The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land

by Thomas Asbridge

  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.24

  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.25

  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 [fight
ing] 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:

  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.

  Immobilised by fear and starvation, with morale crumbling, the First Crusaders seemingly had no avenue of escape and little prospect of survival. In these bleakest of days, most believed that defeat was imminent.26

  Historians have long argued that at this point the course of Antioch’s second siege, indeed the fortunes of the entire crusade, were transformed by a single dramatic event. On 14 June a small group of Franks, led by a peasant visionary named Peter Bartholomew, began digging in the Basilica of St Peter. Bartholomew claimed that an apparition of the apostle St Andrew had revealed to him the resting place of an extraordinarily powerful spiritual weapon: the spear that pierced the side of Christ on the cross. One of the men who joined the search for this ‘Holy Lance’, Raymond of Aguilers, described how:

  We had been digging until evening when some gave up hope of unearthing the Lance…But the youthful Peter Bartholomew, seeing the exhaustion of our workers, stripped his outer garments and, clad only in a shirt and barefooted, dropped into the hole. He then begged us to pray to God to return His Lance to [the crusaders] so as to bring strength and victory to His people. Finally, in His mercy, the Lord showed us His Lance and I, Raymond, the author of this book, kissed the point of the Lance as it barely protruded from the ground. What great joy and exultation then filled the city.

  The discovery of this small metal shard, an apparent relic of Christ’s Passion, was long believed to have had an electrifying effect upon the crusaders’ state of mind. Interpreted as an irrefutable indication of God’s renewed support, an assurance of victory, it supposedly spurred the Latins to take up arms and confront Kerbogha in open battle. Another Frankish eyewitness described the impact of this Holy Lance: ‘And so [Peter] found the lance, as he had foretold, and they all took it up with great joy and dread, and throughout all the city there was immense rejoicing. From that hour we decided on a plan of attack, and all our leaders forthwith held a council.’27

  In fact, the impression fostered by this account–that the Christians, their spirits suddenly rejuvenated by an ecstatic outpouring of faith, made an urgent and immediate move to engage their enemy–is profoundly misleading. Two whole weeks separated the discovery of the Lance from the battle eventually fought against Kerbogha.

  Peter Bartholomew’s ‘discovery’ certainly had some effect on crusader morale. To modern sensibilities the story of his visions might seem fantastical, his claim to have uncovered a genuine remnant of Christ’s own life fraudulent, even ludicrous. But to eleventh-century Franks, familiar with the concepts of saints, relics and miraculous intervention, Peter’s experiences rang true. Conditioned by a well-ordered system of belief, in which the saintly dead acted as God’s intercessors on Earth, channelling His power through sacred relics, most were willing to accept the authenticity of the Holy Lance. Among the leaders of the crusade only Adhémar of Le Puy seems to have harboured any doubts, and these probably stemmed from Peter’s lowly social status. But buoyed though their spirits may have been by the advent of this relic, the Latins remained paralysed by fear and uncertainty through the second half of June. The unearthing of the Lance was not the overwhelming catalyst to action, much less a focal turning point in the fortunes of the First Crusade.28

  By 24 June the crusaders were on the brink of collapse and so dispatched two envoys to seek parley with Kerbogha. Historians have tended to follow uncritically the Latins’ own explanation for this embassy, characterising it as an exercise in bravado. In reality, it was more probably a forlorn attempt to negotiate terms of surrender. A non-partisan eastern Christian source described how ‘the Franks became threatened with a famine [and thus] resolved to obtain from Kerbogha a promise of amnesty on condition that they deliver the city into his hands and return to their own country’. A later Arabic chronicle appears to substantiate this version of events, asserting that the crusader princes ‘wrote to Kerbogha to ask for safe conduct through his territory, but he refused, saying: “You will have to fight your way out.”’

  With this, any chance of escaping Antioch evaporated. Recognising that their only hope now lay in open battle, no matter how bleak the odds, the Latin princes initiated preparations for a final, suicidal confrontation. In the words of one Latin contemporary, they had decided that ‘it was better to die in battle than to perish from so cruel a famine, growing weaker from day to day until overcome by death’.29

  In those final days the Christians carried out last-ditch preparations. Ritual processions, confessions and communion were undertaken by way of spiritual purgation. Meanwhile, Bohemond, now elected commander-in-chief of the army, set about concocting a battle plan. On paper, the Franks were hopelessly outclassed, numbering perhaps 20,000 including non-combatants. Their elite force, the heavily armoured mounted knights, had also been crippled by a dearth of horses, and most were now forced to fight astride pack animals or on foot. Even the German Count Hartmann of Dillingen, once a proud and wealthy crusader, was reduced to riding a donkey so diminutive that it left his boots dragging in the dirt. Bohemond thus had to develop an infantry-based strategy designed to confront the enemy with maximum speed and ferocity.

  For all its size, Kerbogha’s army did have two potential weaknesses. With the bulk of his force still cautiously encamped some distance to the north, the troops encircling Antioch were relatively thinly spread. At the same time, Kerbogha’s men lacked the Latins’ sense of a desperate common cause, being bound by only the thinnest veneer of unity. Should the Muslims start to lose confidence in their general, cracks might appear.

  By 28 June 1098 the crusaders were ready for battle. At dawn that day they began marching out of the city while clergy lining the walls offered prayers to God. Most believed that they were marching to their deaths. Bohemond had chosen to sally out of the Bridge Gate, crossing the Orontes to confront the Muslim troops guarding the plains beyond. If they were to avoid being stopped in their tracks and cut down to a man, rapidity and cohesion of deployment would be essential. As the ga
tes opened an advance guard of Latin archers let fly raking volleys of arrows to beat back the enemy, clearing the way across the bridge. Then, with Bohemond holding the rear, the Franks marched forward in four closely ordered battle groups, fanning out into a rough semi-circle and closing to engage the Muslims.

  As soon as the Bridge Gate was opened, Kerbogha, encamped to the north, was alerted by the raising of a black flag above the Muslim-held citadel. At this moment he could have committed his main force, hoping to catch the crusaders as they exited the city and shatter their formation. As it was, he hesitated. This was not, as legend later had it, because he was frivolously engaged in a game of chess. Rather, Kerbogha hoped to strike a killer blow, allowing the Franks to deploy outside the city so that he could crush them en masse, bringing the siege of Antioch to a swift and triumphant conclusion. This strategy had some merit, but it required a cool head. Just when the general should have held his position, letting the crusaders advance to fight a battle on ground of his choosing, he lost his nerve. Sensing that the Latins were gaining a slim advantage in the fracas beside the city, he ordered his entire army to make a panicked and disordered advance.