Ed West Ed West

What really matters in the Covid culture wars?

A protester displays a sign reading 'unvaccinated' during a protest in Germany (Getty images)

During the grimmest days of the First Crusade in 1098, the western Christians found themselves besieged by the Turks in Antioch. They had travelled more than a thousand miles from France, and countless fellow believers had died in the almost impossible trek across the known world; now running out of food and water, they were tired, hungry and desperate.

At their lowest point, and ready to give into despair, Christian spirits were raised by the arrival of one Peter Bartholomew, a poor man from Provence who claimed he had been visited by the Virgin, promising them victory. The noblemen in charge were suspicious, as Peter was not only an illiterate farmhand type but also quite shifty, yet soon momentum built around his cause. He had an audience.

Peter had then dreamed he had seen the Holy Lance, the spear which had pierced Jesus’s side on the cross, and apparently – according to his vision – was buried outside the city’s church of St Peter. So off they all went, digging for hours in the June heat to find this object and prove victory was at hand; after several hours, the exhausted Frenchmen saw Peter suddenly appear ‘clad only in a shirt and barefooted’ with a lance in his hand. He was proved correct, even if no one had actually seen him find it. Two weeks later, the crusaders won the Battle of Antioch, and the Provençal peasant’s triumph was complete.

Yet many of the those in charge were still sceptical, and the issue caused division among the crusaders, primarily along regional lines. The ‘Franks’ – as the Arabs called all crusaders – were split between the Provençals and Normans, two distinct groups whose cultural and linguistic differences dated back to the Germanic conquest of northern Gaul and beyond. The Normans didn’t believe Peter, because the Provençals did.

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