The Siege of Jerusalem: Crusade and Conquest in 1099
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Th
at the plunder gained by the poor at Ma’arra satisfi ed their needs for only a short interval was demonstrated within the month by acts of cannibalism. At fi rst the crusaders began to split open the bodies of the pagans, because they came across bezants in the stomachs of corpses. Th
ese small gold coins had
been swallowed by some of the inhabitants of the city in order to hide them.
Others, such as the notorious tafurs, then fell to the fl esh on these unearthed bodies for scraps of food. Disgusted and concerned about plague, the princes had the bodies stacked up into a mound and burnt. 31
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It was at Ma’arra that a major political upheaval took place in the Christian army, one that would have important consequences for the question of who should rule Jerusalem. Count Raymond had hoped to use the town as a base for a principality that he could hold as a vassal of the Byzantine emperor. But in the harsh circumstances of December 1098 this was an ambition that was deeply unpopular with the poor and those knights who were not attached to him, amongst whom were the Provençal followers of Adhémar. Aft er the death of the papal legate his knights had nominally placed themselves under the command of Count Raymond, but with the expectation he would lead them to Jerusalem. Around Christmas 1098 at a council of the Provençals they sided with the poor in insisting that the Count lead the way to the Holy City, failing which they demanded that he hand over the Holy Lance and the people would march to Jerusalem with the Lord as their leader.
Count Raymond subsequently arranged a conference with the other princes to negotiate the terms on which the expedition would continue. Th is meeting
took place at Chastel-Rouge, probably on 4 January 1099, but came to nothing.
In the meantime, the Count had allocated a signifi cant number of his knights and footmen to garrison Ma’arra. But the poor crusaders could see the danger in this. What would happen if the Christian forces were diminished by the allocation of a garrison to every captured city between Antioch and Jerusalem?
Th
ey resolved upon an extraordinary policy. Th
ey took their hammers and
picks to the walls of their own city, thus rendering it defenceless and unsuitable as a base for Raymond’s local operations. As a policy this proved to be brilliant, despite the fact that it was not far from insanity. Th
e recently created bishop of
Albara, acting for the Count, used threats and force to prevent the poor, including the sick and infi rm, from destroying the city defences. But as soon as his guards passed by, the people returned to their task. Count Raymond on his return to the city was furious but helpless. He bowed to the alliance of poor pilgrim and knight and set off southwards. 32
At last they were moving through fertile terrain, and day by day the poor regained health, the knights became stronger, and the army seemed to multiply.
Again during the course of the march, on 28 January 1099, the poor once more grabbed plunder from under the noses of the knights, this time during an attack upon Hosn al-Akrad. While Count Raymond and his most loyal followers were committed to the battle, the commoners ran off in search of booty and, when they had obtained it, one aft er the other began to leave the fi ghting. Th eir success in obtaining loot led to foot soldiers joining in the search for foodstuff s, prisoners and coin. Soon even the common knights, seeing their comrades pass them by with their plunder, started to leave the front line for the same goal.
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Count Raymond was unaware that he was gradually being abandoned by the army and having pushed forward too far, came closer to death than in any of the major battles he had fought in. As the Muslim fi ghters drew closer to him, Raymond faked a charge, causing his opponents to hesitate and in that moment the count wheeled and with his bodyguard escaped towards safety. Th e following day, having received a furious lecture from Count Raymond, the entire Christian army came to attack the city, only to fi nd it a ghost town. Th e inhabitants had fl ed, in such a hurry that they had left their dead unburied.
Although he was marching south, Count Raymond still harboured an ambition to form a principality in the region. He proposed that the Christian army attempt the capture of Jabala at which point Peter Bartholomew found an unexpected supporter. As the voice of the poor, Peter had been constantly urging the army press on to Jerusalem. Now Tancred, leader of a troop of Normans, the most sceptical faction with regard to the Holy Lance, spoke up, saying that it was evidently God’s will, expressed through his visits to the commoners, that no one should turn aside from the journey. Count Raymond was obliged to abandon that idea, but his ambitions grew again following the delivery of a huge amount of gold and silver from Jala al-Mulk ibn Amma¯r, emir or Tripoli, who was anxious to buy off the danger of an attack on his city. With this coin, Count Raymond was able to off er to pay suffi
cient knights that it was agreed
to attempt to take the city of ‘Arqā. Th
e crusaders reached ‘Arqā on Valentine’s
Day, 1099. Th
ey were not to leave it for three months, even though the support for this action quickly became lacklustre, especially aft er the emir of Tripoli ceased his payments.
On the night of 5 April, during the now deeply unpopular siege, another vision occurred to Peter Bartholomew, one which cost him his life. Christ addressed the visionary and demanded great eff ort in attacking the city. Th ose
who were lingering in their tents were compared to Judas and Pontius Pilate.
Christ urged that some of the malingerers be executed to make an example to all. Th
is vision was a political misjudgement by Peter Bartholomew. Th
e former
servant had kept his infl uential position by striking a balance between enhanc-ing the authority of Count Raymond and by articulating the needs of the commoners. By siding with the unpopular perspective of the count at ‘Arqā, the visionary had made a fatal mistake. Th
e attitude of the Norman contingent
abruptly hardened against him. Worse, the last message that the now politically active body of poor crusaders wanted to hear was that they must bestir themselves in this siege or risk execution for cowardice. For the sake of endorsing Count Raymond’s strategy, Peter Bartholomew had alienated himself from his supporters and allowed his enemies the chance to bring him down.
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On learning of this vision the legitimacy of Peter’s Lance was immediately challenged by Arnulf of Chocques, the friend and chaplain of Robert of Normandy.
At fi rst it looked like Arnulf had misjudged the mood of the army as many of the clergy rallied to Peter. Arnulf began to retreat and prepared to make a confession of error to the visionary. But it was close. Th
ere was enough support for
the challenge to Peter that Arnulf rallied and once more threw down the eccle-siastical gauntlet. Arnulf proclaimed Peter and the Holy Lance a fraud, with Peter then off ering to undertake an ordeal by fi re to prove his testimony. 33
Medieval ordeals were not as absurd as they sometimes seem to modern eyes. Oft en they were more a test of public opinion than of the presence of divine intervention. Just how hot the blacksmiths’ irons were that a woman must run over to prove her innocence of the charge of adultery, for example, depended on the ill will or otherwise of the clergy in charge of the proceedings.
In this case, Peter’s sympathizers were very infl uential in the building of two great bonfi res with a narrow space between them.
On 8 April, a beautiful day with clear blue skies, Peter Bartholomew, clad only in a tunic, carried the Holy Lance along the narrow path between two ferocious pyres. Th
e fl ames, however, shooting up into the sky, left him rela-
tively unscathed and he even took a moment to pause right in the centre of the blaze as if in prayer. Emerging from the fi re
s Peter held the Lance aloft and screamed ‘God help us!’ It should have been a moment of great triumph for Peter and his supporters. But those less enamoured of Count Raymond’s goal of capturing ‘Arqā were ready. Th
ey mobbed the visionary as if delighted, but
during the tussle delivered several deep stabs to the would-be saint and crushed him until his back was broken.34
With the death of the visionary came the fi nal disintegration of the hegemony of Count Raymond’s entourage over the crusade, particularly because those Southern French followers of the Bishop of Le Puy who had joined the following of the Count aft er the death of their lord no longer co-operated with their Provençal comrades. In fact, it was with the return of William Hugh of Monteil, brother of Adhémar, with a piece of the true cross that Adhémar had carried that a new mutiny broke out against Count Raymond. A great commotion took place in which Count Raymond’s followers set fi re to their own tents and departed from the siege. Th
e count broke into tears and attempted to halt the
movement, but once a part of the Provençal contingent was underway the other crusaders needed little encouragement to join in.35
As the army approached Tripoli, around 13 May 1099, Count Raymond made one last eff ort to gain control of the leadership of the army by off ering gift s to the other princes, so that they would support him in an attack on the
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city. Th
is proposal drew upon the count the wrath of another visionary, the priest Peter Desiderius, who reported that St Andrew had come in the night with a strong rebuke for the count: ‘do not be a plague to yourself or to others because unless Jerusalem is captured you will have no help. Let the incomplete siege of ‘Arqā not trouble you, it is not to concern you that this city or others which are on the route are not at present captured.’ Th
is vision encouraged a
further mutiny, this time by the poor, who could no longer restrain themselves.
Irrespective of sensible military formation, they set out at evening and enough soldiers came with them that the rest of the army soon followed. Th e resumed
march was enthusiastic but hard on those who could not keep up. A trail of bodies lined the route. But at last, over three years since Peter the Hermit had set out from Cologne, the Christian army was approaching Jerusalem.36
Chapter 3
Factions and Schisms
Th
at a Christian army could travel on foot successfully all the way from Nicea to Jerusalem in an era when the region was dominated by Muslim princes was due to one fact above all: a deep and bitter split between Cairo and Baghdad.
Two diff erent administrative systems and two diff erent versions of Islam bordered each other, with the fault line precisely that area of Palestine through which the crusaders marched.
To the east, the once dynamic Abbasid dynasty adhered to the Sunni religious tradition. At the height of Abbasid authority, around the year AD 800, the caliph had theoretical authority over territory stretching from the southern part of Spain, across North Africa, through Persia and nearly reaching to the Indus.
But maintaining a unifi ed jurisdiction over such an extended and culturally disparate region proved impossible and before long the Abbasid administrative system fragmented, to the benefi t of more localized lordships. It seemed that a centrifugal decline in Abbasid sovereignty was inevitable and irreversible, until a new force capable of centralizing the authority of the caliphate swept down from central Asia from the 1040s, a Turkish tribe, the Seljuks. Conquering Iran, Iraq, Anatolia and Syria, the Seljuks – who had earlier adopted the Sunni form of Islam – recognized the caliph at Baghdad as their spiritual head.
Not that this was the old dynasty restored to its full vigour. Th e deference
shown by the Seljuks to their caliph was limited to religious matters; the practical governance of the region lay in the hands of Turkish ‘emirs’, senior military commanders, who had considerable local autonomy and dynastic ambition.
When a powerful enough fi gure could command widespread obedience from several emirs he took the secular title of ‘sultan’ and to all intents and purposes governed independently of the caliph. In Christendom at this time the papacy was attempting to emancipate itself from local secular aristocratic infl uence, aspiring to become an autonomous voice capable even of commanding kings.
Th
e Sunni caliphate was evolving in the opposite direction, being reduced to a political tool for the strongest Seljuk military faction and being revered only as the voice of religious judgement.
A similar trend was at work in the region controlled by the main Islamic rivals of the Seljuks, the Shia Fatimids of Egypt. Th
e caliphate of al-Mustansir
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at Cairo had experienced massive political turbulence, which was stabilized only aft er the repulsion of a Seljuk invasion of Egypt in 1077. Th e Egyptian
victory was led by Badr al-Jamālī, an Armenian governor of Acre, who had been invited by the Fatimid caliph to come to Cairo as his ‘vizier’ or chief minister. Badr’s harsh measures against rival factions secured his position and he quickly obtained titular authority over the army of Egypt and also the direction of the missionary activity of the Shia clergy. On the death of Badr in 1094 the accession of his son, al-Afdal, demonstrated that – in Cairo as in Baghdad – the ability of the caliph to rule was being undermined by those who controlled secular authority.
Of the two caliphates, the Fatimids appeared the weaker, not least due to a renewed bout of political instability in the 1090s. When al-Mustansir died, in 1094, soon aft er al-Afdal had come to power, the vizier was able to prevent al-Mustansir’s heir, Nizār, from becoming caliph, instead promoting the younger son al-Musta’li to the succession and subsequently reinforcing his control over the politically isolated youth by marrying al-Musta’li to his own sister. Nizār, however, had a substantial body of supporters and while this manoeuvre by al-Afdal may have enabled him to control a weak caliph, it also led to a new schism in the Shia clergy, with the enterprising Hasan ibn Sabbăh leading the opposition to al-Afdal and creating a following, the Bātinī (called by later Western writers the ‘assassins’), which by recruiting among the lower social classes of the Shia populations of Syria and Iran was to grow to a become a movement capable of threatening the authority of a number of Near Eastern rulers, both Shia and Sunni.
Th
e most important confl ict in the region though, overriding the internal divisions in their respective caliphates, was that between the Fatimids and the Seljuks. To a large degree the rivalry of al-Afdal, vizier of Cairo, with the various Turkish emirs of Syria and Iran for control of the cities of Palestine can be portrayed as religious rivalry between Shia and Sunni, but this should not suggest that the cities of the Near East were religiously homogeneous; far from it.
All the major Muslim-controlled cities at the time contained mixed populations of both Shia and Sunni worshippers and most rulers were unwilling or unable to persecute the opposite sect. Th
e battles and sieges that took place in
the 1080s and 1090s arose from the clash of ruling elites much more than from popular religious antagonism.
Th
e bitterness of the confl ict between Fatimid and Seljuk rulers led to a distortion in their understanding of the implications of the arrival of the crusading army. Over 100 years aft er the fall of Jerusalem to the Christians, it was still being said in the Sunni world that the arrival of the crusaders had been the
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work of the Fatimids. Once the Seljuks had reached Syrian lands and controlled cities as far south as Gaza, wrote the Sunni intellectual Ibn al-Athir, there was no buff er state between them and the Fatimids, who therefore sent to the Franks to invade Syria, to conquer it and separate them from their Mus
lim rivals. Ibn al-Athīr himself doubted this story; he was writing c.1212, long aft er the true nature of the Christian enterprise had become clear, but the basis for many Sunnis believing that the crusades were a Fatimid conspiracy was rooted in the actual historical experience. For it was undeniably the case that the Fatimids were initially well disposed towards the crusaders, seeing them as potential allies, allies capable of checking the hated Seljuks.1
At the time that the various strands of the Christian army set out in 1096, al-Afdal was struggling with the Seljuk threat to the Fatimid coastal cities of Palestine, the Bātinīd schism, and the eff ects of several years of plague in Cairo.
Th
oroughly misunderstanding the unique nature of the crusade – that it was as much a pilgrimage as a conventional army – al-Afdal saw only the possibility that he might be able to direct the Christians against his Seljuk enemies. Th e
fact that crusaders had worked closely with al-Afdal’s ally, Alexius Comnenus, the Byzantine Emperor, in order to capture Nicea from the Seljuks of Rum suggested that it might be possible to come to an understanding with them. Indeed, late in June 1097, some members of the Christian army sailed south to contact the Shia ruler.2
In return, ambassadors from Egypt arrived at Antioch during the siege just as the Christians celebrated their major victory over a sortie by the garrison, the day that Duke Godfrey had famously cut an opposing rider in two. Th e victorious Christian army put on a good show for the Fatimid delegation; they spruced up their tents and demonstrated their riding skills by marking out an arena for quintain by placing their shields on stakes. Quintain was a challenge that required a knight to ride at speed past a target that he aimed to strike with his lance. Th
e target swung on an arm that was counter-weighted and the trick
was to be moving fast enough that aft er you had smitten the target you were past the device before the weight could spin around and give you a belt, potentially throwing you from your horse. It was good practice at a skill that, along with their heavier armour, gave the Christian knight an advantage over his Muslim counterpart. Not that the crusaders were attempting to intimidate the ambassadors from Cairo; the possibility of a mutually benefi cial agreement was recognized on both sides. Aft er all, it was their common enemy the Seljuks who ruled Antioch and Jerusalem.