his punishment if he flee before the Saracens and forsake his standard in battle.[1]
The history of the Templars, significantly epitomized in the amendments to their regula, shows the necessary as well as inevitable secularization of a military monastic order; an order which for the purposes of this chapter may be placed among the chief historical examples of chivalry. For in this chapter we are not straying through the pleasant mazes of romantic literature, but are keeping close to history, with the intention of drawing from it illustrations of chivalry's ideals. We shall not, however, enter further upon the story of the Order of the Temple, with its valorous and rapacious achievements and most tragic end; but will rather look to the careers of historic individuals for the illumination of our theme.
Reaching form and consciousness in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, chivalry became part of the crusading ardour of those times. All true knights were or might be Crusaders; and of a truth there was no purer incarnation of the crusading spirit than Godfrey of Bouillon, that figure of veritable if somewhat slender historicity, upon whom in time chronicler and trouvère alike were to fasten as the true hero of the enterprise that won Jerusalem. And so he was. Not that Godfrey was commander of the host. He was not even its most energetic or most capable leader. Boemund of Tarentum and Raymond of Toulouse were his superiors in power and military energy. But neither Boemund, nor Tancred, nor Raymond, nor any other of those princes of Christendom, was what Godfrey appears to us, the type and symbol of the perfect, single-hearted, crusading knight, fighting solely for the Faith, with Christian devotion and humility, and, like them all, with more than Christian wrath. The First Crusade (1096-1099) was stamped with hatred and slaughter: on the dreadful march, at the more dreadful siege and final sack of Antioch, and finally when the holy sepulchre's defilement was washed out in Saracen blood. And there was no slaughterer more eager than Godfrey.
The cruelty and religious fervour of the Crusade are
- ↑ See e.g. de Curzon's edition, sections 419, 420, 574.
