The House of Wisdom

by Jonathan Lyons

  The city and its surrounding lands were a rich prize. It sat at the crossroads of lucrative East-West trade and had periodically changed hands among the Arabs, Byzantines, and Seljuk Turks. The Arab physician Ibn Butlan, far from his native Baghdad, found the bazaars of Antioch overflowing with goods, while residents enjoyed civic water supplies and other conveniences, including a public clepsydra, or water clock, near one of the city gates.26 Now, with the Byzantine emperor helpless back in Constantinople and the local Muslims deeply divided, Antioch’s impressive defenses were all that stood between the ambitious Bohemond and his dream of establishing his own royal line. “So fortified was it with walls and towers and barbicans, that it had no need to fear assault of any machine or the attack of any man, not even if all mankind were to come together against it,” says the Frenchman Raymond of Aguilers in his firsthand account of the First Crusade.27

  After a long and ineffectual siege, Bohemond’s agents managed to bribe a disgruntled tower guard to look the other way as a small force of crusaders climbed one of the walls and then threw open Antioch’s massive gate. The local garrison fled to the city’s impressive citadel, while a considerable Muslim relief force under the command of the Turkish general Kerbogha approached menacingly from the east. The crusaders, by now tired and suffering from a lack of supplies, mounting desertion, and general low morale, found themselves unable to take the citadel and faced with the mortal threat of Kerbogha’s looming counterattack. Food supplies soon ran low, and the depleted countryside had little left to offer the hordes of scavenging crusaders. Fulcher of Chartres, loyal chaplain to Baldwin of Edessa, describes how many were reduced to subsisting on barely cooked thistles, bean shoots, and the meat of horses, donkeys, dogs, and rats. “We believed that these misfortunes befell the Franks, and that they were not able for so long a time to take the city, because of their sins. Not only dissipation, but also avarice or pride or rapaciousness corrupted them.” An army council resolved to send the women away “lest they, stained by the defilement of dissipation, displease the Lord.”28

  It is emblematic of the Crusades that a religious vision, even one doubted by almost all of the prominent figures present, saved the day for the Christians. Peter Bartholomew, a lowly pilgrim, claimed divine inspiration had revealed the location in the city of the Holy Lance, which tradition said had pierced Christ’s side as he hung from the cross. The pilgrim directed the increasingly desperate crusaders to the local cathedral of St. Peter, patron saint of Antioch and its first bishop. Sure enough, a little digging in the floor of the cathedral uncovered what the searchers were convinced was the tip of this valued relic. The discovery transformed the morale in the crusader camp, inspiring a remarkable victory on June 28, 1098, against the much larger attacking force of Kerbogha, which had already been weakened along the way by a failed attempt to retake Edessa from Baldwin. The Muslim armies fled in disgrace.

  Bohemond, who had skillfully outmaneuvered all his European and Byzantine rivals, including Emperor Alexius and his top generals, now controlled Antioch. The local Arab princes, chiefly the rulers of the nearby towns of Aleppo and Shaizar, were unprepared to set aside their own longstanding feud to challenge the establishment of this crusader statelet. Instead, they saw Christian Antioch as just one more player in a crowded geopolitical field that also included Sunni and Shi’ite Muslim factions, as well as their mutual rivals of long standing, the Byzantines.29

  In the far-off Muslim capital of Baghdad—three weeks’ ride by camel under the desert sun—the caliph was not impressed by accounts of murder and mayhem at the hands of these cold-blooded crusaders. Not even the fall of Jerusalem, on July 15, 1099, and its attendant slaughter of Muslims, Jews, and eastern Christians, could stir the court. “How dare you slumber in the shade of complacent safety, leading lives as frivolous as garden flowers, while your brothers in Syria have no dwelling place save the saddles of camels and the bellies of vultures?” demanded Abu Saad al-Harawi, who had made the long journey from Damascus to warn the caliph of the danger posed by al-Ifranj.30 Al-Harawi, who had discarded his traditional judge’s turban and shaved his head as a sign of mourning, got nowhere.

  There was, the caliph’s court concluded, little cause for alarm, but those in the direct path of the marauding Ifranj were appalled by what they saw and heard of the barbarians from the West. One learned Arab knight, Usama ibn Munqidh, summed up local reaction to these Christian interlopers, setting a tone that still strikes a chord across the Muslim world: “Glory be to the Creator, the Maker! Indeed, when a person relates matters concerning the Franks, he should give glory to God and sanctify Him! For he will see them to be mere beasts possessing no other virtues but courage and fighting, just as beasts have only the virtues of strength and the ability to carry loads.”31

  The Christians’ reliance on trial by ordeal offended the sensibilities of the Muslims, with their highly evolved system of legal disputation and formal schools of religious law. Western notions of medicine were based largely on superstition and exorcism, in sharp contrast to the Arabs’ advanced clinical training and understanding of surgery, pharmacology, and epidemiology. The newcomers lacked any real knowledge of hygiene and sanitation, a deep affront to Muslims who performed ritual ablutions before each of the five daily prayers. Muslim observers thought very little of what they saw of Frankish culture. From their perspective, the Ifranj had no understanding of even basic technology, except perhaps for the engines of war, no proper science, medicine, or mathematics, and no real philosophical inquiry. Moreover, the crusaders’ reputation for cruelty was sealed by an outbreak of cannibalism after the sack of the Syrian town of Mara, in the winter of 1098. “Our troops boiled pagan adults whole in cooking pots; they impaled children on spits and devoured them grilled,” writes Radulph of Caen, a witness to the atrocities at Mara.32 Fellow chronicler Albert of Aix captures the full horror of the incident in a single, banal aside: “Not only did our troops not shrink from eating dead Turks and Saracens, they also ate dogs.”33

  Usama, scion of the local Muslim dynasty the Banu Munqidh, came to know the crusaders intimately, fighting with some and befriending others. His highly personable memoir, The Book of Contemplation, condemns the Christians for the barbarity of trial by ordeal and chastises them for their loose morals, poor diet, and general bad habits. As the title suggests, the book falls within the classical Arabic genre of adab, works designed to instruct the reader more than to convey literal truths.34 Still, The Book of Contemplation provides a fascinating window on the crusaders’ world as seen by the Arabs. In one passage, Usama recounts an Arab doctor’s tale of two Christian patients who died needlessly after the physician’s sage advice was spurned and more primitive Western techniques applied. Ignoring the Arab’s pleas, the Franks lopped off a knight’s mildly infected leg with an ax and made an incision in the shape of a cross into an ill woman’s head, before rubbing her skull with salt; both died on the spot. At this point, the doctor dryly remarked, “So I asked them, ‘Do you need anything else from me?’ ‘No,’ they said. And so I left, having learned about their medicine things I had never known before.”35

  Usama does grudgingly acknowledge some useful facility with medicinal plants among the Christians, and he becomes sufficiently familiar with them to study their ways and habits firsthand. A crusader acquaintance on his way back from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land even offers to escort Usama’s fourteen-year-old son to Europe so that the boy might learn proper “reason and chivalry” among the knights of Christendom and then return “like a truly rational man.” Ever the gentleman, Usama quickly makes a polite excuse and deftly sidesteps the offer, but he reveals to his Muslim readers his true thoughts at the very notion: “And so there fell upon my ears words that would never come from a truly rational head! For even if my son were taken captive, his captivity would not be as long as any voyage he might take to the land of the Franks.”36

  He also notes, with obvious satisfaction, that those of the Ifranj who have lived the long
est among the local Muslims are somewhat less objectionable than the boorish new arrivals. “Among the Franks there are some who have become acclimatized and frequent the company of Muslims. They are much better than those recently arrived from their lands, but they are the exception and should not be considered representative.”37 To bolster his case, Usama then tells a number of amusing tales of these bumptious newcomers, including one account of a knight who tries to forcibly “correct” the direction in which the local Muslims pray by turning them eastward and away from Mecca.

  Such easy interaction between putative enemies reflects a central reality of twelfth-century life in the Levant, which was marked by periods of accommodation and cooperation, both personal and political, interspersed with bouts of enmity and outright conflict. Hamdan bin Abd al-Rahman, an Arab physician, served some of the early crusaders. He was rewarded with a village in the principality of Antioch after successfully treating one of the Christian lords. Hamdan was later made administrator of a local district on the crusaders’ behalf, before entering the service of Imad al-Din Zengi, the Muslim ruler of nearby Aleppo. Hamdan, who died in 1159, recorded his own observations and exploits in The Way of the Franks Who Went out to Syria in Those Years, but no copy has ever been found.38

  Usama ibn Munqidh had good reason to look down upon the Army of the Cross and to shrink at the notion of his son learning the “reason and chivalry” of the Franks, for he and his fellow Arabs were the beneficiaries of a glorious Muslim civilization created over the course of hundreds of years. By the mid-eighth century, the Abbasid caliphs had established themselves at the head of a huge empire. At its height, it stretched from the Atlantic to Afghanistan and created an enormous expanse of shared values, outlook, and opportunity. The Abbasids sought to legitimate their rule as rightful and worthy heirs to the classical traditions of Greece, Persia, India, and Mesopotamia, launching perhaps the most ambitious effort in history to gather and assimilate the world’s learning. In southern Spain, their Arab rivals the Umayyads and their successors produced some of the greatest of the Arab philosophers and scientists, thinkers whose works would one day shake the foundations of Christian Europe. Known among the Arabs as al-Andalus, this region served as an important staging ground for ideas and technology that began to trickle into Western Europe as early as the tenth century.

  None of that, of course, held any interest for Peter the Hermit, his legion of followers, or the Christian kings and knights who soon established the principalities of the Latin East in and around the Holy Land. The crusaders, abandoning Christ’s theology of love for the pope’s theology of war, slaughtered the local urban populations, mostly Muslims and Jews, in their zeal to “reclaim” Jerusalem for the one true faith. Eastern Christians, with their unfamiliar dress, language, and customs, often fared little better.

  One Muslim traveler, venturing far from his native Spain, had found Jerusalem in the years shortly before the First Crusade to be an intellectual melting pot “teeming with scholars.” His account details the competing schools of Islamic law and the famous intellectuals who gathered to debate around the central mosque: “We entered the Holy Land and reached the Aqsa mosque. The full moon of knowledge shone for me and I was illuminated by it for more than three years.”39 The city, he adds, provided an ideal meeting place for experts in all three of the great monotheistic faiths.

  That all disappeared in the flash of a sword. The city’s scholarly class was killed wholesale, along with much of the rest of the populace. Raymond of Aguilers, chaplain to Raymond of Saint-Gilles, who led the crusaders of southern France, records the carnage: “Piles of heads, hands, and feet were to be seen in the streets of the city. It was necessary to pick one’s way over the bodies of men and horses. But these were small matters compared with what happened in the Temple of Solomon. What happened there? If I tell the truth, you would not believe it. Suffice to say that, in the Temple and Porch of Solomon, men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins.”40

  The extremes of violence that characterized the First Crusade—such as the cannibalism at Mara or the frenzied slaughter at the Temple of Solomon—reflected the potent Christian propaganda machine behind the campaign. At the time, the West knew little of Islam and its teachings, but church ideologues successfully sowed the seeds of holy war by painting a highly damaging portrait of the Muslims. The peoples of the Near East—Muslim, Jew, or “schismatic” Christian—were left to reap the whirlwind. Antipathy for the followers of Islam was particularly charged in those parts of Western Europe most distant from Muslim life. Attitudes in southern Italy, Spain, and Sicily—areas actually bordering on the Islamic world—were considerably more relaxed.41 The less the Christians knew about the infidel, the more they hated him.

  Charges against the Muslims of idolatry and reliance on violence and coercion were central to the crusader narrative. Another key element was the generalized claim that Jerusalem and the Holy Land were Christian, or more precisely Latin Christian, by right and always had been so. They had been seized and defiled by the Muslims—“seduced,” in the language of some propagandists—and violence was necessary and even justified to right this great historical wrong. Similar language was applied to the Muslims in southern Spain. Here, church historians and others linked contemporary Christian kings to the earlier reign of the Visigoths before the coming of Islam. Only armed force could restore their rule; thus, the sacred notion of Reconquista, akin to the Crusades of the East, was born. Contempt was reserved for those kings who would not fight for the faith. The ninth-century Chronicle of Alfonso III, for example, bitterly denounces one local Christian ruler, Silo of Asturias, who “had peace with the Ishmaelites.”42

  Looking eastward, the ever-enthusiastic Dominican theologian Humbert of Romans argued that in a proper Crusade there could be no innocent victims; all Muslims were guilty, for they destroyed both the body and the soul of pious Christians. Crusading, Humbert said, represented a just war, grounded in divine right and fought for faith, not spoils. He also dismissed the arguments of some traditionalists that Christianity had always opposed violence of any kind. In its early days, the church had been weak and thus had had to rely on miracles and humility. Now the military might of the Christian West allowed an armed response to its enemies.43 To Humbert, it seems, Christ’s teachings were just an exercise in realpolitik.

  Clerical resentment at the use of real or imagined Christian holy sites as places of Muslim worship also ran deep.44 The carnage at the Temple of Solomon, which at one point continued despite attempts by a senior crusader to protect the defenseless Muslims sheltering on its rooftop, should have come as no surprise. Witness the frank accounts of the contemporary Christian chroniclers, who display no real unease at the bloodshed and at times express their satisfaction that the brutal killing, such as that of the vanquished foe at the Temple of Solomon, was legitimate. “Indeed, it was a just and splendid judgment of God that this place should be filled with the blood of the unbelievers, since it had suffered so long from their blasphemies. The city was filled with corpses and blood,” concluded Raymond of Aguilers.45

  The epic Song of Antioch captures many of the prevailing themes of Crusades propaganda: the rightful recovery of the Holy Land, the godlessness of the Muslims, the home in heaven for the fallen martyrs, and the perfidy of the Jews. In one passage, Christ on the cross tells his fellow prisoners of the future coming of the crusaders: “ ‘My friends,’ he said. ‘The people are not yet born who will avenge my death with their steel lances … They will regain my land and free my country.’ ” One of the prisoners, a robber crucified to the right of Jesus, says simply: “It would be good to see yourself avenged on these treacherous Jews who torment you.”46

  Not all Muslims were as indifferent to the arrival of the crusaders as the caliph and his court in distant Baghdad. Many Arabs had no doubt that the capture of Jerusalem and the creation of the crusader states along the Syrian coast were part of an ominous pattern of Christian expansionism that had to be re
sisted. From the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, the legal scholar and preacher Ali ibn al-Sulami sounded the alarm. In his Kitab al~Jihad, or The Book of Holy War, published six years after the Muslims were first driven from Jerusalem, al-Sulami linked the coming of the crusaders to their earlier success against Muslim rule in Sicily. He saw the Christian campaign as a religious war against Islam.47 And he blamed the crusaders’ successes on infighting among the Muslims and their inability to adhere to their faith, particularly their abject failure to unite to defend the lands of Islam from nonbelievers. “This interruption [in waging defensive jihad] combined with the negligence of the Muslims toward the prescribed regulations [of Islam] … has inevitably meant that God has made Muslims rise up one against the other, has placed violent hostility and hatred among them, and has incited their enemies to seize their territories.”48

  Al-Sulami understood that the crusaders were intent on holding Jerusalem and would seek to expand their control of the region to secure the city and its prized Church of the Holy Sepulcher. But The Book of Holy War also rightly identified the enemy’s vulnerabilities, in particular the crusaders’ long supply lines back to Western Europe. And it predicted that a united Muslim ummah, or community of believers, could successfully drive the invaders into the sea. “One knows for sure their weakness, the small amount of cavalry and equipment they have at their disposal and the distance from which their reinforcements come … It is an opportunity which must be seized quickly.”49

  The Ifranj would soon discover just how prescient al-Sulami had been. The Army of God had failed to grasp that its remarkable military successes, however honestly won on the battlefield, were largely a reflection of the fractured, almost anarchic, state of affairs across Syria and Asia Minor. Within forty-five years, the Muslims began to roll back the Christian advances, a turn of events crowned by the triumphal entry into Jerusalem in 1187 of the political and military leader Saladin at the head of a unified force from Egypt and all of Syria.