The First Crusade (28 page)

That January the crusade reached its lowest point to date. One of Bohemond's followers, who lived through this terrible period, explained the Frankish predicament, conveying an immediate sense of their despair:

We were thus left in direst need
..
. The Turks were menacing us on the one hand, and hunger tormented us on the other, and there was no one to help us or bring us aid. The rank and file, with those who were very poor, fled to Cyprus, Asia Minor or into the mountains. We dared not go down to the sea for fear of those brutes of Turks, and there was no road open to us anywhere.
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With this in mind, Simeon, the Greek patriarch of Jerusalem, with the support of Bishop Adhemar, wrote a heartfelt letter of appeal to all the Christians of western Europe. His insistent message is a sure indication of how many crusaders had been lost to death or desertion. What the Franks needed now was more manpower: 'Come to fight in the army of the Lord . . . Bring nothing with you except only what may be of use to us. Let only the men come; let the women, as yet, be left. From the home in which there are two, let one, the
one more ready for battle come.
In particular he sought to goad any who had taken a crusading vow but not yet left for the East with the threat of excommunication. Of course, he was not above using deception to encourage recruitment. In spite of all the suffering at Antioch, he still described the Holy Land as 'flowing with milk and honey'; he also maintained that the hardest section of the campaign was over.
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Through all of January 1098 only one faint glimmer of hope briefly illuminated the crusaders' cause. During one of the minor skirmishes outside Antioch that were a daily feature of the siege, the Franks captured a young, high-ranking Muslim nobleman. Learning that his family commanded one of the city's towers, they sought to negotiate secret access to the tower in return for his release. A dialogue was established and the scheme might have come to fruition had Yaghi Siyan not discovered the plot and relieved the family members of their command. Showing a complete absence of clemency, the crusaders responded by hauling their bedraggled prisoner, who had already suffered severe torture, before the walls, where he was summarily decapitated in fiill sight of the Muslim garrison. Their plan had failed on this occasion, but a potential weakness in the city's defences - betrayal - had been exposed.
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A
NEW
ENEMY
CONFRONTED

In the first days of February news arrived that a fresh Muslim army was approaching Antioch. This time it was Ridwan of Aleppo who had chosen to lead around 12,000 men to relieve Yaghi Siyan, and was now camped at Harim. By this point, the surprise encounter with Duqaq of Damascus back in December must have alerted the crusaders to the need for better local intelligence. They had perhaps improved their network of scouts and local informers; certainly they had a little time to plan for Ridwan's arrival, but they still faced the very real possibility of being crushed between Antioch's garrison and the Aleppan army. In the face of this new threat, the Latins had three overwhelming concerns, born out of the experiences and depredations of the previous months. They were, above all, desperately short of horses. Concern for their mounts had already been evident during the troublesome crossing of Asia Minor, but, through the winter of 1097-8, the crusaders became wholly fixated upon the wellbeing of their horses. When eyewitnesses described the struggles to find supplies, they almost invariably went on to comment on the excessive cost of horse feed: '[The Franks] endured the sight of their horses wasting away from starvation. Straw was scarce and seven or eight solidi did not buy an adequate amount of grain for one night s provend
er for one horse.

One of Bohemond's main justifications for his threat to leave the siege in January had been that he was sick of watching 'his men and horses dying from hunger'. Indeed, our sources give the impression that horses were valued almost as much as men. There were two reasons for this: from a practical military standpoint, the crusaders knew that their most powerful weapon in battle was the mounted knight - the medieval equivalent of a tank; to the individual, a horse conveyed status, indeed one could not effectively maintain the position of knight without a mount. In early 1098, horses were precious commodities. A strange incident amid the chaotic fighting outside Antioch on 29 December was indicative: in the heat of battle a group of knights suddenly turned from the fray, deserting the infantry; but their flight was not inspired by cowardice; instead, they were racing to be the first to catch a single riderless horse which had been spotted leaving the field. Knights soon became reluctant to fight in skirmishes for fear that their horses might be killed, their status lost. In response, the crusader princes, led by Raymond of Toulouse, established a common war chest from which knights could claim funds to replace mounts lost in battle. Funded by the crusader 'confraternity', this arrangement was another example of practical economic co-operation among the crusade leadership. Even so, new horses could be bought only if they were available, and by February they were extremely scarce. It was said that the Provencals could muster only a hundred, and that even these were 'scrawny and feeble'; in the whole army there were at best a thousand knights who still had mounts. Many of these would not have been frilly fledged warhorses, and we know that some knights even rode into battle on mules and donkeys. The first question, then, that faced the crusaders when they heard of Ridwan's approach was how to make best use of their limited cavalry.
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Two other related matters needed to be resolved: the experience of recent months had demonstrated that a single overall commander was needed in full-scale pitched battles; it was also apparent that, in the heat of a melee, proper co-ordination between infantry and cavalry was extremely difficult to achieve. The crusader princes duly held an urgent council on 8 February to discuss these matters and their response to Ridwan's approach. They decided to divide their forces to cover two fronts. Seven hundred knights under the command of Bohemond, Robert of Flanders and Stephen of Blois would ride out to meet Ridwan. Meanwhile, the remaining princes would maintain the siege with the entire infantry. A division of manpower was obviously necessary, but such a radical separation of cavalry and foot is quite revealing. One Latin eyewitness argued that 'this decision came because it was likely that the unfit and timid ones in the ranks of the footmen would show more cowardice than bravery if they saw a large force of Turks'.

This may not be entirely accurate, given that a fair proportion of the infantry must, by this time, have been made up of experienced knights who had now lost their horses. In fact, the division probably had more to do with strategy. Freed of the encumbrance of slow-moving footsoldiers, the cavalry could potentially move with greater precision and speed. The Franks had clearly learned from experience, adopting and adapting the Turkish penchant for mobile, horse-based warfare. The princes probably made a further innovation, electing Bohemond as overall commander of the expeditionary force.
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The crusaders were facing an immense challenge: to repel some 12,000 Muslims with under 1,000 troops of their own. The sheer imbalance of these forces makes one wonder whether the Frankish sources exaggerated the severity of their predicament, but, for once, even the Arabic sources confirm that the Aleppan army was numerically superior. How, then, could the crusaders possibly hope to prevail against such odds? Looking back on the battle, one crusader argued that God had miraculously multiplied the number of Latin knights from 700 to 2,000 as the fighting began. In reality, the crusaders might have risked drawing more men from the siege to create a larger combined force, but they chose to rely upon divine support and superior tactics rather than sheer weight of numbers. Their plan was both inspired and audacious. They could have fought a defensive battle, centred around the Iron Bridge, but this would have relied upon grinding attrition and, win or lose, would have been extremely costly in terms of manpower. Instead, outnumbered twelve to one, they decided to go on the offensive.

In a direct reversal of their experiences in the Foraging Battle, they sought to use surprise to their advantage. They set out from Antioch, under the cover of darkness, on the night of 8 February, advancing rapidly along the road to the Iron Bridge. In a sense, they were trying to set up a large-scale ambush and, having taken the initiative, they were able to choose their point of attack. The ground they selected probably lay on the approach to the Iron Bridge, but its exact location cannot be determined with any certainty. It does seem that they hoped to limit the possibility of long-range encirclement by hemming in the Muslim forces on ground flanked by natural obstructions, so they may well have chosen a point between the River Orontes and the foothills behind Antioch. Indeed, the main force of knights may themselves have taken limited cover behind a low hill.

On the morning of 9 February, scouts were carefully deployed and returned with news that Ridwan was marching straight down the road from the Iron Bridge, with two detachments of troops thrown ahead of his main force. The crusaders had one chance for success. They could not hope to prevail in a long-drawn-out engagement; instead they had to rely upon shock tactics and the judicious use of the main weapon, the cavalry charge. Under these conditions timing was paramount. If they deployed their full force immediately the brunt of their charge might be absorbed by Ridwan's vanguard, leaving the main Muslim army free to close and partially encircle the Franks. Instead, in a masterful piece of generalship that was probably the brainchild of Bohemond, they divided their forces into six squadrons. When Ridwan appeared, five of these were deployed against the Aleppan vanguard, while the sixth, under Bohemond, waited in reserve. One eyewitness described these first minutes of battle: The din of battle arose to heaven, for all were fighting at once and the storm of missil
es darkened the sky.
Knowing that they were heavily outnumbered, these knights must have been terrified, but they played a crucial tactical role. Their shock attack drew Ridwan's main force forward into the heart of the battle. His massed troops now began to push the crusaders back, and the Aleppans most likely felt that victory was at hand. In fact, this was the moment for which Bohemond had prepared. Now, with the Muslims bunched together in one force, he launched his sixth squadron in a ferocious cavalry charge. The author of the
Gesta Francorum,
who was almost certainly in the midst of Bohemond's troops, wrote an impassioned description of this attack:

So Bohemond, protected on all sides by the sign of the Cross, charged the Turkish forces, like a lion which has been starving for three or four days, which comes roaring out of its cave thirsting for the blood of cattle
...
His attack was so fierce that the points of his banner were flying right over the heads of the Turks. The other troops, seeing Bohemond's banner carried ahead so honourably, stopped the retreat at once, and all our men in a body charged the Turks, who were amazed and took flight. Our men pursued them and massacred them right up to the [Iron Bridge].
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The fate of the enti
re crusade had been gambled on Bohemond's ability to break the massed Aleppan ranks with a perfectly timed, crushing cavalry charge. With one bold manoeuvre he changed the course of the battle, throwing Ridwan's army into a chaotic rout. The crusaders pursued them as far as Harim, capturing horses and supplies. Within hours the remaining Turks had torched the castle and fled eastwards. The expeditionary force had won a spectacular victory. Meanwhile, back at Antioch, the infantry had successfully repelled a series of attacks from the city's garrison. In the wake of these triumphs, the crusaders sought to press home their advantage: 'With the battle and booty won, we carried the heads of the slain to camp and stuck them on posts as grim reminders of the plight of their Turkish allies and
of future woes of the besieged.
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In these desperate winter months the crusaders had, through a combination of luck and military genius, survived encounters with two large Muslim relief armies. Had the forces of Damascus and Aleppo combined against them, the outcome would surely have been different. But the fractured world of Muslim Syria led Duqaq and Ridwan to act in isolation, their mutual hatred of one another overcoming any common impulse to repel the crusaders from the gates of Antioch.

By pure coincidence, on or around 9 February, the crusaders received a very different kind of Muslim visitation that allowed them further to exploit the rifts within Islam. An embassy arrived by ship from the Fatimid caliphate of Egypt, ruled at this time by the Vizier al-Afdal. This delegation may well have been sent in response to contacts established by the crusaders after Nicaea and on the advice of the Emperor Alexius. The pathological hatred that divided the two main arms of the Islamic faith - the Sunni Turks of Abbasid Baghdad and the Shi'a Fatimids - meant that the Egyptians had absolutely no intention of opposing the crusaders' siege of Turkish Antioch. Indeed, like many Muslims of the time, they may have misunderstood the Franks' intentions and aspirations to reconquer Jerusalem, believing them to be part of a limited Byzantine campaign.