God's War: A New History of the Crusades

In return for Islamic rule and protection, the People of the Book had to recognize their subordinate status and pay a tax, the jizya. Despite the reaction of some modern sentimentalists, there was little of generosity but much of pragmatism in these rules. By contrast, beyond the world of Islamic order, in the Dar al-harb (House of War), non-Islamic political structures and individuals were open to attack. All the world must recognize or embrace Islam through conversion or subjugation. Thus on the Muslim community was enjoined jihad, struggle. In classical Islamic theory, i.e. traditionally from the seventh and eighth centuries but possibly later, this took two forms, the greater (al-jihad al-akbar), the internal spiritual struggle to achieve personal purity, and the lesser (al-jihad al-asghar), the military struggle against infidels. Both were obligatory on able-bodied Muslims. Unlike Christian concepts of holy war, to which the Islamic jihad appears to have owed nothing, jihad was fundamental to the Faith, described by some as a sixth pillar of Islam. In theory, fighting was incumbent on all Muslims until the whole world had been subdued, but it was a spiritual as well as military exercise from the start, and a corporate not individual obligation.

In practice, after the first century of conquest, accommodation was regularly achieved across religious and political frontiers. Islam was not in a constant state of aggression against neighbours and was no more actively militant than their enemies. Continued, almost ritualized raiding across stable frontiers in Asia Minor or Spain was lent added intensity during the collapse of Frankish power and continued Byzantine impotence in the west in the ninth century, highlighted by the conquest of Sicily by 830 and pirate bases being established in Calabria and Provence. However, much Muslim warfare was internal. By the mid-tenth century separate caliphates had been established, that of the Umayyads at Cordoba in Spain was of long standing and reached a pinnacle of success in this century, ending it with raids deep into Christian territory under the command of the effective ruler of Cordoba, al-Mansur. The Fatimid caliphate of north Africa had annexed Egypt in 969, buoyed by its Shi’ite heresy, a religious as well as political challenge to the Abbasids of Baghdad. The tenth century also saw a revival of Byzantine military power. Nicephoras Phocas (963–9) regained Cyprus and Syrian Antioch; his successor, John Tzimisces (969–76), campaigned in northern Iraq (974) and, in 975, in Syria and northern Palestine, his propaganda possibly even offering the prospect of a recapture of the holy sites of Jerusalem.

Yet such wars were hardly religious, even if some thought them just or holy. The Greeks wished to secure the eastern marches of Asia Minor; Nicephoras was perfectly willing to allow Muslim Aleppo to become a client, self-governing city. Al-Mansur posed as a holy warrior, yet he hired Christian mercenaries and his attack on the famous shrine of St James at Compostela in Galicia in 997 was only made possible by Christian nobles who acted as guides.³⁶ This essentially secular pattern continued into the eleventh century, especially in Spain, where Christian adventurers rifled through the debris left by the collapse of the Cordoba caliphate from the 1030s, often in alliance with, or in the service of, Muslim princelings.

From the perspective of the western church, conflict with Islam was ipso facto meritorious in a religious context. Whatever the reality of ambitious Italian trading cities, Norman bandits, Spanish lords or even Greek princes, churchmen, in particular successive popes, conceptualized the conflict, fitting it into a wider picture of cosmic significance and individual grace. Whereas in the ninth century, Christendom appeared genuinely threatened, the frontier skirmishing of the eleventh century was of a very different order, yet the rhetoric was conversely gaudier. This was of considerable importance as the attitude to wars against the infidel in the earlier eleventh century coloured the whole approach of Urban II. The motives for holy war were always ever only partly practical, those directed against Muslims often being only tangentially related to any military necessity in defence of Christendom. What counted for successive popes was the place of these wars in Christian history and the opportunity they afforded for a revival of religious enthusiasm, devotion and piety, essentially concerns internal to the church and Christian society.