The First Crusade (40 page)

First, of course, the crusaders had to engineer Marrat's fall - no simple task. Although this 'wealthy and heavily populated' town lay on an undulating upland plain and so lacked natural defences, it was fully enclosed within a defensive wall and surrounded by a dry moat. At first its populace, remembering the ease with which Raymond Pilet's attack had been thwarted, were scornful of the crusader threat. One Provencal eyewitness recalled, 'the haughty citizens railed at our leaders, cursed our army, and desecrated crosses fixed to their walls to anger us. We were so enraged by the natives that we openly stormed the walls
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This first attack did not go well. Some Franks reached the town walls, but they carried only two scaling ladders which were 'short and fragile'. With no way into Marrat, the 'leaders saw that they could do nothing and that they were labouring in vain' and so ordered the retreat. Even with the combined force of Raymond, Robert and Bohemond's troops, the crusaders were still ill prepared to prosecute full-scale siege warfare. Realising that a new approach was needed, the three princes met in council. Marrat demanded a different type of strategy from that adopted at Antioch. The town was small enough for a close-encirclement siege to be attempted, but starving the enemy into submission would inevitably be a long-drawn-out process, one during which the crusaders themselves were just as likely to run short of food. Indeed, with winter reaching its height, their lines of supply soon began to show signs of strain. Within a week the crusaders' food supplies started to dwindle. One Latin eyewitness remarked: 'It grieves me to report that in the ensuing famine one could see more than ten thousand men scattered like cattle in the field scratching and looking, trying to find grains of wheat, barley, beans or any vegetable
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At the same time, discipline was flagging. Peter Bartholomew, who had accompanied Raymond into the Jabal as-Summaq, accused the army of a whole host of sins, including 'murder, pillage, theft and adultery', and prescribed a series of cleansing 'spiritual preparations', the offering of prayers and the giving of alms.

Under these conditions the princes needed to bring their investment of Marrat to a swift resolution. The Muslim garrison refused their offers for a negotiated surrender, so the crusaders decided to adopt an aggressive, assault-based siege strategy. This style of warfare had particular requirements for both attacker and defender. The crusaders' primary aim was to overcome Marrat's defences, for once a breach had been achieved they could bring their numerical superiority to bear within the confines of the town. The goal of the Muslim garrison was to use any and all means available to stop the enemy getting access to the walls. Luckily two chroniclers of the crusade, Raymond of Aguilers and the anonymous author of the
Gesta Francorum,
were present at Marrat and lived through the siege that followed. By combining their vivid accounts with the surviving Arabic evidence a richly detailed picture of the military-techniques emerges.

To ease their approach, the crusaders began by filling in sections of the dry moat. The town walls themselves might be overcome in two ways - by forcing them to collapse or by climbing over them. The crusaders pursued both lines of attack. Sappers were deployed to undermine the walls. In its most advanced form sapping involved digging and then collapsing tunnels beneath a wall to undermine its stability. The crusaders had employed this time-consuming technique at Nicaea, but at Marrat they seem to have used a quicker, more basic approach. The defensive methods used by the Muslim garrison - we hear that they 'hurled stones from catapults, darts, fire, hives of bees, and lime upon our men who had sapped their walls' -suggest that the crusaders were out in the open, simply running to the foot of the walls and trying to pry out or smash the masonry to cause a collapse.

For the most part, however, the crusaders, and in particular the Provengals, concentrated their efforts on finding the means actually to mount the walls of Marrat. Trees from a nearby wood were cut down to produce larger, sturdier ladders, but the decisive step was the construction of a formidable siege tower:

Raymond [of Toulouse] caused a wooden siege tower to be built, and it was strong and lofty, so engineered and constructed that it ran upon four wheels. On the top storey stood many knights and Everard the Huntsman, who blew loud blasts on his horn, and underneath were armed knights who pushed the tower up to the town wall, over against one of its towers. When the pagans saw this they immediately made an engine by which they threw great stones upon our siege tower, so that they nearly killed our knights. Moreover, they threw Greek fire upon the siege tower, hoping to burn and destroy it, but this time God would not let it bum, and it was higher than all the town's walls.
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During an attack the crusaders, for their part, 'threw great stones down upon those standing on the city wall' and, when close enough, used spears to harry the enemy and long iron hooks to drag their tower right up to the wall. This impressive siege tower took nearly ten days to build, and was an expensive project even for Raymond, but, once completed, it made a huge difference to the crusaders' prospects. On n December a full-scale assault was launched and, tellingly, the crusaders opted to attack Marrat from at least two different directions at once. Raymond's siege tower - packed full of Provencal knights, among whom was William V, count of Montpellier - was pushed up to the walls. Behind it 'stood the priests and clerks, clad in the holy vestments, beseeching God to defend his people'. Horrified by the threat of the tower, the Muslim garrison concentrated its efforts towards repelling this attack. This proved fatal. On the ot
her side of town another Provenc
al detachment had simultaneously attacked the wall, this time with scaling ladders, and facing weakened resistance they prevailed. Gulpher of Lastours, an Aquitainian knight who had joined Raymond's contingent, was the first to mount the wall, but his success nearly turned to disaster:

The ladder broke at once under the weight of the crowd who followed him, but nevertheless he and some others succeeded in reaching the top of the wall. Those who had gone up cleared a space around them. Others found a fresh ladder and put it up quickly, and many knights and foot soldiers went up it at once, but the Saracens attacked them so fiercely, from the wall and from the ground, loosing arrows and fighting hand to hand with spears, that many of our men jumped off.
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Hard pressed as they were, some crusaders managed to hold their ground on the wall. Once again the Muslim garrison was forced to switch priorities, pulling troops away from other sections of the wall to shore up this breach. In the ensuing respite sappers, on the other side of town, protected by the siege tower, were undermining the town's defences' when, suddenly, a section of the wall collapsed and 'panic-stricken [the garrison] fled into the town'. As the crusaders began pouring on to its walls, Marrat lay on the brink of capture, but the breakthrough came too late in the day to be immediately conclusive - 'night ended the fight and left some towers and parts of the city in Saracen control. Already in possession of the upper hand, the princes decided not to risk the chaotic uncertainty of urban combat in the dark, and, having encircled the town with their knights 'to cut off any escapees', they setded down to await dawn. The poorer crusaders who had accompanied Raymond, Robert and Bohemond were not so patient. With the backbone of Marrat's resistance broken their minds turned to the possibility of plunder: 'Because starvation had made them [desperate, they] carried the fight to the besieged in the shades of the night. Thereby the poor gained the lion's share of booty and houses in Marrat while the knights, who awaited morning to enter, found poor pickings.'
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The fall of Marrat presents a clear distillation of the crusaders' darker impulses - their single-minded greed and cold-blooded brutality. The town's sack was always going to be about one thing -plunder - and the Franks were prepared to go to virtually any lengths to get it. The princes certainly did not choose to wait for daylight to facilitate a more controlled, peaceful surrender from the Muslim garrison. They held off until 12 December so that they might overrun the town more safely and strip it of loot more efficiently. Bohemond attempted to negotiate the surrender of Marrat's leaders, instructing them through an interpreter that if they gathered with their families in a specified 'palace which lies above the gate, he would save them from death'. But this act had nothing to do with clemency. Bohemond did not carefully orchestrate the safe capture of Marrat's aristocracy to offer them security or preferred treatment. He simply wanted them in one place so that he might rob them more easily. We hear from one eyewitness that 'Bohemond took those whom he had ordered to enter the palace, and stripped them of all their belongings, gold, silver and other valuables, and some of them he caused to be killed, others to be taken to Antioch and sold as slaves.'
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The sheer ferocity of Marrat's sack was intensified by the poorer crusaders' night-time scavenging. As day broke on 12 December, the knights, frustrated that they had been beaten to the best booty, unleashed their anger on the town's populace in a mad scramble to gather up what was left:

Our men all entered the city, and each seized his own share of whatever goods he found in houses or cellars, and when it was dawn they killed everyone, man or woman, whom they met in any place whatsoever. No corner of the town was clear of Saracen corpses, and one could scarcely go about the streets except by treading on their dead bodies.
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One medieval Arabic writer later estimated the Muslim dead at 10,000, an exaggeration, but one that indicates the perceived severity of the slaughter. Some Muslims escaped immediate death by hiding in caves underneath the town, but the crusaders went to almost perverse lengths to get at them and their riches:

The Christians filched all the goods above ground, and, driven by hopes of Saracen wealth underground, smoked the enemy out of their caves with fire and sulphur flames. When the plunder in the caves proved disappointing, they tortured to death the hapless Muslims in their reach. Some of our men had the experience of leading the Saracens through the streets, hoping to locate spoils of war, only to find their captives would lead them to wells and then suddenly jump headlong to their deaths in preference to revealing goods owned by them or others. Because of their intransigence all submitted to death. Their corpses were thrown into swamps and areas beyond the walls, and so Marrat yielded little plunder.
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Of course, the conquest of Marrat was not just about amassing moveable treasure. Raymond of Toulouse had come south to expand his Provencal enclave, cement his domination of the Jabal as-Summaq and destabilise Bohemond's grip over northern Syria. Bohemond, for his part, had followed Raymond to prevent him taking sole possession of Marrat. With the town captured, the princes were presented with one overriding question: who had the right to claim Marrat? Having been responsible for constructing the campaign's decisive weapon - the siege tower - Raymond saw himself as the chief architect of Marrat's fall and naturally believed he deserved full rights to the town. In contrast, the Provencals argued, Bohernond and his men had been 'only halfhearted in pressing the siege . . . more of a hindrance than a help'. Even so, during the sack Bohemond, acutely attuned as always to the exigencies of the right of conquest, raced along the walls posting men to occupy as many towers as possible. Raymond's followers may have seized most of the town itself, but Bohemond controlled the greater part of its defences.

Thus from 12 December a complex stalemate was achieved. Raymond could not claim sole lordship of Marrat while Bohemond retained control of his towers. The mirror image of this predicament existed at Antioch, where Bohemond's rule was challenged by Raymond's possession of the Bridge Gate and Palace. The true,

underlying significance of the entire expedition to Marrat emerged once negotiations towards a settlement began. Apparently, Bohemond stated bluntly:
1
shall agree to nothing with Raymond unless he cedes the Antiochene towers to me
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Bohemond had come to the Jabal as-Summaq in search of a bargaining tool with which to break the deadlock at Antioch, but when Raymond proved utterly unwilling to relinquish his foothold in that city, it became clear that, far from being resolved, the quarrel between them had instead only intensified.
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9

THE FALTERING PATH

The Feast of the Nativity passed at Marrat in miserable inactivity. Most crusaders, from knights to the poorest peasants, were becoming increasingly disgruntled. Once the meagre spoils of the recent sack had been exhausted, hunger once again began to threaten. As far as the mass of crusaders was concerned, the expedition would survive only if it began moving south with a rejuvenated unity of purpose, towards Jerusalem. Popular pressure was growing within both the Provencal and southern Italian Norman camps, for the princes to put aside their differences and focus instead upon the interests of the crusade. Both Raymond and Bohemond were facing the real possibility of open rebellion or desertion.

Many Provencals believed Raymond should strike out for Jerusalem regardless of what the other crusade princes might do. They wanted him, 'the recipient of the Holy Lance
...
to make himself leader and lord of the army', but they warned that, if he were not willing to restart the expedition, he should 'hand over the Holy Lance to the masses, and they would continue the march to Jerusalem under the Lord's leadership'. The threat was obvious - do something to solve the crisis or risk losing popular support. To the masses, Raymond's prestige had been boosted through his association