Capture of Jerusalem by the Crusaders, July 15, 1099. In this painting by Émile Signol, Godfrey Bouillon gives thanks to God in the presence of Peter the Hermit after the capture of the city. 1847. Palace of Versailles. • WIKIMEDIACOMMONS The vast popular movement that resulted in the capture of Jerusalem by the Crusader armies had its origins in the appeal launched, four years earlier, by Pope Urban II at the very end of the Council of Clermont. On November 27, 1095, on the sidelines of the council, the initial object of which was to impose the Gregorian reform in the kingdom of France and to promote among the knights the movement of the "peace of God", the pope exhorted the laity and the knights Auvergnats gathered in front of the cathedral to liberate by arms the Holy Sepulchre, the tomb of Christ, in the hands of Muslims since the VII th century. As at the Council of Piacenza, in March of the same year, he echoed the request for military aid formulated by the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I st . The emissaries of the basileus had depicted to him in the darkest aspects the situation of Eastern Christians since the conquest of Anatolia and Syria-Palestine by the Seljuk Turks. Sympathizing with the misfortunes of his Eastern co-religionists, in the name of the community uniting Latins and Greeks, the pope therefore proclaimed the duty of the knights to come to their aid by placing themselves militarily under his direction. He thus called them to take the road to Jerusalem. But the reward for their commitment would be primarily spiritual:to those who embarked on this pilgrimage in arms, the Pope did not offer territories to conquer, but the assurance that they would do penance and obtain the remission of their sins. . People's Crusade and Princes Clermont's appeal received a welcome that Urban II probably did not expect. From the close of the council, his message was relayed to the people by bishops, monks and itinerant preachers, including the famous Peter the Hermit. In December 1095, the pope himself aroused, by sending letters, the participation of the high nobility. He took care of supervising the military expedition, the departure of which he fixed for August 15, 1096, and placed at its head his legate, Adémar de Monteil, bishop of Le Puy. The fiery speeches of the itinerant preachers were very effective. They made it possible to enlist volunteers from all walks of life. In addition to the poor, peasants or craftsmen, many knights from the minor nobility decided to adorn their clothes with the sign of the cross. Huge crowds of men, often rudimentarily armed, accompanied by women and children, set off on March 8, 1096, well before the official departure date set by the pope. The popular expedition, led by a few penniless knights, journeyed through the Holy Roman Empire, committing innumerable plunders and perpetrating major massacres against the Jews of the Rhine Valley. Ill-prepared and poorly armed, the first Crusaders were massacred as soon as they crossed the Bosphorus. When the popular expedition arrived in Constantinople in August 1096, not without having suffered many losses in battles in Eastern Europe, the armies of the official crusade had only just begun to assemble. Emperor Alexis I st encouraged this turbulent troop to immediately engage in combat against the Turks. Ill-prepared and poorly armed, these first Crusaders were massacred as soon as they passed the Bosphorus, and the survivors preferred to return to the Byzantine capital to await the arrival of the official expedition. The pope, anxious to keep control, had taken care not to entrust the direction of the crusade to a single military leader. From their home regions, four main contingents formed and departed overland for Constantinople:Lorraine, northern French, and Germans, led by Godfrey of Bouillon; French, Flemings, and Normans, including Stephen of Blois, Robert of Flanders, and Robert of Normandy; Normans from southern Italy, led by Bohemund of Tarentum; and, finally, Provençaux and Burgundians, led by Raimond de Saint-Gilles, Count of Toulouse. Their arrival, in scattered order, in the Byzantine capital was spread over several weeks, between the end of December 1096 and April 1097. The difficult crossing of Anatolia There, the main Crusader leaders had to take an oath of allegiance to Emperor Alexios I st and promise to restore to him the conquered territories which formerly belonged to Byzantium. From April 1097, an army often estimated at 43,000 fighters crossed the Bosphorus to seize the city of Nicaea, then in the hands of the Seljuk sultan of Rum, Kılıç Arslan. The long siege, from May 14 to June 19, was only resolved by the reinforcement of the Byzantine army, and, once conquered, the city was handed over to the emperor by virtue of the agreements made. The Crusader armies then moved on to southern Anatolia during the summer. The lack of food, the strong heat and the regular harassment of the Turkish archers made their progress in hostile territory particularly difficult. At the end of the summer, an expeditionary force led by Baudouin de Boulogne and Godefroi de Bouillon made its way towards Tarsus, in the south, through Cappadocia and Cilicia, a region repopulated with Armenians since the Seljuk conquest, and seized of the city of Edessa. In early October 1097, the Crusader armies assembled near Antioch, which had fallen under Seljuk rule 12 years earlier. The Emperor's reversal engendered a nagging grudge among the Crusaders as well as sinking them into deep despair. The siege of the city, protected by a citadel and powerful walls, dragged on beyond the harsh winter, undermining the morale of the crusaders decimated by cold and hunger. Then, the following summer, thanks to the betrayal of a guardian of a tower, the Crusaders finally managed to penetrate the city, and Antioch fell on June 2, 1098. The Crusaders were in turn besieged by the Turks, and hoped for the arrival of the reinforcements promised by Alexis I er . However, the latter, considering the city definitively lost, had ordered his men to turn back. The emperor's volte-face gave birth to a tenacious resentment among the crusaders at the same time as it plunged them into deep despair, which only the fervor of the preachers made it possible to overcome. The timely discovery of a fragment of the Holy Lance – having pierced the side of Christ, according to Christian tradition – galvanized the morale of the besieged, and on June 28 the Turkish army was routed and the siege was broken. . But, for the Crusader leaders, the supposed betrayal of Alexis I er released them from their oath, and therefore the city was not restored to him. The march on Jerusalem The rupture of the agreement with the basileus confirmed the growing appetites of the leaders of the crusade who, despite their initial wish, sought to seize territories for their own account. After the capture and sacking of Ma'arrat al-Nu'man, in northern Syria, in November 1098, the departure of the expedition for Jerusalem was delayed, and the procrastination of the leaders provoked the anger and revolt of the pilgrims. at the beginning of January 1099. In the face of popular pressure, the Crusader leaders were forced to reaffirm the liberation of Jerusalem as the goal of the expedition. In Antioch, where the papal legate had just died, Bohémond de Tarente set about organizing the new principality, while the armies of Raimond de Saint-Gilles, Godefroi de Bouillon and Tancred de Hauteville began the conquest of Syria-Palestine. Along the coast, they won several successes and traveled south for a few months until they reached Bethlehem, where Tancred, the first to enter, prayed in the Church of the Nativity. The city given over to looting Jerusalem, the Crusader objective, was now near. At the beginning of June, the Crusader armies regrouped at the foot of the city walls and prepared the siege. Of the tens of thousands of men who had left Europe more than three years earlier, only some 1,500 knights and 12,000 infantry now massed around the Holy City. Fear of an intervention by the armies of the Fatimid Caliph of Egypt hastened the beginning of the siege, which was launched on the night of July 13 to 14. The fighting was bloody, and the next day the first crusaders entered the city. The Muslim governor, entrenched with his garrison in the citadel, then negotiated his surrender and obtained permission to leave the city safe and sound with his men. After his departure, the city was given over to pillage, and the Muslim and Jewish inhabitants were massacred or taken prisoner. Godefroi de Bouillon was preferred to Raimond de Saint-Gilles to reign over the kingdom of Jerusalem, despite the opposition of the priests, reluctant to entrust the conquests to temporal power. The county of Edessa and the principality of Antioch in 1098, the kingdom of Jerusalem in 1099, then the county of Tripoli, from 1102, thus constituted the four states created after the first crusade. A new phase then opened:after the time of conquest came that of the consolidation and defense of the Latin States of the East. Find out more • Warfare in the Medieval Near East, M. Eychenne and A. Zouache (eds.), Ifao/Ifpo, 2015.• War and peace in the medieval Near East, M. Eychenne, S. Pradines and A. Zouache (eds.), Ifao/Ifpo, 2019.• The First Crusade:the call from the East, P. Frankopan, Perrin, 2021. Timeline Summer 1096 A motley crowd of lowly people and warriors led by knights sets out for Constantinople to deliver the Holy Places.Spring 1097 The Crusaders advanced south and forced the Turks back, but their troops were decimated by marches, battles and rivalries between knights.June 7, 1099 At the end of an exhausting expedition, the crusaders arrive at the gates of Jerusalem. Three days later, their first assault was repulsed. The enterprise seems doomed.July 15, 1099 Supplied by sea, the Crusaders raise two towers and manage to take the Holy City. They then indulge in the massacre of thousands of innocent people. A Bloody Expedition The massacre of Jerusalem was preceded by another less known massacre:that of Antioch, perpetrated during the night of June 2 to 3, 1098. Entering the city through treachery, crusaders spared neither the women or the children or the Christians of the East, incapable as they were for the most part of distinguishing them from the Muslims. As in Jerusalem, the population there bore the brunt of the hardships suffered by the Crusaders during their seven-month siege. In Ma'arrat al-Nu'man, during the winter of 1098, hunger even drove some crusaders to commit acts of cannibalism:devoured grilled", said the Norman writer Raoul de Caen. Juan Carlos Losada, Doctor of History Belfries, decisive war machines The mobile towers, or belfries, allowed the Crusaders to approach the ramparts while protecting themselves from the showers of projectiles sent by the besieged. Higher than the walls of Jerusalem, these towers rose on several floors, the first of which was sometimes provided with a ram and the last of a footbridge which it was possible to lower to let the assailants out, and whose the facade was pierced with loopholes for archery or crossbow shooting. These towers were mounted on wheels or rollers, and moved by men or oxen within their base. Their wood was lined with freshly slaughtered animal skins or metal plates to resist Greek fires. This type of tower was used until 1645. J.C.L. Crusader Assault Raimond de Saint-Gilles, Count of Toulouse, camped south of Jerusalem, while the other knights (Godefroi de Bouillon, Tancred de Hauteville, Duke Robert I st of Normandy and Robert I st the Frisian, Count of Flanders) take up position in the north. Deep valleys and strong walls hinder the assault to the east and west. On July 14, the Crusaders undertook to bombard the northern walls with mangonels (a kind of catapult) – forcing the besieged to withdraw – and to fire incendiary arrows against the bags of straw with which the walls were lined to cushion the fire. impact of projectiles. They begin to charge the double wall by means of a massive ram which causes the outer enclosure to yield. The Crusaders engulf their tower in this breach and approach it from the following dawn of the inner enclosure. A shower of incendiary arrows falls on the besieged, the gateway of the tower descends on the ramparts, and the brothers Letold and Gilbert de Tournai set foot in the city. The fate of al-Quds has changed. J.C.L.
