At that point, however, they were re-drugged, removed from the garden and returned to Hassan’s castle. The covenant he then offered them was simple: they could return to paradise, of which he was the guardian, provided they did everything that he asked.
However it was gained, Hassan won the unswerving loyalty of his sect of fanatical believers and worked to foment uprisings against the Seljuq sultans and Abbasid caliphs, both Sunnis, as well as the infidel crusaders. The Assassins murdered Seljuq and Abbasid officials and sometimes Fatimids too. They assassinated the crusader princes Raymond II, count of Tripoli, and Conrad of Montferrat, whose murder may have been ordered by Richard I of England (Hassan was known sometimes to cooperate with crusaders). Much later, an Assassin almost succeeded in killing Prince Edward of England, who later became Edward I, with a poisoned dagger, but he survived. It was said that the Knights Hospitallers hired Assassins to murder various of their opponents. Other Muslim leaders were outraged by the power of the Old Man of the Mountain and often tried to crush him—but he was a dangerous opponent. When the sultan Saladin resolved to destroy the Assassins, he found a dagger under his pillow, and took the warning. The great Middle Eastern princes attacked the Assassins, but each time they survived as an idiosyncratic outlaw state.
The sheikh died of natural causes in 1124. He was replaced by his henchman Kya Bozorg-Ummid, who created an Assassin dynasty when he was succeeded by his son. But the Assassins were finally destroyed by the Mongol Khan and empire-builder Hulugu, Genghis Khan’s grandson, who stormed Alamut in 1256. The new Mamluk ruler of Egypt, Sultan Baybars, wiped out the last Assassin strongholds in Syria in 1273.
GODFREY OF BOUILLON
& THE CRUSADER KINGS OF JERUSALEM
1060–1100
… if you had been there you would have seen our feet colored to our ankles with the blood of the slain. But what more shall I relate? None of them were left alive; neither women nor children were spared.
Fulcher of Chartres, medieval chronicler and chaplain to the armies of Godfrey of Bouillon and his brothers, describing the siege of Jerusalem in 1099
The crusader warrior Godfrey of Bouillon became the first ruler of the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem, after indiscriminately slaughtering thousands of Jews and Muslims, “purifying” the city in the name of God.
Godfrey was born in 1060, probably in Boulogne-sur-Mer, to Eustace II, count of Boulogne (who had fought on the side of the Normans at the Battle of Hastings in 1066), and Ida “the Blessed” of Boulogne (a pious and saintly figure who founded a number of monasteries). Godfrey was an athletic and fair-haired boy of “pleasing” features, who, in the words of William of Tyre, was “tall of stature … strong beyond compare, with solidly built limbs and a stalwart chest.” As the second son of the family, Godfrey did not stand to inherit much from his father, but in 1076 his childless hunchback uncle bequeathed him the duchy of Lower Lorraine.
If Godfrey was in many ways the typical crusader, the idea of the crusade belonged to one visionary: in 1095, Pope Urban II announced a new theological concept—Christian holy war. In Clermont on November 27, Urban addressed a crowd to declare that all who took the Cross and fought to liberate and cleanse the Holy Sepulcher of Jerusalem, to liquidate the infidel, would be granted remission of sins. As many as 80,000 people—from princes to peasants—answered the call and set off for Jerusalem, raising money any way they could, often with massacres and looting of Jewish communities. Some were adventurers who hoped to make their fortunes (as Godfrey’s family did) but this was an age of faith and the great majority were believers who risked their lives (and most died on the way) to reach Jerusalem. Godfrey himself, along with his brothers Eustace and Baldwin, answered the call. Godfrey declared he was determined to avenge the blood of Jesus on the Jews.
In August 1096, Godfrey’s army—estimated at 40,000—began the long march through Hungary toward Constantinople. When they arrived in November, it soon became apparent that the crusaders and Emperor Alexius I had very different priorities. Alexius wanted to concentrate on winning back the lands he had lost to the Turks, whereas the crusaders were eager to conquer Jerusalem and capture the Holy Land. After a period of political tension throughout 1097—in which Godfrey’s troops pillaged the neighborhood of Salabria—Godfrey tentatively agreed that his army would submit to Alexius’s orders for a time before marching southwards toward Jerusalem.
From the summer of 1098, Godfrey’s force—and other crusading armies—began to make inroads into Muslim lands, his reputation growing as he did so. In October, he reportedly killed 150 Turks with only twelve knights in a battle outside Antioch and the following month he cut a Turk in half with a single, downward swipe of his sword. Eventually, in February 1099, the various crusading armies finally conquered Antioch and Edessa and began their advance on Jerusalem, fighting through Tripoli and Beirut before arriving to besiege the city in June. Only about 12,000 crusaders had survived to reach the Holy City, under the command of five princes, Raymond the count of Toulouse, Robert the count of Flanders and Robert the duke of Normandy, plus the princely Norman adventurer Tancred de Hauteville and Godfrey. On the morning of Friday July 15, Godfrey was among the first crusaders to breach the city’s weak spot in its northern wall, after his men had built and scaled a movable tower which they had placed against the defenses. Ferocious fighting took place on the parapets as Godfrey bravely held his position and directed his men into the city so that they could open the gates.
Thousands of crusaders flooded into the streets, as the Muslim citizens fled to al-Aqsa mosque. The Fatimid governor of the city, made his last stand in the Tower of David. He and some of his soldiers were allowed to escape, but over the next forty-eight hours, those left in the city—combatant and civilian, Muslim and Jew—were put to the sword and murdered in the streets. The crusaders pillaged Muslim holy sites such as the Dome of the Rock and either burned their victims to death or cut open their stomachs, believing that Muslims swallowed their gold. The city’s Jews had fled to a synagogue, which the crusaders simply burned to the ground. Raymond of Aguilers reported that he saw “piles of heads, hands and feet” scattered across the city, while Fulcher of Chartres, a chaplain to Baldwin’s army, wrote approvingly that “this place, so long contaminated by the superstition of the pagan inhabitants” had been “cleansed from their contagion.” Six months later, it still stank of putrefaction.
At the height of the systematic massacre, Godfrey stripped to his undergarments and walked solemnly, barefoot through the blood, to pray at the Holy Sepulcher, site of Jesus’ crucifixion. On July 22, his fellow crusaders chose him to be the first Christian ruler of Jerusalem, although he refused to take the name of king in the city in which Christ had died, preferring instead the title Duke and Advocate of the Holy Sepulcher. It was there that he was buried after dying of plague on July 18, 1100, his mission complete.
The massacre of Jews and Muslims in Jerusalem was a terrible crime but it was certainly vastly exaggerated: Muslim historians claimed that 70,000 or even 100,000 died in the slaughter but it is likely there were no more than 30,000 inside the city and the latest research from contemporary Arab source el-Arabi suggests the number may be closer to between 3,000 and 10,000. Crusader brutality demonstrates the evil of intolerance but the Christians were scarcely alone in this: when the crusader cities of Edessa and Acre later fell, the slaughter by Muslim conquerors was much greater.