The age of the crusadesLudlow, James M. (James Meeker)
History
The age of the crusades
Ludlow, James M. (James Meeker)
Crusades
of England (1068-1135) put out the eyes of his brother Robert
and of his two grandchildren, and forced his daughter to cross a frozen
fosse, stripped half naked.
The penalties under law also revealed the hardness of men’s hearts.
Criminals were hung by their feet, by their necks, or by their thumbs,
with burning matter fastened upon some part of the body; they were put
into dungeons with snakes, and into cages too small to allow the full
motion of the limbs; they were made to wear wooden or iron collars of
enormous weight, so arranged that the culprit could take no position
without feeling the burden.
In battle the soldier was to despise the bow, his delight to face the
enemy at point of sword, his glory the blood that bespattered him from
the gurgling arteries of the foe, or that trickled from his own wounds.
No Fabian policy gave éclat to the warrior; victory was measured by the
heaps of the slain, not by the progress of the cause. No quarter was
ordinarily given or expected on the capture of strongholds; and not
infrequently the entire surviving population of conquered cities paid
with their lives the penalty for having permitted themselves to be
defended by the vanquished. Raymond of Toulouse we shall learn to admire
as our story advances. He was one of the most self-restrained and
chivalric of the early crusaders; yet he put out the eyes and cut off
the noses of his captives, and sent them thus mutilated to their homes,
as a warning to their neighbors not to molest the march of the “soldiers
of the cross.” Of this act of atrocity the chronicler of the day
remarks: “It is not easy to do justice to the bravery and wisdom
conspicuously displayed by the count here.” Too commonly the innocence
of childhood, the venerableness of age, and the sacredness of sex were
indiscriminately outraged by the license of conquest.
The love of war for its own sake was the dominant passion of such
people. When no plausible pretext could be urged for declaration of
hostilities, it burst out between neighborhoods as by spontaneous
combustion. Raids and counter-raids took the place of the commercial
rivalries of later times.
From the days of Charlemagne it had been the custom to signalize
entrance upon manhood by buckling about the loins the sword, the
investment with “virile arms.” The church, in hopeless inability to
check the universal passion for fight, sought only to direct it to the
suppression of ecclesiastical enemies. Pope Paschal (1099) exhorted
Count Robert of Flanders to persecute to the utmost the Emperor Henry,
saying, “By such battles you shall obtain a place in the heavenly
Jerusalem.” Bernard, without dispute the holiest man of the next
century, offered no excuse or palliation for his harangue to the
faithful: “Let them kill the enemy or die. To submit to die for Christ,
or to cause one of His enemies to die, is naught but glory.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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