Baldwin I of Jerusalem and Sigurd the Crusader took the Fatimid port of Sidon on 4 December 1110 after a siege of about 47 days, the king's army attacking from the land while the Norwegian fleet, joined by the Venetians, held the sea.
The siege of Sidon in the autumn of 1110 won the Kingdom of Jerusalem the Fatimid port that lay between its new conquest of Beirut and the still unconquered city of Tyre. Baldwin I of Jerusalem invested the town from the land while Sigurd the Crusader, one of Norway's joint kings, closed it from the sea with the fleet he had brought from the north, and a Venetian fleet under Doge Ordelafo Faliero joined them during the operation.
It was Baldwin's second attempt on the town. In August 1108 an Egyptian fleet and Turkish horsemen from Damascus had forced him to give up, which showed that Sidon could not be taken while Fatimid galleys moved freely along the coast. The Norwegian fleet removed that problem. The garrison and townspeople surrendered on 4 December 1110, on terms that allowed those who wished to leave to go with their goods, and Baldwin made Sidon a lordship for the Flemish knight Eustace Grenier.
The dating rests on the Damascus chronicler Ibn al-Qalanisi, who is reported to put the start of the siege on 19 October and its length at forty-seven days; some modern accounts give the surrender as 5 December rather than the 4th. Norse tradition remembered the same weeks very differently, as the high point of Sigurd's journey to Jerusalem.
By 1110 the Franks held most of the coast of Palestine. Baldwin had taken Caesarea in 1101 and Acre in 1104 with the help of Italian fleets, and Tripoli had fallen in 1109 to a combined effort that made Bertrand of Toulouse its count. Sidon, Tyre and Ascalon were still held for the Fatimid caliphs of Cairo, garrisoned from Egypt and supplied by sea. The Fatimids had refortified Sidon in 1098, and in early 1106 its governor paid Baldwin a large tribute for a two-year truce.
When the truce ran out Baldwin tried force. In August 1108 he laid siege to Sidon with a squadron of adventurers from several Italian cities, but an Egyptian fleet defeated the Italian ships in a sea fight outside the harbour, and when Turkish horsemen arrived from Damascus he lifted the siege. That failure set the terms for the next attempt: without ships able to keep the Fatimid squadrons away, a land army before Sidon could be undone from the sea.
The spring of 1110 showed what a fleet could do. With Genoese and Pisan ships blockading the harbour and Bertrand of Tripoli beside him, Baldwin took Beirut by storm on 13 May 1110, and the Italians massacred much of its population. Sidon was now the only Fatimid port between Frankish Beirut and Tyre. Baldwin could not follow up at once, because Mawdud, the atabeg of Mosul, had invaded the County of Edessa, and the king spent part of the summer campaigning against him in the north.
Sigurd had sailed from Norway in 1107 with sixty longships, the figure given in the verse of the skald Thorarin Stutfeld that Heimskringla quotes. Three years and many fights lay behind the fleet when it reached the Levant in the summer of 1110: a winter at the court of Henry I of England, a second in Galicia, battles along the Muslim coast of Iberia and in the Balearic Islands, and a long stay in Sicily. Einarr Skúlason's verse puts the landing at Acre, though some modern accounts allow that it may have been Jaffa.
Baldwin received Sigurd with great honour and rode with him from Jerusalem to the river Jordan and back. He then asked for help against the coastal towns still in Muslim hands, and Sigurd is reported to have answered that his men had come to devote themselves to the service of Christ. The Norwegians were not the only newcomers: modern accounts of the campaign add groups of English, Flemish and Danish pilgrims who joined the king's army.
Heimskringla sets out the price of the alliance plainly. Before the campaign, by order of Baldwin and the patriarch Gibelin of Arles, a splinter was cut from the relic of the True Cross and given to Sigurd, on condition that he and twelve of his men swore to promote Christianity with all their power, to work for an archbishop's seat in Norway, to introduce tithes, and to keep the relic where Saint Olaf lay. Several modern summaries present the splinter as a reward for Sidon, but in the saga the oath comes first and the siege afterwards.
Baldwin's army closed in on Sidon from the landward side while Sigurd brought his ships up from Acre and anchored off the town. The fleet's task was to seal the harbour against supply and to protect the army from Fatimid ships based at Tyre, the kind of naval relief that had wrecked the attempt of 1108. Ibn al-Qalanisi's date for the start of operations is 19 October 1110.
What happened at sea is told in two ways. In one version, followed by several modern historians, a large Fatimid fleet came up from Tyre and got the better of the Norwegians until the Venetian fleet under Ordelafo Faliero arrived and turned the balance. In the other, a large Egyptian fleet that had been preparing to strike at Acre withdrew into the harbour of Tyre when it heard that the Christian ships were sailing for Sidon, and did not dare come out, so that Sigurd could anchor off the town with his whole force. The Venetian part is not in doubt: accounts of Faliero's reign give his expedition to Syria about a hundred ships, and Venice was rewarded with property in Acre.
On land Baldwin's engineers built siege towers taller than the walls, from which crossbowmen shot down into the defences, and each man in the towers is said to have been given a bucket of water and vinegar against fire. The defenders answered by tunnelling under the ground where the great tower stood, intending to bring it down. Norse verse also remembers a stone-throwing engine battering the houses of the town.
The governor of Sidon tried two other ways out. Before the fighting began he is said to have offered Baldwin a large sum of money to leave the town alone, and was refused. During the siege a plot was made to kill the king through a converted Muslim in his personal service; by the story that has come down, Christians living in Sidon learned of it and shot a warning into the Frankish camp on an arrow, and the plan failed. With the mines and the murder plot both defeated, the town had nothing left to bargain with except its surrender.
Sidon surrendered on 4 December 1110, after about forty-seven days. Baldwin offered the kind of terms he had given at Acre in 1104: safe conduct for everyone who wished to leave, with permission to take their goods to Damascus, and security for those who stayed. Modern accounts drawing on the Arabic sources add that he imposed a levy of 20,000 dinars, a sum that allowed the wealthier citizens to buy their departure while poorer families had no choice but to remain under Frankish rule.
Beirut seven months earlier had ended in a massacre by the Italian crews. At Sidon Baldwin spared the townspeople, many of whom moved to Tyre and Damascus, while a Muslim population stayed on under Frankish rule, so the kingdom gained a working port with its trade and revenues intact.
Heimskringla says the kings took possession of the town and of a great treasure of money, and that Sigurd made a present of his share to Baldwin. The Norwegian fleet then sailed north to Cyprus and on to Constantinople, where Alexios I Komnenos received Sigurd, who left his ships with the emperor and travelled home overland. Faliero was killed seven years later, fighting below the walls of Zadar in 1117.
Baldwin gave Sidon to Eustace Grenier, a Flemish knight from the diocese of Thérouanne who had come east with him and already held Caesarea. The two fiefs together made Eustace one of the most powerful lords in the kingdom. In April 1123, while Baldwin II of Jerusalem was a prisoner, he was elected constable and bailiff, and he died that June. His son Gerard succeeded him at Sidon, and the Grenier family held the lordship until 1187 and again after 1197, until Julian Grenier sold it to the Knights Templar in 1260.
The conquest left Tyre and Ascalon as the last Fatimid strongholds on the coast. Baldwin besieged Tyre from late November 1111 without a fleet, and Eustace paid for siege engines for the attempt; it failed when Toghtekin of Damascus came to the city's relief, and Baldwin withdrew to Acre in April 1112. Tyre did not fall until 1124, when a Venetian fleet again made the difference, and Ascalon held out until 1153.
Sidon stayed a Frankish lordship for seventy-seven years. After Saladin destroyed the kingdom's field army at the Battle of Hattin in July 1187, the coastal towns had few men left to defend them, and Sidon passed to him later that year. German crusaders recovered it in 1197. The Sea Castle that stands on the islet off the harbour today was built by the crusaders in the thirteenth century, long after 1110, and is the most visible trace of Frankish Sidon.