The First Crusade and Islam
For all its violent conquests, the First Crusade elicited a surprisingly muted response within the Muslim world. The campaign generated no outpouring of Arabic testimony to match the veritable flood of comment in Latin Christian texts. Indeed, the first surviving Arabic chronicles to describe the crusade in any detail were written only around the 1150s. Even in these works, composed by the Aleppan al-Azimi and the Damascene Ibn al-Qalanisi, the coverage was relatively brief–little more than a skeleton narrative overview, covering the crossing of Asia Minor and events in Antioch, Marrat and Jerusalem, peppered with occasional condemnations of Frankish atrocities. These included a comment on the incalculable number of Antiochenes ‘killed, taken prisoner and enslaved’ when the city fell in early June 1098, and the observation that ‘a great host [of Jerusalem’s populace] were killed’ during the crusaders’ sack of the Holy City.
By the 1220s, the Iraqi historian Ibn al-Athir was more fulsome in his censure, recording that ‘in the Aqsa mosque the Franks killed more than 70,000, a large number of them being imams, religious scholars, righteous men and ascetics, Muslims who had left their native lands and come to live a holy life in this august place’. He then described how the crusaders looted the Dome of the Rock. Ibn al-Athir added that a deputation of Syrian Muslims came to the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad in late summer 1099 to beg for aid against the Franks. They were said to have recounted stories of suffering at Latin hands ‘which brought tears to the eye and pained the heart’, and to have made a public protest during Friday prayer, but, despite all their entreaties, little was done, and the chronicler concluded that ‘the rulers were all at variance…and so the Franks conquered the lands’.47
How should this apparent lack of historical interest in the First Crusade within Islam be interpreted? In western Europe the expedition was widely celebrated as an earth-shatteringly significant triumph, but in the Muslim world of the early twelfth century it seems barely to have registered as a tremor. To an extent, this may be attributed to the desire of Islamic chroniclers to limit references to Muslim defeats, or to a general disinterest in military events on the part of Islamic religious scholars. But it is surprising, nonetheless, that the most contemporaneous Arabic accounts do not show clearer traces of anti-Latin invective or contain more vocal demands for vengeful retribution.
A few isolated Muslim voices did call for a collective response to the First Crusade in the years immediately following Jerusalem’s capture, among them a number of poets whose Arabic verses were repeated in later collections. Al-Abiwardi, who lived in Baghdad and died in 1113, described the crusade as ‘a time of disasters’ and proclaimed that ‘this is war, and the infidel’s sword is naked in his hand, ready to be sheathed again in men’s necks and skulls’. Around the same time, the Damascene poet Ibn al-Khayyat, who had earlier lived in Tripoli, described how the Frankish armies had ‘swelled in a torrent of terrifying extent’. His verses expressed regret at the willingness of Muslims to be pacified by Christian bribes and weakened by internecine rivalry. He also exhorted his audience to violent action: ‘The heads of the polytheists have already ripened, so do not neglect them as a vintage and a harvest!’ The most interesting reaction was that of ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, a Muslim jurist who taught in the Grand Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. Around 1105 he appears to have delivered a number of public lectures on the merits of jihad and the urgent need for a resolute and collective Islamic response to the First Crusade. His thoughts were recorded in a treatise, the Book of Holy War (Kitab al-Jihad), sections of which survive to this day. But despite al-Sulami’s prescient assessment of the threat posed by the Franks, his calls for action, like those of the poets, went unheeded.48
The stark absence of a concerted Islamic reaction to the coming of the crusades can be explained in a number of ways. In general, Near and Middle Eastern Muslims seem to have had only a limited understanding of who the First Crusaders were and why they came to the Holy Land. Most imagined that the Latins were actually Byzantine mercenaries, engaged in a short-term military incursion, not driven warriors devoted to the conquest and settlement of the Levant. These misconceptions helped to blunt Islam’s response to the events of 1097 to 1099. Had the Muslims recognised the true scale and nature of the crusade, they might have been inspired to put aside at least some of their own quarrels to repel a common enemy. As it was, the fundamental divisions remained. A deep-seated fracture still separated the Sunnis of Syria and Iraq and the Shi‘ite Fatimids of Egypt. Rivalry between the Turkish rulers of Damascus and Aleppo continued unabated. And in Baghdad, the Seljuq sultan and Abbasid caliph were preoccupied with their own Mesopotamian power struggles.
Over the next century some of these problems were resolved and enthusiasm for a jihad against the invading Franks spread across the Muslim world of the eastern Mediterranean. To begin with, however, the Latins who invaded the Levant faced no determined pan-Islamic counter-attack. This gave western Christendom a crucial opportunity to consolidate its hold on the Holy Land.
4
CREATING THE CRUSADER STATES
The First Crusade brought Latin Christendom control of Jerusalem and of two great Syrian cities, Antioch and Edessa. In the wake of these astounding achievements, a new outpost of the western European world was born in the Near East, as the Franks expanded and consolidated their hold over the Levant. In the Middle Ages, this region was sometimes referred to as ‘Outremer’, the land beyond the sea, while today the four major settlements that emerged in the first decades of the twelfth century–the kingdom of Jerusalem, the principality of Antioch and the counties of Edessa and Tripoli–are frequently described as the ‘crusader states’.49
At its core, the crusading movement, for centuries to come, would be dominated by the need to defend these isolated territories, this island of western Christendom in the East. With the benefit of hindsight, it is all too easy to forget that the basic survival of the crusader states hung in the balance in the years that followed the First Crusade. That expedition had achieved the impossible–the recapture of the Holy City–but amid the exultant drive towards that singular goal the crusaders had largely ignored the need for systematic conquest. The first generation of Frankish settlers in Outremer thus inherited a disjointed patchwork of poorly resourced towns and cities, and their fragile ‘new world’ teetered on the brink of extinction. In 1100 the future of the crusader states seemed desperately uncertain, and all the bloody triumphs of the crusade stood to be erased.50
PROTECTOR OF THE HOLY CITY
This problem was immediately apparent to Godfrey of Bouillon, the first Frankish ruler of Jerusalem. Possessing only meagre resources in terms of military manpower, with most of Palestine as yet unconquered and the forces of both Abbasid and Fatimid Islam cowed but far from broken, his initial prospects were bleak. Godfrey’s first priorities were to expand the Latin foothold in the Holy Land and to secure maritime communications with the West. To fulfil both needs he targeted Arsuf, the small Muslim-held fortified port town just north of Jaffa, but, despite a hard-fought siege in autumn 1099, he failed to secure its capture.