Peace Be Upon You (15 page)

The Almoravids succeeded in stemming the Christian advance and then ruled what remained of Muslim al-Andalus with far less tolerance for the People of the Book. Under the Almoravids, Christians and Jews were subject to heavier taxation and more restrictions. Had the dynasty lasted, the noose of cultural chauvinism might have tightened even more. As it turned out, once ensconced in the palaces of their predecessors, the Almoravids began to feud with one another. The glue of holy war could form only an initial bond, and once the object was attained, it weakened.

As for the Christians, the success of the war against the Muslims of Iberia did not escape the notice of the church in Rome. Western and Central Europe may have been fragmented, but across the small world of elites, news traveled. Monks traded manuscripts and ideas, and princes and barons intermarried. At the very end of the eleventh century, the former prior of Cluny was elected pope, and he took the name of Urban II. He had lived most of his life in the region now called Burgundy, and he had played a central role in the rise of the Cluniacs to such prominence. His selection as pope in 1088 was a triumph for the order, and it raised the hope that he would be able to magnify the power of the papacy throughout Christendom. Those hopes were not disappointed. In 1095, in the town of Clermont, closer to Cluny than to Rome, Pope Urban dramatically shifted the focus of Christian holy war away from Spain. He called on all good Christians to turn their efforts to retaking Jerusalem. And so they did.

I
N PURELY MILITARY TERMS
, the Crusades were negligible. At least seven times over the course of two centuries, armies from France, Germany, Italy, and England invaded the Near East. Initially, these armies were led mostly, though not entirely, by second-tier nobles and third sons who faced dead-end lives as retainers. Later, they were led by kings and princes who sought both temporal and spiritual glory in campaigns against the Muslims. At their height, the Crusader states of the Near East comprised a narrow band that barely included present-day Israel, Lebanon, and slivers of Jordan, Turkey, and Syria. While the crusading urge took centuries to dissipate, by the beginning of the fourteenth century the Crusades as a mass movement were over, and the Crusader states were eradicated. The movement began in a burst of religious fury, but in the end it probably did more harm to the Christian Byzantine Empire than it did to the Muslim states of the Near East.

In purely symbolic terms, however, the Crusades became the perfect metaphor for conflict between Islam and the West. Out of the sorry, often pathetic history of the Crusades, the myth of endless conflict was forged.

The Crusades were launched by Pope Urban to liberate the holy city of Jerusalem from the grip of Muslims, who were described as uncouth infidels defiling the holiest of holies and as “a race alien to God” who had desecrated ground sanctified by the blood of Christ.
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It would take thick rose-colored lenses to transform the Crusades into a symbol of harmony. The blood-soaked streets of Jerusalem, taken after a long siege in 1099, and the armies of Christendom indulging in what even later Western
propagandists admit was a wild orgy of death, make that impossible. But the killing fields of Jerusalem lasted days. Crusader states were enmeshed in the Near East for more than two hundred years. In between the intermittent battles, there were long periods of calm and poignant moments of amity.

Even with the Crusades, therefore, the memory that has survived is incomplete. It is a memory framed by prejudice, and whatever doesn’t fit the history of conflict has been elided, forgotten, and buried. In the long years that separated the actual Crusades, Muslims lived uneventfully under Christian rule in the Near East. While there was far less of the cultural interaction that made Muslim Spain so dynamic, there was also little animosity. Indifference may not be the stuff of legend, but it more accurately describes the decades of live-and-let-live that separated the brief but exciting episodes of armies mustering, sieges laid, and battles fought.

While the Muslims of Egypt and the Near East were accustomed to clashes with Christian Byzantium, the arrival of the first Crusaders from Western Europe took them by surprise. The ferocity of the Crusaders stunned them, as did the simple intensity of their faith. By the end of the eleventh century, Muslims of the Near East had only the faintest connection to the early fervor of Muhammad and the Arab conquests. They were used to war, but not to war inspired by religious passion.

The exception, perhaps, was the animosity between Sunnis and Shi’ites, which seemed to worsen with each passing century. The sudden rise of the Shi’ite Fatimid empire in Egypt in the tenth century was seen by the Sunni majority of the Near East as a grave threat, and for good reason. The Fatimids forged an unlikely coalition of North African tribes, and then swept across the desert from Tunisia and into Egypt. Their leader proclaimed himself caliph, which meant that in the middle of the tenth century no fewer than three people simultaneously donned that mantle, one in Baghdad, one in Córdoba, and one in Cairo. Then Hakim, the Fatimid caliph of the early eleventh century, declared that he was also the messiah, and began to persecute those who did not bow to him. Instead of showing tolerance, he stripped the People of the Book of their rights. Like a Muslim Caligula or Nero, his behavior was erratic, confusing, and often cruel. He demanded that shops in Cairo stay open all night on the off chance that he decided to stop by, and he instituted a lottery where some were rewarded with gold, others with death.
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Hakim meted out draconian punishments to everyone—Sunni, Shi’a, Christian, black, brown, or fair-skinned—who might challenge his legitimacy. The persecution of Christians, however, had consequences that he neither foresaw nor lived to see. In 1009 his soldiers desecrated and then partly destroyed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem to punish Christians for their refusal to embrace his new revelation. Word of that deed spread to the West, and though the pope and the royals of Europe could do little more than rail against the Fatimids, the memory did not fade. Instead, it festered over the next decades, until it sparked what became the First Crusade.

By then, however, Hakim was long dead. He had made far too many enemies, and he finally alienated one too many faction. His end was suitably bizarre. He rode out of Cairo on a donkey and disappeared. He had been in the habit of leaving the palace with only a small retinue of guards, and that was his undoing. But the absence of a body provided one group of followers with a sliver of hope. Various Shi’ite factions over the years had declared that their imam had not died but had instead removed himself from visible society to wait until the time was right for him to appear again. When Hakim vanished, a few steadfast followers refused to believe that he had been assassinated and claimed instead that he had gone into hiding to await the end of times. Hounded out of Egypt, these followers became known as the Druze, a secretive, close-knit community that survived in the mountains of Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine.

When the Sunnis were not fighting the Fatimid Shi’ites, they were fighting one another. The tenth and eleventh centuries saw the rise of Turkish power. The Turks had filtered into the Near East and Anatolia from Central Asia and had slowly converted to Islam after they were hired as mercenaries by both the Abbasid caliph and other Arab rulers. The emergence of the Turkish Seljuk dynasty in the eleventh century threatened all of the established powers in the region, especially the Byzantines and the Fatimid Shi’ites.

Because the Near East of the eleventh century was wracked by internecine conflicts between Muslim sects and Muslim states, it was ripe for a foreign invasion. Even so, no one expected a war with Christians from Europe, and few of the inhabitants of the Near East had any dealings with the West. Spain was far removed from the daily world of Damascus, Antioch, Jerusalem, or any of the other city-states of the
Near East. Though Jewish clans kept in touch with one another across the thousands of miles spanned by the Mediterranean, most Muslims were more provincial. Merchants traveled widely, and men of learning did as well, but even these had little contact with the backward states of Europe. As a result, the sudden appearance of thousands of European knights claiming a divine mandate to liberate Jerusalem was not something Muslims in the Near East had ever imagined.

It was unexpected for Western European Christians as well. They had never launched a campaign against so distant a goal. They had, however, fought “crusades” against non-Christians and heretics. While scholars have analyzed the various strands that led to the First Crusade, there are heated academic debates about how new the Crusades actually were. There had been campaigns against pagans in northern Europe and against Muslims in Spain and in Italy. Christian rulers routinely whipped up the passions of their soldiers by linking sacrifice in battle to Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. But there was a difference between evoking Christ in pre-battle speeches and calling for a military holy pilgrimage thousands of miles away
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Regardless of how novel the idea was, the result of Pope Urban’s call was unprecedented. Never before had an army of Christians from the West been raised against the Muslims of the Near East.

THE CALL IS ANSWERED

THE GIST
of Urban’s speech at Clermont in late 1095 was simple: Christians had a sacred duty to liberate Jerusalem from Muslim rule. No official version of the speech has survived, and the various contemporary accounts differ considerably in detail and in tone. But they all suggest that Urban urged the bishops and princes of Christendom to assemble an army for the sole purpose of taking Jerusalem. In some accounts, Urban dwelt on the purported atrocities being committed by Muslims against pious Christians and pilgrims. In classic demagogic fashion, he listed the tortures that Christians were supposedly suffering, ranging from disembowelment and intestines twirled around filthy metal instruments to unfathomable acts committed within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, including the forced circumcision of monks on the bloodstained altar. Other accounts of the speech stressed the
redemptive power of liberating the city. Urban admonished the princes that they had been living lives of sin and had themselves committed atrocities in their petty wars with one another. For that, Urban declared, they would be held responsible on judgment day, unless they dedicated themselves to the noble cause of Jerusalem.

“Let therefore hatred depart from among you,” Urban announced; “let your quarrels end, let wars cease, and let all dissensions and controversies slumber. Enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulchre; wrest that land from the wicked race, and subject it to yourselves.” The Holy Land itself, Urban continued, was crying out for help.

That land which as the Scripture says floweth with milk and honey, was given by God into the possession of the children of Israel. Jerusalem is the navel of the world; the land is fruitful above others, like another paradise of delights. This the Redeemer of the human race has made illustrious by His advent, has beautified by residence, has consecrated by suffering, has redeemed by death, has glorified by burial. This royal city, therefore, situated at the center of the world, is now held captive by His enemies, and is in subjection to those who do not know God, to the worship of the heathens. She seeks therefore and desires to be liberated, and does not cease to implore you to come to her aid.

And those who answered the call, Urban promised, would be rewarded. “All who die by the way, whether by land or by sea, or in battle against the pagans, shall have immediate remission of sins. This I grant them through the power of God with which I am invested.” The task at hand was one that every believer had a duty to undertake, provided they had the means. The alternative, Urban declared, was unacceptable.

O what a disgrace if such a despised and base race, which worships demons, should conquer a people which has the faith of omnipotent God and is made glorious with the name of Christ! With what reproaches will the Lord overwhelm us if you do not aid those who, with us, profess the Christian religion! Let those who have been accustomed unjustly to wage private warfare against the faithful now go against the infidels and end with victory this war which should have been begun long ago. Let those who for a long time, have been robbers, now become knights. Let those who have been fighting against their brothers and relatives now fight in a proper way against the barbarians. Let those who have been serving as mercenaries for small pay now obtain the eternal reward…. Let those who go not put off the journey but rent their lands and collect money for their expenses; and as soon as winter is over and spring comes, let them eagerly set out on the way with God as their guide.
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