God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Tyerman, Christopher

  The other armies fared no better. William of Aquitaine, who had left home in March, joined forces en route to Constantinople with Welf of Bavaria arriving at the Byzantine capital just as the Lombards were leaving Nicomedia in early June. A few days later they were joined by William of Nevers, who, for unknown reasons, decided to try to catch up with the Lombard army. By the time the Nivernais force reached Ankara, William abandoned the pursuit, turning south towards Konya and the main route to Syria. After fighting off Turks, presumably of Kilij Arslan, William reached Konya in mid-August. Finding his force insufficient to capture or intimidate the city, and too vulnerable to await the Aquitainians and Bavarians, William decided on a dash for Cilicia, pressing on to Ereghli, where his army was surrounded and destroyed. Once again the cavalry abandoned the infantry and non-combatants to their fate; once again the leaders escaped, ultimately finding their way, destitute, to Antioch.

  Hard on the Nivernais’ heels came the large army of William of Aquitaine and Welf of Bavaria, which included Hugh of Vermandois and, more exotically, Ida, dowager margravine of Austria. At Constantinople, rumours about the Lombards’ fate persuaded some nervous Germans sensibly but expensively to embark by sea for the Holy Land; according to one them, the chronicler Ekkehard abbot of Aura, they reached Jaffa in six weeks.12 Their comrades who chose the land route set out in mid-July along the route of the First Crusade from Nicaea, to Dorylaeum, Philomelium and Konya. Despite careful and extensive preparations, once they were out of Byzantine territory food quickly ran out, and Turkish attacks intensified. Reaching Ereghli at the beginning of September, the Christians were surprised by Kilij Arslan’s army and routed. Many of the leaders, equipped with finer horses and loyal servants, escaped with their lives if not their dignity or possessions. Hugh of Vermandois died of his wounds at Tarsus; Archbishop Thiemo of Salzburg was captured and later, according to popular legend, martyred; and Ida of Austria disappeared, most likely killed but later rumoured to have ended her days in a Muslim prince’s harem, the medieval west being almost as obsessed by titillating images of Muslim sexual pred-atoriness and licence as by their blasphemy, stories of miscegenation proving especially popular. The survivors of the Ereghli disaster, including William of Aquitaine, struggled through to Cilicia and thence to Antioch. Once in Syria, having helped Raymond of Toulouse capture the port of Tortosa, the aristocratic remnants of the three armies fulfilled their vows as pilgrims. Many returned home bankrupt in pocket and reputation. A few stayed to assist the new king of Jerusalem, Baldwin I, sharing in his mauling by the Egyptians at Ramla in May 1102, and, like the hapless Stephen of Blois, finding a martyr’s crown or, like Arpin, viscount of Bourges, a Fatimid prison.

  If nothing was gained by the 1101 expeditions, thousands of lives and livres were lost together with the westerners’ local reputation for invincibility and further trust of the Greeks, who were glibly cast as scapegoats for the failure alongside the sins of the participants. Yet the campaigns possessed a wider significance. While establishing a topos of theologically explicable failure in terms of the moral deficiencies of those involved, in practical terms it imposed limits on eastern ambitions. The Lombards had envisaged capturing Baghdad; Urban II had allegedly encouraged the Milanese to think of conquering Egypt. Such dreams of a Christian conquest of the Near East died in the hills above Merzifon and the marshes around Ereghli. The enterprise of the Holy Land remained thereafter practically confined to securing Syria and Palestine; larger schemes were devised in the twelfth and later centuries, especially involving the power on the Nile, but the events of 1101 showed that Urban II’s revolution of history could turn only so far.

  THE ESTABLISHMENT OF LATIN RULE

  The Holy Land the westerners sought to control and defend possessed geographic but not political definition. The territory that at various times came under Latin rulers in the century after 1097 stretched some 600 miles from the Gulf of Alexandretta and Cilicia in the north to the Gulf of Aqaba on the Red Sea in the south. Dominating the region is a chain of mountains running from the tall Amanus and Nosairi ranges, rising to 9,000 feet, in the north, through the parallel Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon mountains flanking the Biqa valley in the centre, to the hills of Samaria and Judea in the south, which, though lower, still rise in places to over 3,000 feet. To the west stretches a narrow, fertile coastal plain, occasionally interrupted by tongues of hill country, as along the Lebanese shore and at Haifa, irrigated by the released winter rainfall brought to the highlands by the prevailing westerly winds. To the east the mountains are bounded by a deep depression carrying the valleys of the Orontes, the Litani and the Jordan, which, except where the Anti-Lebanon rises beyond the Biqa, gives way to a plateau, fertile in places such as eastern Galilee, before the landscape merges with treeless scrub bordering the desert that stands to the east and south. In southern Palestine, where the coastal plain is wider, the hills descend gently to meet the formidable Negev desert. There were few roads from the coast to the interior, the chief routes leading from St Symeon via Antioch to Aleppo; from Tripoli to Homs; from Tyre to the Biqa; and from Acre to Galilee and on to Damascus. Although both the hills and plains were more forested than in later centuries, and many areas were agriculturally fertile and productive, particularly the coastal strip, the Orontes valley and Galilee, the climate, especially in the south, was unforgiving when compared with the areas many of the western settlers had left behind, with scorching dry summers and, as Stephen of Blois had discovered to his surprise, cool, wet winters.13 Summer in Jerusalem, high in the Judean hills, could see midday temperatures daily reach the 90s F (mid-30s C), with an average in July and August of over 75 F (25 C), but in mid-winter see average temperatures in the mid-40s F (c.8 C) with frost at night. The coast, although milder in winter, experiences considerable humidity in summer, while the rift valley at Jericho and the Dead Sea, well over 1,000 feet below sea level, is stifling in summer, with temperatures well above 100 degrees F.

  The physical context exerted a profound influence on power and settlement. It was a relatively small space that the westerners came to occupy, in area comparable with England or a medium-sized state in the USA, such as New York or Alabama. Even in the twelfth century, when summer military campaigns in Europe could cover hundreds of miles, Outremer was a narrow region. Warfare was intimate, witnessed by the long succession of captured Frankish commanders who languished sometimes for years in Muslim prisons. (Whether from Frankish charity, violence, incompetence or chance, few if any Muslim generals suffered similar indignities in return.) The western obsession with the region created its own imaginary space of boundless extent, a liminal world of religious contest, aliens and otherness in which usually level-headed eyewitnesses such as Fulcher of Chartres, a Jerusalem resident for over a quarter of a century, felt compelled to locate marvellous fantastical beasts against the evidence of his own eyes: basilisks, Capricorns, chimeras, dragons, etc.14 The mundane reality determined a costive high politics at once sensitive, vulnerable and dependent on intruders from outside. Cities were crowded except where, as in Jerusalem, religion and strategy dictated social exclusion. Yet, despite the smallness of scale, and the absence of any directed policy of immigration from the west (in contrast to other areas of western conquest in Spain, the Baltic or Sicily), previous depopulation and some Muslim emigration allowed for limited but not negligible western colonization.

  In terms of agricultural opportunities, while Antioch and Galilee were prosperous, the rural economy of Palestine scarcely matched that of the north and western Mediterranean, where many settlers came from. However, exploitation of the natural resources sustained an economy centred on towns, cities and trade with a prominent role for money. Power followed wealth, the fragmentation of Fatimid and Seljuk control over the region re-emphasizing the importance of the sea-ports – Acre, Tyre, Sidon, Beirut – and the linked commercial emporia of the interior, such as Aleppo and Damascus. For centuries rule had been exercised by foreign interlopers with little or no interest i
n creating new structures of government. Despite the political chaos of the later eleventh century, the continuity imposed by geography and economics was reflected in an underlying administrative organization left largely undisturbed by successive conquerors: the Byzantine district (civitas) of Caesarea of the seventh century lay behind the twelfth-century lordship of Caesarea; the Roman province of Palaestina Secunda corresponded with the Palestinian boundaries of the principality of Galilee.15 Socially, economically and religiously, village life, outside war zones, remained largely undisturbed. Nevertheless, to enjoy the benefits of dominion, the new invaders, like their predecessors, needed to master the strongpoints, the markets and the trade routes. This required manpower, precisely what the newcomers lacked.

  When most of the surviving first crusaders left Syria in the late summer of 1099, western conquests comprised the county of Edessa, the remote Franco-Armenian condominium ruled by Baldwin of Boulogne straddling the upper Euphrates; Bohemund’s principality in northern Syria, based on Antioch and the lower Orontes valley but with ostensible interests in Cilicia; and a narrow stretch of land in Judea and Samaria running along the west bank of the river Jordan from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea, including Tiberias, Nablus, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Hebron, which was linked to the sea by a neck of territory surrounding the road down from the Holy City to the port of Jaffa, the nascent kingdom of Jerusalem ruled by Godfrey of Bouillon, assisted by Tancred of Lecce. In addition there remained elements of the Provençal army with Count Raymond, desperate for his own sovereign conquest; a large Pisan war fleet that had brought the new papal legate Daimbert of Pisa; and detachments of Greek troops, such as the garrison at Lattakiah, trying to make good Alexius’s broken-backed policy of imposing his own overlordship in the wake of the Christian invasion of Syria. While Bohemund’s military establishment appeared capable of sustained aggression, Baldwin of Edessa relied on his small, perforce tight-knit entourage of knights supported by successful diplomacy and local alliances. Together, on their pilgrimage to Jerusalem at Christmas 1099, Bohemund and Baldwin were apparently able to muster an impressive company, of hundreds perhaps even thousands, but only because it was greatly swelled by the Italians accompanying Archbishop Daimbert. In Jerusalem, Duke Godfrey had been left with as few as 300 knights and 2,000 infantry, the westerners occupying barely more than one street in the devastated city outside the manned fortifications. Manpower was insufficient to clear away all the corpses from the July massacre; the carcasses and stench of putrefaction remained evident to visitors over five months later. For some years later, visiting pilgrims noted the remains of corpses littering the roads, the devastation around Jerusalem and the constant fear of Muslim attack.16 Although, as Tancred showed by annexing Galilee in the summer of 1099, some said with little more than a score of knights, small bands could operate effectively in the chaotic political conditions of ill-defended rural Palestine, protection of the Christian enclaves, especially Jerusalem, let alone securing their stability by extending their frontiers to stronger natural boundaries, depended on help from outside, particularly from the west. Generations successfully maintaining and expanding their holdings failed to obscure the central strategic fact. Militarily, Outremer was never entirely self-sufficient, its survival relying initially on transient western soldiers, sailors and pilgrims; then settlers from Europe; later new military orders, recruited and funded from the west, and western investment in the form of western endowments for Holy Land religious houses; and, throughout, Christian fleets, notably from north Italian maritime cities. Just as the early conquests along the Levantine coast relied on Italian sea-power and often pilgrims’ muscle, so the army that faced Saladin in the final crisis of the twelfth-century kingdom of Jerusalem in July 1187 contained visiting crusaders, troops of the Templars and Hospitallers funded from Europe and local mercenaries paid with money deposited in Jerusalem by sympathetic western rulers.

  Nowhere was this dependence on the west more obvious than in the conquest of the coast between 1099 and 1124, where the capture of ports relied on foreign maritime assistance as allies or mercenaries: Jaffa in 1099 (Pisa); Haifa in 1100 (Venice); Arsuf and Caesarea in 1101 (Genoa); Tortosa and Jubail in 1102 (Genoa); Lattakiah in 1103 (Genoa); Acre in 1104 (Genoa); Tripoli in 1109 (Genoa and Provence); Beirut in 1110 (Genoa and Pisa); Sidon in 1110 (Norwegian); Tyre in 1124 (Venice). Without a fleet, as at Tyre in 1111, or where a fleet was repulsed, as at Sidon in 1108, land attacks failed. The crucial importance of the maritime cities in the establishment of the Frankish principalities on the Levant coast was reflected in the privileges afforded them in the conquered cities, such as the Genoese at Antioch (1098), Jubail (1102) and Acre (1104) or the Venetians at Tyre in 1124, where they were rewarded with a third of the city and its territory. Along with the Pisans, the Genoese and Venetians gained privileged access to ports and markets, received extensive property and rights of jurisdiction over their own nationals, which allowed them to create more or less immune quarters in chosen maritime cities in which visiting merchants could stay and from which they could trade. Such was the importance of the Genoese in the creation of the kingdom of Jerusalem under its first king, Baldwin I, that later in the century they were able to make good a spurious claim that their contributions had been commemorated by an inscription erected in the church of the Holy Sepulchre.17

  The conquest of the coast did not immediately lead to the peaceful occupation of the hinterland; the road from Jaffa to Jerusalem, the slopes of Mt Carmel and the Lebanon remained unsafe for a generation and more. Banditry, from both sides of the frontier, persisted, as did raids by neighbouring rulers. However, with the occupation of the coastal ports came security of the lifelines with the west and control of the main trade routes with the interior. Although until late in the century return on commerce probably disappointed the Italian investors, without such a hold the settlements could not have survived financially, economically or demographically. Strategically, each port gained reduced the scope of Egyptian fleets; the loss of Tyre prevented the Fatimids from threatening the trade and pilgrim routes between the Holy Land, Cyprus, Byzantium and western Europe.

  It is often argued that the Italian involvement in the Holy Land venture reveals sordid materialism, even nascent capitalism at odds with devotion to the crusading ideal. This is nonsense. The typology of a conflict between ‘medieval’ faith and ‘modern’ commercialism is meaningless; faith is as much a feature of the modern world as materialism was of the medieval. At best such generalizations are literary conventions; at worst a form of condescending historical snobbery. Either way, such views belie the evidence. Writers such as the twelfth-century Genoese Caffaro suggest civic patriotism, but his Liberation of the East (De Liberatione Civitatum Orientis) and most of the other evidence available point to a mix of religious idealism and perceived self-interest familiar in many other crusaders.18 The Italian presence in the east predated 1095; there was an Amalfitan hospital in Jerusalem in the early 1070s. The involvement of the maritime cities formed part of a process whereby the eastern Mediterranean was opened to western interests, a process that embraced the military, colonial and pious as well, the Italian merchant and the crusader playing complementary, related roles. The investment in fleets was great; the chance of disaster strong; the financial risks huge; the returns uncertain. With the resulting profits hardly matching expectations until late in the century, the Genoese privatized their holdings in Lattakiah, Jubail, Antioch and Acre to the Embriaco family, while the Venetians made over their rural possessions around Tyre to the Contarini.19 The accusation that the privileges granted the Italians constituted them as states within a state, apparent in the thirteenth century, cannot be sustained for periods of strong secular rule in the twelfth. The commitment of these cities and their citizens to the Holy Land was neither more nor less idealistic than their fellow Latin Christians. The idea that enthusiasm for the cross failed to penetrate these bastions of early capital is inherently unlikely, based on a flawed model o
f human behaviour and contradicted by the evidence.

  The conquest of the coast formed part of an often desperate struggle to maintain the initial conquests in Syria and Palestine from a plethora of enemies: Byzantium; the Seljuks of Iraq; the Turks of Mosul, Aleppo and Damascus; and the Fatimids of Egypt. Well might one of the settlers, Baldwin I’s chaplain Fulcher of Chartres, recall in pious wonder: ‘why did they not, as innumerable locusts in a little field, so completely devour and destroy us?’, a vivid image from one who witnessed in his time in Jerusalem at least three serious plagues of locusts (1114, 1117, 1120).20 Across the political and religious divide, the issue appeared the same. While contemporary Muslim poets satisfied themselves with extravagant lamentations on the violence and devastation wreaked by the Franks in successive massacres of civilian populations in the cities captured from 1098 onwards, the Damascene lawyer al-Sulami, writing c.1105, shrewdly noted their weakness: ‘the small amount of cavalry and equipment they have at their disposal and the distance from which their reinforcements come’. He concluded that this presented ‘an opportunity which must be seized at once’.21 The Muslim rulers of Syria and Palestine needed little encouragement, less out of religious zeal promoted by the heightened rhetoric of fear and outrage, often generated by refugees from the conquered areas, than from motives of political and commercial self-interest. Although the Frankish policy of massacre and exclusion of Muslims from the cities they captured up to 1110 differed from customary behaviour, politically they were treated less exceptionally. The impression left by the twelfth-century chronicle of Ibn al-Qalanisi of Damascus, a centre for Palestinian refugees, is of the Franks as one of many fractious groups in a region of competing princelings, each jockeying for advantage. Ironically, the western interlopers immediately offered an additional diplomatic and military option for many Muslim rulers eager for allies, especially in the chronic rivalries between Mosul, Aleppo and Damascus. The creation of Christian Outremer, therefore, revolved around military security, but not just its own.