The Field of Blood

In the year 1119, in the hill-country of northern Syria near Sarmada, between Aleppo and the Crusader-held city of Antioch, the Turkmen prince Najm al-Din Ilghazi ibn Artuq, of the Artuqid dynasty, lord of Mardin in the Jazira and master of Aleppo, brought a large army built around the mounted archers of the Turkmen against the field army of the Principality of Antioch, led by its prince and regent Roger of Salerno. Roger, against advice, had advanced and encamped in an exposed position; Ilghazi's host surrounded the Frankish army at dawn and overwhelmed it before it could properly form, and in a few hours destroyed it almost to a man. Roger himself was killed, and so great was the slaughter that the Franks ever after remembered the place as the Ager Sanguinis, the Field of Blood. It was one of the most complete and crushing defeats the Crusaders of the East ever suffered, and for a moment it left Antioch open and nearly defenceless. Yet Ilghazi, whether from the exhaustion and dispersal of his men after the victory and the plunder, or from the difficulty of holding so large a force together, did not march on the city, and the Principality of Antioch, reinforced from Jerusalem, survived. The battle is remembered as a great Muslim victory of the early Crusading period and as a sign of how the divided Muslim powers might, when united under an able commander, shatter the Frankish armies, a lesson that Zengi, Nur al-Din and Salah al-Din would carry much further. This scene depicts the Field of Blood; in keeping with the project's ethics any figure is anonymous and at a distance, and the slaughter is shown without gore.