by Tom Harper
Knights of the Cross
( Demetrios Askiates - 2 )
Tom Harper
Knights of the Cross follows Tom Harper’s critically acclaimed debut, The Mosaic of ShadowsByzantium, 1098. Two years prior, the legions of armies of the First Crusade were called upon by the Byzantine emperor to reinforce his position as the mightiest power in Christendom. Fighting as mercenaries, and claiming no particular allegiance, their presence was strained within the city walls of Byzantium. But with their differences now settled, the armies of the First Crusade leave the emperor---racing across the vast stretch of Asia Minor, chasing the Turkish armies of the East.
As they continue to route the Turks and reclaim the stolen land for Christendom, the powerful armies are quickly halted. On the Syrian border, their advance is blocked before the impregnable walls of Antioch. As winter draws on, they are forced to suffer a fruitless, interminable siege---gnawed upon by famine, and tormented by the Turkish defenders. The perilous season leaves the entire crusade on a precarious verge of collapse.
In the midst of this freezing misery, rivalries, and divisions appear. Lines are drawn between the ruling princes; the lords and the men they command; and between the Byzantines fighting alongside the Western crusaders. So when the Norman knight, Drago, is found murdered, his lord, the ruthlessly ambitious Bohemond, charges Demetrios Askiates, unveiler of mysteries, with finding the murderer. As Demetrios investigates further, the trail seems to lead ever deeper into the vipers’ nest of jealousy, betrayal, and fanaticism that lies at the heart of the crusade.
A separate army of Turkish infidels is sent to relieve Antioch. With danger looming within the crusader ranks, and impending battles headed their direction, time is running out, and Demetrios is forced to work with Bohemond to uncover the killer. And still the walls of Antioch are locked, with no key in sight---and no assurance that once the crusaders are inside, the battles will end.
The extraordinary story of the crisis of the First Crusade---a powerful novel of intrigue, sacrifice, savagery, and holy war. An amazing sequel to the acclaimed debut, The Mosaic of Shadows. “Gripping for its portrayal of the crusader leaders . . . this is a great example from a trustworthy historian.” ---Independent
About the Author
Tom Harper is also the author of The Mosaic of Shadows and Siege of Heaven.
He studied medieval history at Oxford University and now lives in London.
Visit Tom Harper at www.tom-harper.co.uk
For my parents
who gave me afterward every day
For lo I raise up that bitter and hasty nation,
Which march through the breadth of the earth
To possess the dwelling places that are not theirs.
They are terrible and dreadful,
Their judgement and their dignity proceed from themselves.
Their horses are swifter than leopards,
And are more fierce than the evening wolves.
Their horsemen spread themselves, yea,
Their horsemen come from afar.
They fly as an eagle that hasteth to devour,
They come all of them for violence;
Their faces are set as the east wind,
And they gather captives as the sand.
– Habakkuk
(adapted C. V. Stanford)
Having sworn allegiance to Byzantium, the army of the First Crusade crossed into Asia Minor in May 1097. At Nicaea and Dorylaeum they won two resounding victories against the Turks, capturing their capital and opening the road south towards Jerusalem. Through July and August, in the face of burning heat and hunger, the crusaders swept aside all resistance as they marched almost a thousand miles across the steppes of Anatolia. Outside the ancient city of Antioch, however, their progress halted: the Turkish garrison was all but impregnable, and as winter drew on the army was devastated by rain, disease, starvation and battle. By February 1098 they had suffered five months of attrition to no discernible gain. Rivalries festered between the different nations of the crusade – Provencales from southern France, Germans from Lorraine, Normans from Sicily and Normandy, and Byzantine Greeks. Fractious princes grew jealous of each others’ ambitions, while the miserable mass of foot-soldiers and camp-followers seethed at the failure of their leaders to deliver them. And in the east, the Turks began to assemble an army that would crush the crusade once and for all against the walls of Antioch.
Acknowledgements
In trying to make sense of the tangled history of the First Crusade, I have relied principally on the judgements of two clear-thinking historians: Steven Runciman’s A History of the Crusades (Penguin) and John France’s Victory in the East (Cambridge University Press). Elsewhere, the heretical ritual and creation myth in chapter 26 are adapted from translations in Walter Wakefield and Austin Evans’ Heresies of the High Middle Ages (Columbia University Press); the passage from Tertullian in chapter 12 is adapted from a translation in the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (www.ccel.org); and the visions of Peter Bartholomew and Stephen in chapter 31 are adapted from translations by August Krey in The First Crusade (Princeton). Most of all, I am indebted to Dr Susan Edgington, who very generously gave me access to the draft typescript of her translation of Albert of Aachen’s narrative. When it is eventually published by Oxford University Press, it will fill one of the great remaining gaps in the historiography of the First Crusade. I have used the work of all these historians and many others; sometimes I have probably confused their scholarship, and sometimes I have deliberately abused it for my own purposes. Any errors or distortions in this book are of course my own.
I am particularly grateful to all those who helped me on my research trip across Turkey, especially Ohrlan Pammukale, who taught me the true meaning of Turkish hospitality. My wife Marianna stoically shared the heat, the driving, the dodgy kebabs and the language barrier; then came home and offered me her usual unstinting support. Helen, George, Iona and my mother read the first draft: their enthusiasm and criticism was a great help. As ever, my agent Jane Conway-Gordon moved in mysterious ways and performed wonders.
At Random House, I owe a great many thanks to my wise and patient editor Oliver Johnson, his assistant Emily Sweet, my publicist Emily Cullum, Richard Ogle and the long-suffering design department, Chris Moore for the artwork and Rodney Paull for the wonderful maps – as well as all those whom I never see working behind the scenes.
I
Besiegers
7 March – 3 June 1098
α
It was a restless day for the dead. I stood in a grave before Antioch, and watched the Army of God dig the corpses of their enemies from the fresh earth where they had been buried. Men half-naked and smeared with grime worked with passionate intensity to dispossess the dead, plundering the goods they had taken to the afterlife: unstrung bows curled up like snails, short knives, round shields caked with clay – all were dug out and hurled onto the spoil pile. A little further away a company of Normans counted and arranged more gruesome trophies: the severed heads of the corpses we had recalled from death. The day before, an army of Turks had sallied from the city and ambushed our foraging expedition; we had driven them back, but only with a great effort that we could ill afford. Now we opened their graves, not from wanton greed or cruelty – though there was that also – but to build a tower, to watch the gate and keep the city’s defenders penned within their walls. We made a quarry of their cemetery, and the foundations of our fortress from their tombs.
The giant who stood with me in the grave shook his head. ‘This is no way to wage a war.’
I looked up from the tombstone that I was trying to dislodge and stared at my companion. An unrelenting season of cold and rain had returned his
stout features to the sallow colour of his ancestors, while his unkempt hair and beard were almost of a colour with the rusting links of his armour. Like all who had survived the winter horrors, his skin hung loose from his bones, his shoulders seemed too narrow for his mail coat, and the tail of his belt flapped from being drawn so tight. Yet still there was strength in the arms which had once seemed like the columns of a church, and a gleaming edge on the axe which leaned against the wall of the trench.
‘You’ve served twenty years in the Emperor’s army, Sigurd,’ I reminded him. ‘Would you have me believe that you never plundered your enemies, nor took booty from the battlefield?’
‘This is different. Worse.’ He wormed his fingers into the earth and began tugging on the stone, rocking it back and forth to loose it from the mud that held it. ‘Looting the fallen is a warrior’s right. Looting the buried . . .’
His arm tensed and the flat stone toppled out, splashing into the puddles on the floor of the pit. We crouched, and lifted it like a bier between us.
‘The Turks should have buried their dead within their walls,’ I argued, as though that could forgive such savagery. Why they had buried their losses from the previous day’s battle here, beyond the city and near our camp, I could not guess: perhaps, even after five months of siege, there were yet some barbarities they thought beyond us.
We slid the stone over the lip of the hole and hauled ourselves out, scrambling for purchase on the clammy earth. Standing, I tried to brush the dirt from my tunic – unlike Sigurd, I could not wear armour for such work – and looked at the labour going on around us.
They styled themselves the Army of God, but even He in His omniscience might not have recognised them. This was not the Divine Saint John’s vision of St Michael and all the angels, clothed in white linen and with eyes like flames of fire: these men were the wasted survivors of untold ordeals, little more than a rabble, their eyes filled only with suffering. Their skins were as stained and torn as their clothes; they staggered rather than marched – yet fearsome purpose still consumed their souls as they dug and tore at the bones, stones and plunder of the Ishmaelite cemetery. Only the crosses betold their holy allegiance: crosses of wood and iron strung from their necks; wool and sackcloth crosses sewn into smocks; crosses in blood and brutalised flesh painted or burned or carved into their shoulders. They seemed not the army of the Lord but rather His herd, branded with His mark and loosed to roam the Earth.
As Sigurd and I crossed the graveyard with our stone held between us I tried not to see the impieties around us. A small and lonely corner of my thoughts marvelled that I could still feel shame at this, after the myriad horrors that I had seen in the months since we arrived at Antioch. I turned my gaze away, to the impenetrable city barely two hundred yards distant and the broad green river which flowed before it. At this end of the city the river was almost against the foot of the walls; further north it meandered away, leaving a wedge of open ground between the ramparts and the water. It was there, on marshy land and barely beyond bowshot of our enemies, that our army was camped. From the hillock I could see the jumble of unnumbered tents strung out like washing on a line. Opposite, the many-turreted walls of Antioch stood as serene and inviolate as they had for centuries past, while behind them the three peaks of Mount Silpius towered above the city like the knuckles of a giant fist. For five months we had stared at those walls, waiting for them to crack open with hunger or despair, and for five months we had starved only ourselves.
Crossing a ditch, we climbed towards the low summit of the mound that the Franks had thrown up after the rudimentary fashion of their castles. A Norman sergeant wearing a faded tabard over his armour indicated where we should place our burden, while around us sailors from the port of Saint Simeon laid out planks of timber. At the bottom of the slope, towards the river, a screen of Provençal cavalry sat on their horses and watched for a Turkish sortie.
‘I’ve suffered wounds for the Emperor in a dozen battles.’ Sigurd’s voice was brittle. ‘I’ve struck down men within an arm’s length of ending his life. But if I had known he would have me robbing graves to please a Norman thief I would have cast aside my shield and hammered my blade into a ploughshare long ago.’
He leaned on the long haft of his axe, like an old man on his stick, and stared angrily at the land before us. ‘That city is cursed. The city of the cursed, besieged by the army of the damned. Christ help us.’
I murmured my agreement. It was only as my gaze swept back down to the river that I realised what his last words had signified, what he had seen.
‘Christ preserve us.’ Where the river met the walls, a stone bridge spanned its course – the sally port that our new tower was intended to guard against. Now, I saw, the gates had opened and the drum of hoofbeats echoed from under the arches. Even before our sentries could move, a thin column of Turkish horsemen emerged and galloped forward. Their bows were slung over their shoulders, yet they did not hesitate in charging straight up the slope towards us.
‘Bowmen!’ shouted the Norman sergeant. ‘Bowmen! A bezant for any rider you can unhorse.’
Between what we carried and what we had dug out, there was no shortage of arms among us, but the appearance of the Turks struck panic into our ranks. Some threw themselves into the excavated graves or upon the stones in the shallow foundation trench; others surrendered every defence and fled up the hill behind us. I saw Sigurd snatch one of the round shields from the spoil pile and run forward brandishing his axe. His shame forgotten, the war cry rose from his throat.
He would have little say in this fight, though. The Provençal cavalry had spurred to meet the Turks, desperate to close within spear-length. But rather than engage them the Ishmaelites loosed a rapid flight of arrows and turned back towards their walls. I saw one of the Franks grasping his stomach where a shaft had penetrated it, but otherwise the Turks looked to have done little damage. It was no more than a prick, a gnat’s sting such as we had endured almost daily since investing the city. At least, it should have been.
But the swift retreat of the Turks had brought new courage to our cavalry and they charged down towards the river after their fleeing quarry. Behind them, I saw Sigurd lower his axe as he slowed to a halt and started screaming unheeded warnings.
The Provençals would never listen to advice from an English mercenary in Greek employ, certainly not when presented with a broken line of their enemy to ride down. There was little that Sigurd or I or any man could do save watch. As the Turkish horsemen reached the mouth of the bridge, they executed the drill for which they were famed and feared across Asia: at full gallop, they dropped their reins, twisted back in their saddles, nocked arrows to their bowstrings and loosed them at their pursuers. Throughout the manoeuvre they neither wavered in their course nor slowed their pace. In an instant their horses had carried them into the safety of the city.
I shook my head in awe and anger. All winter, men from every nation had sought to mimic the trick, galloping up and down the meadows outside Antioch until their hands were raw and their horses half-lame. None had mastered it. Nor was it merely vain display, for I saw now that several of the shots had hit their mark, while the rest of our cavalry stood halted by the attack.
And, too late, they noticed how close they had come to the city. A hundred Turkish archers rose from the ramparts, and in an instant the air was thick with arrows. Horses screamed and reared while riders tried desperately to turn their heads to safety. I saw two animals go down, blood streaming from their sides: the rider of one managed to leap clear and run back but the other was trapped under the flanks of his steed and could not move. A fistful of arrows plunged into his body within seconds. His companion, on foot, was luckier: one arrow glanced off his coned helmet, another struck his calf but did not bite, while a third lodged in his shoulder but did not bring him down.
As he passed beyond their reach, the Turks on the walls put down their bows and took up a great shout, praising their God and mocking our impotence. If
they hoped by their taunts to provoke us into another futile charge they were disappointed, for the survivors of our cavalry were limping back to our lines. There seemed to be more horses than riders among them, and a dozen beasts and men were lying motionless near the bridge. A small party of Turks emerged from the open gate to plunder them. A few of the men around me grabbed bows and loosed shots, but they fell short and did nothing to deter the looters. Sickened, I watched as two of the fallen were dragged back into the city. There would be no mercy or ransom for them.
‘Fools!’ the Norman sergeant raged as the Provençals reached our position. ‘Knaves and cowards! You lost good horses there – and for what? To hearten the Turks at the sight of your witless sacrifice? When my lord Bohemond hears of this, you will wish yourselves in the infidels’ houses of torture with the men you left behind.’
The Provençal leader’s eyes stared down from either side of the strip of iron covering his nose. His ragged beard sprang wild beneath his helmet. ‘If the men of Sicily could build this cursed tower and not waste time pillaging the dead, then the men of Provence would not have to waste their forces protecting them. That is what your lord Bohemond has commanded.’
I turned my attention away from them, for Sigurd had returned. He strode past the bickering officers, ignoring them, threw down the plundered shield and stamped on it. Even his strength could not crack it.
‘Five months,’ he growled. ‘Five months and we’ve learned nothing more than how to kill ourselves.’
The clanking tread of men-at-arms silenced the recriminations. A company of Lotharingians were approaching along the muddy track, their long spears clattering against each other over their heads. I was grateful for the relief, for it had been a hateful day. By my feet the rubble of broken tombs was at last beginning to fill the foundation trench, but it would be a week or more before the tower was completed – if the Turks did not first find a way to destroy it. Even then it would take us no closer to the inside of those unyielding walls.
