Catapulted firebombs careened into the Frankish tower, but, shielded by slick hide-swathed wattle screens, these failed to catch and the siege engine held solid, inching ever forwards. At last, near noon, it passed through the rift in the outer defences to reach the main walls. With the crusaders now just yards from the ramparts and both sides exchanging frenzied volleys of smaller-scale missile weapons, the Fatimids made a final attempt to stem the assault, employing their own ‘secret’ weapon. They had prepared a huge wooden spar, soaked in a combustible material, akin to Greek fire (a naphtha-based incendiary compound), which could not be extinguished by water. This beam was set alight and then hefted over the walls to land in front of Godfrey’s engine as a flaming barrier. Luckily for the Latins, they had been tipped off by local Christians about the one weakness of this terrible, impervious fire: it could be quenched by vinegar. Godfrey had thus stocked the tower with a supply of vinegar-filled wineskins, and these were now used to douse the flaming conflagration. As Franks on the ground dashed in to pull away the smouldering timber, the path ahead to the battlements was at last opened.
The success of the Latin offensive now depended on gaining an actual foothold on the city’s ramparts. The immense height of the siege tower gave the Franks a significant advantage–at this point the main walls rose to about fifty feet–allowing Godfrey and his men in the top storey to rain down a stream of suppressing fire upon the defenders. Suddenly, in the midst of fierce fighting, the crusaders realised that a nearby defensive tower and a portion of the battlements were burning. Whether through the use of flaming catapult missiles or fire arrows, the Franks had succeeded in igniting the main wall’s wooden substructure. This blaze ‘produced so much smoke and flame that not one of the citizens on guard could remain near it’–in panic and confusion the defenders facing the crusaders’ siege tower broke into retreat. Realising that this opening might last only moments, Godfrey hurriedly cut loose one of the wattle screens protecting the tower, fashioning a makeshift bridge across to the ramparts. As the first group of crusaders poured on to the walls, scores of Franks raced forward below with scaling ladders and began climbing up to reinforce their position.
Once Godfrey and his men achieved this first dramatic breach, the Muslim defence of Jerusalem collapsed with shocking rapidity. Terrified by the crusaders’ brutal reputation, those stationed at the northern wall turned and fled in horror at the sight of the Franks cresting the battlements. Soon the entire garrison was in a state of chaotic disorder. Raymond of Toulouse was still struggling on Mount Zion, his troops seemingly on the brink of defeat, when the incredible news of the breakthrough arrived. Suddenly Muslim defenders on the southern front, who only moments before had been fighting with venom, began to desert their posts. Some were even seen jumping, terrified, from the walls. The Provençals wasted no time in rushing into the city to join their fellow crusaders, and the sack began.39
The horror of ‘liberation’
Soon after midday on 15 July 1099 the First Crusaders achieved their long-cherished dream–Jerusalem’s conquest. Surging through the streets in blood-hungry, ravening packs, they overran the Holy City. What little Muslim resistance remained melted away before them, but most Franks were in no mood to take prisoners. Instead, three years of strife, privation and yearning coalesced to fuel a rampaging torrent of barbaric and indiscriminate slaughter. One crusader joyfully reported:
With the fall of Jerusalem and its towers one could see marvellous works. Some of the pagans were mercifully beheaded, others pierced by arrows plunged from towers, and yet others, tortured for a long time, were burned to death in searing flames. Piles of heads, hands and feet lay in the houses and streets, and men and knights were running to and fro over corpses.
Many Muslims fled towards the Haram as-Sharif, where some rallied, putting up futile resistance. A Latin eyewitness described how ‘all the defenders retreated along the walls and through the city, and our men went after them, killing them and cutting them down as far as the [Aqsa mosque], where there was such a massacre that our men were wading up to their ankles in enemy blood’. Tancred gave his banner to a group huddled on the roof of the Aqsa, designating them as his captives, but even they were later slain in cold blood by other Franks. So gruesome was the carnage that, according to one Latin, ‘even the soldiers who were carrying out the killing could hardly bear the vapours rising from the warm blood’. Other crusaders ranged through the city at will, slaughtering men, women and children, both Muslims and Jews, all the while engaging in rapacious looting.40
Neither Latin nor Arabic sources shy away from recording the dreadful horror of this sack, the one side glorying in victory, the other appalled by its raw savagery. In the decades that followed Near Eastern Islam came to regard the Latin atrocities at Jerusalem as an act of crusader barbarity and defilement, demanding of urgent vengeance. By the thirteenth century, the Iraqi Muslim Ibn al-Athir estimated the number of Muslim dead at 70,000. Modern historians long regarded this figure to be an exaggeration, but generally accepted that Latin estimates in excess of 10,000 might be accurate. However, recent research has uncovered close contemporary Hebrew testimony which indicates that casualties may not have exceeded 3,000, and that large numbers of prisoners were taken when Jerusalem fell. This suggests that, even in the Middle Ages, the image of the crusaders’ brutality in 1099 was subject to hyperbole and manipulation on both sides of the divide.
Even so, we must still acknowledge the terrible inhumanity of the crusaders’ sadistic butchery. Certainly, some of Jerusalem’s inhabitants were spared; Iftikhar ad-Daulah for one took sanctuary in the Tower of David and later negotiated terms of release from Raymond of Toulouse. But the Frankish massacre was not simply a feral outburst of bottled rage; it was a prolonged, callous campaign of killing that lasted at least two days and it left the city awash with blood and littered with corpses. In the midsummer heat the stench soon became intolerable, and the dead were dragged out beyond the city walls, ‘piled up in mounds as big as houses’ and burned. Even six months later a Latin visiting Palestine for the first time commented that the Holy City still reeked of death and decay.
The other unassailable truth of Jerusalem’s conquest is that the crusaders were not simply driven by a desire for blood or plunder; they were also empowered by heartfelt piety and the authentic belief that they were doing God’s work. Thus that first, ghastly day of sack and slaughter concluded with an act of worship. In a moment which perfectly encapsulated the crusade’s extraordinary fusion of violence and faith, dusk on 15 July 1099 saw the Latins gather to give tearful thanks to their God. A Latin contemporary rejoiced in recounting that, ‘going to the Sepulchre of the Lord and his glorious Temple, the clerics and also the laity, singing a new song unto the Lord in a high-sounding voice of exultation, and making offerings and most humble supplications, joyously visited the Holy Place as they had so long desired to do’. After years of desperate suffering and struggle, the First Crusaders’ terrible work was done: Jerusalem was in Christian hands.41
AFTERMATH
The crusaders’ thoughts soon turned to the fate of their new conquest. Having travelled 2,000 miles to claim Jerusalem for Latin Christendom, it was clear to all that the city would now have to be governed and defended. The clergy contended that a site of such rarefied sanctity should not be subjected to the rule of a secular monarch, arguing instead for the creation of a Church-run ecclesiastical realm, with the Holy City as its capital. But because Jerusalem’s Greek patriarch had died recently in exile in Cyprus, there was no obvious candidate to champion this cause. Raymond of Toulouse eyed the position of Latin king, but his popularity had been waning since Arqa and, on 22 July 1099, Godfrey of Bouillon, chief architect of the crusaders’ victory, took up the reins of power. In a gesture of conciliation to the clergy he accepted the title of ‘Advocate of the Holy Sepulchre’, implying that he would merely act as Jerusalem’s protector.42