[Jedidah]

Which crusade are you referring to?

It’s a lot more complicated than one battle.

[GeronL]

I would be very skeptical, the barbarians weren’t exactly unarmed peaceniks. Remember Christendom was fighting a defensive war, thats what the Crusades were.

Apparently we’re still fighting them.

[Nachum]

It would appear that many accounts of the Crusades include accounts of great massacres of Jews and Moslems.

[John-Irish]

Given the brutal nature of the hand-to-hand kind of combat of that time it no doubt was bloody to the extent one side stood and fought. My uneducated guess is that after some initial contact and fighting, both side probably withdrew and might have waited to see what the other side might do. Given the rather cowardly way Muslims fight my guess is they high-tailed at the first oppurtunity so there might not have been a lot of Crusaders dead and wounded. As to slaughtering a whole city? Why do that when there might have been loot to go after.

[TWfromTEXAS]

I am not an expert on this subject but I believe when they first took Jerusalem, every Jew and mussie in the city was killed.

[Ryde]

The First Crusade. The Crusaders split among themselves with one body north of the city and one south. The attacks launched, if I am reading this correctly and remembering my own trip to Jerusalem some years ago, had to have come in a pretty uncoordinated fashion. Jerusalem is not easy to attack as the Romans could have attested. The terrain is dreadful and few medieval battles were fought in cities. Being armored and working your way through blind twisty streets is not a good way to stay alive. The whole story has the smell of exaggeration.

[Flag_This]

When the crusaders took Jerusalem there was wide-scale carnage. The crusaders’ own accounts talk about “blood up to the horses bridles,” but I’ve never heard it claimed that they wiped out the entire city.

[Qatar-6]

The massacre of most of the population of Jerusulam when the city fell at the culmination of the first crusade is well documented and from what I have read (the history of the crusades being something I studied once upon a time) has suffuciently varied sources and first hand accounts to be considered a historical fact

The fighting was indeed desperate and It was only with difficulty that Godfrey de Boullion's troops gained the city.

Most of the inhabitants (moslem and jew) were butchered in the streets or tortured to reveal their money, gold, jewels etc. Many corpses were cut open to retrieve jewels that had been swallowed.

Only a few of the defenders under the Fathimad governor held up in David's tower and were able to negotiate their safe passage from the city.

All in all it's estimated about 30K men wonmen and children were killed

This is not a comment on Christianity. Just typical war in the 11th century. Neither the crusaders nor their Islamic counterparts thought what occured particularly unusual. A city under seige had disdained an offer to surrender under reasonable terms. If such a city was taken by storm with great loss to the attackers, little mercy could be expected.

[justa-hairyape]

One of the worse city sieges was when the Mongols sacked Baghdad.

[SunkenCiv]

Ping!