24 April 2011
Ma’arrat an-Numan: Cannibals Wearing Crosses
Today, Ma'arat al-Nu'man is simply a medium sized town on the M5, about halfway between Hama and Aleppo. It’s of far less importance than either of those or even compared to nearby Idlib. Few tourists venture there and, if they do, they are likely only to visit the mosaic museum on the main square. Housed within the largest Ottoman caravanaserai still standing in Syria and dating from the 16th century, it serves as an ideal setting for an impressive collection of mosaics, mainly from the late Roman and Byzantine period and gathered from the nearby Dead Cities.
A thousand years ago, though, Ma’arat was far more significant than it is today. In the eleventh century, it was best known as the home of the blind poet Abu al-Ala al-Maari (973-1057), a freethinking promoter of vegetarianism and of atheism. He said, “the inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts: those with brains, but no religion, and those with religion, but no brains” and “do not suppose the statements of the prophets to be true; they are all fabrications. Men lived comfortably till they came and spoiled life. The sacred books are only such a set of idle tales as any age could have and indeed did actually produce.” He also wrote a parody of the Quran while his Risālat al-ghufrān, in which the poet visits paradise and meets deceased pagan poets, may have inspired Dante’s Divine Comedy. In the tolerant and pluralistic atmosphere of Syria, open irreverence was not merely tolerated but celebrated.
In the same age, a great mosque was built in Ma’arrat. The minaret is one of the more striking aspects of the city and was rebuilt after an earthquake in 1170 by the architect Hassan Ben Mukri al-Sarman though the bulk of the mosque dates from the age of Abu al-Ala. This grand mosque marked a city that, in the eleventh century, was rapidly rising as a major center for the region. Yet it is not for its medieval remains that it is best known, though the mosque, as well as a madrassa from the same period and remains of the citadel, are well worth visiting. Rather, it is because Ma’arrat an-Numan was once a watchword for one of the major attrocities of that age.
Every war has its share of atrocities and the First Crusade was no exception. The massacre inflicted by the Crusaders upon the defenders of Jerusalem – “if you had been there, your feet would have been stained to the ankles with the blood of the slain … neither women nor children were spared” – is well known. Not as famous but perhaps equally significant in establishing the Crusader states were two similar events in the Frankish invasion of north Syria. These two incidents both involved cannibalism on the part of the Crusaders, first at Antioch and, later, at Ma’arrat an-Numan (the Marra of the Frankish chroniclers).
These two incidents, while well known to this day among Arabs, have received little attention in the West. Though they were carried out by a relatively small number of the Crusaders, they appear to have been instrumental in establishing a real fear of all the Crusaders and in the establishment of the Christian states in “the land beyond the sea”. Reports of these incidents as well as of the other atrocities committed by the Crusaders appear to have sealed the reputation of the Franks as savages among the Muslims and that fear (as well as severe disunity including an ongoing war between Sunni and Shia) helped to prevent the formation of a strong Islamic resistance or the launching of any successful counterattacks during the first decades after the establishment of the Crusader states despite the greater strength in numbers and resources of the Muslims.
The first of the two anthropophagic incidents occurred at Antioch. In the course of a long siege and counter-siege, food became increasingly scarce and the Crusaders desperately sought any sustenance: “Then the starving people [the Crusader army] devoured the stalks of beans still growing in the fields, many kinds of herbs unseasoned with salt, and even thistles which because of the lack of firewood were not well cooked and therefore irritated the tongues of those eating them. They also ate horses, asses, dogs, and even rats. The poorer people ate even the hides of animals and the seeds of grain found in manure.”
As the siege continued, the hunger grew worse and, “in a letter to Pope Paschal II, crusade leaders reported that ‘some could scarcely refrain from eating human flesh’.” During the winter of 1097/1098, “some of the poor even turned cannibal. Some wild Flemings who had followed Peter the Hermit and were known as ‘Tafurs" acquired a considerable reputation for this kind of thing. They always fought in the front lines and made the most of any Turks they killed.”
After Antioch had finally fallen, the Crusader leaders decided to attack the city of Ma’arrat-an-Numan. This town had a population of around 25,000 and was located astride the main route about fifty miles southwest from Antioch, towards Damascus and Jerusalem. Food and other rations were short among the invading army and capturing Ma’arrat was seen as both a way of keeping the army busy and of securing food for them. After a two-week siege, from November 27 to December 11, 1098, Count Raymond of Toulouse’s miners opened a breach in the wall and the city was entered. “On that day and the next [the Crusaders] killed all the Saracens from the greatest to the least and plundered all their possessions.”
While the massacre of the entire population of a city was certainly an atrocity, it wasn’t particularly unusual for that lot. More troubling for them was the discovery that Ma’arrat did not have the stores of food that they had imagined it to contain. Fulcher describes the actions of the Crusaders during the siege with more approbation: “I shudder to say that many of our men, terribly tormented by the madness of starvation, cut pieces of flesh from the buttocks of Saracens lying there dead. These pieces they cooked and ate, savagely devouring the flesh while it was insufficiently roasted. In this way the besiegers were more harmed than the besieged.”
Other contemporaries attest to these events as well. Guibert of Nogent goes further in his description of the cannibalism at Ma’arrat. He says of it: “when at Ma’arrat – and wherever else – scraps of flesh from the pagans’ bodies were discovered; when starvation forced our soldiers to the deed of cannibalism (which is known to have been carried out by the Franks only in secret and as rarely as possible), a hideous rumor spread among the infidel: that there were men in the Frankish army who fed very greedily on the bodies of the Saracens. When they heard this, the Tafurs, in order to impress the enemy, roasted the bruised body of a Turk over a fire as if it were meat for eating, in full view of the Turkish forces.” At least part of the action of the Crusader-cannibals seems then to have been to spread news of their ‘diet’ in order to frighten the enemy.
In some of the Old French epic poems describing the events of the Crusade, the Tafurs, the group of Crusaders responsible for the acts of cannibalism, are further described and their actions glorified. These Tafurs were drawn from the poorest part of the Crusading army and carried neither arms nor money. Apparently, they were drawn from those peasants and townsmen who had participated in the People’s Crusade led by Peter the Hermit and, after their defeat by the Turks in western Asia Minor, they had joined up with the Crusade of the nobility. Most were Flemish and were said to have numbered ten thousand. These people were proud of their poverty, driving out any of their number who acquired wealth, and believed that they would be the ones who would recapture Jerusalem. Of their leader, the man known as “King Tafur”, Guibert of Nogent describes him as a Norman knight of high-birth who, when “he saw that these men were wandering about without a lord … he laid down his weapons and clothes, and volunteered to be their king.” The name “Tafur” is said by Guibert to have been given them by the “infidels” though he preferred the name “Trudennes or tramps” due to their footloose ways. The meaning of “Tafur” is still uncertain and modern scholars have suggested a number of interesting possibilities, deriving it from the name of the pagan god Toutatis, the Armenian tahavor (king), the Arabic taafour (miserable), and the Flemish talevart (a type of shield) or some combination of these. Other than being cannibals, these people were said at Antioch to have taken “a particular delight in violating the infidel women whom they found in that city.”
While rape of the women of the defeated population has long been considered a standard event in warfare, cannibalism is not. For both Medieval Christians and Muslims, it was something beyond the pale of human behavior and done by monsters and savages, whether the ghouls of Arabic folklore or the ogres of western Europe, and doing so was normally seen as putting a person or group of people as beyond the human community. During the Fifth Crusade (1213-1221), a Frankish knight imprisoned in Egypt had killed and eaten his daughter and had had his wife butchered as well. On his return to Europe, Pope Innocent III “ordered him to wander about on a three-year penitential pilgrimage. And he was never supposed to remarry, or eat meat, again.” In contrast, the Tafurs were not ordered to do penance nor did they suffer any form of punishment. In fact, as we have seen, they were “praised” in Western Europe.
Some modern historians have suggested that there was a religious impulse behind their behavior. According to this theory, the Tafurs were strongly under the guidance of Peter the Hermit who “inflamed the Tafurs’ eschatological dreams and fed them with spiritual sustenance based upon the Old Testament model of God leading the Chosen People through the desert.” They ate the flesh of Muslims not out of sheer necessity but as a part of a ceremonial meal of a “new manna”. According to Richard the Pilgrim, when food was scarce during the siege of Antioch, King Tafur and a delegation of his followers had approached Peter. The Hermit advised them to feast on the fallen Turkish warriors which they did along the banks of the Orontes and, shortly afterwards, they opened Turkish graves for still more food.
Sometimes, taking part in a ritual action of “pollution” is believed to be a way of gaining greater power in primitive societies; such a belief seems to have been a part of the Tafurs’ mindset. Meanwhile, the Christian Eucharist with its claimed transformation of bread and wine into the literal flesh and blood of Jesus might give rise to an association between anthropophagy and holiness. Through these acts, the Tafurs would see themselves as prepared to capture Jerusalem, a city believed to be the most holy place on Earth.
These cannibalistic acts of the Crusaders, though only a minority within the Crusade participated in them, appear to have had a tremendous impact on Muslim perceptions of the Crusaders. From Ma’arrat almost all the way to Jerusalem, the Crusaders marched virtually unopposed. The Emirs of the region hastened to bring provisions and whatever would facilitate the rapid progress of the Crusaders out of their lands. Only at Hisn al-Akrad (Krak des Chevaliers), Arqa, and Saida (Sidon) did they meet with even token resistance. At Hisn al-Akrad and at Arqa, the Crusaders had attacked without provocation in attempts to win the provisions held at both places. At Arqa, the besieging army withdrew after five weeks with nothing gained. According to one interpretation, “Arqa’s real strength was that from the very moment of the battle its inhabitants were convinced that if a single breach in the wall were opened, they would all be slaughtered like their brothers in Ma’arra and Antioch.”
The Tafurs’ actions may have convinced the Muslims that defeat would mean their extermination and worse in a way that the high-born warlords of the Crusade could not – though their own brutality certainly added to a general image of the Crusading host as that of a horde of savages. Most preferred surrender without resistance to annihilation and many fled before the advancing army; “the populace was paralyzed by terror and ceased to resist unless forced to do so.”
The leaders of the Crusade appear to have realized that the sight of a roasting Turk and the rumors of cannibalism would have this effect and, while not actively encouraging them, did little to prevent it; “if they did not approve these atrocities, they seem at least to have tolerated them.” Richard the Pilgrim, who had taken part in the Crusade, even claimed that Godfrey of Bouillion offered King Tafur “a bottle of his best wine in order that the meal [of Turkish flesh] might be yet more enjoyable.” Certainly, a degree of ethnocentrism was present in their views. As Albert of Aachen wrote: “the Christians did not shrink from eating not only killed Turks or Saracens, but even dogs.”
Strategically, then, the Tafurs were at least as valuable as the knights. In Turkish epic literature, the Franks came to be “invariably described as anthropophagi.” The news of these events and of the massacre at Jerusalem must have traveled swiftly through the Islamic world and caused a real dread of the Europeans. This dread helps to explain why, in the early years of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, no counter-offenses were mounted on the part of the Muslims despite their numerical superiority. As one writer puts it succinctly, the cannibalism “was one of the effectual causes of the Crusade’s success.”
One can see similar events throughout human history. The use of terror to cow the enemy into non-resistance has long been a weapon of the conqueror, whether it’s Saddam Hussein gassing Kurdish civilians, Harry Truman dropping atomic bombs on the Japanese, or Raymond of Toulouse putting whole Arab cities to the sword. But the cannibals of Antioch and Ma’arrat an-Numan belong to a different grouping. These men were not acting on the orders of Bohemond or Raymond or of any “leader” of the Crusade other than that of their own captain, King Tafur, and of Peter the Hermit. Nor did the leaders of the Crusade sanction their actions. Are there any parallels to these actions?
Perhaps there is, though the analogy may be unwarranted. Eight and a half centuries after the First Crusade, a similar situation arose n the same part of the world as another group of invaders attempted to wrest Palestine away from its Arab inhabitants and establish a new state in what they saw as their religious homeland. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the principal Zionist military organization, the Haganah (the forerunner of the Israeli army), had disavowed the forced expulsion of the Arab population from what was to become Israel. The more radical members of the Irgun Zvei Leumi and Lehi militias, however, began a campaign of terroristic attacks against the the Arab population with the intention “to spread panic among the Arabs and to cause them to flee whenever Jewish forces approached.” At the village of Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948, 254 Arab civilians – everyone then in the village – were killed. As news of the massacre spread, hundreds of thousands of Arabs fled.
The result – the removal of over eighty percent of the Arab population of what was to become Israel – was certainly helpful to the mainstream of the Zionist movement and in the formation of the Jewish state. The mainstream criticized but seldom condemned the perpetrators – the guerilla who led the action, Menachem Begin, would eventually become Israel’s Prime Minister – and some even credited it with being the turning point in Israel’s War of Independence. And as the Arabs of the Twelfth Century would see the dead of Antioch, Ma’arrat, and Jerusalem as having been “redeemed” by Saladin, today an oft-repeated hope is that a “new Saladin” might emerge and redeem their dead.
Looking at the history of the First Crusade and how men acting from what seemed to them to be the highest motives performed the basest deeds, we can possibly understand the chasm of fear and misunderstanding that has separated the nations of the Christian West from the Islamic Middle East more clearly. Perhaps, too, the cannibals of Christendom, when added to the traditional image of the Crusaders, allow a truer version of that period to emerge. Without them, the Kingdom of Jerusalem might never have been established and, without them, too, the hatred of the Muslims for those states might never have burnt so fiercely.
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Fulcher of Chartres, A History of the Expedition to Jerusalem, 1095-1127, trans. by Frances Rita Ryan, W W Norton & Co., New York, 1973., p. 122.
Ibid., p. 96.
Ronald C. Finucane, Soldiers of the Faith: Crusaders and Moslems at War, J. M. Dent & Sons, London, 1983, p. 64.
Hans Eberhard Mayer, The Crusades, trans. by John Gillingham, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1972, p. 55.
Fulcher, p. 113.
Ibid, pp. 112-3.
Elizabeth Hallam, editor, Chronicles of the Crusades: Eyewitness Accounts of the Wars between Christianity and Islam, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1989, p. 85.
Ibid., p. 85.
Lewis Sumberg, “The ‘Tafurs’ and the First crusade”, in Medieval Studies, vol. XXI, 1959, p. 225.
Ibid., p. 238.
Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, Oxford University Press, New York, 1970, p. 66.
Hallam, p. 85.
Sumberg, pp. 226-8.
Ibid., p. 230.
Finucane, p. 66.
Ibid., p. 128.
Sumberg, pp. 237-9.
Amin Maalouf, The Crusades through Arab Eyes, trans. by Jon Rothschild, al Saqi Books, London, 1984, p. 43.
Ibid., p. 40.
Sumberg, p. 239.
Albert of Aaachen, Historia Hierosolimitana: History of the Journey to Jerusalem, trans. Susan B. Edgington, Clarendon Press, 2007, ch. V.29, pg. 375.
Maalouf. P. 39.
Finucane, p. 128.
Fred J. Khouri, The Arab Israeli Dilemma, Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, 1968, p. 124.
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