God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Tyerman, Christopher

  The disaster of the defeat of Roger of Antioch at the Field of Blood in 1119 provoked Baldwin II and his advisers early in 1120 to send ambassadors west to seek help from the papacy and Venice. A number of western lords, including Fulk of Anjou, may have answered the call. Pope Calixtus II, perhaps inspired by his abundant family ties with crusading and the east, added his weight to the appeals to the Venetian doge, Domenico Michiel, sending him a papal banner for an eastern campaign. The Doge, who acquired a well-deserved bellicose reputation, took the cross with other prominent Venetians in 1122 before embarking with a substantial fleet for the eastern Mediterranean. The Venetian expedition of 1122–4 encapsulated many of the diverse motives that propelled westerners eastwards; trade, plunder, military adventurism, colonial expansion, profit, piety and the appetite for relics. On the way out, the fleet attacked Corfu in retaliation for the reduction in their trading privileges proposed by Byzantine emperor John II. Only on hearing of the capture of Baldwin II by Balak of Aleppo in April 1123 did the Venetians proceed to the Levant, where the following month they destroyed an Egyptian fleet between Jaffa and Ascalon. While the doge claimed to be fulfilling a longstanding wish to visit the Holy Places, the Venetian credentials as soldiers of the cross operated within a frame of self-interest. Only after protracted negotiations with the regency government of Jerusalem held during Christmastide 1123 and much wrangling among the Jerusalemites as to the best target did the doge agree to an attack on Tyre, with Ascalon the last great port of the Levantine coast outside Frankish possession. In return for this aid, Venice was to receive a third of Tyre with extensive privileges in the conquered city, including free trade, the use of their own weights and measures, wide legal autonomy and immunities and an annual tribute of 300 besants. The siege lasted from February to July 1124 before the Damascene garrison surrendered. Along with the immediate booty and future privileges, the Venetians, whose commercialism never excluded piety, carried off a lump of marble on which Christ was alleged to have sat. The capture of Tyre did not end the Venetian campaign. Returning westwards, they terrorized the Aegean, sacking Rhodes and wintering in Chios, where they acquired relics of the martyred St Isidore, before pillaging Samos, Lesbos and Andros, then launching a series of raids along the Dalmatian shore of the Adriatic culminating in the plunder of Zara, after which, singing the Te Deum Laudamus, they returned to Venice ‘full of happiness and joy’.54 Or so it was remembered in the lagoon. Seen only from the perspective of wars of the cross, the Venetian crusade represented a serious commitment of time and investment in ships, men and money. While the Venetian fleet was at war it could not be trading as well. Yet the context for the victories off Ascalon and at Tyre was an extended, Viking-like raid on Christian Byzantine territory and property. The whole enterprise appeared designed for tangible as well as spiritual gain; it certainly reaped the former. While this did not represent as much of a contradiction at the time as it may seem now, such a layered response informed much of the interest in the cause of the cross and the Holy Land. It also serves as a foretaste and clue to the events eighty years later that led to the sack of Constantinople.

  The Venetian expedition of 1122–5 illustrated how the needs of the Holy Land could be stitched into concerns of the Faithful that had little or no intrinsic association with armed pilgrimage or holy war except coincidence. Much the same could be applied to many responses to the papacy’s new militant formula: social; political; chivalric; diplomatic; colonial; commercial. The striking feature of the early twelfth century appears the lack of consistent action on behalf of the cross at the same time as the image of the first Jerusalem campaign patchily suffused cultural attitudes to war and Christian society of the lay and ecclesiastical elites. As the enclaves in the east became established and their borders tentatively secured, the sense of urgency in appeals for aid slackened. The 1130s saw penitential wars on the Jerusalem model applied elsewhere, for example against the supporters of the anti-pope Anacletus. The 1120s, despite the imprisonment of Baldwin II and the death of Bohemund II, had seemingly marked an end to major, state-threatening crises, while the failure before Damascus in 1129 ended further dramatic territorial expansion. However, both assumptions as well as the ideal of holy war itself were to be tested to their limits before the 1140s were out.

  9

  God’s Bargain: Summoning the Second Crusade

  The fall of Edessa between 24 and 26 December 1144 to the Turkish atabeg Imad al-Din Zengi, ruler of Mosul and Aleppo, rapidly assumed greater significance than its immediate strategic context demanded. The result of an opportunistic attack when its Frankish count, Joscelin II, was away, Zengi’s success at Edessa helped consolidate the north-western frontier of his Aleppan-Mosul federation. Confining his habitual savagery to the surviving Frankish Christians, Zengi soon consolidated his hold on the east bank of the Euphrates. However, Zengi’s main target in Syria since his annexation of Aleppo in 1128 was Damascus, while his wider political interests concerned the Jazira and Iraq more than Frankish Syria. He captured Edessa because of immediate local circumstances, such as the deaths the year before of King Fulk of Jerusalem and the Byzantine Emperor John II, which, given the hostility between Count Joscelin and Raymond of Poitiers prince of Antioch, reduced the chance of a Christian counter-attack. After his success at Edessa, revolt in Mosul early in 1145 and continued intriguing by local Armenian and Muslim princes with the Franks deflected Zengi from Damascus to further policing operations in the Euphrates valley. On one such foray, at Qal‘at Ja‘bar, on the night of 14 September 1146, Zengi, comatose with drink, was murdered in his bed by a favoured Frankish slave.1 Immediately, his empire ruptured, with one son, Sayf al-Din acquiring Mosul, another, Nur al-Din, Aleppo. A Frankish attempt to take advantage of the situation by reoccupying Edessa in November 1146, led by Joscelin II and Baldwin of Marasch, failed utterly, the count fleeing ignominiously, Baldwin meeting a heroic death, the city’s walls being levelled and the local Armenian Christians suffering the massacre they had avoided two years earlier.2

  The fall of Edessa had burnished Zengi’s reputation as a holy warrior. The caliph in Baghdad conferred on him the titles: ‘the Ornament of Islam, the Auxiliary of the Commander of the Faithful (i.e. the caliph), the Divinely Aided King’.3 The accolade of mujahid lent religious ideology to the military power of a leader feared by his followers almost as much as by his foes, reputedly a sadistic monster, at the sight of whom one man was supposed to have dropped dead from fright, who crucified his own troops found marching out of line and trampling crops. An eager member of Zengi’s entourage wrote, ‘If the conquest of Edessa is the high sea, Jerusalem and all the Frankish lands (sahil) are its shore’.4 Yet, while the preoccupations of Zengi’s heirs precluded Islamic unity and further assault on Latin Outremer, the Franks seemingly accepted this analysis, drawing almost apocalyptic conclusions. The message brought west in 1145 was clear: Islam was on the march; all Christian Outremer was in danger; something had to be done. The result was one of the greatest international military efforts of the middle ages.

  MUSLIM REVIVAL

  Zengi’s apologists portrayed him as champion of the jihad, the sixth pillar of Islam, the perpetual collective and sometimes individual obligation on all the Faithful to struggle (jihad) spiritually against unbelief in themselves (al-jihad al-akbar, the greater jihad) and physically against unbelievers (al-jihad al-asghar, the lesser jihad). The Christian conquest and rule over Muslim lands inevitably aroused the traditional rhetoric of holy war. As in Christendom, religion and politics operated as mutually sustaining forces within society, especially one as ethnically diverse as that of the Near East. Zengi, owing formal allegiance to an Arabo-Iraqi-Persian caliphate controlled by a Turkish sultan, was himself a Turk whose army and entourage comprised Turcomans, Kurds and slaves, chiefly from the Eurasian steppes and the northern Black Sea, and whose political ambitions embraced domination of Arab emirs and princes in Syria. Religion supported authority and defined political identity. Any Mus
lim ruler, like his western counterparts, surrounded himself with religious advisers and civil servants trained in religion. The Iranian Imad al-Din al-Isfahani (1125–1201), one of Nur al-Din’s leading civil servants, later Saladin’s field secretary and biographer, once worked as a professor at a Damascus religious school (or madrasa), a man learned in the Faith as well as law and administration.5 Without a formal structure of priesthood, Islam easily pervaded secular institutions and life. As happened with holy war in western Christendom in the eleventh century, the recrudescence of jihad in the twelfth-century Near East relied on intellectual and spiritual movements being translated into political ambition and action, a determining alliance between the pulpit and the battlefield that found concrete expression in the minbar (mosque pulpit) built by Nur al-Din at Aleppo in 1168. Adorned with inscriptions praising the jihad, it was, as its maker had intended, installed in the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem by Saladin on his conquest of the city in 1187.6

  By 1098, when the western armies captured Antioch, the First Crusade could be seen as a continuation of traditional Byzantine border activity. No active indigenous Syrian tradition of united Islamic military response had survived centuries of coexistence. The arrival of the new Sunni Turkish zealots in the late eleventh century affected Syrian Muslims – Arab rulers or Shi’ite peasantry – more than the unbelievers. Only when the Christian army pushed south in 1098–9 did a novel threat become apparent, symbolized by the massacre of the inhabitants of Ma ‘arrat al-Nu ‘man in December 1098, an atrocity kept alive in the poems of exiled survivors: ‘why has destiny pronounced such an unjust sentence on us?’. As Frankish conquests increased, so did the number of articulate, displaced Muslim refugees available to tweak the consciences of Muslim rulers. In Damascus some time before 1109, the poet Ibn al-Khayyat, who had worked for the emirs of Tripoli, demanded an armed response: ‘The cutting edge of their sword must be blunted/And their pillar must be demolished’. After the fall of Tripoli to the Franks in 1109, its emir, Fakhr al-Mulk, settled in Bagdhad, where violent demonstrations by visiting Aleppan citizens in February 1111 successfully persuaded Sultan Muhammed to dispatch an army against the Franks. A generation later, Zengi’s circle included the poets Ibn al-Qaysarani, from Caesarea (taken by the Franks in 1101), and another Tripoli refugee, Ibn Munir, both of whom urged their master to recapture Jerusalem after his capture of Edessa. Later in the century, fundamentalist émigrés from Nablus made a suburb of Damascus a centre of holy war ideology and recruits. Articulate refugees goaded the public consciences of those who posed as leaders of the faithful with tangible results: in 1136 Zengi restored property in Ma ‘arrat al-Numan to its former residents or their heirs.7

  Jihad rhetoric and action came partly in consequence of a religious revival, partly because it was good politics. The Shi’ite qadi (i.e. judge) of Aleppo, Ibn al-Khashshab, who organized resistance to Frankish attacks in 1118 and 1124, urged a principled stand against the infidel. During the campaign leading to the defeat of Roger of Antioch at the Field of Blood in 1119, Ibn al-Khashshab rode through the Muslim lines ‘spear in hand’ preaching the virtues of jihad, the novelty of such clerical interference causing some resentment. A generation later, such clerical cheer-leading would have seemed normal. Beleaguered Muslims in the front line naturally looked for aid from Baghdad, their appeals for military help deliberately couched in religious terms. The Aleppans’ protests of 1111 targeted Friday prayers in the sultans’ and caliph’s mosques, preventing the sermons and vandalizing pulpits, ritual symbols of political as well as spiritual power, in an overt challenge to authority. Sultan Muhammed reacted by sending Mawdud of Mosul to Syria for a second time. In 1129, faced by another Frankish threat, such tactics were repeated by Damascene merchants led by an Iranian fundamentalist preacher ‘Abd al-Wahhab al-Shirazi.8

  The academic response anticipated the political. The jihad’s greater prominence in religious and political discourse operated within a Sunni revivalism originating in Iran and Iraq, initially stimulated by the fiercely orthodox Seljuk converts and the need to integrate the new Turkish rulers into Islamic culture. Heightened religious and moral commitment found tangible expression in art, architecture and literature. Twelfth-century Syria slid from its cultural backwater into the Islamic mainstream, supported by the patronage of rulers, often parvenus eager to demonstrate their spiritual credentials by endowing new orthodox Sunni schools or colleges. Such a seminary or madrasa acted as a focus for the mediation of the spiritual into the secular. From the 1130s, new religious schools proliferated throughout Syria; Nur al-Din himself founded half of the forty or so built in his reign (1146–74). Their often lavish endowments and rich architecture witnessed a new religious cultural energy in which jihad supplied one strand particularly relevant to Syrian experience. Between 1099 and 1146, the only surviving inscriptions on public buildings anywhere in the Muslim world mentioning jihad come from Syria, such as that on the tomb of Balak, ruler of Aleppo 1123–4 and captor of Joscelin I of Edessa and King Baldwin II: ‘sword of those who fight the Holy War, leader of the armies of the Muslims, vanquisher of the infidels and the polytheists’. Another Aleppo inscription, praising Zengi in 1142, is couched in almost identical terms: ‘tamer of the infidels and the polytheists, leaders of those who fight the holy war, helper of the armies, protector of the territory of the Muslims’, titles that repeat those in an inscription on a madrasa in Damascus dated December 1138.9

  Public expressions of idealism reflected growing Muslim awareness of the Frankish threat. Frontier warfare, justified by the ideals of jihad, provided useful employment for Zengi’s nomadic Turcoman levies as well as security for his conquests, but a new intolerance sprang from fear. In the aftermath of the Frankish attack on Aleppo in the 1120s the city’s Christian churches were converted into mosques. A blueprint for ideology and action had existed for more than a generation. In 1105, at the great mosque in Damascus, a legal scholar al-Sulami (1039–1106) had given public readings from his Book of the Holy War (Kitab al-Jihad) in which he urged moral reform (i.e. the jihad al-akbar) within Islam as the necessary preparation for a military reconquest (jihad al-asghar). Although possibly prompted by the threat to Damascus trade routes posed by the loss of Acre (1104), al-Sulami adopted a broad vision, placing the Frankish invasion in the context of eleventh-century Christian advances in Sicily and Spain and blaming Muslim failure to resist on disunity. Fearful of further Frankish conquests, al-Sulami understood that ‘Jerusalem was the summit of their wishes’. Such calls for pan-Islamic solidarity were not confined to the pulpits and studies of the Fertile Crescent. At about the same time as al-Sulami was preaching religious solidarity and moral rearmament in Damascus, the Almoravid conqueror of al-Andalus, Muslim Spain, Yusuf Ibn Tashfin reputedly launched an armada of seventy ships to liberate Jerusalem, only to see it founder in Mediterranean storms.10

  Al-Sulami’s message of political unity and spiritual purity was translated into a political programme as a matter of convenience as much as Faith by rulers eager to carve out empires in the ruins of Seljuk control of Syria. Sultan Muhammed’s commitment to holy war, which ceased with his last expeditionary force’s defeat by the Franks of Antioch at Tell Danith in 1115, focused on restoring authority over the Muslims in the region more than driving the Franks into the sea. Thereafter, domination of Muslim Syria revolved first around control of Aleppo, then, after 1128, Damascus, a contest in which the Franks played a vigorous and by no means isolated role. For all his jihad rhetoric and posturing, Zengi’s interests drew him eastwards, away from the Franks. However, to construct viable coalition armies, talk of jihad became an obligatory mask for the realpolitik of diplomacy; thus Zengi stressed the ‘obligation of holy war’ when raising his force to attack Edessa. As ruler of Aleppo without Mosul, Nur al-Din was forced to concentrate on Syria and so employ the language of holy war while lacking adequate economic and financial resources to conduct one. The reality of Muslim revival lay in greater political stability and direction of re
sources. But academics and religious leaders, with access to the courts, administration and ears of the rulers, provided a respectable ideology for the ambitions of the Zengids and their successors. While only a united Muslim northern Syria could sustain a jihad, religious ideas conditioned the political elites and their propaganda to accept that, regardless of temporary politicking and opportunist truces, the Franks were an eternal enemy to be expelled, by the mid-twelfth century a dimension to the language of politics no Syrian Muslim ruler could ignore. However, events, not ideas, served as the most effective recruiting officer for the jihad, most of all the abject failure of the Second Crusade.