The Field of Blood Read online

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  Copyright © 2018 by Nicholas Morton

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Morton, Nicholas.

  Title: The field of blood : the battle for Aleppo and the remaking of the medieval Middle East / Nicholas Morton.

  Description: New York, NY : Basic Books, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017022600| ISBN 9780465096695 (hardback) | ISBN 9780465096701 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Ager Sanguinis, Battle of, Syria, 1119. | Sarmadåa (Syria)—History. | Artuqid dynasty, 1098–1408. | Crusades. | Syria—History—750–1260. | Islamic Empire—History—750–1258. | BISAC: HISTORY / Medieval. | HISTORY / Middle East / General.

  Classification: LCC DS99.S26 M67 2018 | DDC 956/.014—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017022600

  ISBNs: 978-0-465-09669-5 (hardcover), 978-0-465-09670-1 (ebook)

  E3-20180122-JV-PC

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  MAPS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  THE RIVAL ARCHITECTS OF THE CRUSADER STATES: BALDWIN OF BOULOGNE AND TANCRED OF HAUTEVILLE (1100–1110)

  CHAPTER 2

  RIDING THE STORM: SELJUK TURKS AND ARAB EMIRS (1111–1118)

  CHAPTER 3

  THE BATTLE (1119)

  CHAPTER 4

  FIELDS OF BLOOD (1120–1128)

  CHAPTER 5

  AFTERMATH (1128–1187)

  AFTERWORD

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABBREVIATIONS

  NOTES

  FURTHER READING

  INDEX

  For Maria and Lia

  PROLOGUE

  THE SCREAM RANG out across the barren wilderness, the sound of a man in mortal agony. Corbaran, the Turkish ruler of Oliferne, sprang up at the sound, calling for his advisers and his crusader captives. He demanded that they listen in case the man should scream again. Corbaran did not know who had made such a cry, but the stranger’s evident distress filled him with pity. Then Baldwin of Beauvais—Corbaran’s prisoner—spoke up. He had recognized the voice. It was his brother Ernoul. The brothers had been taken captive a long while before at the disastrous Battle of Civetot, during the First Crusade, but even their long separation could not make him mistake his own kin. The dying man’s screams became more plaintive and more distant, as though he were being dragged away. Ernoul was calling on Saint Nicholas and the Virgin Mary before his words were suddenly cut short.

  Even before they heard those distant cries, it had been a strange day. Corbaran’s Turkish army, along with its small band of captive crusaders, had not intended to be here. They had strayed into this stark land, which lay somewhere on the slopes of Mount Tigris, when the wind had flung a blizzard of dust into the air, disorienting them and causing them to mistake their road. It had been achingly hot, and they had made camp in a small orchard. Neither the Turks nor the Franks knew where they were, but they all feared that they knew what was causing the distant knight such distress. It was the great dragon Sathanas. They had tried to avoid its lair but had instead strayed directly into its hunting grounds.

  Overcoming his terror, Baldwin demanded that his captor permit him to save his brother. Corbaran refused. He warned Baldwin that deep in the mountain was an ancient city that the dragon had ravaged long ago. Now it was deserted, save for the beast, and no man in his right mind would seek to enter those crags to confront him.

  Still Baldwin would not be dissuaded, and Corbaran reluctantly yielded, granting his captive and friend the weapons he needed. The Turkish lord invited Baldwin to pick his own arms, and he selected a white chain-mail hauberk, a helmet, a shield, two swords with silver hilts, and a javelin. Then he confessed himself to his fellow captive, the bishop of Forez, who appealed to God that Baldwin might live to see Jerusalem. He set off on foot up the mountain, leaving both Turks and Franks grieving for him as though he were already dead.

  Baldwin proceeded cautiously up the ruined road into the mountains. He climbed for many hours into the high places, feeling the weight of his weapons and sweating profusely. Nothing but toads, worms, and snakes lived in those desolate crags. By the time he reached the summit, he was reduced to crawling on his hands and knees. At the peak he commended himself to Christ in preparation for the coming battle and called out boldly to the dragon, challenging it to come out and fight. Then, rounding a boulder, he came upon the beast. It was asleep, having gorged itself on Ernoul’s corpse; only the poor knight’s decapitated head remained.

  When Baldwin approached, Sathanas awoke and reared up, displaying the full length of its great scale-armored body. The spines on its torso bristled, and it raked its vicious talons against the rocks. Baldwin made the sign of the cross and, calling upon Christ and the saints, flung his javelin at the beast. It was a valiant throw, but it made no impression at all on the demon-possessed monster, and the shaft snapped. The dragon bellowed in rage. Far away Corbaran and the French knights heard the roar and, summoning their courage, determined to climb the mountain to aid Baldwin.

  Baldwin and Sathanas flung themselves into combat, talon against sword, in a mortal struggle. Baldwin raised one of his swords, inlaid with a silver cross, but the beast seized it in its jaws and broke it in two, swallowing the fragments. But God caused the broken blade to grow in the dragon’s chest so that it nearly burst out, causing the beast to writhe in pain.

  Baldwin thrust his second sword into the serpent’s mouth. Sathanas lurched, and the Devil flew out of the beast in the guise of a raven. Convulsed with agony, Sathanas battered at Baldwin, knocking his helmet from his head, leaving him bloodied. Baldwin then swung his blade down hard on the dragon’s head, but it simply rebounded from the armored scales. The two were again locked in a deadly combat until, with a mighty thrust, Baldwin rammed his sword down the worm’s throat and into its rocklike heart. The dragon was dead, and Baldwin collapsed from pain and fatigue.1

  The great duel between Baldwin of Beauvais and the dragon Sathanas forms part of a dramatic tale known as the Chanson des Chétifs, which tells the story of a brave group of crusaders imprisoned during the First Crusade who had to fend for themselves in distant lands under their Turkish captors. The earliest version of the story was commissioned in the mid-twelfth century by Raymond, prince of the crusader Principality of Antioch (a large and well-fortified territory situated in the coastal region of northern Syria). The Chétifs is a work of fantasy, yet, like most fictional tales, it communic
ates a great deal about its intended audience.

  This was the kind of story that would have been recited at feasts, when the guests had eaten their fill and were ready to set aside their cares to hear songs of war, heroic knights, mythical beasts, and beautiful maidens. Although the assembled dignitaries of the Antiochene court would undoubtedly have enjoyed the escapism of the dragon slaying—presumably shouting their approval and banging the table as Sathanas’s body crumpled to the ground—there was nonetheless a great deal in this tale that spoke profoundly of the realities of their own lives on the frontiers of the known world.

  The Principality of Antioch was a product of the First Crusade, the colossal military expedition that had carved a path across western Christendom (Christian Europe), the Byzantine Empire (the continuator of the old Eastern Roman Empire), and the Middle East to conquer the holy city of Jerusalem in 1099. In the wake of that successful campaign, most of the survivors took ship back for their homes in western Europe, but a small number of knights remained to defend the scattered pockets of land taken during the years of war. Their objective was to transform a handful of captured towns and cities into viable states that would guarantee Christendom’s ability to retain and protect the holy places of the Near East. Initially there were three such “Crusader States,” founded around the cities of Edessa, Antioch, and Jerusalem, and in time they were supplemented by a fourth centered on the city of Tripoli.

  These early settlers were engaged in a perilous quest, conducted in the teeth of the most intense resistance. In their early years they lacked money, troops, strongholds, ports, governing institutions, and the infrastructure necessary for the creation of a stable country. They were surrounded by neighbors whose languages and customs were unfamiliar and who were far from reconciled to the newly arrived crusaders. Like Baldwin of Beauvais, they were a long way from help, and they were seeking to pioneer new societies in unfamiliar lands. Far to the east, beyond the Tigris River or across the Arabian Desert, lay… they did not know what. There was no reason for them to disbelieve the tales told by many cultures that terrifying beasts like dragons or griffins existed “out there.” They were living on the borders of legend.

  These were also lands steeped in thousands of years of history, and the fortified cities such as Jerusalem, Antioch, or Edessa, which secured the settlers’ (known generally as “Franks”) small territories, often had roots that stretched back into the Greek or Roman era, or even earlier to the Iron Age or the Bronze Age. They were living amid the ruins of former empires, just like the mythical ancient city inhabited by Sathanas.

  In their determination to grow and consolidate their meager holdings, the Franks pursued many policies. They acquired commercial experience, learning to grow sugarcane for export, to yoke the Silk Roads from the Far East for tax, and to trade with a broad assortment of neighboring peoples. They fought wars across many theaters, conducting raids alongside the Bedouin on the margins of the Arabian Desert, fighting Egyptians in the fertile farmlands of the Nile delta, besieging Turkish fortresses in the highlands of southern Anatolia, and tackling enemy war fleets on the rippling blue waters of the Mediterranean.

  They acclimatized themselves to the world of the Levant (the eastern Mediterranean region), picking up new customs and acquiring a taste for local foods, while sharing their own western European culture with the local peoples. They displayed a forceful energy in all they did, not least in their building work: producing huge numbers of strongholds, city defenses, churches, mills, houses, shops, and harbors. These were young, arrogant, devout conquerors constructing new countries for themselves from scratch.

  On a strategic level, the Frankish conquest of the Near East essentially consisted of two overlapping phases. When the First Crusaders returned home, those who remained in the East held three important cities (Edessa, Antioch, and Jerusalem) along with a scattering of nearby towns. These cities provided the starting points for their future states, but on their own they were isolated and vulnerable. The first phase of expansion was therefore to build up the hinterland surrounding these cities, acquiring the unconquered satellite towns that would strengthen their defenses and bring enough farmland under their control to supply the food, resources, and taxes needed to maintain their armies. The most important of these towns were generally the ports strung out along the Levantine coast. These harbors were crucial to the creation of supply lines with western Europe, which could then provide the much-needed manpower, trade goods, and troops to guarantee the survival of the Frankish position in the East.

  This was a vital first step, but if the Crusader States were to become permanent fixtures in the Near East, then they needed to successfully undertake a second phase of expansion: the conquest of their opponents’ major centers of power in Aleppo, Damascus, and Cairo. Only if at least one (but ideally all) of these inland cities came under their control could the crusaders expand beyond the narrow strip of the Levantine coast.2 This was the challenge that consumed the rulers of the Crusader States for decades. It was the conflict on which the success of the Crusader States would turn, the struggle that would ultimately decide whether the Franks would expand to achieve regional dominance or be driven back into the sea.

  For academics in recent decades, it has been easy to write off the Crusader States as a doomed venture that never had any real chance of success. We know that the Crusades did eventually fail and that the Crusader States were overthrown, first in 1187 and then again in 1291. It might be observed that the Franks were consistently outnumbered by their enemies and could never have maintained themselves in the long term against such odds. It could be pointed out that hundreds of miles of sea divided the Crusader States from their major supply sources in western Europe. Historians could underscore the strangeness of the East, highlighting the efforts and ultimate failure of Frankish commanders to engage meaningfully with the complex mesh of ethnic and political alliances spanning the region, while their men and horses struggled to accustom themselves to a diet, a climate, and diseases with which they had no prior familiarity. On these grounds, the eventual demise of the Crusader States could be styled as a foregone conclusion—the crusader settlement was always going to fail, if not sooner then later.

  Such a conclusion, however, fundamentally underestimates how near the Franks came to total success. This book will demonstrate, by contrast, how extraordinarily close the Crusader States came to achieving their goals through completing the second phase of conquest, seizing their enemies’ capitals, and thereby entrenching their presence across the Near East.

  In the heady, early years of the Crusader States, commentators from many civilizations viewed the Franks as an unstoppable force, whose eventual victory was all but certain. So, far from anticipating that the Christian invaders would inevitably be driven back to western Christendom, there was a serious concern that the regional capitals of Aleppo, Damascus, and Cairo would be engulfed by marching columns of Frankish knights. So what stalled this advance? When were they forced onto the back foot?

  In any failed war of conquest there are generally two sets of turning points. The first are those key events that bring the conquerors’ advances to a halt, forcing them to shift from the offensive to the defensive. The second set are those later moments when the final structural supports maintaining the conquerors’ presence within their already-acquired territory are removed or destroyed, leading to the general collapse of their position. To date, historians of the Crusades have tended to focus their attention on the latter turning points, seeking to identify the moments that led to the final collapse of the crusading project. This book asks rather different questions: Why didn’t they succeed?3 How did the Franks’ enemies manage to halt their steady initial advance across the Near East and prevent them from conquering further inland?

  To answer these questions, this book focuses on one of the most hard-fought military struggles in the history of the Crusader States: the war for Aleppo in 1118–1128. This conflict effectively ended the Frankish adva
nce in the north. In the preceding years, the Franks had been making dogged progress across northern Syria, and by 1118 they were poised to take control of Aleppo. Possession of this crucial city would have strengthened their position across the board, giving them the resources and strategic positioning to potentially conquer the entire region. Their ultimate failure to win this struggle stands as a major turning point in the history of the Crusader States and represents the high-water mark of their expanding dominations in northern Syria.

  During this crucial decade, 1118–1128, the pace of conflict was relentless, and every year was punctuated by a persistent cycle of attack and counterattack. Nevertheless, in the midst of the ongoing slaughter, two encounters defined the course of the overall conflict. The first was the more important: the catastrophic crusader defeat at the Battle of the Field of Blood in 1119. This reverse broke the momentum of the Frankish advance across northern Syria, leading to years of chaotic fighting among the embattled factions. The second was the failed attempt to besiege Aleppo by an allied Frankish-Arab army in 1124–1125. These moments, more than any other, were the turning points when the crusader project to conquer Aleppo failed. This defeat represents the first and most important block to the Franks’ strategic advance across the Near East.

  This book re-creates this epic encounter. It begins, in the first two chapters, by exploring the early rise of the Crusader States following the victories of the First Crusade and the steady growth of Christian power in the Aleppan region of northern Syria. The third chapter then opens the great struggle for Aleppo, focusing specifically on the crucial battle at the Field of Blood, exploring why the Christians lost so heavily after years of steady progress. The fourth chapter turns to the battle’s aftermath and the ongoing struggle for Aleppo as later Frankish rulers sought to reassert an aggressive military policy in the north and regain their former expansionist momentum.