Part 15

This led landless knights and princes to seek ways of overcoming this obstacle, by finding an heiress to marry, or by means of aggression and war aimed at acquiring land. The Crusader movement opened a new door to this group of princes and knights; they answered the pope's call and hastened to take part in this movement in the hope that they would succeed in establishing principalities for themselves in the East, to compensate for what they lacked in the West. As for the knights and princes who owned fiefdoms, they found that taking part in the Crusader movement gave them a good opportunity to attain higher glory and greater status. In our study of sources on the Crusades, we saw that the ambitions of the princes in the first campaign were manifested in many political ways. They started to divide the booty when they were still on their way, before they had actually acquired the booty. We shall see, by Allah's leave, how conflict between them occurred outside Antioch, because each one of them wanted to seize it; how those who managed to make some gains for themselves on the road were content with that and gave up participating with the other Crusaders in the march on Jerusalem, which was the original goal of the campaign. Disputes often arose among them — after they settled there — concerning the rule of a principality or who would take control of a city. To no avail, the papacy tried to intervene to resolve the disputes among princes or to warn them that the Muslims surrounded them and that their duty as Crusaders was to cooperate in order to ward off danger from themselves. But these calls fell on deaf ears, because the aims of the princes were selfish and political. They were not greatly concerned about the approval or wrath of the pope; in fact some of the princes did not hesitate to make alliances with neighbouring Muslim forces against their fellow Crusaders, which indicates that the religious motives of those princes were often weak when they conflicted with their political motives.60 As for the Byzantine Emperor Alexius, he did not object to the aims of the campaign leaders, because if it were possible for the Byzantine state to regain the possessions that had been lost as the result of Turkish raids, then he would have some Christian principalities on the border as a buffer zone, and Byzantium would have the right of sovereignty over them. In order to guarantee this, the emperor tried to extract an oath of loyalty from the Western princes. Thus the interests of both Christian sides in launching a war of aggression against the Muslim lands came together, and in fact it is very difficult to separate the material factors from the spiritual ones which motivated the Christians to launch the Crusades. Poverty and the desire to accumulate wealth, along with the spirit of adventure, were factors which created a suitable atmosphere for war, but these factors only appeared as the result of what really provided the impetus for this 'holy' war and liberation of this land: religious zeal. It is clear that the idea of war stemmed from papal policy, the policies of the Byzantine state, and the Islamo-Spanish wars. One of the factors which made it easy to declare war on the Islamic East was the regular fighting in which the Spanish and French engaged against the Muslims in Andalusia; this fighting had taken on the quality of holy war, both on the part of the Muslims, when the Almoravids (al-Murabitoon) in the Maghreb launched a religious Jihad, and on the part of the Christians who were living in the atmosphere in which the Crusader campaigns against the East were launched. Even the great historian Ibn al-Atheer adopted a comprehensive view of the external danger and regarded any aggression against any part of the Muslim world, whether in the East or in the West, as "a small tributary of the same great river"; it was organised foreign aggression against the greatest civilized power of the Middle Ages, namely the Islamic state.61 This is from one angle. From another angle, this historian clearly explains the reasons for the success of this three-pronged attack (in Andalusia, Sicily and Syria/Palestine), which was aimed at exploiting the divisions and attitudes of self-interest that affected the Muslim rulers of the time, for they had lost the spirit of initiative which distinguished the early rulers and Muslims who had built the Islamic state.62 It was clear to any observer that the Western church was eager to expand its feudal lands and gain control of the Eastern churches, in addition to its desire to launch a war against the Muslims. One of the facts of religious fanaticism was the existence of religious groups that were directly connected to the church and which were highly effective in those wars, such as the Knights Hospitaller who were committed to defending Crusader possessions in the East and protecting the holy places. They had a direct connection with the Pope, and one tenth of the income of the churches in Jerusalem was allocated to helping them to fulfil their so-called religious mission.