The First Crusade now faced a seemingly insurmountable task–the conquest of one of the known world’s most fearsomely fortified cities. Even today, amid the urban sprawl of modern expansion, Jerusalem is able to convey the grandeur of its past, for at its centre lies the ‘Old City’, ringed by Ottoman walls closely resembling those that stood in the eleventh century. If one looks from the Mount of Olives in the east, stripping away the clutter and bustle of the twenty-first century, the great metropolis that confronted the Franks in 1099 comes into focus.
