Leaders of the First Crusade

Still the First Crusade was destined to accomplish more than any of the seven or eight crusades which followed it; and this measure of success it achieved probably because none of the great European sovereigns took part in it.

Continuing The First Crusade,
our selection from The Crusades by Sir George W. Cox published in 1898. The selection is presented in nine easy 5 minute installments. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Previously in The First Crusade.

Time: 1096-1099
Place: Palestine

A space of six hundred miles lay between the Austrian frontier and Constantinople; and across the dreary waste the followers of Walter the Penniless struggled on, destitute of money, and rousing the hostility of the inhabitants whom they robbed and ill-used. In Bulgaria their misdeeds provoked reprisals which threatened their destruction; and none perhaps would have reached Constantinople if the imperial commander at Naissos had not rescued them from their enemies, supplied them with food, and guarded them through the remainder of their journey. These succors involved some costs; and the costs were paid by the sale of unarmed men among the pilgrims, and especially of the women and children, who were seized to provide the necessary funds. Of those who formed the train of the hermit Peter, seven thousand only, it is said, reached Constantinople.

Of such a rabble rout the emperor Alexius* needed not to be afraid. He had already seen and encountered far larger armies of Normans, Turks, and Romans; and he now extended to this vanguard of the hosts of Latin Christendom a hospitality which was almost immediately abused. They had refused to comply with his request that they should quietly await the arrival of their fellow-crusaders; and consulting the safety of his people not less than his own, he induced them to cross the Bosporus, and pitch their camp on Asiatic soil, the land which they had come to wrest from the unbelievers.

[* Head of the Byzantine empire.]

Alexius wished simply to be rid of their presence: they had to deal with an enemy still more crafty and formidable in the Seljukian sultan David. The vagrants whom Peter and Walter had brought thus far on the road to Jerusalem were scattered about the land in search of food; and it was no hard task for David to cheat the main body with the false tidings that their companions had carried the walls of Nice, and were reveling in the pleasures and spoils of his capital. The doomed horde rushed into the plain which fronts the city; and a vast heap of bones alone remained to tell the story of the great catastrophe, when the forces which might more legitimately claim the name of an army passed the spot where the Seljukian had entrapped and crushed his victims. In this wild expedition not less, it is said, than three hundred thousand human beings had already paid the penalty of their lives.

Still the First Crusade was destined to accomplish more than any of the seven or eight crusades which followed it; and this measure of success it achieved probably because none of the great European sovereigns took part in it. The task of setting up a Latin kingdom in Palestine was to be achieved by princes of the second order.

Of these the foremost and the most deservedly illustrious was Godfrey, of Bouillon in the Ardennes, a kinsman of the counts of Boulogne, and Duke of Lotharingen (Lorraine). In the service of the emperor Henry IV, the enemy or the victim of Hildebrand, he had been the first to mount the walls of Rome and cleave his way into the city; he might now hope that his crusading vow would be accepted as an atonement for his sacrilege. Speaking the Frank and Teutonic dialects with equal ease, he exercised by his bravery, his wisdom, and the uprightness of his life an influence which brought to his standard, it is said, not less than eighty thousand infantry and ten thousand horsemen, together with his brothers Baldwin and Eustace, Count of Boulogne.

Among the most conspicuous of Godfrey’s colleagues was Hugh, Count of Vermandois. With him may be placed the Norman duke Robert, whose carelessness had lost him the crown of England, and who had now pawned his duchy for a pittance scarcely less paltry than that for which Esau bartered away his birthright. The number of the great chiefs who led the pilgrims from Northern Europe is completed with the names of Robert, Count of Flanders, and of Stephen, Count of Chartres, Troyes, and Blois.

Foremost, by virtue of his title and office, among the leaders of the southern bands was the papal legate Adhemar (Aymer) Bishop of Puy — a leader rather as guiding the counsels of the army than as gathering soldiers under his banner.

A hundred thousand horse and foot attested, we are told, the greatness, the wealth, and the zeal of Raymond, Count of Toulouse, lord of Auvergne and Languedoc, who had grown old in warfare.

Less tinged with the fanatical enthusiasm of his comrades, and certainly more cool and deliberate in his ambition, Bohemond, son of Robert Guiscard, looked to the crusade as a means by which he might regain the vast regions extending from the Dalmatian coast to the northern shores of the Aegean. Nay, if we are to believe William of Malmesbury, he urged Urban to set forward the enterprise for the very purpose, partly, of thus recovering what he was pleased to regard as his inheritance, and in part of enabling the Pontiff to suppress all opposition in Rome. Guiscard had left his Apulian domains to a younger son, and Bohemond was resolved, it would seem, to add to his principality of Tarentum a kingdom which would make him a formidable rival of the Eastern Emperor.

Far above Bohemond rises his cousin Tancred, the son of the marquis Odo, surnamed the Good, and of Emma, the sister of Robert Guiscard.

In Tancred was seen the embodiment of those peculiar sentiments and modes of thought which gave birth to the crusades, and to which the crusades in their turn imparted marvellous strength and splendor.

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