God's Armies

by Malcolm Lambert

  The hosts which assembled in consequence of the preaching of the cross must have been far greater than the small body of professionals anticipated by the Byzantine Emperor Alexius. It astonished contemporaries; the word used was ‘inaudita’, ‘unheard of’. A good estimate would be that the total of the separate contingents who set off on the land route to Jerusalem amounted to 60,000. Nothing like this had ever happened. To provide a comparison: 14,000 would be a fair figure for the army of adventurers and vassals assembled by William, Duke of Normandy, to conquer England in 1066 and even that may be too high.

  In one point the influence of Gregory VII lived on. The crowned heads, the Emperor Henry IV and King Philip I of France, remained excommunicate and did not come – though the extraordinary appeal of crusading led Philip to have his brother Hugh of Vermandois join the expedition. The crucial figures were princes, men of high rank and resources, who could pay the immense cost of the journey: only they with their entourages and their contacts could do it. The cost of supporting and equipping just one arms-bearer for the great journey from northern France to Jerusalem, 2,700 miles along a difficult land route, has been calculated at five times the normal annual income of such a man. The leader had to provide for arms, armour, transport, horses, mules. He also had to make arrangements, provision and assist vital auxiliaries such as farmers and grooms, squires and armourers, and allow for the care and feeding of large numbers of men on a long journey in a hostile environment. Idealism was in the forefront: the notion, beloved of an earlier generation of historians that younger sons starved of inheritance went for the sake of land, is knocked out by these calculations. A younger son could get land elsewhere much more easily.

  Of those who went on crusade, a substantial number can be related to the pope’s journey in France. Others came from farther afield, moved by ‘the great stirring of hearts’. Two deserving special mention are the Count of Flanders from the Empire, who brought great resources, and Godfrey of Bouillon, Duke of Lower Lorraine, who departed with the permission of the Emperor Henry IV, taking with him officials including his seneschal and his chamberlain. He was no Gregorian and had fought on Henry IV’s side. Aware of his faults before leaving for Jerusalem, he restored the priory of St Dagobert de Stenay which his men had wrecked.

  Albert of Aachen, a chronicler who, though he did not himself go on crusade, received reminiscences from Lorrainers who did, gives us a description of the activities of an ascetic evangelist from Picardy called Peter the Hermit, who in old age retired to a monastery he had founded at Huy on the Meuse. This is not far from Aachen and there is a reasonable supposition that Albert had special information based on the old man’s memories. He describes Peter going on pilgrimage to Jerusalem lamenting ‘unlawful and wicked things’ and ‘calling on God himself as avenger of the wrongs he had seen’. He asked the patriarch of Jerusalem why he ‘allowed gentiles and wicked men to defile the holy places, and let the offerings of the faithful be carried off, churches to be used as stables, Christians beaten up, holy pilgrims robbed by excessive fees and distressed by the many violent acts of the infidels’, and received the reply that he had no power to prevent these acts. Peter then had a vision at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre calling on him to cleanse the Holy Places himself. He resolved to inform ‘the pope and the leaders of Christian peoples’. It looks as if Peter was an entirely independent preacher, acting with the authority of his vision. He flourished a celestial letter, calling for aid to Jerusalem. His themes were harsh and apocalyptic, stressing atrocities committed against Christians. He drew the poor in great numbers. For his hearers, Jerusalem really was a land flowing with milk and honey, as in Scripture, and would deliver them from a harsh, confined world in which they were so often close to starvation or made sick by ergotism caused by mould or rotting grain. Their lot had worsened in the course of the eleventh century, binding them more closely and harshly to lords. So they responded massively to Peter and to other preachers like him, and the People’s Crusade was launched.

  However, modern research has shown that Peter’s followers were not exclusively poor. Clearly there must have been trained fighting men providing a cadre of leaders. For example, the lord of Boissy Sans Avoir, an arms-bearer with his own lands, has had his name mistranslated as Walter the Penniless. There were a number of foot soldiers and cavalry: undisciplined as they were, they still had elements of a fighting force. Another straw in the wind suggesting factors at work creating the conditions for crusading quite independently of Urban II comes from the Muslim world. The chronicler al-Azimi from Aleppo recorded harassment of Frankish and Byzantine pilgrims at Syrian ports resulting in some loss of life as they attempted to make their pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1093–4.

  The People’s Crusade soon showed the dark side of society as anti-Semitism, which had emerged earlier in the days of Adémar of Chabannes, again reared its head. Jews were vulnerable. They had liquid cash and they were in the dangerous position of moneylenders. Godfrey of Bouillon blackmailed the Jews of Cologne and Mainz so that each of the two communities provided him with 500 silver pieces. A Swabian Count Emich and his followers, presumably recruited by Peter the Hermit, killed Jews at Speyer after attempting to force baptism on them, massacred others at Worms and looted and killed at Mainz, where the archbishop failed to keep his promise to protect them. No doubt local tensions aided the looters. When Emich and his gangs came up against a capable army led by the king of Hungary, they gave up. Emich escaped, never did go on crusade and went back to Swabia.

  Another sub-leader, Volkmar, persecuted Jews in Bohemia, while a group passing over the landward route imposed forced baptism in the Danube at Regensburg. Vengeance and vendetta were a part of society, and there is Jewish evidence not only of the looting of Jews for money for the great expenses of the journey but also of persecution born of twisted logic – if crusaders were taking great risks to expel the unjust occupiers of Jerusalem, should they not avenge Christ’s suffering by also repressing and killing Jews who had been responsible for His death? Inexperienced leadership and the sheer size of the People’s Crusade led to quarrelling and tension over provisioning in the localities through which they travelled. There was great wastage of personnel: a sub-leader, Gottschalk, and his group, creating trouble in Hungary, were killed off by King Coloman.

  Alexius, confronted with an ill-equipped army far larger than he wished, wisely provisioned these unwelcome arrivals at Constantinople so as to prevent damage to the empire through foraging, then ensured that they were taken on to occupy and garrison Kibotos, on the Gulf of Nicomedia, but control was lost once they were there and elements, looting and foraging round about, were caught by the Turks of Nicaea and massacred. Remnants had to be rescued by the Byzantines. Alexius had expected mercenaries, who would have been under his control. Instead, he received a great and miscellaneous host and was consequently determined to bind them to him as closely as he could. In return for oaths, the leaders would receive aid and guides through difficult terrain. Determined to rebuild Byzantine power after Manzikert in 1071, the emperor’s prime targets were strongpoints in Anatolia and the city of Antioch, lost in 1086. Jerusalem, lost in 638, was merely a distant objective.

  Bohemond of Taranto was odd man out. He had fought a war against Alexius in pursuit of his own brigand-like claim to Byzantium, the legacy to him of his father, Robert Guiscard, Norman ruler of the multi-ethnic and multicultural kingdom of Sicily. He took the cross, then moved very slowly and cautiously to Constantinople, no doubt with the aim of allowing time for the emperor to accustom himself to the extraordinary notion that he should accept his skilled and dedicated enemy as a member of the crusade army sent to aid Christians in the East (that is, first and foremost, Byzantium) as well as conquer Jerusalem. Alexius had little real choice. He had never intended to lead the army in person – he was not a talented general and he had a need to continue to manage the difficult politics of the Empire, constantly confronted as he was by recalcitrant, manoeuvring aristocrats
. He moved the great armies on. Bohemond approached Godfrey of Bouillon and suggested that, together, they could take over Constantinople and supplant Alexius; Godfrey refused.

  In the end the emperor secured from the leaders of the great contingents an oath of vassalage, requiring them to hand over conquered lands and cities in return for vital logistical and personal help. Mistrust ruffled relations; Godfrey used ravaging in imperial lands to emphasise his dissatisfaction, while Alexius played one leader off against another and calmed the situation by supplies of provisions. Tancred, the Norman nephew of Bohemond and a tearaway, attempted to avoid taking an oath altogether, but was finally compelled to do so.

  The crusaders were unaware of changes in the Islamic world which eased their passage to Jerusalem – while still leaving them a very difficult pathway to their objective. Alp Arslan, the victor at Manzikert, died in 1072 and was succeeded by his formidable son Malik Shah, a man of high culture, deeply knowledgeable about Persian literature, the sponsor of beautiful mosques in Isfahan and the poetry of Omar Khayyam and also a ruthless organiser of military power. He kept control of the fluid situation created by the coming of the Seljuqs using traditional slave soldiers, Mamluks, of the type used by the Abbasid caliphs in the ninth century. He was aided by a long-serving vizier, Nizam al-Mulk, the author of a standard work on the conduct of a Muslim ruler and an administrator of high calibre. But they had both been removed on the eve of the Council of Piacenza and the intervention of the Emperor Alexius, as in 1092 Nizam al-Mulk was stabbed to death by an emissary of the Assassins, extremist Shiites who were offended by Nizam al-Mulk’s part in the revival of Sunnism and resented the corruption of the Fatimid caliphate in Cairo. The Assassins were ensconced in an almost impregnable site at Alamut, in the Elburz mountains. A team of inspired devotees under a talented Grand Master, Hasan i-Sabah, they needed no hashish to deaden their pain, only the inspiration of the rewards of paradise, dealing out death to Sunni leaders and Franks at the Grand Master’s will.

  By pure coincidence Malik Shah died of natural causes a week later. Conspiracy theories sprang up. Seljuq leaders were succeeded by opportunist atabegs, ostensibly looking after youthful princes and in practice taking over power from them. The Seljuq sultanate, created by Tughril Beg’s journey to Baghdad, was fragmented so that instead of Malik Shah mobilising Sunni Islam against the crusaders, they had to grapple with individual atabegs. One such was their first antagonist, Kilij Arslan, who had been imprisoned by Malik Shah. He escaped after Malik Shah’s death and set about creating a mini-empire for himself in Anatolia, with Nicaea as his capital, just as the crusaders began their journey from Constantinople.

  Battles with the Atabegs

  While the crusader armies moved on towards their first major objective, Nicaea, an ancient Roman and Byzantine city with substantial walls and towers, Kilij Arslan, confident in his soldiers, left the city to take Melitene, a key point on the route to Mesopotamia and Iran. Frustrated there, he came back to harass the crusaders as they encamped around Nicaea. The city was defended on its western side by the Ascanian Lake – thus diminishing the area of wall to be manned. Kilij Arslan had intended the city to be a key point in his developing leadership and he had put in a garrison that was more stable and better disciplined than garrisons elsewhere. As part of his plan of Byzantine revival, Alexius was determined to recover a city with so long and distinguished a history and he saw the crusader contingents as a unique instrument put in his hands for this purpose.

  Crusader contingents, arriving piecemeal under their leaders and with no effective overall command, occupied different sides of the city, with Bohemond and the Normans along the north wall, Godfrey of Bouillon and Robert of Flanders on the east. Raymond of Toulouse, who came up later, occupied a position by the south gate and was setting up camp when Kilij Arslan arrived with his archers. Seljuq mounted archers were expert in discharging showers of arrows in order to disconcert opponents and break up their formations, finally to encircle and destroy them. Raymond’s forces stood firm, outfaced the shower of arrows and then drew the attackers into close-quarter fighting: hard, slogging work with heavy losses on both sides. Meanwhile Godfrey rallied speedily, came round from the other side of the city as Raymond held his ground and took Kilij Arslan in his right flank, forcing him to retreat. The terrain had been decisive, the hills and woods enclosing Nicaea leaving scant room for manoeuvre by archers, and the crusaders had shown courage. It all raised morale and readied them for the siege proper.

  Siege engines and mangonels came into play but were not at first effective. Missiles made insufficient impact on stout walls and siege engines of the testudo type, wooden penthouses pushed against walls, with armoured roofs to protect miners working below, failed under attacks from the garrison. One such penthouse from Godfrey’s force collapsed, killing those within. Raymond of Toulouse used mangonels to protect his men as they bridged the ditch and pushed forward another penthouse-type engine, which the garrison burned. Finally a massive sum was paid from the common fund of the armies to a Lombard engineer who designed an engine which was pushed across the ditch. Under its protection miners worked on the stone, made holes and in classic fashion put in wood supports, then fired them. As the defence began to crumble, the garrison surrendered on terms and went free, to the displeasure of some crusaders.

  The city went to Alexius, not the crusaders, who were nonetheless compensated with loot. The emperor had given vital help, supplying wood and nails for the siege engines and food for the besiegers – enough to prevent dispersal for foraging but not enough to succour all the poor, some of whom starved. He had forced the garrison to spread manpower across their defences by blockading the Ascanian Lake with his boats. After Nicaea fell, some crusaders abandoned the march onwards to Jerusalem and enlisted under the emperor. Alexius had kept the confidence of the leaders and it is reasonable to suppose that it was under his influence that they sent envoys to the Fatimids in Egypt, who believed this Western force might aid them in recovering lost territory in Syria and Palestine. Neither Alexius nor the Fatimid caliphate had understood the overwhelming passion to recover Jerusalem which animated the crusader army.

  They marched on heading south towards Antioch, aided by the imperial representative Taticius leading a contingent of Byzantine troops guiding the crusader army through the terrain and, where possible, receiving cities and strongpoints for the emperor. Ahead lay Dorylaeum, an old Roman way-station in a key position at the gateway to the plateau of Anatolia. Kilij Arslan came back from Melitene aided by a force of Danishmends, another Turkish group normally his rivals, whom he had persuaded to join him in order to destroy the western army in open country where nomad cavalry could be most effectively deployed. His intelligence was better than that of the westerners and he caught the vanguard of the forces led by Bohemond, Robert of Normandy, Stephen of Blois and Robert of Flanders as they had just crossed a bridge near modern Bozüyük and were entering on a wide valley north of Dorylaeum separated by about three miles of stragglers from the rearguard of Godfrey of Bouillon and Raymond of Toulouse. Bohemond showed his high calibre as a commander, placing infantry, priests and non-combatants in a camp with a marsh behind where they stayed overnight, terrified by the howling warcries of the nomads. Cavalry were placed in a forward position to block the enemy’s advance, but not all held. Some of Bohemond’s force panicked and had to be rallied by an intervention of Robert of Normandy. The blocking force of cavalry retreated to form a carapace with infantry round the camp, which was attacked from three sides. A morale-raising phrase passed round the hard-pressed crusader force to maintain morale: ‘Stand fast together, trusting in Christ and the victory of the Holy Cross. Today may we all gain much booty.’ Booty was the gift of God.

  For five critical hours in daylight infantry and cavalry together stood against mauling attacks, heavy losses being inflicted on both sides, till the rearguard came up in response to the desperate demand of the vanguard. Stragglers on the road between the vang
uard and the peasants generally were massacred. The vanguard broke Kilij Arslan’s army, forcing them away from the camp. Arslan’s men turned to try to meet attacks on their left and rear from Godfrey and Raymond, then lost cohesion and fled pellmell, leaving a trail of corpses and every sort of loot, precious jewels, horses, pack animals, cows and sheep. Kilij Arslan’s attempt at empire-building was finished. The crusaders felt the hand of God upon them, and they met no more serious resistance being welcomed at Iconium and brushing aside a Turkish ambush as they approached Heraclea which then fell to them.

  Though the Turks had been overawed, the army faced grievous conditions on the high plateau of Anatolia after the fight near Dorylaeum, waterless, subject to extremes of temperature. There were many deaths, horses and mules were lost, cavalrymen sometimes were mounted on oxen; thirsty men, taking advantage of a pause on fertile land in Pisidia, drank too much and died. Godfrey of Bouillon out hunting was injured by a bear.

  At Heraclea armies diverged. Baldwin of Boulogne, the brother of Godfrey of Bouillon, and Tancred turned away south and east into Cilicia to exploit contacts with Armenians, restive at the oppressive rule of the Seljuqs, and win over cities where they had a strong presence. There is little doubt that the diversion had the approval of the crusade leaders and was the fruit of collaboration with Taticius acting in Alexius’s interests, who had put the crusaders in contact with the Armenians at the time of the Nicaea siege. Baldwin and Tancred mopped up the cities of Tarsus and Adana, then clashed over Mamistra. There was open fighting between them and men were killed.

  Meanwhile the main army decided against the shorter coastal route to Antioch and took a longer route through the Taurus Mountains for just the same reason as drew Baldwin and Tancred into Cilicia, to forge alliances with the Armenians. They took Comana and Coxon, then turned south through the Amouk valley to seize Artah, east of Antioch, and a vital strategic post for the defence and supply of the city. Armenians rose against the Turkish garrison and opened the gates to the crusaders. The Turks counterattacked but were beaten off.