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Download PDF | Alliances And Treaties Between Frankish And Muslim Rulers In The Middle East Cross Cultural Diplomacy In The Period Of The Crusade

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AUTHOR'S PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION

Some thirty years ago, in 1982, Ludwig Buisson who held the chair in Medieval History at Hamburg University, Germany, drew my attention to the campaigns of Saint Louis, the French Crusader king. It was then when I first came across those striking references in Western sources of the late thirteenth century, most of them in Old French, describing the negotiating procedures and agreements between Crusader/Frankish and Muslim rulers in the years 1249 and 1254, which as a young historian and orientalist immediately caught my attention and fascinated me. I began to consult the early Mamluk historiography in order to improve my understanding of both negotiating techniques and the political strategies that provided the basis for agreements between Franks and Muslims.

Under the guidance of Ludwig Buisson and Albrecht Noth, the inspiring head of the Hamburg School of Oriental Studies and great expert of Muslim historiography, this led me to finally conduct a full research into FrankishMuslim alliances and treaties in the Middle East from the appearance of the first Crusaders in the region to Mamluk rule in Egypt and Syria: I choose to base my work on a comprehensive assessment of both Western and Muslim sources in parallel, and the idea to formulate questions and answers only from the simultaneous analysis of both groups of sources. Hamburg University accepted my study as a PhD thesis in 1987, and De Gruyter published it in German four years later, in 1991, in the series Studies on the Language, History and Culture of the Islamic Orient (vol. 12).!

In the following years, my academic and other professional career interests developed in other directions, focusing more on contemporary Muslim history and the day-to-day challenges of political and technical cooperation between Europe and the Muslim world, with which today I am dealing both as a professor for Europe and the Mediterranean in Bruges, Belgium, and as an official of the European Commission. It was all the more a surprise, and a delightful and flattering one, when in 2002 Peter M. Holt of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London contacted me with the information that he had started to translate my study on Frankish-Muslim alliances and treaties into English in order to enable his non-German speaking students to access the results of my work. Professor Holt soon asked me to authorise the publication of the English translation of the book, which I was only too happy to give. However, it proved unfortunately impossible to finalise the translation and find a suitable publisher before Professor Holt’s death in 2006. This seemed to put the project to a sudden halt.

But the story should continue, with a very pleasant déja-vu: In 2010 Konrad Hirschler asked me if my book had ever been translated into English, as like Peter M. Holt before him he regretted that the language barrier made it increasingly difficult to make full use of the study in his teaching at the School of Oriental and African Studies. I informed Dr Hirschler of Peter M. Holt’s earlier request and translation work, and Konrad Hirschler was soon able to find and access the still unfinished English manuscript in Harris Manchester College Library, Oxford. He immediately decided to continue where Peter Holt had stopped, to complete the translation and finally submit it to Koniklijke Brill in Leiden for publication.

I am greatly indebted to both the late Peter M. Holt and to Konrad Hirschler and his team at SOAS for their generous work on the English version of this book and their enormous efforts to bring the results of my work to the attention of English language readers. Speakers of both languages will notice that while throughout faithful to the German original, the English version is somewhat shorter and sometimes summarizes the German text; it is also more economic with respect to references and quotes from Latin, Arabic and Old French sources. This makes the text more fluent. Readers who wish to have access to the full text including all references and bibliography may wish to go back to the German version.

Dr Hirschler’s contribution has not been limited to editing and putting the finishing touches on Peter M. Holt’s translation. In his preface he very usefully places the findings of my study in the context of the results of specialist research published in the last two decades, which has shed further light on individual aspects of motivation of alliances and of diplomatic practice. Indeed, there is ample room for further research in this field, and in particular the study of Syrian history under the Bahri Mamluks based on an examination of the many still unedited Arabic sources of the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries would promise to provide deeper insights.

While I hope I can still add further contributions to this subject of research, I am delighted that today, some 25 years after the conclusion of work on the original German text, my study on alliances and treaties is still deemed relevant enough to warrant an English translation which will make it available to a wider readership. Political relations between the Muslim world and the West if anything have become ever more complex in the last quarter of a century since this book was written, and confrontation in the region between countries, within societies, and with the involvement of outside players ever more frequent and bitter.

Therefore, not only the findings but also the purpose of this book may still have their justification today. As I stated in my concluding remarks: “For better or worse, history is also used or misused for the purpose of legitimization and historical events as well as tendencies are even occasionally understood as direct instructions for dealing with the present. In view of this practical relevance of history, whether intentional or unintentional, it is all the more urgent that what we comprehend as history should be confronted with changed methodologies.

Applied to the Frankish-Muslim encounters of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the Middle East, called the ‘Crusades’ for the lack of a better term, it might happen that both Western and Arabic scholars would no longer read the sources merely as confrontational, but would obtain the formulation of new questions from the Arabic sources in particular. If by this means a small step could be taken towards the separation of ideology from the debate about the encounter of Europe and the Islamic world in the past and a scrap of the historical burden lifted from the dialogue between Europe and the Arabs, much would already have been achieved.”

I would like to take this occasion to thank all those who contributed in one way or another to making this book possible: Ludwig Buisson and Albrecht Noth who guided and advised me, constantly encouraged me and supervised my PhD thesis; Peter M. Holt and Konrad Hirschler for their initiative, all their hard work and enthusiastic support which has made this English translation possible, and Brill Publishers who accepted to make it available to the public; My mother Margret and my father Volkmar Kohler for all their help in every situation and in particular during my student's years—I would have wished that my father was still with us to see the publication of this book!; And my wife Ina who since we met at university studying Medieval Islam has become my trusted companion for three decades, helped me finish my PhD, went with me to live and work in Northern Africa, and gave birth to our much-loved children.

Michael A. Kohler Brussels, October 2012

FOREWORD

‘Books of this kind are seldom translated into English. That is a pity, for this work deserves to be widely known not merely among specialists in the history of the crusades, but to all who are interested in East-West relations.! Thus the late James Powell concluded his review of the present work, one that deals with the coexistence of Frankish, that is Latin European, and Muslim states in the Middle East during the period of the Crusades. Although more than two decades have elapsed since the publication of the German version (and Powell’s review) the book’s originality still warrants a translation. Many historical studies have remained bound to the idea that ‘the virtually permanent confrontation [between Muslim and Frankish states] was inevitable’, as a study on the principality of Damascus put it.2 This book’s argument questions such a historicization and re-examines the available source material, mainly in Latin, Arabic and Greek. It argues that after their foundation, the Frankish states were swiftly absorbed into the political landscape of Syrian autonomous lordships, wherein a characteristic pattern of alliances and treaties evolved, preventing the intrusion of external powers and the rise of any one particular lordship to a position of dominance. The integration of the Frankish states was facilitated by the development of specific legal instruments, such as the condominium (munasafa) and the suspension clause, which were employed in treaties.

Beyond doubt, research has revised or at least refined some arguments to which the book refers. For example, the motives for individuals to support or join the Crusades, an issue that features prominently in this book’s first chapter, is to a large extent explained here by materialistic factors, be they of an economic, political or social nature.

This issue has since been considered in more subtle ways and, in contrast to the explanation offered here, recent work has put more emphasis on spiritual motives—if one wants to adopt such a binary perspective.? A second example where scholarship has evolved, to take an issue from the field of Arabic/Islamic studies, is the source value of jihad treatises and poetry. Writings such as those by Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami (d. 500/106), especially his early jihad treatise against the Crusaders, have been studied in more detail and in particular Christie has underlined his significance for later writers.t The present book’s point on the employment of jihad-propaganda is still a crucial contribution to this debate, but needs to be set against more favourable readings of the oeuvre of poets such as Ibn Munir (d. 548/153) and Ibn al-Qaysarani (d. 548/1154) over the past years.®

However, in other regards research over the last two decades has confirmed the book’s main thrust or has advanced arguments that neatly fit into its main thesis. The conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 and the treatment of the local populations by the Crusaders, for instance, have been subject to revisionist studies such as those by Kedar. These studies have argued that the number of victims during the early conquest was lower than previously thought.

That the Crusaders did not, even at such an early point, necessarily engage in full-scale massacres of local populations confirms an important argument of this book. In the same vein more studies are now available on a field closely related to the relations between Frankish and Muslim rulers, namely day-to-day relationships between Franks and local populations. The work by Ellenblum on patterns of settlement, for instance, confirms to some extent the close political integration presented in the present book. Just as the Franks did not remain political outsiders to the Syrian political landscape, they also settled well beyond the walls of their fortified cities in the vicinity of (mostly Christian) locales in rural areas.®

With this translation the book’s main argument will be accessible to a wider audience and will also be more widely taken up in scholarship. Over the last two decades several studies on diplomatic contacts between Frankish and Muslim states have been published. However, these have generally been short articles that could neither match the depth and breadth of this book nor offer a comparable conceptualization.” Other studies have brought up new issues, but remained typically focused on one set of sources, either Latin or Arabic.

Recent textbooks on the Crusades such as those by Tyerman and Phillips certainly pay much more attention to the interaction between Frankish and Muslim states as to the interaction between Franks and indigenous populations, be they Muslim, Christian or Jewish.9 Yet their main focus is on the internal workings of these states and the history of crusading campaigns so the rich history of the interaction of these states within the Middle East remains rather marginal. It might be expected that a text-book on the Middle East for the period of the Crusades would adopt a different perspective and allow the Frankish states to be seen more as a part of this region’s history rather than first and foremost as part of European medieval history. Yet, such a text-book is still a desideratum and the text-book by Holt is not only outdated, but its title was anyway a misnomer for a book that is basically a (very fine) history of the Mamluk Empire.!°

If we move away from the academic field towards books specifically authored for non-academic audiences, the framework of presenting the interaction between Frankish and Muslim states is deeply influenced by the approaches of the mid-twentieth century. Such books still reflect the idea of the Crusades as colonial endeavours and the Frankish states as colonial entities that remained fundamentally alien to their Middle Eastern environment throughout their existence, as was argued by Prawer for instance."

This is even true for the otherwise excellent and well-informed book by Waterson that is underpinned by a teleological narrative of a ‘Muslim resistance’ that crystallises after somewhat hesitant beginnings under the holy trinity of jihad-studies, that is Imad al-Din Zengi, his son Nur al-Din and Saladin, from the 1140s onwards. After a temporary relapse under the Ayyubid dynasty in the early thirteenth century, according to this narrative history finds its predestined course in the second half of this century under the Mamluks and their aggressive policies towards the remaining Frankish polities.!”

Against such a background of historiographical development, this book still makes an important contribution to the field and invites us to rethink modern perceptions and scholarship of these events. Professor Peter Holt of SOAS translated most of the book between 1999 and 2001, but he was not able to revise and publish it before his death in 2006. It was only in 2010 that the manuscript came to my attention and the project could be concluded.

On an editorial note: The number of footnotes of the original has been significantly reduced. References to secondary sources were only adopted if explicitly referred to in the main text or if they are indispensable for following the text’s argument. References to primary sources, however, were generally retained in order to make the text’s line of argument transparent. The bibliography lists all primary and secondary works used in the German original, even if not cited in this translation, to give an insight into the works consulted. Despite the publication of newer editions for many of the primary sources, the original references were retained to ensure consistency. Full transcription of Arabic terms has been limited to the references and some terminological discussion in the main text where it was indispensable. In all other cases diacritics are omitted, though hamza (’) and ‘ayn (‘) have been retained throughout the text.

Iam thankful to the libraries that made this project possible: Sue Killoran (Harris Manchester College Library, Oxford) generously granted access to Peter Holt’s manuscript and Malcolm Raggett (Centre for Digital Africa, Asia and the Middle East, SOAS library) provided invaluable technical assistance in digitizing the typewritten manuscript. S. Namir Henrikson (SOAS) meticulously edited the first digital draft of the work and Emma Diab (New York University) and Suzanne Ruggi (Salisbury) saved me from a number of linguistic mistakes and rendered the translation into clearer, more readable English.

The Faculty of Arts and Humanities, SOAS, supported this project financially in its initial stages. I am grateful to Michael Brett, Jonathan Phillips, Gerald Hawting, Yehoshua Frenkel, Doris BehrensAbouseif and the anonymous reader for offering advice at different stages of the project. My thanks go also to Andrew and Harriet Holt and particularly to Michael Kohler who has supported the transation of this book in many ways. I am most profoundly indebted to the late Albrecht Noth, one of the co-supervisors of the PhD thesis underlying this book, who introduced me to it when I was an undergraduate student at the University of Hamburg.

Konrad Hirschler London, October 2012

INTRODUCTION

‘In the field of Crusades studies the history of institutions has increasingly replaced the history of events. The former has become the dominant approach.”

This assessment of the historiography of Crusades succinctly summarises the development of the field since the 1930s and particularly since the end of the Second World War. Nineteenth-century studies on the crusading period had focused on the critical edition and discussion of the sources. Early overviews of the history of this period, in turn, were characterised by historical positivism and they mainly narrated the history of events, especially the history of specific expeditions to the East, only occasionally combined with cultural history. Since the 1930s, however, research has turned towards the ‘Crusader states’ with a particular emphasis on the legal and social structures of the formation of these states and the history of settlement. In addition, themes such as economy, war, church and art were subject to examination.”

This reorientation has significantly expanded our knowledge of the political, legal, administrative, social and economic conditions of the states that were founded in the course of the Crusades. Nevertheless, turning away from the history of events had the effect of virtually stopping research on the Frankish-Muslim relations during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, especially concerning the political and legal history of the relationships of the Frankish states with their Muslim neighbours. An additional reason for this development was that Western historians could—and can—access the Arabic sources from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries only in translation.

It is not by chance that the decreased interest in the history of relationships coincided with the point when the information of the two partial translations of Ibn al-Qalanisi (d. 555/160) had been integrated into scholarship.? Since this point no significant translation of Arabic sources pertinent to the Crusades has been published. Those few contributions that have during the last decades advanced our knowledge on Frankish-Muslim relations were either authored by orientalists or those few medievalists who had Arabic.* These studies have especially focused on the period of Saladin (1169-1193),5 the Ayyubids (1193-1260)® and the early Mamluks (1250-1291).”?

However, they primarily deal with specific Frankish-Muslim treaties or are biographies and dynastic histories in which the relationships of the rulers with the Franks are only one among many subjects. Although these studies have elucidated some aspects of the policies and technicalities of treaties they do not offer a continuous history and interpretation of Frankish-Muslim state relations from the First Crusade onwards. The few attempts in this regard have been very brief publications whose medievalist authors have insufficiently taken into account the Arabic sources and no monograph on the development and the context of Frankish-Muslim relations in the Middle East, especially during the twelfth century, has been published yet.®

The groundbreaking studies by Prawer on settlement and by Riley-Smith on administration have shown that the Crusaders adopted a number of existing administrative institutions during the process of state formation. However, with regard to their relationships the view has persisted in the field that the Frankish states remained outposts of the Christian world and foreign elements in the largely Islamic Middle East. The image of the period as one of Christian-Islamic confrontation that the majority of Western sources—less so the work by William of Tyre (d. 186)— projected reinforced this view.

These Latin and Old French sources were for the most part written in Europe often by authors who had previously gone to Syria and Palestine as ‘armed pilgrims’. Modern studies have heavily relied on these sources and Arabic sources—as far as available in translation—have been only used as supplementary material. In addition, the use of these sources has been highly problematic as evident in the history of reception of Usama b. Mungidh’s (488—584/1095—188) autobiography. Older research considered it as the classical example of the Frankish-Muslim modus vivendi of the twelfth century that displays a spirit of tolerance and proves the acculturation of the Franks in the Middle East.? More recently this perception was turned around and Usama b. Munqidh re-emerged as the main witness for the cultural discrepancy between the two camps and for the ‘spirit of counter-crusading’ that supposedly developed on the Islamic side in reaction to the Crusades.!°

The study of the reception of jihad propaganda by Muslim rulers in chronicles and poetry of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, especially by Sivan, has further contributed to interpreting Frankish-Muslim relations as one of a confrontation between Christianity and Islam (cf. chapter II). Interestingly, modern Arabic historiography has adopted this concept and has represented the jihad against the Crusades as a precursor for successfully fighting back European imperialism. The foundation of Israel has only increased the topicality of the Crusades, especially for Middle Eastern authors."

Yet, was the history of Frankish-Muslim relations in the Middle East really a confrontation between Christendom and Islam; was it really characterised by the spirit of crusading and counter-crusading as Western sources suggested and as modern historiography partly argued? If this was indeed the case, were the examples of Frankish-Muslim cooperation— that are well known to modern historiography—merely isolated occurrences that should be explained in terms of ‘tolerance’ and ‘policies of modus vivendi’?

Against the background of these questions, the present study analyses the Frankish states’ legal and political relations with their Muslim neighbours in the Middle East. The study’s aim is not only to list examples of cooperation documented in Latin, Arabic, Greek and Christian Oriental sources. Rather, the central point is to analyse alliances and treaties involving the Frankish states with regard to their rationale, their supporters and their detractors on both sides.

Was there a Frankish or Islamic policy of alliances, what were the underlying political concepts and what developments are traceable? What was the actual relevance of the ideas of crusading and jihad? A final aim of the study is to analyse the legal framework that was used for contacts between Frankish and Muslim rulers. Was there also development over time with regard to the content and instruments of treaties? A crucial point of the method proposed here in order to address these questions is that Arabic sources cannot merely supplement Western sources, but that they have to be used in conjunction and that they have to be considered to be of equal value.

In some regards, the Arabic sources are even to be preferred over the Latin or Old French counterparts. Most of the Frankish and Western sources were either authored with reference to specific Crusades or pilgrimages or they are ‘official’ historiography—as in the case of William of Tyre. The Arabic texts, by contrast, ignore any concept of Crusade or jihad history. Consequently, they offer more than just the Islamic perspective on events and processes that are known from Western sources. Arabic sources are not only more numerous, but their main advantage is that they report on the Franks within the general history of the Middle East. Exactly this advantage disappears in the published translations that often include only those passages that concern the Franks.

The Oriental sources (Arabic, Syriac and Armenian) are particularly rich on account of the plurality of genres and—in the case of chronicles— their annalistic-compilatory character. If the works were not commissioned panegyrics, the authors generally compiled the relevant reports on an event without reworking them or commenting upon them. This is valid for the universal chronicles of Ibn al-Athir (d. 630/1233) and Sibt b. al-Jawzi (d. 654/1262) as well as for the local chronicles—a genre that has no counterpart on the Frankish side—of Ibn al-Qalanisi (Damascus) and Ibn al-‘Adim (d. 660/1262, Aleppo).

In addition, we have biographies (e.g. by Baha’ al-Din Ibn Shaddad (d. 632/1234)) on Saladin and by Ibn ‘Abd al-Zahir (d. 692/1293) on Baybars and Qalawun, dynastic histories (e.g. Abu Shama’s (d. 665/1268) Rawdatayn), autobiographies (e.g. by ‘Umara al-Yamani (d. 569/174) and Ibn Mungidh) as well as historical geographies (e.g. by Yaqut al-Rumi (d. 626/1229), ‘Izz al-Din Ibn Shaddad (d. 684/1285) and al-Idrisi (d. 560/1165)).

Of particular value are the epistles that have been preserved in manuscripts or that were inserted into narrative sources, especially the letters by the head of Saladin’s chancery, al-Qadi al-Fadil (d. 596/1200), and anthologies of poetry that offer crucial insights into the history of mentalities and sometimes also into the background of specific Frankish-Muslim alliances. Outstanding examples for this are Kharidat al-gasr by ‘Imad al-Din al-Katib al-Isfahani (d. 597/1201) and the Diwan of the Egyptian Wazir Tala’i‘ b. Ruzzik (d. 556/1161). The chancery sources, such as al-Qalqashandi’s (d. 821/1418) Subh, are crucial for understanding the technicalities of treaties. Only these texts reproduce complete texts of Frankish-Muslim treaties and oaths, even though they only go back to the second half of the thirteenth century.”

Thus, Arabic sources do not only offer additional information on cases of Frankish-Muslim cooperation, the Muslim perspective on the Crusades and insights into Frankish-Muslim ‘daily life’. Rather, they provide most crucially the possibility of analysing the history of the Frankish states as part of the Syrian history (i.e. al-Sham, the region between the Sinai, the Cilician Gate and the Euphrates). This approach allows an outright classification of conflicts between Frankish and Muslim rulers as confrontations between Christianity and Islam to be avoided.

On this basis, the present study does not start with the First Crusade, but rather three decades earlier as the characteristic constellation of alliances and powers that the Franks encountered had come into being around 1070. The study focuses on the twelfth century, but includes also the thirteenth century for the analysis of Frankish-Muslim treaties’ technicalities. This is because the legal instruments that had been developed in the twelfth century to resolve conflicts continued to be used in the thirteenth century and were to some extent even further developed in this period.

The thirteenth century is, however, of less interest for the policies of alliances. After the end of the Third Crusade (1192) the Frankish states mostly stopped playing a major role in the Middle East and became increasingly dependent on European support. Consequently, they ceased to be an important alliance partner for the Muslim states, except for Antioch’s reliance on Aleppo until 1216 and the alliances between the kingdom of Jerusalem and the Ayyubid rulers of Syria between 1240 and 1244.

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