Setting off in groups after the summer harvest, the official army of Adhemar and the great lords arrived at Constantinople between October 1096 and April 1097. But of the 40,000 Crusaders who approached the city, no more than 4500 were nobles or knights. Travelling in their wake was yet another mass of poor and humble people, artisans and peasants, not unlike the rabble that had caused so much death and devastation the previous year along the Rhine. This untrained and undisciplined horde, which included women and other non-combatants, and a great number of religious fanatics, filled the leaders of the crusade with anxiety, as they did Alexius, the Byzantine emperor, because they were unpredictable and needed to be fed. But as the crusade was also a pilgrimage, there was little that could be done to prevent them joining in the march.
Alexius ferried the Crusaders across the Bosphorus, and in May they had laid siege to Nicaea, the Seljuk capital. Making clear what he saw as their purpose in Asia Minor, the emperor had the Crusader leaders swear an oath that they would ‘restore to the Roman Empire whatever towns, countries or forts they took which had formerly belonged to it’ and when Nicaea fell in June 1097, he took care that his imperial forces and not the Crusaders received the surrender. For the Byzantines there was nothing novel in fighting against the infidel; they had been doing so for five hundred years. But their concern now was to secure Asia Minor rather than to rush pell-mell towards Jerusalem, and this made them suspect in the eyes of the zealous Latin knights.
It was in this uneasy atmosphere that Alexius skilfully guided and provisioned the Crusaders across the length of Asia Minor. From Nicaea the First Crusade marched southwards to Dorylaeum (Eskisehir) where with Byzantine help it won a great victory over the Seljuks, and then farther south to Philomelion (Aksehir) and on to Iconium (Konya). A detachment passed through the Cilician Gates to Tarsus, but the main body swung up into Cappadocia, to Caesaria (Kayseri), and the two groups joined up again at Maras before heading southwards along the eastern flanks of the Amanus mountains, so that in the autumn of 1097 they stood before the walls of Antioch. The taking of the city the following year marked the parting of the ways between the Crusaders and the Byzantines, for instead of turning Antioch over to Alexius in keeping with his oath, Bohemond made it a principalityof his own.
The Tafurs
The knights and the nobility may have thought that they were leading the crusade, but the poor who marched in their wake regarded themselves as the elite, a people chosen by God. Most of the common people who had joined the first wave of the crusade perished on the long journey across Europe or were cut to ribbons by the Seljuks no sooner than they had crossed the Bosphorus.
Many of those who survived and now joined the second wave of the crusade, the one led byAdhemar, bishop of Le Puy, and the great French, Norman and Provencal lords, were known as Tafurs. Stories describe them as barefoot, wearing sackcloth, being covered in sores and filth, and living on roots and grass and sometimes the roasted corpses of their enemies. Wherever they went they left a trail of devastation. Too poor to afford swords, they fought with clubs, knives, shovels, hatchets, catapults and pointed sticks. Their ferocity was legendary; the leaders of the crusade were unable to control them and never went among them without being armed, while the Muslims were terrified of the Tafurs.
Though the Tafurs made a virtue of their poverty, in fact they were full of greed. The Tafurs looted every city captured by the Crusaders; theyalso raped the Muslim women and committed indiscriminate massacres. Urban and the princes had intended a campaign with limited objectives, but in reality the crusade tended constantly to become what the common people wanted it to be, a war to exterminate ‘the sons of whores’, as the Tafurs called the Muslims.
World History
