The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land (9 page)

Up to this point Yaghi Siyan’s men had been able to use the city’s Bridge Gate with relative impunity, and thus had control of the roads leading to St Simeon and Alexandretta. The Christians now fortified a derelict mosque on the plain in front of this entrance, creating a basic siege fort which they christened La Mahomerie (The Blessed Mary), from which they could police the surrounding area. Count Raymond offered to shoulder the burden of garrisoning this outpost at exorbitant cost to his treasury, but his motives may not have been entirely altruistic. At the start of the siege, southern Italian Norman troops had occupied ground in front of the St Paul Gate and were thus primed to make a swift incursion into the city, if and when it fell. This gave Bohemond a good chance of staking a claim to the city because, earlier in the expedition, the princes had agreed to abide by the rules of ‘right by conquest’–whereby captured property belonged to the first claimant or occupier. By positioning his own men in front of Antioch’s other main entrance, the Bridge Gate, Raymond was now ideally placed to challenge his rival.

Within a month the Franks had improvised another siege fort, fortifying a monastery near Antioch’s last accessible portal, the Gate of St George. Tancred agreed to man this post, but only in return for a hefty payment of 400 silver marks. Having begun the crusade in the second rank of nobles, shadowed by his uncle Bohemond’s renown, Tancred was now beginning to emerge as a significant figure in his own right. Following his adventures in Cilicia, the honour of this command and the wealth it brought served both to enhance his status and lend him a degree of autonomy.
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BETRAYAL

By April 1098 the crusaders had tightened the cordon around Antioch. Yaghi Siyan was still able to bring in some supplies through the Iron Gate, but his ability to harry the Franks had been severely curtailed. It was now the turn of the Muslim garrison to face isolation, dwindling resources and the spectre of defeat. Throughout the siege, however, the crusaders were haunted by a gnawing fear: the prospect of a unified Muslim relief army marching to Antioch’s aid, trapping them between two enemies.

The Latins had already benefited from the crippling factionalism that afflicted Muslim Syria. Unwilling to put aside their differences–and perhaps mistaking the crusaders for Byzantine mercenaries–Duqaq of Damascus and Ridwan of Aleppo had responded to Yaghi Siyan’s entreaties by sending separate, uncoordinated forces to combat the Franks in December 1097 and February 1098. Had these two great cities united their resources that winter they probably would have trounced the First Crusade before the walls of Antioch. As it was, the Latins successfully repelled both of their armies, although not without significant loss.

The crusaders also knew full well that Near Eastern Islam was sundered by an even more elemental schism–that between Sunnis and Shi‘ites–and on the advice of Alexius Comnenus had sought to exploit this division by establishing contact with the Shi‘ite Fatimids of North Africa back in the summer of 1097. This approach elicited a response in early February 1098, when an embassy from al-Afdal, vizier of Egypt, arrived in the Christian camp outside Antioch to discuss the possibility of some form of negotiated settlement with the First Crusaders. The visit of these Muslim envoys was neither fleeting, nor secretive. They remained in the crusaders’ camp for at least a month, and their presence was reported widely by Latin eyewitness sources. And yet the welcoming of this embassy seems to have occasioned little, if any, criticism. Stephen of Blois for one showed no embarrassment when writing to his wife that the Fatimids had ‘established peace and concord with us’. The crusaders and Egyptians reached no definitive agreement at Antioch, but the latter did offer promises of ‘friendship and favourable treatment’, and in the interests of pursuing just such an entente, Latin envoys were sent back to North Africa, charged with ‘entering into a friendly pact’.

Until the early summer of 1098 the First Crusaders had successfully employed diplomacy and pre-emptive military intervention to stave off a direct Muslim counter-attack. In late May, however, a dread-laden rumour began to circulate: a new enemy was abroad. It seemed that the sultan of Baghdad had finally responded to Antioch’s desperate appeals for aid by raising a huge relief force. On 28 May scouts returned to the Frankish camp to confirm that they had seen a ‘[Muslim] army swarming everywhere from the mountains and different roads like the sands of the sea’. This was the fearsome Iraqi general Kerbogha of Mosul, marching at the head of some 40,000 Syrian and Mesopotamian troops. He was less than one week from Antioch.
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The news that Sunni Islam had at last united against the crusaders horrified the Latin princes. Seeking to conceal these grim tidings from the masses for fear of inciting panic and desertion, they convened an emergency council to discuss a course of action. Although the encirclement of the city had tightened and Yaghi Siyan’s resistance was weakening, no swift end to the siege was yet in sight. The Franks were in no position to confront Kerbogha in a full-scale battle–they were outnumbered by as many as two to one and faced a severe shortage of horses with which to mount a cavalry offensive. After all the bitter struggles and sacrifices of the preceding months, it now appeared that the Christian army would be crushed against Antioch’s walls by the oncoming wave of Muslim attack.

At this moment of crisis, with the crusade facing devastation, Bohemond stepped forward. He argued that, in light of their predicament, whoever could engineer Antioch’s fall should have legal right to the city, and after much debate this was generally agreed with the proviso that it should be returned to the Emperor Alexius if he came to claim it. With the bargain in place, the wily Bohemond revealed his hand. He had, it transpired, made contact with a renegade inside Antioch, an Armenian tower commander named Firuz, who was prepared to betray the city.

A few days later, on the night of 2–3 June, a small group of Bohemond’s men used an ox-hide ladder to climb an isolated section of the city’s south-eastern wall, where Firuz was waiting. Even with the traitor’s help, this sortie was so risky that Bohemond himself chose to wait below, for had an alarm been raised the isolated advance party would surely have been butchered. As it was, the guards of the three nearest towers were rapidly and silently dispatched and a small postern gate opened below. Up to this point stealth had been essential, but with the first breach made Bohemond sounded bugles to initiate a second, coordinated attack on Antioch’s citadel. The calm night air was suddenly shattered as the Franks screamed out their battle cry: ‘God wills it! God wills it!’ As the growing tumult punctured the darkness, the city’s garrison was thrown into a state of utter confusion and some of the eastern Christians still living in Antioch turned on their Muslim overlords and rushed to open the city’s remaining gates.

With resistance crumbling, the crusaders poured into Antioch, straining to release eight months of pent-up anger and aggression. Amid the gloom of the approaching dawn, the chaotic slaughter began. One Latin contemporary noted that ‘they were sparing no Muslim on the grounds of age or sex, the ground was covered with blood and corpses and some of these were Christian Greeks, Syrians and Armenians. No wonder since (in the darkness) they were entirely unaware of whom they should spare and whom they should strike.’ Afterwards, one crusader described how ‘all the streets of the city on every side were full of corpses, so that no one could endure to be there because of the stench, nor could anyone walk along the narrow paths of the city except over the corpses of the dead’. Amongst all this uncontrolled bloodshed, and the looting that followed it, Bohemond ensured that his blood-red banner was raised above the city, the customary method of staking claim to captured property. Raymond of Toulouse, meanwhile, raced through the Bridge Gate to occupy all the buildings in the area, including the palace of Antioch, establishing a significant Provençal foothold within the city. Only the citadel, perched high above on the crest of Mount Silpius, remained in Muslim hands, under the command of Yaghi Siyan’s son. The governor himself fled in terror, only to be caught and decapitated by a local peasant.
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Bohemond’s devious plan had succeeded, ending the first siege of Antioch, but there was little chance to celebrate. On 4 June, just one day after the city’s fall, the vanguard of Kerbogha’s army arrived. With Muslim troops flooding in, Antioch was soon surrounded, leaving the First Crusaders trapped within.

THE BESIEGED

The second siege of Antioch, in June 1098, was the crusade’s greatest crisis. The Latins had avoided a battle on two fronts, but they now found themselves besieged within Antioch’s walls. Denuded of resources during the first investment, the city could offer them little in the way of food or military supplies. And, with its citadel in enemy hands, its mighty defences were fatally undermined. The entire expedition was on the brink of destruction.

The crusaders’ one fragile spark of hope was that the long-awaited Byzantine army might arrive under the command of Alexius Comnenus to save them. Unbeknownst to the Franks, however, events had conspired to snuff out even this faint prospect of deliverance. On 2 June, just before Antioch fell to the Latins, the crusader prince Stephen of Blois adjudged that the Christians had no chance of survival and decided to flee. Feigning illness, he escaped north and set off to recross Asia Minor. His departure must have been enormously damaging to morale, but Stephen caused even more harm to the expedition’s prospects, and to the crusading movement as a whole.

In central Anatolia he came across Emperor Alexius and his army encamped at the town of Philomelium. Throughout the siege of Antioch the crusaders had been expecting Greek reinforcements, but Alexius had been preoccupied recapturing the coastline of Asia Minor. When Stephen reported that the Franks by now had most likely been defeated, the emperor elected to retreat to Constantinople. At this crucial moment Byzantium failed the crusade, and the Greeks were never fully forgiven. Stephen returned to France only to be branded a coward by his wife.

The First Crusaders were thus abandoned to face Kerbogha’s horde alone. The Mosuli general proved to be a formidable adversary. The Franks saw him as the officially appointed ‘commander-in-chief of the sultan of Baghdad’s army’, but it would be wrong to imagine that Kerbogha was merely the servant of the Abbasid caliphate. Nursing his own expansive ambitions, he recognised that a war against the Franks at Antioch offered the perfect opportunity to seize control of Syria for himself. Kerbogha had spent six months carefully laying the military and diplomatic foundations for his campaign, piecing together an immensely intimidating Muslim coalition. Armies from across Syria and Mesopotamia committed to the cause, including a force from Damascus, but most were driven not by overriding hatred for the Christians, nor by spiritual devotion, but by fear of Kerbogha, a man who now seemed destined to rule the Seljuq world.

In early June 1098 Kerbogha approached the second siege of Antioch with diligent care and purposeful resolution. Establishing his main camp a few miles north of the city, he made contact with the Muslims holding the citadel and began amassing forces in and around the fortress on the eastern, less precipitous slopes of Mount Silpius. Soldiers were also deployed to blockade the Gate of St Paul in the north of the city. Kerbogha’s initial strategy was based on an aggressive frontal assault, channelled through Antioch’s citadel and its environs. By 10 June he was ready to launch a blistering attack. Over the next four days he poured in wave after wave of troops as Bohemond led the Franks in a desperate hand-to-hand struggle to retain control of the city’s eastern walls. This was the most intense and unrelenting combat the crusaders had ever experienced. Literally lasting from dawn till dusk without pause, in the words of one eyewitness, ‘a man with food had no time to eat, and a man with water no time to drink’. Nearing exhaustion, utterly petrified, some Latins reached breaking point. A crusader later recalled that ‘many gave up hope and hurriedly lowered themselves with ropes from the wall tops; and in the city soldiers returning from the [fighting] circulated widely a rumour that mass decapitation of the defenders was in store’. By day and night the rate of desertion increased, and soon even well-known knights like Bohemond’s brother-in-law were joining the ranks of the so-called ‘rope-danglers’. At one point word spread that the princes themselves were preparing to flee, and Bohemond and Adhémar of Le Puy were forced to bar the city’s gates to prevent a general rout.

Through sheer bloody-minded determination, those who remained managed to cling on to their positions. Then, on the night of 13–14 June, a shooting star appeared to fall out of the sky into the Muslim camp. The crusaders interpreted this as a favourable omen, because the very next day Kerbogha’s men were seen retreating from the slopes of Mount Silpius. But the Muslim redeployment was probably driven by hard strategy. Having failed to break Frankish resistance through frontal assault, Kerbogha switched to a less direct approach. Skirmishing still occurred on a daily basis, but from 14 June the Muslim besiegers focused their energy on encircling Antioch. The bulk of the Abbasid army remained in the main camp to the north, but large detachments of troops were now posted to blockade the Bridge Gate and the St George Gate. By tightening this cordon, severing Latin contact with the outside world, Kerbogha hoped to starve the crusaders into submission.

Food had been scarce ever since the Franks entered Antioch. Now, however, shortages intensified and the Latins were soon racked by unprecedented levels of suffering. One Christian contemporary described these days of horror: