Fulness of apostolic charity

Especially was there one, the divinely appointed shepherd of the poor of Christ, the anxious steward of. His Church, who from his high and ancient watch tower, in the fulness of apostolic charity, surveyed narrowly what was going on at thousands of miles from him, and who with prophetic eye looked into the future age; and scarcely had that enemy showed himself, who was in the event so heavily to smite the Christian world, but he gave warning of the danger, and prepared himself with measures to avert it. Scarcely had the Turk touched the shores of the Mediterranean and the Archipelago, when the Pope detected and denounced him before all Europe.

The heroic Pontiff, St. Gregory the Seventh, was then upon the throne of the Apostle; and though he was engaged in one of the severest conflicts which Pope has ever sustained, not only against the secular power, but against bad bishops and priests, yet at a time when his very life was not his own, and present responsibilities so urged him, that one would fancy he had time for no other thought, Gregory was able to turn his mind to the consideration of a contingent danger in the almost fabulous East. In a letter written during the reign of Malek Shah, he suggested the idea of a crusade against the misbeliever, which later popes carried out. He assures the Emperor of Germany, whom he was addressing, that he had 50,000 troops ready for the holy war, whom he would fain have led in person. In truth the most melancholy accounts were brought to Europe of the state of things in the Holy Land.

A rude Turcoman ruled in Jerusalem; his people insulted there the clergy of every profession ; they dragged the patriarch by the hair along the pavement, and cast him into a dungeon, in hopes of a ransom; and disturbed from time to time the Latin Mass and office in the Church of the Resurrection. As to the pilgrims, Asia Minor, the country through which they had to travel in an age when the sea was not yet safe to the voyager, was a scene of foreign incursion and internal dis-traction. They arrived at Jerusalem exhausted by their sufferings, and sometimes terminated them by death, before they were permitted to kiss the Holy Sepulchre.

Such calamities were of frequent occurrence, and one was very like another. I think it worth while, however, to set before you the circumstances of one of them, that you may be able to form some ideas of the state both of Asia Minor and of a Christian pilgrimage, under the dominion of the Turks. You may recollect, then, that Alp Arslan, the second Seljukian Sultan, invaded Asia Minor, and made prisoner the Greek Emperor.

Warlike operations immediately

This Sultan came to the throne in 1062, and appears to have begun his warlike operations immediately. The next year, or the year following, a body of pilgrims, to the number of 7,000, were pursuing their peaceful way to Jerusalem, by a route which at that time lay entirely through countries professing Christianity broad beans. The pious company was headed by the Archbishop of Mentz, the Bishops of Utrecht, Bamberg, and Ratisbon, and, among others, by a party of Norman soldiers and clerks, belonging to the household of William Duke of Normandy, who made himself, very soon afterwards, our William the Conqueror.

Among these clerks was the celebrated Benedictine Monk Ingulphus, William’s secretary, afterwards Abbot of Croyland in Lincolnshire, being at that time a little more than thirty years of age. They passed through Germany and Hungary to Constantinople, and thence by the southern coast of Asia Minor or Anatolia, to Syria and Palestine. When they got on the confines of Asia Minor towards Cilicia, they fell in with the savage Turcomans, who were attracted by the treasure, which these noble persons and wealthy churchmen had brought with them for pious purposes and imprudently displayed. Ingulphus’s words are few, but so graphic that I require an apology for using them. He says then, they were “ gutted of the immense sums of money they carried with them, together with the loss of many lives”.