Last Crusade, The

by Cliff, Nigel

  34 Scandalous rumors: One especially incendiary letter was purportedly addressed to Count Robert of Flanders by the Byzantine emperor Alexius I Comnenus. As well as detailing the wholesale defilement of churches, it alleged that the Turks lined up to violate virgins while making their watching mothers sing obscene songs, and sodomized men of all ages, including clergymen, monks, and even bishops. The letter, which is written in a lurid tabloid style, may be apocryphal, or it may be a later forgery based on real material; either way, the accusations give a startling insight into the pitch to which enmity between Christians and Muslims had risen. Andrew Holt and James Muldoon, eds., Competing Voices from the Crusades (Oxford: Greenwood, 2008), 9.

  34 “have completely destroyed”: Robert the Monk, quoted in Thomas F. Madden, The New Concise History of the Crusades (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 8–9. A verbatim report of Urban II’s speech has not survived; Robert’s version was written twenty years after the event, and its catalog of Muslim depravities may have been intended to validate the First Crusade after the fact.

  35 toward Jerusalem: Robert the Monk reports Urban II’s focus on Jerusalem. In the account of Fulcher of Chartres, who was present at Clermont, the pope instead stresses the need to defend Constantinople against the fast-advancing Turks. In his own letter to the Crusaders, written shortly after the council, Urban II talks about the outrages of the Muslims who had seized “the Holy City of Christ” but does not overtly call for its liberation. In all probability, though, that was his hope. Edward Peters, The First Crusade: The Chronicle of Fulcher of Chartres and Other Source Materials (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), 30–31, 16.

  35 one Egyptian ruler: The Fatimid caliph Al-Hakim, who then controlled Jerusalem, launched a widespread program to destroy Christian churches in Egypt and Palestine. His more tolerant son and heir allowed Constantinople to bribe him into agreeing to the shrine’s reconstruction. The Fatimids lost Jerusalem to the Turks in 1073 but recaptured the city in 1098, the year before the Crusaders arrived.

  35 “and does not cease”: Robert the Monk, quoted in Peters, First Crusade, 4.

  36 “Hence it is”: Ibid., 3–4.

  37 “marvelous works”: Raymond of Aguilers, quoted in Thomas Asbridge, The First Crusade: A New History (London: Free Press, 2004), 316. The estimate of 100,000 dead was considerably in excess of Jerusalem’s population at the time, which likely numbered around 30,000.

  37 “seizing infants”: Albert of Aachen, in ibid., 317.

  37 “gulped down”: Fulcher of Chartres, in ibid., 318.

  37 the al-Aqsa Mosque: The name means “the farthest mosque.” A lofty stone building at the southern end of the Temple Mount, it was built well after Muhammad’s time but had become popularly identified as the earthly destination of the Prophet’s Night Journey. Since there were soon no Muslims left in Jerusalem to explain this, the Crusaders decided it must be the Jewish First Temple built by King Solomon. There were no Jews left, either, to point out that the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar had destroyed Solomon’s Temple some sixteen centuries before the Crusaders showed up. The first Crusader kings unsuspectingly used the mosque as their palace and then gave it to a new knightly fraternity known as the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ. After the Hebrew history they imagined lay buried beneath the Islamic floor at their Christian feet, the Poor Fellow-Soldiers became known as the Knights Templar.

  37 a nearby rock: The rock is located under the Dome of the Rock, the Muslim shrine built at the end of the seventh century in a wholly successful attempt to outdo the city’s rival religious structures. In Jewish belief, it is the Foundation Stone from which the earth was formed, the altar where Abraham offered to sacrifice his son, and the resting place of the Ark of the Covenant, though all three locations are heavily disputed. In 2000, Israel’s then opposition leader Ariel Sharon took a walk on the Temple Mount that provoked a six-year intifada; so the religious layers of Jerusalem continue to pile up.

  37 up to their ankles, their knees, or their bridle reins in blood: While Muslim writers exaggerated the number of the dead to outrage their coreligionists’ feelings, Christian writers exaggerated the number out of pride at performing God’s work. Fulcher of Chartres, who was in Jerusalem five months after the conquest, says that nearly 10,000 were killed in the “Temple of Solomon” alone; the Muslim historian Ali ibn al-Athir puts the figure at 70,000. None are to be taken literally; Raymond of Aguilers’s line about the blood rising to the horses’ bridles is straight out of the book of Revelation.

  37 “in mounds as big as houses”: The anonymous Gesta Francorum (“Deeds of the Franks”), quoted in Asbridge, First Crusade, 320.

  37 one rapturous monk: Robert the Monk. Some Christian fundamentalists now believe that Israel is that precursor state.

  38 galloped in silent, tight formation: For the impression the Templars made on the battlefield, see the anonymous pilgrim’s account known as the Tractatus de locis et statu sanctae terrae (“Tract on the places and state of the Holy Land”), quoted in Helen Nicholson, The Knights Templar: A New History (Stroud, UK: Sutton, 2001), 67–68.

  38 The Templars and Hospitallers lived like monks: The Templars were allowed no possessions and were sworn to chastity. A dauntingly detailed rulebook laid out their every move; even minor transgressions meant a year of whippings and eating off the ground. The rule eventually ran to 686 clauses. See Malcolm Barber, The New Knighthood: A History of the Order of the Temple (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 182, 219–21.

  38 a renegade sect of Shia fanatics: The Assassins were a radical band of Ismailis who were frustrated by the failure of the Egyptian Fatimids to impose Shiism on the ummah. The result of their campaign of terror was the discrediting of the whole Shia movement. “To shed the blood of a [Muslim] heretic,” wrote one Assassin acolyte, “is more meritorious than to kill seventy Greek infidels.” Quoted in Bernard Lewis, The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967), 48.

  39 another devastating defeat on Constantinople: At the Battle of Myriocephalum. The Christians’ cause was not helped when, six years later, the emperor stood by while Orthodox mobs massacred thousands of Catholics who lived in Constantinople and dragged the severed head of the pope’s representative through the streets tied to the tail of a dog, an event that in part motivated the mayhem of the Fourth Crusade.

  40 “so as to free the earth of anyone who does not believe in God”: Saladin’s words were recorded by his retainer and biographer Baha ad-Din; quoted in Francesco Gabrieli, Arab Historians of the Crusades (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 101.

  40 the fresh Muslim troops crushed them in hours: By the ferocious standards of his age, Saladin was magnanimity itself. The foot soldiers were sold into slavery, and the nobles were held for ransom. The feared warrior-monks of the Hospital and the Temple were not so fortunate. Among their Muslim enemies they were reputed to be more devils than men; clerics lined up to behead them one by one while Saladin, his secretary Imad ad-Din recorded, looked on with a face full of joy. See Barber, New Knighthood, 64.

  41 cosmopolitan Sicily: In the eleventh century two Norman brothers named Roger and Robert Guiscard had wrested Sicily from its Muslim rulers, who had wrested it from Constantinople. The Normans were the descendants of Vikings, or Norsemen, and long after they converted to Christianity, wherever there was a war there were sure to be Normans. Yet the peripatetic warriors quickly adapted to their new homes, and they were especially seduced by sophisticated Sicily. Its governance was put in the capable hands of a meritocracy of Jews, Muslims, and Christians, and religious freedom flourished. Muslim travelers were taken aback at their enthusiastic reception in Christian Palermo, where women went to mass in an Eastern cloud of silk robes, colored veils, gilt slippers, and henna tattoos, and they were even more surprised to discover that some Normans spoke decent Arabic.

  42 “Rage and sorrow are seated in my heart”: Quoted in Stephen Howarth, The Knig
hts Templar (New York: Atheneum, 1982), 223.

  43 the death of their Great Khan: The Khan then was Ogedei, Genghis Khan’s third son and first successor.

  44 “Their situation approached the point of annihilation”: Quoted in Michael W. Dols, The Black Death in the Middle East (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 67. While Christians saw the plague as God’s punishment for mankind’s sins, Muslims dealt with the disaster by interpreting it as God’s offer of martyrdom for the faithful. That belief was shaken, though not destroyed, when the plague hit Mecca despite Muhammad’s prediction that no disease would touch either it or Medina.

  45 the Council of Constance: The numbers and professions of the attendees are given in Jerry Brotton, The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 96. The council, which met from 1414 to 1418, ruled that all men, including the pope himself, were duty-bound to obey its decisions, and it appointed Martin V as the first uncontested pope in nearly a century.

  45 an eternal building site: “Houses have fallen into ruins, churches have collapsed, whole quarters are abandoned; and the town is neglected and oppressed by famine and poverty,” lamented the new pope. Rome’s inhabitants, he added, “have been throwing and illicitly hiding entrails, viscera, heads, feet, bones, blood, and skins, besides rotten meat and fish, refuse, excrement, and other fetid and rotting cadavers into the streets . . . and have dared boldly and sacrilegiously to usurp, ruin, and reduce to their own use streets, alleys, piazzas, public and private places both ecclesiastical and profane.” From the start the new Rome was planned on a scale to represent and reinforce the glory of the revived church; the people’s faith, said Pope Nicholas V, would be “continually confirmed and daily corroborated by great buildings” that were “seemingly made by the hand of God.” Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes, 3rd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 193; Brotton, Renaissance Bazaar, 106.

  48 “We lost the day”: Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century (New York: Knopf, 1978), 561.

  Chapter 3: A Family War

  50 Crusaders from northern Europe: In 1147, several boatloads of English, Scottish, Flemish, German, and Norman knights en route to the Second Crusade stopped off for provisions in the port town of Porto. Porto had grown around an old Roman outpost called Portus Cale, which had been retaken from the Berbers in the ninth century; as the scrappy statelet expanded, the name Portus Cale evolved into Portugal. The Crusaders were enticed with tall tales of magnificent treasure to reinforce the army that was besieging Lisbon, and for four burningly hot months they bombarded the citadel. Finally the English built a series of siege towers, breached the walls, and set about pillaging with intent. In the spring of 1189 more Crusaders piled into the Algarve, where they massacred six thousand Muslims and brutally besieged the city of Siles. With the final conquest of the Algarve in 1249, Portugal became the first European nation-state to fix its borders.

  50 a royal chronicler: Duarte Galvão, Crónica de D. Afonso Henriques, quoted in Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 162.

  51 routed the attackers: At the Battle of Aljubarrota. The victory came at the cost of the death or dispersal of most of the old nobility who had sided with Castile; John I confiscated their lands and created a new nobility from among his supporters.

  51 The English and Portuguese had been allies: After the siege of Lisbon a number of English knights had stayed on; one, Gilbert of Hastings, was installed as Lisbon’s first bishop. English soldiers fought on John’s side at Aljubarrota, and the year after the battle John I signed the Treaty of Windsor, enshrining between the Portuguese and English kings, “their heirs and successors, and between the subjects of both kingdoms an inviolable, eternal, solid, perpetual and true league of friendship, alliance and union.” The treaty is the oldest extant alliance between European nations. H. V. Livermore, A New History of Portugal, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 67.

  52 Philippa arrived in Portugal: Philippa’s captivating story is told in T. W. E. Roche, Philippa: Dona Filipa of Portugal (London: Phillimore, 1971).

  52 “little blue Englishwoman’s eyes”: Ibid., 57.

  52 The prospect of such a pampered entrée: The primary authority for the planning and execution of the Crusade against Ceuta is the Portuguese chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara. His account originally formed a supplement to the Chronicle of King John I by Fernão Lopes, Zurara’s predecessor as court chronicler. A recent Portuguese edition is Gomes Eanes de Zurara, Crónica da tomada de Ceuta (Mem Martins: Publicações Europa-América, 1992). An abridged translation is given in Conquests and Discoveries of Henry the Navigator, ed. Virginia de Castro e Almeida and trans. Bernard Miall (London: Allen & Unwin, 1936).

  53 “great exploits”: Zurara, Conquests and Discoveries, 33.

  54 “excellent exercise of arms”: Letter of Duarte I, quoted in Peter Russell, Prince Henry ‘the Navigator’: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 40.

  55 several times it had granted bulls of Crusade: The bulls were issued by the Roman popes, whom the Portuguese, along with the English, had supported against the French claimants. The first bull was dated 1341; it was renewed in 1345, 1355, 1375, and 1377.

  56 “I am going to make a request”: Zurara, Conquests and Discoveries, 52–53.

  57 “On with you, greybeards!”: Ibid., 57. Behind the scenes, the council was far from unanimous in its support for the plan; many young nobles still hankered after renewing the war with Castile. Zurara’s claim that men of ninety were lining up to take part is best read as a poetic assurance that the nation’s wisest voices were behind the Crusade.

  57 Italian merchants and sailors: The Genoese, who were driven to seek out new commercial opportunities when Venice cornered the trade in Asian luxury goods, were the dominant group. In 1317 one Genoese was appointed Portugal’s first admiral.

  58 a ruinous piece of chivalric nonsense: Decades later, creditors were still trying to recover the large sums they had loaned the crown. See Russell, Prince Henry, 44.

  59 “I do not know”: Zurara, Conquests and Discoveries, 66–67.

  60 the assembled army numbered more than 19,000: The figures were given by a spy in the service of Ferdinand I of Aragon; Russell, Prince Henry, 31. Other estimates ranged as high as 50,000 men.

  62 The king’s confessor: As Peter Russell notes, the priest made much of John I’s guilt at having spilled a great deal of Christian blood during the wars against Castile; to salve his conscience, he explained, the king was determined to spill a matching amount of infidel blood. “Presumably,” Russell comments, “no one in the royal entourage thought it odd that John’s moral discomfort was to be assuaged at huge expense to his people and by yet more spillage of their blood.” Ibid., 46.

  62 a new papal bull: The pope from whom John I secured the bull was John XXIII, the second of the Pisan line of pontiffs elected in opposition to the French and Roman popes. Having been ritually accused of piracy, murder, rape, simony, and incest, John XXIII was deposed at the Council of Constance in May 1415 and was declared an antipope, two months before the Crusade he had endorsed set sail.

  63 The elderly governor: Salah ben Salah, the governor of Ceuta, was the lord of a string of nearby cities and came from a prominent African seafaring family.

  64 the town would be at their feet: At this point, Zurara has a throng of young Moroccans seek out the governor of Ceuta and suggest how to seize the enemy fleet, win a great victory, and reap a rich bounty. The Christians were weighed down with heavy armor, they supposedly explained; all that was needed was to meet them on the beaches and knock them to their feet, and they would be unable to get up. Whether or not the governor was given such sage advice—it is hard to conceive how Zurara might have got wind of it—he was mindful of his depleted forces and decided his best hope was to prevent the Portuguese from ente
ring the city. Many of his troops left their defensive positions and swarmed onto the beaches, with disastrous results.

  65 “And to you, Lord”: Zurara, Conquests and Discoveries, 98.

  65 “black as a crow”: Ibid., 99.

  66 “Our poor houses look like pigsties”: Quoted in C. R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire 1415–1825 (London: Hutchinson, 1969), 13.

  67 “did not trouble themselves about such things”: Ibid.

  68 They destroyed the cistern with the townspeople inside: Valentim Fernandes, Description de la Côte d’Afrique de Ceuta au Sénégal, ed. and trans. P. de Cenival and T. Monod (Paris: Larose, 1938), 18–19. The huge cistern was filled from the city’s springs; ships that wanted to replenish their water supply from it paid handsomely for the privilege.

  68 long-awaited invasion of France: Malyn Newitt notes the coincidence in A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion, 1400–1668 (London: Routledge, 2005), 19.

  Chapter 4: The Ocean Sea

  70 the carefully cultivated legend: The image of Henry as a lonely man of science who founded a groundbreaking school of navigation dates back to the sixteenth-century Portuguese chronicles; written at the height of empire, they inevitably romanticized its founding father. The legend was enshrined in R. H. Major’s nineteenth-century biography of “Prince Henry of Portugal, Surnamed the Navigator,” and it has proved hard to dislodge. See Peter Russell, Prince Henry ‘the Navigator’: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 6–7.