It was the energetic papal reformer Gregory VII (pope 1073–1085) who first sanctioned lay knights as militia Christi to fight against the infidel, focusing the martial energies of the mounted aristocracy away from one another and toward the perceived threat of Islam. He did this in part because of Christian successes against Muslims in Sicily and Spain, and because of a new wave of Islamic territorial expansion that threatened the very existence of Byzantium after the loss at Manzikert. Unlike previous popes who advocated peace, Gregory discarded this pacifist ideology in favour of the ‘theory of the two swords’. Gregory believed, as the temporal representative of St Peter and the Vicar of Christ, that the pope held two swords: a spiritual blade to be drawn by his own hand, and a secular one to be drawn at his command by nobles and knights serving as ‘soldiers of Christ’.
Moreover, Gregory added a powerful spiritual incentive: ‘taking up the cross’ and going on crusade granted the knight a papal indulgence, essentially a total remission of sins both past and future. Gregory’s vision of the Christian soldier who wins salvation by military action provided the ideological and psychological motivation for crusade. All that was needed was a casus belli, and that was provided by the Byzantine emperor’s call for help to Gregory’s successor and protégé, Pope Urban II.
In the late eleventh century the Byzantine Emperor Alexius I Comnenus appealed to Pope Urban II to use his influence in western Europe to dispatch military aid in order to assist the emperor in recovering the Anatolian districts lost after the battle of Manzikert. Urban II seized upon this request to justify a much more ambitious project, the recovery of the Holy Land from control of the Muslim Seljuk Turks and Arabs in the region. At a Church council at Clermont in central France in November 1095, Urban preached the First Crusade to nobles and commoners alike, unleashing a river of enthusiasm that exceeded even the pope’s expectations. This ‘call to arms’ initiated cultural and military contacts with the Levant that pulled the Latin kingdoms out of feudal warfare in western Europe and directly again into the streams of Eurasian history.
The armies of the First Crusade (1095–1099) were led by a half-dozen French and Norman nobles, including Hugh of Vermandois, brother of King Philip I of France; Robert of Normandy, brother of King William II of England; and Bohemond of Taranto (eldest son of Robert Guiscard and a participant at Durazzo in 1081) and his very capable nephew Tancred. Joining these Norman lords from England, France, Italy and Sicily were Raymond of St Gilles, count of Toulouse, and Godfrey of Bouillon, duke of Lower Lorraine. Within eight months of Urban’s sermon at Clermont, thousands of knights and tens of thousands of infantry enlisted under the banners of these great regional princes, and, together with thousands of religious pilgrims, set out by land and sea for their base of operations at Constantinople. They arrived in the Byzantine capital in late 1096.
When the soldiers of the First Crusade first set off from Constantinople for the Holy Land in the spring of 1097, their initial contact with the Seljuk Turks reinforced their belief in the superiority of mounted shock combat. In June the crusaders besieged the Seljuk capital at Nicaea on Lake Ascania, just east of the Sea of Marmara in Asia Minor. When the sultan of Nicaea returned from Armenia to relieve the city, his Turkish cavalry was beaten back by the more heavily armoured European knights. Pressing their siege, the crusaders breached the outer walls. But when they began their attack the following morning, the knights found that the Turkish garrison had surrendered to the Byzantine emperor during the night. Denied pillaging rights over the city, the crusaders set off south-east across Asia Minor in two columns about equal in size and about a day’s march apart.
Bohemond of Taranto commanded the first column, consisting mostly of Normans from France and Italy. A day behind marched the second column, mostly Lorrainers and Provençals, led by Raymond of Toulouse and Godfrey of Bouillion. The first column came out of the forested mountains of Bithynia alone and found itself harried by Seljuk Turkish horse archers. On 30 June, Bohemond’s crusaders camped at the ruined city of Dorylaeum in central Anatolia, then resumed their advance the following morning.
Map 3.5 The Battle of Dorylaeum, 1097. (a) Phase I: Upon receiving word of an approaching Turkish army, Bohemond dispatches a messenger to locate the second crusader column (1). He orders his infantry to make camp (2) and readies his cavalry to locate the foe (3), but before they can establish their camp or deploy for action, the larger Turkish army is upon them (4). The Turks encircle the Latin camp (5), and their initial assault presses the Christian knights back into their infantry (6). (b) Phase II: The encircling Turks launch hit-and-run missile attacks against the beleaguered crusaders (1) all around the perimeter. Some of the Franks grow restless and small groups of cavalry attempt to pursue their tormentors (2) who easily outdistance the heavier horse. The crusader cavalrymen, cut off from their infantry support, are easily surrounded and cut down by the Seljuks (3). (c) Phase III: Gaps begin to appear in the crusaders’ lines and the Turks launch a sabre charge into the gaps (1). Just as Bohemond’s forces begin to disintegrate, the second crusader column under Godfrey and Raymond arrives on the field (2). The Latin heavy cavalry strike the rear of the Turkish formation and begin to roll up their left flank (3). (d) Phase IV: Recognizing his opportunity, Bohemond launches mounted charges from within the camp against the rapidly disintegrating Turkish flank (1) as Godfrey’s and Raymond’s fresh forces surge forward (2). Unable to re-form and hard-pressed from front, rear and flank, the Seljuk army is transformed into an incoherent mass of individuals seeking nothing more than survival. The crusaders show no quarter and inflict perhaps as many as 3,000 causalities as the remnants of the Turkish army flee the field (3).
After marching a short distance, the crusaders’ scouts reported a large Turkish army advancing on them. Recognizing the numerical superiority of the approaching Turks, Bohemond sent a messenger to find the second column and ordered his infantry to make camp, since – and in typical medieval fashion – he judged his footmen to be tactically ineffective against the mounted enemy warriors (Map 3.5(a)). But before the camp could be set up and before the Christian knights could deploy, the large Turkish host appeared and encircled the crusaders, pushing the knights back into the infantry. A European eyewitness to this attack stated: ‘After we had set ourselves in order the Turks came upon us from all sides, skirmishing, throwing darts and javelins and shooting arrows from an astonishing range.’
After a while, some of the Frankish lancers grew restless and attempted mounted sorties against the Seljuk light cavalry. But the Latin heavy cavalry could not reach the faster Turkish horse archers, who rode off only to rapidly cut back and swarm the pursuing knights, separating the hapless European heavy cavalry from their infantry support (Map 3.5(b)). For six hours, the remainder of Bohemond’s troops held their ground while Turkish horse archers wore down the crusaders, killing men and horses. A contemporary described the scene, stating the crusaders were ‘crushed one against another like sheep penned up in a fold, hopeless and panic-stricken, we were shut in by the Turks on every side’. Under a shower of Turkish arrows, the crusader line began to form gaps.
At midday, the Turks organized a light cavalry sabre charge into the rapidly disintegrating crusader force (Map 3.5(c)). At that moment, Frankish knights from the second column rode up and struck the Seljuk flank and rear. Bohemond’s messengers had found the second column encamped some 6 or 7 miles away. On receiving the news, Godfrey and Raymond immediately mounted up and, leaving their infantry to guard the camp, spurred off for the battlefield. The arrival of the Christian heavy cavalry completely surprised the formed Turkish cavalry, who had neglected to reconnoitre the second column’s march. The Seljuks had no time to turn and form a new front. The charge of thousands of crusader heavy cavalry struck the Turkish centre from the rear, rolling up the horse archers’ left flank. Seeing the arrival of a relief force, Bohemond ordered an attack the moment his allies appeared at the rear of the enemy, catching the Turkish left wing between the two Christian forces (Map 3.5(d)). The crusader knights’ charge was incredibly decisive, inflicting perhaps 3,000 casualties on the Turks. Christian losses were about 4,000 men in total.
The one-sided victory won at Dorylaeum became a model battle for the crusaders, with the heavy casualties inflicted on the Turks only reinforcing western prejudices concerning the strength of their heavy cavalry. For the Turks, the shock of losing so many of their light cavalry to these strange medieval juggernauts would delay a fully organized military response on their part, but reorganize they would.
After completing their march across Anatolia, the forces of the First Crusade split into two armies, one under Baldwin of Boulogne and Tancred going on to establish Christian rule over Edessa in Armenia in March 1098, and the other under Bohemond of Taranto and Raymond of Toulouse marching south down the eastern coast of the Mediterranean toward the Holy Land. This second army nearly starved before capturing Antioch in a protracted siege in June 1098. By the time the crusaders stood before Jerusalem in mid-June 1099, their fighting strength was reduced to only 14,000 men.
Map 3.6 The Crusader States.
Under the leadership of Godfrey of Bouillon, the crusaders began a siege of Jerusalem, building three large siege towers and launching attacks against the city’s defences. After difficult fighting, the crusaders finally breached the walls on the night of 13 July, putting tens of thousands of Muslims and Jews to the sword. A month later, the crusaders confirmed their grip on the Holy City when they defeated a relief army sent from Egypt at the battle of Ascalon. At Ascalon, a crusader army surprised the Egyptian camp at dawn on 12 August. In the mêlée that followed, the entire Muslim army was shattered. By the early twelfth century, the crusaders had carved out feudal possessions in the Levant consisting of the kingdom of Jerusalem, the county of Tripoli in Lebanon, the principality of Antioch and the county of Edessa in Armenia (Map 3.6).
Once settled in, the crusaders adopted a defensive strategy centred on the seizure of existing fortified places such as Muslim and Byzantine-era castles and walled cities. This strategy was coupled with an aggressive castle-building programme, dotting the Levant with literally dozens of new castles over the duration of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Despite their prolific use of fortifications, the crusaders continued to rely heavily on their field armies to defend against Muslim counter-attacks. But because manpower was an almost irreplaceable commodity, the crusaders avoided pitched battles whenever possible. Battle was offered only as a last resort or when the odds seemed overwhelmingly in the crusaders’ favour.