Armies of Heaven (22 page)

It ought to have been a great crusader victory, but the next day, with Tancred's men still camped outside the city, another, much larger army marched into view, apparently ready for a fight. This was Baldwin of Boulogne and his men, who from a distance thought they were seeing a Turkish army camped in front of Tarsus. Baldwin and Tancred rejoiced upon recognizing one another, and they managed to celebrate one pleasant dinner together. The next morning, however, Baldwin demanded that Tancred share the spoils of Tarsus with him and his men equally or else turn the entire city over to him. Baldwin's apparently specious reasoning was that Tarsus had surrendered not out of fear of Tancred but in response to rumors of Baldwin's arrival. Were it not for his own army, Baldwin continued, without any real justification, the Turks would still be in charge of things. Difficult as it is to believe, the two crusaders were ready for all-out war against each other, but to avoid bloodshed, they agreed to allow the citizens of Tarsus to decide whom they wished to be their prince, Baldwin or Tancred. The leaders of Tarsus answered without hesitation: They preferred Tancred, not because of his innate virtue but because of his uncle Bohemond's fearsome reputation.

Baldwin flew into a rage. In the words of Albert of Aachen, “He cared not a wit for the pretension and rank of Tancred and Bohemond, likening them to mud and shit.” For the Armenians' benefit, he used more measured and diplomatic terms: “You should not believe that Bohemond and this Tancred, whom you so respect and fear, are in any way the greatest and most powerful chiefs of the Christian army, nor that they bear comparison to my brother Godfrey, duke and leader of the soldiers from all Gaul, or any of his kin. For this same prince, my brother Godfrey, is duke of a realm of the great and earliest Roman emperor Augustus, by hereditary right of his noble ancestors; he is esteemed by the whole army, and great and small
do not fail to comply with his words and advice on all matters because he has been elected and appointed chief and lord of everyone.”
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Though not exactly true, Baldwin's arguments nonetheless carried the day. Bohemond and Tancred were parvenus. Godfrey's authority, and Baldwin's own, stretched back to Augustus. Baldwin may then have claimed as well that Godfrey's sword was the same one that the Emperor Vespasian had carried into battle in 70 AD when he had destroyed the city of Jerusalem and left its streets flowing with Jewish blood. Within a few years at least, the Armenians believed this to be the case. Tancred could not compete with such an imperial pedigree. Or, more prosaically, Tancred realized that he could not win in open combat against the Lotharingians. Whatever the case, he withdrew from St. Paul's birthplace, and the citizens raised Baldwin's standards over their walls. The city's gates were opened, and Baldwin's men were allowed to enter. Inside, they found a few Turks who had not left the city, and who were in no mood to fight. They had stayed in their towers along the wall, waiting to see what Baldwin and Tancred's intentions were. If it became apparent that the Franks were going to settle in Tarsus, then they would leave the tower peacefully.
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They got their answer the next day when about three hundred more Norman soldiers arrived at Tarsus's gates, presumably to reinforce Tancred's hold over the city. Baldwin, however, decided not to let them in. In his view, Tancred's followers were potential enemies, and he already had enough problems with the Greeks and Armenians. So he locked the gates, claiming that no more Christians would enter Tarsus until Godfrey arrived. The Normans, hungry and miserable, set up camp outside the walls. Only the Armenian Christians in Tarsus felt some pity for them; they lowered down live sheep and baskets full of bread, which the Normans received gratefully, happy at least to be able to go to sleep on a full stomach.

The Turks in Tarsus, on the other hand, probably knew nothing of the internal Christian conflicts. As far as they could tell, the city was lost, and it was time for them to escape and find new places to conquer. Taking all their valuables, all three hundred left Tarsus in the middle of the night, heading toward the mountains. On the way out, they passed through the sleeping Normans' camp and killed most of them before they had the chance to wake up—decapitating some, eviscerating others, shooting with arrows in the moonlight anyone who managed to get to his feet.

Such was the spectacle that greeted the citizens of Tarsus the next morning: the fields outside their city littered with Christian corpses. A riot broke out. Crusaders demanded revenge. They wanted blood—Turkish blood, preferably, but there was also talk of killing Baldwin, who barricaded himself in a tower until everyone's temper calmed. Fortunately for him, a couple hundred Turkish stragglers were left behind—poor workers whom the wealthier soldiers had not had time to bother over. The Lotharingians rounded them all up and cut their heads off. The Christian women of Tarsus also demanded justice for past crimes. The Turks had raped them, they said, and if a Christian woman had resisted, the Turks would cut off her nose or ears. Several women had the scars to prove it. The actual perpetrators had likely already fled, but the Franks were happy to inflict violence on whomever happened to be at hand. “The people of Jesus Christ were more greatly inflamed to hatred of the Turks by this scandal and horrendous accusation and they further increased their slaughter of them.”
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By this point Tarsus was a bloody mess, inside and out, and Baldwin must have been anxious to move on. A near miraculous turn of events enabled him to do so. A few days after the slaughter of the Turks, a small fleet of ships approached the city's ports. Baldwin gathered his men together, expecting to find a contingent of Turks who had returned to challenge his rule. Boldly the crusaders approached the port and discovered the ships' crews instead to be—Belgian. One of them Baldwin had likely met before—a man named Winemer who had once served in the household of Baldwin's oldest brother, Eustace, now on crusade with Robert of Flanders. The newly arrived sailors said they were pilgrims who had departed from Flanders and Lotharingia eight years earlier, hoping to worship at the Holy Sepulcher. Along the way they had become distracted by the riches, and chaos, of the East and had decided to stay to make their fortunes, temporarily deferring the prospect of prayers at Christ's tomb. Baldwin straightaway administered the crusader's oath to all of them. They had probably been expecting to plunder Tarsus. Instead, they would govern it: Three hundred pirates would stay behind, along with two hundred of Baldwin's men. The rest would continue with him on the long road to Antioch and Jerusalem.
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Baldwin was at this point traveling in Tancred's shadows. Despite the setback in Tarsus, Tancred was moving from one success to another. Baldwin's
men, of course, were not impressed. As they saw it (or as some of them would later repeat back in Germany), the Normans in Cilicia first conquered a castle of girls, then demolished a castle of children, and finally laid low a castle full of shepherds. In reality, Tancred had won control of the Armenian city Mamistra with the help of a local lord called Ursinus. As soon as the Turkish garrison in Mamistra had heard rumor of Tancred's approach, backed as he now was by Armenian allies, they had abandoned the place. After he arrived, Mamistra's Armenian citizens lined up to greet him and offer him an alliance. They also presented him with a great deal of the treasure left behind by the Turks, which Tancred distributed magnanimously to his followers. A few days later, Baldwin reached Mamistra and, apparently in a mood for compromise, asked for trading privileges. Tancred was inclined to agree—not to let him into the city but to allow him to barter with his new subjects. But not all of his men were as forgiving. “Ah Tancred!” one of them, Richard, Prince of Salerno, cried, “today you are the most worthless of men! You see Baldwin right there! By his treachery and jealousy you lost Tarsus. Ah! If you have an ounce of manhood left in you, you'll call up your men and bring down on him the same injury that he caused you!”
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What happened next is unclear. Whatever occurred, it reflected well on neither side. Either the two armies fought each other—prisoners were taken, and soldiers were killed—or else both sides lined up for battle, but neither was willing to engage the other. Whatever the case, prisoners were taken, and a few soldiers were killed. Barely a month after leaving the main army, Tancred's and Baldwin's crusade had become a war of Latin pilgrims against Latin pilgrims, meddling in Armenian and Turkish politics, with no very clear purpose or direction. The two groups may have been dispatched as part of an overarching “Armenian strategy” to secure local support necessary for the rest of the army to cross Anatolia, but they seem to have reverted quickly to stereotype—ill-tempered, small-minded European lords out to defend their pride and advance personal and familial reputations. Holy war was a fragile thing: Once outside the apocalyptic maelstrom of the main army, it was easy to lose sight of heavenly Jerusalem and its eternal rewards.

The day after the fighting in Mamistra, both Tancred and Baldwin reached this same conclusion, realizing “that they had both done wrong
and had violated the devotion of the sacred road to Jerusalem.” Prisoners were exchanged, plunder returned, and peace confirmed. Baldwin withdrew from Mamistra and left Tancred in control. “The whole thing could just be reduced to a nursery rhyme,” Tancred's biographer Ralph of Caen observed: “
Finders keepers, losers weepers
.” Each side then at last made its own way toward the plain at the foot of the Taurus Mountains and toward the city of Marash, where the rest of the army awaited.
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Tancred and Baldwin, along with their followers, arrived at Marash around October 15, just after the main army had camped there upon crossing the Taurus Mountains. The numbers in both groups had diminished greatly. Some men had been lost to battle, others left behind in recently captured cities. The crusade had replenished its losses to a degree, having picked up a few Armenian recruits and advisors, as well as the two hundred Belgian pirates they had met outside Tarsus, but it was a much smaller army that prepared to march on Antioch.

The reunion of armies was not wholly joyous. At Marash Tancred learned that his uncle Bohemond had split from the army to investigate rumors of a roaming band of Turks, who were no doubt preparing some sort of trouble for the crusade. Baldwin likely was shocked to find his brother Godfrey bedridden, his massive, self-inflicted wound still not healed. They would have exchanged stories, Godfrey telling him about the illiterate peasant he'd saved from an enormous bear, Baldwin trying to put the best sheen on his falling out with Tancred and his subsequent abandonment of Tarsus. Baldwin also may have told Godfrey about the stories he had concocted during his diplomatic negotiations—how the Armenians now believed Godfrey not just a Lotharingian duke, but a Roman emperor armed with the sword of Vespasian. Godfrey, who recalled that Alexius had adopted him as a son and thus given him some claim to imperial title, must have appreciated that last detail. But Godfrey had sad news to pass on as well. In Baldwin's absence, his wife, Godevere, had contracted a disease that was still making the rounds among the soldiers, and she had recently died, buried outside Marash. It is impossible to guess what he felt upon hearing of his wife's death. She goes almost
unmentioned in the medieval chronicles—unsurprising, considering how uninterested medieval military writers were in women. But that Baldwin had taken her on crusade at all suggests that he must have felt genuinely close to her, as does his leaving her with the main army rather than taking her on what promised to be a dangerous and undermanned expedition through Cilicia. The loss must have left him genuinely saddened and perhaps in doubt about whether his future lay in Jerusalem.
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As the army awaited Bohemond's return, Baldwin decided it was time to leave. He had accomplished great things in Cilicia and had shown a surprising knack for Eastern politics, successfully navigating the various ethnic, linguistic, and religious factions in southern Anatolia. Through the allies he had made in Cilicia, he learned that the Christians in northern Syria might be interested in recruiting him to resolve their own quarrels and to shore up their defenses against the Turks. Perhaps he could even establish his own lordship there and do some good for the pilgrimage at a distance.

One day's march beyond Marash and three days' march from Antioch, he broke away from the army. He took with him seven hundred knights, an unknown number of foot soldiers and servants, and at least one chaplain, Fulcher of Chartres, who had originally departed with Stephen of Blois but for unknown reasons decided to follow Baldwin in search of unknown goals in Syria. It might be that the experience of cowering inside a tent for hours at Dorylaeum waiting to die had proved too much for Fulcher. “Oh, battle!” Fulcher would write of a later conflict. “Hateful to the innocent, terrifying to those who see it.... I saw this battle. My mind trembled. I feared I would be wounded. Everyone rushed at one another's weapons as if they felt no terror at death. Such a cruel catastrophe, where there is no love.” The siege of Antioch promised yet more dangerous encounters. The prospect of settling in a friendly Christian city must have appealed to him.
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At some point during all of these comings and goings (probably around the time of the army's arrival at Marash), Count Raymond of Saint-Gilles, long ailing, seemed finally ready to die. Bishop William of Orange performed last rites. And then something strange happened. Raymond of Aguilers knew his readers would be skeptical about this turn of events, but as a true miracle, he could not ignore it. “There was in our army,” he
wrote, “a count from Saxony. He went to Count Raymond and said that he was a legate of St. Gilles.” St. Gilles, a seventh-century hermit venerated in Occitania and buried in the church of Saint-Gilles-du-Gard, was also, of course, Count Raymond's familial saint. St. Gilles had twice appeared to the Saxon count and told him to deliver a message to Raymond: “Be confident, for you shall not die from this disease. I have sought a truce for you with God, and I will always be with you.”
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