13. Philip I.
CHAPTER XIII. Philip I. (1060-1108)
The Council was held at a place called Clermont, in the centre of France. The Pope had first to arrange several matters of business. Among other things he again excommunicated Philip I. of France; but little notice was taken of this, as every one was much more interested in the question about Jerusalem. The Pope made his great speech to a large meeting of people. He described the cruelties of the Turks, and the way in which they behaved at Jerusalem, and called upon every one who heard him to go to the defence of the Holy City and the sepulchre of Christ. He promised that all those who went should be forgiven everything wrong they had done, and if they died by the way, should go at once to heaven.
None of the common people doubted that the Popes had the power of saying whether they should go to heaven or not, and Pope Urban's promise persuaded many men to take the journey who might otherwise have stayed at home. The Pope asked his hearers whether they would go, and they cried out, "Dieu le veut;" God wills it. The, Pope then begged the bishops, who were going home to their different parts of the country, to preach to their people as he had done to them, and to try to persuade as many men as possible to join an army which was soon to set out for Jerusalem. Some of the bishops promised eagerly; "some wept, some doubted, some were disturbed;" but when they got back among their people and began to obey the Pope's commands, they found that the poor people, who had probably heard some of the speeches of Peter the Hermit, were ready and eager to set out on the journey, and by degrees not men only but women and children came to declare themselves ready to follow Peter, or any one who would show them the way to the Holy Land. Several of the great barons also declared themselves ready to be leaders of the army. It was to set out in nine months; but the poor people were too eager to wait so long. A band of serfs, monks, people who owed money and could not pay, with other bad men who wanted to escape from the country, all met together and set out with Peter the Hermit for a guide. They had only eight horsemen among them, and one soldier named Walter the Penniless. They managed to reach Asia after many wanderings, and were at once attacked by the Turks and entirely destroyed. When their friends who were following them arrived at the place, they found only a pyramid of whitened bones. Peter the Hermit, however, seems in some way or other to have escaped.
The Pope was anxious that this war against the Turks should be considered a specially holy one, and that everyone who went on it should be respected by his neighbours, so that others might be led to follow his example. He gave crosses to all the soldiers who set out on the journey to the Holy Land; they were sometimes small metal ornaments, or more often linen or cloth cut into the shape of a cross. These men with the cross were called Crusaders, from a Latin word meaning cross, and the war was called a Crusade.
The barons, counts, and dukes assembled their men slowly. They formed three great armies; one was from Lorraine, the country between France and Germany, of which the people were German rather than French; they were led by one of the bravest soldiers of that time, Godfrey, Duke of Bouillon. The second army was entirely French, and had at its head, Hugh the brother of Philip I.; Robert, Duke of Normandy, the brother of the English king, William Rufus; and the Duke of Brittany. The third army was made up of Aquitanians and other men from the south of France, and was led by the chief man of those parts, the Count of Toulouse.
These three armies went different ways through Europe, and were a great trouble to the countries through which they had to pass, especially to the Emperor of Constantinople, who had to let them stay in his city while they were waiting to cross over into Asia. They all met in Asia at last, and marched towards Jerusalem. They came to a city named Antioch, and after a long siege took it, and made one of their chiefs Prince there. Many thousands of the Crusaders had been killed in the journey to Antioch and the siege. There had been about six hundred thousand of them; there were now only forty thousand, and Jerusalem was defended by a large Turkish army. But the Crusaders had gone too far to turn back; they attacked Jerusalem, and after a siege of five weeks and a great struggle, the Christians became masters of it, exactly two years and eleven months after the day fixed for the setting out of the Crusade.
Godfrey of Bouillon was made King of Jerusalem; two other leaders made themselves princes of two of the other chief towns; many of the Crusaders, among them Peter the Hermit, went home to Europe; and others stayed to help to rule the new kingdom. The Turks waited their time. Soon after the end of the first Crusade Philip had his eldest son crowned, and they reigned together for eight years, at the end of which time Philip died, and his son Louis became sole king.
Many great changes came to the French people in consequence of the Crusades. Some of these were changes for the better, and some changes for the worse. One of the worst changes was that people became accustomed to think it right to fight with any one whose religion was different from their own. They had been taught that a crusade was a holy war, and that it was right and noble to undertake it, and they were next taught that every war was a crusade which was ordered by the Pope, or was against people who did not believe in the religion he taught.
The Crusades, for there were many others after the first one, besides accustoming people to wars about religion, had the bad consequence of wasting the lives of great numbers of men. (I have said that) more than five hundred thousand men died on the way from France to Antioch, and of course the Mahommedans were killed also in great numbers. The Christians died in vain, for they could not drive the Saracens out of the Holy Land, nor even keep Jerusalem long.
Another change that came at this time was that the Pope became even more powerful than he had been before, because all the Crusaders looked to him as their head. He was able to get rid of any one who displeased or resisted him by a command to take the cross, as it was called; which means to go on a crusade; where very likely the crusader would be killed, or if not, he would be away for many years, and would probably have to spend so much money in making ready for the expedition that he would come home poor and weak, and not in a state to give trouble to the Pope. The Crusades were a change for the better for the serfs and men who were not nobles. According to the laws of that time, no one could be both a soldier and a slave; so that if a serf became a Crusader he (left off being)<ceased to be> a slave, and it would have been thought so wicked to take a man away from the army and make him a serf again, that no master dared do it. A serf sometimes, without going on the Crusade, bought his freedom from his master, who was only too glad to find anything to sell.
The nobles who were going on a crusade, and wanted money with which to prepare for their journey, were glad also to sell some part of their lands to any one who would give them money in return. The people who had money to spare were the burghers, as they were called; that is men who lived in a bourg or town, but had no estate of their own, and were not nobles. A law was made that whoever, with the consent of the king, bought an estate from a noble, should himself become a noble. Thus a new set of nobles was formed, richer than the old nobles, though less powerful, and more inclined to submit to the king, who had made the law by which they became nobles.
To the king also these changes brought more power than had belonged to the old kings, as some of the nobles sold their lands to him instead of to the burghers, and he was able to give them away to any one he liked, and to put into power those who would be most obedient to him. Other nobles gave their lands to monasteries, and the monks and clergy grew rich like so many of their neighbours.
But all the riches which came to the King, Pope, burghers, and monasteries, were lost by the nobles, and this made a great change in the state of the country. The nobles, who had lived as small kings, each in his own castle with his serfs around him, and had refused to obey even the king of the country, became by the end of the Crusades so weak that they were obliged to be obedient, while the burghers and other common people had grown so strong, that the nobles did not dare to ill-treat them as of old.
At the end of the first Crusade, however, the nobles were still powerful, and when they made Godfrey de Bouillon King of Jerusalem, and had to settle laws by which he might govern his kingdom, they were made as like as possible to the laws and customs which were common in Europe. The barons and even the burghers had slaves, and the land was held on feudal tenure; this means that the kings gave land to their chief subjects on condition of their doing certain things in return for it; in particular, of their going out to fight with a certain number of followers, when the king wanted soldiers.
The men who held the land were called the vassals of the king, and they in their turn gave part of their land to other men, who became their vassals, and made them the same promises that the barons had made to the king. The kings of Jerusalem governed well, and kept their vassals in good order, and the pilgrims from Europe were surprised to see the difference between the order at Jerusalem and the disorder and confusion of their own countries.
At this time there were many brave and good soldiers who had no land or money, but fought well, and were much respected by their friends and feared by their enemies. Most of these were knights, great numbers of whom distinguished themselves in the Crusades. The knights, to begin with, were usually the sons of the great barons. The land of a baron almost always went at his death to his eldest son. The younger sons of the chief were often sent to the castle of some other baron or chief to be taught all the exercises which it was proper for a gentleman of those days to understand.
They were first made pages, and learned to wait upon the lady of the castle. When the page grew older he was taught to ride and use the sword or spear. He then became a squire, received a sword and belt from the priest, and followed his lord to war. He held his master's horse, carried his armour, guarded his prisoners, or watched his banner. At the age of twenty-one, if he had been brave and faithful as a squire, he was considered fit to be made a knight. This was a serious and important event. The young man who was to become a knight kept watch in a chapel all the night before, praying and fasting. In the morning an address was made to him by a priest, who explained the duties of a knight — to serve his king, to defend his country, to punish any one whom he found doing wrong, to help the weak and oppressed, in particular to help all women, and to do justice and judgment. He took an oath to keep the laws; a new suit of armour was then put upon him, and he knelt down before his lord, who dubbed him a knight; that is, tapped him on the shoulder with the flat of his sword, saying, Rise up, Sir John, or Sir James, or whatever his name might be. After this he was a knight, or in French, a chevalier; meaning a man who rides on horseback, for the common people always went on foot. His chief business was to fight; his chief duty was to keep the oaths which he had taken when he became a knight; to defend the weak and innocent against the strong and cruel, ladies against their enemies, and all Christians against heathens or Mahommedans. In a peaceful and well-ordered country a knight would not find much to do. (English) people of the present day have laws, judges, and policemen to defend the weak from the strong, the good from the bad, and even a man on horseback is not allowed to interfere with them; but in those times France was not a peaceful or well-ordered country, and there was plenty to be done by any strong man who cared for order and justice.
But it was in the Holy Land as Crusaders that the knights chiefly distinguished themselves. All the bravest soldiers were knights, kings were always knighted, and if a man who was not a knight did anything specially brave, he was often knighted, as a reward, upon the battlefield. There is a word which was used in those times to express the qualities which a good knight ought to have, and which is still used to express the same qualities; chivalrous meant brave, polite, unselfish, truthful, and the time of chivalry means the time in which those virtues were supposed to belong to the best soldiers. Probably, however, there were never more than a few knights who really kept their vows as they should have been kept, and there were bad as well as good men among them, as in every other body of people.
