The First Crusade (30 page)

We can interpret this action in a number of ways: as a coldly calculated atrocity, part of the ongoing game of siege and intimidation; or, as Raymond of Aguilers would have us believe, the isolated action of the poor rabble, 'excited by the sight of Turkish spoils'. We should recognise, however, that Raymond, perhaps because of his status as a chaplain, appears to have been more acutely aware than other eyewitnesses that the crusaders might be criticised for particularly extreme acts of barbarity, and tends to attribute them to the base and faceless poor'. In any case, we can be in no doubt that the cemetery's desecration added to the Muslim garrison's despair. One Latin contemporary noted: The sight of this action caused the Turks to be dejected and grief-stricken almost to death, and daily they did nothing but weep and wail
.
They were far from broken, but they must have felt that the crusaders were finally gaining the upper hand.
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The Franks were now in a position to blockade the Bridge Gate and, around 10 March, work began on fortifying the abandoned mosque. They did not set out to construct a technically sophisticated or even permanent fortress. Even cowed by recent events, the Antiochene garrison might rally to attack the Franks before the fortification was complete, so the crusaders needed an easily erected makeshift fort. For three days a mass effort was made and the princes themselves joined in by helping to carry stones. With a detachment of archers watching the Bridge Gate for any sign of Muslim attack, the crusaders dug a double ditch around the mosque, put up a rough stone-and-lime-mortar curtain wall within this perimeter, and finally raised two improvised rock towers beside the mosque itself.

By 14 March the new stronghold had been completed and named La Mahomerie, the old French for the Blessed Mary, Christ's mother. Although it had been built by a communal effort, its command was now conferred solely upon Raymond of Toulouse. His chaplain took great care to explain why his lord accepted this onerous and expensive task:

Debate ensued over the choice of a prince as guardian of the new fort, since a community affair is often slighted because all believe it will be attended to by others. While some of the princes, desirous of pay, solicited the vote of their peers for the
office,
the count, contrary to the wishes of his entourage, grabbed control, partly in order to excuse himself from
the accusation of sloth and partl
y to point the way of force and wisdom to the slothful.
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The chaplain went on to explain that, because Raymond had, since the preceding summer, been periodically incapacitated by illness, a rumour had spread among the crusaders that 'he was willing neither to fight nor to give'. With his standing increasingly eclipsed by other princes, and even his own people, the Provencals, beginning to doubt him, Raymond agreed to command La Mahomerie, we are told, in order to reinstate his good name. But Raymond of Aguilers' rather desperate attempts to explain this decision give off the distinct aroma of propaganda. He probably conceded that Raymond of Toulouse's act was not entirely selfless to forestall more damaging questions about his hero's motivation. One issue had begun to burn in Raymond of Toulouse's mind: who would win possession of Antioch when the city finally fell? Before March 1098 Raymond had not made an outstanding contribution to the siege and so could not claim the city on the basis of having orchestrated its fall. He did, however, still possess a relative abundance of one increasingly scarce resource: money. While other princes expected to be paid to organise the defence of La Mahomerie, Raymond offered to meet all expenses out of his own purse. In effect he bought exclusive rights to the siege fort. Why? The laws of war - which granted ownership by 'right of conquest' - had already influenced Bohemond's decision to secure access to the Gate of St Paul at the start of the siege. Now Raymond followed suit by blockading the city's other major portal, the Bridge Gate. Both were now set for a race into Antioch when the city fell.
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Towards the end of March 1098 Yaghi Siyan rallied his troops' flagging spirits sufficiently to launch a surprise dawn attack out of the Bridge Gate, testing the strength of La Mahomerie. Raymond of Aguilers, probably camped within the fort by this time, recalled with some horror that their position was almost overrun. In his opinion, it was the miraculous hand of God that saved the Provencals: 'On the preceding day a torrent of rain drenched the fresh earth and thus filled the fosse around [La Mahomerie]. As a result
...
the strength of the Lord hindered the enemy'

In fact, the crusade princes must have known that the siege fort could never withstand a sustained, full-scale assault - a fortification thrown up in three days was not intended for such a purpose. Instead, in the event of an attack, La Mahomerie was designed to provide Raymond of Toulouse's troops just enough protection to allow

Frankish reinforcements to be sent across the Bridge of Boats. Raymond of Aguilers remembered that the dawn attack was thwarted in just such a way: The noise of combat attracted our forces, and
as a result the fort was saved.
Antioch's Bridge Gate may not have been sealed, but control of the traffic before it was now in the crusaders' hands.
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With the Bridge Gate guarded, the Muslim garrison took to using the city's last major gate, that of St George, but with the increased Latin control over the area even this became precarious. One Latin eyewitness gleefully reported that a group of crusaders, probably Provencals, captured 2,000 horses - surely an exaggeration - that had been led out of the Gate of St George to pasture on the slopes of Mount Silpius. Even so, the crusaders soon took steps to blockade this final gate. In the first week of April the council of princes appointed Tancred, Bohemond's nephew, to fortify and man a monastery next to the gate in return for 400 marks of silver, one-quarter of which came directly from Raymond of Toulouse. This payment is quite revealing. In the
Gesta Francorum
- written by an anonymous southern Italian Norman whom we would expect to be a partisan supporter of his countryman - Tancred is actually reported to have said he would do the job, but only 'if I may know what reward I shall have'. This self-serving attitude was probably the result of both his acquisitive nature and his status in the second, poorer rank of the crusader aristocracy. In fact, Tancred benefited from the arrangement all around, because within days of taking up his post he captured an Armenian and Syrian trade caravan bound for Antioch's St George Gate, seizing 'corn, wine, barley, oil and other such things'.
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From early April 1098 the crusaders tightened the noose around Antioch. Their cordon was not perfect - it was still possible for some limited supplies to be brought into the city via the Iron Gate - but the balance had tilted in the besiegers' favour. Throughout the preceding winter they had struggled to gather enough food to survive, while the Antiochene garrison received regular supplies. Now, with the tables turned, the crusaders could forage in relative safety and enjoyed

secure lines of communication with St Simeon, and it was the turn of Yaghi Siyan and his men to suffer. The crusaders' lot was further improved when lavish gifts of horses and weapons arrived from Baldwin of Boulogne, now established as ruler of Edessa, and, in May, by the return of other crusaders who had manned outlying forts and foraging centres.
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The Provengal crusader Raymond of Aguilers made an intriguing observation about this period in a casual aside during a description of Frankish visions. He revealed that at this point in the siege the Latin priest Evremar travelled south to the Muslim city of Tripoli, where he supposedly spent some time 'keeping body and soul together'. The idea that the crusaders might, even in the midst of the struggle to overcome Antioch, be able to travel freely through Islamic territory and even benefit from Muslim hospitality suggests that the lines of inter-religious conflict may not have been as clearly drawn during the expedition as historians once supposed.
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Very little is known about the progress of the siege through the remainder of April and May. Even eyewitness sources pass over the period in little more than one or two lines. We can, however, make tentative attempts to piece together some events. The strain within Antioch certainly seems to have been mounting. One Latin contemporary, Peter Tudebode, recalled that around this time Yaghi Siyan sought to ransom a recently captured crusader named Rainald Porchet. He was dragged up on to the city's walls and ordered to negotiate a suitable payment from his Latin comrades below or face death. Tudebode provided a heavily dramatised account of Rainald's reaction, in which he refused to plead for his release, rejected Siyan's last-ditch offer to repudiate Christianity and become a Muslim, and met his subsequent death by decapitation in prayer. The aftermath of this 'martyrdom' was even more ferocious:

Then [Yaghi Siyan], in a towering rage because he could not make Rainald turn apostate, at once ordered all the [captive crusaders] in Antioch to be brought before him with their hands bound behind their backs
...
He ordered them stripped stark naked, and as they stood in the nude he commanded that they be bound with ropes in a circle. He then had chaff, firewood, and hay piled around them, and finally as enemies of God he ordered them put to the torch. The Christians, those knights of Christ, shrieked and screamed so that their voices resounded in heaven.
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Tudebode told this story as a powerful example of Christian piety in the face of Muslim cruelty, but, if true, it may also indicate a significant hardening in the psychological battle between besieger and besieged. By massacring his remaining Latin captives, Yaghi Siyan was throwing away potential ransom money. But cold calculation rather than blind rage may have prompted his action. He probably thought that his failure to secure any payment for Rainald demonstrated that the crusaders, believing Antioch's fall to be imminent, would now refuse to pay any further ransoms. By callously butchering prisoners, however, he virtually guaranteed that the remaining crusaders would be baying for Muslim blood, putting an end to any hopes among his faltering garrison for a peaceful surrender. The message to his men was simple: if you want to live, you will have to fight.

By May, the garrison's nerve seemed to be failing. The crusader knight Anselm of Ribemont recorded in a letter that around 20 May an offer of surrender was received from the city. He wrote that the Muslims went *so far as to receive some of our men among them, and several of their men came out to us'. However, these Latins, including a member of Hugh of Vermandois' contingent, Walo II of Chaumont-en-Vexin, constable to the king of France, were then killed inside Antioch. Anselm believed the whole affair had been a 'trap', but it is quite possible that a section of the Muslim garrison was actually trying to orchestrate an unsanctioned surrender to Hugh's men, only for Yaghi Siyan to discover the affair and slaughter the crusader envoys.
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THE
TRAITOR
WITHIN

This plot may have been foiled, but by late spring there were other disaffected elements within the city. By April, or early May at the latest, Bohemond had established a secret line of communication with an Antiochene named Firuz. Acting alone, or at the head of a very small group of conspirators, Firuz would change the course of history. In many ways, his actions alone determined the fate of the First Crusade. But, for a man of such significance, Firuz is a remarkably shadowy figure. Mentioned by almost every contemporary account of the crusade, his story is slightly different in each telling. His identity, motivation, the very details of how his conspiracy worked, are all veiled in mystery.

Our best guess is that Firuz was an Armenian resident of Antioch who had adopted the Muslim faith. A number of sources describe him as having been a relatively wealthy armour-maker, but we can be certain that during the crusader siege he helped guard the city's walls. He seems to have commanded at least one tower on the south-eastern walls rising above the Gate of St George, not too far from Tancred's siege fort. As such, he had control over a relatively isolated stretch of Antioch's defences. The means for his betrayal are therefore comparatively clear, but what of motive and opportunity? One crusade chronicler would have us believe that Firuz was persuaded to act by three successive visions of Christ. According to a twelfth-century Muslim writer based in Damascus, he turned to the crusaders because Yaghi Siyan had confiscated his wealth and property. Firuz may well have been disenchanted with Antioch's ruler, but in all likelihood his actions were chiefly inspired by simple greed. One southern Italian crusader admitted frankly that Bohemond bribed him with lavish promises of'riches and great honour', while another contemporary believed that Bohemond promised to make Firuz the equal of Tancred in power and wealth.

But how was contact with Firuz first established? The explanation of the Byzantine princess Anna Comnena, writ
ten decades later in
Constantinople, appears at first sight to be wonderfully improbable -
Firuz, she wrote, simply 'used to lean over the walls' and chat with Bohemond. It is perhaps not entirely impossible that the first connection was made when Firuz hailed Tancred's men stationed nearby, but communication is more likely to have been initiated and maintained via Armenian traders passing in and out of the city.
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