Antioch was known to be the Franks’ next stop. An ancient center of Christianity, Antioch had had great strategic as well as cultural value to the Byzantine Greeks, dominating as it did the passes into northern Syria and embracing one of the few fords of the Orontes River. Over the past centuries it had repeatedly changed hands between Arab, Byzantine, and Turkish conquerors. It was logical that Alexios, the Byzantine emperor, would try to use the Franks to retake it, and the Franks themselves, exhausted and low on supplies, had every reason to want it for themselves. If for no other reasons than these, the loss of Antioch to the Franks would be a terrible blow to Saljuq power in the north. Yaghi-Siyan leaped into action. He sent one of his sons with a body of troops to Damascus to rouse Prince Duqaq. He sent another to Karbuqa in Mosul and to other commanders in the east to raise troops among the Turcomans. He also sent messengers to “all the amirs of the Muslims.”16 As it happens, we now know that the arrival of the Franks at Antioch in 1097 immediately inspired at least one scholarly discussion in Damascus of the theoretical limits of jihad, a debate that hinged significantly on whether the duty should be met locally or whether Muslims in neighboring regions were also expected to pitch in. It was the latter position that won out, which bode well for Yaghi-Siyan’s efforts. Not surprisingly the army that he raised also included a body of men who volunteered expressly to engage in jihad. Once constituted, this large Muslim army marched to the vicinity of Antioch to engage the Franks.17 The Fatimids, for their part, thinking perhaps of their relations with Byzantium and even the possibility of Frankish success, sent envoys to negotiate a separate peace treaty with the Franks, thus relieving them of a threat from Egypt for the time being.18 Fatimid scheming aside, Yaghi-Siyan must have been grateful for the support he received from his Saljuq colleagues.19 In advance of their arrival at Antioch, the Franks had planned their siege well and had taken pains to claim adequate foraging lands and secure supply lines to last them during what was expected to be, given Antioch’s indomitable fortifications and inaccessible citadel, a long and grueling siege. The Franks continued their policy, first worked out in Cilicia, of securing the loyalty of neighboring castles and their lands, in some cases seizing them outright or allowing native Christians to seize them on their behalf,—“all of this,” one chronicler later wrote acidly, “due to Yaghi-Siyan’s ugly conduct and oppressive grip over his lands.”20 But were Frankish contacts with the West to be maintained, they needed to secure a port. Antioch was an inland city, rolling astride the Orontes Prey for the Sword
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