[1][2] That December, Bohemond and Robert II of Flanders led 20,000 men to forage and plunder the surrounding countryside of food, opening Raymond IV to counterattack by Seljuk Empire commander and Antioch governor Yaghi-Siyan.

The Crusaders could also not afford to conduct a lengthy siege, as winter was approaching and they had few supplies, but they were also unable to break through the city's defences, consisting of a deep ditch and strong walls.

[6] The Crusaders repeatedly sent envoys offering terms of surrender that included security of the Arab population's lives and properties in return for the establishment of a Frankish governor of the city.

This fact itself is not seriously in doubt, as it is acknowledged by nearly a dozen Christian chronicles written during the twenty years after the Crusade, all of which are based at least to some degree on eyewitness accounts.

The earliest text in this tradition, the Gesta Francorum, states that because of great deprivations after the siege, "Some cut the flesh of dead bodies into strips and cooked them for eating."

[16] Raymond of Aguilers, who seems to have been present at Ma'arra, likewise states that the cannibalism happened after the siege and "in the midst of famine", but adds that human flesh was consumed in public and "with gusto" rather than secretly and shamefully.

[18] Ralph states that "a lack of food compelled them to make a meal of human flesh, that adults were put in the stewpot, and that [children] were skewered on spits.

[20] Fulcher states that many crusaders "savagely filled their mouths" with cooked "pieces from the buttocks of the Saracens" which they had cut from the bodies of enemies while the siege was still ongoing.

[22] The Byzantine princess Anna Komnene ascribes it to an even earlier period, the People's Crusade, and describes it in a way similar to Ralph of Caen: "they cut in pieces some of the babies, impaled others on wooden spits, and roasted them over a fire".

[25] He also notes that the fact that only Muslims were eaten is at odds with hunger as a sole or primary motive – presumably, desperate starving people would not have cared much about the religion of those they consumed.

[26] He concludes that Ma'arra was probably only "the most memorable instance of what was likely a periodic response to famine", namely cannibalism, and that it went "beyond poor and hungry people eating from the dead" in secret.

Reports and rumours of their brutality in Ma'arra and Antioch convinced "many Muslim commanders and garrisons that the crusaders were bloodthirsty barbarians, invincible savages who could not be resisted".

[32] Among modern historians, Amin Maalouf is probably the best known who upheld the Tafur thesis: The inhabitants of the Ma'arra region witnessed behaviour during that sinister winter that could not be accounted for by hunger.

They saw, for example, fanatical Franj, the Tafurs, roam through the country-side openly proclaiming that they would chew the flesh of the Saracens and gathering around their nocturnal camp-fires to devour their prey.