God's War: A New History of the Crusades

The ten years after the death of Muhammed at Mecca in 632 redrew the political and religious map of the Mediterranean and Near East. The ancient rivals of Christian Byzantium and Sassanian Persia who had fought each other almost to a standstill in a war that had lasted a generation (602–28) proved easy pickings for the Arab-led armies that swept from the Arabian peninsular to conquer the Fertile Crescent: Syria and Palestine 635–41; Persia 637–42; Egypt 640–42. In classical Muslim historiography, deliberately symbolic was the entrance into Jerusalem of the caliph (i.e. successor to the Prophet as Commander of the Faithful), Umar, in February 638. The caliph was not the field commander of operations in Palestine but, with the fall of Jerusalem imminent, he arrived to supervise proceedings. Having negotiated a peaceful surrender of the Holy City whence, Islamic tradition insisted, the Prophet had made his night journey to heaven, Umar entered the city, on a donkey or camel – the sources disagree – ostentatiously dressed in coarse, dirty robes, perhaps in deliberate contrast to the lavish parades favoured by the defeated Byzantines. The religious element in the triumph was clear to both Muslim and Christian commentators. Going to the terrace on which the Jewish Temple had stood, the supposed site of Muhammed’s celestial ascent but now reduced to a rubbish tip, Umar ordered the clearance of the site and the construction of a small mosque. Equally, in accordance with the surrender terms, the shrines, churches and synagogues of the Christians and the Jews were left untouched. This iconic moment resonated for centuries; it was entirely appropriate that the fullest contemporary history of crusading and the subsequent western settlements in Palestine and Syria in the twelfth century, by Archbishop William of Tyre, began with the Arab conquests and the failure of the Byzantine emperor Heraclius to resist them.³⁵

The conquest of Jerusalem marked just one stage of Muslim expansion. Within a century of the Prophet’s death, Muslim rule extended from central Asia and north India to Spain. In the Mediterranean basin, Constantinople had survived the great siege of 674–7, but Byzantine sea supremacy had been shattered; Cyprus had been ceded to joint rule, Muslim control on the mainland of western Asia extended to Armenia and Cilicia, and the Byzantine provinces in north Africa lost by 698. In a lightning campaign, Visigothic Spain was overwhelmed by Arab-led Berber armies in 711–13. Although defeated by the Franks at Poitiers in 732, Muslim armies continued to harass southern Gaul for some years. Although the era of conquest was followed by civil war, religious schism and a collapse of political unity, with Spain and north Africa acquiring separate rulers, the Abbasid caliphs, established since 750 in Baghdad, retained the nominal loyalty of much of the Islamic world. More significantly, an international affinity was created by Islamic culture and, to a lesser degree, religion. The question of the extent of Arabization and Islamicization of conquered lands remains obscure and vexed, but it appears that the process was slow, uneven and, by the eleventh century, still incomplete. It is not certain whether there was even a Muslim majority in Syria or Palestine when the crusaders arrived in 1097.

In part this was a consequence of Islamic law. For those Christians and Jews, People of the Book, living within Muslim lands, the so-called Dar al-Islam (House of Islam), religious tolerance was guaranteed by the early Islamic texts. Sura 109 of the Koran declared:

Unbelievers, I do not serve what you worship, nor do you serve what I worship. I shall never serve what you worship nor will you ever serve what I worship. You have your own religion, and I have mine.