Alexmagnet Explains: The First Crusade 2 (The Sequel is Never as Good) · 9:12pm Apr 6th, 2014
Evidently some of you guys liked this kind of thing, so fuck it, here I am again. To be totally honest, I was expecting pretty “meh” responses all around, but everyone that commented seemed to suggest that they really liked it and wanted to see it continue, which I’m more than happy to do. At this point, I kinda wanna just get through the rest of The First Crusade and get to some of the more interesting historical events that I really want to talk about. In fact, I plan to talk about Japan’s Sengoku period next since it’s not only utterly fascinating, but it’s something I think most of you guys (read: Americans/Canadians) probably wouldn’t really know too much about, which is a shame since there’s so much cool shit that happened. After that, however, I think I’m gonna open up these blogposts (which I’d like to become a regular-ish thing) to suggestions on what topic to talk about.
Anyway, when we last left our intrepid heroes, if they can be called such, the Crusaders, specifically Bohemond, had managed to capture the Muslim city of Antioch. What follows is the rest of their story… y’know, up to a certain point. The Crusades are usually split up into several different wars, but they were more or less continuous for about 200 years. I’m only here to talk about the first bit, the time between the building of The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the first capture of Jerusalem, so roughly 300-1100 CE.
So, are you ready? No? Well fuck you, get ready. The history train has no brakes. I mean, it does, it’s all in the past so you can go as slow or as fast as you want, but that’s not really the point. The point is The First Crusade is interesting, so let’s talk about it.
I was going to avoid making any Monty Python references since it’s the most obvious choice, and incredibly lazy, but here we are… I’m the worst.
Shortly after capturing Antioch, I mean really fucking shortly, like two days shortly, Bohemond was beset by Emir Kerbogha, a renowned soldier of Turkish origin. When Kerbogha heard that Antioch had been captured, her gathered a rather ragtag army of about 75,000 men of varying nationalities and creeds to besiege the recently sieged city. In fact, the Crusaders, despite having managed to capture Antioch, had not fully taken control of the city yet, partially due to the fact that there was still a small Muslim force that had barricaded itself within the citadel, and partially because they’d literally only been inside the city for less than 48 hours. It was all they could do to get inside, turn around, and then fend off an attack the second the closed the gates.
Now, what follows from here is an interesting mishmash of coincidences and falsifications that allowed the Crusaders to actually survive this battle. See, as you may recall, the Crusaders initially had well over 100,000 troops (again, by some estimates this was a far larger number, and smaller by others), but since leaving Constantinople they’d lost tens of thousands of men to raids by Turks, small skirmishes, and quite a few laying siege to Antioch. So in actuality, they were far outnumbered by the time Kerbogha showed up with his dudes. Understandably, this pretty much scared the shit out of them. They had only just managed to capture their first major city, and here they were about to get booted out.
Jesus is getting really tired of your pussyfooting around, you guys.
Seeing that they were in pretty deep shit, a guy you may remember from the last blogpost—Peter the Hermit—who led the ill-fated Peasant’s Crusade to their slaughter but himself survived and was later convinced to stay the course and not run back to Europe—decided to offer a solution to the Emir. Peter the Hermit and Kerbogha would duke it out, mano y mano, and the loser would pack their knives and fuck off into the sunset… or be dead, y’know, whichever. Anyway, the Emir, not being a fucking idiot, knew that he had the Crusaders way the hell out numbered so it was only hurting him to fight a battle he might lose. Kerbogha might’ve been a great soldier, but he wasn’t fucking Achilles. He knew that he didn’t have to fight Hector, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to throw his life away in a battle that didn’t even need to be fought. So he told Peter to fuck off and told his men to keep the siege going.
Okay, before we move onto what Peter Bartholomew did (different from Peter the Hermit), let’s stick with Emir Kerbogha for a sec. Now, Mr. Kerbogha, as I said, was a pretty renowned soldier at the time, but despite this it was all he could do to keep his army from tearing itself apart. Each of the Emirs, controlling a portion of the 75,000 men, had their own ambitions and goals, and they would only follow Kerbogha so long as those goals happened to align with what he was doing. Unfortunately, a lot of the Emirs had the same goal: capture Antioch. So, it was pretty inevitable that they would come to blows, and, as Kerbogha feared, his army did eventually collapse in on itself and most of them went back home before they ever fought the Crusaders. This is something that people seem to forget when they look at why a bunch of poorly-equipped, tired as fuck, and probably starving and thirsty Crusaders didn’t lose at Antioch like they should have. Their victory is often attributed to something else entirely. THE MOTHERFUCKING HOLY LANCE.
THE MOTHERFUCKING HOLY LANCE.
The Motherfucking Holy Lance (abbr. as “The Holy Lance”), to give you a quick history lesson within a history lesson, was the spear that Jesus of Nazareth was stabbed in the gut with while he was chilling on the cross. I won’t bother getting into the specifics, but suffice it to say, this was a pretty important relic to the Crusaders. Now, it was Peter Bartholomew who “found” this Holy Lance in some dungeon in Antioch. I say “found” with sarcastic quotes because he was almost certainly full of shit. You see, Peter claimed to have discovered this Lance subsequent to a vision from Jesus that pointed him to where it was. The only catch being that he didn’t tell anyone about this vision until after he’d already “found” the Lance. If that doesn’t sent up some red flags, well… I don’t know what will. Anyway, the real kicker here is that Crusaders had already seen the Holy Lance. Yeah, that’s right. They saw that shit back in Constantinople when Alexius showed them all the relics he had. So not only where these Crusaders willing to believe Peter’s bullshit about a vision, they were also ready to willingly forget SHIT THEY ALREADY SAW.
But regardless of the Holy Lance’s veracity, the mere fact that they had this supposedly holy relic empowered the remaining Crusaders and allowed them to make a final charge against Emir Kerbogha’s army, which, if you’ll recall, was pretty much nonexistent at this point. The Emir, despite having lost loads of his dudes, still expected to fight a bunch of bloodied and bruised Crusaders, so he stuck around and probably shit his pants when he saw the Crusaders charging at him and waving their swords. Kerbogha managed to survive the fight and ran back to Turkey with his tail between his legs, and faded into obscurity after that. The Crusaders, meanwhile, decided to push on and a few months later left Antioch to capture a small city to the east called M'arrat-an-Numan.
Normally, the capture of such a small town of little consequence would merely be a footnote in the history of the Crusade, and it largely still is, but for one, tiny, itsy-bitsy thing: cannibalism. Cannibalism you say? Yes, yes I do say. See, the Crusaders first reached Antioch in June of 1098, and they didn’t leave until December. When they left the city, they left with almost no food, and the majority of them, by the time they’d reached M’arrat-an-Numan, were quite literally starving to death. So, having massacred the roughly 8000 people that were living there, they did the only thing they could in their malnourished state. They cut up the dead bodies, including the bodies of women and children, and cooked them over fires, or boiled them in stew. It’s a pretty horrific testament to what people will do when they starved, fanatical, and bloodthirsty. I honestly can’t really even make a joke about it. The Crusaders cooked the Saracens over a fire like they were hot dogs at a 4th of July party? How about that? No… I don’t feel good about that one either. Let’s just move on…
Here’s a picture of my cat to get your mind off cannibalism.
After the incident at M’arrat-an-Numan, Raymond of Toulouse, one of the four “leaders” of the Crusade, takes his men and starts to make for Jerusalem, presumably figuring that if they were going to crusade, they’d best get on it before they all die of old age. Bohemond, who’d been named Prince of Antioch, wasn’t too eager to give up his recently-acquired power, so he elected to stay behind in Antioch I guess provide moral support or whatever. So, pretty much going it alone at this point (alone with several thousand other men), Raymond makes his way south to Jerusalem, and captures along the way a rather important fixture.
Krak des Chevaliers (The Fortress of Knights), was strategically fucking awesome. It was just east of Tripoli and sat atop a high cliff that overlooked the only route from Antioch to Beirut. Of course, as badass as this awesome fortress was, it wasn’t Jerusalem, so eventually Raymond was forced to abandon it and keep moving on. This fortress eventually became famous for being the headquarters of the Knights Hospitaller when Raymond II gave it to them in 1142. They conducted their operations in Syria during the Crusades for years from this place, and over the past 800 years or so, it’s become the single greatest source of Crusader artwork in the whole goddamn world. Tourists and scholars still consider it an invaluable piece of history… it’s just too bad that it’s in Syria.
The infamous, and surprisingly well-preserved, Kark des Chevaliers.
Anywho, after leaving Krak des Chevaliers, Raymond unsuccessfully laid siege to Arqah. Really though, that isn’t that interesting since nothing of any import really happened during that time, so instead we’re going to move, briefly, to a little story involving Peter Bartholomew. Now Peter, as I talked about a few paragraphs ago, was famous for “finding” the Holy Lance. Of course, you and I with the benefit of hindsight can say that he was pretty much a fraud, but at the time, he had to vehemently defend himself against accusations that he was, well, a fucking fraud.
In April of 1099, a priest by the name of Arnul Malecorne (which sounds like a villain from a Disney movie) suggests that Peter go through a “trial by fire” in order to prove the Lance’s authenticity. Peter, not believing himself to be full of shit, says, “Come at me, bro” and takes the trial. Now, the trial by fire was a pretty common form of judicial judgement in the Middle Ages, and persisted for hundreds of years after that, almost until the Renaissance. There were many different forms of this trial, sometimes referred to as “trial by ordeal”, but the most common by far was to have the accused walk across red-hot plowshares (usually about 9 feet of them). If they walked away unscathed, or didn’t die three days later, then it was considered a success and they were innocent.
This is a plowshare. Now imagine heating it up to forging temperatures and then walking across nine of these suckers. Yeah, there’s a reason it was eventually outlawed.
Peter Bartholomew, when he conducted his trial by fire, managed to survive, and Malecorne ended up declaring both his visions (of which he’d had many), and the Holy Lance, to be authentic. Of course, about a week and a half later he ended up succumbing to his injuries and died, probably due to infection. Luckily for him though, he didn’t die right afterwards, so he went down in history as an authentic hero of the Crusades. I guess back then “good enough” was all you needed to become an authentic messenger of God. Good work, Peter. You get a solid D for survival. In America, that’s a passing grade.
But enough about Peter Bartholomew, let’s get back to the Crusaders, for we’re nearing the end of this little tale. Well, I say that but really this is like the end of the first chapter in the book of the Crusades since, as I said, they were more or less continuous for several hundred years. The First Crusade was merely the most militarily successful. Anyway, several months after Raymond’s successful capture of Krak des Chevaliers—June of 1099 to be exact—the Crusaders finally reached their ultimate goal: Jerusalem. They approached the gates on June 7th expecting to find it still under the control of the Turks. Little did they know that, a year earlier, while they were fucking around in Constantinople, the Fatimids had already shown up and kicked the Turks out, and the city was now under the governorship of one Iftikhar ad-Daula.
Now ad-Daula was a reasonable man, and he wasn’t looking for a fight with the Crusaders, tales of whom had undoubtedly reached his ears, so he offered them a frankly pretty sweet deal. Christian pilgrims and worshippers would be protected and guaranteed safety and access to the city. However, the Crusaders weren’t about to capitulate what they saw as an infidel leader allowing them to have the scraps from The Last Supper. Obviously, they weren’t having any of this shit. They took his peace agreement, tore it up, and probably ate it because they were really hungry. Having tried to be reasonable, ad-Duala was now forced to prepare for a siege.
The next day the Crusaders did their best to take the city by force. According to some recordings from scribes or whatever at the time, the Crusaders original plan was to march around the city under the leadership of Catholic priests in the hopes that city’s walls would just crumble into dust like the walls of Jericho did in the Bible. Needless to say, they were somewhat disappointed when they realized that priestly vestments, no matter how cool looking, were not enough to lay a city low. After that little plan failed, they just attacked the city in an unorganized mess, and that too failed (unsurprisingly). Who would’ve thought that just throwing your army willy-nilly against a heavily fortified city wouldn't work?
Surprisingly enough, not an effective military strategy.
Well, I guess luck, or God, or whatever, was on their side, because a few days later a couple of Genoese galleys sailed into port and allowed the Crusaders a good opportunity to resupply (since they were once again on the brink of mass starvation) and then dismantle the ships so they could be repurposed as siege towers. On July 15th, after several days of sieging, the Crusaders finally managed to breach the walls of Jerusalem. Godfrey, along with Robert of Normandy, scaled the walls with his siege tower north of the Tower of David, and Raymond of Toulouse, at the same time, conquered the western walls near Mt. Zion. Once the Crusaders made it inside the city, despite the fact that they were heavily outnumbered, they were able to easily gain control, their religious fervor allowing them to defeat the city guard quite handily.
However, just because the Crusaders had managed to capture the city, did not mean the killing was over. Many of the city’s mostly Muslim population took shelter within The Dome of the Rock and the Temple Mount. It’s really too bad that those places didn’t provide adequate protection, because just a little while later, the Crusaders broke into these, and many mosques, and put the Muslims to the sword, slaughtering them mercilessly young and old alike. It was a massacre on an unprecedented scale, and only got worse when the Crusaders started murdering the Jews as well. Unlike the Muslims, a handful of whom who were able to surrender peacefully, the Jews were not even given a chance. They holed themselves up in one of the cities synagogues and awaited their demise. Rather than have them all beheaded or stabbed, the Crusaders instead took fire to the building and burned it down around them. This part of the tale is unverified, since the only written account of it came from two weeks after the slaughter, but it’s a story that was told by many eyewitnesses. Regardless, it’s quite obvious the Crusaders were not interested in sparing anyone who’d helped defend the city and repelled them on more than one occasion.
After their successful capture of Jerusalem, the First Crusade is more or less over, save for one last battle that took place at the city gates when an Egyptian army of 50,000 showed up to relieve the Fatimid defenders. Unfortunately, they arrived too late, and nearly all of them were dead. By this point, the Crusaders were down to a few hundred knights, and about 9-10,000 foot soldiers. So it’s fair to say that they were outnumbered 5-to-1. The major deciding factor in the Battle of Ascalon, as it would later be called, was the Egyptian army’s decidedly underpreparedness. Godfrey, now named “The Defender of the Holy Sepulchre”, took arms and led the crusaders out of Jerusalem and towards Ascalon. Vizier al-Afdal Shahanshah, the leader of this Egyptian army, which really was more an amalgamation of different Middle Eastern nationalities including Persian, Arabs, Kurds, Turks, and even Ethiopians, had brought along with him many small farm animals with the intention of drawing out the Crusaders. His intention was to get them to want to leave Jerusalem and pillage the surrounding lands for food and water. Little did he know that the Crusaders had caught wind of his arrival and rode out to meet him.
This has nothing to do with anything.
By most accounts, the Egyptian army was caught unawares and were quickly defeated, though some say the battle went on for longer than five minutes. Of course, the end result was still the same. The Crusaders won, and returned victorious to Jerusalem, having finally completed their holy task.
And so, ladies and gentlemen, so ends the First Crusade. It was a long and bloody ordeal, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children, and it was only the first of several. After the Crusaders had managed to take Jerusalem, the would spend the next hundred years defending it against Turkish and Muslim attack, later famously defending the city against Saladin with Richard the Lionheart.
Richard, by the way, was a bit of a dick. He’d pretty much lived the majority of his life separated from England, despite being the king at the time, and saw his homeland as a bottomless money pouch that he could just pull resources and men from without any repercussions. Of course, in the real world there’s no such thing as hammerspace, and you can’t just pull money and bodies out of fucking nothing. Richard “the Lionheart” ended bankrupting the country and forced his brother, John, to tax the fucking bejeezus out of England. Poor John, man. He got stuck with all the blame for squeezing the country to pay for his brother’s war while he was just trying to keep the crown solvent. He became the butt of many parodies, including being the villain of many Robin Hood tales. It didn’t help that Richard was later held prisoner and ransomed off, further throwing England into debt.
The true hero of Disney’s Robin Hood
But anyway, enough about that. That’s a story for a different time.
Welp, that’s the First Crusade down. As I said at the beginning of this thing, I plan on doing Japan’s Sengoku period next, and it’ll likely be a brief overview, much like I’ve done here, but if there’s anything about that period that you guys want to know specifically, like about Nobunaga perhaps, then let me know. I’ll do what I can to accomodate.
Until next time.
alexmagnet out...
Gotta admit, having Lionheart to your name is pretty badass. Hell, most of the people back then weren't very different than COD platers nowadays, with nicknames and kill counts and everything. Except, well, the Crusaders probably had better hygiene.
Very informative. I giggled like an idiot through most of this, realized that made me a terrible person, and continued anyway.
Nice work, man!
1986535 And were less likely to teabag someone after they killed them, I'd wager.
1986604
Not sure if eating them is any better.
@Alex: How can I convince you to be my history teacher? I don't know why people thought words like "the motherfucking holy lance" made history informal.
1986675
Pay me. The landlord doesn't accept laughter as legal tender.
These are really good!
1986717
Damn. Wish i wasn't a jobless college student. Guess this would have to be enough.
With all the mass starvation, I couldn't help but think of The Oregon Trail. There was probably even more dysentery. At least no one tried to ford any rivers...
In any case, fantastic lesson. Thank you for it. Definitely looking forward to the Sengoku period. Considering how many video games the Japanese have made out of it, it must be exciting. Though I'm fairly certain that Pokémon were not actually involved. Fairly.
1986489
It's like highlighting. It separates the motherfucking wheat from the chaff.
For God and Country!
Putting this next bit in spoilers because it's terrible.
The cannibalism part puts a whole new spin on "Baby Back Ribs".
You were warned.
Also material support in the form of supplies, but frankly he probably just wanted to be a prince.
It's telling that the Crusader Kingdoms devolved almost immediately into feudal states that exactly parroted those back in Europe.
One of them was also "stick your arm into boiling oil."
Luck, God, or greedy Genoese merchants.
And that's how the Crusades led to the Magna Carta, folks.
Richard and his brothers were all pretty hilarious.
His mother Eleanor of Aquitaine was absolutely fascinating.
Really, the entire Plantagenet dynasty as a whole was interesting. It's funny you mention him being separated from England, since they were the French-speaking spawn of the Norman William the Conquerer and their invasions of France were all aimed at taking the French crown. For a good chunk of that they controlled the entire east of modern-day France, until Phillip II started kicking their asses back to England.
Leave it to poor John to bear the brunt of the native English noble's displeasure. Twice.