The danger of conflict had throughout been imminent; and the danger arose, not so much from the fact that the crusaders were armed men, marching through the country of professed allies, but from the thorough antagonism between Greeks and Latins in modes of thought and habits of life. Nor must we forget the vast gulf which separated the Eastern from the Western clergy. The clergy of the West despised their brethren of the East for their cowardly submission to the secular arm. These, in their turn, shrunk with horror from the sight of bishops, priests, and monks riding with blood-stained weapons over fields of battle, and exhibiting at other times an ignorance equal to their ferocity.
The strength and valor of the crusaders were soon to be tested. They were now face to face with the Turks, on whose cowardice Urban II had enlarged with so much complacency before the Council of Clermont. The sultan David, or Kilidje Arslan, placed his family and treasures in his capital city of Nice and retreated with fifty thousand horsemen to the mountains, whence he swooped down from time to time on the outposts of the Christians. By these his city was formally invested; and for seven weeks it was assailed to little purpose by the old instruments of Roman warfare, while some of the besiegers shot their weapons from the hill on which were mouldering the bones of the fanatic followers of Peter. It was protected to the west by the Askanian lake, and so long as the Turks had command of this lake they felt themselves safe. But Alexius sent thither on sledges a large number of boats, and the city, subjected to a double blockade, submitted to the Emperor, who was in no way anxious to see the crusaders masters of the place. The crusaders were making ready for the last assault, when they saw the imperial banner floating on the walls. Their disappointment at the escape of the miscreants, or unbelievers, for so they delighted to speak of them, was vented in threats which seemed to bode a renewal of the old troubles; but Alexius, with gifts, which added force to his words, professed that his only desire now, as it had been, was to forward them safely on their journey. Nor had they to go many stages before they found themselves again confronted with their adversary.
The conflict took place near the Phrygian Dorylaion, and seemed at first to portend dire defeat to the crusaders. More than once the issue of the day seemed to be turned by the indomitable personal bravery of the Norman Robert, of Tancred, and of Bohemond; and when even those seemed likely to be borne down, they received timely succors from Godfrey, and Hugh of Vermandois, from Bishop Adhemar of Puy and from Raymond, Count of Toulouse. Still the Turks held out, and it seemed likely that they would long hold out, when the appearance of the last division of Raymond's army filled them with the fear that a new host was upon them.
The crusaders had won a considerable victory. Three thousand knights belonging to the enemy had been slain, and Kilidje Arslan was hurrying away to enlist the services of his kinsmen. Meanwhile the Latin hosts were sweeping onward. Hundreds died from the heat, and dogs or goats took the place of the baggage-horses which had perished. At length Tancred with his troop found himself before Tarsus, the birthplace and the home of that single-hearted apostle who long ago had preached a gospel strangely unlike the creed of the crusaders. Following rapidly behind him, Baldwin saw with keen jealousy the banner of the Italian chief floating on its towers, and insisted on taking the precedence. Tancred pleaded the choice of the people and his own promise to protect them; but the intrigues of Baldwin changed their humor, and the rejection of Tancred by the men of Tarsus was followed by an attempt at private war between Tancred and Baldwin, in which the troops of Tancred were overborne. So early was the first harvest of murderous discord reaped among the holy warriors of the Cross. It was ruin, however, to stay where they were; and the main army again began its march, to undergo once more the old monotony of hardship and peril.
A very small force would have sufficed to disorganize and rout them as they clambered over the defiles of Mount Taurus; nor could Raymond, recovering from a terrible illness, or Godfrey, suffering from wounds inflicted by a bear, have done much to help them. But for the present their enemies were dismayed; and Baldwin, brother of Godfrey, hastened with eagerness to obey a summons which besought him to aid the Greek or Armenian tyrant of Edessa. As Alexius had done to his brother, so this chief welcomed Baldwin as his son; but Baldwin, having once entered into the city, cared nothing for the means which had brought him thither, and the death of his adoptive father was followed by the establishment at Edessa of a Latin principality which lasted for fifty-four, or, as some have thought, forty-seven years. Baldwin had anticipated the unconditional surrender of Samosata; but the Turkish governor had some of the Edessenes in his power, and he refused to give up the city except on the payment of ten thousand gold pieces. The Turk shortly afterward fell into Baldwin's hands, and was put to death.
Meanwhile the main army of the crusaders was advancing toward the Syrian capital (Antioch), that ancient and luxurious city whose fame had gone over the whole Roman world for its magnificence, its unbounded wealth, its soft delights, and its unholy pleasures. The days of its greatest splendor had passed away. Its walls were partially in ruins; its buildings were in some parts crumbling away or had already fallen; but against assailants utterly ignorant and awkward in all that relates to the blockade of cities it was still a formidable position. Nor could they invest it until they had passed the iron bridge—so called from its iron-plated gates—of nine stone arches, which spanned the stream of the Ifrin at a distance of nine miles from the city. This bridge was carried by the impetuous charge of Robert of Normandy, aided by the more steady efforts of Godfrey; and in the language of an age which delighted in round numbers, a hundred thousand warriors hurried across to seize the splendid prize which now seemed almost within their grasp.
But the city was in the hands of men who had been long accustomed to despise the Greeks, and who had not yet learned to respect the valor of the Latins. Preparing himself for a resolute defence, the Seljukian governor Baghasian had sent away as useless, if not mischievous, most of the Christians within the town; and the crusading chiefs had begun to discuss the prudence of postponing all operations till the spring, when Raymond of Toulouse with some other chiefs insisted that delay would imply fear, and that the imputation of cowardice would insure the paralysis of their enterprise. The city was therefore at once invested, so far as the forces of the crusaders could suffice to encircle it; and a siege began which in the eyes of the military historian must be absolutely without interest, and of which the issue was decided by paroxysms of fanatical vehemence on the one side, and by lack, not of bravery, but of generalship on the other. Of the eastern and northern walls the blockade was complete; of the west it was partial; and the failure to invest a portion of the western wall, with two out of the five gates of the city, left the movements of the Turks in this direction free.
But the besiegers were in no hurry to begin the work of death. The wealth of the harvest and the vintage spread before them its irresistible temptations, and the herds feeding in the rich pastures seemed to promise an endless feast. The cattle, the corn, and the wine were alike wasted with besotted folly, while the Turks within the walls received tidings, it is said, of all that passed in the crusading camp from some Greek and Armenian Christians to whom they allowed free egress and ingress. Of this knowledge they availed themselves in planning the sallies by which they caused great distress to the besiegers, whose clumsy engines and devices seemed to produce no result beyond the waste of time, and who felt perhaps that they had done something when they blocked up the gate of the bridge with huge stones dug from the neighboring quarries.
Three months passed away, and the crusaders found themselves not conquerors, but in desperate straits from famine. The winter rains had turned the land round their camp into a swamp, and lack of food left them more and more unable to resist the pestilential diseases which were rapidly thinning their numbers. A foraging expedition under Bohemond and Tancred filled the camp with food; it was again recklessly wasted. The second famine scared away Tatikios, the lieutenant of the Greek emperor Alexius; but the crusading chiefs were perhaps still more disgusted by the desertion of William of Melun, called "the Carpenter," from the sledgehammer blows which he dealt out in battle. Hunger obtained a victory even over the hermit Peter, who was stealing away with William of Melun, when he with his companion was caught by Tancred and brought back to the tent of Bohemond.
For a moment the look of things was changed by the arrival of ambassadors from Egypt. To the Fatimite caliph of that country the progress of the crusading arms had thus far brought with it but little dissatisfaction. The humiliation of the Seljukian Turks could not fail to bring gain to himself, if the flood of Latin conquests could be checked and turned back in time. His generals besieged Jerusalem and Tyre; and when the Fatimite once more ruled in Palestine, his envoys hastened to the crusaders' camp to announce the deliverance of the Holy Land from its oppressors, to assure to all unarmed and peaceable pilgrims a month's unmolested sojourn in Jerusalem, and to promise them his aid during their march, on condition that they should acknowledge his supremacy within the limits of his Syrian empire.