The sack of Jerusalem on 15 July 1099 is one of the most extraordinary and horrifying events of the medieval age. Over the course of three years the Latins had, through force of arms and power of faith, forged a route across Europe and the Near East. In the long-imagined moment of victory, with their pious ambition realised, they unleashed an unholy wave of brutality throughout the city, surpassing all that had gone before. The Provençal crusader Raymond of Aguilers 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.34
Many Muslims fled towards the Temple Mount, where some rallied, putting up futile resistance. One Latin eyewitness remembered how ‘all the defenders fled along the walls and through the city, and our men went after them, killing them and cutting them down as far as Solomon’s Temple, where there was such a massacre that our men were wading up to their ankles in enemy blood’.
Some prisoners were taken – indeed Tancred and Gaston of Béarn reportedly gave their banners to a group huddled on the roof of the Temple of Solomon – but even these were later slaughtered by other crusaders. As the massacre on the Temple Mount was taking place, other Franks ranged through the city at will:
After a very great and cruel slaughter of Saracens, of whom 10,000 fell in that same place, they put to the sword great numbers of gentiles who were running about the quarters of the city, fleeing in all directions on account of their fear of death: they were stabbing women who had fled into palaces and dwellings; seizing infants by the soles of their feet from their mothers’ laps or their cradles and dashing them against the walls and breaking their necks; they were slaughtering some with weapons, or striking them down with stones; they were sparing absolutely no gentile of any place or kind.35
Of Jerusalem’s Muslim inhabitants, few other than the Fatimid commander, Iftikhar ad-Daulah, and the remnants of the elite Egyptian cavalry force seem to have survived the general carnage. When Godfrey overran the northern walls they made a break for the Tower of David, riding at speed through the city’s narrow streets. Once there, they hastily abandoned their precious horses and locked themselves within the confines of the citadel. Even so, they quickly thought better of trying to hold out against the crusaders, negotiating terms of surrender with Raymond of Toulouse.36
The sack of Jerusalem was not simply characterised by dreadful brutality. In the midst of all this violence, the crusaders’ minds quickly turned to thoughts of spoils. Conditioned by the customs of war and accustomed to long years of survival through plundering, the Franks now gave free rein to their acquisitive instincts. One eyewitness remarked that ‘our men rushed around the whole city, seizing gold and silver, horses and mules, and houses full of all sorts of goods’. Tancred, for one, was said to have rushed into the Temple of Solomon, grabbing all the gold, silver and precious stones that he could carry. In fact, the crusaders’ pillaging seems to have been remarkably methodical:
After this great massacre, they entered the homes of the citizens, seizing whatever they found in them. It was done systematically, so that whoever had entered the home first, whether he was rich or poor, was not to be harmed by anyone else in any way. He was to have and to hold the house or palace and whatever he had found in it entirely as his own. Since they mutually agreed to observe this rule, many poor men became rich.37
Later, once the first rush of looting had died down, some Franks went to such disgusting lengths to sate their avaricious impulses that even their fellow crusaders were astounded: ‘How astonishing it would have seemed to you to see our squires and our footmen, after they had discovered the trickery of the Saracens, split open the bellies of those they had just slain in order to extract from the intestines the bezants which the Saracens had gulped down their loathsome throats while alive.’38
The crusaders had apparently come to Jerusalem alight with a pious passion to do God’s work, but a modern observer might be forgiven for imagining that no flame of Christian devotion could possibly continue to burn amid such a storm of greed and violence. Not so. For the sack of Jerusalem proves one thing beyond contestation – in the minds of the crusaders, religious fervour, barbaric warfare and a self-serving desire for material gain were not mutually exclusive experiences, but could all exist, entwined, in the same time and space. So it was that, fresh from bloodthirsty slaughter and rapacious plundering, the Franks suddenly turned their hands to acts of worship and devotion. In a moment that is perhaps the most vivid distillation of the crusading experience, they came, still covered in their enemies’ blood, weighed down with booty, ‘rejoicing and weeping from excessive gladness to worship at the Sepulchre of our Saviour Jesus’. This was the task for which they had marched thousands of kilometres– to ‘liberate’ the most sacred place on earth, the supposed site of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, to give thanks to God in the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem. 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’.
All the eyewitness Latin accounts record this remarkable scene of devotion. None seems to find it incongruous. It is easy, when considering the First Crusade, to imagine the motives and emotions of its participants in modern terms, to suppose, with what we might term informed cynicism, that they, and the contemporaries who wrote about them, simply cloaked the expedition in a patina of spirituality and fervent piety so as to excuse and justify their actions. There was certainly nothing noble or praiseworthy about the Frankish sack of Jerusalem, but it demonstrates that many crusaders were driven on, not simply by bloodlust or greed, but also by an authentic and ecstatic sense of Christian devotion. The crusaders had come to the Levant as armed pilgrims. Now at last, against massive odds and at horrific cost in terms of human suffering, they had ‘freed’ the Holy Land in the name of Christianity.39