God's War: A New History of the Crusades

commenting from Alexandria in the summer of 1099, remarked on the ‘countless multitudes’ who attacked Syria with ‘Divine aid inspired by Almighty God’. The significance of these intruders became apparent. In 1105, a religious lawyer teaching at the Great Mosque in Damascus, Ali Ibn Tahir al-Sulami, unwittingly mirrored Urban II’s historical analysis in explaining the advance of the ifranj:

A number fell upon the island of Sicily at a time of difference and competition, and likewise they gained possession of town after town in Spain. When mutually confirmatory reports reached them of the state of this country – the disagreement of its lords, the dissensions of its dignitaries, together with its disorder and disturbance – they carried out their resolution of going out to it, and Jerusalem was the summit of their wishes.²

So marked did these dissensions appear, and so favourable to any invader, some have wondered whether Alexius and Urban deliberately timed their initiative to take advantage of them. The chroniclers who accompanied the expedition to Jerusalem well knew that the Muslim world the western host entered in June 1097 lacked unity in politics, race and religion. They distinguished between Muslim ‘Turks’ – the warrior elite originating in the Eurasian steppes – and ‘Saracens’ or ‘Arabs’ – the Arabic-speaking, settled population of the Levant: the anonymous veteran who wrote the Gesta Francorum, one of the earliest written accounts, carefully discriminated between these and also the different Christian communities – Greek, Armenian and Syrian (i.e. Greek Orthodox, Jacobite or Maronite Christians in Syria who spoke Arabic).³ The protracted negotiations with the Fatimid rulers of Egypt between June 1097 and May 1099 revealed the potential for exploiting Near Eastern political fissures; partitioning Palestine may even have been mooted at Antioch in March 1098. Throughout their march across Asia Minor and Syria, western leaders appeared well informed of their opponents’ alliances. Subsequent successes in Cilicia, at Edessa and Antioch, and the unopposed march to Jerusalem in 1099 relied on the failure of the competing Muslim powers to unite, the crusaders’ appreciation of this disunity and their willingness to exploit it through diplomacy and war.

It is a persistent myth that western Christians possessed either no knowledge of or a universally blinkered hostility to Islam and Muslim rulers. In eleventh-century Spain, opportunist military adventurers, such as Rodrigo Diaz, El Cid, happily served Muslim employers when it suited them. On a military level, the soldiers of Christ of 1097 recognized the quality of their Turkish opponents. Even Pope Gregory VII, a scourge of Christian backsliders, attempted to maintain friendly relations with the Muslim ruler of Mauritania, on the startlingly tolerant grounds that ‘we worship and confess the same God though in diverse forms and daily praise and adore him as the creator and ruler of this world’.⁴ From the other side, so-called Muslim policy was often conducted and implemented by non-Muslims, Christians of various denominations as well as Jews. The Coptic Christian community in Egypt remained influential in administration until the fourteenth century. In many areas of western Asia under Islamic rule in the eleventh century it is doubtful whether there existed a Muslim majority.⁵ Constructive contact between the Christian army and selected Muslim powers was unsurprising, especially since the Byzantines had been pursuing such strategies for generations.

From the middle of the eleventh century, the heterogeneous polity of the Near East had revolved around the dominance of orthodox Sunni Muslim Seljuk Turks in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Asia Minor controlling the decadent Abbasid caliphate of Baghdad and the faltering heretical Shi’ite caliphate of the Fatimids in Egypt.⁶ In 1055, the chief of the Orghuz Turcoman tribes in north-eastern Iran, the Seljuk Tughrul Beg, seized Baghdad, appropriating for himself from the caliph the title of sultan (literally, in Arabic, ‘power’). Tughrul (d. 1063), his nephew Alp Arslan (1063–72) and great-nephew Malik Shah (1072–92) created an empire including Iran, Iraq and, from the late 1070s, central and southern Syria; northern Syria, a group of client city states, was incorporated by 1086. Alp Arslan, by his decisive defeat of the Byzantine emperor, Romanus Diogenes, at Manzikert in 1071, opened Anatolia to Turcoman invasion and settlement. The sultanate created there, of Rum (i.e. the former lands of the Byzantines who always referred to themselves as Romans), was ruled by Seljuk cousins of Malik Shah, Suleiman Ibn Kutulmush (d. 1086) and his son Kilij Arslan, whose influence in northern Syria was successfully challenged by Malik Shah’s brother Tutush. While the sultanate of Rum occupied southern and western Anatolia, another Turkish power, the Danishmends, established control of the north and east of the peninsula. The two powers competed for advantage, while unsuccessfully combining to resist the westerners’ advance across Anatolia in the summer of 1097.

Turkish authority from the Persian Gulf to the Dead Sea rested on military strength exercised by the control of local communities by Turkish garrisons or mercenaries holding indigenous political hierarchies in check. The western invaders of 1097 acknowledged that Turkish military supremacy had ‘terrorized the Arabs, Saracens, Armenians, Syrians and Greeks’.⁷ Such rule varied from the militant Turkish holy warrior ethos of the Danishmends to the Great Seljuks of Baghdad, fully assimilated into the Arabo-Persian culture of the Abbasids: Malik Shah is not a Turkish name at all; it means King King in Arabic and Persian, a sort of echo of the imperial title of the ancient Persian Shahanshahs, Kings of Kings. Local power depended on standing armies of mercenaries, as the traditional Turkish nomadic life clashed with the settled rural and urban conditions of Iraq, Syria, Palestine and much of Anatolia. As effective warriors, the Turks of Asia Minor and Syria maintained their hold, real power often lying with mercenary army commanders rather than princely governors. Even the power of the Seljuk sultans in Baghdad was overshadowed by that of their vizier, Nizam al-Mulk.

One characteristic of the Seljuks was their fiercely orthodox Sunni Islam, putting them at odds with many of their subjects, not only the various Christian sects but also the Shi’ite majority among the Muslim peasantry of Syria, as well as with the heretical caliphs of Egypt, with whom they contested control of Palestine. After establishing themselves in Egypt in 969, the Shi’ite Fatimid caliphate became increasingly dependent on its mercenary troops, Berber tribesmen, Blacks (Sudan in Arabic) from the upper Nile, Turks and other slave warriors (mamluks). These elements fought for supremacy behind the throne of Caliph al-Mustansir (1036–94) until he appointed as his vizier the aged Armenian mamluk Badr al-Jamali, who ruled Egypt as a military dictator from 1074 to 1094. The political potential of religion was dramatically demonstrated in 1092, when a Shi’ite splinter group established at Alamut, south of the Caspian Sea, murdered the immensely powerful vizier of Baghdad, Nizam al-Mulk; the killers’ sect was later known in the west as the Assassins. The Egyptian rulers were less ideologically militant or successful, their hold over the hinterland of Syria and Palestine reduced to nominal control over a few sea-ports on the Palestinian littoral. In an attempt to eject Turkish authority from Palestine Badr al-Jamali’s son and successor, al-Afdal, sought friendship with Byzantium and an agreement with the Greeks’ newest allies in 1097–9.

Tensions and rivalries were inherent in a polity where form disguised substance; behind the caliph a sultan, behind a sultan a vizier, behind a vizier a mamluk. Indigenous hierarchies were subject to foreign domination: Egypt and Iraq competed for Syria and Palestine; Armenian, Turcoman, Kurd or Berber adventurers subjugated local aristocracies. These fissures were deepened by a disastrous coincidence of death between 1092 and 1094, which swept away all the major political figures of the Near East. In 1092, the Vizier Nizam al-Mulk, effective ruler of the Seljuk empire, was followed to his grave a few weeks later by the Sultan Malik Shah himself. A similar pattern was repeated in Egypt in 1094, when the death of the Vizier Badr al-Jamali closely followed that of his ostensible master, the veteran Fatimid Caliph al-Mustansir. In the same year, the Sunni caliph of Baghdad, al-Muqtadi, also died. These multiple deaths provoked succession struggles and political fragmentation from Iran to Anatolia, Syria and Palestine. In Asia Minor, Kilij Arslan, held hostage by Malik Shah since the defeat and death of his father Suleiman in 1086, began to restore an independent sultanate of Rum in competition with the Seljuks and the Danishmends of eastern Anatolia. In the civil wars over Malik Shah’s inheritance, his brother Tutush, ruler of Syria, was defeated and killed in 1095 by the sultan’s son Barkyaruq, whose own power remained disputed by his brother Muhammed until his death in 1105. While much of the internecine fighting occurred in western Iran, political unity in Syria imploded. Tutush’s bickering sons Ridwan of Aleppo and Duqaq of Damascus failed to impose their authority allowing the Turkish atabeg (i.e. guardian of prince or governor) of Mosul, Kerbogha, the opportunity to extend his authority into northern Syria, while local dynasties asserted their independence further south, such as the Ortoqids in Jerusalem or the Shi’ite Banu ‘Ammar in Tripoli. At Edessa in northern Iraq, in Cilicia and northern Syria, Armenian princelings re-established themselves in the debris of Seljuk rule. The new Egyptian vizier, al-Afdal, took advantage of this instability to restore Fatimid power in southern Palestine, culminating in his capture of Jerusalem from the Ortoqids in 1098.

In this political turmoil, where power rested with military warlords with varying claims to legitimacy, the western army appeared neither as distinctive nor as threatening as it thought itself. With the main contest for power in the Near East being fought in Iran, hundreds of miles to the east, the westerners’ targets – Cilicia,