Crusader: By Horse to Jerusalem, page 20
About 21 April, Count Raymond of St Gilles, reached the imperial capital. Having chosen the long and arduous route through Dalmatia, his army arrived even more tired and tetchy than Godfrey's. They were particularly incensed at the bullying they had received at the hands of the military police they called Patzinaks. These were in fact Petcheneg tribesmen from the Crimea who had been hired by Alexius. They had orders to shepherd Raymond's army on its way, chivvying stragglers and protecting imperial property. So enthusiastically did this light cavalry carry out its role that the pilgrims came to regard them as worse than bandits. Even the redoubtable fighting bishop Adhémar, the Pope's personal representative, was set upon by a gang of Petchenegs when he wandered off on his own. Knocked off his mule, then beaten up, he was lucky to be rescued by a party of pilgrims who had been drawn by the commotion. The harassment by the Petchenegs grew so bad that the exasperated travellers sacked two of the coastal towns on their way to Constantinople.
Indeed Raymond was in such a foul mood when summoned before the Emperor and asked to give an oath of loyalty, that he refused. He had not come all that distance, he said, to give allegiance to another sovereign or to fight for anyone except the Lord. It was a measure of Alexius's manipulative genius that he totally won Raymond over. According to Anna, Alexius preferred Raymond to the other leaders because he 'valued truth above everything else', and he shone among the Latins 'as the sun amidst the stars of heaven'. Put more bluntly, Alexius quickly discovered that Count Raymond was as gullible as Duke Godfrey. He suborned the Count so successfully that he persuaded him to spy on Bohemond, and foil any actions that might be seen as being against the imperial interest.
So in every particular Alexius had outfoxed the Crusade's leaders, from his clever use of Hugh of Vermandois to his honeyed persuasion of Raymond. The Basileus had kept the Franks from formulating a common policy, sewn dissension in their ranks, bribed them individually, and hoodwinked them collectively into thinking that he was their staunch ally. Several of the Frankish nobles as they marched away from Constantinople thought they had never met such a paragon as Alexius. 'There is no man today like him under heaven,' enthused Stephen of Blois in a letter to his wife Adele.
'The Emperor received me with dignity and honour and with the greatest affection, as if I were his own son, and he loaded me with most bountiful and precious gifts. And in the whole of our army of God there is neither duke, nor count, nor any person of power whom he trusts or favours more than myself.'
In truth Alexius had not the slightest intention of travelling with the host. 'Their countless masses terrified him,' said Anna. He despatched a Byzantine general by the name of Tatikos with a detachment of the imperial army to accompany the Franks, ostensibly to reinforce the Crusade. But it soon became apparent that Tatikos was really on hand to restrain and to spy. He provided guides and siege equipment to the ill-disciplined and ill-prepared Franks, but in the actual battles against the infidel, the Byzantine troops appear to have taken little real part. In the final analysis, however, it was Alexius, not the Crusaders, who had missed the great opportunity. Ironically Alexius, for all his subtlety, had misjudged his guests. He had rated them as dangerous and venal, so he bribed and bemused them. He had totally failed to realise that many of them were driven by something more than the lust for plunder and territory. The leaders of the Crusade might be purchased but time would show that the ordinary pilgrims were the ultimate driving force of the great march. They were determined to get through to the shrine of the Holy Sepulchre, with or without the Emperor's help. Their tenacity and the fighting skill of the knights would succeed where the much more sophisticated Byzantine army had failed. When the extent of Alexius double-dealing became clear to the pilgrims, they turned against a man who they felt had toyed with them by asking for their help, then leaving them in the lurch at a time when they were marching into great danger. 'Shall I write of the most fraudulent and abominable treachery of the Emperor's counsel,' asked Raymond of Aguilers in his chronicle, 'Or shall I record the infamous escape of our army and its unimaginable helplessness?' To the ordinary pilgrim the perfidy of the Emperor was to become a byword. They were to feel, and not for the last time, that the great and the mighty had deluded them.
Chapter 15 - Nicaea
The clamour and noise of Turkey burst upon us. It was the seventh national frontier we had crossed, and by far the most noticeable. On one side was the orderly calm of Bulgaria, on the other the ebullience and bustle of the Turks. The same cars which a hundred yards down the road had lined up in obedient columns to present their papers to Bulgarian customs officers, exuberantly surged out into Turkey like hounds from a kennel. They jostled and swerved, switched lanes, stopped suddenly to disgorge Turkish families rushing off to buy their duty-free goods from kiosks, or parked haphazardly to submit to customs searches which in one instance was exposing seven colour television sets hidden in the back of a van. In Bulgaria everything was done by the rules; in Turkey the regulations were regarded as a source of puzzlement, delay, or dispute. The frontier officials had no notion of what to do about importing horses when I told them that we were in transit for Syria, another thousand miles of riding. There was a shrug and a smile and the horses' names were written into my passport and we were released on the promise that I would regularise matters when I got to Istanbul.
Twenty-six years earlier a hospitable Turkish family had befriended me when, by motorcycle, I arrived for the first time in Istanbul with two other student companions. Nine children living in three rooms had somehow squeezed aside to make space for three strangers, and I had never forgotten or lost touch with them. Now a delegation from 'my' family was at the frontier to meet us. Those nine children and their spouses now worked throughout a network of Istanbul jobs — used car salesmen, bank clerks, shipping offices, telephonists — and one, the youngest daughter, a nine-year-old when I first met her, was in full flight as a highly successful businesswoman. Fashionably dressed in red and black she was standing at the frontier post when we arrived, while a sister, a brother, a brother-in-law, a nephew and a pair of friends waited in the background, crammed in a car from the second-hand car dealer's stock, ready to rush us off for a meal at a roadside cafe. Official sponsorship in Bulgaria would now be replaced by an ebullient Turkish 'network' initiative, invoking friends, business contacts, friends of friends, and distant relatives, all of whom would be asked to help us. Already a young man had been produced who would drive the wretched jeep to Istanbul and relieve us of that tedious chore.
At Edirne, the first large town on our road to Istanbul, the chaos and colour and activity reached deafening proportions. A national festival was in progress and military bands were trundling down the main street on floats as white-helmeted bandsmen blew on brass instruments and thumped drums. The swarm of traffic bunched and rushed past the obstacles, horns beeping cheerfully. I was grateful that we now had three very road-wise horses, for no novice would have held its nerve in that traffic. The drivers buzzed spectacularly either side of us, hooting happily, and sped away. Shopkeepers came running across the pavement to shout and wave greetings. And when we emerged into the countryside the drivers of the big lorries would lean out of the cab windows, with one hand on the horn button and the other stuck out and raised upward in a jaunty salute of appreciation. For the first couple of hours it was very entertaining, but then it became so irritating that we deliberately steered a path out of earshot of the road.
Turkey-in-Europe was like Hungary all over again. The fields were vast, and we could travel in a straight line in any direction we wanted. The harvest was in, and we rode across mile upon mile of stubble interspersed with occasional fields of dead, abandoned maize. The farmers were burning the straw and often it looked as if a devastating army had passed that way. The horses walked over the black ash, and thin ripples of red flame stretched across the fields ahead of us. Once or twice we were obliged to pick our way through gaps in the advancing fireline. The ground smouldered under the horses' hooves as they edged through the buffeting wave of heat. The only wildlife was dense flocks of crows, which twisted and swarmed and climbed in the sky as if they were flecks of soot rising from the burning land.
It took us four days to ride from the frontier to the rim of Istanbul's conurbation. In that huge open countryside of Thrace we followed the imperial road without any practical difficulty. At night we were taken in at farm houses or by the muhtars, the village headmen, to whom it was inconceivable to turn away a traveller. This was rural Turkey and although the stream of cars and trucks was rushing past, loaded with modern washing machines and video tape players, the social values of the villager were firmly rooted in Islamic and Turkish tradition.
We had been on the road for four months, as long as it had taken Duke Godfrey to reach the Queen of Cities. In all that time Sarah had been caring for the horses without a break, and the strain was beginning to have its effect. She was longing, she confessed, for a change from the daily routine of grooming and watering and feeding and double checking. I, too, was looking forward to taking a worthwhile break in Istanbul, spending some time with 'my' family, but also thinking about the future of our journey. Istanbul was approximately the halfway point between Chateau Bouillon and Jerusalem, and if we continued onward at our present speed I could anticipate the very real risk that we would be trapped by the early winter snowfall in the mountains of eastern Turkey. Furthermore we did not yet have permission to ride across Syria. I began to wonder if perhaps it would be wiser to divide the long ride into two parts, take a winter break to give the horses a thorough rest somewhere in Turkey and press an application for Syrian visas, then ride on next spring. The change of plan would mean that our journey would be extended to the best part of eight months spread over two years, but then the Crusaders — delayed even more by the need to besiege a number of Muslim-held towns — had taken nearly three years to complete their trek. When I suggested the revised programme to Sarah, she agreed for the sake of the horses, particularly for Carty who had already come farther than many experts had predicted. As for her own plans, she was prepared to commit herself to go with me only as far as the winter layover point. But any riding the following year would depend on her own circumstances at the time. I did not complain. After all, officially she was still only accompanying me 'for a couple of weeks'.
On Thursday 3 September, we rode over a rise in the ground and saw ahead a distant straight line on the horizon. It was the Sea of Marmara. With a slight shock I realised that we had not seen the sea since crossing to France with Carty and Mystery, though in all that time we had been travelling steadily in one direction, southeast. The sea was a boundary. It meant we had crossed one continent, and were about to transfer to the next.
I hired a small lorry to take the horses into the centre of Istanbul, a hideous, slow journey through the stifling traffic jams of the city, lingering for what seemed like hours in the acrid fumes of the road tunnels of the motorway. We stood in the back of the lorry alongside the horses, petting them and reassuring them as they nervously looked over the low side of the lorry at the maelstrom of cars around them. Fearful that Mystery would panic once she found herself in a vehicle again, we devised a partial solution. Mystery always threw herself to the left when frightened, so we loaded her tightly against Carty, on his right, so that he served as a vast prop, like an equine bookend. He was unbudgeable on his huge hooves and each time Mystery toppled sideways, she would land against his huge bulk in a terrified huddle. After a moment or two Carty would give a massive nudge with his haunch and push her upright again. In this fashion, we proceeded without incident into the heart of the city where, for ten days, the horses rested in stables. In that time Sarah took her much-needed break from horse-tending chores but, as I knew she would, she was much too conscientious to leave the horses in the sole care of the stable grooms. Every day she went to check on their well-being and supervise their care and feeding. Meanwhile I busied myself with ordering a new Turkish-style head collar and lead chain for Carty from a harness maker in the Grand Bazaar, finding replacement saddle blankets to replace the old ones which had completely worn out, and - yet again - getting the horses re-shod, this time by the resident stable blacksmith.
But my most important task was a visit to Ankara to see the Director of the British Institute of Archaeology. Dr David French had devoted a large part of his professional life to studying the Roman roads of Anatolia. Across the length and breadth of the country he had noted Roman milestones, recorded traces of the roads, and compared the routes used by Romans, Byzantines, pilgrims and Crusaders to build up a compendious knowledge of his special topic. Now, very generously, he placed that expertise at my disposal. I came back to Istanbul carrying a folio of large-scale maps, each marked with a thin red line that Dr French had traced for me. The line indicated the track that the First Crusade had taken in a great meandering Z-shape across Turkey-in-Asia, over deserts, mountains and steppe until the pilgrims reached Antioch on the border of the Arab lands. To follow Duke Godfrey, all I needed to do was keep to that red line.
On 14 September another rented truck took the horses over the Bosphorus Bridge, which was banned to animal traffic and deposited them on the Asian shore. When Duke Godfrey and the pilgrims were ferried across the Bosphorus to continue their march to the Holy Land, they had taken the coast road, keeping close to the Sea of Marmara on their right. Today that coast road is a disaster of urban blight. Mile after mile of depressing apartment blocks alternate with offices, factories, scrap yards and building sites. This dreariness extends for almost a hundred miles along the shore. Yet it is only a thin ribbon of ugliness. Go five or six miles inland, make a short climb to the plateau and abruptly the interior of Turkey spreads out in all its immensity, covered in scrubland and nearly empty of people and settlement. It was there, in the deserted plateau, that I planned to take the horses, keeping parallel with the Roman road.
We rode only a little distance that first day in Asia. The weather was hot and, after their rest in Istanbul the horses needed to be reintroduced gradually to their work. Our target was the summer hill resort at Polonezkoy settled in the mid-19th century by Polish soldiers, mainly from eastern Poland, who served the Ottoman sultan. 'Polish Village' might still have been a cosy north European settlement. There were hedges, orchards and steeply sloping meadows which fell away to small streams draining through willow thickets, and the neat houses with their front gardens along the web of lanes gave a most un-Turkish feeling to the place. There was even a white-painted Christian church with a plain cross over the entrance to the cemetery and — most oddly in a Muslim country — the sounds and smell of pigs in a sty. The young farmer who offered a pasture for the animals told us that some 50 or 60 of the inhabitants still preserved their Polish connections. They spoke Polish in the home and, where possible, visited Poland and arranged school exchanges. But, he said, numbers were dwindling fast and all-Polish marriages were rare.
Our friends in Istanbul had asked us to be prudent about the track we followed, so as not to infringe on military zones in the sensitive areas overlooking the Bosphorus. But in the event — as everywhere in Turkey - we found that if we were discreet and kept well clear of the main army installations, no one troubled us. Next morning we rode past the radar domes that watch the approaches to the Bosphorus, but no one asked us what we were doing there, and the riding through a forest of small oak trees was magnificent. In any other country, so close to a major city, one would have met walkers or physical fitness enthusiasts. But in the entire morning Sarah and I encountered only a half platoon of soldiers laboriously digging a trench across the path to bury a telephone cable. Obligingly they filled in a temporary earthen bridge so the horses could walk across.
Military camps, army training grounds, and small dormitory towns continued in succession until we arrived at the open levels of the main plateau with its heathland. And here we came upon the birth pangs of a new town, a raw line of half-formed buildings in every stage of construction with labourers swarming over them. The fronts of the structures were ready, but the rears were still covered in scaffolding and wooden shuttering ready to receive poured concrete. Bulldozers, cranes and heavy trucks were moving everywhere. The road was potholed and rutted under their weight. Heaps of building sand, cubes of cement sacks, and piles of reinforcing rods were scattered about. But there was no sign of ordinary life, no grocery shops, bakeries, corner stores or gardens. Instead, each morsel of food was being carried in by lorries that parked under the row of trees in the main square and formed an impromptu market. We rode past rank upon rank of baths and basins and lavatory bowls stacked neatly on the ground. The start and end of the town were marked by a scatter of half a dozen little shacks, like garden potting sheds beside the road. They were land offices and, ever hopeful they all displayed signs which read 'Building Plot For Sale'.
Beyond the new town the immensity of Turkey-in-Asia opened out around us. Everything was on a vaster scale than anything we had witnessed in Europe. We were barely on the fringe of Anatolia and yet already there was the sensation of an infinite land stretching away to the horizon and beyond. Ahead, in the east, we could identify great haze-shrouded ridges, the wrinkled folds of the main Anatolian plateau vanishing into the distance. For the next thirty miles we traversed a brown wilderness of stunted oak bushes until next morning, quite abruptly, we found ourselves riding over the lip of a broad valley, a swathe of fertility hidden below horizon level and laid out beneath us with green fields, woodlands and a scatter of villages. A low tent was pitched strategically on the shoulder of the hill to look out across the magnificent scene. It was a tent out of Central Asia, low and spread out with wide wings of some sort of dark cloth. As we passed the entrance, I caught a glimpse of a woman in baggy pantaloons standing by the central pole. At first, by her rhythmic movement I thought she was churning milk, rocking it back and forth in a skin, but then we saw she was operating two huge bellows by hand, each bellow as big as a wine cask. She was pumping air steadily, and from somewhere on the far side of the tent came the sound of a hammer ringing on metal. They were nomad tinsmiths.
