Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

by Tamim Ansary

  By 1095 CE, the dream of a universal community had failed at the political level. The ulama were barely holding society together with Qur’an, hadith, and shari’a. The philosophers were a scattered breed, still adding to the conversation, but with voices that were growing ever dimmer. This was the world in which Ghazali lived and worked, a world in which trusting to reason could easily seem unreasonable.

  And then the catastrophes began.

  9

  Havoc

  474-783 AH

  1081-1381 CE

  ASSAULT FROM THE WEST

  Really, there were two catastrophes, one little, one big. The little one came from the west. At this time, the Muslim world knew as little of western Europe as Europeans later knew about the African interior. To Muslims, everything between Byzantium and Andalusia was a more or less primeval forest inhabited by men so primitive they still ate pig flesh. When Muslims said “Christians,” they meant the Byzantine church or the various smaller churches operating in Muslim controlled territory. They knew that an advanced civilization had once flourished further west: a person could still make out traces of it in Italy and parts of the Mediterranean coast, which Muslims regularly raided; but it had crumbled during the Time of Ignorance, before Islam entered the world, and was now little more than a memory.

  This Muslim view was not far wrong. Europe had been in terrible shape for a long time. Under attack for centuries from Germanic tribes, from Huns, from Avars, from Magyars, from Muslims, from Norsemen and others, it had sunk to a level of bare subsistence. Almost everybody in Europe was a peasant. Almost every peasant did backbreaking labor from dawn to dark just to scratch up enough food to keep from starving and support a thin upper class of military aristocrats and clerics (and since clerics couldn’t marry, their ranks were replenished largely out of the military aristocracy.) Except for those few who went into the church, upper-class boys studied hardly anything except how to fight.

  Sometime in the eleventh century, however, the consequences of various tiny technological innovations accumulated to a tipping point. These innovations were so subtle that they probably went all but unnoticed at the time. One was a modified, steel-tipped “heavy” plow that could cut through roots and, compared to the older models, dig a deeper furrow in the dense, wet soil of northern Europe. The heavy plow enabled peasants to clear forests and extend their fields into areas previously considered unsuitable for farming. In effect, it gave peasants more land.

  A second invention was the horse collar, which was just a slight improvement of the yoke used to harness a beast of burden to a plow. The earlier version could be used only with oxen, due to its shape. If a horse were strapped to that yoke, the strap would press against the horse’s neck and choke off its air supply. At some point, some unknown innovator modified that yoke just enough to have it press against a horse’s shoulders and a lower spot on its neck. With this yoke, peasants could use horses instead of oxen to plow their fields, and since horses plow about fifty percent faster than oxen, they could till more land in the same amount of time.

  A third innovation was three-field crop rotation. Farming the same plot of land year after year exhausts the soil, so farmers have to let their fields “rest” from time to time. But the stomach never rests, so European peasants customarily divided their land into two fields. Each year they planted crops in one field and let the other field lie fallow. The next year, they planted crops in the second field and let the first lie fallow.

  Over the centuries, however, Europeans came to realize that a field didn’t have to rest every second year. It stayed just as fertile if it lay fallow one year out of three. Gradually, peasants started dividing their land into three plots, and planting two of them each year while letting one lie fallow. In effect, this gave peasants one-sixth more arable land each year.

  What did these little changes add up to? Not much. They merely allowed peasants to produce a slight surplus from time to time. When they had a surplus, they took it to certain crossroads on designated days and traded with peasants who had a surplus of something else. As the goods they had access to grew more various and more abundant, they were able to borrow some time from the backbreaking business of sheer subsistence to make handcrafted items to trade, whatever they were good at. Certain crossroads turned into more or less permanent market sites, which then developed into towns. Towns began to attract people who could work full time making things to sell for cash. Cash allowed some people to spend all their time going from market to market, just buying and selling. Money came back into use in Europe, and as money proliferated, the wealthiest Europeans acquired the means to travel.

  And where did they travel? Well, this being a world steeped in religion and religious superstition, they went to shrines in search of miracles. If they had limited means, they visited local shrines, but if they could afford better, they went to the great shrines in the Holy Lands. This was a long and dangerous journey for western Europeans, and without a universal currency the only way to pay for it was with gold or silver, which made such travelers prime targets for bandits; so pilgrims often formed groups, hired bodyguards, and organized communal expeditions to Palestine. There, they visited the places where Christ and his disciples had walked and worked and lived and died. They begged forgiveness of the Lord, got a leg up in the quest for heaven, bought charms to treat their physical ills, purchased some of the marvelous items to be had in the bazaars of the east, acquired relics and souvenirs for their relatives, and headed home to contemplate their life’s greatest adventure.

  Then the Seljuk Turks wrested control of Palestine away from the tolerant Fatimids and the indolent Abbasids. As new converts, these Turks tended toward zealotry. They weren’t zealous about sobriety, modesty, charity, and the like, but they ceded second place to none when it came to expressing chauvinistic disdain toward followers of other religions, especially those from faraway and more-primitive lands.

  Christian pilgrims began to find themselves treated rather shabbily in the Holy Lands. It wasn’t that they were beaten, tortured, or killed—nothing like that. It was more that they were subjected to constant little humiliations and harassments designed to make them feel second-class. They found themselves at the end of every line. They needed special permission to get into their own shrines. Every little thing cost money; shopkeepers ignored them; officials treated them rudely; and petty indignities of every sort were piled upon them.

  When they got back to Europe, they had much to swear and gripe about, but they also had tales to tell about the opulence of the East: the gorgeous houses they had seen, the silk and satin even commoners wore, the fine foods, the spices, the perfumes, the gold, the gold . . . stories that stirred up both anger and envy.

  The battle of Manzikert in 1071 CE, the one in which the Seljuk Turks crushed the Byzantines and took their emperor prisoner, came as stunning news. It also triggered a stream of messages from the Byzantines. The Byzantine emperors harangued the knights of the West to come to their aid in the name of Christian unity. The patriarch of Constantinople sent urgent messages to his diehard western rival, the pope, warning that if Constantinople fell, the heathen “Mohammedans” would stream right to Rome.

  Meanwhile, with the European economy on the mend, the population was rising, but European customs had not kept pace in two crucial ways. First, productive labor was still considered unsuitable to the dignity of the noble born: their job was to own land and make war. Second, ancient custom still decreed that when a landowner died, his eldest son inherited the whole estate, leaving the younger sons to make their way as best they could. Ironically, this custom of “primogeniture” was only reinforced by an opposite process at the highest levels, the tendency of kings and princes to divide their realms among their sons, which fragmented kingdoms into ever-smaller units. France, for example, had dissolved into semisovereign units called counties and even smaller units ruled by really minor noblemen called castellans, whose nobility consisted of possessing one castle and whatever
surrounding area it could dominate. A castle could not be divided among several sons, and so at this level, the level where knights were generated, the custom of “eldest son inherits all” became pervasive.1

  Every generation therefore saw a larger pool of landless noblemen for whom there was no suitable occupation except war, and with the invasions sloping off, there wasn’t even enough war to go around. The Vikings, the last major wave of invaders, no longer posed a threat because, by the eleventh century they had crammed into Europe and settled down. “They” had become “us.” Even so, the system kept producing knights and more knights.

  Enter the pilgrims, stage left, complaining of the indignities visited upon them by heathens in the Holy Lands. Finally, in 1095, Pope Urban II delivered a fiery open-air speech outside a French monastery called Claremont. There, he told an assembly of French, German, and Italian nobles that Christendom was in danger. He detailed the humiliations that Christian pilgrims had suffered in the Holy Lands and called upon men of faith to help their brethren expel the Turks from Jerusalem. Urban suggested that those who headed east should wear a cross-shaped red patch as a badge of their quest. The expedition was to be called a croisade, from croix, French for “cross,” and from this came the name historians give to this whole undertaking: the Crusades.

  By focusing on Jerusalem, Urban linked the invasion of the east to pilgrimage, thus framing it as a religious act. Therefore, by the authority vested in him as pope, he decreed that anyone who went to Jerusalem to kill Muslims would receive partial remission of his sins.

  One can only imagine how this must have struck those thousands of restless, rowdy, psychologically desperate European knights: “Go east, young man,” the pope was saying. “Unleash your true self as the awesome killing machine your society trained you to be, stuff your pockets with gold guilt-free, get the land you were born to own, and as a consequence of it all—get into heaven after you’re dead!”

  When the first crusaders came trickling into the Muslim world, the locals had no idea who they were dealing with. Early on, they assumed the interlopers to be Balkan mercenaries working for the emperor in Constantinople. The first Muslim ruler to encounter them was a Seljuk prince, Kilij Arslan, who ruled eastern Anatolia from the city of Nicaea, about three days’ journey from Constantinople. One day in the summer of 1096, Prince Arslan received information that a crowd of odd-looking warriors had entered his territory, odd because they were so poorly outfitted: a few did look like warriors, but the rest seemed like camp followers of some kind. Almost all wore a cross-shaped patch of red cloth sewn to their garments. Arslan had them followed and watched. He learned that these people called themselves the Franks; local Turks and Arabs called them al-Ifranj (“the Franj”). The interlopers openly proclaimed that they had come from a distant western land to kill Muslims and conquer Jerusalem, but first they intended to take possession of Nicaea. Arslan plotted out the route they seemed to be taking, laid an ambush, and smashed them like so many ants, killing many, capturing many more, and chasing the rest back into Byzantine lands. It was so easy that he gave them no more thought.

  He didn’t know that this “army” was merely the ragtag vanguard of a movement that would plague Muslims of the Mediterranean coast for another two centuries. While Urban had been speaking to the aristocracy up at the monastery, a vagabond named Peter the Hermit had been preaching the same message out on the streets. Urban had addressed nobles and knights, but presumably any Christian who went crusading could get the remission of sins the pope was offering, so Peter the Hermit was able to recruit from all classes—peasants, artisans, tradespeople, even women and children. His “army” left before the formal army could get organized, in part because his “army” didn’t feel much need to get organized. They were off to do God’s work; surely God would take care of the arrangements. It was these tens of thousands of cobblers, butchers, peasants and the like that Kilij Arslan succeeded in crushing.

  The next year, when Kilij Arslan heard that more Franj were coming, he dismissed the threat with a shrug. But the Crusaders in this next wave were real knights and archers led by combat-hardened military commanders from a land where the combat never stopped. Arslan’s engagement with them came down to a battle of lightly clad mobile horseman firing arrows at the armored tanks that were the medieval knights of western Europe. The Turks picked off the Franj foot soldiers, but the knights formed defensive blocks that arrows could not penetrate and kept moving slowly, ponderously, and inexorably forward. They took Arslan’s city and sent him running to one of his relatives for refuge. The knights then split up, some heading inland toward Edessa, the rest heading down the Mediterranean coast toward Antioch.

  The king of Antioch sent a desperate appeal to the king of Damascus, a man named Daquq. The king of Damascus wanted to help, but he was nervous about his brother Ridwan, the king of Aleppo, who would swoop in and grab Damascus if Daquq were to leave it. The ruler of Mosul agreed to help, but he got distracted fighting someone else along the way, and when he did arrive—late—he got into a fight with Daquq who had also finally arrived—late—and these two Muslim forces ended up going home without helping Antioch at all. From the Muslim side, this was the story of the early Crusades: a tragicomedy of internecine rivalry played out in city after city. When Antioch fell, the knights took vengeance for the city’s resistance with some indiscriminate killing, and then kept heading south, towards a city called Ma’ara.

  Knowing what had happened at Nicaea and Antioch, the Ma’arans were terrified. They too sent urgent messages to nearby cousins, begging for help, but their cousins were only too glad to see the wolves from the west batter Ma’ara, each one hoping to absorb the city for himself once the Franj had blown by. So Ma’ara had to face the Franj alone.

  The Christian knights set siege to the city and reduced it to desperation—but in the process reduced themselves to desperation as well, because they ate every scrap of food in the vicinity and then commenced to starve. Obviously, no one was going to feed these invaders, and that was the problem with setting a long siege in a strange land.

  At last Franj leaders sent a message into the city assuring the people of Ma’ra that none of them would be harmed if they simply opened their gates and surrendered. The city notables decided to comply. But once the Crusaders made it into Ma’ara, they did more than slaughter. They went on a frightening rampage that included boiling adult Muslims up for soup and skewering Muslim children on spits, grilling them over open fires, and eating them.

  I know this sounds like horrible propaganda that the defeated Muslims might have concocted to slander the Crusaders, but reports of Crusader cannibalism in this instance come from Frankish as well as Arab sources. Frankish eyewitness Radulph of Caen, for example, reported on the boiling and grilling. Albert of Aix, also present at the conquest of Ma’ara, wrote, “Not only did our troops not shrink from eating dead Turks and Saracens; they also ate dogs!”2 What strikes me about this statement is the implication that eating dogs was worse than eating Turks, which makes me think that this Franj, at least, considered Turks a different species from himself.

  Amazingly enough, even after this debacle, the Muslims could not unite. Examples abound. The ruler of Homs sent the Franj a gift of horses and offered them advice about what they might sack next (not Homs). The Sunni rulers of Tripoli invited the Franj to make common cause with them against the Shi’i. (Instead, the Franj conquered Tripoli.)

  When the Crusaders first arrived, the Egyptian vizier al-Afdal sent a letter to the Byzantine emperor, congratulating him on the “reinforcements” and wishing the Crusaders every success! Egypt had long been locked in a struggle with both the Seljuks and the Abbasids, and al-Afdal really thought the newcomers would merely help his cause. It didn’t seem to dawn on him until too late that he himself might be in the line of pillage. After the Franj conquered Antioch, the Fatimid vizier wrote to them to ask if there was anything he could do to help. When the Franj moved against Tripoli, Afdal took adv
antage of the distraction to assert control of Jerusalem in the name of the Fatimid khalifa. He posted his own governor there and assured the Franj they were now welcome to visit Jerusalem anytime as honored pilgrims: they would have his protection. But the Franj wrote back to say they were not interested in protection but in Jerusalem, and they were coming “with lances raised.”3

  The Franj marched through largely empty country, for their reputation had preceded them. Rural folks had fled at their approach, and small towns had emptied into larger cities with higher walls for protection. Jerusalem had some of the highest walls around, but after a forty-day siege, the Crusaders tried the same gambit they had run successfully at Ma’ara—open the gates, no one will be harmed, they told the citizens—and it worked here too.

  Upon securing this city, the Franj indulged in an orgy of bloodletting so drastic it made all the previous carnage seem mild. One crusader, writing about the triumph, described piling up heads, hands, and feet in the streets. (He called it a “wonderful sight.”) He spoke of crusaders riding through heathen blood up to their knees and bridle reins.4 Edward Gibbon, the British historian who chronicled the fall of the Roman Empire, said the Crusaders killed seventy thousand people here over the course of two days. Of the city’s Muslims, virtually none survived.

  The city’s Jewish denizens took refuge in their gigantic central synagogue, but while they were in there praying for deliverance, the Crusaders blockaded all the doors and windows and set fire to the building, burning up pretty much the entire Jewish community of Jerusalem in one fell swoop.