Saint Matthew of Beauvais
The Martyr Knight
Join me today to meet a saint of the First Crusade.
Name: Matthew of Beauvais
Life: died c. 1098 AD
Status: Saint
Feast: March 27
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Abbot Guibert of Nogent knew that he had lived through extraordinary times.
Guibert had watched along with all of Europe as his people, the Franks, took the crusader vow and led a European army East to do battle in the Holy Land. All of Europe had been following the reports from the front. It had been a story of warriors, betrayals, violence, nobility and triumph. These were the themes of what we now call the First Crusade. But for Guibert, they were personal, since they were also the story of a young man whom he had known very well, and who had gone to the Holy Land to fight. His name was Matthew.
Now that the fighting was over, someone needed to keep these memories alive. To Guibert’s annoyance, the most popular account was the Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanorum, that is The Deeds of the Franks and other Jerusalem-bound Pilgrims. The book was, in Guibert’s estimation, sloppy and unsophisticated. “I savor those things which are able to exercise my mind more than those things which, too easily understood, are incapable of inscribing themselves upon a mind always avid for novelty.” (Robert Levine translation)
Since nobody was writing a literary account of the crusade, Guibert would have to do it himself. He began to do research. In addition to stylistic improvements, his version would be more spiritually uplifting and say less about the other pilgrims, since the really interesting ones were the Franks. It was all there in Guibert’s title: Dei Gesta per Francos, God’s Deeds through the Franks. Finally, there would be an account worth reading, and if readers preferred trash that sounded like an adventure novel, well, so much the worse for them.
In everything that I have written and am writing, I have driven everyone from my mind, instead thinking only of what is good for myself, with no concern for pleasing anyone else. … I await the blows of whatever words may fall upon me. And so let us take up what we have begun, and calmly bear the judgments that men bark at us.
Guibert began to write his convoluted account of the first crusade. It was destined to be ignored for most of the next thousand years.
Guibert’s story brings us to the fateful year 1095 AD. The vast cast of characters includes the pope and future Blessed, Urban II. He was also a Frank, which automatically put him in Guibert’s good books. There are many knights and lords of Europe. Some were well-known, like the handsome and ruthless Norman knight Bohemond, fresh from war in Italy and preparing for crusade in a sufficiently flamboyant manner. For every Bohemond, there were many minor knights, warriors like the young Matthew of Beauvais who had heard the message of crusade in Northern France and quietly prepared to do his duty.
No tale could be complete without a villain. For Guibert, the villain would be the Byzantine Eastern Roman Emperor, Alexios I Komnenos, a wicked puppetmaster in his gilded capital of Constantinople, modern Istanbul. But like any true villain, the emperor would begin the story looking like one of the good guys.
By 1095, the Eastern and Western Churches had been in schism for about forty years. The disagreement was theological. But over the decades, the rift had widened to include matters that were not of much importance. Eastern priests found it weird that Western priests wore rings but did not wear beards. How could you work with such people? Gradually, the schism had widened until it had a political dimension, and Byzantine interests drifted away from the West.
When Urban II became pope, he hoped to solve the schism with the East. When he started looking into it, he got good news. He had an ally in Constantinople.
The Byzantine Emperor Alexios had come to power in a moment of crisis. He had been a general, a barrel chested man with a weightlifter’s body who took command and stabilized the Byzantine world when it was close to falling apart. The emperor’s methodical approach and careful diplomacy had pieced things back together. And the Emperor Alexios was a sincere Christian, often staying up late into the night to read and discuss scripture with his wife. He had looked at the schism and come to the conclusion that things had gotten way out of hand. His scholars agreed. It was not worth sacrificing Church unity over this.
The trouble was that by now the schism was reflected at the political level. And so the emperor and the pope began to work together, quietly laying the groundwork for reconciliation. The pope made sure that Westerners went to help Constantinople in their battle against the fearsome Pecheneg nomads. The emperor wrote to the lords of Christendom and influential centres of the Church, like the monastery that Saint Benedict had built on Montecassino. The emperor won many Christians over with precious gifts of relics. Guibert of Nogent was as impressed as anyone, though he turned up his nose at some of them. One relic was supposedly the head of Saint John the Baptist, but someone else already claimed to have the head of Saint John the Baptist. Guibert sniffed at some people’s credulity; if the saint had had a second head, Guibert was pretty sure it would have been mentioned in the Bible.
The pope and the emperor were working out their plan as Alexios stabilized the Byzantine Empire. But then, in 1095, disaster. The emperor had set up part of his Eastern strategy with the help of an allied Turkish lord to stabilize the Byzantine cities on the East coast of the Mediterranean. Then Alexios’ ally was murdered, and the man who took his place was an active enemy of Byzantium. Suddenly, the stability was gone and Alexios had enemies on his border. Of course when one thing went wrong, everything else fell apart too. Soon the Pechenegs were pressing in, the shadowy cult of the Assassins were killing Alexios’ other allies, and many of the lords of Byzantium had picked this moment to start a civil war.
The Seljuk Turks captured the cities along the Mediterranean coast of modern Turkey, Nicaea (modern İznik), Ephesus (near modern Selçuk), and Antioch (near modern Antakya). Byzantine weakness also meant that they could not assist the persecuted Christians of Palestine, or the pilgrims travelling to the holy places there. Even Arab chroniclers took note of how badly they were treating the Christians, and wondered if there would be blowback if news got back to Europe.
Alexios needed Urban to trigger their plan. In 1095, the emperor sent the pope a desperate letter. It was now or never.
And so, on November 27 of 1095, in Clermont in the North of France, Pope Urban II launched the First Crusade. It was to be a grand expedition in which the warriors of Christendom would march East. They would free Jerusalem and perhaps other cities in the Holy Land, and give them back to Emperor Alexios. Pilgrims would be safe again, Jerusalem would be Christian again, and East and West would come back together. For the men fighting this war, Pope Urban explained, it would be a military pilgrimage, a war with a spiritual dimension:
[W]hat king who is going to war does not open his treasury in order to spend on the warriors and to do other things which are required by the war: therefore the king of kings, Christ the Lord, opens his treasury and spends on his warriors: his treasury contains, however, the treasure of indulgence, grace, and glory. (Ane L. Bysted translation)
As word of the crusade spread, Christians could make a public vow to take part. They would sew a fabric cross onto their garments. It was a reminder of their vow, but also a passport, allowing them free passage through Christian lands as they went East.
There was so much enthusiasm that many people couldn’t wait for the official crusade to begin. A ragtag group that we remember as the People’s Crusade wandered to Constantinople, looting and rioting and causing trouble along the way. They were easily defeated by the Turks, and their leader, a man named Peter the Hermit, led them to safety. Things might have been different, Guibert sniffs, if they had had better Frankish leadership:
When he was unable to restrain this undisciplined crowd of common people, who were like prisoners and slaves, Peter, together with a group of Germans and the dregs of our own people … reached the city of Constantinople (Robert Levine translation)
A better class of people were preparing a more carefully planned undertaking.
Guibert could see it with the young knight Matthew. Guibert’s family ranked above Matthew’s in the complicated system of feudal ties, and so Guibert knew Matthew as a sort of younger brother. In time, Guibert seems to have become a kind of spiritual director to the young knight. He knew Matthew’s mind. Money and women provided plenty of temptations for the young. But Guibert had watched as Matthew remained firm in the faith and, as Guibert put it, “entirely free from sexual vice”. Matthew developed a reputation for generosity. Guibert, who had done his own share of military training, was quietly impressed when he saw Matthew fight. Now, Matthew made the necessary arrangements in case he did not return, and set out for the East.
Others took the cross with a little more fanfare. The Norman Lord Bohemond said that he knew nothing of what was happening until a group of men rode by crying out the crusader warcry, Deus vult, God wills it. Bohemond was so moved when they told him their plan that he got out his cloak - his best one, just to be clear - and personally cut it into strips to give crosses to all his companions.
Soon, vast numbers of men were on the move. They may have been as many as 80,000. The march served as its own recruiting drive, and the crusade grew as it travelled. After a somewhat peaceful march, made more peaceful when the emperor’s guides arrived to help move the crusaders along, they got to Constantinople.
The crusaders gawped at the golden city at the heart of the Byzantine Empire. Usually, even visiting lords could only see the emperor briefly, brought into the palace and passing by its mechanical wonders, singing metal birds and gilded lions with swishing tails to come before the emperor’s imposing throne. Even the throne was mechanical, and could rise up toward the ceiling if the emperor wanted to make the person in front of him feel especially small. But now, the Emperor Alexios came down and mingled with the crusaders as though they were his own men. He gave them rich gifts. This was part of the process of rebuilding ties with the West.
The Emperor Alexios’ daughter, Anna, would remember meeting the handsome blue-eyed Norman Lord Bohemond. She was so charmed that she could even overlook his terrible accent when speaking Greek. And yet even then, in the comfort of Byzantium, Anna was realizing the force they were about to unleash in the middle East. Years afterwards, Anna remembered the sense of menace that Bohemond gave off. Even when he laughed, she wrote, it sounded like a threat.
Meanwhile the emperor looked for competent young men. One man who caught his eye was Matthew of Beauvais. Perhaps Matthew reminded Alexios of a younger version of himself. Both men were warriors who took their spiritual lives seriously. In time, Guibert writes, the emperor began to rely on Matthew as an emissary to help smooth over the many problems of an army on the move.
Soon, the crusaders left the city of Constantinople. Alexios had hoped to lead the expedition personally, but the situation was still too volatile for him to leave his city. Instead, he kept in touch by letters to manage the overall strategic direction of the campaign, and sent a general and troops to represent him in tactical matters. Alexios’ plan was to move along the coast toward Jerusalem, recapturing his lost cities along the way. The crusaders marched to the recently lost city of Nicaea.
Nicaea had made preparations for a long siege. They had stocked up on food and ammunition. They even had a psychological warfare division, who used a claw on a chain to pick up the bodies of fallen crusaders and hang them on the walls of the city to demoralize their friends. Alexios assumed that there would be a long siege. He had not calculated for Norman siegecraft. Even before the army was assembled, Norman engineers were building siege devices and rolling them up to the walls. Under this cover, the Normans simply began disassembling the walls of Nicaea. Stones would be removed and replaced with wooden pieces, so that large sections of the wall could be set on fire to trigger a collapse. The Muslim garrison of Nicaea began to panic, and negotiated a surrender with the Emperor Alexios. The crusaders had their first victory. It was the summer of 1097.
Soon word spread: the Byzantine Empire had found powerful new allies. And just like that, Alexios’ problems began to solve themselves, as enemies showed up in Constantinople ready to discuss peace. The crusaders fended off Muslim attacks as they went. Cities and forts often surrendered when they came close. Alexios’ men were there to reabsorb them into the Byzantine Empire, or to appoint new lords from among the crusaders.
Finally, the crusaders arrived at Antioch, near modern Antakya. The city’s huge walls towered more than 60 feet high. The Muslim garrison of Antioch would not give in as easily as other cities had. They hung the Christian Patriarch of Antioch over the walls, upside down, and tortured him as the crusaders watched. The crusaders prepared for a long siege, and the emperor tried to make sure they received food in shipments sent by sea.
Even so, food ran low. Then, disease broke out in the camp. Muslim relief forces kept trying to break in to Antioch, and the crusaders had to fight them off. It seems to have been in one of these encounters that Matthew was caught in the midst of the fighting, isolated and captured.
Putting the story together after the fact, Guibert of Nogent tried to see things from the Muslim point of view. Matthew was wealthy, and yet the people holding him didn’t ask for a ransom. Instead they pressured Matthew to convert to Islam, and told him the alternative to conversion was death. Why? Guibert concluded that Matthew would be a valuable asset because of his ties to the Emperor Alexios. Matthew surprised everyone by asking for a few days before had to give an answer.
The answer, when it came, was on a Friday. A later tradition has it that it was Good Friday. Here are Matthew’s words, as they came to Guibert:
If you think that I have put off the sword hanging above my head because I wanted to enjoy a few more days alive, and not because I wanted to die on the day on which my Lord Jesus Christ was crucified, then it is fitting that I give evidence of how a Christian mind thinks. Get up, then, and kill me for the example that you want, so that I may restore my soul to him for whom I die, who on this day gave his own life for mankind. (Robert Levine translation)
Matthew of Beauvais would die a martyr, one of the first martyrs of the crusades.
After the martyrdom, history rolled on. The crusaders finally found a way to sneak a few men into the city. These men opened the gates under cover of a general assault. Antioch fell. But the very next day, before they could even restock the city, a massive Muslim army arrived. The crusaders were now starving inside Antioch rather than outside it.
Just before the Muslim relief army closed in, the crusaders sent a messenger to the emperor. If he had still been alive, they might have sent Matthew of Beauvais to bring the message. As it was, they chose a man named Stephen of Blois. Stephen was eager to go, because in his view, the crusaders had no chance. He was glad to get out with his life.
The Emperor Alexios had already heard about the situation, and was on his way to help the crusaders at the head of a Byzantine army. But when Stephen of Blois met the emperor, Stephen advised him to stop. Stephen told him that there was no chance the crusaders could survive. They were probably dead already. Stephen was fleeing for Europe, and he suggested the emperor take his men home.
And so the Emperor Alexios turned his army around, and marched away.
In fact, the crusade had not been destroyed. Starving and desperate, the knights decided to stake everything on one last cavalry charge. They rode out to face the vastly superior Muslim force, which was slow to prepare because the commander could not believe anyone would try such a suicidal strategy. The forces of Christendom fought bravely, but they were massively outnumbered. What saved them, according to those who were there, was a miracle. Here’s how Guibert told the story:
And lo, innumerable forces began to come down from the mountains, and their horses and standards shone brightly; our men, however, were stunned even more now, fearing that these men were bringing reinforcements for the Turks, until they discovered that this was aid, now visible, sent by Christ. After the battle, they thought that these glorious leaders were, in particular, the martyrs George, Mercurius, and Demetrius. These things were seen by many of our men
The crusade was saved. Antioch was saved. The force would move on to capture Jerusalem as well.
And yet the seeds of distrust had been planted between the Western lords and the Eastern Emperor. Why had Alexios not come? Was it really because of Stephen of Blois? Or had Alexios been their secret enemy all along?
Bohemond would capitalize on this distrust of the emperor to claim Antioch for himself. And as the crusade captured the cities of the Holy Land, the crusader lords would set up an independent kingdom. This meant it would be cut off from the support it might have had as part of the Eastern Roman Empire, and both the Byzantines and the crusaders would fight and eventually lose alone. The political divisions between East and West would become a chasm. The schism in the Church has lasted for almost a thousand years.
The famous chronicle of the expedition, the Deeds of the Franks, would make Bohemond the hero and Alexios the villain. Despite his loathing for the book, Abbot Guibert took the same approach in his sadly ignored God’s Deeds through the Franks.
Guibert also repeats the story of the saints in white who had charged down the mountain to save the crusaders at Antioch. It’s an interesting detail because Guibert had something of a reputation as a researcher and debunker of miracles for which there was not enough evidence. This means Guibert probably researched this report himself. Did he ask the returning soldiers whether anyone recognized the young knight Matthew among the white riders? Guibert does not say. Instead, Guibert closes his account of Matthew’s life and death with a personal comment. Guibert no longer saw Saint Matthew of Beauvais as a kind of little brother. In putting together the story of his life and death, Guibert recognized the outlines of a man whom he would have been proud, very proud, to call a friend.
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Hugh, I am an American priest living in Rome. I really like your podcast and am sharing it with friends. Thanks for this great work. Prayers, Fr David Daly (ddaly@legionaries.org)