In his list, John of Würzburg includes Armenians, Jacobites, Maronites, Copts and Nestorians, all of whom were seen as heretical by the Greeks, who had persecuted them in the past. At best, they were seen as schismatic by the Latins, since they were not in communion with Rome. It is not clear if the crusaders thought they had come to save these from the Turks as well, although Michael the Syrian says that, during the expedition, the Franks had promised God that, if he allowed them to enter Jerusalem, they would live in peace with all Christian confessions and would give each of them churches and convents.61 Nevertheless, following the death of Adhémar of Le Puy in August 1098, the secular leaders of the crusade informed the pope that they had driven out the Turks and pagans, but were unable to expel those whom they called the heretics, by which they meant the Greeks, Armenians, Syrians and Jacobites.62 This hostility may have derived in part from the inability of the Latins to distinguish the different elements in the local population. William of Tyre says that, during the siege of Antioch, there were many spies in the camp, who could move easily among the troops since ‘some pretended to be Greeks, some Syrians, and other Armenians, and all could easily assume the characteristics of such nations in idioms, manners, and dress’.63 Nonetheless, it soon became evident that accommodation with the local Christians was possible in a way never achieved by the Byzantines, as links developed through marriage and military co-operation, and William says that nearly all the inhabitants of Antioch were ‘true believers’.64
The Armenians and the Jacobites were the most numerous, although they were found mostly in the northern crusader states rather than in the kingdom of Jerusalem.65 Armenia can be broadly defined as the lands between the Caucasus to the north and the Taurus mountains to the south, with the Black Sea to the west and the Caspian to the east. Like Syria, Armenia had had the misfortune to be a zone of conflict between the great powers; the Byzantines in particular saw it as an area of great strategic importance. The Armenians claimed apostolic origin for their Church, but they were actually converted in the early fourth century by St Gregory the Illuminator, ‘the Apostle of Armenia’ (c.240–332). They did not adhere to the Chalcedonian creed; indeed, they may not even have known about the council at the time it was held. They were therefore not trusted by the Byzantines, who saw them as monophysite heretics, although the Armenians denied this. Whatever the truth of this, they had been victims of both the Byzantine policy of dispersal and the more recent Seljuk expansion, which explains why the crusaders encountered them in Cilicia (which became known as Lesser Armenia), northern Syria and around Edessa.66 As a consequence, there was, says the anonymous author of the treatise on the Holy Land, ‘an implacable hatred’ between the Greeks and the Armenians.67
Armenian unwillingness to accept the Chalcedonian definitions may well have had more to do with fear of Byzantine domination than with doctrine. However, the Jacobites were quite distinctly monophysite in that they believed the Incarnate Christ to be of one nature only, rejecting the doctrine set down at Chalcedon of two natures, divine and human, mystically united, while the Maronites were monotheletes, accepting that Christ had two natures, but only one (Divine) will.68 The Jacobites were named after Jacob Baradaeus, who became metropolitan of Edessa in c.542, during a career of consistent opposition to the Byzantines. As the Syrian Orthodox Church, they had communities in all the crusader states, but were particularly strong in northern Syria, under the leadership of their own patriarch of Antioch.69 Although there were fewer of them in the south, nevertheless they had a continuous line of metropolitans in Jerusalem in the twelfth century, among whom was Ignatius Hesnun (who died in 1124 or 1125), who rebuilt the church of St Mary Magdalene and Simon the Pharisee, situated in the north-east corner of the city, which had been virtually deserted at the end of the eleventh century.70
The Maronites had originally been based at Antioch, but when the crusaders arrived they were mainly to be found in the northern Lebanese mountains, where they had taken refuge from Byzantine persecution. They were less dispersed than the Armenians and the Jacobites; William of Tyre estimated that there were about 40,000 of them living in the region of Gibelet. Their heresy was, he says, ‘that in our Lord Jesus Christ there exists, and did exist from the beginning, one will and one energy only’.71 This seems to be a reference to the doctrine of monotheletism, which Heraclius had tried to introduce in an unsuccessful attempt to reconcile dissident Churches in the midst of the Persian crisis of the 620s. They took their name from St Maro (350–433), who founded a monastery on the Orontes not far from Apamea in the late fourth century, although their monophysite beliefs were most likely to have been derived from another Maro, Maro of Edessa, who lived in the late sixth century.72
The Copts and the Nestorians were less important to the crusaders, although, as John of Würzburg shows, they clearly had a presence in the kingdom of Jerusalem. The Copts, in fact, might have become of much greater interest to the Latins had King Amalric succeeded in gaining control of northern Egypt during the 1160s, since their main centre was Alexandria. Coptic tradition claimed unbroken succession from St Mark, martyred in Alexandria in AD 68. Their opposition to Chalcedon was therefore less a doctrinal matter – they did not deny the two natures of Christ – than one of authority.73 The Nestorians were different from the other four eastern Christian Churches in that they believed in two separate natures in Christ Incarnate, although it is not clear that Nestorius, the patriarch of Constantinople after whom they were named, actually taught this himself. Nestorius had certainly been a controversial figure, having been made patriarch in 428, only to be deposed in 431 and exiled to Upper Egypt five years later. Whatever the truth of this dispute the Nestorians had been very successful in the early middle ages, spreading east through Persia, so that by c.1000 they had at least twenty metropolitan dioceses.74
One other group of Christians included in John of Würzburg's list was the Georgians, whose monastery and church of the Holy Cross stood about a mile to the south-west of Jerusalem. It was a special place, as it was believed to encompass the stump of the tree from which the wood of the Cross was made.75 The Georgians had been converted by the mid-fourth century and accepted the Chalcedonian tenets; as monks, hermits and pilgrims, they had had a presence in and around Jerusalem since at least the fifth century. Although it had been damaged in the eleventh century, Abbot Daniel mentions that the monastery was functioning at the time of his visit, and there was also a convent of Georgian nuns, one of whom, the former wife of King David (1089–1125), had probably founded the house at about this time.76 The Georgians had considerable military strength: in 1120, Ansell, cantor of the Holy Sepulchre, described the kingdom as ‘a rampart for us against the Medes and Persians’, and, after the Latin defeat in 1187, they were strong enough to insist that Saladin restore their losses in Jerusalem as a consequence of the war.77 However, the core of their power between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea was too far north to have much direct effect upon the crusader states. Even so, after 1187, Queen Tamar (1184–1213) took the opportunity to assume the role of protector of the Christians in the East on the basis that both the Latins and the Greeks had failed in this task.78
The crusaders, of course, believed that Syria and Palestine were ‘the lands of the Christians’. This was not the way the Jews saw it. For them, ever since the Diaspora, as early as the eighth century BC, the land of Israel had been in the hands of invaders. The famous thirteenth-century Jewish scholar from Gerona known as Nahmanides (Moses ben Nahman) (d. c.1270) wrote a commentary on Leviticus 26:32, ‘I will destroy your land and the enemies who occupy it will be appalled.’ Conceived in the light of events in the East in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, it took this form: ‘And these are good tidings proclaiming in all the lands of the Diaspora that our land does not accept our foes. And this is a decisive proof and a great promise, because you will hardly find in all the inhabited world a country which is so fair and spacious, settled from time immemorial, and which is as much ruined as
this one. For ever since we departed from it, it has not accepted a single other nation or language. They all try to settle it, but it is beyond their power.’79
The capture of Jerusalem by the crusaders in July 1099 was yet another of these enemy blows. Jews who had remained in the city suffered badly in the massacre, but not all of them were killed, since Tancred would not otherwise have been able to ransom some of them after the crusader frenzy had died down.80 Jewish leaders in Cairo were aware of the situation and sent representatives to Ascalon with funds to pay ransoms, a practice that continued until 1102.81 After this, Jews were not allowed to remain in Jerusalem, but they continued to live in some of the crusader cities such as Tiberias and in the larger Galilean villages, where they were within walking distance of the synagogues.82 In fact, by c.1170, limited settlement had again been permitted in Jerusalem, for the Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela, who meticulously recorded the Jewish communities scattered around the Mediterranean and the Middle East, said that a small group of about 200 lived ‘under the Tower of David in one corner of the city’, where they specialised in dyeing, over which they had been given a monopoly by the king in return for a small rent.83
However, even before Jerusalem fell, Tancred and Eustace of Boulogne had made a raid on Nablus, 32 miles to the north. There, they found not only local Christians, but also a substantial community of Samaritans, perhaps as many as 1,000 people. There were probably another 500 living in Acre, Caesarea, Ascalon and Gaza.84 The Samaritans were a separate Jewish group, who based their religious rites upon a version of the Pentateuch and centred their worship on their temple on Mount Gerizim. They had been excluded from the main body of the Jews since the time of the Babylonian exile in the sixth century BC, in which they had no part, and since the time of the Muslim invasions had been Arabic-speaking, although continuing to pray in Hebrew.
The Arabs had swept into this complicated world of different peoples and beliefs in the 630s. Muhammad believed that he was the unworthy instrument of God's final revelation and thus the ultimate successor of the Jewish prophets, including Christ. Islam imposed a strict monotheism and moral code, which entailed a series of obligations, most importantly, as Ibn Shaddad, Saladin's qadi of the army, expressed it, ‘testimony that there is no god but God, performance of the prayers, the giving of alms, fasting in Ramadn, and the Pilgrimage to the Sacred House of God’.85 This had been set down in the 114 suras (chapters) of the Koran, later supplemented by the Hadith, or sayings of the Prophet. After Mecca, the place of pilgrimage, and Medina, which had sheltered Muhammad during his exile from Mecca, Jerusalem was the third of the great holy cities. Here the Archangel Gabriel had taken Muhammad to the rock from which the Prophet ascended through the seven heavens to receive Divine revelation. When Saladin besieged Jerusalem in early October 1187, there followed, claimed Ibn al-Athir, ‘the fiercest fight that anyone had ever seen, as each side of the two sides believed that it was a religious task and a binding duty’.86
However, when Muhammad had died in 632, Islam was a faith that was still evolving, with only a fraction of the adherents and territory it was to gain over the next two centuries. Inevitably, as it expanded, it was modified by circumstances: the Islamic world of the crusader era was not one dominated by the desert tribes of Arabia, but by military and intellectual leaders whose bases were urban mosques and madrasas, and who followed a literature that had not been consolidated until the ninth century.87 Not surprisingly, under the pressure of such development, Islam had splintered. If they had not been fully cognisant of it before, the crusaders at Antioch were soon aware that the Muslims were far from unified in their faith, for, in February 1098 envoys representing the Fatimid caliph at Cairo presented themselves at the crusader camp. According to Albert of Aachen, they not only offered them the city of Jerusalem, which they had recently retaken from the Turks, but also urged them to continue their attack on Antioch. ‘There had been,’ he says, ‘very severe discord and hatred between [the caliph] and the Turks long before this expedition of the Christians.’88
This hatred was based on more than cultural and racial antagonisms, for the Fatimid caliphate had been established in 969 as the chief Shi'ite power within Islam, thus consolidating a long-standing schism that found its origins in the generation that followed Muhammad's death. William of Tyre, who wrote a history of the Muslim world, describes how Muhammad's successors, beginning with Abu-Bakr (who had been one of his earliest associates), had ruled as caliphs, ‘because they succeeded their famous master and were his heirs’. They were, however, challenged by Ali, a cousin of Muhammad, who ‘considered it unfitting that he should be called the successor of his cousin and not rather a great prophet himself’. Not everybody accepted this, but there were some who believed him, ‘so a schism developed among that people which has lasted even to the present. Some maintain that Muhammad is the greater and, in fact, the greatest of all prophets, and these are called in their own tongue, Sunnites; others declare that Ali alone is the prophet of God, and they are called Shiites.’89 William's presentation of the schism as a rivalry between two prophets was not entirely accurate in that Ali claimed to be the first true successor of Muhammad rather than his rival; nevertheless, it is clear that the Latins soon grasped that this represented a fundamental fissure within Islam, which, although political in origin, had over time developed religious dimensions as well.90
From 750, the Sunni had been represented by the Abbasids, the second of whom built a new city at Baghdad, near the former Persian capital of Ctesiphon. The Abbasid dynasty achieved great longevity, lasting until 1258, when they were exterminated by the Mongols. However, from the mid-tenth century, they were largely in the hands of a new element in Islam, the Seljuk Turks; in 1055, the reigning caliph had installed Tughril Beg as sultan or temporal ruler, and from this time the Turks represented the cutting edge of the Sunnite cause. The first crusaders were much impressed by the Seljuks, even when describing their atrocities. Survivors of the crusade of 1101 told Albert of Aachen that they were ‘wicked and dreadful men, whose heads were shaved in front and behind, on right and left sides in the manner of a neck, and whose sparse hairs hanging down from these four necks bristled as an uncut crest, with also untrimmed and flowing beards, and who are reported to resemble in their appearance nothing so much as ugly and filthy spirits’.91 In a powerful passage, the author of the Gesta, the battle of Dorylaeum fresh in his mind, wrote: ‘What man, however experienced and learned, would dare to write of the skill and prowess and courage of the Turks, who thought that they would strike terror into the Franks, as they had done into the Arabs and Saracens, Armenians, Syrians and Greeks, by the menace of their arrows?’ He claimed they had a saying that they were of common stock with the Franks and, he says regretfully, if only they adhered to the true faith ‘you could not find stronger or braver or more skilful soldiers’.92
However, by the later twelfth century the Franks had become aware of another Muslim enemy, the Kurds, seen as equally formidable. Their homelands were in southern and eastern Anatolia and north-eastern Iraq but, not surprisingly, since Saladin was a Kurd, they played a prominent part in his armies. According to an anonymous Christian survey of the forces gathered by Saladin during the battles for the control of Acre between 1189 and 1191, the Kurds were the best knights and were characterised by the greatest nobility. ‘They serve all the Saracen princes as soldiers, just like the English and Danes in Constantinople.’93
The Shi'ites, for their part, asserted that they represented the only legitimate line of imams, by which they meant those who were divinely guided in their exposition of the true faith, and from these there would appear the Mahdi or Guided One. There was much disagreement over who this would be and when this event would occur, but for the crusaders the most significant element was the Fatimids at Cairo, who adhered to an imam called Ismail, who died sometime before 765. His successor had appeared in 909 and his descendants established themselves at Cairo sixty years later. There was evidently a p
owerful messianic element among the Shi'ites, which itself was always likely to provoke further splits. In 1090, one such group of dissidents set themselves up at Alamut in Persia and adopted political murder as their preferred method of operation. These became known as the Assassins, and their western branch, established in the 1130s in enclaves in the Nosairi mountains, became very well known to the Latins, although they were to be found farther east around the Jabal as-Summaq at the time of the First Crusade.94 According to William of Tyre, in the 1170s they numbered around 60,000 and possessed ten fortresses together with adjacent villages.95
The majority of indigenous Muslims living in the lands conquered by the crusaders were to be found in the south. The main Muslim villages were in Samaria and eastern Galilee, while the Franks settled in the area north of Jerusalem as far as Sanjil (Saint-Gilles), that is, in the places already inhabited by eastern Christians. There was, therefore, a distinct Muslim region, determined by cultural rather than ecological frontiers, and already established centuries before the arrival of the crusaders.96 These must have been the people described by the German pilgrim Theoderic in the early 1170s around Nablus. ‘When we were going along this road we saw a crowd of Saracens, who were all beginning to plough with their oxen and asses a very well-kept field. And they uttered a horrid cry, which is not unusual for them when they start any work, but they filled us with great terror! There are a great number of pagans there, who stay everywhere in cities and villages and farms of this province.’97
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