Jerusalem: The Biography

1099

DUKE GODFREY: THE SIEGE

It was the high summer of 1099 in the arid Judaean hills; the Holy City was well defended by Egyptian troops backed by a militia of Jerusalemite Jews and Muslims. They were well stocked with provisions and the cisterns were full of water, whereas the wells of the parched countryside had been posioned. Jerusalem’s Christians were expelled. The citizens, 30,000 at the most, could comfort themselves that the Egyptian vizier was marching north to rescue them, and they were well armed: they even possessed the secret flame-throwing weapon, Greek Fire.^* Behind Jerusalem’s formidable walls, they must have disdained their attackers.

The Frankish army was too small, just 1,200 knights and 12,000 soldiers, to surround the walls. In open battle, the lightly armoured Arab and Turkish cavaliers could not withstand the awesome charges of the Frankish knights, who formed a fist of thundering steel mounted on hulking destrier warhorses. The knights each wore a helmet, a cuirass and hauberk chain-mail over a gambeson (a padded quilt undergarment) and were armed with lance, broadsword, mace and shield.

Yet their Western horses had long since perished or been eaten by the hungry army. In the blistered gorges around Jerusalem, charges were impossible, horses useless and armour too hot: this exhausted force of Franks had to fight on foot, while their leaders feuded constantly. There was no supreme commander. Pre-eminent among them, and also the richest, was Raymond, Count of Toulouse. A courageous but uninspiring leader, noted for obstinacy and lack of tact, Raymond initially set up camp in the west opposite the Citadel but after a few days moved south to besiege the Zion Gate.

Jerusalem’s weak spot was always in the north: the young, capable Duke Robert of Flanders, the son of a veteran Jerusalem pilgrim, camped opposite what is now Damascus Gate; Duke Robert of Normandy (son of William the Conqueror), brave but ineffectual and nicknamed Curthose (short-shanks) or just Fatlegs, covered Herod’s Gate. But the driving spirit was Godfrey of Bouillon, the strapping, blond Duke of Lower Lorraine, aged thirty-nine, ‘the ideal picture of a northern knight’, admired for his piety and chastity (he never married.) He took up positions around today’s Jaffa Gate. Meanwhile the twenty-five-year-old Norman Tancred de Hauteville, eager to conquer a principality of his own, galloped off to seize Bethlehem. When he had returned, he joined Godfrey’s forces at the north-western corner of the city.

The Franks had lost legions of men and travelled thousands of miles across Europe and Asia to reach the Holy City. All realized that this would either be the apogee or the apotheosis of the First Crusade.

POPE URBAN II: GOD WILLS IT

The Crusade had been the idea of one man. On 27 November 1095, Pope Urban II had addressed a gathering of grandees and ordinary folk at Clermont to demand the conquest of Jerusalem and the liberation of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Urban saw his life’s mission as the restoration of the power and reputation of the Catholic Church. He devised a new theory of holy war to reinvigorate Christendom and the papacy, justifying the cleansing liquidation of the infidel in return for the remission of sins. This was an unprecedented indulgence that created a Christian version of Muslim jihad, but it dovetailed with the popular reverence for Jerusalem. In an age of religious fervour, a time of holy signs, Jerusalem was Christ’s city, seen as both supreme shrine and celestial kingdom, yet familiar to every Christian, evoked in sermons, in tales of pilgrimages, in passion plays, paintings and relics. But Urban also passionately stoked the rising anxiety about the security of the Holy Sepulchre, citing the massacre of pilgrims and the Turkoman atrocities.

The moment was ripe for thousands of people, high and low, to answer Urban’s call: ‘violence held sway among the nations, fraud, treachery and chicanery overshadowed all things,’ observed the Jerusalemite historian William of Tyre. ‘All virtue had departed, every kind of fornication was practised openly, luxury, drunkenness and games of chance.’ The Crusade offered personal adventure, the removal of thousands of troublemaking knights and freebooters, and escape from home. But the modern idea, promoted in Hollywood movies and in the backlash after the disaster of the 2003 Iraqi war, that crusading was just an opportunity for enrichment with sadistic dividends, is wrong. A handful of princes created new fiefdoms and a few Crusaders made their careers, whereas the costs were punishing and many lives and fortunes were lost in this quixotic and risky but pious enterprise. A spirit was abroad that is hard for modern people to grasp: Christians were being offered the opportunity to earn the forgiveness of all sins. In short, these warrior-pilgrims were overwhelmingly believers seeking salvation on the battlements of Jerusalem.

The crowds at Clermont answered the pope: ‘Deus le volt! God wills it!’ Raymond of Toulouse was one of the first to take the Cross. Eighty thousand people, some in disciplined contingents led by princes, some in rampaging gangs led by adventurers, and others in pious crowds of peasants under holy hermits, took the Cross. As the first wave crossed Europe heading for Constantinople, they forced the conversion or massacred thousands of Jews in vengeance for the killing of Christ.

The Byzantine Emperor Alexios, half-horrified by these Latin ruffians, welcomed them – and hurried them on towards Jerusalem. Once in Anatolia, hordes of European peasants were killed by the Turks, but the organized, committed and experienced knights of the main armies routed the Seljuks. The enterprise was a triumph of faith over experience and reason: from the beginning but with rising intensity as they neared the Holy Land, the military campaign was guided and encouraged by divine visions, angelic visitations and the discovery of sacred signs that were just as important as military tactics. But fortunately the Europeans were attacking a region that was fatally divided between warring caliphs, sultans and amirs, Turks and Arabs, who placed their own rivalries above any concept of Islamic solidarity.

The fall of Antioch was the Crusaders’ first real success, but they were then besieged inside the city. Faced with starvation and stalemate, the Crusade almost ended there. At the height of the crisis at Antioch, Peter Bartholomew, one of Count Raymond’s men, dreamed that the Holy Lance lay under a church: they dug down and duly found the Lance. Its discovery boosted morale. When Bartholomew was accused of being a fraud, he underwent an ordeal by fire. He survived his walk across what was usually nine feet of red hot irons and claimed no ill effects. But he died twelve days later.

The Crusaders survived Antioch and, as they marched southwards, the Turkish and Fatimid amirs of Tripoli, Caesarea and Acre made deals with them. The Fatimids abandoned Jaffa, and the Crusaders cut inland towards Jerusalem. When the contingents were establishing themselves around the walls, a hermit on the Mount of Olives, inspired by a vision, told the Crusader warlords to attack immediately. On 13 June, they attempted to storm the walls but were easily repulsed, suffering heavy losses. The princes realized that success required better planning, more ladders, catapults and siege-engines, but there was not enough wood to build them. They got lucky. On the 17th, Genoese sailors docked at Jaffa and hauled the timbers of their dismantled ships to Jerusalem to build wheeled siege-machines equipped with catapults.

The princes were already bickering over the spoils. The two ablest had grabbed their own principalities: Bohemond of Taranto had been left to hold Antioch while Godfrey’s dynamic brother Baldwin had seized Edessa, far away on the Euphrates. Now the rapacious Tancred demanded Bethlehem for himself, but the Church laid claim to the site of the Nativity. The heat was unforgiving, the sirocco blew, water was short, men too few, morale low, and the Egyptians were approaching. There was no time to lose.

A divine message saved the day. On 6 July, a visionary priest announced that he had (not for the first time) been visited by Adhemar of Le Puy, a revered bishop who had died at Antioch, but whose spirit now urged the Franks to hold a procession around the walls as Joshua had around Jericho. The army fasted for three days then on 8 July, led by priests bearing holy relics, they marched barefoot around the walls of Jerusalem, ‘with trumpets, banners and arms’, as the Jerusalemites mocked them from the battlements, hurling insults at the crucifixes. The Joshuan circuit completed, they assembled on the Mount of Olives to be addressed by their chaplains and to witness the reconciliations of their leaders. Ladders, siege-engines, mangonels, missiles, arrows, fascines – everything had to be ready, and everyone worked day and night. Women and old men joined the effort by sewing the animal hides for the siege-engines. The choice was stark: death or victory on the ramparts of the Holy City.

TANCRED: CARNAGE ON THE TEMPLE MOUNT

By night on 13 July, the Crusaders were ready. Their priests preached them into a ferment of ferocious and sanctimonious determination. Their mangonels catapulted cannonballs and missiles at the walls, from which the defenders had suspended sacks of cotton and hay to soften the blows until the ramparts resembled giant washing lines. The Muslims fired their own mangonels. When the Christians discovered a spy in their midst, they catapulted him alive over the walls.

The Crusaders worked all night to fill the ditches with fascines. Three siege-machines were brought forward in parts, then assembled like giant flatpacks, one for Raymond on Mount Zion, the other two in the north. Raymond was the first to position his siege-machine against the walls, but the Egyptian governor, commanding the southern sector, put up determined resistance. At almost the last moment, Godfrey of Bouillon identified the weakest point in the defences (east of today’s Herod’s Gate, opposite the Rockefeller Museum). The Dukes of Normandy and Flanders, along with Tancred, swiftly moved their forces to the northeastern corner. Godfrey himself ascended his siege-tower as it was pushed forward at the ideal spot: he emerged at the top wielding a crossbow as the armies traded salvoes of arrows and bolts, and the mangonels rained missiles on the walls.

As the sun rose, the princes used flashing mirrors on the Mount of Olives to co-ordinate their moves. Simultaneously Raymond attacked to the south and the Normans in the north. At dawn on Friday the 15th, they renewed their attacks. Godfrey rode the rickety wooden tower, shooting bolts over the walls while the defenders unleashed their Greek Fire – but not enough to stop the Franks.

At midday, Godfrey’s engine finally closed on the walls. The Franks threw planks across and two brothers climbed into the city, with Godfrey following them. They claimed to have seen the late Bishop Adhemar fighting among them: ‘Many testified he was the first to scale the wall!’ The dead bishop ordered them to open the Gate of the Column (Damascus Gate). Tancred and his Normans burst into the narrow streets. To the south, on Mount Zion, the Count of Toulouse heard the cheering. ‘Why do you loiter,’ Raymond scolded his men. ‘Lo, the Franks are even now within the city!’ Raymond’s men broke into Jerusalem and pursued the governor and garrison to the Citadel. The governor agreed to surrender to Raymond in return for the lives of his garrison. Citizens and soldiers fled to the Temple Mount, pursued by Tancred and his men. In the fray, the Jerusalemites slammed shut the gates of the Temple Mount and fought back, but Tancred’s warriors smashed their way on to the sacred esplanade, crowded with desperate people.

The fighting raged there for hours; the Franks went berserk, and killed anyone they encountered in the streets and alleyways. They cut off not only heads but hands and feet, glorying in the spurting fountains of cleansing infidel blood. Although carrying out a massacre in a stormed city was not unprecedented, the sanctimonious pride with which the perpetrators recorded it possibly was. ‘Wonderful sights were to be seen,’ enthused one eyewitness, Raymond of Aguilers, the Count of Toulouse’s chaplain: ‘Our men cut off the heads of their enemies, others shot them with arrows so that they fell from the towers, others tortured them longer by casting them into the flames. Piles of heads, hands and feet were to be seen on the streets. It was necessary to pick one’s way over the bodies of men and horses.’

Babies were seized from their mothers, their heads dashed against the walls. As the barbarity escalated, ‘Saracens, Arabs and Ethiopians’ – meaning the black Sudanese troops of the Fatimid army – took refuge on the roofs of the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa. But, as they fought their way towards the Dome, the knights hacked a path across the crowded esplanade, killing and dicing through human flesh until ‘in the Temple [of Solomon, as the Crusaders called al-Aqsa], they rode in blood up to their bridles. Indeed it was a just and splendid judgement of God that this place should be filled with the blood of unbelievers.’

Ten thousand people, including many Muslim clergy and Sufi ascetics, were killed on the Temple Mount, including 3,000 packed into al-Aqsa. ‘Our gladiators’, wrote the chronicler Fulcher of Chartres, started shooting down the Muslims on the roof of al-Aqsa with their bows. ‘What more shall I relate? None were left alive, neither women nor children were spared.’ But Tancred sent his banner to the remaining three hundred people on the roof of al-Aqsa, signifying protection. He halted the killing, took some valuable prisoners and was shown the treasures of the Temple Mount. He then plundered the huge golden lanterns that hung in the shrines there. The Jews sought refuge in their synagogues, but the Crusaders set them on fire. The Jews were burned alive, almost a climactic burnt offering in Christ’s name. Godfrey of Bouillon took off his sword and with a small entourage circled the city and prayed, before making his way to the Holy Sepulchre.

Next morning, to Tancred’s fury, Raymond’s men nervously climbed onto the roof of al-Aqsa, surprised the huddled Muslims and beheaded the men and women in another spasm of killing. Some of the Muslims leaped to their deaths. A respected female scholar from Shiraz in Persia took refuge with a crowd of women in the Dome of the Chain – they too were slaughtered. A ghoulish delight was taken in the dismemberment of the victims, which was treated almost as a sacrament. ‘Everywhere lay fragments of human bodies, headless bodies and mutilated limbs, strewn in all directions.’ There was something even more dreadful in the wild-eyed, gore-spattered Crusaders themselves, ‘dripping with blood from head to foot, an ominous sight that brought terror to all who met them’. They searched the streets of the bazaars, dragging out more victims to be ‘slain like sheep’.

Each Crusader had been promised possession of any house marked by his ‘shield and arms’: ‘consequently the pilgrims searched the city most carefully and boldly killed the citizens’, culling ‘wives, children, whole households,’ many of them ‘dashed headlong to the ground’ from high windows.^*

On the 17th, the pilgrims (as these slaughterers called themselves) were finally sated with butchery and ‘refreshed themselves with the rest and food they greatly needed’. The princes and priests made their way to the Holy Sepulchre where they sang in praise of Christ, clapping joyously and bathing the altar in tears of joy, before parading through the streets to the Temple of the Lord (the Dome of the Rock) and the Temple of Solomon. Those streets were strewn with body parts, decaying in the summer heat. The princes forced the surviving Jews and Muslims to clear the remains away and burn them in pyres, after which they were themselves butchered and presumably joined their brethren on the fires. The Crusaders who died were buried in the Cemetery of the Lion at Mamilla or in the sacred earth just outside the Golden Gate, already a Muslim cemetery, ready to arise at the Last Day.

Jerusalem was so full of treasures, ‘gems, raiments, gold and silver’ and valuable prisoners that the Franks held slave-auctions for two days. Some respected Muslims had been saved for ransom: a thousand dinars was demanded for the Shafii scholar Sheikh Abd al-Salam al-Ansari, but when no one paid he was killed. Surviving Jews and 300 Hebrew books (including the Aleppo Codex, one of the earliest Hebrew Bibles that partially survives today) were ransomed to Egyptian Jews. The ransoming of prisoners was to be one of the most lucrative industries of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. But not all the human giblets could be collected, and Jerusalem literally stank for long afterwards – even six months later, when Fulcher of Chartres returned: ‘Oh what a stench there was around the walls, within and without, from the rotting bodies of the Saracens, lying wherever they had been hunted down.’ Jerusalem was not yet secure: the Egyptian army was approaching. The Crusaders urgently needed a commander-in-chief – the first King of Jerusalem.

GODFREY: ADVOCATE OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE

The higher nobles and clergy made inquiries into the morals of the candidates for the crown. They felt they had to offer the throne to the senior prince, the unpopular Raymond, but did so grudgingly. Raymond obligingly turned it down, insisting he could not be a king in Jesus’ city. They then offered it to their real choice, the chaste and worthy Duke Godfrey, who accepted a newly coined title: Advocate of the Holy Sepulchre.

This outraged Raymond who, realizing he had been tricked, refused to give up the Tower of David until the bishops mediated. Triumphant as their arms were, these warrior-pilgrims did not find it easy to enforce the morality expected in a city ruled by Jesus himself. They elected the Norman chaplain, Arnulf, as patriarch but he soon had to defend himself for adultery and fathering a child by an Arab woman.

Arnulf placed bells in the churches (the ringing of church bells had always been banned by the Muslims). This was to be a Latin, Catholic Jerusalem. Now he demonstrated how vicious the schism was: he placed the Latin priests in charge of the Holy Sepulchre, banishing the Greek patriarch and clergy. He thereby started the unseemly conflict among Christian sects that continues to scandalize and amuse visitors to this day. Yet Arnulf could not find the main section of the True Cross and the Orthodox priests refused to reveal its hiding-place. The patriarch tortured them; a Christian torturing Christians to procure the Life-Giving Tree of the Lamb of God. They finally conceded.

On 12 August, leaving Jerusalem almost undefended, Advocate Godfrey led the entire Crusader army out towards Ashkelon where he defeated the Egyptians. When Ashkelon offered to surrender to Raymond, Godfrey refused to accept unless it was ceded to him: Ashkelon was lost – only the first of many self-inflicted wounds caused by the feuding of Jerusalem’s leaders. But Jerusalem was secure – if empty.

The Dukes of Normandy and Flanders and many of the Crusaders now returned home, leaving Godfrey with a putrid, devastated city peopled by just 300 knights and 2,000 infantry, and scarcely enough citizens to fill a quarter. Raymond of Toulouse recovered from his sulk and set about reducing the Lebanese coast, finally founding his own dynasty as Count of Tripoli. There were four Crusader states – the Principality of Antioch, the Counties of Edessa and Tripoli, and the Kingdom of Jerusalem. This idiosyncratic patchwork of interrelated fiefdoms became known as the land of Outremer, ‘Across the Sea’.

Yet the reaction of the Islamic world – divided between the weakened caliphs of Sunni Baghdad and Shiite Cairo – was surprisingly muted. Only a few preachers called for jihad to liberate Jerusalem, and there was little reaction among the all-powerful Turkish amirs, who remained preoccupied with their personal feuds.

On 21 December, Baldwin, Godfrey’s brother, who was Count of Edessa, and the flaxen-haired Prince Bohemond of Antioch arrived to spend Christmas in Jerusalem. But Godfrey struggled to defend himself against the Church. The pope’s representative, an overweening Pisan named Daimbert, was now appointed patriarch (to replace the sinful Arnulf). Determined to establish a theocracy to be ruled by himself, he forced Godfrey to cede the city and Jaffa to the Church. In June 1100, Godfrey collapsed in Jaffa, probably with typhoid. Borne home to Jerusalem, he died on 18 July and was buried five days later, like all his successors, at the foot of Calvary in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.¹

Daimbert took control of the city, but Godfrey’s knights refused to surrender the Citadel, and instead summoned the late advocate’s brother, Baldwin. The Count of Edessa was fighting to defend northern Syria, however, and received no message until late August. On 2 October Baldwin set out with 200 knights and 700 troops, and found that he had to fight all the way to Jerusalem, facing repeated Islamic ambushes. On 9 November, with less than half his original force, he at last entered the Holy City.