CHAPTER 12
There can be no doubt that burning religious conviction underlay the success of the First Crusade. Time and again when all seemed lost, at Antioch and at Jerusalem particularly, the army rallied to God’s cause. The deep conviction that they were the servants of God underlay the boldness with which they tackled and surprised such formidable enemies as the Egyptians, when all rational calculation would have advised against it. Indeed, not the least of the factors which made for their success was the inability of the Middle Eastern powers to comprehend this all or nothing mentality. But burning zeal has to be controlled, disciplined and sustained. Ecclesiastical power alone was not enough, and as in Western society generally so on the crusade, power was exercised by an alliance of church, in the person of Adhémar, and state in the persons of the princes. When the ambitions, hesitations and doubts of the lay leaders disrupted the crusade and ecclesiastical authority collapsed with the death of Adhémar, the army was plunged into crisis from which it was rescued only by a zealot minority represented by Peter Bartholemew in alliance with the count of Toulouse. They owed their power to articulating the feelings of the overwhelming mass of the crusaders of all ranks, and when Peter was discredited Godfrey was able to harness this raw power. That religious zeal had a very narrow and material focus – to liberate Jerusalem. Later crusades would never suffer from such tunnel vision, but this enormously concentrated the efforts of the army in contrast to their successors in 1101 and 1147.1 For ideological cohesion was a rare phenomenon in the eleventh century, as Gregory VII had discovered, and it is hard to see how any wider objective could have carried the concentrated appeal of Jerusalem.
But their spirit and organisation could never have succeeded without help. Byzantine aid was of enormous assistance. At the siege of Nicaea it was very much in evidence, but thereafter it appeared to dwindle. This was a false perspective, for Alexius’s real service to the crusaders was to support them from Cyprus which formed an offshore base for the siege of Antioch and operations in North Syria (see fig. 3). In addition, Alexius seems to have committed a sizable fleet to their assistance – far more important than Tatikios’s small contingent. Without Byzantine help it is difficult to see how the western fleets could have operated so successfully. The reason for this enormous Byzantine investment was that this was a joint enterprise. The whole Armenian strategy promised the restoration of Byzantine power in the old dominion of Philaretus and the collapse of the Seljuk dominion in western Asia Minor opened the way for the reconquest of the southern part of the sub-continent. So when it came to a dispute Alexius could rightly say that he had played his part but in the end the greatest prize eluded him, for the decision to turn back at Philomelium gave Bohemond his opportunity and a moral justification for the dislike of the Greeks which was never far below the surface amongst the Westerners.
And Byzantine help had its influence in another way. The crusade was enormously assisted by the divisions of Islam. Had the Seljuk dominion of less than ten years before still existed, it is impossible to see how they could have succeeded. Alexius almost certainly explained the problems of the Turks and the divisions of Islam to his allies, for we know it was his idea to send an embassy to Egypt. But it has to be said that the western princes took their cue skillfully and played the Egyptians well, and applied the idea to other Islamic powers. They were more pragmatic than the stereotype of the crusader in absolute and bitter opposition to all that is Islamic would sugggest. The fanaticism which drove on the great expedition was an underlying force of enormous power but its influence upon events was continual rather than continuous. Nor should we forget that although the Islamic powers were divided, they were each individually very strong and that in every major battle the crusaders fought against odds. No matter how enthusiastic they were, nor how well supported, victory in the clash of arms was never inevitable and to understand that we must turn to more narrowly military factors.
The individual leaders exerted great control over their own armies. Robert of Normandy is one of the failures of history and this casts a shadow over him, but at Dorylaeum he rallied the troops at a crucial moment, and at Ascalon he was at the heart of a charge which swept all before it. This was military ability of a high order. Robert of Flanders was a brave soldier who organised the foraging and gathering of materials at Jerusalem. Godfrey was in the thick of the fighting at the siege of Jerusalem and this was important in an age when leading by example mattered. Bohemond was an able general whose aggressive tactics created the victories over Ridwan and Kerbogah. He made the crusaders use rear-guards – this was by no means an innovation in western war but it was a development which needed discipline and control, and such qualities became more evident in the crusader army as time went on. Bohemond’s genius lay in his aggressiveness – his determination to unsettle the enemy and take them unawares, and this characterises his victories over Ridwan and Kerbogah. He was not a tactical innovator – the real innovation was the use of infantry, and that arose from circumstance as they became better armed and more experienced. The battle against Kerbogah was an infantry battle perforce – it was only at Ascalon that the lessons of careful co-ordination were applied. But Bohemond’s real importance lay in the fact of his appointment as sole commander in moments of crisis. The divisions of the leaders, their determination to head their own armies and do jointly only what was agreed jointly, was the real weakness of this and almost all other crusades. It was their good fortune that when this co-operation was at its newest and their troops at their rawest, they confronted the weakest of their enemies, the Turks of Asia Minor. The nomads were ferocious fighters, but they were not numerous and Kilij Arslan’s tactics depended too heavily on the moral effect of sudden onslaughts. He allowed his men, whose genius lay in mobile warfare, to be caught in slogging matches where numbers counted; in 1101 the Turks would learn patience and close only with a demoralised enemy. It was luck too that when the leaders were at their most divided after the fall of Antioch, the Islamic world was demoralised and quite unable to exploit their problems, so that despite the fragility of their co-operation they pressed on to Jerusalem.
The leaders were able men who managed to work together, though only just. Their real ability showed at its best in sieges. Nicaea, Antioch and Jerusalem were large and well-defended cities such as few westerners had seen before, but the army set about their reduction systematically. Probably the siege of Nicaea helped the leaders to settle a raw army, though at a terrible price in lives. Full credit has never been given to a leadership which perceived the problems of the siege of Antioch and tackled them with enormous persistence and eventual success. The experience at Antioch was an intensification of what they were used to in the West – war of position rather than the formal investment experienced at Nicaea – the strangling of an enemy rather than assault against fortifications. The siege of Jerusalem exemplifies the skills of what was now a highly experienced and coherent grouping of armies, though the passiveness of the defenders contributed. It was not technological innovation which made their sieges so successful. All the instruments they used seem to have been known to their enemies.2 The western approach to war which favoured systematic and often clumsy preparation also favoured good performance in this area. Success was the product of organisation and command above all.
The Franks enjoyed no technical advantages over their enemies. Their western horses may have been rather larger than those of the nomad Turks but probably not significantly so, and they soon died anyway. The Turks, an element in all the armies that they faced, had the short bow which dictated their tactics and which the Franks found difficult to counter. They may even have had a form of quick-firing crossbow unknown to the West. The Franks probably had rather better armour, but in general their weapons were very like those of their enemies.
The outstanding factor on the battlefield was the tactical skill of the Turkish horsemen firing their arrows from horseback. They were always relatively few and this was critical in Asia Minor. In the Caliphate they were the cutting edge of armies and supported by diverse and adaptable forces. The Franks had no technical answer to the problem and their response was precisely what one would expect – the tactical expedient of solidity of formation. This is always desirable in both cavalry and infantry, but very difficult to achieve when there was no formal system of training. In their first battle the Franks found themselves fighting in close ground near Nicaea, which frustrated Turkish tactics. At Dorylaeum the enemy was free to manoeuvre and attacked skillfully, cruelly exposing the Franks who lacked any overall command. But the chances of topography and direction of attack, and the determination and skill of the leaders held the armies together. Thereafter the crusader host became a more coherent group of units and Bohemond was able to use this experience and skill to great advantage at the Lake Battle. Against Kerbogah the same cohesiveness was seen amongst the infantry who were also refined and trained by the experience of war and the lessons of this were applied at Ascalon where a complex marching formation was adopted, and the classic pattern of infantry protecting cavalry marked the final deployment. This was not innovation as such, for similar formations had been used in the West but here it was used with great success.3
It is this growth of the coherence and experience of the crusader host as a whole which was the key to their military success. In many ways their overall organisation and weapons were inferior to those of their enemies and they were ‘away from home’ in a strange climate. But the divisions of their enemies meant that their weaknesses were never exposed fully and they were given time in which they became more and more experienced. Crucially the Turks of Asia Minor failed to stop them. Thereafter what had been a relatively incoherent host, within which some armies were better ordered than others, became more coherent and experienced, and more successful.
In a military sense the crusade was a success. It may not have achieved all that Urban wanted it to achieve in terms of friendship with the Eastern Empire.4 Its success was limited in that it established bare outposts with poor communications with the West and uncertain relations with Eastern Christendom, but that is our viewpoint blessed as we are with hindsight. There was no single will directing the crusade; it was the product of many wills interacting with circumstances, and all that gave it a precarious unity was Jerusalem. To free it was the task they set themselves and to have achieved that was remarkable.
The crusade had little immediate impact on western armies at this time. The twelfth century would see the rise of two distinct tactical developments: the mass charge by cavalry, using couched lances for the maximum shock impact, and the rise of highly effective infantry.5 Discipline and clearly articulated command structures were vital to these developments. Launching a cavalry charge was so difficult even for the Templars with their background of order and discipline that they felt the need to write it all down in detail.6 These developments were only possible because the monarchies of the West more and more used mercenaries and professional commanders who were able to impose an appropriate discipline on the more ‘regular’ forces which formed the cores of their commands. This, combined with the development of the heavier horses, created the classic medieval cavalry charge, and one of its antidotes – disciplined infantry, who in any case became more and more necessary as castles grew more complex. The conditions of the crusade replicated the conditions of common service and experience which made these armies so efficient. Conditions in the crusader states continued to demand constant military activity which had much the same effect, hence the high prestige of the armies of Outremer in the twelfth century. It is possible that the glory and the prestige of the First Crusade helped to impress upon western commanders the need for discipline and coherence in their armies. In 1106 Robert Curthose found himself brought to bay by his brother Henry at Tinchebrai, rather as he had been by his father at Gerberoi in 1079. As then, he decided to risk battle, on a single coherent charge, but he was heavily outnumbered.7However, Henry of Huntingdon says that Robert’s forces fought well and pressed the enemy hard relying on the fact that they were ‘well trained in the wars of Jerusalem’.8 It was indeed a hard training which produced coherent armies and ferocious fighters. It was this, their belief in God and themselves, and their able commanders which gave them the victory in the East.
1 The Crusade of 1101 is the subject of a Swansea Ph.D thesis by Alec Mulinder, which, when complete, should provide valuable insight into the failure of this crusade. The Crusade of 1101 lacked coherence. Its various elements never gathered together and perished separately, largely because they had no clear objective such as the First Crusade found in Jerusalem. They were fighting an enemy, the Turks of Asia Minor, who had learned the lessons of the earlier campaign and refused to be drawn into battle.
2 Here I differ sharply from L. White, ‘The Crusades and the technological thrust of the West’, in V. J. Parry and M. E. Yapp, eds., Parry War, Technology and Society in the Middle East (London, 1975), pp. 97–112, who argues that it was innovation in this area that gave the crusaders their advantage.
3 France, ‘La guerre dans la France féodale’, 193–8.
4 This is not the place to rehearse the debate about Urban’s intentions which are touched on above, pp. 4–5.
5 On the charge see the literature mentioned above, p. 71, n.66, 67, although it must be said that this discussion has focussed far too much on the question of the couched lance and insufficiently on the practical problems of marshalling mounted men – far more important for the rise of shock tactics; on the rise of infantry see J. Boussard, ‘Les mercenaires au xii siècle. Henri II Plantagenet et les origines de l’armée de métier’, Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes 106 (1945–46), 189–224 and Contamine, War in the Middle Ages, pp. 70–3.
6 M. Bennett, ’La Règle du Temple as a military manual, pp. 7–20, draws attention to the sub-units of ten knights under a commander comparable to the conroi discussed by Verbruggen, ‘Tactique militaire’, 161–80.
7 On Gerberoi see above, p. 44; H. W. C. Davis, ‘The battle of Tinchebrai’, English Historical Review, 24 (1909), 728–32, 25 (1910), 295–6 estimates that Robert had only 6,000 with 700 cavalry to oppose Henry I’s 40,000 including 2,400 cavalry.
8 HH, p. 235.
APPENDIX
A note on the sources
The astonishing success of the First Crusade inspired some of its participants to record their experiences, either in letters written as events unfolded or in chronicles prepared afterwards. This in turn inspired others and so an extraordinary volume of material appeared in the west in the course of the twelfth century and beyond. This note does not seek to examine all of it let alone repeat or challenge the work of many distinguished commentators. The present writer has sought to look at the crusade as a military campaign and we are concerned here with the problems of understanding what these and other sources used tell us about it. Here I address general problems raised by the main sources for the crusade.
Of the extraordinary value of the letters to the historian of the crusade there can be no doubt. The excitements of battle spring out from the pages of the letters of Stephen of Blois and Anselm of Ribemont as do the terrible sufferings and the sense of loss of comrades. When Stephen, as one of the major leaders, who was actually chosen later to lead the army, speaks of his esteem for the Emperor Alexius and in the same breath speaks of Antioch as the next major goal we must pay attention, for here is the voice of one who was involved in the planning.1 Anselm’s deep mourning for his many dead friends and his valuable information about the loss of horses (supported by the narrative sources) underline the concerns of an important but not leading figure. These men were not wholly disinterested; they show a lively concern for the well-being of their lands in the West and Stephen rejoiced in the acquisition of booty.2 They are mercifully free from reflection and consideration: it is of great significance that they almost all date from the period before the summer of 1098 and reflect no hostility, and in the case of Stephen of Blois considerable admiration, for the Byzantines. Those of Adhémar and Symeon Patriarch of Jerusalem, testify to good relations between East and West. It is only with the letter from the Princes in September 1098 that hatred of the Byzantines becomes evident and this document, in the form in which we have it, may well have been heavily influenced by Bohemond.3 This is a vital corrective to certain important latin narratives in which hatred of the Greeks and distortions about their deeds is a dominating factor. The Anonymous, author of the Gesta Francorum, shared his nation’s contempt for the Greeks and all their works, while Raymond of Aguilers seems to have taken a violent dislike to them in the course of the journey. This has helped to disguise from historians the extent to which there was a community of interest between the Byzantine emperor and the crusading princes until the summer of 1098 when the quarrel over Alexius’s desertion at Philomelium and Bohemond’s ambition for Antioch resulted in a breach. It is interesting that in the last of the letters which we have, Daimbert’s summary of events written in September 1099 in the name of one who was a papal legate with knowledge of Urban’s thinking, the issue of relations with the Byzantines is avoided, even though the letter was probably written by Raymond of Aguilers who hated and despised the Greeks.4 The letters also, to a degree, correct the obvious gap in all the accounts – they are very thin on the journey across Asia Minor, to the extent that reconstructing the route is by no means simple. In fact this may be connected with the anti-Byzantine sentiment which later grew up and led the chroniclers to neglect a period when they were in close alliance with the Greeks. After Dorylaeum, the journey, though hard, was not full of incident and thus was overshadowed by later events.
The accounts of the crusade written by participants were all written after the event and are much more reflective and interpretative. All of them see themselves as recording the work of God. This is most obvious in the case of Raymond of Aguilers whose latest editors have not hesitated to call it ‘The book of the lance’, analogous to those records of the wonder-working of relics so common at this time in the West. But what Raymond was really trying to do was to show the workings of the divine economy as then understood:
‘For the army of God, even if it bore the punishment of the Lord himself for its sins, out of His compassion also stood forth victor over all paganism’. And the same reflection appears even earlier in the letter of Daimbert of Pisa: ‘And so, because some were puffed up at the happy outcome of these events, God opposed to us Antioch, a city impregnable to human might, and detained us there for nine months, and so humbled us in the siege outside the city until every swelling of our arrogance relapsed into humility.’5
Thus the nucleus of the idea that the spiritual exercises of the crusade were as important to its success as the military emerged.6 This emphasis on divine intervention affects all our sources and limits the level of explanation which they give. Thus the victory at Dorylaeum is God’s will, according to the Anonymous author of the Gesta Francorum.7 Individual authors, even if eyewitnesses, were also limited in their perceptions by where they were at any given time. Fulcher of Chartres provides an extraordinarily vivid account of the battle of Dorylaeum, from the point of view of a civilian in the camp. But he left the crusade early in 1098 and thereafter relied on others.8 The Anonymous was in Bohemond’s army besieging Nicaea and so knows almost nothing of the major battle with the Turks which took place to the south of the city and gives us the impression that it was a mere skirmish. No writer was present at the Foraging Battle which is obscure in the extreme. Even when our informant was centrally involved in a battle his information is not always very useful. The Anonymous gives us a vivid sense of his participation in the Lake Battle of February 1098 and the passage is deservedly famous, but he does not tell us where the battle took place. Anselm of Ribemont’s account of the battle against Kerbogah forgets to mention Godfrey de Bouillon. Such omissions, the consequences of the excitements, alarms and confusions of battle, the proverbial ‘fog of war’, are a commonplace of military history.9 The Anonymous was involved in the heavy fighting outside the citadel of Antioch during the second siege of that city, hence his failure to mention other fighting during this siege, yet he never explains the physical nature of the battlefield as Raymond of Aguilers does exceedingly well.10 Such are the limitations of the ‘worm’s eye-view’ which is so often that of the eyewitness. Raymond of Aguilers was a better writer, but a priest rather than a military man. He understood the salient fact about Turkish warfare – that the enemy encircled your forces in an effort to demoralise them by archery, but this becomes an idée fixe dominating his discussion of every battle, often inappropriately.11 Raymond is sometimes guilty of trying to tidy up the battlefield, to impose order from chaos, notably at the Lake Battle, and the same can be said of the Anonymous.12 Overall, the central problem of these eye-witness sources is that they were eye-witnesses with all the narrowness of view that implies. This is especially true of the Gesta Francorum. Raymond of Aguilers, as chaplain to the count of Toulouse, was close to the high command of the army and his information on decisions and policy is often good but he was more interested in politics than purely military decisions. However, he does tell us about meetings and discussions, such as that between the leaders near Shaizar and he is very informative on numbers which must have been a real preoccupation in the later stages of the campaign.13
By contrast, the Anonymous was an ordinary knight and ill-informed about such matters. But suppositions about the supposed spontaneity and direct simplicity of his account need to be tempered considerably. The best evidence is that his work was written by 1101, which is certainly early. His text was used by Raymond of Aguilers as an aide mémoire, especially for the period of the siege of Antioch; thereafter his dependence, always minimal, virtually disappears. His work appeared shortly after that of the Anonymous but certainly before 1105, for the death of the count of Toulouse in that year is never suggested. But there are indications that what we have may not be the text written or dictated by an anonymous South Italian Norman knight in the service of Bohemond. The insertion of a passage suggesting that Alexius granted Antioch to Bohemond is patent, while in the description of the fighting around the citadel there are indications of revision and the literary passages may well come from a different hand.14 But even more notable is the very bland account given in Book X of the Gesta Francorum which avoids the issues which divided the army. This blandness is also very evident in Fulcher’s account, where its obvious root is that author’s concern for the reputation of the house of Boulogne whose servant he was from early 1098 until his death about 1127. Were we to rely on Fulcher and the Anonymous (along with the works heavily based on them) the internal dynamics of the crusader army would be lost to us. This is the great strength of Raymond of Aguilers’ account, for all its obvious weaknesses and in particular its reliance on the Gesta. Raymond was involved and was a partisan, and while we may distrust his standpoint we can hardly deny that there was a standpoint to take. The divisions of the crusaders after the seizure of Antioch exercised a powerful influence on the course of events, and in any assessment of the success of the crusade it is important to consider the astonishing fact that they succeeded despite them. Moreover, in understanding crusading history as a whole it is a false perspective to see such problems of command as originating later and being a deviation from the spirit of the crusade – they were inevitable and apparent from the first.
Almost all writing about the First Crusade has been dominated by the Gesta Francorum. This is, in part, because a work written (apparently) by a layman who participated would seem to be God’s gift to historians and there is about it an immediacy and an apparent freshness: it has been indicated here that this may in part be an illusion. It was extensively used by later writers – Bauldry of Dol, Guibert of Nogent, Peter Tudebode and Robert the Monk of Rheims, the anonymous Historia Belli Sacri are obvious examples whose works are virtually copies.15 Other writers, Raymond of Aguilers, Fulcher of Chartres, above all William of Tyre, knew his text or one of its many other derivatives, and de facto the idea has grown that the Anonymous’s is the ‘normal’ account of the crusade and its framework has been built into almost all modern writing. In fact this is a dangerous illusion. We need to look afresh at events without this assumption which has been dinned into us largely by the sheer repetition of the Anonymous’s tale. For the most part those who used his narrative reveal interesting attitudes and interpretations of events without contributing much to the elucidation of what happened at the time.16 Some, however, add useful information: Peter Tudebode actually went on the crusade on which two of his brothers died and he adds quite a lot of material, while the Historia Belli Sacri has a considerable value especially on matters concerning the South Italian Normans.17
If the Gesta’s story has been overvalued, the very opposite can be said of that of Albert of Aachen. There is in Albert a great deal of poetic material, some of it found in the Chanson d’Antioche and some not.18 The whole question of the relationship between Albert’s text and that of the Chansonis highly controversial. It has always seemed unlikely that the poet (or poets) used Albert because they left out so much of his picturesque detail. However, the assumption that the Chanson is based on an earlier work by Richard the Pilgrim, who actually went on the crusade and therefore has historical value for events not mentioned by chroniclers, has been severely challenged.19 The commonsense solution is that Albert selected material which he heard in recitations and used it and that some of this was incorporated into the Chanson, often in slightly different form.20 That Albert used such material need not detract from his credibility for this was an age when the distinctions between romance, legend and history were fine – witness the fabulous passages in the Gesta. It has recently been demonstrated that Albert’s work was written shortly after 1102: anything so close to events has to be taken seriously, for the author would have been open to challenge by living persons. This same study has freed us from the tyranny of the ‘Lost Lorraine Chronicle’ which for over a hundred years has dominated discussion of Albert of Aachen.21Albert did not go on the crusade but he seems to have based his story, as he asserts, on the tales of people who did. Often he found it difficult to work out precisely what they were telling him for he did not know the ground – it is clear that he was confused about the location of the gates of Antioch. At other times he seems to have had more than one story about the same thing – as in the case of Guinemer of Boulogne. Overall his sources were men of middling rank – and knights deeply interested in military affairs.22 This produces much convincing material, but it is episodic, like that of the Anonymous, for his informants were not of a rank to direct events. However, there is so much information in Albert that it is vitally important in building up a picture of crusader operations. Albert was a German and devoted to Godfrey of Bouillon and it was probably to protect his reputation against Bohemond’s high standing in the wake of the crusade (so high that the Italians in the crusade of HOI set out to rescue him from Turkish imprisonment) that Albert disparages him so consistently.23 It is interesting that Albert does not share the general hostility of the other narrative sources and indeed he sometimes praises Alexius. Even in his account of the skirmishing at Constantinople when his hero Godfrey was involved, he is less than wholehearted in his condemnation.24 This is important because Albert presumably reflected the attitudes of his informants, men of middling rank who had been on the crusade. This would suggest that hostility to the Greeks was less a general phenomenon than something confined to most of the political leadership and shared by chroniclers for various reasons. However, Albert is generally disparaging about the Provençals and this reinforces what has been said about the isolation of Count Raymond.25 William of Tyre used Albert’s Historia extensively and sometimes corrected it but he adds little to our understanding of the events of the crusade.
Given the early date and the nature of his sources Albert’s work deserves to be treated as an eyewitness account. From the point of view of the military historian his chief weakness is that of all the narratives – it is episodic. But Albert did try to put his information together to gain a picture of events and he succeeded to a remarkable degree.26 Perhaps because he was a cleric and not a participant he tells us a lot about methods of weapons and siege-machinery. His own ignorance compelled him to take an overview of events which is highly useful. But, in fact, taking all the Western eyewitness and near-eyewitness sources together the major problem they pose for the military historian is that they tell us little directly about the ‘nuts and bolts’ of war. They simply assumed this knowledge in the audience for which they wrote and so left posterity the task of teasing it out.
The Islamic sources are radically different. It is possible to get a very good picture of Islamic politics and society at the time of the First Crusade. Nizam al-Mulk had been deeply involved in the government of the Seljuks in the eleventh century which gives his Book of government special value. Ibn-Khaldun’s Muqaddima is of vital importance, not least because he gives us insights into the waging of war in the Islamic world. There is a considerable literature which informs us about the methods and organisation of war, but on the events of the crusade the information is very limited. This is hardly surprising for from their perspective the crusade was hardly a glorious episode. Ibn al-Qalanisi’s Damascus chronicle of the crusades, written about half a century after the First Crusade, is very brief. Kemal ad-Din wrote his Chronicle of Aleppo in the early thirteenth century on the basis of earlier material, and it provides a very interesting and useful account of events in North Syria without adding much to the western sources. Ibn al-Athir’s remarkable World history was also written in the thirteenth century using earlier material but it is not especially useful for the Crusade. No source gives us any real insight into the Turks of Asia Minor about whom we are abysmally ignorant. By contrast the Islamic manuals of war such as those edited by Cahen, Latham, and Paterson and Scanlin, are very valuable even though many of them were written much later. The greatest gap which all this leaves is information about the Turks and in particular about their horses. The skill of these horse-archers was much admired, but we do not know how they cared for their animals and even whether they used strings of them to support their tactics.27
The Armenian Chronicle of Matthew of Edessa, written about 1140, is very valuable for the information it provides on relations between the Armenians and their former Byzantine overlords and new friends or enemies from the West. Michael the Syrian was Jacobite Patriarch of Antioch (1166–99) but his Syriac account is not very informative on the events of the First Crusade. Anna Comnena’s Alexiad is informative, but it is also the most mendacious of the sources. She presents the Crusade as some natural disaster which fell upon the empire, never admitting that her father had asked for Western aid and she never admits his debt to its success. Her whole account, written forty years after the event, is coloured by hindsight and in particular by the question of Antioch which would so concern Alexius and his two immediate successors. Anna is contemptuous of the barbarian Franks whom she denounces as untrustworthy while at the same time praising her father’s cunning tricks. If her attitudes were widely shared by the Byzantine upper class one can perhaps understand the deep hostility to Byzantium which was generated in the ranks of the crusaders.
The spate of translations of oriental sources in the years since Runciman’s History of the crusades has given us more insight into conditions in the East but the essential story of the crusade must still be written from the Western, and in particular the eyewitness, accounts. Amongst these that of Albert of Aachen is the most important from a military point of view. The production of a new edition and translation should help to reduce our excessive dependence on the Anonymous Gesta Francorum the text of which though valuable, is not as simple as has been believed and will not bear the weight of scholarly interpretation piled upon it.
1 See above, pp. 165–7.
2 Hagenmeyer, Kreuzzugsbriefe, pp. 140, 144, 149.
3 Hagenmeyer, Kreuzzugsbriefe, pp. 132, 142–4, 161–5.
4 Hagenmeyer, Kreuzzugsbriefe, pp. 168–74.
5 Krey, First Crusade, pp. 8, 276.
6 On which see Blake, ‘Formation of the “Crusade Idea”, 11–31.
7 GF, pp. 20–1.
8 See below, p. 378. On Fulcher and his sources, amongst which was the Gesta Francorum see the Introduction to the Hagenmeyer edition.
9 ‘In so far as the battlefield presented itself to the bare eyesight of men, it had no entirety, no length, no breadth, no depth, no size, no shape, and was made up of nothing except small numberless circlets commensurate with such ranges of vision as the mist might allow at each spot… in such conditions, each separate gathering of English soldiery went on fighting its own little battle in happy and advantageous ignorance of the general state of the action; nay even very often in ignorance that any great conflict was raging.’ E. W. Kinglake, Invasion of the Crimea, 9 vols. (London, 1901), 6.486 on the battle of Inkerman.
10 GF, pp. 60–2; see above, pp. 275–6 and compare Fig. 13.
11 See above, pp. 239–47, 283.
12 See above, pp. 248, 285.
13 See above, pp. 161, 129, 312.
14 See above, pp. 16, n. 48, 276.
15 The attempt to assert the primacy of Tudebode’s chronicle by its latest editors, Hill and Hill, appears to founder on the simple fact that the South Italian attitudes of the author are so evident. However, it is recognised that the early textual history of the Gesta is probably more complex than has generally been imagined.
16 On which see Blake, cited n. 6 above.
17 PT, pp. 7–9. On HBS sec above, pp. 163–6, 245–6.
18 For examples see above, pp. 216–18.
19 R. F. Cook, “Chanson d’Antioche”, Chanson de Geste: le Cycle de la Croisade est-il épique? (Amsterdam, 1980), pp. 40–5 and 49–69. I rather share Cook’s scepticism of the historical value of the Chanson. As his ‘Nouveau Resumé’, pp. 49–69, suggests, there is little of value and the stories not supported by chronicle evidence appear fabulous and at best distortions.
20 This is the conclusion of S. Edgington, A Critical Edition of the Historia Iherosolimitana of Albert of Aachen, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1991.
21 Once again these are the conclusions of Dr Edgington in Chapter 1 of her thesis. The demolition of the ‘Lost Lorraine Chronicle’ is very convincing. This is a major contribution to crusader historiography.
22 See above, pp. 172, 217, 231.
23 For example see above, pp. 241, 292. Dr Edington points out that, in the early stages of his account, Albert uses honorific descriptions of Bohemond and sometimes praises him, but that later this is dropped. She suggests that this may reflect attitudes amongst returning crusaders. However, the careful denigration of his role at the Foraging Battle and the battle against Kerbogah suggest to me something more deliberate.
24 I owe perception of the importance of this theme to Dr Edgington.
25 See above, p. 324.
26 His account of events at Edessa is remarkably accurate. Beaumont, ‘Albert of Aix and the county of Edessa’, pp. 101–38 discussed this long ago and Dr Edgington’s thesis reinforces the point.
27 For a detailed discussion of the Oriental sources see Gahen, Syrie du Nord, pp. 33–93 and Sivan, L’Islam et la croisade, pp. 23–37.