Chapter 2
For seven hundred years European folk memory has ringed the name of Saladin with a double aura of martial brilliance and soft-toned chivalry. In his book Islam and the West: the making of an Image, N. A. Daniel wrote, ‘The legend of the true Saladin has been known over a wider area and for a longer time than any figure in western memory than perhaps St Francis.’ That claim really is rather a startling one. Yet still more remarkable than the wide currency of his name is his good reputation. After all, by destroying the achievements of the First Crusade and conquering again for Islam the holy city less than a century after it had been won for Christendom, he struck a harder blow at Europe’s self-esteem than any Asian warrior since Attila the Hun. Nevertheless, within years of his death, romance and rumour in the West were claiming that there were great men in Europe who could trace their ancestry from the amours of the famous sultan. Centuries later, in his Notable History of the Saracens, published in London in 1575, Thomas Newton described the hero of Islam as ‘a man of surpassing and politic wit, stoute valyant and of nature frank and liberal. A man very prudent and wise, one for excellent actes, moderation and valiantness greatly renowned.’
Just why Saladin, although he decisively trounced Christian armies and drove them from the Holy Places, has never been pigeon-holed with the other monsters of nursery history is one of the many intriguing facts about the man. The encounter between Christians and their enemies was close and continuing. A number of Europeans met Saladin and many more saw his conduct of affairs at close quarters. They had fine opportunities for verifying the hoary legends of the bestiality of Muhammad and his followers. In fact European attitudes to him switched during his lifetime from stereotyped abuse to poorly concealed eulogy.
Perhaps it was merely a matter of saving face. Europe could not ignore the fact of defeat, and some Christians thought it well deserved. Muslims naturally believed that the Franks had been humiliated by the will of God for their wickedness and corruption and the view is echoed in Europe. From the south of France, friars reported that as they preached their open-air sermons bystanders ostentatiously gave alms to beggars on the fringes of the congregation with the words: ‘Take this in the name of Muhammad for he is more powerful than Christ.’
In fact voices had been raised against the Crusading movement for some time before the loss of the kingdom. Summing up the Second Crusade of 1147–8, the anonymous author of the Annales Herbipolenses, writing in Würzburg, concluded that the enterprise had been directly inspired by the devil. But the writer also probed the motives of the Crusaders and found them sadly inadequate. ‘With difficulty, a few could have been found who … were kindled by love of Divine Majesty.’ But many more, he went on, only simulated religious zeal while they hurried off to join the army for a variety of discreditable reasons. ‘Some, eager for novelty, went for the sake merely of learning about strange lands; others, driven by want and suffering from hardship at home, were ready to fight not only against the enemies of the Cross of Christ but even their fellow Christians, if this seemed to offer a chance of plunder. Others were weighed down by debt or thought to evade the service they owed their lords while some were even known criminals flying from the deserved penalties of their crimes.’
No doubt it was all very reprehensible, but there were respectable authorities to support their attitude. Fulcher of Chartres, the historian of the First Crusade had written: ‘Every day our relations and friends follow us willingly, abandoning whatever they possessed in the West. For those who were poor there, God has made rich here. Those who had a few pence there have numberless gold pieces here; he who had a village there, possesses, with God as giver, a whole town here. Why then return to the West when the East suits us so well?’
Being a churchman Fulcher no doubt felt it right to mention the name of God from time to time, but without overstraining the imagination one can almost hear the explosion of disgust that this passage must have touched off in the library at Würzburg. It was not only the more honest Christian observers who commented on these wordly ambitions, their Muslim enemies recognised the facts easily enough.
Before beginning the siege of Lisbon in the year of 1147, the Anglo-Flemish leaders called on the Moorish commander of the town to capitulate. In his speech rejecting his enemies’ demand he poured scorn on the high-sounding principles that they pretended to. ‘By calling your ambition zeal for righteousness, you misrepresent vices as virtues,’ he cried from the walls. ‘It is not the want of possessions but ambition of the mind that drives you on.’
The Crusades foreshadow the European imperial impulse, ‘the ambition of the mind’, that began in the fifteenth century. But in this first venture Europe had to retire before an opponent that was militarily superior and materially more advanced. The Muslims classed the Franks quite simply as barbarians. At the end of the eleventh century European culture could offer little in the arts, in science, or in scholarship to match the sophisticated and mature civilisation of the Abbasid caliphate. To us it seems obvious that this once great culture was due to be superseded, but to contemporary Arabs it was by no means obvious. What was quite apparent was that the rough, tough soldiers of Christ who came out of the West were neither literate, courtly nor humane. The barbaric sack of Jerusalem by the Crusaders brought a new dimension to warfare in the Middle East. For three days the Christian army had run amuck; sober eye-witnesses recalled wading through streets up to the knees in blood and severed human remains. It would require a powerful act of imagination for an Arab to treat these newcomers as civilised.
But as the Frankish settlement in Palestine consolidated itself, and as the newcomers increasingly adapted themselves to the facts of their new situation, Frankish and Muslim rulers came to look on each other in political terms first, with religion generally a poor second. Even the original crusading army had been divided by the self-interested policies of ambitious men. But while the simple overriding objective was the conquest of Jerusalem conflict had remained more or less submerged. However, during the twelfth century Palestine and western Syria were divided between four Christian rulers. To the north-east the County of Edessa lying across the upper Euphrates encompassed some ten thousand square miles of what is now Turkey. West and south of it was the Principality of Antioch called after its capital, now Antakya in Turkey. To the east it bordered the lands of the Muslim ruler of Aleppo while southwards it shared a frontier with the third Frankish state, the County of Tripoli. Taking its name from its capital city it stretched about a hundred miles along the coast to Jabala in the south, occupying the modern Syrian coastal province of Latakia and the northern territory of modern Lebanon. Across its borders it faced the Muslim Arab rulers of Shaiza, Hamah and, most important, Homs. Standing sentinel against these was the site known as the Castle of the Kurds which the Knights of the Hospital refortified as the seemingly impregnable castle of Krak des Chevaliers. South from Tripoli lay the kingdom of Jerusalem. Its southern frontier with Egypt, from the gulf of Aqaba and the Gaza strip, was almost identical with the frontier established by the State of Israel in 1948, but eastwards the kingdom of Jerusalem extended beyond the Dead Sea to Petra and Karak. It included the whole of the territories west of the river Jordan now disputed between the Israelis and the Jordanians. Northwards the kingdom enclosed the southern half of modern Lebanon with the Lebanese port of Beirut as its northernmost city. These frontiers were achieved during the first twenty years of the twelfth century by and large, thanks to the momentum of the Crusade and the disunity of the Muslims. The first state to suffer from the Muslim reaction was Edessa. After barely half a century it was overwhelmed by forces from the great city of Mosul in northern Iraq. Its capture in 1144 sent shock waves across Christian Europe and prompted the mobilisation of the Second Crusade. This disastrous expedition did nothing to stop the gradual recrudescence of Muslim power and the remaining Frankish states were under growing pressure. Aleppo, Shaizar, Hamah, Homs and eventually Damascus became engrossed in the war to expel the Franks. Southwards, Egypt, governed by the Fatimid caliphs and once supreme throughout the Syrian coastlands, still mounted threatening expeditions against the kings at Jerusalem. Sometimes the kings had to fend off skirmishing attacks from the Bedouin of the Jordan desert.
Ancient traditions complicated society and religion within the new Christian states. Before the explosion of Islam in the seventh century, the region had been within the frontiers of the Byzantine empire and owed allegiance to the rites of the Eastern Church. In the centuries since the Arab occupation the population had been allowed freedom of worship on the payment of the standard tax levied on unbelievers. Many found the intolerant single-mindedness of the Frankish rulers an unwelcome change from modus vivendithe worked out with the pragmatic Islamic rulers of former times. The Latin Church moved into the organisational structure of the former Eastern Orthodox Church. The Patriarchs of Antioch and Jerusalem, once great dignitaries of the Eastern Church, now owed allegiance to Rome; the Holy Places in Jerusalem were in the custody of Catholic priests and the churches in Jerusalem celebrated Catholic rites. Many native Christians belonged to the Jacobite Church of Syria. Its doctrine on the single divine nature of Christ was considered heretical by Latins and Orthodox alike and the language of its liturgy was ancient Syriac. The other chief native Churches were the Armenian Church and the Maronite Church, which held that although the nature of Christ was dual – both human and divine – it was governed by but a single divine will. These groups, all of which survive to this day, were more angered by the supremacy of the Catholic Church than they had been by the Muslim. They were potential fifth columnists should the Franks ever find themselves under pressure.
As the century advanced a growing number of the intruders themselves came to terms with the ancient civilisation they had disturbed. Many learnt to speak Arabic, dressed in eastern fashion – if only because such dress was more practicable than European fashions in the climate – and revelled in the luxuries of eastern hygiene and cooking. Visitors from Europe looked on them askance just as during the nineteenth century members of the British imperial administration frowned on those of their colleagues who ‘went native’.
Such visitors included thousands of pilgrims to the Holy Places, some of whom stayed on for a year or two to fight in the armies of the kingdom. In fact the Christians depended heavily on manpower from Europe, since the climate, exotic diseases, as well as the wastage of war, drastically arrested the natural growth of the population. It was in this situation that the orders of the Temple and the Hospital, founded to provide accommodation and medical care for pilgrims to the Holy Places, rapidly grew into military orders. In fact the Temple had from its beginnings undertaken to protect the traffic on the roads from brigands and marauding bands of Muslims. The orders maintained discipline and their esprit de corps by vows and a life-style modelled on the obedience and vocation of the monastery. These soldiers of Christ soon became the crack troops of the kingdom of Jerusalem. They also became, thanks to vast endowments from Europe, the richest institutions in Frankish Palestine.
With the advantage of hindsight we can see that the expulsion of the Franks from Palestine was only a matter of time. The time it took for their Muslim enemies to find a leader under whom they could unite. But, so strong is the inevitability of the present, so strong is the belief of most people that things will always remain much as they are, and so engrossing is the day-to-day business of one’s own life and ambitions, that very few among the Franks themselves regarded the Christian states in the Middle East as historical anomalies. Knowing nothing about the politics of the land before their arrival they assumed reasonably enough that the divided rule of city by city and the rivalries of the various potentates was a permanent feature. They may have been aware of the large claims to universal authority made by the caliphs at Baghdad, but then there were similar claims made on behalf of the German emperor who, as the self-styled heir of Rome, was supposed to be the overlord of even the kings of France and England. In any case most of the Crusaders were themselves the feudal subordinates of the French king and so were quite familiar with a polity headed by a ruler of large theoretical authority but little practical power. The counts of Flanders and the dukes of Burgundy and Aquitaine all owed allegiance to Paris but ran their affairs independently. Their cousins who joined the First Crusade discovered that even beyond the remote frontiers of Christendom things were run on much the same lines. Just as the Christian kings of England and France were prepared to fight one another for gain so were the Muslim rulers of Damascus or Aleppo. The newcomers were soon allying themselves to suit their political advantage.
The king of Jerusalem claimed supremacy over the other Christian states in the Middle East, over Edessa, Antioch and Tripoli. He found it an authority hard to exert. Edessa fell to the Infidel at least in part because her coreligionists were unable or unwilling to come to her aid. Even within the kingdom itself rivalry and insubordination ran deep. The vast estates of the Templars and the Hospitallers were outside the royal control, being endowments to a spiritual corporation. As for the knights themselves, the finest soldiers in Palestine, they jealously guarded their independence of action and could not be relied upon to take orders of the king as high commander.
The divisions within the Christian lands were matched at first by the rivalries in Islam. The two traditional centres of Muslim authority in the Middle East were Baghdad and Cairo. Baghdad, a capital of learning and culture, had been founded by the Abbasid caliphs who during the eighth and ninth centuries had claimed supremacy throughout the Muslim world. That power had declined but the claims remained. They rested not only in a once real political and military force but also in religion, for the Abbasids headed the orthodox or Sunnite branch of Islam. In the tenth century their weakened position had come under heavy challenge when the Shi‘ite sect, the chief rival to Sunnite orthodoxy, found powerful champions in a North African dynasty who rapidly established their power along the whole North African coast, and then in 973, after an easy conquest of Egypt, set up their capital at the new city and palace complex of Cairo. Tracing their descent from Fatima, daughter of Muhammad, these Shi‘ite Fatimid rulers claimed to be in the true line of succession of the prophet, and the contest between them and the heirs to the Abbasid caliphate overshadowed the politics of the Middle East for the next two centuries.
In modern terms, it was a power struggle between Iraq and Egypt for ultimate hegemony in the heartlands of Islam; control of Palestine was the focus. Seen from Baghdad, Saladin and his two great predecessors Nur-ad-Din and Zengi were the agents of orthodoxy in its age-long attempt to crush the usurping Fatimids. In Cairo the objective was to recover complete control of the Syrian coast as a preliminary to a drive on Baghdad. Palestine was the cockpit of war where the intrusion of the Franks was a regrettable diversion; it and north-western Syria constituted a power vacuum in which the rulers of Aleppo, Homs and Damascus battled for advantage, disregarding the great powers – the Christian states soon joined them. They had a common interest in opposing the encroachments of the ‘great powers’ and the pattern of alliance often reflected this. Saladin’s predecessors had gradually forced unity on the lesser Muslim potentates of the Syrio-Palestine system; when in the 1170s he successfully took control of Egypt and yoked it to the new alliance to the north the outlook for the kingdom of Jerusalem was black.
Saladin’s religion was of course central to his life. His biographer Baha ad-Din noted that one of the Hadith, the canonical Traditions, attributed these words to the Prophet: ‘There are five pillars of Islam: the affirmation that there is no god but God; prayer; the paying of the legal tithe; the fast of Ramadan; and the Pilgrimage to God’s Sacred House (at Mecca).’ The overriding article of faith is the belief in God as the only creator and lord of the universe, absolute in power, knowledge, glory and perfection, and in his single indivisible nature. It is an uncompromising monotheism; which labelled the Christian belief in the Trinity as polytheistic. Secondly, the Muslim believes in the angels of God, immaculate beings and created from light, below them the Jinn created from smokeless fire, and in devils which are evil Jinn. Third comes belief in the prophets and apostles of God. In order of time these are Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad. Christ holds an honoured place. The greatest prophet before Muhammad, he is believed to have been born of a virgin and a spirit proceeding from God but not sharing in his nature and certainly not to be called the son of God. His revelation has been succeeded by Muhammad who is seen as the last and greatest of the prophets and the most perfect of all God’s creatures. Belief in the scriptures of God is the fourth item of faith. These include the first five books of Moses, the Psalms of David and the Gospels, though all these are thought to have been corrupted and degraded from their original inspiration. In any case they are all superseded by the Koran which is the uncreated word of God proceeding directly from him through the mouthpiece of his prophet (the very word koran means recitation). It is not surprising in view of this that the actual text of the Koran has always been held in the greatest reverence by Muslims. The copying of the text is a traditional exercise of piety and the finest examples of Islamic calligraphy are to be found in Korans copied by scholars and cultured laymen. Where the Christians decorated their churches with the statues of saints and earned thereby the additional jibe of idolaters, the mosques of the faithful were embellished with tiles and mosaics bearing inscriptions from the text of the Holy Book.
Fifthly, the Muslim believes in the resurrection of the dead and the Day of Judgement and in a future life of rewards and punishments. But though evil-doers will be punished in the afterlife all Muslims can expect, eventually, to enter a state of happiness. This unbelievers can never hope for. Like Christianity, then, Islam is an exclusive religion and this fact alone does much to explain the bitter conflict between the two. The other great article of faith is in the predestination by God of all events both good and evil. The development of the jihad in the conflict in Palestine and its part in the career of Saladin is so important that it will be dealt with at length in Chapter 4.
Born in the late sixth century of the Christian era, in Mecca, a city on the fringes of the late Roman world and with a large Jewish population, Muhammad was inevitably influenced by the two great religions that had preceded him. Like Christians, Muslims believe that the revelation of their prophet supersedes what has gone before. Like Christians too, they hold a faith that has much in common with what went before. To the medieval mind the similarities between Islam and Christianity were a cause of scandal leading to the view that Muhammad was a renegade heretic from the Church and a vile perverter of the true faith. It becomes a little more possible to understand the heat and the fury that goaded the passions of enthusiasts on either side of the religious divide. It is to Saladin’s credit that while his commitment to his faith was total it never blinded him to the fact that his opponents were men and the possibility that they might, against all the evidence, be men of honour. For while he held to his oath once it had been pledged, no matter to whom, the Christians made no scruple about breaking their word if it had been given to the infidel.
Besides the articles of the faith the Muslim had also four chief duties. These were the obligation to observe the five daily hours of prayer; to give alms to the poor at least once a year and at least a fortieth part of his wealth; to fast during the hours of daylight in the month of Ramadan, and, if possible, to make the pilgrimage to Mecca – the Hajj – at least once in his life. Nur-ad-Din, Aiyub, Shirkuh: all had gone. As to the Ramadan fast, religious dispensation was allowed during illness or time of war. Saladin’s spare frame and tired features testified to his frail constitution, while war-making in the cause of Islam was almost his way of life. Even so, his secretaries had a standing instruction to keep a tally of fasting days he missed, so that the arrears might be made good at the first opportunity.
It weighed heavily with Saladin, during the closing years of his life, that he had never made the pilgrimage. But in all other respects he was a model of the faith from that day when, in his thirty-third year, he emerged as the master of Egypt and began his career as the champion of Islam. The glory of the capture of Jerusalem was his, but the triumph had been prepared for by his great predecessors Zengi and Nur-ad-Din.