The World of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  Louis’ failure did little to suppress the Egyptian strategy. In 1270 his second crusade, a disastrous, ill-conceived and ill-executed expedition to Tunis, was declared to be preparatory to another assault on Egypt. From the second half of the thirteenth century, stimulated by defeat, the crusades to Egypt spawned an extensive genre of detailed descriptions and investigations of the Egyptian economy and society, many based on eyewitness testimony from merchants, travelling clerics or released prisoners of war. The sixty years from 1270 saw a wealth of treatises, pamphlets and policy documents examining, sometimes in minute detail, economic warfare, maritime blockade, Near Eastern diplomacy and ethnicity, campaign costs, shipping, and the requirements of professional amphibious attacks on the Nile.62 Actions included trade bans on war materials – iron, timber, etc. – that Egypt lacked. Some strategists went further and insisted on a total cessation of all trade, while others argued that no sanctions should harm Christian merchants more than Muslim importers, recognition of the significance of the scarcely resistible attraction of Egyptian markets.63 The Egyptian crusade strategy stimulated or forced European planners and commanders to engage with a wider Afro-Asian world beyond the politics of Syria and Palestine. By the beginning of the fourteenth century, western observers were proposing alliances with the Il-Khans of Persia or with the Nubians of the Upper Nile. In the context of a new Egyptian crusade, a detailed gazetteer was produced by an Armenian prince describing Asiatic realms from Turkey to China while insisting that a necessary precursor to any crusade must be accurate knowledge of Egypt’s policy and resources.68

  MEDICINE

  Healthcare was taken very seriously by crusade commanders and planners. Despite medieval Arabic condescension and modern commentators’ disdainful superiority, medical provision for crusaders was extensive and neither wholly nugatory nor homicidal. Although wedded to classical notions of the four humours and privileging the academic learning of physicians over the artisan experience of surgeons, medieval western European medicine was not altogether ineffective in addressing the needs of crusaders and settlers in Outremer. If cures remained largely beyond medical knowledge or scientific skill, nursing was afforded respect and resources. The great twelfth-century hospital in Jerusalem run by the Order of St John catered for hundreds of patients regardless of class, race or religion, providing palliative care based on a regime of medicinal herbs, non-intervention, good diet, rest and a measure of cleanliness. The importance of medical care was recognised. Every crusade was accompanied by physicians and surgeons who complemented nursing the sick and wounded with necessary and not always ineffective campaign and battlefield surgery. Godfrey of Bouillon’s life was saved by doctors (medicos) when he was badly injured while hunting a bear during the march across Asia Minor in 1097. They probably cauterised what appeared to be a serious arterial wound.64 By the early thirteenth century, if not before, Italian cities were employing leading consultants to accompany their crusading contingents, while Louis IX took a cluster of physicians and surgeons with him to Egypt, including a laywoman doctor (physica). Formal provisions were made to cope with the high incidence of disease and sickness on campaign as well as battle injuries. In 1189, Frederick Barbarossa organised ambulance wagons for the sick to minimise both mortality and delay.65 Hospitals or hospices were common features of campaigning on station. Besides the Hospitallers’ customary provision, at the siege of Acre, field hospitals were established by the troops; one such hospital, manned by crusaders from Lübeck, Bremen and Hamburg was dedicated to St Mary, and another, by English crusaders from London, to Thomas Becket. The German hospital was the germ of what later became the Order of Teutonic Knights. During his campaign in Palestine in 1191–2, Richard I established a hospice for his troops at Ramla, while in battle he equipped a medical station in a fortified cart.66

  89. Carts for the wounded.

  The effect of these expedients on morale may have been greater than their medical usefulness. Mortality rates on crusade are impossible to calculate accurately, but some have estimated levels among the knightly classes of between 25 and 35 per cent, possibly an underestimate and certainly lower than for the mass of crusaders: most probably succumbed to disease, bad diet, appalling sanitary conditions and malnutrition. Dysentery and scurvy seem the common ailments for which crusade physicians had awareness but no cure. Arguably, doctors achieved more, if limited success, with battlefield injuries. Wounds were cauterised or washed in wine or vinegar; broken bones were set; arrows removed; bone fragments extracted. Archaeology has revealed successful trepanning operations and recoveries from severe fractures and wounds. However, survival remained as much a lottery as a science, despite growing knowledge of superior Arabic medicine and empirical experience increasingly informing medical textbooks.67

  The awareness of Europe being, in a phrase popular in the later Middle Ages, merely an ‘angle of the world’, produced among crusade theorists and later humanist scholars alike an almost existential anxiety, forcing them to assess Christendom in global and material terms, an encouragement to think geographically rather than confessionally. The portolan navigational maps included in manuscripts of crusade history and crusade advice by the Venetian merchant and crusade lobbyist Marino Sanudo (c. 1270–1343) in the 1320s bear witness to the early stages of this process.69 More widely, western study of Egyptian society, particularly of the Mamluk system of recruiting foreign slaves as warriors, elicited interest in ethnology, just as the recognised manpower deficit facing western invaders of the Middle East stimulated serious analysis of international demography. One writer even suggested that the solution to combating the Muslim advantage was to infiltrate the harems of the east with trained regiments of bluestocking Mata Haris who would give birth to a Christian Fifth Column in the Muslim world.70 Eccentricities apart, the understanding of the sheer scale of the task of overpowering Egypt inspired some genuinely global and innovative thinking.

  The thirteenth-century attacks on Egypt produced paradoxical results. The Fifth Crusade assisted in sustaining the unity of the Ayyubid Empire after the death of al-Adil; the defeat of Louis IX set the Mamluks on the path to power and empire. For westerners, the Egyptian strategy opened new international horizons while exposing the impossible legacy of 1099: Erard of Valery’s lap dog yapping at a mastiff indeed. However, another dimension lay not in geopolitical conflict, but in the experience of individuals, such as the veteran of the Fifth Crusade from Provins in the Ile de France who had stayed in Egypt after the crusade’s withdrawal, probably as a prisoner of war, and had then converted to Islam and married an Egyptian. By the time he met an appalled King Louis after his defeat in 1250, he had risen to a position of some importance at the Ayyubid court. Or Magistra Hersende, a laywoman and physician from Paris attached to Louis’ entourage on crusade, who was found cradling the sick, dysentery-ridden king when he was captured near Sharamsah in April 1250 (see ‘Medicine’, p. 282).71

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CRUSADES IN SPAIN

  The failure of western Christendom’s armies in the eastern Mediterranean stood in contrast to Christian rulers’ success in Spain. In 1248, the same year that Louis IX embarked for the Levant, Fernando III of Castile accepted the surrender of Seville, the last great metropolis of al-Andalus (‘the land of the west’), leaving only Granada in Muslim hands on the Iberian Peninsula. For the previous two centuries Spain had presented both a parallel and a contrast to the crusades in the east. Observers as different as Urban II in the 1080s and 1090 and the Damascus scholar al-Sulami in 1105 regarded the wars in Spain as part of wider Christian assaults on Islamic lands. For al-Sulami, the Franks, encouraged by Muslim disunity, had conquered Sicily and made extensive conquests in Spain before descending on the Near East,1 while during the First Crusade Urban encouraged Catalan counts to concentrate on the local struggle rather than the Jerusalem adventure: ‘it is no virtue to rescue Christians from the Saracens in one place, only to expose them to the tyranny and oppression of the Saracens in another’
.2 However, except in rhetoric and possibly spiritual incentive, the circumstances of eleventh-century Christian advances in Spain were distinct from those surrounding the Jerusalem wars. Crusading did not inspire the conquest of al-Andalus, Muslim Spain. Instead, the formulae of cross, papal privileges and remissions of sins were applied to pre-existing secular rivalries, finding natural affinity within long-standing self-justifications of political contest.

  90. Spanish Christian troops.

  The Spanish ‘Reconquest’

  War between Christian lords in the far north of the Iberian Peninsula and Muslim rulers to their south was not new in the late eleventh century. Exchange and competition across Christendom’s Spanish frontier pre-dated crusade indulgences, establishing patterns of conduct and traditions later coloured but not shaped by the negotium crucis. The political history of early medieval Spain hardly compared with that of Europe north of the Pyrenees. In the early eighth century, the former Roman province of Hispania, dominated by an entrenched Christian Visigothic kingdom based at Toledo, was overrun after 711 by north African Berber armies commanded by Arab generals. A Muslim emirate with a capital at Cordoba (756–1031), rebranded in 929 as an autonomous caliphate, emerged under descendants of the Near Eastern Umayyad caliphs of the seventh and eight centuries. Only in the north beyond the Duero valley, in the Cantabrian mountains and the Basque country, did Christian lordships survive. Elsewhere, the Arab conquest led to a slow process of Arabisation and even slower Islamicisation: by 900 only about 25 per cent while in 1000 perhaps about 75 per cent of the population of Spain may have been Muslims. Jews and Christians, as People of the Book, paid the jiyza or poll tax, and adopted the customs and language of their masters. Arabic-speaking Christians, known as Mozarabs, developed their own liturgies. Early medieval Spain, as elsewhere around the Mediterranean, witnessed a pragmatic convivencia (literally ‘living together’) characterised by separation and indifference not tolerance or harmony, cultural synthesis combined with economic competition and potential social hostility.

  The earliest Christian enclave to cohere into a perceptible lordship developed around Orviedo in the Asturias which, by the early tenth century, had expanded south to incorporate a new capital, León, and the county of Castile in the upper Ebro valley. In the western Pyrenees, lordships later known as Navarre and Aragon emerged. In the early ninth century a Carolingian county was established in Catalonia after Charlemagne’s attempts in 778 to create a Frankish march further south around Zaragoza had failed in a campaign later made famous by the Song of Roland’s embroidered stories of the defeat of its rearguard at Roncevalles. Apart from Catalonia’s involvement in trans-Pyrenean Francia, the politics of the Christian principalities revolved around local rivalries and raiding across the frontier with the Cordoba caliphate. The Song of Roland’s depiction of the massacre of a Frankish regiment by Pyrenean Basques in 778 as an epic contest between heroic Christian knights and demonic armies of Islam reflected eleventh-century French fiction, not eighth-century Iberian realities. After the eighth century, the Spanish frontier wars only began to be incorporated into grander perceptions of cosmic religious confrontation once they attracted French recruits and serious papal interest in the eleventh century.

  How far, if at all, these local struggles for material existence and advantage had previously been perceived by Christian Spaniards in religious terms remains unclear, as does the genesis of the idea that the conquest of Muslim Spain constituted a reconquest, the Reconquista of nationalist myth. Early versions of the Reconquest idea were crafted in the late ninth century in the Asturias to demonstrate a legitimising link between Asturian kingship, the old Visigoth rulers, and a providential mission to restore Christian rule to the peninsula. This justified raids and campaigns against the Moors (people from the north African coast, Mauretania, Berbers) in religious terms, an elevation of purpose and consolidation of political identity familiar across early medieval western Europe, and not restricted to Christian rulers. The great Cordoban vizier, al-Mansur (i.e. ‘the Victorious’, 976–1002), declared his attacks on Christian territory to be jihads and flaunted his Koranic credentials. However, religious frontiers competed with many others in early eleventh-century Iberia. While the power of the Cordoban caliphate made it a prime threat to its Christian neighbours, political competition saw Christians fighting Christians, Muslims fighting Muslims, and all engaging in alliances and economic and commercial exchange across religious divides.

  Politics and cash, not religion, provided the impetus for the wars after the sudden collapse of the Cordoban caliphate in 1031, which was replaced by unstable but still wealthy so-called taifa or ‘party’ kingdoms.3 These competing Muslim principalities actively sought external military aid regardless of religion. Christian rulers soon took advantage, entering into agreements under which they were hired by taifa rulers in return for parias, annual tributes, effectively protection money, paid in gold. The urban economy of al-Andalus had exploited the gold coming across the Sahara from west Africa. The parias gave Christian rulers of the north direct access to large quantities of gold, a very scarce commodity in the rest of western Europe, consolidating their power, creating new opportunities to expand their frontiers at their paymasters’ expense and to attract attention from beyond the Pyrenees. This last included fashionable ideas of holy war. However, religion was not a factor in paria agreements. In one, with the emir of Zaragoza in 1069, for 1,000 gold pieces a month, Sancho IV of Navarre promised not to allow ‘people from France or elsewhere’ to cross his kingdom to attack Zaragoza or to ally with anyone, Christian or Muslim, against the emir.4 Such arrangements encouraged a mercenary free trade. Anyone – Muslim or Christian – with sufficient military credentials and armed support could sell their services to the highest bidder. The most famous freelance was the Castilian nobleman Rodrigo Diaz, El Cid (c. 1045–99). As well as serving Fernando I of León-Castile (1035–65) and his son Alfonso VI (1065–1109), Rodrigo fought for the emir of Zaragoza (1081–6) against Catalans and Aragonese. From 1089, he operated his own army, fighting Christian as well as Muslim rulers in eastern Spain before creating for himself an independent taifa lordship at Valencia (1094–99) that survived until 1102.5 Christian rulers still competed with each other, no more united than their Muslim neighbours.

  Such opportunism sought the respectable cloak of ideology, conquest justified as reclaiming territories that ‘originally belonged to the Christians’ or as ‘the recovery and extension of the Church of Christ’, a claim made explicit by Alfonso VI after capturing Toledo in 1085 when he wrote of the city, after 376 years of Muslim rule, now restored ‘under the leadership of Christ . . . to the devotees of His faith’. Urban II echoed the theme, writing that Toledo had been ‘restored to the law of the Christians’.6 The religious rhetoric of Reconquest hardly concealed the secular drivers of the campaigns against the taifa kingdoms once Christian rulers sought political control rather than financial exploitation. By the 1090s, the frontier of al-Andalus had been pushed south to a line roughly from Coimbra in the west to north of Tarragona in the east, with a Christian salient extending down to Toledo on the Tagus in the centre. The Christian gains were modest and hardly presaged any inevitable annexation of the whole peninsula; al-Andalus still dominated most of the richest regions. These late eleventh-century wars were of piecemeal conquest and, in places, expulsion. One abiding feature of the Reconquest remained the custom that cities were surrendered through negotiation, with garrisons and civilians allowed to depart, a pattern repeated right up to and including the final expulsion of the Moors from Granada in 1492. Unlike some Levant campaigns, and even where complicated by north African interventions, the Spanish wars were fought as between neighbours, not aliens.

  Holy War

  The indigenous political and religious justification of Reconquest provided fertile ground for holy war as developed by the eleventh-century papacy, just as the wars themselves attracted trans-Pyrenean recruits. A Catalan-Aragonese attack on Barbastro
, north-east of Zaragoza, in 1064–5, drew recruits from Burgundy, Normandy, Aquitaine and possibly Norman Sicily perhaps lured by an offer of remission of penance and sins by Pope Alexander II, who around the same time provided a blanket just-war authorisation when fighting Muslims who oppressed Christians. In one respect, the warriors at Barbastro followed a new uncompromising militancy, their brief occupation of the town marked by violent atrocities later familiar from the First Crusade. Foreigners brought with them an ignorance of Muslims and a confident brutish martial spirituality that chimed with the policies of contemporary popes. Spain became a laboratory for hegemonic papal policies in replacing the Spanish Mozarab liturgy with a Roman one and in the spiritualisation of war, particularly against Islam. In 1073, Gregory VII argued that Spain ‘from ancient times belonged to the personal right of St. Peter’ and, despite long Moorish occupation, still did, a claim combated by Alfonso VI in 1077 when he styled himself ‘emperor of all Spain’.7 Further trans-Pyrenean links were witnessed by the penetration of Cluniac monasticism into northern Spain, from mid-century under the lavish patronage of the kings of León. In 1064, Raymond Berenguer I of Catalonia promulgated a Peace and Truce of God, a mechanism popular in places north of the Pyrenees whereby local lords swore to keep the peace and protect ecclesiastical property. By the 1080s, marriages of Spanish princes and princesses to spouses from north of the Pyrenees had become familiar. All five of Alfonso VI’s legitimate wives came from outside Spain, a sign his dynasty had entered the family of western European rulers, even if domestically Alfonso may have retained local tastes: one of his mistresses may have been the daughter-in-law of the emir of Seville.8

  The fusion of border conflicts, Reconquest and holy war in Spain came from the coincidence of the invasion of al-Andalus by the Moroccan Almoravids in 1086 and the promotion of penitential war by the papacy in the generation before the First Crusade. Originally a radical group of Islamic fundamentalists from the margins of the Sahara, by the early 1080s the Almoravids – the al-Murabitum or ‘people of the ribat’ (Islamic frontier military monasteries) – had conquered Morocco, rigorously enforcing austere religious observance somewhat at odds with the relaxed sophistication of al-Andalus. By the mid-1080s they were ready to extend their authority across the Straits of Gibraltar into al-Andalus. With pressure growing from the north in the aftermath of Alfonso VI’s capture of Toledo in 1085, the taifa emirs, led by Seville, had little option but to invite Almoravid aid. The invasion, under Yusuf ibn Tushufin, led to the defeat of Alfonso at Sagrajas in 1086. While providing apparent support for al-Andalus, over the next quarter of a century, by force, coercion and diplomacy, the Almoravids absorbed the taifa emirates into their own empire, the last, Zaragoza, falling in 1110. The Almoravids’ destruction of the paria system and their military threat encouraged the reactive adoption of Christian holy war. The arrival of the north Africans added a new and, for both Christian opponents and indigenous Muslims, an unwelcome and complicating dimension to Iberian politics. This was recognised by the distinction drawn by twelfth-century Christian Spanish writers between the Muslims of al-Andalus, ‘Moors’ and ‘Hagarenes’, with whom business could be done, and alien invaders, ‘Moabites’(Almoravids) and, later, ‘Assyrians’ or ‘Muzmotos’ (the Almohads, invaders from north Africa from the 1140s), with whom it could not.9