A History of the Crusades (33 page)

Although the Fatimids did exert themselves to reoccupy Jerusalem in 1098, the place was not of vast importance to them. Ramla was their capital in Palestine and Ascalon their chief naval base. Outside the towns in Palestine their writ hardly ran at all and bedouin and Turkoman freebooters terrorized villagers, merchants, and pilgrims of all religions. A
letter written in 1100 by a Jewish pilgrim stranded in Egypt reveals how he had vainly been trying to reach Jerusalem for five years, but bandits and bedouin had made the road to the city impassable.

However the danger faced by pilgrims in Palestine was not the immediate cause of the First Crusade. Rather the territorial gains made at the expense of the Greeks in Asia Minor by the Seljuk sultan of Rum, Kilij Arslan I, led the Byzantine emperor, Alexius I, to ask for military help from the West. Kilij Arslan belonged to a separate branch of the Seljuk clan and it was one which was constantly at odds with the ‘Greater Seljuks’ of Iran and Iraq. Indeed it was Kilij Arslan’s attempt to profit from the Greater Seljuk’s disarray in Upper Iraq which was to lead to his death in 1107. In Asia Minor itself, the supremacy of the Seljuks of Rum was contested by a rival dynasty of Turkish frontier warriors, the Danishmendids, whose centre of power was in northern Anatolia. Both the Seljuks of Rum and the Danishmendids ruled over territories whose populations were overwhelmingly composed of Greek Christians.

Given the divided state of the Islamic world, the successive triumphs of the armies of the First Crusade in Anatolia, northern Syria, and Palestine are hardly surprising. Although Turkish armies were dispatched from Aleppo, Damascus, and Mosul for the relief of Antioch in 1097–8, their movements were uncoordinated. The smaller coastal cities to the south were far too weak to resist the Christian advance, and when the Fatimids lost Jerusalem to the crusaders there may have been some among the Sunni Muslims who viewed the loss of that place by their Shi‘ite enemies with quiet satisfaction.

The letter written in 1100 by a Jewish pilgrim stranded in Egypt gives us a picture of how things appeared in the immediate aftermath of the Christian conquest of Jerusalem. It reveals that plague had ravaged and weakened Egypt but that nevertheless, al-Afdal, the Egyptian vizier and general, was confidently expected to retake Jerusalem later that year. Many Muslims also
failed to appreciate at first the full significance of the crusading movement and of the Christian occupation of Jerusalem. The Franks were widely mistaken for Byzantine troops and they were not expected to hang on to Jerusalem for very long. Even so, despite all the political and religious divisions in the Muslim community and despite widespread Muslim ignorance about the origins and motives of the crusaders, there was immediate outrage over crusader atrocities at such places as Ma‘arrat alNuman, where many inhabitants had been massacred, and their capture of the Holy City.

Towards the end of 1099 the chief
qadi
of Damascus, al-Harawi, led a delegation of refugees to Baghdad to seek the help of the Caliph al-Mustazhir. Al-Harawi’s address to the caliph, which brought tears to the eyes of his audience, was soon afterwards adapted and turned into verse by the Iraqi poet Ibn al-Abiwardi.

How can the eye sleep between the lids at a time of disasters that would waken any sleeper?
While your Syrian brothers can only sleep on the backs of their chargers or in vultures’ bellies?

The caliph, who had no soldiers of his own to speak of, wrote to Barkayaruq asking him to do something, but the Seljuk sultan, who at that time was engaged in a war in northern Iran with his brother, Ghiyath al-Din Muhammad, did nothing.

In 1110 a similar delegation, this time headed by the Shi‘te
qadi
of Aleppo, Ibn al-Khashshab, came to Baghdad determined to stir up opinion at the caliph’s court in favour of concerted action against the Franks. With the support of Sufis and merchants, Ibn al-Khashshab organized a demonstration in the caliph’s mosque in Baghdad during the Friday prayers and this action was repeated a week later. Then the processional entry of the caliph’s wife into Baghdad was similarly disrupted. The caliph was furious. It is true that Ghiyath al-Din Muhammad I, who on Barkayaruq’s death in 1105 had taken over the latter’s pretensions to rule over the Seljuk sultanate, promised that he would do something and went through the motions of preparing for a jihad. However, the victims of the crusaders in Syria
were never to receive any substantial help from any of the claimants to the Seljuk sultanate.

Much early Muslim propaganda against the crusades was couched in poetry and conformed to the conventions which governed Arabic poetry’s various genres. Thus poetry about the destruction and exile brought about by the crusaders tended to be expressed in a form first developed by the pre-Islamic nomadic Arabs to lament vanished camp-sites, ‘places of lost bliss’: as for example in this poem which recycles traditional motifs in a lament for the crusaders’ sack of Ma‘arrat al-Numan in 1098.

This my friend is a town which God has doomed to its destruction. Stop [your] camel and bewail with me its former residents, old and young,
And remember, if you enter it one day, that it was the residence of the beloved!

Although initial Muslim responses to the coming of the crusades were inevitably confused and often couched in inappropriately archaic forms, some Muslim leaders swiftly came to grips with the full significance of the Christian invasion and set about trying to organize a counter-crusade. ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami (1039–1106) was a Sunni Muslim religious scholar attached to the great mosque of Damascus. His
Kitab al-jihad
(1105) was the first treatise on the Holy War to be produced after the arrival of the Franks in the Near East. Unlike some of his contemporaries, al-Sulami did not confuse the crusaders with Byzantines. Rather, he regarded the expedition of the Franks as part of a Christian ‘jihad’ from the West, which had the aim of helping native Christians as well as conquering Jerusalem. He presented the triumph of the crusaders in Syria as a symptom of the moral and political decay of Islam and of the enfeebled state of the caliphate, but he also offered his readers the certainty of future victory, since the Prophet Muhammad had predicted that the Muslims would lose Jerusalem for a while, but then they would not only retake it, but they would go on to conquer Constantinople.

Al-Sulami was also aware of conflicts between Christianity and Islam which were going on in Spain, Sicily, and North Africa. His readiness to see the crusade within the broader context of a struggle between the two religions, extending all the way across the Mediterranean, was later to be closely echoed in a chronicle written by the thirteenth-century Mosuli historian Ibn al-Athir.

The first appearance of the empire of the Franks, the rise of their power, their invasion of the lands of Islam and occupation of some of them occurred in the year 478 [1085–86], when they took the city of Toledo and others in the land of Andalus, as has already been set forth. Then in the year 484 [1091–92] they attacked the island of Sicily, and conquered it, and this too I have related before. Then they forced their way even to the shore of Africa, where they seized a few places, which were however recovered from them. Then they conquered other places, as you will now see. When the year 490 [1096–97] came, they invaded the land of Syria.

Another historian based in Aleppo in the early twelfth century, Hamdan ibn Abd al-Rahim, actually wrote a book devoted to
The History of the Franks who Invaded the Islamic Lands
. Ibn Abd al-Rahim’s book has not survived, except in quoted extracts in later histories. Its loss is particularly sad as Ibn Abd al-Rahim was well placed to have written such a work, having first held a village from the Frankish lord of al-Atharib and then later taken service with the first great leader of the jihad, Zangi.

Although al-Sulami’s was the first jihad treatise to be written in response to the crusade, it was not the first book to be written on the subject. The ultimate authority for jihad is to be found in the Qur‘an itself.

Prescribed for you is fighting, though it be hateful to you. (Qur‘an ii. 216)

Fight those who believe not in God and the Last Day and do not forbid what God and His Messenger have forbidden—such men as practise not the religion of truth, being of those who have been given the Book—until they pay tribute out of hand and have been humbled. (Qur‘an ix. 29)

And fight the unbelievers totally even as they fight you totally; and know that God is with the godfearing. (Qur‘an ix. 36)

Jihad, which is commonly translated as ‘holy war’, literally means ‘striving’: that is striving to advance Islam. According to traditional Sunni Muslim doctrine, leadership of the holy war to extend the territories of Islam was vested in the caliph. In the eighth and ninth centuries it had been one of the duties of the Abbasid caliph to direct the jihad. Harun al-Rashid, for example, led his troops against the Byzantines every other year; in the alternate years he led the
hajj
, or pilgrimage to Mecca. Jihads were also launched in the eastern lands against the pagan Turks in Transoxania and central Asia as well as against idolatrous Hindus in northern India. Volunteers for these and other holy wars were known as
ghazi
s. They fought in the expectation of booty and, if they fell in the course of campaigning, they were assured of the status of martyrs.

The
Bahr al-Fava
‘
id
or ‘Sea of Precious Virtues’, is an encyclopaedic and rather preachy treatise in the mirrors-for-princes genre, written in the 1150s or 1160s by an anonymous Persian, probably resident in Nur al-Din’s Aleppo. Since the author was evidently intensely concerned with the struggle against the Franks in Syria, he sets out the doctrines and regulations concerning the jihad, as they were understood in the mid-twelfth century. There are two sorts of jihad: there is an interior jihad against one’s own moral flaws and an exterior jihad against the infidel. According to the
Bahr
—and here, as elsewhere, it reflected conventional thinking on the subject—there are then two sorts of exterior jihad. First, there is the offensive jihad. This is a collective duty imposed on the Muslim community to extend the Muslim territories (
Dar al-Islam
). Some Muslims will wish to take part in these aggressive campaigns against non-Muslim neighbours; all Muslims are obliged to support them with money and approbation. Secondly, there is the defensive jihad to drive out aggressors who have occupied territory held by the Muslims. This sort of defensive war is an obligation that falls on every able-bodied, adult Muslim.

The
Bahr
examines the rights and duties of those going on jihad in some detail. The warrior must seek his parents’ permission if he is under-age. If he is married he must make sure that his wife is properly provided for. He should not expect to be
paid. (However, the Muslim treasury may pay Christians and Jews to fight alongside Muslims in the jihad.) A Muslim on the battlefield may only flee when he is confronted by more than two infidels. Women and children may not be killed.

The rules regarding booty are extremely complex. Here some of the
Bahr
’s claims seem eccentric. It argues that even animals who participate in the jihad deserve presents, ‘and the gift for an elephant should be more than that for a camel or an ass’. Elsewhere in his treatise, the author, who is evidently an
‘alim
, or religious scholar, insists that religious scholars also have a right to a share in the spoils of the war against the infidel: ‘Beware lest you think that a
ghazi
is only he who holds a sword in his hand and confronts the infidel; for indeed that scholar who in a mosque and
mihrab
[prayer niche] holds pen in hand and knows the proofs of Islam, is a warrior and his pen is sharper than the sword.’ Although the author of the
Bahr
loathed and despised Christians, heretics within the fold of Islam were perceived by him as an even greater threat. ‘Shedding the blood of a heretic is the equal of seventy holy wars.’

While some theorists in the Middle Ages argued that the jihad was a defensive war only, this was the view of a minority and most authorities held that the obligation of jihad did not lapse until all the world was brought under the sway of Islam. The
Bahr
insists that the first duty of a Muslim ruler is to prosecute the jihad and bring about the victory of Islam, and if he does not do so and he makes peace with the infidel, that ruler would be better dead than alive, for he would be corrupting the world. However, the author of the treatise recognized that, whatever pious theorizing might hope for, the Franks in Syria continued to prosper, while Muslim made war upon Muslim.

In Shi‘i theology only the imam may call for an offensive jihad, and, since the imam is in occultation, this particular duty is in abeyance until the Last Days approach. Thus, for example, although the Isma‘ili Fatimids and the Twelver Shi‘ite Banu Munqidh lords of Shayzar repeatedly engaged in battles with the crusaders, jihad played no part in their ideology. Also, many Muslims, particularly Shi‘is and Sufis, stressed that the external
jihad took second place to the jihad against the evil in one’s own soul.

Propagandists for the jihad stressed the special status of Jerusalem in Islam and in the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries treatises were produced which were devoted to the special excellences (
fada
‘
il
) of Jerusalem, or of Palestine, or of Syria as a whole. Such treatises drew on similar works which had been produced during the Arab wars with the Byzantines. A related genre dealt with the lesser pilgrimages, or
ziyarat
, to the tombs of prophets, martyrs, and Sufi holy men, many of which happened to lie in territory then occupied by the infidel Franks.