Dealing with these armies, the emperor ‘used every means possible, physical and psychological, to hurry them across the Straits’ to Asia. Once across, the peasant rabble encountered the horse archers of the sultan of Rum, Kilij Arslan (Sword Lion), who massacred 17,000 of them. Few survived. The princely armies were next. Sword Lion confronted the Crusaders at Dorylaeum, but his horse archers failed to break heavily armoured knights.* In October 1097, they arrived at Antioch, where they discovered the miraculous ripeness of their timing. The House of Islam was shattered, ruled by feuding Turkic atabegs – barons – while the Fatimiyya caliphs struggled to control their own generals and the Cairene crowd; and they still hated the Sunnis more than the Christians, and signed a non-aggression pact with the Crusaders.
Bohemond besieged Antioch, aided by supplies delivered by Genoese ships to St Simeon, the nearest port. The Crusades were made possible by the Italian trading cities, led by Genoa,* followed by Pisa – a massive commercial opportunity which the shrewd Italians did not miss. Venice took the Cross as a city and built a special crusading fleet.
At Antioch, where the Crusaders were growing desperate, Bohemond cultivated an Armenian Christian in command of one of the towers. When he was ready, the Giant persuaded the princes that whoever took Antioch should keep it as their own. As the atabeg of Mosul galloped to save the city, Bohemond’s agent opened the gates; Hauteville forces poured in, killing every Muslim. But then the Turks arrived. Now it was the Crusaders’ turn to be besieged, obliged to eat horses, dogs and rats, and experiencing trances of hunger. One pilgrim was inspired by a vision to unearth the Holy Lance that had stabbed Jesus’ side on the Cross, discovered beneath a church floor. It certainly raised morale: as priests brandished the Lance in sacred procession, the Giant led out his starving army, routed the Turks and claimed the city as his own principality.*
Godfrey and other princes led the army southwards, finally arriving outside Jerusalem. The astonishing beauty of the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque crowned Mount Moriah where the Jewish Temple had once stood, its surviving golden walls still revered by its Jews. But it was the Holy Sepulchre that was the object of the Crusade. Sacred to three Abrahamic religions, Jerusalem was a small fortified town of 20,000 Muslims and Jews, its walls defended by several thousand Egyptian troops, including Nubian cavalry.
As the Crusaders, now reduced to a mere 10,000, besieged the Holy City in the blistering heat of the Judaean wilderness, they were again rescued by the Genoese, who arrived at Jaffa on the Mediterranean and, dismantling their ships, brought the wood with which to build mangonels and siege engines.
On 15 July 1099, as the mangonel stones and the arrows flew on both sides, as battering rams smashed against the gates, the thirty-eight-year-old Godfrey accompanied the first troops from his siege engine on to the north-east walls while others broke in from the south. Opening the gates from within, the Crusaders, who had only just survived their 3,000-mile journey, slaughtered everyone they encountered, men, women and children, Muslims and Jews. While the Egyptian general and his troops negotiated their escape, everyone else was killed. Desperate Jerusalemites crowded on the Haram al-Sharif (as the Muslims called the Temple Mount), clambering on to the roof of the Dome of the Rock and praying to be delivered. Tancred de Hauteville, penniless and ambitious but at least more humane than his comrades, tried to negotiate a safe conduct in return for ransom, but ‘Some of the pagans were mercifully beheaded, others pierced by arrows plunged from towers and yet others, tortured for a long time, were burned to death,’ wrote one of the Crusaders. ‘Piles of heads, hands and feet lay in streets and houses,’ trampled as ‘men and knights were running to and fro over the corpses’. Babies were brained against the walls. The Jews were burned alive in their synagogue. Tancred supervised the looting of gold and treasure from the Dome and al-Aqsa. The princes rode horses with gore up to their bridles and then proceeded, their tunics, faces and hands besmeared with blood, to pray at the Sepulchre, tearfully praising God. While the bodies were burned in bonfires, the princes and soldiers raced to grab the best houses. Godfrey was elected king, but, insisting that Jesus was the only king of Jerusalem, he chose the title Advocate of the Holy Sepulchre and converted al-Asqa, believing that it had once been Solomon’s Palace, into the royal residence. Although a few connected Muslims and Jews were kept alive and ransomed to the Egyptians, virtually every Jerusalemite was killed.
