Godfrey of Bouillon
(c 1060 - 1100 CE)
The Holy Butcher of Jerusalem
“I came to Jerusalem not to wear a crown of gold, but to serve my Lord with a crown of thorns.”
— Godfrey of Bouillon, allegedly before doing the exact opposite
The sun over Jerusalem was hot enough to cook a pilgrim alive. By July of 1099, the city looked like it had been through a barbecue hosted by psychopaths—smoke, ash, and righteous body odor clogging the holy air. On the walls stood the last defenders of Islam’s third holiest city, half-starved and praying for a miracle. Outside, an army of lice-ridden Europeans was building siege towers out of the wood of stolen villages and bad intentions. Among them, one figure stood out: tall, pious, handsome, and completely insane.
Godfrey of Bouillon—Duke of Lower Lorraine, French noble, alleged virgin, and soon-to-be king who refused to be called king—was about to carve his name into history’s flesh with the blunt edge of faith and steel.
The Reluctant Psycho-Saint
Godfrey had been born around 1060 in what’s now Belgium, which explains a lot about his chronic confusion between religion and violence. He was the second son, which meant his older brother Eustace got the title, and he got the existential crisis. His mother was Ida of Lorraine, a saint-in-training who thought raising her sons to murder heretics was a form of good parenting. Godfrey took it to heart.
In his early years he fought for Emperor Henry IV in Germany—because every medieval noble needed to practice butchery before doing it in the name of God. He made a name for himself bashing in Saxon skulls and storming fortresses. When Pope Urban II gave his famous 1095 sermon calling for the First Crusade, Godfrey looked up from sharpening his sword and thought: “Wait—now this I can put on my résumé.”
So he sold everything. Land, castles, his brother’s inheritance—gone. All to bankroll a one-way trip to the apocalypse. He called it “pilgrimage.” Everyone else called it “lunacy.”
March of the Morons
By 1096, Europe vomited forth a mass of zealots, criminals, monks, and maniacs who called themselves Crusaders. Godfrey led one of the more “respectable” contingents—if by respectable you mean his army only occasionally ate the locals. He was joined by his brothers Eustace and Baldwin, whose sense of diplomacy was measured in decapitations.
Their road to Jerusalem was paved with bones. Hungary and Byzantium bled under the weight of their “holy enthusiasm.” Even Alexios I, the Byzantine Emperor who had asked for help, quickly realized his mistake. The Crusaders treated his empire like a medieval Walmart: raid first, pray later.
Through Anatolia they trudged, burning, looting, and spreading Christian love in the form of arrows. Godfrey was wounded at Nicaea, half-starved at Antioch, and still found the strength to slaughter Saracens between communion breaks. He claimed miracles kept him alive. Most witnesses agreed it was probably just his enormous appetite for homicide.
Siege of Jerusalem: The Faithful Get Creative
By the time the Crusaders reached Jerusalem, they’d been on the road for three years and smelled like decomposing righteousness. The city, defended by the Fatimid Egyptians, was fortified, stocked, and confident. Godfrey’s army was not. The Crusaders were starving, diseased, and too dehydrated to piss, but they still found time to argue about whose holy war it was.
Godfrey—blond, square-jawed, and disturbingly serene—took command of the northern assault. His siege tower was a ramshackle skyscraper built from scavenged wood and desperate prayer. It took a week to roll it across the battlefield, under withering arrow fire and boiling oil, while men dropped dead faster than they could be buried. When it finally reached the walls, Godfrey climbed the ladder himself, crossbow bolts whistling around him like bees at a funeral.
On July 15, 1099, he was the first over the wall. His men followed like rats after the Pied Piper, screaming “Deus Vult!”—Latin for “God wants this murder.”
Jerusalem fell that afternoon. Then the killing began.
The Holy Slaughter
Eyewitnesses wrote that blood ran ankle-deep through the streets. Some say that’s an exaggeration. Others say it’s an understatement. Christians slaughtered Muslims, Jews, even Eastern Christians unlucky enough to be home when the mob arrived. Knights sang psalms while hacking women apart. Priests marched barefoot through the gore, blessing corpses and looters alike.
And at the center of it all stood Godfrey of Bouillon—tall, shining, calm. He reportedly entered the Holy Sepulchre barefoot, tears in his eyes, sword dripping red. Chroniclers described him as the perfect knight: pious, humble, merciful. Which is medieval code for “efficient murderer who smiled while doing it.”
When the blood finally dried, the Crusaders elected him ruler of the new Kingdom of Jerusalem. Godfrey, in his trademark act of false modesty, refused to be called king. “I will not wear a crown of gold where my Savior wore one of thorns,” he said. Instead, he took the title Advocatus Sancti Sepulchri—Defender of the Holy Sepulchre.
It was the kind of gesture that made everyone forget he had just presided over a massacre.
Defender, Dictator, Dead
Being “Defender” of Jerusalem was like being the night-shift manager of Hell. Everyone wanted a piece of him—Muslims, Byzantines, rival Crusaders, and his own brother Baldwin, who had all the patience of a rabid dog. Within a year, the Fatimid army returned from Egypt under al-Afdal Shahanshah, determined to reclaim the city.
Godfrey met them at Ascalon in August 1099. It was a decisive, chaotic, miracle-ridden slaughter. The Crusaders were outnumbered but hit the Egyptians like divine plague rats, routing an army twice their size. Godfrey fought at the front, swinging his sword like he was auditioning for sainthood. When it was over, thousands of Egyptians lay dead, and the Crusaders stood victorious, half-naked and delirious from heat.
Jerusalem was secure—for the moment. And Godfrey, the monk-soldier, had become a living legend.
Then, almost immediately, he died.
The cause is debated: dysentery, plague, arrow wound, or God finally checking his math. He lasted less than a year as ruler, dying in July 1100 somewhere near Caesarea or Jerusalem, aged about forty. His brother Baldwin quickly swooped in, crowned himself King Baldwin I, and proceeded to rule like the family’s less religious, more competent sociopath.
Godfrey’s body was entombed in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, turning him into both relic and real-estate problem. Pilgrims came to pray at his tomb; rival lords came to plot over it. The man who wouldn’t wear a crown got more gold-leaf memorials than anyone else in the city.
The Making of a Holy Action Figure
History, of course, loves to repaint its killers as heroes. Within a century, Godfrey had been turned from a crusading aristocrat with control issues into a divine warrior-saint. Chroniclers described him as “the purest knight who ever lived.” Poets made him a paladin of Christendom. His legend became the cornerstone of crusader propaganda—proof that European nobility could commit genocide and still make it into Paradise if they smiled about it.
In The Song of Roland and later The Jerusalem Delivered by Torquato Tasso, Godfrey became a mythic avenger in shining armor—half Achilles, half Sunday School teacher. Tasso’s version leads an army of sinning superheroes and ends with divine victory, omitting the smell of burnt children and the casual cannibalism at Ma’arrat al-Numan.
Medieval Europe lapped it up. They built statues, named boys after him, and claimed he descended from the lineage of King David or even Jesus himself. The Holy Roman Emperors used his myth to justify their own crusades, like a brand endorsement from beyond the grave.
In modern times, the shine has worn off. Historians point out that Godfrey’s “piety” looked a lot like colonial ambition, and his “holy victory” was an ethnic cleansing that set the Middle East on fire for centuries. Yet he still stands atop equestrian statues in Brussels and Bouillon, one arm raised to Heaven, the other clutching a sword that probably still drips with imaginary blood.
The Aftertaste of Glory
If you squint, you can almost admire him. Godfrey was consistent. He believed every word of his madness. Unlike the politicking crusaders who followed, he really did think he was cleansing the world for Christ. The tragedy is that faith like his doesn’t clean—it burns.
He wasn’t the worst of the Crusaders, just the most efficient. He took the cross seriously, and in doing so, proved that conviction without conscience is just zeal with better PR.
When modern tourists visit Jerusalem and stare up at the ramparts of the old city, they walk over the bones of his victims and his soldiers alike. Nobody can tell which is which anymore. That’s legacy for you: a blend of glory, guilt, and sun-bleached dust.
Godfrey of Bouillon died thinking he’d secured God’s kingdom on earth. Instead, he built a monument to holy arrogance that still smolders a thousand years later.
The crown of thorns fit him better than he knew.
warrior rank #184
Sources
Riley-Smith, Jonathan. The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986.
Asbridge, Thomas. The First Crusade: A New History. Oxford University Press, 2004.
Runciman, Steven. A History of the Crusades, Vol. 1. Cambridge University Press, 1951.
Tyerman, Christopher. God’s War: A New History of the Crusades. Harvard University Press, 2006.
“Gesta Francorum,” anonymous crusader chronicle (ca. 1100).
Chronicle of Raymond of Aguilers, eyewitness account.
The Jerusalem Delivered, Torquato Tasso, 1581 (the first fanfiction adaptation).
“Medieval Trading Cards: Crusader Edition,” imaginary set allegedly featuring “Godfrey, Level 99 Cleric.”
Deus Vult! The Musical, canceled after one performance in 1972.
