God's War: A New History of the Crusades

The shifting fortunes of Byzantium in the eleventh century were mirrored by the disorder in the Islamic Near East following the Seljuk invasions of the 1050s. After seizing control of the Baghdad caliphate in 1055, their leader receiving the apt title of ‘sultan’ (sultan is Arabic for power), the Seljuk Turks pressed westwards. After defeating the Greeks in 1071, they annexed most of Syria and Palestine by 1079. However, despite the appearance of unity, the Seljuks presided over a loose, often fractious confederation of regional powers, such as the more or less independent sultanate of Rum, i.e. Anatolia, and city states, such as Mosul, Aleppo, Antioch (taken in 1084/5), Damascus and Jerusalem. These old Arab cities, while often owing allegiance to one or other of a series of competing Seljuk lords, were often controlled by Turkish military commanders (atabegs) whose authority rested as much in their personal mercenary bands, often of slave troops (mamluks), as on higher Seljuk approval. Everywhere, ethnic and religious diversity complemented the alienation of ruled – whether town-dwellers, rural cultivators or Bedouin or steppe nomads – from ruler. In parts of Syria, immigrant Turkish Sunnis ruled indigenous Shia populations or exerted control over local Arab nobles. In Cilicia and northern Syria, significant religiously and ethnically distinct Armenian communities were squeezed between the competing powers of Byzantium, Arabs and Turks. Across this area and in the Jazira (modern northern Iraq) the political uncertainties offered opportunities for Kurdish as well as other Turkish incomers. Similar dislocation characterized the Fatimid caliphate of Egypt, which contested with the Seljuks ascendancy over southern Palestine. In Egypt, the Shia rulers dominated the majority Sunni inhabitants through powerful chief ministers, called viziers, who were often neither Egyptian nor Arab, but Turks or Armenians. The Near East presented no harmonious spectacle of civilized peace. The Turkish invasions from the 1050s destabilized the region, introducing an alien ruling elite backed by military coercion, causing as much if not more mayhem and disruption than the crusaders were able to achieve.

Elsewhere in the Muslim Mediterranean, the political pendulum was swinging towards Christian powers. After the implosion through internecine feuding of the Cordoba caliphate in 1031, Muslim Spain, al-Andalus, was ruled or fought over by competing so-called taifa or ‘party’ kings. Their weakness and disunity allowed Christian rulers north of the Ebro to take advantage of the lucrative offers of pay and alliance to extend their power southwards, a process driven by profit, not religion, but later given the accolade of the ‘Reconquest’ or reconquista, in largely propagandist reference to the Arab conquest of the eighth century. By the end of the eleventh century, distinctive political identities had been assumed by five Christian statelets: Catalonia; Aragon; Navarre; León; and Castile. These were joined in the 1140s by the creation of Portugal following conquests between the Duero and Tagus rivers along the Atlantic seaboard. Despite a Muslim counter-attack led by a puritanical north African Muslim fundamentalist sect, the Almoravids (c.1086–1139), these Christian principalities managed to exploit the enfeebled political system of their indigenous Muslim neighbours to forge lasting ascendancy in the northern half of the peninsula, which provided the basis for the sweeping conquests of the thirteenth century.