The World of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  The Unification of Turkish Syria

  The political history of Syria and Palestine between 1099 and 1187 is dominated by the successive conquests between 1127 and 1174 of Imad al-Din Zengi and his son Nur al-Din, which united inland Syria and the Jazira, followed by the incorporation of these lands between 1174 and 1186 into the empire of Saladin, sultan of Egypt, prior to his annexation of most of Outremer in 1187–9. The reordering of the politics of the region was furthered by Saladin’s suppression of the Fatimid caliphate in 1169–71. In 1187, for the first time in over two centuries, the great cities of Mosul, Aleppo, Damascus, Jerusalem, Alexandria and Cairo, as well as the Holy Places of the Hijaz, acknowledged the same overlord.

  Zengi, atabeg of Mosul in 1127 and Aleppo in 1128, with a deserved reputation for ruthlessness and brutality, had extended his power on both sides of the Euphrates and southwards towards Damascus. In 1144 he captured Frankish Edessa, the dismemberment of the principality completed by his son Nur al-Din in 1151. After Zengi’s assassination in 1146, Mosul and Aleppo had been divided between his two sons, only reunited under his second son, Nur al-Din of Aleppo (1146–74) in 1149. In 1154, Nur al-Din finally occupied Damascus. Both Zengi and Nur al-Din chipped away at neighbouring Frankish territory, especially in the north. After his victory over Prince Raymond of Antioch at Inab in 1149, Nur al-Din threatened Antioch itself and symbolically washed in the Mediterranean to signal the wider Muslim advance. The implosion of the Fatimid regime in Egypt in the 1160s drew Nur al-Din to send his Kurdish general Shirkuh to annex the country, in competition with the Franks of Jerusalem. Victory in 1169 left Shirkuh’s nephew Saladin as sultan and, although nominally subject to Nur al-Din, de facto ruler, a position he consolidated by abolishing the Fatimid caliphate. On Nur al-Din’s death in 1174, Saladin moved quickly to control Damascus, then dispossess or subjugate Zengid and other rulers in Syria, Aleppo submitting in 1183 and Mosul in 1186. Despite a few forays against Outremer, and a few successes, such as at Jacob’s Ford in 1179 (see ‘A Day at Jacob’s Ford’, p. 128), only after commanding the united resources of Egypt, Syria and the Jazira did Saladin move to conquer Outremer.

  55. Saladin, a contemporary image.

  It has become common for the unification of Syria, Egypt and Palestine in the twelfth century to be ascribed to a Muslim religious revival. The First Crusade had attracted a call for jihad from a Damascene religious scholar ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami (d. 1106), who regarded it as part of a general Christian assault on Islamic lands stretching from Iberia and Sicily to Syria, its success attributed equally to Muslim political divisions and the abandonment of the tradition of jihad. This embraced both the military struggle against infidels (al-jihad al-asghar or lesser jihad) and the more important inner contest against enemies of the soul (al-jihad al-akbar or greater jihad): ‘Put the jihad against your souls ahead of the jihad against your enemies, for truly your souls are greater enemies to you than your human enemies.’18 The association of politics with religion became standard among twelfth-century Arabic commentators on the wars in Syria and Outremer, although some preferred more temporal analyses of greed and danger. Whatever their private commitment, Zengi, Nur al-Din and Saladin each proclaimed their status as leaders of the jihad. However, the alleged Muslim revival might more accurately be described as a process whereby successful Turkish and Kurdish warlords harnessed suitable strands of Muslim law and theology to bind the administratively vital indigenous judicial, academic and bureaucratic elites, the ulema, to accept their usurping rule. In 1130, Zengi’s announcement of a jihad against the Franks concealed his designs on Muslim Hama and Damascus.19 Almost six decades later, Saladin was accused of similar dereliction of duty in his persistent campaigning against fellow Muslims, not the Franks.20

  Following Seljuk precedent, conquest came hand in glove with lavish investment in religious institutions and promotion of the parvenu rulers’ Islamic credentials, Koranic virtues and deferential lip-service to the Abbasid caliphate. However, as mujahidin, these rulers could also distinguish themselves from their increasingly ineffectual Seljuk or Arab predecessors. Fostering good relations with the members of the ulema such as Saladin’s influential minister, the Palestinian writer, lawyer and poet al-Fadil (1135–1200), granted thuggish warlords respectability.21 This process was supported by endowing religious schools, madrasas, that offered employment for educated civilians and military nobles alike. New Turkish and Kurdish rulers built their regimes on war, wealth, patronage and propaganda but also on indigenous administration, justice and accommodation of diversity. Madrasas were visible symbols of this alliance, prominently situated within major urban centres, such as Damascus. Unlike their Frankish conquerors, the unifiers of Muslim Syria respected local interests, where convenient, allowing a patina of continuity to cover new regimes. In 1136, after capturing Ma’arrat al-Numan from the Franks, Zengi restored property to owners who had been dispossessed by the Franks in 1098 or their heirs, their title checked against the Aleppan land tax archives.22 The political use of religion rested on theological and scholarly trends in west Asian Islam stimulated by uncertain political legitimacy and lent focus by the Frankish occupation’s creation of an influential body of vociferous refugees. The Seljuks’ patronage of madrasas in Iran and Iraq had encouraged the identification of religion, politics and social community, emphasising conservative Sunni textual tradition in the study of the Koran and the hadith (sayings of the Prophet), rather than innovative philosophy or natural science. In a parallel investment in religious study, some schools were founded in early twelfth-century Shi’ite Fatimid Egypt, perhaps to combat the influence of the Christian Copts.23 Scholarly promotion of uniformity through madrasas helped rulers counter political dissent and encourage identity between the nomadic warrior Turkish lords and their settled subject peoples, with, in Syria, the Franks providing a convenient rhetorical focus of threat.

  56. Teaching in a mosque.

  Inscriptions even before his capture of Edessa in 1144 praised Zengi as ‘tamer of the infidels and the polytheists, leader of those who fight the holy war, helper of the armies, protector of the territory of the Muslims’, all rather far from the reality: the early Seljuks and other Turkish rulers adopted a rather relaxed adherence to Islam, retaining many aspects of steppe culture.24 By contrast, Nur al-Din, seemingly a man of sincere private piety, went further, hugely increasing the number of madrasas in his lands, many with personal endowments.25 In 1168 he commissioned a pulpit (minbar) in Aleppo decorated with exhortations to jihad, which was intended for the al-Aqsa mosque once Jerusalem was recovered. It was, by Saladin, in November 1187.26 The recovery of Jerusalem became a symbol for spiritual as well as political renewal, a theme exploited by Saladin and his propagandists, particularly once that goal had been achieved. The courts of the Zengids and Ayyubids (namely Saladin, son of Ayyub, and his family) were staffed with members of the ulema steeped in the new orthodoxy; at Nur al-Din’s court Ali ibn Asakir (1105–76), the leading scholar of his generation, also collected hadith on the jihad; another of Nur al-Din’s civil servants, the Iranian Imad al-Din Isfahani (1125–1201), had taught in a Damascus madrasa, later becoming Saladin’s secretary and biographer. The Iraqi Beha al-Din ibn Shaddad (1145–1234), a noted legist, taught in madrasas in Mosul and Baghdad and, among other works, composed a monograph on jihad; hired by Saladin in 1188 as judge of the army, he repaid the compliment by writing a flattering biography of the sultan showing him in the best light of a Koranic mujahid as befitted his honorific title Salah al-Din, ‘Righteousness of the Faith’.27

  57. Nur al-Din’s minbar in the al-Aqsa before its destruction in 1969.

  Jihad provided a legitimising cause as part of the wider promotion of Koranic Islamic virtues, what has been described as a ‘recentring’ rather than a revival.28 Enthusiasm for armed jihad, as distinct from the habitual round of regional warfare, was not a creation of the Zengids. They merely took advantage of a vocal minority within the educated elites, reinforced by ar
ticulate refugees at Iraqi and Syrian courts with carefully preserved memories of crusade atrocities such as the massacre at Ma ‘arrat al-Numan in 1098. Territorial competition became rebranded as religious war. Jihad proved especially significant for Saladin. The Zengids were Turkish nobility, with experience of rule stretching back to the reign of Malik Shah, when Zengi’s father was governor of Aleppo. The Kurdish Ayyubids were upstarts, mercenary generals who traded their military service under the Zengids for political power, beginning with Saladin’s father Ayyub’s appointment as governor of Baalbek by Zengi in 1139. Saladin himself owed his position to his role as his uncle Shirkuh’s lieutenant in the conquest of Egypt in 1168–9 under the nominal suzerainty of Nur al-Din. Helped by a remarkable series of convenient (and not necessarily coincidental) deaths – Shirkuh in 1169; the twenty-two-year-old last Fatimid caliph al Azid, 1171; Amalric of Jerusalem, 1174; Nur al-Din, 1174, and his teenage son al-Salih of Aleppo, 1181 – Saladin imposed his family’s rule in Egypt and abolished the Shi’ite caliphate in 1171, cloaking usurpation with the aura of a Sunni champion. Careful to pay formal obeisance to the Abbasid caliph, between 1174 and 1186 Saladin swept aside the Zengids in Syria and the Jazira through force, bullying, bribery, patronage and diplomacy, drawing to himself and his family the adherence both of the civilian ulema and the mercenary regiments, the askari, on whom political control depended. Across Egypt and Syria, Saladin methodically placed his relations in control of key economic, fiscal, military and administrative resources through grants of political office and tax revenues (iqta). A conquering parvenu with no legitimacy beyond his own agency, Saladin needed to demonstrate his religious credentials to rule through the overt performance of Koranic models: public ritual piety; puritan domestic simplicity; strict but merciful legal judgement; generosity in finance, charity and patronage; dedication to the culture of jihad. Regardless of Saladin’s private beliefs, and it might be noted that Nur al-Din founded many more religious schools than he did, politics required such behaviour.

  Saladin’s empire also relied on fresh conquests to consolidate new alliances and reward new followers. The Franks presented unique adversaries. Totems of enmity for the revived Islamic seriousness, they were immune to Saladin’s usual carrot-and-stick tactics of annexation. Legally, Saladin could only agree temporary truces with the infidel. Politically he had nothing to offer, as the Franks could not submit to his overlordship. Mortal confrontation was therefore inevitable, encouraging the presentation of power politics as jihad. Thus, the presence of the Franks ideologically as well as materially assisted Syrian unification and the development of the strong Muslim militarised polities of the Zengid and Ayyubid Empires.

  The Second Crusade, 1145–8

  The Franks’ greatest opportunity to contest Syrian unification came in response to Zengi’s serendipitous capture of Edessa in December 1144. Although leading to no immediate assault on the rest of Outremer, as Zengi turned his attention to policing his existing conquests, the loss of Edessa and the Franks’ failure to retake the city in 1146 presented a strategic and moral blow, exposing the lack of providential certainty in the Franks’ occupation. The political context was confused. The deaths of Fulk of Jerusalem and John II of Byzantium in hunting accidents in 1143 were balanced by a Mosul revolt against Zengi in 1145, his murder in 1146, and the division of his empire between his sons. In 1145 the new Byzantine emperor, Manuel I (1143–80), received the homage of Prince Raymond of Antioch (r. 1136–49), who otherwise stood to gain most by a new crusade in northern Syria. Jerusalem was adjusting to the uneven joint rule of the widowed Queen Melisende and her teenage son Baldwin III (1143–63). Any substantial crusader intervention in Syria threatened to undermine Byzantine interests there, as would the involvement of Sicily and Germany, rivals to the Greeks in Italy. Equally, Byzantium saw no advantage in disturbing relations with Muslim neighbours, while wariness of western motives had grown since the First Crusade, with Antioch remaining a source of potential conflict. The diplomatic bouillabaisse was thickened by the precarious position of Pope Eugenius III (1145–53). Elected in February 1145, after his predecessor had been killed in street fighting in Rome, overshadowed in Italy by rivalry between Sicily, Germany and Byzantium, Eugenius’s decision to follow Urban II’s precedent in calling for a mass redemptive military campaign to the Levant operated, as had the 1095 appeal, as part of a policy of consolidating papal influence and authority.

  Eugenius’s letter calling for a new crusade, Quantum praedecessores (‘How much our predecessors’), was framed by the glorious memory of the First Crusade. While citing the loss of Edessa as the specific casus belli, Eugenius repeated Urban II’s formula of the urgency of help for the ‘eastern Churches’, perhaps as a sop to Byzantium, but certainly in evocative imitation of the 1095 call with its implicit claim of papal responsibility for the universal Church. Urban’s precedent was again cited for the grant of remission of sins, while papal authority was invoked in offering the crusaders’ temporal privileges, fully described for the first time with reference to a Holy Land campaign.29 Initial response was muted, and the bull, first sent in November 1145, was reissued in March the following year. The call was first taken up at Christmas 1145 by Louis VII of France, who may already have been toying with an eastern expedition of his own, but preaching and recruitment only gained momentum with the involvement of the pope’s mentor Bernard of Clairvaux and the network of his Cistercian order of monks, of which Eugenius had been a member (see ‘Bernard of Clairvaux’, p. 170). Thereafter, in contrast to 1095–6, the pope played a secondary role, easing diplomatic contacts and issuing bulls in response to requests to extend crusaders’ privileges to campaigns in northern Spain and the Baltic. Conrad III of Germany admitted to the pope that he had taken the cross (from Bernard at Christmas 1146) ‘without your knowledge’.30 Although he attended Louis’ ceremonial departure from St Denis near Paris in June 1147, Eugenius left set-piece exhortations and the necessary grind of promotional touring to others, especially his old tutor, the charismatic Bernard.

  Recruitment for the new venture probably outstripped that for the First Crusade, the consequence of careful orchestration between the papally authorised preaching campaign of Bernard and the Cistercians and the commitment of the kings of France and Germany and leading regional nobles, such as the counts of Flanders, Champagne, Savoy and Toulouse and the duke of Bavaria. A series of high-profile theatrical assemblies, at Bourges (December 1145), Vézelay (March 1146), Speyer (December 1146), Etampes (February 1147), Regensburg (February 1147) and Frankfurt (March 1147) established domestic support for two monarchs whose authority was otherwise limited or contested. Crusade leadership paid political dividends; for Louis VII it provided the first instance of a French king commanding a large national army on an international campaign since the 870s. Recruitment stretched from Languedoc to the eastern marches of Germany, from the North Sea to Tuscany, pulling in urban elites as well as rural lords, knights, merchants, soldiers for hire, townspeople, artisans, men and, to the misogynist disgust of clerical critics seemingly after the event, women. Recruits included at least two who were dumb from birth.31 Local habit, family connections, dynastic traditions and political convenience were again as instrumental as inspirational oratory. Bernard set a tone of general religious revivalism. Already a champion of the Templars and an enthusiast for redemptive holy war, he argued that the crisis in Outremer provided a unique opportunity: in serving the ‘cause of Christ’, to paraphrase St Paul, ‘to conquer is glorious, to die is gain’ (cf. Philippians 1:21): win win.32

  Bernard’s success cast him as the victim of aggressive stalking by audiences who identified in him Christ-like qualities.33 Other preachers were less fastidious. One, a Cistercian called Radulph, thrilled crowds in the Rhineland during the summer and autumn of 1146 preaching against ‘the foes of the Christian religion’, including local Jews.34 Popular anti-Judaism faced equivocal church policy. At almost the exact time Radulph was stirring up racial hatred, Abbot
Peter the Venerable of Cluny was writing to Louis VII comparing the Jews of Europe unfavourably to Muslims, regarding their presence in Christendom as polluting and calling for them to be punished, short of actually killing them. Anti-Jewish riots and murder accompanied crusade recruitment in eastern France and central Europe as well as those encouraged by Radulph in the Rhineland. Ecclesiastical and secular protection appeared to be more effective than in 1096, with violence, though extreme, less widespread or concerted. Bernard’s main concern was that Radulph had preached without licence. Crusading was popular in the Rhineland where some, perhaps many, resented what appeared to them the privileged status of the Jews, protected by the king, wealthy bishops and rich lords, enjoying financial benefits while poorer crusaders plunged into debt. Eugenius III had forbidden crusaders access to Jewish credit in Quantum praedecessores if they wished to enjoy immunity from interest. The theological refinement of protecting those proclaimed by the Church as the oldest enemies of Christ may have been lost on those summoned to avenge the insult to Christ in the east. To the authorities the disturbances constituted acts of civil disobedience, unwelcome distractions to crusade planning. Radulph was silenced by being returned to his monastery; the agitation subsided.