The Crusades- Islamic Perspectives

by Carole Hillenbrand

  Figure 6.26 Leather binding of a volume of al-Hamawi, Thubut al-Hujja, fifteenth century, Egypt

  Figure 6.27 Muslim surgical instruments (scrapers, scalpels, hooks and forceps), al-Zahrawi, Kitab al-Tasrif (‘Book of Explanation’), 670/1271–2, Egypt(?)

  On the other hand, Usama can on occasion praise the efficacity of Frankish medicine. The Crusader leader Fulk had a treasurer, a knight called Bernard, who was kicked by a horse; his infected leg was cured by a Frankish doctor with very strong vinegar. ‘He was cured and stood up (again) like the devil’.108 In another story, illustrating their curious medicine, Usama speaks of a cure for a Muslim boy suffering from scrofula on his neck. An unnamed Frank (not mentioned as a doctor) gives the boy’s father the ‘recipe’ for a cure consisting first of an application of burnt glasswort leaves, olive oil and sharp vinegar and then of burnt lead soaked in clarified butter. The boy was cured.109 Usama himself used the same method successfully on others afflicted with scrofula.

  The Franks themselves recognised the skills of the local Arab doctors. In his biographical dictionary of doctors, Ibn Abi Usaybi‘a (d. 1270) mentions Abu Sulayman Da’ud.110

  Figure 6.28 (above, below and opposite) Animated inscription on the Wade Cup, inlaid brass, c. 1230, north-west Iran

  Abu Sulayman Da’ud, born of Christian parents in Jerusalem under Frankish occupation, had entered the service of the Shi‘ite Fatimid caliph in Egypt. When the Crusader leader Amalric came to Egypt he was much taken with Abu Sulayman’s medical knowledge and he took him (and his five children) back with him to Jerusalem. There Abu Sulayman prepared a suitable treatment for Amalric’s leprous son. Abu Sulayman’s sons were also involved in Amalric’s affairs – one of them, al-Muhadhdhab Abu Sa’id, took over from his father as Amalric’s physician. Another son, Abu’l-Khayr, was given the care of Amalric’s leprous son and taught him riding. After Saladin’s conquest of Jerusalem, this talented family joined the service of Saladin and his successors.111

  Such biographies cross ideological divides and show the greater flexibility of everyday life (and man’s continuing need for good doctors, whatever their religious persuasion or ethnic origin).

  Was the Frankish Lifestyle Influenced by the Muslims?

  Usama states clearly that some Franks had adopted a Muslim lifestyle: ‘Amongst the Franks there is a group who have become acclimatised and have associated with Muslims.’112 But these, he declares, are an exception.

  Usama describes the lifestyle of one Orientalised Frank who was visited in his house by ‘a friend’ of Usama’s. The friend goes on to say:

  I went with him and we came to the house of one of the old knights who had come out in the Franks’ first expedition [i.e. the First Crusade]. He had been removed from the register and [military] service and had a property in Antioch from which he lived. He brought out a fine table and extremely clean and excellent food. He saw me refraining from eating and said: ‘Eat, set your mind at rest, for I don’t eat the Franks’ food. I have Egyptian women cooks. I eat only what they have cooked and no pork enters my house.’ So I ate, albeit warily, and we left.113

  Shared Chivalric Values between Muslim and Frankish Knights

  An awareness of the common religious purpose and knightly qualities of the Franks occasionally emerges from the Muslim commentators. The poet al-‘Unayn writes of the Franks in 618/1221–2: ‘A host of Christians beyond count … had assembled, one in idea, religion, ardour and resolve.’114

  We have already seen that the Islamic sources reveal a grudging admiration for the military skills of the Frankish leaders, some of whom they view as worthy adversaries. This admiration is limited: the Muslim chroniclers rarely, for example, praise the magnanimity of the Frankish leaders towards their captives in war. An exception is Baldwin the Leper who is singled out by Ibn al-Athir for his chivalrous treatment of 160 Muslim prisoners from the countryside of Aleppo, releasing them, and giving them clothes before sending them home.115 Saladin’s honourable treatment of Crusader ladies in Jerusalem in 1187 receives high praise,116 but there is nothing comparable mentioned in connection with Frankish victories.

  Usama calls the Templars his friends,117 and mentions several instances of contact between himself and the upper echelons of Frankish society. Usama is open about his friendship with one particular knight:

  There was in the army of King Fulk son of Fulk a modest knight who had come from their country to go on pilgrimage and return home. He got on friendly terms with me, became my constant companion and used to call me ‘my brother’ and there was between us love and companionship.118

  This story is very difficult to take literally since the knight was obviously only on a short visit to the Holy Land and Usama states elsewhere that he does not understand the Frankish language at all. So how can this friendship have developed at all? Of course it is necessary for Usama to claim first-hand intimacy with some Franks in order to ‘know’ their ways and satirise them. Even when his narratives begin with favourable comments about the Franks this is merely setting the scene for a cleverly constructed story which debunks them. In the case of the knight in Fulk’s army, for example, Usama goes on to make disparaging comments about the level of Frankish education in Europe.

  Figure 6.29 Hunting scene, glazed ceramic dish, early thirteenth century, Rusafa(?), Syria

  Usama believes that the Franks are courageous and that they rate their knights highly and place them in the counsels of kings:

  The Franks (may Allah render them helpless!) possess none of the virtues of men except courage, consider no precedence or high rank except that of the knights, and have nobody that counts except the knights. These are the men on whose counsel they rely, and the ones who make legal decisions and judgements.119

  Usama complained to Fulk V, count of Anjou, that the Frankish lord of Banyas had stolen some sheep of his during a period of truce and that, when the sheep gave birth, the lambs died and the remainder were then returned to him. Fulk referred the case to six or seven of his knights who withdrew to consider what to do. They then returned, pronouncing that the lord of Banyas should pay a fine for the damage caused. Usama accordingly accepted a sum of 400 dinars. He then reflects: ‘Such a judgement, after having been pronounced by the knights, not even the king nor any of the chieftains of the Franks can alter or revoke. Thus the knight is something great in their esteem.’120

  Usama is impressed by the valour of the Frankish knight Badrhawa who routs four Muslim warriors, but he cannot allow him to remain a hero in his narrative. Whilst he is at pains to emphasise that the four Muslim warriors learned their lesson and ‘now became imbued with valour’, Badrhawa has to come to a sticky end. On his way to Antioch, or so Usama’s story goes: ‘a lion fell upon him from a forest in al-Ruj, snatched him off his mule and carried him into the forest where he devoured him – may Allah’s mercy not rest upon his soul’.121

  Cultural and religious pride cannot allow the Frankish knight to have the last word in this tall story: the Muslim warriors learn from their experience and the Frankish knight, though valorous, falls mightily and meets his appointed death in comic retribution. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the Crusader hero, Badrhawa, is riding a mule, not the animal associated with chivalry, a horse.

  Yet the Frankish knight at whose table Usama had eaten, as already mentioned, was able later in an explosive scene in the market to save Usama’s life: ‘The effect of that eating together was my escape from being killed.’122

  According to Usama, the Franks were able in their turn to recognise valour in a Muslim enemy. Tancred, who succeeded Bohemond as lord of Antioch in 1104, made peace with Usama’s uncle who at Tancred’s request sent him a fine horse, mounted by a young Kurdish cavalier called Hasanun. The Franks recognised in him a valiant cavalier and Tancred gave him a robe of honour.123 A year later, however, once the truce had expired, Hasanun was taken prisoner and tortured by those selfsame Franks and his right eye was gouged out.124 Such, notes Usama, are the vicissit
udes of peace and war and the untrustworthiness of the Franks.

  The Ridiculous Side of Frankish Chivalry

  Usama tells the following tall story about a leopard. Every day at noon a leopard would come and jump up to the window of the church of Hunak (40 cubits high), where it would sleep all day. The Frankish knight, Sir Adam, who owned the castle of Hunak, heard about the leopard and

  put on his coat of mail, mounted his horse, took his shield and lance and came to the church … As soon as the leopard saw him, it jumped from the window upon him while he was on his horse, broke his back and killed him. It then went away. The peasants of Hunak used to call that leopard, ‘the leopard that takes part in the holy war (al-namir al-mujahid)’.125

  Usama’s story makes the Frankish knight seem mildly ridiculous as all his defensive measures were of no avail against the speed and strength of the leopard. It is also significant that just before this story Usama has related how he and some companions had managed to kill a leopard.126 Similarly no sympathy is shown for the accidental drowning of the mighty monarch Frederick I Barbarossa in 586/1190. He is presented by ‘Imad al-Din in two differing versions of the story as an ignorant fool for venturing at all into the River Calycadnus.127

  The Fate of Muslims under Crusader Rule

  Frankish rule over Levantine Muslims was much shorter than Muslim rule over the Christians of Spain. In Spain a slow acculturation process was possible over several centuries and in the Granada area for considerably longer. Some of the Frankish states were of very short duration (Jerusalem for the periods 1099–1187 and 1229–44); other areas with Muslim populations were ruled by the Franks for much longer (Antioch, for example, from 1098 to 1268 and Tyre from 1124 to 1291).

  Figure 6.30 Inlaid brass pen-case with the titles of Abu’l-Fida Isma’il, ruler of Hama (d. 732/1331), Syria

  When searching for information about the Muslim perspective on Frankish rule, one is confronted by the problem that all but one of the Muslim chroniclers lived outside the Frankish states themselves. The work of the sole Muslim writer who did live under Frankish rule, Hamdan b. ‘Abd al-Rahim al-Atharibi, as already mentioned, has unfortunately not survived. In general, therefore, it is difficult to make firm statements about how Muslims fared under Crusader rule since the evidence is scanty, is not of local origin and comes from different periods of time.

  Refugee Movements

  From the very beginning of the Frankish occupation, refugees from the coastal cities of Syria and Palestine fled to Damascus and Aleppo as well as Egypt and Iraq. Damascus was especially affected because it was close and the refugees often wanted to go back out of a deep ancestral attachment to their land. The movement of refugees was most acute in the first years – from 492/1099 until the fall of Tyre in 518/1124. Nevertheless, it continued at least until the middle of the twelfth century. The sources – which as a rule only mention rulers and the scholarly elite – do not allow one to quantify the number of refugees. But it seems reasonable to conjecture that the common people are unlikely to have moved; only the relatively wealthy would have been able to do so.128 Amongst such refugees were city governors, notables and poets. Some of those who fled, for example from Tyre, travelled with absolutely nothing, with no riding-beasts and only what they had on their backs.129 The Shi‘ite governors of Acre and Tripoli fled to their co-religionists in Egypt.130 The poets who fled, such as Ibn Munir and Ibn al-Qaysarani, wrote elegies lamenting their lost homes.131

  Yet on the basis of the sources, it would seem that such demographic disruption was the exception rather than the rule and that the majority of the Muslims living in territories conquered by the Franks remained where they were. It should be remembered that Greater Syria had been subjected throughout the second half of the eleventh century to frequent changes of government and military conflicts which caused damage and disruption to both villages and towns. Peasants, the old and the sick were, predictably the ones who had to stay while the higher stratum of a village or town had more chance to leave. According to Ibn al-Qalanisi, the only Muslims in Tyre who stayed on after the conquest of the town in 1124 were those who were too weak to travel.132 ‘Imad al-Din remarks that the subjected Muslims in Sidon, Beirut and Jubayl were the poor.133

  Kedar rightly raises the possibility that Muslim writers may have wished to minimise the size of the Muslim population who opted to remain under Frankish rule. On balance, it seems that the ordinary Muslims of Syria and Palestine endured foreign rule – this time, as it happens, from western Europe – with their customary passivity. When Muslim armies came occasionally from the east to fight the Franks in the early decades of the twelfth century, the local Muslim population must have helped their co-religionists, as for example during Mawdud’s campaign in 506/1113. Ibn al-Qalanisi reports that there was considerable Muslim reaction to Mawdud’s arrival:

  There was not a Muslim left in the land of the Franks who did not send to the atabek [i.e. Mawdud] begging that he should guarantee him security and confirm him in the possession of his property and a part of the revenue of Nablus was brought to him.134

  But generally speaking, the Muslims under Crusader rule must have acquiesced, in realistic acknowledgement that submission was more sensible than conflict, however much tensions might smoulder under the surface. It seems likely that for the mass of the Muslim population the Frankish conquest did not bring about any profound transformation. Their lot remained much the same, whoever their overlords.135

  One important, though short, Muslim source which bears on these matters has recently come to light. A sixteenth-century chronicler of Damascus, Ibn Tulun, describes the exodus of a number of Hanbali families from villages to the south-west of Nablus in the year 551/1156–7.136 His source is Diya’ al-Din al-Muqaddasi (d. 1245) who was a second-generation descendant of the original refugees who had settled after their emigration to a new quarter of Damascus, al-Salihiyya. Diya’ al-Din describes Frankish rule in general as tyrannical:

  The Muslims came under the rule of the Franks in the lands of Jerusalem and its environs and they used to work the land for them. They [the Franks] used to harm them and imprison them and take something from them like the poll-tax (jizya).137

  Figure 6.31 Musicians, Fatimid ivory carving, eleventh century, Egypt

  But the tyranny of one Crusader ruler is singled out for particular condemnation, that of Ibn Barzan (Baldwin of Ibelin, lord of Mirabel) who owned a number of the villages to the south-west of Nablus:

  When the infidels used to take from every man under their rule one dinar, he [Baldwin] (may God curse him!) used to take from each of them four dinars and he used to cut off their feet. There was not among the Franks anyone more arrogant or proud than he was (may God put him to shame!).138

  Baldwin’s ire was directed especially at a Hanbalite legal scholar, Ahmad b. Muhammad b. Qudama, who hailed from the village of Jamma’il and was the grandfather of the narrator, Diya’ al-Din al-Muqaddasi. Ibn Qudama used to read the Qur’an to the villagers and preach to them on Fridays, and people from the surrounding villages would flock to hear him. Baldwin, to whom these activities were reported as ‘distracting the peasants from their work’, spoke about killing him.139 Thereupon Ahmad decided to flee to Damascus ‘because of his fear for himself and his inability to practise his religion publicly’.140 Ibn Qudama’s secret departure was followed by that of the members of his own family and related families who escaped in small groups to Damascus; their exodus encouraged the inhabitants of at least eight villages in the area to leave and reside in the Damascus suburb of al-Salihiyya, where Ibn Qudama and his followers had settled.

  Despite the poignancy of this account, it seems probable that most Muslims in the Latin east did not leave their homes and emigrate to nearby Islamic territory. Attachment to their land and to their property and lack of the resources necessary for travel prevailed over whatever religious, political or fiscal difficulties they may have experienced. The Nablus area seems to have remained a hotbed of resentment
against the Crusaders. In 583/1187–8 Muslim peasants attacked the Franks, forcing them to take refuge in their castles even before the arrival of Saladin’s army. As ‘Imad al-Din writes:

  When they [the Franks] learned of their defeat and that they could not hope to rectify their situation, they were afraid of living closely with the Muslims and they dispersed. The people of the estates attacked them in the houses and quarters and plundered what stores and goods they found and they attacked their weak ones and blockaded the citadels to the disadvantage of their strong ones.141