315. Ibn al-Shihna, trans. Sauvaget, 48 and 76–7.
316. Ibn Jubayr, Broadhurst, 296.
317. Ibn Jubayr, Broadhurst, 53.
318. Lewis comments on ‘the often well-grounded suspicion that they [the Oriental Christians] were collaborating with the enemies of Islam’ (Islam, II, 217).
319. Sivan, L’Islam, 180.
320. EP. s.v. Kibt (A. S. Atiya).
321. Al-Maqrizi, trans. Broadhurst, 120.
322. Ibn Abi Usaybi‘a, Uyun al-anba’ fi tabaqat al-atibba’, Beirut, 1957.
323. There is even the example of the Jewish doctor Yusuf b. Yahya al-Sabli (d. 1226) who was originally from Morocco and fled persecution there to take refuge in Aleppo around the turn of the twelfth century. This indicates that the situation in Aleppo must have been tolerable for dhimmis - A. -M. Eddé, ‘Les médicins dans la société syrienne du VIIe/XIIIe siècle’, Annales Islamologiques, 29 (1995), 93–4.
324. According to al-Maqrizi, a version of the Covenant of ‘Umar was issued in 700/1300: Suluk, II, 922–4.
325. Al-Maqrizi, according to Ashtor, ‘Social isolation’, 76.
326. Ibid., 80.
327. Ibid., 81.
328. Al-Nawawi, Al-masa’il al-manthura, Damascus, 1348, 16.
329. Al-Qalqashandi, Subh, XIII, 378.
330. EI2: s.v. Kibt.
331. Cf. L. Pouzet, ‘Hadir ibn Abi Bakr, al-Mihrani’, BEO, 30 (1978), 173–83.
332. Al-‘Ayni,’Iqd al-juman, RHC, II, 215–16.
333. Al-Maqrizi, Suluk, quoted by Lewis, Islam, I, 89.
334. Al-Qalqashandi, Subh, VIII, 36–8; Lewis, Islam, I, 99.
335. C. Cahen and I. Chabbouh, ‘Le testament d’al-Malik as-Salih Ayyub’, Melanges Laoust, BEO, 29 (1977), 97–114.
336. Ibid.
337. Al-Maqrizi, Khitat, I, 90.
338. Al-Maqrizi, trans. Broadhurst, 223.
339. A. S. Atiya, The Crusade in the Later Middle Ages, London, 1938, 260.
340. This author should not be confused with another better-known scholar of the same name, al-Nuwayri.
341. Atiya, Crusade, 365.
342. Ibid., 272.
343. Atiya, Crusade, 11.
344. Lyons, The Crusading stratum’, 148.,
CHAPTER SEVEN
Armies, Arms, Armour and Fortifications
Make ready for them all thou canst of armed force and of horses tethered, that thereby ye may dismay the enemy of Allah and your enemy, and others beside them whom ye knew not.1 (Qur’an, 8:60)
Introduction
IN MODERN TIMES the Arabs have come to call the phenomenon of the Crusades ‘the Crusading wars’ (al-hurub al-salibiyya). This term reflects the reality that the Crusades were primarily and fundamentally about war. In spite of protracted periods of truce and peaceful relations between Muslims and Franks, during which the two sides traded and made alliances with each other, the reality of the Frankish occupation of Muslim lands in the years from 1099 to 1291 necessitated a constant readiness on both sides for war, and frequent calls to arms. In the early stages of the Frankish presence, the Muslims needed to defend themselves against more Frankish attacks on their strongholds and cities and to prevent further Frankish expansion. In the later stages of the Frankish occupation, when the balance of power had changed, the Mamluks were in a state of constant readiness for war, poised eventually to remove the Franks from the House of Islam. It is important also to stress that in spite of the emphasis given in this book to ideological aspects of the Muslim-Frank confrontation, the war between them was also an essentially practical matter, a military struggle which lasted intermittently for nearly two centuries and was accompanied by loss of life, the destruction of property and strongholds, and the devastation of agriculture.
Figure 7.1 The planet Mars, Artuqid coin, c. 1200, Diyarbakr, Turkey
Previous Scholarship on Crusading Warfare
Crusading warfare has been the subject of much scholarship in the West. The castles of the Franks have received close attention from architectural and Crusader historians, and the military aspects of the Crusades have formed part of general histories of war throughout the ages. Two works in particular are important in the context of Crusader-Muslim warfare: R. C. Smail, Crusader Warfare 1097–1193;2 and C. Marshall, Warfare in the Latin East, 1192–1291.3 Using the wealth of Western medieval source material and such Islamic sources as have been translated into European languages, these two books cover in a very clear and comprehensive manner many aspects of this subject. In particular, they point to the vital importance of castles and strong points in the military history of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries;4 the archaeological and architectural research of D. Pringle has highlighted this point very persuasively.5
Important work has also been carried out by specialists on arms and armour who have used Islamic sources to elucidate certain aspects of Islamic warfare, and the results have appeared in scholarly monographs and articles.6 But broader interpretations of Islamic warfare in the particular context of the Crusades have not generally been undertaken by specialists in Islamic history either in the Middle East or in the West.7
Figure 7.2 Officer, Dioscorides, De Materia Medica, 619/1222, Iraq
The Aims of this Chapter
True to the avowed focus of the present book, this chapter will highlight only those military themes which emerge from the Islamic sources, and will show how medieval Muslim writers themselves viewed the Crusader-Muslim conflict. A second aim will be to test this evidence against the theories of modern military historians.
The Problem of the Medieval Islamic Sources
The information provided by Muslim historians of the Middle Ages does not permit a clear or systematic description of Muslim or Frankish military tactics in battle, or of the course of individual battles and sieges during the Crusading period, or of the actual weapons used. Individual snippets of interest to historians of war may be gleaned from a laborious trawl through hundreds of pages of medieval chronicles; but even when they are pieced together they do not constitute a corpus of data on which confident generalisations can be based.
Part of the problem lies in the very nature of Muslim historical writing itself and in the milieu of those who composed the medieval chronicles. Muslim chroniclers of the Middle Ages were decidedly not professional military historians and it is therefore not appropriate to expect them to display any specialised military insight in their work. Sometimes, and especially in the Mamluk period, they were essentially administrators. More often they were, first and foremost, religious scholars who moved laterally into writing history from a deep study of the Qur’an, the hadith and the Shari‘a. This was the background, for example, of arguably the greatest Muslim historian of the Crusading period, Ibn al-Athir,8 and of many others.
Such scholars came to historiography with a clear aim: to record the victories of the Muslims as a reflection of God’s will for the world, and to chart the immutable Divine design which was the triumph of Islam, God’s final and complete Revelation. Usama, although a soldier himself and very much a man of the world, also shares this viewpoint, declaring: ‘Victory in warfare is from Allah and is not due to organisation and planning, nor to the number of troops and supporters.’9 The parallel with the ‘Deus vult’ mantra of the First Crusade leaps to the eye.
With such an overall religious purpose firmly fixed in their minds, Muslim chroniclers tend to stress the propagandistic aspects of the events they record. They skate over the practicalities of war – the details of the sequence of battles and sieges, the terrain, the weapons – and dwell instead on the glory (or occasionally humiliation) which ensued from military engagements with the Franks. The numbers of troops present at a certain battle are sometimes given in the Muslim chronicles, but these ‘facts’ are vague and unreliable. Even successful skirmishes against the Franks can be transformed into great victories by the simple device of grossly inflating the size of the enemy army and emphasising a brilliant performance on the battlef
ield by the greatly outnumbered but valiant Muslim soldiers, aided by God.
Another problem with many of the Muslim accounts of military engagements between Muslim and Frank is that the chroniclers were not present at the event and often record it after one or more generations have passed. They do not understand the practicalities of warfare and prefer to describe the build-up and outcomes of military engagements rather than what happened in the thick of the fighting. They rarely reveal a sensitivity to the details and implications of terrain.
The Evidence of Works of Art
Military historians who wish to use the evidence of surviving works of art encounter particular difficulties. Even if architecture, miniature painting, metalwork and pottery from the period of the Crusades can be dated accurately – not always an easy task – such visual evidence is not always entirely reliable as a guide to actual military practice. Artistic time and chronological time are not necessarily synchronic, and allowance has to be made for the imaginative creativity of the artist. What did the Muslim and Frankish armies look like? The simplest way to describe their appearance at the time of the Crusades – their armour, horses, weapons, battle formations – would be to look closely at contemporary depictions in miniature painting, ivories, pottery, metalwork, sculpture and other artefacts made in the Levant during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Unfortunately, for the key area of Palestine there is virtually no securely dated contemporary evidence of this kind and there is not much more in the case of Syria. It is tempting, therefore, to use works of art from neighbouring areas – such as Egypt, Anatolia, Iraq and even Iran – or which may date to just before and just after the Crusading periods. By this means it is possible to assemble a critical mass of information. This is precisely the aim of the illustrations (particularly the drawings) in this book, which are intended to evoke in general fashion the ambience of life in the Middle East between the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries. At the same time, it is not the intention to force this visual material to fill gaps in the record. There are obvious limits to its reliability. In the specific field of armour and weapons, for example, it is tempting to select works which pre-date or post-date the Crusading period and to argue from them that, given the slow pace of change in military practice and technology in the medieval period, it is likely that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Muslim armies must have shared the same characteristics as those in the periods immediately preceding and thereafter. This is not good scholarship, however, and is a dangerous path to follow. Evidence for Muslim weapons in Palestine and Syria during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries has to be taken either from specific detailed descriptions in literary sources – and, as noted above, these scarcely exist – or from the few surviving works of art produced in that area in that very period. Very often those works of art will prove to be too general in their depiction of the relevant details to be of much use. But they suffice to give the flavour of the times and of contemporary material culture.
Figure 7.3 Foot soldier, Varqa va Gulshah (‘Varqa and Gulshah’), c. 1250, Turkey
There are also significant problems in relating the evidence of works of art to the information found in written sources. It is again very tempting for scholars with a specific interest in costume, weapons, armour and the like to use the sources to develop categories of these objects and to propose a detailed evolution for some of them, or to suggest patterns of change in their typology or use. The difficulty with such procedures is that it is all too easy to read more into the sources than they actually say and to attribute to them fine distinctions which are simply not there in the original Arabic.
Thus – to take a single example – the carefully fashioned prose of ‘Imad al-Din al-Isfahani with its balanced repetitions and antitheses, and with its carefully constructed climaxes, cannot be used as a concrete source for military technology. To put it more succinctly, if ‘Imad al-Din gives us several different words for ‘sword’ it does not necessarily mean that all these words refer to different kinds of sword used in the Crusader-Muslim conflict. Indeed, quite often he is just showing us his vast repertoire of learned Arabic vocabulary. There is no point in modern scholars using such quotations to embroider a preconceived theory of how weapons of a specific type were used (or evolved) in a particular place or period.
Figure 7.4 Spear, Nasir al-Din, Anthology, 671/1272–3, Turkey
The obvious conclusion is that the Arabic chronicles are an unsatisfactory source for such information whereas works of art, if interpreted judiciously, are a still under-exploited mine of information for widening our knowledge of military aspects of the Crusades. This is especially true when they are used carefully in conjunction with the evidence of written sources. Such artefacts include coins, metalwork and pottery as well as arms and armour.
Architectural and archaeological evidence, especially castles and citadels, is vital, but again it has to be evaluated in combination with a careful study of the topography of the area in question and of the relevant texts. One also has to remain aware of the problems posed by epigraphically unidentified later rebuildings and restorations.
The Military Manuals of the Muslims
Introduction
From an early stage the Muslims wrote treatises on the arts of war. As well as the genre of books of jihad already mentioned, which bore such titles as The Book of Horsemanship in the Conduct of Jihad in the Path of God, others dealt with horsemanship in a more practical way, with archery or with military tactics. In his valuable book The Catalogue (Al-Fihrist) Ibn al-Nadim (d. between 380/990–1 and 388/998), a Baghdad bookseller and bibliophile, lists all the books in Arabic known to him. He includes a whole section outlining ‘the books composed about horsemanship, bearing of arms, the implements of war, and the management and usage of these things among all nations’.10 According to him, this genre dated back to pre-Islamic Persia, and a number of these works were written for the ‘Abbasid caliphs, for example al-Mansur and al-Ma’mun. Such treatises reflect not only the influence of pre-Islamic Persia but also that of Byzantine (and even ancient Greek) theory, and all of these elements enriched the Islamic military tradition.11
A significant number of Muslim military manuals date to the Ayyubid period and their production increased markedly under the Mamluks.12 A greater interest in writing these kinds of books and presenting them to sultans and commanders characterised the increasingly militarised society of Syria and Egypt and had much to do with the irruption of the Mongols and Franks into the Islamic world.
A general note of caution should be sounded here. Despite their detailed presentations, the evidence of these works (cf. figures 7.10 and 8.8) should be treated with caution, since it is impossible to say with certainty whether they reflect actual military practice or merely an ideal. Reference will, however, be made to them at different points in this chapter and their evidence will be evaluated in combination with what the chronicles say.
Figure 7.5 A combination of shield and bow, Tabsirat arbab al-albab (*The Perception of Those with Understanding’), written by al-Tarsusi for Saladin, c. 583/1187, probably Syria
A Survey of the Military Manuals of the Muslims from the Crusading Period
Al-Tarsusi
A military manual from Saladin’s time has survived.13 It was written by al-Tarsusi around the year 570/1174 especially for Saladin, because of his ‘exploits in the jihad against the infidels’.14 This work is of particular value precisely because it dates from Saladin’s time. Al-Tarsusi, who was incidentally of Armenian extraction but wrote in Arabic, is at pains in his book to emphasise that he has relied for much of his information on the expertise of an arms maker from Alexandria called Ibn al-Abraqi. His manual lays particular emphasis on the bow but it also gives a thorough survey of a range of weapons, how they are made, what they looked like and how they were used. He also discusses war machines – mangonels, battering-rams, towers – and the use of Greek fire (naft), the disposition of armies on the battlefield, and how to make armour. Of cours
e, it is very difficult to know how closely the arms and tactics which al-Tarsusi describes in his manual correspond to actual military practice in Saladin’s time. But there is certainly a practical tone to his statements, and an array of technical details, which together lend some credibility to his work.
Figure 7.6 Protective shelter for manoeuvring a piece of siege machinery into position, Tabsirat arbab al-albab (‘The Perception of Those with Understanding’), written by al-Tarsusi for Saladin, c. 583/1187, probably Syria
Al-Harawi
A work written by ‘Ali b. Abi Bakr al-Harawi (d. 611/1214) gives comprehensive coverage of tactics and military organisation and discusses such topics as the conduct of sieges and battle formations.15 Scanlon describes it as ‘a very thorough study of the Muslim army in the field and under siege’.16
Figure 7.7 Catapult with counter-weight, Tabsirat arbab al-albab (‘The Perception of Those with Understanding’), written by al-Tarsusi for Saladin, c. 583/1187, probably Syria
The Military Manuals of the Mamluks
The Mamluk military environment produced a large number of works of furusiyya (‘horsemanship’). The term furusiyya means much more than equestrian skills: it involved a whole range of expertise including the training of both horse and rider, the way in which the knight should use his weapons and how the cavalry as a whole should conduct itself.17 A noted scholar of the Mamluks, David Ayalon takes the definition of furusiyya even further, describing it as embracing ‘all that the horseman had to master by systematic training in order to become an accomplished knight’.18
Some of these furusiyya manuals are still extant in manuscript form, lavishly illustrated with vignettes of the life of the horse and its rider, together with the military uniforms and weapons of the period.19 Such practical manuals need to be assessed within a wider and not exclusively military context, namely the development of what might be termed ‘Islamic chivalry’. This set of ideals found expression particularly in the reign of the vigorous ‘Abbasid caliph al-Nasir (1175–1225). The concept of futuwwa (roughly translatable as ‘youthful manliness’) encouraged by al-Nasir seems to have involved formal ceremonies calculated to foster personal loyalty to the caliph, and rites of investiture such as girding with trousers. There are parallels here with the ceremonies of knighthood in Europe. In the Islamic world, there was the further dimension of links with guilds, Sufi brotherhoods and all four Sunni legal schools. Thus, as in European knighthood, the religious element was well to the fore. The exact role of futuwwa beliefs and ceremonies amongst the Muslims of Syria and Palestine up to 1291 has yet to be explored in detail.
The Crusades- Islamic Perspectives Page 49
