Thus, when Latin crusading armies arrived in the Near East to wage what essentially were frontier wars, they were not actually invading the heartlands of Islam. Instead, they were fighting for control of a land that, in some respects, was also a Muslim frontier, one peopled by an assortment of Christians, Jews and Muslims who, over the centuries, had become acculturated to the experience of conquest by an external force, be it at the hands of Byzantines and Persians, or Arabs and Turks.

Islamic warfare and jihad

In the late eleventh century, the style and practice of Muslim warfare were in a state of flux. The traditional mainstay of any Turkish fighting force was the lightly armoured mounted warrior, astride a fleet-footed pony, armed with a powerful composite bow that enabled him to loose streams of arrows from horseback. He might also be equipped with a light lance, single-edged sword, axe or dagger. These troops relied upon speed of movement and rapid manoeuvrability to overcome opponents.

The Turks classically employed two main tactics: encirclement–whereby an enemy was surrounded from all sides by a fast-moving, swirling mass of mounted warriors, and bombarded with ceaseless volleys of arrows; and feigned retreat–the technique of turning tail in battle in the hope of prompting an opponent to give fevered chase, the indiscipline of which would break their formation and leave them vulnerable to sudden counter-attack. This style of combat was still favoured by the Seljuqs of Asia Minor, but the Turks of Syria and Palestine had begun to adopt a wider array of Persian and Arab military practices, adjusting to the use of more heavily armoured mounted lancers and larger infantry forces, and to the needs of siege warfare. By far and away the most common forms of warfare in the Near East were raiding, skirmishing and petty internecine struggles over power, land and wealth.¹⁰ In theory, however, Muslim troops could be called upon to fight for a supposedly higher cause–that of holy war.

Islam had, from its earliest days, embraced warfare. Muhammad himself prosecuted a series of military campaigns while subjugating Mecca, and the explosive expansion of the Muslim world during the seventh and eighth centuries was fuelled by an avowed devotional obligation to spread Islamic rule. The union of faith and violence within the Muslim religion, therefore, was more rapid and natural than that which gradually developed in Latin Christianity.

In an attempt to define the role of warfare within Islam, Muslim scholars turned to the Koran and the hadith, the ‘traditions’ or sayings associated with Muhammad. These texts provided numerous examples of the Prophet advocating ‘struggle in the path of God’. In the early Islamic period there was discussion about what this ‘struggle’ or jihad (literally ‘striving’) actually involved–and the debate continues to this day. Some, like the Muslim mystics, or Sufis, argued that the most important or ‘Greater jihad’ was the internal struggle waged against sin and error. But by the late eighth century, Sunni Muslim jurists had begun to develop a formal theory advocating what is sometimes termed the ‘Lesser jihad’: ‘rising up in arms’ to wage physical warfare against the infidel. To justify this they cited canonical evidence, such as verses from the ninth sura of the Koran, including: ‘Fight the polytheists totally as they fight you totally’, and hadith, such as Muhammad’s declaration that: ‘A morning or an evening expedition in God’s path is better than the world and what it contains, and for one of you to remain in the line of battle is better than his prayers for sixty years.’

Legal treatises from this early period declared that jihad was an obligation incumbent upon all able-bodied Muslims, although the duty was primarily seen as being communal, rather than individual, and the responsibility for leadership ultimately rested with the caliph. Making reference to the likes of the hadith ‘The gates of Paradise are under the shadow of the swords’, these treatises also affirmed that those fighting in the jihad would be granted entry to the heavenly Paradise. Jurists posited a formal division of the world into two spheres–the Dar al-Islam, or ‘House of Peace’ (the area within which Muslim rule and law prevailed); and the Dar al-harb, or ‘House of War’ (the rest of the world). The express purpose of the jihad was to wage a relentless holy war in the Dar al-harb, until such time as all mankind had accepted Islam, or submitted to Muslim rule. No permanent peace treaties with non-Muslim enemies were permissible, and any temporary truces could last no more than ten years.

As the centuries passed, the driving impulse towards expansion encoded in this classical theory of jihad was gradually eroded. Arab tribesmen began to settle into more sedentary lifestyles and to trade with non-Muslims, such as the Byzantines. Holy wars against the likes of Christians continued, but they became far more sporadic and often were promoted and prosecuted by Muslim emirs, without caliphal endorsement. By the eleventh century, the rulers of Sunni Baghdad were far more interested in using jihad to promote Islamic orthodoxy by battling ‘heretic’ Shi‘ites than they were in launching holy wars against Christendom. The suggestion that Islam should engage in an unending struggle to enlarge its borders and subjugate non-Muslims held little currency; so too did the idea of unifying in defence of the Islamic faith and its territories. When the Christian crusades began, the ideological impulse of devotional warfare thus lay dormant within the body of Islam, but the essential framework remained in place.¹¹

Islam and Christian Europe on the eve of the crusades

A charged and vexatious question remains: did the Muslim world provoke the crusades, or were these Latin holy wars acts of aggression? This fundamental enquiry requires an assessment of the overall degree of threat posed to the Christian West by Islam in the eleventh century. In one sense, Muslims were pressing on the borders of Europe. To the east, Asia Minor had served for generations as a battleground between Islam and the Byzantine Empire; and Muslim armies had made repeated attempts to conquer Christendom’s greatest metropolis–Constantinople. To the south-west, Muslims continued to rule vast tracts of the Iberian Peninsula and might one day push north again, beyond the Pyrenees. In reality, however, Europe was by no means engaged in an urgent struggle for survival on the eve of the crusades. No coherent, pan-Mediterranean onslaught threatened, because, although the Moors in Iberia and the Turks in Asia Minor shared a common religious heritage, they were never united in one purpose.

In fact, after the first forceful surge of Islamic expansion, the interaction between neighbouring Christian and Muslim polities had been relatively unremarkable; characterised, like that between any potential rivals, by periods of conflict and others of coexistence. There is little or no evidence to suggest that these two world religions were somehow locked in an inevitable and perpetual ‘clash of civilisations’. From the tenth century onwards, for example, Islam and Byzantium developed a tense, sometimes quarrelsome respect for one another, but their relationship was no more fraught with conflict than that between the Greeks and their Slavic or Latin neighbours to the west.

This is not to suggest that the world was filled with utopian peace and harmony. The Byzantines were only too happy to exploit any signs of Muslim weakness. Thus, in 969, while the Abbasid world fragmented, Greek troops pushed eastwards, recapturing much of Asia Minor and recovering the strategically significant city of Antioch. And with the advent of the Seljuq Turks, Byzantium faced renewed military pressure. In 1071, the Seljuqs crushed an imperial army at the Battle of Manzikert (in eastern Asia Minor), and though historians no longer consider this to have been an utterly cataclysmic reversal for the Greeks, it still was a stinging setback that presaged notable Turkish gains in Anatolia. Fifteen years later, the Seljuqs also recovered Antioch.