God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  Afonso’s determination bordering on desperation to reach agreement with the crusaders was reflected in generous terms. The Portuguese ruler needed victory at Lisbon to exploit the temporary disunity among the Moorish princes of southern Iberia in the wake of the collapse of the previously dominant Almoravid power in north Africa. Securing the Tagus frontier, Afonso would reinforce his credentials as a Christian warrior worthy of papal recognition as king and further assert his independence from his nominal overlord, Alfonso VII of León-Castile. Afonso offered the ‘Franks’, as the treaty had it, the entire booty from the captured city and the ransoms of all the inhabitants they rounded up. Once it had been thoroughly ransacked, Afonso would then allocate property in the city and surrounding countryside to the Franks, who would also enjoy exemption from certain commercial tolls. To encourage trust, Afonso promised not to desert the siege or try to twist the treaty provisions. Additionally, guarantees for supplies and pay were presumably settled with the dissident Anglo-Normans. The whole deal was confirmed by oaths and the exchange of hostages. Thus Afonso partly hired and partly allied with the Christian fleet.17

  The new allies invested Lisbon on all sides. Ships lay in the river to the south of the city; Afonso and the Portuguese occupied high ground to the north with the Anglo-Normans on the west and the Flemish and Germans on a hill to the east. After a fruitless formal parley with the enemy further to reinforce the legitimacy of the attack, on 1 July, following a confused melee in the steep, narrow streets of the western suburb, the besiegers managed to drive the defenders back behind the walls of the main city, in the process uncovering a vast cache of food supplies concealed in cellars. There followed a bitter attritional conflict. The small Muslim garrison, with large numbers of civilians, including refugees from Santarem, faced a grim prospect. Denied the supplies hoarded in the western suburbs, with little prospect of relief, they were reduced to reliance on the strength of the city walls, the difficulty of the hilly terrain for siege engines, crude psychological warfare in the form of abuse aimed at insulting their attackers’ religion and the fidelity of their wives, and frequent costly sorties as much to undermine Christian morale as in the realistic hope of militarily forcing a withdrawal. Once attempts to persuade the governor of Evora to send help failed, the main Muslim strategy appeared to be to wait for something to turn up, most likely the disintegration of Christian harmony and the raising of the siege as in 1142. These tactics showed prospects of success when, in early August, concerted assaults from east, west and the sea by large and elaborate siege engines, including rams, trebuchets, towers, one reputedly ninety-five feet high, and precarious ‘flying bridges’ mounted on pairs of ships, failed utterly, with most of the machines fired, stuck in the sand or damaged by Muslim artillery. Five times men from Cologne unsuccessfully tried to undermine the walls.

  With casualties mounting, the besiegers faced a major crisis. The destruction of the siege engines left the attackers ‘not a little demoralized’ while with the failed mining operations, the East Anglian priest Raol remembered: ‘our forces again had cause for deep discouragement and, murmuring much among themselves, they made such complaints as that they might have been better employed elsewhere.’18 Now the dividends of the hard-fought battles of May and June to maintain unity and a chain of corporate command became apparent. Stories of the hunger, privations and desperation of the Muslims circulated. To quell talk of abandoning the siege, the leaders hauled some ships on to the beaches and ‘lowered the masts and put cordage under the hatches, as a sign that they were spending the winter (hyemandi signum)’.19 Successful foraging expeditions around Lisbon garnered rich pickings and heavy Muslim casualties as well as securing the besiegers from any threats to their supply lines. In the new mood of optimism, even the withdrawal of most of the Portuguese forces, leaving only Afonso and his military household with the bishop of Oporto, failed to cause a panic. As September arrived, instead of seeking an excuse to leave, the besiegers sensed their advantage as more and more of the besieged crossed the lines to surrender, bearing tales of the horrors within the city. According to a Rhineland witness most were so desperate that they accepted baptism; possibly these were in fact Mozarab Christians whom the northerners could not distinguish from Muslim locals; the cultural gulf remained unbridged: some of these unfortunate refugees ‘were sent back… to the walls with their hands cut off, and they were stoned by their fellow citizens’.20 Perhaps this incident merely underscores the sadism inspired by prolonged close-contact warfare; perhaps it dimly echoes the blurred rhetoric of conquest and forced conversion heard by the Germans from the lips of the abbot of Clairvaux.

  The final stages of the siege revolved around perfecting the mechanics of undermining or overtopping the stubborn city walls conducted in more or less security, as the defenders’ ability to launch sorties had subsided in the face of starvation and a massive sustained fusillade by the Anglo-Norman trebuchets firing at a rate of more than eight stones a minute. During September, while the Germano-Flemish dug a huge galleried mine under the eastern walls, the Anglo-Normans, directed by a Pisan engineer, constructed a new eighty-three-foot tower on the western beach. The final assaults, though protracted, appeared coordinated. The eastern mine was fired on the night of 16 October, causing a large section of the walls to collapse, although the pile of rubble in front of the breach prevented the attackers from forcing an immediate entry into the city. On 19 October, after the ritual dimension of warfare had been observed with the blessing both of the siege tower and the troops, the tower began to be manoeuvred into place before the south-western corner of the walls. So narrow was the level area of beach that the tower became surrounded by water, cutting it off from the main force. Throughout the night of 19 October and the whole of 20 October, the garrison of 100 Anglo-Norman and 100 Portuguese knights led support troops in a desperate defence of the tower, from fire, salvoes of missiles and sorties from the walls. Seven young men from Ipswich played a crucial part in dousing the flames that threatened to destroy the engine during the night of 19–20 October. Christian casualties mounted, the Pisan engineer was wounded by a stone and the Portuguese fled, the tower garrison only being relieved on the evening of 20 October.21 Next day saw the final assaults from both east and west. Seeing they would be overwhelmed, rather than be massacred the Muslim defenders asked for surrender terms. Negotiations became protracted, inciting restless elements in the crusader army to mutiny against the leadership, whom they suspected of selling out their rights to plunder and booty; the Anglo-Norman camp was wrecked by a group of 400 sailors led by a priest from Bristol, and the Portuguese camp threatened by a Germano-Flemish mob. Unsurprisingly, the Muslims temporarily withdrew their peace overtures until order had been restored. The treaty finally agreed on 23/4 October allowed the governor alone to retain food and property, while on 24 October 140 Anglo-Normans and 160 Germano-Flemish were peacefully to occupy the citadel and organize the despoliation of the city and its citizens. In the event the Germans and the Flemish smuggled in 200 more and the orderly occupation soon turned into looting, rape and pillage. The governor was captured; the Mozarab bishop had his throat cut.22 Having achieved immediate gratification, the Flemish and Germans then submitted with the other crusaders to the orderly ransacking of the city and expulsion of the citizens, which lasted five days (25–29 October). To the familiar accompaniment of rotting corpses, religious processions, racketeering and refugees, Lisbon returned to Christian rule.

  Given the time of year, there was no prospect of an immediate resumption of the journey to Jerusalem. Afonso was eager to entice colonists and settlers, agreeing to the appointment of Gilbert of Hastings as the new bishop of Lisbon in a signal display of cultural imperialism.23 With the Mozarab bishop conveniently murdered, there was no question of another local; equally Afonso may have hoped to encourage settlement and to display to the papacy his orthodox international ecclesiastical connections: Bishop Gilbert introduced the Salisbury breviary and missal into his cathedral a
nd, a few years later, returned to England to recruit more soldiers and settlers. Others remaining included the priest Raol, to whom is attributed the most detailed account of the siege; he maintained his contacts with home, some years later sending a copy of his narrative to a Suffolk clerk, Osbert of Bawdsey. Such settlement witnessed the effective end to the unity so hard won and preserved since Dartmouth. While the thirst and competition for booty had both imperilled and inspired the assault on Lisbon, the lure of profitable and privileged colonization broke up the crusader army. In early February, part of the fleet embarked for the Mediterranean to fulfil their vows separately, per varia discrimina, as a Rhineland crusader put it. Before passing through the Straits of Gibraltar, one group, probably Flemish and German, attacked the port of Faro, without success, an attempt to extract protection money from the Muslims proving a messy failure. Once in the Mediterranean, some contingents sailed directly to the Holy Land.24 Others, mainly Englishmen but also Flemings and Germans, who may have lingered at Lisbon until April, tried their luck with the papally blessed Christian campaigns in eastern Iberia, culminating in the Genoese-Catalan-led siege of Tortosa on the Ebro on the southern border of Catalonia (July to December 1148), after which a few continued to Palestine while their comrades, as at Lisbon, settled. One such, Osbert ‘Anglicus’, the Englishman, only honoured his Jerusalem vow after two decades waxing rich in the new Christian enclave.25

  The success of the crusaders at Lisbon confirmed the fears of the doubters. It had brought out the best and worst in them, the heroism of the young men from Suffolk, the obsessive, violent greed for a valuable horse shown by Arnold of Aerschot in the division of the spoils. The numbers and strength of the fleet became dissipated through casualties, subsequent diversion and settlement in Portugal and Catalonia. The survivors who reached Outremer in time to join the abortive siege of Damascus in July 1148, probably mainly Flemish and Germans who would have found their overlords Count Thierry and King Conrad in Jerusalem, represented only a fraction of the 10,000 who had sailed from Dartmouth in May 1147. Many of the leaders survived, including Hervey of Glanvill and Christian of Gistel, although, judging by the tone and omissions of his priest Raol’s account of events, the former may not have reached the Holy Land, while the latter almost certainly did. For the development of Portugal, the capture of Lisbon, with that of Santarem a few months earlier, marked a significant as well as symbolic advance. For the reconquista it provided new heroes and fresh opportunities. For the cause of the Holy Land, the fall of Lisbon proved at best an irrelevance, at worst a distraction. Most of the rest of Europe ignored it.

  THE ROADS TO THE HOLY LAND: MAY 1147 TO APRIL 1148

  On the same October day that the Christians began the orderly ransacking of Lisbon, 2,000 miles to the east one of the largest armies assembled by a medieval king met with disaster near Dorylaeum in north-west Anatolia, close to the scene of the First Crusade’s victory of 1097. The subsequent retreat westwards towards Nicaea and the coast finished what the battle had begun; losses were horrific; the rearguard wiped out; the commander-in-chief suffering a severe arrow wound to the head. The defeat of Conrad III’s magnificent army, with its echoes not of 1097 but of 1101, placed the whole enterprise in jeopardy, militarily and psychologically. Although within a few weeks, Conrad could describe the traumatic events in the Anatolian hills dispassionately, others saw in them the harsh judgement of God. Veterans later wept at the memory. Louis VII’s army remained in the field, but an aura of besieged failure became established, matched by the mounting practical obstacles against which the French in their turn were broken.26

  The scale of later recriminations reflected the size of the armies led eastwards. German, French and Greek observers testified to the magnitude of Conrad III’s forces on its progress to Constantinople, too numerous for Byzantine officials to count.27 Beside the ranks of fighting men, support troops, clerical and civilian camp followers marched substantial contingents of unarmed pilgrims taking advantage of the protection afforded by the military expedition, a group large and inconvenient enough for Conrad unsuccessfully to try to separate them from the fighting units on reaching the Turkish frontier. One veteran lamented that Pope Eugenius had not insisted on the weak staying at home and, instead of banning fancy clothes, falcons and hunting dogs, ‘had equipped all the strong with the sword instead of the wallet and the bow instead of the staff; for the weak and helpless are always a burden to their comrades and a source of prey to their enemies’.28 Fresh recruits joined the German host on its way from Regensburg, down the Danube to Vienna, Hungary and on to the Byzantine border at Branitz, which was reached around 20 July. The size of Conrad’s army may be reflected in its modest rate of progress, especially once it left the Danube and turned south into Bulgaria. At less than ten miles a day, with no opposition, the Germans marched considerably more slowly than the First Crusaders, who had faced resistance.29 The weight of numbers persuaded King Geza of Hungary, Conrad’s enemy of only a year earlier, to pay protection money to ensure a peaceful passage. The hulks of the large German fleet abandoned at Branitz on the Bulgarian border provided locals with plentiful firewood and building materials. Forewarned but alarmed, the Greek emperor Manuel negotiated a German oath not to cause trouble within his territories; in return he promised access to supplies and markets. It says much for Manuel’s power as well as Conrad’s authority that the march from the Danube to the plains of Thrace passed without serious incident, helped by the fruitful season of the year. Once in Thrace, the opportunities for forage and plunder proved irresistible, as did the local wine, the combination provoking a serious affray at Phillipopolis and the loss of drunken stragglers lagging behind the main columns, their unburied rotting carcases posing a health problem for the French coming up behind. With German discipline fraying, Manuel failed to persuade Conrad to divert his march to Asia across the Hellespont rather than the Bosporus. After further violent incidents at Adrianople and a disastrous flash flood on 8 September that hit the German camp on the plain of Choereobacchi, engulfing men, horses and large quantities of equipment, Conrad’s battered and bad-tempered army reached Constantinople on 10 September to find Manuel had placed his capital on full military alert.

  Manuel had good reason to be nervous.30 He had closely followed the preparations of 1146–7 and tracked the approaching armies with almost intolerably obsequious diplomats. Yet, despite his repeated offers of cooperation and aid, the emperor faced the most dangerous coincidence of circumstances imaginable. By the time the first western troops arrived at the walls of Constantinople, relations with his erstwhile ally Conrad had deteriorated to the extent that it was believed the Germans were contemplating attacking the city. To meet the challenge from the west, Manuel had been forced to abandon his campaign against the Seljuk sultan of Rum and agree a treaty, news of which, when picked up by the crusaders, aroused suspicion, incredulity and anger. The amount of effective assistance Manuel could provide, especially on and beyond the frontier regions of western Asia Minor, would always fall short of the westerners’ expectations raised by Manuel’s own promises, the awesome scale of his capital, the expensive dress of imperial servants and the deliberately intimidating but gorgeous court ritual and entertainment. If relations with Conrad had turned sour, those with Louis of France promised to be no less bitter. Byzantine attempts to subjugate Cilicia and Antioch had aroused hostility from churchmen, who complained at Greeks ousting Latin clergy, and from lay nobles with close relatives in the principality: Prince Raymond of Antioch was the uncle of Louis’s queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and many Franks throughout Outremer still regarded the king of France in some ancestral sense as an overlord. He, in turn, felt a degree of permanent responsibility for them, all of which potentially clashed with Byzantine aspirations in Syria. More ominous still for Manuel, one faction close to King Louis hankered after an alliance with Roger of Sicily, who, at the very time the crusaders were approaching Constantinople, attacked Byzantine Greece: Corfu and Cephalonia were ca
ptured; Corinth, Thebes and Euboea plundered. Manuel could have been excused for worrying lest behind these western incursions lay a plot to seize the empire by a new Franco-German-Sicilian coalition.

  In the event, by a mixture of aggression, bribery and promises of help, Manuel, whose wife, Bertha of Sulzbach, was Conrad’s sister-in-law, defused any immediate threat from the Germans. Despite sporadic violent clashes and a series of rather tetchy diplomatic exchanges, after almost a month camped outside the walls of Constantinople, the German army crossed the Bosporus on ships supplied by Manuel. Although rejecting a formal alliance with the Greeks, Conrad accepted guides and food before setting out to follow the route of the army of 1097, refusing to wait for the French in his eagerness to press on to Syria. On 15 October, at Nicaea, possibly to quell a threatened mutiny by those outside the nobles’ retinues, his army divided, one part under his half-brother, Otto of Freising, choosing the coastal road southwards through Byzantine-held territory, the bulk of the force embarking south-east on the road towards Dorylaeum and Iconium. For ten days, the main German army advanced so slowly that food ran short, the columns becoming easy targets for Turkish skirmishers. The westerners failed entirely to adapt to Turkish tactics, despite the presence of Greek guides. On 25 October, near Dorylaeum, the German heavy cavalry fell into the classic Turkish trap, drawn away from the main body of the army by a traditional Turkish feint, leaving the infantry unprotected and open to heavy casualties while being mauled themselves. This severe setback persuaded the German high command to withdraw to Nicaea to regroup. As their food supplies were already exhausted, the retreat was slowed and the line broken by the need for forage to sustain men and horses. With increasing intensity, the Turks picked off stragglers and bombarded the main column with a constant barrage of arrows, the Germans’ retreat becoming a rout once the rearguard under Bernard of Ploetzkau was cut off and overwhelmed. The enthusiastic but inept westerners waged an unequal struggle against agile Turkish mounted archers: ‘these active youths… midway in their course, encountered winged death instead of the enemy against whom they were running swiftly and boldly with oft-drawn swords and using sheep-skins as shields’.31 Without archers and increasingly without horses, German resistance let alone counter-attack became impossible beneath the hail of arrows: Conrad himself was hit by two, seriously wounding him in the head. A starving and broken remnant of the once magnificent army struggled back to Nicaea by the beginning of November, where many abandoned the expedition entirely, seeking Byzantine help for quick passage home. Others survived the Turkish arrows only to succumb to starvation.