Free Armies of Heaven by Jay Rubenstein Page B

inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to Coloman. The pilgrims turned over their weapons and money.
    As soon as pilgrims had been disarmed, the royal army killed almost all of them in a merciless slaughter. A few crusaders escaped the chaos and made their way back to Germany. The field outside of St. Martin’s, they swore to anyone who would listen, was left covered “with dead and butchered bodies and blood”—newly crowned martyrs of Christ, though their killers were fellow Catholics whom the pilgrims themselves had persecuted. 12
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    BY THE TIME THAT Emicho of Flonheim and his army arrived in Hungary, Coloman had lost any inclination to cooperate with the crusade. Like the citizens at Nish, he had learned to see the pilgrims as false Christians, thieves, and violent men. With Emicho, this analysis was appropriate.
    Emicho had led the most brutal pogroms against the Jews in the Rhine Valley, stirring up such a frenzy that the killings continued well into the summer, after his own men had turned toward Hungary. The size of his army is difficult to gauge. Albert of Aachen gave the outlandish figure of 200,000 soldiers, including 3,000 knights (another contemporary offered the more likely figure of 12,000 soldiers). It would have been well financed,
not only because of the plunder Emicho had taken but also because he counted several prominent nobles among his followers. These included Thomas of Marle, Drogo of Nesle, Clarembald of Vendeuil, and William of Melun, nicknamed “the Carpenter” because of the way he hewed his enemies in two as if they were lumber. Albert characterized Emicho’s men as a frivolous group, given to revelry and fornication. But as their ruthless treatment of the German Jews demonstrates, they were dangerously fanatical, their leader proclaiming himself an apocalyptic emperor intent upon wiping Judaism from the face of the earth and making himself king of all true Christians.
    When Emicho and his band arrived at Moson, Coloman refused to deal with them: His kingdom was now closed to the Franks. The last battle with Gottschalk was recent enough that the neighboring fields were still littered with stinking corpses. Emicho, the mad emperor, consulted with his leading men about how to respond, and together they chose to lay siege to Moson and to devastate the Hungarian kingdom. 13
    The siege lasted for several weeks. Emicho’s armies tried to seize control of the region by building bridges that would allow them to cross the River Leitha outside of Moson and to traverse the swamps in the area more easily as well. The Hungarians did their best to disrupt these maneuvers, resulting in several minor skirmishes. In one encounter, William the Carpenter, earning his nickname, cleaved off the head of one of Coloman’s chief advisors. The pilgrims celebrated around his severed head that evening, admiring in particular its long and flowing gray hair. But eventually food began to run short, and Emicho realized that more aggressive measures were called for.
    On August 15, 1096, in a final push again Moson, his men moved two catapults close to the city and broke through the walls in two separate places. As the Franks poured through the breach, the Hungarians offered one last desperate defense (King Coloman, however, was preparing to flee into Russia along a secret network of bridges he had had constructed in the swamps around the city). Victory was seemingly within Emicho’s grasp. Perhaps he might have crowned himself king of Hungary—presumably asserting his right as Last World Emperor. We shall never know because just as quickly as his men had penetrated the city, they turned around and retreated in a fright. Why they did so is unclear. Albert of
Aachen reckoned it a judgment of God, and it must have looked like one since according to eyewitnesses the Danube and Leitha rivers both ran red with blood. The better-equipped knights with faster horses managed to escape.