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  * The ancient Byzantine hyperpyron or ‘bezant’ was the standard gold currency of the Levant. Muslim dinars adhered to this standard as well.

  Chapter 2

  THE WILD EAST

  Why should one who has found the East so favorable return to the West? God does not wish those to suffer want who, carrying their crosses, have vowed to follow Him, nay even unto the end. You see, therefore, that this is a great miracle, and one which must greatly astonish the whole world.1

  When Abbot Bernard spectacularly launched the Second Crusade at Vézelay in 1146, he was consciously echoing an epoch-making speech of fifty years before; on a platform at Clermont in 1095, Pope Urban II had unleashed the crusading idea onto an unsuspecting world.

  Ostensibly Urban was responding to a plea for help from the Greek Orthodox Christians of the East. For more than four centuries the Byzantine Empire, the Greek successor to the Roman Empire, had barred the expansionist forces of Islam from flooding into Europe. But in 1071 at Manzikert they had suffered a calamitous defeat at the hands of the Seljuk Turks. Anatolia and almost all their Asian territories had been overrun. In 1081 Alexius Comnenos became emperor, and in 1095 he asked for reinforcements from the West. Alexius was interested in a crack force of mercenaries, but Urban did not simply pass on a straightforward call for recruits; instead, sensing the opportunity to put the Church in the forefront of something big, he created a potent hybrid of pilgrimage and holy war – a crusade.

  Medieval Christianity was superstitious and obsessed with pilgrimages. An arduous journey to a holy place associated with a saint brought great rewards for the pilgrim. At the pilgrimage site the saint’s deeds and often his or her relics – usually a body part or an object associated with their life – could be venerated. Prayers would be answered and, in recognition of the pilgrim’s devotion, sins would be forgiven. Of course the most respected of all pilgrimage sites were the holy places in Palestine, associated with the life and death of Christ himself. Urging the belligerent feudal knights of Western Europe to take Christ’s resting place from the infidel, while also promising remission of sins, was a stroke of genius. Fifty years later Bernard was building on Urban’s example to inspire a new generation to buy into the crusading brand.

  Urban’s idea had quickly spiralled out of his control. The earliest incarnation of crusading fervour was the disastrous popular expedition led by Peter the Hermit. In 1096 his horde of fanatical peasants trekked across Europe towards the Holy Land, chanting prayers and perpetrating massacres, usually on hapless Jewish communities in their path. As soon as they moved from Byzantine to Muslim territory, the Turks quickly slaughtered them. Peter the Hermit was among the few who escaped. Not far behind tramped the great armies of the First Crusade proper. While the war-weary Byzantines were appalled by Peter’s hopeless rabble – hardly the contingent of fighting men they had hoped for, when they asked the West for help – the Emperor Alexius was even more disturbed by the endless columns of fearsome, heavily mailed knights advancing towards his capital of Constantinople.

  Luckily for Byzantium, the crusaders saved their aggression for the Muslims and, against all the odds, went on to capture the ancient cities of Edessa and Antioch and, in July 1099, the Holy City of Jerusalem itself. After fulfilling their vows, most crusaders returned to their homes in Western Europe, but many remained in the East, to become the ruling class in the lands they had conquered. They set up four independent crusader or ‘Latin’ states, imposing their feudal form of government on the conquered populations of Muslims and native Christians. These colonies occupied a country rich in trade and fertility – and richer still in the medieval imagination. For centuries men would leave their homes to fight for these lands, many of them expecting no reward except in heaven. It was a landscape covered in classical and biblical sites. It was also vulnerable – in most places just a narrow band of territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the desert, running from Anatolia in the north to the borders of Egypt in the south.

  The northernmost of these domains was the county of Edessa. It was centred on the ancient city of Edessa (present-day Sanliurfa in Turkey), which had become the first officially Christian polity in the world during the second century AD. The county was sparsely populated, spreading across the vast savannahs between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers. With most of the population made up of Armenian and other native Christian groups, the county had formed a barrier against the surrounding Muslim enemies. This barrier had been smashed when the Turkish warlord Zengi stormed the city of Edessa in 1144.

  South of the county of Edessa lay the principality of Antioch, which stretched along the Mediterranean shore from Cilicia to the port of Jabala and the border with the county of Tripoli. Its capital was Antioch, the largest urban centre between Constantinople and Cairo. Antioch had been in Byzantine hands until as recently as 1078, and the emperors of Byzantium maintained a passionate (and legally compelling) claim to suzerainty over the city. This was a constant challenge for its Latin rulers.

  The next state down the coast was the county of Tripoli. It occupied the littoral between the massive castle of Margat in the north and the environs of Beirut in the south. To the east it took in the mountains of Lebanon, site of mighty crusader strongholds like Krak des Chevaliers, which looked down on the Muslim territories beyond. These crags were also the home of the Assassins. An extreme heterodox Islamic sect, the Assassins used their trademark brand of political murder to maintain independence from Christian and orthodox Muslim powers alike.

  The southernmost Latin colony was the largest and most powerful – the Kingdom of Jerusalem. It boasted the most magnetic pilgrimage sites, including Nazareth and all the religious sites related to Jesus’ life as described in the New Testament. The kingdom also included crusader Palestine’s most important ports, Acre, Tyre and Jaffa, and fielded the strongest army of all the Latin states. Its eastern boundary was long and porous, however, with the Jordan River fordable at numerous points. Reaching right down to the Red Sea, the great fief of Oultrejordan (‘beyond the Jordan’) was created to defend the long southern stretch of this border fronting onto the desert. All of the kingdom’s southern side was bounded by desert and was open to incursions from the Egyptians, who were especially irksome due to their stubborn hold on the coastal city of Ascalon, the only city in Palestine still in Muslim hands.

  Unable to expand further against Islam, the crusaders built a web of castles across the Levant to defend their borders and dominate the conquered territory. Behind their castle walls, the Franks settled into a precarious stalemate of perpetual cross-border raiding, punctuated by major battles. Sometimes there would be temporary truces, usually with feuding Muslim emirs buying off the ever-aggressive crusader knights. Instability was chronic. Nomadic Turcoman hordes might sweep through at any time, ravaging Muslim and Christian territory alike. And every pilgrimage season brought welcome contingents of new crusaders, eager to combat the surrounding foes.

  Among these enemies, most crusaders would have included the venerable, magnificent, but ramshackle Byzantine Empire. From time immemorial the empire had been the world’s Christian superpower, and it still dominated extensive territories across Eastern Europe, the Balkans and Greece. In Asia, however, it faced relentless waves of migrating Turkish tribes from the east. The brilliant emperor Alexius I Comnenos (1081-1118) had retaken the offensive, and under his energetic son John (1118-43) and his grandson Manuel, the Byzantines had pushed back enemies on a number of fronts. But apart from some coastal territory, most of Anatolia remained in Muslim hands. The crusaders distrusted the Greeks, whom they saw as shifty, effeminate Orientals, obsessed with fashion and obsequious etiquette. The sophisticated Byzantines in their turn looked down upon the Franks as dangerous, uncouth barbarians. Even the common Christian heritage could be more divisive than unifying – the Latin and Greek Churches, run from Rome and Constantinople respectively, having split in the ‘Great Schism’ of 1054.

  Imperial preoccupations with t
heir European provinces meant that the Byzantines rarely entered directly into crusader affairs, but when they did, tensions between Greek and Latin Christians often led to violence. Successive emperors in Constantinople provoked the crusaders by claiming sovereignty over previously Byzantine-held territories like Antioch. Constantinople also wanted Greek patriarchs to preside over the Eastern Church, especially in great bishoprics like Antioch and Jerusalem. As Reynald de Chatillon would learn, these claims were sometimes pressed by force.

  There was another rival Christian state in the region, too – the small Armenian kingdom on Antioch’s northern border. The Armenians were a warlike, fiercely independent people who had carved out a realm from the Byzantine province of Cilicia and were constantly probing Antiochene territory. Both Armenians and Greeks could be unhelpful, unreliable and sometimes downright hostile to the Franks – Reynald would fight them both in time – but, unlike the Muslims, the Christian powers of the Near East were not set on extermination of their co-religionists. The Franks may have regarded Byzantium with suspicion, but it was also a powerful ally of last resort, a strategic Christian counterweight to Muslim power. Now and again Greeks, Armenians and Franks overcame their differences and managed to mobilize together against the reviving expansionist pressure of Islam.

  At the beginning of the crusading period, after the death of the powerful Seljuk sultan Malik Shah, the Islamic Near East was politically and militarily fragmented, wholly unprepared for the irruption of heavily armed Frankish knights. This was greatly to the benefit of the early crusaders, who established their enclaves between the Muslim powers in Syria to the east and Egypt to the west. To hold onto their hard-won conquests, the Franks’ overriding strategic imperative was to prevent the various Muslim powers of the region coalescing. Most worrying was the doomsday scenario of Egypt and Syria working in concert. Luckily Syrian and Egyptian Muslims did not get along.

  In Cairo the ruling dynasty was the Arabic Fatimid caliphate. The Fatimids were Muslims of the minority Shi’ite sect, implacably opposed to the orthodox Sunni Islam that was prevalent in Syria. The Egyptians were ruling much of Palestine, including Jerusalem, when the First Crusade conquered it, and in the early years of the Kingdom of Jerusalem they made several major counter-offensives. They also launched frequent raids from their garrison behind Frankish lines at Ascalon. The Egyptian fleet, the largest in the region, was a persistent threat to Christian shipping and to the crusader coastal cities. Egypt, with its ancient trade routes, fertile delta and intensive agriculture watered by the annual inundation of the Nile, was immensely rich and had virtually unlimited supplies of manpower, but it was often weakened by power struggles at court, not least between the caliphal figureheads and their chief ministers, the viziers, who ruled in all but name. In the middle of the twelfth century Egypt was not an immediate threat to the survival of the crusader states.

  More acutely dangerous were the Muslim emirs of Syria on the crusaders’ eastern borders. These were mostly orthodox Sunni Turks, warlords who owed a nominal allegiance to the Sunni caliph and the sultan in far-away Baghdad. This allegiance was reflected in the local rulers’ acceptance of symbolic robes of investiture sent by the caliph, and in the use of titles like atabeg (roughly, ‘governor’). By the middle of the twelfth century, the most dangerous of these chieftains were the Zengids, descendants of the Turkish atabeg Zengi, conqueror of Edessa. Early in 1146, one of Zengi’s eunuchs, feeling slighted by his master, waited until the atabeg was in a drunken stupor and then murdered him. But Zengi’s death brought no respite for the Franks. In the fortress city of Aleppo, only fifty miles from Antioch, ruled Zengi’s son, the new atabeg Nur al-Din Mahmud.

  Nur al-Din was a terrifying adversary. A brilliant general, he was brave, too, and a formidable warrior, personally wielding bow and sword in battle, to the great concern of his retainers. He was an ardent orthodox Muslim, and the chronicler Michael the Syrian complained that he treated non-Muslim subjects badly, forcing Christians to cut their hair, and ordering Jews to wear a red symbol on their turbans and their right shoulder, to mark them out. To Muslims, he commanded respect and devotion. He was honest, approachable and shunned personal wealth. He was also pious and dedicated to jihad. The city of Jerusalem was holy to Islam, as well as to Judaism and Christianity, and Nur al-Din was committed to its recapture and the utter extirpation of the Frankish presence in the East. He had even built a great pulpit destined for the holy mosque of Al-Aqsa, on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount.

  After having Zengi’s murderers cruelly executed, Nur al-Din had imposed his authority on northern Syria, unifying many of the competing Muslim emirates under his rule. In November 1146, he snuffed out a crusader attempt to reoccupy Edessa, and in savage retaliation obliterated the Christian presence there for ever. By March 1148, when Reynald arrived in Outremer with the Second Crusade, Nur al-Din was already chipping away at the remaining crusader fortresses in the county of Edessa and threatening the principality of Antioch.

  The other powerful Syrian entity confronting the Latin states was Damascus. This ancient city was hostile to the crusaders, but had also worked with them when any other Islamic ruler became too powerful. Both Nur al-Din and his father Zengi had been thwarted by alliances of convenience between Damascus and Jerusalem. In the mid-twelfth century, Damascus was ruled by Mu’in al-Din Unur, a pragmatic politician who was quite prepared to deal with the crusaders and, vitally, an opponent of rising Zengid power.

  In the long run, though, if Aleppo, Damascus and Cairo could work together, uniting Syrian and Egyptian Islam in jihad, the Latin states would be caught between the hammer and the anvil. Fundamentally, whatever local understandings with the crusaders could be reached, Muslims could not tolerate a Christian power ruling in Dar al-Islam – the lands of Islam – especially in the Holy City of Jerusalem. As the poet al-Qaysarani wrote:

  This matter has been decreed and Jerusalem is as good as purified. There is no purification for it except when it runs with blood.2

  From the Muslim point of view, underlying even the most civil of inter-faith relations was an undertone of anger, disdain and revulsion. Muslim writers of the time reveal their attitude in the inevitable curses, whenever the Franks are mentioned: ‘may God defeat them’, ‘God curse them’, ‘may God clear the land of their pollution’. Ibn Jubayr, who travelled through Frankish territory in the 1180s, has some decent things to say about their society (the Franks’ fair taxation, for instance), but loathes them viscerally. The city of Acre ‘stinks and is filthy, being full of refuse and excrement’. The Christian queen is ‘a sow’, the king ‘a pig’3 and all the unclean polytheists should suffer extermination. Muslims regarded the crusaders as ‘polytheists’, seeing the curious Christian belief in the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit as worship of three separate gods. It is decreed in Islam that polytheists who do not convert deserve one fate – death. When Muslims developed superficially cordial relationships with Franks, as did the aristocratic Arab chieftain Usama Ibn Munqidh, at heart they still despised their Christian friends and strove to bring about their annihilation. Among other things, Usama derided Frankish medicine, justice, education, sexual morals and honour. The one quality he did allow those ‘devils of Franks’ was courage.

  Courage was a quality Reynald de Chatillon would show in abundance, but any traveller to Outremer required plenty of it. Even a peaceful pilgrimage to Jerusalem was a perilous undertaking. Storms and pirates beset the spring and autumn sailings to Palestine. The land route was even riskier, plagued by robbers in Europe and, beyond the borders of Christendom, by hordes of warlike infidels, bent on killing or enslaving any Christian who fell into their grasp. Once in the Holy Land, the pilgrim was prey to an unhealthy new climate and fatal diseases. And then there was the return journey.

  Whether the crusader intended to stay in Outremer or campaign just for a season, he would have to face a well-armed and implacable foe, whose forces far outnumbered his. During the half-century before Abbot Bern
ard launched the Second Crusade, entire expeditions from Lombardy, Bavaria and Aquitaine were destroyed crossing Turkish territory in Asia Minor. Before even reaching the crusader states, the men were dead, the female camp followers and children sold as haremgirls and slaves. The crusader settlers defending their hard-won gains had also suffered crippling defeats. At Ramleh in 1102, for instance, in the heart of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Egyptian army trapped and destroyed a Frankish force. King Baldwin I barely escaped with his life, while a host of noble lords lost theirs. At the Ager Sanguinis, the Field of Blood, in 1119, Turcoman cavalry annihilated the army of Antioch. Prince Roger of Antioch himself was among the dead.

  Everyone knew the risks, and many crusaders made wills before they left. Indeed, in his preaching Bernard made it clear that crusaders should assume they would not come back, that they were giving their lives for the cause. To die in God’s work would bring life everlasting and a remission of sins. ‘I call this a blessed generation,’ he wrote:

  that can seize an opportunity of such rich indulgence as this, blessed to be alive in the year of jubilee, this year of God’s choice. The blessing is spread throughout the whole world and all the world is flocking to receive this badge of immortality.4

  Despite, or partly because of, the great peril of the task, Reynald and his blessed generation flocked to take the cross. Bernard said that he was ‘sowing the Crusade’; and this was the greatest harvest yet. The expedition that was to be called the Second Crusade would number in its ranks Emperor Conrad of Germany, King Louis VII of France, Count Theobald of Champagne and many more of the greatest nobles of Christendom. Beyond the vague aims of avenging the fall of Edessa, shoring up the Christian forces in the East and somehow taking the Holy War to the heathen, the crusade had no specific plan of campaign. Nor did the organizers offer any specific lure of new territory to conquer, or great treasure to share. None was needed. For a restless crop of warlike young men like Reynald, the seed of the crusade fell on fertile ground.