The World

Seljuks, Komnenoi and Hautevilles

ARSLAN RAMPANT LION AND THE AGELESS ZOë

‘God created them in the shape of lions,’ wrote a courtier of the Seljuk Turks, ‘with broad faces and flat noses, muscles strong, fists enormous.’ A Turkmen warlord named Seljuk had fought for the Jewish Khazar khagans in his youth. The names of his sons – Israel, Yusuf and Musa – suggest the family may have converted to Judaism, but in the 990s Seljuk switched to Islam, embracing jihad as his mission, and gathered a federation of tribes in Transoxiana, assisted by warlike sons. ‘They ascend great mountains, ride in face of danger, raid and go deep into unknown lands.’ Seljuk and son were just one of the Turkic warrior clans carving up the Arab empire.^*

After Seljuk’s death in 1009, his grandson Tugril defeated the Ghazni sultans before moving on to the big prize. In 1055, his troops galloped into Baghdad, rescuing Caliph al-Qaim from the Shiites. While fighting the Fatimiyya and the Romans and conquering an empire, Sultan Tugril, like many a Turkish warlord, aspired to the Persianate culture of Baghdad. His nephew Alp Arslan – Heroic Lion – was the greatest potentate of his time, ruling from Pakistan to Türkiye. He promoted a Persian vizier, Abu Ali Hasan, granted the title Nizam al-Mulk – Order of the Realm – who embellished the Seljuk capitals Isfahan (Iran) and Merv (Turkmenistan) with mosques, libraries and observatories.

As the Seljuks attacked the Roman marches, the heiress to the glories of the Basil Bulgar Slayer was his niece Zoë. After a disappointing trip to Italy to marry a German emperor who died before her arrival, Zoë spent the rest of her life with her two sisters in the gynaeceum (women’s quarters) of the Great Palace. Basil had prevented the spinsters from marrying aristocrats who could threaten his crown. Theodora Porphyrogenita was known for her piety, Zoë Porphyrogenita for her blonde beauty and her lovers.

On the day he died, her father Constantine VIII married Zoë, now fifty, to a sexagenarian aristocrat, Romanos Argyros, who at once became emperor. ‘Every part of her,’ wrote historian Michael Psellos in his Chronographia, ‘was firm and in good condition.’ Zoë devoted much attention to cosmetics, installing a myrepseion (laboratory) in her apartments.^* The effort paid off: her mosaic portrait in Hagia Sophia, created when she was in her sixties, shows a handsome woman. Doctors and charlatans were consulted to help her conceive, but she quickly turned against her husband. Joannes the Eunuch, a Paphlagonian peasant’s son who had been Basil II’s secretary, and was now parakoimomenos (chief minister), introduced Zoë to his younger brother, Michael, an epileptic former money changer, who charmed the empress.

In April 1034, when Zoë was fifty-six and Michael twenty-five, they strangled Romanos in his bath and married the next day. As his passion for Zoë cooled, Michael IV became anxious that she would turn against him. When Michael was incapacitated, Zoë and Joannes the Eunuch promoted his nephew to Caesar. This was Michael the Caulker. The Eunuch became a monk and retired, ostensibly just serving as orphanotrophos, curator of Constantinople’s largest orphanage. But the omnipotent Eunuch was now hated. The Caulker exiled his uncle, castrated all his cousins and then in 1042 moved against Zoë. He accused her of treason, tonsuring and then imprisoning her on an island from which she was unlikely to return.

But the Basil family was still loved. In the hippodrome, Michael was bombarded with fruit, then besieged in the palace by the women of Constantinople, united in female solidarity. Zoë, now sixty-four, returned to power; the Caulker was blinded and castrated. Zoë and her nunnish sister Theodora were enthroned. Two months later, Zoë married (an old lover) Constantine Monomachos, who as emperor moved his mistress into a ménage à trois. The Romans feared that their beloved old sisters were in danger, and they were pacified only by the appearance of Zoë and Theodora in the hippodrome. Just as Zoë planned to reconquer Italy, five sword-swinging Norman brothers changed everything.

IRON-ARM WILLIAM, WILY ROBERT AND AMAZONIAN SICHELGAITA

In 1035, William Iron-Arm, the first of the Hauteville boys, arrived in southern Italy to back a Lombard nobleman against Zoë’s forces. Sicily remained Muslim, while Naples and Apulia belonged to Zoë – and Rome was ruled by the Marozian pope Benedict IX, son of Alberic of Tusculum. Benedict, elected at twenty, became notorious for ‘his rapes, murders and other unspeakable acts of violence and sodomy’, according to a later pope. ‘His life as a pope was so vile, so foul, so execrable, that I shudder to think of it.’ But Benedict’s conduct was typical of a priesthood that was denounced by the reforming priest Damian in his aptly titled Book of Gomorrah for rampant simony, venality, concubinage, sodomy, paedophilia and mutual masturbation. In 1045, priests rebelled and invited the German emperor king Heinrich III to rescue them from the Marozian pornocrats. Heinrich took Rome and destroyed the Marozians once and for all. But all this volatility was irresistible to a gifted family of swaggering blond giants.

Tancred de Hauteville, a minor Norman baron descended from a Viking named Hiallt, had twelve sons, so most of them had to seek their fortunes abroad.

The two eldest brothers, Drogo and William, arrived in Italy where they fought for all sides. In 1036, one of the Arab amirs of Sicily appealed to Empress Zoë, who raised an army that included Viking mercenaries led by a Norwegian prince Harold Hardrada and the Hauteville brothers. Zoë’s Sicilian expedition was a disaster; the imperious Romaioi disrespected the Hautevilles, who thereafter hated Constantinople. The brothers changed sides, joined the army of Heinrich, defeated Zoë’s forces and seized Apulia. Heinrich (now emperor) recognized Iron-Arm William as count of Apulia. In 1042, they were joined by Humphrey and Robert. The latter was known as Guiscard, meaning Wily, and was best described by Anna Komnene, emperor’s daughter and the finest (female) historian of the era: ‘His stature was so lofty that he surpassed even the tallest, his complexion was ruddy, his hair flaxen, his shoulders were broad, his eyes all but emitted sparks of fire – he was neatly and gracefully formed from tip to toe.’ Robert arrived alone, too poor to afford a servant, but his brother Iron-Arm died soon afterwards and Count Drogo fobbed him off. Robert earned his nickname with his trick of taking castles by pretending to be dead, being borne into the castles inside a coffin by his solemn warriors – only to kick the lid off and spring out, sword in hand.

In 1053, the rise of the Hautevilles was suddenly challenged from a surprising direction. A new pope, Leo IX, a German priest backed by Heinrich, launched a resurgence of the papacy, banning simony and ordering celibacy for priests, a concept unique to the Catholic Church. And terrified of the ‘wicked race’ of Hautevilles, he led an army southwards to destroy them. Instead Wily Robert and his brother Humphrey defeated and captured Leo, an experience that convinced the Holy Father that he needed closer relations with Constantinople, where – Zoë having died – her widower Monomachos now ruled. But in Constantinople Leo’s delegates achieved the opposite, aggressively confronting the Greeks about their differences in doctrine.^* Behind this lurked a rising confidence as western Europe became richer and more populous, combined with a seething jealousy of Constantinople, metropolis of sacred Autokrators, venomous conspiracies and incomprehensible Greek. The papal envoys stormed into Hagia Sophia and excommunicated the patriarch – creating a schism that has never healed, a theological divergence that remains today.

The Hautevilles released Leo only when he recognized their territories. After the death of Humphrey, Robert became the count, now joined by the eighth brother, Roger, ‘a youth of the greatest beauty, of lofty stature, of graceful shape, eloquent in speech, cool in action, pleasant and merry, furious in battle’. Wily Robert already had a son Bohemond, but the foundation of a royal house was now within his reach so he rejected the first wife as a concubine and married a Lombard princess whose flaxen locks and Amazonian swagger equalled his own. This Sichelgaita fought in battle brandishing an axe. ‘When dressed in armour,’ writes Anna Komnene, ‘this woman was a fearsome sight.’

The schism with Constantinople left Pope Nicholas II no choice but to turn to the Hautevilles, whom he commissioned to conquer Sicily from the Arabs in a holy war. In 1060, they landed on the island.

North and south, the descendants of the Vikings were changing Europe. In Sicily, 1066 was another of year of stalemate for the Normans, but not in northern Europe. That year William the Bastard, duke of Normandy, descendant of Rollo the Viking, invaded England.

William, illegitimate son of Duke Robert by an embalmer’s daughter, was seven when he succeeded to the duchy. The Bastard grew up in a rough school – one of his guardians was actually murdered in his bedroom right in front of him – and from an early age he had to fight nobles, family and invasions by King Henri I of France, who ruled only the Île-de-France around Paris and coveted Normandy. The Bastard had inherited a forward policy towards England where the Alfred and Canute families were intermarried with his own. In 1051, Edward the Confessor, last of the Alfred dynasty, promised the throne of England to his first cousin William. When Harold, earl of Wessex, son of Godwin, was shipwrecked in Normandy, the Bastard squeezed an oath of loyalty out of him before sending him home. Harold had no real claim to the throne, except that his sister was married to the king. When Edward died, Harold hurriedly had himself crowned as enemies across the sea raised their armies.

The Bastard commissioned a fleet to invade. Yet he had competition from the Hard Ruler: Harold Hardrada had as a boy lost his kingdom to King Canute, escaping abroad to serve Yaroslav the Wise in Kyiv, then joining the Varangian Guard of Constantinople and fighting beside the Hauteville brothers, before in 1046 reclaiming Norway. Now he invaded England with 10,000 troops and Harold’s dissident brother Tostig. Landing in Tyneside, Hardrada defeated the northern earls, as Harold galloped north. If one had to back anyone in this tournament, one would have backed Hardrada – but a lucky thrust or arrow changed all. Harold killed Hardrada at Stamford Bridge – just as the Bastard landed at Hastings. Harold headed south with an exhausted army. At Hastings, an arrow struck him in the eye. The surprise results of two small battles directed England towards Normandy instead of Scandinavia. The Bastard became the Conqueror.^*

In 1071, while William crushed English resistance, Palermo, the great Arab capital of Sicily, finally fell to Roger de Hauteville, great count of Sicily, who instead of massacring its Arabs and Jews embraced their culture and made Arabic an official language. Wily Robert meanwhile waged war against Constantinople, taking its last Italian outpost, Bari. Then a disaster in the east encouraged him to seize the big prize: Constantinople itself.

PENIS IN A PALM TREE: THE POET -PRINCESS AND THE VAIN LION

As William scoured England and Roger besieged Palermo, Emperor Romanos IV was marching out to fight Alp Arslan, the Seljuk sultan, who was making advances into today’s Anatolia, the beginning of its transformation into a Turkish heartland. But Arslan’s chief war was against the Fatimiyya caliphs, so he renewed an earlier treaty with Romanos, then headed southwards into Syria. But, provoked by Seljuk raids, the emperor advanced with a disorganized army of Varangians, Pechenegs and Anglo-Saxons. Arslan headed north but offered a generous peace which Romanos impulsively rejected. At Manzikert, on 26 August 1071, unwisely dividing his army and feuding with his generals, Romanos was routed.^* Arslan made him bow low, resting his boot on the imperial neck, but then he raised him to his feet, asking, ‘What would you do if I were brought before you as a prisoner?’

‘Perhaps I’d kill you,’ replied Romanos, ‘or exhibit you in the streets of Constantinople.’

‘My punishment is far heavier,’ said Arslan. ‘I forgive you, and set you free.’

If the battle was small and not particularly bloody, ‘the fortunes of the Roman empire had sunk to their lowest ebb’. Back in Constantinople, Romanos was clumsily blinded, and died from an infection.

Arslan marched eastwards to crush a rebel, whom he captured and was just sentencing to death when the desperado lunged at him. Proud of his archery, the sultan coolly waved aside his bodyguards and raised his crossbow, but his foot slipped and the assassin stabbed him. ‘Alas, I was surrounded by great warriors, who guarded me day and night … yet here I lie dying in agony,’ he told his paladins. ‘Remember this lesson learned: never allow vanity to overcome good sense.’ Buried in Merv beside his father, the forty-two-year-old Arslan surely dictated his tomb’s inscription: ‘O those who pass behold the sky-high grandeur of Alp Arslan! He is under black soil now.’

His son Malikshah, then only fifteen, and his veteran vizier Nizam al-Mulk^* were with him, struggling to hold Arslan’s realms together. A cousin set up a sultanate of Rum (Rome) in the formerly Roman provinces of Anatolia, and their campaigns against Constantinople brought the Romans to the negotiating table.

In Merv, Nizam introduced Malikshah to the Persian polymath Omar Khayyam, deviser of algebraic formulae, observer of stars, poet of wine-sipping girls and transient life. Khayyam worked in the Seljuks’ observatories, the jewel of their court, at a time when Merv itself became Mother of the World, home to 500,000, endowed with a library and observatory, the world’s biggest city outside China.

The sultan adored Nizam, calling him ‘father’, and with his assistance stabilized his vast empire, reflecting on the paradox of earthly supremacy: ‘I can cope with hunger,’ Malikshah used to say, ‘but save me from the curse of abundance.’ Yet as his confidence grew he came to resent Nizam, who lectured him: ‘Remind the sultan, I’m his partner. Doesn’t he remember when his father was killed, and I crushed the rebels? If ever I close this vizieral inkstand, the sultanate will topple.’ The indispensable are soon dispensed with. Nizam moved against the Assassins, Shiite sectarians,^* who had just set up a little theocracy at Alamut in the Iranian mountains and had started a terrorist campaign against Sunnis. Nizam besieged Alamut, but failed to take it. The Assassins ordered Nizam’s assassination, but there were rumours that Malikshah had encouraged them.

In October 1092, the vizier, seventy-four years old, was stabbed to death in his litter, but a month later Malikshah was poisoned by the caliph – and the Seljuks shattered into baronial fiefdoms, leaving the House of Islam in the east as vulnerable as it was in the west.

In 1091, in Cordoba, a libertine Arab poet-princess died as a new force of Berber invaders from Morocco galloped into the city. The story of this caliph’s daughter shows how the richest kingdom in the Europe, the caliphate of Abd al-Rahman, fell to an African invasion.

She was Wallada, a caliph’s daughter. The caliphs had lost power to a brilliant warlord who had ravaged the Christian north but hollowed out the caliphate. In 1025, her father Muhammad III was poisoned, and al-Andalus broke up into little kingdoms ruled by warring kinglets – the taifas.

Blonde and blue-eyed with ‘flowing hair and white shoulders’, Wallada enjoyed a rare life for an Islamic woman in Corboda, now ruled by noble clans. No longer secluded in the Umayya harem, independently wealthy, she appeared in public, wearing silks that showed off her beauty and her figure, recited her poetry in public, competing against men in poetry contests, and set up a school for female poets. She flaunted her lovers. When the religious authorities grumbled, she had lines of poems defiantly written on her dresses: ‘I allow my lover to touch my cheek and bestow my kiss on him who craves it.’ Around 1031, she fell in love with an aristocratic vizier, Ibn Zaydun, who naturally proposed in poetry:

Between you and me (if you wished) there could exist

What cannot be lost: a secret undivulged.

She relished her sensuality – ‘When night falls, anticipate me visiting you; / For I believe night is the best keeper of secrets’ – but she was tormented by jealousy, particularly when Ibn Zaydun slept with one of her black slaves:

You know that I am the clear, shining moon of the heavens,

But to my sorrow, you chose, instead, a dark and shadowy planet.

Ibn Zaydun claimed, ‘You compelled me to commit the sin … You were right, but pardon me, O sinner!’ She paid him back with her most talented female protégée, the poetess Muhja bint al-Tayyani, and a male vizier. Ibn Zaydun turned nasty, writing to Wallada, ‘You were for me nothing but a sweetmeat that I took a bite of and then tossed away the crust, leaving it to be gnawed on by a rat.’ Wallada got her revenge by exposing his affairs with slave boys:

Because of his love for rods in trousers, Ibn Zaydun,

In spite of his excellence,

If he would see a penis in a palm tree,

He would turn into a woodpecker.

^*

Exiled to Seville, Ibn Zaydun regretted losing Wallada: ‘I remember you with passion … Delicious were those days we spent while Fate slept. There was peace, I mean, and we were thieves of pleasure.’ As for Wallada, this proto-feminist leaves history in her own words – of course: ‘Respected I am, by God of the highest, and proudly I walk with head held high.’

The sybaritic life of the small Muslim kingdom was short-lived. In 1091, on the day Wallada, last of the Umayya, died at the age of ninety-one, blue-veiled Berber horsemen of the Atlas mountains rode with their elephants and camels into Cordoba – masters of a new Euro-African empire that stretched from the Senegal River to the Pyrenees mountains.

The conflicts between Islamic and Christian kings looked like a holy war, but religion was just one element; greed, ambition and family were just as important. Often there were Muslims, Christians and Jews, not to speak of Berbers and Normans, on both sides at each battle. Samuel ibn Naghrillah was a Jew born among the palace elite in Cordoba who escaped the turbulence there to set up a sweetshop in Granada. There he was invited to write letters for the local king, and ended up becoming his secretary and then vizier. Holding court in his palace the Alhambra, for thirty years he ruled Granada, won battles against Christians and Muslims and wrote erotic poetry to boys and girls, while naturally assuming the leadership of the Sephardim, Spanish Jews, to whom he was haNagid – the prince. After his death in 1056, his young son Joseph succeeded him for a decade until this Jewish vizier was accused of planning a coup, whereupon the Granadans stormed the Alhambra and crucified Joseph – not only as a reprisal against Jewish presumption but as the traditional punishment for treason.

While the Jewish prince was ruling Granada, a Castilian knight named Rodrigo Díaz was serving the kings of Castile, the largest of the Christian kingdoms in northern Spain. When he was exiled in a court intrigue, he changed sides and fought for the Islamic kings. Never losing a battle, Díaz won the nickname El Campeador – Champion – among the Spaniards and El Sayyid – the Lord – among the Arabs, Hispanicized into El Cid. In 1085, his former master, Alfonso VI el Bravo, who had united the kingdoms of Castile and León, took Toledo from the Muslims. But instead of expelling Muslim subjects, Alfonso declared himself Emperor of the Two Faiths, a vision reflected in his own love life: in addition to five wives, he also kept Muslim concubines.

The Islamic collapse so alarmed the poetry-spouting king of Seville, al-Mutamid, that he appealed to a horde of fundamentalist tribesmen, the rising power of north Africa. He was playing with fire. ‘I’ve no desire to be the man who delivered al-Andalus to the infidels,’ he said. ‘I’d rather be a camel driver in Africa than a swineherd in Castile.’

An African army prepared to invade Europe.

ROGER’S FART, ZAYNAB’S MAGIC AND EL CID’S SWORD

An extraordinary quartet – two brothers, a nephew and the wife of two of them – had radically changed west Africa before they even reached Spain. In the deserts of Mauritania, on the borders of the kingdom of Wagadu, a Berber convert named Abdullah ibn Yasin launched a jihad among recently converted Berber tribes who called themselves al-Murabitin. Wearing their blue tagelmust veil below the eyes, the Murabits – now led by Abdullah – quickly conquered the vital trading towns Sijilmasa and Awdaghost, before turning north and defeating the Maghrebi kings.^* After Abdullah was killed in battle, his brother Abu Bakr besieged the Maghrebi capital Aghmat, defended by its governor Luqut. When it fell in 1058, Abu Bakr married Luqut’s widow Zaynab an-Nafzawiyya, daughter of a Berber merchant from Tunisia, beautiful, intelligent and rich in gold, experience and supernatural powers. Nicknamed the Magician, she refused to entertain offers of marriage until Abu Bakr had conquered much of the country, at which she blindfolded him and took him to a treasure-filled cave, where she unveiled him: all now belonged to him. That was a legend, but she negotiated with existing elites on Abu Bakr’s behalf. The Berbers, like the pre-Islamic Arabs, had a tradition of female leaders, including the queens who had resisted Arab conquest.

While fighting to the south, Abu Bakr appointed his nephew Yusuf ibn Tashfin as his co-ruler, giving him his wife Zaynab, who became his co-ruler. Yusuf gradually conquered much of the Maghreb, but finding the capital Aghmat too suffocating, he created a new one – Marrakesh, the city that gave Morocco its name.

In 1076, Abu Bakr, now calling himself Amir al-Muslim – Commander of the Muslims – pushed southwards along the caravan route into west Africa, where he broke the Wagadu kingdom of the ghanas. Taking a Fulu girl as one of his wives, Abu Bakr fathered a boy (who later founded a Jolof kingdom) before he was killed by an arrow fired – in an example of very bad luck – by a blind Soninke warrior. Inheriting this new empire that extended from Algeria and Morocco to Mali and Senegal, Yusuf now received al-Mutamid’s invitation from Spain.

King Alfonso warned Yusuf against invading. ‘Wait and see what happens!’ replied Yusuf. In 1086, some 15,000 men including 6,000 shock cavalry from Senegal crossed to Gibraltar on rafts, with elephants and camels. Yusuf’s blue-veiled warriors defeated Alfonso, who just managed to hold on to Toledo and appealed to the pope for a holy war. When Yusuf sailed back to Africa, El Cid helped Alfonso restore his power over his Islamic allies before striking out for Valencia, which he captured, declaring himself the prince – an independent ruler at last. But Yusuf was not finished: in 1090, he crossed the straits again, exiling or killing the decadent Islamic kinglets.^*

While the Veiled Ones besieged Valencia, its prince, El Cid, died and his wife Jimena held out for three years until Alfonso evacuated her. She then rode into Burgos with the body of the Champion. Yusuf had conquered a new Islamic empire in Spain. Christendom was in crisis.

Only in Sicily had Islam been overcome by the Hauteville brothers. In 1081 Wily Robert, sensing Constantinople’s weakness, attacked the Basileia Romaion, sending a vanguard under his eldest son, the twenty-seven-year-old Bohemond, across the Adriatic into the Balkans. Son of Wily’s first wife, Bohemond, even more colossal and flaxen-haired than his father, was nicknamed after the mythical giant Buamundus Gigas. Robert and his duchess Sichelgaita marched east. In Constantinople, an aristocratic general named Alexios Komnenos, who was lucky, tireless and talented, seized the throne, facing enemy advances on all fronts – Normans in the Balkans, Pechenegs and Cumans in Ukraine, Seljuks in Anatolia – but backed by his Varangian Guard (which now included Anglo-Saxon axemen) and by the fleet of Constantinople’s client city Venice, he marched into the Balkans to stop the Hautevilles.

Sichelgaita rode into battle with her husband and stepson. When the Hauteville troops almost broke, Sichelgaita rode after them with a spear, a sight so fearsome to her fleeing soldiers that they turned, rejoined the battle and won. But Alexios, aided by the plague, broke the Hauteville forces, and Robert was recalled by the pope. Alexios switched to repel Pechenegs and Cumans of Ukraine and then pushed back the Seljuks – a remarkable performance that saved the Basileia Romaion. No wonder his daughter Anna adored Alexios, who reminded her of ‘a fiery whirlwind … His dark eyebrows were curved, the gaze of his eyes both terrible and kind … his broad shoulders, muscular arms and deep chest were of heroic mould’ – and he would be the hero of her history, The Alexiad.

Afterwards, Alexios rewarded Venice, founded in 421 by refugees from Roman Aquileia and Ravenna escaping from barbarians, by granting it special trading rights in the empire and bestowing on its elected ruler the titles ‘dux of Venice’. Isolated on its lagoon, Venice had developed from a Constantinopolitan colony into an aggressive seafaring state, ruled by a dux who became the doge of the Serenissima Respublica which expanded into Dalmatia and took up the trading of spices and slaves before starting to seize its own colonies. It was not the only sea state thriving on trade with the east: Genoa and Pisa, both similar Christian oligarchies, were its rivals.

Alexios enjoyed another stroke of luck. In 1085, Wily Robert died of the plague aged sixty-nine, succeeded by his brother Great Count Roger of Sicily, who was now invited by Genoa and Pisa to attack Islamic Tunis, an early crusade. Roger was more interested in selling Sicilian wheat to Tunisia than in massacring Muslims. His response was pungent: ‘Roger lifted his foot and made a great fart, saying “Here’s better counsel!”’ But the Hauteville fart was not enough to still the winds of holy war. A new pope was about to rearm Christendom with a new mission: Crusade.

CRUSADERS: THE GIANT AND THE EMPEROR’S DAUGHTER

Emperor Alexios appealed to the new pope Urban II for aid in fighting the Seljuks. All popes had to balance the power of the German emperors against the Hautevilles. Urban’s election had been opposed by the German emperor, who had set up a counter-pope. Already eager to reinvigorate the Church, to buttress Alexios and probably also to divert Germanic baronial aggression, Urban learned of a new Turkic massacre of Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem. He convened a council at Clermont, where on 27 November 1095 he incited an assembly of princes, clerics and people ‘to destroy that vile race’ of infidel Turks and ‘enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulchre; wrest that land from the wicked race, and subject it to yourselves … for the remission of your sins, with the assurance of the imperishable glory of the Kingdom of Heaven’.

His audience chanted ‘Deus vult!’ – God wills it! – a militant mantra that resounded through Europe. Bohemond de Hauteville was besieging Amalfi when he heard it. Then, ‘inspired by the Holy Ghost’, the Giant ordered ‘the most valuable cloak to be cut up immediately into crosses and most of the knights at the siege began to join him’. It was the same with his nephew, the twenty-year-old Tancred, whose crusading zeal was compared to ‘the vitality of a previously sleeping man’.

Princes and peasants alike awoke to this frenzy, rushing to take the Cross – the promise to undertake the ‘pilgrimage’ to conquer Jerusalem. The word crusade was not used until later. The numbers were astonishing. In the first wave, led by a barefoot preacher known as Peter the Hermit, 80,000 peasants, princes and priests surged across Europe towards Constantinople, where they hoped with all the vagueness of fanatical believers that they would somehow reach Jerusalem. Princes mustered armies of knights and soldiers, led naturally by the Normans. William the Conqueror’s eldest son Robert, demeaningly known as Curthose – Shortpants – who had inherited Normandy (while his brother William II Rufus received England), immediately joined a movement that was inspired by a mix of faith, ambition and adventure, stimulated by the energy released by economic and population growth. There was no need to choose between motives: zealotry, plunder, travel, opportunism dovetailed precisely with religious salvation and violent adventure.

Roger’s fart notwithstanding, Bohemond, prince of Taranto, son of Wily Robert, now forty years old, had seven Hautevilles in his retinue including his nephew Tancred, whose ‘powers were roused, boldness set in motion, eyes opened’. Like so many thousand others, ‘His soul was at a crossroads. Which of the two paths to follow? The Gospels or the world?’ Now he could have both.

It must have seemed doubtful the pilgrims would ever reach Jerusalem and kill ‘the accursed race’ of Muslims, so they turned on the infidels in their midst: the Jews. One of the crusading princes, Godfrey of Bouillon, the Franco-German count of lower Lorraine, who was accompanied by his two brothers, announced he was ‘avenging the blood of the crucified one by completely eradicating any trace of those bearing the name “Jew”’. In May 1096, Jews were massacred in Trier, Mainz and Speyer, the first spasm of anti-Jewish racism that would become a bacterium within European culture.

‘The whole of the west living between the Adriatic and Gibraltar migrated in a body to Asia, marching from one end of Europe to the other,’ recalled Anna Komnene, then awaiting the pilgrims in Constantinople. After a decade of war against rebels, Alexios had stabilized the empire. But Anna hoped to succeed him.

Alexios had left his mother in charge when he was fighting the Hautevilles, and he had initially planned to leave the empire to his eldest daughter Anna, who had been born into the purple with both parents present: ‘This signified even in the womb the love I was destined to have for my parents.’ As a child betrothed to her father’s early co-emperor, then almost married to a Seljuk sultan’s son, she grew up believing she would rightfully rule, and when she was later married to an aristocrat she and her mother believed the couple would succeed. Instead Alexios crowned his son Joannes as co-emperor. Anna was disappointed.

Alexios was alarmed by the pope’s populist war: all wars led by Roman emperors were holy by definition and his experiences with the Hautevilles had taught him that the Franks – as he called all westerners – were brutes of ‘uncontrollable passion, erratic character, unpredictability and avarice’.

When the ragged mob of Frankish pilgrims arrived outside Constantinople, Alexios fed them and hurried them on their way into the sultanate of Rum. Then Bohemond de Hauteville and the princely armies arrived. Receiving them in the Great Palace, Alexios did not rise to greet them, confident of his Roman superiority. He was friendly even to his old enemy Bohemond, though the Giant suspected his food might be poisoned. Anna called him ‘a born perjurer’, but couldn’t lift her gaze from this brutish blond, ‘a marvel for the eyes … so perfectly proportioned’. And he was no dumb blond: ‘His wit was manifold and crafty … he was well informed.’ Bohemond, who had so much to gain and nothing to lose, was persuaded by the princes to take the oath of friendship to Alexios, meaning that he would be their lord, a humiliation eased by roomfuls of gold.

Dealing with these armies, the emperor ‘used every means possible, physical and psychological, to hurry them across the Straits’ to Asia. Once across, the peasant rabble encountered the horse archers of the sultan of Rum, Kilij Arslan (Sword Lion), who massacred 17,000 of them. Few survived. The princely armies were next. Sword Lion confronted the Crusaders at Dorylaeum, but his horse archers failed to break heavily armoured knights.^* In October 1097, they arrived at Antioch, where they discovered the miraculous ripeness of their timing. The House of Islam was shattered, ruled by feuding Turkic atabegs – barons – while the Fatimiyya caliphs struggled to control their own generals and the Cairene crowd; and they still hated the Sunnis more than the Christians, and signed a non-aggression pact with the Crusaders.

Bohemond besieged Antioch, aided by supplies delivered by Genoese ships to St Simeon, the nearest port. The Crusades were made possible by the Italian trading cities, led by Genoa,^* followed by Pisa – a massive commercial opportunity which the shrewd Italians did not miss. Venice took the Cross as a city and built a special crusading fleet.

At Antioch, where the Crusaders were growing desperate, Bohemond cultivated an Armenian Christian in command of one of the towers. When he was ready, the Giant persuaded the princes that whoever took Antioch should keep it as their own. As the atabeg of Mosul galloped to save the city, Bohemond’s agent opened the gates; Hauteville forces poured in, killing every Muslim. But then the Turks arrived. Now it was the Crusaders’ turn to be besieged, obliged to eat horses, dogs and rats, and experiencing trances of hunger. One pilgrim was inspired by a vision to unearth the Holy Lance that had stabbed Jesus’ side on the Cross, discovered beneath a church floor. It certainly raised morale: as priests brandished the Lance in sacred procession, the Giant led out his starving army, routed the Turks and claimed the city as his own principality.^*

Godfrey and other princes led the army southwards, finally arriving outside Jerusalem. The astonishing beauty of the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque crowned Mount Moriah where the Jewish Temple had once stood, its surviving golden walls still revered by its Jews. But it was the Holy Sepulchre that was the object of the Crusade. Sacred to three Abrahamic religions, Jerusalem was a small fortified town of 20,000 Muslims and Jews, its walls defended by several thousand Egyptian troops, including Nubian cavalry.

As the Crusaders, now reduced to a mere 10,000, besieged the Holy City in the blistering heat of the Judaean wilderness, they were again rescued by the Genoese, who arrived at Jaffa on the Mediterranean and, dismantling their ships, brought the wood with which to build mangonels and siege engines.

On 15 July 1099, as the mangonel stones and the arrows flew on both sides, as battering rams smashed against the gates, the thirty-eight-year-old Godfrey accompanied the first troops from his siege engine on to the north-east walls while others broke in from the south. Opening the gates from within, the Crusaders, who had only just survived their 3,000-mile journey, slaughtered everyone they encountered, men, women and children, Muslims and Jews. While the Egyptian general and his troops negotiated their escape, everyone else was killed. Desperate Jerusalemites crowded on the Haram al-Sharif (as the Muslims called the Temple Mount), clambering on to the roof of the Dome of the Rock and praying to be delivered. Tancred de Hauteville, penniless and ambitious but at least more humane than his comrades, tried to negotiate a safe conduct in return for ransom, but ‘Some of the pagans were mercifully beheaded, others pierced by arrows plunged from towers and yet others, tortured for a long time, were burned to death,’ wrote one of the Crusaders. ‘Piles of heads, hands and feet lay in streets and houses,’ trampled as ‘men and knights were running to and fro over the corpses’. Babies were brained against the walls. The Jews were burned alive in their synagogue. Tancred supervised the looting of gold and treasure from the Dome and al-Aqsa. The princes rode horses with gore up to their bridles and then proceeded, their tunics, faces and hands besmeared with blood, to pray at the Sepulchre, tearfully praising God. While the bodies were burned in bonfires, the princes and soldiers raced to grab the best houses. Godfrey was elected king, but, insisting that Jesus was the only king of Jerusalem, he chose the title Advocate of the Holy Sepulchre and converted al-Asqa, believing that it had once been Solomon’s Palace, into the royal residence. Although a few connected Muslims and Jews were kept alive and ransomed to the Egyptians, virtually every Jerusalemite was killed.

At Christmas, when the city still stank of human putrefaction and many knights headed back to Europe, Bohemond and Godfrey’s brother, Baldwin, arrived for their first pilgrimage. The new patriarch of Jerusalem, Daimbert of Pisa, blessed Baldwin as count of Edessa and Bohemond as prince of Antioch.^* When Godfrey died in 1100, his brother Baldwin was chosen as king of Jerusalem, founding a French dynasty there, while Bohemond, basing himself in Antioch, expanded his principality – until he was captured that year by a Turkic warlord and held for ransom.^* His nephew Tancred, glorying in the title prince of Galilee, served as regent of Antioch until the Giant’s return. Bohemond’s Antiochene principality, to which the family later added Tripoli (Lebanon), lasted more than twice as long as the kingdom of Jerusalem – an eastern branch of the Hautevilles.

Infuriated by ‘that thorough rogue’, Emperor Alexios tried to buy the Giant, but Bohemond instead persuaded King Baldwin to pay his ransom. Needing more cash and knights, Bohemond sailed for Europe where, revelling in his new status, he married the king of France’s daughter Constance, who delivered the required son. Back in Antioch, the Giant set off to attack Alexios, but was defeated and in 1108 forced to submit to the emperor. He died not long afterwards.

By 1118, Alexios too was dying, determined to leave the throne to his son Joannes, known for his dark looks as the Moor and for his measured personality as the Beautiful. His wife still championed her daughter Anna. The night before his father’s death, Joannes pre-empted mother and sister by taking his father’s signet ring and seizing the Great Palace. Anna tried to raise troops and planned a hit on Joannes, who did not attend Alexios’ funeral for fear of assassination. The Beautiful kept the throne, soon uncovering another conspiracy by Anna, who was thereafter confined to a convent.^* Joannes and his son Manuel were as capable as their father, doing their best to destroy the Hautevilles, who were meanwhile planning to seize Jerusalem.

From the very start the Hautevilles of Sicily had ruled differently, promoting Arabs and Greeks. When the great count Roger, brother of the Wily and uncle of the Giant, died in 1101, his widow Adelaide ruled on behalf of his sons Simon (briefly) and Roger II. Baldwin of Jerusalem needed cash; Adelaide wanted Jerusalem. Ridding himself of his first wife after a childless marriage, Baldwin wed the thirty-seven-year-old Adelaide, on the understanding that if they had a son he would inherit Jerusalem and, if they did not, Roger II would become king. In Jerusalem, Adelaide was bilked by Baldwin I, then dispatched humiliatingly back to Sicily. Her son Roger was incensed. He claimed Jerusalem, and Antioch on behalf of his younger cousins, a plan foiled by the Antiochene barons who married their heiress Constance (Bohemond’s granddaughter) to a French prince, Raymond of Poitiers.^*

The Crusades inspired the stirrings of coordinated Islamic resistance. In 1144, Edessa fell to Zengi, the atabeg of Mosul and Aleppo, which served as the catalyst for the second Crusade, led by the pious young Louis VII of France (accompanied by his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine) and the king of Germany, Conrad III. Crusader strategists recognized that for the Crusader states – known as Outremer, Across-the-Sea – to survive, they had to win either Syria or Egypt. They chose Syria. Travelling down to Antioch, the monkish Louis was cuckolded by his feisty wife Eleanor, heiress to Aquitaine, who had an affair with her urbane uncle, Raymond. After a rendezvous with the Jerusalemites led by Baldwin III, the three kings bungled their siege of Damascus. Their failure played into the hands of Joannes’ heir Emperor Manuel, who was now able to force the Hautevilles to acknowledge his overlordship.^*

Not all the Hautevilles had to compromise. Swarthy and Italianate, taking after his mother rather than the flaxen Hautevilles, Roger II may have been foiled in Outremer but in Sicily and southern Italy he built Europe’s greatest kingdom, a source of much jealousy on the part of German emperors who had been accustomed since the days of Charlemagne and Otto to dominating Italy, and of Roman popes who feared Norman power.

Embracing the multi-ethnic nature of Sicily, Roger II created a unique court that combined Norman, Greek, Arab and Jewish culture. Married to the half-Arab daughter of Alfonso of Castile, he ruled through George of Antioch, a Greek corsair who had formerly served Arab rulers in Tunisia and gloried in the title amir amiratus – amir of amirs (the origin of the word admiral). George took Tripoli in 1146 and a swathe of north Africa, then Corfu, and he next attacked Constantinople, firing arrows right into the Great Palace. Manuel was defended by his Venetian allies, to whom in gratitude he granted a bespoke trading quarter in Constantinople. But when he asked them to attack Sicily, they refused. Outraged, he awarded special status to the Genoese.

At home, Roger commissioned the breathtaking Palatine Chapel with its Byzantine domes and mosaics and Fatimiyya muqarna – stalactite vaulting – and the only contemporary portrait of Roger himself, presented as a sacred ruler. Escorted by Arab bodyguards, he favoured Arab and Jewish scholars. In 1138, the geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi created the Tabula Rogeriana, a world map or planisphere, engraved on silver, incorporating the best knowledge available until the voyages of Columbus, and wrote The Avocation of a Man Desirous of Full Knowledge of the Different Countries of the World – which described the journeys by Arab sailors to the Saragossa Sea off Bermuda – and a description of China.^* But it did not show Mongolia, where during the 1120s, as Roger built his Sicilian empire, a chieftain of the Mongols was conquering his own.

* To the east, a warlord named Mahmud hacked out a new realm, based in Ghazni (Afghanistan), which he expanded from Persia to Pakistan, repeatedly raiding northern India. The Ghaznavis fought like Turks but embraced refined Persianate culture. Mahmud patronized a Persian poet, a Khorasani landowner’s son called Ferdowsi (Paradisiacal, his nom de plume), who for thirty years had been writing the Shahnameh – the Story of Kings – an epic poem of gods and heroes starring a strapping Prince Rustam and promoting the Persian over the Arab, fusing pre-Islamic and Islamic Persian culture. Mahmud promised Ferdowsi a gold piece for every couplet but took so long to pay up, the money arrived as the poet’s funeral cortège left. While the caliph remained nominal overlord, he granted the Ghaznavis a new title of secular authority: sultan, the power.

* Blondeness and pallor were much prized: myrrh, lime, saffron, sandarach and thapsia were used for hair dye; chalk and lead powder for face make-up. Her ingredients were imported from Egypt and India.

* Some of these differences were minor, others significant. The easterners rejected the western reforms – priestly celibacy and new wording in the Credo that the Holy Spirit derived not just from the Father but also from the son (filioque). The westerners in turn rejected the Roman emperor’s title, Equal of the Apostles.

* This was not just about England and Normandy. All of these princes were players in a complex eastern world. Hardrada was married to Elisiv, the daughter of Yaroslav of Kyiv. On the English defeat, many Anglo-Saxon exiles went to serve in Constantinople and were granted a colony called New England, probably in Crimea. Harold and his wife Edith Swanneck had four sons, who each invaded England to expel the Bastard – three were killed in the attempt. Their daughter Gytha was married to Vladimir Monomakh, prince of Kyiv, and it was their son, Harold’s grandson, Yuri Dolgoruky, who was the founder of Moscow and progenitor of all the tsars down to Ivan the Terrible.

* Manzikert is still celebrated by Turks every year. Western Europeans understood that the weakening of the eastern empire was a catastrophe. In 1074, after Manzikert, Pope Gregory VII had proposed a war to support Constantinople – the first step towards the Crusades twenty-five years later.

* Nizam wrote a guide to politics for Malikshah, reflecting amid much sage advice on the danger of family. ‘One obedient slave is better than 300 sons,’ he wrote, ‘for the latter desire their father’s death, the former their master’s glory.’

* In 1090, the fissiparous schisms of the Fatimiyya caliphate produced the Assassins. Like Shia itself, it started with a family split when the caliph handed the succession to his son al-Mustali over the claims of the eldest al-Nizari, who in 1095 rebelled and was killed by immurement (entombed while alive). Nizari’s backers, led by a mystic-scholar named Hassan i-Sabbah, believing that the immured prince was occulted and would return as the Mahdi, fled Egypt and seized the castle of Alamut in the mountains of northern Persia, founding a principality that lasted two centuries. Its early leaders called themselves the Dai – the Missionary – but later they claimed descent from Nizari, ruling as sacred imams. The Nizaris compensated for their small size by fanaticism, assassination (and, some claimed, drugs, hence the nickname Hashishim – Assassins). Their hitmen killed thousands of Sunnis, including two Abbasiya caliphs. Later: Saladin twice survived their attacks; a hit squad disguised as monks assassinated a Crusader king of Jerusalem; another wounded the English prince who survived to become Edward I.

* The trope of penises and palm trees refers to the Arab story that Mary shook a date tree while giving birth to Jesus, leading to much ribaldry among these female poets. In Muhja’s shocking verses, she compares Wallada’s mysterious pregnancies to that of the Virgin Mary: ‘Wallada has become fertile by another man; the secret-keeper revealed it. To us, she resembled Mary, but this palm tree is an erect penis.’

* The name al-Murabitin (possibly meaning people of the ribat after their fortress-monasteries) was translated as Almoravid in English.

* The poet-king al-Mutamid was exiled to Morocco. When Cordoba fell to the invaders, his daughter-in-law Princess Zaida fled to Alfonso, who made her his concubine before converting her to Christianity and marrying her as Queen Isabella. In 2018 newspapers claimed that the British queen Elizabeth II was descended from the Prophet Muhammad, citing Zaida as her ancestor. Zaida had two daughters; one, Elvira, married Roger, the Hauteville count of Sicily; the other, Sancha, is the progenitor of a line of royalty, via Richard earl of Cambridge and Mary queen of Scots, to George I. It is a link between Islam and Christendom from a more cosmopolitan time. Al-Mutamid was descended from the Arab kings, the Lakhm of Iraq – royalty older than the Prophet but not related to him – and al-Mutamid was Zaida’s father-in-law, not her father. There is no evidence Zaida, let alone Elizabeth II, was descended from Muhammad.

* Kilij Arslan was killed fighting rival Turkic lords; in 2020, his tomb was discovered at Sivlan, Türkiye.

* Genoa had initiated the Crusades with raids on Mahdia and Tunisia (in 1016 and again in 1087, the one rejected by Roger I’s fart). It was a republic, known as La Superba, ruled by consuls chosen by a cartel of mercantile families – led by the Doria, Grimaldi (today princes of Monaco) and Embriaco. The Genoese traded silver from Sardinia and wool, but above all gold and slaves, black and white, from Africa and Russia, trading between Nile and Atlantic, building up colonies from Ceuta in Morocco to their slave market in Kaffa (Feodosia, Crimea). But they spent much of their energy fighting their hated rivals, Pisa and later Venice.

* It was the second Crusader state. Baldwin of Boulogne, brother of the Jew-hating Godfrey of Bouillon, had already galloped off and seized Edessa (Urfa, south-eastern Türkiye) as his own county.

* Genoese ships commanded by the merchant prince Gugliemo ‘Hammerhead’ Embriaco were essential not just for the conquest of Jerusalem but also of Caesarea, Acre (where they received a third of the income) and (in today’s Lebanon) Tripoli, Tyre and Gibelet (Byblos) which became a family fiefdom of the Embriaco family. The Venetians, arriving later, clashed with their Pisan rivals and afterwards stormed Haifa, where the mainly Jewish population was slaughtered.

* The Crusader paladins were not all male: in 1101, a small German crusade was partly led by Ida, margravine of Austria, who aged around forty-five was ambushed by Sword Lion, the Seljuk sultan of Rum, and killed in battle.

* While her brother turned out to be the greatest of the late emperors, Anna survived for decades, writing her history to exorcise her bitterness: ‘I died a thousand deaths,’ yet ‘after my misfortunes, I am still alive – to experience yet more’. Her loss was history’s gain. Just as Ban Zhao was the first female historian in China, Anna was the first in the west.

* When Bohemond died at fifty-six, Antioch was inherited by his son, Bohemond II, who was brought up by his mother in Europe until he was of age. In 1126 he arrived to build his own realm, allying himself with Baldwin II of Jerusalem, cousin of the first, who married him to his daughter Alice, thereby linking the largest of the fragile Crusader states. But being a Crusader monarch was a risky enterprise. Bohemond II, ‘forceful’ like his father but less lucky, fought Frankish rivals and Islamic foes before invading Syria with his father-in-law Baldwin II. There he was killed four years later – his head sent to the caliph of Baghdad – leaving Antioch to his baby daughter, Constance. Raymond of Poitiers was the son of William IX the Troubadour, duke of Aquitaine, who had campaigned against the Muslims in Spain, bringing back from al-Andalus the knightly poets and enslaved dancer-singers who helped promote a fashion for courtly love, sung in French by singer-songwriter-knights – the troubadours. William personified the cult of love, devoting himself to his beautiful mistress, the wondrously named Dangereuse de l’Isle Bouchard, who was the grandmother of Eleanor of Aquitaine.

* After Raymond was killed in battle, his widow Constance, liberated from political marriage, fell in love with a reckless, penniless adventurer, Reynald de Châtillon, whom she married and raised to titular prince – while her stammering son Bohemond III succeeded to the throne. Constance had to recognize Manuel, to whom she married her daughter Maria, thereby joining the Hautevilles to their enemies, the Komnenoi.

* When Roger II died in 1154, his third wife was pregnant. A girl, another Constance, was born posthumously. Given the number of sons and male relatives, it seemed unlikely that she would be politically significant.