The Siege of Jerusalem

Crusade and Conquest in 1099

Conor Kostick

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441126757
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

The story of the final battle of the First Crusade
The most extraordinary siege in medieval history began with the arrival of a Christian army at Jerusalem on the dawn of Tuesday, 6 June, 1099. Other sieges may have lasted longer, involved greater numbers of troops, and deployed more siege engines but nothing else in the entire medieval period compares to the extraordinary journey that the besiegers had made to get to their goal and the heady religious enthusiasm among the troops.
This was the culmination of the First crusade, a military pilgrimage that had seen hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children leave their homes in Western Europe, march for three years over thousands of miles, and undergo tremendous hardship to reach their longed-for goal: Jerusalem. No other medieval army had made such a journey and no other army had such a peculiar makeup. There were hundreds of unattached poor women, gathered from the margins of Northern French towns by the charity of the charismatic preacher, Peter the hermit, and given a new direction in their lives through the expedition to Jerusalem. There were farmers who had sold their land and homes, put all their belongings in two-wheeled carts, and marched alongside their oxen. Bards came and earned their keep by composing songs about the events they were witnessing, from songs about the heroic charges of the nobles to bawdy satires on the lax behavior of some of the senior clergy. Naturally, knights and foot soldiers were at the heart of the fighting forces, but even here there was a strange fluidity to the army, with the status of a warrior rising or falling depending on his ability to keep his horse alive and his armor in good order. The Siege of Jerusalem offers a vivid and engaging account of the events of that siege; the key figures, the turning points, the spiritual beliefs of the participants, the deep political rivalries, and the massacre of the inhabitants, which left such a deep scar in the horrified imagination of those who learned about it, that it still evokes passionate feelings nearly a thousand years later.

Chapter 1

In the Beginning

On 18 November 1095 a council of some 300 clerics from all over Europe convened at Clermont in southern France for the most important assembly of their generation. The city had been a notable political centre for hundreds of years, ever since – at the end of the first century BC – Agrippa had ordered the construction of major road east to west across France, from Lyon to Saintes. The fact that Clermont lay on such a major route helped make it the choice of venue for the pope, Urban II, to host a major synod at which he intended to establish papal authority in the country. Urban also had a special message to deliver on the last day of the council, for which announcement prominent secular lords and indeed more humble folk were encouraged to journey to the city. As the council deliberated over matters such as church reform and the scandalous affection of Philip I of France for Bertrade of Montfort, wife of Fulk IV of Anjou, the numbers arriving at the city in anticipation of the pope’s important declaration grew larger. So, on the 27 November, with its business done, once it had been realized that no building could contain the numbers wishing to attend, the assembly adjourned to a field outside the city where the papal throne had been set up.

Against the striking background of the Puy-de-Dôme, a dormant volcano, the pope delivered his message to the crowd, still and attentive, straining to hear every word. The time had come, Urban shouted, to assist their fellow Christians in the East, whose suffering at the hands of the Saracens was growing daily. The time had come, also, when Christians should cease warfare against one another. Rather, they should direct their military prowess against the enemies of God. Let the followers of Christ form an invincible army and wage war against the Saracens. For those guilty of sin, there was no better way to earn a remission of their penance than to join this Christian army in its march to the East.

‘God wills it! God wills it!’ roared the crowd in reply as they surged forward. The clergy and princes nearest the pope prostrated themselves and begged for absolution. It was a thrilling moment for those present, in which passion and excitement overwhelmed any reservations. Cold calculation and logistical considerations were irrelevant. The pope had given those present a dream. The land in which flowed milk and honey was to be theirs. Knights could earn salvation and the favour of God without having to give up the horse and lance. It was a divine mission, a pilgrimage, a war, all combined in a movement that would see God’s people marching just as though they were the Children of Israel being delivered from Egypt.

The unexpected enthusiasm and cries of the crowd meant that some of the behind-the-scenes planning was lost. It was possible, at least, to see from his gestures that the pope was appointing Adhémar, the statesmanlike bishop of Le Puy, to a special role. But the subsequent speech of the envoys of Count Raymond of Toulouse was hardly noticed except by those nearest the pope. The roars of approval and enthusiasm meant a rather confused and chaotic end to the council, which broke up without appreciating the message Count Raymond had crafted for them. The elderly veteran of decades of political manoeuvring in Provence was willing to assign Toulouse over to his eldest son, Bertrand, and lead a substantial force east in the service of the pope. Naturally, being respectful of church authority, the count did not insist on being sole leader. Rather – as his envoys put it – together Raymond and Adhémar would be another Aaron and Moses, the divinely inspired leaders of the Children of Israel.¹

This was all very well, and accorded with the perspective for the journey that had been outlined earlier, at Nîmes, when a meeting had taken place between Raymond and Urban. But their discussion had envisaged a more modest and restrained assembly held within the cathedral, where the tall vaulting provided fine acoustics for carefully worded speeches. Within moments of the Pope’s actual announcement, however, it was evident that the reality of the enterprise was going to be of much greater scope than Urban, Raymond and Adhémar had anticipated. And as the crowds dispersed from Clermont, the storm showed no signs of abating.

The world was astir. All Christendom soon became agitated by the appeal to join an armed penitential expedition to Jerusalem. The pope had stamped his foot and not one, but several enormous armies now unexpectedly sprang into being, each with their own leadership and with none of them showing the slightest appreciation of the idea that Count Raymond was another Aaron.

The message that left Clermont and began to spread rapidly around Europe ignored all but the core ideas expressed by Urban: that there was to be an expedition to Jerusalem by a Christian army greater than any that had ever been seen and those who joined it would earn a heavenly reward. Attempting to keep the popular enthusiasm for the mission from distorting his conception of it, the pope sent several letters explaining the purpose and the armed pilgrimage and restricting which categories of persons should participate. The spiritual reward that he offered participants was remission of their sins. He also set the start date for the departure of the crusade, 15 August 1096.

Urban, however, had set in motion social forces far beyond those he could control and his letters had only limited effect. For the most part the details of his message were lost. Every social class of person thought that they were eligible to participate in the journey. Everyone, including educated clerics, believed that to join was to merit more than forgiveness for their sins: to join this fight for God was to be guaranteed of a place in heaven. And many thousands of people, impatient to start, intended to do so in the spring, rather than after the autumn harvest.

It did not help the pope that a number of self-appointed preachers began to travel through Europe gathering recruits for the journey with their own version of the crusading message. There were the women who found a cross, fallen from heaven, who very many people prepared to follow to the east. Another woman made an extraordinary impression when she claimed to be the mistress of a goose that was divinely inspired. Word of this saintly bird spread through castles and towns and while there were those who scoffed at such superstition, when she reached Cambrai, a huge city then theoretically part of the empire of the German king, Henry IV (today at the north-eastern edge of France), a large assembly filled the church, to witness the woman and her goose as they arrived at the city and walked together up to the altar.² But among all the popular preachers of the journey to Jerusalem, there was one whose activities made him the dominant figure, to such an extent that for many it was he, rather than the pope, who was the authoritative voice of God in this matter.

Peter the Hermit was a small, middle-aged, man with a tremendous turn of phrase and corresponding powers of persuasion. Riding a donkey, he dressed in the humble garb of a hermit. His critics pointed out that despite this show of modesty, Peter did not forgo meat and wine, as a true hermit should. But his critics were few. As Peter travelled from town to town, he displayed a letter, which, it was popularly believed, God himself had given to the hermit. In fact, Peter’s letter was from the Patriarch of Jerusalem appealing for assistance from the Christian west. Having been in the Holy City as a pilgrim, Peter had witnessed for himself how the followers of Christ were being exploited, how the holy places of the city were refused to all those who did not have gold, and how many devout Christians died outside the walls with their desire to worship in Holy Sepulchre unfulfilled.³

Great multitudes came to hear Peter. Some, believing themselves in the presence of a living saint, strove to obtain relics from the hermit, even prizing the silver hairs from the tail of Peter’s donkey. Peter spoke to all social orders and all responded to him. The rich gave generously and with their wealth Peter was very generous on behalf of the poor. He was particularly concerned with the most unfortunate women of the cities of France. Peter’s generation, more than any other, had seen the church wage a vigorous campaign to end clerical marriage, even to the extent of mobilizing crowds to drive from the churches those clergy who refused to renounce their wives. In addition to the numbers of cast-off and impoverished women who, for one reason or another, had lost their male guardians, the towns of Peter’s day were filled with women who as a result of the campaign against the sin of Nicholiatism had fallen from a respectable and secure state to a precarious existence. To them and all marginal women, Peter offered dowries so that they could regain through marriage their lost security.

In the course of his constant travels and urgent exhortations, Peter recruited an enormous army of men and women, some 40,000 strong, for the march to Jerusalem. But it was noticeable that there were only around 500 knights amongst this force. The vast majority of Peter’s army were foot soldiers and poorly equipped farmers.⁴ Nevertheless, it was an extraordinary achievement for a hitherto unknown hermit to raise the largest army in Christendom. That success itself testified to many that divine will was being made manifest through the small but passionate preacher. For the participants themselves, their lowly status was a badge of pride: divine approval was more likely to come to the humble than the proud.

The appeal of Peter’s preaching was assisted by the fact that life for the poor was extremely harsh in 1094 and 1095, the two years preceding his Pied Piper speaking tour. In those years famine and plague had ravaged northern Europe. Famine had reduced the poor to living on the roots of wild plants, and even the rich were threatened by the shortage of crops. The ‘plague’ described by the chroniclers was in fact an outbreak of ergot poisoning in the rye crop. This sickness caused limbs to wither and blacken, as though burnt by an invisible fire. In abandoned churches the rotting trunks of the unfortunate victims of the mould were piled up in stacks. How much more attractive was the prospect of moving to the Promised Land? Hundreds of farmers seized the opportunity provided by Peter’s expedition, loaded up their carts with all their household belongings and together with their wives and children set out with the hermit. These farmers were not just intending to fight as part of a Christian army: they were emigrating. The value of land and farms collapsed as a rush of people strove to turn their fixed property into coin for the journey.⁵

At Peter’s right hand was one of the few nobles to join this popular march, the Burgundian knight, Walter Sanzavohir. Walter left Cologne for the long journey through central Europe to Byzantium shortly after Easter, 12 April 1096, with just eight knights but thousands of men and women on foot. Some eight days later, Peter followed him with a war chest full of gold from the donations of the wealthy towards the cause. As they passed through Germany, incredulous peasants scoffed to learn that this rabble intended to march all the way to Jerusalem. But soon these cynics in turn became inflamed by the excitement. Perhaps, after all, they were living in an age where God’s handiwork was more manifest than at any time since the days of Christ. Were there not signs in the heavens? The celestial portents alone testified that this was the time to abandon the routine but grim struggle for a living and exchange it for a blessed journey to the Promised Land. New armed bands formed from those who had formerly been labelled ‘Epicureans’ for their refusal to undergo the hardships of the march. Gottschalk, for example, was a German priest who had been inspired to assist in preaching the journey to Jerusalem after attending a sermon by Peter the Hermit. With his own effective speaking skills, Gottschalk drew together a sizeable army of pilgrims in the Rhineland, this time including very many knights.⁶

Right at the outset of the crusade the darker side of this popular enthusiasm for the divine mission was evident. Among the contingents that formed up in the wake of the passage of Walter and Peter through Lotharingia, Francia and Bavaria were those who turned the passions aroused by the hermit into warfare against the local Jewish population. The Jewish community of Cologne were surprised by a sudden attack on 29 May 1096 and after a great massacre, their property was shared among a crusading army. At Mainz a powerful local noble, Count Emicho, together with his fellow knights Clarembald of Vendeuil and Thomas of Marle, had been awaiting the arrival of the pilgrims to lead a similar onslaught against the Jewish population of the locality. Forewarned by the experience of their co-religionists in Speyer and Worms, the Jewish community of Mainz sought protection from Bishop Ruthard and paid an incredible sum of coin for it. But Ruthard was unable to prevent Emicho and his army breaking into the episcopal palace where most of the Jewish community had gathered and slaughtering them all, men, women and children.⁷ Is it any wonder that when news of these massacres reached the Near East, the Jewish population of Jerusalem chose to fight side by side with the Muslim population of the city against the crusading army. After all, outside the city walls were Clarembald, Thomas and other knights who had already led Christian pilgrim armies against unarmed Jews.

The idea of taking the cross and marching to capture Jerusalem appealed just as much to those at the top of the social spectrum as to those at the bottom. Although no king found the crusading message persuasive, very many senior lords – for a variety of reasons – welcomed the idea and took the cross. Of these, the most exalted in status, if not in the number of his followers, was Hugh of Vermandois, known as Hugh the Great, brother of the now excommunicate King Philip I of France. Almost as prominent in the higher reaches of the European nobility was Robert Curthose, the eldest son of Duke William I of Normandy, the conqueror of England. The adventure of the crusade appealed to this dissolute lord, who abandoned his hunting and depredations in Normandy in anticipation of pursuing the same interests in the Near East. A more pious crusader and equally prominent noble was another Robert, the second count of that name from Flanders. Robert had been regent of Flanders between 1085 and 1091 when his father, Robert I of Flanders had been on pilgrimage. These two men of the same name, but of very different character, co-operated to bring a sizeable army from northern Europe. Their acceptance of the cross had come as a surprise to the pope, who now found he had to grant the northerners their own papal legate, Arnulf of Choques, an outspoken teacher from the cathedral school at Caen who joined the expedition as chaplain to Robert of Normandy.

Not be to outdone, when Stephen, the elderly and wealthy Count of Blois, took the cross he too had the pope give legatine powers to his chaplain, Alexander. Thus as the news from Clermont had spread north, the unanticipated response to the idea of a penitential expedition to Jerusalem had required Urban to revise his initial conception of the leadership of the undertaking. Instead of one Christian army, at the head of which was the experienced Count Raymond and the Bishop of Le Puy, there were now three armies marshalling their forces with papal approval. Not to mention that Peter and several popular armies were already underway, albeit with a rather more tenuous relationship to the papacy. And the mobilization of Christendom for Holy War was not finished, for two more powerful armies formed up in support of the expedition. One was drawn from the people of Lotharingia, the other composed of Normans from southern Italy.

Three brothers of Boulogne (located in modern day north-eastern France beside the English Channel), took the cross: Eustace, the elder, destined to inherit the family lordship of the city; Godfrey, who was adopted as heir to his maternal uncle’s position as Duke of Lower Lotharingia; and Baldwin, the youngest, who had left a career in the church to enjoy the lifestyle he preferred, that of a knight. The decision of such important nobles to journey to Jerusalem encouraged many other prominent figures from Lower Lotharingia and nearby regions to attach themselves to this contingent. Not all were vassals of Godfrey, but as duke of the region from which many of them came, Godfrey carried the greatest authority in the Lotharingian army, more so, indeed, than his elder brother. In accordance with papal direction, the German contingent set out in August 1096, finding themselves travelling in the wake of the political chaos generated by the fact that on the route ahead of them had gone the various contingents of the People’s Crusade.

Last to form up were those whose general was Bohemond, leader of a south Italian Norman army. The Normans were recent arrivals in southern Italian politics, but had defeated the local nobility, the papacy and the Byzantine Empire, to become the ruling elite of the region. When Robert Guiscard, the lowly sixth son of a minor Norman family, went to Italy he did so as a mercenary, but by the time of his death in 1085, he was the Duke of Apulia, recognized as such by the papacy.

In 1096, news of the crusade reached Amalfi at a time that Bohemond, eldest son of Robert Guiscard, was fighting for the city in alliance with his uncle, Roger I of Sicily, against his half-brother, Roger Borsa. Suddenly, an entirely new horizon opened to Bohemond. He took aside his young nephew Tancred and tried to persuade the talented warrior that their fortunes would be better served in the east than squabbling over their family inheritance in Italy. Tancred was sceptical until he was promised the role of second-in-command and that he would have the same freedom of action as would a duke under a king. The agreement was struck. Norman adventurers in search of fortune knew the value of uniting together against the world and when they did so thrones tumbled. Bohemond announced to his army his intention of supporting the papal initiative. Demonstratively, he cut up his most valuable cloak to make crosses. Not only did his own men rush to follow, but also – and this was the first fruit of Bohemond’s adop...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Chapter 1 In the Beginning
• Chapter 2 Endurance
• Chapter 3 Factions and Schisms
• Chapter 4 Thirst
• Chapter 5 Siege Warfare
• Chapter 6 Preparing for the Assault
• Chapter 7 The Storming of Jerusalem
• Chapter 8 Friday, 15 July 1099
• Chapter 9 The Aftermath
• Chapter 10 Legacy
• Appendix
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• eCopyright