Barbarian" Crusaders -- A Second Look

Two weeks ago I laid out several of the popular misconceptions about the crusades and made a rebuttal. Today I want to look more closely at the persistent myth that the crusaders were "less civilized" than their Muslim opponents.

The crusaders are widely portrayed as "barbarians" today primarily because they are seen as brutal aggressors against "peace-loving, tolerant, and highly sophisticated" Arab societies in the Middle East. This ignores the fact that the Arabs had taken the Holy Land by the sword, not with sweet words, persuasion, or peaceful tolerance. And that expansion continued far beyond the Holy Land: 

Muslim armies attacked Constantinople 678. In 698 the Christian city of Carthage fell to the sword of Islam. In 713 Corsica was conquered. By 720 the Muslim invasion of Spain was nearly complete. In 732 an invading Muslim army almost reached the Loire before it was crushed by the Franks under Charles Martel and pushed back behind the Pyrenees. In 827 Muslim armies started the conquest of Sicily, and ten years later landed in Italy. In 846 Rome was attacked and St. Peter's sacked by Muslim armies. In 934 Genoa was sacked. In 997 the Muslims sacked Santiago de Compostella, the most important pilgrimage church in the West. In 1009 the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, built by the Byzantines in the reign of Constantine the Great (306 – 337), was utterly destroyed.

Meanwhile, however, the Muslims had divided into Shiites and Sunnis and engaged in bloody wars in which they murdered, raped, pillaged and burned rival Muslim cities. Zengi, atabeg of Mosul, for example, according to a Muslim source ordered the “pillaging, slaying, capturing, ravishing and looting” of Edessa, but was feared in Damascus because of “his exceptionally cruel and treacherous behavior” – to his co-religionists. The great “chivalrous” Saladin spent more of his career fighting his fellow Sunni Muslims than he did fighting the Christians.

Attempts to depict the crusaders as illiterate brutes lacking in cultural accomplishments also miss the mark. The “unwashed masses” might not have been very cultivated—but nor were the peasants and common soldiers of the Byzantine Empire or the Turks.  The upper classes in 11^th century Europe, on the other hand, had already started to develop arts and architecture to a high degree of sophistication as manuscripts, artifacts and the architectural record shows. Literacy may have been confined to an elite and fostered mostly by the clergy, but the leaders of the crusade themselves were highly educated. (And, by the way, at this time classical Greek scholars had been re-discovered and were being studied in the West.) Furthermore, literacy was not exactly universal in the Byzantine and Muslim worlds either. While it is fair to say that in certain fields (mathematics and astronomy) the Muslim world was more advanced than Western Europe, in other fields (shipbuilding, transportation and agricultural technology), the West was more developed.  As earlier entries have stressed, medicine in the West was on about par with the East, not hopelessly more backward as so often portrayed.



However, two features of Western European feudal society set it apart from the East into which the crusaders came so suddenly and unexpectedly at the end of the 11^th century. 

First was the decentralized system of government based on complex, feudal relationships. Both the Byzantine and the Muslim world in this period were intensely hierarchical societies in which the Emperor (in the one) and the Caliph (in the other) theoretically held supreme and absolute control over his subjects. To be sure, reality looked slightly different.  By the end of the tenth century the Syrian Caliphs were virtual prisoners of the Abbasid dynasty, and changed masters when the Seljuk Turks captured Baghdad in 1055.  Thereafter they were puppets of the Selkjuk sultans, while the Fatimid Caliphs were at the mercy of their viziers. 

But whether the theoretically absolute rulers wielded actual power or not, their powerful “protectors” always ruled in their name; they considered – and called themselves – slaves of their masters. Western feudalism, in which kings were little more than the “first among equals,” was utterly alien to the Eastern mentality, and so was the outspokenness and (from the Easter perspective) impudence of vassals. The Eastern elites saw the inherent dangers of such a fluid system and associated it with primitive tribal structures. Yet it was exactly these feudal kingdoms that gradually devolved power to ever wider segments of the population until (through a series of constitutional crises) they eventually developed into modern democracies. Meanwhile, the Eastern states remained mired in autocracy.

The other feature of Western European society that the Muslims (though not the Byzantines) found disgusting and incomprehensible was the presence of women in public life. The fact that women had names and faces that were known outside the family circle was viewed as immoral and dishonorable (much the way the Athenians viewed Spartan women) by the Muslims of the 12th and 13th centuries. The fact that women not only had names and faces, but a voice in civic affairs and could play a role in public life including controlling and bequeathing wealth and influencing politics was even more offensive. Yet modern developmental research shows a strong correlation between societies that empower women and development. Societies that insist on muzzling and oppressing half their population are nowadays considered less “civilized.”

 

Whether you view the crusaders or the Saracens as more civilized depends on how you view democracy and womens’ rights. And modern commentators who feel compelled to “apologize” for the crusades are either utterly ignorant of the issues at stake and the comparative cultures of the antagonists—or implicitly reject the very Western values they allegedly defend. 

In my three part biography of Balian d'Ibelin I endeavor to portray the crusader society as accurately as possible.

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Clash of Cultures: Crusaders vs the Crusader States

Acre, the commercial heart of the crusader states, where the clash of culture often occurred.

Last week I described some of the urban architecture in the crusader states that inspired admiration — but also envy — on the part of visitors from the West. Throughout the existence of the crusader states, pilgrims from the West flocked to the Holy Land, some in search of salvation, some simply “sight-seeing,” and some as “armed pilgrims” to offer their sword (or bow or axe) in the defense of the Christian territories. Many of these pilgrims wrote accounts of their travels, and many chroniclers in the West, whether they had personally been there or not, included impressions of the Holy Land obtained second (or third, or fourth) hand from these travellers in their works. From the mid-12^th century on, a hefty strain of critique and censure of the settlers in “Outremer” runs through many of these works. Each defeat, each unsuccessful crusade, was routinely attributed to the sins of those involved: that is the crusaders and the residents of the Holy Land.

Medieval Depiction of a Godfrey de Bouillon, the first pious and devout Ruler of Jerusalem,
often contrasted to the later "degenerate" kings.

By the Third Crusade Westerners clearly viewed the residents of Outremer with suspicion. No previous set-back was comparable to the loss of the entire kingdom, including, obviously, the most sacred site of all, the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. Although men flocked to take the cross and the largest armies led by the most prominent rulers of the age set out on the Third Crusade, their objective was to rescue the Holy Land — not the kingdom or people who had occupied the Holy Land since the First Crusade. On the contrary, most of the crusaders appear to have blamed the residents of Outremer collectively (rather than just Guy de Lusignan personally) for losing the Holy Land. These people were at the latest by this time given the derisive name of poulain, which derives from the French for foal and imputed mixed blood. They were viewed as the sinners to blame for the catastrophe, which the (by inference) virtuous men from the West now needed to rectify.

Crusaders

These were the beliefs held before setting out on crusade, but they were reinforced by confrontation with life in Outremer.

The first problem was the widespread use of stone building materials, something that was still pretty much a luxury in the West. The extensive use of stone, therefore, made the cities of Outremer appear exotic to the pilgrim arriving by sea before he or she even set foot on land.  Admittedly, those coming by land would have already adjusted to the use of stone and brick. Still, the physical differences in the architecture and the heat of the summer sun (most pilgrims came in the spring and departed in the fall), undoubtedly created a sense of being in a very different world, and most people are suspicious of things that seem very different from home.

White Limestone and Palms -- so different from Northern Europe

The second problem, of course, was that the majority of the natives (Orthodox Christians, Jews and Muslims) dressed in “oriental” styles. Although the Latin elites still followed Western fashion for the most part, the climate alone dictated some adaptation of Western clothing. In temperatures approaching 40 degrees Centigrade (100 degrees Fahrenheit), it was unthinkable to wear the heavy furs and wools, or the layers of clothing common in the West. While Latin women never adopted “the veil” in the Arab tradition of black robes completely concealing a woman’s figure including arms and face, Latin women would certainly have protected their faces from the ravages of the Palestinian sun with sheer silks, probably short enough to be thrown back over their head when indoors.  More shocking to the new-comers, however, the very same fashions if worn in gauze and silk rather than wool and linen would have resulted in gowns that clung and revealed more of the female figure. Meanwhile, while neither knights nor sergeants went around in turbans and kaftans (as some modern writers would have you believe), again the fabrics used for shirts, tunics, hose and surcoats would have been considerably lighter and sheerer than fabrics common in the West. Easy access to some of the more powerful dyes (saffron for yellow, the sea snails (porphyra) for purple, etc.) may have made these clothes brighter and more vivid as well. The result was undoubtedly a somewhat mind-boggling mixture of styles and colors that seemed extravagant and exotic to the newcomer.

Hollywood's Interpretation of Mixed Styles and Opulence in the Crusader Sates
Sibylla of Jerusalem as depicted in "The Kingdom of Heaven"

The third problem was the discovery that the majority of the population in Outremer, including the Orthodox Christian natives, spoke Arabic. Regardless of religion, this was the lingua-franca of Outremer, used by merchants across the region alongside Greek. The poulains born in Outremer, living side-by-side with Arabic speaking neighbors in the cities, trading with Arabic-speaking shopkeepers, or even lords dealing with Arab-speaking tenants and servants all had to acquire a degree of competency in Arabic just to conduct daily business.  To more recent arrivals this command of the “infidel's” language smacked of treason. The fact that many Latin Christians, who had come out as crusaders, later married Arabic- or Greek-speaking women reinforced the impression of ambiguous loyalty on the part of the poulains. At a minimum, it created suspicion simply because the newcomers could not hope to understand Arabic based on an understanding of Latin, the lingua-franca of the West.

Church Art was particularly influence by Byzantine traditions and mosaics, for example, were more common.

This suspicion about the loyalty of the residents of the crusader states had been reinforced over the decades leading up to the Third Crusade by a series of truces the Kings of Jerusalem had made with their Muslim counterparts. While the residents in the crusader states recognized the sheer tactical utility of periodic truces and pauses in the fighting, newly arrived crusaders were often appalled to think they had come so far to fight the Saracens, only to be told:  “Oh, well, thanks for coming, but at the moment we have a truce and aren’t fighting the Saracens, we're trading with them instead.” Such armed pilgrims returned home embittered and told stories about how the poulains had “sold out” to the Saracens.

Another source of friction between Western visitors and permanent residents of the crusader states was the apparent “wealth” of the natives. As early as 1125, Fulcher of Chartres, one of the chroniclers of the First Crusade, had written that in the crusader states “he who was poor [at home in the West] attains riches here. He who had no more than a few deniers finds himself here in possession of a fortune. He who owned not so much as one village finds himself, by God’s grace, the lord of a city.” (Cited in Bartlett, Downfall of the Crusader Kingdom, p. 189.) Fulcher was trying to recruit settlers, and was doubtless exaggerating, but his claims seemed to match what visitors encountered.

Because the Latin Christians in the crusader states were integrated into the upper and middle levels of society while the very bottom rungs were filled by native Christians or Muslims, travelers to the crusader states from the West was more likely to encounter and interact with men and women from a higher strata of society.  Furthermore, because items that were outrageously expensive in the West were produced in the crusader states (silk, glass, sugar, citrus fruits, pomegranates) these “luxury” items were accessible to people much farther down the social scale than in the West. Visitors were undoubtedly aghast to find common laborers and soldiers enjoying lemons and sugar, or wearing, if not pure silk, some of the mixed textiles that combined silk with cotton or linen.

This glass and enamel cup is believed to originate from the crusader states.

And then there was the issue of bathing. Not that bathing was not an integral part of Western culture in this period; it was. But in the West bathing was considerably more difficult and less convenient, at least during the winter months when a bath could only be enjoyed if the water was first heated up. Furthermore, for the upper classes, bathing was a private affair — a tub carried up to a bedchamber, filled with buckets of water hauled there by servants, and attended upon by a wife, daughter or squire. In the crusader states the public bath-houses of the Greeks and Romans had been taken over, rebuilt and supplemented by those of the Arabs and Turks. Bathing was not only easier and cheaper in a climate where cooler was better most of the time, bathing was also a public affair with professional bath attendants rather than retainers and family in attendance. The public baths in the tradition of the Greeks, Romans and Turks included massages with fragrant oils rubbed into the skin. All of this smelled, particularly clerics, like “dins of iniquity” reminiscent of Jezebel, Salome and the Queen of Sheba.

A 19th Century -- equally erroneous - depiction of a Turkish bath that reflects the same misconception about the mixing of sex with cleanliness.

Last but not least, the culture of West Europeans clashed with the culture of the crusader states because the crusader states were heavily urbanized and cosmopolitan at a time when most Western kingdoms were still predominantly agricultural and parochial. The poulains had little choice but to be tolerant of different customs, clothes, foods and even religions because they were surrounded by these things. To survive they traded with Cairo and Damascus, Aleppo and Constantinople. Jews were allowed to live throughout the kingdom except in Jerusalem itself. Muslims likewise lived, and were allowed to follow their religion, across the kingdom, again with the exception of Jerusalem itself. Muslims even had the right to the haj in some cities such as Nablus. Although taxed more heavily, neither Muslims nor Jews were subject to persecution, and some enjoyed wealth and administrative power. This was quite simply because poulains, who never made up more than 20% of the population, could not afford bigotry in any regard. Yet that very tolerance struck many newcomers as near-heresy. It was a short step from being scandalized at poulain tolerance and jealous of the poulain wealth to seeing in the poulains the sinners to blame for all the disasters that had befallen the Holy Land — reinforcing all the prejudices which with the crusaders had sailed from the West.

My novels set in the crusader kingdoms show Outremer through the eyes of the poulains rather than the crusaders:

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Crusaders and Chivalry

The crusaders have often been accused of barbarism — starting with the Byzantine princess Anna Comnena and more recently by 19^th and 20^th century historians, not to mention President Obama. Yet the crusaders viewed themselves as both civilized and virtuous. They, like the crusades themselves, were a product of one of the great civilizing movements of the medieval period: chivalry. To understand the crusaders, it is essential to understand that their religious faith was Roman Catholicism, but their secular faith was chivalry.  So just what was “chivalry”?

The biographer of William Marshal, one of the most famous knights of the late 12^th and early 13^th century — often held up as the personification of chivalry — answered the question as follows:

So strong a thing,

and of such hardihood,

and so costly in learning,

that a wicked man or low

dare not undertake it.

That certainly conjures up images of the knights in search of the Holy Grail 

— but does little to explain the crusades or the crusaders. Based on the historical sources, including medieval handbooks on chivalry, literature and biographies, what follows is a more prosaic explanation:

Chivalry evolved out of the military and literary traditions of antiquity, and emerged at the beginning of the High Middle Ages as a concept that rapidly came to dominate the ethos and identity of the nobility. Chivalry is inextricably tied to knighthood, a phenomenon distinct to Europe in the Middle Ages. There have been cavalrymen in many different ages and societies, both before and after the High Middle Ages, but the cult of knighthood, including a special dubbing ceremony and a code of ethics, exists only in the Age of Chivalry.

Chivalry was always an ideal. It defined the way a knight was supposed to behave. No one in the Middle Ages seriously expected every knight to live up that ideal all of the time. Even the heroes of chivalric romances usually fell short of the ideal at least some of the time – and many only achieved their goal and glory when they overcame the baser instincts or their natural shortcomings to live, however briefly, like “perfect, gentle knights.”

Chivalry was a code of behavior that young men were supposed to aspire to – not already have. The code was articulated and passed on to youths in the form of romances and poems lionizing the chivalrous deeds of fictional heroes. It was also recorded in the biographies of historical personages viewed as examples of chivalry, from William Marshal to Geoffrey de Charney and Edward, the Black Prince. Finally, there were a number of textbooks or handbooks that attempted to codify the essence of chivalry.

So what defined chivalry?

First and foremost, a knight was supposed to uphold justice by protecting the weak, particularly widows, orphans, and the Church. This is why it was so intimately intertwined with the Crusades. No knight could show his devotion to the Church more completely than by abandoning his secular interests to fight for the Holy Land. This is why protection of pilgrims was the primary mission of the Knights Templar, when they were founded. It is why protecting and providing care for the sick and infirm was the core function of the Knights Hospitaller. Chivalry gave knights — noble fighting men — a role that was profoundly Christian in nature and it was this Christian element that made chivalry utterly different from earlier warrior cults that stressed courage, strength and prowess at arms for their own sake. Achilles, remember, didn’t fight for any cause but his own fame, and the same was true of Norse and Germanic heroes before the advent of chivalry.

Second, while the monk-knights of the militant orders devoted their entire lives to the defense of the Church and others in a spirit of humility, secular knights were supposed to pursue a permanent quest for honor and glory, sometimes translated as “nobility.” 

It was in this secular context that the troubadours introduced for the first time the notion that “a man could become more noble through love.” Thus love for a lady became a central – if not the central – concept of chivalry, particularly in literature.

Notably, the chivalric notion of love was that it must be mutual, voluntary, and exclusive – on both sides. It could occur between husband and wife – and many of the romances such as Erec et Enide by Chrétien de Troyes or Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival revolve in part or in whole around the love of a married couple. But the tradition of the troubadours put love for another man’s wife on an equal footing with love for one’s own – provided the lady returned the sentiment. The most famous of all adulterous lovers in the age of chivalry were, of course, Lancelot and Guinevere, closely followed by Tristan and Iseult.

Likewise noteworthy in a feudal world was the fact that the lover and the beloved were supposed to be valued not for their social status or their wealth, but for their personal virtues, albeit only within the band of society that was “noble.” By definition, the heroes of chivalry are knights, and their ladies are just that: ladies. Stories about peasants, priests, and merchants are simply not part of the genre, any more than lusting after a serving “wench” qualifies as “love” in the chivalric tradition. But within the chivalric class, a lady was to be loved and respected for her beauty, her graces, and her wisdom regardless of her status, and a knight was to be loved for his chivalric virtues, not his lands or titles.

So just what were those “chivalric virtues”? One of the handbooks on chivalry written by the Spanish nobleman Ramon Lull lists the virtues of a knight as: nobility, loyalty, honor, righteousness, prowess (courage), love, courtesy, diligence, cleanliness, generosity, sobriety, and perseverance. Wolfram von Eschenbach in Parzifal, on the other hand, stresses a strong sense of right and wrong, compassion for the unfortunate, generosity, kindness, humility, mercy, courtesy (particularly to ladies), and cleanliness.

I hope readers will agree these are the (ambitious!) virtues of civilized men, not barbarians.

Readers interested in learning more about this fascinating concept can turn to:

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Learn more about crusader society at: Balian d'Ibelin and the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

A Crushing Defeat over Saladin - The Battle of Montgisard

In in 1177, Salah-ad-Din (known in the West as Saladin) launched a full-scale invasion of the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem.  It was less than ten years since Saladin had assassinated his way to power in the Fatimid Caliphate in Cairo, and ruthlessly suppressed numerous rebellions to establish Sunni rule over the Shia and Coptic Christian population on the Nile. It was only three years since the coup d’etat in Damascus by which he had established himself in the heart of Syria but failed to take key cities such as Aleppo and Mosul that remained loyal to the son and legal successor of Nur ad Din. Saladin had thus largely united the Caliphates of Cairo and Baghdad for the first time in 200 years, but his hold on power was precarious. In Egypt his faced suspicion and opposition because he was Sunni, and in Syria he was viewed as a usurper and upstart because he was a Kurd and had stolen the Sultanate from the rightful heir.

A Contemporary Depiction of Salah-ad-Din from an Islamic Manuscript

Saladin countered these internal doubts and dissatisfaction with his rule with the age-old device of focusing attention on an external enemy: the Christian states established by the crusaders along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. These states represented not merely a military threat to his lines of communication between Egypt and Syria, but had also five times in the 1160s invaded Egypt. These were not all outright wars of aggression, as the Shia Viziers had requested Christian help against their Sunni enemies in three of the campaigns, but the fact remained that army of Jerusalem, often aided by Byzantine fleets, had conducted campaigns on Egyptian territory and once come close to capturing Cairo.

Saladin did not simply beat the drum of alarm concerning an external enemy in order to rally his subjects around him; he took up the cry of “jihad” — Holy War. This was a clear attempt to increase his stature vis-a-vis his remaining rivals in Syria. Salah-ad-Din means “righteousness of the faith,” and Salah-ad-Din throughout his career used campaigns against the Christian states as a means of rallying support.

Another depiction of Saladin; Source Unknown

Saladin had not invented jihad. The word itself appears multiple times in the Koran, but with varying meanings. It was also used as justification for the Muslim conquests of the 7^th Century.  It had, however, been largely forgotten or neglected until Nur ad-Din, the Seljuk ruler of Syria from 1146-1174, resurrected the concept. Most historians agree, however, that Nur ad-Din used jihad when it suited him but remained a fundamentally secular ruler. He had, however, unleased the jinni from the bottle and the concept of “Holy War” soon gained increasing support in the madrassas and mosques across the Seljuk territories of the Near East. By the time Saladin came to power there was a body of already radicalized youth eager to follow the call to jihad.

Meanwhile, in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, King Amalaric, who had been so intent on conquering parts if not all of Egypt, had died.  He had been succeeded by Baldwin IV, a youth suffering from leprosy. Conscious of his own weakness and immanent death, Baldwin IV sent to the West for aid, and in early August 1177, Count Philip of Flanders reached Acre with a large force of Western knights.

On the advice of the High Court, Baldwin IV offered Philip of Flanders the regency of his kingdom, whose armies were preparing yet another invasion of Egypt aided by a large Byzantine fleet. Flanders, however, insisted on being made king of any territories the joint Christian forces conquered. The idea did not sit well with either the King of Jerusalem or the Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, both of whom were footing the bill and providing the bulk of the troops for the expedition. The result was that the entire expedition was called off, the Byzantine fleet withdrew while Philip of Flanders took his knights and half the barons of Jerusalem north to attack the Seljuk strongholds of Hama and Harim instead.

A Medieval depiction of a Crusading Host

Saladin had gathered his forces in Egypt to repel the impending attack. He rapidly learned that not only had the invasion of Egypt been called off, the Byzantine fleet had withdrawn and the bulk of the fighting forces of Jerusalem had moved north. It was a splendid opportunity to strike, and Saladin seized the opportunity with a force estimated at 26,000 light horse — which leaves open the question of whether there were infantry with Saladin or not. The force also allegedly included some 1,000 mamluks of the Sultan’s personal body guard.

According to an anonymous Christian chronicler from northern Syria, the news of Saladin’s invasion plunged Jerusalem into despair. The king was just 16 years old, had no battle experience of his own, and his most experienced commanders (or many of them) were besieging Hama. The Constable of the Kingdom, the competent and wise Humphrey de Toron II, was gravely ill. But Baldwin rallied the forces he had — according to Archbishop William of Tyre, Baldwin’s former tutor now his chancellor and our best contemporary source , and with just 376 knights made a dash to Ascalon.

Arriving there only shortly before Saladin himself on November 22, King Baldwin took control of the city, but could not risk open battle because of the imbalance of forces.  His dash to Ascalon may have been heroic, but as a result Saladin could bottle up the King and his knights inside Ascalon. This in turn meant that nothing lay between Saladin and Jerusalem except scattered garrisons. Saladin left a force of undefined size to maintain the siege of Ascalon and moved off with the bulk of his troops.

The Sultan and his emirs were so confident of victory that they took time to plunder the rich cities of the coastal plain, notably Ramla and Lydda, but also as far inland as Hebron. In Jerusalem, the terrified population sought refuge in the Citadel of David.

The Citadel of David as it appears today.

But Baldwin IV was not yet defeated. With the number of Saracen troops surrounding Ascalon dramatically reduced, he risked a sortie, rendezvoused with Templars from Gaza (although to this day no one knows how he got the message to them) and started to pursue Saladin’s now dispersed and no longer disciplined army. Meanwhile, he had already issued the arrière ban, a general call to arms that obligated every Christian to rally to the royal standard in defense of the realm. Infantry started streaming to join him.

On the afternoon of November 25, King Baldwin’s host of about 450 knights (375 secular knights and 84 Templars from Gaza), with their squires, Turcopoles and infantry in unspecified numbers caught up with the main body of Saladin’s troops at a place near Montgisard or Tell Jazar, near Ibelin (modern day Yavne).  The Sultan, as he later admitted to Saracen chroniclers, was caught off-guard. Before he could properly deploy his troops, the main force of Christian knights led (depending on which source you believe) by Reynald de Chatillon, “the Ibelin brothers” or the Templars smashed into Saladin’s still disorganized troops, apparently while some were still crossing or watering their horses in a stream.

A modern portrayal of the Battle of Montgisard by Mariusz Kozik

Although the battle was hard fought and there were Christian casualties, the Sultan’s forces were soon routed.  Not only that, Saladin himself came very close to being killed or captured and allegedly escaped on the back of a pack-camel. But for the bulk of his army there was no escape. Those who were not slaughtered immediately on the field, found themselves scattered and virtually defenseless in enemy territory. Although they abandoned the plunder they had accumulated, it was still a long way home — and the rains had set in.  Cold, wet, slowed down by the mud, no longer benefiting from the strength of numbers, they were easy prey for the Christian residents and settlers of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.  The latter, after the sack of Lydda, Ramla and other lesser places, had good reason to crave revenge. Furthermore, even after escaping Christian territory, the Sultan’s troops still found no refuge because once in the desert the Bedouins took advantage of the situation to enslave as many men as they could catch in order to enrich themselves. Very few of the Sultan’s men made it home to safety in Egypt.

Saladin was badly shaken by this defeat. He had good reason to believe it would discredit him and initially feared it would trigger revolts against his rule. Later, he convinced himself that God had spared him for a purpose, and he was to learn from his defeat. He never again allowed himself to be duped by his own over-confidence and his subsequent campaigns against the crusader states were marked by greater caution. However, it was not until the crushing defeat of the Christian armies at Hattin in July 1187 — almost ten years later — that he had his revenge.

The Battle of Montgisard is an important episode in Knight of Jerusalem, the first book in a three part biography of Balian d'Ibelin.

A landless knight, 

a leper king,

and the struggle for Jerusalem.

 A divided kingdom,

a united enemy,
and the struggle for Jerusalem

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"God’s Battalions" by Rodney Stark - A Review

This well-researched book with its profuse bibliography and copious notes is not a history of the crusades. Nor is it, as some reviewers suggest, an apology for the crusades. Rather this is an extended essay which refutes a number of common myths or outdated theories about the crusades and the crusader states. Stark is not a polemicist, but a professor at Baylor University, who has published extensively on religion and sociology.  In short, he is a scholar intent on paring away legend and prejudice to enable academic and popular discourse shaped by fact not fiction. Any serious scholar of the crusades and the crusader states should start with this book — and then get on with their actual research unencumbered with false notions.  Even more important, this ought to be required reading in all classes that touch on the topic of the crusades.

Stark systematically dissects and destroys the following notions about the crusades that still dominate public perceptions and debate.

• The idea that the crusaders were aggressors, who fell upon peace-loving and tolerant Muslim states without provocation.
• The equally anachronistic idea that the crusades were an early form of European colonialism.
• The claim that Jerusalem was particularly “holy” to Muslims in the period before the Crusades.
• The thesis that crusaders were primarily motivated by greed.
• The portrayal of crusaders as uncultivated barbarians fighting a “higher” civilization in the Muslim east.
• The assertion that the Christians conducted warfare in ways that were more brutal and cruel than their enemies.
• The myth that the Muslim rulers were more tolerant of other religions — and their own heretics — than Christian rulers.
• The thesis that Western/Latin crusaders fell upon Constantinople without provocation and “destroyed” the city without cause.
• The notion that bitterness over the crusades persisted (despite the Muslim’s complete and utter victory over the Crusader States in the second half of the 13^th century) to the present day.

A Medieval Depiction of Richard the Lionheart and Saladin

Stark starts by cataloguing the long list of Muslim conquests against Christian states and peoples from Syria and North Africa to Armenia, Spain and Southern France, but he also provides a chilling list of mass murders of Christian monks and pilgrims — each with dates and numbers: 70 Christian pilgrims executed in Caesura for refusing to convert to Islam and 60 crucified in Jerusalem in the early eighth century, the sack and slaughter of the monastery near Bethlehem in the later eighth century, the destruction of two nearby churches gradually escalating to multiple attacks on churches, convents and monasteries in and around Jerusalem including mass rapes in 808 and 813, a new wave of atrocities in 923, the destruction of an estimated 30,000 (yes, thirty-thousand) Christian churches including the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in 1009. So much for Muslim “tolerance.”

The Church of the Holy Sepulcher as we see it today is largely a crusader construction because the earlier Byzantine churches were destroyed.

Stark also brings considerable evidence that the alleged “superiority” of Muslim/Arab culture was largely based on accomplishments of Persian, Jewish, Indian and, indeed, Christian scholars living under Muslim rule.  Thus the alleged mathematical superiority of the Arabs came from the Hindus, the great libraries and legacy of learning came from the Greeks, Arab medicine was, Stark argues, “Nestorian Christian” in origin and so on. He then contends that the Christian west was anything but “backward” and the so-called “Dark Ages” is a misnomer that says more about the ignorance of historians than the state of civilization in the period between the fall of Rome and the First Crusade.  Stark points out that the military technology of the crusaders — from stirrups, horseshoes and crossbows to the devastatingly effective “Greek Fire” — was markedly superior to the military technology of their opponents. But it wasn’t just in military matters that the crusaders were ahead of the Saracens. In the fields of agriculture, land-transportation and nautical technology, Western technology also significantly out-stripped that of the Middle East. 

Stark is perhaps at his best in documenting the many times that Muslim victors slaughtered the garrisons and inhabitants of conquered cities — long before the first crusaders even set out from Europe. He points out the hyperbole in popular accounts of the fall of Jerusalem in the First Crusade as well. But he is most effective in countering the myth of Muslim chivalry is his account of the fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in the second half of the 13^th Century, where time and again the Mamluk leaders broke their word and enslaved or massacred those to whom they had promised freedom and life. One quote from a primary, Muslim source about the sack of the great Roman city of Antioch should suffice to make this point. The source is a letter to the Prince of Antioch (who had not be present in his city to defend it) by none other than the Muslim Sultan himself. Sultan Baibars gloated: “You would have seen your Muslim enemy trampling on the place where you celebrate Mass, cutting the throats of monks, priests and deacons upon the altars, bringing sudden death to the Patriarchs and slavery to the royal princes. You would have seen fire running through your palaces, your dead burned in this world before going down to the fires of the next.” Ah, yes, Saracen “chivalry” at its best indeed.

The book does have its weaknesses, of course. Stark is covering far too great a canvas to provide any analysis or detail.  His book is structured as a rebuttal to unfounded allegations and theses, but for the most part he does not provide alternative theses.  Certainly, he does not describe personalities and their impact on events except in some rare instances. His explanations of developments are often facile, and occasionally he falls into outright errors. (For example, he claims plate armor was so heavy a knight needed a crane to mount his horse; in reality it was much lighter than chainmail and a knight in his prime could vault onto his horse without use of a stirrup much less a crane.) But the bottom line is that this book does what it sets out to do: it destroys a whole series of insidious myths that turn the crusades into an excuse for all subsequent barbarity; it clears the way for a more productive debate based on fact rather than falsehood.

My biographical novel of Balian d'Ibelin in three parts is set in the Kingdom of Jerusalem in the last quarter of the 12th Century.

A Biographical Novel of Balian d'Ibelin
Book I: Knight of Jerusalem was released in September 2014.

A landless knight,
                       a leper king,
                                    and the struggle for Jerusalem.

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