The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land Read Online Free PDF

just finding his feet. There is no evidence to suggest that Christians in the West knew of these manifold difficulties, so they cannot be regarded as a definite trigger for the holy war to come. Even so, the timing of the First Crusade was remarkably propitious. 9
    The Near East at the end of the eleventh century
     
    The endemic disunity afflicting Islam at the end of the eleventh century would exert a profound influence over the course of the crusades. So too did the Near East’s distinctive cultural, ethnic and political make-up. In truth, this region–the battleground in the war for the Holy Land–cannot be spoken of as a Muslim world. The relatively tolerant approach to subjugation adopted during the early Arab-Islamic conquests meant that, even centuries later, the Levant still contained a very high proportion of indigenous Christians–from Greeks and Armenians to Syrians and Copts–as well as pockets of Jewish population. Nomadic communities of Bedouins also continued to range widely across the East–migrant Arabic-speaking Muslims, who had few fixed allegiances. This long-established pattern of settlement was overlaid by a numerically inferior Muslim ruling elite, itself made up of Arabs, some Persians and the newly arrived Turks. The Near East, therefore, was little more than a fractured patchwork of disparate social and devotional groupings, and not a purebred Islamic stronghold.
    As far as the main powers within the Muslim world were concerned, the Levant was also something of a backwater–notwithstanding the political and spiritual significance attached to cities like Jerusalem and Damascus. For Sunni Seljuqs and Shi‘ite Fatimids, the real centres of governmental authority, economic wealth and cultural identity were Mesopotamia and Egypt. The Near East was essentially the border zone between these two dominant spheres of influence, a world sometimes to be contested, but almost always to be treated as a secondary concern. Even during the reign of Malik Shah, no fully determined effort was made to subdue and integrate Syria into the sultanate, and much of the region was left in the hands of power-hungry, semi-independent warlords.
    Thus, when Latin crusading armies arrived in the Near East to wage what essentially were frontier wars, they were not actually invading the heartlands of Islam. Instead, they were fighting for control of a land that, in some respects, was also a Muslim frontier, one peopled by an assortment of Christians, Jews and Muslims who, over the centuries, had become acculturated to the experience of conquest by an external force, be it at the hands of Byzantines and Persians, or Arabs and Turks.
    Islamic warfare and jihad
     
    In the late eleventh century, the style and practice of Muslim warfare were in a state of flux. The traditional mainstay of any Turkish fighting force was the lightly armoured mounted warrior, astride a fleet-footed pony, armed with a powerful composite bow that enabled him to loose streams of arrows from horseback. He might also be equipped with a light lance, single-edged sword, axe or dagger. These troops relied upon speed of movement and rapid manoeuvrability to overcome opponents.
    The Turks classically employed two main tactics: encirclement–whereby an enemy was surrounded from all sides by a fast-moving, swirling mass of mounted warriors, and bombarded with ceaseless volleys of arrows; and feigned retreat–the technique of turning tail in battle in the hope of prompting an opponent to give fevered chase, the indiscipline of which would break their formation and leave them vulnerable to sudden counter-attack. This style of combat was still favoured by the Seljuqs of Asia Minor, but the Turks of Syria and Palestine had begun to adopt a wider array of Persian and Arab military practices, adjusting to the use of more heavily armoured mounted lancers and larger infantry forces, and to the needs of siege warfare. By far and away the most common forms of warfare