138 DESTINY DISRUPTED
route they seemed to be taking, laid an ambush, and smashed them like so
many ants, killing many, capturing many more, and chasing the rest back
into Byzantine lands. It was so easy that he gave them no more thought.
He didn't know that this "army" was merely the ragtag vanguard of a
movement that would plague Muslims of the Mediterranean coast for an-
other two centuries. While Urban had been speaking to the aristocracy up
at the monastery, a vagabond named Peter the Hermit had been preaching
the same message out on the streets. Urban had addressed nobles and
knights, but presumably any Christian who went crusading could get the
remission of sins the pope was offering, so Peter the Hermit was able to re-
cruit from all classes-peasants, artisans, tradespeople, even women and
children. His "army'' left before the formal army could get organized, in
part because his "army" didn't feel much need to get organized. They were
off to do God's work; surely God would take care of the arrangements. It
was these tens of thousands of cobblers, butchers, peasants and the like
that Kilij Arslan succeeded in crushing.
The next year, when Kilij Arslan heard that more Franj were coming, he
dismissed the threat with a shrug. But the Crusaders in this next wave were
real knights and archers led by combat-hardened military commanders from
a land where the combat never stopped. Arslan's engagement with them came
down to a battle oflightly clad mobile horseman firing arrows at the armored
tanks that were the medieval knights of western Europe. The Turks picked off
the Franj foot soldiers, but the knights formed defensive blocks that arrows
could not penetrate and kept moving slowly, ponderously, and inexorably for-
ward. They took Arslan's city and sent him running to one of his relatives for
refuge. The knights then split up, some heading inland toward Edessa, the
rest heading down the Mediterranean coast toward Antioch.
The king of Antioch sent a desperate appeal to the king of Damascus,
a man named Daquq. The king of Damascus wanted to help, but he was
nervous about his brother Ridwan, the king of Aleppo, who would swoop
in and grab Damascus ifDaquq were to leave it. The ruler ofMosul agreed
to help, but he got distracted fighting someone else along the way, and
when he did arrive-late-he got into a fight with Daquq who had also fi-
nally arrived-late-and these two Muslim forces ended up going home
without helping Antioch at all. From the Muslim side, this was the story
of the early Crusades: a tragicomedy of internecine rivalry played out in