God's War: A New History of the Crusades

Nonetheless, even if conditions had not in reality become more difficult, perceptions may have altered. The First Crusade did not open up the Near East to westerners. There is more and more evidence that Asia Minor as well as the Balkan areas of the Byzantine empire were crawling with French, Italians and Germans. Large numbers of south Italian Normans had entered and stayed in the service of Alexius I after the failure of the Norman campaign against him in the Balkans in 1081. When Bohemund and his force arrived in Byzantium in 1097, they were among friends and relations. Many in the post-Conquest Anglo-Saxon aristocratic diaspora had found their way into the imperial Varangian guard. The Greeks positively encouraged western knights to enter imperial employment, such was their admiration of western military tactics: this enthusiasm helped lose them the battle of Manzikert against the Seljuk Turks in 1071, when western levies under the Norman Roussel of Bailleul deserted. The pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the late 1080s of Robert the Frisian, count of Flanders, led to his sending Alexius a force of 500 knights around 1090: his son, Robert, was one of the leaders of the 1096 expedition. By the early 1090s Alexius may have been employing thousands of western troops in Asia Minor, for whom he constructed at least one base, at Kibotos, and possibly planned another, at Nicomedia, under the supervision of a Frankish monk. Western clerics as well as soldiers and pilgrims were apparently familiar figures at the Byzantine court, some of whom also made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. After the final conquest and settlement of Sicily in 1092, a process to which Alexius paid close attention, Norman troops were more available than for a generation. While after the Council of Piacenza, Urban II looked northwards, Alexius’s gaze may have been resting firmly on the south, as it had for over a decade.

Almost at every step of their journey, the armies of 1096 to 1099 encountered expatriate westerners. When Bohemund’s nephew, Tancred, arrived at Adana in Cilicia in September 1097, he found a Burgundian, Welf, already in occupation with a force of Armenians. At Tarsus in the same month, Baldwin of Boulogne encountered a fleet of Flemish and Frisian pirates who claimed to have been plying their trade in those waters for eight years.⁵¹ More sensationally, after the Christian army had invested Jerusalem on 7 June 1099, in his camp facing the Damascus Gate, Duke Robert of Normandy received an unexpected visit from a fellow countryman living locally who offered his services to his natural lord. Twenty-two years before, Hugh Bunel had committed one of the most notorious murders of the day when he decapitated Mabel of Bellême at her castle of Bures, ‘where she was relaxing in bed after a bath’, this in revenge for her seizing his patrimony. Pursued by Mabel’s sons, William the Conqueror’s agents and bounty-hunters, Hugh had fled to Apulia, then Sicily, then Byzantium before, fearful of William’s ‘strong hand and long arm, he left the Latin world’. He had lived among Muslims for twenty years when the crusaders arrived at the walls of Jerusalem.⁵²