This chapter will be longer than the previous ones, partly because they were short in time span, and partly because a lot happened.
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Chapter 3 - Deus Vult! 1086-1099
Paris July, 1087
"You treacherous fools! Did you really think that your little rebellion would actually work? Now you will pay the price Count Guillaume: you are hereby stripped of all your titles, you will live out the remainder of your days in exile, out of my sight. And you, my brother... what am I supposed to do with you? Hmmm... You will rot in prison for as long as I see fit. There will be much time to contemplate your mistaken actions.
"Now, Duke Folques, I want to confirm you as my new Royal Marshal; your skills will not be wasted."
The audience ended, and Guillaume, former Count of Macon and Bourgogne, rose and was escorted out of the castle. The King's brother, Robert, the pretender who had sparked a succession crisis a month after the coronation, was picked up and led away to the dungeons. Despite his easy victory, King Hugues was in a foul mood after dealing with the two miscreants. With his brother in jail and his claim to the kingship no longer recognized, he was not a threat, but Hugues would have preferred that Robert kept quiet and continued fathering progeny for the dynasty. More than anything, he was just relieved that the Dukes of Aquitaine and Toulouse had not intervened in the war, because if they had, events would have turned out very differently. As it stood however, his chancellor had fostered good relations with both powerful dukes, and they were content for the time being.
Folques was Duke of Anjou. He had been appointed as Marshal after the King's father-in-law [who was Marshal originally] had joined the rebellion to install Robert on the throne. Despite this treachery from his own father-in-law, the King had decided to leave the man alone. He was after past 60, and wouldn't cause any more trouble.
On a better note, earlier in the year the King's sister had married Prince Pedro of Aragon who was the eldest son of the King of Aragon. This is of course brought an alliance, which would undoubtedly be more useful to the Aragonese, who ruled a tiny one-county kingdom.
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Paris, March 1090
In the throne room King Hugues is perched upon the dais while holding court and dealing with minor matters of state. The last 3 years had been quiet since the end of the rebellion. His brother Robert remained in the dungeons, and the Duke of Aquitaine had died the year before, splitting his realm between his two sons. It had no taken long before the two of them had started squabbling, and now it seemed a war between the Dukes of Poitou and Aquitaine would erupt anytime.
The Kingdom was somewhat larger now, after the King had offered vassalization to the minor counts on his eastern borders. The Counts of Verdun [who also controlled Nordgau in Alsace], Geneve, and the Prince-Bishop of Liege had all accepted, while the German lords had declined. The Prince-Bishop of Liege was still grateful to Hugues for the assistance rendered against the Kaiser, and anyways welcomed the protection of a King.
All of a sudden, a messenger wearing Papal colours burst into the chamber and the room went silent. He announced that His Holyness the Pope had declared Crusade for Anatolia to reclaim lands lost to the infidels and to help the embattled Greeks of Constantinople. The Sultan of Rum's hordes had overrun nearly all of Anatolia and controlled territories all the way to within a few miles of Constantinople. Thus the situation had been for some time, and King Hugues, being a religious man, immediately declared that France would participate.
The silence in the room shattered when someone shouted "Deus Vult!" and a flurry of activity broke out as lords departed to their lands to gather the might of France. Suddenly there was a sense of purpose in the air, and the talk was of nothing else across the land. Over the course of the spring and summer, levies from across the breadth of the land gathered in Bourgogne, until in September, a host 5,000 strong set out on the long march through Germany, Hungary, and the Byzantine territories to reach Anatolia in the spring of the next year, 1091.
The King had mandated that all the lords of the realm under the age of 50 must participate, and so the host of France carried many colourful banners and wore many colourful uniforms. The Royal Guard led the way, consisting of some 1500 men divided in 3 regiments - two of heavy infantry, and one of knights, while the levies of the realm were a more mottly collection of peasants.
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Finally, in April 1091 they reached Eregli, on the coast of the Black Sea, and assisted a Papal army in capturing the fortress, before moving inland toward Paphlagonia and Ancyra. Throughout 1091 they encountered no resistance as they sieged successive Turkish strongholds, before finally encountering some 2,000 hired mercenaries near the Sultan's capital that were easily dispatched.
However, the tables turned the next year, when two large armies sent by the great Seljuk Sultan arrived on the scene. After some maneuvering they caught up to the slow Frankish host and on Dec.31, 1091 one of the largest battles of the war took place at Elbistan in Cilicia. There was great loss of life on both sides, as the crusaders gave as good as they got. At one point, the Franks had nearly routed the entire Turkish host when they recieved reinforcements that turned the tide of the battle decisively in favour of the Turks. Shortly after, disaster struck when the King's guard were cut off from the rest of the army and encircled. They were slaughtered to a man and King Hugues captured by the infidel. After nearly 12 hours of killing, some 8,000 dead littered the fields as the Frankish host ran.
After the battle, Marshal Folques of Anjou took command and sent the army to Byzantine lands to recover and gather reinforcements. With only a fraction of the men in fighting shape, there was no further point in continuing the campaign for the time being; the forces of the other crusader lords would continue on without them.
However, with the King imprisoned by the Turkish lord of Dwin, there was risk of division in the realm. Thankfully, the nobles saw sense and stability prevailed during the King's captivity.
After being captured, Hugues had offered to ransom himself for freedom, and the Count of Dwin was tempted for a time, but after a month of captivity he decided on a more twisted course of action...
Oh yes, so twisted were the infidels that they would do such a thing. And it only strengthened King Hugues' resolve to continue the crusade. No longer was it for the glory of God, but for vengeance instead, no matter what it took. A new, even larger host was assembled this time, some 8,000 strong, and with the King now recovered, they set out again in the autumn of 1093 for Anatolia. Their captured holdings had been retaken by the infidel in the past year in a new counter-offensive that King William the Conqueror of England was unable to stop. But once the Frankish host arrived, the tables turned. Over the next 6 years, many would die, but nothing could halt the advance of the Franks and their zealous King, save perhaps the typhoid fever, which ravaged its way through the lands they were attacking, killing friend and foe indiscriminately. Nearly half the army died of the fever, but by 1099 the victory was complete.
The King did get his revenge, with the death of his castrator in battle he felt at ease for the first time in years.
The Pope granted King Hugues the glory of success in the campaign, and he immediately installed his living younger brothers as counts of large tracts of land in the new territories. The d'Anjou and the de Montfort families also become major landholders on the Black Sea coast. With the success of the Crusade, Christendom has at least temporarily halted the advance of the infidels, while also helping secure the eastern frontiers of the Byzantine Empire, allowing them time to recuperate from their massive losses in the past decades.
