The fall of Crusader Jerusalem

Balian of Ibelin - The Christians butchered every Muslim within the walls when they took this city.

Saladin - I am not those men.

Saladin - I am Saladin.

Saladin - Saladin.

Balian of Ibelin - Then, under these terms, I surrender Jerusalem.

Kingdom of Heaven(Director's Cut) [Blu-ray]

After occupying Ascalon on 5 September, Saladin advanced on Jerusalem. By mid- September he had taken the monasteries and villages in the outskirts of the city, including the Premonstratensian monastery of Montjoie (Nabi Samâwil), the monks of which appear to have been unsuccessfully racing against time to complete their fortifications and moat. Saladin himself arrived at Jerusalem on Sunday 20 September. By this time the population of the city had swelled considerably. Franks from Ascalon, Darum, Gaza, Ramleh and other towns and villages had fled to the capital. Goods were brought in from the surrounding countryside to supply the city’s needs in preparation for the expected siege.

After the Frankish defeat at Hattin, Balian of Ibelin, lord of Nablus, received permission to come to Jerusalem in early July to take away his wife, Maria Comnena and his family. Saladin permitted this on condition that he did not remain more than one night or take up arms in defence of the city. On arriving in Jerusalem, Balian was welcomed by church leaders and the populace as the badly needed leader of the city’s defence. The commanders of the Templars and the Hospitallers maintained that it was his moral obligation to defend Jerusalem. The greatest pressure on Balian was exerted by Patriarch Eraclius. Balian was in a difficult position because of his oath to Saladin, which he felt bound to uphold. He chose the extraordinary action of applying to Saladin to release him from his oath, and Saladin with even more remarkable magnanimity agreed to do so. Balian immediately set up a provisional government, organizing a makeshift army as there were almost no fighting men in the city. ‘Imad al-Dîn and Ibn Shaddâd describe Jerusalem as being filled with more than 60,000 fighting men, and Ibn al-Athîr refers to 70,000 cavalry and infantry. However, these numbers are pure propaganda, doubtless aimed at glorifying the achievement of the Ayyubid army. According to the Chronicle of Ernoul and Bernard the Treasurer there were only two knights in the city who had escaped from Hattin! In order to alleviate the situation, Balian knighted all noble youths over the age of fifteen and promoted some forty burgesses to knighthood. Gold and silver were stripped from the roof of the Holy Sepulchre to be used for minting coins to pay the new knights.

The events which followed mirror, to some extent, the siege of Jerusalem by the Frankish armies in 1099. The defenders procured supplies from the surrounding countryside and took up positions around the walls. On 21 September the besieging army advanced on the northern and north-western walls. Attacks on these positions continued for several days, but to no avail. With their backs to the wall, the Franks seem to have regained the tenacity they had lost at Hattin. The realization that they were defending the Holy Sepulchre itself must have strengthened their motivation.

The next move of the Muslims once again echoes the manoeuvres of the Crusaders in 1099. On Friday 26 September they took up position further to the east, on the northern wall, in the area of St Mary Magdalene’s postern and opposite the northern part of the eastern city wall. One major difference between the two sieges was that the Muslim army was well equipped with siege machinery. They set up mangonels and began a bombardment of the walls. A tremendous hail of arrows was fired by at least 10,000 archers at the defenders, preventing them from remaining on the walls. These measures allowed the Muslim attackers, defended by another 10,000 mounted men armed with lances and bows, to cross the ditch and set to work at sapping the walls, until a section of the forewall collapsed. This, in effect, sealed the fate of Jerusalem. The Franks, realizing the hopelessness of their position, asked for terms. Saladin initially refused and, in desperation, Balian of Ibelin warned him in no uncertain terms of the drastic measures that the Franks were prepared to take. According to Ibn al- Athîr, Balian said that the Franks would kill the women and children and all the Muslim prisoners, between 3,000 and 5,000, destroy their property and, most appalling of all, dismantle the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque. This had the desired effect and Saladin agreed to let the Franks ransom themselves. He first demanded 100,000 bezants, a sum which Balian told him was unrealistic. In the end, the terms agreed upon were ten dinars for a man, five for a woman and one for a child. The Franks were given forty days to raise the ransom money. These terms were beyond the means of most of the inhabitants; while many were freed without payment, many others were taken into captivity. Ibn al-Athîr gives the number of Franks expelled from the town as 60,000.

The city had surrendered on Friday 2 October 1187, and the departure of the Franks was completed by 10 November. The Muslims celebrated their recovery of the city with special prayers in the restored mosques. According to ‘Imad al-Dîn, Saladin wished to purify the city ‘of the filth of the hellish Franks’. He did this by turning mosques that had been converted by the Franks into churches back into mosques, by removing the church furnishings and erasing the structural changes made to these buildings, and by converting other structures built by the Franks into mosques and madrasas. He tore down the gilded cross from the Dome of the Rock and dismantled many of the Christian structures on the Temple Mount, including the monastery of the Augustinian canons which was located to the north of the Templum Domini (Dome of the Rock). The latter was cleansed and most of the changes made to the building by the Franks were removed, including the marble plates placed over the rock to preserve it from being damaged by the pilgrims, frescoes, Latin inscriptions and the altar. However, the Romanesque iron grille around the rock and the iron lampstands were left in place. Churches in the city and outside the walls were damaged or dismantled. Wood, iron, doors and marble flooring were stripped from them. The Holy Sepulchre however, was spared. Some of the emirs had wished to destroy it in order to put an end to Christian pilgrimage, but there was apparently fairly strong opposition to this by those who pointed out that Caliph ‘Umar had not done so when he took the city in the seventh century. It was also noted that it was not the building that the Christians worshipped, but the place of the Cross and the tomb. Rather than destroying the church, they closed it to the general public and a fee of ten bezants was demanded of visitors. On 27 October 1189 Saladin converted the Patriarch’s Palace into a hospice for Sufis known as al-Khankah al-Salâhiyya. A few years later, on 26 July 1192, he converted the church and convent of St Anne into a school of law, the al- Madrasa al-Sâlahiyya. The spire was torn down from the church of the Hospital, which was turned into a college for Shâfi‘ites.

In 1191 Saladin carried out repairs to the city walls. He realized that it was imperative to strengthen the walls and prepare the city for the expected attack by Richard I and his army. In this period Saladin resided in the ‘house of the priests by the Sepulchre’ (possibly the patriarch’s palace or the quarters of the Augustinian canons), while he personally supervised the work. The Arab historian, Mujîr al-Dîn (1456–1522) records that for this purpose he brought 2000 Frankish prisoners to the city, and a group of fifty masons were sent from Mosul to dig a ditch around the walls. He restored or rebuilt towers on the wall between St Stephen’s Gate and David’s Gate. Stone was quarried from the moat for the rebuilding and, to supplement this source, buildings outside the walls, including the church of St Mary of Mount Zion, the upper church of the Sepulchre of the Virgin Mary in Jehoshaphat, and perhaps the church of St Lazarus, were dismantled. From these measures we can conclude that in the east and south of the city, the destruction of the city walls during the siege in 1187 had been extensive. Damage to the fortifications in the south, although not referred to in the descriptions of the siege, would explain the rebuilding of the walls at this time to include Mount Zion within the fortifications once again. This measure was carried out by Saladin’s brother, al-Malik al-‘Adîl.

Under Ayyubid rule Christian pilgrims were allowed to visit the city, but they were subject to heavy restrictions. They were limited in their movement within the city and were probably forced to pay for entrance to most of the holy sites. However, a truce concluded between Saladin and Richard the Lion Heart in 1192 put an end to the ten bezant fee required on entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. In order to control and limit pilgrim traffic into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the eastern portal of the main gate was blocked, as was the entrance to Calvary via the external Chapel of the Franks. It may have been during this period that the western entrance from the Street of the Patriarch into the Rotunda was also blocked. According to La Citez, pilgrims were forced to use a northern entrance via the canons’ quarters and their passage through the city was restricted to a single route from the St Lazarus postern on the northern wall directly to the church. Despite these restrictions, pilgrimage continued and Christians visited the city between 1187 and 1229, though undoubtedly in smaller numbers than under the Franks. There are indications that under Ayyubid rule the economic base of the city was considerably weakened, no doubt a direct result of the decline in the number of Western pilgrims visiting Jerusalem. This economic decline compelled the leadership to supplement the city’s revenues with a third of those of Nablus, whose administrator offered to shoulder all the expenses of Jerusalem and of the troops in the city. In these circumstances it is perhaps not surprising to find that there is even some evidence for a partial change of heart on the part of the Muslim leadership regarding Christian pilgrimage and a selective promotion of pilgrimage.

Jerusalem on the eve of the Crusades

Just over four and a half centuries had passed since Jerusalem had come under Muslim rule. In AD 614, after a twenty-day siege, Byzantine Jerusalem had been conquered by the Persians. Although the city was recaptured fourteen years later by Emperor Heraclius, the Persian victory of 614 heralded the approaching end of Christian Jerusalem. Two decades later, between AD 636 and 638 the Holy City fell to the Muslim army of Caliph ‘Umar. For the next four and a half centuries Jerusalem was held by a succession of Muslim military governors representing foreign rule: the Umayyads ruling from Damascus until 750, the Abbasids from Baghdad until 878, the Egyptian Tulunid caliphate from 868 to 905 and Fatimid caliphate from 969 until 1073. In June of that year the Turkish Seljuks took the city and in 1098, one year before the arrival of the army of the First Crusade, Jerusalem reverted to Fatimid rule.

In general, under the Muslims the physical layout of Jerusalem differed little from that of the Byzantine city. The only major change was the eleventh-century reconstruction of the city wall in the south, which left the City of David and Mount Zion outside the walls, and the realignment of the north-west wall somewhat further to the west. However, major alterations were made to the urban infrastructure by the construction of many new and remarkable public buildings. The most important of these were the Dome of the Rock, the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Umayyad palaces south of the Temple Mount (Haram al-Sharîf).

The population of Jerusalem in the Fatimid period approached twenty thousand. It was a diverse amalgamation of Jews, various communities of Eastern Christians and Muslims. Several hundred years after the Islamic conquest, the Muslims may still not have been the majority and do not appear to have been entirely in control of the city. Christian and Jewish pilgrimage continued, in spite of the difficulties and dangers involved.

Nasir-i Khosraw described Jerusalem as a great city with strong walls, iron gates, high, well-built bazaars and paved streets. The Seljuk occupation of the city from 1073 until 1098 has left no evidence for any major construction in that period. However, there is evidence for a religious-intellectual revival in the city after a certain spiritual drought under the Fatimids. In August 1098, the Fatimids under the command of the vizier, al-Afdal ibn Badr al-Jamâlî, reoccupied Jerusalem. In preparation for the anticipated arrival of the Crusader armies, which by that time were approaching Antioch, the Fatimid governor Iftikhâr al-Dawla stationed in the city a large, welltrained army augmented by a special Egyptian corps of 400 élite cavalry. The Muslims prepared for the arrival of the Crusaders by strengthening the city walls, particularly in the north, where they built or strengthened an existing barbican and ditch, and on Mount Zion, where they cut another ditch and possibly reconstructed the forewall. Residents of surrounding villages moved inside the walls, and the greater part of the Christian population was expelled from the city to the outlying villages. The latter was a precaution against possible treachery on the part of the Christians, who were understandably suspected of harbouring aspirations of a return to Christian rule.

Conquest and occupation in the twelfth century

On 27 November 1095, in the town of Clermont in central France, Pope Urban II called on Western Christianity to organize an army to free the Holy Sepulchre from the hands of the infidel. In the following year a great crusade was organized and set out for the East. On the morning of 7 June 1099 the army of the First Crusade arrived at a hill subsequently known as Montjoie, from where they could see Jerusalem in the distance. This was probably Nabi Samâwil, one of the highest hills in the Judaean Mountains and traditional site of the burial place of the prophet Samuel, located 7.5 km north-west of Jerusalem. By dusk they were camped outside the city walls. The six week siege of Jerusalem, the culmination of the three years of the First Crusade, began.

According to the Frankish chronicler, William, archbishop of Tyre, on the Frankish side there were some 1,500 knights, 20,000 foot-soldiers and 18,500 followers. On the Muslim side there were an estimated 40,000 well-equipped soldiers. Iftikhâr al-Dawla set up his headquarters in the citadel (the Tower of David) located beside the western gate, and the citizens, mostly Muslims and Jews, were stationed along the entire length of the walls. Accounts vary as to the initial deployment of the Crusading army on 7 June. According to William of Tyre, it was concentrated in the north-west of the city, ‘from the gate known today as St Stephen, which faces north, to the gate which lies below the Tower of David on the west side of the city’. Count Raymond of Toulouse initially took up a position opposite the wall, between the citadel and the northwestern corner. The Italian Norman, Tancred, faced Qasr al-Jâlûd (sometimes known as the Quadrangular Tower and later as Tancred’s Tower) at the north-west corner of the city, and further to the east along the northern wall were Robert of Normandy, Robert of Flanders and, at the centre of the northern wall near Damascus Gate, Godfrey of Bouillon. The description by Albert of Aachen (Aix), however, places Godfrey opposite the Tower of David to the west, with Tancred to his left, Raymond of Toulouse to his right, Robert of Flanders and Hugh of St Pol behind and Robert of Normandy with Conan of Brittany at Damascus Gate.

The first major action was an ill-prepared and fundamentally pointless direct attack on the walls that took place on 13 June. The attack, which perhaps was dictated by the spiritual mood of the troops rather than by military considerations, was doomed to failure from the start. In medieval warfare a castle or walled city could not be taken without a good supply of timber needed for the construction of ladders and siege machinery. As noted earlier, the Crusader armies had almost none. The Muslims had probably destroyed whatever forests survived around Jerusalem before they arrived. Fulcher of Chartres wrote that the princes had ordered wooden ladders to be made but complained that there were too few of them, resulting in the abandonment of the attack. The anonymous author of the Gesta Francorum wrote that if the scaling ladders of the Franks had been ready the city would have fallen. He does record the use of one ladder, noting that after breaking through the barbican the Franks set it up against the great wall.

But scaling ladders alone were clearly not sufficient for a full-scale attack on a strongly fortified city. Although ill-conceived, the motivation for this direct attack is not difficult to understand in light of the difficult terrain, which greatly diminished the likelihood of an effective blockade of the walls, essential to carrying out a siege. It was obvious that the Fatimids would reply in force to the Crusader advance into their territory and to their attack on Jerusalem. It was essential for the Crusaders to occupy the city as soon as possible and to place the walls of Jerusalem between themselves and the Fatimid army.

The predictable failure of the direct attack resulted in the Crusaders taking a more sober approach to the problem. With the weariness and despondency of the army, the heat and lack of supplies and the impending threat from Egypt, a protracted siege was not a real option. As time was of the essence, the Crusader leaders moved in two directions: on the one hand they attempted to improve the morale of the troops by reawakening their dormant religious feelings through sermons, fasts and prayer, and on the other they made an effort to obtain the wood needed to build siege machinery, making do with what they could find. According to Fulcher of Chartres, battering rams and sows (movable roofed structures used during a siege to approach a wall without being exposed to fire) were prepared, and a tower was constructed ‘from small pieces of wood because large pieces could not be secured in those regions’. Non-combatants were sent to Bethlehem to gather branches and twigs to make coverings for assault machines. The Franks also moved further afield in their search for timber.

On 8 July a barefoot march around the walls was led by priests with crosses and holy relics, ending on the Mount of Olives where a sermon was preached by Arnulf of Choques. The fighting spirit was restored. If the Crusaders had hoped that this march would precipitate a biblical collapse of the walls they were disappointed. However, the search for timber to build siege machinery was at last successful. Wood was found over 50 km distant, near Nablus. Also, according to Albert of Aachen, a local Christian showed the Franks where to find timber four miles towards Arabia (east). William of Tyre records that timber was found six or seven miles distant and that it was used to build siege machines: mangonels (or petraries), rams and scrophae (sows). Ralph of Caen records that Tancred, who was suffering from dysentery and sought privacy during one of the searches for wood, came upon a cave containing some 400 beams of wood conveniently left there by the Fatimids, perhaps from their siege of the Seljuks. Another conveniently timed event was the arrival of Genoese ships at Jaffa on 17 June. At the same time a large Fatimid fleet approached Jaffa. Rather than having their ships sunk by the Muslims, the Genoese dismantled them and withdrew to the citadel. They then accompanied their dismantled ships to the outskirts of Jerusalem, where the construction of siege engines commenced.

According to the Gesta Francorum, when the defenders discerned the construction of the siege weapons, they reacted by strengthening the fortifications and increasing the height of the defences. The Frankish siege machines included three large siege towers, which were placed on Mount Zion and at two different positions on the northern wall. These were the only parts of the city’s defences where the natural topography allowed the use of siege towers, which could only be used on fairly flat terrain. The Gesta relates that it took the Franks three days and three nights to fill the ditch and bring the towers up to the walls. Two of the towers were partly destroyed in the fighting but the third, under the command of Godfrey of Bouillon, was brought up against the forewall east of St Stephen’s Gate (Damascus Gate). On Friday 15 July, a battering ram was used to knock down the barbican. According to William of Tyre, the fighters in the siege engines ignited sacks of straw and cotton, spreading black smoke onto the ramparts and causing the defenders to abandon their positions. At nine o’clock two Flemish brothers, Lethold and Gilbert of Tournai, mounted the wall, followed by Duke Godfrey, and entered the city. The Franks later raised a cross on the wall at this place to commemorate the event. Godfrey sent a number of knights to open the northern gate and the entire army entered the city.

In the south, on Mount Zion, Raymond of Toulouse’s men scaled the walls with ladders and ropes and entered the city. The Muslim defenders fled to the citadel. After negotiations, the Fatimid commander surrendered the citadel to Raymond; in return the Muslim and Jewish fugitives who had taken refuge there were permitted safe passage to the coastal city of Ascalon.

However, the fate of most of the population of Jerusalem was less fortunate. The First Crusade ended true to form. The slaughter of the Jewish communities in the Rhineland in 1096 and of the Muslims in the town of Magharat an-Nu‘aman near Antioch in January 1099 was not to eclipse the massacre carried out by the Crusaders during their first three days in Jerusalem. There are a number of graphic descriptions of this slaughter. Part of the population sought refuge on the roof of the al-Aqsa Mosque. They were promised the protection of Tancred and the banners of Tancred and Gaston of Béarn were displayed as proof of this, but they were slaughtered nonetheless. In the words of Raymond of Aguilers: ‘wonderful sights were to be seen. Some of our men – and this was the more merciful course – cut off the heads of their enemies; others shot them with arrows so that they fell from the towers; others tortured them longer by casting them into the flames. Piles of heads, hands and feet were to be seen in the streets of the city.’ Muslim and Jewish captives who had somehow escaped the slaughter were employed to dispose of the dead, and contemporary accounts paint a horrible picture reminiscent of atrocities in more recent times. One Frankish source, the Gesta Francorum, notes that the Crusader leaders ‘commanded that all the Saracen corpses should be thrown outside the city because of the fearful stench, for almost the whole city was full of their dead bodies. So the surviving Saracens dragged the dead ones out in front of the gates, and piled them up in mounds as big as houses.’ According to Raymond of Aguilers: ‘It was necessary to pick one’s way over the bodies of men and horses . . . in the Temple and porch of Solomon, men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins . . . The city was filled with corpses and blood.’ The corpses were so numerous that when Fulcher of Chartres visited the city five months later, the foul odour was still overwhelming: ‘Oh, what a stench there was around the walls of the city, both within and without, from the rotting bodies of the Saracens slain by our comrades at the time of the capture of the city, lying wherever they had been hunted down!’

These graphic and appalling accounts of the events should however be regarded with reservation as to their accuracy. The Christian sources no doubt exaggerate the magnitude of the slaughter, probably motivated by pride in the extent to which they were carrying out the papal call to destroy the gentiles (infidels). The Muslim sources exaggerate the number of dead in order to gain sympathy and emphasize the barbarity of the Crusaders. The description of Ibn al-Athîr illustrates the unreliability of the details. He writes: ‘In the masjid al-Aqsâ the Franks slaughtered more than 70,000 people.’ This number far exceeds even the highest estimate of the entire population of Jerusalem at the time of the siege. Fulcher gives nearly 10,000 killed in the Temple of Solomon, as does William of Tyre, who adds no less than 10,000 for the rest of the city. While it is clear that the massacre was on a large scale, Benjamin Z. Kedar has recently presented a new perspective, suggesting that the various horrendous accounts of the massacre are perhaps more in the nature of religious narratives in the tradition of apocalyptic texts than historically accurate descriptions of the events. This was the ‘baptism by fire’ from which the new ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ was to arise.