procession was reached at an assembly summoned by William Hugh of Monteil, Adhemar of Le Puy’s brother. After a three-day fast, on 8 July the whole army, led by the clergy bearing the growing collection of relics, processed barefoot around the walls of Jerusalem, ignoring the taunts of the locals. On completion of the circuit, the host was addressed on the Mount of Olives by Raymond of Aguilers, for the Provencals, Arnulf of Choques, the smooth-talking chaplain to the duke of Normandy, and Peter the Hermit, now under the patronage of Godfrey of Bouillon and the Lorrainers. Count Raymond and Tancred were publicly reconciled.49 The political and religious threads of the expedition were thus drawn tightly together in a public demonstration that recognized the regional diversity of the enterprise while insisting on its single identity, shared experience and common goal. As at Antioch, it was hoped that such rededication would ignite a willingness to hazard all in a last throw of fate. News of al- Afdal’s large relief army leaving Egypt had reached the Christian camp. It was now or never.
The final assault on Jerusalem begun on 13 July was a desperate affair. Attacks were launched on two fronts, by the Provencals on the narrow line of wall by the Zion Gate in the south and by the northern forces – of Godfrey, Robert of Normandy, Robert of Flanders and Tancred – who had moved, with their siege tower and ram, to the north-east corner of the walls on 10 July. While the Provencals made little impact, the northerners’ slowly wore down the defence, their tactics revolving around pushing their siege tower as close to the inner wall as possible to allow troops to gain access to the ramparts by planks and ladders. While other contingents provided ferocious salvoes of arrows and bolts, the Lorrainers under Duke Godfrey were in charge of the tower. Resistance was everywhere fierce, strongest in the south, nearest to the centre of power at the Citadel; in both sectors catapults were used by the defenders. Casualties were high; perhaps as many as a fifth or a quarter of the western armies. Contact between the two Christian assaults was maintained by signallers stationed on the Mount of Olives using reflectors. At midday on Friday, 15 July, the dispirited Provencals were encouraged to renew their attack while the northerners’ siege tower was painfully edged towards the inner wall over which it towered. Albert of Aachen recorded that a golden cross was placed on the top storey of the tower, where Duke Godfrey himself stood firing his crossbow into the city.50 When the tower was pushed right against the wall, from the storey below the brothers Ludolf and Engelbert from Tournai threw planks across the gap and entered the city, soon followed by Godfrey, Tancred and the Lorrainers. The defenders fled to the Haram al-Sharif, the Temple Mount, but were overtaken by Tancred before they could secure the precinct. The scale of the slaughter there impressed even hardened veterans of the campaign, who recalled the area ‘streaming with blood’ that reached to the killers’ ankles. Raymond of Aguilers resorted to the language of the Book of Revelation in describing the Christian knights in front of the al-Aqsa mosque wading through blood up to their horses’ knees.51 The survivors took refuge inside the mosque, many hiding in the roof while Tancred plundered the Dome of the Rock near by before calling a halt to the killing by offering those inside the al-Aqsa mosque his protection, presumably hoping for ransom. Meanwhile, news of the entry of the Christians into the city caused the defenders in the south to withdraw to the Citadel, with Count Raymond in pursuit. Without delay Iftikhar al-Dawla struck a deal that guaranteed the garrison’s safe conduct to Ascalon in return for surrendering the Citadel, although some were ransomed, at knock-down rates.52
The massacre in Jerusalem spared few. Jews were burnt inside their synagogue. Muslims were indiscriminately cut to pieces, decapitated or slowly tortured by fire (this on Christian evidence). Such was the scale and horror of the carnage that one Jewish witness was reduced to noticing approvingly that at least the Christians did not rape their victims before killing them as Muslims did.53 The city was comprehensively ransacked: gold, silver, horses, food, the domestic contents of houses, were seized by the conquerors in a pillage as thorough as any in the middle ages. Profit vied with destruction; some Jewish holy books were later ransomed to the surviving community in exile. Violence overcame business on 16 July when Tancred’s prisoners in the al-Aqsa mosque were butchered in cold blood, possibly by Provencals who had missed the previous day’s action. The city’s narrow streets were clogged with corpses and dismembered body parts, including some crusaders crushed in their zeal for the pursuit and massacre of the defenders. The heaps of the dead presented an immediate problem for the conquerors; on 17 July many of the surviving Muslim population were forced to clear the streets and carry the bodies outside the walls to be burnt in great pyres, whereat they themselves were massacred, a chilling pre-echo of later genocidal practices.
This secondary slaughter, in cold blood, perhaps even more than the initial mayhem, provoked mounting retrospective shock and outrage amongst Muslim intellectuals, religious leaders and politicians over the next century and a half. Some thousands, men, women and children, were massacred, although certainly fewer than the 70,000 trumpeted in early thirteenth-century Arabic chronicles. A few Muslim and Jewish Jerusalemites survived, managing either to escape, sometimes with their possessions and holy books, such as the belongings of the Egyptian garrison and its hangers-on, the Torah scrolls that reached Ascalon, or to be ransomed, a process that could take months, suggesting a not entirely indiscriminate policy of killing on the part of the crusaders.54 Massacres were not a monopoly of western Christians. The recent Turkish conquests in the Near East had been accompanied by carnage and enslavement on a grand scale. When it suited, Muslim victors could behave as bestially as any Christian, as Zengi showed at Edessa in 1144 and Saladin was to prove in suppressing opposition in Egypt in the 1170s and in the killing of the knights of the military orders after the battle of Hattin in 1187. Immediate contemporary Muslim reactions appeared muted when contrasted to later polemics. Massacres as well as atrocity stories were – and are – an inescapable part of war. In the face of a Muslim counter- attack, letting the locals live may not have seemed a prudent option to the Christian victors, however obscene the alternative.
The scenes of carnage and plunder in the streets of Jerusalem attract particular notoriety through the juxtaposition of extreme violence and anguished faith. Some of the butchers thought they saw Adhemar of Le Puy urging them on. On the evening of 15 July 1099, with the din of slaughter still echoing round the city, in the midst of the almost deserted Christian quarter, recently emptied of most of its inhabitants by the Muslim governor, the conquerors went to pray at the church of the Holy Sepulchre, the object of all their labours. As one veteran put it:
our men rushed round the whole city, seizing gold and silver, horses and mules, and houses full of all sorts of goods and they all came rejoicing and weeping from excess of gladness to worship at the Sepulchre of our Saviour Jesus, and there they fulfilled their vows.
Another, in language redolent of the Bible and the liturgy, touched on the contrasting emotions of those who, after three years of almost unimaginable effort, struggle, anxiety and fear, found themselves at journey’s end:
Jerusalem was now littered with bodies and stained with blood… With the fall of the city it was rewarding to see the worship of the pilgrims at the Holy Sepulchre, the clapping of hands, the rejoicing and singing of a new song to the Lord. Their souls offered to the victorious and triumphant God prayers of praise which they could not explain in words.55
The capture of Jerusalem, however remarkable a crowning achievement, did not end the expedition, its internal divisions or its military vulnerability. The settlement of secular and ecclesiastical authority within the city and its surrounds resurrected the simmering hostilities between the leaders. On 22 July, Raymond of Toulouse was once more outmanoeuvred. After apparently refusing an offer to accept the crown of Jerusalem, perhaps on clerical prompting, he saw instead his latest chief rival, Godfrey of Bouillon, the only other main leader willing to remain in the east, elected as secular ruler, or Advocate (the title implying ecclesiastical authority). As at Antioch, Raymond was then forced to surrender his strongpoint in the city, the Citadel. He nearly abandoned the expedition, taking himself off to sulk on a trip to the Jordan valley, only reluctantly joining the army to repel the Egyptians. On 1 August, in a further blow to Raymond’s standing, the Norman Arnulf of Choques, the prosecutor of Peter Bartholomew, was elected patriarch of Jerusalem, the previous patriarch, Symeon, who had joined the army at Antioch, having died in Cyprus a few days earlier. With Arnulf’s election the top posts in Jerusalem had gone to the Lorrainers and Normans. By this time a number of Count Raymond’s own followers had transferred allegiance. Arnulf secured his control of the church of the Holy Sepulchre by establishing Latin canons. More significantly, he unearthed a piece of the True Cross, possibly by persuading or coercing local Christians into telling him where one had been hidden. This story of concealment and discovery, containing echoes of the Holy Lance story, may have been circulated to establish a respectable provenance for a relic whose finding was timely, convenient and iconic. The discovery of the Jerusalem relic of the True Cross brought physical symbolism to the fulfilment of the journey of the bearers of the cross. It was to play a central role in the religious ceremonial, military display and political iconography of the new Christian kingdom of Jerusalem.56
More vital business intruded into the feuding at Jerusalem with the arrival at Ascalon in the first days of
