God's Armies

by Malcolm Lambert

  Another duty of the episcopate was to carry the True Cross to battlefields. This was above all the duty of the patriarch of Jerusalem but it could be carried by bishops. The kingdom also attracted men with a strong sense of liturgy, seeing a prime duty in ensuring that rites were performed to a high standard in the multitude of shrines welcoming pilgrims, and those who had a practical, outgoing piety, looking after the sick and poor and organising their care.

  The assembly of Nablus, summoned in 1120 by Baldwin II, an avaricious but devout king known for the hard skin on his knees created by hours of prayer, was designed to avert the wrath of God on his kingdom by a series of decrees repressing immoral behaviour and to ensure that tithes were not sequestrated by barons but paid to the Church. It included a blunt clause permitting clergy to engage in warfare – a decision that went beyond anything officially permitted hitherto in the Western Church but characteristic of the general role of clergy in the kingdom.

  Settlement

  Between 1115 and the mid-1160s the armies of the Christians, not the Muslims, were the aggressors. Once Baldwin I had secured the position of the Crusader States, the armies of the settlers, sometimes reinforced by crusaders from the west, sometimes not, generally ruled battlefields and maintained military superiority with their cavalry charges and their insistence on seizing the initiative. Of course, there were set-backs. Antioch soon became a worry. It lay as far away from Jerusalem as Edinburgh lies from London, and it was subject to pressures both from Byzantium and from Muslims. Normans ruled in Antioch but in one catastrophic episode in 1119, known as the Field of Blood, in an act of impetuous folly Roger of Salerno, regent for Bohemond’s young son, did not wait for settler reinforcements from Tripoli and Jerusalem, and, with his own limited resources, took on a Muslim attacker, Il-Ghazi the Artuqid, once co-governor of Jerusalem. Roger and all his knights were lost. Baldwin II rose to the occasion, used all the powers of decision which the kings had acquired, distributed the widows and saw that Antioch stayed a Christian bulwark. But he had to spend time in the north and so did his successor, Fulk, causing resentment among Jerusalem barons.

  In the south the initiative remained with the Christians until the rise of a counter-force on the Muslim side based on Mosul and Aleppo later in the century. The Israeli historian Ronnie Ellenblum argues that Frankish rule achieved a level of security in its key lands which the Levant had not had for generations and permitted a hitherto unsuspected peaceful agricultural settlement on certain sites. This attracted fresh craftsmen who enjoyed friendly working arrangements with local Christians, probably underpinned by intermarriage between Franks and Eastern Christians, echoing at a lower level the marital arrangements of kings.*

  It is clear that historians have underestimated the peaceful survival in parts of the Holy Land of Christians who lived on as dhimmis, did not succumb to the long-term pressure to convert to Islam and thus avoid the tax imposed on them. The work of Ellenblum has fleshed out this hypothesis. He has looked more closely at the nature of fortification in these areas and concludes that the so-called ‘castles’ were often simply fortified manor houses, widespread in western Europe as the vogue grew for these structures, designed to assert a lord’s power and give focus to a settlement, rather than guarding against some armed threat. Records of boundary disputes imply that Franks in these settlements took a close personal interest and were not distant absentees dependent on a dragoman, in the manner of the absentee lairds in the Highlands of Scotland or the Protestant Ascendancy in southern Ireland with their harsh local representatives.

  Where records allow, they reveal another surprising fact – that the economic migrants who made the long journey from the West to work in these small settlements came not from northern France but from central and southern France, Catalonia and Italy. The truly enterprising in the Middle Ages, as Marc Bloch long ago taught us, were willing to travel great distances to earn well and improve status. Magna Mahumeria, north of Jerusalem, gives us a picture of the pattern of skills within that settlement. Here were construction workers, carpenters, gardeners, vineyard workers, metalworkers, butchers and bakers, clearly freemen with skills, willing to travel and make new lives where local shortages had forced better pay for their talents.

  Significantly, the settlements had adapted to the conditions of Near Eastern agriculture, such as thinner soils, locusts and much greater aridity. They had developed the technology needed to cope with problems of climate and pests and were practising terracing, making irrigation canals and using oil presses. This is likely to have involved co-operation with Muslims and small farmers. Ibn Jubayr, who travelled through the Holy Land in 1184 as Saladin threatened the Crusader States, noted Christians and Muslims working the land in co-operation and he concluded that some Muslims, badly treated by their co-religionists elsewhere, had come to prefer Christian-occupied territory. On Ellenblum’s map various indicators – the burgus, the manor house, the church or the monastery – guide the reader towards the sites of these settlements while a set of numerals act as keys to the detailed information on which Ellenblum’s reconstruction is based. At a glance one can see a conglomeration of settlements clustering north of Jerusalem, another cluster farther north round Neapolis (Nablus) and a line of others by the coast and near Acre. There are a few west of Galilee,† and Ellenblum reminds us that Christians there were at peace and not exposed to Muslim attack until as late as 1169.

  In and around Jerusalem churchmen carried on the quiet work of consolidation and improvement of rents and holdings, characteristic of many a monastic house in western Europe. So, for example, the canons of the Holy Sepulchre contracted in 1132 with a widow in Jerusalem to provide her with an annuity and food from their kitchen for life, specified as a loaf of bread per day, half a litre of wine and a cooked meal, a meat meal or whatever the canons ate on Sundays and great feast days. They also made immediate repairs to her property and in return gained possession of her orchard and the reversion of her house on her death. The cartulary of the Sepulchre is a full one in good preservation; no doubt similar quiet economic advances, less well recorded, took place elsewhere.

  The Fatal Flaw

  The Crusader States were not weak and artificial entities, fragments of western Europe in an alien world doomed to a short life, as has been commonly believed. Step by step, building a case within his narrative of events, Malcolm Barber in 2012 destroyed this view.‡ The Crusader States were viable and their weaknesses surmountable. They could have lasted a lot longer, Jerusalem remaining Christian, but for one major flaw: the lack, generation after generation, of a male heir of full, fighting age. ‘Woe to the kingdom when the king is a child!’ In the medieval world that could easily be disastrous.

  The genealogy of the kings shows their misfortune. Baldwin I left no child at all. His cousin Baldwin II was happily married to the Armenian Morphia but had only four daughters. A suitable husband was found for Melisende in Fulk V Count of Anjou, a warrior and a pilgrim who knew the kingdom well. They were married in 1129 and had two sons, Baldwin and Amalric. After Fulk’s early death Melisende was crowned together with her thirteen-year-old son Baldwin III. They ruled together until Baldwin, after some struggle with his mother, insisted on ruling alone. He married Theodora, niece of the Emperor Manuel, who gave a handsome dowry. But she was only twelve years old and after over four years of marriage there were no children. She and Baldwin died young and the crown descended to Melisende’s second son, Amalric, albeit not without controversy. Amalric’s first marriage to Agnes of Courtenay was annulled. With Agnes he had a son, Baldwin, and a daughter, Sibylla; by his second marriage to Maria Comnena, great-niece of the Emperor Manuel, he had a daughter, Isabella. Amalric, in the tradition of both Baldwin I the Conqueror and Baldwin III, aimed at extracting tribute or land from Egypt or even achieving outright conquest with the aid of Byzantium. He worked hard at the project but failed to break through and in 1174 died of dysentery.

  There followed a succession disaster. Baldwin IV, t
he eldest son, was a leper who led in battle and in council as best he could, winning one important victory, but he was doomed to an early death and could never sire a son. Which of the daughters would succeed? Sibylla or Isabella? It turned out to be Sibylla. In a bad case of romantic love triumphing over duty, she insisted on marrying as her second husband Guy of Lusignan, an aggressive, insecure adventurer, outwitting opposition in the kingdom. Unhappily aware that hereditary right could bring in as heir the leading baron Raymond of Tripoli, a descendant of Baldwin II’s daughter Hodierna, Guy succumbed to the slanderous suggestion that Raymond was seeking to discredit him, made a fatal decision to fight and in three days lost the kingdom’s field army. The kingdom never recovered. Its promise of future prosperity and vitality was snuffed out.

  * Ronnie Ellenblum, Frankish Rural Settlement in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (Cambridge, 1998).

  † Also known as the Lake of Tiberias.

  ‡ M. Barber, The Crusader States (New Haven, CT, and London, 2012).

  6

  FROM WARLORD TO

  JIHADI: NUR AL-DIN

  AND SALADIN

  Two events were crucial for the rise of the emir Nur al-Din to be the master of the Islam of his day, its most effective propagandist and thinker – a world changer. One was the capture of the city of Edessa at Christmas 1146, the other the collapse of the Second Crusade in June 1148.

  Zangi’s Legacy to Nur al-Din

  Nur al-Din’s father Zangi, atabeg of Mosul then master of Aleppo, was a ferocious disciplinarian, governing a mixed army of Turcomen, Kurds and slaves by the terror of crucifixion for the least infraction of his will. His first-class intelligence service warned him that Joscelin II, an indolent count of Edessa who had quarrelled with his neighbour settler Raymond of Poitiers, prince of Antioch, had vacated the city altogether and had left inside a garrison of mercenaries. Using all his resources, Zangi took Edessa in one month, capturing it at Christmas 1146 and leaving no time for the Christians to relieve it, massacring the Franks but sparing Eastern Christians and their churches. It gave him undeserved fame as a jihadi, rewarded with praise, titles and robes by the caliph of Baghdad. He paid panegyrists to praise him in their poetry for preparing to cleanse the sahil, the coastal lands of the caliphate, from the Franks. But they were not wholly committed and one even developed a liking for Christian Antioch and wrote amorous verse to Frankish ladies. In reality, Zangi was a warrior against fellow Muslims rather than Christians, a collector of cities, passionately devoted to adding Damascus to his existing bag of Mosul, Aleppo and Edessa.

  Damascene leaders lived in terror of what might happen to them in the light of the fate of their dependency Baalbek, where the garrison had been promised their freedom if they surrendered but were promptly massacred when they did, their place being taken by Zangi’s men under the command of a Kurdish mercenary Najm al-Din Ayyub. Consequently they sought defence against Zangi by having the Franks as their allies.

  Zangi’s life ended dramatically. He was knifed to death in his tent, by a slave, allegedly while in a drunken state, on II September 1146 during his siege of a Muslim fortress on the Euphrates. The chronicler Ibn al-Athir, however, had a different story. An attendant found him seriously wounded. ‘Master,’ he asked, ‘who has done this to you?’ He was about to reply when death took him. Not a casual killing, then, but a planned assassination by someone who had got past the guards – so, much more likely to be a Damascus emissary.

  Zangi had ruled by fear alone. As soon as he died, his corpse was hurried into the ground without ceremony, his followers looted his treasure and there was anarchy. His eldest son, Saif al-Din, seized Mosul while Nur al-Din, his second son, moved with speed to Aleppo where he knew the governor and was also viewed with favour by Shirkuh, Ayyub’s brother. The gates were opened to him, delivering the citadel, a natural feature which towered 200 feet over the city and gave him a vital security in these uneasy early years. Meanwhile the careless Joscelin, invited back to Edessa by the surviving Christians, slipped into the city without preparing any siege engines. As the Christians welcomed him, the Muslim garrison barricaded themselves in the citadel and could not be overcome. Nur al-Din moved up from Aleppo with maximum speed, catching Joscelin, his troops and the luckless Christians between his army and the garrison. All the Christian men were killed, all the women and children were enslaved and smoke rose from Edessa. It never recovered. Joscelin, although he escaped, was captured in 1150 and died in Nur al-Din’s prison nine years later. Nur al-Din had established his credentials as warrior and true jihadi.

  The first loss of a crusader state, the tripwire against Muslim attack from the north, was bound to stir a major reaction in the West and its fruit was the expedition known to historians as the Second Crusade. It had the potential to crush Nur al-Din.

  The Second Crusade

  This crusade had as its leaders Louis VII, king of France, and the emperor elect Conrad, king of the Romans, a man who had twice served in the Middle East. It included his nephew Frederick of Swabia, the future Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa, an extraordinary number of high-ranking aristocrats and a plethora of top-ranking churchmen. Behind its summoning lay the golden voice of the Cistercian monk Bernard of Clairvaux, who had worked with the first pope of the order, Eugenius III, the summoner of the crusade. In a major ceremony in the presence of St Bernard at Speyer Cathedral, Conrad had taken the cross and in an atmosphere of exaltation, a multitude had done the same. Bernard was indeed the voice of the epoch. In preaching tours he had the adulation of a modern pop star, with enthusiasts pulling off pieces of his clothing. The cadences of his preaching in French as he travelled in German-speaking lands still moved many who did not understand his language. They wept and took the cross.

  Louis was moved by the French tradition of crusading, and, working on that tradition, Abbot Suger presented to him the standard of Charlemagne at the royal shrine in the abbey of Saint-Denis and exposed for his veneration the relic of St Denis, the converter of France. There were strong links to the past. Detailed examination of charter evidence shows a continuity of noble families who in the years after the First Crusade sent their sons to serve in the Holy Land. Broadly associated with the preaching tours of Urban II or Peter the Hermit, all looked back to the achievements of the First Crusade. Louis’s expedition was viewed with alarm by the Emperor Manuel of Byzantium, who feared an attack on Constantinople and as a precaution made a pact with the sultan of Anatolia – a truce to ensure Muslims and crusaders did not combine against him. This contributed to the mistrust of Byzantium which dated back to Alexius’s supposed abandonment of the First Crusade at Antioch.

  The approach to the Holy Land was botched. There was insufficient shipping to carry so large an army by the preferred seaward route, so it had to go by land. Louis, a devout man repenting of an atrocity in his past, was no skilled general. He coped inadequately with the perils of the landward route through Anatolia and, in a fight for survival against the Turks, was forced to leave his infantry to be massacred and take ship to Antioch with his aristocrats. He was affronted by subsequent events in Antioch. His queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, was an attractive woman and a child of the south, an heiress bringing Aquitaine to the French crown, and was in contact at Antioch with Raymond of Poitiers, the prince, a scion of the house of Raymond of Toulouse. They spoke Occitan to each other, which Louis did not understand and made him feel excluded. Supposedly there was an amorous entanglement and so Louis was unwilling to co-operate in any way with Raymond and left Antioch with Eleanor and his leading men to travel to Jerusalem.

  Failing to co-ordinate with Louis’s army, Conrad suffered heavy defeat near Dorylaeum and lost many of his German infantry when he moved back to Nicaea. In poor health, he went to Constantinople and the medical care of Manuel, causing some Germans to abandon the expedition altogether. Finally Conrad and survivors took ship to Acre. Conrad, as emperor elect, may well have felt he was the man of highest rank and the rightful leader of this crusade
; originally a supporter of an attack on Edessa, he seems to have become convinced that it was no longer feasible. The decision to abandon the north and instead capture Damascus was probably taken at a small assembly in Jerusalem in April 1148, where Conrad stayed with the Templars: it was later ratified in a massive assembly of leading aristocrats and churchmen.

  The galaxy of high rank assembled for the crusade may have been a source of over-confidence. Newcomers would have believed that what was still a substantial army with great men leading was bound to win through but settlers knew more about the wiliness of the enemy and the hazards of Near Eastern climate and geography. The primary position of honour in any assembly was that of the king of Jerusalem and it was his natural function with his barons to provide the newcomers with counsel based on experience. The misfortune of the crusaders at this juncture was that Baldwin III was inexperienced, lacked full independence and also the prestige to be won by successful warfare.

  The strategy of the Second Crusade was defensible. Louis had received a daunting report on Edessa, wrecked by Nur al-Din and lacking any Christian population. It was reasonable to strike it off the list and defensible to look towards Damascus, the greatest city in Syria, a trading centre and key point on the Silk Road from China to the west, with special expertise in producing silk and steel blades for swords. Control of its commerce and the fertile lands near it would be an advantage. Restoration of the military reputation of the Christian crusaders and settlers was essential and to take this city was to remove a vital building block of power from the Muslims.