Ricardolindo
Well-known member
- Location
- Portugal
The First Crusade could have been destroyed at Antioch. What if it was? Would the concept of the Crusades, in general, or of the Levant Crusades, specifically, have been discredited?
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First Crusade defeated
- Thread starter Ricardolindo
- Start date
Ricardolindo
Well-known member
- Location
- Portugal
So, does anyone else have any thoughts on this? I should specify that Kerbogha could have destroyed the Crusade army.
heraclius
Well-known member
- Location
- New Forest, Hampshire, England, UK
The Crusaders , camped outside the strongly-walled Antioch which was still held by a Seljuk garrison under general Yaghi-Siyan, only managed to get inside and take the city (via secret contacts with the defenders of one of the towers on the walls, possibly local 'Eastern rite' Christian vassals of the Seljuks) two to three days before Kerbogha's large relieving army arrived outside. If they had not done so they would have been trapped in their camp on the plain outside A, and either had to fight the Seljuks immediately or else retreat down the River Orontes to the port of St Simeon (which they held) to gain time. As it happened , the fall of A gave them the protection of the city walls , presumably supplies and weapons seized from the city garrison, and time to rally and to build up morale and they could emerge to fight at a time of their choosing - three weeks later. The discovery of the alleged 'Holy Lance ' relic that had been used to wound Christ at the Crucifixion, found under the floor of the cathedral after a claimed 'revelation in a dream' to one of the Crusaders , also improved morale by showing 'Divine approval' for their cause.
Lacking one or all of these factors, defeat by the large mixed infantry and cavalry army which Kerbogha had brought from his governorship of Mosul would have been more likely though the Crusaders would have been fighting with their backs to the wall (literally - the walls of Antioch) and so been likely to put up a strong showing. Who won in this sort of desperate struggle, between a well-armed force of Turks (with experienced steppe cavalry and horsed archers plus an ability to wheel away from an attack to safety and then charge back at will) and desperate Crusaders used to hand to hand combat was varied in 'Crusaders vs Turks' battles of the late C11th and early C12th , but the odds were in Kerbogha's favour. The Crusaders also had more tired and under-fed horses who had had to struggle all the way across Asia Minor and Cilicia to Syria. A smaller Christian force could easily be overwhelmed by a larger Turkish one, and was on occasion eg 1119 and 1130 when two Princes of Antioch in turn fell in battle - and of course the stronger and more coherent Turks had won against the Byz army (which had Western cavalry mercenaries in it) at Manzikert in 1071.
If Kerbogha wins he secures Syria for the Seljuks, but at the same time as this campaign the Fatimids (Shi'a not Sunni so seen as unwelcome 'heretics' by the majority of the Syrian/ Palestinian Moslem locals) had regained Jerusalem by invasion from Egypt - the F had previously ruled Palestine until the arriving Seljuks from Iraq took it in the early 1070s. The Seljuk governors of J, the sons of Ortoq, had fled N to Iraq and ended up as Seljuk governors of the 'Jazirah' region (ie the later SE Turkey area of Diyarbakir) plus later Mosul too - the locales of modern Syria and Iraq govts vs ISIS and Syrian civil war conflicts keep on cropping up in Crusader history, as I noted while doing my 'Chronology of the Crusades' textbook for Routledge (pub 2015) in the early-mid 2010s. If Kerbogha is still alive and victorious, he not the Ortoqids is in charge of Mosul - and as the war-winner and a champion of Islam he is in a good position to overshadow his technical overlords, the prestigious but militarily weak Seljuk Sultans of Iraq, based in Baghdad. They are led by the successively ruling sons of the late Sultan Malik Shah (d 1092), who were often at feud with each other. Does he end up challenging current Sultan Mohammed (d 1118), or does the latter find him a threat and quietly try to have him assassinated - by using his rivals the Ortoqids? Or does Kerbogha end up in the role of the regional strongman, dynastic founder, and champion vs the Frankish' (and on and off the Byzantine) Christians which in OTL later went to the next powerful commander of the Jazirah, Zangi, in the 1120s? Does her try to remove, or keep on as puppets, the Sultan's cousins ruling Aleppo (Ridwan) and Damascus (Duqaq)?
If the Crusaders are wiped out or lose most of their leaders and troops, they still have Godfrey of Bouillon (OTL soon to be appointed to rule Jerusalem)'s brother Baldwin , OTL king of Jerusalem 1100 to 1118, ruling his new principality of Edessa , on and E of the upper Euphrates and just taken over from the local Armenians whose precarious ruling governor (Thoros) had been forced to accept him as his heir then been mysteriously assassinated. (At this point this corner of SE Turkey was ethnically mostly Christian, and dominated by refugee Armenians who had fled there from the invading Turks to the N during the mid-C11th when it was part of the Byzantine frontier. This 'Armenian' principality was partly to survive as a Byz- and Crusader-allied kingdom in Cilicia to 1393. The complex rival claims of Turks, Kurds and Armenians to the region now go right back to the C11th.) So if Baldwin's small new principality was to survive at all he would have now had to rely on heavy Byz help from emperor Alexius I - who at this point, June 1098. was in mid-Asia Minor with an army but decided the Crusaders were doomed and refused to advance any further. Hence their bitterness and later attacks on him - or so their excuses for their later wars went.
More likely Baldwin has to give up and leave isolated Edessa; though he and his troops or refugee local Armenians could have been placed in Cilicia by Alexius while the Seljuks were too busy fighting the Fatimids in Palestine. In fact Alexius had wanted a Western Christian mercenary army under his legal orders, to reconquer land for him, not out of control Crusaders on a 'holy mission' to take Palestine for themselves and the arriving Crusader army of 1096-7 was alarming to him - having their main force destroyed would have put him back in control of the Christian offensive. Possibly he can now recruit Baldwin and co, and any late-arriving Crusaders as they turn up at Constantinople, to help him retake parts of central and SE Asia Minor as originally planned and insist that these areas are held from him as part of his empire. If Bohemund of Taranto and other leaders who in OTL accused him of deserting them are still alive, they do not have the men or the control of Antioch that they did in OTL to fight him; Bohemund would have to go home to S Italy and recruit an army from his own lands and his half-brother Roger's lands in Apulia to invade Byzantium. A successful invasion of Greece is even less likely than it was when he invaded in reality; Alexius would have been 'proved right' in his refusal to risk a march into Syria to rescue the Crusade and probably the Papacy would have had to accept his explanations in order to keep him as a potential ally against Bohemund's family and the German ('Holy Roman') emperor. The cause of Crusading might well have taken a serious enough 'reality check' to postpone any more attacks on the Levant for a couple of decades , but the Italian merchant republics (Venice , Genoa and Pisa) had large fleets to use for an easier,seaborne attack and if one of them quarrelled with the Seljuks or the Fatimids they could help a later attack. Possibly the more restless and land-hungry warlords of the West with a thirst for 'holy war' would have headed off to Spain to help the 'Reconquista' vs smaller and easier Moslem targets - eg a French / Toulousan army joining Rodrigo Diaz de Bivar ('El Cid) in the epic defence of Valencia against the Moroccans ? (Cf the finale of the modern film with El Cid, aka Charlton Heston, dead but strapped onto his horse for the final battle to terrify the Moslems.)
One result for England - if Duke Robert of Normandy, at Antioch in 1098, gets killed that leaves his brother William II with no legal heir and a claim to succeed him in Normandy as per their 1092 agreement. Does he take Normandy over, and/or have to make his next brother Henry (OTL King Henry I) his heir, or does he finally bother to marry and get sons? And if he is warring against Norman barons and the alarmed King Philip of France in summer 1100 he is not in the New Forest to be killed in a 'hunting accident', whether or not this was a plot by Henry. So does he last longer as king, and does Henry ever succeed him? And would Edgar Atheling and Normandy's neighbour Count Robert of Flanders be killed off in battle at Antioch too?
Lacking one or all of these factors, defeat by the large mixed infantry and cavalry army which Kerbogha had brought from his governorship of Mosul would have been more likely though the Crusaders would have been fighting with their backs to the wall (literally - the walls of Antioch) and so been likely to put up a strong showing. Who won in this sort of desperate struggle, between a well-armed force of Turks (with experienced steppe cavalry and horsed archers plus an ability to wheel away from an attack to safety and then charge back at will) and desperate Crusaders used to hand to hand combat was varied in 'Crusaders vs Turks' battles of the late C11th and early C12th , but the odds were in Kerbogha's favour. The Crusaders also had more tired and under-fed horses who had had to struggle all the way across Asia Minor and Cilicia to Syria. A smaller Christian force could easily be overwhelmed by a larger Turkish one, and was on occasion eg 1119 and 1130 when two Princes of Antioch in turn fell in battle - and of course the stronger and more coherent Turks had won against the Byz army (which had Western cavalry mercenaries in it) at Manzikert in 1071.
If Kerbogha wins he secures Syria for the Seljuks, but at the same time as this campaign the Fatimids (Shi'a not Sunni so seen as unwelcome 'heretics' by the majority of the Syrian/ Palestinian Moslem locals) had regained Jerusalem by invasion from Egypt - the F had previously ruled Palestine until the arriving Seljuks from Iraq took it in the early 1070s. The Seljuk governors of J, the sons of Ortoq, had fled N to Iraq and ended up as Seljuk governors of the 'Jazirah' region (ie the later SE Turkey area of Diyarbakir) plus later Mosul too - the locales of modern Syria and Iraq govts vs ISIS and Syrian civil war conflicts keep on cropping up in Crusader history, as I noted while doing my 'Chronology of the Crusades' textbook for Routledge (pub 2015) in the early-mid 2010s. If Kerbogha is still alive and victorious, he not the Ortoqids is in charge of Mosul - and as the war-winner and a champion of Islam he is in a good position to overshadow his technical overlords, the prestigious but militarily weak Seljuk Sultans of Iraq, based in Baghdad. They are led by the successively ruling sons of the late Sultan Malik Shah (d 1092), who were often at feud with each other. Does he end up challenging current Sultan Mohammed (d 1118), or does the latter find him a threat and quietly try to have him assassinated - by using his rivals the Ortoqids? Or does Kerbogha end up in the role of the regional strongman, dynastic founder, and champion vs the Frankish' (and on and off the Byzantine) Christians which in OTL later went to the next powerful commander of the Jazirah, Zangi, in the 1120s? Does her try to remove, or keep on as puppets, the Sultan's cousins ruling Aleppo (Ridwan) and Damascus (Duqaq)?
If the Crusaders are wiped out or lose most of their leaders and troops, they still have Godfrey of Bouillon (OTL soon to be appointed to rule Jerusalem)'s brother Baldwin , OTL king of Jerusalem 1100 to 1118, ruling his new principality of Edessa , on and E of the upper Euphrates and just taken over from the local Armenians whose precarious ruling governor (Thoros) had been forced to accept him as his heir then been mysteriously assassinated. (At this point this corner of SE Turkey was ethnically mostly Christian, and dominated by refugee Armenians who had fled there from the invading Turks to the N during the mid-C11th when it was part of the Byzantine frontier. This 'Armenian' principality was partly to survive as a Byz- and Crusader-allied kingdom in Cilicia to 1393. The complex rival claims of Turks, Kurds and Armenians to the region now go right back to the C11th.) So if Baldwin's small new principality was to survive at all he would have now had to rely on heavy Byz help from emperor Alexius I - who at this point, June 1098. was in mid-Asia Minor with an army but decided the Crusaders were doomed and refused to advance any further. Hence their bitterness and later attacks on him - or so their excuses for their later wars went.
More likely Baldwin has to give up and leave isolated Edessa; though he and his troops or refugee local Armenians could have been placed in Cilicia by Alexius while the Seljuks were too busy fighting the Fatimids in Palestine. In fact Alexius had wanted a Western Christian mercenary army under his legal orders, to reconquer land for him, not out of control Crusaders on a 'holy mission' to take Palestine for themselves and the arriving Crusader army of 1096-7 was alarming to him - having their main force destroyed would have put him back in control of the Christian offensive. Possibly he can now recruit Baldwin and co, and any late-arriving Crusaders as they turn up at Constantinople, to help him retake parts of central and SE Asia Minor as originally planned and insist that these areas are held from him as part of his empire. If Bohemund of Taranto and other leaders who in OTL accused him of deserting them are still alive, they do not have the men or the control of Antioch that they did in OTL to fight him; Bohemund would have to go home to S Italy and recruit an army from his own lands and his half-brother Roger's lands in Apulia to invade Byzantium. A successful invasion of Greece is even less likely than it was when he invaded in reality; Alexius would have been 'proved right' in his refusal to risk a march into Syria to rescue the Crusade and probably the Papacy would have had to accept his explanations in order to keep him as a potential ally against Bohemund's family and the German ('Holy Roman') emperor. The cause of Crusading might well have taken a serious enough 'reality check' to postpone any more attacks on the Levant for a couple of decades , but the Italian merchant republics (Venice , Genoa and Pisa) had large fleets to use for an easier,seaborne attack and if one of them quarrelled with the Seljuks or the Fatimids they could help a later attack. Possibly the more restless and land-hungry warlords of the West with a thirst for 'holy war' would have headed off to Spain to help the 'Reconquista' vs smaller and easier Moslem targets - eg a French / Toulousan army joining Rodrigo Diaz de Bivar ('El Cid) in the epic defence of Valencia against the Moroccans ? (Cf the finale of the modern film with El Cid, aka Charlton Heston, dead but strapped onto his horse for the final battle to terrify the Moslems.)
One result for England - if Duke Robert of Normandy, at Antioch in 1098, gets killed that leaves his brother William II with no legal heir and a claim to succeed him in Normandy as per their 1092 agreement. Does he take Normandy over, and/or have to make his next brother Henry (OTL King Henry I) his heir, or does he finally bother to marry and get sons? And if he is warring against Norman barons and the alarmed King Philip of France in summer 1100 he is not in the New Forest to be killed in a 'hunting accident', whether or not this was a plot by Henry. So does he last longer as king, and does Henry ever succeed him? And would Edgar Atheling and Normandy's neighbour Count Robert of Flanders be killed off in battle at Antioch too?