R1.1 Transformation in North Africa and the Middle East (750–1291)

Between 750 and 1291 the Middle East and North Africa saw the rise and slow break-up of the Abbasid caliphate, one of the largest and richest states of the medieval world, and two centuries of war with crusaders from Latin Europe. These developments shaped the political map of the region, the relationship between rulers and Islamic religious scholars, and later memories of conflict between Islam and the West.

The overview timeline shows the two halves of the study. For about a century after 750 the Abbasid caliphs ruled most of the Muslim world from Iraq. After the 860s their power broke up, and by 1095, when the crusading movement began, the region was divided between rival Turkish rulers and the Fatimid caliphs of Egypt. The Crusades then encouraged the reunification of Syria and Egypt that ended them.

The Umayyad caliphate and its crisis, c. 717–747

The caliphate was the Islamic state led by a caliph (in Arabic khalifa, "successor" or "deputy"), who claimed to lead the whole Muslim community after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632. From 661 the caliphs came from the Umayyad family of Mecca and ruled from Damascus in Syria. By the 720s the Umayyad caliphate stretched from Spain and Morocco to the borders of India and China.

An Arab military empire

Umayyad power rested on Arab tribal armies settled in garrison cities such as Kufa and Basra in Iraq and Merv in Khurasan (north-eastern Iran and modern Turkmenistan and Afghanistan). Arab soldiers drew salaries from the conquered lands, and the Syrian army, loyal to the dynasty, kept order across the empire.

Non-Arabs who converted to Islam were attached to Arab tribes as clients, or mawali. In many provinces they continued to pay the land tax and sometimes the poll tax, the jizya, that non-Muslims paid, and they received lower pay or none when they fought. Their resentment was strongest in Khurasan and Iraq, where most of them lived. The caliph Umar II (717–720) tried to treat converts more equally, but his successors reversed much of his reform because the treasury needed the revenue.

Religious opposition

Many Muslims also questioned whether the Umayyads had any right to rule. Pious critics accused them of turning the caliphate into worldly kingship (mulk). The Shi’a, or "party" of Ali, believed that leadership belonged to the descendants of Ali, the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, and mourned his son Husayn, killed by an Umayyad army at Karbala in 680. The Kharijites rejected any dynastic claim and rebelled repeatedly. All these groups shared a hope that a member of the Prophet’s family would restore just rule.

The third fitna, 744–750

In 744 a group of Umayyad princes murdered the caliph al-Walid II, and the dynasty fell into civil war, the third fitna. The Syrian army itself split between two tribal factions, the Qays and the Yaman, whose feuds had grown under earlier caliphs. Marwan II (744–750), backed by the Qays, won the war but had to fight rebels in Syria and Iraq for years. He moved his capital from Damascus to Harran in northern Mesopotamia, far from the eastern provinces where the decisive challenge would come.

The Abbasid revolution, 747–750

The Abbasids descended from al-Abbas, an uncle of the Prophet. In the 740s they lived quietly at Humayma, in what is now southern Jordan, while their agents ran a secret mission, the da’wa, from Kufa. They inherited this network from the Hashimiyya, a movement that had worked since about 718 for rule by the Prophet’s family, the house of Hashim.

The da’wa in Khurasan

Abbasid agents chose Khurasan as their base. It was distant from Syria, its Arab settlers had married into local families and resented orders from Damascus, and its many mawali wanted equal status. The agents preached for "the chosen one (al-rida) from the family of Muhammad", without naming him. Shi’a supporters of Ali’s descendants could believe that the chosen one would be an Alid, while the leaders intended an Abbasid. Black banners and clothing, linked in popular belief with the coming of a saviour from the east, became the movement’s symbol.

Abu Muslim and the Khurasani army

In 745 the Abbasid leader Ibrahim sent a young freedman of uncertain origin, Abu Muslim, to Khurasan. In June 747 he raised the black banners in villages near Merv and built an army from Arab settlers and Iranian converts, who were enrolled on equal terms by village rather than by tribe. He exploited feuds among the province’s Arab tribes, took Merv and drove out the Umayyad governor.

Abu Muslim’s general Qahtaba ibn Shabib then led the army west through Iran, defeating Umayyad forces near Tus, at Gurgan and at Nahavand. Qahtaba drowned during a battle on the Euphrates in 749, but his son took Kufa. In November 749 Abu al-Abbas, a brother of the dead Ibrahim, was proclaimed caliph in the Kufa mosque. He took the title al-Saffah. The Alid supporters who had expected one of Ali’s descendants were sidelined, and the movement’s chief organiser in Kufa, Abu Salama, who had looked for an Alid candidate, was killed the next year.

The Zab and the end of the Umayyads

In January 750 Marwan II met the Abbasid army on the Great Zab river, a tributary of the Tigris in northern Iraq. His Syrian army, divided and tired after years of civil war, broke. Marwan fled to Egypt, where he was killed in August 750. Al-Saffah’s uncle Abdallah ibn Ali invited the surviving Umayyad princes to a banquet at Abu Futrus in Palestine and had them killed.

One prince, Abd al-Rahman, escaped across North Africa to Spain, where he took power in Córdoba in 756. Al-Andalus, as Muslim Spain was called, never accepted Abbasid rule, and it became the first province lost to the new dynasty.

The factors diagram groups the reasons for the Abbasid victory. Umayyad weaknesses made a revolt possible, and the secret da’wa gave discontent a single direction. The decisive element was military. The Khurasani army was a new kind of force, loyal to the movement and not to a tribe, and it defeated Umayyad armies that were divided by the fitna.

Consolidation under al-Mansur, 754–775

Al-Saffah died in 754 and was succeeded by his brother Abu Ja’far, who took the title al-Mansur ("the victorious"). Most historians regard al-Mansur as the real founder of the Abbasid state, because he removed every rival who could challenge the dynasty and built its capital and administration.

Removing rivals

• Family. His uncle Abdallah ibn Ali, victor of the Zab, claimed the caliphate in 754. Al-Mansur sent Abu Muslim against him, and Abdallah was defeated near Nisibis.

• The revolution’s own hero. Abu Muslim commanded the loyalty of Khurasan and was too powerful to trust. In 755 al-Mansur summoned him to court and had him killed. Revolts in his name followed in Khurasan, but the Khurasani army stayed loyal to the dynasty.

• The Alids. In 762 Muhammad al-Nafs al-Zakiyya ("the Pure Soul"), a descendant of Ali’s son Hasan, rebelled in Medina, and his brother Ibrahim rose in Basra. Both were defeated and killed by early 763. The Shi’a who had supported the da’wa now knew that the "chosen one" would never be an Alid.

The Abbasids had come to power with Shi’a support and then turned against Ali’s descendants. From this point the Abbasid caliphs presented themselves as leaders of the whole community, and Shi’a opposition became a lasting challenge to their legitimacy.

The foundation of Baghdad, 762

In 762 al-Mansur began building a new capital on the west bank of the Tigris, close to where the Tigris and the Euphrates come nearest to each other and about 35 km from Ctesiphon, the old capital of the Sasanian Persian empire. He called it Madinat al-Salam, the "City of Peace", but it kept the name of the village on its site, Baghdad. The core was a round walled city a little over 2 km across, with four gates named after the regions they faced (Kufa, Basra, Syria and Khurasan) and the caliph’s palace and mosque at the centre. Markets, barracks and suburbs soon spread outside the walls and across the river.

The two great rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, flow along its borders, so that goods and provisions come to it by land and by water with such ease that every object of trade which can be exported from the east or west, whether from Islamic or non-Islamic lands, makes its way there.

Al-Ya’qubi, Kitab al-Buldan (The Book of Countries), c. 890 (translated by Matthew S. Gordon and others, 2018). Al-Ya’qubi was a geographer and official who had lived in Baghdad and wrote in praise of the Abbasid capital, so the passage carries civic pride. Its emphasis on rivers and trade is supported by other evidence: Iraq’s irrigated land fed the city, and the rivers linked it to the Persian Gulf and to Syria.

From Syria to Iraq: what changed

The move to Baghdad had large consequences. The caliphate’s centre of gravity shifted east, away from the Mediterranean and Byzantium and towards Iran, the Gulf and the Indian Ocean. The Syrian Arab tribes lost their privileged place. Iranian administrators, many of them converts or the sons of converts, filled the government, and the court took on the ceremonial of the Sasanian kings: the caliph sat behind a curtain, visitors kissed the ground, and an executioner stood near the throne. The Abbasids called themselves "the blessed dynasty" (al-dawla al-mubaraka) and presented the caliph as God’s deputy on earth.

Government, economy and religion under the early Abbasids

The structure of government

The structure diagram shows how power flowed from the caliph. Day-to-day government lay with the vizier (wazir), who supervised the diwans, the departments that kept the army rolls, assessed and collected the land tax (kharaj) and wrote the caliph’s letters. The barid, a network of post stations and messengers inherited from the Sasanians and Umayyads, carried orders and sent the caliph confidential reports on governors, judges and prices.

Provincial governors (amirs) commanded troops and collected taxes, but Baghdad tried to keep finance and justice partly separate from them. Judges, or qadis, appointed by the caliph, applied Islamic law in each city. The army was at first made up of the Khurasanis and their sons, known as the abna’ al-dawla ("sons of the dynasty"), who were settled in Baghdad’s northern suburbs.

From the 750s until 803 members of the Barmakid family held high office, and under Harun al-Rashid they were the most powerful officials in the empire. They were descended from a Buddhist priestly family of Balkh in Afghanistan. Khalid ibn Barmak served al-Saffah and al-Mansur; his son Yahya was tutor and then vizier to Harun al-Rashid, and Yahya’s sons held governorships and controlled the treasury. The Barmakids patronised poets, scholars and translators and were famous for their generosity.

Economic development

Abbasid rule created a single economic zone from the borders of Spain to Central Asia, with one religion of government, Arabic as a common language of business and law, and gold dinars and silver dirhams accepted everywhere. Merchants could travel and trade across this area under one legal system.

• Agriculture. The irrigated plain of southern Iraq, the Sawad, was the richest tax base of the empire. Canals were repaired and extended, and crops such as rice, sugar cane, citrus fruits and cotton spread westwards from India and Iran across the Islamic world.

• Trade. Baghdad sat at the junction of routes to the Gulf ports of Basra and Siraf, from which ships sailed to India, South-East Asia and China, and of overland routes to Syria, Egypt and Central Asia.

• Paper. Papermaking, learned in Samarkand in Central Asia, reached Baghdad, where a paper mill is reported in the 790s under the Barmakids. Paper was cheaper than parchment or papyrus, and it made a large bureaucracy, a book trade and the translation movement easier.

• Finance. Merchants used credit instruments such as the sakk (a written order to pay, the origin of the word "cheque") and the suftaja (a bill of exchange paid in another city), so that cash did not have to be carried across the empire.

Growth had a social cost. The kharaj fell heavily on peasants, and much wealth rested on the labour of enslaved people. In the salt marshes of southern Iraq, thousands of East Africans, known as the Zanj, were forced to clear salt crusts from the land so that it could be farmed. Their revolt of 869–883, led by Ali ibn Muhammad, captured Basra in 871 and took fourteen years to crush. It is one reason the economy of southern Iraq declined in the later ninth century.

Religion and the ulama

The Abbasids claimed religious authority as the Prophet’s family, but in practice the shaping of Islamic law passed to scholars, the ulama. These men studied the Qur’an and the reports of the Prophet’s words and deeds (hadith), taught in mosques and served as judges. The four Sunni schools of law (madhhabs) took shape in this period, each named after an early scholar.

The table of the four schools shows that Islamic law was developed by independent scholars across the empire, not issued by the caliph. The ulama drew their authority from learning and public respect, which made them a check on rulers.

The Mihna, 833–c. 848

The caliph al-Ma’mun tried to reverse this. In 833 he ordered the Mihna, an inquisition in which judges and leading scholars had to declare that the Qur’an was created, a doctrine of the rationalist theologians known as the Mu’tazila. Those who held that the Qur’an was the uncreated word of God could lose office or be imprisoned. Most scholars gave way, but Ahmad ibn Hanbal refused and was flogged under al-Ma’mun’s successor al-Mu’tasim. The caliph al-Mutawakkil abandoned the policy from about 848.

The failure of the Mihna was a turning point. It showed that the caliph could not define belief against the scholars, and Ibn Hanbal became a hero of traditionalist Sunni Islam. Religious authority remained with the ulama, which helped Sunni Islam survive later, when caliphs lost their political power.

Harun al-Rashid and al-Ma’mun: the height of Abbasid power

Harun al-Rashid, 786–809

Harun al-Rashid became caliph in 786, aged about twenty, after the short reign of his brother al-Hadi. His reign is remembered, above all through the later stories of The Thousand and One Nights, as the golden age of Baghdad. The Barmakids ran the government for most of it, and the revenues of the empire paid for a lavish court and generous patronage.

• Prestige and diplomacy. Embassies passed between Harun and Charlemagne, king of the Franks, who shared his hostility to Byzantium and to the Umayyads of Córdoba. Frankish annals record the arrival at Aachen in 802 of an elephant, Abul-Abbas, sent by Harun.

• War with Byzantium. Harun led raids into Anatolia and organised the frontier zone (the thughur) with fortified towns. In 806 he took Heraclea in Cappadocia, and the emperor Nikephoros I agreed to pay tribute.

• The fall of the Barmakids. In January 803 Harun had Ja’far al-Barmaki executed and imprisoned his father Yahya and brother al-Fadl. The reasons are unclear: the sources tell romantic stories, but the family’s wealth and control of the treasury probably made them seem a threat to the caliph.

• Distance from Baghdad. From 796 Harun lived mainly at Raqqa on the Euphrates, nearer the Byzantine frontier. He died at Tus in Khurasan in 809 while travelling to put down a rebellion there.

Harun’s most damaging decision concerned the succession. In 802 he made his sons swear, in documents hung in the Ka’ba at Mecca, that al-Amin would be caliph in Baghdad and that al-Ma’mun would succeed him, governing Khurasan with wide powers in the meantime. Dividing authority between two brothers with their own armies and courts invited conflict.

The civil war, 811–813

In 810 al-Amin named his own son as heir in place of al-Ma’mun. War broke out in 811. Al-Ma’mun’s general Tahir ibn al-Husayn defeated al-Amin’s much larger army near Rayy and advanced on Baghdad, which was besieged for more than a year. Parts of the city were destroyed, and the poor of Baghdad fought the besiegers in street battles. In September 813 al-Amin was captured and killed.

The civil war, sometimes called the fourth fitna, had lasting effects. A caliph had been killed by the army of another caliph, which damaged the office. The old Baghdad army, the abna’, had been defeated by Khurasanis, and the caliphs would look for new soldiers whose loyalty depended on them alone.

Al-Ma’mun, 813–833

Al-Ma’mun ruled from Merv for five years after his victory. In 817 he named Ali al-Rida, a descendant of Ali and the eighth imam of the Twelver Shi’a, as his heir, and changed the dynasty’s colour from black to the green associated with the Prophet’s family. The decision may have aimed to reconcile Shi’a Muslims, or to strengthen al-Ma’mun’s own claim to religious leadership. Baghdad rebelled and proclaimed his uncle Ibrahim ibn al-Mahdi caliph. Ali al-Rida died suddenly in 818, and in 819 al-Ma’mun returned to Baghdad and restored the black banners.

Al-Ma’mun’s reign shows both the strength of the caliphate and the forces that would weaken it.

• Learning. He paid for translations, sent missions to Byzantium to look for Greek manuscripts and supported astronomers who built observatories in Baghdad and Damascus and measured the length of a degree of latitude.

• Religious authority. The Mihna of 833 was his attempt to make the caliph the final judge of doctrine; it failed under his successors.

• Delegation. In 821 he made Tahir governor of Khurasan. Tahir’s family, the Tahirids, held the province by inheritance until 873 while still sending revenue to Baghdad and serving the caliph. It was an early example of the hereditary governorships that later broke the empire apart.

• Frontier war. He died in 833 near Tarsus while campaigning against Byzantium.

The comparison of the two reigns shows why historians often treat al-Ma’mun’s reign as the high point of Abbasid intellectual life and Harun’s as the high point of wealth and prestige. Both reigns also contained the causes of later weakness: a disputed succession under Harun, and under al-Ma’mun a quarrel with the ulama and the first hereditary provinces.

The translation movement and the "Golden Age"

Between the late eighth and the tenth centuries, scholars in Baghdad translated into Arabic most of the Greek scientific and philosophical works then available, together with Persian and Sanskrit texts. This translation movement began under al-Mansur, who wanted works on astrology and astronomy, and continued for two centuries with the support of caliphs, viziers, generals and wealthy families.

Many translators were Christians who knew Syriac and Greek. The most famous, Hunayn ibn Ishaq (809–873), a Nestorian Christian physician, translated most of the medical works of Galen and developed careful methods of comparing manuscripts. The palace library, known as the House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikma), stored and copied these texts.

The table of scholars shows the range of this work and its spread beyond Baghdad. By the tenth century the most important patrons were often regional dynasties, such as the Samanids in Bukhara and the Buyids in Iran and Iraq. The Golden Age of learning therefore continued while the caliph’s political power declined.

Literature also flourished. Adab, the polished prose expected of educated officials, combined Arabic, Persian and Greek material. Al-Jahiz wrote witty essays on everything from misers to animals. The stories later gathered as The Thousand and One Nights drew on Persian, Indian and Arabic sources, and their picture of Harun’s Baghdad is legend more than history.

North Africa and Egypt under the Abbasids

The western provinces were the first to slip out of Abbasid control. They were far from Baghdad, many of their Berber inhabitants had joined Kharijite revolts against Arab rule in the 740s, and they were difficult to reach with armies from Iraq.

The table of western dynasties shows that by 800 the Abbasids directly ruled nothing west of Egypt. Harun’s grant of Ifriqiya to Ibrahim ibn al-Aghlab in 800 was a practical choice: in return for an annual tribute and recognition of the caliph in Friday prayers, a local family would defend the province. The Aghlabids conquered Sicily from Byzantium, beginning in 827, and built the Great Mosque of Kairouan in its present form.

Egypt mattered more, because its grain and taxes were among the largest in the empire. Ahmad ibn Tulun, sent there as a governor in 868, built his own army of Turkish and African slave soldiers and a new quarter with a great mosque, and occupied Syria in 878. Baghdad recovered Egypt in 905, but lost it again to the Ikhshidids and then, permanently, to the Fatimids in 969.

The breakdown of Abbasid power, 833–945

Turkish soldiers and the move to Samarra

Al-Ma’mun’s brother and successor al-Mu’tasim (833–842) built a new army of Turkish slave soldiers, bought or captured in Central Asia and trained as horse archers. These ghilman (singular ghulam, "youth" or "servant") had no ties to any tribe or region and were expected to be loyal to the caliph alone. When they clashed with the people of Baghdad, al-Mu’tasim moved the court in 836 to a new palace city, Samarra, about 125 km up the Tigris. Samarra remained the capital until 892.

The new army made the caliph strong for a time; al-Mu’tasim sacked the Byzantine city of Amorium in 838. But the Turkish commanders soon controlled the court. In December 861 Turkish officers murdered the caliph al-Mutawakkil, with the support of his son. In the decade that followed, the "Anarchy at Samarra", three more caliphs were deposed and killed, while soldiers whose pay was in arrears fought over the treasury.

Provincial dynasties

As the centre weakened, governors turned their provinces into hereditary states. Some still recognised the caliph in Friday prayers and on coins and sent occasional tribute; others ignored him.

The table of eastern dynasties shows the same pattern as in the west. Distance, slow communications and the need for strong local defence made hereditary rule practical, and once a family held a province’s army and taxes, Baghdad could only bargain with it. Each grant of autonomy reduced the revenue that paid the caliph’s soldiers, which made the caliph more dependent on whichever commander controlled them.

Economic crisis and revolt

The tax base of Iraq shrank. Fighting damaged the canals of the Sawad, salinisation lowered yields, and the Zanj revolt of 869–883 devastated southern Iraq. From the 900s the Qarmatians, a radical Isma’ili Shi’i movement based in eastern Arabia, raided Iraq and attacked pilgrim caravans. In 930 they sacked Mecca and carried off the Black Stone of the Ka’ba, which they returned only in 951. A caliph who could not protect the pilgrimage lost prestige as well as revenue.

Unable to pay salaries in cash, caliphs and later military rulers assigned soldiers the right to collect taxes from particular districts. This grant, the iqta, spread widely under the Buyids. It kept armies paid but gave soldiers an interest in squeezing peasants and little interest in maintaining irrigation, and it moved control of the land further from the central government.

Abroad, the Byzantine Empire went on the offensive. Under the generals and emperors Nikephoros Phokas and John Tzimiskes, Byzantium took Crete (961), sacked Aleppo (962) and recaptured Antioch (969). The caliph, who had once sent armies across Anatolia, could do nothing to defend the frontier.

Three caliphates: the Fatimid challenge

The most serious challenge was religious. The Fatimids were Isma’ili Shi’a who claimed descent from Fatima and Ali and believed that their imam was the rightful leader of all Muslims. With the support of the Kutama Berbers, their leader Ubayd Allah overthrew the Aghlabids and proclaimed himself caliph in Ifriqiya in 909, taking the title al-Mahdi. In 969 the Fatimid general Jawhar conquered Egypt and founded a new capital, Cairo (al-Qahira, "the victorious"), with the mosque of al-Azhar. The Fatimids sent missionaries across the Islamic world and at their height ruled Egypt, Syria, the Hijaz with Mecca and Medina, and Sicily.

In 929 the Umayyad ruler of Córdoba, Abd al-Rahman III, also took the title of caliph, partly to answer the Fatimid claim. By the mid-tenth century three rulers called themselves caliph: in Baghdad, in North Africa and Egypt, and in Spain. The Abbasid claim to lead the whole Muslim community had become one claim among several.

The Buyids take Baghdad, 945

In 945 the Buyids, a family of soldiers from Daylam in the mountains south of the Caspian Sea, entered Baghdad. Their leader Mu’izz al-Dawla took the title of amir al-umara ("commander of commanders"), and in 946 he had the caliph al-Mustakfi blinded and deposed. The Buyids were Shi’a, but they kept a Sunni Abbasid caliph because his recognition gave their rule legitimacy among the Sunni majority. For the next century the caliph appointed judges and led prayers but had no army and no say in government.

The chain from 836 to 1258 shows that the Abbasid caliphate lost its political power long before it was destroyed. By 945 the caliph had become a figurehead, and the institution survived because its religious and symbolic authority was useful to the soldiers who held real power.

The Seljuks and the late caliphate, 1055–1258

The Seljuks were a family of Oghuz Turks from the steppes east of the Caspian who had converted to Sunni Islam. Their tribesmen conquered Khurasan in 1040 and moved west into Iran. In 1055 their leader Tughril Beg entered Baghdad, ended Buyid rule and was proclaimed sultan ("authority") by the caliph al-Qa’im.

The Seljuk sultans presented themselves as defenders of the Sunni caliphate against the Shi’i Fatimids and Buyids. Under Alp Arslan (1063–1072) and Malik Shah (1072–1092) they ruled from Central Asia to Syria. In August 1071 Alp Arslan defeated and captured the Byzantine emperor Romanos IV Diogenes at Manzikert in eastern Anatolia. The battle opened Anatolia to Turkish settlement, and within a decade Turkish rulers controlled most of it, including Nicaea, close to Constantinople.

The great Persian vizier of Alp Arslan and Malik Shah, Nizam al-Mulk, organised the sultanate. He extended the iqta system to pay the Turkish army and founded madrasas, colleges of Islamic law, in Baghdad (the Nizamiyya, opened in 1067) and other cities. The madrasas trained Sunni scholars and officials and helped spread a common Sunni culture across the Seljuk lands. His Siyasatnama (Book of Government), written for Malik Shah around 1091, advised the sultan on how to rule justly and warned against Shi’i "heretics".

The Seljuk system rested on a few strong individuals. In 1092 Nizam al-Mulk was murdered, traditionally by an agent of the Nizari Isma’ilis, known in Europe as the Assassins, and Malik Shah died a few weeks later. His sons and brothers fought over the succession, and Syria split between rival Turkish princes. This was the situation the First Crusade found in 1097.

After the Seljuk sultanate in Iraq declined, the caliphs briefly recovered real power. Al-Nasir (1180–1225) built up an army, ruled Iraq directly and tried to make the caliph the centre of the Muslim world again, using brotherhoods (futuwwa) to bind princes to him. His revival was limited to Iraq and did not survive the next threat from the east.

The Mongols and the end of the Baghdad caliphate, 1219–1260

In 1219–1221 the Mongol armies of Chinggis Khan destroyed the empire of the Khwarazm-shahs in Central Asia and Iran. The cities of Bukhara, Samarkand, Merv and Nishapur were sacked, and contemporaries described killing on a scale they had never known.

I say, therefore, that this thing involves the description of the greatest catastrophe and the most dire calamity (of the like of which days and nights are innocent) which befell all men generally, and the Muslims in particular; so that, should one say that the world, since God Almighty created Adam until now, has not been afflicted with the like thereof, he would but speak the truth.

Ibn al-Athir, Al-Kamil fi’l-Ta’rikh (The Complete History), on the Mongol invasions of 1220–1221, written in the 1220s (translated by E. G. Browne). Ibn al-Athir was a scholar of Mosul who had lived through the Crusades and wrote as a Muslim historian of the whole Islamic world. The passage is a lament, shaped by religious language, and it does not give reliable numbers; its value is as evidence of how Muslims of the time understood the invasions, as a disaster greater than anything the Franks had done.

In 1256 Chinggis Khan’s grandson Hülegü led a new army west. He destroyed the Assassin castles in Iran and then demanded the surrender of Baghdad. The last Abbasid caliph in Baghdad, al-Musta’sim, refused and failed to raise an effective army. The Mongols besieged the city from late January 1258; it surrendered on 10 February, and the caliph was executed days later. The city was sacked for about a week. Accounts written afterwards give death tolls ranging from tens of thousands to many hundreds of thousands; none is reliable, but the killing and destruction were on a very large scale.

Hülegü’s descendants ruled Iran and Iraq as the Ilkhanate. When his army moved into Syria in 1260, the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt, under the sultan Qutuz and the general Baybars, defeated a Mongol force at Ayn Jalut in Palestine on 3 September 1260. The battle stopped the Mongol advance at the edge of Syria. In 1261 Baybars, now sultan, invited a surviving member of the Abbasid family to Cairo and installed him as caliph. Shadow Abbasid caliphs lived in Cairo under the Mamluks until the Ottoman conquest of 1517, with religious prestige and no power.

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Why did Abbasid rule collapse, and what were its effects?

The factors diagram groups the causes of the collapse. Historians usually weigh them in two ways. The first is internal against external: the Turkish soldiers, the provincial dynasties, the Shi’i challenges and the fiscal crisis were internal, and they had reduced the caliph to a figurehead by 945, more than three centuries before the Mongols. The second is how the causes reinforced one another: lost provinces meant lost revenue, lost revenue meant unpaid soldiers and iqta grants, and unpaid soldiers made and unmade caliphs.

Many medieval Muslim writers explained the decline in moral terms, as the result of luxury and injustice. In the fourteenth century the North African historian Ibn Khaldun offered a more general theory: dynasties rise on the group solidarity (asabiyya) of tough, often nomadic peoples, grow soft and divided in the cities, and are replaced by new groups with stronger solidarity, usually within about three generations. The Abbasid story, with its Khurasanis, Turks, Buyids, Seljuks and Mongols, fits his model well, though modern historians stress economic and military causes more than character.

Regional impact

• Iraq and Baghdad. Baghdad, which had perhaps several hundred thousand inhabitants at its height, declined steadily from the tenth century and above all after 1258. Iraq became a frontier province of the Ilkhanate, and its irrigation system was not restored.

• Egypt and Cairo. Cairo replaced Baghdad as the greatest city of the Arabic-speaking world, first under the Fatimids and then under the Ayyubids and Mamluks. From 1261 it was also the seat of the caliphs.

• Iran. Persian language and culture revived under the Samanids and later dynasties, and Persian became a second language of Islamic literature and government.

• The Maghreb. North Africa went its own way. After the Fatimids moved to Cairo in 973, their Zirid governors in Ifriqiya broke away in the 1040s; Arab tribes from Egypt, the Banu Hilal, then overran much of the countryside. Two Berber reform movements built empires in Morocco and Spain: the Almoravids (c. 1040–1147), who recognised the Abbasid caliph in name, and the Almohads (1121–1269), whose rulers called themselves caliphs.

• Religion. The loss of caliphal power did not weaken Sunni Islam. The ulama, the law schools and the madrasas provided religious authority that did not depend on any ruler.

Why did the Crusades begin?

A crusade was a war that the pope declared to be holy, whose participants took a public vow, marked by a cloth cross sewn on their clothes, and received spiritual rewards. The first and most important crusades aimed to win and then defend Jerusalem and the holy places of Christianity. To explain why the crusading movement began in 1095, historians look both at Latin Europe, where the crusaders came from, and at the Middle East, which explains where they could succeed.

Religious causes

In the second half of the eleventh century a reform movement transformed the Latin Church. Reforming popes, above all Gregory VII (1073–1085), fought simony and clerical marriage and claimed authority over kings and emperors, which led to the Investiture Contest with the German emperor. They also tried to control the violence of knights: the Peace of God movement protected clergy, peasants and Church property, and reformers began to describe war against the enemies of the Church as a pious act.

Pilgrimage to Jerusalem was a familiar form of penance. Large groups travelled east in the eleventh century, and some were attacked on the way; in 1064–1065 a great German pilgrimage was attacked near Ramla. The memory of 1009, when the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim ordered the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built over the place where Christians believed Christ was buried, still circulated, although the church had since been rebuilt with Byzantine help.

Pope Urban II combined these ideas. Fighting to free Jerusalem would be a penitential pilgrimage, and those who took part with the right intention would receive the remission of the penance due for their sins, a grant later called an indulgence. Many knights feared for their souls because their way of life involved violence, and the crusade offered them a way to save them through fighting.

Political causes

The immediate political cause came from Byzantium. After Manzikert (1071), Turkish rulers took most of Anatolia. The emperor Alexios I Komnenos (1081–1118) had begun to recover, and in March 1095 his envoys at the Council of Piacenza asked the pope for western soldiers. Alexios wanted mercenaries under his command, not an independent army.

Urban had his own aims. Aiding the eastern Christians might heal the schism of 1054 between the Latin and Greek Churches and would show the pope, not the German emperor, as the leader of Latin Christendom. Christians had already fought successful wars against Muslims at the edges of Europe: Alfonso VI of Castile took Toledo in 1085, and Norman knights completed the conquest of Muslim Sicily in 1091.

The speech at Clermont, 27 November 1095

At the end of a church council at Clermont in central France, Urban II preached to a crowd of clergy and knights. No text of his speech survives. Five chroniclers later wrote versions of it, and they differ, though all agree that he called for an armed expedition to help eastern Christians and offered spiritual rewards. The version by Robert the Monk adds a social argument.

Let none of your possessions detain you, no solicitude for your family affairs, since this land which you inhabit, shut in on all sides by the seas and surrounded by the mountain peaks, is too narrow for your large population; nor does it abound in wealth; and it furnishes scarcely food enough for its cultivators. Hence it is that you murder one another, that you wage war, and that frequently you perish by mutual wounds.

Robert the Monk, Historia Hierosolymitana, c. 1107, his version of Urban II’s speech at Clermont (translated by Dana C. Munro, 1895). Robert, a French monk who may have heard the speech, wrote about twelve years later, after the crusade had taken Jerusalem, and he shaped the speech to explain and celebrate a success. The passage shows that some contemporaries linked crusading to overcrowding and violence at home, but it is a chronicler’s reconstruction, not Urban’s own words.

Economic and social causes

Older explanations stressed material motives: population growth in western Europe, land hunger, younger sons excluded from inheritance, and the commercial ambitions of Italian cities. Genoa, Pisa and later Venice did profit, by supplying the crusaders and gaining trading quarters in the ports they helped to take.

Research since the 1980s, above all by Jonathan Riley-Smith, has weakened the material explanation for the knights. Charters show that crusaders often sold or mortgaged land to pay for the journey, which could cost several times a knight’s annual income, and that whole families, including eldest sons, took the cross. Most crusaders returned home after 1099. Such behaviour fits religious devotion better than a search for land or loot, although hopes of reward and adventure were present too.

Conditions in the Middle East

The Muslim Near East in 1095 was divided. After the deaths of Nizam al-Mulk and Malik Shah in 1092, the Seljuk sultanate split between his heirs. In Syria the brothers Ridwan of Aleppo and Duqaq of Damascus were rivals, and other Turkish commanders, such as Kerbogha of Mosul, pursued their own interests. The Fatimid caliph al-Mustansir died in 1094, and a succession dispute split the Isma’ili movement. The Fatimids and the Seljuks were enemies, and in August 1098, while the crusaders were in Antioch, the Fatimids took Jerusalem from its Turkish rulers.

Muslim rulers did not at first see the crusaders as a new kind of enemy. Many took them for Byzantine mercenaries. The idea of jihad as a duty to fight for the faith existed in Islamic law but had little hold in Syria at the time. When the Damascus scholar al-Sulami preached a jihad against the Franks in 1105, he found little response from rulers.

The People’s Crusade and the Rhineland massacres

Before the main armies left, popular preachers such as Peter the Hermit raised large, poorly organised bands, known as the People’s Crusade, of ordinary people. In May and June 1096 some of these groups, led by local lords such as Count Emicho, attacked the Jewish communities of Speyer, Worms, Mainz and Cologne. Hebrew chronicles record at least 800 dead at Worms and about a thousand at Mainz, and others were forced to convert. These Rhineland massacres were condemned by many bishops, but they showed that crusading zeal could turn against non-Christians at home. The bands that reached Anatolia were destroyed by the Turks at Civetot in October 1096.

The First Crusade and the crusader states, 1096–1144

The main crusading armies left in the summer and autumn of 1096 under great lords: Godfrey of Bouillon, duke of Lower Lorraine, and his brother Baldwin of Boulogne; Raymond, count of Toulouse; Bohemond of Taranto, a Norman from southern Italy, and his nephew Tancred; Robert of Normandy; and Robert of Flanders. The papal legate Adhemar, bishop of Le Puy, represented Urban II. Perhaps 60,000–100,000 people set out, including non-combatants; historians’ estimates vary widely because the chroniclers’ numbers are unreliable.

The timeline of the First Crusade shows the stages of the campaign. At Constantinople most leaders swore to return former Byzantine lands to Alexios, and Byzantine troops helped at Nicaea. The crusaders then crossed Anatolia, defeated the Seljuk sultan Kilij Arslan at Dorylaeum and reached Antioch in October 1097.

Antioch and Jerusalem

The siege of Antioch lasted eight months, through a winter of hunger. The city fell on 3 June 1098, when a commander inside the walls let Bohemond’s men in. Days later the crusaders were themselves besieged by a large relief army under Kerbogha of Mosul. After the reported discovery of the Holy Lance, a relic said to have pierced Christ’s side, the crusaders attacked on 28 June 1098 and defeated Kerbogha, whose army was divided by quarrels between its emirs. Bohemond kept Antioch for himself, in breach of the oath to Alexios, which soured relations with Byzantium.

The army reached Jerusalem in June 1099 with perhaps 12,000–14,000 fighting men, of whom only about 1,300 were knights. Genoese sailors who had landed at Jaffa supplied timber for siege towers. On 15 July 1099 the crusaders broke into the city.

But these were small matters compared to what happened at the Temple of Solomon, a place where religious services are ordinarily chanted. … in the Temple and porch of Solomon, men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins. Indeed, it was a just and splendid judgment of God that this place should be filled with the blood of the unbelievers, since it had suffered so long from their blasphemies.

Raymond d’Aguilers, Historia Francorum qui ceperunt Iherusalem (History of the Franks who captured Jerusalem), written c. 1099–1101 (translated by August C. Krey, 1921). Raymond was a chaplain in the army of the count of Toulouse and an eyewitness of the siege. His image of blood "up to their knees and bridle reins" echoes the Book of Revelation (14:20), so it is a religious way of describing God’s judgement, not a measurement. The source is valuable for showing that participants saw the massacre as righteous.

The crusaders killed much of the Muslim population, including those who had taken refuge in the al-Aqsa mosque, and Jews who had gathered in a synagogue. The number of dead is disputed. Ibn al-Athir, writing more than a century later, gives over 70,000 in the al-Aqsa mosque alone, a figure most historians think much exaggerated. An Andalusian scholar, Abu Bakr ibn al-Arabi, who had recently lived in Jerusalem, gave 3,000 killed in al-Aqsa; letters from the Jewish community preserved in Cairo show that some Jews and Muslims were ransomed or survived. Modern estimates of the total therefore range from a few thousand to around 10,000.

On 12 August 1099 the crusaders defeated a Fatimid relief army at Ascalon. Most then went home, leaving a few hundred knights to hold the conquests.

The crusader states

The crusaders created four states in Syria and Palestine, known together as the crusader states, or Outremer ("the land beyond the sea"). Their rulers were Latin Christians, mostly French-speaking, who formed a small minority among Muslim, Eastern Christian and Jewish populations.

Godfrey of Bouillon refused the title of king, reportedly because he would not wear a crown of gold where Christ had worn a crown of thorns. He died in July 1100. His brother Baldwin I (1100–1118) took the royal title and, with the help of Italian fleets, captured the coastal cities: Arsuf and Caesarea (1101), Acre (1104), Beirut and Sidon (1110). Tyre fell in 1124 with Venetian help, in return for which Venice received a third of the city and freedom from tolls.

The chart of how long each state lasted shows that the crusader presence was durable. Edessa, the most exposed, fell within half a century, but the other three survived for 170–190 years.

Why the First Crusade succeeded

• Muslim disunity. The crusaders fought the Turkish rulers of Anatolia, Antioch, Aleppo, Damascus and Mosul separately; no ruler led a combined Muslim response, and the Fatimids were enemies of the Seljuks.

• Byzantine help at Nicaea, with guides and supplies, at least until the quarrel over Antioch.

• Religious conviction and cohesion. Belief that they were doing God’s will, reinforced by visions and relics such as the Holy Lance, held the army together through great hardship.

• Sea power. Genoese, Pisan and later Venetian ships brought supplies and siege materials and made the conquest of the coast possible.

• Surprise. Muslim rulers did not expect a permanent conquest by western Christians and did not at first treat it as a religious war.

Holding the conquests: castles and the military orders

The crusader states always lacked soldiers, because most crusaders returned home. They relied on castles, on settlers and on new institutions, the military orders: communities of knights who took religious vows of poverty, chastity and obedience and lived like monks while fighting.

• The Knights Templar were founded in Jerusalem around 1119–1120 to protect pilgrims and took their name from their headquarters in the al-Aqsa mosque, which the crusaders called the Temple of Solomon.

• The Knights Hospitaller began as a hospital for pilgrims in Jerusalem and had taken on a military role by the 1130s.

• The Teutonic Knights, a German order, were founded at the siege of Acre in the 1190s.

The orders received lands across Europe and could send money and men to the east. They garrisoned great castles such as Krak des Chevaliers, held by the Hospitallers from 1142, and became the most professional part of the Frankish army. They were also independent of the kings of Jerusalem and often quarrelled with them and with each other.

The Muslim counter-crusade: Zengi, Nur al-Din and Saladin

The Muslim recovery took almost ninety years. It depended on the reunification of Muslim Syria and then of Syria with Egypt, and on the revival of jihad as an idea that could justify that unification.

Zengi and the fall of Edessa, 1144

The first serious Muslim victory came in 1119, when Ilghazi, a Turkish ruler from Mardin, destroyed the army of Antioch at the battle known to the Franks as the Field of Blood. But lasting change began with Imad al-Din Zengi, a Turkish commander appointed governor (atabeg) of Mosul in 1127, who took Aleppo in 1128. Zengi spent most of his career fighting other Muslim rulers, especially Damascus. On 24 December 1144 he captured Edessa, the capital of the first crusader state. Muslim writers celebrated the victory as a triumph for Islam, and in Europe it led to the Second Crusade. Zengi was murdered by one of his own slaves in 1146.

The Second Crusade, 1145–1149

The pope Eugenius III called the Second Crusade in 1145, and the abbot Bernard of Clairvaux preached it. Two kings led it: Conrad III of Germany and Louis VII of France. Both armies were badly defeated by the Turks while crossing Anatolia. In June 1148 the leaders met at Acre and decided to attack Damascus, whose ruler had been an ally of the Kingdom of Jerusalem against Zengi’s family. The siege, in July 1148, was abandoned after four days.

The failure had several causes: the losses in Anatolia, poor relations with Byzantium, divided leadership, and the strategic error of attacking Damascus, which pushed its rulers towards Nur al-Din. In 1154 Nur al-Din took Damascus, uniting Muslim Syria for the first time since the 1090s.

Nur al-Din and the revival of jihad, 1146–1174

Zengi’s son Nur al-Din ruled Aleppo from 1146 and Damascus from 1154. He presented himself as a pious Sunni ruler fighting a jihad against the Franks. He founded madrasas, a hospital in Damascus and a centre for the study of hadith, encouraged scholars to write and preach about jihad and the merits of Jerusalem, and in 1168–1169 commissioned a carved wooden pulpit (minbar) to be installed in the al-Aqsa mosque once Jerusalem was recovered.

Carole Hillenbrand argues that this propaganda was a real force. It made war against the Franks a religious duty and a source of legitimacy, so that rulers who made truces with the Franks, or who fought fellow Muslims, could be criticised. It also served Nur al-Din’s ambitions, because it justified his conquest of Muslim rivals in the name of unity.

Egypt and the rise of Saladin, 1163–1174

By the 1160s the Fatimid caliphate in Egypt was weak, split by struggles between its viziers. Both Nur al-Din and King Amalric of Jerusalem tried to control it. Nur al-Din sent his Kurdish general Shirkuh, with Shirkuh’s nephew Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, known in Europe as Saladin. After three campaigns, Shirkuh became vizier of Egypt in January 1169 and died two months later; Saladin succeeded him.

In September 1171 Saladin had the Friday sermon (khutba) in Cairo read in the name of the Abbasid caliph, ending the Fatimid caliphate after 262 years. The last Fatimid caliph died days later. Egypt returned to Sunni allegiance, and its wealth was now available to a Sunni ruler of Syria. When Nur al-Din died in 1174, Saladin took Damascus and then, over the next twelve years, Aleppo (1183) and the allegiance of Mosul (1186), in campaigns fought mainly against other Muslims.

Hattin and the fall of Jerusalem, 1187

The Kingdom of Jerusalem was divided in the 1180s. The leper king Baldwin IV died in 1185, and the succession of Guy of Lusignan in 1186 split the nobility. Reynald of Châtillon, lord of the castle of Kerak east of the Dead Sea, attacked Muslim caravans in breach of truces and even sent ships into the Red Sea in 1182–1183 to threaten the route to Mecca. His raids gave Saladin a reason for a holy war.

In July 1187 Saladin besieged Tiberias. Guy marched to relieve it across dry country in the summer heat. Saladin’s army surrounded the Frankish force near the hill known as the Horns of Hattin, cut it off from water and set fire to the scrub. On 4 July 1187 the Frankish army was destroyed. Guy was captured, Reynald was killed by Saladin himself, about two hundred captured Templars and Hospitallers were executed, and the relic of the True Cross was taken.

Almost every Frankish soldier in the kingdom had been at Hattin, so the towns and castles had no garrisons. Acre and most of the coast fell within weeks. Jerusalem, defended by the nobleman Balian of Ibelin, surrendered on 2 October 1187. Saladin allowed the Franks to leave on payment of a ransom; thousands who could not pay were enslaved, though Saladin and his brother freed some without payment. There was no massacre, and Eastern Christians were allowed to stay. Muslim writers contrasted this with 1099.

Maintain the holy war; it is the best means which you have of serving God, the most noble occupation of your lives; support God’s cause, and He will support you; protect His religion, and He will protect you … purify the rest of the land from this filth which hath angered God and his Apostle.

Muhyi al-Din ibn al-Zaki, Friday sermon in the al-Aqsa mosque, 9 October 1187, as preserved by the biographer Ibn Khallikan (translated by William MacGuckin de Slane, 1843). The preacher was the chief judge of Damascus, chosen by Saladin to give the first sermon after the conquest. The sermon was official propaganda: it praised Saladin as the champion of Islam and urged the conquest of the remaining Frankish towns. It shows how far the language of jihad had become central to Muslim political legitimacy since 1144.

YouTube

The Third Crusade, 1189–1192

The fall of Jerusalem led to the Third Crusade, led by the three most powerful rulers of western Europe: the German emperor Frederick Barbarossa, Philip II of France and Richard I of England. Frederick drowned in a river in Anatolia in June 1190, and most of his army went home. The Franks, from their last stronghold at Tyre, had been besieging Acre since 1189, while Saladin’s army besieged them.

Philip and Richard arrived in 1191, and Acre surrendered on 12 July 1191. When the ransom agreed with Saladin was not paid on time, Richard had about 2,700 Muslim prisoners killed (contemporary accounts give between 2,600 and 3,000). On 7 September 1191 Richard’s disciplined army, marching down the coast with the fleet beside it, defeated Saladin at Arsuf. Twice Richard advanced close to Jerusalem, and twice he turned back, judging that even if he took the city he could not hold it after the crusaders left.

Exhaustion on both sides led to the Treaty of Jaffa (2 September 1192), a three-year truce. The Franks kept the coast from Tyre to Jaffa; Jerusalem stayed in Muslim hands, but Christian pilgrims could visit it. Saladin died in Damascus in March 1193, and his lands were divided among his sons and brothers, the Ayyubid family.

The later Crusades and the end of the crusader states, 1193–1291

The timeline from 1189 to 1291 shows two phases. Until 1250 the Ayyubid rulers of Egypt and Syria often quarrelled among themselves and preferred trade and truces with the Franks to all-out war. After 1250 the Mamluk sultans of Egypt, facing both the Franks and the Mongols, set out to destroy the crusader states.

The Fourth Crusade and Byzantium, 1202–1204

Pope Innocent III called the Fourth Crusade in 1198, intending to attack Egypt. Its leaders contracted with Venice to transport about 33,500 men, but far fewer arrived, and they could not pay. To reduce the debt they helped Venice capture the Christian city of Zara on the Adriatic in November 1202. They then agreed to restore a claimant to the Byzantine throne, Alexios Angelos, in return for money he could not pay. On 12–13 April 1204 the crusaders stormed and sacked Constantinople, the greatest Christian city of the age, and set up a Latin Empire that lasted until the Byzantines recovered the city in 1261.

For the eastern Mediterranean the sack of 1204 was the most damaging result of any crusade. Byzantium, which had defended the Christian frontier against Islam for six centuries, never recovered its strength, and the Greek Orthodox Churches remembered 1204 as a betrayal. The crusade never reached the Holy Land.

Crusades to Egypt and a Jerusalem regained by treaty

Crusade leaders now saw Egypt as the key to Jerusalem. The Fifth Crusade (1217–1221) took the port of Damietta in 1219. The Ayyubid sultan al-Kamil offered to exchange Jerusalem for it, but the papal legate refused, and the crusaders were trapped by the Nile flood and forced to leave in 1221.

In 1229 the emperor Frederick II, who had been excommunicated by the pope, gained Jerusalem without fighting through a treaty with al-Kamil, who needed peace to deal with rival Ayyubid princes. The city was returned unfortified, and the Muslim holy places on the Temple Mount stayed in Muslim hands. Many on both sides condemned the agreement. In 1244 Khwarazmian troops, refugees from the Mongols and allies of the sultan of Egypt, sacked Jerusalem, and the Frankish army was destroyed at La Forbie near Gaza. Jerusalem was never again held by the crusaders.

King Louis IX of France led the next major expedition (the Seventh Crusade), landing in Egypt in 1249. His army was defeated at Mansura in February 1250, and he was captured and ransomed.

The Mamluks, 1250–1291

During the crisis of 1250 the Mamluk officers of the Ayyubid army murdered the new sultan, Turanshah, and took power in Egypt. The Mamluk state was ruled by an elite of slave soldiers, bought as boys from the steppes north of the Black Sea, converted, trained and freed. Each generation of rulers was replaced by new imports, not by the sons of the old elite, so the army stayed highly trained and loyal to its commanders.

After Ayn Jalut (1260) the Mamluk sultan Baybars (1260–1277) fought on two fronts: against the Mongol Ilkhanate, which several times sought alliance with the Franks, and against the crusader states, which he saw as possible Mongol allies. He took Caesarea and Arsuf (1265), the Templar castle of Safed (1266), Jaffa and Antioch (1268) and the Hospitaller fortress of Krak des Chevaliers (1271). At Antioch most of the population was killed or enslaved.

Sultan Qalawun (1279–1290) took Tripoli in 1289. His son al-Ashraf Khalil besieged Acre, the capital of the kingdom since 1191, with a large army and heavy siege engines. The city fell on 18 May 1291, and by August the Franks had abandoned Tyre, Sidon, Beirut and their last castles. The Mamluks destroyed the coastal towns and fortifications so that no future crusade could land and use them.

Armies, tactics and fortifications

Both sides used similar weapons and many of the same techniques, but they fought differently because their armies were built in different ways.

The comparison table shows why pitched battles were rare. Frankish commanders knew that a lost battle could cost them the kingdom, as at Hattin, so they usually stayed on the defensive behind castle walls. Muslim commanders could rarely take strong castles quickly before their seasonal armies went home. The Mamluks changed this balance after 1260: a permanent professional army, heavy siege engines and the will to keep a siege going let Baybars and his successors take one fortress after another.

The Assassins also played a part. Based in fortresses in the Syrian mountains, they killed leaders on both sides, including Conrad of Montferrat, the newly chosen king of Jerusalem, in 1192, and twice tried to kill Saladin. They were destroyed in Iran by the Mongols and in Syria by Baybars in the 1270s.

Why did the Crusades end in failure for the crusaders?

Historians weigh several factors to explain why the crusaders won in 1099 and lost by 1291. Most stress that the balance between them changed over time.

The table of factors suggests a judgement. Muslim disunity explains the First Crusade’s success, and the gradual reunification of Syria and Egypt, achieved for local political reasons and justified as jihad, explains most of the crusaders’ later losses. Frankish dependence on Europe turned this into defeat, because the states could not survive a major loss in battle without help that came less and less often.

The impact of the Crusades in the Middle East

Political impact

The largest effect of the Crusades on the Middle East was political. The Frankish presence gave Muslim rulers a reason, and a religious justification, to unite Syria and Egypt. Zengi, Nur al-Din, Saladin and the Mamluks all built their power partly on the claim to lead the war against the Franks. The Fatimid caliphate ended in 1171, and Egypt became the centre of a Sunni state that dominated the region until 1517.

The Mamluk sultanate was the long-term winner. It defeated both the Mongols and the Franks, gave the Abbasid caliphate a new home in Cairo, and became a militarised state in which a foreign slave-soldier elite ruled a mainly Arab population. Byzantium, by contrast, never recovered from 1204.

Religious and social impact

The wars hardened religious attitudes on both sides. The revival of jihad was linked to a wider Sunni revival, with new madrasas and pious foundations in Damascus, Aleppo and Cairo. The position of local Christians varied. Some, such as the Armenians of Cilicia, allied with the Franks; others, such as the Copts of Egypt, came under suspicion after crusades attacked Egypt. The Jewish community of Jerusalem was destroyed in 1099, and Jews were barred from living in the city under Frankish rule; Saladin allowed them to return after 1187.

Economic impact

Trade continued, and in some ways grew, during the wars. Italian merchants had quarters in Acre, Tyre and Alexandria and carried spices, silk, sugar and cotton to Europe. The Andalusian traveller Ibn Jubayr, passing through the region in 1184, recorded with surprise that Muslim and Christian caravans moved between Damascus and Acre while their armies were fighting, each side taxing the other’s merchants. Historians see this commerce mainly as a continuation of older Mediterranean trade, which the crusader ports extended. Against these gains stand the costs of a long war, the ransoms and the Mamluk destruction of the coastal cities after 1291, which weakened the Syrian coast for centuries.

Cultural impact and contact

Daily contact in the crusader states produced some mutual knowledge, but less exchange of learning than in Spain or Sicily, where Latin scholars translated Arabic works. The memoirs of Usama ibn Munqidh, a Syrian aristocrat and soldier who knew Frankish knights personally, show both contact and contempt.

Mysterious are the works of the Creator, the author of all things! When one comes to recount cases regarding the Franks, he cannot but glorify Allah (exalted is he!) and sanctify him, for he sees them as animals possessing the virtues of courage and fighting, but nothing else; just as animals have only the virtues of strength and carrying loads.

Usama ibn Munqidh, Kitab al-I’tibar (Book of Contemplation), written in the 1180s (translated by Philip K. Hitti, 1929). Usama wrote in old age at Saladin’s court, for Muslim readers who enjoyed stories of Frankish oddness. He also describes Frankish friends and a Frankish cure that worked, so his contempt is a literary pose as well as a judgement. The memoir shows that educated Muslims saw the Franks as brave but culturally inferior.

Memory and significance

For Muslim writers of the time, the Franks were one problem among several, and the Mongols were a greater one. Medieval Arabic historians had no special word for the Crusades and usually described them as wars of the Franks. Carole Hillenbrand and other historians show that the idea of "the Crusades" as a central episode of Islamic history, and as a symbol of Western aggression, became widespread in the Arab world from the late nineteenth century, under European imperialism. Modern political uses of the Crusades therefore tell more about the modern period than about the twelfth century.

Perspectives and debates

What kind of revolution brought the Abbasids to power?

The table of interpretations shows a shift from ethnic explanations to ones that stress coalition and religion. Wellhausen’s view reflected nineteenth-century ideas about national conflict between Arabs and Persians; Shaban used new readings of the sources; Kennedy’s synthesis is now the most widely accepted. A balanced judgement treats the revolution as religious in its language, social in its grievances and military in the way it was won.

The Golden Age and its "decline"

Older accounts treated the House of Wisdom as an academy created by al-Ma’mun and the translation movement as the product of individual curiosity. Dimitri Gutas, in Greek Thought, Arabic Culture (1998), argues that translation began under al-Mansur and was driven by the needs and ideology of the Abbasid elite: Sasanian imperial traditions, practical sciences such as astronomy and medicine, and the debates of theologians. He presents the House of Wisdom as a palace library in the Sasanian tradition. George Saliba, in Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (2007), rejects the idea that Islamic science declined after the twelfth century or after 1258, pointing to later work in astronomy that was more original than the translations themselves.

Why did people go on crusade?

These views can be weighed by their evidence. Riley-Smith’s use of charters makes the religious explanation strong for the first crusaders, while Tyerman shows how religious ideas worked through social structures. Madden’s defensive interpretation is criticised for reading the Crusades as a response to Islam in general, when in 1095 the crusaders’ Muslim opponents were divided and Jerusalem had been under Muslim rule for more than 450 years.

How significant were the Crusades for the Middle East?

Carole Hillenbrand, in The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (1999), uses Arabic sources to show that the Frankish presence revived jihad and helped unify Syria and Egypt, and that it had a lasting effect on Muslim attitudes to the West. Paul M. Cobb, in The Race for Paradise (2014), places the Crusades in a wider Islamic history in which the Franks were one frontier problem among many, and the Mongols mattered more. Amin Maalouf’s The Crusades through Arab Eyes (1983), a popular history built from Arab chronicles, stresses the trauma of the Frankish invasion and its modern echoes. The difference is partly one of timescale and viewpoint: Hillenbrand stresses the religious and long-term significance, while Cobb stresses the political priorities of medieval Muslim rulers.

Applying the ideas in exam questions

The practice questions are written in the style of the IB for this study, each with guidance on what a strong answer contains.

The guidance follows the IB’s approach: a statement of what the question requires, indicative content that is neither prescriptive nor exhaustive, and the features of a top-band answer.

Paper 3: the Abbasid revolution

Paper 3: the impact of Abbasid rule

Paper 3: the emergence of the Crusades

Paper 3: the impact of the Crusades

Self-check

• To do:

  I can explain how the Umayyad caliphate was weakened by mawali grievances, religious opposition and the third fitna.

• To do:

  I can explain how the da’wa, Abu Muslim and the Khurasani army brought the Abbasids to power in 747–750.

• To do:

  I can explain how al-Mansur consolidated Abbasid rule and why the founding of Baghdad mattered.

• To do:

  I can describe the structure of Abbasid government, including the vizier, the diwans, the barid and the qadis.

• To do:

  I can explain the main economic developments of early Abbasid rule and their social costs, including the Zanj revolt.

• To do:

  I can explain the rise of the ulama and the significance of the Mihna.

• To do:

  I can compare the roles of Harun al-Rashid and al-Ma’mun, including the civil war of 811–813.

• To do:

  I can explain the translation movement and the "Golden Age", and what historians such as Gutas and Saliba argue about it.

• To do:

  I can explain how North Africa and Egypt slipped out of Abbasid control (Idrisids, Aghlabids, Tulunids, Fatimids).

• To do:

  I can explain the political, economic, military and religious causes of the collapse of Abbasid power, and distinguish 945 from 1258.

• To do:

  I can describe the Seljuk period, Manzikert, Nizam al-Mulk and the Mongol sack of Baghdad, and the regional impact of the collapse.

• To do: