Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream: The

Crusades, Apocalyptic Prophecy, and

the End of History Jay Rubenstein
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Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream
Nebuchadnezzar’s
Dream
T H E C RU S A D E S , A P O C A L Y P T I C P RO P H E C Y,
AND THE END OF HISTORY

Jay Rubenstein

1
 1
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Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Jay Rubenstein 2019
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You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Rubenstein, Jay, 1967– author.
Title: Nebuchadnezzar’s dream : the Crusades, apocalyptic prophecy, and the
end of history / Jay Rubenstein.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2019] | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018008319 | ISBN 9780190274207 (hardback : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Crusades—First, 1096–1099. | Crusades—Second, 1147–1149. |
Jerusalem—History—Latin Kingdom, 1099–1244. | End of the world—History
of doctrines—Middle Ages, 600–1500.
Classification: LCC D161.2 .R746 2019 | DDC 956/.014--dc23 LC record available at
https://lccn.loc.gov/2018008319

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc.
United States of America
F or E dwa r d
 C ON T E N T S

List of Figures ix

List of Tables xi

Maps xiii

Preface xvii

part i: Prophecy and the First Crusade 1

chapter 1: Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream, 600 bce 3

chapter 2: Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream, 1106 ce 7
chapter 3: Building Blocks of the Apocalypse 21
chapter 4: The Oncoming Madness of Antichrist 35
chapter 5: Sacred Geography 49

part ii: Warning Signs 65

chapter 6: Crusaders Behaving Badly 67

chapter 7: Troubling News from the East 80

part iii: Prophecy Revised (1144–1187) 99

chapter 8: The Second Crusade’s Miraculous Failure 101

chapter 9: Translatio imperii: Leaving Jerusalem 123
chapter 10: Apocalypse Begins at Home 143

part iv: The New Iron Kingdom 165

chapter 11: Jerusalem Lost 167

chapter 12: The Crusade of Joachim of Fiore 181

vii
viii Contents

conclusion: The Ongoing Madness of Antichrist 208

Acknowledgments 221

Notes 223

Select Bibliography 259

Index 269
 L I S T OF F IGU R E S

figure 1: Michael Battling the Dragon

figure 2: Augustus Caesar at the Fulcrum of History
figure 3: Lambert’s Illustration of Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream
figure 4: Antichrist Seated on Dragon
figure 5: Antichrist’s Activity from the Book of Revelation
figure 6: The Saint-Bertin Map of Jerusalem
figure 7: A Crocodile
figure 8: Alexander the Great
figure 9: Rome and Babylon in Otto of Freising’s Two Cities
figure 10: Augustus Caesar in Otto of Freising’s Two Cities
figure 11: Otto the Great in Otto of Freising’s Two Cities
Figure 12: Henry IV Faces Henry V at the Regen River
figure 13: Antichrist Emerges from the Loins of the Church
figure 14: Frederick Barbarossa on the Eve of Departing for Jerusalem
figure 15: Joachim’s Red Dragon
figure 16: Two Trees, Representing Joachim’s Two status of History

ix
 L I S T OF TA BL E S

table 1: Lambert’s Six Ages of History 28

table 2: Lambert’s Three Ages of History 28
table 3: Lambert’s Kingdoms and Ages of the World 33
table 4: Bernard’s Model of the Hours, Temptations, and the Apocalypse 110
table 5: Bernard’s and Gerhoh’s Fourfold Models of History 157
table 6: Joachim’s Trinitarian Model of History 185
table 7: Joachim’s First Presentation of the Seven tempores 191
table 8: The Seven Seals, from the Exposition of the Apocalypse 193
table 9: Joachim’s Later Reading of the Seven Seals 203
table 10: Joachim’s Reading of Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream 205

xi
 North Sea
World of the Crusades
First Crusade
London
Second Crusade of Louis VII
ATLANTIC
Cologne
Third Crusade of Frederick Barbarossa
Third Crusade of Richard the Lion Heart
OCEAN Paris
Metz Mainz

Vézelay
Blois

k Sea
Clermont

Lyon Milan Venice Blac

Genoa Belgrade
Toulouse Niksar
Leon Pisa Adrianople
Marseille
Constantinople

Rome Dyrranchium Nicaea Mosul

Barcelona Edessa
Toledo Bari
Thessaloniki
Naples Aleppo
Ephesus Saleph
River Antioch
Cordoba Jabala
Seville
Athens Tripoli
Palermo

Damascus
Tyre
Tunis
Acre

Jerusalem
Mediterranean Sea
Alexandria

Cairo
0 200 400 600 Miles

0 200 400 600 800 1,000 Km

MAP 1
 Europe in the
Crusade Era North Sea

German
Bruges
Empire
Flanders Cologne
English Cha nnel Saint-Omer

Mainz
Nogent-sous-Coucy

Caen Reims
Paris
Dol Saint-Evroul
Chartres Troyes Freising Reichersberg
Reichersberg
Clairvaux
Tours Abbey Schäftlarn
Abbey
Bourgueil Tegernsee
Cîteaux Abbey
FRANCE Abbey

Saint-Léonard Cluny
de Noblat Abbey

Montferrat Ferrara

ITALY

Mediterranean Sea Rome

0 100 200 Miles

0 200 400 Km

MAP 2
 Joachim of Fiore's
Italy

Adriatic Sea
Viterbo
Rome
Veroli
Casamari

I TA LY
Naples

Fiore
Tyrrhenian Sea

Corazzo

Ionian Sea
Messina

Palermo

Mount Etna

Sicily

Mediterranean Sea
0 50 100 Miles

Malta 0 80 160 Km

MAP 3
 P R E FAC E

This book began with an observation and the question that followed
upon it. The observation involves one of the most creative historians
of the Middle Ages, Guibert of Nogent (ca. 1060–1125), and how he
looked at the key event of his lifetime, the First Crusade. In addition
to being one of the most perceptive writers of his day, Guibert was
also one of the most melancholic and dyspeptic, not often given to
enthusiasm about the state of human affairs. Upon first hearing the
news of the campaign for Jerusalem’s capture, he became uncharac-
teristically excited about the crusade. By the end of his life, however,
his attitude toward it had grown more jaundiced. He had become
disillusioned with the whole enterprise.1 The question then followed
from this observation: Was Guibert’s disillusionment widely shared?
How did his contemporaries look upon the event that has come to
define their age?
To answer this question in full, which this book will try to do,
requires first addressing another question. If disillusionment such as
Guibert’s followed the First Crusade, what was the illusion that had
originally inspired it? The First Crusade, and in particular the cap-
ture of Jerusalem, had changed the course of history. Indeed, it rep-
resented in the eyes of contemporaries probably the most important
event ever. But more fundamentally, it changed not just perceptions
of the past but of the future. Human potential seemed limitless, but
time itself was winding down. Divine closure, in the form of the
Apocalypse, was at hand.
That is where my work ended, but when I began, I was confident
that the Apocalypse and the crusades had nothing to do with one
another. Recent historians have almost all agreed on this point: When
talking about the crusade movement, it is best to avoid prophecy.
Such an attitude, more importantly, conformed to Guibert’s preju-
dices, too. It was a point of principle for him. Rather than a prophetic
framework, the most meaningful level of interpretation of any event
or idea was, for him, moral, or tropological, something akin to what
modern readers think of when they hear the word psychological: How

xvii
xviii Preface

is the human mind structured, and what makes people behave as they
do? Guibert’s goal as a teacher and writer was to change hearts.
Promises of heavenly reward and threats of hellfire, he thought, were
ineffective tools for reaching listeners and teaching them how to
behave. Whatever the reason for Guibert’s disillusionment, it could
not be because it didn’t meet his apocalyptic expectations. Guibert
had none to begin with.
Yet during the course of my work, I kept noticing exceptions
in the foundational sources for crusade history to what I believed
the anti-apocalyptic rule. Eventually, I had made note of so many
instances of apocalyptic language that I had to throw the rule out
altogether. That earlier, skeptical consensus was understandable.
Historians try to empathize with their sources, to treat them (with
rare exception) respectfully, or to at least assume that historical fig-
ures with whom they are engaged were rational actors, that they had
sound reasons for what they thought and wrote, and weren’t prone
to lunacy. In our age, those who believe in the Apocalypse are dis-
missed as mad, the kind of people who reject reality and retreat into
allegorical or literal bunkers.
For most historians, it has been far easier to see the crusades as
driven by a desire for wealth, territorial expanse, or colonial dreams.
Or if religion drove them, it would likely be a need for penance on
the part of the soldiers, a desire for salvation, a dream of redemption
for themselves or their families. In the halcyon days of the early
1990s, when history supposedly had ended and liberal democracies
stretched into the future as far as the prophetic eye could see, this
sort of modernizing, empathetic retelling of crusade history seemed
the only rational approach. Now that we have reentered an age
where religious violence is not so foreign, where its enactors openly
dream of bringing about the End Times in some form or other, an
apocalyptic reading of crusade sources seems compelling, or at least
pardonable.
The story told here, however, is not about the rage for apocalyp-
tic thinking that erupted in 1099. It is rather an examination of the
question that animated Guibert and other contemporary writers,
and one with revived relevance. What had the capture of Jerusalem
changed and would these changes endure? Behind it is the question
of how to live with an ongoing apocalyptic war, one that seemingly
can end only with the destruction of institutions of human judgment
and secular government and their transformation into something
eternally enduring. That was the illusion that Guibert embraced and
then gradually let go.
Preface xix

Part 1 lays the foundation for this project by laying bare the illu-
sion. In its initial conception, the First Crusade was understood and
interpreted in biblical, prophetic language. This vision originated
not with theologians. It came, rather, from Bohemond of Antioch,
from soldiers who had helped lead the crusade and who proclaimed
that by taking Jerusalem, the crusaders had fulfilled prophecies from
the book of Daniel, prophecies involving the ancient Babylonian
King Nebuchadnezzar and a dream about statues and a magical rock.
The dream’s interpretation had long been shrouded in obscurity,
but now those meanings were coming clear, according to Bohemond.
A man of remarkable charisma—he was tall and uncommonly hand-
some, it was said—Bohemond was a brilliant field tactician without
whose leadership the crusade would have likely failed during the
long siege of Antioch (October 1097–June 1098).
But for all his charm and genius, as well as his facility at self-­
promotion, Bohemond was a soldier—and a mercenary’s son—not a
scholar. And he was an opportunist, too, having abandoned the cru-
sade shortly after the fall of Antioch, preferring to remain as the
city’s ruler rather than to continue on the road to Jerusalem. Even in
1106, as he preached about the prophetic significance of the cru-
sade, his eyes were fixed on not a Muslim but a Christian enemy, the
Byzantine ruler Alexius Comnenus, whose empire he hoped to claim.
Bohemond’s presentation was therefore, for multiple reasons, a bit
rough around the edges. Better-educated historians needed to put a
nicer gloss on it. None did more in this cause than Lambert of Saint-
Omer, a Flemish canon who is one of the principle figures in this
narrative. Lambert placed the conquest of Jerusalem at the culmina-
tion of world history. That was the illusion; that was the grand hope.
European soldiers had fulfilled prophecies of both the Old and New
Testaments.
But this view of history had consequences, which form the sub-
ject of Part 2. These consequences also help to explain the sources
of Guibert’s disillusionment. Because of their achievements, born of
personal purgation and purity, veteran crusaders were being held to
impossible standards of conduct and virtue. The turbulent and at
times pathologically brutal behavior of some of these men—justified
by appeals to their status as crusaders—would have given any thought-
ful observer cause to question how they or their achievements could
possibly fit into God’s plan. Additionally, the triumph of the crusade
carried in its wake hundreds of stories of tragedy, now mostly lost to
view but certainly known to contemporaries. It is not a question of
whether the First Crusade remained popular or else a target of
xx Preface

scathing criticism. It is, rather, a recognition that the idealized ver-

sion of the story crafted in the years following 1099 was from the
start vulnerable to doubt, and that such doubt would have been pres­
ent well before the first great failure in the crusade movement, the
Second Crusade (1146–49).
The Second Crusade was indeed a monumental disaster, and
its impact on the memory of the First Crusade is the primary focus
of the third part of this book. It was the moment when the disillu-
sionment experienced earlier by Guibert became widespread. The
mismanagement of the campaign and its shockingly fast and dire
denouement alone would have undercut the idealistic memory of
the First Crusade.
Perhaps more startling than the historical and political changes
inspired by the Second Crusade were the concomitant changes
in prophetic thought itself. Effectively, Christian theologians and
intellectuals began writing Jerusalem and the Holy Land out of
their apocalyptic narratives. Revelation, the advent of Antichrist, the
Second Coming of Christ—all looked more likely to be events that
would occur inside Europe, products of ongoing battles between
popes and emperors, rather than the result of wars fought in the
­distant East.
Christian Europe might have continued down this self-critical
road and eventually lost interest altogether in the settlements in the
Holy Land and in continuing the crusade project. In 1187, however,
the Muslim general Saladin conquered Jerusalem, an event shocking
enough to demand yet another revision of history and another rein-
vention of prophecy. That is the subject of the fourth and final part
of this book. The fiction that the First Crusade had been a transfor-
mational moment in salvation history could no longer be main-
tained. It was just another battle. Armageddon might yet occur in
Jerusalem, but if so, the First Crusade would be only a footnote to it.
It surely is no coincidence that at this precise moment, when exter-
nal events dictated a complete rethinking of the Apocalypse, the
most influential prophetic thinker in the Middle Ages, Joachim of
Fiore, began writing in earnest. Among his many other achieve-
ments, which have been widely recognized and even celebrated,
Joachim forced a complete reevaluation of the importance of both
the First Crusade and of the ongoing crusade movement. Despite his
reputation as a medieval thinker unusually tolerant toward outside
groups, including Muslims, Joachim’s vision embraced an inevitable
and probably endless conflict between Christendom and Islam,
between West and East.
Preface xxi

A final word on terminology. The word apocalypse literally means

“revelation.” In the Latin tradition, it is the title of the last book of
the Bible, written by John of Patmos (an obscure figure who, in the
Middle Ages, became conflated with John the Apostle). It also refers
to a genre of literature about the End Times and Last Judgment, a
genre to which Jewish, Christian, and Muslim writers have all con-
tributed. Among students of the Middle Ages, “apocalypse” refers to
a belief that the Last Days are imminent (as opposed to eschatology,
which refers to a general interest in the Last Days, without a sense
that they are at hand). A related concept is millennialism or millenari-
anism, a belief based on Revelation 20 that Christ will return to earth
to rule for one thousand years before the Last Judgment actually
occurs. Because of the association between this last belief and social-
ist utopias, millennialism has been the focus of most histories of
apocalyptic thought—the lead character, as it were.2 In this book, by
contrast, millennialism plays only a minor part.
The ongoing fascination with millennialism does help to
explain why historians of apocalyptic thought have taken so little
interest in the crusades. And although I will make frequent use of
the word apocalypse, the book of the Apocalypse proper did not exert
significant influence on twelfth-century thinkers who tried to isolate
the intersections between prophecy and current events. The most
important text was instead the book of Daniel, specifically the story
of that dream of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, a dream with
whose historical context this story shall begin.
Fig. 1. St. Michael slaying the dragon, from Lambert of Saint-Omer’s illustrated
Apocalypse. Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, Cod. Guelf 1 Gud. lat., fol. 15r.
Fig. 2. Augustus enthroned, from the Liber floridus. Ghent,
Universiteitsbibliotheek, MS 92, fol. 138r.
Fig. 3. Two dreams of Nebuchadnezzar, combined, from the Liber floridus. Ghent,
Universiteitsbibliotheek, MS 92, fol. 232v.
Fig. 4. Antichrist enthroned on a dragon, from the Liber floridus. Ghent,
Universiteitsbibliotheek, MS 92, fol. 62v.
Fig. 5. Antichrist slays the two witnesses in Jerusalem, from Lambert of Saint-Omer’s
illustrated Apocalypse. Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, Cod. Guelf 1 Gud.
lat., fol. 14r.
Fig. 6. The circular map of Jerusalem made at the monastery of Saint-Bertin.
Saint-Omer, Bibliothèque d’agglomeration de Saint-Omer, MS 776, fol. 50v.
Fig. 7. A crocodile, as imagined by Lambert of Saint-Omer, from the Liber floridus. Ghent, Universiteitsbibliotheek, MS 92, fol. 61v.
Fig. 8. Alexander the Great, as depicted in the Liber floridus. Ghent,
Universiteitsbibliotheek, MS 92, fol. 155v.
Fig. 9. The building of Rome (above) and the storming of Babylon (below), from
Otto of Freising’s Two Cities. Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jene, Thüringer
Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek, MS Bos. q. 6, fol. 20r.
Fig. 10. Augustus Caesar enthroned, from Otto of Freising’s Two Cities. Friedrich-
Schiller-Universität Jene, Thüringer Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek, MS Bos.
q. 6, fol. 38v.
Fig. 11. Emperor Otto I enthroned from Otto of Freising’s Two Cities. Friedrich-
Schiller-Universität Jene, Thüringer Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek, MS Bos.
q. 6, fol. 78v.
Fig. 12. Armies of Henry IV and Henry V face off at the river Regen, from Otto of
Freising’s Two Cities. Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jene, Thüringer Universitäts-
und Landesbibliothek, MS Bos. q. 6, fol. 91v.
Fig. 13. Hildegard of Bingen’s vision of Antichrist emerging from the loins of the
church. Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.
Fig. 14. Frederick Barbarossa preparing to leave on Crusade, as depicted in
Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica, Vat. lat. 2001, fol. 1r. Album/Art Resource, NY.
Fig. 15. Joachim of Fiore’s seven-headed dragon, from The Book of Figures. Oxford, Corpus Christi College,
MS 255a, fol. 7r.
Figs. 16a (left) and 16b (right). Joachim’s diagrams of the first and second status, depicting fundamental
parallels in history, from The Book of Figures. Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 255a, fols. 5v and 6r.
 PA RT I

Prophecy and the First Crusade

 CHAPTER 1

Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream, 600 bce

A
CCORDING TO DANIEL , in the second year of his reign
King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon had a troubling dream.
He wished to know its meaning, even though the king him-
self seems to have forgotten its details. Thus when Nebuchadnezzar
called together his soothsayers, he set them a double task: describe
the dream and then interpret it. Understandably, the soothsayers
complained, “There is no one on earth, O king, who can accomplish
your command! Nor does any king, though great and mighty, ask such
a thing of any diviner, or wise man, or Chaldean.”1 Nebuchadnezzar,
unmoved, ordered them all put to death.
It is a singular moment in a legendary, near-mythical career.
During Nebuchadnezzar’s reign, Babylon assumed an imperial gran-
deur, which it had never previously possessed. At his command,
architects and engineers created the Hanging Gardens, one of
the Seven Wonders of the World. The wealth and splendor of his
court attracted merchants, diplomats, and settlers from many lands,
a diversity of peoples and tongues that itself was a wonder too. Their
presence beneath a three-hundred-foot ziggurat, dedicated to the
god Marduk, and their incessant multilingual chatter inspired the
city’s enslaved Jews to invent a tall tale, that of the Tower of Babel—a
fantasy of divine vengeance and destruction that remains a potent
explanation for the world’s ongoing discord.2
Those Jews’ presence in Babylon, during the period called “the
Babylonian Captivity,” has become likewise proverbial. Historically,
it was the culmination of a series of wars beginning in 605 bce.

3
4 Prophecy and the First Crusade

Nebuchadnezzar, returning from a successful campaign against Egypt,

forced the kingdom of Judah to accept status as a tributary state.
Eight years later, he suppressed a Jewish rebellion and brought the
Judean King, Jeconiah, to his capital as a prisoner. He did so with
God’s blessing, according to the Old Testament, since Jeconiah’s
father, Jehoiakim, “filled Jerusalem with innocent blood, which the
Lord would not pardon.”3 In 587 bce, after another rebellion,
Nebuchadnezzar ordered the city of Jerusalem destroyed and its
people forcibly relocated. More distressing, he had the Temple of
Jerusalem, built at the command of Solomon, razed and its treasures
and vessels broken into pieces.4
To return to the dream: Alone among Babylon’s wise men, a
Jewish exile named Daniel met both of Nebuchadnezzar’s challenges.
“For there is a God in heaven,” Daniel proclaimed, “who opens mys-
teries and who has revealed to you, King Nebuchadnezzar, what will
transpire in the Last Days. Here are your dream and the visions of
your head seen while you lay in bed.”5 The king had gazed upon a
colossal statue made of various metals. The head was gold, the chest
and arms silver, the belly and thighs bronze, and its legs iron. Its feet
were made partly of iron and partly of clay. Then a stone, cut from
the side of a mountain without the intervention of human hand,
struck the statue’s feet. The entire thing crashed to the ground,
making it as chaff on the summer’s threshing floor. In its place, the
stone grew into a mountain and filled the earth.
That statue, Daniel explained, symbolized all the kingdoms
and empires that ever would exist, the times and ages that God alone
can change. The golden head was Nebuchadnezzar, a king among
kings to whom God had given strength, power, and glory. After
Nebuchadnezzar’s death, a new kingdom would arise, inferior to
his rule, symbolized by the silver chest and arms, to be succeeded by
still another, again less impressive, bronze kingdom, one that would
nonetheless rule the entire earth. The fourth kingdom, of iron,
would be the least splendid of all, but prove more powerful than any
of its predecessors, and it would dominate and destroy whoever
might challenge it. Yet that kingdom, too, would grow vulnerable.
Its people would mix their seed with that of other nations, and, like
iron and clay, they would not cohere. At last, God himself would
strike it down and set up his own kingdom, one that would consume
all earthly rulers and that would endure forever. “God has shown to
the king what is going to happen,” Daniel concluded. “The dream is
true and its interpretation faithful.” Nebuchadnezzar abased himself
before Daniel and ordered animals and incense sacrificed to him.6
Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream, 600 bce 5

Some questions about the dream remained unanswered—chiefly,

who were the successor states, the silver, bronze, and iron kingdoms?
Clarity emerged only during two later visions in the same book, ones
that Daniel himself experienced. In the first he saw four beasts—a
lioness, a bear, a leopard, and an unnamed creature, “wonderful and
terrible,” with slashing claws and iron teeth. The second one involved
a bloody clash between a ram and goat. Based on correspondences
among these animals and between them and the four metals, and
thanks as well to explanations given by an angel, it is possible for
careful readers to fully interpret Nebuchadnezzar’s dream.7 The
silver chest symbolized Persia, whose ruler, Darius, allowed the Jews
to rebuild Jerusalem. The bronze midsection was the kingdom of
Alexander the Great. And the iron legs were the Hellenistic succes-
sor states, particularly the Seleucids, who dominated the former
Babylonian Empire, and the Ptolemies, who ruled Egypt. And what
of the stone uncut by human hand or the mountain that would fill
the earth? These figures were to remain veiled. In the words of the
angel, they would be “closed and sealed until the appointed time.”8
The original readers of Daniel—completed more than four
hundred years after the book’s events were supposed to have
occurred—believed that the appointed time had begun. They were
residing in and around the city of Jerusalem, where the Seleucid
monarch Antiochus IV Epiphanes had outlawed the practice of
Judaism. His decree sparked a new uprising, the Maccabean Revolt.
The book of Daniel was compiled at this time as an act of intellectual
resistance.9 As such, Antiochus was the fourth, nameless beast in
Daniel’s vision, a creature more fearsome than any that had come
before. More precisely, he was that beast’s eleventh horn, uttering
blasphemies before God. He was also the last ruler of the iron empire,
whom God would strike down. In his place would emerge a new
­kingdom, one to dominate historical events and preserve Jerusalem
till the end of time.
The Maccabean Revolt succeeded, but it did not initiate the
Last Days. Antiochus IV died in 164 bce, about three years after the
composition of the book of Daniel. The Maccabees established a
dynasty that governed Judea for nearly a century, but it did not fill
the earth as a mountain. Instead, in 63 bce, Judea became a client
state of Rome, just as it had once been a tributary of Babylon. The
symbolism of the vision, the meaning of the last three metals and the
stone, were opened anew for debate.
About 450 years later, the biblical translator and exegete
St. Jerome developed what would become the standard interpretation
6 Prophecy and the First Crusade

of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. The golden head and silver chest were

still Babylon and Persia. The bronze belly and thighs, however, now
incorporated both Alexander the Great and the various Hellenistic
successor states. In hindsight, the iron legs stood for Rome. Once
ferocious and indomitable, her empire had, in Jerome’s eyes, weak-
ened. Barbarians had overrun it. Yet Rome depended on those same
barbarians to fight its wars. Iron and clay, Romans and barbarians,
mixed together. The stone that would bring Rome down was Christ.
Uncut by human hand, that is to say born of a virgin and unstained
by sex, Christ and his church would grow into a mountain and fill the
earth. His heavenly kingdom would stretch into eternity, long after
all earthly rule had ceased.10
So elegant was Jerome’s reading that it stood unchallenged for
centuries, one of the fundamental building blocks of Christian his-
torical and apocalyptic thought. But in 1103, in a castle in northern
Anatolia, modern-day Turkey, in the city of Niksar, a prisoner named
Bohemond had an epiphany about Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. It hap-
pened while he was speaking with his friend Richard of the Principate,
like Bohemond a Norman and a veteran of the First Crusade. In the
midst of their conversation, Bohemond realized something remark-
able about that stone uncut by human hand. It was not a symbol for
Christ. It was instead a symbol of Bohemond himself. He and his
friends—they were the stone. The prophet Daniel had been talking
about them.
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