Soldier of Crusade (3 page)

‘The Bible tells us it has been so,’ intoned Peter the Hermit, which got him a look from a more secular emperor. ‘The Old Testament tells of many times when God has interceded to protect his flock. Think of the parting of the Red Sea …’

That had the courtiers in attendance shifting uncomfortably, for if they were good sons of the Church they were also men who knew that miracles were caused more by imagination than divine intervention. There were soldiers of the empire amongst them too, like Boutoumites, and they had to work hard not to scoff at the old man’s words. Alexius gave Peter a look that, if it was gentle, demanded his silence, then indicated that Sigibuld should continue with his tale.

‘The priests had them kneel and entreat before the Turks launched their assault, as if the power of prayer alone would stop them from
attacking. They were still at their devotions when the first arrows landed amongst them, and packed as they were the bolts did great slaughter. It was as if the shock broke their spirit, for they set up a great wailing and gnashing, many claiming that God had deserted them. They began to rush about both in front and behind we fighting men and lost what little unity they had possessed.’

‘Easy meat for the Turkish archers?’

Sigibuld dropped his head when Alexius said that, his voice seeming now to come from the depths of his belly.

‘We could not move to break up their formations without we trampled our own people, this while the mounted archers got to our rear, dashing forward to fire an arrow then withdrawing before we could inflict any damage upon them. Kilij Arslan then sent his swordsmen into the melee of pilgrims. Many who died were on their knees begging for forgiveness, the rest began to scatter, running in all directions, which left we fighting men to face a full assault from a force greater than our own with the need to do battle on both flanks as well as to our front.’

‘How many survived?’ Alexius asked, cutting across Sigibuld.

He did not want to hear what this Lombard was about to tell him, of the butchery which followed and how it was achieved; he had fought the Turks too many times himself, had seen their mounted archers ride forward and, while still moving, launch a flood of arrows at a defensive line cowering under shields. In his mind’s eye he could see how that would, on an open battlefield, pin the defenders so that their enemy could get round their flanks and begin to crush them between twin pincers in a way that meant resistance would be flattened.

‘If there is indeed place in heaven,’ Sigibuld continued, avoiding
the direct question, ‘for those who perish on this venture, then surely the likes of Walter will gain entry and glory when they do. Many knights fought on even when their bodies were pierced by the Turkish bolts and took many of the infidel with them before they finally fell.’

‘And you, Sigibuld, how did you get clear?’

That made the Lombard pull himself up to his full height; there was in the question the accusation of him being less of a man than those he had named. ‘We were still mounted and when those we had chosen to lead were slain it was obvious that no other choice presented itself but flight. The Turkish horses were blown from their previous exertions and sluggish in pursuit, but more in our favour was the way their compatriots fell upon the bodies of the dead to strip and mutilate them.’

‘How many got away?’

‘Around seventy knights.’

‘And the pikemen?’

‘They, being on foot, were less fortunate. Some did survive by throwing away their weapons and hanging on to our stirrup leathers.’

‘And where are they now?’

‘Defending Civetot, Highness, which is why I have come on here and in haste, stopping not even to remove the blood and filth from my person. The town and the remaining pilgrims are at risk if the Turks keep advancing, for there is nothing of a fighting nature to prevent it. I have come to ask that you either provide men to defend the town or send ships to withdraw the people left behind, the women and children as well as those too old or infirm to fight.’

They could smell Civetot long before any of the boats sent to bring off the remaining pilgrims ever sailed into the Gulf of Nicomedia,
the great bight, on the southern arm of which the wretched town sat. Never a place of beauty it was ravaged now, the churches burnt shells and the homes of those who had lived here torn down into dust. Rotting carcasses of flesh leave a high odour in a warm climate, yet it was testament to the amount of slaughter that it could be discerned so far from the shore that there could be no doubt what the sailors would find when they set foot on the beach.

Kilij Arslan had indeed come on from the massacre described by Sigibuld, to attack a settlement bereft of any means of resistance. There were survivors, but few, the kind who had rushed into the sea and managed to stay afloat as the butchery was accomplished on land. There were also those the Turks had thought dead, buried so deep in a pile of bodies that the fact of their still breathing was undetectable, a few dozens from the many thousands to tell the tale of what had occurred, about a host who had no interest in conversion to Islam but only in killing what they saw as a plague.

There had been others who avoided the massacre: young women and boys who could be sold into carnal servitude, the few fit men who had not marched off with the army able to work as slaves aboard galleys or in quarries. For the rest they were killed; women not of tender years were of no use and neither were small children, infants and newly born babies. The old were despatched as a matter of course and the Turks had gathered those they had slain into a great mound of suppurating flesh that had left the ground around it, where their tuns of blood had leached out from the ferociously administered wounds, as soggy as a bog.

Peter the Hermit had come as well and many wondered at his silent thoughts as he surveyed the death of both his hopes and his Crusade. Was his faith still intact? Did he think, like the victims over
whose bodies he prayed must have thought, that their dreams were delusions? Or did he believe these souls to be martyred and already in paradise? No one asked Peter and he was not speaking.

‘Go back to Constantinople,’ said the man Alexius had put in command of the ships, ‘and tell the Emperor that the People’s Crusade is no more.’

T
he Apulian army was unaware of what had happened ahead of them and would have shown indifference if they had been told – what else could be expected of a force of peasants? Many were experienced mercenary soldiers who had previously marched along the ancient Via Egnatia, as were the mailed and mounted Norman knights who moved east with them, not least their leader. Just over ten years previously the then Duke of Apulia, Robert de Hauteville, had been obliged to curtail a second bite at conquest, required to go home to suppress an insurrection of his ever-discontented barons, whose natural bellicosity had been watered by Byzantine gold.

Bohemund had been entrusted to continue his father’s invasion, and given that he had suffered an ultimate reverse, not all of his memories of this land were ones to be covered in a golden glow. The memory dimmed even more as he recalled that the deeper he had pushed into Macedonia and Thessaly the greater became the difficulties for the
forces he had led, as much from the terrain as from enemy action to slow his progress, as well as the determination of the Emperor Alexius Comnenus to bring him to battle on a field of his choosing.

If there had been many successes, in the end he had been beaten by a combination of factors: campaign weariness after endless forced marches, a dearth of plunder and a lack of reinforcements added to that staple weapon of the enemy he faced – wealth with which to bribe his father’s Apulian subjects as well as Bohemund’s captains in the field. Both led men who fought for no higher cause than their own personal gain, a right his followers had exercised when he had been forced to absent himself from the campaign at the same time as an emissary, a fellow Norman in the imperial service, appeared from the Emperor Alexius laden with treasure, an act which broke the cohesion of a tired army and led to an ignominious retreat.

Unlike on his previous incursion Bohemund had no desire to push his men in the kind of swift march required to seek and wrong-foot an opponent, he being in no hurry to get to Constantinople. Other large bodies of Christian knights were on the way from Northern Europe and Germany, one of which, from the Duchy of Lower Lorraine, should already be near the capital having taken the route through Hungary. They would join those who had embarked from the ports of Bari and Brindisi under Hugh of Vermandois.

Bohemund, busy gathering his own forces in the port cities which he controlled, had met to talk with and entertain Vermandois, as well as to seek some measure of his opinions on the forthcoming campaign, only to find himself conversing with a vainglorious fool who had never independently led men in a real battle. This boded ill for the future since, given his royal connection to the King of France, Vermandois saw himself as the leader by right of the whole
enterprise. That was not an opinion Bohemund accepted and he had enough respect for Alexius Comnenus, even if he had never met him, to believe he too would smoke that Vermandois was a dolt.

It was most certainly not one likely to be shared by the other powerful warlords who would follow in the wake of Vermandois, especially the contingents from Toulouse and Provence, reputed to be commanded by the men who had first responded to a personal plea from Pope Urban. Likewise, those from Normandy, Flanders and England would have men in their ranks who would not readily take commands from another, for they included amongst their number the second son of William the Conqueror. It was good fortune that Count Hugh’s brother, the King, clearly a man of some sagacity, had sent with Hugh his constable, Walo of Chaumont, who was both a good soldier and, being a high official of the French Court, a practised diplomat.

So, several bodies were reported to be ahead of the Apulians and would thus be earliest to the Byzantine capital, there to meet with Alexius and to have set the terms by which the Western armies would help to reconquer imperial lands, news of which would come to Bohemund before he reached Constantinople. Prior knowledge of what would be asked for would allow the Apulian leader to play a better hand, for, if Palestine was the ultimate aim, that presaged a long, arduous campaign over hundreds of leagues and difficult terrain, fraught with as many difficulties as opportunities.

Unlike some of the other leaders who would answer Pope Urban’s call to Crusade Bohemund was too experienced a warrior and general to be blinded by the mysticism of the enterprise. If the aim was sacred the task was military and that required those who undertook it to be pragmatic. Added to that he was a near neighbour and recent
enemy who knew Byzantium too well to just accord them the kind of Christian brotherhood likely to be spoken of in other bands of warriors, most tellingly its troubled history and endemic lack of stability.

No one who aspired to or wore the imperial diadem could ever feel safe and that had been too often proved over centuries in a court full of intrigue, where either violence or poison lay behind every marble column. He had grown up with tales of both in execution; the deposed ruler if he was not killed was at least rendered harmless by having his eyes put out.

Alexius Comnenus, now in his fifteenth year of rule, had lasted longer than most. He might have come to power through a kinder deposition, but he had acceded to the throne in a palace coup that saw his predecessor, himself a usurper, despatched with eyes intact to live out his days in a monastery. It was just as likely that there were plots being hatched to remove the present incumbent of the imperial throne regardless of his abilities, which were manifestly high. That was the nature of the polity and had been since the time of Constantine, founder of the city that bore his name.

Whoever ruled Byzantium was required to be well versed in the devious arts of intrigue as well as deception and Alexius would be no exception. Bohemund surmised he would seek to use the forces granted to him by Western religious fervour to further the aims of the Eastern Empire. That he would do so was not to be despised; no ruler who wished to secure his throne could afford to behave in any other fashion. Yet it was as well to be aware that such priorities would colour every act of Byzantine support; Bohemund was prepared to sup with his one-time enemy Alexius, but he would do so with a long spoon.

The first task once all the contingents converged would be to push back the Seljuk Turks. They had been advancing west over many decades, as much an enemy to their Mohammedan co-religionists as the Greeks, Jews and Armenians over whom they now ruled. They had steadily eaten into the Eastern Empire, making their most telling gains after the disastrous Battle of Manzikert a quarter of a century previously. There the flower of the Byzantine army had gone down to a disastrous and total defeat that included the capture of the then emperor, Romanos Diogenes.

That reverse proved so comprehensive that Constantinople had never recovered the initiative, indeed it had struggled to hold on to what it still possessed on the southern side of the Bosphorus and had asked, many times and to no avail, for help from their Christian brethren of the West. These pleas for aid were sent to Roman pontiffs who had enough trouble on their own doorstep, often from the Normans, more regularly from the King of the Germans, to even think of what was happening in the East.

Added to that there was a definite schism that was far from being healed around certain disagreements about priestly celibacy, the proper way to conduct the Mass and the use of unleavened bread to denote the body of Christ. More tellingly divisive was a refusal from the Patriarch of Constantinople to acknowledge the Vicar of Rome as head of the entirety of the Christian Church, both Orthodox and Latin, these matters now fifty years in dispute.

Left to its own devices, Byzantium had struggled. The Turks had expanded their gains against a weakened empire to become a threat to the imperial capital itself, in possession of the heavily fortified city of Nicaea, within three days’ marching distance of Constantinople, having established what they called the Sultanate of Rüm, an Arabic
corruption of Rome, which went some way to establish their aims. One day they aspired to take all of the Eastern Roman Empire; what kept them in check now was not Byzantine resistance but their own ability to fall out amongst themselves.

Pope Urban, in receipt of lurid tales of how maltreated were pilgrims to Jerusalem, mocked, robbed and even forced to convert, called for a crusade to free the Holy Places of Palestine. This could only be accomplished in alliance with Byzantium, for they held the narrow water crossing from Europe to Asia, added to which no military force could invade or move south without their aid and support, both in terms of supply and cooperation.

Thus the two aims had coincided and set in motion these great armies. That the Emperor would want to control the enterprise was certain; what he would be willing to grant in terms of plunder and territorial possessions if successful was as yet unknown, for if it was faith that brought many to answer the crusading call, personal advancement added to both territorial gain would not be far behind.

These were the thoughts, made up of memory, experience and speculation, that filled the mind of Bohemund, the subject of conversations only with his nephew Tancred, the one person to whom he would occasionally show his innermost feelings. Yet there could be no conclusion; too much – personalities, the outcome of future battles – was open to speculation. That was not a situation that made the leader of the army anxious, it being that with which he had lived since he had first been old enough to reason and to fight.

Even if the Apulians had wanted to move swiftly a rapid advance was barely possible; the old Roman road, acceptable as a trade route for merchants and their goods-laden donkeys scarcely served for an army
of thousands. It stood as an emblem of the polity that was supposed to keep it in good repair; everything was on the perish and that meant progress was naturally constrained. In places, like the high mountain passes, it had been part washed away by winter mudslides and was barely negotiable; even on level ground there were gaps where the polygon stones that were supposed to provide the pavé had been stolen to be put to other uses by locals well able to ignore the central imperial authority, leaving the road in places a quagmire after even a modicum of rainfall.

That lack of firm rule posed the next hindrance to the daily movements as the hill tribes, never wholly subdued by Byzantium, sought to alleviate the poverty of their miserable existence by a continual set of raids on the Apulian baggage train, but more persistently on the supplies provided by Byzantine storerooms and farms to which Bohemund had helped himself, despite protests, both those carried in carts and that on the hoof: grain, pulses and peas for the men, oats for the horses, and cattle to be slaughtered and provide occasional meat. Worse were the depredations on the herd of spare horses without which no mounted force could go into battle.

The raids were sharp affairs, short in duration, happening in daylight as well as in darkness, the sole object to swiftly steal what could be carried off in the time between launching an assault and the speed with which the nearest mounted party could react to chase the intruders off. That brought forth another difficulty – pursuit was dangerous to a small party of lances; to follow the tribesmen into their own mountain terrain left the Normans at great peril from ambush, while to mount a greater incursion just saw the raiders melt away to higher ground.

On the rare occasions when the tribesmen had been cornered
they had proved they could fight; these people saw themselves as the descendants of the armies of Alexander the Great and it was from this high country that had come the men who, under his leadership, had conquered half the known world.

Many of the Apulian host, if asked, would not shrink to compare Bohemund to that military titan and it had nothing to do with his remarkable height and build; he was the son of Robert de Hauteville, acknowledged to be the greatest soldier of his time and known to the world, for his cunning and cleverness, as the
Guiscard
. The family from which Robert sprang, a string of brothers, having come from the depths of the Contentin in north-west Normandy, had risen from owning nothing but their weapons and their horses to become mighty warriors and the ruling line of Southern Italy and Sicily.

Bohemund’s half-brother now held a trio of ducal titles while his uncle, another Roger, was the Great Count of Sicily and master of that island, even if, in title, he was supposed to be a vassal of his namesake nephew. Originally fighting in tandem with the
Guiscard
, Count Roger had, with papal blessing and encouragement, completed the conquest of the island, defeating both the Saracens and Islam in what had come to be termed a “Crusade”, similar to that taking place in Spain against the Moors. More pleasing to the papacy was the way he had dealt with the Orthodox form of religion, to which the mass of the Greek population adhered.

They looked to Constantinople for spiritual guidance and Roger was working to replace that with worship in the Latin rite, rededicating churches, encouraging priests and monks from the north as well as setting up abbeys and monasteries into which they could move to spread the Creed as set out by Rome, so if anyone stood high in papal favour and personal power, it was he.

Added to that, the Great Count held the line between his two nephews,
Borsa
and Bohemund; the latter would have taken everything without his uncle’s intervention. That was another plus for the papacy, who found pious and malleable
Borsa
easier to deal with than the combative Count of Taranto.

All three had risen on the efforts of the men of their family that preceded them, first and foremost the eldest de Hauteville who had outmanoeuvred the slippery Lombards, a race that sought to use them only as military mercenaries, going on to outwit those fellow Normans who saw him as a subject not an equal. William had begun to carve out in south-east Italy what would become the Duchy of Apulia, aided by brothers Drogo, Humphrey, Godfrey, sometimes Mauger, then Robert and Roger.