The Jerusalem Conquest of 492/1099 in the Medieval Arabic Historiography of the Crusades: From Regional Plurality to Islamic Narrative
This article discusses the reports on the conquest of Jerusalem in 492/1099 in Arabic chronicles. It argues that the reports on this event developed in three distinct and very diverse regional traditions in Egypt, Syria and Iraq. On the basis of the early Egyptian and Syrian evidence, it is highly unlikely that the conquest of Jerusalem was accompanied by a large-scale massacre of the entire population. This evidence shows furthermore that contemporaries did not see the fall of the town as a momentous event. The later Iraqi tradition, by contrast, introduced not only a new dimension to the massacre of the town’s inhabitants, but developed two further narrative strands which were largely unknown to earlier reports: the plundering of the Dome of the Rock and the subsequent delegation to Baghdad. The development of these strands must be seen within the political and intellectual setting of Baghdad, most importantly the conflict between Sultanate and Caliphate and the profile of the Hanbalite traditionalist milieu of the city. Ibn al-Athir’s famous report from the early seventh/thirteenth century almost exclusively goes back to this Iraqi strand and was an “Islamic narrative” in that it sidelined all previous regional traditions and reframed the conquest as a momentous event in terms of eschatology, martyrdom and divine intervention. This development of the Arabic reports on the fall of Jerusalem reflects the broader transformation of how relationships with crusaders and Franks were conceptualized from a pre-jihādī landscape to one where jihād propaganda moved to the centre of political discourse. In 2004 this journal published Benjamin Kedar’s seminal article on the Jerusalem massacre in the Western historiography of the crusades. His article discussed reports ranging from eyewitness accounts to modern studies and tried to establish along the way a historically accurate picture of the events. On the basis of the medieval Latin (and also to some extent the Arabic) sources, Kedar concluded that “the massacre in Jerusalem was considerably more extensive than in other towns.”1 I thank Bernard Hamilton and the anonymous readers for their insightful and very detailed comments on this article. The argument has greatly benefited from discussions with students in the course “The Middle East in the Period of the Crusades” at SOAS (University of London) over the last years. Further helpful comments came from participants in the “Crusades and The Latin East” seminar (Institute of Historical Research, London) where a version of this paper was presented in March 2013. 1 Benjamin Kedar, “The Jerusalem Massacre of July 1099 in the Western Historiography of the Crusades,” Crusades 3 (2004): 15–75, here 74.
Muslim Reactions to the Frankish Presence in Bilād al-Shām: Intensifying Religious Fidelity within the Masses
In his ground-breaking book, Crusade and Mission, Benjamin Z. Kedar introduces evidence derived from different sources, Western and Eastern alike, indicating the conversion of Muslims to Christianity in the Crusader East as early as the First Crusade. This phenomenon, Kedar argues, should not be surprising, for wherever a Muslim population came under Christian yoke in the Mediterranean sphere, there were Muslims who became Christians. Furthermore, though christianising the subjected Muslims was not an overt goal of the Crusade, there were Crusaders in the Levant who sought out and tried to baptise the unbelievers. Added to the incidents of conversion were the more widespread phenomena of Frankish–Muslim alliances: cooperation between Muslims and Crusaders, and even social contacts between leaders of the two conflicting sides. No matter how random the crossing or blurring of religious boundaries were, they must have aroused the fear of those who considered themselves guardians of the “true” religion, a fear of the erosion of the unity of the Islamic community (the umma) and the weakening of the faith of its people. Their preaching and propaganda efforts were therefore directed, to a large extent, internally against those whom they considered traitors or those who, by neglecting the ideals of Islamic unity and supremacy over the unbelievers, enabled the establishment of Frankish rule over Islamic territories. Scholarly literature dealing with the Crusader period in Bilād al-Shām has generally focused on the anti-Christian propaganda mounted by religious scholars in order to urge Ayyūbid rulers and warriors to wage jihād. This article focuses instead on the means adopted by Muslim writers (widely defined as historians and high officials at the royal courts, travellers, and poets) to intensify religious loyalties and to clearly delineate the boundaries within the civilian Muslim population under Frankish rule. Drawing primarily on Arabic sources pertaining to the first and second crusades, the inquiry revolves around examples of converts to Christianity and supporters of the Franks, as compared with jihād warriors and martyrs. The major argument put forward is that the descriptions and portraits included in the literary sources, as well as the prevailing depiction of the Franks as barbarian aggressors defiling Islamic land and sanctities, were additional mechanisms of encouraging resistance to the Frankish presence while simultaneously fostering intensified fidelity to Islam. The authors who drew them were, therefore, no mere recorders of major events, but also played a significant role in fusing Islamic religious and political ideals into the masses. Certainly, some of the
Shoeless Joe: Fantasy and the Humor of Fellow-Feeling
In his essay on Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, Thomas Carlyle writes of a humor that manifests itself in smile rather than laughter. "Richter is a man of mirth," says Carlyle, whose humor is "capricious . . . quaint . . . [and] heartfelt" (15). The three adjectives represent for Carlyle the essence of what he terms "true humor" because they suggest Richter's enormous respect for humanity. "True humor," he goes on to say, "springs not more from the head than from the heart; it is not contempt, its essence is love; it issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper" (17). These smiles are not Hobbesian smirks of superiority1 but genuine signs of compassion for, sympathy toward, and empathy with the object of the humor. Carlyle further provides a direct link between humor and both pathos and nobility; the link is the smile of the caring man. For Carlyle, this smile is one of "fellow-feeling":