Crusades

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CRUSADES

Both the word "crusades" and its Arabic equivalent, al-hurub al-salibiyyah, are modern terms. What these words refer to, however, can be quite different depending on who is using them. The dominant trend in secular academic research on the Crusades since the 1970s has been one of expansion of the topic in terms of activities and military campaigns included, of time span, and of geographic expanse. Despite this revisionism, there is little doubt that in the popular parlance of nonspecialists, the Crusades refers to the almost two-century-long presence (1097–1291 c.e.) of Latin Christians from central and western Europe in the Holy Land of the eastern Mediterranean coastal strip. Thus, while events after 1291—such as the Christian reconquest of Spain, campaigns against heretics in or on the borders of Latin Christendom, or the European conflicts with the Ottoman Empire—are now within the domain of current scholarship on the Crusades (particularly in Europe), they do not figure large in the discourse of the Crusades ongoing in the contemporary population of the Holy Land.

Overview of the Crusades

At the Council of Clermont in 1095, Pope Urban II delivered a sermon that set in motion the Crusades. Precisely what he said is unknown, nor is there agreement as to his motivations and goals, but in the aftermath of Clermont, clergy, nobles, and commoners mobilized for campaigns to reconquer Jerusalem, which had been in Muslim hands since 638 c.e. While what comes next follows the common shorthand of referring to major Crusade campaigns by numbers, it should be emphasized that this practice does not take into account the steady stream of armed pilgrims flowing into and out of the Holy Land nor the numerous smaller military campaigns that they undertook.

The First Crusade (1097–1101) resulted in the establishment of four Crusader states in lands of the eastern Mediterranean littoral: the County of Edessa, the Principality of Antioch, the County of Tripoli (although the city itself was not captured until 1109), and the Kingdom of Jerusalem. In light of the obstacles these first crusaders faced in their long journey east—shortages of supplies, uneasy relations with the Byzantine Empire, travel across rough and unfamiliar terrain inhabited by hostile populations, lack of organization, and internal rivalries, to name but a few—this initial success was remarkable. Indeed, the First Crusade almost ended at Antioch between 1097 and 1098, where the Crusaders first laid siege to the Muslims for several trying months, and upon victory were subsequently besieged themselves by numerically superior forces.

This Crusader victory is usually linked to the disunited opposition they faced. In the late eleventh century c.e., there was no single powerful Muslim state to oppose the invasion of the ifranj (Franks), as the Muslims called the invaders. In many cities of the Seljuk confederation, military authorities known as atabegs were busy establishing their autonomy, and were often preoccupied by rivalries with other local Muslim rulers. The Sunni Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad was unable to directly influence military affairs. The Shi?ite Fatimid caliphate in Cairo, itself engaged in a struggle against the Seljuks for control of Jerusalem, did comparatively little to counter the Crusader incursion. In the words of the Muslim chronicler Ibn al-Athir: "When the Franks—may God curse them—extended their control over what they had conquered of the lands of Islam, and it turned out well for them that the troops and the kings of Islam were preoccupied with fighting each other, at that time opinions were divided among the Muslims, desires differed and wealth was squandered" (Hillenbrand, 31). Over the next four decades the Crusaders entrenched themselves in the landscape of Outremer (literally, "across-the-sea"), skirmished with the Muslims, and began the construction of numerous castles, made necessary by their constant shortage of manpower.

The first major success of the Muslim counter-Crusade was achieved by the Turkish military leader Zangi, the atabeg of Mosul and Aleppo. After consolidating his control over northern Syria and the Jazira (northwestern Iraq), he launched a series of campaigns against the Crusaders, culminating in his capture of Edessa in 1144. Zangi's elimination of this Crusader state gave added impetus to calls in Europe for another major Crusade. Forces of the Second Crusade subsequently arrived in Syria in 1147, and after heated discussion between the resident Crusaders and the new arrivals, decided to attack Damascus, ironically one of the Muslim cities whose ruler up to that point had coexisted with the Franks. This campaign ended in defeat for the Crusaders on the outskirts of Damascus in July 1148.

Zangi's career as a counter-Crusader was cut short by his assassination in 1146, but was continued by his son Nur al-Din. Nur al-Din expanded the area under his control, occupying Damascus in 1154, and, utilizing the vocabulary of jihad, he launched attacks against the Franks. In response to numerous Crusader sorties against Egypt in the 1160s, Nur al-Din sent a contingent of his forces to aid the Fatimid state. This force was led by the Kurdish general Shirkuh, who had in his service his nephew Salah al-Din Yusuf b. Ayyub, subsequently known as Saladin to the Crusaders. Upon his uncle's death, Saladin took command of this force, and by March 1169, took control of Egypt, subsequently bringing the Fatimid Caliphate to an end. Following the death of Nur al-Din in 1174, Saladin moved against his former overlord's heirs and brought Damascus and eventually most of Syria (Aleppo submitted in 1183) and the Jazira (Mosul submitted in 1186) under his control. He then mounted a major campaign against the Franks, defeating the bulk of their forces at the battle of the Horns of Hattin near Tiberius on 4 July 1187. Jerusalem fell to him by October of that year, and the Crusader holdings were reduced to a few castles and coastal cities.

These victories made Saladin a hero. A contemporary poet wrote of him,

You took possession of Paradises palace by palace,
When you conquered Syria fortress by fortress.
Indeed, the religion of Islam has spread its blessings over created beings,
But it is you who have glorified it. (Hillenbrand 1999, p. 179)

The defeat of the Latin forces also sparked the Third Crusade (1189–1192), in which three European monarchs were personally involved: the German emperor Frederick I, King Philip II of France, and King Richard I (the Lionheart) of England. Frederick drowned in Anatolia on his way to Outremer, and Philip and Richard quarreled from the moment of their arrival in the Latin East. Nevertheless, their combined forces helped recapture Acre, henceforth the capital of the truncated Kingdom of Jerusalem. After Philip's return to France, Richard led a series of campaigns against Saladin and, by his departure in 1192, had aided in the reestablishment of Latin control over most of the coastal cities and their immediate hinterlands.

Saladin's death in 1193 provided a temporary respite to the Crusaders, as his successors (collectively known as the Ayyubids, from the name of Saladin's father) engaged in struggles over preeminence in the lands that had been united by Saladin. In these struggles, some Ayyubid princes were not adverse to making temporary alliances with the Franks against their Ayyubid rivals. The diversion of the Fourth Crusade (1204) to Constantinople, which was sacked and subsequently occupied, did little to change this situation in Outremer. These divisions among the Ayyubids contributed to the complex narrative of the Fifth Crusade (1217–1229). Recognizing the strategic importance of Egypt, this crusade began with the Franks besieging and eventually occupying the Egyptian port city of Damietta. In the face of intra-Ayyubid rivalries, the Ayyubid ruler of Egypt, al-Malik al-Kamil, offered to give Jerusalem to the Franks if they would leave Egypt, but the Crusaders refused. By 1221, the Crusaders were forced out of Egypt. The Fifth Crusade came to an end in the bizarre events of 1228–1229, in which the emperor Frederick II, excommunicated for his delays in fulfilling his crusading vows, successfully negotiated a treaty with al-Malik al-Kamil allowing the Christians to take control of certain sites in Jerusalem, yet was bombarded with offal by the residents of Acre as he left to return to Europe. The last Crusader presence in Jerusalem was eliminated in 1244, when the city was sacked by Kharazmian warriors, themselves displaced from their homelands by the Mongol invasions from Central Asia.

The final major crusade to the Latin East was that of King Louis IX of France (1248–1254). Louis and his forces succeeded in capturing Damietta in 1249, but were subsequently defeated at Mansura in 1250 by the forces of the late Ayyubid ruler of Egypt, al-Malik al-Salih. Upon surrender and payment of a large ransom, Louis went to Acre, where he spent four years strengthening fortifications before returning to France.

To understand the end of the Crusader presence in Outremer, one must return to events of 1249–1250. During the course of Louis's Crusade in late 1249, the Ayyubid al-Malik al-Salih died. When his son Turanshah arrived from Syria in early 1250 to succeed his father, he took steps to limit the influence of key groups among his father's supporters. The main target of Turanshah's punitive actions was the corps of his father's mamluks, or military slaves. In his struggles against his Ayyubid rivals, al-Malik al-Salih had built up a sizable regiment of these military slaves, who while still youths had been purchased as slaves from regions outside the Islamic world and subsequently converted to Islam and trained in military techniques. His regiment was known as the Bahri mamluks, since their barracks were located on an island in the river (bahr) Nile. Faced with loss of influence and possibly life, these mamluks of al-Malik al-Salih turned against Turanshah, and murdered him shortly after the victory of Mansura.

After this regicide, the history of the subsequent decade of the history of Muslim Egypt and Syria is dominated by a complex struggle for power, further complicated by the Mongol invasions. The decade ended with the definitive establishment of the Mamluk Sultanate in 1260 by Baybars, one of those Bahri mamluks. After consolidating Mamluk control, Sultan Baybars launched his forces against the Crusaders, capturing Antioch (in 1268) and several major Crusader castles. After Baybars' death in 1277 there was a brief lull, but attacks against the Crusaders resumed later in the reign of the Sultan Qalawun, who conquered Tripoli shortly before his death in 1289. Upon the capture of Acre in 1291 by the forces of Qalawun's son, al-Ashraf Khalil, the few Crusaders left on the coastal strip abandoned their holdings and fled, thus bringing Frankish presence in Outremer to an end, although no one at the time realized it. In order to discourage Crusader attempts to reoccupy the Muslim coastal cities, the Mamluks razed their fortifications.

The Crusades in the Muslim World Today

A survey of scholarly literature and public discourse in the modern Muslim world reveals that the Crusades have great relevance and resonance today. They are commonly seen as the forerunner of the European colonial efforts of the first half of the twentieth century, placed in the context of perceived centuries of Western antagonism to the Islamic world, and often explicitly linked to the establishment of the modern state of Israel. (Crusade references appeared, for example, in a series of post–1956 Suez crisis Egyptian postage stamps celebrating Egypt as "Tomb of the Invader." One stamp celebrates Saladin's victory at Hattin; a second shows Louis IX in chains after his defeat at Mansura.) It is not uncommon to find references to Saladin and his victory at Hattin in political speeches or celebrated in books. In 1992, a larger-than-life statue of Saladin was unveiled in Damascus. The Crusades also figure in some modern Islamist writing, in which the failures of current leaders to resist Western incursions are compared to the successes of the heroes of the counter-Crusades. And while Hillenbrand (and others) have pointed out the pitfalls of the anachronistic use of nationalistic labels in the study of medieval history, the symbols and perceived lessons of the Crusades have been incorporated into the rhetoric of Arab nationalist movements in particular. Thus in the words of one Arab intellectual, the Crusades when viewed through Arab eyes are seen as an act of rape (Maalouf, 266).