by Jeffrey Lee
For the brothers – Tam Tam, Bee Boy and Li’l Tigs
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations and Maps
Prologue
Introduction: A Monstrous Unbeliever
1 Dead Man Walking
2 The Wild East
3 Knight-errant
4 Arriviste
5 Diabolic Daring
6 A Violent Sinner
7 Guardian of the Land
8 Imperial Vassal
9 In the Power of Nur al-Din
10 Years of Darkness
11 Phoenix
12 Hero
13 Lord of La Grande Berrie
14 Desert Raider
15 Sea Wolf
16 The Lion and the Wolf
17 The ‘Manchurian’ Regent
18 King-maker
19 Truce-breaker
20 Apocalypse
21 The Ultimate Crusader
Endnotes
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Index
ILLUSTRATIONS & MAPS
Colour Section
Contents of the FedEx package sent by Al-Qaida in 2010 (© PA)
Chapel of St Radegund fresco (DeAgostini/Getty Images)
Cressac Chapel fresco (Corbis)
Illustration from the manuscript of William of Tyre’s History of Deeds done beyond the Sea, 12th century (Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images)
Illustration from the manuscript of William of Tyre’s History and its Continuation, 13th century (Bibliothèque nationale de France)
Illustration of Reynald de Chatillon’s seal as Prince of Antioch (From The Crusades: The Story of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, by T. A. Archer and Charles Lethbridge Kingsford, London & New York, 1894)
View from across the Orontes river by J. Redway (1841) (Print Collector/Getty Images)
Reynald’s stronghold at Kerak in Oultrejordan (Marco Tomasini/Shutterstock)
The Muslim stronghold of Shayzar (© Maxime Goepp, www.orient-latin.com)
The citadel of Aleppo (Valery Shanin/Shutterstock)
The castle on the Ile de Graye (Mildax/Shutterstock)
Contemporary portrait of Saladin, c. 1180 (Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images)
Illustration of Reynald’s seal as Lord of Oultrejordan (From La Palestine by Baron Ludovic de Vaux, Paris, 1883)
Portrait of Manuel I Comnemos and Maria of Antioch (DeAgostini/Getty Images)
Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem (Nickolay Vinokurov/Shutterstock)
The Horns of Hattin in Galilee, Israel (Zeromancer44/Wikimedia Commons)
Illustration from the Chronica Maiora by Matthew Paris, 13th century (Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)
Maps
Crusader States and Castles
The Second Crusade, 1147–49
Principality of Antioch
Kingdom of Jerusalem
Reynald’s Arabian Campaign
Prologue
Sana’a, Yemen, 29 October 2010
The Sana’a office of the global courier company FedEx is on Hadda Street, a busy, dusty drag of upscale shops and restaurants in the Yemeni capital. Among the customers dropping off packages that Friday was a veiled woman who said she was Hanan al-Samawi, an engineering student. She left a box for shipping to the city of Chicago, Illinois.
Inside the box was a Hewlett-Packard LaserJet printer, some traditional Yemeni clothing, a souvenir model of Yemen’s famous mud skyscrapers and a few English books, including a torn copy of The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot.
Inside the printer were 300 grams of the industrial explosive PETN, more than enough to bring down a jetliner in flight. It was primed to detonate over Chicago.
The plot was the work of the Islamist terror group, Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. The device’s living targets were the people of Chicago, but the bomb was not addressed to them. It was addressed to an old enemy, the most hated and feared of the crusaders who battled the forces of Islam in the Middle Ages.
The bomb was addressed to a man who had been dead for more than 800 years. It was addressed to Reynald de Chatillon.
Introduction
A MONSTROUS UNBELIEVER
Reynald was the most perfidious and wicked of the Franks. He was the greediest, the most determined to destroy and do evil, to violate agreements and solemn oaths, to break his promise and to lie
Imad al-Din1
Twenty-first-century terrorists address their printer-bomb to a long-dead Frankish knight.
The crusades live.
This might surprise most Westerners, for whom the crusades are little more than a dim and dusty story of knights fighting Saracens in the deserts of the Middle East. In fact the legacy of the crusades is very much alive, for they were the crucible in which the forging of the modern world began.
The series of religio-military expeditions, which marched from Western Europe to seize Jerusalem from the Muslims, were the first counter-attacks by Western Christendom against the expanding civilization of Islam – a civilization then superior in medicine, science, mathematics, commerce and much else. The states created in the Levant, settled by the crusaders and then fought over for two centuries were the Christian West’s first colonial experiment. The movement began with the staggeringly successful First Crusade, which captured the Holy City of Jerusalem in 1099. Half a century later came the Second Crusade (1145-9), when Reynald de Chatillon went to the East. The Third Crusade of 1189-92 is perhaps the one best lodged in the Western psyche, given its leading men: King Richard the Lionheart, for Christendom, and his chivalrous adversary, the sultan Saladin, for Islam.
Crusades were not directed just against Saracens in the Orient. Religious fervour and the spirit of conquest drove the frontiers of Christendom in all directions. Crusades were launched against Muslims in Iberia, Eastern European Slavs, heretical Christians and even the Greek Christian Byzantine Empire.
Usually, in the twenty-first century, Western awareness of the crusades remains vague, carrying with it (if anything) some inchoate guilt for ‘Christian aggression’. In the year 2000, Pope John Paul II’s apology for the Church’s errors was widely taken to include the crusades. But long before crusading fervour dwindled, Islam’s knowledge had been transferred to the West, opening the way to the modern scientific method and the long path to the Enlightenment during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Islamic civilization, set into a defensive posture, stagnated and its power waned. This impotence lies behind much of today’s desperate Islamist extremism. In 1492, the Catholic Reconquista finally triumphed, with the defeat of the last Muslim kingdom in Spain. In the same year, and sponsored by the same Catholic monarchs, Columbus discovered the New World, assuring the supremacy of the Christian West. The dangerous idea that set these tectonic shifts in motion was spearheaded by men such as Reynald de Chatillon.
Among Muslims there is no guilt for the violence of the crusading wars, nor are they seen as distant historical events. Rather, there is a widespread belief that the Islamic world is still engaged in a virtuous battle against the crusader onslaught. Any loss of Islamic land – whether it was to medieval Frankish crusaders like Reynald, the Catholic Reconquista in Spain, the Zionist armies in Palestine in 1948 or the American-led occupation of Iraq in 2003 – forms part of this historical perspective. The crusades are seen by some as an ongoing scourge, one that has inflicted an open, festering wound on Islam. The militant Islamists of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) describe all their Western enemies as ‘crusaders’, whether they are tourists on a Tunisian beach, the President of the United States or concert-goers in Paris. Bitterness over the crusades was certainly a motivating factor for the terrorists of Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) when the
y addressed their cargo bomb to Reynald. After the attempt, which luckily failed,2 AQAP wrote in their English-language propaganda journal, Inspire:
Today, we are fighting a war against American tyranny. This is a new crusade waged by the West against Islam. Therefore we wanted to put things into proper perspective This current battle fought by the West is not an isolated battle but is a continuation of a long history of aggression by the West against the Muslim world3
Addressing the package to a crusader, AQAP pronounced, would ‘revive and bring back this history’. But why choose Reynald de Chatillon in particular as the embodiment of this crusader enemy? Why not Godfrey de Bouillon or Raymond of Toulouse, leaders of the First Crusade? When they seized Jerusalem from the Muslims in 1099, their troops perpetrated a massacre so vile that on the Temple Mount their horses waded in blood up to their knees. Or why not the much more famous Richard the Lionheart, whose mere presence terrorized armies, and who festooned his bridle with the heads of Saracens that he had killed?
Reynald is reviled even more than those crusaders of malign memory. He epitomizes the crusades’ enduring legacy of enmity between Christian and Muslim. The Muslims called him ‘Arnat’, or simply ‘al-Brins’ (the Prince), and he was a figure of hatred and terror from the first. For twelfth-century Muslims chronicling the war against the crusaders, Arnat was ‘The most treacherous and wicked of the Franks’.* Likened to Abu Lahab, the loathsome enemy of the Prophet Muhammad, Arnat was blamed for spreading ‘disorder, devastation and ruin’. He was ‘one of the most devilish and recalcitrant Franks’, ‘the most hostile to the Muslims and the most dangerous to them’, ‘a monstrous infidel and a terrible oppressor’.
In the present day this reputation as a Muslim bogeyman remains as potent as ever. The typical modern Muslim view of Reynald is of someone ‘fanatical, greedy and bloodthirsty’.4 He ‘aroused more hatred between Arabs and the Franks than had been caused by decades of wars and massacres’.5 As Inspire explains, AQAP’s FedEx bomb was addressed to Reynald in particular because he was ‘one of the worst and most treacherous of the crusade’s leaders’.
When you get to know what Reynald did – the blasphemy and trauma he inflicted on Islam – it is not surprising that many Muslims still detest the man and his legacy. He was the most effective and ruthless military opponent of the Muslims, particularly of Saladin, who has been elevated in posterity to almost saintly status. And Reynald’s shocking exploits (or mad escapades, depending on your point of view) sent tremors through the religious sensibilities of the Islamic world. He struck at the very heart of the faith itself. Reynald’s strategy could even be said to be the spark that lit that never-ending jihad, the Holy War, which Islamist groups, including AQAP and ISIS, still prosecute today.
While Reynald’s name lives in infamy in the bestiary of Islamism, in the West he has been relegated to almost complete obscurity. Modern historians have usually dismissed him as a peripheral maverick, a ‘knight-brigand’ or a ‘parvenu’. This is a surprising mistake, given his substantial influence in the crusader states. Equally surprising, when his impact is admitted, traditional Western historical narrative usually echoes the negative Islamic view of Reynald. In contrast to his Muslim foes and crusader rivals, who are seen as tolerant and compromising, Reynald is portrayed by Western historians as a greedy, selfish bigot and as an inveterate warmonger. He is ‘crude, thick-headed and stubborn’, ‘aggressive, unadapted and incomprehending’.6 In the traditional historical narrative, Reynald is cast as the arch-villain of the crusading epic. He is even made responsible for the crusaders’ greatest military disaster. Some recent scholars have sought to redress the balance, pointing out Reynald’s contribution and his embodiment of ‘traditional crusading values’, but their influence has been largely limited to academic circles.7
For instance, I mentioned Reynald to a Swedish friend who lives in the Middle East and has an interest in the region’s history. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, ‘he was that horrible man who threw prisoners off the walls of his castle.’ Now while Reynald was responsible for many acts of violence and cruelty, and the walls of his mighty fortress at Kerak are easily high enough to throw a man to his death, there is no evidence of this actually occurring. A quick trawl of the Internet, though, finds this story to be common currency, sometimes with gruesome embellishments. As a Kerak travel guide claims:
One of his [Reynald’s] more notorious pleasures involved encasing the heads of his prisoners in wooden boxes so that, when he flung them off the castle walls, he could be sure that they hadn’t lost consciousness by the time they hit the rocks below8
Across all sorts of websites – whether entertainment, travel or ‘historical’ – the same picture of Reynald is drawn: he is ‘notorious’, ‘barbarous’ and ‘despicable’, and his ‘reputation for treachery, betrayal and brutality is unsurpassed’.9 This goes for other media, too. In a BBC documentary series on the crusades, Reynald was called a ‘manic aggressive’.10 And the Reynald character in historical novels is usually wicked, while in films he has been portrayed almost as a caricature of the bad guy. In Ridley Scott’s crusading Hollywood blockbuster, Kingdom of Heaven,11 the excellent Brendan Gleeson plays Reynald as a sort of violent buffoon and a member of the Order of the Knights Templar – shorthand, in this view of the crusades, for the embodiment of unreconstructed Christian militancy. The real Reynald was certainly violent – consistently and extremely – but in a violent time. He was never a Templar. Nor was he a buffoon.
Reynald’s bad press began in his own lifetime. The Muslim chroniclers wax vitriolic about him, and key crusader sources are also hostile; the greatest historian of the Latin East, Archbishop William of Tyre, who knew Reynald personally, was a political opponent and had other reasons to dislike him, as we shall see. The second main Frankish record is the chronicle of Ernoul, squire of the prominent crusader noble Balian of Ibelin, another bitter rival of Reynald. Still, there are sources that provide different glimpses of the man and, despite the bias against him, we can piece together a picture of Reynald that is surprisingly positive.
The truth reveals the epic life of Reynald de Chatillon as one of the most important of the crusading period. Famous all over Christendom, Reynald was an embodiment of the chivalric ideal. His knightly virtues were notable enough to promote him from obscurity to woo princesses and win royal power in one of the great romantic stories of the age. Via humiliation and harsh imprisonment, he rose to confront emperors and sultans. A ruthless, brutal grudge-holder, he inflicted revenges so savage and spectacular that they still echo down the ages. A renowned warrior, he led crusader armies to one of their most comprehensive military victories and inflicted on Saladin his most decisive reverse, adding years to the survival of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. A daring tactician, he waged an unprecedented, unrepeated campaign against his Islamic enemies in their own back yard. Reynald became the pre-eminent figure in the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, a colossus in the struggle for Palestine that obsessed the Christian world through the twelfth century. Reynald’s personality, his external enmities and internal rivalries dominated the last crucial years of the kingdom. And amidst cataclysmic defeat, his death would be decisive in its fall.
Uncovering the true story of Reynald de Chatillon means revising some other accepted truths about the crusades. This book emphasizes how appeasement and treachery – rather than Reynald’s aggressive policies – undermined the Kingdom of Jerusalem. It will put Reynald’s undoubted aggression and other attributes into context, while telling the extraordinary story of what was, for good or ill, one of the more remarkable medieval lives. It is a life that has been ignored, obscured and misrepresented for too long.
* The crusaders were usually known as ‘Franks’ or ‘Latins’: ‘Franks’ because the largest contingents came from what is now France, and Old French was the lingua franca of the crusader states; ‘Latins’ to distinguish them from Greek Christians.
Vézelay, Burgundy, 31 March 1146
Dressed in his rough white monk’s habit, the frail figure of Abbot Bernard looked out from a makeshift wooden platform across a crowd of many thousands of souls.
Jutting up from a rolling plain, the steep hill of Vézelay loomed behind him, crowned by a massive Romanesque basilica, the abbey-church of St Mary Magdalene. So many had come to hear Bernard speak that the multitude had overflowed the great church and the town itself. They had moved down to this new site in the spring meadows, where this sea of humanity – townspeople, peasants, priests, the flower of the nobility, King Louis VII himself – waited for the speaker to begin. They had gathered to witness Bernard, abbot of the pioneering monastery of Clairvaux, spiritual spearhead of the Cistercian order and the greatest orator of the age, preach the crusade.
The actual words of Bernard’s speech are lost, but we can be sure of much of the content. Expressed through Bernard’s inimitable, potent, mellifluous rhetoric, it would have echoed the proclamation recently issued by Pope Eugenius III, the papal bull Quantum Praedecessores. So Bernard would have described the recent catastrophic loss of the city of Edessa, one of the key crusader cities in the East, to the fierce Turkish warlord, Zengi. He would have described the suffering of the Christians of Edessa and the danger its fall posed to the Holy City of Jerusalem. He would have urged the men present, and especially the nobility – the warriors – to enlist alongside the king in his armed pilgrimage to the East, to fight for Christ and the Holy Land. He probably dangled the carrot of glory, honour and other earthly rewards for the successful crusader. Without doubt he promised heavenly rewards to anyone who ‘took the cross’. These rewards included a complete remission of their sins.
Bernard’s pale body looked ‘almost lifeless’, but his words carried immense power. Whatever he said, it had an almost miraculous effect. That day, wrote an onlooker, Bernard was ‘heaven’s instrument’, bestowing on the multitude ‘the dew of the divine word’.12 The crowd was gripped and inspired. Then and there, thousands committed to the crusade. When Bernard finally called all those who wished to make the ‘noble journey’ to step forward and take the cross, the response was overwhelming. ‘Crosses!’ the crowd roared. ‘Give us crosses!’
