God's War: A New History of the Crusades

Ascalon. While the doge claimed to be fulfilling a longstanding wish to visit the Holy Places, the Venetian credentials as soldiers of the cross operated within a frame of self-interest. Only after protracted negotiations with the regency government of Jerusalem held during Christmastide 1123 and much wrangling among the Jerusalemites as to the best target did the doge agree to an attack on Tyre, with Ascalon the last great port of the Levantine coast outside Frankish possession. In return for this aid, Venice was to receive a third of Tyre with extensive privileges in the conquered city, including free trade, the use of their own weights and measures, wide legal autonomy and immunities and an annual tribute of 300 besants. The siege lasted from February to July 1124 before the Damascene garrison surrendered. Along with the immediate booty and future privileges, the Venetians, whose commercialism never excluded piety, carried off a lump of marble on which Christ was alleged to have sat. The capture of Tyre did not end the Venetian campaign. Returning westwards, they terrorized the Aegean, sacking Rhodes and wintering in Chios, where they acquired relics of the martyred St Isidore, before pillaging Samos, Lesbos and Andros, then launching a series of raids along the Dalmatian shore of the Adriatic culminating in the plunder of Zara, after which, singing the Te Deum Laudamus, they returned to Venice ‘full of happiness and joy’.⁵⁴ Or so it was remembered in the lagoon. Seen only from the perspective of wars of the cross, the Venetian crusade represented a serious commitment of time and investment in ships, men and money. While the Venetian fleet was at war it could not be trading as well. Yet the context for the victories off Ascalon and at Tyre was an extended, Viking-like raid on Christian Byzantine territory and property. The whole enterprise appeared designed for tangible as well as spiritual gain; it certainly reaped the former. While this did not represent as much of a contradiction at the time as it may seem now, such a layered response informed much of the interest in the cause of the cross and the Holy Land. It also serves as a foretaste and clue to the events eighty years later that led to the sack of Constantinople.

The Venetian expedition of 1122–5 illustrated how the needs of the Holy Land could be stitched into concerns of the Faithful that had little or no intrinsic association with armed pilgrimage or holy war except coincidence. Much the same could be applied to many responses to the papacy’s new militant formula: social; political; chivalric; diplomatic; colonial; commercial. The striking feature of the early twelfth century appears the lack of consistent action on behalf of the cross at the same time as the image of the first Jerusalem campaign patchily suffused cultural attitudes to war and Christian society of the lay and ecclesiastical elites. As the enclaves in the east became established and their borders tentatively secured, the sense of urgency in appeals for aid slackened. The 1130s saw penitential wars on the Jerusalem model applied elsewhere, for example against the supporters of the anti-pope Anacletus. The 1120s, despite the imprisonment of Baldwin II and the death of Bohemund II, had seemingly marked an end to major, state-threatening crises, while the failure before Damascus in 1129 ended further dramatic territorial expansion. However, both assumptions as well as the ideal of holy war itself were to be tested to their limits before the 1140s were out.

9

God’s Bargain: Summoning the Second Crusade

The fall of Edessa between 24 and 26 December 1144 to the Turkish atabeg Imad al-Din Zengi, ruler of Mosul and Aleppo, rapidly assumed greater significance than its immediate strategic context demanded. The result of an opportunistic attack when its Frankish count, Joscelin II, was away, Zengi’s success at Edessa helped consolidate the north-western frontier of his Aleppan-Mosul federation. Confining his habitual savagery to the surviving Frankish Christians, Zengi soon consolidated his hold on the east bank of the Euphrates. However, Zengi’s main target in Syria since his annexation of Aleppo in 1128 was Damascus, while his wider political interests concerned the Jazira and Iraq more than Frankish Syria. He captured Edessa because of immediate local circumstances, such as the deaths the year before of King Fulk of Jerusalem and the Byzantine Emperor John II, which, given the hostility between Count Joscelin and Raymond of Poitiers prince of Antioch, reduced the chance of a Christian counter- attack. After his success at Edessa, revolt in Mosul early in 1145 and continued intriguing by local Armenian and Muslim princes with the Franks deflected Zengi from Damascus to further policing operations in the Euphrates valley. On one such foray, at Qal‘at Ja‘bar, on the night of 14 September 1146, Zengi, comatose with drink, was murdered in his bed by a favoured Frankish slave.¹ Immediately, his empire ruptured, with one son, Sayf al-Din acquiring Mosul, another, Nur al-Din, Aleppo. A Frankish attempt to take advantage of the situation by reoccupying Edessa in November 1146, led by Joscelin II and Baldwin of Marasch, failed utterly, the count fleeing ignominiously, Baldwin meeting a heroic death, the city’s walls being levelled and the local Armenian Christians suffering the massacre they had avoided two years earlier.²

The fall of Edessa had burnished Zengi’s reputation as a holy warrior. The caliph in Baghdad conferred on him the titles: ‘the Ornament of Islam, the Auxiliary of the Commander of the Faithful (i.e. the caliph), the Divinely Aided King’.³ The accolade of mujahid lent religious ideology to the military power of a leader feared by his followers almost as much as by his foes, reputedly a sadistic monster, at the sight of whom one man was supposed to have dropped dead from fright, who crucified his own troops found marching out of line and trampling crops. An eager member of Zengi’s entourage wrote, ‘If the conquest of Edessa is the high sea, Jerusalem and all the Frankish lands (sahil) are its shore’.⁴ Yet, while the preoccupations of Zengi’s heirs precluded Islamic unity and further assault on Latin Outremer, the Franks seemingly accepted this analysis, drawing almost apocalyptic conclusions. The message brought west in 1145 was clear: Islam was on the march; all Christian Outremer was in danger; something had to be done. The result was one of the greatest international military efforts of the middle ages.

MUSLIM REVIVAL

Zengi’s apologists portrayed him as champion of the jihad, the sixth pillar of Islam, the perpetual collective and sometimes individual obligation on all the Faithful to struggle (jihad) spiritually against unbelief in themselves (al-jihad al- akbar, the greater jihad) and physically against unbelievers (al-jihad al-asghar, the lesser jihad). The Christian conquest and rule over Muslim lands inevitably aroused the traditional rhetoric of holy war. As in Christendom, religion and politics operated as mutually sustaining forces within society, especially one as ethnically diverse as that of the Near East. Zengi, owing formal allegiance to an Arabo-Iraqi-Persian caliphate controlled by a Turkish sultan, was himself a Turk whose army and entourage comprised Turcomans, Kurds and slaves, chiefly from the Eurasian steppes and the northern Black Sea, and whose political ambitions embraced domination of Arab emirs and princes in Syria. Religion supported authority and defined political identity. Any Muslim ruler, like his western counterparts, surrounded himself with religious advisers and civil servants trained in religion. The Iranian Imad al-Din al-Isfahani (1125–1201), one of Nur al-Din’s leading civil servants, later Saladin’s field secretary and biographer, once worked as a professor at a Damascus religious school (or madrasa), a man learned in the Faith as well as law and administration.⁵ Without a formal structure of priesthood, Islam easily pervaded secular institutions and life. As happened with holy war in western Christendom in the eleventh century, the recrudescence of jihad in the twelfth-century Near East relied on intellectual and spiritual movements being translated into political ambition and action, a determining alliance between the pulpit and the battlefield that found concrete expression in the minbar (mosque pulpit) built by Nur al- Din at Aleppo in 1168. Adorned with inscriptions praising the jihad, it was, as its maker had intended, installed in the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem by Saladin on his conquest of the city in 1187.⁶

By 1098, when the western armies captured Antioch, the First Crusade could be seen as a continuation of traditional Byzantine border activity. No active indigenous Syrian tradition of united Islamic military response had survived centuries of coexistence. The arrival of the new Sunni Turkish zealots in the late eleventh century affected Syrian Muslims – Arab rulers or Shi’ite peasantry – more than the unbelievers. Only when the Christian army pushed south in 1098–9 did a novel threat become apparent, symbolized by the massacre of the inhabitants of Ma ‘arrat al-Nu ‘man in December 1098, an atrocity kept alive in the poems of exiled survivors: ‘why has destiny pronounced such an unjust sentence on us?’. As Frankish conquests increased, so did the number of articulate, displaced Muslim refugees available to tweak the consciences of Muslim rulers. In Damascus some time before 1109, the poet Ibn al-Khayyat, who had worked for the emirs of Tripoli, demanded an armed response: ‘The cutting edge of their sword must be blunted/And their pillar must be demolished’. After the fall of Tripoli to the Franks in 1109, its emir,