By William Napier for MailOnline
Updated:
Jerusalum is lost! Fly, fly for your lives! July 15, 1099, and the Holiest City is at last in the hands of the Crusaders.
The Muslim defenders fall back from the battered, blood-splashed walls; the innocents in the streets cower and whimper in fear, searching for places to hide their families.
Others flee to the Temple Mount and the refuge of Al Aqsa Mosque.
Arduous: Some Crusaders perished in the searing heat
For they have heard about the Crusaders from the West, and how they bring terror and atrocity to every city they capture.
The ferocious warriors of Christ have sailed and marched for more than a thousand miles.
They have fought their way across burning deserts, forded rivers in full spate, suffered dysentery and sunstroke and the perpetual attacks of the Saracens.
And they are in no mood for mercy.
The Army of Christ had finally come within sight of the Holy City itself, the city they had dreamed of for three long years, on June 7.
In the wastes of the Syrian desert, some of them had resorted to cannibalism, slicing flesh from their fallen comrades, or from the bodies of the Saracens, to roast over brushwood fires
And a week later, they had launched their furious blitzkrieg upon its ancient golden walls. The civilians inside were terrified, but the attackers' situation was desperate, too.
There was little wood to build the vast siege towers, ladders and catapults they needed to breach the city's defences, and the wells and springs for miles about had been poisoned by the enemy.
Tormented by cruel thirst and under the parching heat of the Palestinian summer sun, some turned to drinking the blood of their horses or mules. Others simply went mad.
Yet they had already seen worse.
The crusade had begun to assemble in a rain-streaked Europe three years earlier, in 1096.
And their long journey had been a catalogue of horrors.
En route through Europe, many of the Christian soldiers had been involved in bloody massacres of the Rhineland's Jewish population.
And later, in the wastes of the Syrian desert, some of them had resorted to cannibalism, slicing flesh from their fallen comrades, or from the bodies of the Saracens, to roast over brushwood fires.
They had also died in their hundreds from dysentery and scurvy, losing their hair and bleeding from their eyeballs.
'People had so much dead flesh on their gums that the surgeons had to remove it before they could chew their food and swallow it down,' a contemporary source wrote.
Unbelievable horrors: The Crusaders fought for weeks on end
'It was most pitiful to hear people throughout the camp howling as their dead flesh was cut away.
‘They screamed like women in labour.'
Yet whatever unbelievable horrors and hardships they had encountered, these Christian knights had endured them in the name of their religion - and their hunger for loot.
Their toughness was legendary - and now they contrived to build two great siege towers with what little wood they had to begin their final assault.
This was a guerre a l'outrance, war with no quarter given - or expected.
The Crusaders captured one Muslim, and after interrogation under torture, loaded him into a catapult and fired him back into the city.
But 'it did not throw the wretch far', records a chronicler of the time, without pity.
'He fell on to sharp stones below the walls and broke his neck, his nerves and his bones.'
For days and weeks there was desperate fighting.
Huge catapults - built from wood the Crusaders did manage to scavenge - pummelled the ancient walls, and the siege towers rolled ever closer to the battlements.
In reply, the Muslims unleashed blazing pots filled with 'Greek fire', a kind of medieval napalm made of a co*cktail of sulphur, wax and tar.
It cannot be extinguished, and inflicts horrendous burns.
As this terrible barrage ripped into the Crusader army, hundreds were left screaming in balls of flame.
But the Crusaders' ferocity and fanaticism triumphed.
Two brothers, Ludolf and Engelbert, from the city of Tournai in Flanders, were the first to stand on the walls and form a vital bridgehead.
Immediately, scaling ladders were slammed into place and dozens more attackers swarmed up to join them.
The defenders dropped back, aghast, terrified at these Crusaders' devilish reputation.
Now, the vengeance and slaughter could really begin.
The Crusaders themselves proudly recorded what happened next.
'Some of the pagans were beheaded, others pierced by arrows, others tortured for a long time and then burned to death in searing flames.
‘Piles of heads, hands and feet lay in the streets.'
The City of Jerusalem, holy to Jews, Christians and Muslims alike, was turned into a slaughterhouse.
'There was so much killing that our men waded up to their ankles in enemy blood,' boasted one warrior for Christ.
Another observer, less impressed, wrote of 'the very great and cruel slaughter of Saracens.
‘They were stabbing - even raping - women, seizing infants by their feet from their mothers' laps or their cradles and dashing them against the walls.
‘They spared absolutely no one'.
The massacre was accompanied by voracious looting. Bloodshed, greed, gold and the Christian faith weren't mutually contradictory to the medieval mind.
For many, it was a religion of unfathomable violence and mysticism.
According to one contemporary eyewitness, the Turks killed them all, 'the feeble and crippled, monks and aged women, infants at the breast, all were put to the sword'
Some sacked the Temple of Solomon for precious stones. Others, hearing rumours that the enemy had swallowed their gold coins, wasted no time in slitting open the bellies of the dead and the living, said medieval chronicler Fulcher of Chartres, 'in order to extract from their intestines the bezants [gold coins] which the Saracens had gulped down their loathsome throats while alive'.
Then, according to a description which still astounds, drenched with the blood of their enemies and weighed down with looted treasures, they marched 'rejoicing and weeping from excessive gladness to worship at the Sepulchre of our Saviour Jesus'.
There, they sang hymns and psalms of thanksgiving for the great victory.
The Fall Of Jerusalem in 1099 is just one of the many terrible yet unforgettable scenes from the Crusades - which lasted centuries - explaining why they still exert such a dark fascination nearly a thousand years on.
Two new books on the subject, Holy Warriors by Jonathan Phillips, and The Crusades by Thomas Asbridge, have just appeared in as many months, and the spell exerted by these extraordinary clashes between Cross and Crescent shows no sign of waning.
There are place names with the ring of legend: the Cilician Gates, the Horns of Hattin, or the mighty castle of Krak des Chevaliers in Syria, without question the greatest fortress ever built.
Orlando Bloom in Kingdom Of Heaven which portrayed the standard Islamic view of the Crusades as episodes of unprovoked Western aggression
There are unforgettable characters, such as Saladin, Richard the Lionheart and the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, who was sucked into the Saleph river in modern-day Turkey on the Third Crusade and left his army in chaos.
And then there were those quintessentially medieval pilgrimages such as the Children's Crusade and the People's Crusade, so full of blind faith, suffering and sorrow.
The People's Crusade was inspired by a gaunt, unwashed demagogue called Peter the Hermit. His huge, fanatical and entirely unprepared peasant mob set off before the main body of the First Crusade to liberate the Holy Land, as if by force of will alone: 15,000 men, women and children.
Unable to afford even a place on a boat, they walked from Cologne.
And wherever they walked, these peasant pilgrims unleashed pogroms against the Jews. The crusading ideal had stirred up deep-seated racial and religious hatred.
Astonishingly, many made it as far as Turkey, looting and ravaging the countryside as they went.
Finally, brutality was met with brutality, as a Turkish army fell on their camp, slaughtering all they found.
According to one contemporary eyewitness, the Turks killed them all, 'the feeble and crippled, monks and aged women, infants at the breast, all were put to the sword.
'They took away only the young girls and nuns, whose faces and figures they found pleasing, and beautiful young men'.
The Children's Crusade took place in 1212.
By then, the victories of the First Crusade had been undone and Jerusalem had again fallen to Islam.
And so, fired with religious zeal and led by a visionary shepherd called Stephen, thousands of boys and girls aged from seven to 14, 'carrying banners, wax candles, crosses and censers, made procession through the cities and villages, singing aloud, Lord God, raise up Christendom! Return to us the True Cross'.
Such hopeless naivety could only end badly.
They set off east through Germany, and then south over the alpine passes in high summer.
Ill-equipped and clad in rags, vast numbers perished.
A few reached the port of Genoa on the Italian coast, only to be turned away by hard-headed ships' captains - and the most pathetic crusade of all fizzled out.
Unsuccessful: Despite centuries of conflict and countless Crusades, the Christian armies ultimately failed in their bid to reconquer the Holy Land
Despite centuries of conflict and countless Crusades, the Christian armies ultimately failed in their bid to reconquer the Holy Land and that ideal - in practice, so far from ideal - finally died. But it continues to haunt us, and the Islamic world.
Yet as historians point out, the Crusades are often subject to serious misrepresentation.
Left-liberals have shown themselves peculiarly eager to accept a standard Islamic view of the Crusades as episodes of unprovoked Western aggression against peaceful, tolerant and vastly more civilised Muslim lands.
Ex-Python Terry Jones's television history of The Crusades was an outstanding example of this, as was Ridley Scott's movie Kingdom Of Heaven. Bill Clinton even apologised for them. But does this make any sense?
It is vital to understand that, before the Crusades were ever dreamed of, Islamic armies had struck many times at the heart of Europe.
Jerusalem itself was never 'conquered' initially by Christianity or the West, of course: Christianity simply grew there, spread by preaching.
But it was conquered by the armies of Islam in 638, erupting out of the Arabian peninsula armed with scimitar, shield and, above all, a fanatical new faith that urged them to perpetual jihad with all unbelievers.
By 715 they had conquered most of Spain, and soon they had got as far as Northern France, only stopping with their defeat at Tours by Charles Martel.
Shortly afterwards, the Caliphate of Jerusalem ordered all Jews and Christians to bear a special symbol on their hands - the first instance in history of such a measure.
Another Muslim army ravaged France in 848 two years after they had attacked Rome, sacked St Peter's itself and extorted promises of tribute from the Pope.
In 850, Caliph al-Mutwakkil forced all Christians and Jews in his territory to affix wooden images of devils to their houses, and to wear only yellow garments to mark them out.
And a century later, Muslims went on a rampage through Jerusalem, plundering and destroying both the Church of Calvary and the Church of the Resurrection.
Some scholars even argue the very idea of 'holy war' was learned from the example of Islam on the march
In this same century before the Crusades, Muslim armies captured Crete, Cyprus and Sicily.
Under Caliph al-Hakim in the early 11th century, thousands of churches were destroyed throughout the ancient Christian heartland of the Middle East, and when the Seljuk Turks captured Jerusalem in 1077, just 22 years before it fell to the Crusaders, they too massacred some three thousand inhabitants.
All these Islamic attacks on the West occurred before the First Crusade. Some scholars even argue that the very idea of 'holy war' was learned from the example of Islam on the march.
Of course, nothing justifies the hellish atrocities of 1099.
And once the Crusades were raging, atrocities were common to both sides without distinction.
Indeed, the great Muslim leader Saladin still enjoys a reputation for chivalry, in contrast to the brutish Europeans - yet this wasn't always the case.
After his great victory at Hattin in 1187, he followed to the letter the instructions of the Koran.
'When you meet the unbelievers on the battlefield, strike off their heads.'
Saladin himself beheaded Reynald de Chatillon, kneeling unarmed before him. He went further with some other knights, handing them over not to professional executioners but to some attendant scholars and Sufi ascetics.
They were extremely grisly and drawn-out executions indeed.
As one Arab source records, 'each of these begged to be allowed to kill one of the unbelievers, and drew his sword and rolled back his sleeve.
Saladin sat upon his dais watching, his face joyful'.
As for the carnage that accompanied the fall of Jerusalem in 1099, it was, in fact, a good deal smaller in scale than others of the period.
Crusaders showed no mercy
The fall of the Crusader kingdom of Antioch to Sultan Baibars in 1268, for instance, was followed by the slaughter of some 17,000 civilians, and the enslavement of perhaps 100,000 more.
Baibars subsequently boasted in letters to the remaining Crusader princes of the massacre and of how 'the pulpits and crosses were overturned, the leaves of the Gospel torn and cast to the wind, the dead devoured by the fire of this world'.
Even greater slaughter of innocent civilians followed the Islamic capture of Christian Constantinople in 1453, a date which arguably brought the Middle Ages to an end.
And good riddance, some might say.
Yet, for better or worse, the Crusades are still topical.
'The past is never dead. It's not even past,' as William Faulkner said.
George W. Bush, with spectacularly bad judgment, spoke of the need for a 'crusade' after the September 11 bombings.
Osama bin Laden has referred to the Crusades repeatedly as an excuse for himself and his murderous cohorts.
And only last month, there was a new rumpus over army rifle sights for our soldiers in Afghanistan being inscribed with verses from the Bible.
Some have professed bafflement at this. Why on earth should it matter, as long as the sights work? But this is to forget our history.
Whether we like it or not, the Crusades and their legacy remain with us, in all their heroism and cruelty, grandeur and lunacy, and their terrible, profitless bloodshed.
Given the 15 centuries of bloody clashes between Islam and Christendom, it is hardly surprising that tensions should exist today between these two great civilisations, and tragically, that these tensions should still erupt in spasmodic, fanatical violence.
But there is surely some hope in the fact that, in Western Europe at least, the great majority of Muslims and Christians do live side by side with one another, without feeling the need to be forever at each other's throats, or wading ankle deep in each other's newly-spilled blood.
• William Napier's bestselling Attila trilogy is published by Orion.
