OUTREMER

Just before first light on 28 June 1119 Prince Roger of Antioch gathered his army in readiness for battle. His men huddled together to listen to a sermon, partake of mass and venerate the Antiochene relic of the True Cross–girding their souls for the fight ahead. In the days leading up to this moment, Roger had reacted with decisive resolution to news of an impending Muslim invasion. After years of passively enduring Antiochene expansionism and repeated demands for exorbitant tribute, Aleppo had suddenly moved on to the offensive. Mustering a force–perhaps in excess of 10,000 men–the city’s new emir, the Artuqid Turk Il-ghazi, marched on the border zone with Frankish Antioch. Facing this threat, Roger could have waited for reinforcements from his Latin neighbours, including Baldwin of Bourcq (who had assumed the Jerusalemite crown in 1118). Instead, the prince assembled around 700 knights, 3,000 infantry and a corps of Turcopoles (Christianised mercenaries of Turkish birth) and crossed to the eastern flanks of the Belus Hills. Roger camped in a valley near the small settlement of Sarmada–which he believed was well defended by enclosing rocky hills–and that morning was about to initiate a swift advance, hoping to catch his enemy unawares and replay his success of 1115. Unbeknownst to the prince, however, on the preceding evening scouts had revealed the Christians’ position to Il-ghazi. Drawing upon local knowledge of the surrounding terrain, the Artuqid commander dispatched troops to approach Roger’s camp from three different directions and, as one Arabic chronicler attested, ‘as dawn broke [the Franks] saw the Muslim standards advancing to surround them completely’.⁷⁵

THE FIELD OF BLOOD

With bugles sounding an urgent call to arms through the ranks, Roger rushed to organise his forces for combat, a cleric bearing the True Cross beside him. As Il-ghazi’s men closed in, there was just time to assemble the Latin host beyond the confines of the camp. In the vain hope of regaining the initiative, Roger ordered the Frankish knights on his right flank to deliver a crushing heavy charge and, at first, they appeared to have stemmed the Aleppan advance. But as battle was joined along the line, a contingent of Turcopoles stationed on the left wing buckled, and their rout splintered the Latin formation. Outnumbered and encircled, the Antiochenes were gradually overrun.

Caught at the heart of the maelstrom, Prince Roger was left horribly exposed, but ‘though his men lay cut down and dead on all sides…he never retreated, nor looked back’. One Latin eyewitness described how, ‘fighting energetically…[the prince] was struck by a [Muslim] sword through the middle of his nose right into his brain, and settling his debt to death [beneath] the Holy Cross he gave up his body to the earth and his soul to heaven’. The unfortunate priest carrying the True Cross was likewise cut down, although it was later said that the relic exacted its own miraculous revenge for this killing, causing all the Muslims nearby to suddenly become ‘possessed by greed’ for its ‘gold and precious stones’ and thus to begin butchering one another.

As resistance collapsed, a few Franks escaped westwards into the Belus Hills, but most were slaughtered. A Muslim living in Damascus described it as ‘one of [Islam’s] finest victories’, noting that, strewn across the battleground, the enemy’s slain horses resembled hedgehogs ‘because of the quantity of arrows sticking into them’. So terrible was this defeat, so great the number of Christian dead, that the Antiochenes thereafter dubbed the site ‘Ager Sanguinis’, the Field of Blood.

The Latin principality, stripped of its ruler and army, stood open to further assault. Il-ghazi, nonetheless, made no real attempt to conquer Antioch itself. Traditionally, he has been criticised broadly for not seizing an ideal opportunity to capture the Frankish capital. Yet, in truth, Antioch was weakened, but far from helpless. Its extraordinarily formidable fortifications meant that, even with limited manpower to hand, the city could resist conquest by an external enemy. Il-ghazi possessed neither the time to prosecute a grinding siege, nor the men to garrison the city should it fall. Aware that Frankish reinforcements from the south would likely arrive within weeks, and with Aleppan strategic interests foremost in his mind, Il-ghazi chose instead to focus upon the Jazr border zone east of the Belus range, retaking al-Atharib and Zardana. By early August he had reoccupied this buffer zone, safeguarding Aleppo’s survival as a Muslim power.

In the meantime, Latin armies from Jerusalem and Tripoli reached Antioch, and King Baldwin II prepared for a counter-strike. Rallying the remnants of the principality’s fighting manpower, he confronted Il-ghazi on 14 August 1119 in an inconclusive battle near Zardana. The Muslim army, recently bolstered by Damascene troops, was driven from the field, and, with momentum faltering, Il-ghazi drew his campaign to a close. Christian losses were high and among those captured was Robert fitz-Fulk the Leper, lord of Zardana. Brought to Damascus, he might have hoped for clemency from his friend and former ally Tughtegin, but when Robert refused to renounce his religion, the atabeg flew into a rage and beheaded him ‘by a stroke of his sword’. Rumour had it that Tughtegin had Robert’s skull fashioned into a gaudy, gold-plated, jewel-encrusted goblet.⁷⁶

King Baldwin II’s arrival in northern Syria secured the Frankish principality’s immediate survival, but Outremer as a whole now had to confront the Field of Blood’s terrible aftermath. The territorial losses were grave–beyond Il-ghazi’s conquests, Muslim Shaizar exploited Christian weakness to overrun all of the Summaq plateau, barring the outpost at Apamea–but Antioch had recovered from an even bleaker position after the defeat at Harran in 1104. The true significance of 1119 lay in the prince’s death. Never before had an incumbent Latin ruler fallen in battle and, worse still, Roger died childless, leaving Antioch prone to a crippling succession crisis. With few options available, Baldwin stepped into the breach. The claim of Bohemond of Taranto’s nine-year-old son and namesake, Bohemond II, then living in Italy, was resurrected, with the king agreeing to act as regent until the young prince-designate reached his majority at the age of fifteen.

In a wider sense, the Field of Blood was a deeply unsettling shock for Latin Christendom. This was not the first Frankish reversal. In the afterglow of the ‘miraculous’ First Crusade, earlier setbacks had already cast their shadow: the collapse of the 1101 Crusade; Baldwin I’s defeat in the second Battle of Ramla; the mauling at Harran. But in the wake of 1119–the ‘sorrow of sorrows’, which ‘took away joy and went beyond the bounds and measure of all misery’–a troubling question that cut to the heart of the belief system that underpinned crusading and the settlement of Outremer was unavoidable. If holy war truly was the work of God, sanctioned and empowered by His divine will, then how could defeat be explained? The answer was sin–success for Islam in the war for dominion of the Levant was a punishment, mandated in Heaven, for Christian transgression. The sinner, or scapegoat, at the Field of Blood was deemed to be Prince Roger, now branded as an adulterer and a usurper. In the future, the notion of sin as a cause of defeat would gain ever wider currency, and other individuals and groups would be targeted to explain the vagaries of war.⁷⁷

COUNTERING MISFORTUNE

In one sense, the alarm caused by the Field of Blood proved to be unfounded. The threat posed by Aleppo soon abated and Il-ghazi died in 1122 without scoring another telling victory against the Franks. Over the next two decades Near Eastern Islam remained disunited, mired in internal power struggles–and thus little concerted thought was given to waging jihad against Outremer. Indeed, the Latins made a number of significant conquests in this period. Baldwin II recouped Antioch’s losses in the Summaq and east of the Belus Hills. A foothold in another strategically sensitive border zone–this time between Jerusalem and Damascus–was secured when the Franks occupied the fortified town of Banyas, situated to the east of the River Jordan’s headwaters, standing guard over the Terre de Sueth. In 1142 the Jerusalemite crown also supported the construction of a major new castle in Transjordan. This fortress, Kerak, perched upon a narrow ridge amid the Jordanian desert, grew to become one of the great ‘crusader’ strongholds of the Levant and was designated as the region’s administrative centre.

Nonetheless, the crusader states were plagued by instability in the years that followed the Field of Blood. This was born largely of misfortune rather than entrenched Muslim aggression, as captivity and untimely death robbed the Latins of a series of leaders, igniting succession crises and engendering civil strife. Taken prisoner during a chance Muslim attack in April 1123, King Baldwin II spent sixteen months in captivity before being ransomed, during which time a coup in Palestine was narrowly avoided. Bohemond II arrived in 1126 to assume control of Antioch and was married to Baldwin II’s daughter Alice, but the young prince was slain during a raid into Cilicia just four years later, leaving behind an infant girl, Constance, as heir. Alice spent the early 1130s intriguing to seize power in the principality. Baldwin II’s own death from illness in 1131, closely followed by the demise of his ally and successor as count of Edessa, Joscelin of Courtenay, also eradicated the last vestiges of Outremer’s old guard. Against this background of incipient weakness, the need for an injection of strength and support became ever more pressing.⁷⁸

The Military Orders

The emergence of two religious orders combining the ideals of knighthood and monasticism played a vital role in buttressing the Frankish Levant. In about 1119, a small band of knights, led by a French nobleman named Hugh of Payns, dedicated themselves to the charitable task of protecting Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land. In practical terms, at first this meant patrolling the road from Jaffa to Jerusalem, but Hugh’s group quickly gained wider recognition and patronage. The Latin patriarch soon acknowledged their status as a spiritual order, while the king himself gave them quarters in Jerusalem’s Aqsa mosque, known to the Franks as the Temple of Solomon, and from this site they gained their name: the Order of the Temple of Solomon, or the Templars. Like monks, they made vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, but, rather than dedicate themselves to lives of sheltered devotion in isolated communities, they took up sword, shield and armour to fight for Christendom and the defence of the Holy Land.

As the Templars’ leader (or master), Hugh of Payns travelled to Europe in 1127 in search of validation and endorsement for his new order. Formal recognition by the Latin Church came in January 1129, at a major ecclesiastical council held at Troyes (Champagne, France). In the years to come, this official seal of approval was further garlanded by papal support and extensive privileges and immunities. The Templars also earned the endorsement of one of the Latin world’s great religious luminaries, Bernard of Clairvaux. As abbot of a Cistercian monastery, Bernard was renowned for his wisdom and trusted as an adviser in all the courts of the West. The combination of political and ecclesiastical power that he wielded was unprecedented, but in physical terms Bernard was a wreck, forced to have an open latrine trench dug next to his pew in church so that he could relieve the symptoms of an appalling chronic intestinal affliction.

Around 1130 Bernard composed a treatise–titled In Praise of the New Knighthood–extolling the virtues of the Templars’ way of life. The abbot declared the order to be ‘most worthy of total admiration’, lauding its brethren as ‘true knights of Christ fight[ing] the battles of their Lord’, assured of glorious martyrdom should they die. This lyrical exhortation played a central role in popularising the Templar movement across Latin Europe, garnering acceptance for a revolutionary offshoot of crusade ideology that in many ways was the ultimate distillation and expression of Christian holy war.

The example set by the Templars encouraged another charitable religious movement founded by Latins in the Near East to embrace militarisation. Since the late eleventh century, Jerusalem’s Christian quarter had contained a hospital, funded by Italian merchants and devoted to the care of pilgrims and the sick. With the Holy City’s conquest by the First Crusaders and the associated influx of pilgrim traffic, this institution, dedicated to John the Baptist and so known as the Hospital of St John, grew in power and importance. Recognised as an order by the pope in 1113, the Hospitallers, as they came to be known, began to attract widespread international patronage. Under the guidance of its master, Raymond of Le Puy (1120–60), the movement appended a martial element to its ongoing medical functions, emerging by the mid-twelfth century as the second Military Order.

Over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Templars and Hospitallers stood at the heart of crusading history, playing leading roles in the war for the Holy Land. In the central Middle Ages, Latin lay nobles commonly sought to affirm their devotion to God by giving alms to religious movements, often in the form of title to land or rights to its revenue. The mercurial popularity of the Military Orders therefore brought them rich donations in Outremer and across Europe. Despite their relatively humble origins–immortalised in the Templars’ case by their seal, depicting two impoverished knights riding a single horse–both were soon endowed with enormous wealth. They also attracted a steady stream of recruits, many of whom became highly trained, well-equipped warrior-monks (as knights or lower-ranking sergeants). Most medieval European war bands were startlingly amateurish, accustomed only to fighting in short seasonal campaigns and predominantly composed of poorly drilled, lightly armed irregulars. The Templars and Hospitallers, by contrast, could levy expert full-time standing forces: in effect, Latin Christendom’s first professional armies.

The Military Orders became supranational movements. Primarily focused on the protection of the crusader states, they nonetheless developed an array of other European military, ecclesiastical and financial interests, including a prominent role in the Iberian frontier wars against Islam. In the Levant their unprecedented military and economic might brought them a concomitant degree of political influence. Both orders enjoyed papal patronage, gaining independence from local secular and ecclesiastical jurisdictions, and so had the potential to destabilise the Latin East’s sovereign polities. As rogue powers, they might question or even countermand crown authority, or ignore patriarchal edicts and episcopal instruction. For now, though, this danger was more than balanced by the transformative benefits of their involvement in Outremer’s defence.

Together, the Templars and Hospitallers brought a desperately needed influx of manpower and martial expertise to crusader states starved of military resources. Crucially, they also possessed the wealth to maintain, and in time extend, Outremer’s network of forts and castles. From the 1130s onwards, the lay lords of the Latin East began ceding control of fortified sites to the orders, often allowing them to develop semi-independent enclaves in border zones. Command of the castle of Baghras gave the Templars a dominant position in the northern reaches of the Antiochene principality. Rights to Safad in Galilee and to Gaza in southern Palestine brought the order similar rights and responsibilities. The Hospitallers, meanwhile, gained centres at Krak des Chevaliers, perched above the Bouqia valley between Antioch and Tripoli, and at Bethgibelin, one of three strongholds built in southern Palestine to defend Jerusalem and exert military pressure upon Muslim-held Ascalon.⁷⁹

Turning to Christendom

After 1119 the Levantine Franks also began to look beyond their own borders for aid. In theory at least, eastern Christians should have been one obvious source of assistance.* Encircled by Islam and distant as it was from western Europe, Outremer needed a neighbouring ally if it was to achieve long-term survival. Yet, although the crusader states shared a common Christian faith with the Byzantine Empire–the Mediterranean superpower feared and respected by the Muslim world–since Jerusalem’s conquest the Greeks had contributed precious little to the war for the Holy Land. The embittered dispute over Antioch lay at the heart of this failure to secure imperial support and, if unaddressed, this problem looked set to cripple the Frankish Levant for decades to come. In 1137, after long years of distraction elsewhere in Byzantium, Alexius I’s son and heir, Emperor John II Comnenus, marched into Syria to reassert Greek influence over what he considered the eastern fringes of his realm. John managed to impose theoretical suzerainty over Antioch, and from this point forward the principality’s relations with the rest of Outremer were always balanced by its ties to Constantinople. But in military terms the empire’s contribution was disappointing, with expeditions against Aleppo and Shaizar ending in failure. John returned to the East in late summer 1142, probably planning to create a new Byzantine polity at Antioch ruled directly by his youngest son Manuel. As it was, John died in a hunting accident in Cilicia in April 1143–a sudden catastrophe that brought the Greek expedition to an immediate halt.⁸⁰

In fact, Outremer turned most frequently to western Christendom for assistance after the Field of Blood. In January 1120, at a general assembly of the kingdom of Jerusalem’s secular and ecclesiastical leaders in Nablus (north of the Holy City), the crisis facing the crusader states was discussed. This resulted in the first direct appeal to Pope Calixtus II for a new crusade to the Holy Land and a further entreaty to Venice. The Italian mercantile republic responded by sending a fleet of at least seventy ships east in autumn 1122 under the crusading banner. With Venetian help the Jerusalemite Franks captured the heavily fortified city of Tyre in 1124–one of Palestine’s last remaining Muslim-held ports and a major centre of Mediterranean shipping and commerce.* King Baldwin II sought to rally another crusade for a projected attack on Damascus in 1129, but despite recruiting a sizeable party of western knights, the campaign itself proved to be a fiasco.

Intent upon forging closer links with the Latin West and keen to solve their own succession crises, the Levantine Franks also looked to secure eligible European husbands for a number of Outremer’s heiresses. In the crusader states, as in much of medieval Christendom, there was a perceived need for male rule; secular lords, from kings to counts, were expected to lead, or at least direct, their armies in times of war, and military command generally was deemed to be the preserve of men. Ideally, marriage candidates would be high-born aristocrats–men willing to commit to the defence of the Holy Land and possessed of the social standing to bring new wealth and manpower to the East. One such figure was Raymond of Poitiers–the duke of Aquitaine’s second son and a relation of France’s Capetian king–who was married to Constance of Antioch in 1136, bringing a long period of political turbulence in northern Syria to an end. An even more influential union was orchestrated in the late 1120s. King Baldwin II had four daughters with his Armenian wife Morphia, but no sons, and therefore he sought a match for his eldest child Melisende to secure the royal succession. After protracted negotiations, in 1129 the princess duly wed Count Fulk V of Anjou, one of France’s most eminent potentates with ties to the monarchs of England and France.

Upon Baldwin II’s death, Fulk and Melisende were consecrated and crowned on 14 September 1131. Perhaps twenty-two years of age, the new queen was the first ruler of Jerusalem to be born of mixed (Latin-Armenian) parentage. As such, she was the living embodiment of a new oriental Frankish society. Around 1134, however, Latin Palestine was brought to the brink of civil war by a dispute over crown rights. Resentful of the new king’s decision to appoint his own handpicked supporters to positions of wealth and influence, and his growing estrangement from Melisende, Jerusalem’s established Frankish aristocracy set out to curb Fulk’s authority by forcing him to rule jointly with the queen. After a decidedly frosty period, during which the king apparently ‘found that no place was entirely safe among the kindred and partisans of the queen’, the royal couple were reconciled. From this point forward, Melisende started to play a central role in governing the realm, and her position was further consolidated after Fulk’s death in 1143, when she was appointed as joint ruler with her young son Baldwin III.

In the longer term, these events helped to reshape the nature and extent of royal authority in Palestine. Baldwin I and Baldwin II had often ruled almost as autocrats, but as the twelfth century progressed it became clear that the Latin nobility could limit the absolute might of the monarchy. Over time, the crown rulers of Frankish Jerusalem engaged in a greater degree of consultation with their leading nobles, and the council of the realm’s most important landholders and ecclesiastics, known as the Haute Cour (High Court), became Palestine’s most important forum for legal, political and military decision making.⁸¹

A CRUSADER SOCIETY?

One of the rarest and most beautiful treasures to survive from the crusading era is a small prayer book, thought to have been made in the kingdom of Jerusalem during the 1130s and now residing in London’s British Library. Bound between two ornate ivory covers decorated with carvings of unsurpassed delicacy, its pages contain a series of magnificent and deeply emotive illuminations illustrating the life of Jesus. The work of many master craftsmen, a piece of the highest attainable quality, the book was designed as a personal guide to Christian life and religious observance–detailing saints’ days, listing prayers–that technically would be called a psalter. Taken simply on its own terms, it is a masterpiece of medieval art.

Yet what sets this remarkable remnant of a distant age apart is its provenance. For this psalter is thought to have been commissioned by King Fulk of Jerusalem as a gift for his wife, Melisende; perhaps even as a peace offering to salve the wounds opened in 1134. As such, it offers us an extraordinary, tangible connection to Outremer and the world of Melisende. The notion of seeing, perhaps even of touching, an item that belonged to the queen, particularly one so intimately related to her daily life, is stirring enough.

But Melisende’s Psalter has far more to tell us; indeed, its mere existence opens up a furious debate that cuts to the heart of crusading history. For the book’s construction and decoration seem to speak of an artistic culture in which Latin, Greek, eastern Christian and even Islamic styles have intermingled, fusing to create a new and unique form; what might be termed ‘crusader art’. At least seven artisans, labouring in the workshop of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, collaborated in the Psalter’s production (including a Byzantine-trained artist bearing the distinctly Greek-sounding name Basilius, who signed one of the internal images). The images wrought upon its ivory covers are broadly Byzantine in form, but are enclosed within densely packed geometric borders suggestive of Islamic influence. Other elements of the manuscript exhibit different influences: the text has been attributed to a French hand; the numerous decorated capital letters that introduce pages are western European in conception; and the detailed calendar contained within is English.⁸²

Does this psalter reflect wider truths about the nature of life in the Frankish Levant? Was the society inhabited by Melisende and her contemporaries itself distinct in character and quality; and was this ‘crusader’ world one of perpetual war–a closed community of religious and ethnic intolerance–or a melting-pot of cross-cultural interchange? This debate has the potential to offer profoundly instructive insights into the reality of medieval life. It is also among the most heated in all crusade history. Over the last two hundred years historians have presented wildly divergent visions of the relationship between Frankish Christians and the indigenous peoples of the Near East, with some emphasising the forces of integration, adaptation and acculturation and others depicting the crusader states as oppressive, intolerant colonial regimes.

Given the relative paucity of a surviving body of medieval evidence that sheds light on Outremer’s social, cultural and economic context, it is not surprising that the image put forward of the crusader states has often revealed more about the hopes and prejudices of our own world than the mentality and mores of the medieval past. For those who believe in the inevitability of a ‘clash of civilisations’ and a global conflagration between Islam and the West, the crusades and the societies they begat can serve as grim proof of mankind’s innate propensity to savagery, bigotry and tyrannical repression of an enemy ‘other’. Alternatively, the evidence of transcultural fusion and peaceful coexistence in Outremer can be harnessed to underpin the ideal of convivencia (literally ‘living together’), to suggest that peoples of differing ethnic and religious backgrounds can live together in relative harmony.⁸³

Despite all of these manifest complexities, the world of Outremer demands close and careful examination, because it has such integral bearing upon the fundamental issues of crusade history, opening up a pair of pressing questions: was the Frankish conquest and colonisation of the Near East unusual because it occurred in the context of holy war, or actually quite unremarkable? And did the creation of the crusader states change the history of western Europe–accelerating cross-cultural contact and the diffusion of knowledge; serving as a breeding ground for greater familiarity and understanding between Latin Christians and Muslims?

Life in Outremer

A number of elementary facts conditioned the nature of life in the crusader states. Outremer’s foundation did not bring about a widespread displacement of the Levant’s indigenous population. Instead, Frankish settlers governed polities whose populations reflected that region’s historic diversity–a mixture of Muslims, Jews and eastern Christians. This latter group included a bewildering number of Christian rites, among them Armenians, Greeks, Jacobites, Nestorians and Copts; as well as ‘Syrian’ (or Melkite) Christians, who were Greek Orthodox but spoke Arabic. The distribution and relative representation of these different peoples varied considerably across the crusader states because of established settlement patterns: with a preponderance of Armenians in the county of Edessa and Greeks in the principality of Antioch; and probably a higher proportion of Muslims in the kingdom of Jerusalem.

The Latins ruled over these native subjects as an elite, heavily outnumbered minority. Linguistic difference seems to have remained as a defining and dividing factor. The common spoken tongue adopted by the Latins was Old French (with Latin used in formal documentation) and, while some settlers did learn Arabic and other eastern languages like Greek, Armenian, Syriac and Hebrew, most did not. Many Franks resided in urban and/or coastal communities–and thus in relative isolation from the agrarian indigenous population. In rural inland settings, western lords generally lived in separate manor houses, largely cut off from their subjects, but the pragmatic necessity of sharing scarce resources like water sometimes prompted increased contact. In general, small rural settlements tended to have a coherent devotional identity, so that one village might be made up of Muslims, another of Greeks (the same is true in parts of the Near East today). But large towns and cities were more multicultural.

So the Franks evidently ruled over, and in some cases lived among, a diverse range of ‘eastern’ peoples. Did the Latins stand aloof, or integrate themselves into this richly variegated setting? According to King Baldwin I’s chaplain Fulcher of Chartres, writing in the 1120s, they seem quickly to have undergone a high degree of acculturation:

Consider, I pray, and reflect how in our time God has transformed the Occident [West] into the Orient. For we who were Occidentals have become Orientals. He who was a Roman or a Frank has in this land been made into a Galilean or a Palestinian. He who was of Rheims or Chartres has now become a citizen of Tyre or Antioch. We have already forgotten the places of our birth.

Admittedly, Fulcher was writing the equivalent of a recruitment manifesto; seeking to new lure new Latin settlers to the East. But even with this proviso in mind, his testimony seems to indicate openness to the idea of assimilation. Fulcher went on to describe another mode of cross-cultural contact–intermarriage. Unions between Franks and eastern Christian Greeks and Armenians were relatively commonplace, and sometimes served to cement political alliances. Queen Melisende of Jerusalem herself was a product of just such a marriage. Frankish men might also wed Muslim women who converted to Christianity. But marriages between Latins and Muslims seem to have been extremely rare. At a council held in Nablus in 1120, soon after the crisis caused by the Field of Blood, the Frankish hierarchy instituted a series of laws explicitly forbidding fraternisation. The punishments for sex between Christians and Muslims were severe: a man would be castrated; a consenting woman would have her nose cut off. These were the first such examples of encoded prohibition in the Latin world. The same batch of legislation also banned Muslims from wearing clothing ‘in the Frankish custom’. The import of these rulings is debatable, in part because any law can be read in a positive or negative light. Do the Nablus decrees reflect a world of intense segregation, where such acts would be unimaginable; or were these laws created to restrict what had become a common practice? Certainly, there is no evidence to indicate that these edicts were put into action, nor were they carried over into Outremer’s thirteenth-century law codes.

When they first captured cities like Antioch and Jerusalem and decided to settle in the Near East, the Latins had to develop the means to rule their new lordships by establishing administrative frameworks. In general, their approach was to import many practices from the West, while adopting and adapting some Levantine models. This process was probably driven by the pragmatic need rapidly to set up a functioning system, rather than any particular desire to embrace new forms of government. Regional considerations also influenced decisions. In the principality of Antioch, with its history of Greek rule, the main city official was a dux (duke), an institution drawn from a Byzantine template; in the kingdom of Jerusalem, a similar role was performed by a Frankish-style viscount.

Eastern Christians certainly played some role in local and even regional government; so, too, on occasion, did Muslims. Most Muslim villages seem to have been represented by a ra’is–the equivalent of a headman–just as they had been under Turkish or Fatimid rule. Through a single reference, it is known that in 1181 the Muslim citizens of Tyre also had their own ra’is named Sadi. A similarly isolated piece of evidence indicates that in 1188 the Latin-held Syrian port of Jabala had a Muslim qadi (judge). It is impossible to gauge the true extent of this type of representation.⁸⁴

Perhaps the most fascinating source of evidence for the nature of life in Outremer is Usama ibn Munqidh’s Book of Contemplation, a collection of tales and anecdotes by a northern Syrian Arab nobleman who watched the war for the Holy Land unfold through the twelfth century. Usama’s text is crammed with direct comments on (and incidental details about) contact with the Franks and life in the crusader states. His interest was almost always in the bizarre and unusual, so the material he recorded has to be used with some caution; nonetheless, his work is an invaluable mine of information. On the question of orientalised Latins, he wrote: ‘There are some Franks who have become acclimatized and frequent the company of Muslims. These are better than those who have just arrived from their homelands, but they are the exception, and cannot be taken as typical.’ In the course of his life, Usama encountered Franks who had taken to eating Levantine food and others who frequented hammam (bathhouses) that were open to Latins and Muslims alike.

One of the most surprising revelations to emerge from Usama’s writings is the normalised, almost day-to-day nature of his encounters with Franks. While some of these took place in the context of combat, many meetings were of an amicable and courteous form. This may well have been a function of Usama’s high social class, but it is clear that Latins did establish friendships with Muslims. In one case, Usama described how ‘a respected knight [in King Fulk’s army] grew to like my company and he became my constant companion, calling me “my brother”. Between us there are ties of amity and sociability.’ Nonetheless, there was an undertone to this tale, one that reverberated through many of the stories related in the Book of Contemplation: an inbred sense of Muslim cultural and intellectual superiority. In the case of his knightly friend, this came to the fore when the Frank offered to take Usama’s fourteen-year-old son with him back to Europe so that the boy could receive a proper education and ‘acquire reason’. Usama thought this preposterous proposition revealed ‘the Franks’ lack of intelligence’.

Another seemingly unlikely association enjoyed by Usama ibn Munqidh was his amicable relationship with the Templars. According to Usama:

When I went to visit the holy sites in Jerusalem, I would go in and make my way up to the Aqsa mosque, beside which stood a small mosque that the Franks had converted into a church. When I went into the Aqsa mosque–where the Templars, who are my friends, were–they would clear out that little mosque so that I could pray in it.

Usama evidently had no difficulty either in making a pilgrimage to the Holy City or in finding a mosque in Frankish territory within which to perform his canonically mandated daily prayers. Did this right to worship extend to Muslims living under Latin rule; indeed, was Outremer’s non-Frankish population as a whole treated equitably, or subjected to oppression and abuse? One fact is clear: in the Latin East, the primary division was not between Christians and Muslims, but between Franks (that is to say, Latin Christians) and non-Franks (be they eastern Christian, Jewish or Muslim). This second group of subjected indigenous peoples was made up mostly of peasants and some merchants.⁸⁵

In legal terms, non-Franks were generally treated as a separate class: for serious breaches of law they were subject to the ‘Burgess’ court (just like non-noble Latins), and here Muslims were allowed to take oaths on the Koran; but civil cases came before theCour de la Fonde (or Market Court), specifically instituted for non-Franks. The constitution of this body favoured eastern Christians because it was manned by a jury of two Franks and four Syrians, with no Muslim representation. Outremer’s Latin law codes also seem to have assigned harsher punishments to Muslim offenders.

Much of the historical debate about the treatment of subjected Muslims has centred on the day-to-day issues of rights to worship and financial exploitation. In this regard, the evidence provided by the Iberian Muslim traveller and pilgrim Ibn Jubayr is enlightening. During a grand journey in the early 1180s that took in North Africa, Arabia, Iraq and Syria, Ibn Jubayr passed through the kingdom of Jerusalem, visiting Acre and Tyre before taking ship to Sicily. Of his journey through western Galilee he wrote:

Our way lay through continuous farms and ordered settlements, whose inhabitants were all Muslims, living comfortably with the Franks. God protect us from such temptation. They surrender half their crops to the Franks at harvest time, and pay as well a poll-tax of one dinar and five qirat for each person. Other than that, they are not interfered with, save for a light tax on the fruits of trees. Their houses and all their effects are left to their full possession.

This account seems to indicate that a large, sedentary Muslim population lived in relative peace within Latin Palestine, paying a per-capita levy (like the poll-tax imposed by Islamic rulers on their non-Muslim subjects) and a produce tax. Surviving evidence for the level of taxation imposed within Islamic polities around this same time suggests that Muslim peasants and farmers were no worse off living under Frankish Christian rule. In fact, Ibn Jubayr even suggested that Muslims were more likely to be treated with ‘justice’ by a ‘Frankish landlord’ and to suffer ‘injustice’ at the hands of ‘a landlord of [their] own faith’. This did not mean that he approved of peaceful coexistence or abject submission to Latin rule. At one point he noted that ‘there can be no excuse in the eyes of God for a Muslim to stay in any infidel county, save when passing through it’. But principled objections such as this actually lend further credence to the positive observations he chose to record.⁸⁶

Ibn Jubayr also reported that subjected Muslims had access to mosques and rights to prayer in Acre and Tyre. On the basis of this sliver of evidence, it is impossible to state categorically that all Muslims living in Outremer enjoyed similar devotional liberty. Broadly speaking, the most that can be suggested is that outnumbered Frankish settlers had a vested interest in keeping their native subjects content and in situ, and the conditions of life for indigenous eastern Christians and Muslims did not prompt widespread civil unrest or migration. By the contemporary standards of western Europe or the Muslim East, non-Franks living in the crusader states were probably not particularly oppressed, exploited or abused.⁸⁷

One mode of contact that undoubtedly brought together Levantine Franks and Muslims was trade. There were sure signs of vibrant commercial enterprise during the first hundred years of Latin settlement. Italian merchants from Venice, Pisa and Genoa played leading roles in this process, establishing enclaves in Outremer’s great ports and coastal cities and creating a complex network of trans-Mediterranean trade routes. These pulsing arteries of commerce, linking the Near East with the West, enabled Levantine products (such as sugar cane and olive oil) and precious goods from the Middle East and Asia to reach the markets of Europe. As yet, the bulk of trade flowing out of the Orient still passed through Egypt, but, even so, Outremer’s economic development proved extraordinarily lucrative: it paved the way for cities like Venice to become the leading mercantile powers of the Middle Ages; and through customs and levies, it also helped to stock the treasuries of Antioch, Tripoli and Jerusalem. This does not mean that the Latin settlements in the East should be regarded as exploitative European colonies. Their establishment and survival may have depended, in part, upon the likes of Genoa; but they were not set up, in the first instance, as economic ventures. Nor did they serve the interests of ‘western homelands’ as such, because the financial benefits accrued by the ‘state’ tended to stay in the East.

The passage of goods from the Muslim world to the Mediterranean ports of the Frankish Levant was crucial not only to the Latins. It also became one of the linchpins of the wider Near Eastern economy: vital for the livelihoods of Muslim merchants plying the caravan routes to the East; critical to the incomes of Islam’s great cities, Aleppo and Damascus. These shared interests produced interdependency and promoted carefully regulated (and thus essentially ‘peaceful’) contact, even at times of heightened political and military conflict. In the end–even in the midst of holy war–trade was too important to be disrupted.

Historians often present 1120 as a year of crisis and tension in the Levant. After all, the Field of Blood was fresh in the memory, and it was in this year that the council of Nablus prescribed harsh punishments for intercultural fraternisation. But in 1120 Baldwin II also instituted scything commercial tax cuts in Jerusalem. According to Fulcher of Chartres (who was then living in the Holy City), the king declared that ‘Christians as well as Saracens were to have freedom to come in or go out to sell whensoever and to whomsoever they wished.’ According to Muslim testimony, around the same time, Il-ghazi–the victor at the Field of Blood–abolished tolls in Aleppo and agreed terms of truce with the Franks. The degree of coordination between these two supposed enemies is impossible to determine, but both were obviously making strident attempts to stimulate trade. In fact, the tenor and scope of Latin–Muslim commercial contacts appear largely to have been unaffected by the rising tide of jihadi enthusiasm within Islam. Even Saladin, the ‘champion’ of the holy war, forged close links with the seaborne merchants of Italy when he became ruler of Muslim Egypt. Keen to promote profitable trade and to secure ready supplies of shipbuilding timber (which was difficult to source in North Africa), he endowed the Pisans with a protected commercial enclave in Alexandria in 1173.⁸⁸

Knowledge and culture

Another form of exchange was also taking place in Outremer during the twelfth century: the transmission of Muslim and eastern Christian knowledge and culture among members of the Latin intellectual elite. The evidence for this form of ‘dialogue’ in Jerusalem is limited, but in Antioch, with its long-embedded traditions of scholasticism, the situation was quite different.⁸⁹ The city and its environs were home to numerous eastern Christian monastic houses, predating the crusades and famed as centres of intellectual life. Here, some of the great minds of the Christian world gathered to study and translate texts on theology, philosophy, medicine and science that were written in languages such as Greek, Arabic, Syriac and Armenian. With the creation of the crusader states, Latin scholars naturally began to congregate in and around the city. In about 1114 the famous philosopher and translator Adelard of Bath visited, perhaps staying for two years. A decade later, Stephen of Pisa–the Latin treasurer of the Church of St Paul–was carrying out groundbreaking studies. In the course of the 1120s he produced some of the most important Latin translations ever to originate in the Levant. Stephen was most famous for his translation of al-Majusi’s Royal Book–an extraordinary compendium of medical lore–that later helped to advance knowledge in western Europe.⁹⁰

The extent to which this medical knowledge influenced actual practice in the Latin Levant is debatable. Usama ibn Munquidh wrote with relish about the peculiar and sometimes distinctly alarming techniques used by Frankish doctors. In one case a sick woman was diagnosed as having ‘a demon inside her head’. Usama apparently watched as the attending Latin physician first shaved her head and then ‘took a razor and made a cut in her head in the shape of a cross. He then peeled back the skin so that the skull was exposed and rubbed it with salt. The woman died instantaneously.’ Usama concluded dryly: ‘I left, having learned about their medicine things I had never known before.’ Latin settlers in the crusader states seem to have recognised that Muslims and eastern Christians possessed advanced medical knowledge; and some, like the Frankish royal family in Jerusalem during the second half of the twelfth century, retained the services of non-Latin doctors. But there were some centres of excellence operated by western Christians, including the massive hospital in Jerusalem dedicated to St John and run by the Hospitaller Military Order.

The artistic fusion of Melisende’s Psalter was echoed in buildings erected in the crusader states around this time, most famously in the massive reconstruction programme undertaken at the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, during the reigns of Fulk and Melisende. When the Franks first conquered Palestine this church was in a state of some decay. Through the 1130s and 1140s the Latins rejuvenated this most sacred site, designing a suitably majestic structure that, for the first time, would enclose all the various shrines associated with Christ’s Passion: including the Calvary chapel (on the supposed site of his crucifixion) and his burial tomb or Sepulchre. By this time, the church was also closely associated with the Frankish crown rulers of Jerusalem, being the venue for coronations and the burial site of kings.

In overall configuration, the new plan for the Holy Sepulchre adhered to the western European ‘Romanesque’ style of the early Middle Ages, and bore some similarity to other major Latin pilgrim churches in the West, including that found in Santiago de Compostela (north-western Spain). The ‘crusader’ church did have some distinctive features–including a large domed rotunda–but many of these peculiarities resulted from the building’s unique setting, and from its architects’ ambition to incorporate so many ‘holy places’ under one roof. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre standing today is still, broadly speaking, that of the twelfth century, but almost all of the interior ‘crusader’ decoration has been lost (as have the royal tombs). Of the extensive Latin mosaics only one remains–almost hidden on the ceiling, within the dim confines of the Calvary chapel–depicting Christ in Byzantine style. The main entryway to the building, through grand twinned portals on the south transept, was crowned by a pair of lavishly sculpted stone lintels: one, on the left, showing scenes from Jesus’ final days, including the Last Supper; the other, a complex geometric web of interwoven vine-scrolling, dotted with human and mythological figures. These lintels remained in situ until the 1920s, when they were removed to a nearby museum for preservation. Throughout, the sculpture on the south façade appears to incorporate Frankish, Greek, Syrian and Muslim influences.

The new ‘crusader’ church was consecrated on 15 July 1149, exactly fifty years to the day after Jerusalem’s reconquest. This building set out to proclaim, honour and venerate the unique sanctity of the Holy Sepulchre–Christendom’s spiritual epicentre. It also stood as a bold declaration of Latin confidence, affirming the permanency of Frankish rule and the might of its royal dynasty; and as a monument that celebrated the achievements of the First Crusade, even as it bore splendid testimony to Outremer’s cultural diversity.⁹¹

God’s land of faith and devotion

The ‘crusader’ Church of the Holy Sepulchre was just one expression of the intense devotional reverence attached to Jerusalem, and to the Holy Land as a whole. For the Franks, this Levantine world–through which Christ himself had walked–was itself a sacred relic, where the air and earth were imbued with the numinous aura of God. It was inevitable that the religious monuments built in this hallowed land, and the expressions of faith carried out among its many holy places, would be coloured by an especially febrile piety. Latin religious life was also affected by the fact that many of the indigenous peoples of the Near East (including eastern Christians, Muslims and Jews) shared this sense of zealous adoration.

Through the twelfth century, the most common western European visitors to Outremer were not crusaders; they were pilgrims. Thousands came from Latin Christendom, making landfall at ports like Acre–the human equivalent of the precious cargo shipped from east to west; others came from the likes of Russia and Greece. Some stayed as lay settlers or became monks, nuns or hermits. Only a few religious houses were erected on entirely undeveloped sites, but many disused locations were revitalised (such as the Benedictine convent of St Anne in Jerusalem), and Latin monasteries that pre-dated the crusades, like Notre-Dame de Josaphat (just outside the Holy City), enjoyed a massive boost in popularity and patronage.

Acts of devotion also brought Franks into contact with the native inhabitants of the Levant. Some Latins sought to get closer to God by living ascetic lives of isolation in areas of wilderness like Mount Carmel (beside Haifa) and the Black Mountain (near Antioch); there they mingled in loose communities with Greek Orthodox hermits. One of the most remarkable examples of religious convergence occurred at the Convent of Our Lady at Saidnaya (about fifteen miles north of Damascus). This Greek Orthodox religious house, deep in Muslim territory, possessed a ‘miraculous’ icon of the Virgin Mary which had been transmuted from paint into flesh. Oil supposedly flowed from the icon’s breasts and this liquid was treasured for its incredible healing properties. Saidnaya was a well-established pilgrimage destination, popular with eastern Christians and Muslims (who revered Mary as the mother of the prophet Jesus). From the second half of the twelfth century onwards, it also was visited by a number of Latin pilgrims–some of whom took phials of the Virgin’s ‘miraculous’ oil back to Europe–and the shrine proved to be particularly popular among the Templars.

Just as some Franks were permitted to pass through Islamic lands to reach Saidnaya, so were Muslim pilgrims occasionally able to access sacred sites in Outremer. In the early 1140s, Unur of Damascus and Usama ibn Munqidh were allowed to visit the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. Around this same time, Usama also travelled to the Frankish town of Sebaste (near Nablus) to see the crypt of John the Baptist (and, as previously noted, he claimed to have made frequent trips to the Aqsa mosque). In the early 1180s, the Muslim scholar ‘Ali al-Harawi was able to make a thorough tour of Islamic religious sites in the kingdom of Jerusalem, and later wrote an Arabic guide to the area. On the basis of these few potentially isolated incidences, however, it is impossible accurately to gauge the real extent of Muslim pilgrim traffic.

In spite of these various forms of devotional interaction, the underlying religious atmosphere was still characterised by a marked degree of intolerance. Frankish and Muslim writers continued to denigrate one another’s faiths, commonly through accusations of paganism, polytheism and idolatry. Relations between Latin and Levantine Christians also continued to be shaded by tension and distrust. The crusaders’ conquest of the Near East put an effective (if not permanent) end to the region’s established Greek Orthodox ecclesiastical hierarchy. New Latin patriarchs were appointed in Antioch and Jerusalem, and Latin archbishops and bishops were installed all across Outremer. The leaders of this Latin church made strident efforts to defend their ecclesiastical jurisdiction and to curtail what they regarded as the dangers of cross-contamination between western and eastern Christian rites, particularly with regard to monasticism.⁹²

The Frankish East–Iron Curtain or open door?

The crusader states were not closed societies, wholly isolated from the Near Eastern world around them, nor uniformly oppressive, exploitative European colonies. But by the same token, Outremer cannot accurately be portrayed as a multicultural utopia–a haven of tolerance in which Christians, Muslims and Jews learned to live together in peace. In most regions of the Latin East, at most times in the twelfth century, the reality of life lay somewhere between these two polar opposites.

The ruling western European minority showed some pragmatic willingness to accommodate and incorporate non-Franks into the legal, social, cultural and devotional fabric of Outremer. Economic imperatives–from maintaining a subjected native workforce to facilitating the passage of trade–also promoted a degree of equitable interaction. Theoretically, two conflicting paradigms might be expected to have shaped ‘crusader’ society: on the one hand, the softening of initial antipathies over time, through gradually increasing familiarity; and, on the other, the potentially counteractive force of mounting jihadi enthusiasm within Islam. In reality, neither trend was so clear cut. From the start, Franks and Muslims engaged in diplomatic dialogue, negotiated pacts and forged trade links; and they continued to do so as the twelfth century progressed. And even as the decades passed, writers of all creeds persistently fell back on traditional stereotypes to express seemingly immutable suspicion and loathing of the ‘other’.⁹³

Franks, eastern Christians and Muslims living in the Near East may have come to know each other a little better in the course of the twelfth century, but this did not lead to real understanding or enduring harmony. Given the prevailing realities of the wider world, this should be no surprise. The medieval West itself was racked by inter-Latin rivalry and interminable martial strife; endemic social and religious intolerance was also on the rise. By these standards, the uneasy mixture of pragmatic contact and simmering conflict visible in the Levant was not that remarkable. And while the ethos of holy war may have influenced the nature of Frankish society, Outremer does not seem to have been defined by the crusading ideal.

For all this, the Latin settlement of the Near East did give rise to a remarkable, albeit not entirely unique, society–one that was subject to a distinctive range of forces and influences. The patterns of life in Outremer show some signs of acculturation and the surviving evidence of artistic and intellectual endeavour bears the hallmarks of cultural fusion. But this is likely to have been the result of undirected and organic development, not a deliberate drive towards assimilation.

ZANGI–TYRANT OF THE EAST

It was once popular to suggest that Muslim attitudes towards Outremer underwent a critical shift with the rise of the Turkish despot Zangi in 1128. That year certainly was one of change in Near Eastern politics. It began with the death of the Damascene ruler Tughtegin, who, in time, was succeeded by a string of ineffectual emirs of the Burid dynasty, placing Damascus on the path to internal decay and debility. That June, Zangi, the atabeg of Mosul, exploited the endemic factionalism afflicting northern Syria to seize control of Aleppo, ushering in a new era of secure, energetic rule.

Said to be ‘handsome, brown-skinned, with beautiful eyes’, Zangi was a truly remarkable individual. Even in a brutal, conflict-ridden age, his capacity for untempered violence was legendary, his insatiable hunger for power unequalled. One Muslim chronicler offered this forbidding, awestruck description of the atabeg: ‘He was like a leopard in character, like a lion in fury, not renouncing any severity; not knowing any kindness…he was feared for his sudden attacking; shunned for his roughness; aggressive, insolent, death to his enemies and citizens.’ Born around 1084 to a prominent Turkish warlord, Zangi grew up amid the inferno of civil war, surviving in an environment of near-constant warfare, awash with betrayal and murder, by learning to be resourceful, cunning and exceptionally ruthless. He came to prominence in the 1120s, earning the support of the Seljuq sultan of Baghdad, and by 1127 had been appointed as governor of Mosul and military adviser and commander to the sultan’s two sons.

Zangi had a well-earned, and no doubt carefully cultivated, reputation for cruelty and callous, even arbitrary, brutality. He believed wholeheartedly in the power of abject fear, both to inspire loyalty in his subjects and to drive his enemies into submission. One Arabic chronicler conceded that the atabeg used terror to control his troops, noting that he ‘was tyrannical [and] would strike with indiscriminate recklessness’, observing that ‘when he was unhappy with an emir he would kill him or banish him and leave that individual’s children alive but castrate them’.⁹⁴

Given his fearsome qualities, we might expect Zangi to have transformed Islam’s fortunes in the war for the Holy Land. In the past, he has certainly been presented as a figure of central importance to the history of the crusades–as the first Muslim leader to strike a decisive blow against the Franks, the progenitor of an Islamic ‘counter-crusade’ who rekindled the fires of jihad, a towering mujahid (holy warrior) and champion of this new era. Yet for all this, through virtually his entire career Zangi’s real impact upon, and interest in, the world of the crusades were negligible. In part, this might be explained by simple geopolitics. The atabeg bestrode the Near and Middle East like a colossus, with one foot resting in Mosul and the other planted west of the Euphrates, in Aleppo. Out of necessity, he was forced to divide his time, energy and resources between these two spheres of influence–Mesopotamia and Syria–and was thus never able truly to focus upon fighting the Franks. But even this rationale, often trumpeted to defend Zangi’sjihadi credentials, is somewhat misleading, because it is predicated upon two faulty assumptions.

For Turkish warlords like Zangi, the Near East (including Syria and Palestine) and the Middle East (particularly Iraq and Iran) were not of equal political value and significance. The atabeg’s career demonstrates that, in the first half of the twelfth century, the heartland of Sunni Islam remained in Mesopotamia. It was there, in cities such as Baghdad and Mosul, that the greatest wealth and power were to be won. For Zangi, and many of his contemporaries, the battle against the Franks in the west was almost akin to a frontier war and, as such, of only intermittent and tangential interest.

What is more, when the atabeg did concern himself with Levantine affairs, his primary objective proved not to be the eradication of the crusader states, but the conquest of Damascus. Through the 1130s, in between long periods of absence in Mesopotamia, Zangi made repeated attempts to push the sphere of Aleppan influence south towards this goal, seeking to absorb Muslim-held settlements like Hama, Homs and Baalbek that had become Damascene dependencies. Throughout Zangi showed a ready willingness to break vows, turn on allies and terrorise enemies in pursuit of his goals. In 1139 the ancient Roman city of Baalbek (in Lebanon’s fertile Biqa valley) was pummelled into submission after a scouring assault and finally surrendered on the promise that its troops would be spared. Intent upon sending a chillingly clear message to any Syrian Muslims resisting his authority, Zangi reneged on these terms and crucified Baalbek’s garrison to a man. Then, to ensure the city’s continued loyalty, he appointed another up-and-coming member of his entourage as its governor, the Kurdish warrior Ayyub ibn Shadi, a man whose family would come to increasing prominence in the course of the twelfth century.

During this same period, Zangi employed a mixture of diplomatic intrigue and overt military pressure in his dealings with Damascus itself, hoping to engineer the capital’s submission and eventual capture. His cause was only abetted by the chaotic, blood-drenched feuding that gripped the city for much of the 1130s. Despite the continued survival of the Burid dynasty in the form of a succession of feeble figureheads, real power in Damascus gradually devolved upon Unur–a Turcoman military commander who had served Tughtegin as a mamluk (slave soldier). It was he who now had to face the spectre of Zangid aggression. In the wake of Baalbek’s savage conquest, Zangi laid siege to Damascus in December 1139, maintaining a loose cordon and launching intermittent attacks over the next six months. Even the atabeg was reluctant to launch a full-strength assault against a city of such profound historical significance for Islam, hoping instead to slowly squeeze Damascus into submission.

Yet, as the noose tightened in 1140, Unur rejected calls for surrender. Rather than submit to Zangid domination, he turned to a non-Muslim power for aid, dispatching an ambassador to Jerusalem to seal a new alliance against Aleppo. In an audience with King Fulk, Zangi was portrayed as ‘a cruel enemy, equally dangerous to both [Latin Palestine and Damascus]’, and a munificent monthly tribute of 20,000 gold pieces was promised in return for Frankish assistance in combating this menace. In addition, Banyas (which had been retaken by the Muslims in 1132) would be ceded to Jerusalem.

Convinced both of the value of these extremely generous terms and of the benefits of forestalling Zangi’s conquest of Syria, Fulk led an army north to relieve Damascus. With his operations against the city stalled, this threat was enough to prompt the atabeg’s retreat. He returned to Mosul, once more turning his attention to Mesopotamian affairs.⁹⁵

Zangi against the Franks

Throughout the 1130s Zangi showed little or no interest in the prosecution of an anti-Frankish jihad and any attacks launched against the Latins in this period were either almost incidental or related to his advance into southern Syria. The atabeg’s only notable offensive against Outremer came in July 1137, when he targeted the fortress of Barin (to the west of Hama and the Orontes). But even this campaign should not be misconstrued, because Zangi’s primary intention was to use Barin as a ready staging post for his aggression against Muslim Homs. The atabeg’s first concern was to further his southward expansion towards Damascus, not to deliver a mortal blow to the crusader states.

During the early 1140s Zangi focused almost exclusively on events east of the Euphrates, seeking to expand his power base in Iraq and to consolidate relations with the Seljuq sultan of Baghdad. From 1143 the atabeg was particularly concerned with subjugation of the Artuqid princes and minor Kurdish warlords to the north, in Diyar Bakr. Facing this aggression, one Artuqid, Qara Arslan of Hisn Kaifa, forged a pact with Joscelin II of Edessa (who succeeded his father in 1131), offering to relinquish territory to the Franks in return for aid. In autumn 1144, believing his county to be safe from attack, Joscelin duly led a large Edessene army to Qara Arslan’s assistance. This move, born of an imperfect appreciation of Zangi’s ambitions and capabilities, would have a profound impact upon Outremer’s history.

Soon after the count’s departure, the few troops that remained in Edessa alongside its Latin archbishop were stunned by Zangi’s arrival outside their walls. The atabeg had long valued precise, up-to-date intelligence, happily expending a small fortune to maintain an extensive network of spies and scouts across the Near and Middle East. He therefore learned almost immediately of Joscelin’s absence and the weakening of Edessa’s garrison. Sensing a rare, and probably unexpected, opportunity, Zangi switched targets from Diyar Bakr to the Frankish capital. His war band, already equipped with siege weaponry, reached the city by forced march in late November and immediately initiated a devastating investment. For the next four weeks the Christians within strove to endure incessant bombardment and repeated assaults by armoured towers and teams of sappers, but the defenders’ position was all but hopeless.

Learning of the attack, Joscelin II tried to assemble a relief force at Tell Bashir. Melisende responded immediately to his pleas for assistance, sending troops north, but, for reasons that remain unclear, Raymond of Antioch prevaricated. With the count still desperately trying to prepare a counter-strike, the dreadful news of Edessa’s fall arrived. On 24 December 1144, Zangi’s miners collapsed a huge section of the city’s towering fortifications. With Muslim troops flooding through the breach, the Christians fled in terror towards the citadel. Amid the resultant panic hundreds were crushed to death, the Latin archbishop among them, even as the atabeg’s soldiers set about their grisly work. One Armenian native of the city wrote that the Muslims ‘ruthlessly shed an enormous amount of blood, neither respecting the age of elderly people, nor taking pity on the innocent, lamb-like children’. Those few who reached the inner fortress held out for a further two days, but by 26 December the entire city was in the hands of Islam.

Zangi’s conquest of Edessa may have been largely opportunistic, but it was still an unmitigated catastrophe for the Franks. The strategic consequences alone were profoundly alarming. With its principal city lost, the surrounding Latin county stood on the brink of total ruination. Should this most northern of crusader states fall, contact and communication between the Muslim powers in Mesopotamia and Syria would become far more fluid and secure. In this context, the principality of Antioch’s future looked bleak indeed: its northern neighbour and ally transformed into an enemy; its rival, Aleppo, resurgent. The danger of a domino effect, in which weakness and vulnerability seeped southwards, bringing the successive collapse of each remaining Latin polity, was only too obvious. The Frankish chronicler William of Tyre reflected upon the ‘ominous disaster’ of 1144, observing that there was now a real prospect of the Muslim world ‘overrunning the entire East unchecked’.*

The psychological impact of this event was perhaps even more significant. Never before had one of Outremer’s four great capitals fallen to Islam. Edessa, the first eastern city to be seized by the crusaders, had stood inviolate for almost half a century. Its sudden unheralded loss sent a tremor of fear and apprehension pulsing through the Latin Levant, severely undermining confidence and morale. Any lingering sense of Christian invincibility evaporated; the dream of Outremer–of a permanent, divinely wrought resettlement of the Holy Land–lay shattered. And, to make matters worse, Zangi, so long a looming threat, could be expected to capitalise upon his victory, galvanising Islam to ever greater efforts in the war for dominion of the Near East.

As this dire news filtered back to the West, the renowned Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux echoed these dreadful concerns, affirming in a letter that: ‘The earth is shaken because the Lord of heaven is losing his land…the enemy of the Cross has begun to lift his sacrilegious head there and to devastate with the sword that blessed land, that land of promise.’ Bernard warned that sacred Jerusalem, ‘the very city of the living God’, might itself be overrun. The only answer for the Latin East, indeed for western Christendom as a whole, was to launch a new crusade.⁹⁶