Titans of History (16 page)

1056–1124

No man ever escaped when the Sheikh of the Mountain desired his death
.

Marco Polo

“The Old Man of the Mountain,” Hassan al-Sabbah, was arguably the forerunner of modern jihadist terrorism, a medieval Osama bin Laden (though unlike him, a Shiite), but he was also a figure of learning and mystique, a charismatic military and religious leader who achieved power for his sect far beyond its resources. His fiefdom of Alamut, high in the Elburz Mountains of northern Iran, was the base of the mysterious but deadly sect known as the Assassins. Marco Polo, who visited the area on his way back from China, told of a beautiful garden in which a powerful sheikh trained fanatical killers to become his loyal followers with hashish-fueled promises of paradise. These same men would then do all that the Old Man asked—even kill themselves, if that was what he desired.

Hassan al-Sabbah was born in the Persian city of Qom, becoming an admired scholar of Shia Islam. While still a youth, his family moved to the town of Rayy, and it was there that he resolved to devote his life to the Shia Ismaili sect.

Hassan carved an early career at the court of the Seljuq Turks, a Sunni dynasty whose empire controlled much of Iran, Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine between the 11th and 14th
centuries. In the service of the Seljuq sultan, Hassan rose to become a senior adviser but ended up causing offense and was banished, an insult he never forgot.

Hassan roamed around the Middle East until he arrived in Egypt in about 1078. Cairo was then the capital of the Fatimid empire whose caliphs were Shia Ismailis. He remained there for some three years, continuing his studies and establishing himself as a religious leader of the Nizariya faction. But when he and his faction lost out in a political struggle and were driven out of Cairo, he led his sect on a new path. He and his followers established or fortified a series of remote strongholds across the Middle East, from Lebanon to Iraq, and from Syria to Iran. He returned to his native Iran, taking over Alamut castle in the Elburz Mountains. It would remain his aerie and capital until his death.

There Hassan set about building a militia of armed followers who could both defend his “kingdom,” proselytize on behalf of his Shia sect and destroy the enemies of true Islam. Foreigners claimed that through the profligate use of the psychoactive drug hashish, Hassan created his “Hashishim”—hence the word assassins—to kill “impious usurpers” and Sunni leaders. (He remained nominally loyal to the Fatimid caliphs in Cairo, but in reality he became a remarkable independent political force, feared and loathed by all the great powers of the Middle East.) His control was overwhelmingly through faith, will and charisma. His adepts called themselves the New Doctrine, while his feared fighters were the Fedayeen—or the Holy Killers, admired by some, feared by all; other Muslims sometimes called them Batini—seekers after esoteric knowledge. Their favorite weapon was the dagger, sometimes poisoned.

On discovering one of his followers playing the flute, he had the man banished. He even had his own son executed for drinking wine. Those who came to serve Hassan were indoctrinated, trained and equipped before being sent forth to carry out their master's
orders. Integral to this process was the beautiful garden he had built, described by Marco Polo as the “largest and finest” the world had ever seen. The stories of the Assassins are partly mythical. It is impossible to confirm Marco Polo's claims that within its walls conduits had been cut through which ran wine, milk, honey and water, while groups of beautiful women cavorted. The effect was such as to make people believe that this was indeed Paradise. Marco Polo described how Hassan manipulated young men into being his blindly obedient followers:

The Old Man … had a potion given them, as a result of which they straightway fell asleep; then he had them taken up and put into the garden, and then awaked. When they awoke, they … saw all the things that I have told you, and so believed that they were really in Paradise. And the ladies and damsels remained with them all day, playing music and singing and making excellent cheer; and the young men had their pleasure of them. So these youths had all they could desire, and would never have left the place of their own free will
.

At that point, however, they were re-drugged, removed from the garden and returned to Hassan's castle. The covenant he then offered them was simple: they could return to paradise, of which he was the guardian, provided they did everything that he asked.

However it was gained, Hassan won the unswerving loyalty of his sect of fanatical believers and worked to foment uprisings against the Seljuq sultans and Abbasid caliphs, both Sunnis, as well as the infidel crusaders. The Assassins murdered Seljuq and Abbasid officials and sometimes Fatimids too. They assassinated the crusader princes Raymond II, count of Tripoli, and Conrad of Montferrat, whose murder may have been ordered by Richard I of England (Hassan was known sometimes to cooperate with crusaders). Much
later, an Assassin almost succeeded in killing Prince Edward of England, who later became Edward I, with a poisoned dagger, but he survived. It was said that the Knights Hospitallers hired Assassins to murder various of their opponents. Other Muslim leaders were outraged by the power of the Old Man of the Mountain and often tried to crush him—but he was a dangerous opponent. When the sultan Saladin resolved to destroy the Assassins, he found a dagger under his pillow, and took the warning. The great Middle Eastern princes attacked the Assassins, but each time they survived as an idiosyncratic outlaw state.

The sheikh died of natural causes in 1124. He was replaced by his henchman Kya Bozorg-Ummid, who created an Assassin dynasty when he was succeeded by his son. But the Assassins were finally destroyed by the Mongol Khan and empire-builder Hulugu, Genghis Khan's grandson, who stormed Alamut in 1256. The new Mamluk ruler of Egypt, Sultan Baybars, wiped out the last Assassin strongholds in Syria in 1273.

1060–1100

…
if you had been there you would have seen our feet colored to our ankles with the blood of the slain. But what more shall I relate? None of them were left alive; neither women nor children were spared
.

Fulcher of Chartres, medieval chronicler and chaplain to the armies of Godfrey of Bouillon and his brothers, describing the siege of Jerusalem in 1099

The crusader warrior Godfrey of Bouillon became the first ruler of the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem, after indiscriminately slaughtering thousands of Jews and Muslims, “purifying” the city in the name of God.

Godfrey was born in 1060, probably in Boulogne-sur-Mer, to Eustace II, count of Boulogne (who had fought on the side of the Normans at the Battle of Hastings in 1066), and Ida “the Blessed” of Boulogne (a pious and saintly figure who founded a number of monasteries). Godfrey was an athletic and fair-haired boy of “pleasing” features, who, in the words of William of Tyre, was “tall of stature … strong beyond compare, with solidly built limbs and a stalwart chest.” As the second son of the family, Godfrey did not stand to inherit much from his father, but in 1076 his childless hunchback uncle bequeathed him the duchy of Lower Lorraine.

If Godfrey was in many ways the typical crusader, the idea of the crusade belonged to one visionary: in 1095, Pope Urban II announced a new theological concept—Christian holy war. In Clermont on November 27, Urban addressed a crowd to declare that all who took the Cross and fought to liberate and cleanse the Holy Sepulcher of Jerusalem, to liquidate the infidel, would be granted remission of sins. As many as 80,000 people—from princes to peasants—answered the call and set off for Jerusalem, raising money any way they could, often with massacres and looting of Jewish communities. Some were adventurers who hoped to make their fortunes (as Godfrey's family did) but this was an age of faith and the great majority were believers who risked their lives (and most died on the way) to reach Jerusalem. Godfrey himself, along with his brothers Eustace and Baldwin, answered the call. Godfrey declared he was determined to avenge the blood of Jesus on the Jews.

In August 1096, Godfrey's army—estimated at 40,000—began the long march through Hungary toward Constantinople. When they arrived in November, it soon became apparent that the crusaders and Emperor Alexius I had very different priorities. Alexius wanted to concentrate on winning back the lands he had lost to the Turks, whereas the crusaders were eager to conquer Jerusalem and capture the Holy Land. After a period of political tension throughout 1097—in which Godfrey's troops pillaged the neighborhood of Salabria—Godfrey tentatively agreed that his army would submit to Alexius's orders for a time before marching southwards toward Jerusalem.

From the summer of 1098, Godfrey's force—and other crusading armies—began to make inroads into Muslim lands, his reputation growing as he did so. In October, he reportedly killed 150 Turks with only twelve knights in a battle outside Antioch and the following month he cut a Turk in half with a single, downward
swipe of his sword. Eventually, in February 1099, the various crusading armies finally conquered Antioch and Edessa and began their advance on Jerusalem, fighting through Tripoli and Beirut before arriving to besiege the city in June. Only about 12,000 crusaders had survived to reach the Holy City, under the command of five princes, Raymond the count of Toulouse, Robert the count of Flanders and Robert the duke of Normandy, plus the princely Norman adventurer Tancred de Hauteville and Godfrey. On the morning of Friday July 15, Godfrey was among the first crusaders to breach the city's weak spot in its northern wall, after his men had built and scaled a movable tower which they had placed against the defenses. Ferocious fighting took place on the parapets as Godfrey bravely held his position and directed his men into the city so that they could open the gates.

Thousands of crusaders flooded into the streets, as the Muslim citizens fled to al-Aqsa mosque. The Fatimid governor of the city, made his last stand in the Tower of David. He and some of his soldiers were allowed to escape, but over the next forty-eight hours, those left in the city—combatant and civilian, Muslim and Jew—were put to the sword and murdered in the streets. The crusaders pillaged Muslim holy sites such as the Dome of the Rock and either burned their victims to death or cut open their stomachs, believing that Muslims swallowed their gold. The city's Jews had fled to a synagogue, which the crusaders simply burned to the ground. Raymond of Aguilers reported that he saw “piles of heads, hands and feet” scattered across the city, while Fulcher of Chartres, a chaplain to Baldwin's army, wrote approvingly that “this place, so long contaminated by the superstition of the pagan inhabitants” had been “cleansed from their contagion.” Six months later, it still stank of putrefaction.

At the height of the systematic massacre, Godfrey stripped to his undergarments and walked solemnly, barefoot through the
blood, to pray at the Holy Sepulcher, site of Jesus' crucifixion. On July 22, his fellow crusaders chose him to be the first Christian ruler of Jerusalem, although he refused to take the name of king in the city in which Christ had died, preferring instead the title Duke and Advocate of the Holy Sepulcher. It was there that he was buried after dying of plague on July 18, 1100, his mission complete.

The massacre of Jews and Muslims in Jerusalem was a terrible crime but it was certainly vastly exaggerated: Muslim historians claimed that 70,000 or even 100,000 died in the slaughter but it is likely there were no more than 30,000 inside the city and the latest research from contemporary Arab source el-Arabi suggests the number may be closer to between 3,000 and 10,000. Crusader brutality demonstrates the evil of intolerance but the Christians were scarcely alone in this: when the crusader cities of Edessa and Acre later fell, the slaughter by Muslim conquerors was much greater.

As for Godfrey, his short reign founded a kingdom and a dynasty, built by gifted and remarkable warlords: most significantly his much more dynamic, talented and bigamous brother, Baldwin count of Edessa who succeeded him as king of Jerusalem. Baldwin I conquered a substantial kingdom in what is today's Israel, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. His heir was his cousin Baldwin II, who continued to build the kingdom, succeeded by his half-French, half-Armenian daughter, a powerful and shrewd ruler, Queen Melisende. Under her the Jerusalem kingdom reached its golden age: it was Melisende who built not only today's church of the Holy Sepulcher but also the Tomb of the Virgin Mary and the markets of Jerusalem that also survive today. But the death of her son Baldwin III marked the end of its heroic period. The tragedy of Baldwin IV—a brave teenage prince who was slowly dying of leprosy—symbolized the crisis of the kingdom, beset by
corruption, ineptitude and intrigue, which was defeated by Saladin. Jerusalem fell in 1187 but a rump kingdom based along the coast around Acre survived until 1291.

1122–1204

No matter how bestial and obdurate a man might be, that woman could bend him to her will
.

Richard of Devizes,
Chronicle of the Deeds of Richard the First

(late 12th century)

Eleanor of Aquitaine was the queen of two kings, and the mother of two more. Her resilience, her courage and her unshakeable will made her legendary across Europe as a woman in a male-dominated age who refused to submit to convention, and whose every action expressed her determination to rule.

As a young woman, Eleanor was the matrimonial catch of Europe, beautiful and charismatic. On inheriting the duchy of Aquitaine at the age of fifteen, she became the ruler of one fifth of what is now modern France. Duke William IX of Aquitaine (1071–1126), Eleanor's grandfather, was brazenly charming, famed as a troubadour and lover. His poetry was the first to use the vernacular of the south, the
langue d'oc
. Mixing obscenity with charm, delicate seductiveness with boisterous humor, manipulating complex verse forms with insouciant ease, Duke William inspired and fostered the languishing brilliance of the troubadour poets.