The Christian campaign began with the capture of Nicea in 1097, followed by a victorious progress through Asia Minor. For nearly a year the crusaders besieged and then were in their turn besieged in Antioch, enduring tortures of hunger, thirst, and disease. When courage flagged and hope seemed nearly dead, it was the supposed discovery, by one of the chaplains, of the lance that had pierced Christ’s side as he hung upon the Cross that kept the Christians from surrender. With this famous relic borne in their midst by the papal legate, the crusaders flung the gates of Antioch wide and issued forth in a charge so irresistible in its certainty of victory that the Turks broke and fled. The defeat became a rout, and Antioch remained as a Christian principality under Bohemund, when the crusaders marched southwards along the coast route towards Jerusalem. They came in sight of this, the goal of their ambitions, on 7th June, 1099, not garbed as knights and soldiers but barefooted as humble pilgrims, kneeling in an ecstasy of awe upon the Mount of Olives. This mood of prayer passed rapidly into one of fierce determination, and on 15th June Godfrey de Bouillon and his Lorrainers forced a breach in the massive walls, and, hacking their way with sword and spear through the streets, met their fellow crusaders triumphantly entering from another side. The scene that followed, while in keeping with mediaeval savagery, has left a shameful stain upon the Christianity it professed to represent. Turks, Arabs, and Jews, old men and women, children and babies, thousands of a defenceless population, were deliberately butchered as a sacrifice to the Christ who, dying, preached forgiveness. The crusaders rode their horses up to the knees in the blood of that human shambles. ‘There might no prayers nor crying of mercy prevail,’ says an eyewitness. ‘Such a slaughter of pagan folk had never been seen nor heard of. None knew their number, save God alone.’ Their mission accomplished, the majority of crusaders turned their faces homewards, but before they went they elected Godfrey de Bouillon to be the first ruler of the new Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, with Antioch and Edessa in the north as dependent principalities. Godfrey reigned for almost a year, bearing the title ‘Guardian of the Holy Grave’, since he refused to be crowned master of a city where Christ had worn a wreath of thorns. His protest is typical of the genuine humility and love of God that mingled so strangely in his veins with pride and cruelty. When he died he left a reputation for courage and justice that wove around his memory romance and legends like the tales of Charlemagne. [Sidenote: The Military Orders]