The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land (28 page)

With the rebalancing of power that followed Zangi’s death, Aleppo and Damascus were feeling their way towards a new relationship. No longer fearful of imminent Zangid invasion, Unur’s authority was rejuvenated, and he began to sever his ties as a client ruler of the Franks. When one of his dependants, Altuntash of Bosra, sought to form a breakaway alliance with the kingdom of Jerusalem in spring 1147, Unur moved to intervene. Nur al-Din came south to lend support and together the two beat back a Latin attempt to occupy Bosra. This notable success earned Unur recognition from the rival caliphs of Baghdad and Cairo, with both sending robes of honour and diplomas of investiture. Against this backdrop, Damascus, rather than Aleppo, appeared in 1147 to be the dominant Syrian Muslim polity.

Nur al-Din spent that summer consolidating his position in the north and campaigning on the western border zone with Antioch. Chilling news then put the emir on the defensive. An ‘innumerable’ Latin army was reportedly ‘making for the land of Islam’ it was said that so many Christians had joined the huge force that the West had been left empty and undefended. Alarmed by these tidings, Aleppo, and all its Muslim neighbours, sought to prepare for the Second Crusade, and the coming of a new war.
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COUNTERING THE CRUSADE

Over the next six months, reports of the German and French crusaders’ experiences gradually filtered back to the Near East. One Damascene heard that ‘a vast number of them perished’ in Asia Minor, through ‘killing, disease and hunger’, and by early 1148 it was apparent that Ma‘sud, the Seljuq sultan of Anatolia, had inflicted crippling losses upon the Franks. For Nur al-Din and Unur, anxiously waiting in Aleppo and Damascus, these tidings must have been a welcome, but surprising, relief. Their Turkish neighbours to the north-west–more often rivals than allies over recent decades–had blunted the Christian crusade even before it reached the Levant.

Even so, the danger was not past. That spring, Latin survivors (still numbering in their thousands) began to arrive in the ports of Syria and Palestine. The question now was, where would they strike? Nur al-Din readied Aleppo for an attack and his brother, Saif al-Din, brought reinforcements from Mosul later that summer. Yet against expectations the Frankish offensive, when it finally came in July 1148, was launched to the south against Damascus.

Reaching Antioch that March, King Louis VII of France had quarrelled with Raymond of Antioch. Edessa’s recent devastation scuppered any lingering plans to attempt its immediate reconquest; instead Raymond advocated a campaign targeting Aleppo and Shaizar. The plan had considerable merit, offering an opportunity to strike against Zangid power while Nur al-Din was still consolidating his hold over northern Syria, but the French king rejected the scheme and promptly marched south to Palestine. The causes of Louis’ decision have long been debated. He may have been short of funds, concerned about King Conrad of Germany’s activities in the Latin kingdom, and keen to fulfil his own pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The heart of the matter, though, was probably a torrid scandal. Upon arriving in Antioch, Louis’ young charismatic wife Eleanor of Aquitaine had spent a great deal of time in the company of her uncle, Prince Raymond. Rumour spread that they had begun a passionate, incestuous affair. Humiliated and appalled, the French monarch was forced to drag his wife out of the city against her will, an act that soured their relationship beyond repair and put an end to any hopes of cooperation between Antioch and the crusaders.

With Conrad having arrived in the Holy Land that April, the French and German contingents regrouped in northern Palestine in early summer. On 24 June a joint Latin council of the leading crusaders and Jerusalem’s High Court was held near Acre to debate a future course of action, and Damascus was chosen as the new target. This decision was once viewed by scholars as an act of near-lunacy, given the Muslim city’s recent alliance with Frankish Palestine and its resistance to Zangid ascendancy. But this view has been rightly challenged on the grounds that Zangi’s death in 1146 reshaped the balance of power in Muslim Syria. Once Jerusalem’s docile pawn against Aleppo, by 1148 Damascus had become a far more threatening and aggressive neighbour. As such, its neutralisation and conquest were a reasonable objective and the city’s seizure might transform Outremer’s prospects for long-term survival.
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In midsummer 1148, the Christian kings of Europe and Jerusalem advanced to Banyas and then marched on Damascus. Unur did his best to prepare the city, strengthening defences and organising troops and militia. Requests for aid were dispatched to his Muslim neighbours, including the Zangids. On 24 July the Franks approached through the dense, richly irrigated orchards south-west of Damascus. These tightly packed copses, enclosed by low mud walls, stretched some five miles from the city’s suburbs. Traversable only via narrow lanes, they had long served as a first natural line of defence. The Muslims did their best to halt the Latin advance, launching skirmishing attacks and incessant arrow volleys from watchtowers and concealed vantage points amidst the trees, but the enemy pressed on.

By day’s end the Franks had established a camp on the open ground in front of the city, from where they had access to the waters of the Barada River. In contrast to the likes of Antioch and Jerusalem, Damascus possessed no great encircling fortifications, but was protected at most by a low outer wall and the crowded jumble of its outlying suburbs. With the Christians now waiting on its very outskirts, the metropolis seemed horribly vulnerable. Unur ordered the streets to be barricaded with huge wooden beams and piles of rubble and, to raise morale, a mass gathering was held in the Grand Umayyad Mosque. One of Damascus’ most sacred treasures, a revered copy of the Koran, once owned by the Caliph ‘Uthman (an early successor to Muhammad), was displayed to the throng ‘and the people sprinkled their heads with ashes and wept tears of supplication’.

For the next three days a desperate struggle was played out, as the Muslims battled to hold back the Franks, and both sides suffered heavy casualties in close, hard-fought combat. Reinforcements from the Biqa valley boosted Muslim resistance and, with the arrival of Nur al-Din and Saif al-Din anticipated, Unur played for time. He appears to have promised to renew tribute payments in return for an end to hostilities. Aware of the rivalries coursing beneath the surface of the Christian coalition, Unur also sought, rather deviously, to sow seeds of doubt and distrust. A message was apparently sent to the crusader kings warning of the Zangids’ approach, while a separate envoy contacted the Levantine Franks, pointing out that their alliance with the westerners would only culminate in the creation of a new adversary in the East, for ‘you know that, if they take Damascus, they will seize the coastal lands that you have in your hands’. The Christian ranks certainly seem to have been plagued by internal tensions, as Latin sources confirm that the Franks began arguing over who should have rights to the city if it fell.

Having made little progress and with doubts surfacing, the Franks held a council of war on the evening of 27 July. A somewhat panicked decision was made to move to the east of the city from where, it was believed, a direct attack might be more easily launched. In fact, this area of Damascus proved to be just as strongly defended, and the Christians now found themselves camped in an exposed, waterless position. Beneath the searing summer sun, their nerve broke. According to one Muslim eyewitness, ‘reports reached the Franks from several quarters of the rapid advance of the Islamic armies to engage in the holy war against them, and they became convinced of their own destruction and the imminence of disaster’. Latin sources murmur of treachery within the army, of pay-offs by Unur and heated recriminations on all sides. On 28 July, the coalition of crusaders and Levantine Franks began an appallingly humiliating retreat, harried by Damascene skirmishers as they fled. King Conrad later wrote that the Christians had ‘retreated in grief with the siege a failure’, while William of Tyre described the crusaders as being ‘covered with confusion and fear’. The French and German kings spoke of plans to launch a second, better-equipped assault against Damascus, or of a possible campaign against Fatimid Ascalon, but no action was taken on either count. Conrad set sail for Europe in September and, after visiting the holy sites, Louis followed his lead in spring 1149. With relief, one Muslim chronicler declared that ‘God saved the believers [in Damascus] from their evil.’
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As far as the Franks were concerned, the main Levantine thrust of the Second Crusade had ended in miserable defeat. After such grand, regal preparations, the Christians’ plans had come to naught and the very concept of Latin holy war was now brought into question. The consequences of this grave setback for the popularity and practice of crusading would be felt long into the future. Despite the protracted debate over the wisdom of the Franks’ decision to besiege Damascus, historians have tended to underplay the crusade’s impact upon Near Eastern Islam. On the surface, the balance of power appeared unchanged–Unur remained in control of Damascus; the Christians had been repelled. But at the critical moment of danger, the Damascenes had been forced to appeal to Aleppo and Mosul. For a brief moment in the mid-1140s, Unur had seemed capable of checking Zangid ascendancy; now, in the aftermath of the Second Crusade, he had to accept an increasingly subservient relationship with Nur al-Din.

The Latin attack on Damascus in 1148 also contributed to a hardening of anti-Frankish sentiment among the wider Damascene populace. Before long, Unur and the Burid ruling elite reopened diplomatic channels with the kingdom of Jerusalem, but local support for the policy of alliance with Palestine was now in terminal decline.

The county of Edessa dismembered

Aleppo had escaped the Second Crusade unscathed and, if anything, the Latin expedition had bolstered Nur al-Din’s position in northern Syria. Certainly the crusade had done nothing to reverse the Zangid gains achieved in the county of Edessa. In the years that followed, the scattered remnants of what had been the first crusader state were gradually picked over by Islam. Facing pressure from three fronts–as Nur al-Din, Ma‘sud of Konya and the Artuqids of Diyar Bakr all vied to seize Edessene territory–Count Joscelin II tried to buy a measure of security by agreeing a submissive truce with Aleppo. But when the count was captured in 1150, Nur al-Din paid scant notice of Joscelin’s supposed status as a client-ally; the Frank was thrown into prison (and possibly blinded) and remained in confinement until his death nine years later.

Zangid supporters made the most of Joscelin’s fall from power. Describing him as ‘an intransigent devil, fierce against the Muslims and cruel’, one Muslim chronicler noted that ‘[the count’s] capture was a blow to all Christendom’. Expanding on this theme, the poet Ibn al-Qaysarani (now a member of Nur al-Din’s court) affirmed that Jerusalem itself would soon be ‘purified’.
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With Joscelin captive, his wife Beatrice sold off the remainder of the Latin county to the Byzantines, prompting a stream of Frankish and eastern Christian refugees to flee to Antioch. The countess settled in Palestine, where her children–Joscelin III and Agnes–later became prominent political figures. Even the Greeks proved unable to defend these isolated outposts and, with the fall of Tell Bashir to Nur al-Din’s forces in 1151, the county of Edessa came to a final, irredeemable end. The Zangids had eradicated one of the four crusader states.

Nur al-Din emerged as the Near East’s foremost Muslim leader in the aftermath of the Second Crusade. Over the course of his career, Nur al-Din would unite Syria, extend Zangid power into Egypt and score a series of victories against the Christian Franks. He became one of the greatest luminaries of medieval Islam, celebrated as a stalwart of Sunni orthodoxy and a champion of
jihad
against Latin Outremer. Indeed, the appellation by which he is known to history, ‘Nur al-Din’, literally means ‘the Light of Faith’.

Muslim chroniclers of the age generally presented Nur al-Din as the very archetype of a perfect Islamic ruler–deeply pious, clement and just; humble and austere, yet cultured; valiant and skilful in battle, and committed to the war for the Holy Land. This view was most powerfully expressed by the great Iraqi historian Ibn al-Athir (d. 1233), writing in Mosul in the early thirteenth century, when that city was still governed by members of Nur al-Din’s Zangid dynasty. Among his many works, Ibn al-Athir composed a voluminous account of human history, starting with the Creation, and even in this chronicle Nur al-Din was presented as the principal protagonist. ‘The fame of his good rule and justice’ was said to have ‘encompassed the world’, and ‘his good qualities were numerous and his virtues abundant, more than this book can contain’.
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Modern historians have sought, with varying degrees of success, to reach beyond this panegyric to reconstruct an authentic vision of Nur al-Din, producing wildly divergent images. A central feature of this process has been the attempt to pinpoint a moment of transformation or spiritual epiphany in the emir’s life, after which he assumed the mantle of the
mujahid
.
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In the context of the crusades, two interlocking issues are imperative. Nur al-Din spent a fair portion of his life fighting against fellow Muslims–but was he acting for the greater good, unifying Islam in preparation for
jihad
, or was holy war simply a convenient veil behind which to construct a Zangid empire? And did Nur al-Din start out as an ambitious, self-serving Turkish warlord, only (at some point) to experience a deepening of his religious conviction and a quickening of his desire to prosecute the holy war? In part, these questions can be resolved by tracing the path of Nur al-Din’s career–examining when and why he fought against the Latins; and assessing his dealings with the Sunni Muslims of Syria, the Shi‘ite Fatimids of Egypt and the Greeks of Byzantium.

THE BATTLE OF INAB

In the summer of 1149 Nur al-Din launched an offensive against the Christian principality of Antioch, seeking to consolidate his burgeoning authority over northern Syria. Since late 1148 his troops had clashed with Antiochene forces in a number of small-scale encounters, but the results had been inconclusive. In June 1149, Nur al-Din capitalised upon the recent rapprochement with Unur of Damascus by calling for reinforcements, assembling a formidable invasion army, spearheaded by 6,000 mounted warriors. Historians have made little effort to understand the Aleppan ruler’s motivations, assuming that he was simply seeking a confrontation with Prince Raymond of Antioch. But just like his predecessor Il-ghazi in 1119, Nur al-Din’s actions probably had a more defined strategic purpose.

In 1149, Nur al-Din set out to conquer two Latin outposts–Harim and Apamea. The fortress town of Harim stood on the western fringe of the Belus Hills, in a commanding position overlooking the Antiochene plains. Just twelve miles from Antioch itself, Harim had been in Latin hands since the time of the First Crusade. The Belus range had long played a role in the struggle between Aleppo and the principality. Earlier in the twelfth century, when Antioch was in the ascendant, the Franks had occupied territory to the east of these craggy hills, offering a direct threat to Aleppan security. First Il-ghazi, and then Zangi, pushed them back, re-establishing a border that followed the natural barrier of the Belus. But Nur al-Din was not content with this state of equilibrium. He sought to capture Harim and gain a foothold beyond the barrier of the Belus range, thereby undermining the defensive integrity of Antioch’s eastern frontier.

Nur al-Din also targeted Apamea, on the southern edge of the Summaq plateau. In the past, Antiochene dominion over the Summaq threatened the main routes of communication between Aleppo and Damascus, but Zangi had recaptured much of this area in the late 1130s. By 1149 the Franks retained only a meagre corridor of territory, hugging the Orontes valley south to the increasingly lonely outpost at Apamea. Nur al-Din’s primary objective in 1149 seems have been the conquest of this fortified settlement, eradicating the lingering Latin presence in the Summaq region. Recent attempts to directly overrun Apamea, perched upon a lofty ancient earthen tell, had failed. Switching tack, Nur al-Din now sought to isolate the town–severing its main line of communication with Antioch by taking control of the ash-Shogur Bridge across the Orontes.

In June he advanced into this vicinity and began operations by laying siege to the small fort of Inab. When this news reached Antioch, Prince Raymond reacted swiftly, perhaps even impetuously. Later Latin tradition held that he set off immediately to relieve Inab, ‘without waiting for the escort of his cavalry, [hurrying] rashly to that place’, but this may have been something of an exaggeration because a Muslim contemporary based in Damascus reckoned that the Franks arrived with 4,000 knights and 1,000 infantry. Raymond’s force also included a contingent of Assassins, led by his Kurdish Muslim ally, ‘Ali ibn Wafa. Nur al-Din responded to the Antiochenes’ approach on 28 June with caution, retreating from Inab to assess his enemy’s strength, but his eyes were open for any chance to launch a counter-attack, and just such an opportunity soon presented itself.

Arriving in the environs of Inab, Raymond rather optimistically assumed that he had frightened off Nur al-Din’s forces and successfully secured the region. He elected to camp that night on the open plain rather than withdraw to a place of safety–a fatal error. Having actually moved off only a short distance, Nur al-Din gathered intelligence of the Frankish numbers and their exposed position and immediately retraced his steps under the cover of night. As dawn broke on 29 June 1149 the Latins awoke to find themselves surrounded. Sensing that a famous victory was now within his grasp, the lord of Aleppo wasted no time in pressing the advantage, ‘storm[ing] the camp as if he were besieging a city’ in the words of one Christian. According to the Damascus Chronicle, Prince Raymond vainly sought to rally his men and mount a defence, ‘but the Muslims split up into detachments which attacked them from various directions and swarmed over them’. Vicious hand-to-hand fighting ensued and, as the winds picked up, dust clouded the air, adding to the confusion. Outnumbered and encircled, the Franks soon buckled, but even as swathes of his troops fled the field, Raymond held his ground, fighting on to the end. One contemporary Arabic text described how ‘the swords of Islam had the final word [and] when the haze dispersed [the Christians] lay upon the ground prostrate and dirt-befouled’.

The Muslims had prevailed and the full extent of their triumph became clear when Nur al-Din’s men began combing the battlefield. There the Antiochene ruler Raymond ‘was found stretched out amongst his guard and his knights; he was recognised and his head cut off and carried to Nur al-Din, who rewarded the bearer of it with a handsome gift’. It was rumoured that the prince had been cut down by a sword blow from the Kurdish warlord Shirkuh. Nur al-Din apparently had the Frank’s head sealed within a silver trophy case and dispatched to Baghdad to celebrate the defeat of an enemy who, according to the Muslims, had ‘acquired special repute by the dread which he inspired, his great severity and excessive ferocity’. Latin sources confirm that Raymond’s corpse was decapitated, adding the grisly but practical observation that, when the Antiochenes finally returned to recover his mutilated body, it could only be identified by ‘certain marks and scars’.
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The significance of the Battle of Inab in 1149 paralleled that of the Field of Blood thirty years earlier. The Frankish principality was again deprived of a potent ruler and, with no obvious adult male heir apparent, left leaderless and vulnerable. Nur al-Din was now in a dominant position, but his actions after Inab are revealing. Crucially, he made no determined attempt to subjugate Antioch itself, but instead sent a large portion of his army south to Apamea. Nur al-Din led the remainder of his troops on the principality’s capital, but after a brief siege agreed to leave the city inviolate in return for a sizeable tribute payment of gold and treasure. Travelling to the coast, he took the symbolic step of bathing in the Mediterranean–a gesture affirming that Islamic power now stretched west to the sea.

The real work of conquest began around mid-July, with an assault on Harim. With its Latin garrison weakened after Inab, the town fell swiftly and steps immediately were taken to bolster its defences. Towards the end of that same month, Nur al-Din marched south to Apamea. Cut off from Antioch, with no hope of rescue, the Franks stationed there surrendered in return for a promise that their lives would be spared.

Like Il-ghazi in 1119, Nur al-Din had capitalised upon his defeat of the Antiochenes to achieve focused strategic goals–in this case, the neutralisation of Antioch and the assertion of Aleppan dominion over the lands east of the Orontes. He also forsook a potential opportunity to capture Antioch, perhaps in part because he lacked the manpower and material resources to overwhelm that city’s immense fortifications and knew that Frankish reinforcements would arrive soon from Palestine. Certainly in 1119 and again in 1149 Antioch’s conquest was not prioritised as an objective.

In spite of these evident similarities, the Battle of Inab was not a simple rerun of the Field of Blood. In 1119 King Baldwin II of Jerusalem had rushed to the principality’s aid and, over the following years, recouped its territorial losses. His grandson, King Baldwin III, likewise travelled north to Syria in summer 1149, but proved unable to fully revive Antioch’s fortunes. Apamea was never recovered and a brief attempt to retake Harim failed. With Nur al-Din’s soldiers ensconced within striking distance of its capital, the principality’s ability to threaten Aleppo was severely curtailed. Later that summer the Latins were pressed into a humiliating treaty with Nur al-Din that, by confirming Aleppan rights over the Summaq plateau and the territory east of the Belus Hills, tacitly acknowledged Antioch’s emasculation.

Nur al-Din’s underlying motivations and intentions in 1149 also differed fundamentally from those of Il-ghazi and this, in itself, exposes a deeper truth about the shifting balance of power in Syria. The Field of Blood had been an expression of Antiochene and Aleppan rivalry, a last-ditch attempt to stem the sweeping tide of Frankish territorial expansion eastwards. In stark contrast, and despite initial appearances, the campaign that culminated in the Battle of Inab was actually driven by inter-Muslim enmity. Nur al-Din set out to occupy Apamea not to stave off Frankish aggression, but rather to open a clear and unchallenged route south from Aleppo to his real target, the Burid-held city of Damascus. Driven back beyond the Orontes, the Antiochenes would be in no position to interfere in this greater game.

Generations of modern historians have misconstrued the causes and significance of Inab, some even maintaining that this victory marked the vital moment of transformation for Nur al-Din into a dedicated
jihadi
warrior. To be sure, the lord of Aleppo celebrated his success against the Christians. One Muslim chronicler observed that ‘the poets made much praise of Nur al-Din in congratulation for this victory, as the killing of [Prince Raymond] had a great effect on both sides’, and went on to quote this verse by Ibn al-Qaysarani:

But to accept this propaganda at face value is to ignore the reality of Nur al-Din’s strategic focus in 1149: Damascus. Future events would demonstrate that he was wholly content to leave Antioch in the faltering grip of the Franks because, neutralised as a threat in the theatre of Levantine conflict, the Latin principality served as a useful buffer state between Aleppo and Greek Byzantium. In fact, in these early years of his rule, Nur al-Din’s overriding concern was the conquest of Damascus.

Events in August 1149 initially seemed to offer Nur al-Din the perfect opportunity to increase his influence within Muslim Syria. After dining on a particularly hearty meal, his sometime ally and rival Unur of Damascus was ‘seized by a loosening of the bowels’ which developed into a debilitating bout of dysentery. By the end of the month Unur was dead and Damascus plunged into a chaotic power struggle. But any hopes of capitalising upon this misfortune evaporated when news arrived of a second death, this time of Nur al-Din’s elder brother, Saif al-Din, on 6 September. Rushing to Iraq, Nur al-Din briefly sought to stake a claim to Mosul, but was eventually begrudgingly reconciled with his younger sibling, the heir designate Qutb al-Din Maudud. For now a chance to take control of Damascus had been missed. Faltering Burid rule endured in the city, but it would not be long before Nur al-Din’s gaze once again turned south of Aleppo.
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THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS

In 1150 Latin Outremer was beset by adversity. Arguably there had never been a more propitious moment for the lords of Near Eastern Islam–and for Nur al-Din in particular–to strike at the heart of the crusader states, sweeping the Franks into the Mediterranean. The Christians had suffered, in swift succession, the Second Crusade’s failure, defeat at Inab and the county of Edessa’s dissolution. After 1149 their difficulties only deepened. Panicked calls to western Europe for a new crusade were made, but with recent humiliation fresh in the memory, they went unanswered. In Antioch, Prince Raymond’s sudden death prompted yet another succession crisis because his son and heir, Bohemond III, was only five years old, and his widow Constance forcefully rejected her cousin King Baldwin III of Jerusalem’s plans to marry her off to a suitor of his choosing. Like her mother Alice before her, Constance sought to control her own fate, but this left the principality without an incumbent male military commander for four years and saddled Baldwin III with oversight of Antioch. The young king’s responsibilities were multiplied even further in 1152 by the murder of Raymond II of Tripoli by a band of Assassins. As the count’s son and namesake, Raymond III, was just twelve years old, Baldwin was again forced to assume the mantle of guardian.