The soldiers of the Muslim army laughed loud and long as they pictured the scene that had just been described to them. But the sequel of the account chilled them. A few days after the ceremony, ‘father’ and ‘mother’ were lynched by a mob urged on by the ‘son’, who watched impassively as they were put to death and then proceeded to proclaim himself the ‘count’ of Edessa. He then appointed his Frankish companions to all the important posts in the army and the administration.
Hearing his worst fears confirmed, Karbūqa decided to organize a siege of the city. His emirs again sought to dissuade him. The three thousand Frankish soldiers in Edessa would not dare to attack the Muslim army, which numbered tens of thousands of men. On the other hand, they were quite sufficient to defend the city itself, and the siege might well drag on for months. In the meantime Yaghi-Siyān, abandoned to his fate, might give way to the pressure of the invaders. But the atabeg would not listen. Only after a futile three weeks under the walls of Edessa did he acknowledge his mistake and set out once more for Antioch, on a forced march.
Meanwhile, within the besieged city, the high hopes of early May had given way to utter disarray. In the palace and in the streets alike, no one could understand why the troops from Mosul were taking so long. Yaghi-Siyān was in despair.
The tension reached a paroxysm just before sunset on 2 June, when the look-outs reported that the Franj had assembled their forces and were heading north-east. The emirs and soldiers could think of only one explanation: Karbūqa was in the area, and the attackers were setting out to meet him. Within a few minutes, houses and ramparts had been alerted by word of mouth. The town breathed again. By sunrise, the atabeg would pry the city loose. The nightmare would finally end. It was a cool and humid evening. Long hours were spent discussing the situation on the doorsteps of darkened homes. Finally Antioch drifted off to sleep, exhausted but confident.
Then at four in the morning, from the southern rim of the city, came a dull sound of rope being dragged against stone. From the peak of a great five-sided tower a man leaned out and gestured. He had not slept all night, and his beard was dishevelled. His name was Fīrūz, a maker of armour in charge of the defence of the towers, Ibn al-Athīr would later report. A Muslim of Armenian origin, Fīrūz had long been part of Yaghi-Siyān’s entourage, but he had lately been accused of black-market trading, and Yaghi-Siyān had slapped a heavy fine on him. Fīrūz, seeking revenge, contacted the attackers. He told them that he controlled access to a window overlooking the valley south of the city, and declared that he was prepared to escort them in. Better still, to prove that he was not leading them into a trap, he sent them his own son as hostage. For their part, the attackers promised him gold and land. Thus the plot was hatched: it would be put into action at dawn on the third day of June. The night before, in order to mislead the garrison into relaxing its vigilance, the attackers would pretend to move away from the city.
When agreement was reached between the Franj and this accursed maker of armour, Ibn al-Athīr writes, they climbed to that small window, opened it, and hauled up many men by means of ropes. When more than five hundred of them had ascended, they sounded the dawn trumpet, while the defenders were still exhausted from their long hours of wakefulness. Yaghi-Siyān awoke and asked what was happening. He was told that the sound of the trumpets was coming from the citadel, which had surely been taken.
The noise was actually coming from Two Sisters Tower. But Yaghi-Siyān did not bother to check. He thought that all was lost. Succumbing to his fear, he ordered that one of the city gates be opened and he fled, accompanied by several guards. He rode for hours, haggard and unable to recover his spirits. After two hundred days of resistance, the ruler of Antioch had finally broken down. While reproaching him for his weakness, Ibn al-Athīr evoked his death with emotion.
He burst into tears at having abandoned his family, his sons, and the Muslims, and, in great pain, he fell unconscious from his horse. His companions tried to put him back in the saddle, but he could no longer hold himself upright. He was dying. They left him and rode off. An Armenian woodcutter who happened to be passing by recognized him. He cut off his head and brought it to the Franj in Antioch.
The city itself was a scene of blood and fire. Men, women, and children tried to flee through muddy alleyways, but the knights tracked them down easily and slaughtered them on the spot. The last survivors’ cries of horror were gradually extinguished, soon to be replaced by the off-key singing of drunken Frankish plunderers. Smoke rose from the many burning houses. By midday, a veil of mourning enveloped the city.
Only one man was able to keep his head amidst the bloodthirsty lunacy of 3 June 1098: the indefatigable Shams al-Dawla. The moment the city was invaded, the son of Yaghi-Siyān had barricaded himself in the citadel with a small group of fighters. The Franj tried to dislodge them on several occasions, but were repulsed each time, not without suffering heavy losses. The greatest of the Frankish commanders, Bohemond, a gigantic man with long blond hair, was himself wounded in one of these attacks. Having learned something from his misadventure, he sent Shams a message proposing that he abandon the citadel in exchange for a guarantee of safe conduct. But the young emir haughtily refused. Antioch was the fief he had always meant to inherit, and he intended to fight for it to his dying breath. There was no shortage of supplies or sharp arrows. Enthroned majestically at the summit of Mount Ḥabīb al-Najjar, the citadel could resist the Franj for months. They would lose thousands of men if they insisted on scaling its walls.
The determination of these last defenders eventually paid off. The knights abandoned their attack on the citadel, and instead established a security zone around it. Then, three days after the fall of Antioch, Shams and his companions saw to their delight that Karbūqa’s army had appeared on the horizon. For Shams and his handful of diehards, there was something unreal about the appearance of the cavalry of Islam. They rubbed their eyes, wept, prayed and embraced one another. The soldiers’ cries of Allāhu akbar, ‘God is great!’, rose to the citadel in a continuous roar. The Franj dug in behind the walls of Antioch. The besiegers had become the besieged.
Shams’s joy was tinged with bitterness, however. When the first emirs from the rescue expedition joined him in his redoubt, he bombarded them with a thousand questions. Why had they come so late? Why had they given the Franj time to occupy Antioch and massacre its inhabitants? To his utter astonishment, the emirs, far from defending their army’s tactics, denounced Karbūqa for all these evils: Karbūqa the arrogant, the pretentious, the inept, the coward.
This was not simply a matter of personal antipathy. It was a genuine conspiracy, and the ringleader was none other than King Duqāq of Damascus, who had joined the Mosul troops as soon as they crossed into Syrian territory. The Muslim army was decidedly not a homogeneous force, but a coalition of princes whose interests were often contradictory. No one was unaware of the territorial ambitions of the atabeg, and Duqāq had little trouble convincing his colleagues that their real enemy was Karbūqa himself. If he emerged victorious from the battle against the infidels, he would set himself up as a saviour, and no Syrian city would escape his rule. On the other hand, if Karbūqa was beaten, the danger to the Syrian cities would be lifted. Compared to that threat, the Frankish peril was a lesser evil. There was nothing alarming about the Rūm’s desire to retake their city of Antioch with the aid of their mercenaries, for it was inconceivable that the Franj would create states of their own in Syria. As Ibn al-Athīr put it, the atabeg so annoyed the Muslims with his pretensions that they decided to betray him at the battle’s most decisive moment.
This superb army, then, was a colossus with feet of clay, ready to collapse at the first fillip. Shams, who was willing to forget the decision to abandon Antioch, still sought to overcome all this pettiness. He felt that it was not yet time for accounts to be settled. But his hopes were short-lived. The very day after his arrival, Karbūqa summoned Shams to inform him that he was to be deprived of his command of the citade
l. Shams was indignant. Had he not fought bravely? Had he not held out against all the Frankish knights? Was he not the rightful heir of the ruler of Antioch? The atabeg refused to discuss the matter. He was in charge, and he demanded obedience.
The son of Yaghi-Siyān was now convinced that the Muslim army could not win the day, in spite of its imposing size. His only consolation was the knowledge that the situation in the enemy camp was scarcely any better. According to Ibn al-Athīr, after conquering Antioch, the Franj went without food for twelve days. The nobles devoured their mounts, the poor ate carrion and leaves. The Franj had suffered famine before during past months, but on those occasions they had always been able to gather provisions by raiding the surrounding countryside. Their new status as a besieged army, however, deprived them of this possibility. And Yaghi-Siyān’s food reserves, on which they had counted, were practically exhausted. Desertions were running at an alarming rate.
Providence seemed unable to decide which of these two exhausted and demoralized armies to favour during that June of 1098. But then an extraordinary event brought about a decision. The Occidentals cried miracle, but the account of Ibn al-Athīr contains no hint of the miraculous.
Among the Franj was Bohemond, their commander-in-chief, but there was also an extremely wily monk who assured them that a lance of the Messiah, peace be upon him, was buried in the Kusyan, a great edifice of Antioch. He told them: ‘If you find it, you will be victorious; otherwise, it means certain death.’ He had earlier buried a lance in the soil of the Kusyan and erased all his tracks. He ordered the Franj to fast and to make penance for three days. On the fourth day, he had them enter the building with their valets and workers, who dug everywhere and found the lance. The monk then cried out, ‘Rejoice, for victory is certain!’ On the fifth day, they began exiting from the city gates in small groups of five or six. The Muslims said to Karbūqa, ‘We should slip up to the gate and slaughter all who come out. It would be easy, for they are dispersed.’ But he answered, ‘No. Wait for all of them to leave, and we will kill them all, every last one.’
The calculation of the atabeg was less absurd than it may appear. With such indisciplined troops, and with his emirs waiting for the earliest excuse to desert him, he could not afford to prolong the siege. If the Franj were ready to join the battle, he did not want to frighten them with an excessively massive attack, which would threaten to drive them back into the city. What Karbūqa had failed to anticipate, however, was that his decision to temporize would be seized upon by those who sought his downfall. While the Franj continued their deployment, desertions began in the Muslim camp. There were accusations of treason and cowardice. Sensing that he was losing control of his troops and that he had probably under-estimated the size of the besieged army as well, Karbūqa asked the Franj for a truce. This merely demolished the last of his prestige in the eyes of his own army and emboldened the enemy. The Franj charged without even responding to his offer, forcing Karbūqa in turn to unleash a wave of cavalry-archers upon them. But Duqāq and most of his emirs were already serenely withdrawing with their troops. Realizing his mounting isolation, the atabeg ordered a general retreat, which immediately degenerated into a rout.
Thus did the powerful Muslim army disintegrate ‘without a stroke of sword or lance, without the firing of a single arrow’. The Mosul historian was hardly exaggerating. The Franj themselves feared a trick, he wrote, for there had not yet been any battle justifying such a flight. They therefore preferred not to pursue the Muslims. Karbūqa was thus able to return to Mosul safe and sound, with the tatters of his troops. All his great ambitions vanished for ever before the walls of Antioch, and the city he had sworn to save was now firmly in the hands of the Franj. It would remain so for many a year.
Most serious of all was that after this day of shame, there was no longer any force in Syria capable of checking the invaders’ advance.
3
The Cannibals of Ma‘arra
I know not whether my native land be a grazing ground for wild beasts or yet my home!
This cry of grief by an anonymous poet of Ma‘arra was no mere figure of speech. Sadly, we must take his words literally, and ask with him: what monstrous thing came to pass in the Syrian city of Ma‘arra late in that year of 1098?
Until the arrival of the Franj, the people of Ma‘arra lived untroubled lives, shielded by their circular city walls. Their vineyards and their fields of olives and figs afforded them modest prosperity. The city’s affairs were administered by worthy local notables devoid of any great ambition, under the nominal suzerainty of Riḍwān of Aleppo. Ma‘arra’s main claim to fame was that it was the home town of one of the great figures of Arab literature, Abu’l-‘Alā’ al-Ma‘arri, who had died in 1057. This blind poet, a free-thinker, had dared to attack the mores of his age, flouting its taboos. Indeed, it required a certain audacity to write lines like these:
The inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts:
Those with brains, but no religion,
And those with religion, but no brains.
Forty years after his death, a fanaticism come from afar descended on this city and seemed to prove this son of Ma‘arra right, not only in his irreligion, but also in his legendary pessimism:
Fate smashes us as though we were made of glass,
And never are our shards put together again.
His city was to be reduced to a heap of ruins, and the poet’s oft-expressed mistrust of his compatriots would find its cruellest vindication.
During the first few months of 1098 the inhabitants of Ma‘arra uneasily followed the battle of Antioch, which was taking place three days’ march north-west of them. After their victory, the Franj raided several neighbouring villages, and although Ma‘arra was spared, several of its families decided to abandon the town for more secure residences in Aleppo, Homs, and Hama. Their fears proved justified when, towards the end of November, thousands of Frankish warriors arrived and surrounded the city. Although some citizens managed to flee despite the siege, most were trapped. Ma‘arra had no army, only an urban militia, which several hundred young men lacking any military experience hastily joined. For two weeks they courageously resisted the redoubtable knights, going so far as to hurl packed beehives down on the besiegers from the city walls.
To counter such tenacity, Ibn al-Athīr wrote, the Franj constructed a wooden turret as high as the ramparts. Some Muslims, fearful and demoralized, felt that a more effective defence was to barricade themselves within the city’s tallest buildings. They therefore abandoned the walls, leaving the positions they had been holding undefended. Others followed their example, and another point of the surrounding wall was abandoned. Soon the entire perimeter of the town was without defenders. The Franj scaled the walls with ladders, and when the Muslims saw them atop the walls, they lost heart.
It was 11 December, a pitch-dark night, and the Franj did not yet dare to penetrate the town. The notables of Ma‘arra made contact with Bohemond, the new master of Antioch, who was leading the attackers. The Frankish commander promised to spare the lives of the inhabitants if they would stop fighting and withdraw from certain buildings. Desperately placing their trust in his word, the families gathered in the houses and cellars of the city and waited all night in fear.
The Franj arrived at dawn. It was carnage. For three days they put people to the sword, killing more than a hundred thousand people and taking many prisoners. Ibn al-Athīr’s figures are obviously fantastic, for the city’s population on the eve of its fall was probably less than ten thousand. But the horror lay less in the number of victims than in the barely imaginable fate that awaited them.
In Ma‘arra our troops boiled pagan adults in cooking-pots; they impaled children on spits and devoured them grilled. The inhabitants of towns and villages near Ma‘arra would never read this confession by the Frankish chronicler Radulph of Caen, but they would never forget what they had seen and heard. The memory of these atrocities, preserved and transmitted by local poets and oral t
radition, shaped an image of the Franj that would not easily fade. The chronicler Usāmah Ibn Munqidh, born in the neighbouring city of Shayzar three years before these events, would one day write:
All those who were well-informed about the Franj saw them as beasts superior in courage and fighting ardour but in nothing else, just as animals are superior in strength and aggression.
This unkind assessment accurately reflects the impression made by the Franj upon their arrival in Syria: they aroused a mixture of fear and contempt, quite understandable on the part of an Arab nation which, while far superior in culture, had lost all combative spirit. The Turks would never forget the cannibalism of the Occidentals. Throughout their epic literature, the Franj are invariably described as anthropophagi.
Was this view of the Franj unjust? Did the Western invaders devour the inhabitants of the martyred city simply in order to survive? Their commanders said so in an official letter to the pope the following year: A terrible famine racked the army in Ma‘arra, and placed it in the cruel necessity of feeding itself upon the bodies of the Saracens. But the explanation seems unconvincing, for the inhabitants of the Ma‘arra region witnessed behaviour during that sinister winter that could not be accounted for by hunger. They saw, for example, fanatical Franj, the Tafurs, roam through the country-side openly proclaiming that they would chew the flesh of the Saracens and gathering around their nocturnal camp-fires to devour their prey. Were they cannibals out of necessity? Or out of fanaticism? It all seems unreal, and yet the evidence is overwhelming, not only in the facts described, but also in the morbid atmosphere it reflects. In this respect, one sentence by the Frankish chronicler Albert of Aix, who took part in the battle of Ma‘arra, remains unequalled in its horror: Not only did our troops not shrink from eating dead Turks and Saracens; they also ate dogs!