CHAPTER 2

CONQUEST AND ITS JUSTIFICATIONS

Jihad, Crusade, Reconquista

THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE AGES and well beyond, religion, whether Christian or Muslim, inspired or justified military conquests. Muslims waged jihad against the Christian infidel, Rm, or the Ifranj: Christians called for Crusade against Saracens and for the reconquest of territories fallen to the infidels. But both sides also used the logic and vocabulary of holy war against internal enemies, claiming that victory came from God: for example, in the struggle of the “Orthodox” against “heretics” or “schismatics”; between the Sunni Seljuks and the Fatimid Shiites; between the Byzantines and the Normans; or between the papacy and the Hohenstaufen. Although the ideology of holy war served to justify or celebrate one victory or another, let us make no mistake: religion was often an a posteriori explanation for a conflict that had many other causes. These conflicts should not be viewed as avatars of a “clash of civilizations” between “Islam” and “the West.” On the battlefield, on the Iberian Peninsula, in Palestine, in Sicily, or on the Maghrebian coast, Christians often allied with Muslims and vice versa, facing adversaries who were themselves mixed.

Yet religion was both an important motivation and an essential justification for war in the Middle Ages. I shall examine various examples, privileging two types of texts: chronicles and legal documents. Let us consider first the Muslim conquest, then the various forms of Christian conquest.

WAR AND CONQUEST IN ISLAM: FROM MUHAMMAD TO THE ABBASID CALIPHATE

The first century of Islam saw the astonishingly rapid conquest of an enormous part of the known world. From the Hegira of Muhammad in 622 to his death in 632, the Muslims were able to impose their dominion through conversion and conquest of the entire Arabian Peninsula. The caliphs, the Prophet’s successors, conquered Syria, Iraq, Persia, and Egypt. Then they turned to North Africa, with the mass conversion of Berber tribes followed by the conquest, between 711 and 718, of most of the Iberian Peninsula. At the same time, Muslim troops conquered territories in Transoxiana (Afghanistan) and on the banks of the Indus.

Many factors account for these conquests—in particular, the political and religious unity of the Arab tribes and the weakness of the two great rival empires, Persia and Byzantium. The subjects of these empires were not inclined to fight to defend their masters; that was especially the case for the Monophysite Christians of Syria and Egypt, who were persecuted as heretics by Constantinople and offered little resistance to the Muslims. In negotiations during the siege of a city, Muslim conquerors guaranteed freedom of worship to the residents and offered them judicial autonomy, in exchange for the recognition of Muslim authority and the payment of an annual tribute. A century after the Hegira, the new Muslim empire extended from the Indus to the Atlantic: of the two empires that had dominated the Mediterranean world and the Middle East for centuries, Persia was completely integrated, as was a good part of Byzantium, though Constantinople still resisted all attempts at conquest.

Had not God shown his preference in granting Islam these astounding victories? A seventh-century Muslim, it seems, found it easy to declare to a Christian monk that “it is a sign of God’s love for us and pleasure with our faith that he has given us dominion over all regions and all peoples.”¹ Sophronius, the patriarch of Jerusalem, who had to surrender that city to Caliph ‘Umar I in 638, complained that the Saracens boasted they had conquered the whole earth.² The meteoric rise of Islam appeared truly miraculous to Muslim authors: a handful of desert warriors had vanquished the richest and most populous parts of the most powerful empires in the world.

The Muslim was not supposed to force the “people of the book” (ahl al-kitb, that is, Jews and Christians) to convert; he could, however, oblige them to recognize the superiority and the suzerainty of Muslim power. The Qur’an (9:29) is explicit: “Fight against such of those to whom the Scriptures were given as believe neither in God nor the Last Day, who do not forbid what God and His apostle [Muhammad] have forbidden, and do not embrace the true Faith, until they pay tribute [jizya] out of hand and are utterly subdued.” The Muslim community was enjoined to conduct war and submit non-Muslims to its power. It was not to compel them to embrace Islam but only to obtain their submission to Muslim power and make them pay the jizya, a specific tribute or tax that constituted one of the principal legal obligations of the non-Muslim in Islamic territories. That war was part of the jihad, or effort on the path toward God, which every Muslim was supposed to make.³ But according to the Qur’an, it was only one element: of the thirty-five occurrences of the word jihd and related terms in the holy book, only ten refer to war.⁴ Usually, that “effort on the path toward God” was made by peaceful means. The Qur’an summons the Muslims to conduct the “greater jihad” against the infidels through preaching.⁵ As Alfred Morabia has noted, all mentions of war refer to Muhammad’s expeditions against specific enemies; no passage in the holy book speaks of war to spread Islam beyond the peninsula.⁶ The Qur’an displays ambivalence toward war. Some passages exhort Muslims to spread the faith solely by peaceful means, while others authorize defensive war when the Muslims are attacked, and still others encourage war to submit the infidel enemies to Muslim power. Finally, many verses indicate disagreements within the early Muslim community regarding the use of violence, beginning in Muhammad’s lifetime: some Muslims undertook an offensive expedition, whereas others refused to participate.⁷

But the view of jihad evolved in the generation following the death of the Prophet, a generation that saw great conquests, doctrinal quarrels with Judaism and Christianity, and, at the same time, the formation of Muslim doctrine, especially through the setting down in writing of the traditions, or Hadith. These traditions reflect a great diversity of viewpoints on jihad, as on many other subjects. Some of the compilers provide a particularly bellicose view of relations between the Muslims and the world beyond Islam. Muhammad is said to be not merely the prophet sent to the Arabs; his mission is universal in character. Jihad would supposedly consist primarily of expanding the domain of Islam (dr al-islm) by force of arms, until the whole world recognized its suzerainty. That gave rise to the distinction between the dr al-islm, the territories subject to Muslim power, and the dr al-kufr, the realm of infidelity, also called dr al-harb, the realm of war, territories that had not yet been won over to Islam but that must be sooner or later. That distinction, absent from the Qur’an, took root during the time of the great conquests.⁸ As for the apparent contradictions in the Qur’an regarding war in the service of Islam, commentators resolved them by contextualizing the revelations, which were supposedly received in very specific situations: the passages counseling nonviolence, they claimed, were revealed at a time when the Muslim community of Mecca was weak and could not forcibly resist. The more militant passages came from the Medina period, when the Muslims asserted their power, and they abrogated the previous revelations, establishing the new norms that were to govern the community from then on. That interpretation, as Reuven Firestone has shown, was produced during Islam’s rapid expansion, when the militant view was seeking firm support in the Qur’anic text.⁹

The theory and the practice of jihad continued to change, reflecting the preoccupations and needs of the Muslim community. Spiritual for the most part during Muhammad’s Mecca period, more bellicose after the Hegira—when Muhammad became the leader of Medina and conducted military actions against pagan and Jewish tribes on the peninsula—jihad assumed a completely different dimension during the great conquests: it became an appeal to submit the earth as a whole to the power of God’s religion. The divisions that marked the dr al-islm during the fitnas (civil wars) of 680 and 750 and the increased resistance of certain adversaries (especially the Byzantines) would lead to a further evolution in the concept. Jihad became primarily defensive: it was necessary to protect the community against the incursions of enemies, whether Byzantines, Turks (not yet Islamized), or “heterodox” currents within Islam.

Of course, those who felt most threatened by the Byzantine expansion tried to revive the sense of an obligation to jihad against the infidel. That was the case, for example, of Sayf al-Dawla, sultan of Aleppo from 945 until his death in 967, who employed a whole team of preachers. “It is you who should lead the offensive, not the infidels,” exclaimed one of them, Qadi Tarsusi.¹⁰ But these appeals, coming from a border region that would be retaken by Byzantium between 974 and 987, only underscored that the time of the great conquests was over and that the war against the infidel was a priority only for the zones directly threatened. In the marches of the dr al-islm, jihad was also often invoked to justify raids in which religious motivations combined with the lure of booty. The most important element, because it was the most lucrative, may have been the slave trade: these raids on land or sea supplied captives to be sold everywhere in the Muslim world.

The “external” jihad, the fight to conquer the dr al-harb, was only rarely considered obligatory for Muslims. It was, however, meritorious, and some historians claim that jihad is the “monasticism” of Islam.¹¹ Consider the complex development of the term ribat, which originally meant preparation for battle and later came to designate fortified posts, usually near borders with the dr al-harb, where the mujahidin could earn glory and accumulate wealth by waging defensive or offensive war against the infidel.¹²

It is difficult to know how the Muslim conquerors of the seventh and eighth centuries perceived these wars, since most of the Arab sources that relate them date from the ninth century. It is clear that the conquests of that later time, such as Sicily by the Aghlabids of Ifriqiya (present-day Tunisia), undertaken in 827, assumed a religious dimension.¹³ But that did not prevent alliances between the Aghlabids and the cities of the southern Italian coast such as Amalfi—which discreetly remained neutral during the conquest of Sicily—or Naples, which allied itself with the Aghlabids against the Lombard prince of Benevento.¹⁴

In Spain, the accounts of the conquest—from the landing of the Berber general Tariq in 711 to the taking of Narbonne in 719 by Governor al-Samh ibn Malik al-Khawln—are all late texts: they betray a nostalgia for the heroic age of the great expeditions.¹⁵ By 719, the advance into Europe was running out of steam. In 721, al-Samh besieged Toulouse but was attacked by Eudes, count of Aquitaine, who killed the governor and put the Muslim troops to flight. After that, confrontations were common, but they consisted of raids more than attempted conquests. The best known is that of 732: having pillaged Bordeaux and Poitiers, Muslims troops were attacked and dispersed by the forces of Charles Martel, and Governor ‘Abd al-Rahmn al-Ghfiq met his death. That Battle of Tours (also called the Battle of Poitiers), though its importance has been wildly exaggerated in historiography, did mark a serious setback for the Hispano-Arabs and an important milestone in the rise to power of the Carolingian family. It in no way put an end to the raids in Gaul, however. They continued for more than a century, interrupted by truces or periods of calm.

A closer look indicates that, despite chronicles that readily speak of glorious jihad or the defense of Christianity, here too alliances were often established between Christians and Muslims. Count Eudes of Aquitaine feared his powerful neighbor to the north, Charles Martel, as much as he did the Andalusian governors. He therefore formed an alliance with a Berber chief, Munuza, installed in a castle in the Pyrenees not far from Puigcerdá. It is clear that what linked Eudes and Munuza was that both were trying to resist the power of a mighty coreligionist, while seeking to avoid an invasion of the “infidel” from across the Pyrenees. In vain: Munuza met his death at the hands of Cordovan troops in 729, and Charles Martel took advantage of his Poitiers victory in 732 to annex Aquitaine. This kind of alliance was common in the following decades, when Cordova tried to secure its power one way or another over the peninsula. A whole series of Muslim rebels on the northern peninsula crossed the Pyrenees to ally themselves with Charlemagne or his son Louis the Pious. The Banu Qasi of Aragon had an agreement with the Christians of Pamplona, and the rebels of Merida and Toledo frequently appealed to the kings of the Asturias and to the Frankish kings. As for the Franks, those who wished to free themselves from the tutelage of Louis the Pious and Charles the Bald naturally made deals with Cordova.

Between the mid-eighth and the mid-ninth centuries, four major powers asserted their authority around the Mediterranean: the Abbasid caliphate, the Byzantine Empire, the Umayyad emirate, and the Carolingian Empire. The Abbasids, who were fighting Byzantium in Anatolia and Syria and who saw the emirate of Cordova as the offshoot of an illegitimate regime they had suppressed in the East, turned to the Carolingians, their natural allies because they were enemies of these same Byzantines and Umayyads. Pepin the Short, therefore, sent an embassy to Baghdad in 765. It was probably well received by Caliph al-Mansr, who sent back a mission with gifts for the king in 768. Charlemagne sent an embassy to Hrn al-Rashd in 797, and in 802 an Abbasid delegation arrived in Aix-la-Chapelle laden with gifts, the most cumbersome of them an elephant named Ab al-‘Abbas, who did not fail to impress witnesses. In 831, Caliph al-Ma‘mn sent another delegation to Louis the Pious in Thionville.¹⁶ Although these exchanges did not come to much, they do indicate that geopolitical interests, for the Carolingians and for the Abbasids, were much more important than any religious solidarity.¹⁷

On a more or less regular basis, the Umayyad emirs and caliphs of Cordova waged jihad year after year against the infidels of the north: their aim seems to have been booty and prestige more than the conquest of territories. These wars against the small northern kingdoms continued sporadically under the caliphs, allowing them to impose humiliating terms on the sovereigns of these kingdoms, which cast into relief the caliphs’ theoretical suzerainty over their territories. True, the chamberlain al-Mansr b. Ab ‘mir (977–1002), under the theoretical authority of the caliph, invoked the ideology of jihad in order to conduct several devastating expeditions against the Christian states. The most notorious is the one that took him to Santiago de Compostela: the general brought back the church bells, both booty and a symbol of the humiliation he was able to inflict on the infidel enemies.¹⁸ But these raids, catastrophic though they were for their victims, were short-lived; al-Mansr seems to have used them primarily to assert his power in Cordova, and he did not try to establish a Muslim presence in the devastated territories. Furthermore, nothing indicates that this belligerent attitude toward the Christians led to a change of attitude toward the Mozarab dhimmis of the caliphate; Christian contingents remained an essential part of his army.

THE ARAB CONQUESTS SEEN BY EUROPEAN CHRONICLERS IN THE SEVENTH TO NINTH CENTURIES

How did the Christians of Europe react to the Muslim conquests? From Constantinople to Jarrow Monastery in Northumbria, various authors tried to explain as best they could the causes and consequences of the “Saracen” conquest. Let us examine in particular those works by chroniclers who tried to insert these conquests into a Christian view of history. That is, if God is the author of history, if He is just, why did He allow these “infidel” invaders to seize so much territory at the expense of the Christians? This was not the first time the question had arisen. In the fourth and fifth centuries, “barbarian” (especially Germanic) peoples, whether pagans or Arians, had conquered a good part of the Western Roman Empire. The Eastern Empire (what historians call the Byzantine Empire) had to endure the assault of many enemies: Slavs, Avars, and Persians. It was always hoped that these infidels would be defeated or would convert to Christianity. In the end, these hopes were often realized: most of the Slavic and Germanic invaders eventually joined the church.

It was from that point of view that some Christian authors presented the wave of “Saracen” invaders: as a scourge sent by God to punish the Christians for their sins, but a scourge that was not fundamentally different from previous attacks. The Chronicle of Fredegar (about 658), the very first Latin chronicle to mention the Arab victory over the Byzantines, describes the invasions in semiapocalyptic terms: astrologists warned Emperor Heraclius of his imminent defeat at the hands of a circumcised race; he opened the mythical north gates (built by Alexander the Great), to release a flood of barbarians from the north on the Saracens, but to no avail.¹⁹

For Bede (about 673–735), a monk in the Jarrow Monastery in Northumbria, the Saracens were a distant and vague threat.²⁰ In his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, in which he recounts the triumphant history of the growth of British Christianity and celebrates the lives of the monks, the distant incursions of non-Christian warriors on the European continent warrant only brief mentions, as a few small dark clouds on the horizon. Bede nevertheless noted the appearance, in the year 729, of two comets presaging the arrival of the barbarian invaders, before adding, “at this time a terrible plague of Saracens ravaged Gaul with cruel bloodshed and not long afterwards they received the due reward of their impiety [perfidia] in the same kingdom.”²¹ Some historians have suggested that Bede is alluding here to the defeat of ‘Abd al-Rahmn al-Ghfiq by Charles Martel’s forces in 732, but it is more likely an allusion to the Battle of Toulouse (721), in which Eudes, duke of Aquitaine, defeated Emir al-Samh. The Saracen incursion was a “terrible calamity” reminiscent of the ordeals and punishments of the Hebrews in the Old Testament, followed by a reversal that proved Christian superiority in a satisfying manner. In addition, Bede explains that the Saracens were punished for their perfidia, a word that other authors of the time generally used to designate religious error, whether pagan, Jewish, or heretical (though on occasion it could mean “treachery” without any religious connotations). It seems they were punished more for their religious error than for their devastating incursions into Christian Gaul. In reality, for Bede, the Saracens’ brutality was probably the direct consequence of their perfidia. After all, his Ecclesiastical History speaks of other groups of perfidi who waged war relentlessly until their conversion: the residents of Kent before the arrival of Augustine of Canterbury, the Angles, the Picts, and others. In fact, in a Europe continually ravaged by war and invasions, the Saracens were only one group of infidel intruders among others. Christian European authors proved to be largely incurious about the religion of these invaders, whether Saracens, Vikings, or something else. They all seemed to be part of the terrible ordeals God was inflicting on His people, but no one had the sense that their religious beliefs and practices merited investigation, much less that they were the slightest bit legitimate.

The Saracens’ advantage over other distant invaders, from the standpoint of a monk and scholar such as Bede, was that it was possible to learn about them by consulting the Bible. It is in his biblical commentaries that he appears aware of the scope and importance of the Saracen invasions. Genesis (16:12) describes Ishmael as a “wild man” with his “hand … against every man.” Like a number of his contemporary Eastern brothers, Bede saw that as a transparent allusion to the Saracen conquests: “And here now is his hand against every man and the hand of every man against him, while they [the descendants of Ishmael] impose his authority over the entire length of Africa and occupy most of Asia and a part of Europe, in hatred and hostility toward all.”²²

From Constantinople, where Theophanes wrote his chronicle in about 815, things looked rather different. It was now clear that the new Muslim masters of the Middle East were there to stay, and it was therefore necessary to explain their successes within the context of Christian history. Theophanes devoted a brief biographical sketch to Muhammad, “the leader and false prophet of the Saracens.”²³ He describes the marriage of Muhammad to the widow Khadja, and his travels in Palestine in search of the writings of Jews and Christians. Muhammad had an epileptic seizure that aggrieved Khadja, and he consoled her in these terms: “I keep seeing a vision of a certain angel called Gabriel, and being unable to bear his sight, I faint and fall down.” Khadja sought advice from a “certain monk living there, a friend of hers (who had been exiled for his depraved doctrine).”²⁴ That heretical monk—originating, perhaps, from the Muslim traditions concerning two Christians close to Muhammad, Waraqa and Bahira—explained to her that Muhammad was truly a prophet, to whom the angel Gabriel was manifesting himself in visions. After that excellent beginning, his “heresy” was soon spread by force. Muhammad, says Theophanes, promised all who fell while fighting the enemy a paradise full of sensual delights: food, drink, sex. He recounted “other things full of profligacy and stupidity.”²⁵

Fully aware of the religious motivations behind the Muslim conquests, Theophanes characterizes Islam as a heresy combining Jewish and Christian elements; later, he presents Mecca as the place of the Saracens’ “blasphemy.”²⁶ He is no less clear about the reasons why God allowed these Muslim heretics to conquer vast territories. It was because Heraclius embraced the Monothelite heresy (according to which Christ had only a single, unified will, rather than two distinct wills, one human, one divine) that the Christians began to lose their territories in favor of the Arabs. That disgrace was particularly tragic in that, in Theophanes’ eyes, Heraclius had been the champion of Orthodoxy, the one who had crushed Constantinople’s Avar and Persian enemies and recaptured the True Cross from them. God and the Virgin had watched over Heraclius and guaranteed his success, until the day the emperor inexplicably became a heretic, at which time they abandoned him to the Arab invaders. Moreover, if Heraclius had allowed himself to be drawn into the nets of heresy, the fault lay with the Syrian Monophysites.²⁷ How could the pillaging of Syria by the Arab armies be anything but a divine punishment, just and terrible?

In Latin Europe, by contrast, the Latin chroniclers said nothing about the religious dimension of the Muslim conquest. They continued to represent the Muslims as scourges sent by God to punish them for their sins and as formidable military adversaries, but not as religious adversaries. For the Carolingian chroniclers, the Goths lost Spain because of their sins, and it was quite natural that the hegemony over their former territory (Septimania, Catalonia) had passed over to the Franks. The Chronicon moissiacense presents the Arab conquest of Spain as punishment for the sins of the Visigoth king Witiza.²⁸ Nevertheless, whether they were reporting the sack of Benevento or the victory of Charles Martel in Poitiers, the chroniclers have nothing to say about the religious beliefs or practices of these “Saracens.”²⁹ The same is true, in the tenth century, for Liutprand of Cremona’s description of the depredations perpetrated by the Saracens of Fraxinetum.³⁰

In the ninth century, many authors were preoccupied with the Aghlabid conquest of Sicily, then with the incursions on the Italian peninsula. But ecclesiastics also expressed the idea that the incursions of the “infidels” were a punishment sent by God against “bad Christians.” That was the perspective of Adon, archbishop of Vienna, and of Pope John VIII.³¹ These “Saracens” or “Arabs” were often called “pirates,” “thieves,” or “looters.” Terms of opprobrium, no doubt, but ones that were applied to many Christians as well, which suggests these were small armed bands rather than disciplined armies.

At the same time, other texts speak of alliances between Christian princes and Muslim leaders. When Muslim troops sacked the city of Benevento, the soldiers of Emperor Louis II (855–875) portrayed the Saracens as avengers sent by God against the Beneventines, who had taken the emperor captive.³² When Pope John VIII called for unity as a way to counter the depredations of the “infidels,” it was in part to assert his influence in southern Italy. Naples and Amalfi therefore preferred to ally themselves with the Aghlabids of Tunisia and Sicily, despite the spiritual threats from Rome.³³ On the shifting borders between Byzantium and its Muslim neighbors, a number of Arab and Turkish leaders integrated the Byzantine elite, even as some members of the provincial Byzantine elite were forming alliances with their Muslim neighbors or suzerains.³⁴ The examples could be multiplied: people complained of the incursions of the “infidel Saracens” when they were the victims of their attacks, but that in no way prevented alliances between Christian and Muslim princes.

THE CRUSADE OF THE CHRONICLERS

Until the eleventh century, confrontations between Europeans and Arabs had usually taken place on European soil. But then the situation began to change: the Pisans and Genoese conducted pillaging expeditions in North Africa; then came the Christian conquest of Mediterranean islands such as Sicily, which the Normans conquered between 1061 and 1091; and then the First Crusade, launched in 1095, which culminated in the taking of Jerusalem in July 1099 and the formation of the Latin states in the East—the kingdom of Jerusalem, the county of Tripoli, the principality of Antioch, and the county of Edessa. We shall see in chapter 3 how the European leaders of these states imposed their power on a majority Muslim Arabophone peasantry. At this point, let us examine how the chroniclers of the Crusade justified that expedition.

It should be pointed out, first, that the troops who captured Jerusalem in 1099 were not aware that they were participating in a “Crusade”; it was not until the thirteenth century that canonists explicitly used the term crociata.³⁵ Contemporaries linked their expedition to a pilgrimage: they called it iter (journey), via (way), or peregrinatio (pilgrimage); the soldiers were usually peregrini (pilgrims), sometimes cruce signati (marked by the cross, or “Crusaders,” hence the later term “Crusade”).³⁶ In fact, when Pope Urban II launched his appeal in Clermont in 1095, he presented the expedition as an armed pilgrimage and offered participants the same indulgences that were granted to pilgrims going to Jerusalem. The vow to set off was also assimilated to a vow of pilgrimage; the “pilgrim” had a cross sewn into his or her clothing to mark that pledge. The chroniclers therefore have a tendency to present these mighty armies as bands of humble pilgrims headed for Jerusalem. At the same time, however, they call them “soldiers of Christ” (milites Christi) or “the army of God” (exercitus Dei or militia Dei). They present the Christian army as heir to the army of Israel in the Old Testament. The chronicler Robert the Monk relates that, after the decisive victory of Dorylaeum (1097), which opened eastern Anatolia to “God’s army,” the victorious soldiers sang a hymn to God, adapting the one Moses had uttered to thank him for destroying Pharoah’s army: “Thy right hand, O Lord, is become glorious in power: thy right hand, O Lord, hath dashed in pieces the enemy” (Exodus 15:6–7).³⁷ Of course, the words of Exodus were more likely to flow from a monk’s pen than from the lips of soldiers; but at least this passage says a great deal about how a certain monastic elite perceived the expedition. Robert was not alone: other chroniclers established a close parallel between the army of Israel and the militia Dei that set out to conquer Jerusalem.³⁸

That view, of course, required that the adversary be portrayed as the enemy of God. In the Chronicle of Robert the Monk, Pope Urban II, launching the appeal for the First Crusade, painted a very dark picture: from the East news was arriving that the Persians, “a despised race,” had invaded the lands of the Christians in those regions, sowing destruction, spilling blood, and spreading fire. In addition, these enemies of God were said to have destroyed churches, overturned altars, circumcised Christians by force, and poured the blood from these circumcisions onto altars and into baptismal fonts—not to mention their rape of Christian women.³⁹ In Robert the Monk’s chronicle, the Turks have become Persians (the Romans’ traditional enemy), and he readily attributes the worst atrocities to them. According to him, the goal of the expedition was to rescue these Eastern Christians and to avenge them, but also to recover the territories unjustly taken by the infidels and to return the sanctuaries profaned by them to the Christian faith.

Most of these authors knew nothing about Islam, but they made up for their ignorance by using their imaginations and their knowledge, acquired through books, of other discredited beliefs, those of the pagans of antiquity. For example, the chronicler Petrus Tudebodus sees the Saracens as “our enemy and God’s … saying diabolical sounds in I know not what language.”⁴⁰ He attributes to a Saracen chief an oath “by Machomet and by the names of all the gods.”⁴¹ These enemies were therefore idolatrous pagans, like those who had once persecuted the chosen Jewish people and then the early Christians. Hence Tudebodus depicts as martyrs the Christians who lost their lives at the hands of these infidels.

The most striking example of the use of the Turks’ supposed idolatry to justify the Crusade appears in many chroniclers’ descriptions of the sacrilegious worship of the Saracens of Jerusalem. According to Fulcher of Chartres, in the Temple of the Lord—that is, the Dome of the Rock—they had installed an idol of Muhammad, to whom they addressed their vain prayers, thus profaning that holy site.⁴² Raoul of Caen reports that his patron, the worthy Tancred, had found the idol in the temple and had piously destroyed it.⁴³ Such sacrileges in the most holy places of the world could only bring glory to the undertaking of the soldiers of Christ. It hardly mattered that these acts were pure fiction.

Not all chroniclers depicted the Muslim adversary as an idolater, however. One of the chroniclers of the First Crusade provides a very different (though no less hostile) image of Muhammad. Guibert of Nogent declares that Muhammad is not the God of the Saracens as some think, but that the Saracens believe he is “a just man and their patron, through whom divine laws were transmitted.”⁴⁴ Guibert inserts a short biography of Muhammad into his chronicle, The Deeds of God through the Franks (1109). He knows that the Saracens worship only God the Father, that they reject the Trinity, and that they believe Jesus was a man and a prophet but not God. According to Guibert, that “Mathomus,” with the aid of a heretical Christian, compiled a law that “gave them free rein for every kind of shameful behavior.”⁴⁵ To make the Arabs believe he was a prophet, Muhammad trained a dove to eat seeds from his ear, so that people would believe it was an angel from heaven. He attached the scrolls of his law to the horns of a cow, then celebrated its advent as a miracle. That new law, acclaimed by the crowd, encouraged excesses of the flesh: polygamy, prostitution, homosexuality. As a just punishment for his crimes, “Mathomus” endured a horrible death: first afflicted with epilepsy, he was later devoured by flatulent pigs. The stories of false miracles resemble those told about the heresiarchs: these deceptions, inspired by the devil, supposedly explain why the mob embraced the heresies.

The ideological function of that life of Muhammad, placed at the beginning of Guibert’s chronicle, is clear: it serves as a justification for the Crusade. Guibert declares that the Eastern Christians were too clever and that their ratiocination led them to fall into every sort of heresy. Islam is said to be only the most recent and most catastrophic manifestation of these heretical tendencies. The message is simple: the Eastern peoples need Westerners to put their affairs in order. The denigration of the Prophet is a key element in the justification of the Crusade. Other Crusade chroniclers followed Guibert’s lead. William, archbishop of Tyre, presents Muhammad as the “firstborn of Satan,” a madman and liar who “seduced Arabia.”⁴⁶ The disciples of such a man could have no political legitimacy in the land of Christ.

THE CRUSADE OF THE JURISTS

Whereas the chroniclers depict the Crusades as a reconquest of the patrimony of Christ unduly usurped by the infidels, canon law gave a legal framework to the war, which was waged under ecclesiastical authority to assert the rights of the church. The Concordia discordantium canonum (or Decretum) from the mid-twelfth century is an encyclopedic compilation, attributed to Gratian, that became the foundation for the entire system of canon law in the Middle Ages. The Decretum is divided into various causae (cases). The causa that interests us is the twenty-third, which deals with the legitimacy of war waged under church authority against the heretics. As in all the causae, Gratian first posits a hypothetical case, then presents conflicting opinions, which he tries to resolve by citing authoritative texts:

Some bishops, along with the people in their charge, sank into heresy. By threats and torture, they began to force the Catholics in the region to embrace their heresy. The pope ordered the bishops of the neighboring regions, who had accepted civil jurisdiction from the hands of the emperor, to defend the Catholics against the heretics. These bishops, having accepted that apostolic mandate, summoned troops and began to fight the heretics, both openly and by ruse. Many heretics were killed, others despoiled of their own property and that of their churches; others were imprisoned or reduced to slavery, while still others were compelled to return to the unity of the Catholic faith.⁴⁷

Many historians, with some justification, have seen this causa as an allusion to the First Crusade; this impression is confirmed by the many illuminated manuscripts of the Decretum that, beginning in the thirteenth century, illustrate causa 23 with scenes iconographically identical to the illuminations in the Crusade chronicles. The thirteenth- and fourteenth-century canonists make reference to this causa when they speak of the Crusades. The parallels between the First Crusade and the case at hand are too numerous to be fortuitous: they include the power of the pope to call the milites to arms for the defense of oppressed Christians, and the right of the victors to appropriate the property of the defeated and to establish their power over the conquered territories. There can be no doubt that Gratian is seeking to affirm the legitimacy of the First Crusade. But he also provides criteria for judging the legitimacy of any sort of military action, offensive or defensive, undertaken under the church’s authority.

Gratian obviously does not intend to rule on the legality of the “Crusades” as such, since the concept of “Crusade” did not yet exist. He poses the problem much more broadly. For him, it seems, the legal precedent for the First Crusade was the fight against the Donatist heretics of North Africa in the fourth and fifth centuries. In both cases, the aim was to reestablish Roman authority (imperial or pontifical) over those who rebelled against it and to assist the Catholic Christians being persecuted by the heretics. If Gratian presents the bishops’ adversaries as heretics, it is because, by the twelfth century, that was how the Muslims were viewed, as we have seen in the examples of Guibert of Nogent’s and William of Tyre’s chronicles. It is therefore possible to apply that causa dealing with heretics to the “Saracens.”

As in each of Gratian’s causae, the hypothetical case is followed by a series of questions proceeding from it—eight in this case. He considers, among other things, the legitimacy of the war, the duty of aiding one’s comrades, the punishment for the guilty, and the authority of various individuals (popes, bishops, emperors, and so on) to call people to arms against the heretics. In his seventh question, Gratian asks whether the possessions of the heretics and their churches may be confiscated and whether “good Christians” may seize them. In his responses, he asserts the legitimacy of the conquest and of the appropriation of lands and other property. True to the incipient scholastic style of the twelfth century, Gratian cites authorities for and against each of his propositions: biblical passages, ecumenical councils, pontifical bulls, and church fathers—Ambrose, Jerome, Gregory the Great, and especially Augustine, who provides most of the citations. This preference for the bishop of Hippo is altogether logical. In his writings on the Donatists, Augustine justifies the use of arms in the service of the Catholic Church against the heretics. Augustine was not the first to refuse them civil rights. Under Constantine, heretics were already deprived of privilegia. By the fourth century, heresy was assimilated to a crime of lèse-majesté, even treason, in imperial legislation.⁴⁸

In the four excerpts for quaestio 7, which articulates the right of Christians to appropriate the property of heretics, Gratian cites the bishop of Hippo exclusively. According to Augustine, the Donatists had placed themselves outside the law: having rebelled against both divine law and human law (that of the empire), they had no legitimate title to possess goods. Gratian follows Augustine and stipulates the right of Catholics to confiscate the heretics’ possessions, thus offering a justification for conquest at their expense. That justification became authoritative and constituted the starting point for any reflection on the subject by twelfth- and thirteenth-century canonists. For the canonist Huguccio, who taught in Bologna in the late twelfth century (and who was probably the teacher of the future pope Innocent III), the war against the heretics was authorized by both human and divine law.⁴⁹ Canon 3 of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) imposed on prelates the duty to combat heresy and to mobilize princes to drive out the heretics, granting Catholics the right to confiscate their personal property. The decretist Laurentius Hispanus (d. 1248) declared that causa 23 conferred legitimacy on any war against heretics or Saracens.⁵⁰ The theologians who addressed causa 23 were generally of the same opinion. For the Franciscan Alexander of Hales (d. 1245), the Crusaders’ despoliation of heretics and Saracens was a meritorious act.⁵¹

Some jurists hesitated, however, to relegate the Saracens to the rank of heretics, especially since, like the Jews, many Muslims possessed the status of a subaltern minority, tolerated in Spain, Sicily, and the Latin states of the East. A few canonists presented the war against the Saracens rather as a restoration of legitimate Christian power, which the infidels had supposedly usurped. The thirteenth-century Dominican jurist Raymond of Penyafort, in his Summa de casibus, recognizes that the Saracens may legitimately reign, but not in territories they acquired at the expense of Christians. The Christian conquest of Muslim territories became legitimate when it was a reconquest of formerly Christian lands: the Holy Land, Spain, or other parts of the former Roman Empire. That is also the opinion of other thirteenth-century canonists, such as William of Rennes and Johannes de Deo, and of theologians such as Robert of Courçon. Pope Innocent IV confirmed the right to reconquest. Thomas of Aquinas goes even farther: for him, infidels cannot rule over Christians, and the church has the right to abolish that domination.⁵² In their work, therefore, thirteenth-century jurists followed in Gratian’s footsteps, declaring categorically the legitimacy of the reconquest of the Christian territories of the Roman Empire, where the heretics, including the Saracens, did not have the right to exercise power.

THE RECONQUISTA IN SPAIN

While the Crusaders were carving out principalities in the East, the Christian kingdoms of the northern Iberian Peninsula launched conquests against the Muslim principalities. In the early eleventh century, the caliphate of Cordova, which had ruled the peninsula until that time and which represented the most powerful and richest state of Europe, sank into fitna, civil war, and ultimately broke into taifas, small rival emirates fighting among themselves. The Christian sovereigns of the north (the count of Barcelona and the kings of Castile, Aragon, León, and, as of the late eleventh century, Portugal) took the opportunity to conquer lands or to ask the emirs for tributes (parias). That was the case, for example, of Fernando I (1035–1065), king of Castile and León, who demanded parias from the emirs of Toledo, Badajoz, and Seville. His son Alfonso VI (1065–1109) continued and broadened that policy: the heavy burden of the tributes obliged the emirs to impose non-Qur’anic taxes on their subjects, which led to revolts. Alfonso took advantage of one rebellion against the emir of Toledo to seize that city in 1085. The emirs of other taifas, to deal with the threat represented by Alfonso, appealed to the Almoravids, a Berber dynasty ruling a good part of western Africa, from Mali to Algiers. The Almoravids intervened, inflicted a bitter defeat on Alfonso in Zallaka (1086), and imposed their rule over the taifas. In the 1140s, another Maghrebian dynasty, the Almohads, overthrew the Almoravids, conquered Andalusia, and launched attacks on Christian kingdoms of the north. But a coalition of Christian kingdoms finally inflicted a decisive defeat on the Almohads in 1212, at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, opening the way to conquest. James I of Aragon seized Majorca (1229) and Valencia (1238), while Fernando III of Castile and León took Cordova (1236) and Seville (1248). Only the Nasrid kingdom of Granada remained in the hands of Muslim leaders until its conquest by Isabel of Castile and Fernando of Aragon in 1492.

Reconquista, or “reconquest,” is the term traditionally used in historiography to designate these successive waves of conquests by Christian princes. The word implies a coherent ideological program: at issue is not merely a conquest but a return to normalcy, a reestablishment of a Christian order that was temporarily overthrown by Muslim domination. Although the term reconquista is for the most part an invention of nineteenth-century historiographers,⁵³ the concept is rooted in medieval historiography. In the ninth-century kingdom of Asturias, the idea was already taking shape that the Asturian kings were the heirs of the Visigoth kings of old and that the “Chaldeans” were merely a scourge sent by God, destined to vanish from the peninsula in favor of the Asturian king Alfonso III. That ideology would be elaborated by chroniclers in the entourage of his successors, kings of León and Castile. Two essential elements were joined together: first, the restoration of a dynasty stemming from the line of the Visigoths, and, as a result, the only legitimate power on the entire peninsula; and second, Christian restoration, a corollary of that Gothic restoration. Only the reign of Christian princes could be legitimate: the Muslim princes had no right to rule on Iberian soil. This idea is also found in the crown of Aragon, whose kings obviously did not subscribe to the notion of a Gothic restoration, which would have meant bowing to the monarchs of Castile and León.⁵⁴

In the ninth century, when Cordova recovered its strength under the caliphate, the Christian kingdoms of the north could hardly claim to be launching a new “reconquest” of the peninsula. It was only in the eleventh century, when Alfonso VI took the offensive against the emirs of the taifas, that the Asturian idea of a restoration of “Gothic” legitimacy reemerged. The king managed to take the city of Toledo, former capital of the Visigoth kings, which added weight to his claim to their inheritance. That preoccupation was apparent in the titles he bestowed on himself: he was dubbed “Alfonso, emperor of all Spain by the grace of God” and “magnificent victor of the Toledan empire”; his power extended over “the whole empire of Spain and the kingdom of Toledo.”⁵⁵ Curiously, that claim to a Gothic restoration appears most clearly not in Latin chroniclers of the time but in two Arab authors. ‘Abd Allah, the last Zirid emir of Granada, recounts that Count Sisnando Davides, sent by Alfonso VI to Granada to demand payment of parias, told him: “In the beginning, al-Andalus belonged to the Christians [Rm], until they were defeated by the Arabs, who pushed them back into Galicia. But now that it is possible, they wish to recover what had been stolen from them by force.” Whether Sisnando said this or not, it is clear that ‘Abd Allah was well aware of that ideology of Gothic and Christian restoration. Ibn Bassam (d. 1148) relates that Alfonso, after taking the city, turned the main mosque into a church. At that time, advisers suggested that he “assume the crown and put on the garments of the Christians who ruled the peninsula before the conquest.”⁵⁶

That ideology appears clearly in three chronicles from the thirteenth century: the Chronicon mundi (1236–1242) by Lucas of Tuy; De rebus Hispaniae (1243–1246) by Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, archbishop of Toledo and close adviser to King Fernando III of Castile and León; and the Estoria de Espaa, written at the order of King Alfonso the Wise (1252–1284) and completed under the reign of his son Sancho IV (1284–1295).⁵⁷ The Estoria recounts the history of the various dynasties that ruled Spain: Greek, Carthaginian, Roman, Vandal, Visigoth, and Arab. Of all these groups, only two were legitimate, the Romans and the Visigoths. Alfonso X, king and emperor (since he claimed the imperial title), was the natural successor of both. The others were intruders, especially the invaders from Africa, Carthaginians and Moors.⁵⁸ The Estoria de Espaa, like the chronicles preceding it, refused to recognize any legitimacy on the part of the Arab masters (“Chaldeans,” “Saracens,” or “Moors”). An anonymous Latin chronicle written in 754 set the tone: the “loss” of Spain by the Christian Visigoth kings was an unparalleled catastrophe, surpassing the destruction of Jerusalem and the sack of Rome.⁵⁹

The other side of that political imposture by the “Moors” was their religious illegitimacy. Several authors insert a brief biography of Muhammad into their chronicles of the history of Spain. The Prophetic Chronicle (883) presents him as a “heresiarch,” an “impious prophet” to whom the “spirit of error” (that is, the devil) appeared in the form of a golden-faced vulture, claiming to be the archangel Gabriel. Emboldened by the vulture’s revelations, the chronicle maintains, Muhammad assumed the role of prophet and preached the total destruction of nonbelievers by the sword. The text describes the “pseudo-prophet” as a violent and lustful man who does not hesitate to take other men’s wives. In addition to being a heresiarch, Muhammad bears the traits of the Antichrist: he supposedly predicted that the angel Gabriel would come to raise him from the dead after three days; but, “instead of angels, dogs came to devour his flank, attracted by the rank odor.” That polemical biography serves to deny all religious or political legitimacy to the Moors, disciples of a false prophet.⁶⁰ Similar biographies appear in Lucas of Tuy, Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, and in the Estoria de Espaa. The portrait drawn by Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, who uses Arabic sources, is less coarse, more nuanced and thorough, than that of the Prophetic Chronicle. But the conclusion is similar: “By a false revelation, the crafty Muhammad concocted a pestilential virus.”

If the devil is on the side of the heresiarch and his thugs, God and his saints support the Christians. For the authors from León and Castile, Santiago (Saint James) was the first patron saint of the reconquista. At the Battle of Clavijo in 844 (whose historical existence is not clearly established), the saint, mounted on a white horse and carrying a white banner, intervened to give the victory to the Castilians against the Muslims. Similar legends developed around other battles: the apostle became a miles (soldier) fighting for Castile against its enemies. But he sometimes also intervened against Christian enemies, especially the Portuguese. The Military Order of Santiago, founded in 1170, adopted as its ensign Rubet ensis sanguine Arabum, “The sword is red with the blood of the Arabs.” Later, especially in the modern period, it became Santiago matamoros, “Saint James, Moor-slayer.” Santiago is represented on horseback, sword in hand, with Moors lying on the ground around him. That iconography spread to Spain and to the Americas; cities in both Mexico and Texas are named “Matamoros.”

James was not the only patron saint of the Christian armies. Isidore of Seville, whose remains were transferred to León in the twelfth century, was a favorite of authors from that region, particularly Lucas of Tuy. In his Miracles of Saint Isidore,⁶¹ Lucas describes how the saint appeared to King Alfonso VIII in a vision during the siege of Baeza (1147), promising him victory over his Moorish enemies, even though they were much greater in number. Beside Isidore was Saint James, armed with a double-edged sword. On the eve of taking Cordova, the former capital of the caliphate, Fernando III prayed to Isidore, patron saint of the Spanish reconquista, to deliver up the city.

The integrity of places of worship was another key element used to justify the retaking of territory from the hands of the “infidels.” If we are to believe the Christian chroniclers, the Moors, during their conquest of the peninsula, had destroyed churches; worse, they had converted them to mosques. The Estoria de Espaa presents the matter as follows:

The sanctuaries were destroyed, the churches demolished. In the places where God had been joyfully praised, [the Muslims] blasphemed and wreaked havoc. They hurled the crosses and altars out of the churches. The chrism, the books, and all things for the honor of Christianity were looted and trampled underfoot. Feasts and celebrations, all were forgotten. The honor of the saints and the beauty of the church were no longer anything but ugliness and abomination. In the churches and towers where God had been praised, there, in that same place, they invoked Muhammad.⁶²

One of the aims of the reconquest was therefore to return these places to the true faith. After the conquerors took a city from the Muslims, there was often a ritual “purification” of the main mosque, which then became a church.⁶³ The churches returned to their original use; the proper hierarchy of priest, bishop, primate, and pope was reestablished, as was the righteous power of the heir to the Gothic kings of Spain.

More than in Castile and León, it was in Aragon that the kings embraced the ideology and legal frameworks of the Crusade. The first great conquest of King James I was of Majorca, in the Balearic Islands. In November 1229, Pope Gregory IX wrote to James that he was sending men, both laymen and clergy, to help the king in his expedition and that the pope “granted them the indulgence normally reserved for those who come to the aid of the Holy Land.” Gregory was also very clear about the purpose of the Crusade: to return the territory to Christendom. James, he said, had taken up the cross “so that, once the enemies were captured or dispersed, the land could be restored to the divine Faith and the rites of the Church could be propagated.”⁶⁴ That justification for conquest, as a Crusade to restore the Christian faith in usurped territories, was repeated in pontifical documents regarding James’s later conquests, especially that of Valencia, which he took in 1238 after a long siege. Outside the walls of the besieged city, James held a mass baptism of Muslims newly converted to Christianity, an initiative with great symbolic value intended to discourage the Muslim defenders while allowing the Crusader king to display his moral and religious merit.

THE REVIVAL OF JIHAD AGAINST THE “FRANKS” IN THE ELEVENTH TO THIRTEENTH CENTURIES

In the West as in the East, the conquests of Rm or of the Ifranj would revive the ideological rhetoric of jihad. This rhetoric had long existed, since the caliphs of Cordova had waged regular campaigns against the Christian principalities that refused to pay them tribute, invoking the ideology of holy war to justify and glorify what were primarily punitive expeditions or raids. The hajib al-Mansr expanded that policy, conducting devastating raids on the northern peninsula. He sought thereby to deter those who might revolt against his usurpation of power from the caliph. In the East, the Seljuk Turks used the rhetoric of jihad to legitimate their conquests of Byzantium but also to oppose the Shiite (hence “heterodox”) Fatimids of Egypt.

In Spain, it was primarily with the arrival of the Berber dynasties, the Almoravids in 1086 and the Almohads in 1174, that jihad became an essential element of political ideology.⁶⁵ It can be found in the letters from the Almohad chancery, which call the Christian enemies “infidels,” “miscreants,” or “associationists.”⁶⁶ When Almohad troops surprised a raiding expedition conducted by the count of Avila in 1173, al-Qlam, secretary to the Almohad caliph Ab Ya‘qb Ysuf, presented the skirmish as a great victory of Islam over the infidel. The enemy was led off to the gates of hell, and the Almohad troops returned in glory to Seville, bearing “the humiliated flags of the Christians, on which appeared their images, their crosses, signs of their lies about God and of their impiety. They also brought the head of their reprehensible leader, their stoned Satan, persecutor of the believing people, the most insolent of all the infidels toward the Merciful One.”⁶⁷ In a letter describing the taking of Almeria by the Almohads, another author speaks of the victorious troops as lions that “offered each other the blood of that mob of infidels to drink.”⁶⁸ Yet these same Almohad caliphs, like the Almoravids before them, hired Catalan and Portuguese mercenaries and signed trade treaties with the Pisans and the Genoese.⁶⁹ In addition, the “infidels” they fought most doggedly, and those most vilified in their writings, were their Muslim rivals, the Almoravids, who were accused of the worst crimes: heresy, debauchery, infidelity, paganism. Ibn Tumart, founder of the Almohad movement, said it clearly: “Know—God help you!—that fighting them is a religious obligation for most of you, for those who are able to fight. Devote yourself to jihad against the veiled infidels [the Almoravids, whose men wore veils], since it is at least twice as important to combat them as to combat the Christians and all the infidels. In fact, they have attributed a corporeal aspect to the Creator—may he be glorified!—have rejected the tawhid [the absolute unity of God], have rebelled against the truth!”⁷⁰

To judge by the first Muslim reactions to the Crusades in the East, religious hostility had little place there. It was first believed that the Frankish troops were only mercenaries of Byzantium being used to lead a counterattack against the Turks, and the Egyptian Fatimids were not displeased with the early successes of the Crusades against their Seljuk enemies. They soon realized, however, that the Franks were acting on their own behalf, and they deplored the massacres being perpetrated. But the hostility they felt toward the Franks was not a religious hostility; after all, the Muslims knew Christianity well, thanks to the Byzantines and the dhimmis. The ferocity of the Franks seems to have had a completely different origin. The Muslims concluded alliances with them or made war on them, but war was not an expression of jihad.

Gradually, however, the Muslims of the region began to realize that the Franks were motivated by religious hostility. There were descriptions of the profanations of mosques that the Franks perpetrated, and in 1127, Muslims of Aleppo avenged themselves by attacking churches belonging to Christian dhimmis. In Damascus and Aleppo, pietists exhorted Muslims not to ally themselves with the infidel Franks and began to call for jihad against them. In 1125, they succeeded in delivering the city of Aleppo to the prince of Mosul, Bursuq, who was succeeded by ‘Imd al-Dn Zengi in 1128. Zengi is often portrayed as the originator of jihad, of the Muslim counteroffensive. It was he who retook the city of Edessa in 1144, the first action of the Muslim reconquest. But it cannot be said that the war against the Franks was a high priority for the prince of Mosul, nor that he regularly resorted to jihad. It was rather his son, Nr al-Dn, who embraced and developed that ideology, marrying the “greater jihad” (the internal struggle against oneself) to the “lesser jihad” (the struggle against the external enemy). Nr al-Dn led an austere life, abolished non-Qur’anic taxes, surrounded himself with men of religion, and waged war against the Franks—and against any Muslim who did not embrace his dual jihad, especially the Shiite community of Aleppo. In presenting himself as a unique mujhid, the only sovereign able to unite the Muslims against the Franks, he succeeded in unifying Syria. He imposed his power over Damascus through a propaganda war against its timorous princes, who were vacillating between truces and war with the Franks, as much as by his military force. The pietist circles of Damascus and public opinion were on Nr al-Dn’s side, and in 1154 his troops took the city without a fight.

When Nr al-Dn died in 1174, his successor, Saladin, announced his intention to continue his work, using the appeal for unity and jihad to impose his power over Muslim rivals in Syria. Nevertheless, between 1174 and 1186 Saladin waged war primarily on other Muslims in northern Syria and Iraq, in order, he said, to unify his coreligionists before reconquering the lands under Frankish domination. When in 1187 Reginald of Châtillon attacked a Muslim caravan, thereby breaking the truce between the kingdom of Jerusalem and Saladin, the sultan decided that the time had come to attack the kingdom. The decisive victory of Hattin and the taking of Jerusalem followed. Henceforth, no one could contend with Saladin for the title of mujhid; the praise and congratulations from the whole Muslim world were unanimous. Jerusalem’s importance for Islam grew, and it was said that the Kaaba rejoiced at the deliverance of its brother al-Aqsa Mosque. The holy city was purified of the taint of the “pig eaters” and “polytheists.” Saladin’s biographer Imd al-Dn describes how Taq al-Dn, the sultan’s nephew, had the entire Dome of the Rock sanctuary cleansed with pure water, then with rose water, to “make that blessed ground pure until its purification is a certainty.”⁷¹

The unity that Saladin built up with so much difficulty did not last long. Upon his death in 1193, his brother, sons, and nephews fought over his legacy. They were able to unite in the event of a crisis: when the forces of the Fifth Crusade seized Damietta in the Nile Delta in 1219, al-Muazzam, sultan of Damascus, and al-Ashraf, sultan of al-Jazira, came to the aid of their elder brother, al-Kmil, and succeeded in inflicting a bitter defeat on the Frankish army. But a few years later, al-Kmil concluded an alliance with Emperor Frederick II against his brother al-Muazzam, promising Jerusalem to the emperor. By the time the emperor came to the Holy Land in 1229, al-Muazzam had already died, but Frederick and al-Kmil negotiated the Treaty of Jaffa, granting the entire holy city to the emperor, with the exception of the Esplanade of the Mosques. In 1239, a year after al-Kmil’s death, his nephew al-Nsir Dwd retook the city. But he soon found it prudent to ally himself with the Franks: in 1240 or 1241, he granted them the right to buy weapons in Damascus proper, which provoked the anger of the ulemas.⁷² Then, in 1243, believing he was well advised to form an alliance with the Ifranj against the Khwarezmians, he returned Jerusalem to them, without even demanding control of the mosques on the Esplanade, which were turned into churches, something al-Kmil had carefully avoided in 1229.⁷³ For the Ayyubids—the dynasty Saladin had built on the ideological foundations of a jihad to recover Jerusalem—the holy city had become an asset that could either be retained or be readily granted to the Franks to obtain their alliance.

The Mamluks, who overthrew the Ayyubids during Louis IX’s Egyptian Crusade in 1250, were imbued from the start with the ideology of jihad. They waged it against the Eastern Franks and against the Mongols, who conquered a good part of the Muslim world, notably sacking Baghdad in 1258. The Mamluks crushed a Mongol army in Ain Jalut, Syria, in September 1260 and were soon planning the expulsion of the Eastern Franks. In 1263, they undertook the slow and systematic conquest of the Frankish cities and fortresses of Syria. The conquest of Acre in May 1291 sounded the death knell of the Latin East.

FROM THE RECONQUISTA TO IMPERIAL CONQUEST: THE IBERIANS AGAINST THE MOORS IN THE FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH CENTURIES

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when attempts to relaunch the Crusades failed and the Ottomans invaded eastern Europe, those in the Iberian kingdoms dreamed of new conquests at the expense of the Muslims of Granada and the Maghreb. Several fifteenth-century authors displayed growing intolerance for the presence of a Muslim power on the peninsula.⁷⁴ Calixtis III preached a new Crusade against Granada in 1457, a plan enthusiastically welcomed by the Franciscan polemicist Alonso de Espina (among others). In his Fortalium Fidei, Alonso took up the anti-Muslim polemics and historiographical traditions of the thirteenth-century chroniclers, asserting the illegitimacy of Muslim power. In 1482, Queen Isabel of Castile and her husband, King Fernando of Aragon, began the conquest of the emirate of Granada. On January 6, 1492, the couple entered the city as victors and annexed the emirate to Castile.

The Portuguese had already waged war on the “Moors” beyond the Strait of Gibraltar. On July 25, 1415, King João I of Portugal departed from Lisbon at the head of a fleet of 242 ships, accompanied by his four sons. On August 21, the Portuguese troops landed on the Moroccan coast, routed a Marinid army, and took the city of Ceuta. The Portuguese “purified” the mosque, turned it into a church, and hung bells in the minaret on Sunday, August 24. At the end of the mass, the king knighted his four sons. On September 2, the king returned to Portugal, leaving twenty-seven hundred men behind. Ceuta was now a commercial and military outpost of Portugal. João, the illegitimate son of King Pedro (1357–1367) and the founder of a new dynasty (the House of Avis), no doubt needed a real coup to demonstrate the legitimacy of his reign. He therefore revived the holy war against the infidels. In so doing, he launched Portugal on a new venture: exploration, conquest, and colonization of the territories outside the Iberian Peninsula.

One of João’s four sons present at the taking of Ceuta was Enrique, known to history as Henry the Navigator (1394–1460).⁷⁵ That prince set up his residence in Sagres, on Cape St. Vincent at the southwest tip of Portugal (and Europe), where he nurtured a dual obsession: to conquer lands at the expense of the Moors and to find new commercial routes granting direct access to African gold and Asian spices. In Sagres, he used his considerable resources (several lordships, from which he drew revenues) to assemble cartographers and navigators around him. Between 1419 and 1427, Portuguese sailors discovered the uninhabited islands of Porto Sando, the Madeira, and the Azores, which Enrique arranged to have colonized. Agriculture developed there, especially the production of wine, wheat, and sugarcane. In the 1430s, the Portuguese caravels began to push farther and farther down the southern African coast, reaching Cape Bojador in 1434, Cape Branco in 1441, Sierra Leone in 1460, and finally, the Cape of Good Hope in 1487. That opened the way to the Indies, where Vasco da Gama arrived in 1498.

These navigators engaged in trade and fishing, and they also captured slaves. The chronicler Gomes Eanes of Zurara describes the many raids that occurred year after year.⁷⁶ A caravel would arrive on an island or an inhabited coast. The crew made land, usually at night. Without a sound, the Portuguese encircled a village. Then, to cries of “Portugal! Santiago! Saint George!” they attacked, killing any men who resisted and capturing the others. The battles, when there were any, were quickly won by the better-armed Portuguese, who had the advantage of surprise. Often they put to flight the men and captured only women and children, whom they bound and took on ship. After a few “fine catches,” a caravel could proudly leave with a cargo of several hundred slaves. Zurara describes the undertaking with pride; it showed that God was on the side of the Christians and against the Moors. From time to time, he displays compassion for these slaves, especially when he describes how a group, upon its arrival in Portugal, was divided into lots to facilitate their sale, which had the effect of separating husbands from wives, children from parents. He evokes the cries and tears on all sides, the confusion when children ran back to the arms of their mothers, before being torn from them once again. But it was all for the best, he affirms: most of the captives became Christians (often better ones than the native Portuguese, he says). No doubt God reserved a great reward for those who led so many souls to eternal salvation.

In Christian as in Muslim territory, the ideology of holy war was often used to justify conquest of the “infidels.” That in no way prevented political and military alliances with princes of the rival faith. It also did not keep Muslim and Christian societies from granting a large place to religious minorities.