The Siege of Antioch 1098: 100,000 Crusaders Trapped With No Food for 8 Months

Added: 2026-06-10

[00:00:00]His name was Anelm of Riamont. And on the morning of October 21st, 1097, he was standing in mud up to his ankles, looking at the largest city he had ever seen. He had walked there, not marched, walked, 2,000 m through Anatolia's killing heat, through poisoned wells and passes where horses tumbled off cliffs and nobody looked back. By the time he reached Antioch, he had eaten his own boots. Picture what you would have seen standing beside him. 60 ft walls, 400 towers, a river on one side, a mountain on the other, 7,000 soldiers waiting behind the gates.

[00:00:47]>> And Selm wrote a letter home that night.

[00:00:50]He called the city almost impossible to take. He was being generous. What he couldn't know, what you could not have known is that taking Antioch was not the nightmare.

[00:01:05]What came after was >> we must bring aid.

[00:01:07]>> Here is what the textbooks skip.

[00:01:10]>> By the time these men reached Antioch, they were already half dead.

[00:01:14]>> The crusade had launched the summer before in 1096.

[00:01:18]Pope Urban II had called for holy war at the Council of Claremont, and the response was something nobody had planned for. Nobles mortgaged estates.

[00:01:30]Knights sold their horses. Farmers dropped their tools and walked east. If you had stood on any road in northern France that summer, you would have seen a river of human beings flowing toward Jerusalem. Most with no military training and no idea what they were marching into. Five separate armies.

[00:01:52]>> Five commanders who despised each other.

[00:01:56]>> Raymond IVth of Tulus led the southern French. Sunh hardened veterans of border wars against Moorish raiders. Godfrey of Buon brought the northern Europeans cold and disciplined. Bohimand of Toranto commanded the Norman Italians, arguably the most dangerous soldiers in Europe at that moment. Robert of Normandy had pawned his entire duchy to fund the trip. Together they numbered somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 soldiers, priests, women, children. a medieval city moving on foot across a continent. They crossed into Byzantine territory and immediately began falling apart. Emperor Alexios I had asked for help, specifically a few thousand mercenaries. What arrived instead was the entire armed population of Western Europe camping outside Constantinople and eating everything in sight. Alexios did what clever men do with chaos. He moved them across the Bosphorus as fast as possible and pointed them east. Then the dying started. Anatolia in summer is not survivable in full iron armor. The plateau sits over 3,000 ft above sea level. The heat is merciless. The Seljuk commander, Kilage Arlan, had designed a strategy for exactly this landscape. No pitched battle, just constant hitand-run raids, bleeding the column one skirmish at a time, and then the scorched earth, every well poisoned, every village emptied, every field burned to black stubble. Albert of Arkin describes men cutting open dead camels to drink the fluid inside. Men sucking moisture from damp soil. The roadside becoming a continuous line of bodies. Horses collapsed and were butchered on the spot. Dogs were eaten. Boot leather was boiled and chewed. A third of the army, perhaps 30,000 people, never made it off that plateau. The survivors descended from the Taus Mountains in October 1097, blinking into the Syrian plane.

[00:04:15]And there was Antioch. third largest city in the Christian world or it had been the Seljuks had seized it from Bzantium in 1084.

[00:04:26]Before that it was Roman apostolic the city where followers of Jesus were first called Christians.

[00:04:34]St. Peter had been its first bishop. The walls above all that history rose 60 ft, anchored on one side by the Arantis River and on the other by the sheer rock face of Mount Silius.

[00:04:49]Garrisoned by 7,000 men under a commander named Yagi.

[00:04:55]>> A man who was not a fool.

[00:04:57]>> He had been watching the crusaders coming for months. He had stockpiled food. He had expelled the city's Christian population, thousands of civilians, because fewer mouths meant the supplies lasted longer. Those expelled families walked straight into the crusader camp and told them everything. If you were one of those commanders, this is where you would have looked at your hollowedout army and made the only call available. Lay siege. Wait him out.

[00:05:28]>> Raymond planted his standard outside the bridge gate.

[00:05:32]took the northeast. Godfrey covered the northwest. The army stretched itself across miles of wall too thin. Everyone knew it and dug in. It was late October 1097.

[00:05:46]They thought it would take weeks. It would take 8 months. And the hunger had not even started yet.

[00:05:54]The siege of Antioch was supposed to be simple. Surround the city. Cut the supply lines. Wait.

[00:06:02]Nobody mentioned that the besiegers had no food either. The crusaders arrived in October, the worst possible month. The local harvest was already in. The villages within foraging distance had been stripped bare by Yagi before they arrived. Within 2 weeks, the food situation was critical. Pack animals went first. Mules, draft horses slaughtered methodically, the meat salted and rationed. Then the salted meat ran out. Foraging parties pushed 30 m from camp, competing with bandits for scraps. Many didn't come back. Then the rains came. Picture yourself 60,000 strong, packed into a waterlogged field beneath walls that show no intention of surrendering. Tents rotted. Latrines overflowed into the sleeping areas.

[00:06:56]Typhoid moved through the camp like a slow fire, taking three men a day, then 10, then more. Raymond of Aguilera's records that corpses were sometimes left unburied because the living were too weak to dig.

[00:07:13]>> The smell, he wrote, was indescribable.

[00:07:17]Dissentry followed the typhoid, then scurvy, as the diet narrowed to grain paste and bone broth. Your gums would have blackened. Your teeth would have loosened. Wounds you should have shaken off in a week were now killing men in a month. Yagan, meanwhile, did exactly what a competent commander does. He waited and he raided.

[00:07:44]Every night, small parties slipped out through the postern gates and hit the crusader pickets, killed centuries, drove off horses, set fire to stores.

[00:07:55]Sleep became impossible.

[00:07:58]>> Bohemond responded the only way he knew how. Aggression, counter raids deep into the countryside. Villages suspected of supplying Antioch were burned to the ground. It was brutal. And by the standards of medieval warfare, completely unremarkable.

[00:08:17]By December, the camp was eating rats, not as a last resort, as a staple. Rat meat boiled into thin broth, mixed with grass or bark for substance. Leather belts softened in water and chewed.

[00:08:33]Fulture of Chartra, who lived through it, writes with an exhausted matterof factness that makes it worse somehow.

[00:08:40]No drama, just this is what we ate.

[00:08:45]Then in December, a Bzantine fleet docked at the port of St. Simeon, 40 mi west, carrying grain from Emperor Alexios. A supply convoy was organized immediately. Yagisan's spies told him the moment it left. The garrison sorted in force while the convoy was gone. They hit the weakened camp from two sides. By the time Boond drove them back inside, the crusaders had lost men they could not replace. The supplies arrived. They helped for 3 weeks. Then they were gone.

[00:09:22]>> January brought frost. February brought more rain. Men who had arrived broadsh shouldered from France were now skeletal. Even Peter the hermit, the wildeyed preacher who had helped launch the whole crusade, tried to slip away in the night. Tankrred dragged him back to camp in disgrace.

[00:09:43]It was around this point that a peasant priest named Peter Bartholomew started having visions. He claimed St. Andrew himself had appeared to him and revealed that buried beneath the floor of the cathedral inside Antioch lay the holy lance. The spear that had pierced Christ's side at the crucifixion.

[00:10:07]Find it, the vision said, and God would deliver the city. The commanders received this with polite skepticism.

[00:10:16]The soldiers received it differently.

[00:10:19]Desperate men do not require probability.

[00:10:22]They require hope. The story spread through the camp like the only warm thing left in it. They were going to need something to believe in >> because what came next was worse than anything they had survived so far.

[00:10:38]>> By spring 1098, both sides were breaking. The crusaders had been outside the walls for 7 months. Disease and starvation had cut the army roughly in half. Desertions were a daily problem.

[00:10:53]Inside the city, things were not much better. Yagisan's stockpile had been deep. But 7 months of siege drains, any grainery. Worse, his promised reinforcements kept failing. Damascus had marched out to relieve Antioch in December and been driven back by Boond during the foraging campaign. Aleppo had tried in February and been routed near the lake of Antioch at Har. Each time the crusaders somehow kept winning the field battles. Then came the news that changed everything. A massive army was assembling in Mosul 300 miles east. The Seljuk commander Kaboga was bringing perhaps 35,000 fresh troops from across northern Mesopotamia, the largest relief force yet. And this one was not going to be turned back by skirmishing. The crusaders had maybe 3 weeks. After that, they would be crushed against the walls of a city they had spent 8 months failing to take.

[00:11:59]This is the moment Bohemond made his move inside Antioch. One of the tower captains, an Armenian convert to Islam named Firuse, who commanded a section of the Western Wall called the Tower of the Two Sisters, had grown disillusioned.

[00:12:17]Some sources say Yagi had insulted him.

[00:12:21]Others say Firu had simply done the math and chosen the side he thought would win. Through secret messages, he agreed to let Boeon's men climb his tower under cover of darkness. The price was steep.

[00:12:36]Bohemond demanded that whoever entered the city first should rule it afterward.

[00:12:41]Raymond hated this, but Kaboga was 3 weeks away. They agreed. On the night of June 2nd, 1098, 60 men climbed a leather ladder thrown up the western wall.

[00:12:55]Firuse let them in. They cut the throats of the centuries in the neighboring towers. They opened the gate of St. George from the inside. Bohemon's main force poured through and within hours the streets of Antioch became a slaughter house. If you can picture sleeping men dragged from their beds in the dark, you have the right image.

[00:13:17]Raymond of Aguilles describes corpses choking the alleys. The next morning, Yagisan tried to flee. He was thrown from his horse in the chaos and decapitated by an Armenian peasant who recognized him. His head was delivered to the crusader commanders in a sack.

[00:13:35]The city was taken after 8 months. After 30,000 deaths, the crusaders celebrated for less than a day. Because on June 4th, 48 hours later, Kaboga's army appeared on the horizon. 35,000 fresh troops, cavalry, siege engines. They surrounded the city with the same precision the crusaders themselves had used 8 months earlier. The besiegers were now the besieged. And here is what nobody had thought to check during the 48-hour victory party. Yagi's granaries, which the crusaders had assumed would feed them, were empty. Eight months of siege had drained them. The food they had killed 30,000 of their own to reach was already gone. Burond walked the storooms personally. Nothing, not flour, not salted meat, not even foder for the horses. You are now locked inside a stone city with no exit, surrounded by an army twice your size, with no food and no possibility of resupply.

[00:14:46]And what they did next is something most history books refuse to describe in full.

[00:14:53]There is a letter signed by the crusader commanders themselves in July 1098, sent west from inside Antioch.

[00:15:02]It survives.

[00:15:04]You can read it today.

[00:15:06]>> They knew exaggeration wouldn't be believed, >> so they wrote the truth in flat language.

[00:15:14]It is one of the most disturbing documents from the medieval period. The war horses went first. The Destrias, irreplaceable battle horses that knight spent fortunes on, animals that were essentially family. Boeond ordered them slaughtered methodically. The army needed protein. The horses needed grain that did not exist. By the end of June, the crusader cavalry had been almost entirely eaten. Roughly 200 horses left out of thousands. Then came what Albert of Arkin records next. Dogs, cats, mules, donkeys, >> then the smaller animals, rats, mice, anything with meat on its bones. Rat became a luxury item. Filulture of Chartra records a single rat selling for the equivalent of a knight's daily wage.

[00:16:08]Then the inedible things, leather, all of it. Saddle leather, belts, boots, the straps that held armor together. You would have soaked them for days, boiled them, chewed them. You would have eaten the bindings of your books, scraped mold off the cellar walls, boiled bark, and drunk the bitter liquid, and then they ate worse. Raymond of Agalas, who was inside the city throughout, records that some men ate the flesh of the dead. He does not elaborate. He does not need to.

[00:16:47]The Arab chronicler Iban al- Air records the same thing from the other side. A western source called the Gesta Franorum confirms it in a single exhausted sentence. Some of our people ate the flesh of Sariss and even sometimes the flesh of their own companions.

[00:17:08]This is the part the documentaries skip.

[00:17:11]Men who had crossed 2,000 mi in the name of Christ were eating each other inside the city where the followers of Jesus had first been called Christians.

[00:17:22]You can imagine the silence after a meal like that.

[00:17:26]>> The way no one asked what was in the pot. Boimond meanwhile was setting fires not outside the city inside it. He ordered entire neighborhoods burned, not as punishment, as discipline. Men were hiding in cellars, refusing to man the walls. So Boemont burned the cellars.

[00:17:48]Raymond of Aguileles records 2,000 buildings going up in a single night. It was brutal. It was almost certainly necessary because outside the walls, Koga's siege engines were now operational. Catapult stones sailed over the walls. Arrows whistled down at any movement, and Kaboga had cut off the citadel, the high fortress on top of Mount Silpius that the crusaders had failed to capture. A Seljuk garrison still held it. The crusaders were being attacked from outside and from above simultaneously.

[00:18:25]The hospitals, and the word is generous, were rooms where men were laid out on the floor and waited to die. Wells inside Antioch had been fouled by Yagi before the city fell. Some had bodies in them. You drank from puddles from the river downstream of the corpses being thrown over the walls. Cholera moved through the population like a second army. 2 weeks after the city fell, 15,000 more were dead. Then the desertions. Men climbed over the walls at night and dropped into no man's land.

[00:19:04]Most were killed the moment they hit the ground.

[00:19:06]>> Lord, >> a few made it, including a knight named William of Grand Mesnil, who ran all the way to the coast. The crusaders had a name for these men, Fambbley, rope walkers, because they climbed down on knotted ropes in the dark, and most of them fell. Bohemond stationed guards on every section of wall. It barely worked.

[00:19:31]The army was disintegrating.

[00:19:33]And then a priest dug a hole in the floor of a cathedral. And what he pulled out of it would either save them or doom them completely.

[00:19:44]On June 14th, 1098, a peasant priest named Peter Bartholomew walked into the Cathedral of St. Peter with a shovel and a story nobody quite believed. St. Andrew, he claimed, had been visiting him in dreams. The spear that pierced Christ's side at the crucifixion was buried beneath this cathedral. Find it and the army would be saved. The commanders had stalled him for weeks.

[00:20:14]With the army eating its own dead, they finally let him dig. They dug for hours, found nothing.

[00:20:22]Then Peter jumped into the pit himself, scratched at the floor with his hands, and came up holding a corroded iron spearhead. Whether he planted it there is a question historians have argued for 900 years. Either way, it didn't matter.

[00:20:39]What mattered was the effect. The news swept through Antioch in hours. The holy lance, the blade that had touched the side of Christ, was here. God had not abandoned them. The starving cannibal army that had been hours from collapse was suddenly the army of God again.

[00:20:59]>> A sign from God.

[00:21:00]>> Bohemon's plan was insane. Every man who could still hold a sword would form up at dawn and march out through the bridge gate in full view of Kaboga's army.

[00:21:12]Starving men against fresh troops outnumbering them two to one. Raymond of Tulus called it suicide.

[00:21:20]>> Boond called it the only option.

[00:21:24]>> Better to die on open ground with the lads carried before them than to be hunted through the streets when the city finally fell.

[00:21:33]On the morning of June 28th, the gates opened.

[00:21:37]>> Fewer than 15,000 men were fit enough to march. Many had no armor. They had eaten the leather straps. The cavalry once thousands now mustered 150 horses with their ribs visible. Raymond of Aguilerles carried the lance at the head of the column. Then something happened that no historian has fully explained.

[00:22:02]>> Kaboga did not destroy them.

[00:22:05]>> His coalition of Seljuks, men who deeply distrusted each other, began to fall apart the moment the crusaders formed up. The Amir of Damascus refused to engage.

[00:22:18]>> The Amir of Hums pulled his contingent off the field. The crusaders struck Kaboga's left wing.

[00:22:25]>> The wing collapsed. The center wavered.

[00:22:29]And in one of the most stunning reversals in medieval history, his entire army broke and ran. Chronicers wrote of a column of light coming down from the hills of mounted saints George, Demetrius, Maurice leading the charge in shining armor.

[00:22:47]>> Whether you believe it or not, the result was the same. The siege was over.

[00:22:54]When the survivors counted themselves, the number was roughly 40,000.

[00:22:59]They had set out with around 100,000.

[00:23:02]60,000 were gone. And the road to Jerusalem still lay ahead.

[00:23:09]Anelm of Ribmont, the man we met at the beginning, standing in mud, looking up at walls he called almost impossible to take, survived Antioch. He wrote one more letter home after the siege, describing the victory, the relief, the army moving south toward Jerusalem. He did not make it. Anselm was killed eight months later at the siege of Arka, struck in the head by a stone thrown from the walls. He never saw the city he had walked across a continent to reach.

[00:23:44]Like 60,000 others, he simply stopped along the road and was buried where he fell. In his first letter written outside Antioch before any of this began, he had described the city's walls as immense. But the will of God, he wrote, as greater still. He meant it as faith. He meant it as comfort. He had no idea what would have to be eaten and who would have to be burned before those walls came