The Crusades- Islamic Perspectives

by Carole Hillenbrand

  We were bringing out the captives, each two chained to one man from Shayzar. Some of them had half of their bodies burned and their legs remained. Others were dead by fire. I saw in what befell them a great object lesson.186

  Those who were incarcerated in Muslim prisons, whether they were Crusader prisoners-of-war or Muslims – miscreants, or amirs and high officials who had fallen foul of individual rulers – often suffered a terrible ordeal. Ibn Wasil describes the fate of one such unfortunate, a Muslim military commander who had been thrown into the pit (jubb) at Ba‘lbakk: ‘It was dark and there was no difference between night and day there. Each day the prisoner was given a little bread and salad.’187

  The great Muslim thinker and reformer Ibn Taymiyya, who was at times a thorn in the side of the Mamluk ruling elite, was put with his two brothers in the worst prison of the Cairo citadel, the jubb (cistern or pit), a stinking dungeon full of bats. He records his feelings in one of his letters dated 706/1307, comparing his fate with that of other prisoners who are Christians: ‘The Christians are in a good prison … If only our prison was the same kind as the Christians’.’188

  Figure 8.32 Warrior wearing the khayagh or ‘cut coat’ in lamellar armour, Firdawsi, Shahnama (‘Book of Kings’ – the Great Mongol Shahnama), c. 1330, Tabriz, Iran

  These Christians were probably Crusaders, since it would be highly unlikely that ordinary Copts or other Oriental Christians would have been so well treated in the prisons of Cairo. Numerous Christian prisoners were held in Cairo after the fall of Acre in 1291 and if they were to be ransomed it is understandable that their Muslim captors should choose to treat them more leniently than a so-called dissident and ‘trouble-maker’ like Ibn Taymiyya who was the self-appointed conscience of the Mamluk regime.

  There is interesting evidence on the way in which Frankish prisoners were treated in the Mamluk period. It is to be found in a legal document composed in 679/1280 by one Ibn al-Mukarram during the reign of Sultan Qalawun. The document gives practical advice on a number of legal topics and includes the following section on prisons: ‘Prisons should be guarded and protected during the day and at night. The beards of all prisoners of war – Franks and Antiochans, or others – must be shaved, and make sure they do so whenever their beard grows back.’189 What probably lay behind these measures was a desire to be able to distinguish clearly between bearded Muslim and beardless non-Muslim prisoners.

  There are suggestions of previous laxity in the Muslim treatment of Frankish prisoners in the rather strict counsels offered by Ibn al-Mukarram. Indeed, he suggests that some prisoners in the past may even have been granted certain privileges which will now no longer apply: ‘Prisoners of war who are employed (in public works) must not spend the night outside the jail. None of them is to be allowed to go to the bathhouse or to any church or any attraction.’190

  Ibn al-Mukarram then goes on to stress the need for the prisoners’ chains to be checked and secured at all times. He urges that the security around and in the prisons in which the Franks reside must be doubled during the night. He mentions specifically a prison known as the khizanat al-bunud which was used to detain Frankish princes and their families.191

  As already noted, it is clear from the sources that Frankish prisoners were used as forced labour, especially in building projects. The huge undertaking of constructing the Cairo citadel would not have been possible without a labour force comprising huge numbers of Frankish prisoners. According to al-Maqrizi, quoting Ibn ‘Abd al-Zahir, 50,000 Frankish prisoners were used to build the Cairo citadel.192 This is, of course, a suspiciously round figure; nevertheless it indicates that the numbers must have been unusually high. This information is corroborated by Ibn Jubayr who saw the citadel being built in 11 83.193

  Figure 8.33 Ocean-going ship, al-Hariri, al-Maqamat (The Assemblies’), c. 1230, probably Baghdad, Iraq

  Saladin again used prisoners when he was rebuilding the fortifi-cations of Acre in 1187, ‘bringing his tools, animals and prisoners’.194 Najm al-Din Ayyub employed Frankish prisoners to work on the building of his new citadel on Rawda Island. The Ayyubid sultan al-Malik al-Salih, in his dying advice to his son, suggests that the strengthening of the defences of Damietta should be carried out by Frankish prisoners.195

  The Naval Dimension

  A neglected area of the narrowly military aspect of the Crusader-Muslim conflict is the maritime dimension. Most scholarly studies pay scarcely any attention to this question, although the weakness of the Levantine Muslims in naval matters at the time of the Crusades was clearly a major factor in the longevity of Frankish rule in the region. It is true that as early as 1848 Reinaud remarked on the fact that the Muslims were inferior in matters maritime. But his important statement was not taken up by scholars until the 1970s, when the researches of Ayalon196 and Ehrenkreutz197 confirmed the truth of his generalisation.

  There is an evocative saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad himself: ‘A campaign by sea is like ten campaigns by land’.198 And certainly non-seafaring Arabs – those who lived in the desert or towns far away from the coasts – seem to have been afraid of the sea. According to Muslim tradition, there was an alleged Arab aversion to the sea which went back to the time of the second caliph of Islam, ‘Umar (d. 644), and his request to his great general ‘Amr b. al-’As, the conqueror of Egypt, to describe the sea to him. ‘Amr responded thus:

  The sea is a boundless expanse, whereon great ships look tiny specks; nought but the heavens above and waters beneath; when calm, the sailor’s heart is broken; when tempestuous, his senses reel. Trust it little, fear it much. Man at sea is an insect on a splinter, now engulfed, now scared to death.199

  It comes as no surprise that ‘Umar forthwith recommended that Muslims should avoid seafaring. If they did venture forth on the sea, they did so without his knowledge and were punished for it. Where did this alleged fear of the sea come from? Of course, at one level, it may be seen as a reflection of the deep-rooted unease of desert peoples more used to manipulating vast land expanses than the unfamiliar dangers of the ocean. The Arab proverb ‘It is preferable to hear the flatulences of camels than the prayers of fishes’ expresses this preju-dice.200 Moreover, most of the territories of the eastern Islamic world did not have access to major sea waterways and were also not acquainted with seafaring and military engagements at sea. Indeed, the story of ‘Umar suggests a woeful lack of naval experience on the part of the early Muslims.

  Yet the hypothesis that navigation is alien to the Islamic world is clearly simplistic. Those peoples of the Arabian peninsula itself who lived on the coasts had long been familiar not just with local fishing but also with long-distance maritime trade. Indeed, they were the dominant mercantile force in the waters between India and the Persian Gulf from the third millennium BC onwards, and knew the secrets of the monsoon winds.201 As early as the eighth century there were Arab trading settlements as far east as Canton. Moreover, when the Arab conquerors took over Egypt, Syria and Palestine, they inherited a time-honoured Mediterranean maritime tradition which went back to Phoenician times, and they began to challenge the Byzantines at sea.202 Further east, the Muslim rulers also became heirs to the expertise possessed by their newly conquered coastal subjects who plied their trade along the traditional sea lanes of the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf and, as noted above, beyond. Indeed, the ‘Abbasids built on this firm foundation and Baghdad, an inland port thanks to the navigability of the Tigris and the Euphrates, looked out on vast horizons – the Mediterranean, Africa, India, Indonesia and China.

  Figure 8.34 Boat, al-Hariri, al-Maqamat (‘The Assemblies’), 634/1237, probably Baghdad, Iraq

  The long-lived Mediterranean maritime tradition had not died with the advent of Muslim rule. There were dockyards in Alexandria, al-Fustat, Damietta and other Egyptian ports, and the islands of Crete and Sicily were conquered for Islam in ships built in Egypt. Muslim naval power flourished under the early Fatimids, and Alexandria, Damietta and Fustat were major centres for shipb
uilding after the Fatimids had moved to Egypt from North Africa in 969. Alexandria was an ideal naval base, possessing a superb harbour, large shipyard and Coptic builders.203 Both riverine and oceangoing ships were made. The only commodity lacking in Egypt was good timber; this had to be imported. The extent of the trade in wood in the early Islamic period may be judged by the fact that the pulpit (minbar) in the Great Mosque of Qayrawan in Tunisia, dated 862, is made of Burmese teak.

  Figure 8.35 Broken-masted dhow, al-Hariri, al-Maqamat (‘The Assemblies’), c. 1230 (note the single cabin for the captain on the main deck, the high prow, anchor and hinged rudder), probably Baghdad, Iraq

  Although Ibn Khaldun is carried away by his own rhetoric in his assessment of Muslim supremacy at sea in the heyday of the Fatimids of Egypt and the Umayyads of Spain, he nevertheless points to a robust Muslim naval tradition in parts of the Mediterranean and to the Muslims’ ability to fight at sea and to launch campaigns of conquest by sea aimed at the islands of the Mediterranean:

  During the time of the Muslim dynasty, the Muslims gained control over the whole Mediterranean. Their power and domination over it was vast. The Christian nations could do nothing against the Muslim fleets, anywhere in the Mediterranean… They (the Muslims) covered most of the surface of the Mediterranean with their equipment and numbers and travelled its lanes on missions both peaceful and warlike. Not a single Christian board floated upon it.204

  Muslim Attitudes to the Sea in the Crusading Period

  Many Muslims were terrified of the sea. Travelling, let alone fighting, at sea was a very hazardous affair and must have daunted all but the most stout-hearted. Transporting troops and horses was also dangerous and potentially expensive. A little-known testimony to the problems of sea travel is the account of Ibn al-’Arabi in the 1090s. He and his father were unfortunate enough to be shipwrecked off the North African coast. Ibn al-’Arabi writes as follows: ‘We emerged from the sea like the dead man from the grave … We were starving from the shipwreck and in a foul state of nakedness. The sea had (even) ripped open the receptacles containing oil.’205

  Apart from the problems of the weather, these overcrowded ships were often in difficulties, as Ibn Jubayr points out: ‘Sometimes the ship’s hull struck one of the corals during its passage among them, and we heard a crashing sound which caused us to despair; and sometimes we did not know whether we should live or die.’206

  The experiences of Ibn Jubayr on his journey east reveal the typical fears of the twelfth-century traveller. Even more momentous were journeys undertaken on campaign in ships bearing valuable arms, machines of war and fighting men. In 1189 Saladin travelled along the coast to Acre. Ibn Shaddad records his own grave anxiety about the sea:

  It was the deepest winter, the sea was very rough ‘with waves like mountains’ as God says in the Qur’an. I had little experience of the sea and it made a deep impression on me; in fact I thought that if anyone had said to me that if I spent a whole day sailing on the sea he would make me master of the whole world I could not have done it. I thought that anyone who earned his living from the sea must be mad … All these thoughts were caused by the sight of the tempestuous sea.207

  Similar prejudices against the sea are expressed a century later in an alleged conversation, reported by Ibn Wasil, between the captured French king, St Louis, and the Muslim amir Husam al-Din, who had been deputed to guard him. Husam al-Din said to his royal prisoner:208

  How could it have come into the mind of a man as perspicacious and judicious as the King to entrust himself thus to the sea on a fragile piece of wood, to launch (himself) into a Muslim country defended by numerous armies and to expose himself and his troops to an almost certain death? At these words the King smiled and said nothing. So the amir went on as follows:

  ‘One of our religious scholars thinks that anyone who exposes himself and his belongings twice to the sea must be considered as mad and that his testimony can no longer be accepted in law.’ Thereupon the King smiled again and said: ‘He who said that was right’.209

  However apocryphal or stereotyped this conversation may be, it is yet another piece of evidence of Muslim antipathy to the sea.

  Types of Ships

  Our knowledge of types of medieval Muslim ships comes partly from works of art (plate 8.7), notably thirteenth-century book painting, and also from numerous, disparate references in Islamic geographical and travel literature and historical chronicles. These literary texts are the principal source of information for vessels before the thirteenth century. However, a major problem is that many writers often assume that their readers know what particular terms mean and do not define them or differentiate between warships and trading vessels or between oceangoing and riverine boats.

  The tenth-century Muslim geographer al-Muqaddasi (d. 378/988–9) lists 36 types of ship which according to his testimony existed in his lifetime.210 Of these 36, ten are mentioned in a Mediterranean context.

  As Agius points out,211 in the time of al-Muqaddasi, there were two broad categories of ships: the sewn type (khaytiyya), which ‘were stitched together with coconut cord by the shell-first method (i.e. the hull first, then the ribs inserted later)’, and the nail type, in which ships ‘were nailed together with ribs first and then the planks attached to them’ (the so-called skeleton method). The galleys were constructed by the second method, which was more expensive. Sewn hulls were, according to Ibn Jubayr and Ibn Battuta, flexible and more resilient against high waves and the dangers of shipwreck.212 Goitein found evidence in the Geniza documents that Muslim ships carrying up to 500 passengers were not unusual in Cairo in the late eleventh century. Travellers and merchandise were carried in light galleys (ghurab) powered by oars. Writing around 1190, Ibn Mammati mentions that a ghurab had 140 oars.213

  Plate 8.7 Lateen-rigged boat, Almohad glazed ceramic dish, twelfth century, Spain

  Figure 8.36 Fatimid galley, lustre dish, tenth century, Bahnassa, Egypt

  The Importance of the Frankish Fleets in the Early Crusading Period and the Muslim Neglect of Naval Matters

  As already mentioned, the disunity and weakness of the Muslims made them powerless to prevent the seizure of the Levantine ports by the Crusaders in the first decades of the twelfth century. The Crusaders’ successes were due in no small measure to the support of the Italian fleets.214 The city-states of Venice, Genoa and Pisa participated from the outset in the sea offensive from Europe; crews from Genoa helped to lay siege to Antioch and Jerusalem, andin 1099 a large fleet from Pisa arrived in the seas off Syria, supported in the following year by a fleet from Venice. Ships from the Italian maritime cities were used to supply armies, rescue trapped forces and keep up communications with western Europe. The dispatch of these Italian fleets was at least in part motivated by the desire for commercial gain but, be that as it may, they were invaluable in the establishment of the Frankish states in the Levant from 1100. They also helped considerably during that period in the capture of the remaining ports;215 al-Sulami had alerted his fellow Muslims to this imminent danger in his prophetic book, the Kitab al-jihad. In fact, in spite of the solemn warnings by al-Sulami of the dire consequences to the Muslims of the loss of the Syrian ports, the Crusaders rapidly seized nearly all of them.

  Furthermore, even the waves of newcomers who continued to arrive by sea from western Europe did not arouse a response from the Muslims on land or at sea and the Crusaders, having captured the Levantine ports, were able to fortify them, thus defending themselves from the Muslims and providing themselves with bases to which further reinforcements of troops, arms and supplies could come, unimpeded, from Europe. The Crusaders learned from the bitter and gruelling experiences of the First Crusade that the land routes to the Levant were not the best way to approach their goal. Thereafter, they came predominantly by sea. When subsequent Crusades were launched, the warriors from Europe took the sea routes to Syria and Palestine. Moreover, the influx of Franks, both soldiers for the faith and pilgrims, who flowed in a steady stream int
o the Levant in the periods in between the formal Crusades also arrived by sea. Access to the coast was crucial to continuing Crusader sur-vival. The extraordinary nature of the Syrian coastline – one of the straightest in the world, with few natural harbours – made possession of those ports which did exist, such as Tyre, Sidon, Beirut and others, all the more precious (colour plate 5).

  With the benefit of hindsight, it seems remarkable that no Muslim leader until Saladin saw the need to make a priority of the ports rather than of the cities inland, such as Damascus, Aleppo and Jerusalem. After all, it was through the ports that reinforcements of men, arms and provisions kept on arriving and at this early juncture the Muslims were unable to do anything about it. Ideally, joint operations by sea and land would have been best, but even concerted attacks on the ports from inland would have been within the reach of Muslim military leaders in the period 1100–60, had they made those targets their priority. They did not.

  Figure 8.37 Probably a Fatimid shalandi, of the kind described by Ibn Mammati: a ’decked ship on which soldiers fought while rowers plied their oars beneath’; c. twelfth century, Fustat, Egypt

  The Fatimids and the Navy

  Since the Muslims possessed so few of the coastal towns of Syria and Palestine, it was an inevitable consequence that they would find it difficult to build up a fleet and put it to sea to confront the Franks in that part of the Mediterranean. Of the Muslim territories with easy access to the eastern Mediterranean after 1110, there remained only the Fatimid empire, which retained the Egyptian ports. Further to the west, Tunisia had been the springboard for the conquest of Sicily and could have been used again to establish Muslim outposts on various islands to counter growing western European power in the Mediterranean. But here again nothing materialised at the key moment of Crusader expansion. It is hard to resist the conclusion that the Muslims tamely let the Crusaders secure a massive strategic advantage, and it took the Muslims the best part of two centuries to make good that initial loss.