A characteristic of science and mathematics, including the historical sciences, during high points in the history of the West — both at the time of the dawn of scientific scholarship with the ancient Greeks and science's modern reawakening and takeoff at the close of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance — has been the presence of a “chain” or “constellation” of scientific practitioners.  A Western scholar, of greater or lesser genius, typically had predecessors (whether living at the time or not) whose work influenced his thoughts, and the latter's results in turn went on to inspire successors.  Thus the phenomenon Newton likened to “standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Among the poignancies of the history of scientific scholarship across the Medieval Arab and Islamic world, however, are those occasions when one encounters a brilliant, penetrating mind, but one who rather than circling as a bright star amongst a constellation of lesser and greater luminaries, instead passed as a lone meteor brightly illuminating the darkness, but having few or no antecedents and leaving equally few successors.

In the realm of mathematics and arithmetic, such a nearly solitary personage would include al-Kashi (i.e., Jamshid al-Kashi, died 1429), a prominent figure in the story of the evolution of our modern decimal numbering system; Impearls will likely do an article someday wherein al-Kashi's contributions will be considered.  In the domain of history, though there existed talented Arabic historians before and after him, there were none like Ibn Khaldun (in full, Wali al-Din 'Abd ar-Rahman ibn Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr Muhammad ibn Khaldûn), born in Tunis, originally of Spanish Arab stock, and lived 1332−1406.  Greatest of Arab historians, few historians in any time or place have possessed Ibn Khaldun's breadth and scope of inquiry — which basically included all of society.  Indeed, he was the first sociologist of history.

Modern scholars praise Ibn Khaldun extravagantly.  Arnold Toynbee in his monumental work A Study of History wrote of him: ¹

[Ibn Khaldun was] an Arabic genius who achieved in a single “acquiescence” of less than four years' length, out of a fifty-four years' span of adult working life, a life-work in the shape of a piece of literature which can bear comparison with the work of Thucydides or the work of a Machiavelli for both breadth and profundity of vision as well as for sheer intellectual power.  Ibn Khaldun's star shines the more brightly by contrast with the foil of darkness against which it flashes out; for while Thucydides and Machiavelli and Clarendon are all brilliant representatives of brilliant times and places, Ibn Khaldun is the sole point of light in his quarter of the firmament.  He is indeed the one outstanding personality in the history of a civilization whose social life on the whole was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”  In his chosen field of intellectual activity he appears to have been inspired by no predecessor, and to have found no kindred souls among his contemporaries, and to have kindled no answering spark of inspiration in any successors; and yet, in the Prolegomena (Muquddamat) to his Universal History he has conceived and formulated a philosophy of history which is undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind that has ever yet been created by any mind in any time or place.

George Sarton in his Introduction to the History of Science put it similarly: ²

… Ibn Khaldun was a historian, politician, sociologist, economist, a deep student of human affairs, anxious to analyse the past of mankind in order to understand its present and its future.  Not only is he the greatest historian of the Middle Ages, towering like a giant over a tribe of pygmies, but one of the first philosophers of history, a forerunner of Machiavelli, Bodin, Vico, Comte and Curnot.  Among Christian historians of the Middle Ages there are but one or two who can perhaps compare with him, to wit, Otto von Freising and John of Salisbury, and the distance between them and him is great indeed, far greater than the distance between him and Vico.  What is equally remarkable, Ibn Khaldun ventured to speculate on what we should call to-day the methods of historical research….

Finally, Robert Flint in his History of the Philosophy of History wrote: ³

As regards the science or philosophy of history, Arabic literature was adorned by one most brilliant name.  Neither the classical nor the medieval Christian world can show one of nearly the same brightness.  Ibn Khaldun (a.d. 1332−1406), considered simply as an historian, had superiors even among Arabic authors, but as a theorist on history he had no equal in any age or country until Vico appeared, more than three hundred years later.  Plato, Aristotle and Augustine were not his peers, and all others were unworthy of being even mentioned along with him.  He was admirable alike by his originality and sagacity, his profundity and his comprehensiveness.  He was, however, a man apart, as solitary and unique among his co-religionists and contemporaries in the department of historical philosophy as was Dante in poetry or Roger Bacon in science among theirs.  Arabic historians had, indeed, collected the materials which he could use, but he alone used them….

Impearls will eventually quote several excerpts from Ibn Khaldun's Prolegomena or Muqaddimah, translated as “An Introduction to History,” but for now we will restrict ourselves to Ibn Khaldun's description of naval affairs, including the circumstances leading up to and encompassing the Crusades of the West; thus, it fits nicely into Impearls' series on the Crusades: Crusades V — the Crusades from an Arab point of view.  Scroll down to the next posting for the selection.

Following quotations are from An Arab Philosophy of History: Selections from the Prolegomena of Ibn Khaldun of Tunis (1332−1406), translated and arranged by Charles Issawi, 1950, The Wisdom of the East Series, John Murray, Albemarle Street, London (Butler & Tanner Ltd., Frome and London); pp. x-xi.

¹ Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, Vol. III, 1956, Royal Institute of International Affairs and Oxford University Press, London.

² George Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science, 1962, Carnegie Institution of Washington, Williams & Wilkins Company, Baltimore.

³ Robert Flint, History of the Philosophy of History, 1893, William Blackwood & Sons, Ltd., Edinburgh.

UPDATE:  2005-08-29 00:40 UT:  Geitner Simmons of the ever-rewarding Regions of Mind blog links to Impearls' Ibn Khaldun articles (as well as its recent piece on zero), noting:  “Michael explains the intellectual contributions of the medieval Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun and quotes from his historical writings on the Arab admiralty.”  In an e-mail to Impearls, Geitner also wrote:  “It was a pleasure to read your observations on all those topics.  […]  Congratulations on the high standard you continue to set at Impearls.”

Labels: Arab civilization, Arnold Toynbee, crusades, Geitner Simmons, George Sarton, historiography, Ibn Khaldun, medieval history, Robert Flint

(The admiralty) is one of the ranks and functions of the dynasty in the realm of the Maghrib and Ifrîqiyah.  It is subordinate to the person in charge of “the sword” and comes under his authority in many respects.  In customary usage, the person in charge of the admiralty is called Almiland, with an emphatic l.  (The word) is derived from the language of the European Christians.  It is the technical term for the office in their language.

The rank (of admiral) is restricted to the realm of Ifrîqiyah and the Maghrib, because both Ifrîqiyah and the Maghrib are on the southern shore of the Mediterranean.  Along its southern shore the lands of the Berbers extend from Ceuta to Alexandria and on to Syria.  Along its northern shore are the countries of Spain and of the European Christians (Franks), the Slavs, and the Byzantines, also extending to Syria.  It is called the Byzantine Sea or the Syrian Sea, according to the people who inhabit its shores.  Those who live along the coast and on the shores of both sides of the Mediterranean are the more concerned with (maritime) conditions than any other maritime nation.

The Byzantines, the European Christians, and the Goths lived on the northern shore of the Mediterranean.  Most of their wars and most of their commerce was by sea.  They were skilled in navigating (the Mediterranean) and in naval war.  When these people coveted the possession of the southern shore, as the Byzantines (coveted) Ifrîqiyah and as the Goths the Maghrib, they crossed over in their fleets and took possession of it.  Thus, they achieved superiority over the Berbers and deprived them of their power.  They had populous cities there, such as Carthage, Sbeitla, Jalûlâ, Murnâq, Cherchel, and Tangier.  The ancient master of Carthage used to fight the master of Rome and to send fleets loaded with armies and equipment to wage war against him.  Thus, (seafaring) is a custom of the inhabitants of both shores of the Mediterranean, which was known in ancient as in modern times.

When the Muslims took possession of Egypt, ‘Umar b. al-Khattâb wrote to ‘Amr b. al-‘Âs and asked him to describe the sea to him.  ‘Amr replied:  “The sea is a great creature upon which weak creatures ride — like worms upon a piece of wood.”  Thus, he recommended at that time that the Muslims be kept away from seafaring.  No Arab travelled by sea save those who did so without ‘Umar's knowledge and were punished by him for it.  Thus it remained until Mu‘âwiyah's reign.  He permitted the Muslims to go by sea and to wage the holy war in ships.  The reason for this was that on account of their Bedouin attitude, the Arabs were at first not skilled in navigation and seafaring, whereas the Byzantines and the European Christians, on account of their experience of the sea and the fact that they had grown up travelling in ships, were used to the sea and well trained in navigation.

The royal and governmental authority of the Arabs became firmly established and powerful at that time.  The non-Arab nations became servants of the Arabs and were under their control.  Every craftsman offered them his best services.  They employed seagoing nations for their maritime needs.  Their own experience of the sea and of navigation grew, and they turned out to be very expert.  They wished to wage the holy war by sea.  They constructed ships and galleys and loaded the fleet with men and weapons.  They embarked the army and warriors to fight against the unbelievers across the sea.  This was the special concern of the provinces and border regions closest to the shores of the Mediterranean, such as Syria, Ifrîqiyah, the Maghrib, and Spain.  The caliph ‘Abd-al-Malik recommended to Hassân b. an-Nu‘mân, the governor of Ifrîqiyah, that a shipyard be set up in Tunis for the production of maritime implements, as he was desirous of waging the holy war.  From there, the conquest of Sicily was achieved.

Thereafter, under the ‘Ubaydid(-Fâtimids) and the (Spanish) Umayyads, the fleets of Ifrîqiyah and Spain constantly attacked each other's countries in civil war operations, and they thoroughly devastated the coastal regions.  In the days of ‘Abd-ar-Rahmân an-Nâsir, the Spanish fleet had grown to about two hundred vessels, and the African fleet to the same number, or close to it.  The fleet admiral in Spain was Ibn Rumâhis.  The ports used by (the Spanish fleet) for docking and hoisting sail were Pechina and Almería.  The fleet was assembled from all the provinces.  Each region where ships were used contributed one unit under the supervision of a commander in charge of everything connected with fighting, weapons and combatants alike.  There also was a captain who directed the movement of the fleet, using either the wind or oars.  He also directed its anchoring in port.  When the whole fleet was assembled for a large-scale raid or for important government business, it was manned in its home port.  The ruler loaded it with men from his best troops and clients, and placed them under the supervision of one commander, who belonged to the highest class of the people of his realm and to whom all were responsible.  He then sent them off, and awaited their victorious return with booty.

During the time of the Muslim dynasty, the Muslims gained control over the whole Mediterranean.  Their power and domination over it was vast.  The Christian nations could do nothing against the Muslim fleets, anywhere in the Mediterranean.  All the time, the Muslims rode its wave for conquest.  There occurred then many well-known episodes of conquest and plunder.  The Muslims took possession of all the islands that lie off its shores, such as Mallorca, Minorca, Ibiza, Sardinia, Sicily, Pantelleria, Malta, Crete, Cyprus, and of all the other (Mediterranean) provinces of the Byzantines and the European Christians.  Abû l-Qâsim ash-Shî‘î [Al-Qâ’im, the second Fâtimid, who ruled from 934 to 946] and his descendants sent their fleets on raids against the island of Genoa from al-Mahdîyah.  They returned victorious with booty.  Mujâhid al-‘Âmirî, the master of Denia, one of the reyes de taïfas, conquered the island of Sardinia with his fleet in the year 405 [1014/15].  The Christians reconquered it in due course.

During all that time, the Muslims were gaining control over the largest part of the high sea.  Their fleets kept coming and going, and the Muslim armies crossed the sea in ships from Sicily to the great mainland opposite Sicily, on the northern shore.  They fell upon the European Christian rulers and made massacres in their realms.  This happened in the days of the Banû Abî l-Husayn, the rulers of Sicily [the Kalbite governors of Sicily in the latter part of the tenth and the beginning of the eleventh century], who supported the ‘Ubaydid(-Fâtimid) propaganda there.  The Christian nations withdrew with their fleets to the north-eastern side of the Mediterranean, to the coastal regions inhabited by the European Christians and the Slavs, and to the Aegean islands, and did not go beyond them.  The Muslim fleet had pounced upon them as eagerly as lions upon their prey.  They covered most of the surface of the Mediterranean with their equipment and numbers and travelled its lanes (on missions both) peaceful and warlike.  Not a single Christian board floated on it.

Eventually, however, the ‘Ubaydid(-Fâtimid) and Umayyad dynasties weakened and softened and were affected by infirmity.  Then, the Christians reached out for the eastern islands of the Mediterranean, such as Sicily, Crete, and Malta, and took possession of them.  They pressed on against the shores of Syria during this interval, and took possession of Tripoli, Ascalon, Tyre, and Acco.  They gained control over all the seaports of Syria.  They conquered Jerusalem and built there a church as an outward manifestation of their religion and worship.  They deprived the Banû Khazrûn of Tripolitania and (conquered) Gabés and Sfax, and imposed a poll tax upon their inhabitants.  Then they took possession of al-Mahdîyah, the (original) seat of the ‘Ubaydid(-Fâtimids), and took it away from the descendants of Buluggin b. Zîrî.  In the fifth [eleventh] century, they had the lead in the Mediterranean.  In Egypt and Syria, interest in the fleet weakened and eventually ceased to exist.  Since then, they have shown no concern for the naval matters with which they had been so exceedingly concerned under the ‘Ubaydid(-Fâtimid) dynasty.  In consequence, the identity of the office of the admiralty was lost in those countries.  It remained in Ifrîqiyah and the Maghrib, but only there.  At the present time, the western Mediterranean has large fleets and is very powerful.  No enemy has trespassed on it or been able to do anything there.

In (Almoravid) times, the admirals of the fleet in (the West) were the Banû Maymûn, chieftains from the peninsula of Cadiz, which they (later on) handed over to (the Almohad) ‘Abd-al-Mu’min, to whom they paid obedience.  Their fleets, from the countries on both shores, reached the number of one hundred.

In the sixth [twelfth] century, the Almohad dynasty flourished and had possession of both shores.  The Almohads organized their fleet in the most perfect manner ever known and on the largest scale ever observed.  Their admiral was Ahmad as-Siqillî.  The Christians had captured him, and he had grown up among them.  The ruler of Sicily (Roger II) selected him for his service and employed him in it, but he died and was succeeded by his son, whose anger (Ahmad) somehow aroused.  He feared for his life and went to Tunis, where he stayed with the chief of Tunis.  He went on to Marrakech, and was received there by the caliph Yûsuf al-‘Ashrî b. ‘Abd-al-Mu’min with great kindness and honour.  (The caliph) gave him many presents and entrusted him with command of his fleet.  (As commander of the fleet) he went to wage the holy war against the Christian nations.  He did noteworthy and memorable deeds during the Almohad dynasty.

In his time, the Muslim fleet was of a size and quality never, to our knowledge, attained before or since.  When Salâh-ad-dîn Yûsuf b. Ayyûb {Saladin to the West –Imp.}, the ruler of Egypt and Syria at this time, set out to recover the ports of Syria from the Christian nations and to cleanse Jerusalem of the abomination of unbelief and to rebuild it, one fleet of unbelievers after another came to the relief of the ports, from all the regions near Jerusalem which they controlled.  They supported them with equipment and food.  The fleet of Alexandria could not stand up against them.  (The Christians) had had the upper hand in the eastern Mediterranean for so long, and they had numerous fleets there.  The Muslims, on the other hand, had for a long time been too weak to offer them any resistance there, as we have mentioned.  In this situation, Salâh-ad-dîn sent ‘Abd-al-Karîm b. Munqidh, a member of the family of the Banû Munqidh, the rulers of Shayzar, as his ambassador to Ya‘qûb al-Mansûr, the Almohad ruler of the Maghrib at that time, asking for the support of his fleets, to prevent the fleets of the unbelievers from achieving their desire of bringing relief to the Christians in the Syrian ports.  Al-Mansûr sent him back to Salâh-ad-dîn, and did not comply with his request.

This is evidence that the ruler of the Maghrib alone possessed a fleet, that the Christians controlled the eastern Mediterranean, and that the dynasties in Egypt and Syria at that time and later were not interested in naval matters or in building up government fleets.

Ya‘qûb al-Mansûr then died, and the Almohad dynasty became infirm.  The Galician nations seized control of most of Spain.  The Muslims sought refuge in the coastal region and took possession of the islands of the western Mediterranean.  They regained their former strength, and their power on the surface of the Mediterranean grew.  Their fleets increased, and the strength of the Muslims became again equal to that of (the Christians).  This happened in the time of (the Merinid) Sultan, Abû l-Hasan [ruled from 1331 to 1351], the Zanâtah ruler in the Maghrib.  When he desired to wage the holy war, his fleet was as well equipped and numerous as that of the Christians.

Then, the naval strength of the Muslims declined once more, because of the weakness of the ruling dynasty.  Maritime habits were forgotten under the impact of the strong Bedouin attitude prevailing in the Maghrib, and as the result of the discontinuance of Spanish habits.  The Christians resumed their former, famous maritime training, and (renewed) their constant activity in the Mediterranean and their experience with conditions there.  (They again showed) their former superiority over others on the high seas and in (Mediterranean) shipping.  The Muslims came to be strangers to the Mediterranean.  The only exceptions are a few inhabitants of the coastal regions.  They ought to have many assistants and supporters, or they ought to have support from the dynasties to enable them to recruit help and to work toward the goal of (increased seafaring activities).

The rank (of admiral) has been preserved to this day in the dynasties of the Maghrib.  There, the identity (of the admiralty is still preserved), and how to take care of a fleet, how to build ships and navigate them, is known.  Perhaps some political opportunity will arise in the coastal countries, and the Muslims will ask the wind to blow against unbelief and unbelievers.  The inhabitants of the Maghrib have it on the authority of the books of predictions that the Muslims will yet have to make a successful attack against the Christians and conquer the lands of the European Christians beyond the sea.  This, it is said, will take place by sea.

¹ Ibn Khaldûn, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, Chapter 3: “On dynasties, royal authority, the caliphate, government ranks, and all that goes with these things,” Section 32: “The ranks of royal and governmental authority and the titles that go with those ranks,” Sub-section: “The admiralty,” translated from the Arabic by Franz Rosenthal, abridged and edited by N. J. Dawood, 1967, Bolligen Series, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey; ISBN 0-691-09946-4, 0-691-01754-9 (paperback); pp. 208-213.

Labels: Arab civilization, crusades, East Roman Empire, Ibn Khaldun, medieval history, Reconquista

Geitner Simmons, writing in his blog Regions of Mind, has followed-up on Donald Sensing's and my earlier Crusader articles (after linking to them) with a piece called “The first crusader.”  Geitner points out that the crusades could properly be said to commence early in the 7th century, with the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius and the Persian invasion of the empire — and thus began neither with the Spanish Reconquista nor the Western numbered Crusades starting in the late 11th cent.  This is quite a reasonable point of view historically, and the story Simmons refers to is indeed terrific: total victory over the Persians (and Avars) by Emperor Heraclius after the former had initially conquered almost all the Roman Empire's Asian and African territories, at the same time that the barbarian nomadic Avars occupied and threatened most of Byzantium's remaining European possessions.

The book review that Geitner quotes from, however, is unfortunately quite unsatisfactory (no fault of Simmons, he pointed to what he had) in communicating the enormous scale of Heraclius' astonishing achievement, which without hyperbole can be said to rival the exploits of Alexander.  Here's what historians Donald MacGillivray Nicol and John L. Teall, writing in Encyclopædia Britannica (we'll give folks a break from The Cambridge Medieval History), had to say in this regard: ¹

When Heraclius “went out into the lands of the themes” in 622, thereby undertaking a struggle of seven years' duration against the Persians, he utilized the third of his sources of strength: religion.  The warfare that ensued was nothing less than a holy war: it was partly financed by the treasure placed by the church at the disposal of the state; the Emperor's soldiers called upon God to aid them as they charged into battle; and they took comfort in the miraculous image of Christ that preceded them in their line of march.  A brief summary of the campaign unfortunately gives no idea of the difficulties Heraclius encountered as he liberated Asia Minor (622); fought in Armenia with allies found among the Christian Caucasian peoples, the Lazi, the Abasgi, and the Iberians (624); and struggled in far-distant Lazica while Constantinople withstood a combined siege of Avars and Persians (626).  An alliance with the Khazars, a Turkic people from north of the Caucasus, proved of material assistance in those years and of lasting import in Byzantine diplomacy.  Heraclius finally destroyed the main Persian host at Nineveh in 627 and, after occupying Dastagird in 628, savoured the full flavour of triumph when his enemy, Khosrow, was deposed and murdered.  The Byzantine emperor might well have believed that, if the earlier success of the Persians signalized the resurrection of the Achaemenid Empire, his own successes had realized the dreams of Caesar, Augustus, and Trajan.

Yet this was a war fought by medieval Byzantium and not by ancient Rome.  Its spirit was manifest in 630, when Heraclius triumphantly restored the True Cross to Jerusalem, whence the Persians had stolen it, and — even more — when Constantinople resisted the Avar-Persian assault of 626.  During the attack, the patriarch Sergius maintained the morale of the valiant garrison by proceeding about the walls, bearing the image of Christ to ward off fire, and by painting upon the gates of the western walls images of the Virgin and child to ward off attacks launched by the Avars — the “breed of darkness.”  The Avars withdrew when Byzantine ships defeated the canoes manned by Slavs, upon whom the nomad Avars depended for their naval strength.  The latter never recovered from their defeat.  As their empire crumbled, new peoples from the Black Sea to the Balkans emerged to seize power: the Bulgars of Kuvrat, the Slavs under Samo, and the Serbs and Croats whom Heraclius permitted to settle in the northwest Balkans once they had accepted Christianity.

As for the Byzantine defenders of Constantinople, they celebrated their victory by singing Romanos' great hymn “Akathistos,” with choir and crowd alternating in the chant of the “Alleluia.”  The hymn, still sung in a Lenten service, commemorates those days when Constantinople survived as a fortress under ecclesiastical leadership, its defenders protected by the icons and united by their liturgy.  This they sang in Greek, as befitted a people whose culture was now Greek and no longer Latin.

Heraclius accomplished all this not only by superb generalship, but with also a great dash of personal valor.  As historian Enno Franzius writes in his biography of Heraclius in Britannica: ²

In 622, clad as a penitent and bearing a sacred image of the Virgin, he left Constantinople, as prayers rose from its many sanctuaries for victory over the Persian Zoroastrians, the recovery of the Cross, and the reconquest of Jerusalem.  He was, in effect, leading the first crusade.  Indeed, in the ensuing hostilities, a pious poet contrasted the dancing girls in the Persian general's tent with the psalm singers in the Emperor's.  In a brilliant campaign, he manoeuvred the Persians out of Anatolia and suggested a truce to the Persian monarch.  This offer Khosrow II contemptuously rejected, referring to himself as beloved by the gods and master of the world, to Heraclius as his abject and imbecilic slave, and to Christ as incapable of saving the empire.  Mindful of the propagandistic value of Khosrow's response, Heraclius made it public.

The next two years he devoted to campaigns in Armenia, the manpower of which was vital to the empire, and to a devastating invasion of Persia.  In 625 Heraclius retired to Anatolia.  He had encamped on the west bank of the Sarus River when the Persian forces appeared on the opposite bank.  Many of his men rushed impetuously across the bridge and were ambushed and annihilated by the enemy.

Emerging from his tent, Heraclius saw the triumphant Persians crossing the bridge.  The fate of the empire hung in the balance.  Seizing his sword, he ran to the bridge and struck down the Persian leader.  His soldiers closed rank behind him and beat back the foe.

In 626 the Persians advanced to the Bosporus, hoping to join the Avars in an assault on the land walls of Constantinople.  But the Romans sank the primitive Avar fleet that was to transport Persian units across the Bosporus and repelled the unsupported Avar assault.  Heraclius again invaded Persia and in December 627, after a march across the Armenian highlands into the Tigris plain, met the Persians near the ruins of Nineveh.  There, astride his renowned war-horse, he killed three Persian generals in single combat, charged into enemy ranks at the head of his troops, killed the Persian commander, and scattered the Persian host.

A month later, Heraclius entered Dastagird with its stupendous treasure.  Khosrow was overthrown by his son, with whom Heraclius made peace, demanding only the return of the Cross, the captives, and conquered Roman territory.  Returning to Constantinople in triumph, he was hailed as a Moses, an Alexander, a Scipio.  In 630 he personally restored the Cross to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

Heraclius fought his “crusade” very differently from the sort of general mayhem and massacre which later western European-organized crusades acquired a reputation (not entirely warranted) for.  As Franzius wrote:

[E]ven though he fostered the crusading spirit, [Heraclius] waged war in a less inhumane manner than most of his contemporaries.  He did not enslave or massacre the inhabitants of conquered towns and he treated his prisoners of war well, releasing them rather than butchering them when he could not feed them.  His mercy contrasted sharply with Khosrow's acerbity and probably hastened his victory in Persia.

Heraclius' more humane treatment of helpless prisoners and captured cities may reflect yet more of the supreme qualitative chasm in education and culture separating the medieval East Romans from the western European states and their knights (as Impearls' earlier piece Crusades II attests).  In this regard, it's worth looking at application of the death penalty in medieval Byzantium, which is quite at variance from ordinary perceptions of the brutality of the Middle Ages.  J. B. Bury writes: ³

From Augustus to Justinian penalties were ever becoming severer and new crimes being invented.  After Justinian the movement was in the direction of mildness.  In the eighth century only two or three crimes were punishable by death.  One of these was murder and in this case the extreme penalty might be avoided if the murderer sought refuge in a church.  On the other hand penalties of multilation were extended and systematised.  This kind of punishment had been inflicted in much earlier times and authorised in one or two cases by Justinian.  In the eighth century we find amputations of the tongue, hand, and nose part of the criminal system, and particularly applied in dealing with sexual offences.  If such punishments strike us to-day as barbaric (though in England, for instance, mutilation was inflicted little more than two centuries ago), they were then considered as a humane substitute for death, and the Church approved them because a tongue-less or nose-less sinner had time to repent.  In the same way, it was a common practice to blind, instead of killing, rebels or unsuccessful candidates for the throne.  The tendency to avoid capital punishment is illustrated by the credible record that during the reign of John Comnenus there were no executions.

Revisit that last bit again: in a cosmopolitan, sophisticated state whose capital city incorporated hundreds of thousands of residents — empire as a whole, millions — over a reign (Emperor John II Comnenus) of 25 years, there were no executions.  However one feels about applicability of capital punishment in the present day, such a record cannot but convey a certain culturally-based merciful attitude by medieval Byzantium towards offenders that ought to give us pause today.  Are we really so sure, for example, that locking up criminals for years or decades of time — or executing them — is more humane than just cutting off a nose?  If deterring crime is the goal, loss of a nose (with more to follow if one persists in one's crimes) might be a greater deterrent for many a potential criminal (as well as pragmatically solving the problem of “community notification”) than vague prospects of prison.  While not seriously entertaining such punishments for the present day, I do emphasize that our own conventions of what's humane and what's not aren't unchallengeable.  In my view, East Rome has a decent claim to having been, in reality, basically a moral as well as cultured civilization, and very far indeed from what some might propose as the necessary character of such a Christian theocracy: a kind of Christian Taliban — that's manifestly not medieval Byzantium.

One other thing: we've focused here (as does Geitner) on the crusade of Heraclius in the early 7th century, and what that tells us about the medieval Byzantine world — however, there's plenty else in the history of the East Roman state warranting the appellation of “crusade.”  After the Muslim irruption from Arabia, commencing near the end of Heraclius' life, for many decades the Byzantines were forced into a struggle merely to survive; a large part of their territory was stripped from them, and central Anatolia became the residual core of the empire.  Throughout the 10th and much of the 11th centuries, however, East Rome rebounded to the extent of undertaking quite a Reconquista of her own, recovering from Muslim rule the pirate-nest islands of Crete and Cyprus, most of eastern and southeastern Anatolia, the important city of Antioch in Syria, even threatening Jerusalem — all this, though, is a tale for another day.  It was only after the empire's defeat and even more disastrous aftermath of the epochal battle of Manzikert in 1071 (caused, as Bury notes, by the execrable judgment of the emperor in command) that the Byzantines were driven to the desperate and dangerous expedient of appealing to the West for aid.  The rest, as they say, is history.

¹ Donald MacGillivray Nicol (Koraës Professor Emeritus of Byzantine and Modern Greek History, Language, and Literature, King's College, University of London) and John L. Teall (Professor of History, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts), “The History of the Byzantine Empire: The Heraclians and the Challenge of Islam,” Encyclopædia Britannica, Britannica CD 1997, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.

² Enno Franzius (author of History of the Byzantine Empire), “Heraclius,” Op. cit.

³ J. B. Bury (M.A., F.B.A.), “Introduction” to Volume IV: The Eastern Roman Empire, edited by J. R. Tanner, C. W. Previté-Orton, and Z. N. Brooke, The Cambridge Medieval History, planned by J. B. Bury, Cambridge at the University Press, London, 1923; p. xiii.

UPDATE:  2005-07-29 10:00 UT:  An article The Arab Admiralty – and an Arab naval view of the Crusades by Ibn Khaldûn has been posted.  See also the associated piece Ibn Khaldûn – Master Historian of the Arabs.

UPDATE:  2003-12-14 12:30 UT:  Geitner Simmons responded to Impearls' article above with a link and some very kind words:  “What worthwhile examinations of history Michael McNeil provides at Impearls.  […]  Now a new post at Impearls delves deep into the story of Heraclius' “First Crusade,” yielding many great historical nuggets.  […]  The post shows the fine work that the history-blog universe, at its best, is capable of.”

Eric Scheie also commented in an e-mail:  “That is a wonderfully written, thoughtful, well-researched piece.”

UPDATE:  2003-12-15 19:20 UT:  Eric Scheie linked to this article from his blog Classical Values, calling it “a real gem!” and some other praise that I blush to repeat except say that I'm not “a genuine scholar of the Byzantine period” — or of much else actually — just a guy who's read some books, and remembered oh-too-tiny a bit of what I've read.  (Keeping a big, fat tome or two in the bathroom does wonders, I find: a page or couple at a sitting out of a history book eventually covers a lot of temporal-spatial territory!)  I do appreciate the compliments, though, and they make nice decoration for these updates!  (In response to Eric's question, I do have something to post on that, but I'm not quite ready to do so — have to look up some stuff then think about it — and in the meantime the link his reader dropped off seems to provide more than a good start, much of that material I'll also have to absorb, so let's keep the topic in mind as an article idea for the future.)

Labels: crusades, East Roman Empire, medieval history

The Cause of the Crusades (to be specific, the cause of the First Crusade) was explored in an earlier article, as was the civilizational relationship between the East Roman Empire and the states of the medieval West.  Once the Crusades were launched, they continued intermittently in progress for centuries.  It turns out that the original cause of the (First) Crusade differs from the reasons why they continued on for so long, and why they came to an end is for a different reason yet.  What were those causes?

Since we've been using The Cambridge Medieval History as a major reference to the Middle Ages, it's worth noting that one can take an overall view of the whole of the medieval period by simply reviewing the titles of the (originally) eight volumes in the set, which summarize in a nutshell the (its) story of the Middle Ages in the West, to wit:

I.  The Christian Roman Empire and the Foundation of the Teutonic Kingdoms
II.  The Rise of the Saracens and the Foundation of the Western [Holy Roman] Empire
III.  Germany and the Western Empire
IV.  The Eastern Roman Empire
V.  Contest of [Western] Empire and Papacy
VI.  Victory of the Papacy
VII.  Decline of Empire and Papacy
VIII.  The Close of the Middle Ages

Notice that the overall story of the later medieval period, revealed by the names of the volumes of The Cambridge Medieval History, is a long-drawn-out contest between the Papacy and the Western (or Holy Roman) Empire, in which the Papacy was for a time victorious, but after which both Papacy and Empire declined.

Recall the questions of why, once launched, the Crusades became a movement which continued for centuries, and why they ultimately came to an end.  While for the Eastern Empire, as previously noted, the Crusades were “simply a series of barbarian invasions of a particularly embarrassing kind,” for the West the Crusades served as a key instrument in the great play during the Middle Ages by the Papacy for ultimate power.  The Crusades thus continued so long as they proved to be a source of increased power and influence for the Papacy; they came to an end when the “sacred office” became so corrupted in view of the public by secularizing influences resulting from its acquired Imperial role that that power base evaporated.

Here's how historian E. J. Passant, writing in The Cambridge Medieval History, described the matter: ¹

The Crusades were initiated by the Papacy, and from the moment of Urban II's appeal to the Council of Clermont down to the fall of Acre — and indeed for long after — they remained one of the first preoccupations of every Pope.  Describing the policy of the Curia of so late a date as the middle of the fourteenth century, Viollet remarks that “Rome ne cessait guère, dans l'intérêt général de la chrétienté, d'entretenir de grands mais stériles projets de Croisade; c'est pour elle un impérissable honneur.”  And what was true of the French Papacy of Avignon was far more true of the Popes of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries at the height of their power.  It were strange if this continuous direction for two hundred years of the armed forces of Europe in the campaign against the infidel should have left no mark upon the Papacy itself.  When Nicholas II, in 1059, issued the decree regulating the election of future Popes, the great effort of the Church to emancipate itself from the secularisation involved in its acceptance of a feudal constitution began.  The long struggle with the Empire, which opens between Hildebrand and Henry IV, and which continued relentlessly throughout the period of the Crusades, was an attempt — successful in the main — to organise the Church as a “societas perfecta,” to use a phrase of later controversy, independent of the secular power within its own sphere, and only dependent upon that power in so far as it needed the sword of material force to carry out the sentences of spiritual judgment.  In all other respects the Divine Society was to be as superior to the secular as its very nature demanded.  The attempt to attain this ideal, with all its tremendous implications, involved the Popes not only in continual warfare with successive Emperors but also in decisive conflict with the Kings of England and France, and, in an increasing degree, it involved the secularisation of the Papacy itself.  To be successful its occupants must be statesmen first and men of God second; to carry on war they must raise men and money, and resort to shifts of all kinds to do so; to seize every advantage, to shape policy to fit every change of circumstance, they must be prepared to use diplomatic dissimulation and, if necessary, to lie with hardihood.  That this process of degradation, from the lofty heights of spiritual control to the lowest levels of political expediency, set in, is not difficult of proof; it suffices to compare Gregory VII with Innocent IV, or the enthusiastic response with which the call to the First Crusade was met, with the indifference and even hostility which greeted such appeals in the later thirteenth century.  The wheel had gone full circle, and the attempt to free the members of the Church from secular control ended in a more subtle secularisation of its very heart — the Papacy itself.

In that process the Crusades played an important part.  They were one of the main sources of papal strength throughout the twelfth century, for they provided the Popes with the moral support of Europe, and placed the Papacy in a position of acknowledged leadership which was one of the greatest value in the struggle with the secular powers.  The literal mind of the Middle Ages found it more easy to understand the task of succouring the earthly Jerusalem by the force of arms than that of gaining the heavenly Jerusalem by the practice of the Christian virtues, and in this case the natural man could at once find an outlet for his martial energies and also, by virtue of the indulgence attached to the Crusade, make certain of attaining the heavenly reward.  Every motive of self-sacrifice or self-interest, every desire for glory or for gain, was appealed to by the call to the Crusade.  The noble could hope to carve out a principality in the East; the merchant to make gain by transporting the crusading armies and supplying their necessities; the peasant to escape from the crushing burdens of his servile status.  But foremost in the minds of all, at least in the early days, was the unselfish desire to regain for Christ the city made sacred by His life and death, and, inspired by this common aim, men of every class and country of Europe flocked to take the Cross at the instigation of the one authority acknowledged by them all — Christ's earthly Vicar.  Here for the first time Christian Europe gave expression to a common mind and will, and it is of the highest significance that this mind and will had been formed and educated by the Church and was now placed at the service of the Church's head.

There can be little doubt that this moral enthusiasm of Europe proved in the twelfth century an almost incalculable assistance to the Papacy in its struggle with the Empire.  To this force of a united Christendom behind them the successors of that Gregory VII who died in exile owed much of the great advance which they were able to make in the century after his death.  For the Crusades were a living parable of the doctrine of the superiority of the spiritual sword.  They were organised by the Popes and directed by their legates, and, what was more, all those who took the Cross became by that act the subjects of the Papacy in a new and special sense.  Their goods during their absence, themselves before they departed and until they returned with their vows fulfilled, were removed from secular and placed under ecclesiastical jurisdiction.  The Kings of France or England, of Hungary or Naples, the very Emperors themselves were, as crusaders, at the orders of the Pope, and the value of the moral compulsion of public opinion upon which the Popes could rely in forcing reluctant monarchs to take the Cross is clearly evidenced by the example of Henry II in his extreme old age, or of Philip Augustus, or of Frederick II.  It is difficult indeed, except by this explanation, to account for the amazing difference between the position of the Papacy at the accession of Urban II, staggering under the defeat of Gregory VII and the schism which followed, faced too with a Church as yet but half-hearted in support of the reforming policy, and the position of almost undisputed supremacy occupied by Innocent III.  After making all allowances for the ability of Alexander III and the persistence with which the “Hildebrandine” policy was pursued, after taking into account all the circumstances which were favourable to Innocent III's own assertion of his claims — the folly of John, the death of Henry VI, and the youth of Frederick II — there remains the fact that in an age when emotional religion was becoming steadily more powerful, the Pope, as leader of the conflict with the infidel, was enabled to command to an unprecedented degree the devotion of the faithful.

Yet, in the thirteenth century, much of this prestige and much of this popular devotion were lost.  It was not merely that the Holy Land little by little fell into the hands of the Saracen and that the respect given to success was withdrawn when failure followed.  The Papacy might have retained undiminished reverence had it failed, as St Louis failed, with clean hands and for no lack of high courage.  But the very success which had attended the crusading appeal proved too strong a temptation to the Popes, and the appeal to take the Cross not only ceased to attract but definitely alienated the faithful when it was used as a weapon in the struggle against the Hohenstaufen.  The list of so-called crusades in the thirteenth century, not directed against the Saracen, makes sad reading.  No good Christian, indeed, was likely to be shocked by an appeal to take the Cross against the infidels of Provence, though a full Holy Land indulgence for forty days' service might seem almost too easily won when “the greater part of the faithful returned home after the forty days were over”; but since the expedition of Prince Louis against the English king was announced as a crusade, since the papal feud with the Hohenstaufen, so obviously maintained to safeguard the Papal States from danger, was provided with religious sanctions, it is not improbable that Matthew Paris represents a genuine popular reaction, and not merely his own opinion, when he writes of the “crusade” of 1255:  “When the faithful heard this, they marvelled that he should promise them reward for shedding the blood of Christian men that was in former time promised for the shedding of infidel blood.”

But, apart from the direct effect upon public opinion of this misuse of the Crusade for party ends, there emerged from the crusading movement two financial weapons of lasting importance to the papal armoury — the indulgence and the tithe.  […]

¹ E. J. Passant (M.A., Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge), Chapter IX: “The Effects of the Crusades upon Western Europe,” Volume V: Contest of Empire and Papacy, edited by J. R. Tanner, C. W. Previté-Orton, and Z. N. Brooke, The Cambridge Medieval History, planned by J. B. Bury, Cambridge at the University Press, London, 1926; pp. 320-323.

UPDATE:  2003-12-13 12:00 UT:  A supplemental article Crusades IV – the Byzantine Crusades, concerning crusades undertaken by the Eastern Empire itself, has been posted.

Labels: crusades, Holy Roman Empire, medieval history, Papacy

Renowned scholar J. B. Bury planned the entire (originally) 8-volume series of The Cambridge Medieval History, and among other things wrote the Introduction to Volume IV of the series, on The Eastern Roman Empire (that great medieval empire known to historians today as the Byzantine Empire but, as Bury says, more properly would be called simply the Roman Empire).  The subject of the Crusades, the Middle Ages, and the relationship between the Eastern Empire and western Europeans of the time having been previously raised, it's worth considering some of Bury's words from his Introduction to Volume IV.  With regard to an overall assessment of the Eastern Empire vis-a-vis the medieval West, Bury wrote: ¹

As a civilised state, we may say that the Eastern Empire performed three principal functions.  As in its early years the Roman Empire laid the foundations of civilisation in the West and educated Celtic and German peoples, so in its later period it educated the Slavs of eastern Europe.  Russia, Bulgaria, and Serbia owed it everything and bore its stamp.  Secondly, it exercised a silent but constant and considerable influence on western Europe by sending its own manufactures and the products of the East to Italy, France, and Germany.  Many examples of its embroidered textile fabrics and its jewellery have been preserved in the West.  In the third place, it guarded safely the heritage of classical Greek literature which has had on the modern world a penetrating influence difficult to estimate.  That we owe our possession of the masterpieces of Hellenic thought and imagination to the Byzantines everyone knows, but everyone does not remember that those books would not have travelled to Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, because they would not have existed, if the Greek classics had not been read habitually by the educated subjects of the Eastern Empire and therefore continued to be copied. ²

Here we touch on a most fundamental contrast between the Eastern Empire and the western European states of the Middle Ages.  The well-to-do classes in the West were as a rule illiterate, with the exception of ecclesiastics; among the well-to-do classes in the Byzantine world education was the rule, and education meant not merely reading, writing, and arithmetic, but the study of ancient Greek grammar and the reading of classical authors.  The old traditions of Greek education had never died out.  In court circles at Constantinople everyone who was not an utter parvenu would recognise and understand a quotation from Homer.  In consequence of this difference, the intellectual standard in the West where book-learning was reserved for a particular class, and in the East where every boy and girl whose parents could afford to pay was educated, were entirely different.  The advantages of science and training and system were understood in Byzantine society.

The appreciation of method and system which the Byzantines inherited both from the Greeks and from the Romans is conspicuously shewn in their military establishment and their conduct of war.  Here their intellectuality stands out in vivid contrast with the rude dullness displayed in the modes of warfare practised in the West.  Tactics were carefully studied, and the treatises on war which the officers used were kept up to date.  The tacticians apprehended that it was stupid to employ uniform methods in campaigns against different foes.  They observed carefully the military habits of the various people with whom they had to fight — Saracens, Lombards, Franks, Slavs, Hungarians — and thought out different rules for dealing with each.  The soldiers were most carefully and efficiently drilled.  They understood organisation and the importance of not leaving details to chance, of not neglecting small points in equipment.  Their armies were accompanied by ambulances and surgeons.  Contrast the feudal armies of the West, ill-disciplined, with no organisation, under leaders who had not the most rudimentary idea of tactics, who put their faith in sheer strength and courage, and attacked all antagonists in exactly the same way.  More formidable the Western knights might be than Slavs or Magyars, but in the eyes of a Byzantine officer they were equally rude barbarians who had not yet learned that war is an art which requires intelligence as well as valour.  In the period in which the Empire was strong, before it lost the provinces which provided its best recruits, its army was beyond comparison the best fighting machine in Europe.  When a Byzantine army was defeated, it was always the incompetence of the general or some indiscretion on his part, never inefficiency or cowardice of the troops, that was to blame.  The great disaster of Manzikert (1071), from which perhaps the decline of the Eastern Empire may be dated, was caused by the imbecility of the brave Emperor who was in command.  A distinguished student of the art of war has observed that Gibbon's dictum, “the vices of Byzantine armies were inherent, their victories accidental,” is precisely the reverse of the truth.  He is perfectly right.

Concerning the specific subject of the Crusades, as Bury put it, “The Crusades were, for the Eastern Empire, simply a series of barbarian invasions of a particularly embarrassing kind […].”

And it's worth remembering the origins of Venice, which played such a critical role in the Crusades and, especially, in the Fourth Crusade wherein the “New Rome” of Constantinople was conquered (1206) by the armed forces of the West.  Bury notes:

The character of Venice and her career were decided by the circumstance that she was subject to the Eastern Emperors before she became independent.  She was extra-Italian throughout the Middle Ages; she never belonged to the Carolingian Kingdom of Italy.  And after she had slipped into independence almost without knowing it — there never was a violent breaking away from her allegiance to the sovrans of Constantinople — she moved still in the orbit of the Empire; and it was on the ruins of the Empire, dismembered by the criminal enterprise of her Duke Dandolo, that she reached the summit of her power as mistress in the Aegean and in Greece.  She was the meeting-place of two civilisations, but it was eastern not western Europe that controlled her history and lured her ambitions.  Her citizens spoke a Latin tongue and in spiritual matters acknowledged the supremacy of the elder Rome, but the influence from new Rome had penetrated deep, and their great Byzantine basilica is a visible reminder of their long political connexion with the Eastern Empire.

¹ J. B. Bury (M.A., F.B.A.), “Introduction” to Volume IV: The Eastern Roman Empire, edited by J. R. Tanner, C. W. Previté-Orton, and Z. N. Brooke, The Cambridge Medieval History, planned by J. B. Bury, Cambridge at the University Press, London, 1923; pp. x-xi, xiv.

² A superb example of such preservation can be seen in the Archimedes palimpsest, reported on in Impearls' article here.  Notice the implication: 10th century Constantinopolitans were reading, and making copies of, The Method of Archimedes.

UPDATE:  2003-12-03 19:50 UT:  A supplemental article Crusades III – the End of the Crusades, concerning reasons why the Crusades came to a close, has been posted.

UPDATE:  2003-12-13 12:00 UT:  Geitner Simmons, writing in his blog Regions of Mind, has replied to Donald Sensing's and my Crusader articles with a posting entitled “The first crusader,” concerning crusades undertaken by the Eastern Empire itself.  I've responded to his piece with a follow-up article Crusades IV – the Byzantine Crusades.

Labels: crusades, East Roman Empire, medieval history

In One Hand Clapping, Donald Sensing has posted a piece “Setting the record straight,” attempting to correct modern misperceptions about the causes of the medieval Crusades, pointing in turn to an article a year or so back by historian Thomas F. Madden “The Real History of the Crusades” writing in the 2002-04 issue of Crisis Magazine.  Given the timeliness and urgency of the present-day war on terror, the popular search for causes of which has unearthed issues going back as far as the Crusades if not beyond, intelligent consideration of this topic is particularly pertinent today.  In this connection, as Sensing says, “Prof. Madden's article [is] all well worth reading.”

I agree with the points Sensing and Madden are making, and in the case of Madden I certainly don't deign to criticize a professional historian (which I definitely am not) writing in his area of expertise.  I do have a concern, however, about the emphasis and some of the facts cited (or rather, facts not cited) by these gentlemen in support of their position. 

Madden, for instance, writes that, “Christians in the eleventh century were not paranoid fanatics.  Muslims really were gunning for them.”  Madden, however, provides no examples of Muslim perfidy and aggression in Europe after the (early) 8th century, when the Iberian peninsula, modern Spain and Portugal, were (mostly) lost to Islam.  The conquest late in the 11th century of Asia Minor, by the Seljuk Turks, from the old Roman Empire (whose Emperor's appeal to the West can be said to have directly inspired the Crusades) took place far from western Europe.  The Roman Empire in the East obviously suffered, but why should the West (though spiritually sympathetic with their fellow-Christian East Romans) have cared very much, at least to the extent of launching — again and again over centuries — armies and armadas?  It's almost as if Britain, surviving fragment of the British Empire and mother country to the United States, were to successfully motivate America to come to its aid today against (say) “Papist aggression”… by denouncing outrages dating back to Spain's conquest of the Americas, the Spanish Armada, and the Thirty Years War!

Medieval western European knights may have been violent folk by our standards, but they were no more inclined to sail off in their thousands to (what was then) the ends of the Earth, for what were by even then ancient causes, than is anybody else.  No, the proximate cause of the 11th century western European military challenge to Islam must be sought much closer in space and time.

As Prof. William B. Stevenson wrote in The Cambridge Medieval History, it was, “The Muslim attack on southern Europe, from the eighth century to the eleventh, [which] called forth the counter-stroke which is known as the First Crusade.”  (Emphasis added.)  The Muslim scourge on Europe thus didn't end in the 8th century but rather intensified.  As Prof. Stevenson describes it: ¹

After the Muslim conquest of North Africa, Spain (eighth century), and Sicily (ninth century), all the southern coast of France and the western coast of Italy, with the islands of Sardinia and Corsica, lay at the mercy of hostile fleets and of the forces which they landed from time to time.  The territories and suburbs of Genoa, of Pisa, and of Rome itself were raided and plundered.  The Italian cities of the north had as yet no fleets, and the Muslims held command of the sea.  In the south of Italy and in southern France Muslim colonies established themselves and were the terror of their Christian neighbours.

During the 10th century, this tide began to turn.  Muslim colonists were expelled from southern France, for instance, by 975.  As late as 1002, however, Bari could still be besieged and the southern coast of Italy ravaged, while Pisa was sacked in 1004 and again in 1011 by Saracen fleets.  In 1015 Muslims from Spain seized the sizable island of Sardinia outright, driving Genoa and Pisa into an alliance to evict them (in which they were successful by 1017).

Around the same time frame Norman adventurers, redoubtable fighters from the formerly Viking domain of Normandy in northern France, began establishing themselves in southern Italy, and by 1060 had crossed over the strait and started conquering bits of Muslim Sicily.  In 1072 Palermo was taken, signaling the Normans' overall success, but some parts of the island were not secured for their new Norman realm of Sicily (and southern Italy) until as late as 1091.

With regard to contemporary events in Spain, Stevenson writes:

In Spain the same work of reconquest made steady progress after the middle of the [11th] century.  Here too Norman valour and Norman swords played an efficient part.  Expeditions from South France, and probably also ships from Italy (1092-1093), joined in the war.  Normans, Italians, and southern French, were thus already practically leagued in warfare against the common foe.  The First Crusade joined to these allies other peoples, more widely separated, and bore the contest from the Western to the Eastern Mediterranean.  But the contest remained the same, and the chief combatants on the Christian side were still Normans, Italians, and Frenchmen.

The battle continued to be fiercely fought in Spain (also under the aegis of a “Crusade”) for many decades, though nearly all the work of the Reconquista was done by the middle of the 13th century, leaving only a small enclave of Granada for Ferdinand and Isabella to finish off more than two hundred years later (just before sending Columbus, in 1492, on his way).

Stevenson considers when Europe first became capable of undertaking the Crusading effort:

The date at which Europe became ready for a united attack on the Muslim East cannot be put earlier than the last quarter of the eleventh century.  The enemy were then at last driven out of the home lands, excepting Spain, and the Western Mediterranean was again a Christian sea.  As long as the struggle in the West was proceeding, schemes for the conquest of Palestine were impracticable.

As he says, “The recovery of Italy and Sicily and a large part of Spain from Muslim rule gave an impulse to the victors which could not fail to carry them to further enterprises.”

The biggest signpost of shifting strategic balances in the western Mediterranean during the 11th century may be regarded as the attack by Genoa and Pisa on the port of Mahdiyah in what is now Tunisia in 1087, signaling acquisition of naval supremacy by the Christians.  Without superiority at sea nothing else was really possible.  Even if some Crusaders could, and did, march overland as far as Constantinople and thence over to Asia Minor, they could not be supplied in their destination of the Holy Land without seaborne support.

Notice by when the First Crusade was actually underway: 1096.  Thus, by the standards of the time, western Europeans launched their counterstroke of the Crusades essentially as quickly as they could after it first became possible for them to do so (and not several centuries after the insult).

One other point.  It's often characterized as if the Crusaders' determination to go to and emphasis on securing the Holy Land was strictly a matter of faith and religious conviction, which had and made no military sense.  Disregarding the potent motivating factor such powerful symbolism had for medieval Crusader warriors (which armies do at their peril), from the Eastern Roman Emperor's point of view it probably would have made sense were the Crusaders to have concentrated on destroying the Seljuk Turk states that had threateningly established themselves in central and eastern Anatolia.  The Crusaders, however, did not do that “sensible” thing, and there is another viewpoint according to which attacking the Holy Land makes perfect military sense.

During the half century that the Frankish Kingdom of Jerusalem extended as far south as Elat and islands to the south in the Gulf of Aqaba, the Islamic domain was strategically cut in two.  Had such a geographic severing been permanently enforced, in theory the remaining now-disjoint Muslim-controlled parts (many regions of which still contained Christian majorities) could over time have been subdued piecemeal.

It's also not well known that several of the later Crusading expeditions were aimed at securing not the Holy Land but rather Egypt, and a couple times came close to achieving their goal.  Conquering Egypt would have accomplished much the same thing: strategically, geographically splitting Islam.  Long-term Crusader success at either of these projects would have constituted, of course, an alternate history far distant from our own.

¹ Professor William B. Stevenson, Chapter VII: “The First Crusade,” Volume V: Contest of Empire and Papacy, edited by J. R. Tanner, C. W. Previté-Orton, and Z. N. Brooke, The Cambridge Medieval History, planned by J. B. Bury, Cambridge at the University Press, London, 1926; pp. 265-271.

UPDATE:  2003-11-29 16:20 UT:  A supplemental article Crusades II – Eastern Empire vis-a-vis the West, comparing the Roman Empire in the East with the medieval West, has been posted.

UPDATE:  2003-11-26 15:30 UT:  Added medieval Arabic world map.  Presented to the Norman king of Sicily by Arabic geometer al-Idrisi in A.D. 1154 (note: south is at top).

UPDATE:  2003-11-27 16:00 UT:  Donald Sensing has linked back to this article (thanks, Donald).

UPDATE:  2003-12-02 16:20 UT:  In News From the Fridge, Phil Fraering has posted a link to this article, along with the comment, “I now want to find a history of Italy during the Middle Ages.”  I must say that Phil, and anyone else choosing to delve into this amazing history, has quite a story awaiting them!  I have no specifically Italian history to recommend to them (I've been mostly reading more general histories of the area and era such as The Cambridge Medieval History), but a quick search for “Norman Sicily” (say) on the Advanced Book Exchange turns up a variety of interesting-looking possibilities, such as:

Donald Matthew, The Norman Kingdom of Sicily, Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Dana Facaros and Michael Pauls, Sicily: The Mythic Garden of Persephone, an Islamic Paradise on Earth, the Fairy-Tale Norman Kingdom, Globe Pequot Press.
John Julius Norwich, The Other Conquest: The Norman Conquest of Sicily in the 11th Century, Harper & Row, 1967.  [That one was popular in Britain, I noticed a decade or so ago.]
The Travels of Ibn Jubayr: Being the Chronicle of a Mediaeval Spanish Moor Concerning his Journey to the Egypt of Saladin, The Holy Cities of Arabia, Baghdad the City of the Calips, the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, and the Norman Kingdom of Sicily, translated by Ronald J. C. Broadhurst, 2001.

Also, in his blog Dean's World, Dean Esmay has posted an article Exposing Anti-Christian Bias which explores its title's subject by concentrating on secularist mischaracterizations of the Crusades, as he puts it, “as an example of Christian aggression.”  (Dean has also included this article and its commentary in his Best Discussions archive.)  At the end of his piece, Dean links to Donald Sensing's couple of articles on the subject, and finally — with the comment, “Still more interesting info, that gets into even greater nitty-gritty, can be found here” — to Impearls' article here.

While I agree with most of Dean's analysis, I do have a couple of qualifiers and points of disagreement.  Dean writes:

With rare exception, the Crusades almost all ended in victory for Muslims.  The defeats for Christianity were often humiliating, and the few victories were almost all short-lived.

That “rare exception,” of course, being the First Crusade — which was a brilliant, staggering victory.  It was such a success that even all the following decades of disunion and internecine strife among the Christians — probably the most significant factor in the eventual failure of the (eastern) Crusades, best I can make out — couldn't completely negate that victory for nearly two hundred years (1291) when the Kingdom of Jerusalem finally met its bitter end.  Moreover, it can be argued (as The Cambridge Medieval History certainly does) that even with the unmitigated disaster to the Byzantine cause that the Fourth Crusade entailed, the Crusades taken as a whole probably gave an additional three century lease on life to the Eastern Roman Empire, no mean accomplishment and one with lasting consequences for our world (see the follow-up article for an appreciation of the Byzantine Empire).

And that's just for the eastern Crusades.  One can't overlook the Crusades in the West, though today we tend to forget them, or categorize them as something else (“Reconquista” rather than numbered “Crusade”), but to those fighting those wars, they were Crusades, and their hard-won gains have been lasting.  Parts of France and Italy, Crete, Sicily, Sardinia (from a brief occupation), the Balearic Islands, the huge Iberian peninsula (Spain and Portugal) itself, all were recovered from Islamic hands, and remain so to this day.  Sicily or Sardinia taken alone is as big as historic Palestine (and somewhat larger than the modern state of Israel).

If Osama Bin Laden yet lives today, he assuredly remembers those historic events as lasting victories (so far, as he thinks) for the Crusaders.
 

UPDATE:  2003-12-03 19:50 UT:  A supplemental article Crusades III – the End of the Crusades, concerning reasons why the Crusades came to a close, has been posted.

UPDATE:  2003-12-13 12:00 UT:  Geitner Simmons, writing in his blog Regions of Mind, has replied to Donald Sensing's and my Crusader articles with a posting entitled “The first crusader,” concerning crusades undertaken by the Eastern Empire itself.  I've responded to his piece with a follow-up article Crusades IV – the Byzantine Crusades.

Labels: crusades, East Roman Empire, medieval history, Reconquista