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Massacre of Jews
In his call for a Crusade at the Council of Clermont, Pope Urban II regularly
referred to “nonbelievers” as the enemy. Yet, this could imply either Muslim or
Jew. Anti-Semitism was already a familiar phenomenon in Europe, where Jews
were routinely considered “Christ-killers.” As a result, before even departing
Europe on their mission, crusader bands scoured many areas of Germany,
particularly the Rhineland, where Jews were given a choice between conversion
to Christianity or death. On this occasion, some twelve thousand Jews were
killed and a number of Jewish communities engaged in mass suicide.
The pope’s call thus ennobled violence for a sacred cause and painted a
picture of rewards in heaven for the killing of all non-Christians. Even more
astonishing, while the pope never included Eastern Orthodox Christians in the
ranks of nonbelievers, at the popular level, many European Christians very much
thought of Greek Christians as nonbelievers as well, particularly after the “Latin
Massacre” in Constantinople in 1182, nearly a century after the First Crusade.
In any event, the wildly popular response to the first papal call brought forth
few knights but hordes of common people who volunteered for the trek,
including large numbers who lacked fighting skills and were ignorant of the
actual military tasks ahead of them. Large numbers of women and some children
set off as well. These bands were often little more than undisciplined rabble
subject to scant control beyond their own apocalyptic visions of salvation and an
urge to escape the miseries of everyday life at home. Their behavior en route
indeed revealed their character. This “People’s Crusade” found itself engaged in
local confrontations with other Christians even as they marched down through
Christian lands in the Balkans. Coming only decades after the Great Schism
between Rome and Byzantium of 1054, Eastern Orthodox Christians were held
in low esteem. The Byzantine Emperor in Constantinople recognized the
potentially dangerous nature of this uncontrolled rabble from afar: as they
approached the city, he was anxious to move them quickly on past the city and
into the Turkish-controlled parts of Anatolia. Most of the people’s armies
actually never even made it to Jerusalem, dying of disease and hardship, or
perishing at the hands of the Turks in Anatolia.
Those who did make it to the Holy Land were largely ignorant, culturally and
geographically lost, sometimes starving, and capable of great violence during the
conquest of Eastern cities, often killing most inhabitants, destroying mosques,
and pillaging the cities. They also engaged in several well-documented cases of
cannibalism, according to Western crusaders themselves:

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Radulph of Caen, an eyewitness to events at Ma’arra in 1098, wrote,
“In Ma’arra our troops boiled pagan adults in cooking-pots; they impaled
children on spits and devoured them grilled.”
The chronicler Albert of Aix seemed to rank Muslims lower than dogs
when he wrote, “Not only did our troops not shrink from eating dead
Turks and Saracens; they also ate dogs!”
The People’s Crusade actually represented the first major military confrontation
of the European West with Middle East, apart from Spain far to the west, which
experienced eight hundred years of often-contested Arab rule. The Crusades also
marked a historic major invasion of the Middle East by the European West—
with lasting impact. Tales of crusader barbarity were seared into Muslim folk
memory thereafter.
In later Crusades, more experienced knights responded to the call to go to
Jerusalem. But these same professional military forces now posed as great a
threat to Byzantium as they did to Muslims: these Western troops were operating
on Byzantine soil but outside Byzantine control. Byzantine fears were soon to be
richly realized in the Fourth Crusade.
When the troops of the First Crusade finally reached Jerusalem in 1099,
reconquest was a brutal affair, in extraordinary contrast to the manner in which
Jerusalem fell to disciplined Arab forces some five hundred years earlier. In 637
CE, we recall the second Caliph ‘Umar had personally entered the city after a
siege of many months; Arab troop discipline was maintained and the city was
not pillaged, in accordance with a treaty ‘Umar had signed with the patriarch of
Jerusalem at the time of surrender. In reference to the Christians, that treaty had
stated that
their churches are not to be taken, nor are they to be destroyed, nor are
they to be degraded or belittled, neither are their crosses or their money,
and they are not to be forced to change their religion, nor is any one of
them to be harmed.
Jewish sources furthermore report that ‘Umar was shocked at the condition of
the ruins of the Jewish temple, which had been turned into a garbage heap under
the Romans; since the site was sacred for Muslims as well, ‘Umar personally
helped clean the site by hand along with his men. Jews were allowed to practice
Judaism in the city for the first time since their expulsion by the Romans some

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five hundred years earlier.
But the capture of Jerusalem by the first crusader forces in 1099 was quite a
different story. Jews, who feared the arrival of Christian rule, fought on the
Muslim side in defense of the city, but to no avail. After a long and costly siege,
the crusaders broke into the city on 15 July and in a twenty-four-hour period
murdered virtually every single inhabitant—men, women, and children, Muslim,
Jew, and most Eastern Orthodox Christians—probably around sixty thousand
people. This included thousands of Jews taking refuge in their synagogue, and
many thousands more Muslims in the al-Aqsa mosque. The Catholic
Encyclopedia reports tersely: “the Christians entered Jerusalem from all sides
and slew its inhabitants regardless of age or sex.”
Fulcher of Chartres, a crusader who participated in the conquest, wrote:
“Indeed, if you had been there you would have seen our feet coloured to our
ankles with the blood of the slain. But what more shall I relate? None of them
were left alive; neither women nor children were spared.”
There are numerous other accounts of immense cruelties inflicted by the
crusaders on Muslim towns and populations on the way to Jerusalem. It would,
of course, be foolish to suggest that cruelty and killing were all one-sided.
Warfare in all ages is brutal. The point of reporting a few of these selected
accounts here is not to suggest that the crusaders were evil and Muslims mere
innocent victims. But European forces were in fact invading the heartland of the
Middle East. This was the first of what was going to be a long history of Western
armed intervention into the Middle East over many centuries to come. The
bloody-mindedness of the crusaders themselves is scarcely known in any
Western popular tales of crusader chivalry. Furthermore, there is a striking
contrast of religious and legal aspects between the Muslim conquest of
Jerusalem in 637 and the Christian conquest of Jerusalem in 1099. Muslims were
required by the tenets of Islam to respect the place of Christians and Jews in
Muslim society and largely did so (although there were, of course, other cases
where they did not observe Islamic strictures); yet Christians were in no way
required by Christian doctrine to protect the place of Jews and Muslims in
Christian society and largely did not. And finally, the West needs to be aware of
the Muslim mirror-vision of the crusader tales; their own alternative narratives of
these events still influence Muslim culture today.

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