The Deeds of God | Page 7

We judge that the early Roman institutions usefully served the common good and the spread of their power. And yet, if the essence of these things were laid bare, not only would the relentless madness of fighting without good reason, only for the sake of ruling, would obviously deserve reproach. Let us look carefully, indded let us come to our senses about the remains, I might have said dregs, of this time which we disdain, and we may find, as that foolish king said,[31] that our little finger is greater than the backs of our fathers, whom we praise excessively. If we look carefully at the wars of the pagans and the kingdoms they traveled through by great military effort, we shall conclude that none of their strength, their armies, by the grace of God, is comparable to ours.
Throughout the text Guibert relentlessly insists that the Crusaders outdo the ancient Jews; in the last book he attempts to strip them of every accomplishment:
The Lord saves the tents of Judah in the beginning, since He, after having accomplished miracles for our fathers, also granted glory to our own times, so that modern men seem to have undergone pain and suffering greater than that of the Jews of old, who, in the company of their wives and sons, and with full bellies, were led by angels who made themselves visible to them.[32]
Partisan outbreaks like this fill the Gesta Dei per Francos, perhaps more clearly distinguishing it from the earlier accounts of the First Crusade than Guibert's more elaborate syntax, and self-conscious diction.
His hatred of poor people also penetrates the text, often to bring into higher relief the behavior of aristocrats. In Book Two, for example, he offers a comic portrayal of poor, ignorant pilgrims:
There you would have seen remarkable, even comical things: poor men, their cattle pulling two-wheeled cart, armed as though they were horses, carrying their few possessions together with their small children in the wagon. The small childrne, whenever they came upon a castle or town on the way, asked whether this was the Jerusalem they were seeking.
In the seventh and last book, Guibert tells the story of the woman and the goose, again to ridicule the foolishness of the poor:
A poor woman set out on the journey, when a goose, filled with I do not know what instructions, clearly exceeding the laws of her own dull nature, followed her. Lo, rumor, flying on Pegasean wings, filled the castles and cities with the news that even geese had been sent by God to liberate Jerusalem. Not only did they deny that this wretched woman was leading the goose, but they said that the goose led her. At Cambrai they assert that, with people standing on all sides, the woman walked through the middle of the church to the altar, and the goose followed behind, in her footsteps, with no one urging it on. Soon after, we have learned, the goose died in Lorraine; she certainly would have gone more directly to Jerusalem if, the day before she set out, she had made of herself a holiday meal for her mistress.
Poor people, however, are not merely comic, but dangerous, to themselves, as Guibert's version of the story of Peter the Hermit indicates, and to others, as Guibert's version of the death of Peter Bartholomew emphasizes.[33]
The story of the goose, however, is a comic reflection of a persistently urgent problem on the First Crusade; Guibert addresses the problem of famine often, and expresses particularly warm sympathy towards aristocratic hunger:
How many jaws and throats of noble men were eaten away by the roughness of this bread. How terribly were their fine stomachs revolted by the bitterness of the putrid liquid. Good God, we think that they must have suffered so, these men who remembered their high social position in their native land, where they had been accustomed to great ease and pleasure, and now could find no hope or solace in any external comfort, as they burned in the terrible heat. Here is what I and I alone think: never had so many noble men exposed their own bodies to so much suffering for a purely spiritual benefit.
Furthermore, he bends over backwards to defend aristocrats towards whom other historians of the First Crusade were far less sympathetic. Guibert's description of the count of Normandy, for example, shows remarkable moral flexibility:
It would hardly be right to remain silent about Robert, Count of Normandy, whose bodily indulgences, weakness of will, prodigality with money, gourmandising, indolence, and lechery were expiated by the perseverance and heroism that he vigorously displayed in the army of the Lord. His inborn compassion was naturally so great that he did not permit vengeance to be taken against those who had plotted to betray him and had been sentenced to death, and