WAR CRIMES AND ATROCITIES (True Crime) Read Online Free PDF Page B

their first battle of the First Crusade. They were attacked by the same Seljuk Turks who had had such an easy victory over the People’s Crusade – and who were expecting another one now. However, the Battle of Dorylaeum was a complete victory for the crusaders.
    Considerably heartened by this success against a foe whose style of warfare was so different from their own, the crusaders moved on towards the distant Holy Land. Had they known that, in all, they were to endure three years of battles, sieges (including a year-long siege of Antioch, about 640 km [400 miles] from Jerusalem), disease and near-starvation before they reached their goal, Jerusalem, they would almost certainly still have continued, so strong was their fervent belief in the cause.
    They were also strengthened by signs that God was on their side. The crusaders had won at Antioch, for instance, because of the miraculous discovery in the city of the Holy Lance, which was said to have pierced Christ’s side when he was on the Cross. The final march on Jerusalem, from January to June 1099, was also marked by a series of visions and miracles that indicated the rightness of their cause.
    The crusaders sighted the wall of Jerusalem on
    7 June, 1099. Many of them stood with tears running down their faces, others fell to their knees and kissed the dusty ground. So uplifted were they by the sight that many among them wanted to attack the city at once. An assault was launched on the walls a few days later, but it failed through a lack of scaling ladders. It was not until 15 July, when two enormous siege engines had been completed, that the crusaders’ assault on Jerusalem began.
    Duke Godfrey began the attack, riding on one of the siege engines to the weakest point in the city wall. Beams were run out from it at rampart height to make a bridge, and the first crusader knights charged across it into Jerusalem. What followed was the sacking of Jerusalem and a bloody massacre of its citizens. The Jewish population of the city – men, women and children – were cut down in the chief synagogue, where they had taken sanctuary. A group of Muslim defenders made a formal capitulation to a leading crusader, having agreed to pay a large ransom. The agreement was honoured and they were escorted out of the city. Few, if any, other Muslims survived.
    The blood-crazed crusader soldiers, oblivious to the orders of their knight commanders, went on the rampage. For two days, they slaughtered the citizens of Jerusalem, ‘wading in blood up their ankles,’ according to a medieval account of the sack of Jerusalem. ‘Almost the whole city was full of their dead bodies,’ recalled one knight, noting that the temple where the Muslims made their last stand was ‘streaming with their blood’.
    The slaughter ended at last, and the crusade leaders processed solemnly to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where they gave thanks to God for their great victory. The next day, they chose Duke Godfrey as the first leader of the new crusader kingdom of Jerusalem. Godfrey, who died in Jerusalem, never took the title of king. His brother, Baldwin, who had accompanied him on the crusade, did, ruling as Baldwin I.
    The scale of the slaughter, huge even in an age when massacres were a regular part of warfare, while it caused great rejoicing in the West. However, many Church leaders were horrified, and it deeply shocked the Muslim and Jewish worlds and undoubtedly helped fuel the warlike response of Islam to the Christian presence in the East in the next century.

The Battle Of Hattin 
    July 1187

     
    During the half century between the first two crusades mounted by Catholic Christianity to wrest the Holy Land back from the Infidel, from about 1096 to 1149, the crusaders established a hold over a sizeable part of Syria and Palestine, with its frontiers the mountains of Lebanon and the river Jordan. There were four main Christian-ruled areas: the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the principality of Antioch,