The First Crusade (31 page)

However their link was formed, by mid-May at the latest Bohemond had in principle persuaded Firuz to give the crusaders access to his section of the walls.* But Bohemond was not content simply to orchestrate Antioch's fall - he wanted to ensure that it fell into his acquisitive hands and, to that end, he was more than willing to put his own interests before those of the crusade. Without revealing his arrangement with Firuz, he came to a council of the princes, apparently saying:

Most gallant knights, you see that we are all, both great and small, in dire poverty and misery, and we do not know whence better fortune will come to us. If, therefore, you think it a good and proper plan, let one of us set himself above the others, on condition that if he can capture the city or engineer its downfall by any means, by himself or by others, we will agree to give it to him.
¹⁷

Knowing that he now held the key to Antioch's downfall, Bohemond was trying to

*
In a rather garbled account, Albert of Aachen recorded that an Armenian - also, rather strangely, named Bohemond - acted as a go-between with Firuz, but noted that it was generally believed in the crusader camp that Bohemond had chanced to capture Firuz's son earlier in the siege and now coerced him to action.

trick his fellow princes into confirming an agreement that would guarantee his rights to the city. We cannot doubt that his scheme was utterly self-serving given that it is reported in full by his supporter, the author of the
Gesta Francorum.
To Bohemond's annoyance, however, the rest of the crusade leader flatly refused his proposal, maintaining that Antioch must be divided equally among all. At this point, around the middle of May, there was as yet no sense of urgency or panic in the crusader camp. The tide of the siege had turned in their favour, progress was being made, other ploys - such as that involving Walo of Chaumont-en-Vexin - were being pursued. In short, when Bohemond first came to the negotiating table the crusaders were not desperate. That was about to change.
¹⁸

Back in October 1097, when the crusaders first approached Antioch, Yaghi Siyan had sent his youngest son, Muhammad, east to negotiate support from Baghdad and the rulers of Mesopotamia. This may well have been followed up by further entreaties in March 1098. One Latin chronicler invented a graphic but fanciful account of this embassy, in which Yaghi Siyan's envoys first sought to demonstrate the severity of their situation and the depth of their despair: They took their hats off and threw them to the ground, they savagely plucked out their beards with their nails, they pulled at and tore their hair out by the roots with their fingers, and they hea
ved sighs in great lamentations.

The sultan of Baghdad was so impressed by this demonstration of despair that he supposedly 'summoned magicians, prophets and soothsayers of their gods and asked about future victory
⁷
. Once assured of propitious omens, he ordered a massive relief force to be mustered and placed under the command of his supporter, Kerbogha, the atabeg of Mosul, a figure simply characterised as 'a dreadful man'.
¹⁹
The lengthy description of these events may well be pure fiction, but it is representative of two prevalent themes running through most contemporary Latin accounts. Just as there was not one dominant Christian leader of the First Crusade, so the Latin expedition faced a series of Muslim enemies rather than a single foe. Lacking an obvious, primary antagonist, many Latin observers singled out Kerbogha as the crusade's most dangerous opponent, styling him, to some extent at least, as their anti-hero. Kerbogha tends, therefore, to be the subject of more speculative, even fantastical, characterisation than any other Muslim leader. In one extraordinary passage, the author of
Gesta Francorum
even went so far as to record a lengthy, but entirely fabricated, conversation between Kerbogha and his mother, in which she warned him not to fight the crusaders because they were protected by the Christian God, predicting that If you join battle with these men you will suffer very great loss and dishonour, and lose many of your faithful soldiers, and you will leave behind all the plunder which you have taken, and escape as a panic-stricken fugitive
.

All in all, Kerbogha comes across in the Latin sources as an arrogant but formidable general. Perhaps more importantly, observers in the crusader camp believed that he was the officially appointed representative of the Seljuq sultan of Baghdad - in the
Gesta Francorum
he is described as 'commander-in-chief of the army of the sultan of Persia'. In a sense he is portrayed as the sanctioned champion of Islam, leading the finally united might of Syria and Mesopotamia:

Kerbogha had with him a great army whom he had been assembling for a long time, and had been given leave by the khalif, who is the pope of the Turks, to kill Christians . . . [He had] collected an immense force of pagans - Turks, Arabs, Saracens, Paulicians, Azymites, Kurds, Persians, Agulani and many other people who could not be counted.
²⁰

Kerbogha stood at the head of this intimidating, if rather bewildering, array of troops, but his image as the 'official' leader of Sunni resistance to the crusade is deeply misleading. If we piece together the evidence provided by the limited corpus of Arabic sources for these events, a strikingly different picture emerges. Kerbogha had risen to power in Mosul, far to the east in Mesopotamia, on the back of his reputation as an astute and merciless military commander, and although he was the sultan of Baghdad's ally, he was not his puppet.

Kerbogha harboured his own ambitions for northern Syria, and the advent of the First Crusade presented the perfect opportunity for their realisation. Under the cloak of a sacred struggle to annihilate the ravening Frankish horde, he hoped to occupy Antioch and large swathes of Syria. If successful, he himself might be able to challenge for power in Baghdad. Kerbogha spent six months carefully laying the military and diplomatic foundations for his campaign, piecing together an immensely intimidating coalition of Muslim forces. Drawn from across the Abbasid world, armies were committed from Damascus, Harran, Horns, Mardin, Samosata and Sindjar, among other places. Most came not from religious duty or deep-felt hatred of the crusaders, but rather out of fear of Kerbogha. They knew that he might one day lead the Seljuq world, and they chose now to be his ally rather than his enemy. Only Ridwan of Aleppo resisted the call to arms, staunchly refusing to renounce his independence.

Some allies joined Kerbogha at Mosul, others marched directly to a rendezvous at Antioch, but, once gathered, the Turkish host was massively powerful. An Armenian from Edessa estimated their number at 800,000 cavalry and 300,000 infantry; one Muslim chronicler simply described Kerbogha s army as 'uncountable'. These must have been gross exaggerations, but Kerbogha probably commanded in excess of 35,000 men. So long as the campaign went well, Kerbogha could expect to retain the 'loyalty' of this massive composite army. But should his generalship falter, should the facade of his inexorable ascent towards pre-eminence begin to crumble, then their obedience might weaken.
²¹

Rumours that a huge Muslim army was gathering reached Antioch in the second half of May 1098. The crusader princes decided to investigate the matter more frilly, dispatching scouting parries under the likes of Reinhard of Toul and Drogo of Nesle, east to Artah, south to the Ruj and north towards Cilicia. Their surveillance confirmed the princes' worst fears: 'They saw the [Muslim] army swarming everywhere from the mountains and different roads like the sands of the sea, marvelling at their infinite thousands and totally unable to count them.'
²²

On 28 May the first scouts returned to Antioch with their dreadful news. It now seemed that, after eight months camped outside the city walls, the exhausted, bedraggled Franks would be crushed between Antioch and Kerbogha's advancing army. Knowing what a devastating effect this revelation would have on crusader morale, the princes decided to keep the news secret for the time being and met to discuss the situation in an emergency council on 29 May. Facing batde on two fronts and probable extermination, all the princes, with the likely exception of Raymond of Toulouse, now agreed to Bohemond's earlier proposal, apparently stating: 'If Bohemond can take this city, either by himself or by others, we will thereafter give it to him gladly, on condition that if the emperor come to our aid and fulfil all his obligations which he promised and vowed, we will return the c
ity to him as it is right to do.
²³

This partial compromise allowed them to meet Bohemond's demands while still paying lip-service to their oaths to the Emperor Alexius. With this agreement in place, Bohemond finally revealed his relationship with Firuz. Historians have often argued that the Latins were incredibly fortunate that Kerbogha chose to besiege Edessa for three weeks in May before moving on to Antioch, because this bought the crusaders enough time to orchestrate the Firuz scheme. In reality it is very likely that Bohemond had already established communications with Firuz in the preceding months. He certainly had the means to orchestrate the city's betrayal at the council held earlier in May, but held back because he was not promised his desired reward. This reveals two important points: Bohemond was focused above all else upon securing the right to rule Antioch; and Kerbogha's delay at Edessa did not save the crusade, it merely postponed the moment at which Bohemond sprang his carefully crafted plan.
²⁴

In the following days the final preparations were made with Firuz, and his son was smuggled out of the city to act as a hostage in Bohemond's camp. The plan agreed between Bohemond and Firuz was relatively straightforward. On the evening of 2 June a large detachment of crusaders - both cavalry and infantry - would march off in plain view of the Muslim garrison, only to return under cover of darkness. The knights would retrace their steps and then make the rest of the way on foot, while the infantry would be led by one of Firuz's co-conspirators through the mountains. Both groups would then rendezvous at the walls above the Gate of St George. Having completed this diversionary manoeuvre, a small detachment of troops would scale the walls near Firuz's tower, overwhelm any immediate resistance and then rush to open the city's gates.

*Tancred s biographer, Ralph of Caen, who wrote about a decade after the event, would even have us believe that his hero had no idea that the attack would take place. This seems improbable given that Tancred commanded the siege tower not far from Firuz's section of wall, but can perhaps be explained by Ralph's desire to excuse Tancred s failure to play a significant role in these events
.

A high degree of secrecy surrounded the whole scheme. One crusade chronicler remarked that 'Bohemond's plan was not common knowledge
^’
among the crusaders, and some Provencals seem to have been surprised by the course of events on 2/3 June. Since Armenians moving amid the Franks had earlier been believed to be spying for the Muslim garrison, it would have made sense not to broadcast Bohemond's plan throughout the army.* One might suspect that Bohemond tried to keep his plans secret to ensure that his men were able to seize key sections of the city. In reality, however, the plan must have been widely agreed by the princes in order to ensure a rapid and co-ordinated response as soon as the walls were breached. Even with a traitor co-operating inside the city, Bohemond's scheme was still desperately dangerous. Without an immediate and overwhelming deployment of crusaders into the city once the gates were opened, the isolated advance troop might well be butchered and the opportunity lost. Bohemond certainly seems to have co-ordinated his movements with Raymond of Toulouse and Adhemar of Le Puy, and to have

agreed that, once the first breach was made, Godfrey of Bouillon and Robert of

Flanders would lead a direct attack on Antioch's citadel.
²⁵

One prince who did not play any part in Bohemond's scheme was Stephen of Blois. He probably attended the council on 29 May, but he seems to have decided that, in

the face of Kerbogha's approach, the crusaders' prospects for survival were bleak. Early on 2 June he announced that he was ill and, in the company of many of the crusaders from Blois-Chartrain, withdrew north over the Belen Pass to Alexandretta. He never returned, although, as we shall see, he was to have a profound effect on the crusade's later progress. The shocking impact of Stephen's departure, which even at the time must have been construed by many as a desertion, was rendered even more significant by the fact that the other princes had, in the early months of 1098, chosen him to act as the expedition's 'commander-in-chief. This title probably meant that Stephen had chaired crusader councils. The desertion of one of the crusade's most powerful leaders at the very moment when its fate hung in the balance did not augur well for the Latins' prospects and the crusader camp was gripped by an atmosphere of fear and anticipation on 2 June.
²⁶

That evening one of Bohemond's followers, a man bearing the rather odd nickname of 'Bad-crown', summoned the troops that would make the diversionary departure. Everything went to plan, and at roughly 3 a.m. on 3 June some 700 crusaders gathered on the slopes above the Gate of St George. A sizeable group under the command of Godfrey and Robert of Flanders carried on towards the citadel while the rest stayed with Bohemond. They waited until the night-watch carrying lanterns passed by atop the walls and then rushed forward to contact the traitor within. To their immense relief Firuz was there. He lowered a rope to which the crusaders attached their oxen-hide ladder, which was then duly hauled up and secured to the battlements. Sixty men were due to climb up in the advance party, but they were absolutely terrified. One Latin contemporary recalled that 'their hearts were struck with fear and very great doubt and each of them was reluctant and very much against being the first in and climbing the walls'. Many would have known the recent fate of Walo of Chaumont-en-Vexin and his men when they were betrayed in the city. Mounting the ladder they had no real idea whether or not they were heading into a trap.