Crusaders

As the Sun started to climb over the horizon, her golden rays slowly flooded the vast expanses of the eastern Mediterranean Sea. Gentle waves joyously ducked beneath one another, sprinkling around them a fine mist made up of drops of water and shreds of rainbow. The bronze bells rang out in the distance signaling from ship to ship the start of a new day, the morning prayers and the change of the watch. Another dreadful night was over with all it's horrors to the true Christian soul. 

Vivid Italian chatter sparked up like bonfires, the oars hit the waves with renewed fervor and propelled the proud bows of the galleys of Saint Mark further towards the East. Ten war galleys were escorting about two dozen larger transport vessels crammed with cloth, olive oil and worrying merchants. With them there were hundreds of hopeful pilgrims heading to the Holy Land, poor and rich, who abandoned everything for the safeguarding of complete strangers and for the honor of Christ. 

There were the proud templars, grizzled veterans of many wars with the Saracens who were returning from Europe to Acre, and from there traveling further on to their many castles in the Holy Land. They were accompanied by sergeants, servants, a few new recruits and of course, by the brother priests who looked after their spiritual welfare. Mostly french knights, these templars had an aura of pride and martial prowess, always looking for a way to prove their individual valor. Their untamed passions and pride was bridled only by the rigorous rules laid down by Bernard of Clairvaux. Probably this was the source of the ever present sense of tension around them. 

The knights of Saint John in their black robes looked like a gathering of scholars whose knowledge, as their glaring sword hilts suggested, lay not in the parchments but in the wielding of weapons. They ran the great hospitals and protected the pilgrims, successfully holding in check the various emirs and other Seljuk princelings of Syria form their enormous castles in Margat and Krak des Chevaliers. 

 

From France came a host of pious peasants in hope of salvation and a better future. They were huddled together in the cargo holds of the large merchant cogs along with merchandise and horses. Mostly poor, runaways from their lords estates, they were looking to better their miserable condition in the service of some local potentate in the Holy Land and of course to wash away the sins of a lifetime by undertaking this most holy journey. 

The Germans were quiet and looked at everybody else with a certain amount of contempt, especially on the Italian sailors who were loud, cocky and seemed as if they were plotting from sunrise to sunset on the demise of the imperials.

As people not accustomed to the hardships of sea travel they suffered the most. And because of that they were laughed at the most, of course behind their back because the fabled Teutonic rage was not a matter to take it lightly by anybody. They were a strange bunch. Hailing from the ancient forests of Germania, the home of those people who brought to an end the Roman Empire in the West just to become in half a millennium the staunchest protectors of the imperial heritage with their pale and ginger haired emperors, they were slow but burning with fury in fight, being loyal to the very end and cruel to the point of savagery. The popes were not sure what to think of them, at least not sure about the intentions of their emperors who had the strange idea of being sacred just by the very virtue of their office. Their eternal mistrust of strangers caused them to be always armed to the teeth and to keep their thoughts and emotions for themselves. It was not an uncommon sight to see their long silhouette stretching over the deck in the sunlight as they banded together to stare towards the endless horizon as if waiting for something familiar to appear.

The ships stopped on their way to the East from the Venetian lagoon by the Dalmatian coast, territory fiercely disputed by the ambitious sailors of Saint Mark and the young christian power, the Kingdom of Hungary. Zara was one of the apples of discord between the two polities, a bustling trading port of her own right. Here came aboard a few dozen Hungarians. They brought with them horses, ugly and small beasts, but as it later turned out tenacious and at least as fast as the famed and magnificent horses of Arabia. These horses had harnesses studded with bronze or silver fittings and bore small and light saddles.

These Hungarians wore the most exotic mixture of clothes and weapons. They carried bows like those of the Saracens with quivers on their waist. Some of them had a mail shirt, others just a lamellar cuirass made of leather or iron scales in the Greek fashion. Underneath their armor they invariably wore a long leather or baize kaftan. On their backs they had a small circular shield and a sturdy short lance. They had no helmets or the like just a sturdy leather hat. On their feet they had light boots made of boiled leather. Their outlandish appearance struck fear and concern in their traveling companions as they were all bearded and moustachiod men with braided hair. There was something menacing in their presence.

The horseman were part of the retinue of a cleric, named Lucas of Győr. But he was not of the regular and pious stock. He wore a full suit of mail, a helmet and he did not restrict himself to the use of a mace, which brakes the bones but spares the soul. He had a large sword on his left side instead, a shield flung on his back with a devilish dragon on it, painted in red like blazing fire, spitting burning death from his mouth. He most gracefully cursed using the most ingenious medley of Hungarian, Slavonic and Latin swear-words at the honest indignation of his fellow travelers. But he was a learned and traveled man nonetheless who conversed in Latin and Italian, could handle himself with the Germans and was no stranger to the Greek tongue. He studied in Bologna, than became a bishop in his native lands, where a priest is as much a servant of God as he is a warrior. When asked by some fellow clerics why he traveled to the Outremer, he just fondled his long moustache and answered very shortly: "I have something to resolve with God." But all his cursing and martial appearance aside, when he was celebrating mass that summer morning aboard the San Giovanni, he appeared as one of the most pious man of God, wholly engulfed by the presence of the Lord in the Sacrament. There was a little disturbing detail though which blurred the image of a saint, his ever present pair of spurs, which shone in the morning light, promulgating the Church Militant ever ready to do battle against the enemies of Christ.