In the middle of June 1146, as northern Europe began
to stir itself for crusade, George of Antioch, the grizzled vizier of Sicily,
sailed a fleet of ships to the shores of the Muslim-ruled Ifriqiya and prepared
to attack the city of western Tripoli (Tarabalus al-Gharb, a city found on the
coast of modern-day Libya). Somewhere close to his sixtieth birthday,
distinguished by his long white hair and full, straight, neatly manicured
beard, George has been a prominent minister in the court of Roger II for neatly
half his life. He was a financial expert and an adept administrator, but he was
nowhere more effective than in command of a fleet of galleys. George’s
honorific title – ammiratus ammiratorum-
could be translated from its Latin form as ‘emir of emirs,’ although an
alternative rendering was ‘admiral of admirals. During the summer of 1146 he
confronted the walls of Tripoli and considered the best way to bring the
inhabitants quickly into obedience.
George had been in these waters many times before. Born to a Syrian Christian
family, he had trained in public accountancy in pre-crusader Antioch and
subsequently at the Zirid court in Mahdia, the largest port in Ifriqiya, which
lay almost four hundred miles along the coast from Tripoli. Some time shortly after
1108 he absconded and arrived in Sicilian service, working in the cities of
Messina and Palermo, and occasionally visiting the Fatimid court in Cairo as an
envoy. From the 1120s he led raids on the coastal towns of his former
employers; in 1142, he returned to Mahdia, sailed right into the harbor and
confiscated ships at anchor, as punishment for the Zirids’ defaults on their
debts to King Roger for shipments of Sicilian grain. Since then he has overseen
yearly attacks, plundering and conquering strongholds including Djidejelli,
Brask and the Kerkennah Islands.
The reason for the sudden wave of Sicilian aggression was that Zirid Ifriqiya
was starving and vulnerable. North African harvests had been failing, and
unrest had ripped through the coastal cities and countryside alike. ‘Because of starvation the nomads
sought out the towns and the townspeople closed their gates against them,’
wrote Ibn al-Athir. ‘Plague and great mortality followed. The countryside was
emptied and from while families not a single person survived.’ The effects soon
touched Sicily. Piracy was rife in Ifriqiyan ports and the gold caravans that traveled to the coast from Sudan were
disrupted by general unrest. Refugees came flooding across the Mediterranean to
Sicily in the hope of finding food and safety. Their desperate state persuaded
the king and his vizier that conquering Ifriqiya, a deed that Roger’s father
had eyed with skepticism and caution, was now tantalizingly possible.
Tripoli was no small target, for it was defended by both seaward and landward
walls. But according to the account given by Ibn al-Athir, the citizens made
George of Antioch’s job easy,. When the Sicilian ships arrive on June 15
Tripoli was already facing a crisis of internal order. The governor, a member
of the Arab clan known as Banu Matruh, had been overthrown in favor of a
visiting dignitary from the Almoravids, the veil-wearing, intolerant puritans
who had overrun Morocco and Muslim Spain. Having stopped in Tripoli on his way
to perform hajj at Mecca, the Amoravid suddenly found himself defending the
city from a Sicilian fleet off the coast while trying to quell rebellion in the
streets. Seeing the disarray and sensing an easy victory, George of Antioch
sent his men to erect ladders and scale the defenses. ‘After fierce fighting
the Franks took the city by sword,’ wrote Ibn al-Athir. The battle was followed
by ‘a bloodbath and seizure of women and property.’
From this point, the conquest of Ifriqiya proceeded apace. Town governors
abandoned their allegiance to the Zirids of Mahdia in favor of the Franks
across the water. George of Antioch forced the hand of those who resisted. In
short order Gabers, Susa and Sfax became formal Sicilian protectorates. In
1148, when Mahdia itself fell, the Zirid palaces would be looted and their
riches shipped back to Palermo.
At the time when the Second Crusade had just been called and preachers all over
Western Europe were summoning Christians to take up arms against Islamic enemies,
a campaign of conquest and tribute taking by a Christian king against Muslim
neighbors was bound to attract notice, even if it occurred many hundreds of
miles from the Holy Land. When Ibn al-Athir wrote about the Sicilian campaigns
against Ifriqiya many years later, he placed them squarely in his broader
narrative of Frankish reaction to the fall of Edessa. This was a natural enough
conclusion. That Roger and George of Antioch’s assaults amounted at least
superficially to a campaign of Christian
expansion seemed to be confirmed in 1148, when Pope Eugene formally appointed
an archbishop of Africa. Unsurprisingly many Muslims in Ifriqiya burned with
the humiliation of being subjugated by unbelievers; after the governor of Gabes
sent an envoy to negotiate peaceful submission to Roger, he was kidnapped by
his disgusted rivals and tortured to death, ending his days choking on his own
severed penis. ( The governor’s envoy, meanwhile, was dressed in a pointed hat
covered in bells, paraded about Mahdia strapped to a camel and then stoned to
death by a mob.)
Despite this, however, Roger of Sicily’s attacks on Ifriqiya did not fit neatly
into Bernard of Clairvaux and Pope Eugene’s rhetoric and theory of crusading.
For one thing, Roger made no serious effort to place his African ambitions in
the context of crusade preaching and did not personally take the cross. He no
doubt remembered that at the height of the Roman Church’s schism in the 1130s,
Pope Innocent II had preached holy war against Sicily and the other supporters
of Anacletus, stating that the participants would earn crusade privileges. Nor
did George of Antioch’s fleet set sail under crusader crosses, baying for
blood. They were primarily agents of a pragmatic, self-serving policy focused
on economic gain and a desire to expand Sicilian kingship beyond the shores of
the island itself.
Nowhere was this more obvious than in Tripoli itself. After the city fell there
was the customary period of plunder. But soon enough George of Antioch declared
amnesty, promised to protect citizens’ property and invited those who had fled
in fear of their lives to return to the city. A Sicilian garrison was
installed, the walls strengthened and a moat dug. Yet Tripoli was neither
occupied nor forcibly Christianized. Six months later the Banu Matruh
recognized Roger’s lordship and were returned to power, having agreed that
Muslims in Tripoli now owed to the king
of Sicily the same taxes as Muslims on the island: the jizya and a land tax. The Arab governor (wali) would henceforth wear a robe of office sent directly from
Palermo, but a balance of power sensitive to the ethnic makeup of the
population was achieved by the appointment of a Berber chief magistrate (qadi). An active policy of resettlement
began, with Sicilians and others under Roger’s rule being encouraged to cross
to Ifriqiya. So while Tripoli had been taken by a Christian fleet that
inflicted terrible bloodshed, soon enough it was back under Islamic government
and its economy was booming. ‘It quickly flourished and its affair prospered,’
wrote Ibn al-Athir.
Here, then, was a form of Christian expansion that
defied easy categorization, even against the background noise of the Second
Crusade preaching. It reflected,, perhaps, Roger’s complex cultural inheritance
and that of Norman Sicily at large. Although certainly a Christian, and related
by blood to many illustrious crusaders, Roger was also strongly influenced by
Arabic and Greek culture. His royal mantle, made in Palermo’s leading workshop
to celebrate his coronation, gave this mixed inheritance striking visual form.
A beautiful red silk garment decorated with garnets, pearls, rubies and
sapphires, it was embroidered with gold thread with lions attacking camels – a
metaphor for the Norman victory over the Arab world. Yet this handsome cloak
was also proudly inscribed with Kufic
Arab script, which gave the date of its creation in Islamic form (528 rather than
1133-34). When Roger occasionally issues charters in Latin ( he preferred Greek
and Arabic) he was king ‘by the grace of Allah.’ But coins minted during his
reign declared him ‘powerful through the grace of Allah’ In a contemporary
mosaic (commissioned by none other than George of Antioch) in the Church of
Santa Maria dell’Ammiraglio in Palermo, Roger is depicted receiving his crown
from Christ while dressed like a Christian emperor. Yet he generally preferred
to comport himself like an Egyptian caliph: wearing Arab dress, only showing
his face on feast days, parading with horses decked in gold and silver before
him and having a parasol borne above his head- a distinctive symbol of
specifically Fatimid preeminence.
Roger’s genius, aided and abetted by George of Antioch, was his ability to
combine, into a singular Sicilian whole, elements of all cultures that
coexisted under his leadership. Ibn al-Athir, writing after the events, looked
at Roger and merely saw an acquisitive, piratical ‘Frank’ to be cursed with the
rest of them; but Roger was actually a very long way from the stereotype of the
zealot crusade. It was telling indeed that he and George of Antioch limited
their assault on the Islamic world during the 1140s to the North African
trading stations that could serve Sicily’s economy. When the armies of the
Second Crusade began to move in mid-1147 Roger thought less of supporting their
adventure in the Holy Land than exploiting the disruption caused by Louis and
Conrad’s march on Constantinople to plunder Byzantine islands in the Adriatic.
As Roger focused his efforts on expanding Sicilian
rule in North Africa, the real crusaders beyond the Alps were driving towards
departure for the East. In a grand council held in Chalon-sur-Marne in early
February 1147 the French and German crusade leaders decided that that they
would not travel via Sicily. (Conrad in particular had no wish to deal with
Roger II, whom he regarded as a deadly enemy.) Pope Eugene had called on the
faithful to emulate the deeds of their forefathers, so it was in their forefathers’
footsteps they would go: following the Danube through Hungary and then
traversing the Balkans to Constantinople, crossing Asian Minor with the support
of the eastern emperor Manuel I Komnenos before descending into the crusader
states via Antioch. Planning and provisioning for this notoriously difficult
journey, along with the political preparation for regencies in both the French and
German kingdoms, occupied the weeks leading up to Easter, the symbolic date on
which the two armies had agreed to set out.
As they plotted their route, however, a new strand to crusading emerged. In
Saxony a faction of the crusaders had come together whose motivation was no less
self-interested than Roger of Sicily’s. They too saw their opportunities much
closer to home: not among the Judean hills or on the Aleppan plateau, but in the
river lands that fed the Baltic Sea. Here- in what is now norther Poland and
northeast Germany – lived Slavic tribes referred to collectively (if
imprecisely) as the Wends. The Wends were pagans. Their deities were to be
found not in heaven but in the features of the natural earth, such as oak
trees, brooks and rocks. They worshipped in timber-built temples rather stones
churches. They sacrifices cattle and revered inhuman idols such as the
four-headed Svantovit, and they did not take kindly to attempts to baptize them
into subservience.*They were, in the view of a small but significant number of
Conrad’s subjects, entirely fair game.
Just as was the case in Ifriqiya, sparring between Christians and non-Christians
in the Baltic regions had been under way for many years before the genesis of
crusading. Since Carolingian times in the ninth century armies commanded by
God-fearing lords had fought wars of expansion into pagan territories and left
their cultural stamp by appointing bishops and building churches. (This had
been done most successfully in Denmark, where Christianity had been embraced in
the 960s. By the eleventh century the eastern boundary of the Christian domain
coincided more or less with the course of the river Elbe. Then, for a time,
missionaries rather than soldiers crossed the line into Wendish country. But by
the early twelfth century a desire colonize and Christianize by force was
rising once again.
Around the year 1108 a Flemish clerk in the service of Adalgod, archbishop of
Magdeburg, composed a document known as the Magdeburg Letter. It made an impassioned
case for external military assistance against the Wends who, the letter claimed,
were committing atrocities against good Christians folk. ‘We have been weighed
down for a very long time by the many kinds of oppressions and disasters which
we have suffered at the hands of the pagans,’ it stated. ‘They have profaned
the churches of Christ with idolatry . . . they invade our region very
frequently and, sparing no one, they lay waste, kill, overthrow and afflict
with carefully chosen torments. They behead some and offer the heads to their demons
. . .they allow some to endure the gibbet and to drag out a life that is more
wretched than death . . .by means of gradual dismemberment . . .They skin while
they are still living and, after scalping them, they disguise themselves with
their scalps and burst into Christian territories.’ Lurid accounts of
blood-drinking ceremonies followed before the author called on his ‘dearest
brothers in all of Saxony, France, Lorraine and Flanders to prepare for holy
war . . . this is an occasion for you to save your souls and, if you wish it,
acquire the best land in which to live.’ The country, he wrote, with a faint
but distinct echo of the famous biblical description of the Promised Land
(Exodus 3:8), was rich in meat, honey, corn and birds ‘and if it were well
cultivated none could be compared to it for the wealth of its produce.’ In 1108
all this had come to nothing because Pope Paschal II had declined to authorize
crusading against the Wends. But nearly four decades on things had changed.
During the early 1140s a dozen or so Christian noble families from Saxony had
begun a unilateral military push into Wendish country to enrich themselves on colonized
land. They cut a swath through the borderlands known as the Saxon Lines,
ousting Slavic Wagrian and Polabian people and building fortresses to mark the
extent of their land grab. In their wake came families of Christian settler-farmers
and teams of missionary priests. Wendish serfs were driven from their lands. Wendish
chiefs were forced to accept the lordship of Christian lords like Albert the Bear,
margrave of Brandenburg. This was in itself bad news for the Wends. With th
In March 1147 Bernard of Clairvaux attended a meeting in Frankfurt, convened to
thrash out arrangements for Conrad III’s march on the Holy Land. But far from
agreeing to join their king, however, Saxon nobles put their case for staying
home and fighting the Wends. ‘They had as neighbors certain tribes that were
given over to the filthiness of idolatry,’ recalled Otto of Freising, ‘and in
like manner took the cross in order to assail
these races in war.’ Recognizing that this was a considerable deviation
from the crusading mission Eugene envisioned when he heard that Zengi had
stormed the walls of Edessa, the Saxons had come up with a new style of
crusader cross: ‘not sewn simply to their clothes, but brandished a lot,
surmounted on a wheel.’
This was plainly unorthodox, but Bernard of Clairvaux was never one to recoil
from radical ideas. He like what he saw, and straightaway dipped his pen to support
the Saxon’s right to make holy war not on Muslims but on the Wends. In a letter
packed tightly with biblical allusion and apocalyptic bombast, he declared that
the Baltic pagans, through little more than their existence in places the Saxons
wanted to colonize, represented perfectly well as the enemies of God, ‘whom, if
I may say so, the might of Christendom has endured to long.’ No truce or peace
was to be made with these people, he thundered. They were to be battled until
such time as they were either ‘converted or deleted.’ On April 13, Pope Eugene
formerly agreed. He issued a bull, Divina
Dispensatione, permitting the same remission of sins and spiritual benefits
for fighting in the Baltic region as accrued to those joining Conrad and Louis.
Thus, from July 1147 armies of Danes and Saxons roared into Wendish territory
and spent several months burning temples and forcibly baptizing prisoners. They
were only partially successful: captured Slavs tended to accept baptism with a shrug
before returning to pagan ritual and thinking no more about it; and eventually
the Wendish chief Prince Nyklot agreed to pay tribute for peace, in the sort of
deal Bernard of Clairvaux has specifically abominated. Nonetheless, in 1147
another front of crusading had been
opened. For the next four decades the Wends would be steadily pursued to the
conversion or deletion that Bernard of Clairvaux had commanded, and their lands
divided greedily between various
Christian powers who connived at their destruction. By the 1180s, they had
effectively been wiped out. But the appetite for Christian expansion in the
Baltic, under the guise of crusading, was not. Three hundred years of warfare
between Germanic armies and pagan tribes and kingdoms had begun.
The final target of the Second Crusade was far from the lands of the Ziridis
and the Wends, and further still from Edessa and Jerusalem. Indeed, it was about
as far west as one could go in mainland Europe before being swallowed by the uncharted
maw of the Atlantic Ocean. It was the kingdom of Portugal . . .
* not a characterization the Jesuit Missionaries of the 17th and 18th
centuries or Malinowski might have made.
No comments:
Post a Comment