God's War: A New History of the Crusades

The Road to the Holy Sepulchre

Count Stephen of Blois’s optimism appeared justified. Nicaea, the capital of the Turkish Seljuks of Asia Minor, the sultanate of Rum, surrendered on 19 June 1097. A month before, the still-assembling crusader force had decisively repulsed the relief attack by the sultan, Kilij Arslan, a remarkable achievement for such a novice and fragmented army. During the siege, the westerners, employing catapults, siege towers and using boats provided by the Greeks to blockade the city from the adjoining Ascanian lake, established a common fund for expenses, including payment for an Italian engineer. Faced by such a vast host, perhaps numbering 60,000, Nicaea agreed surrender terms with the Emperor Alexius, including a prohibition on plunder that was less than enthusiastically received by the besiegers. The capture of the Seljuk capital, for years a target for Byzantine mercenaries, marked an impressive achievement for the ‘army of God’, as Stephen of Blois proudly described it. Alexius had taken no direct part in military operations, beyond logistical help, but through his new vassals a large, strategically important city had been returned to his empire intact, undermining Kilij Arslan’s grip on the largely non-Turkish cities of western Asia Minor and signalling a new force in Near Eastern politics. When the emperor assembled his allies at Pelekanum after the siege, apart from extracting oaths from recalcitrants such as Tancred of Lecce, giving advice, discussing strategy and showering rich and poor alike with gifts, he arranged for a crusader embassy to be despatched to negotiate with the Fatimid regime in Egypt, fellow adversaries of the Turks, with whom he was on amicable terms. The victors of Nicaea were thus recognized as more than another western mercenary force doing the Greeks’ bidding on the margins of western Islam. Their distinctive ambitions were understood by their Byzantine patron, if not as yet by his Muslim friends and enemies.¹

This soon changed. The Damascus chronicler Ibn al-Qalanisi (d. 1160), a young man at the time of the First Crusade, remembered the ominous rumours reaching Syria in 1097:

there began to arrive a succession of reports that the armies of the Franks had appeared from the direction of the sea of Constantinople with forces not to be reckoned for multitude. As these reports followed one upon the other, and spread from mouth to mouth far and wide, the people grew anxious and disturbed in mind.

An Armenian monk, writing in Syria during the invasion of 1097–9, described the westerners who followed ‘the sign of the cross of Christ’ as fulfilment of Christ’s promise to come to the assistance of His people. Another, commenting from Alexandria in the summer of 1099, remarked on the ‘countless multitudes’ who attacked Syria with ‘Divine aid inspired by Almighty God’. The significance of these intruders became apparent. In 1105, a religious lawyer teaching at the Great Mosque in Damascus, Ali Ibn Tahir al-Sulami, unwittingly mirrored Urban II’s historical analysis in explaining the advance of the ifranj:

A number fell upon the island of Sicily at a time of difference and competition, and likewise they gained possession of town after town in Spain. When mutually confirmatory reports reached them of the state of this country – the disagreement of its lords, the dissensions of its dignitaries, together with its disorder and disturbance – they carried out their resolution of going out to it, and Jerusalem was the summit of their wishes.²