The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

Oddly enough, these same Vikings became the people we now know as Russians. They raided and traded to the north, and in 850 a Viking called Rurik made himself ruler of Novgorod. The inhabitants of Russia were Asiatics, of Mongol stock, with a tendency to lethargy and dreaminess. A combination of this Asiatic stock with Viking blood produced what we today regard as the typical Russian with slanting eyes and high cheekbones.

During this period, Europe was a bloody chaos of ‘criminal rats’ fighting for supremacy. The Slavs, under King Sviatopluk, held an empire that stretched from Germany to the Carpathians. Arnulf, one of the German Carolingians, resisted the Slavs with the aid of a Russian people called the Magyars (or Hungarians); it proved to be a mistake, for the Magyars were as savage and predatory as the Vikings. They were superb horsemen who could shoot accurately with a bow and arrow from the back of a galloping horse. Like the Vikings, they were cruel and destructive, burning villages and setting fire to the harvest for the sheer pleasure of spreading terror. When they raided a village, they killed all the men, mutilated the children, then tied the women on the backs of cattle and drove them off for rape and slaughter. It was the Hungarians who put an end to Sviatopluk’s empire. They invaded northern Italy in 899, and when the emperor Berengar led fifteen thousand troops after them they defeated him, forced him to pay ransom money and spent another year plundering.

In the south, the threat still came from the Muslims, now known as the Saracens, who now occupied Sicily. The Abbasid Empire was falling apart, but the Muslims had learned the art of seafaring and were the chief pirates of the Mediterranean. Like the Vikings, they raided and plundered far from home – although, being in the slave trade, they were less likely to slaughter their victims. In 846 they even reached Rome and sacked St Peter’s. They established themselves a base on the coast of Provence and even became a menace on the Alpine passes, taking particular pleasure in seizing Christian prelates on their way to Rome and demanding large ransoms. The pilgrimage to Rome, which had been popular since the seventh century, became more dangerous than ever before. The Church tried to forbid women pilgrims to go, since males who put them up for the night were likely to demand payment in kind and the lady usually ended as the local prostitute in some remote part of France or Italy. The Arab pirates made the sea more dangerous than it had been since the days of the Cilician pirates. They practically strangled trade between Rome and Byzantium. In northern Italy, the pirates had established a fortified camp on the river Garigliano and raided as they felt inclined, from Rome to the Alps. Finally, the warrior pope John X formed alliances with various princes and persuaded the Byzantine fleet to bottle up the river mouth. They besieged the impregnable fortress, starved the Arabs into submission, then went in and slaughtered every one of them. It must have been a satisfying moment, and princes and counts all over Europe must have daydreamed grimly about doing the same to the Slavs or Magyars or Vikings on their own doorsteps. In fact, the German emperor Otto the Great did succeed in inflicting a crushing defeat on the Magyars at the battle of the Lechfeld, in 955. The Magyars then decided to settle down, occupied the land we now call Hungary, and became a nation of peaceful farmers and horsebreeders.

All this explains why, when we think of the Middle Ages, we think of castles and towers and walled cities with battlements. Walls were the only defence against the raiders. Yet gradually the raids ceased as Vikings, Magyars and Slavs settled down to farming. The Normans continued to raid all over the Mediterranean, although even they settled down after William the Conqueror became king of England – not, however, before they had retaken Sicily from the Arabs and sacked Rome (1084).

The Arabs were also in retreat. By the year 1000 – the year the early Christians believed the world would end – their power was coming to an end in Spain; in 1034 and the following year, the Byzantine fleet, manned by Scandinavian mercenaries, decimated the Arab pirates and raided Moslem strongholds in north Africa. Yet, oddly enough, this downfall of the Arabs was not particularly beneficial to Byzantium. As Baghdad grew less important, the trading routes from the east into Europe began to pass it by; and since Byzantium had been on the trading route to Baghdad, it also suffered. Besides, a new and dangerous power was arising to the east of Byzantium: the Turks. They were swiftly becoming the Vikings – or the Huns – of the Mediterranean. The reason, as usual, was the growing population. The Turks were a tough nomadic people who had few towns; but in the late tenth century they overthrew their Persian overlords and, by the year 1000 Turkestan was ruled by the ‘mighty Mahmud, the victorious lord’ (as he is called in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam), who extended his empire as far as India. After the death of Mahmud in 1030, a strong clan called the Seljuks made a bid for power. They took over Baghdad, conquered Armenia from the Greeks, and finally controlled all of Asia Minor – so that the land that had been the home of Helen of Troy, and the refuge of the Cilician pirates, finally became Turkey. The clash with Byzantium was inevitable, and in 1071 the Turks inflicted total defeat on the Byzantine army at the battle of Manzikert, in Armenia. The Byzantine emperor, Romanus, was captured and ransomed, but was murdered later that year; the great Turkish leader, Alp Arslan, was also assassinated in the following year. By that time, Jerusalem had fallen to the Turks without a struggle; Damascus and Antioch followed. The Byzantine emperor, Michael IV, saw the Turks at his gates and made an agonised appeal to the pope in Rome for help. Meanwhile, Spain was again under attack, this time from a fanatical Muslim sect, the Almoravids. So, just as the Christian world was getting used to the idea that the Saracens were on the run, they learned that things were worse than ever.

Two men were chiefly responsible for bringing the news to Europe (for in those days of poor communication, it might have taken years). One was the pope himself Urban II, a Frenchman. He hurried to France in 1095, asked many bishops to meet him at Clermont, and there, in a great open field, stood on a platform and told the vast crowd of Turkish atrocities against Christians in the Holy Land. In fact, there is little evidence that the Turks mistreated Christians; they were far harsher against their own dissident sects. But it was undoubtedly true that pilgrimages to the Holy Land had now become much more dangerous. When the pope called for a crusade, hundreds of noblemen fell on their knees and dedicated themselves and their property to the service of God.

The other great preacher of the crusade was a dirty, flea-infested monk called Peter the Hermit, a short, dark-haired man who rode around on a donkey. But he possessed what we would now call ‘charisma’, that curious power of swaying a crowd that was later to be Hitler’s most remarkable asset. Men were doubly eager to listen to him since life was hard and miserable, and the idea of a visit to the Holy Land seemed a welcome alternative to ploughing for sixteen hours a day.

What followed was something of a grim farce. Most of these ignorant peasants were not quite sure who they were supposed to fight; they had a vague idea that all foreigners were heathens. In the Rhineland, thousands of men set out to join a certain Count Emich, who claimed to have wakened up one morning and found a cross branded on his flesh. Some of the pilgrims had apparently decided to follow a god-inspired goose, although it is not clear how they recognised its inspiration. Count Emich felt that butchery may as well begin at home, and ordered his followers to attack the Jews of Spier – they were to become Christians on pain of death (or, in the case of women, rape). They went on to Worms and massacred the Jews there for two days, then on down the Rhine, slaughtering Jews wherever they found them. Many now decided that they had done their Christian duty and returned home. In Hungary, other crusaders obtained permission of the king to revictual, provided they behaved themselves. They took this to be permission to pillage the countryside; a young Hungarian boy was impaled to teach him a lesson. The king declared that if the crusaders wanted to pass through his domain they must agree to be temporarily disarmed. Then the Hungarian army got its own back by massacring them. Emich himself was refused permission to enter Hungary, so the crusaders fought the Hungarians until they were all routed and massacred – Count Emich managed to escape and went back home.