Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [106]
The Westerners found that the armored knight was not invulnerable. After the First Crusade, a local ruler held a trial combat between champions. In the tourney the Western knight charged his opponent with a heavy spear, aiming at his exposed chest. The Syrian faris threw a javelin into the shoulder muscle of the knight’s horse, causing it to stumble and crash to the ground. The knight was thrown off, but before he could get to his feet, the Arab had knocked him prostrate with his war hammer, and then jumped down to prick the Westerner’s exposed throat with his sword. At that point the mock combat was stopped. However, the Arabs and Turks quickly realized that these men were not like the Byzantines, whom they knew from many battles. An image of these powerful Franks (Franj in Arabic) surfaced in Arabic literature. They appeared as huge clean-shaven men “like leftovers from the race of Ad” or not men at all. They carried stout broad-headed lances or spears of tempered steel.35 The reckless courage and determination of the knights was incomprehensible to their Muslim peers. Usāmah ibn Munqidh, the Muslim paladin, tells a story of eight Arab warriors who met a single Crusader horseman. He demanded that they give him their camels. They cursed him and refused. One by one he killed or disabled four of them. Then he demanded the camels again, saying, “Otherwise I shall annihilate you.” Then he divided the eight camels and led four away. “He drove his four under our very eyes, for we were helpless with regard to him and had no hope for him. Thus he returned with his booty; and he was only one while we were eight men.”36
The first battle of the Crusade clearly showed how dangerous the Western style of war could be to much larger Eastern armies. The Crusaders besieged the town of Nicaea, which had been the fatal lure for the People’s Crusade. On June 16, 1097, the Seljuq sultan, Kilij Arslan, sent his best troops to relieve the garrison defending the chief city of his domain. The Turks descended from the high surrounding hills, shouting their battle cries and banging on drums. A thin line of Crusaders stood between the Turks and the ramparts of the city. Kilij Arslan’s men rushed at the city’s main gate, expecting to brush the Westerners aside. To their surprise, as they pushed forward, a column of Crusaders struck them a stunning blow to their flank. The Orientalist nineteenth-century painting of the battle by Henri Serrur is highly romanticized, but it captures the sense of a savage melee, with the knights steadily hacking their enemies asunder. In a battle that lasted from dawn to dusk, Kilij Arslan learned the devastating power of the long spears and heavy swords of the Westerners.
The Crusaders, for their part, soon learned to respect the accuracy and rapid fire of the Turkish archers. Little over a month after the fall of Nicaea, the Turks ambushed a Crusader column on its way to the old Roman road junction at Dorylaeum. They killed or wounded many Westerners, but the survivors regrouped, fought back, and then slaughtered the Turks. However great their losses, nothing halted the slow advance of the Crusaders. As they ran out of supplies and the horses died, the knights ended up riding oxen. But still they marched on. They made a huge sweep east and then south, over deserts and across mountains; they were losing men daily, but by October 1097 they stood before the huge city of Antioch, the key to the Levant. A massive urban sprawl, Antioch covered a plain almost three miles long and a mile wide between the river Orontes and Mount Silpius, where the Lebanon and the Taurus mountain ranges meet. Its long lines of ramparts followed the contours of the land, without any obvious weak points. Above the city walls stood a strongly fortified citadel. All through the winter the Crusaders camped before these impenetrable walls, suffering daily the sorties of the city’s defenders. However, the halt before Antioch allowed them to replenish their supplies. Fleets of ships brought food and equipment from Cyprus.