ABSTRACT
The conquest of Jerusalem by the armies of the First Crusade was the end result of Christianity’s claim for physical domination of the city; it was hailed as a miracle and a manifestation of Divine Will. This claim was hardly new, and there are indications of its existence as far back as the tenth and eleventh centuries, though disguised until 1074 (when Gregory VII considered the reconquest of Jerusalem) as an eschatological inevitability.1 Adso of Montier-en-Der wrote in his widely read and highly influential De Ortu et Tempore Antichristi (c. 950) that the Antichrist would wage war in Jerusalem not against Jews or Gentiles, but against Christians. The presence of Christians in Jerusalem, perhaps even their domination, appeared in Adso’s treatise as a precondition for the beginning of the events of the End of the World, for the arrival in Jerusalem of Antichrist, the precursor of the end.2 Adso and eleventh-century versions of his treatise described the last Roman emperor who, after gaining victory over all his rivals, would rule the entire Roman Empire. On the eve of the arrival of Antichrist he was to come to Jerusalem and deposit his crown and sceptre on the Mount of Olives.3 As early as the tenth century, this legendary figure was associated in the West with the struggle of Christianity against Islam. This identification became still more pronounced in the eleventh century, and in some versions of Adso’s prophecy, propagated in the West under the title Prophecy of the Last Emperor, the emperor defeated the Moslems on the eve of his arrival in Jerusalem. Accordingly, Benzo of Alba, in 1086, advised the Emperor Henry IV to conquer Rome, then Constantinople and Jerusalem; thereafter duly honouring Christ’s Sepulchre and
1 For a discussion of the problem of the claim for domination of Jerusalem as predating the First Crusade, see Prawer, ‘Jerusalem in Christian and Jewish Perspectives’, pp. 741-50, 800-802, versus Bredero, in ibid., pp. 797-800. Bredero did not present any textual evidence in favour of his view that the political claim to Jerusalem predated the First Crusade. Riley-Smith, The First Crusade, pp. 48-9, 55, 108, 146, assumed its existence on the eve of the crusade, but produced textual evidence dating from 1098 onwards, emanating mostly from chroniclers who wrote in the first decade following the conquest of Jerusalem. 2 Adso Dervensis, p. 28. For this treatise see O. Prinz, ‘Eine frühe abendländische Aktualisierung der lateinischen Übersetzung des Pseudo-Methodios’, DA, 41 (1985),
other holy places, he would be crowned ‘ad laudem et gloriam viventis in secula seculorum’.4 This was actually the plan of the emperor’s foe, Pope Gregory VII, who in 1074 considered leading an expedition of fideles Sancti Petri to liberate the Eastern churches as well as the Holy Sepulchre. In a letter dated 1074 to Emperor Henry IV, Pope Gregory wrote that ‘already fifty thousand men are preparing, if they can have me as their leader and prelate, to take arms against the enemies of God and push forward to the Sepulchre of the Lord under His supreme leadership’.5
