HAVOC 139city after city. When Antioch fell, the knights took vengeance for the city's
resistance with some indiscriminate killing, and then kept heading south,
towards a city called Ma'ara.
Knowing what had happened at Nicaea and Antioch, the Ma'arans
were terrified. They too sent urgent messages to nearby cousins, begging
for help, but their cousins were only too glad to see the wolves from the
west batter Ma'ara, each one hoping to absorb the city for himself once the
Franj had blown by. So Ma'ara had to face the Franj alone.
The Christian knights set siege to the city and reduced it to desperation-
but in the process reduced themselves to desperation as well, because they ate
every scrap of food in the vicinity and then commenced to starve. Obviously,
no one was going to feed these invaders, and that was the problem with set-
ting a long siege in a strange land.
At last Franj leaders sent a message into the city assuring the people of
Ma'ra that none of them would be harmed if they simply opened their
gates and surrendered. The city notables decided to comply. But once the
Crusaders made it into Ma'ara, they did more than slaughter. They went
on a frightening rampage that included boiling adult Muslims up for soup
and skewering Muslim children on spits, grilling them over open fires, and
eating them.
I know this sounds like horrible propaganda that the defeated Muslims
might have concocted to slander the Crusaders, but reports of Crusader
cannibalism in this instance come from Frankish as well as Arab sources.
Frankish eyewitness Radulph of Caen, for example, reported on the boiling
and grilling. Albert of Aix, also present at the conquest of Ma'ara, wrote,
"Not only did our troops not shrink from eating dead Turks and Saracens;
they also ate dogs!"^2 What strikes me about this statement is the implica-
tion that eating dogs was worse than eating Turks, which makes me think
that this Franj, at least, considered Turks a different species from himsel£
Amazingly enough, even after this debacle, the Muslims could not
unite. Examples abound. The ruler of Horns sent the Franj a gift of horses
and offered them advice about what they might sack next (not Horns).
The Sunni rulers ofTripoli invited the Franj to make common cause with
them against the Shi'i. (Instead, the Franj conquered Tripoli.)
When the Crusaders first arrived, the Egyptian vizier al-Afdal sent a let-
ter to the Byzantine emperor, congratulating him on the "reinforcements"