God's Armies

by Malcolm Lambert

  Suleiman failed to suppress the Safavid dynasty, patrons of a rich Persian literature. Twelver Shiism reigned, and the Safavids ruled a gunpowder empire. There were yet more conquests, which took the Ottomans to the Persian Gulf and overran Georgia and Armenia. Baghdad fell, but neither Selim nor his successors were able to destroy the Safavids totally.

  Control and training of Suleiman’s servants reached a high standard. His grand vizier presided over slaves who had demonstrated their skills and had been trained in palace schools, with the result that Istanbul became for a time a cosmopolitan Renaissance centre of learning, with secular subjects taught as well as Quranic instruction to shape Muslim boys to become teachers and imams.

  Signs of future troubles nevertheless began to emerge. The Ottoman Empire was a vast free-trading area and the rewards for the dedicated commercial figures with know-how, contacts and linguistic capacity were immense. The Capitulations of 1536 were part of the deal made with Francis I and gave special privileges to French merchants, an unwise move as in less capable hands more privileges were given. The Ottomans had lost their vital hold on the spice trade when the Portuguese showed their mastery of the use of cannon on shipboard, creating the broadside, and dispatched Vasco da Gama round the Cape of Good Hope, making direct contact with the spice islands and with India.

  There was a hardening of the arteries in the later sixteenth century and in the seventeenth, a loss of military pre-eminence, which combined with weaknesses in the sultanate to initiate a long period of decline. A decision by Selim the Grim in 1517 to decree the death penalty for those who engaged in the science of printing was a portent. Manifestly, it at once cut off literate and learned Muslims from an immense array of information and damaged their civilisation. Characteristically, Selim gave no reasons: it was an act of power, and one can only speculate on motives. Calligraphy was one of the glories of Islam and by tradition the act of copying the Quran was in itself meritorious. In Istanbul there was great expenditure on this act and a formidable body of skilled men deployed for the purpose. Examples of the calligraphy were also visible everywhere. Could it be that it was felt to be almost blasphemous for the uncreated word of God to be exposed to a mere mechanical, unthinking technique? Or had the influence of the ulama played a role? Their decisions, quietly circulated, had importance. Ottoman authorities could glimpse what was emerging in Catholic Europe as the invention of printing gave the impetus to Martin Luther’s challenge to the Church. Judgements by scholars within Islam could be made available to all who could read and might well shake the existing ulama’s authority.

  The last and most significant of all factors damaging the Ottoman lands was the loss of quality sultans. Suleiman the Magnificent fell prey to the schemes of a favourite slave girl, Roxelana, who deceived him about his son, led him to have him strangled and then persuaded him to get rid of a capable grand vizier to ensure that her own son succeeded. He was Selim the Sot (caliph 1566–74), and his achievement was to lift the prohibition on wine-drinking and attack Cyprus to secure a share of its wine stocks.

  Selim was fortunate in the high calibre of his grand vizier whom he was happy to leave as the effective power in the empire while he indulged himself. A Serb from Visegrad originally destined for the priesthood, he was pulled into Ottoman service and the Islamic faith through the devshirme, the military levy and rose steadily through the ranks by his great talents and fine manners and reigned as grand vizier under the title Sokollu Mehmed Pasha until his death in 1579. He exercised diplomatic skills, making peace with Western powers while never losing a gentle side-interest in his Serbian compatriots despite the barriers of belief between them: he revived the Serbian archbishopric of Pecs and built the bridge over the River Drina in Visegrad. His widow commissioned one of the most beautiful golden-age Ottoman mosques in Istanbul in his memory. Selim’s grand vizier delayed decline but could not ward off the effects of unsatisfactory sultans and inner instability for the system depended on strong central leadership and sultanates of sufficient length for policies to be carried through. Statistics illuminate the position: from the founder, Osman, up to and including Suleiman the Magnificent there had been ten sultans reigning for nearly 280 years; from Selim the Sot there were thirteen sultans covering 140 years.

  Sheer size created problems. The sultan’s bureaucracy had to send out a multitude of orders and when control weakened, great families who had been clients, bound by ties of service to the sultan, made themselves independent, hereditary powers, only loosely linked to the sultanate. Queen mothers and harem favourites influenced sultans and foreign embassies learned to establish direct links with personalities. Western powers, preoccupied and only spasmodically concerned with Ottoman affairs, acquired a new vitality and challenged the Turkish war machine. The Portuguese ocean-going vessel, as we have seen, beat the Ottomans and eliminated their spice trade monopoly. Western powers with big ships – merchantmen with the broadside, such as caracks – came into the Mediterranean. The Habsburgs, with long-range cannon, musketeers and arquebusiers and the techniques of timed salvoes, changed battlefield conditions and forced Ottoman commanders to recruit much larger numbers of infantry and in consequence dilute the quality of the Janissaries, who ceased to be a highly specialised battle-winning corps. Cavalry diminished in importance. The view has been put forward that changes in warfare were the major driving force behind financial and institutional change in the seventeeth century.* Certainly two wars showed up Ottoman deficiencies, as campaigns against Iran between 1578 and 1590 ended in success but only after strain, and a long slogging match against Austria between 1595 and 1606 drained resources, lowered morale and caused food deficiencies in Istanbul. Contemporaries picked out moral failings, weak personalities and the withdrawal of sultans from battlefield command as the keys to decline.

  The success of the Ottoman system had long depended on tight central control, a system above corruption and loyal, well-trained Janissaries with the spahis, the cavalry force not allowed to establish appanages for their families.

  Ahmed I, the great-grandson of Selim the Sot, reigned from 1603. He had no military experience and the traditions of the past were abandoned. Appalled by the bloodbath in which his father, Muhammad III, killed nineteen sons, Ahmed felt it more humane to confine princes to special quarters with the harem, which had the consequence that many were terrified of taking responsibility. Hitherto Ottoman sultans had treated themselves as natural rulers of the world and all those who wished to make agreements were taken as supplicants who were due to pay tribute. Ahmed ended this and concluded a treaty with Austria in 1606 on terms of equality.

  Still allowing heavy expenditure in a time of austerity, he made an impression on the skyline at Istanbul when his architect Sinan, himself a slave, designed one of the most beautiful of all late Muslim buildings, the Blue Mosque.

  The judiciary, once respected, became corrupt. As time went on, Janissaries conspired to put in power sultans of their choice and insisted on financial deals with the harem. They abandoned celibacy and ensured that their sons inherited positions: the status of Janissary with privileges was sold; one young sultan who tried to bypass the Janissaries and raise a new military force was dethroned and killed.

  Alien merchants took the place of an indigenous middle class which could have supplied stability and debt put the Ottomans in the hands of outsiders. A last effective crusade in 1683, in which a key role was played by Polish lancers rescuing Vienna, makes a natural endpoint. Jihad, the ghazi, spirit, once an Ottoman inspiration, had died; crusade had won a victory, however precariously. Finally, in the eighteenth century decline had gone so far that it was found necessary to make a formal treaty recognising the special status of the Russian tsars as protectors of the Slav minorities.

  While the Ottomans in decline lost their distinctive Islamic character, a new force, Wahhabism, sprang into life in the Arabian desert. Over and over again fresh impetus in the Islamic world has come from the bare expanses of the desert, the pas
sion for monotheism which it inspires and the memory of Muhammad. So it was with the meditations of the scholar Muhammad ibn al-Wahhab based in central Arabia, a follower of Hanbal who insisted in the face of persecution that the Quran was uncreated and not open to commentary and interpretation. The Wahhabi viewpoint went well beyond Hanbal and propounded an extreme puritanism and an utter rejection of all compromise with other faiths. Al-Wahhab took time to study in Mecca, Medina, Damascus and Basra, incubating his drastic reformist ideas, then began to preach in 1740. It was not wholly an accident that his movement was launched just as the decline of Ottoman power was becoming manifest. Al-Wahhab was repudiated by his fellow scholars but rescued by the ruler of a small tribal principality in Najd, north-central Arabia, and thereafter his movement never lost its hold in the desert lands.

  Al-Wahhab went well beyond Hanbal in his ferocious commitment to monotheism, rejecting the rituals of Sufism, all veneration of shrines, tombs and relics, even including those of the Prophet, and the most innocuous expressions of respect for other beliefs. Ibn Saud, the ruler of Najd, warred against rival tribes, seeking a super-tribal unification and followed al-Wahhabi’s lead in using state power to enforce doctrinal purity. Riyadh became the Wahhabi capital. Wahhabis captured Mecca for a time, destroyed the birthplaces of Muhammad, Khadija, Ali and Abu Bakr, before being expelled by the Ottoman general Mehmet Ali, the reformer and revifier of Sunni Egypt. Wahhabism was never eliminated and in the view of its enemies lived on as a virus in the desert wastes of Arabia through the nineteenth century.

  The Enlightenment

  France was the key to this last development, inimical root and branch to crusading. Writers asked about the authenticity of the Christian Scriptures and speculated that hundreds of years had elapsed between the events and the writing of the Gospels. Diderot wrote scornfully and humorously about the Sepulchre, a fragment of rock which had led to the spilling of so much blood. The French episcopate was intimately bound to the army and often sprang from the same families: they sought obedience to faith and were not equipped to debate issues with intellectuals. The French Revolution had a strong anticlerical cast and involved pushing hapless clergy into blasphemous acts; the notion of a divine will requiring action for the faith, the vow and the indulgence were alien to such thinkers.

  In England the fears of a Jacobite takeover by Catholic Highlanders created a panic and the Catholic Church, the source of crusading, sank to a low point with a recusant remnant subject to penal laws, remaining a quiet, patient group. Generally the climate of opinion was hostile. The Hospitallers were victims of the malaise and of aristocratic self-aggrandisement and their decadence opened the way to their collapse in 1798 in the face of Napoleon. In these circumstances it is surprising that there was such a revival of interest in crusading in the years following the French Revolution.

  * C. Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1500: The Structure of Power (Basingstoke, and New York, 2002).

  11

  MODERN TIMES

  Michaud and the French

  Jean-François Michaud (1767–1839) began to publish his three-volume History of the Crusades in 1817, two years after the exiling of Napoleon and the return of the Bourbon monarchy. In 1829 a companion volume of text with translations appeared, revising Michaud’s work before his death. It went on selling and reached a ninth edition in 1856, before culminating in a luxury edition of 1877 which traced crusading history from Peter the Hermit to the battle of Lepanto, with wonderful illustrations by Gustave Doré. Michaud’s passionate views shone through. He believed in monarchy, Christianity and the superiority of the French nation and hated both the French Revolution and the Enlightenment which inspired it. The French were a crusading nation, he insisted, and they had won heroic victories: ‘astonishing triumphs’, he wrote, ‘which made the Muslims believe that the Franks were a race superior to other men’.

  The phrase ‘astonishing triumphs’ rings hollow when the facts are known: Jerusalem had been lost to the Muslims; the coastal strip had fallen in 1291; and Christian Orthodox Constantinople was captured by a crusading army. Michaud was aware of these events but, it seems, felt that they were outweighed by the gift which the Frankish crusaders brought to the Muslims, ‘the victorious Christian law’, which began ‘a new destiny in those faraway lands which had first come to us’. The crusaders, he held, established ‘Christian colonies’ which would one day enable France to become the model and centre of European civilisation. The holy wars contributed much to this development, he believed. Michaud had a literary talent and the companion volume of texts made him seem like a researcher. It was not so: he was a jackdaw picking out facts to suit his thesis. The Crusader States were not colonies as the nineteenth century understood them and Christian law had made no impact on the Muslims.

  Michaud’s book and the attitudes which made it so popular were in effect a blueprint for the French colonisation of Muslim lands in the nineteenth century. Louis-Philippe, king of France from 1837 to 1848, took up Michaud with enthusiasm and commissioned a series of paintings, 120 in all, depicting the heroic acts of the French crusaders for five rooms in the palace at Versailles devoted to the crusades. The glorious past would underpin his rule and offset the unhappy impression of despotism and extravagance left by Louis XIV’s building of Versailles; by contrast, Louis-Philippe’s museum, devoted to the colonies, began with the Frankish conquests in Syria and Lebanon. A commentator viewing a painting of the French assault on Constantine in Algeria in 1837 made an uninhibited reference to the crusading past. ‘We find there again, after an interval of five hundred years, the French nation fertilising with its blood the burning plains studded with the tents of Islam. Missionaries and warriors, they every day extend the boundaries of Christendom.’ The conquest of Algiers in 1830 was described as a crusade, a Lieutenant Joinville served in the campaign to take it and the French intervention of 1881 in Tunisia was likened to St Louis’s last crusade to Tunis. A statue of Joinville was erected outside Tunis.

  Along with crusading scenes, Louis-Philippe’s paintings included the arms of the aristocratic families whose ancestors had gone on crusade. Bourgeois families who had grown rich through entrepreneurship clamoured for inclusion. Their pleas were heard by Eugene-Henri Courtois, a forger of crusade charters who, with two accomplices, for good fees, obligingly provided evidence of crusading ancestors for his clients.

  Walter Scott and the British

  The romantic novels of Walter Scott on crusading, especially Ivanhoe, published in 1819, and The Talisman, published in 1825, added another dimension to crusading in the popular mind. Scott was a child of the Scottish Enlightenment, which regarded the whole crusading movement in the words of David Hume, as the ‘most signal and most durable example of the folly of mankind in the history of any age or nation’, and in The Talisman he is scathing about crusading leaders, describing a treacherous marquis and an evil Templar Grand Master and portraying Richard Lion-heart as a man who was warlike but oafish. In the introduction he made a stark contrast between the Christian English monarch, showing ‘all the cruelty and violence of an Eastern Sultan’, and Saladin, displaying ‘the deep policy and prudence of a European sovereign’. In the story a Scottish knight is befriended by an emir, Saladin in disguise, who subsequently enters the Christian camp to heal Richard Lionheart.

  For his portrait of Saladin, Scott drew on a tradition established in medieval vernacular literature designed to appeal to aristocratic audiences who admired valiant warriors and loved good stories. A curious compensatory mechanism began to operate after the fall of the Crusader States in 1291. If God’s will had allowed the crusaders to fail, might it not be better for defeat to have taken place at the hands of a man of true virtue who shared the chivalric ideas of his opponents? It was said that Saladin had been a child of a Western mother, daughter of the count of Ponthieu, and in a fifteenth-century account one of his aristocratic prisoners dubbed him a Western knight. He became a kind of honorary Westerner. Dante placed him
in Limbo, the place of natural happiness reserved for those who had not received baptism, and in 1779 Gotthold Lessing, the German philosopher-playwright, made Saladin the hero of his play Nathan the Wise. Scott was heir to a long literary tradition which exalted Saladin – but he gave it an extra twist (and by implication a deeply anti-Muslim one) when he spoke of the ‘deep policy and prudence of a European sovereign’. Here is anachronism indeed.

  The British never quite made up their minds about the crusades. Writing about them oscillated between the view of Gibbon (‘savage fanaticism’), part of his general denigration of the Middle Ages as ‘the triumph of barbarism and religion’, and a popular romantic storytelling tradition that admired crusades and included fictional characters to adorn their narrative in a genre much publicised in the sixteenth century by the Italian Torquato Tasso and his poem Jerusalem Liberated. The Victorian passion for the Middle Ages reinvigorated a positive interest in the crusades. The youthful Burne-Jones kept a handbook of chivalry, Kenelm Digby’s The Broad Stone of Honour, by his bedside. The Pre-Raphaelites were moved by the Middle Ages altogether and a positive view of crusading was carried with it. Walter Scott’s own Enlightenment view of Richard Lionheart was largely diluted by public taste for panoramas in the plays based on Scott’s novels: the oafish warrior faded in the general diffusion of taste for all things medieval. Readers liked the sentimental impact of scenes such as Richard’s first sight of Jerusalem and the wholly mythical depiction of Queen Berengaria catching sight of evidence of her lost husband’s where-abouts after he is shipwrecked.

  The clash of views is reflected in the discussions which took place over a proposed statue of the Lionheart. Baron Carlo Marochetti, a fashionable society sculptor best known for designing the tombs of Victoria and Albert at Frogmore, displayed his sculpture of Richard at the Great Exhibition of 1851 but found no takers. A commentator in the London Illustrated News thought it wholly inappropriate to associate a statue of ‘that madcap fanatic sovereign’ with the ‘industrial triumphs of this age of progress’. After delays, a compromise was reached whereby public subscription amounting to £3,000 and a contribution of £1,600 from the Ministry of Works met the costs of the bronze statue of Richard in full armour brandishing a sword which was erected in 1860 near the entrance to the House of Lords, where it still stands. The statue represents the rehabilitation of Richard from Scott’s harsh depiction. By contrast, Scott’s description of Saladin as a generous, courageous and chivalrous leader has prevailed in popular understanding in the West and has effaced the Saladin of history, a man of great courage who grew in stature but who was more complex and more troubled than convention has allowed.