Armies of Heaven (35 page)

It was time for a new plan, but Kerbogah continued to hesitate. Rather than attack, he pathetically sought another parlay, ready now to accept the Franks' offer of a judicial duel. As a result, his army entered the fray too late and too little prepared. (Or did Kerbogah order his army to delay its counterattack in order to crush the Franks all at once, as one Latin writer and one Arab writer argued? Nearly a decade later, the circumstances of the battle remained controversial.)
³²

As Kerbogah would soon realize, the time for negotiation had passed. And despite all the Franks' previous talk of their cause being based on property rights secured by St. Peter, and despite their willingness to settle it according to legal procedure and to consider surrender, they had now crossed over into heaven. Or heaven had crossed into their world. The true holy war had begun. Lines of priests and monks clad in vestments marched in front of the armies, chanting and summoning heavenly aid for the battle.

Help from above arrived. First, God sent a light rain to refresh the wearied Franks and their mounts. Then, a cross that some of the Normans were carrying began to shine brightly, striking fear into the Saracens. Adhémar of le Puy's chaplain, none other than the chronicler Raymond of Aguilers, held aloft the Holy Lance of Antioch and wielded it as a talismanic weapon. The very winds struggled to determine the outcome, and when for a time things seemed to go poorly for the Franks, Eurus, the east wind, appeared to prevail over Zephyrus, the west.
³³

As some of the veterans remembered the battle, what really turned the fighting was the appearance of ghost riders. Their number included the fallen crusaders, just as Peter Bartholomew and the former ropedanc-ing priest had promised. Many saints were there as well. God loved the Franks so much, the apostle Andrew had earlier told Peter, “that the saints, who are now at rest and who know in advance the gift God has planned, were willing to be in the flesh and to fight with us.” Their number included George, Theodore, Demetrius—“You have to believe these words,” an eyewitness wrote, “since many of our men saw it”—and all the other white-clad riders whom Pirrus had often seen riding down from a mysterious camp in the hills. Saints Peter and Paul, meanwhile, vigorously offered prayers of intercession for the soldiers, without actually becoming directly involved in the fighting.

The ghost army marched in five divisions, exiting the city along with the crusaders, their numbers freely mingling with the living Franks. “For truly as they said, our princes had established only eight divisions, and once outside the city we were in thirteen orders.” With this army in the fray, with priests chanting psalms of victory, with the Holy Lance keeping the Saracens and their arrows miraculously at bay, Christ was at last conferring
the victory at Antioch of which “the pilgrim church of Franks” had so long dreamed.
³⁴

Shortly after Adhémar and the chaplain Raymond took to the field, a grass fire broke out. Was it a Saracen battle tactic—a deliberate attempt to blind the Franks and their horses and thus more easily kill them—or an agreed-upon signal for the Saracens to retreat? Yet another point of controversy. Regardless, a panicked, disorganized withdrawal began, the Turks blinded with their own smoke and terror—or else with dread instilled in them from the Holy Lance of Christ. Bohemond emerged from the city at the head of his reserve force only to find the battle, to all appearances, ended. Kerbogah's massive army was fleeing, with the ragtag band of the crusaders in pursuit on their mules or oxen or half-dead horses. Most of the Turkish cavalry escaped, their horses in far better condition than the Franks'. Their foot soldiers were captured. As for the Turkish women, the historian Fulcher of Chartres bragged that the Franks did not rape them but only pierced their bellies with lances. “They left behind their tents, their gold and silver and many treasures, their sheep and oxen, their horses and mules, their camels and asses, their grains and wine, their flour and many other things that we needed to live.” The battle for Antioch was over, and the Franks, unbelievably, had won.
³⁵

Surely some of the crusaders, like modern historians, wondered just how they had survived. Their success in battle had always depended on two things: the opportunity to engage the Turks at close quarters and the strength of their knights. But as Kerbogah would have readily agreed, the numbers didn't add up. By June 28 the Franks had fewer than two hundred horses left. A few thousand infantry and two hundred poorly equipped knights seemed a poor match for an army so large that contemporaries numbered it in the hundreds of thousands. Kerbogah's decision to delay his attack until the Franks were in the open field seemed a wise decision—to wait until the enemy was most vulnerable to encirclement and false retreats, basic tactics of Turkish cavalry. With any kind of discipline, Kerbogah could not have lost and a commander like Bohemond could not have believed that his pathetic, starving warriors would ever win.
³⁶

So how did they? The Arab historian Ibn al-Athir (the same historian who I have suggested was not trustworthy on matters of crusader psychology)
offered a straightforward solution: Kerbogah's armies betrayed him. They had only joined his cause with reluctance. Kerbogah, he wrote, “thinking that the present crisis would force the Muslims to remain loyal to him, alienated them by his pride and ill-treatment of them. They plotted in secret anger to betray him and desert him in the heat of battle.” That appears to be exactly what happened. Remarkably, Ibn al-Athir's portrayal of Kerbogah was perfectly in line with what the Franks said about him. He was an arrogant man, someone so anxious to impose his own will on Antioch that he first disinherited Yaghi-Siyan's son in favor of his own man, Ahmad ibn-Marwan, and then promptly began to bully Ahmad ibn-Marwan.

The Franks, particularly Tancred, seem to have been aware of this situation. They also could have readily understood how the Turks drafted into Kerbogah's service would have viewed their general. Kerbogah was a representative of Baghdad, a ruthlessly ambitious man anxious to impose his own vision of a unified culture on what was essentially a frontier society. Many of the men in Kerbogah's army would have been no more enthusiastic about his presence than, for example, Raymond of Saint-Gilles would have been if King Philip I had marched to Occitania to impose order on Raymond's principality or if representatives of Henry IV had showed up in southern Italy trying to coerce Bohemond's clan into more predictable and subservient behavior.
³⁷

Yet there is even more to the story. It may be that Kerbogah's followers not only deserted him in the battle but also that Bohemond, and perhaps the other crusader princes, knew—or at least suspected—that this would happen. Perhaps Ahmad ibn-Marwan raised the possibility in his discussions with Tancred. He may well have identified other dissatisfied leaders in the Turkish army whom the Christians could try to contact. And on the eve of the battle, the Christians had had the opportunity to pursue such leads in the form of the legation led by Peter the Hermit and at least one fluent Arabic speaker. In this scenario the sudden grass fire in the Turkish camp may indeed have been a signal to retreat, as the author of
Deeds of the Franks
suggested, a signal about which the Franks had been warned in advance.

In any case Ahmad ibn-Marwan knew that the fix was in. As soon as the battle started to turn, he sent word down from the citadel that he
wanted to surrender. Raymond of Saint-Gilles, who had been left behind to block the citadel, immediately sent up his banner, and Ahmad ibn-Marwan had it displayed from a tower. Some of the Normans, however, informed the Turks in the citadel that the banner was not Bohemond's. Ahmad ibn-Marwan returned it at once and only formalized his surrender when he received the banner of the man whom Tancred had helped to establish as his ally.
³⁸

If this were the case—if Christians had conspired with Turks to gain victory at Antioch—then neither side would later want to make the fact known. The Turks had betrayed their leader and allowed the Franks to establish a second capital, along with Edessa, in Syria. It would not have been a proud moment in Muslim history.

As for the Christians, they preferred the illusion of a great—no, rather, a miraculous—victory. Adhémar of le Puy, who by now had embraced the Holy Lance of Antioch, was a man who knew something about faking a miracle. He, Bohemond, and the other princes would have been content in this case to let appearances speak for themselves. Through the miracles of God, the crusaders had achieved the impossible. Why let on that it had been another negotiated betrayal, instead of a heroic last stand gone unbelievably right?

And to a degree we ought to accept this explanation. The Franks believed that their enemies were idol worshippers. They were adherents of a cult whose founder, Mathomos, was a heretic and a libertine. The Franks saw in this same Mathomos a cruel parody of Christ and indeed a precursor to Antichrist. They believed that as warriors the Turks were very much like themselves, and if only they would renounce their misguided and misbegotten religion, they might stand alongside Christians as brothers. But because they would not, the Turks and Saracens were limbs of Satan and legates of Antichrist. Kerbogah may have believed that he was fighting a traditional war in which numbers, strategy, and, perhaps, law would play a role. But the Franks knew their battle fit into a much grander apocalyptic drama, one whose ending had long been written.

 

 

 

 

A
fter the defeat of Kerbogah, the army went into something like early hibernation. Jerusalem, by some reports, was a mere ten days' march away if the crusaders committed to going. Instead, the princes decided to rest until at least November. Fulcher of Chartres, who was in Edessa, indicated that the leaders did not want to advance until the beginning of the harvest season when supplies would be more plentiful, but no one else supported this explanation. The Franks instead seemed to have lost their direction.

In the meantime the armies dispersed into different parts of Syria, each group foraging for food and looking for adventure on its own. The leaders, meanwhile, fought among themselves. Their struggles were in part political and personal, with Bohemond and Raymond vying for control of Antioch and seeking out allies among the other lords. But these leaders were at the same time engaged in an ideological battle over the meaning of the crusade. In question was not only whether their campaign was, at heart, an apocalyptic enterprise. They also faced a subtler problem: What kind of apocalypse would it be?
¹

The political problems (as distinct from the ideological ones) had begun before the battle with Kerbogah ended. As we have seen, the Turks in the citadel preferred to surrender to Bohemond, not Raymond. And Bohemond had already secured a promise from all the other Frankish leaders that should he play an instrumental role in Antioch's capture, he would gain possession of it. He had now played that sort of role twice, first by securing Pirrus's cooperation in betraying the city and then by simultaneously defeating Kerbogah and securing Ahmad ibn-Marwan's agreement to hand over the citadel. To secure his claim to the keep, Bohemond expelled from it all but his own men. Raymond, his chief rival and critic, forced his way inside a tower near the Bridge Gate, the area of the most intense fighting during the siege, and established a stronghold there. The princes were unsure how to settle these claims, particularly if Alexius or Tetigus turned up with their long-expected army, asserting imperial rights to the city.

This last problem was especially pressing. Alexius had it in his power to wreck the whole crusade if in the name of Antioch he decided to set his armies against the Franks. The princes, with the exception of Bohemond, therefore decided to take the question directly to him. They dispatched Hugh the Great to Constantinople, charging him either with inviting Alexius to come to Antioch to claim his prize or else with denouncing him to his face as a traitor and informing him that the Franks had broken all ties with him. As is sometimes the case, equally reliable sources give diametrically opposed reports. Whatever the tenor of Hugh's mission, it didn't matter. Alexius never rejoined the Franks, and Hugh never returned to the crusade.
²

Bohemond continued about the business of establishing himself as prince of Antioch. He set the clergy to work restoring the cathedral of St. Peter to its former glory, as the fearsome icon of Christ no doubt gazed down approvingly. He allowed Patriarch John IV—who had become somewhat of a folk hero after the Turks had hung him from the wall during the siege—to return to his office. Not everyone, on earth or in heaven, was happy with that decision. Barely a month later, in a vision the apostle Andrew told Peter Bartholomew that the Franks needed to appoint a new
patriarch, one who followed Latin law. But the decision to retain John IV was probably politic if Bohemond wished to pacify his new subjects, the survivors of the long siege and the sacking of the city. He also granted a church dedicated to St. John to the people of Genoa, whose fleet had provided crucial supplies over the previous nine months. As part of this deal, the Genoese obtained possession of thirty houses near the church and the rights to run a market on the square. The giant's guiding philosophy was that if he acted as if he owned the place, everyone, Raymond included, would eventually go along with him. And for the most part, they did. Perhaps grudgingly, at some point Bohemond received the title of “lord and advocate of the city.”
³

A spirit of melancholy, however, was settling over Antioch's new ruler. Comfortably ensconced in his citadel, he invited Robert of Flanders and Godfrey of Bouillon to dine with him. At the end of their meal, he began to play sullenly with a knife. Robert chided him, telling him to lighten up, given all that he had accomplished. Bohemond attempted to brighten and rise to the occasion. In a show of bravado, he pointed at a large candle and boasted that he could slice it in two with a single stroke. Robert bet him that he couldn't, and each man agreed to wager a cloak on it. Bohemond swung the knife and cut the candle into two unequal sections, in itself an astonishing feat, but “wondrous to say, one candle became two.” That is, the smaller half fell to one side and suddenly caught fire. It glowed for a short while and then burned itself out.