Armies of Heaven (44 page)

Whatever else the crusade might have been, it was an exercise in vengeance for the crusaders' suffering and for the Crucifixion of Christ and destined to happen on a Friday, the day when “the Jewish race, desiring to
put to death their master Jesus, instead put themselves to death.” A slightly later poet, writing about the crusade in the vernacular, asked his audience to imagine Christ on the cross at Calvary, facing death but attempting to comfort the good thief Dimas, crucified beside Him. “Friend,” Christ said, “there is a people, not yet born, who will come here to avenge me with sharpened spears. They will kill these devils' pagans, who have never kept my commandments. Then all of Christendom will be cleansed, my land will be conquered and my country freed! After 1000 years it will be baptized and raised up high! And then the Holy Sepulcher shall be visited and venerated anew.”
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These were the stakes at the end of the First Crusade.

Their heads may have been in heaven, but the Franks had to keep their feet on earth. In particular, they needed to finish building siege towers—mobile wooden castles whose height exceeded a city's ramparts. In a typical assault, armies would maneuver these towers as close to the walls as possible, using them to rain down arrows on the city's defenders. The towers themselves were not intended to provide access to the ramparts but to create sufficient cover for the soldiers on the ground so that they could raise ladders against the walls, clamber to the top, and engage the enemy in hand-to-hand combat. The Franks were building two great towers, one under the command of Godfrey and the other under the command of Raymond, and apparently two smaller towers as well. They would be used in a two-pronged assault: from Raymond's camp at Mount Zion to the south and from the other princes' camp at the city's northwestern corner.

The first attack, from Mount Zion, would be relatively straightforward. The second involved some trickery, perhaps necessarily so. A double wall surrounded North Jerusalem. The Franks would need to break through the first barrier before they could attempt to surmount the second. Rather than hit the wall at the point where they were building their tower (and hence where the Egyptians would expect them to strike), they instead planned to shift their equipment at the last moment to a more favorable location near Herod's Gate. That was the trickery. They had built the tower so that it could be easily disassembled and moved. If the plan succeeded,
the Saracens would not have adequate time to reallocate their manpower and defensive equipment and thus would be less able to repel the assault. The night before the attack began, July 13, 1099, they carried out this plan. It worked brilliantly, though it seemed to Raymond of Aguilers more miraculous than strategic. “For it was at that point manifestly obvious to the all the faithful that the Lord's hand was with us.”
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The battle began the next day, as at Jericho, with a blast of trumpets. To the north around Godfrey's tower and under cover of rocks flung from catapults, the Franks maneuvered a massive battering ram into position against the wall. The Saracens did everything they could to destroy the weapon, including trying to set it on fire, but without success.

By the end of the day, Godfrey's men had smashed through Jerusalem's exterior wall. They then set the battering ram on fire to clear an opening for their siege tower to pass through the next morning. The Egyptian defenders, having passed the day trying to burn up the battering ram, now fought to extinguish the flames, but this effort, too, was unsuccessful .
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At Mount Zion the city did not have a double wall. Raymond's army needed only to move a siege tower into position and attack with ladders, but these warriors faced heavier resistance than Godfrey's men did. Jerusalem's defenders had concentrated most of their resources—nine of their fourteen catapults—against the Provençals, perhaps because the walls there seemed more vulnerable. And the defenders' effort did prove more effective against Raymond. By nightfall the Provençals had suffered heavy losses, and their tower had taken serious damage from catapults. After an exhausting day of combat and with these mixed results, the Franks passed a sleepless night, keeping watch so that no further harm came to their siege engines.
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Fighting resumed the next morning. “Everyone girded himself with weapons and sought the city together. Each man was preaching to himself; each one was his own priest, his own bishop.”

The northern Franks had only to move Godfrey's tower closer to the wall. It probably stood about forty feet high and had at least three different levels, with Godfrey at the top, directly under a golden cross—probably the one Arnulf had crafted in the deserts near Arqa. Godfrey was now “no longer a knight, but an archer, the Lord directing his hand to battle, his fingers to war.” Two other towers under the command of Tancred and
Robert of Normandy were proving impossible to move. Only when priests surrounded one of them and chanted “
Kyrie eleison
” did the massive building come unstuck. Each side, Christian and Muslim, the chaplain Raymond observed, was fighting for its religion, one army wishing to capture Jerusalem for God, the other resisting with all its might, compelled by the laws of Muhammad and tapping into the powers of the occult as well. “Two women were trying to hex one of our catapults, but a stone powerfully flung from this same machine struck the women as they sang, along with three little girls. Their souls cut down, the incantations ceased.”
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This victory over the occult notwithstanding, the Provençal cause was failing. Most of the siege equipment had broken apart, and the great tower was starting to crumble. Raymond and his closest advisors convened an emergency council, trying to devise a strategy on the fly when—suddenly—someone spotted a mysterious warrior on the Mount of Olives, brandishing a sword and signaling that the city was open to attack. “Who that knight was,” Raymond reported, “I was never able to discover.” Another writer, possibly an eyewitness, suggested an answer: The soldiers “saw a beautiful person sitting atop a white horse.” Perhaps it was a saintly warrior or the soul of a fallen comrade or maybe even the first rider of the Apocalypse, who rode a white horse and who, according to exegetical tradition, was Christ. If the identification is correct, the rider's anonymity was no accident, for according to prophecy he would have “a name written on him that no one but he himself knows.”
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What had actually happened (in historical, rather than apocalyptic, time) was that Godfrey's army had breached the northern defenses and had thus created a panic in the city. No one could agree who was the first over the walls. It may have been a knight named Lethold or his brother Englebert or Bernard of Saint-Valéry or Godfrey and Tancred together. Or was it, as some claimed, a spectral Adhémar of le Puy?

This breach occurred after one of the most dramatic moments in the battle. The Saracens atop the wall had brought forth an enormous tree trunk, attached to an equally enormous chain, and they had set the trunk ablaze with Greek Fire. This primitive chemical weapon they hurled into Godfrey's tower. But the Franks had anticipated this attack; local Christians—perhaps Tancred's friends at Bethlehem—instructed them to counteract the fire with vinegar. Thus, before the battle they had cov-ered
Godfrey's tower in ox and camel hides soaked in vinegar, and the flames never caught. At the same time, soldiers on the ground managed to latch hooks onto the chain and to drag both it and the flaming tree to earth. In the general confusion, some of the Franks inside the tower may have torn lumber from their own walls and dropped them onto the ramparts, effectively improvising walkways into Jerusalem, or else Godfrey himself broke apart a section of the wall at the top of the tower and turned it into a makeshift bridge. Whatever the case, Lethold, Engelbert, Bernard, or Godfrey and Tancred staked a place on Jerusalem's ramparts. Other crusaders approached the walls with ladders, and a celebratory massacre began.
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One writer described it as “more a slaughter than a fight.” Another said that the pilgrims pursued and killed the Muslims from behind, their backs still turned. Neither cruel nor cowardly, the killings were “deserved retribution inflicted upon the worst of men.”

Those who saw the massacre, and those who just imagined it, delighted in the simplest details. Of the Muslims, “one was laid low, struck through the head, one through the belly, another through the guts, one through the neck, another through the back.” The Franks sliced open human bodies, eviscerating them from the head to the kidneys and cutting them lengthwise from left to right. Duke Godfrey “had showed such a capacity for killing in no previous battle,” even at Antioch, when he had cut the giant Muslim in two. The deaths were, in Raymond of Aguilers's mind, “miracles.” “Some had their heads cut from their bodies (which was fairly merciful) or were hit with arrows and forced to jump from towers. Others suffered for a long, long time, and were consumed and burned up in flames. Horses and men on public roads were walking over bodies. But these things I say are trifling. Let us go to the Temple of Solomon.”
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About the killing on the Temple Mount (or Noble Sanctuary), historians reached for new literary heights. “Our pilgrims entered the city, pursuing and killing Saracens up to the Temple of Solomon. They gathered there and fought our men hard all day, so that their blood flowed through the whole temple.” This picture—of Christians tramping through rivulets of enemy blood—haunted twelfth-century writers. And still they tried to improve upon it. Guibert said that blood rose so high that it seeped through the tops of the Franks' boots. Baudry wrote that the Franks splashed around in Saracen blood up to their calves. Robert the Monk outpaced all of them. Rivers of Saracen blood flowed fast and deep and carried severed limbs and heads down the streets, torsos and extremities mixed and intermingled so that no one could have put them back together again, if anyone had been inclined to try.
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But no writer raised the level of violence, and blood, higher than Raymond of Aguilers. “And what happened there? If I tell you the truth, it will be beyond belief. Let it suffice to say that in the temple and around the portico of Solomon they were riding in blood to their knees, and up to the reins of the horses.” Raymond drew upon a specific source here: Revelation 14:20. [Plate 8] There, an angel of the Lord gathers the harvest of the earth and runs it through the wine press of God's wrath. “And the wine press was trodden outside the city, and blood flowed from the wine press, as high as a horse's bridle, for a distance of about 200 miles.” The fact that Raymond used a biblical allusion here does not mean that he did not at the same time remember seeing exactly what he described. As the chaplain witnessed and recollected the battle, in his mind he saw the Apocalypse.
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At least one other warrior felt the same way. Tancred, upon entering Jerusalem, attacked the most impressive structure in the city, the Dome of the Rock (where he had heard the greatest wealth in Jerusalem was to be found), and began immediately stripping it of its gold. While plundering the temple, he noticed a mysterious silver object. It seemed to him a statue. And as he liked to tell for years afterward, he stood before it and began to speak, or else he burst into song.

His men carried out the statue with difficulty. At the end of the day, they spared only one vessel in the entire building: a vase hanging from the ceiling, rumored to contain some of Christ's blood, or else manna gathered in the desert by the Children of Israel.
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It was a time to plunder, to kill, to bluster, but it was also a time to worship. As the fighting raged on, Godfrey of Bouillon, a descendant of
Charlemagne who, according to his brother Baldwin, carried with him the sword of the Emperor Vespasian and who had been adopted by the Emperor Alexius as his heir—in sum, an ideal candidate for the title of Last Emperor—withdrew from combat, shed his armor, and left the city with three companions. Outside the walls they took off their shoes in a way that Peter Bartholomew might have appreciated and processed around the perimeter of the city barefoot. They then entered Jerusalem at the foot of the Mount of Olives, near where the Lions' Gate is today, and marched humbly to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. The route they traced would be roughly equivalent to that later invention and pious fraud, the Stations of the Cross, or Via Dolorosa, which pilgrims of Jerusalem still follow.