The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land (18 page)

By the end of 1106 Bohemond had returned to southern Italy to supervise the ongoing construction of a crusading fleet, having recruited many thousands of men to his cause. But despite the size of the force that gathered in Apulia one year later–some 30,000 men to be carried by a fleet of more than 200 ships–historians have long disputed the nature of this expedition. The current consensus maintains that this campaign, which targeted the Greek Christian empire of Byzantium, cannot be regarded as a fully fledged crusade, or at the very least should be branded as a distortion of the crusading ideal. The expedition obviously bore some striking similarities to the First Crusade, with participants taking a vow, bearing the symbol of a cross and expecting to receive a remission of sins. The nub of the debate, however, depends on papal involvement. Surely, so it is argued, the pope would never knowingly have awarded the privileged status of a crusade to an expedition against fellow Christians; rather, it was Bohemond, twisted by ambition and hatred, who deceived Paschal II, pretending that his armies would fight in the Levant.

This view of events is riddled with significant problems. The bulk of contemporary evidence suggests that the pope was aware of Bohemond’s intentions and nonetheless supported him, even dispatching a papal legate to accompany and endorse the preaching campaigns in France and Italy. Even in the unlikely case that the pope was misled, there can be no doubt that a huge number of lay recruits accepted the idea of joining a crusade against the Greeks. In fact, the tendency to sideline Bohemond’s expedition as a perversion of crusading is symptomatic of a more fundamental misconception: a belief that the ideas and practices of crusading had already coalesced to create a uniform ideal. For most people living in western Europe in the early twelfth century, this new type of devotional warfare had no finite identity and was still subject to continual, organic development. As far as they were concerned, crusades did not need to be directed against Muslims, and many readily accepted the idea of waging a holy war against Alexius Comnenus once he had been deemed the enemy of Latin Christendom.

However the background to the 1107–8 ‘crusade’ against Byzantium is viewed, the expedition itself proved to be a shambolic disaster. Crossing the Adriatic in October 1107, the Latins laid siege to the city of Durazzo (in modern Albania), regarded by contemporaries as ‘the western gate of the [Greek] empire’. But, in spite of his military pedigree, Bohemond was outwitted by Alexius, who deployed his forces to cut the invaders’ supply lines while carefully avoiding direct confrontation. Weakened by hunger, unable to break Durazzo’s defences, the Latins capitulated in September 1108. Bohemond was forced to accede to a humiliating peace accord, the Treaty of Devol. By the terms of this agreement, he was to hold Antioch for the remainder of his life as the emperor’s subject, but the Greek patriarch was to be restored to power in the city and the principality itself to be all but emasculated by the cession of Cilicia and Latakia to Byzantium.

As it was, this agreement was not implemented and thus had little bearing upon future events, because Bohemond never returned to the Levant. After sailing back to southern Italy in the autumn of 1108, he appears only fleetingly in historical records, his reputation broken, his grand dreams and ambitions shattered. Constance bore him a son, also named Bohemond, around 1109, but by 1111 the once great commander of the First Crusade was ailing, and on 7 March he died in Apulia. At Antioch, Tancred remained in power, perhaps still nominally as regent, but with his authority uncontested among the Franks. From the perspective of Outremer, one positive did emerge from Bohemond’s later career: his Balkan campaign diverted Greek resources from the Levant, allowing Tancred to assert lasting control over Latakia and Cilicia.
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TO RULE IN THE HOLY REALM

Tancred’s drive to expand the principality of Antioch and to augment its wealth and international influence accelerated after 1108, and he showed a ruthless willingness to use any and all means in pursuit of these ambitions, even if that meant fighting fellow Latins while engaging Muslim allies. For the next five years he worked tirelessly, drawing upon a seemingly inexhaustible pool of martial energy to engage in near-constant campaigning. Beleaguering his neighbours and opponents through a mixture of territorial conquest, political coercion and economic exploitation, Tancred came close to forging an Antiochene empire in the Levant.

The counties of Edessa and Tripoli

Between 1104 and 1108 Antioch was the effective overlord of the county of Edessa. Once Tancred assumed control of the principality in autumn 1104, he installed his brother-in-law and fellow southern Italian Norman First Crusader Richard of Salerno as regent of Edessa. Even though Richard proved unpopular, Antiochene influence went unchecked while Count Baldwin II remained in captivity.

Antioch certainly made no effort to orchestrate the count’s release. In the summer of 1104, when Baldwin’s captors first sought to organise the terms of his ransom, even Bohemond demurred. Rather than repay the energy Baldwin had expended to secure Bohemond’s own freedom in 1103, the prince preferred to retain control of Edessa’s considerable agrarian and commercial resources, estimated to value in excess of 40,000 gold bezants per annum. Once at the helm of Frankish Syria, Tancred continued to enjoy these revenues and to ignore Baldwin’s plight.

By 1107 the count’s companion, Joscelin of Courtenay, lord of Tell Bashir, had been ransomed by the populace of that town, and in the following year Joscelin successfully negotiated Baldwin’s release from Mosul. It was the Turkish warlord Chavli, the latest ruler of Mosul, who finally agreed terms; but with an eye to the fragility of his own position and the ongoing internecine struggles within Near Eastern Islam, Chavli demanded not only a cash ransom and hostages, but also a promise of military alliance.

When Baldwin sought to reclaim Edessa in the summer of 1108, a tense standoff ensued. Having enjoyed access to the wealth and resources of the county for four years, Tancred had no intention of simply handing over a territory which he had saved from conquest, and he now sought to pressure Baldwin into taking an oath of subservience; after all, he argued, historically Edessa had been the vassal of the Byzantine duchy of Antioch. The count refused, not least because he had already sworn allegiance to Baldwin of Boulogne in 1100. With neither side willing to give ground, conflict seemed inevitable.

In early September both men raised armies. Less than ten years after Jerusalem’s conquest, Baldwin and Tancred–fellow Latins and veteran crusaders–were now ready and willing to crush one another in open war. More shocking still was the fact that Baldwin marched forth to this struggle alongside his new ally, Chavli of Mosul, and some 7,000 Muslim troops. When battle was joined, probably near Tell Bashir, Tancred, although outnumbered, managed to hold the field. But with some 2,000 Christian dead on both sides, Patriarch Bernard, the ecclesiastical overlord of both Antioch and Edessa, stepped in to calm frayed tempers and adjudicate. When witnesses publicly attested that Tancred had actually promised Bohemond in 1104 that he would relinquish control of Edessa upon Baldwin’s release, the Antiochene ruler was forced grudgingly to back down. The city of Edessa itself may have been repatriated, but the embedded hatred and rivalry remained. Tancred stubbornly refused to hand over territory in the northern reaches of the county and was soon pressing Baldwin to make tribute payments in return for peace with Antioch.
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With this dispute still simmering, Tancred’s acquisitive gaze settled upon the nascent county of Tripoli. In the immediate aftermath of the First Crusade his old rival Raymond of Toulouse had sought to carve out his own Levantine lordship centred on the northern reaches of modern-day Lebanon. The challenge confronting Raymond was considerable, for unlike the founders of other Latin settlements he had no crusader conquests to build upon, and the region’s dominant city, Tripoli, remained in Muslim hands.

Nonetheless, Raymond made some progress, capturing the port of Tortosa in 1102, with the aid of a Genoese fleet and survivors from the 1101 crusade. Two years later he conquered a second port to the south, Jubail, resplendent with Roman ruins. Meanwhile, on a hill outside Tripoli, Raymond constructed a doughty fortress, christened Mount Pilgrim, thereby securing effective control of the surrounding region. Yet, despite his tenacious efforts, when the count died in his mid-sixties on 28 February 1105, Tripoli itself remained unconquered.

In the years that followed, two men sought to press claims to Raymond’s legacy. His nephew, William Jordan, the first to arrive in Outremer, continued to pressure Tripoli while also overcoming the neighbouring town of Arqa. In March 1109, however, Raymond’s son Bertrand of Toulouse reached the Holy Land, determined to assert his rights as heir. When he brought a sizeable fleet to reinforce the siege of Tripoli, the two claimants squabbled over rights to the city, even though it had yet to be captured, and William Jordan quit Mount Pilgrim for the north. The emergent county of Tripoli looked as if it might founder amid bitter dynastic squabbling.

In the end, however, the contest for control of Tripoli involved far more than the simple issue of inheritance; it became the centrepiece of a wider struggle for dominion over the crusader states. Realising that he would need an ally if he was to have any hope of claiming Tripoli, William Jordan turned to Tancred, offering to become his vassal. Not surprisingly, Tancred seized this sudden opportunity to expand Antiochene influence southwards; should Tripoli fall under his sway and his designs upon Edessa come to fruition, then the principality might rightly claim to be Outremer’s leading power. Modern historical analysis has persistently underestimated the significance of this episode, the assumption being that the kingdom of Jerusalem was automatically and immediately recognised as the overlord of the Frankish East at the start of the twelfth century. True, the Holy City had been the focus of the First Crusade, and Baldwin of Boulogne was the only Latin ruler in the Levant to assume the title of king, but his realm encompassed Palestine, not the entire Near East. Each of the four crusader states was founded as an independent polity and Jerusalem’s pre-eminent status among them had never been formally ratified. A current of rivalry had coloured relations between Baldwin and Tancred ever since they contested control of Cilicia in 1097; now, in 1109, Tancred’s brash assertiveness offered a challenge to Baldwin’s authority that would determine the balance of power in the Latin Levant.

Over the next twelve months, Jerusalem’s monarch resolved this political crisis with stunning finesse, roundly outplaying his old opponent. To his credit, Baldwin made no attempt to counter Antiochene ambition with direct force of arms, preferring instead to promote and harness the notion of Frankish solidarity in the face of Muslim adversaries. Employing diplomatic guile, he affirmed Jerusalemite supremacy even as he advanced Outremer’s defensive security.

In the summer of 1109 Baldwin called the rulers of the Latin East to assist Bertrand of Toulouse at the siege of Tripoli. On the face of it, this was to be a grand Frankish alliance, dedicated to the subjugation of an intransigent Muslim outpost. The king himself marched north with some 500 knights; Tancred, together with 700 knights, arrived in the company of his new ally, William Jordan; and Baldwin II of Edessa and Joscelin likewise brought a sizeable force. Alongside Bertrand’s Provençal navy and a Genoese fleet, this represented a formidable assembly. And yet, entrenched animosity and fractious suspicion rippled beneath the surface of this coalition.

Of course, the subtext to the whole affair–as all the key players must well have known–was the issue of power among the Franks. Would Baldwin I allow Antioch’s burgeoning influence to go unchecked, and if not, what manner of riposte would the king employ? With the gathering complete, the king enacted his canny scheme. Having already taken Bertrand of Toulouse under his wing, extracting an oath of fealty in exchange for Jerusalem’s support, he now convened a general council to resolve the dispute over Tripoli’s future. Baldwin I’s masterstroke was to comport himself not as a wrathful, overbearing overlord, nor as Tancred’s conniving rival, but rather as an impartial arbiter of justice. In the words of one Latin contemporary, the king listened to ‘all the injuries of both sides’ along with a jury of ‘his loyal men’ and then enacted reconciliation. Raymond of Toulouse’s heirs were ‘made friends’, with Bertrand given rights to the bulk of the county, including Tripoli, Mount Pilgrim and Jubail, and William placated with Tortosa and Arqa. What is more, Baldwin II and Tancred were said to have been ‘reconciled’ on the understanding that Antioch would relinquish control of all remaining Edessene territory. By way of compensation, Tancred was reinstated as the lord of Haifa and Galilee.

The king appeared to have achieved an equitable settlement, restoring harmony to Outremer. The coalition forces were certainly able to prosecute Tripoli’s investment with renewed vigour, bludgeoning the city’s Muslim garrison into submission by 12 July 1109. In reality, however, Tancred had been stymied and humbled. He made no effort to claim his lordship in the kingdom of Jerusalem, not least because this involved an oath of subservience to Baldwin I. The king, meanwhile, despite maintaining a façade of impartiality, had served his own interests, protecting his relationship with Edessa and positioning his own favourite as the new ruler of a Tripolitan county. He cannot have been overly dejected when, soon after Tripoli’s capitulation, William Jordan was ‘pierced through the heart in a secret attack and died’, leaving Bertrand in a position of uncontested authority.

In May 1110 Baldwin I seized an opportunity to consolidate further his status as overlord of the Latin Levant. That spring, Muhammad, the Seljuq sultan of Baghdad, finally reacted to the Frankish subjugation of the Near East. He dispatched a Mesopotamian army to begin the work of reclaiming Syria under the command of Maudud, a capable Turkish general who recently had come to power in Mosul. The first target was the county of Edessa. In the face of this threat, the Latins united, and the swift arrival of a large coalition army from Jerusalem, Tripoli and Antioch forced Maudud to break off his short-lived siege of Edessa. King Baldwin I used the opportunity presented by this gathering of the ruling Frankish elite to call a second council of arbitration, this time with the sole focus of addressing the ongoing dispute between Tancred and Baldwin of Bourcq. According to one Christian contemporary, resolution was to be achieved, ‘either by a fair trial or by agreement of a council of magnates’. Knowing that he was unlikely to receive anything approaching ‘fair’ treatment, Tancred had to be persuaded to attend by his closest advisers and, once the council began, his fears were soon confirmed. With King Baldwin presiding in judgement, Tancred was accused of inciting Maudud of Mosul to attack Edessa and of allying with Muslims. These charges were almost certainly manufactured and, notably, no mention was made of either Baldwin of Bourcq’s own alliance with Mosul in 1108 or Baldwin I’s dealings with Damascus. Facing the united opprobrium of the council and threatened with ostracism from the Frankish community, Tancred was once again forced to back down. From this point on, he seems to have stopped demanding tribute from Edessa.