by Tamim Ansary
The city’s native Christians did not fare so well either. None of them belonged to the Church of Rome but to various Eastern churches such as the Greek, Armenian, Coptic, or Nestorian. The crusading Franj looked upon them as schismatics bordering on heresy, and since heretics were almost worse than heathens, they confiscated the property of these eastern Christians and sent them into exile.
THE THEATER OF THE CRUSADES
The taking of Jerusalem marked the high-water mark of the Franj invasion. The victorious crusaders proclaimed Jerusalem a kingdom. It ranked the highest of the four small crusader states that took root in this area, the others being the principality of Antioch and the counties of Edessa and Tripoli.
Once these four crusader states had been established, a sort of deadlock developed, which ground on dismally for decades. The two sides continued to clash sporadically during these decades, and the Franj won some battles, but they also lost some battles. They pounded the Muslims, but also got pounded, and they quarreled with one another, just as the Muslims were doing among themselves. Sometimes they forged temporary alliances with some Muslim prince to gain an advantage against a rival Franj.
Strange alignments formed and died. In one battle Christian king Tancred of Antioch fought Muslim amir Jawali of Mosul. One third of Tancred’s force that day consisted of Turkish warriors on loan from the Muslim ruler of Aleppo, who was allied with the Assassins, who had links with the Crusaders. On the other side, about one third of Jawali’s troops were Franj knights on loan from King Baldwin of Edessa, who had a rivalry going with Tancred.5 And this was typical.
On the Muslim side, the absence of unity was breathtaking. It stemmed partly from the fact that the Muslims saw no ideological dimension to the violence, at first. They felt themselves under attack not as Muslims but as individuals, as cities, as mini states. They experienced the Franj as a horrible but meaningless catastrophe, like an earthquake or a swarm of snakes.
It’s true that after the carnage at Jerusalem, a few preachers tried to arouse Muslim resistance by defining the invasion as a religious war. Several prominent jurists began delivering sermons in which they used the word jihad for the first time in ages, but their harangues fell flat with Muslim audiences. The word jihad merely seemed quaint, for it had fallen out of use centuries earlier, in part because of the rapid expansion of Islam, which had left the vast majority of Muslims living so far from any frontier that they had no enemy to fight in the name of jihad. That early sense of Islam against the world had long ago given way to a sense of Islam as the world. Most wars that anyone could remember hearing of had been fought for petty prizes such as territory, resources, or power. The few that could be cast as noble struggles about ideals were never about Islam versus something else, but only about whose Islam was the real Islam.
Given the turmoil of the Muslim world, perhaps some disunity was inevitable: when the Franj dropped into this snake pit, fractious Muslims simply incorporated them into their ongoing dramas. Not all the disunity was spontaneous, however. The Assassins were busy behind the scenes, sowing turmoil, and quite successfully.
Just before the Crusades began, Hassan Sabbah had established a second base of operations in Syria, run by a subsidiary master whom the Crusaders came to know as the Old Man of the Mountains. By the time the Crusades began, virtually everyone who wasn’t an Assassin hated the Assassins. Every power in the land was trying to hunt them down. The Assassins’ enemies included the Shi’i, the Sunnis, the Seljuk Turks, the Fatimid Egyptians, and the Abbasid khalifate. As it happened, the Crusaders were making war against the same gallery—the Shi’i, the Sunnis, the Seljuk Turks, the Fatimid Egyptians, and the Abbasid khalifate. The Assassins and Crusaders had the same set of enemies so, inevitably, they became de facto allies.
During the first century of the Franj invasions, every time the Muslims began moving toward unity, the Assassins murdered some key figure and triggered turmoil anew.
In 1113 CE the governor of Mosul called a conference of Muslim leaders to organize a unified campaign against the Franj. Just before the meetings began, however, a mendicant approached the governor on his way to the mosque, pretended to beg for alms, then suddenly plunged a knife in his chest. So much for the unity campaign.
In 1124, Assassin agents murdered the second most influential cleric preaching the new jihad. The next year, a group of supposed Sufis attacked and killed another such preacher, the most influential proponent of jihad, the first of this era to revive the call.
In 1126, the Assassins killed al-Borsoki, the powerful king of Aleppo and Mosul who, by uniting these two major cities, had forged the potential core of a united Muslim state in Syria. Borsoki had even taken the precaution of wearing armor under his clothes—he knew that Assassins were lurking about. But as fake Sufis attacked him, one of them cried, “Aim for his head!” They knew about his armor. Borsoki died of neck wounds. His son immediately took command and might have saved the nascent state, but Assassins killed him too, and four rival claimants to the throne plunged this part of Syria back into war.
Murders of this sort happened an astounding number of times during the early Crusades. Some of the murders were not proven to have been the work of the Assassins, but once the terrorist narrative had been reified, the terrorists didn’t need to commit all the terrorist acts. They could claim any murder that bore their stamp and use it to forward their cause. Apparently, they kept detailed records of their work, but because they were so very secretive, no outsiders had access to these records at the time, and when the cult was finally destroyed by the Mongols in 1256, it was destroyed so thoroughly its records were almost all erased from history. Therefore no one now knows how many of the murders attributed to Assassins were actually committed by them. Rumors and whispers tell us they cast a grim shadow over their times but we will never know the scope of their impact on the Crusades: the records are gone.
What finally turned the tide against the Franj was a series of Muslim leaders, each of whom was greater than the one before. The first of them was the Turkish general Zangi, who governed Mosul, then took Aleppo, and then absorbed many other cities into his domains until he could reasonably call himself the king of a united Syria. This was the first time in fifty years that a Muslim country larger than a single city and its environs had existed in the Levant (the region between Mesopotamia and Egypt).
Zangi’s troops revered him because he was the archetypal soldier’s soldier. He lived as ruggedly as his men, ate what they ate, and put on no airs. He soon decided that Muslims had a single common enemy and began to organize a unified campaign against this enemy. First, he squeezed the weakness out of his machine: he eliminated flatterers from his court and courtesans from his armies. More important, he built a network of informers and propagandists throughout Syria that kept his governors in line.
In 1144, Zangi conquered Edessa, which made him a hero to the Muslim world. Edessa wasn’t the biggest city in the east, but it was the first sizable city the Muslims had taken back from the Franj, and with recapture of Edessa, one of the four “Crusader Kingdoms” ceased to exist. A wave of hope ran through the Levant. A wave of dismay and war fever swept western Europe, inspiring a group of monarchs to organize what turned out to be a dismally ineffectual Second Crusade.
Zangi supported preachers who promoted jihad because he saw jihad as an instrument for unifying the Muslims. Unfortunately Zangi could not very well put himself at the head of a new jihad because he was a hard-drinking, foulmouthed brawler; the very qualities that endeared him to his men offended many of the ulama. He did, however, create an anti-Franj movement that another more pious ruler could build into a real jihad.
His son and successor, Nuruddin, possessed the qualities his father had lacked. Though he shared his father’s martial energy, Nuruddin was polished, diplomatic, and devout. He called on Muslims to unite around one set of religious beliefs (Sunni Islam) and make jihad their central objective in life. He revived the image of the just and pious man wh
o fought not for ego, not for wealth, nor for power, but for the community. In restoring to Muslims this sense of themselves as a single Umma, he gave them back their sense of destiny, nurturing a fervor for jihad that another, greater ruler could use to craft a real political victory.
This greater ruler turned out to be Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayub, commonly known as Saladin, the nephew of one of Nuruddin’s top generals. In 1163, Nuruddin sent Saladin’s uncle off to conquer Egypt, just to keep it out of Franj hands, and the general took along his nephew. The general succeeded in taking Egypt, and then promptly died, leaving Saladin in charge. Officially, Egypt still belonged to the Fatimid khalifa, but real power belonged to his vizier, and the Egyptian court gladly accepted Saladin as the new vizier, mostly because he was only twenty-nine years old, and the courtiers thought his youth and inexperience would make him their tool.
Saladin had indeed shown little hint of greatness while living in his uncle’s shadow. Retiring by nature and modest to a fault, he showed no inclination for war. As soon as he took charge of Egypt, Nuruddin told him to abolish the Fatimid dynasty, and the order distressed him. The Fatimid khalifa was a sickly twenty-year-old at this time, who didn’t really rule anything anyway. He was just a figurehead, and Saladin was loathe to hurt his feelings. He obeyed his orders, but he abolished the khalifate so quietly, the khalifa never even knew about it. One Friday, Saladin simply arranged for a citizen to get up in the mosque and recite a sermon in the name of the Abassid khalifa in Baghdad. No one protested and so the deed was done. The frail young khalifa soon expired of natural causes without learning that he was a private citizen and that his dynasty had ended. His death left Saladin as the sole ruler of Egypt.
Now came a series of nonencounters with his supposed boss. Nuruddin kept arranging meetings; Saladin kept making excuses not to be there: his father was sick, he himself was feeling under the weather—it was always something. In truth, he knew that if he met his master face-to-face, he would have to break with him, because he was already the bigger man, king of a more powerful country, and incipient leader of the Muslim cause, and he didn’t want to quarrel about it. So he maintained the fiction that he was Nuruddin’s subordinate until the older man passed away. Then, Saladin proclaimed himself king of Syria as well as Egypt. Some of Nuruddin’s followers cursed him then and called him a disloyal upstart and an arrogant young fool, but they were swimming against history. The Muslim savior had arrived.
He was a man of slight build, this Saladin. He had a pensive air and melancholy eyes, but when he smiled, he could light up a room. Charitable to the point of penury, he was humble with the humble, but majestic with men of might. No one could intimidate him, yet he never stooped to intimidating anyone over whom he had power. As a military leader, he was okay, but nothing special. His power ultimately lay in the fact that people simply adored him.
Saladin sometimes wept at sad news and often went out of his way to perform acts of hospitality and grace. A Franj woman once came to him devastated because bandits had kidnapped her daughter and she didn’t know where to turn for help. Saladin sent his soldiers out to look for the girl. They found her in the slave market, bought her, and brought her back to her mother, and the two went back to the Franj encampment.
In his personal habits Saladin was just as ascetic and demanding of himself as Nuruddin had been, but he was less demanding of others. He was religious but lacked a streak of dogmatism that had marred Nuruddin’s personality.
The Assassins tried hard to kill Saladin. Twice they penetrated right to his bedside while he was sleeping. Once they wounded him in the head but he was wearing a leather neck-guard and a metal helmet under his turban. After these two attempts, Saladin decided to smash the Assassins once and for all. He set siege to their fortress in Syria, but then—
Something happened. To this day, no one knows what. Some say that Sinon, the Syrian head of the Assassins, sent a letter to Saladin’s maternal uncle promising to have every member of the family killed unless the siege was lifted. The Assassins’ own sources say that in the middle of the night, after having surrounded himself with guards and every other possible precaution against assassination, Saladin woke up to see a shadow passing through his tent wall and to find a piece of paper pinned to his pillow bearing the message, “You are in our power.” That story is surely apocryphal, but the fact that people believed it gives an idea of the power the Assassins had acquired in the popular imagination. This time, however, the usual Assassin tactic backfired, for having tried and failed twice to kill him, the Assassins succeeded only in adding to the legend of Saladin’s invincibility.
Saladin moved carefully, letting his reputation unite his people and soften his enemies. He retook most of the Crusaders’ holdings bloodlessly through encirclement, economic pressure, and negotiation. In 1187, when he finally moved on Jerusalem, he began by sending in a proposal that the Franj relinquish this city peacefully as well. In exchange, Christians who wanted to leave could take their property and depart, Christians who wanted to stay could do so and practice their religion unmolested, Christian places of worship would be protected, and pilgrims would be welcome to come and go. The Franj indignantly rejected giving up Jerusalem, their main prize and the whole point of these Crusades, so Saladin encircled the city, took it by force, and then dealt with it as Khalifa Omar had done: no massacres, no plundering, and all prisoners set free upon payment of a ransom.
Despite the gentility of it, Saladin’s recapture of Jerusalem did fully reverse the gains of the First Crusade, arousing new consternation in Europe and leading the continent’s three most important monarchs to organize the famous Third Crusade. One was the German Frederick Barbarossa, who fell off his horse in a few inches of water and drowned on the way to the Holy Lands. One was French monarch Phillip II of France, who made it to the Holy Lands, took part in the conquest of the port of Acre, and then went home exhausted. That left only the English king Richard I, known to his countrymen as the Lionheart. Richard was a formidable warrior, but scarcely deserved the reputation he enjoyed back home as a paragon of chivalry. He broke promises lightly and did whatever it took to win battles. He and Saladin danced around each other for about a year, and Richard won the main battle they fought, but by the time he laid siege to Jerusalem in June of 1192, illness had reduced his strength and the heat had him panting. Saladin sympathetically sent him fresh fruit and cool snow and waited for Richard to realize that he didn’t have the men to retake Jerusalem. Finally, Richard agreed to terms with Saladin, which were roughly as follows: Muslims would keep Jerusalem but protect Christian places of worship, let Christians live in the city and practice their faith without harassment, and let Christian pilgrims come and go as they pleased. Richard then headed home, preceded by the news that he had won a sort of victory at Jerusalem: he had forced Saladin to be nice. In fact, he had secured exactly the terms Saladin had offered from the start.
After this Third Crusade nothing of much significance happened, unless you count the Fourth Crusade of 1206 in which the Crusaders never even made it to the Holy Land because along the way they got preoccupied with conquering and sacking Constantinople and defiling its churches. By the mid-thirteenth century the whole crusading impulse had grown feeble in Europe and at last it just died away.
Historians traditionally count eight Crusades over the course of two hundred years, but really there was at least a trickle of crusaders arriving and leaving at any given time during those years. So it’s probably more accurate to say that the Crusades lasted about two hundred years, with eight periods during which the traffic swelled, usually because some monarch or coalition of monarchs organized a campaign. Over these two centuries, “crusading” simply became an ongoing activity for Europeans, with some families sending one or two sons off to the wars in every generation, these sons departing when they came of age, not when “the next crusade” was leaving.
The first wave of European knights took a handful of cities and established four quasi-pe
rmanent “Crusader kingdoms,” after which would-be crusaders from England or France or Germany always had a place to land and an army to join if they headed east. Some Christians of western European stock were of course born in these kingdoms and lived and died there, but many came east for a few years, did some fighting for the cause, acquired some booty if they were lucky, and went home. The Crusaders built impressive stone fortresses, but their sojourn in the east always had a temporary feel to it.
Some modern-day Islamist radicals (and a smattering of Western pundits) describe the Crusades as a great clash of civilizations foreshadowing the troubles of today. They trace the roots of modern Muslim rage to that era and those events. But reports from the Arab side don’t show Muslims of the time thinking this way, at least at the start. No one seemed to cast the wars as an epic struggle between Islam and Christendom—that was the story line the Crusaders saw. Instead of a clash between two civilizations, Muslims saw simply a calamity falling upon . . . civilization. For one thing, when they looked at the Franj, they saw no evidence of civilization. An Arab prince named Usamah ibn Munqidh described the Franks as being like “beasts, superior in courage and in fighting ardor, but in nothing else, just as animals are superior in strength and aggression.”6 The Crusaders so disgusted the Muslims that they came to appreciate the Byzantines by contrast. Once they understood the political and religious motives of the Crusaders, they made a distinction between “al Rum” (Rome—i.e., the Byzantines) and “al-Ifranj.” Instead of “the Crusades,” Muslims called this period of violence the Franj Wars.
In areas under attack, Muslims did, of course, feel threatened by the Franj, even horrified by them, but they didn’t see in these attacks any intellectual challenge to their ideas and beliefs. And although the Crusades were certainly a serious matter for Muslims living along the eastern Mediterranean coast, the Crusaders never penetrated deeply into the Muslim world. For example, no real army ever reached Mecca and Medina, only a small raiding party led by a renegade whom even other Franj regarded as a despicable rogue. The Crusaders never laid siege to Baghdad nor did they penetrate historic Persia. People in Khorasan and Bactria and the Indus Valley remained completely unaffected by the incursion and largely unaware of it.