The Crusades are commonly presented as a clash of civilisations driven by the ideology of jihad on one side and holy war on the other. Yet Muslim rulers in the Latin East concluded pragmatic alliances with their Christian enemies just as readily as the Franks did. When did such arrangements serve the faith and when did they betray it?
Just as the Christian concept of holy war did not prevent Frankish rulers from negotiating with Muslims, the Islamic doctrine of jihad left considerable room for pragmatic peacemaking. From the earliest encounters, Muslim rulers made truces and even alliances with Christian powers when political necessity demanded it, playing off Frankish factions against one another much as Christian leaders played off rival Muslim powers [1].
The most revealing early case is that of Shams al-Khilafa, emir of Ascalon, described by the chronicler Ibn al-Qalanisi as a ruler more interested in trade than in warfare, inclined to peaceful relations with his neighbours. When he concluded an alliance with King Baldwin I in 1111, his own coreligionists viewed it as a betrayal of the Muslim cause. He was assassinated by local opponents of his pro-Frankish policy [1]. His fate illustrates a recurrent tension on the Muslim side: pragmatic accommodation with the Franks could be condemned as apostasy from the duty of jihad, yet the political realities of a fragmented Muslim world made such accommodation almost inevitable.
Saladin himself, the supreme symbol of jihad in the crusading era, was in practice a master of the strategic truce. His famous piety and commitment to holy war were in large part a tool of political legitimacy, used to justify his campaigns against fellow Muslims as much as against the Franks. As scholars of Saladin's court propaganda have shown, his chroniclers worked hard to reconcile his repeated truces with the Crusader states with his image as the champion of Islam [2]. Saladin made peace with the Crusaders when it suited his consolidation of power over Mosul, Aleppo and Damascus. The truce he granted Raymond III of Tripoli in 1185, which was the direct precursor to the crisis at Hattin, was itself a calculated political instrument, not an abandonment of jihad [1].
The Ayyubid period after Saladin's death in 1193 saw this pattern become even more pronounced. With the empire fractured among his successors, individual Ayyubid princes regularly allied with Frankish powers, including the military orders, against rival Muslim rulers. Some Ayyubid princes actually allied themselves with the military orders in an attempt to gain political advantages over their Muslim rivals: in 1240, al-Salih Ayyub of Egypt ceded Ascalon to Frankish barons allied with the Templars, hoping to undermine their alliance with his rival from Damascus. The ideology of holy war had given way entirely to raison d'etat [3].
The Mamluk sultans who followed drew the clearest line. Baybars and Qalawun concluded formal treaties with the Templars, Hospitallers and individual Frankish cities in the 1270s and 1280s, but these were instruments of managed dismemberment rather than genuine coexistence. Each separate treaty isolated one Christian entity from the others and made collective resistance impossible [4]. For the Mamluks, peace was a weapon of conquest. The Muslim concept of treason in these dealings, as on the Christian side, was ultimately defined not by religious ideology but by political loyalty: alliance with the enemy was acceptable for a ruler pursuing state interests, but condemnable when it undermined the unity of the Muslim world.
Treason, on the Muslim side as on the Christian, was always in the eye of the beholder.
This blog is original work by TemplarsNow based on an AI-assisted quick scan on the topic, which itself was inspired by [1] Friedman, Y., "Peacemaking in an Age of War: When Were Cross-Religious Alliances in the Latin East Considered Treason?" In: Boas, A.J. (ed.), The Crusader World. New York: Routledge, 2016, pp. 98–107. Other references and further reading, all links verified Jun 10, 2026: [2] Hamblin, W.J., "Muslim Perspectives on the Military Orders during the Crusades." BYU Studies Quarterly, 40:4 (2001); [3] Friedman, Y., "How to End Holy War: Negotiations and Peace Treaties between Muslims and Crusaders in the Latin East." Common Knowledge, 21:1 (2015), pp. 112–129; [4] Forey, A., "The Participation of the Military Orders in Truces with Muslims in the Holy Land and Spain during the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (summary)." Ordines Militares, 17 (2012). The illustration shows a petitioner before a Muslim ruler. Illustration by Yahya ibn Mahmud al-Wasiti from the Maqamat al-Hariri, Baghdad, 1237 CE. This is the political court environment in which Muslim rulers weighed truces and alliances also with Frankish powers. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Ms. Arabe 5847. Source Wikimedia, Public domain.
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