Текст книги "The Crusades. The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land"

Автор книги: Thomas Asbridge

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Chastened, Conrad joined forces with the French, who by now had crossed the Bosphorus, to attempt a second advance. They successfully traced a different route south towards the ancient Roman metropolis of Ephesus, where the onset of illness forced the German king to remain behind. In late December, with rain and snow falling, Louis left the coast, leading his army along the Meander valley towards the Anatolian uplands. At first, military discipline held and early waves of Seljuq attacks were repulsed, but around 6 January 1148 the crusaders lost formation while trying to cross the imposing physical obstacle of Mount Cadmus and suffered a searing Turkish assault. Losses were heavy and Louis himself was surrounded, narrowly avoiding capture by taking refuge in a tree. Shaken by the experience, the king now asked the force of Templar knights that had joined his army back in France to lead the survivors in a tightly controlled march south-east to the Greek-held port of Adalia–a decision illustrative both of the crusaders’ dire predicament and of the martial reputation already accrued by the Templar Order. Louis later sent a letter to the abbot of St Denis recalling these grim days: ‘There were constant ambushes from bandits, grave difficulties of travel, daily battles with the Turks…We ourselves were frequently in peril of our life; but thanks to God’s grace were freed from all these horrors and escaped.’ Exhausted and hungry, the French reached the coast around 20 January. Some thought was given to marching onwards, but eventually Louis decided to sail to Syria with a portion of his army. Those left behind were promised Byzantine support, but most died from starvation or were killed during Turkish attacks. The French king reached Antioch in March 1148. Meanwhile, having recuperated in Constantinople, Conrad likewise decided to complete his journey east by sea and sailed to Acre.

The Second Crusaders who took the land route to the Near East, proudly hoping to emulate the ‘heroism’ of their forebears, had been crushed; thousands were lost to combat, starvation and desertion. The expedition had been broken even before it reached the Holy Land. Many blamed the Greeks for this terrible reversal, levelling accusations of treachery and betrayal. But, although Manuel had indeed offered Louis and Conrad only limited support, it was the Latins’ own incaution in the face of heightened Turkish aggression that precipitated disaster. With both the Germans and French so roundly and ignominiously defeated, William of Tyre concluded that the crusaders’ once ‘glorious reputation [for] valour’ now lay in tatters. ‘Henceforward’, he wrote, ‘it was but a joke in the eyes of those unclean peoples to whom it had once been a terror.’ Louis and Conrad had finally reached the Levant; the question now was whether their greatly weakened forces could hope to achieve anything of substance and rekindle the crusading flame.¹⁰⁷

II

THE RESPONSE OF ISLAM

7

MUSLIM REVIVAL

The half-century since the advent of the First Crusade had seen little sign of a united or determined Islamic response to the Christian conquest of the Holy Land. Jerusalem–the most sacred city in the Muslim world after Mecca and Medina–remained in Latin hands. And the elemental division between Sunni Iraq and Syria and Shi‘ite Egypt endured. Barring occasional Muslim victories, most notably at the Field of Blood in 1119, the early twelfth century had been dominated by Frankish expansion and aggression. But in the 1140s it seemed as if the tide might be shifting, as Zangi, the atabeg of Mosul and Aleppo, and his family (the Zangid dynasty) took up the torch of jihad.

ZANGI–THE CHAMPION OF ISLAM

Zangi’s capture of Edessa in 1144 was a triumph for Islam: what one Muslim chronicle described as ‘the victory of victories’. When his troops stormed the city on 24 December, the atabeg initially allowed them to pillage and slaughter at will. But after this first wave of violence, he enforced an approach that was, at least by his standards, relatively temperate. The Franks suffered–every man was butchered and all women taken into slavery–but the surviving eastern Christians were spared and permitted to remain in their homes. Likewise, Latin churches were destroyed, but their Armenian and Syriac counterparts left untouched. Similar care was taken to limit the amount of damage inflicted upon Edessa’s fortifications, and a rebuilding programme was undertaken immediately to repair weakened sections of the walls. Realising the strategic significance of his new acquisition, Zangi wished the city to remain habitable and defendable.

With Edessa in his possession, the atabeg could hope to unite a vast swathe of Syrian and Mesopotamian territory, stretching from Aleppo to Mosul. And for the Muslim world of the Near and Middle East, his startling achievement seemed to promise the dawn of a new era, one in which the Franks might be driven from the Levant. There can be no doubt that 1144 marked a turning point for Islam in the war for the Holy Land. Equally, it is clear that Zangi made energetic efforts to publicise his success as a blow struck by a zealous mujahid in the name of all Muslims.

Within Islamic culture, Arabic poetry had a long-established role in both influencing and reflecting public opinion. Muslim poets commonly composed works for public recitation, sometimes before massed crowds, mixing reportage and propaganda to comment upon current events. Poets who joined Zangi’s court, some of them Syrian refugees from Latin rule, authored works celebrating the atabeg’s achievements, casting him as the champion of a wider jihadi movement. Ibn al-Qaysarani (from Caesarea) stressed the need for Zangi to reconquer the whole of the Syrian coastline (the Sahil), arguing that this should be the holy war’s primary aim. ‘Tell the infidel rulers to surrender…all their territories’, he wrote, ‘for it is [Zangi’s] country.’ At the same time, this notion of pan-Levantine conquest was twinned with a more precise objective, one that possessed an immediate devotional focus–Jerusalem. Edessa lay hundreds of miles north of Palestine, but its capture was nonetheless presented as the first step on the path to the Holy City’s recovery. ‘If the conquest of Edessa is the high sea’, Ibn al-Qaysarani affirmed, ‘Jerusalem and the Sahil are its shore.’

Many Muslim contemporaries appear to have accepted this projection of the atabeg as a jihadi warrior. The Abbasid caliph in Baghdad now conferred upon him the grand titles ‘Auxiliary of the Commander of the Faithful, the Divinely Aided King’. Given that the Zangids were still, to an extent, outsiders–upstart Turkish warlords, with no innate right to rule over the established Arab and Persian hierarchies of the East–this caliphal endorsement helped to legitimate Zangi’s position. The idea that the atabeg’s career had somehow been building to this single achievement also gained currency. Even a chronicler based in rival Damascus declared that ‘Zangi had always coveted Edessa and watched for a chance to achieve his ambition. Edessa was never out of his thoughts or far from his mind.’ On the basis of his 1144 victory, later Islamic chroniclers labelled him a shahid, or martyr, an honour reserved for those who died ‘in the path of God’ engaging in the jihad.

This is not to suggest that Zangi recognised the political value of espousing the principles of holy war only after his sudden success at Edessa. An inscription dated to 1138, from a Damascene madrasa (religious school) patronised by the atabeg, already described him as ‘the fighter of jihad, the defender of the frontier, the tamer of the polytheists and the destroyer of heretics’, and the same titles were again used four years later in an Aleppan inscription. The events of 1144 allowed Zangi to emphasise and expand upon this facet of his career, but even then jihad against the Franks remained as one issue among many. Within his own lifetime, the atabeg sought, first and foremost, to present himself as a ruler of all Islam; an aspiration highlighted by his decision to employ an array of honorific titles tailored to the differing needs (and distinct tongues) of Mesopotamia, Syria and Diyar Bakr. In Arabic he was often styled as Imad al-Din Zangi (‘Zangi, the pillar of religion’), but in Persian he might present himself as ‘the guardian of the world’ or ‘the great king of Iran’, and in nomadic Turkish as ‘the falcon prince’.¹

There is precious little evidence to suggest that Zangi prioritised jihad above all other concerns before, or even after, 1144. He did take steps to consolidate his hold over the county of Edessa in early 1145, seizing the town of Saruj from the Franks and defeating a Latin relief force that had assembled at Antioch. But before long, he was to be found once again fighting fellow Muslims in Iraq. By early 1146 it was whispered that Zangi was preparing for a new Syrian offensive. Construction of siege weaponry began and, while officially these were for the jihad, an Aleppan chronicler admitted that ‘some people thought that he was intending to attack Damascus’.

Zangi was now sixty-two and still in remarkably rude health. But on the night of 14 September 1146, during the siege of the Muslim fortress of Qalat Ja‘bar (on the banks of the Euphrates), he suffered a sudden and unexpected assault. The details of the terrible attack are murky. Zangi was said to have retained numerous watchful sentries to guard against assassination, but somehow they were bypassed, and the atabeg was set upon in his own bed. The assailant was later cast variously as a trusted eunuch, slave or soldier and, not surprisingly, rumours also circulated that the bloody deed had been instigated by Damascus. The truth will probably never be known. An attendant who found Zangi grievously wounded recounted the scene:

I went to him, while he was still alive. When he saw me, he thought that I was intending to kill him. He gestured to me with his index finger, appealing to me. I halted in awe of him and said, ‘My lord, who has done this to you?’ He was, however, unable to speak and died at that moment (God have mercy on him).²

For all his feral vitality and enduring ambition, the atabeg’s tumultuous career had been cut short. Zangi, lord of Mosul and Aleppo, conqueror of Edessa, lay dead.

The advent of Nur al-Din

Zangi’s demise was a squalid, brutal and ignominious affair. Amid the shock of the moment, even his relatives gave little thought to honouring the deceased; the atabeg’s corpse was buried without ceremony and ‘his stores of money and rich treasures were plundered’. Attention turned instead to the issues of power and succession.

Zangi’s heirs moved swiftly: his eldest son, Saif al-Din, seized Mosul–affirmation that Mesopotamia was still seen as the true cradle of Sunni Islam; the atabeg’s younger son, Nur al-Din Mahmud, meanwhile, travelled west to assume control of his father’s Syrian lands. This division of Zangid territory had notable consequences. Without direct interests in Iraq, Nur al-Din, the new emir of Aleppo, would be focused upon Levantine affairs, and thus perhaps better placed to pursue the jihad. At the same time, however, without access to the Fertile Crescent’s wealth and resources, the strength of his Syrian realm might wane.

Nur al-Din came to power aged around twenty-eight. He was said to have been ‘a tall, swarthy man with a beard but no moustache, a fine forehead and a pleasant appearance enhanced by beautiful, melting eyes’. In time he would attain power to eclipse even that held by his father, emerging as Latin Christendom’s most feared and respected Muslim adversary in the Near East–a ruler who nurtured and re-energised the cause of Islamic holy war. Even William of Tyre was later moved to describe him as ‘a wise and prudent man and, according to the superstitious traditions of his people, one who feared God’. But in 1146, the emir’s position was precarious and the task set before him all but insurmountable.³

In the wake of Zangi’s assassination, Syria was thrown into disarray. The brutal effectiveness of the atabeg’s despotism now became apparent as lawlessness broke out across large swathes of the Muslim Levant. Even a Damascene contemporary acknowledged that ‘all the towns were in confusion, the roads became unsafe, after enjoying a grateful period of security’. With Nur al-Din’s right and ability to rule as yet unproven, a number of Zangi’s loyal lieutenants realigned their interests. Under pressure from Unur, the de facto ruler of Damascus, the Kurdish warlord Ayyub ibn Shadi surrendered Baalbek and moved to the southern Syrian capital. Nur al-Din retained the support of Aleppo’s Zangid governor, Sawar, and the backing of Ayyub’s brother, Shirkuh, but on balance the young emir’s prospects for success, or even survival, were slim.

As emir of Aleppo, Nur al-Din found himself in control of one of the great cities of the Near East. Already in the twelfth century Aleppo had an almost unimaginably ancient history–the site of human settlement for at least seven thousand years. In physical terms, the metropolis governed by Nur al-Din from 1146 was dominated by an impressive walled citadel, rising out of the heart of the city, atop a steep-sided, 200-foot-high natural hill. One near-contemporary visitor noted that this ‘fortress is renowned for its impregnability and, from far distance seen for its great height, is without like or match among castles’–even today it dominates the modern city. Aleppo’s Great Mosque, a short distance to the west, was founded around 715 under the Umayyads, to which the Seljuqs had added a striking square minaret in the late eleventh century. The city was also a renowned commercial hub, home to a network of covered souqs (markets). Aleppo may not have been Syria’s first city in the twelfth century, but it was a centre of political, military and economic power–as such it offered Nur al-Din a vital platform upon which to build his career.⁴

In 1146, amidst the chaotic vacuum of power that followed Zangi’s murder, Nur al-Din needed to assert his authority. An opportunity to do just this soon presented itself, as urgent news of a sudden crisis arrived. The Frankish count of Edessa, Joscelin II, was making a desperate attempt to recover his capital. Leading a rapidly assembled force, he had marched on the city in October 1146 and, with the collusion of its native Christian population, breached Edessa’s outer defences by night. The Muslim garrison fled to the heavily fortified citadel and were now closely besieged.

Nur al-Din reacted with urgent resolution, determined to prevent Edessa’s loss to the Franks and to forestall any possibility of westward expansion by his brother Saif al-Din. Mustering thousands of Aleppan troops and Turcoman warriors, the emir prosecuted a lightning forced march through day and night, travelling at such an intense pace ‘that [the Muslims’] horses dropped by the roadsides from fatigue’. This speed paid off. Lacking the manpower and siege engines to overcome the citadel, Joscelin’s troops were still ranged within the lower city when Nur al-Din arrived. Trapped between two forces, the count immediately abandoned the city, escaping at the cost of heavy Latin losses. With Edessa back in his possession, the emir chose to make a blunt demonstration of his ruthless will. Two years earlier, Zangi had spared the city’s eastern Christians; now, as punishment for their ‘connivance’ with the Franks, his son and heir scourged Edessa of their presence. All males were killed, women and children enslaved. One Muslim chronicler remarked that ‘the sword blotted out the existence of all the Christians’, while a shocked Syrian Christian described how, in the aftermath of this massacre, the city ‘was deserted of life: an appalling vision, enveloped in a black cloud, drunk with blood, infected by the cadavers of its sons and daughters’. The once vibrant metropolis remained a desolate backwater for centuries to come.⁵

Grim as its impact was in Edessa, Nur al-Din’s show of strength helped to cement his rule over Aleppo. On this occasion, the emir had followed his father’s lead in relying upon brute force and fear to impose his authority. Over time, however, Nur al-Din proved capable of employing more subtle modes of governance–from consensual politics to the shaping of public opinion–alongside steely resolve. Like Zangi, he aspired to unite Aleppo and Damascus, but to begin with, at least, the emir cultivated an atmosphere of renewed cooperation with his southern Syrian neighbour. A marriage alliance was arranged between Nur al-Din and Unur of Damascus’ daughter, Ismat. The Aleppan emir also made the magnanimous gesture of releasing a slave girl captured by Zangi at Baalbek in 1138, who had once been Unur’s lover. In the opinion of one Muslim chronicler, ‘this was the most important reason for the friendship between [Nur al-Din and the Damascene]’.

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.⁶

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.⁷

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.’⁸

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’.⁹

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.