Chapter Thirty-Two: In Which A Duke Fights His Last Battle
Serlo pulled away the flap and ducked into the diffuse light of his tent. Hélie was still lying where Serlo had left him over an hour ago, on a thin pallet on the ground and shivering with chills despite the Egyptian summer heat and the blankets covering him.
“Feeling any better?”, Serlo asked his squire while opening the brooch holding his mantle in place over his well-worn coat of mail.
A feeble nod was the young squire’s answer. The fever had him firmly in its clutches; it was everywhere in the humid mosquito-infested maze of the delta, especially now, with the seasonal flooding. It had already also befallen Serlo, but he had weathered it off; like many others, Hélie was only now suffering its full brunt.
For over half a year, since the past winter, the Norman army had been campaigning in the delta. Bohemond meant to force Mukhtar to come to terms by devastating his lands and taking as many fortified towns as possible, and the first major one he had set his eyes upon had been Manpura, commanding the central delta. The siege had already progressed far when Mukhtar had returned from Syria. The Fatimid King had bought peace with the Seljuks and their slowly recovering lord Börü by handing back all his conquests and returning into the borders from before the war. Being thus freed for the defense of his homeland he had marched back into Egypt; together with the remnants of Abdul-Qadir’s and Ashot’s defeated armies, Mukhtar had at the very least ten thousand fighting men to the les than nine thousand Bohemond had at his command in Egypt.
The arrival of Mukhtar had forced Bohemond to abandon the siege of Manpura to avoid being caught between the returning Fatimid army and the walls of the town. What had ensued now had been a succession of strategic maneuvers and reactions, of marches and countermarches all across the delta, with both Mukhtar and Bohemond trying to force the other into a disadvantageous position. The Fatimid King had proven that his reputation as wily and seasoned commander was not unfounded and the Normans had found themselves retreating from the enemy no less frequently than driving the Muhammadan host before them. Especially in the early stages, before Mukhtar had been able to combine his own host with those of Abdul-Qadir and Ashot, there had been a few minor engagements that had all gone in the Normans’ favour, but since Mukhtar had reunited his forces some three months ago, there had only been a number of skirmishes between outriders. The Normans had usually had the better of the Muhammadans and the numerical strength of the two armies was by now evened out, but Bohemond had been unable to bring Mukhtar to anything approaching a decisive battle. Whenever the Normans had come close to forcing the Fatimids to give battle at a disadvantage, Mukhtar had managed to extricate himself from the situation, and the other way around – until now.
Serlo dropped into his folding chair and massaged his right knee; after over a year on campaign and many months spent in the saddle, it was now hurting constantly. War was a young men’s game – but one particular young man was lying in sick.
With Serlo’s gaze on him, Hélie lowered the blanket from his nose to free his mouth. Through teeth clicking with chill, he asked: “Has anything been decided?”
“Yes”, Serlo replied. “You better get well. We’ll try to break out in two days’ time, and were going to need every single man, fever or not.”
Hélie looked even more miserable at his news. “Two days already? Why not wait? We’ve easily got two week’s forage for the horses.”
Serlo stretched out his legs in front of him, very gingerly and acutely aware of his hurt knee. “The flooding”, he said. “The natives swear that the water is going to rise for about six more weeks, and that it’s going to rise about a feet a week. With every day we deliberate, charging Mukhtar’s position is going to get more difficult. The water is already now coming up over the ankle.”
But it wasn’t so much the water that would impede the charge but the sucking mud underneath it. An armoured man sank into it for an ample hand’s breadth, and the massive warhorses would have an even more difficult time with that footing. The usual mounted charge would be impossible under these circumstances.
Mukhtar had them good. He had managed to deceive the Norman scouts as to his whereabouts and so the Christians had allowed themselves to make camp at a vulnerable position – and then Mukhtar had descended upon them. The Normans were encamped on dry farmland, but their campsite was like an island. To the north was the sea, to the west and south a very minor arm of the Nile swollen with the flood to come up to a man’s neck, and to the east was a flooded field – and beyond it Mukhtar. The Normans could not risk crossing the Nile with the Fatimid army so close at hand, not when the men would be hard pressed to wade across and see the horses to the other side; Mukhtar would follow them and his archers would do grievous damage to crossing Norman army. And they could also not stay and sit out the time until the flood subsided. The patch of dry land they were sitting on offered enough fodder to feed their horses for two, maybe three weeks, but then there would still be a month to endure. Waiting would be the death of the horses, and without cavalry they’d have no protection from the Fatimid horsemen. All that remained was the less than attractive prospect of charging over a mile of flooded fields, sinking deep into the mud and water with every single step towards the enemy.
The Norman and Fatimid positions before the Battle of the Sodden Fields
“Can’t the King send for the fleet to pick us up?”, Hélie asked. “It’s close and–“
“I hope that’s the fever speaking”, Serlo grumbled. After a year, he would have thought that the youth knew more of warfare. “Embarking while the enemy harries you is no less punishing than landing in face of an enemy’s resistance. Thousands would die. We might as well try to cross the river under Mukhtar’s arrows.”
“But an attack across those sodden fields…”
Serlo pressed his lips into a thin line. He was dreading the attack no less than Hélie; he had never had to give battle at worse odds. “I know”, he said. “But it’s our only chance. If we sit it out, we lose our horses. If we embark on ships, we lose a third of the army without as much as scratching Mukhtar. And if we cross the river, it’s no different. In all three cases, the war is lost. We would have to withdraw to a secure position and wait for reinforcements – no way how we could again take to the offensive before next year. And the realm can’t afford keeping so many men in the field for that very much longer.”
For some time, the clacking of Hélie’s teeth was the only sound made in the tent, but then the young Frank posed the pivotal question: “Do we – do we know how many archers Mukhtar has?”
“We’ve killed off a good many in the past encounters”, Serlo replied. Native African armies were usually heavy on archers, but with the Egyptians the Norman had tipped the balance in those recent months. “They’ve only about half as many as we do, certainly less than a thousand, maybe not even half that much. And we will attack well before dawn. The darkness should reduce the usefulness of their archers while we close with them.”
It would still be gruelling enough. Struggling hundreds of paces through the mud and water, with arrows raining down on them …. with over eight thousand men crossing those flooded fields, the Fatimids would not need to take good aim. Much would depend on how well the Normans’ own archers would be able to cover the crossing, and how many men would get to close with the enemy.
In spite of the heat, a shiver ran over Serlo.
* * *
The Battle of the Sodden Fields, as it had come to be known, had ben the most terrible Serlo had ever been in. In the dim light of predawn, they had set out across the flooded, fighting against the deep clinging mud with every step. They had soon been noticed by the enemy, and Mukhtar had drawn up his men in their long assigned positions – and then the arrows had come, a relentless rain of death falling on the hapless Normans. The irregulars had taken the brunt of those, as Bohemond had placed them in front of his attack, where they would invariably become the main target for the Egyptian archers. The unarmoured levy, more than a thousand strong, had died almost to a man, but their deaths had bought the core of the army the crossing. Now covered by ther own archers, who had finally advanced into range, the professional fighting men, the knights in front, had struggled up the gentle but muddy and treacherously slope to engage the enemy. Prospects had been grim for the Norman host, exhausted from wading two miles through the deep mire and outnumbered by an enemy occupying the high ground.
In the end, it had ben the iron resolve of the knights that had broken the Muhammadans. Again and again they had flung themselves against the enemy ranks, single-minded, stubborn, unheeding of their comrades being hacked down all around them. Three hundred of them, a full quarter of the host’s knightly contingent, had died that day, but in the end, they had broken the enemy. Mukhtar had realized that the dogged assaults of the Norman knights had robbed him of his initial superiority and that the luck of the field had now swung to the Christians, and he had sounded the retreat.
Had the Normans been able to pursue the weary and demoralized Fatimids, they might have decided the war then and there, but pursuit had been out of the question. Almost three thousand Normans lay dead or dying, scarcely a man was without wound, and even the professional fighting men – few others had survived the battle – were shaken and weary close unto death. The field was thick with the cadavers of over a thouand dead horses and some seven thousand slain men, all of whom, a dozen fallen barons expected, had been left to rot and bloat in the mud, now sodden with more than just water – the Christians ad their own injuries to see to and had been too spent to retrieve and bury the honourably dead. The battle had been harrowing and the cost gruesome, but it had all but won the war for Bohemond.
Maybe for Bohemond, Serlo thought, but probably not for myself. With every stride of his destrier across the parched plains, he cold discern more of the army Mukhtar had led up against him. More than three thousand men by the looks of it, almost all of the remaining Fatimid army, save possibly a force to garrison Cairo – and more than twice, maybe three times, the number of Serlo’s own.
After the Normans had recovered from their costly victory on the Sodden Fields, their had been voices for following Mukhtar to Cairo and assaulting the Fatimid capital, but the more prudent and cautious counsels, Serlo’s among them, had prevailed. Cairo was too strong a fortress, and Mukhtar defended it still with some four thousand men, more than were likely to be overcome by the remaining five and a half thousand Normans. It had instead been decided to put pressure on Mukhtar by mercilessly pillaging his country – he would either have to emerge from the safety of Cairo to meet his enemy in the open, or he would be forced to come to terms.
So the Normans had set out to plunder the delta, their first target being Manpura, the town they had already sieged half a year previous. The second time around, no Fatimid army had appeared to relieve Manpura, and after only a month, at the height of the flood, the town had fallen to the Christians. Despite the fortunes of war having now swung so clearly against Mukhtar, the Fatimid Caliph had once again refused an offer of peace.
There had been hints that Mukhtar was trying to woo the support of the bedouins of the Libyan desert instead of making peace, and when this new possible threat to the Norman positions in Egypt had become known, Bohemond had dispatched Serlo with some twelve hundred man to the oasis of Natrun. It had after all been Serlo who had a year ago secured the western desert, and both his knowledge of these lands and desert warfare at large was unmatched by any other Norman captain. While Bohemond was continuing his war in the delta, Serlo had thus taken up positions in the valley of Natrun with its poisonous acid lakes, and he had been glad of the respite from the rigours of campaigning.
Until Mukhtar had come.
The cunning Fatimid must have led his army forth from Cairo in secret, for no warning of his approach had been given, and Bohemond was far away. Serlo could oly guess what Mukhtar intended with his foray into the desert, either crushing Serlo’s smaller, isolated host, or else trying once more to cut the Normans’ lines of communication with their realm. Well, whatever it was, he was going to find out soon, for Mukhtar had asked him to a parlay.
Serlo ordered his party of retainers to stay back, while he had his own stallion advance for another dozen paces. The Fatimid king didengaged from his own party in a similar way, like Serlo accompanied by a single man who would serve as translator. Mukhtar Yaseen cut a somber figure, a lean man on a black charger, dressed in simple all black clothes. His bearded face was almost gaunt, with furrows cut deep into it and dominated by a sharp nose.
Mukhtar Yaseen, King of Egypt and Syria, Caliph of the Shiites
Both translators relayed their masters’ greetings, then Mukhtar cut right to the business at hand, his words relayed by the effete man at his elbow, a eunuch by the looks of him: “My master asks that you yield the oases and withdraw to your own lands, Duke Serlo de Hauteville. Your men must give up their horses, weapons and armour, all save the men of noble birth. Every knight will be allowed to retain all weapons and all armour. You can withdraw with your lifes, and your honour undiminished.”
Serlo scanned the Muhammadan ranks a quarter mile behind Mukhtar’s party. “I will not yield.”
The Fatimid King’s reply was more lenghty than Serlo’s and promptly rendered by his translator: “My master has brought more than three times thousand warriors. You are greatly outnumbered and have no fortifications to defend yourelves from. You can not prevail. There is no shame in withrawing from a vastly superior foe – it is wisdom.”
In lieu of a reply, Serlo glanced up at the sun, as if bored. It was unfair that he should have survived the hell of the Sodden Fields only to die here. But then Serlo was calm; he felt no regret. He had lived six and sixty years, long enough to see his legacy safely continued in his son and now also daughter – it could not go forever. This was as good a place to die as any. He would not abandon the lines of communication and trade his cousin’s victory in the war and his own honour for a measly two or three more years.
There was irritaton in Mukhtar’s face when he next spoke, again translated by the eunuch: “If you do not accept my master’s generous offer now, you and your men can expect no mercy. He will put each and every one of you to the sword.”
“I have not asked for terms or quarter”, was Serlo reply. “And neither have I asked for this parlay. Has your master had his say?”
The eunuch translated Serlo’s words into the guttural tongue of the Arabs. Mukhtar cocked his head slightly and narrowed his eyes, giving Serlo a probing glance. When the Caliph next opened his mouth, his words were spoken in thickly accented Greek, a language Serlo had some knowledge of by his first wife: “This is madness. You cannot win against my army.”
“No”, Serlo answered laboriously in the same tongue. “I cannot win. But I can fight you.”
Mukhtar looked upon Serlo for a moment, then he gave a little nod, or maybe the hint of a bow. In a final salute and farewell he raised his right hand and greeted: “As-salamu ‘alaikum.”
“Wa ‘alaikum as-salam”, was Serlo’s reply before he turned around his horse to ride to his very last battle.
* * *
The Battle of Natrun had been a minor one if compared to the great engagements on the Sodden Fields and at Cairo and even the somewhat smaller fought before Alexandria, but it had nonetheless been pivotal for the war and momentous in its consequences. Twelve hundred Normans had been trapped with their backs to the desert by almost thre times their number, led by no other than the reknowned warrior Mukhtar Yaseen himself, who had not only overthrown the previous Fatimid in King a short and brilliantly conducted civil war, but who had alsovanquished the vastly superior army of the Seljuk Sultan. The battle was a forgone conclusion before even the first blow had ben struck, but Duke Serlo de Hauteville and his paltry band had charged the enemy nonetheless, a stubborn gesture of Norman resolve and fury.
As soon as King Bohemond had received word of Mukhtar’s stealthy movement, he had set out at forced marches, striking west to intercept the Fatimid host and come to his cousin’s aid. He was too late. The tired Norman army arrived at the valley of Natrun three days after the battle had been fought. And they arrived to find Serlo in sole possession of the field.
Resolved to sell his life dearly, Serlo had charged the Fatimid center in a deadly wedge. The Norman attack had penetrated deep into the Muhammadans’ ranks and carried on right through them, cutting Mukhtar’s line in halves. Disarray had spread through the shattered Egyptian ranks, and ere Mukhtar had been able to restore order and to encircle the Normans with his vastly superior numbers, hundreds of his men had already been slain. Eventually, the Muhammadans had been able to renew their attack on Serlo’s now completely encircled host, but when Mukhtar had realized with what fervour and abandon the trapped Normans were laying about, he had sounded the retreat. The Fatimid King could have won this day, but only at a loss in manpower so prohibitive that it would have destroyed his capacity to resist the Normans anymore. And thus Mukhtar had swallowed his pride and ordered the retreat, more willing to suffer a disgracing defeat in a battle than to win the battle but lose the war.
In retreating from Serlo’s stalwart band Mukhtar may have averted having his armed might whittled down past the point where he could still defend his kingdom from the Normans, but he had nonetheless been finished. The Battle of Natrun had demonstrated the full extent of Norman resolve and demoralized the Egyptian Muhammadans. If their famous warrior-king could not even prevail when the odds seemed to clearly favour him, what hope was there left? Six weeks after Serlo had won his miraculous victory, and without even a further skirmish being fought during this time, King Mukhtar Yaseen was finally forced to make peace and accept the Norman terms.
And they had been harsh terms. Mukhtar had not only had to give up Alexandria and the entire western delta together with the left bank of the Nile as far as a hundred miles south of the pyramids, but also the town of Manpura with her surrounding lands and thus the command of the central delta. In private, Bohemond had made it very clear hat these new borders with the Fatimids would not be the final ones and that his unstable and exposed position in the central delta was merely to serve as an outpost deep in the side of the enemy and a base from where to strike out at the Fatimids at some not-too-distant future date. Even though the war had been hard-fought, it had taught Bohemond that the Egyptians were not quite as strong as feared, and it had whetted his appetite for the remaining riches of the land; he was determined to eventually appropriate himself of them.
Serlo was hoping that this new war would only be waged after his days.
The Norman and Fatimid realms at the end of 1110.
