The World of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  The Seljuks and the Turks they promoted were aliens in a world of local Arab rulers and the civilian class of Arabic administrators and lawyers, notably the religious scholars, the ulema, who interpreted the law. Language presented a stubborn barrier. In the late twelfth century one Arab Syrian nobleman recalled his days fighting in the armies of Zengi, the Turkish atabeg of Mosul and Aleppo in 1135. He remembered Zengi discussing tactics with one of his commanders: ‘they were both speaking Turkish, so I did not understand what they were saying’.11 Seljuk public espousal of Sunni Islam proved important in reassuring indigenous elites and providing necessary levers of patronage and control. The great Baghdad vizier Nasim al-Mulk (d. 1092) initiated a policy of founding religious schools for the study of law and theology, madrasa. These schools provided a physical focus of Seljuk influence in buildings that became prominent features in cities from Iran to Syria; they supplied grateful members of the ulema with lucrative employment; and, in their officially directed syllabus, they helped engineer a practical accommodation between often disruptively competing Islamic legal traditions. Nevertheless, for all the techniques of soft power, the Seljuk Empire was a military system, sustained of necessity by violence. Few areas witnessed the consequences more destructively than Syria.

  Syria

  Greater Syria (al-Sham), including Syria and Palestine, presented a paradox in the Arab empire, at once a region of special sanctified religious significance and a frontier between the dar al-Islam (Abode of Islam) and the dar al-hab (Abode of War), the front line against the infidel.12 Since the eighth century, the centre of Arab power had rested further east, in Iraq and Iran. The northern frontier with Byzantium from the Upper Euphrates to Cilicia remained porous and contested while in the 970s the Fatimids annexed much of southern Syria and Palestine. In the later tenth century, the Byzantines reconquered parts of northern Syria, including Antioch, establishing a frontier with Fatimid-controlled territory north of Levantine Tripoli. Despite occasional recourse to standard religious rhetoric, these wars hardly generated the aura of holy wars on either side. Syria remained unstable, open to attack from Iraq, Egypt and the nomadic tribes of the Syrian and Arabian deserts, divided by competition between Greeks, Armenian, and rival Arab emirs loyal to Abbasids or Fatimids and disturbed by squabbling factions within the great cities of the region – Damascus, Aleppo, Antioch, Tripoli, Edessa, Mosul. From 1064, warring Aleppans sought the help of Turkish mercenaries, who added to the embattled political scene by challenging those who had invited them in the first place.

  In 1071 the Seljuk sultan, Tughril’s nephew and successor, Alp Arslan, intervened, forcing the submission of Aleppo before being called away to combat the Byzantines in Anatolia, marking the start of Syria’s integration into the Seljuk Empire. Seljuk dominance was challenged by the Fatimids in the south, by indigenous Arab elites, and by freelance Turkish and Turcoman chiefs across the whole region. In 1078 a second Seljuk invasion, led by Alp Arslan’s son Tutush, began a wholesale conquest in the name of his brother, the sultan Malik Shah (whose name symbolically combined the Arabic and Persian words for king). By 1086, Tutush had imposed Seljuk overlordship on Antioch (taken from the Byzantines), Damascus, Aleppo and Jerusalem. However, the coastal ports (Tripoli, Tyre, Acre, Jaffa, Ascalon) remained independent or nominally under Fatimid rule while the governors appointed by the Seljuks to administer the cities of the interior tended to act in their own autonomous interests, continuing regional rivalries and divisions that existed long before the arrival of the Turks. In comparison with the main centres of Seljuk power in Iran and Iraq, inland Syria lacked material and human resources, making it peripheral to Seljuk dynastic power games while forcing local rulers into fiercer competition for those limited opportunities for wealth that did exist. This combination of relative poverty and stubborn localism ensured that Seljuk power in Syria proved ephemeral. By 1115, Seljuk princes had disappeared from Syria, although the empire continued further east until the end of the century.

  Division appeared early. A civil war for the sultanate after the death of Malik Shah in 1092 led to the defeat and death of Tutush in 1095. Tutush’s sons were children – Ridwan of Aleppo (d. 1113) was thirteen and Duqaq of Damascus (d. 1104) even younger. While Ridwan ruled as well as reigned, Duqaq was overshadowed by his mamluk atabeg, Tughtakin, who ultimately succeeded him in Damascus. By the winter of 1097, when the crusaders arrived before Antioch, northern Syria had fragmented into feuds between Ridwan and Duqaq and the governor of Antioch, Yaghi-Siyan, against the atabeg of Mosul, Kerboga, while further south Jerusalem was held in the name of the Seljuks by a Turkish governor until the city was captured by the Fatimids in 1098. The failure of Seljuk control in Syria proved almost unimaginably propitious for the crusaders.

  Byzantine Crisis

  The Seljuks were not alone in finding imperial power precarious. When he abandoned his invasion of Syria in 1071, Alp Arslan had marched to confront a Byzantine army under Emperor Romanus IV Diogenes (1068–71) advancing from Anatolia into Armenia. The subsequent Seljuk victory at the battle of Manzikert near Lake Van confirmed that there would be no effective halt to continuing Turkish penetration of the Greek Empire’s eastern provinces. However, the Turks presented only one threat to Greek imperial power. One of Romanus IV’s unreliable allies at Manzikert, the Norman mercenary captain Roussel of Balleul, set himself up as an independent lord in Anatolia. Balleul and other western-hired swords proved a mixed blessing for Byzantium, adding to the complexity of private enterprise opportunism that characterised both sides of the struggle with the Seljuks. After 1071, Turkish infiltration of Armenia and Anatolia gathered pace. In 1077 a Seljuk cousin of Alp Arslan, Suleiman ibn Kutulmush, established a sultanate based on Konya, called the sultanate of Rum. In 1078, Nicaea, less than a hundred miles from Constantinople, fell to him. Soon most of the hinterland of Asia Minor and parts of the Aegean coast were in the hands of various Turkish warlords and pirates, threatening supply lines to the Byzantine capital. Across the former eastern provinces, Turcic tribes, including a nomadic group known as Danishmends, preyed on towns and settled agriculture more or less at will. In the west, the loss of Bari in 1071 to Norman freebooters led by Robert Guiscard was followed by Norman campaigns along the eastern Adriatic coast around Dyrrachium in 1081 and 1085. In the northern Balkans the Pechenegs, a coalition of steppe tribes from beyond the Danube, had penetrated the empire’s frontiers. After their defeat in 1091, another group of nomads, the Cumans, menaced the region. Closer to the throne, the loyalty of army high command proved unreliable.

  Although Alexius I (1081–1118) managed to stabilise the Balkans in the 1080s and 1090s, this hardly inhibited the threat from Nicaea or in the Aegean. The losses of Bari and, later, Antioch (1084/5) were not reversed. Diminishing territory, especially in Anatolia, created manpower and fiscal problems: fewer taxpayers and recruits without any diminution of military needs or expense. Increasingly, Byzantium recruited troops from neighbours and former enemies, including Normans and Turks, but also western and northern Europeans, such as the Varangian Guard of Scandinavians and Anglo-Saxons. Self-interest dictated the establishment of Italian trading posts in Constantinople. In 1082, Alexius granted Venice tax exemption and free access to trade and ports within the empire in return for their assistance against the Normans in the Adriatic. Constantinople had long been a truly cosmopolitan city, attracting residents from across Eurasia from the Atlantic to the steppes. In the strategic crisis facing Alexius I in the 1090s, of particular interest were mercenaries from western Europe. It was his good fortune that a ready supply became available, although not exactly in the guise he may have expected. Like the rulers in the Arab empires who summoned steppe nomads to serve in their armies, Alexius found the westerners who answered his call had ambitions of their own.

  The Rise of Western Europe

  Superficially, western Europe had little to offer its eastern neighbours. Its rural economy precluded monetised systems of regular taxation. In the elev
enth century, rents and renders from land were still received largely in kind not cash. In Byzantium and the lands of the former Arab empire, a commercial system was supported by gold as well as silver-based currencies and large towns and cities. In western Europe, the availability of coin, minted from various silver alloys, was limited; labour was cheaper than to the south and east, so labourers had less disposable income; cities were of negligible size. In the early eleventh century, the populations of Baghdad and Cairo may have numbered around half a million; Constantinople perhaps 600,000; Cordoba at least 100,000. By contrast, the largest western European cities, Cologne, Florence, Milan, Rome, Venice, may have harboured 30,000–40,000. By the end of the century, London and Paris may have contained about 20,000 each, hardly even third-rate by Near Eastern terms. While the quickening of economic activity, an increase in long-distance trade, a growth in markets and political centralisation greatly expanded urban populations across western Europe over the next two centuries, even cities such as Paris, which by 1300 approached a size of 100,000, were still dwarfed by the great emporia of the Near East.

  BYZANTIUM AND THE CRUSADES

  The Byzantine perspective on the crusades was wholly different from that of western Christendom. In the historical context and world view of the surviving Eastern Roman Empire, the crusades formed one episode in a centuries-long sequence of disruptive incursions, distinctive as much in retrospect as in reality. Although periodically significant and finally transformative in Byzantine imperial politics, the crusades simply did not matter as much to the Greeks as they did in western Europe. The crusaders and their settlements competed for Byzantine attention with Bulgars, Pechenegs, Cumans, Serbs, Armenians, Italians, Arabs and Turks as disparate clients, subjects, rivals or neighbours within the wide Byzantine sphere of influence that stretched from the Adriatic and Danube to Cilicia and northern Syria, from the Russian steppes to the Levant. The crusades deepened and expanded ties between Byzantium and western Europe but did not initiate them. Assumptions of inevitable entrenched wariness and hostility between Byzantium and crusaders or the Franks of Outremer ignore constant economic, commercial, diplomatic, cultural and political exchange, a diversity of relationships variously marked by competition, cooperation, exploitation and co-existence. Byzantium itself covered widely disparate societies, demographics and geography. Trade between Byzantium and western and northern Europe in silks, soldiers, pilgrims, saints, slaves, metals, furs, spices or icons operated on their own separate lines, many of them long-standing by the late eleventh century. Foreign paid troops had long been a feature of Byzantine armies, for example the Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon Varangian Guard, while the mid- and later eleventh century saw an increase in western European recruits and settlers – the so-called frangopouloi – whose style of cavalry warfare was admired. The Greek call for western aid in 1095 rested on an established tradition. However, western troops were not alone; foreign recruits included Slavs, Armenians and Turks. The Byzantine polity was cosmopolitan in nature and international in reach, not least in what might be called soft power: culture, language, religion. Greek ecclesiastical and political presence in Italy and Sicily was not extinguished by the loss of the last territorial holding of Bari to the Normans in 1071. Bohemund of Taranto may have proved belligerently hostile, but he held a Greek birth name (Mark) and may well have spoken Greek.13

  14. The walls of Constantinople.

  Byzantine rulers assessed the crusades in customary terms of geopolitical advantage. The absence of overt ideological support grated on western observers, but Greek Orthodoxy, while traditionally embracing the idea of war in defence of religion, never embraced the western idea of penitential warfare. The failure of Greek rulers to provide crusaders with more substantial material and military aid in 1147 or 1189 fuelled suspicion and resentment. This provoked Henry VI of Germany’s bullying in 1195–6, when he demanded money with menace from Byzantium for his crusade, and encouraged the leaders of the Fourth Crusade to accept the future Alexius IV’s fanciful offer of lavish assistance in 1203. The overriding primacy of Byzantine strategic interests, which embraced alliance with Turks when expedient, and diplomatic habits including necessary deceit, offended some western observers. Consequently relations could be constructive when interests coincided, as when the Byzantines tried brokering an anti-Seljuk alliance between the crusaders and the Egyptian Fatimids in 1097–9, but they could also be fraught when they did not, as over the status of Antioch after its capture by the First Crusade in 1098. Even there, ultimately long-term Byzantine objectives were peacefully achieved with acceptance of Byzantine overlordship in 1137, 1145 and 1159. Despite tensions over Antioch, Byzantine aid assisted Frankish leaders such as Raymond of Toulouse and the 1101 crusade. Relations with Outremer Franks were pragmatically friendly, producing in the mid-twelfth century a series of marriage alliances with Antioch, Tripoli and Jerusalem, close diplomatic agreement with Jerusalem in the 1170s and joint campaigns against Ayyubid Egypt executed (1169) or planned (1177). In 1176, Manuel I and Pope Alexander III even floated a scheme for a joint crusade.

  15. Alexius I, Empress Irene and the future John II.

  The context of the crusades was of ever closer connections with Byzantium. Despite theological and institutional divisions between the eastern and western Churches that had prompted a public schism in 1054, Greek emperors maintained regular diplomatic correspondence with popes: between 1198 and 1202, during preparations for the Fourth Crusade, Innocent III and Alexius III exchanged at least eight embassies and twelve extensive letters. Manuel I was famously sympathetic to western influences at court, marrying an Outremer Frank in 1161, one of numerous dynastic alliances linking Byzantium to the nobility of the west. Westerners became entangled in Byzantine politics: members of the north Italian Montferrat family were closely involved in bloody coups in 1182 and 1187 as well as, more famously, 1203–4. Byzantium appeared to some a land of opportunity long before 1204. Less dramatically, Greek clergy worked in tandem with Roman Catholics in Outremer, Sicily and Calabria, as they were to do after 1191 in Cyprus. Trade provided the staple contact, fostered by the mutually profitable commercial privileges agreed with western shippers, notably the Venetians. Venetian raids in 1122–3 and anti-western riots in Constantinople in 1171 and 1182 did not inflict lasting damage; in 1198 a treaty restored all Venice’s trading rights, commerce with Byzantium comprising up to half the city’s commercial activity. Crusading quickened cultural exchange, like the western dissemination of Greek texts and translations from centres like Antioch or from shared artistic projects elsewhere in Outremer, as in the decoration of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem (c. 1170), jointly sponsored by Baldwin III and Manuel I. The flow of Greek art, relics, icons and texts increased hugely after 1204, but it had begun earlier.

  16. Byzantine-Frankish cooperation: the mosaic of Jesus on Palm Sunday in the Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem.

  The chief source of conflict came from immediate political crises not existential cultural alienation. For two centuries from the late eleventh century the rulers of Sicily – Normans (1060s–1194), Hohenstaufen (1194–1266) and Angevins (1266–82) – had contested Byzantine power in the central Mediterranean, usually without association with the crusades (Bohemund’s 1107–8 Balkan campaign and the threats during the Second Crusade and by Henry VI in the 1190s being exceptions). Whatever the subsequent political or literary gloss, on each twelfth-century large-scale land crusade issues of supply, not culture or religion, provoked armed confrontation, as they did again in 1204. One of the ironies of the Fourth Crusade rests in the evidence of desired cooperation not confrontation displayed in the treaties with Alexius IV. After the debacle of 1204, except for lacklustre attempts from the 1230s to shore up the Latin empire of Constantinople (1204–61) and, later, other westerner-held enclaves in Greece, crusading more often sought to include an alliance with Byzantium against mutual opponents, notably from the fourteenth century the Ottomans. However, the westerners’ price of su
ch an alliance, union of the Greek Orthodox with the Roman Catholic Church, was impossible for successive Greek emperors, wielding much reduced religious and political authority, to deliver. In 1204 a cultural legacy of mistrust and hostility was created among Byzantines that had not existed so virulently before. The unions agreed in 1274 and 1439, as well as a plan in 1355, came to nothing. Nonetheless, a few western anti-Turkish naval leagues in the fourteenth century included Byzantium, now little more than a city state, hardly a major regional still less world power. In the last sixty years before the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453, crusades were planned and deployed to save not defeat Byzantium. As in the 1090s, Byzantium in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was regarded as a potential, if awkward, crusading ally not enemy.14

  However, unlike the Near East, where climate change caused droughts, western Europe benefited from the climatic warming of the period. Agricultural yields improved; populations grew; commerce expanded; the need and use of markets and money grew. With it came social changes: modest urbanisation; enhanced levels of numeracy and literacy; and greater wealth for the aristocratic military elites who exploited these increasingly lucrative agricultural and commercial resources. The growth of towns stimulated inter-regional and international transmission of goods, people and ideas as well as the creation of newly prosperous, mobile groups of merchants and artisans. However, power remained largely concentrated in the hands of those who controlled land and the people who worked it. Political fragmentation from the late ninth and tenth centuries encouraged local lords to assert largely autonomous power, improving agricultural and commercial revenues and the consequent ability to employ military entourages to impose their authority, allowing them to sustain their independence. Castles provided visible signs of how increased wealth consolidated lordship power. Capricious rule and unbridled violence were tempered by traditional law, custom, accepted communal processes of arbitration and conflict resolution necessary within intimate social and economic communities. Competition for control of economic exploitation was fierce, pursued by technologically more sophisticated elites of armed mounted warriors. These arms-bearers, of whatever social origins, gradually developed into a distinct community of shared function, behaviour, social importance and cultural values: the knights so vividly illustrated in the Bayeux Tapestry. By 1100, a knight was synonymous with power and, as even kings depicted themselves as armed mounted warriors on their seals, symbolised authority: all nobles were knights; by 1200, all knights were noble.15