The Crusades- Islamic Perspectives

by Carole Hillenbrand

  Saladin became the next and most famous of the Muslim Counter-Crusade leaders (plate 1.5). He promoted himself as the rightful successor of Nur al-Din. In the years 1174 to 1187 many of Saladin’s efforts were directed at subjugating his Muslim rivals and creating a united front in Egypt and Syria against the Crusaders. Finally in 1187 he fought the Crusaders under the command of King Guy of Lusignan in the key battle of Hattin on 4 July and inflicted a famous victory on them. The reconquest of important Crusader possessions, such as Acre, followed. Saladin’s triumph was crowned with the retaking of Jerusalem on 2 October 1187. By the end of 1187, only a few parts of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem remained in Crusader hands, notably Tyre. Saladin had created a system of collective family rule, delegating to his relations control of the major cities and territories which he conquered, thereby creating a loose confederation of states with himself at the head. This system continued under his successors, the Ayyubids, his own family dynasty.

  Plate 1.5 Fals of Saladin, copper, 578/1182–3, Nisibin, Turkey

  Figure 1.23 Bronze coin of the Seljuq prince Rukn al-Din Sulayman (reigned 592–600/1195–1204), Turkey

  The Third and Fourth Crusades

  The defeat at Hattin and the fall of Jerusalem triggered a new Crusading enterprise: the three most powerful monarchs of western Europe, Frederick Barbarossa of the Holy Roman Empire, Philip of France and Richard the Lionheart, embarked on the Third Crusade. This began in earnest with a Crusader attack against Acre which finally capitulated to the Crusaders in 1191. Despite this and other Crusader victories over Saladin, the Third Crusade ended with a truce in 1192; it was agreed that the Franks should hold most of the coastal strip whilst Jerusalem remained in Muslim hands. A year later, Saladin died. Although he had won at Hattin, regained Jerusalem for Islam and kept Egypt united with the rest of the Muslim Levant, he had failed to take Tyre and to rid the Levant of the Crusaders. His success in abolishing the Fatimid Shi‘ite caliphate of Cairo removed the ancient Sunni-Shi‘ite feud between the Egyptian government on the one hand and the Sunni rulers of Syria on the other – a rift from which the Crusaders had benefited. From 1193 onwards, the Crusaders focused much more attention on attacking Egypt, believing that it held the key to reconquering Jerusalem. Egypt was the ostensible target of the Fourth Crusade in 1202, led by Boniface de Montferrat and Baldwin IX of Flanders. However, this notorious Crusade did not fight Muslims but instead ended with the conquest of Constantinople in April 1204 and the establishment of the Latin empire of Constantinople (1204–61).

  The Ayyubids, Saladin’s Family Dynasty, 589–648/1193–1250

  At the death of Saladin, the Muslims still had the upper hand and the Crusader states were seriously weakened. The latter possessed a few ports and a narrow strip of the hinterland. Yet, despite the Muslims’ advantages, they did not press them home.15 They preferred to treat the Franks as rulers with whom to make political alliances and commercial treaties. The Kurdish Ayyubids, members of Saladin’s family, succeeded to his territories in Egypt, Syria and Mesopotamia. Their government traditions were based on those of the Seljuqs and they were also heirs to the Fatimid administration in Egypt. Individual Ayyubid rulers governed as a confederacy rather than a centralised polity, thereby ensuring the continued survival of the Crusader states. The Ayyubid princes expended their energies in capturing cities and fortresses from each other rather than in prosecuting jihad against the Franks. They were usually concerned with détente with the Crusader settlements on the Syrian coast rather than overt hostilities so that they could reap the economic advantages of maintaining trade routes across Frankish territory to the sea. In the second half of the Ayyubid period family conflicts abounded and political equilibrium was rare.16

  Figure 1.24 Astrological image (the moon?) on copper coin, 626/1228–9, Mosul, Iraq

  Figure 1.25 Dinar of the only female Mamluk ruler, Shajarat al-Durr (‘Tree of Pearls’), 648/1250–1, Cairo, Egypt

  Subsequent Crusades in the Ayyubid period were sent against Egypt; at a time when the Mongols from the east posed an even greater threat to the Islamic world, some Christian monarchs sought alliances with the Mongols against the Muslims (cf. colour plate 4). Saladin’s brother, al-‘Adil, was still sultan of Egypt when the Fifth Crusade began to arrive in 1218 on the Nile Delta and took Damietta the following year. Al-‘Adil died the same year and his son, al-Kamil, who succeeded him, regained Damietta in 1221.

  Figure 1.26 Mounted hunters, mina’i tile in relief, early thirteenth century, probably Kashan, Iran

  In 1228 Frederick II of Sicily arrived on Crusade in Palestine. The Ayyubid sultan al-Kamil, threatened by internal family strife, preferred negotiation to war and concluded a treaty with Frederick a year later, surrendering Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth and other districts to the Crusaders. This capitulation over Jerusalem brought al-Kamil widespread Muslim criticism. A devastating blow was dealt to Jerusalem in 1244 when soldiers from distant Khwarazm in Central Asia, displaced by the Mongol invasions and moving westwards on the rampage, took advantage of the weakness of the city, which they conquered and sacked. Thereafter Jerusalem reverted to Islamic rule. Frankish decline continued, despite the Crusade of Louis IV of France who captured Damietta in 1249 and then advanced on Cairo. He was cornered in al-Mansura and forced to surrender.

  It was in the Ayyubid period, especially in the 1240s, that the Franks reached their greatest territorial expansion of the thirteenth century. It was at this point that it was most apparent how fully integrated the Franks had become in the political map of the Near East; they were one of a number of quasi-indigenous groups vying for power in the area and treated as such by their Muslim neighbours. The Franks might still rely on Europe for men and equipment but politically they were part of the Near Eastern political jigsaw; the Franks in the Ayyubid period, lodged as they were between the intensive campaigns of the last years of Saladin’s career and the uncompromising attempts to destroy them which were to come from the Mamluks in the second half of the thirteenth century, enjoyed a short intermezzo in which they seem to have been in some ways just another warring faction in Middle Eastern politics.

  The Mamluks: The Expulsion of the Franks from the Levant

  With the overthrow of the Ayyubids and the accession of a new dynasty, the militant Mamluks of Egypt, in 1250, the Islamic Counter-Crusade was revitalised and the steps necessary to remove the Crusaders permanently from the Near East could be set in train. The Mamluk sultans were interested in the public face of religion and readily donned the mantle of the leaders of the Sunni world. Pressures from a new enemy, the Mongols, and the continuing presence of the Franks formed a powerful focus to channel the energies of the new dynasty. Although the Mongol army under Hülegü set out with the express aims of abolishing the ‘Abbasid caliphate, destroying the Assassins of Alamut and advancing on Egypt, the last of these objectives was never achieved. Concerned with the Mongol threat, the Mamluk sultans nevertheless made the extirpation of the Crusader presence a major priority, especially after their famous victory over the hitherto invincible Mongols at the battle of Goliath’s Well (‘Ayn Jalut) in 1260.

  Figure 1.27 Inscription on the minaret of the Great Mosque with the name of the craftsman and the date 483/1090, Aleppo, Syria

  Figure 1.28 Qasr al-Ablaq, citadel (palace of al-Nasii Muhammad), plan and interior view, j 13–14/1313–15, Cairo, Egypt

  Plate 1.6 Silver dirham, obverse, struck 667/1268 in Cairo

  Figure 1.29 Transcription of coin of Baybars, late thirteenth century, Egypt

  The Mamluk sultan Baybars (d. 1277), a ruler of iron determination and ruthlessness, was the key figure who began the process of removing the Franks (plate 1.6). Once he had united Syria and Palestine, the Crusaders could do little against him. Baybars conducted three major campaigns. During the years 1265–71 he conquered many of the Frankish possessions, including Antioch in 1268 and Krak des Chevaliers in 1271. These successes were built on by subsequent Mamluk sultans. Sultan Qalawun
(d. 1290) seized Marqab and Maraclea in 1285 and Tripoli in 1289. Sultan al-Ashraf (d. 1293) conquered or destroyed the remaining Crusader possessions and his campaign culminated in the fall of Acre on 18 May 1291, an event which is taken as signifying the end of Frankish rule in the Levant, and in the Franks’ abandoning the ports still in their hands, such as Tyre, Sidon and Beirut.

  Notes

  1. M. Michaud, Histoire des Croisades, Paris, 1829, vol. I, 1.

  2. J. Riley-Smith, in M. Billings, The Cross and the Crescent, London, 1987, 9.

  3. J. Riley-Smith, in Crusaders and Muslims in Twelfth-Century Syria, ed. M. Shatzmiller, Leiden, 1993, 4–5.

  4. T. Jones and A. Ereira, The Crusades, Harmondsworth, 1994.

  5. F. H. M. ‘Ashur, Al-jihad al-islami didd al-salibiyyin wa‘l-Mughul fi’l-‘asr al-mamluk, Tripoli (Lebanon), 1995.

  6. Cf. the recent review of this book by A. F. Broadbridge in Mamluk Studies Review, 2 (1998), especially 199–201.

  7. S. Zakkar, Al-hurub al-salibiyya, Damascus, 1984.

  8. For a recent treatment of the perspective of the medieval Christian historians of Egypt, cf. F. Micheau, ‘Croisades et Croisés vus par les historiens arabes chrétiens d’Égypte’, Itinéraires d’Orient: Hommages à Claude Cahen, Res Orientales, 6 (1994), 169–85.

  9. Ibn al-Qalanisi, Dhayl tarikh Dimishq, trans. H. A. R. Gibb as The Damascus Chronicle of the Crusades, London, 1932; trans. R. Le Tourneau as Damas de 1075 à 1154, Damascus, 1952.

  10. Usama b. Munqidh, Kitab al-i‘tibar, trans. P. K. Hitti as Memoirs of an Arab-Syrian Gentleman, Beirut, 1964; trans. A. Miquel as Des enseigne-ments de la vie; Paris, 1983. There are a number of other translations of this work.

  11. Ibn al-Athir, Al-Kamil fi‘l-tarikh, ed. C. J. Tornberg, Leiden and Uppsala, 12 vols, 1851–76.

  12. The Mamluk period is particularly rich in historiographical materials; the works of al-Jazari (d. 739/1338) and of al-Nuwayri (d. 732/1331–2) deserve particular attention and the chronicle of al-‘Ayni (d. 885/1451) remains largely unpublished. Cf. D. P. Little, ‘The fall of ‘Akka, in 690/1291: the Muslim version’, in Studies in Islamic History and Civilisation in Honour of Professor David Ayalon, ed. M. Sharon, Jerusalem, 1986, 161.

  13. For an account of al-Hakim’s actions based on earlier sources, cf. al-Maqrizi, Khitat, II, 285–9, quoted by Lewis, Islam, I, 53.

  14. Al-Ghazali, Kitab al-Mustazhiri, partial ed. by I. Goldziher in Streitschrift des Gazali gegen die Batinijje-Sekte, Leiden, 1916, 183.

  15. R. S. Humphreys, ‘Ayyubids, Mamluks and the Latin East in the thirteenth century’, Mamluk Studies Review, 2 (1998), 1–18.

  16. R. S. Humphreys, ‘Legitimacy and instability in Islam’, in The Jihad and Its Times, ed. H. Dajani-Shakeel and R. A. Messier, Ann Arbor, 1991, 10–11.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The First Crusade and the Muslims’ Initial Reactions to the Coming of the Franks

  When the Franks – may God frustrate them – extended their control over what they had conquered of the lands of Islam and it turned out well for them that the troops and the kings of Islam were preoccupied with fighting each other, at that time opinions were divided among the Muslims, desires differed and wealth was squandered.1 (Ibn al-Athir)

  Introduction

  THIS CHAPTER examines the state of the Muslim Near East in the 1090s on the eve of the First Crusade (colour plate 11). It then looks at what the Islamic sources say about the main sweep of events which brought the Crusaders to the walls of Jerusalem and at the subsequent establishment of Crusader states in the Levant. The rest of the chapter considers the political effects of the First Crusade and the emotional impact of the Frankish invasion. This was very great indeed, for the First Crusade hit the Muslim world like a bolt from the blue. What is more, the timing of this devastating attack from such an unexpected quarter could not have been more auspicious for the Europeans.

  For the record, the Islamic sources call the European Christians the ‘Franks’ (al-ifranj). The equivalent Arabic term for ‘Crusaders’ (al-salibiyyun – those who take up arms in the service of the Cross) – is a later usage which dates from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Interestingly enough, the etymology of both terms, Crusaders (from the Latin crux (cross)) and salibiyyun (from the Arabic salib (cross)), stresses the centrality of the symbolism of the Cross underlying the European military campaigns which came to be known as the Crusades (in modern Arabic called ‘the Crusading wars’ (al-hurub al-salibiyya)). Indeed for the western European Christians, a crusade was believed to be ‘Christ’s own enterprise, legitimised by his own personal mandate’.2 In the course of this book, the terms ‘Franks’ and ‘Crusaders’ will be used interchangeably.

  Figure 2.1 Dragon, stone relief on city wall, early thirteenth century, Konya, Turkey

  The Muslim Sources for the First Crusade

  It is always helpful to listen to the authentic ring of contemporary eyewitness accounts of momentous events. It is a truism that historical works which date from later periods reshape history and reflect the changing attitudes of different historical milieux, retrospectively imposed, but often enough such later sources are all that has survived.

  One of the main difficulties of studying the early period of the Crusades is precisely such a lack of contemporary sources. The oldest extant chronicles are those of the Syrian writers Ibn al-Qalanisi and al-‘Azimi,3 both written around 1160. It is a great pity that the work tantalisingly entitled History of the Franks who Invaded the Islamic Lands has not survived: its author, Hamdan b. ‘Abd al-Rahim, was actually working for the Franks shortly after their first arriving in Syria.4

  Actual extant works which date from the time of the First Crusade or shortly afterwards are rare. There are a few poems which are quoted in later chronicles5 and in collected works (diwans) of poets such as al-Abiwardi, Ibn al-Khayyat and others.6 Moreover rare and very valuable testimony is given in a work entitled the Book of Holy War (Kitab al-jihad). Its author, ‘Ali b. Tahir al-Sulami (d. 500/1106), was a religious lawyer from Damascus, a scholar who taught philology at the Great Mosque.7 Of the two manuscripts of his work, both in Damascus, both difficult of access and unavailable in a printed edition, only a few sections have actually survived. The manuscripts appear to have been dictated during the year 1105, and thus in the very early period of Frankish expansion in Syria and Palestine.

  Otherwise, for the Islamic view of the events of the First Crusade and its impact, we are dependent on the evidence of later writers, such as Ibn al-Athir (d. 630/1233) in his Universal History8 and Ibn al-‘Adim (d. 660/1262) in his chronicle about Aleppo.9 Additional information can be pieced together from other later Muslim sources – chronicles, biographical dictionaries and geographical works. These works will be used extensively in the course of this chapter and throughout the book.

  It is important at the outset, however, to stress the limitations of medieval Islamic historical sources. One looks to them in vain for a detailed account of the battles of the First Crusade or for any deep understanding of why the Franks had come. These deficiencies do not stem from any desire on the Muslims’ part to pass over a series of ignominious defeats at the hands of the Crusaders. It is rather a general characteristic of medieval Islamic historical writing which tends to stress propagandistic themes, skating hazily over military details. It must be remembered that most Islamic chroniclers were by training religious scholars or administrators, not military strategists; they talk about what interests them and they see history through the prism of faith. For them, history is the unfolding of God’s will for the world and the inevitable victory of Islam.

  The General State of the Islamic World on the Eve of the First Crusade

  It is a familiar tenet of Crusader history that the warriors of the First Crusade succeeded because of Muslim disunity and weakness. Had the First Crusade arrived even ten years earlier, it would have met strong, unified resistance from the state then ruled by Malikshah, the last of the three so-called Great Seljuq sul
tans. His western domains included Iraq, Syria and Palestine. Yet previous scholarly discussions of the overall Muslim position in 488/1095 have not gone far enough in emphasising to what extent the Islamic world was bereft of unity and catastrophically weakened both by a complete lack of powerful leadership and by religious schism.

  The Devastating Events of the Years 485–487/1092–1094

  In the space of less than two years, beginning in 485/1092, there was a clean sweep of all the major political leaders of the Islamic world from Egypt eastwards. In 485/1092 the greatest figure of Seljuq history, the vizier Nizam al-Mulk, the de facto ruler of the Seljuq empire for over thirty years, was murdered. A month later, Malikshah, the third Seljuq sultan, died in suspicious circumstances, after a successful twenty-year reign, followed closely by his wife, grandson and other powerful political figures. The Muslim sources view the year 487/1094 as even more doom-laden, for in this year yet another era was brought to an end with the death of the Fatimid caliph of Egypt, al-Mustansir, the arch-enemy of the Seljuqs, who had ruled for fifty-eight years. His death was closely followed by that of his vizier, Badr al-Jamali, builder of the city wall of Cairo (plates 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 6). Also in 487/1094 the ‘Abbasid Sunni caliph al-Muqtadi died. As the Mamluk historian Ibn Taghribirdi puts it: ‘This year is called the year of the death of caliphs and commanders.’10

  Figure 2.2 Quarter dinar minted by the Fatimid caliph al-Mustansir (427–87/1036–94), Sicily

  This succession of deaths in both the key power centres of the Islamic world, namely the Seljuq and Fatimid empires, occurring at exactly the same time, must have had the same impact as the disintegration of the Iron Curtain from 1989 onwards: familiar political entities gave way to disorientation and anarchy. The timing of the First Crusade simply could not have been more propitious. Had the Europeans somehow been briefed that this was the perfect moment to pounce? Unfortunately there is little evidence on this in the Islamic sources, but seldom has the arm of coincidence been longer.