A History of the Crusades

by Jonathan Riley-Smith

  Imad al-Din Zangi, the atabak of Mosul (1127–46), was more successful at presenting himself as the leader of the jihad. The thirteenth-century Mosuli historian Ibn al-Athir was to write that if ‘God in his mercy had not granted that the atabak [Zangi] should conquer Syria, the Franks would have completely overrun it.’ Zangi moved to occupy Aleppo in 1128. Its citizens, fearful both of threats by the Assassin sect within the city and of the external threat from the Franks, did not resist him. Like so many atabaks nominated by the Seljuks, Zangi made use of his position to establish what was effectively an independent principality in northern Iraq and Syria. In this principality, Zangi imitated the protocol and institutions of the Seljuk sultans of Iran. Like the Seljuks, he and his officers sponsored the foundation of madrasas and khanqas.

  The madrasa, which had its origins in the eastern lands of the Seljuk sultans, was a teaching college whose professors specialized in the teaching of Quranic studies and religious law. It was an entirely Sunni Muslim institution and indeed one of the most important aims of such colleges was to counteract Shi‘i preaching. Khanqas (also known as zawiyas) were hospices where Sufis lodged, studied, and performed their rituals. Sufi preachers and volunteers were to play an important part in the wars against the crusaders. The proliferation of madrasas and khanqas in Syria under Zangi and his successors was part of a broader movement of moral rearmament, in which both rulers and the religious élite devoted themselves to stamping out corruption and heterodoxy in the Muslim community, as part of a grand jihad which had much wider aims than merely the removal of the Franks from the coastline of Palestine. The Bahr al-Fava ‘id, discussed above, faithfully reflects the ideology of the time. Besides preaching holy war against the Franks, it counsels its readers against reading frivolous books, sitting on swings, wearing satin robes, drinking from gold cups, telling improper jokes, and so on.

  Although Muslim pietists, particularly in Aleppo, looked to Zangi as the man of destiny and the new leader of the jihad, for the greater part of his career he did little to meet their expectations and in fact he spent most of his time warring with Muslim rivals. He particularly hoped to add Muslim Damascus to his lands in Syria, but Damascus’s governor, Mu‘in al-Din Unur, was able to block Zangi’s ambitions by making an alliance with the kingdom of Jerusalem. However, in 1144, thanks to a fortunate though unplanned concatenation of circumstances, Zangi did succeed in capturing the Latin city of Edessa. The historian Michael the Syrian lamented the capture of the city: ‘Edessa remained a desert: a moving sight covered with a black garment, drunk with blood, infested by the very corpses of its sons and daughters! Vampires and other savage beasts ran and entered the city at night in order to feast on the flesh of the massacred, and it became the abode of jackals; for none entered there except those who dug to discover treasures.’

  But according to Ibn al-Athir: ‘when Zangi inspected the city he liked it and realized that it would not be sound policy to reduce such a place to ruins. He therefore gave the order that his men should return every man, woman and child to his home together with all the chattels looted from them … The city was restored to its former state, and Zangi installed a garrison to defend it.’

  Zangi, who was assassinated by a slave in 1146, was succeeded in Aleppo by his son Nur al-Din, and it was Nur al-Din who, with the assistance of an eager pro-jihad faction within the walls of Damascus, made a triumphal entry into that city in 1154. There Nur al-Din commissioned a minbar, or pulpit, to be installed in the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, in expectation of that city’s imminent reconquest by his armies. However, the conquest of Egypt proved to be a more urgent priority. Ascalon had fallen to the Franks in 1153, giving crusader fleets a port within striking distance of the Nile Delta. The Fatimid caliphs of Egypt had become the impotent pawns of feuding military viziers and ethnically divided regiments. There were some in Egypt in the 1150s and 1160s who favoured coming to terms with the kingdom of Jerusalem in order to secure its assistance in propping up the Fatimid regime, while others rather looked to Nur al-Din in Damascus for help in repelling the infidel.

  The Rise of Saladin

  In the end it was a Muslim army sent by Nur al-Din which succeeded in taking power in Egypt and in thwarting Christian ambitions in the region. But Nur al-Din himself gained very little from the success of his expeditionary force. The largely Turkish army he sent to Egypt was officered by a mixed group of Turks and Kurds, and it was one of the Kurdish officers, Saladin (or Salah al-Din) from the Kurdish clan of Ayyub, who took effective control as vizier of Egypt in 1169. In 1171 Saladin took advantage of the death of the incumbent caliph of Egypt to suppress the Fatimid caliphate and from then on the symbolically significant Friday sermons in the congregational mosques were preached in the names of the Abbasid caliph of Baghdad and of Nur al-Din, the sultan of Damascus. In Egypt, Sevener Shi‘ism had been the affair of an élite and, even then, there had been many powerful Sunni Muslims, Christians, and Jews. Although there was little resistance to the enforced return to Sunnism, Saladin and his successors in Egypt were careful to foster orthodoxy by founding madrasas and by patronizing Sufis.

  Saladin was ever ready to offer declarations of loyalty to Nur al-Din, but he was less forthcoming about actually providing his master with the money and military assistance which he was repeatedly asked for. When Nur al-Din died in 1174, Saladin advanced into Syria and occupied Damascus, displacing Nur al-Din’s son. The greater part of Saladin’s career as ruler of Egypt and Damascus is best understood first in terms of his unsuccessful attempts to take Mosul from its Zangid prince and secondly in terms of his drive to create an empire to be ruled by his clan. He had to satisfy his Ayyubid kinsmen’s expectations by carving out appanages for them. This clan empire was largely created at the expense of Saladin’s Muslim neighbours in northern Syria, Iraq, and the Yemen. Throughout his whole career, an enormous part of Saladin’s resources were devoted to fulfilling the expectations of kinsmen and followers. Generosity was an essential attribute of a medieval Muslim ruler.

  However, Saladin was also under pressure of a different kind

  left: PLATE 1 A knight in a twelfth-century relief. Most of the principal elements of the knight’s equipment arc depicted, hut not the lance. The spurs indicate that the favoured method of fighting was on horseback; but it was also possible to operate on foot, as most of the knights on the First Crusade were forced to do when their mounts died.

  right:PLATE 2 Moissac, an abbey in south-western France which Urban II visited during his tour of France and which possessed a famous collection of relics from Jerusalem.

  Monasteries such as Moissac, which were often the largest and most renowned religious establishments in their localities and which could draw on well-established pools of lay respect and support, played an important part in propagating the crusade appeal.

  PLATES 3 Among the marginal drawings in the Luttrell Psalter is this visualization of a combat between a suitably villainous Saracen and a knight. The English royal arms on the knight’s shield suggest that the drawing depicts the legendary duel between Richard I and Saladin on the Third Crusade.

  PLATE 4 A twelfth-century ground plan of the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, showing Christ’s tomb in the centre of the lower, aerial view. The circular plan of the site was widely imitated elsewhere in Latin Christendom during the medieval period the Temple Church in London being one surviving example.

  PLATE 5 Divine assistance. The turning point in the First Crusade was the victory at Antioch on 28 June 1098, which to many of the crusaders was accomplished with the assistance of an army of angels, saints, and the ghosts of their dead, led by St George. Not long after the battle it was depicted over the door of the church of St George at Fordington in Dorset.

  PLATE 6 Taking the cross. A crusader receives his cross from a bishop; he has already been given the scrip (purse) and staff of a pilgrim. The separate ceremonies of taking the cross and receiving the symbols of pilgrimage were merged in the later twelfth cen
tury.

  PLATE 7 The cathedral of Jubayl (Gibelet), as rebuilt following an earthquake in 1170, with an open-air baptistery attached to the north side.

  PLATE 8 The castle of Segura de la Sierra in Andalusia was given to the order of Santiago in 1242 during a period of rapid Christian advances in Spain. In 1245 it became the scat of the order’s comendador mayor of Castile, who had earlier been based at Uclés.

  PLATE 9 The temple church in London. Military orders depended on the favour of patrons, many of whom entered an order shortly before death or chose burial there. These effigies arc of William Marshal, first carl of Pembroke, who died in 1219, and his son William, the second earl, both of whom received burial in the Templars’ London church.

  PLATE 10 In this illustration from the treatise on chess by Alfonso X of Castile, a Christian and a Muslim face one another, an image perhaps of the convivencia, or coexistence between Christians and Muslims, that was sometimes achieved in medieval Spain. Even so, many Arabic treatises on chess stressed the value of the game as training in military strategy for warriors in the jihad.

  PLATE 11 A contemporary pen drawing of a Hussite wagon fortress. These improvised defensive structures proved ideal for the rapid deployment of crossbows and field guns. Note the depiction on the tent of the chalice, access to which at the eucharist was a principal demand of the utraquists (= in atraque specie,‘[communion] in both kinds’).

  PLATE 12 The battle of Lepante, 1571. The last great crusading victory, Lepanto did not, as was once thought, turn the tide of war in the Mediterranean against the Ottoman Turks; but it did raise morale amongst the Catholic powers.

  left: PLATE 13 Elevation and plan of the Teutonic Order’s great fourteenth-century water mill at Danzig; an example of the efficient technical and commercial organization which underlay the order’s economy.

  right: PLATE 14 Ruins of the Teutonic Order’s castle and octagonal tower at Weissenstein in Estonia in the northern part of the Livonian orderstate; the brethren continued to defend this distant area until 1561.

  PLATE 15 Crusader’s vigil. A romanticized image of a lone crusader by the German artist Carl Friedrich Lcssing.

  PLATE 16 The only surviving Teutonic knights. Members of the Protestant Bailiwick of Utrecht of the Teutonic Order in chapter. The portraits on the wall behind them arc of their chief commanders who, until recently, were painted in armour.

  from pious idealists and refugees from Palestine to prosecute the jihad against the Latin settlements. Leading civilian intellectuals, like al-Qadi al-Fadil and Imad al-Din al-Isfahani, both of whom worked in Saladin’s chancery, incessantly nagged their master, exhorting him to cease fighting against neighbouring Muslims and to turn his armies against the infidel. Al-Qadi al-Fadil and his subordinates were to turn the chancery into a major instrument of propaganda for Saladin, and, in letters dispatched all over the Muslim world, they presented Saladin’s activities as having one ultimate goal, the destruction of the Latin principalities. When partisans of the house of Zangi and other enemies of Saladin attacked him as a usurper and as a nepotist bent on feathering his family’s nest, Saladin’s supporters were able to point to his prosecution of the jihad as something which legitimized his assumption of power. Even so, Saladin was not really very active in the field against the Christians until 1183, after Zangid Aleppo had recognized his supremacy.

  The Armies of Saladin

  Although the armies that Saladin led against the Latin principalities were formally dedicated to the jihad, they were not composed of ghazis. Instead, Saladin’s army, like those of Zangi and Nur al-Din, was primarily composed of Turkish and Kurdish professional soldiers. Most of the officers, or emirs, received an iqta, an allocation of tax revenue fixed upon a designated village, estate, or industrial enterprise, which they collected for themselves and in return for which they performed military service. Despite being the recipients of iqta, they also expected handouts on campaign. In addition Mamluks, or slave soldiers, formed an important part of Saladin’s élite force, as they did of almost every medieval Muslim army. Saladin and his contemporaries also recruited mercenaries, and the Seljuks in Anatolia even made use of Frankish mercenaries. Finally, the numbers of Saladin’s armies on campaign were swelled out by tribal contingents of bedouins and Turkomans who fought as light cavalry auxiliaries in expectation of booty.

  The élite Turkish troops were experts in the use of the composite recurved bow made of layers of horn and sinew and commonly about a metre in length when unstrung. Like the English longbow, the Turkish bow could only be handled by someone who had been trained and who had developed the necessary muscles. Unlike the English longbow, it was an offensive cavalry weapon and it had more penetrating power and an even longer target range than the longbow. However, the mass of bedouin and Turkoman auxiliaries used simpler bows, whose arrows had much less force, and hence those accounts of the English crusaders marching towards Arsuf in 1191, so covered with arrows that they looked like hedgehogs, even though they were more or less unscathed. Muslim troops in close combat generally made use of a light lance, javelin, or sword. Although most men were protected only by leather armour—if that—the emirs and Mamluks in lamellar armour or mail were as heavily protected as their knightly opponents. With the exception of the introduction of the counterweight mangonel as a launcher of projectiles for siege purposes, there were no significant innovations in Muslim military technology in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

  An Arab-Syrian Intriguer in the Age of Saladin

  Kitab al-It‘ibar (‘The Book of Learning by Example’) sheds an interesting light on encounters between Muslims and Christians on and off the battlefield. Its aristocratic author, Usamah ibn Munqidh, was born in Shayzar in northern Syria in 1095 and died in 1188. He was almost 90 when he wrote his treatise on how divinely ordained fate determines everything, especially the length of a man’s life. Since most of the examples (‘ibrat) are taken from Usamah’s own life, the book has the appearance of an autobiography. Viewed as autobiography it is however an extremely gappy and evasive piece of work and it presents a wilfully fragmentary account of his numerous dealings with the Franks. In fact, during the early 1140s Usamah and his patron, Mu‘in al-Din Unur, the general who controlled Damascus, were in regular communication with King Fulk and both visited the kingdom of Jerusalem on diplomatic business. But business was often mixed with pleasure and, for all his ritual cursing of the Franks, Usamah went hunting with them and he had plenty of opportunities to get to know them socially.

  According to Usamah the ‘Franks (may Allah render them helpless!) possess none of the virtues of men except courage’. But this was the virtue that Usamah himself valued above all others, and, in his remarkably balanced account of the customs of the Franks, he is at pains to point to both positive and negative aspects. On the one hand, some Frankish medical procedures are stupid and dangerous; on the other hand, some of their cures work remarkably well. On the one hand, the Frankish judicial procedure of trial by combat is grotesque and absurd; on the other hand, Usamah himself received justice from a Frankish court. On the one hand, some Franks who have newly arrived in the Holy Land behave like barbarous bullies; on the other hand, there are Franks who are Usamah’s friends and who have a real understanding of Islam.

  While Usamah chose to stress the many times he had encountered the Franks in hand-to-hand combat, his book is singularly free of any reference to jihad. In part this may reflect retrospective embarassment about his diplomatic dealings with the Franks, but it is also the case that Usamah was, like the rest of the Banu Munqidh, a Shi‘ite Muslim and therefore he had no belief in the special religious validity of a jihad waged under the leadership of a usurping warlord like Saladin.

  Incidentally, quite a number of Usamah’s contemporaries, eyewitnesses of the crusades, also wrote autobiographies, which we only know about from quotations in the works of others. ‘Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi (1161/2–1231/2), an Iraqi physician, wrote one such book. Had it survived, it m
ight have been even more interesting than Usamah’s autobiography, for ‘Abd al-Latif, an exceptionally intelligent man who led an interesting life, visited Saladin during the siege at Acre and then later at Jerusalem after the peace with the Richard. ‘Abd al-Latif also wrote a refutation of alchemy, in which he discusses the alchemists’ belief that the Elixir was to be found in the eyeballs of young men. ‘Abd al-Latif remembered being present at the aftermath of one of the battles between the crusaders and the Muslims and seeing scavenging alchemists moving from corpse to corpse on the bloody field and gouging out the eyeballs of the dead infidel.

  The War Poets

  In his own times Usamah was famous not as an autobiographer, but as a poet. Although he had studied the Qur‘an with care, his moral values were only drawn in part from the Qur‘an and both the code of conduct he subscribed to and the language in which he described his battles with the Franks and others owed at least as much to the traditions of the pre-Islamic poetry of the nomadic Arabs of the Hijaz. In this respect, Usamah was no different from many of the leading protagonists in the Muslim counter-crusade. The council of advisers around Saladin in the 1170s and 1180s included some of the most distinguished writers of the twelfth century. Imad al-Din al-Isfahani, who worked in Saladin’s chancery, was not only a panegyric historian, but also one of the most famous poets of his age. Al-Qadi al-Fadil, who headed Saladin’s chancery, was similarly a poet. He was also a crucially influential innovator in Arabic prose style and his metaphor-laden, ornate, and bombastic prose style was to be imitated by Arabic writers for centuries to come.