Bohemond’s devious plan had succeeded, ending the first siege of Antioch, but there was little chance to celebrate. On 4 June, just one day after the city’s fall, the vanguard of Kerbogha’s army arrived. With Muslim troops flooding in, Antioch was soon surrounded, leaving the First Crusaders trapped within.

THE BESIEGED

The second siege of Antioch, in June 1098, was the crusade’s greatest crisis. The Latins had avoided a battle on two fronts, but they now found themselves besieged within Antioch’s walls. Denuded of resources during the first investment, the city could offer them little in the way of food or military supplies. And, with its citadel in enemy hands, its mighty defences were fatally undermined. The entire expedition was on the brink of destruction.

The crusaders’ one fragile spark of hope was that the long-awaited Byzantine army might arrive under the command of Alexius Comnenus to save them. Unbeknownst to the Franks, however, events had conspired to snuff out even this faint prospect of deliverance. On 2 June, just before Antioch fell to the Latins, the crusader prince Stephen of Blois adjudged that the Christians had no chance of survival and decided to flee. Feigning illness, he escaped north and set off to recross Asia Minor. His departure must have been enormously damaging to morale, but Stephen caused even more harm to the expedition’s prospects, and to the crusading movement as a whole.

In central Anatolia he came across Emperor Alexius and his army encamped at the town of Philomelium. Throughout the siege of Antioch the crusaders had been expecting Greek reinforcements, but Alexius had been preoccupied recapturing the coastline of Asia Minor. When Stephen reported that the Franks by now had most likely been defeated, the emperor elected to retreat to Constantinople. At this crucial moment Byzantium failed the crusade, and the Greeks were never fully forgiven. Stephen returned to France only to be branded a coward by his wife.

The First Crusaders were thus abandoned to face Kerbogha’s horde alone. The Mosuli general proved to be a formidable adversary. The Franks saw him as the officially appointed ‘commander-in-chief of the sultan of Baghdad’s army’, but it would be wrong to imagine that Kerbogha was merely the servant of the Abbasid caliphate. Nursing his own expansive ambitions, he recognised that a war against the Franks at Antioch offered the perfect opportunity to seize control of Syria for himself. Kerbogha had spent six months carefully laying the military and diplomatic foundations for his campaign, piecing together an immensely intimidating Muslim coalition. Armies from across Syria and Mesopotamia committed to the cause, including a force from Damascus, but most were driven not by overriding hatred for the Christians, nor by spiritual devotion, but by fear of Kerbogha, a man who now seemed destined to rule the Seljuq world.

In early June 1098 Kerbogha approached the second siege of Antioch with diligent care and purposeful resolution. Establishing his main camp a few miles north of the city, he made contact with the Muslims holding the citadel and began amassing forces in and around the fortress on the eastern, less precipitous slopes of Mount Silpius. Soldiers were also deployed to blockade the Gate of St Paul in the north of the city. Kerbogha’s initial strategy was based on an aggressive frontal assault, channelled through Antioch’s citadel and its environs. By 10 June he was ready to launch a blistering attack. Over the next four days he poured in wave after wave of troops as Bohemond led the Franks in a desperate hand-to-hand struggle to retain control of the city’s eastern walls. This was the most intense and unrelenting combat the crusaders had ever experienced. Literally lasting from dawn till dusk without pause, in the words of one eyewitness, ‘a man with food had no time to eat, and a man with water no time to drink’. Nearing exhaustion, utterly petrified, some Latins reached breaking point. A crusader later recalled that ‘many gave up hope and hurriedly lowered themselves with ropes from the wall tops; and in the city soldiers returning from the [fighting] circulated widely a rumour that mass decapitation of the defenders was in store’. By day and night the rate of desertion increased, and soon even well-known knights like Bohemond’s brother-in-law were joining the ranks of the so-called ‘rope-danglers’. At one point word spread that the princes themselves were preparing to flee, and Bohemond and Adhémar of Le Puy were forced to bar the city’s gates to prevent a general rout.

Through sheer bloody-minded determination, those who remained managed to cling on to their positions. Then, on the night of 13–14 June, a shooting star appeared to fall out of the sky into the Muslim camp. The crusaders interpreted this as a favourable omen, because the very next day Kerbogha’s men were seen retreating from the slopes of Mount Silpius. But the Muslim redeployment was probably driven by hard strategy. Having failed to break Frankish resistance through frontal assault, Kerbogha switched to a less direct approach. Skirmishing still occurred on a daily basis, but from 14 June the Muslim besiegers focused their energy on encircling Antioch. The bulk of the Abbasid army remained in the main camp to the north, but large detachments of troops were now posted to blockade the Bridge Gate and the St George Gate. By tightening this cordon, severing Latin contact with the outside world, Kerbogha hoped to starve the crusaders into submission.

Food had been scarce ever since the Franks entered Antioch. Now, however, shortages intensified and the Latins were soon racked by unprecedented levels of suffering. One Christian contemporary described these days of horror:

With the city thus blockaded on all sides, and [the Muslims] barring their way out all round, famine grew so great amongst the Christians that in the absence of bread they…even chewed pieces of leather found in homes which had hardened or putrefied for three or six years. The ordinary people were forced to devour their leather shoes because of the pressure of hunger. Some, indeed, filled their wretched bellies with roots of stinging nettles and other sorts of woodland plants, cooked and softened on the fire, so they became ill and every day their numbers were lessened by death.

Immobilised by fear and starvation, with morale crumbling, the First Crusaders seemingly had no avenue of escape and little prospect of survival. In these bleakest of days, most believed that defeat was imminent.²⁶

Historians have long argued that at this point the course of Antioch’s second siege, indeed the fortunes of the entire crusade, were transformed by a single dramatic event. On 14 June a small group of Franks, led by a peasant visionary named Peter Bartholomew, began digging in the Basilica of St Peter. Bartholomew claimed that an apparition of the apostle St Andrew had revealed to him the resting place of an extraordinarily powerful spiritual weapon: the spear that pierced the side of Christ on the cross. One of the men who joined the search for this ‘Holy Lance’, Raymond of Aguilers, described how:

We had been digging until evening when some gave up hope of unearthing the Lance…But the youthful Peter Bartholomew, seeing the exhaustion of our workers, stripped his outer garments and, clad only in a shirt and barefooted, dropped into the hole. He then begged us to pray to God to return His Lance to [the crusaders] so as to bring strength and victory to His people. Finally, in His mercy, the Lord showed us His Lance and I, Raymond, the author of this book, kissed the point of the Lance as it barely protruded from the ground. What great joy and exultation then filled the city.