Читаем Death and the Devil полностью

“So off they went, kings and princes, knights and squires, thieves and beggars, priests and bishops, the riffraff from the streets, swindlers, murderers, anyone who could ride or walk. They set off rejoicing to fight for the Lord, bribed by the unparalleled remission of their sins, if only they would take up the sword and journey to the Holy Land. And they kept on crying Deus lo volt!, as if God could have wanted them to massacre the unbelievers in their own land, steeping their hands in the blood of the Jews of Mainz, Worms, Speyer, and other cities, to indulge in mindless, wholesale slaughter, beheading, burning, disemboweling innocent men, women, and children, laying waste to the countryside, plundering, the scourge of even the Christians they claimed to be going to liberate.”

Jaspar spat on the ground. “God willed that? The stories your Bram told about the Crusades were a load of crap. I heard them and nothing could be further from the truth, even if he did put it over well. Bram was no crusader. He’d got to know a few of those who came back with no arms, no legs, or no wits left. Hungary and Byzantium, Istria and Constantinople, everything was razed to the ground. I read what a chronicler from Mainz wrote, before they butchered him, too: Why did the sky not go black? Why did the stars not extinguish their light? And the sun and the moon, why did they not go dark in the vault of heaven when, on one day, eleven hundred holy people were murdered and slaughtered, so many infants and children who had not yet sinned, so many poor, innocent souls? They beseeched the Almighty to help them, but the Almighty happened to be somewhere else, or perhaps He thought they deserved it. And all that happened while they were still here, in our towns and cities.”

He shook his head. “Then they went off to the Holy Land, in the name of the Lord. The scum, the foot soldiers, the bands of marauders, never arrived. They either died of starvation, were killed, or simply dropped dead on the way. But the great armies of knights did get there. They besieged Jerusalem. For five weeks! They sweated themselves silly in their armor, they must have stunk like pigs, they were foul and festering, but they held on. Then they entered the city. It is said that on that day our men waded up to their horses’ fetlocks, to their knees in Saracen blood. What was their new Christian kingdom founded on? On murder! On torture and mutilation! On rape and pillage! Those are your Christians, my son. That is the Christianity we’re so proud of. Brotherly love!” He spat contemptuously. “And what is it Paul says to the Hebrews? A few boring injunctions: Let brotherly love continue. Be not forgetful to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them; and them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in the body.”

Jacob waved his mug as he tried not to lose his balance. “But that was all a long time ago,” he said, the sounds merging into one long word.

“No!” Jaspar shook his head violently. “No, the Saracens reconquered Jerusalem. There was one Crusade after another, especially after even a saint like Bernard of Clairvaux placed himself at the service of the butchers. You know Bernard?”

“Not as such—”