God's War: A New History of the Crusades

Their comrades who chose the land route set out in mid-July along the route of the First Crusade from Nicaea, to Dorylaeum, Philomelium and Konya. Despite careful and extensive preparations, once they were out of Byzantine territory food quickly ran out, and Turkish attacks intensified. Reaching Ereghli at the beginning of September, the Christians were surprised by Kilij Arslan’s army and routed. Many of the leaders, equipped with finer horses and loyal servants, escaped with their lives if not their dignity or possessions. Hugh of Vermandois died of his wounds at Tarsus; Archbishop Thiemo of Salzburg was captured and later, according to popular legend, martyred; and Ida of Austria disappeared, most likely killed but later rumoured to have ended her days in a Muslim prince’s harem, the medieval west being almost as obsessed by titillating images of Muslim sexual pred-atoriness and licence as by their blasphemy, stories of miscegenation proving especially popular. The survivors of the Ereghli disaster, including William of Aquitaine, struggled through to Cilicia and thence to Antioch. Once in Syria, having helped Raymond of Toulouse capture the port of Tortosa, the aristocratic remnants of the three armies fulfilled their vows as pilgrims. Many returned home bankrupt in pocket and reputation. A few stayed to assist the new king of Jerusalem, Baldwin I, sharing in his mauling by the Egyptians at Ramla in May 1102, and, like the hapless Stephen of Blois, finding a martyr’s crown or, like Arpin, viscount of Bourges, a Fatimid prison.

If nothing was gained by the 1101 expeditions, thousands of lives and livres were lost together with the westerners’ local reputation for invincibility and further trust of the Greeks, who were glibly cast as scapegoats for the failure alongside the sins of the participants. Yet the campaigns possessed a wider significance. While establishing a topos of theologically explicable failure in terms of the moral deficiencies of those involved, in practical terms it imposed limits on eastern ambitions. The Lombards had envisaged capturing Baghdad; Urban II had allegedly encouraged the Milanese to think of conquering Egypt. Such dreams of a Christian conquest of the Near East died in the hills above Merzifon and the marshes around Ereghli. The enterprise of the Holy Land remained thereafter practically confined to securing Syria and Palestine; larger schemes were devised in the twelfth and later centuries, especially involving the power on the Nile, but the events of 1101 showed that Urban II’s revolution of history could turn only so far.

THE ESTABLISHMENT OF LATIN RULE

The Holy Land the westerners sought to control and defend possessed geographic but not political definition. The territory that at various times came under Latin rulers in the century after 1097 stretched some 600 miles from the Gulf of Alexandretta and Cilicia in the north to the Gulf of Aqaba on the Red Sea in the south. Dominating the region is a chain of mountains running from the tall Amanus and Nosairi ranges, rising to 9,000 feet, in the north, through the parallel Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon mountains flanking the Biqa valley in the centre, to the hills of Samaria and Judea in the south, which, though lower, still rise in places to over 3,000 feet. To the west stretches a narrow, fertile coastal plain, occasionally interrupted by tongues of hill country, as along the Lebanese shore and at Haifa, irrigated by the released winter rainfall brought to the highlands by the prevailing westerly winds. To the east the mountains are bounded by a deep depression carrying the valleys of the Orontes, the Litani and the Jordan, which, except where the Anti-Lebanon rises beyond the Biqa, gives way to a plateau, fertile in places such as eastern Galilee, before the landscape merges with treeless scrub bordering the desert that stands to the east and south. In southern Palestine, where the coastal plain is wider, the hills descend gently to meet the formidable Negev desert. There were few roads from the coast to the interior, the chief routes leading from St Symeon via Antioch to Aleppo; from Tripoli to Homs; from Tyre to the Biqa; and from Acre to Galilee and on to Damascus. Although both the hills and plains were more forested than in later centuries, and many areas were agriculturally fertile and productive, particularly the coastal strip, the Orontes valley and Galilee, the climate, especially in the south, was unforgiving when compared with the areas many of the western settlers had left behind, with scorching dry summers and, as Stephen of Blois had discovered to his surprise, cool, wet winters.¹³ Summer in Jerusalem, high in the Judean hills, could see midday temperatures daily reach the 90s F (mid-30s C), with an average in July and August of over 75 F (25 C), but in mid-winter see average temperatures in the mid-40s F (c.8 C) with frost at night. The coast, although milder in winter, experiences considerable humidity in summer, while the rift valley at Jericho and the Dead Sea, well over 1,000 feet below sea level, is stifling in summer, with temperatures well above 100 degrees F.

The physical context exerted a profound influence on power and settlement. It was a relatively small space that the westerners came to occupy, in area comparable with England or a medium-sized state in the USA, such as New York or Alabama. Even in the twelfth century, when summer military campaigns in Europe could cover hundreds of miles, Outremer was a narrow region. Warfare was intimate, witnessed by the long succession of captured Frankish commanders who languished sometimes for years in Muslim prisons. (Whether from Frankish charity, violence, incompetence or chance, few if any Muslim generals suffered similar indignities in return.) The western obsession with the region created its own imaginary space of boundless extent, a liminal world of religious contest, aliens and otherness in which usually level-headed eyewitnesses such as Fulcher of Chartres, a Jerusalem resident for over a quarter of a century, felt compelled to locate marvellous fantastical beasts against the evidence of his own eyes: basilisks, Capricorns, chimeras, dragons, etc.¹⁴ The mundane reality determined a costive high politics at once sensitive, vulnerable and dependent on intruders from outside. Cities were crowded except where, as in Jerusalem, religion and strategy dictated social exclusion. Yet, despite the smallness of scale, and the absence of any directed policy of immigration from the west (in contrast to other areas of western conquest in Spain, the Baltic or Sicily), previous depopulation and some Muslim emigration allowed for limited but not negligible western colonization.

In terms of agricultural opportunities, while Antioch and Galilee were prosperous, the rural economy of Palestine scarcely matched that of the north and western Mediterranean, where many settlers came from. However, exploitation of the natural resources sustained an economy centred on towns, cities and trade with a prominent role for money. Power followed wealth, the fragmentation of Fatimid and Seljuk control over the region re-emphasizing the importance of the sea-ports – Acre, Tyre, Sidon, Beirut – and the linked commercial emporia of the interior, such as Aleppo and Damascus. For centuries rule had been exercised by foreign interlopers with little or no interest in creating new structures of government. Despite the political chaos of the later eleventh century, the continuity imposed by geography and economics was reflected in an underlying administrative organization left largely undisturbed by successive conquerors: the Byzantine district (civitas) of Caesarea of the seventh century lay behind the twelfth-century lordship of Caesarea; the Roman province of Palaestina Secunda corresponded with the Palestinian boundaries of the principality of Galilee.¹⁵ Socially, economically and religiously, village life, outside war zones, remained largely undisturbed. Nevertheless, to enjoy the benefits of dominion, the new invaders, like their predecessors, needed to master the strongpoints, the markets and the trade routes. This required manpower, precisely what the newcomers lacked.

When most of the surviving first crusaders left Syria in the late summer of 1099, western conquests comprised the county of Edessa, the remote Franco-Armenian condominium ruled by Baldwin of Boulogne straddling the upper Euphrates; Bohemund’s principality in northern Syria, based on Antioch and the lower Orontes valley but with ostensible interests in Cilicia; and a narrow stretch of land in Judea and Samaria running along the west bank of the river Jordan from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea, including Tiberias, Nablus, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Hebron, which was linked to the sea by a neck of territory surrounding the road down from the Holy City to the port of Jaffa, the nascent kingdom of Jerusalem ruled by Godfrey of Bouillon, assisted by Tancred of Lecce. In addition there remained elements of the Provencal army with Count Raymond, desperate for his own sovereign conquest; a large Pisan war fleet that had brought the new papal legate Daimbert of Pisa; and detachments of Greek troops, such as the garrison at Lattakiah, trying to make good Alexius’s broken-backed policy of imposing his own overlordship in the wake of the Christian invasion of Syria. While Bohemund’s military establishment appeared capable of sustained aggression, Baldwin of Edessa relied on his small, perforce tight-knit entourage of knights supported by successful diplomacy and local alliances. Together, on their pilgrimage to Jerusalem at Christmas 1099, Bohemund and Baldwin were apparently able to muster an impressive company, of hundreds perhaps even thousands, but only because it was greatly swelled by the Italians accompanying Archbishop Daimbert. In Jerusalem, Duke Godfrey had been left with as few as 300 knights and 2,000 infantry, the westerners occupying barely more than one street in the devastated city outside the manned fortifications. Manpower was insufficient to clear away all the corpses from the July massacre; the carcasses and stench of putrefaction remained evident to visitors over five months later. For some years later, visiting pilgrims noted the remains of corpses littering the roads, the devastation around Jerusalem and the constant fear of Muslim attack.¹⁶ Although, as Tancred showed by annexing Galilee in the summer of 1099, some said with little more than a score of knights,