Victory in the East

by John France

  The leaders were able men who managed to work together, though only just. Their real ability showed at its best in sieges. Nicaea, Antioch and Jerusalem were large and well-defended cities such as few westerners had seen before, but the army set about their reduction systematically. Probably the siege of Nicaea helped the leaders to settle a raw army, though at a terrible price in lives. Full credit has never been given to a leadership which perceived the problems of the siege of Antioch and tackled them with enormous persistence and eventual success. The experience at Antioch was an intensification of what they were used to in the West – war of position rather than the formal investment experienced at Nicaea – the strangling of an enemy rather than assault against fortifications. The siege of Jerusalem exemplifies the skills of what was now a highly experienced and coherent grouping of armies, though the passiveness of the defenders contributed. It was not technological innovation which made their sieges so successful. All the instruments they used seem to have been known to their enemies.2 The western approach to war which favoured systematic and often clumsy preparation also favoured good performance in this area. Success was the product of organisation and command above all.

  The Franks enjoyed no technical advantages over their enemies. Their western horses may have been rather larger than those of the nomad Turks but probably not significantly so, and they soon died anyway. The Turks, an element in all the armies that they faced, had the short bow which dictated their tactics and which the Franks found difficult to counter. They may even have had a form of quick-firing crossbow unknown to the West. The Franks probably had rather better armour, but in general their weapons were very like those of their enemies.

  The outstanding factor on the battlefield was the tactical skill of the Turkish horsemen firing their arrows from horseback. They were always relatively few and this was critical in Asia Minor. In the Caliphate they were the cutting edge of armies and supported by diverse and adaptable forces. The Franks had no technical answer to the problem and their response was precisely what one would expect – the tactical expedient of solidity of formation. This is always desirable in both cavalry and infantry, but very difficult to achieve when there was no formal system of training. In their first battle the Franks found themselves fighting in close ground near Nicaea, which frustrated Turkish tactics. At Dorylaeum the enemy was free to manoeuvre and attacked skillfully, cruelly exposing the Franks who lacked any overall command. But the chances of topography and direction of attack, and the determination and skill of the leaders held the armies together. Thereafter the crusader host became a more coherent group of units and Bohemond was able to use this experience and skill to great advantage at the Lake Battle. Against Kerbogah the same cohesiveness was seen amongst the infantry who were also refined and trained by the experience of war and the lessons of this were applied at Ascalon where a complex marching formation was adopted, and the classic pattern of infantry protecting cavalry marked the final deployment. This was not innovation as such, for similar formations had been used in the West but here it was used with great success.3

  It is this growth of the coherence and experience of the crusader host as a whole which was the key to their military success. In many ways their overall organisation and weapons were inferior to those of their enemies and they were ‘away from home’ in a strange climate. But the divisions of their enemies meant that their weaknesses were never exposed fully and they were given time in which they became more and more experienced. Crucially the Turks of Asia Minor failed to stop them. Thereafter what had been a relatively incoherent host, within which some armies were better ordered than others, became more coherent and experienced, and more successful.

  In a military sense the crusade was a success. It may not have achieved all that Urban wanted it to achieve in terms of friendship with the Eastern Empire.4 Its success was limited in that it established bare outposts with poor communications with the West and uncertain relations with Eastern Christendom, but that is our viewpoint blessed as we are with hindsight. There was no single will directing the crusade; it was the product of many wills interacting with circumstances, and all that gave it a precarious unity was Jerusalem. To free it was the task they set themselves and to have achieved that was remarkable.

  The crusade had little immediate impact on western armies at this time. The twelfth century would see the rise of two distinct tactical developments: the mass charge by cavalry, using couched lances for the maximum shock impact, and the rise of highly effective infantry.5 Discipline and clearly articulated command structures were vital to these developments. Launching a cavalry charge was so difficult even for the Templars with their background of order and discipline that they felt the need to write it all down in detail.6 These developments were only possible because the monarchies of the West more and more used mercenaries and professional commanders who were able to impose an appropriate discipline on the more ‘regular’ forces which formed the cores of their commands. This, combined with the development of the heavier horses, created the classic medieval cavalry charge, and one of its antidotes – disciplined infantry, who in any case became more and more necessary as castles grew more complex. The conditions of the crusade replicated the conditions of common service and experience which made these armies so efficient. Conditions in the crusader states continued to demand constant military activity which had much the same effect, hence the high prestige of the armies of Outremer in the twelfth century. It is possible that the glory and the prestige of the First Crusade helped to impress upon western commanders the need for discipline and coherence in their armies. In 1106 Robert Curthose found himself brought to bay by his brother Henry at Tinchebrai, rather as he had been by his father at Gerberoi in 1079. As then, he decided to risk battle, on a single coherent charge, but he was heavily outnumbered.7 However, Henry of Huntingdon says that Robert’s forces fought well and pressed the enemy hard relying on the fact that they were ‘well trained in the wars of Jerusalem’.8 It was indeed a hard training which produced coherent armies and ferocious fighters. It was this, their belief in God and themselves, and their able commanders which gave them the victory in the East.

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  1 The Crusade of 1101 is the subject of a Swansea Ph.D thesis by Alec Mulinder, which, when complete, should provide valuable insight into the failure of this crusade. The Crusade of 1101 lacked coherence. Its various elements never gathered together and perished separately, largely because they had no clear objective such as the First Crusade found in Jerusalem. They were fighting an enemy, the Turks of Asia Minor, who had learned the lessons of the earlier campaign and refused to be drawn into battle.

  2 Here I differ sharply from L. White, ‘The Crusades and the technological thrust of the West’, in V. J. Parry and M. E. Yapp, eds., Parry War, Technology and Society in the Middle East (London, 1975), pp. 97–112, who argues that it was innovation in this area that gave the crusaders their advantage.

  3 France, ‘La guerre dans la France féodale’, 193–8.

  4 This is not the place to rehearse the debate about Urban’s intentions which are touched on above, pp. 4–5.

  5 On the charge see the literature mentioned above, p. 71, n.66, 67, although it must be said that this discussion has focussed far too much on the question of the couched lance and insufficiently on the practical problems of marshalling mounted men – far more important for the rise of shock tactics; on the rise of infantry see J. Boussard, ‘Les mercenaires au xii siècle. Henri II Plantagenet et les origines de l’armée de métier’, Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes 106 (1945–46), 189–224 and Contamine, War in the Middle Ages, pp. 70–3.

  6 M. Bennett, ’La Règle du Temple as a military manual, pp. 7–20, draws attention to the sub-units of ten knights under a commander comparable to the conroi discussed by Verbruggen, ‘Tactique militaire’, 161–80.

  7 On Gerberoi see above, p. 44; H. W. C. Davis, ‘The battle of Tinchebrai’, English Historical Review, 24 (1909), 728–32, 25 (1910),
295–6 estimates that Robert had only 6,000 with 700 cavalry to oppose Henry I’s 40,000 including 2,400 cavalry.

  8 HH, p. 235.

  APPENDIX

  A note on the sources

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  The astonishing success of the First Crusade inspired some of its participants to record their experiences, either in letters written as events unfolded or in chronicles prepared afterwards. This in turn inspired others and so an extraordinary volume of material appeared in the west in the course of the twelfth century and beyond. This note does not seek to examine all of it let alone repeat or challenge the work of many distinguished commentators. The present writer has sought to look at the crusade as a military campaign and we are concerned here with the problems of understanding what these and other sources used tell us about it. Here I address general problems raised by the main sources for the crusade.

  Of the extraordinary value of the letters to the historian of the crusade there can be no doubt. The excitements of battle spring out from the pages of the letters of Stephen of Blois and Anselm of Ribemont as do the terrible sufferings and the sense of loss of comrades. When Stephen, as one of the major leaders, who was actually chosen later to lead the army, speaks of his esteem for the Emperor Alexius and in the same breath speaks of Antioch as the next major goal we must pay attention, for here is the voice of one who was involved in the planning.1 Anselm’s deep mourning for his many dead friends and his valuable information about the loss of horses (supported by the narrative sources) underline the concerns of an important but not leading figure. These men were not wholly disinterested; they show a lively concern for the well-being of their lands in the West and Stephen rejoiced in the acquisition of booty.2 They are mercifully free from reflection and consideration: it is of great significance that they almost all date from the period before the summer of 1098 and reflect no hostility, and in the case of Stephen of Blois considerable admiration, for the Byzantines. Those of Adhémar and Symeon Patriarch of Jerusalem, testify to good relations between East and West. It is only with the letter from the Princes in September 1098 that hatred of the Byzantines becomes evident and this document, in the form in which we have it, may well have been heavily influenced by Bohemond.3 This is a vital corrective to certain important latin narratives in which hatred of the Greeks and distortions about their deeds is a dominating factor. The Anonymous, author of the Gesta Francorum, shared his nation’s contempt for the Greeks and all their works, while Raymond of Aguilers seems to have taken a violent dislike to them in the course of the journey. This has helped to disguise from historians the extent to which there was a community of interest between the Byzantine emperor and the crusading princes until the summer of 1098 when the quarrel over Alexius’s desertion at Philomelium and Bohemond’s ambition for Antioch resulted in a breach. It is interesting that in the last of the letters which we have, Daimbert’s summary of events written in September 1099 in the name of one who was a papal legate with knowledge of Urban’s thinking, the issue of relations with the Byzantines is avoided, even though the letter was probably written by Raymond of Aguilers who hated and despised the Greeks.4 The letters also, to a degree, correct the obvious gap in all the accounts – they are very thin on the journey across Asia Minor, to the extent that reconstructing the route is by no means simple. In fact this may be connected with the anti-Byzantine sentiment which later grew up and led the chroniclers to neglect a period when they were in close alliance with the Greeks. After Dorylaeum, the journey, though hard, was not full of incident and thus was overshadowed by later events.

  The accounts of the crusade written by participants were all written after the event and are much more reflective and interpretative. All of them see themselves as recording the work of God. This is most obvious in the case of Raymond of Aguilers whose latest editors have not hesitated to call it ‘The book of the lance’, analogous to those records of the wonder-working of relics so common at this time in the West. But what Raymond was really trying to do was to show the workings of the divine economy as then understood:

  ‘For the army of God, even if it bore the punishment of the Lord himself for its sins, out of His compassion also stood forth victor over all paganism’. And the same reflection appears even earlier in the letter of Daimbert of Pisa: ‘And so, because some were puffed up at the happy outcome of these events, God opposed to us Antioch, a city impregnable to human might, and detained us there for nine months, and so humbled us in the siege outside the city until every swelling of our arrogance relapsed into humility.’5

  Thus the nucleus of the idea that the spiritual exercises of the crusade were as important to its success as the military emerged.6 This emphasis on divine intervention affects all our sources and limits the level of explanation which they give. Thus the victory at Dorylaeum is God’s will, according to the Anonymous author of the Gesta Francorum.7 Individual authors, even if eyewitnesses, were also limited in their perceptions by where they were at any given time. Fulcher of Chartres provides an extraordinarily vivid account of the battle of Dorylaeum, from the point of view of a civilian in the camp. But he left the crusade early in 1098 and thereafter relied on others.8 The Anonymous was in Bohemond’s army besieging Nicaea and so knows almost nothing of the major battle with the Turks which took place to the south of the city and gives us the impression that it was a mere skirmish. No writer was present at the Foraging Battle which is obscure in the extreme. Even when our informant was centrally involved in a battle his information is not always very useful. The Anonymous gives us a vivid sense of his participation in the Lake Battle of February 1098 and the passage is deservedly famous, but he does not tell us where the battle took place. Anselm of Ribemont’s account of the battle against Kerbogah forgets to mention Godfrey de Bouillon. Such omissions, the consequences of the excitements, alarms and confusions of battle, the proverbial ‘fog of war’, are a commonplace of military history.9 The Anonymous was involved in the heavy fighting outside the citadel of Antioch during the second siege of that city, hence his failure to mention other fighting during this siege, yet he never explains the physical nature of the battlefield as Raymond of Aguilers does exceedingly well.10 Such are the limitations of the ‘worm’s eye-view’ which is so often that of the eyewitness. Raymond of Aguilers was a better writer, but a priest rather than a military man. He understood the salient fact about Turkish warfare – that the enemy encircled your forces in an effort to demoralise them by archery, but this becomes an idée fixe dominating his discussion of every battle, often inappropriately.11 Raymond is sometimes guilty of trying to tidy up the battlefield, to impose order from chaos, notably at the Lake Battle, and the same can be said of the Anonymous.12 Overall, the central problem of these eye-witness sources is that they were eye-witnesses with all the narrowness of view that implies. This is especially true of the Gesta Francorum. Raymond of Aguilers, as chaplain to the count of Toulouse, was close to the high command of the army and his information on decisions and policy is often good but he was more interested in politics than purely military decisions. However, he does tell us about meetings and discussions, such as that between the leaders near Shaizar and he is very informative on numbers which must have been a real preoccupation in the later stages of the campaign.13

  By contrast, the Anonymous was an ordinary knight and ill-informed about such matters. But suppositions about the supposed spontaneity and direct simplicity of his account need to be tempered considerably. The best evidence is that his work was written by 1101, which is certainly early. His text was used by Raymond of Aguilers as an aide mémoire, especially for the period of the siege of Antioch; thereafter his dependence, always minimal, virtually disappears. His work appeared shortly after that of the Anonymous but certainly before 1105, for the death of the count of Toulouse in that year is never suggested. But there are indications that what we have may not be the text written or dictated by an anonymous South Italian Norman knight in the service of Bohemond. The insertion of a passage sugges
ting that Alexius granted Antioch to Bohemond is patent, while in the description of the fighting around the citadel there are indications of revision and the literary passages may well come from a different hand.14 But even more notable is the very bland account given in Book X of the Gesta Francorum which avoids the issues which divided the army. This blandness is also very evident in Fulcher’s account, where its obvious root is that author’s concern for the reputation of the house of Boulogne whose servant he was from early 1098 until his death about 1127. Were we to rely on Fulcher and the Anonymous (along with the works heavily based on them) the internal dynamics of the crusader army would be lost to us. This is the great strength of Raymond of Aguilers’ account, for all its obvious weaknesses and in particular its reliance on the Gesta. Raymond was involved and was a partisan, and while we may distrust his standpoint we can hardly deny that there was a standpoint to take. The divisions of the crusaders after the seizure of Antioch exercised a powerful influence on the course of events, and in any assessment of the success of the crusade it is important to consider the astonishing fact that they succeeded despite them. Moreover, in understanding crusading history as a whole it is a false perspective to see such problems of command as originating later and being a deviation from the spirit of the crusade – they were inevitable and apparent from the first.