In June 1098 the First Crusaders found themselves ensnared in a bizarre predicament. Having spent some eight months battling to gain entry to Antioch, they now suddenly found themselves trapped within its walls. The advance scouts from Kerbogha’s immense army began to arrive outside Antioch. They soon struck an early blow against the crusaders. The Muslim scouting party, made up of 300 cavalry, initially made a cautious approach, sending ahead a detachment of thirty men to reconnoitre the city. The sight of this seemingly isolated force approaching Antioch proved too much to resist for Roger of Barneville, a powerful southern Italian Norman knight renowned for his martial prowess and skill as a negotiator. In a moment of foolhardy bravery he charged out against them with only fifteen of his most capable men and, when the Muslims fled, raced on in pursuit. In spite of all his military experience, Roger had been lured into a fatal error of judgement and fallen foul of the Muslims’ favourite tactic – the feigned retreat. As he was drawn away from the safety of the city, the remainder of the Muslim scouting force suddenly poured out of a hidden valley. The Latin chronicler Albert of Aachen described how Roger, facing odds of twenty to one, turned tail, making a desperate break for the city:
The Turks on galloping horses drove on the fleeing [crusaders], until Roger drew near the town-wall and almost escaped across the shallows of the Orontes with his men. But luck was against him and in full view of all those who were standing around the ramparts the noble champion was beaten by a Turkish soldier on a faster horse. An arrow pierced his back and penetrated his liver and lung, and so he slipped from his horse and breathed his last.
In full sight of the cowed and horrified onlookers within Antioch, his body was decapitated and his head stuck on the end of a Muslim spear as a trophy of victory. Albert of Aachen imagined this scouting party gleefully reporting to Kerbogha that the crusaders would offer little resistance. Roger’s body was recovered and buried with full honours by Adhémar of Le Puy and all the princes in the doorway of the St Peter’s basilica. Even so, the crusaders saw the death of so prominent a knight as a dreadful omen. One of their number remarked that with the loss of this ‘most illustrious and beloved knight . . . sorrow and fear gripped our people’. Their ultimate nightmare had come to fruition – thousands of kilometres from home, already exhausted by months of battle and suffering, they were about to be surrounded by an overwhelming force from which there was seemingly no escape.1
The crusaders quickly decided that they were in no position to meet this new threat in a full-scale battle, as they had done with Ridwan’s army in February. Kerbogha’s force was much larger – outnumbering their own by as much as two to one – and, more importantly, the crusaders themselves were now critically short of cavalry, having run out of horses. Albert of Aachen believed that this explained why the Franks failed to respond when Roger of Barneville was ambushed:
Hardly 150 horses remained to the [crusaders], and those were enfeebled by shortage of fodder; the Turks’ horses, however, were fat and not worn out. As many as 400 Turkish horses were found and captured in the city of Antioch, which they had not yet begun to tame for riding to their custom, or taught to turn about in pursuit of the enemy and urge on with spurs.2
Under these circumstances, the princes chose to fall back on Antioch’s immense fortifications and took up defensive positions within the city. On 5 June Kerbogha’s main army reached the Iron Bridge, the key crossing of the River Orontes, twelve kilometres north of the city. The crusaders had left a garrison to protect the bridge, but it was quickly overrun and slaughtered. Only the Frankish commander was spared, left in chains to rot in one of the bridge’s towers.3
The way forward to the city now lay open, but Kerbogha continued to exercise caution. He chose to establish his main camp some three kilometres north of Antioch, at the junction of the Orontes and its smaller tributary, the Kara Su – giving himself time to assess the city’s defences and make contact with the Muslims still holding its citadel. Almost immediately, his attention turned to La Mahomerie, the siege fort built by the crusaders in front of Antioch’s Bridge Gate. The Franks seem to have abandoned their two other forts – Malregard and Tancred’s Tower – but were determined to retain control of the strategically crucial zone around La Mahomerie. During their own attempts to besiege the city this area had proved to be a vital battleground, and now it controlled access to the crusaders’ sole surviving line of supply, the road to St Simeon. For the next three days Kerbogha set about testing Frankish resolve, throwing 2,000 men against the siege fort’s makeshift defences. For some reason the job of resisting this vicious onslaught fell to Robert of Flanders, even though Raymond of Toulouse had, before the fall of Antioch, jealously guarded his position as commander of La Mahomerie. Now Robert made a valiant attempt to hold on to the fort with just 500 men, and for three days he resisted wave after wave of Muslim attack. Eventually though, on the night of 8/9 June, with the futility of his position clear, he moved his troops back into the city under cover of darkness and set fire to La Mahomerie, destroying the fort to prevent it falling into enemy hands.4
In this same period, Kerbogha made contact with Yaghi Siyan’s son, Shams ad-Daulah, now in command of Antioch’s citadel. There may, at first, have been some brief discussion between these two about rights to the city, but ad-Daulah quickly realised that he was in no position to negotiate. Kerbogha put one of his own commanders in control of the citadel and, around 8 June, began massing forces in and around the fortress on the eastern, more gentle slopes of Mount Silpius. Further troops were deployed to blockade the Gate of St Paul in the north of the city. By 10 June Kerbogha was ready to unleash an almighty assault upon the crusaders. The Franks themselves had spent months struggling to overcome Antioch’s defences, but Kerbogha now had one tremendous advantage – control of the citadel. From this position he could threaten the entire length of the walls running atop Mount Silpius and, even more significantly, he might gain access to the small path that wound its way down to the main city below. The crusaders were exhausted, outnumbered, isolated and horseless, but, even so, had they had possession of the citadel they might have had some slender hope of holding out against Kerbogha. As it was, they knew that there would be no long-drawn-out rerun of their own siege. This struggle would instead be swiftly settled by bloody combat.
The citadel’s overwhelming strategic significance was not lost on Bohemond – from the first moment of Antioch’s fall on 3–4 June he had concentrated his efforts upon gaining a foothold on Mount Silpius. He rejected the idea of mounting a frontal assault on the citadel itself from within Antioch after taking one look at its fortifications. True to its name, this stronghold was designed to resist attack both from outside the city and from within. Even today, with its walls crumbling in disrepair, a line of formidable towers can be seen, defiantly facing the city below. By the time Kerbogha took control of this fortress, Bohemond had, however, established a camp opposite and to the south, along the ridge of Mount Silpius. Muslim and Latin were left facing each other across a small rocky valley, which can also be clearly seen today. From his position, Bohemond had control of a large section of the city walls and a series of towers from which he might hope to police the path leading down to Antioch. Of course, just as Antioch’s huge size had presented problems to the crusaders as besiegers, now it posed similar difficulties to them as defenders. From 8 June, with Kerbogha gathering the bulk of his forces around the citadel, Bohemond seems to have been joined by Robert of Normandy and Robert of Flanders, but the Franks could ill afford to spread themselves too thinly – Godfrey stayed below in the city to defend the Gate of St Paul, while Raymond divided his time between fighting at the citadel and defending the Bridge Gate.5
On 10 June the crusaders, realising that Kerbogha was almost ready to launch an attack via the citadel, decided to make a pre-emptive strike. Using a small postern gate further south along the ridge of Mount Silpius they deployed a force to harry Kerbogha’s camp. This rather audacious attack seems to have caught the Muslims off guard, and, aided by the element of surprise, the crusaders managed to drive them into a retreat. Overjoyed by their apparent success, some Latins merrily began to loot the camp, only to be overrun by Kerbogha’s counterattack. Caught in the open, those who could made a chaotic flight back to the postern gate, but, as one Frankish eyewitness recalled, this ‘was so terribly strait and narrow that many of the people were trampled to death in the crowd’. This ill-judged foray beyond the walls left the crusaders frightened and demoralised, but much worse was to come. Kerbogha now launched a combined offensive. His troops poured out of the citadel towards Bohemond’s upper camp and along the path to the city, and at the same time others, approaching from outside, attacked the city walls running south of the citadel. Forced to fight on two fronts, the crusaders were stretched to the limit: ‘The Turks strained with might to overrun and expel us from their route because descent into Antioch was possible only through our mountain. From morning until evening the fight raged with ferocity the like of which has never been reported.’6
What shocked the crusaders most was that, with such vast reserves of manpower, Kerbogha was able to unleash a seemingly unending stream of attackers. For two days the fighting raged without pause from dawn till dusk. A crusader who lived through this terror remarked that ‘a man with food had no time to eat, and a man with water no time to drink’. The sheer, brutal intensity of this struggle sent some crusaders over the edge. One Latin eyewitness recalled that ‘many gave up hope and hurriedly lowered themselves with ropes from the wall tops; and in the city soldiers returning from the encounter circulated widely a rumour that mass decapitation of the defenders was in store. To add weight to the terror, they too fled even as some urged the undecided to stand fast.’
Soon, panic spread throughout the city and even well-known knights began to desert:
While this was going on, William of Grandmesnil [Bohemond’s brother-in-law], Aubré his brother, Guy Trousseau and Lambert the Poor, who were all scared by the battle of the previous day, which had lasted until evening, let themselves down from the wall secretly during the night and fled on foot to the sea, so that both their hands and their feet were worn away to the bone. Many others, whose names I do not know, fled with them. When they reached the ships which were in St Simeon’s Port they said to the sailors, ‘You poor devils, why are you staying here? All our men are dead, and we have barely escaped death ourselves.’ When the sailors heard this they were horrified, and rushed in terror to their ships and put to sea. At that moment the Turks arrived and killed everyone whom they could catch. They burned those ships which were still in the mouth of the river and took their cargoes.
Given the unrelenting ferocity of Kerbogha’s attacks and the nature of the crusaders’ overall predicament, it is not surprising that many chose to flee. On 11 June another rumour spread through the army suggesting that the princes themselves were preparing to flee towards the coast, and the crusade leaders were able to calm their troops only by each swearing an oath not to abandon Antioch. One Provençal crusader noted that, ‘even then only the closing of the gates of Antioch by orders of Bohemond and Adhémar prevented wholesale evacuation’.7
Those who stayed somehow managed to hold their ground on Mount Silpius for four long days. In part they survived through sheer, bloody-minded determination and martial skill: Bohemond was in the thick of the fighting and at one stage he was surrounded and had to be rescued by Robert of Flanders and Robert of Normandy; later a southern Italian knight, known only as Mad Hugh, managed to defend a tower on the walls single-handedly, breaking three spears in the process. Even so, the casualty rate was high – among the dead was Peter Tudebode’s brother, lost to a wound received during the fighting. On 12 June the shortage of manpower up on Silpius became so desperate that Bohemond took the curious step of ordering buildings in the south-western quarter of the city, where he believed some crusaders were hiding, to be set alight. The fire got out of hand, almost reaching the Basilica of St Peter and the Church of St Mary, but it did apparently prompt some to join the fighting.8
A distinctly medieval mixture of piety and superstition also began to figure in the unfolding of events. On 11 June a priest named Stephen of Valence came to the princes gathered at the top of Silpius, claiming to have received a vision of Christ and the Virgin Mary in which the crusaders were admonished for their sins and charged to purify themselves for five days. The Provençal chaplain Raymond of Aguilers, impressed by the priest’s story, recounted how ‘Stephen reported the above vision to an assembly [of crusaders], swore upon the cross to verify it, and finally signified his willingness to cross through fire or throw himself from the heights of a tower if necessary to convince the unbelievers.’ This story does not seem to have had a massive or immediate effect upon morale, but it does foreshadow the powerful, almost fevered tide of ecstatic spirituality that was about to grip the crusaders. Then, on the night of 13/14 June, with the Frankish resistance close to collapse, a strange light was seen in the heavens. One of Bohemond’s followers recalled: ‘There appeared a fire in the sky, coming from the west, and it approached and fell upon the Turkish army, to the great astonishment of our men and of the Turks also. In the morning the Turks, who were all scared by the fire, took flight in panic.’9
Seen as a divine portent, this phenomenon, probably a comet, heartened the crusaders and unnerved the Muslims. But Kerbogha’s decision to redeploy his troops on 14 June was based on sound strategic judgement and not prompted simply by superstition. Having tried to break through the crusader lines for four days, he now elected to spread his forces more evenly, throwing a wider, enclosing net around the city. A substantial force was left in the citadel, the guard on the Gate of St Paul was strengthened and now, for the first time, a concerted effort was made to blockade the Bridge Gate and the Gate of St George. A crusader in Antioch at the time wrote that from this point on ‘the Turks besieged the city on all sides, so that none of our men dared to go out or come in except by night and secretly’. Kerbogha may have failed to smash his way into Antioch, but now he would squeeze the crusaders into submission.10
With the city surrounded and communications with St Simeon severed, the crusaders were effectively cut off from the outside world. For the next two weeks the second siege of Antioch entered a new phase. Intermittent skirmishing continued: Godfrey lost 200 men during one attempt to raid the Muslim camp outside the Gate of St Paul; Tancred, whom one Latin contemporary described as a ‘very fierce knight who could never have enough Turkish bloodshed’ later made a stealthier attack out of the same gate with ten men and proudly returned with the heads of six slain Muslims. There were many other acts of individual ‘heroism’. At one point, Henry of Esch, who almost drowned in the Orontes during the first siege of Antioch, spotted a group of Muslims setting ladders against an unmanned tower near the Iron Gate. He immediately rushed into the breach with only two men – his relatives Franco and Sigemar of Mechela – in support, and was able to hold off the enemy long enough for reinforcements to arrive. Henry survived the encounter unscathed, but Franco received ‘a very severe and scarcely curable wound to the head’, while Sigemar was ‘pierced through the belly with a sword to its hilt’. Meanwhile, on the slopes of Mount Silpius, the princes took the opportunity presented by the relative lull in fighting to throw up a crude defensive wall of stones and mortar between their upper camp and the citadel, which they then patrolled day and night.11
In reality, after 14 June, Kerbogha adopted a strategy of containment, and as a result a more insidious and debilitating threat began to unman the crusaders – starvation. They had already endured terrible shortages of food through the preceding winter, but now, stranded in a city which had already been stripped of resources by an eight-month siege, they faced a new level of suffering. One Frankish eyewitness recounted:
The blasphemous enemies of God kept us so closely shut up in the city of Antioch that many of us died of hunger, for a small loaf cost a bezant, and I cannot tell you the price of wine. Our men ate the flesh of horses and asses; a hen cost fifteen shillings, an egg two, and a walnut a penny. All things were very dear. So terrible was the famine that men boiled and ate the leaves of figs, vines, thistles and all kinds of trees. Others stewed the dried skins of horses, camels, asses, oxen or buffaloes, which they ate.12
Another contemporary was appalled by the stories of misery told by those who lived through these days:
With the city thus blockaded on all sides, and the [Muslims] barring their way out all round, famine grew so great amongst the Christians that in the absence of bread they . . . even chewed pieces of leather found in homes which had hardened or putrefied for three or six years. The ordinary people were forced to devour their leather shoes because of the pressure of hunger. Some indeed, filled their wretched bellies with roots of stinging nettles and other sorts of woodland plants, cooked and softened on the fire, so they became ill and every day their numbers were lessened by death. Duke Godfrey, as they say who were there, paid out fifteen marks of silver for the flesh of a miserable camel; for a she-goat it is testified beyond doubt that his steward Baldric gave three marks to the seller.13
The First Crusade had now reached its nadir. Tormented by the constant threat of a full-scale Muslim assault, too terrified to contemplate a counterattack yet weakened day by day by death and hunger, a crisis in morale left the Latin army utterly paralysed within Antioch. All the eyewitness sources indicate that total defeat seemed both inevitable and imminent.14 It was under these conditions that one of the expedition’s most extraordinary and intriguing episodes took place – an event that would appear to provide a direct insight into the crusaders’ state of mind.
On the evening of 10 June a bedraggled peasant from Provence named Peter Bartholomew came, unbidden, to seek an audience with Bishop Adhémar of Le Puy and Count Raymond of Toulouse. In the private interview that followed Peter related a remarkable tale, stating that he had, since 30 December 1097, been visited by ‘two men clad in brilliant garments’ on no fewer than five separate occasions. He described these apparitions, saying: ‘The older one had red hair sprinkled with white, a broad and bushy white beard, black eyes and an agreeable countenance, and was of medium height; his younger companion was taller, and fair in form beyond the sons of men.’
These were, he believed, visions of St Andrew the apostle, accompanied by Christ. Peter described the progress of these apparitions in considerable detail. They had begun at the end of 1097 when an earthquake shook Antioch, and continued – as Peter’s travels took him across northern Syria in search of food – in locations as diverse as Edessa, Mamistra and St Simeon. Quite apart from anything else, Peter’s story indicates the lengths to which some crusaders were forced to go to forage for supplies. Peter had, he said, received his final vision that very day, as he sat ‘dejected and listless’ on a rock, having barely escaped alive from the fighting beyond the city walls on the top of Mount Silpius. From his very first appearance, St Andrew had had one very specific message to give Peter. Christian tradition held that, at the time of his crucifixion, Jesus’ body had been pierced in the side by a spear wielded by the Roman soldier Longinus, which became known as the Holy Lance. This most sacred relic, St Andrew revealed, was now buried in the Basilica of St Peter, the main church of Antioch itself. In his earliest vision, back when the city still lay unconquered, Peter, still clad in his nightshirt, had been miraculously spirited past Muslim guards into the midst of the basilica and shown the Lance’s exact resting place. Peter was charged with revealing the relic’s location to the crusader princes so that it might be recovered once Antioch fell, and then used as a standard, for, the apostle said, ‘he who carries this lance in battle shall never be overcome by the enemy’. But, Peter claimed, he had been too frightened and intimidated to tell his story, even though St Andrew returned again and again to castigate him for his inactivity. Now, finally, in the crusade’s darkest hour, he had decided to come forward.15
Fantastical as Peter’s tale may sound today, saintly visions and empowered relics were firmly established elements in the Christian cosmology of the eleventh century. Western European society had been conditioned to believe that saints – the sanctified dead – could act as intercessors in heaven for ordinary Christians living on earth, petitioning God for aid on their behalf and appearing through visions and miracles to manifest his divine will on earth. The physical remnants of these venerated Christians’ lives – including parts of their body and objects that they had touched – were deeply revered. These relics were tangible foci of sanctity, mobile powerhouses of spiritual authority and intervention. Where a relic went, so the presence of the saint followed and thus, also, the power of God. Of all the relics in the Christian world, an item from Christ’s own life was considered to be the most precious and powerful, so the potential significance of the Holy Lance was immeasurable. We should not for one minute imagine that belief in the efficacy and reality of this seemingly eccentric ideological framework was limited to the credulous poor. Kings, counts, popes and bishops venerated saints and their relics. Bishop Adhémar brought a small piece of wood, which he believed had been part of the cross upon which Christ was crucified, with him on crusade; Raymond of Toulouse carried a chalice that had belonged to St Robert of Chaise-Dieu, a celebrated holy man and founder of a Benedictine monastery. The crusaders had also been picking up new relics throughout their journey. A priest in Robert of Flanders’ contingent actually stole an arm of St George from a Byzantine monastery. When he died the relic eventually found its way into the possession of Robert himself, who then became so devoted to the saint that he began styling himself ‘the son of St George’.16
Peter Bartholomew’s revelations about the location of the Holy Lance came at a time when spiritual fervour was near boiling point – as one eyewitness remarked in mid-June, ‘now reported revelations of our comrades became rife’ – but at first his story met with a rather mixed reception. Even Raymond of Aguilers, chaplain to the count of Toulouse, and the firmest advocate of the Lance’s authenticity and power among the eyewitness crusader writers, admitted that at the end of their interview ‘The Bishop [Adhémar] considered the story fraudulent, but the count immediately believed it and placed Peter Bartholomew in the custody of his chaplain, Raymond [of Aguilers].’17
In many ways, Bishop Adhémar’s scepticism was quite understandable. The Latin Church and its clergy certainly accepted that saints might appear in visions and manifest miracles through their relics, but they were also keen to validate the authenticity of such stories very carefully. Such proof was, of course, not easy to come by. Often the decision to accept or condemn was made on the basis of the visionary’s social status and his willingness to swear a sacred oath in support of his story. On this basis, Peter – a poor servant in the employ of the Provençal knight William Peyre of Cunhlat – started off at a disadvantage in comparison, for example, to the priest Stephen of Valence, although one source does record that, like the latter, ‘Peter came forward and swore the whole story was quite true.’ The real problem, as Adhémar must have known, was that a Holy Lance was already sitting in the relic collection of the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople. According to Greek tradition, the Lance had been discovered in Jerusalem by St Helena in the early fourth century, and then brought to Constantinople some 400 years later. Naturally, therefore, Adhémar greeted Peter’s tale with caution.18
Even so, by the time Kerbogha began redeploying his forces to encircle Antioch on 14 June, Raymond of Toulouse had decided that a search for the Lance must be made. Raymond of Aguilers, who played an intimate part in these events, wrote a feverishly detailed account of what took place:
On [14 June] twelve men and Peter Bartholomew collected the appropriate tools and began to dig in the church of the Blessed Peter, following the expulsion of all other Christians. The bishop of Orange, Raymond of Aguilers, author of this work, Raymond of [Toulouse], Pons of Balazun, and Farald of Thouars were among the twelve. We had been digging until evening when some gave up hope of unearthing the Lance. In the meantime, after the count had gone to guard the citadel, we persuaded fresh workers to replace the weary diggers and for a time they dug furiously.
But the youthful Peter Bartholomew, seeing the exhaustion of our workers, stripped his outer garments and, clad only in a shirt and barefooted, dropped into the hole. He then begged us to pray to God to return His Lance to the crusaders so as to bring strength and victory to His people. Finally, in His mercy, the lord showed us his Lance and I, Raymond, the author of this book, kissed the point of the Lance as it barely protruded from the ground. What great joy and exultation then filled the city.19
In physical terms, the relic ‘discovered’ by Peter was probably little more than a small shard of metal, but, initially, most First Crusaders wholeheartedly accepted its authenticity. Adhémar may have continued to harbour some doubts, but among the majority of the princes and throughout the massed ranks of the army the Lance enjoyed a rapturous reception. One Latin eyewitness recalled that ‘across all the city there was boundless rejoicing’, while another Frankish chronicler remarked that a ‘great euphoria seized the city’ as the native Greek, Armenian and Syrian population of Antioch rushed to join the celebrations. The discovery of such an extraordinarily powerful relic, coming at the very moment at which the crusade had seemed to face certain annihilation, was interpreted by many as an irrefutable indication of God’s renewed support for the expedition.
Traditionally, modern historians have drawn a clear, almost unwavering, connection between the Lance’s discovery and the events that followed, arguing that, from the edge of defeat, the crusaders were galvanised into action by the Lance’s electrifying impact. With morale rejuvenated, they elected to pursue a bold, aggressive and extremely dangerous strategy – to break out of the city and confront Kerbogha’s army head on. Hans Eberhard Mayer, one of the greatest living authorities on the crusading movement, has written: ‘The immediate effects of the discovery were enormous. The army’s morale was raised and all were united in the urgent determination to break the blockade and destroy Kerbogha.’20
This approach does have a solid basis in evidence – in short, we believe that the crusaders were directly inspired to act by the Holy Lance because that is precisely what they tell us. Later that year, on 11 September 1098, the crusader princes declared in a letter to the pope: ‘We were so comforted and strengthened by [the Lance’s] discovery and by so many other divine revelations that some of us who had been discouraged and fearful beforehand, then became courageous and resolute to fight, and encouraged each other.’21
The Gesta Francorum, written by an anonymous southern Italian Norman crusader, has done even more to shape our opinion. Widely circulated and often copied in the Middle Ages, this eyewitness account has come to exert an almost inescapable influence over our own modern reading of the First Crusade. Crucially, the anonymous author of this text, having just described the unearthing of the Holy Lance, recorded that ‘from that hour we decided on a plan of attack, and all our leaders forthwith held a council’.22From these words, one is almost left imagining the crusaders – their zealous blood boiling with battle hunger – sprinting from the Basilica of St Peter, straight out of the city gates and into combat. But this impassioned image is deeply misleading. The Holy Lance was discovered on 14 June 1098, yet the crusaders did not go into battle until 28 June. Two whole weeks separate these events.
Precise evidence for the period is lacking, but a reconstruction of this shadowy hiatus can be attempted. The crusaders would have been in no mood to hang around because food was, day by day, becoming scarcer in the city and many Franks were beginning to starve. It also seems unlikely that the crusaders would have needed two weeks to prepare for battle, given that they had, back in February of that same year, defeated Ridwan of Aleppo with just a few days’ notice. Peter Bartholomew did issue a series of proclamations after having received a new visitation from St Andrew and Christ during the night of 15/16 June. These included the recommendation that all crusaders ‘turn from sin to God and offer five alms because of the five wounds of the Lord’. Raymond of Toulouse, who organised the collection of these donations, amassed quite a fortune as a result. The Franks were also instructed to celebrate the discovery of the Lance on 21 June, although we have no idea how widely this was observed. Even so, no particular or dramatic event prevented the crusaders from going to battle.23
We can then explain the delay of two weeks that followed 14 June only by accepting that, while the discovery of the Holy Lance certainly bolstered Frankish morale, it was not enough to convince them to go immediately into battle against such terrible odds. This would mean that the unearthing of the relic was not the key turning point in the second siege of Antioch, much less a watershed in the fortunes of the entire crusade. To understand when and why the Franks decided to risk battle on 28 June we must consider other factors.
The crusaders had, since late 1097, been expecting Byzantine reinforcements to arrive at Antioch, possibly under the command of the Greek emperor himself, Alexius I Comnenus. For their part, the Byzantines had been busy trying to exploit the damage done by the crusaders to Seljuq power in Asia Minor. In the early spring of 1098 Alexius sent a fleet, under the command of his brother-in-law John Doukas, into the Mediterranean to mop up pockets of Turkish resistance along the west coast at Smyrna and the city of Ephesus, once a grand Roman metropolis. John then made a break inland, overrunning the famous spring-town of Hierapolis, before making camp at Philomelium. By early June, Alexius had marched an army from Constantinople to rendezvous with John. This two-pronged sweep brought much of the south-west quarter of Asia Minor back under Byzantine control.
According to his daughter and biographer Anna Comnena, Alexius was then at last ready to march on Antioch to be reunited with the Franks. But this was not to be. Around 20 June a rather forlorn group of travellers arrived out of the east at Philomelium. After deserting his comrades at Antioch on 11 June and taking ship from St Simeon, William of Grandmesnil landed at Alexandretta. There he found another deserter, Stephen of Blois, who, on the basis of William’s story and his own surveillance of Kerbogha’s army, decided that the time was ripe for quitting the perils of northern Syria. Together they set sail for Tarsus, and from there continued their journey overland, only to come across Alexius at Philomelium. Not surprisingly, they painted a grim picture of events at Antioch, apparently telling the emperor that ‘the Franks had been reduced to a position of the utmost danger; in fact, they swore on oath that the collapse was complete’. The Latin sources that recounted this meeting imagined Count Stephen making even more dire predictions: ‘I tell you truly that Antioch has been taken, but the citadel has not fallen, and our men are all closely besieged, and I expect by this time they have been killed by the Turks. Go back, therefore, as fast as you can, in case they find you and your followers.’
In truth, Alexius may never have planned to make an immediate move to Antioch – from his perspective it made more sense to hold his ground in Anatolia and advance to claim Antioch only once the crusaders had done the hard work of securing its downfall – but now he faced a clear choice. Naturally, his absolute priority was the safety of Constantinople and the empire. If the crusaders had already been overrun then he could do little for them. If he set off for Antioch only for the city to fall while he was en route his army might well be caught by a resurgent wave of Turkish aggression and obliterated. With the First Crusade on the brink of collapse, the risks involved in making a headlong rescue attempt were simply too great. Despite voluble protestations from a group of Latin mercenaries within his army – among them Bohemond’s own brother, Guy – the emperor made his choice. An immediate evacuation of the entire area was ordered, and a scorched-earth policy set in motion, so that any advancing Muslim force would be unable to forage for food. With the fields of Anatolia aflame, Byzantium turned its back on the crusaders.24
We cannot be certain that news of Alexius’ decision reached the Franks in Antioch before 28 June. Albert of Aachen believed that it did, writing that ‘the terrible news of the emperor turning back and his army dispersing sped across the ramparts of Antioch and afflicted the pilgrims’ hearts with great grief and shook much of the boldness from their spirits’. But Albert was not an eyewitness and his chronology could well be at fault. A messenger would literally have had to sprint back to northern Syria for it to be possible. Even so, as the days of June slipped by and Kerbogha’s iron grip around Antioch tightened, the Franks must have begun to give up hope of reinforcement.25
If this reading of events is correct, then by the fourth week in June the crusaders were in desperate straits – weak with starvation, surrounded by enemies and abandoned by their allies. It is in this context that we must examine the strange and seemingly incongruous events of 24 June. On around that date, the crusader princes sent two envoys into the midst of Kerbogha’s camp. They chose as ambassadors Peter the Hermit, disgraced deserter and demagogue to the masses, and an interpreter named Herluin. At least three eyewitnesses, actually in Antioch at the time, recorded that Peter carried a bold message of extraordinary defiance. Even though it was they, the Franks, who were trapped, seemingly powerless, within Antioch, Peter reportedly confronted Kerbogha with an ultimatum, saying, ‘Our leaders, as one man, require you to take yourselves off quickly from the land which belongs to God and the Christians, for the Blessed Peter converted it long ago to the faith of Christ by his preaching. But they give you permission to take away all your goods . . . whithersoever you may choose.’26
Not surprisingly, Kerbogha simply laughed in their faces, warned that death or captivity awaited unless they surrendered immediately and converted to Islam, and sent the envoys back to Antioch empty handed. In reality, the crusade princes would have known that such unrealistic demands were virtually guaranteed to be rejected out of hand. Of course, our sources were not really trying to portray this as an episode of serious negotiation, but rather to show the crusaders as wildly defiant in the face of extreme adversity. Perhaps this was the truth of the matter – the envoys’ mission may simply have been a propaganda exercise. Other Latin writers who were not present at Antioch presented the embassy in slightly more realistic terms:
They announced to the Turks through a certain Peter the Hermit, that unless they peacefully evacuated the region which at one time belonged to the Christians, they would surely begin war against them. But, if they wished it to be done otherwise, war could be waged by five or ten or twenty, or by 100 soldiers chosen from each side, so that with not all fighting at the same time, such a great multitude would not die, and the party which overcame the other would take the city and kingdom freely without controversy. This was proposed, but not accepted by the Turks, who, confident in their large numbers and courage, thought that they could overcome and destroy us.27
This suggestion of a champions’ trial by battle is intriguing, not least because Fulcher seems to imply that, even in this crusading context, the avoidance of excessive bloodshed was morally desirable. Nonetheless, it was still basically an unrealistic proposal, because Kerbogha had no reason to risk giving up his numerical superiority. In fact, if we accept the testimony of the crusader sources, we must conclude that the princes were not here engaging in genuine diplomacy. Peter’s embassy could then be variously explained as a morale-boosting exercise, a spying mission to gauge the strength and disposition of Kerbogha’s forces or perhaps simply a delaying tactic.
Only in less partisan, non-Latin sources do we receive any hint that something much more serious might have been going on behind the scenes. Matthew of Edessa, an Armenian Christian near-contemporary, described what he believed happened in June 1098:
[Kerbogha’s] army arrived [at Antioch]. Being seven times larger than the Frankish force, their troops violently besieged and harassed it. Then the Franks became threatened with a famine, because provisions in the city had long become exhausted. More and more hard-pressed, they resolved to obtain from Kerbogha a promise of amnesty on condition that they deliver the city into his hands and return to their own country.
A later Arabic source would seem to corroborate this story, recording that ‘after taking Antioch, the Franks camped there for twelve days without food. The wealthy ate their horses and the poor ate carrion and leaves from the trees. Their leaders, faced with this situation, wrote to Kerbogha to ask for safe conduct through his territory, but he refused, saying: “You will have to fight your way out.”’28
This evidence has been widely discounted by historians on the assumption that the crusaders, their morale buoyed up on a rising wave of pious fervour after the discovery of the Holy Lance and already committed to battle, would never have seriously considered seeking terms of surrender. But, in fact, the decision to take the risk of sending Peter the Hermit on an embassy to Kerbogha makes more sense if we accept that he was dispatched to explore the real possibility of negotiating a surrender. On 24 June the crusader princes found themselves trapped in a corner – isolated and exhausted, their armies had finally been brought face to face with the spectre of defeat and extermination. They had marched across the known world not to conquer Antioch but to recover the Holy City of Jerusalem and perhaps now, in desperation, their leaders, at least, were prepared to consider any option that might allow them to reach Palestine alive. Had they given up Antioch, but been permitted to leave northern Syria, this still might have been possible.29
When Kerbogha, from his position of strategic dominance, refused to accept anything short of unconditional surrender, that door closed. The crusaders were left with a clear choice: fight or face death or captivity. Albert of Aachen, who based his account on the personal recollections of men who lived through the second siege of Antioch, recorded:
The Christian people were besieged and began to suffer from shortage of supplies and lack of bread. They did not have the strength to suffer these things any longer, so great and small consulted together, saying it was better to die in battle than to perish from so cruel a famine, growing weaker from day to day until overcome by death.30
As the last days of June approached, the crusaders did, without doubt, make a profoundly courageous decision – to face Kerbogha’s horde in open battle. Looking back with hindsight, the partisan crusade writers may well have judged it inappropriate to record that before this they contemplated surrender.
The controversial suggestion that the Franks were not primarily or directly inspired to fight Kerbogha by the discovery of the Holy Lance is potentially unsettling, because it threatens to undermine a cornerstone in our accepted image of the First Crusaders. The remarkable impact of the Holy Lance has long been held up as a fundamental proof of their overwhelming religious devotion. Historians have argued that it was only the inspirational power of the crusaders’ faith – their unshakeable conviction that they were acting with divine sanction – that stirred them from anxious slumber. If the Franks did indeed spend much of the period between 14 and 28 June in an agony of fearful indecision, and perhaps even sought to negotiate the surrender of Antioch, then we are left looking at a subtly different species of crusader: one for whom spiritual devotion was still an extremely powerful motivating force, but perhaps not an all-conquering inspiration. Blind, ecstatic faith did not send the crusaders running into battle. Instead, with all other options exhausted, trapped in an intolerable predicament, their strength failing, they decided to place their trust in their God and risk everything in one last-ditch effort.