Jerusalem. The Biography

While Turkoman soldiers fought pitched battles through the streets, ‘no one else cared. No market was closed, no ascetic left his place in al-Aqsa Mosque; no debate was suspended.’ † But the monstrosities of Hakim, the defeat of the Byzantine emperor, the fall of Jerusalem to the Turkomans and the slaughter of pilgrims shook Christendom: the pilgrimage was in danger. 21
    In 1098, the Egyptian vizier was surprised to learn that a powerful army of Christian Europeans was advancing on the Holy Land. He presumed they were just Byzantine mercenaries, so he offered them a carve-up of the Seljuk empire: the Christians could take Syria; he would regain Palestine. When he discovered their object was Jerusalem, the vizier besieged the city ‘for forty days with forty catapults’ until the two sons of Ortuq fled to Iraq. Appointing one of his generals as
iftikhar aldawla
or governor of Jerusalem with a garrison of Arabs and Sudanese, the vizier returned to Cairo. The negotiations with the Franks continued into the summer of 1099 – the Christian envoys celebrated Easter in the Sepulchre.
    The timing of the Frankish invasion was fortuitous: the Arabs had lost their empire to the Seljuks. The glory of the Abbasid Caliphate wasnow a distant memory. The Islamic world had fragmented into small warring baronies ruled by princelings dominated by Turkish generals – amirs
–
and regents known as atabegs. Even as the Christian armies marched south, a Seljuk princeling attacked Jerusalem but was repelled. Meanwhile the great city of Antioch had fallen to the Franks, who marched down the coast. On 3 June 1099, the Franks took Ramla and closed in on Jerusalem. Thousands of Muslims and Jews took refuge within the walls of the Holy City. On the morning of Tuesday 7 June, the Frankish knights reached the tomb of Nabi (the Prophet) Samuel, four miles north of Jerusalem. Having travelled all the way from western Europe, they now gazed down from Montjoie – the Mount of Joy – on the City of the King of all Kings. By nightfall, they were camped around Jerusalem.

CRUSADE
     
    Enter on the road to the Holy Sepulchre; wrest that land from the wicked race and subject it to ourselves.
    Pope Urban II, Address at Clermont
    Jerusalem is for us an object of worship that we could not give up even if there were only one of us left.
    Richard the Lionheart, Letter to Saladin
    Jerusalem is ours as much as yours – indeed it’s even more sacred to us.
    Saladin, Letter to Richard the Lionheart
    Have we any heritage save the sanctuaries of God?
    Then how should we forget His Holy Mount?
    Have we either in the East or the West
    A place of hope wherein we may trust
    Except the land that is full of gates
    Towards which the gates of Heaven open.
    Judah Halevi
    When I took up my theme and said
    When I to Zion from Spanish exile went
    My soul from depths to heaven made ascent
    Greatly rejoicing that day, God’s hill to see
    The day for which I longed since I had come to be.
    Judah al-Harizi

1099
     
    DUKE GODFREY: THE SIEGE
     
    It was the high summer of 1099 in the arid Judaean hills; the Holy City was well defended by Egyptian troops backed by a militia of Jerusalemite Jews and Muslims. They were well stocked with provisions and the cisterns were full of water, whereas the wells of the parched countryside had been posioned. Jerusalem’s Christians were expelled. The citizens, 30,000 at the most, could comfort themselves that the Egyptian vizier was marching north to rescue them, and they were well armed: they even possessed the secret flame-throwing weapon, Greek Fire. * Behind Jerusalem’s formidable walls, they must have disdained their attackers.
    The Frankish army was too small, just 1,200 knights and 12,000 soldiers, to surround the walls. In open battle, the lightly armoured Arab and Turkish cavaliers could not withstand the awesome charges of the Frankish knights, who formed a fist of thundering steel mounted on hulking destrier warhorses. The knights each wore a helmet, a cuirass and hauberk chain-mail over a gambeson (a padded quilt undergarment) and were armed with lance, broadsword, mace and shield.
    Yet their Western horses had long since perished or been eaten by the hungry army. In the blistered gorges around Jerusalem, charges were impossible, horses useless and armour too hot: this exhausted force of Franks had to fight on foot, while their leaders feuded constantly. There was no supreme commander. Pre-eminent among them, and also