Christopher Tyerman - God's War - A New History of the Crusades

Gregory’s scheme of 1074 displayed a broad sense of history. The pope placed his desire to help and be reconciled with the eastern church in the context of papal visits to Constantinople that had ceased in the early eighth century when the Carolingian Franks were adopted as the new protectors of the church in the west. The church’s legitimizing of war in the eleventh century was similarly influenced by a historical perspective. Just as Carolingian warriors gained in reputation by being seen as the champions of Christianity against pagan and infidel foes, so the perception of a turn in what had seemed an inexorable tide running against Christendom not only inspired gestures such as Gregory VII’s in 1074 and Urban II’s in 1095 but enhanced the status of those called upon to fight for the Faith. However important the just and holy war against enemies of the church in general, the highest justification for knighthood was the battle against the infidel, against Islam. The earliest vernacular French chansons de geste of the late eleventh and early twelfth century, which provide some insight into the mentality and idealism of the arms-bearing classes, while displaying little of the trappings of the crusade – war as penance, Jerusalem and the Holy Land, papal authorization – demonstrated the special status of war against the infidel, who stood both in practice and in literary type as the absolute antithesis to the Christian world, a dangerous alien aping of the familiar and the good. As the Song of Roland , the earliest surviving version of which seems to have been consolidated c. 1100, put it in a notorious line: ‘Paien unt tort e chrestiens unt dreit’ (Pagans are wrong and Christians are right). 34The memory of the long struggle with Islam from the seventh century was not lost 400 years later. If anything, it had grown in symbolic as well as political significance, an exaggerated exercise in collective religious and cultural nostalgia. The context of western reactions to Islam in the eleventh century was of a period of active military confrontation on all frontiers which had been preceded by one of relative stability. The First Crusade occurred at a time of shifting fortunes along the borders of Christendom, which provided the opportunity to think of aggressive campaigns even before the request for aid from the eastern emperor in 1095.

ISLAM AND HOLY WAR

The ten years after the death of Muhammed at Mecca in 632 redrew the political and religious map of the Mediterranean and Near East. The ancient rivals of Christian Byzantium and Sassanian Persia who had fought each other almost to a standstill in a war that had lasted a generation (602–28) proved easy pickings for the Arab-led armies that swept from the Arabian peninsular to conquer the Fertile Crescent: Syria and Palestine 635–41; Persia 637–42; Egypt 640–42. In classical Muslim historiography, deliberately symbolic was the entrance into Jerusalem of the caliph (i.e. successor to the Prophet as Commander of the Faithful), Umar, in February 638. The caliph was not the field commander of operations in Palestine but, with the fall of Jerusalem imminent, he arrived to supervise proceedings. Having negotiated a peaceful surrender of the Holy City whence, Islamic tradition insisted, the Prophet had made his night journey to heaven, Umar entered the city, on a donkey or camel – the sources disagree – ostentatiously dressed in coarse, dirty robes, perhaps in deliberate contrast to the lavish parades favoured by the defeated Byzantines. The religious element in the triumph was clear to both Muslim and Christian commentators. Going to the terrace on which the Jewish Temple had stood, the supposed site of Muhammed’s celestial ascent but now reduced to a rubbish tip, Umar ordered the clearance of the site and the construction of a small mosque. Equally, in accordance with the surrender terms, the shrines, churches and synagogues of the Christians and the Jews were left untouched. This iconic moment resonated for centuries; it was entirely appropriate that the fullest contemporary history of crusading and the subsequent western settlements in Palestine and Syria in the twelfth century, by Archbishop William of Tyre, began with the Arab conquests and the failure of the Byzantine emperor Heraclius to resist them. 35

The conquest of Jerusalem marked just one stage of Muslim expansion. Within a century of the Prophet’s death, Muslim rule extended from central Asia and north India to Spain. In the Mediterranean basin, Constantinople had survived the great siege of 674–7, but Byzantine sea supremacy had been shattered; Cyprus had been ceded to joint rule, Muslim control on the mainland of western Asia extended to Armenia and Cilicia, and the Byzantine provinces in north Africa lost by 698. In a lightning campaign, Visigothic Spain was overwhelmed by Arab-led Berber armies in 711–13. Although defeated by the Franks at Poitiers in 732, Muslim armies continued to harass southern Gaul for some years. Although the era of conquest was followed by civil war, religious schism and a collapse of political unity, with Spain and north Africa acquiring separate rulers, the Abbasid caliphs, established since 750 in Baghdad, retained the nominal loyalty of much of the Islamic world. More significantly, an international affinity was created by Islamic culture and, to a lesser degree, religion. The question of the extent of Arabization and Islamicization of conquered lands remains obscure and vexed, but it appears that the process was slow, uneven and, by the eleventh century, still incomplete. It is not certain whether there was even a Muslim majority in Syria or Palestine when the crusaders arrived in 1097.

In part this was a consequence of Islamic law. For those Christians and Jews, People of the Book, living within Muslim lands, the so-called Dar al-Islam (House of Islam), religious tolerance was guaranteed by the early Islamic texts. Sura 109 of the Koran declared:

Unbelievers, I do not serve what you worship, nor do you serve what I worship. I shall never serve what you worship nor will you ever serve what I worship. You have your own religion, and I have mine.

In return for Islamic rule and protection, the People of the Book had to recognize their subordinate status and pay a tax, the jizya . Despite the reaction of some modern sentimentalists, there was little of generosity but much of pragmatism in these rules. By contrast, beyond the world of Islamic order, in the Dar al-harb (House of War), non-Islamic political structures and individuals were open to attack. All the world must recognize or embrace Islam through conversion or subjugation. Thus on the Muslim community was enjoined jihad , struggle. In classical Islamic theory, i.e. traditionally from the seventh and eighth centuries but possibly later, this took two forms, the greater ( al-jihad al-akbar ), the internal spiritual struggle to achieve personal purity, and the lesser ( al-jihad al-asghar ), the military struggle against infidels. Both were obligatory on able-bodied Muslims. Unlike Christian concepts of holy war, to which the Islamic jihad appears to have owed nothing, jihad was fundamental to the Faith, described by some as a sixth pillar of Islam. In theory, fighting was incumbent on all Muslims until the whole world had been subdued, but it was a spiritual as well as military exercise from the start, and a corporate not individual obligation.

In practice, after the first century of conquest, accommodation was regularly achieved across religious and political frontiers. Islam was not in a constant state of aggression against neighbours and was no more actively militant than their enemies. Continued, almost ritualized raiding across stable frontiers in Asia Minor or Spain was lent added intensity during the collapse of Frankish power and continued Byzantine impotence in the west in the ninth century, highlighted by the conquest of Sicily by 830 and pirate bases being established in Calabria and Provence. However, much Muslim warfare was internal. By the mid-tenth century separate caliphates had been established, that of the Umayyads at Cordoba in Spain was of long standing and reached a pinnacle of success in this century, ending it with raids deep into Christian territory under the command of the effective ruler of Cordoba, al-Mansur. The Fatimid caliphate of north Africa had annexed Egypt in 969, buoyed by its Shi’ite heresy, a religious as well as political challenge to the Abbasids of Baghdad. The tenth century also saw a revival of Byzantine military power. Nicephoras Phocas (963–9) regained Cyprus and Syrian Antioch; his successor, John Tzimisces (969–76), campaigned in northern Iraq (974) and, in 975, in Syria and northern Palestine, his propaganda possibly even offering the prospect of a recapture of the holy sites of Jerusalem.