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The Levantini Podcast
The Race for Paradise - An Islamic History of the Crusades
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In this episode of the podcast, we spoke with Professor Paul M. Cobb about his book The Race for Paradise - An Islamic History of the Crusades. Professor Cobb's book offers a new perspective on the Crusades by telling this period of history through Muslim sources. The book can be purchased on Amazon.
Professor Cobb is a Professor of Islamic History and Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania.
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SPEAKER_04Hi, Alex. It's great to be here. So what initially drew you to this period of history and the Crusades in particular?
SPEAKER_02That is a good question. I started out actually not working on the Crusades in my academic career. At the University of Chicago, I was, I wrote my dissertation on a much earlier period, the rise of Islam and the first century or so of Islamic history. And that produced a book on popular rebellions in Syria in the 8th and 9th centuries. And that I assumed would be my sort of subtle for the rest of my career. It's a fascinating period, complex sources and many different languages, and lots of sort of puzzles to keep you engaged. And then I moved in my career, as you know, early career academics often do, and wound up at Notre Dame, the University of Notre Dame in Southborn, Indiana, which, as you may know, is a Catholic institution. And they have an awesome medieval studies program there at the Medieval Institute. And I had read maybe one or two books on the Crusades as a graduate student, but up to that point I had never taught it, and I'd never, you know, other than as a component of a history survey of the Middle East. And I had certainly never imagined it as a research focus. But it was while I was at Notre Dame that many of my colleagues, my medievalist colleagues, encouraged me to, as the sort of medieval Islam guy on campus, to sort of participate in conversations academically or show up to give a guest lecture here and there on the crusades. And I could see a place for the students there, both the undergraduates and the graduates, in providing a history of the crusades that incorporated Islamic sources. And I saw it as a kind of gateway drug to get these great, very high-powered medieval graduate students and very interested undergraduates who were interested for their own reasons in medieval Europe and in the Latin world and maybe church history or theology to get them into my part of the world. And it was at that time that I revisited a text that I had read in translation. This was an Arabic text that I had read in translation, and then in some excerpts in the original Arabic, as an undergraduate, as a matter of fact. And this is a very famous, what is sometimes called memoirs of a medieval Assyrian aristocrat and eyewitness to the Crusades, a fellow named Usama ibn Munkav. And he's a fascinating figure, and he wrote these so-called memoirs, which were translated back in the 20s by a guy named Philip Hitti, and they were so popular, you know, they were re-released in paperback and they were used in excerpts or in full in undergrad teaching everywhere for decades. So that's that's how I encountered them, although we also read bits of them in Arabic when I was an undergrad. And I thought, well, that was a fun source. I remembered it having something to do with the Crusades. And then I realized that the translation that was done in the 20s was awful. And it's not awful. It's very readable, but it has it has some problems that I noticed as an Arabist that I wanted to sort of rectify. So it was getting involved in Usama's life, his memoirs, his writing, and he wrote much more than these memoirs. He was an absolute towering literary figure of his time, that that got me more steadily into the more the wild angly world of these uh Crusader-era Arabic sources from the Ayyubid and Mamluk period, these dynasties that were contemporary with the Crusades. The number of sources explodes, and the quality of them is much richer than anything produced in the early Islamic period in terms of encyclopedias and geographical dictionaries and massive chronicles and biographical dictionaries, just lots of fun, very rich and appealing source material that really hasn't been exploited to its fullest extent.
SPEAKER_04Right. And you touch on that a lot in your book, and you talk about what you call the traditional perspective of the crusades versus the Islamic perspective. And your book focuses on the Islamic perspective, so you're almost solely using Muslim sources. And I'd like if you can touch upon, for people who aren't familiar with it, what is the traditional perspective of the crusades and what were you trying to achieve by focusing on the Muslim sources? Sure.
SPEAKER_02What I refer to as the traditional perspective is it's a kind of a Frankenstein monster of different traditional approaches to the Crusades, but I think it stands as a representative of how the Crusades have been understood and studied by people working mostly in Western European sources. And to my mind, it has two important dimensions that make it different from what I refer to as the Islamic perspective, or I would actually want to stress an Islamic perspective, because there are, of course, many perspectives here. And those are a chronological framework and a geographical framework that are very specific to the traditional approach, that are different in the Islamic history of the Crusades that I'm trying to describe in my book. Traditionally, there's that word again, historians working from the Western European perspective have used a variety of source material emanating from Western Europe, documentary and literary, and generally see the Crusades as beginning with Pope Urban II's call at Claremont in 1095 for what we now call the First Crusade. And they carry this story forward to track the movement of the armies of the First Crusade and the establishment of the Crusader states in what is now Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, and Jordan, and then traces the sort of divergent histories of those different Frankish or Crusader states in the region, in the Middle East. The story usually extends until 1291, when the city of Acre was recaptured by Muslims and the last of the Crusaders was allegedly kicked out, the Levant. So from 1095 to 1291, or the Claremont to Jerusalem or Claremont to Acre narrative is the traditional perspective. Lately, scholars have noticed that, of course, there are these later crusades that extend beyond 1291 that were not particularly successful, but they involved crusading to Muslim territory in Eastern Europe and Greece, the Balkans, and so on, and the Mediterranean Islands, to say nothing of other varieties of the crusading experience in, let's say, the Baltic region against pagans up there, or against heretics in southern France, the so-called Albigensian Crusades. So the traditional perspective has opened up, but it's still one rooted in Western European sources and still holds that 1095 to 1291 period as kind of the core to which everything else is kind of added. So that's a very specific geographical focus and chronological focus that simply does not exist in the Islamic perspective, the one that I'm writing about in my book. For one thing, if you look at contemporary Muslim sources, they view, almost all of them view, the Crusades not as some radical notion of holy war instituted by Pope Uber II in 1095. They view these invasions of the Levant as simply the latest, maybe an uptick in Frankish shenanigans across the Mediterranean. So for them, 1095 is not a particularly significant date. Rather, the uptick in Frankish aggression occurs about a generation earlier, in the middle of the 11th century, let's say in the 1050s, and they view Frankish expansion and reconquest in Sicily and in Spain and attacks in North Africa as all part of this Frankish expansion into Muslim territory across the Mediterranean. For Muslim sources, Muslim interpreters of these events, this was a Mediterranean phenomenon. It was not strictly Levantine, limited to the Levant. And moreover, it was one that began well before the Crusades and extended beyond them. So when I was writing this book, I had to sort of decide well, when to end this, because some authors at the time, Muslim authors, that is, writing in Arabic, in 1291 did view those events as significant. You know, a pause in their narrative about what was going on, certainly, at least a chapter heading in their chronicles. But the struggle continued, as it were, and it's clear that certainly the Ottomans, the Ottoman Turks, who engaged Western European crusaders, self-proclaimed crusaders in some cases in Eastern Europe, saw themselves as operating as characters in the same story. So whereas if you think of it as a in cinematic terms, if you leave the movie camera running in 1291, I wanted to know what happened after that. And the scene changes to Cyprus and to Eastern Europe, but it doesn't mean that the story ends. And for Muslim sources, the story was still very much alive right up until 1453. That's the date that I chose to end. So it's a story from around 1050 to around 1453 when Constantinople fell to Muslim armies. And by that time, by 1453, I would say the chess board had been changed. The players were all different, and the world of what one could recognize as the Crusades a century earlier was radically different. And so that's for someone else to write about.
SPEAKER_04So before we dive into the meat of your book, I think it'd be helpful for the audience for us to define some key terms that keep popping up throughout, and for people who haven't studied Middle Eastern history before. So I have about six terms for you to define for us. So first, Darl Islam and Dar al-Harb.
SPEAKER_02Okay, great. So this is like stump the expert. This is good. The Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb are two terms, Arabic terms, actually from Islamic law. They're quite technical, but they do a nice job of sort of atom brating a worldview, and it's a legalistic worldview that divides the world between the world where Islamic reigns, that is the Muslim world, the Dar al Islam, or abode of Islam, to use a kind of quaint Victorian translation, and the abode of war, that is, those zones where Islamic law does not hold sway, where the behavior of Muslims towards non-Muslims is not regulated by Islamic law and therefore might be different. It doesn't necessarily mean a zone where you have to be at war, but in the context of how the Islamic law was formulated, it was a distinction between zones where Islamic law held sway and where it did not.
SPEAKER_04And next, so who were the Normans or slash the Franks? Because I think they're the Normans become the Franks, is that correct?
SPEAKER_02That's right. In a kind of monstrous transformation, yes. That's one thing I tried to do in this book is to give, I mean, I took my lead, I hope people notice, from the really awesome books that about the Crusades from the traditional perspective, which often have this sort of ethnic, geographical, chronological background, but I wanted to do it from a Muslim point of view. And fortunately, we have an abundant, rich, fascinating, and sometimes hilarious literature by Muslim geographers and what we would call maybe ethnographers about the people who inhabited their world. And the Franks were one of them, this ethnic group they called the Franks. For Muslim sources, the Franks came to be essentially any Latin-speaking European, simply put. But observant Muslim writers knew that there were different varieties of Franks. There were Normans, there were lombards, there were Germans, and even the English get their time in the sun, and Eglisians and so on. The Normans began, you can see etymologically where they come from. The word means Northmen, Norsemen. They were, in fact, Vikings who had raided Western France and settled there and eventually through deals with the Pope and with the French king, they became vassals of the French king. And so the Normans who settled in Normandy, which was named after them, were originally of Scandinavian origin. And perhaps there's something of that Viking tradition in there because they wind up everywhere, like a bad penny across Mediterranean history. They are involved in early papal expeditions in northern Spain. They, of course, turn up across the Channel in 1066, causing their own kind of mayhem. And they turn up in Sicily, which they conquer as mercenaries for the Pope across the straits in Italy. They subsequently turn up fighting the Byzantines in Greece and then some of the Mediterranean islands, and even forming mercenary freebooting polities in what we would now call Turkey in Byzantine territory. So by the time they show up in the armies of the Crusades, these guys are a well-known feature of Mediterranean military life and social life. And in fact, some of them, some of the very same individuals who made their name in the First Crusade, first sharpened their swords in Sicily or fighting the Byzantines in Greece.
SPEAKER_04Okay, so next, if you can define the circle of equity.
SPEAKER_02Good, yes, thanks. So that's the one contribution that I'm quite proud of in this book, a reference to the circle of equity or a circle of justice. This is a political model, and I want to highlight, by the way, the work of my colleague and former grad school buddy, Linda Darling, now at the now at Arizona, as a mayor of factor, who produced a fabulous study that traces this idea, this concept from ancient Near Eastern times right up until I think the 19th century. It's a model of how the world works, an idealized model of politics that I think helps readers, I hope helps readers understand what medieval Muslims would have expected from their states and what medieval elites, medieval politicians, needed to do in order to remain in power. And also to enhance the idea that what an innocent reader might think is tyranny or a total disregard for the inalienable rights of the populace, this was simply not part of the model that was in place. And it's a distinctive model, a long-lived one, and one which was very much embraced by Muslim rulers and Muslim citizens across the Mediterranean. We encounter versions of the circle of equity from Spain to India and Central Asia from ancient times, pre-Islamic times, in fact, right up until the 19th century. So it's very much concurrent. And it describes the interdependence of every element of society. So society is like a clockwork. The king or the ruler relies upon the strength of an army to do his bidding, to maintain order. And the army relies upon the tax money produced by the peasants, by the populace, to pay them. And the peasants or subject populace look for religious or moral guidance to the, in ancient times, the priestly class, or in Islamic times, the ulama, the scholarly class, who in turn, at 12 o'clock at the top of the circle, advise the ruler, who rules with justice, as interpreted by the ulama. So the key to all of this is equity and justice, hence the name. If a king is unjust, he's a tyrant, he gets toppled. The whole thing falls apart. If the army is not paid, then they rebel and the whole thing falls apart. If peasants don't pay their taxes or vote with their feet and move around, the whole thing falls apart. If the ulama are not guiding the rulers and not guiding the populace in proper moral behavior, again, the whole thing falls apart. It's a way of representing and thinking about the interdependence of the various segments of medieval Islamic society that I found very useful and I think new to a lot of readers.
SPEAKER_04Got it. So I think, like you mentioned, the Muslim sources didn't view the initial crusades as some brand new phenomenon. They saw it in a much longer string of history. And on that point, I think it's important to go back to what the political map of the Near East looked like at the time of the initial Arab conquests. And be interested to know what kind of impact that had on the historical memory in the Christian world.
SPEAKER_02That's a very good question. And it is directly relevant to how the Franks, to use a crass term, to use a Muslim term, you know, the term Franks is often used, well, I I would argue is used exactly the same way that medieval Europeans use the term Saracens. There are these two kind of uh very simplistic terms that collapse a lot of complicated identities, but I'll throw them around just for simplicity's sake, if that's all right. But yes, Franks observing the Middle East did so through the lens of history. They understood where things were to a certain degree. And but to sort of rewind the story before the Crusades to the 7th century, with the initial Arab conquests of the 630s and 640s, so the Prophet Muhammad, who founded the religion of Islam, for lack of a better term, he would not see himself as a founder, but rather as a restorer of the religion of Abraham. But in historical terms, he died in the year 632. After his death, his successors, the caliphs, as they became known, led Muslim armies to conquer lands in the Middle East, in North Africa and Spain and Central Asia and South Asia, over about a century, actually less than a century, in lands formerly controlled by the Byzantine Empire on the one hand, and the Persian Empire on the other. Those are the two major superpowers of the late antique and early medieval Middle East. The Byzantines, their capital was Constantinople, and they saw themselves as the inheritors of the Roman tradition, great heritage of the Roman Empire. And indeed, they are sometimes simply referred to as the East Roman Empire to acknowledge the fact that since the fourth century, Constantinople had been a kind of second capital with Rome of the Roman Empire. So the empire that didn't collapse, the Byzantines, remained in power right up until 1453 when the capital was finally taken by the Ottoman Turks. But the territory that they controlled was sort of whittled away at. So in the initial Arab conquest of the 7th century, the Byzantines, a Christian, Greek-speaking inheritor of the Roman heritage, lost control of Syria and of Palestine. So the Holy Land was lost to them, as was the breadbasket of the Mediterranean, Egypt, North Africa, and other holdings in the Mediterranean of less direct significance, although Cyprus was valuable to them as well. The Muslim armies made the mountains of southern what we would call Turkey today, or Anatolia in geographic terms, a kind of frontier between the Muslim world and the Byzantine world. And Asia Minor or Turkey or Anatolia, however you like to call it, was the sort of no man's land between Byzantine territory and Muslim territory.
SPEAKER_04And what kind of impact did that have on historical memory in the Christian world?
SPEAKER_02So this greatly limited the size of the empire, but it also created for Christians everywhere, not just Byzantines, but even in the West, the Church of Rome, where the liturgy was in Latin, where there were slight theological differences, and indeed a schism between these two great Christian churches, Christians remembered that Palestine once was controlled by the Roman Empire or the Byzantine Empire, and that it was now controlled by Muslims. It's not clear that Franks, at least, had a very clear idea of what Islam or Muslims were, at least put broadly, and some people certainly did and wrote about it in pretty informed terms, but most Frankish description of Muslims describes them as pagans or as worshipping Muhammad or devil worshippers of some kind.
SPEAKER_04So on the on the flip side of that, in the years leading up to the First Crusade, or even at that time, how do Muslim sources describe the Franks?
SPEAKER_02Good. Yes. So to get back to ethnography, the Franks emerge as, I describe it as on the edge of civilization, not quite out, not quite barbarians, but not quite civilized either, sort of warming their hands over the fire of civilization. They're known to be uh Christian people who have some nice cities and armies that are worth paying respect to, and also some rulers who are acknowledged strong rulers, and also places of very valuable commodities. So, for example, fur and fishes and wood and slaves, raw materials, really. It was kind of an underdeveloped zone of the Mediterranean. And from the perspective of the medieval Islamic world, which at the time was one of the most developed and civilized places on the planet, Western Europe was the fringes of an underdeveloped. Part of the Eurasian landmass where you went for raw materials, but you didn't want to stay necessarily. And the people there were close to barbarians. And some stories they had were fanciful stories like the Franks are barbaric people who live in perpetual darkness and who are covered in fur and they shed their fur once a year, and you know, that sort of thing. But gradually, over time, particularly in places where Franks and Muslims met in contact, peaceful and non-peaceful contact, for example, Spain or Sicily and some of the islands, more accurate knowledge filtered across frontiers. And you can see that in how both sides were writing about each other right on the eve of the First Crusade. So, in a way, the Crusades blew apart a kind of moment in time when both sides were getting to know more about each other. It could also be said that the Crusades forced a conversation in a way. Because certainly, as a result of the Crusades, Latin Christians began writing about Islam in a more informed way, even as they ratcheted up the ridiculous stereotypes and virulent language.
SPEAKER_04So I now want to get into the first crusade and to kind of set the stage for it. What did the political map of the Islamic world look like at that time when the armies arrived? Was there an idea of political unity or was it?
SPEAKER_02Sure. So it's significant that Pope Urban II, when we don't really know what he said when he called for the crusade, we don't have any contemporary record of what he said, but there are lots of slightly later renderings of what he said, and they're all slightly different. There are a couple of themes that emerge, and one of them is that we have to liberate the Holy Land. So this idea that the Holy Land had been taken in the 7th century, and now 400 years later, it's time for us to get it again, to get it back. Better late than ever, I guess, but there it is. The political map, though, was complicated. And I suspect that the leaders of the First Crusade must have been informed of this, or at least as they approached, as they marched across Europe into Byzantine territory, I suspect that they became informed of how things looked on the ground. And here's how things looked on the ground on the eve of the First Crusade in the Muslim world. The Muslim world was divided. In Baghdad, you had the center of at least symbolic power in a dynasty called the Abbasids, who had been in Baghdad, who in fact had built Baghdad, but had been in place since the year 750, and Baghdad was their capital city. So they were this ancient dynasty that had ruled the Muslim world most of it for centuries before the coming of the First Crusade. By the time of the First Crusade, though, the dynasty was basically symbolic. They held no real power. The caliphs, the rulers in Baghdad were largely symbolic figures. They were representatives of the Sunni Muslim world, the vast majority of Muslims at the time, but nevertheless only one part of it. The Seljuk Turks were a different ethnic group who had come in shortly before the First Crusade, not unlike the Normans in the West. The Seljuks invaded in the east. They were a nomadic group from Central Asia, and they were also Sunni Muslims and so allied themselves, saw themselves, or at least tried to portray themselves as the protectors of the Abbasids. And while they did not inhabit Baghdad, it was an alliance with the Abbasids was part of their sort of public-facing persona. They were doing the good work that the Abbasids could not do. And one of those aspects of that work was fighting not the Franks yet, but fighting heretics. And the most terrifying heretic or the most terrifying sectarian group from the point of view of Baghdad were Shiite groups in Syria and in Egypt. And this wasn't such a problem until really a generation or so before the First Crusade, when not just a sort of underground movement or a new sect, but rather a Shiite state was established in Egypt, in Cairo. This is the Fatimid state. The Fatimids were of a particular variety of Shi'ism known as Ismaili Shi'ism, and they had their origins in North Africa, but eventually captured Egypt, built Cairo, and made it their capital city. The Shiites and the Seljuks slash Abbasids then were two rival superpowers in the region. On one hand, you had the Fatimids, a Shiite state based in Cairo, with all the wealth of the Red Sea and the Mediterranean flowing into their coffers, who had also, on the eve of the First Crusade, expanded at Seljuk expense into Palestine and Syria. And then you had, on the other hand, the Seljuks working for the Abbasids, who were Sunni Muslims, Turkish in origin, with a multi-ethnic state of Kurds and Arabs and so on, with Iraq and Iran as their kind of heartland. So for both states, Syria and Palestine was a kind of a frontier zone. And it is precisely at this fault line between the Fatimid Empire and the Seljuk Empire that the Crusaders inserted themselves in the 1090s, when they, by July of 1099, found themselves before the walls of Jerusalem.
SPEAKER_04So essentially there I mean there was no political unity in that particular area. That's right.
SPEAKER_02That's the one particular zone, in fact, I would say, that showed a kind of seam, a kind of disunity. And I can't help but think that can't be coincidence.
SPEAKER_04And if you can, I it's it's hard to ask you to do this briefly without getting too into the weeds, but the armies had to come through Anatolia before they got to Syria. What were the motivations or the reasons why the Byzantine emperors allowed these armies to come through? What was going on?
SPEAKER_02So historical memory is at play here too. The Byzantines are very much aware that they, more than anyone else, used to control the Holy Land back in the day. But more prominently, and more recently, they had controlled cities in northern Syria, prime among them, Antioch, which was not the jewel in their crown. Constantinople was the biggest, most glorious Christian city in the world at that time. But Antioch had been a close runner-up. And it had always been Byzantine territory, and it was where the name Christian was first used by St. Paul. And it was an administrative center for the church, and it was uh there are all kinds of reasons why Antioch was valuable to the Byzantines, and they wanted it back. The Seljuks had taken it, and they really wanted it back. So there is some pretty explicit evidence that the Byzantines had sort of hoped to use the Franks. And you must understand that the Byzantines were an ancient empire with a long history of being very successful at not getting involved in petty squabbles, but instead pitting one side after the other to get their way. They're very clever diplomats. And it's clear that they saw the Franks as just another wave of barbarians, like the Huns or whoever, and so had hoped to sort of use the armies of the First Crusade as sort of a cat's paw to reconquer lands formerly held by the Byzantines, and they made the leaders of the First Crusade swear oaths to return the land to Byzantine control. So was that, I mean, did they actually expect that to happen? That's a good question. As you're intimating, it of course did not happen. Antioch was taken by the Franks and became the center of a crusader state, as did the city of Edessa and Tripoli and what is now Lebanon and Jerusalem, the center of the kingdom of Jerusalem itself, all of these territories could be claimed by the Byzantines, and none of them were returned. In fact, they eventually returned to Muslim hands. So while the Byzantines might have thought they would gain at least a kind of ally in the region, in fact, the unwillingness of the Franks and the rulers of these city-states to return their land to the Byzantines became a source of great tension. And the tension goes both ways. The Franks began depicting the Byzantines as a sort of a bunch of sort of ungrateful sissies up there in Constantinople, not willing to see the glory of the accomplishment, the miraculous nature of the accomplishment of the Franks and all that they've done, all that they did for Christianity. So they both get a lot of bad press in each other's media.
SPEAKER_04So the it's interesting because we talked about the way that the Muslim sources viewed the crusades, and it wasn't necessarily in religious terms, or they saw it in a much longer string of episodes in history, but the capture of Jerusalem seems to have been a pretty traumatic event for the Muslim world in 1099. And like if you can you can talk about that. Do you see in the Muslim sources that you're reading, is that does that come through that this was something different?
SPEAKER_02Yes, absolutely. This is a vivid moment, it's a dramatic moment for writing history. Jerusalem had been taken by, from the Muslim perspective, a barbarian force that no one would have expected to have ever got that far. And the city, the holy city, was desecrated from a Muslim perspective. And so much of the kind of lament that occurs in the sources is about the desecration of the city, how it no longer is a place fit for prayer and how the Muslim shrines there were either closed or off-limits or destroyed. What's interesting to me, well, there are two things that are interesting to me about this episode. One is that it encourages a focus on the literary nature of our sources. And so one of the secret missions of this book that I wrote was to get readers who might be approaching the Crusades from the traditional sort of blokey history channel perspective of the Crusades, but to get them to see the artfulness and the literary quality of these sources, to see how the language and use of genre and conventions and playfulness of our sources was on display when writing about the past, that these are not just base chronicles of names and dates and so on, but literary compositions in their own right that are coming from certain perspectives. And I think it's nice that stuff is out there in translation. I've translated stuff myself, but uh if readers don't understand the literary background, the conventions and genres and so on that are involved in the production of the sources that we read in translation, they're using them at their own risk. So I wanted to show just how rich the Muslim sources were, but also to make a plea for getting to know the literary tradition better before you just stampede and start quoting things like a willy-nilly. That's one thing. The other thing is that this episode lends itself to pausing and reflecting on the nature of the sources. And this has been done in particular in two ways by two different scholars with absolutely wonderful results. First, many decades ago, I want to say 30 years ago, the great Israeli historian of the Crusades, Benjamin Kadar, looked at these accounts, Frankish, Arabic, and I think maybe even some Hebrew accounts, of the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, the massacres in particular, and kind of said, Oh, come on. I mean, did all this really happen? Obviously, there's a lot of emotive language in there, a lot of exaggeration, but let's can we can we just for a minute talk about what really happened? And so his article is an attempt to figure out what happened. Subsequently an Islamic historian named Conrad Hirschler, just about a decade ago, maybe less, published a piece where he did a kind of archaeology of the Arabic sources and showed that this kind of attitude, this you know, brow beating or or, you know, hair-rending and heart-thumping narrative of the massacres of the crusaders in 1099, actually took a bit of time to become the standard line, and that the way in which historians wrote about the events of 1099 changed over time. So the initial reaction was terrible, obviously, it was a terrible thing. But Jerusalem did not achieve the significance and did not have these stories of massacres ornamenting these accounts until much later, when it became, let's say, under Saladin, a much more useful way of talking about the past. You focus on those events.
SPEAKER_04One thing that's really interesting in your book is you talk about how we have a tendency now to, in modern times, to put our perspective on things in the past and we expect that that world was the same as ours when it's just they lived in a completely different reality that I think you almost say that you can't even really understand how they thought or how they perceived things because it's so different from the reality we live in. And one of the episodes I thought was kind of interesting, and it doesn't get a ton of weight in your book or anything, but it was just a small thing that I noticed about how political and military alliances start forming between the Muslim armies and the Christian armies, like fairly soon after that, right?
SPEAKER_02That's right, yeah. I mean, pretty soon after the founding of most of the Crusader states, even before the dust had settled, the Franks, the Frankish leaders had inserted themselves into the political map of the Middle East. Or vice versa, a Frankish ruler making an alliance with a Muslim prince to become his buddy in a campaign against one of his Frankish rivals.
SPEAKER_04Seems very bizarre to us, but in that world it probably wasn't too strange.
SPEAKER_02That's right. I think we tend to view the past, I think, you know what it is, Alex? I think it's nation-states. I think that's the problem. We tend to view the past through maps in which there are borders and the states are colored in very specific ways, solid colors all the way through. And it doesn't allow for ambiguity and nuance, but also flexibility that a given ruler might have for the short-term gains of a particular moment where identities or loyalties get manipulated.
SPEAKER_04Right. In that same vein, I was going to ask what the Muslim sources tell us about the Franks who ended up acclimatizing to the region, being born in those states. What do they say about them versus the people who came conquering?
SPEAKER_02So this brings us back to this fellow I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, which is Osama ibn Mulkith, the Syrian aristocrat who left memoirs. And he had, you know, he lived to be 93, and he wrote these memoirs at the end of his life, and he had the opportunity to observe the Franks firsthand in battle, but also in times of peace. He was a diplomat as well as a courtier and a poet, as well as a warrior. He wasn't particularly good as a warrior. He had the opportunity to observe Franks and write about them. And he did make a distinction between the Franks who had settled in the Middle East, who were sort of quite respectable chaps, and then newly arrived Franks who were still rough around the edges. And there's a very famous episode where he goes to Jerusalem. He's in Jerusalem, that is Frankish-controlled Jerusalem, on a diplomatic mission. And he claimed to have friends amongst the Templars, an organization of sort of armed monks that began with the Crusades, and had their headquarters on the Temple Mount, on the Haram al-Sharif. And he got permission to go to the Temple Mount and pray there in the Aqsa Mosque. And while he was there, a newly arrived Frank saw this Muslim, Sa'ussama, praying, as Muslims do in Palestine, to the south towards Mecca. And he grabbed him bodily and turned him around and said, apparently, no, no, you should be praying to the east, because that's how Christians pray. That's a direction that Christians prayed in. And he was sort of shaken up by this until his buddies, the Templars, kind of ran this guy off and sort of apologized profusely to him saying, Yeah, we're so sorry, he's he's just off the boat. You know, he doesn't he doesn't know how things work here. So I think that was an illustrative story about how the Franks assimilated and how friendships were possible. And there are other stories too about medicine and food, and one retiree, a sort of veteran of the of the Second Crusade, and I think it's Antioch, who had settled down and had the Muslim cook and was very much enjoying a uh luxurious uh Levantine lifestyle that I know I aspire to.
SPEAKER_04I had some questions prepared about Salad and his campaigns and the people that came before him that paved the way for him, but I don't want us to get too in the weeds there and then run out of some of these other questions. So I think we'll we can do another episode on Salad. Yeah, we'll save that for another time. But one chapter I really loved in your book was the arrival of the Mongols and the sense of doom, and it's the end of the world that these sources saw in them. So, how did Muslim sources view the Mongols compared to the Crusaders?
SPEAKER_02That's a very good question. I'm glad you liked it. Thank you. I tried to write that, begin that chapter with the creation myth of the Mongols, and to sort of whereas I kind of begin most chapters with a story about an individual person, I begin that one mythologically because there's a kind of mythos that surrounds the Mongols.
SPEAKER_04Please go into that if you if you can.
SPEAKER_02They are themselves mythic figures in a way. And the idea is that they're sort of like, you know, in science fiction terms, they're like like the Borg or something, you know. Uh they they just sort of assimilate and uh resistance is futile. But they're not like that at all, of course. They are human beings, uh nomadic group with particular goals in mind for politics, but also for settling and for their own populace. And they're also the part of the Mongol experience that uh gets involved with the Crusader experience in the Levant is only one small part of a larger Mongol empire. And that's something to keep in mind. So the Muslim sources, you know, your phrase is an accurate one. Many Muslim sources saw the coming of the Mongols as a sign of the end of time. It didn't help that in Muslim tradition, as in other monotheistic traditions, there was this belief that one of the portents, one of the signs that Judgment Day was coming, would be the coming of Gog and Magog, these mysterious figures from beyond the frontiers of the world, beyond the great wall built by Alexander. And in Muslim tradition, as in most other monotheistic traditions, Gog and Magog were indeed held to come from Central Asia, which is exactly where the Mongols came from. And the Mongols were, if the Franks were maybe barbarians, the Mongols were definitely barbarians from the point of view of the Muslim sources, who wrote about them as this terrifying force, really, not even a collection of people, that stampeded in and then stampeded away after destroying cities, burning them to the ground, and taking their entire populations back to Central Asia. Now we now know, thanks to a close reading of Arabic sources, Persian sources, Chinese sources, and Mongolian sources, that that's obviously a very one-sided perspective on what the Mongols were doing. But the initial experience, anyway, of the coming of the Mongols to this storyline of Franks versus Saracens was a traumatic one. For the Muslims who were dealt the heaviest blow from Central Asia, it was a check on expansion and on success that they almost didn't recover from. From the Frankish point of view, it must have seemed, at least in some quarters, and we know it did because they wrote about it this way, as a kind of glorious surprise. To use the science fiction terms, you know how, Alex, there was a movie before your time called Star Wars, in which Han Solo at the end swoops in on the Millennium Falcon when the resistance is trying to destroy the Death Star. It must have been one of those moments when suddenly things looked really grim for the Franks. And then all of a sudden the Mongols invade. And they must have thought, wow, awesome. And also there were rumors that the leaders of the Mongols were Christians. And so the Franks spent a lot of their energy attempting to make alliances with the Mongols to create a kind of pincer movement against the Muslim world. These wound up to be dismal failures, but the Mongols did present a kind of wild card that the Franks and the Muslims had to adjust to.
SPEAKER_04Right. You get to a point in your book where you talk about there was one episode where the Franks try to make an alliance with the Muslims to face the Mongols. I don't think it was any grand thing, and it didn't amount to anything. But I was when I was reading it, I was like, oh man, this is gonna result in a really cool episode that could possibly make a great movie, and then it went nowhere.
SPEAKER_02So it's I see that as one of the great what-ifs, because it did fall apart. But it would have been interesting to see if the Franks had actually thrown in with the Mamluks, is the dynasty that actually did defeat the Mongol, or at least keep them at bay, out of the Levant, out of the Eastern Mediterranean. It turns out the Mamluks didn't need the Franks, after all, because of, again, another quirk of history. What happened was, and keep in mind that Syria and Palestine for the Mongols was quite a distant frontier for a state based in Mongolia. And China was really, from the Mongol perspective, China was the plum. That was the real empire that needed, that they wanted to conquer. So this part of the world was kind of a marginal zone for the moment. So when the Mongols expanded into Syria and Palestine, the Mamluks, who were a dynasty based in Cairo and Syria in the 13th century, they marched into the field to meet them and had hoped to make an alliance with the Franks and some others to sort of fight this fearsome menace. But then it turns out they didn't need it because the great Khan back in Mongolia died. And the, as usually happened in succession disputes, the various relatives who led these provincial armies retired or withdrew back to Mongolia for the inevitable succession struggle, which meant that there was a much smaller and much less powerful army under a Not particularly charismatic general in the field that the Mamluks found them very easily manipulable and defeated them pretty handily in 1260 at Ainjulut. The Mongols kind of hung out on the margins, though, of Syria for a few more decades and were a clear and present danger. But then they sort of receded in the background and the Mongols of Iran, anyway, converted to Islam and became again part of the larger diplomatic and political communities.
SPEAKER_04Aaron Powell What is your research shown to counter the argument that the Muslim responses to the Crusades led to militant Islam?
SPEAKER_02Aaron Ross Powell That is a what you might say a teleological reading of history or a cherry-picked version of history. On this card, I like to sort of quote Mark Twain on this, that is, history doesn't repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes. And there are analogies between, let's say, perceived conflict, if this is how you perceive things, between Muslims today in the Middle East and Christian states or self-identified Christian societies. And while they indeed might both sides can claim a link to the Crusades, it's not an organic link. It's a discursive link. They have to really work hard to depict themselves as inheritors of, let's say, the Franks or the Saracens, if you know properly understood. And I hope my book does help people properly understand where at least the Muslim societies of the Crusader period were coming from. There are many wellsprings for what you might call political Islam today, intellectual wellsprings as well as political ones, but they don't lead in any direct straight line back to the Crusades. There were movements of reform, Islamic reform, and what we might call fundamentalism throughout Islamic history before the Crusades. And none of them took a particularly militant view towards external Christians. The idea that the Crusades gave birth to modern-day political Islam is, I think, only acceptable in the rhetorical sense that many Muslim fundamentalists today might hark back to the Crusades in the same way that the alt-right today in the West harks back to the Crusades.
SPEAKER_04On that same topic, I mean your research kind of counters the claim that today, like you said, in modern times people look back on the Crusades and they see it as a clash between Islam and Christendom. I think both sides tend to do that. But I think the reality was much different. And that in your research kind of shows that it wasn't so much a clash between Islam and Christendom, it was a clash between political forces.
SPEAKER_02I would say, yes, exactly. At most, the clash of a couple of Muslim polities against a couple of Christian or Frankish polities whose citizens also would have interacted in different ways. And I think reckoning with the diversity of those experiences is important. I think it's a way to counter these easy narratives of good guys versus bad guys, whoever your good guys or bad guys happen to be, and force us to contend with the humanity of the situation. The one thing we do know is how humans think and work and operate. And just getting up today and being here for this podcast, I went through any number of nuanced and complicated decisions to get here. And it's surprising to me how we do not accord, how historians often do not accord the complexity of thought and motive to our subjects that we accord to ourselves.
SPEAKER_04Well, I think that that's a good place for us to stop. And for people who want to purchase your book, it's available on Amazon. It's the The Race for Paradise, an Islamic History of the Crusades by Paul M. Cobb. And thanks so much for being here today. I really enjoyed our talk.