The first days of March 1098 marked an end to the trials of winter and a change in the crusade’s fortunes. On 4 March an English fleet arrived at St Simeon bearing supplies, building tools and craftsmen. These new resources were invaluable, but we know very little about the men who brought them to the Levant.1 Just as with the Genoese fleet that arrived in November 1097, we are really left to guess whether these English ships were part of a calculated supply system or simply a chance arrival. Certainly the eyewitness crusader sources did not remark that the fleet had been long awaited or expected, but, planned or otherwise, its cargo promised to turn the tide of the siege of Antioch.2
Up to this point the crusaders’ encirclement of the city could at best be described as partial. They had blockaded three gates in its north-west quadrant, but the Bridge Gate, the Gate of St George and the less accessible Iron Gate remained unguarded. Efforts had been made to police the roads leading from the Bridge Gate to St Simeon and Alexandretta, but supplies continued to reach the Muslim garrison. Worse still, for the crusaders, their most important line of supply – that leading to St Simeon – was exposed to frequent attack. For the Latins to have any hope of starving the Antiochene garrison into submission, their cordon would have to be tightened and the Bridge Gate area controlled. The arrival of the English fleet offered an opportunity to do just that. As soon as they heard of its appearance, the crusader princes held a council to discuss the best use of these new resources and decided to build a siege fort, similar to the one they had constructed on the slopes of Mount Staurin, in front of the Bridge Gate. This was a risky business on the exposed dead ground between the gate and the Orontes river, so rather than start from scratch they chose to fortify an abandoned mosque that stood on a small hill close to the Bridge Gate.
Before this could happen, the newly arrived craftsmen and materials needed to be fetched from the coast. It is a testament to the value of these commodities and to the potential danger of the journey that two of the crusade’s most powerful princes, Bohemond and Raymond of Toulouse, with sixty knights and at least 500 infantry (although we cannot be sure of the total number of infantry), were sent to St Simeon to act as escorts.3
The return journey took them three days, and in their absence Yaghi Siyan harassed the remaining crusaders with a number of minor sorties. Bohemond’s and Raymond’s return journey from the coast was particularly perilous because, laden with tools and building materials, they moved at a slower pace. It probably took them the best part of two days to cover the thirty kilometres from St Simeon, and along the way they allowed gaps to appear in their marching order. This was quite a serious failure of generalship on their part – marching forces that break formation are inevitably vulnerable to attack – and perhaps indicates a lack of co-ordination between the two leaders. As they neared Antioch, around 7 March, a section of the crusader line, probably infantry, was attacked. The Antiochene garrison had laid an ambush. One eyewitness described the crusaders’ abject terror as they were surrounded by screaming Muslim horsemen, fighting much as they had months earlier in the Battle of Dorylaeum:
The Turks began to gnash their teeth and chatter and howl with very loud cries, wheeling round our men, throwing darts and loosing arrows, wounding and slaughtering them most brutally. Their attack was so fierce that our men began to flee over the nearest mountain or wherever there was path. Those who could get away quickly escaped alive, and those who could not were killed.4
The death toll from this initial engagement – some 500 infantry but, surprisingly, only two knights – indicates the continuing lack of cohesion between mounted and foot troops, and, perhaps, the ability of horsemen to escape danger more quickly. This rout could have spelled disaster for the Franks, but Bohemond – who seems to have been commanding the rearguard – rushed forward with reinforcements, Godfrey of Bouillon led further troops into the fray from the main crusader camp, and a ferocious battle ensued on the ground in front of the Bridge Gate. At this point Yaghi Siyan likewise poured in more troops, and one Latin eyewitness recalled that he closed the Bridge Gate behind them, ‘thereby demanding his soldiers to win the fight or perish’. But with the added weight of Godfrey’s reinforcements, the crusaders began to gain the advantage. The Muslim troops panicked, turning in headlong flight back towards the Bridge Gate, which Yaghi Siyan now tried to rush open in desperation:
They fled swiftly across the middle of the bridge to their gate. Those who did not succeed in crossing the bridge alive, because of the great press of men and horses, suffered there everlasting death with the devil and his imps; for we came after them, driving them into the river or throwing them down, so that the water of that swift stream seemed to be running red with the blood of Turks, and if by chance any of them tried to climb up the pillars of the bridge, or to reach the bank by swimming, he was stricken by our men who were standing all along the river bank.5
Modern historians writing on the crusade have tended to downplay the significance of this battle, but to the Franks it seems to have marked an important turning point. Almost every contemporary Latin account provides a detailed description of these events, in language drawn from a grand palette of crusading rhetoric. At points this even outstrips the glorification lavished upon the earlier victories over Duqaq of Damascus and Ridwan of Aleppo. The crusaders who died in the initial Muslim ambush were celebrated as martyrs – ‘Our knights or footsoldiers suffered martyrdom, and we believe that they went to heaven and were clad in white robes and received the martyr’s palm’ – a deliberate contrast to those Muslim dead who, it was claimed, would suffer in hell at the hands of ‘imps’. Those who then prevailed in the Frankish counterattack were said to have ‘invoked the name of Jesus Christ and, being assured of the journey to the Holy Sepulchre . . . joined in battle with one heart and mind’. To the Latin writers, they were ‘knights of the true God, protected on all sides by the sign of the Cross’, who held a religious service to give thanks to God as soon as the battle ended. This pious style of description is not unique; indeed throughout the expedition contemporary Latin writers were determined to drive home their belief that the Franks were engaged in a profoundly sacred campaign, fought in God’s name and under his direction. What is remarkable is that such a wealth of religious imagery should be squandered on what would appear to be a relatively insignificant battle. We know that skirmishes between the crusaders and the Antiochene garrison took place outside the walls almost daily. The battle of 7 March brought no sudden end to the siege, perhaps it even had no immediately identifiable strategic impact upon its progress, and this is probably why it has effectively been ignored by modern historians. Why, then, was it so important to the crusaders themselves, so impressive a victory that many of the native Christian women still living in Antioch were supposedly prompted to come to ‘windows in the walls, and when they saw the wretched fate of the Turks they clapped their hands secretly’?
The crusaders did claim to have inflicted heavy casualties upon their enemy: twelve ‘emirs’ or commanders were said to have fallen in the battle, ‘together with 1,500 more of their bravest and most resolute soldiers, who were the best in fighting to defend the city’. If accurate, these figures would represent a serious weakening of a garrison that had probably numbered 5,000 at best. Estimates of overall Latin casualties vary between 1,000 and the strangely precise figure of 2,055, so losses on each side may well have been almost equal.
In fact, the real significance of the Bridge Gate battle lay in its impact upon morale. During the five months that they had lain encamped around Antioch, the crusaders had survived two major battles against the forces of Damascus and Aleppo, but, to date, this engagement represented perhaps their most decisive victory over the city’s garrison itself. Yaghi Siyan had gambled upon deploying a large force to catch Bohemond and Raymond of Toulouse in isolation, but had failed. Eyewitnesses emphasise that this defeat and its aftermath had a marked effect upon the Muslim garrison’s state of mind: ‘The survivors no longer had the will to howl and gabble day and night, as they used to do . . . henceforth they had less courage than before, both in words and works.’ The opposite was true for the crusaders. Those who had survived the horrors of winter and won the recent battle against Ridwan of Aleppo seem to have felt that this latest success presaged a change in the balance of fortune. Raymond of Toulouse’s chaplain celebrated the precious booty and much-needed horses captured after the fray: ‘Some [crusaders] running back and forth between the tents on Arabian horses were showing their new riches to their friends, and others, sporting two or three garments of silk, were praising God, the bestower of victory and gifts, and yet others, covered with three or four shields, were happily displaying these mementoes of their triumph.’6
Even more importantly, the crusaders had succeeded in bringing their prized cargo of tools, materials and craftsmen to Antioch. But, before work began on the new siege fort, a particularly macabre episode took place. At dawn on 8 March the Antiochene garrison stole out of the city to bury their dead in the grounds of the very mosque that the crusaders were planning to fortify. The Franks responded with chilling barbarity:
Together with them [the Muslims] buried cloaks, gold bezants [coins], bows and arrows, and other tools the names of which we do not know. When our men heard [this] they came in haste to that devil’s chapel, and ordered the bodies to be dug up and the tombs destroyed, and the dead men dragged out of their graves. They threw all the corpses into a pit, and cut off their heads and brought them to our tents so that they could count the number exactly, except for those that they loaded on to four horses belonging to the ambassadors of the emir of Cairo and sent to the sea-coast.7
We can interpret this action in a number of ways: as a coldly calculated atrocity, part of the ongoing game of siege and intimidation; or, as Raymond of Aguilers would have us believe, the isolated action of the poor rabble, ‘excited by the sight of Turkish spoils’. We should recognise, however, that Raymond, perhaps because of his status as a chaplain, appears to have been more acutely aware than other eyewitnesses that the crusaders might be criticised for particularly extreme acts of barbarity, and tends to attribute them to the base and faceless ‘poor’. In any case, we can be in no doubt that the cemetery’s desecration added to the Muslim garrison’s despair. One Latin contemporary noted: ‘The sight of this action caused the Turks to be dejected and grief-stricken almost to death, and daily they did nothing but weep and wail.’ They were far from broken, but they must have felt that the crusaders were finally gaining the upper hand.8
The Franks were now in a position to blockade the Bridge Gate and, around 10 March, work began on fortifying the abandoned mosque. They did not set out to construct a technically sophisticated or even permanent fortress. Even cowed by recent events, the Antiochene garrison might rally to attack the Franks before the fortification was complete, so the crusaders needed an easily erected makeshift fort. For three days a mass effort was made and the princes themselves joined in by helping to carry stones. With a detachment of archers watching the Bridge Gate for any sign of Muslim attack, the crusaders dug a double ditch around the mosque, put up a rough stone-and-lime-mortar curtain wall within this perimeter, and finally raised two improvised rock towers beside the mosque itself.
By 14 March the new stronghold had been completed and named La Mahomerie, the old French for the Blessed Mary, Christ’s mother. Although it had been built by a communal effort, its command was now conferred solely upon Raymond of Toulouse. His chaplain took great care to explain why his lord accepted this onerous and expensive task:
Debate ensued over the choice of a prince as guardian of the new fort, since a community affair is often slighted because all believe it will be attended to by others. While some of the princes, desirous of pay, solicited the vote of their peers for the office, the count, contrary to the wishes of his entourage, grabbed control, partly in order to excuse himself from the accusation of sloth and partly to point the way of force and wisdom to the slothful.9
The chaplain went on to explain that, because Raymond had, since the preceding summer, been periodically incapacitated by illness, a rumour had spread among the crusaders that ‘he was willing neither to fight nor to give’. With his standing increasingly eclipsed by other princes, and even his own people, the Provençals, beginning to doubt him, Raymond agreed to command La Mahomerie, we are told, in order to reinstate his good name. But Raymond of Aguilers’ rather desperate attempts to explain this decision give off the distinct aroma of propaganda. He probably conceded that Raymond of Toulouse’s act was not entirely selfless to forestall more damaging questions about his hero’s motivation. One issue had begun to burn in Raymond of Toulouse’s mind: who would win possession of Antioch when the city finally fell? Before March 1098 Raymond had not made an outstanding contribution to the siege and so could not claim the city on the basis of having orchestrated its fall. He did, however, still possess a relative abundance of one increasingly scarce resource: money. While other princes expected to be paid to organise the defence of La Mahomerie, Raymond offered to meet all expenses out of his own purse. In effect he bought exclusive rights to the siege fort. Why? The laws of war – which granted ownership by ‘right of conquest’ – had already influenced Bohemond’s decision to secure access to the Gate of St Paul at the start of the siege. Now Raymond followed suit by blockading the city’s other major portal, the Bridge Gate. Both were now set for a race into Antioch when the city fell.10
Towards the end of March 1098 Yaghi Siyan rallied his troops’ flagging spirits sufficiently to launch a surprise dawn attack out of the Bridge Gate, testing the strength of La Mahomerie. Raymond of Aguilers, probably camped within the fort by this time, recalled with some horror that their position was almost overrun. In his opinion, it was the miraculous hand of God that saved the Provençals: ‘On the preceding day a torrent of rain drenched the fresh earth and thus filled the fosse around [La Mahomerie]. As a result . . . the strength of the Lord hindered the enemy.’
In fact, the crusade princes must have known that the siege fort could never withstand a sustained, full-scale assault – a fortification thrown up in three days was not intended for such a purpose. Instead, in the event of an attack, La Mahomerie was designed to provide Raymond of Toulouse’s troops just enough protection to allow Frankish reinforcements to be sent across the Bridge of Boats. Raymond of Aguilers remembered that the dawn attack was thwarted in just such a way: ‘The noise of combat attracted our forces, and as a result the fort was saved.’ Antioch’s Bridge Gate may not have been sealed, but control of the traffic before it was now in the crusaders’ hands.11
With the Bridge Gate guarded, the Muslim garrison took to using the city’s last major gate, that of St George, but with the increased Latin control over the area even this became precarious. One Latin eyewitness gleefully reported that a group of crusaders, probably Provençals, captured 2,000 horses – surely an exaggeration – that had been led out of the Gate of St George to pasture on the slopes of Mount Silpius. Even so, the crusaders soon took steps to blockade this final gate. In the first week of April the council of princes appointed Tancred, Bohemond’s nephew, to fortify and man a monastery next to the gate in return for 400 marks of silver, one-quarter of which came directly from Raymond of Toulouse. This payment is quite revealing. In the Gesta Francorum – written by an anonymous southern Italian Norman whom we would expect to be a partisan supporter of his countryman – Tancred is actually reported to have said he would do the job, but only ‘if I may know what reward I shall have’. This self-serving attitude was probably the result of both his acquisitive nature and his status in the second, poorer rank of the crusader aristocracy. In fact, Tancred benefited from the arrangement all around, because within days of taking up his post he captured an Armenian and Syrian trade caravan bound for Antioch’s St George Gate, seizing ‘corn, wine, barley, oil and other such things’.12
From early April 1098 the crusaders tightened the noose around Antioch. Their cordon was not perfect – it was still possible for some limited supplies to be brought into the city via the Iron Gate – but the balance had tilted in the besiegers’ favour. Throughout the preceding winter they had struggled to gather enough food to survive, while the Antiochene garrison received regular supplies. Now, with the tables turned, the crusaders could forage in relative safety and enjoyed secure lines of communication with St Simeon, and it was the turn of Yaghi Siyan and his men to suffer. The crusaders’ lot was further improved when lavish gifts of horses and weapons arrived from Baldwin of Boulogne, now established as ruler of Edessa, and, in May, by the return of other crusaders who had manned outlying forts and foraging centres.13
The Provençal crusader Raymond of Aguilers made an intriguing observation about this period in a casual aside during a description of Frankish visions. He revealed that at this point in the siege the Latin priest Evremar travelled south to the Muslim city of Tripoli, where he supposedly spent some time ‘keeping body and soul together’. The idea that the crusaders might, even in the midst of the struggle to overcome Antioch, be able to travel freely through Islamic territory and even benefit from Muslim hospitality suggests that the lines of inter-religious conflict may not have been as clearly drawn during the expedition as historians once supposed.14
Very little is known about the progress of the siege through the remainder of April and May. Even eyewitness sources pass over the period in little more than one or two lines. We can, however, make tentative attempts to piece together some events. The strain within Antioch certainly seems to have been mounting. One Latin contemporary, Peter Tudebode, recalled that around this time Yaghi Siyan sought to ransom a recently captured crusader named Rainald Porchet. He was dragged up on to the city’s walls and ordered to negotiate a suitable payment from his Latin comrades below or face death. Tudebode provided a heavily dramatised account of Rainald’s reaction, in which he refused to plead for his release, rejected Siyan’s last-ditch offer to repudiate Christianity and become a Muslim, and met his subsequent death by decapitation in prayer. The aftermath of this ‘martyrdom’ was even more ferocious:
Then [Yaghi Siyan], in a towering rage because he could not make Rainald turn apostate, at once ordered all the [captive crusaders] in Antioch to be brought before him with their hands bound behind their backs . . . He ordered them stripped stark naked, and as they stood in the nude he commanded that they be bound with ropes in a circle. He then had chaff, firewood, and hay piled around them, and finally as enemies of God he ordered them put to the torch. The Christians, those knights of Christ, shrieked and screamed so that their voices resounded in heaven.15
Tudebode told this story as a powerful example of Christian piety in the face of Muslim cruelty, but, if true, it may also indicate a significant hardening in the psychological battle between besieger and besieged. By massacring his remaining Latin captives, Yaghi Siyan was throwing away potential ransom money. But cold calculation rather than blind rage may have prompted his action. He probably thought that his failure to secure any payment for Rainald demonstrated that the crusaders, believing Antioch’s fall to be imminent, would now refuse to pay any further ransoms. By callously butchering prisoners, however, he virtually guaranteed that the remaining crusaders would be baying for Muslim blood, putting an end to any hopes among his faltering garrison for a peaceful surrender. The message to his men was simple: if you want to live, you will have to fight.
By May, the garrison’s nerve seemed to be failing. The crusader knight Anselm of Ribemont recorded in a letter that around 20 May an offer of surrender was received from the city. He wrote that the Muslims went ‘so far as to receive some of our men among them, and several of their men came out to us’. However, these Latins, including a member of Hugh of Vermandois’ contingent, Walo II of Chaumont-en-Vexin, constable to the king of France, were then killed inside Antioch. Anselm believed the whole affair had been a ‘trap’, but it is quite possible that a section of the Muslim garrison was actually trying to orchestrate an unsanctioned surrender to Hugh’s men, only for Yaghi Siyan to discover the affair and slaughter the crusader envoys.16
This plot may have been foiled, but by late spring there were other disaffected elements within the city. By April, or early May at the latest, Bohemond had established a secret line of communication with an Antiochene named Firuz. Acting alone, or at the head of a very small group of conspirators, Firuz would change the course of history. In many ways, his actions alone determined the fate of the First Crusade. But, for a man of such significance, Firuz is a remarkably shadowy figure. Mentioned by almost every contemporary account of the crusade, his story is slightly different in each telling. His identity, motivation, the very details of how his conspiracy worked, are all veiled in mystery.
Our best guess is that Firuz was an Armenian resident of Antioch who had adopted the Muslim faith. A number of sources describe him as having been a relatively wealthy armour-maker, but we can be certain that during the crusader siege he helped guard the city’s walls. He seems to have commanded at least one tower on the south-eastern walls rising above the Gate of St George, not too far from Tancred’s siege fort. As such, he had control over a relatively isolated stretch of Antioch’s defences. The means for his betrayal are therefore comparatively clear, but what of motive and opportunity? One crusade chronicler would have us believe that Firuz was persuaded to act by three successive visions of Christ. According to a twelfth-century Muslim writer based in Damascus, he turned to the crusaders because Yaghi Siyan had confiscated his wealth and property. Firuz may well have been disenchanted with Antioch’s ruler, but in all likelihood his actions were chiefly inspired by simple greed. One southern Italian crusader admitted frankly that Bohemond bribed him with lavish promises of ‘riches and great honour’, while another contemporary believed that Bohemond promised to make Firuz the equal of Tancred in power and wealth.
But how was contact with Firuz first established? The explanation of the Byzantine princess Anna Comnena, written decades later in Constantinople, appears at first sight to be wonderfully improbable – Firuz, she wrote, simply ‘used to lean over the walls’ and chat with Bohemond. It is perhaps not entirely impossible that the first connection was made when Firuz hailed Tancred’s men stationed nearby, but communication is more likely to have been initiated and maintained via Armenian traders passing in and out of the city.17
However their link was formed, by mid-May at the latest Bohemond had in principle persuaded Firuz to give the crusaders access to his section of the walls.18 But Bohemond was not content simply to orchestrate Antioch’s fall – he wanted to ensure that it fell into his acquisitive hands and, to that end, he was more than willing to put his own interests before those of the crusade. Without revealing his arrangement with Firuz, he came to a council of the princes, apparently saying:
Most gallant knights, you see that we are all, both great and small, in dire poverty and misery, and we do not know whence better fortune will come to us. If, therefore, you think it a good and proper plan, let one of us set himself above the others, on condition that if he can capture the city or engineer its downfall by any means, by himself or by others, we will agree to give it to him.19
Knowing that he now held the key to Antioch’s downfall, Bohemond was trying to trick his fellow princes into confirming an agreement that would guarantee his rights to the city. We cannot doubt that his scheme was utterly self-serving given that it is reported in full by his supporter, the author of the Gesta Francorum. To Bohemond’s annoyance, however, the rest of the crusade leaders flatly refused his proposal, maintaining that Antioch must be divided equally among all. At this point, around the middle of May, there was as yet no sense of urgency or panic in the crusader camp. The tide of the siege had turned in their favour, progress was being made, other ploys – such as that involving Walo of Chaumont-en-Vexin – were being pursued. In short, when Bohemond first came to the negotiating table the crusaders were not desperate. That was about to change.20
Back in October 1097, when the crusaders first approached Antioch, Yaghi Siyan had sent his youngest son, Muhammad, east to negotiate support from Baghdad and the rulers of Mesopotamia. This may well have been followed up by further entreaties in March 1098. One Latin chronicler invented a graphic but fanciful account of this embassy, in which Yaghi Siyan’s envoys first sought to demonstrate the severity of their situation and the depth of their despair: ‘They took their hats off and threw them to the ground, they savagely plucked out their beards with their nails, they pulled at and tore their hair out by the roots with their fingers, and they heaved sighs in great lamentations.’
The sultan of Baghdad was so impressed by this demonstration of despair that he supposedly ‘summoned magicians, prophets and soothsayers of their gods and asked about future victory’. Once assured of propitious omens, he ordered a massive relief force to be mustered and placed under the command of his supporter, Kerbogha, the atabeg of Mosul, a figure simply characterised as ‘a dreadful man’.21 The lengthy description of these events may well be pure fiction, but it is representative of two prevalent themes running through most contemporary Latin accounts. Just as there was not one dominant Christian leader of the First Crusade, so the Latin expedition faced a series of Muslim enemies rather than a single foe. Lacking an obvious, primary antagonist, many Latin observers singled out Kerbogha as the crusade’s most dangerous opponent, styling him, to some extent at least, as their anti-hero. Kerbogha tends, therefore, to be the subject of more speculative, even fantastical, characterisation than any other Muslim leader. In one extraordinary passage, the author of Gesta Francorum even went so far as to record a lengthy, but entirely fabricated, conversation between Kerbogha and his mother, in which she warned him not to fight the crusaders because they were protected by the Christian God, predicting that ‘If you join battle with these men you will suffer very great loss and dishonour, and lose many of your faithful soldiers, and you will leave behind all the plunder which you have taken, and escape as a panic-stricken fugitive.’
All in all, Kerbogha comes across in the Latin sources as an arrogant but formidable general. Perhaps more importantly, observers in the crusader camp believed that he was the officially appointed representative of the Seljuq sultan of Baghdad – in the Gesta Francorum he is described as ‘commander-in-chief of the army of the sultan of Persia’. In a sense he is portrayed as the sanctioned champion of Islam, leading the finally united might of Syria and Mesopotamia:
Kerbogha had with him a great army whom he had been assembling for a long time, and had been given leave by the khalif, who is the pope of the Turks, to kill Christians . . . [He had] collected an immense force of pagans – Turks, Arabs, Saracens, Paulicians, Azymites, Kurds, Persians, Agulani and many other people who could not be counted.22
Kerbogha stood at the head of this intimidating, if rather bewildering, array of troops, but his image as the ‘official’ leader of Sunni resistance to the crusade is deeply misleading. If we piece together the evidence provided by the limited corpus of Arabic sources for these events, a strikingly different picture emerges. Kerbogha had risen to power in Mosul, far to the east in Mesopotamia, on the back of his reputation as an astute and merciless military commander, and although he was the sultan of Baghdad’s ally, he was not his puppet.
Kerbogha harboured his own ambitions for northern Syria, and the advent of the First Crusade presented the perfect opportunity for their realisation. Under the cloak of a sacred struggle to annihilate the ravening Frankish horde, he hoped to occupy Antioch and large swathes of Syria. If successful, he himself might be able to challenge for power in Baghdad. Kerbogha spent six months carefully laying the military and diplomatic foundations for his campaign, piecing together an immensely intimidating coalition of Muslim forces. Drawn from across the Abbasid world, armies were committed from Damascus, Harran, Homs, Mardin, Samosata and Sindjar, among other places. Most came not from religious duty or deep-felt hatred of the crusaders, but rather out of fear of Kerbogha. They knew that he might one day lead the Seljuq world, and they chose now to be his ally rather than his enemy. Only Ridwan of Aleppo resisted the call to arms, staunchly refusing to renounce his independence.
Some allies joined Kerbogha at Mosul, others marched directly to a rendezvous at Antioch, but, once gathered, the Turkish host was massively powerful. An Armenian from Edessa estimated their number at 800,000 cavalry and 300,000 infantry; one Muslim chronicler simply described Kerbogha’s army as ‘uncountable’. These must have been gross exaggerations, but Kerbogha probably commanded in excess of 35,000 men. So long as the campaign went well, Kerbogha could expect to retain the ‘loyalty’ of this massive composite army. But should his generalship falter, should the façade of his inexorable ascent towards pre-eminence begin to crumble, then their obedience might weaken.23
Rumours that a huge Muslim army was gathering reached Antioch in the second half of May 1098. The crusader princes decided to investigate the matter more fully, dispatching scouting parties under the likes of Reinhard of Toul and Drogo of Nesle, east to Artah, south to the Ruj and north towards Cilicia. Their surveillance confirmed the princes’ worst fears: ‘They saw the [Muslim] army swarming everywhere from the mountains and different roads like the sands of the sea, marvelling at their infinite thousands and totally unable to count them.’24
On 28 May the first scouts returned to Antioch with their dreadful news. It now seemed that, after eight months camped outside the city walls, the exhausted, bedraggled Franks would be crushed between Antioch and Kerbogha’s advancing army. Knowing what a devastating effect this revelation would have on crusader morale, the princes decided to keep the news secret for the time being and met to discuss the situation in an emergency council on 29 May. Facing battle on two fronts and probable extermination, all the princes, with the likely exception of Raymond of Toulouse, now agreed to Bohemond’s earlier proposal, apparently stating: ‘If Bohemond can take this city, either by himself or by others, we will thereafter give it to him gladly, on condition that if the emperor come to our aid and fulfil all his obligations which he promised and vowed, we will return the city to him as it is right to do.’25
This partial compromise allowed them to meet Bohemond’s demands while still paying lip-service to their oaths to the Emperor Alexius. With this agreement in place, Bohemond finally revealed his relationship with Firuz. Historians have often argued that the Latins were incredibly fortunate that Kerbogha chose to besiege Edessa for three weeks in May before moving on to Antioch, because this bought the crusaders enough time to orchestrate the Firuz scheme. In reality it is very likely that Bohemond had already established communications with Firuz in the preceding months. He certainly had the means to orchestrate the city’s betrayal at the council held earlier in May, but held back because he was not promised his desired reward. This reveals two important points: Bohemond was focused above all else upon securing the right to rule Antioch; and Kerbogha’s delay at Edessa did not save the crusade, it merely postponed the moment at which Bohemond sprang his carefully crafted plan.26
In the following days the final preparations were made with Firuz, and his son was smuggled out of the city to act as a hostage in Bohemond’s camp. The plan agreed between Bohemond and Firuz was relatively straightforward. On the evening of 2 June a large detachment of crusaders – both cavalry and infantry – would march off in plain view of the Muslim garrison, only to return under cover of darkness. The knights would retrace their steps and then make the rest of the way on foot, while the infantry would be led by one of Firuz’s co-conspirators through the mountains. Both groups would then rendezvous at the walls above the Gate of St George. Having completed this diversionary manoeuvre, a small detachment of troops would scale the walls near Firuz’s tower, overwhelm any immediate resistance and then rush to open the city’s gates.
A high degree of secrecy surrounded the whole scheme. One crusade chronicler remarked that ‘Bohemond’s plan was not common knowledge’ among the crusaders, and some Provençals seem to have been surprised by the course of events on 2/3 June. Since Armenians moving amid the Franks had earlier been believed to be spying for the Muslim garrison, it would have made sense not to broadcast Bohemond’s plan throughout the army.27 One might suspect that Bohemond tried to keep his plans secret to ensure that his men were able to seize key sections of the city. In reality, however, the plan must have been widely agreed by the princes in order to ensure a rapid and co-ordinated response as soon as the walls were breached. Even with a traitor co-operating inside the city, Bohemond’s scheme was still desperately dangerous. Without an immediate and overwhelming deployment of crusaders into the city once the gates were opened, the isolated advance troop might well be butchered and the opportunity lost. Bohemond certainly seems to have co-ordinated his movements with Raymond of Toulouse and Adhémar of Le Puy, and to have agreed that, once the first breach was made, Godfrey of Bouillon and Robert of Flanders would lead a direct attack on Antioch’s citadel.28
One prince who did not play any part in Bohemond’s scheme was Stephen of Blois. He probably attended the council on 29 May, but he seems to have decided that, in the face of Kerbogha’s approach, the crusaders’ prospects for survival were bleak. Early on 2 June he announced that he was ill and, in the company of many of the crusaders from Blois-Chartrain, withdrew north over the Belen Pass to Alexandretta. He never returned, although, as we shall see, he was to have a profound effect on the crusade’s later progress. The shocking impact of Stephen’s departure, which even at the time must have been construed by many as a desertion, was rendered even more significant by the fact that the other princes had, in the early months of 1098, chosen him to act as the expedition’s ‘commander-in-chief’. This title probably meant that Stephen had chaired crusader councils. The desertion of one of the crusade’s most powerful leaders at the very moment when its fate hung in the balance did not augur well for the Latins’ prospects and the crusader camp was gripped by an atmosphere of fear and anticipation on 2 June.29
That evening one of Bohemond’s followers, a man bearing the rather odd nickname of ‘Bad-crown’, summoned the troops that would make the diversionary departure. Everything went to plan, and at roughly 3 a.m. on 3 June some 700 crusaders gathered on the slopes above the Gate of St George. A sizeable group under the command of Godfrey and Robert of Flanders carried on towards the citadel while the rest stayed with Bohemond. They waited until the night-watch carrying lanterns passed by atop the walls and then rushed forward to contact the traitor within. To their immense relief Firuz was there. He lowered a rope to which the crusaders attached their oxen-hide ladder, which was then duly hauled up and secured to the battlements. Sixty men were due to climb up in the advance party, but they were absolutely terrified. One Latin contemporary recalled that ‘their hearts were struck with fear and very great doubt and each of them was reluctant and very much against being the first in and climbing the walls’. Many would have known the recent fate of Walo of Chaumont-en-Vexin and his men when they were betrayed in the city. Mounting the ladder they had no real idea whether or not they were heading into a trap.
The Gesta Francorum, whose author followed Bohemond to the foot of the walls, provides palpable evidence of the dangers involved. He described how Bohemond encouraged his men, saying: ‘Go on, strong in heart and lucky in your comrades, and scale the ladder into Antioch, for by God’s will we shall have it in our power in a trice,’ but then shrewdly decided not to join the first wave of attack himself. Eventually, men began to climb. A knight from Chartres named Fulcher (not to be confused with his namesake, the crusade chronicler), the son of Fulcher fitz-Gerard, a canon of Notre Dame de Chartres, was the first to mount the walls. But now, in their panicked desperation not to be caught in mid-climb, too many crusaders rushed up the ladder and, overburdened, it toppled, killing some and injuring others:
The people of God shook with horror at this, thinking all these things had happened by Turkish trickery, and that now all those sent in had undoubtedly perished. No sound, no outburst was heard in the city nor on the ramparts, even though those who fell made a great noise. Lord God raised a strongly blowing wind that night. [Firuz], obedient to the vow he had made to Bohemond concerning the betrayal of the city, once again let down the rope to draw up the ladder.30
At last, the remaining men reached the wall top and the most dangerous moment of the entire assault. Speed and silence were essential, for had the general alarm been raised the entire attack might have been thwarted. Amazingly, the crusaders managed to kill the patrolling watchmen and the sleeping guards of the nearest three towers ‘without an outcry’ being made, although in their haste they did mistakenly hack to death Firuz’s own brother. Back on the ground Bohemond’s remaining troops became impatient. The author of the Gesta Francorum, who was in among this group, vividly recalled that ‘there was a [postern] gate not far from us to the left, but it was shut and some of us did not know where it was, for it was still dark. Yet by fumbling with our hands and poking about we found it, and all made a rush at it, so that we broke it down and entered.’31
Up to this point the attack had been based on stealth and silence. Now, suddenly, that changed. With the breach made, Bohemond sounded bugles so that by prearranged signal Godfrey and Robert would know to begin their attack on the citadel. All at once, Bohemond’s men began shouting and screaming to terrify the Antiochenes, calling out their rallying cry, ‘God’s will! God’s will!’ again and again. Every eyewitness account remarks on the abrupt and overwhelming outburst of noise. One remarked that ‘at this moment the shrieks of countless people arose, making an amazing noise throughout the city’. Another reported: ‘The crusaders killed all whom they met, and at daybreak they cried out in such terrifying screams that the whole city was thrown into confusion and women and children wept.’32
In those crucial first minutes the combination of surprise, the confusion of darkness and fear of the crusaders’ unrestrained brutality paralysed the defenders. As soon as he was within the city, Bohemond ordered his banner, blood red in colour, to be raised from the walls near the top of Mount Silpius. His intention was clear – to stake an unquestionable claim to the city – but, according to one eyewitness, his act had a more immediate impact: ‘Now as dawn broke our standards flew atop the southern hill of Antioch. Panicked by the sight of our troops on the overhanging hill, some of the Antiochenes rushed through the gates while others leaped from the walls. The Lord threw them into such chaos that not a single one stood and fought.’33
At the same time, some of the native Christians still living within the city decided to turn on the Muslim garrison and began opening the city’s remaining gates. This chaotic reaction to Bohemond’s assault sealed Antioch’s fate. Had Yaghi Siyan moved quickly to staunch the breach in the south-eastern quarter and maintain a tight guard over the city’s other gates, he might have averted disaster. As it was, with the way open, the remaining crusaders began pouring into the city. What followed was a chaotic and bloody massacre, fuelled by eight months of suffering, starvation and stored aggression. Although some pockets of Muslim resistance remained, these were quickly overwhelmed. In the half-light of dawn the slaughter was indiscriminate: ‘They were sparing no Muslim on the grounds of age or sex, the ground was covered with blood and corpses and some of these were Christian Greeks, Syrians and Armenians. No wonder since [in the darkness] they were entirely unaware of whom they should spare and whom they should strike.’ After the city had fallen an eyewitness noted: ‘All the streets of the city on every side were full of corpses, so that no one could endure to be there because of the stench, nor could anyone walk along the narrow paths of the city except over the corpses of the dead.’34
The Muslim garrison had only one success. In the first wave of fighting Godfrey and Robert of Flanders failed to break into Antioch’s formidable citadel. With panic sweeping the rest of the city, Yaghi Siyan’s son rallied what few troops he could find and struggled up the slopes of Mount Silpius to find refuge in the fortress. Isolated high above the city, the citadel remained in Muslim hands. Yaghi Siyan himself proved less cool-headed. Believing the citadel to have fallen already, he took flight, perhaps out of the Iron Gate, with his personal bodyguard. He managed to get some distance from the city, but was then thrown by his horse and left for dead by his men. A few hours later, his battered body was discovered by an Armenian butcher who promptly decapitated it and presented the head to the crusaders.35
After eight tortuous months of ineffective military investment, the crusaders finally overcame Antioch’s fortifications by means of intrigue and bribery. Once within the city they unleashed a ferocious wave of carnage before which the Muslim garrison could not stand. Repellent as it was, the appalling violence perpetrated by the Latins during the sack of Antioch did in fact improve the crusade’s prospects of success. Their willingness to butcher the city’s garrison gave them a reputation for absolute ruthlessness, and in the coming months other Muslim cities on the road to Jerusalem considered negotiating with the Latins rather than face wholesale destruction.
Perhaps inevitably, the crusaders’ bottled-up bloodlust was matched only by their hunger for booty. Indeed, one contemporary recalled that, once inside Antioch, ‘our rabble wildly seized everything that they found in the streets and houses. But the proved soldiers kept to warfare, in following and killing the Turks.’ The truth was that most of the city’s resources had been exhausted:
[The crusaders] patrolled the city looking for provisions, but they discovered few. They found many purple garments of different kinds, also pepper and very many spices, the gentiles’ clothes and tents, gaming pieces and dice, also some money but not much. No wonder, for during the long siege, the many thousands of gentiles assembled in that place had used it all up.36
Raymond of Toulouse did, however, capitalise upon his position in front of the Bridge Gate. When fighting began on 3 June his men overran this entrance and seized all the buildings in the area, including the Bridge Gate itself and the Palace of Antioch. Thus, while Bohemond raised his banner above the city, Raymond simultaneously established a powerful Provençal foothold in Antioch. It looked as though Bohemond was not going to claim possession of the city quite as easily as he had hoped.37
The crusaders had stolen and battled their way into Antioch, but their success came not a moment too soon. On the very next day, 4 June, Kerbogha’s army began to arrive; the crusaders were soon surrounded. Suddenly the besiegers had become the besieged.38