Still, the memory of that disappointment seems to have faded because in this case, in the early summer of 1119, Roger decided to advance, unsupported, against Ilghazi. The patriarch was not the only person to try to stop him: even the frontier lords, whose lands were most imperiled by Ilghazi’s advance, agreed that he should wait. Nonetheless, he would not be dissuaded.36 Battle was imminent.
Choosing whether or not to give battle was a difficult decision for any medieval commander, but it was an especially fraught question for the rulers of the Crusader States.37 On the one hand, Roger may have felt that he had no choice but to give battle without waiting for his allies. He would have been aware of the sheer scale of his enemies’ forces and the speed with which they could overcome his frontier defenses. If he chose to wait for reinforcements before giving battle, he might have to permit his enemies to ravage a sizable chunk of his principality before he was in a position to face them. Such a decision would dent his credibility as a ruler, revealing him to be negligent in his responsibility to protect his people. The subsequent reconstruction work would take time and money, curbing his own expansionist ambitions. On these grounds, he could not afford to wait. By extension, if he could win a victory, unaided, against Ilghazi at this stage, his position would be substantially strengthened, stressing his credentials as a great Christian warrior.
On the other hand, Roger would have been aware that battle was a very dangerous business, and most Frankish rulers in the Crusader States tried to avoid large-scale encounters. The Antiochene army may have been an elite force, but it was also small and could not easily replace heavy casualties, either in men or horses. Even a hard-won victory could leave him in a worse position than his opponents. His manpower reserves were extremely limited, whereas his Turkish enemies would have no difficulty finding new Turkmen tribesmen to fill their ranks. Thus, the consequences of victory were potentially dire, but a defeat could be catastrophic. The Battle of Harran in 1104 had demonstrated how much could be lost following a major defeat, raising the specter of long-term damage to the principality and its territorial integrity.
Roger chose to fight. Perhaps he reminded himself of his earlier victory over the Turks at Tell Danith in 1115. Perhaps he realized the value of maintaining a healthy sense of fear and respect among the Turks, a feeling that would be dispelled if he refused battle. Perhaps he hoped that victory over Ilghazi would pave the way for the subsequent conquest of Aleppo. Certainly, the city’s future hung on the outcome of this battle between its two aggressive suitors. Either way, his decision to advance was highly controversial and was made against the express wishes of many of his closest advisers.
Realizing that Roger was determined, the patriarch challenged him to confess his sins so that he might go into battle unstained by the crimes of his past. Roger was impressed by this chastisement and, in his main tent, he unburdened himself of his misdemeanors and received absolution from the group of clerics assembled there.
The army then made camp at Sarmada, a place that would become known as the Ager Sanguinis–the Field of Blood. The Franks fortified their encampment but soon came to realize that the location was poorly provided with food and water. It was at this point that the first enemy scouts arrived, masquerading as bird sellers. They took the lay of the land, and worked out the best paths and lines of approach to the Christian position.
Soon afterward, news arrived that Ilghazi had made his first attack. He had assaulted the Christian frontier fortress of al-Atharib, a strategically important staging post for attacks on Aleppo.38 If al-Atharib were to fall, it would give Ilghazi a strong base close to Roger’s camp.
Strongholds such as al-Atharib were vital to Antioch’s defense. The maintenance of the principality’s borderlands hinged on possession of strongly fortified towns and castles such as Zardana, Apamea, Artah, Kafartab, and Azaz. This was not the case in all the Crusader States. Some regions, such as the Kingdom of Jerusalem’s Damascus-facing frontier, were only rarely challenged in these years, so they maintained few fortifications.39 But the intensity of the fighting in northern Syria required Antioch to maintain a heavily fortified frontier facing Aleppo. A serried rank of large fortresses provided the strongpoints that could absorb an enemy attack until the Antiochene field army could assemble and march out to their relief. They also helped amplify the deterrent effect of Antioch’s main field army. Enemy commanders did not like fighting battles with a Frankish army that had a castle in the immediate vicinity because such strongholds could both supply the Franks with information and resources and provide them with a place of refuge. There was also a danger that the garrison would sally out from the gates midbattle and attack from an unexpected quarter. This combination of castles and field armies enabled the Franks to stave off far larger forces than might otherwise have been deterred by their meager companies of cavalry and infantry.
The Turks could always choose to avoid the fortresses when staging an attack, simply advancing past them and into the Frankish heartlands beyond. In practice, however, both in 1119 and on other occasions, they rarely selected this option. Leaving a well-garrisoned enemy fortress to one’s rear, along the line of retreat, was a dangerous business: If an attack went badly, the Turkish commander would have nowhere to run. Even if an attack went well, the garrison could still cause trouble on the Turks’ return journey because they would be burdened with plunder, captives, and stolen cattle. Consequently, Turkish attackers preferred to cut a hole in Antioch’s fortified frontiers before pressing on into the lands beyond.
Building a castle was expensive and time-consuming, and for the most part the early Frankish rulers, like their Turkish counterparts, preferred to augment existing structures rather than create new fortresses from scratch. This was a cheaper alternative, and building materials, often stripped from ancient Greek or Roman remains, could be easily reconstructed into fortifications. Among the most striking examples of such reused classical sites is the fortress of Bosra in the Hawran region, where, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a series of Turkish rulers transformed a Roman amphitheater into a fort.40 Many other strongholds were constructed around ancient forts, often Byzantine in origin. Very few were newly built. Even the cost of maintaining and strengthening existing fortified towns such as al-Atharib, Zardana, and Azaz must have been considerable. Many took a pounding when they were originally captured, and al-Atharib in particular was heavily damaged during Tancred’s long siege in 1110. In addition, in 1114 there was a major region-wide earthquake, which caused significant damage to all three towns. Nevertheless, the Franks invested heavily in these strongpoints and rebuilt them as swiftly as possible. These towns were strongly fortified, and several had two lines of walls so the costs of repair—particularly given that the Franks must have rebuilt or refortified them at speed and under threat of attack—must have been very high. Fortunately for the Antiochenes, their revenue during this period seems to have been equally impressive, and both their prolific coinage and their ability to raise armies year after year testify to their substantial financial resources.41
Castles were not solely intended for frontier defense. They could be constructed for a range of purposes, including as a base for staging attacks. In 1111 Tancred had started to build a fort near Shaizar, from which the Franks could launch attacks and throttle the town by relentless raiding. This was a common tactic, and, further south, Baldwin I used the same strategy in 1117, building the fort of Scandalion to isolate the city of Tyre.42
Away from the frontier, in the principality’s heartlands, Antioch’s barons established castles that provided places of refuge in time of attack, centers for Frankish settlement in rural areas, and visible symbols of Frankish dominance. One particularly impressive example of such strongholds is Saone (now referred to in Syria as “Saladin’s Castle”), owned by the Mazoir family. As with other castles, it had formerly been a Byzantine site, but when the Mazoirs took control in about 1108 they substantially augmented its fortifications.43 As with many crusad
er castles, the Franks took full advantage of its natural defenses. This castle is situated on a valley spur with steep slopes dropping down to the valley floor on three sides. The remaining side, which connects the spur to the surrounding hills, was fortified with a massive ditch, twenty yards wide and twenty-eight yards deep (eighteen meters by twenty-six meters), cut into the solid rock.44
Castles served various purposes across the Crusader States. It must have been very disconcerting to be so far from western Christendom, so few in number and with nowhere to retreat except the sea. Castles helped address the ongoing manpower deficit that was a continual military weakness for the Crusader States, while at the same time also helping establish a network of secure locations from which the Franks could enforce their control and settle the land with their own people. Perhaps these ramparts, towers, and ditches also helped them look beyond the inherent insecurity of their position while affirming their hope that their frail grip on the coastline could have a future. Whatever their motives, the rate of building was exceptionally rapid in all the Crusader States, and in the Principality of Antioch, “[the] steep slopes and narrow valleys must have rung almost unceasingly with the sound of masons’ hammers.”45
In 1119 Roger of Salerno had been prepared for Ilghazi’s assault upon the castle of al-Atharib and had already sent additional men to support the garrison. When the Turks arrived, they mounted a frontal attack on the fortress and then started to withdraw. The Turkish plan seems to have been to feign flight in order to draw the Christian defenders into a trap. However, they bungled the maneuver and were soundly beaten off by the castle’s troops, led by Robert of Vieux-Pont. The men of Antioch had won the first round.46
News of the repulsed attack against al-Atharib heartened the Antiochene army, and Roger sought to build on this early victory by making plans to march on the fortress, presumably in an attempt to force his enemy to withdraw. The journey would be reasonably safe, given that, except for one low range of rocky hills, it would be on flat terrain. It was in this spirit of rising confidence that plans were made to dispatch scouts and prepare for their advance.
This confidence, however, did not last long. Just as the assembled commanders were concluding their council of war, a strange woman entered the tent where they were assembled. She harangued them, foretelling that they would all be killed on the following day. This unexpected and alarming event seems to have unnerved many of the Frankish barons and to have struck a jarring note against their former enthusiasm. A morning service held the following day by the archbishop of Apamea seems to have somewhat rebuilt the army’s shaky morale, and they prepared to put their plans into action.47 But it was too late. Scouts had returned to the Christian army in great haste, their horses suffering from many arrow wounds. The Turks had moved first and were advancing against the Frankish camp along three separate trajectories. Battle was upon them.
Ilghazi had taken the Franks by surprise. They had not anticipated that he would move so soon, particularly following his failed attack on al-Atharib. Roger still had time to prepare his army for the coming encounter, but even so Ilghazi had picked the battlefield.
Ilghazi had spent the months prior to his invasion of Antioch traveling around the Jazira, gathering his forces and using his family’s lands at Mardin as his base. He knew that he would need an overwhelming force to confront the Franks and that such an army could only be raised from among the Turkmen tribes who traversed the region. Fortunately for him, he arrived in the Jazira to find these tribes seething with rage and spoiling for a fight. The Turkmen had just suffered a major raid by the Edessan Franks, who had seized hundreds of their people and thousands of their livestock and carried them back to their own lands. The Turkmen fighters were willing to accompany Ilghazi, and they offered him hostages as a tender of their good faith.48
By the time Ilghazi recrossed the Euphrates, he had assembled a great army. Medieval authors are notorious for their poor guesswork when reporting army sizes, and estimates for this force by Arabic authors range from twenty thousand to eighty thousand troops.49 The real number was probably toward the lower end of this range, but writers from almost every culture underline the fact that the army was far larger than most armies of this period.
It was probably his army’s overwhelming might, and its large contingent of Turkmen warriors, that led Ilghazi to attack without waiting for Tughtakin. Despite his defeat the previous year at the hands of Joscelin of Courtenay, Tughtakin was hurrying north with his own army, but Ilghazi’s chieftains were not inclined to delay. Turkmen cavalry were enthusiastic raiders, but they were not regular troops; they required a steady stream of plunder and incentives if they were to remain with the army. The Muslim writer Ibn al-Athir commented about such tribal fighters that “each one of them would arrive with a bag of wheat and a sheep and would count the hours until he could take some quick booty and then go home.”50 Ilghazi may have been held in high regard by these tribes, but their impatience may have forced an immediate attack.
On the day of the battle itself, as Ilghazi’s army prepared to attack, the Aleppan qadi Ibn al-Khashshab addressed the troops, encouraging them to fight bravely in a holy war against the Franks. This speech provides an important indicator of the Turks’ engagement with notions of jihad, or lack thereof.51 On the one hand, that he addressed them at all, even if he himself was Shia whereas the Turkmen were, at least nominally, under Sunni leadership, shows their receptiveness to such ideas. On the other hand, the Turks’ response reveals their rather mixed religiosity: apparently the qadi was heckled by a Turkmen warrior, who asked his fellows whether they had traveled all the way from their own land only to take instruction from a man in a turban (by implication, an Islamic cleric).52 The tribesman clearly felt that the qadi had no business claiming authority over them, and the Turkmen tribes may have considered him as little more than the defeated representative of a city that their master now controlled. For his part, Ibn al-Khashshab, apparently ignoring the impolite jibe, delivered such an inspirational speech—presumably in Turkish—that he brought his listeners to tears. He had won them over, but it is striking that the soldiers had not automatically understood or accepted his presence within their ranks. They were clearly not accustomed to receiving instruction in jihad.
The mainstay of Ilghazi’s army, thus, were Turkmen warriors. They were capable fighters whose war craft and command structure still largely reflected their former life on the central Asian steppe. In that culture almost all children were raised to ride and shoot from an early age, so almost all adult males (and some females) had skills suitable for the battlefield. This was very different from the structure of agricultural societies (such as in Europe or the Islamic world), where only a small proportion of the male population was raised for war and the majority were destined for a life working the land.53 Practicing their skills of archery and horsemanship on a daily basis, the Turks were extremely adept warriors, and Muslim travelers to the central Asian steppe had formerly remarked on the Turks’ proficiency. One Arab envoy, Ibn Fadlan, sent to those regions from Baghdad in 922, noted that one archer had managed to shoot a goose from the sky while riding a galloping horse.54
Turkish arms, armor, and horses also reflected their nomadic background. Theirs was typically a life spent in the saddle, and the vast majority of the Turkmen forces would have been mounted. Their horses were hardy but were often rather small. Turks kept their horses in herds, and there were no fences or enclosures to let them selectively breed for size and strength. On these smaller horses, it was impractical for the Turks to wear the kind of heavy armor worn by crusader knights, although Frankish chain mail was highly prized. Turkish armor was probably mostly made of leather derived from their flocks and herds. The Turks’ main weapon was the bow. Turkish composite recurved bows were powerful weapons and were manufactured from lengths of bone and horn taken from their livestock.
Confronting an army almost entirely made up of archers had initially been a shock for the First Crusaders. I
n western Europe archers were generally only one contingent within a broader army, and they were rarely mounted. On campaign, the Turks adopted an approach to warfare very different from that of their Arab, Byzantine, or Frankish enemies, prizing the bow and depending on fluidity of movement and command. For their agricultural enemies, warfare was a business of supply trains, logistics, and structured formations of infantry mixed with cavalry squadrons. It required money, encampments, and clearly defined command structures. War was generally fought to secure or weaken specific towns, cities, or strongholds.
The nomadic Turkmen had a rather different approach. Their war craft was characterized by movement and fluidity, and their goals were to control areas of grazing and to seize plunder and, only to a lesser degree, strongpoints. Nomadic armies did not require the same supply chains as did the armies of sedentary peoples because they brought their herds with them, a major advantage. Nor did campaigning incur the same costs because warfare was conducted within a tribal culture that did not require regular wages and taxation in quite the same way, and because weapons were sourced from their own herds and were the responsibility of the individual warrior.
In battle, Turkmen tactics similarly reflected this fluidity. They fought in tribal groupings under their various chieftains. Typically, these contingents did not form a steady battle line; rather, they fanned out, surrounded an enemy, raced in to shoot a few volleys of arrows when the opportunity arose, and then withdrew to await a new chance. They took their time, and a battle could be spread over several days. These tactics were not predicated on a decisive hand-to-hand duel in the center of a predetermined battlefield, like the classic encounter anticipated by their enemies, but consisted of grinding their enemy down in a relentless cycle of attacks that steadily reduced the enemy’s numbers and morale. Turkmen acted rather like lions, circling herds of prey, picking off stragglers, and lunging into their ranks only when the time was right.
The Field of Blood: The Battle for Aleppo and the Remaking of the Medieval Middle East Page 11
