“The screaming had stopped. What replaced it was worse. A silence pressed down on Jerusalem, heavy as the black smoke twisting up into the July sky of AD 1099. The sun hung behind that smoke like a dying coal, dimmed by burning flesh and smoldering cedar beams. In the alleys below, only one sound carried. A wet, steady, methodical sound. The sound of men at work.”
“Crusaders moved between corpses. Their mail, their surcoats, their beards were stiff with drying blood. They were not praying over the dead. They were cutting them open. Hands pushed into the still-warm stomachs of fathers, mothers, infants. Searching.”
“The defenders had swallowed gold coins before the breach, hoping to die with their wealth hidden inside them. The knights pulled the coins back out one by one. The gutters of Jerusalem did not carry water that day. They carried a slow red current. On the Temple Mount, the chroniclers wrote that the blood reached the horses’ bridles. Then the ankles. Then higher. This was the holy destination. The journey’s end. The city promised by God.”
“What kind of pilgrimage finishes like this? What kind of men carve open children and believe heaven is watching with approval? The answer starts four years earlier. A field outside Clermont, France. November, AD 1095. Pope Urban II climbed onto a wooden platform and looked out at a sea of Frankish knights, and he saw an opportunity dressed as a crisis. Europe was devouring itself.”
“A whole generation of armored second sons had been locked out of inheritance by the law of primogeniture. Trained from boyhood to kill. Given nothing to inherit. They were professional violence with nowhere to point itself, robbing pilgrims, burning villages, gutting each other in petty wars. Urban did not want to disarm them. He wanted to aim them.”
“He looked at this restless herd of killers and saw a weapon. All it needed was a target. So he gave them one. East. Jerusalem. The Holy Sepulchre, he told them, was in pagan hands, and only their swords could take it back. But sermons alone do not move armies across continents. Urban needed something stronger. So he offered them the thing no priest had ever offered before.”
“Plenary Indulgence. Not a small forgiveness. A total wipe. Every sin a man had committed, and every sin he was about to commit on the road to Jerusalem, erased from God’s ledger. Murder. Theft. Rape. Burned villages. Slaughtered children. Forgiven in advance. It was a license for atrocity stamped with the seal of Rome.”
“And it transformed the men in that field. Peasants who had stolen bread became soldiers of Christ. Knights who had butchered their neighbors became pilgrims of the cross. The worst things a man could do were now the surest road to paradise. They were given two words to shout while they did it. Deus Vult. God wills it.”
“Those words would travel with them for the next two hundred years, screamed over villages, over caravans, over the dying in the streets of Jerusalem.”
“To understand the weapon Urban II forged in that field at Clermont, you have to first stand inside the forge. You have to feel the heat of the iron he was working with.”
“Eleventh-century Europe was not a land of banners and oaths and chivalrous knights riding to rescue maidens. It was a wound that had been refusing to close for generations. The whole social order rested on one cruel rule. Primogeniture. The eldest son took everything. The castle. The fields. The title. The mill on the river. The peasants who worked the land and the right to judge them when they stole bread. Everything.”
“For every heir who walked into his inheritance on his eighteenth birthday, two or three or four younger brothers walked out of the manor with nothing but a horse, a hauberk of riveted mail that weighed thirty pounds, a sword forged for one purpose, and the muscle memory of how to use it. They had been raised since boyhood for one thing. War. And now there was no war waiting for them.”
“So they made their own.”
“These men became a roaming sickness across the countryside of France, Lotharingia, and the German marches. They robbed pilgrims walking to Compostela. They burned the barns of peasants who could not pay their tolls. They sold their swords to whichever lord would feed them this week and killed for that lord against another lord the following month.”
“They fought duels over insults nobody else could remember. The Church tried to leash them. At the Council of Charroux in AD 989, then again at Narbonne in AD 1054, bishops declared the Peace of God, protecting clergy and peasants and church property from violence. Then they added the Truce of God, forbidding fighting on Sundays, on feast days, on the days of Christ’s passion.”
“The knights ignored most of it. You do not tell a wolf which days it may hunt.”
“Beneath this layer of armored predators lay something worse. The peasants themselves were dying. The decades before the crusade became a slow apocalypse for the poor. The rains came when they should not have, then refused when they should. Crops failed in cycles.”
“The chronicler Sigebert of Gembloux recorded famines so severe in the years AD 1085 and AD 1094 that whole villages emptied. People boiled tree bark for broth. Roots. Clay. The monk Glaber, writing of an earlier famine, said the starving had begun digging up the recently buried. Mothers handed their children to passing strangers in exchange for a loaf of bread, telling themselves it was kindness.”
“Then came the fire in the blood. They called it Saint Anthony’s Fire because the monks of the Order of Saint Anthony tended its victims at the hospital in La Motte-aux-Bois. The cause, hidden from them, was a fungus called ergot that grew on damp rye in poor harvests. The grain made it into the bread. The bread made it into the people.”
“The poison constricted their blood vessels. Their hands and feet burned as if held over coals. The skin blackened. The fingers separated at the knuckle. The mind broke open into visions of demons and screaming angels. Whole villages staggered through this together, certain that hell had reached up through the soil to claim them early.”
“This was the Europe that heard the Pope’s call on November 27th, AD 1095. A continent of starving farmers who had nothing left to lose, and idle, armored killers who had nothing left to gain at home. Dry kindling, soaked in oil, waiting for one spark. The man who lit it had not come to Clermont by accident.”
“Urban II, born Odo of Châtillon in Champagne, had been a monk at Cluny before he was a pope. He understood the French nobility from the inside. He spoke their language. He had been preparing this speech for months, riding from town to town through southern France, taking the temperature of the lords as he went. He did not speak in Latin that day. He spoke in their own tongue.”
“The platform had been built outside the city walls because no church in Clermont was large enough to hold the crowd. The chronicler Fulcher of Chartres, who claimed to be present, recorded the scene. Bishops in white. Knights kneeling in the November mud. Frost on the grass. Urban did not offer them theology. He offered them a transaction.”
“He spoke of the suffering of Christians in the East, but he wrapped that suffering inside a sales pitch. The Holy Land, he told them, was a country flowing with milk and honey. A second Eden. For the landless second sons, he promised estates and titles carved out of foreign soil. For the starving farmer, he promised fields that produced without effort, vines heavy with grapes, herds without disease.”
“Robert the Monk, who wrote a version of the speech a decade later, recorded the line that broke the crowd. From the lands you live in, Urban told them, little flows but poverty. Go then. Wrest the holy places from a wicked race.”
“It was the perfect manipulation. The reward shaped exactly to fit the hunger of whoever was listening. Eternal salvation in one hand. Worldly riches in the other.”
“Then he gave them the enemy. He described the Seljuk Turks as a race alien from God, a foul people defiling sacred ground, torturing pilgrims, desecrating altars. Most of it was rumor that had traveled west through Byzantine envoys. The Emperor Alexios I Komnenos had asked Urban for a few hundred mercenaries to help him take back Anatolia. Urban gave him a continent in arms.”
“When he finished speaking, the crowd answered with two words that swept across the field like wind through wheat. Deus Vult. God wills it.”
“Men tore strips of red cloth from their cloaks and sewed crosses to their shoulders on the spot. Bishop Adhemar of Le Puy was the first to kneel and take the cross. Within weeks the news was running through every market town in France.”
“What came pouring out first was not an army. A wandering preacher named Peter the Hermit took the message and turned it into a fever. He was a small man from Amiens, dirty, barefoot, riding a donkey through the towns of northern France. He held up a letter he claimed had fallen from heaven, written in God’s own hand.”
“He smelled, the chroniclers wrote, of sour wine and unwashed wool. People kissed the hem of his robe and tore hairs from his donkey to keep as relics. Tens of thousands followed him. Farmers. Widows. Beggars. Children who had never been more than five miles from their village. A few minor knights, men like Walter Sans-Avoir, drifted to the head of the column to give it some shape.”
“They had no armor. No supply train. No plan. Only a cross stitched onto their tunics and the certainty that God would feed them when the bread ran out. This was the People’s Crusade. It became the first test of what Urban had unleashed, and it failed every test at once.”
“They had to eat.”
“The towns they passed through could not feed a moving city of perhaps forty thousand people. So they took. Their first conquests were the granaries and pantries of fellow Christians in the Rhine Valley. When they reached the Hungarian border at Semlin in June AD 1096, the looting grew so violent that King Coloman of Hungary sent his army to cut them down. Thousands died in the road before they had ever seen a Muslim.”
“The blood on their hands at the start of the journey belonged to people who prayed to the same God.”
“Then, before they ever reached the East, they found a closer target.”
“The Rhineland was home to ancient Jewish communities. Old. Prosperous. Woven into the cloth and silver trades of Speyer, Worms, Cologne, Mainz, and Trier.”
“They had lived there since the Roman legions had built the first walls along the river. As the crusader bands moved north along the Rhine in the spring of AD 1096, a question began to pass from mouth to mouth in the ranks. Why march for two years to kill the enemies of Christ when there were unbelievers here, in these very streets, with gold sewn into their robes?”
“A German noble named Emicho of Leiningen took up that question and made himself its answer. He claimed a cross had been burned into his flesh by an angel. He gathered a column of perhaps ten thousand men and turned them on the Jews.”
“In Speyer on May 3rd, AD 1096, the bishop John sheltered most of the community in his own palace and executed crusaders in the marketplace to keep the rest of them in line. Speyer survived, more or less. Eleven Jews were killed.”
“Worms did not survive. The mob arrived on May 18th. They broke into Jewish houses one after another. They dragged out families into the dust of the street. They offered each one the same choice. Be baptized, or be killed. Most refused. They were cut down on their own doorsteps. The synagogue burned. The Torah scrolls were torn apart and thrown into the river.”
“The worst was Mainz.”
“The Jewish community of Mainz had paid Archbishop Rothard a fortune in silver, perhaps four hundred pounds, for his protection. He took the money. He brought them inside the walls of his own palace, sat them in his own banquet hall, and swore his guards would hold the line.”
“Emicho’s men arrived on May 25th, AD 1096. For two days they hammered at the palace gates with axes and beams. The defenders fired arrows down from the walls until they ran out of arrows. On May 27th, the gates broke. The Archbishop ran. He took a side door, slipped down to the river, and rowed across to a fortified house on the far bank. He left his soldiers behind, left his promises behind, left the families he had sworn to protect to face the men outside.”
“Inside the courtyard, the community understood what was coming. Faced with the sword or the baptismal font, they chose neither. They chose a third path that the chroniclers, both Jewish and Christian, would record with horror for a thousand years.”
“The Hebrew chronicles of the Mainz Anonymous and Solomon bar Simson preserved what happened in that courtyard. Fathers gathered their sons. Mothers held their daughters.”
“Knives that had cut bread the day before were drawn for a different work. Parents killed their children first, so the children would not see the crusaders come through the door. Then husbands killed their wives. Then the survivors killed themselves. Rabbi Kalonymus ben Meshullam, the leader of the community, took his own son David into the cellar of the palace and ended the boy’s life with his own hand before ending his own.”
“A woman named Rachel of Mainz, the chronicles record, killed her four children one by one and then sat in the courtyard with their bodies arranged around her until the crusaders came for her too.”
“When Emicho’s men finally smashed through into the palace, they walked through halls that ran with blood that had not been shed by them.”
“The survivors who had not been able to bring themselves to die were finished with axes and swords. More than a thousand people died in Mainz that day. Similar massacres followed at Cologne, Trier, Metz, and Regensburg through the summer. The crusade was six months old. It had not yet reached the sea.”
“The peasant army staggered on across the Bosphorus in early August AD 1096. Emperor Alexios met Peter at the docks of Constantinople, took one look at the column, and ferried them across the strait as quickly as possible to keep them away from his city. He warned them to wait for the professional army that was still coming. They did not wait.”
“In the dry hills of Bithynia, near a town the Byzantines called Civetot, they finally met what they had been marching toward. A real army. A column of Seljuk Turks under the command of Kilij Arslan, sultan of Rûm. Mounted archers. Disciplined officers. On October 21st, AD 1096, the Turks ambushed the crusader camp at dawn.”
“Anna Komnene, the emperor’s daughter, recorded the slaughter in her Alexiad. The peasants were caught in the open, half of them still asleep. The battle lasted minutes.”
“Peter the Hermit was conveniently away in Constantinople negotiating supplies. The rest were killed where they stood or roped together and sold in the slave markets of Anatolia within the week. Their bones were piled into a hill by the roadside that Byzantine travelers would still describe decades later as the Mountain of Crusaders.”
“That was only the opening act.”
“Behind the peasants came the real army. The army of the great lords. Roughly sixty thousand men by some counts. Better mailed, better fed, better led, and far more dangerous. They crossed into Constantinople in waves through the winter of AD 1096 and into the spring of AD 1097. Alexios, watching them arrive, made each great lord swear an oath of loyalty before he ferried them across the Bosphorus. He understood, even if Urban did not, that what was coming into Asia was a force that could not be steered.”
“They learned from the mistakes of the dead peasants. They did not learn mercy. They marched into the same furnace of hunger and fear, and the furnace did its work on them too. By the time they reached the Syrian coast, three years of road and siege had stripped them down to something harder than the men who had set out.”
“The siege of Antioch nearly ended them. They reached the walls on October 21st, AD 1097. Antioch was one of the great cities of the ancient world. Its walls climbed the slopes of Mount Silpius and ran for miles. There were four hundred towers. There were Christian churches inside, Saint Peter’s among them, and Muslim garrisons commanded by a Turkish governor named Yaghi-Siyan. Eight months the crusaders sat outside, through a winter so wet the chronicler Raymond of Aguilers said the rain fell as if the sky had broken. Horses died of cold. Men deserted by climbing the cliffs above the camp in the dark.”
“Then on June 3rd, AD 1098, the city fell through betrayal. A tower captain named Firouz, an Armenian convert to Islam, lowered a rope from his section of wall for Bohemond of Taranto. The Normans climbed up in the dark. The gates opened from inside. The crusaders slaughtered Yaghi-Siyan’s garrison and most of the civilian population in a single night. The governor fled into the hills and was decapitated by a peasant who recognized him by his expensive boots.”
“Then came the second siege. A Turkish relief army under Kerbogha of Mosul arrived four days later. The crusaders were now inside the walls, and Kerbogha was outside. The food ran out within weeks. Horses were eaten first. Then dogs. Then leather belts boiled into broth. Then nothing.”
“The chronicler Fulcher wrote of men chewing the bark off trees inside the city walls.”
“It was in this hollowed-out condition that a peasant named Peter Bartholomew claimed a vision. He said the Holy Lance, the spear that had pierced the side of Christ on the cross, was buried beneath the floor of the Cathedral of Saint Peter inside the city. They dug for hours. Raymond of Aguilers, who was present, wrote that just before nightfall Peter himself jumped into the pit and pulled out a piece of rusted iron. Whether he had planted it or believed his own vision, the effect was the same. The discovery cracked the army’s despair like a hammer hitting glass.”
“On June 28th, AD 1098, they marched out of the gates with the Lance carried at the head of the column and broke Kerbogha’s army in a single afternoon. The Turks fled. The crusaders took their camp and ate their supplies.”
“After that, they were no longer soldiers. They were the army of God. Every massacre behind them became proof of their righteousness. Every horror became scripture.”
“But the food was still not enough. A few miles south lay the Syrian city of Ma’arrat al-Nu’man.”
“They reached its walls in late November AD 1098. After a difficult siege of two weeks, the city fell on December 11th. The crusaders slaughtered the inhabitants in the usual way, perhaps twenty thousand people inside a single day and night. The army’s supply situation had not changed. They were still starving. The countryside was scorched.”
“And in the silence after the massacre, they crossed a line that no chronicler wanted to write down but several of them did anyway.”
“Radulph of Caen recorded it plainly. In Ma’arra, he wrote, our men boiled adult pagans in cooking pots. They impaled children on spits and ate them roasted. Fulcher of Chartres, writing later and trying to soften the memory, admitted the same. He wrote that many of his people, driven mad by hunger, cut strips of flesh from the buttocks of Saracens already lying dead, cooked them, and when the meat was still raw at the center, devoured it anyway. Albert of Aachen confirmed it. The leaders of the crusade later wrote a letter to Pope Paschal II admitting that a horrible famine had forced their men to feed on the bodies of the Saracens.”
“This was not one starving man losing himself in the dark. This was widespread. Done by firelight in the open. Recorded by their own side.”
“Something had broken in them that would not grow back. The wall between man and monster, the one every culture builds and reinforces with ritual and rule, had been knocked down inside the army of God.”
“It is in moments like Ma’arra, when you read the words written by the crusaders’ own scribes, that the real shape of this campaign comes into focus. A pilgrimage that ate its way to the holy city.”
“The men who came out of Ma’arra were not the men who had ridden out of Champagne and Lorraine and Normandy three years earlier. The great lords could barely command them now.”
“Godfrey of Bouillon, the silent duke who carried a relic of the True Cross around his neck. Raymond of Saint-Gilles of Toulouse, the old wealthy cynic with one eye, who had pledged to die in the East and meant it. Bohemond of Taranto, the Norman prince who had come east not for God but for a kingdom of his own, and who would peel off at Antioch to take that kingdom. Tancred, Bohemond’s young nephew, ambitious and educated and already calculating his share. Robert of Flanders. Robert of Normandy, the son of William the Conqueror. They led an army that had walked through every kind of hell a man can walk through, and the army no longer feared anything on this earth.”
“In early June of AD 1099, after three years on the road, the column came over a ridge in the Judean hills and stopped.”
“The sun was high. The air was dry and smelled of dust and wild thyme. Cicadas droned in the olive trees. In the valley below, washed in the white summer light, sat the city they had been promised. Walls of pale limestone. The Tower of David rising at the western gate. The dome of the Holy Sepulchre, the Dome of the Rock, the lines of cypresses along the Kidron Valley.”
“Jerusalem.”
“The men fell to their knees in the road and wept. Some kissed the dirt. Some pulled off their boots so they could walk the last miles barefoot, the way pilgrims should. The chronicler Raymond of Aguilers wrote that even the hardest of them, men who had eaten the dead at Ma’arra, sobbed like children.”
“Inside the walls, the Fatimid governor Iftikhar al-Dawla watched the kneeling army from the parapets. He had taken the city from the Seljuks only the year before. He had perhaps a thousand soldiers and a population of around forty thousand. He had expelled the local Christians a few weeks earlier to prevent a fifth column inside the walls. He had poisoned the wells around the city for miles. He had heard what happened at Antioch and at Ma’arra. He knew what was coming over that ridge.”
“What none of them knew, on either side of those walls, was that what was coming would be worse than Ma’arra. Much worse.”
“While the crusader army was eating its way south through the Syrian summer, the city waiting for them at the end of the road was not a ruin. It was not an empty stage set for a holy reconquest. It was a working city, full of children and merchants and bakers and old men who had been born inside its walls and expected to die inside them.”
“Jerusalem in AD 1099 had been under Muslim governance for four hundred and sixty-one years, ever since the Caliph Umar took it from the Byzantines in AD 638. For most of those centuries, life inside the walls had been ordinary. Taxes were paid. Bread was baked. Sons inherited their fathers’ shops. The Christian pilgrims who arrived from Europe each Easter were taxed at the gate, given lodging in hospices funded partly by the merchants of Amalfi, and sent home with palm fronds and bottles of Jordan water.”
“A pilgrim named Saewulf, who walked these same streets only three years after the events you are about to hear, recorded the lanes and lodgings in detail in his journal.”
“In the year of the crusade, the city had recently changed hands. The Fatimid Caliphate of Cairo, ruled by the boy Caliph al-Mustali and the powerful vizier al-Afdal Shahanshah, had taken Jerusalem back from the Seljuk Turks in August AD 1098, only ten months before the Franks arrived. The Fatimids were Shia Muslims. The Seljuks were Sunni. The crusaders did not know or care about the difference. They were marching to fight Turks. They would find themselves besieging a city held by Egyptians who had also just finished fighting Turks. The historian Ibn al-Athir, writing a century later in Mosul, noted the bitter irony.”
“The Fatimids had even sent envoys to the crusader camp at Antioch the previous winter, proposing an alliance against their common Seljuk enemy. The envoys returned with vague answers and a sense that something terrible was coming for them too.”
“The streets inside the walls were narrow and roofed in places against the sun. The markets ran along the lines they had run along since Roman days, following the old cardo down toward the Temple Mount. A merchant standing in the Suq al-Attarin, the perfumers’ market, could hear Arabic, Persian, Greek, Armenian, Syriac, and Judeo-Arabic in the space of a few breaths. The streets smelled of saffron, of dust kicked up by donkeys, of olive oil burning in clay lamps, of the lye soap they made in the workshops near the Mamilla pool.”
“Muslims prayed five times a day at the Dome of the Rock, the gold-roofed shrine built by the Caliph Abd al-Malik in AD 691 over the stone where Muhammad was believed to have ascended to heaven. They prayed at the al-Aqsa Mosque, the long silver-roofed hall at the southern end of the platform, rebuilt by the Caliph al-Zahir in AD 1035 after an earthquake had pulled it down. Eastern Christians, Greek Orthodox and Armenian and Syriac and Georgian, worshipped at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, rebuilt by the Byzantine Emperor Constantine IX Monomachos in AD 1048 after the mad Caliph al-Hakim had torn it down a generation earlier in AD 1009. The Jewish community, smaller than it had been in antiquity but ancient nonetheless, kept its synagogue in the quarter near the southern wall and traded in cloth and silver and ink. The Cairo Geniza, a treasure of letters preserved in a synagogue storeroom in Old Cairo, contains the correspondence of these very families.”
“Letters about marriage contracts, about shipments of indigo, about a sick aunt in Ramla. The last of those letters from Jerusalem stops in the spring of AD 1099.”
“For these forty thousand people, Jerusalem was not a prize on a map. It was the alley they had played in as children. It was the cistern their grandfather had dug. It was the doorway where their mother had stood waiting for them at dusk.”
“The man holding the walls of that home was named Iftikhar al-Dawla. His title meant Pride of the State. He was not a fanatic. He was not a young man hungry for glory. He was a career officer of the Fatimid army, a Sudanese officer by some accounts, hardened by years of service on the Egyptian frontier where the Fatimids had been fighting Berber raiders and rebel tribes for decades.”
“He had been receiving reports out of Syria since the previous autumn. Messengers had ridden in describing the fall of Antioch on June 3rd, AD 1098. The betrayal of Yaghi-Siyan by the tower captain Firouz. The slaughter of Kerbogha’s relief force at the gates of the city on June 28th. Then the reports from Ma’arrat al-Nu’man had arrived in January, brought by Syrian refugees walking south barefoot.”
“Iftikhar understood that whatever was walking south through Syria was not an army that obeyed any rule of war he had studied at Cairo.”
“He had less than a year to prepare. Possibly closer to three months once the route was certain. The crusaders had spent the spring of AD 1099 detouring south along the coast, accepting tribute from the Fatimid governors of Tripoli and Beirut, taking food and silver and continuing south. Iftikhar received those reports too. He knew his own caliph was paying the men coming to kill him.”
“He used the time the way a doctor uses a tourniquet on a wound that is going to cost a limb. He chose what to save and what to cut off.”
“First, the water.”
“The Judean hills in June are hot enough to crack stones. The temperature on the limestone reaches forty degrees Celsius by midmorning and stays there until sundown. Wells lay scattered across the countryside, dug over centuries by farmers and pilgrims and Roman engineers. Iftikhar sent work parties out for miles in every direction with orders to ruin them. Some they filled with stones. Some they fouled with the carcasses of dead animals. Some they collapsed entirely. The chronicler William of Tyre, archbishop of the crusader kingdom a century later, recorded that within a day’s march of Jerusalem there was no clean water to be had. Only the Pool of Siloam at the southeastern corner of the city still ran, fed by the Gihon spring through Hezekiah’s tunnel cut in the rock seventeen centuries earlier. That water flowed within bowshot of his walls. Iftikhar wanted it that way.”
“Second, the wood.”
“He sent the same parties through the orchards. Olive trees that had been pruned by four generations of the same family came down. Fig trees. Almond. Mulberry. Anything large enough to be cut into a beam. The Judean countryside in June already had little timber to give. Iftikhar took what there was. He was not just denying the crusaders food. He was denying them the only material from which they could build the towers and rams that could reach the top of his walls.”
“Third, the people.”
“This was the cruelest decision and the one he made knowing exactly what it meant. He could not feed the entire population through a siege of unknown length. He could not afford a single sympathetic gate-opener inside the walls. So in the weeks before the army arrived, he opened the gates and pushed the city’s native Christians out. Greek Orthodox families. Armenian families. Syriac families. Old men who had spent forty years working in the same workshop. Women carrying children too small to walk. Out into the same poisoned countryside he had just created. They scattered toward Bethlehem and the coast, refugees from the city of their birth, expelled by a Muslim governor to be saved from a Christian army that would have killed them anyway because their beards were the wrong shape.”
“He kept the soldiers he had. Several hundred Arab cavalry. Perhaps four hundred Sudanese infantry, professional troops sent from Cairo. The militia of the local population. Stockpiles of food sealed in the cellars of the citadel. Naphtha, the p”
