structural:scholar_edition, structural:reformatting
The Siege of Jerusalem marked the successful end of the First Crusade, whose objective was the recovery of the city of Jerusalem and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre from Islamic control. The five-week siege began on 7 June 1099 and was carried out by the Christian forces of Western Europe mobilized by Pope Urban II after the Council of Clermont in 1095. The city had been out of Christian control since the Muslim conquest of the Levant in 637 and had been held for a century first by the Seljuk Turks and later by the Egyptian Fatimids. One of the root causes of the Crusades was the hindering of Christian pilgrimages to the Holy Land which began in the 4th century. A number of eyewitness accounts of the battle were recorded, including in the anonymous chronicle Gesta Francorum. After Jerusalem was captured on 15 July 1099, thousands of Muslims and Jews were massacred by Crusader soldiers. As the Crusaders secured control over the Temple Mount, revered as the site of the two destroyed Jewish Temples, they also seized Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock and repurposed them as Christian shrines. Godfrey of Bouillon, prominent among the Crusader leadership, was elected as the first ruler of Jerusalem.