vital foraging sorties. The expedition appeared trapped in a vice, unable to make military progress and incapable of feeding itself. Misery and fear led to desertion; Peter the Hermit and William the Carpenter of Melun were caught trying to flee. Even Bohemund contemplated abandoning the enterprise as he saw men and horses in his modest company dying of hunger.20 The presence in Syrian waters of friendly shipping made escape easier.
To counter collapsing morale, in January, the papal legate, Adhemar of Le Puy, instituted penitential fasting, intercessory prayers, processions and alms-giving for the laity, with the clergy celebrating masses and singing psalms. Communal participation in familiar religious ceremonies played on the psychological requirement for the beleaguered Christians to shake off fatalism, lethargy and inertia by involving the ordinary soldier and pilgrim in active contributions to the army’s destiny. With a simultaneous secular crackdown on law and order within the army, the revivalist message was reinforced by the removal of all women from the camps, wives included, the association of sex with divine disapproval being widely promoted by the western clerical establishment.21 Ritual public humiliations and punishment for adulterers were staged to underscore the evils of sexual licence, the culprits stripped naked and flogged in front of the whole army. More mundanely, an appeal for alms helped pool resources. The leaders, who reached decisions through regular councils, formed a confraternity, a sworn association which could distribute donations without complications of conflicting lordships or loyalties. The funding of the siege forts and a bridge of boats across the Orontes was organized in this way, as were payments to Tancred for him to blockade Antioch’s southern gate. To meet the crisis of January 1098, Raymond of Toulouse paid 500 marks into the common fund to help knights replace their horses.22 To further reassure their followers, the leaders swore oaths not to abandon the siege. These measures emphasized the particular corporate identity that had grown through shared experience and crisis. Correspondence to the west in October and November 1097 proclaimed that God fought for ‘the army of the Lord’; in January, the bishops in the army recorded the assistance in battle of the ‘knights of Christ’, the Greek saints George, Theodore, Demetrius and Blaise.23
The bishops were appealing to the west for reinforcement. In fact, the army was receiving a constant stream of reinforcements from as far apart as Italy, England and Denmark, many travelling with the fleets that arrived in the Levant in 1097–8 providing the besiegers with vital sustenance.24 At no time was the army of God entirely cut off from the west or its Greek paymasters. In the need to replace its devastating casualties as well as its chronic problems of supplies may lie the decision of Tatikios, early in February 1098, to leave Antioch, as he claimed, to seek food and more troops.25 Although later condemned as a doubledyed coward by western observers intent on constructing a justification for the failure to cede Antioch to the Greek emperor, Tatikios may have harboured perfectly legitimate motives. The supply chain to Antioch had broken down; direct consultation with the imperial authorities might have improved matters. Tatikios left his staff behind at Antioch. There were rumours that he had struck a deal with Bohemund, granting him control over the Cilician cities of Mamistra, Tarsus and Adana. This would fit the actual rather than the imagined relations between the Greek general, veteran of commanding western troops in the Balkans, and the probably Greek-speaking Bohemund. They had travelled together in the vanguard to Antioch and remained in close contact. At this stage, Bohemund must have appeared one of the most philhellene of the western princes. A Greek story had Bohemund warning Tatikios to leave in order to avoid an assassination plot hatched against him by the other commanders. At the time, Tatikios’s departure made little impact; contemporary letters fail to mention it. While it is possible that Bohemund may have taken some role in engineering Tatikios’s withdrawal and it is certain that his absence suited the Norman’s schemes, conspiracy charges against either party lack evidence untainted by later propaganda, political posturing or special pleading.
Of greater importance was the military result of the new sense of community. Thanks to Bohemund’s tactics and disciplined cohesion on the battlefield, the relief army of Ridwan of Aleppo was heavily defeated near the Lake of Antioch, some miles north-east of the city, on 8 February 1098. As at Dorylaeum, the battle near al-Bara in 1097, at Antioch itself later in 1098 and Ascalon in 1099, the fate of the crusade rested on the chance and skill of fighting. The Christian troops increased in effectiveness as numbers dwindled to a hardened core of veterans accustomed to strenuous pitched battles between massed forces of cavalry and infantry. The determination for victory existed in direct correlation to the consequences of defeat. In terms of morale, this gave the Christians an advantage. The victory over Ridwan temporarily steadied Christian resolve, while the arrival of an English fleet in early March allowed the blockade of the city to be tightened by the building of a new fort opposite the Bridge Gate, protecting vital access to the port of St Symeon. However, acute problems of food, horses and morale soon returned. Even the weather was terrible, reminding Stephen of Blois of home: ‘What some say about the impossibility of bearing the heat of the sun throughout Syria is untrue, for the weather here is very similar to our winter in the west.’26 Sharp encounters with the Antioch garrison sapped men and energy without disturbing the stalemate. Some optimism for the future may have been derived from the negotiations with Egyptian ambassadors in February and March 1098 and the dispatch of Christian envoys to accompany the Egyptians back to Cairo. By April, all gates of the city faced Christian blockade. However, news of a fresh Muslim relief force exposed the army’s continuing peril.
During the spring of 1098, Kerbogha, atabeg of Mosul, assembled a large coalition against the western invaders from as far apart as Damascus, Anatolia and northern Iraq. Collecting allies as he went, Kerbogha was taking the opportunity afforded by the crusaders’ disruption of local power structures to create a new overlordship in Syria, ostensibly loyal to the Seljuk sultan in Baghdad. His alliance included elements hostile to the Fatimids of Egypt and Ridwan of Aleppo as well as to the westerners and their Armenian associates. The attempt to capture Edessa during the three-week siege in mid-May and the seizure of other cities and towns in the region point to a strategy in which relief of Antioch formed only a part. The atabeg’s objectives may be judged from the protraction of negotiations with Yaghisiyan’s son; the price of Kerbogha’s assistance was high. The actual outcome of the fighting of 1098 led to the establishment of Christian power in northern Syria, yet, until his defeat before Antioch, Kerbogha’s assault on Syria offered the opposite prospect of a revived Turkish authority over the region. As with the defeat of al-Afdal of Egypt at Ascalon in August 1099, the westerners’ victories in 1097–9 altered the political complexion of the Near East as much by denying the alternative outcomes of Seljuk or Fatimid
News of the approach of Kerbogha’s massive army reached the besiegers at Antioch in late May when it was only a few days’ march away. Although they were well informed of the diplomatic efforts to dislodge them, each relief attempt had taken the westerners by surprise. Kerbogha’s appearance was the nastiest yet, catching the Christians between a huge hostile field army and the impenetrable walls of Antioch. At a crisis meeting of the high command on 29 May, Bohemund was again entrusted with the leadership: if he could capture the city, he could keep it for his own provided no aid came from the Greek emperor, this last proviso reflecting the unease at Bohemund’s ambition felt by Adhemar of Le Puy and Raymond of Toulouse, who harboured his own designs on the city. This agreement did nothing to stem the panic. Desertions multiplied, the most prominent being that of Stephen of Blois. Only nine weeks earlier, he had boasted to his wife of his appointment to a prominent role in the communal leadership, in his words ‘lord, guardian and governor’, perhaps in charge of administrative matters or coordinating supplies.27 Stephen fled on 2 June, yet, within hours, Antioch had fallen.
The legendary quality of so many incidents during the First Crusade is nowhere more evident than in the story of how Bohemund and an Armenian dissident in Antioch, Firuz, collaborated in allowing the crusaders to penetrate the walls of the city at a point under the traitor’s command on the night of 2–3 June 1098. It appears that Bohemund had been hatching the scheme for some time, probably before the meeting of 29 May. Contact across the front line at Antioch was common, especially with local Armenians. Bohemund and his followers possessed a linguistic advantage for this: on the night of the agreed commando-style raid on his section of the walls, they were able to converse with Firuz in Greek.28 However, the small force which established itself under cover of dark on the inside included Godfrey of Bouillon and Robert of Flanders; Tancred, Count Raymond and Bishop Adhemar had also been let into the secret and were instrumental in rousing the main army to exploit the incursion the following morning. The element of surprise devastated the civilian population waking to uproar and the sounds of massacre. The overwhelmed garrison immediately withdrew to the citadel, leaving the city below to be plundered at will by the invaders. Resistance crumpled. Yaghisiyan panicked and fled, fearful, perhaps, of reprisals for his oppressive regime; within hours he had been assassinated by local Christians, the
The fall of Antioch reflected the growing self-discipline and tenacity of the western army rather than any
