Armies of Heaven (43 page)

In this atmosphere of excitement, the army decided on an immediate attack, in part because the hermit whom Tancred had met on the Mount
of Olives encouraged them to do so. The Franks' victory was, he assured them, preordained if they followed his instructions. The leaders were at first skeptical, pointing to their lack of siege equipment. The hermit responded, “Almighty God, if he wishes, will conquer the wall with a single ladder. The Lord is ever present for those who struggle on behalf of truth.” He further recommended June 11 as the day God had chosen for victory, but the army waited another two days as it searched for wood to build additional ladders. The region, however, had been exhausted of supplies, owing in part to the battles over the city between Turks and Egyptians. On the day of the attack, the Franks still had only one ladder, “without a companion.”
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On June 13 the crusaders did storm the city, and somehow, with no siege equipment to speak of, managed to raise their lonely ladder up against the walls. The first Frank to climb to the top, a young man named Raimbold Croton, had his hand instantly sliced off but escaped with his life. Several other knights fell beneath stones thrown from the walls or else had their eyes shot out with arrows.

In sum the attack failed; “the result did not meet their desire.” Perhaps it was because the Franks had doubted the hermit's words and waited two extra days. Or maybe it was because they had failed to show Jerusalem due respect in their initial approach. Raymond of Aguilers quietly complained that, according to the late Peter Bartholomew, they should have walked the final two miles barefoot—an injunction that only a few of the pilgrims had followed. The soldiers who left their shoes on defended the choice. The approach, they said, was risky. They could not afford to get caught shoeless. For Raymond, however, the army had grown lazy. With a barefoot procession, the city would have fallen as predicted.
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A more protracted siege would be necessary, but the army could not afford an engagement as lengthy as the one at Antioch. The danger from Egypt was imminent, but even without Egypt, the scarcity of drinking water threatened to destroy the army. Jerusalem lies near no major body of fresh water and has almost no natural sources of potable water beyond what is collected in underground cisterns. What few wells there were
the Egyptians had either blocked or poisoned. The nearest source, the Pool of Siloam, flowed only every three days. Even there, when water appeared, men and women would fight with one another to be the first to drink it while it was still clear. Sometimes in the struggle the Franks would drown one another. In the meantime the poor and infirm would lie helplessly nearby, pointing at their mouths, unable to use words to beg because their tongues had gone so dry. The only other option for drinkable water was to risk a five- or six-mile journey to the nearest springs. Those who managed to bring any liquid back sold it at exorbitant prices. Survival for the army depended on getting quickly inside the city and out of the summer desert sun.
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Barring a new traitor like Pirrus, the Franks would have to break into Jerusalem on their own, which would require procuring enough supplies for massive new siege engines. In the days that followed the initial, failed attack, the leaders began a renewed and more intensive search of the region. They met with some greater success this time through “a type of miracle,” albeit an unusual one.

All of the princes were involved in the search. Tancred participated reluctantly since he was suffering from dysentery. When the pain in his bowels became too much to bear, he looked for a cave to hide in—an easy enough task in the valleys around Jerusalem. Finding one that looked suitable for his needs, whose entry was somewhat concealed, he darted inside to relieve himself and perhaps to nap. In the indirect light of the cave, as he squatted down to employ his “excretory virtue,” he noticed, against the opposite wall, a neat pile of lumber, apparently left behind by either the Egyptians or the Turks in one of the recent battles. Construction at last could begin.

More important (if not as miraculous) was the unexpected arrival on June 17 at the nearby port of Jaffa (in modern-day Tel Aviv) of six ships from Europe. The ships provided both supplies and engineers to help with the siege works. A quick, brutal attack to finish the crusade was now feasible.
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In terms of an overall strategy, the leaders organized their camps in a way intended to stretch the Saracen defenses, forcing the Egyptian garrison to defend two separate points at opposite ends of the city. Most of the Franks set camp around Jerusalem's northwest corner (protected by
a double wall: an exterior curtain wall and a more formidable interior wall), while the Provençals at first concentrated around the Tower of David and the Jaffa Gate.

A little later Count Raymond relocated farther south, onto Mount Zion, seemingly against the wishes of the other leaders and against those of his own followers. The new setting offered Raymond several advantages—notably, higher terrain and more level ground for an attack. But with Jerusalem no decision was ever purely strategic. Mount Zion was the burial place of King David and King Solomon and of the first Christian martyr, Stephen. It was the traditional site of the Last Supper, the place where Christ had appeared to his apostles after death, and the location of the Dormition of the Virgin Mary, where she fell into a final deep sleep. After Count Raymond had seen these places, many of them in ruins, largely destroyed by an earthquake in 1033, he turned to his companions and asked, “If we pass by the holy things that God has shown to us here, and if the Saracens take them over, what will become of us? What if their hatred leads them to pollute and destroy them? Who can say whether God has given us this moment as a test, in order to discover just how much we love Him? I can tell you one thing for sure: If we do not faithfully guard these holy sites, He is not going to give us the other things inside the city.”
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Even so, many of Raymond's followers did not want to move from their camps at the Jaffa Gate—put off either by the dangers of the new location or simply by the inconvenience of pulling up stakes. To make them accept his vision, Raymond offered fresh stipends. Holy war did not preclude making a profit after all. The count would later pay his followers—soldiers and commoners, men and women alike—to carry rocks to fill in the ditch between Mount Zion and the city walls (one penny for every three stones) in order to level out the ground and to pave the way for the final attack.
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By early July all was ready for the Franks to storm the city, except for one vital piece of business: a procession of penance and humility around Jerusalem's walls. From a military perspective, it was an exercise in morale building. The struggles between Raymond and Bohemond over Antioch, as well as the endless delays along the road to Jerusalem at places like Ma‘arra and Arqa, had created serious divisions. A liturgical procession in which everyone participated would have been a useful corrective.

The ceremony would serve one other fundamental purpose: It was a last-ditch attempt to appease a wrathful God on the eve of this most important battle. The military probably consulted with all the available and respected visionaries, including the hermit from the Mount of Olives, and concluded that July 8 would be the best time for the ceremony. The hermit recommended another regimen of prayer and fasting, too, and assured them that God would finally enable them to surmount Jerusalem's walls.
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Raymond of Aguilers tells a more exotic version of this story, and in doing so makes a case for his own man, Peter Desiderius, to act as the army's new prophet. Bishop Adhémar of le Puy, Raymond said, now dead for almost a year, appeared again to Peter Desiderius and through him ordered the army to undertake the procession. The Franks needed to be “sanctified from impurities” before entering Jerusalem. If they marched around the city, barefoot like angels or apostles, invoking God and fasting, then they would “fight manfully for the city, such that it will be captured on the ninth day.”

Peter took the orders first to William Hugh of Monteil, Adhémar's brother, and to his own count Isoard of Die, before the proposal went before a council of all the princes and the people on July 6. Everyone agreed to the procession—to reconcile themselves brother to brother, to embrace humility, and to seek the mercy of God through His saints so that “He might grant judgment against His enemies and ours, the ones who hold the place of the Passion and burial and who contaminate it, and who try to keep us from our own redemption and from such a blessing of divine humility.”
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Two days later the armies gathered for the march. It started near Count Raymond's camp on Mount Zion, in front of the Church of St. Mary, and moved on toward the Church of St. Stephen. From there they traveled through the Valley of Jehoshaphat, ending up on the Mount of Olives, the place of Christ's final ascension into heaven—thus roughly following Tancred's itinerary when he had broken off from his followers on June 7 to explore Jerusalem alone. The armies then walked back down the mountain to the tomb of the Virgin before once again returning to the place of the Ascension.

This procession was in part a reenactment of Joshua leading the Children of Israel in a six-day march around the walls of Jericho. As such, it
was an outright act of aggression. For in Joshua's case, on the seventh day the trumpets sounded, the Israelites let out a shout, and the walls crumbled to the ground.
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The Egyptian garrison, however, found the whole thing amusing. Along the ramparts they set up crosses and held mock crucifixions, spitting on the images of Christ or urinating over them. A cleric named Peter Tudebode remembered a group of Saracens breaking apart a crucifix and shouting, “‘
Frangi agip salip?
' In our language that means, ‘Franks, is this a good cross?'” Such ridicule probably encouraged rumors that Muslims were physically attacking the Holy Sepulcher, hurling spears and stones at it—much like the pathetic leaders of Antioch who had tried to dislodge the icon of Christ in the cathedral. As the pilgrims' march drew to a close, one cleric who wandered too close to the walls was shot through the eye with an arrow. He fell dead immediately in front of Peter Tudebode, who never forgot the mocking words that the Saracens shouted at this humble procession.
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The enemy's jeering provided immediate fodder for the preachers in their sermons at the place of the Ascension. One of the men who spoke was the chaplain Raymond of Aguilers, who urged brothers to reconcile with one another so that God might grant them the city. Albert attributed the same message to Peter the Hermit and to Arnulf of Choques, Robert of Normandy's chaplain, and says that their words helped soothe the rancor that had grown between Tancred and Raymond. Probably, as was the case with the trial of Peter Bartholomew, several preachers spoke at once to different groups, all of them delivering roughly the same message.
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The most dynamic of these sermons, however, appears in the history of Baudry of Bourgueil, a chronicler who wrote in 1107, having never left Europe. He didn't accredit it to any particular preacher. It was most likely the message that he wished he had delivered if he had been able to participate in the crusade. In any case it nicely summed up what would become conventional historical thought in the twelfth century about what the crusade had meant and what the stakes of the expedition had been.
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“You know with what gall they are polluting God's sanctuary,” he said of the Saracens, “how they have subjected the holy city to so many poisons!” Just as Jerusalem pointed toward higher and more beautiful truths—toward heaven—so did these Saracens cover a darker reality. They
were not just Egyptians; they were demons. Not metaphorical demons, but real, physical, hellish servants of the devil. “In this little city the ones who are snarling at us are the limbs of others, and they are lesser and weaker than their masters.” The stakes of this battle were therefore greater than the control of an earthly Jerusalem. Heaven itself was in the balance: “For if these enemies, who are nothing, are able to triumph and to take away from us the city we now see, what do you think their lords will do, when servants dare such things?” If the Franks should prove unworthy of this earthly Jerusalem, then the heavenly one, too, might be forever closed. Physical danger, moral danger, and otherworldly danger all were converging in this single apocalyptic moment where Christians met pagans and saints fought demons.
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In order to win, the crusaders needed to become like Joseph of Arimathea, who took Christ down from the cross and gave Him a tomb where He might rest. Then they could claim victory over all enemies, external and internal. But, above all, their war was for heaven, both the crusaders' right to enter heaven and, perhaps, the very survival of heaven itself. These are esoteric concepts, but Baudry framed them in simple language any warrior could appreciate. “I am speaking now to fathers and sons and brothers and nephews: If some foreigner struck down someone in your family, would you not avenge their blood? How much more ought you to avenge your God, your Father, your Brother Whom you now see mocked and punished and crucified, Whom you hear crying out alone, begging for help?”

At heart this was a blood feud, an extended war between families typical of early medieval culture. Christ's blood had been shed. The divine Christ, who was both Father and Son, continued to suffer, to cry out for vengeance. Historically speaking, Christ's killers were not Muslims but pagan Romans and (especially according to medieval interpreters) Jews. Were the Franks really, then, avenging Christ, or were they attacking the wrong enemy? Baudry had resolved this difficulty dozens of pages earlier when he observed that Jews, heretics, and Saracens were, in the pilgrims' eyes, all enemies of God and all equally detestable.
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