Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition

Crusades
(3,532 words)

Originally applied to military and religious expeditions organized in Western Europe and
intended to take back from and defend against Islam the Holy Places of Palestine and nearby
Syria, the term was later extended to all wars waged against "in dels" and even to any
undertaking carried out in the name of a worthy or supposedly worthy cause; naturally these
extensions of meaning are not part of our present concern.

The rst Crusade (1096-99), following on from expeditions against the Muslims in the West, led
to the establishment around Jerusalem, Tripoli, Antioch and Edessa of four States constituting
(and later including Cyprus, then the Latin Empire of Constantinople) the Latin East, which
from then on until the recapture of its last citadel Acre by the Muslims in 1291 was an essential
factor in the history of the Middle East. The second Crusade started by the fall of Edessa bore no
concrete results; the third, started by the fall of Jerusalem, ensured the maintenance of
"Frankish" possessions on the Syro-Palestinian coast; the fourth was only concerned with
Constantinople, the fth failed at Damietta in Egypt, the sixth was more of a diplomatic journey
by Frederick II and brought about the temporary restitution of Jerusalem to the Franks, the
seventh led by St. Louis after the loss once more of the Holy City ended in another disaster at
Damietta and the eighth, which brought the same king to Tunis, ended with his death. One
might add to this traditional number of Crusades other less important ones and later Crusades
against the Ottomans (Nicopolis, Varna, etc.). The Crusades ¶ in Syria-Palestine alone had a
lasting e fect on the history of Muslim countries, in view of the Frankish dominance in the East,
uninterrupted for nearly two centuries, which was initiated by the rst Crusade and maintained
by those that followed.

In an encyclopaedia of Islam there can of course be no question of giving the history even of
only these Crusades in its entirety; it would even be somewhat odd to speak of them at all, were
it not that the Crusades when considered in terms of Islam give rise to certain problems which
alone will be discussed here.
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The speci c character of the Crusades was not and could not be understood by Muslims. The
very term, ḥurūb al-ṣalībiyya , used to designate them in modern Arab literature, was unknown
to ancient authors, who referred to Crusaders by the plain ethnical term "Franks", and seems to
have made its appearance during the Ottoman period in Christian circles of the East in uenced
by French culture. The theory of the Crusade, a war for the defence or liberation of oppressed co-
religionists, di fers from the theory of the djihād , a war for the expansion of Islam; but in
practice almost the very reverse appears to have obtained at the time of the rst Crusade, djihād
in the majority of Muslim countries being no more than a memory and Christendom from the
time of Charlemagne onwards having elaborated campaigns for the expansion of Christianity by
force of arms. No doubt, in one sense the Crusades appear as a reaction, which had gradually
been desired and made possible, against the humiliation of four centuries caused by the Muslim
conquest of half the Mediterranean basin; but the example of Spain and Sicily proves that the
Christian West did not need any deterioration in the generally reasonable treatment of
Christians in Muslim countries as a spur to move onto the o fensive or counter-o fensive. In the
East it is true that the Turkoman invasion of Asia Minor revived amongst a particular social
group the tradition of Muslim Holy War in the form of ghazwa , bringing disaster to Byzantine
Christendom; but in the old Muslim countries and particularly in Palestine the forming of the
Saldjūḳid Empire brought no fundamental change to the lot of autochthonous Christians or to
the treatment of foreign pilgrims; the precise motivation of crusading, however sincere it was,
could riot therefore occur to the Muslim mind. Muslims obviously saw that they were dealing
with Christian warriors who as such were attacking Islam, but apart from the distance from
which they came they saw in them roughly the equivalent of the Byzantines whose
Christianinspired attacks and counter-attacks they had been sustaining for two centuries.

The Crusaders’ conquests only a fected territory which was incompletely Islamized, relatively
small and quickly reduced by gradual Muslim reconquest, and even in Syria-Palestine did not
reach any of the large Muslim centres. Nevertheless, the constant menace to vital sea and land
routes between Muslim countries in the Middle East, the knowledge of Muslim abasement
under Frankish rule, above all the repetition of Crusades, the non-assimilation of Franks into the
native milieu and the permanence of a state of at least "cold" war nally conferred indisputable
importance on the Crusades and the existence of the so-called "Latin" East in the history of
Middle Eastern Islam. It would be interesting to examine more thoroughly than has hitherto
been the case how Muslims, according to time and place, reacted to this phenomenom.

¶
The Crusades found the Muslim Middle East in a state of division and dissension which alone
made their initial success possible. Preceding generations had seen many examples of Islamo-
Christian co-operation in Syria even against other Christians or Muslims. Although the Frankish
invasion brought death or exile to many Muslims in Syria-Palestine, minor chieftains and certain
isolated populations apparently at rst assumed that it would be possible to adapt themselves to
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t t f ll l lt ti ith i d f h th f l d f Sh
a state of small-scale war alternating with periods of peace, such as the former lord of Shayzar,
Usāma b. Munḳidh, by drawing on his early memories, was able to depict for us in his Memoirs.
Soon, however, more directly threatened or more intensely Muslim communities, angered by the
disgraceful indi ference to the Frankish danger of Muslims beyond Syria-Palestine, attempted to
rouse them from it by for example demonstrating in Baghdād. Although individual volunteers,
subsidies (particularly for prisoners’ ransoms) and exhortations were sometimes forthcoming
from the rest of the Muslim world, the backbone of resistance came really from the immediate
neighbours of the Franks. A necessary condition for that, and this was bound to be one
consequence of the Crusades, was some degree of rapprochement between various Muslim
elements which only recently had been suspicious of each other: Arabs from the plains and the
towns, Turks from the o cial armies that had come into being under the Saldjūḳid regime,
Turkomans lacking discipline but ready for ghazwa, warlike Kurds joining up with the Turkish
armies that shortly before they had been ghting and so on. Ḏj̲azīra constituted the hinterland, a
source of manpower, such as Syria with its meagre resources could never be, and there followed
a process of political uni cation between the two regions (remaining however somewhat
incomplete in Ḏj̲azīra). From a religious point of view, the Frankish menace certainly
contributed without being its sole cause to the progress of Sunnism, which was already
developed in the Saldjūḳid domains of Irano-Mesopotamia, but until then scarcely of any
importance in Syria. For one thing, intransigent elements denounced the heterodox as
accomplices of the Franks and responsible for the misfortunes of Islam; more important,
however, moderate Shīʿīs and even sometimes the Fāṭimids, no longer sustained by unanimous
Ismāʿīlism, in the face of common enemies rallied to the Sunnī Turkish princes; the only group to
remain outside this alliance were the Assassins, violent and irreconcilable enemies of Sunnī
orthodoxy, who were massacred by the Muslim majority and who sometimes collaborated with
the Franks from their frontier strongholds. Naturally, the anti-Crusade movement never a fected
the whole of the Muslim population even amongst the neighbours of the Franks; devout
Muslims lamented the fact that some of their brethren, who were subjects or neighbours of the
Franks, found it less dangerous to come to terms with them than to ght them and minor
princes were hesitant about involving themselves in coalitions which could only serve to
increase the authority of the more important. The ability of Zengī, Nūr al-Dīn and Saladin lay in
realizing, each in his own manner, that the struggle against the Franks, by necessitating and
favouring the uni cation of Muslims, played into the hands of anyone able to lead such a
movement, although it is not possible for us of course, any more no doubt than it was for them,
to say how far they were prompted by ardent conviction ¶ and how far by self-interest. This
policy appeared to reach its nal objective when after Jerusalem Saladin conquered almost the
whole of the Latin East.

It would be interesting to know whether in the Muslim States concerned the war against the
Franks or their neighbours brought about any deeper or broader changes than this partial "moral
rearmament". The period of the Crusades certainly coincides with a remarkable rise of inland
Syria, starting with Damascus, then of Egypt which replaced Baghdād, linked too closely with the/
Iranian States, as the liveliest area of Arab Islam; but it is di cult to indicate the exact role of the
various factors in this development, as it is to say whether the militarization of the politico-
social order common to the whole of the Muslim world was more extensive here than elsewhere.
In the art of warfare it is probable that some progress in siege armament and artillery is due to
contact with the Franks; the mutual borrowings which appear to have taken place between the
two sides in the technique of forti cation have still never been properly studied. Peaceful trading
relations between Frankish and Muslim territories co-existed with war; but Alexandria, not Acre,
was the great international trading centre of the Mediterranean and the fall of the Latin East was
to have little e fect on commerce.

It would be normal to expect the anti-Frankish reaction to have brought about some original
movement of ideas. But Islam was no longer in a progressive phase and the con ict was after all
limited. Subject to future research, therefore, the impression is that there was not really any
ideological fermentation. The ancient themes of djihad were rediscovered, the old accounts
(pseudo-Wāḳīdī) of the Conquests and anti-Byzantine ghazwa were taken out and developed,
emphasis was laid on devotion to the holy places of Jerusalem: but there was nothing really new
and it must be admitted that the struggle against the Crusaders did not give rise to any doctrinal
study of holy war or any popular works comparable with the epics about the Conquests or anti-
Byzantine wars.

Furthermore, diplomatically, whereas Saladin in particular tried to play o f Westerners and

Byzantines against each other, no unity comparable with the unity, however slight, of Western
Christendom against Islam was ever achieved between the East and West of the Muslim world,
for each part was involved in its own struggles with neighbouring Christians. Even in the East,
leaving aside the Iranians who were far away and shaken by successive crises, the Turks of Asia
Minor, after involuntarily setting the Crusades in motion by their invasion, practically restricted
their e forts to attacks against Byzantium and, showing little interest in Syria, only took some
part in the struggle against the Crusaders in the rst century of the Latin East, when the latter
crossed their territory. The Caliphate itself does not appear to have taken a very deep interest in
the anti-Frankish struggle.

Furthermore, at the end of Saladin’s reign, the very seriousness of the Frankish defeat stirred the
West, so that before his death in spite of all e forts he had to resign himself to certain losses and
to the maintenance of a Frankish seaboard, emphasizing the extent of material sacri ces made
practically in vain. Whence arose under the Ayyūbids the desire for a new policy which,
recognizing both the presence of Franks in the trade ports of Syria-Palestine and the lessening of
the Frankish menace, now that, left ¶ to their own devices, the Eastern Franks could hardly
contemplate further aggrandisement, sought to set up a modus vivendi economically favourable
to both sides. This policy, compromised by the Crusading activities of the West, nevertheless
continued a fairly successful existence for half a century, nding its most spectacular and in the
eyes of the devout its most scandalous expression when, with certain reservations, al-Kāmil
restored Jerusalem to Frederick II Could such a policy have been kept up for a long time? The /
restored Jerusalem to Frederick II. Could such a policy have been kept up for a long time? The
unleashing of the Mongol conquest made it in any case impracticable. That invasion, much more
dangerous for the time being than the Crusades could ever be, produced in the Mamlūk State,
established in Egypt and Syria as the nal redoubt of Muslim resistance, an uncompromising
tension of all forces and the unquestionable predominance of an intransigent army. Some of the
Franks had come to terms with the barbarians: their extermination or expulsion became a
matter of supreme urgency and this time Europe did not prevent it.

With the exception of the Armenians in the North, native Christians had remained practically
outside the Crusades; Muslims therefore did not at rst change their attitude to local Christians
and even occasionally supported members of the Greek Church who had serious grounds for
complaint against Latin dominance, as well as the Jews. Tolerance of this kind contrasted with
the treatment of Muslims under Frankish rule who, except in some special localities, had neither
mosque nor ḳāḍī and were frequently considered as virtual enemies or spies. The over-quoted
passage of Ibn Ḏj̲ubayr, shaming his co-religionists for Muslim satisfaction with good Frankish
administration in the rich district of Tyre, cannot outweigh many cases where the opposite
applied nor can it the legal status of Muslims; because of its warlike spirit, the Latin East was
backward compared with the understanding which the Norman sovereigns of Sicily and the
Spaniards were showing at the same time. In the long run the presence of Franks eventually
jeopardized the native Christians of Muslim countries as well. For the lack of any future
possibility of triumphing by the force of arms prompted the Franks to try to establish relations
with Christians of Muslim states. It was inevitable that such a move should give rise to at least
some suspicion amongst the Muslims. The most unfortunate individual case was that of the
Maronites. This purely Lebanese minority living entirely within Frankish territory had rallied to
the discipline of the Church of Rome and to a certain extent, in the coastal towns at least, had
become intermingled with the Franks. Muslim reconquest did not wipe out the danger of
Frankish attacks on the Syrian coast and, to prevent any Maronite complicity, the Mamlūks had
many of the Maronite districts along the coasts evacuated. The fortunes of the Armenians, who
had been the Mongols’ quartermasters and were linked politically with the Christian West, were
even less happy; in the fourteenth century their Cilician kingdom was destroyed and its
population decimated. Generally speaking, the hardening of the Muslim attitude was bound to
undermine the position of Christians and it is necessary to realise that the Crusades alone must
bear, if not the sole responsibility, at least the greater part of it, for a development completely
opposite to their avowed object.

Did they at least help to increase the interpenetration of peoples, the knowledge of Islam in the
¶ West, or of the West in Muslim countries? It would of course be paradoxical to contend that
among the members of the two geographically close populations there was no exchange of
knowledge. But examination of institutions in the Latin East shows fewer borrowings from the
Muslim past and less social intermingling than in the Christian States of Sicily and Spain.
Similarly, from a cultural point of view, objective comparison leads to the categorical conclusion
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th t h th W t h i dk l d f M li i ili ti it h d i l
that where the West has acquired knowledge of Muslim civilization, it has done so mainly
through Spain or Sicily and not through Western settlements in the East or Crusaders from the
West; moreover, Islam as such nearly always remained misunderstood and the few accurate ideas
about it that the West nally acquired are due to the e forts of missionaries, in other words to
work undertaken in an entirely di ferent spirit from the spirit of the Crusades. As for the
Muslims, although some showed a certain curiosity about the Franks in the East or about a
Western leader as exceptional as Frederick II, it must be acknowledged that their historians,
geographers and anti-Christian polemists still had after the Crusades the same few notions
about the European West, gleaned from their co-religionists in the West, that they had had
before. Therefore, and contrary I regret to current opinion, it seems to me an anachronism to
repeat with those who have worked on the cultural or political in uence, indeed a very real one,
of modern France in the East, or written within that context, that the Crusades laid their
foundations; if in their own way they bore witness to the beginning of a process of
interpenetration, the atmosphere they created proved subsequently more of a hindrance than a
help.

(C. Cahen)

Bibliography

The Arabic sources of the history of the Crusades are catalogued in C. Cahen, La Syrie du Nord à
l’époque des Croisades, 1940, 33-94, without however certain elucidations which may be found
particularly in (besides a forthcoming work by N. Elissée f on Nūr al-Dīn) H. A. R. Gibb, The
Arabic sources for the life of Saladin, in Speculum, xxv (1950)

B. Lewis, The sources for the history of the Syrian Assassins, ibid., xxvii (1952)

H. Gottschalk, al-Malik al-Kāmil, 1958, Introduction. The ve volumes of Historiens Arabes in the
Recueil des Historiens des Croisades published by the Académie des Inscriptions su fer from lack
of method in the choice of extracts and insu cient care in the establishment and translation of
texts (not to mention their inconvenient format)

they have still not yet however been replaced by editions or above all, for those who need them,
by better translations. Since 1940 have appeared—and we quote only the essential—a French
translation by R. Le Tourneau of Ibn al-Ḳalānisī’s Damascus chronicle (Damas de 1075 à 1154,
French Institute in Damascus, 1952), vol. i of a new and this time good edition of Abū Shāma’s K.
al-Rawḍatayn by M. A. Ḥilmī (Cairo 1957), as well as an edition of his Dhayl (Cairo 1947)

the rst two volumes, less important than those to follow, of a good edition of Ibn Wāṣil’s
Mufarridj al-Kurūb by al-Shayyāl (Cairo 1953 and 1957)
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an edition of the Ayyūbid part of al-Makīn b. al-ʿAmīd’s chronicle by C. Cahen (in BEO,
Damascus, xv, 1955-57)

the edition of part of Ibn ʿAbd al-Ẓāhir’s life of Baybars, under the title Baybars the First, by S. F.
Sadeque, Oxford and Dacca 1956

the rst two volumes out of the three of the excellent ¶ edition of (Kamāl al-Dīn) Ibn al-ʿAdīm’s
Zubda by Sāmī Dahān (Fr. Inst. Damascus, 1951 and 54) and, by the same editor, the part on
Damascus of Ibn Shaddād’s Aʿlāḳ (Fr. Inst. Damascus, 1956), with the part on Aleppo edited by D.
Sourdel (ibid., 1958)

of the extant half of the Life of Baybars by the same author (in the absence of any edition) there
is a Turkish translation by Şerefuddin Yaltkaya, Istanbul 1941

an edition by C. Zurayk and S. Izzedin, 1939-42, of the two volumes by Ibn al-Furāt on the years
672-696

an edition at Ḥaydārābād, 2 vol. 1954-55, of the part of Yūnīnī covering the years 664-670

and nally for the years 689-698 an analysis of Ḏj̲azarī by J. Sauvaget, 1949. None of these authors
of course deals speci cally with the Crusades. A good number of selected and translated texts,
together with useful introductions, has been given by Fr. Gabrieli, Storici Arabi delle Crociate,
1957.

For the general history of the Crusades in their Eastern setting reference should be made to the
general works of Grousset, Runciman, my Syrie du Nord and the collective History of the
Crusades by the University of Philadelphia under the supervision of K. M. Setton, vol. i (twelfth
century) 1955, vol. ii (thirteenth century) in the press, and three further volumes on the later
Crusades, institutions and civilization. A broadly conceived general bibliography of the
Crusades will be found in H. E. Mayer, Bibliographic zur Geschichte der Kreuzzüge, Hanover 1960.
It seems useful here only to indicate the few studies devoted particularly to aspects of the
problems treated above: C. Cahen has given the outlines of a forthcoming Autour des Croisades,
Points de vue d’Orient et d’Occident, in En quoi la Conquête turque appelait-elle la Croisade
(Bulletin de la Faculté des Lettres, Strasbourg, Nov. 1950), An Introduction to the First Crusade (Past
and Present, 1954) and Les Institutions de l’Orient Latin, in Oriente e Occidente, XII Convegno Volta,
1956. The only other studies which need be quoted here are: H. A. R. Gibb, The achievement of
Saladin in Bull, of the John Rylands Library, 1952

A. S. ʿAṭiya, The Crusades, Old ideas and new conceptions, in Cahiers d’Histoire Mondialef Journal
of World History, ii/2, 1954

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and, on a much broader theme, U. Monneret de Villard, Lo studio dell’ Islam nel XII e XIII secolo,
in Studi e Testi, cx (1948), and A. Malvezzi, L’islamismo e la cultura europea, n. d. [1957] (the
history of the knowledge of Islam).

Cite this page

Cahen, Cl., “Crusades”, in: Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, Edited by: P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W.P. Heinrichs.
Consulted online on 15 June 2020 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_SIM_1636>
First published online: 2012
First print edition: ISBN: 9789004161214, 1960-2007