By Sword and Fire

by Sean McGlynn

  The official armies were led by Raymond of Toulouse, Godfrey of Bouillion, Hugh of Vermandois, Robert of Normandy, Robert of Flanders, Stephen of Blois and Baldwin of Boulogne. It was this collective force with its core of knights and infantry that won the crusades its spectacular success; smaller groups ‘led’ by a goat and a goose imbued with the Holy Spirit had, not surprisingly, a much more limited impact. Setting out in late 1096, serendipitously to arrive in a Middle East riven with political disunity, the crusaders successfully besieged Nicaea in May 1097 (only for it to submit to the Greeks instead, thereby depriving the army of valuable loot), following it up with a dramatic victory at the close-run battle of Doryaleum as they crossed Anatolia. Almost as telling as human losses were animal ones: most of the pack animals had died and eighty per cent of knights had lost their mounts by the time the expedition reached the Holy Land. Antioch was placed under siege in October 1097. Exposed to the elements through a bitter winter, the crusaders took nearly eight months to capture the city; when they did, the author of the Deeds of the Franks informs us, ‘All of the squares of the city were everywhere … full of the corpses of the dead, so that no one could endure it there for the excessive stench. No one could go along a street of the city except over the bodies of the dead.’12 The haul of booty was incalculable; but the haul of provisions in a city that had been under siege for so long was minimal. Weakened further by famine and disease, and unable to withstand a siege from a large Muslim army arriving before the city, the crusaders made a sortie that crushed their enemy, adding another spectacular but hard-won victory to their campaign.

  The crusading army that had set out for Jerusalem in 1099 had been reduced to about fourteen thousand in strength. It reached the walls of Jerusalem in mid-June and began a fierce siege lasting just over four weeks. The ditch around the walls was filled in at certain places, allowing rams and constructed towers to be brought up to the walls. All the while the crusaders operated under a deadly hail of missiles, including incendiaries in the form of coals, flammable pots and objects covered with pitch and studded with nails. On the morning of 15 July a siege tower allowed the crusaders to fight their way onto the ramparts; the Muslim defence crumbled and the city was sacked. Some fled to the temple, others took temporary refuge in the citadel, the Tower of David.

  The Latin accounts of the sack of the city are graphic. Many writers used the Deeds of the Franks as a basis for their own accounts, composed by an anonymous eyewitness once thought to be a knight but more recently considered to be a cleric. This explains why there appears to be so much agreement between the sources. Raymond of Aguilers, another observer of and participant in the crusade, adds much further important detail of his own. However, some writers cannot resist further embellishments and heightening of the drama; Robert the Monk in particular enjoys lingering over the gory details. Here is how some of them describe the massacre.

  The Deeds of the Franks provides history with the famous statement ‘there was such a massacre that our men were wading up to their ankles in enemy blood’. The emir of the city surrendered to Count Raymond and was granted his life. His people were not so fortunate. At the Temple, many prisoners were taken; the crusaders ‘killed whom they chose’. Many on the temple roof were given Christian banners for protection and spared the immediate slaughter, only to be beheaded the following morning. Such was the stench of putrefying corpses, ‘the surviving Saracens dragged the dead ones out in front of the gates and piled them up in mounds as big as houses’.13

  Fulcher of Chartres writes that ‘nowhere was there a place where the Saracens could escape the swordsmen’. Those who had climbed to the top of Solomon’s Temple ‘were shot to death with arrows’, and of those within it, ‘about 10,000 were beheaded’. (Albert of Aachen more realistically gives this number as three hundred.) ‘If you had been there, your feet would have been stained up to the ankles with the blood of the slain…. Not one was allowed to live. They did not spare the women and children.’14 Raymond of Aguilers exclaims that ‘the amount of blood’ the crusaders ‘shed that day is incredible’; ‘piles of heads, hands and feet were to be seen in the streets’. Raymond picks out the events at the Temple as exceeding the ‘powers of belief’. Going one better, he describes how the attackers ‘rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins’.15

  Robert the Monk is the most gratuitous – and disturbing – of all. He is worth quoting at length because his account of the First Crusade proved to be the most popular contemporary account throughout Europe, sating the appetite of the bloodthirsty society described in chapter one. ‘In no battle’, he writes, were there ‘so many opportunities to kill.’

  Many thousands of chosen soldiers slashed human bodies from head to abdomen…. Those who did manage to get away from such butchery and slaughter made their way to the Temple of Solomon…. Our men … found a new rush of courage, broke into the temple and put its occupants to a wretched death. So much human blood was spilt there that the bodies of the slain were revolving on the floor on a current of blood; arms and hands which had been cut off floated on the blood and found their way to other bodies so that nobody could work out which body the arm had come from which was attached to another headless body. Even the soldiers who were carrying out the massacre could hardly bear the vapours rising from the warm blood. Once they had finished this indescribable slaughter their spirits became a little gentler; they kept some of the young people, male and female, alive to serve them.

  Describing the killings at the Temple of Solomon the next day, Robert displays his sadistic humour: ‘A very large number of Turks had in fact climbed up there, and would have been all too grateful to flee if they could have grown wings and flown away; funnily enough nature failed to provide wings, giving instead a miserable exit from their wretched lives…. They flung themselves to the ground, finding death on the soil which provides all things needed to sustain life.’ Yet even Robert does not claim that the massacre was total: ‘The Christians did not kill everyone, but kept many to serve them.’16

  The most obvious discrepancy from the texts is Fulcher of Chartres’s claim that all the inhabitants of Jerusalem were put to the sword without exception. This extreme version has tended to dominate the modern perceptions of the scale of the massacre. Ibn al-Athir believed over seventy thousand were killed in Jerusalem; a modern historian has put the figure between twenty and thirty thousand, which is still very excessive. Jerusalem had evacuated many of its citizens before the siege and its garrison of experienced soldiers was not large. Evidence exists to mitigate the scale of the massacre: Ibn al-Athir allows that only the men were killed, women and children being taken into captivity, and that a promise to spare some of the garrison was honoured; many Muslim survivors from Jerusalem turned up in Damascus; and a Jewish source states that so many prisoners were taken the ransom price had to be lowered.

  Allowing for these reservations, it is clear that Jerusalem still witnessed scenes of widespread slaughter. Storming was a violent climax to any siege; and although the investiture of Jerusalem was relatively brief, it came at the end of a campaign that lasted nearly three years and which was full of hardships and deprivations that exceeded even the harsh conditions of warfare in Europe. Ever present had been fear of a strange and alien enemy; disease which weakness made even more deadly and which claimed as many lives as combat; excruciating hunger which led some to resort to cannibalism; and, constantly referred to by the chroniclers, the agonizing thirst, which one source says finished off hundreds of crusaders on one occasion alone. Jerusalem offered a chance to avenge these deprivations and torments with the winning of the crusade’s ultimate goal. The need for revenge was also prevalent in an army that had been depleted to just over ten thousand by the end of the expedition; an attrition rate approaching seventy per cent has been calculated for the crusaders’ losses over the three years. Robert the Monk believes that by the time of the siege of Jerusalem, Duke Godfrey was no longer interested in the spoils of war, ‘instead, as the
head of his Franks he was desperate to make the enemy pay for the blood of the servants of God which had been spilt for Jerusalem, and wanted revenge for the insults [hardships] they had heaped on the pilgrims’.17

  In the bloodlust of combat, with adrenalin still coursing through their bodies, many crusaders, like other soldiers in their position, were more than ready to kill an enemy who only moments before had been trying to kill them. But killing and revenge were not the only things on their minds as they stormed the city: all were in pursuit of booty, a practical and financial reward to complement the spiritual one, a monetary recompense for their suffering and an opportunity, finally, to make a profit. The Deeds of the Franks tells how ‘the army scattered through the city and took possession of the gold and silver, the horses and mules, and the houses filled with goods of all kinds’.18 Fulcher of Chartres is explicit on this point: ‘After this great massacre’, the crusaders ‘entered the homes of the citizens, seizing whatever they found in them. It was done systematically, so that whoever had entered the home first … was to have and to hold the house…. Since they mutually agreed to maintain this rule, many poor men became rich’19 (my italics).

  Killing the inhabitants removed an obstacle to plunder: there could be no protests or physical attempts to stop the soldiers and it removed the possibility of any later claims or exemptions that might be sought after the dust of combat had settled. Fulcher also offers another explanation why killing assisted the pursuit of booty:

  It was an extraordinary thing to see our squires and poorer people split the bellies of those dead Saracens, so that they might pick out besants [gold coins] from their intestines, which they had swallowed down their horrible gullets while alive. After several days, they made a great heap of their bodies and burned them to ashes, and in these ashes they found the gold more easily.20

  As with revenge, the correlation between atrocity and financial gain is overwhelmingly strong. At Marrat the previous year, the poorer crusaders tortured and murdered prisoners in order to terrify others in to revealing where valuables were hidden. (The question of rape is not raised by the chroniclers, but it is easy to envisage situations where family members were also killed if they intervened or even pleaded for a wife, daughter or mother.)

  What made the sack of Jerusalem special was not the massacre carried out there – Antioch and Marrat shared a similar experience during the crusade – but that it took place in Jerusalem, Christianity’s most hallowed city (in medieval maps it was positioned at the centre of the world), and one also holy to the other two great monotheistic religions. The chroniclers reflect this salient fact and, as clerics, they can play up the religious angle of the massacre to the point of hyperbole. Thus Raymond of Aguilers’ description of crusaders riding up to their bridles in blood is in fact a biblical allusion, an apocalyptic and millenarian reference to the Book of Revelation. The propensity of some crusade writers to exaggerate the quantity of blood spilled in massacres has been addressed in a very brief but highly instructive paper by David Hay. He shows that distance from an event served to promote an author’s extravagant and bloodthirsty rendition of it, while writers from an ideological perspective opened the taps to a bloodbath even further. For the latter, ‘massacres were not to be abhorred but were instead divinely ordained rites of purification, and consequently these writers sought to convey the impression that non-Christian populations were completely annihilated; hence Fulcher relates how Jerusalem was “restored to its pristine dignity” and cleansed of the contagion of its pagan inhabitants by the triumphant crusaders.’21

  It is worth adding that Muslim thinking on purification through blood-shedding was similar, as we have seen at Hattin. Furthermore, as with battles, victory was a sign of God’s approval; the more complete the victory, the greater this approbation; and nothing was more complete than the total annihilation of an enemy in a thorough massacre. Hay proposes that a proper interpretation of the sources reveals that it was normally just the male population that was massacred. This is an important corrective up to a point, and explains some of the differences in reports of the scale of the massacre at Jerusalem. However, even those who wrote disapprovingly of such killings, as Albert of Aachen does above in describing the anti-Jewish pogrom at Mainz, point out that women and children were victims, as they too commonly were in Christian versus Christian wars in the West. Very few massacres were complete – the practicalities of mass killings made such events rare – and many perpetrators did single out just the men; but women and children were all too easily, in modern parlance, part of the collateral damage. Even when not directly targeted, as they sometimes were, they could just as readily be killed by a deliberate policy of inaction, as will be seen in the next section. The laws of war that afforded women and children more protection were not always put into practice and were flouted with impunity on many occasions.

  Whereas the looting at Jerusalem was systematic, the butchery was not. The Deeds of the Franks coldly captures the arbitrary nature of brutality when not predetermined: the crusaders ‘killed whom they chose, and whom they chose they saved alive’.22 Peter Tudebode writes: ‘Our men grabbed a large number of males and females … killing some, and sparing others as the notion struck them.’23 For some men, this decision – the notion to act one way or the other – would be rational; for others, more disturbingly, the action might be random and capricious. We are not aware of any orders that specifically commanded the killing of the entire population at Jerusalem. The killings, therefore, were not ostensibly the result of military instructions in pursuit of strategic ends, which would seem to make it a rare example among the cases studied in this book.

  Or it would but for a tragic postscript to events at Jerusalem. The sack has simplistically been seen by many as a manifestation of the murdering fanaticism of the crusading hordes, giving vent to their bloodlust as they poured into the city. However, it seems that there were actually two massacres in the city – or even three, if the killings of the prisoners on the roof of the Dome the day after the city fell are treated separately. According to Albert of Aachen, three days after taking the city, a council held by the leaders decided to kill all the remaining prisoners and hostages, be they men, women or children. Again it is unclear to what extent this was carried out (had some of the survivors we know about been taken out of the city in the intervening period?), but Albert was horrified by the executions that did take place. The reason for these calculated murders is one we have encountered at Wexford, Acre and Agincourt: an Egyptian army making its way directly to Jerusalem raised fears that the prisoners might rise up against the captors, who would be busily engaged in a new round of fighting. That this fear materialized indicates two things: first, there must have been a substantial number of survivors from the first round of killing to cause such concern; and secondly, this new massacre may have been every bit as terrible as the first.

  This grim episode in the aftermath of the fall of Jerusalem has been much overlooked in popular histories of the crusade and in some academic ones; consequently, the question not asked is: were all the people of Jerusalem not doomed the moment the city was lost anyway? For if there had been no slaughter when the crusaders broke into the city, there would have been an even bigger massacre three days later, when the remaining survivors were ordered to be put to the sword.

  Château Gaillard, 1203–4

  One of the defining moments in the centuries of Anglo-French conflict was the English loss of Normandy in 1204. When war broke out between King John and King Philip II of France in 1202, the wealthy duchy of Normandy was the great prize sought by the French. Just as Dover Castle was considered by contemporaries to be the key to England, so Château Gaillard was the great fortress that could open or block the way to Normandy. When Philip’s armies set up camp here in September 1203, one of the great set-piece sieges of the Middle Ages was put into motion.

  The castle was the personal project of Richard I; it was his ‘saucy castle’, his ‘beautiful castle on the ro
ck’. Dominating the region from its site on an imposing crag high above the river Seine, and the heart of an integrated defence complex at Andelys, it represented state-of-the-art architectural engineering; it was so well designed that Richard I boasted it could be defended even if the walls were made of butter. The money he lavished on it came to more than the expenditure on all his castles in England throughout his entire reign. No wonder it was considered impregnable. But for Philip to annex Normandy, he had first to conquer Château Gaillard.

  The epic six-month siege that ensued received little detailed attention from chroniclers, with only a few mentioning it little more than in passing. Our main record for events here comes from the distinctly pro-French sources penned by William the Breton, Philip’s royal chaplain. It has to be said that his chronicle and, even more blatantly, his epic poem the Philippidos, make no attempt to disguise his partiality; yet as an eyewitness who had a clear understanding of the nature of war, his vivid account of events at Château Gaillard is an invaluable insight into the reality of medieval siege warfare.

  The castle was in the charge of Roger of Lacy, constable of Chester, a veteran soldier widely acknowledged for his martial ability. With no landed interests in Normandy, he was loyal to the English Crown, on which his fortunes depended. His defence of the castle under siege was dogged and determined, resisting the huge concentration of French forces that blockaded him in for half a year. At one stage, the siege was nearly lifted by a spectacular combined river and land relief attack led by William Marshal, but poor co-ordination, a misreading of the tides and the determined resistance of the French saw it end in failure. Soon afterwards, the fortified island by the town of Petit-Andely fell to a daring French commando operation; left unprotected, the inhabitants of the town fled to the castle for refuge, only to be expelled later. The French tightened the blockade: excavating lines of circumvallation and contravallation (for defence and attack), and, building a siege camp, they literally dug in for the duration.