God's Armies

by Malcolm Lambert

  It can be seen that success in achieving the object of the whole expedition hung by a thread. If the garrison never launched sallies to unsettle the besiegers – as they easily could have done – they were still subjecting them to heavy fire from missiles, arrows, naphtha and stones from mangonels if they came within range of the walls. They had the interior lines, their own supplies of water and the 400 mounted men. The ladder attack on 13 June subjected the attackers to heavy losses and the movement of the ram and the siege tower up to the final assault point on 13–14 July was brought about by very large numbers, exposed to sustained, heavy attack by projectiles, pushing the ram and tower by muscle power. John France suggests that one quarter of the attacking army was lost in the course of the siege, leaving a frail force for an inevitable battle with the Fatimids from Egypt after the city had fallen. There was one ingenious improvisation in the overnight movement of the northerners’ siege tower and ram, disconcerting their opponents and much courage, tenacity and further improvisation in the use of the siege tower in the last stages to fire arrows to drive away defenders. But there was nothing inevitable about this victory. Lethal damage to the tower, following on from the contretemps over the jammed ram, could have led to stalemate and despair.

  A religious passion periodically held the army together. Some on the approach stopped short at Montjoie, the point in the Judaean hills where the city can first be seen, put off their shoes and walked barefoot for the last miles – a scene splendidly captured by Gustave Doré in Michaud’s classic popular history of the Crusades.

  Princes quarrelled, as they always did. Raymond of Toulouse was angry with Tancred because of his diversion from Jerusalem to capture Bethlehem. The princes disputed among themselves about the rule in Jerusalem once the city was captured. Who was to hold power? Raymond remained in tension with Godfrey and the northern group. But the vision of Adémar led to the Jericho-style procession, which gave the opportunity, in the emotion of the moment, for Tancred to be reconciled with Raymond and for the princely quarrels to stop. When the last, dangerous assaults were being made on 14–15 July there were priests on hand singing hymns and exhorting soldiers. As on the march, some acute generalship, improvisation and military techniques made up in part for the adventurism, pride and ambition of fighting princes and their disputes, with religious zeal, discreetly guided, holding the army together at critical points.

  Massacre in Jerusalem

  The city fell. The massacre which followed was overwhelming. The 400 mounted men made for David’s Tower at top speed, where they joined the Fatimid garrison in refuge. Gates were opened. The Josaphat Gate on the east side brought in yet more besiegers. Raymond of Toulouse’s force, seeing the enemy abandon their positions, climbed the walls with ladders and joined in the attack from the southern side. Attack from a series of angles left no easy position where defenders could rally. Raymond’s chaplain, Raymond of Aguilers, who was an eyewitness, described grievous scenes of beheading, wounding with arrows, torturing, burning, and victims forced to jump to their deaths from towers. Raymond himself went to the Citadel and joined the Fatimid governor with his garrison. The abandoned horses of the 400 were seized gladly by the crusaders who saved them for battle with the Fatimids from Egypt which they knew would come. Raymond took charge, extracted ransoms from the garrison, who were joined by a small number of Jews and with a high probability some Muslims; the garrison was subsequently given safe conduct with some who had joined them, albeit in small numbers.

  Some have seen in the descriptions of babies smashed against walls by clerical chroniclers an echo of Psalm 137, with its bitter conclusion from the Israelites in Babylonian captivity, ‘Happy shall he be that ... dashes your little ones against the stones’. Kedar, himself a Jew, poignantly reminds us that exactly the same actions were undertaken by SS troops in the murder of Jews in the Holocaust and believes that in 1099 we are encountering an actual, literal event. He is surely right. In the terrifying excitement of forced entry, some crusader horsemen were crushed to death with their mounts. Poorer soldiers forced their way into houses, killing inhabitants and extracting loot, making some richer than they had ever been. Tancred showed a keen eye for plunder and took precious items from the Dome of the Rock which he believed to be the Temple; to Muslim refugees who had managed to save themselves and were on the roof of the al-Aqsa mosque he offered banners of identification so that he could gain ransoms for them; he was angered when his promise was dishonoured later on by other crusaders, who killed them all. Ransoming saved some Jews, as is shown by correspondence deriving from the Cairo Jewish community who paid to save co-religionists and preserve rolls of the Torah. But there were Jews who had taken refuge in a synagogue and were burned to death.

  Albert of Aachen describes Godfrey of Bouillon avoiding the slaughter and going out of the city, circling around with three of his men and then re-entering via the eastern gate to pray and give thanks at the Holy Sepulchre. This is in some contrast to the author of Gesta Francorum, who in a famous phrase describes the end of the slaughter and goes on to record the crusaders picking their way to the Sepulchre with the words ‘all our men came rejoicing and weeping for joy to worship at the church of the Holy Sepulchre’.

  Conventions of warfare in the crusaders’ homeland put the defenders of a town or castle at mercy if they declined terms put by besiegers and their strongpoint was stormed. Often in practice there were last-minute bargains to be made, with variable treatment of those who were at mercy: they might, for example, be forced to leave without any possessions but still with their lives. It is apparent from the sources that the effects of the victory after this siege had a quite unusual ferocity and, further, that examples of the results of storming in the West in this age, sometimes cited by historians in mitigation and explanation, do not in fact compare with what happened in Jerusalem.

  The besiegers had suffered grievously on their long journey from the West, had been bombarded with projectiles during the siege and subjected to insults and ostentatious desecration of crosses. A great release of tension as the city at last fell was not surprising. And yet the massacre extended to sacred buildings and included women and children and involved many atrocities. Moreover, there were in fact no fewer than three massacres in Jerusalem: the opening onslaught, the subsequent killing of Tancred’s victims on the roof of the al-Aqsa mosque and, on the third day after the victorious entry, a decision by the princes to kill in cold blood Muslims who remained, whether captive or subject to what were in effect ransom contracts, consequently in breach of agreement. In effect, despite minor survivals, both Jewish and Muslim communities in Jerusalem after the siege ceased to exist. Fulcher of Chartres, chaplain and chronicler to Baldwin, the conqueror of Edessa, who arrived with his master one month after the fall of Jerusalem, observed the masses of bodies lying in the city, the great stench of the corpses and the measures taken to remove them, with some Muslims being forced and some poor Christians being paid to take bodies out of the city and heap them up in great mountains outside the walls. It has been argued that descriptions of the killings in Jerusalem have been influenced by Scriptural rhetoric from the Book of Revelation and the massacres artificially heightened in the chroniclers’ accounts by the text in Chapter 14, verse 20, about blood rising to the level of horse bridles – a clear impossibility and an excitatory phrase in clerical eyes, as bloodshed could be seen as fulfilling the divine words. Chroniclers do speak about bloodshed, especially at the Dome of the Rock and its portico, and of the blood rising to the ankles of men and horses or to the knees of horses. This echoes the words of Revelation which contrast the rewards of the blessed and the torments of the damned, who ‘drink of the wine of the wrath of God’, and then describe the grim actions of an angel with a sharp sickle who gathers the clusters of the vine of the earth, now ripe, and casts them into ‘the great wine press of the wrath of God’. Then the text goes on: ‘and the wine press was trodden outside the city and blood came out of the winepress even unto the ho
rse bridles’. The crusaders who came into the city were led to believe they were the agents of the wrath of God, and so acted.

  After the city fell, the question arose: who was to rule? It was no idle query, for there was an honourable view that the city of Christ’s Passion and Resurrection should be under the rule not of laymen but of a spiritual authority. However, on 22 July the leadership rejected the claims of a patriarch and offered the crown to Raymond, who refused it; the offer then passed to Godfrey, who accepted a position as Advocate. A primacy of honour, it was felt, should go to a patriarch, while the practicalities of gathering resources, making grants and sustaining an army should be in the hands of a layman. Raymond was at first reluctant to surrender the citadel but finally gave way and Arnulf of Choques, chaplain of Robert of Normandy, was made patriarch.

  Ascalon and the Aftermath of the Crusade

  There remained the menace of Fatimid Egypt. Over twenty years Badr al-Jamali, an Armenian mercenary, had restored the defences of Cairo and acted as financier to the caliph. It was just this military dominance which offended the founder of the Assassins but Badr al-Jamali was a leader to be feared, as part of the surviving defences of the citadel of Cairo – built by specialist Armenian stonemasons imported by Badr al-Jamali and made of the highest quality of masonry from Badr’s native Cilicia – witness to this day.

  Al-Afdal, who succeeded him in 1094, was not as secure or as experienced as his father but he was conscious of the high traditions he had inherited and was determined to fight. Godfrey took the lead by taking his forces from the city and moving forward to challenge the Fatimids and their army outside the port of Ascalon, a crucial link between Egypt and former Fatimid lands in Palestine. Reluctantly, Raymond and Robert of Normandy followed Godfrey and accepted his plan of action, assembling the Christian army in squadrons, enabling them to meet attack from any quarter and moving with speed through the countryside towards the gates of Ascalon. As they came out of their night camp on 12 August to the north of the port they met herds of animals assembled to provide for the Egyptian army. The soldiers showed a discipline gained over years of campaigning and at first declined to disperse and forage; instead they moved through the herd, giving the impression of being a much larger army than was the case.

  All the princes were now in action, assembled with their contingents. Godfrey and the princes, despite being a much smaller force, had seized the initiative and surprised the enemy encamped outside Ascalon. A crucial part was played by Robert of Normandy’s cavalry, which captured the enemy’s standard and broke their morale. Many were crushed as they tried to swarm through the gate to take refuge in Ascalon. Al-Afdal escaped and promised to destroy the Christian settlers with the power of the Fatimid army. Godfrey and Raymond quarrelled over possession of Ascalon: the garrison, at first ready to surrender, got wind of the dispute and decided to stand firm. It was a fateful decision, for Ascalon was a menace to the Crusader States for half a century thereafter.

  An armed conflict between Godfrey and Raymond was narrowly averted; at length the princes, including Raymond, left for home, and Godfrey faced the chronic problems of creating a land base for Jerusalem, pulling in new manpower and somehow acquiring the seaports that were essential for trade, pilgrims and reinforcements. The continued dangers of the land route to the Holy Land were dramatically revealed in the crusade of 1101, an ill-fated and ill-thought-out affair in which a blend of enthusiasts attracted by the triumph of 1099 and erring would-be crusaders, who had not yet fulfilled their vows and were rounded up by reproaches of bishops and of Pope Paschal II, came to grief through neglect of all the lessons of the First Crusade, failing to co-ordinate armies’ movements and make use of close-quarter fighting skills to neutralise the mounted archers of the Seljuqs. Most perished, including Stephen of Blois, dispatched to the East once again by his formidable wife. One survivor was Raymond of Toulouse, crusading yet again, who after some vicissitudes found a lasting home in the County of Tripoli which he founded and handed on to heirs.

  This collapse threw into focus the achievements of the First Crusade and gave a new and even greater status to those who had served in it. Kingship and lordship, which all too often sullied the crusading ideal and halted armies, also kept crusading in being over decades. Investigations of charters reveal the degree to which the decisions of lords and their followers to go on crusade and the traditions of extended families over time established crusading families. They link to the preaching of Urban II and to the very different preaching tour of Peter the Hermit. Names of families recur right down to the Second Crusade, in 1147–8. Why some families and not others with similar backgrounds and monastic connections took up crusading remains a mystery. Women bore the brunt of their husbands’ long absences, but Jonathan Riley-Smith suspects they were often key personalities in maintaining crusader kin groups.

  As the 1101 Crusade floundered to its end, Godfrey was already dead. On 18 July 1100 he had succumbed to fierce heat and, maybe, typhoid. He was being entertained by a Muslim emir at Caesarea; rumours of poisoning spread, but are an unlikely explanation. The first man to rule in Jerusalem and a leader both in the siege and the battle of Ascalon, he was buried in a position of great honour within the entrance to the church of the Holy Sepulchre. He was succeeded, not as Advocate but as King, by his younger brother, Baldwin of Edessa, backed by the Lorrainers among the settlers. He seized power after travelling down with his small army and beating off a Muslim attack at the Dog river. Daibert of Pisa, former papal legate, who had displaced Arnulf as patriarch, wisely forbore to push his claim to rule Jerusalem and anointed and crowned Baldwin in the church at Bethlehem on Christmas Day 1100, leaving behind in Edessa as successor an obscure crusader, supposedly a cousin, Baldwin of Bourcq.

  In power Baldwin at once showed his extraordinary energy and capacity, taking oaths of fidelity from his new vassals, heading his army in a brief attack on Ascalon and reconnoitring desert territory south of the Dead Sea even before his coronation, and thereafter working hard in liaison with the Italians to take ports, build up a demesne and establish money fiefs to attract recruits to the kingdom. Al-Afdal was as good as his word and tried repeatedly to use his army to expel the Christian settlers, fighting a battle in September 1101 in which there were heavy losses on both sides and trying again in May 1102, when Baldwin came close to disaster through his own arrogance. He ignored advice to wait for reinforcements, attacked al-Afdal and was forced to flee and hide in the mountains, then escape via Arsuf and Jaffa before re-assembling his troops and, in a new encounter, forcing the enemy to give way at the end of May. Opinion thought that he had lost in the first battle because he had not got the relic of the True Cross with him. Unconquered, Ascalon remained a threat because it enabled the Fatimids to ship in troops more or less at will to attack Baldwin’s lands and, when al-Afdal mounted his last offensive in 1105, he seized the opportunity to combine his own Shiite forces from Egypt with an army from Sunni Damascus under a Turkish leader. But Baldwin was ready for him, having assembled men in the presence of the patriarch of the day with the True Cross, and now had a much bigger army with more mercenaries and local Christians in his service. Al-Afdal was forced back to Ascalon with losses.

  It was the end of his interventions but not of other opportunist attacks on the Ascalon garrison. Baldwin remained a risk-taker and, though there were still dangerous Muslim jabs at him, he believed in pressing them hard, interrupting their caravan trade and seeking opportunities to take land from them. He left to posterity a coastal state with an all-weather port at Acre, strong maritime power and a closely integrated relationship with his bishops and fighting men. A line of Crusader States along the coast formed: the County of Edessa, the Principality of Antioch, the County of Tripoli, the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

  Cairo, the seat of the Fatimids, was only 264 miles from Jerusalem and Baldwin took the view that it was vital for the future of his kingdom and allied states to destabilise Egypt and seize land within it to provide money
fiefs for arms-bearers in the future. He died in pursuit of that objective. On an expedition deep in Egypt, he felt death approaching. Hating the prospect of being buried there and his grave becoming an object of ridicule, he urged his army to carry him back in a litter as fast as they could. When he died in 1118, at el-Arish, still in Egypt, his cook, following his wishes, eviscerated his body and the army carried his remains forward to be taken through the Golden Gate on Palm Sunday and buried with great honour next to his brother Godfrey in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. He deserved his place; he, more than anyone else, was the true creator of the states of Outremer.