Soldier of Crusade

by Jack Ludlow

  In the end it was the prospect of plunder that swung the vote towards action, indeed the very nature of many of the people that made up the People’s Crusade. Stark indeed was the truth when set against what had gone before, which was in too many cases no more than rank religious hypocrisy designed to mask naked greed, this from adventurers who had thought of nothing since setting out from their European hovels and manor houses other than the fabled riches of the East. The more honest pilgrims were souls with no fear of death; had not Peter the Hermit promised that if they perished on this venture their entry to heaven was assured? So overwhelming was the sentiment to march that those who disagreed could not stand against it.

  The host that set out next day was indeed formidable if seen from a distance and spread across the landscape: three hundred plus mounted knights trained in the art of war, at least the same number who at some time in their lives had borne arms in battle as milities, able to use pikes for defence and axes as well as sharp daggers in close combat. The remainder, and they were several thousand in number, were stave- and pitchfork-carrying peasants so fired by their faith to be sure that when they came to the walls of Nicaea, they would, like those of Jericho, tumble to the sound of their combined prayers.

  In such a ragged army there was scant discipline and if Walter Sansavoir had agreed to take the lead, he did not have anything like overarching control; what he had was dispute if he even attempted to issue an order, so that midway through the second day, as much due to heat as disorderliness, the host utterly lacked any kind of cohesion and that was exposed when before them they could observe, on an open plain with no protection from a flank assault, a large force of disciplined Turks advancing to meet them and one of which they had gained no prior warning.

  ‘We should have tried to withdraw,’ reported a Lombard knight called Sigibuld, his torn, cross-bearing surplice still covered in his own blood, mixed with those with whom he had fought, the whole overlain with dirt of a battlefield and a long and dangerous flight. ‘Many suggested it but Walter Sansavoir asked how it could be done with a rabble over which we had little control when advancing.’

  ‘The enterprise was foolish,’ Alexius replied, his voice weary. ‘You should never have gone beyond Civetot.’

  ‘We did not expect to meet Kilij Arslan in open battle,’ Sigibuld protested.

  ‘The Sultan led them in person?’

  ‘They cried out his name when they attacked.’

  ‘What a price to pay for a lesson known to every soldier,’ said Manuel Boutoumites, titled Curopalates and thus high enough in rank as a trusted advisor to speak unbidden in the presence of his Emperor. ‘Never underestimate your enemy.’

  Alexius nodded and a lifted finger was a signal for Sigibuld to continue, which he did in a voice devoid of emotion.

  ‘We tried to form up as best we could. Walter had we knights take up position to the front, mixed with the men who knew how to use weapons so that we could present a defence, the aim to let the Turks know that any attack would cost them dear. The rest we sought to keep to the rear but they would not listen, so convinced were they, egged on by the priests, that God would surely smite their enemies before they even came within longbow shot. I think they expected bolts of lightning to come from the sky.’

  ‘The Bible tells us it has been so,’ intoned Peter the Hermit, which got him a look from a more secular emperor. ‘The Old Testament tells of many times when God has interceded to protect his flock. Think of the parting of the Red Sea …’

  That had the courtiers in attendance shifting uncomfortably, for if they were good sons of the Church they were also men who knew that miracles were caused more by imagination than divine intervention. There were soldiers of the empire amongst them too, like Boutoumites, and they had to work hard not to scoff at the old man’s words. Alexius gave Peter a look that, if it was gentle, demanded his silence, then indicated that Sigibuld should continue with his tale.

  ‘The priests had them kneel and entreat before the Turks launched their assault, as if the power of prayer alone would stop them from attacking. They were still at their devotions when the first arrows landed amongst them, and packed as they were the bolts did great slaughter. It was as if the shock broke their spirit, for they set up a great wailing and gnashing, many claiming that God had deserted them. They began to rush about both in front and behind we fighting men and lost what little unity they had possessed.’

  ‘Easy meat for the Turkish archers?’

  Sigibuld dropped his head when Alexius said that, his voice seeming now to come from the depths of his belly.

  ‘We could not move to break up their formations without we trampled our own people, this while the mounted archers got to our rear, dashing forward to fire an arrow then withdrawing before we could inflict any damage upon them. Kilij Arslan then sent his swordsmen into the melee of pilgrims. Many who died were on their knees begging for forgiveness, the rest began to scatter, running in all directions, which left we fighting men to face a full assault from a force greater than our own with the need to do battle on both flanks as well as to our front.’

  ‘How many survived?’ Alexius asked, cutting across Sigibuld.

  He did not want to hear what this Lombard was about to tell him, of the butchery which followed and how it was achieved; he had fought the Turks too many times himself, had seen their mounted archers ride forward and, while still moving, launch a flood of arrows at a defensive line cowering under shields. In his mind’s eye he could see how that would, on an open battlefield, pin the defenders so that their enemy could get round their flanks and begin to crush them between twin pincers in a way that meant resistance would be flattened.

  ‘If there is indeed place in heaven,’ Sigibuld continued, avoiding the direct question, ‘for those who perish on this venture, then surely the likes of Walter will gain entry and glory when they do. Many knights fought on even when their bodies were pierced by the Turkish bolts and took many of the infidel with them before they finally fell.’

  ‘And you, Sigibuld, how did you get clear?’

  That made the Lombard pull himself up to his full height; there was in the question the accusation of him being less of a man than those he had named. ‘We were still mounted and when those we had chosen to lead were slain it was obvious that no other choice presented itself but flight. The Turkish horses were blown from their previous exertions and sluggish in pursuit, but more in our favour was the way their compatriots fell upon the bodies of the dead to strip and mutilate them.’

  ‘How many got away?’

  ‘Around seventy knights.’

  ‘And the pikemen?’

  ‘They, being on foot, were less fortunate. Some did survive by throwing away their weapons and hanging on to our stirrup leathers.’

  ‘And where are they now?’

  ‘Defending Civetot, Highness, which is why I have come on here and in haste, stopping not even to remove the blood and filth from my person. The town and the remaining pilgrims are at risk if the Turks keep advancing, for there is nothing of a fighting nature to prevent it. I have come to ask that you either provide men to defend the town or send ships to withdraw the people left behind, the women and children as well as those too old or infirm to fight.’

  They could smell Civetot long before any of the boats sent to bring off the remaining pilgrims ever sailed into the Gulf of Nicomedia, the great bight, on the southern arm of which the wretched town sat. Never a place of beauty it was ravaged now, the churches burnt shells and the homes of those who had lived here torn down into dust. Rotting carcasses of flesh leave a high odour in a warm climate, yet it was testament to the amount of slaughter that it could be discerned so far from the shore that there could be no doubt what the sailors would find when they set foot on the beach.

  Kilij Arslan had indeed come on from the massacre described by Sigibuld, to attack a settlement bereft of any means of resistance. There were survivors, but few, the kind who had rushed into the sea and
managed to stay afloat as the butchery was accomplished on land. There were also those the Turks had thought dead, buried so deep in a pile of bodies that the fact of their still breathing was undetectable, a few dozens from the many thousands to tell the tale of what had occurred, about a host who had no interest in conversion to Islam but only in killing what they saw as a plague.

  There had been others who avoided the massacre: young women and boys who could be sold into carnal servitude, the few fit men who had not marched off with the army able to work as slaves aboard galleys or in quarries. For the rest they were killed; women not of tender years were of no use and neither were small children, infants and newly born babies. The old were despatched as a matter of course and the Turks had gathered those they had slain into a great mound of suppurating flesh that had left the ground around it, where their tuns of blood had leached out from the ferociously administered wounds, as soggy as a bog.

  Peter the Hermit had come as well and many wondered at his silent thoughts as he surveyed the death of both his hopes and his Crusade. Was his faith still intact? Did he think, like the victims over whose bodies he prayed must have thought, that their dreams were delusions? Or did he believe these souls to be martyred and already in paradise? No one asked Peter and he was not speaking.

  ‘Go back to Constantinople,’ said the man Alexius had put in command of the ships, ‘and tell the Emperor that the People’s Crusade is no more.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Apulian army was unaware of what had happened ahead of them and would have shown indifference if they had been told – what else could be expected of a force of peasants? Many were experienced mercenary soldiers who had previously marched along the ancient Via Egnatia, as were the mailed and mounted Norman knights who moved east with them, not least their leader. Just over ten years previously the then Duke of Apulia, Robert de Hauteville, had been obliged to curtail a second bite at conquest, required to go home to suppress an insurrection of his ever-discontented barons, whose natural bellicosity had been watered by Byzantine gold.

  Bohemund had been entrusted to continue his father’s invasion, and given that he had suffered an ultimate reverse, not all of his memories of this land were ones to be covered in a golden glow. The memory dimmed even more as he recalled that the deeper he had pushed into Macedonia and Thessaly the greater became the difficulties for the forces he had led, as much from the terrain as from enemy action to slow his progress, as well as the determination of the Emperor Alexius Comnenus to bring him to battle on a field of his choosing.

  If there had been many successes, in the end he had been beaten by a combination of factors: campaign weariness after endless forced marches, a dearth of plunder and a lack of reinforcements added to that staple weapon of the enemy he faced – wealth with which to bribe his father’s Apulian subjects as well as Bohemund’s captains in the field. Both led men who fought for no higher cause than their own personal gain, a right his followers had exercised when he had been forced to absent himself from the campaign at the same time as an emissary, a fellow Norman in the imperial service, appeared from the Emperor Alexius laden with treasure, an act which broke the cohesion of a tired army and led to an ignominious retreat.

  Unlike on his previous incursion Bohemund had no desire to push his men in the kind of swift march required to seek and wrong-foot an opponent, he being in no hurry to get to Constantinople. Other large bodies of Christian knights were on the way from Northern Europe and Germany, one of which, from the Duchy of Lower Lorraine, should already be near the capital having taken the route through Hungary. They would join those who had embarked from the ports of Bari and Brindisi under Hugh of Vermandois.

  Bohemund, busy gathering his own forces in the port cities which he controlled, had met to talk with and entertain Vermandois, as well as to seek some measure of his opinions on the forthcoming campaign, only to find himself conversing with a vainglorious fool who had never independently led men in a real battle. This boded ill for the future since, given his royal connection to the King of France, Vermandois saw himself as the leader by right of the whole enterprise. That was not an opinion Bohemund accepted and he had enough respect for Alexius Comnenus, even if he had never met him, to believe he too would smoke that Vermandois was a dolt.

  It was most certainly not one likely to be shared by the other powerful warlords who would follow in the wake of Vermandois, especially the contingents from Toulouse and Provence, reputed to be commanded by the men who had first responded to a personal plea from Pope Urban. Likewise, those from Normandy, Flanders and England would have men in their ranks who would not readily take commands from another, for they included amongst their number the second son of William the Conqueror. It was good fortune that Count Hugh’s brother, the King, clearly a man of some sagacity, had sent with Hugh his constable, Walo of Chaumont, who was both a good soldier and, being a high official of the French Court, a practised diplomat.

  So, several bodies were reported to be ahead of the Apulians and would thus be earliest to the Byzantine capital, there to meet with Alexius and to have set the terms by which the Western armies would help to reconquer imperial lands, news of which would come to Bohemund before he reached Constantinople. Prior knowledge of what would be asked for would allow the Apulian leader to play a better hand, for, if Palestine was the ultimate aim, that presaged a long, arduous campaign over hundreds of leagues and difficult terrain, fraught with as many difficulties as opportunities.

  Unlike some of the other leaders who would answer Pope Urban’s call to Crusade Bohemund was too experienced a warrior and general to be blinded by the mysticism of the enterprise. If the aim was sacred the task was military and that required those who undertook it to be pragmatic. Added to that he was a near neighbour and recent enemy who knew Byzantium too well to just accord them the kind of Christian brotherhood likely to be spoken of in other bands of warriors, most tellingly its troubled history and endemic lack of stability.

  No one who aspired to or wore the imperial diadem could ever feel safe and that had been too often proved over centuries in a court full of intrigue, where either violence or poison lay behind every marble column. He had grown up with tales of both in execution; the deposed ruler if he was not killed was at least rendered harmless by having his eyes put out.

  Alexius Comnenus, now in his fifteenth year of rule, had lasted longer than most. He might have come to power through a kinder deposition, but he had acceded to the throne in a palace coup that saw his predecessor, himself a usurper, despatched with eyes intact to live out his days in a monastery. It was just as likely that there were plots being hatched to remove the present incumbent of the imperial throne regardless of his abilities, which were manifestly high. That was the nature of the polity and had been since the time of Constantine, founder of the city that bore his name.

  Whoever ruled Byzantium was required to be well versed in the devious arts of intrigue as well as deception and Alexius would be no exception. Bohemund surmised he would seek to use the forces granted to him by Western religious fervour to further the aims of the Eastern Empire. That he would do so was not to be despised; no ruler who wished to secure his throne could afford to behave in any other fashion. Yet it was as well to be aware that such priorities would colour every act of Byzantine support; Bohemund was prepared to sup with his one-time enemy Alexius, but he would do so with a long spoon.

  The first task once all the contingents converged would be to push back the Seljuk Turks. They had been advancing west over many decades, as much an enemy to their Mohammedan co-religionists as the Greeks, Jews and Armenians over whom they now ruled. They had steadily eaten into the Eastern Empire, making their most telling gains after the disastrous Battle of Manzikert a quarter of a century previously. There the flower of the Byzantine army had gone down to a disastrous and total defeat that included the capture of the then emperor, Romanos Diogenes.

  That reverse proved so comprehensive that Constantinople had never
recovered the initiative, indeed it had struggled to hold on to what it still possessed on the southern side of the Bosphorus and had asked, many times and to no avail, for help from their Christian brethren of the West. These pleas for aid were sent to Roman pontiffs who had enough trouble on their own doorstep, often from the Normans, more regularly from the King of the Germans, to even think of what was happening in the East.

  Added to that there was a definite schism that was far from being healed around certain disagreements about priestly celibacy, the proper way to conduct the Mass and the use of unleavened bread to denote the body of Christ. More tellingly divisive was a refusal from the Patriarch of Constantinople to acknowledge the Vicar of Rome as head of the entirety of the Christian Church, both Orthodox and Latin, these matters now fifty years in dispute.

  Left to its own devices, Byzantium had struggled. The Turks had expanded their gains against a weakened empire to become a threat to the imperial capital itself, in possession of the heavily fortified city of Nicaea, within three days’ marching distance of Constantinople, having established what they called the Sultanate of Rüm, an Arabic corruption of Rome, which went some way to establish their aims. One day they aspired to take all of the Eastern Roman Empire; what kept them in check now was not Byzantine resistance but their own ability to fall out amongst themselves.