The Feast of the Nativity passed at Marrat in miserable inactivity. Most crusaders, from knights to the poorest peasants, were becoming increasingly disgruntled. Once the meagre spoils of the recent sack had been exhausted, hunger once again began to threaten. As far as the mass of crusaders was concerned, the expedition would survive only if it began moving south with a rejuvenated unity of purpose, towards Jerusalem. Popular pressure was growing within both the Provençal and southern Italian Norman camps, for the princes to put aside their differences and focus instead upon the interests of the crusade. Both Raymond and Bohemond were facing the real possibility of open rebellion or desertion.
Many Provençals believed Raymond should strike out for Jerusalem regardless of what the other crusade princes might do. They wanted him, ‘the recipient of the Holy Lance . . . to make himself leader and lord of the army’, but they warned that, if he were not willing to restart the expedition, he should ‘hand over the Holy Lance to the masses, and they would continue the march to Jerusalem under the Lord’s leadership’. The threat was obvious – do something to solve the crisis or risk losing popular support. To the masses, Raymond’s prestige had been boosted through his association with the Holy Lance, their totem of success and divine sanction, but his role as its guardian also conveyed a new burden of heightened expectations. If Raymond did not prove himself to be unswervingly dedicated to the Lance’s cause – that of the crusade – then the prestige he had gained might actually do him more harm than good.
Under this acute pressure, Raymond took two steps to appease his followers. In the last days of December he announced his intention to march south towards Jerusalem in just over two weeks. Bohemond, having already expressed his refusal to recommence the expedition before Easter 1099, decided to leave for Antioch a few days later. With no deal brokered with the Provençals, Bohemond chose to withdraw his troops from Marrat, deeming it impossible to maintain safely such an isolated foothold in the Jabal as-Summaq. After this, Raymond performed a further exercise in public relations, announcing a second general council of the crusader princes to discuss the expedition’s resumption, this time to be held at Rugia, the Provençal base. By these two steps Raymond reasserted his ascendancy among the princes. On the surface at least he seemed to be taking the moral high ground in the dispute with Bohemond, and the call to council at Rugia rather than Antioch conveyed an obvious underlying message about his dominant authority.
The truth was, however, that even in the first days of January 1099 Raymond was still trying to fulfil both of his goals – territorial gains in northern Syria and leadership of the crusade. With his popular critics temporarily assuaged, he began to consolidate his hold over Marrat. Together with Peter of Narbonne, the newly appointed bishop of Albara, he set about ‘Christianising’ the town – converting mosques and erecting crosses – and ‘determining both the number and choice of personnel’ for its Frankish garrison. Raymond may have been preparing to march south towards Jerusalem, but he still had every intention of holding on to his carefully constructed enclave in the Jabal as-Summaq and of continuing to challenge Bohemond’s position in Antioch.1
Around 4 January 1099 the princes gathered at Rugia for one last-ditch attempt to resolve the dispute over Antioch, but, not surprisingly, neither Bohemond nor Raymond would agree to budge an inch. Raymond’s next outlandish act probably explains why he bothered to call the abortive council in the first place. With all the princes gathered together, he sought to buy their support. His chaplain recalled that ‘Raymond offered Godfrey and Robert of Normandy 10,000 solidi apiece, 6,000 to Robert of Flanders, 5,000 to Tancred, and proportionately to others,’ a considerable investment. He may have dressed this up as financial sponsorship of the crusading ideal, but in essence Raymond was trying to purchase confirmation of his status as leader of the expedition with hard cash. In fact, only two of the four named princes seem to have taken the bait at this point. From mid-January Robert, duke of Normandy and his men joined forces with the southern French. More surprisingly, so too did Tancred. Bohemond’s nephew had been gradually moving out of his uncle’s shadow since the summer of 1097. Now he made a full break and seems actually to have entered service with Raymond.
Godfrey, meanwhile, maintained his neutrality and Robert of Flanders, who had followed Raymond into the Jabal as-Summaq, now seems to have broken with the Provençal camp. Perhaps disillusioned by Raymond’s acquisitiveness, Robert returned to Antioch with Bohemond. All the same, Count Raymond came out of the council of Rugia in a strengthened position. He may not yet have been acknowledged as the crusade’s outright leader, but he was now the dominant force within the expedition.2
Not everything went Raymond’s way in the first week of January 1099. While he was occupied at Rugia, events at Marrat took an unexpected and shocking turn. The lines of supply sustaining the Provençal presence there had always been tenuous, but with the advent of the New Year they collapsed. The poor, who had already endured a hungry Christmas, were now left destitute. Suddenly it seemed that the horrors of starvation that had ravaged the Franks one year earlier outside Antioch had returned. Now at Marrat, without princely guidance, the most destitute crusaders went to appalling lengths to alleviate their hunger. Some, desperate to find money wherever they could, ‘ripped up the bodies of the [Muslim] dead, because they used to find coins hidden in their entrails’. Others took even more savage steps: ‘Here our men suffered from excessive hunger. I shudder to say that many of our men, terribly tormented by the madness of starvation, cut pieces of flesh from the buttocks of Saracens lying there dead. These pieces they cooked and ate, savagely devouring the flesh while it was insufficiently roasted.’ Another account that is perhaps even more disturbing asserted that, ‘food shortage became so acute that the Christians ate with gusto many rotten Saracen bodies which they had pitched into the swamps three weeks before. This spectacle disgusted as many crusaders as it did strangers.’
This cannibalism at Marrat is among the most infamous of all the atrocities perpetrated by the First Crusaders. These acts were so extreme that, in contrast to the usually offhand contemporary descriptions of violence, both key sources here show real dismay and revulsion. To the men writing about the crusades, some forms of violence – holy war carried out in the name of God – were acceptable, while all others deserved condemnation. On this occasion the line of acceptability was crossed. The division between glorification and censure, the exaltation of wholesale massacre and denunciation of cannibalism, might appear arbitrary, perhaps even simplistic, when today the very notion of religious warfare might be considered an abomination. But, on the question of Christian violence, the moral and spiritual code that governed medieval European society differed vastly from that which prevails today. Thus, before judging the nature of crusading violence, we must remember that in the Middle Ages, an era of endemic savagery, warfare was regulated by a particular, medieval sense of morality.
Terrible as it is to acknowledge, the horrors perpetrated at Marrat did have some positive effects on the crusaders’ short-term prospects. News of the Franks’ brutality soon reached nearby Muslim towns and cities. One crusader noted that ‘the infidels spread stories of these and other inhuman acts of the [crusaders], but we were unaware that God had made us an object of terror’. This, combined with tales of the Latin sack of Antioch, was enough to convince many Muslim commanders and garrisons that the crusaders were bloodthirsty barbarians, invincible savages who could not be resisted. In the coming months, most quickly decided that it would be better to accept costly and humiliating truces with the Franks rather than face them in battle.3
The mob back at Marrat had another surprise for Raymond of Toulouse when he returned from Rugia around 7 January. In his absence, Peter of Narbonne had begun preparations to garrison the town ‘with knights and footmen from the army’. But, when news of this plan spread through the masses and it became clear that despite his promises Raymond had every intention of retaining Marrat and perpetuating the dispute with Bohemond, open rebellion broke out. The poor made a startling demonstration of civil disobedience. To prevent any further delays or arguments, they started pulling down Marrat’s walls and fortifications, stone by stone, intending to leave it defenceless and untenable:
Thereupon, even the sick and weak, arising from their beds and hobbling along on sticks, came all the way to the walls. An emaciated person could roll back and forth and push [stones] from the walls. The bishop of Albara and Raymond’s friends, exhorting and pleading against such vandalism, went about the town, but those who had scrambled from the walls and hidden at their approach were quick to resume their work as soon as the guards passed by them.4
In reality, the mob may well have done serious damage to Marrat’s walls but could hardly have razed its defences to the ground in such a short space of time. More significant for Raymond was the unmistakable message carried in their actions: no longer could he contest the domination of northern Syria with Bohemond while also playing the role of an idealised crusade leader dedicated to the recapture of Jerusalem. The time had come for one path to be chosen and Raymond took the road to the Holy City. Putting the needs of the crusade first, he made no attempt to refortify Marrat, effectively turning his back on the Jabal as-Summaq, for the time being at least.
Over the next few days Raymond led forceful raids south towards the nearby town of Kafartab in search of badly needed food for the poor. By 13 January his army had just enough supplies to march out of the region. As a powerful reminder of his renewed dedication to the crusade, Raymond chose to leave Marrat in religious procession: ‘On the appointed day the count, his clerics, and the bishop of Albara departed and trudged along barefooted, calling out for God’s mercy and the saints’ protection, as flames set by the departing Christians mounted the ruins of Marrat. In the rear marched Tancred with forty knights and many footmen.’
Within two days they were joined by Robert of Normandy. After countless months of delay, dispute and distraction the expedition had at last resumed its journey south towards Jerusalem. The First Crusade looked set to enter its final act.5
The expedition had now reached a turning point. Raymond’s decision to march south out of the Jabal as-Summaq proved so popular that he seemed set to become the unquestioned leader of the entire crusade. But he still faced some thorny problems. His dispute with Bohemond lay unresolved and the schism between them was now probably irreparable, but two other princes, Godfrey of Bouillon and Robert of Flanders, still remained at Antioch with their armies. Without their strength and support, Raymond had little hope of forcing his way through to Palestine and Jerusalem. He also had to determine a strategy for the journey ahead.
Eighteen months earlier the crusaders had crossed Asia Minor with relative speed by, for the most part, avoiding confrontation. With the exception of Nicaea, they had not sought to capture nor garrison most of the settlements passed. Upon reaching Syria, however, the expedition had been brought to a standstill by the Latins’ determination to seize Antioch and its environs. Now a choice had to be made: the road to Jerusalem was littered with Muslim towns and cities; if the crusaders sought to conquer each and every one their progress south would be interminably slow. But there was an alternative: with the Muslim world of Syria thrown into disarray by Kerbogha’s defeat at Antioch and cowed by the recent brutality at Marrat, there was every possibility that the crusaders might make a rapid, purposeful advance on Jerusalem, negotiating advantageous, even profitable, truces with local Islamic rulers as they went.
For Raymond of Toulouse, this approach had one major flaw – it failed to reward his smouldering territorial ambitions. It appeared that Raymond had turned away from the squabble over Antioch, recommitting himself to the crusading ideal, refocusing upon Jerusalem. But actually he had, at the very least, left a Provençal garrison at Albara and probably harboured plans to consolidate his hold over the Jabal as-Summaq at a later date. As the crusade began moving south, it soon became clear that Raymond had not been cleansed of his desire for conquest, and soon he was once again torn between his two conflicting passions – the power of leadership and rewards of territorial gain. He may have been poised to lead the crusade in January 1099, but his actions in the first four months of that year would determine once and for all whether he could retain that position.
In the early weeks of the march south from Marrat, it seemed that Raymond had resolved to focus on the march to Jerusalem. Even before leaving the Jabal as-Summaq the crusaders began to receive delegations from nearby Muslim powers, and for the time being Raymond was happy to negotiate truces. His chaplain remarked: ‘News of the resumption of the crusade caused nearby rulers to send Arab nobles to Raymond with prayers and many offerings and promises of future submission as well as free and saleable goods.’
The first settlement to offer terms was Shaizar, an imposing fortress perched on a rocky spur above a bend in the Orontes river and held by the Banu Munqidh, an Arab family who had long railed against the Seljuq domination of Syria. Being less than heartbroken over the defeats suffered by the Turks at Antioch, and judging the Franks to be the new pre-eminent power in the region, the Munqidhs quickly offered safe passage through their lands and ‘to sell them horses and food’. Their approach was perfectly understandable – simply put, they were hoping to get the crusaders out of their lands as quickly and peacefully as possible to protect Shaizar from assault and destruction. The crusaders’ reaction is more problematic. In earlier phases of the expedition our Latin sources presented the crusaders as brutal xenophobes, possessed of a seemingly psychopathic hatred of Islam, conditioned by papal rhetoric and popular preaching to view all Muslims as sub-human. Now ‘suddenly’ the Franks were willing to negotiate with the ‘enemy’, albeit on this occasion from a dominant and exploitative position.
The truth is that the crusaders were, when it suited their purposes, willing to adopt a more pragmatic approach to their dealings with Islam. This was not simply dependent upon the ethnic or religious background of the Muslims encountered. While some crusaders were conscious of the differences between Seljuq Turks, Arabs and Egyptians, this did not dictate their attitude, as negotiation took place with all three groups. This adaptable outlook is unlikely to have been the preserve of the ‘enlightened’ aristocracy, as no popular outcry within the crusader host is recorded. Eyewitness Latin accounts of the expedition, written on the whole by clergymen, are reluctant to admit the full extent of this ‘diplomatic’ contact. Their monochromatic presentation of relations with Islam may have blinded us to some of its subtler nuances. The First Crusaders were capable of compartmentalising their feelings towards the Muslims of Syria and Palestine. They could sheath the sword of holy war when necessary.6
The détente with Shaizar soon brought benefits for the crusaders. On the second day travelling through Munqidh territory their hunger was finally assuaged by the capture of a large herd of cattle. Wealthier Latins were also able to buy fresh horses at the markets of Shaizar and another nearby town, Homs, whose emir had been led to defeat by Kerbogha in the Great Battle of Antioch. A marked improvement in the crusaders’ prospects was observed as ‘day by day the poor regained health, the knights became stronger, the army seemed to multiply, and the farther we marched the greater were God’s benefits’.
These bounties continued when the Latins found the town of Raphania abandoned, its ‘gardens full of vegetables and houses full of food’. After the rigours experienced at Marrat, Raymond wisely decided to take this leg of the journey slowly, allowing his army to recover its vitality. In all, they spent ten leisurely days traversing ground that could have been covered in two. Even so, Raymond sought to protect and order his forces during the march, once it became apparent that some of the poorer stragglers were being ambushed by Muslim robbers. Raymond himself took command of the rearguard, while Robert of Normandy, Tancred and Peter of Narbonne held the vanguard.7
Finally, as they neared the south-eastern reaches of the Jabal Ansariyah, the verdant uplands that separate the Orontes river valley from the coast, a definitive choice of route had to be taken. One road to Jerusalem struck inland, heading to the east of Mount Lebanon and then south via Nablus, but this would have taken the crusade past Damascus, one of Syria’s most powerful Muslim cities. A council soon decided instead to strike west for the coast and then follow the Mediterranean south into Palestine. This route had one massive advantage: it allowed the crusaders to benefit from naval aid. Reinforcements, food and military supplies could all be received by sea, and rapid channels of communication with the other Franks at Antioch and the Byzantines might be established via the Venetian, Genoese and English fleets now plying the waters of the eastern Mediterranean. For this approach to be fully effective, however, the crusaders would have to occupy ports along the southern Syrian and Palestinian coast to allow ships safe anchorage.8
The road towards the coast took the crusaders through the beautiful fertile valley of al-Bouqia, and here again they spent time gathering supplies. To the south the valley rises into the snow-capped peaks of the Lebanese mountains, but to the north it is overlooked by the foothills of the Jabal Ansariyah, where today still stands perhaps the greatest fortification to be wrought by human hand in any age – Krak des Chevaliers. Situated on a steep-sided promontory, and thus rendered almost impregnable on three sides, Krak was constructed by the Latin Knights of St John, the Hospitallers, through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Pouring vast sums of money into the project, employing the finest architects and masons, they created an almost flawless expression of medieval castle technology. Today Krak survives as the most perfectly preserved monument of the crusading age, its vast twin walls enclosing a complex system of defences, with space to billet 2,000 troops. Back in 1099 only a small, relatively rudimentary fortification – Hisn al-Akrad – stood where Krak would later be built. Even so, with their stronghold positioned high above the al-Bouqia valley, its garrison felt protected enough to unleash a series of skirmishing attacks upon the crusaders as they passed on 28 January. Enraged by their audacity, Raymond set off to launch a frontal assault on the castle. He made little headway and at one point was almost killed when separated from his men, but the sheer ferocity of the Frankish attack terrified the Muslims. On the following morning the crusaders awoke to find the fortress abandoned, as ‘only the spoils of war and a ghost castle awaited us’. With food once again in plentiful supply, they passed a further two weeks in al-Bouqia.
News of this latest Latin success against a fortification that had been considered impregnable sent further shock waves through the local Muslim world. The emir of Homs rushed to confirm his treaty with Raymond, sending gifts of horses and gold. Fakhr al-Mulk ibn-Ammar, the Arab emir of Tripoli, one of the great coastal cities to the south, was similarly impressed. Like the Banu Munqidh of Shaizar, his family had for years clung on to independence from Seljuq Turkish rule and was more than willing to purchase safety from the passing crusader army. The emir duly sent Raymond ten horses, four mules and some gold as gifts to open negotiations for a truce.9
Up to this point, Raymond of Toulouse had enjoyed considerable success. In his first month as nominal leader of the expedition the army had made slow but sustainable progress south. For once, his men were well fed and in good spirits, and Raymond’s position and status seemed increasingly secure. But he was actually facing a real crisis. Riding the wave of earlier crusader successes, the count had reached the coast with a relatively small army. Even with the support of Robert of Normandy and Tancred, he commanded, at best, 5,000 combatants. By February 1099, his army had reached the limit of military viability: to march any further south without reconnecting with the other crusading forces would be an extremely risky proposition, inviting death and destruction. In a sense Raymond had taken a gamble when he marched south from Marrat. He had hoped that this move would galvanise the other princes still at Antioch, forcing them to rejoin an expedition that was now under his direction. Raymond’s piecemeal progress to the coast had given them plenty of time to catch up. But, as he neared Tripoli, there was still no sign of Godfrey, Bohemond or Robert of Flanders. They had called his bluff.