The Impossible Victory: How Outnumbered, Starving Christians Defeated a Massive Muslim Army
They Ate Leather Shoes and Drank Horse Blood — Then Won a Miracle at Antioch
This week in history featured several military engagements between the forces of Islam and Christendom, though none more decisive and dramatic — indeed, long seen as miraculous — than the battle that took place before the walls on Antioch on June 28, 1098.
As discussed here, earlier that month, the Crusaders had managed to liberate from Islamic abuse the ancient Christian city of Antioch — the place where the very word “Christian” was first coined (Acts 11:26).
Before they could celebrate, however (or even recuperate), Kerbogha, the Turkish lord (or atabeg) of Mosul, arrived with a “countless and innumerable throng” of forty thousand fighters consisting of Turks, Arabs, Egyptians, Africans, and Persians. “It is quite obvious that these people are completely mad,” the atabeg observed of the hopelessly outnumbered Crusaders. “They are a presumptuous race…. Doubtless they have every confidence in their courage. But by Muhammad, it was a bad day for them when they entered Syrian territory.”
Kerbogha quickly blockaded Antioch, and the Christians who only the day before had been the besiegers became the besieged. Worse, by the time the Crusaders took Antioch, most of its stores had been depleted by the Turks during their lengthy besiegement, forcing the feral Franks to eat leather shoes and drink horse blood.
Now desperate, the Crusaders “met for deliberation, and it was decided by common consent to send a deputation” to Kerbogha, “proposing that he agree to do one of two things: either let him depart and leave the city to the Christians as a possession forever — the city which had been theirs in the first place and which now, by the will of God, had been restored to them — or let him prepare for battle and submit to the decision of the sword.”
Such Just War logic lay at the heart of the message delivered to the Turkish leader by the Christian delegation:
Kerbogha, the Frankish lords send the following message to you. What staggering audacity has possessed you that you should have marched against them with armed forces when in their view you and your king and your people [in a word, Muslims] are guilty of invading Christian lands with unbridled covetousness and insulting and killing them all…. If you had any kind of rule of law and wanted to act fairly towards us, we would negotiate, reserving the rights of honor, and demonstrate to you with incontrovertible arguments what ought to belong to the Christians.
Further underscoring the religious nature of the quarrel, the delegation continued by telling Kerbogha that if he were to embrace Christianity, they would surrender Antioch to him and take him for their lord. But if he still refused, then “fly immediately or prepare your necks for our swords!”
As might be expected, Kerbogha “was so transported with anger that he could barely speak,” and finally responded by saying that “we took” Christian lands “by means of our remarkable strength, from a nation [Byzantines] scarcely better than women.” He continued:
Moreover, we think that you are mad to come from the ends of the earth, threatening with all your might to drive us from our homes, when you have insufficient supplies, too few arms, and too few men. Not only do we refuse to accept the name of Christians, but we spit upon it in disgust. To respond briefly to the message you have brought: return, you who form this delegation, to your leaders swiftly and tell them that if they are willing to become [Muslims] like us and renounce the Christ upon whom you seem to rely, we shall give them not only this land, but land of greater wealth and size.
Should the Crusaders refuse this offer, however, “they will undoubtedly die horribly,” continued the atabeg, “or endure the exile of eternal imprisonment, as slaves to us and our descendants … [and] I shall save all those who are in the flower of youth of either sex, for the service of my master.”
The Christian delegation returned to Antioch. After hearing Kerbogha’s retort, the famished, exhausted, and vastly outnumbered men concluded that there was nothing left but to sally forth and meet the hordes besieging them head on.
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