Augustus
…
In popular culture, the sack of Jerusalem by the crusaders in 1099 is often presented as an act of singular brutality. It is then contrasted with the retaking of Jerusalem by Saladin in 1187 which is presented as being magnanimous and chivalric. Neither of these are particularly accurate though.
In addition, such images are also co-opted to support modern political agendas, which is all the more reason to highlight why they are wrong.
First, and most importantly, the comparison is completely invalid in the first place as it compares apples to oranges. The crusaders took the city by force, while the Muslims retook it via a negotiated surrender. This makes a world of difference.
In medieval warfare, trying to take a walled city was no cakewalk. A siege could take many months, and maintaining one for this long was never a given as it was no picnic for the besiegers either who often faced great hardships. The other option, trying to capture the city by force was a perilous task, likely resulting in very heavy casualties for the attackers and again by no means certain to succeed.
Based on this reality, certain norms appeared in siege warfare regarding a 3rd option: negotiated surrender, which was promoted by 2 means: carrot and stick.
The carrot generally required [many of] those inside to retain their life and liberty, usually in exchange for some form of tribute and/or subjugation, otherwise why else would you surrender? The stick was that if you made them take it by force, you could expect no mercy when the city fell, inhabitants would be massacred or enslaved.
Given the nature of medieval warfare, such tactics were clearly logical and probably contributed to fewer overall deaths than the alternatives.
When Jerusalem was taken by the crusaders, it followed a siege, during which the rulers had been calling for Muslim armies to come to their aid and kill the besiegers, which obviously worried the crusaders. The attackers had also suffered significant casualties when they eventually took the city, and under these circumstances the norms of warfare meant a massacre would be expected.
When this happened it was certainly brutal but not abnormally so. It is often portrayed that the Crusaders massacred close to the entire population, but this is not correct. Jewish sources, for example, show significant numbers of people ransomed. In addition, some Muslims who surrendered were granted passage. While accurate numbers don't exist, it would be much closer to 25% than 85%.
Interestingly, Christian sources actually overstate the severity of the massacre which is why it is often believed to have been worse than it was. This often seems counterintuitive to the modern mind where we expect atrocities to be downplayed or covered up, but was a common feature in the pre-modern world.
The laws of warfare stated that no quarter was expected after bitter sieges, yet the Frankish eyewitnesses went further in advertising their butchery and claiming that no one was spared. But some of their descriptions are inspired directly by the Book of Revelation. They did not specify numbers. Later, Muslim historians claimed 70,000 or even 100,000 were killed, but the latest research suggests that the massacre was smaller, perhaps around 10,000, considerably less than the future Muslim massacres of Edessa and Acre. The best-placed contemporary, Ibn al-Arabi, who had recently lived in Jerusalem and was in Egypt in 1099, cited 3,000 as killed in al-Aqsa. Nor were all the Jews killed. There were certainly Jews and Muslims left alive. Unusually, it seems that the Crusader chroniclers, for propaganda and religious purposes, hugely exaggerated the scale of their own crimes. Such was holy war.
Simon Sebag-Montefiore - Jerusalem: The Biography
Overall, it was a brutal sacking of a city which is repellent to modern sensibilities, but was par for the course in Medieval times.
In contrast, the city being retaken by the forces of Saladin is often portrayed as very chivalrous and civilised, and is contrasted to the crusaders sack as an example of the nobility of Saladin (and nowadays, to make a point about 21st C politics). This is also somewhat of a myth though, and derives not from Islamic sources, but Victorian romanticised ideas of Saladin as a 'noble savage' popularised by the likes of Sir Walter Scott in The Talisman.
Although it is out of fashion to portray Saladin as a holy warrior lusting for Christian blood, this is precisely how he appears in the admiring biographies written about him by his household officers Baha ad-Din Ibn Shaddad and ‘Imad ad-Din al-Isfahani; the same is true of the portrait of Saladin that emerges from the Kamil at-Tawarikh (The Epitome of Histories) of the more critical Ibn al-Athir. ‘Imad ad-Din relates admiringly how two days after Hattin, Saladin sat on his dais and watched on with joy as a whole band of scholars, Sufis, ascetics, and other devout men took turns slashing away at captured Templars and Hospitallers. “How many ills did he cure by the ills brought upon a Templar.” Exults Imad ad-Din. “I saw how he killed unbelief to give life to Islam,and destroyed polytheism to build monotheism”
At first, Saladin demanded an unconditional surrender as the only alternative to it being taken by force . Concessions were only offered after Balian, who was in charge of the defence, threatened to kill every Muslim in the city and destroy every Muslim holy site before the city fell. Only then were terms for a negotiated surrender grudgingly offered.
The Muslim warrior elite shared with the Franks an ethos of reciprocity, and the two together, religious zeal and the drive to avenge injury, brought an enormous pressure to bear upon Saladin in 1187 to take Jerusalem by storm rather than accept surrender, to deal with the Franks just as the Franks had dealt with the population of Jerusalem when they had taken it almost a century earlier, “with murder and enslavement and other savageries!” ‘Imad ad-Din assures his readers that in response to Balian of Ibelin’s plea to spare the inhabitants of Jerusalem, Saladin responded, “Neither amnesty nor mercy for you! Our only desire is to inflict perpetual subjection upon you. ... We shall kill and capture you wholesale, spill men’s blood and reduce the poor and women to slavery.”
Both Ibn al-Athir and ‘Imad ad-Din explain that the only reason that Saladin failed to carry through on his threats is because Balian countered with his own. As recounted by Ibn al-Athir, Balian, despairing of obtaining the sultan’s mercy, declared:
“Know, O Sultan, that there are very many of us in this city, God alone knows how many. At the moment we are fighting half-heartedly in the hope of saving our lives, hoping to be spared by you as you have spared others; this is because of our horror of death and our love of life. But if we see that death is inevitable, then by God we shall kill our children and our wives, burn our possessions, so as not to leave you with a dinar or a drachma or a single man or woman to enslave. When this is done, we shall pull down the Sanctuary of the Rock and the Masjid al-Aqsa and the other sacred places, slaughtering the Muslim prisoners we hold – 5,000 of them – and killing every horse and animal we possess. Then we shall come out to fight you like men fighting for their lives, when each man, before he falls dead, kills his equals; we shall die with honour, or win a noble victory!”
Faced with the spectre of the destruction of Islam’s shrines and the slaughter of thousands of Muslims, Saladin called a council of his advisers. “All of them were in favour,” Ibn al-Athir writes, “of granting the assurances requested by the Franks, without forcing them to take extreme measures whose outcome could not be foreseen.” Saladin saw the wisdom of this counsel and began negotiations although in his inimitable inflated style. This apparently was the “official version” of the surrender emanating from Saladin’s camp.
Cultural Representation and the Practice of War in the Middle Ages - Richard Abels
Journal of Medieval Military History
As a condition for surrender, the population could pay a ransom to be allowed to leave, although up to 15,000 were eventually enslaved as they couldn't afford the payment. It is generally believed that Saladin was relatively generous in setting the level of the charge, and did allow people who paid to leave with their possessions and gave them safe passage, but he was hardly the paragon of virtue he is often portrayed as.
So, while it is quite common to see these stories repeated today, they are almost always presented inaccurately or completely out of context as both sides basically did exactly what was expected in the circumstances.
Thoughts? Disagreements?
In addition, such images are also co-opted to support modern political agendas, which is all the more reason to highlight why they are wrong.
First, and most importantly, the comparison is completely invalid in the first place as it compares apples to oranges. The crusaders took the city by force, while the Muslims retook it via a negotiated surrender. This makes a world of difference.
In medieval warfare, trying to take a walled city was no cakewalk. A siege could take many months, and maintaining one for this long was never a given as it was no picnic for the besiegers either who often faced great hardships. The other option, trying to capture the city by force was a perilous task, likely resulting in very heavy casualties for the attackers and again by no means certain to succeed.
Based on this reality, certain norms appeared in siege warfare regarding a 3rd option: negotiated surrender, which was promoted by 2 means: carrot and stick.
The carrot generally required [many of] those inside to retain their life and liberty, usually in exchange for some form of tribute and/or subjugation, otherwise why else would you surrender? The stick was that if you made them take it by force, you could expect no mercy when the city fell, inhabitants would be massacred or enslaved.
Given the nature of medieval warfare, such tactics were clearly logical and probably contributed to fewer overall deaths than the alternatives.
When Jerusalem was taken by the crusaders, it followed a siege, during which the rulers had been calling for Muslim armies to come to their aid and kill the besiegers, which obviously worried the crusaders. The attackers had also suffered significant casualties when they eventually took the city, and under these circumstances the norms of warfare meant a massacre would be expected.
When this happened it was certainly brutal but not abnormally so. It is often portrayed that the Crusaders massacred close to the entire population, but this is not correct. Jewish sources, for example, show significant numbers of people ransomed. In addition, some Muslims who surrendered were granted passage. While accurate numbers don't exist, it would be much closer to 25% than 85%.
Interestingly, Christian sources actually overstate the severity of the massacre which is why it is often believed to have been worse than it was. This often seems counterintuitive to the modern mind where we expect atrocities to be downplayed or covered up, but was a common feature in the pre-modern world.
The laws of warfare stated that no quarter was expected after bitter sieges, yet the Frankish eyewitnesses went further in advertising their butchery and claiming that no one was spared. But some of their descriptions are inspired directly by the Book of Revelation. They did not specify numbers. Later, Muslim historians claimed 70,000 or even 100,000 were killed, but the latest research suggests that the massacre was smaller, perhaps around 10,000, considerably less than the future Muslim massacres of Edessa and Acre. The best-placed contemporary, Ibn al-Arabi, who had recently lived in Jerusalem and was in Egypt in 1099, cited 3,000 as killed in al-Aqsa. Nor were all the Jews killed. There were certainly Jews and Muslims left alive. Unusually, it seems that the Crusader chroniclers, for propaganda and religious purposes, hugely exaggerated the scale of their own crimes. Such was holy war.
Simon Sebag-Montefiore - Jerusalem: The Biography
Overall, it was a brutal sacking of a city which is repellent to modern sensibilities, but was par for the course in Medieval times.
In contrast, the city being retaken by the forces of Saladin is often portrayed as very chivalrous and civilised, and is contrasted to the crusaders sack as an example of the nobility of Saladin (and nowadays, to make a point about 21st C politics). This is also somewhat of a myth though, and derives not from Islamic sources, but Victorian romanticised ideas of Saladin as a 'noble savage' popularised by the likes of Sir Walter Scott in The Talisman.
Although it is out of fashion to portray Saladin as a holy warrior lusting for Christian blood, this is precisely how he appears in the admiring biographies written about him by his household officers Baha ad-Din Ibn Shaddad and ‘Imad ad-Din al-Isfahani; the same is true of the portrait of Saladin that emerges from the Kamil at-Tawarikh (The Epitome of Histories) of the more critical Ibn al-Athir. ‘Imad ad-Din relates admiringly how two days after Hattin, Saladin sat on his dais and watched on with joy as a whole band of scholars, Sufis, ascetics, and other devout men took turns slashing away at captured Templars and Hospitallers. “How many ills did he cure by the ills brought upon a Templar.” Exults Imad ad-Din. “I saw how he killed unbelief to give life to Islam,and destroyed polytheism to build monotheism”
At first, Saladin demanded an unconditional surrender as the only alternative to it being taken by force . Concessions were only offered after Balian, who was in charge of the defence, threatened to kill every Muslim in the city and destroy every Muslim holy site before the city fell. Only then were terms for a negotiated surrender grudgingly offered.
The Muslim warrior elite shared with the Franks an ethos of reciprocity, and the two together, religious zeal and the drive to avenge injury, brought an enormous pressure to bear upon Saladin in 1187 to take Jerusalem by storm rather than accept surrender, to deal with the Franks just as the Franks had dealt with the population of Jerusalem when they had taken it almost a century earlier, “with murder and enslavement and other savageries!” ‘Imad ad-Din assures his readers that in response to Balian of Ibelin’s plea to spare the inhabitants of Jerusalem, Saladin responded, “Neither amnesty nor mercy for you! Our only desire is to inflict perpetual subjection upon you. ... We shall kill and capture you wholesale, spill men’s blood and reduce the poor and women to slavery.”
Both Ibn al-Athir and ‘Imad ad-Din explain that the only reason that Saladin failed to carry through on his threats is because Balian countered with his own. As recounted by Ibn al-Athir, Balian, despairing of obtaining the sultan’s mercy, declared:
“Know, O Sultan, that there are very many of us in this city, God alone knows how many. At the moment we are fighting half-heartedly in the hope of saving our lives, hoping to be spared by you as you have spared others; this is because of our horror of death and our love of life. But if we see that death is inevitable, then by God we shall kill our children and our wives, burn our possessions, so as not to leave you with a dinar or a drachma or a single man or woman to enslave. When this is done, we shall pull down the Sanctuary of the Rock and the Masjid al-Aqsa and the other sacred places, slaughtering the Muslim prisoners we hold – 5,000 of them – and killing every horse and animal we possess. Then we shall come out to fight you like men fighting for their lives, when each man, before he falls dead, kills his equals; we shall die with honour, or win a noble victory!”
Faced with the spectre of the destruction of Islam’s shrines and the slaughter of thousands of Muslims, Saladin called a council of his advisers. “All of them were in favour,” Ibn al-Athir writes, “of granting the assurances requested by the Franks, without forcing them to take extreme measures whose outcome could not be foreseen.” Saladin saw the wisdom of this counsel and began negotiations although in his inimitable inflated style. This apparently was the “official version” of the surrender emanating from Saladin’s camp.
Cultural Representation and the Practice of War in the Middle Ages - Richard Abels
Journal of Medieval Military History
As a condition for surrender, the population could pay a ransom to be allowed to leave, although up to 15,000 were eventually enslaved as they couldn't afford the payment. It is generally believed that Saladin was relatively generous in setting the level of the charge, and did allow people who paid to leave with their possessions and gave them safe passage, but he was hardly the paragon of virtue he is often portrayed as.
So, while it is quite common to see these stories repeated today, they are almost always presented inaccurately or completely out of context as both sides basically did exactly what was expected in the circumstances.
Thoughts? Disagreements?
