God's War: A New History of the Crusades

11

‘A Great Cause for Mourning’:¹ The Revival of Crusading and the Third Crusade

The sour taste left by the failure of the Second Crusade undermined both the idea and practice of this method of Christian holy war, casting doubt on its motives and morality. Despite repeated and increasingly urgent appeals from Outremer, successive popes failed to inspire new general expeditions east despite employing the full armoury of religious rhetoric, spiritual inducements and diplomatic persuasion. Individual wealthy enthusiasts conducted armed pilgrimages east. Some possessed armed intent, such as the Holy Land addict Count Thierry of Flanders in 1157–8 and 1164–5 (on top of his visits in 1139 and 1148); others, such as Duke Henry the Lion of Saxony (1172), did not. Dynastic adventurers and opportunists could be lured east by the prospect of a lucrative or spectacular marriage, as in 1176, when William of Montferrat arrived to marry Sibyl, sister and heir to the leper King Baldwin IV. Yet after his death in 1177, even Sybil’s attractions failed to entice a bridegroom from the west. When, in 1175, Philip of Alsace, count of Flanders, planned to follow the family tradition with a prolonged stay in the Holy Land, he felt the need to consult the redoubtable intellectual, poetess, musician, mystic and fashionable spiritual sage Abbess Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179). Philip asked whether God, with whom his correspondent claimed to be in direct contact, would approve. For once His message lacked clarity. Hildegard’s tepid endorsement only voiced approval of fighting the infidel in some imagined future, ‘if the time shall come’ when they threatened ‘the fountain of faith’.² Such caution in crusading commitment touched Christendom’s other frontiers. Between 1149 and 1192, there were only three papal grants of Jerusalem privileges to conflicts with infidels in Iberia, and just one in the Baltic, in 1171. The Second Crusade cast a deep shadow.

Even when events conspired to offer some prospect of success, responses were negligible. In 1176, the Greek emperor, Manuel I, hoping to bolster his position in Asia Minor and Cilicia as well as his alliances in western Europe, announced his intention of leading a joint Greek and Latin expedition to the Holy Land. Despite Pope Alexander III’s vociferous urging, western support was dismal even before Manuel’s advancing army was defeated by the Seljuk Turks of Iconium at the battle of Myriokephalon on 17 September 1176. When a Greek fleet of 150 ships arrived at Acre the following year, squabbling and suspicions within the Jerusalem government led to the cancellation of the proposed attack on Egypt, shenanigans that confirmed western scepticism about the plight of Outremer and the honesty of its rulers.

By 1184, the political fabric of Christian rule in Syria and Palestine had become badly frayed, worn down by increased Muslim pressure, government financial difficulties, prolonged and desperate dynastic instability in Jerusalem and tensions between its rulers and those of Tripoli and Antioch. Yet the embassy led to the west by Patriarch Heraclius of Jerusalem in 1184–5 attracted mistrust, ridicule, indifference, self-interest and caution, verging on the dismissive. The patriarch met Pope Lucius III, the German emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, and Philip II of France before begging Henry II of England to lead a new crusade; he was offered money and empty promises. Only a handful of recruits volunteered. King Henry was recorded as remarking that the patriarch sought his ‘own advantage not ours’.³ Another witness saw only the jangling jewellery, aromatic perfumes and lavish display of wealth as the patriarch’s entourage passed through Paris, not the genuinely desperate plea for armed help.⁴ On the eve of the greatest defeat of western arms by a non-Christian army since the tenth century, at Hattin in Galilee on 4 July 1187, crusading appeared to have run its course, a model of holy war that, in the shape taken since 1095, had served its turn and lost its fierce popular resonances. The events of that summer’s day in the hills above Tiberias reignited them.

NUR AL-DIN, SALADIN AND THE MUSLIM REVIVAL

Writing in the early 1180s, the Jerusalem historian Archbishop William of Tyre, in a remarkable and justly famous passage, described how the strategic balance in the Near East had tilted decisively against the Franks. He attributed this deterioration to three developments: the sinfulness of contemporary Franks in contrast to their ancestors; the loss of the advantage that their religious zeal and military training gave the first crusaders over the then indolent and pacific locals; and the unification of Syria and Egypt:

In former times almost every city had its own ruler… not dependent on one another… who feared their own allies not less than the Christians [and] could not or would not readily unite to repulse the common danger or arm themselves for our destruction. But now… all the kingdoms adjacent to us have been brought under the power of one man. Within quite recent times, Zengi… first conquered many other kingdoms by force and then laid violent hands on Edessa… Then his son, Nur al-Din, drove the king of Damascus from his own land, more through the treachery of the latter’s subjects than by any real valour, seized that realm for himself, and added it to his paternal heritage. Still more recently, the same Nur al-Din, with the assiduous aid of Shirkuh, seized the ancient and wealthy kingdom of Egypt as his own… Thus… all the kingdoms round about us obey one ruler, they do the will of one man, and at this command alone, however reluctantly, they are ready, as a unit, to take up arms for our injury. Not one among them is free to indulge any inclination of his own or may with impunity disregard the commands of his overlord. This Saladin… a man of humble antecedents and lowly station, now holds under his control all these kingdoms, for fortune has smiled too graciously upon him. From Egypt and the countries adjacent to it, he draws an inestimable supply of the purest gold… Other provinces furnish him numberless companies of horsemen and fighters, men thirsty for gold, since it is an easy matter for those possessing a plenteous supply of this commodity to draw men to them.⁵

William’s analysis found confirmation from Muslim witnesses and events.

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The Christian failure before Damascus in 1148 did not immediately lead to the unification of Syria. Nur al-Din of Aleppo (1117–74) was perceived by some in Damascus as a greater threat to their independence than the Franks. Although providing troops for Nur al-Din’s campaign, which culminated in the defeat and death of Prince Raymond of Antioch at Inab in June 1149, the Damascenes simultaneously agreed a new truce with Jerusalem which lasted almost until Nur al-Din’s annexation of Damascus in 1154. A joint Damascus/Jerusalem army besieged Bosra in the Hauran region in 1151, and Damascus regularly paid tribute to its Frankish neighbour, while continuing to appease Nur al-Din by allying with him in northern Syria. Only with the Frankish capture of Ascalon in 1153 did the majority of Damascus’s ruling elite decide that the Christians presented the greater threat. Even so, Nur al- Din’s occupation of Damascus in April 1154 only came after an economic blockade followed by an armed assault.⁶

The peaceful terms granted the rulers of Damascus showed that Nur al-Din was more accommodating than his brutal father Zengi. The jihad was integrated into the substance of his policies as he regularly demanded support for annual renewals of what he announced as holy war. In 1149, he advertised the significance of his victory at Inab by bathing in the Mediterranean. Religious propagandists travelled in his armies. Palestinian emigre poets in his entourage called for the reconquest of their homeland ‘until you see Jesus fleeing from Jerusalem’.⁷ In practice, as his critics pointed out, Nur al-Din spent most of his career engaged in subjugating other Muslims to his rule, annexing Damascus in 1154, Mosul in 1170 and contesting control of Egypt after 1163, and was willing to agree treaties with the invading Byzantine emperor in 1159 and the Jerusalemites in 1161. However, his inheritance of Aleppo, confining him to Syria rather than his father’s stamping ground of Iraq, imposed on Nur al-Din a more intense focus on his Frankish neighbours while at the same time depriving him of his father’s resources to effect territorial gains at their expense, a gap covered by jihad rhetoric and displays of private austerity and extreme spirituality. Nur al-Din’s image as the pious, just, puritanical mujahid was displayed on inscriptions and coins and in the patronage of religious learning, schools, scholars and mosques. He cultivated a reputation as a just ruler and judge, a knowledgeable jurist and theologian, educated, literate, orthodox, although, in the words of an Iraqi panegyrist, Ibn al-Athir, ‘not a fanatic’.⁸ Nur al-Din’s piety apparently increased after serious illnesses, in 1157 and 1159, and a defeat by the Franks before Crac des Chevaliers in 1163, a pattern of penitential progress similar to that of another ruler who wore his faith on his sleeve a century later, Louis IX of France.

In 1161, Nur al-Din undertook the hajj and rebuilt the walls of Medina in the Hijaz, with Mecca the holiest cities in the Muslim world, gestures of obvious political as well as religious significance. Nominally, the Hijaz lay under the sovereignty of Egypt, although in practice ruled by local families claiming descent from the Prophet. Nur al-Din’s appearance and patronage announced a new power in Islam. Convenience and