Джеймс Миченер - The Source

But at Antioch, the third largest city of the Roman empire, frequented by Caesars and adorned by them, that sainted city where the word Christian was first used, Gunter proved himself a valiant general. The siege of this tremendous fortress-city, whose thick walls never did surrender to the machines of the Crusaders, was initiated on October 21, in 1097, and it continued with battle and brutality until June of the next year, when the impregnable walls still mocked the invaders. The painful siege was marked by three critical periods, and in each Gunter distinguished himself.

As the Crusaders drew their forces into a knot about the walls an unforeseen emissary approached from the south—a Muslim from Egypt whom Volkmar leaped forward to kill. But Gunter stayed his brother-in-law and led the Egyptian to the leaders, where the Muslim proposed an alliance between his people and the Crusaders to smash the Turkish upstarts, and Gunter argued warmly that the Crusaders should accept the offer and bind themselves to the Egyptians.

“With infidels?” Volkmar stormed.

“With anyone who has an army,” Gunter countered.

“It would profane the Crusade,” Volkmar reasoned.

“When we have won,” Gunter proposed, “then we can cleanse ourselves of profanation.”

He worked with the Egyptians, evolving a plan whereby they would capture Jerusalem from the Turks while the Crusaders took Antioch, breaking the back of Turkish power along the chain of seaports, but the proposed union accomplished little, for when the Egyptians, true to their part of the bargain, proceeded to capture Jerusalem from the Turks—so that the Crusaders could have occupied the city without a battle had they been partners in a true alliance—the Christian part of the bargain was not pursued, because bitter men like Volkmar who had seen Muslims kill their families could not believe that other Muslims might have other interests; and the momentary promise of a powerful eastern alliance vanished.

Of Gunter’s second accomplishment, Wenzel of Trier wrote:My Lord Gunter met with great good fortune when the fate of our crusade hung in the balance. As our knights stood facing the bleak walls of Antioch powerless and near starvation, General Babek decided that the moment was proper for him to move in and revenge his defeat, so he sped down upon us from the east with near fourteen thousand, and our captains decided, “If we wait, we die. Let us therefore ride out to see what can be done,” and my Lord Gunter rode forth with only seven hundred knights, singing as they approached the enemy, where victory was deemed impossible. But with the aid of God the seven hundred crushed the fourteen thousand and Gunter rode back to Antioch singing once more and sharing his saddle with the mistress of the Turkish general, the dark-eyed girl who taught him the Arabic.

And finally, when it became apparent that the ancient Roman walls of Antioch, now strengthened by the engineers of Byzantium, could not be pierced in any manner, it was Gunter who established contact with a Turkish spy who for the proper amount of gold arranged to open the gates for Count Bohemond of Taranto. It was an unlikely offer, one which Gunter had been able to arrange through his knowledge of Arabic, but which he himself scarcely believed. On the night of June 3, 1098, the spy made good his deal, swung open the impregnable gates and admitted the Franks to the city, where an unparalleled slaughter took place.

At one point Volkmar, surging through the fallen city with his men, held back his sword just in time to keep from killing two girls in Arab dress who knelt pitifully before him making the sign of the cross. To his surprise he found that they were Christians, faithful to Rome, and he shouted to his men to wait, but before he could act the girls were slain—as were thousands of their fellow worshipers.

It was at this senseless point, when all were being killed indiscriminately, even Christian girls the same age as his daughter, that Volkmar withdrew from the mighty surge of the movement. He leaned against a mosque which was being gutted by his own men and deadened his ears to the screams of the dying. He thought of the distant days when he had planned his march in the cool castle of Gretz, and he longed for that uncomplicated German sanctuary.And in those hours [wrote Wenzel of Trier] while others were gaining the riches for which we struggled, the jars of incense and the chests of gold, my Lord Volkmar wandered empty-handed through the streets of Antioch until he came to what had once been the Church of Peter and Paul but was now a mosque, and he entered there and took his place on the stones before the spot where the altar had stood before the Muslims tore it down, and he prayed that God would lead him in peace to Jerusalem, for he was sick unto death of killing. But even as he prayed, men from Gunter’s army chased three Turks into the mosque, cut them open and threw their entrails over the carvings sacred to their god Mahmoud.

When the great, twisting, tumbling Crusade resumed its march toward Jerusalem, Count Bohemond was left behind as Prince of Antioch, while Baldwin of Bouillon, an ordinary knight, was sent to distant Edessa with the title of count; and from these developments all men like Gunter of Cologne who had intended carving their kingdoms from the Holy Land gained encouragement, looked hopefully toward the next battle and discussed their dreams with their associates. But Volkmar of Gretz rode alone. He was now an old man of fifty-one and his sandy-red hair showed signs of white. His neck was still stocky, but his arms moved more slowly and sometimes in battle he felt that he lacked the strength to ride forward. Three of his mounts had died in battle and in his loneliness he had premonitions that a fourth would go down and take him along, cutting him short of Jerusalem, which he no longer expected to see. The armies were bogged down in Syria and typhus raged through the camps, so that the future was obscure.

But then, in the spring of 1099, as the end of his third year at war approached, events began to move with startling speed. The Arab town of Ma’arrat fell, and when the squat fortress of Arqah gave signs of proving even more difficult than Antioch the Crusaders discovered the simple expedient of letting it stand. Leaving a small siege group they by-passed the thorny fort, then did the same with the lovely chain of ancient Arab seaports: Tripoli, Bairut and Tyr. All were by-passed with their Turkish armies intact; and the Crusaders found themselves poised for the final dash to Jerusalem. “If we win the city,” Gunter of Cologne insisted, “we can come back and pick off the seaports one by one, like grapes,” and the original allure of the Crusades revived. It was of this exhilarating period that Wenzel wrote:On that May afternoon when we marched south from Tyre toward the city that was to become St. Jean d’Acre, leaving the inhospitable lands of the north and entering upon those sacred grounds of Palestine, where our Lord Jesus Christ had lived and died, a great exultation seized our men, and each spurred his horse forward so that he might be the first to cry, “We have come to the land of our sweet Lord Jesus.” And in this spirit we came to a small hill from which we could look down upon the pagan spires of Acre, nestling within tremendous walls, and I feared that this formidable place would dampen our spirits, but our leaders cried, “We shall not war against that seaport, we shall leave it as we did the others. On to Jerusalem.” And right willingly did we by-pass those enormous walls.My Lord Volkmar and I were in the left, or eastern flank, riding midway toward the Sea of Galilee, when we chanced to see some Turks in the distance. We spurred our horses up a small hill, thinking to give them chase, when Gunter of Cologne swept past us on a French horse he had acquired, shouting, “Let us enter the Holy Land of Jesus,” and he so excited us with his movement, urging us on to follow him, that we forgot the Turkish soldiers, and rode furiously southward until we came to the crest of a hill from which we saw the most pleasing sight to greet us since the day we left Gretz. To the west rose the pagan spires of Acre, shimmering beside the sea, and there the great lords were parleying, agreeing to spare the city. To the east we saw the rich and wooded hills, leading down to the Sea of Galilee, where our blessed Lord had lived and taught.But straight ahead, on a small mound, with gray olive trees to the south, stood the little town of Makor, its mosques bright in the sun and the holy cross of our Lord rising from the steeple of the basilica. My Lord Volkmar cried, “Behold that sweet town and its green fields.” But before we could move forward Gunter shouted, “This town is mine!” And he galloped his horse down the hill madly, riding up to the town and shouting for all to hear, “This town is mine! It shall be the capital of my kingdom!”