1. The Call from the West

In the last years of the eleventh century a summons went through Gaul: whoever desired the Lord with a pure heart and mind, and wished to carry the cross faithfully after him, should hesitate no longer, but take the road to the Holy Sepulchre at once. Peter Tudebode, the priest who marched with the armies and wrote their story, believed that hour had been appointed long before. It was the time the Lord shows daily to his faithful, the time of which he speaks in the Gospel: "If anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me."

The pope did not leave the word to travel on its own. Urban, pope of the Roman see, went as quickly as he could into the mountain country with his archbishops, bishops, and priests, and set about preaching with care. Whoever wished to save his soul, he told the crowds, should not hesitate to take up the Lord's road; and if a man lacked money for the journey, divine mercy would give him enough. He did not promise ease. "Brothers," he said, "we must suffer many things for the name of Christ — the miseries of poverty, persecution, privation, sickness, nakedness, hunger, thirst, and other things of this kind — just as the Lord said to his disciples: 'You must suffer many things for my name. Do not be ashamed to speak before the faces of men; I shall give you utterance and eloquence, and afterward a generous reward will follow you.'"

The message spread gradually from region to region, and then it was everywhere at once. When the Franks heard it they fastened crosses to their right shoulders and declared with one accord that they would follow, all together, the footsteps by which they had been redeemed from the hand of hell. A man who sewed the cross to his shoulder had made a vow; from that moment the road to Jerusalem ran through his life, whatever else his life had held.

So they left their homes. They did not leave as one army, and no one commanded them all. One great company took the landward road through Hungary — the road that Charlemagne, the renowned king of France, had long ago caused to be prepared as far as Constantinople. With it went Peter the Hermit; Duke Godfrey; and Godfrey's brother Baldwin, whom Tudebode calls a wise champion of Christ, with many others besides. Other companies, under greater princes, would gather more slowly and go by other ways.

Peter the Hermit did not wait for any of them. He drove ahead of every army on the Hungarian road, and of all the leaders of the whole movement he was the first to reach the walls of Constantinople.

2. The People's Crusade

Peter the Hermit arrived at Constantinople on the first of August, and with him came a very great host of Germans. He found others already assembled there — Lombards and Longobards and many more — a multitude of the poor and the eager who had answered the summons faster than any prince could arm. The emperor Alexius ordered that they be given a market, as inside the city, and he gave them plain advice: "Do not cross the Arm until the great multitude of Christians arrives, for you are not numerous enough to fight the Turks."

They would not hear it, and they did not behave like pilgrims. They tore down and burned the palaces of the city's suburbs, stripped the lead from the roofs of churches, and sold it back to the Greeks. Alexius's patience went with his lead roofs. Angrier by the day, he ordered them across the Arm of Saint George and into Asia. On the far shore nothing improved: they burned and laid waste houses and churches as they went, and did not cease from any kind of evil.

At Nicomedia the host broke apart. The Lombards, Longobards, and Germans separated from the French, because — the priest who recorded all this was himself a Frank, and reports the reason without blinking — the French were swollen with pride. The Lombards and Longobards chose a leader of their own, a man named Rainald; the Germans did likewise. Then they pushed on into Romania, the Turks' country now, and marched four days beyond the city of Nicaea.

There they found a fortress named Exerogorgo, empty of inhabitants, and seized it — and inside it, ample grain, wine, meat, every good thing. It looked like providence. It was a trap. The moment the Turks heard that Christians were in the fortress, they came to besiege it. Before the fortress gate stood a well, and at the foot of the walls a spring, and beside the spring Rainald went out to keep watch. On the feast of the dedication of Saint Michael the Turks arrived, caught Rainald and all who were with him outside, and killed many of them. The survivors fled inside, and the Turks sealed the fortress and cut off the water entirely.

What followed was one of the cruelest ordeals of the whole war. The defenders were so tormented by thirst that they bled their horses and donkeys and drank the blood. Some lowered cloths into the cistern and pressed them into their mouths. Some urinated into another man's cupped hands, and he drank. Others dug up damp earth and lay on their backs and piled it over their chests and bodies against the terrible dryness of their thirst. The bishop and the priests in the fortress held the garrison together with words: "Be strong everywhere in the faith of Christ. Do not fear those who persecute you. As the Lord says, 'Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.'"

Eight days of this, and then treachery finished what thirst had begun. The lord of the Germans made a secret bargain with the Turks to betray his companions. Pretending to go out and fight, he fled to the enemy, and many went with him. Of those who remained, the ones who refused to deny God were beheaded. The rest the Turks seized and divided among themselves as a man divides sheep. Some they set up as targets and shot with arrows; some they sold or gave away like animals, each man leading his captives home — to Khurasan, to Antioch, to Aleppo, wherever he lived. These, Tudebode writes, were the first to receive blessed martyrdom for the name of Christ.

The Turks then learned that Peter the Hermit and Walter were at the fortress of Civitot, above Nicaea, and they came there with great joy to kill them. Walter they met on the way, with his knights, and killed them all at once. Peter was not there to die with them. Not long before, he had gone back to Constantinople, because he could no longer restrain the mixed host he had brought east: it would not obey him and would not listen to his words. The army that had followed him now lay in its camp without him, and the Turks fell upon it and killed a great part of it. They found some asleep, some lying down, some naked; they found a priest celebrating Mass and made a martyr of him at his altar. Those who could escape fled to Civitot. Some threw themselves into the sea; others hid in the woods and mountains.

The Turks pursued the survivors into the fortress and piled up wood to burn them with it. But the Christians inside set fire to the piled wood themselves, and the flames turned back on the Turks — because, Tudebode says, God did not wish to abandon the Christians. Those taken alive were divided like the captives of Exerogorgo before them and scattered through the Turkish lands, some to Khurasan, some to Persia.

All this happened in the month of October. When the emperor heard that the Turks had scattered the pilgrims, he was glad; he rejoiced. He sent for the survivors, brought them back across the Arm — and then bought up all their weapons. The people's crusade was over. It had crossed Europe, sacked its way to Nicomedia, and died of thirst, arrows, and betrayal within sight of the first city it meant to take. Whatever was to be done against the Turks would have to be done by the princes, and the princes were already on the roads.

3. The Princes Take the Cross

The princes came by other roads. A second army entered the lands of Slavonia, down the eastern shore of the Adriatic: this was the host of Raymond, count of Saint-Gilles, and with him rode the honorable Adhemar, bishop of Le Puy, the expedition's spiritual head. A third took the ancient road to Rome, and in it marched the count of Flanders, Robert of Normandy, Hugh the Great, and many others, making for the heel of Italy and the ports of Brindisi, Bari, and Otranto.

From Bari, Hugh the Great and William, the son of the Marquis, put to sea at once and landed at Dyrrachium, on the emperor's Adriatic shore. It was an unlucky landfall. When the duke of that city heard that these men had landed, an evil thought arose in his heart: he had them arrested and carefully conveyed to the emperor at Constantinople, so that they might swear fidelity to him. The first of the great lords to reach the emperor's court arrived, in effect, as prisoners — a foretaste of everything the pilgrims would learn to expect from the Greeks.

The most formidable recruit of all took the cross in the middle of another war. Bohemond was besieging Amalfi when word reached him that an innumerable host of Franks had set out to wrest the road to the Holy Sepulchre from the hands of the most wicked pagans, so that it might stand open again to all Christians everywhere. He began at once, with great care, to ask the questions of a professional soldier: what weapons did this people carry, what emblem of Christ did it bear on the journey, what cry did it sound in battle? The answers came back in order. They carry arms suited for war. They wear the cross of Christ on the right shoulder or between both shoulders. And they cry all together with one voice: God wills it! God wills it! God wills it!

Then, moved by the Holy Spirit, Bohemond called for the most precious mantle he possessed and had it cut to pieces — the whole of it — and distributed as crosses. The effect on the siege camp was immediate. The greater part of the knights at Amalfi flocked to him, so many that Count Roger of Sicily was left almost alone before the walls, and went back to Sicily grieving and mourning that he had lost his people. Bohemond returned to his own land, equipped himself on every side for the journey, and crossed the sea with his army. With him went his kinsman Tancred, the Marquis's son, a man the chronicle never tires of calling prudent, and many others.

They landed in Bulgaria, where they found grain, wine, and food for the body in great abundance, and came down to the valley of Adrianople to wait until the whole force had crossed. Then they set out through a land of plenty, from village to village, fortress to fortress, city to city, until they reached Kastoria, where they solemnly celebrated the Nativity of the Lord. From Kastoria they entered Pelagonia, and there they found a fortress of heretics, built in a lake. They attacked it from every side, took it at once, burned it, and burned its inhabitants with it — the whole congregation of heretics together. The army of the cross made no apology for such work, and its chronicler records it without one.

At the river Vardar the column divided to cross, and the emperor's men saw their chance. Bohemond was over the water with one part of his people; the count of Rossignol remained on the far bank with his brother the bishop and the rest, and there the imperial army fell on them. Tancred heard the fighting, turned back, threw himself into the river, and reached them by swimming; two thousand soldiers went into the water after him. They found Turcopoles and Pincenates — the emperor's mercenary horsemen — pressing the rearguard, charged them, defeated them thoroughly, and captured many, whom they led bound before Bohemond.

Bohemond looked at the prisoners and asked them a plain question: "Why, wretches, are you killing Christ's people and mine? I have no dispute with your emperor." They answered as plainly: "We can do nothing else. We are in the pay of the emperor, and whatever he commands, we must carry out." Bohemond let them go without any punishment. The battle had fallen on a Wednesday, at the beginning of Lent, and the chronicle closes the episode as it closes every mercy and every victory: may God be blessed in all things, for ever and ever.

The emperor now judged it wiser to escort this army than to fight it. He sent one of his own soldiers, a man he loved and called Corpolasius, to conduct the Franks safely through imperial territory to Constantinople, and ordered the towns along the way to bring them a market. But such was the fear of Bohemond's army that no townsman would let a single Frank inside a city's walls. In this manner they reached the city of Rusa and halted. There Bohemond made a decision: leaving his army to follow in good order, he rode ahead with a few knights to speak with the emperor face to face.

Count Raymond's road had been crueler. He came out of Slavonia having suffered, for the name of Christ and the road to the Holy Sepulchre, many things he ought never to have suffered, and having lost many of his most honorable knights. At Dyrrachium — imperial territory, where he might have hoped his troubles were over — the Greeks lay in wait for the knights of Christ day and night, never ceasing to do whatever secret harm they could. The duke of the city gladly promised safe conduct through his lands; under that very safe conduct his men treacherously killed one of Raymond's distinguished knights, Pontius Rainald, and gravely wounded Rainald's brother. And while this was happening, letters from the emperor reached the column, full of peace and brotherhood, promising to treat the count as one of his own sons.

The letters were still being read aloud while Turks, Pincenates, Clavi, Cumans, Uzes, and Athanasians lay in ambush on every side of the road. One day the bishop of Le Puy, lodged a little apart from the army, was seized by Pincenates. They threw him from his mule, stripped him, and wounded him on the crown of his head; but because so great a bishop was still necessary to the people of God, Tudebode writes, God's mercy preserved his life. A cry went up in the tents, the army ran to him, and he was rescued from their hands. So the march went on: at the fortress of Buchinat, warned that Pincenates were waiting in a narrow mountain road, the count stayed behind with a strong body of knights, found them, killed one part, and hunted the other. And still the emperor's peaceful letters kept coming, while on every side his people watched for a chance to strike.

At Rusa the townspeople worked against the pilgrims with open ingenuity, and Raymond's patience ended. He ordered his men to arms, sounded his signals, and took the city by storm. At Rodosto, imperial soldiers attacked the tail of his column; he turned on them, killed thirty, and captured sixty horses. There, at last, his own envoys met him, returning from Constantinople with the emperor's message. All losses would be carefully made good, they reported, once the army reached the capital. And they carried a request from Duke Godfrey, Bohemond, the count of Flanders, and the other princes: Raymond should leave the greater part of his army behind and hasten ahead with a few unarmed knights. The emperor, they said, had taken the cross, and declared that he would join the journey to Jerusalem and be its leader and its head.

Raymond had buried a knight murdered under safe conduct and pulled his bishop half-dead out of the hands of the emperor's irregulars. Now he was invited to leave his army and come to that emperor's city unarmed. He went. Every army of the pilgrimage was converging on Constantinople, and whatever the princes thought of Alexius, none of them could reach Jerusalem without passing his door.

4. Constantinople

Godfrey had reached Constantinople first, two days before the Nativity of our Lord, and his dealings with the emperor set the pattern for everything that followed. He camped near the city until Alexius had him honorably quartered in the suburb. Once the duke was settled, his squires went out confidently each day for straw and the other necessities of a great camp, believing they could go where they wished. The emperor — "the wicked emperor, whose name was Alexius," as the chronicle introduces him — had them craftily watched, and commanded his Turcopoles and Pincenates to attack and kill them.

Baldwin, the duke's brother, heard what had been ordered. He set out at once, in the greatest determination, found the emperor's men in the act of killing his people, and attacked them wholeheartedly. With God's help he defeated them, captured sixty, killed some of the prisoners, and brought the rest before his brother. The emperor was furious; the duke read the fury and drew his knights out of the suburb, back to their old camp beyond the walls. Nor was that the end of it. When evening came the emperor sent his armies against the duke and the people of Christ. The unconquered duke — the chronicle's epithet — drove them off, killed seven, and chased the rest to the very gate of the city.

Then, having answered force with force, he returned to his tents and waited. For nearly five days he remained in that field, until an agreement was reached: the duke would cross the Arm of Saint George, and on the far side the emperor promised him a full market, as good as Constantinople's, and alms for the poor of the army.

Bohemond's reception, when he arrived ahead of his army, was altogether smoother, for Alexius feared him more than any man in the movement. The emperor ordered him honorably received and cautiously lodged outside the city, then sent for him to speak privately. The two came to terms: the emperor granted Bohemond land in Romania fifteen days' journey in length and eight in width, and Bohemond gave his pledge in return — he would neither take the emperor's land nor consent to its being taken.

Raymond, arriving with his handful of unarmed knights, proved harder metal. The emperor told him to become his man and to give the same pledge Bohemond and the other princes had given. The count refused outright. "Far be it from me! On this journey I shall acknowledge no lord except the one I already have, for love of whom I have come this far. But if you wish earnestly to bear the cross and come with us to Jerusalem, then I, my men, and everything I possess by God's mercy shall be freely at your disposal."

While the count stood in Constantinople saying no, the emperor's army found his host on the road, alone, and attacked it fiercely, doing all the harm it could. When the news reached him Raymond groaned aloud. He summoned Bohemond and the other princes and demanded that the emperor answer for it: why had he lured the count to Constantinople only to betray him and let his army be mauled? Alexius denied everything. This had not been done on his advice, he said; to his knowledge no injury had occurred; and for that matter Raymond's own army had acted against him, breaking castles and cities in his land. He offered satisfaction faithfully, and gave Bohemond to the count as his surety. The matter went to judgment, and the count discharged his pledge; and after that his army came up to Constantinople.

The emperor pressed again for homage and the pledge. Raymond, unappeased, weighed instead how he might take vengeance on the emperor's army. But Duke Godfrey, the count of Flanders, and the other princes told him it was unjust to fight against Christians; and Bohemond went further — if the count wronged the emperor and refused the pledge, Bohemond himself would take the emperor's side. There was no answer to that. Raymond took his men's counsel and swore to uphold the life and honor of Alexius: neither by himself nor through others would he take away the emperor's land. But on the matter of homage he did not move. Called upon to become the emperor's man, he answered that he would not do it at the peril of his own head. Of all the princes of the crusade, only Raymond of Saint-Gilles never became the emperor's vassal — a stubbornness that would shape the army's quarrels for years.

Bohemond's final terms were struck last. The emperor, who feared him in his heart because Bohemond had driven him from the field many times in the old wars, promised that if he would willingly swear, he should have land beyond Antioch fifteen days' journey in length and eight in width. Bohemond swore — on the precise understanding that if the emperor faithfully kept his oath, Bohemond would never violate his own. Each man had built his loophole into the bargain, and each would one day claim the other had opened it first.

So it was accomplished. Bohemond's army came up to Constantinople; the contingents assembled and came down to the harbor; and all of them together crossed the Arm of Saint George, made a common landing on the Asian shore, and marched to Nicomedia, where they rested three days. Behind them lay the empire, its markets, and its treacheries. Ahead stood the first Turkish city of the war.

5. Nicaea

The army's first siege was Nicaea, which the chronicle calls the capital of all Romania. Duke Godfrey and the count of Flanders opened the siege with their armies; Bohemond came up beside them and took his station on the north. On the sixth of May they made their camp before the walls, and on the day of the Lord's Ascension they began the assault, attacking the city from every side and building wooden engines and towers to overthrow the towers on the walls. For two days they pressed the attack with such strength and ferocity that they undermined the wall itself.

Inside the city, the Turks — the barbarous people, in the chronicle's words — sent messengers to the relief army gathering to save them. The message named the weak point: come boldly and safely, enter by the southern gate, for on that side no one will meet or oppose you. The advice was excellent the day it was sent and fatal the day it was followed, because on that very day Raymond of Saint-Gilles and the bishop of Le Puy had swiftly occupied the southern gate.

The count came up from the other side, protected by divine power, as Tudebode has it, and shining in earthly armor amid his most valiant army. He met the Turks advancing to the city, fell on them with force, defeated them, and put them to flight; the greater part of them were killed. Their comrades came on again, rejoicing at the first report and eager for a decisive battle, carrying ropes with which to bind the Christians and lead them captive to Khurasan. They came down joyfully, little by little, from the summit of the mountain toward the gate. As fast as they descended into that valley, the Franks beheaded them; and the Franks kept the heads, loaded them into the sling of a siege engine, and hurled them over the walls into Nicaea, so that those within might suffer still greater anguish.

Raymond and the bishop of Le Puy now took counsel about a tower that stood before their tents. They set men to dig beneath it, with crossbowmen and archers covering them on every side; the diggers reached the foundations of the wall, packed the cavity with posts and timber, and set it alight. That night the tower collapsed. But it was dark, and the besiegers could not fight in the breach; and the Turks rose in the night and rebuilt the wall behind it so strongly and cleanly that when day came no one could harm them from that side. It was the pattern of the whole siege: what the pilgrims broke, others found a way to keep.

Seeing that no help would reach them from their own armies, the Turks of Nicaea sent an embassy — not to the men at the walls, but to the emperor. They offered to surrender the city to him freely, if he would let them depart alive with their wives, children, and possessions. Alexius, filled — the chronicle insists — with vain and wicked thoughts, ordered them let go unharmed and brought safely to Constantinople under his protection. For friendship with the emperor, the pilgrims agreed to it. They had lain before Nicaea seven weeks. Many of them had faithfully received martyrdom there, rendering their blessed souls to God joyfully and gladly; many of the poorest had died of hunger, and died, the chronicle says, blessedly for the name of Christ. The city they had bled for passed quietly into the emperor's power, and he rejoiced over it more and more, and ordered very great alms distributed to the army's poor. Alms were what the siege of Nicaea paid.

The army left the city and came on the first day to a bridge, where it halted for two days. On the third day, while it was still dark, the columns rose and set out, and in the night they could not hold to one road. They moved as two columns, apart from each other, for two days. In one marched Bohemond, Robert of Normandy, Tancred, and many others; in the other, Raymond of Saint-Gilles, Duke Godfrey, the bishop of Le Puy, Hugh the Great, the count of Flanders, and the rest. No one had planned it, and the accident of darkness was about to bring on the crusade's first pitched battle in the open field.

6. The March Across Anatolia

On the third day out from the bridge the Turks fell on Bohemond's column with all their force. They came on shrieking, chattering, and shouting some diabolical cry in a tongue the Franks did not know, and they seemed without number. Bohemond took one look at the horde in the distance and gave his orders: every knight was to dismount, and the tents were to be pitched at once. Before the work was done he spoke to the knights again. "Lords and most valiant knights of Christ, a close-pressed battle now surrounds us on every side. Let all the knights go out manfully to meet them, while the foot soldiers prudently and swiftly pitch the tents."

By the time it was done the Turks had already closed the ring, fighting, hurling javelins, casting darts, and shooting arrows to an extraordinary range from every direction. The Franks could neither withstand them nor bear the weight of so many enemies; but they held their ground with one accord, and their women stood with them. That day the women of the army were a very great help: they carried water to the fighters, encouraged them without pause, fought, and defended their men.

Bohemond had already sent riders to the other column — to Raymond of Saint-Gilles, Duke Godfrey, Hugh the Great, the bishop of Le Puy, and the rest — with word to come up to the battle at speed: if the Turks wished to fight today, let them come manfully. The messengers were mocked for their pains. It is all false, the princes' men answered; no one believed the Turks so resourceful that they would dare to rise and fight again. But the bold Duke Godfrey and Hugh the Great marched anyway, and arrived first with their armies; the bishop of Le Puy followed with his; and Raymond, count of Saint-Gilles, came close behind them with a great host.

What they saw when they crested the hills astonished them. Mountains, hills, valleys, and plains were covered on every side with the excommunicate race — Turks, Arabs, Saracens, and peoples the chronicler could not even name. The Franks passed a word of encouragement quietly among themselves: be entirely united in the faith of Christ and armed for victory with the standard of the holy Cross, for today, if it pleases God, you will all be made rich. Then the battle lines were drawn. On the left stood Bohemond, Robert of Normandy, Tancred, Robert of Ansa, and Richard of the Principate. The bishop of Le Puy took his men around by another mountain, to encircle the unbelieving Turks from the far side. On the right rode Raymond of Saint-Gilles, Duke Godfrey, the count of Flanders — the very fierce knight, the chronicle calls him — Hugh the Great, and many whose names the chronicler never learned.

The moment the knights came forward, the enemy broke. Turks, Arabs, Saracens, Angulani, and all the barbarous nations fled at speed across the mountain shortcuts and over the plains. Tudebode sets their number at 360,000 — Turks, Saracens, Publicani, Persians, Angulani, and other pagans — besides the Arabs, whose number, he says, no one knows except God alone. They fled as far as their own tents, and were not allowed to keep even those. They ran again, and the Franks pursued and killed them through the whole of that day, and took great plunder: gold, silver, horses, asses, camels, sheep, cattle, and much else they could not put a name to. The battle had lasted from the third hour until the ninth, and the chronicle is frank about how near-run it was: if the Lord had not been in the fight and had not quickly sent up the second battle line, not one of them would have escaped. Two honorable knights died there, Goffred of Monte Scabioso and William the Marquis's son, Tancred's brother, along with other knights and foot soldiers whose names no one recorded.

Then the priest of Civray did a remarkable thing: he stopped to praise his enemies. What wise or learned man, he asks, would dare describe the skill, the military prowess, the courage of the Turks? They believed their arrows could terrify the Franks as they had terrified the Arabs, Saracens, Armenians, Syrians, and Greeks — and that, please God, they would never live to see. They claimed descent from the Franks themselves, and said that no man was born to knighthood except the Franks and they. And Tudebode will tell the full truth, which no one will dare deny: had the Turks stood firm in the faith of Christ — had they believed rightly in the one God in Trinity, born of the Virgin, crucified and risen, who reigns in heaven and on earth — then no one could have found men more prudent, more courageous, or more ingenious in war. The battle was fought on the first day of July.

The rout ran for four days and nights, and it broke more than an army. Soliman, the enemy's leader, son of Soliman the Elder, was fleeing from the city of Nicaea when he met ten thousand Arabs coming the other way. They greeted him with contempt: "O most wretched and miserable of all pagans, why do you still flee in terror?" Soliman answered them in tears. He had beaten the Franks once, he said, and thought he held them bound for the taking — and then he had looked back and seen a host so innumerable that every mountain, hill, valley, and plain seemed filled with them. "We were so extraordinarily afraid that we scarcely escaped their hands, and we are still in very great terror. If you are willing to believe me, get away from here — because if they merely learn where you are, scarcely one of you will remain alive." The ten thousand turned their backs and scattered across Romania.

The Franks came on behind, and the retreating Turks made the country a desert in front of them. At each fortress and city they told the inhabitants they had defeated and overcome all the Christians, that none would ever again dare rise against them — only let us in. Once inside they plundered the churches and the houses and everything else; they took the horses, asses, mules, gold, and silver, and carried off the children of the Christians; they burned or wrecked everything useful, and fled onward in great fear. The pilgrims who followed marched into a land deserted, waterless, and uninhabitable, and barely came out of it alive. Hunger and thirst pressed them on every side, and there was nothing to eat but ears of standing grain rubbed out between the hands. On that march the greater part of the army's cavalry perished, and many knights went forward on foot. For want of horses, oxen served as mounts, and such was the need that goats, rams, and even dogs carried baggage. At last the road tilted down into an excellent land, full of food and every good thing.

Near Iconium the people of the country gave them practical advice: carry waterskins, for on the next stretch there was no water for a full day's march. They did as they were told, reached a river, and camped on it for two days. The scouts, ranging ahead as always, pushed on to Heraclea, where a great multitude of Turks waited in ambush for a chance to hurt the knights of Christ. The knights found the ambush first, attacked it boldly, and with God's favor broke it the same day; the enemy turned their backs, and the army entered Heraclea and rested four days.

There the army lost two of its boldest men to a private war. Tancred and Baldwin, Duke Godfrey's brother, separated from the main body and rode together into the valley of Botrenthot; then Tancred parted from Baldwin and came down to Tarsus with only his own knights. The Turks of the city came out to meet him, massed, and made ready to fight; and when Tancred's men engaged them they broke and bolted back inside their walls. Tancred came up at full gallop and pitched camp squarely before the city gate.

Then Baldwin arrived from the other direction with his army, and asked Tancred, as a friend, to admit him to partnership in the city. Tancred's answer was short: "I refuse you any share in this partnership." Night settled the first question for them. The Turks inside, terrified, fled the city together in the dark, and the inhabitants came out under cover of night crying: "Hurry, unconquered Franks, hurry! The Turks are all departing together, driven by fear of you." At daybreak the leading citizens surrendered the city of their own accord, and said to the lords — who were quarreling — "Stop now, lords, stop. We ask that the man who fought so bravely against the Turks yesterday rule and reign over us."

Baldwin kept disputing. Let us enter together and plunder the city, he told Tancred; whoever can obtain more, let him have it; whoever can seize something, let him take it. Tancred refused: "Far be that from me. I will not plunder Christians. The men of this city have chosen me as their lord, and it is me they want." But the argument was never going to be won by the smaller army. Baldwin had the greater force, and in the end Tancred yielded the city, willing or not, and withdrew manfully with his men. Fortune paid him quickly: two excellent cities, Athena and Mamistra, and many fortresses surrendered to him soon after.

The main army meanwhile had entered the land of the Armenians, thirsting, says the chronicle, and burning for Turkish blood. One fortress proved too strong for them, and a man of that country named Simeon stepped forward and asked for the land, promising to defend it from the hands of the Turkish enemy; they gave it to him willingly, and he stayed with his people. The army marched on and came safely to Caesarea in Cappadocia, and beyond Cappadocia to an exceedingly beautiful and fertile city that the Turks had besieged for three weeks just before their coming, without taking it. It surrendered to the pilgrims at once, with great joy. A knight named Peter of Alipha asked to hold it, in fealty to God and the Holy Sepulchre, to the lords and to the emperor, and they granted it to him freely and with great affection. That night, hearing that the Turks who had besieged the place were prowling toward the army, Bohemond went out with his knights to hunt them down — and for once found nothing.

At Coxon, a rich city whose Christian inhabitants surrendered at once, the army lived well for three days and recovered its strength. Word came to Raymond there that the Turks assigned to guard Antioch had abandoned the city, and his council resolved to send a force ahead to hold it. He chose his men — Peter of Castillon the viscount, William of Monte Pisierio, Aralius the viscount, Peter of Roaix, and Peter Raymond of Dalphor, with five hundred knights. In the valley near Antioch, at a fortress of the Publicani, the detachment learned the truth: the Turks were still in the city and preparing to defend it in strength. Peter of Roaix went his own way regardless. He slipped past Antioch by night, entered the valley of Rugia, fought the Turks and Saracens he found there, killed many, and drove the rest hard. He sent back to Count Raymond a spear dressed with the lips and noses of dead Turks. The Armenians of that country, seeing how decisively he had beaten the pagans, surrendered to him at once, and he took the city of Rursa and many fortresses.

For the army behind him there remained one last ordeal before Syria: a mountain the chronicle calls simply diabolical. The track was so high and so narrow that no man dared pass another on it. Horses went over the edge; one roped pack animal dragged down the next. The knights stood along that path in open grief, beating their hands together, wondering what to do with themselves and their arms, and then they began to sell what they could not carry — shields, the finest mail coats, helmets — for three or five denarii, for whatever was offered. Those who found no buyer simply threw their armor over the side and walked on. Out of that accursed mountain country they came down to the city of Marash, whose people came out joyfully with a great market, and there, in abundance again, they waited for Bohemond to come up.

Then the knights entered the valley in which the royal city of Antioch stands — the capital of all Syria, the city the Lord Jesus Christ entrusted to the blessed Peter, prince of the apostles, that he might recall it to the worship of the holy faith. So the chronicle announces it. The hardest work of the whole war was waiting at the bottom of that valley.

7. The Siege of Antioch

As the army neared Antioch, the scouts riding ahead of it met an innumerable host of Turks at the Iron Port, hurrying to the aid of the city. The Franks fell on them wisely, with one heart and mind, and utterly defeated them; the barbarians were thrown into confusion and fled, and many were killed. The victors took rich plunder — horses, camels, mules, and asses loaded with grain and wine — and the army came down and camped on the riverbank. Bohemond rode forward the same day with four thousand knights and posted himself before the city gate, to seal it against anyone slipping out or in by night. The next day, a Wednesday at midday, the twelfth day before the Kalends of November, the army reached Antioch itself.

They laid siege to three of the city's gates; on the remaining side there was no room to besiege anything, for a high and exceedingly narrow mountain shut the city in. For nearly fifteen days the Turks inside the city feared the besiegers so much that not one of them dared attack. The besiegers, for their part, found the valley an unlooked-for paradise: provision everywhere, as if from the dew of heaven — vineyards, pits filled with grain, trees bent with fruit, every good thing the body needed.

The city's Armenians and Syrians began coming out almost at once, pretending to be fugitives. They were in the camp every day — while their wives stayed inside the walls — and they cunningly studied the army's presence, its resources, and its strength, and carried everything they saw back to the excommunicate people shut up within. It was cheap and excellent espionage, and the Turks used it. Instructed now in the besiegers' condition, they began to steal out of the city and hem the pilgrims in, not from one direction but everywhere, toward the sea and toward the mountain. And they had help outside the walls: not far from the camp stood a fortress called Aregh, packed with brave Turks, who harried the army again and again.

The lords, grieving at how often their pilgrims were being cut down, sent knights to find where these raiders lay. The knights found the hidden position — and sprang the trap deliberately, falling back slowly toward the place where Bohemond lay concealed with his men. It cost them dearly; many knights died in the withdrawal. Then Bohemond rose like a most valiant champion of Christ, the barbarians rushed in on what they took for a broken handful, and the Franks closed and cut them to pieces. The prisoners were led before the city gate and beheaded there, in full view, to deepen the grief of those watching from the walls.

The garrison answered from above. Men climbed the mountain overhanging the camp and shot down into it, dropping arrows inside Bohemond's lines; one day a woman in the camp was killed where she stood. The leaders met and resolved to build a fortress on the summit that commanded Bohemond's camp, and once it was built and fortified, the leaders guarded it by turns. The siege was settling into the long grind of watch and counter-watch — and then winter arrived, and with it the true enemy. Even before the feast of the Nativity, grain and every bodily provision had become exceedingly expensive. No one dared forage far; there was nothing left to eat in Christian territory; and no one dared enter the land of the Saracens at all except in great force.

At the Christmas council the leaders faced the arithmetic and split the army in two: one part would go out for provisions and guard itself on the road, the other would hold the siege lines and watch the enemy. Bohemond spoke first, as he usually did. "Lords and most prudent knights, if it pleases you and seems good and honorable, I shall go with the most prudent count of Flanders." So after they had celebrated the solemnities of the Nativity most gloriously, Bohemond and the count led out more than twenty thousand knights and foot soldiers on the Monday, and entered the land of the Saracens safe and unharmed.

They were not the only army moving. Turks, Arabs, and Saracens beyond counting — from Jerusalem, from Damascus, from Aleppo and the country around — had assembled to relieve Antioch, and when they heard that a Christian force had entered their own land they came for it at first light, formed in two battle lines, one ahead and one behind, meaning to close the ring. The count of Flanders, armed at all points with the protection of faith and with the sign of the cross he bore faithfully every day, went straight at them with Bohemond beside him. The Franks struck as one man, and the enemy fled at once, turning their backs in haste. Many were killed; the survivors ran, in the chronicle's grim formula, then and there into the wrath of perdition. The victors gathered up horses and spoils and returned rejoicing, praising and magnifying God.

The garrison of Antioch had been waiting for exactly this absence. Knowing Bohemond and the count of Flanders were away, the Turks came out to probe the siege lines for their weakest point, found it, and on a Tuesday fell suddenly on men who were neither armed nor expecting battle. They killed many knights and foot soldiers that day. The bishop of Le Puy lost his seneschal, the man who carried and directed his banner in the field. Had the river not run between the city and the camp, the chronicle judges, the Turks would have come often, and charged with loosened reins into the tents themselves.

Bohemond's expedition, meanwhile, was discovering the limits of victory. Marching back through Tancred's mountain country, his foragers found that earlier hands had swept the whole region bare. Some men found food; many turned back empty-handed and simply started for camp alone. Bohemond rounded on them with a speech the army remembered. "O wretched and most miserable people, basest and most sorrowful of all Christians — why do you want to leave so quickly? Wait; wait until we are gathered together. Do not wander about like sheep without a shepherd. Our enemy watches and keeps vigil day and night to find you alone or leaderless, and labors daily to kill you and drag you into captivity. What will you do, wretches, when he finds you?" When he finished speaking he looked before him and behind him, and found himself almost entirely alone. He collected the men he could and rode back to the siege more empty-handed than laden.

The relief expedition had beaten an army and brought home almost nothing. Before Antioch, hunger now commanded both camps, and the winter had only begun.

8. Hunger and Betrayal

Hunger, in that camp, had a price list. When the Armenians, Syrians, and Greeks of the country saw the foragers come back with nothing, they went off through the mountains by paths they knew, bought up grain and provisions, and carried them into the camp to sell — one ass-load for eight purpurati, a sum the chronicle reckons at a hundred and twenty denarii. The famine was immense, and money decided who survived it. Many knights died at Antioch that winter because they could not pay.

Men began to slip away. William the Carpenter and Peter the Hermit — the same Peter who had preached the road to thousands — took counsel together over the misery they saw coming and deserted in the night. Tancred went after them, caught them, and hauled them back in disgrace. William gave his word that he would return willingly to the army and give satisfaction to the lords, and he spent that whole night in Bohemond's tent, lying there, says the chronicle, like some evil thing. At first light he stood shamefaced before Bohemond, and Bohemond flayed him in front of everyone.

"O wretch, disgrace of all France! Shame and crime of the province of Gaul! Most wicked of all men the earth supports! Why did you flee so shamefully? Did you mean to betray these knights and the army of Christ, the way you betrayed others in Spain?" William said nothing; not a word left his mouth. The assembled Franks begged Bohemond, Christ's knight, to let nothing worse be done to him, and Bohemond consented readily enough — on terms. William must swear with his whole heart and mind never again to abandon the journey to the Holy Sepulchre, whether things went well or badly; and Tancred must undertake to do him no harm, personally or through friends. The terms were accepted at once, and William was released. Not long afterward, overcome by his own shame, he slipped away for good. As for Peter the Hermit, the chronicle wastes no more words on his lapse.

Tudebode drew the moral his age drew from every calamity: God allowed this poverty and misery to fall upon the army because of its sins. Whatever the cause, the figures were stark. In the whole host there could not be found a thousand knights whose horses were even fit for war.

Then the army's official guardian abandoned it. Tatikios, a noble and wealthy knight of the emperor's army, had been attached to the Franks to guide them and to receive the liberated land in fealty to Alexius. When word came of a Turkish army moving against the camp, this wretch — the chronicle's word — groaned, concluded that the Franks were as good as dead, and began assembling every lie he could sow. "Lords and most prudent men," he told them, "you see that we are held here by extreme necessity, and aid reaches us from no direction. Allow me, then, to return to the country of Romania, and without any doubt I shall return to you. I shall have ships come here by sea, laden with grain, wine, barley, meat, flour, cheese — every provision we need. I shall have horses brought for sale, and a market sent through the emperor's territory. I shall swear faithfully to see all this carried out. And my servants and my tent will remain in the camp: be certain that I shall come back as quickly as I can." He went, and his tent stood in the camp like a pledge no one would ever redeem. By that act, the chronicle declares, then, now, and forever, Tatikios is a perjurer.

So the deepest necessity closed in. The Turks pressed the camp on one side, hunger tormented it on the other, and there was no relief or aid from any direction. No one dared step beyond the tents; the leaders themselves were in great fear; and the lesser folk and the poorest were already fleeing — some to Cyprus, some back to Romania, some into the mountains. The sea was barred by fear of the Turks. No road anywhere lay open. And into this came the news the leaders had dreaded: an innumerable Turkish host was on its way against them.

The council faced it squarely. They could not fight on two fronts; therefore they would split what strength was left. The foot soldiers would stay to guard the tents and hold off the city garrison. The knights — every knight the army could still mount — would ride out against the relief force, which lay camped by the fortress of Areght, beyond the Iron Bridge. In the evening the mounted army crossed the river, and its leaders settled the plan: all of them together against an enemy said to number twenty-five thousand, while the bishop of Le Puy, Robert of Normandy, and Count Eustace kept the tents against the men in the city.

At first light the scouts went out to find the Turkish army — where it was and what exactly it was doing — and came racing back with the answer. The Turks were coming from the direction of the river in two battle lines, with their main force behind. "Look! Look! They are coming now! Be ready on every side — they are already near; you can see them from here." Each leader drew up his own line: six lines in all, of which five advanced together while Bohemond came on slowly behind with the sixth, in reserve, the count of Flanders riding at the head of the first.

The armies met head-on, and for a time it was killing at close quarters, every man striking down his man, the shouting rising to heaven and showers of missiles darkening the air. Then the enemy's main force came up from behind and hit the Frankish line so hard that it began to give ground. Bohemond, watching his outnumbered army bend, groaned, and turned to his constable, Robert son of Gerard. "Remember the wise men of old and our valiant forefathers — what sort of men they were, and what battles they fought." Robert went forward with Bohemond's standard, armed on every side with the sign of the cross, a most valiant athlete of Christ, and drove into the enemy. The sight of that standard carried so skillfully out in front rallied every line at once; the whole army turned and attacked together. Seven hundred Franks were fighting twenty-five thousand Turks, and by God's grace, the chronicle records, it was the twenty-five thousand who broke. They fled with the Franks on their backs, cutting them down; the survivors reached their fortress, stripped it of everything they could carry, set it on fire, and kept running. Even the countryside turned on them: the Armenians, Syrians, and Greeks, learning that the Turks had lost the battle, went out and held the narrow passes, killing and capturing many.

The knights came back to camp remounted and re-equipped from the enemy's dead, driving live prisoners and carrying severed heads, which they set up before the city gate — where, as it happened, envoys from the emir of Babylon were encamped, sent to Count Raymond and the other leaders from Egypt. The foot soldiers had earned their share of the day too, fighting the garrison before the three gates from morning until night. The battle was fought on a Tuesday at the beginning of the fast, the fifth day before the Ides of February.

The victory changed the siege, and the leaders moved to lock in what it had bought. The garrison still harassed the camp day and night from the bridge gate. Before we lose God's people and our own, the council resolved, let us build a fortress at Machomaria, in front of the gate where the bridge stands; from there we can pin our enemies down. Raymond of Saint-Gilles spoke first: give me aid in building it, and I shall fortify and guard it. Bohemond offered the second half of the plan: he would go with the count to the port of Saint Symeon and escort back the men there — ship's carpenters and laborers who could do the work — while everyone remaining fortified the camp against a sortie.

The Turks read the movement perfectly. When the builders gathered, the garrison came out, scattered them, and killed many knights, leaving the camp in grief. The next day they did something worse. Knowing the two leaders had gone down to the port, the commanders of the garrison rode out and laid their ambush on the road, and when Raymond and Bohemond appeared, escorting the port men home, the Turks came at them shrieking and howling from every side, shooting, cutting, killing. The column broke and fled through the nearest mountains and wherever a path offered. Whoever could run fast enough lived; whoever could not, died there. More than a thousand knights and foot soldiers of Christ were martyred that day — and the chronicle watches them go up: rejoicing, clothed in white, bearing the robe of the martyrdom they had received, crying to God with one voice, "Why do you not defend our blood, which has been shed today for your name?"

Bohemond had not taken the road the others took. He came in fast with a few knights, at the gallop, to the army gathered beyond the river Farfar — and the army, burning with anger at the slaughter of its own, invoking Christ's name and the Holy Sepulchre, went straight back at the enemy. The Turks stood astonished. They were expecting fugitives, another easy killing like the morning's; instead the knights of the true God, marked on every side with the sign of the cross, hit them with tremendous force. They bolted for the narrow bridge, and the bridge became a trap. Those who could not force their way across in the crush of men and horses met eternal destruction there, the chronicle says, and surrendered their wretched souls to the devil and Satan's ministers. The Franks drove them into the water with lances; the swift current ran red with Turkish blood along its whole visible length; and when any of them tried to creep across the bridge supports or swim wounded to the bank, Franks standing along the shore thrust them back under and killed them in the stream. The clamor of both armies rang against the sky, and the showers of missiles and arrows hid the daylight. In the city, the Christian women came to the windows along the walls, watched the Turks' miserable fate below, and secretly clapped their hands, as was their custom. The city's Armenians, Syrians, and Greeks had no such liberty: under the orders of their Turkish masters they shot arrows down at the besiegers every day, willingly or not.

Twelve emirs of the Turkish host died in that fight — died, the chronicle insists, in both soul and body — and with them fifteen hundred of their wisest and bravest knights, the backbone of the city's defense. The survivors' voices died with them: no more shouting and chattering by day and night. Only darkness separated the two sides, still trading javelins, darts, and arrows across it, but the strength of the garrison, in word and deed alike, was broken. The besiegers re-horsed themselves again from the wreckage.

At first light the next day other Turks came quietly out of the city and gathered up the reeking corpses along the riverbank — all they could find that the current had not hidden — and buried them at Machomaria, beyond the bridge before the gate, laying in the graves cloaks, gold bezants, bows, arrows, and other gear. Word reached the camp, and the whole army went to that diabolical burial ground, as the chronicle calls it, broke open the tombs, dragged the dead out of the graves, and tumbled the bodies into a pit. They cut off the heads and carried them back to the tents to make an exact count, keeping aside four horse-loads which they sent to the coast, to the envoys of the emir of Babylon, so that Egypt might see the arithmetic for itself. The Turks on the walls watched all of it. They grieved, the chronicle says, almost to death, weeping daily, able to do nothing but weep and wail.

On the third day the army built its fortress — and built it out of the gravestones. Working in joy and exultation, they raised the walls that same day with the stones lifted from above the Turkish dead, every leader building his section with a vast rampart, and set two towers there at Machomaria. With the fortress finished, the strangulation of Antioch began in earnest. The garrison's swollen pride was reduced to nothing, and the pilgrims walked safely again, to the port and into the mountains, praising God as they went.

The lords entrusted the bridge fortress to Raymond of Saint-Gilles, who kept more knights in his household than any of them and could spend more. With him stood Gastos of Bearn and his men, Peter viscount of Castello, Raymond viscount of Torena, William of Monspeslerio, Golferius of the Towers, Peter Raymond Dalpoz, William of Sabra, and many others; and Raymond hired on, for pay, every knight and retainer he could get. The post earned its garrison. One day the Turks came out and surrounded the fortress entirely, shouting, shooting, wounding and killing, until the very tents bristled with embedded arrows; only aid from the main army averted a disaster. The defenders answered by building a great siege-engine to break the bridge itself, and in a day of fighting on the span they killed many Turks and breached it. That night, while the Franks slept, the Turks came out, burned the engine, and repaired the bridge. The army of Christ woke to find its day's work undone, and was exceedingly angry.

Then the garrison tried a different weapon. They brought up onto the wall a noble Frankish knight named Rainald Porchet, whom they had held a long time in their harsh prisons, and told him to call down to the Christians to ransom him for a great price before he lost his head. What Rainald called down was this: "Lords, it is all the same as if I were already dead. I beg you as my brothers: offer no payment for me. Be secure in your faith in Christ and the Holy Sepulchre, for God is with you and always will be. You have killed all the greater and bolder men of this city — twelve emirs and five hundred nobles. There is no one left in it who can fight you or defend it."

The Turks asked their interpreter what the prisoner was saying. "Nothing good about you," the man told them. Cassian, the emir of Antioch, had Rainald brought down from the wall and made him, through the interpreter, the standing offer of that war: "Rainald, do you wish to live honorably with us, and rejoice?" Rainald asked how he could live honorably with them without sinning. The emir laid it out: renounce the God you believe in and worship; believe in Muhammad and our other gods; and we shall give you gold and silver, horses and mules, wives and inheritances and every rich possession you desire, and raise you to the highest honor. Rainald asked for time to take counsel with himself, and the emir willingly granted it.

Rainald used the time to pray. He knelt, joined his hands, turned toward the east, and humbly asked God to help him and to receive his soul into Abraham's bosom. The emir watched, and asked the interpreter once more what Rainald was saying. "He will by no means renounce his God," the interpreter answered. "He rejects all your treasures and your gods." The emir, in a rage, ordered him beheaded on the spot, and the Turks beheaded him with great rejoicing. The chronicle follows him past the sword-stroke: angels received his soul, and carried it before God rejoicing and singing psalms, for the love of whom he had accepted martyrdom.

Cassian's fury did not stop there. Because he had failed to turn Rainald to his gods, he ordered every pilgrim prisoner in the city brought before him with hands bound. He had them stripped naked, roped together in a single mass, ringed with dry wood, straw, and hay, and then — like an enemy of God, says the chronicle — he ordered the fire lit. The knights of Christ shrieked and cried aloud, and their voices carried to heaven, to the God for love of whom their flesh and bones were burning. All of them were martyred in one day, and the chronicle clothes them, too, in white robes, and sends them up to the Lord for whom they suffered.

One gap remained in the noose around Antioch: on the far side of the river stood a fortress in a monastery, and while it lay open the garrison could still come and go. The council put the question — who would hold it? — and got silence, or demands for a large supporting force. Tancred came forward first, with a soldier's candor: "If I knew what advantage would come to me, I would fortify that fortress diligently with my own men alone, and bar our enemies the road they use against us." They promised him four hundred marks of silver, and Tancred agreed. He went out with his knights and servants and shut every road and path so tightly that the Turks, in terror of him, no longer dared leave the city gate for grass, or wood, or any other necessity. Fortune tested him at once: that very day a large convoy of Armenians and Syrians came down out of the mountains hauling provisions for the city's relief. Tancred met them and took everything — men, grain, wine, barley, oil, all of it. From then until Antioch fell, nothing moved on those roads without his leave.

Here the priest of Civray breaks off to confess the limits of his craft: he cannot recount everything the army did before Antioch was taken, for no one in these parts, he says, cleric or layman, can relate it all in speech or writing just as it happened. He turns instead to the thing that mattered — how the city fell.

There was among the city's commanders an emir of Turkish birth named Pirus, who had struck up a close friendship with Bohemond. Messengers passed quietly between them, and Bohemond pressed his suit: receive me within the city as a friend, and I promise you Christianity, wealth, and high honor. Pirus took the bargain. "I guard three towers," he sent back. "I freely promise them to him, and whenever he wishes, I shall receive him into them."

Bohemond now had Antioch in his pocket, and he went to the leaders wearing, the chronicle notes, a cheerful face and a serene mind, to sell them a proposition. See, he said, in what poverty and misery we all stand, great and small, with no notion from what quarter relief may come. Choose one man from among us, and if by any means or stratagem he can take this city — himself or through others — grant it to him as a gift, with one voice. The leaders refused flatly. "This city will never be surrendered to any one man. We shall all possess it equally: equal labor, equal honor." Bohemond withdrew with something less than a smile, and kept his towers to himself.

The refusal lasted exactly as long as the leaders' nerve. Hard on its heels came reports of a new enemy host — Turks, Publicani, Agulani, Azymites, and other heathen peoples past naming or numbering — already gathering to fall on the siege. The council reconvened in a different temper and voted Bohemond his prize with both hands: if Bohemond can take the city, by himself or through others, we grant it to him freely — on one condition. If the emperor comes to our aid and fulfills every agreement he promised and swore, we shall return the city to him as is right. Otherwise, let Bohemond hold it in his power forever.

Bohemond went back to his friend, entreating him humbly day after day: now is the time; let my friend Pirus help me now. Pirus, delighted, sent his own son to Bohemond under cover of night as a hostage — surety that the invitation was honest — and with the boy came the plan. Tomorrow, have the whole Frankish host called out and marched off as if on a plundering expedition into the Saracens' land. Then bring it back swiftly by the mountain on the left. I shall be watching for those columns, and I shall receive them into the towers under my guard.

Bohemond gave the order through a servant of his named Mala Corona, who proclaimed the feigned raid through the whole host, and he let the inner circle — Duke Godfrey, the count of Flanders, Raymond of Saint-Gilles, the bishop of Le Puy — into the secret in a single sentence: if it pleases God, Antioch will be delivered to us tonight.

It went almost exactly as designed. The knights held the plain, the foot soldiers the mountain, and the columns marched and rode all night, swinging back toward the city as day approached. Before the towers, Bohemond dismounted and gave the word: go with confidence and in joyful harmony; climb the ladder into Antioch; if it pleases God, we shall soon hold the city in our power. The ladder was already up, lashed fast to the wall. Nearly sixty men climbed it and spread through the towers Pirus held — and there the plan stalled, because sixty was not what Pirus had been promised. Seeing how few Franks had come up, he began to fear for himself and for them alike, and his cry carried along the wall: Micro Francos echome — we have few Franks! "Where is Bohemond? Where is that unconquered knight?" A Lombard servant scrambled back down the ladder and ran to Bohemond, standing below with the reserve. "Why are you standing here, prudent man? What did you come for? Look — we already hold three towers!"

That broke the hesitation. Bohemond and the rest surged to the ladder, and the men in the towers began to shout with one voice, "God wills it! God wills it!" — and the climbers below took up the cry. They swarmed up in astonishing numbers, seized tower after tower, and killed everyone they found; Pirus's own brother died with the rest. Then the ladder snapped under them. For a moment anguish and confusion ran through the party — cut off inside a hostile city in the dark — until someone remembered a postern gate close by on the left. They groped for it through the darkness, found it, broke it open, and the army poured through. An immense uproar rolled across Antioch.

Bohemond wasted none of it. He sent his standard up a hill directly before the citadel, where all the city could see it. The whole population was screaming in the streets. At first light the troops still in the tents outside heard the tumult, hurried out, saw Bohemond's banner standing on the height — and ran, every man for his own gate. They burst into the city and killed every Turk and Saracen they found, except those who escaped up into the citadel; some Turkish knights got out through the middle gates and survived in flight.

Cassian, lord of Antioch, fled with the rest, taking whatever way he could with a party of his men. Their horses gave out in Tancred's territory not far from the city, and they went to ground in a village house. The people of that mountain country — Syrians and Armenians — recognized him. They seized him, cut off his head, and carried it to Bohemond, the price of their full freedom. The belt and scabbard of the emir of Antioch were valued afterward at sixty bezants.

By then every street in the city was so choked with corpses that a man could hardly bear to be there for the stench; no one could walk the streets except upon dead Turks. Antioch, which had defied the army through a winter of famine and eight months of siege, had fallen in a single night. It was Thursday, the third day of June. May God be blessed, the chronicle writes over the whole of it, through all ages of ages.

9. Trapped Inside the City

The army that would swallow the crusade had been gathering for months. Kerbogha, commander of the army of the sultan of Persia, was still in Khurasan when Cassian, emir of Antioch, began sending him envoy after envoy: come at the right time, for a strong and powerful Frankish people has me trapped and gravely besieged in Antioch. If Kerbogha gave faithful aid, Cassian would put the city itself into his hands, or enrich him with a very great gift. Kerbogha had long been assembling an immense Turkish army, and he had received from the caliph — their pope, the chronicle explains, reaching for the nearest Christian office — permission to kill. He set out at once on the long road to Antioch.

The muster he led was immense. The emir of Jerusalem marched with him with his army; the king of Damascus came with a very great host; and Kerbogha gathered innumerable pagan peoples from every quarter — Turks, Arabs, Saracens, Publicani, Azymites, Kurds, Persians, Agulani, and many others no one could name or number. Among them the chronicle singles out the Agulani, three thousand of them, who feared neither lances nor arrows nor any weapon, because they and their horses were covered entirely in iron, and who carried nothing into battle but swords.

As this army approached the city, Sanzedola, son of Cassian, came out to meet it and ran weeping to Kerbogha. He begged as a suppliant: the Franks had killed his father; they held the city and were besieging him in the citadel; they meant to drive the Turks from Romania and Syria, and laid claim to Khurasan itself; nothing remained but for them to put every last Turk to the sword. He had waited faithfully for Kerbogha's coming — would Kerbogha now aid him in this peril? Kerbogha's price came back without ornament: put the citadel in my hands first, and then you will see how I serve your interests. Sanzedola tried to bargain — kill all the Franks, deliver me their heads, and I will give you the fortress and be your vassal — and got nowhere. "It will not be as you think and suppose. Place that citadel in my hands at once." Willing or unwilling, he surrendered it.

On the third day after the Franks had entered Antioch, Kerbogha's advance guard was riding before the walls, and his army camped at the river by the Iron Bridge. The Turks stormed the bridge tower and killed every man they found in it, sparing only its commander, whom the Franks would find after the great battle, bound in iron chains, on the vigil of the apostle Peter. The next day the host moved up to the city and camped between the two rivers, and lay there for two days.

Kerbogha now had a citadel to garrison, and his choice of castellan told its own story. He summoned an emir he knew to be truthful and mild and offered him the command with full honors: hold this fortress with the greatest care, for I know no one here more truthful and brave. The emir's answer was blunt. He would never have wished to obey Kerbogha in such a duty at all; but rather than be compelled, he would take it on one condition — if the Franks drove Kerbogha from the field in the deadly battle to come, he would immediately surrender the citadel to them. Kerbogha, who did not believe such a battle could be lost, told him: I know you to be so honorable and prudent that I consent to every good thing you wish to do. The bargain would be worth a city before the month was out.

In the camp in the valley, Kerbogha's officers brought him a trophy for his amusement: a worthless sword covered with rust, a thoroughly wretched wooden bow, and an utterly useless lance, lately taken from poor pilgrims. "Here are the weapons the Franks have brought to fight us." Kerbogha laughed out loud, and made a speech over the rusty sword to the whole assembly. These, he said, are the splendid weapons of war that the Christians born in the western land — in Europe, the third part of the world — have brought against us in Asia; with these they intend to drive us beyond the borders of Khurasan and erase our names beyond the Amazon River; these are the men who drove our kinsmen from Romania and from royal Antioch, the honorable capital of all Syria.

Then he called his secretary and dictated a letter to be read throughout Khurasan — to the caliph our pope, to our king the sultan, most valiant knight, and to all the most prudent knights of Khurasan: greetings and boundless honor. Let them rejoice and be glad, fill their bellies, and give themselves to their pleasures; let them beget many sons to fight bravely against the Christians. Let them receive these three weapons, taken from a company of Franks, and learn what the Frankish people carries against weapons like ours, worked and purified three and four times over like the purest silver and gold. And let them know that I hold all the Franks shut inside Antioch, with the citadel at my free disposal and all of them below it in my hand; I shall condemn them to death or lead them to Khurasan in harsh captivity, these men who threatened to expel us beyond upper India as they expelled our kinsmen from Romania and Syria. I swear by Muhammad and by the names of all the gods that I shall not come again before your face until I have conquered with my right hand royal Antioch, all Syria and Romania, and Bulgaria as far as Apulia, to the honor of the gods, of you, and of all our Turks.

At this point the chronicle does an extraordinary thing: it walks into Kerbogha's own family. The scene that follows could have reached Tudebode only as camp story, and it should be read as the crusaders' story about their enemy; he tells it, at length and with relish, as fact.

Kerbogha's mother was living in the city of Aleppo, and when she heard what her son intended she came to him at once, in tears. Was it true that he meant to fight the Frankish people? It was entirely true, he told her. Then she begged him, by the names of the gods and by his own courage and goodness, not to do it. He was unconquered; no man had ever seen him driven from a field; his prowess was renowned from east to west, and prudent knights trembled at the sound of his name. And none of it would matter. "My son, the Christians cannot fight you — I know well that they are unable to wage battle against you — but their God fights for them every day. Day and night he defends them and watches over them as a shepherd watches over his flock, and whoever sets himself against them, their God confounds. Before the Christians are ready to begin battle, their almighty and warlike God has already defeated their enemies with his saints. How much more will he do it to you, who are his enemy and prepare to resist them with all your strength? These Christians are called sons of Christ and of God, sons of adoption and promise, and Christ has already given them their inheritance, whose boundaries run from the rising of the sun to its setting. If you begin this battle you will lose your faithful men, your knights, and every spoil you have with you, and you will end by fleeing in great terror. You will not die in this battle — their God does not strike the offender in open wrath at once, but punishes with manifest vengeance when he wills — and I fear his vengeance for you. You will die this year."

Kerbogha, deeply shaken, wanted to know her sources. Who had told her that the Christians' God loved them so, and fought for them, and that these people would defeat him at Antioch and take his spoils and hunt him in a great victory — and that he himself would die suddenly within the year? Her answer reached back a hundred years. It stood written, she said, in our book and in the volumes of all the gentiles, that the Christian people would come against us, defeat us everywhere, and rule over the pagans, our people everywhere subject to them; only whether this was that people, or another still to come, she could not tell. And she had done more than read: following him in her grief as far as Aleppo, she had searched the stars of heaven, the planets, the twelve signs of the celestial sphere, and innumerable lots, and had found in all of them that the Christian people would defeat us everywhere.

Her son had one more question, and the chronicle sets it down without a smile. "Are not Bohemond and Tancred the gods of the Franks? Do they not deliver them from every persecution by their enemies? And do they not eat two thousand cattle and four thousand pigs at each meal?" His mother corrected him. Bohemond and Tancred are mortal like all other men; only their God loves them greatly above all others and gives them each day a strength in battle beyond other men's. For their God is almighty: he made heaven and earth and established the seas; his throne is prepared forever in heaven, and his power is to be feared everywhere. Then, said Kerbogha, if that is so, I shall not cease to fight them. And when his mother heard that no counsel of hers would move him, she withdrew in great sorrow back to Aleppo, taking with her all the spoils she could carry.

The battle she foresaw did not come at once; what came first was misery. On the third day Kerbogha armed, and a great part of the Turks came with him against the city from the citadel side. The Franks who moved up to resist were simply overpowered and driven back inside — through a gate so extraordinarily narrow that many of them died in it, crushed by their own comrades. Some fought outside the city, some within; on Thursday they fought through the day until evening, and on Friday all day again, and the Turks killed many.

On that Friday a most valiant knight named Arvedus Tudebovis took his wound. His companions carried him down into the city, where he lived until Saturday and then departed this world, living in Christ, between the ninth and the sixth hours. A priest named Peter, his brother, buried his body before the western gate of the blessed apostle Peter, at a time when he and every man in the city feared momently for his own head. Arvedus was the chronicler's brother, and the chronicle pauses over the grave to beg something of us directly: that all who read or hear this account give alms and say prayers for his soul, and for the souls of all the dead who died on the road to Jerusalem.

Others answered the terror differently. After the day-long battle, William of Grentamasnil, his brother Alberic, Yvo of Grentamasnil, William of Bernevilla, Guy Trosellus, William son of Richard, and Lambert the Poor lowered themselves secretly from the wall in the night and fled on foot toward the sea, and by the time they reached it the flesh was worn from their hands and feet to the bone. Many others whose names the chronicle does not know fled with them. At the port of Saint Symeon they cried their panic to the sailors: why are you wretches standing here? All our men are dead; we barely escaped with our lives; the Turkish army has the rest surrounded in the city. The sailors ran to their ships and stood out to sea, and when the Turks reached the port they killed everyone they caught, burned the ships still lying in the river channel, and took their cargoes.

Inside Antioch the remnant did what it could. Against the citadel, whose garrison pressed down on them with weapons and numbers they could not match, they raised a wall and guarded it day and night. Oppression reached the point of eating horses and asses; and the terror of the Turks outside grew so great that many of the army's own leaders wished to slip down the walls by night, as the deserters had done. On one day the Turks of the citadel trapped three Frankish knights in a tower before it; two fought their way out wounded, but the third held the tower approach alone all day, and with a broken lance struck down two Turks at the wall. He broke three lances in his hands that day. His name was Hugh Lo Forsenes, of the company of Godfrey of Monte Scabioso.

But most of the army had stopped fighting altogether, and Bohemond and Tancred could not pry the people out of the houses where they had shut themselves — some in fear of hunger, some of the Turks — to man the mountain before the citadel. Bohemond's remedy was arson. He had fire set to the quarter that held the palace of Cassian the emir, and as the flames climbed and the wind rose, the householders spilled out and ran with what they could carry, some to the mountain, some to Raymond's gate, some to Duke Godfrey's, each to his own people. The cure nearly consumed the city and its author's nerve with it: Bohemond watched in real distress, fearing for the churches of Saint Peter and Saint Mary, as the fire burned from the third hour until midnight and took two thousand churches and houses before the wind died.

There was no rest anywhere in it. The citadel Turks fought day and night, with nothing but weapons' reach between the lines; four emirs sometimes led them, covered entirely in gold, their horses armored in gold down to the knee. A man who had bread was not free to eat it; a man who had water was not free to drink it. The Franks walled off the mountain a second time, with a rough fortress and an engine, and hung on. One night fire appeared in the sky out of the west and fell among the Turkish camps, and both sides marveled at it; in the morning some of the Turks fled in terror of the fire. But the ring did not loosen. The chronicle counts the besiegers at 365,000 pagans, apart from the emir of Jerusalem with his people, the king of Damascus with his, and the king of Aleppo — and against that arithmetic, portents fed no one.

Famine now did what Kerbogha's assaults had not. A small loaf sold for a gold bezant. Of wine, the chronicle says only uquen grasin — no wine. A hen cost fifteen solidi, an egg two, a single nut one denarius, three or four beans one denarius; a small she-goat sixty solidi, a goat's stomach five, a ram's tail three solidi and nine denarii, the small tongue of a camel four. Men ate and sold the flesh of horses and asses. They boiled the leaves of fig trees and vines and ate them; they took the dried hides of horses, asses, camels, oxen, and buffaloes — hides five and six years old — soaked them for two nights and a day, cooked them, and ate them. For the name of Christ, Tudebode writes, and to free the road to the Holy Sepulchre, we endured these torments and many more that he cannot name. Twenty-six days the servants of God bore this tribulation, this hunger, and this fear.

They were also, though they did not know it, being written off. Stephen, count of Chartres — the foolish Stephen, the chronicle calls him — had been chosen by all the leaders as the army's head, and before Antioch fell he had pleaded grave illness and withdrawn to the fortress of Alexandretta. The trapped army waited for him day after day to come to its aid. Instead, when he heard that the Turks had the city surrounded, he climbed a mountain that overlooked the plain of Antioch, counted the innumerable tents, and fled — back to his camp, which he stripped, and then at speed back along the pilgrim road, away from the war.

At Philomena he met the emperor Alexius marching east, drew him aside, and buried the crusade with a word. Antioch is taken, he reported, but the citadel holds out; our men are besieged in grave distress, and I believe that by now the Turks have killed them all. Turn back as quickly as you can, before they find you too. The emperor, terrified, called in Guy — Bohemond's brother, serving in the imperial army — and the other Franks at his court, and put it to them: perhaps at this very hour every man of the army was dead or in chains, as this wretched count who fled so foolishly reports; let us turn back quickly, lest we die as suddenly as they.

The grief that followed ran through the whole imperial host. Guy and the others wept and wailed aloud, and men cried with one voice a terrible prayer: O true God, three and one, why have you permitted this? Why have you let the people who followed you fall into the hands of their enemies? Why have you allowed those who were freeing the road of your journey and your Sepulchre to die so quickly? If what these most wicked men report is true, we and all other Christians will abandon you and remember you no more, and not one of us will dare call upon your name again. For days afterward, the chronicle says, no one in that army — archbishop, bishop, abbot, priest, cleric, or layman — dared invoke the name of Christ.

No one could console Guy. He wept, beat his hands together, broke his fingers. Alas, Bohemond, honor and glory of the whole world, whom the entire world feared and loved! Why had he not died the moment he left his mother's womb? Why had he not drowned at sea, or fallen from his horse and broken his neck? If only he had received a blessed martyrdom at his brother's side! Then, when they had finally quieted him, he pulled himself upright and turned on the messenger. "Do you perhaps believe this half-gray, foolish knight? Have I ever heard anyone speak of a feat of arms that he performed? He has withdrawn shamefully and dishonorably, like a most wicked and wretched man — and everything this miserable man reports is entirely false."

It made no difference. The emperor ordered the whole country cleared — its inhabitants driven into Bulgaria, every place stripped and devastated so that the advancing Turks would find nothing — and turned his army around. The Franks in his service went back with him, willing or unwilling, grieving almost to death; many pilgrims too sick to keep up lay down and died on that road. The rest returned to Constantinople.

Inside Antioch, the starving army knew none of this. It was still waiting, day after day, for the help that was now marching the other way.

10. The Holy Lance

Help, when it came, did not come from any road. One day, while the leaders stood on the mountain before the citadel, sorrowful, grieving, and out of counsel, a priest named Stephen came before them and asked leave to tell them something he had seen.

He had been lying that night in the church of Saint Mary, mother of the Lord Jesus Christ, when the Savior of the world appeared before him, and with him his mother and the blessed Peter, prince of the apostles. The Lord stood before Stephen and asked, "Stephen, do you know me?" He answered, "No." As the Lord spoke, a complete cross appeared upon his head, and he asked again, "Stephen, do you know me now?" "I recognize you in no other way than that I see a cross on your head, as on our Savior." "I am he."

Stephen fell weeping at his feet and begged him to aid his people against the oppression of the accursed race that held them shut in the city. The Lord's answer was an accounting. I have aided you well, and I shall aid you well. I permitted you to possess the city of Nicaea and to win every battle; I led you as far as this place, and I had compassion on what you suffered at the siege of Antioch; I brought you safe and sound into the city with the greatest relief. But many Christians commit a very wicked deed, lying with pagan women, and an immense stench rises from it to heaven. Then the gracious Virgin Mary and the blessed apostle Peter fell at the Lord's feet, pleading for the people in their distress: for a long time the pagans held our churches and committed unspeakable evils in them; now the Christians have driven your enemies out, and the angels rejoice in heaven.

And the Lord gave Stephen his instructions. Go and tell my people to return to me, and I shall return to them. Within five days I shall send them the greatest aid. Let them sing Congregati sunt every day throughout the army; let them do penance, walk barefoot in procession through the churches, give alms to the poor, have masses sung, and receive the body and blood of Christ. Then let them begin battle, and I shall send with them as aid the blessed George, Theodore, and Demetrius, and all the pilgrims who have died on this road to Jerusalem.

Stephen offered the leaders proof on his own body: let him climb the highest tower and throw himself down — if he stood up unhurt, believe him; if not, behead him or burn him. The bishop of Le Puy forbade any such test, and instead had the Gospels and a cross brought, and made Stephen swear upon them that it was true.

Whatever each leader privately believed, the effect was immediate. At that very hour they took counsel and swore that none of them, while he lived, would flee from the city, whether to death or to life. Bohemond is said to have sworn first — the chronicle's own careful phrase — then Raymond of Saint-Gilles, Robert of Normandy, Duke Godfrey, Robert count of Flanders, and many other leaders; and Tancred swore that so long as forty knights stood with him he would turn back neither from the city nor from the road to Jerusalem. When the army heard of the oath it rejoiced greatly.

There was a second visionary in Antioch, and his story reached back before the city fell. A pilgrim named Peter Bartholomew had been visited by the apostle Andrew, who asked him, "What are you doing, good man?" Peter asked who he was, and the apostle answered: I am the apostle Andrew. Know, my son, that when you enter the town, you must go to the church of the blessed apostle Peter; there you will find the lance of our Savior Jesus Christ, with which he was wounded as he hung on the gibbet of the cross. Then he was gone. Peter was afraid to repeat any of it — who would believe him? — and told himself he had seen a mere vision. Andrew came a second time and asked why he had not told the pilgrims what he had been commanded. "Lord, who would believe this?" The apostle's answer, as Peter told it, was to carry him bodily into the besieged city, to the very place where the lance lay hidden in the earth; to draw the lance up out of the ground before his eyes and put it into his hands, saying, "This is the lance of our Lord Jesus Christ, which I and my brother, the apostle Peter, placed here"; and to bury it again in the same place. When Peter protested that the Turks on the walls would kill him the moment they saw him, Andrew said only: go, and do not be afraid. And Peter walked out of the city in full view of the Turks, and no one said a word to him.

When the trapped army heard Peter Bartholomew's account of where the Lance of Christ lay, joy ran through it like food. Peter took his story to the count of Saint-Gilles, and Raymond went with great rejoicing to the church of Saint Peter, where Peter showed them the place, before the choir doors on the right. Twelve men dug there from morning until evening, deeper and deeper, until at last — it was the fourteenth of June — Peter Bartholomew himself found the lance in the pit, exactly as the blessed Andrew had shown him. They lifted it with great joy, singing Te Deum laudamus, and carried it in triumph to the altar. The whole city filled with joy. The Frankish soldiers came crowding to Saint Peter's to see it, and the Greeks, Armenians, and Syrians of the city came singing Kyrie eleison at the top of their voices, crying in their own speech, Kalo Frangia exi condari Christo — "The Franks are good, for they have the lance of Christ."

Now the leaders planned battle — but first, correct to the last, they sent Kerbogha a formal demand to quit the field. Peter the Hermit and an interpreter named Arluin carried it into the enemy camp: go to the accursed Turkish army, they were told, speak wisely, and ask why they have so boldly and arrogantly entered the land of the Christians. The message the two men delivered was equal parts theology and title-deed. Our lords wonder greatly why you have come; perhaps it is because you wish to become Christians and believe in the one true God, born of the Virgin Mary, in whom we believe. If not, then all our people, great and small, humbly ask you to depart quickly from the land of God and of the Christians — for long ago the blessed apostle Peter preached in this land, brought it to the worship of Christ, and was chosen its first bishop. Depart, and they will let you carry away everything you possess: horses, mules, asses, camels, sheep, cattle, and every other treasure.

Kerbogha and his emirs, swollen with pride, answered fiercely in kind. We neither seek nor desire your God or your Christianity, and we reject you altogether with them. We wonder, rather, why your lords call their own a land that we took by the greatest force from effeminate peoples. Do you wish to know our answer? Return, and tell your leaders this: if they will become Turks in every respect and renounce the God you worship with bowed heads, we shall give them this land and much more — cities, fortresses, wives, the greatest inheritances; not one of your men will stay a foot soldier, but all shall be knights as we are, and we shall hold them in our dearest friendship. If they refuse, they shall die to the last man, or be carried in chains to Khurasan into perpetual captivity, and serve us and our children forever. The envoys came back through the lines and reported every word of it.

So there would be battle, on the terms both sides had now stated aloud: renounce your God, or die, or make the other side do it. The army spent its last days of hunger doing exactly what the Lord had commanded through the priest Stephen. They kept three-day fasts; they confessed their sins; they walked in procession from one church to another; they received absolution, and faithfully took the body and blood of Christ; they gave alms to the poor and had masses sung.

Then they formed six battle lines inside the city. In the first was Hugh the Great with the French and the count of Flanders; in the second, Duke Godfrey with his army; in the third, Robert of Normandy with his men; in the fourth, Adhemar, bishop of Le Puy, carrying with his own hands the lance of the Savior, with his people and the army of Raymond of Saint-Gilles — for Raymond himself stayed behind before the citadel, to hold the mountain against the garrison above the city. In the fifth was Tancred with his people, Gastos of Bearn with his, and the men of the count of Poitiers; in the sixth, Bohemond with his army.

The bishops, priests, clerics, and monks put on their sacred vestments and went out of the city with the army, carrying crosses in their hands, praying and begging God to save his people and bring them through every danger; others stood above the gate itself, holding the holy crosses over the files of soldiers passing beneath, signing and blessing them as they went. So arrayed, armored in ceremony and nearly out of food, the army of the pilgrimage walked out of the gate before Machomaria to settle the war.

11. The Battle for Antioch

Kerbogha watched the Frankish lines come out of the gate one after another, beautifully arrayed, and liked what he saw. "Let them all come out," he said, "so that we may take their heads more easily." First came the foot soldiers of Hugh the Great and the count of Flanders, then each force in its order — and as the files kept coming, and the size of the host assembling under the walls became plain, Kerbogha's confidence went out of him. He was suddenly very afraid. He sent orders to the emir who had charge of everything in his army: if you see fire kindled at the head of the host, proclaim the retreat and fall back, and know that the Turks have lost the field. Then he began to withdraw slowly toward the mountain, and the Franks came on slowly after him.

The Turks divided, one part swinging toward the sea while the rest held their ground, intending to catch the Franks between the two. The Franks read the move and answered it in kind: they formed a seventh battle line out of the forces of Duke Godfrey and the count of Normandy, put Count Rainard at its head, and sent it against the Turks coming in from the sea. Those Turks fought, and their arrows killed many. The remaining companies extended their front from the river to the mountain, a full two miles, and on both flanks the Turkish squadrons began to circle in, hurling javelins and shooting arrows, wounding men along the whole line.

Then something appeared for which the army had been told to watch. Out of the mountains came innumerable soldiers on white horses, under standards that were all of white. The Franks stared at this host without any idea who it might be — until they recognized it as the aid of Christ, the help he had promised through the priest Stephen, its leaders Saint George, the blessed Demetrius, and the blessed Theodore. This is not a rumor Tudebode passes along at second hand; he insists on it. These words are to be believed, he writes, for several of our men saw this.

The battle now tipped all at once. The Turks stationed toward the sea, unable to hold, set fire to the grass — the agreed signal — and the men guarding the tents saw it, seized the pick of the treasure, and fled. The Franks pushed forward toward the tents, where the enemy stood thickest: Duke Godfrey, the count of Flanders, and Hugh the Great rode along the water against the strongest of the enemy, attacked together under the sign of the cross, and the other lines went in with them. The Turks and the other pagans, shrieking their cries in a foreign tongue, broke and ran. Calling on the one true God, the knights rode over them; in the name of Jesus Christ and of the Holy Sepulchre the battle was joined, and with God's aid it was won.

The pursuit mattered more than the plunder, and the knights of Christ knew it: they chased the fugitives rather than stopping to strip the camp, hunting them as far as the Iron Bridge and on to Tancred's fortress, while behind them the enemy's whole world lay abandoned — tents, gold, silver, treasures, sheep, cattle, horses, mules, asses, camels, grain, wine, flour, everything a starving army needed. The country finished what the knights began. The Armenians and Syrians of the region, hearing that the Turks were beaten, ran to the mountain passes and killed every fugitive they could catch. The army came back into Antioch with great joy, praising and blessing God, who had given the victory to his people.

One man kept his word about that victory. The emir holding the citadel, watching Kerbogha and all the pagans stream off the field before the Frankish army, was seized with anger and fear together — and immediately, urgently, asked for the Franks' standards. Raymond of Saint-Gilles, whose post lay before the citadel, sent his up, and the emir took it joyfully and set it in the highest tower. Then he asked for Bohemond's standard as well, and after the battle Bohemond gave it, and the emir received it with the greatest gladness. The terms of surrender were struck between them: those of the pagans who wished to become Christians might remain with Bohemond, and those who wished to go to Khurasan would be allowed to depart safe and uninjured. Bohemond granted everything the emir asked and sent his own men into the citadel at once. Not many days later the emir was baptized, with all those who chose to acknowledge Christ; those who held to their own laws Bohemond had escorted, as promised, to the land of the Saracens.

So ended the battle for Antioch, fought on the fourth day before the Kalends of July — the twenty-eighth of June, the vigil of the apostles Peter and Paul. The beaten army did not simply escape. Fleeing half-dead and wounded through valleys, woods, fields, and roads, Kerbogha's men fell into the hands of the Greeks, Syrians, and Armenians of the countryside, who knew a lost battle when they saw one and ambushed the fugitives in every narrow place. The pilgrims, for their part, returned to the city and offered fitting thanks to the most high and true God and to the Holy Sepulchre. The army that had endured twenty-six days of hunger and terror, written off by every friend it had, had destroyed the greatest host the East had yet sent against it.

12. Ma'arrat

Victory posed a question hunger had postponed: what now? The leaders met in council in the church of Saint Peter to decide how to govern and lead the people until the journey to the Holy Sepulchre — the thing itself, the vow under all the suffering — could begin. The answer was dictated by the country. It was high summer, and the land of the Saracens ahead was exceedingly dry and waterless; no one dared lead the people of Christ into it in that season. So they fixed a date: the Kalends of November, the feast of All Saints. On that day everyone would assemble at Antioch from wherever he had wintered, and the march to Jerusalem would begin. The plan was approved as good and honorable, and the leaders dispersed to their own cities and castles. Before they went, a proclamation ran through Antioch: any needy man who lacked gold or silver could take service on agreed terms and be faithfully paid.

Not everyone was content to wait. A knight of Raymond's army named Raymond Pilet, who kept many knights and retainers of his own, led them out into the land of the Saracens on his own account. Beyond two pagan cities he came to a castle called Thelemanit, whose Syrian inhabitants surrendered at once of their own accord. After eight days messengers told him of a Saracen castle nearby, filled with a pagan population; he attacked it from every side, and with the help of God and the Holy Sepulchre his men quickly took it. They seized every pagan in the place. Those who consented to acknowledge Christ and asked for holy baptism they kept alive; those who wholly refused Christianity they condemned to death on the spot. This was the war as the chronicle understood it, and it records the sorting without a flicker.

Success ended three days later in front of Ma'arrat. Raymond Pilet's men marched on that city, where a great host of Turks, Arabs, Saracens, and other pagans had gathered out of Aleppo, Damascus, and the strongholds around; the enemy came out, feinted flight, then turned and fought them through the day until evening. The heat was intense, and no spring could be found; thirst did what the enemy could not. The Syrians and the common people of the expedition — because of their sins, the chronicle judges — broke first, terrified between thirst and fear, and made for the castle; the Turks saw the retreat and struck with the strength that victory lends. Many died happily surrendering their souls to God, and among them fell an excellent knight who bore the chronicler's own family name: Arnald Tudebovis. The survivors got back to their castle and stayed there several days.

The army at Antioch, which knew nothing yet of that defeat, was absorbing a heavier loss. Adhemar, bishop of Le Puy — the army's shepherd and guide since the first muster in Gaul — was seized by illness, and by God's will he departed this world, falling asleep in the Lord on the feast of Saint Peter in Chains, at rest, the chronicle says, in the bosom of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The whole army of Christ was plunged into anguish and immeasurable grief, for he had been the support of the poor and the counselor of the rich. The chronicle preserves the burden of his preaching, addressed to knights and the wealthy: none of you can be saved unless he honors and sustains the poor clergy; you cannot be saved without them, and they cannot live without you; they must plead with God daily for your sins, and you must feed and guide them, for they do not know how to get what they need as you do. Cherish them, he asked, for the love of God, as far as you can.

Raymond of Saint-Gilles filled part of the waiting season with conquest. He entered the land of the Saracens and came to a city called Albara, attacked it with his army, and by God's will took it at once. He killed every Saracen he could find in it — men and women, adults and children alike — brought the city under his rule, and restored it to the faith of Christ. Then he consulted his wisest men and devoutly chose a bishop for it, a man who would convert the place to the worship of God and consecrate what the chronicle calls the former house of the devil into a temple of the living and true God, with shrines of the saints. The cleric he chose was taken to Antioch and consecrated; he would later preside over the army's councils in the place of Adhemar of Le Puy.

All Saints came, and the leaders kept the appointment — all but Bohemond, delayed in Romania by grave illness, who hurried south as soon as he could bear arms. And at once the assembly ran onto the rock that would split the crusade. The moment the leaders asked how the journey should begin — this is a good and excellent time, men said; why delay any longer? — Bohemond began demanding, daily, the agreement the leaders had made with him about the surrender of the city. His complaint was aimed at Raymond of Saint-Gilles, who would bind himself to no such agreement, for fear of perjuring himself against the emperor. Over and over the princes gathered in the church of Saint Peter — Bohemond and Raymond, Duke Godfrey, Robert of Normandy, the rest, great and lesser — to reconcile the two. Bohemond recited his agreement in everyone's hearing; Raymond recited the oath he had sworn to the emperor, and reminded them all on whose advice he had sworn it — Bohemond's. The bishops, Duke Godfrey, Robert count of Flanders, Robert of Normandy, Count Eustace, and the other leaders withdrew apart, into the place where the chair of Saint Peter stood, to judge between the two men; and then, fearing that any open judgment would break up the journey to the Holy Sepulchre, they declined to give one.

Raymond ended the deadlock by lowering his own price. Rather than see the journey abandoned, he said, if Bohemond would come with them to Jerusalem, he would submit to whatever the bishops, Duke Godfrey, Robert of Normandy, the count of Flanders, and the other leaders approved — saving always his fidelity to the emperor. Bohemond approved and assented; the two gave their promises into the bishops' hands, before the pilgrims, that the journey to the Holy Sepulchre would in no way be obstructed. Neither man gave an inch on the city itself. Bohemond provisioned and strengthened the citadel on the high mountain; Raymond did the same with the palace of Cassian and the tower above the bridge gate, on the side toward the port of Saint Symeon. Two garrisons, two claims, one city — a settlement in name only.

No one who had spent a year dying in front of Antioch needed to ask why neither man would give it up, but the chronicle explains anyway, in a proud set piece. The city is very large, beautiful, and distinguished. Four great mountains stand within its circuit, and on the highest sits the citadel, immensely strong; below lies the noble city, watered by springs, once furnished — the chronicle claims — with twelve hundred churches and three hundred and sixty monasteries, its patriarch ruling a hundred and fifty-three bishops. Two walls enclose it, the greater one exceedingly high and wonderfully broad, built of great stones and carrying four hundred and fifty towers; on the east the mountains bound it, and on the west, beside the walls, runs the great river the chronicle here calls the Pharphar. Its antiquity matched its strength: seventy-five legendary kings were said to have established it, ending with Antiochus, who gave the city his name. This was the prize the pilgrims of the Holy Sepulchre had besieged for eight months and one day, been besieged within for twenty-six days, and enjoyed in rest and great joy for five months and a half. No one was willing to abandon it foolishly, and two men wanted it.

The road to Jerusalem reopened at the end of November, and it ran straight into another siege. On the eighth day before the month's end Raymond led his army out of Antioch, through the city of Rubea and Albara, and on the fourth day before the end of November he stood before Ma'arrat, where a very great host of Saracens, Turks, Arabs, and other pagans had gathered — the city that had already beaten Raymond Pilet. The count attacked the next day and failed, because, as the chronicle has it, God's will had not yet come. Bohemond followed shortly with his army and camped before the walls on a Sunday, and on the Monday the whole force assaulted the city with such violence from every side that, had ladders stood against the wall, Ma'arrat would have fallen that day; they fought hand to hand at the wall with lances and swords. But the pagans' strength held, and the day cost the attackers dear. The besiegers now suffered in their turn: food began to fail, and so great was the pagan population around them that no one dared go out to look for more.

Saint Andrew — who does not sleep, says the chronicle, but always watches over Christians in distress — intervened once more through Peter Bartholomew. If the Christians repented of their misdeeds, kept good faith with one another as the Lord commanded — love your brothers as yourselves — and returned to God the portion he had reserved for himself when he made the world, namely a tenth of everything they possessed, then he would give them the city in a short time and fulfill all their desire. The tithe was to be divided in four: one part for the bishop, one for the priests, one for the churches, one for the poor. It was recited before the council, and everyone assented.

Then Raymond built the machine that took the city. It was a wooden siege tower, very strong and lofty, cunningly designed, running on four wheels. Knights stood on its top; Ebrard the Huntsman sounded trumpet blasts from it; splendid standards streamed above; and more than a hundred armed knights, sheltering underneath, walked it up against the wall beside one of the city's towers. The pagans met it with engines of their own, hurling huge stones that nearly killed the knights in the tower, shredding the standards with arrows and stones, and throwing Greek fire against the frame in the hope of burning it — but the merciful and compassionate God, the chronicle says, did not allow it to burn. The tower topped every wall and turret in Ma'arrat. From its upper gallery William of Monspeslerio and the others heaved great stones down onto the Saracens on the wall, striking their shields so hard that shield and man together fell dead into the city; others held standards out on their spears, and with lances and iron weapons tried to drag the defenders bodily toward them. Behind the tower, out of the arrow-fall, the priests and clerics stood in their sacred vestments, praying to Christ to defend his people, give victory to the knights, exalt holy Christianity, and destroy paganism. So it went until evening.

The wall broke at sunset. Golferius of the Towers went up a ladder first and made his feet good on the rampart; the ladder snapped under the crowd that followed him. He fought on the wall with his lance, killing, while a second ladder was found and raised, and knights and foot soldiers swarmed up until the wall could scarcely hold them. The Saracens fought back ferociously, along the parapet and from the ground inside, with arrows and with lances at close quarters, and terrified men began lowering themselves back down the outside. But the boldest held the wall — and underneath them, all this while, sappers under the shelter of the tower were digging out the wall's foundations. When the Saracens on the rampart saw the wall being undermined beneath their feet, their nerve went, and they fled into the city. It was late on Saturday, the eleventh of December, as the sun was setting.

What followed, the chronicle tells without apology. Bohemond sent his interpreter to the leading Saracens with an offer: gather with your wives, children, and goods in the palace above the gate, and I shall protect you from death. The army poured into Ma'arrat, and every man took for his own whatever valuables he could find in the houses and the storage pits. When morning came they killed everyone they found, male or female; no corner of the city was free of corpses, and a man could scarcely walk the streets except on the dead. As for the people in the palace — the ones under Bohemond's protection — Bohemond seized them, stripped them of everything they had, gold, silver, and all their valuables, killed some, and had the rest driven to Antioch to be sold.

The victors had conquered a city with nothing in it to eat. The stay stretched on; they dared not push far into Saracen country, there was nothing left to seize nearby, and the Christians of the land brought nothing to sell. Famine set in among the conquerors of the town, and it drove the poorest of the pilgrims to the extremity for which Ma'arrat is remembered. They cut open the bodies of the dead pagans, because bezants were found hidden in their bellies; and some, driven by hunger, cut the flesh of the dead into pieces, cooked it, and ate it. When the leaders saw it they had the pagan corpses dragged outside the gates, piled into heaps, and burned.

Through all of it the quarrel ground on. Bohemond could not be reconciled with Raymond, and went back to Antioch. Raymond summoned Duke Godfrey, the count of Flanders, Robert of Normandy, and Bohemond to a council at the city of Rusa, where the leaders tried once more to set a date for the journey — and once more found that no reconciliation was possible unless Raymond surrendered Antioch to Bohemond, which, for the sake of his pledge to the emperor Alexius, he would not do. The dukes and counts went back to Antioch, and Raymond returned to Ma'arrat, where the pilgrims were wintering, and sent men to provision and hold his two strongpoints in Antioch, Cassian's palace and the bridge-gate tower facing the mosque. In Ma'arrat the wise bishop of Orange died; the pilgrims had now been in the city a month and three days. Then Bohemond ended the pretense. Determined to possess Antioch by his own power, he expelled every one of Raymond of Saint-Gilles's men from the city.

Raymond's answer, when the news reached him, surprised everyone. He made light of it. He was done — not with the vow, but with the quarrel. As a servant of our Lord Jesus Christ he took up the journey to the Holy Sepulchre, and on the thirteenth of January he walked out of Ma'arrat barefoot, a pilgrim on the road again. Eight miles on he reached the fortress of Capharda and rested three days, and there Robert of Normandy joined his march. Antioch had kept Bohemond. Jerusalem would get the rest.

13. The Long Road South

The barefoot count discovered that his reputation had marched ahead of him. The king of Caesarea had already sent messengers repeatedly to Raymond at Ma'arrat and at Capharda: he wished to make an agreement with him and be his friend; he would give him as much of his revenue as Raymond pleased; he was eager to show favor to the Christians, would guarantee the pilgrims safety from all fear throughout his realm, and promised a market for horses and food. The pilgrims came down and camped beside the river called Pharphar, near Caesarea — where the king's friendship showed its actual size. He forbade the market unless they moved away from his city; the next day he sent two Turks along to show them the river ford and guide them to somewhere else they could plunder. Peace, in Syria that winter, meant paying the Franks to go and plunder someone else.

The guides earned their keep. In a valley beneath a fortress the army found more than five thousand animals and ample grain and other goods, and the whole host of Christ was restored. The lord of that fortress made his own agreement with Raymond, gave horses, and swore by his own law that he would do the pilgrims no further harm; they rested there six days. The lord of the next Arab fortress made terms in the same way. Then the army crossed into a valley toward the city of Caphalia, exceedingly beautiful and stocked with every good thing — and found it empty. Its inhabitants had heard the Christian pilgrims were coming and had abandoned the city whole, gardens full of vegetables, houses full of food.

Beyond a high and immense mountain lay the valley of Desem, rich in grain and livestock, and the army stayed there fifteen days. One fortress nearby stood burned and abandoned by its own Saracens. Beside it was another, crammed with a very great pagan host, and the pilgrims attacked it so fiercely they would have carried it at once had the defenders not driven their immense herds out through the lines — a ransom on the hoof, and it worked. The attackers went back to their tents driving animals. At first light they struck camp to begin a proper siege, but around midnight the pagans inside fled to the last man, and the pilgrims walked into a second abandoned fortress furnished, in the chronicle's favorite phrase, with abundance from the dew of heaven: grain, wine, flour, oil, chickens, everything they needed.

They celebrated the feast of the Purification of Saint Mary there, on the second of February, with great devotion — and received ambassadors. From the city of Camela came messengers with horses and gold from its king, who wished an agreement and promised to favor and honor Christians wherever they went. The king of Tripoli likewise sent word that he wished peace, with ten horses, four mules, and many bezants to sweeten it. Raymond's reply to Tripoli set the price high: he would make no peace with him unless the king became a Christian. The king — remarkably — promised and agreed to do so. The promises of frightened kings would be tested later; meanwhile the army marched.

In mid-February, on a Monday, the pilgrims came to the fortress of Arqa and pitched their tents around it, and the easy season ended. Arqa was filled with an innumerable pagan host — Turks, Saracens, Arabs, Publicani — who had fortified it remarkably and meant to fight. The fortress stood high on a mountain behind two walls, and it would hold the army for three months.

The siege spun off skirmishes in every direction. One day fourteen knights rode toward Tripoli, eight miles off — among them Raymond viscount of Torena, Peter viscount of Castelion, Amanevus of Lobene, Sicardus, Bego de la Ribere, and William Botinus — and met sixty Turks, Saracens, Arabs, and Kurds driving along captives of ours and fifteen hundred animals. Fourteen against sixty, fortified by the sign of the cross, they attacked, and with God's help overcame them, killing six and taking six horses. On another day Raymond Pilet and Raymond of Torena led their knights against the city of Tortosa, which a great pagan garrison defended. A day's fierce assault won nothing, so at evening they withdrew into a corner of ground beside a wood and lit fires — innumerable fires, as though the entire army of Christ lay camped there. The garrison looked out at that field of flames, panicked, and fled in the night, leaving a city full of goods above an excellent harbor. The knights who came at dawn to storm Tortosa found it empty, moved in, and lived there for as long as the siege of Arqa continued. Nearby Maraclea followed the cheaper course: its emir made terms and admitted the pilgrims and their standards into the city.

The lords who had stayed north were on the road at last. Duke Godfrey, Robert count of Flanders, and Bohemond followed Raymond's track as far as the city of Lichia, where Bohemond, master of Antioch at last, turned back for good. Godfrey and the count of Flanders continued south and laid siege to Gibellum, and were battering it when a messenger arrived from Raymond: the pagans were massing from every direction to fight him at Arqa; come. The two leaders promptly made terms with Gibellum's emir, who gave them horses and bezants and a promise to harm no more pilgrims, and force-marched to Arqa, where they camped across the river and joined the siege. The great pagan attack never came. The rumor had done what rumors do; the reinforcements stayed.

What came instead was a bloodletting at Tripoli. Riding to the city, the pilgrims caught Arabs, Turks, and Saracens outside the walls, attacked at once, routed them, and killed the greater part of the city's fighting nobility. So great was the slaughter and the shedding of blood that the very water flowing into Tripoli seemed to run red as it poured into the cisterns. The city's survivors were left grief-stricken and so afraid that scarcely one of them dared pass the gate.

Inside the crusader army that spring, a different battle came to a head — over the relic at its heart. A great controversy had arisen among many in the army of Christ: they did not believe that the lance Raymond of Saint-Gilles carried was the Lance of the Lord Jesus Christ at all. Many pilgrims were angered by the doubt, and none more wounded by it than Peter Bartholomew, who had found the relic. The resolution proposed was the oldest in Christendom: let fire judge. It was determined that the ordeal should be held on the Friday of the Lord's Passion — the day Christ hung on the cross and took the lance-wound the relic claimed to remember.

On that day men of the army built the pyre: green wood and dry, small-cut, stacked fourteen feet long and three and a half feet high. The bishop of Albara and the army's priests came barefoot, in sacred vestments, carrying crosses; they circled the wood three times with psalms and a litany, and the bishop alone set it alight; then they circled the burning pile three times with holy water, while the whole pilgrim army prayed and sang to the Lord Jesus Christ, asking him to reveal whether this was the Lance with which he had been wounded on the cross, and to forgive their sins. Peter Bartholomew walked to the western end of the fire, stripped off his clothes, put on a single black tunic, and took up the Lance, wrapped in a linen cloth. He knelt and prayed three times. Then Peter the Hermit pronounced the terms so that everyone could hear them: "This Christian intends to enter this fire on the condition that this Lance is the very one that Andrew the Apostle showed him in Antioch, in the church of Saint Peter the Apostle — the Lance with which our Lord Jesus Christ was wounded while hanging upon the cross. If it is not that Lance, let neither the man nor the Lance come out of the fire."

Peter Bartholomew carried the relic into the flames. And the compassionate Lord Jesus Christ, the chronicle testifies, wishing to reveal his miracle through Peter, allowed him to emerge unharmed from the blaze, and the Lance passed through the fire in the sight of everyone. That is the whole of Tudebode's verdict: man and relic vindicated together, before the assembled army, on Good Friday.

The war of supply, meanwhile, was being won handily. Riders sweeping beyond the valley of Desem brought back cattle, asses, sheep, and animals without number; sixty men who split off from that expedition found three thousand camels. Ships put into a harbor near the siege carrying a very large market — grain, wine, meat, oil, barley — and the whole army lived in plenty. But Arqa would not fall, and it kept killing men the army could not spare. Several pilgrims received their martyrdom there: Pontius de Balaun, Anselm of Ribemont, William Picard, and others whose names the chronicle never learned. Easter was celebrated in the siege lines on the tenth of April. By then the fortress had been invested three months less a single day.

It was the calendar that ended the siege. The king of Tripoli kept sending messengers asking Raymond to give up the fortress and make an agreement with him — and the leaders, looking at the fields, saw the new crops coming on: fresh beans in mid-March, new grain by mid-April. Leaders and common men took counsel together and judged it good to begin the journey to Jerusalem with the new harvest. Arqa, unbeaten, was left standing; the terms of Tripoli were accepted by all.

On Friday the thirteenth of May the army reached Tripoli and stayed three days, and the king made his peace concrete. He released more than three hundred pilgrims captured in the earlier fighting; he gave Raymond fifteen thousand bezants and fifteen horses of great value; and he opened a great market of horses, asses, bread, cheese, and every kind of good, so that the whole army of Christ was enriched. On the largest matter he bound himself with a condition: if they could win the battle that the emir of Babylon was even now preparing against them, and could take Jerusalem, he would become a Christian and hold his land from them. So it was declared and concluded, and the army had its first official notice of the enemy waiting beyond Jerusalem: Egypt was coming.

The last leg was a forced march down the summer coast. Leaving Tripoli on the Monday in mid-May, they traveled a narrow and difficult road all day and night to the fortress of Bethelon, and then to the seaside city of Gibelon, where thirst punished them severely; exhausted, they reached the river called Braim. Through the day and night of the Lord's Ascension they crossed a mountain where the road narrowed to a defile, expecting an ambush at every step; by God's favor, no enemy had troubled to set one. They passed Beirut, Sidon, Tyre, and Acre; from Acre they went by the fortress of Haifa and came to Caesarea by the sea, where they celebrated Pentecost, the twenty-ninth of May. Then Ramla — abandoned, like so much else that spring, for fear of the Franks.

Ramla had one thing no other empty town could offer. Nearby stood the venerable church holding the precious body of Saint George, who had faithfully suffered martyrdom there at the hands of faithless pagans for the name of Christ. The leaders took counsel and devoutly elected a bishop to guard and govern that church, endowing him with their tithes of gold, silver, livestock, and horses so that he and those who stayed with him could live honorably. The soldier-martyr who had ridden out of the mountains at Antioch now had a bishop at his tomb, and the army that installed him stood one march from Jerusalem.

14. Jerusalem

Jerusalem lay before the army at last. On Tuesday, the seventh of June, Raymond of Saint-Gilles, Duke Godfrey, and the whole rejoicing column of the pilgrims came up before the holy city and laid their siege close against its walls. Robert of Normandy took the north, beside the church of Saint Stephen the First Martyr — the place where Stephen had joyfully received the stones for Christ's name — with the count of Flanders next to him. Duke Godfrey besieged the city from the west, Tancred beside him. Raymond of Saint-Gilles took the south, on Mount Zion, beside the church of Saint Mary, Mother of the Lord: the place where she departed this world, where the Lord ate with his disciples, and where the Holy Spirit came down into the disciples' hearts. The army had reached the geography of its own faith; from here to the end, every position in the siege was also a shrine.

On the third day, knights of the army of the Holy Sepulchre rode out to raid — Raymond Pilet, Raymond of Torena, and others with them — and met two hundred Arabs. They fought those pagans, and with the aid of God and the Holy Sepulchre defeated them, killed many, and took thirty horses. On the Monday following, the army assaulted the city so fiercely that, had the ladders been ready, Jerusalem would have fallen then and there. They leveled the outer wall and raised a single ladder against the great wall, and knights went up it to trade sword-strokes and lance-thrusts with the defenders face to face. Men died there, Rainald, Hugh of Lusignan's seneschal, first among those the chronicle names — but more of the enemy died than of ours. It was not enough. Without engines the city was unreachable, and the army settled into a siege for which it possessed almost nothing — least of all water and bread.

For ten days of that siege there was no bread to eat at all, until a messenger came up from the coast: ships had put into the port of Jaffa. The leaders sent an escort at first light — a hundred knights out of Raymond's army under Raymond Pilet, with Gaudemar Carpinel, Achard of Montemerlo, William of Sabra, and others. On the way to the port, thirty of them, including Gaudemar and Achard, separated from the rest — and rode into seven hundred Arabs, Turks, and Saracens. The thirty attacked fiercely, and were engulfed. Achard of Montemerlo was killed, with the poor foot soldiers who were with him, and the enemy had the survivors so completely enclosed that every man of them expected death — when a second messenger got clear and found Raymond Pilet with the seventy. "Why are you standing here with these knights? Look — our men are in the direst straits among the Arabs, Turks, and Saracens; perhaps every one of them is already dead. Help them! Help them!" The seventy raced to them and found them still fighting. The sight of the fresh riders split the pagans into two companies; the Franks, invoking Christ's name and the Holy Sepulchre, hit them so hard that each knight brought down his man; and the enemy broke, terrified, and ran. The pursuit ran nearly four miles. Many were killed; one was deliberately kept alive to give a full account of the enemy's plans; and a hundred and three captured horses came back to the siege lines with the survivors.

Thirst was the siege's true enemy. The defenders had stopped or fouled the water of the country, and the besiegers sewed up hides of oxen, buffalo, and goats and hauled water six miles in them, drinking foul and stinking stuff from those vessels and eating barley bread — day after day of the greatest privation and distress. The spring of Siloam, at the foot of Mount Zion, sustained them a little. Water was sold among the Christians of God at prices so high that a penny could not quench one man's thirst. And every spring and well for miles had its ambush: Saracens lay hidden at the water, killed whom they could catch, drove off the animals into their caverns and caves in the mountains, and cut down pilgrims who went out to gather grapes.

Against this the army's leaders, exceedingly angry, deployed what they had. In council, the bishops and priests advised a procession around the city. So the clergy came barefoot from the church of Saint Mary on Mount Zion to the church of Saint Stephen the First Martyr, dressed in sacred vestments, carrying crosses, singing psalms, and praying that the Lord Jesus Christ would deliver his holy city and his Sepulchre from the pagan people and give it into Christian hands for the performance of his holy service; the knights and retainers walked armed at their side.

The Saracens answered ceremony with ceremony. They paraded along the tops of the walls carrying Muhammad on a spear, draped in a cloth; and when the Christians halted in station before Saint Stephen's, as processions do, the men on the walls shouted, howled on trumpets, and devised every mockery they could. Then, in sight of all the Christians, they made a wooden cross in the likeness of the one on which merciful Christ redeemed the world in his blood, beat it with a stick, and smashed it against the wall, shouting Frangia, git salip — "Franks, it is a good cross." The Christians watched it in great sorrow, and did not stop praying. The procession climbed to the church on the Mount of Olives, from which Christ ascended into heaven, and there a most honorable cleric named Arnulf preached, setting before them the mercy God had shown the Christians who had followed him all the way to the stone of his Ascension. Below, in the open ground between the Temple of the Lord and the Temple of Solomon, Saracens ran to and fro with swords and clubs, threatening the worshippers on the hill. The procession went down to the monastery of Saint Mary in the Valley of Jehoshaphat, from which her most holy body was taken up into heaven, and returned at last toward Mount Zion — where, at the monastery door, an arrow struck the cleric walking at the head of the procession in the middle of the forehead, and he died where he fell. His soul, the chronicler believes, will reign with Christ for ever.

For this scene the chronicle offers its plainest credential in the whole work: the man who first wrote it should be believed, because he was in the procession and saw it with his bodily eyes — Peter the priest, Tudebode of Civray.

Prayer and engineering advanced together. The leaders now arranged to bring siegecraft against the city — so that, in the chronicle's ordering of motives, they might enter the Savior's Sepulchre in prayer. Two wooden siege towers were built, and other engines besides: Duke Godfrey made his tower with its machines, and Raymond of Saint-Gilles did likewise. Timber had to come from distant country, and it came on the shoulders of fifty and sixty Saracen prisoners at a time — thus, the chronicle observes with satisfaction, the Christians used the Saracens themselves to confound the Saracens. The defenders watched the engines rise and answered them, fortifying the city remarkably; the towers on the walls grew taller by night.

One day the Saracens sent a man of their own to examine the engines. The Syrians and Greeks in the camp knew a Saracen when they saw one and pointed him out, crying Ma te Christo caco Sarrazin! — "By Christ, here is a cowardly Saracen!" Seized and questioned through an interpreter, he confessed his errand: the Saracens had sent him to learn what kind of engines the Christians had. The Christians told him that was good. Then they bound him hand and foot, laid him in the sling of a stone-thrower, and tried with all their strength to shoot him into the city. It could not be done: the man was flung with such force that his bonds burst and he was torn apart in the air before ever reaching the wall.

The leaders had marked where the city was weakest, and on a Saturday night they moved the engines and the wooden towers around to that side. At first light they raised and fitted them, and through Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, by day and by night, they made the towers ready. On Wednesday, until the hour of Prime, and again on Thursday, they assaulted the city with extraordinary force from every side until nightfall. At first light on Friday they came on again, and could make no impression on the pagans within — until the hour came at which our Lord Jesus Christ deigned to suffer his Passion upon the cross for our sins. At that hour the knights in Duke Godfrey's tower — the duke himself and his brother Count Eustace — were fighting furiously; a knight named Lethot got from the tower onto the wall of Jerusalem, the first man of the army to stand on it; and Eustace and Godfrey crossed close behind him. The pagans defending that stretch of wall abandoned it and fled down into the city, and the Franks went down after them, killing and hacking them apart as they ran.

On the south side Raymond knew nothing of it yet. His tower had been stopped short of the wall by a deep ditch, and he had solved the problem with money, proclaiming that anyone carrying stones into the ditch would be paid a penny for every three. The filling took three days and two nights. Then the tower rolled up beside a wall-tower, and the defenders fought it savagely with fire and stones, smashed its upper stage, and set it alight. Raymond and his knights were standing in anger and dismay, watching the top of their tower burn, when he suddenly saw three knights of Duke Godfrey's army riding over the Mount of Olives, shouting that Godfrey and his men were already inside the city. Raymond turned to his men. "Why are you delaying? Look — all the Franks are already in the holy city of Jerusalem." They took ladders, raised them against the wall, and fought their way over it.

The emir who held the Tower of David saw how the day was ending and chose his man. He surrendered to Raymond of Saint-Gilles and opened for him the gate at which the pilgrims of former days had paid their tolls, on one condition: that Raymond conduct him, and those with him in the tower, safe and unharmed to the city of Ascalon. Raymond accepted the condition and — the chronicle notes it plainly — gladly fulfilled it.

For the rest of Jerusalem there were no conditions. The pilgrims poured through the city, pursuing and killing Saracens and other pagans all the way to the Temple of Solomon and the Temple of the Lord, where the defenders massed and fought the hardest battle of the day, until evening. Our men killed so many that blood flowed throughout the Temple of Solomon and across the square surrounding the Temple of the Lord. When the last resistance was beaten down, the victors seized many men and women in the Temple, and killed those they wished, and kept alive those they did not wish to kill. On the roof of the Temple of Solomon a very great company of pagans, men and women together, had taken refuge, and Tancred and Gastos of Bearn gave them their standards — the tokens of a conqueror's protection. Then the army ran loose through the city, taking gold and silver, horses and mules, and houses filled with every kind of wealth; and afterward, all of them together, they came weeping for excess of joy to worship at the Sepulchre of our Savior, and paid what they owed.

The standards on the Temple roof kept nobody safe. When morning came, Tancred caused a proclamation to be made that everyone should go to the Temple of Solomon to kill the Saracens — the chronicle records the order without explaining what had become of the protection, and no explanation survives. At the Temple the killing resumed: men shooting up onto the roof with bows; others climbing onto it from the far side and putting the Saracens there to the sword, men and women alike, beheading them with naked blades. Some of the trapped threw themselves headlong off the Temple roof; the rest died on it.

The day after, a council met before the Temple of the Lord and set the city's first business: everyone should pray, give alms, and fast, so that God might choose the man he wished to rule the others, govern the holy city of Jerusalem, and fight the pagans. But the bishops and priests added a prior necessity — the dead. The whole city of Jerusalem was filled with corpses, and the stench was becoming a danger; let them be carried out before anything else. So the surviving Saracens were made to drag the dead Saracens out of the gates, where they were piled into mounds — mounds as large as houses, says the chronicle — and burned. And there the priest of Civray sets down his own verdict on the day: who has ever seen or heard of such slaughter among the pagan people? No one but God alone knew their number.

On the eighth day after the capture, a festival was celebrated throughout Jerusalem, and the council made its choices. Duke Godfrey was elected prince of the city, to fight the pagans and protect the Christians; and in place of the patriarch was elected a most wise and honorable cleric named Arnulf — the preacher of the Mount of Olives — his election associated in the chronicle with the feast of Saint Peter in Chains. The holy city of Jerusalem was captured by God's Christians on Friday, the fifteenth of July, in the year 1099 from the Lord's Incarnation, with the help of our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom, the chronicle writes, belong honor and glory for ever and ever. The vow was paid. The war, as the army learned within days, was not over.

15. Ascalon

A messenger found Tancred and Count Eustace with new orders: prepare yourselves and go take possession of the city of Neapolis. They marched with knights and foot soldiers, and the city's inhabitants surrendered at once. Then a second message from Duke Godfrey overtook them, and it canceled everything else: come to me quickly. Godfrey had learned that the emir of Babylon was at Ascalon, preparing to attack Jerusalem — and preparing it as a slaver as much as a soldier. The emir had brought chains and iron bonds with which to bind the young Christians into perpetual servitude to his people, and had commanded that all the elderly Franks, of both sexes, be killed.

Eustace and Tancred turned south with great joy, hunting the battle through the mountains. Armed for war, they came to Caesarea, followed the sea to Ramla, and there caught what they needed: Arabs who were scouting for the emir's army. Under questioning, willing or not, the prisoners gave a full account — the army's position, its numbers, and where it intended to fight the Christians. Eustace and Tancred sent word straight to Jerusalem, to Duke Godfrey, Patriarch Arnulf, and all the leaders: know that battle has been prepared for us at the city of Ascalon; come swiftly, with every man you can muster.

The duke had it proclaimed through Jerusalem that the army should faithfully prepare for war and march to Ascalon against the enemies of God, and on Tuesday he went out himself with Patriarch Arnulf, Robert count of Flanders, and the bishop of Martorano. Raymond of Saint-Gilles and Robert of Normandy flatly refused to move: "We will not go under any circumstances unless we know for certain that there will be a battle." They sent their own knights to look, with orders to ride back at speed if the report held. The knights went, saw the army with their own eyes, and raced back: it is certainly true. Godfrey, for his part, sent the bishop of Martorano back to Jerusalem to hurry the doubters along; the bishop delivered the words of the patriarch and the duke, and then, riding to rejoin the army, met Saracens on the road. They captured him and carried him off, and no one ever learned where. The war took the messenger and spared the message.

On Wednesday Raymond, Robert of Normandy, and the remaining leaders marched out of Jerusalem, armed and fortified with the sign of the cross. Behind them, Peter the Hermit — the old preacher of the first summons — stayed in the city and organized its prayers, arranging that the Greeks and Latins together should walk in procession to God, pray, and give alms so that God would grant his people victory. The clerics went barefoot in their vestments from the Holy Sepulchre to the Temple of the Lord, carrying crosses and singing the litany.

The army assembled at the river on the Ascalon side, and stumbled at once into temptation: innumerable animals — cattle, camels, sheep, asses — which the Saracens had deliberately sent into their path as a stratagem, bait to scatter a marching army into herdsmen. But for the sake of the Holy Sepulchre, the chronicle says, God was not yet willing to abandon his people: the knights of Christ simply gathered up the whole windfall and kept their ranks. When evening came, the army's two great relics were brought together. Patriarch Arnulf carried the portion of the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ that the pilgrims had found in Jerusalem; Raymond's chaplain carried the Lance. And by the authority of God, the Holy Sepulchre, the most precious Lance, and the most holy Cross, the patriarch pronounced excommunication against any man who turned aside to plunder before the battle was fought and God's enemies defeated. Win first, he was telling them; afterward, return in glad rejoicing and take whatever the Lord has predestined for you.

At first light on Friday the pilgrims of the Holy Sepulchre went out into a very beautiful valley beside the seashore and formed their lines: Duke Godfrey — now, the chronicle says here, elected king in Jerusalem — with his; Raymond of Saint-Gilles with his; Robert of Normandy, Robert of Flanders, and Count Eustace each with his own; Tancred and Gastos of Bearn with theirs. Six battle lines, archers thrown out in front — and on either flank, right and left, walked the captured animals, the camels and cattle and sheep, keeping pace with the army with no driver behind them. This, the chronicle declares, was a very great miracle of God.

So they advanced, slowly, in the name of Jesus Christ and of the Holy Sepulchre, the Lance and the Cross carried in their midst — Godfrey's line on the left, Raymond's on the right along the sea, the two Roberts, Eustace, Tancred, and Gastos in the center. The pagans stood ready for war, each man with a vessel hung at his neck so that he could drink as he fought. Robert count of Flanders charged home most fiercely, Tancred and all the others with him, and at the shock the pagans simply fled. The battle was immense in everything but resistance: the enemy's multitude was innumerable — 660,000, it was said, though the chronicle adds that only God knew their number — and the power of God so accompanied the Franks that the multitude counted for nothing.

What the chronicle describes next is less a battle than a judgment. The enemies of God stood blinded and stupefied: their eyes were open, and they saw the knights of Christ from Jerusalem, and perceived nothing; God's power made them tremble, and they dared not rise against the Christians. In their extremity of fear men climbed trees and hid among the branches, and the Franks shot them out of the trees with arrows and brought them down with lances like falling birds, then hacked them apart on the ground. Others threw themselves flat and dared not get up, and our men cut them to pieces where they lay, as one butchers animals in a slaughterhouse. Along the shore Raymond of Saint-Gilles killed pagans past counting; those who could not run plunged into the sea; the rest fled into the city.

Before the walls of Ascalon, the emir of Babylon stopped to mourn, and the chronicle — which had listened at Kerbogha's tent — now writes the Egyptian's lament for him. O Muhammad and our gods! Who has ever seen or heard such things? Such a force, such strength, such an army — never overcome by any people, Christian or pagan — and now defeated by a people so tiny it could be enclosed in a man's fist, a beggarly, unarmed, utterly impoverished people that owns nothing but a sack and a scrip. And now it pursues our Egyptian people, who used to give it alms when it begged through our whole country. I brought an innumerable multitude here — Turks, Saracens, Arabs, Agulani, Kurds, Acupatores, and other pagans — and I watch them fleeing shamefully with loosened reins along the road to Babylon, not daring to turn against so frail an enemy. I swear by Muhammad and all the divine powers of the gods that I shall never again retain knights under any contract, for I have been defeated by an utterly powerless people. I brought every kind of weapon and engine, and iron bonds enough to lead them chained to Babylon or besiege them in Jerusalem — and they came out against me, two days' journey, to give me battle. What would have become of me before Jerusalem? Neither I nor one man of mine, I believe, would have escaped. What more is there to say? I shall be disgraced forever throughout Babylon. So he ended his speech.

His treasures ended as trophies. One of our men took the emir's stantarum — the word, the chronicle explains, means what we call a standard — with a golden knob at its head and its whole shaft sheathed in silver. Robert of Normandy bought it for twenty marks of silver and gave it to the monastery of the Sepulchre, in honor of God and the Holy Sepulchre; a pilgrim bought the emir's sword for sixty bezants. The emir himself escaped by water. Ships from every pagan land lay off the coast, and when their crews saw the emir in flight with his army they raised sail, took him aboard, and stood out to sea. Ashore, the Franks came into the enemy's tents and found the war's richest haul: gold, silver, robes and rich cloths, heaps of goods of every kind, horses, mules, camels, sheep, cattle, and asses until every hill and all the level ground was covered with animals, and piled weapons of which the army carried off what it wanted and burned the rest in one great fire.

They came back to the holy city of Jerusalem rejoicing, their camels and asses laden with hard-baked bread, flour, wheat, cheese, cloth, and oil, with everything a city could need. Plenty followed victory through the gates: an ox could be had in Jerusalem for eight pennies, a measure of wheat for twelve, a measure of barley for eight. And lest any of this remain unknown to any Christian — it is the chronicle's own closing wish — let it be known that this battle was fought on the twelfth of August, by the bounty of our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom belong honor and glory, now and always, for ever and ever. Amen.

There Peter Tudebode laid down his story. The summons that had gone through Gaul three years before was answered: the road to the Holy Sepulchre stood open behind the army that had walked it, and the city at its end was Christian, provisioned, and cheap to live in. What the road had cost, the chronicle never totals. It had counted the martyrs one by one along the way — at Civitot, at Antioch, at Ma'arrat, under the walls of Jerusalem — and given every one of them to God. It closes as it opened, in the name of the Lord who, Tudebode believed, had willed the whole of it.

16. Afterword: Peter Tudebode and His Chronicle

Nearly everything we know about the man who wrote this story, he tells us himself, and most of it in a single sentence. Describing the great procession around the walls of Jerusalem — the mocked cross, the sermon on the Mount of Olives, the cleric shot dead at the door of the monastery on Mount Zion — the chronicle stops to give its credential: the man who first wrote this should be believed, because he was in the procession and saw it with his bodily eyes — namely Peter the priest, Tudebode of Civray.

A priest, then, of Civray; a marcher in the army's liturgies; and a man who paid the road's price in his own family. During Kerbogha's assault on Antioch a most valiant knight named Arvedus Tudebovis was mortally wounded, and the chronicle follows him to his grave before the western gate of Saint Peter's, buried by "a priest named Peter, his brother," while every man in the city feared for his head — then breaks off to beg alms and prayers for his soul and for all the dead of the road to Jerusalem. Another knight of the same name, Arnald Tudebovis, fell in Raymond Pilet's defeat at Ma'arrat. The chronicle never spells out these kinships beyond the one word "brother," and this edition has not pressed them further; but no reader misses what they mean. This history was written by a man whose family bled into it.

His book is a participant's record, not a scholar's. It moves with the army — "we," "our men," "the knights of Christ" — and remembers what a man in the column would remember: the price of an egg during a famine, the day of the week a wall fell, which gate a body was buried beside, the exact wording of an insult shouted from a rampart. It also remembers what a priest would remember. Every victory ends in a doxology; every massacre of Christians is a harvest of martyrs; visions are sworn to on the Gospels, relics are tested by fire, and the war's turning points arrive on the church's feasts. Tudebode did not regard these as decorations on the history. They were the history: for him the expedition was God's work, its sufferings were penance, and its outcome was proof.

The reader will also have noticed what this chronicle is not. It reports speeches — Urban's preaching, Bohemond's rebukes, Kerbogha's letter, his mother's astrology, the emir of Babylon's lament — that no Frankish priest can have heard, in the manner of all history-writing of its age, which composed for its actors the words the story required. It counts enemies in the hundreds of thousands. It sees the armies of the saints riding out of the mountains. This edition has kept all of it, marking as the chronicle's own claim what only the chronicle can vouch for, because a reader deserves both things at once: the events, and the mind through which they reached us.

The text translated here survives most fully in British Library Harley MS 3904, a manuscript copied within about a decade of the events, whose sixty-five leaves carry the whole work — though its first page has been so worn that the opening lines, and whatever title the work once carried, are largely lost, and the beginning must be completed from the second witness, Bibliothèque nationale de France Latin 4892. That Paris manuscript served as the comparison text throughout: it sometimes compresses what Harley tells at length (it reduces the whole ordeal of the Lance to one dated sentence), sometimes adds what Harley lacks (a long tale of Duke Godfrey's feats in the bridge battle), and breaks off before Harley's final pages, so that the end of the Ascalon story rests on Harley alone. Where the two disagree in ways that matter, the notes in this volume say so. After the chronicle's closing doxology, the Harley manuscript adds a short anonymous pilgrim's guide to the Holy Places; it is not part of Tudebode's narrative, and it is printed here separately, as the appendix the scribe made it.

This reader's edition stands on a complete, newly made English translation of that manuscript, preserved separately with its Latin text and full apparatus. The translation renders every sentence; this book retells the whole but not every sentence of it. Repeated formulas have been gathered, scattered notices of one episode drawn together, and the paragraphing rebuilt for continuous reading — while the events, their order, their agents, their speeches, their numbers, and their claims remain the chronicle's own. Nothing was knowingly invented, and nothing was silently corrected.

Nothing, above all, was cleaned up. Tudebode's Turks and Saracens are pagans, an excommunicate race, the enemies of God; his Islam is an idolatry that worships "Muhammad and our other gods"; his emperor of Constantinople is a wretch and a perjurer; his God burns a fortress of heretics with everyone inside it and receives the work as a mercy. A modern editor could mute all this in an afternoon, and the result would be a lie — a crusade without crusaders. The harshness of the language is not an unfortunate residue on the history; it is evidence, the clearest we have, of what the men of 1096 believed they were doing. This edition therefore reports the chronicle's hatreds as exactly as its heroisms, adding none and hiding none, and trusts the reader to stand at the distance of nine centuries and see both.