Jerusalem

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Ten thousand people, including many Muslim clergy and Sufi ascetics, were killed on the Temple Mount, including 3,000 packed into al-Aqsa. “Our gladiators,” wrote the chronicler Fulcher of Chartres, started shooting down the Muslims on the roof of al-Aqsa with their bows. “What more shall I relate? None were left alive, neither women nor children were spared.” But Tancred sent his banner to the remaining three hundred people on the roof of al-Aqsa, signifying protection. He halted the killing, took some valuable prisoners and was shown the treasures of the Temple Mount. He then plundered the huge golden lanterns that hung in the shrines there. The Jews sought refuge in their synagogues, but the Crusaders set them on fire. The Jews were burned alive, almost a climactic burnt offering in Christ’s name. Godfrey of Bouillon took off his sword and with a small entourage circled the city and prayed, before making his way to the Holy Sepulchre.

  Next morning, to Tancred’s fury, Raymond’s men nervously climbed onto the roof of al-Aqsa, surprised the huddled Muslims and beheaded the men and women in another spasm of killing. Some of the Muslims leaped to their deaths. A respected female scholar from Shiraz in Persia took refuge with a crowd of women in the Dome of the Chain—they too were slaughtered. A ghoulish delight was taken in the dismemberment of the victims, which was treated almost as a sacrament. “Everywhere lay fragments of human bodies, headless bodies and mutilated limbs, strewn in all directions.” There was something even more dreadful in the wild-eyed, gore-spattered Crusaders themselves, “dripping with blood from head to foot, an ominous sight that brought terror to all who met them.” They searched the streets of the bazaars, dragging out more victims to be “slain like sheep.”

  Each Crusader had been promised possession of any house marked by his “shield and arms”: “consequently the pilgrims searched the city most carefully and boldly killed the citizens,” culling “wives, children, whole households,” many of them “dashed headlong to the ground” from high windows.b

  On the 17th, the pilgrims (as these slaughterers called themselves) were finally sated with butchery and “refreshed themselves with the rest and food they greatly needed.” The princes and priests made their way to the Holy Sepulchre where they sang in praise of Christ, clapping joyously and bathing the altar in tears of joy, before parading through the streets to the Temple of the Lord (the Dome of the Rock) and the Temple of Solomon. Those streets were strewn with body parts, decaying in the summer heat. The princes forced the surviving Jews and Muslims to clear the remains away and burn them in pyres, after which they were themselves butchered and presumably joined their brethren on the fires. The Crusaders who died were buried in the Cemetery of the Lion at Mamilla or in the sacred earth just outside the Golden Gate, already a Muslim cemetery, ready to arise at the Last Day.

  Jerusalem was so full of treasures, “gems, raiments, gold and silver” and valuable prisoners that the Franks held slave-auctions for two days. Some respected Muslims had been saved for ransom: a thousand dinars was demanded for the Shafii scholar Sheikh Abd al-Salam al-Ansari, but when no one paid he was killed. Surviving Jews and 300 Hebrew books (including the Aleppo Codex, one of the earliest Hebrew Bibles that partially survives today) were ransomed to Egyptian Jews. The ransoming of prisoners was to be one of the most lucrative industries of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. But not all the human giblets could be collected, and Jerusalem literally stank for long afterwards—even six months later, when Fulcher of Chartres returned: “Oh what a stench there was around the walls, within and without, from the rotting bodies of the Saracens, lying wherever they had been hunted down.” Jerusalem was not yet secure: the Egyptian army was approaching. The Crusaders urgently needed a commander-in-chief—the first King of Jerusalem.

  GODFREY: ADVOCATE OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE

  The higher nobles and clergy made inquiries into the morals of the candidates for the crown. They felt they had to offer the throne to the senior prince, the unpopular Raymond, but did so grudgingly. Raymond obligingly turned it down, insisting he could not be a king in Jesus’ city. They then offered it to their real choice, the chaste and worthy Duke Godfrey, who accepted a newly coined title: Advocate of the Holy Sepulchre.

  This outraged Raymond who, realizing he had been tricked, refused to give up the Tower of David until the bishops mediated. Triumphant as their arms were, these warrior-pilgrims did not find it easy to enforce the morality expected in a city ruled by Jesus himself. They elected the Norman chaplain, Arnulf, as patriarch but he soon had to defend himself for adultery and fathering a child by an Arab woman.

  Arnulf placed bells in the churches (the ringing of church bells had always been banned by the Muslims). This was to be a Latin, Catholic Jerusalem. Now he demonstrated how vicious the schism was: he placed the Latin priests in charge of the Holy Sepulchre, banishing the Greek patriarch and clergy. He thereby started the unseemly conflict among Christian sects that continues to scandalize and amuse visitors to this day. Yet Arnulf could not find the main section of the True Cross and the Orthodox priests refused to reveal its hiding-place. The patriarch tortured them; a Christian torturing Christians to procure the Life-Giving Tree of the Lamb of God. They finally conceded.

  On 12 August, leaving Jerusalem almost undefended, Advocate Godfrey led the entire Crusader army out towards Ashkelon where he defeated the Egyptians. When Ashkelon offered to surrender to Raymond, Godfrey refused to accept unless it was ceded to him: Ashkelon was lost—only the first of many self-inflicted wounds caused by the feuding of Jerusalem’s leaders. But Jerusalem was secure—if empty.

  The Duke of Normandy and the Count of Flanders and many of the Crusaders now returned home, leaving Godfrey with a putrid, devastated city peopled by just 300 knights and 2,000 infantry, and scarcely enough citizens to fill a quarter. Raymond of Toulouse recovered from his sulk and set about reducing the Lebanese coast, finally founding his own dynasty as Count of Tripoli. There were four Crusader states—the Principality of Antioch, the Counties of Edessa and Tripoli, and the Kingdom of Jerusalem. This idiosyncratic patchwork of interrelated fiefdoms became known as the land of Outremer, “Across the Sea.”

  Yet the reaction of the Islamic world—divided between the weakened caliphs of Sunni Baghdad and Shiite Cairo—was surprisingly muted. Only a few preachers called for jihad to liberate Jerusalem, and there was little reaction among the all-powerful Turkish amirs, who remained preoccupied with their personal feuds.

  On 21 December, Baldwin, Godfrey’s brother, who was Count of Edessa, and the flaxen-haired Prince Bohemond of Antioch arrived to spend Christmas in Jerusalem. But Godfrey struggled to defend himself against the Church. The pope’s representative, an overweening Pisan named Daimbert, was now appointed patriarch (to replace the sinful Arnulf). Determined to establish a theocracy to be ruled by himself, he forced Godfrey to cede the city and Jaffa to the Church. In June 1100, Godfrey collapsed in Jaffa, probably with typhoid. Borne home to Jerusalem, he died on 18 July and was buried five days later, like all his successors, at the foot of Calvary in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.1

  Daimbert took control of the city, but Godfrey’s knights refused to surrender the Citadel, and instead summoned the late advocate’s brother, Baldwin. The Count of Edessa was fighting to defend northern Syria, however, and received no message until late August. On 2 October Baldwin set out with 200 knights and 700 troops, and found that he had to fight all the way to Jerusalem, facing repeated Islamic ambushes. On 9 November, with less than half his original force, he at last entered the Holy City.

  a Seventy thousand is the traditional figure for Jerusalem’s population but this is an implausible exaggeration. In the eleventh century, Constantinople had 600,000 inhabitants; Baghdad and Cairo, the great cities of Islam: 400,000–500,000; Rome, Venice and Florence 30,000–40,000; Paris and London 20,000. As for the Greek Fire, “God’s flame,” a petroleum-based concoction fired through siphons, had once saved Constantinople. Now the Muslims, not the Christians, had it.

  b The laws of warfa
re stated that no quarter was expected after bitter sieges, yet the Frankish eyewitnesses went further in advertising their butchery and claiming that no one was spared. But some of their descriptions are inspired directly by the Book of Revelation. They did not specify numbers. Later, Muslim historians claimed 70,000 or even 100,000 were killed, but the latest research suggests that the massacre was smaller, perhaps around 10,000, considerably less than the future Muslim massacres of Edessa and Acre. The best-placed contemporary, Ibn al-Arabi, who had recently lived in Jerusalem and was in Egypt in 1099, cited 3,000 as killed in al-Aqsa. Nor were all the Jews killed. There were certainly Jews and Muslims left alive. Unusually, it seems that the Crusader chroniclers, for propaganda and religious purposes, hugely exaggerated the scale of their own crimes. Such was holy war.

  CHAPTER 22

  The Rise of Outremer

  1100–1131

  BALDWIN THE BIG: THE FIRST KING

  Two days later, Baldwin was acclaimed king and Daimbert was forced to recognize his accession. Almost at once Baldwin set off to raid Egypt. On his return, he was crowned “King of the Latins in Jerusalem” in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem by Patriarch Daimbert.

  The first King of Jerusalem was not as saintly as his brother but he was far more able. Baldwin had an aquiline nose, light skin, dark beard and hair, a prominent upper lip and a slightly receding chin. He had studied for holy orders as a boy and never lost the contemplative air of a clergyman, always wearing a clerical cloak around his shoulders. He married out of political necessity, risking bigamy for the sake of expediency, left no children and may not have consummated any of his marriages. However, he “struggled in vain against the lustful sins of the flesh yet so circumspectly did he conduct himself in the indulgence of these vices” that he offended no one. Some have claimed he was gay, but the nature of his peccadilloes remains mysterious.

  Relentless war was his urgent duty and true passion. His chaplain called him “the arm of his people, the terror of his enemies.” This wily warrior of almost superhuman energy devoted himself to securing and expanding the kingdom, repeatedly fighting the Egyptians outside Ramallah. Once they defeated him, but he escaped on his horse, Gazala, to the coast and, hitching a lift with a passing English pirate, sailed to Jaffa where he landed, mustered his knights and vanquished the Egyptians again. His forces were so small, probably no more than 1,000 knights and 5,000 infantry, that he recruited local auxiliaries (some possibly Muslim) who were known as Turcopoles. A flexible diplomat, he played on the rivalries of the Muslim chieftains, and allied himself with Genoese, Venetian and English fleets to conquer the Palestinian coast from Caesarea to Acre and Beirut.

  In Jerusalem, Baldwin managed to depose the overmighty Daimbert as patriarch, defeating the main challenge to his authority. The Crusaders had destroyed the people of Jerusalem but mercifully they commandeered the sacred places of al-Quds rather than razing them—probably because they believed they were the biblical originals. Baldwin fortified the Citadel, long known to Christians as the Tower of David, which became palace, treasury, prison and garrison: its Crusader arches are still visible. When in 1110 and again in 1113 Egyptian raids threatened the city, the trumpets blared from the Tower of David to call the citizens to arms. In 1104, Baldwin made al-Aqsa Mosque into the royal palace.

  Many Crusaders believed that the Dome and al-Aqsa really had been built by King Solomon or at least by Constantine the Great, though some knew perfectly well that they were Islamic. A cross was placed atop the Dome of the Rock which was now known as Templum Domini, the Temple of the Lord. Like every conqueror of Jerusalem, the Franks used the spolia of other builders to create their own monuments: Baldwin stripped the lead roof of his Aqsa palace to refit the Holy Sepulchre.

  In 1110, Sigurd, the teenage King of Norway, who had fought his way around the Mediterranean massacring infidels, landed at Acre with his 60-ship fleet. Baldwin escorted Sigurd, the first king to visit, into what the Norsemen called Jorsalaborg on roads covered with carpets and palms. Baldwin offered Sigurd a splinter of the True Cross if he would help him storm Sidon with his fleet. Sidon fell—and the Norwegians spent the winter in Jerusalem.

  Baldwin repelled invasions by the atabegs of Damascus and Mosul: it was a life of unending warfare and wheeler-dealing for which this king was well suited. Early in the Crusade, he had married Arda, daughter of an Armenian potentate, an alliance that had helped him seize Edessa as his own county. But Arda was excess to requirements in Jerusalem. He confined her to St. Anne’s monastery just north of the Temple Mount, unchivalrously claiming that she had seduced (or been raped by) Arab pirates on the way to Antioch. She decamped to Constantinople, where her subsequent pleasures suggest it was the former rather than the latter that was the true account.

  Baldwin negotiated a profitable marriage with the rich Adelaide, widow of the Norman Count of Sicily: she arrived at Acre accompanied by three triremes of elegant courtiers, Arab bodyguards—and treasure. Outremer had never seen anything as magnificent as her cavalcade. The streets were bannered and carpeted as Baldwin escorted this ageing Cleopatra into a rejoicing Jerusalem. However, her haughtiness proved inconvenient, her charm insufficient and her wealth all too exhaustible. She disliked provincial Jerusalem, missing the luxuries of Palermo. When Baldwin fell dangerously ill, his bigamy began to trouble him and he despatched the Queen back to Sicily.

  Meanwhile the king found a solution to the emptiness of Jerusalem. In 1115, he raided across the Jordan, building castles there but also encountering the poverty-stricken Syrian and Armenian Christians, whom he invited to settle in Jerusalem, ancestors of today’s Palestinian Christians.

  The Crusaders of Jerusalem faced a strategic dilemma: should they expand northwards into Syria and Iraq or southwards into the fraying caliphate of Egypt? To secure the kingdom, Baldwin and his successors knew they had to conquer one of these territories. Their strategic nightmare was a union of Syria and Egypt. So in 1118 Baldwin raided Egypt, but, halting to catch fish in the Nile, he fell ill again. Carried back in a litter, he died at the border town of El-Arish, where the Bardawil lagoons are named after him. He was a gifted adventurer who had become a Levantine king, now surprisingly mourned by “Franks, Syrians and even the Saracens.”

  On Palm Sunday, the Jerusalemites were solemnly parading their palms in the Kidron Valley when they were heartened to see from the north the arrival of the Count of Edessa. Only then did they observe, approaching from the south, the catafalque of their dead king, weaving closely through the Judaean hills guarded by his mourning army.2

  BALDWIN II THE LITTLE

  Once Baldwin was laid in the Church, the barons reviewed the candidates for the throne. But one faction simply elected the Count of Edessa and seized Jerusalem. The kingdom was fortunate in its choice. Baldwin II, the dead king’s cousin, known as the Little, in contrast to his lanky predecessor, had ruled Edessa through eighteen years of constant warfare and even survived four years of prison after being captured by the Turks. Wearing a long beard down to his chest, blond now streaked with silver, he was wholesomely married to an Armenian heiress, Morphia, with four daughters, and was so saintly that his knees were calloused from prayer. Baldwin was, even more than his predecessor, a Levantine as well as a Frankish king: he was at home in the Middle East, holding court in robes, seated cross-legged on cushions. The Muslims regarded him as “rich in experience” with “good sense and the gift of kingship”—high praise for an infidel.

  In Jerusalem, Baldwin the Little lent his Temple of Solomon to a new military order of “God-fearing” knights, “professing the wish to live perpetually in poverty, chastity and obedience,” who would take their name from their new home. The Templars started as nine guardians of the pilgrim route from Jaffa but grew into a crack military-religious order of 300 knights, wearing the red cross, granted them by the pope, and commanding hundreds of sergeants and thousands of infantry. The Templars converted the Islamic Haram al-Sharif into a Christian complex of sh
rine, arsenal and accommodation:a al-Aqsa was already divided up into rooms and apartments but they added a capacious Templar Hall (of which traces still exist) around the south wall. Near the Rock, the Dome of the Chain became St. James’s Chapel. The underground Mosque of Jesus’ Cradle became the Christian St. Mary’s. Herod’s subterranean halls, which they called the Stables of Solomon, housed the Order’s 2,000 horses and 1,500 pack camels, accessed through a new single gate in the southern wall, all this protected to the south by a fortified barbican. North of the Dome, they built a canons’ cloister, their own bathhouse and a crafts workshop. On top of al-Aqsa, they created, says the German monk Theodorich who visited in 1172, “an abundance of gardens, courtyards, antechambers, vestibules and rainwater cisterns.”

  A little earlier in 1113, Pope Paschal II granted the area just south of the Holy Sepulchre to another new order, the Hospitallers, who later became a holy army even richer than the Templars. At first they wore black tunics with white crosses; later the pope granted them the red surcoat with a white cross. They built their own quarter including a hostel with a thousand beds and the huge Hospital, where four doctors inspected the sick twice a day, checked their urine and let their blood. New mothers each received a cot. But there were limits to its comforts, so each patient received a sheepskin coat and boots to wear to the latrine. Jerusalem echoed with many languages including French, German and Italian—Baldwin granted the Venetians trading privileges—but it was still a Christian reserve: he allowed Muslim traders into the city, but they were not permitted to spend the night in Christ’s capital.