All Things Medieval

Saladin and Richard the Lion-Heart are the most famous names of the Crusades, and finally we’re getting to their stories. We met Richard via his mother Eleanor of Aquitaine; now we meet Saladin through Zengi’s successor Nur ad-Din. First, why were so many of these leaders named Something ad-Din? This name is a Laqab, sort of a nickname. Din means Faith in Arabic, so Nur ad-Din was the Light of the Faith, while Salah ad-Din was the Righteous of the Faith. Their given name is usually forgotten (Saladin’s childhood name was Yusuf).

During the Second Crusade period, Zengi’s son Nur ad-Din ruled Aleppo and Edessa. He married the princess of Damascus, Ismat ad-Din Hatun. (Ismat ad-Din means Purity of the Faith, and Hatun means Lady or Princess.) Damascus hovered between alliances with Turks and Crusaders, depending who seemed stronger, but eventually its ruler died and Nur ad-Din absorbed it. He appointed the former Governor of Tikrit, Ayyub, to be its ruler under his authority. Ayyub’s brother was one of Nur ad-Din’s field generals.

All we can say about Ayyub’s family background is that it’s the same mix that produced Nur ad-Din: Turkic, Kurdish, Arab, probably intermingled. Their root ancestry could be the Arabs who brought herds of goats to the valley of the Tigris River, back in the 8th century. Ayyub is an Arabic name (Job), while his brother always went by a Kurdish name.

Ayyub’s son Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub went into active military service. Nur ad-Din was ambitious to extend his father Zengi’s project: unifying the former Caliphate by conquest, including the jewel in the crown: Egypt. Remember Cairo was built by Shi’ites who aggressively sent missionaries into Persian and Arab lands to agitate against Turkish rule.

So Nur ad-Din sent General Shirkuh (“Mountain Lion” in Kurdish) and his nephew Salah ad-Din down to Egypt. The Fatimid dynasty was so weakened that the teenage Caliph had no real control and the viziers were playing power games. One vizier thought allying with Nur ad-Din would return him to power. He returned to power, but Shirkuh and nephew Saladin stayed on in Cairo, obviously the real new power. Saladin befriended the weak Caliph and, ultimately, Saladin was appointed Vizier.

When the Caliph died in 1171, Saladin saw no reason to continue the charade. He abolished the office and appointed himself Sultan. For Egypt, it was just another regime change. The big question was whether Saladin’s new dynasty would rule well or not. Saladin’s descendants are known as the Ayyubids, ruling for about 80 years.

The Battle of Qatwan took place very, very far from the Holy Land, so it didn’t appear to have a direct connection at first. But it was the beginning of the end for the Seljuk Empire, which had been ruling in Baghdad. Its progenitor, an Oghuz/Turkmen named Seljuk, had converted to Islam around 985, and his descendants moved across Iran until in 1040, they wrested the Central Asian territory from the Ghaznid emperor. From 1055, they were in de facto control of Baghdad.

The Khitans were a large ethnic group in northeast China. They founded the Liao Dynasty in Inner Mongolia and began writing their language in a unique script copied from Chinese. By 1050, they were using Chinese court dress and many began to speak Han Chinese. But they were forced out, northward, by incoming Jurchen, now called Manchu—for whom Manchuria is named. Their king, Yelu Dashi, began striking out in all directions, trying to regain his old territory and expand into new. His tribe was the Kara (Black) Khitans.

The Kara Khitans had never lost their Mongolian-ish customs, so they blended back into Mongolia, in Genghis Khan’s later heartland on the Orkhon River. They began to push westward into the Trans-Oxiania region that had been the farthest reach of the Muslim Conquest. Taking land in modern Kyrgyzstan, they moved into the Fergana Valley, modern Uzbekistan. As they went, they took in more tribal forces, and more.

The Kara Khitans were now in range of Samarkand, last outpost of the Muslim realm. Although the Seljuk Sultan was far away in Baghdad, his son ruled in Nishapur, Iran. He came with an army to the relief of Samarkand.

The Kara Khitai defeated the Seljuk army at Qatwan, 12 kilometers from Samarkand. The Kara Khitan “Western Liao Emperor” Yelu Dashi spent three months in Samarkand, receiving tribute and oaths of loyalty.

Between the battle in 1141 and the Seljuk emir’s death in 1157, the Seljuks’ imperial rule fell apart. They remained as rulers of Azerbaijan and parts of Iran, while Turkmen tribesmen overran Khorasan. Their weakened state allowed independent Turkish lords, like Zengi, to consolidate control in the west. In a distant way, the fall of the Seljuks at the Battle of Qatwan led to the fall of the Crusader kingdoms far to the west.

“Prester John” was the unlikely name of a legendary Christian king somewhere far in the East. From century to century, people kept hearing and passing on rumors of his wealth and piety. A medieval Obi-Wan Kenobi, he was thought to be the West’s only hope as the Turks and Mongols closed in.

There was a longstanding tradition that colonies of long-lost forgotten Christians were in India. Some said the Magi had gone back to Persia and India after seeing Jesus in Bethlehem, and that belief began there. There’s a firmer tradition that Jesus’ disciple Thomas sailed to the east, including a set of Jewish colonies on the southwest coast of India. The churches there all remember St. Thomas as their founder, and some accounts recall the names of his first converts among the Brahmins. Their liturgy has always been in Syriac, rather than Greek or Latin. They may be the original core of the legend of a lost Christian nation in the east.

In the 400s, followers of Bishop Nestorius left Constantinople after the Council of Chalcedon declared their ideas to be heresy. Like Thomas, they went eastward. Christians in Persia wanted to be separate from the Roman-Byzantine church because they were being accused of disloyalty in Persia. When Nestorian priests came as banned refugees, they were welcomed. From Persia, Nestorian missionaries went further east, including south to the coastal Indian churches. Further, we know that in Genghis Khan’s time, some of his neighbor tribes were Nestorian Christians. All of the Great Khan’s sons married Christians!

But the stories of the lost King Prester John began before the time of Genghis Khan and persisted long after. “Prester” seems to be a corruption of Presbyter, or Elder. He was a king, but he was also a bishop and, additionally, a descendant of the Magi.

Bishop Otto of Friesing, who accompanied King Conrad of Germany on the Second Crusade, believed that Prester John had almost joined them. He was King of India, you see, and he had beaten the Muslim Persians solidly just before the Crusade began. His army came as far as the Tigris River to help win back Edessa, but there he met with an unexpected check. Otto says that someone told him the river would freeze so that his army could ride across it. Prester John’s army rode north to find the ice, but the Tigris never freezes over. They waited until another summer had passed and winter came again, but there was still no ice. His army gradually drifted away, and Prester John had to turn for home without ever seeing Jerusalem.

Bishop Otto said he heard this story from a Syrian bishop in Rome. The actual story was probably about a Chinese army’s defeat of Iranian Muslims near Samarkand. You can see how the mistake was made, if they were looking so eagerly for an Eastern Christian king. More about this battle in the next entry.

In 1165 a letter that Prester John supposedly sent to Emperor Manuel Comnenos began circulating around Europe. It was copied and recopied. They took it seriously enough that in 1177, the Pope sent a messenger eastward to find Prester John and give him a reply letter. The messenger never came back.

The much-copied letter tells us that Prester John, King of India, has 72 kings who pay tribute to him. Most of them are pagan, he says, but there are also ten tribes of Israel (the Lost Tribes found!). He provides a list of the amazing animals that live in India, starting with elephants and dromedaries, but quickly passing to crocodiles, red and white lions, white bears, silent grasshoppers, gryphons, pygmies, giants, and one-eyed and horned men. (I’m most curious about those silent grasshoppers.)

In one area of Prester John’s India, no venomous animals can live, while in another, a river coming from Paradise washes gemstones up on its shores. But in the region where pepper trees grow, the snake infestation is so severe that the only way to harvest the pepper is to burn down the forest. That way, the only snakes that survive are the ones who hid in caves, but the rest are piled into big heaps by the harvesters, who are now free to pick the pepper.

The rest of the letter goes on in that way: every legend of the far-off lands makes its way into the list. There are rivers flowing with gemstones (probably pearls), and local children learn to stay underwater for a long time to find them. There are worms called salamanders, who live in fire, and from them, women spin silk. The people live in unimaginable wealth and moral virtue. On and on. There’s just one problem, it turns out: they don’t have many good horses. Other than that, it’s pure Paradise.

As long as that letter circulated, Europeans were sure that Prester John’s army would show up soon. He would sack Baghdad and bring his army from the east, and then finally the Crusades would be successful.

In 1221, a Fifth Crusader brought back word that Prester John’s grandson King David had defeated the Muslims and was on his way. That rumor didn’t pan out; it was actually the Mongols who were on their way, and they did not AT ALL intend to rebuild Jerusalem. In 1306, Ethiopians visited Europe, and rumor spread that finally, at last, Prester John’s kingdom had been located. It was just in Africa, not India.

So for several centuries, Europeans continued to believe that Prester John ruled in Africa, and in some legends, his kingdom was not only Christian but specifically white. Explorers might any day come around the corner of a mountain and find a native white tribe with churches! When the legend finally died out as supposed fact, it lived on in myth. Shakespeare mentions Prester John, and John Buchan wrote an adventure invoking his legend in 1910. The legend was useful for feeling better about colonizing Africa. What was Rhodesia but a sort of modern-day Prester John’s kingdom?

The Second Crusade consisted mainly of a huge expeditionary force led by the French King Louis VII and the German King Conrad III. Its story is one of great initial promise and high theater, ending in disappointment and disaster. It was also was the first time that reigning monarchs went on Crusade.

Pope Eugene III came to Paris, where Louis staged a dramatic Mass at the Cathedral of St. Denis. Louis prostrated himself on the floor before the Saint, committing himself to holy war, then immediately set out. Louis was not really a warrior; he had been the second son, devoted to the church, then suddenly called to rule. In his short reign, he had already been forced to lead knights against rebels, but he came away from that experience with a deep sense of guilt, perhaps because he had burnt down a church with a thousand people sheltered inside. His chief purpose was pilgrimage, and his appointed regent was the Abbot who had mentored him, rather than a nobleman or relative. Normally, the regent would be the Queen, but in this case, his wife chose to come along on the adventure.

The German army set out first, with a planned time lag to allow the countryside to recover from provisioning them before the French army passed through. In this way, both came to Constantinople. It was not peaceful; the German army had clashed with Byzantine forces outside the city, even though the Emperor and King were brothers in law.

Both the German and French armies were decimated by Turkish attacks as they crossed the Anatolian plateau. It was so intense that in one assault, King Louis had to climb a cliff, holding onto tree roots while using his sword as rear guard. Both kings arrived in Antioch alive, but their armies were very badly reduced.

The obvious next step was to proceed to Edessa, since its capture by Turks was the casus belli. But they didn’t do that. King Louis wanted to see Jerusalem first, and there, the high council met and chose to attack…Damascus.

The attack on Damascus was foolish in both political and military terms. It was a miserable failure, as well. The allied forces of Zengi’s son Nur ad-Din and the ruler of Damascus pushed back the remnants of the Crusader forces. Had they attacked Edessa, it might have worked, because Damascus probably would have sat on the sidelines.

And that’s the crucial point: this was the first time Europeans faced a united Turkish force. They had underestimated how much difference it would make. The Crusader lords criticized how the European kings had bungled the siege, while the Europeans said the Crusaders had given up too quickly.

When King Conrad went down to Ascalon to see if he could take it, the other kings did not join him. Leaving many captured noblemen to be ransomed by their families as possible, a bitter Conrad went back to Germany.

King Louis and Queen Eleanor went home in separate ships and soon after, they divorced (via an annulment of the “oops I guess we were cousins” kind). More about them next.

Bernard of Clairvaux felt terrible about having encouraged this mess in the first place; among his writings is a formal apology to the Pope.

Edessa never recovered. Nur ad-Din massacred the Christian population of the city, leaving it largely empty. It dwindled in economic importance and eventually became a ruin.