When I was told about the Crusades in school it sounded like something with knights, crosses, and a holy pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Reading what Muslims who lived there saw does not sound like a holiday.
What were the Crusades
In 1099 an army from Europe appeared at the walls of Jerusalem. A campaign called for by the Pope in 1095 had seen the mobilization of princes, younger sons with no land, and later of rich military orders. It was not up to the ordinary people of Syria and Palestine to decide, they had to live through it.
It is this aspect that has always stuck with me: the decision for war was made by a few influential people who do not usually find themselves on the front lines.
It didn’t necessarily have to be this way, Jerusalem had long been under Muslim rule, but Christian pilgrimage to the city continued. There were Christians living there, Eastern Orthodox ones. There is no doubt that there were local wars, and the emperor of Byzantium did ask for help. However, it was a leap to turn this into a huge Latin war for the liberation of the Holy City, and the Pope benefited from this both spiritually and in the acquisition of lands for the Church. The nobility received land from the Pope with the right to trial of all inhabitants. This allowed the Italian cities to make a profit both from transporting troops and from the trade in the ports. It was the farmers and the townspeople who made the price.
On the Friday, July 15, Ibn al-Athir writes about events in Jerusalem that happened a year after the capture of the Holy City. The Franks cut off people at the edge of the blade, looted the city for a week, killed many in al-Aqsa, among them imams and scholars. Even some contemporary Christian writers pointed out this bloodthirstiness when they simply looked with horror at the number of corpses in Jerusalem. For the Muslims, this day simply passed as the city was plundered.
The First Crusade was also made possible by the fact that the Muslim world was fragmented. The Seljuks were split up, the rulers of Egypt, the Fatimids, were facing their own problems. The local princes of Syria were sometimes willing to make alliances with the Franks against their Muslim neighbors. It was also the preacher from Damascus, al-Sulami, who warned the Muslims that the war waged by the Franks would not end at the coast. Not only did many princes not believe him, but they considered his calls for resistance to be disrespectful to their authority. Hence it was the bravery of the ordinary people that stemmed from the unpopularity of the war that was opposed to the well-equipped but spiritually bankrupt Frankish knights.
Who were the Crusaders?
When I say “Crusaders”, I mean different people. At the top were the Pope, who started the Crusades, and the kings and princes who crossed over to the First Holy War.Then there were knights.There were also the poor people who went on the march with the knights and died on the way to Jerusalem. It was not without reason that in 1096, while the main Frankish troops were on their way to the Holy City, crowds of these poor people murdered the Jews in the European cities they passed through.
After they arrived in the Holy Land, the Templars were founded in 1119. Officially, they were “poor knights” who protected pilgrims, but in reality, they turned out to be much more influential. The Templars fortified the Temple Mount in Jerusalemand observed the most rigid discipline among their number; only a small part of the Templars were armed and engaged in direct combat. There were also knights responsible for maintaining the Templars’ farms and houses and providing them with food and weapons. The Templars were given many donations by the authorities and ordinary citizens. For the most part, they were subject to neither local law nor taxation; they had the right to travel freely through the territories of different rulers and acted as a kind of bank. The poor could deposit funds in the Templars and withdraw them in Europe.
The kings were customers of the Templars, using their services as couriers. So there were also many financial and military aspects of the Frankish aggression. A lot of resources were raised for the prosecution of the war; the donations of the rich and the plundering of the Muslim cities occupied by the Crusaders greatly enriched the Templars and the king. When the French king, Philip IV, found himself in considerable debt to the order, he ordered the murder of its Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, which, as they say, the history of France has not yet atoned for. It is known, of course, that from the Middle Ages onwards, the Templars were implicated in numerous plots against the king, and there is hardly any documentation that can confirm this. Suffice it to say that the people who really benefited from the Crusades were the Pope, the princes, and the cities of Italy and the military orders of the Church, such as the Templars.They spoke of holy wars, but Muslims who had to live through the invasions had other feelings.
How did the Muslims endure this?
First, people fled to the coast, and it was in the writings that the importance of Jerusalem was emphasized. Many farmers paid tribute to the new authorities and sought to survive.
Then the Muslims began to resist the Crusaders one step at a time. Zengi captured Edessa in 1144, the first of the Crusader states, and promoted the idea of jihad. Nur ad-Din made a public speech calling for a holy war and managed to gather an army that laid siege to Damascus. Saladin brought Egypt and Syria together, won at Hattin in 1187, and captured Jerusalem on October 2.
What I want to note here is something that many contemporary Muslim writers wrote about, too. In 1099, the city was captured in a massacre on a Friday. Again on a Friday, in 1187, the city was captured, but Saladin allowed most of the Christians to leave after they had paid a ransom. It was no less of a victory, but he did not follow up on the events of 1099, in which the Frankish soldiers had killed nearly all the Muslims in Jerusalem.
This does not mean that Saladin was merciful. After the battle of Hattin, he ordered the death of all the knights of the Hospital and the Templars in the morning because he knew that they would turn to him again. Having captured a city, Saladin respected the agreements made with the local population and the authorities. It was this that distinguished him from the First Crusaders, whose siege of Jerusalem in 1099 had led to the massacre.
The Muslim writer Usama ibn Munqidh made the kind of observations of the realities of the Crusades that still make sense to this day. He fought the Franks, but also spent some time among them, and described them as both valiant and strange. He expressed admiration for the honor of the Frankish knights, but also wrote about a Frankish knight who called him his brother. It was not only the battles that characterized the relationship between Frankish and Muslim knights. Ibn Jubayr wrote about the markets, about agreements made in times of truce between the warring states, and about the lives of ordinary people living under the rule of the Franks. Ibn Jubayr also noted how the Muslims continued to live their lives, attending to their usual affairs in spite of the foreign occupation. It was such resilience that the Muslims demonstrated in every war.
The last of the Crusader strongholds in Acre fell to the Mamluks in 1291, and the states of the Franks on this coast were gone.
What I want the reader to understand
I chose to write this article because it is rarely seen from the point of view of people living through the war. The Crusades were framed as holy, but it all started with a few influential people in the Church and the nobility. Many ordinary people, both Muslims and not only Muslims, suffered from this.
Of course, the Muslims were not all ideal; they fought among themselves and made many harsh decisions.
But I wanted to say that this was an invasion that was not necessary from a Muslim point of view; not only was it endured, but when the opportunity arose for a general uprising, it was met with courage. Saladin, having captured Jerusalem, did not repeat the massacre of 1099.
Two Fridays in the same city are enough to describe everything. The Friday on which the European army entered the city and the Friday on which the Muslims took it back and allowed the Christians to leave, saving themselves from certain death. It was the time of refugees, broken oaths, battles, and intrigue, but not less importantly, of resistance and life in spite of it all. Ordinary people were not the backdrop, but the actors in this performance.
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