above: a street in Warsaw. The Germans destroyed the city in the summer and autumn of 1944.

Introduction – An Appalling Martyrdom:

The approach of the Red Army to Warsaw at the end of July had encouraged the anti-Communist ‘Armia Krajowa’, the Polish Home Army, to attempt an uprising at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, 1 August 1944, under their Generals Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski and Antoni Chrusciel. As a consequence of this decision, for more than the full two months of August and September 1944, Warsaw suffered an appalling martyrdom as the SS moved in to destroy the Polish insurgents with every kind of inhumane warfare. The result was a desperate and tragic struggle by the Warsaw Poles, just as the Warsaw Ghetto Rising of April 1943 had been for the Polish Jews. The Uprising was crushed with maximum ferocity by the SS in just sixty-three days, which was nonetheless a remarkable length of time for resistance when it is considered that only fourteen per cent of the Home Army were even armed when it began, with only 108 machine guns, 844 sub-machine guns and 1,386 rifles. Warsaw became a city reduced to ruins, where even the ruins were blasted by German guns and aircraft: the dead lay entombed in the ruins and the wounded lay untended on roads or suffered their last agonies in gloomy cellars. Those fighting from the sewers were finished off by gas grenades flung on them by German troops.

The Poles, understandably, had wanted to wrest control of their capital and the sovereignty of their country, away from the Germans before the arrival of the Russians, who they correctly assumed to have no more desire for genuine Polish independence than the Nazis. So, while the Uprising was aimed militarily against the Germans, it was also aimed politically at the Soviets, something that Stalin understood only too well. Appeals for Soviet aid fell on deaf ears, giving the impression at first of glacial indifference and latterly of unbending hostility. The Soviet policy seemed to soften somewhat in mid-September, but by that time the underground army had been throttled. Meanwhile, of lesser note but no less tragic, the rising in Slovakia petered out, though on this occasion Soviet troops fought as best they could to bring direct military aid to the insurgents: the gamble did not come off, however, as Koniev failed to break through to rebel-held territory and Soviet units were left to fight gruelling battles in the Carpathians until late November 1944.

Laurence Rees’ recent book Behind Closed Doors (2008), drawing on material only available since the opening of the Kremlin archives, provides a detailed account of the Moscow meeting between Prime Minister Mikolajczyk and other representatives of the Polish government in exile in London on the one side and Stalin and Molotov on the other. Given the entrenched positions of each of the parties and the massive disparity in real power, the meeting held on 3rd August was destined to be a failure. What was most remarkable, however, was the manner in which Mikolajczyk misjudged the situation. He knew that, as he talked with Stalin in the Kremlin, the fate of millions in Warsaw rested on the result. But despite the urgency of the situation there, the Uprising was the fourth point on his agenda, following a series of points referring back to the Soviet invasion of 1941. Even then, it was dealt with within the context of the exiled Poles’ desire to carry out elections in Poland based on universal suffrage. However, at the end of this all this verbiage, Mikolajczyk finally came directly to the most pressing point: I now have to ask you to order help to be given to our units fighting in Warsaw.  Stalin replied that he would ‘give the necessary orders’, by which he meant that he alone would decide what was required, and he then remarked that he had noticed the absence in Mikolajczyk’s remarks of any reference to the Lublin Poles, the Committee of National Liberation, with whom the Soviets had already concluded an agreement. Mikolajczyk gave a lengthy and emotional response to this, including the plea that:

The four main Polish political parties which are represented in this government (the London Poles) and have for five years carried on the struggle against Germany should have a say in the matter.

Stalin dismissed this view, saying that he had agreed to meet the London Poles, at Churchill’s request, in order to discuss a ‘union’ with the Lublin Poles. Mikolajczyk then made the extraordinary request that he be allowed ‘to go to Warsaw’. Stalin had to remind him that ‘the Germans are there’. The two men then reiterated their respective positions. Stalin wanted the London Poles to deal with the Lublin Poles, and Mikolajczyk restated that, though he would co-operate with the Lublin Poles, they represented a very small section of Polish opinion. While the two ‘sides’ may have been talking to each other, there was certainly no meeting of minds. Stalin spoke increasingly more directly, openly revealing his scorn for the Polish Home Army:

What is an army without artillery, tanks and an air force? They are often short of rifles. In modern warfare such an army is of little use. They are small partisan units, not a regular army. I was told that the Polish government had ordered these units to drive the Germans out of Warsaw. I wonder how they could possibly do this – their forces are not up to that task. As a matter of fact these people do not fight against the Germans, but only hide in woods, being unable to do anything else.

He added, ominously, that ‘the Poles quarrel among themselves’ and that this was something that, in the future, the Soviets would not allow to continue. Of course, there was no real comparison to be made between the representatives of the Polish government in exile and the group that the Soviets had set up in Lublin. But Stalin became so intransigent on the question of the recognition of the Lublin Poles that the minute-taker felt compelled to write: There is a general feeling that the discussion has become futile… The meeting ended just before midnight. Mikolajczyk was partly to blame for his own humiliation at Stalin’s hands, simply because instead of focusing the agenda on the one practical measure that needed at that moment, support for the Warsaw Uprising, he tried to pretend that he was dealing with an equal and to discuss matters which the Soviet leadership did not want to discuss. In sharp contrast to Stalin’s reticence to help the Poles, Churchill reacted quickly to the plight of Warsaw’s inhabitants. Their fight in the streets and parks of the city was precisely the sort of romantic endeavour that appealed to him. On 4th August, the day after Stalin’s meeting with the Polish delegation in Moscow, Churchill sent a cable to the Soviet leader which read:

At the urgent request of the Polish underground army, we are dropping, subject to the weather, about sixty tons of equipment and ammunition into the south-western corner of the city where, it is said, a Polish revolt against the Germans is in fierce struggle. They also say that they appeal for Russian aid, which seems very near. They are being attacked by one and a half German divisions.  This may be of help to your operations. 

Heroes and Villains:

Tadeusz Roman was one of the Polish RAF pilots who tried to help the insurgents in Warsaw. Twenty-five years old, he had served time in a Soviet prison after being caught trying to flee from eastern Poland. After the armistice of 1941, he had made his way west and joined RAF Bomber Command. Now based at Brindisi in southern Italy as part of the Polish Flight, it was not just a matter of honour to help the insurrection. His brother was in the underground army, and Tadeusz thought, mistakenly as it happened, that he was in Warsaw, but, in any case, all the Polish pilots volunteered to take part in the long flight, one of the most dangerous of the war, taking between ten and eleven hours. Starting on 4th August, flights left both Bari and Brindisi, with the airmen of the Polish Flight initially dominating the operation. Between then and the end of September more than two hundred flights were made, dropping a total of more than a hundred tons of supplies. Around eighty Polish airmen lost their lives in the operation, together with more than a hundred other Allied flyers, many of whom were South African. The dangers confronting the bombers were not just from the air defences around Warsaw but from the lengthy and tortuous route over German-occupied territory on the way to the Polish capital and back. Tadeusz’s own luck ran out on 28 August, just after he and his comrades had dropped their supplies over Warsaw. Flying low, at two thousand feet, anti-aircraft fire smashed into one of their engines. Over Krakow, they were hit again, but they managed to coax the plane back to Italy, where they crash-landed on the airport’s perimeter. The other three planes that accompanied him on that night’s mission never returned.

Meanwhile, Mikolajczyk had left Moscow and returned to London. At his last meeting with Stalin, in the Kremlin on the evening of 9 August, he told the Soviet leader that his talks with the Lublin Poles had convinced him that they would eventually reach an agreement. But when he asked Stalin again for ‘immediate assistance’ for Warsaw, he was met with obfuscation: It would be different if our armies were approaching Warsaw, Stalin told him, but unfortunately, this is not the case. He went on to explain that a vigorous counter-attack by the Germans had forced the Red Army to delay their move on the Polish capital. He was sorry for your men who started the battle in Warsaw prematurely. The discussion then moved on to examine the practicalities of an airdrop, about which Stalin was sceptical, but he nevertheless again promised to help the Home Army in Warsaw. However, towards the end of the meeting, when the Polish PM asked if Stalin would tell us something to comfort the Polish hearts at this difficult time, Stalin replied that Mikolajczyk that he was attaching too much importance to words: One should distrust words. Deeds are more important than words. Just four days later the TASS news agency announced that, since the London Poles had not notified the Soviets in advance about the uprising, all responsibility for what was happening in the city lay with them. On the night of 15 August, the American Ambassador had a meeting at the Kremlin with Soviet Foreign Ministry officials, after which he sent a cable back to the USA, reporting:

The Soviet Government’s refusal (to help the uprising) is not based on operational difficulties, nor on a denial of the conflict, but on ruthless political calculations.

Clearly, as far as ‘deeds’ were concerned, Stalin failed the Poles in Warsaw. But it is still possible that when he had met Mikolajczyk on 9 August, he had not definitely made up his mind. He had, as yet, given no reply to the Western Allies about his position on the uprising. One possible interpretation is that between the meeting and the TASS statement on the 13th, he changed his mind. On 9th he was inclined to help, but by 13th he had decided that he wouldn’t. Although he had already demonstrated that his determination to disband the Home Army, in these days he knew he faced battles ahead with the Western Allies over the composition of any future Polish administration. He had no reason to expect at this point that the Allies would eventually go along with his wishes and recognize a modified version of his puppet government, and may have calculated in early August that, if he was to be successful in getting the London Poles to agree to be subsumed by the Lublin Poles, he would need to offer some kind of assistance to the Warsaw Uprising. Laurence Rees has concluded that Stalin was always inclined to act as he did and refuse to help the Poles in Warsaw, a refusal which fitted a pattern of behaviour in which the Soviet leader had demonstrated time and again his distrust of the Poles and his desire to see the Home Army ‘neutralised’.

In any event, by 13 August, Stalin had made up his mind and, during the rest of August, the crucial period of the rising, the Soviets gave no assistance, not even with dropping air supplies. Although it is arguable whether the Red Army would have reached Warsaw in August, they faced a counter-attack from the Germans on the 2nd on the front line east of the city, they could have made the air bridge more successful if they had wanted to. In fact, a statement from the Soviet Commissariat for Foreign Affairs to the US’ Moscow Ambassador on 18 August made their policy quite clear:

The Soviet government cannot, of course, object to British or American aircraft dropping arms in the region of Warsaw, since this is an American and British affair. But they decidedly object to British or American aircraft, after dropping arms in the region of Warsaw, landing on Soviet Territory, since the Soviet Government do not wish to associate themselves either directly or indirectly with the adventure in Warsaw. 

Finally, on 22nd, Stalin himself reiterated this message in the clearest, most strident and insulting terms possible. He described the Home Army as a ‘bunch of criminals’, and stated that the Soviets would refuse to help the Western Allies with the airlift. Churchill tried to enlist Roosevelt’s support in sending a combative reply, only to be told by the American President on 26 August that he did not consider that it would prove advantageous to the long-range general war prospect for me to join you in the proposed message to UJ (‘Uncle Joe’ or Stalin). Hugh Lunghi, a member of the British military mission to Moscow, went with the chief of staff of the mission to the Soviet Ministry of Defence to try to get the Soviets to help with the air supplies:

I must have gone there with him almost daily for the first two weeks, and afterwards it became sort of hopeless. We realised they were not going to allow either us or the Americans to land on Soviet territory. And this seemed to us to be the most terrible betrayal, not only of the Poles, but of the Allies. And again, another example of Stalin cutting off his nose to spite his own face, because it meant the Germans would put down this uprising more easily and then the remaining Germans would be available to oppose the Soviet Army. So it seemed quite crazy to us, but also terrible. We were fuming. We were absolutely furious in the military mission.

In reality, however, Stalin had calculated that if he stood back and did nothing, the Home Army would almost certainly be annihilated. And that was what was then happening inside Warsaw. During August, German SS soldiers, supported by various collaborators – including Cossacks from the 15th Cossack Cavalry Corps – conducted a brutal house to house war in the Polish capital. The most notorious SS unit in Warsaw was led by Oskar Dirlewanger. Although he himself had gained a PhD in political science in the 1920s, he presided over a gang of ill-disciplined and bloodthirsty soldiers, most of whom were convicted criminals released from captivity. They were already notorious for their mistreatment of civilians in the occupied Soviet Union. Matthias Schenk, an eighteen-year-old Belgian conscripted into the German Army, served as a demolition engineer in Warsaw alongside Dirlewanger’s Sturmbrigade. In 2008, he was still haunted by what he saw:

Once we went towards a house (which served as a school) with 350 children. We went upstairs and the children came down – children of nine to thirteen years old. They held up their hands … “Nicht Partisan!” … and they stood on the steps. And the SS started to shoot. And then the commander said: “No ammunition – use the butt of the gun!” And the blood spilled down the stairs.

This was by no means an isolated crime, for the Axis units in the city committed a whole series of atrocities. Many of those witnessed by Matthias Schenk seem purely sadistic, like the point-blank shooting of a little girl and the blowing-up of a thirteen-year-old disabled boy by placing hand grenades in his pocket. Every day in Warsaw, women and children were slaughtered by the occupiers out of their warped sense of ‘fun’. When a hospital held by the Home Army was stormed by the Dirlewanger brigade, Schenk saw, in the aftermath, Polish nurses being sexually assaulted by the SS:

They tore the clothes off these women and jumped on top of them, held them down by means of force … then they were raped … Then Dirlewanger drove them through the (German) crowd, which cajoled and applauded them to the gallows.

These appalling actions were part of a systematic Nazi plan to crush the uprising with brutality. Under the overall command of SS General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, who had previously supervised the shooting of Jews and partisans in the occupied Soviet Union, the Germans targeted civilians as well as members of the Home Army. By 8 August, in one district of the city alone, the Germans had killed at least forty thousand civilians. The overall atmosphere of the German action against the Poles was captured by the SS commander-in-chief Heinrich Himmler, who later stated that he had told Hitler at the time of the rising that:

From the historical point of view the action of the Poles is a blessing … Warsaw will be liquidated; and this city which is the intellectual capital of a sixteen to seventeen million strong nation that has blocked our path to the east for seven hundred years … will have ceased to exist. By the same token… the Poles themselves will cease to be a problem, for our children and for all who follow us. 

Himmler’s use of language is significant. It is reminiscent of the ‘justification’ he gave to senior Nazis for the extermination of Jewish children. They had to be killed along with their parents, he said, because otherwise, they would only cause problems for future German generations. He had previously told SS officers that there was no point in killing Jewish men and allowing the avengers in the shape of the children to grow up for our sons and grandsons. On 2 September, German troops and their auxiliaries stormed a makeshift hospital treating wounded Home Army fighters. At first, the soldiers took valuables from the wounded, such as gold crosses and watches, but those that followed, many of whom were drunk, raped the women. Twenty-year-old Danuta Galkowa, hiding on a stretcher in the basement, under a blanket, heard the horror being enacted all around her:

It was for them entertainment. They were excited by the fact that the people were yelling. … I was in despair, I was afraid only of rape, because I wouldn’t be able to live through that. 

The wounded men of the Home Army who were present in the cellar could do nothing to protect the women. They had serious stomach wounds, broken legs and arms, and could not move. The horror lasted from eight in the morning until dark, when the troops finally left, setting fire to the hospital as they went. Danuta tried to escape, dragging the wounded Home Army officer who had protected her on the stretcher. She pulled him to the entrance, where the Nazis were shooting those trying to escape. A German auxiliary turned his gun on Danuta but it jammed, and in the smoke, darkness and chaos she managed to get away, over the bodies of those who had been murdered in the courtyard, together with the wounded fighter. Eventually, this man who had saved her life became her husband.

Conflict Among Allies:

The summer and early autumn of 1944 were, therefore, a time of conflict between the Allies, not only over what seemed to be the eternal question of Poland but also over the post-war shape of Europe, and, most particularly, Soviet intentions towards the eastern European countries that they were shortly to occupy. Towards the middle of August 1944, the Soviet general offensive began to slacken, Soviet armies outrunning their supplies since behind them lay an advance of some 350 miles. Soviet troops were on the East Prussian frontier and had bridgeheads on the Vistula and the Narew, while the Soviet command planned to wipe Army Group North off the map. The Finns
had already abandoned the German-Finnish compact and late in August were suing for peace, harsh though the terms proved to be.
In the event, the Romanians beat the Finns in the race to make peace. The Soviet hammer having battered three German Army Groups (North Centre and North Ukraine), it was now the turn of Army Group South Ukraine to fall under it. Even before a shot was fired, however, this Army Group faced disaster, hemmed in as it was between the
Red Army eager to fall on it and the Romanians, who were even more eager to betray it.

On 20 August, Malinovskii’s 2nd Ukrainian Front launched its attack, encircling five German corps in the Jassy-Kishinev operation, while Tolbukhin’s forces trapped the Romanian 3rd Army. But defeat
in the field was outmatched and outpaced by political events when on August 23rd a coup in Bucharest knocked Romania out of the war with King Michael’s unconditional surrender to the Allies. Romania’s declaration of war on Germany followed in a trice and Romanian troops were ordered not to open fire on the Red Army. The Romanian defection had cataclysmic consequences for Germany with far more
than the fate of an Army Group involved: the fortunes of war in the entire south-eastern theatre had changed virtually overnight. With a German army hopelessly trapped and what was left of two Romanian armies laying down their arms, the whole of southern Bessarabia, the Danube delta and the Carpathian passes lay open to the Red Army. Henceforth neither the Danube nor the Carpathians could bar the Soviet advance and ahead of the Soviet armies lay the route to the Hungarian plains, the gateway to Czechoslovakia and Austria, as well as a highway to Yugoslavia and Bulgaria.

While these battles and the battle for Warsaw raged on, Winston Churchill met with General Wladyslaw Anders, Commander-in-Chief of the free Polish Army, at Polish military headquarters in northern Italy. In the context of the controversy over the future of Poland, this meeting, on 26 August, was one of the most revealing of the war. Churchill began by congratulating Anders on the performance of the Polish II Corps during the campaign in Italy. He also enquired about the ‘mood’ of the soldiers, given what they are going through at the moment. Anders replied that, while the spirit of his men was ‘excellent’, their great concern is for the future of Poland, and at the moment, the current situation in Warsaw. Churchill said that he and President Roosevelt had asked Stalin to help those fighting in Warsaw, but their request had met with a negative response. Churchill assured him that while they were not ready for joint action over Warsaw, the Allies were doing everything they could to provide aid via the air route. After some argument over the future of Poland’s eastern borders with the Soviet Union, Churchill promised that…

… since Great Britain entered this war to defend your independence, then I can assure you that we will never abandon you.

These words were similar to those he had used at the previous meeting of the two men in Cairo, immediately after the Tehran Conference. Anders himself had been imprisoned in Moscow’s Lubyanska prison during the earlier partition of Poland in 1939, and was under no illusions: as he told Churchill, Stalin’s declarations that he wants a free and strong Poland are lies and fundamentally false. Once again, Anders voiced his serious concerns about Soviet intentions based on current as well as past experience, including the massacre at Katyn:

As they enter Poland, the Soviets arrest and deport our women and children deep into Russia as they did in 1939; they disarm the soldiers of our Home Army, they shoot dead our officers and arrest our civil administration, destroying those who fought the Germans continuously since 1939 and fight them still. We have our wives and children in Warsaw, but we would rather they perish than have to live under the Bolsheviks. All of us prefer to perish fighting than to live on our knees.

According to the minutes recorded by camp, Lieutenant Prince Eugene Lubomirski, Churchill was ‘very moved’ by Anders’ words and added to his earlier declaration:

I know that the Germans and Russians are destroying all of your best elements, especially intellectual spheres. … But you must trust – we will not abandon you and Poland will be happy.

Anders, not surprisingly, was somewhat suspicious of Churchill’s words. He was right to be, not because Churchill was being disingenuous, but because Anders knew he was no longer in a position to make such a promise, considering that a Red Army of 6.7 million was already marching into his country. He reminded the British PM that the Soviet Union would be immensely strong after the war; he was sceptical of Churchill’s view that Britain and the United States would be able to restrain the USSR after the war through their superior supplies of planes, tanks and guns. Churchill was not promising that the Western Allies would be prepared to go to war with the Soviet Union if Stalin refused to guarantee Poland’s independence, but his reply implied the possibility of military action, something that he had explicitly ruled out earlier in the year.

Collapse, Courage and Conflict:

By the beginning of September, the entire German defensive system was on the point of collapse. At that point, Bulgaria, which up to this point had been at war solely with Britain and France, made the inexplicable and suicidal decision also to declare war against the USSR on 5 September, only to collapse within twenty-four hours after the Russians crossed the Danube. Bulgaria, Axis ally of Germany but at heart pro-Russian and Slavophile, received Soviet armies without a shot being fired and duly declared war on Germany on 8 September. Hitler still fed on hopes that the entry of Soviet troops into Bulgaria might well speed an Anglo-Soviet collision, as the Red Army made for the Dardanelles – whereupon German troops in Army Group E might act as a ‘kind of police’ (with British approval) to hold the line against Bolshevism. There was certainly Anglo-Soviet rivalry in the Balkans, involving both Yugoslavia and Greece, but nothing to precipitate outright conflict.

The courage and ingenuity of the Poles during the Uprising were truly remarkable. When the Germans cut off the water supply to the city, the Poles bored wells by hand. Then, on 1 September 1,500 defenders had to retreat from a position at State Miasto (Old Town), using the sewers accessible from a single manhole in Krasinski Square. This lay only two hundred and fifty metres from German positions, and General Bór-Komorowski, the Home Army commander, knew that a few gas-bombs through the manholes or an outbreak of panic in the tunnels would prevent anyone from getting out alive. He nonetheless gave the order, since the defenders had nothing more to lose. So, leaving the Old Town completely defenceless in the event of a surprise German attack, the entire force, along with five hundred civilians, including the wounded and a hundred German prisoners, went down the manhole. As Bór-Komorowski wrote:

Slowly, very slowly, the queue of waiting people disappeared … Each person held on to the one ahead. The human serpent was about one and a half miles in length. … There was no time for rest periods, because room had to be made for others who were waiting by the manhole. It was only with the greatest difficulty that the line moved forward, for the water had now almost completely drained away and the mud had been replaced by a thick slime which gripped their legs up to the calf. The soldiers had no sleep at all for several days and their only food had been dry potato flakes. The rifles slung around their necks seemed unbearably heavy and kept clattering along the tunnel walls … The last soldier in the queue entered the manhole just before dawn.

When the Stukas, artillery, tanks and finally infantry attacked the positions the next morning, initially believing the Poles’ silence to be merely a ruse to conserve ammunition, the Germans found their quarry gone. The Poles had escaped, at least for the present.

By this time, and in contrast with Warsaw’s impending fate, the Allied forces had succeeded in liberating Paris, though not without cost in terms of both men and machinery. The Americans had poured forward through gaps in the German defences which had been created by the carpet bombing of Brittany at the end of July. Collins’ VII Corps took Avranches and allowed US forces to attack westwards into the Breton hinterland and eastwards towards Le Mans, proving the value of Patton’s eve-of-battle observation to his Third Army that flanks are something for the enemy to worry about, not us. 

Better communications and better inter-personal relations might have led to an even greater victory at ‘the Falaise Gap’, the mouth of an area eighteen miles wide by ten miles deep known as the Falaise-Argentan pocket, than the one gained by Montgomery, Bradley and Patton between 13 and 19 August. It was the news of a large Allied invasion of the south of France on 15 August, Operation Anvil, with 86,000 troops going ashore on the first day alone. That had persuaded Field Marshal von Kluge to withdraw from the Falaise pocket. The next day, Kluge ordered a general retreat out of the pocket, warning Jodl at the Army Headquarters that it would be a disastrous mistake to entertain hopes that cannot be fulfilled. Panzer Group West, comprising the Seventh and Fifth Panzer Armies, sustained around fifty thousand casualties, while the Allies lost twenty-nine thousand at the Falaise. Eisenhower visited the pocket forty-eight hours after the battle and later described the scene it as…

… unquestionably one of the greatest “killing grounds” of any of the war areas … It was literally possible to walk for hundreds of yards, stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh.

With Allied fighter-bombers flying three thousand sorties a day, the twenty thousand German soldiers who did escape, the shattered remnants of the hitherto formidable Panzer Armies including Group Eberbach, did so with their 88mm guns intact. After the war, Bradley and Montgomery blamed each other for the over-caution at Falaise, but Kluge’s defeat there led to his replacement by Field Marshal Model on 17 August and enabled the Allies to make for the Seine and to liberate Paris, which had risen on 23 August. Out of the thirty-nine divisions which took part in the Normandy landings, just one was French, 2e Division Blandée (Armoured) under General Leclerc. It fought very bravely in the battle to close the Falaise Gap, and entered Paris first on 25th, as part of the US Fifth Army, although this did not elicit any noticeable gratitude from the Free French leader, General de Gaulle. He had set foot in France for the first time since 1940 on 14 June, more than a week after D-Day, and only then for a one-day visit to Bayeux, after which he had left for Algiers and did not return to French soil until 20 August. In the meantime, Patton’s Third Army had broken out of Avranches at the end of July and had driven through Brittany.  While the French Resistance, the résistants and maquisards, under a separate command from the Free French forces were hampering German armoured retaliation, de Gaulle played little part in any of this from his base in North Africa.

In Paris, the German commander General Dietrich von Choltitz took the humane and historic decision not to set fire to the city. Hitler had demanded of him that Paris must be destroyed from the top to the bottom, that he should not leave a single church or monument standing. The German High Command earmarked seventy bridges, factories and national landmarks – including the Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe and Notre-Dame Cathedral – for destruction. But Choltitz deliberately disobeyed these barbaric instructions and continued to ignore Hitler’s enquiries as to whether Paris was burning. The Germans did not, therefore, fight in the French capital the battle of extirpation that they were simultaneously fighting in Warsaw, bringing about the utter destruction of the Polish capital and two hundred thousand of its people. Instead, Choltitz surrendered and went into captivity as soon as he decently could once the Allied forces arrived. He told the Swedish diplomat who negotiated the terms that he had no wish to be remembered as the man who destroyed Paris. In all, the French lost only seventy-six soldiers in the liberation of Paris, although 1,600 inhabitants were killed in the uprising, six hundred of whom were non-combatants. De Gaulle had asked Eisenhower to allow the French troops to be the first to into the capital, and the Supreme Commander duly gave the order to Leclerc to advance on the city on 22 August.

In any case, the Allies did not see Paris as a prime military objective rather than a purely political one. Eisenhower could spare the French 2e Division from the far greater battles that were taking place right across northern and southern France, fought by British, American and Canadian forces against crack German units. Omar Bradley in his memoirs dismissed Paris as a pen and ink job on the map. The first of Leclerc’s Sherman tanks rolled up the rue de Rivoli at 9.30 a.m. on Friday, 25 August. In the surrender document signed that afternoon by Choltitz and Leclerc, there was no mention of either Great Britain or the United States; the Germans surrendered the city to the French alone. De Gaulle arrived in Paris soon afterwards to make a speech at the Hotel de Ville in which he proclaimed that Paris had been liberated by her own people, with the help of the armies of France, with the help and support of the whole of France, … eternal France. The Allied contribution was summed up in a single phrase. Putting the ‘Liberation’ in context, however, the historian of the Occupation, Ian Ousby, later wrote:

Paris’s concentration of both people and cultural monuments ruled out aerial bombardment and heavy artillery barrages, so taking the city would soak up time and lives in a campaign already behind schedule and high in casualties. Besides, the capture of Paris was not tactically essential.

On the morning of 26 August, de Gaulle led a parade from the Arc de Triomphe down the Champs-Elysées to a thanksgiving service in Notre-Dame. When the head of the National Council of Resistance, Georges Bidault, came up abreast in the parade he hissed, ‘A little to the rear if you please.’ The glory was to be de Gaulle’s alone. Since he did not wish to steal de Gaulle’s limelight, Eisenhower himself did not enter the capital until the following day, five days after he had given the order for the 2e Division to take it.

The Challenge of Leadership:

For his part, although Stalin had decided by the middle of August that the Soviet forces would not support the Home Army in Warsaw, his policy towards the uprising was still not entirely transparent. On 18 September the Soviet authorities overturned their earlier decision and allowed one flight of American bombers en route to Warsaw to refuel on Soviet territory. Also, in the two weeks from 14-28 September, the Soviets themselves dropped supplies on Warsaw. However, since these drops did not involve the use of parachutes, much of the fifty tons of aid provided was destroyed on landing. They were conducted mainly for propaganda purposes so that Stalin could counter the growing outcry of world opinion about Soviet inaction in the face of the destruction of Warsaw, enabling him to demonstrate his public support to the Home Army without offering any effective assistance. Halina Szopinska, a twenty-four-year-old fighter with the Home Army in Warsaw, later testified as to how the airdrops had been a sham:

They had these small planes and would throw dry bread without a parachute and when it fell down it would just break into powder. … They would drop guns without a parachute – ammunition as well. There was no way we could repair it. So they pretended they were helping. They were doing it in such a way that it wouldn’t really help us.

Above: Halina Szopinska, a member of the Polish underground Home Army (AK), who was captured and tortured by the NKVD in December 1944. She then served ten years in prison.

By the end of August, the NKVD had been told to detain and interrogate all Poles who had taken part in the uprising and who had managed to ‘escape’ into the Soviet part of occupied Poland. These interrogations included brutal beatings and humiliations, such as those endured and testified to by Halina Szopinska. The NKVD regarded them as spies for ‘the English’ as well as for the Germans. Halina was sentenced to ten years in prison and in Lublin Castle, she learnt how former members of the Home Army were executed by firing squad as traitors ‘to the motherland’.

In the West, on 1 September, Eisenhower took over day-to-day control of all ground forces from Montgomery, much to the latter’s chagrin. Eisenhower’s plan was for a broad advance into Germany, whereas Montgomery wanted a narrow ‘single thrust’ into the heart of the Reich, spearheaded by his 21st Army Group. On the same day that Montgomery put forward his plan, Patton produced one in which his Third Army led the way instead, with characteristic immodesty, calling it the best strategical idea I’ve ever had. Omar Bradley, meanwhile, felt that his drive on Frankfurt ought to be the centre of operations. It is sadly impossible to believe that the best demands of grand strategy, rather than their own egos, actuated these soldiers, and Eisenhower had the difficult task of holding the ring between them and imposing his own view. His greatness, though doubted by Brooke and Montgomery, stems partly from his success in achieving that. Montgomery’s scheme would have required the Scheldt estuary to have been used as a direct supply route into the Rhine, but the Germans continued to hold it long after the fall of Antwerp in September, with the largely undamaged Fifteenth Army to the north of it. His plan to strike off across the North German Plain towards Berlin, crossing the Weser and the Elbe, made little military sense considering the level of resistance offered by the Germans until as late as April 1945 in this territory. It would also have reduced the US Third Army to the minor role of protecting the flank of the British forces.

Instead, the Supreme Commander stuck with his ‘broad front’ approach to the invasion of the Reich, which he believed would bring all our strength against the enemy, all of it mobile, and all of it contributing directly to the complete annihilation of his field forces. Partly because of the efficacy of the V-weapon flying bomb and rocket campaign against Britain, which could be ended only by occupying the launching sites, the main part was still to be the 21st Army Group’s advance through Belgium north of the Ardennes forest and into the Ruhr Valley, which would also close off Germany’s industrial heartland, and thus deny Hitler the resources to carry on the fight. Eisenhower split the 12th Army Group commanded by Bradley in two and sent most of the First Army north of the Ardennes to support Montgomery, leaving Patton’s Third Army to march on the Saar, covered to the south by the 6th Army Group which had made its way up from the Anvil landings in the south of France. By the end of August, Patton had crossed the Marne and was soon able to threaten Metz and the Siegfried Line. To his intense frustration, his advance was halted by running out of petrol due to the four-hundred mile supply lines to Cherbourg. However, Brussels fell to the 21st Army Group on 3 September and Antwerp the next day, but, as already mentioned, Antwerp was useless to the Allies without the control of the Scheldt estuary.

In September, two months after his sacking, Rundstedt was recalled as Commander-in-Chief West. Watching the Hitler Youth Division retreating over the River Meuse near Yvoir on 4 September, Rundstedt said what many German officers were thinking, but few dared state, that it is a pity that this faithful youth is sacrificed in a hopeless situation. On 11 September, the Allies set foot on German soil for the first time, when American troops crossed the frontier near Trier, yet Hitler still had armies numbering several million men, albeit far too widely dispersed. His ‘Western Wall’, the Siegfried Line, seemed formidable, and his reappointment of Rundstedt was good for the Wehrmacht’s morale, with Field Marshal Model remaining in charge of Army Group B, Rommel and Kluge both having committed suicide, after having been implicated in the Bomb Plot. Later in the month, Churchill – convinced that Hitler was a hopeless strategist – ridiculed him in the House of Commons:

We must not forget that we owe a great debt to the blunders – the extraordinary blunders – of the Germans. I always hate to compare Napoleon with Hitler, as it seems an insult to the great Emperor and warrior to connecthim in any way with a squalid caucus boss and butcher. But there is one respect in which I must draw a parallel. Both these men were temperamentally unable to give up the tiniest scrap of any territory to which the high water mark of their hectic fortunes had carried them. … he (Hitler) has successfully scattered the German armies all over Europe, and by obstination at every point from Stalingrad and Tunis down to the present moment, … has stripped himself of the power to concentrate his main strength for the final struggle.

Yet even while the House of Commons was laughing at Hitler’s strategic blunders, the Führer was planning a concentration of German forces in the Ardennes that would once again astonish the world. Montgomery’s bold scheme to use the British 1st and the US 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions to try to capture the bridges over the Meuse and Rhine and thereby ensure the encirclement of the Ruhr to the north came to grief in mid-September in and around the Dutch towns of Eindhoven, Nijmegen and Arnhem. Despite the highest order of heroism, mistakes were made in the planning stages which meant that it was doomed before it began. It was the largest airborne assault in history, but the intelligence that should have warned the 1st Airborne Division of two Panzer divisions that were refitting near Arnhem was given insufficient weight so that it did not take enough anti-tank weaponry to the drop zones. Operation Market, the airborne assault of Friday, 17 September, was initially successful, but the simultaneous ground attack, Operation Garden, reached Eindhoven and Nijmegen on the 18th and 19th respectively, but could not break through determined German resistance in time to relieve the paratroopers at Arnhem.

(to be continued…)

 

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).