As the last phase of the march to Jerusalem began, the First Crusaders were possessed by a new sense of urgency. Any thoughts of conquering other towns and ports on the journey through Lebanon and Palestine were abandoned, and the Franks, now driven by the determined desire to complete their pilgrimage to the Holy City, advanced with resolute speed. It was not devotion alone that drove the Frankish pace; strategic necessity also played its part. Back in the spring, during the siege of Arqa, the issue of diplomatic relations with Egypt had re-emerged when Latin emissaries sent to the Vizier al-Afdal a year earlier rejoined the expedition in the company of Fatimid representatives. Much had changed in the intervening period. Capitalising upon the tremors of fear that shook the Sunni Seljuq world after Kerbogha’s defeat at Antioch, al-Afdal had seized Jerusalem from the Turks in August 1098. This radical transformation in the balance of Near Eastern power prompted the crusader princes to seek a negotiated settlement with the Fatimids, offering a partition of conquered territory in return for rights to the Holy City. But talks collapsed when the Egyptians bluntly refused to relinquish Jerusalem. This left the Franks facing a new enemy in Palestine and a race against time. The crusaders now had to cover the remaining 200 miles of their pilgrimage with maximum rapidity, before al-Afdal could muster an army to intercept them or properly organise Jerusalem’s defences.
As they traced the Mediterranean coastline south, the crusaders’ passage was eased by the willingness of local semi-independent Muslim rulers to negotiate short-term truces, even on occasion to offer markets in which to purchase food and supplies. Cowed by the Latins’ reputation for brutish invincibility earned at Antioch and Marrat, these emirs were happy to avoid confrontation. Passing by the major settlements of Tyre, Acre and Caesarea, the Franks encountered only limited resistance and were deeply relieved to find a succession of narrow coastal passes unguarded. In late May the expedition turned inland at Arsuf, taking a direct route across the plains and up into the Judean hills. They paused only briefly when approaching Ramla, the last real bastion on the road to the Holy City, but found it abandoned by the Fatimids. At last, on 7 June 1099, Jerusalem came into view. One Latin contemporary described how ‘all the people burst into floods of happy tears, because they were so close to the holy place of that longed-for city, for which they had suffered so many hardships, so many dangers, so many kinds of death and famine’. Al-Afdal’s inaction had allowed the expedition to advance south from Lebanon in less than a month.34
IN HEAVEN AND ON EARTH
After nearly three years, and a journey of some 2,000 miles, the crusaders had reached Jerusalem. This ancient city, Christendom’s sacred heart, pulsated with religion. For the Franks it was the holiest place on Earth, where Christ had suffered his Passion. Within its lofty walls stood the Holy Sepulchre, the church erected in the fourth century CE under the Roman Emperor Constantine to enclose the supposed sites of Golgotha and of Jesus’ Tomb. This one shrine encapsulated the very essence of Christianity: the Crucifixion, Redemption and Resurrection. The crusaders had marched east from Europe in their thousands to reclaim this church–many believing that if the earthly city of Jerusalem could be recaptured it would become one with the heavenly Jerusalem, a Christian paradise. Feverish prophecies abounded of the imminent onset of the Last Days of Judgement centred on the Holy City, imbuing the Latin expedition with an apocalyptic aura.
But across more than 3,000 years of history, Jerusalem had become immutably entwined with two other world religions: Judaism and Islam. These faiths also treasured the city, reserving particular reverence for the area known either as the Temple Mount, orHaram as-Sharif, a raised enclosure in its eastern reaches, containing the Dome of the Rock and the Aqsa mosque, and abutted by the Wailing Wall. To Muslims this was the city from which Muhammad made his ascent to heaven, the third-holiest site in the Islamic world. But it was also the seat of the Israelites, where Abraham offered to sacrifice his son and the two Temples were built.
Just as it is today, Jerusalem became a focus of conflict in the Middle Ages precisely because of its unrivalled sanctity. The fact that it held critical devotional significance for the adherents of three different religions, each of whom believed that they had inalienable and historic rights to the city, meant that it was almost predestined to be the scene of war.
The task ahead
The First Crusade now faced a seemingly insurmountable task–the conquest of one of the known world’s most fearsomely fortified cities. Even today, amid the urban sprawl of modern expansion, Jerusalem is able to convey the grandeur of its past, for at its centre lies the ‘Old City’, ringed by Ottoman walls closely resembling those that stood in the eleventh century. If one looks from the Mount of Olives in the east, stripping away the clutter and bustle of the twenty-first century, the great metropolis that confronted the Franks in 1099 comes into focus.
The city stood isolated, amid the Judean Hills, on a section of raised ground, with deep valleys falling away to the east, south-east and west, enclosed within an awesome two-and-a-half-mile circuit of battlements, sixty feet high and ten feet thick. Realistically, the city could only be attacked from the flatter ground to the north and south-west, but here the walls were reinforced by a secondary curtain wall and a series of dry moats. Five major gates, each guarded by a pair of towers, pierced this roughly rectangular system of defences. Jerusalem also possessed two major strongholds. In the north-western corner stood the formidable ‘Quadrangular Tower’, while midway along the western wall rose the Tower of David. One Latin chronicler described how this dread citadel was ‘constructed of large square stones sealed with molten lead’, noting that if ‘well supplied with rations for soldiers, fifteen or twenty men could defend it from every attack’.35
As soon as the crusaders arrived at Jerusalem a worrying rift within their ranks became apparent, as their armies divided in two. Since the siege of Arqa, Raymond of Toulouse’s popularity had been in decline and, now, abandoned by Robert of Normandy, the count was left struggling even to retain the allegiance of the southern French. Raymond positioned his remaining forces on Mount Zion, south-west of the city, to threaten the southern Zion Gate. The campaign’s emerging leader, Godfrey of Bouillon, meanwhile moved to besiege the city from the north, between the Quadrangular Tower and Damascus Gate. Enjoying the support of Arnulf of Chocques, the priest who had helped to discredit the Holy Lance, Godfrey was joined by the two Roberts and Tancred. In strategic terms, the division of troops had some merit, exposing Jerusalem to attack on two fronts, but it was also the product of gnawing discord.
This was all the more troubling because the Franks could not pursue a long-drawn-out encirclement siege at Jerusalem, as they had at Antioch. The vast length of the city’s perimeter wall meant that, with limited manpower at their disposal, enforcing an effective blockade would be impossible. More pressing still was the issue of time. The crusaders had taken an enormous, if arguably necessary, gamble by marching at speed from Lebanon, without pausing to secure their rear or to establish any reliable network of supply. They were now hundreds of miles from their nearest allies, all but cut off from reinforcement, logistical support or the possibility of escape. And all the while they knew that al-Afdal was racing to prepare his Fatimid forces, bent upon relieving the Holy City and stamping out the Christian invasion. The near-suicidal audacity of the Latin advance left them with but one option: crack the shell of Jerusalem’s defences and fight their way into the city before the Egyptian army arrived.
The City of Jerusalem
In this final, fraught stage of their expedition, the Franks could muster around 15,000 battle-hardened warriors, including some 1,300 knights, but this army was largely bereft of the material resources needed to prosecute an assault siege. The overall size of the garrison they faced is unknown, but it must have numbered in the thousands and certainly contained an elite core of at least 400 Egyptian cavalrymen. Jerusalem’s Fatimid governor, Iftikhar ad-Daulah, meanwhile, had been quite assiduous in preparing to face an offensive, laying waste to the surrounding region by poisoning wells and felling trees, and expelling many of the city’s eastern Christian inhabitants to prevent betrayal from within. When the crusaders launched their first direct assault on 13 June, just six days after their arrival, the Muslim defenders offered staunch resistance. At this stage the Franks possessed only one scaling ladder, a pitiful arsenal, but desperation and the prophetic urgings of a hermit encountered wandering on the Mount of Olives persuaded them to chance an attack. In fact, Tancred spearheaded a fierce strike on the ramparts in the city’s north-western quadrant that almost achieved a breach. Having successfully raised their sole ladder, Latin troops sped upwards, seeking to mount the walls, but the first man to grab the parapet promptly had his hand chopped off by a mighty Muslim sword stroke and the onslaught foundered.
In the wake of this dispiriting reversal the Frankish princes reconsidered their strategy, electing to postpone any further offensive until the appropriate weapons of war could be constructed. As a frantic search for materials began, the crusaders started to feel the effects of the baking Palestinian summer. For the time being at least, food was not the main cause of concern, as grain had been brought from Ramla. Instead, it was water shortages that began to weaken Latin resolve. With all the nearby watering holes polluted, the Christians were forced to scour the surrounding region in search of drinkable liquid. One Frank recalled rather forlornly: ‘The situation was so bad that when anyone brought foul water to camp in vessels, he was able to get any price that he cared to ask, and if anyone cared to get clear water, for five or six pennies he could not obtain enough to satisfy his thirst for a single day. Wine, moreover, was never, or very rarely, even mentioned.’ At one point some of the poor died after gulping down filthy marsh water contaminated with leeches.36
Luckily for the crusaders, just as these shortages were beginning to take hold help arrived from a seemingly unheralded quarter. In mid-June a six-ship-strong Genoese fleet made anchor at Jaffa, a small natural harbour on the Mediterranean coast that was Jerusalem’s nearest port. Their crew, which included a number of skilled craftsmen, made their way to join the siege of the Holy City, laden with an array of equipment, including ‘ropes, hammers, nails, axes, mattocks and hatchets’. At the same time, the Frankish princes used intelligence garnered from local Christians to locate a number of nearby forests and soon began ferrying in timber by the camel-load. These two developments transformed Latin prospects, putting them in a position to build siege machinery. For the next three weeks they threw themselves into a furious programme of construction, fashioning siege towers, catapults, battering rams and ladders, almost without pause, but always with one eye upon the impending arrival of al-Afdal’s relief army. Meanwhile, inside Jerusalem, Iftikhar ad-Daulah looked to the arrival of his master, even as he oversaw the assembly of scores of his own stone-throwing devices and the further strengthening of the city’s walls and towers.
Amid all these determined preparations both besiegers and besieged paused only to exchange morale-sapping acts of barbarism. Wooden crosses were regularly dragged up on to the city walls to be desecrated through spitting and even urination in full sight of the enraged crusaders. For their part, the Franks made a point of executing any captured Muslims, usually through decapitation, in front of Jerusalem’s garrison. During one particularly gruesome episode the crusaders took this tactic to a new extreme. Having caught a Muslim spy in their midst, the Christians once again sought to intimidate their enemy by throwing him back into the city, just as they had done with other victims in earlier sieges. But according to one Latin contemporary, on this occasion the unfortunate captive was still alive: ‘He was put into the catapult, but it was too heavily weighed down by his body and did not throw the wretch far. He soon fell onto sharp stones near the walls, broke his neck, his nerves and bones, and is reported to have died instantly.’37
In early July, with the construction of their siege weapons nearing completion, the Franks received word that a Fatimid relief force was gathering, and the need to achieve a swift victory became even more pressing. In this moment of desperation, spiritual revelation served once again to bolster morale and empower the expedition with a sense of divine sanction. A Provençal priest-visionary, Peter Desiderius, now prophesied that the Holy City would succumb to an assault if the crusaders first underwent three days of ritual purification. Just as at Antioch, there followed a series of sermons, public confessions and masses. The army even made a solemn, barefoot procession around the city’s walls bearing palm fronds, although the Fatimid garrison showed little respect for this ritual, peppering the crusader ranks with arrows when they came into range. By the end of the second week of July, with their siege machines completed and their spirits strengthened by pious fervour, the crusaders were ready to launch their attack.
THE ASSAULT ON JERUSALEM
The crusaders’ assault on Jerusalem began at first light on 14 July 1099. To the south-west, Raymond of Toulouse and his remaining Provençal supporters were positioned on Mount Zion, while Duke Godfrey, Tancred and the other Latins held the plateau to the north of the city. As horn blasts called the Franks to war on both fronts, Muslim troops peering into the half-light over the northern parapet suddenly realised that they had been duped. Godfrey and his men had spent the preceding three weeks constructing a massive siege tower directly in front of the city’s Quadrangular Tower. Watching this three-storey behemoth rise day by day to a height of some sixty feet, the Fatimid garrison had naturally set about reinforcing their defences in the north-western corner of the city. This was just what Godfrey had hoped for. His siege tower had actually been built with a secret technological refinement: it was capable of being broken down into a series of portable sections and then rapidly re-erected. During the night of 13–14 July the duke used the cover of darkness to move this edifice more than half a mile to the east, beyond the Damascus Gate, to threaten an entirely new section of wall. According to one crusader:
The Saracens were thunderstruck next morning at the sight of the changed position of our machines and tents…Two factors motivated the change of position. The flat surface offered a better approach to the walls for our instruments of war, and the very remoteness and weakness of this northern place had caused the Saracens to leave it unfortified.
Having thus deceived his enemy, Godfrey’s first priority was to break through the low outer wall that protected Jerusalem’s main northern battlements, for without achieving such a breach his great siege tower could not be deployed up against the city itself. The Franks had constructed a monstrous, iron-clad battering ram to smash a path through the outer defences and now, under cover of Latin mangonel fire, scores of crusaders struggled to haul this weapon forward, all the while facing the Muslim garrison’s own strafing missile attacks. Even mounted as it was upon a wheeled platform, the ram was desperately unwieldy, but after hours of exertion it was finally manoeuvred into position. With one last mighty charge the Franks sent it crashing into the outer wall, creating a massive fissure; indeed, the ram’s momentum propelled it so far forward that the Fatimid troops atop the ramparts feared that it might even threaten the main walls, and thus rained ‘fire kindled from sulphur, pitch and wax’ down upon the dreadful weapon, setting it alight. At first the crusaders rushed in to extinguish the flames, but Godfrey soon recognised that the charred remains of the ram would block the advance of his great siege tower. So, in an almost comically bizarre reversal of tactics, the Latins returned to burn their own weapon, while the Muslims vainly sought to preserve its obstructive mass, pouring water from the ramparts. Eventually, the Christians prevailed and by the end of the day the northern Franks had succeeded in penetrating the first line of defence, opening the way for a frontal assault on the main walls.
To the south-west of the city, on Mount Zion, the Provençals enjoyed less success. This sector of Jerusalem’s walls was reinforced by a dry moat rather than a curtain wall, so over the preceding weeks Raymond of Toulouse had instituted a fixed payment of a penny for every three stones thrown into this ditch as infill, ensuring the rapid neutralisation of this obstacle. At the same time, he oversaw the construction of his own wheeled siege tower and on 14 July, in concert with Godfrey’s offensive, this colossal engine of war was deployed. Inching its bulk towards the walls, the southern French troops came into range of enemy volleys and met an oppressive torrent of Fatimid missiles. Believing that the main Frankish assault would come from Mount Zion, Iftikhar ad-Daulah had concentrated his defensive firepower in this quadrant and his men now unleashed an incessant barrage. A Latin eyewitness described how ‘stones hurled from [catapults] flew through the air and arrows pelted like hail’, while the advancing siege tower was targeted by viciously effective firebombs ‘wrapped with ignited pitch, wax and sulphur, tow, and rags [and] fastened with nails so that they stuck wherever they hit’. Having failed to reach the walls, with the onset of dusk Raymond ordered a humiliating retreat.38
After a restless night of fearful anticipation for defenders and attackers alike, battle recommenced. The southern French once again set about driving forward their tower, but after some hours the intensity of the continued Muslim bombardment took its toll and the Provençal engine began to collapse and burn. With their offensive stymied, Raymond’s men fell back to Mount Zion in a state of ‘fatigue and hopelessness’. But the simple fact that Jerusalem’s garrison had faced an assault on two fronts stretched Fatimid resources, leaving the northern walls vulnerable. There, on the second day of fighting, Godfrey and his men began to make significant progress. Having breached the outer wall, they now heaved their wheeled siege tower towards this gap and the main battlements beyond. With the sky darkened by the furious exchange of missiles, the lofty edifice, packed with Franks, advanced inexorably. Casualties were appalling. One Latin chronicler recalled that ‘death was present and sudden for many on both sides’. Perched on the tower’s top storey to direct operations, Godfrey himself was desperately exposed. At one point, a flying mangonel stone practically decapitated a crusader standing at his side.
Catapulted firebombs careened into the Frankish tower, but, shielded by slick hide-swathed wattle screens, these failed to catch and the siege engine held solid, inching ever forwards. At last, near noon, it passed through the rift in the outer defences to reach the main walls. With the crusaders now just yards from the ramparts and both sides exchanging frenzied volleys of smaller-scale missile weapons, the Fatimids made a final attempt to stem the assault, employing their own ‘secret’ weapon. They had prepared a huge wooden spar, soaked in a combustible material, akin to Greek fire (a naphtha-based incendiary compound), which could not be extinguished by water. This beam was set alight and then hefted over the walls to land in front of Godfrey’s engine as a flaming barrier. Luckily for the Latins, they had been tipped off by local Christians about the one weakness of this terrible, impervious fire: it could be quenched by vinegar. Godfrey had thus stocked the tower with a supply of vinegar-filled wineskins, and these were now used to douse the flaming conflagration. As Franks on the ground dashed in to pull away the smouldering timber, the path ahead to the battlements was at last opened.
The success of the Latin offensive now depended on gaining an actual foothold on the city’s ramparts. The immense height of the siege tower gave the Franks a significant advantage–at this point the main walls rose to about fifty feet–allowing Godfrey and his men in the top storey to rain down a stream of suppressing fire upon the defenders. Suddenly, in the midst of fierce fighting, the crusaders realised that a nearby defensive tower and a portion of the battlements were burning. Whether through the use of flaming catapult missiles or fire arrows, the Franks had succeeded in igniting the main wall’s wooden substructure. This blaze ‘produced so much smoke and flame that not one of the citizens on guard could remain near it’–in panic and confusion the defenders facing the crusaders’ siege tower broke into retreat. Realising that this opening might last only moments, Godfrey hurriedly cut loose one of the wattle screens protecting the tower, fashioning a makeshift bridge across to the ramparts. As the first group of crusaders poured on to the walls, scores of Franks raced forward below with scaling ladders and began climbing up to reinforce their position.
Once Godfrey and his men achieved this first dramatic breach, the Muslim defence of Jerusalem collapsed with shocking rapidity. Terrified by the crusaders’ brutal reputation, those stationed at the northern wall turned and fled in horror at the sight of the Franks cresting the battlements. Soon the entire garrison was in a state of chaotic disorder. Raymond of Toulouse was still struggling on Mount Zion, his troops seemingly on the brink of defeat, when the incredible news of the breakthrough arrived. Suddenly Muslim defenders on the southern front, who only moments before had been fighting with venom, began to desert their posts. Some were even seen jumping, terrified, from the walls. The Provençals wasted no time in rushing into the city to join their fellow crusaders, and the sack began.39
The horror of ‘liberation’
Soon after midday on 15 July 1099 the First Crusaders achieved their long-cherished dream–Jerusalem’s conquest. Surging through the streets in blood-hungry, ravening packs, they overran the Holy City. What little Muslim resistance remained melted away before them, but most Franks were in no mood to take prisoners. Instead, three years of strife, privation and yearning coalesced to fuel a rampaging torrent of barbaric and indiscriminate slaughter. One crusader joyfully reported:
With the fall of Jerusalem and its towers one could see marvellous works. Some of the pagans were mercifully beheaded, others pierced by arrows plunged from towers, and yet others, tortured for a long time, were burned to death in searing flames. Piles of heads, hands and feet lay in the houses and streets, and men and knights were running to and fro over corpses.
Many Muslims fled towards the Haram as-Sharif, where some rallied, putting up futile resistance. A Latin eyewitness described how ‘all the defenders retreated along the walls and through the city, and our men went after them, killing them and cutting them down as far as the [Aqsa mosque], where there was such a massacre that our men were wading up to their ankles in enemy blood’. Tancred gave his banner to a group huddled on the roof of the Aqsa, designating them as his captives, but even they were later slain in cold blood by other Franks. So gruesome was the carnage that, according to one Latin, ‘even the soldiers who were carrying out the killing could hardly bear the vapours rising from the warm blood’. Other crusaders ranged through the city at will, slaughtering men, women and children, both Muslims and Jews, all the while engaging in rapacious looting.40
Neither Latin nor Arabic sources shy away from recording the dreadful horror of this sack, the one side glorying in victory, the other appalled by its raw savagery. In the decades that followed Near Eastern Islam came to regard the Latin atrocities at Jerusalem as an act of crusader barbarity and defilement, demanding of urgent vengeance. By the thirteenth century, the Iraqi Muslim Ibn al-Athir estimated the number of Muslim dead at 70,000. Modern historians long regarded this figure to be an exaggeration, but generally accepted that Latin estimates in excess of 10,000 might be accurate. However, recent research has uncovered close contemporary Hebrew testimony which indicates that casualties may not have exceeded 3,000, and that large numbers of prisoners were taken when Jerusalem fell. This suggests that, even in the Middle Ages, the image of the crusaders’ brutality in 1099 was subject to hyperbole and manipulation on both sides of the divide.
Even so, we must still acknowledge the terrible inhumanity of the crusaders’ sadistic butchery. Certainly, some of Jerusalem’s inhabitants were spared; Iftikhar ad-Daulah for one took sanctuary in the Tower of David and later negotiated terms of release from Raymond of Toulouse. But the Frankish massacre was not simply a feral outburst of bottled rage; it was a prolonged, callous campaign of killing that lasted at least two days and it left the city awash with blood and littered with corpses. In the midsummer heat the stench soon became intolerable, and the dead were dragged out beyond the city walls, ‘piled up in mounds as big as houses’ and burned. Even six months later a Latin visiting Palestine for the first time commented that the Holy City still reeked of death and decay.
The other unassailable truth of Jerusalem’s conquest is that the crusaders were not simply driven by a desire for blood or plunder; they were also empowered by heartfelt piety and the authentic belief that they were doing God’s work. Thus that first, ghastly day of sack and slaughter concluded with an act of worship. In a moment which perfectly encapsulated the crusade’s extraordinary fusion of violence and faith, dusk on 15 July 1099 saw the Latins gather to give tearful thanks to their God. A Latin contemporary rejoiced in recounting that, ‘going to the Sepulchre of the Lord and his glorious Temple, the clerics and also the laity, singing a new song unto the Lord in a high-sounding voice of exultation, and making offerings and most humble supplications, joyously visited the Holy Place as they had so long desired to do’. After years of desperate suffering and struggle, the First Crusaders’ terrible work was done: Jerusalem was in Christian hands.41
AFTERMATH
The crusaders’ thoughts soon turned to the fate of their new conquest. Having travelled 2,000 miles to claim Jerusalem for Latin Christendom, it was clear to all that the city would now have to be governed and defended. The clergy contended that a site of such rarefied sanctity should not be subjected to the rule of a secular monarch, arguing instead for the creation of a Church-run ecclesiastical realm, with the Holy City as its capital. But because Jerusalem’s Greek patriarch had died recently in exile in Cyprus, there was no obvious candidate to champion this cause. Raymond of Toulouse eyed the position of Latin king, but his popularity had been waning since Arqa and, on 22 July 1099, Godfrey of Bouillon, chief architect of the crusaders’ victory, took up the reins of power. In a gesture of conciliation to the clergy he accepted the title of ‘Advocate of the Holy Sepulchre’, implying that he would merely act as Jerusalem’s protector.42
His ambitions foiled once again, a furious Count Raymond made an abortive attempt to retain personal control of the Tower of David, before abandoning the Holy City in a fit of pique. In his absence, the Norman French crusader Arnulf of Chocques, critic of the Holy Lance, was selected as Jerusalem’s new patriarch designate. The idea of installing a Latin in this sacred post ran roughshod over the rights of the Greek Church, signalling a clear break with the policy of cooperation with Byzantium. As yet, Arnulf’s election remained unconfirmed, being subject to approval from Rome, but this did not stop him from engendering a rather shameful atmosphere of religious intolerance. Within months, the same eastern Christian ‘brethren’ that the Franks had been charged to protect during their holy war were subjected to persecution, as Armenians, Copts, Jacobites and Nestorians were expelled from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
The new order cemented its position by cultivating its own relic cult, destined to banish the sullied memory of the Holy Lance. Around 5 August a piece of the True Cross was unveiled. This relic, probably a rather battered silver and gold crucifix, was believed to contain a chunk of wood from the actual cross upon which Christ had died. It had apparently been hidden through generations of Muslim rule by Jerusalem’s indigenous Christian population. Seized upon by Arnulf and his supporters, this supposed remnant of Jesus’ life soon became the totem of the new Latin realm of Jerusalem, a symbol of Frankish victory and of the efficacy of the crusading ideal.
The last battle
Neither the patriarch nor Godfrey of Bouillon had much opportunity to relish their new-found status. In early August news arrived that al-Afdal had landed at the southern Palestinian port of Ascalon, having assembled an army of some 20,000 ferocious North Africans. The vizier was just days away from marching forth to reclaim Jerusalem for Islam. After all their trials and suffering, the Franks, beset by factionalism and woefully outnumbered, now faced the very real prospect of annihilation and the unravelling of their remarkable achievements.
Rather than wait to be besieged, Godfrey decided to risk everything on a pre-emptive strike against the Fatimids. On 9 August he left the Holy City, his troops marching barefoot as penitent soldiers of Christ, accompanied by Patriarch Arnulf and the relic of the True Cross. Over the next few days Godfrey managed to cobble together a grudging, last-ditch Latin alliance, which saw Raymond of Toulouse rejoin the fray. The massed ranks of the once great Frankish host had now been whittled down to an elite, hardened core of crusade survivors, numbering perhaps 1,200 knights and 9,000 infantrymen in total. This army marched south towards Ascalon on 11 August, but towards the end of the day they captured a group of Egyptian spies who revealed al-Afdal’s battle plan as well as the size and the disposition of his forces. Recognising that they would be outnumbered two to one, the crusaders chose to rely upon an element of surprise to even the odds. At dawn the next day they launched a sudden attack on the still-sleeping Fatimid troops, quartered before Ascalon. Overconfident, al-Afdal had failed to post sufficient watchmen, leaving the Franks free to scythe through rank upon rank of stunned Muslim troops. As Latin knights drove into the heart of their camp, seizing al-Afdal’s personal standard and most of his possessions, the battle quickly turned into a rout:
In their great fright [the Fatimids] climbed and hid in trees, only to plunge from boughs like falling birds when our men pierced them with arrows and killed them with lances. Later the Christians uselessly decapitated them with swords. Other infidels threw themselves to the ground grovelling in terror at the Christians’ feet. Then our men cut them to pieces as one slaughters cattle for the meat market.43
In a state of horrified shock, al-Afdal escaped into Ascalon and immediately set sail for Egypt, leaving the crusaders to crush any lingering resistance and mop up a lavish horde of booty, including the vizier’s own precious sword. The First Crusade had survived its final test, but the petty rivalry that had divided its leaders for so long now exacted a costly price. Terrified and abandoned, Ascalon’s garrison was more than ready to surrender that August, but they demanded to negotiate with Raymond of Toulouse, the one Frank known to have upheld his promises during the sack of Jerusalem. Fearful that the Provençal count might thereby establish his own independent coastal lordship, Godfrey interfered and negotiations collapsed. This squandered opportunity left Ascalon in the hands of Islam. In the decades to come a resurgent Fatimid navy proved able to defend this Palestinian foothold, leaving the nascent kingdom of Jerusalem dangerously exposed to Egyptian attack.
The return to Europe
After the victory at Ascalon, most crusaders considered their work to be done. Against all odds and expectations they had survived the gruelling pilgrimage to the Holy Land, secured the ‘miraculous’ reconquest of Jerusalem and repelled the might of Fatimid Egypt. Of the tens of thousands who had taken the cross years earlier, only a fraction remained, and now the vast majority of these looked to return home to the West. By summer’s end they had joined Robert of Normandy and Robert of Flanders in taking ship from Syria, leaving Godfrey with just 300 knights and some 2,000 infantrymen to defend Palestine. Tancred was the only major crusader prince to remain, his eyes open to the opportunity of establishing his own independent lordship in the East.
Few, if any, crusaders returned to Europe laden with riches. The plunder amassed at Jerusalem and Ascalon seems to have been swiftly consumed by travel costs, and many reached their homelands in a state of near-penniless destitution, afflicted by sickness and exhaustion. Many carried with them a different form of sacred ‘treasure’–relics of the saints, pieces of the Holy Lance and the True Cross, or simple palm fronds from Jerusalem, the badge of their completed pilgrimage. Peter the Hermit, for one, reached France with relics of John the Baptist and the Holy Sepulchre itself, and duly founded an Augustinian priory near Liège in their honour. Almost all were assured a degree of renown for their exploits, and it became common for these crusaders to be celebrated with the nickname ‘Hierosolymitani’, or ‘travellers to Jerusalem’.
Of course, there were hundreds, even thousands, of Franks who did not return to a ‘hero’s welcome’ those who, like Stephen of Blois, had abandoned the expedition before its completion and thus failed to fulfil their pilgrim vows. These ‘deserters’ were greeted by a withering tide of public opprobrium. Stephen was openly chastised by his wife Adela. He, and many like him, sought to overcome the stain of this ignominy by enlisting in a new venture–the 1101 crusade. Since 1096, Pope Urban II had been encouraging waves of Latin reinforcements to set out for the Levant. Urban died in the summer of 1099, just before news of Jerusalem’s capture reached Rome, but his successor, Paschal II, soon took up the call, promoting a large-scale expedition to bring military aid to the nascent Frankish settlements in the East. Buoyed by tales of the First Crusade’s victories, this campaign enjoyed extraordinary levels of recruitment, drawing upon the ranks of the disgraced and thousands of new enthusiasts. Armies that at least matched the size of those amassed in 1096–7 marched to Constantinople, where they were joined by the veteran prince Raymond of Toulouse, recently arrived in Byzantium to renew his alliance with Emperor Alexius.
Despite its apparent martial strength, the 1101 crusade proved to be a shocking debacle. Forsaking the advice of both Stephen of Blois and Raymond of Toulouse, this expedition ignored the need for unified action. Instead, no fewer than three separate armies set out to cross Asia Minor, and each met its doom at the hands of a potent coalition of local Seljuq Turkish rulers, now only too aware of the threat posed by a crusader invasion. Having vastly underestimated the scale of enemy resistance, the 1101 crusaders were wiped out in a succession of devastating military encounters. Of those few who survived, only a handful, including Stephen and Raymond, limped on to Syria and Palestine, and even then they achieved nothing of substance.44
Perhaps surprisingly, these reversals did little to dampen enthusiasm back in Latin Europe for the notion of ‘crusading’. Indeed, many contemporaries actually argued that the failure of the 1101 campaign, supposedly born out of sinful pride, simply served to reinforce the miraculous nature of the First Crusade’s achievements. And yet, despite papal attempts to experiment with this new form of sanctified warfare and to associate the memory of the First Crusade with different theatres of conflict, the start of the twelfth century was not marked by an explosion of crusading enthusiasm. In fact, it would be decades before the Frankish West roused itself to launch expeditions in defence of the Holy Land on the scale of those witnessed between 1095 and 1101. This left the Latins who had remained in the Levant after Jerusalem’s conquest dangerously isolated.
IN MEMORY AND IMAGINATION
The success of the First Crusade stunned Latin Christendom. For many, only the hand of God could explain the crusaders’ survival at Antioch and their ultimate triumph at Jerusalem. Had the expedition been thwarted in the Near East, the very notion of crusading would probably have fallen into abeyance. As it was, the victory fired enthusiasm for this new form of devotional warfare for centuries to come, and the First Crusade became perhaps the most widely recorded event of the Middle Ages.
Configuring the memory of the crusade in Latin Europe
The work of memorialising the crusade began almost immediately, as a number of participants sought, in the first years of the twelfth century, to document and celebrate the campaign. The most influential of these, the Gesta Francorum (the Deeds of the Franks), was written in Jerusalem around 1100, most likely by a noble-born southern Italian Norman crusader of some education. While this account does appear to have been informed by the personal experiences of its anonymous author, it cannot be regarded as pure eyewitness evidence, akin to the likes of a diary. Instead, the author of the Gesta Francorum adopted a new approach to the recording of the past, one that was just starting to emerge in medieval Europe as an alternative to the traditional year-on-year chronicle. Distilling the experiences of thousands of participants into a single, overarching narrative, he constructed the first Historia (narrative history) of the crusade, recounting a tale of epic scope and heroic dimensions. Other crusade veterans, including Raymond of Aguilers, Fulcher of Chartres and Peter Tudebode, drew upon the Gesta Francorum as a kind of base text around which to construct their own narrative accounts–a form of plagiarism commonplace in this era. Modern scholars have turned to this corpus of evidence, and to the letters written by crusaders during the campaign, to recreate a Latin perspective of the expedition. And by cross-referencing this close testimony with non-Frankish sources (by Muslims, Greeks, Levantine Christians and Jews), they have sought to build up the most accurate possible picture of what really happened on the First Crusade–what might be termed an empirical reconstruction.45
In the first decade of the twelfth century, however, a number of Latins living in Europe set out to write–or more accurately to rewrite–the history of the crusade. Three of these–Robert of Rheims, Guibert of Nogent and Baldric of Bourgueil–were particularly important because of the widespread popularity and significance of the accounts they authored. All three were highly educated Benedictine monks living in northern France, with no first-hand experience of the holy war outside Europe. Working almost simultaneously, but apparently without any knowledge of the other two, each of these three monks composed new accounts of the First Crusade, using the Gesta Francorum as the basis for their work. According to their own words, they took on this labour because they believed the Gesta was written in a ‘rough manner’ that used ‘inelegant and artless language’. Yet, Robert, Guibert and Baldric went far beyond simply polishing the Gesta’s medieval Latin. They added new details to the story, sometimes gleaning this information from other ‘eyewitness’ texts, like that of Fulcher of Chartres, elsewhere drawing from the oral testimony of participants or perhaps from their own imaginings. Crucially, at a fundamental level, all three also reinterpreted the First Crusade.
Robert of Rheims, for example, utilised a far richer and more learned palette of scriptural allusion than that employed in the Gesta Francorum. He used these quotations from, or parallels with, the Old and New Testaments to position the crusade within a better-defined Christian context. Robert also emphasised the expedition’s miraculous nature, arguing that its success was not achieved because of the efforts of man, but through the divine agency of God’s will. In addition, Robert recast the whole story of the crusade. The Gesta preserved only an oblique reference to Urban II’s preaching of the campaign and was structured so as to present the siege and conquest of Antioch as the pinnacle of endeavour, covering events at Jerusalem almost as an afterthought. By contrast, Robert began his history with an extended account of the pope’s sermon at Clermont (which Robert claimed to have witnessed in person) and placed far greater stress upon the Holy City’s capture. In this way, he portrayed the expedition as a venture instigated, directed and legitimated by the papacy, and affirmed that the crusade’s ultimate goal was Christendom’s repatriation of Jerusalem.
Of course, Robert’s history did not alter the events of the First Crusade in any material sense; neither did the accounts penned by Guibert and Baldric. But their work is of fundamental importance to the understanding of the crusades as a whole, because, in comparison to texts like the Gesta Francorum, it was read far more widely by medieval contemporaries. As such, these Benedictine reworkings served to shape the way people recalled and thought about the crusade in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Robert of Rheims’ history was especially admired–the equivalent of a medieval bestseller among the learned elite. It was also used as a source for the most famous chanson de geste (epic poem) about the expedition, the Chanson d’Antioche, whose 10,000 lines of Old French immortalised the crusaders as legendary Christian heroes. Written in the popularchanson form–which fast became the most widely disseminated means in western Europe of recounting ‘historical’ events–the Chanson d’Antioche was designed to be recited publicly in a vernacular language familiar to a lay audience. As such, it too did much to mould the prevailing memory of the First Crusade in Latin Christendom.
From the first wave of ‘eyewitness’ accounts, through to the likes of Robert of Rheims’ Historia and the Chanson d’Antioche, the process of memorialising the crusade had a gradual but far-reaching effect upon the imagined reality of events: promoting Godfrey of Bouillon as the expedition’s sole leader; imbedding the memory of the Holy Lance’s ‘miraculous’ impact; and consolidating the idea that ‘martyred’ crusaders were guaranteed a heavenly reward. Perhaps the most historically charged reconfiguration and manipulation involved the events at Jerusalem on and after 15 July 1099. The Latins’ sack of the Holy City could be readily interpreted by Christian contemporaries as the decisive moment of divinely sanctioned triumph, or by Muslims as an act of unqualified savagery that revealed the Franks’ innate barbarism. It certainly is striking that Christian accounts made no attempt to limit the number of ‘infidels’ killed when Jerusalem fell–if anything, they gloried in the event. They also revelled in the scene of carnage at the Aqsa mosque. The Gesta Francorum noted that the crusaders were left wading up to their ankles in blood by the work of butchery. However, another ‘eyewitness’, Raymond of Aguilers, expanded on this image. Lifting a scriptural quote from the New Testament Book of Revelation, he declared that the Franks ‘rode in [enemy] blood to the knees and bridles of their horses’. This more extreme image gained wide acceptance and was repeated by numerous western European histories and chronicles in the course of the twelfth century.46
The First Crusade and Islam
For all its violent conquests, the First Crusade elicited a surprisingly muted response within the Muslim world. The campaign generated no outpouring of Arabic testimony to match the veritable flood of comment in Latin Christian texts. Indeed, the first surviving Arabic chronicles to describe the crusade in any detail were written only around the 1150s. Even in these works, composed by the Aleppan al-Azimi and the Damascene Ibn al-Qalanisi, the coverage was relatively brief–little more than a skeleton narrative overview, covering the crossing of Asia Minor and events in Antioch, Marrat and Jerusalem, peppered with occasional condemnations of Frankish atrocities. These included a comment on the incalculable number of Antiochenes ‘killed, taken prisoner and enslaved’ when the city fell in early June 1098, and the observation that ‘a great host [of Jerusalem’s populace] were killed’ during the crusaders’ sack of the Holy City.
By the 1220s, the Iraqi historian Ibn al-Athir was more fulsome in his censure, recording that ‘in the Aqsa mosque the Franks killed more than 70,000, a large number of them being imams, religious scholars, righteous men and ascetics, Muslims who had left their native lands and come to live a holy life in this august place’. He then described how the crusaders looted the Dome of the Rock. Ibn al-Athir added that a deputation of Syrian Muslims came to the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad in late summer 1099 to beg for aid against the Franks. They were said to have recounted stories of suffering at Latin hands ‘which brought tears to the eye and pained the heart’, and to have made a public protest during Friday prayer, but, despite all their entreaties, little was done, and the chronicler concluded that ‘the rulers were all at variance…and so the Franks conquered the lands’.47
How should this apparent lack of historical interest in the First Crusade within Islam be interpreted? In western Europe the expedition was widely celebrated as an earth-shatteringly significant triumph, but in the Muslim world of the early twelfth century it seems barely to have registered as a tremor. To an extent, this may be attributed to the desire of Islamic chroniclers to limit references to Muslim defeats, or to a general disinterest in military events on the part of Islamic religious scholars. But it is surprising, nonetheless, that the most contemporaneous Arabic accounts do not show clearer traces of anti-Latin invective or contain more vocal demands for vengeful retribution.
A few isolated Muslim voices did call for a collective response to the First Crusade in the years immediately following Jerusalem’s capture, among them a number of poets whose Arabic verses were repeated in later collections. Al-Abiwardi, who lived in Baghdad and died in 1113, described the crusade as ‘a time of disasters’ and proclaimed that ‘this is war, and the infidel’s sword is naked in his hand, ready to be sheathed again in men’s necks and skulls’. Around the same time, the Damascene poet Ibn al-Khayyat, who had earlier lived in Tripoli, described how the Frankish armies had ‘swelled in a torrent of terrifying extent’. His verses expressed regret at the willingness of Muslims to be pacified by Christian bribes and weakened by internecine rivalry. He also exhorted his audience to violent action: ‘The heads of the polytheists have already ripened, so do not neglect them as a vintage and a harvest!’ The most interesting reaction was that of ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, a Muslim jurist who taught in the Grand Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. Around 1105 he appears to have delivered a number of public lectures on the merits of jihad and the urgent need for a resolute and collective Islamic response to the First Crusade. His thoughts were recorded in a treatise, the Book of Holy War (Kitab al-Jihad), sections of which survive to this day. But despite al-Sulami’s prescient assessment of the threat posed by the Franks, his calls for action, like those of the poets, went unheeded.48
The stark absence of a concerted Islamic reaction to the coming of the crusades can be explained in a number of ways. In general, Near and Middle Eastern Muslims seem to have had only a limited understanding of who the First Crusaders were and why they came to the Holy Land. Most imagined that the Latins were actually Byzantine mercenaries, engaged in a short-term military incursion, not driven warriors devoted to the conquest and settlement of the Levant. These misconceptions helped to blunt Islam’s response to the events of 1097 to 1099. Had the Muslims recognised the true scale and nature of the crusade, they might have been inspired to put aside at least some of their own quarrels to repel a common enemy. As it was, the fundamental divisions remained. A deep-seated fracture still separated the Sunnis of Syria and Iraq and the Shi‘ite Fatimids of Egypt. Rivalry between the Turkish rulers of Damascus and Aleppo continued unabated. And in Baghdad, the Seljuq sultan and Abbasid caliph were preoccupied with their own Mesopotamian power struggles.
Over the next century some of these problems were resolved and enthusiasm for a jihad against the invading Franks spread across the Muslim world of the eastern Mediterranean. To begin with, however, the Latins who invaded the Levant faced no determined pan-Islamic counter-attack. This gave western Christendom a crucial opportunity to consolidate its hold on the Holy Land.