Sea of Faith

by Stephen O'Shea

  A similar expropriation took place in the great city of Antioch, which had been taken back by the Muslims after the departure of the gigantic George Maniakes for his misadventure in Sicily. The crusader capture of Antioch was engineered by a son of Robert Guiscard. Bohemond of Taranto, born of Guiscard's first marriage, had been disowned by his stepmother, the amazon Sichelgaita.* Bohemond, a battle-hardened Norman denied his inheritance, was thus a pilgrim of an extremely hungry stripe. In 1098, after months of siege, battle, atrocity, and the opportune discovery of what the crusaders claimed to be the lance that had pierced the side of Jesus' body, the city was overrun and the requisite massacre of its inhabitants conducted. In the ensuing power struggle among the leaders of the crusade, Bohemond succeeded in brushing aside his noble rivals and setting himself up as prince of Antioch. Once again, the undertakings made at Constantinople had been flouted.

  In the months and years that followed the contours of a new Latin entity took shape in the Levant. The powerful comtal family of Toulouse, the Saint-Gilles, made themselves masters of Tripoli, the greatest port on the eastern littoral since the time of the Phoenicians. The ruin of the crusader citadel, called qal'at sinjil after the ruling Latin clan, can still be seen in the city today. Jerusalem, despite caviling by a clergy reluctant to see it demoted from otherworldly status, became a kingdom like any other. By 1110, what was called Outremer (Beyond the Sea)—the lands controlled by the Latins from Edessa, Antioch, Tripoli, and Jerusalem—had become a force in the region, a Christian federation undreamed of only fifteen years earlier. The Byzantines, far from rejoicing at seeing Heraclius avenged, looked with unease at this new and unruly presence on their doorstep.

  The Muslim view of their new neighbors was, as might not be expected, just as ambivalent. The lords of Aleppo, Damascus, and Mosul could not overcome their loathing of one another to unite in the face of a common threat. In a remarkably short time, in fact, the indigenous warrior classes came to view these strange and powerful Franks as useful bludgeons in the intra-Muslim struggle for primacy in Syria. Although endless rounds of raiding, kidnapping, and ransoming characterized the relations between Latin and Muslim, there were several instances of formal alliances between the grandees of Outremer and the atabegs of Islam. As early as ITO8 the Frankish count of Edessa allied with the emir of Mosul to fight the Latin prince of Antioch and the Muslim king of Aleppo. Such strategic cooperation, the convivencia of bloodshed, was not uncommon.

  Within Outremer itself, the Latins had to come to an understanding with their subjects if they were to profit from their sojourn in the promised land. No matter how many people they killed or exiled, the newcomers would always be outnumbered by the large, heterogeneous populace of the region. The Levant was a kaleidoscope of belief: in addition to a native Jewish population, Zoroastrians, Druzes, non-Latin Christians (Armenians, Greek Orthodox, Jacobites, Ma-ronites, and Nestorians), and different communities of sunni and shia Muslims all resided there. Clearly if Outremer were to survive, the peasants had to be left on the land and the merchants in the cities, whatever their faith. This pressure to achieve a modicum of convivencia came not only from within, but also from without. The merchants of Genoa, Pisa, and Venice had negotiated their concessions on the conquered coastline, and their terms were clear: for Outremer to stay connected to the west through the services of their mariners, it had to ensure that the trade routes from the east remained open and ran, more important, directly into the cargo holds of the Italian ships at anchor off Tripoli, Tyre, Sidon, Acre, and Ascalon. The crusaders might take a cut, but the locals were the ones who knew how to conduct this business. Few in numbers, short on the skills of peace, the Latin knights had no choice but to adopt the Muslim practice of tolerance.

  Unlike that of Palermo and Toledo, the twelfth-century convivencia of Outremer was a fragile shoot. Toledo, its supply of belligerent Castilians inexhaustible, could defend itself against Almoravid incursions. Palermo, sited on a wealthy island that became a magnet for Christian immigration, had little to fear from Ifriqiyan marauders. The Latins of Outremer, however, were alone, perched at the edge of the great expanse of the dar al Islam, the sea at their back. The horrors attendant upon their arrival in the east would have been told and retold to the outraged faithful of the umma. The slaughters of Jerusalem and Antioch, while reprehensible, approached but did not go beyond the bounds of the acceptable in an extremely violent era.

  However, that was not the case elsewhere. In the winter of 1097-98 an army of famished crusaders had stormed Ma'arat al-Numan, a town on the Orontes River south of Aleppo. There, according to both Christian and Muslim chroniclers, the Latin warriors killed all of the townspeople and then set about roasting and eating them. The slain children, apparently, were a delicacy. Even to medieval eyes, this was an atrocity. It could only be a matter of time before a disunited Muslim world came together for vengeance, no matter how much the barbarous Latins adapted to the mores of Middle Eastern convivencia. As it turned out, less than a century would pass before the eviction notice was served.

  *His widowed mother, Adelaide, remarried a crusader king of Jerusalem, only to be discarded when it looked as if she might inherit the kingdom.

  *She had made sure Apulia and Calabria reverted to her own son, but that patrimony, it will be recalled, was then swallowed up by King Roger II of Sicily.

  CHAPTER SIX

  HATTIN 1187

  Jihad and Crusade; the doom of Outremer

  Outremer can still be seen in Syria. The Mediterranean coast south of Latakia, the main port of the Syrian Arab Republic, is a narrow strip of land bordered to the east by the forested wall of the Jebel Ansariye mountain range. On this sliver of littoral and farther south in Lebanon, the crusaders dug in their heels, erecting castle, fortified church, and isolated redoubt in the hope of retaining their new kingdoms. Inland, the alarmed Muslims did the same, bequeathing to the region one of the greatest concentrations of medieval castles to be found anywhere in the world. The swords of the warriors ceded to the winches of the stonemasons, as each piece in the Outremer puzzle sought safety behind massive walls.

  One needs little imagination to enter the past in this part of Syria, despite the gimcrack resort hotels and the unsightly legions of polyethylene greenhouses lining the shore. To look landward from the seaside town of Baniyas is to stare straight up at a behemoth rising 360 meters into the sky, its windowless round towers bespeaking a time of constant peril. This sinister fortress, Marqab, first contructed in 1062, then ceded to the Latins in the early eleventh century, housed a crusader confraternity of knights, intent on keeping the pilgrimage routes open. A brooding castle of black basalt stone, Marqab nicely reflects the soured optimism of the crusaders a mere generation or two after their success in Jerusalem.

  Further proof of crusader anxiety, and piety, lies a dozen kilometers to the south of Marqab, at the port of Tartus. A few blocks in from its tidy breakwater, in a large traffic island of a park, stands the Church of Our Lady of Tortosa (Tar-tus). The cathedral's devotional pedigree is untouchable—the site is thought to have housed, in classical times, the very first sanctuary dedicated to the Virgin Mary. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Mary was eclipsed by Mars, for the building, which is the best preserved of all crusader churches in the Middle East, is as solid and defensible as any fortress. The pleasant Mediterranean garden now surrounding it cannot disguise the warlike posture of the sanctuary. Although two of its corner towers have long since been removed (to be replaced by a lone minaret), this great gray hedgehog of stone was patently built to withstand attack. Nonetheless it is of rare beauty, especially underneath the graceful tan vaulting of its nave and two aisles. Our Lady of Tortosa can be considered a crusader herself: a fortified church very much of the day in its mix of mature Romanesque and early Gothic, it seems somehow plucked out of the Ile-de-France and deposited, pilgrimlike, on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. Within it now is a dusty museum displaying Phoenician sarcophagi, friezes of Ba
al, and Roman mosaics—the archaeological memories of an ancient land. Compared to all those represented in the museum, the crusaders were mere passersby, their stay here lasting from 1099 to 1291.

  Our Lady of Tortosa, a fortified crusader church in Tartus, Syria. The building is now an archaeological museum.

  To move inland from Tartus is to quit Latin territory. North of town today, on the coastal highway, stands a large statue of the late Syrian president Hafez al-Assad, his back to the sea, his golden arms outstretched as if to embrace the cement plant opposite. At this point a narrow connecting road leads off eastward, abruptly scaling slopes dotted with the second homes of the rich and well-connected of Horns and Damascus. Beyond the crest of the ridge, hundreds of meters high, the view of the sea disappears and the rugged landscape of the Jebel Ansariye takes over. Geology has conspired, as in much of the Mediterranean, to cut the coast off from the interior. In this instance it reflects the confessional geography of the crusader day.

  The road inland dips and winds through a prospect of blind cliffsides falling into bottomless ravines, the thickets of myrtle and oak scrub slashed into clearings to make way for the occasional pebble-strewn olive grove. Despite the harshness of the surroundings, villages of concrete-cube houses line the summit route, apparently inhabited in the majority by unveiled girls in track suits strolling arm in arm past groups of laughing street urchins. These settlements grow scarcer, and vanish entirely once the town of Sheikh Badr is left behind. The road dives into a gorge so deep as to be in permanent shadow, then ascends a shrub-covered slope cut by striations of white limestone made dazzling by the return of sunlight. The spine of this new ridge, windswept and scorched dry, tops a peninsular finger of land pointing into a valley sealed on three sides by cave-riddled eminences. At the very extremity of the peninsula, rising out of a forbidding outcropping of rock, are the ruins of the Qalaat al-Kahf (Castle of the Cavern), once the headquarters of Sinan ibn Salman ibn Muhammad, whom the crusaders called the Old Man of the Mountain. This tortured upland of inhospitable scrub and sudden drop was, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the province of a sect known to the Christians as the Assassins.

  To examine the rubble of this lair is to enter the precincts of legend. The battlements, now barely distinguishable from the scarified pile of rock, were those from which some of Sinan's devotees, so the story goes, hurled themselves to their deaths at the command of their leader, for the edification of a visiting crusader dignitary, Henry of Champagne. Horrified, Henry implored his host to desist.* Even more lurid were stories of hashish-induced glimpses of paradise (whence, it was once thought, the name hashishi, or Assassin): the acolyte would be led, stoned, into a grove of fleshy pleasure—a foretaste of the afterlife—then rendered unconscious, brought back to this world, and given a martyr's mission that would be zealously fulfilled so as to regain admission to that voluptuous land of limitless ambrosia and languorous maidens. These stories, embellished by westerners (Marco Polo was a great Assassin mythologizer), reflect more on the tale-teller than on the subject—but anyone clambering past the cisterns and gateways of al-Kahf cannot help but feel a twinge of excitement. The walls of one half-exposed chamber, once the castle's hammam, are covered with hennaed handprints, burnt-orange mysteries that have resisted the winds whistling in from the gorge. Murderers? Maidens? The rock does not answer.

  The presence of Sinan and his Assassins in Syria lent homicidal nuance to the affairs of Outremer. The sect, which had arisen in eleventh-century Persia, believed that Islam had been waylaid by heretical impostors. The genuine authority over the umma, according to their lights, hewed faithfully to the descendants of Huseyn—Ali's son killed at Karbala in 680—until the seventh generation (to a certain Ismail), then dipped out of sight for several generations before resurfacing in the shia Fatimid caliphate of Egypt. When a legitimate heir to that throne, Nizar, was murdered by his younger brother in 1095, the Ismailis held that the mantle of imam, or spiritual guide of Islam, somehow came to be bestowed on successive leaders of the Assassin sect in their mountain hideaway of Alamut, near the Caspian Sea.

  Depending on the demands of the moment, the Assassins—or more correctly, the Nizari Ismailis—could ally themselves with the unwelcome crusaders of the coast or with their unloved sunni brethren of the Orontes Valley. Or they could be discreetly hired for sensitive operations by an interested third party. During the Third Crusade (1189—92), a capable king of Jerusalem, Conrad of Montfer-rat, fell victim to their daggers. The identity of the contractor is a matter of speculation: perhaps it was King Richard Lionheart, jealous of Conrad's influence, or the sultan Saladin, worried about Conrad's warring abilities—or neither. Count Raymond of Tripoli met a similar fate at the hands of the Assassins, as did an heir to the Christian principality of Antioch, cut down by killers disguised as monks as he stepped out of a Christmas service held at Our Lady of Tortosa. The hideout of Qalaat al-Kahf lay only one night's stealthy ride from the crusader church. As for Marqab, it was only ten kilometers away from the Old Man of the Mountain, as the crow flies.

  However unnerving that proximity must have seemed to the Latin knights, the sunni Muslims had the most to fear from this independent county of fanatics in the Jebel Ansariye. (The Assassins possessed a dozen or so castles there.) "To shed the blood of a heretic is more meritorious than to kill seventy Greek infidels," wrote an exponent of their faith. As possessors of absolute truth and authority, the Nizaris took it upon themselves to terrorize, and thus destabilize, the ruling sunni elite of Islam. Their first victim was Nizam al-Mulk, the all-powerful vizier of Alp Arslan and Malikshah, who had done so much to aid the spread of sunni orthodoxy. Scores of other dignitaries—among them two Abbasid caliphs—fell to the Nizaris of Alamut, in attacks usually carried out after Friday prayers in the courtyard of a prominent mosque, to ensure maximum publicity, horror, and, of course, instant martyrdom for the murderer, whom the enraged bystanders would waste no time in tearing to pieces.

  The successful expansion of the Nizaris into Syria coincided with the arrival of the Crusaders. In a Muslim east beset by quarrels among city-states ruled by independent Turkish atabegs paying lip service to the Seljuk sultan, the terrain was ripe for interlopers to carve out kingdoms for themselves, whether they were inflamed by faith or greed, or both. The First Crusade had blundered into Syria at just the right time: the rulers of Aleppo and Damascus, two brothers, were at each other's throats; the Turks of Anatolia were fighting their own internecine wars; and even mighty Egypt, long ruled by the charismatic Fatimids, had lost much of its cohesion as a series of viziers wrested power from the shia caliphs. The Crusaders had stumbled across this opportunity unwittingly; the Nizaris, attuned to the discord, made their move with calculation.

  The Assassin castle at Masyaf, at the foot of the Jebel Ansariye. Saladin lifted his siege of the fortress after realising his bodyguards were themselves Assassins.

  Both groups of intruders coveted the wealthy cities of the Syrian interior, the same desert ports that Heraclius had been forced to give up in the seventh century. Of all these, none is more redolent of the era of Outremer than Aleppo, now a sprawling metropolis of millions but still possessed of a historic heart that would not seem unfamilar to any Assassin infiltrator or Latin ambassador. In the market streets of its souk, or bazaar, shafts of sunlight stream through cracks in the weathered stone vaults to pick out motes of dust floating above Armenian goldsmith, Kurdish pistachio merchant, and Arab butcher hoisting a freshly slaughtered calf from the back of his donkey onto a swinging meat hook. At the principal mosque of the old town, rebuilt in the twelfth century after fire had destroyed the original Umayyad structure, crowds of children skitter across the marble geometry of the courtyard while their devout parents cluster inside around the shrine of Zachariah, John the Baptist's father. Across an alley alongside the mosque, half-blocked by supplicant blind men, a doorway opens onto the Halawiye madrasa, a center of sunni learning since the time of Nizam al-Mulk. The learn
ed sit on carpets in a domed hall and welcome the visitor with unaffected warmth, their backs to a semicircle of six pillars topped with a flamboyant jungle of acanthus leaves. This half-lit room is all that remains of the Cathedral of St. Helen, a fragment of Byzantine antiquity (Helen was Constantine's mother) that was used without hindrance by local Christians for centuries after the Muslim conquest—until the 1120s, when their crusading coreligionists rode in from Marqab and other coastal fortresses to enact the customary atrocities in the Aleppan countryside. In reprisal, the Christians of Aleppo were evicted from their remnant of a church and the scholars of the madrasa moved in, where they have been ever since.

  In these places—madrasa, mosque, and souk—medieval Aleppans heard the rumors of Latin aggression and Assassin conspiracy. The Persian Nizaris, adept at converting many Syrians to their Ismaili creed, moved freely throughout the city in the confused years of the early twelfth century. One emir of Aleppo, Ridwan, a nephew of Malikshah, was believed by his suspicious subjects to be a master of black magic, so fortuitously did his enemies meet untimely ends. A partial explanation of his luck lay in his secret ties with the Assassins, whom he also used to intimidate his hated brother, Duqaq, the ruler of Damascus.