God's War: A New History of the Crusades (23 page)

From the middle of the eleventh century, the heterogeneous polity of the Near East had revolved around the dominance of orthodox Sunni Muslim Seljuk Turks in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Asia Minor controlling the decadent Abbasid caliphate of Baghdad and the faltering heretical Shi’ite caliphate of the Fatimids in Egypt.
⁶
In 1055, the chief of the Orghuz Turcoman tribes in north-eastern Iran, the Seljuk Tughrul Beg, seized Baghdad, appropriating for himself from the caliph the title of sultan (literally, in Arabic, ‘power’). Tughrul (d. 1063), his nephew Alp Arslan (1063–72) and great-nephew Malik Shah (1072–92) created an empire
including Iran, Iraq and, from the late 1070s, central and southern Syria; northern Syria, a group of client city states, was incorporated by 1086. Alp Arslan, by his decisive defeat of the Byzantine emperor, Romanus Diogenes, at Manzikert in 1071, opened Anatolia to Turcoman invasion and settlement. The sultanate created there, of Rum (i.e. the former lands of the Byzantines who always referred to themselves as Romans), was ruled by Seljuk cousins of Malik Shah, Suleiman Ibn Kutulmush (d. 1086) and his son Kilij Arslan, whose influence in northern Syria was successfully challenged by Malik Shah’s brother Tutush. While the sultanate of Rum occupied southern and western Anatolia, another Turkish power, the Danishmends, established control of the north and east of the peninsula. The two powers competed for advantage, while unsuccessfully combining to resist the westerners’ advance across Anatolia in the summer of 1097.

Turkish authority from the Persian Gulf to the Dead Sea rested on military strength exercised by the control of local communities by Turkish garrisons or mercenaries holding indigenous political hierarchies in check. The western invaders of 1097 acknowledged that Turkish military supremacy had ‘terrorized the Arabs, Saracens, Armenians, Syrians and Greeks’.
⁷
Such rule varied from the militant Turkish holy warrior ethos of the Danishmends to the Great Seljuks of Baghdad, fully assimilated into the Arabo-Persian culture of the Abbasids: Malik Shah is not a Turkish name at all; it means King King in Arabic and Persian, a sort of echo of the imperial title of the ancient Persian Shahanshahs, Kings of Kings. Local power depended on standing armies of mercenaries, as the traditional Turkish nomadic life clashed with the settled rural and urban conditions of Iraq, Syria, Palestine and much of Anatolia. As effective warriors, the Turks of Asia Minor and Syria maintained their hold, real power often lying with mercenary army commanders rather than princely governors. Even the power of the Seljuk sultans in Baghdad was overshadowed by that of their vizier, Nizam al-Mulk.

One characteristic of the Seljuks was their fiercely orthodox Sunni Islam, putting them at odds with many of their subjects, not only the various Christian sects but also the Shi’ite majority among the Muslim peasantry of Syria, as well as with the heretical caliphs of Egypt, with whom they contested control of Palestine. After establishing themselves in Egypt in 969, the Shi’ite Fatimid caliphate became increasingly dependent on its mercenary troops, Berber tribesmen, Blacks (
Sudan
in Arabic)
from the upper Nile, Turks and other slave warriors (mamluks). These elements fought for supremacy behind the throne of Caliph al-Mustansir (1036–94) until he appointed as his vizier the aged Armenian mamluk Badr al-Jamali, who ruled Egypt as a military dictator from 1074 to 1094. The political potential of religion was dramatically demonstrated in 1092, when a Shi’ite splinter group established at Alamut, south of the Caspian Sea, murdered the immensely powerful vizier of Baghdad, Nizam al-Mulk; the killers’ sect was later known in the west as the Assassins. The Egyptian rulers were less ideologically militant or successful, their hold over the hinterland of Syria and Palestine reduced to nominal control over a few sea-ports on the Palestinian littoral. In an attempt to eject Turkish authority from Palestine Badr al-Jamali’s son and successor, al-Afdal, sought friendship with Byzantium and an agreement with the Greeks’ newest allies in 1097–9.

Tensions and rivalries were inherent in a polity where form disguised substance; behind the caliph a sultan, behind a sultan a vizier, behind a vizier a mamluk. Indigenous hierarchies were subject to foreign domination: Egypt and Iraq competed for Syria and Palestine; Armenian, Turcoman, Kurd or Berber adventurers subjugated local aristocracies. These fissures were deepened by a disastrous coincidence of death between 1092 and 1094, which swept away all the major political figures of the Near East. In 1092, the Vizier Nizam al-Mulk, effective ruler of the Seljuk empire, was followed to his grave a few weeks later by the Sultan Malik Shah himself. A similar pattern was repeated in Egypt in 1094, when the death of the Vizier Badr al-Jamali closely followed that of his ostensible master, the veteran Fatimid Caliph al-Mustansir. In the same year, the Sunni caliph of Baghdad, al-Muqtadi, also died. These multiple deaths provoked succession struggles and political fragmentation from Iran to Anatolia, Syria and Palestine. In Asia Minor, Kilij Arslan, held hostage by Malik Shah since the defeat and death of his father Suleiman in 1086, began to restore an independent sultanate of Rum in competition with the Seljuks and the Danishmends of eastern Anatolia. In the civil wars over Malik Shah’s inheritance, his brother Tutush, ruler of Syria, was defeated and killed in 1095 by the sultan’s son Barkyaruq, whose own power remained disputed by his brother Muhammed until his death in 1105. While much of the internecine fighting occurred in western Iran, political unity in Syria imploded. Tutush’s bickering sons Ridwan of Aleppo and Duqaq of Damascus
failed to impose their authority allowing the Turkish atabeg (i.e. guardian of prince or governor) of Mosul, Kerbogha, the opportunity to extend his authority into northern Syria, while local dynasties asserted their independence further south, such as the Ortoqids in Jerusalem or the Shi’ite Banu ‘Ammar in Tripoli. At Edessa in northern Iraq, in Cilicia and northern Syria, Armenian princelings re-established themselves in the debris of Seljuk rule. The new Egyptian vizier, al-Afdal, took advantage of this instability to restore Fatimid power in southern Palestine, culminating in his capture of Jerusalem from the Ortoqids in 1098.

In this political turmoil, where power rested with military warlords with varying claims to legitimacy, the western army appeared neither as distinctive nor as threatening as it thought itself. With the main contest for power in the Near East being fought in Iran, hundreds of miles to the east, the westerners’ targets – Cilicia, Antioch, Edessa, Jerusalem – were peripheral. As Tutush had discovered, rule of Syria counted for little against the forces of Iraq and Iran. Given the nature of their enterprise, the Christian expeditionary force rarely constituted a genuine threat to local dynasts. Despite the loss of Nicaea and defeats by the crusaders in 1097, the sultanate of Rum and the power of the Danishmends remained intact if dented. Only where Turkish authority had already eroded or collapsed – as in Cilicia or parts of northern Syria, including Antioch – did the crusaders threaten existing structures of authority. This new, fanatical, single-minded force apparently of Byzantine mercenaries fitted easily into a world dominated by armies of foreign hirelings – Kurdish, Turcoman or Armenian. The First Crusade was well suited to contemporary Near Eastern politics.

Such insights were far from apparent to the members of the expedition as they set out to cross Anatolia in late June 1097. Within days of leaving the area of Nicaea, the army was almost defeated, its vanguard overrun and nearly destroyed, by Kilij Arslan’s field army. Four years later, similar western contingents were serially annihilated by local forces, leaving merely uneasy rumours of their fate. Such could easily have been the fate of the 1097 host. The battle, conventionally called of Dorylaeum, but actually fought over twenty-five miles to the north, attracted vivid if confused memories, recalling fear (‘huddled together like sheep in a fold… we had no hope of surviving,’ remembered one),
recognition that it had been a close-run thing and certainty that victory had been God-given.
⁸

By the early morning of 1 July 1097, the Christian vanguard, perhaps 20,000 strong, comprising the contingents of Bohemund, Robert of Normandy, Stephen of Blois and Robert of Flanders, with the Byzantine troops under Tatikios, had advanced about forty-five miles south-east of Nicaea, reaching a valley just under three miles north of the modern Bozuyuk. There they were confronted by Kilij Arslan and his new ally the Danishmend emir. The Turkish force was mounted and probably outnumbered the western knights in the vanguard, which had become detached from the main body of crusaders under Raymond of Toulouse and Godfrey of Bouillon, around 30,000 strong, who were still some three miles away when battle was joined. On seeing the size of the Turkish army, Bohemund, his generalship skill already recognized, ordered the infantry, priests and other non-combatants to make a defensive camp, awkwardly with its back to a marsh, while the mounted knights advanced towards the enemy. Immediately things went badly, the mobile Turkish mounted archers driving the knights back to the camp, which became assailed on all flanks. Surrounded, the vanguard fought ferociously in dogged, bloody close combat, sustained by their close formation, lack of alternatives and a burgeoning
esprit de corps
.
⁹
After more than five hours, the vanguard faced massacre until the arrival of the main force under Godfrey and Raymond compelled the Turks to break off their assault to engage in a series of running fights across the field before abandoning the fray when the Provençals, led, some said, by Adhemar of Le Puy, threatened to encircle them. In the pursuit, lasting some days, the westerners looted the sultan’s camp, seizing gold, silver, horses, asses and camels (employed as pack-animals for the rest of the booty), cows and sheep. While proving the crusaders’ mettle, the battle had exposed failures of command and the danger still posed by the Turks; disaster had come perilously close.

While the largely nomadic Turkish forces of Kilij Arslan and the Danishmends could not be destroyed in one set-piece defeat, such a reverse undermined the sultan’s authority, especially over the towns of
Anatolia with large Christian populations, and his recently constructed prestige amongst his Turkish supporters. Towns and cities across Anatolia repudiated the sultan, many welcoming the passing crusaders. The sheer size of the westerners’ force invited respect. In crossing central Anatolia, its main enemy was heat by day and, in the uplands, sharp cold by night, thirst, lack of supplies and fatigue. There was an almost unstoppable haemorrhaging of horses: one veteran suggested they lost most of them in a few weeks after the battle, a potentially fatal blow. While Tancred and Baldwin of Boulogne separately pressed on directly towards Konya, the main army, moving at times as little as five miles a day and never much more than ten, took a detour into more fertile territory around Pisidian Antioch to the south to allow effective foraging. Reunited at Konya in mid-August, the great army was showing signs of depletion. Goats, sheep, even dogs were pressed into service as pack animals, their backs soon lacerated with sores, while knights rode cows or walked. In high and late summer temperatures could soar to over 30 degrees. Some recalled hundreds dying, mainly of thirst; the true figure may have been thousands. New-born babies were abandoned by their mothers. The march across Anatolia scarred the memories of the survivors. The leaders were not immune, Raymond of Toulouse falling so gravely ill that he received the last rites and Godfrey of Bouillon apparently being attacked and injured by a bear.
¹⁰
The requirements of food and water were paramount, determining the routes and behaviour of the army. Without cowed Turkish opponents and the general uprising against the sultan in Christian towns, the westerners could hardly have survived. The only serious military resistance encountered was at Ereghli (Heraclea) about a hundred miles east of Konya, around 10 September.

After Heraclea, the great army divided, a decision displaying awareness of regional political conditions, local geography and topography, diplomatic opportunities, and prospects for collective and personal gain. Byzantine interests remained influential. Confronted by the formidable barrier of the Taurus mountains, the ordinary route for travellers to Syria led south-east through the steep, narrow pass known as the Cilician Gates (at its tightest about thirty yards across) down into the fertile Cilician plain, past Tarsus, Adana, Mamistra to Alexandretta and the Belen pass through the Ammanus mountain range, thence to northern Syria and Antioch, a journey from Heraclea of some 220 miles. This route was taken by two separate contingents, led by Tancred and Baldwin of Boulogne, acting on orders of the whole command or, possibly, as surrogates for Bohemund and Godfrey of Bouillon. Despite bitter, at times violent rivalry once in Cilicia, these forays in September and early October cleared opponents from the southern flank of the main army
and established access to significant areas for supply and forage while denying them to the Turks of Antioch. Although Tancred and Baldwin came to blows at Tarsus, the latter being implicated in the Muslim massacre of 300 knights sent by Bohemund to reinforce his nephew,
¹¹
and again at Mamistra, they left behind sympathetic local rulers and garrisons: Baldwin’s at Tarsus, Tancred’s at Mamistra and possibly Baghras in northern Syria. The evidently self-interested campaigns of these two youthful, well-connected, skilful but landless adventurers materially aided the attack on Antioch and the protection of longer-term western interests in Syria.

The main army turned northwards from Heraclea towards Caesarea in Cappadocia (Kayseri), crossing the mountains by steep but broader passes before turning south-east to Coxon (Goksum) and Marasch, through defiles almost as precipitous and narrow as those of the Cilician Gates, to approach Antioch from the north, a distance from Heraclea of just under 400 miles, a long, agonizing trek through inhospitable, barren high country, the road reaching over 5,500 feet, with the risk of snow at higher altitudes. The march from Heraclea to Antioch took about seven weeks, averaging about eight miles a day; losses in the Taurus mountains were great. The reason for this apparent diversion lay in the need to encourage Armenian Christian support and to secure the hinterland of Antioch by clearing the Taurus approaches of hostile Turks. Byzantine authority was restored in some places; at Comana, the Italian Norman Peter of Alipha or Aups, a veteran in Byzantine service, assumed command of the city ‘in fealty to God and the Holy Sepulchre and to our leaders and the emperor’.
¹²
At others local Christians resumed control, as the Armenian Simeon at an unnamed town in Cappadocia, and Tatoul at Marasch. Tatoul was a supporter of the Greek emperor; Simeon had accompanied the army providing it with local knowledge and political contacts. The diversion to Caesarea and Marasch thus served Greek interests by liberating local Christians from Turkish dominion under the imperial aegis. Militarily, approaching from the north isolated Antioch by freeing the mountain cities, capturing the strategically important city of Artah, which controlled the city’s eastern approaches, and establishing a presence in the fertile Ruj valley, east of the Orontes, on which Antioch stands. Combined with the Cilician activities of Tancred and Baldwin, the westerners stood well placed to attack Antioch.