God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  Elsewhere in Christendom, reactions coupled shock, sorrow and blame. While participants sought scapegoats in the Greeks or the Jerusalemites or even their own tactical naivety, observers, less charitably, condemned the whole enterprise and its leaders and participants for arrogance, lack of humility, immorality, rapacity and ultimate sterility within the traditional analysis of failure caused by sin. The promoters of the enterprise came in for heavy criticism, Eugenius III admitting that the expedition had inflicted ‘the most severe injury of the Christian name that God’s church has suffered in our time’. The English pope, Hadrian IV, writing to Louis VII a decade later, recalled the criticism of the papacy as the author of the crusade, although, with characteristic tactlessness, he suggested the king had undertaken the Jerusalem journey ‘with little caution’.61 Glowing with patriotic enthusiasm, Henry archdeacon of Huntingdon sought to gloss a moral point by contrasting the failure of the proud, wealthy kings with the success of humble ‘ordinary rather then powerful men’ on the Lisbon adventure: ‘the greater part of them came from England’. Some in Germany saw behind the disasters the work of the Antichrist. A monk in Würzburg, witness to anti-Jewish atrocities in 1147, savaged both organizers and recruits: the preachers ‘pseudo-prophets, sons of Belial and witnesses of Antichrist, who seduced the Christians with empty words’, the crusaders mostly novelty-seeking tourists, money-grubbers, debtors, escaped convicts or refugees from harsh landlords.62 Vincent of Prague was not alone in blaming the disaster on the presence of women; sex and holy war did not mix.63 While Otto of Freising delicately suggested that he and the other crusaders, through pride and arrogance, had fallen short of the moral standards set by Bernard of Clairvaux, others were less charitable towards the abbot, who felt compelled to issue an extended apologia in his own and Eugenius’s defence in a treatise called De Consideratione (completed between 1149 and 1152). Bernard remained publicly regretful but eager to make amends in a new effort, in 1150 quoting approvingly the tag: ‘I go to Jerusalem to be crucified a second time.’ In De Consideratione he admitted the sins of the crusaders and the mercilessness of Divine Judgement. Defending himself from charges of rashness, he claimed due papal authority but accepted that God’s severity scandalized many. To reassure Eugenius, to whom the work was addressed, he cited the example of the Hebrews punished for their lack of faith to wander in the Wilderness, casting himself and the pope in the role of Moses, performing God’s will, however painful. Thus, Bernard hoped, he and the pope could excuse themselves as agents of God’s purpose, adding, in a flourish of self-righteous flagellation: ‘I would rather that men murmur against us than against God. It would be well for me if He deigns to use me for his shield.’64 Bernard’s reputation survived, even if the repute of his expedition did not. King Amalric of Jerusalem used to tell of the night before a battle in Egypt in March 1167, when the long-dead abbot appeared in a dream to chide him for his sins (he was a notorious lecher), which shamed the piece of the True Cross he wore round his neck. Only when Amalric promised to repent did Bernard bless the cross; next day the relic saved the king’s life.65

  Yet King Amalric could also have talked of the falling-off of trust between east and west in consequence of the Second Crusade. In the words of William of Tyre, tutor to Amalric’s son, ‘fewer people, and those less fervent in spirit, undertook this pilgrimage thereafter… those who do come fear lest they be caught in the same toils and hence make as short a stay as possible’.66 The searing disappointment and the rumours of treachery and misbehaviour led some to doubt the very concept of holy war and the justice of fighting and killing Muslims. Others merely mocked what appeared as wasteful, self-indulgent folly. The heady enthusiasm so powerfully and convincingly orchestrated by Bernard in 1146 and 1147 produced dust and ashes, as Otto of Freising had it, a time of weeping. For many thousands it had brought death, glorious, mundane, painful, wretched. ‘So great was the disaster of the army and so inexpressible the misery that those who took part bemoan it with tears to this very day,’ wrote one who knew some of the survivors.67 All were united in acknowledgement of the personal human cost, thrown more sharply into relief by the lack of any wider material gain. Most people, complained Bernard of Clairvaux, ‘judge causes from their results’.68 Few voices were raised to contradict them; fewer still convinced.

  The Third Crusade

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  ‘A Great Cause for Mourning’:1 The Revival of Crusading and the Third Crusade

  The sour taste left by the failure of the Second Crusade undermined both the idea and practice of this method of Christian holy war, casting doubt on its motives and morality. Despite repeated and increasingly urgent appeals from Outremer, successive popes failed to inspire new general expeditions east despite employing the full armoury of religious rhetoric, spiritual inducements and diplomatic persuasion. Individual wealthy enthusiasts conducted armed pilgrimages east. Some possessed armed intent, such as the Holy Land addict Count Thierry of Flanders in 1157–8 and 1164–5 (on top of his visits in 1139 and 1148); others, such as Duke Henry the Lion of Saxony (1172), did not. Dynastic adventurers and opportunists could be lured east by the prospect of a lucrative or spectacular marriage, as in 1176, when William of Montferrat arrived to marry Sibyl, sister and heir to the leper King Baldwin IV. Yet after his death in 1177, even Sybil’s attractions failed to entice a bridegroom from the west. When, in 1175, Philip of Alsace, count of Flanders, planned to follow the family tradition with a prolonged stay in the Holy Land, he felt the need to consult the redoubtable intellectual, poetess, musician, mystic and fashionable spiritual sage Abbess Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179). Philip asked whether God, with whom his correspondent claimed to be in direct contact, would approve. For once His message lacked clarity. Hildegard’s tepid endorsement only voiced approval of fighting the infidel in some imagined future, ‘if the time shall come’ when they threatened ‘the fountain of faith’.2 Such caution in crusading commitment touched Christendom’s other frontiers. Between 1149 and 1192, there were only three papal grants of Jerusalem privileges to conflicts with infidels in Iberia, and just one in the Baltic, in 1171. The Second Crusade cast a deep shadow.

  Even when events conspired to offer some prospect of success, responses were negligible. In 1176, the Greek emperor, Manuel I, hoping to bolster his position in Asia Minor and Cilicia as well as his alliances in western Europe, announced his intention of leading a joint Greek and Latin expedition to the Holy Land. Despite Pope Alexander III’s vociferous urging, western support was dismal even before Manuel’s advancing army was defeated by the Seljuk Turks of Iconium at the battle of Myriokephalon on 17 September 1176. When a Greek fleet of 150 ships arrived at Acre the following year, squabbling and suspicions within the Jerusalem government led to the cancellation of the proposed attack on Egypt, shenanigans that confirmed western scepticism about the plight of Outremer and the honesty of its rulers.

  By 1184, the political fabric of Christian rule in Syria and Palestine had become badly frayed, worn down by increased Muslim pressure, government financial difficulties, prolonged and desperate dynastic instability in Jerusalem and tensions between its rulers and those of Tripoli and Antioch. Yet the embassy led to the west by Patriarch Heraclius of Jerusalem in 1184–5 attracted mistrust, ridicule, indifference, self-interest and caution, verging on the dismissive. The patriarch met Pope Lucius III, the German emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, and Philip II of France before begging Henry II of England to lead a new crusade; he was offered money and empty promises. Only a handful of recruits volunteered. King Henry was recorded as remarking that the patriarch sought his ‘own advantage not ours’.3 Another witness saw only the jangling jewellery, aromatic perfumes and lavish display of wealth as the patriarch’s entourage passed through Paris, not the genuinely desperate plea for armed help.4 On the eve of the greatest defeat of western arms by a non-Christian army since the tenth century, at Hattin in Galilee on 4 July 1187, crusading appeared to have run its course, a model of holy war that, in the sh
ape taken since 1095, had served its turn and lost its fierce popular resonances. The events of that summer’s day in the hills above Tiberias reignited them.

  NUR AL-DIN, SALADIN AND THE MUSLIM REVIVAL

  Writing in the early 1180s, the Jerusalem historian Archbishop William of Tyre, in a remarkable and justly famous passage, described how the strategic balance in the Near East had tilted decisively against the Franks. He attributed this deterioration to three developments: the sinfulness of contemporary Franks in contrast to their ancestors; the loss of the advantage that their religious zeal and military training gave the first crusaders over the then indolent and pacific locals; and the unification of Syria and Egypt:

  In former times almost every city had its own ruler… not dependent on one another… who feared their own allies not less than the Christians [and] could not or would not readily unite to repulse the common danger or arm themselves for our destruction. But now… all the kingdoms adjacent to us have been brought under the power of one man. Within quite recent times, Zengi… first conquered many other kingdoms by force and then laid violent hands on Edessa… Then his son, Nur al-Din, drove the king of Damascus from his own land, more through the treachery of the latter’s subjects than by any real valour, seized that realm for himself, and added it to his paternal heritage. Still more recently, the same Nur al-Din, with the assiduous aid of Shirkuh, seized the ancient and wealthy kingdom of Egypt as his own… Thus… all the kingdoms round about us obey one ruler, they do the will of one man, and at this command alone, however reluctantly, they are ready, as a unit, to take up arms for our injury. Not one among them is free to indulge any inclination of his own or may with impunity disregard the commands of his overlord. This Saladin… a man of humble antecedents and lowly station, now holds under his control all these kingdoms, for fortune has smiled too graciously upon him. From Egypt and the countries adjacent to it, he draws an inestimable supply of the purest gold… Other provinces furnish him numberless companies of horsemen and fighters, men thirsty for gold, since it is an easy matter for those possessing a plenteous supply of this commodity to draw men to them.5

  William’s analysis found confirmation from Muslim witnesses and events.

  * * *

  The Christian failure before Damascus in 1148 did not immediately lead to the unification of Syria. Nur al-Din of Aleppo (1117–74) was perceived by some in Damascus as a greater threat to their independence than the Franks. Although providing troops for Nur al-Din’s campaign, which culminated in the defeat and death of Prince Raymond of Antioch at Inab in June 1149, the Damascenes simultaneously agreed a new truce with Jerusalem which lasted almost until Nur al-Din’s annexation of Damascus in 1154. A joint Damascus/Jerusalem army besieged Bosra in the Hauran region in 1151, and Damascus regularly paid tribute to its Frankish neighbour, while continuing to appease Nur al-Din by allying with him in northern Syria. Only with the Frankish capture of Ascalon in 1153 did the majority of Damascus’s ruling elite decide that the Christians presented the greater threat. Even so, Nur al-Din’s occupation of Damascus in April 1154 only came after an economic blockade followed by an armed assault.6

  The peaceful terms granted the rulers of Damascus showed that Nur al-Din was more accommodating than his brutal father Zengi. The jihad was integrated into the substance of his policies as he regularly demanded support for annual renewals of what he announced as holy war. In 1149, he advertised the significance of his victory at Inab by bathing in the Mediterranean. Religious propagandists travelled in his armies. Palestinian émigré poets in his entourage called for the reconquest of their homeland ‘until you see Jesus fleeing from Jerusalem’.7 In practice, as his critics pointed out, Nur al-Din spent most of his career engaged in subjugating other Muslims to his rule, annexing Damascus in 1154, Mosul in 1170 and contesting control of Egypt after 1163, and was willing to agree treaties with the invading Byzantine emperor in 1159 and the Jerusalemites in 1161. However, his inheritance of Aleppo, confining him to Syria rather than his father’s stamping ground of Iraq, imposed on Nur al-Din a more intense focus on his Frankish neighbours while at the same time depriving him of his father’s resources to effect territorial gains at their expense, a gap covered by jihad rhetoric and displays of private austerity and extreme spirituality. Nur al-Din’s image as the pious, just, puritanical mujahid was displayed on inscriptions and coins and in the patronage of religious learning, schools, scholars and mosques. He cultivated a reputation as a just ruler and judge, a knowledgeable jurist and theologian, educated, literate, orthodox, although, in the words of an Iraqi panegyrist, Ibn al-Athir, ‘not a fanatic’.8 Nur al-Din’s piety apparently increased after serious illnesses, in 1157 and 1159, and a defeat by the Franks before Crac des Chevaliers in 1163, a pattern of penitential progress similar to that of another ruler who wore his faith on his sleeve a century later, Louis IX of France.

  In 1161, Nur al-Din undertook the hajj and rebuilt the walls of Medina in the Hijaz, with Mecca the holiest cities in the Muslim world, gestures of obvious political as well as religious significance. Nominally, the Hijaz lay under the sovereignty of Egypt, although in practice ruled by local families claiming descent from the Prophet. Nur al-Din’s appearance and patronage announced a new power in Islam. Convenience and devotion entwined very effectively. The inscriptions on Nur al-Din’s elaborate minbar (or pulpit), built in Aleppo 1168–9, proclaimed his jihad credentials, not least in the declared intention to relocate it in the al-Aqsa mosque once the Holy City had been recaptured, a wish fulfilled by Saladin twenty years later. Such a pulpit, in which politicized polemic could be broadcast under the guise of the religious Friday sermon (the Khutba), represented a highly visible pledge of the unity between spiritual and political ambition, ideology and empire building. In consolidating an alliance with the newly strident and influential religious classes in law and administration, Nur al-Din hoped to reconcile political opponents to his dominance. He offered unity within Near Eastern Islam under the nominal authority of the Sunni caliph of Baghdad, whose express sanction for each conquest and annexation was deliberately sought. Not only in retrospect could Nur al-Din be seen as ‘the fighter of jihad, the one who defends against the enemies of [Allah’s] religion, the pillar of Islam and the Muslims, the dispenser of justice to those who are oppressed in the face of the oppressors’.9 His now more famous successor, Saladin, learnt the lesson and was careful to follow it.

  Yet mid-twelfth-century Outremer did not seem about to capsize. While Muslim military incursions could still threaten disaster, in the kingdom of Jerusalem at least only the immediate frontier areas were regarded as presenting much risk to settlers. Despite the recriminations following the Second Crusade and a sharp and potentially damaging conflict (1149–52) culminating in open civil war (1152) between the young King Baldwin III and his mother, Queen Melisende, the Franks managed to stabilize the position of Antioch in 1150 and resume offensive operations. Nur al-Din’s attacks on Damascus were thwarted in the early 1150s. In moves to weaken Ascalon, the last remaining Palestinian port in Muslim hands, Gaza was rebuilt and given to the Templars in 1149–50. In January 1153, Baldwin III began to besiege Ascalon, which surrendered on 19 August, affording the king massive booty, a secure southern frontier and access to Egypt. By 1155, the alarmed but tottering Egyptian government began paying tribute to Jerusalem. By 1159, with Jerusalem’s ally Manuel I, the dominant figure in the eastern Mediterranean, exerting his overlordship in Antioch, arranging a treaty with Nur al-Din and contemplating war with Fatimid Egypt, William of Tyre’s analysis of a tightening noose would have appeared fantastic. However, the fate of Jerusalem was soon to be cast into hazard on the banks of the Nile.

  The reorienting of Frankish defence strategy in the 1160s from northern Syria to Egypt marked an apparent reversal of tradition. From the reign of Baldwin I until the late 1150s, successive kings of Jerusalem had been drawn north to restore order and security in the wake of defeat, loss of leaders or internal political squabbling. T
he main military threats to Outremer’s survival since the 1110s had come from Aleppo, Mosul and the forces of the Jazira (i.e. Upper Mesopotamia) and Iraq. Left to itself, Damascus tended towards alliance with Jerusalem, while Fatimid Egypt had long abandoned active reconquest of Palestine. Baldwin II had reinforced this northern policy by marrying two of his four daughters respectively to Bohemund II of Antioch (d. 1130) and Raymond II of Tripoli (d. 1152). However, ties between Antioch and Jerusalem became strained by the aggressive behaviour of the new prince of Antioch, the glamorous Frenchman Reynald of Châtillon, who married Constance of Antioch in 1153. After scandalizing opinion by extorting money from Patriarch Aimery of Antioch through public torture, in 1156 Reynald broke the alliance with Byzantium by raiding Cyprus.10 Whether Reynald’s capture by Nur al-Din in 1161 and detention in Aleppo until 1176 strengthened or weakened the Frankish cause is unclear; it certainly removed a source of friction. Immediately, his capture involved Baldwin III in another round of political horse-trading between supporters of Constance and her son by her first husband, Raymond of Poitiers, Bohemund III. However, the city’s destiny was no longer his to decide since Manuel I’s personal assertion of his lordship over Antioch in 1159.11