The Crusades- Islamic Perspectives

by Carole Hillenbrand

  The Role of the Byzantine Emperor in the First Crusade and its Aftermath – The Muslim Version

  The shadowy but important part played in the drama of the First Crusade by the Byzantine emperor Alexius Comnenus is a crucial dimension which is mentioned occasionally in the Islamic sources. There are hints that he conducted a clever diplomatic game, involving many of the players in the ensuing drama.100

  We have already mentioned that, according to al-‘ Azimi, the Byzantine emperor wrote to the Muslims in 489/1096 informing them of the arrival of the Franks.101 It seems likely that it was the Fatimids who are meant here by the term ‘Muslims’ since they had longstanding links with Byzantium. Whether Alexius’ motives were to inform or to threaten is not explained by al-‘Azimi. As we saw earlier, Alexius’ involvement with the Crusader leaders when they arrived in Constantinople is also mentioned by al-‘Azimi. According to his testimony, they swore oaths to the king of Byzantium that they would hand over to him the first fortress which they conquered, but they did not keep faith in this matter.102

  Al-‘ Azimi also suggests that the king of Byzantium was still active in northern Syria in 496/1102–3, mentioning that he took Lattakia in that year.103 In Jumada II 504/December 1110-January 1111, the Byzantine emperor, labelled the upstart king (mutamallik), sent an envoy to the Seljuq sultan asking for help against the Franks, urging him to fight them and drive them out of the Muslim lands. Ibn al-Qalanisi reports a very convoluted message which is a mixture of cajolement and threat:

  He [the Byzantine emperor] stated that he had prevented them [the Franks] from traversing his dominions to the lands of the Muslims and had gone to war with them, but if their ambitious designs upon the land of Islam led to a constant succession of their armies and reinforcements proceeding hereto, he would be impelled by imperious necessities to come to terms with them and to give them free passage and assistance with their aims and objects.104

  Muslim Reactions to the First Crusade and the Establishment of the Frankish States in the Levant

  Hitti speaks of the Crusaders as ’a strange and unexpected enemy’.105 This is a good description of the initial reaction of the Muslims most in the firing line of the First Crusade. Waves of shock, fear and incomprehension spread from the areas most affected across the Islamic world. But the impact of the catastrophe diminished the further afield the news of it spread.

  Our knowledge of the immediate Muslim reactions to the impact of the First Crusade is based on two contemporary sources, Arabic poetry and the work entitled the Book of Holy War written by al-Sulami. Some Arabic poems written by contemporary poets – al-Abiwardi (d. 507/1113), Ibn al-Khayyat (d. in the 1120s) and others-have survived.

  Perhaps al-Abiwardi,106 who spent much of his life in Baghdad, was present when one or more of the delegations from Syria visited Baghdad to tell of the tribulations they had undergone at the hands of the Crusaders and to implore the Seljuq leadership and the caliph to send military help against them. At all events, he composed some very moving and passionate lines lamenting the fall of Jerusalem and the lack of wider Islamic response to it:

  Figure 2.22 Lance of the Mamluk sultan Tuman Ba’i, early sixteenth century, Cairo, Egypt

  How can the eye sleep between the lids at a time of disasters that would waken any sleeper?

  While your Syrian brothers can only sleep on the backs of their chargers, or in vultures’ bellies! …

  This is war, and the infidel’s sword is naked in his hand, ready to be sheathed again in men’s necks and skulls.

  This is war, and he who lies in the tomb at Medina [i.e. the Prophet himself] seems to raise his voice and cry: ‘O sons of Hashim!’107

  A second poet, Ibn al-Khayyat, had worked for the rulers of Tripoli before the coming of the First Crusade and kept in touch with them after he moved to Damascus.108 Perhaps his memories of life in Tripoli made him more aware of the Frankish threat than many of his contemporaries. Some of the verses he wrote for his patron, a military commander in Damascus called ‘Adb al-Dawla (d. 502–3/1109), are concerned with the need to wage jihad against the Franks.109 He stresses first the enormous size and unrelenting succession of the Crusading armies:

  Figure 2.23 Parade dagger, ninth-eleventh centuries, Syria

  The polytheists have swelled in a torrent of terrifying extent.

  How long will this continue?

  Armies like mountains, coming again and again, have ranged forth from the lands of the Franks.

  Those who have tried to fight the Franks have been annihilated or bought off:

  They [the Franks] push violently into the mire those who venture forth [against them].

  And those who would fight they make them forget with money.

  He refers elliptically to the evil effect of grudges harboured by Muslim princes against each other; indeed, they have become worse with the presence of the Franks:

  The evil of grudges [continues] whilst grudges have become inflamed by unbelief.

  Warming now to his major theme, Ibn al-Khayyat rises to a climax of outraged grief and indignation against the massacres perpetrated by the Franks and urges immediate action against them:

  The heads of the polytheists have already ripened,

  So do not neglect them as a vintage and a harvest!

  The cutting edge of their sword must be blunted And their pillar must be demolished.

  Finally, the poet invokes the name of the great Seljuq sultan Alp Arslan who won the famous victory at Manzikert against the Byzantines in 463/1071.

  A third poet whose identity remains unknown has moving words preserved in the history of the Mamluk historian Ibn Taghribirdi.110 He takes a traditional form – the panegyric ode (qasida), normally addressed by the poet to his patron – and, stung by the disasters of the First Crusade, transforms it into an eloquent outburst against the Muslims who have allowed these catastrophes to happen:

  Do you not owe an obligation to God and Islam, defending thereby young men and old?

  Respond to God! Woe to you! Respond!111

  Other poets also dwell on the anguish and fear caused by the Crusader onslaught. One such poet, gazing on his house after the carnage at Ma’arrat al-Nu‘man, declares:

  I do not know whether it is a pasturing place for wild beasts or my house, my native residence …

  I turned towards it and asked, my voice choked with tears, my heart torn with affliction and love.

  ‘O house, why has destiny pronounced such an unjust sentence on us?’112

  A merchant from Ma’arrat Misrin relates a similar tale of lamentation and pain: ‘I am from a city which God has condemned, my friend, to be destroyed. They have killed all its inhabitants, putting old men and children to the sword.’113

  Apart from the poetry, the other surviving testimony which dates from shortly after the first coming of the Crusaders is the Book of Holy War, apparently completed around 498/1105 by al-Sulami, a Damascus legal scholar and preacher at the famous Umayyad mosque. If this represents the true date of the composition of this treatise, we have here an extraordinarily far-sighted and illuminating work, showing an understanding, probably unique at this early stage of the Crusades, of what the Franks were planning to do and of how the Muslims should respond.114

  Al-Sulami has a clear idea of the difference between Frank and Byzantine. He calls the newcomers Ifranj, a term previously used, for example by al-Mas’udi, to denote the inhabitants of the Carolingian empire. The Islamic world had long been used to Byzantium as its neighbour, and parts of northern Syria in particular had been ruled intermittently from Constantinople in the period immediately preceding the Crusade (Antioch, for example, had been Byzantine for over a century until 1084). It is understandable, therefore, that initially at least there might have been confusion as to the identity of the Christian invaders who took Jerusalem. Al-Abiwardi, for example, in his lament on the fall of Jerusalem, calls the invaders al-Rum, the usual term for the Byzantines,115 and Ibn Shaddad also confuses Byzantines and Franks
in his geography of northern Syria.116 But al-Sulami is not confused. He sees the Franks’ aims all too clearly.

  Figure 2.24 (above and opposite) Leisure pursuits and animals, Fatimid carved ivory plaques (from a book-covert), eleventh–twelfth centuries, Egypt

  His work is a legal treatise about Holy War (jihad), and it will be discussed in that context in Chapter 3. However, as well as providing rules for the conduct of jihad, al-Sulami also adds his personal comments in the margin, linking what he is saying in the main body of his text with what is actually happening in his own time. In particular, in the introduction to the second part of his work, al-Sulami explains why he wrote it, and he gives a detailed description of the political situation in Syria after the Frankish invasion. Al-Sulami has a wide view of the Crusader enterprise, seeing the whole sweep of the western European Christian advances southwards: ‘A group [of Franks] pounced on the island of Sicily at a moment of discord and mutual rivalry and they conquered in like fashion one town after another in Spain.’117 He is in no doubt that the reason for Crusader success in his own time in different parts of the world is the lacklustre attitude on the Muslims’ part towards the observances of their religion:

  This interruption [in waging jihad] combined with the negligence of the Muslims towards the prescribed regulations [of Islam]… has inevitably meant that God has made Muslims rise up one against another, has placed violent hostility and hatred amongst them and has incited their enemies to seize their territories.118

  Turning to his own land, al-Sulami also blames the Frankish success on the disturbed political conditions whose result was that ‘the rulers hated and fought each other’. Clearly the Franks knew the situation in advance:

  Examining the country of Syria, they [the Franks] confirmed that the states there were involved one with another, their opinions diverged, their relationships rested on secret desires for vengeance. Their [the Franks’] greed was thereby reinforced, encouraging them to apply themselves [to the attack].119

  The Muslims only had themselves to blame for ‘manifesting a lack of energy and unity in war, each trying to leave the task to the others’.120

  It is important to stress that al-Sulami certainly understands what the Franks are after: ‘Jerusalem was the goal of their desires.’121 Writing only a few years after the loss of the Holy City, al-Sulami sees all too clearly that the Franks have further expansionist aims which must be stopped at all costs by Muslim reunification:

  Even now they are continuing the effort to enlarge their territory; their greed is constantly growing as they see the cowardice of their enemies who are happy to live away from danger. Moreover, they hope now for sure to make themselves masters of the whole country and to take its inhabitants captive. Would to God that, in His goodness, He would frustrate them in their aspirations by re-establishing the unity of the community.122

  It should be noted here that in 498/1105 a number of the Syrian ports – Ascalon, Tyre, Tripoli and others – were still in Muslim hands. Al-Sulami’s jeremiad is uncannily prescient; but, like many a prophet of doom, he was without honour in his own country. He was born at least a generation too early.

  In a prophetic statement, al-Sulami foresees what would happen later in the century when Nur al-Din and Saladin worked towards the encirclement of the Crusader state of Jerusalem and in particular the unification of Syria and Egypt, divided politically and ideologically since the tenth century:

  The sovereign… must devote himself to his relations with the sovereigns of other countries, Syria, the Jazira, Egypt and adjacent regions, for terror [of the Franks] can reconcile the old hatreds and secret hostilities of the inhabitants of these countries as well as turn them away from their rivalries and mutual jealousies.123

  Al-Sulami stresses the need for urgent action in the defence of the Syrian coastline before it is too late. Although a religious lawyer, he seems to have penetrating insights into the military and political vulnerability of the Franks: ‘One knows for sure their weakness, the small amount of cavalry and equipment they have at their disposal and the distance from which their reinforcements come… It is an opportunity which must be seized quickly.’124

  Sadly, these warnings were to remain unheard for over half a century. Instead, the Franks duly took the Syrian coastline and fortified the ports, thus facilitating the continuing traffic of men, arms and equipment from Europe; as al-‘Azimi writes without elaboration for the year 497/1104: ‘The Franks built up the coastal towns because all of them were broken down.’125

  An Overview of the Years 492–504/1099–1110

  By 1110 the Franks had established four states in the Near East-Jerusalem, Edessa, Antioch and Tripoli. They had also kept the Fatimids of Egypt at bay, although the latter still held the port of Ascalon with its garrison. Very quickly indeed, the Franks had built up a strong coastal base, ensuring free and easy access for supplies and soldiers to be sent from western Europe. Apart from Edessa in the north and Jerusalem in the south, all the Frankish possessions were along the coast, a location which immediately halved the defensive measures necessary to protect them. They did not, however, possess Aleppo or Damascus with their much greater financial resources, thereby allowing these cities to remain foci for Muslim retrenchment and revitalisation. Nor did they own any bases in Egypt itself. They were still very much a beleaguered minority. A united Muslim onslaught by land and sea could have finished them off then and there. But this was, of course, an unrealisable ideal. The Muslims were disunited, disorganised and dispirited on land, and incompetent in maritime matters. They were also motivated by considerations of Realpolitik, as we shall see later in this chapter. The Franks too on occasion proved themselves to be shrewd diplomats, as the Muslim sources make clear; but they were also actuated, again as the Muslim sources reveal, although it took them some time to realise it, by religious fervour of a kind that the Muslims were not yet ready to match. Moreover, they were fully aware that they were far from home and that they lacked speedy military backup – this is the implication of al-Sulami’s exhortation to the Muslims to control the Levantine ports – which must have given an edge of desperation to their courage. Thus it came to pass that the Franks, in spite of their limited territorial possessions and obvious numerical inferiority, were able to fortify themselves and to continue to receive reinforcements from western Europe. Even if these took some time to arrive, their route to the Near East was relatively secure from harassment.

  Figure 2.25 Soldier wearing Mongol armour, Rashid al-Din, Jami‘ al-Tawarikh (‘World History’), 714/1314, Tabriz, Iran

  Displacement of the Muslim Population

  As well as the vicissitudes of war, foreign occupation, famine and disease,126 those fortunate enough to survive the initial Crusader onslaught had the option of flight. It seems that some chose this option. Ibn Muyassar mentions for the year 493/1100: ‘Many people from the Syrian territories came to Egypt fleeing from the Franks and famine.’127

  Certain famous individuals are known to have moved because of the First Crusade – a typical example is the poet Ibn al-Qaysarani (‘the man from Caesarea’) who was forced to flee from that town after the Franks seized the Levantine coasts.128

  Panic and fear must have been rife as some of the population moved to safer refuges whilst the Franks continued their victorious wave of campaigns. People were afraid for their property and their venerated objects. Those possessions that were portable were moved to more secure locations; Ibn al-Dawadari (in the early fourteenth century) records that after the sack of Ma’arrat al-Nu‘man the Muslims took the ‘Uthmanic Qur’an from there to Damascus.129 Such precautions would have been unnecessary in intra-Muslim squabbles and merely underline how alien an enemy the Franks were to the Muslims of the Near East.

  There is also some evidence for larger-scale refugee movements in Syria and Palestine in the wake of the Crusader onslaught.130 The demographic exodus of Muslims from lands occupied by Crusaders began in 491/1098 with the conquest of Antioch and contin
ued in tandem with the setting-up of the remaining Crusader states, which culminated in the taking of Tyre in 518/1124.

  Many Muslims fled massacres perpetrated by the Crusaders when they entered cities by force or even cities which had capitulated and been promised terms of truce but where the army leaders were unable to impose their authority on their troops. Refugees fled, according to the sources, from terrible carnage, as for example at Saruj in 494/1101. According to Ibn al-Qalanisi: ‘The Franks then advanced to Saruj, recaptured it, and killed and enslaved its inhabitants, except those of them who escaped by flight.’131

  In the case of Arsuf, also captured that year, the same source mentions that the Franks drove out its inhabitants.132 This process must have been repeated many times over as the Franks continued to expand in the period 493–518/1099–1124. Thereafter, the situation changed as a modus vivendi was often established between Frankish overlord and Muslim subject.

  Sometimes the inhabitants of towns that had capitulated or certain sections of the population of a city were able to leave because the Crusaders honoured their promises to save their lives. Such was the case with the governor of ‘Arqa and some of the troops who were allowed to depart after the conquest of the town in 502/1109.133

  On other occasions desperate populations abandoned their cities en masse, as in the case of Ramla in 492/1099 where ‘The people fled in panic from their abodes’,134 fearing that a Frankish attack was imminent and taking refuge in towns which were considered safe havens. According to the Syrian chronicler Ibn Abi Tayyi’, many Aleppans fled to the Jazira and Iraq on hearing of the fall of Tripoli in 502/1109.135