Jerusalem Delivered: The Epic That Turned a Siege into Legend

Long before any poet set pen to paper, Jerusalem had already earned its reputation as the most contested city on earth. Perched on a plateau in the Judaean Mountains between the Mediterranean and the Dead Sea, it had been destroyed at least twice, besieged twenty-three times, captured and recaptured forty-four times, and attacked fifty-two times over the course of its history. Sacred to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam alike, it was never simply a place on a map — it was a prize that armies crossed continents to seize.

In 637, the city fell to the armies of Caliph Umar after a war with the Byzantine Empire, bringing it under Muslim rule. That status held for more than four centuries until 1099, when the armies of the First Crusade stormed the walls and seized the city for Christendom. Out of that conquest rose the Kingdom of Jerusalem and a scattering of other Crusader states across the Levant — European rule planted deep in a land whose holiness had never depended on who governed it.

The Christian hold on Jerusalem did not last. In 1187, nearly ninety years after the Crusaders took the city, the forces of Saladin met the Crusader army at the Battle of Hattin and shattered it. Jerusalem returned to Muslim control after eighty-eight years in Christian hands, a reversal that echoed across Europe and became, for later generations, one of the defining dramas of the medieval world.

It was this drama — the First Crusade, its siege, and the fierce, doomed grandeur of holy war fought over Jerusalem — that supplied the raw material for one of the greatest epic poems of the Italian Renaissance: Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, 'Jerusalem Delivered.' Tasso took the historical siege of 1099 and transformed it into verse, giving literary immortality to a campaign that had already reshaped the fate of the city.

What made the subject so irresistible was the city itself. Jerusalem's walls, as they stand today, were rebuilt for the last time in 1538 under the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, but the Old City they enclose — divided since the nineteenth century into Armenian, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim quarters — still holds the physical memory of every army that ever marched on it. Within less than one square kilometer sit the Temple Mount and the Western Wall, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Dome of the Rock, and the Al-Aqsa Mosque — a density of sacred sites unmatched anywhere else on the planet.