One of the Crusaders, Raymond of Aguilers joyfully recounted:
“With the fall of Jerusalem and its towers one could see marvelous work. Some of the pagans were mercifully beheaded, others pierced by arrows plunged from towers, and yet others, tortured for a long time, were burned to death in searing flames. Piles of heads, hands and feet lay in the houses and streets, and men and knights were sunning to and fro over corpses.” (Thomas Asbridge, The First Crusade-A New History, (Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 316.)
A Latin eyewitness described how ‘all the defenders retreated along the walls and through the city, and our men went after them, killing them and cutting them down as far as the [Aqsa mosque] , where there was such a massacre that our men were wading up to their ankles in enemy blood’…So gruesome was the carnage that, according to one Latin, ‘even the soldiers who were carrying out the killing could hardly bear the vapours rising from the warm blood’. (Thomas Asbridge, The Crusades – The Authoritative History of the War For the Holy Land(Harper Collins Publishing, 2010), p. 101)