Crusades and Kingdoms

Peter the Hermit’s name sits inside a short note at the top of pp. 98–99, beside a red cross dated “1096 to 99.” Adams fits the whole first crusade into that note: “Preached by Peter the Hermit 1096. 300,000 men blest. by Urban II. Godfrey commands. Jerusalem taken 1099. Godfrey King.” Read it aloud and you have the story in five short lines. Adams even explains the name for you. The men wore, in his words, “A cross of red cloth on their right shoulder. Hence ‘Crusade.’” He numbers eight such crosses in all, and the table on p. 100 gives each one in his own words.

Under the crosses, Europe has changed shape. Charlemagne’s single stream has broken into kingdoms, one row each, and the page gives way if you take it one row at a time, left to right. Start at the far left, where Louis’ stream divides in 843 among his sons, Lothaire, “Louis the German” and Charles the Bald. The shape looks like a revolt, yet it is an inheritance among brothers, so read Adams’ words before you trust the shape. For a true break, find “Venice becomes independent of the Eastern Empire 997,” a thin ribbon pulling away. That one is Key 4 · A stream that splits is a revolt.

Row by row, the north and east come into the church, and Adams writes it on the streams themselves. In Poland “Micislaus… becomes Christian,” in Sweden “Christianity introduced,” and just below, Russia reaches “Wladimir I, ‘the Great.’” In the south the thin stream of Asturias has grown into Castile and Aragon, “Christian Spain,” while Mahometan Spain declines after 1031. A Norman helmet dated 1048 sends two branches into Italy, Sicily under Roger and Naples under Robert, and the Saracens and Greeks lose southern Italy.

Then go back up to the red crosses and read them as a believer would. Plenty of them went out of real devotion, and the first crusade won what Adams draws just below the edge of the spread: the “Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, 88 years,” until “Saladin of Egypt takes Palestine” in 1187. Yet he calls the third crusade “glorious but fruitless,” and beside his fifth he writes “Baldwin Count of Flanders took Constantinople 1203.” Crusaders sacked a Christian city. Jesus had told Pilate that his kingdom was not of this world.

Two quieter splits run through the same pages. In 1054 Rome and Constantinople excommunicated each other, and Adams gives it no caption at all. You find it only because the block of Pope Leo IX ends at “54,” and so does the block of Zoe and Constantine IX in the Eastern Empire (p. 100). The other quarrel is between pope and emperor. In the Germany stream Henry IV is “deposed” in one block and “reinstated” in the next, and the right to appoint bishops is at last “settled by treaty between Pope Calixtus II and Emperor Henry V.”

Look last at the bottom right of p. 99, where red circles crowd together: the Lateran councils of 1123, 1139, 1179 and 1215. Papal-Rome has never looked stronger than it does here, and the next stretch asks what it did with that strength.