When the crusaders finally reached Jerusalem in 1099, there was a complete massacre. They ran after every single man, woman, and child they could find and killed them. One crusader reported the following morning when he tried to go to the Holy Sepulcher to pray, the blood was up to his ankles in some places. However those who ran to Count Raymond of Toulouse and pleaded for mercy were spared, meaning he had to protect these people from his fellow crusaders.

See, the interesting thing about the first crusade is there was no real leadership. In the years leading up to the First Crusade, Seljuk Turks were conquering much of the Byzantine territories in Anatolia (modern-day Turkey), and even besieged the capital Constantinople itself. Internally the Byzantines were a mess because the court officials were wary of the army encroaching on their power and convinced the emperor to defund the military slowly over several decades, so when the Seljuks finally arrived there wasn't much resistance. A palace coup occurred in 1081 that placed Alexius I on the throne, but the situation was so bad that after trying to solve shit on his own he finally appealed to Pope Urban II in 1094 for help.

West Europe itself was undergoing a transitional period: The barbarian, Muslim, and Viking invasions were over, so it could finally get its bearings and try to build civilization all over again. Law codes were enacted. Court etiquette was becoming institutionalized. Art was starting to make a larger appearance. And most importantly, primogeniture. I discussed this before on my xanga, but it was the custom for the barbarian tribes to divide a father's patrimony equally amongst his sons. That usually meant either all the sons start killing each other until one comes out on top, or they live in peace and their power is diminished because the wealth has been split. Eventually they started giving the whole thing to the eldest son, which meant the younger sons either had to enter the church or find a wealthy heiress to marry. That wasn't possible for everyone, so Europe was experiencing a problem of younger sons roaming the countryside and robbing people or trying to start fights with lords in different lands to get their property.

Which brings us to the Council of Clermont in 1095, which many prominent clerical and lay leaders attended. Pope Urban laid it all out: The Seljuks are knocking on the door of Constantinople, and the Byzantines are asking for our help. We have a shit ton of people who are fighting amongst ourselves for land. Why not just go out to the east and fight the Muslims instead? I'll even throw in you get a free ticket to heaven if you die. Most of the famous individuals from the First Crusade were second sons and they left with the intention of making some sort of realm for themselves out in the Levant.

But this whole enterprise was a complete misunderstanding. Remember, before the Roman Empire was divided in half between East and West. East became what we call the Byzantine Empire (they never called themselves that and continued to refer to themselves as the Romans all the way to the end). The West just collapsed under the weight of the barbarians. So Alexius just turned to whom he expected to take up the mantle of emperor, the pope. Except the pope doesn't really have an army of his own. So he had to ask other people to do it for him, which is what happened at Clermont. Alexius was under the impression the pope would send some of his highly-trained troops over. What he got instead were several armies and much, much more.

The main players of the First Crusade are Godfrey of Bouillon and his brother Baldwin, Bohemond of Toranto and his nephew Tancred, Bishop Adhemar of Le Puy, and Raymond of Toulouse. They were actual military men and spent their time collecting supplies, training their men, and securing routes to Constantinople. In the meantime, word went round about that crusade. Alexius wanted soldiers. Urban wanted to send soldiers. But that didn't meant people were going to listen. Again, this is a transitional time in Europe. It's kinda like now with the new internet and computer technology shaking things up and people are somewhat unsure what the future will look like. Now that Europe was settled a bit, urbanization became a thing again and society had to relearn what it's like to have artisans, use cash instead of bartering, and a system of bureaucracy. These towns were out of the social structure of the Middle Ages: They weren't part of the church, they weren't part of the nobility, and they weren't part of the serfs who tended to the land. So you had an uneasy populace who suddenly got a voice of certainty in the form of preachers talking about this crusade, saying salvation could be found in the Middle East. People just up and left their homes, not really comprehending the situation or what they would face out in Anatolia, completely untrained in how to fight.

We're not certain how many showed up for the First Crusade, but it's somewhere between 50,000-100,000. And every single person is doing their own thing. Godfrey and Baldwin have their own army, Bohemond's got his, Raymond probably has some of the best in the whole lot, and tens of thousands of civilians milling about without any weapons or armor. It was a complete mess and if the Muslim world at that time also weren't undergoing internal fraction, there's no way they could've won. No one was coordinating their positions or anything. Hell, Baldwin left halfway to conquer some lands to the northeast of Jerusalem called Edessa and wasn't even there for the siege of Jerusalem. Bohemond did the same thing with Antioch.

Which brings us back to the beginning of the story. You have a bunch of religious zealots who were not mentally prepared for the situation, wearing heavy metal armor, walking through the hot sun of Israel with barely any supplies, were nearly wiped out several times in battle, have very little discipline because there's no real leadership structure to keep people in line, and after a long, terrible journey through Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, and finally Israel are pretty much only still continuing because they believe God wants them to take back Jerusalem on the infidel. So when they finally reached their goal, they unleashed all their frustrations on the poor populace.

Because this venture was not planned to go this way from the offset (Alexius was just thinking they would push the Seljuks back to probably the edge of Anatolia), it's also incredible the crusaders were able to hold onto their lands for about a century or two. They had to start a kingdom from the start, bringing their European social structures that's foreign to a Middle Eastern population. They could not keep up population-wise with the Muslims at the edge of their borders, and new knights had to keep being imported to to replace those who died in battle; that's the origins of the Templars, Hospitallers, and the Teutonic Order: to encourage people to sign up and join the fight in the Holy Land. But eventually the Byzantines got their shit together and started demanding the land they said the crusaders took from them, and then the Muslims united under Saladin... Jerusalem fell in 1187 and the last holdings was in 1291 when Acre was taken. I wonder what the original crusaders would've thought if they knew all their hard work would be destroyed a century later. Perhaps not kill everyone so the locals are not pissed off at you.