Chapter XVIII: The Capture of Jerusalem

The Egyptian commandant of Jerusalem had not idly awaited the slow approach of its assailants. He had stored it abundantly with provisions, strengthened the walls with masonry and defensive machines, and by appeals to Moslems everywhere had completed its garrison. The suburban country was reduced to a desert, stripped of all vegetation which could furnish food for man or beast; all standing trees, and the timber in houses that might be wrought into machinery of assault, were destroyed. The wells in the valleys were filled with stones, and poison thrown into the cisterns where water had been stored.

Possibly the knowledge that the district about Jerusalem could furnish them no help led the leaders to listen to the counsel of a solitary hermit who dwelt on the Mount of Olives, and who promised in Christ’s name a successful assault if undertaken at once. It does not seem clear how an army without siege apparatus could take a place so strongly fortified. On the east the vast walls, rising from the valley of Jehoshaphat, were too lofty to tempt the most daring. Those on the south, overlooking the Kidron, were not less impregnable. The crusading army took every possibility of approach into consideration, and in imitation of Vespasian and Titus a thousand years before, stretched their lines on the north and west of the city. But only a blind faith in divine assistance could have led to the assault, even on these sides, without battering-rams or scaling-ladders. Yet at the trumpet’s call the Christians advanced. They joined their shields into a roof, which was a poor defence against the stones and boiling oil that descended upon them. Still the front ranks dug into the walls with pikes and axes, while the rear ranks of archers and slingers endeavored to drive the foe from the ramparts above. A few, finding a solitary ladder, mounted the walls, but were unable to withstand the crowd of Infidels who met them. In deep discouragement, they abandoned the assault, having learned the lesson that, even at Jerusalem, Heaven assures no enterprise which is conceived regardless of human discretion.

Events soon occurred which turned this distrust of miraculous intervention into a belief that Heaven was actually fighting against the Christians. It was a summer of fearful heat even for that land. Tasso’s description of those fiery days is as truthful as it is poetic:

“The fair flowers languish, the green turf turns brown,
The leaves fall yellow from their sapless sprays;
Earth gapes in chinks; th’ exhausted fountain plays
No more its music; shrunk the stream and lakes;
The barren cloud, in air expanded, takes
Semblance of sheeted fire, and parts in scarlet flakes.
Not a bird’s fluttering, not an insect’s hum,
Breaks the still void; or, on its sultry gloom
If winds intrude, ’tis only such as come
From the hot sands, sirocco or simoom,
Which, blown in stifling gusts, the springs of life consume.”

_Jerusalem Delivered_, canto xiii.

To avoid the burning atmosphere which drained their blood, men buried themselves naked in the ground. At night they sought to gather the dew, with which to moisten their lips. Those who found some tiny pool fought among themselves for the possession of its foul water. It seemed that the very “stars fought in their courses” against the people of God, as once against Sisera. The occasional raids of Moslems upon defenceless bands of Christians, as they wandered in search of relief, were magnified by general fear into the approach of vast armies. It was rumored that Egypt had massed its power and was approaching from the south.

But for opportune relief it is probable that the crusaders would have been compelled to raise the siege. At the most critical moment some Genoese ships entered Jaffa. Three hundred of the bravest knights fought their way through the Moslems who obstructed the road to the coast, and succeeded in bringing to the camp before Jerusalem a quantity of provisions and material for siege machinery, as well as a number of skilled engineers and artisans. They were unable to prevent the ships being destroyed by the enemy. Gathering new courage from this reinforcement, a band penetrated to the forests of Samaria, full thirty miles distant, and cut timber, which, with incredible toil, they brought back for the construction of battering-rams, catapults, and strong roofs under which to conduct their renewed operations. Among the most formidable contrivances was the movable tower, three stories high, within the base of which men worked with levers to move the structure close to the walls, while on the upper floors soldiers were massed, who at the lowering of the drawbridge descended upon the ramparts.

Encouraged by this material aid, the crusaders again sought the heavenly succor. They remembered that Joshua combined faith with valor, and that, having invested Jericho with prayers and psalms, its walls fell down. They would now repeat the experiment. For three days they held a solemn fast. On the fourth, preceded by the priests bearing images of the saints, with song and cymbals and trumpet, and burnished arms flashing in the hot air, they set out for the mystic investment of the frowning walls of Jerusalem. Beginning on the west, the procession moved northward. The entire army worshipped prostrate at the tombs of St. Mary and St. Stephen. Bending their course to the southeast, they wept at the reputed garden of Gethsemane. They then went up the Mount of Olives, and there, on the spot whence Christ had ascended, held a grand convocation. At their feet lay the landscape, hallowed by the exploits of Hebrew patriots and prophets, but chiefly by the footprints of the Son of God. On the one hand gleamed the Jordan and the Dead Sea; on the other was Jerusalem, like an altar overturned and desecrated by the presence of the heathen. Their most eloquent orator, Arnold de Rohes, harangued them as he pointed to the dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the grand objective of all their toil, heroism, and piety. Chieftains who had long cherished mutual animosity, like Tancred and Raymond, stood together in the embrace of forgiveness and the pledge to forget all their differences, while their hearts were reunited as in a celestial flame.

The Moslems themselves added fuel to the fire of Christian enthusiasm by parading on the walls of the city with crosses, which they saluted with blasphemous gestures and cries. Peter the Hermit voiced the fresh fury which swayed all breasts. He cried, “Ye see, ye hear, the blasphemies of the enemies of God. Swear to defend the Christ, a second time a prisoner, crucified afresh. I swear by your faith, I swear by your arms, that these mosques shall again serve for temples of the true God.”

Descending from the Mount of Olives, the procession moved southward, paying reverence at the Pool of Siloam and the tomb of David. As the red sun was setting in the white gleam of the Mediterranean, the host returned to their camps on the west of the city, chanting the words of Isaiah: “So shall they fear the name of the Lord from the west, and His glory from the rising of the sun.” In strange attestation of the unity of religious sentiment in antagonistic faiths, the songs of the Christians were echoed from the city by the voices of the muezzins, who, from the minarets of mosques, called their faithful to prayer.

During the night Godfrey made a rapid change in his point of attack, so that in the morning the bewildered Moslems saw the walls threatened where they had made little preparation for defence. A great ravine which thwarted the operations of Raymond was quickly filled by the multitude, who rushed amid the thick rain of arrows, carrying stones, which they threw into it.

At daybreak, July 14, 1099, as from a single impulse, the rams began their blows; the catapults and ballistæ filled the air with flying stones and blazing combustibles, and a storm of arrows swept the walls. The assault was met with equal skill and courage, and night fell upon an indecisive engagement. Raymond’s tower had been destroyed, and those of Godfrey and Tancred were injured so that they could not be moved.

The 15th of July witnessed a repetition of the carnage. The priests kept up an unceasing procession of prayer around the city, a pious exhibition, which was matched by the appearance on the walls of two Moslem sorceresses, who, as the Christians said, invoked the aid of nature and demons. In vain was the heroism and sacrifices of the crusaders. Their towers were burned and fell, burying their defenders beneath the blazing fagots. The host was beginning to withdraw from the seemingly useless slaughter. Suddenly the cry, “Look! look!” directed all eyes towards the Mount of Olives. The imagination of some one had seen—or his shrewdness, recalling the ruse of the Holy Lance at Antioch, had invented—the apparition of a gigantic knight on the sacred mount, waving his shield. The cry of “St. George! St. George!” rent the air. A timely change in the wind blew the flames and smoke of the Christians’ remaining towers towards the walls. The Moslems were blinded and choked as by the breath of unearthly spirits. Godfrey’s men rushed upon them, drove them from their defences, and, climbing over the wall, pursued them down through the streets of the city. Tancred obtained a similar advantage, and in another torrent poured his contingent over the northern end of the ramparts. The Christians within the city opened the gates, and new tides of slaughter and victory rolled among the houses. Last of all, Raymond carried the battlements which opposed him; thus the various bands met within the city. One rally of the Moslems checked but for an instant the inevitable result.

The valor of this last effort of the defendants might have elicited the magnanimity of the victors for so worthy a foe, but it only enraged their brutality. They who paused long enough in the carnage to remember that it was Friday, and the very hour when Christ died in love for all men, did not remember the simplest precepts of their holy religion, and visited their now unresisting enemies with slaughter unsurpassed in the annals of cruelty. Neither age nor sex was spared. Children’s brains were dashed out against the stones, or their living bodies were whirled in demoniacal sport from the walls. Women were outraged. Men were prodded with spears over the battlements upon other spears below, or were reserved to be roasted by slow fires amid the mockeries of their captors. In the letter sent by Godfrey and others to the Pope occur these words: “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 Saracen up to the knees of their horses.”

Both Latin and Oriental historians give seventy thousand as the number of Mussulmans who were massacred after the capture, besides those who fell in the fight. It is certain that the entire population that did not escape from the city were intended for death, for such was the deliberate decree of the council of chiefs. The blood-crazed soldiers extended the scope of this outrageous mandate to include the Jews, who perished in the flames of their synagogue. From their hiding-places in mosques, homes, and the vast underground vaults, the citizens were plucked out by the point of the lance and sword. Thus many a Moslem died in the confirmed belief of the superior humanity of his own religion, though it was called the religion of the sword.

The only apology for this cruelty that can be given is the brutality of manhood in these dark ages. The gentler Christianity of earlier days had been sadly changed by the propensities of the semi-barbaric Northern conquerors who embraced it. The church had as yet been able to affect the masses with only its dogmas and ritual, not with its deeper and more truly religious influence for the restraint of passion and the tuition of the sentiment of love. The military spirit, too, had allied itself with the ecclesiastical; as Milman says, “The knight before the battle was as devout as the bishop; the bishop in the battle no less ferocious than the knight.” The truth of this is evident from the fact that contemporary writers do not attempt to excuse it, but glory in sights the imagination of which appals our modern sensibilities. Raymond d’Agiles, an eye-witness, speaks with pleasantry of the headless trunks and bodies dancing on ropes from the turrets. The ghost of the dead Adhemar was seen in his ecclesiastical robes partaking of the triumph, but those who describe the vision report no rebuke from his lips for the carnage. Tancred and Raymond of Toulouse alone seem to have raised any voice of mercy, and they suffered the imputation of mercenary motives for their clemency.

Jerusalem was given over to the Christian spoilers. Every man secured possession of the dwelling upon which he first set his mark or name. To Tancred’s share fell the entire furniture of the mosque of Omar, six chariot-loads of gold and silver candelabra and other ornaments. With characteristic generosity, he divided the booty with Godfrey and many private soldiers, reserving fifty marks of gold for the redecoration of the Christian churches. But most precious to their credulity was the True Cross, alleged to have been miraculously discovered by Helena, the mother of Constantine, in the fourth century, which, having been stolen by Chosroes the Persian, had been restored to the sacred city by Heraclius.