CRUSADE

AFTER THE BATTLE of Manzikurt in 1071, the Byzantines had lost almost the whole of Asia Minor to the Seljuks and found that Islam was virtually on their doorstep. Yet the power of the Turkomans was waning, and it seemed to Emperor Alexius Comnenus I that a few brisk campaigns might settle them once and for all. Early in 1095 he asked Pope Urban II for military help, expecting to be sent a few detachments of the Norman mercenaries who had fought for him before. The pope, however, had more ambitious plans. Later in the year he addressed the clergy, knights, and poor people of Europe at the Council of Clermont and preached a holy war of liberation. He begged the knights to stop fighting one another in the pointless feudal wars that were tearing Europe apart and to go to the aid of their fellow Christians in Anatolia, who had been subject to the Muslim Turks for over twenty years. Once they had freed their brethren from the yoke of the infidel, they should march to Jerusalem to liberate the tomb of Christ from Islam. There would be the Peace of God in Europe and the War of God in the Near East. We have no contemporary record of the actual words of Urban’s speech, but it seems certain that he saw this expedition, which would become known as the First Crusade, as an armed pilgrimage, similar to the huge massed pilgrimages which had already made their way to the Holy City three times during the eleventh century. Hitherto pilgrims had been forbidden to bear arms; now the pope had given them a sword. At the end of his speech, Urban received an immense ovation. The vast crowd shouted with one voice, “Dens hoc vult!”: “God wills this!”

The response was extraordinary, widespread, and immediate. Popular preachers spread the word, and in the spring of 1096 five armies of about sixty thousand soldiers accompanied by hordes of noncombatant peasants and pilgrims with their wives and families set off on the road to Jerusalem. Most of them died on the perilous journey through Eastern Europe. They were followed in the autumn by five more armies of some 100,000 men and a crowd of priests. As the first detachments struggled toward Constantinople, it seemed to Princess Anna Comnena as though “the whole West, and as much of the land as lies beyond the Adriatic Sea to the Pillars of Hercules—all this, changing its seat, was bursting forth into Asia in a solid mass with all its possessions.”¹ The emperor had asked for conventional military help and found that he had inspired what seemed like a barbarian invasion. The Crusade was the first cooperative venture of the new West as it emerged from the Dark Ages. All classes were represented: priests and prelates, nobles and peasants. They were all seized by a passion for Jerusalem. It is not the case that the Crusaders were merely seeking land and wealth: crusading was grim, frightening, dangerous, and expensive. Most Crusaders returned home having lost their possessions, and they would need all their idealism merely to survive. It is not easy to define the Crusader ideal, since these pilgrims all had very different conceptions of their expedition. The higher clergy probably shared Urban’s ideal of a holy war of liberation to enhance the power and prestige of the Western church. Many of the knights saw it as their duty to fight for Jerusalem, the patrimony of Jesus, as they would fight for the rights of their feudal lord. The poorer Crusaders seemed inspired by the apocalyptic dream of a New Jerusalem. But Jerusalem was the key. It is unlikely that Urban would have got the same response if he had made no mention of the tomb of Christ.

But this idealism had a dark underside; it soon became apparent that the victory of Christ would mean the death and destruction of others. In the spring of 1096 a band of German Crusaders massacred the Jewish communities of Speyer, Worms, and Mainz along the Rhine. This had certainly not been the pope’s intention, but it seemed ridiculous to these Crusaders to march thousands of miles to fight Muslims—about whom they knew next to nothing—when the people who had actually killed Christ (or so the Crusaders believed) were alive and well on their very doorsteps. These were the first full-scale pogroms in Europe; they would be repeated every time a new Crusade was preached. The lure of Christian Jerusalem thus helped to make anti-Semitism an incurable disease in Europe.

The Crusading armies which left in the autumn of 1096 were more orderly than their predecessors, and they did not turn aside to kill Jews. Most reached Constantinople in good order. There they swore that they would faithfully return territory that had previously belonged to Byzantium, though as events proved, some had no intention of keeping their vow. It was a good time to attack the Seljuks: their early solidarity had given way to factional strife, and the emirs were fighting one another. The Crusaders made a good start, and they inflicted defeats on the Turks at Nicaea and Dorylaeum. But it was a long journey, food was scarce, and the Turks pursued a scorched-earth policy. It took the Crusaders three years of unimaginable hardship to reach Jerusalem. When they arrived at Antioch, they laid siege to this powerfully fortified city during the terrible winter of 1097-98; over the course of the siege, one man in seven starved to death and half the army deserted. Yet, against the odds, the Crusaders were ultimately victorious, and when they stood at last before the walls of Jerusalem in 1099, they had changed the map of the Near East. They had destroyed the Seljuk base in Asia Minor and created two new principalities governed by Western rulers: one in Antioch, under the Norman Bohemund of Tarentino, and the other in Armenian Edessa, ruled by Baldwin of Boulogne. Yet their victories had been hard-won. A fearful reputation had preceded these ironclad warriors. There were dark rumors of cannibalism at Antioch, and the barbaric Christians from Europe were known to be utterly ruthless and fanatical in their religious zeal. Many of the Greek Orthodox and Monophysite Christians of Jerusalem, alerted by these alarming tales, fled to Egypt. Those who remained behind were expelled from the city by the Muslim governors, together with the Latin Christians, who were rightly suspected of sympathy with the Crusaders. Their knowledge of the city and the terrain proved extremely valuable to the Crusaders during the siege.

The Crusader leaders deployed their troops around the walls. Robert the Norman was posted near the ruined Church of St. Stephen in the north; Robert of Flanders and Hugh of St. Poll were placed on the southwest of the city; Godfrey of Bouillon, Tancred, and Raymund of St. Gilles encamped opposite the citadel, while another army was posted on the Mount of Olives to ward off an attack from the east. Then Raymund moved his Provençal troops to defend the holy places outside the walls on Mount Sion. At first the Crusaders made little progress. They were still not accustomed to besieging the stone cities of the East, which were far larger and more imposing than most towns in Europe, and they lacked the skill or the materials to build siege engines. Then a Genoese fleet arrived in Jaffa and dismantled its ships of masts, cords, and hooks, which enabled the Crusaders to build two towers or “belfreys,” which could be wheeled up to the walls—a device that was unfamiliar to the Muslims. Finally on 15 July 1099, a soldier in Godfrey’s army managed to break into the city from one of these towers, and the rest of the Crusaders followed, falling on the Muslim and Jewish defenders of the city like the avenging angels of the Apocalypse.

For three days the Crusaders systematically slaughtered about thirty thousand of the inhabitants of Jerusalem. “They killed all the Saracens and the Turks they found,” said the author of the Gesta Francorum approvingly, “they killed everyone, whether male or female.”² Ten thousand Muslims who had sought sanctuary on the roof of the Aqsā were brutally massacred, and Jews were rounded up into their synagogue and put to the sword. There were scarcely any survivors. At the same time, says Fulcher of Chartres, a chaplain in the army, they were cold-bloodedly appropriating property for themselves. “Whoever first entered a house, whether he was rich or poor, was not challenged by any other Franks. He was to occupy and own the house or the palace and whatever he found in it as if it was entirely his own.”³ The streets literally ran with blood. “Piles of heads, hands and feet were to be seen,” says the Provençal eyewitness Raymond of Aguiles. He felt no shame: the massacre was a sign of the triumph of Christianity, especially on the Ḥaram:

If I tell the truth it will exceed your powers of belief. So let it suffice to say this much, at least, that in the Temple and the Porch of Solomon, men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins. Indeed, it was a just and splendid judgment of God that this place should be filled with the blood of unbelievers since it had suffered so long from their blasphemies.⁴

Muslims and Jews were cleared out of the Holy City like vermin.

Eventually there was no one left to kill. The Crusaders washed and processed to the Anastasis, singing hymns with tears of joy rolling down their faces. Standing around the tomb of Christ, they sang the Office of the Resurrection, its liturgy seeming to herald the dawn of a new era. As Raymund saw it:

This day, I say, will be famous in all future ages, for it turned our labors and sorrows into joy and exultation; this day, I say, marks the justification of all Christianity, the humiliation of paganism, the renewal of faith. “This is the day that the Lord hath made, let us rejoice and be glad therein,” for on this day the Lord revealed himself to his people and blessed them.⁵

This was a view quickly adopted by the establishment of Europe, who had probably been horrified at the first news of the massacre. But the Crusade had been such a resounding success—against all odds—that they came to believe it had enjoyed God’s special blessing. Within ten years, three learned monks—Guibert of Nogent, Robert the Monk, and Baldrick of Bourgeuil—had written accounts of the First Crusade which entirely endorsed the belligerent piety of the Crusaders. Henceforth the Muslims, hitherto regarded with relative indifference, would be viewed in the West as a “vile and abominable race,” “absolutely alien to God” and fit only for “extermination.”⁶ The Crusade had been an act of God on a par with the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt; the Franks were now the new chosen people of God: they had taken up the vocation that the Jews had lost.⁷ Robert the Monk made the astonishing claim that the Crusaders’ conquest of Jerusalem was the greatest event in world history since the Crucifixion.⁸ Soon the Antichrist would arrive in Jerusalem and the battles of the Last Days would begin.⁹

But the Crusaders themselves were nothing if not practical, and before any of these apocalyptic triumphs occurred, the city had to be cleared up. William of Tyre says that the bodies were burned with great efficiency so that the Crusaders could make their way to the holy places “with greater confidence”¹⁰—without, presumably, suffering the inconvenience of tripping over severed limbs. But in fact the task was too great, and bodies were still lying around the city five months later. When Fulcher of Chartres arrived in Jerusalem to celebrate Christmas that year, he was horrified:

Oh, what a stench there was around the walls of the city, both within and without, from the rotting bodies of the Saracens slain by ourselves at the time of the capture of the city, lying wherever they had been hunted down.¹¹

Overnight, the Crusaders had turned the thriving and populous city of Jerusalem into a stinking charnel house. There were still piles of putrefying corpses in the streets when the Crusaders held a market three days after the massacre. With great festivities and celebration, they sold their loot, blithely unconcerned about the carnage they had inflicted and the hideous evidence lying at their feet. If a respect for the sacred rights of their predecessors is a test of the integrity of any monotheistic conqueror of Jerusalem, the Crusaders must come at the bottom of anybody’s list.

They had not looked further than the conquest and had no clear idea about how the city should be governed. The clerics believed that the Holy City should be run by a patriarch on theocratic lines, the knights wanted one of their own to be its lay ruler, while the poor, who exerted considerable influence on the Crusaders, were hourly expecting the New Jerusalem and wanted no conventional government at all. At length a compromise was achieved. Since the Greek Orthodox patriarch had been expelled by the Muslims during the siege, the Crusaders appointed Arnulf of Rohes, the chaplain of Robert of Normandy, to fill the office, replacing a Greek by a Latin. They then chose Godfrey of Bouillon, an unintelligent but pious young man of enormous physical courage, as their leader. Godfrey declared that he could not wear a crown of gold in the city where his Savior had worn a crown of thorns and took the title “Advocate of the Holy Sepulcher.” The city would be ruled by the patriarch, but Godfrey would give him military protection (advocatia). A few months later, Daimbert, archbishop of Pisa, arrived in Jerusalem as the official papal legate. He summarily deposed Arnulf, assumed the patriarchate himself, and banished all the local Christians—Greeks, Jacobites, Nestorians, Georgians, and Armenians—from the Anastasis and the other churches of Jerusalem. Pope Urban had given the Crusaders the mandate of helping the Oriental Christians, but now they were extending the intolerance of their predecessors in the Holy City to the people of their own faith. On Easter Sunday 1100, Godfrey gave Patriarch Daimbert “the city of Jerusalem with the Tower of David and all that pertained to Jerusalem,”¹² on condition that the advocate could make use of the city while he conquered more land for the kingdom.

This was the most pressing task for the Crusaders. Their conquest of Jerusalem had not liberated the whole of Palestine for the church. The Fatimids were still in control of many parts of the country, including the vital coastal cities. Godfrey began to conduct raids against the Fatimid bases backed up by the Pisan fleet. By March 1100, the emirs of Ascalon, Caesarea, Acre, and Arsuf had surrendered and accepted Godfrey as their overlord. The sheikhs of Transjordan followed suit, while Tancred established a principality in Galilee. Yet the situation was precarious. The kingdom now had defensible borders, but for the next twenty-five years it would have to struggle to survive, surrounded as it was by bitterly hostile enemies.

The Crusaders’ chief problem was manpower. Once Jerusalem had been won, most of their soldiers went home, leaving only a skeleton army behind. Jerusalem was particularly desolate. It had recently housed about 100,000 people, but now only a few hundred lived in the empty, ghostly city. As William of Tyre said, “the people of our country were so few in number and so needy that they scarcely filled one street.”¹³ They huddled together for security in the Patriarch’s Quarter around the Holy Sepulcher.¹⁴ The rest of the city remained uninhabited, its streets dangerously haunted by prowlers and Bedouin who broke into the empty houses. Jerusalem could not be adequately defended: when Godfrey led his soldiers on a raid, there were only a few noncombatants and pilgrims left to ward off an attack. Once the hostilities died down, Muslims and Jews began to filter back to such cities as Beirut, Sidon, Tyre, and Acre, and Muslim peasants remained in the countryside. But after the conquest of Jerusalem, the Crusaders promulgated a law banning Jews and Muslims from the Holy City; the local Christians were also expelled, because the Crusaders suspected them of complicity with Islam. To the unsophisticated Westerners, these Palestinian, Coptic, and Syrian Christians seemed indistinguishable from Arabs. However holy the city, few of the Franks wanted to live in Jerusalem, now only a shadow of its former self. Most preferred the coastal towns, where life was easier and there were more opportunities for trade and commerce.

Immediately after the conquest, Godfrey moved into the Aqsā Mosque, which became the royal residence, and he converted the Dome of the Rock into a church called the “Temple of the Lord.” The Ḥaram meant a great deal to the Crusaders. The Byzantines had shown no interest in this part of Jerusalem, but the Crusaders had come to believe that they were the new Chosen People and that it was therefore fitting that they should inherit this Jewish holy place. From the first, it played an important part in the spiritual life of Crusader Jerusalem, and Daimbert made the “Temple of the Lord” his official residence. The importance of the Ḥaram to the Crusaders can be seen by the fact that the patriarch and his advocate chose to live in this lonely outpost, which was far away from the main Crusader quarters on the Western Hill. Their nearest neighbors were the Benedictine monks whom Godfrey had installed in the Tomb of the Virgin Mary in the Kidron Valley.

Godfrey’s reign was short. In July 1100 he died of typhoid fever and was buried in the Anastasis, which the Crusaders preferred to call the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Patriarch Daimbert made ready to assume secular as well as spiritual leadership, but was outmaneuvered by Godfrey’s brother Baldwin, count of the Crusader state of Edessa in Armenia, who was summoned to Jerusalem by his fellow countrymen of Lorraine. Baldwin was far more intelligent and worldly than his brother. Having trained for the priesthood in his youth, he was better educated than most laymen, and he had tremendous physical presence. He would make the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem a viable possibility, When Baldwin arrived in the holy city on 9 November 1100, he was greeted with tumultuous joy not only by the Franks but by the local Christians who waited for him outside the city. Baldwin realized that if the Franks were to survive in the Near East, they needed friends, and since the Jews and Muslims were out of the question, that meant that the Greek, Syrian, Armenian, and Palestinian Christians were their natural allies. Baldwin himself had an Armenian wife and had won the confidence of the Christians of the East, whom Daimbert had treated with such contempt.

On 11 November, Baldwin was crowned “King of the Latins” in the Nativity Church in Bethlehem, the city of King David. He had no scruples about wearing a golden crown in Jerusalem or being called a king. Under his leadership, the Crusaders went from one triumph to another. By 1110, Baldwin had conquered Caesarea, Haifa, Jaffa, Tripoli, Sidon, and Beirut. The Crusaders now established a fourth state: the County of Tripoli. In these conquered towns, the population was slaughtered and the mosques were destroyed, and Palestinian refugees fled to the safety of Islamic territory. The memory of these massacres and dispossessions made it very hard for the Crusaders to establish normal relations with the local people in later years. The Crusaders seemed unstoppable, yet the Seljuk emirs and the local dynasts put up no serious opposition. Still locked into their personal quarrels, they found it impossible to form a united front. There was no hope of a riposte from Baghdad. The caliphate was now incurably weak and could not take these wars in faraway Palestine seriously. As a consequence, the Crusaders were able to found the first Western colonies in the Near East.

Baldwin also had to solve the problem of Jerusalem, which was still a deserted shell with scarcely any inhabitants. The Franks were still leaking away to the more affluent cities on the coast. They were mostly peasants and soldiers, not craftsmen and artisans, so it was difficult for them to make a living in a city which had relied on local light industry. By the Law of Conquest of 1099, the people who had taken part in the Crusade were empowered to become landowners and householders. They were now free of the feudal hierarchy of Europe and, as freedmen, could own property. Some of these “burgesses,” as they were called, were now the owners of houses in Jerusalem or of estates and villages in the surrounding countryside. To keep them from leaving the city, Baldwin introduced a law which gave the possession of a house to anybody who had lived in it for a year and a day: this prevented people from deserting their estates during a crisis in the hope of returning when times were easier. The burgesses would become the backbone of Frankish Jerusalem; they would work in the city as cooks, butchers, shopkeepers, and smiths. But there were not enough of them.

Baldwin hoped to bring the local Christians back to the churches and monasteries of Jerusalem, and in 1101 he was given a heaven-sent opportunity. On the night before Easter, the crowds waited as usual for the miracle of the Holy Fire. Nothing happened: the divine light failed to appear. Presumably the Greeks had taken the secret with them and were not inclined to divulge it to the Latins. The failure looked bad: had the Franks displeased God in some way? At length, Daimbert suggested that the Latins follow him to the Temple of the Lord, where God had answered the prayers of Solomon. The local Christians were asked to pray too. The next morning, it was announced that the fire had appeared in two of the lamps beside the tomb. The message from heaven seemed clear. The Armenian historian Matthew of Edessa claimed that God had been angry that “the Franks expelled from the monasteries the Armenians, the Greeks, the Syrians, and the Georgians” and had only deigned to send the fire because the Eastern Christians had asked for it.¹⁵ The keys of the tomb were restored to the Greeks, and the other denominations were permitted to return to their shrines, monasteries, and churches in the Holy City.

Henceforth the King of Jerusalem became the protector of the local Christians. The higher clergy remained Latin, but there were Greek canons in the Holy Sepulcher Church. When the Jacobites returned from Egypt, where they had fled in 1099, the Monastery of Mary Magdalene was restored to them. The Armenians were especially favored, since there were now Armenian members of the royal family. Baldwin had created a special link with Armenia, and the community and Convent of St. James prospered. Important Armenian dignitaries and notables came to Jerusalem as pilgrims, bearing rich gifts: embroidered vestments, golden crosses, chalices, and crucifixes encrusted with precious stones, which are still used on major feast days, and illuminated manuscripts for the convent library. The Armenians were also given the custody of the Chapel of St. Mary in the Holy Sepulcher Church.

Finally in 1115, Baldwin was able to solve the population problem in Jerusalem by importing Syrian Christians from the Transjordan, who had become personae non gratae in the Muslim world since the Crusader atrocities. Baldwin lured them to the city by promising them special privileges and settled them in the empty houses in the northwest corner of the city. They were allowed to build and restore churches for their own use: St. Abraham’s near Stephen’s Gate and St. George’s, St. Elias’s, and St. Jacob’s in the Patriarch’s Quarter.

Baldwin’s policy must have worked, because from this point Jerusalem developed and the population reached some thirty thousand. It was a capital city once again, and also the chief metropolis of all the Frankish states because of its religious significance. This brought new life and zest to Jerusalem. In some ways, it was organized like a Western city. The Muslim sharīah court was replaced by three courts for civil and criminal offenses: the High Court for the nobility, the Court of the Burgesses, and the Court of the Syrians, a lesser body, run by and for the local Christians. The Crusaders kept the markets which had developed in the old Roman forum beside the Holy Sepulcher and along the Cardo. They probably learned about the organization of the sūq from the local Christians, because they kept the Oriental system of having separate markets for poultry, textiles, spices, and takeaway food. Franks and Syrians traded together, but on opposite sides of the street. Jerusalem could never become a trading center, since it was too far from the main routes. Merchants from the Italian cities, who established communes in the coastal towns and played an important role in urban life there, did not bother to establish themselves in Jerusalem. The city remained—as always—dependent upon the tourist trade. Baldwin had scotched the clerical idea of running Jerusalem as a theocracy. Once he had got rid of Daimbert,¹⁶ he chose patriarchs who were content with a subservient role. From 1112 the patriarch had complete jurisdiction in the old Christian Quarter, but Baldwin ruled the rest of the city, and the kingdom was freer of ecclesiastical control than any contemporary European state.

This seal of the Templars, which shows two of the knights sharing the same horse, reflects the early idealism of the Poor Soldiers of Jesus Christ before they became rich and powerful.

It was ironic that after the fanatical religiosity of its inception, Crusader Jerusalem became a rather secular place. As soon as they were settled, the Franks also began to transform it into a Western city. They began in 1115 with the Dome of the Rock, another sign of the importance of this site in Frankish Jerusalem. The Crusaders had no clear idea of the history of this building. They realized that it was not the Temple built by King Solomon, but seem to have thought that either Constantine or Heraklius had graced the site of the holy Temple with a building which the Muslims had impiously converted for their own use. In 1115 they began, as they thought, to restore it to its pristine purity. A cross was put atop the Dome, the Rock was covered with a marble facing to make an altar and choir, and the Qurānic inscriptions were covered with Latin texts. It was a typical Crusader venture, aiming to blot out Muslim presence as though it had never been. Yet the craftsmanship was of the highest order: the grille built by the Crusaders around the Rock is one of the finest surviving pieces of medieval metalwork. It also took years: the “Temple of the Lord” was not officially consecrated until 1142. North of the new church, the Crusaders built cloisters for the Augustinians and converted the Dome of the Chain into a chapel dedicated to James the Tzaddik, who was believed to have been martyred on the Temple Mount.

At first there was no money to renovate the Aqsā Mosque, which had been badly damaged and plundered during the conquest. Baldwin had even been forced to sell the lead off the roof. Then, in 1118, a small band of knights who called themselves the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Jesus Christ presented themselves to the king and offered to perform a charitable service. They would police the roads of Palestine and protect the unarmed pilgrims from the Bedouin and other Muslim desperadoes. They were exactly what the kingdom needed, and Baldwin immediately gave them part of the Aqsā as their headquarters. Because of their proximity to the Temple of the Lord, the Poor Soldiers were known as the Templars.¹⁷ Hitherto monks had been forbidden to bear arms and fight, but when the church recognized the Templars as an official ordo, sacred violence was—to some degree—canonized. These soldier monks embodied the two great passions of the new Europe, war and worship, and they quickly attracted new recruits. They helped to solve the chronic manpower problem of the kingdom, and during the 1120s the Templars became an elite corps in the crusading armies, abandoning the purely defensive military objective of their origins.

Ironically, the Poor Knights soon became rich and one of the most powerful orders in the church. They were able to refurbish their headquarters in the Aqsā, which became a military compound. The underground Herodian vaults became their stables. Known as “Solomon’s Stables,” they were able to house over a thousand horses with their grooms. Internal walls were built inside the mosque to make separate rooms: storehouses filled with weapons and supplies, granaries, baths, and lavatories. On the roof were pleasure gardens, pavilions, and cisterns, and the Templars had added a west wing to the mosque for a new cloister, a refectory, and cellars. They also laid foundations for a splendid new church, which was never completed. Again, the craftsmanship was of a high standard. The sculpture in particular, with a characteristic “wet-leaf” patterning, shows an imaginative blend of Byzantine, Islamic, and Romanesque style.

Yet the Templars illustrated the main tendency of Crusader Jerusalem. Crusading had been seen as an act of love: the pope had urged the knights of Europe to go to the help of their Christian brethren in the Islamic world; thousands of Crusaders had died out of love for Christ in the attempt to liberate his patrimony from the infidel. Crusading was even seen as a way for the laity to live out the monastic ideal.¹⁸ But this “love” had been expressed in violence and atrocity. In the career of the Templars too, charity and concern for the poor and oppressed had quickly modulated into military aggression. All violence had been forbidden on the Ḥaram; now the Aqsā had been transformed into a barracks and a military arsenal. Soon the round Templar churches, modeled on the Anastasis, began to spring up in towns and villages all over Europe, reminding Christians there that the whole of Christendom was mobilized for a holy war in the defense of Jerusalem.

We can see the same trend in the Templars’ rivals, the Knights Hospitaler, who were based in the old Latin Hospice of St. John the Almoner in the Patriarch’s Quarter. Gerard, the abbot, had assisted the Crusaders during the siege of Jerusalem, and after the conquest he was joined by a group of knights and pilgrims who felt called to care for the poor and needy. Hitherto, knights would never have dreamed of degrading themselves in the menial tasks of nursing, but under Gerard they voluntarily shared the humble lives of the poor and dedicated themselves to charitable work. Like the Templars, the Hospitalers embodied the ideal of holy poverty, which had been so important during the First Crusade, and, again, the Hospitalers soon attracted many vocations in both Palestine and Europe. In 1118, Gerard died and was replaced by Raymund of Le Puy, who did much to promote the order in Europe, but, like the Templars, the Hospitalers were entirely Jerusalem-centered. In their rule, the word outremer (“overseas”) refers to Europe. By the mid-twelfth century, the Hospitalers had also become soldiers and fought in the Crusading armies, their charity leading inevitably to militarism. Yet they never abandoned their charitable work. In the huge and magnificent compound they built for themselves south of the Holy Sepulcher, the brothers cared for about a thousand sick people all the year round and distributed quantities of alms, clothing, and food to the poor. A stone’s throw from the Holy Sepulcher, the Hospital represented the more attractive face of Crusading.

Like these Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem, the Crusaders believed that they were following in Jesus’s footsteps. They had taken up their cross (saving red crosses on their clothes at the beginning of their expedition) and were ready to lay down their lives for his sake and for the defense of his holy city. But the sword was also central to their vision.

Pilgrims were always most impressed by the Hospital. They were beginning to discover a very different Jerusalem. The Byzantines had not directed pilgrims to the Temple Mount, for example. They had seen the place as a mere symbol of the defeat of Judaism, and the Temple Mount played no part in their liturgy. But as early as 1102, when the British pilgrim Saewulf visited Jerusalem, he was proudly escorted around the shrines of the Ḥaram, which had quickly been given a Christian significance. The Gate of Mercy was now seen as the place where Joachim and Anna, the parents of the Virgin Mary, had first met. Another of the Ḥaram gates was the “Beautiful Gate,” where St. Peter and St. John had cured a cripple. The Dome of the Rock was now revered as the Temple where Jesus had prayed all his life: his footprint could be seen on the Rock. The Ḥaram also played a crucial role in the liturgy of the Crusaders.¹⁹ All their major ceremonies now included a procession to the “Temple of the Lord”: it was now central to the Palm Sunday celebrations, for example. Another major change in the devotional life of the city was that many of the sites of the Passion, which had originally been located on Mount Sion, seemed to be shifting to the north of town. Saewulf, for example, found that the pillar where Christ had been scourged was now in the Holy Sepulcher Church instead of Mount Sion. Pilgrims were also beginning to be taught that the Praetorium, where Pilate had sentenced Jesus to death, was not in the Tyropoeon Valley as before but north of the Temple Mount, on the site of the Antonia fortress. This change could have been inspired by the Templars, who might have wanted this holy place in their district of Jerusalem.

Baldwin I died in 1118 and was succeeded by his cousin Baldwin of Le Bourg, count of Edessa, a pious but genial man, who was devoted to his Armenian wife and four daughters. Baldwin was the first king to be crowned in the Holy Sepulcher Church instead of the Bethlehem basilica. He processed through the streets, where the balconies and roofs were festooned with Oriental rugs, and, in the presence of the patriarch, bishops, and Latin and local clergy, he vowed before the tomb of Christ to protect the church, the clerics, and the widows and the orphans of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. He also took a special oath of loyalty to the patriarch. After the ceremony, the king processed to the Temple of the Lord, where he laid his crown on the altar, before proceeding to a banquet in the Aqsā, served by the city’s burgesses. In 1120, Baldwin vacated his quarters in the Aqsā, leaving the mosque entirely to the Templars, and took up residence in a new palace near the citadel, where he was closer to the heart of Crusader Jerusalem.

In 1120, Baldwin attended the Council of Nablus, which tried to curb the tendency of some of the younger generation to assimilate with the local culture. In the early years of the kingdom, Fulcher of Chartres had enthusiastically told the people of Europe: “Westerners, we have become orientals! The Italians and the Frenchmen of yesterday have been transplanted and become men of Galilee and Palestine.”²⁰ This was certainly an exaggeration, but over the years the Franks had changed. A whole generation had grown up in the East with no memories of Europe. They took baths—a practice that was almost unheard of in the West; they lived in houses instead of wooden shacks and wore soft clothes and the keffiyeh. Their wives wore veils, like the Muslim women. This shocked the pilgrims from home: the Franks of Palestine seemed to be going native, and since the Islamic world had achieved a far higher standard of living than Europe at this point, they had adopted what seemed to these more rugged Christians a decadent and effete lifestyle. Many of the Palestinian Franks had realized that some degree of accommodation was essential if they were to survive. They had to trade with Muslims and establish normal relations. Baldwin II even slightly relaxed the ban that excluded Jews and Muslims from Jerusalem. Muslims were now permitted to bring food and merchandise to the city and stay there for limited periods. By 1170 there was also a family of Jewish dyers living near the royal palace.

But this assimilation was superficial. During the 1120s the Franks were adapting old fortresses and building a ring of new castles around their kingdom, as a bulwark against the hostile Muslim world. A line of fortified churches and monasteries also encircled Jerusalem at Ma’ale Adumin, on the Jericho road, Hebron, Bethany, Nabi Samwil, al-Birah, and Ramallah. The Crusaders were not breaking down the barrier of hatred that now existed between Western Christianity and Islam but erecting massive stone walls against their neighbors. Their states became artificial Western enclaves that remained alien and inimical to the region. They were military states, poised aggressively and constantly ready to strike. The twelfth century was a time of immense creativity in Europe, but not in the Crusader kingdoms. There the chief innovations were the military orders and military architecture. Their chief intellectual passion was Western law. The Franks made no real attempt to plumb the intellectual and cultural riches of the Near East and therefore put down no real roots. Their energies were concentrated on survival, and the societies they created were essentially artificially preserved against their surroundings.

Yet the Crusaders tried to be creative and to leave their mark on the alien country they had conquered. In 1125 the Franks began an intensive building program in Jerusalem. Not even Herod built as much as they did in Palestine. They were trying to make themselves feel at home by building Europe in the Holy Land. Consequently their buildings and churches show few signs of Byzantine or Muslim influence; nor did the Crusaders keep abreast of the new architectural developments in Europe. They remained in a Romanesque time warp, untouched by the Gothic, building churches that looked like the ones they had known at home before the Crusade. First they began a massive reconstruction of the Holy Sepulcher Church, which was to be completed in time for the fiftieth anniversary of their conquest of the city in 1149. Then they built an exquisite Romanesque church dedicated to St. Anna, the mother of the Virgin Mary, beside the Pool of Beth-Hesda. The site had been venerated by Christians as the birthplace of the Virgin since the sixth century. Now it became a Benedictine convent and church. Despite their cruelty and fear, the Franks still retained some understanding of spirituality. In the Church of St. Anna the eye is drawn directly to the high altar by the line of columns in the nave; the bare simplicity means that there are no distractions, while the light falling into the church from different directions creates subtle patterns of shadow and a sense of distance.

The Franks also restored the churches in the Kidron Valley and the Mount of Olives: the Church of Gethsemane and the Tomb of the Virgin, where the Crusaders also built a monastery and decorated the crypt with frescoes and mosaics. The round Church of the Ascension was also rebuilt and decorated with Parian marble. This church also became part of the Crusaders’ war machine and reflects their embattled piety. It was, the pilgrim Theodorich tells us, “strongly fortified against the infidels with towers, both great and small, with walls and battlements and night patrols.”²¹ The Eleona Basilica had been destroyed by the Persians in 614 and had never been rebuilt; on this site the Crusaders built two churches to commemorate Jesus’s teaching of the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostle’s Creed to his disciples. The Basilica of Holy Sion had been ruined by al-Hākim and had never been restored. Now the Crusaders repaired the “Mother of all the churches,” enclosing many of the ancient shrines: the Chapel of St. Stephen, where the martyr’s body had been laid before being transferred to Eudokia’s church; the Upper Room of the Last Supper; and, next door, the Chapel of Pentecost, decorated by a picture of the descent of the Spirit. On the floor below was the “Galilee Chapel,” where Jesus had appeared to his apostles after the Resurrection.²² While they were restoring this chapel, the Crusaders made a discovery that they did not quite know how to deal with. One of the old walls fell in to reveal a cave, containing a golden crown and scepter. Today some scholars think that it may have been an ancient synagogue. The workmen rushed in panic to the patriarch, who consulted with a Karaite ascetic. They decided that they had stumbled upon the Tomb of David and the Kings of Judah. For centuries, people had confused Mount Sion with the original ’Ir David on the Ophel hill. It had long been assumed that the citadel beside the west gate of the city had been David’s fortress, and Herod’s Hippicus tower was generally known as the Tower of David. It was probably inevitable that one day somebody would “discover” his tomb on Mount Sion. The patriarch wanted to investigate the cave, but the workmen were too frightened. The patriarch then “ordered the place to be closed up and hidden,” said the Jewish traveler Benjamin of Tudela, who visited Jerusalem in about 1170, “so that to this day the Tombs of David and the Kings of Judah cannot be identified.”²³ Later, however, the Tomb of David would be uncovered by the Crusaders and made part of the Basilica of Holy Sion—the cause of much trouble in the future.

In 1131, Baldwin 11 died and was succeeded by his eldest daughter, Melisende, and her husband, Fulk, count of Anjou, a formidable warrior who had decided in his middle years to devote his life to the defense of Jerusalem. It was important that the kingdom be seen to have a strong ruler, since for the first time in its history a powerful Muslim leader had risen in the Near East: Imad ad-Din Zangī, the Turkish commander of Mosul and Aleppo. He was determined to impose peace on the region, which had long been torn apart by the internecine wars of the emirs. Slowly and systematically, Zangī began to subdue the local chieftains of Syria and Iraq, and, with the support of Baghdad, he brought them, one by one, under his authority. Zangī was not particularly interested in recovering territory occupied by the Franks: he had his hands full with the recalcitrant Muslim emirs. But the Franks were very conscious of Zangī’s growing empire. Fulk fortified the borders of the kingdom more strongly than ever, dispatching a garrison of Hospitalers to the frontier castle of Beth-Gibrin in 1137. That year he also made an alliance with Unur, prince of Damascus, who was determined that his city should not be absorbed into Zangī’s empire.

The embattled piety of the Crusaders spread to Europe, as we see in the Templar Church of Cressac, Trance, whose walls are entirely covered with these frescoes showing the knights riding out to fight for Jerusalem.

One of the diplomats who negotiated this treaty was the Syrian prince Usāmah ibn Mundiqh, who, after the signing, was taken on a tour of Frankish Palestine and left us, in his memoirs, a valuable glimpse of the way the Muslims regarded the Westerners who had so violently erupted into their region. A cultured, affable man, Usāmah was bemused by the Franks. He admired their physical courage but was appalled by their primitive medicine, their disrespectful treatment of women, and their religious intolerance. He was horribly embarrassed when a pilgrim offered to take Usāmah’s son back with him to Europe to give him a Western education. As far as Usāmah was concerned, his son would be better off in prison than in the land of the Franks. Yet he did admit that the Franks who had been born in the East were better than the newcomers, who were still filled with the primitive prejudices of Europe. He illustrated this insight with an instructive anecdote. He had made friends with the Templars in Jerusalem, and whenever he visited them in the Aqsā they put a little oratory at his disposal. One day, when he was praying facing Mecca, a Frank rushed into the room, lifted Usāmah into the air, and turned him forcibly toward the east: “That is the way to pray!” he exclaimed. The Templars hurried in and took the man away, but as soon as their backs were turned, the same thing happened again. The Templars were mortified. “He is a foreigner who has just arrived today from his homeland in the north,” they explained, “and he has never seen anyone pray facing any other direction than east.” “I have finished my prayers,” Usāmah said with dignity and left, “stupefied by the fanatic who had been so perturbed and upset to see someone praying facing the qiblah.”²⁴

Increasingly the Kingdom of Jerusalem was torn by an internal conflict between those Franks who had been born in Palestine and who could, like the Templars in this story, understand the Muslims’ point of view and wanted to establish normal relations with their neighbors, and the newcomers from Europe, who found it impossible to tolerate another religious orientation. This dissension was growing at a time when their Muslim neighbors were at last laying their own destructive factionalism aside and uniting under a strong leader. In 1144 the Franks suffered a blow which showed them how vulnerable they were. In November that year, as part of his campaign against Damascus, Zangī conquered the Crusader city of Edessa and destroyed the Frankish state. There was wild jubilation in the Muslim world, and Zangī, a hard-drinking, ruthless warrior, suddenly found himself a hero of Islam. When he was killed two years later, he was succeeded by his son Mahmoud, who was more generally known by his title Nūr ad-Dīn (“Light of the Faith”). Nūr ad-Dīn was a devout Sunni, determined to wage a holy war against both the Franks and the Shiites. He went back to the spirit of Muhammad, living frugally and giving large sums of money to the poor. He also initiated an effective propaganda campaign for thejihād. The Qurān condemns all war as abhorrent but teaches that, regrettably, it is sometimes necessary to fight oppression and persecution in order to preserve decent values. If people were killed or driven from their homes and saw their places of worship destroyed, Muslims had a duty to fight a just war of self-defense.²⁵ The Qurānic injunction was a perfect description of the Crusaders, who had killed thousands of Muslims, driven them from their homes, and burned their mosques. They had also desecrated the Ḥaram of al-Quds. Nūr ad-Dīn circulated the anthologies of the Praises of Jerusalem (fa˙dāil al-quds) and commissioned a beautiful pulpit to be installed in the Aqsā Mosque when the Muslims liberated Jerusalem from the Franks.

The practice of jihād had died in the Near East. The cruel aggression of the Western Crusaders had rekindled it. But they could make no effective response to Nūr ad-Dīn because of their ingrained prejudice. When the armies of the Second Crusade finally arrived in Palestine in 1148 to relieve the beleaguered Franks, instead of attacking Nūr ad-Dīn in Aleppo the Crusaders turned against their one ally in the Muslim world, Unur of Damascus. This meant that Unur had no option but to ask for the help of Nūr ad-Dīn. The Crusaders then compounded their stupidity by totally mismanaging the siege of Damascus, which was an ignominious failure. The Second Crusade showed that the Franks’ hostility to the Islamic world could set them on a suicidal course. Their isolation from the region also meant that they had no grasp of the realpolitik of the Near East.

The failure of the Second Crusade must have soured the dedication of the restored Church of the Holy Sepulcher on 15 July 1149, the fiftieth anniversary of the conquest of the city. After the ceremony, the congregation processed to the Temple of the Lord and visited the Kidron Valley, where the Crusaders who had fallen in the battle for Jerusalem were buried. They ended up at the cross in the northern wall which marked the spot where Godfrey’s troops had penetrated the city in 1099. The contrast with the recent fiasco must have been painful. The new church was a triumph, however: the Crusaders had brought all the scattered shrines on the site—the tomb of Christ, the rock of Golgotha, and the crypt where Helena was supposed to have found the True Cross—into one large Romanesque building. (See diagram.) They had joined the eleventh-century Rotunda built by Constantine Monomarchus to their new church on the site of the old courtyard, linking the two by means of a high triumphal arch. Yet the Western architecture did not clash with the Byzantine, and the Crusaders had attempted to harmonize with the local style, a feat that they could not achieve in life. What remained of the tomb was covered with a marble slab, to which a gold casing was added later. Mosaics and slabs of colored marble adorned the walls in a way that was both brilliant and elegant, a splendor that is hard to imagine today in the present gloomy building.

Nūr ad-Dīn continued his campaign. His plan was to encircle the Franks with a Muslim empire dedicated to the jihād. Yet in the Kingdom of Jerusalem the internal feuds continued. It seemed as though the aggression built into every aspect of life in the Crusader states impelled the Franks to turn against one another. In 1152 the young King Baldwin III had clashed with his mother, Melisende, who started to fortify Jerusalem against her son. There would have been open civil war had not the burgesses of the city forced Melisende to surrender. The Templars and the Hospitalers were also at loggerheads, and neither would submit to the authority of the king and patriarch. The Hospitalers built a tower in their complex that was higher than the Holy Sepulcher Church. It was a deliberate insult and an act of defiance. They also sabotaged services in the Holy Sepulcher. William of Tyre tells us that as soon as the patriarch got up to preach, they would “set their many great bells ringing so loudly and persistently that the voice of the Patriarch could not rise above the din.” When the patriarch remonstrated with them, the Hospitalers simply stormed into the Holy Sepulcher Church and let loose a stream of arrows.²⁶ Clearly, the experience of living in the holy city did not inspire the Crusaders to follow Christ’s ethic of love and humility.

The fatal disunity of the Kingdom continued right up to the bitter end, the Christians consumed with internal power squabbles. The Franks tried to forestall Nūr ad-Dīn’s plan to conquer Fatimid Egypt, but failed when the kingdom was captured by the Kurdish general Shirkuh. His nephew Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb succeeded him as wazīr in 1170 and abolished the Shii caliphate. Yūsuf, usually known in the West as Saladin from his title Salūh ad-Dūn (“the Righteousness of the Faith”), was passionately devoted to the jihādbut convinced that he and not Nūr ad-Dīn was destined to liberate Jerusalem, and this brought him into conflict with his master. When Nūr ad-Dīn died of a heart attack in 1174, Saladin fought his son for the leadership of his empire. His charisma, kindliness, and evident piety won him the support of the Muslims, and within ten years he was the acknowledged leader of most of the main Muslim cities in the region. The Crusaders found themselves surrounded by a united Muslim empire, led by a devout and charismatic sultan and dedicated to the destruction of their kingdom.

Yet even in the face of this obvious threat, the Franks continued to quarrel among themselves. At a time when strong leadership was essential, their young king, Baldwin IV, had leprosy. The barons of the kingdom backed the regent, Raymund, count of Tripoli, who knew that their only hope was to appease Saladin and try to establish good relations with their Muslim neighbors. They were opposed, however, by a group of newcomers who clustered around the royal family and pursued a policy of deliberate provocation. The most notorious of these hawks was Reynauld of Chatillon, who broke every truce that Raymund made with Saladin by attacking Muslim caravans and, on two occasions, attempted—unsuccessfully—to attack Mecca and Medina. For Reynauld, hatred of Islam and absolute opposition to the Muslim world was a sacred duty and the only true patriotism. The kingdom also lacked spiritual leadership. The patriarch Heraklius, another newcomer, was illiterate and degenerate, and openly flaunted his mistress. The death of the “Leper King” in March 1185 was succeeded the following year by the death of his small son, Baldwin V, and there was almost a civil war for the succession as Saladin prepared to invade the country. Reynauld broke yet another truce, which Raymund had engineered to give the kingdom breathing space, and the barons had no choice but to accept the Leper King’s brother-in-law Guy of Lusignan—a weak and ineffective newcomer—as their king. But they were still bitterly divided. The feuding and arguments continued as the whole army prepared to fight Saladin in Galilee in July 1187. The hawkish party prevailed with King Guy and persuaded him to attack the Muslims, even though Raymund urged that it would be much wiser to wait. It was nearly time for the harvest, and Saladin would be unable to keep his large army on foreign soil for much longer. But Guy did not listen to this sensible advice and gave the orders to march and attack. The result was an overwhelming Muslim victory at the battle of Hittin near Tiberias. The Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem was lost.

After Hittin, Saladin and his army marched through Palestine, receiving the submission of one town after another. The Christian survivors took refuge in Tyre, but some went to Jerusalem in a desperate attempt to save the Holy City. Finally the Muslim army encamped on the Mount of Olives and Saladin looked down at the desecrated shrines on the Ḥaram and the cross on the Dome of the Rock. He preached a sermon to his officers, reminding them of the fa˙dāil al-quds: Jerusalem was the city of the Temple, the city of the prophets, the city of the Night Journey and the mirāj, the city of the Last Judgment. He considered it his duty to avenge the massacre of 1099 and was determined to show no mercy to the inhabitants. Inside the city, the Christians were afraid. There was no knight capable of organizing an effective defense. Then, as if in answer to prayer, the distinguished Baron Balian of Ibelin arrived. He had entered the city with Saladin’s permission to collect his wife and family and take them to Tyre. He had vowed to spend only one night in Jerusalem. But when he saw the plight of the besieged Christians, he went back to the sultan and asked him to release him from his oath. Saladin respected Balian and agreed, sending an escort to take his family and all their possessions to the coast.

Balian did his best with meager resources, but his task was hopeless. On 26 September 1187, Saladin began his attack on the western gate of the city, and his sappers started to mine the northern wall near St. Stephen’s Gate. Three days later, a whole section of the wall—including Godfrey’s cross—had fallen into the moat, but the Muslims now had to face the inner defensive wall. Balian, however, decided to sue for peace. At first Saladin would show no mercy. “We shall deal with you just as you dealt with the population when you took [Jerusalem],” he told Balian, “with murder and enslavement and other such savageries.”²⁷ But Balian made a desperate plea. Once all hope was lost, the Christians would have nothing further to lose. They would kill their wives and children, burn their houses and possessions, and pull down the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsā before coming out to meet Saladin’s army; each one of them would kill a Muslim before he died. Saladin consulted his ulamā and agreed to take the city peacefully. The Franks must not stay in the city, however. They would become his prisoners, though they could be ransomed for a very moderate sum of money.

On 2 October 1187, the day when the Muslims celebrated the Prophet’s Night Journey and mirāj, Saladin and his troops entered Jerusalem as conquerors. The sultan kept his word. Not a single Christian was killed. The barons could easily afford to ransom themselves, but the poor people could not, and they became prisoners of war. Large numbers were released, however, because Saladin was moved to tears by the plight of the families who were being separated when they were taken into slavery. Al-Ādil, Saladin’s brother, was so distressed that he asked for a thousand prisoners for his own use and released them on the spot. All the Muslims were scandalized to see the richer Christians escaping with their wealth without making any attempt to ransom their fellow countrymen. When the Muslim historian Imād ad-Dīn saw Patriarch Heraklius leaving the city with his chariots groaning under the weight of his treasure, he begged Saladin to confiscate this wealth to redeem the remaining prisoners. But Saladin refused; oaths and treaties must be kept to the letter. “Christians everywhere will remember the kindness we have done them.”²⁸ Saladin was right. Christians in the West were uneasily aware that this Muslim ruler had behaved in a far more “Christian” manner than had their own Crusaders when they conquered Jerusalem. They evolved legends that made Saladin a sort of honorary Christian; some of these tales even asserted that the sultan had been secretly baptized.

The Crusading experiment in Jerusalem was almost over. The Muslims would try to re-create the old system of coexistence and integration in al-Quds, but the violent dislocation of Crusader rule had damaged relations between Islam and the Christian West at a fundamental level. It had been the Muslims’ first experience of the Western world, and it has not been forgotten to this day. Their sufferings at the hands of the Crusaders had also affected the Muslims’ view of their Holy City. Henceforth, there would be a defensiveness in their devotion to al-Quds, which would become a more aggressively Islamic city than hitherto.