16
The Prophet said. ‘The cases which will be decided first on the Day of Resurrection will be the cases of blood shedding.’
From the Hadith, The Book of Tenderness.
Kerbogha wasted three weeks trying to reduce Edessa, without success. The breathing space this gave the Crusaders was used by Bohemond to bring to fruition a long-planned betrayal of Antioch by a disgruntled and cuckolded Armenian armourer who now promised to deliver three towers of the city to Bohemond’s Normans. By dawn 500 Crusaders were within the walls and the battle cry, ‘Deus Lo Volt!’ was raised. The slaughter was immense and à outrance, or without quarter given. This, however, likely induced the troops of the citadel to refuse to surrender.
Yaghi Siyan abandoned the city but this did not save him. His head was presented to Bohemond a few days later by an Armenian shepherd. Perhaps it cheered him, and possession of Antioch was certainly key to the Norman’s wider plan of war with Alexius for possession of Asia Minor and perhaps even the Byzantine Empire itself, but the Crusaders were now the besieged as Kerbogha’s army arrived and the storehouses of Antioch were completely empty.
Desertions accelerated, despair set in and then a common man, Peter Bartholomew, told the princes of how Saint Andrew had appeared before him and told him that the Holy Lance that had pierced Christ’s side would be found beneath the ground of the Church of Saint Peter. The Muslim writer Ibn al-Athir wrote cynically of the find:
There was a holy man who had great influence over them, a man of low cunning who proclaimed that the Messiah had a lance buried in [Saint Peter’s Church] in Antioch. ‘And if you find it you will be victorious and if you fail you will surely die.’ Before saying this he had buried a lance in a certain spot and concealed all trace of it. He exhorted them to fast and to repent for three days, and on the fourth day he led them all to the spot with their soldiers and workmen, who dug everywhere and found the lance as he had told them. Whereupon he cried. ‘Rejoice! For victory is secure!’
Whatever the truth of the story of the lance, and there was healthy scepticism about it among the Normans and the papal legate Bishop Ademar, its discovery does seem to have restored confidence among the southern French in particular and among the common people. It was however Bohemond’s tactics on the day of the Battle of Antioch that achieved the near-miraculous defeat of Kerbogha’s army.
The story of Kerbogha playing chess the night before taking the field and the warnings his mother sent to him of how Bohemond and Tancred should be feared as they were the gods of the Franks and could eat 2,000 heifers and 4,000 hogs at one sitting were later inventions but his glaring error of allowing Bohemond to deploy his entire, and very slow-moving, infantry forces and nominal force of 700 mounted knights can only be excused on the pretence that he wished to ensure the destruction of the entire Franj field army.
It did not turn out that way. Bohemond arranged his knights in six lines and held direct command of the last of these squadrons, which gave him a strong spine to break the Turks and to avoid encirclement, but it was the infantry’s fervent charge that broke Kerbogha’s army apart. All the weaknesses of a confederate army led by an unpopular and haughty leader who prosecuted the battle with, as Herodotus would have it, ‘that most dangerous tendency in war: a wish to kill but not to die in the process’, were exposed very rapidly, and the Turks fled the field so rapidly that the most famous battle of the First Crusade may very well have been somewhat bloodless.
Fighters, as fleet as the wind, wearing white raiment and bearing white banners above them were also reportedly seen that day, as an army of dead Crusaders joined their still-living pilgrim brothers on the battlefield. Given such wonders it seemed impossible that Jerusalem would not fall to the army of God.