.