The Crusades Through Arab Eyes

“Two days later not a single Muslim was left alive within the city walls. Some had taken advantage of the chaos to slip away escaping through gates battered down by the attackers. Thousands of others lay in pools of blood on the doorsteps of their homes or alongside the mosques.”

Maalouf introduces readers to the Crusaders’ brutality early in the text when he describes the violence they visited upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem after they breached the city’s walls in the summer of 1099. Maalouf juxtaposes this barbarism with the temperance and mercy of rulers like Saladin later in the text. This contrast exposes erroneous Western notions of the Crusades as heroic missions that were mere responses to Muslim violence, with Maalouf introducing the theme of Crusading as a Multi-Ethnic Religious Conflict.

“These Occidentals bore scant resemblance to the mercenaries to whom the Turks were accustomed. Although their number included several hundred knights and a significant number of foot-soldiers, there were also thousands of women children and old people in rags. They had the air of some wretched tribe evicted from their lands by an invader. It was also reported that they all wore strips of cloth and the shape of a cross sewn onto the backs of their garments.”

Maalouf describes the Seljuk view of the “People’s Crusade,” the first, unsuccessful wave of the First Crusade. Though this wave achieved little and the army comprised a mix of knights, peasants, women, and children, it served as a warning to the Turks and reflected the religious fanaticism of the invaders. This warning they largely ignored, due to The Context of Inter-Muslim Political Turmoil.

“And yet, rarely in history has a victory proved so costly to those who had won it.”

The Seljuks celebrated their routing of the People’s Crusade. This victory, however, was hollow since a larger wave of reinforcements soon arrived in the east. This wave, which the French nobility headed, took Nicaea, the Sultanate of Rum’s capital, before making further incursions and finally conquering Jerusalem.