The links established in Cilicia, between Baldwin and the Armenians turned out to be of major importance as Baldwin, probably a failed priest who had abandoned orders for a military career, came in contact with a more distant Armenian leader, Thoros, ruler of Edessa, 45 miles east of the Euphrates. Thoros was uneasy in his power over the city because he had deserted Armenian allegiance and ruled as one of the Orthodox Byzantine faith. Thoros asked Baldwin to join him and be his son and heir and in a ceremony celebrating their agreement the childless Thoros embraced his newfound ally; both stripped to the waist and Thoros wrapped a shirt round them both. He was unwise to trust Baldwin, the most ruthless of all the crusaders. Not long after, in March 1098, a rising took place in the city in which Baldwin had complicity. Thoros was lynched and Baldwin took over one of the great cities of Mesopotamia. It was the first of the Crusader States of Outremer, a tripwire against Muslim attack and a nursery of kings. Baldwin gave vital aid to the crusaders who besieged Antioch, but he was unwilling to do anything to endanger his new possession and he had no part in the climax of the crusade, the siege and capture of Jerusalem.
The Siege of Antioch
Some time after Baldwin’s triumph, the main body of the crusaders passed on to Antioch. They decided they could not afford to bypass it on the journey to Jerusalem; moreover, they were still working in collaboration with Alexius. For all its troubles, plague and earthquake, the city remained a great fortress girdled by the Orontes river with a perimeter of some 7½ miles, its wall studded with defensive towers, ascending to the heights of 19,500 feet (500 metres). A citadel near the summit gave observation of all movements on the plain below and a garrison of about 4,000 under the ferocious leadership of Yaghisyan, a Mamluk appointed by Malik Shah, who forced Armenians and eastern Christians to serve as defenders by holding their wives hostage.
The princes had learned lessons from the episodes of crass individualism in the arduous journey from Constantinople and exercised a collective leadership. On 21 October 1097, in front of the gates on the north-east, they debated. The choice was between a policy of either waiting and resting their army, relying on the Armenians’ supplies and their own officers scattered at strongpoints across much territory, or one of open siege, enveloping the city as best they could and exerting pressure on the garrison. Raymond of Toulouse urged the importance of holding together and focusing on the overriding objective of Jerusalem. He won the debate and in the autumn the crusaders moved step by step to limit the free movement of the garrison and its reception of fresh troops and supplies, gradually inhibiting the garrison’s use of the multitude of gates of the city.
The crusader force dared not try a close siege for the perimeter was far too great and the danger of their troops being overwhelmed by an unexpected sally from the garrison too strong. Mr Micawber would have recognised their policy: they were aware that they, unaided, could not achieve a decisive result but hoped something would turn up – perhaps a major mistake by Yaghisyan or reinforcements from Byzantium. The rival sides were like evenly matched wrestlers neither of whom could achieve a decisive throw. The road to St Symeon was bitterly fought over: men and materials could win their way from the port, but at heavy cost in fighting en route. The crusaders were still making progress before Christmas, putting a squeeze on the garrison as Genoese reinforcements enabled Bohemond to build a siege-fort, Malregard, to inhibit Turkish attacks from Harem on his side of the perimeter by St Paul’s Gate; besiegers assembled a Bridge of Boats across the Orontes and Tancred established a presence near St George’s Gate. But at Christmas 1098, in the struggle for supplies that was a central factor in the siege, the balance of advantage tilted towards Yaghisyan’s garrison and away from the besiegers, as cold, hunger and disease began to have their effect and Yaghisyan sought a counterweight from Muslim allies outside Antioch. His first choice was Duqaq, atabeg of Damascus, who surprised Robert of Flanders and Bohemond as they led a mixed force of infantry and cavalry on a distant expedition to secure forage. In the battle against Duqaq on 31 December 1097 the cavalry kept their nerve and avoided encirclement but had to beat a retreat to the besiegers’ camp, abandoning both the forage collected and their infantry, who were massacred. Thereafter besiegers were reluctant to set out on foraging expeditions with manpower of less than 200–300 for fear of garrison counterattack. Men began to leave. The poor tried to stay alive ‘eating dogs and rats, the skins of beasts and seeds of grain found in manure’. Bohemond, distressed at seeing the suffering of his Christian supporters and their mounts, thought of leaving and his half-brother Guy did abandon the siege. Peter the Hermit tried to slip away but was intercepted by Tancred. Taticius left in February with the reasonable objective of calling up supplies and Byzantine troops; his move was later interpreted as cowardice.
As morale fell away, Adémar sought to recall the crusaders to their mission with prayers, processions, psalm-singing and Masses and a search for divine help through repentance and discipline, as he dismissed women from the camp and in a vivid demonstration had two adulterers, stripped naked and flogged through the camp. It checked desertions.
Then Yaghisyan called to his aid Ridwan of Aleppo with a substantial army which approached the city via the Iron Bridge, a control point for the crossing of the Orontes to the north of Antioch. The leadership gave command of the crusaders’ counter-attack to Bohemond, who led out from the crusader camp all the cavalry they had, 700 in all, on every kind of mount, including pack animals and even oxen. From these 700 he kept in reserve his best men and horses. Two advance squadrons of Ridwan were reconnoitring. In tight formation the miscellaneous force on the crusader side ambushed them, catching them in their flank. They fell back and in the ensuing mêlée were enmeshed in Ridwan’s main force. As Ridwan’s mass of cavalry by sheer force of numbers began to push the crusaders back, Bohemond saw the crisis of the battle had come; he led his reserve in a charge with couched spears, checking Ridwan’s archers, whose bows were wet after a shower, and achieved total surprise. They all fled. It was a high-risk tactic against overwhelming hostile forces, and it worked.
The prestige of victory was well demonstrated by an array of severed heads of the crusaders’ enemies and impressed emissaries from al-Afdal, vizier of the Shiite Fatimid caliph in Cairo, discussing a possible arrangement for the crusader army to be given privileges in Jerusalem or even the city itself in return for their help in checking inroads of Sunni Seljuqs and recovering lost Fatimid territory. For a year the crusaders had their emissaries in Cairo. It all proved inconclusive. Al-Afdal cut the Gordian knot in August 1098, took Jerusalem and expelled the Artuqids (alias Ortoqids), heirs to Artuk I, Seljuq governor of the city. In the event, the crusader passion for taking Jerusalem for themselves exclusively took over in 1099, and any thoughts of a deal vanished.
Recovered from illness, Raymond of Toulouse took a hand after Christmas and used his resources to establish a counterfort, Mahommeries, on a hill opposite the Bridge Gate. A common fund established by the princes helped to meet expenses. Tancred received payment and established a tower on the base of a monastery to act as counterfort to St George’s Gate. So military successes and the relighting of the beacon of sacred mission fought against gnawing hunger, disease and despair.
At this moment Yaghisyan threw the dice for the last time and invited to his aid Kerbogah of Mosul, with an army that dwarfed anything yet brought against the crusaders. While Kerbogah, instead of going straight to Antioch, spent three weeks trying in vain to capture Edessa, Bohemond used the general alarm created by news of Kerbogah’s approach to make his move, suborning with rich promises Firuz of the non-Muslim defenders, probably an Armenian, to betray his towers and promised entry to Antioch to his fellow princes in return for his own dominion over the city; they agreed, subject to the rights of the Emperor Alexius, should he wish to exercise them, and in a night movement on 2–3 June Bohemond and others broke in, opened a postern gate and let in the besiegers while also seeking to take the citadel. In da
rkness and confusion many were massacred, Muslims, Armenians and Eastern Christians alike. Yaghisyan was killed but his son held the citadel despite Bohemond. The besiegers had got in at last after over eight months but Kerbogah’s great menace still loomed and the citadel was still in Muslim hands. Desertions multiplied. Stephen of Blois became convinced that all was lost and said so when he met the Emperor Alexius, coming up with his army. Crusaders assumed that he was coming to relieve them in Antioch. When the news reached them that Alexius was not coming to help them in their desperate straits, the link between Byzantium and the West was broken; nothing healed it, and the capture of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204 merely confirmed the ‘fait accompli’ of June 1098.
On 8 June, Kerbogah launched an assault among the heights at the north-west seeking to link up to the citadel and there were fierce encounters at other points on the perimeter as Kerbogah made diversionary moves. In the last phase of the battle for Antioch there was a familiar blend of emotions: the warrior’s delight in heroic battle, overwhelming fear and moments of crusading fervour as visionaries brought new assurance of God’s favour in dire need. On 11 June a priest, Stephen of Valence, while in a state of terror, had a vision of Christ with the cross, Mary and Peter promising aid if the crusaders prayed, did penance and recognised their sinfulness. Shortly afterwards another visionary, Peter Bartholomew, was given assurance from St Andrew that the Holy Lance which pierced Christ’s side at the Crucifixion would be found if he excavated in the floor of the cathedral; urged on by Raymond of Toulouse, a party assembled and dug. On 14 June, when all seemed lost, Peter Bartholomew found a piece of metal. One of the holiest of all relics had been vouchsafed to the surviving Christians as a sign of divine support which aided morale. In the end the desperate need for survival led to final action and on 28 June the leaders committed all their forces under Bohemond’s command. ‘It would be better’, they thought, in the words of Albert of Aachen, ‘to die fighting than to succumb to the cruel famine and watch the miserable Christian people perish day by day.’
In daylight they broke out of the Bridge Gate, each prince’s group having been allocated a function in a skilfully devised sequence of movements: Hugh of Vermandois at the outset with his bowmen demolishing a Muslim attempt to block the crusaders as they emerged from the Bridge Gate; Godfrey of Bouillon and other northern leaders marching up the plain into the path of a series of Kerbogah’s units, keeping the Orontes on their flank. Renaud of Toil safeguarded their rear and Raymond in the mountains blockaded the Muslim forces in the citadel while Adémar with southern French troops in a great sweeping movement sought to outflank the Turks, bringing strong forces to bear where they least expected it.
Kerbogah had been careless with his great host, deploying it widely round the Antioch perimeter and leaving a nucleus of his force up in the north, probably hoping to destroy the crusading army as a whole as it debouched. Dismayed, his men began to flee. Bohemond had kept one squadron in reserve with every single surviving mount, 200 in all, and charged at a critical point. That settled it. Kerbogah up in his camp simply broke off the engagement. The citadel surrendered to Bohemond, and the army fell on Kerbogah’s camp, absorbing loot and killing wholesale. Although he was, technically speaking, going to war on behalf of the Abbasid caliph, Kerbogah was no jihadi himself, even if he had jihadis in his host. He had bargained and delivered a hostage to Yaghisyan; at heart an opportunist, he belonged in the ‘fractured borderlands of Islam’, the world of self-seeking atabegs that proliferated after the breakdown of Seljuq unity and he gave in fairly easily. The crusaders, by contrast, and for all their flaws, were driven on by a combination of the will to survive and the recurrent crusading sense that they must conquer or die. It was a great achievement by Bohemond and all his troops.
No sooner was Antioch won and loot and forage absorbed than the leadership fell back to its default position of quarrelling, individualist self-seeking and casual marauding. The fierce Syrian heat caused disease and many died. On 1 July the leaders decided to delay the advance on Jerusalem; a month later, on 1 August, Adémar died, probably of typhoid. He had been an irreplaceable spiritual leader. Raymond of Toulouse refused to accept Bohemond’s possession of Antioch and used his troops to hold on to the Palace and the Bridge Gate while even the Genoese, contracted to keep supplying Bohemond, were uneasy about Alexius exercising a claim to the city because of the princes’ oaths to him and disconcerted by the rivalry between Bohemond and Raymond for Antioch. Raymond set about making more territorial conquests so as to disrupt Bohemond’s supply line. The poor grew cynical about the princely leaders, called for an advance to Jerusalem and were frustrated about the lack of forage and foodstuffs for them: some in desperation went to attach themselves for the sake of food to Baldwin’s garrison at Edessa.
Eventually, still in pursuit of his claim to Antioch, Raymond set about besieging the Muslim town of Maarat-an-Numan and was joined temporarily by Bohemond, hoping to exercise a part-claim to Maarat by right of conquest and so frustrate Raymond. There was a devastating massacre of inhabitants, made worse by heavy looting and a night-time assault by the desperate poor. Their frustrations led at one stage to a group called the Tafurs practising cannibalism by openly feasting on the haunches of dead Muslims, an episode which shocked contemporaries. On 13 January Raymond, in effect abandoning his claim to Antioch, seized the chance to assert leadership, ordered the ruined Maarat to be fired behind him, called praying clergy to accompany him and walked out in front of them in bare feet, clad as a pilgrim, symbolically asserting his claim to lead troops on to Jerusalem.
However, some character trait damaged Raymond’s claim to leadership: for all his wealth and achievements his fellow princes never accepted him and, in the sequence of events after his departure from Maarat, schemes for territorial aggrandisement tripped him up. With strange obstinacy he insisted on besieging the insignificant town of Arqa. He was still accompanied by Peter Bartholomew, the visionary and discoverer of the Holy Lance, who in the dead months of 1098 had gone on insisting on the need to advance to Jerusalem. But he became wild and bloodthirsty in his revelations and in April 1099 was subjected to the ordeal to prove the authenticity of his visions. After fasting, he committed himself to the judgement of God, running the barefoot gauntlet of burning fires; he did not survive, either being crushed by excited onlookers or succumbing to the effects of his injuries. With the end of Peter Bartholomew and a rebellion by the poor came the finish of Raymond’s solitary leadership. The princes swept him aside, abandoned the Arqa siege, reasserted collective leadership and all together moved to Tripoli, thereafter marching at speed along the coastal road to the south and to Jerusalem. Compromise with al-Afdal and the Fatimid caliphate or collaboration with Byzantium was abandoned: they would conquer. They turned aside from the coast at Jaffa and came in sight of the Holy City on 7 June. They were a much diminished force.
Jerusalem
John France estimates that the total surviving crusader force consisted of 12–13,000 cavalry and 12,000 foot – too few for a conventional siege. They had to storm the city and to do this it was essential to have siege towers or ladders, rams and mangonels and sufficiently flat ground in proximity to the walls. Both sides were conscious of the economic and military power of Fatimid Egypt and the prospect of a relief army aiding the garrison and catching the besiegers in the classic, devastating position of being caught in the open by a fresh, equipped army, spurred the besiegers to a rapid sequence of action and the besieged to comparative passivity as they waited for help. Before the arrival of the crusade, the Fatimids had given the garrison 400 mounted men with the brief of galloping to any critical point, then dismounting to reinforce troops hard pressed. The city had strongpoints at the Quadrangular Tower and the Citadel to deter attack; the Seljuqs had dug moats and there were double walls, plus the deterrent for attackers of a grave lack of water on the arid plateau and an absence of timber to construct siege towers or ramps. Improvisation and the he
lp of the Genoese and skilled men got over the problem of constructing siege towers but lack of water remained a grievous handicap, especially for the poor, and made defence against naphtha harder.
A hermit from the Mount of Olives addressed the leaders on 12 June and assured them that it was time to attack. Wood was too scarce to provide more than one ladder. On 13 June Reybold of Chartres, from Tancred’s contingent, was first to put his hand on the top of the city wall and had it chopped off. After this the leaders conferred and two siege towers were constructed. On the southern side one built by Raymond of Toulouse made an additional point of pressure but his position on the high land made him vulnerable to missiles from the garrison, which in the end burnt his siege-tower. The second, a ramshackle construction the height of a four-storey house, created out of frail materials by Godfrey of Bouillon and a coalition of French princes, was taller than the wall in places but nevertheless was light and manoeuvrable.
Adémar in death was still potent. When he appeared in a vision to another prophetic figure, Peter Desiderius, calling for the host to process round the city as Joshua did before the walls of Jericho fell, everyone responded, marching barefoot with relics and music round part of the walls up to the site of the Ascension of Christ on the Mount of Olives. Princes’ quarrels were stilled and all were called back to their purpose. The procession took place on 8 July; decisive action followed on the night of 13–14 July, when Godfrey’s siege tower was taken down and conveyed under cover of darkness to a new site on flat land on the north, probably near to Herod’s Gate. With it went a carefully prepared battering ram and the besiegers’ mangonels. The garrison was taken by surprise: their ropes, padding, projectiles and mangonels had been readied for assault near the original assembly point of the siege tower and had to be shifted to the new site. Signallers using reflectors on the Mount of Olives co-ordinated attacks on the northern and southern fronts. But everything now hung on the assault mounted on the northern side on 14 and 15 July, as the besiegers in great numbers pushed forward a massive ram while the garrison protected the wall, lowering straw and ropes, swinging beams against the tower and assailing the attackers with arrows. Godfrey of Bouillon, a master of the crossbow, used his skill to fire the padding protecting the wall. The ram was attacked with naphtha by the garrison, forcing besiegers to use precious water to prevent the fire taking hold. Then the ram stuck in the hole made in the outer wall, leaving the inner wall unbroken, and the position was reversed as the besiegers tried to destroy their ram with fire and the garrison poured on water to keep it in position in order to block the approach by the siege towers. At last the decision was taken to abandon the ram and bring the siege-tower, well prepared against fire with wet hides, directly up to the wall in an attempt to scramble up and over. The garrison’s mangonels’ arc of fire carried some projectiles beyond the tower, relieving pressure on its defences. A battle followed, with the garrison’s naphtha being countered by vinegar to douse the flames, till at last an improvised bridge carried besiegers across the wall; in one account a critical part was again played by Godfrey of Bouillon in the crossing. Once the besiegers had reached the rampart, the defence collapsed and was overwhelmed by the incoming host.
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