On a late November morning in the year 1095, Pope Urban II delivered a sermon that would transform the history of Europe. His rousing words transfixed the crowd that had gathered in a small field outside the southern French town of Clermont, and in the months that followed his message reverberated across the West, igniting an embittered holy war that would endure for centuries to come.
Urban declared that Christianity was in dire peril, threatened by invasion and appalling oppression. The Holy City of Jerusalem was now in the hands of Muslims–‘a people…alien to God’, bent upon ritual torture and unspeakable desecration. He called upon Latin Europe to rise up against this supposedly savage foe as ‘soldiers of Christ’, reclaiming the Holy Land and releasing eastern Christians from ‘servitude’. Enticed by the promise that this righteous struggle would purge their souls of sin, tens of thousands of men, women and children marched out of the West to wage war against the Muslim world in the First Crusade.1
POPE URBAN AND THE IDEA OF CRUSADING
Urban II was perhaps sixty years old when he launched the First Crusade in 1095. The son of northern French nobility, and a former cleric and Cluniac monk, he became pope in 1088, at a time when the papacy, reeling from a rancorous and protracted power struggle with the emperor of Germany, stood on the brink of overthrow. So parlous was Urban’s position that it took him six years to reassert control over Rome’s Lateran Palace, the traditional seat of papal authority. Yet, through cautious diplomacy and the adoption of measured, rather than confrontational, policies of reform, the new pope oversaw a gradual renaissance in the prestige and influence of his office. By 1095 this slow rejuvenation had begun, but the papacy’s notional right to act as head of the Latin Church and spiritual overlord to every Christian in western Europe was still far from realised.
It was against this background of partial recovery that the idea of the First Crusade was born. In March 1095 Urban was presiding over an ecclesiastical council in the northern Italian city of Piacenza when ambassadors from Byzantium arrived. They bore an appeal from the Greek Christian Emperor Alexius I Comnenus, a ruler whose astute and assertive governance had arrested decades of internal decline within the great eastern empire. Exorbitant programmes of taxation had refilled the imperial treasury in Constantinople, restoring Byzantium’s aura of authority and munificence, but Alexius still faced an array of foreign enemies, including the Muslim Turks of Asia Minor. He thus dispatched a petition for military aid to the council in Piacenza, urging Urban to send a detachment of Latin troops to help repel the threat posed by Islam. Alexius probably hoped for little more than a token force of Frankish mercenaries, a small army that could be readily shaped and directed. In fact, over the next two years, his empire would be practically overrun by a tide of humankind.
The Greek emperor’s request appears to have chimed with notions already fermenting in Urban II’s mind, and through the spring and summer that followed the pope refined and developed these ideas, envisaging an endeavour that might fulfil a broader array of ambitions: a form of armed pilgrimage to the East, what is now called a ‘crusade’. Historians have sometimes characterised Urban as the unwitting instigator of this momentous venture, suggesting that he expected only a few hundred knights to answer his call to arms. But in reality he seems to have had a fairly shrewd sense of the potential scale and scope of this enterprise and to have laid the foundations of widespread recruitment with some assiduity.
Urban recognised that developing the idea of an expedition to aid Byzantium offered a chance not only to defend eastern Christendom and improve relations with the Greek Church, but also to reaffirm and expand Rome’s authority and to harness and redirect the destructive bellicosity of Christians living in the Latin West. This grand scheme would be launched as part of a broader campaign to extend the reach of papal influence beyond the confines of central Italy, into Urban’s birthplace and homeland, France. From July 1095 onwards he began a lengthy preaching tour north of the Alps–the first such visit by a pope for close to half a century–and announced that a major Church council would be held in November at Clermont, in the Auvergne region of central France. Through the summer and early autumn Urban visited a succession of prominent monasteries, including his own former house of Cluny, cultivating support for Rome and preparing the ground for the unveiling of his ‘crusading’ idea. He also primed two men who would play central roles in the coming expedition: Adhémar, bishop of Le Puy, a leading Provençal churchman and an ardent supporter of the papacy; and Count Raymond of Toulouse, southern France’s richest and most powerful secular lord.
By November the pope was ready to reveal his plans. Twelve archbishops, eighty bishops and ninety abbots congregated in Clermont for the largest clerical assembly of Urban’s pontificate. Then, after nine days of general ecclesiastical debate, the pope announced his intention to deliver a special sermon. On 27 November, hundreds of spectators crowded into a field outside the city to hear him speak.2
The sermon at Clermont
At Clermont Urban called upon the Latin West to take up arms in pursuit of two linked goals. First, he proclaimed the need to protect Christendom’s eastern borders in Byzantium, emphasising the bond of Christian fraternity shared with the Greeks and the supposedly imminent threat of Muslim invasion. According to one account, he urged his audience ‘to run as quickly as you can to the aid of your brothers living on the eastern shore’ because ‘the Turks…have overrun them right up to the Mediterranean Sea’. But the epic endeavour of which Urban spoke did not end with the provision of military aid to Constantinople. Instead, in a visionary masterstroke, he broadened his appeal to include an additional target, one guaranteed to stir Frankish hearts. Fusing the ideals of warfare and pilgrimage, he unveiled an expedition that would forge a path to the Holy Land itself, there to win back possession of Jerusalem, the most hallowed site in the Christian cosmos. Urban evoked the unparalleled sanctity of this city, this ‘navel of the world’, stating that it was ‘the [fountain] of all Christian teaching’, the place ‘in which Christ lived and suffered’.3
In spite of the undoubted resonance of these twinned objectives, like any ruler recruiting for war the pope still needed to lend his cause an aura of legitimate justification and burning urgency, and here he faced a problem. Recent history offered no obvious event that might serve to focus and inspire a vengeful tide of enthusiasm. Yes, Jerusalem was ruled by Muslims, but this had been the case since the seventh century. And, while Byzantium may have been facing a deepening threat of Turkish aggression, western Christendom was not on the brink of invasion or annihilation at the hands of Near Eastern Islam. With no appalling atrocity or immediate threat to draw upon, Urban chose to cultivate a sense of immediacy and incite a wrathful hunger for retribution by demonising the enemy of his proposed ‘crusade’.
Muslims therefore were portrayed as subhuman savages, bent upon the barbaric abuse of Christendom. Urban described how Turks ‘were slaughtering and capturing many [Greeks], destroying churches and laying waste to the kingdom of God’. He also asserted that Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land were being abused and exploited by Muslims, with the rich being stripped of their wealth by illegal taxes, and the poor subjected to torture:
The cruelty of these impious men goes even to the length that, thinking the wretches have eaten gold or silver, they either put scammony in their drink and force them to vomit or void their vitals, or–and this is unspeakable–they stretch asunder the coverings of all the intestines after ripping open their stomachs with a blade and reveal with horrible mutilation whatever nature keeps secret.
Christians living under Muslim rule in the Levant were said to have been reduced to a state of ‘slavery’ by ‘sword, rapine and flame’. Prey to constant persecution, these unfortunates might suffer forced circumcision, protracted disembowelment or ritualised immolation. ‘Of the appalling violation of women’, the pope reportedly reflected, it would be ‘more evil to speak than to keep silent’. Urban appears to have made extensive use of this form of graphic and incendiary imagery, akin to that which, in a modern-day setting, might be associated with war crimes or genocide. His accusations bore little or no relation to the reality of Muslim rule in the Near East, but it is impossible to gauge whether the pope believed his own propaganda or entered into a conscious campaign of manipulation and distortion. Either way, his explicit dehumanisation of the Muslim world served as a vital catalyst to the ‘crusading’ cause, and further enabled him to argue that fighting against an ‘alien’ other was preferable to war between Christians and within Europe.4
Pope Urban’s decision to condemn Islam would have dark and enduring consequences in the years to come. But it is important to recognise that, in reality, the notion of conflict with the Muslim world was not written into the DNA of crusading. Urban’s vision was of a devotional expedition sanctioned by Rome, focused first and foremost upon the defence or reconquest of sacred territory. In some ways his choice of Islam as an enemy was almost incidental, and there is little to suggest that the Latins or their Greek allies truly saw the Muslim world as an avowed enemy before 1095.*
The pulse-quickening notion of avenging the ‘execrable abuses’ enacted by demonised Muslims may have captivated Urban’s audience at Clermont, but his ‘crusading’ message contained a further, even more powerful, lure; one that addressed the very nature of medieval Christian existence. Bred upon a vision of religious faith that emphasised the overbearing threat of sin and damnation, the Latins of the West were enmeshed in a desperate, lifelong spiritual struggle to purge the taint of corruption from their souls. Primed to seek redemption, they were thus enthralled when the pope declared that this expedition to the East would be a sacred venture, participation in which would lead to ‘the remission of all their sins’. In the past, even ‘just war’ (that is, violence that God accepted as necessary) had still been regarded as innately sinful. But now Urban spoke of a conflict that transcended these traditional boundaries. His cause was to possess a sanctified quality–to be a holy war, not simply condoned by ‘the Lord’, but actively promoted and endorsed. According to one eyewitness, the pope even averred that ‘Christ commands’ the faithful to enlist.
Urban’s genius was to construct the idea of ‘crusading’ within the framework of existing religious practice, thus ensuring that, in eleventh-century terms at least, the connection he established between warfare and salvation made clear, rational sense. In 1095, Latin Christians were accustomed to the idea that punishment owed through sinfulness might be cancelled out by confession and the performance of penitential activities, like prayer, fasting or pilgrimage. At Clermont, Urban fused the familiar notion of a salvific expedition with the more audacious concept of fighting for God, urging ‘everyone of no matter what class…knight or foot-soldier, rich or poor’ to join what was to be, in essence, an armed pilgrimage. This monumental endeavour, laden with danger and the threat of intense suffering, would take its participants to the very gates of Jerusalem, Christendom’s premier pilgrimage destination. As such, it promised to be an experience imbued with overwhelming redemptive potency; functioning as a ‘super’ penance, capable of scouring the spirit of any transgression.
From the rape of the Holy City by an alien enemy to the promise of a new path to redemption, the pope conjured a persuasive and emotive blend of images and ideas in support of his call to arms. The effect on his audience appears to have been electric, leaving ‘the eyes of some bathed with tears, [while others] trembled’. In what must have been a pre-planned move, Adhémar, bishop of Le Puy, was the first to step forward to commit to the cause. On the following day the bishop was proclaimed papal legate (Urban’s official representative) for the coming expedition. As its spiritual leader, he was expected to promote the pope’s agenda, not least the policy of détente with the Greek Church of Byzantium. At the same time, messengers arrived from Raymond of Toulouse proclaiming the count’s own support for the cause. Urban’s sermon had been a resounding success, and over the next seven months he followed it up with an extended preaching tour, which saw his message crisscross France.5
And yet, in spite of the fact that Clermont must be regarded as the First Crusade’s moment of genesis, it would be wrong to regard Urban II as the sole architect of the ‘crusading ideal’. Previous historians have rightly emphasised his debt to the past, not least in relation to Pope Gregory VII’s pioneering exploration of holy war theory. But it is equally important to recognise that the idea of the First Crusade–its nature, intentions and rewards–underwent ongoing, largely organic development throughout the expedition. Indeed, this process even continued after the event, as the world sought to interpret and understand such an epochal episode. It is all too easy to imagine the First Crusade as a single, well-ordered host, driven on to Jerusalem by Urban’s impassioned preaching. In reality, the months and years that followed November 1095 saw disjointed waves of departure. Even what we commonly term the ‘main armies’ of the crusade began the first phase of their journey not as a single force, but rather as a rough conglomeration of smaller contingents, gradually feeling their way towards shared goals and systems of governance.
Within a month of the pope’s first sermon, popular (and often unsanctioned) preachers had begun to proclaim the call to crusade across Europe. In their demagogic hands some of the subtleties surrounding the spiritual rewards associated with the expedition–what would come to be known as the crusading ‘indulgence’–seem to have been eroded. Urban had likely intended that the remission offered would only apply to the temporal punishment for confessed sins; a rather complex formula, but one that adhered to the niceties of Church law. Later events suggest that many crusaders thought they had been given assured guarantees of heavenly salvation and thus believed that those who died during the campaign became sacred martyrs. Such notions continued to inform thinking about the crusading experience for centuries to come, establishing a gnawing rift between official and popular conceptions of these holy wars.
Notably, Pope Urban II did not invent the term ‘crusade’. The expedition he launched at Clermont was so novel, and in some ways still so embryonic in its conception, that there was no word with which it could be described. Contemporaries generally termed this ‘crusade’ simply an iter(journey) or peregrinatio (pilgrimage). It was not until the close of the twelfth century that more specific terminology developed, in the form of the word crucesignatus (one signed with the cross) for a ‘crusader’, and the eventual adoption of the French term croisade, which roughly translates as ‘the way of the cross’. For the sake of convention and clarity, historians have adopted the term ‘crusade’ for the Christian holy wars launched from 1095 onwards, but we should be aware that this lends a somewhat misleading aura of coherence and conformity to the early ‘crusades’.6
The call of the cross
In the months that followed the Council of Clermont, the crusading message spread throughout western Europe, evoking an unprecedented reaction. While Pope Urban broadcast his message throughout France, bishops from across the Latin world who had attended his original sermon took the call back to their own dioceses.
The cause was also taken up by popular, rabble-rousing preachers, largely unsanctioned and unregulated by the Church. Most famous and remarkable of these was Peter the Hermit. Probably originating from a poor background in Amiens (north-eastern France), he became renowned for his austere, itinerant lifestyle, repellent appearance and unusual eating habits–one contemporary noted that ‘he lived on wine and fish; he hardly ever, or never, ate bread’. By modern standards he might be deemed a vagabond, but among the poorer classes of eleventh-century France he was revered as a prophet. Such was his sanctity that his followers even collected the hairs of his mule as relics. A Greek contemporary noted: ‘As if he had sounded a divine voice in the hearts of all, Peter the Hermit inspired the Franks from everywhere to gather together with their weapons, horses and other military equipment.’ He must have been a truly inspirational orator–within six months of Clermont he had gathered an army, largely made up of poor rabble, numbering in excess of 15,000. In history this force, alongside a number of other contingents from Germany, has become known as the ‘People’s Crusade’. Spurred on by crusading fervour, its various elements set off for the Holy Land in spring 1096, months before any other army, making ill-disciplined progress towards Constantinople. Along the way, some of these ‘crusaders’ concluded that they might as well combat the ‘enemies of Christ’ closer to home, and thus carried out terrible massacres of Rhineland Jews. Almost as soon as the People’s Crusade crossed into Muslim territory they were annihilated, although Peter the Hermit survived.7
This first wave of the crusade may have ended in failure, but, back in the West, larger armies were gathering. Public rallies, in which massed audiences were bombarded with emotive rhetoric, prompted fevered recruitment, and crusading enthusiasm also seems to have been propagated more informally through kinship groups, networks of papal supporters and the links between monastic communities and the nobility. Historians continue to dispute the numbers involved, primarily because of the unreliability of wildly inflated contemporary estimates (some of which exceed half a million people). Our best guess is that somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 Latin Christians set off on the First Crusade, of which 7,000 to 10,000 were knights, perhaps 35,000 to 50,000 infantry troops and the remaining tens of thousands non-combatants, women and children. What is certain is that the call to crusade elicited an extraordinary response, the scale of which stunned the medieval world. Not since the distant glories of Rome had military forces of this size been assembled.8
At the heart of these armies were aristocratic knights, the emerging martial elite of the Middle Ages.* Pope Urban knew only too well the anxiety of these Christian warriors, trapped in a worldly profession imbued with violence, but taught by the Church that sinful warfare would lead to damnation. One contemporary observed:
God has instituted in our time holy wars, so that the order of knights and the crowd running in their wake…might find a new way of gaining salvation. And so they are not forced to abandon secular affairs completely by choosing the monastic life or any religious profession, as used to be the custom, but can attain some measure of God’s grace while pursuing their own careers, with liberty and in the dress to which they are accustomed.
The pope had constructed the idea of an armed pilgrimage at least in part to address the spiritual dilemma threatening the knightly aristocracy, and he also knew that, with the nobility on board, retinues of knights and infantry would follow, for even though the crusade required a voluntary commitment, the intricate web of familial ties and feudal obligation bound social groups in a common cause. In effect, the pope set off a chain reaction, whereby every noble who took the cross stood at the epicentre of an expanding wave of recruitment.
Although no kings joined the expedition–most being too embroiled in their own political machinations–the crème of western Christendom’s nobility was drawn to the venture. Members of the high aristocracy of France, western Germany, the Low Countries and Italy, from the class directly below that of royalty, these men often bore the titles of count or duke and could challenge or, in some cases, even eclipse the power of kings. Certainly they wielded a significant degree of independent authority and thus, as a group, can most readily be termed ‘princes’. Each of these leading figures commanded their own military contingents, but also attracted much looser, more fluid bands of followers, based on the bonds of lordship and family and perpetuated by common ethnic or linguistic roots.
Count Raymond of Toulouse, the most powerful secular lord in south-eastern France, was the first prince to commit to the crusade. An avowed supporter of the Reform papacy and ally of Adhémar of Le Puy, the count almost certainly had been primed by Urban II even before the sermon at Clermont. In his mid-fifties, Raymond was the expedition’s elder statesman; proud and obdurate, boasting wealth and far-reaching power and influence, he assumed command of the Provençal-southern French armies. Later legend suggested that he had already campaigned against the Moors of Iberia, even that he had made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, during which one of his eyes had been pulled out of his head as punishment for refusing to pay an exorbitant Muslim tax on Latin pilgrims. Indeed, the count was said to have returned to the West carrying his eyeball in his pocket as a talisman of his hatred for Islam. Fanciful as these tales may have been, Raymond nonetheless had the experience and, more importantly, the resources to vie for overall secular command of the crusade.9
The count’s most obvious rival for that position was a forty-year-old southern Italian Norman, Bohemond of Taranto. As the son of Robert ‘Guiscard’ (Robert ‘the Wily’), one of the Norman adventurers who conquered southern Italy during the eleventh century, Bohemond gained an invaluable military education. Fighting alongside his father during the 1080s in a four-year Balkan campaign against the Greeks, Bohemond learned the realities of battlefield command and siege warfare. By the time of the First Crusade he had an unequalled martial pedigree, prompting one near-contemporary to describe him as ‘second to none in prowess and in knowledge of the art of war’. Even his Byzantine enemies conceded that he had an arresting physical presence:
Bohemond’s appearance was, to put it briefly, unlike that of any other man seen in those days in the Roman world, whether Greek or barbarian. The sight of him inspired admiration, the mention of his name terror…His stature was such that he towered almost a full cubit over the tallest men. He was slender of waist and flanks, with broad shoulders and chest, strong in the arms…The skin all over his body was very white, except for his face which was both white and red. His hair was lightish-brown and not as long as that of other barbarians (that is it did not hang on his shoulders)…His eyes were light-blue and gave some hint of the man’s spirit and dignity…There was a certain charm about him [but also] a hard, savage quality in his whole aspect, due, I suppose, to his great height and his eyes; even his laugh sounded like a threat to others.
But for all his lion-like stature, Bohemond lacked wealth, having been disinherited by his acquisitive half-brother in 1085. Driven by rapacious ambition, he thus took the cross in the summer of 1096 with at least one eye upon personal advancement, nursing dreams of a new Levantine lordship to call his own. Bohemond was accompanied on crusade by his nephew, Tancred of Hauteville. Barely twenty, with little real experience of war, this young princeling nonetheless had an unquenchable dynamism (and could apparently speak Arabic), and he quickly assumed the position of second in command of the relatively small but redoubtable army of southern Italian Normans that followed Bohemond into the East. In time Tancred would become one of the foremost champions of the crusading cause.10
The leading southern French and Italian Norman crusaders were all allies of the Reform papacy, but after 1095 even some of the pope’s most embittered enemies joined the expedition to Jerusalem. One such was Godfrey of Bouillon, from the region of Lorraine. Born around 1060, the second son to the count of Boulogne, he could trace his lineage back to Charlemagne (later legend even had it that he was born of a swan) and was said to have been ‘taller than the average man…strong beyond compare, with solidly built limbs and stalwart chest, [with] pleasing features [and] beard and hair of medium blond’. Godfrey held the title of duke of Lower Lorraine, but proved unable to assert real authority over this notoriously volatile region and probably took the cross with some thought of starting a new life in the Holy Land. Despite his reputation for despoiling Church property and his limited military background, in the years to come Godfrey would demonstrate an unswerving dedication to the crusading ideal and a gift for clear-headed command.
Godfrey stood at the forefront of a loose conglomerate of troops from Lorraine, Lotharingia and Germany and was joined by his brother, Baldwin of Boulogne. Reportedly darker-haired but paler-skinned than Godfrey, Baldwin was said to have a piercing gaze. Like Tancred, he would emerge from relative obscurity during the course of the crusade, demonstrating a bullish tenacity in battle and an almost insatiable appetite for advancement.
These five princes–Raymond of Toulouse, Bohemond of Taranto, Godfrey of Bouillon, Tancred of Hauteville and Baldwin of Boulogne–played pivotal roles in the expedition to reclaim Jerusalem, leading three of the main Frankish armies and shaping the early history of the crusades. A fourth and final contingent, made up of the northern French, also joined the campaign. This army was dominated by a tight-knit kinship group of three leading nobles: the well-connected Robert, duke of Normandy, eldest son of William the Conqueror and brother to William Rufus, king of England; Robert’s brother-in-law Stephen, count of Blois; and his namesake and cousin, Robert II, count of Flanders.
For these potentates, their followers and perhaps even the poorer classes, the process of joining the crusade involved a dramatic and often emotional ceremony. Each individual made a crusading vow to journey to Jerusalem, similar to that for a pilgrimage, and then marked their status by sewing a representation of the cross on to their clothing. When Bohemond of Taranto heard the call to arms, his reaction was apparently immediate: ‘Inspired by the Holy Ghost, [he] ordered the most valuable cloak which he had to be cut up forthwith and made into crosses, and most of the knights who were [there] began to join him at once, for they were full of enthusiasm.’ Elsewhere, some took this ritual to extremes, branding their flesh with the sign of the cross, or inscribing their bodies or clothing with blood.
The process of identification through a visible symbol must have served to separate and define the crusaders as a group, and the pilgrim vow involved certainly brought crusaders an array of legal protections for their property and persons. The contemporary descriptions of these moments of dedication tend to stress spiritual motivation. We might doubt this evidence, given that it is almost always provided by churchmen, except for the fact that it is supported by a wealth of legal documents, produced either by, or at the behest of, men placing their affairs in order before departing for Jerusalem. This material seems to confirm that many crusaders did indeed see their actions in a devotional context. One crusader, Bertrand of Moncontour, was so inspired that he decided to give up lands which he was withholding illegally from a monastery in Vendôme because ‘he believed that the Way of God [the crusade] could in no way benefit him while he held these proceeds of theft’.
The documentary evidence also reflects an atmosphere of fear and self-sacrifice. Prospective crusaders seem to have been deeply apprehensive about the long and dangerous journey they were undertaking, but were at the same time willing to sell virtually all their possessions to fund their participation. Even Robert of Normandy was forced to mortgage his duchy to his brother. The once fashionable myth that crusaders were self-serving, disinherited, land-hungry younger sons must be discarded. Crusading was instead an activity that could bring spiritual and material rewards, but was in the first instance both an intimidating and extremely costly activity. Devotion inspired Europe to crusade, and in the long years to come the First Crusaders proved time and again that their most powerful weapon was a shared sense of purpose and indestructible spiritual resolution.11
BYZANTIUM
From November 1096 onwards the main armies of the First Crusade began to arrive at the great city of Constantinople (Istanbul), ancient gateway to the Orient and capital of the Byzantine Empire. For the next six months the various contingents of the expedition passed through Byzantium on their way to Asia Minor and the frontier with Islam. Constantinople was a natural location for the diverse forces of the crusade to gather, given that it stood on the traditional pilgrim route to the Holy Land and that the Franks had travelled east with the express intention of aiding their Greek brethren.
The ambitions of Alexius
The Byzantine Emperor Alexius I Comnenus had already witnessed the disordered collapse of the People’s Crusade, and it usually is argued that he viewed the advent of the main crusade with equal disdain and suspicion. His daughter and biographer Anna Comnena wrote that Alexius had ‘dreaded [the arrival of the Franks], knowing as he did their uncontrollable passion, their erratic character and their irresolution, not to mention their greed’. Elsewhere she described the crusaders as ‘all the barbarians of the West’ and was particularly scathing in her descriptions of Bohemond as ‘a habitual rogue’ who was ‘by nature a liar’. Drawing upon her vituperative rhetoric, historians have often depicted the early Greco-Latin encounters of 1096–7 as being stained by deep-seated mistrust and ingrained hostility. In fact, Anna Comnena’s account, written decades after the event, was heavily coloured by hindsight. To be sure, currents of wary circumspection, even of antipathy, pulsed beneath the surface of crusader–Byzantine relations. There were even occasional outbreaks of ill-tempered infighting. But to begin with, at least, these were eclipsed by instances of constructive cooperation.12
To truly understand the First Crusaders’ journey through Byzantium and beyond, the preconceptions and prejudices of both the Franks and the Greeks must be reconstructed. Many imagine that in terms of wealth, power and culture European history has always been dominated by the West. But in the eleventh century the focal point of civilisation lay to the east, in Byzantium, inheritor of Greco-Roman might and glory; continuator of the known world’s most enduring empire. Alexius could trace his imperial heritage back to the likes of Augustus Caesar and Constantine the Great, and for the Franks this imbued the emperor and his realm with a near-mystical aura of majesty.
The crusaders’ arrival at Constantinople served only to reinforce this impression. Standing before its colossal outer walls–four miles long, up to fifteen feet thick and sixty feet tall–there could be no doubt that they beheld the heart of Christian Europe’s great superpower. For those fortunate enough to be granted entry to the capital itself, the wonders only multiplied. Home to perhaps half a million citizens, this metropolis dwarfed the largest city in Latin Europe tenfold. Visitors could marvel at the domed Basilica of St Sophia, Christendom’s most spectacular church, and gaze at the giant triumphal statues of Alexius’ legendary forebears. Constantinople also was home to an unrivalled collection of sacred relics, including Christ’s crown of thorns, locks of the Virgin Mary’s hair, at least two heads of John the Baptist and the bones of virtually all the Apostles.
It is little wonder that most crusaders expected, quite naturally, that their expedition would begin in the service of the emperor. For his part, Alexius offered the Frankish armies a cautious welcome, shepherding them from the borders of his empire to his capital, ever under a watchful eye. He viewed the crusade as a military tool to be used in the defence of his realm. Having requested aid from Pope Urban in 1095, he was now confronted by a swarm of Latin crusaders. But for all their supposed unruly savagery, he recognised that the Franks’ brutish vitality might be harnessed in the interests of the empire. Wielded with care and control, the crusade might prove to be the decisive weapon in his struggle to reconquer Asia Minor from the Seljuq Turks. Both Greeks and Latins were thus primed for collaboration, but the seeds of discord were present nonetheless. Most Franks expected the emperor to assume personal command of their armies, leading them as part of a grand coalition to the gates of Jerusalem itself. Alexius had no such plans. For him the needs of Byzantium, not those of the crusade, would always be paramount. He would furnish the Latins with aid and happily capitalise on any successes they enjoyed, not least if they enabled him to repulse the threat from Islam and perhaps even reclaim the strategically vital Syrian city of Antioch. But he would never expose his dynasty to overthrow, or his empire to invasion, by conducting a protracted campaign in the distant Holy Land. This disjuncture of aims and expectations would, in time, prove to have tragic consequences.
In service of the emperor
Determined to stamp his authority on the Franks, Alexius took full advantage of the crusader host’s fragmented nature, dealing with each prince individually as they arrived at Constantinople. He also played upon his great capital’s imposing magnificence to intimidate the Latins. On 20 January 1097 one of the first princes to arrive, Godfrey of Bouillon, was invited in the company of his leading nobles to an audience with Alexius at the opulent imperial Palace of the Blachernae. Godfrey apparently found the emperor ‘seated, as was his custom, looking powerful on the throne of his sovereignty, not getting up to offer kisses [of greeting] to the duke nor to anyone’. Maintaining this air of regal majesty, Alexius required Godfrey solemnly to promise that ‘whatever cities, countries or forts he might in future subdue, which had in the first place belonged to the Roman Empire, he would hand over to the officer appointed by the emperor’. This meant that any territory captured in Asia Minor and even beyond would be handed over to the Byzantines. The duke then offered the emperor an oath of vassalage, creating a reciprocal bond of allegiance which confirmed Alexius’ right to direct the crusade, but also entitled Godfrey to expect imperial aid and counsel. In a characteristic show of Byzantine munificence, the emperor sweetened this act of capitulation by showering the Frankish prince with gifts of gold and silver, along with precious purple fabrics and valuable horses. With the deal done, Alexius promptly whisked Godfrey and his army across the Bosphorus Strait–the narrow finger of water connecting the Mediterranean with the Black Sea and separating the European and Asian continents–in order to avoid the potentially destabilising buildup of Latin troops outside Constantinople itself.
In the succeeding months virtually all the leading crusaders followed Duke Godfrey’s example. In April 1097 Bohemond of Taranto appeared to make peace with his former Greek enemy, willingly acceding to the oath. He was lavishly rewarded with an entire room packed with treasure, which, according to Anna Comnena, practically made his eyeballs pop from his head. Three Frankish nobles sought to evade Alexius’ net. The ambitious lesser princes, Tancred of Hauteville and Baldwin of Bologne, each made an immediate crossing of the Bosphorus to avoid the oath, but were later persuaded to submit. Raymond, count of Toulouse, alone stubbornly resisted the emperor’s overtures, finally agreeing only to a modified pact which saw him vow not to threaten Alexius’ power or possessions.13
The First Crusaders’ Route to the Holy Land
The siege of Nicaea
The main armies of the First Crusade started to gather on the shore of Asia Minor in February 1097, and over the following months their numbers gradually built up to perhaps 75,000, including some 7,500 fully armed, mounted knights and a further 35,000 lightly equipped infantry. The timing of their arrival on the doorstep of the Muslim world proved to be most propitious. Months earlier Kilij Arslan, the Seljuq Turkish sultan of the region, had annihilated the People’s Crusade with relative ease. Thinking that this second wave of Franks would pose a similarly limited danger, he set off to deal with a minor territorial dispute far to the east. This blunder left the Christians free to cross the Bosphorus and establish a beachhead without hindrance throughout that spring.
The Latins’ first Muslim target was defined by their alliance with the Greeks, and Alexius’ primary objective was Nicaea, the city just inland from the Bosphorus which Kilij Arslan had brazenly declared his capital. This Turkish foothold in western Asia Minor threatened the security of Constantinople itself, but it had stubbornly resisted the emperor’s best efforts at reconquest. Now Alexius deployed his new weapon: the ‘barbarian’ Franks. They arrived at Nicaea on 6 May to find an imposing stronghold. One Latin eyewitness described how ‘skilful men had enclosed the city with such lofty walls that it feared neither the attack of enemies nor the force of any machine’. These thirty-foot-high battlements, nearly three miles in circumference, incorporated more than one hundred towers. More troubling still was the fact that the western edge of the city was built against the shores of the massive Askanian Lake, thus allowing the Turkish garrison, which probably numbered no more than a few thousand, to receive supplies and reinforcements even if they were encircled on land.
The Christians came close to suffering a damaging reversal in the first stage of their siege. Having now recognised the threat to his capital, Kilij Arslan returned from eastern Asia Minor in late spring. On 16 May he tried to launch a surprise attack upon the armies ranged before Nicaea, pouring out from the steep, wooded hills to the south of the city. Luckily for the Franks, a Turkish spy caught in their camp betrayed the Seljuqs’ plans when threatened with torture and death. When the Muslim assault began the Latins were ready and, through sheer weight of numbers, soon forced Kilij Arslan to retreat. He escaped with most of his army intact, but his military prestige and the morale of Nicaea’s garrison suffered grave damage. Hoping to accentuate enemy desperation, the crusaders decapitated hundreds of Turkish dead, parading the heads upon spikes before the city and even throwing some over the walls ‘in order to cause more terror’. This sort of barbarous psychological warfare was common in medieval sieges and certainly not the preserve of the Christians. In the coming weeks the Nicaean Turks retaliated with macabre tenacity, using iron hooks attached to ropes to haul up any Frankish corpses left near the walls after skirmishes and then hanging these cadavers from the walls to rot, so as ‘to offend the Christians’.14
Having repulsed Kilij Arslan’s attack, the crusaders adopted a combined siege strategy to overcome Nicaea’s defences, employing two styles of siege warfare simultaneously. On one hand, they established a close blockade of the city’s landward walls to the north, east and south, hoping to cut off Nicaea from the outside world, gradually grinding its garrison into submission through physical and psychological isolation. As yet, however, the Franks had no means of severing westward lines of communication via the lake, so they also actively pursued the more aggressive strategy of an assault siege. Early attempts to storm the city with scaling ladders failed, so efforts centred upon creating a physical breach in the walls. The crusaders built some stone-throwing machines, or mangonels, but these were of limited power, incapable of propelling missiles of sufficient size to inflict significant damage to robust battlements. Instead, the Latins used light bombardment to harass the Turks and, under cover of this fire, attempted to undermine Nicaea’s walls by hand.
This was potentially lethal work. To reach the foot of the ramparts troops had to negotiate a deadly rain of Muslim arrows and stone missiles, and, once there, they were exposed to attack from above by burning pitch and oil. The Franks experimented with a range of portable bombardment screens to counter these dangers, with varying degrees of success. One such contraption, proudly christened ‘the fox’ and fashioned from oak beams, promptly collapsed, killing twenty crusaders. The southern French had more luck, constructing a sturdier, sloping-roofed screen which allowed them to reach the walls and begin a siege mine. Sappers dug a tunnel beneath the southern battlements, carefully buttressing the excavation with timber supports as they went, before packing the void with branches and kindling. At dusk around 1 June 1097 they set this wood alight, leaving the whole structure to collapse, bringing down a small section of the defences above. Unfortunately for the Franks, the Turkish garrison managed to repair the damage overnight and no further progress was made.
By mid-June, with the crusaders enjoying no noteworthy progress, it fell to the Byzantines to tip the balance. Stationed a day’s journey to the north, Alexius had maintained a discreet but watchful distance from the siege, while dispatching troops and military advisers to assist the Latins. Most notable among these was Taticius, a cool-headed veteran of the imperial household born of half-Arab, half-Greek parentage, known for his loyalty to the emperor.* It was not until mid-June that Alexius made the defining contribution to Nicaea’s investment. In response to requests from the crusader princes, he portaged a small fleet of Greek ships twenty miles overland to the Askanian Lake. At dawn on 18 June this flotilla sailed towards Nicaea’s western walls, trumpets and drums blaring, as the Franks launched a coordinated land-based assault. Utterly horrified, with the noose closing around them, the Seljuq troops within were said to have been ‘afraid almost to death, and began to wail and lament’. Within hours they sued for peace and Taticius and the Byzantines took possession of the city.
The capture of Nicaea marked the high point of Greco-Frankish cooperation during the First Crusade. There were some initial grumbles among the Latin rank-and-file about the lack of plunder, but these were soon silenced by Alexius’ decision to reward his allies with lavish quantities of hard cash. Later western chronicles played up the degree of tension present after Nicaea’s fall, but a letter written home by the leading crusader Stephen of Blois later that same summer made it clear that an atmosphere of friendship and cooperation endured. The emperor now held an audience with the Frankish princes to discuss the next stage of the campaign. The crusaders’ route across Asia Minor was likely agreed and the city of Antioch identified as an objective. Alexius’ plan was to follow in the expedition’s wake, mopping up any territory it conquered and, in the hope of maintaining control over events, he directed Taticius to accompany the Latins as his official representative, along with a small force of Byzantine troops.
Throughout that spring and summer Alexius furnished the Latins with invaluable advice and intelligence. Anna Comnena noted that Alexius ‘warned [them] about the things likely to happen on their journey [and] gave them profitable advice. They were instructed in the methods normally used by the Turks in battle; told how they should draw up a battle-line, how to lay ambushes; advised not to pursue far when the enemy ran away in flight.’ He also counselled the crusade leadership to temper blunt aggression towards Islam with an element of pragmatic diplomacy. They followed his advice, seeking to exploit Muslim political and religious disunity by dispatching envoys by ship to the Fatimid caliphate in Egypt to discuss a potential treaty.15
As the crusaders left Nicaea in the last week of June 1097, Alexius could look back over the preceding months with some satisfaction. The Frankish horde had been channelled through his empire without major incident and a grave blow struck against the Seljuq Kilij Arslan. In spite of occasional moments of friction, with the magisterial presence of the emperor close at hand, the Latins had proved themselves to be both cooperative and subservient. The question was how long the spell would hold now that the crusade was marching on to the Holy Land and away from the heart of Byzantine authority.
ACROSS ASIA MINOR
Without Alexius’ leadership the Franks had to wrestle with the issues of command and organisation. Essentially their army was a composite force, one mass made up of many smaller parts, united by a common faith–Latin Catholicism–but drawn from across western Europe. Many had been enemies before the expedition began. They even faced a profound communication barrier: the northern French crusader Fulcher of Chartres remarked, ‘Who ever heard such a mixture of languages in one army?’
This disparate mass needed to be guided by a resolute hand. Indeed, the dictates of military logic suggested that without a clear, individual commander the crusade surely would be doomed to disintegration and collapse. But from the summer of 1097 onwards, the expedition had no single leader. The papal legate, Adhémar of Le Puy, could claim spiritual primacy, and the Greek Taticius certainly offered guidance, but in practice neither wielded total power. In fact, the crusaders had to feel their way towards an organisational structure through a process of experimentation and innovation, relying heavily upon the unifying influence of their shared devotional goal. Against all expectations, they achieved significant success. Their most valuable decision-making tool proved to be group discussion, normally anathema to military enterprise. From now on a council, made up of the leading Frankish princes–men such as Raymond of Toulouse and Bohemond of Taranto–met to discuss and agree policy. Early on they created a common fund through which all plunder could be channelled and redistributed. They also had to decide how best to negotiate the crossing of Asia Minor.
Because of its vast size, the crusade could not realistically move forward as a single army. Stretched out along the Roman roads and pilgrim routes that lay ahead, a single column of 70,000 people might take days to pass a given point. Foraging for food and supplies as they went, they would also scourge the surrounding countryside like a plague of locusts. But the Christians could ill afford to break into smaller contingents, travelling separately as they had en route to Constantinople, because Kilij Arslan and the Seljuq Turks still posed a very real threat. The princes eventually chose to divide their forces in two, while maintaining relatively close contact during the march.16
The Battle of Dorylaeum
On 29 June 1097, Bohemond’s southern Italian Normans and Robert of Normandy’s army set off, trailed at some distance by Godfrey of Bouillon, Robert of Flanders and the southern French. The plan was to rendezvous some four days’ march to the south-east, at Dorylaeum, an abandoned Byzantine military camp. Kilij Arslan, however, had other ideas. After his humiliation at Nicaea he had amassed a full-strength army and was now hoping to ambush the crusaders as they crossed his lands. Their division into two armies gave him an opportunity to strike. On the morning of 1 July he attacked Bohemond’s and Robert’s leading force in an area of open ground at the junction of two valleys near Dorylaeum. One member of Bohemond’s army recalled the horror of the moment as the Turks suddenly came into sight and ‘began all at once to howl and gabble and shout, saying with loud voices in their own language some devilish word which I do not understand…screaming like demons’. Kilij Arslan had come with a throng of lightly armed but agile Seljuq horsemen, hoping to wreak havoc among the slower-moving crusader ranks, encircling like a whirlwind and shattering their formation with an unceasing hail of missiles. The Latins were certainly shocked by their opponents’ tactics. One eyewitness in the thick of the fighting wrote: ‘The Turks were howling like wolves and furiously shooting a cloud of arrows. We were stunned by this. Since we faced death and since many of us were wounded, we soon took flight; nor is this remarkable, because to all of us such warfare was unknown.’
Some may have fled, but, astonishingly, Bohemond and Robert were able to rally their troops and set up a makeshift camp beside a marsh. Instead of chaotic retreat, they chose to hold their ground, establish a defensive formation and wait for reinforcement. For half a day they relied upon weight of numbers and superior armour to resist the continuing Turkish assault. To strengthen their resolve in the face of this swarm, the crusaders passed a morale-boasting phrase down the line: ‘Stand fast together, trusting in Christ and the victory of the Holy Cross. Today may we all gain much booty.’ Occasionally, however, enemy troops did break through:
The Turks burst into the camp in strength, striking with arrows from their horn bows, killing pilgrim foot-soldiers, girls, women, infants and old people, sparing no one on grounds of age. Stunned and terrified by the cruelty of this most hideous killing, girls who were delicate and very nobly born were hastening to get themselves dressed up, offering themselves to the Turks, so that at least, roused and appeased by love of their beauty, the Turks might learn to pity their prisoners.
Even so, the crusader line held firm. In the medieval age effective generalship was heavily dependent upon force of personality, the power to inspire obedience, and it is much to Bohemond’s and Robert’s credit that they were able to control their troops in the face of such aggression. After five appalling hours, the main crusading force arrived and Kilij Arslan was forced to retreat. Casualties were high, with perhaps as many as 4,000 Christians and 3,000 Muslims killed, but the attempt to terrify the crusaders into routing had failed. From this point on Kilij Arslan avoided them. The nomadic Seljuqs of Asia Minor had not been defeated, but their resistance was broken, opening the route across Anatolia.17
Contacts and conquests
After Dorylaeum the crusaders faced a different kind of enemy during their three-month march to Antioch. Thirst, starvation and disease plagued them throughout the summer of 1097 as they passed a series of settlements abandoned by the Turks. According to one chronicler, at one point the lack of water became so acute that:
Overwhelmed by the anguish of thirst as many as 500 people died. In addition horses, donkeys, camels, mules, oxen and many animals suffered the same death from very painful thirst. Many men, growing weak from the exertion and the heat, gaping with open mouths and throats, were trying to catch the thinnest mist to cure their thirst. Now, while everyone was thus suffering with this plague, [a] river they had longed and searched for was discovered. As they hurried towards it each was keen because of excessive longing to arrive first amongst the great throng. They set no limit to their drinking, until very many who had been weakened, as many men as beasts of burden, died from drinking too much.
It may seem remarkable that the deaths of animals were described in almost equal detail to those of men, but all the contemporary sources share this obsession with horses and pack animals. The army relied upon the latter to transport equipment and supplies, while knights depended upon their mounts in battle. In the past historians emphasised the military advantage enjoyed by crusader knights because of their larger, stronger, European horses, but, in truth, most of these died even before Syria was reached. A Frankish eyewitness later noted that because of this ‘many of our knights had to go as foot-soldiers, and for lack of horses we had to use oxen as mounts’.18
Crusaders occasionally fell foul of more unusual dangers. Godfrey of Bouillon, for one, was attacked and severely wounded by a savage bear while hunting. He was lucky to survive. These perils and hardships seem to have prompted more careful planning of the journey’s next leg. Upon reaching the fertile south-eastern corner of Asia Minor the crusaders began forging alliances with the local Armenian Christian population, who until then had been living under Turkish rule. At Heraclea, Tancred and Baldwin of Boulogne were sent south into Cilicia, while the main army took the northern route via Coxon and Marash. Both groups made contact with indigenous Armenian Christians, but Tancred and Baldwin went further, establishing an allied resource centre that helped to supply the entire crusade in the months to come, and securing a more direct route into Syria for the armies of reinforcements that the Franks were expecting to join them at Antioch.
In the aftermath of this Cilician expedition Baldwin decided to break off from the main crusade to seek his fortune in the eastern borderlands between Syria and Mesopotamia. He saw an opportunity to establish his own independent Levantine lordship and, leaving with a small company of just one hundred knights, began a campaign of brutal conquest and unceasing self-advancement that revealed his skills both as a military commander and as a wily political operator. Styling himself as the ‘liberator’ of Armenian Christians from the yoke of oppressive Turkish rule, Baldwin swiftly established control over a swathe of territory running east to the River Euphrates. His burgeoning reputation then earned him an invitation to ally with Thoros, the ageing Armenian ruler of Edessa, a city in the Fertile Crescent, beyond the Euphrates. The two were actually joined as adoptive father and son by a curious public ritual: both men stripped to the waist, and then, as Thoros embraced Baldwin, ‘binding him to his naked chest’, a long shirt was placed over them to seal their union. Unfortunately for Thoros, this ceremony did little to temper Baldwin’s ruthless ambition. Within a few months his Armenian ‘father’ had been murdered, probably with Baldwin’s tacit approval. The Frank then seized control of the city and surrounding region to create the first crusader state in the Near East–the county of Edessa.19
Meanwhile, the armies of the First Crusade regrouped on the borders of northern Syria in early October 1097; they had survived the crossing of Asia Minor, albeit with major losses. The events of the following century would prove that this in itself was an extraordinary achievement, as successive crusades foundered in this region. But a gargantuan task that would eclipse even these trials now stood before them: the siege of Antioch.