Last Crusade, The

by Cliff, Nigel

  18 Old Man of the Sea: The mythical character, also identified as the sea god Nereus, appears in Hercules’s eleventh labor. In it, Hercules is sent to fetch the golden apples of immortality from the garden of the Hesperides, the daughters of the Titan named Atlas who holds the heavens on his shoulders. Hercules seizes the shape-changing Nereus and extracts from him the location of the garden, then frees Prometheus from his fiery torment and in return learns that only Atlas can fetch the apples. Hercules offers to bear Atlas’s burden while he goes off to the garden; on his return Atlas tries to trick the hero into taking the weight off his shoulders for good. Hercules asks Atlas to hold the skies while he rearranges his cloak, and runs away. In one variant, Hercules builds his pillars to liberate Atlas.

  18 a millennium of mariners: One or two earlier navigators were bolder. Around 500 BCE, the Carthaginian explorer Hanno the Navigator sailed through the Pillars of Hercules and likely reached the Senegal River; his journey is recorded in his Periplus, a Greek translation of the text on a tablet that Hanno deposited in a temple. Herodotus briefly mentions the earlier circumnavigation of Africa, in a clockwise direction, by a Phoenician-crewed fleet sent by the Egyptian pharaoh Necho II; his skeptical report that the Phoenicians found the sun on their right as they sailed west around the southern tip of Africa lends the only credence to a story for which there is no other evidence and which is mainly remembered by those who posit a link between the pyramids of Egypt and Mexico.

  18 the Seven Peaks: The mountain range culminates in the near three thousand feet height of Jebel Musa, the Mountain of Moses, which is the alternative candidate for the southern Pillar of Hercules.

  19 sinful wickedness of their rulers: While divine punishment for the Goths’ constant civil wars was seen behind the defeat, divine providence was detected when the exiled nobles managed to put aside their differences, elect a ruler, and found Asturia, the kernel of the Christian kingdoms that would eventually push back against Islam. In 722 Pelayo, the first king of Asturia, won a minor victory against the Berbers that was later identified as the start of the Christian comeback. “I will not associate with the Arabs in friendship,” a chronicler had him grandly proclaim, “nor will I submit to their authority . . . for we confide in the mercy of the Lord that from this little hill that you see, the salvation of Spain and of the army of the Gothic people will be restored.” Repeated claims of continuity between Gothic Spain and the new Christian kingdoms helped justify the wars against Islam as the reconquest of Iberia by its rightful rulers. Joseph F. O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 5–6.

  19 Arab armies had besieged Constantinople: The sieges took place in 674–78 and 717–18. Between 80,000 and 120,000 troops marched on Constantinople in 717; eighteen hundred war galleys attacked by sea. Starvation, freezing temperatures, and disease decimated the land army; Greek fire destroyed much of the fleet, and its remnants were wiped out in a freak storm.

  20 that day in 732: Western tradition has accorded the Battle of Poitiers a significance that was lost on Arab writers and is lost, too, on revisionist historians. In Europe’s foundation stories, though, Poitiers became paramount. In chapter 52 of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon famously supposed that if the battle had gone the other way, “perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mohammed.” See Maurice Mercier and André Seguin, Charles Martel et la Bataille de Poitiers (Paris: Librarie orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1944); Jean-Henri Roy and Jean Deviosse, La Bataille de Poitiers (Paris: Gallimard, 1966).

  20 the Hammer: Charles Martel was the greatest in a long line of seventh- and eighth-century palace mayors who were the powers behind the throne of the Frankish Merovingian kings. Martel, the bastard son of the palace mayor Pepin of Herstal, scythed through the customary mayhem that followed Pepin’s death and united much of present-day France, western Germany, and the Low Countries under his rule. In 751 his son, also called Pepin, finally seized the throne with the backing of the pope.

  20 tactics that had reaped such spectacular rewards: The Arab maneuver known as karr wa farr—“attack and withdrawal”—was impracticable for Europe’s soldiers, who were weighed down by heavy helmets, coats of armor, and shields. See Hugh Kennedy, The Armies of the Caliphs: Military and Society in the Early Islamic State (London: Routledge, 2001); David Nicolle, Armies of the Muslim Conquest (London: Osprey, 1993).

  20 rancorous power struggles: As late as 807, the governor of Toledo invited hundreds of prominent rebels to a feast in his palace, decapitated them, and threw their bodies into a prepared pit; the grisly event became known as “La Jornada del Foso,” or the Day of the Pit.

  21 a king’s ransom: Mayeul, the abbot of Cluny, was kidnapped in 972.

  21 “a plank on the water”: Ibn Khordabeh, Book of Routes, quoted in Jack Turner, Spice: The History of a Temptation (New York: Random House, 2004), 96.

  21 “Europeans”: In the Chronicle of 754. The reliability of the text has been disputed, and some medievalists date the term to the late Middle Ages.

  22 Augustus, Emperor of the Romans: The papacy derived its sovereignty over the secular rulers of the former western lands of the Roman Empire from a document called the Donation of Constantine, which was purportedly written in the fourth century, was first seen in the eighth century, and was proved to be a forgery in the fifteenth century.

  22 schism with the Orthodox Church: Even in Western Europe, dissenters repudiated St. Peter’s successors long before the Protestant Reformation split its society in two. Among the most determined and most unfortunate were the puritanical Cathars of southern France, who held that the material world was evil and broke off with opulent, corrupt Rome; the heresy was eventually wiped out, at the cost of as many as a million dead.

  23 Peoples of the Book: The Quran names the Sabians as a third People of the Book; Islamic scholars later added Zoroastrians and Hindus.

  23 “with wooden saddles”: Philip Khuri Hitti, History of Syria, Including Lebanon and Palestine (London: Macmillan, 1951), 543. The caliph was Mutawwakil. Even under less petty regimes, the dhimmi were forbidden to build new places of worship and sometimes to repair old ones, church bells had to be muffled, and proselytizing was a capital crime.

  23 all-powerful foreign minister: Hasdai ibn Shaprut started out as Abd al-Rahman III’s personal physician; from medic to minister was a classic career path for ambitious medieval men.

  23 Sephardi Jews: Many of Iberia’s Jews had migrated there following the Roman sack of Jerusalem in 70 CE. The Goths had energetically persecuted them; at the end of the seventh century, paranoid that Jews were conspiring to overthrow them, they seized their property and distributed it to their slaves, then enslaved them and forbade them to practice their religion.

  24 Christians took just as happily to Arab culture: Paul Alvarus, a Jewish convert to Christianity, famously let out a great wail of complaint that the supple, sophisticated Arabic tongue had seduced his coreligionists: “The Christians love to read the poems and romances of the Arabs; they study the Arab theologians and philosophers, not to refute them but to form a correct and elegant Arabic. Where is the layman who now reads the Latin commentaries on the Holy Scriptures, or who studies the Gospels, prophets or Apostles? Alas! All talented young Christians read and study with enthusiasm the Arab books; they gather immense libraries at great expense; they despise the Christian literature as unworthy of attention. They have forgotten their language. For every one who can write a letter in Latin to a friend, there are a thousand who can express themselves in Arabic with elegance, and write better poems in this language than the Arabs themselves.” Quoted in John Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 86.

  24 deflower the Virgin Mary: Eulogius was eventually arrested for harboring a Musl
im girl who had converted to Christianity. At his trial he offered to induct the judge into the Christian religion, then launched into a lecture about the manifold errors of Islam. The judge threw up his hands and sent the prisoner before the ruling council, which was treated to a sermon on the glories of the Gospels. The stubborn monk’s Muslim peers admired him as a scholar and a man and begged him to stop his insane mission of self-destruction, but he started up again and was beheaded. See Tolan, Saracens, 93; Olivia Remie Constable, ed., Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 51–55.

  24 individuals with their own perceptions and desires: The awakening is preserved in the era’s poetry and song. See Peter Cole, trans. and ed., The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950–1492 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Salma Khadra Jayyusi, “Andalusi Poetry: The Golden Period,” in Jayyusi, ed., The Legacy of Muslim Spain (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 317–66.

  24 exotic new crops: Among them were lemons, limes, grapefruit, figs, pomegranates, watermelons, apricots, almonds, saffron, spinach, artichokes, eggplants, cotton, rice, sugarcane, mulberry trees, henna plants, and palm trees. See Olivia Remie Constable, “Muslim Merchants in Andalusi International Trade,” in Jayyusi, Legacy of Muslim Spain, 759–73; Richard A. Fletcher, Moorish Spain (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1992), 62–64.

  25 “ornament of the world”: María Rosa Menocal adopts the famous saying as the title of her book about the culture of convivencia. The nun was Hroswitha of Gandersheim.

  25 fifty-two battles: Or thereabouts; fifty-two is the number given by the pioneering North African historian Ibn Khaldun in the fourteenth century. Al-Mansur owed his initial advancement to a commission by the then chancellor to murder the uncle of the heir to the throne, thus ensuring the delicate boy’s accession and the chancellor’s influence.

  26 orgies of fratricide: One king, Sancho of Leon, was pushed off a cliff by his sister to make way for their brother (and possibly her lover) Alfonso the Brave, the future conqueror of Toledo.

  27 a war of religious liberation: In the late eleventh century, the 27 of Aragon and Navarre declared that his conquests were intended “for the recovery and extension of the Church of Christ, for the destruction of the pagans, the enemies of Christ . . . so that the kingdom . . . might be liberated to the honour and service of Christ; and that once all the people of that unbelieving rite were expelled and the filthiness of their wicked error was eliminated therefrom, the venerable Church of Jesus Christ our Lord may be fostered there forever.” O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade, 8. It hardly needs saying that the kings of the Reconquest were hungry for land and booty, but in an age when faith defined life it is too easy to read such statements as mere posturing, as opportunism cloaked in a holy habit.

  27 a Spanish field: The field, the Campus stellae or “Field of the star,” was later held to have lent its name to Santiago de Compostela, the city that grew up around the purported tomb. In 997, Almanzor attacked and burned Santiago and carted away its church bells to be melted down into lamps for Córdoba’s Mezquita; more than anything else, his actions made St. James the rallying cry of the Reconquest and Santiago a magnet for international pilgrims. When the Reconquest reached Córdoba, the lamps went back home.

  27 El Cid: The champion’s real name was Rodrigo Diaz; El Cid was the Spanish version of the Arabic honorific al-sayyid, or “the lord,” which was given him by his Muslim troops.

  27 a synagogue designed by Muslim architects: The synagogue was eventually stormed by a Christian mob and was turned into the church of Santa Maria la Blanca. The eddy of competing city-states and commingling cultures unleashed by the breakup of al-Andalus has been likened to the Italian Renaissance; see María Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Boston: Little, Brown, 2002), 40–41, 144.

  27 fashions, and songs: Among the most culturally influential figures of al-Andalus was a singer from Baghdad named Ziryab, who became Islamic Spain’s arbiter of fashion and manners and brought his repertoire of ten thousand songs of love, loss, and longing to the West. When the Arabic songs crossed the Pyrenees, not least in the mouths of captured qiyan or singing girls, they came to the ears of French troubadours, heavily influenced European music and literature, and may have inspired the concept of courtly love. Fletcher, Moorish Spain, 43–45; Menocal, Ornament of the World, 123.

  28 help from abroad: The invitation to the Almoravids was extended by Muhammad ibn Abbad al-Mutamid, the emir of Seville, who famously remarked after Toledo fell to Alfonso the Brave that he “would rather be a camel-driver in Africa than a swineherd in Castile.” Fletcher, Moorish Spain, 111.

  28 The Almohads: The new rulers did not entirely eradicate al-Andalus’s ingrained habits of learning. Ibn Rushd, known in the West as Averroës, was the chief judge of Seville before the Almohads sent him to their Moroccan capital Marrakech as a royal physician. His commentaries on Aristotle, which insisted that science was superior to religion since God had created a logical universe that could be divined by the application of reason, were translated in Toledo and spurred the development of Scholasticism, the dominant philosophical and theological movement of medieval Europe. Averroës’s rationalist beliefs found an unlikely supporter in the Almohad caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf and were enshrined in the Almohad Creed of 1183, but as religious intolerance mounted, the philosopher was sent into exile and his books were burned. Averroës’s contemporary Musa ibn Maymun, known in the West as Maimonides, represents the end of convivencia. The scion of a long line of Arabized Córdoban Jews, he escaped the Almohads’ persecutions by moving to Egypt, where he became another royal physician, only to fall foul of more pogroms against Jews. He turned his back on his past, repudiated (in Arabic) Jews’ cooperation with Muslims as a disaster, and predicted the eclipse of Islam. Yet his schooling in al-Andalus prepared him to write the most influential of all the Arabic works that tried to reconcile Aristotelian logic with religion, the Guide for the Perplexed, as well as medical textbooks that were still heavily used in the Renaissance. The intellectual impact of Muslim Iberia was felt in Europe long after its eclipse.

  29 mysteries of Islam: The first Latin translation of the Quran was made in 1143.

  30 marched south across Spain: The pivotal Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa was fought in 1212 across a plain in the eastern foothills of the Sierra Morena, the mountain range that separates Andalusia from La Mancha. According to several contemporary reports, the entire Spanish army became trapped on a plateau and was only saved from catastrophe when a shepherd showed them a sheep run that led down to the Muslim camp. In the usual manner, the shepherd was later revealed to have been none other than a long-dead saint in disguise.

  Chapter 2: The Holy Land

  31 Pope Urban II: Ironically, the pope who inspired vast armies to march east was barely able to enter Rome; a rival pope installed by the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV, who had been embroiled in an infamous struggle with Urban’s predecessor, Gregory VII, over which of the two wielded supreme power, was nestled there. For years Urban wandered Italy as an exile, dependent on charity and deeply in debt; on the few occasions he made it to Rome, he was forced to barricade himself on an island in the Tiber, hole up in a loyalist’s fortress, or helplessly anathematize his rival from outside the walls, while his supporters fought running battles with the so-called antipope’s troops. Urban’s position was still precarious in 1095, and the backbone of the Crusading army came from his homeland in northern France.

  32 excommunicated the patriarch: The patriarch returned the favor and excommunicated the legates. Despite doubts about the legality of the decrees, the long-strained ties between the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church had finally snapped and would never be restored.

  32 ousted the Umayyad caliphs: The Abbasids defeated the Umayyads in 750 and moved their capital to Baghdad i
n 762. Among the few survivors of the bloody banquet was a young prince named Abd al-Rahman, who evaded the bounty hunters all the way to Spain, where he reestablished the Umayyads as the ruling dynasty of al-Andalus.

  33 an embassy from Constantinople: The extravaganza is recounted by the eleventh-century historian al-Khatib al-Baghdadi; see Hugh Kennedy, The Court of the Caliphs: The Rise and Fall of Islam’s Greatest Dynasty (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004), 153.

  34 a Shia sect: The sect is the Ismailis, who trace the legitimate line of successors to Muhammad through an imam named Ismail ibn Jafar. A Baghdadi missionary carried their teachings to Tunisia and in 909 roused the local population to overthrow their ruler in favor of a self-proclaimed descendant of the Prophet via Fatima, Ali, and Ismail. In 969 the Fatimids conquered Egypt, which had been ruled for twenty-two years by a eunuch and former slave named Abu al-Misk Kafur (Musky Camphor). One story holds that the new ruler, the caliph al-Muizz, answered religious scholars who doubted his lineage by drawing his sword and showering the floor with gold coins: “There is my lineage,” he retorted.

  34 Persian power revived for a time: The Samanid Empire lasted through most of the ninth and tenth centuries; Bukhara, its capital, rivaled Baghdad as a cultural center. Foremost among its luminaries was the philosopher and physician Ibn Sina, who was long revered in the West as Avicenna; his al-Qanun (“The Canon”), a vast encyclopedia of Greek and Arab medical knowledge, was a primary text in European and Asian medical schools well into the modern era.

  34 smashed its armies: At the Battle of Manzikert in 1071. To complete the humiliation the victorious sultan Alp Aslan killed the vanquished emperor Romanos IV Diogenes with kindness; he lavished gifts on him and sent him home, where his domestic enemies gouged out his eyes. As Constantinople distracted itself with new civil wars the Turks walked virtually unopposed into the vast Anatolian peninsula—Rome’s great province of Asia Minor, today the Asian lands of Turkey. In a trice, the empire was reduced to its capital and a vulnerable straggle of hinterland.