The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco Da Gama (61 page)

27
a synagogue designed by Muslim architects:
The synagogue was eventually stormed by a Christian mob and was turned into the church of Santa Maria la Blanca. The eddy of competing city-states and commingling cultures unleashed by the breakup of al-Andalus has been likened to the Italian Renaissance; see María Rosa Menocal,
The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain
(Boston: Little, Brown, 2002), 40–41, 144.

27
fashions, and songs:
Among the most culturally influential figures of al-Andalus was a singer from Baghdad named Ziryab, who became Islamic Spain’s arbiter of fashion and manners and brought his repertoire of ten thousand songs of love, loss, and longing to the West. When the Arabic songs crossed the Pyrenees, not least in the mouths of captured
qiyan
or singing girls, they came to the ears of French troubadours, heavily influenced European music and literature, and may have inspired the concept of courtly love. Fletcher,
Moorish Spain
, 43–45; Menocal,
Ornament of the World
, 123.

28
help from abroad:
The invitation to the Almoravids was extended by Muhammad ibn Abbad al-Mutamid, the emir of Seville, who famously remarked after Toledo fell to Alfonso the Brave that he “would rather be a camel-driver in Africa than a swineherd in Castile.” Fletcher,
Moorish Spain
, 111.

28
The Almohads:
The new rulers did not entirely eradicate al-Andalus’s ingrained habits of learning. Ibn Rushd, known in the West as Averroës, was the chief judge of Seville before the Almohads sent him to their Moroccan capital Marrakech as a royal physician. His commentaries on Aristotle, which insisted that science was superior
to religion since God had created a logical universe that could be divined by the application of reason, were translated in Toledo and spurred the development of Scholasticism, the dominant philosophical and theological movement of medieval Europe. Averroës’s rationalist beliefs found an unlikely supporter in the Almohad caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf and were enshrined in the Almohad Creed of 1183, but as religious intolerance mounted, the philosopher was sent into exile and his books were burned. Averroës’s contemporary Musa ibn Maymun, known in the West as Maimonides, represents the end of convivencia. The scion of a long line of Arabized Córdoban Jews, he escaped the Almohads’ persecutions by moving to Egypt, where he became another royal physician, only to fall foul of more pogroms against Jews. He turned his back on his past, repudiated (in Arabic) Jews’ cooperation with Muslims as a disaster, and predicted the eclipse of Islam. Yet his schooling in al-Andalus prepared him to write the most influential of all the Arabic works that tried to reconcile Aristotelian logic with religion, the
Guide for the Perplexed
, as well as medical textbooks that were still heavily used in the Renaissance. The intellectual impact of Muslim Iberia was felt in Europe long after its eclipse.

29
mysteries of Islam:
The first Latin translation of the Quran was made in 1143.

30
marched south across Spain:
The pivotal Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa was fought in 1212 across a plain in the eastern foothills of the Sierra Morena, the mountain range that separates Andalusia from La Mancha. According to several contemporary reports, the entire Spanish army became trapped on a plateau and was only saved from catastrophe when a shepherd showed them a sheep run that led down to the Muslim camp. In the usual manner, the shepherd was later revealed to have been none other than a long-dead saint in disguise.

Chapter 2: The Holy Land

31
Pope Urban II:
Ironically, the pope who inspired vast armies to march east was barely able to enter Rome; a rival pope installed by the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV, who had been embroiled
in an infamous struggle with Urban’s predecessor, Gregory VII, over which of the two wielded supreme power, was nestled there. For years Urban wandered Italy as an exile, dependent on charity and deeply in debt; on the few occasions he made it to Rome, he was forced to barricade himself on an island in the Tiber, hole up in a loyalist’s fortress, or helplessly anathematize his rival from outside the walls, while his supporters fought running battles with the so-called antipope’s troops. Urban’s position was still precarious in 1095, and the backbone of the Crusading army came from his homeland in northern France.

32
excommunicated the patriarch:
The patriarch returned the favor and excommunicated the legates. Despite doubts about the legality of the decrees, the long-strained ties between the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church had finally snapped and would never be restored.

32
ousted the Umayyad caliphs:
The Abbasids defeated the Umayyads in 750 and moved their capital to Baghdad in 762. Among the few survivors of the bloody banquet was a young prince named Abd al-Rahman, who evaded the bounty hunters all the way to Spain, where he reestablished the Umayyads as the ruling dynasty of al-Andalus.

33
an embassy from Constantinople:
The extravaganza is recounted by the eleventh-century historian al-Khatib al-Baghdadi; see Hugh Kennedy,
The Court of the Caliphs: The Rise and Fall of Islam’s Greatest Dynasty
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004), 153.

34
a Shia sect:
The sect is the Ismailis, who trace the legitimate line of successors to Muhammad through an imam named Ismail ibn Jafar. A Baghdadi missionary carried their teachings to Tunisia and in 909 roused the local population to overthrow their ruler in favor of a self-proclaimed descendant of the Prophet via Fatima, Ali, and Ismail. In 969 the Fatimids conquered Egypt, which had been ruled for twenty-two years by a eunuch and former slave named Abu al-Misk Kafur (Musky Camphor). One story holds that the new ruler, the caliph al-Muizz, answered religious scholars who doubted his lineage by drawing his sword and showering the floor with gold coins: “There is my lineage,” he retorted.

34
Persian power revived for a time:
The Samanid Empire lasted through most of the ninth and tenth centuries; Bukhara, its capital, rivaled Baghdad as a cultural center. Foremost among its luminaries was the philosopher and physician Ibn Sina, who was long revered in the West as Avicenna; his
al-Qanun
(“The Canon”), a vast encyclopedia of Greek and Arab medical knowledge, was a primary text in European and Asian medical schools well into the modern era.

34
smashed its armies:
At the Battle of Manzikert in 1071. To complete the humiliation the victorious sultan Alp Aslan killed the vanquished emperor Romanos IV Diogenes with kindness; he lavished gifts on him and sent him home, where his domestic enemies gouged out his eyes. As Constantinople distracted itself with new civil wars the Turks walked virtually unopposed into the vast Anatolian peninsula—Rome’s great province of Asia Minor, today the Asian lands of Turkey. In a trice, the empire was reduced to its capital and a vulnerable straggle of hinterland.

34
Scandalous rumors:
One especially incendiary letter was purportedly addressed to Count Robert of Flanders by the Byzantine emperor Alexius I Comnenus. As well as detailing the wholesale defilement of churches, it alleged that the Turks lined up to violate virgins while making their watching mothers sing obscene songs, and sodomized men of all ages, including clergymen, monks, and even bishops. The letter, which is written in a lurid tabloid style, may be apocryphal, or it may be a later forgery based on real material; either way, the accusations give a startling insight into the pitch to which enmity between Christians and Muslims had risen. Andrew Holt and James Muldoon, eds.,
Competing Voices from the Crusades
(Oxford: Greenwood, 2008), 9.

34
“have completely destroyed”:
Robert the Monk, quoted in Thomas F. Madden,
The New Concise History of the Crusades
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 8–9. A verbatim report of Urban II’s speech has not survived; Robert’s version was written twenty years after the event, and its catalog of Muslim depravities may have been intended to validate the First Crusade after the fact.

35
toward Jerusalem:
Robert the Monk reports Urban II’s focus on Jerusalem. In the account of Fulcher of Chartres, who was present at Clermont, the pope instead stresses the need to defend
Constantinople against the fast-advancing Turks. In his own letter to the Crusaders, written shortly after the council, Urban II talks about the outrages of the Muslims who had seized “the Holy City of Christ” but does not overtly call for its liberation. In all probability, though, that was his hope. Edward Peters,
The First Crusade: The Chronicle of Fulcher of Chartres and Other Source Materials
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), 30–31, 16.

35
one Egyptian ruler:
The Fatimid caliph Al-Hakim, who then controlled Jerusalem, launched a widespread program to destroy Christian churches in Egypt and Palestine. His more tolerant son and heir allowed Constantinople to bribe him into agreeing to the shrine’s reconstruction. The Fatimids lost Jerusalem to the Turks in 1073 but recaptured the city in 1098, the year before the Crusaders arrived.

35
“and does not cease”:
Robert the Monk, quoted in Peters,
First Crusade
, 4.

36
“Hence it is”:
Ibid., 3–4.

37
“marvelous works”:
Raymond of Aguilers, quoted in Thomas Asbridge,
The First Crusade: A New History
(London: Free Press, 2004), 316. The estimate of 100,000 dead was considerably in excess of Jerusalem’s population at the time, which likely numbered around 30,000.

37
“seizing infants”:
Albert of Aachen, in ibid., 317.

37
“gulped down”:
Fulcher of Chartres, in ibid., 318.

37
the al-Aqsa Mosque:
The name means “the farthest mosque.” A lofty stone building at the southern end of the Temple Mount, it was built well after Muhammad’s time but had become popularly identified as the earthly destination of the Prophet’s Night Journey. Since there were soon no Muslims left in Jerusalem to explain this, the Crusaders decided it must be the Jewish First Temple built by King Solomon. There were no Jews left, either, to point out that the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar had destroyed Solomon’s Temple some sixteen centuries before the Crusaders showed up. The first Crusader kings unsuspectingly used the mosque as their palace and then gave it to a new knightly fraternity known as the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ. After the Hebrew history they imagined lay buried beneath the Islamic floor at their Christian feet, the Poor Fellow-Soldiers became known as the Knights Templar.

37
a nearby rock:
The rock is located under the Dome of the Rock, the Muslim shrine built at the end of the seventh century in a wholly successful attempt to outdo the city’s rival religious structures. In Jewish belief, it is the Foundation Stone from which the earth was formed, the altar where Abraham offered to sacrifice his son, and the resting place of the Ark of the Covenant, though all three locations are heavily disputed. In 2000, Israel’s then opposition leader Ariel Sharon took a walk on the Temple Mount that provoked a six-year intifada; so the religious layers of Jerusalem continue to pile up.

37
up to their ankles, their knees, or their bridle reins in blood:
While Muslim writers exaggerated the number of the dead to outrage their coreligionists’ feelings, Christian writers exaggerated the number out of pride at performing God’s work. Fulcher of Chartres, who was in Jerusalem five months after the conquest, says that nearly 10,000 were killed in the “Temple of Solomon” alone; the Muslim historian Ali ibn al-Athir puts the figure at 70,000. None are to be taken literally; Raymond of Aguilers’s line about the blood rising to the horses’ bridles is straight out of the book of Revelation.

37
“in mounds as big as houses”:
The anonymous
Gesta Francorum
(“Deeds of the Franks”), quoted in Asbridge,
First Crusade
, 320.

37
one rapturous monk:
Robert the Monk. Some Christian fundamentalists now believe that Israel is that precursor state.

38
galloped in silent, tight formation:
For the impression the Templars made on the battlefield, see the anonymous pilgrim’s account known as the
Tractatus de locis et statu sanctae terrae
(“Tract on the places and state of the Holy Land”), quoted in Helen Nicholson,
The Knights Templar: A New History
(Stroud, UK: Sutton, 2001), 67–68.

38
The Templars and Hospitallers lived like monks:
The Templars were allowed no possessions and were sworn to chastity. A dauntingly detailed rulebook laid out their every move; even minor transgressions meant a year of whippings and eating off the ground. The rule eventually ran to 686 clauses. See Malcolm Barber,
The New Knighthood: A History of the Order of the Temple
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 182, 219–21.

38
a renegade sect of Shia fanatics:
The Assassins were a radical
band of Ismailis who were frustrated by the failure of the Egyptian Fatimids to impose Shiism on the ummah. The result of their campaign of terror was the discrediting of the whole Shia movement. “To shed the blood of a [Muslim] heretic,” wrote one Assassin acolyte, “is more meritorious than to kill seventy Greek infidels.” Quoted in Bernard Lewis,
The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967), 48.

39
another devastating defeat on Constantinople:
At the Battle of Myriocephalum. The Christians’ cause was not helped when, six years later, the emperor stood by while Orthodox mobs massacred thousands of Catholics who lived in Constantinople and dragged the severed head of the pope’s representative through the streets tied to the tail of a dog, an event that in part motivated the mayhem of the Fourth Crusade.