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As we know, the Crusades were attended not only by noble knights in shining armor, but also by hordes of commoners. One such group during the 1^(st) Crusade was the Tafurs, which started as a band of the Flemish peasants. As the chronicler Guibert de Nogent writes in Gesta Dei per Francos they marched barefoot, carried no arms, and were not permitted to have any riches. Naked, needy and altogether filthy, they went ahead of the main body of the army, living from what they found on the ground. "Tafur" appears to mean just "beggar" or "vagrant". One day, the Tafurs gained an extraordinary leader.Very little is known about him, only that he was supposedly a noble knight from Normandy. One day this man took the name "King Tafur" and the Tafurs accepted his leadership. King Tafur became known for wearing a sackcloth instead of armor and fighting with a scythe. And his subordinates at first gained fame because according to de Nogent “it cannot be said how necessary these were (...) in the siege of cities, in turning stones, when they preceded donkeys and cattle in carrying burdens, when they used balistas and machines with frequent throws”. It is interesting how band of uneducated pesants somehow become masters of siege engines?

For now, it sounds like just another group of Christian fanatics who believe that poverty is the path to God (expet of their strange skill in siege enginerring)... But the Tafurs began to practice something that in the eyes of even – or maybe especially - the greatest zealots should be a great sin, heresy and blasphemy - they ate human flesh.

Most of the stories about cannibalism come from accounts of the siege of the fortresses of Antioch and Ma'arra.

According to the Chanson d’Antioche by Richard the Pilgrim it was something like that. The crusaders march on the city of Antioch and organize a siege. There is a fortified iron bridge at the main gate, and attempts to take it using standard battle tactics and siege engines fail, with great bloodshed. Disgruntled, the crusaders s decide to construct a fortress on the site of a mosque outside the city. As they excavate the foundations they dig up the adjacent cemetary, finding all sorts of valuable buried weapons, silver, fine Asian fabrics and Almerían silks; and in so doing, they unearth Muslim corpses. The desecration enrages the locals, who attack. The Franks kill them, and catapult their heads along with “twenty-five times twenty” cadaver skulls through the fine polished stone walls of Antioch (laisse 164). (The Tafur’s catapulting of massacred bodies is repeated in the Chanson de Jérusalem, but as I suggested before, we will see worse things coming from them).

The lord Peter the Hermit sat before his tent.

To him came Tafur and many of his people.

He had more than a thousand swollen with hunger.

" Sir, counsel me, for holy Charity,

For see, we die of himger and wretchedness."

And my lord Peter replied : " It is through your cowardice.

Go take these Turks who lie there dead.

Cooked and salted they will be good to eat."

And says King Tafur : " It is truth you say."

From the tent of Peter he turns away and has summoned his ribalds

They were more than ten thousand when together assembled.

The Turks they flayed and their entrails removed.

By boiling and roasting they cooked the flesh;

Thus they ate but tasted no bread.

By this were the Pagans much affrighted.

For the scent of the flesh reached to the ramparts.

Twenty thousand Pagans watched the ribalds ;

There was no single Turk who did not weep.

The "ribalds" said to one another: "This Turk's flesh is better than bacon or ham in oil.'

And when they no longer found in the fields Saracens' bodies to flay, they went to dig for them in the cemetery.

“And went to the cemeteries and dug up the bodies;

All together they piled them in a heap.

The decomposed they threw into the Orentes,

The others flayed and dried in the wind”.

The lords of the army come to have a look at this terrible banquet, Robert Short Hose and Boemond, Tancred and Godfrey de Bouillon asked King Tafur how he is feeling. He answered: "By my faith, I am much restored”. And then he asked for a some wine to complete a good meal. And Godfrey of Bouillon himself – the crusade leader who is later crowned the first ruler of Jerusalem – goes as far as to offer the Tafur King wine from his own collection.

After the siegie, we have a conversation between Bohemond and “governor of Antioch. Bohemond says: “None of this can be laid at our door. We did not order it and it wasn’t on our initiative. The responsibility lies with the King of the Tafurs, their leader. They are a ferocious people who detest you: as far as they’re concerned Turkish flesh tastes better than spiced peacock. The King of the Tafurs fears nobody.”

Crazy. Yes, things like cannibalism happen during the war... But something like this is usually treated as a sad, terrifying, disgusting necessity to be forgotten as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, the Tafuri were delighted with human flesh. What's more, they decided to make it a permanent part of their diet.

Another cannibalistic feast occurred in connection with the siege of the fortress of Ma'arra. Raymond of Aguilers confirms that after the siege human flesh was consumed in public and "with gusto" rather than secretly and shamefully. Ralph of Caen claims that “adults were put in the stewpot, and that [children] were skewered on spits. Both were cooked and eaten”.

In the description of the battle of Citevot we read:

There was the king of Tafur and his rabble.

And they swear by God, who created the whole world,

that if they should meet with heathen,

they would eat them with naked teeth.

The Tafur scream and howl and make a great noise.

Time for the great finale of the First Crusade – battle for the Jerusalem. As we read in Chanson de Jerusalem:

„[Godfrey] handed [those who would not convert] over to the ribalts [Tafurs] who beheaded them and, once they had killed them, stripped them naked. They dragged the bodies out in front of Jerusalem and flung them inside using Turkish mangonels. They flayed the corpses and cut them open and salted them, then hung them up to dry in the wind. As for the heads, they impaled them on sharp sticks and stuck them in along the edgeof the ditches”.

Some time after that, the Tafur King is given the honor of making the first assault. And after the victory, it was King Tafur, not some bishop of other priest, who crowned Godfrey de Bouillon as the Advocate of the Holy Sepulchre with the crown of leaves.

And after that, King Tafur and his merry band of the maneaters mysteriously disappear from the annals of the history. No further mention. They helped conquer Jerusalem, their leader crowned its ruler... and that's it. They are not rewarded with lands, titles, or offices. They are not exterminated as a shameful—and no longer necessary—part of the Crusades.

The most obvious connection to myth is ghouls. Perhaps King Tafur was a ghoul, as were at least some of his followers. The rest could simply have been human "worshippers." However, it's worth remembering that ghouls aren't the only cannibalistic motif in Lovecraft's work. "The Picture in the Old House" suggests that there are people who devour their own kin to gain strength, health, and longevity—whether effectively remains an open question.

Perhaps King Tafur and his subjects joined the crusade for mundane reasons - war is known to produce large numbers of corpses. Because the First Crusade was not so much an army as a motley crew of many different groups, most of the time without a clearly defined leadership, discipline was exceptionally lax - which only further emboldened the ghouls, who began to openly practice their culinary customs.

Or perhaps the main reason was something else? The Middle East is, after all, a land of ancient mysteries. There, remnants of the knowledge of Hellenistic philosophers, Egyptian priests, Persian magicians, and Babylonian soothsayers can be found. It was there that the Necronomicon was written. Events that gave rise to the world's greatest religions unfolded there—and before that, much, much older beliefs, such as the Sumerians, flourished there. Perhaps the ghouls were searching for some ancient records or artifacts... or the resting place of some ancient being who inspired one of the many Near Eastern myths?

Or perhaps the Tafurs were a cult of human cannibals seeking knowledge that would allow them to gain eternal life through the consumption of human flesh? They may be a para-Christian group that takes the New Testament references to eating the body of Christ as a guide.

Did the Tafurs achieve their goal and end their activities in this form, considering them no longer necessary? Did the regular crusaders conclude that the cannibals were overreacting and should be quietly disposed of? Did the Tafurs evolve into another organization, such as the famous Templar order, which is associated with numerous conspiracy theories and was ultimately accused of heresy?As for the accusations against the Templars, most of them were pretty standard - secret desecration of the cross, conspiring with the Saracens... But among them there was one very strange one - worshipping the head or heads.The indictment published by the court of Rome set forth ... "that in all the provinces they had idols, that is to say, heads, some of which had three faces, others but one; sometimes, it was a human skull ... That in their assemblies, and especially in their grand chapters, they worshipped the idol as a god, as their saviour, saying that this head could save them, that it bestowed on the order all its wealth, made the trees flower, and the plants of the earth to sprout forth." ( Jules Michelet, History of France). A living object that affects its surroundings by its mere presence sounds Lovecraftian. Was the triple head some creature the Tafur/Templars discovered during the Crusade? Or perhaps ancient knowledge allowed for immortality in the form of severed heads (reminiscent of Mi-Go brain practices), with the triple head being the most successful experiment, combining the three heads of the order's sages into a single biological computer that secretly ruled the organization?

More Lovecraftian inspirations from the real life, history, science and culture You can find in the free brochure: https://adeptus7.itch.io/lovecraftian-inspirations-from-real-life-and-beliefs or on our Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDjiV321dZZ6ZOSge9Y_N4A