God's War: A New History of the Crusades

In this political turmoil, where power rested with military warlords with varying claims to legitimacy, the western army appeared neither as distinctive nor as threatening as it thought itself. With the main contest for power in the Near East being fought in Iran, hundreds of miles to the east, the westerners’ targets – Cilicia, Antioch, Edessa, Jerusalem – were peripheral. As Tutush had discovered, rule of Syria counted for little against the forces of Iraq and Iran. Given the nature of their enterprise, the Christian expeditionary force rarely constituted a genuine threat to local dynasts. Despite the loss of Nicaea and defeats by the crusaders in 1097, the sultanate of Rum and the power of the Danishmends remained intact if dented. Only where Turkish authority had already eroded or collapsed – as in Cilicia or parts of northern Syria, including Antioch – did the crusaders threaten existing structures of authority. This new, fanatical, single-minded force apparently of Byzantine mercenaries fitted easily into a world dominated by armies of foreign hirelings – Kurdish, Turcoman or Armenian. The First Crusade was well suited to contemporary Near Eastern politics.

Such insights were far from apparent to the members of the expedition as they set out to cross Anatolia in late June 1097. Within days of leaving the area of Nicaea, the army was almost defeated, its vanguard overrun and nearly destroyed, by Kilij Arslan’s field army. Four years later, similar western contingents were serially annihilated by local forces, leaving merely uneasy rumours of their fate. Such could easily have been the fate of the 1097 host. The battle, conventionally called of Dorylaeum, but actually fought over twenty-five miles to the north, attracted vivid if confused memories, recalling fear (‘huddled together like sheep in a fold… we had no hope of surviving,’ remembered one), recognition that it had been a close-run thing and certainty that victory had been God-given.⁸

By the early morning of 1 July 1097, the Christian vanguard, perhaps 20,000 strong, comprising the contingents of Bohemund, Robert of Normandy, Stephen of Blois and Robert of Flanders, with the Byzantine troops under Tatikios, had advanced about forty-five miles south-east of Nicaea, reaching a valley just under three miles north of the modern Bozuyuk. There they were confronted by Kilij Arslan and his new ally the Danishmend emir. The Turkish force was mounted and probably outnumbered the western knights in the vanguard, which had become detached from the main body of crusaders under Raymond of Toulouse and Godfrey of Bouillon, around 30,000 strong, who were still some three miles away when battle was joined. On seeing the size of the Turkish army, Bohemund, his generalship skill already recognized, ordered the infantry, priests and other non-combatants to make a defensive camp, awkwardly with its back to a marsh, while the mounted knights advanced towards the enemy. Immediately things went badly, the mobile Turkish mounted archers driving the knights back to the camp, which became assailed on all flanks. Surrounded, the vanguard fought ferociously in dogged, bloody close combat, sustained by their close formation, lack of alternatives and a burgeoning esprit de corps.⁹ After more than five hours, the vanguard faced massacre until the arrival of the main force under Godfrey and Raymond compelled the Turks to break off their assault to engage in a series of running fights across the field before abandoning the fray when the Provençals, led, some said, by Adhemar of Le Puy, threatened to encircle them. In the pursuit, lasting some days, the westerners looted the sultan’s camp, seizing gold, silver, horses, asses and camels (employed as pack-animals for the rest of the booty), cows and sheep. While proving the crusaders’ mettle, the battle had exposed failures of command and the danger still posed by the Turks; disaster had come perilously close.