Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 (9 page)

1
The discovery
that every corpse washed up on the shore bore a cross miraculously inscribed on its shoulder-blade doubtless impressed them, but failed to make them change their minds.

2
Sir Steven Runciman,
A History of tht Crusades,
Vol. I, p. 168.

indulged; as usual, however, all those who wished to do so were allowed to enter in groups of half a dozen at a time to see the sights and worship at the principal shrines. There were no complaints. After a fortnight they followed the other armies over the Bosphorus - no worse, wrote Stephen, than crossing the Seine or the Marne - and joined them at Nicaea.

The relief of Alexius Comnenus, as he watched the last of the Crusaders embark on the vessel that was to carry them over to Asia, may well be imagined. He himself can have had little idea of just how many men, women and children had crossed his territory in the course of the past nine months; the total - ranging from Peter the Hermit's rabble to the great feudal lords like Raymond of Saint-Gilles - cannot have been far short of a hundred thousand. Inevitably, there had been a degree of desultory marauding and a few unfortunate incidents; on the whole, however, thanks to his preparations and precautions - in particular the regular food supplies which he had arranged and the admirable policing by his own troops - the armies had caused remarkably little trouble. Whether willingly or not, all the commanders except Raymond - with whom he had come to a private understanding - had sworn him their allegiance; even if they were later to break their oaths his own moral position would be immeasurably strengthened.

On this last score he had no delusions. The Crusaders were still within his Empire, and although they were at present engaged against his Turkish enemies there was no telling what long-term ambitions they might cherish. As they had already made all too clear, they had no love for the Byzantines. In the Balkans and Thrace, where they had expected to be welcomed as saviours, they had been received with suspicion and mistrust. In Constantinople itself, the small and carefully-shepherded groups of sightseers had been thoroughly shaken by what they had seen. For a French peasant or the burgher of a small medieval German town the first sight of the richest and most luxurious city in the world, of its markets of silks and spices redolent of all the exoticism of the East, of its extravagantly dressed noblemen with their retinues of slaves and eunuchs, of its great ladies borne along on gilded palanquins, their faces brilliant with paint and enamel beneath coiffures of astonishing elaboration, must have appeared first incredible and then profoundly shocking; while such religious services as they attended would have seemed unfamiliar, incomprehensible and deeply heretical into the bargain.

The Byzantines felt no more warmly disposed to the Crusaders.

Foreign armies, however friendly they might be in theory, were never welcome guests; but these dirty and ill-mannered barbarians were surely worse than most. They had ravaged their lands, ravished their women, plundered their towns and villages; yet they seemed to take all this as their right, unaccountably expecting to be treated as heroes and deliverers rather than as the ruffians they were. Their departure had occasioned much rejoicing; and when they returned they would, it was devoutly hoped, be considerably fewer in number than on the outward journey. Fellow-Christians they might be; but there must have been quite a number of the Emperor's subjects who secretly hoped for the success of Saracen arms in the encounters that were to come.

Alexius Comnenus did not share such hopes. He had not summoned the Crusade - he did not even approve of it - but now that it was there he was determined to give it all the help he could, provided only that it kept to its original purpose to deliver the Holy Places from the Infidel. Up to that point, the interests of Christendom and of his Empire went hand in hand. They would cease to do so only if the Crusaders began to forget the Cross that they bore on their shoulders and to act on their own initiative; as Alexius well knew, though it was an easy matter to allow foreign armies to enter one's territory, it was a good deal harder to get them out again.

Contrary to the expectations of many, the First Crusade turned out to be a resounding, if undeserved, success. In June 1097 Nicaea was besieged and captured, with the consequent restoration of Byzantine sovereignty in western Asia Minor; on 1 July the Seljuk Turks were smashed at Dorylaeum in Anatolia; on 3 June 1098 Antioch fell to Crusader arms; and finally on 15 July 1099, amid scenes of hideous carnage, the soldiers of Christ battered their way into Jerusalem, where they slaughtered all the Muslims in the city and burnt all the Jews alive in the main synagogue before, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, clasping their bloodstained hands together in prayer and thanksgiving. Two of their former leaders were not, however, by then among them: Baldwin of Boulogne had made himself Count of Edessa on the Middle Euphrates, while Bohemund - after a bitter quarrel with Raymond of Toulouse -had established himself as Prince of Antioch.

In Jerusalem itself, an election was held to decide upon its future ruler. The obvious candidate was Raymond: he was the oldest of the leading Crusaders, the richest and by far the most experienced. But, to everyone's surprise, he refused. Hi
s arrogance and his overbearing
manner had made him unpopular with his colleagues: he would never be able to count on their obedience or support, and he knew it. The choice eventually fell upon Godfrey of Lower Lorraine. He had not shown any particular military or diplomatic ability during the Crusade, though he had fought bravely enough. A more important consideration was his genuine piety and - in marked contrast to most of his fellows - his irreproachable private life. He too made a show of reluctance; but he eventually agreed provided that, in the city where Christ had worn the crown of thorns, he was not obliged to bear the title of King. Instead, he would take the title of
Advocatus Sancti Sepulchri,
Defender of the Holy Sepulchre.

To Alexius Comnenus, devout Christian that he was, the news of the recovery of Jerusalem could not have been anything but welcome. It was not that he trusted the Crusaders; but the city had been in infidel hands for the best part of four centuries, and was anyway too far distant from Constantinople to be of major strategic importance. The situation in Antioch, on the other hand, caused him grave anxiety. This ancient city and patriarchate had also had a chequered history: it had been sacked by the Persians in the sixth century and occupied by them for nearly twenty years in the early seventh, before falling to the Arabs in 637; but in 969 it had been reconquered by the Empire, of which it had thereafter remained an integral part until 1078. Its inhabitants were overwhelmingly Greek-speaking and Orthodox; and in the eyes of Alexius and all his right-thinking subjects it was a Byzantine city through and through. Now it had been seized by a Norman adventurer who, despite his oath, clearly had no intention of surrendering it and was no longer making any secret of his hostility. He had even gone so far as to expel the Greek Patriarch and replace him with a Latin, Bernard of Valence, formerly Bishop Adhemar's chaplain.

There was, however, one source of comfort: Bohemund was every bit as unwelcome to his neighbours to
the north, the Danishmend Turks
' and Alexius's satisfaction can well be imagined when he heard, in the summer of 1100, that the Prince of Antioch was their prisoner and had been carried off in chains to the castle of Niksar - the Greek Neocaesarea - far away in the mountains of Pontus. There he was to remain for three

1 A Turkoman dynasty whose founder, the Emir Danishmend, had appeared in Asia Minor some fifteen years before and ruled in Cappadocia and the regions around Sebastcia (now Sivas) and Melitene. Over the next centur
y, as we shall see, the Danishme
nds were to play a significant part in Byzantine history; but after the Seljuk capture of Melitene in 1178 they were to vanish as suddenly as they had appeared.

long years until he was finally ransomed by Baldwin, who had become King of Jerusalem - unlike his brother Godfrey, he had had no qualms about the title - on Godfrey's death in July 1100.

During these first years following the Crusaders' triumph, it became ever more clear that Bohemund was not alone in his attitude to Byzantium. After the capture of Jerusalem, the genuine pilgrims — many of them sickened by the atrocities they had seen committed in Christ's name - had begun to trickle home; the Franks who remained in Outremer (as the Crusader lands in the Middle East had come to be called) were the military adventurers who, having recaptured the Holy City, were now out for what they could get. Of all the leaders of the First Crusade, only Raymond of Toulouse - who, ironically, had alone refused to swear the oath at Constantinople - had acted in good faith and had returned to the Emperor certain conquests of what had formerly been imperial territory. The rest were proving little better than the Saracens they had supplanted.

None of this came as any surprise to Alexius; indeed, it confirmed what he had always known. But it could not have improved his temper when he saw, in
iioi
, no fewer than four more expeditions arriving at his capital on their way to the East: a Lombard army of some twenty thousand under Archbishop Anselm of Milan; a large group of French knights - including poor Stephen of Blois, who had taken flight during the siege of Antioch and was now returning at the insistence of his formidable wife Adela - she was not the Conqueror's daughter for nothing - to redeem his reputation; another French army led by Count William of Nevers; and an immense Franco-German force under the joint command of William, Duke of Aquitaine and Welf, Duke of Bavaria - which also included Hugh of Vermandois, who had retired from the First Crusade after the capture of Antioch and was determined to fulfil his vow to reach Jerusalem. What would have been the consequences for Byzantium if these armies had met with the success of their predecessors is a question on which one would rather not speculate; in fact, all met with disaster. The Lombards - who, soon after their arrival, had forced an entry into the Palace of Blachernae and killed one of the Emperor's pet lions - joined up with Stephen and his knights and set off under the command of Raymond of Toulouse, who had been paying a visit to Alexius; they captured Ancyra (now Ankara) and duly returned it to the Empire, but shortly afterwards were ambushed by the Danishmends and their allies at Mersivan, near Amasea (the modern Amasya). Four-fifths of the army per
ished; the women and children -
for once again many of the Crusaders were travelling with their families - were carried off as slaves; Raymond, his Provencal bodyguard and his Byzantine escort fled the field under cover of darkness and made their way back to Constantinople.

The other two armies fared no better. William of Nevers crossed the Bosphorus towards the end of June and led his men via Ancyra to Iconium (Konya), which he tried to capture without success. He then moved on to Heraclea Cybistra (Eregli), which the enemy had recently abandoned, having poisoned all the wells. The summer was now at its height; the Nivernais army, half-mad with thirst, searched desperately for some alternative water supply, but in vain. The Turks, under the joint command of the Seljuk Sultan Kilij Arslan and the Danishmend Malik Ghazi, allowed them a few days to exhaust themselves; then they struck. The Christian cavalry broke and fled, the infantry and non-combatants were slain or captured. William, his brother and a small company of knights managed to escape, and hired some local Turcopoles
1
to take them to Antioch; but their guides betrayed them, stole their horses and all their possessions and left them to fend for themselves, naked in the wilderness. At last they reached the city, where Bohemund's nephew Tancred took pity on them and gave them shelter for the winter. The following spring they rode on, sad and dispirited, to Jerusalem.

The Crusaders from Aquitaine and Bavaria seem to have suffered much the same fate. They too encountered poisoned wells and the torments of thirst but, unlike the Nivernais, they found a river near Heraclea. Unfortunately, this was just what they were intended to do. No sooner had they flung themselves into the water than the Turks loosed a hail of arrows and charged out from their ambush. As usual it was the leaders, with their faster horses, who survived: William of Aquitaine escaped to Tarsus and thence to Antioch, while Welf of Bavaria threw away all his arms and armour and slipped off incognito through the mountains. Hugh of Vermandois was less fortunate. Badly wounded in the knee by an arrow, he too somehow reached Tarsus; but the effort was too much for him and he died there on 18 October, his vow unfulfilled.

The release of Bohemund of Antioch in 1103 was the signal for a renewed burst of activity on the part of those Crusaders who had now settled in Outremer. By this time they were fighting Arabs, Turks and Byzantines more or less indiscriminately, with occasional brief truces;

1 Turkish horsemen serving in the imperial army.

but they were not outstandingly successful, and in the early summer of 1104 they suffered a crushing defeat by the Turks beneath the walls of Harran, some twenty-five miles south-east of Edessa on the Balikh river. Bohemund's army managed to escape without serious losses - though Patriarch Bernard was so frightened that he cut off his horse's tail as he fled, lest some Turk should seize hold of it and catch him - but the forces of Edessa were massacred almost to a man. Both Baldwin and his cousin, Joscelin of Courtenay, were captured.

The catastrophe at Harran, together with the failures of the expeditions of 1101, dealt the military reputation of the early Crusaders a blow from which it never recovered. Together they virtually closed the overland supply line from the West, which was of considerable value to Antioch and essential to Edessa for its very survival. They also made it possible for Alexius Comnenus to recapture several vital fortresses, including Adana, Mopsuestia
1
and Tarsus, and coastal cities from Laodicea (Lattakieh) as far south as Tripoli. Bohemund now felt dangerously threatened. Leaving Tancred to look after his principality and taking with him the
Gesta Francorum
- an account of the First Crusade written by a Norman and heavily biased in favour of his countrymen — he set sail in the late autumn for Europe, to raise reinforcements.
2