Fields of Blood

by Karen Armstrong

  The terrifying experience of Crusading soon changed their views and expectations.53 Many of the Crusaders had never left their villages; now they were thousands of miles from home, shut off from everything they had known, and surrounded by fearsome enemies in alarming terrain. When they arrived at the Ante-Taurus range, many were paralyzed by terror, gazing at these precipitous mountains “in a great state of gloom, wringing their hands because they were so frightened and miserable.”54 The Turks operated a scorched-earth policy, so there was no food, and the poorer noncombatants and soldiers died like flies. Chroniclers report that during the siege of Antioch:

  The starving people devoured the stalks of beans still growing in the fields, many kinds of herbs unseasoned with salt, and even thistles which because of the lack of firewood were not well cooked and therefore irritated the tongues of those eating them. They also ate horses, camels, dogs, and even rats. The poorer people even ate the hides of animals and the seeds of grain found in manure.55

  The Crusaders soon realized that they were badly led and inadequately provisioned. They also knew that they were massively outnumbered. “Where we have a count, the enemy has forty kings; where we have a regiment, the enemy has a legion,” wrote the bishops who accompanied the expedition in their joint letter home; “where we have a castle, they have a kingdom.”56

  Even so, they could not have arrived at a more opportune moment. Not only was the Seljuk Empire disintegrating, but the sultan had recently died, and the emirs were fighting one another for the succession. Had the Turks preserved a united front, the Crusade could not have succeeded. The Crusaders knew nothing about local politics, and their understanding was derived almost entirely from their religious views and prejudices. Onlookers described the Crusading armies as a monastery on the march. At every crisis there were processions, prayers, and a special liturgy. Even though they were famished, they fasted before an engagement and listened as attentively to sermons as to battle instructions. Starving men had visions of Jesus, the saints, and deceased Crusaders who were now glorious martyrs in Heaven. They saw angels fighting alongside them, and at one of the lowest moments of the siege of Antioch, they discovered a holy relic—the lance that had pierced Christ’s side—which so elated the despairing men that they surged out of the city and put the besieging Turks to flight. When they finally succeeded in conquering Jerusalem on July 15, 1099, they could only conclude that God had been with them. “Who could not marvel at the way we, a small people among such kingdoms of our enemies, were able not just to resist them but survive?” wrote the chaplain, Fulcher of Chartres.57

  War has been aptly described as “a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships.”58 The First Crusade was especially psychotic. From all accounts, the Crusaders seemed half-crazed. For three years they had had no normal dealings with the world around them, and prolonged terror and malnutrition made them susceptible to abnormal states of mind. They were fighting an enemy that was not only culturally but ethnically different—a factor that, as we have found in our own day, tends to nullify normal inhibitions—and when they fell on the inhabitants of Jerusalem, they slaughtered some thirty thousand people in three days.59 “They killed all the Saracens and Turks they found,” the author of the Deeds of the Franks reported approvingly. “They killed everyone, male or female.”60 The streets ran with blood. Jews were rounded up into their synagogue and put to the sword, and ten thousand Muslims who had sought sanctuary in the Haram al-Sharif were brutally massacred. “Piles of heads, hands and feet were to be seen,” wrote the Provençal chronicler Raymond of Aguilers: “Men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins. Indeed, it was a just and splendid judgment of God that this place should be filled with the blood of unbelievers.”61 There were so many dead that the Crusaders were unable to dispose of the bodies. When Fulcher of Chartres came to celebrate Christmas in Jerusalem five months later, he was appalled by the stench from the rotting corpses that still lay unburied in the fields and ditches around the city.62

  When they could kill no more, the Crusaders proceeded to the Church of the Resurrection, singing hymns with tears of joy rolling down their cheeks. Beside the Tomb of Christ, they sang the Easter liturgy. “This day, I say, will be famous in all future ages, for it turned our labors and sorrows into joy and exultation,” Raymond exulted. “This day, I say, marks the justification of all Christianity, the humiliation of paganism, the renewal of faith.”63 Here we have evidence of another psychotic disconnect: the Crusaders were standing beside the tomb of a man who had been a victim of human cruelty, yet they were unable to question their own violent behavior. The ecstasy of battle, heightened in this case by years of terror, starvation, and isolation, merged with their religious mythology to create an illusion of utter righteousness. But victors are never blamed for their crimes, and chroniclers soon described the conquest in Jerusalem as a turning point in history. Robert the Monk made the astonishing claim that its importance had been exceeded only by the creation of the world and Jesus’s crucifixion.64 As a consequence, Muslims were now regarded in the West as a “vile and abominable race,” “despicable, degenerate and enslaved by demons,” “absolutely alien to God,” and “fit only for extermination.”65

  This holy war and the ideology that inspired it represented a complete denial of the pacifist strain in Christianity. It was also the first imperial venture of the Christian West as, after centuries of stagnation, it fought its way back onto the international scene. Five Crusader states were established, in Jerusalem, Antioch, Galilee, Edessa, and Tripoli. These states needed a standing army, and the Church completed its canonization of warfare by giving monks a sword: the Knights Hospitaler of St. John were founded originally to care for poor and sick pilgrims, and the Knights Templar, housed in the Aqsa Mosque on the Haram, policed the roads. They took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience to their military commander, and because they were far more disciplined than ordinary knights, they became the most professional fighting force in the West since the Roman legions.66 Saint Bernard, abbot of the new Cistercian abbey of Clairvaux, had no time for regular knights, who with their fine clothes, jeweled bridles, and delicate hands were motivated only by “irrational anger, hunger for empty glory, or hankering after some earthly possessions.”67 The Templars, however, combined the meekness of monks with military power, and their sole motivation was to kill the enemies of Christ. A Christian, Bernard said, should exult when he saw these “pagans” “scattered,” “cut away,” and “dispersed.”68 The ideology of these first Western colonies was permeated through and through with religion, but although later Western imperialism was inspired by a more secular ideology, it would often share the ruthlessness and aggressive righteousness of Crusading.

  The Muslims were stunned by the Crusaders’ violence. By the time they reached Jerusalem, the Franj (“Franks”) had already acquired a fearsome reputation; it was said that they had killed more than a hundred thousand people at Antioch, and that during the siege they had roamed the countryside, wild with hunger, openly vowing to eat the flesh of any Saracen who crossed their path.69 But Muslims had never experienced anything like the Jerusalem massacre. For over three hundred years they had fought all the great regional powers, but these wars had always been conducted within mutually agreed limits.70 Muslim sources reported in horror that the Franks did not spare the elderly, the women, or the sick; they even slaughtered devout ulema, “who had left their homelands to live lives of pious seclusion in the holy place.”71

  Despite this appalling beginning, not only was there no major Muslim offensive against the Franks for nearly fifty years, but the Crusaders were accepted as part of the political makeup of the region. The Crusader states fitted neatly into the Seljuk pattern of small, independent tributary states, and when emirs fought one another, they often made alliances with Frankish rulers.72 For the Turkish commanders, the ideals of classical jihad were dead, and when the Crusaders had arrived, no “volunteers” had rushed to defend the frontiers. No lo
nger poised to resist foreign invasion, the emirs had been lax in their defense of the borders; they were unconcerned about the “infidel” presence, since they were too intent on their campaigns against one another. Even though the Crusading ideal resonated with ahadith that saw jihad as a form of monasticism, the first Muslim chroniclers to record the Crusade completely failed to recognize the Franks’ religious passion and assumed that they were driven simply by material greed. They all realized that the Franks owed their success to their own failure to form a united front, but after the Crusade there was still no serious attempt to band together. For their part, the Franks who stayed in the Holy Land realized that their survival depended on their ability to coexist with their Muslim neighbors and soon lost their rabid prejudice. They assimilated with the local culture and learned to take baths, dress in the Turkish style, and speak the local languages; they even married Muslim women.

  But if the emirs had forgotten the jihad, a handful of “fighting ulema” had not. Immediately after the conquest of Jerusalem, Abu Said al-Harawi, qadi of Damascus, led a deputation of Muslim refugees from Jerusalem to the caliph’s mosque in Baghdad and begged the caliph to call for a jihad against the invaders. Their terrible stories reduced the congregation to tears, but the caliph was now too weak to undertake any military action.73 In 1105 the Syrian jurist al-Sulami wrote a treatise arguing that jihad against the Franks was fard ayn, an “individual obligation” incumbent on the local emirs, who must step into the vacuum created by the caliph’s incapacity and drive the invaders out of the Dar al-Islam. He insisted that no military action would be successful unless it was preceded by the “Greater Jihad,” a reform of hearts and minds in which Muslims battled with their fear and apathy.74

  Yet still there was little response. Far from being maniacally programmed for holy war by their religion, the Muslims had little appetite for jihad and were preoccupied by new forms of spirituality. In particular, some of the Sufi mystics would develop an outstanding appreciation of other faith traditions. The learned and highly influential Muid ad-Din ibn al-Arabi (1165–1240) would claim that a man of God was at home equally in a synagogue, mosque, temple, or church, since all provided a valid apprehension of God:

  My heart is capable of every form.

  A cloister for the monk, a fane for idols,

  A pasture for gazelles, the votary’s Kabah,

  The tables of the Torah, the Quran.

  Love is the faith I hold. Wherever turn

  His camels, still the one true faith is mine.75

  During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the period of the Crusades, Sufism ceased to be a fringe movement and in many parts of the Muslim world became the dominant Islamic mood. Few were capable of achieving the higher mystical states, but Sufi disciplines of concentration, which included music and dancing, helped people to abandon simplistic and narrow notions of God and chauvinist attitudes toward other traditions.

  A few ulema and ascetics found the presence of the Franks intolerable. In 1111 Ibn al-Khashab, qadi of Aleppo, led a delegation of Sufis, imams, and merchants to Baghdad, breaking into the caliph’s mosque and smashing his pulpit in an unsuccessful attempt to rouse him from his inertia.76 In 1119 the troops of Mardin and Damascus were so inspired by the qadi’s preaching that they “wept with emotion and admiration” and achieved their first Muslim victory over the Franks by defeating Count Roger of Antioch.77 But no sustained action was taken against the Crusaders until 1144, when, almost by accident, Zangi, emir of Mosul, conquered the Christian principality of Edessa during his campaign in Syria. To his surprise, Zangi, who had little interest in the Franks, became an overnight hero. The caliph hailed him as “the pillar of religion” and “the cornerstone of Islam,” though it was hard to see Zangi as a devout Muslim.78 The Turkish chroniclers condemned his “roughness, aggression, and insolence that brought death to enemies and civilians,” and in 1146 he was murdered by a slave while in a drunken stupor.79

  It was the spectacle of the huge armies arriving from Europe to recover Edessa in the Second Crusade (1148) that finally galvanized some of the emirs. Even though this Crusade was an embarrassing fiasco for the Christians, the local people were beginning to see the Franks as a real danger. The Muslim riposte was led by Nur ad-Din, Zangi’s son (r. 1146–74), who took the advice of the “fighting scholars” and first dedicated himself to the Greater Jihad. He returned to the spirit of the Prophet’s ummah, living a frugal life, often passing the whole night in prayer, and setting up “houses of justice” where anybody, whatever his faith or status, could find redress. He fortified the cities of the region, built madrassas and Sufi convents, and cultivated the ulema.80 So moribund was the jihad spirit among the populace that reviving it was hard work, however. Nur ad-Din circulated anthologies of ahadith in praise of Jerusalem and commissioned a beautiful pulpit to be installed in the Aqsa Mosque when the Muslims recovered their holy city. Yet never once in his twenty-eight-year reign did he attack the Franks directly.

  His greatest military achievement was the conquest of Fatimid Egypt, and it was his Kurdish governor of there, Yusuf ibn Ayyub, usually known by his title Salah ad-Din (“Honor of the Faith”), who would reconquer Jerusalem. But Saladin had to spend the first ten years of his reign fighting other emirs in order to hold Nur ad-Din’s empire together, and during this struggle he made many treaties with the Franks. Saladin too first concentrated on the Greater Jihad and endeared himself to the people by his compassion, humility, and charisma, but as his biographer explained, his real passion was the military jihad:

  The Jihad and the suffering involved in it weighed heavily on his heart and his whole being in every limb; he spoke of nothing else, thought only about equipment for the fight, was interested only in those who had taken up arms.… For the love of Jihad in God’s Path, he left his family and his sons, his homeland, his house and all his estates, and chose out of all the world to live in the shade of his tent.81

  Like Nur ad-Din, Saladin always traveled with an entourage of ulema, Sufis, qadis, and imams, who recited Quran and ahadith to the troops as they marched. Jihad, which had been all but dead, was becoming a live force in the region; it had been resurrected not by the inherently violent nature of Islam but by a sustained assault from the West. In the future any Western intervention in the Middle East, however secular its motivation, would evoke the memory of the fanatical violence of the First Crusade.

  Like the Crusaders, Saladin discovered that his enemy could be its own greatest foe. He ultimately owed his military success to the chronic infighting of the Franks and the hawkish policies of newcomers from the West who did not understand regional politics. As a result, in July 1187 he was able to destroy the Christian army at the Horns of Hattin in Galilee. After the battle, he released the king of Jerusalem but had the surviving Templars and Hospitalers killed in his presence, judging correctly that they posed the greatest danger to the Muslim reconquista. When he took possession of Jerusalem, his first impulse was to avenge the Crusaders’ massacre of 1099 but was persuaded by a Frankish envoy to take the city without violence.82 Not a single Christian was killed, the Frankish inhabitants of Jerusalem were ransomed for a very moderate sum, and many were escorted to Tyre, where the Christians maintained a stronghold. Christians in the West were uneasily aware that Saladin had behaved more humanely than the Crusaders and developed legends that made him an honorary Christian. Some Muslims, however, were more critical: Ibn al-Athir argued that this clemency was a serious military and political error, because the Franks managed to retain a narrow coastal state stretching from Tyre to Beirut, which continued to threaten Muslim Jerusalem until the late thirteenth century.83

  Ironically, as military jihad became embedded in the spirituality of the Greater Jihad, Crusading was increasingly driven by material and political interests that sidelined the spiritual.84 When Pope Urban summoned the First Crusade, he had usurped the kings’ prerogative in his bid for papal supremacy. The Third Crusade (1189–92), led and convened
by the Holy Roman emperor Frederick Barbarossa, Philip II of France, and Richard I of England, reasserted the temporal rulers’ monopoly of violence. While Saladin inspired his soldiers with hadith readings, Richard offered his men money for every stone of Acre’s city wall torn down. A few years later the Fourth Crusade was hijacked purely for commercial gain by the merchants of Venice, the new men of Europe, who persuaded the Crusaders to attack their fellow Christians in the port of Zara and plunder Constantinople in 1204. Western emperors governed Byzantium until 1261, when the Greeks finally managed to expel them, but their incompetence in the intervening period may have fatally weakened this sophisticated state, whose polity was far more complex than any Western kingdom at this date.85 Pope Innocent III reclaimed papal libertas in 1213 by summoning the Fifth Crusade, which attempted to establish a Western base in Egypt, but the Crusaders’ fleet was incapacitated by an epidemic and the land army cut off by the rising flood waters of the Nile during the march to Cairo.

  The Sixth Crusade (1228–29) entirely subverted the original Crusading ideal because it was led by the Holy Roman emperor Frederick II, who had recently been excommunicated by Pope Gregory IX. Brought up in cosmopolitan Sicily, Frederick did not share the Islamophobia of the rest of Europe and negotiated a truce with his friend Sultan al-Kamil, who had no interest in jihad. Frederick thus recovered Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nazareth without fighting a single battle.86 But both rulers had misjudged the popular mood: Muslims were now convinced that the West was their implacable enemy, and Christians seemed to think it more important to fight Muslims than to get Jerusalem back. Because no priest would perform the ceremony for an excommunicate, in March 1229 Frederick defiantly crowned himself King of Jerusalem in the Holy Sepulcher Church. The Teutonic Knights of the Holy Roman Empire proudly declared that this ceremony had made him God’s vicar on earth, and that it was the emperor, not the pope, who stood “between God and mankind and was chosen to rule the entire world.”87 By now a Crusade’s political impact at home seemed more important than what was happening in the Middle East.