First Jihad: Khartoum, and the Dawn of Militant Islam Read Online Free PDF

for the next sixty years.
The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II vowed in 1215 to lead a crusade, but repeated delays in his preparations and departure led to his excommunication by the Pope in 1227.Frederick finally set out for the Levant in 1228, where his crusade was characterized by its diplomacy rather than by its militancy.Having negotiated the recession of Jerusalem to Christian rule and a ten-year truce, Frederick was crowned King of Jerusalem in 1229.Had subsequent Crusaders followed Frederick’s example, the history of relations between Christians and Moslems might have taken a very different turn, but because of his excommunication his bloodless policies were received with little regard among the European nobility, and so the religious slaughters would continue.
In the autumn of 1248, Louis IX of France, who would become known to history as Saint Louis, sailed to the island of Cyprus where he spent the winter preparing for an attack on Egypt that was launched in the spring.After capturing the port of Damietta, Louis’ army moved on Cairo, but the Crusaders left their flanks unguarded, allowing the Egyptians to close in behind them as they advanced.By knocking down dikes and opening floodgates on reservoirs behind the French forces, the Egyptians created floods that isolated the crusading army on low ground.Disease soon ran rampant, forcing Louis to surrender, the only European monarch to be captured by the Moslems during the whole of the Crusades.When his ransom was paid, Louis went directly to Palestine, where he spent the next four years strengthening the defenses of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, finally returning to France in the spring of 1254.
Louis’ efforts were for naught, however, as one by one, the remaining cities and castles of the Crusader states fell to the Saracens.Antioch surrendered in 1263, Tripoli in 1289.Acre, the last major Crusader stronghold, was taken in March 1291, as well as Tyre that May, and Haifa and Beirut in July.The Europeans had been driven from the Levant.Aside from a few castles and fortifications, and a handful of churches scattered across Asia Minor, little remained of two hundred years of bloodshed caused by the Crusades.However, the scars left on the minds and hearts of the Moslem faithful would prove to be enduring.
At the same time a distinct change came over the motivation driving Islam’s expansion in the centuries that followed the Crusades.There was an unmistakable element of vendetta in the Moslem campaigns against the remnants of the Byzantine Empire over the following two centuries.Constantinople was seen as the staging point for every Crusader incursion into the Levant, while the Empire’s continued official proscription of Islam seemed to be an openly defiant attitude, if not a direct challenge to the Moslem world.If that were so, it was a very foolish stance for the Byzantines to take, for Constantinople no longer possessed even a fraction of the power it once held.The sack of the city during the Fourth Crusade and the more than half a century of Latin rule weakened the Eastern Roman Empire such that it could no longer fend off the repeated incursions of the Turks, who, led by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed, finally captured Constantinople in 1453, renaming it Istanbul.
Yet, by then it was no longer the imperative to holy war that fueled the Turks’ efforts to take Constantinople, or that compelled the next two hundred years of struggle in the Balkans, from where the Ottoman Turks ultimately drove to the gates of Vienna.No longer did Islam embody a drive to conquest in order to spread the word of the Prophet and so turn all of the world to the rightful worship of Allah.The facade of jihad had been largely stripped away from Ottoman ambitions by then, and the wars in the Balkans were was as much a consequence of the desire for conquest and vengeance as it was a means of spreading the faith.
After decades of absorbing the incursions of warriors from the central Asian