In the Holy City of Jerusalem, the Sultan of the Timurid Empire stood upon the ramparts gazing at the enemy army gathered below. The Crusaders had attacked sooner than he had anticipated, and the messenger that he and his Byzantine Allies had been captured and eliminated by the Crusader forces before he could reach the shores of the Reich.
Because of this tragic fate, Jerusalem stood on its own, with a garrison comprising Timurid and Byzantine soldiers, who would have decided to defend the city until their last breaths. Months of indiscriminate bombardment had left much of the city uninhabitable. Luckily, the rounds fired by the Crusader's drake cannons were inert, and thus caused far less damage than the Austrian terror bombings of Florence.