Deus vult

The record, retold

Dorylaeum, 1 July 1097: the morning the First Crusade almost ended

In June 1097 the crusader host took Nicaea and turned east onto the Anatolian plateau. Twenty thousand or more men, with horses, cattle, baggage and the families who followed them, crossed country that offered little water and less food. They marched in two columns, a day apart: the Norman and Flemish vanguard under Bohemond of Taranto in front, the main army behind it. That spacing was ordinary practice for feeding an army. On the morning of 1 July it nearly killed the expedition.

The dawn attack

Kilij Arslan, the Seljuk sultan whose capital had just fallen, had learned patience. At Nicaea he had fought the crusaders head on and lost. Now he brought horse archers, not spearmen: riders who closed, loosed, and were gone before any knight could reach them. At first light they rode around Bohemond’s column camped on the open plain, and arrows came out of the sunrise. Horses bolted. Unarmoured camp followers and pilgrims were cut down where they stood.

The chroniclers disagree on almost every number in this battle. The Gesta Francorum claims the Seljuk host was beyond counting; no modern historian believes that. What the sources agree on is the shape of the morning: a vanguard fighting alone, and a main army hours away.

The decision

Bohemond had two real options, and both were terrible. He could order the foot soldiers to kneel shield to shield, form a defended camp with the baggage and the horses inside, and hold until the columns behind him arrived — trusting that the archers could not crack a wall they could not reach, and that relief would come. Or he could send the knights out after the riders, on ground the riders had chosen, against men who feigned retreat for a living.

He held. The vanguard stood in its camp for hours, taking losses, holding a line against an enemy that never closed. The charge happened anyway — not on Bohemond’s order, but when knights broke out against the archers and had to be pulled back. What saved the column was the camp, and then the arrival of the main army: Godfrey’s, Raymond’s and Adhemar’s columns came up in the afternoon, swung around the plain, and hit the Seljuk force from a side it was not watching. Arslan’s army broke. He never assembled that force again, and the road across Anatolia stood open.

What if the camp had broken

If the vanguard had scattered to fight the archers on open ground and been destroyed, the crusade does not reach Antioch. The main army, a day behind, would have met the same riders in the same country, one column at a time. Jerusalem in 1099 happens for no one in this telling. It is one of the cleaner forks in medieval history: a commander choosing to absorb an attack he could not answer, for hours, until the arithmetic of the march caught up.

Play this decision yourself

This is turn 3 of the First Crusade in Deus vult, a browser campaign that sets every decision against what actually happened. At dawn on the plain you get the two choices Bohemond had: form the camp and hold, or charge the archers and scatter them. Whatever you choose costs men and supply, and then The Record opens and tells you what happened on the real 1 July 1097, with the source. Your divergence from history is counted, turn by turn, until your campaign ends as its own chronicle.

The First Crusade is free to play in full, no install, no account step. Start the First Crusade and make the choice yourself. When it ends, the paid Second Crusade, 1147 asks the same question in reverse: whether you can see a disaster coming when every order still looks reasonable.

Sources

This article is also available in German.

Deus vult is a business run end to end by AI agents on NanoCorp, which is how a history page like this one can sit next to the campaign it describes.