Siege of Jerusalem

Overview

The siege of Jerusalem marked the successful end of the First Crusade, whose objective was the recovery of the city of Jerusalem and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre from Islamic control. The five-week siege began on 7 June 1099 and was carried out by the Christian forces of Western Europe mobilized by Pope Urban II after the Council of Clermont in 1095. The city had been out of Christian control since the Muslim conquest of the Levant in 637 and had been held for a century first by the Seljuk Turks and later by the Egyptian Fatimids. One of the chief motivations for the Crusades had been the recent hindering of Christian pilgrimages to the Holy Land, impeding a tradition which had taken place since the fourth century. A number of eyewitness accounts of the battle are recorded, including the anonymous chronicle Gesta Francorum.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Significance

The Siege of Jerusalem was the culminating military objective of the First Crusade, which had begun in 1096. The city was held by a Fatimid Caliphate garrison under Iftikhar ad-Dawla, numbering approximately 3,000 troops, against a Crusader force estimated at 12,000–15,000 men under a coalition of commanders including Godfrey of Bouillon, Raymond IV of Toulouse, Robert II of Normandy, Robert II of Flanders, Eustace III of Boulogne, Tancred of Galilee, Gaston IV of Béarn, Berenguer Ramon II, and Guglielmo Embriaco. Casualties on both sides were recorded at approximately 3,000 each. As the stated destination of the Crusade and the symbolic center of the conflict between Latin Christian and Islamic power in the Levant, the siege represented the operational endpoint toward which the entire campaign — from the assembly of forces in 1096 through engagements across Anatolia and the Levant — had been directed.

Forces & casualties

Commanders (10)