The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco Da Gama (5 page)

Al-Andalus reached the peak of its power in the tenth century, when its ruler discovered he had become too grand to stomach his status as a mere
emir
, or governor, and proclaimed himself the true caliph, the heir to the legitimate line of succession from Muhammad and the leader of all Muslims. To match his new magnificence Abd al-Rahman III built himself a sprawling palatine city outside Córdoba. Teeming with treasures, with doors carved from ivory and ebony that opened onto moated gardens complete with exotic menageries, gaudy sculptures fashioned from amber and pearls, and gargantuan fish ponds whose inhabitants were fed twelve thousand freshly baked loaves a day, it was a blazing statement of dynastic intent. The long line of ambassadors who tripped over themselves to offer fitting gifts to the new caliph were received in a hall of translucent marble, with at its center, beneath a giant pendant pearl, a pool filled with mercury that dazzled them when it was stirred at the operative moment.

Yet after three centuries, the Islamic powerhouse on mainland Europe crumbled to nothing in a historical flick of the fingers. Like every nation that succumbs to a superiority complex, it had grown too complacent to heed the danger signs. The fairy tale that climaxed with its haughty caliphs sequestered in their palace of marvels came to a fitting end at the hands of an evil courtier named Abu Amir al-Mansur—“the Victorious”—who was indeed so victorious that he won fifty-two out of his fifty-two battles. Most were fought with unprecedented fanaticism against the descendants of the Goths who had clung on in the northern fastnesses of Spain, and al-Mansur’s notoriety earned him the Westernized name of Almanzor. Almanzor locked up the boy caliph who was on the throne, built himself a rival palatine city on the opposite side of Córdoba, turned al-Andalus into a police state, and outraged his urbane subjects by roping rough Berbers and even Christian mercenaries into his military campaigns. On his death in 1002, Muslim
Spain imploded into civil war; a few years later, resentful Berber troops tore down the showpiece home of the caliphs, just seventy years after it had risen to astonish the world.

Al-Andalus fragmented into a patchwork of competing city-states, and the Christian kings across the border finally saw their chance.

The Christian revival in Spain was a long, squabbling business, and the endless churn of its miniature kingdoms is a mind-numbing affair. By long-standing tribal tradition, its rulers left their territories to be divided among their children, and their children duly launched themselves into orgies of fratricide. As the ripples of war eddied back and forth, the rival monarchs made alliances of convenience with Muslim raiders as often as with their religious brethren. Yet gradually they moved south into the weakened city-states, and suddenly a spectacular upset of history was within their grasp.

Around the turn of the millennium, western Europe had finally begun to throw off its bloodstained blanket of darkness. The Vikings had started to settle down and convert to Christianity. France had begun to emerge from the western parts of Charlemagne’s old empire, while the Holy Roman Empire, the forerunner of Germany, soldiered on in its eastern lands. The Roman Church had recovered from an ignominious low point, and once again it had begun to dream of increasing its flock. It saw its chance in Spain.

In 1064 the papacy gave its backing to war against the Muslims of al-Andalus—the first Christian war overtly fought against an enemy that was defined by its faith. From then on the Spanish marched—protected, if never exactly united—under the papal banner. They went into battle armed with an ironclad guarantee from Christ’s representative on earth: mass indulgences for those who died, which absolved them of doing penance for their sins and guaranteed immediate admittance to heaven.

The struggle soon developed a name—the Reconquest—that swept aside the inconvenient fact that most of the peninsula had been Muslim territory for longer than it had been Christian. A
haphazard flurry of battles fought for personal glory and territorial expansion was transformed into a war of religious liberation, and it boasted its own patron saint in the form of the Apostle James. St. James—
Santiag
o in Spanish—had been beheaded in Jerusalem a few years after Jesus’s death, but a hermit guided by a star had miraculously unearthed his bones in a Spanish field. In his unlikely new afterlife, Jesus’s companion was transformed into
Santiago Matamoros
—“St. James the Moor-slayer”—with
Moro
, from the Roman name for the Berbers, being the catchall term that Iberia’s Christians applied to Muslims, Berber and Arab alike. The Moor-slayer lent his name to the Order of Santiago, one of many military brotherhoods that sprang up to wage war on Islam, and the order adopted a stirring motto: “May the sword be red with Arab blood.” From then on the Apostle regularly showed up in the heat of battle, dressed in shining armor and riding a white horse, urging on his followers to stick it to the Infidel.

Even now, not all of Spain’s Christians were so sure where their loyalties lay. This was the time of El Cid, who earned a glowing reputation as a Spanish hero despite being a soldier for hire by Muslims and Christians alike. In 1085 El Cid’s sometimes master, the wily and ambitious Alfonso the Brave of Castile and Leon, inveigled his way into control of the old fortress city of Toledo, and Christian Toledo took over from ruined Córdoba as Europe’s capital of culture. Inside a synagogue designed by Muslim architects, its Christians, Muslims, and Jews celebrated their rites alongside each other. In its School of Translators, Muslims and Jews collaborated to translate medical, scientific, and philosophical texts from Arabic to Latin. Travelers crisscrossed the Pyrenees, introduced Islamic culture and learning to the rest of Europe, and transformed its intellectual life along with its decorative styles, recipes, fashions, and songs. In the twilight of convivencia, the Spanish had become the masters of modernity.

Toledo was one last bright flare of what could have been, one final, chaotic explosion of creativity. As Christian armies pushed
on farther south, Iberia’s remaining Muslim rulers began to fear their days were numbered. When Alfonso the Brave’s enthusiasm carried him a step too far and he prematurely proclaimed himself emperor of all Spain, al-Andalus finally resorted to calling in help from abroad.

It was a fateful mistake.

The Almoravids were a ferocious Muslim sect from the Sahara Desert that had sprung up around a hard-line missionary who insisted on strict discipline and regular bouts of scourging. They had already expanded south to sub-Saharan Africa and north to Morocco, and they were only too ready to hop across the Strait of Gibraltar to Spain. As soon as they arrived, they decided their coreligionists were a bunch of addled sensualists and went home to arm themselves with a
fatwa
, or legal opinion, confirming their right to depose them. When they returned, the proud Arabs of al-Andalus took a deep breath and caved in. The new caliphate duly reunited the squabbling city-states and beat back the Christians until it, too, grew lax and was chased out of power by the Almohads, yet another all-conquering Berber dynasty that poured over from Ceuta.

The Almohads were even more fanatical fundamentalists than the Almoravids, and they set out to transform al-Andalus into a jihadist state.

Long ago, as Islam had expanded far beyond Arabia, its scholars had divided the world into the
dar al-Islam
, the House of Islam, and the
dar al-Harb
, or the House of War. According to that doctrine, the first was duty-bound to press on the second until it withered to nothing. Armed jihad—
jihad
itself merely means “struggle,” and often refers to an inner striving for grace—was the divinely sanctioned instrument of expansion. As the House of Islam fractured and Muslims fought Muslims, the strong arm of holy war had itself withered away. Yet the Almohads tolerated no such frailty, and besides imposing severe strictures on their fellow Muslims, they declared an everlasting jihad against Spain’s Christians and Jews. In the Almohads’ uprooted and fiercely pruned faith, Christians were
no better than pagans: as worshippers of a divine trinity rather than the one true God, they no longer deserved the status of protected people. The dhimmi who still lived in al-Andalus were given an ultimatum: die or convert. Rather than choose, many fled.

Western Christendom had undergone a similar transformation. Christianity had begun as a humble movement of Jewish sectaries, but when it was adopted as the official religion of the Roman Empire, it had soon made peace with war. Rome’s legions had marched into battle under the cross, and so had successive waves of barbarians, many of whom had themselves been converted to Catholicism at the point of a sword. St. Augustine, the first Christian thinker to frame the concept of a just war, had condemned battles fought for power or wealth as no better than grand larceny, but he acknowledged that violence had to be met with violence in order to keep the peace. The journey from Augustine had wound through marauding barbarians and Vikings, through grand papal dreams and a Europe overshadowed by military camps, until fighting for Christianity was seen as a noble struggle against the Antichrist. To Catholic theologians, as they finally began to unravel the mysteries of Islam, any accommodation between the two faiths made no more doctrinal than practical sense: while Muslims at least acknowledged Christians, however misguided, as their precursors in faith, to Christians the newer religion, intolerably, told them they had got it all wrong.

For all their differences, it was their similarities that most divided the two faiths. Unlike any other major religion, both claimed exclusive possession of God’s final revelation. Unlike most, both were missionary faiths that strove to take their message to nonbelievers, whom they labeled infidels. As universal religions and geographical neighbors, they were natural competitors. In the West, those rivalries had been held in check by a handful of enlightened rulers, by the unwieldy extent of the Islamic empire, and by Europe’s bloody introspection. But the final glimmer of tolerance was fast fading, the Islamic world had begun to splinter into sharper shards, and Europe was finally on the move.

The pope called the warriors of Western Christendom to arms. Tens of thousands of Christian soldiers marched south across Spain, their shoulders squared with a vengeful zeal to drive Islam from Europe.

At the western edge of the world, holy war had been unleashed at the same time on both sides of an increasingly unbreachable divide. It was no coincidence that the descendants of Iberia’s freedom fighters would race across the oceans to conquer far-flung lands in the name of Christ. Fighting Islam was in their blood: it was the very founding mission of their nations.

As the battle for the West neared its climax, an energized Europe turned its sights eastward. The counterstrike against Islam that had begun in Spain was headed to Jerusalem itself, and now it came with a name that would haunt the coming centuries: Crusade.

CHAPTER 2

THE HOLY LAND

I
N THE SCORCHING
summer heat of 1099, thousands of sunbaked Christian soldiers marched across Europe, crossed into Asia, and converged on Jerusalem. Weeping with joy, singing prayers, and seeing visions in the sky, they crouched beneath a firestorm of Muslim missiles and wheeled their wooden siege engines up to the holy city’s towering white walls. When they overtopped the battlements, they sliced their way through the time-scarred streets until the stones themselves seemed to bleed. Fresh from the slaughter, staggering under the weight of their spoils, they flocked to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and prayed at the tomb of Christ. Four hundred sixty-one years after it had become Muslim, Jerusalem was Christian again.

The outpouring of European zeal that launched the First Crusade had begun four years earlier, far away in the mountainous forests of central France. There, on a cold November day, 13 archbishops, 90 abbots, 225 bishops, and a clanking train of nobles and knights had gathered to listen to an important announcement by the pope. The church was too cramped for everyone to fit in, and the assembly moved to a nearby field to hear the ringing call to arms that was to unloose centuries of holy war on the East.

Pope Urban II, by birth Odo of Châtillon, was the scion of a knightly family from Champagne. His grand scheme was inspired by the Iberian Reconquest, but he had been spurred to action by an urgent request from Constantinople.

Six centuries after the fall of Rome, Constantinople still regarded
western Europe as imperial land under temporary occupation by barbarians, and it bluntly refused to acknowledge the pope as the supreme leader of Christendom. Just four decades earlier, the pope’s legates had stalked under the dizzying heaped domes of the Hagia Sophia, Constantinople’s great cathedral, and had excommunicated the patriarch on the spot, a fit of pique that sundered the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches for good. To ask Rome for help was a galling prospect, but Constantinople had little choice.