The Old Man could plausibly promise these young men that if they killed at his bidding and were killed in the process, they would enter Paradise, because that same promise is in the Qur’an: “Indeed, Allah has purchased from the believers their lives and their properties; for that they will have Paradise. They fight in the cause of Allah, so they kill and are killed.” (9:111)
Although they mainly killed rival Muslim leaders, Assassins murdered the Latin king of Jerusalem, Conrad of Montferrat, in 1192. They became in the consciousness of the Crusaders the epitome of the ruthless and terrible fanatics against whom they were fighting. Twenty-first-century individual jihadis have frequently boasted, “We love death more than you love life.” The Assassins would have agreed.
Saladin
Meanwhile, a jihad commander was on the scene who would turn the tide in the Holy Land decisively against the Crusaders. Shirkuh’s ambitious young nephew was named Saladin. Once in control in Egypt, he began enforcing the laws subjugating Christians as dhimmis: Michael the Syrian recounted that Saladin “issued an order in Egypt that Christians must always appear in public wearing a [distinguishing] belt as a sign of servitude, and that they could not mount a horse or mule.”41
Saladin was to become one of the most celebrated and renowned Muslim warriors in the entire history of jihad, and one of the few whose name is known in the West.
In modern-day mythmaking, Saladin is to individual Muslims what al-Andalus is to Muslim polities. He has become the prototype of the tolerant, magnanimous Muslim warrior, historical proof of the nobility of Islam. In The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, Amin Maalouf describes Saladin as “always affable with visitors, insisting that they stay to eat, treating them with full honours, even if they were infidels, and satisfying all their requests. He could not bear to let someone who had come to him depart disappointed, and there were those who did not hesitate to take advantage of this quality. One day, during a truce with the Franj, the ‘Brins,’ lord of Antioch, arrived unexpectedly at Saladin’s tent and asked him to return a district that the sultan had taken four years earlier. And he agreed!”42
But he was not always so magnanimous. Saladin set out to conquer Jerusalem in 1187 in response to Crusaders under the command of Reynald of Chatillon’s taking a page from the Islamic prophet Muhammad’s book and raiding caravans—in this case, Muslim caravans. The rulers of the Kingdom of Jerusalem ordered Reynald to stop, because they knew that his actions endangered the very survival of their kingdom. Yet he persisted, and finally Saladin had had enough.43
He struck hard. When Saladin’s forces defeated the Crusaders at Hattin on July 4, 1187, he ordered the mass execution of his Christian opponents. According to his secretary, Imad ed-Din, Saladin “ordered that they should be beheaded, choosing to have them dead rather than in prison. With him was a whole band of scholars and Sufis and a certain number of devout men and ascetics; each begged to be allowed to kill one of them, and drew his sword and rolled back his sleeve.” The great jihad warrior took particular satisfaction in the scene: “Saladin, his face joyful, was sitting on his dais; the unbelievers showed black despair.”44 The warriors of jihad captured the True Cross and displayed it in Damascus, upside down.45
However, when Saladin recaptured Jerusalem for the Muslims in October 1187, he treated the Christians with magnanimity—in sharp contrast to the behavior of the Crusaders in 1099. Yet magnanimity was not his initial plan; he had originally intended to put to death all the Christians in the city. However, the Christian commander inside Jerusalem, Balian of Ibelin, threatened in turn to destroy the city and kill all the Muslims there before Saladin could get inside, so Saladin relented—but once inside the city, he did enslave many of the Christians who could not afford to buy their way out.46 Each Christian had to raise a ransom payment in order to leave the city; those who remained who were not enslaved had to pay the jizya.47
Saladin also took Acre and Jaffa, greatly reducing the Crusaders’ territory. The tide had turned definitively against the Crusaders, and the end of their presence in the Middle East was only a matter of time. Alarmed by Saladin’s victories, Pope Gregory VIII called the Third Crusade, and won the active participation of King Henry II of England and Philip II of France, who had previously been warring against each other.
But what began in a demonstration of Christian unity was doomed by Christian disunity: also participating was Frederick Barbarossa, by now seventy years old. His title of Holy Roman emperor, which all the successors of Charlemagne in Germany had taken, may have played well at home, but in the East it was a different story: the Byzantine emperors still considered themselves to be the sole rightful emperors of the Romans. The Roman emperor Isaac II thus viewed the Roman emperor Frederick Barbarossa as an upstart and a pretender. Isaac granted Frederick permission to pass with his Crusader forces through Byzantine domains, but once Frederick was there, Isaac did all he could to make his passage difficult. So offended was Isaac, emperor of the Romans, by the appropriation of his title that he contacted Saladin himself and concluded a secret treaty with the Muslim commander; Isaac agreed to do everything he could to hinder Frederick’s advance.48
As promised, provisions failed to appear, and Byzantine troops actively interfered with the Crusaders’ advance. Frederick became infuriated and warned Isaac that if the harassment didn’t stop, the Crusaders would attack Byzantine territory. Isaac asked for negotiations, but these became mired in arguments over who exactly was the Roman emperor, and so Frederick ultimately made good on his threat and captured Adrianople. Isaac then agreed that if the Crusaders withdrew from his city, he would provide them provisions and other aid against the Muslims.49
Frederick was then able to advance across Asia Minor, defeating the Turks in one battle before it all came to naught when the elderly Holy Roman emperor drowned while crossing a river in Armenia. His Crusade came to nothing. The other forces of the Third Crusade managed to recapture Acre and Jaffa, but they failed to retake Jerusalem.
Saladin, meanwhile, had visions of extending his jihad far beyond the Holy Land. He understood his fight against the Crusaders as part of the larger jihad that was indeed global, and he wanted to pursue that as well. His friend Baha ed-Din recalled that once, standing on the shores of the Mediterranean with Saladin, the great commander had said to him: “I think that when God grants me victory over the rest of Palestine I shall divide my territories, make a will stating my wishes, then set sail on this sea for their far-off lands and pursue the Franks there, so as to free the earth of anyone who does not believe in God, or die in the attempt.”50
The Fifth Crusade
Saladin did not live to realize his aspiration to take the jihad to the lands of the Franks; he died in Damascus in 1193. Other Muslims, however, had the same goal and would pursue it indefatigably. In April 1213, nine years after the Fourth Crusade went disastrously awry, with the Crusaders getting involved in a Byzantine dynastic dispute and ending up sacking Constantinople, Pope Innocent III called a Fifth Crusade. In his bull Quia Maior, he articulated the reasons for the conflict as he saw them, in the virtual obverse of Saladin’s aspirations for global jihad. Innocent noted that “the Christian peoples, in fact, held almost all the Saracen provinces up to the time of Blessed Gregory”—that is, Pope Gregory the Great, who reigned from 590 to 604.51 “But since then,” Innocent continued, “a son of perdition has arisen, the false prophet Muhammad, who has seduced many men from the truth by worldly enticements and the pleasures of the flesh.”52
He thought that the end of Islam was approaching: “Although [Muhammad’s] treachery has prevailed up to the present day, we nevertheless put our trust in the Lord who has already given us a sign that good is to come, that the end of this beast is approaching, whose ‘number’, according to the Revelation of St. John, will end in 666 years, of which already nearly 600 have passed.” Nonetheless, it was imperative to resist the Saracens: “And in addition to the former great and gra
ve injuries which the treacherous Saracens have inflicted on our Redeemer, on account of our offences, the same perfidious Saracens have recently built a fortified stronghold to confound the Christian name on Mount Thabor, where Christ revealed to his disciples a vision of his future glory; by means of this fortress they think they will easily occupy the city of Acre, which is very near them, and then invade the rest of that land without any obstructive resistance, since it is almost entirely devoid of forces or supplies.”53
This Crusade, too, was ultimately unsuccessful, as were subsequent forays. The warriors of jihad from the Mamluk sultanate took Jerusalem in 1244. The remaining Crusader kingdoms were in serious peril, and there was no help in sight. The jihadis pursued their quarry ruthlessly: in 1268, when the jihad forces of the Mamluk sultan Baybars took Antioch from the Crusaders, Baybars was annoyed to find that the Crusader ruler, Count Bohemond VI, had already left the city. So he wrote to Bohemond to make sure he knew what his men had done in Antioch:
You would have seen your knights prostrate beneath the horses’ hooves, your houses stormed by pillagers and ransacked by looters, your wealth weighed by the quintal, your women sold four at a time and bought for a dinar of your own money! You would have seen the crosses in your churches smashed, the pages of the false Testaments scattered, the Patriarchs’ tombs overturned. You would have seen your Muslim enemy trampling on the place where you celebrate the Mass, cutting the throats of monks, priests and deacons upon the altars, bringing sudden death to the Patriarchs and slavery to the royal princes. You would have seen fire running through your palaces, your dead burned in this world before going down to the fires of the next, your palace lying unrecognizable, the Church of St. Paul and that of the Cathedral of St. Peter pulled down and destroyed; then you would have said, “Would that I were dust, and that no letter had ever brought me such tidings!”54
As the last cities of Outremer were facing conquest and Islamization in 1290, an offer of help came from Arghun, the Mongol ruler of Persia and client of the great Mongol emperor Kublai Khan.
In 1258, Hulagu Khan, the brother of Kublai Khan and grandson of Genghis Khan, sacked Baghdad and toppled the Abbasid caliphate. (The Mamluks restored the Abbasids in Cairo in 1261, but the Abbasid caliphate in Egypt was never much more than a figurehead and a pawn of vying Islamic factions.55) Hulagu’s mother was a Nestorian Christian, and Hulagu himself maintained a positive stance toward Christianity. Two years later, a Christian Mongol leader named Kitbuka seized Damascus and Aleppo for the Mongols. Arghun, a Buddhist, wanted to try to raise interest among the Christian kings of Europe in making common cause to wrest the Holy Land from the Muslims once and for all. Arghun’s closest friend was the Catholicos, the chief prelate of the Nestorian Church. His vizier was a Jew. Arghun had come to power in Persia by toppling the Muslim ruler Ahmed (a convert from Nestorian Christianity) after Ahmed made attempts to join forces with the Mamluks in Cairo.56
Arghun had written to Pope Honorius IV in 1285 to suggest an alliance between the Mongols and the Christians of Europe against the Seljuk Turks and the Mamluks of Egypt, but the pope did not answer.57 The Mongol ruler then sent an emissary, Rabban Sauma, a Nestorian Christian from Central Asia, to Europe to discuss the matter personally with the pope and the Christian kings.
Sauma’s journey was one of the most remarkable in the ancient world: he started out from Trebizond and traveled all the way to Bordeaux to meet with King Edward I of England. Along the way, he met the Byzantine emperor Andronicus in Constantinople (whom he referred to as King Basileus, or King King, demonstrating that thirteenth-century translators weren’t infallible); traveled to Naples, Rome (where Honorius IV had just died and a new pope had not yet been chosen), and Genoa; went on to Paris, where he dined with King Philip IV of France; met with Edward I in Bordeaux; and returned to Rome for a triumphant meeting with the new pope, Nicholas IV.58
All the European leaders liked Rabban Sauma’s proposal of a Mongol–Christian alliance to free the Holy Land. Philip IV offered to march to Jerusalem himself at the head of a Crusader army. Edward I was likewise enthusiastic: Sauma was proposing an alliance that the king himself had called for in the past. Pope Nicholas showered Sauma and Arghun with gifts. But what none of these men, or anyone else in Europe, could decide was a date for this grand new Crusade. Their enthusiasm remained vague; their promises, nonspecific.59
The crowned heads of Europe were too disunited and distracted with challenges at home to take up the Mongols’ offer; perhaps they were also suspicious of a non-Christian king who wanted to wage war to liberate the Christian Holy Land. They may have feared that once they helped the wolf devour the Muslims, the wolf would turn on them in turn. But in any case, it was an opportunity missed. Dissatisfied with the results of Rabban Sauma’s journey, Arghun sent another emissary, Buscarel of Gisolf, to Europe in 1289.60
He asked Philip IV and Edward I for help, offering to take Jerusalem jointly with soldiers sent by the Christian kings; he would then hand the city over to the Crusaders. Edward’s answer, which is the only one that survives, was polite but noncommittal. Dismayed, Arghun tried yet again in 1291, but it was too late: in that year, Outremer fell. By the time the emissaries returned, Arghun himself was dead.61
An alliance with the Mongols was a lost opportunity for the Christian Europeans. In the early fourteenth century, the renowned Islamic jurist Ibn Taymiyya composed a fatwa, that is, a religious ruling on a disputed issue, against the Muslims of Mardin, who had been conquered by the Mongols in 1260, for not waging jihad against their new overlords. Ibn Taymiyya fulminated against the people of Mardin, saying that “in spite of their pretension to be Muslims—[they] not only glorify Chinghis-Khan but they also fight the Muslims. The worst of these infidels even give him their total and complete obedience; they bring him their properties and give their decisions in his name.… Above all this they fight the Muslims and treat them with the greatest enmity. They ask the Muslims to obey them, to give them their properties, and to enter [into the obedience of the rules] which were imposed on them by this infidel polytheistic King…”62
But by that time, there was no Christian presence anywhere in the area that could conceivably have allied with the Mongols to fight against the warriors of jihad. The fourteenth-century Muslim historian Abu’l Fida rejoiced over the end of the Crusader presence in the Holy Land: “With these conquests the whole of Palestine was now in Muslim hands, a result that no one would have dared to hope for or desire. Thus the whole of Syria and the coastal zones were purified of the Franks, who had once been on the point of conquering Egypt and subduing Damascus and other cities. Praise be to God!”63
Indeed, there were many times when the Crusaders seemed on the verge of an immense victory, only to have it snatched from them. Nevertheless, neither Abu’l Fida nor anyone else at the time seemed to have noticed the greatest achievement of the Crusades: from the time Pope Urban II called the First Crusade in 1095 to the fall of the last of Outremer in 1291, there were no jihad forays into Europe. The Reconquista in Spain continued to reduce the size of Islamic al-Andalus, and so in sharp contrast to the jihad forays into Europe and against the Byzantine Empire that had been a regular feature in the centuries before the Crusades, the two centuries of the principal Crusader period saw the forces of jihad both in Spain and in the Holy Land in an unfamiliar posture: on the defensive.
This did not, of course, make any difference to the Christians and Jews who had the misfortune of living within Islamic domains. The influential Islamic jurist Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, who died in 1350, reiterated the restrictions on the dhimmis from the Abbasid capital of Damascus:
Those who are of the opinion that to pray in a church or synagogue is loathsome also say that they are places of great infidelity and polytheism. Indeed, their loathsomeness is greater than that of bathhouses, cemeteries or dunghills since they are places of Divine Wrath.… Moreover, are they not the houses of the enemies of Allah, an
d Allah is not to be adored in the houses of his enemies…?
They [the Christians] are prohibited to sound bells except noiselessly in the depths of their churches…for the sound of bells is the banner of infidelity, as well as its outward sign.… Verily, Allah has annulled the sounding of the Christian bell and the Jewish [ram’s] horn and has replaced them with the call of monotheism and devotion. He has raised the sound of the word Islam as a sign of the true vocation so as to throw into obscurity the call of the infidel, and he has replaced the bell with the [Muslim] call to prayer…just as He has replaced the Satanic scriptures with the Koran.…
“Humiliation and derision are to be the lot of those that disobey my word.” The dhimmis are the most disobedient of His command and contrary to His word; consequently, it befits them to be humiliated by distinguishing them from the comportment of the Muslims whom Allah has exalted through their obedience to Him and His Prophet above those that have disobeyed Him.… That a distinctive sign [ghiyar] must be imposed upon them is clear from the Prophet’s statement, “He of the people who resembles them [the dhimmis] shall be deemed of their number.” …Moreover the distinctive dress serves other purposes. He [the Muslim] will thereby know that he is not to go to meet him, he is not to seat him among Muslim company, he is not to kiss his hand, he is not to stand up for him, he is not to address him with the terms brother or master, he is not to wish him success or honor as is customary toward a Muslim, he is not to give him Muslim charity, he is not to call him as a witness, either for accusation or defence…64
The jihad to impose these and other humiliations upon Christians and Jews in Europe was soon to resume and make immense gains. However, if the Crusades had never been attempted at all, it is quite possible that the warriors of jihad would have overrun all of Europe, and the subsequent history of the world would have taken a drastically different course. Instead, Europe experienced the High Middle Ages, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, and the foundations of modern society were laid. It would not be until the twenty-first century that the free societies created out of this intellectual ferment would again be seriously imperiled by the forces of jihad.
The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS Page 18
