Armies of Heaven (31 page)

Second, on an ethical level there was some consternation about the killing of Syrian and Armenian Christians. Many of them had at first tried to join in the battle and fight for the Franks but then had gotten caught up in the massacre. For their deaths Albert of Aachen blamed accident
and Saracen cunning. In the early stages of the fight, because of darkness, it was nearly impossible to tell Saracen and Eastern Christian apart. And the Saracens, moreover, faked being Christian, offering up counterfeit signs and words of faith. Or perhaps the supposed fakers really were Christian, for another historian observed that the local Christians—desperate not to be killed—took to singing the only shared words from the Latin and Greek mass,
Kyrie eleison
, in hopes that the Franks would recognize the words and spare them. He left unclear whether the tactic worked, but based on Albert's testimony, we may presume not. Incapable of telling friend from enemy, the Franks killed everyone.
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In the best of circumstances, it was difficult to distinguish Eastern Christians from Muslims. Their clothes and beards were almost identical. (Adhémar of le Puy had long before ordered the Franks to shave often in order to prevent such mix-ups.) But if any of the crusaders felt guilty or morally troubled over having struck down Antiochene Christians, they could always blame the victims and not just because of their appearance. Armenians and Syrians had aided the Turks periodically throughout the siege. Many of those killed had simply gotten what they deserved. At any rate these unfortunate deaths were soon forgotten. Fifty years later a Genoese writer would record that the crusaders sang
Kyrie eleison
on entering the city, turning the locals' cry for mercy into a song of triumph.
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To be sure, not all the Antiochenes were killed. Besides those who escaped to the citadel, several hundred others laid low during the battle and learned to live alongside the Franks afterward. We hear a hint of their survival in the complaints of the chaplain Raymond of Aguilers, who said that soon after the city fell, the crusaders succumbed to the charms of “pagan song girls,” whom they presumably had spared. The unnamed sins committed with these women (along with other sins, like overeating) angered God enough that He elected to torment the Franks for another month, using the final Muslim army as His scourge.

Some of the Antiochenes also escaped the city and fled to the countryside, including the amir Yaghi-Siyan. He made for one of the nearby mountains, riding a mule and disguised as a commoner. But despite the lowly animal and humble garb, three Syrian men spotted a jeweled belt and scabbard around his waist. They approached him with pretended reverence but then threw him off his mule, unsheathed his own sword, and
meted out the expected punishment, cutting off his head and sending it to Bohemond as a gift. It was, according to all reports, a big head, the ears large and hairy. The beard would have extended all the way to Yaghi-Siyan's navel, had it still been attached to a body. To Raymond, repulsed by all of the decapitations he had witnessed, this final beheading was an act of divine retribution. The same man who had made martyrs out of so many Christians had finally lost his own head at Christian hands.
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With this victory the Franks had applied the rules of siege warfare from Deuteronomy 20 almost to the letter. They had destroyed a population whom they had learned to demonize, but only after agreeing to at least one truce and only after each side had allowed its children occasionally to play rough with one another.

From a modern perspective, the massacre of an entire city population looks something like a war crime. But the Franks at Antioch, on June 3, 1098, did not do violence to their calling as holy warriors or as crusaders. Rather, the city's destruction was a way to embrace that identity, to align themselves as closely as possible with the Children of Israel (who had carried out similar massacres when they had marched to the Promised Land) and at the same time to displace those Jews forever from the title of “Chosen People.” The corpse-ridden streets of Antioch set the pattern for the rest of the crusade. And it was difficult to deny the prophetic enthusiasms of the more radical elements of the army. All of the Franks had just lived through an apocalypse. Others were soon to follow.

T
he capture of Antioch signaled the advent of a new kind of war. The long siege, the desperate need to escape from a massive relief force, Pirrus's act of betrayal, and the street fighting in the dark all combined to create a singularly brutal event. But the slaughter was also a product of the crusade itself. It was, after all, the first “holy war.”

Since the age of Constantine the Great, Christian knights, kings, and emperors had always fought with God in mind. The crusade, however, was a singular example of religious warfare because God and the warrior fought with a unity of purpose otherwise unimaginable outside of epic poetry. As contemporary historian Guibert of Nogent observed, “God has established in our times ‘holy battles,' so that the erring crowd of knights—who after the fashion of the ancient pagan world busied themselves with mutual slaughter—could now find a new way to earn salvation.” For these two reasons the crusade was new: It offered warriors a way to save their souls through combat, and it was a new type of war—complete with its own sets of rules and its own moral code.
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This last point might seem obvious enough, but it runs against what most historians have written of late about the First Crusade. The rules of war, so the argument goes, were the same in the East as in the West. Following the logic of Deuteronomy 20, the crusaders massacred all, or almost all, the inhabitants of a Muslim city, as they did in Antioch on the morning of June 3, because the city had refused to surrender. If the defenders did not negotiate and the city was taken by force, then the
defenders' lives and property were forfeit. If, on the other hand, a city (Christian or Saracen) did surrender before or during a siege, the attackers (Saracen or Christian) would show mercy. Those were the eleventh-century rules of war, understood by both Turks and Franks. It was rough justice but justice nonetheless.
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Outside of the crusade, however, these rules were not very widely practiced. Great battles like Antioch were not part of an ordinary warrior's experience. Neither were great cities. Apart from Constantinople, many of the Franks would have never seen a city as impressive as Antioch, let alone have broken into such a place and killed most of the inhabitants. Compared to such a battle, war in eleventh-century Europe was commonplace and diffuse, less a disruption of the social fabric and more a seasonal event, like baseball. Grand battles such as Hastings in 1066 were the exception, not the rule. Most fighting was indirect, aimed at a rival lord's property, including his lands and his peasant laborers. No doubt such engagements were violent and terrifying for the unarmed victims, but they were a far cry from the great sieges of the First Crusade.

As for sieges in Europe, they typically targeted castles with small garrisons. The biblical rule of “surrender or die” might have applied, but the results would have looked very different from what happened at Antioch.

The eleventh-century siege of Échauffour is a typical example. The siege began when the knight Arnold, formerly lord of Échauffour, tried to reclaim his own lands after Duke William of Normandy had disinherited him: “One night [Arnold] came to Échauffour with four knights and entering the castle by strength made such an uproar that the sixty knights of the duke imagined he was bringing a great army with him and fled terrified, abandoning the castle which they ought to have guarded. He set fire to it, causing heavy loss to his enemies. He also set fire to the town of St. Évroul, and for many hours he and his minions stormed into every corner of the monastery, brandishing their naked swords and clamoring for Abbot Osbern's blood. But by the will of God he happened to be elsewhere.” Property was lost in the fire, but most of the potential targets escaped before the fighting began.
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Sieges, on occasion, did end tragically, particularly if there were more than a normal garrison inside a castle's walls. To take one example, around the year 1020 an army of Normans invaded Burgundy and seemed to ex-ercise
something like “the rules of war” when they captured the fortress of Mimande. The Normans were enraged at the locals who had helped the Burgundian nobility resist the invasion, so they burned the tower to the ground, along with everyone inside it, “men, women, and children,” who had earlier fled to the castle in hopes of escaping the Normans' fury.

 

Even in the worst cases, however, the small scale of the fortifications would have limited fatalities. Large castles, like William the Conqueror's White Tower in London, were unusual. In the eleventh century, most European fortresses were tall, narrow structures made of stone or wood. They were intended to provide shelter for aristocrats as they went about their business of plundering and terrorizing their own subjects. Such buildings were incapable of sheltering a large number of people, and they certainly would not have enabled casualties comparable to those of any of the great battles of the crusade.
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A possible exception to these rules is the siege of Beneciacum, a brutal massacre that, like the crusade, grew out of a spirit of peace. Around the year 1038, Aimo, Archbishop of Bourges, imposed an oath of peace upon everyone in his archdiocese over the age of fifteen. With all their hearts, they swore on the relics of St. Stephen, the first martyr, to fight against plunderers of church goods; against oppressors of monks, nuns, and clerics; and against anyone who would assail their mother church. “You would
have looked upon the army,” the source for the story, a monk named Andrew, observed, “as if another Israelite people.” Composed of ordinary folk dedicated to peace, it proved itself an effective militia. “Fear and dread of them so filled the hearts of the unbelievers that they trembled before this unarmed multitude of commoners as if it were a division of trained soldiers.” But their achievements were fleeting. Archbishop Aimo overreached his authority and with no real cause accused a castellan named Stephen of Beneciacum of breaking the peace. The church's army besieged his castle, where all of the locals—also mainly commoners—had fled inside its walls. Archbishop Aimo, indifferent to the cost, ordered the fortification set afire. According to Andrew (probably with some exaggeration), 1,400 people died, many pregnant women among them. Stephen survived and was confined to the archbishop's prison.
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Later another castellan named Odo utterly destroyed the peace army. In this battle at least seven hundred clergy died, and so many of their corpses filled a river that they functioned as an effective bridge. Their spears were left eerily stuck into the ground along the banks, like young trees at the edge of a forest. Although exaggerations are likely in both cases, these two battles were nonetheless remembered as massacres. They resembled the crusade in at least two other respects as well: A bishop had formally proclaimed the need for war, and the soldiers who formed the army fought together in the name of God and of peace. Given the typically small scale of European warfare in the eleventh century, these battles were traumatic for eyewitnesses, though the numbers of dead were in no way comparable to those of any of the major crusade battles.
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Aimo's story raises one other important point. When medieval observers were trying to contextualize battles that transcended normal levels of violence, the likeliest place to appeal for precedents was the Old Testament. The peace army was, as noted, like “another Israelite people.” And in the aftermath of the battle, Andrew again turned to the Old Testament, comparing the fate of Aimo's army to what happened to the tribe of Benjamin in the Book of Judges. Some of the Benjamites had committed a particularly brutal rape, but their leaders refused to allow the rapists to undergo justice. The other Israelites agreed to make war against Benjamin. Their first two attacks failed, but on the third day they killed 25,000
of the tribe, and then afterward they destroyed their cities, their animals, their women, and their children.
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Had the crusaders ever followed this ethos in their European homeland, their actions would have been viewed as atrocities. But in the context of a holy war intended to re-create those same Old Testament battles fought in the same deserts where the Israelites had wandered, atrocities were standard practice. The result was a new level of violence, leading to battles that in scale and character were truly apocalyptic.

Even historians at the time recognized that to live through such battles would have been for the soldiers a transformative experience, and probably not a positive one. The levels of bloodshed and brutality were so far beyond ordinary warfare that the experience of it would have changed the warriors' sense of their own humanity. Around 1107 one writer, Baudry of Bourgueil, observed, “Of the fear of the dead customarily felt by the living there was none, since they had grown used to the dead being everywhere next to them just as the living. The stench hardly bothered them, for it had become normal to know and to see and even to sleep amongst the dead without revulsion.” In describing the aftermath of a particularly brutal battle, Guibert of Nogent wrote, “The frequency of the sight and smell began to wear away the horror usually felt in all the senses, so that custom built courage and no one feared to step in the midst of those bodies scattered through the streets.” Each of these writers apparently reached his conclusion independently of the other. Very likely the words were based on the experience of actual crusaders, men who had walked the new path to salvation, who had fought holy battles, and who in moments of unusual introspection recognized that the wars had wrought in their souls changes as profound as the ruptures created in history and in God's plans for salvation.
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