Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

by Tamim Ansary

In 1144, Zangi conquered Edessa, which made him a hero to the Muslim world. Edessa wasn’t the biggest city in the east, but it was the first sizable city the Muslims had taken back from the Franj, and with recapture of Edessa, one of the four “Crusader Kingdoms” ceased to exist.

Unfortunately Zangi could not very well put himself at the head of a new jihad because he was a hard-drinking, foulmouthed brawler; the very qualities that endeared him to his men offended many of the ulama.

His son and successor, Nuruddin, possessed the qualities his father had lacked. Though he shared his father’s martial energy, Nuruddin was polished, diplomatic, and devout.

This greater ruler turned out to be Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayub, commonly known as Saladin, the nephew of one of Nuruddin’s top generals. In 1163, Nuruddin sent Saladin’s uncle off to conquer Egypt, just to keep it out of Franj hands, and the general took along his nephew.

As soon as he took charge of Egypt, Nuruddin told him to abolish the Fatimid dynasty, and the order distressed him.

He obeyed his orders, but he abolished the khalifate so quietly, the khalifa never even knew about it. One Friday, Saladin simply arranged for a citizen to get up in the mosque and recite a sermon in the name of the Abassid khalifa in Baghdad. No one protested and so the deed was done. The frail young khalifa soon expired of natural causes without learning that he was a private citizen and that his dynasty had ended. His death left Saladin as the sole ruler of Egypt.

As a military leader, he was okay, but nothing special. His power ultimately lay in the fact that people simply adored him.

In his personal habits Saladin was just as ascetic and demanding of himself as Nuruddin had been, but he was less demanding of others.

The Assassins tried hard to kill Saladin.

This time, however, the usual Assassin tactic backfired, for having tried and failed twice to kill him, the Assassins succeeded only in adding to the legend of Saladin’s invincibility.

He retook most of the Crusaders’ holdings bloodlessly through encirclement, economic pressure, and negotiation. In 1187, when he finally moved on Jerusalem, he began by sending in a proposal that the Franj relinquish this city peacefully as well. In exchange, Christians who wanted to leave could take their property and depart, Christians who wanted to stay could do so and practice their religion unmolested, Christian places of worship would be protected, and pilgrims would be welcome to come and go. The Franj indignantly rejected giving up Jerusalem, their main prize and the whole point of these Crusades, so Saladin encircled the city, took it by force, and then dealt with it as Khalifa Omar had done: no massacres, no plundering, and all prisoners set free upon payment of a ransom.

One was the German Frederick Barbarossa, who fell off his horse in a few inches of water and drowned on the way to the Holy Lands. One was French monarch Phillip II of France, who made it to the Holy Lands, took part in the conquest of the port of Acre, and then went home exhausted. That left only the English king Richard I, known to his countrymen as the Lionheart. Richard was a formidable warrior, but scarcely deserved the reputation he enjoyed back home as a paragon of chivalry. He broke promises lightly and did whatever it took to win battles. He and Saladin danced around each other for about a year, and Richard won the main battle they fought, but by the time he laid siege to Jerusalem in June of 1192, illness had reduced his strength and the heat had him panting. Saladin sympathetically sent him fresh fruit and cool snow and waited for Richard to realize that he didn’t have the men to retake Jerusalem. Finally, Richard agreed to terms with Saladin, which were roughly as follows: Muslims would keep Jerusalem but protect Christian places of worship, let Christians live in the city and practice their faith without harassment, and let Christian pilgrims come and go as they pleased. Richard then headed home, preceded by the news that he had won a sort of victory at Jerusalem: he had forced Saladin to be nice. In fact, he had secured exactly the terms Saladin had offered from the start.

So it’s probably more accurate to say that the Crusades lasted about two hundred years, with eight periods during which the traffic swelled, usually because some monarch or coalition of monarchs organized a campaign.

In areas under attack, Muslims did, of course, feel threatened by the Franj, even horrified by them, but they didn’t see in these attacks any intellectual challenge to their ideas and beliefs. And although the Crusades were certainly a serious matter for Muslims living along the eastern Mediterranean coast, the Crusaders never penetrated deeply into the Muslim world. For example, no real army ever reached Mecca and Medina, only a small raiding party led by a renegade whom even other Franj regarded as a despicable rogue. The Crusaders never laid siege to Baghdad nor did they penetrate historic Persia. People in Khorasan and Bactria and the Indus Valley remained completely unaffected by the incursion and largely unaware of it.

In short, the Crusades brought virtually no European cultural viruses into the Islamic world. The influence ran almost entirely the other way. And what flowed the other way? Well, the Crusaders opened up opportunities for European merchants in the Levant and Egypt. During the Franj wars, trade between western Europe and the Middle World increased. As a result, people in places like England, France, and Germany obtained exotic goods available in the East, products such as nutmeg, cloves, black pepper, and other spices, as well as silk, satin, and a fabric made from a wonderful plant called cotton.

In the early days of Islam, a series of ill-defined Turkish confederacies dominated the steppes, but once they moved south they morphed into Muslim dynasties, such as the Ghaznavids and the Seljuks.

Then around 560 AH (1165 CE) the brilliant and charismatic Temujin was born. History knows him as Chengez Khan (in the West, Genghis Khan), which means “universal ruler,” a title he did not take on until he was about forty years old.

In 607 AH (1211 CE), Chengez’s Mongols attacked China’s decrepit old Sung Empire and cut through it like a knife into warm cheese. Seven years later, in 614 (1218 CE), the Mongols entered the history of the Middle World.

It was the kingdom of the Khwarazm-Shahs. Their king Alaudin Mohammed considered himself quite the military mastermind, and in his arrogance decided to teach the Mongols a lesson. He started by intercepting 450 merchants traveling through his kingdom under Mongol protection. Accusing these poor merchants of spying for the Mongols, he had them killed and took their goods, but he quite deliberately let one man escape so that he would take news of the massacre back to Chengez. He was looking for trouble. The Mongol lord sent three envoys west to demand reparations. It was probably the last time Chengez would show himself so forbearing. And now, Alaudin Mohammed made his really big mistake. He executed one of the envoys and sent the other two home with their beards plucked out. In this region, one could offer a man no more grievous insult than to pluck out his beard. Alaudin knew this full well, but he wanted to give offense, because he was spoiling for a fight—and he got one. In 615 AH (1219 CE) the great catastrophe began.

They won battles with strategy, ferocity, and, yes, technology. For example, when they attacked fortified cities, they employed sophisticated siege machinery acquired from the Chinese. They had “composite” bows made of several layers of wood glued together, which could shoot harder and further than the bows used in the “civilized” world. They fought on horseback, and their riding skills were such that some of their victims thought the Mongols were some new species of half-human, half-horse creature previously unknown to civilization. Their horses were hardy and fast but rather small, so a Mongol warrior could grip his horse with his legs, hang off on one side, and fire his arrows from under the horse’s belly, thus using the body of the beast itself as a shield. Mongols could ride their horses for days and nights on end, sleeping in the saddle and taking nourishment from veins they opened on their horse’s necks, so that after sacking one city they might suddenly appear at some distant other city so fast they seemed almost to have supernatural powers. Sometimes, the Mongols did bring along extra horses with dummies mounted on them to convey an impression of overwhelming numbers: it was just one more of their many military tricks.

Then he marched on Khorasan and Persia, and here the Mongols attempted genocide.

the Muslim historian Sayfi Heravi said the Mongols killed 1,747,000 when they sacked the city of Naishapur, killing everything down to the cats and dogs. At the city of Herat, he put the toll at 1,600,000.

Whatever the numbers were based on, there must have been some truth to them. Two histories completed around 658 AH (1260 CE), one in Baghdad, one in Delhi, gave almost exactly similar accounts of these horrors, roughly the same statistics for the casualties.

A curious footnote to the Mongol holocaust occurred in 653 AH (1256 CE), when Hulagu was passing through Persia. A Muslim jurist near Alamut complained to the Mongol khan that he had to wear armor under his clothes all the time for fear of the Assassins headquartered nearby. A short time later, two Fedayeen (suicidal Assassin agents) disguised as monks tried to kill Hulagu—and failed. They might as well have tried to pluck out the man’s beard. The cult that could kill anyone met the army that could kill everyone. Hulagu took time out from his westward drive to storm Alamut. He then did to the Assassins what the Mongols had done and would do to many others: he destroyed them physically; he destroyed their stronghold; he destroyed their records, libraries, and papers—in that moment, the menace of the Assassins came to an end.

The attack on Baghdad began on February 3, 1258. By February 20, Baghdad was not just conquered. It was pretty much gone. The Mongols had a proscription against shedding royal blood; it ran against their traditions; they just didn’t do that sort of thing. So they wrapped the khalifa and members of his family in carpets and kicked them to death. As for the citizens of Baghdad, Hulagu’s Mongols killed virtually every one of them. The only ambiguity about how many people the Mongols killed at Baghdad has to do with how many there were to kill. Muslim sources put the toll at eight hundred thousand.