The threat from the crusaders was, by contrast, out in the open. They brazenly sought tribute and plunder in the Orontes and control of the great cities of Syria. In Aleppo their main foe was inanimate: the citadel. A masterpiece of military architecture, it glowers over the old city on a natural lozenge-shaped hill that stretches fifty-five meters into the air above an encircling ditch. The massive structure atop the hill, which protects a palatine city unto itself, proved impregnable to the crusading knights during repeated sieges. A year after a failed attempt in 1118, the Latin forces of Antioch marched out to utter rout at the hands of the Aleppans near a place called Balat, to the south of the ruins of the basilica of St. Simeon the Stylite. The Aleppo citadel would not, however, fill with illustrious prisoners to ransom: the Turkoman then leading the city, II-Ghazi, gave no quarter. "In less than an hour," wrote a Muslim chronicler, "the Franks were all lying dead, cavalry and infantry with their horses and armour, and none escaped to bear the news." Known to the westerners as the Field of Blood, the battle of Balat marked the first serious setback of the crusader cause. That it was not exploited by the Muslims—the road to Antioch lay open—can be put down to the indiscipline of Il-Ghazi. He distributed the booty, disbanded his army, and then returned to the citadel to indulge in a celebratory binge. When he sobered up three weeks later, the neighboring crusader states had restored the defenses of Antioch. Muslim Syria still awaited its avenger.
The sole entrance to the formidable Citadel of Aleppo, a fortified height overlooking the old city.
The crusaders knew that keeping Syria at bay was essential to their survival. Proof of their conviction can still be seen some two hundred kilometers to the southwest of Aleppo, in a crusader fortress as awe-inspiring as that old city's citadel. The Krak des Chevaliers, the Brobdingnag of all medieval castles, dominates the southernmost slopes of the Jebel Ansariye. To the north of it was the rugged terrain of the Assassins; to the south, a valley known as the Horns Gap, a corridor of cultivation that leads from the Orontes to the Mediterranean by passing between the Ansariye range and the much taller mountainous massif of Lebanon. As the most accessible route from coast to interior in the rich segment of the Fertile Crescent stretching from Turkey to Palestine, the valley overlooked by the Krak has always been a place of great strategic importance. Indeed, as early as 1275 B.C.E., an army of the pharaohs clashed with the Hittites nearby at a place called Qadesh.
For the Muslims of the day, many of whom labored on its enlargements, the sheer size of the Hospitalers' additions to the Krak would have confirmed that these strange, powerful men from beyond the sea had every intention of staying in the Levant. (The word Krak derives from the name of the original small fortress on the site built in 1031: Husn al-Akrad, Fortress of the Kurds.) For nearly two hundred years under the crusaders, the castle grew stronger and bigger, as successive generations of military engineers brought in from Europe undertook to reinforce what was called "the key to Christendom." As the science of castle construction in the west became ever more developed given the endemic warfare of feudal lords, the techniques of fashioning the impregnable naturally headed east with the embattled crusaders.
The Krak's sole entrance, a tortuous ascending passageway wide enough for three heavily armored knights to ride side by side, passes through several defensive walls before giving out onto a central esplanade surrounded by battlements. Everywhere there are cyclopean constructions: great round towers rise above the line of the already-tall curtain walls; an inner wall, separated from the outer by a deep moat, encircles a cluster of buildings that house a large and stately Gothic grand hall and a 120-meter-long kitchen and refectory (and no doubt storeroom) that could feed hundreds under its cavernous vaults. The scale of the complex beggars the imagination. From without, visible from almost any part of the Horns Gap, the castle's stone appears to change colors with the shifting light of day, a monument to the permanent and the ephemeral all at the same time.
As at Marqab, its brother in gigantism, the custodians of the Krak were members of a military order of armed monks, one of several martial brotherhoods founded in the time of Outremer. The occupants of the Krak and Marqab were Hospitalers, an order originally established to tend to pilgrims who fell ill. The mother house was in Jerusalem, near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and was founded under Muslim rule in the 1080s by the Amalfitan merchants who then held a monopoly of trade with the Islamic east. Subsequent to the Christian capture of the city, the Hospitalers evolved from a nursing confraternity into a military organization, even if they kept hospices in most of the major centers of Outremer and in the pilgrimage embarkation ports of Europe. Also known as the Knights of the Hospital of St. John (their patron was John the Baptist), they figured large in events around the sea of faith until well into the sixteenth century.
The Krak des Chevaliers, the greatest of Outremer's crusader castles.
The Hospitalers' counterparts—and often bitter rivals—were the Templars, whose name came from the location of their mother house on the Temple Mount of Jerusalem, their headquarters itself being the expropriated al-Aqsa Mosque. Founded in the early twelfth century, the Templars set as their original mission the protection of pilgrims from the brigands who haunted the holy sites of Palestine. In the wake of the First Crusade, more and more pilgrims poured into the Levant, perhaps unaware that the crusading armies had gone home, leaving only a skeletal contingent of knights to protect the cities and castles that had been captured. Outside the walls of these strongholds the wide-eyed western pilgrim could easily fall into an ambush and end up on the auction block in Damascus or Cairo. The Templars, at first few in number, tried to foil these abductions.
From these laudable origins, both orders developed into fearsome war machines with robust treasuries. Their monastic discipline—which included chastity, self-abnegation, and a code of silence—immediately won admiration throughout Europe, which was then experiencing an upsurge in piety typified by the rapid rise of the reforming Cistercian monks, headed by the powerful Bernard of Clairvaux. The most influential prelate of the twelfth century, Bernard used his enormous prestige to help these mail-clad ecstatics by extolling a new concept of permanent Christian belligerence in his De laude novae militae (In Praise of the New Knighthood). The violent proclivities of Europe's feudal warriors, so inimical to the salvation of their souls—and, not incidentally, to the property of the Church—could be gainfully deflected to service in the Holy Land. It was a marriage made in heaven. Bequests, donations, and benefices soon enriched the orders, and recruits flocked to the many houses they established across Europe. At the peak of their power the Templars alone had nine thousand lordships and manors in the west, and even in Bernard's time they had begun developing their most famous sideline: moneylending. Dodging the Church's ban on usury, the warrior-monks encouraged pilgrims to deposit money at their local Templar manor in exchange for a letter of credit that could be redeemed, for a fee, in Outremer. They also built a fleet to ferry paying passengers to and from the ports of Palestine and Syria, thereby stepping on the toes of the Italian merchant republics. The Templars, who in their earliest days had been known as the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ, ended up staggeringly wealthy.
The mailed habit of the Templars, an order of warrior-monks founded in Jerusalem following the success of the First Crusade.
Hospitalers and Templars were an entirely new phenomenon, in that they were organized orders of knights answerable only to the pope. The kings of Europe, much less the king of Jerusalem, could not touch them or order them about. Their fanatic attachment to the survival of Outremer made them ideal candidates for manning isolated castles, especially after the Latin nobles realized that they would always be seriously outnumbered and were best off clustered in the coastal cities. Many of the outposts in the Outremer hinterland, like the Krak, were ceded to these men who had sworn to give no quarter, to engage in battle no matter how great the odds, and, if captured, never to allow themselves to be ransomed.
Their compatriots were another matter, especially after a few decades had passed and the Latins became acclimated to their surroundings. The lords and ladies of Outremer were, mostly, the descendants of those who had stayed on after the euphoric bloodletting of the First Crusade. They were indigenous to the region, accustomed to its climate, diet, and delights, and not at all immune to Muslim mores. In this, they were much like the Normans of Palermo. The kings of Jerusalem wore burnooses and kaffiyeh; hot water and soap held no terrors for them; dancing girls entertained them; professional mourners ululated at their funerals; and their villas, replete with colorful mosaics and a central fountain, resembled nothing so much as a typical Syrian mansion.
We owe many of these observations to Usamah ibn Munqidh, a diplomat and noble from Shayzar, a castle in the Orontes Valley located close to Assassin territory. Usamah's colorful autobiographical memoir, written in the 1180s when he was in his nineties, opens a window onto the uneasy coexistence between the Muslim Arabs of the region and these native foreigners. Usamah's sometimes hilarious testimony—he could not resist cuckold stories—nonetheless underscored what was to be a constant tension in Outremer: the divide between the indigenous Latins and those newly arrived from Europe, either on crusade or in search of adventure. For the latter, the shock of finding kinsmen who had "gone native" led to castigating them aspoulains ("children" or "kids")—that is, epigones, or feebler descendants, of the heroes of the First Crusade. Moreover, the enthusiasm of the newcomers, just off the boat and eager to join battle with the infidel, was thwarted by the live-and-let-live policy adopted by the orientalized poulains, who knew that their wealth depended on Muslim peasants and traders and that fragile Outremer could ill afford virtuoso displays of rapine and plunder. Even the monks of the Temple and the Hospital, who in no way adapted to local customs in their life of warrior asceticism, knew that one had to pick one's fights carefully. The brash hothead, an admired figure in European warrior circles, might spark a catastrophe in Outremer, in the form of a concerted Muslim riposte to the crusader occupation.
Usamah provided an illuminating story of the difference between the poulain and the crusader in recounting a misdventure he had had in Jerusalem in about the year 1140:
Everyone who is a fresh emigrant from the Frankish lands is ruder in character than those who have become acclimatized and have held long association with the the Moslems. Here is an illustration of their rude character.
Whenever I visited Jerusalem I always entered the Aqsa Mosque, beside which stood a small mosque which the Franks had converted into a church. When I used to enter the Aqsa Mosque, which was occupied by the Templars, who were my friends, the Templars would evacuate the little adjoining mosque so that I might pray in it. One day I entered this mosque, repeated the first formula, "Allah is great," and stood up in the act of praying, upon which one of the Franks rushed on me, got hold of me and turned my face eastward saying, "This is the way thou shouldst pray!" A group of Templars hastened to him, seized him and repelled him from me. I resumed my prayer. The same man, while the others were otherwise busy, rushed once more on me and turned my face eastward, saying, "This is the way thou shouldst pray!" The Templars again came in to him and expelled him. They apologized to me, saying, "This is a stranger who has only recently arrived from the land of the Franks and he has never before seen anyone praying except eastward." Thereupon I said to myself, "I have had enough prayer." So I went out and have ever been surprised at the conduct of this devil of a man, at the change in the color of his face, his trembling and his sentiment at the sight of one praying towards the qiblah.*
However considerate Usamah's friends, to hail the native Latins as paragons of tolerance would be a gross overstatement. They were living at a time when the concept of a Christian holy war was being fully elaborated and could hardly fail to be influenced by the pervasiveness of the crusader ethos, not only by virtue of the perceived sacredness of where they lived but also precisely because of the presence in Outremer of the type of uncouth firebrand deplored by Usamah. This "devil of a man" was not a lone sociopath: the ships from the west regularly deposited armed pilgrims on the jetties of Outremer, fired up for action against the infidel. It is misleading to consider the eight upper-case Crusades outlined by traditional historiography as the sole moments of European contribution to the manpower of Outremer. In between these great mobilizations came a constant stream of unsung arrivals: private individuals, sizable contingents not large enough to be deemed an official Crusade, even families of settlers bound for adventure on the eastern frontier. Although Outremer was chronically undermanned, it was hardly understimulated.
Likewise, the conception that holy war was somehow at odds with Christianity does not square with the evolution of the faith. In its infancy a pacifist creed of persecuted underdogs, once the faith was adopted by imperial Rome, the sword entered the Church. Constantine had conquered by the sign of the cross. In his new Rome, Constantinople, the icons and the priests blessed the belligerent activities of the city's armies for almost a millennium. In the west, Augustine of Hippo, aghast at the collapse of the old order of the mare nostrum, had endorsed the concept of a just Christian war. The warring Carolingians thought themselves endowed with a sacred mission, long before the sermon given at Clermont by Urban II. One of his immediate predecessors had even called for a crusade against the Norman Robert Guiscard.
To be sure, there were voices raised in dismay at the unapologetic martial vehemence of twelfth-century Christianity. An English Cistercian of the day, Isaac of Etoile, mixed pragmatism with piety when he wrote about the new warrior monks:
This dreadful new military order that someone has rather pleasantly called the order of the fifth gospel was founded for the purpose of forcing infidels to accept the faith at the point of the sword. Its members consider that they have every right to attack anyone not confessing Christ's name, leaving him destitute, whereas if they themselves are killed while thus unjustly attacking the pagans, they are called martyrs for the faith. . . . We do not maintain that all they do is wrong, but we do insist that what they are doing can be an occasion of many future evils.
Such thoughts would not have crossed the minds of the two hundred Hospitaler knights holding down the Krak. At their silent evening meals in the massive refectory, a brother would read aloud from the Books of Joshua and the Maccabees and other appropriately fire-breathing texts of the Old Testament. Passages from Psalm 17—"And I shall beat them as small as dust against the wind: I shall bring them to nought, like the dirt in the streets"—would have tripped easily off their tongues as they rode through the Orontes Valley to encounter enemy raiding parties. If they killed, they did not sin. In his In Praise of the New Knighthood, Bernard of Clairvaux had concocted for them a distinction between "malecide" and homicide—that is, when they struck down an infidel, they were slaying evil, not a man. Had they known about it, the Assassins, the Krak's neighbors, would have roundly applauded the sentiment. Other churchmen, more in line with the reservations expressed by Isaac of Etoile, hastened to impress on the monastic knights that such a dispensation—the absence of sin—could be granted only if they, as agents of God's will, were themselves pure. "It is useless indeed for us to attack exterior enemies," wrote a prior of La Grande Chartreuse monastery to the Templars, "if we do not first conquer those of the interior." Had he known it, he would have realized, horrified, that he had just described the greatest threat to Outremer: jihad.
The idea of striving in the path of God—jihad—is enshrined in the Islamic canon. The Quran has thirty-five verses in which it is mentioned, ranging from the poetically ambiguous to the pointedly belligerent. In the dark days of his exile in Madina, Muhammad instilled in his followers a duty to be combative against the umma's foes in Mecca. "Fight the polytheists totally as they fight you totally," states verse fourteen of the ninth sura. In one of the hadiths—the sayings of the Prophet given the imprimatur of authenticity through centuries of exegetical scholarship—Muhamma
d declared, "A morning or an evening expedition in God's path is better than the world and what it contains, and for one of you to remain in the line of battle is better than his prayers for sixty years." Subsequent compilations of Islamic law, the sharia, elevated jihad to a sixth pillar of the faith, an equal of the hajj and alms-giving for each able-bodied member of the faithful.
The letter of the Carthusian cited above would not seem so uncannily Islamic without a further refinement in the idea of righteous struggle. The Quran and the traditions describe a second jihad, superior to the first; it involves the individual's fight to go beyond the baser instincts of his nature in order to lead a pious, upright life. This "greater jihad" is far harder to undertake, as it requires application, discipline, and humility, qualities denied the common ruck of humanity. For some scholars, one could not carry out the lesser jihad of war until one had completed the greater jihad of self-correction. In this view there could be no holy war without warriors who were holy—precisely the point the monk was making in his letter to the Templars.
In practice, finding enough saints to man an army is well-nigh impossible, and divesting war, no matter how sacred it has been deemed, of its more mundane motives is hardly any easier. The imperfections of men, however, did not diminish the power behind the idea of jihad. Given the right circumstances and messengers, jihad could be invoked to stem and reverse the demoralization of a populace. To an educated Syrian of the crusader era, the great Arab conquests of the past—Yarmuk, Egypt, al-Andalus—could be seen through the lens of jihad, and rightly so, since some participants in those distant victories no doubt felt they were doing God's work. By the time of the Abbasid ascendancy in the eighth and ninth centuries, with its stabilization of the borders between Islam and the west, jihad had taken on a more ritualistic cast, as the caliph dutifully marched out on a regular basis to skirmish with the Byzantines. Harun al-Rashid went on jihad one year, hajj the next. Similarly, the greatest caliph of Umayyad Spain, Abd al-Rahman III, annually conducted what he called jihad in harrassing the Christians of the north—and, not incidentally, dropping in on any disobedient emirs of his borderlands. A generation later, Almanzor cloaked himself in jihad on his frequent incursions into Aragon and Castile, conveniently ignoring the fact that a sizable portion of his armies were Christians.
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