Religious Warfare and the Sack of Jerusalem 

Article by Thom Absalom. Edited by Sarah Purssell. Additional Research by Kathy Stein.

During the summer of 1099, the army of the First Crusade reached their ultimate goal. Having travelled hundreds of miles and endured untold hardships, the crusaders had to surmount one last obstacle: the walls of Jerusalem. In mid-July, the crusaders finally breached the walls of the Holy City and the subsequent events are infamous. 

‘What happened there? If I tell the truth, it will exceed your powers of belief. So let it suffice to say this much, at least, that in the Temple and porch of Solomon, men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins. Indeed, it was a just and splendid judgement of God that this place should be filled with the blood of the unbelievers’ recorded Raymond d’Aguiliers, chaplain to Count Raymond IV of Toulouse (1041-1105). Having finally overcome this last obstacle, the crusaders engaged in what appears to have been an orgy of violence. D’Aguiliers seems unconcerned by the scale of the massacre, judging it to be God’s will. We must, however, ask the question: why were the crusaders enjoined in what sounds like a frenzied massacre? What motivated the crusaders to such extremes of violence? 

Massacres and wholesale destruction were not unknown in warfare. In 1069, William the Conqueror of England (r.1066 – 1087) brutally crushed a rebellion in Northumbria. Contemporary chroniclers record how the whole of the north from York to Durham was laid to waste, with fields salted and entire villages burnt to the ground. In 1144, a Turkish army led by Zengi of Mosul (1085-1146) massacred the population of Edessa. ‘They murder the widow and the stranger, they slay the orphan, the youth, and the virgin, together with the old Man’, lamented William of Tyre after the massacre. Extreme levels of violence and destruction were obviously not unknown in medieval warfare, but d’Aguiliers was worried that his readers would not believe him. The rarity of massacres and complete destruction during warfare makes it unlikely that the events at Jerusalem were a natural culmination of the war; more immediate reasons should be sought for the slaughter of Jerusalem’s inhabitants. 

D’Aguiliers considers the massacre was an expression of the crusaders’ religious conviction. He records the crusaders singing and praising God while still surrounded by the corpses of city’s inhabitants. He explicitly states that the bloodshed was a ‘splendid judgment of God’. As a priest it is only natural that he should consider the massacre to be God’s reckoning. However, the efforts of the clergymen accompanying the army could have motivated the crusaders to extreme violence. Sermons and a procession around the city walls could have prompted the crusaders to vindicate their faith; by sacking the city they proved that God was with them.On the other hand the accounts of the various crusade writers reveal the true state of the crusading army when it finally entered the city. Having travelled hundreds of miles over the previous three years, the army numbered around fourteen thousand infantry and 1,400 knights – less than half the force that left Western Europe in 1096. The army that arrived at Jerusalem was a long way from home, exhausted, weakened from constant marching and fighting, and the situation would only get worse. D’Aguiliers’ own account reveals the plight of the crusaders as they besieged the Holy City. He described the situation at a spring that rose at the foot of Mount Zion: ‘it was consumed with such great crowding and haste that the men pushed one another into it, and many baggage animals and cattle perished in it.’ He also described how many crusaders died from disease, and how the “Saracens” ambushed the crusaders and stole their cattle as they took them to drink at the springs. From the walls of Jerusalem, Muslim soldiers taunted and ridiculed the desperate crusaders, probably increasing their anger and desperation. Their desperation was heightened further by news of a relief army from Egypt coming to rescue the besieged city. The records of d’Aguiliers, Fulcher of Chartres and others paint a picture of desperation and urgency within the crusader camp. Perhaps the desperation of the crusaders pushed them to such extreme lengths once they entered Jerusalem. Their plight and the anger that they must have felt towards their tormenters could have caused the massacre because the crusaders had little choice: it was victory or death. 

The sack of Jerusalem was a result of the desperation of the Europeans camped outside the city. The extreme circumstances that the army was in caused an extreme reaction when the city was finally breached. The work of the clergymen combined with the crusaders’ plight to rouse them to a state in which wholesale slaughter was acceptable. Desperate and clinging to a hope that God was with them, the crusaders then sacked Jerusalem.

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