The city of Jerusalem

by C. R. Conder

THE FIRST CRUSADE

Godfrey of Bouillon (in the Ardennes) was descended on his mother’s side from Charlemagne. He was the eldest son of Count Eustace II. of Boulogne, and nephew of the duke of Lorraine. He was about thirty-five years old, and had distinguished himself fighting for the emperor Henry IV. against the Pope, but now vowed as penance to aid the Christian cause. Like Bœmund, he was taller than most men, strong and ruddy bearded, loved and respected by all—a true knight, faithful and pure of life, brave and just, courteous to all, and humble of heart. With him came his brother Baldwin, who was the first to establish a Latin province in Asia as Count of Edessa, and who succeeded him as King of Jerusalem. The Lorrainers whom they led numbered 10,000 knights and 24,000 foot. Raymond of Toulouse, who had fought in Spain beside the Cid, led 100,000 men by land to Byzantium with Godfrey. He became Count of Tripoli, and died fighting there on February 28, 1105. Besides these future princes, Robert of Flanders and Robert of Normandy took part in the conquest, and the total force of trained fighting men, assembled at Constantinople in the winter of 1096 A. D., numbered about 200,000 in all. To them fell all the honour and profit, and the wild mobs of 100,000 pilgrims who preceded them, under Peter the Hermit and Walter Lackland, with 20,000 Germans besides, never reached Palestine at all, being massacred by the Turks near Nicæa.

Such were the great actors and such their motives. They knew not what they did, and the results of enthusiasm and of ambition alike were far different from what they hoped. The masses may have found consolation in absolution from their sins, but no priestly blessing could alter the nemesis of conduct that came on them and on their children. The traders who hoped to dominate the commerce of Asia found it necessary, in the end, to make treaties with Moslem rulers. The proud princes of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem were, within a century, to become outcasts dependent on their kinsmen at home. The emperors of Byzantium found, not allies, but masters, in the Franks. The Eastern Churches were dispossessed of their chapels and property by Latin bishops. The power of the Papacy was not in the end secured, nor was the union of Christendom, under the bishop of Rome as its feudal head, established more than a hundred years. Pride led to the fall of the Roman Church; and education gained in Asia led to the Renaissance and to the Reformation. The Eternal Purpose which works for the rise of man guided these unwitting agents by ways which they followed with unwilling feet, and a half-savage Europe became a new centre of civilisation in consequence mainly of the Crusades.

It is remarkable, also, that the success of the Latins was not due solely to hard fighting, but was also brought about by the policy of their leaders. Melek el Afḍal, the vizier of the Fâṭemite khalîfah El Must’aîla, was eager to ally himself with the Latins against the Turks, but was dissuaded by the emperor Alexius Comnenos.[498] El Ghâzi, son of Ortok, sought aid of the Crusaders, at Mardîn, against Radhwân, son of Tutush, his rightful lord at Aleppo. Tancred took the side of Radhwân, but Baldwin I. (in 1110 A. D.) accepted the aid of El Ghâzi against the Seljuks of Môsul; and Roger of Antioch was allied, in 1115, to this same son of Ortok, whose misgovernment of Jerusalem had been the immediate cause of the Crusade. Treaties with Moslems were made by Godfrey and by his successors, and after the fall of the county of Edessa, in 1146 A. D., the Latins were often in peaceful relations with the sulṭân of Aleppo and Damascus. In 1127 ’Imâd ed Dîn Zanghi, the atabek (or “father chief”) who had become Emîr of Emîrs, as protector of the ’Abbaside khalîfah, was a formidable foe of the Latins,[499] and under his son Nûr ed Dîn (1146–74 A. D.), who ruled the West, while his elder brother Ḳutb ed Dîn ruled in Môsul, it became evident that there was no prospect of enlarging the borders of the kingdom of Jerusalem. There was a tacit understanding that the Afrîn, the Orontes, and the Jordan, were to mark the boundaries of the Franks, who never occupied Aleppo or Damascus, but held a precarious sway in Gilead and Moab.

THE CITY STORMED

The Crusaders took Nicæa from the Seljuk prince Ḳilij-Arslân on May 5, 1097; and, when Antioch was betrayed on June 2 of the next year, they defeated the Turks of Môsul under Kerbogha, the general of Borḳiyaruk, after which they set out for Jerusalem, and reached it unopposed in June 1099 A. D. The force sent south did not exceed 1,500 knights and 20,000 foot-soldiers; but, including camp-followers and irregulars, it amounted to about 40,000 men in all. Jerusalem was protected by a single wall, apparently on the lines of Hadrian’s fortification, and it was attacked as usual from the north.[500] The forces of Godfrey were arrayed towards the east, and were separated by those of Count Robert of Flanders and Duke Robert of Normandy from Tancred’s Italians, with whom the men of Lorraine had quarrelled at Tarsus. Tancred attacked on the north-west, at the tower which afterwards bore his name. Raymond of Toulouse was opposite the west wall; and part of his force afterwards took up a position on Sion, opposite the south wall of the city. Tancred’s mad attempt to take Jerusalem by assault, using only a single ladder, failed, and regular siege works became necessary for the reduction of the Egyptian garrison. Wood for siege machines was brought from a valley six miles away, but was found small and useless. In the heat of summer the Franks suffered terribly from want of water: for the wells were choked, and some said were poisoned; the Siloam stream was insufficient and difficult of access; and the foraging parties, sent to Bethlehem and Tekoa, were often cut off by the Saracens, who sallied southwards till they were invested on Sion. The cattle and horses died in great numbers, and a pestilence was caused by their unburied corpses. At length the Genoese fleet reached Jaffa, and sent wood and artificers to aid the exhausted besiegers. Storming towers were made, and were covered with the hides of the dead beasts. After four weeks all was ready for the assault, and on July 12 (the Feast of the Visitation) a solemn procession was made to the ruined church on the summit of Olivet, where Peter the Hermit and Arnold, the ambitious chaplain of Robert of Normandy, preached to the army. The first assault, on July 14, was repelled; for the heavy towers stuck fast, and three witches, weaving spells on the ramparts, were believed to have succeeded, though they were slain, while an apparition of St. George, seen by Godfrey and his brother Eustace, failed to excite the valour of their men. But during the night Godfrey took down his tower, and moved it farther west to the postern of the Magdalen (now called “Herod’s Gate”) where the ditch was less deep. Here it was re-erected, and at 3 p.m. in the afternoon of Friday, July 15 (the Moslem day of rest), the bridge fell on the rampart, and Godfrey stood on the wall—the first to enter the captured city, which, by the custom of the age, he could claim for his own, as Baldwin claimed Edessa and Bœmund claimed Antioch.

A terrible scene of carnage followed when the gates were opened, and the wild Franks, Normans, and Italians poured into the town. lt is said that—in strange contrast to the clemency of Omar and (afterwards) of Saladin—10,000 Moslems were slain in the Ḥaram, when the knights rode in on a pavement soaked with blood. The massacre went on for seven days. Tancred in vain promised security to fugitives in the Aḳṣa, for all were slain by the lawless soldiers. Only those who took refuge in the Tower of David were saved by Raymond of Toulouse, and sent with their families and baggage to Ascalon, which long remained an outpost of the Egyptians in Palestine. After this conquest the success of the Latins was so complete that no Moslem foe appeared before the walls of Jerusalem for eighty-eight years; and when Saladin began to become formidable in 1178 A. D., nine years before the fall of the kingdom, it was found that the ramparts had fallen into ruins through age, and they were hastily repaired.[501] The Frank rule in Palestine, from 1099 to 1187 A. D., was strong and prosperous, and gaps of many years occur in the chronicles, during which we read of no wars, even on the frontiers, which were secured by a line of mighty castles. Notices of Jerusalem, in chronicles and legal documents and letters, thus refer mainly to gifts of land made to the churches and to the military orders, or to internal disputes between the regulars and the patriarchs.

THE FRANK KINGS

Godfrey, being elected, refused to take the title of king in a city where his Master had only worn a crown of thorns. Within a year he died of fever at the early age of forty on July 18, 1100, and was succeeded by his brother Baldwin, the first Latin king, who ruled successfully till 1117 A. D.[502] The third king was Baldwin II. (de Burg), a cousin of Godfrey, who married an Armenian princess. He was captive from May 30, 1123, to August 24, 1124, at Ḥarrân, having been seized by Balak, nephew of El Ghâzi, the lord of Mardîn, and was only delivered after Balak had been slain by Jocelyn of Edessa. But this event did not affect Jerusalem. He left four half Armenian daughters, the eldest (Melisinda or Milicent) being a famous queen, married to Fulk of Anjou, under whom Palestine reached the summit of its prosperity as a Christian kingdom. Fulk[503] reigned from 1131 to 1144, and left two sons, of whom the elder, Baldwin III., was a gallant youth, long held in ward by his crowned mother Melisinda. She founded the Benedictine nunnery at Bethany—of which the tower still dominates the hamlet—in 1147, and rebuilt the Church of the Virgin’s Tomb in the last year of her life; for she died at Nâblus on September 11, 1161, and was buried on the stairs leading down to the cave-chapel of this restored church. Her son survived her only five months, and died on February 10, 1162. He was succeeded by his gloomy brother Amaury, who weakened the kingdom by making war on Egypt. His son Baldwin IV. was only eleven when Amaury died in 1173, and had already been found to be afflicted with leprosy. His reign was rendered miserable by the quarrels and intrigues of the decadent Latins, and he died in 1185, leaving no child. His elder sister Sibyl[504] married William of Montferrat, and afterwards Guy of Lusignan, the unfortunate last king of Jerusalem, whom Saladin defeated at Ḥaṭṭîn on July 3, 1187. The victorious sulṭân hastened to Jerusalem, which thus after eight days of siege fell again into Moslem hands, on Friday, October 2, 1187 A. D.

The old French account, called the “Citez de Jhérusalem,” gives us a very full description of the Holy City “au jor que li Sarrazin et Salahadinz la conquistrent sur les Chrestienz”—in the “day when the Saracens and Saladin conquered it from the Christians”; and, taken with other contemporary documents, and with the earlier accounts by Sæwulf, John of Würzburg, Theodorich, and several more, it enables us to recover the names of every main street, every gate and important building that existed in Jerusalem in the latter part of the twelfth century. Further information as to the churches of the Greeks within the town is also afforded by the accounts of the Russian abbot Daniel, and of the Greek pilgrim John Phocas. To the description of the city we may thus now turn.