The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco Da Gama (6 page)

With its squares and streets lined with the sculptures of ancient Greece and Rome, its Hippodrome ringed with gilded equestrian statues and seats for a hundred thousand, its churches a golden blaze of mosaics and its workshops heaped with exquisite icons and silks, Constantinople had only one rival for the title of the most glamorous metropolis in the known world. That rival city had been built by the Abbasids, an Arab clan that had ousted the Umayyad caliphs from their throne in Damascus and had delivered the coup de grâce by inviting eighty of their deposed cousins to a banquet in which they featured as the main course. In the eighth century the Abbasids had deserted enemy Damascus for a site on the River Tigris, at its closest point to the River Euphrates and twenty miles from the towering ruins of the old Persian capital at Ctesiphon. The new capital was optimistically called Madinat al-Salam, or the “City of Peace,” and was later renamed Baghdad.

As the heir to centuries of Persian cultural splendor and the crossing point of the currents of knowledge that swept across the vast Islamic empire, Baghdad had quickly become the intellectual powerhouse of the world. International scholars gathered at its House of Wisdom to translate the vast corpus of Greek, Persian, Syriac, and Indian writings on science, philosophy, and medicine into Arabic, and Islamic scholars tested the Quran against Aristotle. Mathematicians imported and improved the decimal positional number system from India and unlocked the secrets of algebra and algorithms. The secret of papermaking was extracted from Chinese prisoners, and lending libraries circulated the burgeoning body of
knowledge. Engineers and agronomists perfected the waterwheel, improved irrigation, and bred new crops; geographers mapped the earth, and astronomers charted the sky. Baghdad’s renaissance of learning sent shock waves around the world—and yet, even then, it was going rotten at its core.

The Abbasid caliphs had built Baghdad as a perfectly round city, and at its heart was their monumental palatine complex, the Golden Gate. As their lifestyle grew steadily more kingly, the Golden Gate became a pleasure dome of wine, women, song, and spectacular feasts; in the world captured in the
Arabian Nights
, courtiers kissed the ground as they approached the caliph, who was followed everywhere by an executioner and escaped from his public duties to a vast harem that echoed with the soft steps of an international selection of concubines and wily, witty singing girls. In 917 an embassy from Constantinople was welcomed by mounted troops seated on gold and silver saddles, elephants wearing brocade and satin, a hundred lions, two thousand black and white eunuchs, and waiters offering iced water and fruit juice. The palace was hung with thirty-eight thousand curtains made of gold brocade and carpeted with twenty-two thousand rugs, while four gold and silver boats floated in a tin-lined lake. Another pool sprouted an artificial tree topped with fruit-shaped jewels, with silver and gold birds perched on its silver and gold branches; on order, the tree would start swaying, the metal leaves would rustle, and the metal birds would tweet. It was a far cry from the egalitarian ummah of Medina, and as outrage mounted, the caliphs built themselves an insurance policy in the form of a personal army of mamluks, Turkish slaves seized from the savage tribes that roamed the Central Asian steppes. The solution proved short-lived. The Turks converted to Islam, adopted the local culture, and mounted a series of military coups: in nine years, at least four out of five caliphs were murdered. As the outraged Baghdadis erupted in rebellion, the Turks burned down whole quarters of the city.

The center of Baghdad would not hold, and neither would the center of the far-flung Islamic empire. To the west, a Shia sect wrested control of Tunisia and Egypt; its ruling dynasty, who called themselves the Fatimids, after their claimed descent from Muhammad’s daughter and Ali’s wife Fatima, expanded their dominions to Syria, Palestine, and much of Arabia itself, and for two centuries they ruled as a rival caliphate from their new capital at Cairo. To the east Persian power revived for a time until China’s westward expansion pushed entire Turkish tribes into Iran, where they carved out independent kingdoms and barely paid lip service to the caliphs. In 1055 the Seljuks, a Turkish dynasty named after their first leader, finally seized Baghdad, installed their leader as sultan, or “holder of power,” and relegated the caliphs to the honorary status of religious figureheads.

Throughout these upheavals Constantinople had looked on contentedly. It had retaken some of its long-lost lands, and its armies had almost reached the gates of Jerusalem. Yet the decline of Baghdad turned out to be anything but a triumph for its rival city. The Seljuks soon surged across Constantinople’s eastern borders; within two decades they had smashed its armies and decimated its territories. Now they were massing in front of the capital itself, and the treasure house of the classical world finally seemed on the verge of annihilation.

S
CANDALOUS RUMORS THAT
the Turks made Christian boys urinate in fonts and sodomized clergymen, monks, and even bishops had gripped Europe for years, but for anyone who had missed them, Pope Urban left nothing to the imagination. The Turks, he luridly pontificated from his makeshift pulpit,

have completely destroyed some of God’s churches and they have converted others to the uses of their own cult. They ruin the altars with filth and defilement. They circumcise Christians and smear the blood from the circumcision over the altars or throw it into the baptismal fonts. They are pleased to kill others by cutting open their bellies, extracting the end of their intestines, and tying it to a stake. Then, with flogging, they drive their victims around the stake until, when their viscera have spilled out, they fall dead on the ground. They tie others, again, to stakes and shoot arrows at them; they seize others, stretch out their necks, and try to see whether they can cut off their heads with a single blow of a naked sword. And what shall I say about the shocking rape of women?

That litany of horrors was enough to make Christian blood boil, but Urban had more. It was a tough sell to ask Catholic knights to march to the aid of Orthodox Constantinople and its notoriously scheming emperors, and the pope spun the Crusade in a new direction: toward Jerusalem.

In an age when men and women made arduous pilgrimages to bathe in the divine grace emanating from the relics of obscure saints, the city where Jesus preached, died, and was resurrected was the holy grail of penitents. For centuries Jerusalem’s Muslim overlords had been happy to charge Christians to worship at the holy places, but the new powers of the Islamic world had torn up the old policy. In 1009, one Egyptian ruler had taken umbrage at the number of Christian pilgrims wandering around and had ordered the Church of the Holy Sepulcher pulled down to its foundations. It had been reconstructed, on payment of a heavy tribute, but soon afterward the Turks had arrived at the gates of the holy city and set about persecuting pilgrims with renewed relish. Like a captive virgin, Urban tugged at knightly heartstrings, Jerusalem was begging to be liberated “and does not cease to implore you to come to her aid.”

The situation in the holy city was an unholy embarrassment, but in reality Urban was as desperate to get Europe’s knights out of the West as into the East. As the Dark Ages had finally lifted, a large class of expensively armed and trained warriors was left with
nothing better to do than attack one other, terrorize defenseless populations, or, to Rome’s indignation, raid Church property. “Hence it is,” Urban remonstrated with the assembled knights, “that you murder one another, that you wage war, and that frequently you perish by mutual wounds. Let therefore hatred depart from among you, let your quarrels end, let wars cease, and let all dissensions and controversies slumber. Enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulcher; wrest that land from the wicked race, and subject it to yourselves . . . for the remission of your sins, with the assurance of the imperishable glory of the Kingdom of Heaven.” Christ himself, he proclaimed, commanded them to exterminate the vile Turks from his lands.

“Deus lo volt! It is the will of God!” the knights cried out.

For all Urban’s firebrand rhetoric, the notion of fighting in the name of Christ was hardly new. What was unprecedented was his coupling of armed combat with the pilgrimage of a lifetime. The prospect was so beguiling that thousands of poor men, women, and children flocked to hellfire preachers like Peter the Hermit, who was widely believed to possess a letter from heaven in which God called on his people to attack the Turks. Armed with little but the simple faith that Christ would scatter the unbelievers in its path, the People’s Crusade set out east before the warriors of Europe had even begun to gather. Along the way, many of the pilgrims practiced their slaughter on wealthy Jewish communities before they arrived at Constantinople, where the horrified emperor hastily diverted them to meet a grisly end at the hands of the Turks.

When the real Crusade set out the following year, the gruesome hardships of the journey turned proud warriors into starving beasts who carved off the rotting buttocks of slain Muslims and roasted them on fires, tearing into the flesh while it was still half cooked. Yet it was the assault on Jerusalem itself that guaranteed retribution. Memories would not die of that day of slaughter in the summer of 1099: not in the Muslim world, where writers howled that a hundred thousand had perished, nor among Christians, who with
grim relish wrote home about the “marvelous works” performed in God’s name. Piles of heads, hands, and feet, reported eyewitnesses, were scattered around the streets. Women were stabbed as they fled. Knights were seen “seizing infants by the soles of their feet from their mothers’ laps or their cradles and dashing them against the walls and breaking their necks,” or splitting open the bellies of the dead to retrieve the gold coins they had “gulped down their loathsome throats while alive.” In the al-Aqsa Mosque, venerated by Muslims as the house of worship to which Muhammad had ridden at night on a winged steed before he climbed to heaven from a nearby rock, the slaughter was so great that witnesses vied over whether the Crusaders were up to their ankles, their knees, or their bridle reins in blood. The stench hung in the air for months, even after thousands of rotting bodies were stacked up against the walls “in mounds as big as houses”—by the forced labor of Muslim survivors—and burned in blackening, smoldering pyres from which more swallowed gold was recovered. The scale of the massacre only swelled the Crusaders’ belief that a glorious benediction was shining on them from heaven; one rapturous monk declared that the conquest of Jerusalem was the greatest event in history since the Crucifixion, the precursor to the arrival of the Antichrist and the battles of the Last Days.

Jerusalem became the capital of a Christian kingdom, and a long series of French kings, mostly named Baldwin, were crowned in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. To Jerusalem’s north, three more Crusader states—Edessa, Antioch, and Tripoli—stretched along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. A cordon of castles rose above the parched landscape of Syria and Palestine, each more monumental than the last and each no more than a day’s ride from the next. The biggest of all were manned by the famously disciplined and fabulously rich military orders that had grown out of fraternities set up to care for sick pilgrims and guard them on their travels. The Knights Hospitaller and Knights Templar had become elite corps of holy warriors that answered only to the
pope. The Templars rode on warhorses armed with iron spikes in the advance guard of the Crusades; on the battlefield, with their white mantles emblazoned with red crosses flying behind them, they couched their lances and galloped in silent, tight formation into the enemy’s front lines.

The Templars and Hospitallers lived like monks and fought like devils, but they were often bitter rivals. The land Westerners called Outremer—“Beyond the Sea”—was a curious anomaly from the start. A miniature Europe transplanted to the East and dressed in exotic colors, it was bedeviled by the same lordly egos that set nobles at each other’s throats back home, and it soon fell prey to the same endemic feuds. Crusaders constantly intrigued against each other, while others left the fold and went native. Bloodthirsty newcomers were outraged to find their predecessors wearing kaffiyehs, dousing themselves with deodorant, and sitting cross-legged on a tiled floor next to a plashing fountain while being entertained by dancing girls. They came up with a derogatory name for them—
poulins
, or “kids”—and the mounting estrangement was bound to end badly.

T
HE
C
RUSADER STATES
had always relied for their survival on the even greater disunity of the Muslims who surrounded them on three sides. To the north, the Seljuk Turks had fallen into ferocious internecine fighting. To the east were the feuding city-states of Syria, and to the southwest was Egypt, whose long-ruling Shia dynasty, the Fatimids, had pitched into terminal pandemonium. Stalking silently among them all was a renegade sect of Shia fanatics who knifed their fellow Muslims in the back with even more ardor than they murdered the Christian interlopers. Their headquarters were hidden deep in the tortuous hinterland of the Syrian coast, in a fortress built on a rocky prominence from which their leader, a spectral figure known to the Westerners as the Old Man of the Mountains, reputedly ordered his disciples to jump to their death to impress a passing Crusader. To the rest of the Muslim world the
sect was known as the
hashshashin
, or “hash eaters,” a popular term of abuse from which the Crusaders adapted the name “Assassins.” From there it was a short step to the fantasies of Western fabulists, in which cultists were given a glimpse of Paradise in the form of a hashish-hazed orgy before being sent off on a suicide mission that they were told would admit them to the promised land for good. Stoned or not, the Assassins did away with large numbers of prominent Muslims as well as plenty of Crusaders.

The Second Crusade did a much better job of uniting Muslims than the Muslims themselves had done. Led by the kings of France and Germany in person, it set out in 1147 to recover Edessa, the first Crusader state to be won and the first to be lost, and farcically ended by attacking wealthy Damascus, the only Muslim city that was actually friendly to the Christians. Having patched up their differences and thrashed the pilgrim knights, the Syrians invaded opulent, disintegrating Egypt, which in desperation called in the Crusaders, who first defended Egypt and then attacked it.