God's War: A New History of the Crusades

The siege of Antioch from October 1097 to June 1098 provided the twelfth century with its Trojan War, famed in verse, song and prose, commemorated in stone and glass, the central episode of trial and heroism in epic and romantic recounting of the First Crusade.¹⁵ For once, legend was justified. Despite the size of the western armies, Antioch presented a formidable obstacle. Although its garrison was modest, perhaps only a few thousand, the circuit of the walls, studded with scores of towers, ran for about seven and a half miles, much of it over rough, mountainous terrain. Contained within the fortified area of about three square miles was Mt Silpius, near the summit of which perched the citadel, a thousand feet above the main city. Incapable of investing Antioch by complete blockade, the crusaders’ alternative of assault offered little immediate prospect of success as they appeared at this stage to lack sufficient heavy artillery (i.e. great throwing engines such as mangonels or trebuchets) to breach the walls. A lengthy siege was in prospect, the only choice being whether to conduct it at close range or to blockade the city at a distance. Neither bore the certainty or even prospect of success as the governor of Antioch, Yaghisiyan, nominally a client of Ridwan of Aleppo, exerted much diplomatic energy to garner help. While past animosities prevented a concerted Muslim response, time lay on Yaghisiyan’s side, even though many of the outlying garrisons and commanders in the area, often non-Muslim, took the opportunity to throw off the governor’s unpopular rule, some Armenians regarding the westerners as liberators.

Less clear is why the siege was undertaken in the first place. The Christian army was ill-equipped for siege warfare; the success at Nicaea had been due to Byzantine diplomacy and naval power as much as anything. Given Turkish disunity, negotiation rather than attack might have cleared a path southwards. The warring jealousies of the rulers of the great Syrian cities were not greatly moved by the appearance of the crusaders; accommodation, especially in the context of the westerners’ hardly secret negotiations with Fatimid Egypt, could have been achieved. When, in 1099, the Christian host marched on Jerusalem, there was little suggestion of taking Homs, Damascus or the cities on the Palestinian coast. Perhaps of greater strategic importance than Antioch itself were its ports, Alexandretta, St Symeon and Lattakiah, through which supplies of food (chiefly from Cyprus), war materials and men could reach the Christian army in Syria. Tancred had secured Alexandretta weeks before the main army reached Antioch, and a combination of Greek-sponsored and western fleets had occupied Lattakiah and St Symeon before the land army arrived.

An agreed objective between the Emperor Alexius and the westerners, evident from Stephen of Blois’s comment to his wife from Nicaea, as a strategic target of the war, Antioch’s role was as much political as military or logistic. Alexius, so his daughter later admitted, had hired the western armies ‘to extend the bounds of the Roman (i.e. Byzantine) empire’, specifically, it seems, the northern Syrian principality based on Antioch which had acted as a semi-autonomous buffer between Byzantium and the Seljuks in the late 1070s and early 1080s.¹⁶ Its re-establishment would have greatly helped Alexius reclaim Asia Minor. The care taken by the Christian army to circle Antioch via Cilicia and the Taurus mountains and establish firm relations with Armenian rulers indicated such a policy. Although neither ignorant nor immune to the appeal of Jerusalem, Greek strategy held to more prosaic and customary ambitions, for which the emperor was prepared to lavish money, military aid, naval support and supplies on his western recruits.