The First Crusade 1096–99

This extract is taken from the chapter entitled “The Campaign”

The final Crusader assault lasted from 13 to 15 July 1099. As Raymond d’Aguilers stated: ‘A young man shot arrows ablaze with cotton pads against the ramparts of the Saracens which defended against the wooden tower of Godfrey and the two Counts [on the north side]. Soon mounting flames drove the defenders from the ramparts.’ This enabled the Crusaders to get onto the northern wall … Once inside the city the attackers went berserk, slaughtering any Muslim or Jew they found. … Some troops defending the southern wall withdrew to the Citadel to rejoin their commander, Iftikhar al-Dawla. There, as Ibn al-Athir recorded: A band of Muslims barricaded themselves in the Mihrab Da’ud [the Citadel] and fought on for several days. They were granted their lives in return for surrendering …

Around the Mount Zion area … other defenders were refused quarter. The Saracens fought fiercely with Raymond’s forces as if they had not been defeated … 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 in searing flames. Piles of heads, hands and feet lay in the houses and streets, and indeed there was a running to and fro of men and knights over the corpses.

Worse still was the carnage on the Temple Mount. Defenders who fled to this area were simply massacred along with great numbers of civilians. Ibn al-Athir confirmed the carnage and looting: In the Masjid al-Aqsa the Franks slaughtered more than 70,000 people, amongst them a large number of imams and Muslim scholars, devout and ascetic men who had left their homelands to live in pious seclusion in the Holy Places. The Franks stripped the Dome of the Rock of more than forty silver candelabra, each of them weighing 3,600 drams, and a great silver lamp weighing 44 Syrian rutl, as well as 150 smaller silver candelabra and more than 20 gold ones, as well as much other booty.

The impact of these appalling events varied in different parts of the Islamic world. Ibn al-Athir described how refugees arrived in Baghdad during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. There they told the ‘Abbasid Caliph’s ministers a story that ‘wrung their hearts and brought tears to their eyes’. On Friday, the day of prayer, some leading refugees went to the Congregational Mosque and begged for help, ‘weeping so that their hearers wept with them as they described the suffering of the Muslims in that Holy City, the men killed, the women and children taken prisoner, the homes pillaged.’