The Loss of Antioch

Antioch, the great and ancient city of northern Syria on the Orontes, walled in a vast circuit that climbed from the river over the flank of Mount Silpius to a citadel on the heights, was one of the strongest fortresses of the East and, under the Seljuk Turks, a chief city of Muslim Syria, held in the 1090s by its governor Yaghi-Siyan. When the armies of the First Crusade, having crossed Anatolia, came down upon it in the autumn of 1097, they found it too strong to storm and were forced into a long and miserable siege through the winter, in which both sides suffered greatly from hunger and cold. The Damascene chronicler Ibn al-Qalanisi, in his Dhayl Tarikh Dimashq, and Ibn al-Athir in al-Kamil fi al-Tarikh, record that the city held for some eight months until, on the night of the 2nd to the 3rd of June 1098, it was taken: not by assault alone but by treachery, a captain of one of the towers, named in the sources as Firuz, being persuaded to let a party of the Franks climb the wall by night, after which they opened the gates and took the city amid much slaughter. Yaghi-Siyan fled and was killed, though the citadel on the height still held out under his son. The Aleppan historian Ibn al-Adim, in his Zubdat al-Halab fi Tarikh Halab, sets the loss in the wider tale of Frankish encroachment on the cities of Syria. No sooner had the Crusaders taken Antioch than a great Muslim army, gathered from Mosul and the Jazira and beyond under Kerbogha, the atabeg of Mosul, arrived and besieged them within the walls they had just won, so that the starving conquerors were nearly destroyed in their turn. But the Muslim host was a coalition of rival princes, divided in counsel and distrustful of its commander, and when the desperate Franks sallied out at the end of June it broke and fled, and was defeated. The disunity of the Muslim powers, more than the strength of the invaders, allowed the Crusaders to keep Antioch and to found there a Frankish principality that would endure for over a century and a half, until the Mamluk sultan Baybars took the city in 1268. The loss of Antioch was one of the first and heaviest blows of the Crusading invasion, and a bitter lesson in the cost of Muslim division, the very lesson that Zengi, Nur al-Din and Saladin (rahimahum Allah) would later answer. This scene shows not the assault but its aftermath: the conquered city with a Frankish banner flying above the gate, western knights posted as sentries, and the townsfolk driven out along the road. In keeping with the project's ethics any figure is anonymous and at a distance, and the violence is not graphically shown.