Crusaders, p.1
Crusaders, page 1
CRUSADERS
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Summer of Blood: The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381
The Plantagenets: The Kings Who Made England
The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors
Magna Carta: The Making and Legacy of the Great Charter
Realm Divided: A Year in the Life of Plantagenet England
The Templars: The Rise and Fall of God’s Holy Warriors
The Colour of Time: A New History of the World 1850–1960
(with Marina Amaral)
CRUSADERS
An Epic History of the Wars
for the Holy Lands
DAN JONES
AN APOLLO BOOK
www.headofzeus.com
For Walter
χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά
First published in the UK in 2019 by Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © Dan Jones, 2019
The moral right of Dan Jones to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (HB): 9781781858882
ISBN (E): 9781781858875
Maps by Jamie Whyte
Cover design: Estuary English
Author photo: Peter Clark
Head of Zeus Ltd
5–8 Hardwick Street
London EC1R 4RG
WWW.HEADOFZEUS.COM
Contents
By the Same Author
Title Page
Dedication
Copyright
Epigraph
List of Maps
Introduction
PART I: TRIAL BY ORDEAL
1. The Count and the Imam
2. Poets and Party Kings
3. Empire Under Siege
4. Deus Vult!
5. The Preacher’s Tale
6. March of the Princes
7. The Longest Winter
8. Jerusalem
9. Dividing the Spoils
PART II: KINGDOM OF HEAVEN
10. Sigurd Jerusalemfarer
11. Fields of Blood
12. A New Knighthood
13. Melisende the Magnificent
14. The Swords of Our Fathers
15. Converted or Deleted
16. History Repeating
17. The Race for Egypt
18. Because of Our Sins
PART III: THE HARVEST OF THE EARTH
19. Lionesses and Lionhearts
20. Consumed by Fire
21. Enemies Within
22. The River of Paradise
23. Immutator Mundi
24. Khans and Kings
25. The Enemy From Hell
26. Fragments and Dreams
27. Brave New Worlds
Epilogue: Crusaders 2.0
Plate Section
APPENDICES
Appendix 1: Cast of Major Characters
Appendix 2: Kings and Queens of Jerusalem
Appendix 3: Popes
Appendix 4: Emperors
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
An Invitation from the Publisher
In those days men cared as much for furs as
they did for their immortal souls.
Adam of Bremen (c.1076)
List of Maps
1. Europe and the Holy Land after the First Crusade, c.1099
2. The Crusader States in the Twelfth Century
3. Progress of the Reconquista i
4. The First Crusaders’ March from Constantinople, 1097–99
5. The Siege of Antioch, 1097–98
6. The Siege of Jerusalem, June–July 1099
7. The Second Crusade, 1147–49
8. Pagan Tribes of the Baltic, c.1100
9. The Nile Delta during the Fifth Crusade, 1217–21
10. Mongols and Mamuluks, c.1260
Europe and the Holy Land after the First Crusade, c.1099
The Crusader States in the Twelfth Century
Progress of the Reconquista i
Introduction
An epic written in blood…
Shortly before Easter in the year 1188, an English archbishop of Canterbury went to Wales on a recruitment drive. Thousands of miles away, war had broken out in the eastern Mediterranean and the archbishop, whose name was Baldwin of Forde, had been tasked with recruiting several thousand able-bodied fighting men to join an army that was being deployed there.
It was, on the face of it, not an easy assignment. For those who decided to join up, the journey by land and sea to the east and back would take at least eighteen months. It would cost a lot of money. There was a high chance of shipwreck, robbery, ambush or death from disease long before the destination – the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem, in Palestine – was ever reached. The chances of coming home with much in the way of plunder were negligible. Indeed, the prospect of coming home at all was dauntingly slim.
The enemy commander – the Kurdish sultan of Egypt and Syria, Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, colloquially called Saladin – was highly capable and had already inflicted a series of devastating defeats on armies of the western Christians generically known as ‘the Franks’. The previous summer he had crushed a huge army in the field, imprisoned the king of Jerusalem, seized the holy relic of Christ’s cross, and evicted a Christian government from the city of Jerusalem. The only sure reward for participants in the war to take revenge on Saladin would be redeemed in the afterlife, where it was assumed that God would look favourably on participants, granting them a smoother, swifter entry into paradise.
Although in a religious age obsessed with tallying and remitting sin this was a more enticing offer than it might seem today, Baldwin nevertheless had his work cut out, as he and his entourage slogged through Wales from town to town: preaching, persuading and whipping up enthusiasm for a war against an enemy none of his audience had ever seen, in a land vanishingly few had never experienced outside their imaginations.
In a small town called Aberteifi, in west Wales, a young married couple reacted to Baldwin’s arrival by having a fight. The husband had decided he wanted to sign up for the crusade. His wife was adamant he was going nowhere. According to the writer Gerald of Wales, who travelled with Archbishop Baldwin and kept a vivid record of the journey (although he sadly omitted the couple’s names), the wife ‘held her husband fast by his cloak and belt, and publicly… prevented him from going to the archbishop’.1 They struggled and she won. But, wrote Gerald, her victory proved horribly short lived: ‘Three nights afterwards, she heard a terrible voice saying, “You have taken my servant away from me, therefore what you must love shall be taken away from you.”’
That evening, lying in bed, she accidentally rolled over in her sleep and smothered to death her infant son who was sharing her bed. It was a tragedy. It was also, she realized, an omen. Although by now Archbishop Baldwin had moved on, the distraught couple went to see their diocesan bishop to report the dreadful accident and beg forgiveness.
Only one solution presented itself. They all knew what it was. Those Christians who had agreed to leave to fight Saladin advertised their status as sworn, holy warriors in the army of Christ by stitching a cross made of cloth onto the arm of their clothes.
The wife sewed on her husband’s cross herself.
*
This is a book about the crusades: the wars fought by Christian-led, papal-sanctioned armies against the perceived enemies of Christ and the church of Rome during the Middle Ages. Its title, Crusaders, reflects both its theme and its approach. For a long time during the Middle Ages there was no single word to describe ‘the crusades’ as we have today come to think of them: a series of eight or nine major expeditions from western Europe to the Holy Land, supplemented by a series of other, tangentially connected wars fought from the sun-baked cities of the north African coast to the frozen forests of the Baltic region. Yet from the earliest days of the phenomenon there certainly was a word for those who participated. The men and women who took part in these penitential wars in the hope of spiritual salvation were known in Latin as crucesignati – those signed with the cross. In that sense, then, the idea of the crusader preceded the idea of the crusades, and that is one reason why I have preferred it here.
More importantly, however, the title Crusaders reflects the approach to storytelling that I have taken in this book. It is composed of a series of episodes featuring people who were involved in the crusades, arranged sequentially and chronologically to tell a tableau history that spans the period at large. The individuals whom I have charged with taking us on our journey are the ‘crusaders’ of the book’s title, and they are an ensemble cast who I hope, together, can tell us the story of crusading from the front line.
In choosing these crusaders I have deliberately cast my net wide. I have selected women and men, Christians of the eastern and western churches, Sunni and Shi’a Muslims, Arabs, Jews, Turks, Kurds, Syrians, Egyptians, Berbers and Mongols. There are people here from England, Wales, France, Scandinavia, Germany, Italy, Sicily, Spain, Portugal, the Balkans and north Africa. There is even a band of Vikings. Some have central parts to play, others mere cameos. But this is their story.
The result, taken as a whole, is an avowedly pluralist history of crusading. Historiographically, that is to say that it does not focus exclusively on the establishment, survival and collapse of the crusader states of Palestine and Syria and wars against Muslims in those regions. Rather, it places that central strand of the story in the context of the concurrent histories of official crusades fought on the Iberian peninsula, the Baltic, eastern Europe, southern France, Sicily and Anatolia, and unofficial, populist movements raised elsewhere. Narratively, it means that our story is carried along by a multitude of people, a collective who will together provide a kaleidoscope of intriguing and colourful perspectives on their shared age.
That, at any rate, is the aim. Of course, as I submit this book I am acutely aware of – and profoundly grateful for – the many excellent surveys of the crusades that have been written in recent years. Perhaps the greatest, despite its age, remains Sir Steven Runciman’s glorious three-volume chronicle, A History of the Crusades (1951–4); but more recently English-language readers have been also blessed by the publication of Christopher Tyerman’s God’s War: A New History of the Crusades (2006), Thomas Asbridge’s The Crusades: The War of the Holy Land (2010), Jonathan Phillips’s Holy Warriors: A Modern History of the Crusades (2010), the third edition of the late, great Jonathan Riley-Smith’s The Crusades: A History (2014) and Paul M. Cobb’s The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades (2014). All of these books are superb guides to the period and, although throughout the narrative here I have confined myself to quotations exclusively from primary sources, I have been deeply reassured to have these exemplary modern works of history on my shelves – alongside hundreds of other books and articles, both general and specialist, by other scholars. Without the work of generations of crusades historians past and present, this book would simply not have been possible.
Crusaders is presented in three sections. The first covers the period in which the many strands of thought, activity and warfare that influenced the crusading movement developed, from the 1060s onwards. It builds towards the astonishing story of the First Crusade and culminates with the fall of Jerusalem in July 1099.
The second part of the book picks up the story a few years later, at the start of the twelfth century. It traces the growth and development of the crusader states in Syria and Palestine, keeps an eye on the wars between Christian rulers and the Islamic powers in Spain (known as the Reconquista) and explores the spread of crusading beyond those two theatres into a new realm around the shore of the Baltic Sea. The narrative of this section of the book is anchored by two major crises: the loss of Edessa in 1144, which triggered the Second Crusade, and the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187, which provoked the Third.
The final part of the book charts the desperate efforts of western Christendom to win back Jerusalem in the first half of the thirteenth century, followed by the decline of the crusader states in the east after the rise of the Mongol and Mamluk empires. It also describes the dramatic expansion and politicization of crusading ideology and institutions during and after the papacy of Innocent III, and the process by which crusading was turned upon new enemies: inside and outside the church, real and imaginary. In keeping with its commitment to telling a story long and broad, Crusaders does not conclude in 1291 with the final collapse of the kingdom of Jerusalem, but in 1492, with the completion of the Reconquista and the transmission of crusading’s urges and energies west, to the New World. Lastly, a brief epilogue then sketches the survival and mutation of crusading memory up to the present day.
Each chapter of this book could be, and in most cases has been, a full-length study in itself. I hope the general reader will be inspired by what follows to delve deeper into the history of crusading, and those who have read more in this period will appreciate the approach I have taken to the material. As with all my books, I hope most of all that this is a story which will entertain as well as inform. For, as Sir Steven Runciman once wrote, ‘the romantic story of the Crusades was an epic written in blood’.2
So it was. And so it is. Let us begin.
Dan Jones
Staines-upon-Thames
Spring, 2019
PART I
Trial by Ordeal
1
The Count and the Imam
He perceived two means by which he would profit, one for his soul and the other for his material benefit…
Count Roger of Sicily lifted his leg and farted. ‘By the truth of my religion,’ he exclaimed, ‘there is more use in that than in what you have to say!’1
His advisors stood chastened – and a little perplexed. The count before them was in his late forties and salted to his bones with the experience of military campaigning in southern Italy and the islands of the central Mediterranean. As a young warrior he had been described by one flatterer as ‘tall and well-made, a most fluent speaker, shrewd in counsel, far-sighted in the planning of things to be done, cheerful and pleasant to everyone’.2 In middle age, he had hardened somewhat, and was not one to waste his words on fools.
The plan the advisors had recommended had seemed like a good one, as courtiers’ plans very often do, before they are shredded by the critiques of short-tempered potentates. Not far across the sea from Sicily – roughly 75 miles (120 km) at the closest point – lay the remains of what had in ancient times been called Carthage, afterwards the Roman province of Africa, and now, in the late eleventh century, Ifriqiya.* Its cities – including the capital Mahdia (al-Mahdiyya) on the coast and Kairouan (Qayrawan), inland, where a vast mosque and school had for many generations been frequented by the greatest philosophers and natural scientists in north Africa – were under the shaky command of a crumbling dynasty of Berber Muslims known as the Zirids. The countryside was controlled by various Arab Bedouin tribes sent from Egypt to drive the Zirids out. Political stability was collapsing. Here lay warm and fertile farmlands. There sat prosperous port towns. All ripe for the taking? Roger’s counsellors thought so, and they had therefore recommended to their testy overlord the proposal of a cousin whom one source names only as ‘Baldwin’.3
This Baldwin had come into possession of a great army of Christian soldiers and was casting around for somewhere godless to conquer. He had asked Roger’s blessing to come to Sicily and use it as a launch pad for an invasion of Ifriqiya. ‘I shall be a neighbour of yours,’ he had exclaimed, as though this were good news. But Roger of Sicily was not feeling neighbourly. Ifriqiya was undoubtedly ruled by various followers of Islam, he said, but those infidels happened to be sworn partners of the Sicilians in agreements that kept the peace and allowed for a rich exchange of goods in the island’s markets and ports. The last thing he wanted, he ranted to his gathered minions, was a cousin imposing on his hospitality, waging a reckless war that would disrupt Sicilian trade if it was successful and cost him a lot of money in military support if it failed.
Ifriqiya may indeed have been vulnerable, but if anyone was going to exploit that, it was going to be Roger himself. He had spent the last two and a half decades – almost his entire adult life – carving out his rule in the region, and it would have been a limp end indeed if he were now to put it at risk in pursuit of some harebrained scheme cooked up by a kinsman who had never troubled the soil of the island with his sweat.
If this Baldwin wanted to fight Muslims, said Roger, he would have to find a different part of the Mediterranean in which to go about his business. There were plenty of places he could name that would be preferable to Sicily’s back yard. He summoned Baldwin’s personal envoy to his presence and informed him of his decision. If his master were really serious, he said, then ‘the best way [to proceed] is to conquer Jerusalem’.4
And that is how it all began.
Roger, count of Sicily was eleventh-century Europe’s ultimate self-made man. He was born around the year 1040 as the youngest of twelve sons sired by a minor nobleman from Normandy called Tancred of Hauteville. Given the protocols of inheritance, being born even as a second son implied a lifelong burden of fortune-hunting rather than easy inheritance: to have eleven brothers ahead of you was a disaster. But by the end of the century the Normans had begun to conquer their way around western Europe. They took command of Saxon England in 1066. At the same time, southern Italy fell under their gaze. Opportunities may have been limited for younger sons within Normandy itself, but for anyone prepared to travel, opportunity abounded. As a young man, therefore, Roger had left his homelands in what is now north-west France and set out for territory that had already called many of his kinsmen and countrymen: the rich but unstable southern Italian regions of Calabria and Apulia.
