ISLAM AND THE CRUSADES 39the first major engagement in a series of wars that would last for nearly
two hundred years. It was also the only victory for Kilij Arslan. His army
would be cut to pieces in the next year, as what became known as the
First Crusade crossed into Anatolia.
The First Crusade had marched across Europe in the wake of Peter’s
rabble. This group was much more formidable than the earlier host, for it
was mostly composed of Norman knights and men-at-arms. They may
have numbered 30,000, and they were led by great warlords who vied
with each other in both valor and greed. As these men passed into the
empire, Alexius was rapidly disabused of any idea that they had come to
help Byzantium in the name of Christianity. They had come to carve out
kingdoms, and if they remained in Constantinople, they might well start
their carving there. The emperor was as glad to see them go as he had
been to hear of their coming.
This host bowled over Kilij Arslan’s Turks in 1097. That potentate had
been busily making war on a relative—the normal occupation of the Mus-
lim Middle East, when the crusaders arrived. He gathered his army and
offered battle at the city of Dorylaeum in June 1097. The Frankish knights
marched in separate columns to engage the Turks because their leaders
had too much pride in themselves and too little trust in each other to march
together. The Seljuqs were engaged frontally, pinned, and then enveloped
by two independent columns. The Normans, whose characteristic habit
was to throw themselves into headlong charges, actually surrounded the
Turkish force. Poor Kilij Arslan was probably the only commander who
was ever outmaneuvered by a Norman army.
The Battle of Dorylaeum cleared the path through Anatolia. The Franks
had come to conquer the Holy Land, and not the Turkish peninsula, and
onward they marched, or at least most of them. Count Bohemund detoured
to the east to topple the kingdom of Edessa, betraying its aged and friendly
ruler. This became the first crusader kingdom in the east. It would endure
from 1098 until 1144.
As the Franks moved south, the Turks and Syrians watched for them
and were perhaps somewhat concerned, but made nothing like a concerted
effort at mutual defense. Indeed, the caliphs and emirs of Syria were
habitually at war with each other. If the Franks posed a threat, each ruler
hoped that the foreigners would weaken his hereditary opponents, and
thus make his own position stronger.
Antioch, ruled by the Turkish emir Yaghi-Siyan, was the crusaders’
target. Yaghi-Siyan was an able commander and Antioch a superbly de-
fensible city. Although he did what he could to hold out, the hapless
garrison had to watch as two blundering relief expeditions, one from Da-