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.13
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’.14
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.
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.15
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.16
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:
The Turks burst into the camp in strength, striking with arrows from their horn bows, killing pilgrim foot-soldiers, girls, women, infants and old people, sparing no one on grounds of age. Stunned and terrified by the cruelty of this most hideous killing, girls who were delicate and very nobly born were hastening to get themselves dressed up, offering themselves to the Turks, so that at least, roused and appeased by love of their beauty, the Turks might learn to pity their prisoners.
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.17
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:
Overwhelmed by the anguish of thirst as many as 500 people died. In addition horses, donkeys, camels, mules, oxen and many animals suffered the same death from very painful thirst. Many men, growing weak from the exertion and the heat, gaping with open mouths and throats, were trying to catch the thinnest mist to cure their thirst. Now, while everyone was thus suffering with this plague, [a] river they had longed and searched for was discovered. As they hurried towards it each was keen because of excessive longing to arrive first amongst the great throng. They set no limit to their drinking, until very many who had been weakened, as many men as beasts of burden, died from drinking too much.
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’.18
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 an
d 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.
The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land Page 6