d Not all the synagogues had been destroyed. The Jewish synagogue in Fustat, Old Cairo, contained one of the key historical resources of the Middle Ages: the Cairo Geniza. In those times, all three Peoples of the Book revered the paper on which holy language was written because words had spiritual life like people. The Jews kept papers received in synagogues in a geniza, or storehouse, for seven years at which point they were buried in a cemetery or stowed in a special attic. For over 900 years, the Cairo Geniza was not emptied, preserving 100,000 papers showing Jewish Egyptian life, its connections with Jerusalem, and the Mediterranean world in all its aspects, sealed and forgotten until 1864 when a Jerusalemite scholar first penetrated it. In the 1890s, Geniza documents started to emerge, bought by English, American and Russian scholars, but it was only in 1896 that two eccentric Scottish ladies showed some Geniza documents to Professor Solomon Schechter, who recognized the earliest Hebrew text of Ben Sira’s Ecclesiasticus. Schechter collected the priceless hoard, which enabled S. D. Goitein to produce his six-volume Mediterranean Society.
e This was the age of Jewish ministers for Islamic monarchs. In Egypt, the scion of a trading family of Persian Karaites, Abu Saad al-Tustari became a purveyor of luxuries to Zahir, to whom he then sold a black slave girl. On the caliph’s death in 1036, she became the Walida, mother of Caliph Mustansir, with Tustari as the power behind the throne. He amassed colossal wealth, once giving al-Walida a silver ship and tent worth 130,000 dirhams. He never converted to Islam. The poet Rida ibn Thawb wrote: “People of Egypt, I have good advice for you / Turn Jew, for Heaven itself has become Jewish.” In 1048, Tustari was murdered by Turkish troops, much mourned by the Goan of Jerusalem. Meanwhile the vizier of Islamic Granada in Spain was another patron of Jerusalem: Samuel ibn Nagrela, “The Prince,” a polymathic doctor, poet, Talmudic scholar and general, perhaps the only practising Jew to command Islamic armies in battle. His son succeeded him but was murdered in 1066 in a massacre of Jews in Granada.
f When the captive emperor was brought before the victorious Alp Arslan, whose moustaches were so long he draped them over his shoulders, asked, “What would you do if I was brought before you as a prisoner?” “Perhaps I’d kill you, or exhibit you in the streets of Constantinople,” replied Romanos IV Diogenes. “My punishment is far heavier,” replied Alp Arslan. “I forgive you, and set you free.” But the Lion did not last long himself. When he saw the approach of an assassin, he waved aside his bodyguards in order to display his skill as an archer by bringing down the attacker. But his foot slipped, and the asssassin stabbed him. Dying, he warned his son Malik Shah, “Remember well the lessons learned, and do not allow your vanity to overreach your good sense.” His tomb in Merv reads with Ozymandian irony: “O those who saw the sky-high grandeur of Alp Arslan, behold! He is under the black soil now.”
g A dispute over the Fatimid succession gave rise to a murderous breakaway sect of Ismaili Shiites led by Hassan al-Sabbah. He and his Nizaris fled to Persia, where he seized the mountain fortress of Alamut and later they gained fortresses in Lebanon. He made up for his small numbers by launching a spectacular campaign of terrorism against his Sunni enemies. His team of killers, who terrorized the Middle East for over a century, were supposedly under the influence of hashish, and came to be called the Hashishim, or Assassins. The Muslims, though, called them Batini, seekers after secret esoteric knowledge.
h In 1095, the Sunni philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazali sought refuge in Jerusalem from the Assassins. “I shut myself up in the precinct of the Dome of the Rock,” he said, in a tiny chamber atop the Golden Gate, to write the Revivification of the Science of Religion. This reinvigorated Sunni Islam by separating the logic of philosophy—Greek metaphysics—from the ecstatic revelation of religious truth, while giving each its due. Ultimately his demolition of scientific cause and effect (in his Incoherence of the Philosophers) in favour of divine revelation ended the golden age of Arabic learning in Baghdad and helped undermine Arab science and philosophy.
PART FOUR
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
CHAPTER 21
The Slaughter
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 poisoned. 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.a 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 most of 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 the richest, was Raymond, Count of Toulouse. A courageous but uninspiring leader, noted for obstinacy and lack of tact, Raymond initially set up camp in the west opposite the Citadel but after a few days moved south to besiege the Zion Gate.
Jerusalem’s weak spot was always in the north: the young, capable Count Robert of Flanders, the son of a veteran Jerusalem pilgrim, camped opposite what is now Damascus Gate; Duke Robert of Normandy (son of William the Conqueror), brave but ineffectual and nicknamed Curthose (short-shanks) or just Fatlegs, covered Herod’s Gate. But the driving spirit was Godfrey of Bouillon, the strapping, blond Duke of Lower Lorraine, aged thirty-nine, “the ideal picture of a northern knight,” admired for his piety and chastity (he never married). He took up positions around today’s Jaffa Gate. Meanwhile the twenty-five-year-old Norman Tancred de Hauteville, eager to conquer a principality of his own, galloped off to seize Bethlehem. When he had returned, he joined Godfrey’s forces at the north-western corner of the city.
The Franks had lost legions of men and travelled thousands of miles across Europe and Asia to reach the Holy City. All realized that this would either be the apogee or the apotheosis of the First Crusade.
POPE URBAN II: GOD WILLS IT
The Crusade had been the idea of one man. On 27 November 1095, Pope Urban II had addressed a gathering of grandees and ordinary folk at Clermont to demand
the conquest of Jerusalem and the liberation of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
Urban saw his life’s mission as the restoration of the power and reputation of the Catholic Church. He devised a new theory of holy war to reinvigorate Christendom and the papacy, justifying the cleansing liquidation of the infidel in return for the remission of sins. This was an unprecedented indulgence that created a Christian version of Muslim jihad, but it dovetailed with the popular reverence for Jerusalem. In an age of religious fervour, a time of holy signs, Jerusalem was Christ’s city, seen as both supreme shrine and celestial kingdom, yet familiar to every Christian, evoked in sermons, in tales of pilgrimages, in passion plays, paintings and relics. But Urban also passionately stoked the rising anxiety about the security of the Holy Sepulchre, citing the massacre of pilgrims and the Turkoman atrocities.
The moment was ripe for thousands of people, high and low, to answer Urban’s call: “violence held sway among the nations, fraud, treachery and chicanery overshadowed all things,” observed the Jerusalemite historian William of Tyre. “All virtue had departed, every kind of fornication was practised openly, luxury, drunkenness and games of chance.” The Crusade offered personal adventure, the removal of thousands of troublemaking knights and freebooters, and escape from home. But the modern idea, promoted in Hollywood movies and in the backlash after the disaster of the 2003 Iraqi war, that crusading was just an opportunity for enrichment with sadistic dividends, is wrong. A handful of princes created new fiefdoms and a few Crusaders made their careers, whereas the costs were punishing and many lives and fortunes were lost in this quixotic and risky but pious enterprise. A spirit was abroad that is hard for modern people to grasp: Christians were being offered the opportunity to earn the forgiveness of all sins. In short, these warrior-pilgrims were overwhelmingly believers seeking salvation on the battlements of Jerusalem.
The crowds at Clermont answered the pope: “Deus le volt! God wills it!” Raymond of Toulouse was one of the first to take the Cross. Eighty thousand people, some in disciplined contingents led by princes, some in rampaging gangs led by adventurers, and others in pious crowds of peasants under holy hermits, took the Cross. As the first wave crossed Europe heading for Constantinople, they forced the conversion or massacred thousands of Jews in vengeance for the killing of Christ.
The Byzantine Emperor Alexios, half-horrified by these Latin ruffians, welcomed them—and hurried them on towards Jerusalem. Once in Anatolia, hordes of European peasants were killed by the Turks, but the organized, committed and experienced knights of the main armies routed the Seljuks. The enterprise was a triumph of faith over experience and reason: from the beginning but with rising intensity as they neared the Holy Land, the military campaign was guided and encouraged by 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 deals with 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 soften the 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 Duke of Normandy and the Count of Flanders, along with Tancred, swiftly moved their forces to the north-eastern corner. Godfrey himself ascended his siege-tower as it was pushed forward at the ideal spot: he emerged at the top wielding a crossbow as the armies traded salvoes of arrows and bolts, and the mangonels rained missiles on the walls.
As the sun rose, the princes used flashing mirrors on the Mount of Olives to co-ordinate their moves. Simultaneously Raymond attacked to the south and the Normans in the north. At dawn on Friday the 15th, they renewed their attacks. Godfrey rode the rickety wooden tower, shooting bolts over the walls while the defenders unleashed their Greek Fire—but not enough to stop the Franks.
At midday, Godfrey’s engine finally closed on the walls. The Franks threw planks across and two brothers climbed into the city, with Godfrey following them. They claimed to have seen the late Bishop Adhemar fighting among them: “Many testified he was the first to scale the wall!” The dead bishop ordered them to open the Gate of the Column (Damascus Gate). Tancred and his Normans burst into the narrow streets. To the south, on Mount Zion, the Count of Toulouse heard the cheering. “Why do you loiter,” Raymond scolded his men. “Lo, the Franks are even now within the city!” Raymond’s men broke into Jerusalem and pursued the governor and garrison to the Citadel. The governor agreed
to surrender to Raymond in return for the lives of his garrison. Citizens and soldiers fled to the Temple Mount, pursued by Tancred and his men. In the fray, the Jerusalemites slammed shut the gates of the Temple Mount and fought back, but Tancred’s warriors smashed their way onto the sacred esplanade, crowded with desperate people.
The fighting raged there for hours; the Franks went berserk, and killed anyone they encountered in the streets and alleyways. They cut off not only heads but hands and feet, glorying in the spurting fountains of cleansing infidel blood. Although carrying out a massacre in a stormed city was not unprecedented, the sanctimonious pride with which the perpetrators recorded it possibly was. “Wonderful sights were to be seen,” enthused one eyewitness, Raymond of Aguilers, the Count of Toulouse’s chaplain: “Our men cut off the heads of their enemies, others shot them with arrows so that they fell from the towers, others tortured them longer by casting them into the flames. Piles of heads, hands and feet were to be seen on the streets. It was necessary to pick one’s way over the bodies of men and horses.”
Babies were seized from their mothers, their heads dashed against the walls. As the barbarity escalated, “Saracens, Arabs and Ethiopians”—meaning the black Sudanese troops of the Fatimid army—took refuge on the roofs of the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa. But, as they fought their way towards the Dome, the knights hacked a path across the crowded esplanade, killing and dicing through human flesh until “in the Temple [of Solomon, as the Crusaders called al-Aqsa], they rode in blood up to their bridles. Indeed it was a just and splendid judgement of God that this place should be filled with the blood of unbelievers.”