Holy Warriors (6 page)

Just before dawn on June 3, 1098, a rope was lowered from one of the towers on the southern wall of the city. Before the first fingers of light crept over the citadel the crusaders clambered up ladders and began to take control
of the walls; soon a gate was opened and the holy warriors flooded in. While they began to massacre the inhabitants and to seize as much booty as they could, the majority of the defenders simply withdrew to the safety of the citadel. In other words, the crusaders had taken only the outer shell of Antioch. Within days, the army from Mosul appeared and the westerners became pincered between the Muslims in the citadel and those outside the city: the besiegers had become the besieged. Christian morale plummeted and the crusaders experienced terrible privations. Food was in desperately short supply. The
Gesta Francorum
recorded: “These blasphemous enemies of God kept us so closely shut up in the city of Antioch that many of us died of hunger. . . . 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. These and many other troubles and anxieties . . . we suffered for the Name of Christ and to set free the road to the Holy Sepulchre.”
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More men deserted, including Stephen of Blois. These individuals became known as the “rope-dancers of Antioch,” a derogatory term deriding them for their cowardice.

Yet Stephen’s actions had a further consequence because in his retreat across Asia Minor he encountered Alexius, belatedly coming to assist his allies. Unsurprisingly, the news that the Franks were doomed caused him to turn back; there was no point in carrying on to Antioch if, by the time he arrived, the crusaders had been defeated. Of course, events turned out differently and, regardless of Alexius’s apparent good faith, his decision to retreat allowed Bohemond to claim the Byzantines reneged on their promise to provide military support and that he was free from his oath to return former Greek lands to them.
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By late June the First Crusade was on the verge of collapse. It seemed that only a miracle could save the expedition and, in the heightened, desperate atmosphere of a failing holy war, that is exactly what happened. Peter Bartholomew, a pilgrim in Count Raymond’s contingent, had a vision in which he claimed that Saint Andrew appeared to him and told him where to find the Holy Lance, the lance that had pierced Christ’s side during the Crucifixion.
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As an object so intimately linked to Christ’s last days on earth this was a relic of incalculable importance. A group of thirteen men gathered in the Church of Saint Peter in Antioch and all day they dug frantically at the specified place. By the early evening hope was beginning to fade, yet
the men labored away in the sputtering torchlight and then, finally, a spade struck wood; it was there! A miracle! The chronicler Raymond of Aguilers witnessed the discovery and was so overcome that he kissed the point of the lance even before it was removed from the ground. The news whipped through the Christian camp, energizing and inspiring the common troops as never before. God had encouraged them to persist and they faced their opponents with renewed vigor. Some among the leadership were more skeptical, however. They saw the prestige that accrued to Count Raymond’s men for having discovered the relic and wondered whether it was simply a ploy to enhance his position. At this stage, however, it was unwise to broadcast such concerns too loudly, largely because morale was so greatly enhanced. Adhémar of Le Puy proclaimed a three-day fast, ordered the women out of the camp, and banned gambling and swearing in an effort to cleanse further the crusaders’ morality as they prepared for battle.

On June 28, in six contingents, the Christians lined up outside the city for a do-or-die confrontation. The priests put on their finest vestments and prayed to God to rescue them from evil: “So we closed our ranks and, protected by the sign of the cross, marched into battle.”
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By this time, after two years on campaign, the remaining knights were a tough, battle-hardened force; a loose analogy from the modern day might be a tour or competition in which an international sports team draws players from different club sides. In the course of the tour the players learn how to work with new colleagues to good effect and by the end of the competition they are, in theory, at a peak. The crusaders possessed a cohesion that troops gathered for specific campaigns usually lacked; this was long before the existence of standing armies who could practice tactics on a daily basis. The Muslims began with their customary bombardment of darts and arrows but the crusaders kept their discipline perfectly. It was during this engagement that many of the men saw further evidence of divine support. “There also appeared from the mountains a countless host of men on white horses, whose banners were all white. When our men saw this they did not understand what was happening, or who these men might be, until they realised that this was the succour sent by Christ, and that the leaders were St George, St Mercurius and St Demetrius (this is quite true for many of our men saw it).”
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Given the confusion of battle, the desperation of the troops, the extraordinary pitch of religious fervor—combined with a lack of food and drink—such
apparently implausible events formed an integral part of the crusading experience and did much to inspire victory. The Christians executed a series of complex military maneuvers and drove the Muslims from the field.
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Soon the defenders in the citadel realized that all was lost; they surrendered—Antioch was again in Christian hands. The crusaders were exhausted after their victory and settled down to recuperate. As often happens to those weakened by conflict and poor diet, disease struck hard. Thousands of men and women perished, almost certainly of typhoid. The most notable casualty was Adhémar of Le Puy.
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His firmness and diplomatic skills had done much to keep tensions between the lay nobles at a manageable level, but with his demise the papal influence over the campaign waned and the squabbles between the senior warlords escalated.

The discovery of the Holy Lance had an interesting coda. As noted above, some suspected that Peter Bartholomew’s “discovery” had been rigged to enhance the authority of Raymond’s Provençal forces. Rivals voiced their skepticism and Peter, by this time so convinced of his role as a divine agent, offered to be subjected to an ordeal: trial by fire. By the time of the First Crusade this practice was in decline because people increasingly doubted its veracity. The heat of the fire, for example, could be manipulated by the unscrupulous to affect the result; in a more spiritual sense, it was deemed insulting to demand that a miracle from God act in such a peremptory fashion.
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Peter opted for one of the most rigorous forms of the ordeal ever recorded. After four days of fasting and spiritual preparations he was ready for his test. In front of a huge audience he carried the relic down a narrow gap between two walls of blazing olive branches, four feet high and thirteen feet long. Raymond of Aguilers was again an eyewitness and reported that Peter emerged unscathed and shouted “God help us!” He was then borne to the ground by an ecstatic mob, determined to grab a piece of clothing from such a sanctified soul. In the course of this frenzy, Raymond claimed that Peter’s backbone was broken and this caused his death. Others were more doubtful: Fulcher of Chartres wrote that the priest’s skin was scorched and that he was so badly hurt that he perished from his burns: divine judgment on his fraudulent behavior. The cult of the Holy Lance withered, but whatever the truth of its discovery it had done its work.
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In late 1098 the surviving crusaders began to advance south. In November they besieged the town of Ma’arrat an Nu’man. Once again, in the depths of winter, supplies were hard to find, and Fulcher of Chartres reported:
“our men suffered from excess 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.” Such an act has understandably disgusted generations, although a sense that this was done as a sign of the crusaders’ hatred of the Muslims should be uncoupled from the simple, harsh realities of warfare. (In more recent times, for example, cannibalism has been well documented among early settlers in nineteenth-century Tasmania or in the terrible conditions during the Russian Revolution. During the winter of 1921 in the Volga district people refused to bury their dead relatives and insisted on keeping them to eat; bands of cannibals and traders started to hunt children for food, parents killed babies to feed their other children and even doctors took to eating the remains of their patients.
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It was around this time that tensions became apparent between the rank and file and the leadership. The former, impelled by their desire to reach the Holy Sepulchre, fulfill their vows, and return home, demanded to push on. The nobles, however, were too busy feuding with one another over who should lead the campaign and who might hold past and future conquests. In the end, people power triumphed and pressure from the pilgrims forced the armies to move on, although Bohemond remained behind to consolidate his hold on Antioch. He firmly resisted calls from Alexius to hand the city over to the Greeks, which frustrated the emperor’s design of reestablishing Byzantine influence in northern Syria and generated a tension that would scar relations between the Greeks and the Latin settlers for decades to come.

In the meantime, the main crusading armies moved southward with such speed that many towns were left unconquered in their wake. On June 7, 1099, they finally reached the goal of their three-year journey, Jerusalem, the place marked as the center of the world on most medieval maps and the most important city in the Christian world. Many were moved to tears. Bohemond’s nephew Tancred saw the city from the Mount of Olives and sank
to his knees saying that he would willingly give his life for the opportunity to kiss the Holy Sepulchre.
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By now the crusader force had dwindled to around 1,300 knights and 12,500 footmen. They faced unfamiliar opponents because in August 1098 the Fatimid Egyptians had seized the city from their Sunni Muslim rivals. A strong garrison, including four hundred elite warriors, was well prepared: the Eastern Christians who lived in Jerusalem were expelled to avoid possible betrayal, the local wells were poisoned, and the cisterns inside the city filled to the brim. The walls that encircle Jerusalem today date, for the most part, from the Ottoman period, but their foundations, course, and scale are a close match to those of the late eleventh century. They stretch for about two and a half miles in circumference and are complemented by a moat to the north, the natural defenses of the Valley of Jehoshaphat to the east and the Kidron Valley to the south. The crusaders made a loose encirclement of the city but concentrated their troops in two particular sections. Raymond of Saint-Gilles went to the southwestern corner, while the remainder of the men under Godfrey and Tancred went to the northwestern district. Early attacks foundered; the defenses (a double wall to the north) were too high and the crusaders lacked the wood to build ladders. Tancred himself solved the problem. It seems that he was afflicted with terrible diarrhea; he slunk away to a remote spot to seek relief only to discover a cave filled with beams of timber—a truly divine intervention. The arrival of more wood, plus tools and nails from a Genoese supply ship, was a further boost. The crusaders spent the next few weeks engaged in the construction of two mighty siege towers, several catapults, and a ram. At the height of summer, water supply remained a problem; some were forced to travel six miles to find refreshment and even then it was said to have been filled with leeches. Meanwhile the men labored hard. Pride of place went to the two huge towers, each about fifty feet tall and built on wheeled platforms to enable them to move up to the city walls. Animal hides and branches provided a level of protection for the men inside. A mighty battering ram was another essential weapon, a huge beam tipped with a lethal metal head designed to smash through the lower walls. Those within the city prepared their own defenses: catapults were set up and parts of the fortifications disappeared under a mattress-type padding to try to absorb the impact of crusader artillery.

As the struggle approached its climax, the level of antipathy between the
Christians and the Muslims intensified. An Egyptian spy was captured and then catapulted back toward his coreligionists; the defenders responded by spitting and urinating on crosses. The crusaders decided to fortify themselves spiritually as well. One man had a vision of the dead papal legate, Adhémar of Le Puy, who advised the holy warriors to stage a special penitential procession to the Mount of Olives, the place where Christ ascended into heaven. Afraid to ignore the direction of such a respected figure, the leadership decided to follow this instruction. Barefoot and bearing crosses and relics, the clergy headed a snake of crusaders down the Valley of Jehoshaphat and then up to the sacred place, praying, chanting, and invoking God’s favor.
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By now, with food and water in short supply and the prospect of Egyptian reinforcements imminent, religious devotion became colored with the growing need for a quick breakthrough. Raymond’s tower exerted pressure to the southwest and kept large numbers of defenders occupied. On the other hand, the siege tower to the northwest of the city seemed to be achieving very little. Muslim resistance was strong and the defenders had prudently gathered where the crusaders posed their greatest threat. On the night of July 13, however, Godfrey showed his military genius; he had seen another area of the wall that was weaker, less well defended, and offered a flatter approach for the siege tower. The duke ordered his siege machine to be broken up into its constituent parts and then, under cover of darkness, laboriously moved over a mile to the east and reassembled.