CHAPTER 72
The Land across the Water
DEGENERATION
After Jerusalem’s capture, most Crusaders left for home on the next available galley, sick of the desert, the violence, the faction. Those who stayed were either especially devout or especially quarrelsome.36
While Oltremare’s self-styled nobility frittered away their initiative with internecine power struggles, the ruptured Radinate slowly recovered from the first body blow.37 The Rabbis anathematised any Melic who traded with the interlopers and, inspiring their shaken people with the example of the Maccabees and the Sicarii, they preached Holy War.38 It took a century, but finally Jerusalem was retaken. Oltremare, crushed between the southern and northern Radinate eager to recombine, sought aid from the Mother Country.
Etruria responded by launching a new Crusade.39 This time most of the ‘knights’ were criminals sentenced to ‘Pilgrimages of Atonement’, a sentence that ill-disposed them towards their Motherland. The land across the Water was now Etruria. As Crusade followed Crusade, these exiles created the polity full of dangerous innovation.40 The king’s power was limited by a parliament in which he was obliged to listen to talk of Rights and Privileges from self-styled ‘Barons’, men who had been little better than serfs in Europa.