The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land (11 page)

As the First Crusade idled away that long Syrian summer, the cult of the Holy Lance took hold and the popularity and influence of Raymond of Toulouse and Peter Bartholomew rose in tandem. Even so, by early autumn the count still had not managed to oust Bohemond from Antioch, nor was he in a position to declare himself outright leader of the crusade. What Raymond needed was greater leverage. From late September onwards he led a series of campaigns into the fertile Summaq plateau region to the south-east. These operations have often been misrepresented as foraging expeditions, even as attempts to initiate an advance on Palestine, but in reality Raymond’s goal was the establishment of his own independent enclave to counter and threaten Bohemond’s control of Antioch.

Part of this process involved the conquest of Marrat, the region’s major town. It surrendered after a hard-fought winter siege and Raymond swiftly initiated a programme of Christianisation and settlement, converting mosques and installing a garrison. But shortly afterwards the Latin lines of supply faltered, and some of the count’s poorest followers began to starve. This moment saw one of the crusade’s most appalling atrocities. According to one Frank:

A Latin eyewitness noted that ‘this spectacle disgusted as many crusaders as it did strangers’. Uncomfortable as it may be to acknowledge, these chilling acts of barbarism–which even Frankish chroniclers saw fit to condemn–did bring the Latins some short-term benefit. Among Syrian Muslims the crusaders’ reputation for savagery now gained currency, and in the succeeding months many local emirs sought to negotiate with their fearsome new enemies rather than risk annihilation.
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Meanwhile, as the months of dispute and inaction ground on and a succession of councils of the Latin princes proved unable to resolve the argument over Antioch, popular sentiment among ordinary crusaders began to harden. Pressure was growing for the princes to put aside their differences and focus instead upon the interests of the expedition as a whole. Events came to a head at Marrat in early January 1099 with an extraordinary outbreak of civil disobedience. Dismayed by the fact that even Raymond of Toulouse, champion of the Holy Lance, preferred to contest control of Syria rather than march on to Jerusalem, a mob of poor Franks began to demolish Marrat’s fortifications with their bare hands, ripping down its walls stone by stone. Facing this protest, Raymond finally recognised that he could not hope to lead the crusade and rule Antioch at the same time. On 13 January he made the symbolic gesture of marching south from Marrat barefoot, clad simply as a penitent pilgrim, leaving the town and his hopes of conquest in ruins behind him. Bohemond, meanwhile, remained at Antioch. The dream of achieving independent rule of the city had at last been realised, but his ambition had contributed to months of destructive delay for the crusade, and more importantly, caused severe and enduring damage to Latin relations with the Byzantine Empire.

Appearing to have prioritised the holy war, Raymond enjoyed a groundswell of support and, for a time, he seemed to become the crusade’s acknowledged leader. He took the rather calculated step of using hard cash to ensure that his new drive towards Palestine received the endorsement of fellow princes. Not all could be bribed–Godfrey of Bouillon, for one, stood aloof–but Robert of Normandy and even Tancred now shifted their allegiance to the Provençal camp for 10,000 and 5,000
solidi
(gold coins) apiece. They, and many other Christians, joined the advance south towards Lebanon.

Raymond of Toulouse’s pre-eminence now seemed assured, and it might have remained so had he continued to focus solely upon the task of reaching Jerusalem. In truth, however, beneath the appearance of simple dedication the count still yearned to create a new Provençal lordship in the East. In mid-February 1099 he committed the crusade to an unnecessary and ultimately futile siege of the small Lebanese fortress of Arqa and sought to browbeat the neighbouring Muslim city of Tripoli into submission. Officially Raymond’s excuse was that the expedition needed to pause to allow those remaining crusaders still stationed in and around Antioch, including Godfrey of Bouillon, to catch up. But even when this was achieved the count still refused to press on southwards. After two wasteful months of siege at Arqa, the masses were already restless when Raymond’s prestige was dealt a disastrous blow.

The count’s close association with Peter Bartholomew and the Holy Lance had been instrumental in securing his recognition as commander of the crusade. But as the months passed, Peter proved to be an increasingly volatile ally, given to extreme and unpredictable visionary experiences. By spring 1099 his ravings had become ever more fantastical and when, in early April, he reported that Christ had instructed him to oversee the immediate execution of thousands of ‘sinful’ crusaders, the spell broke. Not surprisingly, doubts were now openly expressed about the self-styled prophet and the relic he purportedly discovered, with the criticism spearheaded by a Norman cleric, Arnulf of Chocques, keen to reaffirm northern French influence.

Apparently convinced of the reality of his experiences, Peter volunteered to undergo a potentially lethal trial by fire to prove his own honesty and the Lance’s authenticity. He spent four days fasting to purify his soul before the test. Then, on Good Friday, before a crowd of crusaders, dressed in a simple tunic and bearing the relic of the Holy Lance, Peter willingly walked into an inferno–blazing ‘olive branches stacked in two piles, four feet in height, about one foot apart and thirteen feet in length’.

There are differing accounts of what happened next. Peter’s supporters maintained that he emerged from the conflagration unscathed, only to be fatally crushed by a fevered mob of onlookers. Other more sceptical observers described how:

However they were inflicted, Peter Bartholomew perished from the injuries received on the day of his ordeal. His demise shattered belief in his prophecies and left the efficacy of the Holy Lance in grave doubt. It also inflicted grievous damage to Count Raymond’s reputation. Raymond tried to hold on to power, but by early May, with even his own southern French supporters clamouring for the march south into Palestine to continue, he was forced to back down, abandoning Arqa and his Lebanese project. As the Franks set out from Tripoli on 16 May 1099, the phase of Provençal domination of the crusade came to end; from now on Raymond would, at best, have to share power with his fellow princes. At last, after more than ten months of delay and disillusionment, the First Crusade began its final advance on the Holy City of Jerusalem.
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As the last phase of the march to Jerusalem began, the First Crusaders were possessed by a new sense of urgency. Any thoughts of conquering other towns and ports on the journey through Lebanon and Palestine were abandoned, and the Franks, now driven by the determined desire to complete their pilgrimage to the Holy City, advanced with resolute speed. It was not devotion alone that drove the Frankish pace; strategic necessity also played its part. Back in the spring, during the siege of Arqa, the issue of diplomatic relations with Egypt had re-emerged when Latin emissaries sent to the Vizier al-Afdal a year earlier rejoined the expedition in the company of Fatimid representatives. Much had changed in the intervening period. Capitalising upon the tremors of fear that shook the Sunni Seljuq world after Kerbogha’s defeat at Antioch, al-Afdal had seized Jerusalem from the Turks in August 1098. This radical transformation in the balance of Near Eastern power prompted the crusader princes to seek a negotiated settlement with the Fatimids, offering a partition of conquered territory in return for rights to the Holy City. But talks collapsed when the Egyptians bluntly refused to relinquish Jerusalem. This left the Franks facing a new enemy in Palestine and a race against time. The crusaders now had to cover the remaining 200 miles of their pilgrimage with maximum rapidity, before al-Afdal could muster an army to intercept them or properly organise Jerusalem’s defences.

As they traced the Mediterranean coastline south, the crusaders’ passage was eased by the willingness of local semi-independent Muslim rulers to negotiate short-term truces, even on occasion to offer markets in which to purchase food and supplies. Cowed by the Latins’ reputation for brutish invincibility earned at Antioch and Marrat, these emirs were happy to avoid confrontation. Passing by the major settlements of Tyre, Acre and Caesarea, the Franks encountered only limited resistance and were deeply relieved to find a succession of narrow coastal passes unguarded. In late May the expedition turned inland at Arsuf, taking a direct route across the plains and up into the Judean hills. They paused only briefly when approaching Ramla, the last real bastion on the road to the Holy City, but found it abandoned by the Fatimids. At last, on 7 June 1099, Jerusalem came into view. One Latin contemporary described how ‘all the people burst into floods of happy tears, because they were so close to the holy place of that longed-for city, for which they had suffered so many hardships, so many dangers, so many kinds of death and famine’. Al-Afdal’s inaction had allowed the expedition to advance south from Lebanon in less than a month.
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IN HEAVEN AND ON EARTH

After nearly three years, and a journey of some 2,000 miles, the crusaders had reached Jerusalem. This ancient city, Christendom’s sacred heart, pulsated with religion. For the Franks it was the holiest place on Earth, where Christ had suffered his Passion. Within its lofty walls stood the Holy Sepulchre, the church erected in the fourth century
CE
under the Roman Emperor Constantine to enclose the supposed sites of Golgotha and of Jesus’ Tomb. This one shrine encapsulated the very essence of Christianity: the Crucifixion, Redemption and Resurrection. The crusaders had marched east from Europe in their thousands to reclaim this church–many believing that if the earthly city of Jerusalem could be recaptured it would become one with the heavenly Jerusalem, a Christian paradise. Feverish prophecies abounded of the imminent onset of the Last Days of Judgement centred on the Holy City, imbuing the Latin expedition with an apocalyptic aura.

But across more than 3,000 years of history, Jerusalem had become immutably entwined with two other world religions: Judaism and Islam. These faiths also treasured the city, reserving particular reverence for the area known either as the Temple Mount, or
Haram as-Sharif
, a raised enclosure in its eastern reaches, containing the Dome of the Rock and the Aqsa mosque, and abutted by the Wailing Wall. To Muslims this was the city from which Muhammad made his ascent to heaven, the third-holiest site in the Islamic world. But it was also the seat of the Israelites, where Abraham offered to sacrifice his son and the two Temples were built.

Just as it is today, Jerusalem became a focus of conflict in the Middle Ages precisely because of its unrivalled sanctity. The fact that it held critical devotional significance for the adherents of three different religions, each of whom believed that they had inalienable and historic rights to the city, meant that it was almost predestined to be the scene of war.

The task ahead

The First Crusade now faced a seemingly insurmountable task–the conquest of one of the known world’s most fearsomely fortified cities. Even today, amid the urban sprawl of modern expansion, Jerusalem is able to convey the grandeur of its past, for at its centre lies the ‘Old City’, ringed by Ottoman walls closely resembling those that stood in the eleventh century. If one looks from the Mount of Olives in the east, stripping away the clutter and bustle of the twenty-first century, the great metropolis that confronted the Franks in 1099 comes into focus.

The city stood isolated, amid the Judean Hills, on a section of raised ground, with deep valleys falling away to the east, south-east and west, enclosed within an awesome two-and-a-half-mile circuit of battlements, sixty feet high and ten feet thick. Realistically, the city could only be attacked from the flatter ground to the north and south-west, but here the walls were reinforced by a secondary curtain wall and a series of dry moats. Five major gates, each guarded by a pair of towers, pierced this roughly rectangular system of defences. Jerusalem also possessed two major strongholds. In the north-western corner stood the formidable ‘Quadrangular Tower’, while midway along the western wall rose the Tower of David. One Latin chronicler described how this dread citadel was ‘constructed of large square stones sealed with molten lead’, noting that if ‘well supplied with rations for soldiers, fifteen or twenty men could defend it from every attack’.
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As soon as the crusaders arrived at Jerusalem a worrying rift within their ranks became apparent, as their armies divided in two. Since the siege of Arqa, Raymond of Toulouse’s popularity had been in decline and, now, abandoned by Robert of Normandy, the count was left struggling even to retain the allegiance of the southern French. Raymond positioned his remaining forces on Mount Zion, south-west of the city, to threaten the southern Zion Gate. The campaign’s emerging leader, Godfrey of Bouillon, meanwhile moved to besiege the city from the north, between the Quadrangular Tower and Damascus Gate. Enjoying the support of Arnulf of Chocques, the priest who had helped to discredit the Holy Lance, Godfrey was joined by the two Roberts and Tancred. In strategic terms, the division of troops had some merit, exposing Jerusalem to attack on two fronts, but it was also the product of gnawing discord.

This was all the more troubling because the Franks could not pursue a long-drawn-out encirclement siege at Jerusalem, as they had at Antioch. The vast length of the city’s perimeter wall meant that, with limited manpower at their disposal, enforcing an effective blockade would be impossible. More pressing still was the issue of time. The crusaders had taken an enormous, if arguably necessary, gamble by marching at speed from Lebanon, without pausing to secure their rear or to establish any reliable network of supply. They were now hundreds of miles from their nearest allies, all but cut off from reinforcement, logistical support or the possibility of escape. And all the while they knew that al-Afdal was racing to prepare his Fatimid forces, bent upon relieving the Holy City and stamping out the Christian invasion. The near-suicidal audacity of the Latin advance left them with but one option: crack the shell of Jerusalem’s defences and fight their way into the city before the Egyptian army arrived.

The City of Jerusalem

In this final, fraught stage of their expedition, the Franks could muster around 15,000 battle-hardened warriors, including some 1,300 knights, but this army was largely bereft of the material resources needed to prosecute an assault siege. The overall size of the garrison they faced is unknown, but it must have numbered in the thousands and certainly contained an elite core of at least 400 Egyptian cavalrymen. Jerusalem’s Fatimid governor, Iftikhar ad-Daulah, meanwhile, had been quite assiduous in preparing to face an offensive, laying waste to the surrounding region by poisoning wells and felling trees, and expelling many of the city’s eastern Christian inhabitants to prevent betrayal from within. When the crusaders launched their first direct assault on 13 June, just six days after their arrival, the Muslim defenders offered staunch resistance. At this stage the Franks possessed only one scaling ladder, a pitiful arsenal, but desperation and the prophetic urgings of a hermit encountered wandering on the Mount of Olives persuaded them to chance an attack. In fact, Tancred spearheaded a fierce strike on the ramparts in the city’s north-western quadrant that almost achieved a breach. Having successfully raised their sole ladder, Latin troops sped upwards, seeking to mount the walls, but the first man to grab the parapet promptly had his hand chopped off by a mighty Muslim sword stroke and the onslaught foundered.

In the wake of this dispiriting reversal the Frankish princes reconsidered their strategy, electing to postpone any further offensive until the appropriate weapons of war could be constructed. As a frantic search for materials began, the crusaders started to feel the effects of the baking Palestinian summer. For the time being at least, food was not the main cause of concern, as grain had been brought from Ramla. Instead, it was water shortages that began to weaken Latin resolve. With all the nearby watering holes polluted, the Christians were forced to scour the surrounding region in search of drinkable liquid. One Frank recalled rather forlornly: ‘The situation was so bad that when anyone brought foul water to camp in vessels, he was able to get any price that he cared to ask, and if anyone cared to get clear water, for five or six pennies he could not obtain enough to satisfy his thirst for a single day. Wine, moreover, was never, or very rarely, even mentioned.’ At one point some of the poor died after gulping down filthy marsh water contaminated with leeches.
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Luckily for the crusaders, just as these shortages were beginning to take hold help arrived from a seemingly unheralded quarter. In mid-June a six-ship-strong Genoese fleet made anchor at Jaffa, a small natural harbour on the Mediterranean coast that was Jerusalem’s nearest port. Their crew, which included a number of skilled craftsmen, made their way to join the siege of the Holy City, laden with an array of equipment, including ‘ropes, hammers, nails, axes, mattocks and hatchets’. At the same time, the Frankish princes used intelligence garnered from local Christians to locate a number of nearby forests and soon began ferrying in timber by the camel-load. These two developments transformed Latin prospects, putting them in a position to build siege machinery. For the next three weeks they threw themselves into a furious programme of construction, fashioning siege towers, catapults, battering rams and ladders, almost without pause, but always with one eye upon the impending arrival of al-Afdal’s relief army. Meanwhile, inside Jerusalem, Iftikhar ad-Daulah looked to the arrival of his master, even as he oversaw the assembly of scores of his own stone-throwing devices and the further strengthening of the city’s walls and towers.

Amid all these determined preparations both besiegers and besieged paused only to exchange morale-sapping acts of barbarism. Wooden crosses were regularly dragged up on to the city walls to be desecrated through spitting and even urination in full sight of the enraged crusaders. For their part, the Franks made a point of executing any captured Muslims, usually through decapitation, in front of Jerusalem’s garrison. During one particularly gruesome episode the crusaders took this tactic to a new extreme. Having caught a Muslim spy in their midst, the Christians once again sought to intimidate their enemy by throwing him back into the city, just as they had done with other victims in earlier sieges. But according to one Latin contemporary, on this occasion the unfortunate captive was still alive: ‘He was put into the catapult, but it was too heavily weighed down by his body and did not throw the wretch far. He soon fell onto sharp stones near the walls, broke his neck, his nerves and bones, and is reported to have died instantly.’
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In early July, with the construction of their siege weapons nearing completion, the Franks received word that a Fatimid relief force was gathering, and the need to achieve a swift victory became even more pressing. In this moment of desperation, spiritual revelation served once again to bolster morale and empower the expedition with a sense of divine sanction. A Provençal priest-visionary, Peter Desiderius, now prophesied that the Holy City would succumb to an assault if the crusaders first underwent three days of ritual purification. Just as at Antioch, there followed a series of sermons, public confessions and masses. The army even made a solemn, barefoot procession around the city’s walls bearing palm fronds, although the Fatimid garrison showed little respect for this ritual, peppering the crusader ranks with arrows when they came into range. By the end of the second week of July, with their siege machines completed and their spirits strengthened by pious fervour, the crusaders were ready to launch their attack.