Armies of Heaven (28 page)

To further impress the Egyptians (and probably to try to build up their own sense of self-confidence, as well as to keep their military skills sharp), the Franks began to host very public tournaments before the city walls. Eleventh-century knightly tournaments were not the orderly series of jousts characteristic of the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance. They were violent and loosely organized affairs in which warriors would divide into teams and have at one another, attempting to capture from the other side as many opponents as possible. The line between a tournament and real combat in Europe could be a fine one. Injuries were common, and deaths were not unheard of. It would have been a joyful, impressive exercise—made all the happier because it enabled the Franks to show off (and get to know) all of the horses they had captured after the battle with Ridwan. To further enhance the general feeling of bonhomie, the princes and clerics even loosened the moral regulations governing the camp, once again permitting the soldiers to play games of chance.

This public relations gesture worked. The Egyptians were surprised to find the knights so carefree when legends of their suffering were becoming proverbial. But the bravado was all based on sleight of hand. The situation at Antioch had improved but was just a little to one side of desperate. The city looked as impossible to capture as ever. For the rest of February, though, the crusaders could begin to believe that fate and God and prophecy were again all on their side.
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As the Egyptian ambassadors finally prepared to return to Cairo in March, the Franks had one other major stroke of good fortune, which would lend substance to whatever promises Stephen of Blois had been making to the Egyptians. On March 4 an English fleet laden with supplies arrived at Saint-Simeon. Not just food, the ships also carried timber and other building materials and carpenters and craftsmen as well. As a result, the Franks could at last extend their encirclement of Antioch, which they had been unable to do for lack of sufficient siege engines. As a first step, the leaders resolved to build a tower, called “the Mahomerie”—the Franks' preferred
translation of “mosque”—overlooking the Bridge Gate. They also decided, or perhaps Stephen of Blois decided, to send the two most popular leaders and, before Stephen's election, the two fiercest rivals for control of the army, Raymond of Saint-Gilles and Bohemond, with about sixty knights and a few hundred infantry, to escort the English sailors and supplies back to Antioch. The Egyptian ambassadors probably accompanied them, too, at last ready to take a formal report back to al-Afdal, the vizier of Egypt.
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It took a full three days to reach Saint-Simeon and two more days to return. While Bohemond, Raymond, and the rest of the escort were absent, the garrison at Antioch made several minor sorties, harassing the main camp, but they were probably of a diversionary nature. The Antiochenes, too, had heard that about the supply ship at Saint-Simeon and probably realized that they needed to take immediate action before the crusaders had a chance to strengthen their siege works. All the time that Bohemond was gone, in the guise of making quick and violent strikes against the Franks' camp, the Antiochenes were in fact carefully dispatching warriors to hidden locations around the city, preparing an elaborate ambush for Bohemond and Raymond upon their return.

On March 7 the battle began. It would prove one of the most brutal, nigh apocalyptic, battles of the entire crusade. As Bohemond and Raymond returned from Saint-Simeon, laden with supplies and accompanied by the English sailors and carpenters, the Antiochenes attacked. Because they had left the city without being spotted, they achieved complete surprise. As far as the Franks could tell, the Saracens were like animals, wildly gnashing their teeth and howling in rage. Right away they killed, by one count, one thousand pilgrims. In retaliation for earlier humiliations, they decapitated at least five hundred of the dead. “We believe,” one of the pilgrims wrote of the fallen, “that they went to heaven and there became white in the stole of martyrdom.” Bohemond, riding at the rear of the army, panicked and fled—or else, according to his followers, he took a different route and didn't hear about the ambush until later.

Amid the bloodbath, some of the soldiers broke through the Turks' army and made it back to camp, telling the leaders—including a finally healthy Godfrey of Bouillon—that the expedition was being destroyed and that the precious military supplies were in danger. Criers were dispatched to spread the news throughout the camp. Pilgrims were enraged,
and they put their trust, notably, not in God, but in “the journey to the Holy Sepulcher.” Calling on the name of Christ, with one heart and mind, they donned armor, crossed the bridge of boats, and set out to avenge their fallen brothers.
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On the other side of the bridge, they found a tearful Godfrey calling them to order. Messengers were also arriving from Bohemond, describing how many Turks there were and what paths they were taking. Then Bohemond himself appeared, along with all of the knights who had escaped with him. Quickly they reorganized themselves, aiming to confront the Turks who had ambushed them, when suddenly another contingent of Antiochene cavalry charged out of the Bridge Gate and attacked the Christians from behind. Yaghi-Siyan, the amir of Antioch, had decided that it was time to destroy the Frankish army by catching them unawares and trapping them between two cavalry divisions. After this second wave of horsemen had left the city, the gates were locked. There could be no escape route now for the Turks, except by killing Franks. Arrows fired on the crusaders from the city ramparts blackened the skies, and the battle that followed looked like Armageddon or else a scene from
The Song of Roland
.
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With Saracens attacking from two directions and Franks either retreating in terror or else charging in fury, the battle turned into a general, disorganized mêlée—the kind of mayhem that favored the Franks. For the first time, Godfrey of Bouillon distinguished himself against an opponent who was not a bear. According to many witnesses, he cut off several Turks' heads, in spite of helmets that protected their necks. More impressively, he sliced one mounted Saracen warrior in two through the waist. The horse galloped back toward the city with the rider's legs improbably stuck in the saddle. When word of this feat reached Edessa, his brother Baldwin likely reminded his subjects that Godfrey carried the sword of Vespasian, but for the Western knights it was just a particularly amusing example of a German warrior at the top of his game.
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At some point, alongside the individual swath of destruction that Godfrey had cut, the other leaders, notably Robert of Normandy and Raymond of Saint-Gilles, unleashed a coordinated charge against the Turks who had exited through the Bridge Gate. The crusaders then drove their enemies back over the river and against the city walls, forcing them into such
a tight formation that if one of them died, he had nowhere to fall, his corpse standing upright on the bridge amid the press of his comrades. The river turned blood-red, almost as if the third angel of the Apocalypse had emptied a vase of God's wrath onto the earth. So many bodies now filled the Orontes that it ceased to flow.

Only nightfall brought the fight to an end, when the Turks cleared enough space in front of the Bridge Gate to open it up and slip back into the city. The Franks occupied themselves with prayer and the collection of plunder. “Thus our enemies were conquered by the power of God and the Holy Sepulcher, and from that day forward they were not able to muster strength as they had before, either in voice or in deed.”
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On the following day in the early morning, a few Antioch citizens quietly exited the city gates to bury their dead, with no interference from the crusaders. This comes as a surprise. It shows the kind of restraint and empathy the Franks might typically show toward Christian enemies but certainly not toward Saracens, and it seems to indicate that even at this late stage of the siege, after nearly five months, some expectation of cooperation on both sides still existed. The Turks anticipated carrying out funerary rights in peace, and the Franks probably intended to let them do so.

But this interlude didn't last long. “When our men heard that the Turks had buried their dead, they prepared themselves and rushed out to that devil's courtyard and ordered all the tombs to be dug up and broken, the bodies to be dragged outside their graves. And then they threw all the corpses into a pit and carried away their severed heads to our tents so that we might be able to count their number.” The total was somewhere between 1,500 and 7,000, not including the bodies lost in the Orontes River. Ecstatic at the level of slaughter, the Franks rigged up four horses to carry the skulls to the port of Saint-Simeon as a gift for the departing Egyptians—a final gesture of goodwill to take to Cairo.
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Again, the incident sparked some debate, and medieval chroniclers would continue to argue about the ethics of these acts for at least another decade. Some of the grave robbers, according to a historian writing in 1106, had hoped to demoralize the enemy, but others acted out of greed. They dreamed of finding valuables inside the tombs, perhaps because of
rumors that Saracens, in pagan fashion, buried their dead with weapons and treasure, presumably to use in the afterlife. Another writer blamed the younger, more hotheaded soldiers for digging up the graves and added an uncharacteristic note of criticism: “What [the Turks] had buried with great honor, [the Christian youth] dug up with great shame.” The events probably caused Guibert of Nogent some discomfort, too, since at this point in his chronicle he suggested the Franks learned such behavior from Saracens. With distance, these acts appeared increasingly more outlandish, but on the morning after the battle, the ground still damp with blood, they were cause for grim satisfaction, even amusement, as the sight of the heads caused the Turks “to weep and howl.”
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Antioch's defenders may have been cowed by their defeat at the river. The sight of the Franks building yet another siege tower directly in front of the Bridge Gate probably intimidated them still further. But they were not ready to surrender. Instead, in answer to the pilgrims' desecration of the graves, they responded in kind with a new exercise in psychological warfare. They paraded one of the Franks captured during the Lake Battle, Reynald Porchet, along the ramparts of the city. He had promised his captors to shout down to the Christians and ask them how much they would pay for his ransom. Instead, he told them to save their money. “Be secure in your faith in Christ and the Holy Sepulcher, because God will always be with you. All the bravest and most important men of the city you have killed! That's 12 amirs and 1,500 nobles! No one remains who can fight against you, and no one can defend the city.” Reynald then disappeared from the wall.

What happened? The Franks didn't know, but they were happy to invent a story. Yaghi-Siyan asked one of his men who spoke French what Reynald was talking about. His advisor replied, “He's saying nothing good about you.” Flying into a rage, the amir ordered Reynald pulled off the wall and dragged back into the city.

“Reynald,” the Turks said, “do you honestly wish to stay with us in happiness?”

“How?” he asked

“Deny your God, whom you worship, and we will give you anything you want. We will give you gold, silver, weapons, horses, many treasures, wives and plunder, and estates, all with great honor.”

“Give me a little time,” he said, “at least an hour to think it over by myself.” They allowed this request. Then Reynald threw himself into prayer, hands joined, facing east, and humbly asked God to deem his soul worthy to be taken up into the bosom of Abraham.

Soon the amir called Reynald and asked the interpreter, “What does Reynald say?”

“He wishes in no way to deny his God,” the interpreter said, “but he does refuse your treasure, gold, and silver.”

Enraged, Yaghi-Siyan ordered Reynald's head cut off. Whereupon angels flew down to carry his soul into heaven. His anger still not sated, Yaghi-Siyan ordered that all the other prisoners in the city, “Christians, or knights of Christ,” be burned alive, their voices echoing to the heavens and perhaps into the Franks' camps as well.
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Reynald was likely not the only Christian paraded along the walls at this time. When the Turks had first captured Antioch in 1084, they had forced Patriarch John IV out of the city's cathedral, along with five hundred monks and clerics, yet allowed them to remain in the city in a smaller church dedicated to the Virgin Mary. On the arrival of the Franks in 1097, the Turks had John put into chains. According to contemporary Christian historians, they did so mainly out of a childlike fear of Christianity and the magical power of its liturgy: “‘This one,' they said, ‘is a saint, and if he leaves the building, there is a chance that the Christians outside the walls might capture us through the power of his prayers.'”
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Now Yaghi-Siyan ordered the Greek patriarch to be dragged from the church where he had been imprisoned and had him dangled him from ropes over the walls, the shackles around his ankles further weighing him down. At this stage the Christians were too confident to let the Turks' jeering affect them. Instead, they retreated comfortably into fantasy. Even as they watched John IV hanging from the walls, they told stories to one another that transformed the jeering Turks into figures of fun and that demonstrated Christ's ongoing concern for the pilgrims—appearances to the contrary.
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The Turks, they told one another, had occupied Antioch's cathedral—“or better yet, they had ‘soiled' it,” first converting it to their way of worship and then dividing it into three temples dedicated to the devil. The gold and silver mosaics that had adorned the walls and had glittered so splendidly they covered with limestone and gypsum, and over this material they wrote words in “a demonic script.” They left floors intact since the beautiful tile work had attracted them to the building in the first place.
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