The Dream and the Tomb [antikvár]

The Dreain and the Tbinb 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-carparisoned 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 oL 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. 17