When the first half of his force was out of sight Bohemund ordered his men to dismount and walk; he wanted his mounts to be as fresh as possible for what he hoped was coming and it was a long time before that anticipation turned to frustration for there was no sign of Robert making contact, sending a hard-riding messenger to alert him to the approaching Turks. Throughout the morning they walked, exercising strict control over their horses when it came to cropping pasture or drinking, for a full belly was not an advantage in an equine when it came to rapid movement.
The sun was well past the zenith and he was getting closer to that escarpment called Jalal Talat when Bohemund realised he had made an error in thinking the fortress of Harim was too far off to trouble the siege of Antioch. So close had they come that a separate camp would have been unnecessary, indeed folly, much more vulnerable than even a small walled fort. Given cause to admire his enemies before, he was in that position again, there being no point in being upset that they failed to conform to his own tactical thinking.
‘Mount up,’ he called as he saw a rider, or rather the dust cloud in which he was near enveloped, his gaze ranging round for some way to keep his presence partly hidden. He wanted the Turks so fully committed they could not avoid contact and he spied to his side a low hill that, if it would not hide his men completely from anyone on an elevated slope, would serve to obscure their number. Riding slowly — he did not want dust in the air to alert the enemy — he led his men to where he had chosen to wait.
Robert was a long time coming, again raising the spectre of him acting for his own reputation, but eventually the ground began to vibrate with the effect of so many hooves and the one man Bohemund had put as lookout began to signal that the fleeing Normans were approaching and assured him that there were upwards of a thousand men in their wake. The lances went down as soon as the men had crossed themselves.
Now it was not vibrations but noise, a thundering and increasing cacophony of fast-riding horses, and then came the distant but faint whoops of excited and triumphant Turks, the same sound they had originally emitted at Dorylaeum. The forward element of Robert’s section, the fastest riders, began to fly past the vision of the waiting Normans and yet Bohemund held still, for his presence remained unknown and that surprised him. Surely the Turks would have the sense to divert some of their pursuers to high ground to alert them to a possible trap, and if they did they could not fail to see what was waiting for them even if it was too late to avoid.
The sight of the bulk of his men riding by, neck over their withers, was soon followed by the first Turks, nearly everyone with a sword out and looking straight ahead, until those with wiser heads could not fail to see, by a flicking glance, what was on their flank. That they tried to pull up caused confusion throughout the Turkish ranks and that to Bohemund was the time to move. He led his men out at a fast canter, trusting the conroy leaders to exercise the requisite control, and they hit the first Turkish riders, spread out as they were, almost at once.
Robert must have been looking back, for as soon as Bohemund moved he had the horn blown and his men spun round to join in, with their young leader showing good judgement by leading them to the left flank of the Turks, the opposite side to which they were being assaulted by Bohemund. Riding flat out in pursuit it was near impossible for the Turks to either turn to meet the enemy in any disciplined manner or to easily realise how precarious their position was and retreat.
They sought to fight, but the odds were numerically against them as well as the tactical situation; they were disordered whereas the Normans were in close to full control, and that was not improved when they started to go down in droves to the couched lances. If there was a leader he had lost the battle before it started, for he could exercise no command that would save his men other than individual flight and, worse for his survival, those to the rear of his leading cavalry, unaware of what they faced, came on pell-mell into the battle, pushing forward their fellows into the rapidly closing jaws of the Norman maw.
The Turks died in droves; forced in upon themselves they fought as bravely as they could, but once more, when it came to even numbers the Normans, in their physical attributes and weapons, outmatched them in every way. For every one that died, another two were wounded to become a prisoner and when the battle was done the Turks had lost so many men to both that Bohemund knew the threat from Harim to be quashed.
The prisoners were brought back to Antioch to be paraded before the walls, a taunt to the defenders to tell them that their situation had gone from sound to questionable: without the support from Harim, the Crusaders’ supplies would increase and theirs would diminish. The Turks jeered at that, so to still their mockery the men Bohemund had captured were brought into plain view and beheaded by a single blow of a Crusader sword, their heads then catapulted over the battlements.
The Turks, if they could not match the numbers, sent out a sneak sortie and caught a high divine, the Archdeacon of Metz, sharing an assignation with a comely young Armenian girl in one of the apple orchards. The cleric, clearly bent on seduction, lost his head immediately, the girl and his skull being taken back into Antioch, she to be, the besiegers were informed, a sound receptacle of the juices of Islam. They knew what that meant: she had been raped into stupefaction. Then she was beheaded like her potential lover, both their heads fired back along with contempt.
Day after day the Armenian patriarch of Antioch, an elderly man as befitted his office, was brought to the walls to be hung upside down while the soles of his feet were beaten with rods, an affliction he bore with more fortitude than those who observed his ill-treatment. Designed to drive good Christians to fury, it succeeded better than the Turks could have supposed and fired up the very people they sought to taunt to a level of barbarity that flew in the face of their stated beliefs.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
For all the successes enjoyed by the besiegers, hunger soon became the abiding curse; all their plans for regular supplies foundered on the inability of those who had promised to deliver, and that continued even after the threat of Turkish interdiction had been removed. Then there came weather that was a surprise to the majority if not those who had a wider knowledge of the world; not just rain and cold, which they thought the region free from, but heavy falls of snow that completely cut off the routes to Antioch for even those trying to meet their commitments.
Supplies by sea, even after the Crusaders had captured and opened the southern port of Latakia, on a benign wind a day’s sailing from Cyprus, were delayed by storms, and it had to be added that the island was a place of no abundance. The locals fed themselves first and no amount of payment would tempt them to risk hunger for the sake of a cause of which most of them had no notion. Foraging, from an area that had borne a heavy burden already, was producing less and less and the store of available sustenance was so depleted as to cause serious concern.
Naturally the fighting men were fed first, which meant that the pilgrims without the means to buy at inflated prices starved, and all the pleas of people like Peter the Hermit fell on deaf ears when it came to the Council of Princes. They worried about the health of their soldiers and it was far from good — disease always stalked siege lines and Antioch was no different, but if the men were weakened by hunger the death toll would escalate to dangerous proportions.
With no reinforcements coming in because of the season it was vital to maintain the numbers they could now muster and, with that in mind, it was decided that the act of foraging had to be extended beyond what would be considered safe or advisable in normal times. The decision was not unanimous that it should be so, especially given the lack of fit horses due to the need to put the feeding of men before equines, and it was this over which Raymond of Toulouse and the Normans came into open conflict.