Джеймс Миченер - The Source

Frederick the German, the Holy Roman Emperor, was a grandson of the noble Barbarossa, with whom he had nothing in common. After shrewdly gaining control of Sicily and much of Italy, he found himself without a wife and looked around for a likely match, hitting upon the idea of wedding the fourteen-year-old queen of the moribund kingdom of Jerusalem; and on their wedding night she found him seducing her cousin. Frederick, after a few days with his child-bride, packed her off to his harem in Sicily, where she had a baby and died, leaving him Jerusalem, if he could get it from the infidel. Was there ever a worse king than Frederick? And for a place that called itself the Holy Land? He was short, fat, bald and myopic. He was humpbacked and had watery green eyes. As a young man he had sworn to go crusading to recapture Jerusalem, but he was so cowardly that he deferred year after year until at last the Pope had to excommunicate him, which enraged him so much that in 1228 he finally made the long trip to Acre, where the local barons found to their astonishment that he respected Islam just about as much as he did Christianity. He brought with him a Muslim counselor to whom he spoke Arabic, and he preferred Muslim customs. He was also suspected of being in the pay of Jews, for when plotters came with the oft-circulated myth that “two Christian children were found this morning dead outside a synagogue,” he disappointed them by refusing to sanction a massacre. Said he, “If the children are dead, bury them.” As he had suspected, there were no dead children. Frederick was a difficult man to understand because he understood so much. Wherever he went his shrewd, inquiring mind sought information about history, architecture, medicine, philosophy and local custom. He was the most brilliant church historian of his day and a radical improviser in economics and government, and by force of personality he bulled through the founding of the University of Naples. He had a rude, German honesty but was one of the most sexually corrupt men of his time, and his knights said of him, “He studied Islam and learned all the wrong things.” Early in his stay at Acre he accepted as hostages two young sons of a local lord, waited till their father was gone, then strung them up to an iron cross so that they could not move and kept them there until their father honored his promises. His own son he drove to suicide. Because he was excommunicated his colleagues despised him, and no more pathetic man ever came crusading than this watery-eyed German. Nor did the Muslims respect him. In spite of his numerous gestures of friendship they described him in their chronicles as a red-faced, myopic little fellow who didn’t have the manhood to grow a beard and who would bring no more than a few bezants in a slave market. They also suspected him of being an atheist, since they had heard him proclaim that his study of history had pretty well convinced him that Moses, Jesus and Muhammad were impostors. This impiety also repelled his own people, so that when he inherited the kingdom of Jerusalem after his child-bride’s death, he could find neither churchman nor knight who would place the crown on his head; he went almost alone to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, had a servant put the crown upon the altar, from which he raised it with his own hands, announcing that he was crowning himself King of the Holy Land. He was an arrogant man, self-seeking, ugly in manner and in all conceivable aspects a travesty of the crusading spirit.

Opposed to him, Cullinane reflected, stood Louis of France, the positive beau ideal of knighthood. Saintly in personal character, a devoted husband and father, he was a king without a known blemish, and after a life dedicated to good works he was joyously canonized by the church and became one of its most popular saints. If I were a Frenchman, Cullinane mused, I’d have to choose St. Louis as my ideal. In battle he was courageous, in negotiations honest, in thought pure, in government just. Whom else can you say that of? There’s no record of his ever having broken his word, and in settling disputes he listened to the other man’s point of view; and often said without sanctimoniousness that his one ideal in life was to bring into the affairs of men and nations the rule of Christian love. We have some of his speeches on the eve of battle—glowing challenges to his troops to live up to their knightly vows, for if they did he was confident that victory would be theirs. He was a tall, handsome man, thin and on the sickly side, but of a noble appearance when decked out in armor, and in each of his battles the chroniclers agree that he fought in the front line, leading his men with outstanding heroism. Looking at him now Cullinane thought, as he stared down at the city of Akko where King Louis had lived for nearly five years, he seems too perfect, but it’s hard to pick a flaw in him. No Pope had to excommunicate Louis to make him undertake a Crusade. As a young man he had come close to dying of malaria, and on his presumptive deathbed had sworn that if God saved him he would go crusading. God heard, and as soon as Louis was able to walk he assembled an enormous fleet and in 1248 sailed for Egypt and the Holy Land, to which he brought dignity, faith and a kind of living poetry. As Cullinane looked at the narrow streets he thought he could see the tall king, dressed in armor and flowing robes, moving through the shadows, for he was the man above all who epitomized the strange malady that sent saintly men from France and Germany to these shores.

It was confusing, therefore, to remember that everything King Louis attempted in the Holy Land ended in disaster. He fumbled and bumbled his way into one catastrophe after another, needlessly sacrificing hundreds, thousands and scores of thousands of the finest soldiers of Europe. On one disgraceful afternoon he ineptly lost so large an army that the Egyptians simply had to chop off the heads of most of his knights because there was nothing else to do with them. Later, by gross error, he allowed himself to be captured, and his faltering Crusade had to dig up one million bezants to ransom him. He squandered armies the way a careless lieutenant loses platoons, and when he was through, the Holy Land was near prostration and recovery was impossible. Frantically seeking allies this saintly Christian stumbled into the hands of the Assassins, the most disreputable of Muslim factions, and he found himself financing the murder of his own people. He was the worst disaster ever to strike the Holy Land, yet his knights worshiped him as their ideal commander; and many, on the eve of battles in which his ineptitude would cost them their lives, penned letters home which still breathe the sanctity he inspired. The Muslims recognized him as a truly good man, but their generals must have prayed that fate would pit them against Louis rather than a real general. In fact, his string of disasters raised embarrassing questions throughout the east: if this greatest of God’s servants could lose so constantly when victory was assured, could it honestly be said that God was on the side of the Christians? You still wonder, Cullinane mused. King Louis at last had to leave St. Jean d’Acre, a dejected man who had failed to accomplish a single aim, but he marched out of the city with flags flying as if he had been a great victor—which in some respects he had been. Years later the crusading zeal again obsessed him and as an old man he convened another great army. Due to some incredible aberration he persuaded himself that he could free Jerusalem by invading not Acre, but Tunisia, and to those inhospitable shores he led one of the most pathetic Crusades ever put together in madness and a love of God. In blazing summer heat he took his reluctant warriors to Africa, where no battles were fought, for plague struck the ships, mercifully killing the saint, who died muttering, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem.” In a lifetime of effort he had never come close to rescuing that city. Most prodigally he had wasted lives and money. Yet he lived on in memory, and still does, as the ideal Crusader.