Robert Payne - The Dream and the Tomb: A History of the Crusades

Robert Payne

Maps of The Four Crusader States, The Ayubite Empire, The Crusade of St. Louis, Events in Egypt, Egypt and Syria, Homelands of Turks, Mongols, and Circassians, and The Fall of Acre are from Soldiers of Fortune: The Story of the Mamelukes by Sir John Glubb, reprinted courtesy of Stein and Day Publishers.

First Cooper Square Press edition 2000

This Cooper Square Press paperback edition of The Dream and the Tomb is an unabridged republication of the edition first published in Briarcliff Manor, New York in 1984.

Copyright 1984 by Sheila Lalwani Payne

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

Published by Cooper Square Press

An Imprint of the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

150 Fifth Avenue, Suite 911

New York, New York 10011

Distributed by National Book Network

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Payne, Robert, 19111983

The dream and the tomb : a history of the Crusades / Robert Payne. 1st Cooper Square Press ed.

p. cm.

Originally published: New York : Stein and Day, 1984.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN: 978-0-8154-1086-7

1. Crusades. I. Title.

D157 .P35 2000

909.07- dc21

00-057010

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

An epic cast and setting. High quality, splendidly readable.

Boston Globe

The important things about Robert Payne are his sensitive, astute intelligence, his vast erudition, and his magic power over words.... If anyone can capture the spiritual essence of a place, of a way of life, of an exotic culture, Payne can.

New York Times

Based on wide reading in the secondary literature, organized around famous crusading leaders, and filled with romantic and anecdotal material, Payne tells an old story exceptionally well.

Library Journal

Probably no author of this century has produced so many books at such a relatively high level of scholarship.

The [London] Times

My late husband, Robert Payne, spent close to seven years researching this book, reading both Western and Arab historians. It is, therefore, an unbiased approach to a most complex subject; it is also a vivid and colorful panorama of the first great confrontation between the Muslim East and the Christian West. In an earlier book, The Holy Sword, published in 1959, Robert wrote: Out of Arabia there came a proud and august people who in their time conquered most of the known world, and there is still too little about them in our history books. Sooner or later we shall have to learn to live with them.

I hope The Dream and the Tomb will help people of all faiths to learn to understand each other and to live with each other. For my husband, this book was a work of love and hope.

It is not often that a major book is published so soon after an authors death. If there are any inconsistencies or omissions, I hope the reader will understand.

I am extremely grateful to Sol Stein and to Benton Arnovitz for overseeing the whole project. I am also very grateful to Patricia Day and to Toby Stein for doing a superb job of editing. My sincere thanks also go to everyone concerned for their help and support. In particular, I would like to thank The Arts of Asia Foundation and The Very Reverend James Parks Morton, Dean of the Cathedral of St. John The Divine.

Sheila Lalwani Payne

IN their hundreds of thousands the Crusaders marched to the Holy Land, some on foot, some on donkeys, some in carts, some in armor and on well-caparisoned horses. Perhaps a quarter of them died on the journey and another quarter died in the wars, and many of them suffered atrociously to defend the small strip of seacoast they called the Kingdom of Jerusalem, a kingdom they held for less than a hundred years. They called themselves peregrini Christi, pilgrims of Christ, and in their eyes the miseries of the enterprise were outweighed by the splendor and the glory. They came from all walks of life: kings and emperors, farm boys and laborers, archbishops and priests, knights and foot soldiers. In wave after wave these armored pilgrims were swept forward to the holy cities of the Holy Land, and most especially to Jerusalem, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the tomb of Christ.

Landowners abandoned their land, peasants allowed themselves to be uprooted, princes plundered their treasuries in order to make the pilgrimage; and sometimes in old age they would return to Europe in feeble health, having spent half a lifetime in Saracenic prisons, proud and happy that they had been to the holy places. The odds were always against them, and some of their happiness derived precisely from the pact they had made with Christ and from the fact that they had accomplished an impossible task. Jerusalem beckoned them; they answered the call, for her voice was loud and insistent. They marched off to a country they thought they knew intimately from reading the New Testament or hearing it read to them, and they discovered very early that the Holy Land resembled no country they had ever seen or ever dreamed of. The desolation of the Judaean wilderness came to them like a shock on exposed nerves; nowhere in Europe was there a wilderness like it. Nor, when they first arrived, had they the faintest inkling how to deal with the Saracens, who were sensual to an extraordinary degree and at the same time unbelievably hard, cruel, and ruthless. They entered an unknown land inhabited by an unknown people, and the strangeness of the land entered their souls.

Today, when we look back at the Crusaders, we find ourselves marveling at their audacity and gallantry and their resourcefulness in building castles and fortresses that were works of art. When we ask ourselves why they went off in the hundreds of thousands, we discover that we do not always know why they went, or what it was all about. Certainly it was not always what the scribes and chroniclers said it was about. The more we find ourselves looking at the Crusaders, the more we shall discover that totally conflicting aims and motives were involved. There was the thirst for power and the thirst for land; there was humility and pride; there was the desire for blessedness and the desire to cut the throats of the pagans; there was malice and envy and all the remaining deadly sins. Rarely were men more sinful than when they set out to conquer the Holy Land, and rarely were they more deeply religious, more certain of their faith. Amid all the confusions and uncertainties surrounding the Crusades there existed the one absolute certainty: the Christian faith. Everything else could be argued about, but the existence of Christ as the lord of the worlds was beyond argument.