Текст книги "The Crusades. The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land"

Автор книги: Thomas Asbridge

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CREATING THE CRUSADER STATES

The First Crusade brought Latin Christendom control of Jerusalem and of two great Syrian cities, Antioch and Edessa. In the wake of these astounding achievements, a new outpost of the western European world was born in the Near East, as the Franks expanded and consolidated their hold over the Levant. In the Middle Ages, this region was sometimes referred to as ‘Outremer’, the land beyond the sea, while today the four major settlements that emerged in the first decades of the twelfth century–the kingdom of Jerusalem, the principality of Antioch and the counties of Edessa and Tripoli–are frequently described as the ‘crusader states’.⁴⁹

At its core, the crusading movement, for centuries to come, would be dominated by the need to defend these isolated territories, this island of western Christendom in the East. With the benefit of hindsight, it is all too easy to forget that the basic survival of the crusader states hung in the balance in the years that followed the First Crusade. That expedition had achieved the impossible–the recapture of the Holy City–but amid the exultant drive towards that singular goal the crusaders had largely ignored the need for systematic conquest. The first generation of Frankish settlers in Outremer thus inherited a disjointed patchwork of poorly resourced towns and cities, and their fragile ‘new world’ teetered on the brink of extinction. In 1100 the future of the crusader states seemed desperately uncertain, and all the bloody triumphs of the crusade stood to be erased.⁵⁰

PROTECTOR OF THE HOLY CITY

This problem was immediately apparent to Godfrey of Bouillon, the first Frankish ruler of Jerusalem. Possessing only meagre resources in terms of military manpower, with most of Palestine as yet unconquered and the forces of both Abbasid and Fatimid Islam cowed but far from broken, his initial prospects were bleak. Godfrey’s first priorities were to expand the Latin foothold in the Holy Land and to secure maritime communications with the West. To fulfil both needs he targeted Arsuf, the small Muslim-held fortified port town just north of Jaffa, but, despite a hard-fought siege in autumn 1099, he failed to secure its capture.

Godfrey returned to the Holy City in early December only to be confronted by a new danger–civil war. Given the contested nature of his elevation and his apparent decision to forgo a regal title, Godfrey’s authority over the Frankish territories in Palestine was open to challenge. Tancred’s continued presence already posed something of a problem, but the real possibility of internal overthrow solidified on 21 December 1099 with the advent of a powerful delegation of Latin ‘pilgrims’. Bohemond of Taranto and Baldwin of Boulogne had travelled south from Antioch and Edessa to fulfil their crusading vows by venerating the Holy Places. They were accompanied by the new papal legate to the Levant, Archbishop Daimbert of Pisa, a man driven by personal ambition and an unflinching belief in the power of the Church. Each of these potentates harboured hopes of ruling Jerusalem, as either a secular or an ecclesiastical realm, and their appearance presented an obvious, if unspoken, threat. And yet, through political pragmatism, Godfrey managed to turn their arrival to his advantage. After celebrating the Feast of the Nativity at Bethlehem, he elected to turn on Arnulf of Chocques and side with Daimbert. By backing the archbishop’s candidacy for the patriarchal seat, Godfrey stemmed the immediate threat from Bohemond and Baldwin and secured the much-needed naval support from the Pisan fleet of 120 ships that had accompanied Daimbert to the Near East. This new pact was not without its price–the donation of a section of the Holy City to the patriarch and the promise of a Pisan quarter in the port of Jaffa.

Baldwin and Bohemond returned to their northern lordships in January 1100, and over the next six months the latter bolstered Frankish authority over Syria at the expense of Byzantium by expelling the Greek patriarch of Antioch and installing a Latin in his place. However, in the course of a rather rash campaign beyond his principality’s northern frontier in July 1100, Bohemond was set upon by a force of Anatolian Turks and taken prisoner. The great crusader general would spend the next three years in captivity, dividing his time, rumour later had it, between courting a glamorous Muslim princess named Melaz and praying for the intervention of St Leonard, the Christian patron saint of prisoners.

In Palestine, Godfrey enjoyed a modicum of success deploying the Pisan fleet to intimidate Muslim-held Arsuf, Acre, Caesarea and Ascalon in early 1100, with each coastal settlement agreeing to make tribute payments to the Franks. Tancred, meanwhile, was busy carving out his own semi-independent lordship in Galilee, capturing Tiberias from the Muslims with relative ease. Upon the departure of the Pisan fleet in spring and the arrival of a new Venetian naval force in the Holy Land in mid-June, Godfrey’s reliance upon Patriarch Daimbert lessened. But before he could capitalise upon this new opportunity to exercise sovereign authority, the duke was taken ill, apparently after feasting upon oranges while being entertained by the Muslim emir of Caesarea. There was some suspicion of poisoning, but in all likelihood Godfrey contracted a disease akin to typhoid during what was, even by Levantine standards, a scorching hot summer. On 18 July he undertook the rituals of confession and communion for one last time and then, in the words of one Latin contemporary, ‘secured and protected by a spiritual shield’ the crusading conqueror of Jerusalem, still little more than forty years of age, ‘was taken from this light’. Five days later, in reverence of his status and achievements, Godfrey’s body was buried within the entrance to the Holy Sepulchre.⁵¹

GOD’S KINGDOM

Godfrey of Bouillon’s death in July 1100 left the newborn Frankish realm of Jerusalem in a state of turmoil. Godfrey’s wish seems to have been that lordship of the Holy City pass to his younger brother, Baldwin of Boulogne, the first Latin count of Edessa. But Patriarch Daimbert continued to harbour his own vision for Jerusalem; one in which the city would become the physical embodiment of God’s kingdom on Earth, capital of an ecclesiastical state with the patriarch at its head. Had he been present at the moment of Godfrey’s demise this dream might have found some purchase in reality. But Daimbert just then was engaged, alongside Tancred, besieging the port of Haifa. Supporters of Godfrey’s bloodline, including Arnulf of Chocques and Geldemar Carpinel, seized this chance to act, occupying the Tower of David (the strategic key to dominion over Jerusalem) and dispatching messengers north to summon Baldwin.

The news reached Edessa around mid-September. The count, now in his mid-thirties, was said to be ‘very tall [and] quite fair of complexion, with dark brown hair and beard, [and an] aquiline nose’, his regal bearing only faintly marred by a prominent upper lip and slightly receding chin. Given Baldwin’s quality and nature–his voracious appetite for power and advancement, his genius for hard-hearted enterprise–the invitation from Palestine represented a stunning opportunity. Even his chaplain, the First Crusade veteran Fulcher of Chartres, was forced to admit that Baldwin ‘grieved somewhat at the death of his brother, but rejoiced more over his inheritance’. In the weeks that followed, Baldwin quickly settled the county’s affairs. To ensure that this, his first Levantine lordship, would remain in Frankish hands and subject to his own authority, Baldwin installed his cousin and namesake, Baldwin of Bourcq (a little-known First Crusader), as the new count of Edessa. He seems to have recognised Baldwin of Boulogne as his overlord at this point.⁵²

Setting out from the northern reaches of Syria with just 200 knights and 700 infantrymen in early October, Baldwin travelled via Antioch and then repelled a sizeable intercepting Muslim force led by Duqaq of Damascus near the Dog River in Lebanon. Once in Palestine, Baldwin moved quickly to outmanoeuvre Tancred and Daimbert, sending ahead one of his most trusted knights, Hugh of Falchenberg, to make contact with Godfrey’s supporters in the Tower of David and to orchestrate a fitting welcome to the Holy City. When Baldwin at last reached Jerusalem on 9 November, he was greeted by jubilant and, most likely, stage-managed celebrations, replete with cheering crowds of Latin, Greek and Syrian Christians. In the face of this apparent outpouring of popular support, Daimbert could do little to intercede. Skulking in the small Mount Zion monastery just outside the city walls, the patriarch absented himself on 11 November when Baldwin was formally declared Jerusalem’s new ruler.

As yet, however, Baldwin was unable to claim the title of king; first he would have to undergo a coronation. This centuries-old rite usually involved a crown wearing, but this was not, as might be imagined, the centrepiece of the ceremony. That honour fell to the ritual of anointment, the moment when holy chrism (oil) was poured upon a ruler’s head by one of God’s representatives on Earth, such as an archbishop, patriarch or pope. It was this act that set a king apart from other men; that imbued him with the numinous power of divine sanction. To achieve this elevation, Baldwin needed to reach some form of accommodation with the Church.

His rule began with a show of forceful intent: a month-long raiding campaign along the realm’s southern and eastern frontiers, securing pilgrim routes and harassing the Egyptian garrison at Ascalon. To his subjects and neighbours alike it was obvious that Baldwin brought a new sense of purpose and power to the Latin kingdom. Daimbert duly recognised that he was better off holding on to office under this new regime than risking deposition from the patriarchal throne. On 25 December 1100, in the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem–a date and place steeped in symbolism–the patriarch crowned and anointed Baldwin of Boulogne as the first Frankish king of Jerusalem. By this act Daimbert effectively ended any notion that the crusader realm might live on as a theocracy. His submission also averted a potentially catastrophic civil war.

But the patriarch was not long saved by this concession. In the months and years that followed, Baldwin I moved with calculated efficiency to stamp out any residual challenge to his authority and to realign the Latin Church in his favour. Fortunately for the king, his most significant secular rival, Tancred, left Palestine in the spring of 1101 to take up the regency of Antioch during Bohemond’s imprisonment. Later that year, Daimbert was deposed when it was discovered that he had embezzled money sent from Apulia to fund the defence of the Holy Land. After a brief return to power in 1102, Daimbert’s fortunes waned and the patriarchal seat passed to a succession of papally sanctioned candidates, culminating in 1112 with the reinstatement of Baldwin’s long-term ally, Arnulf of Chocques. These patriarchs were never wholly subservient to the crown, but were willing to engage in active and mutual cooperation with the king as he sought to consolidate Frankish control over Palestine.

One key feature of this collaboration was the management and cultivation of the cult associated with the Jerusalemite relic of the True Cross discovered by the First Crusaders in 1099. In the first years of the twelfth century the Cross became a totem of Latin power in the Levant. Borne by either the patriarch or one of his leading clergymen into a succession of battles against Islam, it quickly acquired a reputation for miraculous intervention; soon it was said that, in the presence of the Lord’s Cross, the Franks were invincible. ⁵³

Creating a kingdom

Having secured his accession, Baldwin I was confronted by one overwhelming difficulty. In reality, the kingdom over which he now ruled was little more than a loose network of dispersed outposts. The Franks held Jerusalem alongside the likes of Bethlehem, Ramla and Tiberias, but in 1100 these were still just isolated pockets of Latin settlement. Even here, the ruling Franks were vastly outnumbered by the indigenous Muslim population and by eastern Christian and Jewish communities. The bulk of Palestine remained unconquered and in the hands of semi-autonomous Islamic potentates. Worse still, the Latins had barely begun to assert control over the Levantine coastline, controlling only Jaffa and Haifa, neither of which offered an ideal natural harbour. Only by subjugating Palestine’s ports could Baldwin hope to secure lines of communication with western Europe, open his kingdom to Christian pilgrims and settlers, and tap into a potentially bounteous conduit of trade between East and West. Internal security and the need for territorial consolidation, therefore, were paramount.

A Latin eyewitness, Fulcher of Chartres, reflected upon this situation:

In the beginning of his reign Baldwin as yet possessed few cities and people…Up to that time the land route [to Palestine] was completely blocked to our pilgrims [and those Franks who could] came very timidly in single ships, or in squadrons of three or four, through the midst of hostile pirates and past the ports of the Saracens…Some remained in the Holy Land, and others went back to their native countries. For this reason the land of Jerusalem remained depopulated [and] we did not have more than 300 knights and as many footmen to defend [the kingdom].

The perils associated with these problems were reflected in the testimony of early Christian pilgrims who did reach the Near East. Saewulf, a pilgrim (most likely from Britain) who documented his journey to Jerusalem at the very start of the twelfth century, described the prevailing lawlessness of the Judean hills in disturbing detail. The road between Jaffa and the Holy City, he noted, ‘was very dangerous…because the Saracens are continually plotting an ambush…day and night always keeping a lookout for someone to attack’. En route he saw ‘countless corpses’ left to rot or to be ‘torn up by wild beasts’ because no one would risk stopping to organise proper burials. Things had improved somewhat by around 1107, when another pilgrim, a Russian known as Daniel the Abbot, visited the Holy Land, but he still complained bitterly that it was impossible to travel through Galilee without the protection of soldiers.

Perhaps the most striking demonstration that the Holy Land had yet to be truly conquered came in the summer of 1103 when, during a routine hunting trip near Caesarea, Baldwin I was attacked by a small Fatimid raiding party that had seemingly marched into Latin territory at will. Caught in the thick of the fighting, the king was struck by an enemy lance, and, although the precise nature of his injuries is unclear–one account had him stabbed ‘in the back near the heart’, another ‘pierced through the thigh and kidneys’–they were certainly grave. A Latin contemporary described how ‘at once streams of blood gushed ominously from this wound…his face began to grow pale [and] at length he fell from his horse to the ground as if dead’. Thanks to the careful ministrations of his physician, after a protracted convalescence Baldwin recovered, but he continued to be troubled by this injury for the remainder of his life.⁵⁴

Ultimately, Baldwin I was forced to dedicate much of the first decade of the twelfth century to the consolidation of his hold over Palestine, employing a mixture of pragmatic flexibility and icy resolve in his dealings with the Muslim inhabitants of the Holy Land. He received an early boost when a Genoese fleet arrived in Jaffa, possibly alongside ships from Pisa, just before Easter 1101. These sailors had come east probably with a mind to aid in the consolidation and defence of the Levant and to explore new avenues for commerce. They brought a much-needed naval element to Baldwin’s campaign of conquest and, in return, he offered them generous terms: a third share of any booty taken and a semi-independent trading enclave, to be held ‘by perpetual and hereditary right’, within any settlement taken with Italian aid. With the deal struck, Baldwin was ready to go on the offensive.

His first target, Arsuf, had staunchly resisted a land-based assault from Godfrey of Bouillon in December 1099. Now Baldwin was able to enforce a siege from the sea and, after just three days, its Muslim populace sued for peace on 29 April 1101. The king was magnanimous, granting them safe conduct, bearing any goods they could carry, as far as Ascalon. Success had been achieved without loss of Christian life.

Baldwin then turned his attention to Caesarea, twenty-odd miles to the north. This once bustling Greco-Roman settlement had faded over centuries of Muslim rule; its aged walls still stood, but the city’s celebrated port had long since been destroyed and all that remained was a small, shallow harbour. Baldwin sent a legation to the emir of Caesarea, urging him to capitulate or face a merciless siege; but, holding out hope of Fatimid reinforcement, the town’s Muslim inhabitants stoutly rejected any notion of a negotiated surrender. At Arsuf, the Latin king had shown clemency to a submissive foe; here, in the face of such brazen obstinacy, he sought to make a brutal demonstration. Moving in around 2 May 1101, he began bombarding Caesarea with mangonels. Its garrison put up stern resistance for fifteen days, but Frankish troops eventually managed to storm the city’s buckling defences with the aid of scaling ladders. Baldwin now allowed the full wanton fury of his troops to be unleashed on Caesarea’s terrified populace. Christian troops scoured the city, street by street, house by house, giving no quarter, butchering most of the male population, enslaving the women and children and plundering every shred of loot they could find. One Latin observer wrote:

How much property of various kinds was found there it is impossible to say, but many of our men who had been poor became rich. I saw a great many of the Saracens who were killed there put in a pile and burned. The fetid odour of their bodies bothered us greatly. These wretches were burned for the sake of finding the gold coins which some had swallowed.

Not since the sack of the Holy City itself in 1099 had the Levant witnessed such avaricious barbarity. The wealth seized was substantial–the Genoese alone, upon receiving their allotted third, were able to distribute forty-eight solidi of Poitou and two pounds of valuable spices to each of 8,000 men–and the spoils must also have done much to restock the royal treasury. In addition, the Italians were given an emerald-green bowl, the Sacro Catino, once believed to be the Holy Grail, which remains in Genoa’s Cathedral of San Lorenzo to this day. Baldwin I, meanwhile, made a point of sparing the emir and qadi (judge) of Caesarea in order to secure a hefty ransom. A cleric also named Baldwin, notorious for having branded a cross on his forehead at the start of the First Crusade, was then appointed as the new Latin archbishop of Caesarea.⁵⁵

This conquest sent a stark message to the remaining Muslim settlements in Palestine: resistance would bring annihilation. Before long this notion smoothed the way to the most significant conquest of Baldwin’s early reign. In April 1104 he laid siege to the port of Acre, some twelve miles north of Haifa, home to Palestine’s largest and most sheltered harbour. Fighting alongside a seventy-ship-strong Genoese fleet, the king began an assault siege, and the Muslim garrison, isolated from any possible Fatimid reinforcement, soon capitulated, requesting the same terms of surrender given at Arsuf. Baldwin readily acquiesced; indeed, he even allowed Muslim citizens to remain in Acre in return for payment of a form of poll tax. With limited loss of life, he had acquired a valuable prize–a port offering relatively secure anchorage, whatever the season, that could act as a vital channel for maritime communication and commerce with western Europe.⁵⁶ Before long, Acre became the Latin kingdom’s trading capital.

In the years that followed, Baldwin continued gradually to extend and consolidate his control over the Mediterranean seaboard. Beirut was captured in May 1110, this time with the aid of Genoese and Pisan ships. Later that year Baldwin targeted Sidon, which for some time had been bribing the Frankish king with lavish tributes of gold to secure immunity. With the able support of a large contingent of recently arrived Norwegian crusader-pilgrims, under their young king Sigurd, Baldwin laid siege to Sidon in October and forced its surrender by early December, once again on terms of safe conduct and a provision to allow some members of the Muslim population to remain in peace, working the land under Latin rule.

In the course of this first decade, Baldwin I brought a real measure of territorial security to his nascent kingdom and forged a crucial lifeline back to the Christian west. Nonetheless, two cities remained beyond his grasp. To the north, the strongly fortified port of Tyre stood as a stubborn Muslim outpost, separating Acre from Sidon and Beirut; it survived a concerted Frankish siege in 1111 largely because its emir switched allegiance from Egypt to Damascus, securing valuable reinforcement. Unable to achieve its capture, Baldwin isolated Tyre by building fortresses inland at Toron and south along the coast at a narrow cliff pass known as Scandelion.

To the south, Ascalon likewise slipped through Baldwin’s fingers. In the spring of 1111 he threatened to besiege the city, frightening its latest emir, Shams al-Khilafa, into adopting a remarkable policy of political realignment. The emir first bought peace with the promise of a tribute of 7,000 dinars. With al-Afdal, the Fatimid vizier of Egypt, rumbling his objections back in Cairo, al-Khilafa decided that his best hope of political survival lay in a dramatic switch of allegiance. Breaking with the Fatimid caliphate, he travelled to Jerusalem to broker a new deal with Baldwin I and, having pledged his loyalty to the Latin kingdom, was left in power as a semi-independent client ruler. Soon afterwards a Christian garrison of 300 troops was installed in Ascalon, and for some months it seemed that Baldwin’s pragmatism had finally closed the doorway between Egypt and Palestine. The unfortunate Shams al-Khilafa did not live long beyond that summer. A group of Ascalonite Berbers, still loyal to the Fatimids, attacked him while he was out riding. Badly wounded, he fled to his house, but was hunted down and butchered. Before King Baldwin could come to its aid, the Christian garrison was similarly dispatched. Having been sent al-Khilafa’s head, al-Afdal swiftly reimposed Fatimid control over Ascalon.⁵⁷

Servants to the crown

Baldwin I demonstrated a gift for forceful governance in his role as king of an expanding realm. Throughout the first phase of his reign he took great care to ensure that the balance of power in Latin Palestine lay with the crown and not with the nobility. In this he had a particular advantage over fellow monarchs back in the West in that he was, in relative terms at least, beginning with a clean slate. Not having to deal with an imbedded aristocracy, enmeshed within centuries-old systems of lordship and landholding, Baldwin could shape the new kingdom of Jerusalem to his advantage.

A central feature of his approach was the maintenance of a powerful royal domain–the territory owned and directly administered by the crown. Kings in Europe might inherit realms in which many of the richest and most powerful territories had long since been parcelled out to nobles, to be governed as fiefs in the name of the crown but ruled in semi-autonomous fashion. Baldwin I kept many of Palestine’s most important settlements within his domain, including Jerusalem, Jaffa and Acre, creating very few new lordships. Frequently whittled away by the high mortality rate of the warfare-strewn Levant, the aristocracy also had little opportunity to assert hereditary claims to the fiefs that were available. The king also made frequent use of money fiefs, rewarding service with cash rather than land.

The early history of two lordships–Haifa and Tiberias–is particularly illustrative of Baldwin’s management of, and attitude to, his leading vassals. Once Tancred left for Antioch in 1101, Baldwin divided the overpowerful principality of Galilee in two. Geldemar Carpinel, a southern French crusader who had been in Godfrey of Bouillon’s service, was given Haifa in March 1101, perhaps in return for his support of Baldwin’s claim to the throne. Geldemar was killed in battle just six months later and, over the next fifteen years, the lordship of Haifa passed through the hands of three further men, none of whom were related. In this way, authority over the port consistently reverted to the crown, and on each occasion Baldwin was able to redistribute the reward of this fief as he chose.

Tiberias, meanwhile, was given to one of the king’s closest followers, Hugh of Falchenberg, the knight from Flanders who had probably joined Baldwin during the First Crusade. Hugh served the kingdom well, but soon fell foul of the region’s military insecurity and was killed by an arrow during an ambush in 1106. Tiberias then passed to a northern Frenchman, Gervase of Bazoches, who became one of Baldwin’s favourites and was appointed as royal seneschal (in charge of financial administration and the judiciary). Within two years, however, Gervase was captured by Damascene troops during a Muslim raid on Galilee.

Of course, not all of Baldwin I’s vassals met with precipitous or gruesome deaths. Along the northern coast of Palestine, on the border with Lebanon and far from the immediate reach of Jerusalem, the king created some new lordships. One of these, Sidon, he gave to the great rising star of his reign, Eustace Garnier. A knight, probably of Norman origin, Eustace had likely served Baldwin while still in Edessa, and certainly fought for him against the Egyptians in 1105. From relative obscurity, Eustace quickly amassed a potent clutch of lordships, including Caesarea and, through marriage to Emma (the well-connected daughter of Patriarch Arnulf of Chocques), the town of Jericho. Eustace was, however, an exception. On the whole, Baldwin seems to have created a loyal and effective noble class that was, as yet, largely subservient to the crown.⁵⁸

FACING ISLAM

Of course, in the early years of his reign Baldwin I could ill afford to focus simply upon the consolidation of his hold over Palestine; one watchful eye remained trained upon his Muslim neighbours, most notably the Shi‘ite Fatimids of Egypt. Their vizier al-Afdal had been humbled by the First Crusaders, but with the port of Ascalon–the stepping stone between Palestine and Egypt–still in Fatimid hands, the door stood open for a counter-attack on the kingdom of Jerusalem.

The Battles of Ramla

In May 1101, soon after Baldwin’s violent subjugation of Caesarea, news arrived of an Egyptian invasion. Al-Afdal had dispatched a large force that was now advancing on the Holy City under the command of one of his leading generals, the former governor of Beirut, Sa‘ad al-Daulah. Baldwin rushed south, but rather than seek open battle he elected to hold his ground amid the relative security of Ramla and wait for the Fatimids’ next move. For the next three months a tense stalemate held, with Sa‘ad waiting at Ascalon for the right moment to pounce and Baldwin nervously patrolling the region between Jaffa and Jerusalem. Finally, in the first week of September, with the fighting season drawing to a close, the Egyptians began a definitive advance.

Eschewing a reactive policy of defence, Baldwin decided to confront the enemy head-on, ordering an immediate mobilisation at Jaffa. This was a brave decision given the worrying paucity of warriors at his disposal. Even after summoning troops from across the kingdom and ordering that every eligible squire be knighted, he was left with just 260 knights and 900 footmen. Latin estimates of Muslim manpower at this point vary widely–from 31,000 to 200,000–and seem grossly inflated. No reliable Arabic testimony survives, but it is likely that the Franks were heavily outnumbered that autumn. Marching out of Jaffa on 6 September to intercept the Fatimids on the plains south of Ramla, the Christians seem to have been possessed by a sense of desperate determination. Among them was the king’s chaplain, Fulcher of Chartres, who later wrote that ‘we earnestly prepared to die for the love of [Christ]’, taking solace from the presence of the relic of the True Cross carried in their midst.

The atmosphere at dawn the following day was laden with echoes of the First Crusade. With Sa‘ad al-Daulah’s forces spotted ‘from a distance…shimmering in the plain’, the king apparently fell to his knees before the True Cross, confessed his sins and received mass. Fulcher recalled the rousing battle speech his monarch then delivered:

Come then, soldiers of Christ, be of good cheer and fear nothing, [but] fight, I beseech you, for the salvation of your souls…If you should be slain here, you will surely be among the blessed. Already the gate of the kingdom of Heaven is open to you. If you survive as victors you will shine in glory among the Christians. If, however, you wish to flee, remember that France is indeed a long distance away.

With that the Franks began advancing at speed, taking the fight to the Egyptians, arrayed in five or six divisions. Baldwin, astride his fleet-footed mount fittingly named Gazelle, led a reserve force, ready to attack once the shape of the fracas became clear. Riding close to his king throughout, Fulcher of Chartres later evoked the chaotic horror of the battle that followed, writing that ‘the number of the foe was so great and they swarmed over us so quickly that hardly anyone could see or recognise anyone else’. The Latin vanguard was soon decimated, with Geldemar Carpinel among the slain, and the whole army was quickly encircled.