15 July 1099: Jerusalem falls to the crusaders
The holy city runs with blood as tens of thousands are slaughtered
Launched in November 1095, the First Crusade reached its climax at the walls of Jerusalem nearly four years later. It was the height of summer, and outside the walls of the holy city, some 12,000 crusaders were preparing for the final assault. On the night of 14 July, the crusaders attacked from two siege towers. At the city’s north-eastern gate, two knights from Tournai led the charge, soon followed by scores more. And as the resistance crumbled, the blood began to flow.
Even by crusade standards, the sack of Jerusalem was a moment of immense savagery. Many of the city’s Muslim and Jewish citizens fled towards the Al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock, hoping for sanctuary from the crusaders’ bloodlust. But they were to be horribly disappointed. The crusaders, reported one chronicler, “were killing and slaying even to the Temple of Solomon, where the slaughter was so great that our men waded in blood up to their ankles”. The crusader Fulcher of Chartres thought the death toll ran into the tens of thousands.
- Read more | How the First Crusade captured Jerusalem in 1099
“If you had been there,” he wrote, “you would have seen our feet coloured to our ankles with the blood of the slain… None of them were left alive; neither women nor children were spared.”
For days afterwards, Jerusalem reeked of death. Eventually the crusaders’ leaders ordered the survivors to dump the corpses outside the walls. “So the living Saracens dragged the dead before the exits of the gates and arranged them in heaps, as if they were houses,” a chronicle explained. “No one ever saw or heard of such slaughter of pagan people, for funeral pyres were formed from them like pyramids, and no one knows their number except God alone.” | Written by Dominic Sandbrook
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