God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  Traditional Byzantine foreign policy, derived from the techniques of the Roman empire, outlined the best course of action when dealing with barbarians, those outside the empire or those, like the Normans in Italy and Sicily or the Armenians and Turks in northern Syria who, in the timeless Byzantine view of the world, were squatting on former imperial lands. If such tribes threatened the empire, or the emperor wished to use them, the tactics remained much the same: smother them with hospitality; learn their customs and exploit these; divide and rule; forge links of dependence based on profit, golden chains as it were; employ them; Byzantinize them. These were Alexius’s methods in the early months of 1097, to which he added a high dose of flexible opportunism. He was welcoming to all who accepted his hospitality; some, such as Godfrey of Bouillon or Tancred of Lecce, who avoided Constantinople and tried not to meet the emperor, required some small element of coercion; for the rest nothing was too much, as Alexius imposed the authority of fabulous wealth on his bucolic visitors. The oath he wished them to swear to him was, according to Anna, a ‘customary Latin oath’; whatever its details, the reactions of the leaders suggest that they recognized it.50 Alexius used Hugh of Vermandois to persuade Godfrey to come to heel and ensured Godfrey and the rest witnessed Bohemund’s oath. Bohemund, Godfrey and Robert of Flanders were cited as wishing Raymond’s adherence to Alexius’s contract. Bohemund was employed to extract agreement from Raymond and to force Tancred to fall into line. Once agreement and acquiescence had been obtained, Alexius lavished gifts on the westeners, whom he now regarded as his servants. The only aspect of the Greek formula that failed, and did so disastrously, was the inability of most of the westerners to become Byzantines. Although they could meet over mutual self-interest in the deals struck at Constantinople, there was a fundamental gulf not so much of understanding but of aspiration.

  Alexius saw his interests as eternal: the benefit of the empire. Anything else was peripheral or secondary, not least remote Jerusalem. He probably minimized the importance of the reciprocal nature of his agreement with the crusaders, seeing them effectively as mercenaries; they regarded him as a lord with contractual obligations to preserve the interests of his vassals. When he was persuaded that the crusaders were doomed at Antioch in June 1098, Alexius preserved his strategy by withdrawing his own army from danger. For the crusaders, this withdrawal was inexplicable treachery from a lord whose help had been sworn. They, who had risked all so many times, failed to appreciate his caution. The shadow of Antioch fell deep over Graeco-Latin relations in the twelfth century, nowhere more black than in the pages of the eyewitness chroniclers who felt and experienced the betrayal in which dim light they re-evaluated all that had transpired between Alexius and the crusade leadership. It is small wonder that Anna Comnena was so frenetic in her attempts to exonerate Alexius from any suggestion of culpability over Antioch, for he had been caught out by that most politically damaging agent: events. If the westerners had been annihilated at Antioch, as common sense dictated they should have been, Alexius would have been vindicated. Unfortunately not only did they survive, they proceeded to win Jerusalem and return to tell their tale.

  At the heart of the dispute lay the oaths sworn, which were solemn and serious. Despite the contrasting sensitivities locked into the descriptions of events at Constantinople, it appears that Alexius demanded and received from all the leaders except Raymond of Toulouse homage and fealty. They became the emperor’s vassals, promising to restore to imperial rule all lands, towns and castles they captured which had formally belonged to the empire. This is effect meant lands lost in the relatively recent past: even Raymond of Toulouse, who became most protective of the relationship with Alexius, considered towns in Syria beyond Antioch, such as al-Bara, beyond the remit of the agreement.51 In return, Alexius promised help for the crusaders. Some tried to argue that he had promised to join the march to Jerusalem, but this probably represents a post-Antioch gloss. Raymond of Aguilers, a very hostile source, stated that Alexius ruled out his personal involvement. More probable was a guarantee of military aid, supplies and advice, as well as promises to protect the crusaders’ rear and assist reinforcements. The importance of these arrangements was underlined by Alexius’s insistence at the crusaders’ Asiatic base at Pelekanum just before they left for the march across Anatolia that even lesser lords took the oath. The one exception was Raymond of Toulouse, who insisted on swearing an oath more acceptable to Provençal practice, that ‘he would not, either through himself or through others, take away from the emperor, life and possessions’.52 Yet he abided by his obligations more faithfully than his colleagues, perhaps because Alexius had taken special pains to establish good relations with him after their sticky introduction.

  The legal aspects of the agreements struck by Alexius and the western leaders were less important than the political implications. Only by becoming Alexius’s vassals could they extract necessary help. For Bohemund, subservience offered an opportunity for self-advancement; he proposed to Alexius that he be created Domestic of the East, effectively commander of the imperial forces in Asia and, in consequence, commander-in-chief of the crusade.53 Alexius temporized but did not reject his offer of service outright. That Bohemund came up with the idea exposes the nature of his ambition; he wanted leadership; he wanted land. Alexius was not to know the extent to which Bohemund was determined to have both without any ties of vassalage. His whole career to date had made the Norman wish to dispense with overlords. Yet for the present, Alexius suited his case.

  Initially, whatever the details, the treaties of Constantinople worked. Relations between western leaders, not least Bishop Adhemar, with the Greeks were good. Nicaea reverted to imperial control after its capture in June 1097 despite Alexius’s absence. A Byzantine division accompanied the army eastwards towards Antioch, under an experienced commander, Tatikios, a safe choice as a Turkish eunuch of unavoidable loyalty to the emperor rather than a Greek nobleman who could have harboured imperial longings of his own. Cities captured on the way, such as Comana, were indeed restored to Greek lordship. Optimism, if judged by a cheerful letter Stephen of Blois wrote to his wife from Nicaea on 24 June 1097, was high: ‘the army of God’ was looking forward to reaching Jerusalem in five weeks – ‘unless Antioch holds us up’.54 Urban’s plan seemed to be working.

  2. Asia Minor and Syria 1097–99

  4

  The Road to the Holy Sepulchre

  Count Stephen of Blois’s optimism appeared justified. Nicaea, the capital of the Turkish Seljuks of Asia Minor, the sultanate of Rum, surrendered on 19 June 1097. A month before, the still-assembling crusader force had decisively repulsed the relief attack by the sultan, Kilij Arslan, a remarkable achievement for such a novice and fragmented army. During the siege, the westerners, employing catapults, siege towers and using boats provided by the Greeks to blockade the city from the adjoining Ascanian lake, established a common fund for expenses, including payment for an Italian engineer. Faced by such a vast host, perhaps numbering 60,000, Nicaea agreed surrender terms with the Emperor Alexius, including a prohibition on plunder that was less than enthusiastically received by the besiegers. The capture of the Seljuk capital, for years a target for Byzantine mercenaries, marked an impressive achievement for the ‘army of God’, as Stephen of Blois proudly described it. Alexius had taken no direct part in military operations, beyond logistical help, but through his new vassals a large, strategically important city had been returned to his empire intact, undermining Kilij Arslan’s grip on the largely non-Turkish cities of western Asia Minor and signalling a new force in Near Eastern politics. When the emperor assembled his allies at Pelekanum after the siege, apart from extracting oaths from recalcitrants such as Tancred of Lecce, giving advice, discussing strategy and showering rich and poor alike with gifts, he arranged for a crusader embassy to be despatched to negotiate with the Fatimid regime in Egypt, fellow adversaries of the Turks, with whom he was on amicable terms. The victors of Nicaea were thus recognized as more than ano
ther western mercenary force doing the Greeks’ bidding on the margins of western Islam. Their distinctive ambitions were understood by their Byzantine patron, if not as yet by his Muslim friends and enemies.1

  This soon changed. The Damascus chronicler Ibn al-Qalanisi (d. 1160), a young man at the time of the First Crusade, remembered the ominous rumours reaching Syria in 1097:

  there began to arrive a succession of reports that the armies of the Franks had appeared from the direction of the sea of Constantinople with forces not to be reckoned for multitude. As these reports followed one upon the other, and spread from mouth to mouth far and wide, the people grew anxious and disturbed in mind.

  An Armenian monk, writing in Syria during the invasion of 1097–9, described the westerners who followed ‘the sign of the cross of Christ’ as fulfilment of Christ’s promise to come to the assistance of His people. Another, commenting from Alexandria in the summer of 1099, remarked on the ‘countless multitudes’ who attacked Syria with ‘Divine aid inspired by Almighty God’. The significance of these intruders became apparent. In 1105, a religious lawyer teaching at the Great Mosque in Damascus, Ali Ibn Tahir al-Sulami, unwittingly mirrored Urban II’s historical analysis in explaining the advance of the ifranj:

  A number fell upon the island of Sicily at a time of difference and competition, and likewise they gained possession of town after town in Spain. When mutually confirmatory reports reached them of the state of this country – the disagreement of its lords, the dissensions of its dignitaries, together with its disorder and disturbance – they carried out their resolution of going out to it, and Jerusalem was the summit of their wishes.2

  So marked did these dissensions appear, and so favourable to any invader, some have wondered whether Alexius and Urban deliberately timed their initiative to take advantage of them. The chroniclers who accompanied the expedition to Jerusalem well knew that the Muslim world the western host entered in June 1097 lacked unity in politics, race and religion. They distinguished between Muslim ‘Turks’ – the warrior elite originating in the Eurasian steppes – and ‘Saracens’ or ‘Arabs’ – the Arabic-speaking, settled population of the Levant: the anonymous veteran who wrote the Gesta Francorum, one of the earliest written accounts, carefully discriminated between these and also the different Christian communities – Greek, Armenian and Syrian (i.e. Greek Orthodox, Jacobite or Maronite Christians in Syria who spoke Arabic).3 The protracted negotiations with the Fatimid rulers of Egypt between June 1097 and May 1099 revealed the potential for exploiting Near Eastern political fissures; partitioning Palestine may even have been mooted at Antioch in March 1098. Throughout their march across Asia Minor and Syria, western leaders appeared well informed of their opponents’ alliances. Subsequent successes in Cilicia, at Edessa and Antioch, and the unopposed march to Jerusalem in 1099 relied on the failure of the competing Muslim powers to unite, the crusaders’ appreciation of this disunity and their willingness to exploit it through diplomacy and war.

  It is a persistent myth that western Christians possessed either no knowledge of or a universally blinkered hostility to Islam and Muslim rulers. In eleventh-century Spain, opportunist military adventurers, such as Rodrigo Diaz, El Cid, happily served Muslim employers when it suited them. On a military level, the soldiers of Christ of 1097 recognized the quality of their Turkish opponents. Even Pope Gregory VII, a scourge of Christian backsliders, attempted to maintain friendly relations with the Muslim ruler of Mauritania, on the startlingly tolerant grounds that ‘we worship and confess the same God though in diverse forms and daily praise and adore him as the creator and ruler of this world’.4 From the other side, so-called Muslim policy was often conducted and implemented by non-Muslims, Christians of various denominations as well as Jews. The Coptic Christian community in Egypt remained influential in administration until the fourteenth century. In many areas of western Asia under Islamic rule in the eleventh century it is doubtful whether there existed a Muslim majority.5 Constructive contact between the Christian army and selected Muslim powers was unsurprising, especially since the Byzantines had been pursuing such strategies for generations.

  From the middle of the eleventh century, the heterogeneous polity of the Near East had revolved around the dominance of orthodox Sunni Muslim Seljuk Turks in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Asia Minor controlling the decadent Abbasid caliphate of Baghdad and the faltering heretical Shi’ite caliphate of the Fatimids in Egypt.6 In 1055, the chief of the Orghuz Turcoman tribes in north-eastern Iran, the Seljuk Tughrul Beg, seized Baghdad, appropriating for himself from the caliph the title of sultan (literally, in Arabic, ‘power’). Tughrul (d. 1063), his nephew Alp Arslan (1063–72) and great-nephew Malik Shah (1072–92) created an empire including Iran, Iraq and, from the late 1070s, central and southern Syria; northern Syria, a group of client city states, was incorporated by 1086. Alp Arslan, by his decisive defeat of the Byzantine emperor, Romanus Diogenes, at Manzikert in 1071, opened Anatolia to Turcoman invasion and settlement. The sultanate created there, of Rum (i.e. the former lands of the Byzantines who always referred to themselves as Romans), was ruled by Seljuk cousins of Malik Shah, Suleiman Ibn Kutulmush (d. 1086) and his son Kilij Arslan, whose influence in northern Syria was successfully challenged by Malik Shah’s brother Tutush. While the sultanate of Rum occupied southern and western Anatolia, another Turkish power, the Danishmends, established control of the north and east of the peninsula. The two powers competed for advantage, while unsuccessfully combining to resist the westerners’ advance across Anatolia in the summer of 1097.

  Turkish authority from the Persian Gulf to the Dead Sea rested on military strength exercised by the control of local communities by Turkish garrisons or mercenaries holding indigenous political hierarchies in check. The western invaders of 1097 acknowledged that Turkish military supremacy had ‘terrorized the Arabs, Saracens, Armenians, Syrians and Greeks’.7 Such rule varied from the militant Turkish holy warrior ethos of the Danishmends to the Great Seljuks of Baghdad, fully assimilated into the Arabo-Persian culture of the Abbasids: Malik Shah is not a Turkish name at all; it means King King in Arabic and Persian, a sort of echo of the imperial title of the ancient Persian Shahanshahs, Kings of Kings. Local power depended on standing armies of mercenaries, as the traditional Turkish nomadic life clashed with the settled rural and urban conditions of Iraq, Syria, Palestine and much of Anatolia. As effective warriors, the Turks of Asia Minor and Syria maintained their hold, real power often lying with mercenary army commanders rather than princely governors. Even the power of the Seljuk sultans in Baghdad was overshadowed by that of their vizier, Nizam al-Mulk.

  One characteristic of the Seljuks was their fiercely orthodox Sunni Islam, putting them at odds with many of their subjects, not only the various Christian sects but also the Shi’ite majority among the Muslim peasantry of Syria, as well as with the heretical caliphs of Egypt, with whom they contested control of Palestine. After establishing themselves in Egypt in 969, the Shi’ite Fatimid caliphate became increasingly dependent on its mercenary troops, Berber tribesmen, Blacks (Sudan in Arabic) from the upper Nile, Turks and other slave warriors (mamluks). These elements fought for supremacy behind the throne of Caliph al-Mustansir (1036–94) until he appointed as his vizier the aged Armenian mamluk Badr al-Jamali, who ruled Egypt as a military dictator from 1074 to 1094. The political potential of religion was dramatically demonstrated in 1092, when a Shi’ite splinter group established at Alamut, south of the Caspian Sea, murdered the immensely powerful vizier of Baghdad, Nizam al-Mulk; the killers’ sect was later known in the west as the Assassins. The Egyptian rulers were less ideologically militant or successful, their hold over the hinterland of Syria and Palestine reduced to nominal control over a few sea-ports on the Palestinian littoral. In an attempt to eject Turkish authority from Palestine Badr al-Jamali’s son and successor, al-Afdal, sought friendship with Byzantium and an agreement with the Greeks’ newest allies in 1097–9.

  Tensions and rivalries were inherent in a
polity where form disguised substance; behind the caliph a sultan, behind a sultan a vizier, behind a vizier a mamluk. Indigenous hierarchies were subject to foreign domination: Egypt and Iraq competed for Syria and Palestine; Armenian, Turcoman, Kurd or Berber adventurers subjugated local aristocracies. These fissures were deepened by a disastrous coincidence of death between 1092 and 1094, which swept away all the major political figures of the Near East. In 1092, the Vizier Nizam al-Mulk, effective ruler of the Seljuk empire, was followed to his grave a few weeks later by the Sultan Malik Shah himself. A similar pattern was repeated in Egypt in 1094, when the death of the Vizier Badr al-Jamali closely followed that of his ostensible master, the veteran Fatimid Caliph al-Mustansir. In the same year, the Sunni caliph of Baghdad, al-Muqtadi, also died. These multiple deaths provoked succession struggles and political fragmentation from Iran to Anatolia, Syria and Palestine. In Asia Minor, Kilij Arslan, held hostage by Malik Shah since the defeat and death of his father Suleiman in 1086, began to restore an independent sultanate of Rum in competition with the Seljuks and the Danishmends of eastern Anatolia. In the civil wars over Malik Shah’s inheritance, his brother Tutush, ruler of Syria, was defeated and killed in 1095 by the sultan’s son Barkyaruq, whose own power remained disputed by his brother Muhammed until his death in 1105. While much of the internecine fighting occurred in western Iran, political unity in Syria imploded. Tutush’s bickering sons Ridwan of Aleppo and Duqaq of Damascus failed to impose their authority allowing the Turkish atabeg (i.e. guardian of prince or governor) of Mosul, Kerbogha, the opportunity to extend his authority into northern Syria, while local dynasties asserted their independence further south, such as the Ortoqids in Jerusalem or the Shi’ite Banu ‘Ammar in Tripoli. At Edessa in northern Iraq, in Cilicia and northern Syria, Armenian princelings re-established themselves in the debris of Seljuk rule. The new Egyptian vizier, al-Afdal, took advantage of this instability to restore Fatimid power in southern Palestine, culminating in his capture of Jerusalem from the Ortoqids in 1098.