Contemporaries and subsequent generations alike have been astonished, moved and intrigued by the exploits of the armies and fleets from western Europe successfully forcing their way into the Muslim Near East between 1096 and 1099 to seize and sack Jerusalem – which had been under Muslim rule for three and a half centuries, since its capture in AD 638 – in distant Palestine in July 1099. Searching for explanations for such unprecedented and dramatic events, excited western Christian intellectuals employed the language of theology: ‘the greatest miracle since the Resurrection’, a new ‘way of salvation’, almost a renewal of God’s covenant with his Chosen People. Others appeared no less impressed, even if their analyses were grounded in more temporal interpretations: for the Christians of the ancient empire of Byzantium a new barbarian infusion; for Armenian Christians in Syria a fraternal act of liberation; for the Jews of the Rhineland a sudden eruption of impious and bestial persecution; for Muslims, appalled at the massacres perpetrated by the victorious westerners, an outrage and a desecration as well as a defeat. Few involved remained neutral or untouched. For Europeans and western Asians, what is now known as the First Crusade seemed to mark a caesura in world affairs, easily the equal of 1492, 1789 or 1914.
The political context of these military and naval operations revolved around the invitation sent to Pope Urban II (1088–99) by the Byzantine emperor Alexius Comnenus (1081–1118) in the early spring of 1095. Half a century later, in her extensive biographical panegyric the Alexiad, his daughter, Anna Comnena, recalled her father’s motives in sponsoring the westerners, so that ‘they, being organised by us [i.e. Alexius], might destroy the cities of the Ishmaelites [i.e. Muslims] or force them to make terms with the Roman [i.e. Byzantine] sovereigns and thus extend the bounds of Roman territory’.* For decades previously, either through direct imperial inducement or through recruiting agents whose activities have been traced as far west as Winchester, Byzantine emperors had recruited western troops into their armies, in particular the Varangian Guard from northern Europeans, including Englishmen; Normans who had settled in southern Italy; and Frenchmen, most recently a contingent of five hundred knights sent by Count Robert I of Flanders c.1090. In addition to fighting men, cosmopolitan Byzantium attracted a constant stream of western travellers, merchants, pilgrims and clerics, many of whom settled temporarily or permanently, providing a context in which western aid appeared both natural and traditional.
Behind Alexius’ invitation of 1095 lay a particular strategic opportunity. In 1071, the Byzantine army had been defeated at the battle of Manzikert in north-eastern Anatolia by the Seljuk Turks who, having already overrun the Muslim heartlands of Iran and Iraq, now proceeded to impose their rule on most of Syria and Asia Minor. Within twenty years, the Turks had established a sultanate of Rum (i.e. most of western and central Asia Minor) with a capital at Nicaea, within striking distance of the Greek capital of Constantinople; and had excluded Byzantine power from northern Syria, with Antioch falling in 1084. Yet, in 1092, with the death of Malik Shah, the Seljuk sultan of Baghdad, Turkish control over the city states of Armenia, Syria and Palestine fragmented, making any support for the Seljuks of Rum improbable. In Asia Minor itself, the Seljuks faced opposition from the nomadic tribal alliance of Danishmends in the north-east as well as economically resurgent Greek cities in the west. More widely, Alexius could hope for support from the recently subjugated Armenian Christian princes of northern Syria and Cilicia and to exploit the fault lines in Near Eastern Muslim politics between the orthodox Sunnis, reinvigorated by the Seljuks, and the Shiites, whose large communities throughout the region lacked political power except in Egypt, where the Fatimid Shiite caliphs had ruled since 969. More specifically, successive eleventh-century Greek emperors had associated themselves with the Holy Places in Jerusalem, not least as patrons of the rebuilding of the church of the Holy Sepulchre after its destruction by Caliph al-Hakim of Egypt in 1009; Alexius’ diplomatic and ecclesiastical embrace included Symeon, the current Greek patriarch of Jerusalem with whom the crusaders were to co-operate closely on their arrival in Syria in 1097–8. In the Balkans, Alexius had repulsed the concerted attempts by the Normans of southern Italy under their leader Robert Guiscard to annex the Adriatic and Ionian provinces in 1085, and more recently had defeated the threatening Cumans and faced down a dangerous conspiracy against him within the aristocratic officer corps. A usurper himself, Alexius needed continuing military success and effective security to maintain his position. Success in the Balkans and disunity among the Muslim powers to the east offered a chance to achieve both, provided Alexius could recruit enough élite western troops. This task would have appeared easier with the completion in 1091–2 of the conquest of Sicily by the Normans of southern Italy. Since his victory over Robert Guiscard, Alexius had recruited steadily from his former enemies; now, with the conquest of Sicily and the disposal of landed spoils complete, Alexius could expect a further peace dividend in the form of experienced Norman soldiers and commanders for hire.
In western Europe, circumstances seemed propitious for a request for military aid. The eleventh-century Investiture Wars between the papacy and Holy Roman empire, apart from accustoming western arms-bearers to fighting ideological wars soaked in theological propaganda and rhetoric, had neutralised any threat to Byzantine interests in central Europe or the Adriatic from the German western emperor, Henry IV (1056–1106), while forging an alliance of convenience between the Normans of southern Italy and the papacy (which, despite the tricky theological and legal conflicts that separated the eastern and western Christian Churches, sought Constantinople as an ally against the Germans). By 1094–5, Pope Urban II (1088–99) had restored papal authority to the extent of being confident enough to summon a council at Piacenza in March 1095 to consider international issues such as the excommunications imposed on Henry IV and the adulterous Philip I ‘the Fat’ of France (1060–1108). To Piacenza Alexius sent ambassadors who appealed for western aid, recognising both Urban’s use as an ally and his establishment of a wide, independent network of diplomatic contacts throughout western Europe. The appeal, which, given his knowledge of the Italian Normans and the Byzantine court, may not have caught the pope by surprise, fitted Urban’s tactical, strategic and even theological sense. For years, Urban had promoted Christian expansion in Spain, as his predecessors had in Sicily. The Greek invitation, which may have included a reference to Jerusalem, matched a view that the time was ripe to reverse the historical retreat of Christianity before Islam, a belief bolstered by the papal agenda of Church reform that emphasised the need to return to the purity of the early Church in Jerusalem. In 1074, Urban II’s forceful predecessor Gregory VII (1073–85), in the wake of Manzikert and dynastic instability in Byzantium, had proposed a papally led expedition to the east to help Christendom and recover the Holy Sepulchre.
Nothing came of Gregory’s scheme. By contrast, Urban II, while not the initiator, eagerly seized on Alexius’ request to promote the new campaign as a means of secular spiritual reform and a novel demonstration of papal authority in the temporal world. At Piacenza, Urban encouraged ‘many to promise, by taking an oath, to aid the emperor most faithfully as far as they were able against the pagans’. He then embarked on an extended tour of France between August 1095 and September 1096 preaching the new war; establishing the ceremonies of taking the Cross as a sign of commitment and penitential renewal; broadcasting, by letter, legate and sermon, the necessity of the expedition and the spiritual privileges on offer to those who joined up; and recruiting personally some of the leaders of the campaign, including his representative, the papal legate Adhemar, bishop of Le Puy. Some details of organisation were agreed, such as the muster at Constantinople. In retrospect the central event occurred on 27 November at the end of the council held at Clermont in the Auvergne when Urban preached the Holy War to Jerusalem openly, apparently for the first time. However, there were other sermons, and some had reputedly vowed to undertake the eastern journey weeks earlier at Autun. Although his own exertions suggested Urban’s intention to recruit as widely and extensively as possible, the overwhelming response proved difficult to control and probably exceeded what Alexius had envisaged, although in the event his preparations coped remarkably well with the influx of western forces between the summer of 1096, when the first contingents reached Byzantine provinces in the Balkans, and June 1097 when they left Greek lands in Asia Minor bound for Syria. Throughout, Alexius proved well informed and resourceful. Given the extraordinary popularity of Urban’s message, he needed to be.
Although witnesses at the siege of Antioch in January 1098 insisted that the Christian host, despite severe losses in Asia Minor, still contained one hundred thousand armed troops, this is a more credible figure for the total number of original recruits: soldiers, women, children, non-combatants and hangers-on. It is likely that at most between fifty and seventy thousand fighting men reached Asia Minor at one time or another in 1096–7. Swelled by pilgrims using the military adventure as protection for their journey, this still represented a uniquely huge assembly when it finally gathered in one place outside Nicaea in June 1097, perhaps four or five times the size of William of Normandy’s invasion force to England in 1066. Unprecedented in scale, the armies came from all parts of western Christendom, even though they increasingly became identified in western and Muslim sources alike as Franks, Franci, al-ifranj. The first contingents to embark east, as early as the spring and summer of 1096, included forces from Lombardy, that arrived in Byzantium by the summer of 1096, and from northern and eastern France, the Rhineland and southern Germany, led by the Frenchmen Peter the Hermit and Walter of SansAvoir and the Germans Folkmar, the priest Gottschalk and Count Emich of Flonheim. After provoking and executing vicious anti-Jewish pogroms the length of the Rhineland in May and June 1096, the Franco-German armies moved east down the Danube. Although by no means the disorganised rabbles of legend and contemporary apologia, these armies found discipline hard to maintain, and those that struggled through to the Asiatic shore of the Bosporus in August 1096 met with annihilation at the hands of the Turks a month later. The fate, and therefore reputations, of the armies led by dukes and counts proved very different in outcome if not always in action.
There were five main such armies from beyond the Alps. Hugh of Vermandois, brother of Philip I of France, led troops from the royal territories in northern France. Godfrey of Bouillon, duke of Lower Lorraine, commanded the recruits from imperial lands in Flanders, the Low Countries and western Germany, and travelled with his younger landless brother Baldwin of Boulogne; their elder brother, Count Eustace III of Boulogne, journeyed separately. From southern Italy the troops raised embarked with Robert Guiscard’s son, Bohemund of Taranto, and his nephew, the ambitious Tancred. The brothers-in-law Duke Robert of Normandy and Count Stephen of Blois began their march east with Count Robert II of Flanders, who left them behind in Italy in the winter of 1096–7 while he hurried on to Constantinople. And finally, the main contingent from Languedoc followed Count Raymond IV of Toulouse (often called the count of St Gilles), with whom Urban had negotiated directly in 1096, and the papal legate Adhemar of Le Puy. Arriving severally at Constantinople between November 1096 and June 1097, and, in some cases, not without violent coercion, each of the leaders was forced to offer an oath of fealty to Alexius* with the promise to restore to him territory once held by the Byzantines, a suitably vague formula that was to cause later difficulties. In return, Alexius provided the western host with money, provisions and a regiment of troops under the eunuch Taticius, an experienced Greek general.
Once Nicaea had been captured (19 June 1097) and Byzantine lands left behind, the campaign fell into four distinct phases: the march across Asia Minor to Syria (June to October 1097), including the major victory known as the battle of Dorylaeum (1 July 1097); the siege and defence of Antioch (October 1097 to June 1098); the occupation of north-western Syria (July 1098 to January 1099); and the march south, capture of Jerusalem (15 July) and defeat of an Egyptian relief army at Ascalon (January to August 1099). From at least November 1097, the Franks were joined in Syrian waters by fleets from Italy and northern Europe; throughout, new arrivals matched a constant stream of desertions, especially at the crisis of the campaign at Antioch. In September and October 1097, Tancred and Baldwin of Boulogne conducted raids into Cilicia; in February and March 1098, Baldwin managed to establish himself as ruler of the Armenian city of Edessa beyond the Euphrates. Adversity secured unity, notably on the battlefield; success, as at Antioch, threw up divisions. Bohemund took Antioch for himself,* encouraged by the failure of Alexius to come to the Franks’ aid when they were facing catastrophe at the hands of a relief force before and after the city fell (June 1098). After the death of Adhemar of Le Puy (1 August 1098), tensions between the leaders rarely found easy resolution, and the final push towards the Holy City resulted from pressure by the rank and file, appalled at the squabbles of their commanders. Increasingly, as the privations multiplied and the odds against ultimate success lengthened, the Franks felt themselves to be instruments of divine providence. Reports of miracles and visions increased to provide a constant commentary and spur to action. Whatever else, the conquest of Antioch and Jerusalem introduced a new, unexpected and surprisingly durable element into the political calculations of the Near East, as well as leaving an indelible mark on the retina of history.
The First Crusade generated an unprecedented flow of historical writing about one temporal event, as well as stimulating a whole series of vernacular verse epics and romances that continued to proliferate for the rest of the Middle Ages and beyond, from the twelfth-century cycles including the Chanson d’Antioche to Torquato Tasso’s internationally popular Gerusalemme Liberata of 1580. The histories, many actually using the somewhat ambiguous word historia with its medieval overtones of storytelling rather than explanatory analysis, were written in Latin, and therefore by members of the educated élite. These texts circulated, if at all, among this same élite. However, some of the source material for these histories also found transmission into the vernacular epics, and some popular texts, such as that by Robert of Rheims, were later rendered in verse. With songs and oral story-telling, history and verse shared a common pool of accurate recall, memory, invention, interpretation and legend. This was true for even the earliest of accounts, none of which was other than didactic, designed to ‘justify the ways of God to men’, and all of which, at whatever remove, relied on the embroidered stories of old soldiers. The Latin histories divide into three overlapping groups: the accounts by participants in the expedition constructed shortly after the event; compilations of veterans’ tales and versions of the eyewitness narratives composed by western intellectuals in the decade after 1099; and later descriptions based heavily on either or both of the first two categories and incorporated into larger historical projects by writers later in the twelfth century and beyond.
Three main accounts by participants survive: the anonymous Gesta Francorum (Deeds of the Franks, earliest extant version 1104, but much of it probably written by 1101); Fulcher of Chartres’s Historia Hierosolymitana; and Raymond of Aguilers’s Historia Francorum (also known as his Liber, i.e. book), all finished before 1105. A fourth Historia, completed by 1111 by Peter Tudebode, a veteran who lost two brothers on campaign, while containing some unique details, appears closely related to, if not heavily dependent upon, the anonymous Gesta. Raymond of Aguilers also seems to have used the Gesta for some details of the siege of Antioch, although he is, like Fulcher, essentially an independent source. Yet another separate version of events is provided by the sections of Albert of Aachen’s Historia concerning the First Crusade, dating perhaps from as early as 1102. Albert did not go east but relied on the evidence of returning crusaders. Episodic and in places romantic, Albert, although not an eyewitness, preserves perhaps nearly as much authentic experience as the writers who saw the campaign for themselves. All these writers, and numerous other anonymous scribes such as the author of the Historia Belli Sacri or later panegyricists such as Ralph of Caen, whose Gesta Tancredi (Deeds of Tancred) dates from after 1112, worked in similar fashion. Each is a compilation, often collected over some time, of different sources or changing reflections. A number show close congruence with each other, suggesting a circulation and common dependency on some central accounts, notably the Gesta Francorum. None represents direct, unadorned memories. Each offers a view of how the expedition should be assessed and judged within a more or less explicit theological frame, even though a number were written by laymen, such as Pons of Balazun, a Provençal knight. For these reasons, the authenticity of the eyewitnesses lies in crafted invention as much as unadorned accuracy. Yet their testimony, taken with the surviving letters of the crusaders themselves,* and only slightly less prone to literacy device, muat stand as the closest reflection of what it was to be part of an expedition that was seen, by those present as well as later commentators, to have broken the historical mould, to have revealed God’s immanent power in his redirection of Christian history.
All that being so, in the present volume the main narrative of the expedition is explored through the accounts of the three western writers who went on the expedition: Fulcher of Chartres, Raymond of Aguilers and the anonymous author of the Gesta Francorum. Supplementing them, from a Greek perspective, is the Alexiad of Anna Comnena. While all contain material derived either from personal observation or the testimony of witnesses, all are literary compilations, not diaries or affidavits, and each has a particular relationship to the events described. Because of their importance in providing the main backbone of the story, these writers are discussed separately by way of introduction to the eyewitnesses.
The anonymous Gesta Francorum appears to have been written in 1101, certainly no later than 1103, although certain revisions concerning the role of Alexius Comnenus were inserted before 1105. One of the earliest literary accounts of the First Crusade, it was used by Raymond of Aguilers to check his memories and formed the basis for the histories by Robert of Rheims, Guibert of Nogent, Ekkehard of Aura and Baldric of Dol, as well as that of the crusade veteran Peter Tudebode. Although in general composed in a relatively unadorned style, certain overblown passages of romantic imagination, such as the account of dealings with Kerboga, atabeg of Mosul at Antioch, seem to have been interpolated. The first-hand accounts of military operations, such as the battle of Dorylaeum (1 July 1097) or the night commando raid that secured the fall of Antioch (3 June 1098), have prompted the suggestion that the author was a knight, although the text may equally well represent a compilation of field memories put together, perhaps at Jerusalem, by a cleric whose confidence in his knowledge of the Bible led him regularly to misquote where a layman might have checked. This possibility of later compilation may find support in the marked change of emphasis and focus after the siege of Antioch. For most of the narrative, the author’s perspective is that of the southern Italian contingent led by Bohemund of Taranto. From the summer of 1098 (roughly from the siege of Antioch), while the personal witness remains as vivid as before, the action centres on the forces under the Limousin lord Raymond Pilet and the army of Raymond IV of Toulouse in their march southwards to Jerusalem, while Bohemund remained at Antioch. Whether or not this indicates a change of allegiance of a knightly author or the skilful manipulation of distinct eyewitness sources by a third party, the tone of the Gesta is immediate, the accounts of battles as lively and as confused as might be expected from a combatant. Running through the text is a fierce hostility to the Greeks, reinforced by later additions when Bohemund used the chronicle as propaganda during his recruitment in France of an anti-Greek expedition in 1104–5. Whatever else, the Gesta is not a diary. It was composed with the benefit of hindsight, however close. The bitterness towards Alexius must post-date the siege of Antioch, when the Byzantine emperor failed to bring aid. Nevertheless, whatever the exact circumstances of its composition, and for all its literary artifice and careful manipulation of fact and interpretation, the Gesta provides one of the most compelling of all histories of crusading.
Raymond of Aguilers (or Aighuile in the Auvergne) was a canon of Notre Dame of Le Puy, the cathedral of Adhemar of Monteil, bishop of Le Puy and papal legate on the First Crusade. On the Jerusalem expedition Raymond accompanied Bishop Adhemar and Count Raymond IV of Toulouse, whose chaplain he became. In his distinctive southern French or Provençal view of events, he reflects in many instances, but significantly not all, the perspective of Count Raymond, who, by virtue of being of an older generation than the other leaders and speaking a different French vernacular from most of them (langue d’oc instead of langue d’oïl), often appeared isolated and was outvoted in council. Canon Raymond completed his Historia or Liber before 1105. He clearly had access to a version of the Gesta Francorum but had begun work on his book during the campaign itself, possibly at the siege of Antioch. Initially, Raymond collaborated with a Provençal knight, Pons of Balazun, who was killed during the siege of Arqah, near Tripoli (February–May 1099),* a connection which may explain Raymond’s grasp of military tactics and the structure of the battles he described. Raymond is alert to the politics of the campaign’s conduct and to the material conditions within the Provençal camp. He also appears firmly anti-Greek, in contrast with his employer, Count Raymond, who, after tetchy dealings with Alexius in Constantinople in the spring of 1097, tried to maintain consistently loyal and amicable relations with the Byzantine emperor. However, it is as chronicler of the manifestations of the spiritual esprit de corps of the self-proclaimed ‘army of God’ that Canon Raymond most clearly stands out, particularly in his descriptions of the visions and miracles that featured with increasing urgency at the siege of Antioch and during the final months of the campaign in 1099. In particular, Raymond championed the authenticity of the Holy Lance, discovered in Antioch by the Provençal Peter Bartholomew during the darkest days of June 1098, and which he personally had helped unearth. Raymond’s position as an army chaplain may have encouraged this attention to the morale-boosting role of the miraculous and allowed him to be more sensitive to the spiritual mentalities of the mass of lay crusaders than the aloof academic account of Fulcher of Chartres or the secular-tinged Gesta Francorum. As an unabashed apologist for the Holy Lance, he was, by extension, also one for the honesty and integrity of the Provençal clergy who promoted it in the face of growing doubts and later outright disbelief. Yet, while paying a debt of respect to the dead Bishop Adhemar, Raymond did not flinch from recording the bishop’s own initial scepticism over the Lance.† Throughout, professional credulity and critical judgement mix in a tone of seeming self-awareness that draws the reader into a narrative that retains clarity despite its detailed texture of information and scriptural allusion. For Raymond, as for his fellow historians, literal truth would have seemed banal even if at all meaningful. In searching for the significance of events within a divine providential scheme, Raymond easily employed the rhetoric and language of the Bible. It was entirely appropriate to his and his companions’ world view to describe the sack of Jerusalem in July 1099 in words from the Book of Revelation,* a natural as well as apt analogy for the culminating moments of an experience that from inception to fulfilment remained not wholly but centrally a religious exercise.
By virtue of his education, probably at the great cathedral school of Chartres,† and his close proximity to a number of northern French leaders of the First Crusade, Fulcher of Chartres (1059–c.1128), while not free from errors and inventions, provides perhaps the clearest, coolest and best-organised account of the First Crusade. The first redaction of his Historia was probably begun in 1101 and completed before 1105; a second redaction was completed in 1124 which he continued to 1127. Initially attached to the armies of Count Stephen of Blois (also count of Chartres) and his brother-in-law Duke Robert of Normandy, for reasons unknown Fulcher left the main army on 17 October 1097 just south of Marash in northern Syria to go with Baldwin of Boulogne on his adventure eastwards to Tell Bashir and Edessa.‡ Fulcher stayed at Edessa until he accompanied Baldwin on his pilgrimage to Jerusalem at Christmas 1099. Thus Fulcher was not an eyewitness to the events at Antioch in 1097–8, the siege of Jerusalem§ or the battle of Ascalon (July–August 1099),¶ relying for his none the less detailed account of these events on other sources, including the Gesta Francorum, Raymond of Aguilers and other materials, including the letter apparently from the leaders of the crusade to the pope.** From November 1100, when Baldwin of Boulogne arrived at Jerusalem to assume the rule of the kingdom after the death of his brother Godfrey the previous July, Fulcher lived in the Holy City, remaining as Baldwin I’s chaplain until the king’s death in 1118 and then possibly becoming prior of the Mount of Olives. Thus he was in a good position to check his details of the part of the crusade for which he was absent, as well as being well placed to describe the first generation of the new Latin kingdom of Jerusalem in the second and third books of his Historia.* Beside his didactic purpose shared with other histories of the Jerusalem campaign, Fulcher wrote from the perspective of a follower, first of Count Stephen and Duke Robert and then as an apologist for Baldwin and, by extension, his family, including his brothers Godfrey de Bouillon and Count Eustace of Boulogne. The sustained detail and precision of the dates Fulcher includes in his description of the northern princes’ march through Italy and across the Balkans in 1096–7 may indicate that he kept some sort of diary or chronological aide-mémoire. If so, he may have already been contemplating a record of the expedition, perhaps at the invitation of his leaders. By the time he compiled his history after 1100, Fulcher also appeared eager to attract colonists to the beleaguered Frankish garrison in Jerusalem; this may colour his version of Urban II’s Clermont address which avoids specific mention of the goal of Jerusalem but talks more generally about aiding the eastern Church. Partly because of this priority to make journeying east, as soldiers, pilgrims or settlers, appealing, Fulcher tended to gloss over certain conflicts that marked the First Crusade, such as the rows over the oath to Alexius and relations with the Greeks generally in 1097–8 or the divisions amongst the leadership over Antioch and the march into Palestine in 1098–9. This draining away of controversy to leave political blandness may arouse suspicion, especially when contrasted with the overt and robust partisanship of the Gesta and Raymond of Aguilers.
Anna Comnena (1083–1153) was the eldest child of Alexius I Comnenus, Byzantine emperor 1081–1118. Her encomiastic biography of her father, the Alexiad, incorporating an unfinished history by her husband Nicephorus Bryennius (d. c.1137), was not completed until the late 1140s, possibly even after the Second Crusade (1147–8) had once again disrupted Byzantine political life. Anna’s obvious partisanship in favour of her father was matched by her disapproval of his successors, her younger brother John II (1118–43) and nephew Manuel I (1143–80), not least the latter’s periodically pro-western policies. Shortly after John’s accession she and her husband had been involved in a conspiracy to remove him, its failure leading to Anna’s political exile in a convent; she later complained that she had been denied access to her father’s friends for the next thirty years. Beneath a very traditional Greek literary style lurk political resentment and a fierce desire to exonerate her father’s actions in tacit opposition to those of his heirs.
This is especially evident in her account of the First Crusade, which she may have seen passing through Constantinople in 1096–7 as a young teenage girl. Anna attempted to exonerate Alexius from all responsibility for a western military expedition that resulted in a long conflict over the ownership of Antioch and, in some eyes, led to sustained damage to Byzantine interests, authority and diplomacy in the eastern Mediterranean. If she wrote during or just after the Second Crusade, her strictures on the untrustworthiness of westerners would have been lent added resonance and topicality. For all her apparent fullness and sophistication, perhaps because of them, Anna is a most disingenuous and mendacious witness. Her main objective was to undermine the character and honesty of the Franks, treating them as at best misguided, childlike enthusiasts, and at worst deceitful, greedy barbarians, a permanent threat to the empire, in order to remove blame from her father for the débâcle at Antioch in 1098, when the emperor’s failure to relieve the city was held by Bohemund and his successors to have dissolved the bond of fealty established between the crusaders and Alexius by the oaths exchanged at Constantinople in 1096–7. Throughout, Alexius is portrayed as wise, patient, long-suffering, compassionate and skilful, whereas it might be thought that he had miscalculated in summoning the crusaders in the first place and had thereafter been outmanoeuvred by Bohemund over Antioch. Instead of being a tribute to his power, the First Crusade exposed Alexius’ limitations, which Anna wishes to disguise or conceal. Therefore Anna’s account of the negotiations between the Franks and the emperor cannot be taken as other than special pleading.
In the main course of the campaign after the siege of Nicaea Anna is hardly interested, and her history of it descends into fragmented error once Antioch has been taken. Although the western sources demonstrate Bohemund’s willingness to cooperate with Alexius at Constantinople, he is shown to harbour a thinly disguised hostile intent throughout, making him the epitome of the treacherous western barbarian. Yet western martial qualities had been highly fashionable at Alexius’ court, a paradox Anna memorably captured in her justly famous description of Bohemund – whom as a girl she may have seen – inserted in her account of the treaty of Devol in 1108. Whether true to life or a vivid stereotype, the image is impressive:
Bohemund’s appearance was, to put it briefly, unlike that of any other man seen in those days in the Roman world,* whether Greek or barbarian. The sight of him inspired admiration, the mention of his name terror. I will describe in detail the barbarian’s characteristics. His stature was such that he towered almost a full cubit† over the tallest men. He was slender of waist and flanks, with broad shoulders and chest, strong in the arms; in general he was neither taper of form nor heavily built and fleshy, but perfectly proportioned. His hands were large, he had a good firm stance, and his neck and back were compact. If to the accurate and meticulous observer he appeared to stoop slightly, that was not caused by any weakness of the vertebrae of the lower spine, but presumably there was some malformation there from birth. The skin all over his body was very white, except for his face, which was both white and red. His hair was lightish-brown and not as long as that of other barbarians (that is, it did not hang on his shoulders); in fact, the man had no great predilection for long hair, but cut his short, to the ears. Whether his beard was red or of any other colour I cannot say, for the razor had attacked it, leaving his chin smoother than any marble. However, it appeared to be red. His eyes were light blue and gave some hint of the man’s spirit and dignity. He breathed freely through nostrils that were broad, worthy of his chest and a fine outlet for the breath that came in gusts from his lungs. There was a certain charm about him, but it was somewhat dimmed by the alarm his person as a whole inspired; there was a hard, savage quality in his whole aspect, due, I suppose, to his great stature and his eyes; even his laugh sounded like a threat to others. Such was his constitution, mental and physical, that in him both courage and love were armed, both ready for combat. His arrogance was everywhere manifest; he was cunning, too, taking refuge quickly in any opportunism. His words were carefully phrased and the replies he gave were regularly ambiguous. Only one man, the emperor, could defeat an adversary of such character, an adversary as great as Bohemund; he did it through luck, through eloquence, and through the other advantages that nature had given him.*
As an eyewitness, Anna leaves much to be desired. However, her husband Nicephorus Bryennius had played an active part in events at Constantinople in 1096–7;† she may have had access to other reminiscences; her information on the campaign from Nicaea to Antioch could conceivably have been derived from Taticius or her father’s friend, George Palaeologus, who certainly provided her with information about Alexius and was with the emperor at the time; and she seems to have used some imperial archives. Although not to be looked at for impartial accuracy, Anna’s perspective remains an authentic representation of one strand of Byzantine response to the western incursions into the Greek sphere of influence produced by the unprecedentedly large and uncontrolled eruption of the First Crusade that, half a century later, retained the power to anger, alarm and astonish.
For specific episodes a wider circle of evidence is brought to bear in shorter extracts which are introduced and discussed as they appear in the general narrative. Thus letters of Urban II provide a frame for the preaching of 1095–6, as do those of the crusaders themselves for the attempts of those involved to understand what was happening to and around them. Other chronicle accounts, such as those of Robert of Rheims and Guibert of Nogent, contain direct evidence for only part of the story, such as the preparations of 1096, but, thereafter writing at second or third hand, do not compare with the four central narratives for the bulk of the enterprise. Albert of Aachen, also not a participant, relied on the evidence of veterans except for his vivid account of Peter the Hermit, the impact of whose preaching through country near Albert’s home lingered in the local imagination. The experiences of the crusaders’ victims find voice in a wholly different range of material, the Hebrew accounts of the Jewish massacres of 1096, the Syrian Arabic responses to the western invaders or the correspondence between the remnants of the Jerusalem Jewish community and their co-religionists in Egypt after the Holy War had run its violent course.* These corroborative, contradictory or unique sources expand and define the longer narratives of the four main accounts of what we call, but they did not, the First Crusade.
CHRISTOPHER TYERMAN