Holy Warriors (5 page)

As the crusaders set out in late 1096, chroniclers recorded the tearful scenes of departure. Fulcher of Chartres wrote of the overwhelming emotional turmoil at this traumatic moment:

The various contingents of crusaders planned to rendezvous at Constantinople. Some marched through Italy and then sailed from Brindisi across to the western edge of the Byzantine Empire in Dalmatia. Others followed the old pilgrim roads through Hungary and entered Alexius’s lands from the north. The crusaders’ stay at Constantinople was to be fraught with tensions; as we saw above, the behavior of the People’s Crusade had alarmed the Greeks and the arrival of the main armies provoked deeply conflicting emotions. It must be remembered that the emperor had requested a few hundred knights to enter his service; what he got was tens of thousands of holy warriors, intent on passing through his lands toward Jerusalem, and, numbered among them, some of his greatest enemies. More significantly,
there was a massive philosophical gulf between the Greeks and the crusaders. To the Byzantines, holy war—be it crusade or jihad—was abhorrent. They fought for the empire; the emperor was the leader of Christ’s people but they expected no spiritual rewards for their endeavors. They were immensely suspicious of the crusaders’ professed motives and suspected that the wish for land and money was the real reason for their presence.
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The crusaders felt that, as fellow Christians, the Byzantines should provide them with food. When this failed to appear they felt entitled to seek supplies; however, the line between foraging and ravaging was an easy one to cross. Alexius dispatched his own troops to shadow the crusaders. Sometimes this ensured peace, on other occasions there was conflict; the papal legate Bishop Adhémar of Le Puy was beaten up and nearly killed in one exchange in the Balkans.
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Alexius was determined to turn the crusade to his advantage and any help that he provided was to come at a price. His daughter Anna Comnena was in Constantinople when the crusaders arrived and, fifty years later, she wrote
The Alexiad
, an account of her father’s life. Notwithstanding this time lapse, she neatly summarized his methods: he “used every means possible, physical and psychological, to hurry [the crusaders] to cross the straits [the Bosporus].”
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The Byzantines were masters of ceremony and display and they employed their most potent advantage—the city of Constantinople itself—to great effect.
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Its sheer size amazed the crusaders: the population of Paris at this time was approximately thirty thousand; Constantinople’s was around 350,000. The city was shaped like a colossal triangle—the Bosporus and the Golden Horn provided protection on two sides; on the third the mighty double-layered Theodosian walls, built in the sixth century to keep out the barbarian hordes, stretched for three and a half miles between the two waterways. The “queen of cities,” as the Byzantines described their capital, was a place of wealth and splendor far beyond the experiences of the vast majority of the westerners. Hundreds of churches lay filled with relics of unimaginable beauty and value, while at the heart of the city lay the magnificent cathedral of the Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom), far bigger than any building in the West. Covered with the most stunning mosaics, its interior walls were cloaked in multicolored marble. The Greeks offered the nobles and churchmen guided tours of the holy sites and then entertained them in the vast and opulent imperial palaces. Alexius himself played the part of the all-powerful ruler to the full. Godfrey of Bouillon and
his men were received by the emperor, who was “seated, as was his custom, looking powerful on the throne of his sovereignty, not getting up to offer kisses [of welcome] to the duke or anyone.”
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It was entirely plain which was the superior force.

Alexius insisted that the senior nobles should hand back any lands that had formerly been in the possession of the Greeks. In effect, this meant the bulk of Asia Minor and Antioch. The latter had been under Byzantine control until 1085 and was one of the five patriarchal seats of the Christian Church. To the Greeks, Constantinople was the home of Christianity and a far more important city than Jerusalem. That the crusaders wished to recover it was of limited interest to them. The emperor also demanded a form of vassalage; the crusaders were to swear peace and mutual friendship—in other words, to behave themselves—and in return they would receive imperial support and advice, although Alexius would not journey to Jerusalem in person. Some nobles were reluctant to give oaths to a non-Catholic ruler; a few evaded the situation by traversing the Bosporus immediately, and others, such as Raymond of Saint-Gilles, attempted to resist or to negotiate down the level of allegiance required. The majority, however, acquiesced. For those who conceded gracefully there were advantages: Godfrey of Bouillon was given a mound of gold and silver, as well as purple silks and fine horses; even the Greeks’ old enemy, Bohemond of Taranto, was persuaded to conform, and after taking his oath he was rewarded with the contents of a room so full of riches that he could barely enter.
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By the middle of 1097 the armies of the First Crusade were ready to move into Muslim lands. By sheer coincidence—and there is absolutely no evidence that this was planned—the crusaders chose to enter the Muslim world at a moment when it was particularly weak.
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There was, and remains, the basic division in the Islamic faith between the Sunni and the Shi’a. The former were in control of Asia Minor, Syria, and the lands of Persia to the east; their spiritual leader was the caliph of Baghdad. The Fatimid dynasty was Shi’a and they ruled Egypt from Cairo, the base of their caliphate. Such was the level of bitterness between Sunni and Shi’a that they were prepared to ally with the crusaders against one another rather than form a united front against the invading Christians. This situation was compounded by a catastrophic period of upheaval during the mid-1090s when caliphs and viziers from both camps died with alarming regularity—often in the most dubious circumstances. The later Muslim writer Ibn
Taghribirdi, wrote of 1094: “this year is called the year of death of caliphs and commanders.”
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In Asia Minor the demise of the powerful Seljuk sultan Malikshah created a power vacuum that meant that the crusaders did not encounter a major international power, but only smaller lordships more concerned with defeating each other than confronting the Christians. Little help came from the leadership of Islam. The caliph of Baghdad showed negligible interest in events on the western periphery of his lands and largely ignored appeals for help. Unsurprisingly, of course, given the unprecedented nature of the Christian invasion, most Muslims failed to recognize that this was a war of religious colonization. They perceived it as another raid from Byzantium, rather than a war of conquest and settlement, and this misunderstanding also helps to explain the lack of concerted resistance to the crusaders. With the benefit of hindsight, knowing just how marginal the crusaders’ survival actually was, had they faced a more formidable leader, such as Malikshah, it is doubtful whether they would have even managed to cross Asia Minor.

The city of Nicaea (modern Iznik), about 120 miles into Asia Minor, was the first settlement to be attacked by the crusaders. By June 1097 they were joined by their Greek allies and the Muslims soon had to surrender. This marked the only real cooperation between the two Christian groups. Later the same month came the first serious test of the crusaders’ strength. While the Greeks had warned them of Muslim tactics, little, it seems, had prepared them for the intensity of the onslaught. Seljuk armies were based around cavalry, most of whom were lightly armored, highly skilled archers. They would gallop to within fifty to sixty meters of the crusaders, release a hail of arrows, and then retreat. Fulcher of Chartres, an eyewitness, wrote, “The Turks were howling like wolves and furiously shooting a cloud of arrows. We were stunned by this . . . to all of us such warfare was unknown.”
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As the crusader army pushed across Asia Minor it was Bohemond’s men who became the focus of special attention. After an exhausting day of skirmishing on the march he was forced to halt and sent urgent entreaties for help to Godfrey and Raymond. The anonymous writer of the
Gesta Francorum
, an eyewitness to these events, lauded Bohemond’s men for their fortitude in withstanding the ferocity of the Seljuk assaults. He also made a point of praising the role of women in the army: “they were of great help to us that day, for they brought water for the men to drink and gallantly encouraged those who were fighting and defending them.”
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Godfrey and Raymond arrived
at speed by the following morning and after an epic six-hour struggle (known as the Battle of Dorylaeum), the combined strength of the crusaders prevailed. As the
Gesta Francorum
commented, “If God had not been with us in this battle and sent the other army quickly, none of us would have escaped.”
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The march through Asia Minor tested the crusaders’ physical and mental resolve; most of the knights’ fine warhorses died and the greatest warriors of the age were reduced to riding oxen, while goats, sheep, and even dogs carried the baggage. In the late summer of 1097 the crusader army began to divide up. Baldwin of Boulogne headed east toward Edessa (modern Sanliurfa), a fertile region astride the River Euphrates in the southeast of modern Turkey. Edessa was an important site in early Church history because it was the first city to formally adopt Christianity and was the burial place of the apostles Thomas and Thaddeus.
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At the time of the First Crusade it was ruled by Christian Armenians who welcomed the westerners’ support against the Muslims who surrounded their lands. At first, relations between the two parties were good: the local ruler, Thoros, adopted Baldwin as his son in a strange ritual where the two men stripped to the waist and embraced while a large white shirt was placed over both of them. In fact, Thoros was not especially popular with his people and he was soon torn to pieces by a mob, which left Baldwin to take control for himself. Notwithstanding Edessa’s Christian past, this was an act of brazen territorial acquisition by Baldwin, largely disconnected from the spiritual concerns at the heart of Urban’s appeal.

The majority of the army struggled grimly onward, impelled by the lure of Jerusalem. By October 1097 they reached Antioch in northern Syria (although today just inside Turkey and called Antakya). It was here that the pivotal battles of the crusade were fought; the holy warriors’ faith and fortitude were challenged as never before. It would take almost ten months to break the defenders’ resistance, a period of extraordinary suffering and hardship on both sides, yet one that was fundamental to the crusaders’ success. Modern Antioch, bisected by the Orontes, is a rather nondescript city
that covers a fraction of the area of its late classical heyday, yet the shattered remains of its medieval citadel still crown the vertiginous 1,600-foot ridge that looms over the site. Walls and towers cling to the steep sides of this great rock, but on the plain below the formidable ring of double walls that once confronted the crusaders has now almost gone. The size of the city and the scale of its fortifications meant that it was impossible to blockade effectively; in any case, the defenders had prepared well. As the harsh Syrian winter drew on it was the Franks (as they were generically known in both the Christian and Muslim worlds) who began to struggle. On occasion, supplies arrived at the nearby port of Saint-Simeon, courtesy of the Greeks, but the presence of such a large army inevitably began to denude the locality of food. The crusaders were forced to make increasingly distant and dangerous foraging trips and the price of basic commodities soared. Only one thousand horses had survived and the cold and rain caused tents and equipment to rot. Pestilence broke out and thousands of crusaders died or deserted; a steady stream of people left the expedition—perhaps those driven predominantly by material desires believed their hopes to be lost and gave up. Outside Antioch the crusaders constructed their own fortifications and made sporadic assaults on the city, but the campaign appeared to have stalled.

The siege dragged on into the spring of 1098 with sallies, bombardment, engagement and counterengagement. In June, however, the crusaders made a breakthrough. As we saw earlier, Bohemond was a man without lands and the chance to carve out a principality based upon such a splendid city was too good to miss. Unknown to his colleagues, Bohemond had contacted a renegade Armenian inside Antioch who was prepared to betray the city to the crusaders. With pressure for progress at a peak Bohemond made a proposition to the other leaders: if he could get the Christians into the city, they should agree that he could keep it. At first the others refused—they argued that everyone had toiled in front of its walls and that all should share its spoils. News of the imminent arrival of a large Muslim relief force from Mosul focused the minds of the nobles, however; Bohemond’s colleagues consented on condition that if Alexius came to help, the city would be given to him as they had promised.
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