Histories I – Crusades & Castles

Us humans love to believe in things and, unfortunately, when other people tell us they believe something else we love to do a bit of murder. Often these beliefs centre around a religion, which is a surprisingly difficult thing to define. However, generally, it is a system of beliefs which utilises pervasive and powerful symbols to which conceptions about the general order of existence are tied to. Around these conceptions, an air of factuality is given to make each religion seem uniquely realistic to its followers. However, without a public aspect to the religious practice, it can only be considered a privately held belief. For example, my privately held belief is that people who put the milk in before the cereal have been created as a cruel joke by Tony the Tiger’s all powerful evil twin, Terry. But, firstly, this doesn’t have the narrative, symbology or tradition tied in with our pitiful existence (not yet anyway). And secondly, it is lacking the fact that most religions have organised behaviours such as prayer or sacrifice. Reading between the lines, it seems I have a lot of public sacrifices to perform in the name of good cereal etiquette, but in the meantime let’s look at “real” religions.

A Religious Prelude

Prepare thyself for some history my sweet summer child

The earliest examples of religious practice are attributed to the middle and lower Paleolithic periods (300,000 years ago) where intentional burial and symbolic artifacts were found. However, this is lacking in evidence and relies on our modern day interpretation of ancient practices so forget about that and let’s get to the good stuff. Gobekli Tepe is an archaeological site in southeastern Turkey that dates back to pre-10th millennium BC (i.e. more than 12,000 years ago, 7000 years older than Stonehenge). Archeological work is still ongoing but so far 200 pillars in 20 circles have been discovered. Each pillar is 6m tall, weighs up to 10 tons and they are standing due to sockets hewn from the bedrock. The people that built Gobekli Tepe came before the Neolithic revolution (that brought the start of agriculture and animal husbandry at around 9000 BC) and are thought to be a previously unknown people of an advanced order. Klaus Schmit, the discoverer and excavator of the site, believes it to be a Stone Age mountain sanctuary. There is evidence of rituals, feasts and shamanic practices which makes it the oldest religious site in the world. 

After this the next biggest jump is the arrival of the religious texts. The Kesh Temple Hymn, as well as being the oldest religious text in the world, is also the joint oldest surviving literature. Written on clay tablets at around 2600 BC, it was made just as the ancient Mesopotamian Sumer people were developing from a purely logographic writing system (where a written character represents a word and therefore has an inherent meaning) towards a logosyllabic script (written character represents a sound like when using the alphabet). The archaic pre-cuneiform script is considered to be the earliest writing system but once the logosyllabic cuneiform was developed, literature and religion could be fully expressed. The Kesh Temple Hymn starts with the chief deity of the Sumerian pantheon (Enlil – god of wind, earth, air and storms) praising the city of Kesh and the establishment of Ekur (which can be thought of as the location of the assembly of the Gods, similar to Mount Olympus for the Greek pantheon). It goes on to discuss Nisaba (the god of writing, vegetation and understanding) who wrote the work of the gods and transmitted it to humans. In fact, the Enlil/Nisaba relationship is somewhat analogous to the relationship between Yahweh and Moses.

“The princely one came forth royally from the house. Enlil lifted his glance over all the lands, and the lands raised themselves to Enlil. The four corners of heaven became green for Enlil like a garden. Kesh was positioned there for him with head uplifted, and as Kesh lifted its head among all the lands, Enlil spoke the praises of Kesh. Nisaba was its decision-maker; with its words she wove it intricately like a net. Written on tablets it was held in her hands” 

This is only an extract but the words from this hymn, transcribed in the oldest written language (written years before the pharaoh Khufu enlisted the help of the aliens to build a ridiculously large pyramid) went on to influence religions, societies and literature across the expanding modern world. From Babylon to the Bible, the Sumerians and their ancient writing can be seen copied almost word for word in extracts of religious prose and even specific characters crop up under new names. In fact, it’s quite comforting to know that it’s not only students that plagiarise, religions do it too.

Another ancient and extremely important set of religious works are the Vedic texts (the oldest scriptures of Hinduism), written in the ancient Vedic Sanskrit language which developed independently on the Indian subcontinent. This eventually became classical Sanskrit which provided the basis for many of the ancient texts of Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism. Composed of four Vedas which discuss different aspects of the religion from rituals and ceremonies to philosophy and spiritual knowledge, the oldest part dates back to the 2nd millennium BC. These Vedas are mantras which are recited in the modern day for their phonology because just their rhythm and sounds are considered to be the primordial rhythms of creation which were heard by the ancient sages after intense meditation. Unlike many other religious texts, these were transmitted orally through the millennia from father to son and teacher to student. This cemented a memory culture into the Indian subcontinent and a tradition of mnemonic techniques became embedded in society. The Vedic texts weren’t written down for two millennia and through that time, the words of the ancient Vedic Sanskrit teachings became less accessible and more obscure to most people. Rituals were disengaged from the original context but Holdrege (a prominent Indologist) said that, “As long as the purity of the sounds is preserved, the recitation of the mantras will be efficacious, irrespective of whether their discursive meaning is understood by human beings.” In a sense this focus on recitation and memorisation can be applied to many religions since, take Islam for example. For Muslims outside of Arabia and North Africa, Arabic is generally an inaccessible and incomprehensible language. However, the recitation of the Arabic within the Quran is considered extremely important, as part of the religious tradition, whether you are engaged with the meaning or not.

Finally, in my potluck of influential religious things that happened before some baby rocked up in Bethlehem, is the formation and influence of Zoroastrianism. A religion focused on the teachings of a prophet called Zoraster and focussed around the collection of religious texts called “Avesta”, it was written in the Avestan language which dates back to the second millennium BC. The language is grammatically close to Vedic Sanskrit but unlike the Indian language Avestan did not adapt and survive, in fact it is only seen in Zoroastrian scripture. The most ancient and important part of these texts are the Gathas which are 17 hymns pertaining to the religion’s precepts and supposedly written by Zoraster himself. The religion focusses on cosmological duality (heaven and hell, good and evil, light and dark) and it has influenced many of the world’s belief systems since, but most clearly the Abrahamic religions. The idea of judgement after death is one of the most striking similarities, where your decisions under free will decide your fate on the “bridge of judgement”. Thought to have been around since the second millennium BC but only cropping up in historical records from the 5th century BC, it was the state religion of the ancient Persian Empire (Achaemenid) that once spread from India to Libya, Greece and everything in-between). Despite a brief burny burny, stabby stabby rampage through Europe and the edges of Asia by Alexander the Great in the 4th century BC, Zoroastrianism survived the plucky jabs of Hellenistic (Ancient Greek) religious influences and continued to thrive in smaller pockets for almost a millennium. Soon JC and his group of problematic bachelors (otherwise known as the squad) were busy turning water into wine, sneering in the face of buoyancy and writing up a pretty sick biography of the Lord and Saviour. But in the end then they died, leaving a disorganised rabble of followers, barely able to decide what their religion consisted of, doing next to nothing for a few hundred years. Therefore, Zoroastrianism stayed safely tucked away until the Muslim conquest of Persia during the life of the Prophet Muhammad. The Zoroastrian Persians had been fighting the Byzantine Empire for decades and found itself with a lack of people, political stability and money this set the stage for the Arabs to sweep in with the new Islamic religion in the 600s. They allowed the Zoroastrians to keep their faith under an Islamic state for a while but soon there was a slow but steady social and economic pressure to convert to Islam. Islam spread with every year after Muhammad’s death in 635 AD and under each new Caliphate’s rule the influence of Islam grew around the Mediterranean, Middle East and Persia. 

Christians Roll Out

After lying pretty dormant and trying to find what distinguished them from the Jews, the Christians lived pretty chilled lives dodging the occasional bout of persecution within the Roman Empire. This was until their status was made legal in 313 AD, after Constantine the Great saw a cross in the sky (hallucination, as we know, is a legitimate reason for policy change in an Empire). Christianity was pretty soon the official religion of the Roman Empire and Constantine was doing big things. He was changing Byzantium to Constantinople, building the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and convening a little council in 325 AD. This little clubhouse gathering in Constantine’s man cave, created the immeasurably important document, the Nicene Creed. This document cleared up some things for all the Christians, who were still a hodgepodge of ditherers wrestling with their religious identities. With traditions born out of Judaism and beliefs shaped by centuries of Roman cultural and political structures, they needed some guidance. So, in stepped the Nicene Creed to tell them: God is one but also three people but one of those people is a spirit/force (very clear), Jesus is the Son of God and died to save us humans from sin then he rose again to take his place in heaven. With that cleared up and loving Jesus becoming the next big trend, Christianity spread among the powerful and powerless alike. Eventually, the Romans started to lose ground in Western Europe due to enforcing their rule of law as successfully as that teacher you made cry at school. So, with their retreat and eventual complete collapse in 476 AD, the Roman Empire only remained in the East as the Byzantine Empire (with Constantinople as the capital). And, in the West, the pope gained a lot more political power. A few centuries of Popes establishing monasteries and centres of learning across Europe, followed by a few boatfuls of burly Scandinavian blokes with a penchant for murdering monks, brings us nicely to the second millennium AD. 

With the Golden Age of Islam in full swing, a hell of a lot of Turkic tribes had migrated to the Middle East, mixed in and gained power in the region. One of these tribes was the Seljuks who had arrived seeking fortune and they found it. This nomadic tribe raised an Empire and ruled across Persia and the Levant. However, the Islamic control over the Holy Land (which was increasingly seen as a pilgrimage sight by Christians) didn’t sit well with the lads at Constantinople. They wanted their pilgrims to be safe and so called for a crusade. Some bloke called Peter the Hermit (not a name that inspires much in the way of warmongering brilliance) managed to get thousands of European Christians on the war path to the Seljuks in Turkey and beyond. This “People’s Crusade” got a little side tracked on the way and massacred tonnes of European Jewish communities, because a non-believer is a non believer right? They eventually made it to the original target and got slaughtered faster than they could say “Dear me lads, think we misjudged this one”. Just like the Jehovah’s witnesses to this day, the Christians back at home were a persistent lot and on top of that they loved a scrap with people who essentially believed the same thing as they did. So, undeterred, they gathered all the volunteers they could and did a bloody good job of getting rid of the Turks in the First Crusade (1096–1099). In the aftermath of the years of violence, Crusader states were set up along the Mediterranean coast and the French (who did a lot of the holy killing) started building castles. I visited some of those castles. 

Shoubak Castle

Known by Wikipedia as Montréal, the surrounding area was pretty different from its Canadian namesake. Nestled in the hills that rise from the flat and barren Wadi Arabah, Shoubak has quite the location. The castle itself is perched on top of a conical mountain overlooking the exposed hills around it. Dotted with shrubs, bushes and the occasional tree, the hills are generally a strikingly barren backdrop. We parked up and with no one on the door we went inside before anyone official could turn up. Built in 1115 by Baldwin I of Jerusalem (a man destined for a church career who instead, married a Norman lass and joined the Crusader army becoming one of the most successful commanders of the First crusade) the castle was strategically placed to dominate the passage from Egypt to Syria. This allowed them to tax not only the traders that frequented the area, but also the pilgrims going to and from Mecca. When we first entered the castle its state of disrepair was a bit disappointing, but as we clambered over the stone walls and ducked into rooms, we started to see beneath the derelict skin. One of the first things we encountered was a hidden tunnel beneath one of the intact rooms, only high enough to shuffle along with my bum on my heels, Firas and I followed it. We expected it to go only a few metres at most, but it just kept descending deeper and deeper into the mountain and just as the subterranean adventure was getting a little too tight for my liking the way was blocked. Thighs on fire, we emerged and thought that maybe that was the tunnel dug by the crusaders to reach the spring fed cisterns so they could collect water without exposing themselves to attackers. However, despite the unusual amount of informational signage at the castle, there was nothing about the long tunnel.

Everyone split up as we walked around, and we all started to enjoy the hidden archways and remnants of magnificent rooms. At the far side of the castle we all found each other again and enjoyed the incredible view from the intact tower. It looked down into a valley where the rock strata swept across the hillside like streaks from a paintbrush, closer to us the rocks had been eroded into small caves and abandoned houses were concealed from the less observant by virtue of their natural stone walls.

After its construction, the castle stayed relevant until the much stronger Kerak Castle was built in 1142. After power had been moved to Kerak, Shoubak eventually fell into the hands of the absolute mad lad that was Raynald of Châtillon. Born into a French noble family, he saw some action in the Second Crusade (1147) which on the whole was a disaster. Then needing money to pay off his Wonga loan he captured and tortured some very powerful Catholic figures who refused to give him anything, the Byzantine Emperor himself decided this had crossed the line and led his enormous army to Raynald’s front door where he begged for mercy. After surviving the Emperor, he got locked up in Syria in 1161 for raiding some peasants’ villages. When he was released 15 years later, he managed to marry his way to riches and control over lots of what is Palestine and Jordan, including Montreal (Shoubak) castle. Not having had enough adventure, he decided that the extremely influential rising power of Saladin (the Kurdish founder of the Ayyubid dynasty, custodian of the two holy mosques and de facto caliph of Islam) could have some riches to plunder. After winning a battle and plundering some of his caravans, he built boats at Shoubak (miles from the ocean) and then took them down to the Red Sea to raid pilgrims heading to and from the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, even threatening to attack the cities themselves. The audacity of Raynald to be the only Christian leader to dare pursue an offensive military policy against Saladin had been mostly ignored but attacking pilgrims and the holy city was the final straw. Saladin went on a rampage (more on that later) and when he reached Shoubak, he realised the mountain location hindered the use of siege engines, so the army stayed put outside the castle walls for two years during which time defenders were said to have sold their wives and children for food. 

Kerak Castle

After our watery escapade in Wadi Bin Hammad, we made our way to Kerak for some lunch and some castle action. I don’t know what I was expecting but Kerak Castle was far beyond anything I could have imagined. After convincing the guards we all are residents of Jordan, we entered the thick walls. Unlike Shoubak, Kerak is a largely intact behemoth of a structure, an angular extension to the mountain it sits on. First we wandered around the lower courtyard which looked over one of the three valleys that surround the steep sided mountain that Kerak sits on. A small boy kept trying to talk to me in Arabic and eventually I got the hint and followed him. He led us down to the lower levels of the castle with his father. From a nondescript door we had been shown into an underground series of rooms. On our left was a banquet hall and to our right a meeting hall. The meeting hall was 80 metres long with an arched ceiling and had blocked passageways leading to previously open lower levels (the castle had seven stories). We were completely taken aback by the scale and simple beauty of the design. Soon we were out in the sun again where Sebastian, Firas and I set off, certain that in one of the rooms there had to be some treasure. We checked every single room, staircase and alcove and not even a twinkle of gold. On the upper courtyard area of the castle you would be forgiven for believing that the two ends of the castle were the only things left to see, however between these impressive edges were amazingly preserved tunnels with countless rooms coming off either side. This was perfect for us because not only did we have more to explore but we also stayed nice and cool in the passageways.

Other than being one of the largest Crusader castles in the Levant, Kerak castle is historically notable for its successful defences during Saladin’s aforementioned rampage. But we can’t talk about Saladin’s expansionist rage without talking about the man who lit the match. Or more accurately threw gasoline on the bonfire of Saladin’s ambition. I am of course talking, once again, about Big Ray of Châtillon and his off the rails antics. As I said, he was in charge of lots of Palestine and Jordan by this time and he had shacked up in Kerak in 1183 when Saladin’s first siege of the castle began. The siege took place while an important wedding was happening in the castle, but thanks to some shrewd negotiation and the influence of moral chivalry in that day and age, Saladin agreed not to attack the wedding chamber while the rest of the castle was bombarded. Ray held off Saladin in time for back up to arrive and the next year Saladin came again only to be forced to retreat by more reinforcements. However, it was the battle of Hattin (1187) that secured victory for Saladin, not only with Kerak but with the rest of the Levant. Every castle in the land had been called on to build a 20,000 strong Frankish Crusader army which was headed East for Lake Tiberias (Sea of Galilee). This was after Saladin had lured them from fortified encampments towards the open field of battle using carefully placed attacks. Needing water for the soldiers, they had to make it to Lake Tiberas as the springs on the way were insufficient for an army, however, Saladin’s army blocked the approach so they were forced to make camp on an arid plateau. During the night Saladin’s forces tightly encircled the Crusader’s camp and blocked all routes to the water, lighting fires, banging drums and chanting. The acrid air made the crusaders even more thirsty and the noise made sleep impossible, this was all while the opposition restocked their arrows and drank water from the lake. In the morning, more fires blinded the Crusader forces and as they made a desperate exhausted charge for water they were blocked and picked off by the better organised Muslim army. Overwhelmed by wounds and thirst, most of those who didn’t manage to escape put up no resistance, five knights even approached the Muslim leaders to beg to be put to a merciful death. The King of Jerusalem (a guy called Guy) was captured alongside Big Ray who of course was not going to miss out on another pop at Saladin. Understandably it wasn’t long before Saladin personally relieved Ray of his head, and by this time almost all of the fighting men of the Crusader states had been hacked to bits on the field of battle, this left the fortifications of the land under manned and vulnerable. So, Saladin’s army took advantage and captured towns and fortifications all over the kingdom (including Kerak and Shoubak) and eventually Jerusalem surrendered which united the entire region under the Ayyubid Sultanate. A few years of Ayyubid unity ended as the Third Crusade began. Guy (the imprisoned ex-king) was freed and decided to take his anger out on some Muslim blokes, his wife died in the siege but it provided a rallying point that brought Richard the Lionheart into the fray. After some decisive victories, Saladin and the English king came to an agreement in 1192 that a stretch of the Palestinian coast could be under Crusader control and that unarmed christian pilgrims could enter Jerusalem. Saladin died the following year with only one piece of gold and 40 pieces of silver to his name, having given away his vast wealth to his poor subjects. Richard the Lionheart went and royally pissed off the Byzantine Empire by annexing Cyprus and giving it to my guy Guy, so he fled home in disguise only to mess it up, shipwreck, get caught in Europe and then be imprisoned by multiple people. 

Ajloun Castle

Finally, we come to Ajloun. The most visited castle out of the three and surrounded by forested hills, olive groves and overlooking a wide valley. It’s the unknown green side of the Middle East, Northern Jordan you’re a beauty. What makes this castle different from the rest (other than the locale) is the fact it was established in 1184 by the Ayyubids to defend against Crusader attacks. Originally a monastery it was made into a fort by a general in Saladin’s army and it controlled traffic along the same road as Shoubak, from Damascus to Egypt. The castle protected the Ayyubids from the Crusaders in the surrounding castles including Kerak and established an area of control against the expansion of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. However, after the Ayyubids took Kerak, while on their post battle rampage, Ajloun lost its importance to Saladin and his gang. 

We had arrived at Ajloun on a Friday (Friday is not only the holy day and the weekend, but also a day spent with family) so the place was packed. Side stepping screaming children and groups of chatty women we made it across the moat and into the castle. It was the best preserved of the three with totally intact staircases, a mosaic and plenty of rooms on different levels to explore. At the top was a large open area with 360 degree views of the surrounding landscape. It was breathtakingly beautiful, as with the other castles, but ruined on two fronts. Firstly, by the almost criminally thoughtless placement of a phone pylon which obscured the most incredible view down a valley which was a sea of forest and farmland on our side and on the far side was a dusting of small towns sweeping across a patchwork of gold and green. Secondly, it’s not particularly easy to concentrate on almost artistic natural beauty when all around you are loud couples with their loud children piercing the air of calm with needles of hellish squawking. I managed to stop myself throwing children into the moat a few stories below… eventually…

After that we got out of there pretty quickly.

Final Thoughts

So, in conclusion, folk from all corners of this silly spinny rock have enjoyed their fair share of being murdered and then hopping on the murdering bandwagon themselves. Whether it was out of boredom, boredom under the guise of religious war, wanting more gold shiny things, more power, more land or wanting everyone to see that their God is of course the real one, killing a whole load of other people has always been just another day at the office. I’ve learnt a lot while writing this post. Condensing a few millennia’s worth of inter-societal hatred, power struggles and contrasting belief systems into a post which started off talking about Tony the Tiger has been an undertaking. But here we are at the other end, I now have a special place in my heart for the myopically minded adventure madman that was Big Ray of Châtillon and that strange admiration is something special. Jordan’s history, like everywhere else in the world, is intertwined with the socio-political climates around it, the mutating and evolving empires, the migration of people and intermixing of ideas across continents, climates and cultures has made us the fascinatingly odd set of hairless apes we are today. So, in a nutshell the castles are worth a gander but the history that led to their construction and downfall is a timeless story of people and our imperfect desires.