The First Crusade and the Taking of Jerusalem

I. The World of 1095

In the last decade of the eleventh century the Mediterranean world was divided between three great civilisations. In the west lay Latin Christendom, a patchwork of kingdoms and lordships whose clergy looked to the bishop of Rome. In the east stood the Byzantine Empire, heir to Rome and governed from Constantinople by an emperor who regarded himself as the guardian of the Christian faith. To the south and east lay the lands of Islam, which since the seventh century had stretched from Spain to Central Asia but which by the 1090s were politically fractured.

The fracture of the Islamic world was crucial to what followed. In the middle of the eleventh century the Seljuk Turks, a Turkish dynasty from Central Asia that had adopted Sunni Islam, had taken Baghdad and become the protectors of the Abbasid caliph. In 1071 the Seljuk sultan Alp Arslan defeated the Byzantine emperor Romanos IV Diogenes at Manzikert in eastern Anatolia. The battle did not itself destroy Byzantine power, but in the confusion that followed Turkish bands spread across Anatolia, and by the 1080s a Seljuk prince, Sulayman ibn Qutlumush, had established a sultanate with its capital at Nicaea, within striking distance of Constantinople.

In Syria and Palestine the situation was equally unsettled. Jerusalem had been ruled by the Fatimid caliphs of Cairo, a Shiite dynasty, until it was taken by a Turkish commander in about 1073. The death of the great Seljuk sultan Malik Shah in 1092 led to a struggle among his heirs. Aleppo and Damascus were held by rival Seljuk princes, Ridwan and Duqaq, while the Fatimids sought to recover the coast. In 1098, while the crusaders were besieging Antioch, the Fatimids recaptured Jerusalem itself. The crusaders would therefore face not a united Islamic world but a set of competing rulers, many of whom were more concerned with each other than with the newcomers from the west.

In the west the papacy was emerging from the long struggle with the German emperors known as the Investiture Controversy. Urban II, elected pope in 1088, was a Frenchman, a former monk of Cluny, and a determined reformer. He wished to assert the leadership of the papacy over the whole of Latin Christendom and to heal the breach with the eastern church that had been dramatised by the mutual excommunications of 1054. An appeal from Constantinople gave him the opportunity.

II. The Byzantine Appeal and the Council of Clermont

In March 1095 envoys of the emperor Alexios I Komnenos appeared at a council held by Urban at Piacenza in northern Italy. According to the chronicler Bernold of St Blasien they asked for help against the pagans, who had advanced almost to the walls of Constantinople. Alexios was almost certainly thinking of mercenary troops who could serve under his command, as western knights had done before. What he received was something very different.

In November 1095 Urban held a council at Clermont in the Auvergne. After the council had dealt with the reform of the church and the excommunication of King Philip I of France for adultery, Urban preached in a field outside the town on 27 November. No text of his sermon survives. There are five accounts of it, by Fulcher of Chartres, Robert the Monk, Baldric of Bourgueil, Guibert of Nogent and the anonymous author of the Gesta Francorum, but all were written after the capture of Jerusalem and all reflect the knowledge of what had happened. Fulcher, who was probably present, emphasises the call to help the eastern Christians and to end the violence of knights against one another. Robert the Monk places the liberation of Jerusalem at the centre and puts into Urban's mouth a lurid account of Turkish atrocities.

What is clear is that Urban offered those who went a remission of penance. The canon of the council stated that whoever set out for Jerusalem to liberate the church of God out of devotion alone, and not for honour or money, could count the journey in place of all penance. The crowd is said to have responded with the cry Deus vult, God wills it, and many took the cross by sewing a cloth cross on their garments. Urban then travelled through France for most of 1096, preaching and consecrating churches, and letters were sent to Flanders, Bologna and elsewhere.

The idea that fighting could be penitential was new. Earlier church teaching, shaped by Augustine of Hippo, had allowed that a war could be just if it was declared by a lawful authority, for a just cause and with right intention, but it had always regarded the shedding of blood as something requiring penance. Urban turned this around and made the war itself a penance. The phrase taking the cross, which was soon used, echoed the words of Jesus in Matthew 16:24, where he speaks of the disciple who must take up his torture stake and follow him. The words of Jesus concerned self-denial, not warfare, but the crusade preachers applied them to the armed pilgrimage.

III. The People's Crusade

The response to Urban's appeal outran his intentions. Before the official armies had assembled, popular preachers raised large bands of poor pilgrims and some knights. The most famous was Peter the Hermit, a preacher from the region of Amiens who travelled on a donkey and was revered by his followers. In the spring of 1096 several bands set out for the east by way of Germany and Hungary.

Some of these bands, especially those associated with Count Emicho of Flonheim, turned on the Jewish communities of the Rhineland in May and June 1096, at Speyer, Worms, Mainz and Cologne, and further east at Regensburg and Prague. The site's study of the Rhineland Massacres of 1096 describes these events and the Hebrew chronicles that record them. Emicho's army was itself destroyed by the Hungarians at Wieselburg.

Peter's own following, together with a band led by a knight called Walter Sans Avoir, crossed Hungary and the Balkans with considerable disorder. At Nish there was fighting with the Byzantine garrison. Alexios received them at Constantinople in August 1096 and quickly ferried them across the Bosphorus to Anatolia, where they camped at Civetot. In October, while Peter was in Constantinople, the army marched out and was destroyed by the Turks of Kilij Arslan, sultan of Nicaea. A few survivors, Peter among them, later joined the main armies.

IV. The Princes' Armies

The main armies set out in the late summer and autumn of 1096. They were led by great nobles, none of whom was a king. Godfrey of Bouillon, duke of Lower Lorraine, and his brother Baldwin of Boulogne led a force from Lorraine and the Rhineland through Hungary. Raymond of Saint-Gilles, count of Toulouse, the oldest and richest of the leaders, went with the papal legate Adhemar, bishop of Le Puy, through Dalmatia. Bohemond of Taranto, a Norman from southern Italy who had fought the Byzantines in the 1080s, crossed the Adriatic with his nephew Tancred. Hugh of Vermandois, brother of the French king, Robert of Normandy, son of William the Conqueror, Robert of Flanders and Stephen of Blois also led contingents.

The numbers are uncertain. Modern estimates for the combined armies that crossed into Asia in 1097 range from about 50,000 to 80,000, including non-combatants, of whom perhaps 7,000 were knights. The armies were not paid by any central authority. Many crusaders had sold or mortgaged property to raise money, and the charters in which they did so often express a desire for the forgiveness of sins and a wish to see the Holy Sepulchre.

Alexios required the leaders to swear an oath to restore to the empire any former imperial territory they might conquer. Most swore it, some reluctantly. Raymond of Toulouse would only promise to respect the emperor's life and honour. The oath would become a source of bitterness, since the Byzantines expected the crusaders to return Antioch, which had been imperial until 1084, while the crusaders came to feel that the emperor had failed to support them.

V. Nicaea and Dorylaeum

The first target was Nicaea, the Seljuk capital, which the army besieged from May 1097. Kilij Arslan, who had underestimated the new arrivals after his easy victory over Peter's followers, was away fighting in the east. He returned and was defeated outside the walls. The city surrendered on 19 June, not to the crusaders but to Byzantine forces, who had brought boats overland to the lake that protected its western side. Alexios rewarded the leaders but forbade the sack of the city, and some crusaders resented the loss of plunder.

On 1 July 1097 the advance guard under Bohemond was attacked near Dorylaeum by the combined forces of Kilij Arslan and the Danishmendid emir. The Turkish horse archers surrounded the crusaders, who held their camp until the arrival of the second division under Godfrey and Raymond. The Turks then fled. The battle showed the value of the heavily armoured western knight when he was used in disciplined formation, and it opened the road across Anatolia.

The march across the plateau in the summer heat was terrible. Horses died in large numbers, and many knights were reduced to riding oxen. At Heraclea the army defeated another Turkish force. Baldwin of Boulogne and Tancred then left the main army and went into Cilicia, where they quarrelled over Tarsus. Baldwin went on eastward and in March 1098 became ruler of Edessa, an Armenian Christian city on the Euphrates, after the death of its ruler Thoros. Edessa became the first of the crusader states.

VI. The Siege of Antioch

The main army reached Antioch in October 1097. The city was one of the great cities of the eastern Mediterranean, with walls running up the slopes of Mount Silpius, and it was held by the Turkish governor Yaghi Siyan. The crusaders could not surround it completely and could not storm it. The siege lasted through the winter. Food ran short, foraging expeditions had to go further and further afield, and the army suffered from desertion. A Fatimid embassy arrived to propose an alliance against the Turks, and the crusaders sent envoys to Cairo in return.

In early 1098 relieving armies from Damascus and Aleppo were defeated. Then in May news came that Kerbogha, the powerful atabeg of Mosul, was approaching with a large army. Bohemond had made contact with an Armenian or Turkish convert called Firuz who commanded a tower. On the night of 2 to 3 June 1098 Firuz admitted Bohemond's men, and the city fell. The Christian inhabitants joined in the slaughter of the Turks, and Yaghi Siyan was killed while fleeing. The citadel held out.

Two days later Kerbogha arrived, and the besiegers became the besieged. The army was starving. Stephen of Blois had already left, and on his way home he met Alexios, who was marching to help, and persuaded him that the crusade was lost. The emperor turned back, a decision the crusaders regarded as a betrayal.

VII. The Holy Lance and the Battle of Antioch

In the extremity of the siege a poor pilgrim from Provence called Peter Bartholomew reported that Saint Andrew had appeared to him in visions and revealed that the lance that had pierced the side of Jesus was buried in the cathedral of Saint Peter. On 14 June a lance head was dug up. Adhemar of Le Puy was sceptical, but the discovery transformed the mood of the army. Other visions, including one by a priest called Stephen of Valence who claimed to have seen Jesus himself, promised victory.

On 28 June 1098 the army marched out in six divisions and attacked Kerbogha. His coalition, divided by mutual suspicion among its emirs, broke and fled. The citadel surrendered. The chroniclers attributed the victory to the lance and to the saints, some describing an army of white horsemen led by Saint George, Saint Demetrius and Saint Mercurius.

The Holy Lance later became a source of division. Its authenticity was doubted by the Normans of Bohemond's party, and in April 1099 Peter Bartholomew underwent an ordeal by fire to prove it. He died some days later of his burns. The episode shows how deeply the crusade was shaped by the expectation of signs and wonders. The account of the piercing of Jesus' side is given in John 19:34, but nothing in the Gospel suggests that the weapon was to be preserved or that it would be a source of military power.

VIII. Delay at Antioch and the March South

The victory was followed by months of delay. An epidemic, probably typhoid, broke out in the summer and killed Adhemar of Le Puy on 1 August 1098. His death removed the one figure who could command general respect. Bohemond claimed Antioch for himself, arguing that Alexios had broken the agreement by failing to come to their aid, while Raymond of Toulouse insisted that the oath to the emperor should be kept. The dispute paralysed the leadership.

In December the army took Ma'arrat al-Numan after a siege. Several chroniclers, including Fulcher of Chartres and Raymond of Aguilers, report that starving crusaders ate the flesh of dead Muslims there. The incident was remembered in Arabic sources and became a notorious example of the brutality of the Franks. The poor of the army, frustrated by the quarrels of the leaders, tore down the walls of Ma'arra to force Raymond to move on.

In January 1099 Raymond set out barefoot as a pilgrim, and the army marched south along the coast. Bohemond stayed in Antioch, which became the second crusader state. The army spent three months on a fruitless siege of Arqa, near Tripoli, during which Peter Bartholomew's ordeal took place. Then, in May, the army moved quickly down the coast, the local emirs paying them to pass by without attacking.

IX. The Siege of Jerusalem

The army reached Jerusalem on 7 June 1099. By then it numbered perhaps 12,000 to 14,000 fighting men. The city had been taken from the Turks by the Fatimids in 1098, and its governor, Iftikhar al-Dawla, had expelled the Christian population, poisoned wells and prepared for a siege. A first assault on 13 June failed for lack of ladders.

The besiegers suffered badly from thirst in the summer heat. The arrival of Genoese ships at Jaffa provided wood and craftsmen, and the army built two great siege towers, one for Raymond on Mount Zion and one for Godfrey on the north. Learning that a Fatimid army was on its way from Egypt, the leaders resolved on a final attack. On 8 July, on the advice of a visionary priest, the army walked barefoot in procession around the city, as the Israelites had marched around Jericho in Joshua 6:15-20, while the defenders on the walls jeered.

On 15 July 1099 Godfrey's tower was brought against the northern wall. Two Flemish knights, Litold and Gilbert of Tournai, were the first across, followed by Godfrey and his brother Eustace. The defenders fled, and Raymond's men broke in from the south. Iftikhar surrendered in the Tower of David to Raymond and was allowed to leave with his guard.

X. The Massacre of 15 July 1099

What followed has been remembered ever since. The Gesta Francorum states that the crusaders killed so many in the Temple of Solomon, by which they meant the al-Aqsa mosque, that they waded up to their ankles in blood. Raymond of Aguilers, drawing on Revelation 14:20, says that men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins. These phrases are literary exaggerations based on Scripture, but there is no doubt that a large part of the population was killed, including those who had taken refuge on the Temple Mount under the protection of Tancred's banner.

The Arabic sources give figures that are also exaggerated. Ibn al-Athir, writing over a century later, gives 70,000 dead in the al-Aqsa mosque alone. A letter preserved in the Cairo Genizah, written within a year of the conquest, gives a more sober picture. It shows that some Jews were taken captive and ransomed by the Jewish community of Ascalon, and that the Franks sold the Torah scrolls and books they had seized. Another source, Ibn al-Qalanisi, reports that the Jews were burned in their synagogue. Modern historians, notably Benjamin Kedar, have argued that the number of dead was probably in the region of 3,000, still a terrible massacre but far smaller than the later Arabic figure. The site's page on the Cairo Genizah explains the value of these documents.

After the slaughter the crusaders went to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to give thanks. The juxtaposition of the massacre and the thanksgiving troubled no chronicler at the time. Fulcher of Chartres saw the capture as the fulfilment of prophecy and the cleansing of the holy places.

XI. The Battle of Ascalon and the Kingdom of Jerusalem

On 22 July the leaders chose Godfrey of Bouillon as ruler. He refused the title of king and was called Advocate of the Holy Sepulchre. Arnulf of Chocques was chosen as patriarch, though he was soon replaced by Daimbert of Pisa. On 12 August 1099 the crusaders surprised and routed the Fatimid army under the vizier al-Afdal outside Ascalon, but the city itself remained in Fatimid hands until 1153.

Most of the crusaders then went home, leaving Godfrey with perhaps 300 knights and 2,000 foot soldiers. Godfrey died in July 1100, and his brother Baldwin came from Edessa to be crowned the first king of Jerusalem on Christmas Day 1100. The County of Tripoli was established after the city fell in 1109. The site's page on the Crusader States and the Military Orders describes the institutions that followed.

A further wave of crusaders, the expeditions of 1101, set out in response to news of the victory, but these armies, including Lombards, French and Germans, were destroyed in Anatolia by the Turks. The failure of 1101 showed how much the success of the First Crusade had depended on the division of its enemies and on the Byzantine alliance.

XII. The Chroniclers and Their Use of Scripture

The First Crusade is better documented than most medieval events. Besides the Gesta Francorum, the eyewitness accounts of Raymond of Aguilers, chaplain to Raymond of Toulouse, Fulcher of Chartres, chaplain to Baldwin, and Peter Tudebode survive, along with letters written by crusaders during the campaign. The Byzantine princess Anna Komnene described the crusaders in her Alexiad, written in the 1140s. The Arabic historians Ibn al-Qalanisi of Damascus and later Ibn al-Athir describe the events from the other side, and the Hebrew chronicles record the attacks on the Rhineland communities.

The western writers were monks and clerics, and they interpreted the crusade through Scripture. They compared the crusaders to the Israelites of the Exodus and the Maccabees, and spoke of Jerusalem as the city of the great King. Robert the Monk said that the only event to compare with it since the creation of the world was the redemption on the cross. Guibert of Nogent called the work of the crusade the deeds of God through the Franks.

These writers found in the Hebrew Scriptures, especially the books of Joshua and Judges, models of war commanded by God, and they applied them directly to their own day. They paid less attention to the teaching of Jesus himself. In John 18:36 Jesus told Pilate that his kingdom was no part of this world, and that if it were, his attendants would have fought. In Matthew 26:52 he told Peter to return his sword to its place. The apostle Paul told Christians that the weapons of their warfare are not fleshly (2 Corinthians 10:4). The crusade chroniclers rarely engaged with these texts, and when they did, they read them as concerning private vengeance rather than the wars of the church.

XIII. The Earthly and the Heavenly Jerusalem

The crusade was focused on the earthly city of Jerusalem, and especially on the tomb of Jesus in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Pilgrimage to the holy places had been growing in the eleventh century, and the great German pilgrimage of 1064–65, which was attacked by Bedouin, had shown its dangers. The crusade gave pilgrimage an armed form.

The Greek Scriptures, however, place little weight on holy sites. Jesus told the Samaritan woman that the hour was coming when the Father would be worshipped neither on that mountain nor in Jerusalem, but in spirit and truth (John 4:21-24). The letter to the Hebrews speaks of the heavenly Jerusalem (Hebrews 12:22) and says that Christians have no lasting city here but seek the one to come (Hebrews 13:14). Paul contrasted the present Jerusalem, which is in slavery, with the Jerusalem above, which is free (Galatians 4:25-26). Several medieval writers, including some monastic critics, made similar points, but they did not prevail against the enthusiasm for the recovery of the holy city.

XIV. Consequences and Interpretations

The First Crusade established a Latin presence in the Levant that lasted almost two hundred years, until the fall of Acre in 1291. It created a model of holy war that was applied to Spain, as described in the site's page on the Reconquista, to the pagan Baltic, described in the page on the Northern Crusades, and later to heretics within Christendom, as in the Albigensian Crusade. It worsened relations between Latin and Greek Christians and introduced lasting violence against the Jewish communities of Europe.

Historians have long debated the motives of the crusaders. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries many argued that younger sons sought land and wealth. Studies of the charters by Jonathan Riley-Smith and others have shown that crusading was extremely expensive and that many crusaders were the heads of families who risked and often lost their property. Religious motives, particularly the desire for the remission of sins, appear to have been central. Others have emphasised the role of the reform papacy and the wish to channel the violence of the knightly class.

In the Islamic world the conquest made relatively little impression at first. Calls for a counter-jihad were made by preachers like al-Sulami of Damascus in 1105, but it was only with Zengi and Nur al-Din in the following decades that a coordinated response developed. The site's page on the Second Crusade describes the first great crisis of the crusader states.

XV. Assessment

The First Crusade was a remarkable military achievement, carried out by armies with no single commander, over a distance of some 3,000 kilometres, against opponents on their own ground. It was also accompanied by massacre, cannibalism and the persecution of Jews. Its participants believed they were doing the will of God, and their chroniclers clothed their deeds in the language of Scripture.

For readers of the Bible the crusade poses the question of whether the Christian faith can be advanced by the sword. The disciples of Jesus were told to love their enemies and to pray for those who persecuted them (Matthew 5:44). Paul wrote that Christians should not avenge themselves but should conquer evil with good (Romans 12:19-21). The crusaders adopted the language of pilgrimage and penance, but their means were those of conquest. The tension between these two, already visible in 1099, would run through the whole history of the crusading movement.

XVI. The Byzantine Perspective

The Byzantine view of the crusade is preserved above all in the Alexiad of Anna Komnene, the daughter of Alexios, who wrote her history of her father's reign in the 1140s. Anna describes the arrival of the western armies as a movement of whole peoples, more numerous than the sand of the sea or the stars of heaven. She admired the courage of the Franks but regarded them as greedy, unstable and untrustworthy, and she reserved particular hostility for Bohemond, whom she had seen as a girl and described in a memorable portrait of his height, his fair hair and his cunning.

For the Byzantines the western knights were potential allies but also a danger. The Normans of southern Italy, led by Robert Guiscard and his son Bohemond, had invaded the empire in the 1080s, and Alexios had defeated them only with great difficulty. The emperor therefore handled the crusaders with caution, supplying them with markets while keeping them out of the capital, binding the leaders by oaths and gifts, and using their victories to recover territory on the coasts of Anatolia. After the fall of Nicaea, Byzantine forces under John Doukas reconquered Smyrna, Ephesus, Sardis and much of western Asia Minor, a gain that proved more durable than many crusader conquests.

The quarrel over Antioch poisoned relations for decades. Bohemond, returning to the west, raised a new army in 1107 and attacked the empire at Dyrrachium, presenting his expedition as a crusade against the schismatic Greeks. He was defeated and forced to accept the Treaty of Devol in 1108, by which he acknowledged himself the emperor's vassal for Antioch. The treaty was never put into effect, but the idea that the Byzantines were obstacles to the holy war, and even enemies of it, had been planted. It would bear fruit a century later in the Fourth Crusade.

XVII. The Eastern Christians

The crusaders marched through lands with large Christian populations. In Cilicia and around Edessa there were Armenians, many of them refugees from the Seljuk advance, who welcomed the westerners as liberators and supplied them with food and guides. In Syria and Palestine there were Greek Orthodox Christians, often called Melkites, and Syrian Jacobites, whose churches had been separated from the Greek church since the fifth century. The Maronites of Lebanon later entered into communion with Rome.

The relationship between the crusaders and the eastern Christians was complex. The crusaders claimed to be liberating the eastern churches, yet they placed Latin bishops in the sees of Antioch and Jerusalem and often treated the native clergy as subordinates. The Greek patriarch of Antioch, John the Oxite, was at first left in office but was forced into exile around 1100. In Jerusalem the Latin clergy took control of the Holy Sepulchre. Some eastern Christian writers, such as the Armenian chronicler Matthew of Edessa, praised the crusaders at first but came to complain of their harshness and greed.

The Jews of Palestine suffered from the conquest. Besides the victims of Jerusalem, the communities of Haifa, which defended the town alongside the Fatimid garrison in 1100, were also killed or enslaved. The Genizah letters show the Jewish communities of Egypt raising money to ransom captives, and describe the hardships of those who had been released. For most of the twelfth century Jews were forbidden to live in Jerusalem, although a small number of dyers are mentioned there by the traveller Benjamin of Tudela in about 1170.

XVIII. Hunger, Disease and the Poor

The narratives of the chroniclers are dominated by the princes, but most of those who took part in the crusade were not knights. The armies included foot soldiers, servants, clergy, women and large numbers of poor pilgrims who had no means of their own. In the hunger of the siege of Antioch the poor suffered most. Raymond of Aguilers describes how they ate grass, thistles, the hides of animals and the seeds found in dung. Many died, and many deserted.

The poor also had a voice in the direction of the crusade. They were the most insistent that the army should press on to Jerusalem, and visionaries such as Peter Bartholomew came from their ranks. A group known as the Tafurs, led by a figure called King Tafur, appears in later epic poems as a band of ragged and ferocious fighters, though their historical existence is uncertain. The leaders were obliged to create a common fund for the poor, administered by a knight of Raymond's household, and to share out booty to keep the army together.

Disease killed more crusaders than battle. Besides the epidemic of the summer of 1098, the army suffered from dysentery, scurvy and the effects of heat and thirst. Of the many tens of thousands who crossed into Asia in 1097, probably fewer than one in five reached Jerusalem. The human cost of the enterprise was immense on every side.

XIX. Chronology

In 1071 the Seljuks defeated the Byzantines at Manzikert. In 1092 the sultan Malik Shah died. In March 1095 Byzantine envoys appeared at Piacenza, and on 27 November 1095 Urban II preached at Clermont. In the spring of 1096 the popular bands set out, and in May and June the Rhineland communities were attacked. In October 1096 the People's Crusade was destroyed near Civetot. In the winter of 1096–97 the princes' armies reached Constantinople.

On 19 June 1097 Nicaea surrendered, and on 1 July the crusaders won at Dorylaeum. In October 1097 the siege of Antioch began. In March 1098 Baldwin took Edessa. On 3 June 1098 Antioch fell, on 14 June the Holy Lance was found, and on 28 June Kerbogha was defeated. On 1 August 1098 Adhemar died. In December 1098 Ma'arra was taken. On 7 June 1099 the army reached Jerusalem, and on 15 July 1099 the city fell. On 22 July Godfrey was chosen ruler, and on 12 August the Fatimids were defeated at Ascalon. On 25 December 1100 Baldwin I was crowned king.

XX. Bibliography

The following studies, editions and reference works underlie this account.