The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land (17 page)

The most enduring consequence of these dealings was the formulation of a partial armistice (confirmed by written treaty) around 1109. This remarkable accord related to the region east of the Sea of Galilee–known by the Franks as the Terre de Sueth (or Black Lands) because of its dark basalt soil–centred on the fertile arable lands of the Hauran, and extending north into the Golan Heights and south of the Yarmuk River. Baldwin and Tughtegin agreed to establish what in essence was a partially demilitarised zone in this area, allowing Muslim and Christian farmers to cooperate in the exploitation of the land. The produce of the Terre de Sueth was then split into three parts, with one portion retained by the resident peasants and the remainder divided between Jerusalem and Damascus. This arrangement remained in place for much of the twelfth century.
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In the first five years of his reign, however, King Baldwin’s own survival, and arguably that of his entire realm, had been in doubt. Only through flashes of gifted leadership and the good fortune of Muslim disunity and Fatimid martial ineptitude had the Latins prevailed.

LATIN SYRIA IN CRISIS (1101–8)

In the first chill months of 1105, Tancred, the celebrated veteran of the First Crusade, had every reason to despair. He found himself in command of the Latin principality of Antioch at a time when that newborn realm seemed in its death throes. Six months earlier, the Franks’ reputation for invincibility had been shattered when Antioch’s army suffered a frightening and humiliating defeat at the hands of Islam. In response, Tancred’s famed uncle, and Antioch’s supposed prince, Bohemond, had fled the Levant, stripping the city of its resources even as he rushed to set sail for the West. With the principality crumbling before him, beset by rebellion and invasion on every front, Tancred faced the spectre of ruination. Seven years earlier, he had witnessed first hand the horror of Antioch’s siege and the terrible cost of its seizure by the crusade. Now, it seemed, the faltering Frankish enclave created by that conquest was doomed to collapse.

Little, if any, of the blame for this crisis could be laid at Tancred’s feet. In the spring of 1101 he had travelled north from Palestine to act as Antioch’s regent after Bohemond’s imprisonment. In the two years that followed Tancred quickly restored a sense of stability and security to the principality, demonstrating both vigour and competence. Shortly before his capture, Bohemond had allowed the fertile plains of Cilicia, north-west of Antioch, to slip out of his grasp. Hoping for greater autonomy, the region’s Armenian Christian population had switched allegiance to the Byzantine Empire, but Tancred beat them back into submission with a brief but vicious campaign. Not content simply to recoup his uncle’s losses, Tancred then sought to expand the principality. Like the kingdom of Jerusalem, Antioch needed to control the ports of the eastern Mediterranean seaboard, but Latakia, home to Syria’s best natural harbour, remained in Greek hands despite Bohemond’s intermittent efforts. After a protracted siege, however, the town fell to Tancred in 1103.

Tancred seems to have relished the new-found opportunities and authority his position offered; certainly he made no effort to orchestrate the speedy release of his uncle. This task was instead taken up by Bohemond’s recent ecclesiastical appointee, Patriarch Bernard, and by Baldwin of Bourcq, now count of Edessa. Together they set about amassing the vast ransom demanded by Bohemond’s captor, the Danishmendid emir–100,000 gold pieces. The Armenian Kogh Vasil, lord of two cities in the Upper Euphrates, gave one-tenth of this sum in return for promises of alliance, but in the words of one rather scandalised eastern Christian contemporary, ‘Tancred gave nothing.’ Eventually, in May 1103, Bohemond was freed. The consequences for Tancred were galling; not only did he have to hand over the reins of power in Antioch, he was also compelled to relinquish his own conquests in Cilicia and Latakia.
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The Battle of Harran
(1104)

With his own liberty and authority restored, Bohemond sought to build upon his friendship with Count Baldwin II of Edessa. Over the next twelve months the two united in a series of campaigns designed to subdue the territory between Antioch and Edessa and to isolate and harass Aleppo. It was probably with the latter goal in mind that they launched an expedition east of the Euphrates in spring 1104. Dominion over this region would have secured the county of Edessa’s southern frontier while hampering Aleppan communication with Mesopotamia. As it was, they encountered fierce opposition from a sizeable Muslim army, led by the Seljuq Turkish rulers of Mosul and Mardin.

Battle was joined on the plains south of Harran around 7 May. Bohemond and Tancred held the right flank, while Baldwin II commanded Edessa’s forces on the left, alongside his cousin Joscelin of Courtenay (a well-connected northern French aristocrat who arrived in the Levant after 1101 and had received a lordship centred on the major fortress town of Tell Bashir). In the fighting that followed, the Edessene troops became detached from the rest of the army–overcommitting to a charge, they fell foul of a ferocious counter-attack and were routed. Baldwin and Joscelin were taken captive as thousands of their compatriots were killed or imprisoned. Bohemond and Tancred led a chastened retreat towards Edessa, where the latter was left in charge of defending the city.

Harran was a shocking reversal for the Franks. Battlefield losses through casualties and captivity were significant, but the greatest damage was psychological. This defeat shifted the balance of power and confidence in the northern reaches of the Levant; it now dawned on the indigenous peoples of Syria that the Latins were not, after all, indomitable. A near-contemporary Muslim writing in Damascus reflected that ‘[Harran] was a great and unparalleled victory…it discouraged the Franks, diminished their numbers and broke their power of offence, while the hearts of the Muslims were strengthened.’ In fact, Muslims, Greeks and Armenians all seized the opportunity to turn the tide in their favour, and it was Antioch, not Edessa, that suffered most. The Byzantines reoccupied Cilicia and Latakia, although the latter’s citadel may have remained in Frankish hands. To the south-east the towns of the Summaq region expelled their Latin garrisons, turning to Aleppo for leadership. In a final indignity, the strategically critical town of Artah followed suit soon after. Guardian of the main Roman road inland, lying barely one day’s march north-east of Antioch, Artah was regarded by contemporaries as the city’s ‘shield’. By the late summer of 1104, the principality had been decimated; all that remained of this once burgeoning realm was a small nucleus of territory around Antioch itself.
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Early that autumn, Bohemond made an unexpected decision. Recalling Tancred from Edessa, he convened a council in the basilica of St Peter and announced his intention to leave the Levant. The real motives behind this move are hard to unravel. Publicly Bohemond avowed that, in order to save Latin Syria, he would recruit a new Frankish army in western Europe. He may also have expressed his determination to fulfil his vows to St Leonard (to whom he had appealed while in prison) by making a pilgrimage to the shrine of his relics at Noblat, in France. Privately, however, he seems to have had little intention of making a swift return to Outremer, planning, instead, to raise a force with which to attack the Byzantine Empire head-on in the Balkans. This might have the effect of distracting Alexius Comnenus, perhaps forestalling a direct Greek assault on Antioch, but Bohemond’s strategy probably owed more to his desire to conquer new territory in the Adriatic and the Aegean, and to his dream of sitting upon the throne of mighty Constantinople itself.

Bohemond’s disenchantment with the fragility of Antioch’s position is further evidenced by his calculated appropriation of the city’s remaining wealth and manpower before departing. Even the contemporary Latin writer Ralph of Caen, normally a promoter of Bohemond’s cause, observed that ‘he carried off the gold, silver, gems and clothing [leaving the city] to Tancred without protection, wages and mercenaries’. Bohemond set sail from the shores of Syria around September 1104. During the First Crusade, he had trained the full force of his military genius and avaricious guile upon Antioch’s conquest. Now, as he turned his back upon the Levant, he must have known that he was abandoning his old prize to a desperately bleak and uncertain future.
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On the brink of collapse

So it was that Tancred began the year 1105 in a state of beleaguered penury, prince-regent of a realm bound for destruction. In the fire of this crisis, the defining challenge of his career, he proved his mettle. Blending charm and coercion, he won the support of Antioch’s indigenous population for an emergency tax, restocking the treasury and financing the fresh recruitment of mercenaries. He also sought to replenish further his resources by exploiting fully the one positive consequence of the debacle at Harran, Antioch’s nominal lordship over the county of Edessa. Calling ‘all the Christian men’ of northern Syria to arms, stripping Edessa, Marash and Tell Bashir of all but token garrisons, he had by early spring assembled an army of some 1,000 knights and 9,000 foot soldiers. Tancred’s unshakable resolution and incisive strategic acuity now came to the fore.

Facing such a plethora of enemies, he recognised that he could neither fight on every front nor fall back upon a policy of inert defence. Instead he employed targeted, proactive aggression, selecting his quarry with great care. In mid-April he marched on Artah, engineering a decisive confrontation with Ridwan of Aleppo. This was an audacious gamble. Overcoming this foe in pitched battle might allow Tancred to regain the initiative and rekindle the Franks’ martial authority, but he must have known that the Aleppans would outnumber his own forces, perhaps three to one, and that any defeat would mark the end of Latin dominion over Syria.

Before leaving Antioch the Christians undertook rites of spiritual purification, including a three-day fast, purging their souls of sin in a preparation for death that echoed crusading practice. Tancred then crossed the Orontes at the Iron Bridge and moved in to besiege Artah. Once Ridwan took the bait, advancing with a reported 30,000 troops, Tancred backed off. The centrepiece of his strategy was to capitalise upon his close knowledge of the local terrain and to exploit his growing appreciation of Muslim tactics. The route between Artah and the Iron Bridge passed through an area of flat but rocky ground, over which horses could not easily gallop, before reaching an open plain. It was to this second zone that Tancred retreated and, on 20 April 1105, Ridwan pursued. One Latin contemporary described the battle that followed:

In the ensuing battle, the Latins ploughed into the packed ranks of terrified Muslim troops, dispatching the enemy almost at will as Aleppan resistance crumbled. Horrified, Ridwan scurried away to safety as best he could, losing his banner in the process, and Tancred was left the victor on the field, enriched with spoils and glory.

The Battle of Artah marked a watershed in the history of the northern crusader states. Over the next few years Tancred readily recouped the losses suffered after Harran. Artah was immediately reoccupied and the Summaq plateau soon followed suit. Ridwan sued for peace, trying to position himself as a subservient ally, and, with the frontier zone between Antioch and Aleppo secured, Tancred was able to direct his attention elsewhere. By 1110 he had effected long-term Antiochene dominion over Cilicia and Latakia at the expense of the Greeks. At the same time, he shored up the principality’s southern defences against another potentially aggressive Muslim neighbour, the town of Shaizar, by seizing the neighbouring ancient Roman settlement of Apamea. In personal terms, the success of 1105 also served to legitimise Tancred’s position; before long he was ruling less as Bohemond’s regent and more as a prince in his own right. In this, however, he was also aided by a concurrent decline in the fortunes of his famed uncle.
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Bohemond’s crusade

Bohemond of Taranto sailed for Europe in autumn 1104. It was later rumoured among the Greeks that he employed a bizarre form of trickery to avoid capture by Byzantine agents during his voyage across the Mediterranean. Feigning his own death, Bohemond was said to have travelled west in a coffin punctured with concealed air holes. To complete the ruse, he was entombed alongside the rotting carcass of a strangled cockerel to ensure that his own ‘corpse’ emitted a suitably revolting putrefactive odour. Indeed, Emperor Alexius’ daughter, Anna Comnena, even allowed herself a note of admiration for Bohemond’s indomitable ‘barbarian’ spirit when she wrote, ‘I wonder how on earth he endured such a siege on his nose and still continued to live.’

Whatever his mode of transport, Bohemond’s arrival in Italy in early 1105 was greeted with a clamorous outpouring of adulation. The self-styled hero of the First Crusade had returned. He soon won the support of Pope Urban’s successor, Paschal II, for a new crusading expedition, one which Bohemond proceeded to promote in Italy and France for the next two years. Along the way he fulfilled his vow to visit the shrine of St Leonard at Noblat, depositing a gift of silver shackles as a sign of gratitude for his release from imprisonment in 1103. He also appears to have sponsored the copying and dispersal of a rousing narrative account of the First Crusade, akin to the
Gesta Francorum
, which promoted his own achievements and helped to blacken the name of the Greeks. With his fame in the ascendant and his recruiting rallies attracting large enthusiastic crowds, Bohemond secured a marriage alliance which propelled him into the highest echelons of the Frankish aristocracy. In the spring of 1106 he was wed to Princess Constance, daughter of the king of France; around the same time one of the king’s illegitimate daughters, Cecilia, was betrothed to Tancred. Bohemond used the occasion of his own nuptials at Chartres to promote his new crusade, launching a stinging attack on his proclaimed enemy, Alexius Comnenus–supposed betrayer of the crusaders in 1098 and 1101, and invader of Antioch.