The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land

by Thomas Asbridge

  Early that autumn, Bohemond made an unexpected decision. Recalling Tancred from Edessa, he convened a council in the basilica of St Peter and announced his intention to leave the Levant. The real motives behind this move are hard to unravel. Publicly Bohemond avowed that, in order to save Latin Syria, he would recruit a new Frankish army in western Europe. He may also have expressed his determination to fulfil his vows to St Leonard (to whom he had appealed while in prison) by making a pilgrimage to the shrine of his relics at Noblat, in France. Privately, however, he seems to have had little intention of making a swift return to Outremer, planning, instead, to raise a force with which to attack the Byzantine Empire head-on in the Balkans. This might have the effect of distracting Alexius Comnenus, perhaps forestalling a direct Greek assault on Antioch, but Bohemond’s strategy probably owed more to his desire to conquer new territory in the Adriatic and the Aegean, and to his dream of sitting upon the throne of mighty Constantinople itself.

  Bohemond’s disenchantment with the fragility of Antioch’s position is further evidenced by his calculated appropriation of the city’s remaining wealth and manpower before departing. Even the contemporary Latin writer Ralph of Caen, normally a promoter of Bohemond’s cause, observed that ‘he carried off the gold, silver, gems and clothing [leaving the city] to Tancred without protection, wages and mercenaries’. Bohemond set sail from the shores of Syria around September 1104. During the First Crusade, he had trained the full force of his military genius and avaricious guile upon Antioch’s conquest. Now, as he turned his back upon the Levant, he must have known that he was abandoning his old prize to a desperately bleak and uncertain future.64

  On the brink of collapse

  So it was that Tancred began the year 1105 in a state of beleaguered penury, prince-regent of a realm bound for destruction. In the fire of this crisis, the defining challenge of his career, he proved his mettle. Blending charm and coercion, he won the support of Antioch’s indigenous population for an emergency tax, restocking the treasury and financing the fresh recruitment of mercenaries. He also sought to replenish further his resources by exploiting fully the one positive consequence of the debacle at Harran, Antioch’s nominal lordship over the county of Edessa. Calling ‘all the Christian men’ of northern Syria to arms, stripping Edessa, Marash and Tell Bashir of all but token garrisons, he had by early spring assembled an army of some 1,000 knights and 9,000 foot soldiers. Tancred’s unshakable resolution and incisive strategic acuity now came to the fore.

  Facing such a plethora of enemies, he recognised that he could neither fight on every front nor fall back upon a policy of inert defence. Instead he employed targeted, proactive aggression, selecting his quarry with great care. In mid-April he marched on Artah, engineering a decisive confrontation with Ridwan of Aleppo. This was an audacious gamble. Overcoming this foe in pitched battle might allow Tancred to regain the initiative and rekindle the Franks’ martial authority, but he must have known that the Aleppans would outnumber his own forces, perhaps three to one, and that any defeat would mark the end of Latin dominion over Syria.

  Before leaving Antioch the Christians undertook rites of spiritual purification, including a three-day fast, purging their souls of sin in a preparation for death that echoed crusading practice. Tancred then crossed the Orontes at the Iron Bridge and moved in to besiege Artah. Once Ridwan took the bait, advancing with a reported 30,000 troops, Tancred backed off. The centrepiece of his strategy was to capitalise upon his close knowledge of the local terrain and to exploit his growing appreciation of Muslim tactics. The route between Artah and the Iron Bridge passed through an area of flat but rocky ground, over which horses could not easily gallop, before reaching an open plain. It was to this second zone that Tancred retreated and, on 20 April 1105, Ridwan pursued. One Latin contemporary described the battle that followed:

  The Christians held their positions as if torpid…then, when the Turks had passed the rough ground, Tancred charged into their midst as if having been roused from sleep. The Turks quickly retreated, hoping, as was their custom, to turn about while fleeing and shoot. However, their hopes and their tricks were foiled…the [Franks’] spears struck them in the back and the path arrested their flight. Their horses were useless.

  In the ensuing battle, the Latins ploughed into the packed ranks of terrified Muslim troops, dispatching the enemy almost at will as Aleppan resistance crumbled. Horrified, Ridwan scurried away to safety as best he could, losing his banner in the process, and Tancred was left the victor on the field, enriched with spoils and glory.

  The Battle of Artah marked a watershed in the history of the northern crusader states. Over the next few years Tancred readily recouped the losses suffered after Harran. Artah was immediately reoccupied and the Summaq plateau soon followed suit. Ridwan sued for peace, trying to position himself as a subservient ally, and, with the frontier zone between Antioch and Aleppo secured, Tancred was able to direct his attention elsewhere. By 1110 he had effected long-term Antiochene dominion over Cilicia and Latakia at the expense of the Greeks. At the same time, he shored up the principality’s southern defences against another potentially aggressive Muslim neighbour, the town of Shaizar, by seizing the neighbouring ancient Roman settlement of Apamea. In personal terms, the success of 1105 also served to legitimise Tancred’s position; before long he was ruling less as Bohemond’s regent and more as a prince in his own right. In this, however, he was also aided by a concurrent decline in the fortunes of his famed uncle.65

  Bohemond’s crusade

  Bohemond of Taranto sailed for Europe in autumn 1104. It was later rumoured among the Greeks that he employed a bizarre form of trickery to avoid capture by Byzantine agents during his voyage across the Mediterranean. Feigning his own death, Bohemond was said to have travelled west in a coffin punctured with concealed air holes. To complete the ruse, he was entombed alongside the rotting carcass of a strangled cockerel to ensure that his own ‘corpse’ emitted a suitably revolting putrefactive odour. Indeed, Emperor Alexius’ daughter, Anna Comnena, even allowed herself a note of admiration for Bohemond’s indomitable ‘barbarian’ spirit when she wrote, ‘I wonder how on earth he endured such a siege on his nose and still continued to live.’

  Whatever his mode of transport, Bohemond’s arrival in Italy in early 1105 was greeted with a clamorous outpouring of adulation. The self-styled hero of the First Crusade had returned. He soon won the support of Pope Urban’s successor, Paschal II, for a new crusading expedition, one which Bohemond proceeded to promote in Italy and France for the next two years. Along the way he fulfilled his vow to visit the shrine of St Leonard at Noblat, depositing a gift of silver shackles as a sign of gratitude for his release from imprisonment in 1103. He also appears to have sponsored the copying and dispersal of a rousing narrative account of the First Crusade, akin to the Gesta Francorum, which promoted his own achievements and helped to blacken the name of the Greeks. With his fame in the ascendant and his recruiting rallies attracting large enthusiastic crowds, Bohemond secured a marriage alliance which propelled him into the highest echelons of the Frankish aristocracy. In the spring of 1106 he was wed to Princess Constance, daughter of the king of France; around the same time one of the king’s illegitimate daughters, Cecilia, was betrothed to Tancred. Bohemond used the occasion of his own nuptials at Chartres to promote his new crusade, launching a stinging attack on his proclaimed enemy, Alexius Comnenus–supposed betrayer of the crusaders in 1098 and 1101, and invader of Antioch.

  By the end of 1106 Bohemond had returned to southern Italy to supervise the ongoing construction of a crusading fleet, having recruited many thousands of men to his cause. But despite the size of the force that gathered in Apulia one year later–some 30,000 men to be carried by a fleet of more than 200 ships–historians have long disputed the nature of this expedition. The current consensus maintains that this campaign, which targeted the Greek Christian empire of Byzantium, cannot be regarded as a fully fledged crusade, or at the very least sh
ould be branded as a distortion of the crusading ideal. The expedition obviously bore some striking similarities to the First Crusade, with participants taking a vow, bearing the symbol of a cross and expecting to receive a remission of sins. The nub of the debate, however, depends on papal involvement. Surely, so it is argued, the pope would never knowingly have awarded the privileged status of a crusade to an expedition against fellow Christians; rather, it was Bohemond, twisted by ambition and hatred, who deceived Paschal II, pretending that his armies would fight in the Levant.

  This view of events is riddled with significant problems. The bulk of contemporary evidence suggests that the pope was aware of Bohemond’s intentions and nonetheless supported him, even dispatching a papal legate to accompany and endorse the preaching campaigns in France and Italy. Even in the unlikely case that the pope was misled, there can be no doubt that a huge number of lay recruits accepted the idea of joining a crusade against the Greeks. In fact, the tendency to sideline Bohemond’s expedition as a perversion of crusading is symptomatic of a more fundamental misconception: a belief that the ideas and practices of crusading had already coalesced to create a uniform ideal. For most people living in western Europe in the early twelfth century, this new type of devotional warfare had no finite identity and was still subject to continual, organic development. As far as they were concerned, crusades did not need to be directed against Muslims, and many readily accepted the idea of waging a holy war against Alexius Comnenus once he had been deemed the enemy of Latin Christendom.

  However the background to the 1107–8 ‘crusade’ against Byzantium is viewed, the expedition itself proved to be a shambolic disaster. Crossing the Adriatic in October 1107, the Latins laid siege to the city of Durazzo (in modern Albania), regarded by contemporaries as ‘the western gate of the [Greek] empire’. But, in spite of his military pedigree, Bohemond was outwitted by Alexius, who deployed his forces to cut the invaders’ supply lines while carefully avoiding direct confrontation. Weakened by hunger, unable to break Durazzo’s defences, the Latins capitulated in September 1108. Bohemond was forced to accede to a humiliating peace accord, the Treaty of Devol. By the terms of this agreement, he was to hold Antioch for the remainder of his life as the emperor’s subject, but the Greek patriarch was to be restored to power in the city and the principality itself to be all but emasculated by the cession of Cilicia and Latakia to Byzantium.

  As it was, this agreement was not implemented and thus had little bearing upon future events, because Bohemond never returned to the Levant. After sailing back to southern Italy in the autumn of 1108, he appears only fleetingly in historical records, his reputation broken, his grand dreams and ambitions shattered. Constance bore him a son, also named Bohemond, around 1109, but by 1111 the once great commander of the First Crusade was ailing, and on 7 March he died in Apulia. At Antioch, Tancred remained in power, perhaps still nominally as regent, but with his authority uncontested among the Franks. From the perspective of Outremer, one positive did emerge from Bohemond’s later career: his Balkan campaign diverted Greek resources from the Levant, allowing Tancred to assert lasting control over Latakia and Cilicia.66

  TO RULE IN THE HOLY REALM

  Tancred’s drive to expand the principality of Antioch and to augment its wealth and international influence accelerated after 1108, and he showed a ruthless willingness to use any and all means in pursuit of these ambitions, even if that meant fighting fellow Latins while engaging Muslim allies. For the next five years he worked tirelessly, drawing upon a seemingly inexhaustible pool of martial energy to engage in near-constant campaigning. Beleaguering his neighbours and opponents through a mixture of territorial conquest, political coercion and economic exploitation, Tancred came close to forging an Antiochene empire in the Levant.

  The counties of Edessa and Tripoli

  Between 1104 and 1108 Antioch was the effective overlord of the county of Edessa. Once Tancred assumed control of the principality in autumn 1104, he installed his brother-in-law and fellow southern Italian Norman First Crusader Richard of Salerno as regent of Edessa. Even though Richard proved unpopular, Antiochene influence went unchecked while Count Baldwin II remained in captivity.

  Antioch certainly made no effort to orchestrate the count’s release. In the summer of 1104, when Baldwin’s captors first sought to organise the terms of his ransom, even Bohemond demurred. Rather than repay the energy Baldwin had expended to secure Bohemond’s own freedom in 1103, the prince preferred to retain control of Edessa’s considerable agrarian and commercial resources, estimated to value in excess of 40,000 gold bezants per annum. Once at the helm of Frankish Syria, Tancred continued to enjoy these revenues and to ignore Baldwin’s plight.

  By 1107 the count’s companion, Joscelin of Courtenay, lord of Tell Bashir, had been ransomed by the populace of that town, and in the following year Joscelin successfully negotiated Baldwin’s release from Mosul. It was the Turkish warlord Chavli, the latest ruler of Mosul, who finally agreed terms; but with an eye to the fragility of his own position and the ongoing internecine struggles within Near Eastern Islam, Chavli demanded not only a cash ransom and hostages, but also a promise of military alliance.

  When Baldwin sought to reclaim Edessa in the summer of 1108, a tense standoff ensued. Having enjoyed access to the wealth and resources of the county for four years, Tancred had no intention of simply handing over a territory which he had saved from conquest, and he now sought to pressure Baldwin into taking an oath of subservience; after all, he argued, historically Edessa had been the vassal of the Byzantine duchy of Antioch. The count refused, not least because he had already sworn allegiance to Baldwin of Boulogne in 1100. With neither side willing to give ground, conflict seemed inevitable.

  In early September both men raised armies. Less than ten years after Jerusalem’s conquest, Baldwin and Tancred–fellow Latins and veteran crusaders–were now ready and willing to crush one another in open war. More shocking still was the fact that Baldwin marched forth to this struggle alongside his new ally, Chavli of Mosul, and some 7,000 Muslim troops. When battle was joined, probably near Tell Bashir, Tancred, although outnumbered, managed to hold the field. But with some 2,000 Christian dead on both sides, Patriarch Bernard, the ecclesiastical overlord of both Antioch and Edessa, stepped in to calm frayed tempers and adjudicate. When witnesses publicly attested that Tancred had actually promised Bohemond in 1104 that he would relinquish control of Edessa upon Baldwin’s release, the Antiochene ruler was forced grudgingly to back down. The city of Edessa itself may have been repatriated, but the embedded hatred and rivalry remained. Tancred stubbornly refused to hand over territory in the northern reaches of the county and was soon pressing Baldwin to make tribute payments in return for peace with Antioch.67

  With this dispute still simmering, Tancred’s acquisitive gaze settled upon the nascent county of Tripoli. In the immediate aftermath of the First Crusade his old rival Raymond of Toulouse had sought to carve out his own Levantine lordship centred on the northern reaches of modern-day Lebanon. The challenge confronting Raymond was considerable, for unlike the founders of other Latin settlements he had no crusader conquests to build upon, and the region’s dominant city, Tripoli, remained in Muslim hands.

  Nonetheless, Raymond made some progress, capturing the port of Tortosa in 1102, with the aid of a Genoese fleet and survivors from the 1101 crusade. Two years later he conquered a second port to the south, Jubail, resplendent with Roman ruins. Meanwhile, on a hill outside Tripoli, Raymond constructed a doughty fortress, christened Mount Pilgrim, thereby securing effective control of the surrounding region. Yet, despite his tenacious efforts, when the count died in his mid-sixties on 28 February 1105, Tripoli itself remained unconquered.

  In the years that followed, two men sought to press claims to Raymond’s legacy. His nephew, William Jordan, the first to arrive in Outremer, continued to pressure Tripoli while also overcoming the neighbouring town of Arqa. In March 1109, however, Raymond’s son Bertrand of Tou
louse reached the Holy Land, determined to assert his rights as heir. When he brought a sizeable fleet to reinforce the siege of Tripoli, the two claimants squabbled over rights to the city, even though it had yet to be captured, and William Jordan quit Mount Pilgrim for the north. The emergent county of Tripoli looked as if it might founder amid bitter dynastic squabbling.

  In the end, however, the contest for control of Tripoli involved far more than the simple issue of inheritance; it became the centrepiece of a wider struggle for dominion over the crusader states. Realising that he would need an ally if he was to have any hope of claiming Tripoli, William Jordan turned to Tancred, offering to become his vassal. Not surprisingly, Tancred seized this sudden opportunity to expand Antiochene influence southwards; should Tripoli fall under his sway and his designs upon Edessa come to fruition, then the principality might rightly claim to be Outremer’s leading power. Modern historical analysis has persistently underestimated the significance of this episode, the assumption being that the kingdom of Jerusalem was automatically and immediately recognised as the overlord of the Frankish East at the start of the twelfth century. True, the Holy City had been the focus of the First Crusade, and Baldwin of Boulogne was the only Latin ruler in the Levant to assume the title of king, but his realm encompassed Palestine, not the entire Near East. Each of the four crusader states was founded as an independent polity and Jerusalem’s pre-eminent status among them had never been formally ratified. A current of rivalry had coloured relations between Baldwin and Tancred ever since they contested control of Cilicia in 1097; now, in 1109, Tancred’s brash assertiveness offered a challenge to Baldwin’s authority that would determine the balance of power in the Latin Levant.