Upon entering Palestine, as they came upon spots known in sacred history or places of any importance, the same feelings of greed and jealousy which had caused so much trouble in Asia Minor and Syria caused divisions once more amongst the crusaders.  The chieftain, the simple warrior almost, who was the first to enter city, or burgh, or house, and plant his flag there halted in it and claimed to be its possessor; whilst those “whom nothing was dearer than the commandments of God,” say the chroniclers, pursued their march, barefooted, beneath the banner of the cross, deplored the covetousness and the quarrels of their brethren.  When the crusaders arrived a Emmaus, some Christians of Bethlehem came and implore their aid against the infidels.  Tancred was there; and he, with the consent of Godfrey, set out immediately, in the middle of the night, with a small band of one hundred horsemen, and went and planted his own flag on the top of the church at Bethlehem at the very hour at which the birth of Jesus Christ had been announced to the shepherds of Judea.  Next day, June 10th 1099, on advancing, at dawn of day, over the heights of Emmaus, the army of the crusaders had, all at once, beneath their gaze the Holy City.

“Lo!  Jerusalem appears in sight.  Lo! every hand point, out Jerusalem.  Lo! a thousand voices are heard as one in salutation of Jerusalem.

“After the great, sweet joy which filled all hearts at this first glimpse came a deep feeling of contrition, mingled with awful and reverential affection.  Each scarcely dared to raise the eye towards the city which had been the chosen abode of Christ, where He died, was buried, and rose again.

“In accents of humility, with words low spoken, with stifled sobs, with sighs and tears, the pent-up yearnings of a people in joy and at the same time in sorrow sent shivering through the air a murmur like that which is heard in leafy forests what time the wind blows through the leaves, or like the dull sound made by the sea which breaks upon the rocks, or hisses as it foams over the beach.”

It was better to quote these beautiful stanzas from “Jerusalem Delivered” than to reproduce the pompous and monotonous phrases of the chroniclers.  The genius of Tasso was capable of understanding and worthy to depict the emotions of a Christian army at sight of the Jerusalem they had come to deliver.

We will not pause over the purely military and technical details of the siege.  It was calculated that there were in the city twenty thousand armed inhabitants and forty thousand men in garrison, the most valiant and most fanatical Mussulmans that Egypt could furnish.  According to William of Tyre, the most judicious and the best informed of the contemporary historians, “When the crusaders pitched their camp over against Jerusalem, there had arrived there about forty thousand persons of both sexes, of whom there were at the most twenty thousand foot, well equipped, and