17
I know not whether my native land be a grazing ground for wild beasts or yet my home …
A poet of the city of Maarrat al-Numan following the Crusaders’ destruction of the city.
Muslim resistance effectively collapsed following the Battle of Antioch and the Crusaders’ route to Jerusalem was almost unimpeded. Only logistics, continued desertions and arguments between the Crusade’s leaders delayed their advance on the city.
A Crusader force struck out towards Maarrat al-Numan. This ragtag army was nominally under the leadership of Raymond of Saint Gilles but in truth the common people and lower knights of the pilgrimage were pushing their leaders to action amid an outbreak of typhoid fever in Antioch that killed 1,500 newly-arrived troops and the important leader the Bishop of Le Puy.
What is more important about the attack on Maarrat, however, is what we see occurring on the Muslim side of the battle line. Whatever truly occurred at Maarrat – and we are given the choice between Fulcher of Chartres’s starved Franks reluctantly turning to cannibalism or Ralph of Caen’s children-devouring fanatics – Muslims from this point until the fall of Jerusalem seem to have genuinely feared the Franks and were reluctant to take them on. Fortified cities such as Homs and Tripoli appeased the Franks with fresh mounts and supplies. Of course, there was also a degree of realpolitik in all this. By aiding the Crusader march they effectively pushed them onto the Nahr al-Kalb, or Dog River, which marked the beginning of Fatimid lands.
Also at Maarrat the first Crusader assault was soundly defeated by a force of isolated Aleppan troops, and even when the Franks returned with vastly increased numbers, a hastily-recruited city militia threw beehives upon their attackers as they scaled the walls. Ibn al-Athir tells us how they held the Franks at bay for some two weeks:
The inhabitants valiantly defended their city. When the Franks realised the fierce determination and devotion of the defenders, they built a wooden tower as high as the city wall and fought from the top of it, but failed to do the Muslims any serious harm. One night a few Muslims were seized with panic and in their demoralised state thought that if they barricaded themselves into one of the town’s largest buildings they would be in a better position to defend themselves, so they climbed down from the wall and abandoned the position they were defending. Others saw them and followed their example, leaving another stretch of wall undefended, and gradually as one group followed another, the whole wall was left unprotected and the Franks scaled it with ladders. Their appearance in the city terrified the Muslims, who shut themselves up in their houses. For three days the slaughter never stopped …
Up to a point, the townspeople had resisted the hardened soldiers of the Crusade, and a small group of Turkish soldiers had fought alongside Arab townsfolk and peasants. The Arabs of the Levant had not been militarily significant since they had been removed from the state salary roll by Caliph al-Mutasim in the ninth century. Whilst the Bedouin were wooed as allies by both Turks and Franks in the early twelfth century, the Arabs of the cities were viewed disparagingly by the Persian and Turkish professional soldiers of the region. These metropolitan Arabs formed the religious intelligentsia, or ulama, and provided the government with qadis, or religious judges. The most extensive military action they were involved in was no more than the organisation of the shurta, or local police. What would occur over the next few years, however, in terms of resistance to the Franks and a union between the Sunni ulama and Turkish military men, crystallised from the resistance at Maarrat.
The lower orders of the Crusade showed an equal passion for their task: they pulled down the walls of Maarat in order to force Raymond to continue to lead them on to Jerusalem.