Considerably heartened by this success against a foe whose style of warfare was so different from their own, the crusaders moved on towards the distant Holy Land. Had they known that, in all, they were to endure three years of battles, sieges (including a year-long siege of Antioch, about 640 km [400 miles] from Jerusalem), disease and near-starvation before they reached their goal, Jerusalem, they would almost certainly still have continued, so strong was their fervent belief in the cause.
They were also strengthened by signs that God was on their side. The crusaders had won at Antioch, for instance, because of the miraculous discovery in the city of the Holy Lance, which was said to have pierced Christ’s side when he was on the Cross. The final march on Jerusalem, from January to June 1099, was also marked by a series of visions and miracles that indicated the rightness of their cause.
The crusaders sighted the wall of Jerusalem on 7 June, 1099. Many of them stood with tears running down their faces, others fell to their knees and kissed the dusty ground. So uplifted were they by the sight that many among them wanted to attack the city at once. An assault was launched on the walls a few days later, but it failed through a lack of scaling ladders. It was not until 15 July, when two enormous siege engines had been completed, that the crusaders’ assault on Jerusalem began.
Duke Godfrey began the attack, riding on one of the siege engines to the weakest point in the city wall. Beams were run out from it at rampart height to make a bridge, and the first crusader knights charged across it into Jerusalem. What followed was the sacking of Jerusalem and a bloody massacre of its citizens. The Jewish population of the city – men, women and children – were cut down in the chief synagogue, where they had taken sanctuary. A group of Muslim defenders made a formal capitulation to a leading crusader, having agreed to pay a large ransom. The agreement was honoured and they were escorted out of the city. Few, if any, other Muslims survived.
The blood-crazed crusader soldiers, oblivious to the orders of their knight commanders, went on the rampage. For two days, they slaughtered the citizens of Jerusalem, ‘wading in blood up their ankles,’ according to a medieval account of the sack of Jerusalem. ‘Almost the whole city was full of their dead bodies,’ recalled one knight, noting that the temple where the Muslims made their last stand was ‘streaming with their blood’.
The slaughter ended at last, and the crusade leaders processed solemnly to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where they gave thanks to God for their great victory. The next day, they chose Duke Godfrey as the first leader of the new crusader kingdom of Jerusalem. Godfrey, who died in Jerusalem, never took the title of king. His brother, Baldwin, who had accompanied him on the crusade, did, ruling as Baldwin I.
The scale of the slaughter, huge even in an age when massacres were a regular part of warfare, while it caused great rejoicing in the West. However, many Church leaders were horrified, and it deeply shocked the Muslim and Jewish worlds and undoubtedly helped fuel the warlike response of Islam to the Christian presence in the East in the next century.
The Battle of Hattin
During the half century between the first two crusades mounted by Catholic Christianity to wrest the Holy Land back from the Infidel, from about 1096 to 1149, the crusaders established a hold over a sizeable part of Syria and Palestine, with its frontiers the mountains of Lebanon and the river Jordan. There were four main Christian-ruled areas: the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the principality of Antioch, the County of Tripoli and the County of Edessa (lost again to Islam in 1144).
The main problem with this Christian presence in the Holy Land was that it was never much more than a token. Once a crusade was over, most of the knights and the fighting men returned to Europe, leaving small contingents to hold on in castles built to defend weak points. Some of these, such as Krak des Chevaliers, were massive, and virtually impregnable. The Christian fighting men, most of them belonging to two military orders, the Knights Hospitallers and the Knights Templars, stayed within them and made little attempt to persuade the local Muslim townsfolk and peasantry to convert to Christianity.
The crusaders had been lucky when they first arrived in Syria and Palestine at the end of the 11th century because the Muslim leadership had been disunited and at loggerheads with one another. Encounters between crusaders and Muslims, although called battles, were usually quite small affairs, involving just half a dozen knights and their attendant soldiers on the Christian side. By the 1170s, however, things were very different. The Muslim powers in the region were reorganizing themselves and providing a much more united opposition to the crusaders. From the mid-1170s, this opposition was led by the formidable figure of Salah al-Din Yusuf, sultan of Egypt and Syria, and known as Saladin.
Saladin was one of the most remarkable men of his age. Although untiring in his preaching of the jihad against the Christians, he was a patient, clever and far-sighted statesman and a humane, chivalrous warrior. ‘Abstain from the shedding of blood, for blood that is spilt never slumbers,’ he once said – this in an age when massacres were seen as just another element of warfare, or acceptable ‘collateral damage’, in modern terms.
Saladin’s outwardly attractive personality led the Christian barons in Palestine to think that this was a man whom they could trust and come to terms with. They decided on a policy of appeasement, partly because it was obvious that Saladin was the most powerful Muslim leader they had faced, but also because his possessions surrounded them. On land, Saladin could attack them from the south and the east, while his Egyptian fleets could blockade their Mediterranean ports.
The leader of the crusaders who advocated appeasement was Raymond, Count of Tripoli, who was regent for the king of Jerusalem, Baldwin the Leper, from 1174 to 1185. When Baldwin the Leper died without a son and heir in 1185, Count Raymond III expected to be made king in Baldwin’s place. However, his policies in the kingdom had been unpopular. He had made enemies, and a group of war-supporting barons chose Guy of Lusignan as king instead. Thus the first steps on the road to war with Saladin and his Muslim forces were taken.
In 1187, Raymond, Count of Tripoli, made some sort of agreement with Saladin, the precise terms of which have never been established. In giving Saladin’s army permission to cross the river Jordan into the district of Tiberias, Raymond said that he – and Saladin – had intended only that the Muslim peasantry was to be the object of Saladin’s attentions. The crusaders in their towns and castles were to be left wholly alone and certainly not attacked. But Gerard de Ridfort, Grand Master of the Templars, was in the area with some 130 Knights Templar. He had long been Raymond’s enemy, and chose to ignore the order to remain inside the crusaders’ castles and instead engaged the infidel intruders in battle. Saladin claimed that the truce, or whatever his agreement with Raymond had been, was broken and he laid siege to Tiberias. The crusaders, including Raymond, were forced into action.
At this time, the crusader army of the kingdom of Jerusalem, one of the largest ever gathered together in Palestine, was established at al-Saffuriyah, about 32 km (20 miles) from Tiberias. Raymond advised the army not to make the long day’s march to Tiberias – along a road where Saladin had blocked the few wells and springs and on which they could easily be ambushed. Instead they should wait until Saladin moved to country more suitable for fighting a cavalry battle. However, his advice was ignored. The crusader army, led by King Guy of Jerusalem and including the 130 Knights Templar, their attendant fighting men and their grand master, set off at dawn on 3 July, 1187. Saladin, given this news, was jubilant. He had noted just weeks before, if this crusader army could be destroyed, then Jerusalem would be his for the taking.