A History of the Crusades (32 page)

ROBERT IRWIN

D
ETAILS
of how the world would end were so well known to medieval Muslims that the fourteenth-century Arab chronicler, Ibn Kathir, felt able to round off his chronicle of Islamic history,
The Beginning and the End
, with a circumstantial account of the expected sequence of events. Many Muslims in the crusading period believed that the Last Days would be inaugurated by a dark sun rising in the west, followed by the appearance of the barbarous hordes of Gog and Magog. Then the hordes of Gog and Magog would disappear (and, according to one account written in twelfth-century Syria, they would drink Lake Tiberias dry before heading off east). The appearance of Gog and Magog would be followed by that of the one-eyed Antichrist, Dajjal, who would ride through Palestine on an ass, followed by a retinue of 70,000 Jews. Dajjal would perform false miracles in parody of Jesus. But after forty days Jesus would descend from the heavens and slay the Antichrist, before destroying the cross and calling on all people to follow the religion of Islam. Finally the sun would set in the east, the first blast of the trumpet would sound and with it all living things would die. At the second blast every man and woman who had ever lived would be resurrected and brought to Jerusalem to be judged. Other accounts gave slightly differing chronologies and some stressed the role of the Mahdi, a divinely guided figure who would appear in the Last
Days, prior to the appearance of the Antichrist, and who would bring victory and justice to the Muslims.

Speculations about the Last Days and the role of the Mahdi in them were frequently intertwined with prophecies about Islam’s triumph over Christianity and about the future fates of Jerusalem, Constantinople, and Rome. According to a
hadith
, or saying, attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, which was already circulating before the coming of the First Crusade, ‘The Hour will not come until God gives my community victory over Constantinople.’ Apart from
hadith
s, much apocalyptic material was spuriously attributed to Ka‘b ibn al-Akhbar, a seventh-century companion of the Prophet. A literary genre of
malahim
(literally ‘slaughterings’), writings dealing with the fierce wars of the Last Days, was spuriously attributed to the biblical prophet Daniel, or, later, the thirteenth-century Andalusian Sufi mystic, Ibn al-Arabi. Much of the early
malahim
literature was produced at a time when Muslims were struggling to defend their Syrian territory from Byzantine attempts to retake it. The prophecies tended to stress that the Muslims would face many hardships and setbacks—they might even lose Jerusalem to the Christians for a while—before ultimately triumphing. There were tales of a talismanic statue standing in the centre of Constantinople, which used to hold a sphere, on which were written the words ‘I will reign over the world as long as this sphere is in my hands’, but Arab sources reported that the sphere was no longer in the statue’s hand. According to some Muslim legends it was the Mahdi who would conquer Constantinople, after first having taken Rome. In the period just prior to the coming of the First Crusade, Muslim (and Jewish) expectations were particularly focused on the imminence of the Muslim year 500
AH
(corresponding to ad 1106–7).

For Muslims, Christians, and Jews the late eleventh-century Near East was a time of acute insecurity. While some expected the revival of the Islamic faith at the end of the fifth Islamic century, others fearfully awaited the appearance of the Mahdi and the End of the World. At a more mundane level, many Muslims hoped for a decisive victory in the long-drawn-out struggle for control of Syria between the Fatimid caliphs of Egypt and the
Seljuk sultans in the eastern Islamic lands. Whatever people were expecting it certainly was not a religiously inspired invasion of peoples from western Europe.

The success of the First Crusade and the establishment of Christian principalities in the Near East was one of the relatively minor consequences of the disintegration of the Seljuk sultanate after the death of the Sultan Malik-Shah in 1092. The tribal traditions of the Seljuk Turks favoured the sharing of rule amongst the family and, after Malik-Shah’s death, his kinsmen fought over his empire, in Iran, Transoxania, Caucasus, Iraq, and Syria. Turkish generals and client warlords in Syria and elsewhere supported rival princes and pursued increasingly independent local policies. At the same time, generals in the service of the Egyptian Fatimids took advantage of Seljuk disarray to make gains at their expense in Palestine and Syria. Barkayaruq, the eldest son of Malik-Shah, struggled to establish a precarious suzerainty over the heartlands of the empire, but he was still only the senior figure in a territorial confederation when he died in 1105.

From 1038 onwards, the Seljuk sultans had pretended to rule as the servants of the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad and as the defenders of the Sunni Islamic faith. In practice, the eleventh-century Abbasids had little effective political authority, even within the city of Baghdad, and the Caliph al-Mustazhir (1094–1118) had plenty of time to pursue his enthusiasm for poetry and calligraphy. Even so, the Abbasid caliph was, formally at least, recognized as the political and religious head of the Islamic world by most Sunni Muslims. Sunni Muslims took their name from the
Sunna
, or words and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad and his Companions, a body of orally transmitted traditions which helped shape both Islamic law (the
Sharia
) and the conduct of individual Muslims. Sunni Muslims recognized the supreme political authority of the caliphs, even though this authority was by now a legalistic fiction.

In this they differed from Shi‘i Muslims who held that ultimate
religious and political authority could only be held by ‘Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law, and then by the imams who were his descendants and spiritual successors.
Shi‘a ‘Ali
meant the party of Ali. One major group of Shi‘is held that after the disappearance, or occultation, of the twelfth imam in 878, ultimate spiritual authority was in abeyance. Twelver Shi‘is waited for the return of the Hidden Imam and with his coming the imposition of Islamic justice on the whole world. However, another group of Shi‘is, the Isma‘ilis, held that it was after the disappearance in 760 of Isma‘il, whom they regarded as the rightful seventh imam, that the imamate had gone into occultation. In the course of the eleventh century there were further schisms, as first the Druze and then the Nizari Isma‘ilis, or Assassins, broke away from and opposed the pretensions of the Isma‘ili Fatimid caliphate in Cairo.

Although it is impossible to be dogmatic on such a matter, it seems probable that most Muslims in Greater Syria (that is Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine) in the eleventh and twelfth centuries were Sunnis who professed allegiance to the Abbasid caliphs. However, the distinctions between Sunni and Shi‘i doctrines and rituals were not always very clear and many Sunnis had Shi‘i leanings, while there were many Shi‘is who had no compunctions about taking service with the Abbasid caliphs and the Seljuk sultans. Sunnis and Shi‘is lived cheek by jowl in the big Muslim cities. Although the Sunnis were in the majority, the Shi‘i minority was very large and in some parts of Syria the Shi‘is were in the majority. Most Syrian Shi‘is were probably Twelvers, but supporters of the Assassin version of Isma‘ilism made repeated attempts to take over in Aleppo and other big Syrian towns in the early twelfth century, before finally electing to create a small territorial principality centred around the fortress of Masyaf in the Syrian highlands.

Outside the territories of the Fatimid caliph, in most other regions of the Islamic world Shi‘is found themselves in an adversarial position. Although modern Iran is overwhelmingly Shi‘i, in the medieval period it was a bastion of Sunnism. However, Hasan-i Sabah, who was born in Iran, but of Arab descent, established an Isma‘ili Assassin enclave in the highlands south
of the Caspian Sea. His followers seized the castle of Alamut in 1090 and subsequently other castles in the region fell under Isma‘ili control.

Evidently it would be a mistake to think of Greater Syria prior to the coming of the First Crusade as monolithically Muslim. Not only were there religious schisms among the Muslims, but, as has been described in
Chapter 6
, there were still significant communities of native Christians in both the cities and the countryside. One group of Christians, the Melkites (or Orthodox), looked to the Byzantine emperor for leadership and protection, but other Christian sects—among them the Jacobites, Nestorians, and Maronites—may well have preferred to practise their faith freely under Muslim overlords. Many found advancement under Muslim rulers, and native Christians were particularly prominent in the urban bureaucracies and in medicine. The prominence of Christians was even more marked in Egypt, where Copts (Egyptian Monophysites) dominated the fiscal bureaucracy, while some army officers were Armenian Christians.

The political situation of the Near East on the eve of the First Crusade was, if anything, more complex than the religious one; and indeed religious and political issues are often not easy to separate in an Islamic context. The most significant feature of Islamic history in the late eleventh and early twelfth century was the break-up of the empire of the greater Seljuks. After the death of Malik-Shah, the Caliph al-Mustazhir tried alternately to mediate between warring Seljuk siblings and to profit from their conflict by increasing his independent authority in Baghdad. Similarly, elsewhere in the disintegrating Seljuk empire, governors and soldiers appointed to rule over Seljuk towns and provinces took advantage of dynastic strife to establish themselves as independent rulers. Some of those who did so used their formal tenure of the office of
atabak
(literally ‘fatherprince’) to conceal the fact of their usurpation of independent power. An
atabak
was a sort of military nanny who was deputed to protect and advise an under-age scion of the Seljuk dynasty who had been sent out as a provincial governor. However, as one might expect, in one province after another the
atabak
s set the princes aside and effectively took independent power for themselves. Thus, for example, Mosul in the 1090s had come under the control of Karbuqa, its atabak. Elsewhere in Iraq, western Iran, and Syria, independent Turkish warlords and ambitious mercenaries, as well as usurping atabaks, sought to increase their territories at each other’s expense.

In the late eleventh century Greater Syria was a vast war zone fought over by generals and former clients of the Seljuks on the one hand and armies in the service of the Fatimid caliphs in Egypt on the other. From 1064 onwards Turkomans, nomadic Turkish tribal forces, entered Syria. These Turkomans were not under the control of the Seljuk Sultan, but a few years later regular Seljuk troops occupied a large part of Syria, including the axis of large Muslim towns in the Syrian interior, running from Aleppo in the north, via Hama and Homs, to Damascus in the south. However the Seljuks and their allies were less successful in taking coastal towns and the Fatimids still retained a presence on the coast and in Palestine.

On the eve of the First Crusade, Aleppo and most of northern Syria was ruled, or if not ruled at least claimed, by Ridwan, a nephew of Malik-Shah. Ridwan was later to come under the influence of Assassin agents and was always unpopular in Aleppo. Not only was he unpopular in that city, but his ambitions in Syria were also opposed by his younger brother Duqaq, who was nominal ruler of Damascus. Moreover the city of Antioch to the west of Aleppo governed by the emir Yaghi Siyan was allied with Damascus against Aleppo. Antioch’s Muslim population was probably small, for until 1084 it had been a Byzantine city. Ridwan’s territory was also threatened from the east by the ambitions of Karbuqa, the atabak of Mosul.

Almost every town in Syria seemed to have its own ruler. Many of those rulers were Turks and soldiers. Thus Homs was under the control of Janah al-Dawla, another Turkish atabak. It is worth noting here that although most of Syria’s population was Arab, most of the military élite in the region was of Turkish and, to a lesser extent, Kurdish stock. However, from 1086 onwards, the town and fortress of Shayzar in northern Syria were ruled by the Banu Munqidh, an Arab clan of Twelver
Shi‘ites. The city port of Tripoli had successfully rebelled against the Fatimids in 1070 and was governed by a dynasty of
qadi
s (judges) until its capture by the crusaders in 1109. It had a predominantly Shi‘ite population. The port of Jabala was also an independent republic. The port of Beirut was governed by the Fatimids and supplied by their fleets. Tyre, Sidon, and Acre were also under Fatimid control, but only since 1089 and only precariously so and there were repeated revolts against Egyptian rule.

As for Jerusalem, it had been taken from the Fatimids by Atsisz, a Turkish general, in 1071, but in 1098 the Fatimids, taking advantage of Turkish preoccupation with the arrival of the First Crusade in northern Syria, had reoccupied the city. According to the Persian traveller, Nasr-i Khosraw, who visited Jerusalem in the 1050s, the place had a population of about 20,000 and was much visited by Muslim pilgrims, who for one reason or another were unable to perform the
hajj
(pilgrimage) to Mecca and Medina. The city was ‘the third most holy place of God’ and many Muslim mystics chose to reside there. Jerusalem had a special status in the Muslim scenario of the Last Days. On the Day of Judgement when the Trumpet of the Resurrection would be blown for the second time and all creatures brought to life once more, mankind would find itself assembled in the Valley of Gehenna, just outside the eastern wall of Jerusalem. Many Muslims therefore chose to be buried at or close to this site. The Muslim shrine of the Dome of the Rock in the Temple Mount area of Jerusalem had been completed in 692. The reasons for its construction are mysterious, but by the eleventh century it was widely believed by Muslims that it was from the rock in the centre of the shrine that the winged steed Buraq sprang when he carried the Prophet Muhammad up to the heavens on the Night Journey.