God's War: A New History of the Crusades (20 page)

His journey was carefully planned; before leaving, probably in late
August, he wrote to Alexius I, informing him of his intended itinerary.
²⁷
This took him through Italy, where he may have received the papal banner and blessing, to Bari. By this time Hugh’s small contingent of knights had been swelled by the French lords from Emich of Flonheim’s misadventure led by William of Melun. In southern Italy, his party was joined by one of Bohemund’s nephews, William FitzMarquis, and others, including veterans of Byzantine service.
²⁸
Crossing the Adriatic in October, after the indignity of a shipwreck, Hugh was held under comfortable house-arrest in Durazzo by the nonetheless hospitable Greek authorities before being escorted under close guard to Constantinople. Alexius seemed concerned lest Hugh linked up with the large numbers of Italians following the same route along the Via Egnatia from Durrazzo to the capital; or he may have received warning that his old enemy Bohemund was only a fortnight behind the count. Hugh was welcomed at Constantinople in November, only a few weeks after the massacre at Kibotos. Alexius’s treatment of Hugh betrayed nervousness; although well entertained and apparently rather embarrassingly easily flattered by the emperor’s attention, the count’s movements were monitored and some of his followers kept under close arrest. The emperor was beginning to appreciate the scale of his problems. Almost every day, news came of more western grandees bearing down on him while the flow of lesser pilgrims became a flood, swelled by the bumper harvest experienced in the west in the autumn of 1096. Miraculous would not necessarily have been Alexius’s word for it.

Shortly before Christmas 1096, Godfrey of Bouillon, duke of Lower Lorraine, arrived at the Greek capital with a substantial army derived mainly from Lotharingia (Lorraine) and the Low Countries. He proved an awkward guest. His march through central Europe followed the pilgrims’ road which had carried Peter the Hermit’s armies some months earlier. In contrast to his predecessor, Godfrey’s diplomacy worked all the way, a sign of meticulous preparation. Far from the selfless hero of chivalric legend he later appeared, Godfrey struck a number of hard bargains to raise funds for his expedition. Apart from extorting money from Rhineland Jews, he sold some estates; Bouillon itself he mortgaged to the bishop of Liège, with a proviso of restitution if he returned. Although unmarried, perhaps from sexual preference, Godfrey did not regard the expedition to Jerusalem as an excuse for abandoning his status in the west. The younger brother of the wealthy Count Eustace III
of Boulogne, Godfrey’s career had flourished as a partisan of Henry IV. Succeeding to the disputed duchy of Lower Lorraine as a teenager in 1076, Godfrey fought for Henry in Italy in 1083. In 1087, his rights as duke were confirmed by a grateful emperor: his army in 1096 attracted many imperialists from the diocese of Liège.
²⁹
Although before his departure he had minted coins inscribed ‘Godefridus Ierosolimitanus’, and despite apparent political ineffectiveness, he never relinquished his duchy even after becoming ruler of the Christian enclave in Palestine in 1099. With him were two future kings of Jerusalem, his ambitious opportunist younger brother Baldwin and his cousin Baldwin lord of Le Bourcq; the counts of Toul and Hainault; other relatives such as Henry and Godfrey of Esch; and perhaps over 100 other knights. He was later joined by survivors from Peter’s army, such as Fulcher, brother of the vidame of Chartres. One of his strengths on crusade, and as ruler of Jerusalem, lay in the loyalty of his sizeable military household.

Godfrey’s march was prolonged but not turbulent. Leaving Lorraine in August, he negotiated a peaceful crossing of Hungary and access to markets with King Coloman who insisted, as he had with Peter the Hermit, on the security of grand hostages, in this case an extremely reluctant Baldwin of Boulogne and his Anglo-Norman heiress wife, Godehilde of Tosni. Godfrey’s chief spokesman had been Godfrey of Esch, a veteran of earlier diplomacy with the Hungarians, another indication of the scale, depth and complexity of the political as well as material preparations. Reaching the Byzantine frontier in early November, Godfrey quickly struck a deal with the Greek authorities over provisions, promising not to engage in violent foraging in return for secure food supplies, the Byzantines having prepared large food dumps along the route. After a leisurely escorted progress, by the time he reached Adrianople, Godfrey, learning of the treatment of Hugh of Vermandois, become alarmed lest he was walking into a gilded trap. Given his minor role in western European politics, the duke’s pride and self-importance unexpectedly came to the fore as he insisted Alexius release the Frenchmen. As later admirers and perhaps he himself liked to recall, a descendant of Charlemagne, whose mythologized exploits furnished an important corner of the mental world of aristocratic crusaders,
³⁰
Godfrey behaved as if he were the emperor’s equal, not a policy designed to endear him to Alexius. Perhaps Godfrey saw himself in some way as representing his lord, the western emperor Henry IV; certainly
the chronicler of Godfrey’s campaign, Albert of Aachen, placed the German king at the head of his list of rulers in 1096, above the pope.
³¹
Godfrey’s objections to Alexius’s handling of Count Hugh spilt over into violence, as Alexius cut off aid and the Lorrainers began to pillage the neighbourhood of Salabria, between Adrianople and the Sea of Marmora. Only by sending an embassy of Franks in imperial service to reassure the duke of his reception did hostilities cease, but it was a somewhat prickly Godfrey who arrived at Constantinople on 23 December 1096. Stationed on the Golden Horn, then at Pera opposite the city, for weeks Godfrey resisted Alexius’s attempts, conveyed by Hugh of Vermandois and others, to arrange a meeting. Alexius again withdrew food supplies, forcing Godfrey into an abortive assault on the city (13 January 1097) and further ravaging until diplomacy prevailed. Hostages were exchanged (including Alexius’s son and eventual successor, John) before Godfrey attended an audience with the emperor. The outcome was satisfactory to all concerned. Godfrey swore an oath to the emperor, of vassalage according to Albert of Aachen.
³²
Alexius became his patron and helped ship his army across the Bosporus by the end of February 1097. For the Greek emperor, the presence of such a large army, even if peaceful, had presented serious logistical and political problems. Godfrey’s initial refusal to reach some accommodation with Alexius or to move forward across the Bosporus to Asia presented dangers as the winter progressed and the capital and its suburbs had to absorb increasing numbers of pilgrims. Both Alexius and Godfrey were exercised by the imminent arrival of the other major commanders of the expedition; the one fearful of the implications to his capital’s food supplies and security; the other eager to consult with his peers as to how best to proceed. Around 20 January 1097 Godfrey apparently received an embassy from Bohemund, then making very slow but careful progress from the Adriatic coast, suggesting a combined attack on the capital. Despite his stand-off, Godfrey rejected Bohemund’s plan; later veterans of his army spoke about the Greeks without hostility or malice.
³³
At a popular level, relations remained good; equally, Godfrey had not resisted manipulation by Alexius only to become a pawn in Bohemund’s deep-rooted schemes concerning the Greek empire.

Bohemund of Taranto is the most controversial leader of the First Crusade. Of all the major surviving commanders, he alone failed to join the march to Jerusalem in 1099, more concerned with securing his hold
over Syrian Antioch. Admired for his generalship, his pious credentials have been impugned in the light of his priorities in 1099 and his career of attempting to carve out for himself a kingdom in the Balkans at the expense of the Byzantine empire. The traditional view sees his motives as basely material, in contrast to the supposedly more elevated inspirations of some of his colleagues. This is untenable. The psychologies of the crusade’s leaders cannot be reconstructed. Each can be shown to have as much avarice or as little piety as the other. The dichotomy between spiritual and mercenary possesses little meaning. Raymond of Toulouse, whose religious sincerity has been widely accepted, proved both scheming and petulant in his earnest quest for an eastern principality, which he finally achieved in the lands around Tripoli in the south Lebanon. The spiritual agonizing of Tancred of Lecce, Bohemund’s nephew, was matched by his alert political opportunism. Godfrey of Bouillon accepted power and lands when offered them in 1099. Baldwin of Boulogne, the most obviously careerist of all, devoted the last twenty years of his life to defending the Holy Places. All the leaders sought to protect their material interests rather than proceed to Jerusalem in the five months after July 1098. Bohemund was not alone in his desire to achieve status, lands and wealth; neither did this ambition automatically contradict the genuineness of his adherence to the cause of Jerusalem. With Baldwin, he undertook a tricky and dangerous journey to fulfil his pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre at Christmas 1099, a gesture that, for lack of evidence, cannot be assumed to have been purely for reasons of image or politics.

The picture of Bohemund the ruthless schemer derives from the
Alexiad
of Anna Comnena, Alexius’s daughter.
³⁴
Writing half a century after the First Crusade, Anna insists on the deviousness of the westerners, their consistent desire to subvert and occupy the Byzantine empire, and the heroic patience and skill of Alexius, in an attempt to exonerate the emperor from any responsibility for admitting the Franks into the empire and his subsequent failure to establish Greek overlordship over Antioch. Bohemund, who invaded the Balkans twice, in the 1080s and again in 1107–8, is one of the villains of her staunchly anti-western account that has as much to do with the tangled dynastic and imperial politics of the twelfth century as with the events of the 1090s. Seductively vivid, Anna is a confused and misleading source for the crusade let alone the motives of the western leaders. Even her famous description of Bohemund
himself – tall, slim, muscular, good complexion, short light-brown hair, forbidding expression – cannot be trusted, still less Runciman’s fancy that the teenage Anna was taken by his good looks, ‘being, like all Greeks down the ages, susceptible to human beauty’.
³⁵

Nonetheless, Bohemund’s position on crusade is intriguing. The dominant personality in the expedition’s military leadership from April 1097 until January 1099, he founded a Norman dynasty in Antioch that outlasted the Norman kings of England and of Sicily. Yet in 1096, in contrast to all the other leaders who were at least of comital status (i.e. of a count), Bohemund was technically still a vassal of a count, his half-brother, the ineffectual Roger Borsa (1089–1111), younger son and heir of Robert Guiscard in southern Italy. The fabulous inheritance promised him by his father, Robert Guiscard, in the Balkans had come to nothing after the failure of the Norman invasion of 1081–5. Despite rebelling in 1085 and 1087 against Roger Borsa, Bohemund had failed to establish an independent territorial title for himself in the west, a political frustration that shaped his actions on crusade. Although possessed of political clout and contacts above his formal station – he knew Urban II personally – he lacked the extensive patrimony or dependent baronage that supported his fellow leaders. The army he gathered about him in southern Italy in the autumn of 1096 reflected this. The core seems to have been his close relatives, including his nephew, Tancred of Lecce and cousin, Richard of Salerno, known as Richard of the Principate, as well as his standard bearer, Robert FitzGerald. In addition there were former rebels, such as Robert of Ansa; and vassals of his half-brother, such as Robert FitzTristan, and of his uncle, Count Roger of Sicily, such as Robert of Sourdeval.
³⁶
His whole force was small, perhaps in total between 3,500 and 4,000 men. Lacking the power of lordship or the purse, Bohemund had to rely on more overt political and military skills. Even these failed to impose cohesion on his force. One nephew, William FitzMarquis, joined Hugh of Vermandois; another, Tancred, fought under his own banner, refused to accept Bohemund’s authority at Constantinople and thereafter pursued an increasingly independent line.

Bohemund’s army crossed the Adriatic from Bari to the coast of Epirus in late October 1096, probably deliberately avoiding the Byzantine garrison at Durazzo. It then dawdled its way to Constantinople, taking the best part of six months, at an average of just over three miles a day,
almost being caught up by the larger force under Raymond of Toulouse, who had landed at Durazzo over three months behind. Yet there was almost no fighting or local resistance. If the story of his approach to Godfrey for an anti-Greek alliance in January 1097 is credited, the initial delay in the western Balkans is explicable as Bohemund would not wish to become too closely entangled with Greek escorts or garrisons near the capital. Godfrey’s rebuff may have inspired a
volte face
. As his troops neared Thrace, Bohemund left them under the command of Tancred on 1 April and hurried on to Constantinople, which he reached on 9 April. There, so far from fomenting trouble for Alexius, he proved the emperor’s staunchest ally in the often tetchy negotiations with other leaders. Bohemund spent longer with Alexius than any of the other leaders, almost a full calendar month. He eagerly took an oath of fealty and tried to obtain a future role for himself as military commander or ruler of new conquests in the east as the emperor’s vassal. His efforts to persuade Raymond of Toulouse to come to terms with Alexius and to force Tancred to swear an oath of fealty confirmed his alliance with the emperor. In return, Alexius employed him as his agent with the crusade leaders, Bohemund appearing to have acted as the expedition’s quartermaster for the siege of Nicaea, after which he shared the vanguard of the army with Alexius’s representative Tatikios. When he arrived at Constantinople, without his army, Bohemund was the least powerful of the western magnates at the imperial court; when he left Nicaea less than two months later, he was one of its undoubted leaders. Part, at least, of this must be ascribed to his private diplomacy with Alexius.