Jack Ludlow: Soldier of Crusade

‘The Bible tells us it has been so,’ intoned Peter the Hermit, which got him a look from a more secular emperor. ‘The Old Testament tells of many times when God has interceded to protect his flock. Think of the parting of the Red Sea …’

That had the courtiers in attendance shifting uncomfortably, for if they were good sons of the Church they were also men who knew that miracles were caused more by imagination than divine intervention. There were soldiers of the empire amongst them too, like Boutoumites, and they had to work hard not to scoff at the old man’s words. Alexius gave Peter a look that, if it was gentle, demanded his silence, then indicated that Sigibuld should continue with his tale.

‘The priests had them kneel and entreat before the Turks launched their assault, as if the power of prayer alone would stop them from attacking. They were still at their devotions when the first arrows landed amongst them, and packed as they were the bolts did great slaughter. It was as if the shock broke their spirit, for they set up a great wailing and gnashing, many claiming that God had deserted them. They began to rush about both in front and behind we fighting men and lost what little unity they had possessed.’

‘Easy meat for the Turkish archers?’

Sigibuld dropped his head when Alexius said that, his voice seeming now to come from the depths of his belly.

‘We could not move to break up their formations without we trampled our own people, this while the mounted archers got to our rear, dashing forward to fire an arrow then withdrawing before we could inflict any damage upon them. Kilij Arslan then sent his swordsmen into the melee of pilgrims. Many who died were on their knees begging for forgiveness, the rest began to scatter, running in all directions, which left we fighting men to face a full assault from a force greater than our own with the need to do battle on both flanks as well as to our front.’

‘How many survived?’ Alexius asked, cutting across Sigibuld.

He did not want to hear what this Lombard was about to tell him, of the butchery which followed and how it was achieved; he had fought the Turks too many times himself, had seen their mounted archers ride forward and, while still moving, launch a flood of arrows at a defensive line cowering under shields. In his mind’s eye he could see how that would, on an open battlefield, pin the defenders so that their enemy could get round their flanks and begin to crush them between twin pincers in a way that meant resistance would be flattened.

‘If there is indeed place in heaven,’ Sigibuld continued, avoiding the direct question, ‘for those who perish on this venture, then surely the likes of Walter will gain entry and glory when they do. Many knights fought on even when their bodies were pierced by the Turkish bolts and took many of the infidel with them before they finally fell.’

‘And you, Sigibuld, how did you get clear?’

That made the Lombard pull himself up to his full height; there was in the question the accusation of him being less of a man than those he had named. ‘We were still mounted and when those we had chosen to lead were slain it was obvious that no other choice presented itself but flight. The Turkish horses were blown from their previous exertions and sluggish in pursuit, but more in our favour was the way their compatriots fell upon the bodies of the dead to strip and mutilate them.’

‘How many got away?’

‘Around seventy knights.’

‘And the pikemen?’

‘They, being on foot, were less fortunate. Some did survive by throwing away their weapons and hanging on to our stirrup leathers.’

‘And where are they now?’

‘Defending Civetot, Highness, which is why I have come on here and in haste, stopping not even to remove the blood and filth from my person. The town and the remaining pilgrims are at risk if the Turks keep advancing, for there is nothing of a fighting nature to prevent it. I have come to ask that you either provide men to defend the town or send ships to withdraw the people left behind, the women and children as well as those too old or infirm to fight.’

They could smell Civetot long before any of the boats sent to bring off the remaining pilgrims ever sailed into the Gulf of Nicomedia, the great bight, on the southern arm of which the wretched town sat. Never a place of beauty it was ravaged now, the churches burnt shells and the homes of those who had lived here torn down into dust. Rotting carcasses of flesh leave a high odour in a warm climate, yet it was testament to the amount of slaughter that it could be discerned so far from the shore that there could be no doubt what the sailors would find when they set foot on the beach.

Kilij Arslan had indeed come on from the massacre described by Sigibuld, to attack a settlement bereft of any means of resistance. There were survivors, but few, the kind who had rushed into the sea and managed to stay afloat as the butchery was accomplished on land. There were also those the Turks had thought dead, buried so deep in a pile of bodies that the fact of their still breathing was undetectable, a few dozens from the many thousands to tell the tale of what had occurred, about a host who had no interest in conversion to Islam but only in killing what they saw as a plague.

There had been others who avoided the massacre: young women and boys who could be sold into carnal servitude, the few fit men who had not marched off with the army able to work as slaves aboard galleys or in quarries. For the rest they were killed; women not of tender years were of no use and neither were small children, infants and newly born babies. The old were despatched as a matter of course and the Turks had gathered those they had slain into a great mound of suppurating flesh that had left the ground around it, where their tuns of blood had leached out from the ferociously administered wounds, as soggy as a bog.

Peter the Hermit had come as well and many wondered at his silent thoughts as he surveyed the death of both his hopes and his Crusade. Was his faith still intact? Did he think, like the victims over whose bodies he prayed must have thought, that their dreams were delusions? Or did he believe these souls to be martyred and already in paradise? No one asked Peter and he was not speaking.

‘Go back to Constantinople,’ said the man Alexius had put in command of the ships, ‘and tell the Emperor that the People’s Crusade is no more.’

The Apulian army was unaware of what had happened ahead of them and would have shown indifference if they had been told — what else could be expected of a force of peasants? Many were experienced mercenary soldiers who had previously marched along the ancient Via Egnatia, as were the mailed and mounted Norman knights who moved east with them, not least their leader. Just over ten years previously the then Duke of Apulia, Robert de Hauteville, had been obliged to curtail a second bite at conquest, required to go home to suppress an insurrection of his ever-discontented barons, whose natural bellicosity had been watered by Byzantine gold.

Bohemund had been entrusted to continue his father’s invasion, and given that he had suffered an ultimate reverse, not all of his memories of this land were ones to be covered in a golden glow. The memory dimmed even more as he recalled that the deeper he had pushed into Macedonia and Thessaly the greater became the difficulties for the forces he had led, as much from the terrain as from enemy action to slow his progress, as well as the determination of the Emperor Alexius Comnenus to bring him to battle on a field of his choosing.

If there had been many successes, in the end he had been beaten by a combination of factors: campaign weariness after endless forced marches, a dearth of plunder and a lack of reinforcements added to that staple weapon of the enemy he faced — wealth with which to bribe his father’s Apulian subjects as well as Bohemund’s captains in the field. Both led men who fought for no higher cause than their own personal gain, a right his followers had exercised when he had been forced to absent himself from the campaign at the same time as an emissary, a fellow Norman in the imperial service, appeared from the Emperor Alexius laden with treasure, an act which broke the cohesion of a tired army and led to an ignominious retreat.