Abbasid Heavy Swordsmen
Arab Tribal Warriors
The two centuries from the establishment of the Saljuq
sultanate in 1055 to the demise of the ‘Abbasid caliphate in 1258 witnessed the
decisive retreat of Isma’ili Shi’ism from the centre of the political stage and
the resurgence of Sunnism, supported now not solely by the ‘Abbasid caliphs but
by the Saljuqs and similar politico-military elites whose leaders claimed to be
sultans acting on behalf of the caliph. However, Saljuq successes were quickly
overshadowed by the occupation of the Levantine coast by Crusaders from France,
Flanders and other northern European countries. The Crusades were triggered by
the Saljuq victory against the Byzantines at Manzikart in 1071 and the
establishment of the sultanate of Rum in the 1080s, which persuaded the
Byzantine emperor Alexius Comnenus to swallow his natural distrust of Latin
Christians and appeal to Latin Christendom for military assistance. He probably
had in mind mercenaries who would do his bidding, but instead Pope Urban II
responded by preaching the First Crusade and Alexius found himself face to face
with the much more ambitious and much less malleable Crusaders. The Byzantines
would live to regret their appeal to their Western co-religionists.
On the Muslim side the Crusades were totally unexpected and
quickly revealed that the Saljuq empire was, in some ways, a rather shaky
edifice. The military prowess of Turkish tribal cavalrymen was offset by their
reluctance to submit to authority and their constant search for pasturelands
for their flocks which could make them disruptive and unreliable. At the same
time, there were tensions within the Saljuq clan itself. According to Turkish
political norms, possessions belonged to the clan and not to an individual;
therefore the empire did not belong to the sultan but to his clan, the members
of whom expected their share. As a result the sultans had to parcel out the
eastern Islamic lands between numerous relatives who then became independent
potentates on their own patch. This led to a high degree of political
fragmentation within the Saljuq realm, which was exacerbated by the fact that
the Turks’ warrior lifestyle meant that many princes died young leaving their
fiefs to infants or minors in whose name regents known as atabeys ruled. By the
onset of the Crusades in the late 1090s, Greater Syria had been parcelled out
to several mutually suspicious Saljuq princes and atabeys who saw no reason to
cooperate when the Crusaders did appear in the north. Moreover in the years
immediately preceding the First Crusade almost every major Muslim political
figure had died - the Saljuq sultan Malikshah, his chief minister Nizam
al-Mulk, the ‘Abbasid caliph al-Muqtadi, and his Fatimid rival al-Mustansir -
creating a complete political vacuum in the Middle East.
The Saljuqs quickly dissipated the infamous People’s Crusade
led by Peter the Hermit, which had expended most of its energy on massacring
Jews across Europe, but they were defeated by the knights of the First Crusade
at Dorylaeum in 1097. Baldwin of Boulogne then diverted east and insinuated
himself into the court of Edessa in northern Mesopotamia, which was ruled by a
Christian Armenian lord called T’oros. In the strangest story of the First
Crusade, Baldwin persuaded the childless ruler and his wife to adopt him by
means of a bizarre ceremony during which he pretended to suckle from the ageing
queen. Soon after, he murdered his unfortunate adoptive parents and became lord
of Edessa. Various Crusaders held the County of Edessa until 1144, when the
city was captured by the Muslims.
The other Crusaders proceeded south from Asia Minor into
Syria and besieged Antioch. Dissension among the Saljuq princes and their
regents prevented a relief force having any effect, and after six months the
city fell when an armourer surreptitiously let in the Crusaders. In
contravention of the specified aim of the Crusade - the liberation of the Holy
Land from Muslim control - and oaths the Crusaders had taken to Alexius
Comnenus, Bohemond I took Antioch as his appanage and left the rest of the
Crusaders, led by Raymond of Gilles and Godfrey de Bouillon, to proceed south.
In 1097 the most sinister and notorious event of the Crusade took place, the
sack of the small town of Ma’arra where, as Radulph of Caen later admitted,
‘our troops boiled pagan adults in cooking pots; they impaled children on spits
and devoured them grilled’ Jerusalem was finally taken in 1098, its Muslim and
Jewish inhabitants slaughtered by the vengeful Crusaders. A horrified Ibn
al-Athir recorded that the Jews of the city were barricaded in their synagogue
and burnt to death while a massacre of the city’s Muslim inhabitants ensued,
causing the streets literally to run with blood. Godfrey de Bouillon became
custodian of the holy city on behalf of the pope, and Raymond, the only eminent
Crusader not to have acquired a fiefdom, hastened north to make good his claim
to Tripoli on the Levantine coast.
By 1100 the map of the Middle East had become a mosaic of
small principalities clustered around the notional centres of Baghdad, where
the ‘Abbasids and Great Saljuqs held court, and Cairo, the capital of the
Fatimids. In the Levant the handful of Crusaders who remained established a
precarious foothold, dependent on supplies brought by the ships of the Italian
city-states of Genoa and Pisa.
West of Egypt, a new Berber regime, the
Almoravids, had emerged from the Sahara desert below Morocco to create an
empire encompassing parts of West Africa, the Sahara, Morocco and the southern
Iberian Peninsula. Somewhat ironically given the political disintegration in
the Middle East, the Almoravids chose to pledge their allegiance to the
‘Abbasids and thus technically brought North Africa and Spain into the ‘Abbasid
fold for the first time. Although the ‘Abbasids held no real power in the west,
the fact that the Almoravids believed that offering them their loyalty and
service would be politically useful shows the power of the caliphal idea even
in such testing times.
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