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As he sat upon his horse in readiness for the attack, splendid in red and gold arms and armour, girt with the sword of his ancestor Ali and wielding two lances, the animal pranced and one spear fell. The evil omen turned to good when the prince recited the tale of Moses’s staff, thrown down to confute the wizards of Pharaoh; and the narrator to whom the verse was addressed saluted the light of prophecy which laid the meaning of the Holy Book open to his lord and master, the Son of the Messenger of God, the Imam of the Community.
The Crown Prince Ismail of the Fatimid Dynasty, as described by the religious judge Qadi al-Askar al-Marwarrudhi before an assault on Kharijite rebels in 947.
Reliquaries commonly hold the often desiccated and crumbling remains of saints. The magnificent and warlike Fatimid state and elite of the tenth century had also crumbled almost to dust by the 1130s. The army had been decimated in 1123 at the Battle of Yibneh during a campaign to recapture Jaffa. Its massed ranks of Sudanese foot-archers presented the Franks with a static target for their charge and the light Berber cavalrymen were not capable of defending the infantry. The battle only lasted an hour and a hurriedly-launched Damascene diversionary tactic did not distract the Franks from their task of butchery.
The Egyptian navy was fading from the scene too. After the fall of Tyre the Fatimid fleet is barely mentioned in the chronicles, excepting some piratical raids in the 1150s. Apart from occasional raids from Ascalon, little was heard from the army either. William of Tyre dismissed the Egyptians as ‘effeminates’, but this is far from the whole truth. In fact the Fatimids’ withdrawal from the war for Syria was not a direct result of Frankish victories per se, and their one victory in the second Battle of Ramla had at least exposed one weakness of the Frankish state – there were simply not enough Latin soldiers.
Egyptian isolationism in the period immediately after 1125 was, in fact, a result of sustained political crises. The Ismaili Assassins murdered the wazir al-Afdal in 1121, possibly with the connivance of the Fatimid caliph, and tipped the already fragile state into a cycle of political murders and intrigues as wazirs and caliphs competed for the allegiances of army factions. In 1130 the caliph, al-Amir, was also killed by the Assassins. Egypt turned in on itself and became largely irrelevant to the Crusaders until they sought its conquest three decades later. In fact they should have acted in 1130 when the state was ripe for conquest and Damascus was distracted by a succession crisis. As would become apparent during the contests with Nur al-Din and Saladin, without Egypt the Crusader Kingdom was an isolated colony, especially given the growing and overt animosity of Byzantium in the north and the threat of the Turks of the Jazira to Outremer’s east.