Victory in the East

Home > Other > Victory in the East > Page 46
Victory in the East Page 46

by John France


  It would seem that the action at the outer wall took up most of Thursday 14 July, for although he explains how the tower was manned before he describes the firing of the ram, Albert makes it clear that this only approached the wall on the sixth day, Friday 15 July. It towered over the wall – this was its essential function, to overawe the defences and open the way for other kinds of attack by firepower. If the height of the wall at this point was between twelve and fifteen metres, the tower must have been fifteen to seventeen metres, the height of a four-storied house.56 Amongst those in the top storey towering over the defences Godfrey and his brother Eustace commanded; below them in the storey level with the wall, the brothers Ludolf and Engelbert of Tournai were prominent, while those charged with propelling the whole structure huddled and heaved below at ground level. Ralph suggests that some of its crew attacked the wall at its base, and certainly ladders were brought up for it was the function of the tower to cover their erection. However, the business of getting the tower up to the wall proved very difficult. According to Albert the enemy had constructed fourteen mangonels, five of which were deployed against the North French tower and the remainder against that of Count Raymond.57 This fire battered away at the tower as it was inched across to the wall, killing one of Godfrey’s companions with a stone and threatening to destroy the whole thing but its osier covering absorbed much of the shock. Vases of liquid fire were thrown, but this simply poured off the carefully prepared wet hides with which the structure was draped.58 Ralph of Caen produces a vivid and dramatic account of the climax of the action: the tower had to be inched forward two or three times with enormous effort and at one point, one corner, struck by a stone, shattered and the whole structure began to lean and flop. The enemy suspended a beam on ropes slung between two of the towers of the curtain wall. However, the ropes were eventually cut by a blade hastily mounted on a wooden beam, while Robert of Normandy and Tancred deluged the nearest tower and the wall with missiles forcing the defenders off the wall. More ladders were brought up by priests singing hymns and cheering on the troops. Some of those in the assault tower were then able to climb over a tree which was turned to form a bridge over to the wall, and many ladders were erected, and so the crusaders got to close quarters. Albert of Aachen provides a very similar story. On the top stage of the tower where Godfrey stood firing his crossbow was a golden cross which attracted the enemy’s fire. This became so heavy that the crusaders brought in more manpower and did what was evidently not originally intended – they dragged their tower right up to the wall. In this way the projectiles from the enemy mangonels either bounced off the tower back onto the wall and its defenders, or passed over the whole machine. Albert says that because of the buildings within the wall the enemy could not easily redeploy their projectors to correct the range. This is an interesting reflection on the limitations of these high trajectory weapons. Instead the enemy reinforced the garrison of a nearby tower which was draped with mantles, bags of straw and chaff, and ships’ ropes and deluged the Christians with missiles of all kinds – including slings and small mangonels. The wooden tower stood firm before this assault, and so the enemy tried yet again to burn it. This time the garrison brought up a large tree-trunk draped in inflammable material and hung it on a chain between the wall and the Christian tower. This was a considerable undertaking for the large gang necessary for such a task, although they would have had covering fire, would have been deluged by missiles from the Christians. But the fire failed to take hold because, Albert says, the Franks had been advised to use vinegar against it by Christians who had escaped from the city. Eventually the crusaders on the ground seem to have seized the chain, perhaps by hooking it, and a tug-of-war ensued, the result of which was that the tree was torn down and dragged away. Those in the tower were now free to pour fire upon the ramparts and the three Christian mangonels were moved to enhance this. Raymond of Aguilers adds that fire arrows, bound with cotton, fired the defences, driving the enemy from the wall. When it seemed that the enemy were cowed by this failure and the hail of missiles, the brothers Ludolf and Englebert climbed out of the tower and threw down trees across the gap between the tower and the rampart, and so broke into the city.59 Albert and Ralph both say that the besiegers climbed in across tree trunks, while Raymond of Aguilers says that Godfrey cut down the cratem, meaning hurdle or mantlet, which protected the front of the middle and upper stories of the tower and so crossed onto the wall.60 There was no drawbridge on this tower or any other used during the crusade; a hinged bridge with a pulley system would have been very vulnerable, and in any case rather difficult to place at the right height. The tower’s purpose was to dominate the defences allowing the attackers to undermine the walls or (as on this occasion) to mount an attack by ladder. So striking was their deployment that it was noted by almost all the eastern sources which describe the fall of Jerusalem, although there is no suggestion that the writers considered this a novelty in warfare.61

  On the other side of the city things were not going so well. Here there could be no surprise for there was no room for changing the point of attack and it was not until the Thursday that the ditch was filled in after a fierce fight in which the enemy made extensive use of fire, sometimes including blazing mallets stuck with nails which fixed in to anything they hit. There is no record of a ram like that of the North French being used; there was no outer wall here. The whole battlefield was extremely constricted; between the Provençal camp around the Church of St Mary of Mount Zion and the wall was some fifty metres, while effectively only about 160 metres of the wall was accessible to attack and this was dominated by the Zion Gate (fig. 17c). But presumably some machinery was brought up to help weaken the defences, for it is difficult to see into what else these fiery projectiles could have lodged. On the morning of 15 July the Provençals brought all their machines forward including petrariae, but they were outnumbered nine or ten to one by those of the enemy whose missiles did considerable destruction; it is interesting that Albert says that the Saracens concentrated nine of their fourteen mangonels against Count Raymond’s assault. Once more, fire was used extensively against the catapults and tower of the attacking force, and the women, who had helped to fill in the ditch, were employed to bring up water. Raymond gives few details, though he does mention that some enemy women tried to put a spell on the Christian machines and were killed along with their children. It was surely at this point that the episode portrayed in the ‘Unknown account’ must have occurred. Within the Zion Gate the enemy had mounted noviter adinuento machinamento which fired flaming balls of fat, resin and pitch coagulated with hair and flax into Count Raymond’s camp causing great fires. This machine was so well protected by mantles and paddings that the crusader missiles made no impact upon it. Ultimately they fastened a three-pronged hook to the end of a great beam, supported by a long chain attached to its upper part, and with this dragged off the protection around the machine which they were then able to destroy with missiles. This hook was then redeployed against other enemy defences but became stuck in a beam where one of the enemy shinned up, presumably to bind it. The enemy then brought up five more machines tormentis causing the Christians to retreat. Raymond of Aguilers supports Albert’s story that by midday the Provençals were seriously considering withdrawal, when encouraging signals from men posted on the Mt of Olives made the southerners renew the attack with ladders and ropes, a manner of attack which appears to confirm Albert’s information that Raymond’s tower was so badly damaged that it had to be withdrawn from the battle and Tudebode’s information that its upper story was shattered and burning.62 It is unfortunate that we do not have more detail on the southern attack, for Raymond of Aguilers does not dwell on the failure of his own people and confusingly runs the descriptions of the two attacks together. However, it is evident that they faced a well-prepared defence while in the north there was a degree of improvisation. Albert may not be absolutely correct in his numbers when he says that nine of fourteen enemy catapults were deployed on t
he south, but the need to contain the strongly sustained southern thrust must have worried the enemy commanders – especially as it was directed very close to their main centre of resistance. The decision to launch a two-pronged attack may have owed something to divisions in the crusader host, but it was highly effective, not least because of the strange passivity of the garrison. At no point either in the period of intense preparation nor during the assault itself do we hear of determined sallies from the city; it may be that garrison troops had participated in the early raiding on the crusaders, but they launched no spoiling attacks and this is all the odder when it is considered that two sides of the city lay open though both were picketed. Either the garrison felt that it was too small, despite the mobile élite of 400 mounted men specially sent by the Vizir, or they simply expected relief to come much more quickly, or both. Certainly their passivity was an important factor in the crusader victory. Moreover, in view of the general expectation of the arrival of a relief army, the prompt capitulation of the citadel is curious and suggests that their numbers were never great and had been reduced by losses in the fighting to the point where holding it was not practicable.63

  Once the crusaders had got onto the rampart the defence collapsed quickly. The garrison was not numerous enough to stand against the crusaders once they had broken in. In the northern sector the crusaders fanned out east and west, the former opening the Josaphat Gate. Albert says that sixteen westerners were killed by plunging horses in the rush to get into the city. In the south, the garrison seem to have withdrawn into the citadel where Iftikhar-ad-Daulah promptly came to an agreement with Count Raymond whereby his men were spared on condition that the citadel was immediately surrendered.64 In a military sense the battle was over and now the massacre began. This notorious event should not be exaggerated. Many Jews survived; we hear of some being captured by Tancred and we know that some were later ransomed, while many Muslim refugees from the city later took refuge at Damascus bringing with them the celebrated Koran of Uthman. The shock expressed by Ibn al-Athir, for example, and his statement that 70,000 were killed, owes something to the later spirit of Jihad and the thirst for vengeance which it engendered.65 However horrible the massacre at Jerusalem, it was not far beyond what common practice of the day meeted out to any place which resisted. In 1057 the entire population of Melitene was slaughtered or enslaved by the Turks whose conquest of Asia Minor was particularly brutal, while in the chaos after Manzikert Greeks and Armenians slaughtered one another.66 Such events were not confined to the Orient; the Conqueror’s ravaging of the Vexin and sack of Mantes in 1087 was of such savagery that some saw his death in the ruins of this city as divine vengeance. In the ‘harrying of the north’ by the Normans, Ordericus believed 100,000 Christians perished and, commenting on William’s role in this ‘brutal slaughter’, remarked that ‘I cannot commend him’. These were exceptional events, but they were not so rare, and represented, as we have noted, only exaggerations of the common currency of war.67 This is the background of military behaviour and we must remember the heightened emotions of an army which had been through terrible trials; as the city fell there were reports of a vision of Adhémar of Le Puy. It is perhaps the rejoicing in the event so notable in Raymond of Aguilers, and the cryptic and cold acceptance of merciless slaughter in the Anonymous which repel us. Even if we can stomach the slaughter on the day as excesses committed in a moment of exaltation, the killing of Tancred’s hostages who had hidden on the roof of the Dome of the Rock the next day is repellent.68 The rapacious greed shown by many, notably Tancred who had been told by defectors of the wealth of the Dome of the Rock seems, to us, at odds with the religious purposes of the expedition, but of course it was not, though the matter caused bad feeling between the leaders. Godfrey’s pious abstention from pillaging appears noble – but of course Tancred was his man and shared the loot with him. Special mention is made of the capture of the 400 horses of the élite mounted force with which al-Afdal had reinforced the garrison, which had been left outside the citadel where their riders had sought refuge for they were very valuable to a host whose horses must by now have been few and exhausted.69 In fact, large numbers of the native population seem to have survived the initial conquest, but three days later, after Tancred had complained about the massacre of his hostages on the Dome of the Rock, the leaders decreed that all prisoners, men, women and children, should be massacred; this second phase of cold-blooded murder was duly carried out and even Albert was appalled by it. But there was reason behind the horror; the Franks had engaged in a race against time and the gamble had succeeded. But now they anticipated the coming of an Egyptian army and it was fear of leaving an enemy in the nest that brought about this atrocious killing.70

  The army had seized Jerusalem, but it remained in a perilous position, and things were made worse by the divisions in its ranks. After a preliminary meeting on 17 July to deal with practical matters such as clearing bodies from the city, the occasion on which Albert says that they also ordered the massacre of the remaining Muslim population, the leaders met in solemn conclave on 22 July to consider the future of the city. Some of the clergy demanded that the Patriarch be elected first in recognition of the primacy of the spiritual authority, but the princes refused to heed that and offered the throne to Count Raymond who, probably under clerical influence, refused, disdaining the name of king in Jerusalem. Godfrey de Bouillon was then offered the government of the city as ‘Advocate’, a position which recognised the claims of the church while conceding practical power to the lay authority. When he demanded the surrender of the Tower of David, Raymond of Toulouse refused because he wanted to stay in the city until Easter, and there followed an intrigue with overtones of coercion. Even the Provençals, Raymond of Aguilers says, muttered against their lord for they wanted to return home quickly. This note of division in the crusader army, and in particular of tension between Raymond and Godfrey, can be related to the affair of Tancred’s allegiance which goes back to ‘Akkār, while it is notable that a number of important Provençal leaders like Gaston of Béarn seem to have deserted at this time. The upshot was that Count Raymond lost the citadel; Albert says he was forced to surrender it. Then he went to the Jordan for his devotions, returning only for the election of a Patriarch on 1 August, a post which went to the Norman Arnulf of Choques.71 The whole bad-tempered affair promised a rather sour end to the great expedition. But what is interesting is that nobody seems to have set off for home. The reason is fairly obvious; they were expecting attack from an Egyptian army. Any leader who left at such a point would be open to the shameful charge of having deserted the Holy City and his comrades in the hour of need. In addition, any small force would have feared attack on the long march back to friendly territory in North Syria. Self-preservation, therefore, prompted unity of a tenuous kind, which was just as well for they now faced the gathering forces of a powerful enemy.

  The Fatimid Caliphate of Egypt was no longer the great power it had been. A period of economic decline and political instability had been brought to a close with the rise of the Vizir Badr al-Jamali, a Moslem Armenian who was able to consolidate his power in the years 1074–7 and pass it on to his son al-Afdal on his death in 1094. The weakening of the Seljuks after 1094 and the coming of the crusade offered an opportunity for the Egyptians to reassert the control of Palestine and southern Syria which they had lost during the time of trouble to the Seljuks.72 The embassy which the crusaders sent to Egypt on the advice of Alexius Comnenus certainly may have encouraged them to see their coming as a new Byzantine initiative, and this was solidified by the understanding reached with their embassy at Antioch in February-March 1098. In 1097/8 al-Afdal was able to resume control of Sidon and Tyre. The crusaders were well aware that in 1073 the Turks had captured Jerusalem and that it had been reconquered by the Egyptians in August 1098 in the wake of their capture of Antioch. The Egyptians were totally surprised when the crusaders rejected the terms offered at ‘Akkār in early May 1099 of access for small groups to
Jerusalem. It is possible that there was some diplomatic contact after the Frankish capture of Jerusalem for Godfrey was informed of the coming of al-Afdal by an unknown messenger73. A recent study of the Fatimid military suggests that they needed a period of two months to raise an army and establish it in Palestine. If we allow some time for the Egyptian Embassy to have returned home after their disappointment in early May, and for the matter to have been discussed at court before a decision, preparation for the expedition which gathered at Ascalon in early August 1099 must have begun only after it was clear that the breach with the Franks was irrevocable (fig. 16).74

  The Egyptians had a complex military organisation resembling that of the Baghdad Caliphate. Military administration was the task of the Diwan al-Jayish, while the Diwan al-Nawatib controlled all government salaries and the Diwan al-Iqta looked after the ‘Iqta. Three huge military storehouses, Khizana, were maintained at Cairo, the largest holding 200,000 items ranging from personal equipment to siege weapons. The Caliphal palace was at the heart of a complex of barracks which housed a regular army with a normal strength of some 10,000–15,000, of which 4,000–5,000 were cavalry. Perhaps as many as another 10,000 regulars were housed elsewhere, in the ports of Egypt and Palestine and inland cities like Jerusalem. Like the army of the Baghdad Caliphate this was a composite force, ’a multi-ethnic force with considerable slave component, in which mounted archers were prominent’. An Iranian traveller who passed through Cairo in 1047 reports a grand parade featuring 205,000 troops, Berbers and other North Africans, Turks and Persians, Daylami infantry, Nubians, Bedouins and African negroes amongst them.75 The numbers may be exaggerated but it was from amongst these people that the Fatimid Caliphate recruited. Black Sudanese troops were particularly noted by the crusaders.76 The army was organised in regiments, most of which had a common ethnic base, and subdivided into companies of 100 men. There were roughly equal numbers of cavalry and infantry amongst the regulars. After 1074 the Armenians were a major element in the army, for it was from amongst their ranks that al-Jamali had risen. So numerous were they that Armenian churches were built in Cairo to cater for them and their families. The Berbers and Arabs provided light cavalry.77 But an important element in the force was the heavy cavalry for whom the storehouses kept lamellar armour, chain mail shirts and even armoured horse-coverings which seem to have been very rare in the west at this time. Some of the Africans carried fearful war-flails and others were equipped with shields and javelins. The Armenians were primarily archers and many were mounted. The rise of the Seljuks and the long war with them had led to a reduction of the number of Turks in the Egyptian forces, but they continued to be employed. Manuals of war provided this army with ideas about formation and tactics; it is unfortunate that those surviving date from the thirteenth century when Mameluke practises dominated. However, the tactics of the Egyptians seem to have been built round the deployment of a core of well-equipped infantry supported by strong formations of heavy cavalry who were not unlike the western knights.

 

‹ Prev