The Battle of Amiens, 8-12 August:

British troops watch as German prisoners are escorted away.

The Allied attacks of July 1918 had shown the effectiveness of ‘all arms’ battle tactics: troops and tanks advancing behind a ‘creeping barrage’ of artillery fire as ground-attack aircraft swept overhead. Local counter-attacks were so successful that they quickly developed into a general offensive. Every day the Germans had to withdraw somewhere along the line; every day the Allies completed the preparations for another local push. The tactical situation seems to have loosened up slightly; the attacks were expensive but not prohibitively so and, as the Allies ground steadily forward, week in, week out, the morale of the German army finally began to fray.

At Amiens in August, these new tactics were put into operation to even greater effect. It was the most brilliantly conceived and perfectly executed of any British-led action on the Western Front. If this never quite matched the pace Ludendorff had set in March, it was better sustained and so, in the long run, more effective. The success of the advance was due to the profound secrecy in which the forces of the attack had been assembled. The offensive began with British, Australian, Canadian and French troops attacking to the east of the city. On the first day, the Australians met their objectives by early afternoon, taking eight thousand prisoners. But it was the Canadian troops who advanced the furthest, eight miles, taking five thousand prisoners. The Canadian Corps, supplied with ten million rounds of small-arms ammunition, were regarded by the Germans as ‘storm-troops’ and their attack from the north was cunningly concealed by the absence of a preliminary artillery bombardment. Instead, a swarm of 456 tanks were deployed alongside the troops, under the cover of the early morning ground mist. Haig himself attacked in the Somme area. As the troops left their trenches to advance, the artillery barrage began firing two hundred yards in front of their starting line. The guns then began to ‘lift’, increasing in range at timed intervals in their ‘creeping barrage’. The barrage included forty adjustments of a hundred yards every three minutes in this phase of the attack.

The advance slowed by the 12th, as the Allies over-reached their heavy artillery support and ran up against German troops determined to defend their 1917 trench positions, aided by the tangled wastes of the old Somme battlefield. On paper, the material gains by Allies did not appear extensive, for both in ground won and prisoners taken, Germany had frequently exceeded such gains, though it had failed to consolidate its offensives. By contrast, the Allied advance had not only given an indication of how the war could be won, but it had also achieved its essential purpose of striking a deadly blow at the spirit of an already weakening enemy. Ludendorff later confessed that…

August 8th was the black day of the German army in the history of the war. … It put the decline of our fighting force beyond all doubt.

After 8th August, the Kaiser concluded that…

We are at the end of our resources; the war must be ended.

At a conference held at Spa, the German generals informed him and the Imperial Chancellor that there was no chance of victory and that peace negotiations should be opened as soon as possible. The most that could be hoped for was an orderly retirement to the prepared defences of the Hindenburg Line, a strategic defensive action which would win reasonable terms from the Allies. Ludendorff himself offered his resignation, which was not accepted. He had lost hope of any gains, and his one remaining aim was to avoid an abject surrender. This was a far from the optimistic mood required to enter upon the most difficult operations which were still ahead.

The Hundred Days Offensive:

When the initial momentum of the assault at Amiens died away, Haig was no longer willing to batter against stiffening opposition. Instead, he set the Third Army in motion farther north. This proved a more economical method of attack and from this point onwards a series of short, closely related offensives kept the Germans retiring until they reached the Hindenburg Line, from which they had started their offensive in the Spring. Foch was determined to hustle Ludendorff out of all his positions before he could entrench himself along the Hindenburg Line, driving the whole vast German army back to the narrow gut which led to Germany. But, at this time, he anticipated a gradual advance which would see the war continuing into 1919. As soon as serious resistance developed, Foch would, therefore, call a halt to the advance in that sector, only to renew it in another one. Tanks permitted him to mount a new offensive rapidly and frequently, so that his strategy became one of conducting a perpetual arpeggio along the whole of the Front, wearing down the enemy’s line and his reserves. Of this great plan,  to which Haig had undoubtedly contributed, the latter was also to be its chief executant. But, being closer to the field of battle, Haig was steadily coming to believe that, this year, it really would be all over before Christmas.

The ‘Hundred Days Offensive’ was a series of Allied engagements, that put continuous pressure on the retreating Germans. It began at Amiens and finished on 11th November. In all, there were a further twenty-two battles. Although the Germans realised they were to be denied victory they fought tenaciously, inflicting heavy casualties. The advance to victory, like the Somme retreat, cannot be painted in broad lines since it was composed of a multitude of interlinked actions. The first stage, completed by the first week in September, was the forcing of the enemy back to the Hindenburg Line, an achievement made certain by the breaking by the Canadians on 2nd September of the famous Drocourt-Quéant switch. Meanwhile, in the south, the Americans under Pershing had found immediate success at Saint-Mihiel on 12th August, flattening out the Saint-Mihiel salient, cutting it off, and advancing northwards towards Sedan. The next stage was the breaching of the Hindenburg defences, and while Pershing attacked towards Meziéres, the Belgians and the British attacked in the north towards Ghent, movements which took place towards the end of August. Between these movements, the Hindenburg Line was breached at many points, and the Germans were compelled to make extensive evacuations.

The Allied advance was slower than had been expected, however, and the German army was able to retain its cohesion. Nevertheless, it was sadly pressed, and its fighting spirit was broken. The German soldiers had been led to believe that the Allies were as exhausted and as short of supplies as they themselves were. During their spring offensives, however, they had captured stores of allied clothing, food and metals which had opened their eyes to the deception being practised on them. Their casualties had been enormous, and the Allied reserves seemed unlimited. Their letters from home told of their families’ distress, making further resistance seem both hopeless and pointless.

Yet the news of this turn of the tide at Amiens and in its aftermath did not immediately change the popular mood on the home front in Britain. Everybody was over-tired and underfed, and an influenza epidemic was claiming hundreds of victims each week. My grandfather’s battalion, training at Catterick barracks to go to France, was almost wiped out. He was one of few survivors since he was an underage recruit, his mother presenting his birth certificate at the camp gates.   All over the country, there were strikes among munition-workers, followed by trouble with transport services and in the coal mines. Even the London police joined in. These difficulties were overcome very simply by increasing wages. Those in authority, perhaps more aware than most that the last stage of the ghastly shooting-match was finally coming to an end, and knowing something of the state of the German people, were anxiously questioning themselves as to whether a rot might set in.

At this juncture, it was the turn of the British War Cabinet to have doubts, and, as it would have put the brake on Allenby in Palestine, so it would also have held back Haig. But, as John Buchan wrote in 1935, the British commander had reached the point which great soldiers come to sooner or later when he could trust his instinct. On 9th September he told Lord Milner that the war would not drag on till next July, as was the view at home, but was on the eve of a decision. Buchan continued:

He had the supreme moral courage to take upon himself the full responsibility for a step which, if it failed, would blast his repute and lead to dreadful losses, but which, if it succeeded, would in his belief mean the end of the War, and prevent civilisation from crumbling through sheer fatigue.

Haig was justified in his fortitude. With the order, “Tout le monde à la Bataille,” Foch began the final converging battles of the war. One of the most major battles was that of Meuse-Argonne, which began on 26th September and was the American Expeditionary Force’s largest offensive, featuring over one and a quarter million troops by the time it ended on 11th November. This attack proved to be more difficult than the one at Saint-Mihiel on 12th August, as they faced strong German defences in the dense Argonne forest. The weather did not help; it rained on forty of the battle’s forty-seven. On the 26th September, two British and two American divisions faced fifty-seven weak German divisions behind the strongest entrenchment in history. It took the British troops just one day to cross the battlefield at Passchendaele. Brigadier General J. Harington of the 46th (North Midland) Division commented on his troops’ breaching of the Hindenburg Line on 29th September by telling them, You boys have made history. They had been given the difficult task of crossing the heavily defended St Quentin Canal, a feat which they had accomplished using rafts and pulled lines, with troops wearing cork lifebelts taken from cross-Channel steamships. Prisoners were captured at the Bellenglise Tunnel, which had been dug under the canal by the Germans after Allied soldiers fired a German ‘howitzer’ into it.

By the 29th, the combined British and American troops had crossed the Canal du Nord and the Scheldt Canal, and within a week they were through the whole defence system and in open country. Despite their adherence to outdated tactics that brought about heavy casualties, the Americans prevailed and continued their assault right up to the end of the war. By 8th October the last remnants of the Hindenburg zone had disappeared in a cataclysm. Foch’s conception had not been fully realised, however; Pershing had been set too hard a task and was not far enough forward when the Hindenburg system gave, pinning the enemy into the trap which had been set. Nevertheless, by 10th October Germany had been beaten by the US Army in a battle which Foch described as a classic example of the military art.

The Collapse of Germany’s Allies:

The day of doom was only postponed, and Ludendorff no longer had any refuge from the storm. Long before his broken divisions could reach the Meuse Germany would be on its knees.  The signs of Germany’s military decline were quickly read by her partners. It was now losing all its allies. They had been the guardians of Germany’s flanks and rear, and if they fell the country would be defenceless. On 15th September, the much-ridiculed Allied armies comprising British, French, Greek, Italian and Serbian troops, attacked the German-led but mainly Bulgar forces in Macedonia, moving forward into Salonica, and within a fortnight Bulgaria’s front had collapsed and its government sought an armistice. This was concluded on 29th September at Thessalonica. British forces were moving across the country towards the Turkish frontier. French columns had reached the Danube and the Serbs had made a good start on the liberation of their homeland.

The Turks held out for a further month, during which the British conquered Syria, then they too surrendered. On 19th September, General Allenby in Palestine had opened up an action which provided a perfect instance of how, by surprise and mobility, a decisive victory may be won almost without fighting. Algerians, Indian Muslims and Hindus, Arab tribesmen, Africans and Jewish battalions came together to liberate the Holy Land from Ottoman rule. Breaking the Turkish defence in the plain of Sharon, Allenby sent his fifteen thousand cavalry in a wide sweep to cut the enemy’s line of communications and block his retreat, while Prince Faisal and T. E. Lawrence (a young British officer who had attained an amazing ascendancy over the Arab tribes) created a diversion east of the Jordan. This played an important role in Allenby’s victory at Megiddo. In two days, the Turkish armies to the west of Jordan had been destroyed, its right-wing being shattered, while its army on the east bank was being shepherded north by the merciless Arabs to its destruction. By 1st October Damascus was in British hands, and Aleppo surrendered on 26th October. The elimination of Bulgaria exposed both the Danube and Constantinople to attack and the French and British forces diverged on these two objectives. A Franco-British force sailed in triumph past Gallipoli and took possession of Constantinople. With her armies in the east shattered, Turkey made peace on 30th September by the Armistice of Mudros.

The Allied armies in the Balkans still had a fair way to travel before they could bring Austria-Hungary under attack, but it was a journey they never had to make.: the Habsburg Empire was falling to pieces of its own accord. October saw Czech nationalists take over in Prague and proclaim it the capital of an independent Czechoslovak state, while the Poles of Galicia announced their intention of taking the province into the new Polish state – a programme disputed by the Ruthenians of Eastern Galicia, who looked towards the Ukrainian Republic for support and integration. At the same time representatives of the various south-Slav peoples of the empire – Slovenes, Croats and Bosnians, repudiated Austro-Hungarian rule and expressed, with surprising unanimity, their desire to fuse with Serbia and Montenegro to form a single Yugoslav state. All that was left was for revolutions in Vienna and Budapest to declare in favour of separate Austrian and Hungarian republics and the Habsburg Empire had ceased to exist.

Meanwhile, on the anniversary of Caporetto, Italy had made her last advance and the Austrian forces, which had suffered desperately for four years and were now at the end of their endurance, melted away. So did the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  On 3rd-4th November an Armistice was signed at Villa Giusti with Austria-Hungary, and the Dual Monarchy immediately broke up into fragments. The Emperor was left alone and without friends in the vast echoing corridors of the Palace of Schönbrunn. Thus, even as it resisted Allied pressure on the Western Front, Germany saw all its chief allies fall away, collapse and disintegrate.

The Internal Collapse of Germany:

These blows broke the nerve of the German High Command. Ludendorff told the political leaders that an armistice was imperative, and Prince Max of Baden was appointed Chancellor to use his international reputation for moderation in the negotiations. Ludendorff stuck to his idea of a strategic defence to compel better terms, till his physical health failed and with it his nerve; but the civilian statesmen believed that the army was beyond hope and that there must be no delay in making peace. From the meeting at Spa on 29th September till the early days of November there was a frenzied effort by the German statesmen to win something by negotiation which their armies were incapable of enforcing. While Foch continued to play his deadly arpeggio in the West, Germany strove by diplomacy to arrest the inevitable. They knew what the soldiers had not realised, that the splendid fortitude of the German people was breaking, disturbed by Allied propaganda and weakened with suffering. The condition of their country was too desperate to wait for an honourable truce at the front since the home front was dissolving more quickly than the battlefront. The virus of revolution, which Germany had fostered in Russia, was also stealing into her own veins. Popular feeling was on the side of Scheidemann’s view, …

“Better a terrible end than terror without end.”

On 3rd October, the new German Chancellor made a request to Woodrow Wilson, the President of the United States, to take in hand the restoration of peace on the basis of his Fourteen Points, published in January as a way of justifying the USA’s involvement in the war and ensuring future peace. In particular, they were interested in securing a general disarmament, open diplomacy (no secret treaties) and the right of Germany to self-determination. Wilson replied that the armistice now sought by Germany was a matter for the Allied leaders in the field. In the exchange of notes which followed, it became clear that the Allies demanded little short of unconditional surrender. Wilson’s points were, however, used as the basis for the negotiation of the peace treaty at Versailles the following year. Georges Clemenceau, the French prime minister, remained sceptical about them:

“God was satisfied with Ten Commandments. Wilson gave us fourteen.”

Faced with the certainty of being faced with a demand for an unconditional surrender from the Allies, Ludendorff now wished to fight on, but neither the new government nor the people supported him. Short of proper clothing and fuel, weakened by semi-starvation and racked by the influenza epidemic which killed 1,722 in Berlin on one day, 15th October, they demanded peace and turned on the leaders who had promised victory but brought defeat.  Ludendorff resigned on the 26th, and the High Command was superseded by the proselytes of democracy. Everywhere in Germany kings and courts were tumbling down, and various brands of socialists were assuming power. Steps were taken to transfer the real power to the Reichstag. President Wilson had refused to enter negotiations with military and “monarchical autocrats” and therefore required “not negotiation but surrender.” But the height of the storm is not the moment to recast a constitution, and for the old Germany, the only way was not reform but downfall.

With political unrest in Germany, it was thought the removal of the Kaiser would placate the popular mood. Civil War was threatened since the Kaiser, despite relentless pressure, was unwilling to abdicate. On 29th October, he left Berlin for Spa, the army headquarters, where Hindenburg had to tell him that the army would not support him against the people. Some army officers proposed that he go to the front and die an honourable death in battle. It was now early November. On the 3rd, the sailors of the German fleet mutinied rather than sail out into a death-or-glory mission against the British. By 4th November, the mutiny was general, and Kiel was in the hands of the mutineers.

The same day, the army fell into confusion in Flanders, and the Austrian armistice exposed the Bavarian front to hostile attack. The temper of many army divisions was reported to be equally uncertain as the navy. An armistice had now become a matter of life or death, and on 6th November the German delegates left Berlin to sue for one. President Wilson had indicated that an armistice was on offer to the civilian leaders of Germany, but not to the military or the monarchy. Any hopes that this armistice would take the form of a truce between equals were quickly dispelled by an examination of its terms. Haig and Milner were in favour of moderation in its demands, but Foch was implacable, arguing that it must be such as to leave the enemy no power of resistance, and be a pledge both for reparations and security.

A few days later the mutineers had occupied the principal cities of North-west, and an insurrection had broken out in Munich. On 9th November revolutionaries occupied the streets of Berlin. A Republic was proclaimed from the steps of the Reichstag and, at last bowing to the inevitable, the Kaiser abdicated and fled to the Netherlands, where he lived out his life in the Netherlands. Already, on 7th November, the German delegates had passed through the Allied lines to receive the terms drawn up by the Allied Commanders. They had no choice but to accept Foch’s terms for what was an unconditional surrender, but it also became clear that the Armistice could not have been refused by the Allies, both on grounds of common humanity and in view of the exhaustion of their own troops, yet it was negotiated before the hands of fighting Germans were formally held up in the field, leading to the accusation that the politicians who signed it had stabbed the German army in the back. In Buchan’s view, …

… It provided the victors with all that they desired and all the conquered could give. Its terms meant precisely what they said, so much and no more. Wilson’s Fourteen Points were not a part of them; the Armistice had no connection with any later peace treaties. It may be argued with justice that the negotiations by the various Governments between October 5th and November 5th involved a declaration of principle by the Allies which they were morally bound to observe in the ultimate settlement. But such a declaration bore no relation to the Armistice. That was an affair between soldiers, a thing sought by Germany under the pressure of dire necessity to avoid the utter destruction of her armed manhood. It would have come about though Mr. Wilson had never indited a single note.  

There was only one mitigating circumstance. President Wilson had declared that the frontiers of post-war Europe would be decided by its people, not its politicians. Self-determination was to be the guiding principle in this process; plebiscites would take place and make clear the people’s will. On this basis, Germany would not do too badly. This was why the Germans had chosen to negotiate with Woodrow Wilson and not his European allies. True, the President had indicated that there would be exceptions to this general rule: Alsace-Lorraine would have to go back to France and the new Polish state, whose existence all parties had agreed upon, must be given access to the sea. But, if Wilson stuck to his Fourteen Points, Germany should emerge from the war clipped rather than shorn.

The Armistice and its Terms:

With no other option available to them, the German representatives met their Allied counterparts in railway carriage 2419D in a forest near Compiegne on 8th November. In 1940, Hitler symbolically used the same railway carriage to accept the French surrender. The location was chosen to ensure secrecy and no one in the German delegation was a senior military figure. The German Army High Command were keen to remain distant from the proceedings to preserve their reputations. There was little in the way of negotiation, and the Allies presented the Germans with the terms and if they did not sign, the war would continue. The Germans had three days to decide. Early in the morning of 11th November, at 5.20 a.m. to be precise, they concluded that they had no alternative but to agree to the stringent Allied terms and they signed the Armistice document. It detailed what Germany was required to do to secure the peace. Thirty-four sections laid out reparations and territory that had to be given up. Material to be surrendered included:

1,700 aircraft

2,500 field guns

2,500 heavy guns

3,000 Minenwerfer (German trench mortars, nicknamed ‘Moaning Minnies’ by British soldiers)

5,000 locomotives

5,000 motor lorries

25,000 machine guns

150,000 wagons

All submarines

The most important section of the document as far as most of the troops were concerned was the very first:

Cessation of hostilities by land and in the air six hours after the signing of the Armistice (Naval hostilities were also to cease).

It was agreed that at 11 o’ clock on that morning the Great War would come to an end. At two minutes to eleven, a machine-gun opened up at about two hundred metres from the leading British Commonwealth troops at Grandrieu. John Buchan described that last morning’s action:

In the fog and chill of Monday morning, November 11th, the minutes passed slowly along the front. An occasional shot, an occasional burst of firing, told that peace was not yet. Officers had their watches in their hands, and the troops waited with the same grave composure with which they had fought. At two minutes to eleven, opposite the South African brigade, which represented the eastern-most point reached by the British armies, a German machine-gunner, after firing off a belt without pause, was seen to stand up beside his weapon, take off his helmet, bow, and then walk slowly to the rear. Suddenly, as the watch-hands touched eleven, there came a second of expectant silence, and then a curious rippling sound, which observers far behind the front likened to the noise of a light wind. It was the sound of men cheering from the Vosges to the sea.

In fact, some US Army artillery guns continued to fire until 4 p.m., believing the sound of nearby engineering work to be enemy gunfire. But it was soon confirmed that this was indeed the last day of a First World War that had lasted 1,568 days. In the field since 15th July, Germany had lost to the British armies 188,700 prisoners and 2,840 guns; to the French 139,000 prisoners and 1,880 guns; to the Americans 44,000 and 1,421 guns; to the Belgians 14,500 prisoners and 474 guns. In the field, because she could not do otherwise, she made a full and absolute surrender. The number of Commonwealth personnel who died on 11th November was 863, and almost eleven thousand were killed, wounded or recorded as missing on 11th November. The following are the records of the last of the combatants’ countrymen to die in battle in the Great War:

The last Australians to be killed in action on the Western Front were Sappers Charles Barrett and Arthur Johnson and Second Corporal Albert Davey, who had been killed at Sambre-Oise Canal on 4th November. Private Henry Gunther’s death, recorded above, is described in the US Army’s 79th Divisional history:

Almost as he fell, the gunfire died away and an appalling silence prevailed.

Private Gunther’s death was the last of 53,402 losses sustained by the US Army during its sixth-month participation in the war. In the same period, there were 360,000 casualties out of the 1.2 million men in the British Army.  Sixty years later, in eight years of fighting in Vietnam, 58,220 Americans were killed. While the loss of so many young men in Vietnam had a significant impact on American society and culture in the late twentieth century, the losses of World War One had, arguably, an even more profound effect on the USA from 1918 to 1943, when the country finally got over these costs of getting involved in European conflicts and agreed to send its soldiers back to the continent. Another important social effect, though a secondary one, was that resulting from the participation of two hundred thousand African-American troops who served in France. Having been integrated into the fighting forces in western Europe, many of them returned to continuing poverty and segregation in their home states and counties.

Poetry & Pity:

In Shrewsbury, as the bells were ringing to celebrate the armistice on the 11th November, the parents of Wilfred Owen received a telegram informing them of their son’s death. Although like his friend and fellow soldier-poet, Siegfried Sassoon, Owen had come very close to becoming a pacifist during his convalescence at Craiglockart War Hospital in Scotland, where he had met Sassoon in August 1917, he had insisted on being sent back to the front in September 1918. He had felt that he had to return to France in order remain a spokesman, in his poetry, for the men in the front line, through sharing their experiences and their suffering. on 4th October, after most of his company had been killed, he and a corporal captured a German machine gun and scores of prisoners; for this feat, he was awarded the Military Cross. But a month later, and just a week before the Armistice, on 4th November 1918, he was trying to construct a make-shift bridge so as to lead his company over the Sambre Canal, in the face of heavy machine-gun fire, when he himself was killed. Just before he left England for the last time on 31st August 1918, Owen was planning a volume of poetry that he never lived to publish, but which he thought of as a kind of propaganda. He scribbled a preface for it, which began:

This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them.

Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War.

Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.

My subject is War, and the pity of War.

The Poetry is in the pity.

Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.

Owen’s best and most typical poetry, written earlier in the war, is in harmony with this Preface. As Andrew Motion has written more recently (2003), Owen believed that it was still possible to celebrate individual acts of courage and to commemorate losses, but not to glorify conflict as such. He stressed the tragic waste of war, and so his characteristic attitude is of compassion rather than anger. He fills us with a sense of pity for the dead who died such agonising and undignified deaths. He makes us painfully aware of all the good that these young men, British and German, could have achieved if only they had lived. Two types of tension give a cutting edge to Owen’s best poetry. He cannot quite make up his mind about whether God exists and whether pacifism is the only answer to the problem of war. So he carries on an internal debate on these two problems just below the surface of his meaning: the consequent tension gives a terrible intensity to his poetry. Two of his later poems reject Christianity more openly: Futility arraigns God in the most direct way for ever allowing Creation to take place:

Was it for this the clay grew tall?

O what made fatuous sunbeams toil

To break earth’s sleep at all?

A less well-known poem, The End, expresses the most serious doubts that Owen ever put into poetry. He asks what will happen on the Last Day:

Shall life renew these bodies? Of a truth

All earth will He annul, all tears assuage?

His pious mother removed the second despairing question mark from these lines when she chose them for his tombstone, but her more pessimistic son ended his poem with a speech by Earth who says:

It is death.

Mine ancient scars shall not be glorified,

Nor my titanic tears, the seas, be dried.

His finest poetry, however, is not that in which he despairs; it is that in which his faith and his doubts quiver in the balance. But in his letters Owen sometimes puts the case for Christian pacifism with passionate intensity:

Already I have comprehended a light which will never filter into the dogma of any national church: namely that one of Christ’s essential commands was, Passivity at any price! Suffer dishonour and disgrace, but never resort to arms. Be bullied, be outraged, be killed, but do not kill… pure Christianity will not fit in with pure patriotism.

Arguments such as this are made explicitly in his letters but are only hinted at below the surface of his poems. Sassoon was more negative in tone, better at rousing indignation against warmongers than at raising pity for dead soldiers. But in some of his poems he managed to do both:

He’s young, he hated war! How should he die

When cruel old campaigners win safe through!

Such tragedies impelled Sassoon to his desperate protest, O Jesus, make it stop! Owen and Sassoon impelled other poets, both civilians (like Edith Wharton, below) and soldiers, to similar expressions of pity or protest. Kipling, so often unfairly dismissed for his earlier jingoism, compares the modern soldier’s agony to Christ’s agony in Gethsemane, 1914-18, and Edward Thomas’ As The Team’s Head-Brass tells of a Gloucestershire farm labourer who cannot move a fallen tree because his mate has been killed in France. This simple example typifies all that the men might have accomplished whose lives were wasted in war. If Owen had lived, it is generally agreed among literary critics that he would have gone on to be at least as great as his inspiration, John Keats. Perhaps more importantly, his maxim has held firm through the years, even in wars which have generally been considered to be ‘just’. ‘Pity’ and ‘truthfulness’ remain the crucial ingredients, especially when the realities of war are blurred by euphemism, propaganda and ‘fake news’.

Sources:

Colin McEvedy (1982), The Penguin Atlas of Recent History (Europe since 1815). Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Fiona Waters (ed.) (2007), A Corner of a Foreign Field: The Illustrated Poetry of the First World War. Croxley Green: Transatlantic Press.

Norman Ferguson (2014), The First World War: A Miscellany.  Chichester: Summersdale Publishers.

E. L. Black (ed.) (1970), 1914-18 in Poetry. London: University of London Press.

Matthew Hollis & Paul Keegan (eds.) (2003), 101 Poems Against War. London: Faber & Faber.

Irene Richards, J.B. Goodson & J. A. Morris (1938), A Sketch-Map  History of the Great War and After, 1914-35. London: Harrap.

John Buchan (1935), The King’s Grace, 1910-35. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

The Trouble with Ken, Jeremy, Diane etc…

The British Labour Party is preparing to rewrite its definition of anti-Semitism to enable its members to continue to call into question the right of the state of Israel to exist, although the party policy is to support a two-state solution to the ‘problem of Palestine’. In recent weeks, the Party has been digging itself further into the hole that it began when it failed to expel the former Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, for claiming that “Hitler supported Zionism” in the 1930s. Only last week (18th May), we learned that the leader of the Party, Jeremy Corbyn, has nominated as a new appointee to the House of Lords.  Martha Osamor, who’s a Nigerian-born civil rights campaigner, has in the past shown public support of Labour members who were suspended over anti-Semitism, including signing a letter protesting against Ken Livingstone’s suspension. The letter claimed that all those suspended were victims of a conspiratorial campaign against Jeremy Corbyn.

Martha Osamor, a Nigerian-born British civil rights campaigner, has been nominated by Jeremy Corbyn to become a peer. Picture: Facebook

After demonstrations by mainstream Jewish organisations outside Parliament involving many MPs from his own Party and a deeply embarrassing debate in Parliament further exposing the anti-Semitic abuse those same MPs have been subjected to, Jeremy Corbyn finally met two Jewish charities, supposedly to resolve their differences. However, not only did they refuse to accept the proposals put forward by the charities for monitoring and eradicating anti-Semitism from the Party, but Corbyn and his colleagues used the meeting to announce that they were reneging on the Party’s adoption of the International Definition of Antisemitism. 

The definition, which has been widely accepted since its adoption at the Bucharest Plenary of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) on 26 May 2016, is supported in the document by examples which, its authors have confirmed, are not merely optional guidance but are an inseparable part of the definition itself. This is common sense. As every high school student of Humanities is taught, any useful statement must be supported by explanations and examples. Otherwise, it can easily be rejected as mere assertion, of limited value. Its authors add that to suggest that the definition can be somehow detached from the rest of the document is “absolutely false or misleading.” Therefore, the Labour Party cannot claim to have adopted the definition whilst also seeking to discard an integral section of it. So why is it seeking to do this? The Campaign Against Antisemitism has analysed Jeremy Corbyn’s letter to the Jewish charities of 24 April 2018, published in the London Evening Standard. His letter seeks to omit the following examples from the definition document in its ‘adoption’ by his party:

• “Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.”;

• “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination (e.g. by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour)”;

• “Applying double standards by requiring of Israel a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”

It appears that Jeremy Corbyn does not want to stop members of the Labour Party from questioning whether Israel should continue to exist, to deny the right of Jewish people in Israel/Palestine the right to self-determination, or from describing it, for example, as an “apartheid state”.  The Shadow Home Secretary, Diane Abbot MP has also implied that the definition does not allow criticism of Israel, despite the fact that it explicitly states that “criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as anti-Semitic.” We might respond to this by stating “the bloomin’ obvious”, i.e. that the status and history of this country, and indeed of Palestine before it, are not like those of any other country, but that Israel is often expected to demonstrate a higher standard of conduct than any other country in dealing with both internal and external terrorist threats. When this ‘standard’ is inherent in the criticisms of security measures, it often crosses a line into anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Therefore, all three examples given by the IHRA are clearly anti-Semitic and have a long history of being used to promote hatred of Jews.

‘Yid’ and ‘Zio’: Sins of Omission?

Andrew Gwynne MP has criticised the IHRA document for ‘omitting’ the use of specific abusive terms like ‘Yid’ and ‘Zio’ as examples which the Labour Party would itself include. However, as the CAA has pointed out, such abuse is well understood by the Jewish communities in the UK and are also covered by the example within the document which refers to…

…making mendacious, dehumanising, demonising or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as a collective – such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other social institutions… 

The CAA is right to point out how appalling it is that Andrew Gwynne and Jeremy Corbyn seem to be claiming that they know better than the Jewish communities, both at home and abroad, what constitutes anti-Semitism. Not only this, but they also seem to think that they know better than the IHRA’s thirty-one signatory nations. It also represents the height of arrogance in diplomatic terms, for the Labour Party to seek to rewrite an internationally agreed definition in its own interest and for the convenience of a hard-core of extremists within it.

Partition of Palestine: Divine Destiny or Great Disaster?

Above: Palestine before Partition (exact date unknown)

Since this month sees the seventieth anniversary of the declaration of the state of Israel, seen as a ‘great disaster’ by many Palestinian Arabs, it might be instructive to re-examine some of the international initiatives and agreements which led to its establishment, and the diplomatic reactions which followed in the aftermath of the Arab-Israeli War. In November 1945, an Anglo-American Inquiry Committee was appointed to examine the status of the Jews in the former Axis-occupied countries and to find out how many were impelled by their conditions to migrate. Britain, weakened by the war, found itself under growing pressure from Jews and Arabs alike and the Labour Government decided, therefore, to invite the United States to participate in finding a solution. The Report of the Committee was published on 1st May 1946. The report itself declared the following principles:

… that Palestine is a Holy Land, sacred to Christian, to Jew and to Moslem alike; and because it is a Holy Land, Palestine is not, and can never become, a land which any race or religion can justly claim as its very own. …

… the fact that it is the Holy Land sets Palestine completely apart from other lands and dedicates it to the precepts and practices of the brotherhood of man, not those of narrow nationalism.

… The Jews have a historic connection with the country. The Jewish National Home, though embodying a minority of the population, is today a reality established under international guarantee. …

Yet Palestine is not, and never can be a purely Jewish land. It lies at the crossroads of the Arab world. Its Arab population, descended from long-time inhabitants of the area, rightly look upon Palestine as their homeland.

It is, therefore, neither just nor practicable that Palestine should become either an Arab state, in which an Arab majority would control the destiny of a Jewish minority, or a Jewish state, in which a Jewish majority would control that of an Arab minority. In neither case would minority guarantees afford adequate protection for the subordinated group.

A Palestinian put the matter thus: “In the hearts of us Jews there has always been a fear that some day this country would be turned into an Arab state and the Arabs would rule over us. This fear has at times reached the proportions of terror … Now this same feeling of fear has started up in the hearts of Arabs … fear lest the Jews acquire the ascendancy and rule over them.”

Palestine, then, must be established as a country in which the legitimate national aspirations of both Jews and Arabs can be reconciled without either side fearing the ascendancy of the other. In our view this cannot be done under any form of constitution in which a mere numerical majority is decisive, since it is precisely the struggle for a numerical majority which bedevils Arab-Jewish relations. To ensure genuine self-government for both the Arab and Jewish communities, this struggle must be made purposeless by the constitution itself. 

The report recommended the ‘immediate’ admission of 100,000 immigrants from Europe, the victims of Nazi persecution, but refused to set a ‘yardstick’ for annual immigration beyond that. That, it said, should be the role of a trusteeship commission established by the United Nations. Until then, Britain, as the mandatory power, should continue to administer Jewish immigration under the terms of the mandate, ensuring that the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced. But it concluded, even-handedly:

The national home is there. Its roots are deep in the soil of Palestine. It cannot be argued out of existence…

Palestine is a land sacred to three faiths and must not become the land of any one of them to the exclusion of the others, and Jewish immigration for the development of the national home must not become a policy of discrimination against other immigrants.

Further, while we recognise that any Jew who enters Palestine in accordance with its laws is there of right, we expressly disapprove of the position taken in some Jewish quarters … that every Jew everywhere merely because he is a Jew … therefore can enter Palestine as of right … We declare and affirm that any immigrant Jew who enters Palestine contrary to its laws is an illegal immigrant.

President Truman welcomed its recommendation that the immigration and land laws of the 1939 White Paper should be rescinded. Clement Attlee, the British Prime Minister, however, prompted by Ernest Bevin as Foreign Secretary, declared that the report would have to be considered as a whole in all its implications. Ernest Bevin was regarded by many Jews in Britain, the United States and Israel as an arch-enemy of the Jewish people. Due to this, most unfairly, Bevin is still traduced as an anti-Semite. in fact, he had been numbered as a friend of Zionists during the Second World War, but afterwards was faced with the impossible contradictions in Britain’s position in the Middle East, where it was both in charge of Palestine and had wider links with the surrounding Arab countries. British officers ran the Jordanian Arab Legion, one of the instruments of Arab anger against Jewish immigration; yet British officers were in charge of Palestine as well, and had to keep the peace between the Arabs and the Jews who were fighting for a Jewish homeland. There is no doubt that the desperate migrations of Jewish refugees were handled very badly by Britain, determined to limit their settlement to a level that might be acceptable to Palestinian Arabs.

The worst example was the turning-round of a refugee-crammed ship, Exodus, as she tried to land 4,500 people in 1947, and the eventual return of most of them to a camp in Hamburg, an act which caused Britain to be reviled around the world. This was followed by the kidnap and murder of two British soldiers by the Irgun terrorist group, which then booby-trapped their bodies. But Bevin was pressed very hard by the United States, which wanted far larger immigration, and his instinct for a federal two-state solution rather than partition was seen sensible by many contemporary statesmen as well as subsequently. The British forces in Palestine were ill-equipped for the guerilla and terrorist campaign launched against them by Zionist groups. Bevin’s position was entirely impossible; it’s worth remembering that he was equally reviled by Arab opinion.

Nevertheless, to many Jews, it was his reaction to the report of the Anglo-American Commission and subsequent initiatives at the United Nations, and his delay in recognising the state of Israel until February 1949, together with bitter remarks he made in the House of Commons debates on Palestine, which lent support to their wholly negative view of his diplomacy. In his defence, Bevin was simply being cautious about relinquishing control in Palestine, as he was in the case of India, although these were clearly two very different cases in the process of decolonisation. He was no great imperialist, like Churchill, but he believed that Britain should take a lead in the post-war world, as the USA could not be trusted not to retreat into isolation, as it had done in the 1930s, leaving Britain to stand alone against fascism in 1940-41. The ‘socialist’ masters of post-war Britain were, in general, far keener on the Empire than one might expect. To a large extent, this was because without support from the USA, and with continental Europe shattered by six years of war, austerity Britain was dependent on its other overseas trading links with its dominions and colonies. In 1946, Bevin stated clearly that he was not prepared to sacrifice the British Empire because he knew that if it fell, it would mean the standard of life of the British people would fall further, and even more rapidly.

Bevin, like many ordinary Britons in the immediate post-war years,  hated the Germans, but he was also wary of the Soviet Russians, partly because he had fought many long, hard battles with Communists in the trade unions before the war.  He also argued, perhaps correctly in retrospect, that too hasty a colonial retreat would make a mockery of the long-professed policy aim of trusteeship. While Attlee himself was sceptical about the need for a large British force in the Middle East, his government thought it right to maintain a massive force sprawling across it, in order to protect both the sea-route to Asia and the oilfields which British companies worked and the country depended on. Restlessly active in Baghdad and Tehran, Britain controlled Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus and, at the top of the Red Sea, the world’s second-busiest port after New York, Aden. In this context, Palestine, as a former Ottoman territory ‘mandated’ to Britain by the League of Nations, trusteeship needed to be handled carefully in conjunction with the United Nations. In this respect, Lord Strang, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office during Bevin’s term, suggested in his memoirs in 1962, that his opposition to the creation of the State of Israel was due to his preoccupation with long-term political and strategic considerations, and perhaps to his strong anti-Soviet views, rather than to any innate anti-Semitism. Strang wrote:

He was disturbed by fear of active Soviet intervention in Middle East affairs, and foresaw that the persisting Arab-Jewish antagonism would be exploited by Moscow to the detriment of vital Western interests.

Arab reaction was indeed hostile to the Anglo-American Commission; the Arab League announced that Arab countries would not stand by with their arms folded. The Ihud Association group led by Dr J L Magnes and Professor M Buber favoured a bi-national solution, equal political rights for Arabs and Jews, and a Federative Union of Palestine and the neighbouring countries. But Ihud found little support among the Jewish Community. It had, in the beginning, a few Arab sympathisers, but some of them were assassinated by supporters of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al Husaini, the de-facto leader of Palestinian Arabs, who had lived in Germany during the Second World War. He had previously met with Hitler in 1941 to hatch a secret plan for the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere under the protection of British power. 

The evidence submitted by the Arab Office in Jerusalem to the Inquiry in March 1946 was uncompromising in stating that the whole Arab people are unalterably opposed to the attempt to impose Jewish immigration and settlement upon it, and ultimately to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. The statement went on to oppose Zionism in all its objectives, not only on behalf of the Arab Moslem majority but also claiming to speak for the Arab Christian minority, the other Arab countries and the recently formed Arab League, which had taken the defence of Palestine as one of its main objectives. Any solution of the problems presented by Zionist aspirations would have to satisfy certain preconditions, beginning with the recognition of the right of the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine to continue in occupation of the country and to preserve its traditional character. Pending the establishment of a representative Government, all further Jewish immigration should be stopped. and strict measures enforced to taken to check illegal immigration. All further transfer of land from Arabs to Jews should be prohibited prior to the creation of self-governing institutions.

It further stated that, while irrevocably opposed to political Zionism, the Arabs were in no way hostile to the Jews as such nor to their Jewish fellow-citizens of Palestine. Those Jews who had already and who had obtained, or were in the due legal process of obtaining Palestinian citizenship would enjoy full civil and political rights and a fair share in government and administration. The Arab state, so called because Palestine was an integral part of the Arab world … would recognise the world’s interest in the maintenance of a satisfactory régime for the Moslem, Christian and Jewish Holy Places. At the same time, they rejected the concept of the ‘internationalisation’ of Jerusalem, or the need of the international community to protect and guarantee the rights of religious minorities. The Government of Palestine would also follow a progressive policy in economic and social matters, with the aim of raising the standard of living and increasing the welfare of all sections of the population and using the country’s natural resources in the way most beneficial to all. The idea of partition and the establishment of a Jewish state in a part of Palestine was considered inadmissible both in principle and in practice. It would be impossible, they claimed, to devise frontiers which did not leave a large Arab minority within the Jewish state. Moreover, they predicted, partition would not satisfy the Zionists, who would inevitably be thrown into enmity with the surrounding Arab states … and would disturb the stability of the whole Middle East. Finally, the statement also contained a rejection of the proposal for the establishment of a bi-national state, incorporated into a Syrian or Arab Federation.

This Ihud solution, violently opposed by the Jerusalem-based Palestinian leadership, was put forward in the 1947 publication of Buber and Magnes, Arab-Jewish Unity (see above), which put forward a plan based on the principle of self-government for both Arabs and Jews within an overall state of the ‘Holy Land’ recognised by and represented at the United Nations Organisation. The authors pointed to the breakdown of the Versailles Settlement as proof that the only way to protect minorities in a bi-national or multi-national country was for the minority or minorities to have equality with the majority. The example of Transylvania was given as an example of the failure of such an age-old problem to be solved on the basis of either Hungarian or Romanian domination. The Soviet Union and the newly restored Yugoslavia were also given, neutrally, as examples of multi-national states. More positively, the hundred-year example of Switzerland was referred to as the most successful example of a multi-national state affording protection for national languages, cultures and institutions.

British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin announced on 14th February 1947 that His Majesty’s Government had decided to refer the Palestine problem to the United Nations. The tension inside Palestine had risen, illegal Jewish immigration continued and there was growing restiveness in the Arab countries: Palestine, Bevin said, could not be so divided as to create two viable states, since the Arabs would never agree to it, the mandate could not be administered in its present form, and Britain was going to ask the United Nations how it could be amended. The United Nations set up a UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) composed of representatives of eleven member states. Its report and recommendations were published on 31st August 1947. The Committee unanimously adopted eleven resolutions, beginning with an agreement that the British Mandate should be terminated and Palestine granted independence at the earliest practicable date. In summary, the other resolutions were:

• There should be a short, transitional period before this during which the authority for administering the country would be the United Nations;

• The sacred character of the Holy Places should be preserved, and the rights of religious communities protected, by writing them into the constitution(s) of the successor state(s);

• The General Assembly should see that the problem of distressed European Jews should be dealt with as a matter of urgency so as to alleviate their plight;

• The constitution(s) of the new state(s) should be fundamentally democratic and contain guarantees of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, protecting minorities;

• Disputes to be settled by peaceful means and the threat of force must not be used in international relations; this provision to be incorporated into the constitution(s);

• The states formerly territories of the Ottoman Empire to give up all rights, immunities and privileges previously/ currently enjoyed in Palestine;

• The GA should appeal to the peoples of Palestine to cooperate with the UN in efforts to settle the situation there and exert every effort to put an end to acts of violence.

In addition to these eleven recommendations, the majority of Committee members also approved a further recommendation that any solution for Palestine cannot be considered as a solution of the Jewish problem in general. Following on from the resolutions, the majority proposal of the Committee was for the Plan of Partition with Economic Union, with Palestine to be constituted as two states, one Arab and one Jewish, and the City of Jerusalem. The Arab and the Jewish States would become independent after a transition period of two years beginning on 1st September 1947. Before their independence could be recognised, however, they would have to adopt a constitution in line with the pertinent recommendations of the Committee and make a declaration to the United Nations containing certain guarantees and sign a treaty by which a system of economic collaboration would be established and the Economic Union of Palestine created. The City of Jerusalem would be placed, after the transitional period, under the International Trusteeship System under an agreement which would designate the United Nations as the Administering Authority. The plan contained recommended boundaries for the City, as well as for both the Arab and Jewish States. Seven of the ten member countries supported this plan, the three others, including India and Yugoslavia, supporting the minority proposal, the Plan of a Federal State in line with the Ihud solution (outlined above). This plan had an international solution for the supervision and protection of the Holy Places, but Jerusalem was to be the ‘shared’ capital of the federal state.     

The Jewish Agency accepted the majority Partition Plan as the “indispensable minimum,” but the Arab governments and the Arab Higher Executive rejected it. In its subsequent Resolution on the Future Government of Palestine (Partition Resolution), endorsed on 29th November 1947, the UN General Assembly took note of the declaration of the United Kingdom, the ‘mandatory power’ since 1919, to complete its ‘evacuation’ of Palestine by 1 August 1948. The Resolution then set out a ‘Plan of Partition’ involving the setting up of both a Jewish state and an Arab state, each with a Provisional Council of Government. These were to hold elections, not later than two months after the British withdrawal. Jerusalem was to be a shared capital, with Arab residents able to become citizens of the Palestinian state and Jewish residents of the Jewish state. During the transitional period, no Jew was to be permitted to establish residence in the territory of the Arab state and vice versa. Each state was required to draw up a democratic constitution containing provisions laid down in the Declaration provided for in the third part of the resolution, but drawn up by the elected Constituent Assemblies of each state. In particular, these constitutions were to make provisions for:

(a) Establishing in each State a legislative body elected by universal suffrage and by secret ballot on the basis of proportional representation, and an executive body responsible to the legislature;

(b) Settling all international disputes in which the State may be involved by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered;

(c) Accepting the obligation of the State to refrain in its international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations;

(d) Guaranteeing to all persons equal and non-discriminatory rights in civil, political, economic and religious matters and the enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms, including freedom of religion, language, speech and publication, education, assembly and association;

(e) Preserving freedom of transit and visit for all residents and citizens of the other State in Palestine and the City of Jerusalem, subject to considerations of national security, provided that each State shall control residence within its borders.

The Declarations of Independence to be made by both provisional governments were to include a prescribed ‘chapter’ guaranteeing mutual access to the Holy Places, Religious Buildings and Sites according to existing agreements. Access was also to be guaranteed to aliens without distinction as to nationality in addition to freedom of worship, subject to the maintenance of public order. The Governor of the City of Jerusalem was to decide on whether these conditions were being fairly observed. Religious and Minority rights, Citizenship, International Conventions and Financial Obligations were prescribed in the second and third chapters. Any dispute about international conventions and treaties was to be dealt with in the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

On 29th November 1947, the UN General Assembly endorsed the partition plan by a vote of thirty-three to thirteen. The two-thirds majority included the United States and the Soviet Union but not Britain. Norman Bentwich, in his memoirs My Seventy-Seven Years (1962), explains, on the basis of his first-hand evidence of talks with Ernest Bevin in Paris and London on the question of Palestine between 1946 and 1948, how the Foreign Secretary came round to the view that Britain should recognise the state of Israel:

He was, I believe, anxious at the outset to find a solution of the conflict, and confident that he would succeed, as he had in many bitter labour disputes. … when he did recognise the State in 1949, he did his best to foster afresh good relations between Great Britain and Israel; and he made a vain attempt to bring Jews and Arabs together.

The United Nations was resolution was bitterly resented by the Palestinian Arabs and their supporters in the neighbouring countries who vowed to prevent with the use of force of arms the establishment of a Zionist state by the “Jewish usurpers.” The Proclamation of Independence was published by the Provisional State Council in Tel Aviv on 14th May 1948. The Council was the forerunner of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. It began:

The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and national identity was formed. Here they achieved independence and created a culture of national and universal significance. Here they wrote and gave the Bible to the world.

Exiled from the Land of Israel the Jewish people remained faithful to it in all the countries of their dispersion, never-ceasing to pray and hope for their return and the restoration of their national freedom.

The Proclamation continued with a history of Zionism from 1897, when the First Zionist Congress, inspired by Theodor Herzl’s vision of the Jewish State, proclaimed the right of the Jewish people to national revival in their own country. It then made reference to the to the Balfour Declaration of 1917, reaffirmed by the Mandate of the League of Nations. It went on to comment on the Holocaust and the Jewish contribution to the Allied cause in the fight against fascism in the Second World War. It then came to the UN Resolution of 29th November 1947, which, it claimed was a recognition of the right of the Jewish people to lead, as do all other nations, an independent existence in its sovereign State. The Proclamation continued with a series of declarations, including that:

• The State of Israel will be open to the immigration of Jews from all countries of their dispersion; will promote the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; will be based on the principles of liberty, justice and peace as conceived by the Prophets of Israel; will uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of religion, race, or sex; will guarantee freedom of religion and conscience, education and culture; will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and will loyally uphold the principles of the United Nations Charter;
• The State of Israel will be ready to co-operate with the organs and representatives of the United Nations in the implementation of the Assembly of November 29, 1947, and will take steps to bring about the Economic Union over the whole of Palestine; …
• In the midst of wanton aggression, we call upon the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve the ways of peace and play their part in the development of the State, on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its bodies and institutions – provisional and permanent;
• We extend our hand in peace and neighbourliness to all the neighbouring states and their peoples, and invite them to co-operate with the independent Jewish nation for the common good of all. The State of Israel is prepared to make its contribution to the progress of the Middle East as a whole. …

The British Mandate was terminated the Following day and regular armed forces of Transjordan, Egypt, Syria and other Arab countries entered Palestine. This attempt to strangle the State of Israel at birth failed, and Israel, as a result, seized some areas beyond those defined in the UN resolutions. In June 1948 Palestine west of the Jordan was not so much granted self-government as abandoned to whoever was stronger there, which happened to be – after some bloody fighting and a mass exodus of Arab refugees – to be Israel. The armistice of 1949 did not restore peace; an Arab refugee problem came into being, guerilla attacks, Israeli retaliation and Arab blockage of the Suez Canal and the Gulf of Aqaba led to the second and third Arab-Israeli Wars. As for Britain, after the disastrous conclusion to the Palestine problem in 1947-49, everything had conspired to undermine the influence it felt was essential to safeguard its interests in the Middle East, not least in its oil, which was by far Britain’s largest and, for what it did for the country’s industry, its most valuable import.

Did Hitler (ever) support Zionism?

Since I began this article, Ken Livingstone has resigned from the Labour Party. Jeremy Corbyn has commented that he did the right thing, but in an interview with Sky News, Livingstone has said that he remains unrepentant about his remarks of two years ago, denigrating the entire Zionist movement as one of collaboration with Nazism. He continues to twist the true historical narrative of Zionism to suit his own ends, despite being told that he is wrong, both historically and morally. So, what of his claims that Hitler supported Zionism in 1933? In his Berlin interview with the Grand Mufti of 30th November 1941, Hitler himself made it clear that…

Germany stood for uncompromising war against the Jews. That naturally included active opposition to the Jewish national home in Palestine, which was nothing other than a centre, in the form of a state, for the exercise of destructive influence by Jewish interests. 

However, in response to the Grand Mufti’s call for a public declaration to be made of Germany’s support for the aspirations to independence and freedom of the Arabs within six months or a year, Hitler replied:

He (the Führer) fully appreciated the eagerness of the Arabs for a public declaration of the sort requested by the Grand Mufti. But he would beg him to consider that he (the Führer) himself was the Chief of the German Reich for 5 long years during which he was unable to make to his own homeland the announcement of its liberation. He had to wait with that until the announcement could be made on the basis of a situation brought about by force of arms that the Anschluss had been carried out.

The ‘five long years’ referred to here were 1934 to 1939, following the merger of the office of Chancellor and President into ‘Führer’ in August 1934 and the plebiscite which gave him absolute power in the new Reich. The Anschluss took force in April 1938, though it took another year to integrate Austria into German state administration. It’s therefore important to note that anti-Semitism did not become the official policy of the Nazi Party until September 1935 when the Nuremberg Laws were announced. Although many Jews were hounded from office or imprisoned in the first wave of lawless anti-Semitism in 1933. The Reich Citizenship Law of 14th November 1935 defined who was and was not a Jew. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour published the same day forbade inter-marriage and sexual relations between Jews and Germans but also covered relations with blacks, and the Sinti and Roma (gypsies). These laws linked the Eugenics programme with the régime’s anti-Semitism. Over the next four years, the Jewish community in Germany was gradually excluded from business and the professions, through its programme of ‘aryanisation’, lost citizenship status and entitlement to a number of welfare provisions.

That the aim of the régime at this time was to encourage Jewish emigration does not mean that ‘Hitler supported Zionism’. The régime simply saw emigration, whether to Palestine or elsewhere in Europe and the world,  as a means to its end of ridding Germany of its Jewish population. Approximately half of Germany’s Jews emigrated between 1933 and 1939, 41,000 of them to Palestine under the terms of the Ha’avarah Agreement made with Zionist organisations in Palestine on the transfer of emigrants and their property from Germany.

In an unlikely ‘collaboration’ with the SS, training camps were set up in Germany (see the map above) for emigrants to acquire the skills needed in their new life in Palestine. This process slowed considerably by the late 1930s as the receiver states and the British in Palestine limited further Jewish immigration. By the first year of the war (as the figures below show) it had virtually been brought to a halt. Whilst it might, in hindsight, be viewed as an act of ‘collaboration’, it was never part of Hitler’s war strategy or his long-term plan for the genocide of the Jews. Given what happened to the Jews in Germany from 1935 onwards, the attempt of one Zionist group to assist the emigration of people already facing unofficial discrimination and persecution in 1933 was a practical solution to an impending crisis for German Jewry, not one of their own making, and certainly not one driven by any form of ideological affinity with the Nazi régime that was still establishing itself at that time.

At the same time, anti-Semitic activity in Germany intensified. On 9 November 1938, leading racists in the SS instigated a nationwide pogrom destroyed 177 synagogues and 7,500 Jewish shops and businesses. Kristallnacht – the ‘Night of Broken Glass’ signalled the start of a more violent phase in Nazi racial policy. There is no evidence to suggest that Hitler changed his view, first published in Mein Kampf (1924) or his subsequent ‘line’ as party leader, Chancellor and Führer, that the Jewish people both in Europe and the Middle East, if not worldwide, had to be ‘eradicated’.

It is a travesty of the truth to suggest that Hitler saw Zionism as anything other than a creed which was the ideological polar opposite of Nazism. Again, this was confirmed in his statement to the Mufti in 1941 in which he said that…

Germany was resolved, step by step, to ask one European nation after the other to solve its Jewish problem, and at the proper time direct a similar appeal to non-European nations as well. Germany was at the present time engaged in a life and death struggle with two citadels of Jewish power: Great Britain and Soviet Russia… This was the decisive struggle; on the political plane, it presented itself in the main as a conflict between Germany and England, but ideologically it was a battle between National Socialism and the Jews. … He … would carry on the battle to the total destruction of the Judeo-Communist Empire in Europe. …  Germany’s objective would then be solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere under the protection of British power. … In that hour the Mufti would be the most authoritative spokesman for the Arab world. It would then be his task to set off the operations which he had secretly prepared.     

Against this primary source evidence, Ken Livingstone’s claim that “Hitler supported Zionism until he went mad and decided to kill six million Jews” is clearly false, as is the implication in his statement that Zionism and Nazism were, and are, ideological bed-fellows as variants of nationalism. Hitler’s plan was as chillingly logical as it was hateful. It remained the same in 1944 as it had been twenty years earlier, but it was only after 1934 that he had the power to enact it within Germany, and only after 1938 that he could impose it on other European states.

Since Hitler never achieved his war objective of opening the road through Rostov and the Caucasus to Iran and Iraq, he was never able to carry out his plan to extend the genocide of the Jews to Palestine with Arab assistance led by the Grand Mufti. Instead, he continued his policy of extermination of the Jewish populations of occupied countries even when the Red Army was streaming over the Carpathians. He was no more ‘mad’ in 1944 than he had been in 1934, and no more mad in 1934 than he had been in 1924. He was certainly an opportunist in both home and foreign policies, and if he saw a way of getting what he wanted without using bullets and bombs, he was more than willing to take it. That applied just as much to the SS’s dealings with the Zionists as did to his own deals with Chamberlain at Munich and Stalin in the Nazi-Soviet Pact. It was an opportunism shared by his High Command throughout the war, with Adolf Eichmann making deals with Zionists in the occupied countries for the facilitation of Jewish emigration, for example from Budapest, on Kasztner’s Train in 1944. Eichmann told the Zionists sent to negotiate that he had read Herzl’s writings and considered himself a Zionist. They felt that he was mocking them and those they were trying to save by any possible means.

The Right Thing to do…

Added to this, the contemporary fact is that those within the party who continue to spew out anti-Semitic bile, mocking the Zionist cause both past and present, are also those who would reject Israel’s right to exist as it was established in 1948. This a right which, according to its own declarations, was never intended to exclude the rights of Palestinian Arabs, as we have seen and read in the key documents quoted above. However much we may criticise Israel’s actions since 1948 as departing from its own script, we cannot deny its honest intentions. Neither can we lay all the blame on Israel for the failure of peace talks. Representatives of the Palestinian Arabs, including Fatah, have frequently refused to engage in a dialogue which might end the violence and bring the peace process to a successful conclusion in a two-state solution to the overall problem of Palestine. That, ever since Ernest Bevin changed his mind and recognised Israel in 1949, has been the official policy of the Labour Party.

Set against this we are still expected to tolerate the denial by some of the ‘hard left’ in Britain of Israel’s right to exist. This is not only against Labour Party policy but is also inherently anti-Semitic because it seeks to discriminate against the right of Jewish people to their own ‘home’ in Palestine. This right to a ‘homeland’ is enjoyed by most nationalities throughout the world and often taken for granted, in particular, within the multi-national and multi-cultural United Kingdom. British people can be justly proud that the rights of small nations have been upheld through devolution, and that diversity of language and religion is protected. Despite the dominance of one country, England, in terms of population, culture and language, Britons have been able to stay together in an economic and political union. Why then, would we seek to deny the right of Israel to peaceful co-existence with its neighbours? Since when have socialists of any description been against putting the principle of self-determination into action? Surely those who cannot accept these principles of self-determination and peaceful co-existence for Israel and Palestine have no place in the British Labour Party.

For its part, Israel must surely keep the promises it made, on its foundation, to the international community, to its own Arab minorities, and to its Palestinian Arab neighbours, and it is right to criticise it when it breaks these promises. But these breaches do not mean that Israel should forfeit its place among the recognised states of the world. Instead, all ‘parties’, internal and external, need to work together to help bring an end to the century-long conflict between Arabs and Jews. After all, they still share common roots in the region as Semitic peoples, as well as similar aspirations to national independence and self-determination, free from interference from external powers. At the start of that century, they were not so far apart in their mutual national aspirations; they can close that gap again, but only if they agree to leave their trenches. Encouraging them to stay entrenched in their positions will not aid the peace process.

Sources:

Walter Laquer (1976), The Israel-Arab Reader. New York: Bantham Books.

Michael Clark & Peter Teed ( 1972), Portraits & Documents: The Twentieth Century. London: Hutchinson.

Richard Overy (1996), The Penguin Atlas of The Third Reich. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Andrew Marr (2007), A History of Modern Britain. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

France & Spain, c. 1270

Christendom and European Jewry:

The pauperes who took part in the People’s Crusades saw their victims as well as their leaders in terms of the eschatology out of which they had made their social myth. In a sense, the idea of a wholly Christian world was as old as Christianity itself. Yet, because of this idea, Christianity has remained a missionary religion which has insisted that the gospel, or ‘good news’ of Christ the Redeemer, must be shared with the whole of humanity before the ‘End Times’ and that the elimination of disbelief must be achieved through conversion of the disbelievers. The messianic hordes which began to form in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, however, saw no reason at all why that elimination could not equally well be achieved by the physical annihilation of the unconverted. In the Chanson de Roland, the famous epic which is the most impressive embodiment of the spirit of the First Crusade, this new attitude is expressed quite unambiguously:

The Emperor has taken Saragossa. A thousand Francs are sent to search thoroughly the town, the mosques and synagogues. With iron hammers and axes they smash the images and all the idols; henceforth there will be no place there for spells or sorcerers. The King believes in God, he desires to serve him. His bishops bless the water and the heathen are brought to the baptistry. If any one of them resists Charlemagne, the King has him hanged or burnt to death or slain with the sword.

In the eyes of the pauperes, the smiting of the Muslims and the Jews was to be the first act in that final battle which, as had been already revealed in the eschatological literature of the Jews and early Christians, was to culminate in the smiting of the Prince of Evil himself. Above these desperate hordes, as they moved about their work of massacre, there loomed large the figure of the Antichrist, who at any moment may set up his throne in the Temple at Jerusalem: even amongst the higher clergy, there were those who spoke in these terms. Though these fantasies had little to do with the political priorities of Pope Urban, they were even attributed to him by chroniclers struggling to describe the atmosphere in which the First Crusade was launched. It is the will of God, Urban is made to announce at Clermont, that through the labours of the crusaders, Christianity shall flourish again in Jerusalem in these last times, so that when Antichrist begins his reign there, he will find enough Christians to fight. 

As the infidels were allotted their roles in the eschatological drama, popular imagination transformed them into demons. In the dark days of the ninth century, when Christendom was clearly gravely threatened by the advance of Islam, a few clerics had sadly decided that Mohammed must have been the ‘precursor’ of a Saracen Antichrist and saw in Muslims, in general, the ‘ministers’ of Antichrist. As Christendom launched its counter-offensive against an Islam which was already in retreat, popular epics portrayed Muslims as monsters with two sets of horns (front and back) and called them devils with no right to live. But if the Saracen, and his successor the Turk, retained in popular imagination a certain demonic quality, the Jew was an even more horrifying figure. Jews and Saracens were generally regarded as closely akin, if not identical; but since the Jews lived scattered throughout Christian Europe, they came to occupy by far the larger part in popular demonology. Moreover, they occupied it for much longer, with consequences which have extended down the generations and which include the massacre of more than six million of European Jews in the mid-twentieth century.

By the time they began to take on demonic attributes the Jews were far from being newcomers to western Europe. Following the disastrous struggle against Rome and the destruction of the Jewish nation in Palestine, mass emigrations and deportations had carried great numbers of Jews to France and the Rhine Valley. Although they did not attain the same level of cultural eminence and political influence there as they did in Muslim-dominated Spain, their lives in the early Middle Ages were not difficult. From the Carolingian period onwards there were Jewish merchants travelling to and fro between Europe and the Near East with luxury goods such as spices, incense and carved ivory; and there were also many Jewish artisans. There is no evidence to suggest that, after the tribulations of both communities under the Romans in the first and early second centuries, the Jews were regarded by their Christian neighbours with any particular hatred or dread. On the contrary, social and economic relations between Jews and Christians were harmonious, personal friendships and commercial partnerships between them not uncommon. Culturally, the Jews went a long way in adapting themselves to the various countries they inhabited. Yet they remained Jews, refusing to be assimilated into the populations amongst which they lived.

This refusal to be assimilated, which has been repeated by so many generations since the first dispersals began under the Assyrian Empire in the sixth century BC is quite a unique phenomenon in history. Save to some extent for the Gipsies and perhaps peoples of ‘Celtic’ origin, there seems to have been no other people who, scattered far and wide over a long period of time, possessing neither a nation nor territory of its own, nor even any great ethnic homogeneity, has yet persisted indefinitely as a cultural entity and identity. The solution to this ethnographic puzzle is most likely to be found in its religion which not only, like Christianity and Islam, taught its followers to regard themselves as the Chosen People of a single omnipotent God, but also taught them to regard the most overwhelming persecutions – defeat, destruction, desecration, dispersal – not just as immediate signs of divine displeasure for sinfulness, but also as guarantees of future communal bliss.

What made the Jews remain Jews was, it seems, their absolute conviction that the Diaspora was but a preliminary expiation of communal sin, a preparation for the coming of the Messiah and the return to a transfigured Holy Land, albeit belonging to a remote and indefinite future, given the destruction of the Jewish state. For the very purpose of ensuring the survival of the Jewish religion, a body of ritual was developed which effectively prevented Jews from mixing with other people. Intermarriage with non-Jews was prohibited, eating with non-Jews made very difficult, and it was even an offence to read a non-Jewish book.

These circumstances help to explain how European Jewry persisted through so many centuries of dispersal as a clearly recognisable community, bound together by an intense feeling of solidarity, somewhat aloof in its attitude to outsiders and jealously clinging to the taboos which had been designed for the very purpose of emphasising and perpetuating its exclusiveness. Nevertheless, this self-preservative, self-isolating tendency cannot begin to account for the peculiarly intense and unremitting hatred which has been repeatedly and almost continuously directed against the Jewish people more than against any other ethnic group. What accounts for that is the wholly fantastic, stereotypical image of the Jew which suddenly gripped the imagination of the new masses at the time of the first crusades.

The Eschatology of the Medieval Church:

Official Catholic teaching had prepared the way. The Church had never ceased to carry on a vigorous polemic against Judaism. For generations, the laity had been accustomed to hearing the Jews bitterly condemned from the pulpit as perverse, stubborn and ungrateful because they refused to admit the divinity of Christ, as bearers also of a monstrous hereditary guilt for the murder of Christ. Moreover, the eschatological tradition within Christianity had long associated the Jews with the Antichrist himself. Already in the second and third centuries theologians were foretelling that the Antichrist would be a Jew of the tribe of Dan. This idea became such a commonplace that in the Middle Ages it was accepted by scholars such as Thomas Aquinas. Antichrist, it was claimed, would be born in Babylon, would grow up in Palestine and would love the Jews above all peoples. He would return to the Temple for them and gather them together from their dispersion. The Jews for their part would be the most faithful followers of Antichrist, accepting him as the Messiah who was to restore the nation.

If some theologians looked forward to a general conversion of the Jews, most maintained that their blindness would endure to the end and that at the Last Judgement they would be sent, along with the Antichrist himself, to suffer the torments of hell for all eternity.  In the stock Antichrist-lore produced in the tenth century, the Jew of the tribe of Dan became still more sinister. He would be the offspring of a harlot, whose womb would be entered by the Devil in spirit form, thereby ensuring that the child would be the very incarnation of Evil. Later, his education in Palestine would be carried out by sorcerers and magicians, who will initiate him into the black art and all iniquity.

When the old eschatological prophecies were taken up by the masses of the later Middle Ages all these fantasies were treated with deadly seriousness and woven into an elaborate mythology. Just as the human figure of Antichrist tended to merge into the wholly demonic figure of Satan, so the Jews tended to metamorphose into the demons attendant on Satan. In drama and picture, they were often shown as devils with the beard and horns of a goat, while in real life ecclesiastical and secular authorities alike tried to make them wear horns on their hats. Conversely, Satan himself was often portrayed with ‘Jewish features’ and was referred to as ‘the father of the Jews’. The Christian populace was convinced that the Jews worshipped Satan in the synagogue in the form of an animal, invoking his aid in making black magic. Jews were thought of as demons of destruction whose one object was the ruin of Christendom, dyables d’enfer, ennemys du genre humain, as they were known in French miracle-plays.

It was believed that in preparation for the final struggle Jews held secret, grotesque tournaments at which, as soldiers of the Antichrist, they practised stabbing. Even the ten lost tribes of Israel, whom Commodianus had seen as the future army of Christ, became identified with those hosts of the Antichrist, the peoples of Gog and Magog, described as living off human flesh, corpses, babes ripped from their mothers’ wombs and all the most disgusting reptiles. Dramas were written in which Jewish demons were shown as helping Antichrist to conquer the world until, on the eve of the Second Coming and the beginning of the Millennium, the Antichrist and the Jews would be annihilated together amidst the rejoicing of the Christians. During the performances of such dramas armed force was needed to protect the Jewish quarter from the fury of the mob. Popes and Councils might insist that, although the Jews ought to be segregated and degraded until the day of their conversion, they must certainly not be killed, but these imprecations made little impact on the turbulent masses already embarked, as they thought, on the prodigious struggles of the Last Days.

Trade, Money-lending and Usury:

Hatred of Jews has too often been attributed to their role as money-lenders, so it is worth emphasising how slight the connection really was. The fantasy of the demonic Jew existed before the reality of the Jewish money-lender, whom it helped to produce. As, in the age of the crusades, religious intolerance became more and more intense, so too the economic situation of the Jews rapidly deteriorated. At the Lateran Council of 1215, it was ruled that Jews should be debarred from all civil and military functions and from owning land; these decisions were incorporated into Canon Law. As merchants too the Jews were at an even greater disadvantage, since they were unable to travel without risk of being murdered. Besides, Christians themselves began to turn to commerce and they very quickly outstripped the Jews, who were debarred from the Hanseatic League and could not compete with the Italian and Flemish cities.  For richer Jews, money-lending was the one field of economic activity which remained open to them. As money-lenders, they could remain in their homes, without undertaking dangerous journeys; and by keeping their wealth in a fluid state they might, in an emergency, be able to flee without losing it all.  Moreover, in the rapidly expanding economy of western Europe, there was a constant and urgent demand for credit. The lending of money at interest, stigmatised as ‘usury’, was forbidden to Christians by Canon Law. The Jews were, of course, not subject to this prohibition, and were therefore encouraged and even compelled by the authorities to lend their money against securities and were commended for carrying out this necessary function.

Jewish money-lending was, however, of transitory importance in medieval economic life. As mercantile capitalism developed, Christians began to ignore the canonical ban on money-lending. Already by the middle of the twelfth century, the merchant bankers of the Low Countries were making large loans at interest and the Italians were expert bankers. The Jews were unable to compete with them, especially because the cities as well as the territorial princes and lords, all taxed them severely, so much so that the Jewish contribution to the royal exchequer was ten times what their numbers warranted. Once again, the Jews found themselves at a huge disadvantage. Although individual Jewish money-lenders were able from time to time to amass considerable fortunes, arbitrary levies soon reduced them to poverty again. In any case, rich Jews were never numerous; most were ‘lower- middle-class’ and many were poorer. At the end of the Middle Ages, there was very little Jewish wealth in northern Europe to share in the prodigious development which followed upon the discovery of the New World.

Some Jews turned from high finance to small-scale money-lending and pawnbroking. Here, there were some grounds for popular hatred. What had once been a flourishing Jewish culture had by that time turned into a terrorised society locked in perpetual warfare with the greater society around it; it can be taken for granted that Jewish money-lenders often reacted to insecurity and persecution by deploying a ruthlessness of their own.  But already, long before that happened, hatred of the Jews had become endemic among the European masses. Even later, when a mob set about killing Jews it never confined itself to the comparatively few money-lenders but killed every Jew it could lay hands on. On the other hand, any Jew, money-lender or not, could escape massacre by submitting to baptism.

The Demonisation and Scapegoating of Jews:

Jews were not the only ones to be killed. The pauper hordes, inspired by the eschatology of the Last Days, soon turned on the clergy as well. Here again, the killing was carried out in the belief that the victims were agents of the Antichrist and Satan whose extermination was a prerequisite for the Millennium. Martin Luther was not the first to hit upon the idea that the Antichrist who sets up his throne in the Temple can be no other than the Pope in Rome and that the Church of Rome was, therefore, the Church of Satan. Even by ‘orthodox’ theologians, as we would now regard Luther, Jews were seen as wicked children  who stubbornly denied the claims and affronted the majesty of God, the Father of all; and in the eyes of sectarians who saw the Pope as Antichrist the clergy too was bound to seem a traitorous brood in rebellion against their father. But the Jew and the cleric could also themselves very easily be seen as father-figures. This is obvious enough in the case of the cleric, who after all is actually called ‘Father’ by the laity. If it is less obvious in the case of the Jew it is nevertheless a fact, for even today the Jew – the man who clings to the Old Testament and rejects the New, the member of the people into which Christ was born, is imagined by many ‘isolated’ Christians as typically, like Fagin in Dickens’ Oliver Twist, as an old Jew, a decrepit figure in old, worn-out clothes.

Integrated into the eschatological fantasy, Jew and cleric alike became father-figures of a most terrifying kind. That monster of destructive rage and phallic power whom Melchior Lorch portrays wearing the triple tiara and carrying the keys and the papal cross was seen by millenarians in every ‘false cleric’. As for the Jews, the belief that they murdered Christian children was so widespread and so firmly held that not all the protests of popes and bishops could ever eradicate it. If we examine the picture of Jews torturing and castrating a helpless and innocent boy (see below), we can appreciate with just how much fear and hate the fantastic figure of the bad father could be regarded. And the other stock accusation brought against the Jews in medieval Europe – of flogging, stabbing and pulverising the host – has a similar significance. For if from the point of view of a Jew an atrocity committed on the host would be meaningless, from the point of view of a medieval Christian it would be a repeat of the torturing and killing of Christ. Here too, then, the wicked (Jewish) father is imagined as assaulting the good son; this interpretation is borne out by the many stories of how, in the middle of the tortured wafer, Christ appeared as a child, dripping blood and screaming.

 

To these demons in human form, the Jew and the ‘false cleric’ was attributed every quality which belonged to the Beast from the Abyss – not only his cruelty but also his grossness, his animality, his blackness and uncleanliness. Jewry and clergy together were depicted as forming the foul black host of the enemy which stood opposite the clean, white army of the saints, the children of God that we are, the poisonous worms that you are, as a medieval rhymester put it. The saints knew that it was their task to wipe that foul black host off the face of the earth, for only an earth which had been so purified would be fit to carry the New Jerusalem, the shining Kingdom of the Saints.

The European ‘civilization’ of the later Middle Ages was always prone to demonising peripheral communities, but at times of acute disorientation, this tendency became especially marked. Hardship, poverty, distress, wars and famines were so much a part of everyday life that they were taken for granted and could be faced in a sober, stoical manner. But when a situation emerged which was not only menacing but also completely out of the ordinary run of experience, when people were suddenly confronted by hazards which were unfamiliar, unpredictable and uncontrollable, they tended to fly into the fantasy world of demons. If the threat was sufficiently overwhelming and the disorientation widespread and acute, the resulting psychological atmosphere could be one of mass delusion of the most dangerous kind. This is what happened in 1348 when the Black Death reached Europe. It was at once concluded that some group of people must have poisoned the water supply. As the plague continued to spread, people became more bewildered and desperate, and they began to look for a ‘scapegoat’. Suspicion fell first on the lepers, then the poor, the rich and the clergy, before the blame finally came to rest on the Jews, who were thereupon almost exterminated.

The People’s Crusade of 1320: A Trail of Terror…

Set in this context, the last of the People’s Crusades can be seen as a first attempt to usher in a different type of millenarianism which aimed, rather confusedly, at casting down the mighty and raising up the poor. By the first quarter of the fourteenth-century crusading zeal was more than ever a monopoly of the very poor. The Kingdom of Jerusalem had come to an end and Syria had been evacuated; the Papacy had exchanged the mystical aura of Rome for the security of Avignon; political power in each country was passing into the hands of hard-headed bureaucrats. Only the restless masses between the Somme and the Rhine were still stirred by old eschatological fantasies which they now transfused with a bitter truculence. Very little was required to launch these people upon some wholly unrealistic attempt to turn these fantasies into realities. In 1309 Pope Clement V sent an expedition of the Knights Hospitallers to conquer Rhodes as a stronghold against the Turks; the same year saw a very serious famine in Picardy, the Low Countries and along the lower part of the Rhine. The two circumstances taken together were sufficient to provoke another People’s Crusade in that area. Again, armed columns appeared, consisting of miserably poor artisans and labourers with an admixture of nobles who had squandered their wealth. These people begged and pillaged their way through the countryside, killing Jews and also storming castles in which nobles sheltered their valuable sources of revenue. These included the fortress of the Duke of Brabant, who only three years earlier had routed an army of insurgent cloth-workers and, it was reported, had buried its leaders alive. The Duke at once led an army against the crusaders and drove them off with heavy losses.

In 1315 a universal failure of crops was driving the poor to cannibalism and long processions of naked penitents cried to God for mercy. Millenarian hopes flared high and in the midst of the famine a prophecy circulated which foretold that, driven by hunger, the poor would in that same year rise in arms against the rich and powerful and would overthrow the Church and a great monarchy. After much bloodshed, a new age would dawn in which all men would be united in exalting one single Cross. It is not surprising that when in 1320 Philip V of France halfheartedly suggested yet another expedition to the Holy Land the idea was at once taken up by the desperate masses, even though it was wholly impracticable and was rejected out of hand by the Pope. An apostate monk and an unfrocked priest began to preach the crusade in northern France to such good effect that a great movement sprang up as suddenly and unexpectedly as a whirlwind. A large part was also played by prophetae who claimed to be divinely appointed saviours.  Jewish chroniclers, drawing on a lost Spanish source, tell of a shepherd-boy who announced that a dove had appeared to him and, having changed into the Virgin, had hidden him summon a crusade and had promised it victory.

As in the first Crusade of the Pastoureaux in 1251, the first to respond were shepherds and swineherds, some of them mere children. So this movement too became known as a Shepherds’ Crusade. But once again, the genuine crusaders were joined by male and female beggars, outlaws and bandits, so that the resulting army became turbulent. Before long, numbers of Pastoureaux were being arrested and imprisoned; but always the remainder, enthusiastically supported by the general populace, would storm the prison and free their brethren. When they reached Paris these hordes terrified the city, breaking into the Chatalet, assaulting the Provost and finally, on a rumour that armed forces were to be brought out against them, drawing themselves up in battle formation in the fields of St Germain-des-Pés. As no force materialised to oppose them to oppose them they left the capital and marched south until they entered the English territories in the south-west. The Jews had been expelled from the Kingdom of France in 1306 but here they were still to be found; as the Pastoureaux marched they killed Jews and looted their property. The French King sent orders that the Jews should be protected, but the populace, convinced that this massacre was holy work, did everything to help the crusaders. When the governor and the royal officials at Toulouse arrested many Pastoureaux the townsfolk stormed the prison and a great massacre of the Jews followed. At Albi, the consuls closed the gates but the crusaders forced their way in, crying that they had come to kill the Jews, and were greeted by the populace with wild enthusiasm. In other towns, the authorities themselves joined the townsfolk and the crusaders in the massacre. Throughout south-west France, from Bourdeaux in the west to Albi in the east, almost every Jew was killed.

France and Spain, c. 1328

When they reached Avignon, having turned their violence upon the clergy, Pope John XXII excommunicated the Pastoureaux and called upon the Seneschal of Beaucaire to take to the field against them; these measures proved effective. People were forbidden, on pain of death, to give food to them, towns began to close their gates and many of the ‘shepherds’ perished miserably of hunger. Many others were killed in battle at various points between Toulouse and Narbonne, or captured and hanged from trees in twenties and thirties. Pursuits and executions carried on for three months. The survivors split up and crossed the Pyrenees to kill more Jews, which they did until the King of Aragon led a force against them and dispersed them. More than any earlier crusade, this one was felt while it lasted to threaten the whole existing structure of society. The Pastoureaux of 1320 struck terror into the hearts of all the rich and privileged.

Sources:   

András Bereznay (2001), The Times History of Europe. London: Times Books.

Norman Cohn (1970), The Pursuit of the Millenium. St Alban’s: Granada Books.

Pursuing the Millenarians and their Messiahs:

Engraving representing the departure from Aigues-Mortes of King Louis IX for the Seventh Crusade (by Gustave Doré)

While researching into the apocalyptic literature of the first and early second centuries by revisiting Norman Cohn’s classic 1957 text, The Pursuit of the Millennium, republished in 1970, I found a sub-section of his fifth chapter on the Backwash of the Crusades entitled The Pseudo-Baldwin and the ‘Master of Hungary’. As an enthusiast for ‘all things Hungarian’ following my discovery of the rich history of this country, I was intrigued to find out more. Hungary emerged as a significant adjunct to Catholic Christendom in the eleventh century, and during the Crusades, it was of key strategic importance to the Papal project to ‘re-capture the Holy Land’ for Christianity, the effects of which it contended with well into Early modern times. According to Cohn, the gigantic enterprise of the crusades long-continued to provide the background for the popular messianic movements with which his book is concerned.

In the official crusades, secular politics loomed even larger than millenarianism, however. For centuries Constantinople had stood unconquered, though wave after wave of barbarians had attacked it. In the eleventh century, however, the Seljuk Turks, converts to Islam, advancing from their original home in Turkestan (see map above), had conquered the decaying Arab Empire and Baghdad, poured into Syria and Palestine and then turned upon the Byzantine Roman Empire. A battle was fought in Armenia at Manzikert in 1071, at which the armies of the Empire were overwhelmed. All Asia Minor lay in the hands of the Turks, and Constantinople was in great danger. The Eastern Emperor sought the aid of the Pope to organise help from the West to save Christianity in the East, even though the Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church at Constantinople had quarrelled with the Pope.

The Arab followers of Mohammed had allowed Christian pilgrims to worship in Jerusalem, but after the Turkish conquest pilgrims returned from the Holy Land complaining of the cruelty of the new rulers. At a great meeting at Clermont (France) in 1095 Pope Urban II summoned kings and barons to unite to recover the Holy Land from the infidel. Peter the Hermit, a fanatical pilgrim, preached the cause from end to end of Europe. Thousands willingly joined the Crusading armies, for they believed that by so doing they could save their souls from purgatory. The Knights of the Western nations, by the rules of the Order of Chivalry, were taught to protect the Church, and they hoped for chances to display their prowess. Love of adventure or the desire for land and loot brought others into the great army of the Church. Italian cities, especially Venice and Genoa, gave financial support in order to free the Eastern trade routes from the control of the Turks.

There were nine crusades altogether, spaced over two hundred years, but it was only in the first three that the spirit of religious fervour was the chief motive. The great nobles of Western Europe set off in 1096 by different routes to Constantinople. Godfrey de Bouillon was the most famous leader. With the aid of the Byzantine Emperor, they crossed the Bosphorus, overran Asia Minor and in 1099 entered Jerusalem, which had been in Muslim hands for over four hundred years, installing Godfrey as its governor.

The rulers of the three other Catholic kingdoms they established – the County of Tripoli, the Principality of Antioch and the County of Edessa – paid homage to him. But the success of this Crusade was short-lived, for the Turks soon began to recover their lost lands. St Bernard of Clairvaux preached the Second Crusade in 1147, but it achieved nothing. In 1173 a great Muslim leader, Saladin, united Egypt, Syria and Palestine and in 1187 recaptured Jerusalem and most of the Crusading states after his crushing victory at Hattin.

In the ill-fated Third Crusade (1189-91), Richard I of England succeeded in conquering Acre and gaining from Saladin the right for Christian pilgrims to enter Jerusalem. Due to his leadership, this crusade remains the most memorable in English popular consciousness, but it was actually ineffective and simply demonstrated how disunited the Christian leaders were.

Above: Crusader Europe (Eastern Section), c. 1180

Already the political interests of the secular states – especially the Empire of France and England – had found open expression. Then the Fourth Crusade, in the opening years of the thirteenth century, ended as a purely lay war waged for purely political ends, in which the commercial objectives of Venice combined with the territorial ambitions of the French and German princes to bring about the capture of Constantinople and the conquest and partition of the Byzantine Empire. It was this Crusade which had the most influence on the history of Europe, although Pope Innocent III himself was its organiser. He used his power and strength to free the Holy Land, but his idea was to attack Egypt, the centre of Muslim power, but the Crusades were dependent for transport on the services of Venice, the most powerful state in the Mediterranean. As the price for her assistance, she forced the Crusaders to fight her rivals, also persuading them to attack Constantinople, since the Eastern Empire was also unfriendly to her. The Crusaders plundered the city and set up a new Emperor chosen from their ranks. As a result, Latin rulers governed from Constantinople for nearly sixty years, and though the Greeks were finally restored, the Byzantine Empire was greatly weakened. Greed, ambition and revenge had destroyed a movement which had started with so much idealism.

One of the positive results of the first four Crusades, however, was that a new interest in intellectual matters grew up in the West, for large numbers of scholars were influenced by the older civilisation of the Eastern Roman Empire as well as the new ideas of the Arabs. Philosophy, mathematics, science and medicine began to be studied in the medieval universities. There was a great awakening of intellectual curiosity in men’s minds. Although for a time, the power and authority of the Church were strengthened through the uniting of Christians wholeheartedly in the support of a great cause, in the end, new beliefs made men more critical of the universal Catholic faith. Heresies grew up, and the traditional dogma and rituals of the Church were undermined. One of the chief economic results was the increase in trade between East and West, as Crusaders discovered new grains and fruits, as well as costly goods and luxuries on their journeys.

The commercial cities of Italy, especially Venice and Genoa, grew rich in commerce as the Mediterranean became the centre of increased trade. Towns grew up all over Europe, and the power of merchants developed at the expense of the nobles. Although the burghers purchased their privileges from the nobles, the latter increasingly used this source of income as a means of funding their participation in the Crusades. Moreover, the absence of the barons on Crusade greatly strengthened the authority of kings in governing unruly lords. A notable example of this was the kings of France, who gained considerable power over this period. Two religious orders, the Knights Templars and the Knights Hospitallers were founded to serve the needs of pilgrims journeying to and from the Holy Land and to take charge of the sick and injured on their arrival in Jerusalem.

After the Fourth Crusade, these great ‘knightly’ events to recapture the Holy Land became largely irrelevant for the vast majority of the feudal subjects of Church and State, both of which were losing authority in the face of growing disillusionment and anticlericalism. In such a crusade there was no longer any room for the paupers, but they themselves had not abandoned the original idea of the liberation of the Holy City, nor their old eschatological hopes. On the contrary, now that the barons had given themselves up completely to ‘worldliness’, the poor were even more convinced that they alone were the true instruments of the ‘divine will’, the true custodians of the eschatological mission.

In 1212 armies of children set out to recapture the Holy City, one army from France and another, much larger, from the Rhine Valley. Each was headed by a youth who believed himself chosen by God and who was regarded by his followers as a miracle-working saint. These thousands of children could be held back neither by entreaty nor by force; their faith was such that they were convinced that the Mediterranean would dry up before them as the Red Sea had done before the Israelites. These crusades also ended disastrously, with almost all of the children either drowned in the sea or starved to death, or sold into slavery in Africa. Nevertheless, these mass migrations had inaugurated a tradition; for more than a century, autonomous crusades of the poor continued to occur from time to time, and with consequences which were no longer disastrous to themselves alone.

The Sleeping Emperor of Constantinople:

In 1223-4 an age-old fantasy of The Sleeping Emperor reappeared. When the Crusaders had captured Constantinople in 1204, they had installed Baldwin IX, Count of Flanders as Emperor of the city and the other territories of the Eastern Empire which the western princes had been trying to carve up between themselves. Baldwin’s state was, however, very vulnerable, and within a year he had been captured by the Bulgarians and put to death. Nevertheless, less than twenty years later Baldwin had become a figure of superhuman dimensions in the popular imagination, and a whole legend had grown up around him. It was rumoured that the Count was not dead but had been discharging a penance imposed on him for his sins by the Pope. For many years, he had been living in obscurity as a wandering beggar, a hermit. He would very soon be returning in glory to free his land and his people. In April 1225, a suitable hermit was found in a forest near Valenciennes, living in a hut made of branches, and was paraded into the town on horseback wearing a scarlet robe beneath his long hair and flowing beard. He was crowned the following month, as Count of Flanders and Hainaut and Emperor of Constantinople and Thessalonica. In that year, these territories were in the throes of appalling famine such as had not been seen for generations. According to one contemporary observer, although the rich tended to look askance at their new sovereign, the poor were convinced that this was indeed Baldwin who had reappeared among them:

If God had come down to earth, he could not have been better received…. The poor folk, weavers and fullers, were his intimates, and the better-off and rich people got a bad deal everywhere. The poor folk said they would have gold and silver… and they called him Emperor.

Neighbouring princes sent ambassadors to his court and Henry III of England offered him a treaty directed against France. But the hermit also accepted an invitation from the French King, Louis VIII to attend his court in Péronne. This turned out to be a fatal blunder on his part as, in conversation with Louis, he was unable to recall things which the real Baldwin would almost certainly have known. He fled from court back to Valenciennes, where the rich burghers tried to arrest him, but the common people prevented them from doing so. He was identified as one Bertrand of Ray from Burgundy, a serf who had taken part in the Fourth Crusade as a minstrel to his lord, and who, since his return, had become notorious as a charlatan and impersonator.  With Valenciennes about to be besieged by the French, the imposter escaped again, this time with a large sum of money. Recognised and captured, he was paraded through the towns which had witnessed his ‘triumph’, before being hung in the market-place of Lille in October 1225. Nevertheless, the hermit-Emperor took his place in Flemish mythology among the sleeping monarchs who must one day return. In the words of the contemporary observer, at Valenciennes people await him as the Bretons await King Arthur.  

The Messianic Capetians: Philip II & Louis IX of France:

In France, messianic expectations centred on the Capetian dynasty, which during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries came to enjoy a quasi-religious prestige. On the death of the last descendant of Charlemagne in 987 Hugh Capet, Count of Paris had been elected King of the Western Franks. His lands were fertile and easy to defend. After his election as King these lands were called the Royal Demesne (domain), and this was the only part of France that the Capetian kings really controlled. Over the rest of the country they had very little authority other than the right to demand homage from the great nobles; some of them, like the Dukes of Normandy, held more land than the king. The Capetians ruled France for many centuries, and their chief task in France was to master the great feudal lords and so to establish the authority of the king. It was Philip II (1180-1223), known as Philip Augustus, achieved this. At his accession, he was overshadowed by Henry II of England, but he succeeded in adding vast territories to his Royal Demesne and thereby became more powerful than any noble in his kingdom (see maps above and below). He set out with Richard I of England on the Third Crusade but quarrelled with Richard and returned home before the task was complete in order to establish his authority over unruly nobles. He won a great victory over King John of England and the Holy Roman Emperor at the Battle of Bouvines in 1214 which resulted in the Emperor’s downfall and John’s submission to the barons at Runnymede.

Already at the time of the Second Crusade Louis VII had been regarded by many as the Emperor of the Last Days. In the early thirteenth century, there were sectarians in Paris who saw in the Dauphin, the future Louis VIII, a messiah who would reign forever under the dispensation of the Holy Spirit, over a united and purified world. If in the event Louis VIII distinguished himself by his shrewdness and determination rather than by any spiritual gifts, his successor was indeed a secular saint.

Above: Louis IX leaving Limassol

Louis IX, called St Louis (1226 -70) set a new standard for kings throughout Christendom. Together with his rigorous asceticism, the genuine solicitude which he extended to the humblest of his subjects earned him an extraordinary veneration. He also resisted the great feudal nobles, chiefly by gaining control over the administration of justice. In addition to his services to the Church, he also organised two Crusades. When this radiant figure set off on the Seventh Crusade in 1248, miraculous happenings were expected. When he was defeated at Mansura in 1250, losing his army and being captured by the Egyptians, all Christendom was dealt a terrible blow. The disillusionment was so great in France that many began to taunt the clergy, saying that, after all, Mohammed seemed to be stronger than Christ. Louis’ release was eventually negotiated in return for a ransom of 400,000 livres tournois (at the time France’s annual revenue was only about 1,250,000 livres tournois) and the surrender of the city of Damietta. Following his release from Egyptian captivity, Louis spent four years in the Latin kingdoms of Acre, Caesarea, and Jaffa, using his wealth to assist the Crusaders in rebuilding their defences and conducting diplomacy with the Islamic powers of Syria and Egypt. In the spring of 1254, he and his army returned to France.

Louis IX was taken prisoner at the Battle of Fariskur, during the Seventh Crusade (Gustave Doré).

It was in response to this catastrophe, and the refusal of the barons and clergy to raise reinforcements, that there sprang up the first of the anarchic movements known as the Crusades of the Shepherds. At Easter 1251 three men began to preach the crusade in Picardy and within a few days their summons had spread to Brabant, Flanders and Hainaut – lands beyond the frontiers of the French kingdom, but where the masses were still as hungry for a messiah as they had been in the days of Bertrand of Ray a generation earlier. One of these men was a renegade monk called Jacob, who was said to have come from Hungary and was known as the ‘Master of Hungary’. He was a thin, pale, bearded ascetic of some sixty years of age, a man of commanding bearing and able to speak with great eloquence in French, German and Latin. He claimed that the Virgin Mary, surrounded by a host of angels, had appeared to him and had given him a letter – which he always carried in his hand, as Peter the Hermit is said to have carried a similar document. According to Jacob, this letter summoned all shepherds to rescue King Louis and help him to free the Holy Sepulchre. God, he proclaimed, was displeased with the pride and ostentation of the French knights and had now chosen the lowly to carry out his work. It was to shepherds that the glad tidings of the Nativity had first been made known and it was through shepherds that the Lord was now about to manifest his power and glory. His followers, said to number between 30,000 and 60,000, were mostly young peasants, men, women, and children, from Brabant, Hainaut, Flanders, and Picardy. I shall return to the narrative of these events later, but to understand them in more depth it is important to place them within the broader European context of those times.

The Master of Hungary speaking to the shepherds before being received in Amiens by the religious authorities

Margaret ‘Capet’ and the Crowned Heads of Europe:

Above left: The grand coin from the time of Béla III. Béla was made important by the economic and geopolitical position of Hungary during his reign. He introduced the country’s first coinage. His companion on the coin is his first wife, Anne Chatillon (of Antioch) who, though of French descent, he brought with him from Byzantium.

Above Right: The tomb of Béla III and Anne Chatillon formerly in Székesféhérvár, now in the Matthias Church in Buda. Béla’s second wife, whom he married in 1186 was Margaret Capet, who was a Princess of France who was also the widow of young Henry III of England, who died in 1183 before he could succeed his father. She had therefore been Richard I’s sister-in-law.

We know very little about Jacob’s supposed Hungarian origins, but we do know that the Hungarian King Béla III  (1172-1196) had two ‘western’ wives, both of whom introduced and developed ‘the French style’ at court. His first wife was Anne de Chatillon (of Antioch), of French descent, and Margaret Capet was his second, she having been previously married to the Angevin King Henry II of England. Béla himself was a very talented ruler, an outstanding politician who was able to operate well under favourable international conditions. The Holy Roman Empire was very much distracted by its conflict with the Pope, as well as with internal opposition.  Accordingly, the Empire had relinquished its claims of suzerainty over Hungary. Byzantium, too, was paralysed by dynastic struggles and her Serbian and Bulgarian subjects had also risen in arms. Béla had been raised in Byzantium and was for a time the heir apparent to the imperial throne. He had brought his first wife, Anne, with him from Byzantium. For a while after taking up the Hungarian throne, Béla acted as the protector of the Byzantine Empire, but eventually accepted the independence of the Serbs and the Bulgars, bringing an end to the direct links between Byzantium and Hungary. Venice then became Hungary’s greatest rival, attempting to acquire Dalmatia from the Hungarian kingdom. Béla was the most significant Hungarian ruler of the twelfth century, recapturing Dalmatia and Nándorferhérvár (Belgrade) at a time when István’s ‘Crown Lands’ were more than three times the size of modern-day Hungary.

Dynamic economic and social progress along with closer bonds with a generally developing Europe strengthened Hungary. Later, however, a number of serious problems were to arise as a result of this. Waves of French and German settlers flocked to Hungary from the West and the immigrants from France spread viticulture north and east of the Danube. Western settlers also brought with them the idea of crop rotation systems. More efficient agriculture lead to the appearance and growth of towns. The French and Italian merchants of the two earliest such settlements, Esztergom and Székesfehérvár, carried on a profitable trade. They exchanged precious metals from Hungarian mines, wax and animal skins for Western luxury goods. These included cloth from Flanders, French enamelled bronze items, German weapons and Italian silk. Esztergom and Székesfehérvár also served as the locations of royal residences. During Béla III’s reign, the requirements of the royal court increased significantly.

Béla himself had been used to a life of luxury in Byzantium. Previously, though,  the kings of Hungary and their courts had been content with primitive articles made by the craftsmen on the royal estates. The services of rural cooks, dog-catchers and minstrels were required in the palace once a week, and in the past that had satisfied the needs of the royal party. At this time Hungary did not have a permanent capital, so the king travelled from one royal estate to another, using up the revenue of each on the spot, as well as the two-thirds of the county revenues that were his due. Now, however, the court purchased better quality goods, which were either imported from abroad or made by craftsmen who had settled in Hungarian towns. A class of professional officials had also emerged. Béla III had had a permanent residence built at Esztergom, a splendid palace where he could even receive the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa in a way which befitted his rank.

With King Béla as their example, the barons increasingly followed the fashion trends of western Christendom, further prompting Hungary’s participation in world commerce. With the growth of royal income derived from foreign settlers, minting money and from mines which produced salt and precious metals, the financial dependence on the royal estates and the counties declined in importance. The king could afford to cede some of these estates to ambitious feudal lords, who gradually adopted the expensive lifestyles of the knights in western Europe. The feudal lords were not satisfied with the income received as ispán, namely, one-third, and later two-thirds of the county revenues. They wished to acquire estates of their own, in the same way as the feudal aristocracy in the West had done.

French and English Connections:

So, by the end of the twelfth century, Hungary had emerged as an important power in the East, by no means a primitive backwater or poor relation of the western empires of England and France. As part of this emergence, Béla had also consciously sought intellectual links with the West, and Hungarian scholars began attending the seats of learning in Paris on a regular basis. In a letter from Stephanus Tornacensis to Béla III, the envoy names three scholars, Jakab, Mihály and Adorján who were studying in Paris during the late twelfth century. Whether these were the same as the three men who began to preach in Picardy half a century later is unknown, but it may be that Jakab was not merely a renegade monk who had made his way west accidentally, but that, at the age of sixty, fluent in French, he had remained in the French-speaking territories after studying in Paris as a young man. Stephanus’ letter also refers to an adolescens Bethlem who had died and was buried in a churchyard near St Genevieve School, where the students may well have studied. This was also a favourite school with English students, and when Paris University was divided into nations, the English and the Hungarians belonged to the same nation. This may help to explain why Jacob was known as ‘Le Maitre de Hongrie’ in French, as the most senior of the domiciled students there, the others following him from Paris to the Cistercian Abbey at Citeaux in Burgundy (see the Orleans plaque below). If these students were, like their deceased colleague, ‘adolescents’ towards the end of Béla’s reign, the description of their ‘master’ as ‘a very old man’ in 1251 might well connect the two references to ‘Jakab’ or ‘Jacob’. The Hungarian students would therefore have been able not only to absorb the teachings, ideas and ways of thinking of the great English masters in Paris, but to live in the company of their English fellows, so that the Paris school was the first place where the Hungarians – through the media of French and Latin – came into contact with the world of English intellectuals and had the opportunity to absorb knowledge rooted in the soil of ‘English’ or Anglo-French intellectual life.

Above: The tombs of Richard I ‘the Lionheart’ (1157-99) and Henry II (1133-89) and his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine (c 1122-1204)

It was also during this time that the first Hungarian scholar we know about, Nicolaus de Hungaria, spent three years at Oxford (1193-1196). His was the first Hungarian name to appear on record at the University. Apparently, the then King of England, Richard I (Lionheart) paid for his schooling. The Queen of Hungary, Margaret Capet, as the widow of the young King Henry III (crowned, but then died in 1183 before he could succeed his father) was, therefore, Richard’s sister-in-law. As Princess Margaret of France, she became Béla III’s second wife and queen from 1186 to 1196. Therefore, the ties between Angevin England and Hungary were not simply scholarly, but dynastic. Other evidence of the direct contact between England and Hungary was the determination of Henry II to pass through Hungary on his way to the Holy Land in order to carry out the Crusade he had undertaken as a penance for the murder of Archbishop Becket. His primary objective had probably been to visit his relative, Queen Margaret, but his untimely death prevented him from doing so. Nevertheless, we have a surviving letter written by Béla III to his royal kinsman, promising him every assistance and support to enable him to pass through Hungary.  Béla controlled a major section of the main ‘Crusader’s Route’ along the Danube to the Black Sea and the Bosphorus (see the maps above and below). Béla’s Chancellor was the first to keep written records and his anonymous Notary produced the first written history of the Magyars.

Andrew II & Béla IV:

Above: Hungary and Central-Eastern Europe/ Asia Minor

on the Eve of the Mongol Invasions, 1223.

Béla III’s son, Andrew II (1205-1235) was, according to all the Hungarian historians, including István Lázár (1990), in contrast to his puritanical and staid father, a rollicking, lavish, ambitious, and happy-go-lucky young man. He was certainly profligate king who gave away royal lands to his lords, lavishly satisfying their aspirations. Andrew bestowed royal and county estates on the feudal lords and attempted to offset the resulting loss of revenue by levying taxes and customs duties. By thus weakening his own position, he was forced to give in to the demands of the lesser nobles, issuing the so-called ‘Golden Bull’ in 1222, Hungary’s equivalent of ‘Magna Carta’, signed by King John in 1215. Andrew was himself full of ambition and much attached to ‘pomp’. He also engaged in an ill-fated war on Russian soil and was the first Hungarian king to undertake a Crusade in 1217. He dis so purely on borrowed money and even ceded Zara to Venice in exchange for the latter’s assistance in his Crusade adventure. He actually reached the Holy Land through Cyprus but ran out of resources before he could fight a real battle with ‘the infidels’. Returning in disgrace, he complained as follows in a letter to Pope Honorius III in 1218:

When were spending our time in regions across the sea in the service of the pilgrimage we had undertaken, we learned from frequent messengers beyond any shadow of doubt that the seed of dissension had spread inexpressibly in our country. Consequently, shaken by this great danger and so much evil news and unable to bear the destruction of the tender shoot of Christianity in our country, we left the Holy Land out of necessity and not gladly. When we arrived in Hungary after passing through many dangers on the road, we had to experience even viler viciousness than we had heard of, which the members of the Church committed, as did the laity, so many and such kinds that we do not consider it necessary to bring them to the attention of Your Holiness; after all, the enormity of the vicious deeds perpetrated could hardly have remained concealed from your keen-sighted eyes. Your Holiness should also be informed that when we arrived in Hungary, we found not Hungary, but a country so tormented and bereft of its income from the treasury that we could neither pay the debts which our pilgrimage had involved us nor restore our country to its previous condition even in fifteen years.

One of these ‘vicious deeds’ to which he referred was undoubtedly the murder of his despised German wife, Gertrude of Merano, by a conspiracy of discontented chief nobles, while he was away on crusade.  They were shocked by the life of luxury she carried on with her foreign companions at the court. Andrew II reigned for seventeen more years, with his renowned Golden Bull coming into being in 1222, an attempt to restore the shattered legal system by banning many acts of tyranny, as well as to curtail royal power by authorising the nobles to oppose the king by force of arms if he or his successors should breach the terms of the Bull. Gertrude’s tomb at Piliszentkereszt was prepared in 1221, by the French architect from Picardy, Villard de Honnecourt, the most distinguished French architect of the age. Whether he had any Hungarian connections in Picardy we do not know, but it seems a strange coincidence that this was where the so-called ‘Master of Hungary’ began his preaching thirty years later. It’s also reasonable to assume that for western-educated Hungarians like Jacob, the disappointment of the reign of Andrew II after that of Béla III and the sense of national disgrace following the collapse of Andrew’s Crusade would have added to the disillusionment of all Christendom with the Crusades by the mid-thirteenth-century.

Yet a greater disaster was set to befall the country in the reign of Andrew’s son, Béla IV (1235-70). Prince Béla was quite different from his father. He was a devout Christian who took inspiration from St Francis, St Dominic and from his own sister, St Elizabeth. It was as though he had a premonition of the danger which was to threaten Hungary as a result of Mongol expansionism. Even before he succeeded to the throne, Béla tried to fortify the Transylvanian frontiers and after he became king he made every effort to reconstitute the disintegrating Crown Lands and counties. However, this was not a viable path of social development. Béla also sought help from abroad, sending Julian, a Dominican friar, to Bashkiria where he was to invite the remaining Magyars there to move to Hungary. Following that, he also invited the Cuman people, who had already been attacked by the Mongols, to settle in Hungary as well. However, these measures gave rise to internal measures which contributed towards the devastating defeat of 1241. In that year Béla’s army was routed by Batu Khan at Múhi on the River Sajó. The Mongols ravaged the country for more than twelve months and after they eventually left, the Hungarian state had to be re-founded.

Jacob, the Mysterious Magyar ‘Master’ and his Crusade of ‘Les Pastoureaux’ of 1251:

Whatever the details of these earlier links and their connection to, and effects on the radical ideas of Jacob, ‘Master of Hungary’, he must have been a very charismatic preacher by the time he began to gather a ‘flock’ of faithful supporters around him in Picardy in 1251. Shepherds and cowherds – young men, boys and girls alike – deserted their flocks and, without taking leave of their parents, gathered under the strange banners on which the miraculous visitation of the Virgin was portrayed. Before long thieves, prostitutes, outlaws, apostate monks and murderers joined them; and this element provided the leaders. But many of these newcomers also dressed as shepherds and so all alike became known as the Pastoureaux. Soon there was an army which – though the contemporary estimate of sixty thousand need not be taken too seriously – must certainly have numbered many thousands. It was divided into fifty companies; these marched separately, armed with pitchforks, hatchets, daggers, pikes carried aloft as they entered towns and villages, so as to intimidate the authorities. When they ran short of provisions they took what they needed by force; but much was given freely since, as contemporary sources reveal, people revered the Pastoureaux as holy men.

Surrounded by an armed guard, Jacob preached against the clergy, attacking the Mendicants as hypocrites and vagabonds, the Cistercians as lovers of land and property, the Premonstratensians as proud and gluttonous, the canons regular as half-secular fast-breakers; and his attacks on the Roman Curia knew no bounds. His followers were taught to regard the sacraments with contempt and to see in their own gatherings the sole embodiment of truth. For himself, he claimed that he could not only see visions but could also heal the sick, whom the people brought to him to be touched. He declared that the food and wine set before his men never grew less, but rather increased as they were eaten and drunk.  He promised that when the crusaders arrived at the sea the water would roll back before them and they would march dry-shod to the Holy Land. On the strength of his miraculous powers, he claimed the right to grant himself absolution from every kind of sin. If a man and a woman among his horde wished to marry he would perform the ceremony himself; and if they wished to part he would divorce them with equal ease. He was said to have married eleven men to one woman, which rather suggests that he saw himself as a ‘living Christ’, requiring ‘Disciples’ and a ‘Virgin Mary’. Anyone who ventured to contradict him was at once struck down by his bodyguard. The murder of a priest was regarded as particularly praiseworthy and, he said, could be atoned for by a drink of wine.

Jacob’s army went first to Amiens, where it met with an enthusiastic reception. The burghers put their food and drink at the disposal of the crusaders, calling them the holiest of men. They even begged Jacob to help himself to their belongings. Some knelt down before him as though he had been the Body of Christ. After Amiens, the army split into two camps, one marching to Rouen, where it broke up the Archbishop’s synod. The other group marched on Paris, where he so fascinated the Queen Mother that left him free to do whatever he wanted. He dressed as a bishop, preached in churches and sprinkled holy water in a ritual of his own. Meanwhile, the Pastoureaux in the city began to attack the clergy, putting many to the sword and drowning many in the Seine. The students of the University, themselves clerics in minor orders, would have been massacred if the bridge had not been closed in time, though some may have been minded to join the Crusade.

Above: The Commemorative Plaque in Orleans

When they left Paris, the Pastoureaux moved in a number of bands, each under the leadership of a ‘Master’, who, as they passed through towns and villages, blessed the crowds. At Tours, the Crusaders again attacked the clergy, especially Dominican and Franciscan friars, whom they dragged and whipped through the streets. Their churches and friaries were looted: the sacramental instruments were thrown out onto the street. All this was done with the enthusiastic support of the townspeople, as it was at Orleans. There the Bishop had closed the gates against the oncoming horde, but the burghers opened them again in defiance of him. Jacob preached in public, and a scholar from a cathedral school who dared to oppose him was struck down with an axe. The houses where the priests and monks had hidden were stormed and burnt to the ground. Many of the clergy, including teachers at the University, and many burghers were struck down or drowned in the Loire. The remaining clergy were forced out of the town. When the Pastoureaux left, the Bishop, enraged at the reception which had been given them, put Orleans under interdict. It is understandable that some clerics, observing unchallenged killing and despoilation of priests, felt that the Church had never been in greater danger.

At Bourges, however, the tide began to turn against the Pastoureaux. Here too the burghers, disobeying their Archbishop, admitted as many of the hordes as the town could hold, the remainder encamped outside. This time, Jacob preached against the Jews and sent men to destroy the Sacred Rolls in the synagogue. The Crusaders also pillaged houses throughout the town, taking gold and silver where they found it and raping any woman they could lay hands on. The clergy were not molested because they remained in hiding, but by this time the Queen Mother had realised what sort of movement this was and had realised what sort of movement this was and had outlawed all those taking part in it. When the news of this reached Bourges, many of the Pastoureaux deserted. Eventually, while Jacob was preaching, one of the crowd dared to contradict him. Jacob rushed at the man with a sword and killed him; but this was too much for the burghers, who then armed themselves and chased Jacob and his followers out of the town. The ‘Master’ was pursued by mounted burghers and cut to pieces near Villeneuve-sur-Cher. Many of his followers were then captured by royal officials at Bourges and hanged. Bands of survivors made their way to Marseilles and Aigues Mortes, where they hope to embark for the Holy Land, but both towns had received warnings from Bourges so that the Pastoureaux were rounded up and hung. A final band reached Bordeaux, only to be met by English forces under Simon de Montfort, the Governor of Gascony. One of their leaders, attempting to embark for the East, was recognised by sailors and drowned on de Montfort’s orders in the Gironde. Another fled to England and having landed at Shoreham, managed to collect a following of a few hundred peasants and shepherds. When the news of these happenings reached King Henry III, he was sufficiently alarmed to issue instructions for the suppression of the movement to sheriffs throughout the kingdom. The movement very soon disintegrated of its own accord, the Shoreham apostle being torn to pieces by his erstwhile disciples when they heard that the Pope had excommunicated all the Pastoureaux.

Once everything was over rumours sprang up on all sides. It was said that the movement had been a plot begun by the Sultan himself, who had paid Jacob to bring him Christian men and youths as slaves. Jacob and other leaders were said to have been Muslims who had won ascendancy over Christians by means of black magic. There were also those who believed that the Pastoureaux had only enacted the first part of its programme. These people claimed that the intention had been to massacre first all priests and monks, then all knights and nobles; and when all authority had been overthrown, to spread their teaching throughout the world. These messianic mass movements were not only becoming, for both church and state, more dangerously independent, they were also becoming more frankly hostile to the rich and privileged in general. In this, they reflected a real change in popular sentiment, although the possibility of peasant uprisings was nothing new. Under the manorial system, most developed in France, peasants felt they had the right to turn against their lords if his rule was tyrannical, contrary to feudal customs, or capricious. Nevertheless, it was only as the manorial system was disrupted by the development of the commercial and industrial economy referred to by historians and political economists as ‘mercantile capitalism’ that the upper classes of the laity became the target for a steady stream of resentful criticism to which the clergy had already been subjected. The crusade seems to have been more of a revolt against the French church and nobility, who were thought to have abandoned Louis; the shepherds, of course, had no idea what happened to Louis, or the logistics involved in undertaking a crusade to rescue him.

What more do we know of the ‘Master of Hungary’? Two Englishmen, the chronicler Matthew Paris and the philosopher Roger Bacon, were intrigued by his understanding of crowd psychology. Matthew Paris was well-informed about the movement and believed that the ‘Master’ had been one of the leaders of the Children’s Crusade of 1212. If so, this would also fit with the idea of him being a novice in Paris in the 1590s. Matthew Paris had interviewed the archbishop of Canterbury, who had been in France at the time, and Thomas of Sherborne, an English monk taken prisoner by the Pastoureaux. According to Matthew Paris, the Master of Hungary “infatuated” the people who heard him, whereas Bacon, who witnessed his spellbinding performance in Paris, spoke of “fascination” as the key to his success. His anti-Semitism was echoed in a Second Shepherds’ Crusade of 1320, in which many more Jews were killed, and which I shall be writing about in a further article.

In a parliament held in Paris, 24 March 1267, Louis and his three sons took the cross. On hearing the reports of the missionaries, Louis resolved to land at Tunis, and he ordered his younger brother, Charles of Anjou, to join him there. The Crusaders, among whom was Prince Edward of England, landed at Carthage 17 July 1270, but disease broke out in the camp. Many died of dysentery, and on 25 August, Louis himself died.

Death of Saint Louis: On 25 August 1270, Saint Louis dies under his fleur-de-lis tent before the city of Tunis. Illuminated by Jean Fouquet, Grandes Chroniques de France (1455–1460)

 

Sources:

Norman Cohn (1970), The Pursuit of the Millennium. St Alban’s: Granada Publishing.

Sándor Fest (2000), Skóciai Szent Margittól A Walesi Bárdokig: Magyar-Angol történeti és irodalmi kapcsolatok (From St Margaret of Scotland to ‘the Bards of Wales’: Anglo-Magyar Historical and Literary Links). Budapest: Universitas Könyvkiadó. 

Sándor Fest

 

István Lázár (1990), A Brief History of Hungary. Budapest: Corvina Books. 

Péter Hanák (ed.)(1988), One Thousand Years: A Concise History of Hungary. Budapest: Corvina Books.

Irene Richards & J. A. Morris (1946), A Sketch-Map History of Britain and Europe to 1485. London: Harrap.

András Bereznay et. al. (1998), The Times History of Europe. London: Times Books (Harper Collins).