Despite the increased professionalism and dedication of the Mamluk army, their campaign against the Latin settlements was a drawn-out war of attrition, in which siege campaigns were interspersed with periods of truce. The truce documents, many of which have survived, tell us a lot about Syrian society in the thirteenth century, as their various clauses make provision for the establishment of customs posts, the return of escaping slaves, joint taxation of boundary areas, the restitution of shipwrecked goods, and the safe passage of merchants across the frontiers.
Baybars’s long-drawn-out offensive against the Latin strongholds, which began in 1263, was resumed by the sultan al-Mansur Qalawun (1280–90). He took Margat and Maraclea in 1285 and Tripoli in 1289. The Mamluks were by now fielding such large armies that the Christians dared not meet them in open battle. In the course of those decades they also seem to have become skilled at the digging of siege mines and they made increased use of mangonels for hurling projectiles. When finally Qalawun’s son and successor, al-Ashraf Khalil (1290–3), moved against Acre in 1291, he brought with him a train of seventy-two siege engines. The fall of Acre to the Mamluk sultan precipitated the Christian evacuation of the remaining towns and strongholds. Al-Ashraf Khalil, taking a lesson from Saladin’s experience, and fearing that his capture of Acre might provoke a new crusade, had all the Latin towns and ports on the coast of Palestine and Syria systematically ruined so as to prevent them being used as bases by future Christian expeditions.
Latin churches and palaces were looted and in the decades to come Gothic columns and other spoils from Syria were frequently used to adorn the mosques of Cairo. Al-Ashraf Khalil had his victory commemorated in a fresco in the Cairo citadel showing all the fallen Latin strongholds. In the years which immediately followed the fall of Acre, Mamluk armies turned their attentions against heretical and Christian groups in the highlands of Syria and Lebanon who obstinately resisted the imposition of Mamluk authority. The Maronites in particular suffered from campaigns against them in 1292, 1300, and 1305. More generally, Christians living under Muslim rule suffered during the crusading period. They were suspected as acting as spies or fifth columnists for the Franks and later for the Mongols also. In an anti-Christian treatise written towards the end of the thirteenth century by Ibn al-Wasiti, it was alleged that during the reign of Baybars the people of Acre had employed Christian arsonists to burn parts of Cairo. After the overthrow of the Fatimids, Christians were no longer entrusted with senior positions in the army and, though Christians continued to work in the tax bureaux in Damascus and Syria, there were repeated campaigns against their continuing in such work and they were sometimes accused of abusing their positions to oppress Muslims. In the Mamluk period there were sporadic instances of Christian officials being forced to convert—even though the forcible conversion of Christians and Jews is forbidden by Islamic law—and mobs, sometimes led by Sufi preachers, demolished Christian churches on the flimsiest of pretexts. Thus the crusades, one of whose declared aims was to bring aid and succour to the native Christians of the East, had the long-term effect of irretrievably weakening their protected status within Muslim society.
Al-Andalus
While in Syria, Palestine, and Asia Minor Muslim armies in the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries made steady gains at the expense of the Christians, Muslims at the other end of the Mediterranean had been losing ground in Spain from the late eleventh century onwards. The collapse of the Umayyad caliphate in Spain and the sack of Córdoba by Berber troops in 1031 had been followed by the fragmentation of al-Andalus (Muslim Spain) into a number of principalities, ruled by the taifa, or party, kings. These kings lacked the resources to resist a Christian advance from the north and they usually preferred to pay tribute rather than fight. In 1085 Alfonso VI of León captured Toledo, then the largest city in Spain. The taifa kings were panicked into requesting assistance from Ibn Tashfin in North Africa, even though some of them feared the Almoravids as much as they did the Christians. Al-Mutamid, the ruler of Seville and the prime mover in the decision, remarked: ‘I would rather be a camelherd [in North Africa], than a swineherd [under the Christians].’
The Almoravid leader, Ibn Tashfin, had come to power as head of a militant movement of Sunni religious revival. The Almoravids, or more correctly al-Murabitun, were not a family, but a group of men who, having dedicated themselves to the jihad, went to live in ribats, fortified retreats exclusively inhabited by pious volunteers for the holy struggle (see also p. 177). Almoravid preaching stressed the primacy of a strict interpretation of the religious law. Their supporters were notably intolerant towards Christians and Jews and they also persecuted Sufis. Most of the early recruits to the movement came from the Berber tribal confederacy of the Sanhaja. Although the Spanish Arabs desperately needed the military assistance of these wild and woolly tribesmen, still there was a considerable cultural gap between the two groups and the Almoravid occupation of al-Andalus was not universally popular among their co-religionists. The Almoravids won a swift victory at Sagrajas in 1086, but they could not retake Toledo and in the longer run they were unable to reverse the tide of Christian advance in the peninsula. They were however successful in annexing the territories of the taifa kings to their empire.
Although the Almoravids had succeeded in occupying all of al-Andalus by 1110, from 1125 onwards the seat of their power in North Africa was under attack from a new movement of religious revival, which was supported by a different group of Berber tribes. The Almohads, or more correctly the al-Muwahhidun (the professors of the Name of God), as their name suggests, placed great stress on the unity of God. By contrast with the Almoravids, they persecuted adherents of the literalistic Maliki school of religious law and they espoused Sufi doctrines. The Almohad movement found its supporters in the Masmuda confederacy of Berber tribes. The founder, Ibn Tumart, declared himself to be the infallible Mahdi. His followers believed that he performed miracles, including conversing with the dead. Ibn Jubayr, the Spanish Muslim pilgrim to the holy places of the Hijaz, was an enthusiastic supporter and he prayed that the Almohads might one day occupy Mecca and Medina and purify them: ‘May God soon remedy this in a cleansing which will remove these ruinous heresies from the Muslims with the sword of the Almohads, who are the Followers of the Faith, the Party of God, the People of Truth and Sincerity, Defenders of the Sanctuary of God Almighty, solicitous for his taboos, making every effort to exalt His name, manifest His mission and support His religion.’
During the reign of Abd al-Mumin (1130–63) the Almohads occupied all the Almoravid lands in North Africa and crossed over into Spain. The Christian kings there took advantage of the crumbling of Almoravid power to make further gains. Meanwhile, the Almohad occupation of what was left of al-Andalus was, if anything, more unpopular than had been that of the Almoravids. The Almohads did win a victory at Alarcos over Alfonso VIII of Castile in 1195 and for a while their successful prosecution of the jihad in the West challenged comparison with that of Saladin in the East. But Alarcos was the last major victory for the Muslims in Spain and thereafter the Christian Reconquista continued more or less unabated. In 1212 Alfonso of Castile heavily defeated the Almohads at the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa and the way was open for further Christian gains. Córdoba fell in 1236, Valencia in 1238, and Seville in 1248. After the fall of Seville, only the mountainous southern region of Granada remained under Muslim rule. The Nasirid Arab princes, who had seized power there, pursued a precarious policy of balancing the Christians in the north against the Marinid sultans in Morocco. At times they paid tribute to the Christians; at other times they urged the Marinids to come and lead a new jihad in al-Andalus. From the early thirteenth century onwards, Almohad rule of Morocco had been contested by the Marinids, a clan which had put itself at the head of the Zanata Berbers. By 1275 all of Morocco was Marinid and from time to time thereafter Marinid rulers took part in a holy war for the defence of Granada.
Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) was the greatest and most original
of medieval Muslim historical thinkers. Although he was born in Tunis, his ancestors had fled to North Africa from Seville in advance of that city’s conquest by the Christians. Ibn Khaldun elaborated a cyclical philosophy of history in which sedentary civilizations decay and inevitably fall victim to marginal nomads who possess ‘asabiyya (natural solidarity) and who are also often inspired by religion. The triumphant nomads set up their own dynasty but within a few generations at most their vigour and ‘asabiyya is eroded by the settled manner of existence they have adopted. This vision of history was crucially shaped by Ibn Khaldun’s contemplation of the successive fortunes and misfortunes of the Almoravids, Almohads, and Marinids in Spain and North Africa. Ibn Khaldun was inclined to see the early triumphs of the crusaders as merely a particular aspect of growing Christian naval ascendancy in the Mediterranean from the eleventh century onwards. As far as his own times were concerned, he theorized that the centres of power might be moving northwards—perhaps to the lands of the Franks and the Ottomans. He also noted how North African rulers were having to resort to employing European mercenaries, because only Europeans had enough discipline to hold line formations.
Marinid and Nasirid co-operation against the Christian powers was fitful, for the Nasirids were suspicious of Marinid ambitions in Spain, while the Marinids, for their part, were inclined to treat Granada as if it were merely a forward line of defence for their possessions in North Africa. The decline of the Marinids from the 1340s onwards left Granada without any useful allies. Algeciras, a bridgehead between Spain and Africa captured by the Christians in 1344, was retaken by the Nasirid ruler, Muhammad V, in 1369 and this relatively trivial triumph was elaborately commemorated in bombastic inscriptions throughout his part of the Alhambra palace, outside Granada. Algeciras was, however, one of the very rare victories of Muslims over Christians in the fourteenth century.
The unification of Castile and Aragon in 1469 sealed the long-term fate of Granada. A ten-year campaign from 1482 to 1492, making heavy use of artillery, reduced the Muslim fortresses one by one. The last ruler, Muhammad XI, also known as Boabdil (1482, 1487–92), vainly sought for Mamluk or Ottoman assistance, but in the end he was forced to negotiate the surrender of the city of Granada itself in 1492. The Egyptian chronicler, Ibn Iyas, described its fall as one of the most terrible catastrophes ever to befall Islam, but by the 1490s the Mamluk sultans, preoccupied as they were by the threats posed by the Ottoman Turks on their northern frontier as well as by the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean, were hardly likely to be able to provide assistance to distant Granada.
The Mamluk Empire
During the fourteenth and and for most of the fifteenth century the Mamluk sultanate was the greatest power in the eastern Mediterranean. Although the Mongols had made repeated attempts to conquer Mamluk Syria, all these attempts were unsuccessful. In 1322 peace was agreed between representatives of the Mamluk sultan, al-Nasir Muhammad, and those of the ilkhan of Iran, Abu Said. In 1335 the Ilkhanate, plagued by succession disputes after the death of Abu Said, fell apart.
Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328), one of the most important religious thinkers of the late Middle Ages, did more than anyone else to try to keep jihad at the forefront of the political agenda of the Mamluk sultanate. Ibn Taymiyya agitated for a return to the simplicity of the precepts and practices of early Islam and for the sweeping away of all unacceptable innovations. He taught that Christians and open heretics were not the only targets for jihad, for the pious also had a duty to resist those rulers who professed themselves to be Muslims, but who failed to apply the religious law in all its rigour. For a ruler or a soldier to abandon the jihad was the greatest sin a Muslim could possibly commit: ‘If some of those, in whom trust has been reposed, are extravagant and wasteful, therefore, the damage to the Muslims is enormous, for they cause great detriment to both the religious and worldly interests of Muslims by neglecting their duty to fight for them.’
In the first half of the fourteenth century, however, Mamluk sultans mostly interested themselves in lavish building programmes and equally lavish court ceremonial, and their armies did little to extend Dar al-Islam, confining their military activities to profitable raiding expeditions against the Christian kingdom of Cilician Armenia and Christian Nubia. Far from wishing to take the jihad to Europe, the Mamluk authorities were chiefly preoccupied with trade with Venice and Genoa. In 1347 the Black Death reached Egypt and Syria from the south Russian steppes. Thereafter plague epidemics ravaged the Mamluk lands at intervals of five to eight years. Not only did huge numbers die within the frontiers of the sultanate, but plague also devastated the steppe lands from which the young Kipchak slaves had been acquired. Consequently, it became more expensive to purchase Mamluks in the late fourteenth century. Many of the Mamluks who were purchased died of plague before their training had been completed, and the sultans, desperate to keep up the army’s numbers, were inclined to rush the training of their new recruits. Depopulation also reduced the agricultural revenues that the sultan and his emirs collected. Mamluk pay-strikes became common.
The crusade of King Peter I of Cyprus and its sacking of Alexandria in 1365 (see pp. 272, 298–300) administered a severe blow to Mamluk prestige. After the crusade, European merchants in the Mamluk lands were arrested, native Christians were punitively taxed and a revenge fleet was built on the orders of the emir Yalbugha al-Khassaki. But Yalbugha, who ran affairs in Egypt and Syria, using the child-sultan al-Ashraf Shaban to rubber-stamp his decisions, was murdered in the following year. A new wave of treatises on furusiyya was produced by warmongers, but in fact there was no longer a politically significant lobby for the jihad and a peace was agreed with Cyprus in 1370. The sack of Alexandria was merely the most spectacular of a long series of raids on the Nile Delta from the eleventh century onwards. Alexandria recovered and is still one of the great ports of the Mediterranean, but Rosetta, Damietta, and Tinnis, the prosperity of which had to a large extent depended on industry, were less fortunate.
From the 1360s onwards the Mamluk sultans were buying fewer Kipchak and more Circassian Mamluks; not only had many Kipchaks on the steppe died of plague, but others had converted to Islam and hence, according to Islamic law, were unenslavable. Barquq, a Mamluk of Circassian origin, usurped the sultanate. His reign (1382–99) ushered in a period of severe turbulence and conflict between factions of Circassian and Kipchak Mamluks, which continued under his son, al-Nasir Faraj (1399–1412). It was during the precarious sultanate of al-Nasir Faraj that the Turco-Mongol warlord and would-be world-conqueror, Tamerlane (Timur), invaded Syria and sacked Damascus (1400–1). The subsequent Mamluk military recovery, which seems to have begun under the sultan al-Muayyad Shaykh (1412–21), bore its most obvious fruits during the reign of al-Ashraf Barsbay (1422–37).
One of the most striking features of the Mamluk recovery in the fifteenth century is the creation under Barsbay and his successors of a successful war-fleet. Muslim war-fleets now made their strongest showing in the Mediterranean since the heyday of the Fatimids. Maritime warfare between Muslim and Christian was more a matter of piracy than piety. Cyprus, since its capture by Richard I of England in 1191, had served as a base for Christian crusaders and pirates, and especially in the early fifteenth century for Catalan pirates. But Mamluk possession of ports on the Syrian littoral had put them in striking distance of the island and, after an Egyptian fleet had raided Cyprus in 1425, a Mamluk army ravaged the island and captured King Janus in the following year. Thereafter Cyprus became a tributary of the sultanate and its kings engaged themselves not to harbour pirates.
In the 1440s the Mamluks turned their forces against Rhodes. The sultan al-Zahir Jaqmaq (1438–53) was determined to put an end to Christian piracy in the eastern Mediterranean. He also wished indirectly to assist the Ottomans. An early attack against Rhodes in 1440 was hardly more than a desultory raid. A second expedition in 1443 frittered away its resources attacking Christian possessions on the south coast of Asia Minor. Although the third and last ex
pedition in 1444 did actually attempt to invest the fortress of Rhodes, its troops were soon beaten off. According to a contemporary Muslim chronicler, ‘the aims of the troops were not realized, nor did they come back with any result; and for that reason their former zeal for the holy war in that quarter was dampened for a long time to come. And to God alone is the ultimate end of all things.’ In 1446 the French merchant Jacques Coeur negotiated peace between the Mamluks and the Knights Hospitallers on Rhodes.
The Mamluk and Ottoman sultans had a common interest in combating Christian crusades and piracy in the eastern Mediterranean, but elsewhere they found themselves intermittently in conflict, particularly in southern and eastern Turkey where they sponsored rival Turkoman principalities. Although their struggle for supremacy in this region was for the most part fought out by proxy clients, the Mamluks did drift into direct warfare with the Ottomans in 1486–91. It was a war which the Mamluks won, in part due to their successful deployment of artillery, but such a long-sustained conflict strained the Mamluk treasury. Mamluk economic problems were aggravated by the appearance of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean and Portuguese attempts to blockade the Red Sea and deprive Egypt of the revenues of the spice trade. In 1516 the Ottoman sultan Selim the Grim (1512–20), fearing that the Mamluks might make common cause with the new Safavid Shi‘ite regime in Iran, launched a pre-emptive invasion of the Mamluk sultanate. Selim’s tame jurists declared that this war was a jihad, since the Mamluks were obstructing Selim’s fight against the Christians and Shi‘ite schismatics. The Ottoman victories at Marj Dabiq in northern Syria in 1516 and at Raydaniyya in Egypt in 1517 were largely due to Ottoman superiority in numbers and logistics, though treachery and desertions from the Mamluk ranks also played a part. The last Mamluk sultan, Tumanbay, was hung from the Zuweyla Gate in Cairo, and Selim, having annexed Syria and Egypt, went on to declare himself the protector of the holy places of Mecca and Medina. In the decades which followed the Ottomans were able to extend their territory to include a great deal of the North African coast.
A History of the Crusades Page 29