O city of the world, most chastely fair,
In the far West, behold I sigh for thee.
Oh! had I eagles’ wings, I’d fly to thee,
And with my falling tears make moist thine earth.
Halevi, whose poems are still part of the synagogue liturgy, wrote as poignantly as anyone has ever written about Jerusalem: ‘When I dream of the return of thy captivity, I am a harp for thy songs.’ It is not clear if he actually made it to Jerusalem, but according to legend, as he walked through the gates, he was ridden down by a horseman, probably a Frank, and killed, a fate perhaps foreseen in his words: ‘I would fall with my face upon thine earth, and take delight in thy stones and be tender to thy dust. ’
This death would not have surprised Usamah, who studied the violence of Frankish laws. On his way to Jerusalem he had watched two Franks solving a legal question by combat – one smashed in the skull of another. ‘That was but a taste of their jurisprudence and their legal procedure.’ When a man was accused of murdering pilgrims, his trial was to be trussed up and dipped in a pool of water. If he sank he was innocent, but since he floated he was found guilty and, as Usamah put it, ‘they applied some kohl to his eyes’ – he was blinded.
As for their sexual customs, Usamah gleefully recounted how one Frank found another in bed with his wife but let him off with a mere warning, and how another ordered his male barber to shave off his wife’s pubic hair. In medicine Usamah described how while an Eastern doctor was treating a Frank’s leg abscess with a poultice, a Frankish doctor burst in with an axe and hacked off the leg, with the immortal question – would he prefer to live with one leg or die with two? But he died with one. When the Eastern doctor prescribed a special diet to a woman suffering ‘dryness of humours’, the same Frankish doctor, diagnosing a ‘demon inside her head’, carved a cross into her skull, killing her too. The best doctors were Arab-speaking Christians and Jews: even the kings of Jerusalem now preferred Eastern doctors. Yet Usamah was never simplistic – he cites two cases where Frankish medicine miraculously worked.
The Muslims regarded the Crusaders as brutish plunderers. But the cliché that the Crusaders were barbarians and the Muslims aesthetes can be taken too far. After all, Usamah had served the sadist Zangi and, if read in full, his account presents a picture of Islamic violence no less shocking to modern sensibilities: the collecting of Christian heads, the crucifying and bisections of their own soldiers and heretics, the severe punishments of Islamic sharia – and the story of how his father, in a rage, lopped off the arm of his page. Violence and similarly brutal laws ruled on both sides. The Frankish knight and the Islamic faris had much in common: they were both led by self-made adventurers such as the Baldwins and Zangi, who founded warrior dynasties. Both systems depended on the granting of fiefs of property or income-streams to leading warriors. The Arabs used poetry to show off, to entertain and to spread propaganda. When Usamah served the Damascene atabeg, he negotiated with the Egyptians in verse, while Crusader knights spun the poems of courtly love. Both knight and faris lived by similar codes of noble behaviour and shared the same obsessions – religion, war, horses – and the same sports.
Few soldiers, few novelists have captured the excitement and fun of war like Usamah. To read him is to ride in the skirmishes of Holy War in the Kingdom of Jerusalem. He gloried in his battlefield anecdotes of derring-do, devil-may-care cavaliers, miraculous escapes, terrible deaths, and the exhilaration of wild charges, flashing steel, sweating horses and spurting blood. But he was also a philosopher of Fate and God’s mercy: ‘Even the smallest and most insignificant of things can lead to destruction. ’ Above all, both sides believed that, in Usamah’s words, ‘victory in war is from God alone.’ Religion was everything. Usamah’s highest praise for a friend was: ‘a genuine scholar, a real cavalier and a truly devout Muslim’.
Now the tranquillity of Melisende’s Jerusalem was suddenly shattered by an accident caused by the sport shared by both Muslim and Frank grandees.
STALEMATE
1142–1174
ZANGI: HUBRIS AND NEMESIS
When he was not fighting or reading, Usamah hunted deer, lions, wolves, hyenas with cheetahs, hawks and dogs – and in this, he was no different from Zangi or King Fulk, who hunted as often as they could. When Usamah and the Atabeg of Damascus visited Fulk, they admired a goshawk, so the king gave it to them as a present.
On 10 November 1142, soon after Usamah’s visit to Jerusalem, King Fulk was riding near Acre when he spotted a hare and, spurring his horse, gave chase. His saddle girth suddenly snapped and he was thrown. The saddle flew over his head and fractured his skull. He died three days later. The Jerusalemites marched out to escort Fulk’s cortège to burial in the Sepulchre. On Christmas Day, Melisende had her twelve-year-old son crowned as Baldwin III, but she was the real ruler. In an age dominated by men, she was a ‘woman of great wisdom’ who, writes William of Tyre, ‘had risen so far above the normal status of women that she dared undertake important measures, and ruled the kingdom with as much skill as her ancestors’.*
At this bittersweet moment, disaster struck. In 1144, Zangi the Bloody captured Edessa, slaughtering Frankish men, enslaving Frankish women (though protecting Armenian Christians), and thereby destroying the first Crusader state and the cradle of the Jerusalem dynasty. The Islamic world was exultant. The Franks were not invincible and surely Jerusalem was next. ‘If Edessa is the high sea,’ wrote Ibn al-Qaysarani, ‘Jerusalem is the shore.’ The Abbasid caliph awarded Zangi the titles Ornament of Islam, Auxiliary of the Commander of the Believers, Divinely Aided King. Yet Zangi’s hard-drinking perversity caught up with him in his own boudoir.
At a siege in Iraq, a humiliated eunuch, perhaps one of those castrated for Zangi’s pleasure, crept into his heavily guarded tent and stabbed the drunken potentate in his bed, leaving him scarcely alive. A courtier found him bleeding, helplessly begging for his life: ‘He thought I was intending to kill him. He gestured to me with his index finger, appealing to me. I halted in awe of him and said, “My Lord, who’s done this to you?”’ There died the Falcon Prince.
His staff pillaged his belongings around the still-warm corpse and his two sons divided his lands: the younger of them, the twenty-eight-year-old Nur al-Din, tugged his father’s signet ring off his finger and seized the Syrian territories. Talented but less ferocious than his father, Nur al-Din intensified the jihad against the Franks. Shocked by the fall of Edessa, Melisende appealed to Pope Eugenius II, who called the Second Crusade.5
ELEANOR OF AQUITAINE AND KING LOUIS: SCANDAL AND DEFEAT
Louis VII, the saintly young King of France, accompanied by his wife Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine, and Conrad III, King of Germany, a veteran pilgrim, answered the pope’s call. But their German and French armies were mauled by the Turks as they crossed Anatolia. Louis VII only just made it to Antioch after a disastrous fighting march that must have been terrifying for Queen Eleanor, who lost much of her baggage – and any respect for her sanctimonious, inept husband.
Prince Raymond of Antioch urged Louis to help him to capture Aleppo but Louis was determined to make his pilgrimage to Jerusalem first. The worldly Raymond was Eleanor’s uncle and ‘the handsomest of princes’. After the miserable journey, Eleanor ‘disregarded her marriage vows and was unfaithful to her husband’, according to William of Tyre. Her husband was puppyishly besotted with her, but regarded sex, even in marriage, as indulgent. No wonder Eleanor called him ‘more monk than man’. Yet Eleanor, acutely intelligent, dark-haired, dark-eyed and curvaceous, was the richest heiress in Europe, brought up at the sensual Aquitanian court. Priestly chroniclers claimed that the blood of sin coursed through her veins because her grandfather was William the Troubadour, a promiscuous warrior-poet, while her grandmother on the other side was her grandfather’s mistress, nicknamed La Dangereuse. This came about because the Troubadour had facilitated his access to La Dangereuse by marrying her daughter to his son.