Sunday, September 15, 2019

Saladin's hollow victory

Standard Western summaries of the Crusades end with amir Saladin's capture of Jerusalem (hence the "Kingdom Of Heaven" movie). We typically get a coda on the Fourth Crusade. (For a recent example I am casting a side-eye at Catlos, here.) Sometimes we read about crusades after the Fourth, namely that there were some; but by that point nobody's paying attention - the historians switch to the Mongols. Or to crusades like the attack on the Cathars which were western so Don't Count.

And to be fair, the Fourth Crusade is a big deal, for a start in the context of Western / east-Christian and Slavic relations, but also for its own sake. I am not saying, don't study the Fourth Crusade. I am saying that the Fourth doesn't matter in Crusade history. For Innocent III, and for his apologists like Rodney Stark, the Fourth was just a big ugly detour.

In 2014 I started reading Paul Cobb's The Race for Paradise. After I got to Saladin I put the book aside... and then forgot where I put it. I found it again maybe in 2016 and today, I picked it up again. (UPDATE 9/18: and cf. my grandfather.)

Cobb describes Saladin's taking of Jerusalem as a booby prize.

As with many Glorious Victories, the win made the winners feel overconfident. After Saladin proclaimed his victory for Allah and for His Caliph (in Baghdad), many of his mujahids just... went home. They'd already earned their ticket to Paradise. The jealous Caliph meanwhile turned up his nose at this adventure which he hadn't requested. Saladin's most-enduring legacy was to stir up the Frankish hornets, who responded with their Third Crusade. This grueling war bled out the will to fight from both sides; by its end, the Crusade hadn't reached the Holy City, but they'd retained much of the Mediterranean littoral.

We all know the sordid tale of the Fourth Crusade's main force; but some elements called to the cause had meanwhile split off and attached themselves to Crusader might in the Holy Land. And the Fourth Crusade's blueprint, which involved an invasion of Egypt, remained available for future reference. During all these distractions, the Christian kingdoms in Spain had beat the Almohad pseudo-caliphate so hard the latter abandoned the whole peninsula; leaving the Muslim presence to a few rump states around Cordoba, Seville, and Granada. And ten years later, came the Fifth Crusade.

Hardly anyone talks about the Fifth and Sixth Crusades. They're left to apologists like Rodney Stark and to full-on Crusade wonks like my granddad. The main aim of all three of the early thirteenth-century Crusades, IV-VI, was Egypt, which obviously didn't happen (the West had forgotten how the Nile works, so they didn't plan around the floods). But whilst the newcomers were keeping Egypt engaged, the Franks back in the Holy Land kept getting replenished by off-shot freelancers - as happened during the Fourth. And they retook Jerusalem. Moreover: they'd done it by treaty this time.

I propose that the Fifth and Sixth Crusades weren't the footnotes the major histories claim they are. Over AD 1200-1244, which is a long generation, the Near Eastern Muslims were on the back foot... again. There was no Saladin to unite them. There couldn't be; they'd given up Jerusalem themselves. In 1244 the Khwarezm Turks retook Jerusalem for Islam; and there was a Seventh Crusade which failed to get it back, but the Crusader States outside that city were doing just fine without it. (UPDATE 9/18: my grandfather thought differently; but battles were always being won and lost and subsequently overturned by diplomats, including even Hattin.)

Cobb holds that what did in the Crusader States, finally, was their alliance with the Mongols. The Egyptian Muslims, many of whose main commanders were Turks, knew how to fight steppe cavalry, or at least had learnt how to do it in by-now-familiar turf. Once Qutuz had seen off the Mongols, all the Christians were left looking like traitors to every Muslim in the Near East. The Crusade was, now, left without friends. Qutuz's successor Baybars picked off the forts one by one.

It should amaze the amateur historian that those histories in the English language have obscured this resurgence of the Crusader states, over a stretch of two generations 1200-1244. How haven't we heard of this?

I'm going with: Gibbon... again; or at least Gibbon-ism. The Protestants and, later, the Enlightenment needed a Crusade that "stalled out"; they needed the Third to present a check on Rome's ambitions and the Fourth to be its farcical coda. The rest, they can just dismiss as Popes Saying Stuff.

Well, they shouldn't. Even my grandfather, no lover of Rome he, cannot support this narrative. The Fifth and Sixth Crusades carried on from the Third, and achieved the Third's strategic aims. Jerusalem was perhaps too slippery but it had ceased to matter in the meantime.

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