Armies of Heaven (21 page)

The unarmed pilgrims hid inside the tents, trembling in fear as the Turks galloped about them with rapidity and precision. They “howled and shrieked and shouted, making a devilish noise in their high voices . . . crying and shouting like demons.” Terrifying as the situation was, it wasn't surprising. These were, after all, harbingers of Antichrist, standing resolutely in the path of God's plan for salvation. Of course they looked and sounded like demons.
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The Franks withstood the devilish assault. The decision to pitch camp had enabled them to create a makeshift fortification. Their proximity to the marsh further ensured that the Turks could never completely encircle them. They could not defeat Kilij-Arslan from their camp, but they could keep him at bay—not forever, but with luck at least until help arrived.

And the battle dragged on. Clerics like Fulcher of Chartres prayed and cowered. The stouthearted women carried water skins to warriors clothed in full chain mail armor, fighting in the hot Anatolian sun. These women called out encouragement to the men, exhorting them to fight even more bravely. The warriors similarly passed reassuring words up and down the line: “Hold tight together in Christ's faith and in the victory of the Cross, since, God willing, at the end of the day you will all be rich!” Whether they would be rich with heavenly blessings or with the treasures, silks, and exotic foods that they hoped to claim as plunder is unclear. Probably they would be rich with both.
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After five hours, however, the crusaders were dying in ever-greater numbers. The Turks were closing in as their cavalry maneuvers took them closer and closer to the Franks' tents. The women, still taking water to the men, had a new duty: dragging corpses away from the field. Inside the tents among the poor pilgrims and the clerics, the mood grew darker. This catastrophe had happened, they decided, because of the army's sins. Luxury and avarice and other untold crimes—presumably connected to the payments from Alexius—had corrupted the Franks. Earnestly, the men and women in the tents confessed their misdeeds. Five clerics, all dressed in white, pleaded with God to show the army mercy one more time and lay low the enemies. “They sang and cried; they cried and sang. Then many more who were afraid to die rushed to confess their sins.” Outside the tents, the Frankish warriors continued their attacks, not with the ferocity of lions but with the righteous anger of martyrs.
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About midday, after nearly six hours of fighting and with martyrdom seemingly inevitable, help finally arrived. First Hugh the Great, then Godfrey, and finally Raymond of Saint-Gilles and Adhémar of le Puy rode down from the hills to engage the Turks. Looking upon the fray, “our men marveled at where such a multitude of Turks and Arabs and Saracens could have come from, and I don't even know how to name the other peoples. For all the mountains and hills and valley and all the plains inside and out were filled with their excommunicate offspring.” This second battle line began to encircle the enemy to cut off the opportunity for graceful and elegant horsemanship and to force the Turkish army to engage in close-range combat. In this style of fighting, the Franks had every advantage.
Their heavier armor and weaponry made them almost invulnerable to their enemies' lighter weaponry.

The Turks, in genuine disarray, retreated to their camp. The Franks pursued them and continued killing them, plundering as they went—“gold, silver, horses and asses, camels, sheep, and bulls and many other things that I don't know about.” In retrospect, the strategy looked deliberate: The crusaders had established a defensive camp, drawn the Turks in to close combat, and then suddenly ambushed them with the other half of the army. If it was an intentional strategy, however, the Franks had probably waited too long to seize their advantage. Approximately 3,000 Franks died during the fighting—a terrible loss that the army's leaders would later celebrate by proclaiming them as martyrs. “They perished in peace, and without any doubt they now glory in eternal life.”
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God intervened in the battle as well. Some of the soldiers—in fact, Turks who deserted Kilij-Arslan and signed on to the crusade—swore that they had seen “two horsemen, with shimmering weapons and of wondrous appearance, riding ahead of our army, menacing the enemy such that they allowed them no opportunity for fighting.” A later writer said that there were three knights of Christ at Dorylaeum, sitting atop white horses and carrying shimmering banners decorated with crosses. Their names were George, Demetrius, and Theodore, “Christian knights whom almighty God sent to help our people.” All three were saints associated with the East, little venerated in the crusaders' homelands (though that would change after 1099, as crusaders returned to Europe with stories of the marvels they had witnessed), and all of them were soldiers. Theodore and George are frequently associated with killing dragons, Demetrius with spearing a gladiator. Thus, the crusaders were learning to work with the local power brokers in Anatolia on earth as in heaven.

Some observers may have been inclined to write off these ghostly apparitions as desert hallucinations or else as the inventions of Saracen prisoners anxious to curry favor with their captors, but the miracle would receive further confirmation. After the army broke camp at Dorylaeum on July 4 and during the three days that followed, the crusaders continually discovered Saracen corpses and their dead horses littering the roadways of Anatolia in places the Franks had not yet reached, far past the point where
they had stopped pursuing the enemy. There could be only one explanation: The saints had kept up the chase and with their heavenly weapons had continued to cut down the enemy. The boundaries between this world and the next were blurring. Again, the farther from Constantinople the armies marched, and perhaps the more earnestly the soldiers prayed and confessed sins, the keener an interest God took in their affairs.
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Before these miraculous discoveries of Saracen corpses, the Christians rested. They mourned; they sang songs; they picked over their enemies' bodies, searching for jewels, coins, trinkets, and souvenirs; and they buried their own dead. The battle had left many of the Franks unidentifiable. Were it not for the crosses on their cloaks, the crusaders could not have even been sure which bodies belonged to Christians. They also told stories to one another, celebrating their victory and fictionalizing it at the same time. They imagined, for example, their vanquished foe, Kilij-Arslan, turning tail and fleeing to his masters in the East, warning every Saracen he encountered that the Franks were invincible, that surrender now was the wiser course. Some alternately imagined Kilij-Arslan pretending that he had won at Dorylaeum, proclaiming victory in front of every city that he approached, and then going inside and plundering it of all its goods lest the Franks find anything of value in Anatolian territory.

The pilgrims also took a moment to marvel at their own achievement. Clerics searched their memories of Scripture and prophecy (and perhaps through whatever portable libraries they had brought with them) to find words that encapsulated what had occurred. One theologically minded writer, looking back with hindsight from 1107, found the answer in Isaiah, the Old Testament prophet best known for forecasting the Virgin Birth. Perhaps Isaiah had also anticipated the crusade:
I will make you the pride of the ages, a joy lasting from generation unto generation. You will suck at the breast of many peoples and will drink milk from the breast of kings. And you will know that I am the Lord your God who saved you, the mighty redeemer of Jacob
. These words originally described God's promise to the Children of Israel. The Franks, however, were the new Israel—as many of them believed and would have proudly attested, they had wiped the old Jews from the face of the earth before leaving home. They would drain wealth and power from the kings of the East and establish themselves anew in the original city of God.

Dorylaeum had been their Red Sea, and with God's help, they had crossed it. Now they were set to enter the Promised Land.
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It took three days of rest and soul-searching, and three more days of joyfully discovering mutilated bodies on the desert sands, before the celebrations petered out. Despite Stephen of Blois's optimism, Antioch still lay fifteen weeks and several hundred miles in the future. The crusaders were venturing into an unknown and politically turbulent land with no sure allies and relatively few supplies. In these alien climes the wisdom and counsel of Alexius's man Tetigus doubtless proved essential—a point that would have galled many in the army. As far as some crusaders could tell, there was no real difference among Saracen, Jew, and heretic. They were “equally detestable,” all “enemies of God.” Now, to reach Jerusalem, the crusaders apparently were going to depend on one group of schismatic Christians to negotiate on their behalf with still other schismatic groups, particularly Armenians. The splendid and terrifying example of holy war at Dorylaeum notwithstanding, the crusade was again dependent on the search for allies, and not everyone would adapt well to this new reality.
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The first few days were especially difficult. The terrain was rocky, barren, practically waterless—apart from what the Franks were able to extract from cactuses—and difficult to traverse. The August sun was murderous. One Saturday, according to Albert of Aachen, five hundred men and women died of thirst, along with countless horses, mules, oxen, and other pack animals. This number sounds like an exaggeration, but Albert stressed that his information came not from hearsay but from the testimony of reliable witnesses, whose recollection caused “the human mind to tremble in horror.” Besides the adult dead, several pregnant women went into labor on the march, many of them prematurely, but so desiccated were their bodies that “they simply abandoned their newborns in the middle of the road for all the world to see.” The morning after this particular horrific Saturday, the army found a river. They charged its banks and fought one another like animals, as if its waters might suddenly go dry. Gratefully and voraciously, and excessively, not realizing the dangers
posed by dehydration, they drank and drank, and several of them died on the spot, drowning in open air.
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The terrain became a bit more bearable after these harrowing experiences. Cities with large Armenian populations tended to welcome the Franks, seeing them either as Byzantine mercenaries out to restore Greek rule or else as simple allies willing to help them drive out Turkish occupiers. After forcing a large garrison of Turks to leave the city of Heraclea in early September, the Franks rested for four days and then decided, despite their bad experience at Dorylaeum, to divide the army in half once again. The larger group followed a long mountainous route to the north, through Cappadocia and eventually to Antioch, hoping to avoid the narrow passes and steep roads that characterized the more direct route through Cilicia. Two smaller groups, led by Bohemond's nephew Tancred and by Godfrey's brother Baldwin (who left his wife, an English noblewoman named Godevere, with the main army in his brother's care), took this latter, shorter route through Cilicia.

Relatively little is known about how the main army fared, apart from a few anecdotes. Godfrey, while hunting, saw an enormous bear attacking a poor pilgrim. It was “a cunning and wicked animal,” and Godfrey, without hesitation, rushed to the unarmed man's defense. At first it seemed he might easily drive the bear away, but his cloak got caught up in its claws and he fell from his horse, landing awkwardly on top of his own sword. When Godfrey tried to unsheathe the weapon to stab the bear in the throat, he instead sliced his own leg open. The “poor peasant” he'd rescued was by now screaming wildly, and he managed to draw the attention of one of Godfrey's men, named Husechin, who in turn charged at the bear with sword drawn. He and Godfrey together killed the beast, but it had barely stopped breathing when the great duke turned pale and collapsed. Doctors were called in to treat him while the rest of his followers carved up the bear among themselves—they had never seen an animal with so much meat on its bones. The doctors did what they could for Godfrey, but it would be months before he fully recovered. For the next several weeks, and during the early stages of the siege of Antioch, he could only stray far from his tent if carried on a litter. By the time he was healthy enough to fight again, his men had deserted him by the hundreds.
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At about the same time, Raymond of Saint-Gilles fell ill and was confined to bed. His condition was grave enough that Bishop William of Orange stayed nearby, ready to deliver last rites if needed.

The rest of the army trudged on, “thirsting and burning for the blood of Turks” but finding only Armenians, striking treaties with them to recognize their control of particular castles, or else, on occasion, entrusting a fortification to a Frankish solider. The crusaders found a “hellish” mountain range—the Taurus Mountains, whose peaks rise as high as 12,000 feet—so steep and with paths so narrow that several horses tumbled over the side, as did beasts of burden. One ox would fall over the cliff and drag down the rest of the animals tethered to it. As knights lost their mounts and their servants, their weapons proved too great a burden. They tried to sell them, but the market became so glutted that their armor and swords proved almost worthless. As a result, many men threw away whatever was too heavy to carry and stood gloomily to one side, “wringing their hands in sadness and grief, not sure what to do with themselves.” It was a badly depleted and much poorer army that in mid-October finally reached the foot of the Taurus Mountains and the city of Marash in southeastern Turkey, still about one hundred miles north of Antioch.
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As for the smaller armies that had ventured into Cilicia, their leaders rapidly abandoned the ethos of holy war in favor of more straightforward conquest and acquisitiveness, revealing in the process fundamental divisions that would later threaten to undermine the entire crusade. But this part of the journey started with a grand triumph for Tancred. He and his men reached the city of Tarsus, a former Roman capital and the birthplace of the apostle Paul. As Tancred assessed things, Tarsus was a place where Turks dominated, Greeks served, and Armenians fought for their liberty while hiding in the mountains. Impressed at the grandeur of the place and determined to make it his own, Tancred engaged in a bit of subterfuge. He dispatched a few Turcopoles—Alexius's Turkish mercenaries, presumably hired away from Tetigus—who pretended that they were bandits out to plunder the city's cattle, grazing in the nearby fields. As soon as the defenders charged from the city gates to attack, the Turcopoles retreated, and as the Turks followed, the rest of Tancred's army rose up from its hiding places. They chased the Turks back to the gates, killing as many
as they could before archers atop the ramparts forced them back out of bowshot. During the night Tancred and his men set camp, planning their next attack. At the same time, the Turkish commanders evaluated their situation and thought the better of resisting. In darkness they withdrew from the city, leaving behind a small garrison but turning control of the place back over to the Greek and Armenian citizens. “Liberty had returned to the city because of its enemies—liberty which, because of its citizens, had once perished.”
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