Many of those who came on the First Crusade went home when it was over, and few of the pilgrims who followed in their wake chose to settle in the Holy Land. Owing to insufficient Frankish immigration, the Crusader states would always be short of fighting men. The King of Jerusalem, the prince of Antioch and the counts of Edessa and Tripoli could between them raise no more than two thousand knights. The towns were made secure, but travellers along the roads were vulnerable to brigands and sudden enemy raids.
Saewulf of Canterbury, who visited the Holy Land in 1102, described how parties of pilgrims landing at Jaffa were exposed to attack as they journeyed along the mountain road to Jerusalem. Pilgrims who wearied and fell behind, or groups that were vulnerably small, were prey to bands of nomadic Bedouin who lived in the surrounding wilderness. The bandits did not hesitate to kill to get at the money sewn into travellers’ clothes. Corpses were left to rot along the route up to Jerusalem because it was too dangerous for their companions to leave their party to give them a proper Christian burial.
There was danger not only from brigands but from Turkish forces in the north and Egyptians in the south. A Russian recounting his pilgrimage in 1106-07 was referring to the Fatimid Egyptians who held Ascalon, south of Jaffa, when he wrote of his visit to the church of Saint
George at Lydda on the Jaffa-Jerusalem road: There are many springs here; travellers rest by the water but with great fear, for it is a deserted place and nearby is the town of Ascalon from which Saracens sally forth and kill travellers on these roads.’
The Russian’s journey to Galilee, which took him near the town of Baisan, was no less hazardous: ‘Seven rivers flow from this town and great reeds grow along these rivers and many tall palm trees stand about the town like a dense forest. This place is terrible and difficult of access for here live fierce pagan Saracens who attack travellers at the fords on these rivers.’ An especially shocking attack took place at Easter 1019 when a large party of seven hundred unarmed pilgrims, both men and women, set out from Jerusalem for the river Jordan. They were travelling, in the words of a German chronicler, ‘in joy and with a cheerful heart’ when they were set upon by an Egyptian sortie from Ascalon. Three hundred pilgrims were killed and another sixty were captured to be sold as slaves.
World History
