Ghost Town: Jerusalem after the Crusades

The Crusaders Reach Jerusalem (from a set of Scenes from Gerusalemme Liberata)

Metropolitan Museum of Art

        As we have become aware, the Holy Crusades were carried out by Western Christians in an attempt to reclaim the holy land which was Jerusalem. There is no doubt that these “Holy” crusades were the place of atrocities and unbelievable horrors to the people within Jerusalem. An account by Fulcher of Chartres states that during Christmas “Oh, what a stench there was around the walls of the city, both within and without, from the rotting bodies of the Saracens slain by ourselves at the time of the capture of the city, lying wherever they had been hunted down” ( Fulcher of Chartres, History, 1:33).  

Even with the massacres occurring during the 1st Crusade, according to Armstrong “The Crusaders' chief problem was manpower. Once Jerusalem had been won, most of their soldiers went home, leaving only a skeleton army behind. Jerusalem was particularly desolate. It had recently housed about 100,00 people, but now only a few hundred living in the empty, ghostly city” (Armstrong 276). How is it that a conquest seemingly fueled by God and the Pope was nearly abandoned? The question could be answered with the fact that many of the soldiers had left their families back in the countries of Western Europe and did not have any emotional ties to Jerusalem. With this lack of manpower, “Muslims and Jews began to filer back to such cities as Beirut, Sidon, Tyre, and Acre, and Muslim peasants remained in the countryside” (Armstrong 276). 

Although the Catholic Church had placed such importance on Jerusalem and retaken it back from the Muslims that seemingly had stolen from them, their reign on the city would be challenged and overthrown by Saladin and the kingdoms of Syria and Egypt. The question then arises, if the Catholics had established themselves heavily within Jerusalem, would we see the current Jerusalem that we see today in the modern period?