A History of the Crusades

by Jonathan Riley-Smith

  Usamah was said to know by heart over 20,000 verses of pre-Islamic poetry. Usamah’s mnemonic powers were exceptional. But even Saladin, a Kurdish military adventurer, was nevertheless steeped in Arabic literature. Not only did Saladin carry an anthology of Usamah’s poetry about with him, he had also memorized the whole of Abu Tammam’s Hamasa, and he delighted in reciting from it. In the Hamasa (‘Courage’), Abu Tammam (806?–845/6) had collected bedouin poems from the pre-Islamic period and presented them to his readers as a guide to good conduct. In the Ayyubid period ‘people used to learn it by heart and not bother to have it on their shelves’. According to Abu Tammam, ‘The sword is truer than what is told in books: In its edge is the separation between truth and falsehood.’ The poems he had selected celebrated traditional Arab values, especially courage, manliness, and generosity.

  More generally the genres, images, metaphors, and emotional postures pioneered by the pre-Islamic poets helped to dictate the forms of the poetry commemorating defeat and victory in the war against the crusaders and indeed to form the self-image of the élite of the Muslim warriors. Thus tropes developed for boasting about hand-to-hand combat and petty successes in camel raiding in seventh-century Arabia were revived and re-applied to a Holy War fought by ethnically mixed, semi-professional warriors in Syria and Egypt. Saladin’s kinsmen and successors shared his tastes and quite a few of them wrote poetry themselves. Al-Salih Ayyub, the last great Ayyubid Sultan of Egypt (1240–9) employed and was advised by two of the greatest poets of the late Middle Ages, Baha al-Din Zuhayr and Ibn Matruh.

  Cultural Interchange

  Muslim and Frankish military aristocrats were capable of enjoying each other’s company and might go hunting together. There was also a lot of trade between Muslim and Christian and, in particular, merchants passed backwards and forwards between Damascus and the Christian port of Acre. The traveller Ibn Jubayr observed that ‘the soldiers occupied themselves in their war, while the people remained at peace’. However, though there were numerous contacts between Muslims and Christians, there was little cultural interchange. Proximity did not necessarily encourage understanding. According to the Bahr al-Fava ‘id, the books of foreigners were not worth reading. Also, according to the Bahr, ‘anyone who believes that his God came out of a woman’s privates is quite mad; he should not be spoken to, and he has neither intelligence nor faith.’

  Although Usamah could not speak French, it is clear from his memoirs that several Franks could speak Arabic. They learned the language for utilitarian purposes. Rainald of Châtillon, the Lord of Kerak of Moab, spoke Arabic and worked closely with the local bedouin in the Transjordan. Rainald of Sidon not only knew Arabic, but he employed an Arab scholar to comment on books in that language. However, no Arab books were translated into Latin or French in the Latin East, and the Arabs for their part did not interest themselves in western literature. King Amalric employed an Arab doctor, Abu Sulayman Dawud, whom he had brought back from Egypt some time in the 1160s, and this doctor was to treat his leper son, Baldwin. Far more common though was the Muslim use of native Christian doctors. Speculations about the transmission from East to West, via the Latin East, of such things as the pointed arch, heraldic blazons, sexual techniques, cookery recipes, and so forth remain just speculations. Muslim and Christian élites in the Near East admired each other’s religious fanaticism and warrior-like qualities. They had no interest in each other’s scholarship or art. The important cultural interchanges had taken place earlier and elsewhere. Arabic learning was mostly transmitted to Christendom via Spain, Sicily, and Byzantium.

  Hattin and After

  Saladin occupied Aleppo in 1183 and Mayyafariqin in 1185 and he received the nominal overlordship of Mosul in 1186. Only then did he embark on his greatest offensive against the kingdom of Jerusalem. In June 1187 he crossed the Jordan with an army of perhaps 30,000, of which 12,000 were regular cavalry. Some of the remainder were mutawwiun, civilian volunteers for the jihad, and Muslim chroniclers noted the role that these volunteers had, performing such tasks as setting light to the grass in advance of the Christian army. Saladin may have been hoping to capture the castle of Tiberias. He was probably not expecting to encounter King Guy of Jerusalem’s army in battle and he does not seem to have made advance preparations to take advantage of the sensational victory he did win at Hattin. Most of the distinguished Christians taken in the battle were eventually ransomed, but Sufi mystics in Saladin’s entourage were granted the privilege of beheading the captured Templars and Hospitallers.

  In the immediate aftermath of the battle, Saladin moved swiftly to occupy a series of weakly defended places on the coast and elsewhere, before turning against Jerusalem, the surrender of which he received on 2 October. Saladin had failed to take the great port of Tyre and this would later serve as an important base for the Third Crusade. In a conversation a couple of years after Hattin, as they were riding towards Acre, Saladin told his admiring biographer, Baha al-Din ibn Shaddad, of his dream for the future: ‘When by God’s help not a Frank is left on this coast, I mean to divide my territories, and to charge [my successors] with my last commands; then, having taken leave of them, I will sail on this sea to its islands in pursuit of them, until there shall not remain on the face of this earth one unbeliever in God, or I will die in the attempt.’ However Saladin and his advisers failed to anticipate that the fall of Jerusalem to the Muslims would result in the preaching of yet another great crusade in the West. In the meantime, Saladin’s chancery officials wrote to the caliph and other Muslim rulers. Their letters boasted of the capture of ‘the brother shrine of Mecca from captivity’ and insinuated that Saladin’s earlier wars against his Muslim neighbours could now be seen to be justified in that they had enforced unity in service of the jihad.

  Then, as the contingents of the Third Crusade arrived from the West, a war of march and countermarch began. It was effectively a war of attrition, which strained Muslim resources to the limit. In the words of al-Qadi al-Fadil, Saladin ‘spent the revenues of Egypt to gain Syria, the revenues of Syria to gain Mesopotamia, those of Mesopotamia to conquer Palestine’. Constantly short of money, Saladin had great difficulties in keeping large armies in the field. Holders of iqtas wished to supervise the harvests in the villages from which they collected their income, while Saladin’s kinsmen were sometimes more interested in pursuing ventures of their own on the edges of Ayyubid empire than they were in helping him maintain a stand-off against the armies of the Third Crusade. There are hints in Arabic literature of the period that there were some who regarded Saladin as an eschatological figure, a warrior of the Last Days, but shortly after the return of the crusader contingents to Europe, Saladin, worn out by the years of campaigning against the crusaders, died of a fever in 1193.

  The Heirs of Saladin

  Saladin’s successes had been achieved at a considerable cost and his successors were chary of pursuing an unduly aggressive policy which might bring them territorial gains in Syria or Palestine, but at the cost of provoking yet another crusade. After Saladin’s death, his empire was divided among mutually hostile kinsmen, most of whom stressed their attachment to the prosecution of jihad as practised by Zangi, Nur al-Din, and Saladin, but these princes, some of whom were hardly more than figureheads for aggressive factions composed of Turkish officers and Mamluks, were usually more interested in contesting supremacy within the Ayyubid empire. At times indeed one or other of the Ayyubid princes allied with the Franks in the Latin states against others of their kinsmen. Usually, though not always, the ruler of Egypt was recognized by the rest of the clan as the senior and the sultan, while the others, governors in Damascus, Aleppo, Hama, Homs, and elsewhere, were only maliks (princes). Saladin’s brother, Sayf al-Din al-Adil, was sultan of Egypt from 1200 to 1218 and thus it was he who was nominally in charge when the first contingents of the Fifth Crusade landed on the Nile Delta some way to the west of Damietta in May 1218. However, it was his son, al-Kamil, who from the first directed defensive operat
ions and then, when al-Adil died in August, succeeded him as sultan. The crusaders did eventually succeed in taking Damietta in November 1219. But in the longer run they were doomed by their failure to advance swiftly on Cairo, as al-Kamil’s kinsmen in Syria and Mesopotamia, with greater or lesser degrees of enthusiasm, sent contingents of troops to the assistance of Egypt. In the end the crusaders surrendered Damietta to al-Kamil in 1221.

  The poet Ibn Unayn made use of the traditional form of the qasida (ode) to celebrate the victory:

  Ask the backs of the horses on the day of battle concerning us, if our signs are unknown, and the limber lances

  On the morning we met before Damietta a mighty host of Byzantines [sic], not to be numbered either for certain or even by guesswork.

  They agreed as to opinion and resolution and ambition and religion, even if they differed in language.

  They called upon their fellow-crusaders [Ansar al-Salib, lit. ‘helpers of the Cross’] and troops of them advanced as though the waves were ships for them.

  Upon them every manner of mailcoat of armour, glittering like the horns of the sun, firmly woven together.

  And so on for another twenty verses or so. According to the poet, the crusaders fought well and the Muslims treated those who surrendered with compassion. And of course (and this is really the point of the poem) all praise goes to the house of Ayyub and its noble prince al-Kamil.

  Another fawning poet wrote

  If there is a Mahdi it is you,

  You who made the religion of the Elect and the Book to live.

  However, despite the heroic legacy of Saladin and the Ayyubid triumph at Damietta, the Ayyubid dealings with the crusaders in the early thirteenth century are better understood in terms of a need for coexistence than a desire to prosecute the jihad. Although the Muslim religious law could not countenance the formal conclusion of any sort of permanent peace with the infidel, nevertheless the demands of commerce and agriculture led to the negotiating of (usually) ten-year truces and the setting up in some areas of rural condominiums in which Christians and Muslims co-operated in the administration and the collection of the harvest. Thus an intermediate Dar al-Sulh (Territory of Truce) was permitted to exist between the otherwise starkly opposed Dar al-Islam (Territory of Islam) and Dar al-Harb (Territory of War). Saladin’s austere dedication to warfare and politics was not followed by all his heirs. The early thirteenth century was a great age for literature in Arabic, celebrating the pleasures of life: parties, picnics, love, and wine-drinking. The famous poet Baha al-Din Zuhayr (d. 1258) produced a diwan (anthology), the poems of which provide evidence for a dolce vita for some under the Ayyubids; as in the poem in which he describes himself visiting the taverns and monasteries of Egypt with his beloved and getting drunk and fancying ‘the moon-faced, slender-waisted monks’.

  When in 1229 al-Kamil, threatened by a coalition of hostile kinsmen, surrendered Jerusalem to Frederick II, his action aroused widespread criticism throughout the Muslim world. However, his most vociferous critics were other Ayyubid princes, who when it suited them, were just as ready to come to tactical alliances with the Christians. Al-Kamil died in 1238. Primogeniture counted for little or nothing in the Ayyubid confederacy and it was al-Kamil’s second son, al-Salih Ayyub, who took over in Egypt in 1240. Al-Salih Ayyub had already occupied Jerusalem temporarily in 1239 and in 1245 he was to add Damascus to his territories. In his struggles with rival Ayyubid princes and with the Christians who con-tinued to hang on to the coastline of Palestine, al-Salih Ayyub relied heavily on his Mamluk regiment, the Bahris. As has been noted above, almost all Muslim leaders made use of slave troops, but al-Salih Ayyub bought unprecedented numbers of Kipchak Turkish slaves from the south Russian steppe. He trained them thoroughly in the arts of war and he indoctrinated them in a cult of loyalty to himself.

  When Louis IX’s crusade landed in Egypt in 1249 and al-Salih Ayyub died while directing defences at al-Mansura on the Delta, it was largely the Mamluk officers who took over the conduct of the war. The Bahri Mamluks who defeated the French at al-Mansura in 1250 were described by the contemporary chronicler Ibn Wasil as the ‘the Templars of Islam’. A few months later these élite troops murdered Turanshah, al-Salih’s son and presumptive heir. Their action precipitated a decade of acute political turbulence in both Egypt and Syria, in which Ayyubid princes, Turkish and Kurdish generals, and rival factions of Mamluks fought over the provinces of the Ayyubid empire.

  This sort of internecine conflict, which gave the Latin settlements a breathing space, was in a sense a luxury, something which had to be abandoned when the Mongols entered Syria. Although Mongol armies had penetrated the Near East as early as the 1220s and occupied a large part of Anatolia in the 1240s, a more systematic programme of conquest began in the 1250s under the leadership of Hulegu, a grandson of Chinggis Khan.

  In 1256 the Assassin stronghold of Alamut was taken; in 1258, Baghdad, seat of the Abbasid caliphate, was sacked; and in January 1260 the Mongols crossed the Euphrates and entered Syria. Al-Nasir Yusuf, the Ayyubid ruler of Aleppo and Damascus, abandoned both cities to the Mongols and fled into the desert. He was later captured and executed by the Mongols.

  It was left to Qutuz, a Mamluk officer who had usurped the sultanate, to muster an army of Egyptian and Syrian last-ditchers and advance out of Egypt to confront the Mongols at the battle of Ayn Jalut on 3 September. The fruits of Qutuz’s victory, however, were reaped by another Mamluk, Baybars, who murdered Qutuz and proclaimed himself sultan of Egypt and Syria. Al-Zahir Baybars (1260–77) had become sultan by wielding an assassin’s knife and he stayed sultan by proving himself to be an effective war leader. Civilian propagandists did not linger over the facts of his usurpation; they stressed instead his effectiveness as leader of the jihad. Throughout his reign Baybars showed ferocious energy in defending Syria on the Euphrates frontier against the pagan Mongols. He also took Caesarea, Arsuf, Antioch, and Crac des Chevaliers from the Christians. Finally, he and his officials were careful to present this military jihad as part of a wider programme of moral reform and regeneration. The Abbasid caliphate was re-established under Mamluk protection in Cairo. The sultan declared himself the protector of the holy cities of Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem. Measures were taken against the consumption of alcohol and drugs, and heretics were investigated. In the course of a series of campaigns in the 1260s and 1270s the Assassin castles in Syria were occupied.

  By the end of Baybars’s reign the map of the Near East presented a very different appearance from that of the 1090s. The Ayyubids’ failure to take a stand against the Mongols had discredited that dynasty, and Baybars had taken over their principalities, leaving only Hama under a tributary Ayyubid princeling. Egypt and Syria were now part of a single empire. The sultan’s territory extended from the frontiers of Nubia to those of Cilician Armenia. Somewhat similarly, to the east of the Euphrates the patchwork of post-Seljuk principalities had been replaced by the Mongol Ilkhanate.

  Slaves on Horseback

  The Seljuks had made use of Mamluks and, according to one source, Alp Arslan had had 4,000 Mamluks in his army at the battle of Manzikert in 1071. Although Saladin’s emirs seem mostly to have been free-born Turks and Kurds, his shock troops were Mamluks. What was exceptional about the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt and Syria (1260–1517) was the degree to which the key military and administrative offices were monopolized by Mamluks. The Mamluk sultans commonly fielded larger and better-trained armies than their Ayyubid predecessors. At first, most of the Mamluks imported into Egypt and Syria were Kipchak Turks from the steppes of southern Russia, but from the 1360s onwards there was a partial shift in purchasing policy and increasing numbers of Circassians from the Caucasus were recruited. Although Turks and Circassians predominated, there were also significant numbers of Europeans—Hungarians, Germans, Italians, and others—in the Mamluk ranks. Most of these Europeans had been captured as youths in wars in the Holy Land and the Balkans or in pirate raids and then forcibly converted to Islam. />
  The young Mamluks in the Cairo citadel embarked on a punishing schedule of military training. They were made to slice at lumps of clay with their swords as many as 1,000 times a day so as to build up their arm muscles. They were taught bareback riding and horse archery, with special emphasis on how to fire backwards from the saddle. An important exercise was shooting up and back at a gourd raised on a high pole. The horse archer had to drop his reins to fire and guide the horse with his knees as he fired his arrow, and it was not unknown for tyro Mamluks to die as they crashed into the pole. Fatalities were also common in polo, an aristocratic sport which doubled as training for warfare. Large-scale organized hunting expeditions had a similar function in both the Mamluk and Mongol territories.

  Mamluks were also instructed in Arabic and Islam and quite a few learned to read and write. The formation of an educated military élite in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries explains the proliferation of treatises on furusiyya. Furusiyya literally means horsemanship, but works in this genre dealt not only with the management of horses, but with all the skills related to warfare, including the use of the sword, bow, lance, and later cannon, as well as the deployment of siege engines and the conduct of armies. Authors commonly provided such treatises with prefatory doxologies stressing the importance of these skills for the conduct of the jihad in the service of Allah. Thus, for example, al-Tarsusi claimed that his manual on archery was composed for Saladin to help him in his struggle against the infidels. In a later treatise, The Book of Knowledge about Horsemanship, its author Badr al-Din Baktut al-Rammah advocated a sort of self-investiture in knighthood in the jihad, and he wrote that if one wished to be a holy warrior (mujahid), one should go to the seashore and wash one’s clothes, perform the ablutions, invoke God, and plunge oneself in the sea three times before performing the prayer.