The Crusades- Islamic Perspectives

by Carole Hillenbrand

  Reference has already been made to the Covenant of ‘Umar. The fact that it was reissued with such frequency does seem to suggest that its conditions were often flouted.324 Some evidence points to an increasingly hard-line policy on the part of the Mamluk sultans. Discriminatory measures were taken against the Oriental Christians, as well as Jews and Samaritans. According to al-Maqrizi, in 1301 the Mamluk government decreed that differently coloured turbans should be worn by members of the religious minorities – the Christians should wear blue, the Jews yellow and the Samaritans red.325 Similar discriminatory measures were later taken against Christian and Jewish women (in 1354, 1401 and 1419).326 The decree of 1354 passed by the Mamluk government against the Christians and Jews stipulated once again that Christian and Jewish women should wear one black shoe and one white.327

  Figure 6.81 Polo-sticks on a Mamluk playing card, fifteenth century, Egypt

  According to al-Nawawi (d. 1278),328 Muslims should consult only Muslim doctors. This legal statement was followed up in practice by the Mamluk government’s decree in 1354 that Christian and Jewish doctors should no longer care for Muslims.329 According to Atiya, who has analysed the treatment of the Copts in great detail, some forty-four Coptic churches were destroyed between 1279 and 1447-330

  The infamous Shaykh Khadir, Baybars’ Rasputin, indulged in excessively harsh measures against the Jews and Christians in Mamluk lands. His fellow Muslims were alarmed by his conduct. He damaged the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and killed the priest personally. He ruined the church in Alexandria which housed the alleged head of John the Baptist and turned it into a Qur’an school, calling it the Green College (al-madrasa al-khadra’), and thus making a pun on his own name. In 669/1271 he destroyed the great synagogue in Damascus.331

  Anti-Christian feeling in the Mamluk period could arouse great civic unrest, especially at moments of great crisis. According to the Muslim sources, after the coming of the Mongols in 658/1260, the Christians in Damascus had waxed proud. They went through the streets in a public procession, carrying their crosses and proclaiming the superiority of their religion and the abasement of the religion of the Muslims. In reprisal the Muslims plundered the Christians’ houses and destroyed the Church of the Jacobites and the Church of Mary.332 According to al-Maqrizi, those actions were in retaliation for the Christians’ uprising against the Muslims: ‘The Christians had destroyed mosques and minarets which were in the neighbourhood of their churches. They openly rang their bells, carried the cross in processions, drank wine in the streets, and sprinkled Muslims with it.’333

  Figure 6.82 (above and opposite) Leisure pursuits, vintaging and animals, Fatimid carved ivory plaques, (from a book-cover?), eleventh-twelfth centuries, Egypt

  Al-‘Ayni points to the rapprochement between the Christians and the Mongols, which was probably the trigger for these hostile actions on both sides.

  Mamluk chroniclers often betray a strong anti-Christian bias and their bile is directed particularly at the Coptic Christian administrators who played such an important role in the Mamluk bureaucracy. Al-‘Umari describes the Coptic bureaucrats in the high echelons of the Mamluk state as possessing ‘white turbans and black secrets’ and as ‘blue enemies who swallow red death’.334 Envy of the Copts’ administrative skills and high government positions was common. It is enshrined in the so-called testament attributed to the Ayyubid sultan, Najm al-Din Ayyub (d. 1249), who became mortally ill at the time of Louis IX’s attack on Egypt. The work probably echoes later Mamluk anti-Christian sentiments. Advising his pleasure-seeking son Turan Shah on how to rule, the sultan declares:

  Look at the army department (diwan al-jaysh), my son! Those who have wronged the country the most and have even reduced it to ruin are the Christians who have weakened the army as if it belonged to them and they could sell it.335

  The Copts are not only blamed for undermining the Egyptian administration but they are also accused of collaborating with their co-religionists, the Crusaders:

  I have heard that they [the Christians of Egypt] wrote to the Frankish kings of the Sahil [the Levantine coastline] and the islands, saying to them: ‘Do not fight the Muslims. We ourselves are fighting them night and day, we are taking their possessions and attacking their women, we are ruining their country and weakening their soldiers. Come, take possession of it! There is no obstacle left for you!’

  The enemy is near you, in your state; it is the Christians. Do not trust those who convert to Islam … Even if they do so, it is for another reason. Their faith is hidden in their heart like fire in ashes.336

  This hostility is reiterated in the accusations made by al-Maqrizi, who attacks the Copts for sabotaging the Egyptian land tenure system (iqta‘) on which the military depended:

  The Copts practised every kind of deceit and they started to weaken the Egyptian army. They scattered a single iqta‘ in different places so that some of the collection took place in Upper Egypt, some in al-Sharqiyya province and some in al-Gharbiyya province, in order to exhaust the soldiery and increase expense.337

  Al-Maqrizi is also hostile to the Christian clergy. He describes one Jacobite patriarch as being ‘fond of power and the amassing of wealth… given to simony, exacting ordination fees from those whom he ordained’.338 This anti-Christian sentiment was enforced and intensified in the circles of the religious scholars and above all, in the Mamluk period, in the polemical writings and fatwas of Ibn Taymiyya, who harboured no tenderness towards Christians either outside or inside the ‘House of Islam’.

  The Intervention of Europe

  Thus we see that in a range of Islamic sources there is evidence for a backlash against the Oriental Christians. But its impact clearly varied according to geographical and political circumstances.339 Such a backlash targeted Oriental Christians both inside and outside the Mamluk empire, and was often triggered by external acts of aggression on the part of western Europe, either in the form of individual acts of piracy or larger-scale campaigns. Occasionally, too, there were reprisals by western Christians triggered by anti-Christian measures being taken by the Mamluks. The capture and sack of Alexandria by Pierre I of Lusignan, the Crusader ruler of Cyprus, in 1365 is a good example of this process. The Muslim writer al-Nuwayri (Muhammad al-Iskandarani) was in Alexandria at the time and gives a graphic account of the calamity of Muharram 765/October 1365,340 when Pierre and his army sacked Alexandria for a week. This was, he says, ‘the greatest catastrophe in the annals of Alexandria’. Al-Nuwayri himself attributes this attack, amongst other reasons, to the persecution suffered by the Oriental Christians who had been dismissed from their jobs and forced to wear distinctive clothing.341 Other Muslim chroniclers make it clear that the Copts continued to be subjected to persecution at regular intervals throughout the fourteenth century and beyond.342

  Figure 6.83 (above and opposite) Scenes of work, leisure and animals, Fatimid carved ivory plaques, eleventh–twelfth centuries, Egypt

  General Reflections

  But how much of all this hardening of Muslim attitudes can be blamed on the effects of the Crusades? Certainly, to attribute it all to the fanaticism of Crusaders from Europe is too facile, although there must have been some cause and effect. On the other hand, it must be emphasised that Islamic society always had the ability to reform itself from within, to renew and redefine itself, to purify itself of unwanted innovations and pernicious influences. One has only to recall the rise of the two militant Berber dynasties in the eleventh-and twelfth-century Maghrib, the Almoravids and the Almohads, who had no need of Crusader attacks to feel the overpowering urge to impose their vibrant reformist Islam on the cities of North Africa and Spain. Such movements of reform (islah) have punctuated Islamic history in many parts of the world until the end of the twentieth century. Thus it could be argued that the renewed religious zeal of the Sunni Muslims in Syria, Palestine and Egypt from the twelfth century onwards did not spring predominantly from the bitter tribulations they had suffered at the hands of the Crusader
s. Instead, this renewed spirit of jihad and internal hardening would have happened anyway, as an integral part of the nature of the Islamic community.

  The sultans of Mamluk Egypt, whose rule extended well beyond the time when the Crusaders left the Levant, and indeed lasted until the early sixteenth century, constitute a special case. They were ethnic outsiders, recently converted to Sunni Islam, hard-headed military men with simple, uncompromising beliefs, who infused new life into the Muslim community. It could thus be argued – in theory – that the Mamluk rulers did not need the example of the Crusaders to pursue fanatical policies against religious minorities within their territories. The Mamluks, as newcomers to the Near East, did not understand or see the need to come to terms with the long-standing Christian presence in the Levant and were not interested in drawing distinctions between different Christian groups. Nor for that matter would they tolerate the existence of ‘heretical’ groups of Muslims, such as Isma‘ilis, Druzes or other bodies of Shi‘ite believers in the Near East. The Islamic community had to purge itself from within against all contamination, innovation and heresy, and the Mamluks were the ideal warriors to defend Sunni Islam. They formed an alliance with the ‘ulama’ who were only too eager to instruct and reinforce their rulers in the latter’s consolidation of the True Faith.

  General Remarks on Muslim-Christian Relations after 690/1291

  The preceding discussion has attempted to highlight the important but ultimately unanswerable issue of the effect of the Crusades on the attitude of the Muslims in Mamluk times towards Christianity and especially towards Near Eastern Christians. Whilst it is clear that Muslim society always had the inherent ability to redefine and renew its faith, the timing of the upsurge of Muslim religious zeal in the Mamluk period, after centuries of general tolerance towards the ‘People of the Book’ within the ‘House of Islam’, would seem on balance to suggest some connection with the Muslims’ experience of the Crusades. Hence it can be argued that the coming of the Crusaders with their ‘new brand’ of fanatical Christianity acted as a catalyst, or even a direct agent, in the process of hardening Sunni Muslim hearts against people of other faiths, and indeed against any kind of religious deviancy within the ranks of the Muslims themselves.

  The fanaticism of the newly arrived Crusaders shocked the Muslim world in 1099 and continued to do so. The so-called Counter-Crusade did not begin in the thirteenth century with Mamluk successes. Muslim reaction had been born in the twelfth century with Zengi or even earlier and had risen steadily to a crescendo first under Nur al-Din and Saladin and then later under the reinvigorated power of the Mamluks. After 1291 the Muslim response did not cease once their territories were purged of the Crusader presence. In addition to defending their own territories, they could now also launch counterattacks against neighbouring eastern Christian states – Cilician Armenia, which was conquered by the Mamluk sultan al-Ashraf Sha‘ban in 1375; the Latin Kingdom of Cyprus, which was made a tributary of Mamluk Egypt under Sultan Barsbay in 1427; Constantinople, which fell to the Ottomans in 1453; and the Knights Hospitaller in Rhodes, who held out until the Ottomans finally took the island in 1522. These events belong together.

  Indeed, the Ottomans also harboured bellicose intentions towards Christian Europe, and as early as the fourteenth century Sultan Murad I (d. 1389) had announced that ‘he would come to France when he had finished with Austria’.343 This swell of reaction to the Crusades on the part of the Ottomans reached its climax in the sixteenth century. They conquered the Balkans, then Hungary, and moved ever deeper into the heart of Europe, to the very gates of Vienna. Indeed, the shadow of the Turkish threat hung like a black cloud over much of continental Europe throughout the sixteenth century. Thus the Muslim revanche lasted a very long time.

  Conclusions

  It is not surprising that the cultural interplay between Muslim and Frank should have been almost entirely in one direction. A number of factors played a part. As already mentioned, the Muslims felt that they had little to learn from Europe in the religious, social and cultural spheres. The Franks, on the other hand, had much to learn from the lifestyle of the Muslims who had lived in the Near East for many centuries and were fully adapted to the climate and the terrain. Predictably it was in everyday life that the Franks were probably most influenced by Islamic mores, such as bathing and diet, and they came to identify themselves over generations as Levantines.

  Yet in spite of evidence that the two sides, Crusaders and Muslims, could draw closer together, this process of rapprochement should not be exaggerated. Commercial and political alliances between Crusader and Muslim notwithstanding, the ideological divide remained. It is of course much easier to grasp the chronological framework of a period rather than its Zeitgeist. How can we ever know what ordinary Muslims really felt about the Crusades?344

  The preceding discussion has shown that there were considerable points of contact and influence between Muslims and Franks at many levels over more than two centuries. But it is still difficult to generalise about how the Muslims really felt about the Franks. The existence of treaties and the reality of regular contact do not in any way imply that the Muslims respected or liked them, either individually or as a group.

  Notes

  1. Gabrieli, xvi.

  2. Bernard Lewis is very negative about Muslim knowledge of the Franks: ‘We still cannot be but astonished at how little they did know, even more at how little they cared.’ Cf. The Muslim Discovery of Europe, 146.

  3. Fath, 50.

  4. Cf. Chapter 5.

  5. Usama, Hitti, 95.

  6. Arabic text, 140. The verb used for ‘prattle’ is barbara, which is linked to the word for ‘Berber’. It has a negative connotation.

  7. Al-Maqrizi, Broadhurst, 287. Richard the Lionheart is called Malik al-Inkitar (King of England); cf. Ibn al-Furat, Lyons, 107.

  8. Usama, Hitti, 130.

  9. Cf. Ibn Shaddad and ‘Imad al-Din, quoted by Lyons and Jackson, Saladin, 341.

  10. Ibn al-Furat, Lyons, 110.

  11. Manaqib Rashid al-Din, quoted by Gabrieli, 242.

  12. Ibn Jubayr, Broadhurst, 317.

  13. Usama, Hitti, 163; Arabic text, 134.

  14. Arabic text, 134–5; Usama, Hitti, 164.

  15. Cf., for example, V. G. Berry, ‘The Second Crusade’, in K. M. Setton and M. W. Baldwin, A History of the Crusades, I, Madison, Milwaukee and London, 1969, 509; W. B. Stevenson, The Crusaders in the East, Cambridge, 1907, 163; M. W. Baldwin, The Latin states under Baldwin III and Amalric I 1143–74’, in Setton and Baldwin, A History, I, 530.

  16. Ibn al-Athir, Kamil, XI, 86; cf. also Ibn al-Athir, Atabegs, RHC, II, 161; Ibn al-Furat, Shayyal, 517.

  17. Ibn al-Athir, Kamil, XI, 86.

  18. Ibn Nazif al-Hamawi, Al-tarikh al-Mansuri, ed. A. Darwish, Damascus, 1981, under the year 625, cited by Atrache, Die Politik, 229.

  19. Derived from the Latin hospitalis – lodging place for travellers – cf. EI2, Supplement: art. Dawiyya and Isbitariyya.

  20. Probably derived from Latin devotus, ‘one devoted to God’s service’.

  21. Usama, Hitti, 164. Hitti puts the date at around 1140 and Humphreys suggests between the years 532/1138 and 538/1144. (EI2, Supplement: art. Dawiyya and Isbitariyya).

  22. Ibn al-Qalanisi, Gibb, 330.

  23. Ibn Shaddad, RHC, III, 97–8; Ibn al-Athir, RHC, I, 688.

  24. Ibn al-Athir, Kamil, XII, 304.

  25. Quoted by Abu Shama, RHC, IV, 273. Lit.: ‘the heads were beneath the soles of the feet’.

  26. Ibid. Cf. also ‘Imad al-Din, Fath, trans. Massé, 30–1.

  27. Ibn Wasil, III, 146, 148.

  28. Ibn Wasil, II, 149.

  29. EI2, Supplement: art. Dawiyya and Isbitariyya. This article is a detailed, scholarly treatment of this topic; cf. for the Crusader side, J. Riley-Smith, The Knights of St. John in Jerusalem and Cyprus, c. 1050–1310, London, 1967.

  30. Ibn al-Qalanisi, Gibb, 208.

  31. Ibn al-Athir, Kamil, XII, 42.


  32. Ibn Shaddad, RHC, III, 220.

  33. Ibn al-Furat, Lyons, 14.

  34. Michaud, Histoire, II, 548, quoting Ibn Wasil.

  35. Michaud, Histoire, IV, 449; C. Cahen, ‘St. Louis et l’Islam’, JA, 258 (1970), 6.

  36. Mémoires, 475.

  37. Ibid.

  38. Ibid.

  39. Ibn al-Furat, Lyons, 35.

  40. Eddé, ‘Saint Louis’, 90–1.

  41. Al-Idrisi praises his patron Roger of Sicily (trans. Jaubert, xvi-xviii) and Ibn Jubayr waxes lyrical about King William (Broadhurst, 340–3).

  42. Ibn Wasil, IV, 234.

  43. Ibn Wasil, IV, 242.

  44. Kitab al-Suluk, I, 232.

  45. Ibn al-Furat, Lyons, 9.

  46. Ibn al-Furat, Lyons, 39.

  47. Cf. the discussion in Chapter 5.

  48. Of course the Muslim view of Frederick should be weighed against other opinions. Abulafia concludes, for example, that he lived ‘less like an oriental prince than is easily assumed’ (D. Abulafia, Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor, London, 1988, 439).

  49. Ibn Wasil, IV, 248.

  50. Ibn Wasil, IV, 248.

  51. Ibn Wasil, IV, 248.

  52. Ibn Wasil, IV, 248.

  53. Al-Maqrizi, Kitab al-muqaffa’, ed. M. al-Yalawi, Beirut, 1991, biography no. 930, 440. The account is based on the earlier one of Ibn Zafir, 90.

  54. Al-Yunini, III, 92–3.

  55. Al-Yunini, III, 92–3.

  56. This is typical of the inconsequentiality of al-Yunini’s obituaries.

  57. Ibn Shaddad, RHC, III, 94–5; cf. also Ibn al-Athir, Kamil, RHC, I, 674.

  58. Abu Shama, RHC, IV, 257–8.

  59. Ibn Jubayr, Broadhurst, 324.

  60. Ibn Jubayr, Broadhurst, 324.

  61. Quoted by Michaud, Histoire, II, 482.

  62. Abu Shama, RHC, IV, 396–8; cf. al-‘Umari, Lundquist, 33; Ibn Khallikan, de Slane, IV, 534; Ibn Shaddad, RHC, IV, 121, 130.