The Arab historian Ibn al-Athir offers a slightly different version of events. Peter went to Kerbogah hoping only to surrender. The only thing the crusaders requested was safe conduct back to Europe. Kerbogah laughingly refused. The Franks would have to fight their way out, he told Peter.
Given the contradiction between the two accounts, which should we believe? Recent historians have tended to accept Ibn al-Athir’s story on the grounds that the evidence behind it is “less partisan.” We should probably be more circumspect. Ibn al-Athir was a remarkably lucid historian, but no less partisan than the Latin writers. (In this case he might have wanted to show how unreasonable Kerbogah was being, how he had the chance to turn the Franks away, but in his arrogance rejected the opportunity.) Ibn al-Athir also knew much less about the mindset and intentions of the Franks than did contemporary Christian writers. Peter certainly might have floated some sort of handover of the city, probably asking for a guarantee of safe passage to Jerusalem—terms that Kerbogah did not accept. But the fact that Peter offered a possible compromise does not invalidate the impression created in chronicles that diplomatic bluster formed the better part of his presentation. Whatever the case, the two sides could not come to agreement, and Peter and Herluin returned to the city.28
Back inside Antioch Peter announced that Kerbogah would have only war. Drawing a crowd, as he was wont to do, he started to go into detail about the things he had seen, but Godfrey ordered him to be silent, “lest the people, already suffering from fear and deprivation withdraw from the battle.” Godfrey may have had still another reason for telling Peter to be quiet. Peter, or Herluin, may have been sent to gather other intelligence about the Turks, information that the princes did not want the rest of their armies to know. Or they may have feared that there were still spies in the city in communication with Kerbogah, and they did not want these spies relaying back to Kerbogah everything that Peter had learned.29
Over the next three days, in preparation for battle, the princes declared a fast. It was likely unnecessary. The army was already starving. The clergy also arranged liturgical processions in and around Antioch’s churches, along with ceremonies of mass confession. Every available cleric preached, including the Provençal visionary Peter Bartholomew. Andrew was still talking to him, and the apostle’s young spiritual companion had by now revealed himself to be Jesus Christ. (He made His identity known somewhat grotesquely—ordering Peter to kiss His foot. When Peter knelt down, he recoiled in horror at the sight of the bloody open wound. Whether he then pressed his lips to the gory mess, as requested, is unknown.)
Speaking to the crowd, Peter Bartholomew delivered three important messages. First, everyone who was able should perform five acts of charity in commemoration of the five wounds of Christ. Even in these tense circumstances, Peter was thinking of how best to alleviate the suffering of the poor. Second, the Lord wanted the crusaders to change their battle cry. It should be “God help us!” rather than “God wills it!” It is doubtful whether anyone followed him on this point, even among the Provençals. Adhémar of le Puy, who distrusted Peter anyway, would not have tolerated going against Urban II’s instructions. Finally, he proclaimed, “know this well: the days have come that the Lord promised to Blessed Mary and to his apostles, that He would raise up the kingdom of Christians while casting down and trampling the kingdom of pagans.” In other words, based on what Andrew had told Peter, the Apocalypse was at hand.30
Few in the army would have contradicted this opinion. More than ever, the crusade belonged to the prophets.
The Battle with Kerbogah
The fasting over, on June 28, 1098, the Franks did what Kerbogah had least expected: They attacked. Their forces were badly outnumbered. Many of the knights were riding packhorses and mules. Nevertheless, most of the Franks left the city in waves, directly engaging Kerbogah’s army at close range. Another group, under the leadership of Raymond of Saint-Gilles, stayed behind to guard the citadel lest Kerbogah’s lieutenant Ahmad ibn-Marwan suddenly decided to fight aggressively on behalf of his lord. Outside the walls, according to Frankish lore, Kerbogah sat idly by, playing chess with one of his followers. When news of the battle reached him, he refused to believe that it was actually happening. His surprise at the news led him to berate one of his noble followers, a Turk named Mirdalin, who had assured him that the Franks were trapped in the city and would never dare challenge him. “What’s going on? Didn’t you tell me that there were very few Franks and that they’d never fight with me?”
“I never said that they wouldn’t attack,” Mirdalin responded. “But come! I’ll have a look and tell you if they can be easily beaten.” At that moment a third wave of Franks, led by Bishop Adhémar, exited the city, and Mirdalin observed, “They can be killed, but you can’t make them retreat.” (Some Latin writers maintained that Mirdalin was an apostate Christian from Aquitaine. In their version of the story, Kerbogah turned to him and shouted, “You clod! You wretched criminal! What nonsense you told me about these men—that they were eating their horses, in the death throes of hunger, planning to flee! By Mathomos, this lie will come back on your head, and it will cost you the price of your head!” Kerbogah then summoned his “gladiator” and ordered him to unsheathe his sword and cut off the man’s head in a way worthy of his prattling apostasy.)31
It was time for a new plan, but Kerbogah continued to hesitate. Rather than attack, he pathetically sought another parlay, ready now to accept the Franks’ offer of a judicial duel. As a result, his army entered the fray too late and too little prepared. (Or did Kerbogah order his army to delay its counterattack in order to crush the Franks all at once, as one Latin writer and one Arab writer argued? Nearly a decade later, the circumstances of the battle remained controversial.)32
As Kerbogah would soon realize, the time for negotiation had passed. And despite all the Franks’ previous talk of their cause being based on property rights secured by St. Peter, and despite their willingness to settle it according to legal procedure and to consider surrender, they had now crossed over into heaven. Or heaven had crossed into their world. The true holy war had begun. Lines of priests and monks clad in vestments marched in front of the armies, chanting and summoning heavenly aid for the battle.
Help from above arrived. First, God sent a light rain to refresh the wearied Franks and their mounts. Then, a cross that some of the Normans were carrying began to shine brightly, striking fear into the Saracens. Adhémar of le Puy’s chaplain, none other than the chronicler Raymond of Aguilers, held aloft the Holy Lance of Antioch and wielded it as a talismanic weapon. The very winds struggled to determine the outcome, and when for a time things seemed to go poorly for the Franks, Eurus, the east wind, appeared to prevail over Zephyrus, the west.33
As some of the veterans remembered the battle, what really turned the fighting was the appearance of ghost riders. Their number included the fallen crusaders, just as Peter Bartholomew and the former ropedanc-ing priest had promised. Many saints were there as well. God loved the Franks so much, the apostle Andrew had earlier told Peter, “that the saints, who are now at rest and who know in advance the gift God has planned, were willing to be in the flesh and to fight with us.” Their number included George, Theodore, Demetrius—“You have to believe these words,” an eyewitness wrote, “since many of our men saw it”—and all the other white-clad riders whom Pirrus had often seen riding down from a mysterious camp in the hills. Saints Peter and Paul, meanwhile, vigorously offered prayers of intercession for the soldiers, without actually becoming directly involved in the fighting.
The ghost army marched in five divisions, exiting the city along with the crusaders, their numbers freely mingling with the living Franks. “For truly as they said, our princes had established only eight divisions, and once outside the city we were in thirteen orders.” With this army in the fray, with priests chanting psalms of victory, with the Holy Lance keeping the Saracens and their arrows miraculously at bay, Christ was at last conferring the victory at
Antioch of which “the pilgrim church of Franks” had so long dreamed.34
Shortly after Adhémar and the chaplain Raymond took to the field, a grass fire broke out. Was it a Saracen battle tactic—a deliberate attempt to blind the Franks and their horses and thus more easily kill them—or an agreed-upon signal for the Saracens to retreat? Yet another point of controversy. Regardless, a panicked, disorganized withdrawal began, the Turks blinded with their own smoke and terror—or else with dread instilled in them from the Holy Lance of Christ. Bohemond emerged from the city at the head of his reserve force only to find the battle, to all appearances, ended. Kerbogah’s massive army was fleeing, with the ragtag band of the crusaders in pursuit on their mules or oxen or half-dead horses. Most of the Turkish cavalry escaped, their horses in far better condition than the Franks’. Their foot soldiers were captured. As for the Turkish women, the historian Fulcher of Chartres bragged that the Franks did not rape them but only pierced their bellies with lances. “They left behind their tents, their gold and silver and many treasures, their sheep and oxen, their horses and mules, their camels and asses, their grains and wine, their flour and many other things that we needed to live.” The battle for Antioch was over, and the Franks, unbelievably, had won.35
Surely some of the crusaders, like modern historians, wondered just how they had survived. Their success in battle had always depended on two things: the opportunity to engage the Turks at close quarters and the strength of their knights. But as Kerbogah would have readily agreed, the numbers didn’t add up. By June 28 the Franks had fewer than two hundred horses left. A few thousand infantry and two hundred poorly equipped knights seemed a poor match for an army so large that contemporaries numbered it in the hundreds of thousands. Kerbogah’s decision to delay his attack until the Franks were in the open field seemed a wise decision—to wait until the enemy was most vulnerable to encirclement and false retreats, basic tactics of Turkish cavalry. With any kind of discipline, Kerbogah could not have lost and a commander like Bohemond could not have believed that his pathetic, starving warriors would ever win.36
So how did they? The Arab historian Ibn al-Athir (the same historian who I have suggested was not trustworthy on matters of crusader psychology) offered a straightforward solution: Kerbogah’s armies betrayed him. They had only joined his cause with reluctance. Kerbogah, he wrote, “thinking that the present crisis would force the Muslims to remain loyal to him, alienated them by his pride and ill-treatment of them. They plotted in secret anger to betray him and desert him in the heat of battle.” That appears to be exactly what happened. Remarkably, Ibn al-Athir’s portrayal of Kerbogah was perfectly in line with what the Franks said about him. He was an arrogant man, someone so anxious to impose his own will on Antioch that he first disinherited Yaghi-Siyan’s son in favor of his own man, Ahmad ibn-Marwan, and then promptly began to bully Ahmad ibn-Marwan.
The Franks, particularly Tancred, seem to have been aware of this situation. They also could have readily understood how the Turks drafted into Kerbogah’s service would have viewed their general. Kerbogah was a representative of Baghdad, a ruthlessly ambitious man anxious to impose his own vision of a unified culture on what was essentially a frontier society. Many of the men in Kerbogah’s army would have been no more enthusiastic about his presence than, for example, Raymond of Saint-Gilles would have been if King Philip I had marched to Occitania to impose order on Raymond’s principality or if representatives of Henry IV had showed up in southern Italy trying to coerce Bohemond’s clan into more predictable and subservient behavior.37
Yet there is even more to the story. It may be that Kerbogah’s followers not only deserted him in the battle but also that Bohemond, and perhaps the other crusader princes, knew—or at least suspected—that this would happen. Perhaps Ahmad ibn-Marwan raised the possibility in his discussions with Tancred. He may well have identified other dissatisfied leaders in the Turkish army whom the Christians could try to contact. And on the eve of the battle, the Christians had had the opportunity to pursue such leads in the form of the legation led by Peter the Hermit and at least one fluent Arabic speaker. In this scenario the sudden grass fire in the Turkish camp may indeed have been a signal to retreat, as the author of Deeds of the Franks suggested, a signal about which the Franks had been warned in advance.
In any case Ahmad ibn-Marwan knew that the fix was in. As soon as the battle started to turn, he sent word down from the citadel that he wanted to surrender. Raymond of Saint-Gilles, who had been left behind to block the citadel, immediately sent up his banner, and Ahmad ibn-Marwan had it displayed from a tower. Some of the Normans, however, informed the Turks in the citadel that the banner was not Bohemond’s. Ahmad ibn-Marwan returned it at once and only formalized his surrender when he received the banner of the man whom Tancred had helped to establish as his ally.38
If this were the case—if Christians had conspired with Turks to gain victory at Antioch—then neither side would later want to make the fact known. The Turks had betrayed their leader and allowed the Franks to establish a second capital, along with Edessa, in Syria. It would not have been a proud moment in Muslim history.
As for the Christians, they preferred the illusion of a great—no, rather, a miraculous—victory. Adhémar of le Puy, who by now had embraced the Holy Lance of Antioch, was a man who knew something about faking a miracle. He, Bohemond, and the other princes would have been content in this case to let appearances speak for themselves. Through the miracles of God, the crusaders had achieved the impossible. Why let on that it had been another negotiated betrayal, instead of a heroic last stand gone unbelievably right?
And to a degree we ought to accept this explanation. The Franks believed that their enemies were idol worshippers. They were adherents of a cult whose founder, Mathomos, was a heretic and a libertine. The Franks saw in this same Mathomos a cruel parody of Christ and indeed a precursor to Antichrist. They believed that as warriors the Turks were very much like themselves, and if only they would renounce their misguided and misbegotten religion, they might stand alongside Christians as brothers. But because they would not, the Turks and Saracens were limbs of Satan and legates of Antichrist. Kerbogah may have believed that he was fighting a traditional war in which numbers, strategy, and, perhaps, law would play a role. But the Franks knew their battle fit into a much grander apocalyptic drama, one whose ending had long been written.
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Feasting on the Fallen: Antioch to Ma‘arra
(June 1097–January 1099)
After the defeat of Kerbogah, the army went into something like early hibernation. Jerusalem, by some reports, was a mere ten days’ march away if the crusaders committed to going. Instead, the princes decided to rest until at least November. Fulcher of Chartres, who was in Edessa, indicated that the leaders did not want to advance until the beginning of the harvest season when supplies would be more plentiful, but no one else supported this explanation. The Franks instead seemed to have lost their direction.
In the meantime the armies dispersed into different parts of Syria, each group foraging for food and looking for adventure on its own. The leaders, meanwhile, fought among themselves. Their struggles were in part political and personal, with Bohemond and Raymond vying for control of Antioch and seeking out allies among the other lords. But these leaders were at the same time engaged in an ideological battle over the meaning of the crusade. In question was not only whether their campaign was, at heart, an apocalyptic enterprise. They also faced a subtler problem: What kind of apocalypse would it be?1
Aftermath
The political problems (as distinct from the ideological ones) had begun before the battle with Kerbogah ended. As we have seen, the Turks in the citadel preferred to surrender to Bohemond, not Raymond. And Bohemond had already secured a promise from all the other Frankish leaders that should he play an instrumental role in Antioch’s capture, he would gain possession of it. He had now played that sort of role twice, first by securing Pirrus’s cooperat
ion in betraying the city and then by simultaneously defeating Kerbogah and securing Ahmad ibn-Marwan’s agreement to hand over the citadel. To secure his claim to the keep, Bohemond expelled from it all but his own men. Raymond, his chief rival and critic, forced his way inside a tower near the Bridge Gate, the area of the most intense fighting during the siege, and established a stronghold there. The princes were unsure how to settle these claims, particularly if Alexius or Tetigus turned up with their long-expected army, asserting imperial rights to the city.
This last problem was especially pressing. Alexius had it in his power to wreck the whole crusade if in the name of Antioch he decided to set his armies against the Franks. The princes, with the exception of Bohemond, therefore decided to take the question directly to him. They dispatched Hugh the Great to Constantinople, charging him either with inviting Alexius to come to Antioch to claim his prize or else with denouncing him to his face as a traitor and informing him that the Franks had broken all ties with him. As is sometimes the case, equally reliable sources give diametrically opposed reports. Whatever the tenor of Hugh’s mission, it didn’t matter. Alexius never rejoined the Franks, and Hugh never returned to the crusade.2
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