The World of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  The Abbasids

  In Iraq, from the 940s, the once-dominant Abbasid caliphate, established in the mid-eighth century, had been controlled by a succession of emirs from a north Iranian Shi’ite dynasty, the Buyids, who, behind formal deference to the politically emasculated Abbasid caliphs, exercised power through a family coalition of rulers across Iraq and western Iran. They relied on accommodation between their Shi’ite beliefs and those of their Sunni subjects and taxpayers, and on polyglot armies, including Turkish slave troops in a system that lacked cohesive unity. From the 1020s, nomadic tribes from the central Asiatic steppes beyond the Arab world began to migrate south and west, towards Anatolia, attracted by political instability and access to new pasture. In contrast with the Turkish troops recruited by the caliphate from the ninth century onwards, the concerted Turkish invasion from the 1040s and 1050s, led by the Seljuks, transformed the Abbasid polity.

  The Fatimids

  The gradual implosion of Baghdad’s central control over the northern arc of the Fertile Crescent (the region from the Persian Gulf through Mesopotamia, the Jazira and Syria to the Nile valley) was mirrored by the fates of the Abbasid’s two rival caliphates: the Fatimid Shi’ites in Egypt and the Umayyad rulers of Cordoba in al-Andalus. In 969, from their base in north Africa, the Fatimids had conquered Egypt, the economic powerhouse and commercial hub of the Levant, establishing a new administrative capital at Cairo and ruling over a population of predominantly Sunni Muslims, Coptic and Melkite (i.e. Greek) Christians. Armed with the wealth of the Nile valley, they competed with the Sunni Abbasids for dominance over the wider Islamic world. The political contest was pursued largely in Palestine and Syria, making them a frontier zone to be fought over by outside powers. However, by the early eleventh century, direct Fatimid rule over their original north African centre of power had itself broken down as nomadic Arab and Berber tribes ranged freely and local dynasties asserted themselves, such as the Zirids in Tunis, while control of Sicily veered between Zirid overlordship and warring island dynasties.

  In Egypt itself, as in Baghdad, the executive authority of the caliphs, after the robust fundamentalism of Caliph al-Hakim (996–1021), devolved onto competing court factions, a process intensified after the accession as caliph in 1036 of a six-year-old child, al-Mutansir (1036–94). Beside the court and administration, Fatimid armies comprised distinct, at times competing polyglot elements – Arab, Berber, Turkish, sub-Saharan African, Armenian – providing further scope for factionalism and dissension. As political control within the caliphate swung towards military not bureaucratic leadership, competition between Turkish and African regiments intensified, the consequent instability exacerbated by the influx into Egypt of nomads and Bedouin. In the 1050s plague and disappointing levels of the Nile flood reduced tax and rent returns, sharpening competition for control of diminished resources. In the 1060s violence between factions undermined Fatimid rule in Syria and threatened the regime in Egypt before some order was restored under the military rule of the vizier Badr al-Jamali (1074–94), an ethnic Armenian who had carved out a successful career in Fatimid Syria. Power in Egypt remained fragmented. The Fatimid caliphs claimed to be heirs to messianic imams, wielding supreme authority over both faith and law, their rule legitimised directly by God, not, as in Sunni political thought, by the collective authority of the umma. This transcendent status bestowed legitimacy on whoever held actual power under them. However, except with forceful caliphs such as al-Hakim, these theoretical claims made little difference to the realities of a heterogeneous political and social system with inherent centrifugal dynamics of communities and geography.

  The Iranian poet, scholar and court official Naser-e Khosraw (1004–88), in his account of his extended travels across the Near East between 1045 and 1052, provides insight into the concurrent diversity and cohesion of the Arab world. A polymath, his leaning embraced Greek as well as Arabic philosophy and his career took him from India to Egypt to Afghanistan. Remembered chiefly for his Persian poetry, Naser had once worked for the Seljuks, visited Mecca and studied Shi’ite teaching in Egypt. His observations of the territories he crossed and the people he encountered ranged from a young pupil of the great Persian philosopher Avicenna (c. 980–1037) in a town near the Caspian Sea conducting a seminar on Euclid, to a sixty-year-old Bedouin at Harran in the Jazira who insisted he neither knew nor understood the Koran. Along the way Naser observed the military defences in Levantine and Egyptian ports prompted by fears of Byzantine naval attack, but also recorded the diplomacy that allowed the Byzantine rebuilding of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Everywhere he noted the international trade with Byzantium, north Africa, Spain, Sicily and Italy, especially in textiles and slaves. Naser’s picture of the Arab world of the 1040s revealed mobile civilian a well as military elites, an international community of scholarship, doctrinal diversity, urban living and lively commerce – all within a context of political upheaval and the presence of war.3

  The Umayyads

  Further west, similar forces of decentralisation overwhelmed the Umayyad caliphate of Cordoba. Like its eastern Mediterranean equivalents, this Sunni caliphate, formally established in 929 after 150 years of Umayyad rule in Spain, relied on a professional literate bureaucracy, the approval of local Muslim aristocracies, and a mercenary and slave army, made up chiefly of Slavs and Berbers. In 1000 the caliphate appeared at the height of its power – rich, internally peaceful, externally effective – its de facto ruler, al-Mansur (d. 1002), launching a successful raid in 997 on the great Christian shrine of Compostela in Galicia. Yet, by the 1030s, the caliphate had disintegrated. One factor was the attempt by al-Mansur’s heirs to move towards a Christian European model of uniting legitimacy and executive power by usurping the caliphate from the Umayyads. This loosened the bonds of loyalty with the local rulers, already strained by their exclusion from administrative and military patronage. Factional struggles, Umayyad pretenders and uncontrolled Berber freebooters destroyed central authority. Al-Andalus became a cockpit for competition between its Muslim princes, exploitation by Christian rulers to the north, and invasion by Moroccan religious fundamentalists from the south.4

  Western Christendom

  The north-western shores of the Mediterranean presented even less unity. Power resided with regional territorial princelings and rulers of small cities and emerging maritime entrepôts in Catalonia, Provence, Liguria, Lombardy, Tuscany, Campania, Apulia and the Veneto. Around 1000, the Ottonian kings of Germany, who had revived Charlemagne’s western empire in 962, seemed to be laying foundations for a new lasting imperium based on a transalpine alliance between Germany and northern and central Italy under the young charismatic Otto III (r. 983–1002). This proved evanescent, the political future of Italy resting with local lordships, such as those in Apulia and Calabria annexed by Norman adventurers from the 1040s onwards, and cities such as Genoa, Milan, Florence, Pisa, Venice and Rome. Whatever power German emperors wielded in Italy was achieved by negotiation laced with occasional invasion. They were further challenged after 1060 by political and ecclesiastical alliances constructed by belligerent Roman popes, who supported challenges to imperial rights and authority from the Elbe to the Tiber. Further east, in newly Christianised Hungary, Bohemia and Poland, the German emperor’s power to influence local rulers became attenuated. The two generations of conflicts between German emperors and popes, known as the Investiture Contest (to 1122), limited German imperial intervention into wider Mediterranean affairs. At the same time, those seeking alternative sources of legitimacy for military adventurism in the region could look to popes eager for useful political alliances.

  Byzantium

  By the 1020s, the largest, wealthiest and oldest Christian power, the Eastern Roman Empire of Byzantium, had experienced a half century of extensive if expensive territorial expansion. The empire’s borders stretched from northern Syria to Apulia, the Danube to Cyprus and Crete. Its diplomatic reach touched Eurasia from Russia, the steppes nort
h of the Caspian, Scandinavia and the British Isles, to Iran and sub-Saharan Africa. In mid-century, Greek recruiting agents left coins and seals in Winchester while their emperors had paid for the rebuilding of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem (1036–40; see ‘The Holy Sepulchre’, p. xxiii). Like its neighbours to the east, Byzantium relied on a professional bureaucracy, a pliant aristocracy, a peaceful capital, an increasing role for polyglot mercenaries in its armies, the legitimising glue of religion, and taxpayers. Also in common with their eastern neighbours, this aggregation of support splintered as the eleventh century progressed, the tension between defence and taxation matching that between noble, military and bureaucratic factions competing for the imperial throne. Political unrest undermined administrative efficiency. From the 1040s, the once inviolate gold currency began to be debased, losing two-thirds of its value by the 1080s. In the middle of the century, plagues exacerbated economic and fiscal problems, undermining the tax base and intensifying the contest for power. Unlike in Islamdom, where inert legitimacy clung to ancient lineage while power was exercised by others, in Byzantium – as in its classical Roman predecessor – with sufficient support from the Church, army, civil service and the capital, Constantinople, might became right. Despite periods of dual monarchy between empresses and more or less pliant spouses or juvenile relatives, there could be no lasting system of empereurs fainéants. The throne passed by military coup at least three times in the eleventh century, while the empire’s territorial integrity was compromised.

  Eastern Anatolia, the core province of the empire, was penetrated by Turkish nomads from the 1020s, as was northern Syria from the 1060s. Other nomadic groups, the Cumans and Pechenegs, threatened the Danube frontier. In 1071, Bari, the last Byzantine outpost in Italy, was taken by Norman forces, who then launched a series of attacks across the Adriatic on the western Balkans. In the decades after 1070, northern Syria and Armenian Cilicia were lost and most of central Anatolia overrun by more organised Turkish invaders. Although the merry-go-round of new emperors stopped in 1081 with the seizure of power by the general Alexius Comnenus, the empire was reduced to reliance on the coastal plains and ports of Asia Minor, on Greece and the Balkans. The massive loss of taxpaying subjects and lands with which to barter internal support was not matched by any commensurate lessening of the financial and military needs of defence: far from it.5

  By 1100, the existing Mediterranean polities had been overtaken by internal dislocation and foreign invasion from the Eurasian steppes, northern Europe and the deserts of Arabia and north Africa. Power became more decentralised, focused on competing city states and dominated by warrior rulers with origins outside the region, who found their own attempts to rule as challenging as it had been for those they replaced. Nomadic Turks from steppes beyond the Caspian Sea now lorded it over ancient cities of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Palestine, and occupied the ancient Anatolian heartlands of the Eastern Roman Empire. Adventurers from northern France ruled in Palermo and Messina and, from 1098–9, Syrian Antioch and Jerusalem. The cities of the north African seaboard were regular victims of Arab nomads. Moroccan Berbers determined the politics of al-Andalus. Political power in Cairo was swapped between Iraqi, Armenian, Syrian and Kurdish viziers, their armies recruited from the steppes north of the Black Sea to the Sudan. Kurds found preferment from the Caspian to the Nile. Byzantine armies welcomed Slavs, Armenians, Turks, Scandinavians, Anglo-Saxons and Frenchmen. Italian merchants appeared as increasingly familiar presences in the trading posts and markets of north Africa and the Levant. In this context, the invasion of Syria and Palestine by armies from western Europe in the 1090s and their subsequent establishment of new warrior governments based on the region’s cities, while extreme, were hardly eccentric. Local Syrian observers, by the 1090s only too familiar with alien foreign conquerors and overlords, could be forgiven for initially regarding the crusaders’ invasion as yet another, if peculiarly violent and determined, foray by foreign mercenaries, hardly breaking a long and familiar line.6

  A New Dispensation: Nomads, Mercenaries and Conquerors

  Seljuks

  Of all the eleventh-century invaders of the Mediterranean region, the most significant were the Seljuk Turks. They reordered the Muslim world. Unlike previous usurpers of power in the caliphate, the Seljuks came from outside the old Arab empire. While steppe mercenaries and slaves had been employed throughout the caliphate for generations, the Seljuks added not just different rulers but fresh social and economic direction. Driven by pressure on resources in the steppes and attracted by long-standing economic links with surrounding sedentary societies, Turkish tribes had been infiltrating the Near East, Iran, Khoresan, Iraq and eastern Anatolia for some time before the Seljuk chieftains, leaders of the Oghuz Turks originally from the region between the Aral Sea and the Volga, moved south into Khoresan in the 1030s and to Iran in the 1040s.7 The mobile armies of mounted steppe nomads rapidly outmanoeuvred and defeated the forces of indigenous rulers, establishing Seljuk rulers in Khoresan and Iran in the 1040s, in the process forcing other Turkish nomads, often called Turcomen, to seek their fortunes further west in Armenia, northern Iraq, northern Syria and eastern Anatolia. By 1051, the western Seljuk commander, Tughril Beg, had annexed Isfahan as his capital. With north-eastern Iran in their hands, the Seljuks’ attention turned to Iraq and the fading Buyid regime in Baghdad. Unlike other nomad groups eager for a place in the sun, Tughril harboured political ambition to rule as well as to exploit.

  13. A Turkish archer.

  At some point in the tenth century the Seljuks were converted to Islam. They emphasised their orthodox Sunni Islamic credentials to secure their status, in nominal loyalty to the Abbasid caliphate and in obvious contrast to the Shi’ite Buyids in Iraq and the Fatimids in Syria. In 1055, Tughril led his forces into Baghdad, sweeping aside the last Buyids and receiving from Caliph al-Qa’im the title of sultan (literally in Arabic, ‘rule’ or ‘power’), a new title for a new regime with imperial pretensions. Tughril married one of his nieces to the caliph while more significantly securing one of the caliph’s daughters for himself, an event, it was later noted, ‘as had never happened to the caliphs before’.8 These assertions of legitimacy were aided by opposition to the Shi’ite Fatimids. An Iraqi rebellion against the Seljuks attracted Fatimid patronage and support in briefly capturing Baghdad in 1058–9 before being crushed as Tughril reasserted control. The mantle of protector of orthodox Islam was to provide a convenient cloak for more than one parvenu insurgent seeking power in the Arab empire. However, despite their orthodox posturing, it is hard to cast the Seljuk invasions in religious terms. For some generations they retained aspects of steppe culture, such as burials with grave goods and the consumption of alcohol, their beliefs and rituals exhibiting an eclectic mix of steppe shamanism and adopted local Arab custom.9 Their ascendancy was achieved not by religious or cultural accommodation but by extreme violence that did not end with the creation of the sultanate in Baghdad.

  Seljuk conquests, whether of Shi’ites or Sunnis, were accompanied by massacres, plunder, rapine, the payment of lavish protection money and the saturation of slave markets: after one raid in Armenia, ‘the cost of a beautiful girl came down to five dinars and there was no demand for boys at all’.10 This was not simply a matter of barbarian nomads running amok through the ancient treasure houses of Arab wealth. Soon after occupying Baghdad, the Iraqi Seljuks were employing the same polyglot mercenary and slave armies as their predecessors. However, the disruptive injection of a nomadic element into the sedentary economy and society of the Near East held lasting significance. Other nomadic Turkish tribes roamed with increasing freedom across the whole of the Fertile Crescent and Anatolia. The Seljuk Empire was run by coercion and collaboration, targeted brutality not mindless mayhem, the exploitation of urban and rural resources calibrated to secure elaborate networks of patronage and alliance.

  The Seljuk system contrasted with its predecessors in ways that accidentally facilitated the later succes
s of the crusade enterprise. Power rested with Seljuk princes who ruled the various cities and provinces of the empire as a family business, not necessarily harmoniously. Any Seljuk prince could aspire to the sultanate in Baghdad, a feature that guaranteed simultaneous cohesion and competition. The princes’ power depended on their own permanent personal military households – askars – and their paid or enslaved armies, commanded by emirs, who also recruited their own askars. Emirs and prominent askar leaders were rewarded with allocation of tax revenues from specified areas of land (iqta), or governorships of cities or regions, sometimes as atabegs, in theory guardians, mentors and military advisors to young Seljuk princes. In practice atabegs assumed independent authority, subservient in name only, a model familiar to Islamic politics. The new ruling elite was not initially territorial, princes, emirs and atabegs swapping or accumulating cities and regions according to politics and preferment not geography, a fluidity and mobility reflected in the continuing nomadic elements in the Seljuk armies.