Chapter 12
In This Chapter
● Joining up with the People’s Crusade
● Upsetting the Byzantines with the First Crusade
● Getting stuck in siege warfare at Antioch
● Founding Outremer, the kingdom beyond the sea
In 1096, the First Crusade was (finally) ready to begin (check out Chapter 11 for the gen on what led to the Crusade). A lengthy, arduous journey lay ahead into a land about which the vast majority of the papal army had only the sketchiest of ideas.
No grand plan existed - other than to march to Jerusalem and take it back. The leadership of the whole enterprise was constantly challenged, and the Byzantine emperor, Alexius Comnenus I, was justifiably nervous about a Western army arriving in his capital, and he put up a diplomatic (rather than militaristic) fight.
Strap yourself in. This chapter is one bumpy ride through two unofficial Crusades and the papal army’s official First Crusade.
Participating in the People’s Crusade
The preaching of Pope Urban II made a massive impact in Medieval Europe (as I describe in Chapter 11). While the great and the good jockeyed for position in the official papal army that assembled in Italy, another far more radical group of Crusaders also began to make its way to the Holy Land in an effort known as the People’s Crusade, also known as the Peasants’ and Paupers’ Crusade.
Palling around with Peter the Hermit
Urban II wasn’t the only person to preach Crusade. Many of his bishops and priests took the message to their people, and other unofficial recruiters and preachers took to the streets themselves. The most famous and successful of these latter preachers was a man known as Peter the Hermit (whom I mention in Chapter 1).
Peter the Hermit was born around 1050 and came from Amiens in France. He was a nomadic ex-monk who relied on the charity of others to live. In fact, he spent most of his time travelling around talking to people, and so he wasn’t really much of a hermit. Peter the Nomad would have probably been a more accurate description.
He apparently tried to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, only to be stopped by the wars in the Byzantine Empire. Taking Urban’s call to Crusade as his cue, Peter now travelled around northern France recruiting a huge mob of common people to join him on pilgrimage, and help him to go back and clear the way to Jerusalem.
Peter was astonishingly successful in recruiting people to join his journey. Crowds were awed by his inspiring preaching and enthusiastically joined up because going on pilgrimage was effectively an indulgence (Chapter 2 has the lowdown on the granting of indulgences by the Church), something that granted you likely access to Heaven. What Peter and other prophets like him were offering was an organised pilgrimage to the Holy Land - the ultimate spiritual destination on Earth. People jumped at the chance.
Marching with the great unwashed
The People’s Crusade was completely unofficial and left months before the official papal army. Gathering in the German town of Cologne, approximately 40,000 people left in April 1096. To put this number in perspective, it would have been around 10,000 more than the population of a city like Paris at the time - an immense body of people.
This number was made up of a huge variety of different people: young men and women, children, the old, the poor and even the sick. Some modern historians have suggested that there were possibly some armed nobles involved who were so keen to get going that they couldn’t wait for the ‘official’ First Crusade.
Unfortunately, going on pilgrimage, especially to somewhere as far away as Jerusalem, was really hard work; it was even more difficult if you were poor. With no money to buy supplies, the Crusaders had to steal and rob their way to Constantinople.
The Byzantines must have been pretty surprised and rather confused to see the pilgrims arrive in August 1096. The emperor had requested a Christian army from the east. Instead over 30,000 largely unarmed peasants appeared before the city walls!
It must have been a bizarre sight. The chronicler Anna Comnena (see the later sidebar ‘Lady of letters’) describes the scene as follows:
There was such universal eagerness and enthusiasm that every highway had some of them; along with the soldiers went an unarmed crowd, more numerous than the sand or the stars, carrying palms and crosses on their shoulders, including even women and children who had left their own countries.
Lady of letters
One of the best sources for the events surrounding the First Crusade (including the People's Crusade) is Anna Comnena, daughter of the Byzantine emperor Alexius Comnenus. Born in 1083, she was brought up in the cultured and academic court of the emperor and educated far beyond the level of many Western kings.
Anna wrote a life of her father, known as the Alexiad, which provides an unrivalled account of the attitudes of the Byzantines towards the First Crusade. As the emperor's daughter she had complete access to people and documents. Although she was writing 40 years after the events took place, she gives a sharp impression of the Byzantine concerns, particularly that the Crusaders were going to just come and attack Constantinople. She also makes very clear her distaste both for Islam and for the type of Christianity practised in the Western Roman Church. The Alexiad is now available in modern translations and is well worth checking out for a beautiful glimpse into a moment in time nearly 1,000 years ago.
Her own life wasn't without incident. In 1118 when her father died, she made an attempt to convince him to nominate her husband (Nicephorus) and not her brother John as his heir. Alexius refused, and Anna spent some time in a convent, away from court, while her loyalty to the new regime was tested.
Falling apart
After reaching Constantinople, the People’s Crusade fell into a bit of a shambles. No real leadership was in place, and the soldiers from France, Germany and Italy ran amok whenever they encountered a chance for profit.
Members of the People’s Crusade crossed the Bosphorus in September 1096 and slowly made their way towards the town of Nicaea. Although the territory was notionally in the hands of the Seljuk Turks, relations with the Byzantines were good and no army came to attack them.
Instead, the Crusaders filled their time by brutally mistreating the local population - raping, pillaging and torturing their way through local communities.
Eventually the majority of them made their way to the fortress of Xerigordon and settled there, which was a big mistake. The Seljuk Sultan immediately sent an army to lay siege to the fortress. The Crusaders hadn’t realised that the only accessible water was outside the fortress; within a week they were drinking their own urine and the blood of their animals.
The Turks then tricked the remaining Crusaders by telling them that those at Xerigordon had also captured Nicaea and were taking all the booty for themselves. When the Crusaders left their camp, they were almost immediately ambushed by Turks. Nearly 20,000 people were slaughtered.
Peter the Hermit wasn’t with these unfortunate Crusaders. He had travelled back to Constantinople to ask Alexius for reinforcements. Before he reached the city, his People’s Crusade was annihilated.
Persecuting Jews
The People’s Crusade (see the preceding section) wasn’t the only unofficial Crusade that set off before the official papal army left Italy. Furthermore, the first victims of a Crusade army weren’t Turks or Greek Christians - they were the Jews of Europe. (See the later sidebar ‘Blameless murder? The logic of extermination’ for more on these soldiers’s motives.) One of the main motivations was a radical preacher known as Folkmar who corrupted the preaching of Urban II and encouraged people in Central Europe to target non-Christians closer to home. The Jewish population were by far the most obvious target.
A bunch of fairly thuggish knights led by Emich, Count of Leisingen, began their own Crusade shortly after the People’s Crusade. Emich was allegedly a fanatical Christian who claimed to have a cross branded on to his chest. During April and May, he and a small army of one or two thousand made their way across Germany, attacking Jewish communities as they went.
The Jewish populations of Spier, Worms, Mainz and Cologne were brutally attacked by Emich and his men. When local bishops tried to prevent the slaughter, they were attacked as well. Emich went as far as to attack the palace of the Bishop of Worms where 500 Jews were sheltering.
The chronicler Solomon bar Simson describes the slaughter.
This man showed no mercy to the aged, youths or maidens, or babes, or sucklings, not even the sick . . . putting all to the sword and disembowelling pregnant women.
Similar atrocities took place elsewhere in Germany, but all these groups of thugs came a cropper when Emich and his followers arrived in Hungary. By this point, they had run out of supplies or money to buy them and began to pillage around the countryside. The king of Hungary acted quickly, and his men attacked and scattered Emich’s army. Many were slaughtered, and others wandered off to join other Crusade armies. Emich himself returned home where he was mocked for his failure to reach Jerusalem. Hardly an adequate punishment for his crimes.
Blameless murder? The logic of extermination
The horrific pogrom against the Jews was only the first example of the appalling atrocities that took place during the Crusades. Emich and his relatively small band targeted the Jews of Germany because they were alien and foreign. They also viewed the Jews as the people who had killed Christ. Of course, none of this makes any sense because Jesus was Jewish too, but the Crusaders had been fired up by papal rhetoric and the promise that any sins that they committed would be forgiven.
Emich's terrible acts were entirely down to him and didn't spread but the same attitude was behind the Crusaders's willingness to murder Greek Christians, Muslims, Arabs and Turks. All these non-European Christian people were alien, and eliminating them was not considered a sin.
Although the action of various Crusaders may seem inhumane and insane, similar brutal, horrific thinking was responsible for the Holocaust during the Second World War less than 70 years ago, as well as the more recent ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia and ongoing atrocities in Africa.
Heading East
Unsurprisingly after the events of the People’s Crusade (which I describe in the earlier section ‘Participating in the People’s Crusade’), the Byzantine emperor, Alexius Comnenus, was very suspicious of the official papal army when it approached Constantinople in 1097. This army arrived in its various regional groups, and all but its leaders were kept in camps outside the city walls.
Taking Alexius's oath
Alexius asked that all the Crusade leaders swear an oath of loyalty to him. In particular, this oath set out that any territory the Crusaders took from the Turks would be handed back to Byzantium. Alexius set up a system where each leader was invited to the palace to swear the oath, and then the leader and his army were ferried across the Bosphorus before the next one arrived.
If any leader refused to take the oath, Alexius cut off his supplies. The system worked well. Godfrey of Bouillon kicked up a bit of a protest, but Alexius swiftly sent his troops out to knock his followers around, and Godfrey and the other lords soon fell into line. Alexius was just as capable of using the carrot as well as the stick; some leaders were offered riches; Geoffrey of Bouillon himself received a ‘mound of gold and silver’!
The only nobleman to refuse absolutely was one of the last to arrive - Bohemond, the Norman lord of Taranto. Only after he’d asked Alexius to make him commander of all the Byzantine armies in the East and was told in response that it wasn’t appropriate to do so did he take the oath. Anna Comnena (see the earlier sidebar ‘Lady of letters’) seems to have had a bit of a love-hate relationship with Bohemond, deploring his conduct but writing almost admiringly of the powerful impression that he made. I think that she quite fancied him really, but you be the judge:
There was a certain charm about him, but it was somewhat dimmed by the alarm that his person as a whole inspired; there was a hard savage quality to his whole aspect, due I suppose, to his great stature and his eyes; even his laugh sounded like a threat to others.
Making moves on Nicaea
Finally across the Bosphorus, the papal army began its march into Anatolia (in modern-day Turkey). Western Anatolia was under the control of a Seljuk Sultan called Kilij Arslan, but most of the population of the territory were
Christian. The Sultan himself was away, fighting a rebellious emir (provincial governor). He was forced to abandon his plans and march back west as quickly as possible.
The Crusaders first target was the city of Nicaea, where the People’s Crusade had been routed. The army quickly laid siege. Brief skirmishes took place when Turks attacked Raymond of Toulouse’s forces, but they were quickly driven off.
Overall, however, the siege didn’t go well, because the Crusaders didn’t have the necessary heavy siege equipment and the people inside the city were well supplied. In addition, the city was on a lake and the Crusaders didn’t have boats to stop the Turks from rowing across it to get supplies. Six weeks later, and the Crusaders were still stuck outside Nicaea. (See the later sidebar ‘A, B, Siege! A guide to siege warfare’ for more on this subject.)
While the Crusaders were held up outside Nicaea, the Byzantine emperor Alexius took the initiative. A Byzantine force carried out secret negotiations with the Turkish commanders and then rowed across the lake to take the fortress.
The Crusaders were not amused and Alexius had to buy them off with gifts of gold to the leaders, but his efforts showed how serious he was about keeping hold of his territory. The papal army was forced to pack up and trudge off down the road to its first proper battle.
Tactical clashes
The knights of the Crusading army were fearsome fighters (for more on this, see Chapter 11). Heavily armoured, they were also fast and able to mount devastating charges against enemy infantry. These characteristics made them particularly successful against Western European armies who tended to fight in tight formations.
Unfortunately for the knights, the Seljuk Turks didn't often fight in this manner. Simply put, the Turks's tactics were the precise opposite of the Crusaders. The Turks tended to be lightly armed with bows and rode small quick horses, ideal for quick attacks and counter-attacks followed by swift retreats. They wore down an enemy by continually making small-scale but devastating attacks and retreating to distance. The papal army was quite capable of charging the Turks, but the latter were unlikely to stay still long enough for the charge to take full effect.
To defeat this new adversary, the Crusaders had to change the tactics that had previously served them so well.
Achieving the first victory at Dorylaeum
The Crusaders left Nicaea in June 1097 and made their way farther down the Anatolian coast. The massive army of around 35,000 was really too big to travel together because finding supplies was difficult. At this point, they split into two sections: the Franks and men from Lorraine under the leadership of Raymond of Toulouse and the Normans and the rest with Bohemond as leader.
As both sections approached the town of Dorylaeum, Bohemond’s advance party first came under attack from the Turks, and he made a huge tactical change (see the earlier sidebar ‘Tactical clashes’). Instead of charging at the enemy, Bohemond drew up his forces in a defensive formation with the knights protected in its centre. Over several hours, the Turks threw everything at this defensive wall with continual assaults that gradually wore down the defenders.
Eventually, just as the line was about to break, Raymond of Toulouse and the second army approached. At this point Bohemond ordered his knights to go on the charge, and they flew at the now exhausted Turk troops, who scattered. The papal army won the day. More significantly, it was the last time that the papal army were truly challenged on its way through Anatolia.
An interesting note was made by the anonymous writer of a source called the Gesta Francorum (the ‘Deeds of the Franks’) who was an eyewitness to the battle. The writer notes that the real architects of the victory were the women of the Crusader party who continually supplied the fighters with both water and encouragement, both of which activities would have been incredibly dangerous in the heat of battle.
Establishing a new state in Edessa
Dorylaeum was a great victory, but the tensions between the Crusade leaders continued. Also, conditions deteriorated as they travelled farther east. The heat was appalling and even worse for men wearing chainmail and heavy armour. The atmosphere further declined as arguments erupted over how to make the journey down to the Levantine coast.
As Figure 12-1 shows, several Crusaders were tempted into going out of their way into Armenia. Local guides had told them that the Christian city of Edessa would welcome support against the Seljuk Turks. Edessa was the biggest and wealthiest city in the region and a very important trading centre on the Euphrates river.
Figure 12-1: The route of the First Crusade 1096-1099
Baldwin of Boulogne was the leader who made the move, arriving in Edessa in October 1097. A man called Thoros ruled Edessa, and Baldwin asked that, in exchange for his help against the Turks, Thoros formally adopt him as heir. Baldwin went through a formal ceremony that involved both men getting inside one big shirt and rubbing their chests together; Baldwin then did the same with Thoros’s wife. After this ceremony, he officially became their son and heir.
In a shocking move shortly afterwards, traitors killed Thoros. The chronicler Fulcher of Chartres writes of Baldwin’s reaction to the news:
Baldwin and his people were greatly saddened at this, since they were unable to obtain mercy for the prince [Thoros]. Nevertheless, Baldwin received the principality by the gift of the people.
Fortunately for Baldwin, he was able to overcome his grief and become the new ruler of Edessa, which became the first Crusader state. Baldwin married a local princess and set about ruling his new kingdom, leaving the rest of the papal army to get on with the original intention of the First Crusade - taking Jerusalem.
Laying siege on Antioch
While Baldwin was setting himself up in Edessa, the papal army hit a major obstacle - the city of Antioch (see Figure 12-1) the modern-day Turkish town of Antakya. Antioch was the biggest city on the Levantine coast (modern-day Syria) and a hugely important place for the Eastern Christian community.
The vast majority of the population were Christian from various parts of the Byzantine Empire, and it is claimed that the city was the site of the first-ever Christian community, established by the disciples Barnabus, Paul and Peter in the first century AD.
In addition, for the Byzantine emperor Alexius, Antioch was second in importance only to Constantinople for the following reasons:
● Antioch was rich, seriously rich. The city formed the link between the trade routes to the east and the Mediterranean. All trade heading west passed through the city, and traders had to pay taxes before proceeding to the port of St Symeon.
● Antioch was extremely fertile and able to produce a huge amount of food from farmland within the city walls.
To land-hungry Crusaders from Western Europe, Antioch must have seemed like an absolute paradise: one that they had to take for themselves.
The impossible Job
Unfortunately for the Crusaders, the city had been under the control of the Turks since 1084 and was incredibly well-defended. The walls of Antioch were 25 miles (or 40 kilometres) long and completely surrounded the city. Along the walls were almost 400 towers from which sentries were clearly able to observe the movements of any attacking army. As if this situation wasn’t tough enough, the city had excellent water supplies and was full of good farmland.
Crusader Stephen of Blois wrote to his wife Adela as follows:
We found Antioch to be enormous beyond belief, and very strong and well fortified. More than 5,000 Turkish soldiers had flocked within the city not to mention the countless other peoples within.
With Antioch seeming so impregnable, the only way it was likely to fall was through treachery. Given that the city was full of Christians, these individuals must have appeared as likely threats. Therefore, the Seljuk governor immediately imprisoned the Christian Patriarch and expelled all the Christian leaders.
A, B, Siege! A guide to siege warfare
Laying siege to castles, fortresses and cities was a large part of medieval warfare. The process was difficult, incredibly dangerous and very time-consuming. You had essentially two options: starve the enemy into submission, or storm or break down the walls, taking your target by force.
Siege machines were essential to both options. Some of the common weapons and tactics included the following:
● Battering ram: Usually the trunk of a massive tree, this large piece of wood was repeatedly rammed against walls or gates. The downside of rams was that they were slow to move and that the men using them were very exposed to enemy arrow fire.
● Catapult: Various slightly different types of catapults existed, known as Mangonel, Trebuchet or Onager. They were all built using a counter-weight to fling projectiles at the walls of the target. Heavy objects were hurled from a large bucket or sling at the end of the arm. Catapults were also used to hurl burning objects such as oil in an attempt to start fires within the town or castle and thus force the defenders to flee.
● Mining: Attackers tried to bring walls down by digging under them and setting fires in an attempt to decompose the cement, so that they were able to knock out individual stones. Needless to say, mining was incredibly dangerous and unreliable.
● Petard: The petard was invented towards the end of the medieval period (around the end of the fifteenth century), coinciding with the first use of gun powder. A small charge was laid at the base of a wall and exploded in an attempt to bring down the structure. Effectively, it was a small bomb, rather like a modern firecracker, but more powerful and far less stable. Early attempts were not successful, and attackers tended to blow themselves up rather than the walls.
The word 'petard' is the reason for the expression 'hoist by his own petard', meaning someone who is harmed by his own plan to harm another. Petards were so unreliable that this expression was quite accurate!
● Siege tower: Used frequently during the Crusades, these tall wheeled towers were pushed up to the walls and allowed attackers to climb on to the city walls. Giant screens surrounded the towers and protected the attacking troops from arrow fire by the defenders.
● Spreading disease: Some attackers also tried biological warfare. Using catapults they flung diseased corpses (human or animal) over walls or dumped them into the water supply. The effects could be devastating.
Frustration on the Antioch front
The siege of Antioch didn’t go well. The Crusaders made sporadic raids against the walls of the city but were nearly always driven back before they made any impression. In response the Turks led frequent (and successful) sorties out to harass the Crusaders.
The Crusaders had to settle down for what promised to be a long siege.
This meant spending huge amounts of money on siege towers and establishing permanent watch towers around the city. For these constructions they needed a huge amount of wood and were forced to scour the surrounding countryside for timber.
The other problem was that the Crusaders were suffering much more from hunger and disease than the people inside the city. Each knight had to pay for his own food and that of his men. Supplies were short and prices extortionate. Large numbers among the armies died from starvation or diseases that struck because they were so weak. As winter dragged on into 1098, the situation became worse and worse.
Bohemond makes a deal
By June 1098, the siege had dragged on for eight months, and many of the papal army were ready to pack up and go home. Desertions were commonplace.
Just at this point, Bohemond got hold of some important news. One of the guards on a tower in the Antioch walls known as the ‘Two Sisters’ had a grudge against the city governor Yaghi-Siyan and was prepared to betray him.
Bohemond didn’t reveal all this information to the other Crusade leaders. He told them only that he was going to launch an assault and if he was successful he would demand full control of the city. Wearily, and not expecting him to succeed, the other leaders agreed to his demands.
Bohemond’s friendly guard let his men in through a window in the tower. They spread quickly and silently through the city. Within minutes the city was theirs and an appallingly savage rampage followed. Turks were hunted down and eliminated, and thousands were raped and killed, including many Christians.
Counter-attack - and a miraculous lance!
Only days after entering the city, the papal army found itself under siege from a Turk general called Kerbogah, who came from the west with a huge relief army. After months of siege, the papal army was in a terrible state - ill, exhausted and unable to find any food in Antioch, still starving. The population inside the city had eaten their way through supplies and much more was lost in the rampage that followed its fall to the Crusader army.
Assistance came, however, in an unexpected way. Within Antioch’s walls, the Crusaders found a small length of iron buried underneath the Cathedral. The Bishop of Le Puy proclaimed the artefact to be a piece of the Holy Lance, the spear that pierced the side of Jesus when he was on the cross; he announced that it would help lead the army to victory against Kerbogah.
The Crusaders certainly needed the help. The army was on its knees, but on 28 June it left the city to face the Turks. The few hundred mounted knights shambled out across the plain when suddenly a miracle occurred: the Turks broke up and fled.
According to the Bishop of Le Puy, the Turks’s retreat was due to the Holy Lance. Witnesses claimed to have seen an army of white robed horsemen charging down from the hills led by St George!
The truth is a little easier to believe: Kerbogah had been betrayed by his generals, who had hatched a political plot against him. They intended to ‘throw’ the battle to damage his reputation and get him executed by the Seljuk Sultan. Whatever the reason, however, Antioch now belonged to the papal army, and the Crusaders now had a hugely important staging post on their way to Jerusalem.
Capturing Jerusalem
After the unlikely success at Antioch, the papal army was set to march farther south towards its ultimate goal of Jerusalem and establishing a new Kingdom of Jerusalem.
Negotiating with the Egyptians
Before the Crusaders even left Antioch, a big part of what they needed to do had already taken place. During the spring of 1098, the camp outside Antioch had been visited by ambassadors from the Fatamid vizier of Egypt. The Fatamid Caliphate had previously been the controllers of the whole of Palestine (see Figure 12-1), including Jerusalem, and had lost the area to the Seljuk Turks in 1070.
While the Crusaders had been making their slow progress from Constantinople to Antioch, the Egyptians had attacked the Turks in Palestine and were at the point of recapturing it. The vizier wanted to stop the Crusaders from coming any farther south and so was prepared to offer Christian pilgrims free passage in the Holy City but not control of it.
The Egyptian offer must have been attractive to the exhausted army outside Antioch, but three months later, after taking the city and enjoying victory over Kerbogah, the world looked very different. The ‘miracle’ of the Holy Lance was still fresh in the Crusaders’ minds, and they now considered themselves unbeatable. Although the Egyptians weren’t the Turks, they still weren’t Christian. To leave the Holy City in their hands would leave the job half done. They rejected the vizier’s offer and began planning their next move.
Stumbling onward
The leaders of the Crusade were unable to decide what to do next:
● Hugh of France had had enough. He considered Jerusalem saved and sailed back to France with his men.
● Bohemond and the others were still arguing about who controlled Antioch and were held up for several weeks while they resolved the dispute. Bohemond won and, to the huge annoyance of the Byzantine emperor Alexius, began to refer to himself as the prince of Antioch.
In the end, the less prestigious nobles took to the road to Jerusalem first. Poor and hungry, they lived off the land and raided the local area for food. They were particularly savage and became known as ‘Tarfurs’, from the Arabic word meaning ‘without money’. By this time the army of 35,000 had shrunk to nearer 14,000 with fewer than 1,500 knights.
On the road south, they were forced into a shocking act - cannibalism. The chronicler Guibert of Nogent describes the unpleasant tale:
When at Ma’arra - and wherever else scraps of flesh from the pagans’ bodies were discovered; when starvation forced our soldiers into the deed of cannibalism . . . the Tarfurs, in order to impress the enemy, roasted the bruised body of a Turk over a fire, as if it were meat for eating, in full view of the Turkish forces.
The remaining papal army took six months to make its way the relatively short distance from Antioch to Jerusalem. The slowness was partly due to various unnecessary fights against the remaining Turks, an extended stay in the port of Tripoli (where the Crusaders were royally entertained by the local emir) and another long siege at a place called Arqa.
Retaking the city
On 7 June 1099, the papal army finally arrived at the outskirts of Jerusalem - more than two years after first setting out. A first attack on the city failed, and the papal army settled down for what seemed like yet another lengthy siege.
A piece of good fortune occurred, however, during preparations for the siege: Tancred de Hauteville came across a huge amount of timber in the most unlikely of circumstances. Radulph of Caen explains:
Tancred was suffering from severe dysentery, but did not spare himself from riding even though he could barely sit on his horse. The nuisance kept
forcing him to dismount, go away from the group and find a hiding place . . . while Tancred was relieving himself he faced a cave in the rock opposite, where found hundred timbers lay open to view.
The results of Tancred’s unfortunate affliction were a huge bonus because timber was scarce and the army was now able to construct vast siege machines with which to attack the city. (See the earlier sidebar ‘A, B, Siege! A guide to siege warfare’.)
By the middle of July, the Crusaders were ready for a full-scale attack. The papal army that attacked on 15 July was only 20,000 strong. More than half the original number had died or deserted at some point on the two-year journey to Jerusalem. Raymond of Toulouse led the assault and it was almost immediately successful.
What followed was a horrendous slaughter. Tancred and his men desecrated the most holy place of the Muslims, the Dome of the Rock. Others forced their way into a mosque and killed everyone inside. Another party burned down a synagogue in which the Jewish population were sheltering. The atrocities were appalling and thousands and thousands of people were slaughtered, the corpses piling up outside the city gates so high that they towered over the walls.
The Crusaders had regained Jerusalem, but at a huge cost. The incredible mission that Pope Urban II had requested had arguably been a success, but the pope himself never found out; he died two days before messengers arrived in Italy with the news.
Establishing the Kingdom of Jerusalem
After the papal army regained Jerusalem, more problems started. The big issue was what to do with the city. Pope Urban II had originally stated that a new Christian state should be founded. By slaughtering all the non-Christian people of the city, this aim had been achieved by default; the big question was who was now to be in charge.
Selecting a leader
In a surprisingly democratic move, the Crusade leaders decided to vote on who should be the new king. The first vote went to Raymond of Toulouse, but he turned the job down because he felt that it was impious to rule with a crown in the city of Christ. The rest of the knights didn’t share Raymond’s reticence, and so they voted again.
This time the vote went to Godfrey of Lorraine. He accepted but taking his queue from Raymond, he refused to call himself king and took the title of ‘Defender of the Holy Sepulchre (tomb of Christ)’. With Jerusalem in the bag, three Western European nobles now ruled three Eastern states: Baldwin in Edessa, Bohemond in Antioch and Godfrey in Jerusalem.
Of course, plenty of other Eastern cities and ports were available for capturing. Within a few months, a man called Daimbert arrived. He had been the archbishop of Pisa and was sent by the pope to be the new Patriarch of Jerusalem. One of his first acts was to make Tancred ‘Prince of Galilee’. This new title gave Tancred the right to look for his own lands, and he soon attacked the port of Haifa.
With so much territory under Western control, the Holy Land and territories to the north were soon referred to as Outremer, or the kingdom across the sea. In many ways Outremer was just like Lorraine or Aquitaine, a collection of individual principalities that were more or less loyal to an overall lord (Godfrey in this case) with the pope as religious leader.
Over the next two centuries Outremer developed into a quite extraordinary place where Western Europeans lived side by side with, and even married, their non-Christian counterparts (flip to Chapter 14 for more details).
Taking charge: Baldwin I
As events turned out, Godfrey of Lorraine didn’t defend the Holy Sepulchre for very long. Within a year of being chosen, he was dead and a new leader was required. Godfrey’s brother was Baldwin of Edessa and he naturally assumed that the job was his for the taking. Daimbert, however, wasn’t keen and asked Bohemond to stop him, but unfortunately for Bohemond he got himself captured by the Turks. Therefore, nothing could stop Baldwin from marching from Edessa to Jerusalem.
On Christmas Day 1100, Baldwin was crowned King of Jerusalem, becoming one of the most powerful men in the world in the process. His reign, however, didn’t last, Jerusalem fell once more and within 50 years, a call for a fresh Crusade arose (check out Chapter 14 for the full story).