The Crusades Through Arab Eyes

The Mamluk triumph at ‘Ayn Jālūt rebuffed the Mongols while also reconquering lands lost to them. The Mamluk sultan, however, was murdered by his general, Baybars, in October 1260 when a power struggle erupted over control of Aleppo. Baybars thus claimed the sultanate with little resistance since most of the Mamluks viewed him as their true leader. Qutuz’s assassination, nevertheless, provided an opening for Mamluk officials in various Syrian settlements to claim autonomy. Baybars reunified the former Ayyubid empire through a series of Mamluk wars of suppression. He likewise suppressed the Franks and fought remaining Mongols for control over some of their “strongholds” (249) in Galilee. Baybars then successfully reconquered Frankish Antioch in only four days.

This conquest bore little resemblance to those of Saladin. The entire population was massacred or sold into slavery, the city itself ravaged. Previously a prestigious metropolis, it was reduced to the status of a desolate village (249). Bohemond VI of Antioch entered a truce with Baybars, given his newfound impotence, while the Mamluks recognized their actions in Antioch might rally another Crusade. King Louis landed at Tunis, in north Africa, this time. He died a few weeks later while his forces were ravaged by disease. Baybars then conquered Hisn al-Akrād, the fortress the Franj seized during the First Crusade and which they called Crac des Chevaliars, “which Saladin himself had never succeeded in reducing” (251).

The Mongols and the Franks led incursions into Mamluk Syria but found no success. When Baybars died by poisoning in 1277, the Franks only held some coastal territories that Mamluk lands encircled: “Their expulsion was now ineluctable” (252). Baybars’s successor, Qalāwūn, “regularized” the Frankish presence in the east when he negotiated a new, 10-year treaty with them in 1283. Conflict between the Mamluks and Mongols flared again in 1285. The latter attempted an alliance with the West to launch another attack on the Mamluk Empire.

The new sultan grew concerned that the Franj settlements would act as bases from which a new campaign could be launched against his realm: “[T]he presence of the Franj was a permanent threat to the security of the Muslim world” (254). Qalāwūn opted to conquer Tripoli, since it was exempt from his treaty. The Mamluks leveled the city and massacred its inhabitants. Qalāwūn’s men advised him to continue his offensive against the Franj, who were too weak to withstand the Mamluks. However, he agreed only to taking the Frankish settlements exempt from the treaty.

The West responded in 1290 by sending new reinforcements who attacked Damascene merchants and murdered men in the streets. The treaty was broken, and the sultan was furious. He gathered an army in Cairo but died before the campaign began. His successor, Khalīl, marched his Mamluk forces into Palestine in March 1291 and headed to Acre, where Syrian reinforcements joined him.

This final Siege of Acre brought the Crusades to their conclusion when these Muslim troops overran the city in June. The ruler, King Henry, and his nobles fled for Cyprus, the Mamluks destroyed the city, and the remaining Franks were slaughtered or taken prisoner. Khalīl razed the remaining Franj fortifications along the coast to prevent their return. The Holy Land was under Muslim domination again.

The Islamic world was at its cultural and intellectual apex on the First Crusade’s eve. However, by their end the “centre of world history shifted decisively to the West” (261). Maalouf thus questions if the Crusades contributed to this change and destroyed “Arab civilization” (261).

The Arab world was weakened by internal problems prior to the Crusades that the Franks exacerbated. The Islamic golden age drew to its end when the Seljuk Turks’ arrival turned Arab Muslims into outsiders in their homelands. Moreover, the Arab world had difficulty sustaining “stable institutions” while the Crusaders established “genuine state structures” in which the rights of various inhabitants were well-established (262). Muslim territories were thus frequently plunged into internal power struggles whenever a ruler died, making a unified defense against the Crusaders difficult.

The Crusades resulted in the transmission of significant eastern knowledge to the West in the fields of medicine, science, mathematics, and architecture. Likewise, the Crusades “ignited a genuine economic and cultural revolution in Western Europe,” while for the Islamic world “these holy wars led to long centuries of decadence and obscurantism” (264). The Islamic world came to resent the West’s modernity, a tension and alienation that persists to the present. Saladin is a popular figure with modern Arabs and the state of Israel is sometimes regarded as a new Crusader kingdom. For example, “The Arabs perceived the Suez expedition of 1956 as a Crusade by the French and the English” and the Turkish Muslim who tried to assassinate the Pope in 1981 wrote that he wished to murder the “‘supreme commander of the Crusades’” (265). The Crusades, Maalouf asserts, thus mark the genesis of the modern tension between the West and the Muslim world.