God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  On Tuesday, 7 June the Christian army, numbering perhaps fewer than 14,000 fighting men, arrived at the walls of Jerusalem. The object of their quest reached, the ultimate trial began.48 Given the threat of a Fatimid attack, the arid countryside, the impossibility of relief and the inability of such a small army to enforce a complete blockade, there was

  5. The Siege of Jerusalem, June–July 1099

  no question of repeating the slow strangulation of Antioch. Prosecution of the siege was hampered by lack of water, necessitating elaborate schemes of water-carrying over large distances; illness, at least one of the leaders, Tancred, suffering from a bout of dysentery; the unavailability of sufficient wood for ladders, siege engines and towers; and a still divided command. While Godfrey, his new ally Tancred and the dukes of Normandy and Flanders maintained their separate camps outside the northern walls, Raymond of Toulouse initially established himself opposite the Citadel and the western walls before moving after a few days to blockade the Zion Gate in the south, almost as far removed from the northerners as possible. Thereafter, except for moments of communal ritual or planning the final assault, the two sections of the Christian army operated separately. A first, abortive attack on 13 June did not involve the Provençals at all. After the arrival of Genoese mariners who had put in at Jaffa on 17 June, with large timbers and skilled engineers, siege towers could be constructed, but each contingent made their own arrangements. Raymond, paying the construction artisans out of his own pocket, employed the Genoese William Ricau to build his tower, while the northerners, acting in concert, paid the workers out of a common fund, as at Antioch, and had Gaston of Béarn, himself a southerner from the Pyrenees, as their construction supervisor. Early in July, there were heated exchanges between the leaders over Tancred’s opportunistic claim to lordship over Bethlehem and the issue of the future rule of Jerusalem. Tancred and Raymond were formally reconciled only a week before the final assault. Bitterness was probably exacerbated by the defection to Godfrey of a number of prominent Provençals before or during the siege. In such circumstances, victory was little short of miraculous.

  Behind the strong obstacles of double walls, moats and natural contours, the garrison facing the westerners, commanded by the Fatimid governor Iftikhar al-Dawla, was small and surprisingly passive. Made up of professional troops from Egypt and local militias, including troops from the Jewish community, it launched no disruptive forays and scarcely challenged the building of siege machines in the later stages of the investment. Its tactics appear to have been to await help, a policy encouraged by promises from al-Afdal which reached the city via the unguarded eastern side. The prospect of an Egyptian relief force thus forced one side to aggression, the other to inertia.

  To capitalize on the surge of enthusiasm at having finally arrived at Jerusalem, on 13 June, allegedly at the promptings of a hermit living on the Mount of Olives, the northern leaders launched a speculative attack between the Quadrangular Tower in the north-west corner of the city and the Damascus Gate. Relying on only one ladder, even when the outer walls were breached, no concerted attack on the inner rampart was possible, the first man up, Raimbold Croton from Chartres, losing his hand in the attempt. Losses were heavy and, although the outer walls were damaged, the defences held. This failure persuaded the leaders, at a meeting two days later, that the next assault required more careful organization and the participation of all contingents. Over the next few weeks the region was scoured for supplies; the Genoese, with their vital timbers cannibalized from their ships, were escorted to the siege and the engineers set to work. As the material preparations reached fruition, it was agreed on 6 July to hold a solemn religious procession around the walls of the city, in imitation of Joshua at Jericho. The planning and execution of this morale-boosting ritual encapsulated the expedition’s spiritual history. The inspiration, some recalled, came from a vision received by Peter Desiderius; the decision to hold the procession was reached at an assembly summoned by William Hugh of Monteil, Adhemar of Le Puy’s brother. After a three-day fast, on 8 July the whole army, led by the clergy bearing the growing collection of relics, processed barefoot around the walls of Jerusalem, ignoring the taunts of the locals. On completion of the circuit, the host was addressed on the Mount of Olives by Raymond of Aguilers, for the Provençals, Arnulf of Choques, the smooth-talking chaplain to the duke of Normandy, and Peter the Hermit, now under the patronage of Godfrey of Bouillon and the Lorrainers. Count Raymond and Tancred were publicly reconciled.49 The political and religious threads of the expedition were thus drawn tightly together in a public demonstration that recognized the regional diversity of the enterprise while insisting on its single identity, shared experience and common goal. As at Antioch, it was hoped that such rededication would ignite a willingness to hazard all in a last throw of fate. News of al-Afdal’s large relief army leaving Egypt had reached the Christian camp. It was now or never.

  The final assault on Jerusalem begun on 13 July was a desperate affair. Attacks were launched on two fronts, by the Provençals on the narrow line of wall by the Zion Gate in the south and by the northern forces – of Godfrey, Robert of Normandy, Robert of Flanders and Tancred – who had moved, with their siege tower and ram, to the north-east corner of the walls on 10 July. While the Provençals made little impact, the northerners’ slowly wore down the defence, their tactics revolving around pushing their siege tower as close to the inner wall as possible to allow troops to gain access to the ramparts by planks and ladders. While other contingents provided ferocious salvoes of arrows and bolts, the Lorrainers under Duke Godfrey were in charge of the tower. Resistance was everywhere fierce, strongest in the south, nearest to the centre of power at the Citadel; in both sectors catapults were used by the defenders. Casualties were high; perhaps as many as a fifth or a quarter of the western armies. Contact between the two Christian assaults was maintained by signallers stationed on the Mount of Olives using reflectors. At midday on Friday, 15 July, the dispirited Provençals were encouraged to renew their attack while the northerners’ siege tower was painfully edged towards the inner wall over which it towered. Albert of Aachen recorded that a golden cross was placed on the top storey of the tower, where Duke Godfrey himself stood firing his crossbow into the city.50 When the tower was pushed right against the wall, from the storey below the brothers Ludolf and Engelbert from Tournai threw planks across the gap and entered the city, soon followed by Godfrey, Tancred and the Lorrainers. The defenders fled to the Haram al-Sharif, the Temple Mount, but were overtaken by Tancred before they could secure the precinct. The scale of the slaughter there impressed even hardened veterans of the campaign, who recalled the area ‘streaming with blood’ that reached to the killers’ ankles. Raymond of Aguilers resorted to the language of the Book of Revelation in describing the Christian knights in front of the al-Aqsa mosque wading through blood up to their horses’ knees.51 The survivors took refuge inside the mosque, many hiding in the roof while Tancred plundered the Dome of the Rock near by before calling a halt to the killing by offering those inside the al-Aqsa mosque his protection, presumably hoping for ransom. Meanwhile, news of the entry of the Christians into the city caused the defenders in the south to withdraw to the Citadel, with Count Raymond in pursuit. Without delay Iftikhar al-Dawla struck a deal that guaranteed the garrison’s safe conduct to Ascalon in return for surrendering the Citadel, although some were ransomed, at knock-down rates.52

  The massacre in Jerusalem spared few. Jews were burnt inside their synagogue. Muslims were indiscriminately cut to pieces, decapitated or slowly tortured by fire (this on Christian evidence). Such was the scale and horror of the carnage that one Jewish witness was reduced to noticing approvingly that at least the Christians did not rape their victims before killing them as Muslims did.53 The city was comprehensively ransacked: gold, silver, horses, food, the domestic contents of houses, were seized by the conquerors in a pillage as thorough as any in the middle ages. Profit vied with destruction; some Jewish holy books w
ere later ransomed to the surviving community in exile. Violence overcame business on 16 July when Tancred’s prisoners in the al-Aqsa mosque were butchered in cold blood, possibly by Provençals who had missed the previous day’s action. The city’s narrow streets were clogged with corpses and dismembered body parts, including some crusaders crushed in their zeal for the pursuit and massacre of the defenders. The heaps of the dead presented an immediate problem for the conquerors; on 17 July many of the surviving Muslim population were forced to clear the streets and carry the bodies outside the walls to be burnt in great pyres, whereat they themselves were massacred, a chilling pre-echo of later genocidal practices.

  This secondary slaughter, in cold blood, perhaps even more than the initial mayhem, provoked mounting retrospective shock and outrage amongst Muslim intellectuals, religious leaders and politicians over the next century and a half. Some thousands, men, women and children, were massacred, although certainly fewer than the 70,000 trumpeted in early thirteenth-century Arabic chronicles. A few Muslim and Jewish Jerusalemites survived, managing either to escape, sometimes with their possessions and holy books, such as the belongings of the Egyptian garrison and its hangers-on, the Torah scrolls that reached Ascalon, or to be ransomed, a process that could take months, suggesting a not entirely indiscriminate policy of killing on the part of the crusaders.54 Massacres were not a monopoly of western Christians. The recent Turkish conquests in the Near East had been accompanied by carnage and enslavement on a grand scale. When it suited, Muslim victors could behave as bestially as any Christian, as Zengi showed at Edessa in 1144 and Saladin was to prove in suppressing opposition in Egypt in the 1170s and in the killing of the knights of the military orders after the battle of Hattin in 1187. Immediate contemporary Muslim reactions appeared muted when contrasted to later polemics. Massacres as well as atrocity stories were – and are – an inescapable part of war. In the face of a Muslim counter-attack, letting the locals live may not have seemed a prudent option to the Christian victors, however obscene the alternative.

  The scenes of carnage and plunder in the streets of Jerusalem attract particular notoriety through the juxtaposition of extreme violence and anguished faith. Some of the butchers thought they saw Adhemar of Le Puy urging them on. On the evening of 15 July 1099, with the din of slaughter still echoing round the city, in the midst of the almost deserted Christian quarter, recently emptied of most of its inhabitants by the Muslim governor, the conquerors went to pray at the church of the Holy Sepulchre, the object of all their labours. As one veteran put it:

  our men rushed round the whole city, seizing gold and silver, horses and mules, and houses full of all sorts of goods and they all came rejoicing and weeping from excess of gladness to worship at the Sepulchre of our Saviour Jesus, and there they fulfilled their vows.

  Another, in language redolent of the Bible and the liturgy, touched on the contrasting emotions of those who, after three years of almost unimaginable effort, struggle, anxiety and fear, found themselves at journey’s end:

  Jerusalem was now littered with bodies and stained with blood… With the fall of the city it was rewarding to see the worship of the pilgrims at the Holy Sepulchre, the clapping of hands, the rejoicing and singing of a new song to the Lord. Their souls offered to the victorious and triumphant God prayers of praise which they could not explain in words.55

  The capture of Jerusalem, however remarkable a crowning achievement, did not end the expedition, its internal divisions or its military vulnerability. The settlement of secular and ecclesiastical authority within the city and its surrounds resurrected the simmering hostilities between the leaders. On 22 July, Raymond of Toulouse was once more outmanoeuvred. After apparently refusing an offer to accept the crown of Jerusalem, perhaps on clerical prompting, he saw instead his latest chief rival, Godfrey of Bouillon, the only other main leader willing to remain in the east, elected as secular ruler, or Advocate (the title implying ecclesiastical authority). As at Antioch, Raymond was then forced to surrender his strongpoint in the city, the Citadel. He nearly abandoned the expedition, taking himself off to sulk on a trip to the Jordan valley, only reluctantly joining the army to repel the Egyptians. On 1 August, in a further blow to Raymond’s standing, the Norman Arnulf of Choques, the prosecutor of Peter Bartholomew, was elected patriarch of Jerusalem, the previous patriarch, Symeon, who had joined the army at Antioch, having died in Cyprus a few days earlier. With Arnulf’s election the top posts in Jerusalem had gone to the Lorrainers and Normans. By this time a number of Count Raymond’s own followers had transferred allegiance. Arnulf secured his control of the church of the Holy Sepulchre by establishing Latin canons. More significantly, he unearthed a piece of the True Cross, possibly by persuading or coercing local Christians into telling him where one had been hidden. This story of concealment and discovery, containing echoes of the Holy Lance story, may have been circulated to establish a respectable provenance for a relic whose finding was timely, convenient and iconic. The discovery of the Jerusalem relic of the True Cross brought physical symbolism to the fulfilment of the journey of the bearers of the cross. It was to play a central role in the religious ceremonial, military display and political iconography of the new Christian kingdom of Jerusalem.56

  More vital business intruded into the feuding at Jerusalem with the arrival at Ascalon in the first days of August of a substantial Egyptian army, perhaps 20,000 strong, commanded by the Vizier al-Afdal himself. For the westerners, defeating al-Afdal was essential to secure their conquest; battle could not be shirked. By 10 August, leaving a skeleton garrison in Jerusalem with Peter the Hermit to lead prayers of intercession for their success, the Christian leaders had mustered at Ramla, with an army perhaps 10,000 strong, advancing the next day towards Ascalon on the coast twenty-five miles away. The following morning, 12 August, they caught the unprepared Egyptians encamped before the northern walls of the city. Repulsing a vigorous infantry sally, the western knights launched a concerted cavalry charge that put the Egyptian force to flight and captured the enemy camp with its rich pickings of booty. Once again, flexibility, coordination, speed, boldness and surprise allowed the westerners to overcome a force perhaps twice their size. Only continued bickering between Godfrey and Raymond prevented the surrender of the demoralized city itself, which remained in Muslim hands for another fifty-four years, a troublesome Egyptian presence in the kingdom built by Godfrey and his successors.

  The battle of Ascalon marked the completion of the campaign launched from Constantinople in the spring of 1097. Jerusalem was secured; the veterans could depart. Squabbling persisted to the end. In mid-August, Godfrey forced Raymond to abandon an attempt to capture the coastal town of Arsuf. After a final reconciliation with Godfrey, Raymond and the other leaders, Robert of Normandy and Robert of Flanders, and the majority of the surviving crusaders left for the north. At Lattakiah, where they found Bohemund and the newly arrived papal legate, Daimbert of Pisa, with a large fleet attempting to dislodge the Byzantine garrison, they persuaded the attackers to withdraw. Daimbert prepared to continue south to Jerusalem to assert his authority over both church and state. Bohemund withdrew to Antioch. Raymond assumed command of the citadel of Lattakiah in agreement with the Greeks, who, in contradiction of their reputation for hostility and duplicity soon to be popularized in western Europe, helped provide the shipping to carry the crusaders back home. By the end of August, the survivors, including the duke of Normandy and count of Flanders, hundreds of other lords and knights and thousands of humbler soldiers and pilgrims, finally embarked for the west to resume their spectacularly interrupted lives.

  The success of the armies called together by Urban II, whose death on 29 July 1099 robbed him of knowledge of the triumph, was neither inevitable nor incredible. The miserable failure of successive substantial western armies in Asia Minor in 1101 testified to the importance of battlefield tactics, good generalship and luck. After the near-disaster in July 1097, the main expedition performed with increasing cohesio
n, boldness and skill. By June 1098 these hardened troops presented a frightening proposition for the coalition armies of their opponents. Common identity was reinforced by the regular transfer of allegiances and new patterns of lordship within the contingents, as with Tancred’s abandonment of Bohemund and later serial loyalty to Raymond and Godfrey; or Robert of Normandy’s acceptance of Raymond’s leadership in January 1099. Such permeable structures of allegiance and affinity characterized the expedition from the winter of 1097–8. The chronicler Fulcher of Chartres joined the entourage of Baldwin of Boulogne in Cilicia and at Edessa eight months before the desertion of his previous lord, Stephen of Blois. Having set out in 1096 as head of a Lorrainer army, by the time Godfrey became ruler of Jerusalem in 1099 he had attracted supporters from across northern France, a consequence of his wealth; his willingness to accept the support of knights and lords outside his original entourage; the deaths of other lords; and the casualty rate amongst his own vassals and regional allies.57 Attrition and the search for patronage acted as powerful centripetal forces.