The Triumph of Christianity (26 page)

This terrible defeat long deterred Muslim leaders from mounting new attacks. The Muslim historian Ibn Zafir recorded “reproachfully”: “He [the Egyptian vizier] had given up hope of the Syrian coastline remaining in Muslim hands and he did not personally wage war against them after that.”
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This was fortunate for the crusaders, since following their victory over the Egyptians, nearly all of the forces of the First Crusade boarded ships and sailed home, leaving the Outremer to be protected by a small company of about three hundred knights and perhaps two thousand infantry.
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Eventually their ranks were substantially reinforced by two knightly religious orders in which “monastic discipline and martial skill were combined for the first time in the Christian world.”
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The Knights Hospitaller were founded initially to care for sick Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land. Eventually the order kept its “medical” name, but in about 1120 expanded its vows from chastity, poverty, and obedience to include the armed protection of Christians in Palestine. The Knights Templar originated as a military religious order in about 1119. Hospitallers wore black robes with a white cross on the left sleeve, while the Templars wore a white robe with a red cross on the mantel. The two orders hated one another quite intensely, but together they provided the Kingdom of Jerusalem with a reliable force of well-trained soldiers who built and garrisoned a chain of extremely well-sited castles along the frontiers of the kingdom.

Nevertheless, the existence of the kingdoms remained perilous, surrounded as they were by a vast and populous Muslim world. For many years, whenever the Muslim threat loomed especially large, new Crusades were mounted in Europe bringing fresh troops east in support of the crusader kingdoms—and then went home again. Eventually, Europeans lost their fervor to defend the “Holy Land” and Islamic forces began to eat away at the crusader areas. Still, that the Kingdom of Jerusalem lasted until 1291, when its last fortress at Acre fell to a huge Mameluke army, seems a remarkable achievement.

As already noted, not only the defenders, but most of the funds for all of this came from Europe.
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Both of the knightly orders established many religious houses in Europe from which they sent not only young recruits, but a constant, substantial flow of cash. Some of the funds were raised by the productive activities of the houses—each owned great estates including some towns and villages—but most of it was donated by wealthy Europeans. About seventy years after the conquest of Jerusalem, the trade routes from Asia shifted to pass through the kingdom’s ports. This seems to have enriched Genoa and Pisa (and perhaps Venice), since these cities controlled maritime trade on the Mediterranean, but it had little impact on the general economy of the kingdom and surely played no role in motivating crusaders.
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Thus the crusader states “remained dependent on Christendom for men and money, endured as long as Christendom retained enough interest to keep supplying them, and withered and collapsed when that interest was lost.”
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Since a colony is normally defined as a place that is politically directed and economically exploited by a homeland, the crusader states were not colonies
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—unless one places a high material value on spiritual profits.

Nevertheless, the crusaders made no attempt to impose Christianity on the Muslims. In fact, “Muslims who lived in crusader-won territories were generally allowed to retain their property and livelihood, and always their religion.”
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Consequently the crusader kingdoms always contained far more Muslim residents than Christians. In the thirteenth century some Franciscans initiated conversion efforts among Muslims, but these were based on peaceful persuasion, were quite unsuccessful, and soon abandoned.
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In fact, the church generally opposed any linkage between crusading and conversion until the issue arose during the “Crusades” against Christian heretics in Europe (chapter 17).
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Crusader “War Crimes”

I
N THE LAST PARAGRAPH
of his immensely influential three-volume work on the Crusades, Sir Steven Runciman regretted this “tragic and destructive episode.” The “high ideals” of the crusaders “were besmirched by cruelty and greed... by a blind and narrow self-righteousness.”
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In the wake of Runciman’s huge work, many more historians adopted the tradition that the Crusades pitted a barbarian West against a more sophisticated and more civilized East. Thus, the emphasis has been given to evidence that the crusaders were brutal, bloodthirsty, religious zealots.

It is the massacre subsequent to the fall of Jerusalem that is taken as certain proof that the crusaders were brutal even for their era and especially so in comparison with their Muslim opponents. Following a short siege the Christian knights took the city by storm and this is said to have been followed by an incredibly bloody massacre of the entire population. Unfortunately, these claims were written by Christian chroniclers “eager to portray a ritual purification of the city.”
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Did it really happen? The chroniclers’ accounts seem farfetched—streets don’t run knee-deep in blood—but it seems likely that a major massacre did occur. However, it is important to realize that according to the norms of warfare at that time, a massacre of the population of Jerusalem would have been seen as justified because the city had refused to surrender and had to be taken by storm, thus inflicting many casualties on the attacking forces. Had Jerusalem surrendered as crusaders gathered to assault the walls, it is very likely that no massacre would have occurred. But, mistakenly believing in their own military superiority, the Muslims held out. In such cases commanders (Muslims as well as Christians) believed they had an obligation to release their troops to murder, loot, and burn as an example to other cities that might be tempted to hold out excessively long in the future. Thus, Muslim victories in similar circumstances resulted in wholesale slaughters too.

The remarkable bias of so many Western histories of the Crusades could not be more obvious than in the fact that massacres by Muslims receive so little attention. As Robert Irwin pointed out, “In Britain, there ha[s] been a long tradition of disparaging the crusaders as barbaric and bigoted warmongers and of praising the Saracens as paladins of chivalry. Indeed, it is widely believed that chivalry originated in the Muslim East. The most perfect example of Muslim chivalry was, of course, the twelfth-century Ayyubid Sultab Saladin.”
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In fact, this is not a recent British invention. Since the Enlightenment, Saladin has “bizarrely” been portrayed “as a rational and civilized figure in juxtaposition to credulous barbaric crusaders.”
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For example, in 1898, Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm visited Damascus and placed a bronze laurel wreath on Saladin’s tomb. The wreath was inscribed, “From one great emperor to another.”
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Much has been made of the fact that Saladin did not murder the Christians when he retook Jerusalem in 1187. Writing in 1869, the English historian Barbara Hutton claimed that although Saladin “hated Christians... when they were suppliants and at his mercy, he was never cruel or revengeful.”
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But neither Hutton nor most other modern, Western sympathizers with Islam have had anything to say about the fact, acknowledged by Muslim writers, that Jerusalem was an exception to Saladin’s usual butchery of his enemies. Indeed, Saladin had planned to massacre the knights holding Jerusalem, but offered a safe conduct in exchange for their surrender of Jerusalem without resistance (and unlike many other Muslim leaders, he kept his word). In most other instances Saladin was quite unchivalrous. Following the Battle of Hattin, for example, he personally participated in butchering some the captured knights and then sat back and enjoyed watching the execution of the rest of them. As told by Saladin’s secretary, Imad ed-Din: “He [Saladin] ordered that they should be beheaded, choosing to have them dead rather than in prison. With him was a whole band of scholars and sufis and a certain number of devout men and ascetics; each begged to be allowed to kill one of them, and drew his sword and rolled back his sleeve. Saladin, his face joyful, was sitting on his dais; the unbelievers showed black despair.”
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It thus seems fitting that during one of his amazing World War I adventures leading irregular Arab forces against the Turks, T. E. Lawrence “liberated” the Kaiser’s wreath from Saladin’s tomb and it now resides in the Imperial War Museum in London.

Not only have many Western historians ignored the real Saladin; they have given little or no coverage to Baybars (also Baibars), Sultan of Egypt, although he is much more celebrated than Saladin in Muslim histories of this period. When Baybars took the Knights of the Templar fortress of Safad 1266, he had all the inhabitants massacred even though he had promised to spare their lives during negotiations.
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Later that same year his forces took the great city of Antioch. Even though the city surrendered after four days, Baybars ordered all inhabitants, including all women and children, killed or enslaved. What followed was “the single greatest massacre of the entire crusading era”
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—it is estimated that seventeen thousand men were murdered and tens of thousands of women and children were marched away as slaves.
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Since Count Behemund VI, ruler of Antioch, was away when this disaster befell his city, Baybars sent him a letter telling him what he had missed: “You would have seen your knights prostrate beneath the horses’ hooves, your houses stormed by pillagers.... You would have seen your Muslim enemy trampling on the place where you celebrate Mass, cutting the throats of monks, priests and deacons upon the altars, bringing sudden death to the Patriarchs and slavery to the royal princes. You would have seen fire running through your palaces, your dead burned in this world before going down to the fires of the next.”
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The massacre of Antioch is seldom reported in the many apologetic Western histories of the Crusades. Karen Armstrong did report this massacre, but attributes it to “a new Islam” that had developed in response to the dire crusader threat and with a “desperate determination to survive.” Armstrong also noted that because Baybars was a patron of the arts, he “was not simply a destroyer... [but also] a great builder.”
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Even so, Armstrong’s evaluation of Baybars is faint praise compared with that of the Muslims. An inscription from about 1266 calls him “the pillar of the world and religion, the sultan of Islam and the Muslim, the killer of infidels and polytheists, the tamer of rebels and heretics... the Alexander of the age.”
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Many other inscriptions also compare him with Alexander the Great.

Of course, even though most of the crusaders went to war for reasons of faith and at considerable personal cost, few of them adopted a religious lifestyle. They ate and drank as well as they were able, and most of them routinely violated many commandments, especially those concerned with murder, adultery, and coveting wives. Moreover, they did not disdain the spoils of battle and looted as much as they were able—which wasn’t much when balanced against the costs of crusading. And of course they were often cruel and bloodthirsty—after all they had been trained from childhood to make war, face to face, sword to sword, and Pope Urban II called them “Soldiers of Hell.” No doubt it was very “unenlightened” of the crusaders to be typical medieval warriors, but it strikes me as even more unenlightened to anachronistically impose the Geneva Convention on the crusaders while pretending that their Islamic opponents were either UN Peacekeepers or hapless victims.

Rediscovering the Crusades

K
AREN
A
RMSTRONG WOULD HAVE
us believe that the Crusades are “one of the direct causes of the conflict in the Middle East today.”
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That may be so, but not because the Muslim world has been harboring bitterness over the Crusades for the past many centuries. As Jonathan Riley-Smith explained: “One often reads that Muslims have inherited from their medieval ancestors bitter memories of the violence of the crusaders. Nothing could be further from the truth. Before the end of the nineteenth century Muslims had not shown much interest in the crusades... [looking] back on [them] with indifference and complacency.”
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Even at the time they took place, Muslim chroniclers paid very little attention to the Crusades, regarding them as invasions by “a primitive, unlearned, impoverished, and un-Muslim people, about whom Muslim rulers and scholars knew and cared little.”
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Moreover, most Arabs dismissed the Crusades as having been attacks upon the hated Turks, and therefore of little interest.
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Indeed, in the account written by Ibn Zafir at the end of the twelfth century, it was said that it was better that the Franks occupied the Kingdom of Jerusalem as this prevented “the spread of the influence of the Turks to the lands of Egypt.”
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Muslim interest in the Crusades seems to have begun in the nineteenth century, when the term itself
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was introduced by Christian Arabs who translated French histories into Arabic—for it was in the West that the Crusades first came back into vogue during the nineteenth century. In Europe and the United States “the romance of the crusades and crusading” became a very popular literary theme, as in the many popular novels of Sir Walter Scott.
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Not surprisingly, this development required that, at least in Britain and America, the Crusades be “de-Catholicized.”
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In part this was done by emphasizing the conflict between the Knights Templar and the pope, transforming the former into an order of valiant anti-Catholic heroes. In addition, there developed a strong linkage between the European imperial impulse and the romantic imagery of the Crusades “to such an extent that, by World War One, war campaigns and war heroes were regularly lauded as crusaders in the popular press, from the pulpit, and in the official propaganda of the British war machine.”
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