Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 by John Julius Norwich

and an immense Franco-German force under the joint command of William, Duke of Aquitaine and Welf, Duke of Bavaria - which also included Hugh of Vermandois, who had retired from the First Crusade after the capture of Antioch and was determined to fulfil his vow to reach Jerusalem. What would have been the consequences for Byzantium if these armies had met with the success of their predecessors is a question on which one would rather not speculate; in fact, all met with disaster. The Lombards - who, soon after their arrival, had forced an entry into the Palace of Blachernae and killed one of the Emperor's pet lions - joined up with Stephen and his knights and set off under the command of Raymond of Toulouse, who had been paying a visit to Alexius; they captured Ancyra (now Ankara) and duly returned it to the Empire, but shortly afterwards were ambushed by the Danishmends and their allies at Mersivan, near Amasea (the modern Amasya). Four-fifths of the army per ished; the women and children - for once again many of the Crusaders were travelling with their families - were carried off as slaves; Raymond, his Provencal bodyguard and his Byzantine escort fled the field under cover of darkness and made their way back to Constantinople.
    The other two armies fared no better. William of Nevers crossed the Bosphorus towards the end of June and led his men via Ancyra to Iconium (Konya), which he tried to capture without success. He then moved on to Heraclea Cybistra (Eregli), which the enemy had recently abandoned, having poisoned all the wells. The summer was now at its height; the Nivernais army, half-mad with thirst, searched desperately for some alternative water supply, but in vain. The Turks, under the joint command of the Seljuk Sultan Kilij Arslan and the Danishmend Malik Ghazi, allowed them a few days to exhaust themselves; then they struck. The Christian cavalry broke and fled, the infantry and non-combatants were slain or captured. William, his brother and a small company of knights managed to escape, and hired some local Turcopoles 1 to take them to Antioch; but their guides betrayed them, stole their horses and all their possessions and left them to fend for themselves, naked in the wilderness. At last they reached the city, where Bohemund's nephew Tancred took pity on them and gave them shelter for the winter. The following spring they rode on, sad and dispirited, to Jerusalem.
    The Crusaders from Aquitaine and Bavaria seem to have suffered much the same fate. They too encountered poisoned wells and the torments of thirst but, unlike the Nivernais, they found a river near Heraclea. Unfortunately, this was just what they were intended to do. No sooner had they flung themselves into the water than the Turks loosed a hail of arrows and charged out from their ambush. As usual it was the leaders, with their faster horses, who survived: William of Aquitaine escaped to Tarsus and thence to Antioch, while Welf of Bavaria threw away all his arms and armour and slipped off incognito through the mountains. Hugh of Vermandois was less fortunate. Badly wounded in the knee by an arrow, he too somehow reached Tarsus; but the effort was too much for him and he died there on 18 October, his vow unfulfilled.
    The release of Bohemund of Antioch in 1103 was the signal for a renewed burst of activity on the part of those Crusaders who had now settled in Outremer. By this time they were fighting Arabs, Turks and Byzantines more or less indiscriminately, with occasional brief truces;
    1 Turkish horsemen serving in the imperial army.
    but they were not outstandingly successful, and in the early summer of 1104 they suffered a crushing defeat by the Turks beneath the walls of Harran, some twenty-five miles south-east of Edessa on the Balikh river. Bohemund's army managed to escape without serious losses - though Patriarch Bernard was so frightened that he cut off his horse's tail as he fled, lest some Turk should seize hold of it and catch him - but