Siege of Ma'arra

After the crusaders, including Raymond IV of Toulouse and Bohemond of Taranto, successfully led the siege of Antioch, they started to raid the surrounding countryside during the winter months. The crusaders had been ineffective in assessing and protecting their supply lines, which led to widespread hunger and lack of proper equipment within the crusader armies.

In July 1098, Raymond Pilet d'Alès, a knight in the army of Raymond, led an expedition against Ma'arra, an important city on the road south towards Damascus. His troops met a much larger Muslim garrison in the town and they were completely routed with many casualties. For the rest of the summer the crusaders continued their march south and captured many other small towns, and arrived again at Ma'arra in November.

Around the end of November, thousands of crusaders started to besiege the city. The citizens were at first unconcerned, since Raymond Pilet's expedition had been such a failure, and they taunted the crusaders. The crusaders could also not afford to conduct a lengthy siege, as winter was approaching and they had few supplies, but they were also unable to break through the city's defences, consisting of a deep ditch and strong walls.

The defenders of the city, mostly an urban militia and inexperienced citizens, managed to hold off the attacks for about two weeks. The crusaders sent repeatedly envoys offering terms of surrender that included security of the Arab population's lives and properties in return of the establishment of a Frankish governor of the city.[1] These terms were rejected. The crusaders spent this time building a siege tower, which allowed them to pour over the walls of the city, while at the same time a group of knights scaled the undefended walls on the other side of the city.

The crusaders occupied the walls on December 11. The Muslims retreated into the city, and both sides prepared to rest for the night, but the poorer crusaders rushed through and plundered Ma'arra. On the morning of December 12, the garrison negotiated with Bohemond, who promised them safe conduct if they surrendered. The Muslims surrendered, but the crusaders immediately began to massacre the population. Meanwhile, Bohemond seized control of the walls and towers while Raymond of Toulouse took control of the interior of the city, continuing their dispute over who would rule conquered territories. The crusaders also began destroying Ma'arra's fortifications, forcing Raymond to finally agree to continue the march south.

Driven by hunger – as all the Christian sources suggest – some of the starving crusaders at Ma'arra resorted to cannibalism, feeding on the bodies of Muslims. A chronicler, Ralph of Caen, wrote in his contemporaneous account Gesta Tancredi: "I heard and ... learned from the authors of this shame" – that is, from participants on the events – "that they were forced by the lack of food to begin to eat human flesh. Adults from among the [pagans] were put into the cooking pot and their youth were fixed on spits and roasted."[2] These events were also chronicled by Fulcher of Chartres, who wrote:

I shudder to tell that many of our people, harassed by the madness of excessive hunger, cut pieces from the buttocks of the Saracens already dead there, which they cooked, but when it was not yet roasted enough by the fire, they devoured it with savage mouth.[3]

Albert of Aix remarked that "the Christians did not shrink from eating not only killed Turks or Saracens, but even creeping dogs",[4] thus cynically suggesting that eating dogs was even worse than eating Muslims. While the Christian sources all explain the cannibalism as due to hunger, Amin Maalouf is sceptical of this justification:

The inhabitants of the Ma'arra region witnessed behaviour during that sinister winter that could not be accounted for by hunger. They saw, for example, fanatical Franj, the Tafurs, roam through the country-side openly proclaiming that they would chew the flesh of the Saracens and gathering around their nocturnal camp-fires to devour their prey.[5]

He therefore suggests that the cannibalism might have been driven by "fanaticism" rather than, or in addition to "necessity".[6] He also notes that the events at Ma'arra helped to shape a very negative image of the crusaders in Arab eyes. "For three days they put people to the sword, killing more than a hundred thousand people", one Arab chronicler wrote. While this was widely exaggerated, as the whole city's population had probably been less than ten thousand, it indicates an amount of violence that deeply shocked the Muslim world, while the "barely imaginable fate" of the bodies of victims – to serve as food for the conquerors – was an even deeper shock. After these events, the "Franj" frequently appear in Arab and Turkish sources as brutal "beasts" and "anthropophagi".[7]

The historian Thomas Asbridge states that, while the "cannibalism at Marrat is among the most infamous of all the atrocities perpetrated by the First Crusaders", it nevertheless had "some positive effects on the crusaders' short-term prospects". Reports and rumours of their brutality in Ma'arra and Antioch convinced "many Muslim commanders and garrisons that the crusaders were bloodthirsty barbarians, invincible savages who could not be resisted". Accordingly, many of them decided to "accept costly and humiliating truces with the Franks rather than face them in battle".[8]

• List of incidents of cannibalism
• List of massacres in Syria

• Heng, Geraldine (2003). Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy. New York: Columbia University Press.
• Lebedev, Claude (2006). Les Croisades, origines et consequences. Éditions Ouest-France. ISBN 2-7373-4136-1.