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Dare you slumber in the blessed shade of safety, where life is as soft as an orchard flower? How can the eye sleep between the lids at a time of disasters that would waken any sleeper? While your Syrian brothers can only sleep on the backs of their chargers or in vulture’s bellies!
Abu l-Musaffar al-Abiwardi, a poet of the twelfth century.
The sultan’s final expedition set out in 1115. This time Damascene resistance to Baghdad’s reach was overt. Damascus, Aleppo and Crusader Antioch allied against the sultan’s forces. The sultan’s commander, Bursuq, pushed towards Antioch, but Roger mobilised early, upon intelligence from Edessa, and met with the forces of Aleppo and Damascus, as well as those of Il-Ghazi of Mardin not far from Hama.
Baldwin then arrived with the armies of Jerusalem and of Tripoli. As the king, such support of Roger, who was technically his vassal, was expected but Baldwin was also a tough and responsible monarch and his arrival was enough to make Bursuq abandon a planned attack on Roger’s camp.
Bursuq then retreated and this was enough to split the junior emirs, who had joined the expedition in the expectation of plunder, from his command. The composite and tribal nature of Turkish armies was another weakness that acted against a concerted campaign of confrontation with the Crusader states. Bursuq took the field again at Tal Danith, but it took only the army of Antioch and of Edessa to defeat him. His troops were surprised whilst they watered their horses in the Orontes River and he was decisively beaten. For the Syrian-Turkish princes, the campaign’s result was that the status quo ante returned and they remained free of interference from Baghdad. Usama Ibn-Munqidh, an Arab warrior of Shayzar who fought hard against the Crusaders in several campaigns, did not appear at all surprised or outraged by the ‘stratagem by the governor of Aleppo’ of allying with Roger. Baghdad’s involvement in the affairs of the Levant were finished. It perhaps seems perverse that the main agent of resistance to the Crusaders in the early part of the twelfth century, given its actions in 1111, 1113, and 1115, was in fact Tughtigin’s Damascus. Damascus made treaties with Latin Jerusalem, but in fact the city continued to strongly resist the Crusaders in southern Syria. Tughtigin took on a protective occupation of Tyre in 1112 and his forces fought alongside the Fatimids at Ascalon in 1118.
