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Authors: Thomas Asbridge

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From November 1096 onwards the main armies of the First Crusade began to arrive at the great city of Constantinople (Istanbul), ancient gateway to the Orient and capital of the Byzantine Empire. For the next six months the various contingents of the expedition passed through Byzantium on their way to Asia Minor and the frontier with Islam. Constantinople was a natural location for the diverse forces of the crusade to gather, given that it stood on the traditional pilgrim route to the Holy Land and that the Franks had travelled east with the express intention of aiding their Greek brethren.

The ambitions of Alexius

 

The Byzantine Emperor Alexius I Comnenus had already witnessed the disordered collapse of the People’s Crusade, and it usually is argued that he viewed the advent of the main crusade with equal disdain and suspicion. His daughter and biographer Anna Comnena wrote that Alexius had ‘dreaded [the arrival of the Franks], knowing as he did their uncontrollable passion, their erratic character and their irresolution, not to mention their greed’. Elsewhere she described the crusaders as ‘all the barbarians of the West’ and was particularly scathing in her descriptions of Bohemond as ‘a habitual rogue’ who was ‘by nature a liar’. Drawing upon her vituperative rhetoric, historians have often depicted the early Greco-Latin encounters of 1096–7 as being stained by deep-seated mistrust and ingrained hostility. In fact, Anna Comnena’s account, written decades after the event, was heavily coloured by hindsight. To be sure, currents of wary circumspection, even of antipathy, pulsed beneath the surface of crusader–Byzantine relations. There were even occasional outbreaks of ill-tempered infighting. But to begin with, at least, these were eclipsed by instances of constructive cooperation.
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To truly understand the First Crusaders’ journey through Byzantium and beyond, the preconceptions and prejudices of both the Franks and the Greeks must be reconstructed. Many imagine that in terms of wealth, power and culture European history has always been dominated by the West. But in the eleventh century the focal point of civilisation lay to the east, in Byzantium, inheritor of Greco-Roman might and glory; continuator of the known world’s most enduring empire. Alexius could trace his imperial heritage back to the likes of Augustus Caesar and Constantine the Great, and for the Franks this imbued the emperor and his realm with a near-mystical aura of majesty.

The crusaders’ arrival at Constantinople served only to reinforce this impression. Standing before its colossal outer walls–four miles long, up to fifteen feet thick and sixty feet tall–there could be no doubt that they beheld the heart of Christian Europe’s great superpower. For those fortunate enough to be granted entry to the capital itself, the wonders only multiplied. Home to perhaps half a million citizens, this metropolis dwarfed the largest city in Latin Europe tenfold. Visitors could marvel at the domed Basilica of St Sophia, Christendom’s most spectacular church, and gaze at the giant triumphal statues of Alexius’ legendary forebears. Constantinople also was home to an unrivalled collection of sacred relics, including Christ’s crown of thorns, locks of the Virgin Mary’s hair, at least two heads of John the Baptist and the bones of virtually all the Apostles.

It is little wonder that most crusaders expected, quite naturally, that their expedition would begin in the service of the emperor. For his part, Alexius offered the Frankish armies a cautious welcome, shepherding them from the borders of his empire to his capital, ever under a watchful eye. He viewed the crusade as a military tool to be used in the defence of his realm. Having requested aid from Pope Urban in 1095, he was now confronted by a swarm of Latin crusaders. But for all their supposed unruly savagery, he recognised that the Franks’ brutish vitality might be harnessed in the interests of the empire. Wielded with care and control, the crusade might prove to be the decisive weapon in his struggle to reconquer Asia Minor from the Seljuq Turks. Both Greeks and Latins were thus primed for collaboration, but the seeds of discord were present nonetheless. Most Franks expected the emperor to assume personal command of their armies, leading them as part of a grand coalition to the gates of Jerusalem itself. Alexius had no such plans. For him the needs of Byzantium, not those of the crusade, would always be paramount. He would furnish the Latins with aid and happily capitalise on any successes they enjoyed, not least if they enabled him to repulse the threat from Islam and perhaps even reclaim the strategically vital Syrian city of Antioch. But he would never expose his dynasty to overthrow, or his empire to invasion, by conducting a protracted campaign in the distant Holy Land. This disjuncture of aims and expectations would, in time, prove to have tragic consequences.

In service of the emperor

 

Determined to stamp his authority on the Franks, Alexius took full advantage of the crusader host’s fragmented nature, dealing with each prince individually as they arrived at Constantinople. He also played upon his great capital’s imposing magnificence to intimidate the Latins. On 20 January 1097 one of the first princes to arrive, Godfrey of Bouillon, was invited in the company of his leading nobles to an audience with Alexius at the opulent imperial Palace of the Blachernae. Godfrey apparently found the emperor ‘seated, as was his custom, looking powerful on the throne of his sovereignty, not getting up to offer kisses [of greeting] to the duke nor to anyone’. Maintaining this air of regal majesty, Alexius required Godfrey solemnly to promise that ‘whatever cities, countries or forts he might in future subdue, which had in the first place belonged to the Roman Empire, he would hand over to the officer appointed by the emperor’. This meant that any territory captured in Asia Minor and even beyond would be handed over to the Byzantines. The duke then offered the emperor an oath of vassalage, creating a reciprocal bond of allegiance which confirmed Alexius’ right to direct the crusade, but also entitled Godfrey to expect imperial aid and counsel. In a characteristic show of Byzantine munificence, the emperor sweetened this act of capitulation by showering the Frankish prince with gifts of gold and silver, along with precious purple fabrics and valuable horses. With the deal done, Alexius promptly whisked Godfrey and his army across the Bosphorus Strait–the narrow finger of water connecting the Mediterranean with the Black Sea and separating the European and Asian continents–in order to avoid the potentially destabilising buildup of Latin troops outside Constantinople itself.

In the succeeding months virtually all the leading crusaders followed Duke Godfrey’s example. In April 1097 Bohemond of Taranto appeared to make peace with his former Greek enemy, willingly acceding to the oath. He was lavishly rewarded with an entire room packed with treasure, which, according to Anna Comnena, practically made his eyeballs pop from his head. Three Frankish nobles sought to evade Alexius’ net. The ambitious lesser princes, Tancred of Hauteville and Baldwin of Bologne, each made an immediate crossing of the Bosphorus to avoid the oath, but were later persuaded to submit. Raymond, count of Toulouse, alone stubbornly resisted the emperor’s overtures, finally agreeing only to a modified pact which saw him vow not to threaten Alexius’ power or possessions.
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The First Crusaders’ Route to the Holy Land

 

The siege of Nicaea

 

The main armies of the First Crusade started to gather on the shore of Asia Minor in February 1097, and over the following months their numbers gradually built up to perhaps 75,000, including some 7,500 fully armed, mounted knights and a further 35,000 lightly equipped infantry. The timing of their arrival on the doorstep of the Muslim world proved to be most propitious. Months earlier Kilij Arslan, the Seljuq Turkish sultan of the region, had annihilated the People’s Crusade with relative ease. Thinking that this second wave of Franks would pose a similarly limited danger, he set off to deal with a minor territorial dispute far to the east. This blunder left the Christians free to cross the Bosphorus and establish a beachhead without hindrance throughout that spring.

The Latins’ first Muslim target was defined by their alliance with the Greeks, and Alexius’ primary objective was Nicaea, the city just inland from the Bosphorus which Kilij Arslan had brazenly declared his capital. This Turkish foothold in western Asia Minor threatened the security of Constantinople itself, but it had stubbornly resisted the emperor’s best efforts at reconquest. Now Alexius deployed his new weapon: the ‘barbarian’ Franks. They arrived at Nicaea on 6 May to find an imposing stronghold. One Latin eyewitness described how ‘skilful men had enclosed the city with such lofty walls that it feared neither the attack of enemies nor the force of any machine’. These thirty-foot-high battlements, nearly three miles in circumference, incorporated more than one hundred towers. More troubling still was the fact that the western edge of the city was built against the shores of the massive Askanian Lake, thus allowing the Turkish garrison, which probably numbered no more than a few thousand, to receive supplies and reinforcements even if they were encircled on land.

The Christians came close to suffering a damaging reversal in the first stage of their siege. Having now recognised the threat to his capital, Kilij Arslan returned from eastern Asia Minor in late spring. On 16 May he tried to launch a surprise attack upon the armies ranged before Nicaea, pouring out from the steep, wooded hills to the south of the city. Luckily for the Franks, a Turkish spy caught in their camp betrayed the Seljuqs’ plans when threatened with torture and death. When the Muslim assault began the Latins were ready and, through sheer weight of numbers, soon forced Kilij Arslan to retreat. He escaped with most of his army intact, but his military prestige and the morale of Nicaea’s garrison suffered grave damage. Hoping to accentuate enemy desperation, the crusaders decapitated hundreds of Turkish dead, parading the heads upon spikes before the city and even throwing some over the walls ‘in order to cause more terror’. This sort of barbarous psychological warfare was common in medieval sieges and certainly not the preserve of the Christians. In the coming weeks the Nicaean Turks retaliated with macabre tenacity, using iron hooks attached to ropes to haul up any Frankish corpses left near the walls after skirmishes and then hanging these cadavers from the walls to rot, so as ‘to offend the Christians’.
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Having repulsed Kilij Arslan’s attack, the crusaders adopted a combined siege strategy to overcome Nicaea’s defences, employing two styles of siege warfare simultaneously. On one hand, they established a close blockade of the city’s landward walls to the north, east and south, hoping to cut off Nicaea from the outside world, gradually grinding its garrison into submission through physical and psychological isolation. As yet, however, the Franks had no means of severing westward lines of communication via the lake, so they also actively pursued the more aggressive strategy of an assault siege. Early attempts to storm the city with scaling ladders failed, so efforts centred upon creating a physical breach in the walls. The crusaders built some stone-throwing machines, or mangonels, but these were of limited power, incapable of propelling missiles of sufficient size to inflict significant damage to robust battlements. Instead, the Latins used light bombardment to harass the Turks and, under cover of this fire, attempted to undermine Nicaea’s walls by hand.

This was potentially lethal work. To reach the foot of the ramparts troops had to negotiate a deadly rain of Muslim arrows and stone missiles, and, once there, they were exposed to attack from above by burning pitch and oil. The Franks experimented with a range of portable bombardment screens to counter these dangers, with varying degrees of success. One such contraption, proudly christened ‘the fox’ and fashioned from oak beams, promptly collapsed, killing twenty crusaders. The southern French had more luck, constructing a sturdier, sloping-roofed screen which allowed them to reach the walls and begin a siege mine. Sappers dug a tunnel beneath the southern battlements, carefully buttressing the excavation with timber supports as they went, before packing the void with branches and kindling. At dusk around 1 June 1097 they set this wood alight, leaving the whole structure to collapse, bringing down a small section of the defences above. Unfortunately for the Franks, the Turkish garrison managed to repair the damage overnight and no further progress was made.

By mid-June, with the crusaders enjoying no noteworthy progress, it fell to the Byzantines to tip the balance. Stationed a day’s journey to the north, Alexius had maintained a discreet but watchful distance from the siege, while dispatching troops and military advisers to assist the Latins. Most notable among these was Taticius, a cool-headed veteran of the imperial household born of half-Arab, half-Greek parentage, known for his loyalty to the emperor.
*
It was not until mid-June that Alexius made the defining contribution to Nicaea’s investment. In response to requests from the crusader princes, he portaged a small fleet of Greek ships twenty miles overland to the Askanian Lake. At dawn on 18 June this flotilla sailed towards Nicaea’s western walls, trumpets and drums blaring, as the Franks launched a coordinated land-based assault. Utterly horrified, with the noose closing around them, the Seljuq troops within were said to have been ‘afraid almost to death, and began to wail and lament’. Within hours they sued for peace and Taticius and the Byzantines took possession of the city.

BOOK: The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land
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