Armies of Heaven (23 page)

Nothing is known about this Saxon, including why he was with Raymond's army. Presumably, he had not originally departed with the count from southern France. He may have left with Godfrey and then abandoned the duke during his long illness (though it would be strange to leave one ailing leader for another). More likely he was a survivor of Peter the Hermit's fervent German followers or else a refugee from among Emicho's men. A true-believing apocalyptic or a cultist who looked to Jerusalem for the arrival of a Last Emperor, now he was receiving heavenly messages from the saints.

The appearance of such a man at Count Raymond's sickbed suggests two important points. First, the leadership may have been maintaining tight control over the army's more ecstatic members, but the spirit of Peter the Hermit was alive and well with some of the men. During the relatively peaceful days that followed Dorylaeum, characterized more by negotiation than conflict, they were still interacting with the powers of heaven, talking to saints and delivering their messages. Second, the pilgrims who had felt attracted to the ideals of Peter and Emicho were perhaps finding a new home among the Provençals. For as events would demonstrate, under the watch of Count Raymond and Bishop Adhémar, Urban II's handpicked leaders for the crusade, the most radical and visionary elements of the army were inventing their own doctrine of holy war and were aiming to seize control of the entire expedition.

 

 

 

 

D
uring the siege of Antioch, the crusade became a full-fledged holy war. It is difficult to say exactly when this happened—the siege lasted eight months—but sometime during the army's sojourn at Antioch the rules of war completely changed.

When the Franks arrived, their leaders (and certainly Tetigus, their Greek advisor) were expecting to treat the city much as they had Nicea. As a recent Greek possession, it was subject to the terms of the oath that the Franks had sworn to Alexius at Constantinople. The crusaders also would have had some reason to expect Alexius eventually would meet them at Antioch or at least would send further military and logistic support, again as he had done at Nicea. Also just like Nicea, Antioch had a sizable Christian population, including Greek Christians, Armenians, and other local groups whom the Latins tended to lump into the general category of “Syrian.” Considering all of the diplomacy in which the crusaders had engaged during the previous fourteen weeks, they were in theory well prepared to take advantage of these potential allies. If the crusade was able to implement another successful siege and force Antioch's defenders to capitulate, the crusaders could expect to march into the city, administer harsh justice to the Turks, and receive the adoring accolades of the Christians, schismatic though they might be. The Franks could then hand the
city over to Alexius in exchange for new rewards and in doing so restore much of the territory that the empire had lost over the previous half-century. With the power of the Turks shattered and the Egyptians cowed by news of Frankish success, the crusaders might then undertake an easy, leisurely march to Jerusalem.

But Antioch was not Nicea. On a practical level, the city would be even more difficult to capture—perhaps outright impossible to take by force. It had enormous walls, “not able to be broken down by iron or stone, fashioned with an unheard of and unbreakable masonry and with a mass of great rocks.” These walls, moreover, incorporated somewhere between 360 and 450 towers, according to the pilgrims' estimates. The actual figure was probably much lower, but the exaggeration gives us some sense of the city's imaginative impact, especially on Western observers accustomed to much smaller urban spaces.

Besides its towers, Antioch incorporated into its defenses four mountains and a massive citadel that reached hundreds of feet into the sky. Further complicating any potential attack was the Orontes River, which ran close along the city's west wall, dividing the territory around Antioch in half and thus complicating all ground movements. In Raymond of Aguilers's analysis (although this observation may belong to his collaborator, the knight Pons of Balazun), Antioch feared assaults from no army, no matter how well equipped, “even if every sort of man were to come out against it.” Antioch could hold out as long as its inhabitants had bread to eat, and given the city's size and the character of its defenses, cutting off its food supply was nearly impossible. To warriors, however, there was something beautiful about these impenetrable defenses, even as they drove such admirers into starvation: “In every respect, the city is lovely.”
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Antioch also exercised an imaginative appeal for the crusaders that far exceeded that of Nicea. Its importance was fundamental to the history of Christianity, being the first place where the word “Christian” had been used. It was the city where St. Peter had been bishop before leaving for Rome. It was a part of the Christian inheritance, more akin to Jerusalem than to Nicea. Indeed, that the army would want to claim the city for itself had always been a possibility. If the promised help from Alexius failed to arrive, anti-Greek voices and the ideas of the more radical and visionary pilgrims might start to carry the day.
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Initially, the Franks had some hope of taking Antioch quickly, perhaps even without bloodshed. Before reaching the city, Raymond of Saint-Gilles, just recovered from his illness, heard rumor that the Turkish garrison had already abandoned Antioch. Holding a council of his own men, he decided to send five hundred soldiers in advance of the main army to see if the rumor was true and, if so, to take control of the city. This advance force discovered in the shadows of Antioch a castle held by the
Publicani
—likely an Armenian group whom the Franks could not otherwise identify except as heretics—who informed them that the Turks were still very much in charge of the city. The Turks, moreover, had learned of the Franks' approach and were currently preparing a vigorous defense. Raymond's men presumably sent the bad news back to their count. Most of them stayed near Antioch, trying to recruit to their cause Armenian Christians while also searching for some flaw in Antioch's forbidding defenses.
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As news of the city's defenses filtered back to the army, some leaders argued that they ought to postpone the siege until spring, when supplies might be more plentiful and when the much-anticipated aid from Alexius might finally arrive. But caution was not a virtue of God's army. Raymond of Saint-Gilles instead proposed an immediate attack. God had safely brought them this far. He had delivered the heavily fortified city of Nicea into their hands. “It would not be right for us to fear kings or the princes of kings, nor to tremble because of places and times, since the Lord has delivered us from so many dangers.” Raymond's voice, and others, carried the argument, and the army marched on. Perhaps as soon as that same day, about twelve miles from Antioch, near a great stone bridge with iron gates—known as “the Iron Bridge”—that spanned the Orontes River, they encountered the first of Antioch's defenders.

According to French sources, it was a short battle. The Turkish garrison at the bridge was unprepared. The Turks saw the Franks, panicked, and ran. But Lotharingian soldiers had a very different memory of the engagement. It was a long and bloody fight, and the Franks won only after Bishop Adhémar thundered out in the voice of God, “Do not fear the blows of your adversary! Stand fast like men! Beat back these biting dogs! For today God fights for you!”
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The next day, October 21, 1097, the siege proper began. God's will or not, it was going to be a long, incremental affair. The crusaders could not begin to shut down the city as they had done at Nicea. The best they could do was to keep an eye on the walls that did not abut the mountains or the river. In line with this limited goal, they set camps around the northwest quadrant of the city, along the Orontes River, while also scouting out possible sources of food—which, at this early stage, proved surprisingly abundant. Meanwhile, Raymond of Saint-Gilles's men constructed a bridge of boats spanning the Orontes. It served both to control Turkish movement from one of the city gates—the “Bridge Gate”—and to enable the Franks to travel more easily to and from the nearby port of Saint-Simeon. The latter point was crucial since as the siege dragged on the crusaders would be dependent for survival upon goods shipped from Constantinople and Europe. (The first supply ships from Genoa arrived on November 17.)

The Franks seem to have carried out these projects in relative safety. For the first two weeks of the siege, the defenders of Antioch stayed behind their walls, waiting to see exactly what the Franks were up to while also anticipating the arrival of outside help from one of two sources. Before the Franks' appearance, the Turkish governor of Antioch, Yaghi-Siyan, had been able to preserve his independence by playing off against each other the more powerful cities of Aleppo and Damascus. Since 1096 two rival brothers, Ridwan of Aleppo and Duqaq of Damascus, had controlled the cities and had been at war with one another for control of Syria after their father's death. Now with Antioch under siege, Yaghi-Siyan began making diplomatic overtures to each brother, hoping one or the other might come to his aid. It would be over two months before one of them did.

As far as the crusaders could tell, this was simply a time of tranquility and abundance—perhaps too much of a good thing. In the eyes of the chaplain Raymond of Aguilers, such prosperity was a source of trouble. Discipline in camps grew so slack that the leaders weren't even bothering to post watches. The enemy could have inflicted a mortal blow on the army if they had but known to attack. This time of leisure, in Raymond's eyes, also exacerbated social divisions within the army. “Everyone wished only for his own private advantage. About the public good, they thought nothing.”
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Once the Turks realized how carelessly the Franks were behaving, they began to make frequent raids on the camps, sometimes from the city but mainly from elsewhere. For a time the Franks couldn't figure out where the attacks were coming from. They knew only that large numbers of pilgrims were going missing, particularly the poor and unarmed who were wandering about foraging for food. News of these deaths grieved “the wealthier” members of the army, who realized that wicked men were boldly “unsheathing bloody swords” and using them to kill “saintly people.”

At first, the Franks blamed the Antiochene Christians rather than the Turks. Many of these “Armenians and Syrians” claimed to have fled the city to seek shelter with the Franks. But the crusaders believed that the ostensible refugees were spies, relaying intelligence back to the city about the army's dispositions and its more vulnerable points of defense. Something had to be done about this “perfidious people.”
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But the problem wasn't limited to Christian spies. Attacks were also coming from another location, toward the east. The task of finding these villains was assigned to Bohemond, who set out east on November 18, the day after supply ships had arrived from Genoa, accompanied by Robert of Flanders and 150 knights. In short order, Bohemond and his men discovered a garrison of Turks at the castle of Harim, about twenty miles from Antioch on the road to Aleppo. Once Bohemond had located the castle, he elected to employ against it a venerable tactic, used regularly by Turks and Normans alike. That is, he sent a small advance guard to harass the city and draw out its defenders. These men then pretended to retreat. It was no less dangerous a maneuver for being feigned. Two of the Franks were killed while falling back. The rest, however, led the Turks directly into an ambush by the greater part of the expedition. Bohemond, “Christ's most powerful athlete,” led the charge, killing many Turks and taking the rest prisoner.
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It was a classic, even clichéd military tactic. Bohemond's follow-up to the victory, however, would prove more memorable, and controversial. Upon returning to the camp, he led all of the prisoners “to the city gate and decapitated them, in order to render sad those who were in the city.” According to one later source, he then catapulted the heads into the city to make his message clearer still.
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Although the Franks had engaged in public, even theatrical beheadings at Nicea, they did not commonly desecrate the dead after victory in battle. Under normal conditions, the Franks would not have employed such tactics blithely. Decapitation was a violent act that the wicked inflicted upon saints, not a punishment that saints used against the wicked. When the Franks thought about severed heads, they thought about the martyrs whom the Romans had executed: for example, St. Denis, who, after being decapitated outside medieval Paris atop Montmartre, carried his head to a nearby town where a church would be founded in his honor. The figure of a headless Denis was one of the most recognizable statues throughout the Frankish heartland. In more recent history, even licit beheadings could have significant, and unintended, repercussions. In 1076 William the Conqueror ordered the decapitation of one of his political adversaries, Earl Waltheof, who had repeatedly conspired and rebelled against William's rule in England. Granted time to say the Lord's Prayer before his death, Waltheof understandably stumbled over the last words. He stuttered and stuttered and his executioners grew impatient, until one of them drew a sword and chopped off the traitor's head. As the skull hit the ground, its lips moved again and said, “But deliver us from evil. Amen.” So traumatic was the memory of Waltheof 's execution that he gained a wholly unearned reputation for sanctity. In the eleventh-century Latin world, princes had occasion to cut off their subjects' heads, but it was not a punishment that came easily. By 1097 it seemed a foreign practice.
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