Les Croisades sous le regard de l'Orient — Omar Sarmini · Ensemble al-Kindi
The Crusades seen through the eyes of the Orient

Usama, Prince of Syria

Once upon a time there lived a man, who was a warrior, a diplomat when the circumstances demanded, a poet and writer, a great hunter, and above all, a man who loved his native land with all his heart. He was called Usama lbn Munqidh, and as if Fate had wanted to take a hand in this exceptional destiny, he was in fact born in 1098, the very year the first Crusade was being preached at Clermont. He died in 1188, a year after Jerusalem had been recaptured by Saladin, thereby tolling the bell for the second Crusade.

His life, that had begun in the tiny principality of Chayzar on the lower Orontes, spanned almost a whole century. From Chayzar, chance and hazard took him to Damascus, then to Cairo, Upper Mesopotamia and back to Damascus again for his final years.

Usama has left us an invaluable testimony of his life, the Kitab al-‘I’tibar (On Lessons Learned in Life), a kind of autobiography written around three main themes. First of all, the Crusades, or to quote Usama himself, the Franks, with whom he was totally familiar since he made several visits to Palestine, and to Jerusalem in particular, as ambassador to the Templars. He describes the Franks in the heat of battle, a situation in which they excelled, and then again in peacetime, where with very few exceptions, his pen is much more critical about their morals, their medicine, or even their religion. Another theme is that of his memories of his early years, near the Orontes, growing up in the shadow of a brother he loved and cherished dearly. Life was sweet at this time — battles against the Franks from Antioch, endless (days spent hunting till nightfall, the old fortress overlooking the river, the family, the shimmering heat. Throughout his life, even in his ninety-third and last year, when his heart was heavy but his conversation unceasing, Usama still spoke in terms of longing and nostalgia of this time of unadulterated happiness, vanished for ever.

All this — the Franks, life, the battles, misfortunes, times of happiness and regrets — in the end it all bears the same name: Fate, the instrument of God. The main teaching of his book, already announced in its title, is that Death is a paradox. However much one anticipates or expects it, it always manages to take one by surprise, either by the moment it chooses to appear, or by its methods, the way it steals up unexpectedly, its wily tricks...

Only small fragments of a corpus of writing that increased over the years remain nowadays. But fortunately for us, at least two of these fragments are major works - the ‘I’tibar, already mentioned above, and the collection (or diwan) of poems. What is miraculous here is that it's one and the same voice talking, both in poetry and prose. Lamenting the passage of time, or more precisely, the distance taken by the wise man as he observes the eternal adventure of human life through his own journey — this is what gives the diwan and the lines studded here and there in the ‘I’tibar, their most authentic colours, their real moments of truth.

...Our time on earth is like this: life steals up on us all from behind, and when we've reached a feeling of fulfilment in every particle of our being, when we can go no further, then we come right back to where we started from.

ANDRÉ MIQUEL
former Director of the National Library, Professor at the Collège de France
Usama, On the lessons of life, memoirs of a Syrian gentleman from the time of the Crusades
presented, translated and annotated by
André Miquel, the oriental collection of the National Press, Paris, 1983

One Friday
by Myriam Antaki, a Syrian writer from Aleppo

One Friday, «at the very moment when Christ was put on the cross», July 15th 1099, after a siege lasting forty days, where fear and thirst held sway, the walls of the city fell at long last — the city being the celestial and terrestrial capital of Jerusalem. There it lay in the dazzling sun, resplendent in the heat of the day, like a halo of bright, palpitating light. The Crusaders fell on their knees at the sight of so much beauty; at last they were to accomplish the will of God and the Pope. Godfrey de Bouillon, Tancred the Norman, Raymond de St. Gilles, followed by their fair-haired warriors, their swords drawn for the charge, scaled the walls, and set foot on the soil of the Levant for the first time ever, the soil of a much-promised land known to pious Muslims as Al-Quds, the Holy Land. The violence was beyond belief, a crowd thirsting for death rushed upon the city, their eyes ablaze with fury. These armed pilgrims invented nameless horrors in a bloodbath of fire and gore, they killed, sacked, set fire to the Holy City, beautiful «as a young bride arrayed for her spouse». Then at the end of the day, when they had snatched up every bit of gold and chattels, they realised night was falling — darkness was approaching in a pink, drawn-out haze, heavy, like dark dreams; and so, filled with religious ecstasy, «weeping for joy», the Crusaders went to worship and adore Christ's Sepulchre. They prostrated themselves on the cold holy stone, «an empty tomb».

Each age has its own imagination and the road to Jerusalem promised eternity ever since Urban II, the Pontiff of the whole world, revealed God's holy will, "lt is God's will». The Franks abandoned their native kingdom, the clouds of their village sky, the ashes of their own hearth, and their faith spread like spiritual wildfire. Thus the great movement of this people began, like a transhumance; there they all were, pilgrims, warriors, lords, kings, emperors, but in their soul there was nothing but chaos. With time, everything becomes corrupt.

Eventually the Crusaders arrived in the Levant, in a luxuriant land of gold, spices, perfumes, silks... Alas, their treasured ideals were already shattered, split between the mysticism of the Church and their overriding ambition. The Islamic religion already well installed here had given rise to the most advanced civilization in the world. These Arabs not only translated the Greek and Persian philosophers, they took their thinking further, revealed Avicenna and Averroes to the West; Ptolemy and Aristotle were their familiars. The Crusaders went to their schools, learned their language, enjoyed the benefits of the hammam, the scents of bay soap, storax from Syria, incense from the Yemen. A world of terrifying strength that never excluded one-to-one relationships between men, on the contrary it hailed them warmly, anchored as they were in tradition, exchanges within a particular clan, a family gathered round its head, or in war itself, with its unique motto of honour and the sword.

To answer their need for refuge in the heart of a realm so different from their own, these warriors come from afar built some stunningly beautiful castles. In the real world of war and violence, their fortresses stood bathed in sunlight, silhouetted against the horizon on their promontories as if the shattered ideal could be obliterated in an aesthetic of the ethereal and unworldly. Between two calls to arms, the Crusaders would don turbans and garments of rich brocade, and between the fiery sunsets and the starry night, they would listen to the cries of the wounded mingling with love poems sung by lascivious Oriental women with lowered eyes, their bodies swaying like wild lianas. Then, in white alcoves, the slaves with their sweetly plaintive voices would be accompanied by the lute or the piercing notes of a stray flute... Music is the very soul of the Orient.

But they soon had to abandon this life of refinement they had learned to love, and leave their massive stone castles haunted by memories of their past and dreams for their future. So they set off back for the land of their forbears, their heads and hearts full of the memory of this land of their youth, a land whose song would echo within each man for ever and ever. For this was the moment when the great prince Saladin appeared, warrior of Islam and the Muslims, gatherer of the faith who fought his battles to win Allah's mercy. He was a magnanimous prince, fighting under the black flag of the Abasid caliphs, a colour of bad omen for the West, already divided and far from home; he faced a leprous infant king, Baldwin IV, crowned king of Jerusalem at the age of thirteen. His illness could be taken as the symbol of the rot eating away at his realm or the «sacrificial image of Christian atonement». For eventually everything would be consumed and yet it was this young boy, a mere teenager, who inflicted on Saladin his one and only defeat, on a sad grey day in November 1177, a Friday.

War always uses the same terms, the famous strokes of the sword decreed by Fortune that shape whole destinies, the coats of mail, the battle corsage, the scimitars, the metal breastplate, and everywhere the gaunt mask of Death roaming across the battlefields. Franks and Saracens confronted each other in vast mêlées, group against group, man to man, exposing themselves to the blows of each other's swords, accepting provocation, challenge, rancour. In the horror of these combats, where passion drew its last breath as the soiled, blood- and mud-stained standards hung limp and forlorn, they all knew that the outcome of the war depended on the decision of God or Allah, and on that alone.

Ten more bloody years were needed to end this oriental sally, ten years of dramatic events, unease and bloodshed. On one side the Crusade and Christ's tomb, on the other the Jihad or holy war, and in the end, the supreme expression in idealised form of an ultimate combat. The Frankish army under Lusignan was destroyed at Hattin, the shock of defeat was profound, the dream was over, annihilated, wiped out. When Saladin entered Jerusalem/Al-Quds in triumph, his glance settled immediately on the summit of the Dome on the Rock where a large gold cross glinted in the sun. At his decision to wrench it off its stand, Muslims and Franks heaved a great cry of joy or pain. In this their last mêlée, it seemed the very earth was quaking beneath their feet, the earth of this holy land containing the very ebb and flow, the essential mystery of divine revelation. And some then remembered that Christ is love, others that Allah is mercy, but alas, it was too late, one cannot rewrite history. Saladin forbade all excesses and ordered the churches to be purified with rosewater, so that at nightfall a sweet perfume wafted over the city. lt was the 27 Rajab of the year 583 of the Hegira, the legendary date of the prophet Muhammad's nocturnal journey to Jerusalem, a Friday.

Far-reaching memoirs

The Franks with their tales of chivalry thought they were going East to save the Light of the world from darkness, whilst across the water, the Saracens brandished the torch of philosophy; from their passionate but creative thinking came doubt and hence understanding. This was the crux of a huge misunderstanding that was to be a testing ground for the next hundred years. The sea that had been both an obstacle and a link suddenly became smaller with the Crusaders' passage across Europe, and thence this outburst of a war so fantastic, yet so ambitious too, where two geographically distant cultures, each with distinctive features, let slip their veil to reveal a little of their hidden face. Nevertheless the conquered land remained totally ambiguous, a mosaic of Muslim principalities each with its learned scholars, its men of letters and science who stared at these rough-hewn warriors emerging out of nowhere, who seemed to ignore that Islam had its own bright star too. If we are to give any sort of precise account of this 12th century of our era, we cannot leave aside the oriental point of view, expressed by a prince of Syria, Usama Ibn Munqidh, described as being at the same time «actor, witness, warrior and poet» of these Crusades. This exceptional personality entered history armed with a dagger and a stylus. At the end of his long life, the patriarch of a whole epoch, he tells his life story in a prose poem. The elements are so vast that they blend into the course of events and history, the story is both a testimony, an act of writing, far-reaching personal memoirs. Memories, visions experienced or dreamed, often defiled — he describes the destiny of arms, the experience of war and hunting, the spirit of an era. A prince and man of honour, it is he who tells the story — in an oriental fantasy-like tale, with no partiality — of the Crusades from behind the scenes, as seen through the eyes of the Orient. In 1095, on the very day that Pope Urban II was preaching the road to Jerusalem in Clermont at the other side of the world, this noble man was born in the castle of his forefathers at Chayzar, a magical place overlooking the route taken later by the invaders. Surrounded by rocky peaks, it dominated the River Orontes, the most beautiful river in the whole of Northern Syria. This imposing fortress standing amongst steeply pointed slopes outlined starkly against the horizon, never passed into Frankish hands, in spite of several attempts to take it and the superb array of various armies and troops, including those of Baldwin I and the Emperor John Comnenus, and later on, other crusaders who had come across with the King of Jerusalem, the Count of Tripoli and the violent Renaud de Chatillon. As the young Usama gazed at the view plunging dizzily down to the river, he was acquiring his particular poetic vision. Great teachers imparted their knowledge of grammar, rhetoric and history to him. He grew up in the midst of his large family with hundreds of members, amongst them many much-respected women who played an exalted but discreet role throughout this war. An army of maidservants, grooms-men and kitchen staff ensured a certain quality of life, a refinement of taste, a fine art of living. This prince who lived to be nearly a hundred experienced two crusades and saw three of the greatest Islamic sovereigns, Zangi, Nureddin and Saladin, rise to power. He filled page after page with his hand-written account of all his experiences; today only a few pages are missing.

Usama admits he could not understand this war of Salvation, this mad hecatomb — for thus it must be named, no-one has ever spoken of the cruelty and ill-treatment suffered by the pilgrims. Christians from all over Europe always go to the place of the Resurrection, to cross the threshold of the stone sepulchre so as to purge their life and glorify their death. The pilgrimage to Jerusalem is still possible because the Islamic religion orders that «respect and protection shall be offered to all those who, like itself, believe in the truth of a revealed Scripture». One has simply to pay a small entrance fee, the symbolic price for treading on the holy land known to all faithful Muslims as Al Quds. The Syrian prince, the author of several works, was not a true scholar, for his interest lay elsewhere and took him into other domains, from childhood games to hunting, from chasing after desert foxes to war, all with a single ideal and guiding principle, that of the sacrosanct clan; it can be summed up in one word — honour. In the midst of this epic tale of violence the pious Muslim in him remained untouched and his prayer was tantamount to listening to a divine Revelation, for according to him, there is no possible response to the law of destiny, everything will be wiped out and in the end only a single breath will remain to utter the name of Allah. Usama was witness to «a story of men» and his birthplace, the fortress at Chayzar, stood firm against the Franks, maintaining the cause and the honour of Islam. In this same cause he acquired two homelands, the first of which he abandoned in spite of «the new light that promised resurrection» for he was to know exile and an unsettled life for family reasons. Thus he came to visit all the great cities of the Levant — Aleppo, Baghdad, Mecca, Egypt of the Fatimid caliphs, Upper Mesopotamia with its Turkish princes, opulent Mosul, the white citadel of Mayyafariquin, the black stone of Amid. He was also the brilliant Muslim ambassador to the Crusaders in the Holy City. But he chose Damascus as his second home, a city shaded in summer by its trees and fountains, «the most beautiful of God's cities». At the moment of joining forces with Zangi's armies to face the Frankish foe, he acknowledged two praiseworthy qualities in the armed pilgrims: their gallantry and the esteem in which they held their horsemen. In fact his account highlights this confrontation between Islam and Christendom which was to mark the whole Middle Ages. In Jerusalem he met the Knights Templar whom he called his friends only when «their manners grew more polite upon contact with the Levant». He makes a condescending grimace, metaphorically speaking, when he notes the Crusaders' sense of justice. «For the Arabs, the judges and magistrates follow a procedure laid down by the Coran, a speech for the prosecution, a speech for the defence, the witnesses». The Western idea of the judgement of God was a grotesque farce in his opinion, as was ordeal by fire and torture by water. He was shocked by the permissiveness between men and women and found the Franks' hygiene extremely primitive. In time these newcomers did in fact learn to use the hammam, with its redolent steam and perfumes from Arabia. Without any sentimental meanderings, the prince delivered a true account of his personal adventure, so singular that it goes beyond words to become part of the Islamic heritage. At every moment we sense or find this instinctive reservation about the Westerners' manners and morals, their behaviour, and above all, their practices in medicine. For these wartime pilgrims suffered wounds, illness, epidemics, but their science of medicine seemed to be derived from witchcraft. Where Thabet the Arab prepared a plaster to heal an abscess, the Frankish doctor amputated the whole leg and the patient died. For a woman suffering from consumption, Usama's own doctor recommended a special diet along with the appropriate treatment, whereas the Frank held that she had a demon in her head and treated her with a razor, making an incision in the shape of a cross on top of her head that was so deep, it revealed the bone. When the doctor then decided to rub the wound with salt, the woman died in great pain. Sometimes members of the Christian clergy were called to a sick man's bedside, where one of them would block the patient's nostrils with softened candle wax, thereby causing his instant death, whereupon the priest would claim to have brought him relief at last. So many examples that he has witnessed at first hand are recounted with just the right touch or the appropriate reflection of a man who is the guardian and defender of his own culture. It is a known fact that, throughout the century, Damascus offered medical care to some of the world's outstanding personalities, men of science practised plastic surgery there and the Crusaders often had recourse to their services to rebuild a face wounded by a sabre, heal a skin disease or bring healing relief to a state of madness calmed by the sound of the waters.

The Barada flowed through the city of Damascus — a river of paradise that the prince of Chayzar now contemplated as he waited for death. In spite of his great age (he was as old as the century), he put the finishing touches to his book telling the long story of his life. Pages of memories, of prayer expressing his belief in the «absolute freedom of God and the omnipotence of destiny», but also accounts of all the surprising figures who had crossed his path in the course of his life, the lives of men from other places, East and West alike, who had left an impression on him. He who had always loved Damascus, returned to end his days there after ninety three years, it was the city of his exiles, his second home, the fount of his wisdom. Closing his eyes gently, he saw beneath his eyelids the lost paradise of Chayzar, the banks of the Orontes, the streams of his childhood, pictures of his hunting exploits with his trophies spread at his feet, and war, «the world turned against itself», and then silence, the call of God. A last vision lit up his wrinkled face as he remembered Saladin liberating Jerusalem and that sweet scent of rosewater wafting on the air. When night fell on Damascus, he watched and prayed, then quietly went to gaze upon the Perfect Peace. Allah had given him a long life so that he could remember it and write an account of it with modesty and reserve, his own personal adventure and the story of the Crusades, but it was thanks to chance strokes of destiny that he finished his work and that it was saved from oblivion and the dust of centuries afterwards.

Castles of refuge, castles of dreams

In the Levant the splendour of the towns and cities shines out across the rivers, an urban mass founded on some centuries-old tradition leaving an impression of nostalgia and yet calling towards the future. Everywhere, mosques with slender pointed minarets, souqs of uncertain outline, golden-domed palaces, an imposing citadel, the solid mass of the ramparts. These countless cities, the largest in the world, all look alike. They are highly populated, places of exchange for caravanserai, they rise out of a backdrop of gardens and flowers and house a life style of refinement. The Crusaders discovered their opulence and luxury but above all they had to defend and preserve their Levantine kingdoms, and this whilst they were constantly short of men. So, seized with a kind of obsession to build, they became the greatest and most prolific builders of the Middle Ages. They placed the cornerstones of a hundred or so castles on strategic points, rather like amber and coral gems, all on a narrow strip of fertile land stretching from North to South, from Anatolia to the Red Sea, amongst gilded fields extending from the desert to the water.

Today, the Levant of the Crusaders is still that of their castles, some so beautiful and so powerful that the heart beats faster at the sight of them, others where the onlooker is immediately struck by the violence of their presence, whilst the most neglected are reduced to heaps of broken stones strewn amongst the wilderness of nature, swallowed up by time. They all overlook landscapes of immense solitude, where voices from the past come back to haunt the vaults, the chapels, the keeps, the ditches, the plaintive monotonous cry of the souls of the dead. These castles are extraordinarily varied in style, in fact they are places of refuge, sanctuaries of the faith and the bloody spirit of war; some are so huge, they seem like oversized fortresses built by lords of unknown or little-known lineage who went elsewhere to live out a dream impossible to realize in their own land, that of the great feudal lords. All these castles spreading their golden mass beneath the intense blue of the Levantine sky were built in record time with means that were considerable for the time. Great specialists were employed to deploy their skills alongside the forced labour of prisoners of war who succumbed beneath the effort of the manual labour, often carried out in burning heat and sunshine, though they certainly must have brought a touch of oriental fantasy to the work, a native art of building, in spite of the austerity that was the pride of the conquerors. The castles are known as the «Castles of the Sun» for their stone still sparkles in the golden rays of the sun, in spite of the wear and tear, the endless ravages wreaked by time and weather. Today they seem like so many sleeping worlds, liable to stir the imagination of every chance passer-by and bring him to the shores of his dreams. No historian can classify or list these countless monuments, for they still exert their prestige, an endless fascination, a mysterious appeal on all who visit them. Suddenly there is a complicity of silence, a romanticism that attracts some people into a poetic dream and repels others towards more solemn façades or more restricted spaces. But the most important and imposing monuments of this great epic lived out in this land of exile are to be found in Syria — the Crac des Chevaliers, the Marqab, the Château de Saone, later known as Saladin's Castle.

The Crac des Chevaliers is a gem of military architecture. if one were to select the «best» strongholds or fortified castles of the Middle Ages, this one would hold pride of place by its immense size and the extraordinary fascination it exerts. The fortress dominates a large passageway known throughout history, going from the Mediterranean right up to the valley of the Orontes. Its base is the mountain side, from where it overlooks the fertile Bouquée plain irrigated by the Nahr el Kabir. The light-coloured limestone seems to take on the colours of the surrounding countryside and when touched by the rays of the sun or moon, it shimmers like moiré satin, a-quiver with soft colour. The Crac emerges out of a haunting vision of the Crusaders' lost dream, preserved by the Levant out of loyalty to the centuries of its own history. In 1142, Raymond of Tripoli bequeathed the fortress and its estate to the order of the Knights Hospitaller who made some alterations and enlargements to the property. Its construction presents an imposingly solid mass of stone, with colossal fortifications, a double wall, circular towers, an enormous talus, a keep enclosed and topped by small round towers, the barracks and living quarters for a huge military population, with stables and warehouses. The knights' great hall, a masterpiece of Gothic architecture, attains the fullness of an art turned towards the past, at least in the Levant. This immense set of buildings opened its prestigious doors and walls to host feasts and receptions of dazzling magnificence; yet its splendid isolation also meant it served as an austere chapter house for the Hospitallers. The less grandiose dimensions of the chapel lend it an appearance of severity today, though perhaps in former times it was decorated with paintings, trophies and banners. Whatever the case may be, it was a fitting space for the monastic life with a sobriety of style that touches the emotions. The light filters in through two bay windows, giving a play of shade and half-light conducive to deep meditation. Perhaps the Crusaders would have liked to find eternal rest under these thick flagstones; and perhaps once upon a time these spaces created then with such magnificence, but today devoid of all the life that once inhabited them — no warriors' cries, no prayers anywhere — would have watched over the remains of their dead in the stillness and silence of the night.

The Crac des Chevaliers may well be the foremost castle in a great epic, but the Marqab is equally enticing by the sheer enormity of its proportions, the strength of its fortifications. A traveller dazzled by its numerous bastions made to «hold up the sky» will claim that the mountain dominating the castle is so high that it «looks like Atlas bearing the weight of the firmament». Rising mightily above the whole world, this solitary castle is one of mourning because of the grim colour of its stone, a layer of hard black basalt over all the huge buildings, the towers, the halls, even the passageways. lt stood alone facing the sea, an indomitable fortress, the main defence of a land under conquest, holding the Old Man of the Mountain in check. The latter was the chief of the Order of Assassins, an extremely powerful and dangerous sect. For centuries now it has kept watch over the coastal route, with waves unfurling as far as the eye can see, as if the salt of the damp sea breeze could whiten its majestic façades.

The Crusaders' Saone is «the fortress of fortresses», it has the initial advantage of its fantastic situation and represents with dizzy splendour a truly superhuman achievement, stupefying by the sheer immensity of its high walls, surrounded by plunging ravines. A savage splendour, a style and presence of a power and fullness that defy the imagination, clasped between two waterfalls in an inaccessible situation, isolated from the rest of the world. All around, a hard, merciless landscape, with poor or stunted vegetation. In these unyielding surroundings, the austere architecture appears harshly uncompromising, and the great ditch of the moat with its striking monolithic pile rising up like an obelisk, lends the whole site a strange air of damnation. All this beauty seems to disappear into spaces of solitude, protected from the outside world by insurmountable, smooth vertical walls, fixed for ever in time and space. Yet one scorchingly dry summer's day, with the sun at its zenith, Saladin and his army came upon the Château de Saone looming up in the distance. Dazzled by the piercing light, with the unbearable heat shimmering around them, they were transfixed with fear, and said the midday prayer and waited. Then at the sight of such grandeur, they released a homing pigeon to call for reinforcements, but fate had already changed sides and as their gaze followed the white bird's flight, they suddenly spotted an omen of victory: the large standard of the Franks fluttering high on the keep, fell down, as though pushed by some invisible force. It was the end of the epic drama, all that remained now was night and its dreams.

Islam in the face of the crusades
by Georges Tate, CNRS former Director of the Damascus Institute of Archaeology

On the eve of the Crusades the Islamic world had not lost anything of its splendour and magnificence. It covered a vast area of the world, its wealth could be counted by the number of cities it contained, some of them with origins way back in ancient history; others had been founded more recently, but to all intents and purposes they all looked roughly the same — mosques, palaces, souqs and sumptuous private houses were to be found in all of them. This prosperity derived from intensive and varied agriculture, sometimes with a serious theoretical basis, and above all, from trading exchanges with other far-flung regions, a source of immense profit; there was also the caravan and sea trade linking the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic via Egypt and Syria.

The brilliance and splendour of Islamic civilization were revealed in its historic monuments, with the luxuriance of their refined décor. Another indicator of brilliance was the number of scholars and researchers and the intense cultural and intellectual life of this world. They made important advances in algebra and astronomy; they developed new technologies for measuring time; they improved irrigation techniques. They did not rely on pure theory as much as the Greeks, whose works they translated; they were more concerned with accurate observation and precise details of measurement, and thus they made a major contribution to the birth of modern scientific thought.

At the end of the 11th century, no-one could have guessed that the Islamic world was about to undergo aggressive attacks by armies and bands of fanatics coming from Christendom in the West. No more than anyone could have foreseen the defeat these Christians were to inflict upon them, nor the founding of Christian states all along the Syro-Palestinian coast that were to expose Muslims to mortal danger for at least a hundred years.

Yet however confident the world of Islam appeared, by the power it derived from its material wealth and brilliant civilization, together with all the force of its intellectual achievements, it had been considerably weakened ever since the Abbasid caliphate had been deprived of its temporal powers and relegated to a purely religious function. The main reason behind this weakness was the lack of political unity, such as Islam had known under the Umayyads. But this had gradually been worn away until it was finally broken by the formation of three separate and rival caliphates: the Abbasids in Baghdad, the Fatimids in Cairo and the Umayyads in Cordoba. This political fragmentation was aggravated even further by the fact that the Muslims were divided into Sunnis, Shi'a and Kharijites, a division that produced some direct political effects, for, unlike Christianity, the divergences in Islam were not the result of theological or ecclesiastical differences. They were based on differences in legitimacy and the transmission of power. Thus the Abbasids were Sunnis, whereas the Fatimids were Shi'a. Centralised power within the Abbasid caliphate, the largest of the three, and the one on which the major part of Syria theoretically depended, was virtually non-existent. In reality the governor of each province was totally independent and in the capital city of Baghdad, the caliphs depended on their Turkish slaves, whom they'd had the clever idea of making into praetorian guards. By the end of the 11th century the caliphs' authority scarcely extended beyond the walls of their magnificent palaces. At the very end of the 11 th century the Turkish Seljuks made an attempt at restoring unity that almost succeeded. They had been a nomadic people wandering across the plains of Eastern Europe, until they were converted to Sunni lslam, whereupon they made an incursion into Baghdad in 1055 without encountering any opposition. They seized all the power associated with the title of Sultan and relegated the caliph to his spiritual functions. They aimed to unify Islam under the banner of Sunnism, and indeed, they managed to assemble the territories belonging in theory to the Baghdad caliphate, before going on to take Jerusalem from the Fatimids and take over almost all of Anatolia, to the detriment of Byzantium. When Malik Shah died in 1092, the whole fragile structure collapsed and the Seljuk Sultanate fell apart politically speaking; history repeated itself.

Nowhere did this situation seem more serious than in Syro-Mesopotamia. Turkish governors imposed their rule in Diyarbakir, Mosul, Antioch and Damascus, not to mention the small, completely autonomous Arab or Turkish potentates. Meanwhile in the east, the nomadic tribes, sometimes grouped into federal states, constituted yet more independent powers. Jerusalem was captured once again by the Fatimids (1098). The lsma'ili Shi'a sect known as the Assassins had taken refuge in the Alawi Mountains and was spreading terror through its spectacular murders. So it was hardly surprising that in spite of its material and cultural superiority, the Islamic world proved incapable of stopping the unruly army of the First Crusade, even though the latter was poorly equipped. Islam was powerless to stop the Christians taking first Antioch, then Jerusalem, then the whole coastline, before some more, even bolder strategic moves that resulted in their setting up four kingdoms barring access to the coast and even extending deep into the interior, to Upper Mesopotamia, where they established the County of Edessa, and Transjordan, where they set up the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Islam reacted to this conquest with anger and a spirit of revolt, for over and above the political and material damage the Crusaders inflicted upon them, they behaved in the most bloody and barbaric way. They committed massacre after massacre for no political or military reason; they forced the inhabitants of the captured towns into exile. In the decades following the conquest they raided and sacked trading caravans in the most ruthless fashion, even during periods of truce, thereby endangering the social position of the rich bourgeois population of the towns in the interior.

As soon as the Franks arrived beneath the walls of Antioch in 1097, the Emirs of Mosul headed several powerful expeditions to try to stop their advance, but to no avail, they all failed through lack of fighting spirit and above all, through the absence of any whole-hearted support from the Syrians themselves. Apart from everything else, the Syrian urban middle-class were in no hurry to place themselves under the authority of a warlord who would make them feel the whole weight of both the war and his own power. This explains the murder of Mawdud, Emir of Mosul, assassinated in Damascus at the height of his power, just when he was about to mass the whole Syrian population together in a united effort to conquer the Latin states. Later, certain Syrian emirs had no hesitation in joining forces with the Franks in order to stop new expeditions leaving from Mosul. From then on, cordial relations were established with some of the Franks, particularly between soldiers. The Orientals admired the Franks' warlike qualities but scorned their ignorance, brutality and vulgarity.


ZANGI & NUREDDIN: Until 1130, the towns in the interior of Syria remained divided between the necessity for self-defence and their refusal to submit to the authority of a military chief whose power they would have to endure; this would obviously reduce their autonomy and implied the payment of extremely heavy taxes. However, after this date, the die were cast in Northern Syria and the ultimate decision was taken — the raids and pillages waged by the Franks on the caravans made them a major enemy.

Zangi was a Turkish military chief who indulged in many brutal practices; he had become Emir of Mosul in 1127. The following year he entered Aleppo, with the aim of waging a real war against the Franks. With some clever propaganda, he managed to represent this war as a jihad and reduced the Frankish territories in Northern Syria by half, before attacking Damascus, now linked to the kingdom of Jerusalem after the periods of truce. However, he failed to capture it. Edessa, on the other hand, fell to him in 1144, thereby bringing the first of the Levantine Latin states to an end. Zangi was murdered in 1146.

He was succeeded by his son and heir, Nureddin, who carried on his father's policy, although on a broader scale and with a different style. Whereas Zangi had seemed like a foreigner with brutal manners to the Syrians, Nureddin was a man of culture, a great Syrian prince, a lover of luxury who respected local traditions and willingly obeyed the precepts of Islam. His main purpose in life, however, was his war against the Franks, which he elevated to the status of a religious jihad: lost lands were to be reconquered and above all, Jerusalem had to be recaptured; to this end he emphasized the holy nature of the city in Islamic history. His propaganda machine relied on the madrasas, schools of Sunni belief and practice, where the ideology of the jihad could be and was developed. The Dar al-Hadith had a role in this propaganda too, for they specialised in the study of traditions relating specifically to the Prophet; similarly, the ribats or hanaqats, a sort of convent where Sufi adepts assembled; and finally, those followers of Islam whose task was to compose poems to the glory of the Prince or other edifying works in praise of his politics and noble actions. At the same time Nureddin developed particularly efficient administrative services thanks to the numerous rapid links he established between towns; he reorganised the tax system and deployed considerable financial means in order to fulfil his duties as a Muslim prince; he also used his wealth to maintain his powerful army. He installed a governor or wali in each citadel, thus sending Syria into a permanent state of internal factions, but his strategy had positive effects too — the Assassins lost their influence, and Shi'a lost ground, giving way to Sunnism once again. Syria regained its moral and political unity.

From 1164 onwards, the war between the Islamic troops and the Latin kingdoms was fought over vast areas, and with th Fatimids' power on the wane, Egypt was now the main place at stake. Nureddin despatched his Kurdish deputy, Shirkuh, who managed to put down the Franks and with their defeat, brought Egypt under his rule. When Shirkuh died in 1171, he was succeeded by his son Saladin.

SALADIN: in the first place, Saladin was merely Nureddin's representative in Egypt, and it was in Nureddin's name that he abolished the Fatimid caliphate and reinstated Sunni Islam. But his political and military strength, coupled with his personal ambition, made him a rival to Nureddin, who decided to put an end to his dissidence and invade Egypt himself. The project aborted on his death in 1174. The choice of Saladin to carry on the flame met with strong opposition from Nureddin's heirs and was a constant source of conflict; nevertheless, in political terms, Saladin emerged triumphant. Saladin invaded three quarters of Syria but was brought to a halt by the resistance of Aleppo. After nine years of war he finally overthrew Nureddin's heirs and seized Aleppo and Mosul. In 1183 he was at the head of the greatest empire the Near East had known since the Seljuks; it covered Syria, the Yemen and Egypt.

Views on each other: The great divide between Franks and Orientals remained, in spite of the numerous contacts that had encouraged greater familiarity between them.

When the Westerners arrived in the Levant they had no real information, and certainly no details, about the Muslim religion. Guibert de Nogent who wrote a history of the First Crusade between 1104 and 1108, admits that he restricted himself to collecting the opinion of the common people, in other words, popular belief. People knew that Muhammad was not God but a man. For Guibert, the Muslims considered him to be a sort of «chief through whom divine law was communicated», whilst other writers believed Muhammad to be the Beast of the Apocalypse and in VVestem iconography of the 10th and 11th centuries he is represented as the Antichrist. For the majority of contemporary writers, Islam was an immoral religion promising a material paradise and Muhammad nothing but a lustful prophet. Muslims practised all sorts of depraved idolatry, indulged in fornication, shameless licentiousness, homosexuality and madness. The Western image of the Christians of Byzantium was scarcely less caricatural, though Islam, on the other hand, did recognise Christians as being people of the Holy Book who did not have access to the whole Truth; they were to be tolerated in the same way as the Jews.

The arrival of the Franks in the Levant and their settling there led to human relationships that might have altered this lack of understanding on behalf of VVesterners, but unfortunately this was not the case. Only later, in Spain, did the West get to know Islam better. Those Franks born out in the Levant, known as «Ponies» by the newcomers, did learn to appreciate the Muslims, but the more recent immigrants remained contemptuous. Ironically, the only exception to this rule was Saladin, whose magnanimity was regarded by the Franks as the mark of a truly chivalrous spirit. The prestige he enjoyed was such that certain Latin authors thought he must have converted to Christianity in later life. Right from the outset of the First Crusade, the Franks appeared to be bloody barbarians to the Muslims. Later on, in the name of brotherhood in arms, some of them managed to establish cordial relationships with each other during the periods of truce, and the Muslims quickly learnt to distinguish between those Franks born in the East and the newcomers, but they never failed to emphasize the brutality, ignorance and intolerance of them all.

The strength and fragility of the Latin Kingdoms: In spite of the Franks' isolation in the face of the solid block comprising the different Levantine societies and the political entities governing them, they represented a power to be reckoned with. They were divided into three States or Kingdoms, of which the most powerful was the kingdom of Jerusalem. In their early days, their kings wielded more power than kings in the West, although they had no regular civil service to help them, unlike Levantine kingdoms. The king governed with the aid of a High Court, the curia regis, consisting of all the vassals in the kingdom; in fact most of these vassals belonged to the great lords of the kingdom, but the king always had the last word in any decision-making process. The monarchy was hereditary whereas the Lordships weren't, though in practice, they gradually became so and each lord became a kind of minor king within his seigniory. It was they who meted out justice, collected taxes, called up the mounted soldiers. The Franks were only in a majority in the towns or cities of the kingdom, which had sometimes gained certain very limited privileges, though never to the point of making them totally autonomous. The only communities in Syria to be granted important privileges by treaty were the colonies of foreign settlers in each town, and not the towns themselves — for the kings could not do without the aid of the Italian fleets. There was absolutely no solidarity between the conquerors and the local population. The Muslims, who were in fact from the country, since all the city and town-dwellers had been driven out by the Franks, observed a passive submission but ranked themselves alongside the enemies of the Franks. Oriental Christians often felt divided loyalty between their religion and their affinities with other Syrians; generally speaking, the affinities with the Syrians gained the upper hand.

Since the middle of the 12th century, the lords had been divided into a noble aristocracy with fiefs as part of their wealth and a lower, more minor nobility who depended on them. The poorest knights settled in the towns where they lived somewhat miserably. Thanks to the High Court, the aristocracy of the highest-ranking knights managed to curb the king's powers. The military monastic orders such as the Hospitallers and the Knights Templar were another source of power; these were soldiers led by Grand Masters whose main task was to ensure protection for pilgrims. They were sufficiently wealthy to look after and maintain the large fortresses entrusted more and more often into their capable hands, until finally, they formed the only permanent army in the kingdom, and once again, the power they wielded limited that of the king.

From 1183, just before the major confrontation that was to oppose the Kingdom of Jerusalem to Saladin, the former still remained a power to be reckoned with, thanks to its efficient armies and secure strongholds, but this power was fragile nonetheless, for signs of political division were emerging again. After all, this kingdom was only grafted by force on what was basically a minefield of rebellion.

Saladin's Jihad: In the face of the Franks, Saladin adopted the same policy as Nureddin. He made war to excess in the name of the jihad and Sunnism. With the considerable means he had at his disposal, he was able to wage a constant battle on all fronts, thus maintaining a perpetual state of war against the Franks, who, refusing to engage combat, allowed the invading Muslim army to ravage their land, but kept their military power intact. However, political differences, rival ambitions and the stakes they gave rise to all compelled them to face Saladin in 1187, at Hattin, in distinctly unfavourable conditions. Saladin waged a crushing defeat on them and went on to capture all their strongholds one by one, in particular the capital of the Kingdom, Jerusalem. Of the original Latin Kingdoms, there now remained only Tyre, Tripoli and Antioch.

At the news of this disastrous defeat, Christians from the West assembled a powerful army and began to organise the Third Crusade. Saladin, unable to muster the same armies of men as he had done in 1187, could only count on his own troops and was powerless to stop the Kingdom of Jerusalem being reinstated, though it was now precariously reduced to a mere coastal strip; for even though the Franks possessed troops and military power, they did not dare to venture into the interior. According to the terms of the truce settled in 1192, Saladin was to keep Jerusalem but agreed to grant all Christian pilgrims safe access to the Holy City. The Latin Kingdoms were now no more than a second-rate power.

THE AYYUBIDS: On Saladin's death in 1193, his kingdoms were split amongst his heirs. The subsequent weakening of power was compensated by the solidarity amongst members of his family that remained strong and intact at first. In order to uphold this, the Ayyubids adopted a policy vis-a-vis the Franks that at first sight seemed the very opposite of Saladin's, i.e. they abstained from war, so as to avoid the possibility of new crusades, whilst maintaining fruitful business relationships with Christians from the West. This explains how the Sultan Al-Kamil came to hand Jerusalem over to the Franks in 1229, on terms that made their return seem inevitable.

Saint Louis and the Crusade: Amongst all the 13th century kings in the West, Saint Louis was the only one who made a personal decision to embark on a crusade, without being obliged to do so to redeem his sins, or incited to do so by the Papal authorities. The situation in the Latin Kingdoms had not worsened either, so there was nothing to hasten a major expedition overseas. But for him, the ideal Crusade did not only involve the conquest of holy sites, but implied a religious duty to spread the word of God and convert new faithful.

Careful and financially onerous preparations were undertaken for the Seventh Crusade. Nothing was left to chance where finances, equipment, and food were concerned, and the largely French army counted 25,000 men, of whom 7 to 8,000 were mounted troops with nearly three thousand of these knights. From Cyprus they set out towards to Egypt — the conquest of this country had become an end in itself and not merely a means of recovering Jerusalem, now dependent on the Ayyubid Sultan of Cairo. The troops landed in 1249 and immediately seized the town of Damietta but were halted in December before Lieutenant Mansurah's fortress that commanded access to Cairo. Communications with Damietta were cut off, and the troops weakened with scabies, dysentery and constant harassment. They beat a difficult retreat and the Lieutenant was taken captive, only to be released a month later in return for a huge ransom. Meanwhile, in May 1250 the Mamluks had overthrown the Ayyubid dynasty, and a 10-year peace treaty was drawn up with the Mamluk Sultan Abeg, though only 400 prisoners out of 12000 were set free. The Crusade ended in defeat, but Saint Louis carried on and spent another four years in Syro-Palestine. This prolonged stay gave him time to restore the existing Frankish fortresses, as well as build some new ones. The imprisoned Crusaders were finally set free, but all in all the Crusade had actually accomplished very little — it had maintained the status quo at great cost and with a massive loss of lives, but so far there was no new menace on the horizon. Thanks to the Franks, the Ayyubids had managed to keep what Saladin had gained, until they were finally overthrown by the Mamluks in Cairo.

THE MAMLUKS: The Mamluks were Turkish slaves from central Asia. During the reign of the last Ayyubid sultans of Egypt, they had formed more and more army corps. The Bahri, so named because they were billeted near the Nile, had played a decisive part in the Egyptian victory at Al-Mansura against St. Louis (February 1250). After overthrowing the sultan Turan Shah, their emirs seized power in 1250, when they installed a dynasty that included a governing caste, the Mamluks, whose emirs chose the sultan.

The real founder of the dynasty however, was Baibars (1260-1277) who came to power after the assassination of Sultan Qutuz. The sultan, in spite of his extensive powers, came from a military caste who had the sole right to choose his successor. The Mamluk dynasty followed the pattern of previous ones in its internal organisation — an unwieldy administration, State monopolies, a policy of intervention in the economic domain particularly where prices were concerned, the devolution of Iqtas, i.e. certain local village taxes were directly assigned to some of the principal state dignitaries. Under the Mamluks this all functioned extremely efficiently, with no deviations from the strict rules. A postal service that had recourse to horses, pigeons and signals ensured the swift delivery of orders and reports. In Cairo the Mamluks annexed those Abbasids who had escaped from the massacres in Baghdad to their cause by allowing them to keep the rank and title of caliph. Mamluk policy was to defend, conserve and encourage Sunni Islam; in Egypt their reign coincided with a period of great cultural splendour where literature and architecture flourished and general prosperity reigned, thanks to developing trade with East Africa and the Far East.

The Mamluks' principal activity was war. Between 1250 and 1260 they battled against the Ayyubids in Syria and against the Mongols, whom they stopped at Ain Jalut (in Galilee) in 1260. Baibars forced the Mongols to retreat beyond the Euphrates and advanced into Anatolia to fight against the Seljuks. The danger provoked by the Mongols had shown just how far the existence of the Latin kingdoms, however weakened they were, exposed Islam to real peril. In fact the situation of the Latin kingdoms degraded further and further between 1254 and 1270, due to the threat from the Mongols and the consolidation of Mamluk power, together with internal strife that threatened to provoke civil war. Saint Louis did not arrange matters with any financial support. But the Eighth Crusade, undertaken to the dismay of some of his entourage, was the signal for an offensive against. Tunis where Louis finally died of the plague. From 1265 to 1271, Baibars attacked the invaders in a systematic manner, winning some major victories, of which the most notorious was the capture of Caesarea, in spite of the extremely costly precautions taken previously by King Louis in the form of solid fortifications. His successor Qalaun (1279-1290) carried on his work but died before it was finished, and it was his son Al Ashraf Khalil who put an end to the Frankish presence when he took Acre on May 18th 1291.

THE END RESULT: For Islam in the Levant, the end result was totally negative. The existence of the Latin Kingdoms had entailed two hundred years of war, with the most obvious result being the rise to power of military chiefs and the annihilation of the merchant classes, together with the city-dwelling middle-class on a more wide-spread level. It has been claimed that the Crusades provided the opportunity for fruitful exchanges, particularly in the domain of culture, and indeed no-one can question the fact that the Franks acquired new technical knowledge from their contact with the peoples of the Levant. They learned how to use a compass, already familiar in China since the 10th century, and maritime charts, and the special «huissier» ship with a door in her sides to allow the admirals to go in and out, whose design was borrowed from Byzantium. With the use of the zero they acquired mathematical knowledge originally invented by the Indians. In the agricultural domain, they discovered cotton, sugar cane and certain fruit trees. They learned certain new crafts, such as the art of glass blowing and some new weaving techniques for making silk, Tyrian purple, brocades... And in imitation of the Muslim kingdoms, Westerners struck their first gold coins whilst they were in the East. Yet in the domain of the arts, literature, philosophy and science, no trace of Western influence on the East can be detected. All in all, the end result was not negligeable, but only from the Westerners' point of view, and it is not at all sure that these exchanges would not have taken place without the Crusades. ln fact anything really important that the West has learned from its contacts with Islamic civilisation was learned in Spain and not in the Middle East.

There is also a widely held opinion that the Crusades helped to encourage the expansion of Western trade in the Mediterranean, in which case it is said to have played a positive part in Europe's economic development between the 10th and 13th centuries. It is a fact that the transport of troops during the Crusades and the provisions necessary for their survival profited the Italian maritime republics of Venice, Pisa and Genoa, but nothing proves the two phenomena described above were directly linked to each other. In the early 11th century, Mediterranean trade was at a low level. The Islamic world had its most important trading links with the Middle East via the Persian Gulf; as for the West, they scarcely had anything to trade, let alone buy. Maritime trade had started up again before the Crusades, when certain southern Italian towns and cities launched their activity, a notable example being Amalfi, or again in response to the Fatimids' requirements in wood for the construction of the Egyptian war fleet. Later exchanges by sea were all the more intense and numerous; towns in Northern Italy took over from those in the South but the most profitable relations were those formed with the Muslim seaport towns - Saladin had no difficulty in obtaining the individualised swords made in the West. In the 13th century, the trading posts set up by Italian cities in the Latin ports of Syro-Palestine prospered well, but the most important trading centres were the Islamic ports, held in greater favour by the Italian merchants because trading there meant they could escape customs levies. Free ports were particularly valuable to them for the safe passage they offered in limes of war.

Whatever way one looks at it, the end result of the Crusades seems to have been negative for the people of the Levant, without having been really positive for the West.