The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

Peter the Hermit’s army reached Constantinople in August 1096, having stormed a town in Hungary on the way and killed four thousand inhabitants. The emperor Alexius looked at this undisciplined rabble with dismay and recognised that the pope had made a mistake in calling the crusade. His guests proceeded to loot, steal and remove the lead from church roofs. Alexius shipped them across the Bosphorus as quickly as he could. Once in enemy territory, they decided that it was time to begin converting the heathen. They stormed into several villages of Greek Christians and began torturing the inhabitants and roasting babies on spits. Another group captured a castle and discovered, to their delight, that it was full of provisions. It seemed an ideal headquarters from which to raid the countryside. A Turkish army surrounded them and made them aware that their only source of water was a spring below the castle. The crusaders were finally forced to drink the blood of their own horses, and one another’s urine. Then they surrendered. Many of them agreed to become Muslims; the others were killed. The other crusaders – the ones who had successfully converted the Christian Greeks – marched off to avenge their colleagues, were ambushed in a valley and virtually wiped out. Since they had their women and many children with them, they were at a disadvantage. The Turks spared pretty girls and boys, who were carried off into slavery. Only three thousand of the twenty-thousand army managed to fight their way into a disused castle, and held out against besieging Turks while a Greek sailed back to Constantinople for help. The emperor sent several men o’ war and rescued them; but once back in Constantinople their arms were taken from them. That was virtually the end of the ‘first crusade’.

It was obvious that something more organised was required, and the following year an army led by Godfrey of Bouillon arrived in Constantinople. The crusaders, accustomed to the discomfort of their draughty, smoke-filled castles and rat-infested villages, surveyed this magnificent city with envious suspicion, concluded that its inhabitants must be effete and corrupt, and were with difficulty dissuaded by their leaders from trying to seize it for themselves. After some mutual hostility, the crusaders were made to swear loyalty to the emperor and were packed off across the Bosphorus. With constant skirmishes, and many deaths from heat and thirst, they struggled across Syria and laid siege to Antioch. It fell after seven months, and the crusaders massacred every Turk in the town. Then – their original army of thirty thousand reduced to a mere twelve – they marched on Jerusalem and besieged it in the heat of July. Siege towers enabled them to climb the walls. They poured into the city and began a massacre that lasted for several days. No one was spared. The Jews of the city had taken refuge in their synagogue; it was set on fire and they all burned. As Salomon Reinach says, with mild irony, in Orpheus, a History of Religions: ‘It is said that seventy thousand persons were put to death in less than a week to attest the superior morality of the Christian faith.’

In the light of history, we can see that the success of that first crusade was actually a disaster for Europe. It convinced Christendom that the Holy Land could be turned into a kind of Papal State. The result was that over the next two centuries there were eight more crusades, most of which failed miserably. The original success was never repeated; but it inspired all the later efforts. When Turks captured Edessa in 1144, Louis VII of France led a disastrous Second Crusade. In 1174, a brilliant Arab leader named Saladin preached a jehad, or Holy War, against the Christians, and Jerusalem was retaken in 1187. A third crusade failed to retake it, but King Richard I of England succeeded in negotiating a truce allowing Christians access to the Holy Sepulchre – which had been available in any case before the first crusade. The most absurd and pathetic of all the crusades was the Children’s Crusade of 1212. A twelve-year-old shepherd boy named Stephen, from the town of Cloyes, went to King Philip of France and handed over a letter which he claimed had been given to him by Christ, who had appeared to him as he was tending his sheep. The king was understandably suspicious of a letter written in modern French by a first-century Hebrew, and probably recognised the boy as an exhibitionist or a liar; at all events, he sent him away. Undeterred, Stephen began to preach, declaring that the sea would turn into dry land as the children approached, and that children, supported by God, would overthrow the Saracen army. Thirty thousand children under twelve years of age gathered at Vendöme – girls as well as boys – and, surrounded by crowds of sorrowing parents, marched off triumphantly towards Marseilles, preceded by Stephen in a gaily-painted cart. The weather was hot; many died of thirst on the way. Those who arrived safely rushed to the harbour to see the sea divide; when nothing happened, some denounced Stephen and turned back towards home. Most stayed on, hoping for a miracle. After two days, two kindly merchants offered to provide ships to take them across to Palestine. Seven vessels set sail, and the children vanished forever. Eighteen years later, a priest who had accompanied the expedition told what had happened. Two of the ships were wrecked in a storm. The other five were met by arrangement by Saracen merchants, who handed over a large sum of money to their French colleagues and carried off their purchases to the slave markets of Alexandria and Baghdad.

A German children’s crusade, led by a boy named Nicholas, was slightly luckier. Fifteen thousand of the twenty thousand children died on their journey to Italy; when the sea failed to open, they were received by the pope, who told them to go home. Very few survived the return journey, and Nicholas was among those who disappeared. When the survivors straggled back to the Rhineland, angry parents demanded the arrest of Nicholas’s father, who was hanged. The story deserves a place in this criminal history of mankind largely on account of the criminal stupidity of the parents in allowing the children to go.

The Children’s Crusade inspired a fifth crusade. ‘The very children shame us…’ the pope declared. So an army embarked for Egypt, rejected excellent terms from the Saracens, including the surrender of Jerusalem – the Christians wanted money too – and forced the sultan to fight them. His army proved stronger than the Christians, so the crusaders were forced to make terms and go back to Europe. And sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth crusades were equally abortive. Far from freeing the Holy Land from the Saracen, the crusades ended with the Turks entrenched in the Danube Basin.

The Saracens conquered in another way. Those ignorant peasants and equally ignorant nobles who left their homes in 1096 had never looked beyond the boundaries of their own villages. When they were not fighting with the heathen, they were now learning that the Muslims were as honourable and courteous as good Christians, and a great deal more cultivated than most. For thousands of country-bred louts, the crusades were a kind of university. When they came to an end, Europe had ceased to be a provincial backwater.

ASSASSINS AND CONQUERORS

In September 1298, a few years after the end of the ninth crusade, there was a sea battle between two fleets belonging to the rival trading ports of Genoa and Venice. It ended in the humiliating defeat of the Venetians – the commander committed suicide by dashing his head against a bench – and the capture of their fleet. Among the captured sailors was a man named Marco Polo, who was thrown into jail in Genoa. There he found himself sharing a cell with a Pisan called Rusticiano, who had been there since some earlier battle. Rusticiano was a writer of romances, and when Marco Polo began telling him stories of his extraordinary travels in China – the land of the great Kubla Khan – Rusticiano begged him to write it down. So Marco sent for his travel notebooks and, with the aid of Rusticiano, wrote an account of his adventures. He took the manuscript with him when he left prison, and – in spite of the fact that printing had not yet been invented, and books had to be copied by hand – it was soon being read from end to end of Italy.

Regrettably, it was not read for educational reasons. No one believed Marco’s tales of his travels with his father and uncle; his contemporaries assumed it was a novel. Marco was called sarcastically ‘Marco Millions’, because his book mentioned such vast distances and huge sums of money; the book itself became known as The Million. On his deathbed a quarter of a century later, Marco’s friends begged him to admit that the book was mostly lies. ‘I have not told half of what I saw,’ he said irritably. And in carnivals thereafter, there always appeared a clown called Marco Millions who told preposterous lies. It was many centuries before scholars recognised that Marco Polo was a painstakingly truthful man.