They arrived dying with thirst, dropping with weariness, lamenting the loss of the dead that rotted along their road; they arrived shrivelled to rags or already raving with fever and they did what they had come to do.
Above all, it is clear that they had the vices as well as the virtues of a mob.

The shocking massacre in which they indulged in the sudden relaxation of success is quite obviously a massacre by a mob.
It is all the more profoundly revolutionary because it must have been for the most part a French mob.

It was of the same order as the Massacre of September, and it is but a part of the same truth that the First Crusade was as revolutionary as the French Revolution.
It was of the same order as the Massacre of St.Bartholomew, which was also a piece of purely popular fanaticism, directed against what was also regarded as an anti-national aristocracy.
It is practically self-evident that the Christian commanders were opposed to it, and tried to stop it.

Tancred promised their lives to the Moslems in the mosque, but the mob clearly disregarded him.
Raymond of Toulouse himself saved those in the Tower of David, and managed to send them safely with their property to Ascalon.
But revolution with all its evil as well as its good was loose and raging in the streets of the Holy City.

And in nothing do we see that spirit of revolution more clearly than in the sight of all those peasants and serfs and vassals, in that one wild moment in revolt, not only against the conquered lords of Islam, but even against the conquering lords of Christendom.
The whole strain of the siege indeed had been one of high and even horrible excitement.