Sorry I have no spellcheck, will spellcheck it tomorrow.
The Crusading Tradition
Henry the Sarecen Slayer part II
No one can doubt how splendidly, how vigorously, how skillfully our most excellent king has practised armed warfare against his enemies in time of war... He not only brought strong peace in England... he won victories in remote and foreign lands.
- Gerald of Wales, 1190
We will speak, and you will listen.
-Henry II, to the people of Cordoba, 1157
BURP! Now that was a fine meal gentlemen! You guys want to go back to Jimmy's place, or just hang out on the street? Summer twilight is always nice in Ohio.
Yes Jules, there are nice things about Ohio. Come on, this is my home for Christ's sake!
Alright, alright, no more blasphemies. Though for the record I don't believe that's a blasphemy. Saying Jesus was sired by a Roman Legionary is a blasphemy. Which I hasten to add, I don't believe.
Well, while we're here do you want me to wrap up the whole of Henry II's reign, or do you guys wanna talk about the Bible, or Football or something else?
Ok, Ok, Ok, Henry II's reign it is. Alright, now where was I? Yes, Andalusia was the bright shining star of Islamic world. To be fair though, it was only bright because Baghdad had become so dim with decadence, and Christendom with ignorance, and India with blood lust and China...well, I don't want to get into why China was screwed up in the dark ages, but I'm willing to bet it was something like corruption and invasions and the the precursors to Neo-Confucianism, even though Neo-Confucianism proper didn't appear until around the 12 or 13th centuries. So don't ever believe the hype: Islamic Civilization only looked good by comparison. Yes, Andalusia did produce Averroes, but it also produced that wonderful book that was the basis of the Inquisition and Counter-Reformation, "Against the Philosophers."
I'm not a good story teller when it comes to battles, and if you're not good at battles, the campaigns of Alexander can seem boring. The same is true of Henry "the Sword of God" Plantagenet. You guys do know the basics, right? This is high school stuff after all. Alright, well, Henry went straight for the jugular: Cordoba, capital of Islamic Spain. With Cordoba cut off from the rest of Andalusia, resistance across southern Iberia was uncoordinated and lack luster. But just to show you how dangerous a wounded animal is, the would be conquerors of Leon, Castile and Portugal were defeated at a place called Salamda, which is about where the border between Portugal and Leon was. They were not able to rebuild their armies in time, though none of them, not even Portugal, were ever in any deal danger. Only Aragon made progress, sacking towns on the eastern coast and finally besieging the province of Grenada.
Cordoba fell by the end of 1157. Henry II found much to his surprise he was excellent at siege warfare. While he lacked the panache of his descendant, the famous Edward III, or the tactical genius of Edward the Longshanks, he was set a precedent that all great English monarchs were to follow. After Cordoba fell, Henry ordered the city not to be sacked. He then went to the mosque of Cordoba, and promptly turned it back into the Cathedral it had been at the fall of the Visigoth Kingdom.
The Mosque at Cordoba as it appeared in Henry's time
And without Cordoba, organized resistance to the Christians collapsed, just collapsed. English armies began to take the lesser towns one by one. Only in the Balearic Islands, or whatever the fuck you call them, did resistance go on, and it would in various forms for another 100 years. Now Henry faced a crisis here, and this is what interests me. By 1160, the Crusade had gone on for four years, and was carried almost entirely on the back of Plantagenet's. While Aragon was happy, Portugal, Leon and especially Castille wanted spoils. Henry gave them nothing, instead, he used the Pope to turn Castile and Leon against each other. This is very unpopelike, but at this point Henry was offering the entire city of Carthage if he was successful in invading North Africa. Which he got, a fucking ruin. So Henry paid him 150 ducats for the right of the city, and everything was cool again.
The fall of Andalusia itself was anti-climatic, for the Rock of Gibraltar finally fell in 1163, for nearly four years, Henry had been fighting in North Africa. At first, the small English fleet had been repulsed time and time again, but in 1160, 10,000 troops under Henry's command, landed and stormed the city of Marrakesh soon after.
Oh, yes, good question. Now most Crusader treated the locals, Jews, Muslims, even local Christians without utter contempt, like I said, but Henry was different. Now, to be sure, he thought all non-Catholics were wrong, but his official policy was for as much toleration as he could get away with for Muslims, and moderate toleration for non-Catholic Christians. But there a hitch: Cathars and their Bogomil counterparts were NOT considered Christian at any level, as even the few surviving Arian communities in the east were heretics, but within Christian thinking. Cathars were thought of as Satanic corruption, a view that was propagated by Henry, St. Thomas Beckett, and then through several Popes...
I'm aware, Jimmy, that heretics were not always viewed as Christian, but neither where schismatics. If you don't conform to the Vatican's wishes, you are subject to contempt at best and burning at the stake at worst, and that's how the Catholic Church deals with it's critics and opponents, and it's a damned effective way to to do it. Let me say that old English rallying cry: FTP. But back then, they were the only game in town. The church needed a Martin Luther in the 1100s, true, it needed a Martin Luther the day after John of Ephesus died. But there was no Martin Luther in this age So better the Miter than the Turban. Souls needed to be saved.
Henry's famous words were "We will speak, and you will listen." He said this to the assembled people of Cordoba on the steps of the new christened Church. The English government would not forcibly convert the Andalusians, nor persecute them, nor render them second class citizens. They would be *gasp* equals of the Mozarabic Christians they had previously lorded over. Now before the Toleration Act of 1534, which was included in Henry VIII's break with Rome, all non-Catholics had to pay higher taxes, they were made unsuitable for higher office within the Kingdom proper (though this did not keep the famous Averroes from becoming Henry II's personal physician, "outside the realm"), but they were not to be harmed on account of their faith. Henry made a compromise on conversion. Apparently, the Islamic Koran has a nasty provision that anyone who converts from Islam is to be killed, and Henry wasn't THAT culturally tolerant. Instead, he would not press for government sponsored conversion; instead local priests would have to convince Muslims on an individual level to convert. Henry had hoped this would be enough to convert some of the Muslims in Iberia. It worked, but never to a satisfactorally extent as Henry wanted. 70 years later, Henry III would "betray" the word of his grandfather, but it would be until the end of the 13th century that Islam would cease to be a major force in Andalusia. This is commented on by both the Muslims themselves and the Spanish powers who mocked the tolerance of the English as, get this, "Un-Christian." But I'm getting ahead of myself.
The point is, there were no monies to spend on conversion even if Henry had wanted to, and no monies would be spent on conversions after 1173. Why 1173? That's the end of the Plantagenet Crusade. So Henry extended toleration to first Andalusians, then the Berbers and Arabs in North Africa thereafter. By 1163, the Andalusians were on the brink of collapse. Their capital was taken, their armies non-existent, Henry had wiped them all out and put down the rebels in North Africa, except in southern Morocco. And then Tripoli finally fell to the English, the Andalusian regime collapsed. The Emir of the Almohads committed suicide in despair, and the Rebel leaders sought to make peace, only wishing Henry to give back the Toubkal region along with the capital and leave. They were backed by 50,000 Tuareg warriors ready for battle. Henry was exhausted, and so was his Empire, so he readily accepted.
The rest of the Crusade is quite boring without really knowing the battles. Henry waited two years to consolidate his rule in North Africa, then attacked the Fatimids in Egypt. His reasoning was simple: They were a heretical branch of Muslims called the Shiites, and the majority Muslims hated Shiites and the Damascans were growing stronger by the day under Nasrudin. If Nasrudin could get his grubby little paws on Cairo, the Crusader States would be surrounded by a hostile force. The Fatimids HAD to be taken out. And he faced the exact problems Rommel would face in the desert: attacking Egypt from Cyrenaica is just not a good idea. His supply lines were bad, the sand was every where, and worse, and much to the bemusement of the Muslim world, Jerusalem sided with the Fatimids, pitting Henry against the state he wanted to protect. The sieges were long and hard in the Delta, first Alexandria, then eastward until Cairo and the Sinai. This was Catholicism's first encounter with Copts since...no let me rephrase that, it was Catholicism's first contact with Copts. And the reaction on neither side was very good, at least among the clergy. And when the clergy found out about their Monophysitism...
Monophysitism? It means the Copts, like the Armenians and Georgians, and Nubian's and Ethiopians, believed Jesus had one nature and one nature only: divine. And this drove the Catholics nuts.
You believe that, Jimmy, I don't. Jesus had one nature, human. There is no God-man, only the SON of God. But I'm not here to argue that. Nicaea was a shit fest beginning to end. Doesn't matter who won. Every time the Ecumenical Councils met they got it wrong. Every frickin time. All seven councils, all corrupted by petty, overstuffed, pompous, arrogant, perverters of the word of God. Never hesitate to kill a holy man, for they are never holy. They merely get in the way between you and God. Diderot was right: Man will not be free until the last tyrant is strangled with the entrails of the last priest!
Yes, I do realize you're a youth pastor James. Pastors don't count, they don't claim to be holy men.
Anyway, the struggle, was long and hard, but finally, the Fatimids had fallen, and Jerusalem surrendered to Henry, at the gates of Jerusalem. Henry chose to vassilate the Kingdom, so that its foreign policy would be identical to that of the Plantagenet Empire. At this point, the Damascans panicked. By now their possessions extended from Lebanon in the west to Tabriz in the east, Jordan in the south and Kurdistan in the north. The Rum Sultanate, their ally, was bigger, including both lesser and greater Armenia, and most of Anatolia. With his priests begging him to purge and persecute the Copts, Henry did the unthinkable. He attacked the Damascans while they were weak and hoped to God it would be enough until reinforcements from Andalusia would come. This was the spring of 1168, when Henry marched over the Sinai with a force of about 25,000 men, the whole of his army, besieging the cities of Jordan and then posting most of his forces outside Damascus itself. He sent money he could have used to raise troops to both the Caliph in Baghdad and he Emperor in Constantinople, begging them for help. The Caliph offered nothing in return, but he was happy to see Nasrudin go too. Politically astute, Henry offered to return, without question, all of the Rum lands plus Edessa to the Greeks if Manuel Comnenus would invade the Turkish lands.
A word about Manuel I Comnenus. He was a BEAST. He is referred to to this day as Manuel the Great by the Greeks. Everyone feared him, and most loved him. He enjoyed an excellent reputation among Greeks and Catholics alike. And this would have been the coup de grace for him to recover Anatolia at English expense. There was just one problem: he was busy beating the shit out of the Hungarians, and had no real forces to spare. The best he could offer was to bully the sultan of Rum, Kilij Arslan II, who was himself an excellent military commander. This was enough to keep the Turks from sending anything more than token forces.
The Danishmends, on the other hand, were a Turcomen peoples and allies of Rum and the Damascans, sent in plenty of troops. Not once, but three times, did the armies of the Muslims drive the English from Damascus, though Henry inflicted huge losses on them. His goal was to bleed them out and bide his time while Spanish mercenaries were assembled in Gibraltar and brought to Acre. Finally, in Oct. 1169, the King of England finally crushed the armies of the Damascans and killed Nasrudin. with the city under siege, Henry headed north, defeating every Turkish army sent against him and conquering Iconium late in the year 1170 while Damascus fell.
With evermore troops arriving in Acre, the cities of the east had fallen to the English, so the war was over in the Levant when Damascus fell, but the war in Anatolia was only beginning. Henry II, had just liberated the people of Sis, when he got word that nearly 40,000 Turks and Danishmends were sieging Sivas and cutting off his only escape route to Antioch Henry faced a choice, he could march to the Byzantine border and regroup there, call in the ships for evac, or he could take on an army two and half times his own and end the war once and for all. There's some silly story about being convinced to do this by a poor peasant that was actually St. Thomas or Jesus in disguise, but it's silly so I won't go there. The battle of Sivas was a bloody affair. The point is that like Richard III would do at Bosworth, Henry realised his only chance was to kill Kilij Arslan personally. It had to be done.
So he comes charging at the Turkish HQ in the middle of this battle, his knights falling right and left under the whithering arrows, and Henry gets his horse shot out from under him, and he goes flying right? And he tumbles out, only to fall at the feet of Arslan himself. Arslan, this is one version, starts to offer Henry terms, another says he began to gloat like a Bond villain, what is known is Henry take the dagger out of his boot and stabs him in the foot, and right as the sultan's bodyguard are about to mow him down, up comes Henry the Young King, though he wasn't the Young King yet...oh that would be Henry's eldest surviving son. They're on a little roadtrip for some camping, and fishing and slaughtering heathens, you know, all the good stuff. I'll never forget the first time my dad took me out to slaughter heathens...he, he, he. Anyway, Henry the Young King, swings and lops the head off a bodyguard and the rest are stunned as the cavalry catches up and mows down the bodyguard. Arslan, now bleeding and crippled begs Henry for mercy. Henry stabs in him the throat, throws his body aside and looks for another mount. Fucking A.
It took three more years after that, but the outcome was never in doubt. In 1173, the last of the Armenian provinces fell, and as there was no one left alive to make peace with, peace was declared. And there was much rejoicing. and the Aragonese mismanaged their Andalusian possessions so bad, that Murcia defected to the English in 1171, cutting off Aragonese Grenada from reinforcement.
On more thing. By this time, the war between the Hungarians and the Greeks was over, and the Greeks held lands on the right bank of the Danube, lands they had not held since Justinian. To avoid war and looking bad, Manuel and Henry came to an agreement. All of the former Rum, Antioch and Edessa would remain in English hands, as stewards of the Greek lands. Basically, to take Antioch: Antioch was loyal to England, and England was loyal to Constantinople, at least in the Rumlands. So Henry II, the most powerful man in Christendom, was now technically a vassal to both France and Greece, who were in no way as powerful as he.
But oh shit, we gotta go before they kick us out...
World map, circa 1180
Pink is directly annexed to the English kingdom
Red are vassal states (Scotland, Connacht, Wales, Brittany, Jerusalem)
Light Purple represents lands belonging to the Greek Empire under Plantagent stewardship (Antioch, Edessa, the Rumlands)