WAR CRIMES AND ATROCITIES (True Crime) (4 page)

The First Crusaders Take Jerusalem From The Infidel

1099

From the time of its founding by the prophet Muhammad in the 7th century, Islam was remarkably successful in its waging of jihad, or holy war, to convert the peoples of Arabia and the eastern Mediterranean to what they saw as the true faith. Within a few years of the death of Muhammad in 632, the three greatest cities in the Christian Eastern Roman (or Byzantine) Empire – Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem – had all fallen to Islam. Syria and Egypt, also parts of the Byzantine Empire, and the Persian Empire had all been overwhelmed.

Largely because the Holy Places of Christendom were in the Byzantine Empire, the capital of which was Constantinople (now Istanbul), Western Christianity long ignored events in the area. It was not until the 11th century that Western Christianity awoke to the danger of complete annihilation that faced the Christian Church in the eastern Mediterranean and chose to do something about it.

Medieval religious enthusiasm was at its height in Western Europe when, in 1095 at the Council of Clermont, Pope Urban II called on the Christian laity to take up arms for the reconquest of Jerusalem, which had been in Muslim hands since 638. The pope was answering a call for help from the Byzantine emperor Alexius I Comnenus, in despair that his once mighty and far-reaching power over the lands of the Near East had been reduced to little more than over the land around the walls of his capital.

At the end of the Council, the pope preached a sermon on the suffering of the Christians in the East to an immense crowd gathered outside the city of Clermont. He ended with a passionately worded appeal for men to enlist under the sign of the Cross of Christ. His call was answered with huge enthusiasm by hundreds in the crowd, many of whom began there and then to mark their clothes with the sign of the cross. Within weeks, they were joined and in a more professional manner by Frankish, German and Italian counts, dukes, and other rulers from many parts of Western Christianity. Thus the First Crusade began.

The enormous enthusiasm shown by the common people for Pope Urban’s call to arms under the banner of the cross turned into a huge pilgrimage across Europe and into Turkey, which came to be called the People’s Crusade. Leaving behind families, homes and livelihoods, about 20,000 men, women and children – most of them simple, poor folk from Germany, Flanders and France – set out from Cologne for Constantinople after the Easter celebrations of 1096.

The People’s Crusade was made up opf a motley and unruly vanguard, which was led by a preacher of great charisma, Peter the Hermit and included a few knights and fighting men. However, there was no leading soldier in their midst. They made the arduous, 3,000-km (2,000-mile) journey across Europe only to be ambushed and virtually annihilated by the Seljuk Turks near Nicaea (modern-day Iznik in Turkey) in October 1096. A contemporary account of the battle recorded how the Turks swept into the peasants’ camps and ‘destroyed with the sword whomever they found, the weak and feeble, clerics, monks, old women, nursing children, persons of every age’. The remnants either made their way back home or joined up with the contingents of crusaders who were by now arriving in Constantinople, no doubt spreading graphic accounts of what the Turks had done at Nicaea.

THE FIRST CRUSADE

The military crusaders took more time over their preparations. Great lords began assembling armies in France and Italy, while Godfrey of Bouillon, Duke of Lower Lorraine, gathered together a large force from Germany and the Low Countries. Although the kings of England and France were not directly involved, both were represented: William II of England by his brother, Robert of Normandy, and Philip of France by his brother, Hugh of Vermondais.

Eventually, there were to be four main contingents making up the crusading force, each of which took its own route across Europe to their meeting point at Constantinople, where they joined into one vast force.

The first contingent set off in August 1096 and the fourth, led by Robert of Normandy and his brother-in-law Stephen of Blois, in October. Duke Godfrey, lauded by medieval bards as the perfect crusader, was to be the most prominent of the knights on the First Crusade, even being offered the crown of Jerusalem by fellow crusaders. About 4,000 to 5,000 mounted knights and squires, 30,000 foot soldiers and many thousands of non-combatants took part in the First Crusade.

With the average distance covered by a medieval army on the march being only approximately 24 or

25 km (15 or 16 miles) a day, it was clearly going to take the various armies descending on the Holy Land from across Europe many months of arduous marching to get there. For this First Crusade, the Christians could not get to Palestine by sea, as the forces of the Third Crusade were able to do in the following century, for they had no friendly ports at which to land.

It was not until May 1097 that the first of the crusaders, a force about 30,000 strong, came within sight of the city of Nicaea, which they successfully besieged. In early July, they were involved in their first battle of the First Crusade. They were attacked by the same Seljuk Turks who had had such an easy victory over the People’s Crusade – and who were expecting another one now. However, the Battle of Dorylaeum was a complete victory for the crusaders.

Considerably heartened by this success against a foe whose style of warfare was so different from their own, the crusaders moved on towards the distant Holy Land. Had they known that, in all, they were to endure three years of battles, sieges (including a year-long siege of Antioch, about 640 km [400 miles] from Jerusalem), disease and near-starvation before they reached their goal, Jerusalem, they would almost certainly still have continued, so strong was their fervent belief in the cause.

They were also strengthened by signs that God was on their side. The crusaders had won at Antioch, for instance, because of the miraculous discovery in the city of the Holy Lance, which was said to have pierced Christ’s side when he was on the Cross. The final march on Jerusalem, from January to June 1099, was also marked by a series of visions and miracles that indicated the rightness of their cause.

The crusaders sighted the wall of Jerusalem on

7 June, 1099. Many of them stood with tears running down their faces, others fell to their knees and kissed the dusty ground. So uplifted were they by the sight that many among them wanted to attack the city at once. An assault was launched on the walls a few days later, but it failed through a lack of scaling ladders. It was not until 15 July, when two enormous siege engines had been completed, that the crusaders’ assault on Jerusalem began.

Duke Godfrey began the attack, riding on one of the siege engines to the weakest point in the city wall. Beams were run out from it at rampart height to make a bridge, and the first crusader knights charged across it into Jerusalem. What followed was the sacking of Jerusalem and a bloody massacre of its citizens. The Jewish population of the city – men, women and children – were cut down in the chief synagogue, where they had taken sanctuary. A group of Muslim defenders made a formal capitulation to a leading crusader, having agreed to pay a large ransom. The agreement was honoured and they were escorted out of the city. Few, if any, other Muslims survived.

The blood-crazed crusader soldiers, oblivious to the orders of their knight commanders, went on the rampage. For two days, they slaughtered the citizens of Jerusalem, ‘wading in blood up their ankles,’ according to a medieval account of the sack of Jerusalem. ‘Almost the whole city was full of their dead bodies,’ recalled one knight, noting that the temple where the Muslims made their last stand was ‘streaming with their blood’.

The slaughter ended at last, and the crusade leaders processed solemnly to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where they gave thanks to God for their great victory. The next day, they chose Duke Godfrey as the first leader of the new crusader kingdom of Jerusalem. Godfrey, who died in Jerusalem, never took the title of king. His brother, Baldwin, who had accompanied him on the crusade, did, ruling as Baldwin I.

The scale of the slaughter, huge even in an age when massacres were a regular part of warfare, while it caused great rejoicing in the West. However, many Church leaders were horrified, and it deeply shocked the Muslim and Jewish worlds and undoubtedly helped fuel the warlike response of Islam to the Christian presence in the East in the next century.

The Battle Of Hattin 

July 1187

During the half century between the first two crusades mounted by Catholic Christianity to wrest the Holy Land back from the Infidel, from about 1096 to 1149, the crusaders established a hold over a sizeable part of Syria and Palestine, with its frontiers the mountains of Lebanon and the river Jordan. There were four main Christian-ruled areas: the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the principality of Antioch, the County of Tripoli and the County of Edessa (lost again to Islam in 1144).

The main problem with this Christian presence in the Holy Land was that it was never much more than a token. Once a crusade was over, most of the knights and the fighting men returned to Europe, leaving small contingents to hold on in castles built to defend weak points. Some of these, such as Krak des Chevaliers, were massive, and virtually impregnable. The Christian fighting men, most of them belonging to two military orders, the Knights Hospitallers and the Knights Templars, stayed within them and made little attempt to persuade the local Muslim townsfolk and peasantry to convert to Christianity.

The crusaders had been lucky when they first arrived in Syria and Palestine at the end of the 11th century because the Muslim leadership had been disunited and at loggerheads with one another. Encounters between crusaders and Muslims, although called battles, were usually quite small affairs, involving just half a dozen knights and their attendant soldiers on the Christian side. By the 1170s, however, things were very different. The Muslim powers in the region were reorganizing themselves and providing a much more united opposition to the crusaders. From the mid-1170s, this opposition was led by the formidable figure of Salah al-Din Yusuf, sultan of Egypt and Syria, and known as Saladin.

Saladin was one of the most remarkable men of his age. Although untiring in his preaching of the jihad against the Christians, he was a patient, clever and far-sighted statesman and a humane, chivalrous warrior. ‘Abstain from the shedding of blood, for blood that is spilt never slumbers,’ he once said – this in an age when massacres were seen as just another element of warfare, or acceptable ‘collateral damage’, in modern terms.

Saladin’s outwardly attractive personality led the Christian barons in Palestine to think that this was a man whom they could trust and come to terms with. They decided on a policy of appeasement, partly because it was obvious that Saladin was the most powerful Muslim leader they had faced, but also because his possessions surrounded them. On land, Saladin could attack them from the south and the east, while his Egyptian fleets could blockade their Mediterranean ports.

The leader of the crusaders who advocated appeasement was Raymond, Count of Tripoli, who was regent for the king of Jerusalem, Baldwin the Leper, from 1174 to 1185. When Baldwin the Leper died without a son and heir in 1185, Count Raymond III expected to be made king in Baldwin’s place. However, his policies in the kingdom had been unpopular. He had made enemies, and a group of war-supporting barons chose Guy of Lusignan as king instead. Thus the first steps on the road to war with Saladin and his Muslim forces were taken.

A BROKEN TRUCE

In 1187, Raymond, Count of Tripoli, made some sort of agreement with Saladin, the precise terms of which have never been established. In giving Saladin’s army permission to cross the river Jordan into the district of Tiberias, Raymond said that he – and Saladin – had intended only that the Muslim peasantry was to be the object of Saladin’s attentions. The crusaders in their towns and castles were to be left wholly alone and certainly not attacked. But Gerard de Ridfort, Grand Master of the Templars, was in the area with some 130 Knights Templar. He had long been Raymond’s enemy, and chose to ignore the order to remain inside the crusaders’ castles and instead engaged the infidel intruders in battle. Saladin claimed that the truce, or whatever his agreement with Raymond had been, was broken and he laid siege to Tiberias. The crusaders, including Raymond, were forced into action.

At this time, the crusader army of the kingdom of Jerusalem, one of the largest ever gathered together in Palestine, was established at al-Saffuriyah, about 32 km (20 miles) from Tiberias. Raymond advised the army not to make the long day’s march to Tiberias – along a road where Saladin had blocked the few wells and springs and on which they could easily be ambushed. Instead they should wait until Saladin moved to country more suitable for fighting a cavalry battle. However, his advice was ignored. The crusader army, led by King Guy of Jerusalem and including the 130 Knights Templar, their attendant fighting men and their grand master, set off at dawn on 3 July, 1187. Saladin, given this news, was jubilant. He had noted just weeks before, if this crusader army could be destroyed, then Jerusalem would be his for the taking.

It was a hot march, and the crusader army, with throats parched and eyes and noses full of the dust raised by their own feet and their horses’ hooves – was being harried in the rear by Saracen archers on horseback. Saladin’s intention was to cut the crusader column in half. A battle on the move was a well understood tactic in crusader warfare; provided the column of armoured knights and men-at-arms could stay together and march steadily to their objective, losses would be acceptably small. But Saladin’s tactic meant that the rear, marching under a near constant rain of arrows, was in danger of being left behind. To prevent this, the army chose to make camp for the night near low twin peaks known as the Horns of Hattin, having covered less than half the distance to Tiberias.

Early the next day, battle began between the closely surrounded Christian army and Saladin’s forces. The fighting was fierce. The Christian army was exhausted, outnumbered, lacked water and was fighting on unsuitable ground – the dry grass was torched by a Muslim soldier so that the Christian infantry gasped for breath. It was decisively beaten, though only after a last, heroic stand round a relic of the True Cross, which was brought to Palestine by the Franks and always carried into battle by the Christians.

King Guy, Gérard de Ridfort, Grand Master of the Templars, and Count Raynald of Chatillon were among the nobles captured. Only the contingent of men-at-arms led by Raymond of Tripoli escaped, retiring from the battle in good order. Their departure was actually aided by a wily tactic from the Muslim army, which instead of engaging the charging Christian soldiers, opened their ranks to allow them to pass through unopposed, then closed up again, thus cutting them off from the main army. Seeing that the battle was lost, Raymond led his force back to Tripoli.

Except for Raynald of Chatillon, whom Saladin regarded as a truce breaker, the lives of King Guy, the grand master and other nobles were spared. The rank and file of the kingdom of Jerusalem’s army, most of them highly trained and fanatically Christian Hospitallers and Templars, were not. Saladin ordered a mass killing of all the captured knights and fighting men, which he watched from a dais set up in front of the army, and which he forced the Grand Master of the Templars to watch, too. The killings were particularly ghastly, for they were assigned, not to professional fighting men well able to use a weapon, but to the many scholars, holy men and jihad enthusiasts who had flocked to Saladin’s standard. More often then not, it took such men several blows to sever the heads from their victims’ bodies.

This atrociously bloodthirsty annihilation of the army of Jerusalem, with its attendant loss of the relic of the True Cross, deeply shocked the Christian West. One of the best-known depictions of the Battle of Hattin was drawn by the 13th-century English monk, Matthew Paris of St Albans for his
Chronica Majora
. He illustrated the (fictional) moment when Saladin seizes the relic from the desperately clutching hands of King Guy, despite the efforts of the knights at the king’s side. Beneath the trampling hooves of the horses, the ground is strewn with the bodies, limbs and heads of the slain.

The city of Jerusalem capitulated on 2 October, 1187; Saladin had achieved his long-held goal, setting free ‘the mosque of al-Aqsa, to which Allah once led in the night his servant Muhammad’. Within a year the Christians had either lost or surrendered almost all their ports and castles in the kingdom of Jerusalem. As for the relic of the True Cross, tradition has it that Saladin ordered it to be buried under the entrance to the great mosque at Damascus, so that the feet of the faithful could tread on it as they went in to pray.