The Great North African Crusade TL

I'm tinkering with a TL (ideally for some future literary work--fingers crossed) and I'm wondering about the plausibility. Here it is, in its rough form:

POD: 1037-The Seljuk Turks are defeated by the Ghaznavids and contained in Azerbaijan and Central Asia.

The Abbasid Caliphate is not re-invigorated by the Turks per OTL and remains in decline, constantly fighting with the North African Fatimids (the Buyids remain in charge, which will also be significant). The Fatimids, faced with weaker Abbasids, expand their naval efforts in the Western Med, fighting against the Knights of Malta and the like. There's bad blood b/c of the 1010 destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

The Fatimids raid Rome, kill the Pope, and desecrate the Vatican. BAAD move.

The new Pope calls for a Crusade against the Fatimids, citing the destruction of the Holy Sepulcher, the constant Mediterranean wars, and finally, the martyrdom of the Pope and numerous officials in Rome. This one gets a lot more European participation than OTL Crusades, and they're more or less a generation early.

I haven't planned out the war too much, but it will begin in Sicily (ruled by the Fatimids at some point) and continue down into North Africa. There'll be some tactical cooperation (though not a full-blown alliance) with the Abbasid Caliphate, which will invade Egypt. The end result will be Crusader rule over all of North Africa (with the exception of Abbasid Egypt and perhaps some territory controlled by Islamic Spain in the far west). The Byzantines attack the distracted Abbasids and manage to reclaim Syria, though they can't get too much further south (I think I'll keep the Holy Land under Abbasid control).

The next 300 years see increased missionary work (and more than a little thuggery) in efforts to re-Christianize North Africa. These efforts are ultimately successful, and the "going into the desert to convert the heathen" invigorates the ascetic movement.

I have the Turks, still in Central Asia, largely converting to Nestorian Christianity or Manicheanism (thanks Leo). The Nestorian Turks filter down into northern India and Christianize it in the same way that their OTL equivalent Islamified Asia Minor. The Manichean Turks basically conquer China (sort of like the Manchus) and their faith influences the local religions (Leo said that the "Church of the White Buddha" or something to that effect is actually a Manichaen group in semi-disguise).

Now I'm stuck. In earlier discussions in the "Turks Don't Migrate" thread, we discussed an ATL Reformation where North Africa goes neo-Donatist as a result. However, one wonders how a massive effort like this would affect Church politics; would there even BE a Reformation?

Thoughts? Comments? Thrown tomatoes? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Oh, and here're some tidbits I forgot.

There's a good bit of European settlement in northern Africa, so the religious composition of the region doesn't solely depend on the Church's ability to persuade or bully the Muslim population into converting.

England also stays Saxon, since the Normans' military efforts and surplus "landless young nobles" are largely spent on this war.

With the churches energies concentrated southward and the normans not invading england, then the vikings will stay powerful and pagan.

This could be an interesting timeline with the pagan norse surviving to modern days and a majority christian population in north africa maybe starting it's colonization early while the christians were competing with vikings for land in the americas.

Yossarian said:

With the churches energies concentrated southward and the normans not invading england, then the vikings will stay powerful and pagan.

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Why? Christendom focused its energies south anyway. All this really does is bump up the Crusades. The odds of a pagan viking cultuer surviving in any significant form are low.

I thought both the Saxons of England and the Normans were Christians @ the time of the Norman Conquest. Why would not having the Norman Conquest (of England, at least) affect that?

Matt Quinn said:

I thought both the Saxons of England and the Normans were Christians @ the time of the Norman Conquest. Why would not having the Norman Conquest (of England, at least) affect that?

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England was well and truly Christian by this stage-and had been since, well, depending on how you want to classify it, since late 8th Century. The Normans were Christian, part of the treaty that gave the Vikings the land that became Normnady stated they must become Christian; ok, so at first it was more of a token conversation but by the Conquest it was real and Norman Lords were big sponsors of the Church.

There were differences between the two churches though, the Church in England was more 'old fashioned' and had a different style of architecture, very much a native style.

Also, by 11th Century Denmark was Christian-I'm not sure about Sweden and the rest but I know that they had Christianized elements (possibly Paganism survived in remoter areas)

Bumping it back to the top. Any input would be greatly appreciated.

I just had an idea...

According to one of my high-school history texts, violent European anti-Semitism (the pogroms and the like) were kicked off by OTL's Crusades. People said that it made no sense to wage war on Muslims while allowing the "murderers of Christ" to run free at home. According to other sources, the Crusaders ravaged Jewish communities they passed through on the way to the Holy Land (in addition to killing the Jews of Jerusalem itself).

If the Crusaders are more explicitly anti-Islamic (thanks to the Fatimid killing of the Pope) in TTL, and take travel routes that go south rather than east (down through France and Germany into Italy rather than through the Balkans into Byzantium), avoiding many Jewish communities, might there not be such wide-spread anti-Semitism in TTL?

Matt Quinn said:

I just had an idea...

According to one of my high-school history texts, violent European anti-Semitism (the pogroms and the like) were kicked off by OTL's Crusades. People said that it made no sense to wage war on Muslims while allowing the "murderers of Christ" to run free at home. According to other sources, the Crusaders ravaged Jewish communities they passed through on the way to the Holy Land (in addition to killing the Jews of Jerusalem itself).

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I thought much of anti-semitism was inspired by higher classes who owed money to Jews and realised they could sick masses on them and therefore remove debt.

One very interesting ramification of a crusade that went in a different direction, IMHO, is the change in the West's interaction with the Middle East. The Crusades were the start of a very conflicted relationship with the Arab world; if the energies of the West are directed south, then all kinds of things which be butterflied away (e.g. the Templars, and possibly with them international banking, and (indirectly) maybe even the Freemasons and the American and French revolutions). Additionally, those who traveled to the Middle East came back changed, and brought these influences back with them; those who travel to North Africa will be exposed to an entirely different set of influences.

As someone mentioned, the Catholic Church has continued to appoint cardinals to those North African dioceses, so if they were able to recapture those territories the cardinals might actually be forced to take up residence there. North Africa might become a kind of Catholic Siberia for clerics who have fallen out of favor with the Pope.

"Additionally, those who traveled to the Middle East came back changed, and brought these influences back with them; those who travel to North Africa will be exposed to an entirely different set of influences."

Hmm...isn't North Africa part of the Middle East? They're Arabic ethnic-wise and Islamic religiously. Of course, North Africa was full of Islamic splinter groups, the Berbers are an ethnicity in addition to the Arabs, and there might very well be survivors of Donatism at this early date.

"The Crusades were the start of a very conflicted relationship with the Arab world"

How precisely did the Crusades affect things? I read an interview with an Arab in the 1970s who loved the US b/c Americans didn't participate in the Crusades, which seems to indicate long memories on the locals' part. However, Europe had been on the receiving end for some time (Islamic sea-raiders and the Arab land incursions @ Tours and elsewhere). I heard that the Arabs viewed Europeans as dirty barbarians and the arrival of the better-armed Crusaders shook things up quite a bit, but knowing more could be helpful.

Hmm...perhaps the Arabs of the "Middle East proper" have a newfound respect for the Europeans, who in TTL efficiently obliterated the Fatimid Caliphate and were the Abbasids' "unofficial allies" (no overt dealings with "the infidel" a la the French alliance with the Ottomans, but tactical cooperation and perhaps some low-level stuff)? Of course, the fact that said Europeans encouraged (nicely and not quite so nicely) Islamic conversion to Christianity might muddy the waters a little bit.

"As someone mentioned, the Catholic Church has continued to appoint cardinals to those North African dioceses, so if they were able to recapture those territories the cardinals might actually be forced to take up residence there. North Africa might become a kind of Catholic Siberia for clerics who have fallen out of favor with the Pope."

That is a very good idea, Leo. I can work this into the revival of Donatism bit during the ATL-Reformation...some clerics disgruntled with Rome for their "exile" could "go native" out of sheer spite. They might start to think that they're "tougher" than the fat, lazy Europe-based officials, and the Donatist philosophy was all about purity at the top.

"I thought much of anti-semitism was inspired by higher classes who owed money to Jews and realised they could sick masses on them and therefore remove debt."

That did happen; in the same textbook I mentioned, there's a section where a medieval writer talks about how the local lords manipulated the peasants during the Black Death to go after the Jews. I was just wondering if the "reservoir of hate" that the nobles manipulated for their economic well-being got started during the Crusades.

Matt Quinn said:

Hmm...isn't North Africa part of the Middle East? They're Arabic ethnic-wise and Islamic religiously. Of course, North Africa was full of Islamic splinter groups, the Berbers are an ethnicity in addition to the Arabs, and there might very well be survivors of Donatism at this early date.

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The short answer is not really. Most Arabs I know don't really consider the Maghreb to be part of the Middle East. Those people are barely Arab, and those in Morocco were never ruled by the Ottomans (which makes a huge difference, of which most Westerners are unaware). Most of the "Arabs" in North Africa today were Berbers who became Arabized, a process which continues to this very day. Ethnically they're very different from Arabs. Many others are the descendents of slaves from both north and south.

How precisely did the Crusades affect things?

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Big time. The Crusaders' contact with the Middle East was the start of much change in Europe, IMHO. They were more deeply affected by it than most historians are willing to admit. From that point on, the concept of the Orient was born, and with it Orientalism.

Imagine coming back to your damp, soggy castle after a few years bumming around on a beach south of Sidon. You'll probably have brought a few souvenirs back, too, which would be the envy of all your fellow feudal lords. Carpets, Damascus steel, silk, and so on.

Even at the time of the Crusades, the local jargon in these parts was something called Sabir, or the Lingua Franca, a kind of pidgin Romance language mixed with vocabulary from just about every shore washed by the Mediterranean. This became the contact language between pirates and slavers, sailors and merchants, free men and slaves, and was spoken in practically every home in Algiers. Sabir also has the distinction of being the longest living and oldest attested pidgin language, first attested around the time of the 4th Crusade and surviving well into the occupation of Algeria by the French.

There's a theory, the monogenesis theory of pidgin languages, which holds that the slavers brought the Lingua Franca to all corners of the world, which is why all pidgins and creoles are similar. Even as late as the 18th century, John Barbot advised travelers to the New World to know French, English, Dutch, and the Lingua Franca. Many of the world's Romance pidgins appear to be relexified variants of a hypothesized Portuguese pidgin, which may have been an early spin-off of the Sabir. Many of the Spanish and even Dutch pidgins preserve some relics of a Portuguese substrate vocabulary.

If North Africa were conquered by Crusaders, it is likely that something very much like the Lingua Franca would surface as the local vernacular - much more likely, IMHO, than Arabic. For many of the populations in the Mediterranean, LF was the only tongue they held in common, and such a situation historically provides the best circumstances for a pidgin or creole to develop. The Arabs (and by that I mean the people of Arab descent, who were a minority at this time period, confined to the cities) would probably end up like the Maltese - they'd convert to Catholicism and develop a new language, based upon Arabic, but with a largely Romance vocabulary.

Leo,

Thanks for all the info. The stuff about the "Lingua Franca" was very helpful, and I will be sure to look into Maltese and apply some of the principles to North Africa.

Thing is, I was wondering how the Crusades affected the Middle Eastern folks. I've heard from some that it traumatized them and made them hate the West, but there was plenty of violent doings beforehand, so I don't think the alleged rivalry started there.

What do you think.

How did the material culture of North Africa compare with the Mideast?

Matt,

Scholarly types like Leo often restrict the meaning of the Middle East to include the Levant and Egypt, referred to as the Mashriq in Arabic as opposed to the Maghrib, North Africa from Libya west.

My question for Leo would be, what is the availability of spices, silk and all the other Levantine goodies in North Africa. Was North Africa in this century materially on par with the Mideast and Islamic Spain, or was it a bit behind?

Were there any native Christians left in North Africa by this time? I had the impression that North Africa converted earlier and more thoroughly than the Levant and Egypt.

Regarding ethnic Arabs in the region, I think the Ira Lapidus book on Islamic Civilization says there were bedouin migrations out of Arabia that crossed across the Sahara over the century or two after the Islamic conquest so the Arab presence was not strrictly urban.

Why did all these countries (and Somalia?) join the Arab League when Pakistan and Iran didn't?



I also don't think many western scholars admitting the major cultural borrowings that occurred with the Crusades, with the westerners getting more than they gave. Maybe somebody tries to deny or downplay it, but they're probably pushing some agenda. I remember this being admitted in New Jersey middle school textbooks for example, and repeated at higher grade levels. There's some debate over the comparative importance of Spain, Sicily and the Levant as places where knowledge was passed from the Ummah to Christendom, so the particular things that the Crusaders would aqcquire, not acquire or acquire instead of what they got in the Levant is an interesting question.

I think the Iranians would choose a slow death over choosing to join something called the "Arab League." If you've ever heard Iranians talk about Arabs, you'll understand why. Interestingly, Sudanis (and, to a certain degree, Muslim Eritreans and Somalis) tend to talk up their Arabic origins, whereas the Iranians would rather forget that their country was ever under the heel of the "filthy, lizard-eating Arabs"... as for North Africa, Berber nationalism is a fairly recent innovation, exported largely from Europe. Previously Berbers would use their language among themselves, almost as a "secret language," and use Arabic with everyone else. This is one reason why these countries have always been viewed as Arab lands. The Iranians had no such qualms about using their language; in fact, they exported it beyond Iran, with the result that it became a prestige language throughout India and the Silk Route for many centuries (Berber has never been prestigious anywhere).

I'll freely admit that I don't know much about post-Islamic Conquest North Africa, before the modern period. I do know that the urban inhabitants converted to Islam rather quickly. The rural folk are largely Berbers. I have no doubt that there were Bedouin tribes in North Africa, but I don't think that they were any more numerically significant than those who made it as far as Central Asia. The evidence of some ostraca from places like Bu Ngem seems to suggest that a North African Romance dialect was developing, and we know from other sources that Punic and "Libyan" (probably an ancestor of the Berber languages) were still around. The Christians, for the most part, fled to Italy and Europe after the conquest, along with others (such as the Manichaeans, who subsequently assimilated). I'm sure those who were unwilling to flee converted to Islam.

My impression is that the Mediterranean trade routes for luxuries like silk and spices largely bypassed North Africa. After the Islamic conquest, the urban centers of North Africa declined. Piracy and the trans-Saharan slave trade became the economic mainstays of the region. Then again, as I said, I'll willingly plead ignorance. I'd imagine John knows more about this than I do.

North Africa was a very wealthy region in Roman and late antique times, and the wealth did not just evaporate with the Islamic conquest (though many older European history books assume exactly that, quoting the hoary 'neglect of irrigation' story). This will translate into availability od spices, silks, and other luxuries, not (as in the Levant) because they are traded through here, but because there is a market. As long as the CRusaders keep buying, the traders will keep supplying (it's not only Venice where they were Venetians first, Christians second).

The cities of the Maghreb could certainly not compare with those of Egypt, the Iraq or Syria (almost nothing could compare with Damascus, Antioch, Cairo, Alexandria, Basra or Baghdad), but they are sitting on a still functioning, very sophisticated agriculture producing exportable commodities (mostly oil, grain, and increasingly sugar, though the climate is not well suited to that). Again, if the Crusaders have the good sense to leave agricultural production alone, they can take over this source of wealth. An interesting point is that by the 11th century, some Maghrebin cities were renowned centers of legal scholarship - people came from Cordoba and Egypt to study there. That would go, of course, but it points towards a pretty sophisticated culture. Maybe prt of the infratructure is taken over by suitable monastics (Cistercians? I can't quite see the Cluniacs do it, and you don't have Franciscans or Dominicans yet).

If the crusade goes through southern Europe (and is driven by popular outrage in Italy) you will also have a different quality of crusader. the first crusades were mostly driven by people from Northern France and the Rhineland, an area of Europe where warrior prowess was valued almost to the exclusion of everything else and material culture was unbelievably primitive. Italian, Occitan and Illyrian crusaders would understand their enemy much better, many of them even speaking at least colloquial Arabic. I think the chances of a more organic, integrated society in Outremer (Oltramar?) are good. A few centuries of floweriong, akin to Siculo-Norman and Staufen Sicily, woud be possible.

Does anyone know how well the Trans-Saharan trade was established at the time? If the Crusaders take that over, we can look forward to some nasty moments (the forefunners of the Murabitun are not going to be happy about this) and eventually, a Christianising Central Africa. Not that it would matter much at the time - contacts would be fairly sporadic and fraught with difficulty as European find that almost nothing they take for granted (armor, horses, donkeys, cattle herding, wheeled vehicles) works 'as advertised', but the better awareness of Africa and the influx of gold could do wonders. Imagine King Musa on his legendary pilgrimage to Rome.

Unfortunately I doubt it would make much of a dent in European Antisemitism, already well-established at the time, but it might nix a few precedents for violence (rioters through centuries looked back proudly on the first great exterminations during the First Crusade and Count Emicho von Leiningen was locally revered as something like a Saint). That could lead to a more settled, calmer pattern under which Jews are accorded second-class citizen status and milked by the state without interference by screaming mobs (contrary to legend, no noble debtor of a Jew in Germany or France needed to fear the executor. Jews did not have the right to sue Christians, except before the imperial bench, and unless the emperior had very good reasons to lean to this particular Jew, the outcome would be a foregone conclusion even there)

What would that do to Northern Europe? A more Latinate civilisation? Like in Spain, it might further the feeling that Christians and Muslims belong to the same world (though, like in Spain, there's no guarantee that this lasts... the Tunisian Inquisition, anyone?) Will there still be an Age of Discoveries?

Nice idea.

This could be interesting, especially the effects of Latin Christianity being exported southward beyond the Sahara... and Black slaves being dragged north.

(What? Don't tell me you think the Trans-Saharan slave trading would be halted by the goodness of Christian Peity!)

It would be interesting to see the development of these ATL Crusader States if they get enough resettlement to survive (the shorter distance to the main recruiting grounds are a plus, but I do not see anything resembling an outright supplanting of populations). I suspect that (Sunni) Islam would survive for some centuries as the main faith of the peasantry and exist as a minority community indefinately given that the Italian/Provencial ruling classes would be less fixated on converting at swordpoint than the Frankish Crusaders of OTL.

This does nothing to stem the disintergration of the Roman Empire (at least directly, a state marriage of Zoe to some promising Crusader Princeling may help). If the Seljuiks come along to kick in the hollow defences of Anatolia then what happens?

HTG

Wow, a lot of info got posted last night.

Thanks VERY much.

Carlton,

If there are fewer "hard-core warrior types" in the Crusader armies (your comments about their geographic origins), I'd expect the war to be longer and bloodier. I've sketched the campaigns a bit (the opening attack will be in Sicily); perhaps that'll be the Crusader equivalent of Operation Torch, where the bugs get worked out and perhaps the leaders see a need to import a butt-load of Norman warriors to give the army some backbone.

Good point about the Crusaders speaking the proper languages and having more cultural experience. That might cancel out their lack of military experience due to the fact that they won't bother the locals as much (I read "an Arabic account of the Crusades" where a Frankish knight kept physically re-aligning a Muslim who was praying towards Mecca b/c in his experience, people prayed sitting in another direction).

Htgriffin,

I imagine the trans-Saharan slave trade would still continue, but I don't think it'd be at its former strength. According to a "History of Islam in Africa" class, rulers like Askiya Muhammad waged jihads against neighboring pagan (or "insufficiently Islamic"--he wrote to a North African scholar asking what practices an "Islamic" people had to do before they could be classed as non-believers) peoples and took lots of slaves. If there are fewer (if any) explicitly "Islamic" empires operating, there'd be a lot less of that going around. Christian leaders could still indulge in the same sort of thing (claiming a "crusade against fetishism or human sacrifice or whatever"), but since the Crusaders are more explicitly defensive in TTL, I expect Crusades will be proclaimed less often in TTL.

Hmm...how can we get Byzantium to fall in TTL? I don't think the Turks will make an appearance in the West in TTL. Many of the problems that led to the disaster post-Manzikert will still be there, though probably not as advanced as they were in 1071 (or worse, as Romanus made a lot of reforms before he went off to fight). Perhaps bad blood on the account that the Byzantines attacked the Abbasids, the Crusaders' semi-ally during the Crusade, leads to something like OTL's 4th Crusade? Though I do wonder what effect a strong Orthodox Church fairly close to Catholic regions will have in the planned ATL-Reformation (in addition to Protestants and neo-Donatists, perhaps a bunch of Catholics go over to the Patriarch of Constantinople).

Ht,

Thus far, I have Nestorian Turks settling and Turkifying northern India a la what they did in Asia Minor. Perhaps there's some sort of spat between the two powers later and a Nestorian horse army mauls Byzantium a la Manzikert. However, owing to the fact that the power center is so far east (on the other side of the Abbasids and Persia), I don't think they'll be able to hold onto the territory for long (though I could imagine an autonomous gov't developing there, sort like like the Sultanate of Rum).

This might lead to predatory landless young nobles attacking a weakened Byzantium, which has just lost much of its productive territory like OTL, annd finishing the Empire off, or perhaps an extensive reformation of the Byzantine system.