Anyway, this is the group that the other quotes were referring to: the Tafurs.
http://www.iltarget.it/tarfur1.htmDriven by the mirage of wealth, crowds of fanatics left for the Crusades in the Holy Land.
The winter between 1097-98 was a really harsh one.
From the walls of Antioch the Turkish garrison was observing the crusaders besieging their town die slowly of starvation. Differently from the Turks, who had a good victual store, the crusaders were withouth strength left in a parched land far from provision sources. Some knights would go away horseback to look for food, other ones would eat their own horses and lowest-ranking crusaders would buy dogs and rats at a high price or simply leave themselves die of starvation. Then, one day, the Turks saw an astonishing scene.
The most desperate ones among the besiegers were stuffing themselves with large pieces of meat, which had been previously roasted. Their astonishment soon turned into horror. It was the meat of the quartered bodies of their fellows, killed some days before during a skirmish under the walls. The Muslim emir sent some delegates to the Crusader commanders to protest, but they answered that they could do nothing to stop cannibalism. The noble crusaders had to admit that they were not able to tame the tafurs.
Tafur, probably a Flemish word, meant something like rabble, scum, and with this word the knights who took part in the first crusade would call the crowd of vagabonds who followed them on the way to Jerusalem across Europe. Tafurs have nothing common with the Crusaders, who were not cannibals for sure, nor they shared the same social origins as them. Dressed with sackcloth and covered with sores, they were so poor that they could not afford spears and swords, so they would fight with sharp sticks, clubs and even shovels. Nevertheless, their fierceness compensated the lacks in their weaponry.
In battles they would scream and grind their teeth, thirsting for blood only; they had no interest in taking prisoners to get a ransom. The Turks would call the crusaders ?Franks? because the majority of them came from France or from the Flanders, but tafurs were living devils, not Franks.
The liberation of Jerusalem was not surely their highest ambition, they had an even greater desire, that is, to go out of their poverty.
The First Crusade had been preceded by years of drought, pestilence and famine, and life had become unsustainable for farmers.
So, when the First Crusade was proclaimed with passionate descriptions of Jerusalem, ?the heavenly town of abundance?, thousands of undernourished farmers, poorly dressed and homeless, took those words literally and headed for the ?land of abundance? which the noble crusaders would have soon conquered for them. A lot of thousands of people, children and women included, crossed Hungary and the Balkans spending their little savings and then looting and stealing to survive. As they reached Constantinople (the present Istanbul) and as the Greeks did not manage to control them, they accepted to ship them across the Bosporus to Asia Minor.
But when the tafurs, exhausted, landed, they were assaulted and massacred by the Turks, and only three thousand people managed to escape and wait for the main body of the crusader army to come. That group of survivors, hardened by their experience, followed the knights and were more than ever willing to reach the promised land. Determined to obtain the victory, they had united in a ruthless gang and even elected their own king, a former knight.
Initially, that uncontrollable gang had constituted an embarrass for the official army of crusaders, but very soon their contempt turned into fear. The Turks were terrorized by them.
Finally, after nine month besiege, Antioch fell into the hands of the crusaders.
The town was sacked, Muslims and Jews raped and killed.
Also when Jerusalem was conquered, a large number of prisoners were massacred instead of being kept alive to obtain a ransom.
Such crimes have been blamed on the fierce farmers, but these are just conjectures, there is no evidence.
The only thing there is no doubt about is that tafurs, under the walls of Antioch, became cannibals not to die of starvation.
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