On
July 15, 1099, after a month long siege, the crusaders successfully
broke through the defenses of the Egyptian garrison, crossed over the
walls of Jerusalem and entered the Holy City. What followed has gone
down in history as an atrocity of biblical proportions. Allegedly, it
besmirched the name of Christendom for all eternity. It is used to this
day as a shorthand for all things vile and unjustified. It is cited as
an excuse for centuries of jihad. It has been called a justification for
the attacks of 9/11, and is even trotted out as evidence that
Christianity itself is not a religion of peace.
Let's look at what happened -- and put it in context.
After
two years of marching and fighting across 2,000 miles, only one in five
of the men who had set out on a great armed pilgrimage to liberate
Jerusalem from Saracen occupation reached Jerusalem. That is, four out
of five crusaders had already given their lives through disease,
starvation, cold, wounds or in combat. These roughly 10,000 survivors,
of whom roughly 1,200 were knights, were insufficient to surround the
city and cut it off from reinforcement and supply. In short, a siege
which forced the city to surrender on terms, was virtually impossible.
Furthermore,
a large Egyptian relief army was already on the way -- and the Egyptian
garrison in Jerusalem knew about it. They had, therefore, no incentive
to negotiate terms. They were not short of water, food or other
supplies. Reinforcements were already on the way. All they had to do was
wait two or three months, and then they could help obliterate the
pathetic force camped outside the walls.
The
only option available to the crusaders was to assault the city and hope
to take it before the Egyptian field army fell on them. A first attempt
on June 13 failed miserably with high casualties due to lack of ladders
and siege engines. By a stroke of luck, shortly afterwards six Genoese
and English vessels arrived in Jaffa carrying building materials. These
and the ships themselves were used to construct siege engines outside
Jerusalem. With great difficulty and in the face of fierce opposition,
the siege engines were rolled into position against the walls of
Jerusalem on July 14, 1099, but it was not until the following morning
that troops under the leadership of Godfrey de Bouillon gained a
foothold on the northern wall. His men then fought their way into the
city and opened one of the gates from the inside, allowing the rest of
the crusaders to flood in.
According to exultant Christian accounts, a massacre followed. The Gesta Francorum speaks, for example, of a slaughter so great
that "our men waded in blood up to their ankles." Raymond
of Aguilers is even more over the top writing: "men rode in blood up to their knees and
bridle reins."
Yet
the very absurdity of such a claim -- a claim ludicrous in its
impossibility -- ought to alert even the most gullible reader that the
account is not factual. Medieval readers, unlike modern readers,
recognized that the image is taken directly from the biblical account of
the apocalypse and was not intended to be taken literally. In short,
the Christian accounts of the sack of Jerusalem do not even attempt to be factual.
On
the one hand, these accounts, mostly written by clerics who had
accompanied the crusaders, were written to make their patrons (the
crusade's leaders) the heroes of the decisive conflict of their age.
They were consciously reinforcing the self-image of men who saw
themselves as the soldiers of God delivering victory over the forces of
evil. In short, they eulogies of the victors -- a medieval literary form
that had little relationship to reality in any context. On the other
hand, the Christian accounts of the capture of Jerusalem were also intended to be symbolic. Their
purpose was to conjure up images of Armageddon and suggest that the
Saracens had met their Armageddon at Jerusalem on July 15, 1099.
In
other words, the Christian sources are next to worthless in attempting
to discover what really happened in Jerusalem on July 15, 1099. So let's
turn to the Muslim sources. The most striking thing about these is that
none of these are contemporaneous, or even nearly contemporaneous, with
the event. That is, an assault and sack was was allegedly
exceptionally, horrifically, unfathomably dreadful, unusual and
unprecedented, didn't even rate a mention. There were appeals to the
Caliph and other Muslim leaders to assist in reconquering Jerusalem, but
these stressed the fact that Jerusalem had changed hands, that it was
now controlled by "infidels" and "non-believers." The fact that
Jerusalem was lost excited outrage, but not the manner in which it fell.
Not a word was wasted on that.
The
first Muslim accounts devoted to any kind of comprehensive treatment of
the crusades were not written until half a century later and, like
their Christian counterparts, are more religious tracts than histories.
Nial Christie in his excellent study Muslims and Crusaders: Christianity's Wars in the Middle East 1095-1382, From the Islamic Sources concludes:
"...later writers, many of whom were religious scholars, used their
works as a means by which to teach moral lessons....[I]t is difficult to
tell to what extent facts have been skewed to fit the writer's
agenda...." (1)
In
consequence, modern scholars of the crusades have looked beyond the
chronicles of both the crusaders and their enemies to find other clues
to what happened. For example, Jewish records from Alexandria provide
proof that Jews from Jerusalem were ransomed. Dead men are not ransomed,
so all allegations that the entire Jewish population of Jerusalem was
massacred by the crusaders are false. There are also records of ransom
negotiations for Muslim prisoners. So ends the legend that "all Muslims"
were slaughtered by the crusaders. As for native Christians, these were
expelled from Jerusalem before the crusaders even invested the city
because the Fatimid garrison feared the native Christians might aid the
crusaders. Based on the fragmentary evidence of these other sources,
serious crusades scholars nowadays estimate that between 3,000 and 5,000
people (including the Egyptian garrison, i.e. troops) were slaughtered
by the crusaders in their initial assault.(2)
The
slaughter of three to five thousand people certainly qualifies as a
massacre and an atrocity in the twenty-first century. Yet before we let
our outrage carry us away, it is useful to put things into perspective.
First, the right of a victorious army to put the inhabitants of a city
taken by storm "to the sword" is as old as the Iliad -- if not older. Second, this was hardly the first time the Holy City of Jerusalem had been subjected to such a fate. In 614,
for example, the Persians captured Jerusalem from the Byzantines after a
21 day siege and then massacred 26,500 men and enslaved 35,000 women
and children. In 1077, the emir Atsiz ibn Uvaq slaughtered "the entire
population" of Jerusalem as punishment for an insurrection. Furthermore,
in the thirty years before the crusaders' arrival, Jerusalem changed
hands violently four times between Seljuks and Fatimids.
Other
points of comparison are the sack of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258.
This was characterized not only by slaughter and plunder, but by the
wanton destruction of priceless cultural monuments and treasures
including mosques, palaces, hospitals and no less than thirty-six
libraries. The Mongols are said to have turned books into shoes. The
number of civilians slaughtered is estimated at 100,000 -- and possibly
twice that -- leaving the city shattered and depopulated for
generations.
Likewise,
the savage sack of Antioch by Baybars provides perspective on the
crusader assault on Jerusalem in 1099. In 1268, the Mamluk general
ordered the gates of the city closed while his troops slaughtered every
living thing inside -- and then he sent a letter bragging about his
brutality to the Prince of Antioch, who had not been present. Below an
excerpt:
The churches themselves were razed from the face of the earth, every house met with disaster, the dead were piled up on the seashore like islands of corpses…You would have seen your knights prostrate beneath the horses’ hooves…your women sold four at a time and bought for a dinar of your own money… your Muslim enemy trampling on the place where you celebrate mass, cutting the throats of monks, priests and deacons upon the altars…your palace lying unrecognizable…. (3)
The scale of destruction shocked the world, including the Muslim world, and was recognized at the time as the worst massacre in crusading history. It too destroyed the economic prosperity of the city, turning it into a ghost-town for generations to come. To this day it has not recovered its prominence as a cultural, intellectual, political and economic center.The
slaughter of the garrison and civilians during the conquest of
Jerusalem in 1099 besmirches the reputation of crusaders, but it was not
unprecedented, exceptional or extraordinary either in its scale or
violence.
(1) Niall Christie, Muslims and Crusaders: Christianity's Wars in the Middle East, 1095-1382, From the Isalmic Sources [New York: Routledge, 2014] 21.
(2)
Thomas F. Madden, The Concise History of the Crusades [New York: Rowman
& Littlefield, 2014] 32. Also Andrew Jotischky, Crusading and the
Crusader States [New York: Pearson Longman, 2004] 60.
(3) Baybars
letter translated by Francesco Gabrieli in Arab Historians of the Crusades
[Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957] 311.
Dr. Schrader's comprehensive study of the crusader states is available for pre-order on amazon.com.
Very enlightening!
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