The fall of Jerusalem to the Crusaders

The First Crusade stormed Jerusalem after a siege of five weeks and committed a terrible massacre in which tens of thousands were killed at al-Aqsa Mosque and throughout the city. It remained in their hands for ninety-one years.

The hosts of the First Crusade reached the walls of Jerusalem in 492 AH while the Muslims were at the height of their disunity — the Seljuks quarreling and the Fatimids having seized the city a year earlier — so the city found no defender.

On 23 Shaʿban 492 AH (15 July 1099) the Crusaders stormed the walls from the north and committed a massacre described by their own historians before the Muslims': those seeking refuge in al-Aqsa were killed and the Jews were burned in their synagogue, until one of their witnesses said: the horses waded in blood up to the knees.

The news shook the Muslim world, and the judge Abu Saʿd al-Harawi stood crying out in the caliphal court in Baghdad: "Does it become you to sleep in the shade of safety while your brothers in Syria have no shelter but the backs of camels and the bellies of vultures?" The cry was a seed of long jihad that bore fruit a century later at the hands of Nur al-Din and Salah al-Din.