In 1098, the Egyptian vizier was surprised to learn that a powerful army of Christian Europeans was advancing on the Holy Land. He presumed they were just Byzantine mercenaries, so he offered them a carve-up of the Seljuk empire: the Christians could take Syria; he would regain Palestine. When he discovered their object was Jerusalem, the vizier besieged the city ‘for forty days with forty catapults’ until the two sons of Ortuq fled to Iraq. Appointing one of his generals as iftikhar aldawla or governor of Jerusalem with a garrison of Arabs and Sudanese, the vizier returned to Cairo. The negotiations with the Franks continued into the summer of 1099 – the Christian envoys celebrated Easter in the Sepulchre.
The timing of the Frankish invasion was fortuitous: the Arabs had lost their empire to the Seljuks. The glory of the Abbasid Caliphate was now a distant memory. The Islamic world had fragmented into small warring baronies ruled by princelings dominated by Turkish generals – amirs – and regents known as atabegs. Even as the Christian armies marched south, a Seljuk princeling attacked Jerusalem but was repelled. Meanwhile the great city of Antioch had fallen to the Franks, who marched down the coast. On 3 June 1099, the Franks took Ramla and closed in on Jerusalem. Thousands of Muslims and Jews took refuge within the walls of the Holy City. On the morning of Tuesday 7 June, the Frankish knights reached the tomb of Nabi (the Prophet) Samuel, four miles north of Jerusalem. Having travelled all the way from western Europe, they now gazed down from Montjoie – the Mount of Joy – on the City of the King of all Kings. By nightfall, they were camped around Jerusalem.
PART FIVE
CRUSADE
Enter on the road to the Holy Sepulchre; wrest that land from the wicked race and subject it to ourselves.
Pope Urban II, Address at Clermont
Jerusalem is for us an object of worship that we could not give up even if there were only one of us left.
Richard the Lionheart, Letter to Saladin
Jerusalem is ours as much as yours – indeed it’s even more sacred to us.
Saladin, Letter to Richard the Lionheart
Have we any heritage save the sanctuaries of God?
Then how should we forget His Holy Mount?
Have we either in the East or the West
A place of hope wherein we may trust
Except the land that is full of gates
Towards which the gates of Heaven open.
Judah Halevi
When I took up my theme and said
When I to Zion from Spanish exile went
My soul from depths to heaven made ascent
Greatly rejoicing that day, God’s hill to see
The day for which I longed since I had come to be.
Judah al-Harizi
THE SLAUGHTER
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 calclass="underline" ‘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.