After three years of infernal marching, of crossing deserts and mountains, of dying of hunger and thirst, of impossible battles and miraculous relics, the surviving army of the First Crusade finally arrived, in June 1099, before the supreme prize: Jerusalem. The goal of the whole journey, the Holy City, the objective for which so many thousands of European Christians had died. The conquest that followed was the crusade's moment of greatest glory… and also of its greatest shame. Come with me, dear readers, to the end of the road.
The City of the Three Religions
Jerusalem was no ordinary city. It was, and still is, sacred to the three great religions: to the Jews, who claim it as their capital and home since time immemorial —some 3,000 years—, to the Christians as the place where Jesus Christ lived, preached and died —2,000+ years—, and to the Muslims, the last to arrive, 1,400 years ago, as the home of the Al-Aqsa mosque and because in the year 621 AD it received a highly improbable visit from the Prophet Muhammad who, in a single night, on the back of a resplendent mythological winged creature, the Buraq, is said to have flown from Mecca, in Saudi Arabia, to Jerusalem —some 1,300 km as the crow flies— and from there ascended into heaven.
Whether he and the Buraq were stoned out of their minds that night, the Quran doesn't say.
In the year 1099 AD, that is, of our era, the holy city was in the hands of a Muslim garrison —the Fatimids of Egypt had taken it not long before, snatching it from the Artuqid Turks, vassals of the Seljuks and Muslims too— well fortified behind imposing walls and ready to withstand a long siege.
The Crusader army that reached its gates was by now only a fraction of the one that had left Europe: of the tens of thousands at the start, eighty thousand according to some chronicles, perhaps some twelve thousand men were left fit to fight, with barely over a thousand knights. The rest had died on the road, had deserted, or had stayed behind to defend the newly founded Latin kingdoms of the East, the County of Edessa and the Principality of Antioch. But those left to fight that last battle were the toughest Crusaders, the most fanatical and the most determined to take home the big prize: Jerusalem. They had come too far, lost and suffered too much, to fail at the very gates of their goal.
Thirst, Faith and Siege Towers
The siege was brutal, but this time not because of its length, rather because of the general conditions on the battlefield. The Christian besiegers were stranded outside the walls, in the height of summer in an arid land where the defenders had poisoned or blocked the surrounding wells. The Crusaders suffered an atrocious thirst beneath the relentless, scorching sun of Judea. Anyone who has visited that part of the world in summer knows what I'm talking about. On top of that, to complicate matters even further, they lacked the timber to build the siege engines needed to get over the walls.
The immense faith in God of those ancestors of ours, once again, played its part. Spurred on by the sermons of the clergy present, the Crusaders organised a solemn, barefoot procession around the walls of Jerusalem to ask God for a new miracle. All this beneath the astonished and amused gaze of the Muslim defenders perched on top of the walls who, dying of laughter, must have thought those Catholics were drunk or utterly stoned to walk like that, in their robes and barefoot, over that dusty, stabbing, painful stony ground. They didn't know the Crusaders were imitating what the Bible says the Jewish leader Joshua did beneath the impregnable walls of Jericho.
And the miracle was not long in coming. Almost a month earlier, around 17 June, a flotilla of some six Genoese ships had reached the port of Jaffa, about fifty-five kilometres west of the city, under the Italian leader William Embriaco, nicknamed “Caput Mallei, Hammerhead”. The Genoese, famous throughout Italy for their proverbial tight-fistedness and for never handing over anything of theirs for free, had come to enlist and fight in the Crusade on behalf of their city, but, good Ligurians that they were, they didn't want to abandon their valuable ships moored in the harbour for fear of losing them or having them stolen. And, incredible as it sounds, on the orders of Hammerhead, who must have told his men in Genoese dialect something like: «Belín figé ragazzi, le navi costan palanche, adesso le smontiamo tutte e ce le portiamo via per il deserto – Fuck me, lads, ships cost a fortune, we'll take them all apart now and carry them off on our backs across the desert», they dismantled them completely down to the last nail, loaded the heavy timbers, ropes and sails onto their shoulders, and carried them from the port of Jaffa all the way to Jerusalem, thereby saving the siege, so desperately in need of precisely those timbers and nails.
With the timber at last secured, the Crusaders, under the direction of Embriaco's Genoese carpenters and of their “chief engineer” Gaston of Bearn, built two great siege towers mounted on wheels (that of Godfrey of Bouillon and that of Raymond of Saint-Gilles), as well as other lesser engines, true multi-storey mobile castles, so as to reach the top of the walls and break in by force. The final assault was ready.
The Assault of 15 July
On 13 July 1099 the Crusaders launched the general assault, and on Friday the 15th the decisive one. They pushed the enormous siege towers up against the walls amid a rain of arrows, fire and projectiles. After hours of ferocious fighting, a group of knights (the chronicles name as the first Letold of Tournai and his brother Engelbert, followed closely by the Duke of Lorraine, Godfrey of Bouillon) managed to lay a bridge from the top of a tower to the wall and set foot on it. The Muslim defence collapsed. The Crusaders poured into the Holy City screaming like men possessed.
Three years of suffering and deprivation, of dead men, of hunger and desperate faith, at last led to that long-desired instant. Jerusalem, the dreamed-of objective, fell at last, for the first time, into the hands of European Catholic Christians. It was, without a doubt, the moment of greatest glory and emotion of the whole First Crusade. Those men wept with joy and exhaustion. They had achieved the impossible, at a very high price.
The Cruel Massacre of Civilians that Blackened the Triumph
But what came next is one of the darkest pages of medieval history, and honesty demands that it be told without embellishment. After taking the city, the Crusaders, maddened by years of suffering and fanaticism, perpetrated a horrifying massacre among the population of Jerusalem. They made no distinction between combatants and civilians. The Muslims and Jews of the city were slaughtered without mercy, almost all of them, over two days. Only the few who surrendered to Raymond of Saint-Gilles in the Tower of David were spared and escorted to Ascalon.
The chronicles of the time, Christian and Muslim alike, describe atrocious scenes of streets covered in corpses, great pools of human blood, whole families hanged, throat-cut or burned alive and women raped in a colossal, unjustifiable butchery which the Christian chroniclers celebrated as God's just judgement and which Muslims and Jews never forgot, atrocious even by the brutal standards of medieval warfare. It was one of those massacres that stain a victory forever, a reminder that fanaticism, once unleashed, knows no brake. The glory of the triumph was tinged with innocent blood.
The chaplain and historian Fulcher of Chartres, who gathered the account of those who were there, wrote the following:
«The slaughter carried out by our men, inside that Islamic temple, was so great that our men walked with the blood of the Muslims reaching up to their ankles... And in truth, had you been there you would have seen our feet coloured up to the ankles with the blood of the massacre. But what more can I tell you? None was left alive; there was no mercy for women or for children».
His colleague, the likewise chaplain and historian Raymond of Aguilers, who was indeed there, tells it like this, in a free version:
«On that day, 15 July in the year of Our Lord 1099, in Jerusalem, marvellous spectacles came to gladden our eyes… […] Such an incredible quantity of blood was spilled, in the mosque built on Solomon's temple alone, that the corpses of those Islamic infidels floated in it and in many places the blood reached up to our knees…»
The next day, the 16th, in a gloomy and silent Jerusalem, turned into a true ghost town, the Crusader leaders, to prevent dangerous epidemics breaking out and because of the tremendous stench that was already beginning to poison the air, enveloping everything, issued an executive order that is vividly described to us by the anonymous author of the “Gesta Francorum”. I leave you his words, in a free version:
«Our leaders ordered that all the dead Saracens be sent outside the city because of the stench, since the whole city was full of bodies; so the few living Saracens who still remained were made slaves and forced to drag the dead to the exit gates of the walls, and they laid them out on pyres like houses. No one ever could see or hear of a massacre of pagans like that one, since the funeral pyres rose like pyramids, and no one knows their exact number, save God himself».
The Kingdom Born of Blood
After the conquest, the Crusaders founded the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the third Christian state in the Holy Land after Edessa and Antioch, a state that would endure, with ups and downs, for almost two centuries. Godfrey of Bouillon was elected first ruler, although he refused the crown and the title of king (he would not, he said, wear a crown of gold where Christ had worn one of thorns), and so he adopted the less lofty title of Advocatus Sancti Sepulchri, Protector and Defender of the Holy Sepulchre, rather than king.
The First Crusade had achieved its impossible objective. Against all odds, a ragged and decimated army had marched thousands of kilometres (almost five thousand in three long years of war) and conquered Jerusalem. It was the only one of the great crusades to fulfil its military goal one hundred per cent, and that is why it has remained the most legendary crusade of the other seven that followed it in the almost two hundred years of European Christian-Catholic presence in the Holy Land. But its ending holds all the contradiction of that age: the most sublime faith and the most extreme cruelty, living together in the same men, on the same day, in the same holy city.
If you want to live the First Crusade in full, from the preaching to this conquest, with all its characters and battles, you have it in my saga History of the Eight Crusades: starting with The Crusade of Peter the Hermit, continuing with The Blood of Jerusalem · Part 1 and Part 2 —where the Crusaders take the city— and on to The Dawn of the Templars. Real history told like nobody ever told it to you before, with all its glory and all its shadows.
And if you want to know what became of that kingdom, read about Baldwin IV, the leper king who defeated Saladin, about Saladin and about Hugues de Payens, founder of the Templar Order.
Per Aspera, Ad Astra.
✠ David S. Matrecano
Ibiza, 10 November 2026
