The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land (8 page)

The capture of Nicaea marked the high point of Greco-Frankish cooperation during the First Crusade. There were some initial grumbles among the Latin rank-and-file about the lack of plunder, but these were soon silenced by Alexius’ decision to reward his allies with lavish quantities of hard cash. Later western chronicles played up the degree of tension present after Nicaea’s fall, but a letter written home by the leading crusader Stephen of Blois later that same summer made it clear that an atmosphere of friendship and cooperation endured. The emperor now held an audience with the Frankish princes to discuss the next stage of the campaign. The crusaders’ route across Asia Minor was likely agreed and the city of Antioch identified as an objective. Alexius’ plan was to follow in the expedition’s wake, mopping up any territory it conquered and, in the hope of maintaining control over events, he directed Taticius to accompany the Latins as his official representative, along with a small force of Byzantine troops.

Throughout that spring and summer Alexius furnished the Latins with invaluable advice and intelligence. Anna Comnena noted that Alexius ‘warned [them] about the things likely to happen on their journey [and] gave them profitable advice. They were instructed in the methods normally used by the Turks in battle; told how they should draw up a battle-line, how to lay ambushes; advised not to pursue far when the enemy ran away in flight.’ He also counselled the crusade leadership to temper blunt aggression towards Islam with an element of pragmatic diplomacy. They followed his advice, seeking to exploit Muslim political and religious disunity by dispatching envoys by ship to the Fatimid caliphate in Egypt to discuss a potential treaty.
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As the crusaders left Nicaea in the last week of June 1097, Alexius could look back over the preceding months with some satisfaction. The Frankish horde had been channelled through his empire without major incident and a grave blow struck against the Seljuq Kilij Arslan. In spite of occasional moments of friction, with the magisterial presence of the emperor close at hand, the Latins had proved themselves to be both cooperative and subservient. The question was how long the spell would hold now that the crusade was marching on to the Holy Land and away from the heart of Byzantine authority.

ACROSS ASIA MINOR

Without Alexius’ leadership the Franks had to wrestle with the issues of command and organisation. Essentially their army was a composite force, one mass made up of many smaller parts, united by a common faith–Latin Catholicism–but drawn from across western Europe. Many had been enemies before the expedition began. They even faced a profound communication barrier: the northern French crusader Fulcher of Chartres remarked, ‘Who ever heard such a mixture of languages in one army?’

This disparate mass needed to be guided by a resolute hand. Indeed, the dictates of military logic suggested that without a clear, individual commander the crusade surely would be doomed to disintegration and collapse. But from the summer of 1097 onwards, the expedition had no single leader. The papal legate, Adhémar of Le Puy, could claim spiritual primacy, and the Greek Taticius certainly offered guidance, but in practice neither wielded total power. In fact, the crusaders had to feel their way towards an organisational structure through a process of experimentation and innovation, relying heavily upon the unifying influence of their shared devotional goal. Against all expectations, they achieved significant success. Their most valuable decision-making tool proved to be group discussion, normally anathema to military enterprise. From now on a council, made up of the leading Frankish princes–men such as Raymond of Toulouse and Bohemond of Taranto–met to discuss and agree policy. Early on they created a common fund through which all plunder could be channelled and redistributed. They also had to decide how best to negotiate the crossing of Asia Minor.

Because of its vast size, the crusade could not realistically move forward as a single army. Stretched out along the Roman roads and pilgrim routes that lay ahead, a single column of 70,000 people might take days to pass a given point. Foraging for food and supplies as they went, they would also scourge the surrounding countryside like a plague of locusts. But the Christians could ill afford to break into smaller contingents, travelling separately as they had en route to Constantinople, because Kilij Arslan and the Seljuq Turks still posed a very real threat. The princes eventually chose to divide their forces in two, while maintaining relatively close contact during the march.
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The Battle of Dorylaeum

On 29 June 1097, Bohemond’s southern Italian Normans and Robert of Normandy’s army set off, trailed at some distance by Godfrey of Bouillon, Robert of Flanders and the southern French. The plan was to rendezvous some four days’ march to the south-east, at Dorylaeum, an abandoned Byzantine military camp. Kilij Arslan, however, had other ideas. After his humiliation at Nicaea he had amassed a full-strength army and was now hoping to ambush the crusaders as they crossed his lands. Their division into two armies gave him an opportunity to strike. On the morning of 1 July he attacked Bohemond’s and Robert’s leading force in an area of open ground at the junction of two valleys near Dorylaeum. One member of Bohemond’s army recalled the horror of the moment as the Turks suddenly came into sight and ‘began all at once to howl and gabble and shout, saying with loud voices in their own language some devilish word which I do not understand…screaming like demons’. Kilij Arslan had come with a throng of lightly armed but agile Seljuq horsemen, hoping to wreak havoc among the slower-moving crusader ranks, encircling like a whirlwind and shattering their formation with an unceasing hail of missiles. The Latins were certainly shocked by their opponents’ tactics. One eyewitness in the thick of the fighting wrote: ‘The Turks were howling like wolves and furiously shooting a cloud of arrows. We were stunned by this. Since we faced death and since many of us were wounded, we soon took flight; nor is this remarkable, because to all of us such warfare was unknown.’

Some may have fled, but, astonishingly, Bohemond and Robert were able to rally their troops and set up a makeshift camp beside a marsh. Instead of chaotic retreat, they chose to hold their ground, establish a defensive formation and wait for reinforcement. For half a day they relied upon weight of numbers and superior armour to resist the continuing Turkish assault. To strengthen their resolve in the face of this swarm, the crusaders passed a morale-boasting phrase down the line: ‘Stand fast together, trusting in Christ and the victory of the Holy Cross. Today may we all gain much booty.’ Occasionally, however, enemy troops did break through:

Even so, the crusader line held firm. In the medieval age effective generalship was heavily dependent upon force of personality, the power to inspire obedience, and it is much to Bohemond’s and Robert’s credit that they were able to control their troops in the face of such aggression. After five appalling hours, the main crusading force arrived and Kilij Arslan was forced to retreat. Casualties were high, with perhaps as many as 4,000 Christians and 3,000 Muslims killed, but the attempt to terrify the crusaders into routing had failed. From this point on Kilij Arslan avoided them. The nomadic Seljuqs of Asia Minor had not been defeated, but their resistance was broken, opening the route across Anatolia.
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Contacts and conquests

After Dorylaeum the crusaders faced a different kind of enemy during their three-month march to Antioch. Thirst, starvation and disease plagued them throughout the summer of 1097 as they passed a series of settlements abandoned by the Turks. According to one chronicler, at one point the lack of water became so acute that:

It may seem remarkable that the deaths of animals were described in almost equal detail to those of men, but all the contemporary sources share this obsession with horses and pack animals. The army relied upon the latter to transport equipment and supplies, while knights depended upon their mounts in battle. In the past historians emphasised the military advantage enjoyed by crusader knights because of their larger, stronger, European horses, but, in truth, most of these died even before Syria was reached. A Frankish eyewitness later noted that because of this ‘many of our knights had to go as foot-soldiers, and for lack of horses we had to use oxen as mounts’.
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Crusaders occasionally fell foul of more unusual dangers. Godfrey of Bouillon, for one, was attacked and severely wounded by a savage bear while hunting. He was lucky to survive. These perils and hardships seem to have prompted more careful planning of the journey’s next leg. Upon reaching the fertile south-eastern corner of Asia Minor the crusaders began forging alliances with the local Armenian Christian population, who until then had been living under Turkish rule. At Heraclea, Tancred and Baldwin of Boulogne were sent south into Cilicia, while the main army took the northern route via Coxon and Marash. Both groups made contact with indigenous Armenian Christians, but Tancred and Baldwin went further, establishing an allied resource centre that helped to supply the entire crusade in the months to come, and securing a more direct route into Syria for the armies of reinforcements that the Franks were expecting to join them at Antioch.

In the aftermath of this Cilician expedition Baldwin decided to break off from the main crusade to seek his fortune in the eastern borderlands between Syria and Mesopotamia. He saw an opportunity to establish his own independent Levantine lordship and, leaving with a small company of just one hundred knights, began a campaign of brutal conquest and unceasing self-advancement that revealed his skills both as a military commander and as a wily political operator. Styling himself as the ‘liberator’ of Armenian Christians from the yoke of oppressive Turkish rule, Baldwin swiftly established control over a swathe of territory running east to the River Euphrates. His burgeoning reputation then earned him an invitation to ally with Thoros, the ageing Armenian ruler of Edessa, a city in the Fertile Crescent, beyond the Euphrates. The two were actually joined as adoptive father and son by a curious public ritual: both men stripped to the waist, and then, as Thoros embraced Baldwin, ‘binding him to his naked chest’, a long shirt was placed over them to seal their union. Unfortunately for Thoros, this ceremony did little to temper Baldwin’s ruthless ambition. Within a few months his Armenian ‘father’ had been murdered, probably with Baldwin’s tacit approval. The Frank then seized control of the city and surrounding region to create the first crusader state in the Near East–the county of Edessa.
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Meanwhile, the armies of the First Crusade regrouped on the borders of northern Syria in early October 1097; they had survived the crossing of Asia Minor, albeit with major losses. The events of the following century would prove that this in itself was an extraordinary achievement, as successive crusades foundered in this region. But a gargantuan task that would eclipse even these trials now stood before them: the siege of Antioch.

In early autumn 1097 the First Crusaders crossed into northern Syria, arriving at one of the great cities of the Orient, the fortified metropolis of Antioch. They had at last reached the borders of the Holy Land, and now, to the south, perhaps just three weeks’ march away, Jerusalem itself beckoned. But the most direct route to the Holy City, the ancient pilgrim road, ran through Antioch before tracing the coastline of the Mediterranean into Lebanon and Palestine, past a succession of potentially hostile Muslim-held cities and fortresses.

Historians have always maintained that the Franks had no choice but to capture Antioch before continuing their journey south–that the city stood as an immutable barrier to the progress of their expedition. This is not entirely true. Later events suggest that the crusaders could in theory have bypassed the city. Had they been solely focused upon reaching Jerusalem with maximum speed, they might have negotiated a temporary truce to neutralise the threat posed by Antioch’s Muslim garrison, leaving them free to advance with minimum disruption. The fact that the Latins chose instead to besiege Antioch says much about their planning, strategy and motivation.
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The city of Antioch

First and foremost, Antioch appears to have been the core target of the crusader-Byzantine alliance. Founded in the year 300
BCE
by Antiochus, one of Alexander the Great’s generals, the city was ideally placed to tap into trans-Mediterranean trade. Famed as a vibrant crossroads between East and West, Antioch became the third city of the Roman world, a centre of commerce and culture. But during the first explosion of Islamic expansion in the seventh century
CE
, this bastion of the eastern empire was lost to the Arabs. A resurgent Byzantium secured Antioch’s reconquest in 969, but the advent of the rampaging Seljuq Turks saw the city once again slip out of Christian control in 1085. Only too aware of this complex history, Alexius I Comnenus coveted Antioch, dreaming of the day when this city would be the cornerstone of a new era of Greek dominion over Asia Minor. It was for this reason that he continued to support the Franks through the summer of 1097 and beyond, hoping to harness the unprecedented influx of crusading manpower and reclaim the prize of Antioch.

The decision to target the city was thus an expression of ongoing Greco-Latin cooperation; however, the crusaders were not simply doing the bidding of their allies. Antioch, like Jerusalem, had a deeply rooted devotional significance. Tradition held that it was the site of the first Christian church founded by St Peter, chief of the Apostles, and the city still contained a magnificent basilica dedicated to the saint. It was also home to one of the five patriarchs, the leading powers of Christendom. Its liberation therefore chimed with the expedition’s spiritual goals. In time, however, it would also become clear that crusade leaders like Bohemond and Raymond of Toulouse harboured their own more secular, self-serving ambitions for Antioch, aspirations that might clash with Byzantine expectations.

Beyond the issues of Latin–Greek relations and territorial conquest, the attempt to seize Antioch reveals a profound truth about the crusaders. They were not, as some medieval and modern commentators have imagined, a wild horde of uncontrolled barbarians, swarming without forethought to Jerusalem. The events of 1097 prove that their actions were, at the very least, informed by a vein of strategic planning. They prepared for Antioch’s investment with some care, seizing a number of satellite settlements to act as centres of logistical supply and cultivating maritime contacts to ensure naval aid, some of which appear to have been organised months in advance. The Franks were also fully expecting to be reinforced at Antioch by Greek troops under Alexius as well as successive waves of western crusaders, and thus secured the safest, most direct route from Asia Minor to Syria across the Belen Pass. Everything about their behaviour in the autumn of 1097 indicates that the Franks were determined to conquer Antioch, though they recognised that this would be no simple task.

Even so, when the crusaders marched up to the city’s walls in late October they were daunted by the sheer scale of its defences. One Frank wrote in a letter to Europe that at first sight the city seemed ‘fortified with incredible strength and almost impregnable’. Antioch lay nestled between the Orontes River and the foot of two mountains–Staurin and Silpius. In the sixth century the Romans enhanced these natural features with a circle of some sixty towers joined by a massive enclosing wall–three miles long and up to sixty feet in height–running along the banks of the Orontes, and then up and across Staurin and up Silpius’ precipitous slopes. Hundreds of feet above the city proper, near the peak of Mount Silpius, a formidable citadel crowned Antioch’s fortifications. By the late eleventh century this defensive system had been weathered by time and ravaged by earthquakes, but it still presented an awesome obstacle to any attacking force. Indeed, a Frankish eyewitness was prompted to write that the city would ‘dread neither the attack of machine nor the assault of man even if all mankind gathered to besiege it’.
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The crusaders nonetheless had one advantage: Muslim Syria was in a parlous state of disarray. Riven by power struggles since the collapse of Seljuq unity in the early 1090s, the region’s Turkish potentates were more interested in pursuing their own petty infighting than in offering any form of rapid or concerted Islamic response to this unexpected Latin incursion. The two young feuding brothers Ridwan and Duqaq ruled the major cities of Aleppo and Damascus, but were locked in a civil war. Antioch itself was governed as a semi-autonomous frontier settlement of the faltering Seljuq sultanate of Baghdad by Yaghi Siyan, a conniving, white-haired Turkish warlord. He commanded a well-provisioned garrison of perhaps 5,000 troops, enough to man the city’s defences but not sufficient to repel the crusaders in open battle. His only option was to trust in Antioch’s fortifications and hope to survive the advent of the crusade. As the Franks approached he dispatched appeals for aid to his Muslim neighbours in Aleppo and Damascus, as well as to Baghdad itself, in the hope of attracting reinforcement. He also trained a watchful eye on the many Greek, Armenian and Syrian Christian members of Antioch’s cosmopolitan population, wary of betrayal from within.

The City of Antioch

A WAR OF ATTRITION

Upon their arrival, the Latins had to decide upon a strategy. Discouraged by the massive scale of Antioch’s fortifications and lacking the craftsmen and materials required to build weapons of assault siege warfare–scaling ladders, mangonels or movable towers–they quickly recognised that they were in no position to storm its battlements. But, as at Nicaea, an attrition siege presented difficulties. The sheer length of Antioch’s walls, the rugged topography of the enclosing mountains and the presence of no fewer than six main gateways leading out of the city made a full encirclement virtually impossible. As it was, a council of princes decided upon a strategy of partial blockade, and in the last days of October their armies took up positions before the city’s three north-western gates. As time went on the crusaders sought to police access to Antioch’s two southern entrances. A temporary bridge was built across the Orontes to facilitate access to the south, and a series of makeshift siege forts developed to tighten the noose. But one entrance remained, the Iron Gate–perched in a rocky gorge between Staurin and Silpius, out of the crusaders’ reach. Unguarded, it offered Yaghi Siyan and his men a crucial lifeline to the outside world throughout the long months that followed.

From the autumn of 1097 onwards the Franks committed themselves to the grinding reality of a medieval encirclement siege. The day-to-day business of this form of warfare might involve frequent small-scale skirmishing, but in essence depended not upon a battle of arms, but rather upon a test of physical and psychological endurance. For both the Latins and their Muslim foes morale was critical, and each side readily employed an array of gruesome tactics to erode their opponent’s mental resilience. After winning a major battle in early 1098 the crusaders decapitated more than one hundred Muslim dead, stuck their heads upon spears and gleefully paraded them before the walls of Antioch ‘to increase the Turks’ grief’. Following another skirmish the Muslims stole out of the city at dawn to bury their dead, but, according to one Latin eyewitness, when the Christians discovered this:

For his part, Yaghi Siyan ordered the public victimisation of Antioch’s indigenous Christian population. The Greek patriarch, who had long resided peacefully within the city, was now dangled by his ankles from the battlements and beaten with iron rods. One Latin recalled that ‘many Greeks, Syrians and Armenians, who lived in the city, were slaughtered by the maddened Turks. With the Franks looking on, they threw outside the walls the heads of those killed with their catapults and slings. This especially grieved our people.’ Crusaders taken prisoner often suffered similar maltreatment. The archdeacon of Metz was caught ‘playing a game of dice’ with a young woman in an orchard near the city. He was beheaded on the spot, while she was taken back to Antioch, raped and killed. The following morning, both of their heads were catapulted into the Latin camp.

Alongside these malicious exchanges, the siege revolved around a struggle for resources. This grim waiting game, in which each side sought to outlast the other, depended upon supplies of manpower, materials and, most fundamentally of all, food. With logistical considerations paramount, the crusaders were in the weaker position. The incomplete blockade meant that the Muslim garrison could still access external resources and aid. The larger crusading army, however, rapidly denuded their immediate resources and had to range ever further afield into hostile territory in pursuit of provisions. As the campaign continued, harsh winter weather compounded the situation. In a letter to his wife, the Frankish prince Stephen of Blois complained: ‘Before the city of Antioch, throughout the whole winter we suffered for our Lord Christ from excessive cold and enormous torrents of rain. What some say about the impossibility of bearing the heat of the sun throughout Syria is untrue, for the winter there is very similar to our winter in the West.’ One contemporary Armenian Christian later recalled that, in the depths of that terrible winter, ‘because of the scarcity of food, mortality and affliction fell upon the Frankish army to such an extent that one out of five perished and all the rest felt themselves abandoned and far from their homeland’.
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The suffering in the Frankish camp reached its height in January 1098. Hundreds, perhaps even thousands, perished, weakened by malnourishment and illness. It was said that the poor were reduced to eating ‘dogs and rats…the skins of beasts and seeds of grain found in manure’. Bewildered by this desperate predicament, many began to question why God had abandoned the crusade, His sacred venture. Amidst an increasingly malevolent atmosphere of suspicion and recrimination, the Latin clergy proffered an answer: the expedition had become tainted by sin. To combat this pollution, the papal legate Adhémar of Le Puy prescribed a succession of purgative rituals–fasting, prayer, almsgiving and procession. Women, the supposed repositories of impurity, were simultaneously expelled from the camp. In spite of these measures, many Christians fled northern Syria, preferring an uncertain journey back to Europe over the appalling conditions at the siege. Even the demagogue Peter the Hermit, once the impassioned mouthpiece of crusading fervour, tried to desert. Caught attempting to escape under cover of night, he was unceremoniously dragged back by Tancred. Around the same time, the crusaders’ Greek guide Taticius left the expedition, apparently in search of reinforcements and provisions in Asia Minor. He never returned, but the Byzantines on Cyprus did send some supplies to the Franks outside Antioch.

A hardened core of crusaders survived the manifold privations of that bitter winter and, with the arrival of spring, the balance of the siege began to shift slowly in their favour. The system of foraging centres established by the Franks played a part in easing the situation at Antioch: resources arrived from as far afield as Cilicia and, later, from Baldwin of Boulogne at Edessa. More significant still was aid transported across the Mediterranean and siphoned through the northern Syrian ports of Latakia and St Simeon, which the Latins had now occupied. On 4 March a small fleet of English ships arrived at the harbour of St Simeon, carrying food, building materials and craftsmen. A few days later, Bohemond and Raymond of Toulouse successfully escorted this valuable cargo back from the coast in the face of heavy opposition from Antiochene Muslim troops. The resultant influx of materials allowed the Franks to close a key loophole in their investment.