Armies of Heaven (37 page)

The population of Albara was small, but Raymond seems to have treated it brutally. “He killed all the Saracen men and women, great and small, whom he found.” The chaplain Raymond said that his count enslaved several thousand citizens, though he added somewhat disdainfully that Raymond freed any cowardly citizens who had surrendered before Albara fell. Careful to preserve the sacred character of his actions, the count also ordered that his followers elect a bishop, and they solemnly chose a Provençal cleric, Peter of Narbonne. Shortly thereafter Peter traveled to Antioch to receive consecration from John IV. Raymond also entrusted to Peter half of the city and the territories that pertained to Albara and established his rule in a newly consecrated church (recently a mosque, or “devil's house”).
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Raymond then left most of his followers behind—for a time they were sated with blood and war—and returned to Antioch for the proposed November 1 departure. The other princes were already there, with Godfrey accompanied by an impressive number of Saracen slaves, pathetically carrying the heads of their dead friends. As it turned out, no one wanted to leave. The chief troublemaker was Count Raymond, who announced that he would never give Antioch to Bohemond. He was, he explained, reluctant to violate the oath he had made to the emperor. More to the point, his men were still in possession of the Bridge Gate and of Yaghi-Siyan's former palace, and he had just established a foothold in Albara. Bohemond was furious, and the other princes seemed to agree. Raymond had, after all, made a show at Constantinople of preserving his honor and not giving in to Greek pressure. His sudden conversion to Alexius's cause—a road to Damascus moment—must have struck everyone as disingenuous.

In the end Bohemond and Raymond could only agree to follow the will of the other princes—Godfrey, Robert of Flanders, and Robert of Normandy—and not to delay the road to Jerusalem. The rank and file seemed to believe that the leader had agreed on a new date to begin the final march, but in reality they had decided to do nothing except wait for
a month and talk about it again in December. Effectively, Bohemond and Raymond were scuttling the crusade.
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Raymond returned to Albara, accompanied this time by Robert of Flanders. Rather than recuperate for the month, the two princes set a new target: the city of Ma‘arra, whose defenders had earlier humiliated Raymond Pilet and his Latin and Syrian bandits. The people of Ma‘arra, according to the chaplain Raymond, had grown arrogant because of their easy victory over Raymond Pilet. When the Franks arrived on November 28, the citizens stood on the walls mocking them, ridiculing their leaders, and desecrating crosses. Raymond and Robert, likely prodded by the anger of their followers, decided to attack at once but failed for lack of ladders. Bohemond arrived shortly afterward, no doubt suggesting that things might have gone differently if only they had waited for him. But in reality the city was too well fortified to fall easily, Bohemond's presence or not. Once again, as at Antioch, the Franks settled in for what promised to be a long siege.
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And again, as at Antioch, the common soldiers started to feel intense hunger pangs. Perhaps to reassure them, Peter Bartholomew announced that St. Andrew had spoken to him once more, now accompanied by his brother St. Peter. The apostles had wished to scold the army and to reassure them. They explained that the soldiers deserved their suffering. They had forgotten their previous blessings and had not fully appreciated the miracle of the Holy Lance. They had also sinned greatly—theft, adultery, and violence to the poor. If they repented of these practices, established true justice, married their harlots, and offered tithes regularly to the poor, they would again know God's mercy. But in fact God was prepared to give them Ma‘arra anyway. “Whenever you want, attack the city,” St. Peter told him, “since without doubt it shall be yours.” The chaplain Raymond was delighted at these instructions. Some, however, were beginning to weary of the little Provençal rustic. The Normans in particular had started to ridicule him and his relic—probably at Bohemond's suggestion. Undermining belief in the Holy Lance was an easy, albeit indirect, way to dislodge Count Raymond from Antioch.
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In any case no one was willing to attack Ma‘arra just yet. The siege would continue for two more weeks—a time spent in part building a massive, wheeled siege tower and several more siege ladders. It was not an inordinately long time compared to the epic ordeal at Antioch, but even so this waiting period had shocking repercussions. The hunger grew intense more quickly, and the radical elements in the army were not willing to bear their suffering. For Jerusalem they might have endured it, but not for Ma‘arra.

Spurred by the combination of severe hunger and prophetic rage, some members of the army turned to a now familiar, if horrifying, solution: cannibalism. This time they did so proudly, having learned how to use psychological warfare to their advantage. In the words of Fulcher of Chartres, reporting what he had heard from Edessa, “I tremble to say it, but many of our men, seized by the madness of hunger, cut pieces from the buttocks of the Saracens, who were dead at the time, which they cooked and ate, and even if they were barely warmed over they savagely filled their mouths and devoured them.” Another writer said that he learned these details from some of the actual cannibals, apparently proud of what they had done: “Adults were put in the stewpot, and boys were skewered on spits. Both were cooked and eaten.”

If, as described earlier, Bohemond publicly faked cannibalism at Antioch as a way to flush out Turkish spies, the crusaders at Ma‘arra genuinely indulged in it, hoping to terrify the enemy—a step beyond desecrating Saracen graves or using Saracen heads as saddle ornaments. In the goal of inspiring horror, they were successful: “Indeed the Saracens and the Turks said amongst themselves, ‘Who is able to stand against this people, who are so resolute and cruel that—after a whole year of not being driven away from the siege of Antioch, either by hunger or sword or by any other danger—they now eat human flesh?'” But not all of the Franks were pleased at the result. Some were so shocked that they abandoned the expedition altogether, close to Jerusalem though they were.
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Crusade chroniclers agonized over this story. One of them, Guibert of Nogent, blamed the cannibalism on a band of poor soldiers he called the “Tafurs.” Not really warriors, they were mainly helpful peasants or poor pilgrims, carrying out useful tasks for the Frankish aristocracy. The Tafurs' own leader, whom they called a “king,” was reportedly a Norman knight who had
lost his horse. In the epic poetry of the twelfth century, the Tafur king and his earnest peasant band would be transformed into savage warriors, hardened by the deprivations of poverty—an imaginative leap made possible by Guibert's decision to blame them for the cannibalism at Ma‘arra. Modern writers have either followed Guibert's lead and accused the Tafurs for what went wrong, or they have preferred the testimony of Raymond of Aguilers and the author of
Deeds of the Franks
, who both placed the cannibalism after the siege had ended and blamed it only on sharp, unexpected hunger. They also were eyewitnesses, and modern historians, like medieval ones, tend to put greater weight on eyewitness testimony.

As eyewitnesses, however, they were also potentially implicated in the cannibalism. It was in their interest to explain it away. Writers like Fulcher, Ralph of Caen, Guibert of Nogent, and Albert of Aachen, who were well informed about the crusade and who had talked to other participants at the siege of Ma‘arra, had heard too many reports of deliberate, aggressive cannibalism to dismiss it out of hand, including from some men who claimed to have cut their enemies up and put them on spits in full view of the city's defenders. They weren't ashamed. For them it would have all been a part of the process of holy war.

The cannibals, or their confessors, might have even appealed to the Bible to justify their actions since the God of the Old Testament often threatened cannibalism against His enemies, and sometimes against His followers, too. The consumption of human flesh was but one weapon in the divine arsenal. “I will feed your enemies with their own flesh, and like new wine, they shall be drunk with their own blood,” says the prophet Isaiah. “They will eat the flesh of my people,” the prophet Micah says; “they will flay their skin and break their bones and chop them into pieces for the pot, with flesh as if in the midst of the cauldron.” In the book of the Apocalypse, God through an angel commands birds to feed upon the kings of the earth, their servants, and their horses. [Plate 5] And in the Old Testament, He promises a similar fate to the wicked Israelite king Jeroboam: “Dogs will eat those who die in the city belonging to Jeroboam, and the birds of the air will feed on those who die in the country.” Perhaps Albert of Aachen had this passage in mind when he wrote of Ma‘arra, “Christians did not shrink from eating not only killed Turks or Saracens, but even dogs, whom they snatched and cooked with fire.”
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Finally, on December 11, with some soldiers starving, others cannibalizing the dead, and the leaders all but at war with one another, the Franks attacked Ma‘arra from two sides. Priests prayed to God to “raise up Christendom and cast down Pagandom.” Raymond's men pushed and wheeled their siege tower as close to the city as possible, somehow preserving the structure against Saracen attempts to bring it down with catapults and fire. Atop the tower a knight named Evrard “the Hunter” sounded repeated trumpet blasts and probably tried intermittently to earn his nickname by laying low human prey with his bow. Other knights crowded into the tower's upper stories and threw rocks onto the wall's defenders. More effective than arrows, the rocks crashed into their shields and knocked them over into the city.

Finally, by the end of the day, the sun just beginning to set, the Provençals had cleared out enough of a space on the ramparts to raise a ladder. Protected by their siege tower, as its occupants fired arrows and debris down on the wall's defenders, a knight named Gouffier of Lastours (later famous for having a pet lion) ascended the ladder, followed en masse by a swarm of warriors anxious to bring this battle to an end. So many crowded onto the ladder's rungs that it started to split apart, several Franks in full chain mail armor crashing hard to the ground. Gouffier and a few other warriors managed to stake out a place on the ramparts, with Gouffier fighting back Saracens “like a bear beating back a pack of yipping dogs.” The Frankish youth on the ground “forgot about themselves but remembered their friends” and set up another ladder. Soon a few dozen warriors had scrambled up beside Gouffier and were widening their hold on the city's ramparts. It remained a desperate fight—too much for some men, who jumped off the wall rather than face the continual onslaught of arrows, stones, swords, and fire—until sunset. But by nightfall the Franks had claimed a large portion of the wall and likely a tower or two. They had also broken through one of the city's gates. In the morning they could expect to capture Ma‘arra easily.
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A few of the Turkish citizens recognized the impossibility of their situation. Trying to exploit a loophole in the laws of war, they offered to surrender. Their city was all but conquered. Bohemond, as Raymond had at
Albara, agreed to their terms. But Bohemond was not as merciful as Raymond had been. The next day he would kill many of the Turks who had surrendered and would enslave the rest. In the meantime, in the dead of night, as Bohemond engaged in stealth diplomacy, or stealth duplicity, several of the poorer knights, maybe the Tafurs among them, scrambled through the breach in the walls and roamed the dark streets, looking for Saracens to kill and wealth to claim. They'd learned from experience; this time they would not risk the aristocrats scooping up all the Saracen valuables. The rest of the army waited till morning, when it could sack the city with impunity.

The scene that followed would have readily recalled the carnage of Antioch. “No corner was clear of Saracen corpses; you could hardly go anywhere in the city without stepping on Saracen corpses.” According to Arab historians, it was the worst massacre of the crusades. More were killed there than at Antioch or later at Jerusalem. At times the Saracens unwittingly imitated the Jews of the Rhineland, preferring suicide to captivity. They would, for example, offer to lead Franks to hidden storerooms where they might grow rich, but then on the way hurl themselves into wells, “preferring to pay the price of death rather than to show where their supplies were, or anything else.” Because of their stubbornness, Raymond concluded, all of the defenders died. It was the second time that the crusaders had inflicted upon their enemy the rules of war set down in Deuteronomy 20.
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Politically, Ma‘arra threatened to turn into a repeat version of Antioch. Bohemond stationed his men in several towers around the city—more than Raymond managed to take—as if to claim Raymond's prize for his own. Raymond took the high ground, at least formally so, arguing that the city belonged by right to Peter of Narbonne, recently anointed bishop of Albara. Predictably, Bohemond would not give up anything in Ma‘arra until Raymond had first abandoned Antioch.

With the princes' squabble on display for the whole army to see, many soldiers were on the verge of open rebellion. The march to the Holy Land had begun years ago, they argued, and yet each day it seemed to start anew, so irksome were the princes' delays. But Bohemond was not intimidated. In light of current circumstances, he announced, he did not expect to leave for Jerusalem until Easter, and on December 29 he withdrew to
Antioch. Let Raymond clean up the mess they had made at Ma‘arra. And all the while, more and more pilgrims continued to desert.
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