The World of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  THE MELISENDE PSALTER

  Despite the image of Frankish exceptionalism promoted by William of Tyre, the courts of twelfth-century kings of Jerusalem were as diverse and multicultural as any other in the Levant. Royal dynasticism promoted close association with Greeks and Armenians while royal patronage acted as a magnet for indigenous professionals and servants, from medical doctors to artists and craftsmen. The brothers Kings Baldwin III and Amalric had an Armenian grandmother, Morphia, wife of Baldwin II, and a French father, King Fulk; both married Greek princesses (Theodora Comnena and Maria Comnena respectively). The court of Amalric attracted Arab and Jewish doctors, Syrian instructors in horsemanship and, in William of Tyre, tutor to the future Baldwin IV, a Jerusalem Frank possessed of the grandest elite western European academic training. This was not a new development. Baldwin I had employed local Syrian converts, and kings regularly patronised local Syrian Christian religious houses. Frankish Outremer was not hermetically sealed from either its non-Frankish subjects or neighbours. Cross-border alliances of convenience, even against fellow Franks, were not unknown. Aristocratic Muslims visited the Haram al-Sharif and the al-Aqsa mosque. The rebellious Count Hugh of Jaffa attempted to make common cause with the Fatimid garrison at Ascalon in 1134. The refurbishment of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem c. 1170, whose bishop was born in England, was paid for by King Amalric and his father-in-law, the Byzantine emperor Manuel I, and included Greek mosaics with Latin inscriptions.

  45. Front cover of the Melisande Psalter.

  The so-called Melisende Psalter provides exquisite illustration of such cosmopolitan cross-cultural fertilisation. Produced between 1134 and 1143, probably as a special presentation volume from King Fulk to his wife Queen Melisende (the half-Armenian daughter of Baldwin II and heiress to the kingdom), the psalter, a diminutive book (22 cm x 14 cm) of over 200 folios, contains twenty-four illuminated scenes from the New Testament painted by an illustrator with the Greek name of Basilius; an English-style calendar of saints’ and commemoration days, including for Melisende’s parents King Baldwin and Queen Morphia, illustrated by a different artist with monthly signs of the Zodiac showing combined western European and Arabic influence; a copy of the Latin psalms written in northern French script, with a third illuminator contributing initial letters showing a hybrid Italian-Arabic style, possibly Sicilian; and, in the same hand as the psalms, prayers to nine saints, illustrated by a fourth artist who tried to incorporate Byzantine motifs into a western European style. The delicate Islamic-style geometrically designed ivory and gem-studded covers depict, on the front, scenes from the life of King David, and, on the back, a king (perhaps Fulk) performing the Six Works of Mercy from Matthew’s Gospel (feeding the hungry; giving water to the thirsty; clothing the naked; sheltering the homeless; visiting the sick; and visiting the imprisoned). Even the spine, decorated with Byzantine silk and the Greek crosses of the Jerusalem royal arms, breathes a mixture of eastern and western styles and the highest luxury. Probably created in workshops associated with the cosmopolitan Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the psalter bears striking witness to a fertile and eclectic congregation of international styles – northern French, English, Byzantine, Arabic, Islamic and Armenian – that cannot have been as unique as the psalter’s own survival. (It is now in the British Library.)43

  46. Qal’at Sanjil, Raymond of Tripoli’s castle that remained in Frankish hands 1103–1289 and still stands today. A late nineteenth-century view.

  CASTLES IN OUTREMER

  Castles such as Crac des Chevaliers in Syria or Marienburg in Poland represent the largest, most iconic surviving relics of the crusades, symbols of military conquest and rule that lay at the centre of active crusading. This is appropriate, as fortified sites for aggression, defence and authority were central to the imposition and consolidation of political and social control, from the start of campaigns to the enforcement of continued civil power. In every region of crusader conquest – the Levant, Iberia, the Baltic or Greece – castles served a dual function as military bases and as focal points for the protection, subjugation or exploitation of local populations and resources. This merely extended to areas of crusading the use of castles familiar across western Europe from the tenth century onwards. Crusaders brought their expectations and technologies with them, while borrowing from local traditions, adapting existing fortifications, and developing their own innovative sophisticated designs and styles. Each region of conquest imposed distinctive patterns and features.

  In Outremer, the earliest castles were simple towers, scores of which, of one or two storeys, were erected in the first fifty years of Frankish occupation, chiefly as centres of lordships in which to dispense justice, receive taxes and store renders. They were very much on the model of the Norman castles that festooned England after 1066, except that in Outremer the castles were of stone and were not constructed on artificial earth mounds (mottes) as in the west. The great nobles of the new Frankish principalities built their own large keeps, which could extend to substantial palatial complexes, in the cities from which they derived their power and wealth, such as Beirut, Tyre, Jubail or Jerusalem, where the king’s castle incorporated the existing Roman Tower of David. On arrival in the east, crusaders found local enclosure fortifications (castra), common across the eastern Mediterranean, which they adapted and copied as these provided relative ease of construction – walls surrounding a courtyard – and convenient shelter for local Franks, especially in remote areas such as Transjordan (Montreal from 1115 and Kerak from 1142), in frontier regions, such as southern Palestine where from the 1130s a string of castra ringed the Fatimid port of Ascalon (e.g. Ibelin, Darum and Gaza), or on suitable sites such as the small islet off Sidon. The Military Orders, whose wealth meant they began to take over most of the rural castles of all types from the mid-twelfth century, also built castra, essentially as fortified cloisters. Some enclosure castles also contained keeps (as at Darum and Jubail) or were surrounded by often extensive protective outworks (as at Ibelin). In the later twelfth century, additions to initial designs charted increased investment and the growing Ayyubid military threat; some fortified manor house complexes were thus transformed into regular castles (for example, Belmont near Jerusalem).

  47. Crac des Chevaliers.

  From these basic enclosure castles came the famous concentric castle design, simply one castra surrounding another, a double defensive system that echoed Byzantine fortifications such as the Theodosian walls of Constantinople familiar to successive generations of crusaders. The concentric design was pioneered by the Hospitallers at Belvoir, a hilltop site overlooking the Jordan valley and the road from Damascus to Jerusalem bought by the Order in 1168. Completed probably a decade or so later, Belvoir’s concentric design withstood Saladin’s forces for eighteen months to two years (1187–9) before the garrison surrendered once the outer defences had been penetrated; the inner walls were never breached. Belvoir provided a model for later thirteenth-century castle building in Outremer (such as the extensions at Crac des Chevaliers and Margat, both belonging to the Hospitallers) and in the west, notably a number of Edward I of England’s castles in Wales.

  48. Belvoir.

  Location and topography exerted as much influence on castle design as purpose, the contrasting settings of cities, coastal plain, hill country or desert determining salient features. Accessible hilltops, as at Montreal or Saphet in Upper Galilee, offered attractive sites, although more favoured were those naturally protected on three sides by deep river valleys or, in the case of the great fortress of Athlit, Château Pèlerin, built with the help of pilgrims and crusaders during the Fifth Crusade (1217–18), protected by the sea. Some of the largest and most imposing castles were built on such spurs of land, often in contested hill country or near vital trade routes: Crac des Chevaliers protecting the Homs gap behind Tripoli; Saone on the Latakia to Aleppo road; Margat on the coast road between Tortosa and Antioch. The Teutonic Order’s headquarters (1229–71) at Montfort in Upper Gal
ilee was unusual in being an administrative capital not a strategic military post. Outremer’s eclectic castle system reflected varying Frankish needs: internal oversight of material possessions and the local population; political control; settler protection; ostentatious display of power; control of trade routes; extending areas of influence; and defence along flexible and porous frontier zones. The usefulness and flexibility of castles in different contexts was eccentrically if ingeniously confirmed by Richard I’s prefabricated wooden castle, Mattegriffon, which he brought with him from Sicily to the siege of Acre in 1191.46

  As elsewhere, cost dominated the provision of castles in Outremer. Increasingly in the twelfth century and completely in the thirteenth, oversight, ownership and construction of castles became the preserve of the Military Orders who had access to resources beyond the means of the richest secular lords. The costs of construction and maintaining the Galilee Templar castle of Saphet, rebuilt from 1240, were huge: 1,100,000 gold bezants in the first two and a half years, and 40,000 bezants a year thereafter for a garrison of 50 Knights Templar, 30 sergeant brothers, 50 Turcopoles, 300 crossbowmen, 820 servants and labourers and 400 slaves, slave labour having played a necessary part.47 The garrison at Vadum Iacob had been of similar strength, while the complement at Athlit was around 4,000.

  Behind their massive walls and extensive outer defences, achieved by extraordinarily skilled and ingenious feats of engineering in moulding the unforgiving landscape to their purposes, these large castles operated as homes and communities not just barracks. Internally, they were furnished, equipped with cisterns, kitchens, stables, dining halls, chapels, domestic quarters, and, at Belvoir at least, a bathroom. Inside walls were plastered and decorated with frescoes. Inside and out, the stonework and vaulting were finished to a high quality, not least the fine ashlar of the outer walls of most of the grandest castles. Yet despite their architectural sophistication and effective defensive designs, these castles could not survive indefinitely on their own resources. Without relief they were doomed to fall to determined attack, as their capture by Saladin and later Baibars and his successors showed only too decisively.48

  Outremer did not become a cultural catalyst or melting pot. Inter-communal contacts remained circumstantial and superficial. Each community retained its sealed identity, regarding the others – if at all – as strange. The Arabisation of Syria and Palestine had taken centuries. The Franks never continuously occupied anywhere on the Levantine mainland for longer than 186 years (Qal’at Sanjil, the castle site of Mount Pilgrim outside Tripoli, 1103–1289). Some adopted habits of dress, eating, housing, even military tactics appropriate to the environment. Tancred of Lecce issued coins in Antioch portraying himself as an eastern potentate, bearded and perhaps wearing a headdress, possibly a turban. Loose-fitting clothes, veils, surcoats over armour, cool summer fabrics, furs for the cold winters were dictated by the climate. Some acclimatised Franks took to eastern cuisine, although others stuck firmly to a western diet, including pork. Archaeological evidence indicates that the constant stream of new arrivals from the west, as pilgrims or settlers, hardly helped raise the standards of health as they appear to have been generally poorly nourished and riddled with intestinal parasites. Some adaptation to local hygiene can be traced in Frankish maintenance of aqueducts, water cisterns and, in the Hospitaller castle at Belvoir overlooking the Jordan, a bathroom. Militarily, the Franks proved fast learners, coming to terms with Turkish field tactics by developing counter-measures in the delayed massed charge and the fighting march, where the cavalry was protected by flanking infantry. But the Franks did not copy their enemies’ mounted heavy and light archers or the battlefield feints.49 Despite their sustained military endeavours, by the 1180s, Outremer Franks could strike their western European contemporaries as exotic or dissolute, the Jerusalem embassy to Europe in 1184/5 being remembered by one hostile witness for its ostentation and attendant clouds of perfume, features that made it easier to blame the poulains, as the Franks were derisively known in the west, for the political and military setbacks and disasters that engulfed them.50

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CRUSADES AND THE DEFENCE OF OUTREMER, 1100–1187

  Twelfth-century Outremer stood at the extreme physical frontier of Latin Christendom while at the same time occupying a central space in Latin Christian thought, emotion and cosmology. One veteran of the First Crusade and a Jerusalem resident asked, rhetorically, why, despite overwhelming numerical superiority, the Franks’ enemies had failed to crush the newcomers: ‘Why did they not, as innumerable locusts in a little field, so completely devour and destroy us?’ Obviously because of the power and protection of God, but he added, alongside the Almighty, ‘we were in need of nothing if only men and horses did not fail us’.1 Faith and military reinforcements sustained Outremer as an intrinsic, familiar, if exotic, part of Christendom. The phrase ‘shouted aloud at the crossroads of Ascalon’ became a metaphor for common gossip, a twelfth-century version simultaneously of the Clapham omnibus and Timbuctoo, at once popular space and the ends of the earth.2

  The Crusade of 1101

  Even before the fall of Jerusalem in 1099, further armies were being prepared. In response to news of the success at Antioch and the crusaders’ pleas for reinforcements, new preaching campaigns were launched in Italy and France attracting backsliders who had failed to fulfil their vows of 1095–6; those eager to hop onto the bandwagon of success; and shamefaced veterans who had abandoned the 1096 expedition. With songs, letters and early narratives all unblinkingly emphasising the raw, violent physicality of the bloody victory of 1099 and material success, there was little abstract about the new appeal.3 There was talk of conquering Baghdad or Egypt.4 The heroics of 1097–9 seemed to confirm God’s favour and immanence and a turn in the tide of history. The subsequent dismal failures of the campaigns of 1101 served notice that such high ambitions were spiritually and practically unsound, setting a more restricted, realistic frame around future strategies for defending the new conquests.

  While there had been no pause in contingents leaving for the Levant in the years after 1096, the promotional campaigns of 1099–1100 raised very substantial forces, in total perhaps as great as the armies of 1096. Among the leaders were Duke William IX of Aquitaine, Count William II of Nevers, Duke Odo I of Burgundy, Count Stephen I of Burgundy, Duke Welf IV of Bavaria, and even Conrad, constable to Urban II’s arch-enemy Henry IV of Germany. The regions of recruitment mirrored those of 1096. A Lombard army set off from Milan on 3 September 1100, reaching Constantinople in late February or early March 1101, to be met by Raymond of Toulouse, who had been Emperor Alexius’s guest since the previous year. By early June, northern French troops under Stephen of Blois, the Burgundians and Constable Conrad’s small German force had joined Raymond and the Lombards at Nicomedia on the Asiatic side of the Bosporus. Accompanied by the Milanese relics of the city’s patron Saint Ambrose and Raymond’s Antioch Holy Lance, the army’s religious identity did not prevent its Italian leadership deciding on the quixotic political priority of rescuing Bohemund, who had been in Turkish captivity in north-eastern Asia Minor since being defeated in 1100 by an army of Danishmend Turks while trying to relieve the Armenian city of Melitene in eastern Anatolia. Rejecting the advice of the First Crusade veterans to follow the glorified path of 1097, the army captured Ankara before breaking up under sustained Turkish assaults at Merzifon in early August, the leaders fleeing back to Constantinople, abandoning the infantry and non-combatants to massacre or slavery.