The First Crusade: Antioch and Jerusalem
The Crusade Army Assembles
The army that left for the Holy Land in the summer and autumn of 1096 was not a single unified force under one commander. It was a coalition of separate contingents, each under its own noble leader, united by the cross on their tunics and the goal of Jerusalem. The leaders included Godfrey de Bouillon, Duke of Lower Lorraine, his brother Baldwin; Bohemond of Taranto and his nephew Tancred from southern Italy; Raymond of Toulouse from France; and Robert of Normandy, son of William the Conqueror.
The crusade army arrived in Constantinople in stages between November 1096 and May 1097. Emperor Alexios Komnenos received each leader in turn, extracting from them an oath to return any former Byzantine territory they recovered. This promise would create serious tensions later in the campaign. In June 1097, the combined army besieged and captured Nicaea, returning it to Byzantine control. Then the great march south through Anatolia began.
The First Crusade had no single commander. Leadership was shared (and frequently disputed) among major nobles from France, Flanders, Lorraine and southern Italy. This lack of unified command both weakened the crusade’s coordination and preserved it from collapsing when any individual leader failed.
The Siege of Antioch, 1097–1098
Antioch was one of the great cities of the ancient world and a natural stronghold. Its walls ran for miles along steep hillsides, and it was garrisoned by a Turkish force under Yaghi-Siyan. The crusade army arrived in October 1097 and began a siege that would last eight months — one of the most gruelling episodes of the entire campaign.
The crusaders suffered enormously. They lacked the supplies to besiege a major city through winter. Famine killed thousands; desertion was a constant problem; foraging parties were ambushed by Seljuk relief forces. Yet the army held on. The breakthrough came not from military assault but from treachery. A Muslim garrison commander named Firouz agreed to allow Bohemond’s men to scale the walls on the night of 2–3 June 1098. The crusaders poured into the city and seized it, massacring much of the population.
Within days of seizing the city, the crusaders found themselves trapped inside it. A massive Seljuk relief army under Kerbogha of Mosul arrived and surrounded Antioch. With dwindling food and morale collapsing, a monk named Peter Bartholomew reported a vision: the Holy Lance — the lance that had pierced Christ’s side at the crucifixion — was buried in the Church of St Peter in Antioch. A relic was duly “discovered”.
The effect on morale was dramatic. On 28 June 1098, the crusader army, carrying the Holy Lance, marched out through Antioch’s gates and attacked Kerbogha’s far larger force. Kerbogha’s coalition proved fragile: individual Muslim commanders had their own rivalries and withdrew. The crusaders won a decisive victory. Whether the Holy Lance was genuine was disputed even at the time — a papal legate tested it by ordeal — but its psychological impact was real and measurable.
The March to Jerusalem and the Siege, 1099
After Antioch the crusade army was depleted, fractured by disputes over who would control Antioch (Bohemond seized it for himself, violating his oath to Alexios), and weakened by disease. Yet the goal of Jerusalem sustained the march south. The army arrived before Jerusalem on 7 June 1099. The city was defended by a Fatimid Egyptian garrison that had expelled the Seljuks the previous year.
The crusaders had no siege equipment. A first assault on 13 June failed. A period of desperate hardship followed — the summer heat was intense, and the area around Jerusalem had little water. Morale was at crisis point when a fleet arrived at Jaffa carrying timber and craftsmen. By mid-July the crusaders had built two great siege towers. On the night of 13–14 July 1099, they launched a coordinated assault. On 15 July 1099, Godfrey de Bouillon’s men breached the north wall and the city fell.
Jerusalem fell on 15 July 1099, after a campaign lasting nearly three years. Godfrey de Bouillon entered the city but refused the title of King, accepting instead the title “Advocate of the Holy Sepulchre”. He died the following year, in July 1100, and was succeeded by his brother Baldwin I, who took the title of King.
The capture of Jerusalem was followed by a massacre of its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants. Contemporary sources — both crusader and Muslim — describe widespread killing in the streets and in the mosques and synagogues where people had taken refuge. The scale described in crusader sources may be exaggerated for dramatic and spiritual effect, but that a significant massacre occurred is not in doubt. The Jewish community, which had fled to a synagogue, was killed or sold into slavery.
The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem was now established. The results of the First Crusade were enormous. After years of hardship, starvation, disease and combat, a small army of Western knights had achieved what contemporaries regarded as a miracle — the liberation of the holiest city in Christendom. The Christian West had demonstrated that it could project military power deep into the eastern Mediterranean. But maintaining the new kingdom would prove a constant and draining challenge.