Islam and the Crusades

Joseph Cook

For centuries, historians have been intrigued by the Crusades. This paper, like many others before it, seeks to explain the contemporary impact of the Crusades upon the Muslim world. Why have these events so captured the attention of the modern West? Certainly the idea of a religious war, the idea of the Crusade in particular, has a great deal of relevance in the world today, looking of course at America's war in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is not however, a recent attraction. The Crusades have always been paid particular attention by Western Scholars. In part this is likely due to the romance the Middle Ages hold for the West. The Crusades provide a splendid image of mailed soldiers marching alongside honorable knights resplendent in shining plate armor, off to fight the so-called heathens in the East.

The Crusades can be equally romantic for Muslim scholars. The defense of the homeland against the brutish barbarian invaders of the West is a satisfying topic of study. Islamic scholars can be proud to note the victory of their ancestral nations. Today, the Crusades arouse a surprising amount of emotion and frequently anger among the inhabitants of what is today termed, the Middle East. Saladin today is an iconic hero for many, and the namesake of many institutions such as the Salahddin University in Abril, Syria.

Of course the Crusades were neither romantic nor satisfying. Like all wars there were far more victims than victors. The many who met their demise seldom did it in a heroic last stand, surrounded by the bodies of their honorably defeated opponents. As in all medieval warfare, those who died often died horribly, most weakened by starvation; as is particularly seen in the case of siege warfare.

By the time the Crusaders arrived in the Holy Land in the late 11^th century, the Islamic expansion had in many ways ceased, especially compared to the explosion of the Arabs in the 8^th and 9^th centuries. By the time the Empire of Muhammad had reached as far west as the Andalus (modern day Spain) and as far east as western China, the expansionist drive seemed to falter. This was due in a large part to the internal fragmentations of the empire. The first major Muslim civil war occurred as early as 656 AD, only 24 years after the death of the Prophet, leading to the foundation of the Umayyad dynasty.[1] This war, caused by a dispute as to the rightful heir of Muhammad, was far from the last war of succession witnessed by the Islamic peoples. The First Fatima, as this dispute was named, also violently heralded the beginning of the Shia-Sunni split, a schism which still divides Muslims today.

Despite these internal struggles there were several times when Christian Europe was faced with the immediate threat of Arabian conquest. The western expansion up the Iberian Peninsula was halted only by the self-proclaimed Duke of the Franks, Charles Martel at the battle of Tours. Constantinople itself was under siege by the armies of the prophet in 716 AD.

Of course these events take place well before the first Crusade, but these were not the last times European Christianity was to feel threatened by a growing Islamic empire. The Turkish Seljuqs, using the barbaric Ghuzz as a major component of their armies, swept across the Arabian Peninsula in the early 11^th century under the command of Tughril Beg, who was declared "Sultan of the East and West" by the Abbasid Caliphate Ka'im in 1057. After Tughril's death in 1063, the Turks continued their conquest through Asia Minor under his nephew Alp Arslan, scoring a resounding victory against the Byzantines at the battle of Manzikert in 1071. Sir John Glubb sees the Seljuq conquest of Asia Minor less as a planned goal of its leaders, and more as a desire to divert their undisciplined and frightfully barbaric soldiers, the Ghuzz, away from the cultured peoples of Arabia.[2]

The Seljuqs under Arslan's son Malik Shaw went on to conquer Nicaea, a city directly across the Bosporus from Constantinople. Not only was this an overt threat of invasion to the Byzantines, but Asia Minor had acted as the Empire's bread basket, a populous portion of the empire which had generally provided both troops and taxes. Without this well of people and resources to draw on, the Byzantines would have a very difficult time either repelling a Turkish assault on the remainder of their Empire or retaking the land lost.

The Emperors of Byzantium could not turn their backs on their northern provinces either. The Emperor Basil II made a name for himself as Basil the Bulgar Slayer when the Bulgars within the northern borders of Byzantium came out in open revolt against the Empire. Despite spending the majority of his reign from 976 to 1025 quelling these rebellions, Basil II managed two lightning fast campaigns into Syria that, while not permanently changing any borders, showed that the Seljuqs might have faced a different Byzantium when they began their conquest of Asia Minor had this effective military leader been able to focus more of his attention upon his southern borders. The Byzantine armies were also weakened by their own government, precisely at a time when they were most needed. The cause of this is the instability of the Byzantine crown. The emperors of the 11^th century were greatly afraid of a coup by the army, not an unheard of concept in medieval Byzantium. The general response of several emperors at the time was to greatly limit the power of the army by removing many of its most successful and popular generals and decreasing its size.

So, with its own army insufficient to repel the Turks menacing them from across the Bosporus, and the treasuries equally insufficient to hire enough mercenaries to re-conquer Asia Minor, Emperor Alexius Comnenus appealed to the West for aid.

The Emperor's pleas reached Pope Urban II in March of 1095 at the Council of Piacenza. Urban preached his call for a crusade to the East at the Council of Clermont in that same year. The massive popular support for the Crusades was indubitably quite different from the expectations of Alexius Comnenus, who probably was awaiting a small army of organized troops to come marching in. Instead, waves of crusaders, mostly Franks came pouring into the Holy Land These armies marched through Asia Minor and Syria on their path to Jerusalem, disrupting the established forces of the Seljuqs in Asia Minor and allowing Alexius to re-conquer the majority of the land lost, sometimes from the crusaders themselves.

But were the Seljuqs really poised to sweep into Eastern Europe? Geographically it would seem so, with the threatened Constantinople being the door warden, or bridge, to Eastern Europe. Politically however, the Seljuqs were prepared for no such thing. First, Malik Shaw seemed to have no desire to expand the Seljuq influence further north. He was also reluctantly drawn into a war with the Fatimids of Egypt by a Turkoman Chief nominally under his command named Atsiz who conquered Jerusalem in 1070. The Fatimids proved to be a tougher foe than anticipated however, and after reorganizing under a new despotic military dictatorship, called the Badr, they halted the advances of the Seljuqs.

It should also be noted that the Seljuqs were not a people of great statecraft. Frequently the rulers of these undisciplined nomads-turned-conquers had no notion of a centralized government. Malik Shaw handed out the majority of the territory captured as fiefdoms to his generals and servants, greatly weakening his personal power. Thusly, when the Christians arrived in the last years of the 11^th century, there was no organized response to their invasion. Indeed, Muslims at the time were just as likely to be fighting other Muslims as the Frankish armies.

The most visible and resounding impact of the Crusades was the loss of the Mediterranean as an Islamic possession. The loss of Sicily in the mid 11^th century, combined with a dramatic rise in Italian naval power caused the Mediterranean to become a European lake. The shift of naval power over to the Italians was largely due to massive amounts of support given to the Italians as a means of conveying pilgrims and knights to the Crusader States. Also the Crusades opened up many new markets for the flourishing Italian trade empire. Later it would be Spanish naval power that would prevent the Ottoman Turks from dominating the Mediterranean.

The massive influx of European Christians into the regions of Syria and Palestine probably had a surprisingly little impact on the residual number of Christians in the region. The majority of Christian pilgrims returned to their native lands once they considered their spiritual duties accomplished and of those that stayed and settled, many were massacred when the lands they inhabited were re-conquered by Muslims.

These acts, while barbarous, should be considered in the light of certain facts. First, when the Franks conquered Jerusalem in 1099 there was a great massacre of its Muslim and even Christian inhabitants. Reprisals should be expected from conquerors identifying with the wronged party. Secondly, we must look at the nature of politics and governance in the middle ages. A conqueror seldom had the support of his populace, and governments at the time were simply the individual, sometimes irrational acts of the people in charge. It was often the case that there was little established bureaucracy to hold the will of the people in check beyond the threat of the army. We must also remember that the loyalties of the average medieval person were to God and his Church (meaning the established religious leadership) before his nation or ruler.

It should also be remembered that the influence of a conqueror seldom extends beyond the location of his army, meaning that he must rule almost completely by force. This was certainly the case of frequently brutish and unsubtle Seljuqs and Franks. No doubt it would seem natural to limit the number of your potential enemies. Thus the massacring of certain members of conquered cities was probably seen at least as much of a political action as one of passionate fervor.

The response of the various Islamic dynasties of the time seems to be less about a feeling of repelling the barbarian invaders and more about the increase of their individual holdings and power. The Muslim rulers of the time seemed to view the Frankish Crusaders simply as another variable to the incredibly complex equation that was the struggle for power and land in the Arabian Peninsula. If there had been more of a feeling of unity against the Christian invaders, it is likely that the various Islamic empires would have banded together to drive them off the Holy Land much sooner. However it would seem that the splits of the Islamic world had caused too much dissention for such alliances to take place on a broad level.

By all appearances, The Sunni Turks and Caliphates had just as much hostility to the Shia Fatimids as to the Christians. There was an equal amount of Arab hostility to the less-cultured Turks that now ruled their peninsula. So instead of a distinct line drawn between Muslims and Christians, we see a shifting patchwork of alliances and betrayals that has a great deal more focus on territory and influence than any religious ideology.

The Fatimid rule of Egypt was extremely interested in reclaiming its hold on Syria and Palestine. Egypt, by the very nature of its geographic location, has long sought to control Syria and as such to more fully control the routs to Asia. The various Turkish rulers had little unity towards each other, and were almost exclusively interested in local affairs. The few times when they cooperated were when the allied principalities were in danger from the same threat, be it an army of Frankish knights, or the army of some Turkish rival. The Abbasid Caliphs, while equally drawn up in local conflicts, most likely desired above all else the return of their temporal power, and as such were anxious for the Seljuqs to be driven from the Arabian Peninsula.

Even the Christians were almost as likely to fight each other as the Muslims whose territory they were so desperately trying to wrest from them, as we can see in the nearsighted squabble between Baldwin I and Tancred. Even after these antagonists had died and the feud was ended, the Christians still fought the only entity that was likely to be able to give their venture success, Byzantium. The Franks were afraid of the Crusader states becoming a province of Byzantium to such an extent that when Baldwin II was looking for a suitable marriage partner for his daughter Mesilinda, he bypassed a Byzantine noble that would have cemented future support for the Crusader States. Instead he chose Fulk V of Anjou, an experienced and competent ruler, but not one that would bring a great deal of aid to the Holy Land.

The Crusades did not represent a directed blow to the figurative body of an advancing Islamic Empire, so much as another player violently thrust upon the scene of an already complicated and tumultuous region. The respective worlds of Islam and Christianity cannot be seen as two cohesive powers vying with each other for dominance. In reality both of these institutions were, and still are, populated and controlled by individuals. The Muslim world in particular has seen a number of foreign invaders sweep across its territory in the name of its own religion, as we see with the Seljuqs in the 11^th century, and the Mongol invaders of the 1300s, most of which later converted to Islam.

To view the Crusades as a war of Christianity against Islam is misleading. The goal of the Crusaders was to conquer the Holy Land, the so-called Legacy of Christ. It was not to defeat for all time the religion of Islam. The goal of even the Byzantines was to eliminate the threats to their Empire, not to drive the Muslims from the face of the earth. The Crusades contained aspects found in every war; ambition, politics, economics and the struggle for power. Those who would see this unfortunate clash of two civilizations as an epic conflict between two Religions have lost sight of the realities of these events.

Citations:

• Glubb, Lieutenant-General Sir John. The Course of Empire, The Arabs and Their Successors. Hodder and Stoughton LTD; 1965
• Maalouf, Amin. The Crusades Through Arab Eyes. Al Saqi Books; 1984
• Saunders, J.J.. A History of Medieval Islam. Routledge and Kegan Paul; 1965

[1] The Course of Empire, Lieutenant-General Sir John Glubb

[2] The Course of Empire, Lieutenant-General Sir John Glubb, chapter IX