The Crusaders outside Jerusalem now had news of a large army massing in Egypt to relieve the holy city. There was no chance of starving Jerusalem into submission—it could be taken only by assault. Once more, as at Antioch, they risked being trapped between the enemy within the walls and the enemy without. A long investment was therefore out of the question: the city had to be taken by storm. But there was no wood to hand from which they could make ladders and siege towers, and the garrison had poisoned the wells outside the walls. Parties were sent out to scour the country to find enough trees to build siege engines, and eventually two large mobile towers were made in secret out of wood, and clad with wet hides to prevent the Muslim garrison destroying them with Greek fire. On July 13, 1099, the larger of the two towers was rolled slowly into position close to the northern wall of the city, while a covered ram battered away at a lower outer wall that protected the main fortification. For two days the ram pounded at the wall, under constant enemy fire. But it slowly dislodged the stones in the wall so that on the morning of July 14 the tower could be pushed into position, close enough to lower the assault bridges onto the city rampart. The defenders made increasingly desperate efforts to topple it, but they were swept off the wall by a hail of arrows.
Suddenly, huge clouds of acrid black smoke poured out of the siege engines and drifted over the walls, choking the defenders. Seeing the direction of the light breeze, the Christians had lit bundles of damp straw inside the towers. As smoke enveloped the walls, the assault bridges were dropped and two Flemish knights crossed, jumping down onto the city wall. As they held off the defenders, more knights poured across the bridge, consolidating the position on the wall. The defense weakened, and then broke. Ladders were pushed up to the wall and more knights clambered into the city. As they advanced through the streets, the Muslim defenders fled before them. Some knights moved off to open the Gate of the Column, allowing the main body of the army into the city. Others pursued the defenders, and began the slaughter of every living thing within the walls. Count Raymond had given his safe conduct to the survivors of the garrison in the city’s citadel, but many were killed. Raymond of Aguilar, who was with him, wrote:
Some of our men (and this was more merciful) cut off the heads of their enemies; others shot them with arrows, so that they fell from the towers; others tortured them longer by casting them into the flames. Piles of heads, hands, and feet were to be seen in the streets of the city. It was necessary to pick one’s way over the bodies of men and horses …
Indeed, it was a just and splendid judgement of God that this place should be filled with the blood of the unbelievers, since it had suffered so long from their blasphemies. The city was filled with corpses and blood.48
Then there was a hiatus. On the first day, the massacres took place in the heat of battle. On the next day,
in the morning our men climbed up cautiously on to the roof of the Temple and attacked the Saracens, both male and female, and beheaded them with unsheathed swords. The other Saracens threw themselves from the Temple … The Saracens who were still alive dragged the dead ones out in front of the gates, and made huge piles of them, as big as houses. Such a slaughter of pagans no one has ever seen or heard of.49
The Jews of the city had been confined to their synagogue, which was then set alight. All died. And one writer, Albert of Aix, mentions an event that none of those present in Jerusalem included in their reports. On the third day after the city fell, the leaders of the conquest decided that all remaining prisoners, men, women, and children, should be killed lest they side with the army advancing from Egypt in a new siege that the Crusaders expected and feared.50
But that Muslim advance was halted by one final, stunning victory. The elation of the Westerners was crowned by the recovery of some fragments of the true cross. These had been taken by Orthodox priests expelled from the city by the Fatimid commander before the Westerners’ arrival. After the conquest they returned with their precious treasure, and concealed it. The Westerners tortured them until they revealed its hiding place. Unlike the holy lance, the true cross had an unquestioned pedigree. Thus, when the army of Egypt moved along the coast to the city of Ascalon, it was faced by a reinvigorated Crusader army, bearing this most holy of relics in the vanguard.
The Egyptian army was mostly made up of footmen: Arabs, Ethiopians, men from North Africa, Armenians. They were well armed and well equipped. On August 11, the Crusaders, who had marched at full speed to meet their new enemy, came upon them before the walls of Ascalon. The Westerners had learned the lesson of Antioch: now their mounted knights were protected by a strong force of foot soldiers, many in armor. But at Ascalon, it was the Muslim army that charged into the Christian lines, led by the Ethiopians who wielded huge iron flails that could shatter flesh and bone. On both wings, the Egyptian cavalry and some horse archers tried to envelop the Crusaders. Pinned with their backs to the walls of Ascalon, the heaving melee of Muslim footmen provided a perfect target for the charge of the mounted knights. One or two charges threw them into complete disarray, then the Crusaders reformed and charged again, heading for the Egyptian standard. Finally, the Egyptians broke and fled from the battlefield.
At Antioch, the Crusaders’ desperate assault had panicked a much larger force, which had put up little effective resistance. At Ascalon, it was a much harder fight, and the Crusaders were fortunate that the full Egyptian force was not ready for battle when they opened their attack. But by August 1099, they had been hardened by three years of battles, sieges, and an epic journey. Moreover, they had refined the raw skills of Western war. Armored infantry played an increasingly important part and they recognized the value of lighter and more maneuverable mounted troops who could protect the more heavily armored knights, by chasing away the mounted Turkish horse archers. After Ascalon, there was no enemy likely to challenge their possession of Palestine. The Latin kingdoms of the East, stretching from the edge of the Anatolian plateau to the fringes of the Sinai desert, began to embed themselves.
The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem lasted for eighty-seven years, from 1100 to 1187. Its counties, baronies, and lordships formed a frontier society which was constantly under threat. It is not surprising that the most notable and permanent impact that the Westerners made upon the land was in their huge castles and military architecture. The kingdoms in the East were sustained by irregular infusions of fresh manpower and money from the West, but never enough and rarely in a timely fashion. This was a foothold and not a comprehensive conquest, like the Norman occupation of England in 1066. There were perhaps some 3,000 adult Frankish knights, plus around 5,000 sergeants of men-at-arms, many of whom married local Christians or even took Muslim wives—the Western population of the kingdom cannot have exceeded 25,000 in total, amid a much larger population of Arabic-speaking Muslims and local Christians.51 On the borders to north and south lay hostile Muslim states, which eventually overwhelmed the Latin enclave. The Westerners were no more than a scattering of small colonies, usually centered on a castle or a fortified town, their power stronger in theory than it ever was in practice. The Holy Land came to dominate them, rather than the reverse.
I HAVE USED THE WORDS “CRUSADE” AND “CRUSADER.” EVERYONE does. But not a single “Crusader” participated in the First Crusade. At best they were Crusaders avant la lettre, before the word existed. The wars to rescue Jerusalem long antedated the word “Crusade,” which was first coined in Spain in the thirteenth century as cruzada, a generation after the loss of Jerusalem in 1187. It first entered English usage as the French word croisade about 1575, and it was not fully Anglicized as “crusade” until the early eighteenth century, after crusado, crusada, and croisado had all been tried and found wanting.52 “Crusade” has from the beginning been a floating, highly mobile and adaptive term, precisely denoting very little but replete with connotations. It has always been a versatile theory. Popes championed a useful concept that allowed them to declare a holy war on any individual or group, proscribing them as enemies
of Christ.53 There were holy wars against Muslim infidels; against heretics like the Albigensians of Provence; against recalcitrant Christian monarchs; even against humble towns that failed to toe the papal line. But the first category, war against the Muslim infidel, was always popularly regarded as the true war “for and by the cross.”
Sanctified war was an innovation within the Christian church, which had for centuries struggled to impose the Peace of God upon adversaries. The bishops in the province of Narbonne had, forty years before Urban’s speech, declared, “Let no Christian kill another Christian, for no one doubts that to kill a Christian is to shed the blood of Christ.”54 And Urban II, according to Fulcher of Chartres, had expressly contrasted the evil of war with a struggle in a good cause. Urban told the throng at Clermont:
Let those of you who have formerly been accustomed to contend wickedly in private warfare against the faithful, fight against the infidel, and bring to a victorious end the war … Let those of you who have hitherto been robbers now become soldiers. Those of you who have formerly contended against their brothers and relatives now fight against the barbarians as they ought.
Islam had developed a coherent theory of a holy war long before. Muslim jurists had presented a world split into two parts—one was the House of Peace (Dar ul Islam), where a true Islamic ruler governed, and the other the House of War (Dar ul Harb), where Islam was not in control.55 Muslims should strive to ensure that peace took the place of war.56 The Arabic root of the word “to strive or struggle,” J-H-D, generated the word jihad, which meant any kind of battle in a good cause. In everyday terms it referred to the internal struggle against evil or temptation and was called the “greater jihad,” much as later Christian writers came to talk of a holy war against sin.57 But the same word also meant a “holy war” in the purely military sense, which most Muslims regarded as a “lesser jihad,” derived from this process of inner purification.58 Most Western writers have subsequently focused on the secondary meaning, as Rudolph Peters succinctly put it:
The Islamic doctrine of jihad has always appealed to Western imagination. The image of the dreadful Turk, clad in a long robe and brandishing his scimitar, ready to slaughter any infidel that might come his way and would refuse to be converted to the religion of Mahomet, has been a stereotype in Western literature for a long time … The assumption underlying these stereotypes is that Moslems, often loosely called Arabs, are innately bloodthirsty and inimical to persons of a different persuasion, and that [is] owing to their religion, which allegedly preaches intolerance, fanaticism and continuous warfare against unbelievers.59
The theory of jihad was drawn from a few occurrences of the word in the Qur’an and more fully in the juristic commentary on the oral traditions (hadith) of the Prophet Mohammed. These statements often required considerable interpretation to mold them to events. In theory, for Islam as for Christendom, war was an evil. For battle and killing to be sanctified it had to be a struggle in a good and godly cause. Over time, therefore, both communities evolved superficially quite similar ideas for a just war in a good cause. But there were differences between the parallel but separate processes of evolution.60 In Christendom, the doctrine of holy war was hotly debated and transmuted over time into many different ideological strands, mostly in response to social and political change. The terminology of “Crusade” was highly mutable: “pilgrimage,” “journey,” “signed by the cross,” and so on, were other ways of describing it. In Islam, there were two terms commonly used—jihad, and ghaza in Ottoman Turkish—and there could be little debate about the meaning of these terms, and little theoretical investigation of their limits and boundaries. This was because in the dominant Sunni branch of Islam theoretical evolution was severely constrained; as contemporaries expressed it, the “gates of interpretation” (ijtihad) had been closed around the year 900. This meant that the principles of the faith, including the struggle for purity (jihad), were beyond debate and could not be altered.61
But Muslim scholars continued to adjust the application of these immutable principles, by “explaining and interpreting the eternal truths and applying the eternal laws.”62 It was not an ossified and monolithic system and if the theory was fixed, its application was not. Not all wars against infidels were declared to be holy wars, and resistance to the Franks in 1097–9 was certainly not regarded at the time as a jihad. But during the two centuries that the Franj occupied the Levant, the language of jihad grew louder and more sustained. Like the summons to the Crusade, this call to Muslims served a particular purpose.63 The summons brought together an otherwise disunited community. The new idiom of holy war provided a uniquely powerful rhetorical style. Before that fateful encounter in Palestine, Christendom had been focused upon the notion of the Peace of God, and most of the Islamic world had conveniently abandoned both the traditional rhetoric and its practice of the “lesser jihad.” As an outcome of their struggle in the Levant, both cultures were left with a well-honed ideology of war in a just cause.
When the organized forces of “Crusade” and jihad confronted each other directly on the battlefield, the contrast between them was immediately apparent. Visually speaking, the dominant motif of the Western Christian side overwhelmed all others. The Muslim banners carried many different emblems and texts, mostly the names and qualities of God and other suitable verses from the Qur’an. But on the Christian side the single image of the cross was dominant. From the first contact the defining characteristic of the Crusade was the symbol of the crucified Christ. The “Crusaders” were cruce signati, “signed with the cross.”64 In Arab Muslim eyes, there was something distinctive and disquieting about these Christians, the Franks, who wore the cross and had stormed Jerusalem in 1099.65
The cross wearers violated all the acceptable standards of society in ways unthinkable to the local Christians and even the Byzantines. The twelfth-century Muslim warrior Usāmah ibn Munqidh recounted the corrupting impropriety of the Crusaders’ behavior in the Holy Land. They were “without any vestige of a sense of honour and jealousy.” He told a story of a bath keeper whose establishment was frequented by the Franks.
One day a Frankish knight came in. They do not follow our custom of wearing a cloth around their waist while they are at the baths, and this fellow put out his hand, snatched off my loin cloth and threw it away. He saw at once that I had just recently shaved my pubic hair. “Salim!” he exclaimed. I came towards him and he pointed to that part of me. “Salim! It’s magnificent! You shall certainly do the same for me!” And he lay down flat on his back. His hair there was as long as his beard.
I shaved him, and when he felt the place with his hand and found it agreeably smooth he said, “Salim, you must certainly do the same for my Dama.” In their language Dama means lady. He sent his valet to fetch his wife and when they arrived and the valet had brought her in, she lay down on her back, and he said to me, “Do to her what you did to me.” So I shaved her pubic hair, while her husband stood by watching me. Then he thanked me and paid me for my services.
This colorful tale may have recalled a real event, or perhaps it was simply an anecdote. But the Franks certainly baffled Usāmah. “You will observe,” he wrote, “a strange contradiction in their character: they are without jealousy or a sense of honour, and yet at the same time they have the courage that as a rule springs only from the sense of honour and the readiness to take offence.”66 As Carole Hillenbrand has observed:
This story touches on the essential difference perceived by Muslims between their own society and that of the Franks. In a society where women were protected by their menfolk, not allowed to reveal their unveiled faces except to a prescribed number of close male relations, the conduct of the French knight and his wife … both castigates Frankish immorality and also [by contrast] reinforces the values of Muslim society.67
In fact their transgression went further than this. For Muslims, the Crusaders, by breaking the bounds between the forbidden (haram) and the permitted (halal), disrupted and destabilized n
ot only their own lives but also the entire world around them. In Muslim eyes, the Franks created a constant and highly visible desecration. The dominant symbol of the cross was everywhere, atop churches and even the holy mosques of the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa in Jerusalem. The military orders established within the Crusader states all used the cross as their emblem and it became a graphic symbol of defilement. This sense of pollution runs through one of the tales incorporated in the Thousand and One Nights. It tells how the dried excrement of the high patriarch in Constantinople was so revered among Christians that it was preserved and made into the “holiest incense for the sanctification of Christians on all solemn occasions, to bless the bride, to fumigate the newly born and to purify a priest on ordination.” Since the patriarch could not produce the volume required, “the priests used to forge the powder by mixing less holy matters with it, that is to say, the excrements of lesser patriarchs and even of the priests themselves.” Later, this same sanctifying incense was smeared upon a great wooden cross, which Christian soldiers were forced to kiss, and in this case, the narrator avers, “there could be no doubt as to the genuineness of the powder as it smells terribly and would have killed any elephant in the Muslim army.”68
Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam Page 24