Prince of Legend

CHAPTER NINE

Raymond was not a man to give up lightly; not only did he hang on to the Bridge Gate and keep his standard flying, he moved quickly to seize the site of the ruined fort of La Mahomerie, the very point from which Bohemund had directed his battle. Thus he controlled the roads to both St Simeon and Alexandretta, which once more meant any supplies thereof.

The banner of the de Hautevilles might fly from the citadel and the battlements of Antioch but the Count of Toulouse was still not prepared to acknowledge Bohemund as the man who held title and that was followed by a display of avarice that staggered many, given his lack of effort: he claimed, and got from Ademar, his full share of the spoils from Kerbogha’s pavilion to fill coffers already bulging from the alms committed to the Holy Lance.

With the roads now open to the north, news filtered through of the way Alexius Comnenus had deserted them, putting his own safety and survival above the very notion of their existence, retiring all the way to Nicaea and abandoning, indeed scorching, everything the Crusaders had achieved in a year of brutal campaigning. It was telling that while most of his peers despaired of this, and Bohemund actively condemned it, Raymond found ready excuses for the Emperor’s behaviour.

‘He thought us lost, sensed that to come to our rescue would see his destruction as well as that of the Eastern Christian Empire, was fearful of another Manzikert where the imperial army was destroyed. Surely we must allow that such an outcome would not be welcome to anyone who professes faith in Christ the Redeemer.’

‘What I see,’ Bohemund responded, ‘is a man who cares more for his city and his title than he does for his God, his religion or those committed to his aid.’

‘It does not show him in a good light, I grant you,’ wheezed Ademar, who was looking to be in a poor state, unlike Toulouse, who for all his claims of a recurring malady appeared remarkably robust, his face ruddy and his eyes flashing. ‘But who amongst us has not made errors?’

‘Your compassion is admirable, Bishop,’ Godfrey de Bouillon suggested, to a round of nodded agreement.

‘Compassion is one thing,’ Raymond asserted with real force, ‘the rights of the Emperor are another. We are obliged to hand possession of the city over to his control and I will not countenance that we should act in any other way.’

‘So you do not feel betrayed?’

‘You made an oath to Alexius,’ Toulouse barked at Bohemund, before looking around at the others. ‘As did you all, only I declined. Is it irony or bad faith that causes it to fall to me to remind you of what you swore on the holy relics?’

‘I have said it once and I repeat it,’ Bohemund insisted. ‘Alexius swore on the same relics to support us. He has broken his oath and I contend it was one he never intended to keep, which releases us all from whatever commitment we made to him.’

‘Can you say,’ Vermandois asked, ‘that he never intended to keep it?’

‘I can say my family have been fighting Byzantium for decades and never once has their word been worth acceptance.’

‘I do not see that the word of your de Hauteville forbears was any more truthful.’

‘While I am sure, Count Raymond, that the lands around your domains will teem with those who feel your word is meaningless.’

‘My Lords!’ Ademar called, seeking to half rise from his chair and immediately sinking back.

‘Power,’ Bohemund added, ‘attracts such accusations to us all.’

If it was not an apology for insulting Toulouse it was enough to stay him from widening the breach to the point Ademar feared — open conflict between the knights of Apulia and those of Provence — and given that, he was content to let the Count of Taranto continue.

‘Recall how we were greeted as saviours in Constantinople?’

That produced wry smiles, if not from Toulouse, from everyone else; they had been greeted as threatening interlopers and hurried across the Bosphorus for fear they might attack the capital city.

‘We all have reasoned that the Emperor got more for his request for aid against the Turks than he had bargained for, a host so great he came to dread us as much as he feared them. Who amongst us did not expect Alexius to take the field in person and lead us?’

‘His duties precluded it,’ Toulouse protested.

‘Not his duties, Count Raymond, his policy! Alexius was content to use us to beat his long-time enemies but never to trust us, which is why we had his general Tacitus along with us to ensure that whatever fief we took reverted immediately to an imperial possession. He had no faith we would do so unbidden.’

‘Which seems,’ Raymond sneered, ‘given the discussion we are now engaged in, to be a wise precaution.’

‘I expected him outside Nicaea,’ Normandy growled.

‘And I,’ added Flanders. ‘Yet he never moved from his camp while we laid siege. I cannot see why he failed to join with us, even just to show the numbers the defenders must face.’

Alexius had left the capital but had gone no further than a camp two days’ march from Nicaea. The whole siege and capture of the city was left to the Crusaders, apart from a token force of two thousand men under the aforementioned Tacitus who, in any event, took no part in the fighting. Yet when Nicaea surrendered it was Tacitus and his Byzantines who marched into the city and raised the yellow and black imperial banner.

‘He kept his distance in case we failed, my friends, and if we had he would have made offers of peace to the city and the Sultan of Rum, perhaps even offered him gold as a payment for allowing us to dare besiege his city.’

‘You cannot say that with certainty.’

‘While I wonder, Count Hugh, why it needs saying at all. Alexius has not been part of our progress at any time. He has lagged behind, securing what fiefs were at one time Byzantine, many not held since centuries past, leaving us to march on and face whatever the Turks decide to put in our path.’

Bohemund paused then, enough to even let Count Raymond object, but he could not gainsay it.

‘When news came of his flight back to Constantinople I asked the man who brought the message if Alexius had fought any major battles before that and the answer was no. He used his fleet to secure the coast and then proceeded with a caution designed more to achieve the surrender of any towns he passed than to join us and fight off our shared enemy. So we are the stalking horse, the prey who, if we beat the infidel, he will pat on the head and dazzle us with a tiny part of his treasure. If we fail, he will not even stoop to bury our bones. Yet be assured we will see Alexius now, when we have secured a city so prized as Antioch without the spilling of a drop of Byzantine blood.’

‘And much of our own,’ Godfrey de Bouillon commented, though there was no force in the response; it was given more in sorrow than any anger.

‘Yet he will demand we hand it over to him.’

‘An oath is an oath.’

‘It is, Count Raymond, until it is broken. I say here and publicly that the Emperor Alexius has broken his word by failing to support us here and has thus freed me of mine to him and Byzantium, which I suggest applies to all who likewise made their pledge.’

Raymond must have sensed that the mood of the meeting was again not in his favour, so he played what had to be a last card — for all decisions, it had been agreed at the outset, had to be unanimous.

‘While I insist that the Emperor be asked what it is he wishes for the city.’

‘An envoy must go to him,’ cried Vermandois.

Raymond was quick to jump on that and he replied in a sonorous tone that was at odds with his widely known opinion of the scatterbrained, glory-seeking Frenchman.

‘Count Hugh, I can think of no man better qualified to undertake such a mission than yourself.’

‘I am humbled,’ Vermandois responded, though with a manner very much not that: he could not hide the notion that such a mission might add lustre to a reputation he already held to be glowing. ‘But I will only accede if it is the opinion of the whole council.’

‘Count Bohemund?’ Ademar asked, having got nodded assent from the others.

That made the man questioned smile but he too gave silent agreement; Alexius could be asked till he was blue what he wanted of Antioch — without he led an army to back up his wishes they were so much air.

Raymond had thrown delay into the discussion: with that nothing was decided and Bohemund could hold what he had and time was an ally. Yet it was not agreement, nor the peace that Ademar had set out to achieve; Raymond of Toulouse and Bohemund were as far apart as ever, perhaps even more so, and it was with a weary and false expression that he brought the discussion to an end.

‘Good. Count Hugh, I beg you to make ready to go to the Emperor and seek his instructions. Until then, we must put our minds to what progress we can make to Jerusalem.’

That left another more vital point hanging in the air and one that also acted in Bohemund’s favour: no military leader with an ounce of sense would progress south to the Holy City unless he knew Antioch, on his line of communication and his main source of supply, was secure, and to be that someone of ability had to hold it safe.

Not that such a matter was the sole concern of the council: it was still high summer with the hottest month of the year yet to arrive. Having experienced such temperatures the previous year, not one of the leaders saw sense in repeating the horror of what had so very nearly been a death march across the barren, waterless and deliberately scorched lands of Anatolia.

‘But surely the Holy City awaits,’ Ademar insisted, ‘and after we have humbled Kerbogha what infidel will stand in our way?’

‘General Summer will kill us, not the Turks or the Arabs,’ Normandy responded. ‘Let us wait till the weather cools and the stocks of food will be high in the country we pass through. Then we can move swiftly, in such a way and at such speed I would not be surprised to see Jerusalem surrender as soon as they sight our banners from the Temple Mount.’

That was gilding the lily; their enemies had rarely melted away before them and were unlikely to do so now, but the point left unsaid was the army was not ready for an immediate advance: from brave knights to the lowest milities all had suffered privation, desperate battle and an abiding fear of damnation and death, which had only just been lifted. To seek to march them on immediately and in searing heat would be folly.

‘Let us recover our strength and our purpose,’ Duke Robert continued, looking round to ensure he was speaking for all, ‘and let us have time to send word to our homes of our success and to seek men to make up for our losses.’

‘That could take months,’ Ademar protested.

Raymond intervened then, though no one was certain of his motives. Was it to allow time for Alexius to come and take control of Antioch, or was it because he genuinely agreed with what had been said? In the calm months of summer, speedy sailing vessels could get to Provence and back to bring him men and money, though Apulia was even closer, so Bohemund would not be weakened by it.

‘Let it be so, Bishop Ademar. July and August are a furnace and September perhaps still too hot.’

‘October is reputed scarce better,’ added Flanders.

‘Let it be November, then.’ Given it was Godfrey de Bouillon who stated this, it had added weight; he was a hard man with whom to argue when it came to Jerusalem. ‘Then the temperature will be clement, to which we men of the north are more accustomed.’

Seeing the gloom on Ademar’s face, a man who could only advise, not command, Godfrey added with heartfelt enthusiasm, ‘And fear not, Your Grace: before the feast of Christmastide is upon us, you will say Mass in the Holy City.’

Ademar rubbed a weary hand across a heavily creased brow; where now that so flawless countenance which he had brought from his Provencal home? Even if he had donned armour and fought alongside these magnates, they were the men who knew about soldiering. For all his disappointment and the fact that he lacked energy there was real passion in his voice when he announced his agreement.

‘I will not delay past the first day of November, even if I have to go on alone.’

Busy fighting off Kerbogha, the Crusaders had not given any time to the restoration of the Christian faith; they had that now and every church that had been converted into a mosque was reconsecrated. Yet even within that lay dispute: the Patriarch and the local priests, men who had survived a double siege, much persecution and two times the amount of hunger, were adherents of the Greek Creed.

Those who had come with the Crusade were firmly Latin and wished that the places of worship, having been freed by Roman Christians, should celebrate their liturgy in that rite and that the man appointed Bishop of Antioch should be one of their own.

‘Which I most heartily support, Your Grace.’

‘While I cannot agree, Count Bohemund,’ came the reply from a somewhat restored bishop, and it was not without a barely disguised waspish tone at odds with his habitual diplomacy, ‘when Pope Urban appointed me to this post it was with the express instruction to take back from the infidel those lands and places of worship once Christian. In what we have conquered that means the Orthodox rite and I gave my word to the Emperor Alexius that I would fulfil my task as it was given to me.’

‘I have in mind to meet the wishes of the flock you lead.’

‘While I have in mind the wish to meet the dictates of my conscience.’

As usual, much was not being said: Ademar suspected that Bohemund wanted a Latin bishop for his own advantage; it was part of his ambition to have Antioch as his possession. A Byzantine cleric would owe allegiance to and take his instructions from Constantinople and he would also resist any attempt to turn the population towards Rome. If Alexius Comnenus did appear and demand the city be turned over to him, a Greek Patriarch and a rigidly Orthodox flock would make holding out against him much more difficult.

The Bishop also knew he was on safe ground: this was a matter in which no layman could interfere, however strong his reputation or his determination. Pope Urban was keen to mend the schism that had split the two branches of the faith these last forty years and throughout the reign of half a dozen of his predecessors, arguments on the true interpretation of the Holy Trinity and the status of the Bishop of Rome as head of the Christian faith.

These deeply theological questions were also muddied by disagreements over priestly celibacy: Rome insisted upon it and was driving it forward in the lands where it held sway, while Constantinople denied the need and held that priests should live as did their flock. Added to that was a matter as arcane as the correct form of bread to be used in the Mass. Such divergences, Pope Urban knew, would not be overcome by aggressive attempts to bring the Creed of Rome to Asia Minor.

Applying papal policy, for once Bishop Ademar could be adamant and had Bohemund observed the cleric once he had departed in disappointment he would have wondered at the quiet smile the divine allowed himself, perhaps one that would have been tempered if he could have seen into the Count of Taranto’s mind: Bohemund was a man accustomed to setbacks and he was also, given his de Hauteville bloodline, very adept at thinking of ways round them.

It was hard to be sure what it was that turned most of his fellow magnates against Raymond of Toulouse, but turn they did, each one hauling down the banners of the sections of the city they had occupied and allowing the Apulians to raise that of their Count, a sure sign that they were willing to cede to him the title to Antioch.

Was it that he had not fought alongside them in the battle? Or was it that, with the deepest chests of money in his possession, he was still seeking — and often succeeding — to seduce their knights from their primary allegiance to them and have them move over to serve under his banner?

The Duke of Normandy was furious and made no attempt to hide it when any of his knights succumbed to Provencal blandishments and money, while the saintly Godfrey de Bouillon took the view that who served whom mattered less than that all turned up outside the walls of Jerusalem to deliver the city into the hands of the True Faith. Most success was achieved with the now leaderless French, Vermandois having set out for Constantinople, yet even the Apulians were not immune, especially those of deep religious feeling.

At the centre of Raymond’s influence lay the Holy Lance, of which he maintained sole possession, and now he was using it to allude to a success in which he had taken no part. The Great Battle of Antioch had been such an overwhelming victory against such stupendous odds that no one of faith could seriously doubt that it had been brought about by divine intervention and that was easy to attribute to the discovery of the lance.

As he had before, wherever he went, Raymond was keen to display the relic, and simpler minds than those of his peers easily forgot that he had been abed during the event he was seeking to exploit with his shard of rusty metal. Aiding him in this he had Peter Bartholomew, no longer a mere peasant with visions but seen as an oracle, in fine garments, with a line of contact through the saints to Christ himself.

His one-time humble gait and diffident manner had been transformed into strutting arrogance and he had taken to preaching from outside the citadel, the hillsides below him black with those eager to hear his every word, in what the likes of Ademar saw, and this troubled him greatly, as a parody of the Sermon on the Mount.

Faced with this the Bishop hurriedly brought forward, and in the face of opposition from such seemingly disparate voices as Bohemund of Taranto and Peter Bartholomew, the re-enthronement of the Patriarch of Antioch. John the Oxite had held the office previously, until removed by the Turkish governor at the beginning of the Crusader siege, and he had suffered much during the subsequent weeks, often hung from the walls by his feet to be humiliated as a method of infuriating the besiegers, who could not but feel sympathy for an old and venerable man.

That he was an already installed bishop made the ceremony a demonstration more than a true investiture; Ademar was determined that any notion of forcing the Latin Mass on the Armenian population should be laid to rest for good and in that he was able to show just how strong was the faith among the Antiochenes themselves. They had been denied much to celebrate over so many years that they turned out en masse — thousands of men, women and children, even those still at the breast — to celebrate the placing of John the Oxite back on his patriarchal throne.

Looking at him, old, white-haired and scarce able to move in his heavy episcopal garments, Bohemund was not alone in thinking that age and ill-treatment by the Turks had left him frail. As the prayers and chants rose around him the old man, blinking and seeming confused, gave the appearance of one not long for this life, which indicated that the argument would soon be revisited and that he would be wise to prepare his ground.

Naturally, it was incumbent upon the Crusaders to tell the Pontiff of the success in taking Antioch, which Ademar did in a long and fawning epistle in which as much ink was expended praising Urban’s acumen and his titles as was used to describing how the city had fallen and the great battle by which victory had finally been achieved.

His real purpose in the main part of his submission was concerned, even if it was not stated, with the increasingly febrile relationship between Bohemund and Raymond that ended in a plea that Pope Urban come to Antioch himself and lead the onward journey to, as well as the capture of, Jerusalem.

Perhaps because of his increasing frailty, possibly because he could not see the import or the potential consequences, he allowed Bohemund to add a rider regarding the behaviour of Alexius Comnenus, which alluded more to his failures than any support he had provided in the previous two years, which was at the very least ungracious and at worst a betrayal. So strongly worded was this addendum and so powerfully did it condemn the Emperor as well as the Eastern Church of which he was secular head, that it was tantamount to identifying Byzantium as an enemy of equal potency to the Turks.

Bohemund was looking to his own advantage, so he sought to drive home that the hopes held by Rome were misplaced. The forty-year schism between the western and eastern branches of Christendom would never be healed and nor would the Pope ever be acclaimed as the fount of Christian doctrine. Constantinople would never accept celibacy or give way on the form of bread used in the Eucharist. There was no genuine desire on the part of Constantinople to move to reconciliation on such matters, yet the possibility would be dangled before the Papacy as a means of extracting military support. Alexius Comnenus was playing Rome for a dupe, this to help bolster his own power and to secure the Empire for his heirs.

The reference to his Uncle Roger and what he had achieved in Sicily was a subtle reminder of how the Great Count had furthered the cause of Roman Catholicism in that one-time Saracen-ruled island — and had it not been Greek prior to that? Had Count Roger not also pushed back the Orthodox divines and replaced them with priests who celebrated Mass as it should be, in the Roman rite? Had he not endowed and built monasteries to rival anything that pre-existed with the Basilian monks who looked east for spiritual guidance?

His father Robert Guiscard had done the same in Apulia and Calabria, even while at loggerheads, indeed at war, with the fiery Pope Gregory VII, installing Latin bishops and enforcing the celibacy so desired by the Vatican. He, Bohemund de Hauteville, was as committed to the same policy and would pursue it wherever he had the means to do so.