We have no heart to dwell on the massacres which accompanied the victory so clearly purchased by the conquerors.

The historians, Latin or Oriental, set down at seventy thousand the number of Mussulmans massacred on the ramparts, in the mosques, in the streets, underground, and wherever they had attempted to find refuge: a number exceeding that of the armed inhabitants and the garrison of the city.

Battle-madness, thirst for vengeance, ferocity, brutality, greed, and every hateful passion were satiated without scruple, in the name of their holy cause.
When they were weary of slaughter, "orders were given," says Robert the monk, "to those of the Saracens who remained alive and were reserved for slavery, to clean the city, remove from it the dead, and purify it from all traces of such fearful carnage.

They promptly obeyed; removed, with tears, the dead; erected outside the gates dead-houses fashioned like citadels or defensive buildings; collected in baskets dissevered limbs; carried them away, and washed off the blood that stained the floors of temples and houses." Eight or ten days after the capture of Jerusalem, the crusader chiefs assembled to deliberate upon the election of a king of their prize.
There were several who were suggested for it and might have pretended to it.

Robert Shorthose, duke of Normandy, gave an absolute refusal, "liking better," says an English chronicler, "to give himself up to repose and indolence in Normandy than to serve, as a soldier, the King of kings: for which God never forgave him." Raymond, count of Toulouse, was already advanced in years, and declared "that he would have a horror of bearing the name of king in Jerusalem, but that he would give his consent to the election of anyone else." Tancred was and wished to be only the first of knights.