Peace Be Upon You (19 page)

Though there are few surviving accounts of relations between Westerners and Muslims, one Muslim aristocrat did leave a vivid memoir of his life and times. Usama ibn Munqidh grew up in the city of Shayzar in northern Syria. He was, in the words of his translator and master scholar Philip Hitti, “a warrior, a hunter, a gentleman, a poet, and a man of letters. His life was the epitome of Arab civilization as it flourished during the early crusading period.” As a young man, Usama received the typical education of a genteel urban aristocrat and learned classical poetry, grammar, calligraphy, and of course, the Quran. As an adult, he dabbled in rhetoric, philosophy, mysticism, and the arts of war, but to the end, he had a fatalistic view that God determined all moments of all lives and that all anyone could do is live out his allotted days. Toward the end of his life, after the entire region had been unified under the rule of Saladin the Kurd, Usama sat down and recorded his memories.

Usama delighted in the human condition and loved the absurdity of human existence. He recorded the story of a man named Ali Abd ibn abi al-Rayda who had made a name for himself as a soldier and a marauder raiding caravans. He served a local Muslim prince who was killed, and then was hired by a Frankish noble. With his knowledge of the region and his experience intercepting Muslim caravans, Ali helped his new Christian master become rich at the expense of local Muslim traders. Not only did that not please his former companions, it also deeply offended his wife. One night, she hid her brother in her home, and when her husband
returned, they attacked and killed him. She claimed that she was “angered on behalf of the Muslims because of what this infidel perpetrated against them.” But she also took all of her murdered husband’s belongings and relocated to the city of Shayzar, where Usama lived. He reported that she was treated with great respect by the neighbors. In another story, Usama told of a Frankish maid taken captive during a battle who caught the eye of the local Muslim emir. She bore him a son, who became the prince when his father died. Rather than living in luxury as the esteemed mother, however, she left the castle and married a Frankish shoemaker.

Usama was fascinated with the Franks. Much like the Byzantines, he was alternately bemused and appalled by how crude they could be. “Mysterious are the works of the Creator, the author of all things,” he wrote. “When one comes to recount cases regarding the Franks, he cannot but glorify Allah and sanctify him, for he sees them as animals possessing the virtues of courage and fighting but nothing else; just as animals have only virtues of courage and fighting.” Usama was particularly amazed at Frankish medical practices, which were so rudimentary that they tended to kill the patient. He wrote of an Eastern Christian physician who healed a Frankish knight with an abscess on his leg and saved a woman suffering from a mysterious affliction. The physician applied a poultice to the leg that absorbed the infection, and he altered the woman’s diet until she showed signs of renewed health. The Franks, however, did not trust the remedies and sent their own physician, who scoffed at the treatments. The Frankish physician, refusing to believe that the knight’s leg was getting better, said to him, “Which wouldst thou prefer, living with one leg or dying with two?” Faced with this choice, the knight said he’d rather have one leg than no life. So the physician called for an ax and had a few strong men hold the knight down while another chopped off his leg. The blow wasn’t accurate. It cut the patient’s bone and artery, and he promptly bled to death. As for the woman, the Frankish physician took one look at her and declared that she was possessed by the devil. He had her head shaved, fed her nothing but garlic and mustard, watched as she became weaker, carved a crucifix in her skull, peeled off the skin, rubbed the exposed bone with salt, exorcised the demon, and killed the patient.

To be fair, Usama also described instances when Frankish medicine succeeded in healing patients with treatments unknown in Syria at the
time, such as a concoction of ashes, vinegar, burnt lead, and clarified butter applied as a balm for a neck wound. But on the whole, he was both appalled and amused by the raw ignorance of the Franks.

Their sexual mores also astonished him. Usama was hardly the first or last person titillated by lurid tales. He recalled the time he was staying at an inn that served both Muslim and Christian travelers, and the innkeeper told him that a Christian man had come back to his room only to find another man sleeping with his wife. Naturally, he was a bit perturbed and woke the fellow up. “What are you doing here with my wife?” he asked the man. “Well, I was tired,” the man replied. The wife was already in the bed, and it would, he told the irate husband, have been rude to wake her.

Usama also recounts a story told to him by the Muslim owner of a public bathhouse. One day, the owner went to the bath accompanied by a Frankish noble, and he was surprised at how immodest the Franks could be. He put a towel on before entering the bath, but found that the Franks didn’t cover themselves. One of them came up to him and yanked off his towel, which promptly revealed another cultural difference. The owner, like most cultured gentlemen of the Near East, kept his hair trim
—everywhere!
The Frank looked and demanded that the Muslim trim him accordingly. The Frank liked the outcome so much that he called for his wife to be brought. He told her to lie on her back and then asked the owner to do the same for her and offered to pay for it!

The only editorial comment Usama made in telling the story was that the Franks seemed immune from both jealousy and modesty. The fact that the bathhouse owner had shaved the pubic hair of both a Frankish knight and his wife in public was apparently unremarkable to Usama. The only oddity from Usama’s perspective was that the knight had asked. Presumably, the fact that the owner obliged was simply good manners.

Usama was also struck by the rough justice of the Franks. Muslim jurisprudence was well advanced by the twelfth century. Judges could call on centuries of legal precedent as well as volume upon volume of law books in order to apply the principles of the Quran to the case at hand. There was no equivalent among the Franks, who had forgotten most of the Roman legal system and long since abandoned the careful deliberations that had characterized Roman law at its best. In one episode relayed by Usama, a local Frankish blacksmith was accused of aiding several
thieves, and he in turn challenged his accuser to a duel. Rather than trying the case in a court, the local lord agreed, and the blacksmith and the accuser then beat each other to a pulp. The blacksmith won, dragged the corpse away, and then hanged it in an act of ritual humiliation. Usama also described an “ordeal by water” trial. The accused was bound and then dropped in a cask of water. If he sank, he would be presumed innocent, but if he floated, he would be declared guilty. Given that human bodies do not tend to sink immediately, he bobbed a bit, and as a result he was found guilty and punished by having red-hot rods inserted in his eyes.
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Usama was a Muslim aristocrat who served the emir of Aleppo and Damascus and frequently fought against Frankish armies. But he also had warm relations with Christian knights. On several occasions, he went to Jerusalem to pray in Al-Aqsa Mosque and then shared a meal with the Templars who occupied the grounds. He referred to the Templars as “my friends,” and seems to have spent considerable time in their company. He may have been alternately amused and repelled by the Franks, but his world was not so different. It too was punctuated by routine acts of violence, and by casual attitudes toward life, death, and slavery. In his memoirs, people live, people die, they kill and they get killed, and little of it shocks him.

Today’s notions of religious conflict would have made no sense to Usama. Unlike Osama bin Laden, Usama ibn Munqidh did not see religious identity as all-encompassing. His faith was vital, and Allah’s will was paramount. The Franks were infidels—and risked damnation—but so were the Shi’ites and the Fatimids. One month, he might be at war with them; the next, he might be the guest of the Templars at Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Though he was an unusually astute observer of human nature, Usama was also a man of his times. The way he related to his Christian and Frankish neighbors was typical for a person of his class and occupation. Traders and soldiers traveled frequently and freely throughout Syria and Palestine, in spite of dangerous roads and shifting political landscapes. Alliances were fleeting and made and broken promiscuously. When it was convenient, Franks signed peace treaties with the Seljuks or the Fatimids, and when it was advantageous they fought alongside Muslims against mutual enemies. Frankish nobles were as prone to wars with other Franks as they were to waging campaigns against Muslims. Just as
Spain had seen shifting coalitions depending on who was fighting whom, Frankish soldiers fought alongside Turks one year and against them the next. Sometimes religion was the fault line; often it was not.

Until the middle of the twelfth century, the Crusader states had the upper hand in the Near East. Then the tide shifted. Several talented Turkish emirs unified Syria and eventually Egypt. While their motive was to build powerful dynasties, they used the rhetoric of holy war, and when possible, they defined the politics of the Near East in terms of Muslims versus Franks. Whether or not they believed their rhetoric, in what was otherwise a divided region, it united Arabs and Turks, Syrians, Egyptians, and above all, Kurds and transformed them into a potent force capable of expelling the Crusaders from the Near East. The first to urge all Muslims to fight the Franks was a Turkish emir named Zengi, but the most famous was a Kurdish prince, born in the town of Tikrit along the Tigris, named Yusuf, son of Ayyub, later known by his surname, Honor of the Faith, Salah ad-Din.

T
HE SOLDIERS APPEARED
on the outskirts of Jerusalem in late September, just before the autumn solstice in 1187. It had been nearly a century since the Franks had occupied the city, and no Muslim army had come close to retaking it. After the massacre of its former inhabitants in 1099, the kingdom of Jerusalem entered a long period of calm and prosperity. Pilgrims from Europe came and went freely, and the king enjoyed the tribute of towns and estates up and down the coast of Palestine.

Over the decades, however, the Franks failed to extend their initial victories. By the fall of 1187, though the rulers in Jerusalem were aware of the looming threat, they were still ill prepared when it finally arrived at their walls. The military backbone of the kingdom had been shattered just months before, when Saladin, the sultan of Egypt and lord of Damascus and Aleppo, decimated the armies of the Templars and the Franks at the battle of Hattin. The king of Jerusalem was captured and held hostage, and the administration of the city was left to the queen, Sibylla, and the patriarch. Word of Saladin’s advance on Jerusalem, after an attack on Ascalon, preceded his arrival, but the queen could do little but watch as the city came under siege.

For his part, Saladin was overcome with the magnitude of what he was about to accomplish. He had, over the prior fifteen years, changed the political landscape of the Near East and created a new dynasty that united Egypt and Syria for the first time in centuries. During years of tactical battles against both Christians and Muslims, he had one goal in mind: the expulsion of the Franks and the creation of a new empire with
himself as sultan in the service of God. Now, with his armies arrayed and prepared to capture Jerusalem, he remembered why he was there in the first place.

Just weeks before, outside of Ascalon, a delegation of Jerusalem merchants had approached him with an offer of peace. Their proposal was that Jerusalem proper would remain independent and intact, but Saladin would become master of its environs. Saladin, whose reputation for fairness was even then legend, took their suggestion seriously. He knew what had happened the last time the city had changed hands, when it had been emptied and its holy places turned into scenes of carnage, and he wanted no replay. “I believe,” he told the delegation, “that Jerusalem is the House of God, as you also believe, and I will not willingly lay siege to the House of God or put it to assault.” He said that in exchange for the surrender, he would permit the Christians to retain their possessions and some of the land. It was as good an offer as they could have hoped for, yet they refused.

At any other point during the previous century, that would have spelled the end of the city and its inhabitants. But Saladin was of a different mold. Determined to honor Jerusalem, he forced Balian, a nobleman charged with the hopeless task of defending the city, to come to terms. After the Muslims breached the walls, Balian, on the urging of the patriarch, went under the flag of truce to Saladin’s tent. The only weapons he had left were words, and he warned Saladin that the knights of Jerusalem, and the Templars and the Hospitallers above all, were prepared to die as martyrs defending the city. They might lose in the end, he said, but they would make it costly. Saladin dismissed the warning as the bluff of a defeated man, and he reminded Balian what had happened when the Christians had taken the city decades before. Did Balian want to be responsible for an even greater slaughter? It was not an idle threat. Saladin had a reputation for tolerance, but he had also shown flashes of rage and ruthlessness. Like any successful ruler of that time and place, he was capable of violence. Faced with the reality of defeat, the Franks surrendered.