The Lord Almighty from his heavenly throne turned his all-seeing gaze to Syria, where the camp of the crusader army stood. For the sixth year, the soldiers of Christ have been fighting in the East, many cities and kingdoms have obeyed them, but the Holy City of Jerusalem was still the stronghold of the infidels. Reading in human hearts as in an open book, He saw that of the many glorious leaders, only the great Gottfried of Bouillon is fully worthy of the Crusader's story on the sacred feat of the liberation of the Holy Sepulcher. Archangel Gabriel brought this message to Gottfried, and he reverently accepted God's will.
When Gottfried summoned the leaders of the Franks and told that God had chosen him to be the leader over them all, a murmur arose in the assembly, for many leaders did not concede to Gottfried either in nobility or in deeds on the battlefield. But then Peter the Hermit raised his voice in support, and everyone heeded the words of the inspirer and honored adviser to the soldiers, and the next morning the mighty army, in which
under the banner of Gottfried of Bouillon rallied the color of chivalry throughout Europe, set out on a campaign. East fluttered.
And now the crusaders camped at Emmaus, in view of the walls of Jerusalem. Here the ambassadors of the king of Egypt appeared in their tents and offered to abandon the Holy City for a rich ransom. After hearing a decisive refusal from Gottfried, one of them set off home, the second, the Circassian knight Argant, eager to quickly draw his sword against the enemies of the Prophet, galloped to Jerusalem.
Jerusalem at that time was ruled by King Aladin, the vassal of the Egyptian king and the evil oppressor of Christians. When the crusaders launched an attack, Aladin’s army met them at the city walls, and a fierce battle ensued, in which without number fell the unchristians, but many brave knights were killed. The crusaders suffered especially severe damage from the mighty Argant and the great virgin warrior Clorinda, who arrived from Persia to help Aladin. The incomparable Tancred came up with Clorinda in battle and smashed her helmet with a spear, but when he saw a beautiful face and golden braids, struck by love, he lowered his sword.
The bravest and most beautiful of the knights of Europe, the son of Italy, Rinald, was already on the city wall when Gottfried gave the army the order to return to the camp, for the time had not yet come to fall to the Holy City.
Seeing that the stronghold of the enemies of the Lord nearly fell, the king of the underworld called his innumerable servants — demons, furies, chimeras, pagan gods — and ordered all crusaders to fall upon them. Among the others, the servant of the devil was the magician Idraoth, king of Damascus. He ordered his daughter Armida, eclipsing the beauty of all the maidens of the East, to go to the camp of Gottfried and, using all the female art, to bring discord into the ranks of the soldiers of Christ.
Armida appeared in the camp of the Franks, and not one of them, except Gottfried and Tancred, could resist the spell of her beauty. Calling herself the Princess of Damascus, by force and deceit, deprived of the throne, Armida begged the leader of the crusaders to give her a small detachment of selected knights in order to overthrow the usurper with them; in exchange, she promised Gottfried the union of Damascus and all kinds of help. In the end, Gottfried ordered ten brave men to be elected by lot, but as soon as the question was about who would lead the detachment, the Norwegian leader Hernand, at the instigation of a demon, started a quarrel with Rinald and fell from his sword; the incomparable Rinald was forced to go into exile.
Armida, disarmed by love, did not lead to Damascus, but to a gloomy castle on the shore of the Dead Sea, in the waters of which neither iron nor stone drown. Within the walls of the castle, Armida revealed her true identity, inviting the captives to either renounce Christ and oppose the Franks, or perish; only one of the knights, the despicable Rambald, chose life. She sent the rest in shackles and under reliable guard to the king of Egypt.
The Crusaders, meanwhile, carried out a regular siege, surrounded Jerusalem with a rampart, built assault vehicles, and the city’s inhabitants strengthened the walls. Bored with idleness, the proud son of the Caucasus Argant went into the field, ready to fight with anyone who would accept his challenge. The first to rush to Argant was the brave Otgon, but was soon defeated by the infidel,
Then came the turn of Tancred. The two heroes converged, as once Ajax and Hector at the walls of Ilion. The fierce battle lasted until nightfall, without revealing the winner, and when the heralds broke off the match, the wounded fighters conspired to continue it at dawn.
A duel from the city walls with bated breath was watched by Erminius, daughter of the king of Antioch. Once she was a captive of Tancred, but the noble Tancred gave the princess freedom, Hermineus unwanted, because she was burning with an irresistible love for captivating her. Skillful in medicine, Herminia intended to penetrate the camp of the crusaders in order to heal the wounds of the knight. To do this, she cut off her wondrous hair and put on Clorinda's armor, but on the approaches to the camp the guard found her and rushed after her in pursuit. But Tancred, imagining that it was a warrior amiable to his heart, who endangered his life because of him, and wanting to save her from his pursuers, also set off after Ermine. He did not catch her and, having gone astray, was tricked into the enchanted castle of Armida, where he became her captive.
Meanwhile, morning came and no one came out to meet Argant. The Circassian knight began to reproach the cowardice of the Franks, but not one of them dared to accept the challenge, until at last Raymond, the Count of Toulouse, rode forward. When the victory was already almost in the hands of Raymond, the king of darkness seduced the best Saracen archer to fire an arrow into the knight and himself directed its flight. The arrow pierced the joint of the armor, but the guardian angel saved Raymond from certain death.
Seeing how insidiously the laws of the duel were violated, the crusaders rushed to the infidels. Their fury was so great that they almost crushed the enemy and broke into Jerusalem. But not this day was determined by the Lord to take the Holy City, so He allowed the hellish host to come to the aid of the infidels and restrain the pressure of Christians.
The dark forces left no intention of crushing the crusaders. Inspired by the fury of Alecto, Sultan Soliman with an army of Arab nomads suddenly attacked the Franks camp at night. And he would have won if the Lord had not sent the archangel Michael, so that he would deprive the infidels of the help of hell. The Crusaders perked up, closed their ranks, and the knights liberated by Rinald from the Armidine captivity arrived just in time. The Arabs fled, and the mighty Soliman, in the battle, took the lives of many Christian soldiers.
The day came, and Peter the Hermit blessed Gottfried to go on the attack. After serving a prayer service, the crusaders, under the cover of siege machines, encircled the walls of Jerusalem, the Infidels fiercely resisted, Clorinda sowed death in the ranks of Christians with her arrows, one of which Gottfried himself was wounded in the leg. The angel of God healed the leader, and he again entered the battlefield, but the falling night darkness forced him to give an order to retreat.
At night, Argant and Clorinda made a sortie to the camp of the Franks and set fire to the siege vehicles with a mixture made by the magician Ismen. When they retreated, pursued by the crusaders, the city’s defenders slammed the gates, in the dark not noticing that Clorinda remained outside. Then Tancred entered the battle with her, but the warrior was in armor unfamiliar to him, and the knight recognized his beloved, only inflicting a mortal blow to her. Raised in the Muslim faith, Clorinda knew, however, that her parents were the Christian rulers of Ethiopia and that, by the will of her mother, she should have been baptized even in infancy. Mortally wounded, she asked her killer to perform this sacrament over her, and she gave up the Christian spirit.
So that the crusaders could not build new cars, Ismen allowed a host of demons into the only forest in the district. None of the knights dared to enter the enchanted thicket, with the exception of Tancred, but even that could not dispel the ominous spell of the magician.
Despondency reigned in the camp of the crusader army, when Gottfried discovered in a dream that only Rinald would overcome witchcraft and that only the defenders of Jerusalem would tremble before him. At one time, Armida vowed to cruelly take revenge on Rinalda, who repulsed the captive knights from her, but barely saw him when she ignited an irresistible love. The young woman was struck by her beauty in the very heart, and Armida was transported with her lover to the distant enchanted Happy Islands. To these islands two knights went after Rinald: the Danes Karl and Ubald. With the help of the good wizard, they managed to get across the ocean, the waters of which were previously plowed only by uliss. Having overcome many dangers and temptations, the ambassadors of Gottfried found Rinald forgetting everything in the midst of the joys of love. But once Rinald saw the battle armor, he remembered the sacred duty and without hesitation followed Karl with Ubald. Enraged, Armida rushed to the camp of the king of Egypt, who, with the army recruited throughout the East, went to the aid of Aladin. Inspiring the eastern knights, Armida promised to become the wife of the one who will defeat Rinald in battle.
And so Gottfried gives the order for the last attack. In a bloody battle, Christians crushed the infidels, of which the worst - invincible Argant - fell at the hands of Tancred. The Crusaders entered the Holy City, and Aladin with the remnants of the army took refuge in the Tower of David, when clouds of dust rose on the horizon - the Egyptian army was approaching Jerusalem.
And again the battle began, cruel, for the army of the infidels was strong. At one of the most difficult moments for Christians, Aladdin brought the soldiers from the Tower of David to her aid, but everything was in vain. With God's help, the crusaders gained the upper hand, unchristians fled. The king of Egypt became a captive of Gottfried, but he let him go, not wanting to hear about a rich ransom, for he did not come to trade with the East, but to fight.
Having scattered the army of infidels, Gottfried with his companions entered the liberated city and, even without removing his bloodstained armor, he knelt before the Holy Sepulcher.
