The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land

by Thomas Asbridge

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.

By the eleventh century, the rulers of Sunni Baghdad were far more interested in using jihad to promote Islamic orthodoxy by battling ‘heretic’ Shi‘ites than they were in launching holy wars against Christendom. The suggestion that Islam should engage in an unending struggle to enlarge its borders and subjugate non-Muslims held little currency; so too did the idea of unifying in defence of the Islamic faith and its territories. When the Christian crusades began, the ideological impulse of devotional warfare thus lay dormant within the body of Islam, but the essential framework remained in place.