Jerusalem. The Biography

divine visions, angelic visitations and the discovery of sacred signs that were just as important as military tactics. But fortunately the Europeans were attacking a region that was fatally divided between warring caliphs, sultans and amirs, Turks and Arabs, who placed their own rivalries above any concept of Islamic solidarity.
    The fall of Antioch was the Crusaders’ first real success, but they were then besieged inside the city. Faced with starvation and stalemate, the Crusade almost ended there. At the height of the crisis at Antioch, Peter Bartholomew, one of Count Raymond’s men, dreamed that the Holy Lance lay under a church: they dug down and duly found the Lance. Its discovery boosted morale. When Bartholomew was accused of being a fraud, he underwent an ordeal by fire. He survived his walk across what was usually nine feet of red hot irons and claimed no ill effects. But he died twelve days later.
    The Crusaders survived Antioch and, as they marched southwards, the Turkish and Fatimid amirs of Tripoli, Caesarea and Acre made dealswith them. The Fatimids abandoned Jaffa, and the Crusaders cut inland towards Jerusalem. When the contingents were establishing themselves around the walls, a hermit on the Mount of Olives, inspired by a vision, told the Crusader warlords to attack immediately. On 13 June, they attempted to storm the walls but were easily repulsed, suffering heavy losses. The princes realized that success required better planning, more ladders, catapults and siege-engines, but there was not enough wood to build them. They got lucky. On the 17th, Genoese sailors docked at Jaffa and hauled the timbers of their dismantled ships to Jerusalem to build wheeled siege-machines equipped with catapults.
    The princes were already bickering over the spoils. The two ablest had grabbed their own principalities: Bohemond of Taranto had been left to hold Antioch while Godfrey’s dynamic brother Baldwin had seized Edessa, far away on the Euphrates. Now the rapacious Tancred demanded Bethlehem for himself, but the Church laid claim to the site of the Nativity. The heat was unforgiving, the sirocco blew, water was short, men too few, morale low, and the Egyptians were approaching. There was no time to lose.
    A divine message saved the day. On 6 July, a visionary priest announced that he had (not for the first time) been visited by Adhemar of Le Puy, a revered bishop who had died at Antioch, but whose spirit now urged the Franks to hold a procession around the walls as Joshua had around Jericho. The army fasted for three days then on 8 July, led by priests bearing holy relics, they marched barefoot around the walls of Jerusalem, ‘with trumpets, banners and arms’, as the Jerusalemites mocked them from the battlements, hurling insults at the crucifixes. The Joshuan circuit completed, they assembled on the Mount of Olives to be addressed by their chaplains and to witness the reconciliations of their leaders. Ladders, siege-engines, mangonels, missiles, arrows, fascines – everything had to be ready, and everyone worked day and night. Women and old men joined the effort by sewing the animal hides for the siege-engines. The choice was stark: death or victory on the ramparts of the Holy City.
    TANCRED: CARNAGE ON THE TEMPLE MOUNT
     
    By night on 13 July, the Crusaders were ready. Their priests preached them into a ferment of ferocious and sanctimonious determination. Their mangonels catapulted cannonballs and missiles at the walls, from which the defenders had suspended sacks of cotton and hay to softenthe blows until the ramparts resembled giant washing lines. The Muslims fired their own mangonels. When the Christians discovered a spy in their midst, they catapulted him alive over the walls.
    The Crusaders worked all night to fill the ditches with fascines. Three siege-machines were brought forward in parts, then assembled like giant flatpacks, one for Raymond on Mount Zion, the other two in the north. Raymond was the first to position his siege-machine against the walls, but the Egyptian governor, commanding the southern sector, put up determined resistance. At almost the last moment, Godfrey of Bouillon identified the weakest point in the defences (east of today’s Herod’s Gate, opposite the Rockefeller Museum). The Dukes of Normandy and Flanders, along with Tancred, swiftly moved their forces to the northeastern corner. Godfrey himself ascended his siege-tower as it was pushed forward at the ideal spot: he