The March to Jerusalem, and What Followed Its Fall

The crusader armies crossed into Anatolia in 1097, defeated a Seljuk force at Dorylaeum, and reached Antioch in October, where an eight month siege ended with the city's capture in June 1098, days before a large relieving army arrived; a second siege, of the crusaders themselves now trapped inside the city, ended in a further crusader victory. The march south to Jerusalem, delayed by disputes among the crusade's leaders over who would hold Antioch, resumed the following year, and the city was placed under siege in June 1099.

Jerusalem fell to the crusaders on 15 July 1099. Contemporary Christian and later Muslim and Jewish accounts describe the sack that followed as a large scale killing of the city's Muslim and Jewish inhabitants, including people who had taken refuge in the city's mosques and synagogues; the figures given by medieval chroniclers are not independently verifiable and are treated with caution by modern historians, though the scale of the massacre itself is not disputed. Godfrey of Bouillon was chosen to rule the new Christian territory, taking the title Defender of the Holy Sepulchre rather than king, and the conquered lands were organized over the following years into four Crusader states: the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the County of Edessa, the Principality of Antioch and the County of Tripoli.