The Siege of Jerusalem, 1099: How the First Crusade Ended

Written by Simon Williams

The Siege of Jerusalem ended the First Crusade on 15 July 1099, after five weeks of siege warfare, a barefoot penitential march, and a final assault through the northeast wall. The city's capture was followed by a mass killing whose true scale historians still debate.

• Siege began: 7 June 1099
• City captured: 15 July 1099
• Duration: Approximately five weeks
• Crusader leader at the breach: Godfrey of Bouillon
• Fatimid governor: Iftikhar ad-Dawla, negotiated safe passage out of the city
• Outcome: Kingdom of Jerusalem established, first Crusader state centred on the city

By the time the crusading army reached Jerusalem on 7 June 1099, it had already marched and fought its way across Anatolia and northern Syria for three brutal years. What should have been the triumphant final stage of the campaign nearly became its final failure. The crusaders were exhausted, badly outnumbered by the defences facing them, and desperately short of water in the summer heat outside a city with four kilometres of wall standing fifteen metres high.

Five weeks later, on 15 July 1099, that same army broke through the city's defences and took Jerusalem, bringing the First Crusade's stated objective to a violent and controversial conclusion. What happened in the hours and days after the walls fell has shaped how the entire crusading movement is remembered ever since.

This is the story of how a starving, poorly equipped army actually took one of the most heavily fortified cities in the medieval world, and what happened when they did.

Five Weeks Outside the Walls

The crusaders arrived outside Jerusalem on 7 June 1099 to find a city the Fatimid rulers of Egypt had only recently recaptured from the Seljuk Turks the previous year, having held Jerusalem for barely a year before this new threat appeared at its gates. The defences they faced were formidable: a wall roughly four kilometres in circumference, up to three metres thick and fifteen metres high in places, punctuated by five major gates each defended by paired towers.

An early attempt to storm the walls on 13 June, launched with improvised ladders and more enthusiasm than equipment, failed badly. The crusaders lacked the proper siege engines needed to breach defences of this scale, and morale in the camp, already stretched thin after three years of campaigning since leaving Europe, began to falter under the summer heat and a chronic shortage of water around the largely arid approaches to the city, since Iftikhar ad-Dawla had ordered the nearby wells poisoned and the surrounding trees cut down before the crusaders even arrived.

Building the War Machines

The siege's fortunes changed with the arrival of a small fleet of Genoese and English ships at the port of Jaffa, carrying skilled carpenters, rope, nails, and the raw timber needed to build proper siege engines that the crusaders had lacked since arriving. Crusader engineers, working under pressure and reportedly stripping timber from anywhere they could find it, including dismantled ships, began constructing siege towers and catapults capable of finally threatening walls that had turned back every earlier attempt.

Two major siege towers were built, one assigned to Godfrey of Bouillon's forces and another to the contingent led by Raymond of Toulouse, positioned to attack different sections of the wall simultaneously and force the defenders to split their limited manpower across multiple threatened points at once rather than concentrating it in one place. Building both towers within view of the defenders, under intermittent bombardment from the walls, took several more days of hard labour before either was ready to be moved into position for the assault.

The Barefoot Procession

On 8 July 1099, with the siege equipment nearly ready, the crusader leadership organised an act of collective religious penance. Following what was reported as a vision received by a priest named Peter Desiderius, instructing the army to fast for three days and then march barefoot in procession around the city's walls, the entire crusading host walked the full circuit of Jerusalem in bare feet under the summer sun, while clergy carried relics and led prayers, watched the whole way from the walls by the city's defenders.

Whatever its spiritual purpose, the procession also served as a visible demonstration of the crusaders' resolve to the watching Fatimid garrison, just days before the final assault the vision had reportedly promised, and it reinforced discipline within an army that had spent three exhausting years far from home, much of it uncertain whether it would ever reach Jerusalem at all.

The Final Assault

On the night of 14 July, Godfrey's forces quietly relocated their siege tower to a new position opposite the northeast corner of the wall, catching the defenders by surprise when the assault resumed the following morning at a point they had not expected to bear the main weight of the attack. On 15 July, the tower was pushed forward against the wall and a makeshift bridge dropped across the gap, allowing Godfrey's men to cross directly onto the ramparts under heavy fire.

Once crusader troops gained a foothold on the walls, the defence collapsed with startling speed after five weeks of grinding resistance. Gates were forced open from within, and the crusading army poured into the city from multiple directions at once. The Fatimid governor, Iftikhar ad-Dawla, retreated to the Tower of David and negotiated its surrender directly to Raymond of Toulouse in exchange for safe conduct to Ascalon with his bodyguard, becoming one of the very few defenders to leave the city alive. For most of Jerusalem's remaining residents, no such safe passage was offered.

The Massacre and Its Aftermath

What followed the city's fall has become the single most debated episode of the entire First Crusade. Contemporary and near-contemporary chroniclers described extensive killing of Jerusalem's Muslim and Jewish population in the hours and days after the breach, with the Muslim historian Ibn al-Athir later citing a figure of 70,000 dead, a number most modern historians regard as a significant exaggeration even after accounting for refugees who had crowded into the city ahead of the siege.

Modern scholarship generally treats the true death toll as unknowable with precision, while agreeing that the killing was severe and disproportionate even by the standards of medieval siege warfare, where a city that resisted rather than surrendered was traditionally denied the protections a negotiated capitulation would have offered. Notably, near-contemporary accounts such as the Gesta Francorum describe Eastern Christian clergy resuming worship at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre almost immediately afterward, suggesting the violence, however severe, was not applied uniformly to every religious community in the city.

Jerusalem Becomes a Kingdom

In the aftermath of the city's capture, the crusader leadership moved quickly to establish a government, since holding Jerusalem long-term would require more than a victorious army camped outside its walls. Godfrey of Bouillon was offered leadership of the new territory but, in a decision that became central to his own legend, refused the title of king in the city where Christ had worn a crown of thorns, accepting instead the more modest title of Advocate of the Holy Sepulchre, a decision that set the tone for how the new Crusader state would present its own authority in the city.

The Kingdom of Jerusalem that emerged from this decision became the senior and longest-lived of the four Crusader states, surviving in one form or another until the fall of Acre in 1291. Readers curious about the man who accepted this responsibility, and the wider network of castles and territories that followed from it, will find further reading in the Histories and Castles Crusades collection, alongside a free illustrated guide to Richard the Lionheart.

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This article is part of the Crusades series. Read all articles at https://historiesandcastles.com/blogs/the-crusades.

Deepen Your Understanding

→ The History of the Crusades: the full sweep of the crusading era, from Urban II's call at Clermont to the fall of Acre in 1291

→ Godfrey of Bouillon: The Crusader Who Refused a Crown: the crusader who led the final breach and then declined to be crowned king of the city he had just taken

→ Pope Urban II: The Pope Who Launched the Crusades: the pope whose 1095 sermon set the First Crusade in motion, who died two weeks before news of Jerusalem's capture reached Rome

→ The Council of Clermont and the Crusades: the sermon that launched the crusading movement which ended at Jerusalem's walls four years later

→ The Crusader Kingdoms: Daily Life in Outremer: what daily life actually looked like in the kingdom this siege created

→ Balian of Ibelin: The Real Knight Behind Kingdom of Heaven: the knight who negotiated this same city's surrender to Saladin in 1187, nearly a century after this siege

People Also Ask

When did the Siege of Jerusalem take place?

The Siege of Jerusalem began on 7 June 1099, when the crusading army reached the city's outer defences after marching south from northern Syria, and ended with its capture on 15 July 1099 after roughly five weeks of siege warfare. The siege marked the successful conclusion of the First Crusade's central military objective, three years after the crusade had first set out from Europe in 1096, and it remains one of the most consequential and closely studied sieges of the entire medieval period, shaping the region's politics for two centuries afterward.

How did the crusaders finally break into Jerusalem?

The crusaders broke into Jerusalem after building proper siege towers using timber and equipment brought by Genoese and English ships that arrived at the port of Jaffa, having lacked the materials to construct such engines earlier in the siege. On the night of 14 July 1099, Godfrey of Bouillon's forces repositioned one siege tower to a weaker point in the northeast wall, catching the defenders off guard, and on 15 July his men pushed the tower forward, crossed a makeshift bridge onto the ramparts, and forced open the city's gates from within.

What happened to the people of Jerusalem after the city fell?

Contemporary chronicles describe extensive killing of Jerusalem's Muslim and Jewish population following the city's capture on 15 July 1099. The precise death toll remains debated among historians, with the Muslim chronicler Ibn al-Athir's figure of 70,000 generally considered an exaggeration even accounting for wartime refugees, though most scholars agree the killing was severe even by the standards of medieval siege warfare, which traditionally denied protection to cities that resisted a besieging army rather than surrendering to it beforehand, a convention that had real consequences for Jerusalem's fate.

What was the barefoot procession before the siege?

On 8 July 1099, shortly before the final assault, the crusading army undertook a penitential procession around the walls of Jerusalem, marching barefoot after a three-day fast reportedly prompted by a vision received by the priest Peter Desiderius. Clergy carried relics and led prayers throughout the march, which the defenders watched from the walls the entire time, and which the crusaders credited afterward with helping bring about the city's fall only a week later, treating it as confirmation of the vision's promise.

What happened to Jerusalem after the First Crusade captured it?

Following the city's capture, the crusader leadership established the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the senior and longest-lived of the four Crusader states created after the First Crusade. Godfrey of Bouillon was offered rule over the new territory but refused the title of king, accepting the more modest title of Advocate of the Holy Sepulchre instead, and the kingdom he helped found survived, through numerous later military and political crises, until the eventual fall of Acre in 1291 brought crusader rule in the region to its final end.

Primary Sources and Further Reading

• Gesta Francorum: "The Deeds of the Franks", an anonymous eyewitness account by a participant in the First Crusade, one of the earliest and most widely used primary sources for the siege and capture of Jerusalem.
• Ibn al-Athir: Al-Kamil fi al-Tarikh ("The Complete History"), a major later Muslim chronicle recording the Islamic perspective on the siege and its aftermath, written roughly a century after the events it describes.
• France, John (1994): Victory in the East: A Military History of the First Crusade, Cambridge University Press. The standard modern academic military history of the First Crusade's campaigns, including a detailed analysis of the siege.

Note: the precise scale of the massacre following the city's capture is genuinely contested among historians, given the conflicting numbers and possible rhetorical exaggeration in the surviving medieval chronicles on both the Christian and Muslim sides. This article presents the widely accepted broad outline of events while treating the exact casualty figures as an area of ongoing historical debate rather than a settled fact.

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