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The gold dome and its crescent belong to the Dome of the Rock, a Muslim shrine standing where the Jewish temples once stood. The crusaders kept the building. They set a cross on the dome and said Mass inside it as the Temple of the Lord.

The tower touches the wall a little after noon. It is a wooden siege tower built from ships. Genoese sailors ran their vessels ashore at Jaffa weeks earlier and carried them here as timber, masts and all. There is no wood worth the name within miles of Jerusalem. On the fifteenth of July, 1099, a drawbridge slaps down from its top storey onto the northern rampart, and the first knights cross. Behind them stands what is left of the great pilgrimage: perhaps 12,000 fighting men, the residue of the hundred thousand or more who took the cross. Pope Urban had preached the expedition four years before with a phrase that became a war cry, God wills it. The walk itself had eaten the rest. They had set out three years earlier from the river valleys of the Rhine and the Rhône, in Germany and in France. Outside Antioch the hunger got bad enough that the chronicles record men eating thistles and worse. Then fever, arrows, desertion, and a thousand miles of other people's country. The ones who reached Jerusalem in June found the wells poisoned and the siege impossible. They did what armies of that faith did: they fasted, and walked barefoot in procession around the city walls, as Joshua's army had circled Jericho. The Muslim defenders watched from the parapets. Five weeks later the towers came. On the fifteenth the wall fell, and the city was taken. The expedition had shed more than numbers on the way. A people's crusade of the poor was preached ahead of schedule, and it left before the armies of the princes. It marched down the Rhine and opened the enterprise by massacring the Jewish communities of Speyer, Worms and Mainz, over their bishops' objections. Then it crossed into Asia and was wiped out in a month. The main armies' road was longer: two years to cross Anatolia and break Antioch, where the besiegers starved outside the walls and then, trapped in their turn, starved inside them. By the winter after Antioch, at the siege of Maarat, chroniclers on the crusade's own side recorded that the famished ate the dead. Men who had seen and done all of that arrived at last before the city they had been promised absolution for reaching. What followed poisoned the memory of three faiths. The army that had marched three years to free the holy city spent a day and a night killing it. They killed the garrison, the men, women and children of the Muslim quarters, and the Jews who had gathered in their chief synagogue, which was burned. Chroniclers on the winning side did not hide it. They rejoiced in it. One wrote that men rode in blood up to their bridles, a line lifted straight from the Book of Revelation, atrocity dressed as prophecy fulfilled. Even allowing for a victor's arithmetic, the killing was vast, and it was remembered. Some prisoners were kept alive for the work of carrying the dead out of the streets. A week later the princes offered Godfrey of Bouillon the crown of the new kingdom, and he refused the word. He would not wear a crown of gold, he said, in the city where his savior had worn a crown of thorns. He took the title Advocate of the Holy Sepulchre instead. He was dead within a year. Pope Urban, who had set the whole avalanche moving, died in Rome on the twenty-ninth of July, two weeks after the city fell, before any ship could bring him the news. Signol painted the scene in 1847 for the crusade halls at Versailles, a king's museum of national glory. He gave it the white horse, the raised sword, the golden Dome of the Rock through the smoke. And because the century still had some honesty in it, he laid the dead plainly across the bottom of the picture.