The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land (4 page)

Early in his pontificate, Gregory laid plans for a grand military enterprise that can be regarded as the first real prototype for a crusade. In 1074 he tried to launch a holy war in the eastern Mediterranean in aid of the Greek Orthodox Christians of Byzantium, who were, he claimed, ‘daily being butchered like cattle’ by the Muslims of Asia Minor. Latins fighting in this campaign were promised a ‘heavenly reward’. His grandiose project fell flat, eliciting very limited recruitment, perhaps because Gregory had boldly pronounced his intention to lead the campaign in person. The pope’s 1074 formulation of the link between military service to God and the resultant spiritual recompense still lacked specificity. But in the early 1080s, with the conflict with the German emperor in full flow, Gregory took a critical step towards clarification. He wrote that his supporters should fight the emperor and face ‘the danger of the coming battle for the remission of all their sins’. This seemed to indicate that participation in this holy struggle had the same power to purify the soul as other forms of penance because it promised, just like a pilgrimage, to be both difficult and perilous. As yet, this more logical explanation for the redemptive quality of sanctified violence did not take hold, but it set an important precedent for later popes. In fact, the very novelty of Gregory’s radical approach to the militarisation of Latin Christendom caused condemnation among some contemporaries, and he was accused in ecclesiastical circles of dabbling in practices ‘new and unheard of throughout the centuries’. His vision was so extreme that, when his successor Pope Urban II offered a more measured and carefully constructed ideal, he appeared almost conservative in comparison and thus prompted less criticism.
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Gregory VII had taken Latin theology to the brink of holy war, arguing that the Pope had the clear right to summon armies to fight for God and the Latin Church. He also went some considerable way to grounding the concept of sanctified violence within a penitential framework–an idea that would be part of the essence of crusading. Nonetheless, Gregory cannot be regarded as the prime architect of the crusades because he manifestly failed to construct a compelling and convincing notion of holy war that resonated with the Christians of Europe. That would be the work of Pope Urban II.

THE MUSLIM WORLD

From the end of the eleventh century onwards, the crusades pitted western European Franks against the Muslims of the eastern Mediterranean. This was not because these holy wars were launched, first and foremost, to eradicate Islam, or even to convert Muslims to the Christian faith. Rather, it was a consequence of Islam’s dominion over the Holy Land and the sacred city of Jerusalem.

The early history of Islam

According to Muslim tradition, Islam was born in c. 610
CE
when Muhammad–an illiterate, forty-year-old Arab native of Mecca (in modern Saudi Arabia)–began to experience a series of ‘revelations’ from Allah (God), relayed by the Archangel Gabriel. These ‘revelations’, regarded as the sacred and immutable words of God, were later set down in written form to become the Koran. During his lifetime, Muhammad set out to convert the pagan polytheist Arabs of Mecca and the surrounding Hijaz region (on the Arabian Peninsula’s western coast) to the monotheistic faith of Islam. This proved to be no easy task. In 622 the Prophet was forced to flee to the nearby city of Medina, a journey which served as the starting date for the Muslim calendar, and he then waged a bloody and prolonged war of religion against Mecca, finally conquering the city shortly before his death in 632.

The religion founded by Muhammad–Islam, meaning submission to the will of God–had common roots with Judaism and Christianity. During his life, the Prophet came into contact with adherents of these two faiths in Arabia and the eastern Roman Empire and his ‘revelations’ were presented as the perfecting refinement of these earlier religions. For this reason, Muhammad acknowledged the likes of Moses, Abraham and even Jesus as prophets, and a whole
sura
(or chapter) of the Koran was dedicated to the Virgin Mary.

During Muhammad’s own life, and in the few years immediately following his death, the warring tribes of the Arabian Peninsula were united under the banner of Islam. Over the next few decades, under the guidance of a series of able and ambitious caliphs (the Prophet’s successors) these Muslim Arabs proved to be an almost unstoppable force. Their incredible martial dynamism was married to a seemingly insatiable appetite for conquest–a hunger sustained by the Koran’s explicit demand for the Muslim faith and the rule of Islamic law to be spread unceasingly across the world. The Arab-Islamic approach to the subjugation of new territories also eased the path to exponential growth. Rather than requiring total submission and immediate conversion to Islam, the Muslims allowed ‘Peoples of the Book’, such as Jews and Christians, to continue in their faiths in return for the payment of a poll tax.

In the mid-630s ferocious armies of highly mobile, mounted Arab tribesmen began to pour out of the Arabian Peninsula. By 650 they had achieved startling success. With mercurial speed, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Egypt were absorbed into the new Arab-Islamic state. Over the next century the pace of expansion slowed from this breakneck pace, but inexorable gains continued, such that in the mid-eighth century the Muslim world stretched from the Indus River and the borders of China in the east, across North Africa to Spain and southern France in the west.

In the context of crusading history, a critical stage in this whole process was the capture of Jerusalem in 638 from the Greek Christians of Byzantium. This ancient city came to be revered as Islam’s third-holiest site, after Mecca and Medina. In part this was due to Islam’s Abrahamic heritage, but it was also dependent upon the belief that Muhammad had ascended to Heaven from Jerusalem during his ‘Night Journey’, and the associated tradition identifying the Holy City as the focus for the impending End of Days.

It was once popular to suggest that the Islamic world might have swept across all Europe, had not the Muslims been twice thwarted in their attempts to capture Constantinople (in 673 and 718) and then defeated in 732 at Poitiers by Charlemagne’s Frankish grandfather Charles the Hammer. In fact, important as these reversals were, a fundamental and profoundly limiting weakness within Islam had already shown its face: intractable and embittered religious and political division. At their core, these issues related to disputes over the legitimacy of Muhammad’s caliphal successors and the interpretation of his ‘revelations’.

Problems were apparent as early as 661, when the established line of ‘Rightly Guided Caliphs’ ended with the death of ‘Ali (the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law) and the rise of a rival Arab clan–the Umayyad dynasty. The Umayyads moved the capital of the Muslim world beyond the confines of Arabia for the first time, settling in the great Syrian metropolis of Damascus, and they held sway over Islam until the mid-eighth century. However, this same period witnessed the emergence of the Shi‘a (literally the ‘party’ or ‘faction’), a Muslim sect who argued that only descendants of ‘Ali and his wife Fatima (Muhammad’s daughter) could lawfully hold the title of caliph. Shi‘ite Muslims initially set out to contest the political authority of the mainstream Sunni form of Islam, but over time the schism between these two branches of the faith took on a doctrinal dimension, as Shi‘ites developed distinct approaches to theology, religious ritual and law.
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The fragmentation of the Muslim world

Over the next four centuries, the divisions within the Muslim world deepened and proliferated. In 750 a bloody coup brought Umayyad rule to an end, propelling another Arab dynasty–the Abbasids–to power. They shifted the centre of Sunni Islam even further from the Arabian homelands, founding a spectacular new capital in Iraq: the purpose-built city of Baghdad. This visionary measure had profound and far-reaching consequences. It heralded a comprehensive political, cultural and economic reorientation on the part of the Sunni ruling elite, away from the Levantine Near East to Mesopotamia–the cradle of ancient civilisation between the mighty Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, sometimes known as the Fertile Crescent–and further east into Persian Iran and beyond. Abbasid patronage also transformed Baghdad into one of the world’s great centres of scientific and philosophical learning. For the next five hundred years the heart of Sunni Islam lay, not in Syria or the Holy Land, but in Iraq and Iran.

However, Abbasid ascendancy coincided with the gradual dismemberment and fragmentation of the monolithic Islamic state. The Muslim rulers of Iberia (sometimes known as the Moors) broke away to establish an independent realm in the eighth century; and, over the decades, the rift between the Sunni and Shi‘a strands of Islam gradually intensified. Communities of Shi‘ite Muslims continued to live, largely in peace, alongside and among Sunnis across the Near and Middle East. But in 969 a particularly assertive Shi‘ite faction seized control of North Africa. Championed by a dynasty known as the Fatimids (because they claimed descent from Fatima, Muhammad’s daughter), they set up their own rival Shi‘ite caliph, rejecting Sunni Baghdad’s authority. The Fatimids soon proved themselves to be potent adversaries–conquering large swathes of the Near East from the Abbasids, including Jerusalem, Damascus and sections of the eastern Mediterranean coastline. By the late eleventh century, the Abbasids and Fatimids regarded each other as avowed foes. Thus, by the time of the crusades, Islam was riven by an elemental schism–one that prevented the Muslim rulers of Egypt and Iraq from offering any form of coordinated or concerted resistance to Christian invasion.

Even as the enmity between the Sunnis and Shi‘ites hardened, the degree of influence exercised by both the Abbasid and Fatimid caliphs dwindled. They remained as nominal figureheads–in theory retaining absolute control over religious and political affairs–but in practice executive power came to be wielded by their secular lieutenants: in Baghdad, the sultan; in Cairo, the vizier.

A further, dramatic change transformed the world of Islam in the eleventh century–the coming of the Turks. From around 1040, these nomadic tribesmen from Central Asia–noted for their warlike character and agile skill as mounted archers–began to seep into the Middle East. One particular clan, the Seljuqs (from the steppes of Russia, beyond the Aral Sea), spearheaded the Turkish migration. Having adopted the religion of Sunni Islam, these fearsome Seljuqs declared their unswerving allegiance to the Abbasid caliph and readily supplanted the now sedentary Arab and Persian aristocracy of Iran and Iraq. By 1055, the Seljuq warlord Tughrul Beg had been appointed as sultan of Baghdad and could claim effective overlordship of Sunni Islam; a role which members of his dynasty would hold as a hereditary right for more than a century. The advent of the Seljuq Turks brought a new, vital lease of life and unity to the Abbasid world. Their restless energy and martial ferocity soon brought sweeping gains. To the south, the Fatimids were driven back and Damascus and Jerusalem reconquered; notable victories were scored against the Byzantines in Asia Minor; and a Seljuq splinter group eventually founded their own independent sultanate in Anatolia.

By the early 1090s the Seljuqs had reshaped the Sunni Muslim world. Tughrul Beg’s able and ambitious grandson Malik Shah held the office of sultan and, together with his brother Tutush, enjoyed relatively secure rule of Mesopotamia and most of the Levant. This new Turkish empire–sometimes referred to as the Great Seljuq Sultanate of Baghdad–was forged through ruthless despotism and the presentation of the Shi‘ites as dangerous, heretical enemies against whom Sunnis must unite. But when Malik Shah died in 1092, his mighty realm quickly collapsed amid succession crises and chaotic civil war. His two young sons fought to be named sultan, contesting control of Iraq and Iran; while in Syria, Tutush sought to seize power for himself. When he died in 1095, his sons Ridwan and Duqaq likewise squabbled over their inheritance, snatching Aleppo and Damascus respectively. At this same time, conditions in Shi‘ite Egypt were little better. Here, too, the precipitous deaths of the Fatimid caliph and his vizier in 1094 and 1095 brought sudden change, culminating in the rise of a new vizier of Armenian heritage, al-Afdal. Thus, in the very year that the crusades began, Sunni Islam was in a turbulent state of disarray and a new ruler of Fatimid Egypt was just finding his feet. There is no evidence to suggest that Christians in the West knew of these manifold difficulties, so they cannot be regarded as a definite trigger for the holy war to come. Even so, the timing of the First Crusade was remarkably propitious.
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The Near East at the end of the eleventh century

The endemic disunity afflicting Islam at the end of the eleventh century would exert a profound influence over the course of the crusades. So too did the Near East’s distinctive cultural, ethnic and political make-up. In truth, this region–the battleground in the war for the Holy Land–cannot be spoken of as a Muslim world. The relatively tolerant approach to subjugation adopted during the early Arab-Islamic conquests meant that, even centuries later, the Levant still contained a very high proportion of indigenous Christians–from Greeks and Armenians to Syrians and Copts–as well as pockets of Jewish population. Nomadic communities of Bedouins also continued to range widely across the East–migrant Arabic-speaking Muslims, who had few fixed allegiances. This long-established pattern of settlement was overlaid by a numerically inferior Muslim ruling elite, itself made up of Arabs, some Persians and the newly arrived Turks. The Near East, therefore, was little more than a fractured patchwork of disparate social and devotional groupings, and not a purebred Islamic stronghold.

As far as the main powers within the Muslim world were concerned, the Levant was also something of a backwater–notwithstanding the political and spiritual significance attached to cities like Jerusalem and Damascus. For Sunni Seljuqs and Shi‘ite Fatimids, the real centres of governmental authority, economic wealth and cultural identity were Mesopotamia and Egypt. The Near East was essentially the border zone between these two dominant spheres of influence, a world sometimes to be contested, but almost always to be treated as a secondary concern. Even during the reign of Malik Shah, no fully determined effort was made to subdue and integrate Syria into the sultanate, and much of the region was left in the hands of power-hungry, semi-independent warlords.