While the shifting sands of Near East politics were ultimately a gift to the Crusaders, the fate of Peter the Hermit and his followers, who had set off first, provided them with additional unexpected help. Peter’s farce of an army had, by virtue of sheer size, managed to massacre the Jews of several towns along the Danube, but it was no match for the Seljuks. Alexius and his court were appalled at the filth and chaos of Peter’s rabble, and the emperor made sure that the peasant “army” was quickly transported across the Bosphorus and away from the city. Once on the Asian side, they were cut to pieces by the local sultan, who naturally took them as representative of what the Franks could offer. When the far better disciplined and outfitted armies of the Normans and the other knights arrived soon after, the Seljuk emir mistakenly assumed that they were more of the same.
The local Seljuks may not have taken the Crusaders seriously, but Alexius did. Having persuaded most of them to swear allegiance, he had them escorted out of the city and across the Bosphorus into Asia. They took Nicaea (known as Iznik in Turkish) in May 1097 and then advanced south to the same pass that had welcomed Xerxes and Alexander in centuries past. The narrow Cilician pass between the mountains of southern Anatolia separated Asia Minor from Syria, and once through, the Crusaders laid siege to the ancient city of Antioch. Until its capture by the Seljuks in 1085, Antioch had been one of the most important Christian cities in the world, along with Jerusalem, Constantinople, and Rome.
After an arduous eight-month siege, Antioch fell to the Crusaders in June 1098. The task had been made easier by the squabbling that divided the Arab and Turkish factions trying to defend the city’s formidable walls. Antioch was also home to a large Christian population that had lived there since the first century, and when the Crusaders arrived at the
gates, the Turkish governor expelled them. “Antioch is yours,” he told them, “but you will have to leave it to me until I see what happens between us and the Franks.” He promised to look after their wives and children, but he did not allow them to return. These exiles received a cool reception from the Franks. Primarily Greek Orthodox and Armenian, they spoke different languages and worshiped with different rites, and the Franks treated them with suspicion and disdain. The feelings were mutual, and the proud Christians of Antioch, who traced their lineage to Saint Paul, felt less allegiance to the Crusaders than to the Arabs and Turks whom they had lived with, largely in peace, for the previous centuries. Though they served as useful intelligence agents for Bohemond and the other commanders, they did not trust the motives of the invaders.
Antioch finally succumbed after the Crusaders gained the aid of a Turkish general disenchanted with the local faction. Bohemond then allowed his soldiers, who had suffered through long months, to ravage the once-great city. And as in other cities on the road to Jerusalem, the Crusaders did not stop to ask whether the home they looted was owned by Christians, or whether the women they raped could recite the Nicene Creed or the opening verse of the Quran.
8
After several days of indiscriminate pillaging, the princes reined in their army. The treatment meted out to Antioch seemed extreme at that time, but it was hardly out of the norm for Frankish and German warfare, nor did it compare to what was in store for Jerusalem. The duplicity of Bohemond shocked both the Muslims and the Byzantines but would not have raised eyebrows in Europe. He did not honor his commitment to Alexius to return Antioch to Byzantine control and instead set himself up as its king. That alienated not only the emperor but Bohe-mond’s fellow knights as well. One of them, Baldwin, veered east with his army in a fit of jealousy and took the city of Edessa. The remaining forces, now significantly depleted, continued south.
The siege and capture of Antioch roused the Seljuk princes, as well as the Fatimid caliph in Cairo, to take serious notice. One twelfth-century Muslim chronicler later described the Christian victory at Antioch as the culmination of years of aggression against Islam that had begun with the fall of Toledo in Spain to the Christians in 1071, and then continued with the Norman invasion of Sicily, led by kinsmen of Baldwin of Edessa. The pattern, at least to one Muslim historian, was clear: Christians had
been waging an international battle to turn back Muslim advances, and the assaults on Antioch, Edessa, and Syria were only the latest in a series.
9
But even after Antioch, not all Arab and Turkish elites of the Near East took the Crusaders seriously. That would change forever when Jerusalem fell in 1099. Compared to the eight-month siege of Antioch, Jerusalem was taken easily, in less than two months. But while the Crusaders had camped under the walls of Antioch mostly during winter and spring, the contest for Jerusalem was waged during the scorching heat of summer. After more than three years of nearly continuous warfare in unfamiliar territory, the Crusaders were exhausted and anxious for the end of their mission. Perhaps that explains what happened when the walls were finally breached.
As it had been for centuries, Jerusalem was then inhabited by a mix of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. The Jewish quarter had existed since before the time of Christ, and the major Christian sects each had a sliver of the city and some responsibility for maintaining the holy stations along the Via Dolorosa. But the city’s defenses were under the control of the Fatimid governor, and he viewed the local Christian and Jewish population as a potential fifth column. He made a Solomonic decision; the Christians he ordered out of the city, and the Jews he allowed to stay. Most Christians left, with the exception of the guardians of the Holy Sepulchre, which was still not fully reconstructed since Hakim’s desecrations.
The siege was straightforward, and in mid-July 1099, the soldiers of Godfrey of Bouillon, by dint of formidable towers, heavy battering rams, and brute force, breached the walls. Some of the city’s Christians aided the attackers, as the Fatimid governor had feared. They probably hoped that the victorious armies would reward them for their aid. Had they known what would actually happen, they would have fought to the last man to keep the Crusaders from occupying the city.
The Muslim accounts of the fall of Jerusalem described the usual outrages, but what sets Jerusalem apart in the annals of cold-blooded conquest is that the Christian chroniclers were equally shocked at what happened. The Crusaders had journeyed for an elusive goal, and once they had achieved it, their rage exploded. Whatever the reason, the city wasn’t just sacked; it was desecrated and its inhabitants were massacred.
In spite of the paltry efforts of Godfrey and the other Christian general, Tancred, to exercise restraint, their soldiers swept through the city and killed every single soul they found. The massacre was not limited to Arab and Turkish Muslims. The Jews of the city took refuge in their synagogues only to be locked inside and burned alive. Eastern Orthodox monks tried to keep the shrine of the Holy Sepulchre from being looted by soldiers more interested in booty than in blessings, but they were cut down where they stood. There were stories of infants dashed against stones, of torture that lasted for days to amuse the troops, of beheadings, impalings, flayings, dismemberment, and corpses everywhere; and now and then, neat piles of heads surrounded, almost artistically, by pools of blood.
10
LIVE AND LET LIVE
THE SACK
of Jerusalem deeply disturbed the Muslim world. Muslims venerated the city, and the brutality of its conquest by the Christians was a wound that never quite healed. It’s not that the treatment meted out to the unfortunate inhabitants was extraordinary by the standards of the day. But the fact that it happened in Jerusalem, a city so revered, was unsettling, and not only to Muslims. The proverbial morning after, even the Crusaders were shamed by what had transpired, judging from the Christian accounts of the city’s capture. The massacre of Muslims who had taken refuge in Al-Aqsa Mosque may have been marginally acceptable, but the slaying of Eastern Rite Christians in the sanctuary of the Holy Sepulchre was not.
In time, the fall of Jerusalem became a rallying cry for the Muslims of the Near East, but in the immediate aftermath, the outrage was not met by action. Poets wrote laments about what had occurred, and some called for a campaign to repulse the Christian invasion. These had no effect. The Turkish emirs of Damascus and Aleppo were too weak, too antagonistic to the Fatimids, too suspicious of the rulers of Mosul and Iraq, and too competitive with each other to form an alliance capable of challenging the Franks. Calls for Muslim unity in the face of a foreign incursion were not persuasive enough to overcome the political, cultural, and theological divisions between the various factions that controlled
the Near East. “The sultans did not agree among themselves,” wrote the Arab historian Ibn al-Athir, “and it was for this reason that the Franks were able to seize control of the country.”
11
It is tempting to identify the Crusades as dramatic chapters in the war between Islam and the West, especially given the way Jerusalem fell in 1099. And that temptation is bolstered by some of what took place after the First Crusade. As the twelfth century progressed, it became common to view the Crusades as one prong of an international campaign conducted by Western Christians against Muslims. Both Christian and Muslim scholars of the Crusades, beginning centuries ago and resuming in the nineteenth century, lumped the various battles, waged by very different factions thousands of miles apart, under the banner of religious war. Polemicists at the time, again both Muslim and Christian, also had good reason to create this framework.
Yet the fact remains that
at the time
, holy war did not hold enough appeal to the rulers or to the people of the Near East to function as an effective rallying cry. The later tendency in both the West and the Muslim world to focus on the Crusades as war between religions makes it seem as if religion were the only factor, but in truth, it was only one factor, whose importance waxed and waned unpredictably. Put simply: if wars between religions had been of such overriding importance, then Christians throughout Europe would have rushed to fight side by side with their Byzantine brothers, and Muslims would have overcome their divisions and joined hands to fight a common adversary. That did not happen.
Instead, the First Crusade was led mostly by Frankish knights, and then the Franks—rather than fighting a perpetual war against Muslims—became part of the political fabric of the Near East. The victory in 1099 led to a dramatic increase in the number of pilgrims to Jerusalem, as well as a mini migration of settlers. Though exact numbers are impossible to come by, it seems that tens of thousands of people from Western and Central Europe immigrated to the new kingdoms of Jerusalem and Edessa. Some of these were petty nobility looking for a new start; others were artisans, soldiers, or peasants brought by their lords or drawn by a new frontier. Still others were merchants from Genoa, Pisa, Venice, or Amalfi who settled in the coastal ports such as Acre, Tyre, and Jaffa. The Italians, with their superior ships and vibrant
commercial networks in the Mediterranean, took control of what they hoped would be lucrative trade routes stretching into Central Asia, India, and beyond.
Popular histories of the Crusades in both the West and the Muslim world focus exclusively on the conflict. Even the contemporary chroniclers, writing in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, rarely devoted attention to daily life. There was little drama in that, and no heroism. The relentless focus on war has been a problem of history writing in general, and not confined to the subject of Muslims and Christians in the Near East. Until the second half of the twentieth century, few who wrote history—whether they were Muslim, Christian, Jew, or Hindu—wasted time on farming, trade, immigration, domestic life, and the humdrum aspects of getting through the day. History writing has thus exaggerated the frequency and centrality of war, revolution, mayhem, and changes in government. The consequence for the Crusades is that we remember the fighting, but not the peace. For two centuries, however, Western Europeans lived in the Near East, and while a year rarely passed without some skirmish against some adversary, there were long periods of quiet.
Recent historians have made concerted efforts to fill in the blanks of daily life in Europe at the time, but far less effort has gone into painting a complete picture of Near Eastern societies under the Franks. Since the middle of the twentieth century, and with very few original threads, scholars of medieval societies have expertly pieced together a tapestry of the so-called Dark Ages. Yet that skill has barely been employed to flesh out the contours of everyday life in the Crusader states.
As a result, for most of the past nine hundred years, histories of the Crusades—both in the West and in the Muslim world—have told a simple narrative of religious clash, begun by the papacy, fought by the knights of Europe, and then continued at the end of the twelfth century with equal fervor by the Muslims of the Near East and their savior, Sal-adin. That story has become part of the collective memory of both Westerners and Muslims. In the West, within a few years of the creation of the kingdom of Jerusalem, it was already being told in Europe, especially by those who used the First Crusade to create a more centralized church and more powerful states in Europe. Then the story made its way into ballads and epic poems, meant to inspire and entertain. Over the
centuries, long after the last of the Franks had been evicted from the Near East, the memory seeped into popular culture through novels, plays, and eventually, in the twentieth century, movies.
In the English-speaking world, the nineteenth-century novels of Sir Walter Scott did more than anything to establish the popular image of the Crusades. Borrowing liberally from Edward Gibbon, Scott celebrated Saladin and Richard the Lionheart as icons of the contest between Islam and Christianity, and his books were later taken by Hollywood as the source material for films. In novels such as
The Talisman
and
Ivanhoe
, Scott portrayed Saladin as an aristocratic adversary, a Muslim warrior who respected the code of honor held so dear by Christian noblemen and knights. But Saladin was the exception to the rule that portrayed “Saracens” as heretical brutes.