The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land (5 page)

Thus, when Latin crusading armies arrived in the Near East to wage what essentially were frontier wars, they were not actually invading the heartlands of Islam. Instead, they were fighting for control of a land that, in some respects, was also a Muslim frontier, one peopled by an assortment of Christians, Jews and Muslims who, over the centuries, had become acculturated to the experience of conquest by an external force, be it at the hands of Byzantines and Persians, or Arabs and Turks.

Islamic warfare and jihad

In the late eleventh century, the style and practice of Muslim warfare were in a state of flux. The traditional mainstay of any Turkish fighting force was the lightly armoured mounted warrior, astride a fleet-footed pony, armed with a powerful composite bow that enabled him to loose streams of arrows from horseback. He might also be equipped with a light lance, single-edged sword, axe or dagger. These troops relied upon speed of movement and rapid manoeuvrability to overcome opponents.

The Turks classically employed two main tactics: encirclement–whereby an enemy was surrounded from all sides by a fast-moving, swirling mass of mounted warriors, and bombarded with ceaseless volleys of arrows; and feigned retreat–the technique of turning tail in battle in the hope of prompting an opponent to give fevered chase, the indiscipline of which would break their formation and leave them vulnerable to sudden counter-attack. This style of combat was still favoured by the Seljuqs of Asia Minor, but the Turks of Syria and Palestine had begun to adopt a wider array of Persian and Arab military practices, adjusting to the use of more heavily armoured mounted lancers and larger infantry forces, and to the needs of siege warfare. By far and away the most common forms of warfare in the Near East were raiding, skirmishing and petty internecine struggles over power, land and wealth.
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In theory, however, Muslim troops could be called upon to fight for a supposedly higher cause–that of holy war.

Islam had, from its earliest days, embraced warfare. Muhammad himself prosecuted a series of military campaigns while subjugating Mecca, and the explosive expansion of the Muslim world during the seventh and eighth centuries was fuelled by an avowed devotional obligation to spread Islamic rule. The union of faith and violence within the Muslim religion, therefore, was more rapid and natural than that which gradually developed in Latin Christianity.

In an attempt to define the role of warfare within Islam, Muslim scholars turned to the Koran and the
hadith
, the ‘traditions’ or sayings associated with Muhammad. These texts provided numerous examples of the Prophet advocating ‘struggle in the path of God’. In the early Islamic period there was discussion about what this ‘struggle’ or
jihad
(literally ‘striving’) actually involved–and the debate continues to this day. Some, like the Muslim mystics, or
Sufis
, argued that the most important or ‘Greater
jihad
’ was the internal struggle waged against sin and error. But by the late eighth century, Sunni Muslim jurists had begun to develop a formal theory advocating what is sometimes termed the ‘Lesser
jihad
’: ‘rising up in arms’ to wage physical warfare against the infidel. To justify this they cited canonical evidence, such as verses from the ninth
sura
of the Koran, including: ‘Fight the polytheists totally as they fight you totally’, and
hadith
, such as Muhammad’s declaration that: ‘A morning or an evening expedition in God’s path is better than the world and what it contains, and for one of you to remain in the line of battle is better than his prayers for sixty years.’

Legal treatises from this early period declared that
jihad
was an obligation incumbent upon all able-bodied Muslims, although the duty was primarily seen as being communal, rather than individual, and the responsibility for leadership ultimately rested with the caliph. Making reference to the likes of the
hadith
‘The gates of Paradise are under the shadow of the swords’, these treatises also affirmed that those fighting in the
jihad
would be granted entry to the heavenly Paradise. Jurists posited a formal division of the world into two spheres–the
Dar al-Islam
, or ‘House of Peace’ (the area within which Muslim rule and law prevailed); and the
Dar al-harb
, or ‘House of War’ (the rest of the world). The express purpose of the
jihad
was to wage a relentless holy war in the
Dar al-harb
, until such time as all mankind had accepted Islam, or submitted to Muslim rule. No permanent peace treaties with non-Muslim enemies were permissible, and any temporary truces could last no more than ten years.

As the centuries passed, the driving impulse towards expansion encoded in this classical theory of
jihad
was gradually eroded. Arab tribesmen began to settle into more sedentary lifestyles and to trade with non-Muslims, such as the Byzantines. Holy wars against the likes of Christians continued, but they became far more sporadic and often were promoted and prosecuted by Muslim emirs, without caliphal endorsement. By the eleventh century, the rulers of Sunni Baghdad were far more interested in using
jihad
to promote Islamic orthodoxy by battling ‘heretic’ Shi‘ites than they were in launching holy wars against Christendom. The suggestion that Islam should engage in an unending struggle to enlarge its borders and subjugate non-Muslims held little currency; so too did the idea of unifying in defence of the Islamic faith and its territories. When the Christian crusades began, the ideological impulse of devotional warfare thus lay dormant within the body of Islam, but the essential framework remained in place.
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Islam and Christian Europe on the eve of the crusades

A charged and vexatious question remains: did the Muslim world provoke the crusades, or were these Latin holy wars acts of aggression? This fundamental enquiry requires an assessment of the overall degree of threat posed to the Christian West by Islam in the eleventh century. In one sense, Muslims were pressing on the borders of Europe. To the east, Asia Minor had served for generations as a battleground between Islam and the Byzantine Empire; and Muslim armies had made repeated attempts to conquer Christendom’s greatest metropolis–Constantinople. To the south-west, Muslims continued to rule vast tracts of the Iberian Peninsula and might one day push north again, beyond the Pyrenees. In reality, however, Europe was by no means engaged in an urgent struggle for survival on the eve of the crusades. No coherent, pan-Mediterranean onslaught threatened, because, although the Moors in Iberia and the Turks in Asia Minor shared a common religious heritage, they were never united in one purpose.

In fact, after the first forceful surge of Islamic expansion, the interaction between neighbouring Christian and Muslim polities had been relatively unremarkable; characterised, like that between any potential rivals, by periods of conflict and others of coexistence. There is little or no evidence to suggest that these two world religions were somehow locked in an inevitable and perpetual ‘clash of civilisations’. From the tenth century onwards, for example, Islam and Byzantium developed a tense, sometimes quarrelsome respect for one another, but their relationship was no more fraught with conflict than that between the Greeks and their Slavic or Latin neighbours to the west.

This is not to suggest that the world was filled with utopian peace and harmony. The Byzantines were only too happy to exploit any signs of Muslim weakness. Thus, in 969, while the Abbasid world fragmented, Greek troops pushed eastwards, recapturing much of Asia Minor and recovering the strategically significant city of Antioch. And with the advent of the Seljuq Turks, Byzantium faced renewed military pressure. In 1071, the Seljuqs crushed an imperial army at the Battle of Manzikert (in eastern Asia Minor), and though historians no longer consider this to have been an utterly cataclysmic reversal for the Greeks, it still was a stinging setback that presaged notable Turkish gains in Anatolia. Fifteen years later, the Seljuqs also recovered Antioch.

Meanwhile, in Spain and Portugal, Christians had begun to reconquer territory from the Moors, and in 1085 the Iberian Latins achieved a deeply symbolic victory, seizing control of Toledo, the ancient Christian capital of Spain. Nevertheless, at this stage, the Latins’ gradual southward expansion seems to have been driven by political and economic stimuli and not religious ideology. The conflict in Iberia did become more heated after 1086, when a fanatical Islamic sect known as the Almoravids invaded Spain from North Africa, supplanting surviving indigenous Moorish power in the peninsula. This new regime reinvigorated Muslim resistance, scoring a number of notable military victories against the Christians of the north. But Almoravid aggression cannot really be said to have sparked the crusades, because the Latin holy wars launched at the end of the eleventh century were directed towards the Levant, not Iberia.

So what did ignite the war between Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land? In one sense the crusades were a reaction to an act of Islamic aggression–the Muslim conquest of sacred Jerusalem–but this had taken place in 638, and thus was hardly a fresh offence. At the start of the eleventh century, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, thought to enclose the site of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, had been partially demolished by the volatile Fatimid ruler known to history as the Mad Caliph Hakim. His subsequent persecution of the local Christian population lasted for more than a decade, ending only when he declared himself a living God and turned on his own Muslim subjects. Tensions also seem to have been running high in 1027, when Muslims reportedly threw stones into the compound of the Holy Sepulchre. More recently, Latin Christians attempting to make devotional pilgrimages to the Levant, of whom there continued to be many, reported some difficulties in visiting the Holy Places, and spread stories of eastern Christian repression in Muslim Palestine.

Two Arabic accounts offer important but divergent insights into these issues. Ibn al-‘Arabi, a Spanish Muslim pilgrim who set out for the Holy Land in 1092, described Jerusalem as a thriving centre of religious devotion for Muslims, Christians and Jews alike. He noted that Christians were permitted to keep their churches in a good state of repair, and gave no hint that pilgrims–be they Greek or Latin–were suffering abuse or interference. By contrast, the mid-twelfth-century Aleppan chronicler al-‘Azimi wrote that: ‘The people of the Syrian ports prevented Frankish and Byzantine pilgrims from crossing to Jerusalem. Those of them who survived spread the news about that to their country. So they prepared themselves for military invasion.’ Clearly, al-‘Azimi at least believed that Muslim attacks triggered the crusades.
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In fact, on the basis of all the surviving evidence, the case could be argued in either direction. By 1095 Muslims and Christians had been waging war against one another for centuries; no matter how far it was in the past, Islam undoubtedly had seized Christian territory, including Jerusalem; and Christians living in and visiting the Holy Land may have been subjected to persecution. On the other hand, the immediate context in which the crusades were launched gave no obvious clue that a titanic transnational war of religion was either imminent or inevitable. Islam was not about to initiate a grand offensive against the West. Nor were the Muslim rulers of the Near East engaging in acts akin to ethnic cleansing, or subjecting religious minority groups to widespread and sustained oppression. There may at times have been little love lost between Christian and Muslim neighbours, and perhaps there were outbreaks of intolerance in the Levant, but there was, in truth, little to distinguish all this from the endemic political, military and social struggles of the age.

On a late November morning in the year 1095, Pope Urban II delivered a sermon that would transform the history of Europe. His rousing words transfixed the crowd that had gathered in a small field outside the southern French town of Clermont, and in the months that followed his message reverberated across the West, igniting an embittered holy war that would endure for centuries to come.

Urban declared that Christianity was in dire peril, threatened by invasion and appalling oppression. The Holy City of Jerusalem was now in the hands of Muslims–‘a people…alien to God’, bent upon ritual torture and unspeakable desecration. He called upon Latin Europe to rise up against this supposedly savage foe as ‘soldiers of Christ’, reclaiming the Holy Land and releasing eastern Christians from ‘servitude’. Enticed by the promise that this righteous struggle would purge their souls of sin, tens of thousands of men, women and children marched out of the West to wage war against the Muslim world in the First Crusade.
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POPE URBAN AND THE IDEA OF CRUSADING

Urban II was perhaps sixty years old when he launched the First Crusade in 1095. The son of northern French nobility, and a former cleric and Cluniac monk, he became pope in 1088, at a time when the papacy, reeling from a rancorous and protracted power struggle with the emperor of Germany, stood on the brink of overthrow. So parlous was Urban’s position that it took him six years to reassert control over Rome’s Lateran Palace, the traditional seat of papal authority. Yet, through cautious diplomacy and the adoption of measured, rather than confrontational, policies of reform, the new pope oversaw a gradual renaissance in the prestige and influence of his office. By 1095 this slow rejuvenation had begun, but the papacy’s notional right to act as head of the Latin Church and spiritual overlord to every Christian in western Europe was still far from realised.

It was against this background of partial recovery that the idea of the First Crusade was born. In March 1095 Urban was presiding over an ecclesiastical council in the northern Italian city of Piacenza when ambassadors from Byzantium arrived. They bore an appeal from the Greek Christian Emperor Alexius I Comnenus, a ruler whose astute and assertive governance had arrested decades of internal decline within the great eastern empire. Exorbitant programmes of taxation had refilled the imperial treasury in Constantinople, restoring Byzantium’s aura of authority and munificence, but Alexius still faced an array of foreign enemies, including the Muslim Turks of Asia Minor. He thus dispatched a petition for military aid to the council in Piacenza, urging Urban to send a detachment of Latin troops to help repel the threat posed by Islam. Alexius probably hoped for little more than a token force of Frankish mercenaries, a small army that could be readily shaped and directed. In fact, over the next two years, his empire would be practically overrun by a tide of humankind.

The Greek emperor’s request appears to have chimed with notions already fermenting in Urban II’s mind, and through the spring and summer that followed the pope refined and developed these ideas, envisaging an endeavour that might fulfil a broader array of ambitions: a form of armed pilgrimage to the East, what is now called a ‘crusade’. Historians have sometimes characterised Urban as the unwitting instigator of this momentous venture, suggesting that he expected only a few hundred knights to answer his call to arms. But in reality he seems to have had a fairly shrewd sense of the potential scale and scope of this enterprise and to have laid the foundations of widespread recruitment with some assiduity.

Urban recognised that developing the idea of an expedition to aid Byzantium offered a chance not only to defend eastern Christendom and improve relations with the Greek Church, but also to reaffirm and expand Rome’s authority and to harness and redirect the destructive bellicosity of Christians living in the Latin West. This grand scheme would be launched as part of a broader campaign to extend the reach of papal influence beyond the confines of central Italy, into Urban’s birthplace and homeland, France. From July 1095 onwards he began a lengthy preaching tour north of the Alps–the first such visit by a pope for close to half a century–and announced that a major Church council would be held in November at Clermont, in the Auvergne region of central France. Through the summer and early autumn Urban visited a succession of prominent monasteries, including his own former house of Cluny, cultivating support for Rome and preparing the ground for the unveiling of his ‘crusading’ idea. He also primed two men who would play central roles in the coming expedition: Adhémar, bishop of Le Puy, a leading Provençal churchman and an ardent supporter of the papacy; and Count Raymond of Toulouse, southern France’s richest and most powerful secular lord.

By November the pope was ready to reveal his plans. Twelve archbishops, eighty bishops and ninety abbots congregated in Clermont for the largest clerical assembly of Urban’s pontificate. Then, after nine days of general ecclesiastical debate, the pope announced his intention to deliver a special sermon. On 27 November, hundreds of spectators crowded into a field outside the city to hear him speak.
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The sermon at Clermont

At Clermont Urban called upon the Latin West to take up arms in pursuit of two linked goals. First, he proclaimed the need to protect Christendom’s eastern borders in Byzantium, emphasising the bond of Christian fraternity shared with the Greeks and the supposedly imminent threat of Muslim invasion. According to one account, he urged his audience ‘to run as quickly as you can to the aid of your brothers living on the eastern shore’ because ‘the Turks…have overrun them right up to the Mediterranean Sea’. But the epic endeavour of which Urban spoke did not end with the provision of military aid to Constantinople. Instead, in a visionary masterstroke, he broadened his appeal to include an additional target, one guaranteed to stir Frankish hearts. Fusing the ideals of warfare and pilgrimage, he unveiled an expedition that would forge a path to the Holy Land itself, there to win back possession of Jerusalem, the most hallowed site in the Christian cosmos. Urban evoked the unparalleled sanctity of this city, this ‘navel of the world’, stating that it was ‘the [fountain] of all Christian teaching’, the place ‘in which Christ lived and suffered’.
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In spite of the undoubted resonance of these twinned objectives, like any ruler recruiting for war the pope still needed to lend his cause an aura of legitimate justification and burning urgency, and here he faced a problem. Recent history offered no obvious event that might serve to focus and inspire a vengeful tide of enthusiasm. Yes, Jerusalem was ruled by Muslims, but this had been the case since the seventh century. And, while Byzantium may have been facing a deepening threat of Turkish aggression, western Christendom was not on the brink of invasion or annihilation at the hands of Near Eastern Islam. With no appalling atrocity or immediate threat to draw upon, Urban chose to cultivate a sense of immediacy and incite a wrathful hunger for retribution by demonising the enemy of his proposed ‘crusade’.

Muslims therefore were portrayed as subhuman savages, bent upon the barbaric abuse of Christendom. Urban described how Turks ‘were slaughtering and capturing many [Greeks], destroying churches and laying waste to the kingdom of God’. He also asserted that Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land were being abused and exploited by Muslims, with the rich being stripped of their wealth by illegal taxes, and the poor subjected to torture:

Christians living under Muslim rule in the Levant were said to have been reduced to a state of ‘slavery’ by ‘sword, rapine and flame’. Prey to constant persecution, these unfortunates might suffer forced circumcision, protracted disembowelment or ritualised immolation. ‘Of the appalling violation of women’, the pope reportedly reflected, it would be ‘more evil to speak than to keep silent’. Urban appears to have made extensive use of this form of graphic and incendiary imagery, akin to that which, in a modern-day setting, might be associated with war crimes or genocide. His accusations bore little or no relation to the reality of Muslim rule in the Near East, but it is impossible to gauge whether the pope believed his own propaganda or entered into a conscious campaign of manipulation and distortion. Either way, his explicit dehumanisation of the Muslim world served as a vital catalyst to the ‘crusading’ cause, and further enabled him to argue that fighting against an ‘alien’ other was preferable to war between Christians and within Europe.
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Pope Urban’s decision to condemn Islam would have dark and enduring consequences in the years to come. But it is important to recognise that, in reality, the notion of conflict with the Muslim world was not written into the DNA of crusading. Urban’s vision was of a devotional expedition sanctioned by Rome, focused first and foremost upon the defence or reconquest of sacred territory. In some ways his choice of Islam as an enemy was almost incidental, and there is little to suggest that the Latins or their Greek allies truly saw the Muslim world as an avowed enemy before 1095.
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The pulse-quickening notion of avenging the ‘execrable abuses’ enacted by demonised Muslims may have captivated Urban’s audience at Clermont, but his ‘crusading’ message contained a further, even more powerful, lure; one that addressed the very nature of medieval Christian existence. Bred upon a vision of religious faith that emphasised the overbearing threat of sin and damnation, the Latins of the West were enmeshed in a desperate, lifelong spiritual struggle to purge the taint of corruption from their souls. Primed to seek redemption, they were thus enthralled when the pope declared that this expedition to the East would be a sacred venture, participation in which would lead to ‘the remission of all their sins’. In the past, even ‘just war’ (that is, violence that God accepted as necessary) had still been regarded as innately sinful. But now Urban spoke of a conflict that transcended these traditional boundaries. His cause was to possess a sanctified quality–to be a holy war, not simply condoned by ‘the Lord’, but actively promoted and endorsed. According to one eyewitness, the pope even averred that ‘Christ commands’ the faithful to enlist.

Urban’s genius was to construct the idea of ‘crusading’ within the framework of existing religious practice, thus ensuring that, in eleventh-century terms at least, the connection he established between warfare and salvation made clear, rational sense. In 1095, Latin Christians were accustomed to the idea that punishment owed through sinfulness might be cancelled out by confession and the performance of penitential activities, like prayer, fasting or pilgrimage. At Clermont, Urban fused the familiar notion of a salvific expedition with the more audacious concept of fighting for God, urging ‘everyone of no matter what class…knight or foot-soldier, rich or poor’ to join what was to be, in essence, an armed pilgrimage. This monumental endeavour, laden with danger and the threat of intense suffering, would take its participants to the very gates of Jerusalem, Christendom’s premier pilgrimage destination. As such, it promised to be an experience imbued with overwhelming redemptive potency; functioning as a ‘super’ penance, capable of scouring the spirit of any transgression.

From the rape of the Holy City by an alien enemy to the promise of a new path to redemption, the pope conjured a persuasive and emotive blend of images and ideas in support of his call to arms. The effect on his audience appears to have been electric, leaving ‘the eyes of some bathed with tears, [while others] trembled’. In what must have been a pre-planned move, Adhémar, bishop of Le Puy, was the first to step forward to commit to the cause. On the following day the bishop was proclaimed papal legate (Urban’s official representative) for the coming expedition. As its spiritual leader, he was expected to promote the pope’s agenda, not least the policy of détente with the Greek Church of Byzantium. At the same time, messengers arrived from Raymond of Toulouse proclaiming the count’s own support for the cause. Urban’s sermon had been a resounding success, and over the next seven months he followed it up with an extended preaching tour, which saw his message crisscross France.
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And yet, in spite of the fact that Clermont must be regarded as the First Crusade’s moment of genesis, it would be wrong to regard Urban II as the sole architect of the ‘crusading ideal’. Previous historians have rightly emphasised his debt to the past, not least in relation to Pope Gregory VII’s pioneering exploration of holy war theory. But it is equally important to recognise that the idea of the First Crusade–its nature, intentions and rewards–underwent ongoing, largely organic development throughout the expedition. Indeed, this process even continued after the event, as the world sought to interpret and understand such an epochal episode. It is all too easy to imagine the First Crusade as a single, well-ordered host, driven on to Jerusalem by Urban’s impassioned preaching. In reality, the months and years that followed November 1095 saw disjointed waves of departure. Even what we commonly term the ‘main armies’ of the crusade began the first phase of their journey not as a single force, but rather as a rough conglomeration of smaller contingents, gradually feeling their way towards shared goals and systems of governance.

Within a month of the pope’s first sermon, popular (and often unsanctioned) preachers had begun to proclaim the call to crusade across Europe. In their demagogic hands some of the subtleties surrounding the spiritual rewards associated with the expedition–what would come to be known as the crusading ‘indulgence’–seem to have been eroded. Urban had likely intended that the remission offered would only apply to the temporal punishment for confessed sins; a rather complex formula, but one that adhered to the niceties of Church law. Later events suggest that many crusaders thought they had been given assured guarantees of heavenly salvation and thus believed that those who died during the campaign became sacred martyrs. Such notions continued to inform thinking about the crusading experience for centuries to come, establishing a gnawing rift between official and popular conceptions of these holy wars.