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Crusaders occasionally fell foul of more unusual dangers. Godfrey of Bouillon, for one, was attacked and severely wounded by a savage bear while hunting. He was lucky to survive. These perils and hardships seem to have prompted more careful planning of the journey’s next leg. Upon reaching the fertile south-eastern corner of Asia Minor the crusaders began forging alliances with the local Armenian Christian population, who until then had been living under Turkish rule. At Heraclea, Tancred and Baldwin of Boulogne were sent south into Cilicia, while the main army took the northern route via Coxon and Marash. Both groups made contact with indigenous Armenian Christians, but Tancred and Baldwin went further, establishing an allied resource centre that helped to supply the entire crusade in the months to come, and securing a more direct route into Syria for the armies of reinforcements that the Franks were expecting to join them at Antioch.

In the aftermath of this Cilician expedition Baldwin decided to break off from the main crusade to seek his fortune in the eastern borderlands between Syria and Mesopotamia. He saw an opportunity to establish his own independent Levantine lordship and, leaving with a small company of just one hundred knights, began a campaign of brutal conquest and unceasing self-advancement that revealed his skills both as a military commander and as a wily political operator. Styling himself as the ‘liberator’ of Armenian Christians from the yoke of oppressive Turkish rule, Baldwin swiftly established control over a swathe of territory running east to the River Euphrates. His burgeoning reputation then earned him an invitation to ally with Thoros, the ageing Armenian ruler of Edessa, a city in the Fertile Crescent, beyond the Euphrates. The two were actually joined as adoptive father and son by a curious public ritual: both men stripped to the waist, and then, as Thoros embraced Baldwin, ‘binding him to his naked chest’, a long shirt was placed over them to seal their union. Unfortunately for Thoros, this ceremony did little to temper Baldwin’s ruthless ambition. Within a few months his Armenian ‘father’ had been murdered, probably with Baldwin’s tacit approval. The Frank then seized control of the city and surrounding region to create the first crusader state in the Near East–the county of Edessa.19

Meanwhile, the armies of the First Crusade regrouped on the borders of northern Syria in early October 1097; they had survived the crossing of Asia Minor, albeit with major losses. The events of the following century would prove that this in itself was an extraordinary achievement, as successive crusades foundered in this region. But a gargantuan task that would eclipse even these trials now stood before them: the siege of Antioch.

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SYRIAN ORDEALS

In early autumn 1097 the First Crusaders crossed into northern Syria, arriving at one of the great cities of the Orient, the fortified metropolis of Antioch. They had at last reached the borders of the Holy Land, and now, to the south, perhaps just three weeks’ march away, Jerusalem itself beckoned. But the most direct route to the Holy City, the ancient pilgrim road, ran through Antioch before tracing the coastline of the Mediterranean into Lebanon and Palestine, past a succession of potentially hostile Muslim-held cities and fortresses.

Historians have always maintained that the Franks had no choice but to capture Antioch before continuing their journey south–that the city stood as an immutable barrier to the progress of their expedition. This is not entirely true. Later events suggest that the crusaders could in theory have bypassed the city. Had they been solely focused upon reaching Jerusalem with maximum speed, they might have negotiated a temporary truce to neutralise the threat posed by Antioch’s Muslim garrison, leaving them free to advance with minimum disruption. The fact that the Latins chose instead to besiege Antioch says much about their planning, strategy and motivation.20

The city of Antioch

First and foremost, Antioch appears to have been the core target of the crusader-Byzantine alliance. Founded in the year 300 BCE by Antiochus, one of Alexander the Great’s generals, the city was ideally placed to tap into trans-Mediterranean trade. Famed as a vibrant crossroads between East and West, Antioch became the third city of the Roman world, a centre of commerce and culture. But during the first explosion of Islamic expansion in the seventh century CE, this bastion of the eastern empire was lost to the Arabs. A resurgent Byzantium secured Antioch’s reconquest in 969, but the advent of the rampaging Seljuq Turks saw the city once again slip out of Christian control in 1085. Only too aware of this complex history, Alexius I Comnenus coveted Antioch, dreaming of the day when this city would be the cornerstone of a new era of Greek dominion over Asia Minor. It was for this reason that he continued to support the Franks through the summer of 1097 and beyond, hoping to harness the unprecedented influx of crusading manpower and reclaim the prize of Antioch.

The decision to target the city was thus an expression of ongoing Greco-Latin cooperation; however, the crusaders were not simply doing the bidding of their allies. Antioch, like Jerusalem, had a deeply rooted devotional significance. Tradition held that it was the site of the first Christian church founded by St Peter, chief of the Apostles, and the city still contained a magnificent basilica dedicated to the saint. It was also home to one of the five patriarchs, the leading powers of Christendom. Its liberation therefore chimed with the expedition’s spiritual goals. In time, however, it would also become clear that crusade leaders like Bohemond and Raymond of Toulouse harboured their own more secular, self-serving ambitions for Antioch, aspirations that might clash with Byzantine expectations.

Beyond the issues of Latin–Greek relations and territorial conquest, the attempt to seize Antioch reveals a profound truth about the crusaders. They were not, as some medieval and modern commentators have imagined, a wild horde of uncontrolled barbarians, swarming without forethought to Jerusalem. The events of 1097 prove that their actions were, at the very least, informed by a vein of strategic planning. They prepared for Antioch’s investment with some care, seizing a number of satellite settlements to act as centres of logistical supply and cultivating maritime contacts to ensure naval aid, some of which appear to have been organised months in advance. The Franks were also fully expecting to be reinforced at Antioch by Greek troops under Alexius as well as successive waves of western crusaders, and thus secured the safest, most direct route from Asia Minor to Syria across the Belen Pass. Everything about their behaviour in the autumn of 1097 indicates that the Franks were determined to conquer Antioch, though they recognised that this would be no simple task.

Even so, when the crusaders marched up to the city’s walls in late October they were daunted by the sheer scale of its defences. One Frank wrote in a letter to Europe that at first sight the city seemed ‘fortified with incredible strength and almost impregnable’. Antioch lay nestled between the Orontes River and the foot of two mountains–Staurin and Silpius. In the sixth century the Romans enhanced these natural features with a circle of some sixty towers joined by a massive enclosing wall–three miles long and up to sixty feet in height–running along the banks of the Orontes, and then up and across Staurin and up Silpius’ precipitous slopes. Hundreds of feet above the city proper, near the peak of Mount Silpius, a formidable citadel crowned Antioch’s fortifications. By the late eleventh century this defensive system had been weathered by time and ravaged by earthquakes, but it still presented an awesome obstacle to any attacking force. Indeed, a Frankish eyewitness was prompted to write that the city would ‘dread neither the attack of machine nor the assault of man even if all mankind gathered to besiege it’.21