soldiers who followed.[164]

When our men saw that the familiar standard of Bohemund was not
faltering in the least, and the constable was raging with such
eagerness against the Turks, they all took heart and attacked with
such force that flight was the only protection the enemy could hope
for. Our men fell upon the fleeing Turks, who were running at great
speed, helter-skelter, and we did not cease cutting them down and
decapitating their bodies all the way to the narrow bridges of the
Pharphar, After such slaughter, the Turks entered the fort of Areg,
which I mentioned above, looted it entirely, set it afire, and then
fled, never to return to it. However, the perfidious Armenians and
Syrians, who had awaited the outcome of the battle without taking
sides, so that they could join the side to whom victory was granted,
when they saw the Turks vanquished, moved forward and blocked the
roads, killing the Turks as they tried to go by. The painful
indigence of our men was somewhat alleviated with what was taken from
the conquered enemy; horses and money provided relief, and even more
so, our growing triumphs vitiated the Turkish reputation for
fierceness. After the victory, they cut off the heads of one hundred
of those who had fallen in battle, and hung them before the walls of
Antioch for the besieged Turks to look at. It is, of course, the
custom of the Gentiles to keep the decapitated heads and to display
them as a sign of victory. While these things were going on, the
Babylonian emperor sent ambassadors to the leaders of our army,
congratulating them for what they had done to the Turks; in addition,
he promised, although falsely, that he would become Christian, if our
people would grant and restore to him what the Turks had taken from
his kingdom. We had said earlier that the Babylonian empire was far
more powerful than the other eastern kingdoms, but that the Turks,