Armies of Heaven (26 page)

Taking with him only eighty knights, Baldwin crossed the Euphrates and traveled by night toward Edessa, hoping to avoid the Turkish camps scattered throughout the area. After a further four-day delay while his
small force waited out a planned ambush from a much larger Turkish army, Baldwin and his men finally began something of a triumphal procession toward Edessa. Villagers lined the roads leading to the city and cheered them on. They carried crosses and battle standards, and as the Franks passed close by, they threw themselves to the ground and kissed their feet and the hems of the garments, hoping to be liberated, if not from the Turks, then at least from the political chaos that had engulfed the region. Similarly before the walls of Edessa, a crowd rushed out, exuberantly sounding trumpets and making a joyful noise unto the Lord.

T‘oros, his wife, and his twelve closest advisors offered Baldwin formal greetings. So exotic were their dress and demeanor that they looked like something from ancient Rome, and Baldwin and his followers soon decided that these advisors must surely have been Edessa's senators. Feeling himself, no doubt, like a victorious Roman general, he led his Frankish legion through the gates and graciously accepted comfortable lodging.
³

Later, T‘oros summoned Baldwin and the twelve senators to a council. As it transpired, the prince of Edessa's terms were not as generous as they had originally sounded. He was willing to pay Baldwin handsomely in money, treasure, and silks provided that Baldwin fought on his behalf, but he was not willing to give Baldwin a position in the government, let alone any control over tax revenues. Baldwin refused the offer outright and instead asked for safe conduct so that he might rejoin his brother at Antioch. The senators and other leading men of the city erupted in anger on Baldwin's behalf, demanding that T‘oros honor his original promises. Under pressure from all sides, he relented, not only accepting Baldwin into the government, but also agreeing to adopt him as his son and to name him as heir. So deftly did Baldwin handle this situation that one must presume that he had received good advice from local power brokers about how best to exploit T‘oros's situation. One also suspects that there was something unsavory about the whole affair—deals had been struck behind the scenes that no one subsequently wished to acknowledge. Fulcher of Chartres, Baldwin's chaplain, seemed deliberately vague when describing these events, glossing over any difficulties in the negotiations with T‘oros and saying only that the city and its prince fulfilled their promises without delay.
⁴

The adoption ceremony was a public affair and, from the Franks' perspective, a strange one. Stripped down to the waist, Baldwin stood next to T‘oros, himself wearing a long linen shirt. T‘oros raised this garment up and over Baldwin's head so that the two men stood next to each other, bare chest to bare chest, and they exchanged promises, oaths, and mutual pledges of support, all sealed with a kiss. T‘oros's wife gave Baldwin a kiss, too, and with that he was formally welcomed into the family of the prince of Edessa. He was therefore the second member of his family to be adopted by an Eastern lord, after Godfrey, who maintained that Alexius had made him his son during the exchange of oaths in Constantinople.
⁵

Baldwin's adoption, however, yielded more immediate rewards than Godfrey's. He engaged in only one act of real service for T‘oros, leading a brief campaign against the nearby fortress of Samosata and its Turkish leader, Balduk. Nothing much was accomplished there, and Baldwin quickly returned to Edessa, where a small group of dignitaries approached him in secret to express their displeasure with T‘oros's leadership. They were confident that Baldwin could do a better job of protecting their interests. Succinctly put, just two weeks after the adoption, they planned to lynch Baldwin's new father and proclaim Baldwin prince in his place.

According to the Frankish version of the story, Baldwin reacted with horror: “It would be an irredeemable sin if I were to raise my hand against this man after just accepting him as my father and to whom I have pledged faith.” The citizens then agreed to give Baldwin a little time to convince his foster father to resign for the benefit of the community. Baldwin ran to the tower and pleaded with T‘oros. “All the citizens and leaders of this city are conspiring to kill you,” he said, “and are coming here to this tower in a rage and impassioned, carrying every sort of weapon. I'm sorry to bring you such bad news.” Even as he spoke, a crowd surrounded the tower, firing arrows, throwing rocks, and screaming death threats at the prince.

With Baldwin acting as intermediary, T‘oros tried to buy the citizens off with promises of riches. But their bloodlust had become too intense. Baldwin, so the story goes, refused to give up and wanted to continue fighting for his father, driven on by “Frankish animosity.” But T‘oros, full of sadness and apparently full of love for his new child, miserably and tearfully told him to stop resisting; he preferred to die. T‘oros lowered
himself down from his window on a rope, into the hands of a waiting mob, who proceeded to beat him to death. They cut off his head and carried it around on a spear, allowing anyone who wished to spit in T‘oros' face and insult it. And the next day they proclaimed a reluctant Baldwin to be their new “prince and duke of the city.”
⁶

A more likely interpretation, of course, is that Baldwin was complicit in the entire conspiracy. So argued a different version of the story that survives from an Armenian historian from Edessa. With Maundy Thursday fast approaching, forty citizens came together and plotted a Judas-like act of betrayal, assassinating the leader who had through “his ingenious sagacity, skillful inventiveness, and vigorous strength” delivered the city from the cruel dominion of the Turks barely three years earlier. During the night they went to Baldwin and “persuaded him to accede to their evil designs and promised to deliver Edessa into his hands; Baldwin approved of their vicious plot.” And so on March 8, 1098, the forty traitors incited a crowd of citizens to attack the tower. T‘oros commanded enough loyalty to put up a credible resistance, and he ultimately promised to surrender provided that the people gave him and his wife free passage out of Edessa. Perhaps at T‘oros's request, Baldwin took an oath not to harm him, having a fragment of the True Cross brought forward so that he could swear not to do him injury. “Moreover, Baldwin vouched for his own sincerity in the presence of the angels, archangels, prophets, patriarchs, holy apostles, holy pontiffs, and all the host of martyrs—all of which was written down by the count in a letter to T‘oros.” Baldwin then moved his men into the tower.

The next day, March 9, a small gathering of the citizens of Edessa surrounded T‘oros, probably while he was still in the tower and in theory under Baldwin's protection. A few of them threatened him with swords before someone with a club knocked him to the ground, allowing everyone to converge on him and kick him and beat him and then throw him over a rampart, still alive, into the midst of a mob. The people of Edessa beat and stabbed him to death, presumably with Baldwin watching from above. Still not satisfied, the crowd tied their dead prince's feet together and dragged his bloody body by a rope throughout the city, giving everyone the chance to desecrate and dishonor it as he wished.
⁷

These two stories are broadly similar, differing mainly in how direct a role Baldwin played in T‘oros's death. The man who knew Baldwin's heart best, his chaplain Fulcher, left his account deliberately vague. “The citizens criminally planned to kill their prince and to raise Baldwin in the palace so that he might rule the land. They certainly hated their prince. So it was said, so it was done. Baldwin was very sad about it, but had not been able to obtain any indulgence for him. When they had wickedly killed him, Baldwin accepted the principate as a gift from the citizens and immediately made war against the Turks who were then in that country, whom he again and again conquered and killed and overcame.”

Baldwin's first act as prince of Edessa, in fact, was to return to Samosata and, upon the advice of his men, to offer the Turk Balduk a substantial bribe in gold, silver, purple cloth, and horses and mules if he turned over the fortress to him. “From that day forward, Balduk became a subject of Baldwin's, a member of his household, and a regular companion among Gallic men.” Far from taking the war to the Turks, Baldwin allied himself with a former religious and political enemy and welcomed him into his household.
⁸

Baldwin's activity in Edessa was not quite a conquest and certainly not a proper victory. Nevertheless, it brought the First Crusade immediate advantage. Baldwin opened up a supply line to the armies, alleviating much of the economic hardship they had endured throughout the long winter. Even so, we cannot conclude from this observation that Baldwin's adventures in Edessa were part of a grand plan designed to advance the goals of the crusade. Considering what Baldwin actually did do—abandon the pilgrimage to which he had vowed himself, leaving his two brothers potentially to starve at Antioch, venturing off with a small band of supporters and unbelievably establishing himself as prince of an ancient Near Eastern city—we can scarcely imagine how he would have understood his own goals during the winter months of 1098. What is clear is that Baldwin did not act as a conqueror. Rather, he recognized the complexities of Syrian politics, and he successfully inserted himself into that world. He learned to adapt to his new situation, which, given the utterly alien cultural landscape in which he found himself, was a remarkable achievement.

In December 1099 Baldwin would complete his pilgrimage to Jerusalem. A few months later, he would actually become king of Jerusalem. But after
successfully scheming and manipulating his way into the leadership of Edessa in March 1098, he was, for all intents and purposes, an Armenian ruler. He was also effectively out of the crusade. It would fall to others, notably his brother Godfrey, to fulfill the apocalypse that Peter the Hermit had proclaimed in Europe.
⁹

 

 

 

 

A
round February 1, 1098, yet another prominent leader deserted the army. Unlike Peter the Hermit and William the Carpenter, he did so in the light of day and was successful. Tetigus, Alexius's representative, the man with the mangled nose and the crooked heart, announced that he was returning to Constantinople.

His excuse was airtight. He told the Franks that he wanted only to alleviate their supply problems, to contact Alexius, and to force him once and for all to meet his obligations to the pilgrimage. “Have no doubt,” Tetigus told the army, “I will see that many ships come by sea from there loaded with all kinds of fruit, wine, grain, meat, flour, cheese, and the other goods that we are needing. I will have horses brought to be sold here, and there will be a market transported overland set up under the emperor's protection. Behold! All these things I faithfully promise to attend to.” The same historian who recorded this speech observed that “he is a liar and always will be.” Tetigus abandoned the army and never returned. Some of the Franks continued to hope for news from Constantinople, but they would not hear another word of support from the emperor.
¹

As much as the Franks mistrusted Tetigus, Tetigus feared and hated the Franks, and with reason. For as he would later tell the court at Constantinople, his closest friend in the army, Bohemond, the leader who
spoke Greek with something like fluency, approached him in secret and informed him that a rumor had spread among the princes. The emperor was in contact with the Seljuk Turks, these anonymous princes were claiming, and he was plotting with the Turks to destroy the entire Frankish host. “The counts believe the story is true and they are plotting to kill you. Well, I have now done my part in forewarning you: the danger is imminent. The rest is up to you. You must consult your own interests and take thought for the lives of your men.” The rumor was plausible since the Franks believed the emperor guilty of exactly this sort of treachery. In gratitude to Bohemond for his timely warning, Tetigus promised to hand over to him the same territory in Cilicia that Tancred and Baldwin had been fighting over the previous autumn. Then, assuring anyone who would listen that a relief force was in the works, that he would probably run into Alexius on the way to Constantinople, and that a legion of ferocious Turcopoles would arrive at any moment, Tetigus left the camp.
²

As the Greeks departed, several unexpected guests arrived. The Franks' early experiment in Middle Eastern diplomacy, undertaken at the advice of Alexius, had borne fruit. The amir of Cairo—or, as the crusaders preferred to think of him, the king of Babylon—had taken an interest in the Franks' military efforts and had sent a delegation to discuss the possibility of pooling their resources to capture Jerusalem. Some in the army were understandably nervous about this foreign, infidel presence in their midst. And the Egyptians must have been equally baffled by what they had found at Antioch. They had expected a well-disciplined, well-supplied Byzantine army, supplemented by several thousand skilled mercenaries from the West. What they found instead was a ragtag band of starving soldiers (probably at about half of their original strength) whom the Greeks had abandoned and who, upon first glance, appeared incapable of reaching Jerusalem on a good day, let alone capturing it from a well-trained, formidable Turkish enemy. But the Egyptians stayed to talk terms, or perhaps they were just curious to see how the Frankish army would be destroyed.

Meanwhile, the princes were at odds over who ought to take command of the army—a point that thus far had remained unsettled—and, possibly, who ought to rule Antioch should it fall. The most likely candidates were the wealthy Raymond of Saint-Gilles and the charismatic Bohemond of
Taranto. But the issues at stake were more profound than who ought to be their leader. The princes were confronting the question of what the crusade was, at heart, all about—not just which person, but whose vision should give direction to the expedition.