God's War: A New History of the Crusades (24 page)

3. The Siege of Antioch, October 1097–June 1098

This two-pronged attack on northern Syria territorially reconstituted much of the principality carved out by a renegade Greek commander, Philaretus Brachamius, between 1077 and the Turkish occupation of Antioch in 1085 and had been accomplished with the support of local Armenian lords, with whom there had been contact since Nicaea.
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One of them, Bagrat, persuaded the restless Baldwin of Boulogne, with whom he had travelled since Nicaea, to try his luck further east towards the Euphrates, also in lands once controlled by Philaretus. Leaving the army again after a brief stay in mid-October, with a small contingent of knights Baldwin moved on Tell-Bashir where he was welcomed by local Armenians as their lord. Having established military overlordship of the region up to the Euphrates, in a fashion familiar from Greek and Turkish precedents, in February 1098 Baldwin received an invitation from Thoros, the Armenian ruler of Edessa, forty-five miles east of the Euphrates, to come to his aid against the imminent advance of Kerbogha of Mosul, who was preparing a massive army to relieve Antioch and regain northern Syria from this nascent Franco-Armenian coalition. Baldwin accepted on condition Thoros recognized him as his heir. Arriving at Edessa on 20 February 1098, Baldwin tacitly or actively colluded with local dissidents in the rapid removal of Thoros, failing to intervene as his adoptive father was lynched by the town mob. On 10 March, Baldwin assumed authority over Edessa, establishing the first so-called Frankish state in the Levant. Apart from satisfying Baldwin’s ambition, the addition of Edessa and the lands on either side of the Euphrates to the westerner’s sphere of control proved vital for the survival of the whole expedition. A source of material aid and intelligence to the main army, in May 1098, Baldwin’s presence persuaded Kerbogha of Mosul to pause in his march on Antioch to besiege Edessa. This delay of three weeks was crucial; instead of trapping the western army outside the city walls, Kerbogha’s vanguard arrived just one day after the Christians had finally entered Antioch after an eight-month siege. Baldwin’s campaigns in Cilicia and Syria highlighted the impact of small forces; at Edessa, so his chaplain Fulcher of Chartres recorded, he was accompanied by as few as eighty knights, suggesting a force of a few hundred at most, Baldwin’s success exposing the fragility of local power structures and allegiances which contributed to the wider success of the western army in Syria.
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The siege of Antioch from October 1097 to June 1098 provided the twelfth century with its Trojan War, famed in verse, song and prose, commemorated in stone and glass, the central episode of trial and heroism in epic and romantic recounting of the First Crusade.
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For once, legend was justified. Despite the size of the western armies, Antioch presented a formidable obstacle. Although its garrison was modest, perhaps only a few thousand, the circuit of the walls, studded with scores of towers, ran for about seven and a half miles, much of it over rough, mountainous terrain. Contained within the fortified area of about three square miles was Mt Silpius, near the summit of which perched the citadel, a thousand feet above the main city. Incapable of investing Antioch by complete blockade, the crusaders’ alternative of assault offered little immediate prospect of success as they appeared at this stage to lack sufficient heavy artillery (i.e. great throwing engines such as mangonels or trebuchets) to breach the walls. A lengthy siege was in prospect, the only choice being whether to conduct it at close range or to blockade the city at a distance. Neither bore the certainty or even prospect of success as the governor of Antioch, Yaghisiyan, nominally a client of Ridwan of Aleppo, exerted much diplomatic energy to garner help. While past animosities prevented a concerted Muslim response, time lay on Yaghisiyan’s side, even though many of the outlying garrisons and commanders in the area, often non-Muslim, took the opportunity to throw off the governor’s unpopular rule, some Armenians regarding the westerners as liberators.

Less clear is why the siege was undertaken in the first place. The Christian army was ill-equipped for siege warfare; the success at Nicaea had been due to Byzantine diplomacy and naval power as much as anything. Given Turkish disunity, negotiation rather than attack might have cleared a path southwards. The warring jealousies of the rulers of the great Syrian cities were not greatly moved by the appearance of the crusaders; accommodation, especially in the context of the westerners’ hardly secret negotiations with Fatimid Egypt, could have been achieved. When, in 1099, the Christian host marched on Jerusalem, there was little suggestion of taking Homs, Damascus or the cities on the Palestinian coast. Perhaps of greater strategic importance than Antioch itself were its ports, Alexandretta, St Symeon and Lattakiah, through which supplies of food (chiefly from Cyprus), war materials and men could reach the Christian army in Syria. Tancred had secured Alexandretta
weeks before the main army reached Antioch, and a combination of Greek-sponsored and western fleets had occupied Lattakiah and St Symeon before the land army arrived.

An agreed objective between the Emperor Alexius and the westerners, evident from Stephen of Blois’s comment to his wife from Nicaea, as a strategic target of the war, Antioch’s role was as much political as military or logistic. Alexius, so his daughter later admitted, had hired the western armies ‘to extend the bounds of the Roman (i.e. Byzantine) empire’, specifically, it seems, the northern Syrian principality based on Antioch which had acted as a semi-autonomous buffer between Byzantium and the Seljuks in the late 1070s and early 1080s.
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Its re-establishment would have greatly helped Alexius reclaim Asia Minor. The care taken by the Christian army to circle Antioch via Cilicia and the Taurus mountains and establish firm relations with Armenian rulers indicated such a policy. Although neither ignorant nor immune to the appeal of Jerusalem, Greek strategy held to more prosaic and customary ambitions, for which the emperor was prepared to lavish money, military aid, naval support and supplies on his western recruits.

Greek plans for Antioch were complemented by the ambitions and needs of the westerners. By the winter of 1097–8, the resources of many of the lesser and some of the greater leaders of the armies were reaching exhaustion. Negotiations with the Fatimids of Egypt continued: an Egyptian embassy arrived at the crusader camp in February 1098. Agreement with the Egyptians would have reduced pickings in southern Syria and Palestine, making exploitation of northern Syria urgent and necessary. In the winter of 1097–8 elements in the Christian forces eagerly established themselves as de facto rulers of significant tracts of Antioch’s hinterland, even though the dangers of such loose investment of the city were well understood by a high command fearful of the army’s disintegration. Alone, the requirement to find winter quarters to rest and recover from the arduous march across the mountains of eastern Asia Minor scarcely explains the siege of Antioch, especially as the decision taken in October/November 1097 to invest the city closely exacerbated the difficulty of supplying such a large army. There was more to it than logistics. Of particular significance may have been the circumstances of Bohemund, who had attached himself closely to Byzantine interests since arriving at Constantinople in April 1097. It is possible that he hoped for, or even expected, some territorial reward from Alexius in Syria. The expedition
into Cilicia by his nephew, Tancred, may have been conducted on his behalf.
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At Antioch his skills as a field commander propelled him to overall military leadership of the expedition in February 1098 against Ridwan of Aleppo. The near-disaster of the engagement with the forces of Duqaq of Damascus on 31 December 1097 in the Orontes valley, twenty-five miles south of the city, due in part to divided command, persuaded the leaders to appoint a single field commander. This suited Bohemund’s political ambitions. Lacking the forces or the money to compete with Raymond of Toulouse or Godfrey of Bouillon, Bohemund may have long regarded Antioch as a prize to further his own interests, although it was only in May 1098, with the army threatened with annihilation by Kerbogha’s relief force, that he showed his hand. The attempt to capture the city conformed to Greek policy. In theory, it provided a focus for a period of recuperation for the Christian host; it helped keep Egyptian friendship by threatening the Seljuk powers of northern Syria, allowing the Fatimids to recapture Jerusalem itself in July 1098. The siege of Antioch was, therefore, of general political significance as well as reflecting some misplaced confidence. Raymond of Toulouse reputedly argued in favour of the siege on the grounds that God would see them right as He had done at Nicaea and in Anatolia.
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In fact, Antioch almost destroyed the crusade. Yet the extraordinary chain of events forged a harder unity of purpose among the mass of the army, a newly strident militant identity and confidence in divine favour expressed in the willingness of the survivors, great and humble alike, to integrate into their language and behaviour the rhetoric, symbols and theatre of visionary religious enthusiasm.

The siege of Antioch lasted from 21 October 1097 until the city fell on 3 June 1098, whereupon the Christians immediately found themselves besieged, Stalingrad-like, by the relief force under Kerbogha of Mosul until his defeat and flight on 28 June. Once committed, the Christians faced a series of potentially lethal crises stemming from their inability to surround Antioch, the precarious state of food supplies and a succession of Muslim relief expeditions. At no time during the seven and a half months of the first siege was the city entirely blockaded. Men, materials and intelligence could find ways in; the garrison was able to fire on, attack or ambush the besiegers more or less at will, inflicting both military and civilian casualties. Only in March 1098 was the Bridge
Gate that led to the road to the port of St Symeon blocked by the construction of one of three counterforts (the others were built to the north of the city in November 1097 and opposite the George Gate to the south in April 1098). While the western troops could not force entry into the city, their numbers were too great for the Antioch garrison to dislodge. The stalemate was broken in June 1098 by treachery, not military action, and even then the garrison itself held out in the citadel a further three weeks, only surrendering the day after Kerbogha’s defeat rendered its position untenable.

Such deadlock placed enormous strain on resources and morale. In late December 1097, acute food shortages prompted a major foraging expedition south up the Orontes valley towards al-Bara, only for Bohemund and Robert of Flanders to stumble across an allied relief force from Damascus and Homs led by Duqaq of Damascus and his atabeg Tughtegin.
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Duqaq withdrew only after inflicting heavy casualties, mainly among the westerners’ infantry, and preventing the collection of much-needed forage, a failure that threatened the Christians with starvation. Supplies were sought from as far away as Cyprus, Rhodes and Crete, but famine loomed; prices soared; hunger claimed men and horses. The army’s debilitation reduced the number of volunteers to conduct other vital foraging sorties. The expedition appeared trapped in a vice, unable to make military progress and incapable of feeding itself. Misery and fear led to desertion; Peter the Hermit and William the Carpenter of Melun were caught trying to flee. Even Bohemund contemplated abandoning the enterprise as he saw men and horses in his modest company dying of hunger.
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The presence in Syrian waters of friendly shipping made escape easier.

To counter collapsing morale, in January, the papal legate, Adhemar of Le Puy, instituted penitential fasting, intercessory prayers, processions and alms-giving for the laity, with the clergy celebrating masses and singing psalms. Communal participation in familiar religious ceremonies played on the psychological requirement for the beleaguered Christians to shake off fatalism, lethargy and inertia by involving the ordinary soldier and pilgrim in active contributions to the army’s destiny. With a simultaneous secular crackdown on law and order within the army, the revivalist message was reinforced by the removal of all women from the camps, wives included, the association of sex with divine disapproval being widely promoted by the western clerical establishment.
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Ritual
public humiliations and punishment for adulterers were staged to underscore the evils of sexual licence, the culprits stripped naked and flogged in front of the whole army. More mundanely, an appeal for alms helped pool resources. The leaders, who reached decisions through regular councils, formed a confraternity, a sworn association which could distribute donations without complications of conflicting lordships or loyalties. The funding of the siege forts and a bridge of boats across the Orontes was organized in this way, as were payments to Tancred for him to blockade Antioch’s southern gate. To meet the crisis of January 1098, Raymond of Toulouse paid 500 marks into the common fund to help knights replace their horses.
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To further reassure their followers, the leaders swore oaths not to abandon the siege. These measures emphasized the particular corporate identity that had grown through shared experience and crisis. Correspondence to the west in October and November 1097 proclaimed that God fought for ‘the army of the Lord’; in January, the bishops in the army recorded the assistance in battle of the ‘knights of Christ’, the Greek saints George, Theodore, Demetrius and Blaise.
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