Introduction: The Arrival of the Western Invaders
In 1096, news reached the young Turkish sultan Kilij Arslan that a massive, strange army was approaching his lands from the West. Only seventeen years old, the sultan watched as a disorganized mob of thousands descended upon his territory. These invaders, known as the Franj, were unlike any mercenaries he had seen before, wearing crosses on their backs and plundering everything in their path. Kilij Arslan easily defeated this first wave by cutting off their water supply and luring them into a deadly ambush.
This easy victory convinced the sultan that the Westerners were no real threat, so he returned to fighting rival Turkish princes. However, a second, far more formidable wave of professional, iron-clad knights soon arrived at the gates of his capital, Nicaea. Arslan rushed back to save his city, but he found it surrounded by sophisticated siege engines and thousands of disciplined soldiers. The city fell to the Byzantine Emperor, and Arslan’s own wife and newborn son were taken captive.
The sultan realized he could no longer afford to fight his fellow Turks, so he formed an alliance with his rival Danishmend. The two leaders combined their forces to set a massive ambush near Dorylaeum, planning to use their traditional tactics of circling the enemy with light horsemen. Their arrows bounced off the heavy armor of the knights, and two more Frankish armies appeared on the horizon to catch Arslan’s forces in a pincer movement. The sultan was forced to flee, shattering the myth of Turkish invincibility and opening the path to Syria.
The iron tide of invaders then moved toward Antioch, a dazzling metropolis protected by the Orontes River and hundreds of towers. Yaghi-Siyan, the aging ruler of Antioch, prepared for a long siege by expelling the Christian men while keeping their families as hostages to ensure their silence. Outside the walls, the Muslim world was fractured by a bitter feud between the kings of Aleppo and Damascus, who refused to unite against the common enemy. After a siege of two hundred days, a disgraced armor maker named Firuz betrayed the city by opening a window for the invaders, leading to the brutal sack of Antioch.
The arrival of a Muslim relief army was delayed by the stubbornness of Karbuqa, the powerful leader of Mosul, who wasted three vital weeks attacking Edessa. By the time Karbuqa reached Antioch, the Westerners had already secured the city and were prepared to fight. The exhausted knights, emboldened by the supposed discovery of a holy relic, charged out of the gates in a desperate assault. The massive Muslim coalition collapsed instantly due to internal rivalries, leaving the path open for the foreigners to march deeper into the Levant.
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