So wrote Rabbi Eliezer ben Nathan, mourning and celebrating the Jewish martyrs
who perished at the hands of the crusaders.
Leaving the Rhineland, some of the irregular militias disbanded, while others
sought to gain the Holy Land via Hungary, at least one stopping off at Prague to
massacre more Jews there. Only a handful of these armies continued on to Anatolia,
where most of them were quickly slaughtered.
From the point of view of Emperor Alexius at Constantinople, even the “official”
crusaders were potentially dangerous. One of the crusade’s leaders, the Norman
warrior Bohemond, had, a few years before, tried to conquer Byzantium itself.
Hastily forcing oaths from Bohemond and the other lords that any previously
Byzantine lands conquered would be restored to Byzantium, Alexius shipped the
armies across the Bosporus.
The main objective of the First Crusade—to conquer the Holy Land—was
accomplished largely because of the disunity of the Islamic world and its failure to
consider the crusade a serious military threat. Spared by the Turks when they first
arrived in Anatolia, the crusaders first made their way to the Seljuk capital, Nicaea.
Their armies were initially uncoordinated and their food supplies uncertain, but soon
they organized themselves, setting up a “council of princes” that included all the great
crusade leaders, while the Byzantines supplied food at a nearby port. Surrounding
Nicaea and besieging it with catapults and other war machines, the crusaders took the
city on June 18, 1097, dutifully handing it over to Alexius in accordance with their
oath.
Gradually, however, the crusaders forgot their oath to the Byzantines. While most
went toward Antioch, which stood in the way of their conquest of Jerusalem, one
leader went off to Edessa, where he took over the city and its outlying area, creating
the first of the Crusader States: the County of Edessa. Meanwhile the other crusaders
remained stymied before the thick and heavily fortified walls of Antioch for many
months. Then, in a surprise turn-around, they entered the town but found themselves
besieged by Muslim armies from the outside. Their mood grim, they rallied when a
peasant named Peter Bartholomew reported that he had seen in many visions the
Holy Lance that had pierced Christ’s body—it was, he said, buried right in the main
church in Antioch. (Antioch had a flourishing Christian population even under
Muslim rule.) After a night of feverish digging, the crusaders believed that they had
discovered the Holy Lance, and, fortified by this miracle, they defeated the besiegers.
From Antioch, it was only a short march to Jerusalem, though disputes among the
leaders delayed that next step for over a year. One leader claimed Antioch. Another
