Hidden Aspect of Muslims and Christian Relations in the Crusader States

Hidden Aspect of Muslims and Christian Relations in the Crusader States By George Archer B.A. May 2006, State University of New York at Stony Brook M.A. August 2009, The George Washington University A thesis submitted to The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of the Arts August 31, 2009 Thesis directed by Mohammad Faghfoory Professor of Religion Abstract of Thesis Hidden Aspects of Muslim and Christian Relations in the Crusader States This thesis examines the meeting of Near Eastern Muslims and Western European Christians in the 11th and 12th century Latin Crusader Kingdoms. As the crusaders were by definition enemies of the Islamic religion, and settled for several generations in the midst of the Islamic world, they were forced to adopt increasingly more complex and tolerant views of religious ‘others.’ A religiously mixed culture of Christian and Islamic elements began to form, which I shall here attempt to demonstrate and analyze. I will track the early history of this period with an account of the European development of Islamophobia in the 9th-11th centuries based on historical record. After the First Crusade created Latin nations in the Eastern Mediterranean in 1099, the role of Islam in the psyche of the crusaders began to change as they became acclimatized to Islamic cultures and practices. Using primarily eyewitness testimonies from both Christian and Muslim sources, I will expose what can be deduced about these people’s attitudes on Islam in the Crusader States. After describing the recapture of the city of Jerusalem by Saladin in 1087, there will be a short conclusion outlining patterns and progressions of interreligious relations. ii! Table of Contents Abstract of Thesis…………………………………………………………………..……..ii Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………………iii Chapter 1: Overview and Sources……………..…………………………………………..1 Chapter 2: The Construction of the Other, 1058-1095……………………………………9 Chapter 3: The Descent, 1096-1099……………………………………………………..18 Chapter 4: A New Culture……………..……………………………………..………….24 Chapter 5: Christian Kings and Muslim Subjects…………….……….…………………33 Chapter 6: Malik Bardaw!l ………………………………………………………..……..37 Chapter 7: De Laude Novae Militæ – “In Praise of the New Knights”………………….40 Chapter 8: The Muslim Burgher and the H"al#l Crusader……….……………………….47 Chapter 9: Fall of the Latin East…………………………………………………………55 Chapter 10: Concluding Notes - Islam as Shadow and Mirror………………..…………60 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………..63 iii Chapter 1: Overview and Sources The primary goal of this effort is to draw images of Western Christian interactions with Near Eastern Islam in and around Jerusalem in the 11th and 12th centuries, specifically within the small nations born from the First Crusade. We wish to argue that there was a two-fold understanding of Islam in Crusading Western Europeans. It was at once condemning and yet potentially accepting, and this later trait momentarily surfaced as the more dominant of the two in “Latin Jerusalem” in the wake of the early Crusades. After the two cultures violently collided, the initial tension between these two peoples cooled into a short-lived but fascinating third culture that was to be quickly swept away by continuing conflict. This third culture is our task at hand. It was not theologically syncretistic – Christians remained orthodox Christians and Muslims, Muslims - yet this aborted culture had at least inklings of tolerance pointing towards pluralism. This is something of a hidden history without a clear trajectory that can be seen from a modern standpoint, and so a pure chronology of events will be minimized. Outlines of this epoch have already been completed many times over with only the slightest disagreement amongst scholars. A strictly linear account of the period would be merely an exercise in storytelling (although we will have to tell the tale to establish a 1 setting.) To afford sufficient context, there will be a recount of the First Crusade provided. Focus will be given on its calling and some of the key eyewitness records of the event, but only so much as they explain indigenous Western opinions of Islam. This will then give way to several accounts of the relations between Christians and Muslims within the Crusader States according to eyewitnesses. These principle fragments will be overlaid with evidence from the period and its aftermath that addresses or is affected by these experiences. This will be summed up with a short conclusion dealing with how these events and documents can possibly be read and what can be known about religious sentiments in this vanished group of peoples. As is the case when dealing with figures of the remote past, especially when they are not standing in the spotlight of the world stage, there are certain missing voices that cannot be adequately recovered. There were certainly plenty of non-combatants both from the East and the West, but there is little that can be said for them purely due to a sheer lack of evidence. The voices of women, both Muslim and Christian, together a mighty bulk of the populace, are non-existent. To know more of these people would of course be a boon, but without even the barest bones of foundations upon which to build, such as would require the uncovering of previously unknown documents or artifacts, there is nothing further to be said. On the use of a term: ‘crusade’ is a wide-ranging word that properly indicates various Western assaults on perceived heresies across the second half of Western Europe’s Middle Ages.1 These wars include the numerous scuffles with the Byzantines !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 Another term: ‘Middle Ages’ and its synonyms are problematic in several ways. It is an anachronism that would not have made sense to the peoples of that time. It is at least mildly disparaging, as if that formative period of a thousand years was merely an interregnum between Rome and the Renaissance. When we cross into the Islamic world, the term does not seem to apply even more so, as the Muslim world was not “in the 2! (especially the Fourth Crusade), the “Northern Crusades” against indigenous paganisms in the Baltic region, the “Albigensian Crusade” against the Cathars of Languedoc, the Reconquista of the Iberian lands, and of course, the sieges against Near Eastern Muslims. As the common English use of this term today summons up only images of the last of these, and as they alone are our concern here, we will use the term in its vernacular capacity for simplicity’s sake. Why this narrow frame of reference? The Crusader States were hardly the largest or longest meeting of Western Christianity and Islam in medieval times. The various Muslim states of Iberia (al-Andalus) lasted as political entities for the nearly 800 years leading up to 1492, with another century of noteworthy Muslim minority in the peninsula present until 1570. Muslims interacted with the numerous princely realms of Italy from the very dawn of Islam until the early modern era; notably in the arena of commerce with the Venetians and during the Emirate of Sicily (Im#rat S"afiliyyah). More recently, large- scale interactions between all the major lands of the West and the Ottomans occurred until the latter’s eventual fall. Within all this, the West received continuous influxes of Islamic influences in science, technology, medicine, theology, philosophy, and mathematics until the end of the Renaissance. When the modern Westerner reflects on Islam and Christianity’s associations before very recent history, it is the Crusades that stand prominently in the foreground. Whether or not it is an accurate historical claim to say that the Crusades are the quintessential meeting of Islam and Christianity is rarely called into question. To be blunt, the Crusades were not necessarily purely religious conflicts as much as a series of !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! middle” of any two comparable points at all. However, as the phrase had and does have universal approval, we must reluctantly continue its use. 3 economic, commercial, and political adventures (and misadventures) with roughly similar religious overtones between them. The religious elements would remain later in the popular imagination of both Christians and Muslims, while the more material causes would be forgotten. Public memory naturally shifts towards more digestible dualisms: the American Civil War was “over slavery,” Rome fell due to “barbarian invasions,” and so on. The Crusades were surely religious campaigns, but to say that that is all there were is a half-truth. Further confusing the matter, the size of the cultural contact between the religions in the Crusades is often overestimated. The individuals and events in question were quite localized in relation to the great civilizations they are claimed to represent. That the conflicts were between very specific subgroups of two immense religious communities is too often (or too conveniently) neglected. A minority of Latinate Western Christians and the various Muslim bands (Arabs, Turks, Kurds, and the occasional Persian) that shifted around the urban centers in the southwestern Mediterranean are the only active participants in the drama. To expand the Crusades into wars in the name of one civilization or another is both dangerous and false. But yet when

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