Authors: Rodney Stark,David Drummond
God's Battalions (18 page)
Both sides were correct. The dangerous barbarians won battle after battle against staggering odds, even though they had been abandoned by the devious plotters. For when the time came to attack the Turks, Alexius did not take command. Nor did he merge his army with the crusaders. Instead, he sent a small contingent to accompany the crusaders into Asia Minor only as far as needed to recover recently lost Byzantine territory; he interpreted the oath sworn to him by leading crusaders as giving him full and exclusive rights to all these recovered cities and areas. Once the Western knights had accomplished that goal, Alexius seems not to have intended that even a token Byzantine army go any further. His position was that if the crusaders wanted to push on to the Holy Land, that was their own concern, but that “Jerusalem was strategically irrelevant to the empire.”
36
Henceforth, the “barbarians” would have to go it alone, even though the most difficult battles still lay ahead. Consequently, feeling that they had been tricked by the emperor, many leading crusaders rejected Alexius’s territorial claims and their oaths to him, on grounds that he had not kept his word. Thus began an antagonism between East and West that ultimately resulted in the sack of Constantinople in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade.
CONCLUSION
A very frustrating feature of the literature on the Crusades is the lack of reliable numbers. Not only is it extremely difficult to know how many people actually set out on the First Crusade, but few plausible attempts have been made to estimate how many were lost along the way. We know that a substantial proportion of the People’s Crusaders were killed in their several battles in Bulgaria. Surely many more died of the natural causes that always beset such groups in those days; even during the American Civil War, the Union Army lost three men from disease for every one lost in battle.
37
So it is very difficult to guess how many of Peter’s people survived to be slaughtered by the Turks. Similarly, although many, perhaps most, of Hugh of Vermandois’s contingent who set sail from Bari drowned, we can’t estimate how many they were, let alone how many fell out along the way.
All that having been said, I estimate that of the perhaps 130,000 who set out on the First Crusade in 1096, 90,000 did not take part in the siege of Nicaea in June 1097. That is a loss rate of roughly 35 per mile who died or turned back. And by the time Jerusalem was taken, perhaps as many as 115,000 (or 88 percent) of the original crusaders had been lost. If this seems excessive, consider that of Bohemond’s Normans who were sufficiently prominent to be named in the
Gesta Francorum,
a third were dead before 1099 and another fourth were unaccounted for.
38
In addition, these estimates of losses do not include the several thousand additional knights who arrived by sea during the course of the campaign. So the total number who died or deserted probably totaled about 120,000—most of whom perished.
It was not until the upper-class sons of Europe were slaughtered in the trenches during World War I that Europe suffered the loss of a generation of leaders equal to that which took place during the First Crusade. Those who marched east were among the best and the brightest of their time. When they died, the responsibilities for managing many major estates and dealing with many important concerns fell upon widows and minor sons, and on those who failed to serve, just as it did in England, France, and Germany in the 1920s. Even so, commitment to crusading remained high for many more years as the families involved in the First Crusade continued to send their subsequent generations to defend the Holy Land. Indeed, when Europe began to sour on crusading, it appears that it was not the families who had given the most who lost heart; rather, it was families who had never sent a crusader who opposed continuing to pay the taxes required to sustain the crusader kingdoms.
Against all odds, following their capture of Jerusalem, the crusaders quickly marched south and defeated a huge Egyptian army at Ascalon. Here Godfrey of Bouillon is shown directing his victorious troops as they sack the Egyptian camp.
©
Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY
T
HE ACTUAL MILITARY PHASE
of the First Crusade began when the combined forces of the Princes’ Crusade, accompanied by “a small detachment of Byzantine engineers, with siege machines,”
1
left their encampment on the banks of the Bosporus and marched twenty-five miles south to Nicaea, the first Muslim stronghold between them and the Holy Land. Little did they know that more than a year later, after fierce fighting and very heavy losses, they would still only be in Antioch. And it was another year before they reached the gates of Jerusalem, on June 7, 1099 (see map 7.1).
NICAEA
Nicaea was the capital of the Seljuk sultanate of Rûm, ruled by Kilij Arslan.
Rûm
was the Turkish word for “Rome,” and this sultanate consisted of the large portion of Anatolia that the Turks had conquered from the Byzantines, who still referred to theirs as the Roman Empire. It was an opportune time to attack Nicaea, because the sultan was so contemptuous of the crusaders after his easy slaughter of Peter the Hermit’s followers that he had ignored the nearby gathering of “Franj” (Frank) forces and led his army eastward to confront a challenger to his rule. In fact, he was so unconcerned that he left his wife, his children, and his treasure store within Nicaea.
The siege of Nicaea began on May 14, 1097. When word reached Sultan Arslan that the crusaders had surrounded Nicaea and then had easily repelled a sortie by troops from the city, he hurriedly led his army back. Upon arrival he immediately attacked the forces of Raymond of Toulouse, whose troops blocked the way to the southern entrance to the city. Robert of Flanders brought some of his troops to Raymond’s aid, and the battle with Sultan Arslan’s army lasted all day. Arslan was stunned to discover that, “man for man, his Turks were no match for the well-armed westerners on open ground.”
2
As the
Gesta Francorum
described it, the Turks “came along gleefully…but as many as came…had their heads cut off by our men, who threw the heads of the slain into the city by means of a sling, in order to cause more terror among the Turkish garrison.”
3
After dark the sultan withdrew his forces and abandoned Nicaea to its fate.
But the victors had suffered badly, too. Again the
Gesta:
“[M]any of our men suffered martyrdom there and gave up their blessed souls to God with joy and gladness.”
4
Despite these losses, Nicaea was still in Turkish hands. So the crusaders began to plan a general assault.
Unbeknownst to them, Emperor Alexius had quite different plans. He sent several of his agents to conduct secret negotiations, and they convinced the Turks to surrender the city. So, as the sun rose on the morning when the assault on Nicaea was scheduled to begin, the crusaders were greeted with the sight of Byzantine banners flying over the defensive towers of Nicaea and of Byzantine troops patrolling the walls, having been smuggled in during the night. Western crusaders were permitted to enter the city only in groups of six or less at a time.
This further confirmed for the Western leaders that Alexius and his court were not to be trusted, thus adding to the growing antagonism toward the emperor—especially since no Greek troops had helped with the fighting. Suspicions of Alexius grew even more intense when the Turkish commanders and the sultan’s family, instead of being held for ransom, were taken to meet the emperor in Alexandria. “The emperor, who was a fool as well as a knave,” treated them as distinguished guests and then sent them home safely and in style, leaving them, as the
Gesta
put it, “ready to injure the Franks and obstruct their crusade.”
5
Bohemond, of course, reminded his colleagues that Alexius had once used Turkish forces against him.
Perhaps seeking to appease the knights, Alexius decided to reinforce the tiny Byzantine contingent accompanying the crusaders. This impressed no one in the crusader camp because, although the Byzantine army stationed in and around Constantinople greatly outnumbered the crusaders, Alexius sent only a surprisingly small detachment of about two thousand soldiers,
6
commanded by a general named Taticius, the son of an enslaved Turk.
DORYLAEUM
A week after the surrender of Nicaea, the crusaders began to move again. Historians long believed that they headed toward the ruined city of Dorylaeum—for which their next major battle is named. It now is accepted that they followed a more western route and that the battle occurred about forty miles west of Dorylaeum.
7
Meanwhile, the Turks had regrouped under Kilij Arslan and been heavily reinforced by other Turkish princes as well as by Persian and Albanian mercenaries. After the crusaders had traveled for three days, their scouts alerted them that major Turkish forces were approaching and that a battle could be expected soon. At dawn on July 1, this large Turkish force attacked the crusader vanguard made up of Bohemond’s forces, and inflicted substantial casualties while the Normans were getting organized. Bohemond gathered the noncombatants at the center of the encampment, where there were springs, and assigned them the task of carrying water to the troops; crusader women often performed this vital task bravely and effectively. Bohemond dismounted his knights and placed them with his infantry to form a solid defensive perimeter. The Turkish army consisted entirely of light cavalry armed with bows and swords, 8 and although they inflicted some casualties with their arrows, they could make no headway against the infantry line. It seems that the Turks mistook Bohemond’s force for the entire crusader army and were caught entirely unprepared when the main body of knights launched a thundering heavy-cavalry charge against their flank and rear.
Both sides suffered serious losses, but the Turkish casualties were far greater. According to the
Gesta:
“As soon as our knights charged, the Turks, Arabs, Saracens, and Agulani and all the rest of the barbarians took to their heels and fled…God alone knows how many there were of them. They fled very fast to their camp, but they were not allowed to stay there for long, so they continued their flight and we pursued them, killing them, for a whole day, and we took much booty…If God had not been with us in this battle and sent us the other army quickly, none of us would have escaped.”
9
The defeat was so swift and complete that once again Arslan lost his entire treasury, which he had managed to raise to replace the one he had lost at Nicaea.
10
Nevertheless, before he took his forces off to the mountains Arslan had his troops ravage the countryside to “make it impossible [for the crusaders] to feed themselves as they advanced.”
11
After resting for two days following the battle, the crusaders set out to cross Anatolia on their way to Antioch. It was a dreadful march. The summer heat was intense. There was no water: the wells and cisterns (built to store rainwater) had all been destroyed by the Turks. As the
Gesta
tells it, they were passing through “a land which was deserted, waterless and uninhabitable, from which we barely emerged or escaped alive, for we suffered greatly from hunger and thirst, and found nothing at all to eat except prickly plants…On such food we survived wretchedly enough, but we lost most of our horses.”
12
The crusaders slogged on until they reached Iconium, in a fertile valley filled with streams and orchards. In addition to claiming the city, the crusaders rested there for a few days and then marched on to Heraclea, also located in a fertile valley. There they found a substantial Turkish army, led by two emirs who seem to have thought their mere presence would be sufficient to cause the crusaders to change course. But the crusaders attacked at once, and soon the Turks withdrew at full speed—the crusaders’ shortage of horses saving the Turks from being slaughtered.
At Heraclea the crusaders had their choice of two routes to Antioch. One was more direct but very mountainous. The other passed through Caesara Mazacha and was longer but less easily defended. Bohemond chose to cross the mountains. The rest went through Caesara, which they found to have been deserted by the Turks. The forces were reunited at Coxon. There they found plentiful supplies and a cordial welcome from the largely Christian population. After three days of rest, they moved on and discovered that the journey from Coxon to Antioch “was the most difficult that the crusaders had to face.”
13
As the
Gesta
reported: “[W]e set out and began to cross a damnable mountain, which was so high and steep that none of our men dared to overtake another on the mountain path. Horses fell over the precipice, and one beast of burden dragged another down. As for the knights…[some] threw their arms away and went on.”
14
The armor was discarded because of the loss of pack animals; it was very heavy to carry.
Once across the mountain, the crusaders reorganized their units at Marash. Here Baldwin of Boulogne and about a hundred mounted knights, accompanied by the historian Fulcher of Chartres, left the Crusade and traveled east, where Baldwin was adopted by Thoros, the childless Armenian ruler of Edessa. (Secret negotiations had gone on for some time.) Soon after, Thoros was murdered by a mob of citizens, Baldwin became the first count of Edessa, and the county of Edessa became the first of the crusader kingdoms.
Meanwhile, the crusaders marched to the city of Antioch, then the capital of Syria.
ANTIOCH
Antioch is situated on the Orontes River where it cuts through the mountains, about twelve miles from the Mediterranean. At the start of the Christian era it was the third-largest city in the Roman Empire; only Rome and Alexandria were larger.
15
Under Muslim rule it suffered a substantial decline of both population and commerce. Having been recovered briefly by Byzantium in the tenth century, it regained some importance, but declined again when lost to the Turks. Nevertheless, in 1098 it was a city of substantial size, with very impressive fortifications.
The city stood partly on a mountainside, and its massive walls climbed steep slopes, crossed a river, and included a citadel a thousand feet above the main part of the city. Four hundred towers punctuated the walls, “spaced so as to bring every yard of them within bow shot.”
16
Because these defenses were so strong, the conquest of Antioch in the past usually had been achieved by treachery. That is precisely what Bohemond had in mind this time, too. But he kept this to himself as the other leaders considered the military situation. Meanwhile, things were not so good inside the city. For one thing, the garrison was too small to fully man the walls. For another, by recently mistreating the Christian residents (who were the majority) and converting their cathedral into a horse stable, the emir had created a substantial population of potential traitors.
17
While the crusaders considered their options, the emir sent ambassadors far and wide in search of military support—with some success, although no relief forces could arrive for some time. Meanwhile, in October 1097 the crusaders undertook a siege of the city. Unfortunately, just as the Muslim commander did not have enough troops to fully man the walls, there were too few crusaders to fully surround the city. Hence, the flow of supplies to Antioch continued. In November, the crusaders received an important reinforcement: thirteen Genoese galleys and transports arrived on the coast, carrying more crusaders and supplies. Nevertheless, the crusader forces soon consumed all of the available supplies, including fodder.
As winter set in, the besiegers suffered far more from hunger and disease than did those besieged within Antioch—since they continued to be resupplied. Large numbers of the poor noncombatants with the crusaders actually starved to death. Obviously, Alexius could have sent ample supplies by sea. But he did not. Instead, in February he ordered Tatikios and his contingent of Byzantine troops to withdraw, and they sailed away on ships that had been sent for that purpose but had not used the opportunity to bring any supplies. Tatikios made matters even worse by pretending that he was not deserting but going back to get abundant supplies for the crusaders. The crusaders knew better. The
Gesta
put it this way: “[H]e is a liar, and always will be. We were thus left in direst need.”
18
Things soon got so bad in the crusader encampments that Peter the Hermit and William the Carpenter (who had taken part in Emicho’s massacre of Jews) deserted and headed for Constantinople. Bohemond’s nephew Tancred pursued them and brought them back in disgrace. After humiliating them at length in public, Bohemond let them live. Shortly thereafter, William fled once more and probably found sanctuary with Alexius.
19
It was then that a very substantial Muslim relief force advanced on Antioch. The battle was fought on Shrove Tuesday, February 9, 1098. Despite being greatly outnumbered, the crusaders won a smashing victory. Having very few horses, nearly all the knights joined the ranks of the heavy infantry, against which the Muslim cavalry suffered terrible losses during each attack. At the appropriate moment Bohemond suddenly appeared on the Muslim flank with the remaining heavy cavalry of perhaps three hundred knights. At the same time, the crusader infantry also charged. The Muslim force was massacred. Beyond their amazing victory, the crusaders also gained desperately needed supplies from the enemy camp. As the
Gesta
summed up: “Thus, by God’s will, on that day our enemies were overcome. Our men captured plenty of horses and other things of which they were badly in need, and they brought back a hundred heads of dead Turks to the city gate.”
20
A month later, a small Norman fleet from England arrived off the coast, bringing additional supplies and more crusaders.