Heigh-ho, cheeky monkeys! I just flew back into blogland from South Florida – and boy, are my arms tired!
OK, enough with the lame jokes and on with
The Story Thus Far: More than a year after securing the strategically important city of Antioch, the official army of the First Crusade, the Princes’ (a.k.a. Barons’) Crusade, set out toward its ultimate destination, Jerusalem, under Raymond IV of Toulouse’s command (see “Get the Hell Out of My Holy Land! Part 2”).
To protect their flanks as they marched south, the crusaders attacked the fortified city of Ma’arrat al-Numan. Ray’s men penetrated part of the wall with a siege castle and began to loot, prompting his rival Bohemund of Taranto to announce by herald that anyone who took refuge in a particular hall would be spared. When the Franks (the term applied at that time to most Western Europeans) overran the city, even those townspeople under Bohemund’s “protection” suffered at their hands; the men were slaughtered and the women and children sold into slavery.
While the Princes again bickered over leadership at yet another site, Rugia, the soldiers at Ma’arrat once more faced starvation as provisions ran out. When news that the desperate men had started tearing down the walls reached Ray and his fellow barons, they hurried back to the town – only to find that the troops had resorted to cannibalism to survive.
(As a result of this horrific incident, many Middle Eastern languages still refer to crusaders as “cannibals,” and the impression persists that the soldiers ate Muslims because they didn’t consider them human, not because they were starving.)
On January 13, 1099 Ray, walking barefoot as befit a religious pilgrim, finally led the Princes’ Crusade out of Ma’arrat, setting fire to it as they left to show they would not turn back.
By February 14 he had begun besieging the strategically vital town of Arqa near Tripoli (in Lebanon, not Libya), a venture that went wrong from the start despite his persistence. Even when his pet monk, Peter Bartholomew of Antioch’s “Holy Lance” fame, failed his ordeal by fire by, well, dying from it in April, it took Ray almost another whole month to call off the assault and move on to Jerusalem.
The Holy City in the Middle Ages represented a formidable military target in its sheer size and solid fortifications. The crusaders didn’t have the numbers to “invest” (surround) it completely, and its Egyptian Fatimid governor Iftikhar ad-Dawla had prepared for a long siege with his Muslim garrison (among other defensive measures, he sent the possibly pro-crusader Christian population out of Jerusalem), although he didn’t have enough men to guard the entire city either. The heat and dust of the Judean summer started to tell on the Franks again, and a run at the walls prophesied to succeed by a Christian hermit (not Peter, though) failed.
Nevertheless, the crusaders had received enough equipment by sea to build and deploy mangonels and siege castles against the fortressed Jerusalem. Besides, Peter Desiderius, another priest in the army who had also reported seeing visions back in Antioch, now announced that in a dream he learned that if the army fasted and marched around the city barefoot, it would succeed at its next direct attack. Once again, pious zeal (and perhaps the opportunity to rally the flagging troops) led the crusaders to follow these instructions before assaulting the walls one more time.
About noon on July 15, taking advantage of a breach in the walls made by Godfrey of Bouillon’s regiment, the detachment under Tancred, Bohemund’s nephew, penetrated deep into the streets, and it soon became clear that the Europeans would win the day. The citizens made a deal with Tancred for his protection and having crowded into the al-Aqsa Mosque (former site of the Temple of Jerusalem), they flew his banner from the Mosque. Iftikhar then negotiated safe passage for himself and his garrison from the city past the Frankish forces to nearby Ashkelon; to all intents and purposes, at this point Jerusalem was won.
Instead, all hell broke loose inside the Holy City as the invading crusaders massacred every Muslim and Jew they encountered.
Raymond of Aguilers served as Ray’s clerk and historian and his account of the slaughter, at times horrified, awe-struck, and chillingly elated, still serves as one of our primary sources for these events. He reports slogging through blood and corpses up to his knees in the Mosque where the Christians attacked the Muslims despite the promised sanctuary of Tancred’s flag. In addition, the crusaders set fire to the synagogue where the Jewish citizenry had fled and burned them all inside, presuming that they had helped the Muslims.
We don’t know for sure how many died, but Runciman says that the massacre “emptied Jerusalem of its Moslem and Jewish inhabitants….When there were no more Moslems to be slain, the princes of the Crusade went in solemn state through the desolate Christian quarter…to give thanks to God in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (page 287)” – whose destruction in 1009 could arguably be credited as the initial cause of it all.
In terms of its primary stated objective, the First Crusade was an unqualified success. It had set out with the specific goal of returning Jerusalem to Christian hands and it did. After some more of the by-now-usual politicking, the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem was established with Godfrey of Bouillon at its head. Both Ray and Bohemund went on to establish kingdoms of their own in Tripoli and Antioch respectively, but their crowns would sit far more uneasily on their and their heirs’ heads than most royals’.
Of the Crusade’s two prime movers, Pope Urban II died 14 days after the “liberation” of the Holy City before word could reach him of this great victory. His successor, Paschal II, would call for an unsuccessful “second wave” of crusaders in 1100 and 1101 to support the new Kingdom of Jerusalem; often called the Crusade of the Faint-Hearted, it provided a chance for those who didn’t go on or turned back from the First Crusade to vindicate themselves.
(Remember Stephen of Blois who abandoned Antioch at the Turk Kerbogha’s approach? His wife Adela, daughter of William the Conqueror, was so ashamed of what she saw as his cowardice that she wouldn’t let him live at home. He died during this second attempt.)
The other prime mover, Byzantine Emperor Alexius I Comnenus, had cause to worry about this triumph, for the Franks had already shown little tolerance or respect for the Eastern Orthodox Christians in Asia, and Bohemund for one had again revealed himself as his enemy. The Jerusalem bloodbath appalled even Catholics, and its memory still haunts the Middle East to this day.
(For those of you who like timelines – and you know who you are – you might want to note that just a few years before this Crusade got started, circa 1090 CE, a Muslim gentleman named Hasan ibn al-Sabbah took over the mountain stronghold of Alamut, founding a sub-sect of Isma’ili Shi’ite Islam that would come to be known – and feared – by the name of the Nizaris, or in Europe, the Assassins.)
For the Muslims had initially been willing to accept the crusaders as yet more players with whom to negotiate and occasionally combat in the already-complex political arena of the region, but the Franks’ tactics, shocking even for those admittedly violent times, fueled their determination to force these newcomers out no matter what. There would be other crusades, and more names and events on all sides to go down in history, but all interests in this conflicted area would continue to reap this whirlwind for centuries to come.
Sources: A History of the Crusades – Volume 1: The First Crusade and the Foundation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, Steven Runciman, 1964 Harper & Row, New York, NY.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/4/2/221652/0248
Got this story from Pharyngula:
Okay. ‘Tis the season, so I’m gonna talk about something that is increasingly pissing me off.
