The Siege of Arqa, 1099: Anselm of Ribemont, Pons of Balazun and the Fortress Nobody Wanted

At Arqa in 1099 the First Crusade lost two lords, Anselm of Ribemont and Pons of Balazun, in a siege that took nothing and nearly stopped the march.

3 October 2026 · Part of The Crusades — a guide to 14 articles →

In the spring of 1099 the First Crusade spent three months outside a small fortress in what is now northern Lebanon, lost two of its lords there, and left on 13 May having captured nothing. Arqa was not Jerusalem and not Antioch. It stood in the way of no one's pilgrimage vow, and the siege was the work of one ambitious count. The deaths of Anselm of Ribemont and Pons of Balazun at its walls are among the plainest evidence of what a stalled siege cost the men who fought it.

Why Arqa, and why then

By the winter of 1098–99 the crusade had come apart. Adhemar of Le Puy, the papal legate, had died at Antioch, Bohemond of Taranto had kept the city for himself, and the army that was supposed to march on Jerusalem sat idle for months while its princes argued. The rank and file eventually forced the issue. Raymond of Toulouse, the wealthiest of the leaders, moved south along the coast road and, on 14 February 1099, began to besiege Arqa.

His motives are debated. A common reading is that Raymond wanted a lordship of his own on the Lebanese coast, centred on Tripoli, to offset Bohemond's gains at Antioch, and that Arqa was the first step toward it. Runciman gives the siege that political shape. Raymond's chaplain Raymond of Aguilers, our main narrative source, presents the whole affair in the language of the pilgrimage instead, and that framing should be read as the count's advocate speaking.

The besiegers were not a single army. Tancred and Robert of Normandy had entered Raymond's service, since he could pay them. Godfrey of Bouillon refused that arrangement and spent part of the period elsewhere on the coast. The result was a siege run by a coalition whose members disagreed about what it was for.

Two lords who had no story of their own

Neither Anselm nor Pons has a chronicle of their own. They survive in a few lines of the sources and in two rows of our record of these operations, which counts the leaders of the crusading armies who died on campaign.

Anselm of Ribemont held the lordship of Ribemont and Ostrevant, in the north of France. He is better documented than most men of his rank for one reason: he wrote home. His letters to Archbishop Manasses II of Reims describe the capture of Nicaea and the siege of Antioch, and they are among the few eyewitness accounts of the crusade written by a lay lord during the campaign rather than recollected afterward. They end in 1098. Anselm died on 25 February 1099, eleven days after the siege began, as the standard modern reference lists have it.

Pons of Balazun held the lordship of Balazun in southern France and served in the Provençal army of Raymond of Toulouse. His name is attached to one of the crusade's principal narratives. Raymond of Aguilers named him as the colleague with whom he wrote the Historia Francorum. When Pons was killed at Arqa, Raymond carried the work on alone, which is why the chronicle's later chapters read as one man's voice.

How they died, and what the sources say

The dataset records both men as killed in action at Arqa, and it cites the chronicle for each death: for Anselm, Raymond of Aguilers, Historia Francorum, chapter XVI (Recueil des historiens des croisades, Historiens occidentaux III, p. 277); for Pons, the same author, chapter XV.

The wording matters. Modern summaries commonly say that both men were struck by stones thrown from or around the defences, and that Pons died of the blow of a stone missile. This article repeats that only as a summary of the secondary literature. The dataset row for each man says "killed in action" and gives a chapter reference; it does not give a mechanism, and I have not confirmed the mechanism against the Latin text. Where the chronicle falls silent on how a man died, the honest statement is that the source names the death and not its cause.

What the sources do show is the kind of siege it was. A fortress on a hill, defended by a garrison that sallied out and threw missiles down, could kill lords as easily as foot soldiers. The leaders' rank did not keep them back from the walls. A siege that had no clear way to end exposed them for as long as it lasted.

Peter Bartholomew and the Holy Lance

The siege is also remembered for a quarrel that had nothing to do with its walls. Peter Bartholomew, the Provençal who had reported the discovery of the Holy Lance at Antioch, was still with the army, and doubts about the relic had not gone away. In April, Arnulf of Chocques, a clergyman in Robert of Normandy's household, challenged him to prove the lance genuine by ordeal of fire. Peter went through the fire and died of his injuries some days later.

Raymond of Toulouse had staked a great deal on the lance, and Raymond of Aguilers had defended it in his chronicle. Peter's death damaged both. Historians read the episode as a blow to the count's standing as the crusade's leader, and some argue it hurt him more than the stalled siege. Others note that the sources are partisan on both sides, so the exact effect is difficult to measure.

Giving up

Meanwhile the siege produced nothing. The garrison held, and the army outside it was losing time, men and cohesion. Arqa was lifted on 13 May 1099. The crusaders left the fortress untaken and marched south, passing along the coast and then inland toward Jerusalem, which they reached on 7 June and took on 15 July. Tripoli, the larger prize behind Arqa, did not fall to them until 1109.

The fortress had cost the crusade two lords and three months. It had also shown that the princes could not be held to a single plan without the legate who had once held them together. When the army finally moved, it moved because the poorer pilgrims and the lesser knights demanded it, as it had before at Antioch.

Chronology

Conclusion

Arqa is easy to skip when the First Crusade is told as a story of Antioch and Jerusalem. It was a side-quarrel fought for a count's ambitions, and it ended with no victory to remember. For that reason it shows what the great battles do not: how the ordinary arithmetic of siege warfare removed lords from the army, men like Anselm and Pons, who left no deeds for a poet and a few lines for a chronicler. The same arithmetic runs through the whole history of the crusader states, from the destruction of the first wave at Civetot to the fall of Acre in 1291. Behind each siege stood the pilgrims and the women who travelled with the camp, and the military orders that later took over the burden of holding such fortresses.

Frequently asked questions

Where was Arqa and why did the crusaders besiege it? Arqa lay in what is now northern Lebanon, inland from the coast near Tripoli. Raymond of Toulouse besieged it from 14 February 1099, and many historians think he hoped to carve out a lordship around Tripoli to rival Bohemond's Antioch, though his chaplain's chronicle does not say so.

Who were Anselm of Ribemont and Pons of Balazun? Anselm was lord of Ribemont and Ostrevant and the author of surviving letters to Archbishop Manasses of Reims. Pons was lord of Balazun in southern France and a collaborator of Raymond of Aguilers on his chronicle. Both died at Arqa.

How did they die? The dataset records both as killed in action at Arqa, citing Raymond of Aguilers, chapters XV and XVI. Modern summaries often mention stones thrown at the besiegers, but the chronicle reference alone does not let this article state the cause with confidence.

Why did the siege fail? The sources point to a divided command, a garrison that held out, and the damage done to Raymond's authority when Peter Bartholomew died after the ordeal by fire. The crusaders lifted the siege on 13 May 1099 and marched for Jerusalem.

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