Authors: Stephen Dando-Collins
Tags: #Historical
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Titus’s main body from Caesarea was the first to reach Jerusalem, camping in the hills just north of the city. Riding ahead of his legions and taking his staff and an escort of six hundred cavalry with him, Titus reached the summit of twenty-seven-hundred-foot Mount Scopus to the northeast of the city, which provided a panoramic view of the Jewish capital. From the mountain, where a university and a hospital stand today, Titus studied the rugged lay of the land—Jerusalem was and is located among several hills, twenty-five hundred feet above sea level, although today’s barren hills were then tree-covered.
He took particular note of the three walls surrounding the city, the outer walls twenty feet high, the inner thirty feet high and fifteen feet thick, with a number of defensive towers dotted along their length—ninety on the Third Wall, fourteen on the Second, and sixty on the First or Old Wall. Eerily, there was not a sign of Jewish defenders anywhere.
Seeing that the walls were deserted, Titus suddenly spurred his horse forward, planning to go down the slope to take a closer look. Most of his cavalry escort had halted on the reverse side of the hill, so that as he went down the slope, Titus was accompanied by just his staff and immediate bodyguard, leaving the surprised cavalry force behind. Reaching the bottom of the slope, Titus became caught up in gardens. At this moment, thousands of Jewish partisans rushed out the Women’s Gate in the outer Third Wall.
The wildly yelling partisans swiftly cut off Titus and his party, and almost ended the young general’s career in the dust there that spring day.
Titus and most of those with him did manage to fight their way out and rejoin the cavalry, but a straggling bodyguard was hauled from his horse by partisans who cut his throat, and another who dismounted to fight was overwhelmed and killed. It was a lesson for young Titus not to take anything at face value at Jerusalem.
That night, the Moesians of the 5th Legion arrived from Emmaus. The next morning the 12th and 15th Legions set about building a camp on Mount Scopus, and, at Titus’s direction, the 5th built another for itself six hundred yards to the rear of that of the 12th and 15th. Later in the day, the 10th Legion marched in from Jericho, and Titus ordered it to build a camp on the Mount of Olives, due east of the city and separated from it by the Kidron valley.
General Lepidus, the 10th’s new commander, hadn’t witnessed his commander in chief’s brush with death the previous day and was unaware of the surprise tactics of the partisans. Without setting guard pickets down the slope, he put his legion to work building entrenchments on the Mount of Olives. During the afternoon, as his 10th Legion men wielded c22.qxd 12/5/01 5:44 PM Page 236
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entrenching tools in the hot April sun, and with ramparts of the city walls deceptively empty, thousands of armed Jews suddenly swarmed out of the Lower City and across the Kidron, splashed through the stream flowing along the bottom of the mountain, then surged up the slope toward the toiling legionaries.
Taken by surprise and armed with just their swords and entrenching tools, the men of the 10th fell back up the mountain in disorder. It just so happened that Titus was nearby at the time, and he rushed to the spot and rallied the troops. Organizing them into their cohorts, he led them against the partisans, who were driven back into the city.
Titus instructed General Lepidus that in the future he was to deploy large numbers of fully armed legionaries to protect their comrades laboring on defenses. As Titus was standing with a group of officers discussing dispositions, the Jews suddenly burst out of the Lower City again and launched a second attack. Once more they swept up the slope unhindered, as again the men working on the incline hurriedly withdrew. But Titus didn’t budge. Drawing his sword, he ordered his colleagues to do the same.
The partisans quickly surrounded Titus and his party, but already the centurions of the 10th were arming their men with shields and forming them into their cohorts. As the legionaries came running down the hill to support their general, Titus led his party in a charge at their assailants.
Again the partisans were put onto the back foot, and again they fled across the Kidron and into the city. It was another lesson for the 10th.
These tricky partisans were unlike any adversary they’d ever faced before.
As Boy Scouts were to learn in modern times, the legionaries had to be prepared. For anything.
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Titus and his senior officers held a council of war. Some advocated a siege, to starve the Jews into submission. In times past, this is what Titus’s father would have done; it was the prudent course. But Titus wanted a quick victory, so he could turn his attention to his father’s campaign to win the throne. Time was all-important. After hearing his subordinates’ opinions, Titus announced to his generals and colonels that he intended to conduct a massive assault at several different parts of the city and overwhelm the defenders quickly.
Because of the lay of the land, armies assaulting Jerusalem in times gone by had been forced to do so from the north. Titus had his own ideas.
But first he needed to break through the Third Wall, which the Jews had c22.qxd 12/5/01 5:44 PM Page 237
only recently completed. Choosing a place for an assault on the Third Wall thought by modern scholars to have been just to the north of the Jaffa Gate, Titus gave instructions for the ground leading up to it to be leveled, and for trees to be felled throughout the region to provide clear fields of fire for the artillery and to provide timber for siege equipment.
Before they had finished, the legionaries would denude the Jerusalem area of all its trees.
At the same time, Titus set men to work improving the defenses on their own camps, because the Jews several times fought all the way to the camps in surprise raids from the city. He also moved his own headquarters several times, finally settling on a location west of the Old City, close to where the King David Hotel stands today.
Within the walls, two of the Jewish factions fighting each other in their protracted civil war agreed on a truce and combined to fight the Romans. The third faction, while fighting the Romans, continued to fight the other factions at every opportunity.
As Jewish bands unexpectedly sallied from this gate or that gate to fall on Roman work parties, or decoyed green Roman troops into ambushes under the wall, Titus was forced to deploy a large part of his army just defending his work parties. Several ranks of infantry and cavalry circled the city, and with them, archers to cover men digging and carting and felling and building.
The preparation took several weeks. Finally Titus brought up his artillery, and the assault troops prepared their heavy equipment. As the soldiers of the Roman army went to their beds on May 9, all was in readiness.
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XXIII
:
THE END OF
THE HOLY CITY
t dawn on May 10, a.d. 70, the full-scale Roman assault on Jerusalem began. Ravines three hundred feet deep dropped away
A
from the southern, eastern, and southwestern sides of the city, so the young Roman commander had chosen to concentrate on a section of the city’s Third Wall, to the northwest. While assault troops tried to get to the wall and breach it using
testudos,
mantlets, siege towers, and battering rams, the combined artillery of the legions raked the wall in this locality to keep defenders off the ramparts.
Simon ben Gioras was in charge of defenses in this sector, and he tried to counter the Roman efforts with frequent sallies beyond the walls by raiding parties and with 340 artillery pieces of his own mounted on the wall. Ironically, the Jewish gunners were using Roman artillery, captured from the 3rd Augusta, 12th, and 22nd Primigeneia Legions at the taking of the Antonia Fortress and the Battle of Beth-horon four years earlier.
But the Jews didn’t have the training or the skill of their Roman coun-terparts, and the artillery of the 10th Legion played a leading role here in the assault on the Third Wall. Its artillery comes in for particular mention from Josephus, who says the 10th possessed the most powerful spear-throwing Scorpions and the largest stone-throwing
Ballistas
of all the legions. The former Jewish commander, now with Titus’s party, writes of the prodigious rate of fire of the 10th’s quick-firing dart launchers, and tells of how the legion’s biggest stone-throwing weapons—possibly Onagers, heavy
Ballistas
—could hurl stone shot weighing a hundred pounds more than four hundred yards and kill not only men on the front lines in its whooshing progress but also continue on, to mortally wound others in the rear as well. Josephus writes of one Jewish fighter who had his head taken clean off by a Roman artillery shot—the man’s head was later found
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hundreds of yards from his torso. At the earlier siege of Jefat, he says, a single Scorpion bolt skewered several Jewish defenders at once.
Roman gunnery was no hit-or-miss affair. The 10th Legion artillerymen set their ranges with precision. The science of guided missiles—ballistics, as we call it—derives from the catapult, the original missile launcher. To make their gunnery so precise, the artillerymen of the 10th and the other legions at Jerusalem measured the distance from artillery platform to city wall with lead and line.
Josephus tells of how, at the height of the assault on the Third Wall, Jewish spotters on nearby towers were able to yell warnings to their comrades in specific areas to take cover when Roman artillery shot came whizzing toward them with a cry of “Baby coming!”
Partisans in the target area would then hit the dirt. This was made easier by the fact that the Roman artillerymen were using Judean stone for their projectiles, which was quite light in color, almost white. To counter the spotters, the legions’ artillery commanders had their men coat their ammunition in black pitch, making it harder to see.
Under fire all the way from the Jewish defenders, three massive Roman siege towers were rolled over the leveled ground and into position against the Third Wall. A tower had been built by each of three legions—the 5th, 12th, and 15th—and while the 10th concentrated on its artillery exper-tise, these three units now competed to see which could be the first to breach the wall.
Each wooden tower was covered in protective metal plate and had three levels. From the top level, archers and slingers tried to keep defenders at bay. Catapults operated from the next floor down. At ground level, teams of legionaries operated a battering ram slung from the framework of the tower. The ram consisted of a heavy metal head on a long pole, which was swung back and forth to pound away at the base of the wall. Battering rams acquired their name from the metal ram’s head attached to the business end of the length of pole.
The din made by the three rams pounding relentlessly away at the Third Wall was an ominous sign. It forced all three Jewish factions to unite—for the moment. Defenders concentrated their efforts in the sector where the Romans were conducting their siege operations. But apart from a corner of a tower being loosened by the ram operated by the 15th Legion, no damage was done by the siege towers in the first week.
At one point the Roman cavalry protecting the towers was withdrawn.
Seizing the opportunity, a large band of Zealots led by John the Idumaean, a senior resistance commander, rushed out a concealed gateway and set c23.qxd 12/5/01 5:51 PM Page 240
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fire to one of the towers. Titus personally led a cavalry squadron that drove the partisans back the way they had come. It was a costly foray for the defenders—among the Jewish dead was the Idumaean, killed by an arrow. The fire on the tower was soon extinguished.
As the rams kept up their work, day in, day out, the Jewish defenders inside the city walls, who slept in their armor, went to sleep with the sound of the pounding in their ears, and awoke to it again the next day.
On day fifteen of the assault, May 25, the wall began to give way to all three rams. Cohorts of Roman shock troops moved into position. As the wall crumbled close by the gate, legionaries scrambled up the rubble like so many ants, overwhelmed and slaughtered any partisans who stood in their way, and opened the gate. Thousands more legionaries poured in through the gateway.
The defenders fled to the nearby Second Wall. Dating back before 37 b.c., this wall was much higher and thicker than the Third. It didn’t possess as many towers, but it incorporated the bastions of the Temple to the east and Herod’s Palace on the western side of the city.
The assault now moved into its second phase. While he left the camp of the 10th Legion where it was, Titus quickly moved the 5th, 12th, and 15th Legions closer to the city, consolidating their quarters in an area, still on the western outskirts, called the Camp of the Assyrians. It had acquired its name from its use by King Sennacherib and his Assyrian army during their siege of Jerusalem back in 701 b.c. Sennacherib had called off that siege after the people of Jerusalem paid him a huge ransom. The city was not to be so lucky this time.
While his troops threw up their new camp, Titus maintained the momentum of the success at the Third Wall by immediately resiting his artillery to attack the northern part of the Second Wall and by sending one of his siege towers against the central northern tower of the Second Wall. Partisans venturing out in raids against the tower were quickly beaten back by supporting infantry and cavalry.
A few days into the operations at the tower, a Jew named Castor and ten others appeared on the ramparts nearby and indicated that they wanted to surrender. Titus suspended siege operations and offered to let the eleven men come down from the wall unharmed. They then appeared to fight among themselves, with some deciding not to surrender. An archer on the Roman side then let loose an arrow that hit Castor in the nose, and this brought a halt to the fighting. Pulling out the arrow, Castor protested to the Romans. Titus asked Josephus the defector to speak with Castor, but he declined, saying the men on the wall were up to something.