Up to this point Yaghi Siyan’s men had been able to use the city’s Bridge Gate with relative impunity, and thus had control of the roads leading to St Simeon and Alexandretta. The Christians now fortified a derelict mosque on the plain in front of this entrance, creating a basic siege fort which they christened La Mahomerie (The Blessed Mary), from which they could police the surrounding area. Count Raymond offered to shoulder the burden of garrisoning this outpost at exorbitant cost to his treasury, but his motives may not have been entirely altruistic. At the start of the siege, southern Italian Norman troops had occupied ground in front of the St Paul Gate and were thus primed to make a swift incursion into the city, if and when it fell. This gave Bohemond a good chance of staking a claim to the city because, earlier in the expedition, the princes had agreed to abide by the rules of ‘right by conquest’–whereby captured property belonged to the first claimant or occupier. By positioning his own men in front of Antioch’s other main entrance, the Bridge Gate, Raymond was now ideally placed to challenge his rival.

Within a month the Franks had improvised another siege fort, fortifying a monastery near Antioch’s last accessible portal, the Gate of St George. Tancred agreed to man this post, but only in return for a hefty payment of 400 silver marks. Having begun the crusade in the second rank of nobles, shadowed by his uncle Bohemond’s renown, Tancred was now beginning to emerge as a significant figure in his own right. Following his adventures in Cilicia, the honour of this command and the wealth it brought served both to enhance his status and lend him a degree of autonomy.²³

BETRAYAL

By April 1098 the crusaders had tightened the cordon around Antioch. Yaghi Siyan was still able to bring in some supplies through the Iron Gate, but his ability to harry the Franks had been severely curtailed. It was now the turn of the Muslim garrison to face isolation, dwindling resources and the spectre of defeat. Throughout the siege, however, the crusaders were haunted by a gnawing fear: the prospect of a unified Muslim relief army marching to Antioch’s aid, trapping them between two enemies.

The Latins had already benefited from the crippling factionalism that afflicted Muslim Syria. Unwilling to put aside their differences–and perhaps mistaking the crusaders for Byzantine mercenaries–Duqaq of Damascus and Ridwan of Aleppo had responded to Yaghi Siyan’s entreaties by sending separate, uncoordinated forces to combat the Franks in December 1097 and February 1098. Had these two great cities united their resources that winter they probably would have trounced the First Crusade before the walls of Antioch. As it was, the Latins successfully repelled both of their armies, although not without significant loss.

The crusaders also knew full well that Near Eastern Islam was sundered by an even more elemental schism–that between Sunnis and Shi‘ites–and on the advice of Alexius Comnenus had sought to exploit this division by establishing contact with the Shi‘ite Fatimids of North Africa back in the summer of 1097. This approach elicited a response in early February 1098, when an embassy from al-Afdal, vizier of Egypt, arrived in the Christian camp outside Antioch to discuss the possibility of some form of negotiated settlement with the First Crusaders. The visit of these Muslim envoys was neither fleeting, nor secretive. They remained in the crusaders’ camp for at least a month, and their presence was reported widely by Latin eyewitness sources. And yet the welcoming of this embassy seems to have occasioned little, if any, criticism. Stephen of Blois for one showed no embarrassment when writing to his wife that the Fatimids had ‘established peace and concord with us’. The crusaders and Egyptians reached no definitive agreement at Antioch, but the latter did offer promises of ‘friendship and favourable treatment’, and in the interests of pursuing just such an entente, Latin envoys were sent back to North Africa, charged with ‘entering into a friendly pact’.

Until the early summer of 1098 the First Crusaders had successfully employed diplomacy and pre-emptive military intervention to stave off a direct Muslim counter-attack. In late May, however, a dread-laden rumour began to circulate: a new enemy was abroad. It seemed that the sultan of Baghdad had finally responded to Antioch’s desperate appeals for aid by raising a huge relief force. On 28 May scouts returned to the Frankish camp to confirm that they had seen a ‘[Muslim] army swarming everywhere from the mountains and different roads like the sands of the sea’. This was the fearsome Iraqi general Kerbogha of Mosul, marching at the head of some 40,000 Syrian and Mesopotamian troops. He was less than one week from Antioch.²⁴

The news that Sunni Islam had at last united against the crusaders horrified the Latin princes. Seeking to conceal these grim tidings from the masses for fear of inciting panic and desertion, they convened an emergency council to discuss a course of action. Although the encirclement of the city had tightened and Yaghi Siyan’s resistance was weakening, no swift end to the siege was yet in sight. The Franks were in no position to confront Kerbogha in a full-scale battle–they were outnumbered by as many as two to one and faced a severe shortage of horses with which to mount a cavalry offensive. After all the bitter struggles and sacrifices of the preceding months, it now appeared that the Christian army would be crushed against Antioch’s walls by the oncoming wave of Muslim attack.

At this moment of crisis, with the crusade facing devastation, Bohemond stepped forward. He argued that, in light of their predicament, whoever could engineer Antioch’s fall should have legal right to the city, and after much debate this was generally agreed with the proviso that it should be returned to the Emperor Alexius if he came to claim it. With the bargain in place, the wily Bohemond revealed his hand. He had, it transpired, made contact with a renegade inside Antioch, an Armenian tower commander named Firuz, who was prepared to betray the city.

A few days later, on the night of 2–3 June, a small group of Bohemond’s men used an ox-hide ladder to climb an isolated section of the city’s south-eastern wall, where Firuz was waiting. Even with the traitor’s help, this sortie was so risky that Bohemond himself chose to wait below, for had an alarm been raised the isolated advance party would surely have been butchered. As it was, the guards of the three nearest towers were rapidly and silently dispatched and a small postern gate opened below. Up to this point stealth had been essential, but with the first breach made Bohemond sounded bugles to initiate a second, coordinated attack on Antioch’s citadel. The calm night air was suddenly shattered as the Franks screamed out their battle cry: ‘God wills it! God wills it!’ As the growing tumult punctured the darkness, the city’s garrison was thrown into a state of utter confusion and some of the eastern Christians still living in Antioch turned on their Muslim overlords and rushed to open the city’s remaining gates.

With resistance crumbling, the crusaders poured into Antioch, straining to release eight months of pent-up anger and aggression. Amid the gloom of the approaching dawn, the chaotic slaughter began. One Latin contemporary noted that ‘they were sparing no Muslim on the grounds of age or sex, the ground was covered with blood and corpses and some of these were Christian Greeks, Syrians and Armenians. No wonder since (in the darkness) they were entirely unaware of whom they should spare and whom they should strike.’ Afterwards, one crusader described how ‘all the streets of the city on every side were full of corpses, so that no one could endure to be there because of the stench, nor could anyone walk along the narrow paths of the city except over the corpses of the dead’. Amongst all this uncontrolled bloodshed, and the looting that followed it, Bohemond ensured that his blood-red banner was raised above the city, the customary method of staking claim to captured property. Raymond of Toulouse, meanwhile, raced through the Bridge Gate to occupy all the buildings in the area, including the palace of Antioch, establishing a significant Provençal foothold within the city. Only the citadel, perched high above on the crest of Mount Silpius, remained in Muslim hands, under the command of Yaghi Siyan’s son. The governor himself fled in terror, only to be caught and decapitated by a local peasant.²⁵