After the fall of Antioch a knight called Raymond Pilet had detached himself from the Crusade, much in the manner earlier adopted by Baldwin of Edessa, and set off for the same purpose as that reprobate — namely to line his pockets and capture a fief that he could hold as his own. In that he had failed miserably, losing most of his lances and barely surviving the adventure. A fertile plateau it may be but Jabal as-Summaq was, for the Crusaders, also something of a graveyard.
That still rendered a tempting prospect for someone as powerful as Toulouse: no map was required to see that if his Provencal lances kept possession of the Bridge Gate at Antioch and thus access to the coast, then add to that the whole arc of territory that covered the southern approaches and thus deny Bohemund any of its produce, he could make holding the city without his acquiescence close to untenable.
‘I saw his gaze as being on Jerusalem but I should have realised that when he massacred and enslaved all those Muslims in Albara it was for a reason.’
If both Tancred and Bohemund had wondered at that bloodthirsty act, they had not been alone. It had been a tenet of the Crusade, for the very sound reason that it made tactical sense, not to make war on the non-combatant Muslim population outside the need to forage, which often involved inherent cruelties.
But outright butchery was different: enemy soldiers were routinely killed and often made to suffer before they died, that being a reciprocal part of fighting a determined enemy who rarely spared a Christian who fell into their hands. Raymond had, at Albara, broken that convention and it could only have been to spread terror.
‘And now he is moving to besiege Ma’arrat an-Numan, where that terror will prove to be a powerful weapon. It may fall to him for fear of what resistance might mean.’
The city stood on the road between Aleppo and Damascus as well as crossing an old and well-used trading route to the interior and was a wealthy centre of commerce with a mixed Muslim Armenian population. It was reputed to have strong walls, but if mighty Antioch had failed to keep out the Crusaders, then Ma’arrat an-Numan, a much less formidable fortress, would struggle to do so.
Taken, it would finish off the arc of possession that Raymond was seeking to the south of Antioch, giving him a solid line of both land and supply routes from the coast deep into the interior. Given its strategic importance, Bohemund could no more grant him the sole right to that city than Raymond of Toulouse would give him clear title to his own claims.
The country through which they marched, for all its fruitfulness, showed the ravages already of a passing army, with much of the place stripped of food, and given it was now November there was not going to be time for that to be replenished before the next harvest. A peasantry who had suffered before was called upon to feed another transient force of rapacious soldiers, that rendered doubly vicious by what had been extracted from them already, for no delay could be allowed lest the Apulians arrive too late and they must, when they made their goal, to have any security, do so with food of their own.
Throughout the march they came across bands of pilgrims, some on their way from Antioch intent on joining with the man and the holy relic they saw as holding the key to their future. Other pilgrims, and more numerous, began to appear when they got closer to Ma’arrat an-Numan, ragged-looking figures seeking food, for when it came to sustenance the fighting men outside the city were a priority, which left the non-combatants to very much fend for themselves. No succour could be given these unfortunates regardless of their lamentations; the Apulians ignored their pleas with the same disregard as would the men with whom they had set out.
If it was relief to find that Raymond and his army were still camped outside the walls, it was equally obvious that the arrival of this new force was unwelcome and not just by the men in command. Knights and lances who fought for plunder, faced with a prosperous city they fully expected to capture, saw the addition of more lances and milities as a possible dilution of what they might gain from the eventual sack, so it came as no surprise they were greeted with a rate of catcalls, insults and demands that they be gone.
Against that, the forces of Raymond and Robert of Flanders, who had come with him, were making little headway against the Muslim part of the population, determined to resist for the very good reason that they were only too aware of the cost of failure. In terms of professional soldiers what they faced was apparently small, a few dozen at best, who formed the governor’s personal retainers, which should have made the siege a formality, but the opposite was the case.
The city, it seemed, was strong in the desire to resist. Having been offered terms of surrender and turned them down there was no other fate awaiting the Muslim inhabitants of Ma’arrat an-Numan than the ravages of a successful siege. If the lesson of Albara had failed to get them to open their gates, it still had an effect; it made the citizenry that formed the bulk of those opposing them doubly tenacious in defence. Raymond’s terror had worked against, not for him.
Raymond refused to even talk to Bohemund, indeed he did not even exit from his pavilion when his banners appeared and his horns were blown, so it fell to a reluctant Robert of Flanders to explain the situation. The first assaults, made with hastily constructed ladders, had failed, added to which, with the numbers available, it had been impossible to close off Ma’arrat an-Numan from the surrounding hinterland, which obviated the possibility of starving them out.
Bohemund made the point that with his Apulians engaged the situation was now altered, though there were other concerns that he was quick to broach. ‘How well supplied are you, Robert?’
The lack of eye contact that question produced was answer in itself; it took no great genius to see that if the country the Apulians had marched through to get here was practically bare of supply, and the pilgrims who had flocked to follow Raymond and his Holy Lance were scrabbling for food, then the likelihood existed of such a situation being spread in all directions to the whole plateau, and that would not only be due to the extra numbers the area now needed to support.
The siege would not have come as a surprise to the inhabitants of Ma’arrat an-Numan. With Albara in Crusader hands their city stood to be next; they would have been active in filling their storerooms, and sense dictated they would have also destroyed much of that which they could not transport into the city so as to deny sustenance to their approaching enemy.
It took little time for a besieging army, even just trailing with it the normal level of camp followers, to take what was shortage of provender to a situation where it became dearth. The addition of thousands of pilgrims made that many times worse, a situation that had arisen outside Antioch the previous year where the Crusade, both fighters and non-combatants, had come close to actual starvation.
‘I have no appetite for a repeat of that,’ Bohemund said, using the pun to lighten his point, given he was reminding a man who had shared that foul period with him of what they had suffered, ‘which is what we might face if we spend the whole winter engaged in this siege.’
‘Then,’ Robert replied, making no attempt to hide his irritation, ‘a man would be entitled to wonder at your being here.’
‘He would if he did not already know.’
Such a sharp comment made the Count of Flanders uncomfortable, which Bohemund took as a positive sign: if he had hitched his star to Raymond of Toulouse it was not without his being able to discern his motives, which were no more chivalrous than those of the Count of Taranto. Yet he was still inclined to be distant, there being, for instance, no indication of any plan that Raymond might have or where the Apulians could position themselves to be the most effective as an addition to the siege, leaving Bohemund to make his own dispositions based on what he could observe.