Siege of Jerusalem (1099): The Crusaders Take the Holy City

The siege of Jerusalem, from 7 June to 15 July 1099, was the climax of the First Crusade. A much-reduced crusader army besieged the city, held by the Fatimid caliphate of Egypt, built siege towers with timber brought from the coast and stormed the walls on 15 July. The capture was followed by a massacre of many of the inhabitants and the founding of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem.

Background

Jerusalem was sacred to Jews, Christians and Muslims. Its Christian holy places, above all the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, were the goal of the armed pilgrimage proclaimed by Pope Urban II in 1095. For Muslims, the Haram al-Sharif with the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque was the third holiest site in Islam.

Turkish rulers had controlled the city since the 1070s, but in August 1098, while the crusaders were recovering at Antioch, the Fatimid vizier al-Afdal recaptured it. The Fatimids had even sent envoys to the crusaders proposing a division of Syria, but no agreement was reached.

After the hard-won victory at Antioch and months of quarrels, the army marched south along the coast in spring 1099, avoiding battle with local emirs who supplied them in exchange for safe passage.

The armies

The crusaders arrived before Jerusalem on 7 June 1099. Raymond of Aguilers, an eyewitness, put their strength at about 12,000 foot soldiers and between 1,200 and 1,300 knights, plus many non-combatants. Modern historians accept figures of this order, a fraction of the host that had set out in 1096.

The Fatimid governor, Iftikhar al-Dawla, commanded a garrison of Arab and Sudanese troops and had prepared well. He expelled many of the city’s Eastern Christians, gathered supplies and blocked or poisoned the wells and cisterns outside the walls, leaving the besiegers desperately short of water in the summer heat.

The siege

The crusaders were too few to surround the city. Godfrey of Bouillon, Robert of Normandy, Robert of Flanders and Tancred camped on the north and north-west, while Raymond of Toulouse took up position on Mount Zion to the south.

On 13 June, encouraged by a hermit on the Mount of Olives, they launched an assault with only a single scaling ladder; it failed. News then arrived that Genoese ships had reached Jaffa. Their crews brought ropes, nails and tools, and the ships themselves were dismantled for timber. More wood was hauled from forests in Samaria, many kilometres away.

With word that a Fatimid relief army was preparing in Egypt, time was short. On 8 July the crusaders fasted and walked barefoot in procession around the walls, singing hymns as defenders jeered from the ramparts. They then built two large wooden siege towers and other siege engines.

The assault of 13–15 July 1099

The attack began on the night of 13–14 July. Godfrey’s men dismantled his tower and reassembled it overnight at a weaker point of the northern wall, taking the defenders by surprise. On 15 July they filled the ditch, pushed the tower against the wall and, around midday, crossed by a bridge onto the ramparts. Chroniclers name two Flemish brothers, Lethold and Engelbert of Tournai, as the first to cross, followed by Godfrey.

Once the northern wall was breached, resistance collapsed. On the south side Raymond’s men had made little progress, but Iftikhar al-Dawla withdrew into the Tower of David and surrendered it to Raymond in exchange for safe conduct. He and his bodyguard were escorted out of the city and reached Ascalon.

The massacre

What followed shocked even some contemporaries. The crusaders killed large numbers of the Muslim inhabitants, many of whom had taken refuge on the Haram al-Sharif, which the Franks called the Temple of Solomon. Tancred had promised protection to some of them, but they were killed the next morning. Latin chroniclers describe the slaughter in triumphant and graphic terms.

The city’s Jewish community also suffered; the Damascus chronicler Ibn al-Qalanisi wrote that Jews were burned in their synagogue, though the details are debated. Letters preserved in the Cairo Geniza show that some Jews were taken captive and later ransomed by communities in Egypt.

The death toll is uncertain. Ibn al-Athir, writing over a century later, gave 70,000, a figure historians reject as inflated. Benjamin Kedar and others, using earlier Muslim and Jewish evidence, suggest the dead numbered in the low thousands, perhaps around 3,000, while some estimates are higher.

Aftermath: the Kingdom of Jerusalem

On 22 July 1099 the leaders chose Godfrey of Bouillon as ruler. He reportedly refused to wear a crown where Christ had worn a crown of thorns, and took the title Defender of the Holy Sepulchre. Arnulf of Chocques was made patriarch on 1 August, and a relic of the True Cross was produced and venerated.

On 12 August 1099 the crusaders surprised and defeated the Fatimid army under al-Afdal near Ascalon, securing their prize. Most crusaders then went home. Godfrey died in July 1100, and his brother Baldwin of Edessa was crowned the first king of Jerusalem at Bethlehem on Christmas Day 1100.

The kingdom lasted in Jerusalem until Saladin captured the city on 2 October 1187, after which its capital moved to Acre. The 1099 massacre became a lasting reference point in Muslim memory of the crusades.

Key people

• Godfrey of Bouillon (c. 1060–1100): duke of Lower Lorraine, whose siege tower made the decisive breach; first Latin ruler of Jerusalem.
• Raymond IV of Toulouse (c. 1041–1105): led the attack from Mount Zion and received the surrender of the Tower of David; he declined to rule the city himself and later campaigned around Tripoli.
• Tancred (c. 1075–1112): Bohemond’s nephew, among the first into the Haram al-Sharif; he later ruled Galilee and Antioch.
• Iftikhar al-Dawla: Fatimid governor who organised the defence and negotiated his own escape with his garrison.
• Al-Afdal Shahanshah (vizier 1094–1121): ruler of Fatimid Egypt in all but name, who retook Jerusalem in 1098 but arrived too late to save it and was defeated at Ascalon.
• Peter the Hermit: the popular preacher, who addressed the army on the Mount of Olives during the procession of 8 July.

Sources and memory

The siege is described by eyewitnesses, notably Raymond of Aguilers and the anonymous author of the Gesta Francorum, and by the chronicler Fulcher of Chartres, who was not present but reached Jerusalem later in 1099. Their accounts present the capture as a sign of divine favour and dwell on the bloodshed as fitting punishment, a view modern readers find disturbing.

Muslim writers such as Ibn al-Qalanisi and, much later, Ibn al-Athir recorded the fall of the city as a disaster, and the memory of 1099 shaped the later preaching of jihad against the Franks. In nineteenth-century Europe, by contrast, the conquest was celebrated in paintings such as those commissioned for the Salles des Croisades at Versailles.

Timeline

• 1098, August: The Fatimids take Jerusalem from Turkish rulers.
• 1099, 7 June: The crusader army arrives before Jerusalem.
• 1099, 13 June: First assault fails.
• 1099, 17 June: Genoese ships reach Jaffa, bringing materials.
• 1099, 8 July: Barefoot procession around the walls.
• 1099, 13–14 July: The final assault begins.
• 1099, 15 July: The crusaders break in; massacre follows.
• 1099, 22 July: Godfrey of Bouillon chosen as ruler.
• 1099, 12 August: Fatimid army defeated at Ascalon.
• 1100, 25 December: Baldwin I crowned king of Jerusalem.

Why it matters

The fall of Jerusalem in 1099 was the defining success of the First Crusade and the founding moment of the crusader states. Celebrated in Europe as a miracle, it was remembered in the Islamic world as a catastrophe, and the massacre that accompanied it still shapes how the crusades are viewed today.