The First Crusade (33 page)

The citadel's overwhelming strategic significance was not lost on Bohemond - from the first moment of Antioch's fall on 3-4 June he had concentrated his efforts upon gaining a foothold on Mount Silpius. He rejected the idea of mounting a frontal assault on the citadel itself from within Antioch after taking one look at its fortifications. True to its name, this stronghold was designed to resist attack both from outside the city and from within. Even today, with its walls crumbling in disrepair, a line of formidable towers can be seen, defiantly facing the city below. By the time Kerbogha took control of this fortress, Bohemond had, however, established a camp opposite and to the south, along the ridge of Mount Silpius. Muslim and Latin were left facing each other across a small rocky valley, which can also be clearly seen today. From his position, Bohemond had control of a large section of the city walls and a series of towers from which he might hope to police the path leading down to Antioch. Of course, just as Antioch's huge size had presented problems to the crusaders as besiegers, now it posed similar difficulties to them as defenders. From 8 June, with Kerbogha gathering the bulk of his forces around the citadel, Bohemond seems to have been joined by Robert of Normandy and Robert of Flanders, but the Franks could ill afford to spread themselves too thinly - Godfrey stayed below in the city to defend the Gate of St Paul, while Raymond divided his time between fighting at the citadel and defending the Bridge Gate.
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On
10
June the crusaders, realising that Kerbogha was almost ready to launch an attack via the citadel, decided to make a pre-emptive strike. Using a small postern gate further south along the ridge of Mount Silpius they deployed a force to harry Kerbogha's camp. This rather audacious attack seems to have caught the Muslims off guard, and, aided by the element of surprise, the crusaders managed to drive them into a retreat. Overjoyed by their apparent success, some Latins merrily began to loot the camp, only to be overrun by Kerbogha's counterattack. Caught in the open, those who could made a chaotic flight back to the postern gate, but, as one Frankish eyewitness recalled, this was so terribly strait and narrow that many of the people were trampled to death in the crowd'. This ill-judged foray beyond the walls left the crusaders frightened and demoralised, but much worse was to come. Kerbogha now launched a combined offensive. His troops poured out of the citadel towards Bohemond's upper camp and along the path to the city, and at the same time others, approaching from outside, attacked the city walls running south of the citadel. Forced to fight on two fronts, the crusaders were stretched to the limit: The Turks strained with might to overrun and expel us from their route because descent into Antioch was possible only through our mountain. From morning until evening the fight raged with ferocity the like of which has never been reported.'
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What shocked the crusaders most was that, with such vast reserves of manpower, Kerbogha was able to unleash a seemingly unending stream of attackers. For two days the fighting raged without pause from dawn till dusk. A crusader who lived through this terror remarked that 'a man with food had no time to eat, and a man with water no time to drink'. The sheer, brutal intensity of this struggle sent some crusaders over the edge. One Latin eyewitness recalled that 'many gave up hope and hurriedly lowered themselves with ropes from the wall tops; and in the city soldiers returning from the encounter circulated widely a rumour that mass decapitation of the defenders was in store. To add weight to the terror, they too fled even as some ur
ged the undecided to stand fast.

Soon, panic spread throughout the city and even well-known knights began to desert:

While this was going on, William of Grandmesnil [Bohemond's brother-in-law], Aubre his brother, Guy Trousseau and Lambert the Poor, who were all scared by the battle of the previous day, which had lasted until evening, let themselves down from the wall secretly during the night and fled on foot to the sea, so that both their hands and their feet were worn away to the bone. Many others, whose names I do not know, fled with them. When they reached the ships which were in St Simeon's Port they said to the sailors, Tou poor devils, why are you staying here? All our men are dead, and we have
barely escaped death ourselves.
When the sailors heard this they were horrified, and rushed in terror to their ships and put to sea. At that moment the Turks arrived and killed everyone whom they could catch. They burned those ships which were still in the mouth of the river and took their cargoes.

Given the unrelenting ferocity of Kerbogha's attacks and the nature of the crusaders' overall predicament, it is not surprising that many chose to flee. On 11 June another rumour spread through the army suggesting that the princes themselves were preparing to flee towards the coast, and the crusade leaders were able to calm their troops only by each swearing an oath not to abandon Antioch. One Provencal crusader noted that, 'even then only the closing of the gates of Antioch by orders of Bohemond and Adhemar prevented wholesale evacuation'.
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Those who stayed somehow managed to hold their ground on Mount Silpius for four long days. In part they survived through sheer, bloody-minded determination and martial skill: Bohemond was in the thick of the fighting and at one stage he was surrounded and had to be rescued by Robert of Flanders and Robert of Normandy; later a southern Italian knight, known only as Mad Hugh, managed to defend a tower on the walls single-handedly, breaking three spears in the process. Even so, the casualty rate was high - among the dead was Peter Tudebode's brother, lost to a wound received during the fighting. On 12 June the shortage of manpower up on Silpius became so desperate that Bohemond took the curious step of ordering buildings in the south-western quarter of the city, where he believed some crusaders were hiding, to be set alight. The fire got out of hand, almost reaching the Basilica of St Peter and the Church of St Mary, but it did apparently prompt some to join the fighting.
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A distinctly medieval mixture of piety and superstition also began to figure in the unfolding of events. On 11 June a priest named Stephen of Valence came to the princes gathered at the top of Silpius, claiming to have received a vision of Christ and the Virgin Mary in which the crusaders were admonished for their sins and charged to purify themselves for five days. The Provencal chaplain Raymond of Aguilers, impressed by the priest's story, recounted how 'Stephen reported the above vision to an assembly [of crusaders], swore upon the cross to verify it, and finally signified his willingness to cross through fire or throw himself from the heights of a tower if necessary to convince the unbelievers.' This story does not seem to have had a massive or immediate effect upon morale, but it does foreshadow the powerful, almost fevered tide of ecstatic spirituality that was about to grip the crusaders. Then, on the night o
f 13/14 June, with the Frankish
resistance close to collapse, a strange light was seen in the heavens. One of Bohemond's followers recalled: There appeared a fire in the sky, coming from the west, and it approached and fell upon the Turkish army, to the great astonishment of our men and of the Turks also. In the morning the Turks, who were all scared by the fire, took fligh
t in panic.
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Seen as a divine portent, this phenomenon, probably a comet, heartened the crusaders and unnerved the Muslims. But Kerbogha's decision to redeploy his troops on 14 June was based on sound strategic judgement and not prompted simply by superstition. Having tried to break through the crusader lines for four days, he now elected to spread his forces more evenly, throwing a wider, enclosing net around the city. A substantial force was left in the citadel, the guard on the Gate of St Paul was strengthened and now, for the first time, a concerted effort was made to blockade the Bridge Gate and the Gate of St George. A crusader in Antioch at the time wrote that from this point on 'the Turks besieged the city on all sides, so that none of our men dared to go out or come in except by night and secretly'. Kerbogha may have failed to smash his way into Antioch, but now he would squeeze the crusaders into submission.
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With the city surrounded and communications with St Simeon severed, the crusaders were effectively cut off from the outside world. For the next two weeks the second siege of Antioch entered a new phase. Intermittent skirmishing continued: Godfrey lost 200 men during one attempt to raid the Muslim camp outside the Gate of St Paul; Tancred, whom one Latin contemporary described as a very fierce knight who could never have enough Turkish bloodshed' later made a stealthier attack out of the same gate with ten men and proudly returned with the heads of six slain Muslims. There were many other acts of individual 'heroism'. At one point, Henry of Esch, who almost drowned in the Orontes during the first siege of Antioch, spotted a group of Muslims setting ladders against an unmanned tower near the Iron Gate. He immediately rushed into the breach with only two men - his relatives Franco and Sigemar of Mechela in support, and was able to hold off the enemy long enough for reinforcements to arrive. Henry survived the encounter unscathed, but Franco received 'a very severe and scarcely curable wound to the head', while Sigemar was 'pierced through the belly with a sword to its hilt'. Meanwhile, on the slopes of Mount Silpius, the princes took the opportunity presented by the relative lull in fighting to throw up a crude defensive wall of stones and mortar between their upper camp and the citadel, which they then patrolled day and night.
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In reality, after 14 June, Kerbogha adopted a strategy of containment, and as a result a more insidious and debilitating threat began to unman the crusaders - starvation. They had already endured terrible shortages of food through the preceding winter, but now, stranded in a city which had already been stripped of resources by an eight-month siege, they faced a new level of suffering. One Frankish eyewitness recounted:

The blasphemous enemies of God kept us so closely shut up in the city of Antioch that many of us died of hunger, for a small loaf cost a bezant, and I cannot tell you the price of wine. Our men ate the flesh of horses and asses; a hen cost fifteen shillings, an egg two, and a walnut a penny. All things were very dear. So terrible was the famine that men boiled and ate the leaves of figs, vines, thisdes and all kinds of trees. Others stewed the dried skins of horses, camels, asses, oxen or buffaloes, which they ate.
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Another contemporary was appalled by the stories of misery told by those who lived through these days:

With the city thus blockaded on all sides, and the [Muslims] barring their way out all round, famine grew so great amongst the Christians that in the absence of bread they
..
. even chewed pieces of leather found in homes which had hardened or putrefied for three or six years. The ordinary people were forced to devour their leather shoes because of the pressure of hunger. Some indeed, filled their wretched bellies with roots of stinging nettles and other sorts of woodland plants, cooked and softened on the fire, so they became ill and every day their numbers were lessened by death. Duke Godfrey, as they say who were there, paid out fifteen marks of silver for the flesh of a miserable camel; for a she-goat it is testified beyond doubt that his steward Baldric gave three marks to the seller.
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The First Crusade had now reached its nadir. Tormented by the constant threat of a full-scale Muslim assault, too terrified to contemplate a counterattack yet weakened day by day by death and hunger, a crisis in morale left the Latin army utterly paralysed within Antioch. All the eyewitness sources indicate that total defeat seemed both inevitable and imminent.
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It was under these conditions that one of the expedition's most extraordinary and intriguing episodes took place - an event that would appear to provide a direct insight into the crusaders' state of mind.

THE
HOLY
LANCE
OF
ANTIOCH

On the evening of 10 June a bedraggled peasant from Provence named Peter Bartholomew came, unbidden, to seek an audience with Bishop Adhemar of Le Puy and Count Raymond of Toulouse. In the private interview that followed Peter related a remarkable tale, stating that he had, since 30 December 1097, been visited by 'two men clad in brilliant garments' on no fewer than five separate occasions. He described these apparitions, saying: The older one had red hair sprinkled with white, a broad and bushy white beard, black eyes and an agreeable countenance, and was of medium height; his younger companion was taller, and fair
in form beyond the sons of men.

These were, he believed, visions of St Andrew the apostle, accompanied by Christ. Peter described the progress of these apparitions in considerable detail. They had begun at the end of 1097
when an earthquake shook Antioch, and continued - as Peter's travels took him across northern Syria in search of food - in locations as diverse as Edessa, Mamistra and St Simeon. Quite apart from anything else, Peter's story indicates the lengths to which some crusaders were forced to go to forage for supplies. Peter had, he said, received his final vision that very day, as he sat 'dejected and listless' on a rock, having barely escaped alive from the fighting beyond the city walls on the top of Mount Silpius. From his very first appearance, St Andrew had had one very specific message to give Peter. Christian tradition held that, at the time of his crucifixion, Jesus' body had been pierced in the side by a spear wielded by the Roman soldier Longinus, which became known as the Holy Lance. This most sacred relic, St Andrew revealed, was now buried in the Basilica of St Peter, the main church of Antioch itself. In his earliest vision, back when the city still lay unconquered, Peter, still clad in his nightshirt, had been miraculously spirited past Muslim guards into the midst of the basilica and shown the Lance's exact resting place. Peter was charged with revealing the relic's location to the crusader princes so that it might be recovered once Antioch fell, and then used as a standard, for, the apostle said, 'he who carries this lance in battle shall never be overcome by the enemy'. But, Peter claimed, he had been too frightened and intimidated to tell his story, even though St Andrew returned again and again to castigate him for his inactivity. Now, finally, in the crusade's darkest hour, he had decided to come forward.
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