The First Crusade (47 page)
As the second day of the assault began on the northern front, under cover of a renewed bombardment the crusaders began to push their huge siege tower, on top of which Godfrey had placed the golden cross 'standard', towards the breach in the curtain defences and on to the main walls. This three-storey structure, some sixteen metres in height and filled with men - including, on the top floor, Godfrey of Bouillon himself - was immensely heavy, slow-moving and unwieldy. Moving the tower up to the walls was a hazardous process because once in range of the Fatimid mangonels its ponderous bulk presented a perfect target. One Latin chronicler noted: 'The Saracens defended themselves from the Franks and, with slings, hurled firebrands dipped in oil and grease at the tower and at the soldiers who were in it. Thereafter death was present and sudden for many on both sides
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Given the tightly packed streets and buildings within Jerusalem, the Fatimid garrison was able to deploy their mangonels only on or beside the main walls. This meant they could not adjust the range of their heavy bombardment to strike those who managed to get close to the city. The first stage of the siege tower's deployment was essentially a slow but deadly race, in which the defenders sought to destroy the structure with every missile they could muster, and the crusaders pushed on as fast as possible, hoping to slip under the curtain of fire. This was a high-risk manoeuvre, and at one point during the advance Godfrey was nearly killed: 'A stone flying randomly hit a certain soldier who was standing at [Godfreys] side hard on the head. His skull was broken and his neck shattered and he was killed instantly. The duke, who narrowly missed so sudden a blow, fought back fiercely with his crossbow against the citizens and those manning the mangonels
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In the end, the crusaders prevailed, perhaps in part because they had prepared the siege tower so diligently. The wattle screens tied around the structure managed to deflect many of the Fatimids' stone missiles, and the defenders had no better luck using fire: 'From time to time they hurled on to the panels protecting the engine pots vomiting flames
..
. [but they] were covered with slippery skins and did not hold the flames or live coals thrown onto them, but at once the fire slipped from the skins, fell to the ground and went out
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Once the crusaders succeeded in pushing the tower through the gap in the curtain wall the nature of the fighting changed. Both sides now exchanged frantic volleys of smaller-scale missile weapons, including slings and flaming arrows. The immense height of the siege tower now gave the Franks a significant advantage - at this point the main city walls were about fourteen metres high - allowing Godfrey and his men in the top storey to rain down a stream of suppressing fire upon the defenders. In desperation, with the tower now perhaps less than a metre from the walls, the Fatimids deployed a 'secret' weapon.
They unleashed a peculiar form of flammable missile, akin to Greek fire, that produced a flame which could not be put out by water', hoping that this finally would burn the siege engine to the ground. Luckily for the crusaders, local eastern Christians - presumably those exiled from Jerusalem - had forewarned them of this mysterious
fire
and revealed how to deal with it. Although impervious to water, the fire could be extinguished by vinegar, and so, having shrewdly stored a supply in wineskins inside the tower, the Franks countered the attack almost immediately.
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As midday approached Godfrey s assault reached its turning point. If the crusaders could keep up the momentum of attack and actually force their way on to the battlements of J
erusalem, then the tide of battl
e would turn in their favour. Suddenly, in the midst of fierce fighting, the crusaders realised that a nearby defensive tower and a portion of the city walls were on fire. Whether through the use of flaming catapult missiles or
fire
arrows, the Franks had succeeded in setting light to the main waifs wooden sub-structure. This
fire
produced so much smoke and flame that not one of the citizens on guard could remain near if - in panic and confusion the defenders facing the crusaders' siege tower broke into retreat. Realising that this breach might last only few moments, Godfrey hurriedly cut loose one of the hide-covered wattles protecting the tower and fashioned a makeshift bridge across to the ramparts. The first crusader to mount the walls of Jerusalem was Ludolf of Tournai, closely followed by his brother Engelbert These two were quickly joined by a rush of crusaders, including Godfrey, and once a foothold had been established scores of Franks rushed forward to mount the walls with scaling ladders.
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As soon as Godfrey and his men had achieved this first dramatic breach, the Muslim defence of Jerusalem collapsed with shocking rapidity. Terrified by the crusaders' savage reputation, those stationed at the northern wall turned and fled in horror at the sight of the Franks mounting the walls. Soon the entire garrison was in a state of chaotic rout. Raymond of Toulouse was still struggling on Mount
Zion, his troops close to collapse, when the incredible news of the breach arrived. Suddenly Muslim defenders on the southern front, who only moments before had been fighting with venom, began to desert their posts. Some were even seen jumping from the walls in terror. The Provencals wasted no time in rushing into the city to join their fellow crusaders. Their long-cherished dream had been realised - Jerusalem had been conquered.
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BLOODY
VICTORY
The sack of Jerusalem on 15 July 1099 is one of the most extraordinary and horrifying events of the medieval age. Over the course of three years the Latins had, through force of arms and power of faith, forged a route across Europe and the Near East. In the long-imagined moment of victory, with their pious ambition realised, they unleashed an unholy wave of brutality throughout the city, surpassing all that had gone before. The Provencal crusader Raymond of Aguilers joyfully reported:
With the fall of Jerusalem and its towers one could see marvellous works. Some of the pagans were mercifully beheaded, others pierced by arrows plunged from towers, and yet others, tortured for a long time, were burned to death in searing flames. Piles of heads, hands and feet lay in the houses and streets, and men and knights were running to and fro over corpses.
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Many Muslims fled towards the Temple Mount, where some rallied, putting up futile resistance. One Latin eyewitness remembered how 'all the defenders fled along the walls and through the city, and our men went after them, killing them and cutting them down as far as Solomon's Temple, where there was such a massacre that our men were wading up to their ankles in enemy blood'.
Some prisoners were taken - indeed Tancred and Gaston of Beam reportedly gave their banners to a group huddled on the roof of the Temple of Solomon - but even these were later slaughtered by other crusaders. As the massacre on the Temple Mount was taking place, other Franks ranged through the city at will:
After a very great and cruel slaughter of Saracens, of whom
10,000
fell in that same place, they put to the sword great numbers of gentiles who were running about the quarters of the city, fleeing in all directions on account of their fear of death: they were stabbing women who had fled into palaces and dwellings; seizing infants by the soles of their feet from their mothers' laps or their cradles and dashing them against the walls and breaking their necks; they were slaughtering some with weapons, or striking them down with stones; they were sparing absolutely no gentile of any place or kind.
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Of Jerusalem's Muslim inhabitants, few other than the Fatimid commander, Iftikhar ad-Daulah, and the remnants of the elite Egyptian cavalry force seem to have survived the general carnage. When Godfrey overran the northern walls they made a break for the Tower of David, riding at speed through the city's narrow streets. Once there, they hastily abandoned their precious horses and locked themselves within the confines of the citadel. Even so, they quickly thought better of trying to hold out against the crusaders, negotiating terms of surrender with Raymond of Toulouse.
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The sack of Jerusalem was not simply characterised by dreadful brutality. In the mi
dst of all this violence, the cru
saders' minds quickly turned to thoughts of spoils. Conditioned by the customs of war and accustomed to long years of survival through plundering, the Franks now gave free rein to their acquisitive instincts. One eyewitness remarked that 'our men rushed around the whole city, seizing gold and silver, horses and mules, and houses full of all sorts of goods'. Tancred, for one, was said to have rushed into the Temple of Solomon, grabbing all the gold, silver and precious stones that he could carry. In fact, the crusaders' pillaging seems to have been remarkably methodical:
After this great massacre, they entered the homes of the citizens, seizing whatever they found in them. It was done systematically, so that whoever had entered the home first, whether he was rich or poor, was not to be harmed by anyone else in any way. He was to have and to hold the house or palace and whatever he had found in it entirely as his own. Since they mutually agreed to observe this rule, many poor men became rich.
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Later, once the first rush of looting had died down, some Franks went to such disgusting lengths to sate their avaricious impulses that even their fellow crusaders were astounded: 'How astonishing it would have seemed to you to see our squires and our footmen, after they had discovered the trickery of the Saracens, split open the bellies of those they had just slain in order to extract from the intestines the bezants which the Saracens had gulped down their loathsome throats while alive.'
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The crusaders had apparently come to Jerusalem alight with a pious passion to do God's work, but a modern observer might be forgiven for imagining that no flame of Christian devotion could possibly continue to burn amid such a storm of greed and violence. Not so. For the sack of Jerusalem proves one thing beyond contestation - in the minds of the crusaders, religious fervour, barbaric warfare and a self-serving desire for material gain were not mutually exclusive experiences, but could all exist, entwined, in the same time and space. So it was that, fresh from bloodthirsty slaughter and rapacious plundering, the Franks suddenly turned their hands to acts of worship and devotion. In a moment that is perhaps the most vivid distillation of the crusading experience, they came, still covered in their enemies' blood, weighed down with booty, 'rejoicing and weeping from excessive gladness to worship at the Sepulchre of our Saviour Jesus'. This was the task for which they had marched
thousands of kilometres- to 'liberate' the most sacred place on earth, the supposed site of Christ's crucifixion and resurrection, to give thanks to God in the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem. A Latin contemporary rejoiced in recounting that going to the Sepulchre of the Lord and his glorious Temple, the clerics and also the laity, singing a new song unto the Lord in a high-sounding voice of exultation, and making offerings and most humble supplications, joyously visited the Holy Place as they had so long desired to do'.
All the eyewitness Latin accounts record this remarkable scene of devotion. None seems to find it incongruous. It is easy, when considering the First Crusade, to imagine the motives and emotions of its participants in modern terms, to suppose, with what we might term informed cynicism, that they, and the contemporaries who wrote about them, simply cloaked the expedition in a patina of spirituality and fervent piety so as to excuse and justify their actions. There was certainly nothing noble or praiseworthy about the Frankish sack of Jerusalem, but it demonstrates that many crusaders were driven on, not simply by bloodlust or greed, but also by an authentic and ecstatic sense of Christian devotion. The crusaders had come to the Levant as armed pilgrims. Now at last, against massive odds and at horrific cost in terms of human suffering, they had 'freed' the Holy Land in the name of Christianity.
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AFTERMATH
Jerusalem's fall on 15 July 1099 left the Holy City awash with blood, its streets littered with mutilated corpses, the air heavy with the putrid stench of death. So great had the massacre been that the sheer weight of Muslim bodies left rotting in the mid-summer sun threatened to overwhelm the Latins with disease. The princes soon ordered that the city be cleared, and the handful of Muslim survivors were forced into grim labour: '[They] dragged the dead Saracens out in front of the gates, and piled them up in mounds as big as houses. No one has ever seen or heard of such a slaughter of pagans, for they were burned on pyres like pyramids, and no one save God alone knows how many there were.' Only the Fatimid commander, Iftikhar ad-Daulah, and his troops escaped. They alone negotiated terms of surrender that were actually upheld. Having turned over the Tower of David to Raymond of Toulouse, the count escorted them out of the city with safe passage to the nearest Egyptian stronghold, the southern port of Ascalon.
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