In 326 AD, Empress Helena, the mother of the ruling Roman Emperor Constantine I, made a pilgrimage to the Roman city of Aelia Capitolina in the Roman province of Judaea. She had converted to Christianity roughly fifteen years earlier and, in 313, had convinced her son to issue the Edict of Milan that ended the religious persecution of Christians. Thereafter, she sponsored the construction of many churches, but now she was looking for something more spiritual as she approached 80 years of age.
It was 293 years since Christ had been crucified, 256 years since the destruction of the Second Temple, and 190 years since the expulsion of the Jewish and Christian population from the city that had formerly been called Jerusalem. Although expelled and persecuted, she knew that Christians had never completely abandoned Jerusalem. There were still Christians living in Aelia Capitolina whose grandparents’ grandparents had lived in Jerusalem in the time of Christ. She knew or suspected these Christians maintained traditions about the sacred venues associated with Jesus. Furthermore, even if knowledge had not been passed down over the generations, Helena knew the Romans had built a temple to Venus on the site where Christ had been crucified and buried. The Romans had intended to humiliate the Christians by burying the most important physical reminder of their messiah under a temple to the pagan goddess of love. The effect had been to mark with marble the location of Christ’s execution and resurrection.
In consultation with the local Christian community and their bishop Marcarius, Helena ordered excavations under the porch of the Roman temple. These revealed ancient quarries or tombs, which according to Rufinius (writing less than a century later), brought to light three crosses lying in one of the chambers. Helena and Marcarius brought pieces of each cross to a sick woman, who recovered miraculously on contact with the third. Thereafter, that cross was revered as the cross on which Christ had been crucified, and the place where it was found was identified as the tomb of Christ.
To mark the site of Christ’s tomb and commemorate his sacrifice and resurrection, Emperor Constantine the Great ordered and financed the construction of a great church over the grave discovered by his later sainted mother, Helena. This church was constructed in the style of a monumental Greek basilica, 150 by 75 metres, covering almost precisely the same area as the temple to Venus. Furthermore, the church incorporated both the site of Christ’s crucifixion and his grave. The latter could be reached by stairs leading underground. From its consecration onwards, this church became the holiest site in Christendom, more sacred than Agia Sophia in Constantinople or St Peter’s in Rome. It was known as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and instantly became the destination of countless pilgrims across Christendom as Christianity spread across Europe.
For almost 300 years, the Holy Sepulchre sat securely in Jerusalem, surrounded by Christian inhabitants and protected by a mighty Christian empire ruled from Constantinople. Yet slowly the power of Constantinople eroded, and in 614 AD, a Persian army swept across Judea. The Persians captured and sacked Jerusalem, killing an estimated 26,500 men and enslaving roughly 35,000 women and children. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was burned to the ground. It took fourteen years before armies under Emperor Herakleios expelled the Persians in 628.
Although the reconstruction of a church over the tomb of Christ was undertaken immediately, the population and economic losses of the war with Persia inhibited spending. Only a modest structure replaced Constantine’s great basilica. The building was probably temporary, with expectations of later expansion. Instead, just nine years later, Jerusalem was again under siege. This time the enemy at the gates was the Muslim Caliph Umar. After a year-long siege, Jerusalem could no longer resist and fell under Muslim domination.
Under Sharia law, the public practice of any religion other than Islam was prohibited, condemning the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to fall gradually into disrepair. Meanwhile, contrary to popular modern myths, the Christian population was subjected to an annual tribute, extra taxes, forced labour, and land expropriation, as well as systematic persecution and humiliation punctuated by sporadic violent attacks entailing plunder, rape and slaughter.14 All churches and monasteries suffered during the ensuing centuries of Muslim rule. Symbolic of them all, the Holy Sepulchre was burned by Muslim troops in 969 AD, and although partially and modestly repaired by 984, the church was again demolished by the Caliph al-Hakim in 1009. No new attempt to construct a church on the site of the crucifixion was undertaken until almost fifty years later, in 1048. That anything could be built at all was an act of generosity by the Muslim ruler of the period; Sharia law prohibits the construction of any houses of worship not dedicated to Islam. Nevertheless, given the impoverished state of the Christian community under Muslim rule and the restrictions imposed by Islam, this new church was not a significant architectural monument.
Meanwhile, the armies of Islam had spread across the Near East to the gates of Constantinople. They had also subdued the North African continent and stormed onto the Iberian Peninsula. All these conquests were justified by the Islamic concept of jihad, which calls for the elimination of the non-Islamic world. The theory was simple. Islam divides the world into two houses or camps: the Dar al-Islam (usually translated as the Abode of Islam) and the Dar al-Harb (the Abode of War). In the name of peace, all regions still in the Dar al-Harb must be conquered and eliminated until the entire world lives harmoniously together in the house of the Dar al-Islam.
Practical politics interfered with this simplistic world view, and Islamic states found it increasingly convenient to make truces with non-believers. This led to the acknowledgement that there was a grey area between the Dar al-Islam and the Dar al-Harb, namely the Dar al-’Ahd or Dar al-Sulh – the Abode of the Treaty. Throughout the crusader era, however, treaties with non-believers were viewed as temporary conveniences that could not exceed ten years, ten months and ten days. In short, during this period the Islamic world fundamentally rejected the concept of permanent peace between Islam and the Christian powers of Byzantium and the West as contrary to Sharia law.
Despite the successful advance of Muslim armies, the Christian states did not entirely collapse. The Byzantine Empire fought off Muslim sieges of Constantinople in 678 AD and again in 717. In 732, the armies of Islam were halted on the Loire by a Frankish army under Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours. Roughly simultaneously, the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula commenced and would continue for another 700 years. By 746, the Byzantine Empire had regained control of Armenia and Syria but not Palestine. In the succeeding three centuries, the struggle for control of the Mediterranean basin continued with victories and defeats on both sides, but through it all, the Holy Land remained under Muslim rule.
Sadly, that did not mean it was at peace. On the contrary, the Holy Land was a battleground fought over by competing Shia and Sunni caliphates centred in Cairo and Baghdad, respectively. Jerusalem changed hands violently five times between 637 and 1099. In addition, one rebellion against the Arab occupiers was quashed with a massive loss of life. Meanwhile, the Seljuks swept across Anatolia and defeated a large Byzantine army at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071.
The victory of Muslim armies did not necessarily signify the victory of the Islamic faith. Sharia law prohibits forced religious conversions, although it advocates the humiliation and punishment of non-believers to encourage them to see the error of their beliefs. Despite the material benefits of adopting Islam, the pace of conversion was slow. Historians now estimate that the majority of the Levant’s population remained Christian in 1100. It was the dire circumstances in which these Christians lived and the numerous instances of murder, rape and enslavement involving Christian pilgrims travelling to the Holy Land that ignited a new kind of warfare.
The Byzantines had never forgotten Jerusalem, but their strength had been insufficient to recapture the lost territories of the Levant and Egypt. Western Europe, too, had been on the defensive until the victory at Tours, and after that, the struggle ebbed and flowed. However, the West gradually gained wealth and strength, and thoughts turned towards more ambitious projects to reclaim lost territories. In 1074, Pope Gregory VII proposed a military campaign against the Turks to restore Christian control of the Holy Land, but nothing came of it. Twenty years later, in 1095, Byzantine Emperor Alexios I’s urgent appeal to Rome for military aid fell on receptive ears. The new pope, Urban II, decided not only to respond positively but added innovative elements in a dramatic appeal he made to the nobles and knights of France in a rousing recruiting speech at Clermont in November 1095.
First and foremost, he put the liberation of Jerusalem (rather than general help for the beleaguered Byzantines) at the centre of the proposed campaign. In feudal Europe, Christ was seen as the ‘king of kings and lord of lords’. Since under feudalism, a vassal was obliged to come to the assistance of his lord if his lord were attacked, Urban reminded the assembled Christian knights that the destruction of churches or their conversion into mosques constituted an insult to their ultimate feudal lord: Christ himself. Urban called upon Christian knights to do their duty to their Lord Christ by rescuing his earthly kingdom (the Holy Land) from occupation.
Second, Urban II invoked the concept of ‘Just War’. This theory, propagated by St Augustine in the fifth century, broke with earlier Christian pacifist traditions by designating wars declared by Christian leaders against aggression and oppression (e.g., defensive wars) as legitimate or ‘just’. While St Augustine explicitly condemned wars of religious conversion and the use of ‘excessive force’, most mediaeval Christians viewed all wars against pagans as fundamentally legitimate. By the eleventh century, Western Europe had a tradition that honoured, glorified and even sanctified Christian fighting men, provided they fought non-Christians. In his appeal at Clermont, Pope Urban II stressed the fundamental elements of a just war (fighting oppression and aggression) by drawing attention to the suffering of fellow Christians in the Muslim-occupied Near East and highlighting the threat posed by the pagan Seljuks to the New Rome, Constantinople.
Yet, the most radical feature in the appeal at Clermont was Urban’s promise of the remission of sins for those who undertook to liberate Jerusalem. In addition to the assurance they were fighting a just war against aggression and oppression, the participants were offered a route to heaven. This transformed the entire campaign from a military expedition into a pilgrimage, albeit an armed pilgrimage. Possibly Urban had not fully thought through the consequences of his offer. He certainly had not expected the response.
Within a short time, tens of thousands of people had taken vows before their local priest or bishop to go to Jerusalem and pray at the Holy Sepulchre. Notably, the vow was not to kill or fight Saracens; but to pray in Jerusalem. Since the Holy Sepulchre was under Muslim control, the reconquest of Jerusalem was the implicit prerequisite for fulfilling the vow. Yet the vow itself did not require killing or fighting, so it was a vow that anyone could take, regardless of age, gender or health.
To Urban’s dismay, women and children, older people and the disabled– all of no military value – rushed to ‘take the cross’. (The symbol of the crusader vow was a cloth cross worn on one’s outer garment.) This was not what Emperor Alexios had asked for, nor was it what the pope had intended. Alexios had expected trained fighting men who would serve as mercenaries under his officers. Urban wanted Christian knights and sergeants who could fight effectively against the Muslim enemy. Urban vigorously tried to discourage non-combatants from taking the vow and urged the clergy to absolve unsuitable persons of oaths already taken. His efforts may have slowed or reduced the number of non-combatant participants, but neither he nor the secular rulers of the age had the power to stop free men and women from setting off on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
Thus, while the pope diligently coordinated with leading secular lords for an armed expedition led by noblemen and composed of well-armed and provisioned fighting men, thousands of people set off for Jerusalem on their own. They clustered around and followed charismatic leaders, the most famous and successful of whom was a preacher known as Peter the Hermit. Peter first recruited tens of thousands of followers in France and then crossed into Germany, where he was equally successful. Although some knights and isolated nobles joined his improvised host, the preponderance of those who filled his ranks – and numbered in the tens of thousands – came from the lower classes. Most were armed with nothing more than farm and household implements. Many were women.
As they advanced, they felt entitled to food and other necessities. If it was not given to them, they stole it. Some elements in this undisciplined yet fanatical host targeted Jews, plundering and killing them to finance their pilgrimage or as a substitute for the more difficult task of fighting Turks. The problems increased after the hoard passed into Byzantine territory. Clashes with the communities through which this zealous and undisciplined mob passed would have been worse had not the Byzantine Emperor responded by setting up markets along the way.
By 1 August 1096, while the organised military contingents were still marshalling in France, the tens of thousands led by Peter the Hermit reached Constantinople. Here they insisted on continuing into Asia against the emperor’s advice. Cynically, the emperor provided boats to transport them across the Bosporus on 6 August. Once east of the Dardanelles, the host split into two contingents based mainly on language. The German component was surrounded and exterminated by the Turks first, and then several weeks later, the French pilgrims suffered the same fate. Those that converted to Islam were sent east as slaves, while those that did not were killed on the spot. There are no reliable estimates of how many were killed and captured or how many were women. Historians suggest that 20,000 people were lost in this ill-considered expedition. Whatever their numbers, women participants shared the fate of the men: capture or death.
The official armed expedition organised by the pope set out from France in mid-August 1096 and advanced by various routes to avoid overburdening the local markets. The various contingents converged again in Constantinople. Most arrived by the end of 1096, although some troops did not reach the Byzantine capital until April 1097. Even after all elements had united in Constantinople, they did not merge into a disciplined army under a unified command. Instead, as Professor Thomas Madden worded it, they remained ‘a loosely organised mob of soldiers, clergy, servants and followers heading in roughly the same direction for roughly the same purposes’15
Furthermore, all participants were volunteers. Oaths of fealty that bound vassals to their lords at home were irrelevant in the context of a pilgrimage far beyond the borders of their liege’s territory. Indeed, it could be argued that oaths of fealty were temporarily suspended or superseded by the oath before God to fight for Christ. That said, at the core of any band of soldiers was a nobleman surrounded by his household, his dependants (vassals) and his kin. Most lords had brothers, uncles, nephews and cousins who rode with them. They travelled surrounded by these close-knit groups of men who knew each other well and spoke the same language.
The total host assembled is estimated at anywhere between 50,000 to 60,000, of which 10 per cent or 5,000 were knights. The most important secular leaders of this host were ten noblemen:
Robert, Count of Flanders;
Raymond, Count of Toulouse;
Robert, Duke of Normandy (and eldest son of William the Conqueror);
Stephen, Count of Blois, Robert’s brother-in-law;
Hugh of Vermandois, the brother of the king of France;
Eustace, Count of Boulogne;
Baldwin of Boulogne (his brother);
Godfrey de Bouillon, Duke of Lower Lorraine and brother of both of the above;
Bohemond, Duke of Taranto, a Sicilian Norman; and
Tancred, his nephew.
The number of women in this host is unknown, but chronicles and accounts testify to their presence. Two of the leading noblemen of the First Crusade, Raymond of Toulouse and Baldwin of Boulogne, were accompanied by their wives, for example. Furthermore, we know that in later crusades, the female presence amounted to roughly three per cent of participants. All in all, it seems unlikely that women made up more than five per cent of a cohort specifically conceived as a fighting force facing an arduous 2,000-mile, overland armed expedition. What is clear, however, is these female participants were not ‘camp followers’ in the usual sense. On the contrary, Sabine Geldsetzer’s meticulous examination of all known references to crusading women, Frauen auf Kreuzzuegen 1096–1291, concludes that the vast majority of female participants in all crusades were motivated by religious devotion. Furthermore, while they were drawn from all classes of society, the majority went on crusades with their husbands, brothers or fathers.16
On arrival in Constantinople, the Western leaders were astonished to discover that, although he had requested their support, the emperor had no intention of taking command of an expedition to free Jerusalem. After some debate amongst themselves, the Western leaders decided to continue to Jerusalem to fulfil their vows without Byzantine leadership or participation beyond a few advisors. After wintering in Constantinople, they crossed into Turkish-held territory in late May 1097 and decisively won their first encounter with the Turks on 21 May by defeating forces of the Seljuk Sultan Kilij Arslan. This victory forced the Turkish garrison occupying the Byzantine city of Nicaea to surrender. Nicaea, with its predominantly Christian population, was returned to Byzantine control and the crusaders continued eastward.
At once, conditions deteriorated dramatically. The crusaders found themselves in rugged, arid and hostile territory at the height of summer. Water and food were in extremely short supply, and the sultan’s army was still intact. On 1 July, the Turkish army surprised the advance guard with a vastly superior host of light cavalry. The knights and men led by Bohemond of Taranto dug in around the baggage train containing the non-combatants. They fought primarily on foot behind a shield wall until heavy cavalry from the main contingent of crusaders came to their relief and scattered the attacking Turkish mounted archers. The battle is known as Dorylaeum; accounts describe women bringing water to the fighting men holding the perimeter.
Despite the absence of major confrontations over the next four months, the crusader host was decimated by thirst, hunger and exhaustion as it dragged itself across Anatolia in the height of summer without adequate provisions. Four-fifths of the horses died, and an estimated thirty to forty per cent of the humans did as well. Among the dead were women and children. Indeed, mediaeval accounts stress the horrors of this march by reporting that women gave birth by the side of the road to premature infants, who they left to die. While historians are quick to point out that such descriptions are intended to shock readers and may be more symbolic than factual, such stories usually have a core of truth. Tellingly, at this stage of the crusade, Baldwin of Boulogne’s wife, Godera, died of unknown causes.
Finally, on 21 October, the crusaders reached the plains around Antioch. Like Nicaea, Antioch was a predominantly Christian city that had been in Byzantine hands until eleven years earlier. It was home to 40,000 inhabitants and one of the four patriarchs of the mediaeval Church. A robust Turkish garrison controlled its massive walls studded with 400 towers. Through attrition, the crusading host now numbered roughly 30,000 men and women. This was too few to completely enclose the sprawling perimeter of the city, much less mount an assault on such a well-defended fighting force, but they had too many to feed as winter closed in. All they could do was encamp before the walls of Antioch in the expectation that the Byzantine Emperor would arrive with supplies and reinforcements.
As the winter dragged on, malnutrition, hunger, cold, disease and despair overwhelmed thousands. Some died, and some simply abandoned the enterprise altogether. The most prominent of the deserters was Stephan of Blois and, conspicuously, the Byzantine advisors that had previously accompanied the crusaders. Yet, new crusaders joined the siege, having arrived by sea, and supplies were sent from Cyprus by the Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem, who was in exile there. The crusaders also fought off two Seljuk attempts to relieve the city. When they learned that the sultan of Mosul had mobilised a huge host to lift the siege, however, the leaders agreed on a daring attempt to take the city by storm.
On the night of 3 June 1098, Bohemond of Taranto led his troops to a sector of the walls guarded by troops under the command of an Armenian defector. Without resistance, they scaled the walls, climbed over them and entered the city. Bohemond’s troops hastened to open the gates from the inside to the remainder of the besieging army, and the crusaders swept into Antioch and drove the Turkish garrison back to the citadel, notably without slaughtering or killing the residents, the majority of whom were Christian.
Yet, the situation of the crusaders improved only marginally because the army of the Atabeg of Mosul Kerbogha was on their heels. The siege had long since depleted stores inside Antioch. Starvation and disease haunted the crusaders and the civilian population alike. When word reached them that the Byzantine Emperor, slowly advancing with an army to their aid, had turned back for Constantinople, many despaired entirely. Desertions became so common that the leaders put guards on the gates to stop fighting men from escaping.
At this juncture, a priest with the crusading host had a dream that led him to a rusty spearhead. According to his dream, he claimed this was the very spear that had pierced Christ’s side at the crucifixion. Despite extreme scepticism on the part of the leading clerics, the secular leadership recognised the psychological moment was right for a last-ditch attempt to save themselves from certain failure. On 28 June 1098, with their decimated forces, they attacked the far larger army surrounding them – and scattered it to the winds. The victory was celebrated by a joint procession of crusaders and inhabitants through the streets of Antioch to re-throne the Orthodox patriarch in his cathedral.
However, it was the following year before the crusaders recovered sufficient strength and their leaders found the will to continue. The remaining crusaders advanced peaceably and without bloodshed down the coast of the Levant by negotiating with the respective Fatimid commanders in Beirut, Sidon, Tyre, Acre and Haifa. The local Muslim commanders were quite happy to set up markets and allow the crusaders to re-provision in exchange for not attacking or harming their territory. The crusaders were relieved not to have to fight their way south and delighted to have adequate provisions. They reached Bethlehem on 6 June 1099, where they were welcomed as liberators. The following day they finally saw Jerusalem in the distance before them.
By now, the crusading force was too small to surround even a moderate city like Jerusalem. Furthermore, the Fatimid governor of Jerusalem was fully appraised of the crusaders’ advance and their goal. He had already expelled the native Christian population to eliminate the risk of the kind of betrayal that had facilitated the capture of Antioch and reduce the number of mouths he had to feed during the siege. In addition, he poisoned the wells around the city so the besiegers had to drag water from the Jordan River. Finally, the Caliph in Cairo promised to bring relief to Jerusalem within three months. All the governor in Jerusalem had to do was hold off assaults by the small forces before his gates until the Egyptian army arrived.
An attempt by the crusaders to take the city by storm on 13 June failed miserably due to insufficient scaling ladders and the lack of siege engines. Fortunately, six Genoese and English vessels arrived in Jaffa harbour shortly afterwards. These ships were deconstructed to obtain timber to build siege towers. After fasting and walking barefoot around Jerusalem in procession in penance, the army brought their new siege engines against the city’s walls on the night of 13–14 July. After fierce fighting throughout 14 July, the knights of Godfrey de Bouillon gained a foothold on the city walls early the next day. They fought their way to the nearest gate and admitted the remaining crusaders.
An estimated 3,000 to 5,000 Muslim and Jewish residents of the city were slaughtered in the fighting that followed. This is hardly comparable to the 26,500 killed when the Persians took the city or the casualties incurred by the suppression of the rebellion in 1077, nor was it the entire population. However, Christian chroniclers glorified and eulogised the victory in apocalyptical terms to stress its significance. Their hyperbolic language has deceived readers ever since, although, ironically, Muslim and Jewish sources make no reference to an excessive or exceptional bloodbath.
In any case, the crusaders soon came to their senses. They stopped the killing and instead indulged briefly in rapturous thanksgiving, walking the streets Christ had walked and praying in the ruins of the remaining churches. Then reality set in. As in Antioch, they possessed a city they had besieged, but a huge relief army was already on its way. The crusading host, meanwhile, had been devastated by the loss of roughly four out of every five men to one-fifth its original size. In short, it was approximately 10,000 strong, of which an estimated 1,200 were knights. If any women had managed to make it this far, it would only have been a handful.
Believing themselves too few to defend the walls of Jerusalem against an assault, the remaining leaders decided to take the offensive. They led their forces out of Jerusalem and, at dawn on 12 August 1099, surprised a still-sleeping Fatimid army at Ascalon and put it to flight.
Rarely has an army fought so long and hard to obtain a goal without any thought to the post-conflict situation. Now that they held Jerusalem and had fulfilled their vows to pray in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the majority of the crusaders wanted to go home again. Yet abandoning the Holy City would result in it falling once more into Muslim hands. In short, a means of defending their hard-won prize had to be found. The Byzantine Emperor’s conspicuous failure to assist the endeavour, however, made the surviving crusaders reluctant to turn the city over to him. More by default than intent, it was decided that a handful of men – and far fewer, if any, women – would remain behind and retain control of Jerusalem for Christianity. Their position was amorphous, and their future precarious. No one yet dreamed of Christian kingdoms in the Holy Land.