The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

by Frankopan, Peter

  Arriviste potentates were in need of such advice – as uncomfortable in their own skin as newly rich tycoons of today wanting the right interior design and the right food and drink on the table for when guests arrive (you cannot go wrong, assures the author of the Kutadgu Bilig, with water flavoured with conserve of rose). Some of the more determined, however, eschewed the idea of setting up their own court and eating fancy food, and instead set their minds on the greatest prize of all – Baghdad. From the late tenth century, the Seljuks, descendants of a leader originally from the uzz tribal constellation (mainly based in modern Kazakhstan), started to build up momentum. They proved adept at switching sides at opportune moments, offering their services to local rulers in return for appropriate rewards. It was not long before this began to translate into real power. Between the late 1020s and late 1030s, the Seljuks skilfully brought one city after another under their own control, with Merv, Nīshāpūr and Balkh submitting in turn. Then, in 1040, they defeated the Ghaznavids in battle, inflicting a crushing defeat on the numerically superior enemy at Dandanakan.76

  The meteoric rise of the Seljuks from slave soldiers to power-brokers extraordinaire was confirmed in 1055 when they entered Baghdad at the invitation of the Caliph, driving out the unpopular and ineffective Būyid dynasty. Coins were minted in the name of the leader, ughrıl Beg, while the order was given to say the uba in his name – that is, to invoke blessing for his rule during daily prayers. In a further mark to show the dominance of his position in Baghdad and across the caliphate, Ṭughrıl was awarded two new titles: al-Sulān Rukn al-Dawla, and Yamīn Amīr al-Muminīn – Pillar of the State, and the Right Hand of the Commander of the Faithful.77

  This was not without irony. The names of the sons of the eponymous founder of the dynasty suggests that the Seljuks were originally Christian or perhaps even Jewish. With names like Michael, Israel, Moses and Jonah, it is likely that they were among those on the steppes who had been evangelised either by the missionaries referred to by the Patriarch Timothy, or else by merchants who had introduced Judaism to the Khazars.78 Although the timing and circumstances of their conversion to Islam are unclear, it was evidently difficult to hang on to religious beliefs that were a minority among the Muslim masses without losing legitimacy as they advanced rapidly. Had their successes been won more slowly, the world might have started to look very different, with a state emerging in the east led by rulers that were either Christians or Jews. As it was, the Seljuks chose to convert. But it was non-Muslim upstarts from the fringes of the caliphate who found themselves guardians of Muammad’s legacy, champions of Islam and masters of one of the most powerful empires in history.

  Even before their seizure of power in the Abbāsid capital, the Byzantines had become concerned by the rise of the Seljuks. Their inexorable rise had stirred other nomads on the periphery to launch increasingly daring raids deep into the Balkans, in the Caucasus and Asia Minor, startling local populations with the speed of their attacks. Their horses, noted one commentator, were ‘swift as eagles, with hooves as solid as rock’. They pounced on cities ‘as insatiably as hungry wolves devouring their food’.79

  In a misguided attempt to shore up defences in the east, the Emperor Romanos IV Diogenes set out from Constantinople with a large army, meeting with disaster in 1071 at Manzikert where the Byzantine forces were caught by surprise and humiliated. In a famous battle still celebrated today as the moment of the birth of the state of Turkey, the imperial army was surrounded and crushed and the Emperor taken prisoner. The Seljuk ruler, Alp Arslan, made the Byzantine leader lie on the ground and placed his foot on his neck.80

  In fact, the Seljuks and the regime in Baghdad were much less concerned with the Byzantine Empire than they were with the Fāimid caliphate in Shīa Egypt. The two forces quickly locked horns, wrestling over control of Jerusalem. While this was going on, relations were established with Constantinople that were not so much cordial as positively supportive, thanks to the overlap of mutual interests that both had in curtailing the bands roaming Asia Minor who were using the classic steppe strategy of raiding and seeking payments in return for peace. For the Byzantines, this threatened dislocation to the fragile provincial economy; to the Seljuks, it represented a challenge to the authority of the leader as warlords emerged with ideas above their station. For the best part of two decades, the Emperor and the Sultan co-operated, with high-level discussions going so far as to discuss a potential marriage tie to bind the two rulers together. In the 1090s, however, the balance collapsed as the Seljuk world descended into a succession crisis, leaving upstart leaders in Asia Minor to raise the stakes by creating fiefdoms for themselves that made them virtually independent of Baghdad – and serious thorns in the side of Byzantium.81

  With one calamity following another, the Christian Byzantine Empire was rapidly brought to its knees. With few cards left to play, the Emperor took drastic action: appeals were sent to leading magnates all over Europe, including to the Pope, Urban II. Appealing to the papacy was a last-ditch attempt to stop Byzantium teetering over into the abyss, and it was not without risk: forty years earlier, an escalation in tension between the churches of Rome and Constantinople had resulted in a schism that saw patriarchs and emperors excommunicated and priests threatening each other with the burning fires of hell. While part of the argument turned on doctrine, and particularly on the question of whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son as well as from the Father, at the heart of the issue was a wider competition for control of the Christian faithful. Reaching out to the Pope meant glossing over division as well as looking to rebuild relations – both of which were easier said than done.82

  The Emperor’s envoys found Pope Urban II at Piacenza in March 1095, where they ‘implored his lordship and all the faithful of Christ to bring assistance against the heathen for the defence of this holy church, which had now been nearly annihilated in that region by the infidels who had conquered her as far as the walls of Constantinople’.83 The Pope immediately grasped what was at stake, and took action. Making his way north of the Alps, he held a church council at Clermont where he announced that it was the duty of Christian knighthood to march to the aid of their brethren in the east. Urban then began an exhausting tour to rally support from leading magnates, above all in France, cajoling and persuading them to take part in a great expedition that would end up in the Holy City of Jerusalem. The hour of need in the east looked like it might deliver unity to the church.84

  The call to arms lit well-set tinder. Increasing numbers of Christian pilgrims had made their way to visit the Holy Places in the decades before the Pope’s appeal for help. News travelled fast in a world where there were extensive links between western Europe and Constantinople. With pilgrim routes all but closed because of the dislocation in Asia Minor and the Middle East, and alarming reports circulating about the advances being made by the Turks in Anatolia which provided graphic accounts of the sufferings of Christians in the east, many were convinced that the apocalypse was nigh. Urban’s call to arms met with a massive response: in 1096, tens of thousands of men set off for Jerusalem.85

  As the copious source material shows, most of those who set off for the east were motivated by faith and by reports of horrors and atrocities that had substance to them. But while the Crusade is chiefly remembered as a war of religion, its most important implications were worldly. The first great struggle between the powers of Europe for position, riches and prestige in faraway lands was about to begin, triggered by the realisation of the prizes on offer. Things had shifted in such a way that, suddenly, the west was about to drag itself closer to the heart of the world.

  8

  The Road to Heaven

  On 15 July 1099, Jerusalem fell to the knights of the First Crusade. The journey east had been almost unbearably difficult. Many of those who set out never made it to the Holy City, killed in battle, dead from disease or hunger or taken into captivity. As the Crusaders at last reached Jerusalem, they shed tears of happiness and reli
ef as they approached the city walls.1 When the walls of the city were finally breached after a six-week siege, the attackers were primed to shed blood. As one who witnessed the carnage that followed put it, Jerusalem was soon filled with dead bodies, corpses piled up ‘on mounds as big as houses outside the city gates. No one has ever heard of such a slaughter.’2 ‘If you had been there,’ wrote another author a few years later, ‘your feet would have been stained to the ankles with the blood of the slain. What shall I say? None of them were left alive. Neither women nor children were spared.’3

  News of the capture of the Holy City spread like wildfire. The leaders of the expedition became household names overnight. One above all captured the public imagination: Bohemond, son of a Norman legend who had made a name for himself in southern Italy and Sicily, was the star of the earliest accounts of the First Crusade. Suitably handsome, with blue eyes and a smooth strong chin and sporting a distinctive short haircut, Bohemond displayed a courage and guile that were the talk of western Europe. When he returned from the east at the start of the twelfth century, he was fêted as a hero, mobbed everywhere he went, with eligible would-be brides pushed in front of him to choose from.4

  Bohemond seemed to stand for everything about the emerging new world. From the perspective of the Latin chroniclers of the time, he was the perfect talisman for a decisive transfer of power from east to west. Christendom had been saved by the brave knights who had marched thousands of miles to Jerusalem. The Holy City had been liberated by the Christians – not the Greek Orthodox Christians of the Byzantine Empire, but those of Normandy, France and Flanders who made up the overwhelming majority of the expedition. The Muslims had been expelled from a city they had controlled for centuries. Bleak predictions of forthcoming apocalypse had been everywhere on the eve of the Crusade; these were now replaced by optimism, by strident self-confidence and ambition. In a matter of five years, expectations went from fearing the end of the world to welcoming the start of a new era – an age dominated by western Europe.5

  New colonies were founded in Outremer – literally ‘overseas’ – ruled over by new Christian masters. It was a graphic expansion of European power: Jerusalem, Tripoli, Tyre and Antioch were all under the control of Europeans and governed by customary laws imported from the feudal west which affected everything from the property rights of the new arrivals, to tax gathering, to the powers of the King of Jerusalem. The Middle East was being recast to function like western Europe.

  Over the next two centuries, enormous effort went into holding on to the territories conquered during the First Crusade and in its aftermath. The papacy repeatedly sought to impress on the knighthood of Europe that they had an obligation to defend the Holy Land. Serving the King of Jerusalem meant serving God. This message was powerfully articulated and widely circulated, resulting in large numbers of men making their way to the east, some of whom became Templar knights – a particularly popular new order whose zealous mixture of military service, devotion and piety proved intoxicatingly glamorous.

  The road to Jerusalem became a road to heaven itself. At the very outset of the First Crusade in 1095, Pope Urban II had stated that those taking the cross and joining the expedition to the Holy City would receive absolution from their sins. This evolved during the course of the campaign, when the idea developed that those who fell in battle against the infidel should be considered to be on a path to salvation. Journeying east was a journey in this life and the way to reach paradise in the next.

  While accounts of the triumph of Christianity, the papacy and the knighthood resounded from pulpit to pulpit and tavern to tavern in sermon, song and verse in the Christian west, in the Muslim world the reaction was mostly one of apathy. Although there had been concerted efforts to deal with the Crusaders before the capture of Jerusalem and immediately afterwards, resistance was local and limited. Some were perplexed by this laissez-faire attitude. A judge in Baghdad supposedly stormed into the Caliph’s court to decry the lack of reaction to the arrival of the armies from Europe: ‘How dare you slumber in the shade of complacent safety,’ he said to those who were present, ‘leading lives as frivolous as garden flowers, while your brothers in Syria have no dwelling place save the saddles of camels and the bellies of vultures?’ There was unspoken acquiescence in Baghdad and Cairo, based on the feeling that perhaps Christian occupation might be better than either Shīa or Sunnī rivals having control of the city. Although the speech made some around the Caliph weep, most remained aloof – and did nothing.6

  The success of the First Crusade came as no consolation to the Jews of Europe or Palestine, who had witnessed shocking violence at the hands of the supposedly noble Crusaders. In the Rhineland, women, children and the elderly had been butchered in a sudden escalation of anti-Semitism in Europe. Jews were paying the price for the refocusing of western Europe’s manpower and attention towards the east.7 The bloodlust was directly linked to the idea that the Jews were responsible for Jesus’ crucifixion and that the lands of Israel should be held by the Christians of Europe. Nothing would get in the way of new connections being burrowed into the Levant.

  The Crusade was hardly a triumphant story as far as the Byzantines were concerned either. Behind the military success of the Crusade and its poster boy Bohemond lay a less heroic tale – not of glorious achievements and spectacular success, but of the duplicitous betrayal of the empire. All the leaders of the expedition had met Emperor Alexios I personally as they passed through the imperial capital in 1096–7 and swore on oath, over relics of the Holy Cross, that they would hand over all the towns and territories that they conquered which had previously belonged to Byzantium.8 As the expedition dragged on, Bohemond became obsessed with how to wriggle out of these commitments and to seize the prizes for himself – chief of which was the great city of Antioch.

  He took his chance when the city was captured following a debilitating siege. In one of the most dramatic stand-offs of the age, he was confronted in the Basilica of St Peter in Antioch and challenged to defend his refusal to hand the city over to the Byzantine Emperor as promised. As Raymond of Toulouse, the most powerful of all the Crusader leaders, solemnly reminded him: ‘We swore upon the Cross of the Lord, the crown of thorns and many holy relics that we would not hold without the consent of the emperor any city or castle in his dominion.’ Bohemond simply stated that the oaths were null and void because Alexios had not kept his side of the bargain; and with that he simply refused to carry on with the expedition.9

  It was a mark of the brilliance of the propaganda campaign mounted in the early twelfth century which placed Bohemond squarely at the centre of the triumph of the Crusade that there was no mention of the fact that its supposed hero was nowhere near the Holy City when it fell. After a delay of nearly a year spent trying to resolve the impasse over Antioch, the Crusader army eventually set off without him. As the knights processed around Jerusalem in order to give thanks to God before starting the siege, some in bare feet to show their humility, Bohemond was hundreds of miles away, lording it over his new prize, which he had secured through sheer obstinacy and ruthlessness.10

  The stand made by Bohemond at Antioch and in the surrounding region stemmed from the realisation that there were exceptional opportunities on offer in the eastern Mediterranean. In this sense, his seizure of the city was the next step in the magnetic process that had dragged ambitious, capable men from northern and western Europe for decades and centuries beforehand. The Crusade might be best remembered as a war of religion, but it was also a springboard for accruing serious wealth and power.

  It was not only the Byzantines who were unimpressed by Bohemond’s refusal to hand over Antioch and by his aggressive and malicious behaviour, which saw poisonous stories circulated around Europe about Alexios by his supporters. There were others who had been deeply unenthusiastic about the Crusade in the first place – notably Roger of Sicily, part of an older generation that had made fortunes for themselves and did not want to see their position compromised. Accor
ding to one Arabic historian, Roger was dismissive of plans to attack Jerusalem and tried to dampen the spirits of those excited by the prospect of new Christian colonies in the Mediterranean. Hearing of the plan to take Jerusalem, ‘Roger raised his leg and then gave a loud fart. “By the truth of my religion,” he said, “there is more use in that than in what you have to say.”’ Any advance against the Muslims would compromise his relations with leading figures in Muslim North Africa – to say nothing of the problems it would create in Sicily itself, where there was a significant Muslim population – causing friction and interrupting trade. The resulting loss of income would be compounded, he said, by revenues from agricultural land going down because exports would inevitably suffer. ‘If you are determined to wage holy war on the Muslims,’ he said, then do so. But leave Sicily well out of it.11

  There were grounds for the disquiet expressed by the likes of Roger of Sicily. Mediterranean markets had experienced volatility in the decades before the Crusade. Constantinople’s spending power had declined rapidly in the face of a major financial crisis. The price of indigo dye being sold in Alexandria, for example, collapsed by more than 30 per cent in 1094 alone, and it is reasonable to assume there was a similar impact on the trade in pepper, cinnamon and ginger – even if the sources do not say so explicitly.12 The lucrative trade between North Africa and Europe via Palestine, which saw brazil-wood being sold at a 150 per cent profit in 1085, must likewise have experienced contraction.13 Sudden supply and demand shocks could lead to wild swings in prices – such as the surge in the cost of wheat that followed the Norman conquest of Sicily, or the near halving of the value of flax in the Mediterranean because of over-supply in the mid-eleventh century.14