The Glory of the Crusades (11 page)

The Crusaders then engaged the Turks and slaughtered them. Those Muslim troops not killed by the Crusaders fled the field in a panic. Witnessing the destruction of their only hope, the defenders in the citadel surrendered and finally, after almost eight months of siege and constant combat, the Crusaders were victorious.

Part of the reason for the overwhelming success of the Crusaders against Kerbogha was their faith in Christ and the deep conviction that they were fighting and suffering for love of him. The Crusaders were “sustained by faith and determination, by that driving religious enthusiasm which was the motor of the crusade, they fought for the chance to live.”
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Another reason was the miraculous appearance of a heavenly army of angels, saints, and the ghosts of dead Crusaders, as recorded in the
Gesta
:

There came out of the mountains, also, countless armies with white horses, whose standards were all white. And so, when our leaders saw this army, they were entirely ignorant as to what it was, and who they were, until they recognized the aid of Christ, whose leaders were St. George, Mercurius, and Demetrius. This is to be believed, for many of our men saw it.
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The victory at Antioch solidified the First Crusade and drove it to ultimate victory later at Jerusalem. Although thousands of miles from home, the Crusaders had persevered through intense suffering and proved to be one of the finest fighting forces in history. The liberation of Antioch has since been well remembered in Christendom as “a terrible struggle, a military epic indeed, the success of which was more than adequate demonstration that their journey was the work of God.”
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Departure for Jerusalem

After the defeat of Kerbogha’s army, the Crusaders rested and replenished their supplies while they planned for the eventual assault of Jerusalem. During the rest, internal politics among the leaders once more returned to dominate the Crusade. Unfortunately, Bishop Adhemar, the papal legate and the chief mediator among the personality conflicts of the nobles, died of typhoid fever on August 1, 1098. The loss of Adhemar was a huge blow to the Crusade that “further fractured the expedition’s cohesion and direction by removing the one accepted figure of moral authority and religious stature who transcended factional and regional divisions.”
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As any field commander recognizes, it is extremely difficult to keep an army on the march or in the field for an extended period of time without a mission or objective to accomplish. By the fall of 1098 the rank-and-file soldiers were restless and eager to march on Jerusalem.

Cannibalism

While the Crusaders waited to march on Jerusalem, they decided to try and consolidate their hold on Antioch by liberating territory near the city. In late November 1098, the forces of Godfrey and Bohemond besieged the city of Marra, which “was neither a large nor an important place and its defenses were not strong.”
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The siege of Marra provided one of the most infamous events in Crusading history: cannibalism by Crusaders. Fulcher of Chartres records what happened:

Here, when the siege had lasted twenty days, our people suffered excessive hunger. I shudder to tell that many of our people, harassed by the madness of excessive hunger, cut pieces from the buttocks of the Saracens already dead there, which they cooked, but when it was not yet roasted enough by the fire, they devoured it with savage mouths.
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Most accounts indicate that only a small minority of Crusaders, perhaps a group of landless knights known as the Tafurs, engaged in cannibalism, and only due to their state of near starvation. The awful event illustrates the extreme situations Crusaders encountered throughout their journey—situations that the vast majority of Crusaders endured without resorting to desperate acts.

The Siege Begins

In January 1099, the order was given at last, and the Crusaders departed for the Holy City. Raymond of Toulouse began the 450-mile journey barefoot and dressed as a humble pilgrim.

From an original force of 6,000 to 7,000 knights and 60,000 fighting men, the total that left Antioch was only 1,200 knights and 12,000 infantry; the events of the Crusade had certainly taken their toll.
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In May they entered Fatimid territory north of Beirut and marched by the cities of Sidon, Tyre, Acre, and Haifa, each of which gave the Crusaders provisions in exchange for safety.

In early June the lead elements of the Crusade army reached the inland road to Jerusalem, their objective within reach, a full two years after the liberation of Nicaea. A great sense of relief combined with the expectation of much suffering ahead must have pervaded the armies. By the time they arrived at the walls of the Holy City on June 7 they were certainly aware that the liberation of Jerusalem was not an easy proposition. The city had double walls, along with moats. The defenders were not as numerous as the attacking Crusaders, but they were well supplied.

Iftikhar al-Dawla, the Fatimid governor, took extra steps to make conditions for a long-term siege intolerable to the Crusaders. He ordered all animal herds driven from the environs of the city in order to deny the Crusaders easy access to food. He also poisoned the wells near the city, forcing the Crusaders to haul water from the Jordan River and other sources that were miles away.

Almost a week after their arrival on June 13, the Crusaders, despite the lack of proper siege equipment, decided to attack the city. Utilizing only one scaling ladder, they managed to breach the outer wall of defense. They were unable to surmount the inner rampart, however, and after heavy losses were forced to retreat.

While the Crusaders pondered how they could possibly gain entry without proper siege equipment, the Lord once again provided a solution. On June 17 six Genoese and English ships sailed into the port city of Jaffa. The ships carried not only provisions and wood for siege equipment but personnel who could construct proper siege engines and towers.

Arrival of the ships and construction of the siege equipment came at the perfect time, for in early July the Crusaders discovered that a Fatimid relief army was on the march from Egypt and would arrive at Jerusalem within a month. The Crusaders, as they had been at Antioch, were now engaged in a race against time.

Imitating Joshua

The death of Bishop Adhemar almost a year earlier at Antioch was still keenly felt, but the papal legate returned once more to exhort the Crusaders to complete their pilgrimage. The priest, Peter Desiderius, announced that the spirit of Adhemar had appeared to him and rebuked the Crusade leaders for their personal quarrels:

“Speak to the princes and all the people, and say to them: ‘You who have come from distant lands to worship God and the Lord of hosts, purge yourselves of your uncleanliness, and let each one turn from his evil ways. Then with bare feet march around Jerusalem invoking God, and you must also fast. If you do this and then make a great attack on the city on the ninth day, it will be captured. If you do not, all the evils that you have suffered will be multiplied by the Lord.’”
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The Crusaders heeded the advice of Adhemar in Peter’s vision. They fasted for three days, and on July 8 they processed around the city, barefoot and unarmed, singing prayers and bearing relics, including the Holy Lance from Antioch. The Muslim defenders
mocked the Crusaders’ imitation of Joshua and the Israelites at Jericho by hitting and abusing crosses that they hanged over the city walls.
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Miraculously, the defenders never sallied forth from the city to engage the Crusader host while it was the most defenseless. The great procession ended at the Mount of Olives where Raymond d’Aguilers, Arnulf of Choques, and Peter the Hermit encouraged the warriors of Christ with their preaching.

The Final Assault

The Crusaders attacked Jerusalem on July 13, using siege towers and battering rams at two locations. Godfrey had positioned his tower at a northern area of the city near Herod’s Gate and the church of St. Mary Magdalene; this crucial placement ended up catching the defenders by surprise. As the city’s occupiers struggled to repair the wall, they desperately fired catapults at the attacking Crusaders.
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Raymond’s army in the south met with less success; they had placed themselves near Zion Gate, a location that could be defended by nine of the city’s fourteen catapults. Raymond’s warriors suffered heavy causalities.

Although the two army groups were separated, they maintained cohesion of attack by communicating with signalers who used reflectors that had been placed on the Mount of Olives.
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At three o’clock in the afternoon, the hour of Crucifixion, on Friday, July 15, the Feast of the Dispersal of the Apostles, the Crusaders achieved their final objective and entered the Holy City. 460 years from its initial capture by the forces of Mohammed, Jerusalem was once again in Christian hands.

The “Massacre”

As was common in medieval warfare, in Christendom as well as in the Islamic world, a city that refused surrender found itself at the mercy of the attacking army once it forced its way in, which is the reason why many leaders came to terms with an attacker rather than risk a siege.
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Most attacking armies preferred the city’s surrender since it spared the army from causalities and prevented destruction of the city. Once inside Jerusalem, the Crusaders went on a rampage and killed many Muslim troops as well as non-combatants. This event has been described as the “Massacre of Jerusalem” and is used as a weapon for attacking the Crusades and the Church. Detractors, without attempting to understand the historical context of warfare at the time, reference this “massacre” to cast doubts on the morals and motivations of the Crusaders. Many even point to this event as a reason for the recent attacks by Islamic terrorists on the West. Former President Bill Clinton did so in a speech at Georgetown University on November 7, 2001:

Those of us who come from various European lineages are not blameless. Indeed, in the First Crusade, when the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem, they first burned a synagogue with 300 Jews in it, and proceeded to kill every woman and child who was Muslim on the Temple Mount. The contemporaneous descriptions of the event describe soldiers walking on the Temple Mount, a holy place to Christians, with blood running up to their knees. I can tell you that that story is still being told today in the Middle East, and we are still paying for it.
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While there is no doubt many were killed, we must not exaggerate what happened. Many inhabitants of the city (including Jews) were not killed but captured and ransomed; others were expelled from the city.
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The idea that this event, which occurred over 900 years ago, is the reason for Muslim hatred of the West is absurd and illustrates a complete misunderstanding of the Crusading movement and its impact on the Islamic world.

The event is well known because both Islamic and Christian chroniclers recorded it, although there are discrepancies among the various accounts: some claim the massacre went on for several days, others that it occurred on the first day only. The Christian sources do not agree on how many were killed; Fulcher records that 10,000 were massacred, while others indicate only several hundred. Some Islamic sources provide widely inflated numbers, claiming upwards of 75,000 killed (the city’s entire population was between 20,000 and 30,000). It is probable that anywhere from several hundred to 3,000 were slain by the Crusaders.

One interesting thing is the similar language used in the Christian sources to describe the bloodshed. The
Gesta
records that “the slaughter was so great that our men waded in blood up to the ankles.”
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Fulcher of Chartres recorded that “within this Temple about ten thousand were beheaded. If you had been there, your feet would have been stained up to the ankles with the blood of the slain.”
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In a letter sent to Pope Paschal II, the Crusade leaders informed the pope about the killings, writing “and if you desire to know what was done with the enemy who were found there, know that in Solomon’s Porch and in his temple our men rode in the blood of the Saracens up to the knees of their horses.”
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Finally, Raymond d’Aguilers recalled this event and wrote, “[I]t is sufficient to relate that in the Temple of Solomon and the portico crusaders rode in blood to the knees and bridles of their horses.”
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Most Christian accounts of the initial events in Jerusalem after the Crusader liberation utilize similar language in describing the amount of blood spilled by those killed, the same expression used by President Clinton: The blood of the slain was either ankle-deep, calf-deep, or up to the knees of horses.

What most modern people, including the former president, fail to understand is that this language was not meant to be taken literally or to leave a factual record of the numbers of those killed. Rather it was intended to recall passages of Scripture that medieval people would instantly recognize—such as Revelation 4:20, which says, “and the wine press was trodden outside the city, and blood flowed from the wine press, as high as a horse’s bridle for 1,600 stadia.”
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In the Old Testament this image of “treading a wine press” was “without exception a metaphor of judgment.”
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(See, for example, Isaiah 63:3.)