Chronic starvation, hostile landscapes, powerful foes – the First Crusade overcame seemingly insurmountable challenges. Emily Briffett speaks to expert historians to reveal how zeal, strategy and sheer luck secured military success for this ambitious campaign
After three long years, the campaign reached its climax. In June 1099, a crusader army arrived outside Jerusalem and stared up at its towering walls. From late 1095, men, women and children from western Europe had left their homes and set out east on a vast military expedition that would take them to the Holy Land. Now, after enduring lightning ambushes, desperate sieges and periods of near starvation, the jewel in the crown of Christendom was in their sights.
But not yet within their grasp. Between the crusaders and the conquest of Jerusalem stood the city’s determined defenders. These troops of the Fatimid caliphate – a Shia Muslim empire spanning north Africa and parts of the near east, with its capital in Cairo – guarded a population of perhaps 20,000 Muslims, Jews and eastern Orthodox Christians massed within.
At first, the defenders prevailed, resisting everything the increasingly frustrated crusader forces could throw at them. But then, after weeks of skirmishes and as a last resort, the nobleman Godfrey of Bouillon used a siege tower to gain a priceless toehold on the walls to the north of the city, and was able to open the nearest gate.
Hundreds of crusaders poured in. In the searing heat, simmering anger and frustration was unleashed, and a number of the inhabitants were slaughtered. When the dust settled, Godfrey was declared ‘Defender of the Holy Sepulchre’ – ruler in all but name. The holy city was finally in the hands of the crusaders.
- Read more | How the First Crusade captured Jerusalem in 1099
The capture of Jerusalem was a bloody catastrophe for its inhabitants. Indeed, the campaign that preceded it – and others that followed, along with the partisan European views of these events – continue to be problematic in modern eyes.
Yet in purely military terms, the conquest of Jerusalem was an astonishing victory for those Christian attackers – and the culmination of one of the most unlikely, against-the-odds endeavours of the entire Middle Ages: the First Crusade.
The spark that lit the tinder for this campaign was Pope Urban II’s famous rallying cry at the Council of Clermont on 27 November 1095, when he exhorted people across western Europe to take up arms and free the Holy Land from Seljuk Muslim rule. To those listening, the magnitude of the military adventure he was proposing must have been clear.
In the late 11th century, simply embarking on a pilgrimage was considered dangerous enough. The idea of leaving home for several years, trekking thousands of miles across continents to fight an enemy in utterly alien terrain, was nothing short of extraordinary. And the perilous nature of the task ahead clearly weighed heavily on the minds of crusaders and their families.
“Contemporary accounts record that women wept copiously, wondering if they would ever see their husbands again,” says Danielle Park, teaching fellow at the University of Leicester.
They had every reason to worry. Facing perilous mountain passes and vast, arid plains, the crusaders encountered landscapes radically different from western Europe. Without accurate maps, they also had little idea of where they were going or what they would find when they arrived.
By the time they reached Asia Minor and then the Levant – the Muslim lands of the near east, comprising what is today Syria, Lebanon, Israel and the Palestinian territories, and Jordan – they were exhausted, and facing an unfamiliar and hostile population they struggled to understand. Many of their friends had died. They had suffered starvation to the point of cannibalism, and witnessed things that would make anyone recoil in terror.
The First Crusade should not have been successful – yet it was. How were the crusaders able to pull off this medieval feat of arms?
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Rival powers
Urban’s original motivation for issuing his fateful call to arms continues to spark debate. Certainly, that rallying cry was a direct response to a plea for help from the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos (ruled 1081– 1118). Since the 1060s, Christian Byzantine forces had been engaged in a conflict with the Sunni Muslim Seljuk empire – a rival power to the Fatimids that had conquered much of Anatolia and the near east.
The Byzantine empire had long been the dominant force in the eastern Mediterranean, and was now pushing to win back lost territory. Alexios needed western knights to beef up his campaign against the Seljuks and recapture lands to the east.
Alexios’s appeal to Urban seemed to offer a solution to two issues troubling that pope in the 1090s. The first was faltering papal authority; the second was a surfeit of aggressive knights lacking outlets for their martial energies. A hugely ambitious military campaign to the Holy Land promised to tackle both problems in one fell swoop.
So Urban wove his narrative like a medieval spin doctor, claiming back for Christendom the Holy Land – the location of Jesus Christ’s burial, crucifixion, resurrection and ascension – and promising salvation to those who joined the cause.
The result was an explosion of religious fervour that inspired tens of thousands across Europe – mostly from France, but also from Iberia to England, and from the Italian peninsula to the German states – to rally to the crusading cause. (Some, of course, joined for other reasons: a sense of honour, or simply because they had no choice other than to follow their lords.)
That fervour remained largely undimmed when, from late 1096 through to early 1097, the crusader armies gathered at the Byzantine capital, Constantinople, before crossing the Bosphorus and marching through Asia Minor. And it carried those forces all the way to Jerusalem.
Holy War: A timeline of the First Crusade
27 November 1095: Pope Urban II issues a call to arms at the Council of Clermont, setting the idea of crusading ablaze in western Europe’s Christian states.
April 1096: Some 30,000 people set off on the ‘People’s Crusade’. In October, they are crushed by Seljuk Turks at the battle of Civetot, south-east of Constantinople (now Istanbul).
November 1096–April 1097: The main wave of the crusading army gathers outside the walls of Constantinople before crossing the Bosphorus. Many of the leaders swear an oath of fealty to Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos.
14 May–19 June 1097: In the first major clash of the First Crusade, Christian forces besiege Nicaea (near the site of modern-day İznik, north-west Turkey), where the defending Seljuk Turks surrender to the Byzantines.
1 July 1097: A crusader contingent is ambushed at the battle of Dorylaeum (now Eskişehir, south-east of Istanbul). Relieved by the main army, a crusader victory ensues.
20 October 1097–3 June 1098: The crusaders besiege Antioch (now Antakya, south-east Turkey). After striking a deal with a local man, Firouz, they sneak into the city and seize it.
10 March 1098: Baldwin of Boulogne becomes Count of Edessa (in what is now south-east Turkey) after an Armenian uprising overthrows its previous lord, Thoros.
7–28 June 1098: A Seljuk relief force besieges the crusaders inside Antioch. The crusaders break the siege at the battle of Antioch.
7 June–15 July 1099: The crusaders arrive at Jerusalem and besiege it. Once they breach the city walls, they massacre many of its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants before making Godfrey of Bouillon ruler in all but name.
12 August 1099: Crusaders defeat Fatimid forces at the battle of Ascalon (now Ashekelon, north of Gaza), securing their hold on the Levant.
Exploiting a power vacuum
Religious zeal alone can’t explain the success of the First Crusade. Another factor was the state of play in the near east at the time, where their Muslim foes were riven by infighting and destabilised by power vacuums.
One poet described 1094 as the “year of the death of caliphs and commanders”, with chaos roaring across the Muslim near east. The tumult had begun two years earlier, in 1092, when Nizam al-Mulk, vizier of the Seljuk empire, was assassinated.
That same year, the Seljuk sultan Malik-Shah I also died in suspicious circumstances. Then, in 1094, Al-Muqtadi, the Sunni caliph of Baghdad, died, along with al-Mustansir, the Fatimid caliph and his vizier. In short, internal strife was weakening Muslim powers in the region, notably the Seljuk and Fatimid empires.
“In the space of a few years, the leadership across the Muslim near east had been removed,” says Jonathan Phillips, professor of crusading history at Royal Holloway, University of London. “All those decades of experience were wiped out.”
As a result, authority fragmented across the region. Rivalries that had built up over decades spilled over into conflict. So when the crusaders arrived, they were not confronted by a unified opposition. “It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that, had the First Crusade turned up in 1090, it would not have got past its first obstacle,” argues Phillips. “Such was the strength and organisational ability of the Seljuks, the crusaders’ main foe.”
Many Muslim towns and cities were distracted by their internal woes, and were unprepared to deal with the sudden arrival of a huge crusader army on their doorstep. “Every town decided what to do for itself, and this often depended on who was ruling there,” says Suleiman A Mourad, Myra M Sampson professor of religion at Smith College, Massachusetts. “Some fled in fear, while others thought they could make a deal with the crusaders.”
- Read more | Your top questions about the crusades – answered
Friends among foes
Another aspect helping the crusaders’ push east was the fact that much of the population of the near east was Christian. Many of the towns en route to the Holy Land had been ruled by Muslims for just a few years.
For example, Nicaea – an ancient Greek city in north-western Asia Minor, which fell to the crusaders in June 1097 – had been ceded by the Byzantines to the Seljuks as recently as 1081. As a result, locals were often much more supportive of the crusaders than we might initially imagine. For some of them, the First Crusade was not a war of religion but, rather, a means of ejecting a hostile occupying force.
This resentment against Muslim rule had major repercussions during the siege of Antioch (October 1097–June 1098). That Seljuk Turk-held city lay on the crusaders’ route to Jerusalem through Syria. It proved a fiendishly tough nut to crack, and by early 1098 huge numbers of crusaders were dying of starvation outside its walls. Fortunately for them, they had an inside man.
An Armenian guard in Antioch, Firouz, struck a deal with the crusader leader Bohemond of Taranto to allow the latter’s army to pour into the city and capture it. Once Antioch was taken, it was not only the crusaders who massacred the Turkish garrison but also the local Christian population.
Yet to ascribe the First Crusade’s success to Muslim infighting alone – or to the help of sympathetic locals – is to do the crusaders a disservice, argues Steve Tibble, honorary research associate at Royal Holloway, University of London. This was – at times, anyway – an impressively executed military campaign.
“The crusaders were brave and well motivated, and had some very aggressive, entrepreneurial generals,” Tibble explains. These commanders “were more like trade union convenors than dictators”, making strategic decisions based on group discussions. And there was a logic to their choices of targets: they attacked Nicaea to rid the Byzantines of a nearby Seljuk hub, Antioch to establish a defendable base en route to Jerusalem.
Inherent violence
The First Crusade also benefited from the fact that many of those involved were well versed in the ways of war before they’d even contemplated a military campaign in the east. In the 11th century, western Europe was a fragmented, fractious place; elites held sway through what were, in effect, military protection rackets. Violence was already inherent in the system.
And after years of dangerous travel and combat had winnowed out weaker and less-accomplished fighters, those crusaders who eventually reached Jerusalem were the best-equipped and militarily most skilled.
The fact that the enemies were unfamiliar to each other also aided the crusaders. On this campaign they mostly faced Seljuk forces that, even while weakened by infighting, boasted what was probably the best light cavalry in the world. But while the new opponents were still getting the measure of each other, they tended to avoid open combat, which would have left the crusaders’ slower, heavy cavalry and other troops at risk.
Perhaps the European armies’ greatest advantage during the First Crusade, though, was their unity. There were times, of course, when that unity came under enormous pressure. Language differences, bickering commanders with competing agendas, disease and starvation in an alien and often unforgiving landscape – all stretched the bonds linking the crusaders to breaking point. Yet those bonds never quite snapped.
“Whatever it was that drove the crusaders – religious zeal, honour, money, land – all those things coalesced in an ability to stay together,” says Phillips. And they stayed together until the crusaders reached their ultimate goal in the burning heat of the decisive summer of 1099: Jerusalem.
A hollow victory?
The First Crusade was a major military feat, but its legacy over the following two centuries proved problematic.
The capture of Jerusalem in summer 1099 was rapidly feted across western Europe as a major triumph – evidence of Christendom’s apparent superiority over its Muslim foes. Yet the crusaders’ unlikely victory would have dramatic and long-lasting consequences – not all of them benefiting the victors.
Big questions still remain about the original aims of the First Crusade. To what extent was Jerusalem central to Pope Urban II’s thinking when he issued his call to arms, for example?
Was the holy city always his ultimate target – or did the Byzantines or papacy tag it on as an additional incentive to entice western Christendom to action? “Most of the narrative material was composed in the wake of the crusade, so it would have been relatively easy for clerics to project that goal backwards,” says Danielle Park.
Whatever Urban’s original intentions, after the capture of Jerusalem the First Crusade became a blueprint for further military expeditions to the Holy Land.
“It was the crusade’s perceived success that allowed the church to say: ‘God clearly wanted this to happen, therefore crusading is something we should con- tinue to do’,” explains Natasha Hodgson, associate professor of medieval history at Nottingham Trent University.
The success of the First Crusade led western European powers to believe it could be repeated – not recognising that this first triumph was, in some respects, down to chance.
In the event, over the following two centuries, much blood was spilled and vast amounts of money spent both on further campaigns and on attempting to defend the network of crusader states that emerged across the Middle East – ultimately to no avail.
The crusades also, of course, had a grave impact on relations between Christians and Muslims. Religious anger about the presence of Christian states in the near east gradually weaponised Muslim resentment.
By the mid-12th century, this had erupted into a full-blown campaign of retaliation spearheaded by Muslim generals who had learned from their past defeats.
“Maintaining a western presence in the Levant was never sustainable,” reflects Steve Tibble. And less than two centuries later, defeat to Muslim Mamluk forces at the 1291 siege of Acre, now in coastal Israel, heralded the end of the Christian states in the Holy Land.
Emily Briffett is the HistoryExtra podcast editorial assistant and host of our new series exploring the First Crusade
This article was first published in the December 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine