The Dream And The Tomb: A History Of The Crusades Read online

  Praise for

  THE DREAM

  AND THE TOMB

  “An epic cast and setting. High quality, splendidly readable.”

  —Boston Globe

  “The important things about Robert Payne are his sensitive, astute intelligence, his vast erudition, and his magic power over words. . . . If anyone can capture the spiritual essence of a place, of a way of life, of an exotic culture, Payne can.”

  —New York Times

  “Based on wide reading in the secondary literature, organized around famous crusading leaders, and filled with romantic and anecdotal material, Payne tells an old story exceptionally well.”

  —Library Journal

  “Probably no author of this century has produced so many books at such a relatively high level of scholarship.”

  —The [London] Times

  THE DREAM

  AND THE TOMB

  THE DREAM

  AND THE TOMB

  THE DREAM

  AND THE TOMB

  A History of the Crusades

  Robert Payne

  Maps of The Four Crusader States, The Ayubite Empire, The Crusade of St. Louis, Events in Egypt, Egypt and Syria, Homelands of Turks, Mongols, and Circassians, and The Fall of Acre are from Soldiers of Fortune: The Story of the Mamelukes by Sir John Glubb, reprinted courtesy of Stein and Day Publishers.

  First Cooper Square Press edition 2000

  This Cooper Square Press paperback edition of The Dream and the Tomb is an unabridged republication of the edition first published in Briarcliff Manor, New York in 1984.

  Copyright © 1984 by Sheila Lalwani Payne

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  Published by Cooper Square Press

  An Imprint of the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

  150 Fifth Avenue, Suite 911

  New York, New York 10011

  Distributed by National Book Network

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Payne, Robert, 1911–1983

  The dream and the tomb : a history of the Crusades / Robert Payne.— 1st Cooper Square Press ed.

  p. cm.

  Originally published: New York : Stein and Day, 1984.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN: 978-0-8154-1086-7

  1. Crusades. I. Title.

  D157 .P35 2000

  909.07- dc21

  00-057010

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  Manufactured in the United States of America.

  This book is dedicated to

  THE MARTYRS OF ALL WARS

  Acknowledgments

  My late husband, Robert Payne, spent close to seven years researching this book, reading both Western and Arab historians. It is, therefore, an unbiased approach to a most complex subject; it is also a vivid and colorful panorama of the first great confrontation between the Muslim East and the Christian West. In an earlier book, The Holy Sword, published in 1959, Robert wrote: “Out of Arabia there came a proud and august people who in their time conquered most of the known world, and there is still too little about them in our history books. Sooner or later we shall have to learn to live with them.”

  I hope The Dream and the Tomb will help people of all faiths to learn to understand each other and to live with each other. For my husband, this book was a work of love and hope.

  It is not often that a major book is published so soon after an author’s death. If there are any inconsistencies or omissions, I hope the reader will understand.

  I am extremely grateful to Sol Stein and to Benton Arnovitz for overseeing the whole project. I am also very grateful to Patricia Day and to Toby Stein for doing a superb job of editing. My sincere thanks also go to everyone concerned for their help and support. In particular, I would like to thank The Arts of Asia Foundation and The Very Reverend James Parks Morton, Dean of the Cathedral of St. John The Divine.

  Sheila Lalwani Payne

  Contents

  I THE VOICE FROM THE TOMB

  The Dream and the Tomb

  Thunder out of Arabia

  In the Fields of Clermont

  The Crusade of the Poor

  A Pride of Princes

  Under the Walls of Constantinople

  II THE DARK ROADS TO THE HOLY LAND

  Journey Through the Wilderness

  The Siege of Antioch

  The King of the Tafurs

  The Finding of the Holy Lance

  The Triumph

  III THE KINGS WHO CAME FROM ABROAD

  The Quarrels of the Princes

  King Baldwin I

  The Armed Might of the Crusaders

  King Baldwin II

  King Fulk of Anjou

  IV THE KINGS BORN IN THE HOLY LAND

  The Young King Baldwin III

  The Second Crusade

  King Baldwin III and the Heroic Age

  KingAmaury I

  V THE YOUNG KING’S VALOR AND THE FALL OF JERUSALEM

  Baldwin IV: The Leper King

  King Baldwin IV Against Saladin

  The Horns of Hattin

  Islam Takes Jerusalem

  Three Letters

  VI THE RAGES OF KING RICHARD

  A Journey to Joachim

  Slow Boat to Acre

  Richard and Saladin

  A Famous Victory

  Marches and Countermarches

  The Old Man of the Mountain

  VII THE DOGE IN HIS SPLENDOR

  The Vermilion Galley

  The Burning City

  The Devastation of Constantinople

  VIII THE WASTING OF THE TREASURE

  The Children’s Crusades

  The Plagues of Egypt

  IX FREDERICK, EMPEROR OF THE ROMANS, EVER GLORIOUS

  The Stupor of the World

  Brief Victory

  The Disaster at La Forbie

  X THE SAINT IN HIS TOILS

  The Pilgrimages of St. Louis

  Victory and Defeat at Damietta

  St. Louis in Acre

  The Death of St. Louis

  XI THE AX FALLS

  Baibars

  The End of the Kingdom

  The Last Throw of the Dice

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  Maps

  Routes of the Crusades

  Asia Minor and the Holy Land

  Crusader Fortifications and Settlements

  Crusader Jerusalem

  The Four Crusader States (1099-1144)

  The Ayubite Empire

  The Crusade of St. Louis

  Events in Egypt, 1249-1251

  Egypt and Syria in 1254

  Homelands of Turks, Mongols, and Circassians

  The Fall of Acre, May 18, 1291

  Illustrations

  Preaching the crusade

  Crusader fleet

  The 1390 Genoese and French expedition to Barbary

  Siege of Constantinople

  Crusaders bombard Nicaea with the heads of their captives, three views

  Mounted Crusaders

  A Crusader encampment

  Four illustrations of Crusaders in battle

  At the head of a Crusader army

  The siege of
Ascalon

  Crusaders fighting

  Massacre of the Witnesses

  Christ leading the Crusaders

  Crusaders besieging a walled town

  Crusader heavy infantry with archer support

  Heavy fighting on a hillside

  Two illustrations of Crusaders sallying forth from a walled city

  Close fighting with the Muslims

  Recrossing an old battlefield

  Crusaders listening to a preacher

  The taking of Jerusalem, 1099

  The seal of Richard the Lion Hearted, both sides

  The seal of the Templars, both sides

  Crusader doing homage

  The sea castle of Sidon

  Beaufort Castle

  The Horns of Hattin

  Refectory of the Order of St. John in Aere

  Knight’s Hall of Belvoir fortress

  David’s Tower, Jerusalem

  Lion’s Gate, Jerusalem

  The ivory covers of the Melisend Psalter, both sides

  The adoration of the Magi from the Melisend Psalter

  Crusader art with strong Islamic influence

  I

  THE VOICE FROM THE TOMB

  The Dream

  and the Tomb

  IN their hundreds of thousands the Crusaders marched to the Holy Land, some on foot, some on donkeys, some in carts, some in armor and on well-caparisoned horses. Perhaps a quarter of them died on the journey and another quarter died in the wars, and many of them suffered atrociously to defend the small strip of seacoast they called the Kingdom of Jerusalem, a kingdom they held for less than a hundred years. They called themselves peregrini Christi, pilgrims of Christ, and in their eyes the miseries of the enterprise were outweighed by the splendor and the glory. They came from all walks of life: kings and emperors, farm boys and laborers, archbishops and priests, knights and foot soldiers. In wave after wave these armored pilgrims were swept forward to the holy cities of the Holy Land, and most especially to Jerusalem, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the tomb of Christ.

  Landowners abandoned their land, peasants allowed themselves to be uprooted, princes plundered their treasuries in order to make the pilgrimage; and sometimes in old age they would return to Europe in feeble health, having spent half a lifetime in Saracenic prisons, proud and happy that they had been to the holy places. The odds were always against them, and some of their happiness derived precisely from the pact they had made with Christ and from the fact that they had accomplished an impossible task. Jerusalem beckoned them; they answered the call, for her voice was loud and insistent. They marched off to a country they thought they knew intimately from reading the New Testament or hearing it read to them, and they discovered very early that the Holy Land resembled no country they had ever seen or ever dreamed of. The desolation of the Judaean wilderness came to them like a shock on exposed nerves; nowhere in Europe was there a wilderness like it. Nor, when they first arrived, had they the faintest inkling how to deal with the Saracens, who were sensual to an extraordinary degree and at the same time unbelievably hard, cruel, and ruthless. They entered an unknown land inhabited by an unknown people, and the strangeness of the land entered their souls.

  Today, when we look back at the Crusaders, we find ourselves marveling at their audacity and gallantry and their resourcefulness in building castles and fortresses that were works of art. When we ask ourselves why they went off in the hundreds of thousands, we discover that we do not always know why they went, or what it was all about. Certainly it was not always what the scribes and chroniclers said it was about. The more we find ourselves looking at the Crusaders, the more we shall discover that totally conflicting aims and motives were involved. There was the thirst for power and the thirst for land; there was humility and pride; there was the desire for blessedness and the desire to cut the throats of the pagans; there was malice and envy and all the remaining deadly sins. Rarely were men more sinful than when they set out to conquer the Holy Land, and rarely were they more deeply religious, more certain of their faith. Amid all the confusions and uncertainties surrounding the Crusades there existed the one absolute certainty: the Christian faith. Everything else could be argued about, but the existence of Christ as the lord of the worlds was beyond argument.

  We look back at the age of the Crusades with a sense of unappeasable longing, for the world was simpler, all questions were answered, every virtue could be measured, and every vice had its appropriate penalty. The world was ordered, finite, crystal clear. However chaotic were men’s lives, they fitted into an acceptable and credible pattern. Men lived the sacramental life to a degree that we can now scarcely comprehend. Christ walked by men’s sides and was present in the air they breathed. One reason why it is so difficult for us to put ourselves inside the skins of the Crusaders is precisely because we lack the energy of their belief.

  There was a directness in the twelfth-century mind which is lacking in our own. They were trained to it, and did not think of acting otherwise. We shall see in their wars how little they debated strategy: they were more likely to hurl themselves on the enemy than to engage in feints and ambushes or to devise elaborate stratagems. Although they were direct, logical and reasonable, they found not the slightest difficulty in believing in miracles, wonders, portents and apparitions, and the closer they came to the Holy Land the more readily they believed in them. Being simultaneously reasonable and unreasonable, they acted with an exact sense of the real world and were not in the least put out if a miracle took place in front of their eyes. They expected to see miraculous things and eagerly awaited them, while remaining the most practical of men.

  Each Crusader had his own reasons for going on a Crusade; each had his own vision of what he expected to find when he reached the Holy Land. Above all, he expected to find holiness in a concrete form, something that could be seen, touched, kissed, worshipped, and even carried away. Holiness was in the pathways trodden by Christ, in the mountains and valleys seen by Christ, in the streets of Jerusalem where Christ had wandered. They had no feeling for the changing aspect of the city: the Jerusalem they saw was Christ’s Jerusalem, unchanged and eternal; it never occurred to them that Jerusalem had been razed to the ground after Christ’s death. The disciples had slept under the same olive trees on the Mount of Olives that the Crusaders saw. On the Mount of the Ascension they could kiss the footprint left by Christ before he ascended to heaven, and in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre they could gaze upon his tomb. All over Jerusalem there were places associated with him and with his disciples, and their closeness to these places gave them the sense of an abiding presence. He belonged to time and was outside time. Indeed, time for the Crusaders existed under two aspects: a system of dates and calendars informed them that more than a thousand years separated them from Christ, and their knowledge of Christ informed them that he was still present, that he was their contemporary, and the thousand years were as nothing.

  There were fifty places in Jerusalem associated with Christ, but there was only one they regarded with absolute reverence and awe. This was Christ’s tomb. To the medieval mind Christ was most present in the empty tomb. They were not obsessed with the tragedy of his death, they rarely dwelt on the Crucifixion, and the manner of his death was perhaps the least important thing about it. What absorbed their imaginations was less the tragedy of his death than the triumph of the Resurrection. This was the supreme miracle, the miracle that gave meaning to Christian life. In this small space God, wearing the shape of a man, having died, returned to life.

  The tomb therefore acquired in their imaginations a very special significance: It was the relic above all relics, the icon above all icons. Here he lay dead; here he threw off the linen bands; here he sprang into the eternal life promised to all Christians. It was almost as though the shadowy tomb was a machine generating eternal life.

  There was, however, something very strange and disturbing about the tomb, which had been discovered by Bishop Macarius of Jerusalem after di
gging through the rubble of the ancient Roman Temple of Aphrodite. The tomb had been found, according to Eusebius, “against all hope” in A.D. 325. In that same year, the Empress Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine, came to Jerusalem and discovered three crosses in an underground cavern about eighty feet away from the tomb. Constantine ordered a rotunda to be placed over the tomb and a basilica to be placed over the cavern. The rotunda was called the Anastasis, the “Resurrection,” and the basilica was called the Martyrion, the “Place of Martyrdom.” Both were sumptuously decorated with gold and jewels, and both were razed and rebuilt several times between the Persian invasion of A.D. 614 and the arrival of the Crusaders.

  When the Crusaders arrived in Jerusalem, they found only the rotunda. The tomb had vanished; there was no hollowed-out rock; there was only empty space surrounded by a jewel box of delicate columns with mosaics on the circular wall. Lamps burned perpetually over a raised slab of marble intended to represent the tomb. But in the eyes of the Crusaders the tomb was still there. For them the representation corresponded to the reality. Their faith was strong enough to permit them to believe in the physical existence of a tomb that no longer existed and therefore could not be seen. They saw it with the eyes of faith.

  They saw it too with the eyes of men who had traveled far to see it. They had fought their way to it, waded through blood and suffered starvation and wounds in order to come to this place, and their faith was colored by the hardships and dangers of the journey. Having suffered so much, they found what they expected to find. If the Christian doctrine was true, if Christ was lord of the worlds and the gate of eternal life, then it was necessary for the tomb to exist. According to Pope Urban II, God willed the Crusade in order that the Holy Sepulchre should be wrested from the pagans and placed firmly in the hands of the followers of Christ. God had not willed that the tomb itself should survive. God had willed that the pilgrims should be brought into the presence of Christ’s death and Resurrection, and in the minds of the Crusaders there was not the least doubt that it had happened here in this small corner of Jerusalem. They did not ask for precise outlines and verifiable shapes. They asked for Christ, for they believed in him, and they knelt at his tomb, for they believed it could be nowhere else.