The Counts of Gruyère | Page 5

times the violence and the pillage which was the permitted privilege of the robber bishops and the robber lords. Gruyère and its rulers reflected the influence of the all-powerful hierarchy, and Turimbert and his successors took their part in the great religious society extending over all Europe, where the conservation of faith was of supreme importance, and when men belonged more to the church than to their country.
The possession of the great monasteries surpassed those of the largest landholders, and Rome with its mighty prelates for the second time became the capital of the world. When Hildebrand the monk, mounting the papal throne as Gregory VII, excommunicated the German Emperor, Henry IV, he placed the imperial crown upon the head of none other than Rudolph of Rheinfelden, the governor of Transjurane Burgundy and of the province of Gruyère. After Henry, forced to submission, had scaled the icy heights of the Alps to prostrate himself before Hildebrand at Canossa, after Rudolph had been killed in battle by Henry's supporter Godfrey de Bouillon, Hildebrand's pupil and successor Urban II, journeying to Clermont in Cisjurane Burgundy, summoned all Europe in torrents of fiery eloquence to rise and deliver the Holy Land from the power of the Saracens. Unmarked in the churchly parchments which alone record the history of these times, were the successors of Turimbert; but in the period of the first Crusade, Guillaume I, of the succeeding and unbroken line of Gruyère counts, appears as the head of a numerous and powerful family pre?minent for their loyalty to the church. Among the shining names of chivalry immortalized in the annals of the Holy wars are those of Guillaume, of his son Ulric, chanoine of the Church at Lausanne, and of his nephews Hughes and Turin.
Not with Peter the Hermit, the hallucinated dwarf whose sobbing eloquence had led an innumerable motley host of unnamed peasants to certain disaster in the deserts of the East, went the hundred Gruyèrian soldiers led by Guillaume, but with the knights and priests of Romand Switzerland, the Burgundian French and Lombard nobles who swelled the fabled hosts of Godfrey de Bouillon. With gifts of lands to churches and to priories and with the blessing of the lord bishop of their county the Gruyère pilgrims, eager to battle for the holy cause, obeyed with ardor the cry of Dieu le veut, Diex le volt, and leaving their country, faced without faltering, dangers and distant lands and carried their scarlet banner with its silver crane, bravely among the bravest.
"The young bergères of Gruyère," so runs the chronicle, "barred the gates of the city to prevent their departure, by force the gates were burst, and the poor maidens wept as they listened to the standard-bearers cry, a hundred times repeated, "En Avant la Grue, S'agit d'aller, reviendra qui pourra." How wide is the ocean we must cross," they asked as they galloped down the valleys, "as wide as the lake we must pass when we go to pray to our Lady of Lausanne?"
Tasso, the poet of the Crusades, so well appreciated the valor of the Swiss soldiers that he chose their leader for the honor of first scaling the walls of Jerusalem.
"Over the moat, on a sudden filled to the brim With a thousand thrown faggots, and with rolled trees stout and slim, Before all he ventured. On helmet and buckler poured floods of sulphurous fire. Yet scatheless he passed through the furnace of flame, And with powerful hand throwing the ladder high over the wall, mounted with pride."
Again when the Christians were in want of wood for the catapults and rolling towers with which to scale and batter down resisting walls, Tasso leads this same undaunted servant of de Bouillon into the forest enchanted by the Satanic ally of the Musselmans.
"Like all soldiers I must challenge fate-- Surprises, fears and phantoms know I not. Floods and roaring monsters, the terrors Of the common herd affright not me! The last realm of hell I would invade, Descending fearless, sword in hand."
Such, according to Tasso, was the spirit of the Swiss Crusaders. Did the banner of Gruyère float with those of Tancred, of Robert of Normandy and of all the flower of the French noblesse over the walls of Jerusalem delivered? No record tells of it. Many of the hundred "beaux Gruèriens" doubtless perished on the holy soil. A fraction only of the host which in multitudes like the stars and desert sands invaded the east, assembled for the assault upon the Holy City. Famine, thirst and pestilence decimated the great armies upon which fell the united cohorts of the oriental powers. Blasphemy and prostitution, the refuge of despair, alternated in the camp of the Crusaders with fanatic visions of visiting archangels, of armed and shining knights descending the slopes of heaven