The Battle of Antioch, 1098

The armies of the First Crusade, marching east to take Jerusalem, came over the mountains into Syria in October of 1097 and sat down in front of Antioch: a wall they could not get over and could not get around.

Antioch had been fortified by emperors. Its circuit ran for miles, up the side of a mountain and back down, with four hundred towers on it, and inside was a garrison under Yaghi-Siyan who had food and had no reason to come out. The crusaders were perhaps forty thousand when they arrived. They had no siege train worth the name and not enough men to close the whole circuit, so they did the only thing available: they camped in front of the gates and waited to see who starved first.

It was them. By December the country around had been eaten bare. By January they were killing the horses, and a knight without a horse in that army was a poor man overnight, and there were fewer than a thousand horses left in the whole host by spring. They boiled leather and ate it. They ground bones. Men went out at night and did not come back, and it was never clear whether the Turks had them or they had simply gone. Priests and princes both deserted. The ones who stayed prayed a great deal, which cost nothing and was available in quantity.

The wall never fell. In the end it was opened.

A man inside named Firouz commanded a tower on the southern circuit, and for reasons that the sources give differently and none of them kindly, he made an arrangement with Bohemond of Taranto. On the night of the second of June a small party went up a ladder into Firouz’s tower, opened a gate from the inside, and the army came in through it. What happened in the streets after that was not a battle. It ran until morning and it did not distinguish much between the garrison and the people who lived there, and Yaghi-Siyan was killed in flight by men who had nothing to do with any of it.

They took the city on the third of June. On the fifth, Kerbogha of Mosul arrived with an army of thirty-five or forty thousand and put them under siege inside the walls they had just captured, and the citadel above the city was still in Turkish hands and firing down into it. The besiegers were now the besieged, in a city with no food in it, and this time there was nowhere to desert to.

A poor pilgrim called Peter Bartholomew said that Saint Andrew had told him where the lance that pierced Christ’s side lay buried, in the floor of the cathedral of Saint Peter. On the fourteenth of June they dug a pit in that floor and dug it deeper, and at the end of a long day, with Peter Bartholomew in the hole, a piece of iron came up out of it.

I will not tell you what it was. That is not my department, and the men who were there could not agree about it either. Some of the princes believed it at once. Adhemar, the bishop, is recorded as having doubts he kept to himself. What is not in question is what happened next, because it is the only fact that matters: on the twenty-eighth of June an army that had been eating leather for six months walked out of the gates in ranks, with that iron carried in front of it, and attacked a force twice its size.

And Kerbogha’s army came apart. Not broke, at first. Came apart. His emirs had their own quarrels with him and their own reasons to see him fail, and when the crusader line came on, contingent after contingent turned and rode off the field intact and unbloodied, and left him. By evening the relief army did not exist and the men who had destroyed it were still starving.

The dead of Antioch were never counted. Not the ones in the streets on the third of June, not the ones who went out into the winter and never came back, not the ones who simply lay down in the camp between November and May and stopped. It is the largest number on this record and it is the one nobody wrote down.

They were not uncounted to me. I do not need a chronicler. I was in the camp all winter, and I did not leave when the horses were eaten, and I was in the cathedral for the digging. I know what came out of that floor. I know every man who lay down in that camp between November and May, and not one of them is in anybody’s book but mine.