The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land

by Thomas Asbridge

  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 weap
ons 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 op
ening 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: