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And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature, saying: Come, and see.
And behold a pale horse, and he that sat upon him, his name was Death, and hell followed him. And power was given to him over the four parts of the earth, to kill with sword, with famine, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.
The Apocalypse of Saint John. 6: 7-8.
The Crusader siege and storming of Antioch, and the pilgrims’ subsequent encirclement by a mighty foe culminating in a battle that quickly became the stuff of lore and legend, is perhaps the pivotal moment of the First Crusade. The Crusaders had already suffered mightily on their way through Anatolia and Syria through battles, the picking-off of stragglers by Turcomen raiders upon their column, and continuing privations brought on not only by the exhausted and distracted condition of the lands that the Saljuq civil war had left behind, but also by the scorched-earth tactics of their foes.
Antioch was all this and more. Peter Tudebode wrote that, ‘the anxieties and hardships are more than I can recount’. The experience did, however bring an almost unbreakable cohesion to the pilgrim army. This cohesion was only maintained in the early period of the Latin State but it was central to its birth and the stolid defence of Outremer that the Crusaders put up in its early life.
The Crusader siege of the city commenced in October 1097, and it quickly became evident that the Turkish lord of the city, named Yaghi Siyan, was prepared for a long and unpleasant trial of strength. He quickly expelled many of the Christian men from the city in a fairly crafty manner. He first sent the Muslim men living in the city outside the city to dig trenches for his archers and the next day he sent the Christian men out alone to continue the task. Then, when they were ready to return home at the end of a day of digging, he closed the gates on them. They protested their loyalty but they were denied re-entry.
Antioch was Byzantium’s child. Its walls had been created with all evidence of the Greeks’ great skill in construction and its walls were over 5,000 paces long and were tripled in depth at some points. They were also two wagons’ length in thickness. The city had six fortified gates and large parts of the walls could not be attacked directly as the River Orontes ran past extensive parts of the battlements.
A long battle of wills and of attrition began with the heads of Turks being fired over the walls of Antioch and the garrison responding with daily executions of Armenian Christians in the city’s high turrets and by the spectacle of the city’s patriarch being very frequently hung by his heels over the walls by the Turks.
The siege ground on until June 1098, and there was occasional good news to cheer the common people. Antioch’s port of Saint Symeon fell to Byzantine vessels crewed by Englishmen. This relieved the army’s biting famine for a brief period, and armies from both Damascus and Aleppo were defeated despite the shortage of horses.
The defenders ceased to believe that they would be saved, and the Crusaders began to believe that they could break them. The arrival of emissaries of the Caliph of Egypt to the Franks’ camp in the late evening on the very day that the Crusaders had chased the army of Aleppo from the field added to the garrison Turks’ belief that they were doomed. And then news came from Edessa that a vast army had been formed by Kerbogha the Emir of Mosul, and that it rode to destroy the pilgrim army under the black banners of the sixth pillar of Islam; jihad.
Terror gripped the Crusaders and even Raymond of Saint Gilles, who had hoped to rule Antioch in the Emperor Alexius’ name rapidly submitted to the notion that Bohemond should become its prince after the Norman lord of Taranto told the princes’ council how he could rapidly gain entry for the army of God into Saint Peter’s city.
