Armies of Heaven (32 page)

Between the capture of Nicea and the fall of Antioch, the Franks had fought battles of an ever-increasing apocalyptic scale. The day after they took control of the city, when the relief army arrived from Mosul, they would encounter their fiercest opponent and their greatest challenge yet—a conflict in which they would need all the powers of heaven and its saints if they hoped to survive.

 

 

 

 

B
arely one day passed after the Franks took control of Antioch before a massive Turkish relief army reached the city. Its leader, the
atabeg
, or governor, of the city of Mosul, was named Kerbogah. More than any of the other enemies the crusaders had faced or would face, Kerbogah captured their imagination. The stories about him differ in detail, but his role is consistent. Unlike the Turkish leaders of Antioch, alternately shaking their fists and cowering in terror before the image of Christ, Kerbogah was a skeptic: a man who saw the crusade as a normal war governed by the ordinary rules of warfare. In this he was the inverse of a Christian warrior—yet another distorted reflection—not because he opposed his religion to theirs, not because he was superstitious or believed in pagan gods, but because he was rational.

Kerbogah's great mistake, almost a tragic flaw, was his inability to recognize the crusade as a new type of war—a series of holy battles rather than a conflict of men. To his misfortune, he placed his faith in rationality and in numbers at the very moment when, from the Franks' perspective, the wrath and wonder of God had been made everywhere visible.

Who was Kerbogah? As the
atabeg
of Mosul, he was one of the more prominent leaders in the Sunni Turkish world. His high status rested
largely on a reputation for military genius and ferocity. When he decided to intervene at Antioch, he did so with the full knowledge and support of the Sunni Caliphate, but he was likely interested as well in advancing his own ambitions in the fractured political network of northern Syria. According to the twelfth-century Arab historian Ibn al-Athir, Kerbogah was an arrogant man whose abrasive character alienated many of his followers. But abrasive or not, he did manage to assemble a formidable coalition in advance of the battle, drawing support from many of the independent and semi-independent Turkish cities. His recruits included most notably Duqaq of Damascus, who had already attempted to relieve Antioch in December 1097. (Duqaq's estranged brother Ridwan sat out the rest of the siege.) How large Kerbogah's army was is a matter of guesswork. Estimates in the Middle Ages ran as high as one million. Modern writers tend toward a more realistic but still daunting figure of 40,000.
¹

Kerbogah, as the Latin writers understood him, was a “diabolical man” who felt horror at the word “Christian.” But in this case such religious language seems more a matter of habit than conviction. Kerbogah, as they described him, kept his feet firmly grounded in this world, not the next. “These are men like us,” Kerbogah said of the Franks. “We will be fighting against impure and uncircumcised men; we do not fight against God, nor God against us. An equal likelihood of death threatens us all.” To borrow a modern phrase, from Kerbogah's perspective the crusade was a clash of civilizations, and he was prepared to take the fight all the way to Europe. “Let us pursue them tirelessly into their own countries. I would count it the greatest shame, my noble followers, to defend against them here and to conquer them in our own land if we did not inflict the same sort of injury on them in their land, too, and wipe out whatever they had there.” In line with these grand plans for total war, he encouraged the sultan and the caliph in Khorasan (or Baghdad), through letters sent from Antioch, to promote sexual abandon at home. With more sex and more babies, the Saracens might put together an army large enough to conquer Europe.
²

Part rationalist and part madman, Kerbogah was also a bully, a ruthless and selfish lord of a type that Frankish readers would have quickly recognized. His first thought when he reached Antioch had nothing to do with victory. Rather, he wanted to take possession of the great citadel of Antioch,
where many of the Muslim survivors of the June 3 massacre had fled. This massive fortification was in the possession of Sensadolus (or Shams al-Daulah, “Sun of the Regime”), the son of Yaghi-Siyan, recently deposed as governor of Antioch.

Kerbogah opened negotiations with Sensadolus for possession of the tower right after he arrived. The vocabulary in the story is clearly Western, not Islamic, but there may have been some truth to the Latin reports. Upon meeting Kerbogah, so the story goes, Sensadolus observed to him, “I have waited a long time for your assistance, so that you might help me in this danger.”

Kerbogah replied, “If you wish me to help you wholeheartedly and to be your faithful supporter in this danger, give this citadel into my hands, and then you will see how much benefit I can be. I will make my men guard it.”

Sensadolus responded, “If you can kill all the Franks and bring me their heads, I will give you the citadel and gladly make homage to you, and I will guard the citadel in fealty to you.”

To which Kerbogah said, “No, that won't work. Give me the citadel now.” And willingly or not, Sensadolus gave him the citadel.
³

Warriors in eleventh-century France would have found this a familiar story. A great lord had forced someone in a precarious situation to surrender his liberty. Not satisfied with loyalty and service, the lord wanted property, too, effectively extorting a castle from its rightful owner. Kerbogah, again like a thuggish, Frankish strongman, turned the property over to one of his close followers—a “new man” in the area, upon whose loyalty he could more safely depend.
⁴

This new man was Ahmad ibn-Marwan, known in Frankish chronicles as “the amir.” He was “a gentle and peaceable man”—curious qualities in a warlord but appropriate for a cringing sidekick. “The amir,” however, was uncomfortable with Kerbogah's actions. He accepted command of the citadel, but only on the condition that if the Franks defeated Kerbogah, he would surrender the fortification to them peacefully. Kerbogah agreed because he knew Ahmad ibn-Marwan to be an honest and prudent fellow. According to a barely remembered tradition, however, immediately upon giving the citadel to this faithful friend, Kerbogah returned and
demanded right of entry. Another series of negotiations ensued, with the amir offering his lord whatever gold Yaghi-Siyan had left in the tower, as well as the service of the men there, provided Kerbogah used the soldiers to kill Franks. “But I will not,” he concluded, “pay tribute to you for the castle.” Again, using medieval legal language, Ahmad ibn-Marwan wished to hold the castle as an
allod
, given in gift from his lord, and not to obligate himself to permanent, recurring payments. Kerbogah, however, was both acquisitive and erratic—on the one hand enriching his followers while on the other hand reminding them that the largesse he had showed remained in his possession, regardless of earlier promises.
⁵

Yet in the world of Frankish gossip and historical legend, Kerbogah's coalition was already collapsing. Ahmad ibn-Marwan immediately entered into negotiations with Bohemond's nephew Tancred, who spoke a little Syriac. The amir promised that he would hand over the citadel to Bohemond should the Franks prevail against Kerbogah.

As unlikely as it sounds, this story is not merely the product of crusader legend. Kerbogah's great army at Antioch almost immediately began to fracture. Its great size was at once its biggest strength and its greatest weakness. For Kerbogah had cobbled together his army from numerous, semiautonomous warlords, and it was, inevitably, riven with mistrust. Could the Franks have learned of these divisions and exploited them? It is not impossible. Bohemond had already used similar diplomatic tactics to capture Antioch. It was within the abilities of his kinsman Tancred (armed with a little Syriac) to exploit similar diplomatic openings during this final stage of the siege.
⁶

Oblivious to the difficulties he was creating among his own men, Kerbogah continued to prepare for what he saw as an easy victory. The Franks, after all, had starved Antioch of most of its supplies. The Turkish garrison inside the citadel was constantly harassing them. And, above all, Kerbogah had numbers on his side. “I have more amirs with me here than there are Christians, both greater and lesser ones,” he is said to have boasted. Victory was for him an article of faith. The Franks were mad to have invaded Syria. They did not have the necessary manpower, riches, or weapons to prevail. When some of his followers presented him with a few broken and rusted Frankish weapons, he burst into laughter. “Are these the fierce and shiny armaments the Christians have brought against
us into Asia?” he asked. “With these do they think and believe that they can drive us back beyond Khorasan?”

So confident was he in victory that he had brought with him “a countless and infinite number of every kind of chain and fetter” with which he planned to enslave the enemy. A herd of dumb animals, he believed, presented a greater threat than the Christians did. “He was so proud and stubborn that he did not believe any of the Franks would dare to come against him in the field.”
⁷

Only one person in Kerbogah's army had the courage to tell him otherwise: his mother. For unknown reasons, again, according to Frankish rumor, she was staying nearby in the city of Aleppo. As soon as she had heard news of the impending battle—and this story, told by the Franks, is almost surely wholly fictional—she rushed to her son's army and begged him not to fight. “Oh, dearest son, the Christians cannot make war against you. I know that they could never bring the fight to you, but their God fights for them every day!” To support her argument, she marshaled a series of Old Testament citations to demonstrate that a small army supported by the Christian God could easily triumph over a numerically superior foe. If Kerbogah fought, she concluded, he would lose, and he would die within the year.

Kerbogah was incredulous. What possible reason was there to spout such nonsense? The prophecies, she answered, appeared “in our scripture and in the books of gentiles”—the former, presumably, the Qur'an, and the latter, perhaps, any of the popular apocalyptic prophecies that circulated in eleventh-century Europe. Kerbogah's mother had also consulted the signs of the zodiac, all of which showed the same result: The Christians would win. It was uncertain, she concluded, whether this victory would be the final Christian triumph over Islam or just a preliminary battle. Like a lot of Christian prophets in the 1090s, she did not know if the crusade had ignited Armageddon itself, but she was relatively sure that the Last Days were beginning.
⁸

Kerbogah refused to listen, even to his mother. The Franks were vastly outnumbered, they were trapped in a city with no supplies and no horses, they were starving, and they were, after all, only men. “Hugh their standard bearer, and Bohemond of Puglia, and Godfrey the gladiator—are they gods? Surely they eat the same ordinary food as we do? Can their
skin not be cut with iron, just like ours?” The battle would occur on earth, not in heaven.
⁹

That is, at least, what the Franks like to believe about Kerbogah. These were the stories they told one another by torchlight. And from the Franks' perspective, these stories had an obvious moral: If they were going to win this battle and reach Jerusalem, they could not afford to treat it as an earthly conflict. They had to look to the angels for help.

For the actual crusader army, trapped in Antioch and far removed from heaven, the siege of Kerbogah against them began disastrously. On June 4, the day his advance party arrived, about thirty Turkish warriors rode close to the walls, inspiring a prominent crusader named Roger de Barneville to ride out of a city gate and challenge them. Unfortunately for Roger, there were another three hundred Turks hidden and waiting. He and his companions tried to retreat back to the city. A crowd of Franks stood on the city walls and cheered him, but before he could reach the gates, a Saracen shot him in the back with an arrow, knocking him off his horse and to the ground. A few of the Turks quickly fell on his body and cut off his head, which they carried around the perimeter of Antioch out of bowshot. What Roger had intended as a bold gesture to inspire his friends had demoralized the entire Frankish host. “They averted their eyes, unable to bear to watch as his body was torn limb from limb.”
¹⁰

The Franks tried to maintain some tactical advantage by preserving the Mahomerie tower outside the Bridge Gate. Its construction had been crucial in closing the siege around Antioch, and they hoped it would be equally useful in keeping Kerbogah at bay and leaving open the road to Saint-Simeon. For two days Robert of Flanders and a small band of Franks, fighting with lances and crossbows, maintained possession of the Mahomerie. After three days, however, the fighting became particularly brutal. Several of the defenders died or suffered serious injury. Kerbogah's army suffered losses as well, and that evening his troops retreated to seek reinforcements. Count Robert, meanwhile, realized that retaining the tower was a lost cause. He allowed his weary and bloodied men to retreat
back into Antioch in the middle of the night, setting the Mahomerie on fire as they left lest the Saracens turn it against them. The next morning, June 8, about 4,000 Turks turned up for the fight but instead picked through the wreckage left behind.

With the siege tower out of the way, Kerbogah began to relocate his army to the southeast corner of the city, near the citadel. From outside the walls, he could run his army through the massive keep and directly into Antioch. The Franks recognized the danger and tried to cut the Turks off, attacking them near the St. George Gate. That fight raged all day, and those involved experienced a whole new level of exhaustion and delirium. Some of them reported something like combat fatigue—an out-of-body experience or, perhaps, a hellish visitation. “Something happened to our men there both horrible to mention and unheard of. Amidst the hail of arrows and the continuous blows from stones and spears and among so, so many dead, our men were asleep.”