Many Muslims were nomadic or engaged in some form of transhumance. In his description of the origins of the Turkish race, William of Tyre explains that, initially, all the Turks were nomadic, ‘constantly roaming around here and there in search of the best pasture for their flocks’, but that thirty to forty years before the arrival of the crusaders they had established much more stable political entities in Persia. Even so, there continued to exist those whom he calls Turcomans, who ‘still retained their rude and primitive mode of life’.98 Michael the Syrian describes how in the winter the Turcomans were accustomed to migrate from the north into southern Syria, where there was no snow or frost and where they could find pasture, returning in the spring. In 1185, they were attacked en route by a band of Kurds intent on stealing their animals, an incident that escalated into a large-scale conflict that left many dead.99 The Bedouin Arabs were similarly nomadic, living mostly along the outer edges of the crusader lands in the Transjordan and the Sinai and Negev deserts. Raids upon the Jewish and Muslim settlements in eastern Galilee were not uncommon, but often quite unconnected to the wider war between the Muslims and the Franks.100 Nor were the nomads always the predators. In February 1157, King Baldwin III attacked Arabs and Turcomans grazing their flocks and herds in the woodlands near Banyas. These people, says William of Tyre, ‘live in tents and are accustomed to support life from the products of animals’.101
When they crossed the Iron Bridge over the Orontes in October 1097, the crusaders were entering an ancient land, just one more invading army over the centuries. As Fulcher of Chartres was soon to discover, it was an environment that would change them far more than they could ever have imagined. In the course of spending thirty years in the East, Fulcher became imbued with a strong sense of the need for co-existence, reflected not only in his empathy with the Greeks, Syrians and Armenians, but even with the Muslims.102 A generation after the crusade, in the mid-1120s, he reflected on this. ‘Indeed it is written,’ he said, quoting Isaiah, “The lion and the ox shall eat straw together”.’103
CHAPTER 3
The First Settlers
IF one of the objections to Raymond of Toulouse as ruler of Jerusalem was his age, then it is ironic that he outlived Godfrey of Bouillon, who died only a year after his election, on 18 July 1100. Returning from a campaign in the lands of Duqaq of Damascus, Godfrey had begun to make his way south along the coast, where he was met by the emir of Caesarea, who offered him dinner. The duke, however, says Albert of Aachen, ‘refused food with every polite expression of thanks, tasting only some oranges’. Soon after, he began to feel ill, and was secretly taken to a guesthouse at Jaffa, where four of his companions supported his head and feet. But news soon spread and both Vitale Michiel, doge of Venice, who had just arrived with his fleet at Jaffa, and Tancred hurried to visit him. Godfrey was aware that his condition was deteriorating, and had himself moved to Jerusalem, closely followed by the Venetians. In Jerusalem the Venetians visited the Holy Sepulchre and the other holy sites, having been reassured by the duke that he was improving, before returning to Jaffa. Two weeks later, a combined force led by Tancred and Daibert of Pisa, who had replaced Arnulf of Chocques as patriarch of Jerusalem the previous Christmas, set out to besiege Acre, although they were obliged to leave behind Godfrey's deputy, Warner, count of Grez, who had himself become so ill that he had had to be carried to Jerusalem on a stretcher. Four days later, Godfrey's illness became critical. ‘He made confession of his sins in true remorse of heart and with tears, took communion of the Lord's body and blood and, thus secured and protected by a spiritual shield, he was taken from this light.’ He was buried at the entrance to the Holy Sepulchre. His illness had lasted five weeks. Six days later, on 22 July, Warner of Grez also died, and was buried in the entrance to the church of the Tomb of the Virgin in the valley of Jehoshaphat.1
The causes of Godfrey's lingering death are not known. William of Tyre speaks of ‘a violent and incurable disease’, perhaps basing himself on Ekkehard of Aura, who says that, during the summer, many (including Godfrey) died of a pestilentia, that is, an infectious or contagious disease. As Ekkehard visited the kingdom personally the following year, he was probably well informed.2 At the same time, the physical stress of the crusade, together with the severe injuries he had received when attacked by a bear in August 1097, must have made him vulnerable.3 Although by no means the most distinguished or influential of the leaders during the expedition itself, he was uniquely associated with the achievements of the First Crusade in the minds of contemporaries, and remained an inspirational figure for later generations. Within twenty years of his death, Albert of Aachen was able to present his career as foreseen in a dream by a knight called Hercelo of Kinzveiler. In the vision, Hercelo had seen Godfrey on Mount Sinai, receiving the blessing of two men in white. As interpreted by Albert, this meant that ‘in the spirit and gentleness of Moses there may arise a spiritual leader of Israel, preordained by God and prince of the people’. This leader was Godfrey, who succeeded where all others had failed and was ‘made ruler of the city and commander of the people’.4
The reality was more mundane. The victory over the Egyptians near Ascalon on 12 August 1099 had temporarily removed the threat that the Fatimids would immediately retake Jerusalem, a very real danger since, only the year before, in July 1098, they had driven out the Artukid emirs, Soqman and Il-Ghazi. The Franks were aware of this and sought to follow up with an assault on Ascalon itself. Apparently, a few days after the battle, the citizens secretly offered to hand over the city to Raymond of Toulouse, as the only Christian leader they could trust. However, Godfrey and Raymond, already rivals after Godfrey's election and the dispute over the possession of the Tower of David, quarrelled over the command of the army, and therefore failed to present a credible threat.5 In Albert of Aachen's version, this was the result of Raymond's envy of Godfrey's ‘glory’, a state of mind that led him to advise the citizens to hold out as the bulk of the army was about to return home.6 Albert clearly reflects the Lotharingian viewpoint, but Ralph of Caen, too, blames Raymond's ‘arrogant and vain acts’ for this failure, a judgement influenced by what he discerned as the great damage the city had subsequently caused to the Christians, while William of Malmesbury, writing about twenty years later, presents Raymond as filled with resentment and says that, as a consequence, he ‘handed over the keys of the city to the enemies of God’.7 Although Godfrey did attack Ascalon, he was abandoned by Raymond and, left with an inadequate force of 700 mounted men, decided that the siege was no longer tenable.8
The Franks could not afford such internecine conflict. William of Tyre, perhaps anxious to emphasise the importance of divine protection, may have exaggerated the insecurities of the time, but it is nevertheless clear that the crusaders’ grip on the few enclaves they held in Palestine was too shaky to ensure safe travel or to support a settled agriculture. Indeed, the situation was exacerbated by a strike of Muslim peasants ‘in order that our people might suffer from hunger’.9 Fulcher of Chartres, the only chronicler to have visited Jerusalem at this time, when he took part in the pilgrimage of Bohemond and Baldwin at Christmas 1099, describes the privations of the journey from Edessa, including hunger, cold and heavy rain. Nobody would sell them supplies and many stragglers were picked off despite the size of the army. When they reached Jerusalem, the rotting bodies of its defenders still lay in the streets and outside the walls, creating a miasma that intruded upon the joy of worshipping at the holy places.10
Godfrey's failed attack on Arsuf in the autumn of 1099 did nothing to alleviate the situation. Although this was a serious assault lasting two months, from 15 October to 15 December, it was undermined by lack of sea power and the destruction of two of his siege engines, finally ending when the weather became too bad.11 As a result, in the winter of 1099–1100 he was left with no option but to conduct chevauchées and foraging expeditions in order to survive. One of these, in February 1100, on the hinterland of Arsuf, took advantage of the need for local Muslims
to begin preparations for the new agricultural year by attacking the populace while they were in the fields, and was sufficiently ferocious to persuade the emirs of Ascalon, Caesarea and Acre to pay tribute in money and kind, as well as gaining the release of Gerard of Avesnes, a knight from Hainault who had been held as hostage and was thought to have been killed.12
Combined operations with Tancred in May 1100 against the emir of Sawad, whose lands lay immediately to the east of the Jordan, had a similar effect. He was, says Albert of Aachen with some relish, called the Fat Peasant, ‘on account of his very great and gross corpulence and his worthless character, in which he seemed to be entirely a peasant’. The Franks spent a week in his lands ‘inflicting fire and slaughter’ before returning to Jerusalem with ‘immeasurable booty’. Tancred now set his sights on Damascus, sending six men to demand the surrender of the city and Duqaq's submission to the Christian faith. It was a risky mission and the ruler's response was to decapitate five of the envoys, sparing only the one who agreed to accept ‘the Turkish religion’. Tancred retaliated by devastating his lands for two weeks before a settlement was made.13
Brutal and sometimes desperate fighting was an integral part of these encounters. Albert of Aachen recorded how, during the siege of Arsuf, Gerard of Avesnes had been tied to a mast in the form of a crucifix, with the result that, during Godfrey's assault, he had been pierced by ten arrows, while over fifty men manning one of the siege engines were killed when it was set on fire by the defenders. ‘Some had broken backs and necks, others legs half cut off, hips or arms, certain had burst intestines from the unbearable weight of the timbers; having no strength to free themselves, they were reduced to ember and ash along with the timbers.’ Albert's account of Godfrey of Bouillon's men setting upon the peasants and townsmen while they were cultivating their vineyards and fields outside the walls is equally gruesome: ‘they attacked with a sudden cavalry charge some thousand Saracens who came out of the city, and, destroying them with savage wounds, they left over five hundred half-dead on the battlefield, their noses cut off, or hands and feet, while the victors returned to Jerusalem with citizens’ wives and sons as prisoners.’ Albert's description of this as a battle can hardly be justified, but it does encapsulate the balance of weakness in southern Palestine at this time.14
In the end, slash-and-burn could not achieve long-term results; only the capture of the sea ports in combination with the establishment of fortified strong points in the hands of capable lords could offer the Franks a measure of security. Although he had failed at Ascalon and Arsuf, Godfrey rebuilt the walls of Jaffa and improved the port facilities, an action, Albert of Aachen says, that led to the subjugation of the other Muslim cities and to a great increase of Christians arriving by sea. He strengthened Tiberias with ‘a rampart and invincible defences on the steep slope of the mountain’.15 Moreover, the exodus that followed the ending of the expedition was not as dramatic as has sometimes been suggested. Although some of the major leaders returned home, many of those who remained or arrived soon after derived from important families in the West, so that, from the beginning, despite (or perhaps because of) the evident fragility of some dynastic lines and the heavy losses in the unavoidable battles, there developed a degree of aristocratic cohesion which strengthened in the course of the twelfth century.16 Equally importantly, Godfrey had also retained a small group around him which Albert of Aachen describes as the domus Godefridi, an immediate circle of men who had decided to stay in Palestine, which included at least twenty-one seculars, about half of whom were Lotharingian, and three clerics.17
At the same time Godfrey began a process of enfeoffment: Tancred was granted Tiberias and Gerard of Avesnes compensated for his near-martyrdom with fiefs worth 100 marks and possession of the castle of Hebron (St Abraham). This ‘castle’ was, in fact, a large enclosure dating from Herodian times, now known as the Haram al-Khalil.18 Robert of Apulia, who had taken part in the massacre of the populace around Arsuf, was given the tribute from the town in return for a cash payment.19 While he lay sick in Jerusalem in early July 1100, Godfrey made an anticipatory grant of Haifa to a crusader from Dargoire in the Upper Loire region, Geldemar Carpenel, ‘if they managed to capture it’.20 He evidently made several smaller grants as well, for, only days after his arrival to claim the kingship following Godfrey's death, Baldwin assembled all the holders of equipment, money and beneficia, that is, fiefs, so that they could account for their holdings and then swear fealty to him, ‘returning the fiefs individually to each person’.21 In addition, Godfrey issued an edict declaring that each year a written record (prescriptio) should be made of those who had stayed in their tenure for a year and a day, a measure aimed at preventing those who had left from returning to claim property after a year.22
He began, too, the endowment of religious institutions, granting the canons of the Holy Sepulchre twenty-one villages in a key area to the north of Jerusalem.23 These were settled by westerners who, initially at least, must have been survivors of the crusade. Whatever their previous status, these were now freemen, occupying allocated plots of land and paying tithes and a proportion of their harvests. Many must have established themselves as family units, marrying local Christians, widows of dead crusaders or former prostitutes who had come on the crusade as penitents. The presence of western women in the crusading host is well attested, in particular in the denunciations of clerics intent on explaining military failures in terms of immorality, although self-preservation rather than sexual laxity must have been the main determinant of female behaviour given the circumstances they were obliged to face during the expedition.24 The rapid establishment of such communities was essential since Jerusalem was dependent upon its rural hinterland to supply its markets with fresh fruit, vegetables and meat, as well as processed food and drink. The canons particularly needed regular production of oil and wine.25 As well as their obvious economic value, these villages had a strategic role, for they were developed along the main routes to the north towards Nablus, and the west towards Lydda, Ramla and Jaffa.26 In 1124, Fulcher of Chartres mentions a tower at al-Bira, one of the larger villages, constructed, he says, ‘in our time’, strong enough to provide refuge during a raid from Ascalon.27 Given the insecurity of the rural areas and the roads at the beginning of the century, it is likely that some fortification of settlements had been erected almost immediately.
Godfrey himself held a corridor of land from Jaffa to Jerusalem, encompassing Lydda and Ramla, and extending a short distance south to Bethlehem. Such a limited territory could only sustain a relatively small force. According to Albert of Aachen, the raids into the lands of the emir of Sawad had been conducted by 200 knights and 1,000 infantry under Godfrey, to which Tancred had contributed a further 100 knights.28 Ralph of Caen, who presumably obtained his information from Arnulf of Chocques and Tancred, says that, after the departure of the leaders in late August, ‘barely 200 men, who were equipped with breastplates, remained to defend Jerusalem’, about eighty of whom belonged to Tancred's household.29 To put this in perspective, at the battle of Ascalon on 12 August, the Franks had mustered 5,000 knights and 15,000 foot soldiers, an army that, the crusaders claimed, had even then been outnumbered by twenty to one.30 His one port was Jaffa, which was in such poor condition that its inhabitants had abandoned it as indefensible shortly before the crusaders arrived,31 while the road from there up to Jerusalem was described by the English pilgrim Saewulf, in the summer of 1102, as very hard and dangerous because of Saracen ambushes and the lack of water.32 In contrast, as Daibert, archbishop of Pisa, Godfrey and Raymond of Toulouse explained to the pope in a letter of September 1099, any one of the many coastal cities in Muslim hands had more men than the entire crusading army.33
Godfrey was evidently worried that if the situation became widely known in the West it would deter new crusaders. Guibert of Nogent, writing a decade later, recalled that he had been told by Baldwin of Bourcq, a kinsman of Godfrey, who had travelled with him on the First Crusade, that he w
as with Godfrey when they had fought off an ambush of 120 Turks with only twenty knights, ‘made the more audacious by the aid we had continually experienced from God’. On this occasion, in order to inspire those who had remained in France, Godfrey had asserted that he had a vast fortune, derived from ten castles and an abbey, which paid him a sum of 1,500 marks annually. ‘And if God favours my taking Aleppo, I shall soon have 100 castles under my command. Do not believe those who have retreated, claiming that we grow weary with hunger, but rather trust in my words.’34
However, at this time ports were more important than Aleppo and they could not be taken without the help of the Italian fleets. Most were held by emirs, largely independent of higher authority since the tenth century, when the bureaucratic government of the Abbasids at Baghdad had begun to fall apart. As a result, none of these rulers possessed forces comparable in size to Mesopotamian atabegs like Kerbogha, nor could they assemble viable coalitions, but even so their ’askar, or mounted guards, reinforced by local troops and mercenaries, often seemed to be sufficient to see off the Frankish threat.35 Moreover, at various times they received help from Egyptian ships, which had by no means conceded the sea to the Christians.36 The arrival of a large Pisan fleet at Jaffa in late December 1099 therefore offered Godfrey an unprecedented opportunity. The Pisans were led by their archbishop, Daibert, who had landed at Latakia two months before with what they claimed were 120 ships, a fleet too large to be challenged by the Egyptians at Ascalon, where poor harbour facilities precluded the retention of shipping on this scale.37 The archbishop himself reached Jerusalem on 21 December, accompanied by Bohemond and Baldwin, now established in Antioch and Edessa respectively.38 Daibert's exact status remains unclear, although it is generally held that he possessed legatine powers received from Urban II. He had certainly been strongly associated with the late pope, as he had taken the Cross at Clermont and, in 1098, had acted as his legate in Castile. His record in Pisa suggests a strong commitment to the papal reform programme, so it is reasonable to see him as an emissary of Urban II and therefore carrying all the prestige and weight that this implied, even though any legatine powers he may have possessed would have lapsed with the pope's death.39
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