In early 1099, the main body of ‘armed pilgrims’ who had obeyed Pope Urban II’s call to Holy War, left the city of Antioch and started their long march to Jerusalem. They leave Prince Bohemond I behind, ruling another of the new Crusader territories.

On the march, the mystic Peter Bartholomew (or Barthelemy), who had discovered the Holy Lance in Antioch, continues to have visions. Faced with growing scepticism from others, he volunteers to undergo ordeal by fire to prove his veracity. Gustave Doré captures this dramatic event in his Peter Barthelemy Undergoing Ordeal by Fire. Although initially claimed that he survives the ordeal unscathed, he dies less than two weeks later from the severe burns he sustained.

This march takes the crusaders southward along the Mediterranean coast, in parts on quite a narrow coastal corniche. They have local assistance, and most of the towns and cities that they pass capitulate peacefully, enabling them to move quite quickly. They take Beirut on 19 May, Tyre on 23 May, and Caesarea on 26 May.

News has already reached Jerusalem of their intentions; there, the city’s governor expels all its Christians, who had previously been living peaceably and were hardly oppressed. This is to ensure that no one would betray the city to the Crusaders. He also has most of the local wells poisoned, to frustrate any attempts at siege.

A total of about 1,250 knights and twelve thousand other armed men arrive and start putting the city of Jerusalem under siege on 7 June. Despite the greatly diminished size of this army, it’s split into factions which co-ordinate poorly. Tancred has already left to respond to calls of help from Bethlehem, which he then seizes before returning to the siege.

Following consultations with a hermit on the Mount of Olives, the Crusaders attack the city near its Damascus Gate on 13 June, but are repulsed from its inner walls, and retreat quickly. Then on 17 June, Genoese sailors arrive in the port of Jaffa, bringing with them their engineering skills and some timber; wood is also obtained from Nablus to the north.

Francesco Guardi’s romantic fantasy showing Godfrey of Boulogne Summons His Chiefs to Council from about 1755 most probably shows this noble preparing to attend one of the many military Council meetings held during the siege. Other than his capture of Bethlehem, Godfrey’s achievements had been limited, but his reputation is growing.

Two great wooden siege towers are constructed, one under the command of Count Raymond of Toulouse and funded from his own wealth, the other by the Crusaders from the north of France, paid for from common funds. Visions reported by a priest, Peter Desiderius, inspire the Crusaders to process around the city walls on 8 July, reminiscent of the story of Joshua during the siege of Jericho. On this occasion, the walls don’t come tumbling down, but have to wait until the siege towers are ready for use a few days later.

On 13 July, those towers are moved into place and assault starts on the city’s defences. After two days, the outer rampart has fallen, and the inner rampart is then captured. The defenders panic, and at long last Crusaders enter the city.

In the right of Ignazio Lucibello’s two frescoes, he shows The Capture of Jerusalem, with the monastic soldier in the foreground displaying the distinctive cross of Saint John on his shield. This was associated with the later Knights of the Order of Saint John, which survives as an order of chivalry and continues today to provide aid in many countries, including medical support to Palestinians in Gaza.

In the north of the city, Tancred and his forces pursue the city’s defenders to the Temple Mount, where they start massacring them. Tancred calls a halt to this, allowing them a safe refuge in the Al-Aqsa Mosque. In the south, the commander of the garrison agrees to surrender the citadel to Count Raymond in return for safe passage from Jerusalem to Ascalon.

Notwithstanding those efforts to control it, Crusaders continued to massacre the population of Jerusalem. Even Jews who had sought safety in their synagogue were killed when it was burned to the ground, and eye-witness accounts refer to parts of the city becoming knee-deep in blood. The few citizens who survive either fled early, or are held as prisoners for ransom.

Émile Signol’s Taking of Jerusalem by the Crusaders, 15th July 1099 from 1847 shows an idealised and expurgated version of what must have been carnage. At its centre, the knight on a white charger might be Godfrey of Bouillon, with a priest, perhaps Peter Desiderius, to the left. There are bodies littering the ground, and that in the centre is holding the severed head of a woman, and there is the smoke of a burning building, perhaps the synagogue. But there are also many figures apparently giving thanks to their ‘saviours’ for delivering the Holy City from occupation.

Following the ‘delivery’ of Jerusalem, one subsidiary mission is to locate a relic, a fragment of wood claimed to be from the cross on which Christ had been crucified. This had been hidden by Eastern Orthodox priests following the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 1009. Soon after the city had been taken by the Crusaders, Arnulf of Chocques was made Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, and sets about finding the precious relic.

Arnulf is reputed to have tortured the Orthodox priests who had hidden the True Cross until they revealed its location. Doré shows this with uncharacteristically wild exaggeration in The Discovery of the True Cross. The relic was actually just a small piece of wood set in a larger cross of gold, and has now been returned to the rebuilt Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

When Count Raymond of Toulouse initially refuses to become king of the new Crusader city of Jerusalem, Godfrey of Bouillon is chosen to be its leader, and Raymond storms off in anger with his troops.

The military action is still not complete, for on 10 August Godfrey leads his remaining troops to Ascalon, where on 12 August in a short battle they put a much larger Fatimid army to flight. Following that, most of the Crusaders return to Jerusalem, from where many, but by no means all, set off on their long journey back to Europe.

Godfrey of Bouillon dies the following year (1100) in Jerusalem, by which time he had already become the folk hero of the ‘armed pilgrims’ who responded to Pope Urban II’s call. He is succeeded by his brother Baldwin, who becomes King Baldwin I of Jerusalem.

Merry-Joseph Blondel’s portrait of Baldwin I of Jerusalem from 1844 shows a surprisingly effete figure. The younger brother of Godfrey of Bouillon, he enjoyed substantial military success during his reign, dying in 1118. Like many others in the First Crusade, he never returned home.

For those who did leave Jerusalem and try to make their way back to Europe, their experience was very different from that shown in Carl Friedrich Lessing’s romantic Return of the Crusader from 1835. Many were killed before they even got to Constantinople, or died from the harsh environment or disease. Those who did survive were, not surprisingly, welcomed as major heroes.

References

Wikpedia.

Thomas Asbridge (2004) The First Crusade, A New History, Free Press, ISBN 978 0 7432 2084 2.
John France (1994) Victory in the East, a Military History of the First Crusade, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 589871.
Joanthan Riley-Smith, ed (1995) The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, Oxford UP. ISBN 978 0 192 854285.
Jonathan Riley-Smith (2014) The Crusades, A History, 3rd edn., Bloomsbury. ISBN 978 1 4725 1351 9.

It is 1095, another anonymous year between the collapse of the Roman Empire and the start of the Renaissance. There are only about fifty million people in the whole of Europe, and their life expectancy is around thirty years, little more than it was at the height of the Roman Empire. Famines are frequent, and death by starvation common even when crops don’t fail.

Christendom is under threat. Much of Spain and Asia Minor is under the control of Caliphates, and the Byzantine Empire consists of little more than Constantinople and Greece. The major powers in western Europe are France, and the Holy Roman Empire extending from the North Sea to central Italy. Since 1054, Christians in the Byzantine Empire had separated into the Eastern Orthodox Church, while those in the west of Europe still follow Rome in its Catholicism.

For the whole population, death is only a matter of time, and usually not that far away either. Their only hope in life is to go to heaven as their only chance of self-improvement. Opportunities to gain a place in heaven come seldom, though, and most fear deeply that they will only suffer worse torment in hell.

Pope Urban II has a plan. Having travelled through France to attend a meeting in Clermont, on 27 November he delivers a sermon calling for a holy war against the Caliphates occupying the Middle East, to return the Holy City of Jerusalem to Christian rule. The grounds given for this are paradoxical: he describes European society accurately as being violent, and the need for maintaining the Peace of God, but then calls upon all faithful Christians to undertake an ‘armed pilgrimage’ to bring them remission of sins, even if they die in the process.

Francesco Hayez painted Pope Urban II Preaching the First Crusade in the Square of Clermont in 1835. Inspired by Michaud’s account of the Crusades (illustrated later by Gustave Doré), it gives an apocryphal version of the sermon, in which Peter the Hermit also preached, and distributed crosses of red cloth to those joining the ‘armed pilgrimage’.

There are two other key ingredients which are added later: a charismatic preacher known as Peter the Hermit adopts the Pope’s call as his mission in life, and starts his own highly successful campaign to recruit ‘armed pilgrims’, and these pilgrims will travel and fight under the sign of the cross.

Urban’s intention is for the warring peers and knights of Europe to unite in this cause, assemble armies of pilgrims, and depart in the middle of August 1096. Peter the Hermit, though, has other ideas, and forthwith sets out on a tour of France and the Holy Roman Empire recruiting anyone and everyone who will ‘take up the cross’ and head overland through central and eastern Europe to Asia Minor. This forms the ill-fated “People’s Crusade” that leaves early, gets into enormous difficulties wherever it goes, and ends up mostly being slaughtered before they even reach the Caliphates in Asia Minor.

One of the many failings of this People’s Crusade is its misinterpretation of their mission. Even before they leave the Holy Roman Empire, they take to killing anyone who wasn’t a devout Christian, particularly whole communities of Jews. While the main Crusade is still raising funds to sustain itself during its long journey to the east, the penniless and unprepared peasants in the People’s Crusade can only steal and ravage as they travel, giving rise to a succession of battles with locals on the way. These become particularly severe as they pass through Hungary.

In about 1877, the great French painter and illustrator Gustave Doré made a set of one hundred illustrations to accompany a new edition of Joseph François Michaud’s History of the Crusades. In The Army of Priest Volkmar and Count Emicio Attacks Mersbourg, he shows a battle that broke out in what is now Germany, between some of the People’s Crusaders and locals.

Eventually, the main bodies of the ‘armed pilgrimage’ assemble outside Constantinople during the winter of 1096-97. The Pope is represented by the first to ‘take the cross’, Adhemar of Le Puy, and its leaders include Raymond IV, the Count of Toulouse, Bohemond of Taranto and his nephew Tancred, and three aristocratic brothers Godfrey of Bouillon, Baldwin of Boulogne, and Eustace Count of Boulogne.

The Byzantine Emperor Alexios, whose pleas to Pope Urban had been part of the cause of this First Crusade, appears surprisingly disinterested in the campaign, refuses to join it, and is most interested in moving the 30,000-35,000 crusaders on into Asia Minor. He also insists that the leaders swear an oath to return to him all the territory they recover from the Caliphates. In return for that allegiance, he reluctantly provides the ‘armed pilgrims’ with food and supplies.

The main armies merge with the survivors of the People’s Crusade under Peter the Hermit in Asia Minor in early 1097. Their first objective is the city of Nicaea, which they put under siege. The Crusaders are then attacked by the Sultanate army, which they beat back in mid-May, with both sides suffering heavy casualties. The city falls on 18 June, but Crusaders are forbidden from entering, and it’s handed over to a Byzantine force as required by the earlier oaths made with Alexios.

Doré’s After the Battle of Nicea shows one of the early atrocities of the First Crusade, in which the severed heads of massacred inhabitants were thrown into those who had survived the siege.

On 1 July, a larger Seljuk army attacks the Crusaders at Dorylaeum, but flees when reinforcements arrive.

Doré’s vision of The Battle of Dorylaeum in 1097 shows hand-to-hand combat that preceded the invention of gunpowder and firearms.

The Crusaders then march through the heat of the summer, Seljuks having destroyed all crops in their retreat. Among the many who die during this arduous journey is the wife of Baldwin of Boulogne, who abandons his pilgrimage to find a fiefdom locally. In March 1098, Baldwin becomes the ruler of the new crusader state of Edessa.

Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury, father of Tony Robert-Fleury who became an influential teacher of painting, shows Baldwin of Boulogne Entering Edessa in February 1098 in this painting from 1840.

The city of Antioch is the midpoint between Constantinople and Jerusalem, and the next military objective of the Crusade. Heavily fortified and defended, the Crusaders put the city under siege and hope for an insider to turn traitor and let them in. The siege starts on 20 October 1097, but the walls are so long they can’t be fully guarded, and those inside are kept partially supplied.

There are many miniatures showing scenes from the Crusades. Those of Jean Colombe are among the finest, and The Siege of Antioch from about 1474 is one of the very best. This was painted in Sébastien Mamerot’s Les Passages d’Outremer.

The armies outside the walls probably suffer worse privation than those they have put under siege. They’re also attacked by two armies attempting to relieve the siege, but manage to repel them both.

In 1850, Jean-Joseph Dassy painted this spirited and imaginative view of Robert de Normandie at the Siege of Antioch 1097–1098. Given the desperate shortage of horses and the appalling state of the men, this is entertainment rather than history.

In early March, supplies for the Crusaders arrive from the coast at last. Finally, Bohemond of Taranto manages to bribe one of the city’s defenders to let the Crusaders in; in June, Bohemond makes the first ascent of the ladders to lead an attack on the city, which quickly overwhelms its defenders.

Doré captures this in his Bohemond Climbs the Walls of Antioch Alone.

The Crusaders then slaughter almost every one of Antioch’s inhabitants in a bloodbath.

Doré may have romanticised some of his scenes of the Crusades, but he didn’t shrink from pointing out its atrocities, in this plate showing The Massacre of Antioch.

A few days later, Kerbogha of Mosul arrives with a large army and the Crusaders find themselves under siege in the city they have only just captured, in even more desperate straits. When morale is at it lowest ebb, Peter Bartholomew, a monk, has a vision leading to his discovery of what he claims to be the Holy Lance, a relic which was the spear used to pierce the side of Christ when he was crucified.

Jean Colombe shows the Discovery of the Holy Lance (c 1474) inside the cathedral of Antioch, where the monk’s vision revealed it to be. Inevitably, it has since been deemed an imposter.

The starving Crusaders see this as a sign of their victory over Kerbogha’s army, and on 28 June 1098 they leave the city and put their enemy to flight, largely because half of Kerbogha’s army mutiny on the battlefield.

Before the weakened army can leave Antioch, though, there’s a major dispute over who will become the city’s ruler. Bohemond claims it for himself, as it was he who had led its capture, and their oaths to Emperor Alexios are invalidated because he had deserted the Crusade. Others, most importantly Raymond of Toulouse, cannot agree, and argument delays their departure.

At the height of the summer, an epidemic strikes the city, killing many of the army and its dependents, including the Pope’s representative Adhemar of Le Puy. Local farmers then refuse to supply the Crusaders with food, and by December there are reports of Crusaders turning cannibal on eight thousand inhabitants of a nearby town whom they had massacred.

The main body of Crusaders finally leaves Antioch on foot for Jerusalem in early 1099. They have lost almost all their horses to the arduous journey, extreme heat, and starvation. Bohemond remains in the city as its first Prince.

In the next episode I will conclude this brief summary of the First Crusade.

References

Wikpedia.

Thomas Asbridge (2004) The First Crusade, A New History, Free Press, ISBN 978 0 7432 2084 2.
John France (1994) Victory in the East, a Military History of the First Crusade, Cambridge UP. ISBN 978 0 521 589871.
Joanthan Riley-Smith, ed (1995) The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, Oxford UP. ISBN 978 0 192 854285.
Jonathan Riley-Smith (2014) The Crusades, A History, 3rd edn., Bloomsbury. ISBN 978 1 4725 1351 9.