by John France
In September 1099 when Daimbert of Pisa, Raymond count of Toulouse, Robert of Normandy and Robert of Flanders wrote to the West anouncing the crusader victory they stated that the army at Ascalon was 20,000 strong. If this figure was based on the numbers arriving at Laodicea for transport home it may have represented a pardonable exaggeration. The force which came up from Jerusalem under Raymond and the two Roberts, including non-combatants, was of the order of 10,000. Many of the 4,000–5,000 troops, here estimated as being in North Syria, would also have made for the city and the opportunity to go home.71 A milling mass of 12,000 or more arriving and going off at various times would have been difficult to count. In addition, 3,000 remained at Jerusalem and probably something of that order at Edessa and Antioch. A round figure of the order of 20,000 survivors seems likely of whom fewer than 2,000 would have been knights. In the light of all they had gone through and all the attritions they had faced an overall loss rate of 3:1 would appear reasonable. That would have fallen rather more heavily on the followers than on the knights and lords; they might have been more at risk in battle but battle losses were only a fraction of total losses and their superior wealth must have meant they were less exposed, though never immune, to malnutrition and its attendant risks. So a likely figure for the army at its greatest would be around the 50,000–60,000 mark including non-combatants. Losses at Nicaea probably were quite heavy for, as we shall see, they attacked the city vigorously, so there were probably about 50,000 in the army as they left Nicaea, of which 7,000 were knights or lords. They and an unknown number of trained soldiers formed the core of an army which could call up as many as it could arm in an emergency. In time, the proportion which fought must have been very high, for the old, the sick, the children and the weak must have died like flies, the need for men was acute and there must have been plenty of captured weapons available. It has already been noted that the main force of the People’s Crusade was of the order of 20,000, of whom about 3,000 survived to march on, so a total of 70,000–80,000 reached Asia Minor at one time or another. Thousands more must have died on the road to Constantinople, or turned back before they got there and yet others may never have left. By any standards it was a very large force indeed which left Nicaea in late June 1097; its main enemies were those of every army, starvation, malnutrition, disease but they were familiar ghosts which haunted medieval men. They are commented on in our sources when they strike the important, or reached unusual heights, but the daily attrition was so much to be expected, so commonplace, that it has left little record. However it was the best ally of the Turks.
* * *
1 AA, 311–12, 314; GF, p. 13–14.
2 Alexiad, pp. 336–7; Boutoumites had much naval experience but he was also a diplomat who dealt with Hugh of Vermandois. Tatikios was an experienced soldier who had commanded western mercenaries against the Patzinacks in 1090. The two had campaigned together in Bithynia in 1086: B. Skoulatos, Les Personnages Byzantins de l’Alexiade (Louvain, 1980), pp. 181–5, 287–92. On the reasons for Alexius not joining the crusaders, see below pp. 156–7.
3 Alexiad, p. 340.
4 On numeracy see Murray, Reason and Society, especially pp 141–212. There is a remarkable passage on numbers by Ibn-Khaldûn, Muqaddima; an Introduction to History ed. and tr. F. Rosenthal, abridged N. J. Dawood (Princeton, 1967) (hereafter cited as Ibn-Khaldûn), pp. 11–13, when Ibn-Khaldûn attacks uncritical use of sources which produces gross exaggerations: ‘An army of this size (600, 000) cannot march or fight as a unit. The whole available territory would be too small for it. If it were in battle formation, it would extend two, three, or more times beyond the field of vision’. Such common sense is rare in any age!
5 Hagenmeyer, kreuzzugsbriefe, p. 142, Krey, The First Crusade, p. 132.
6 Hagenmeyer, kreuzzugsbriefe, pp. 168, 172.
7 GF, p. 27; RA, p. 106.
8 See above, p. 125, n. 5.
9 On the treaty see above pp. 116–18; M. Bennett, ‘La règle du Temple as a military manual, or how to deliver a cavalry charge’, in C. Harper-Bill, C. J. Holdworth and J. Nelson, eds., Studies in Medieval History presented to R. Allen-Brown, p. 7 says that the Rule of the Temple limited each knight to one or two warhorses, one riding animal and one packhorse with a squire for each warhorse. This reflects the military conditions of the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
10 FG, p. 81; Ekkehard, p. 21; Alexiad, p. 318; AA, 329–30, 365.
11 AA, 330, 331; Hagenmeyer, Kreuzzugsbriefe, p. 145; Peter Tudebode, Historia de Hierosolymitano Itinere, ed. J. H. Hill and L. L. Hill (Philadelphia, 1974) [hereafter cited as Tudebode], p. 36.
12 AA, 373–5; GF, p. 30; RA, pp. 53.
13 AA, 400–1; RA, pp. 380; Hagenmeyer, Kreuzzugsbriefe, p. 151.
14 AA, 400–1.
15 AA, 454, 461, 463, 496.
16 RA, p. 48; Hagenmeyer, Kreuzzugsbriefe, p. 147 and see above p. 125, n. 5.
17 Riley-Smith, Idea of Crusading, p. 63 and Runciman 1. 363, for example, both quote Raymond of Aguilers’ figure for the army at Jerusalem.
18 RA, pp. 100, 112.
19 RA, p. 102.
20 RA, p. 102.
21 RA, pp. 101–2, 105.
22 RA, p. 104.
23 Hagenmeyer, kreuzzugsbriefe, p. 165.
24 RA, p. 136.
25 RA, pp. 134, 142, tells us that the English burned their worn-out boats as the army left ’Akkār, while six Genoese ships put into Jaffa during the siege of Jerusalem only to be trapped by the Egyptian fleet, whereupon, on 19 June, they were burned and the sailors joined the siege.
26 RA, p. 156.
27 AA, 477.
28 GF, pp. 14, 30; AA, 339–40; RA, p. 50.
29 RA, pp. 46, 62, 79; AA, 358.
30 Matthew of Edessa, Chronicle, RHC arm. 1 (Hereafter cited as Matthew), 33.
31 AA, 351–5.
32 FC, p. 90; Matthew, 35.
33 FC, pp. 129–30, 137.
34 RA, pp. 46–8.
35 Hagenmeyer, kreuzzugsbriefe, pp. 145, 151.
36 Runciman 1. 338 gives Bohemond’s army a strength of 500 knights when it left Italy, on the basis of unverified evidence, but Yewdale, Bohemond, p. 37, found the same figure in Lupus Protospatarius. The 10, 000 knights plus many foot mentioned by Albert in Bohemond’s army at Constantinople is clearly a nonsense: AA, 312. However, the general impression is that Bohemond had a small and well-disciplined army and a figure approaching 500 plus servants would not seem unreasonable. By the time he reached Antioch that would have been reduced substantially, and some may have left him in order to go to Jerusalem, as did the author of the Gesta Francorum.
37 GF, pp. 72–3.
38 RA, p. 105; AA, 507, 517; on conditions in the early kingdom see J. Prawer, ‘The Settlement of the Latins in Jerusalem’, Speculum, 27 (1952), 491–5; Riley-Smith, ‘The settlement of Latin Palestine’, 721–36; Murray, ‘The origins of the Frankish nobility of the kingdom of Jerusalem’, 281–300, and ‘The army of Godfrey de Bouillon 1096–99, 328–9.
39 Yewdale, Bohemond, p. 68; AA, 375, 434–5; GF, pp. 56, 63–5, 72.
40 Hagenmeyer, Kreuzzugsbriefe, pp. 165–7; AA, 446.
41 See above p. 125, n. 6.
42 J. Keegan and R. Holmes, Soldiers: a History of Men in Battle (London, 1985), p. 144.
43 J. Houdaille, ‘Le problème des pertes de guerre’, Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, 17 (1970), 423.
44 G. F. Rothenberg, The Art of Warfare in the Age of Napoleon (Indiana, 1978), pp. 54–5, 251; G. Lefebvre, Napoleon from Tilsit to Waterloo, 1807–1815, tr. J. E. Anderson (Paris, 1936, London, 1969), pp. 311, 317.
45 Keegan, Soldiers, pp. 143–4.
46 RA, p. 44.
47 AA, 284–7.
48 E. N. Johnson, ‘The Crusades of Frederick Barbarossa and Henry VI’, in Setton, Crusades, 2. 87–122; Runciman 3. 11; Barbarossa’s army took three days to pass a single point; Nesbitt, ‘Rate of march’, 178–9.
49 Houdaille ‘Le problème des pe
rtes’, 54; Rothenberg, Art of Warfare, pp. 316–17.
50 AA, 328–9; RA, p. 45; GF, p. 18; FC, p. 85; Hagenmeyer, Kreuzzugsbriefe, p. 145.
51 AA, 332–3, 340–1.
52 AA, 339–40; GF, p. 23; FC, pp. 87–8.
53 Hagenmeyer, Kreuzzugsbriefe, p. 150.
54 GF, pp. 27, 33–4; RA, pp. 53–4.
55 AA, 375; RA, p. 55.
56 AA, 203–4; Matthew, p. 33; on fleets see below, pp. 209.
57 RG 640–50. I have followed Riley-Smith, Idea of Crusading, p. 75 identifying these areas.
58 GF, pp. 26, 72; RC, 649; RA, p. 50; on Robert’s relations with Laodicea see David, Robert Curthose, pp. 230–44 and below pp. 215.
59 RA, pp. 68–72; RG, 650–1.
60 GF, pp. 39–42; RA, pp. 59–62; AA, 383–6.
61 RA, p. 59; GF, pp. 62–3; AA, 407, 412.
62 GF, p. 80; RA, pp. 100–1; RC, 675; AA, 450.
63 GF, p. 89; RA, pp. 139–40.
64 Hagenmeyer, Kreuzzugsbriefe, p. 145.
65 Hagenmeyer, Kreuzzugsbriefe, p. 154.
66 GF, p. 17. GF gives the numbers on the foraging expedition as 20,000 knights and foot, In February 1098 he says that there were barely 1,000 horses in good condition, reports the death of 1,000 Christians and 1,500 of the enemy in the battle on the St Symeon road and says that the Egyptian army at Ascalon numbered 200,000: pp. 34, 40–1, 96. It is unfortunate that so many medieval writers who used the Gesta copied this reticence.
67 AA, 329–30, 346–7.
68 GF, pp. 39–42; RA, pp. 59–62.
69 AA, 383, 386; RA, p. 59; GF, pp. 40–41; Tudebode, pp. 54–5; Hagenmeyer, Kreuzzugsbriefe, pp. 151, 158, 166.
70 AA, 367–8; Tudebode, p. 57; RA, p. 51.
71 See above pp. 133–4.
CHAPTER 6
The first enemy: the Turks of Asia Minor
* * *
On 6 May 1097 elements of the crusader army appeared before the city of Nicaea held by Kilij I Arslan, the Seljuk Sultan of Rhüm (1092–1107). The city lies in a fertile basin bounded to the west by the Ascanian Lake (Iznik Gölü). From the south gate (Yenişehir Gate) the land rises sharply into the 800-metre-high Avdan Daglari. From the north gate (Istanbul Gate) the rise into the much higher Naldökan range which the crusaders had crossed is much gentler and only becomes appreciable after three kilometres. To the east (Lefke Gate), a wide and gently sloping valley rises to a watershed then slopes mildly down to the valley of the Sangarius (Sakarya Nehri) and the military roads to Ankara and the Anatolian plateau (see fig. 5). Raymond of Aguilers and Albert of Aachen were much impressed by Nicaea’s fortifications which the leaders examined carefully. Fulcher remarked on the determination and cruelty of its garrison.1 Its fortifications were Roman, dating from the fourth century, but they had been modified and kept in repair under the Byzantine empire. A great wall, pierced at the points of the compass by four main gates, surrounded the city. It was probably about ten metres high and studded with 114 round or square towers rising to seventeen metres, and its circuit measured 4,970 metres. There was a double ditch around the outside.2 These fortifications were made the more formidable because the garrison needed to defend only half their circuit. From the north to south gates the western wall of the city followed the Ascanian Lake whose huge size, forty kilometres long, made it impossible to blockade unless the attacker had boats. It is very important to recognise that until the crusaders brought up boats they faced an enemy who had only to defend half the circuit, and this is the key to understanding the course of military events at Nicaea.3
Amongst the crusader contingents arriving for the siege was, as we have noticed, a force of Byzantine troops under the command of Tatikios. They were later reinforced by more soldiers and some small boats under Boutoumites who blockaded the Ascanian lake on the western perimeter of the city. This was a comparatively small force for Alexius to send in support of what he regarded as his men, almost his hirelings. This is especially true because, as Anna Comnena says, he had twice before attacked the city which seems to have fallen into Turkish hands in 1078, in 1081 and 1086.4 Here was an ancient city whose loss to the empire was deeply felt. The Seljuks were converting it from an outpost into a real capital, thus threatening to stabilise their régime, yet the emperor would hazard only a small force, and, above all, would not come himself. Anna stresses that her father was anxious to regain Nicaea, but offers only the feeblest of excuses for his refusal to join the siege – that he feared the enormous numbers of the Franks.5 Anna’s insistence on the bad faith and untrustworthiness of all Latins is intimately connected with her case that they had broken their oath to Alexius in the matter of Antioch and owes much to hindsight.6 It is, in fact, a revelation of the extent to which much modern writing about the crusades has been from a pro-Byzantine standpoint that her statement has passed unchallenged.7 Alexius had reasons to distrust Latins – the expedition of Guiscard is clear evidence – but he distrusted almost everybody else as well and he had actively sought them as mercenaries. His caution on this occasion probably owed much to his attitude to the Seljuks of Rhüm and the curious process by which they conquered Anatolia.
The Turks are part of a vast family of steppe peoples who include the Mongols. They first appear in western history in the guise of the Huns and later as the Hungarians of the middle Danube. The Patzinacks and Uzes, who were such a scourge of the Byzantine Balkans, are also of the same people. It is, however, with the people of Turkestan – the nomadic tribes occupying a vast area from the Black Sea to Central Asia – that we are concerned, and in particular with the Oghuz who pressed on the frontiers of Islamicised Asia and Persia. Amongst them a pre-eminent family were the descendants of the legendary Seljuk.8 The expansion of Islam into Transoxania brought these Turks into intimate conflict with Islam along the frontiers where ghazis, Islamic volunteers, and nomads waged war. But the Shamanist Turks began to be converted in large numbers to Islam, and in the tenth century we see the creation of Turkish Islamic powers like the Karakhanids of Bukhara and the Ghaznavids who ruled on the borders of India.9 Thus the border between Islam and the Turks became porous to Islamicised Turks, some of whom were already established in the Islamic heartlands by a different process. The Arabs who destroyed the Roman and Persian empires in the seventh century were a warrior aristocracy ruling over diverse peoples and sheer military need forced them to incorporate those peoples into their armies.10 This diversification facilitated the recruitment of peoples with special skills – the Daylamis of the Caspian area provided good infantry until the crusader period. Kurds provided light cavalry and infantry. For a long time Khorasanian horse archers and cavalrymen were important but they tended to be replaced by Turks. At the same time, rulers favoured such processes which lessened their dependence on the tribal elements to which they owed their power.11 The destruction of the Umaiyad Caliphate of Damascus in 750 and the rise of the Abbasids of Baghdad marked a political transformation which favoured Iranian groups, especially a military élite associated with Khorasan, and Mesopotamian groups at the expense of Arabs.12 The Caliphate developed a complex military organisation and placed more and more emphasis on mamlūk troops, slave-soldiers who were often recruited from the Iranian and the Eurasian steppe. Under the Caliph Al Mu’tasim (892–902) Turkish troops became well established in the Islamic armies and he created the great palace complex of Samarra near Bagdad to house these élite forces.13 By the eleventh century Turks were a powerful element in almost all Islamic forces, even as far afield as Egypt, and at this very time political developments on the frontier made them more important. In 1025 a group of Oghuz, having been settled in Khorasan, rebelled and were ejected by the Ghaznavids, but they were followed by another in 1035, pre-eminent amongst whom were Tughril and Chagri who by 1040 dominated all of Khorasan including Merv and Nishapur and drove out the Ghaznavids. While Chagri consolidated their position in the east Tughril turned west. He and his people had imbibed a fierce Islamic orthodoxy and the domination of the Caliph at B
aghdad by Shi’ite Buwaihids and others was a scandal upon which he capitalised. His entry into Baghdad in 1055 was a peaceful one facilitated by contacts with Turkish elements around the Caliph, and though he had to fight later, by 1059 Tughril was master of the Caliphate and enjoyed the title of Shah.14 In the process of constructing his power in the heart of Islam Tughril and his successor, Alp Arslan, were happy to adopt the composite armies of their predecessors in which the tribal element of the Turks was only a part, though Turkish enlistment as slave-soldiers, mamlūks, continued to be important. This was a vital element in the stabilisation of their dynasty and as a corollary they encouraged the nomadic Turks to attack the Fatimids of Palestine and the Byzantine frontier. Patronage of such a holy war would give the Shah prestige and allow the tribes to plunder, while providing a reservoir for recruitment. The scale of their success was remarkable. In 1057 they sacked Melitene (modern Malatya), in 1059 Sebasteia (modern Sivas) and in 1064 Ani and by the late 1060s they were virtually raiding at will in eastern Asia Minor, even devastating the land behind the advance of imperial armies under Romanus IV Diogenes (1067–71) when he campaigned against them in 1069.15