by John Man
When Saladin came to Damascus with his father in the mid-twelfth century, its glory days as an imperial capital were long gone. Islam had been made anarchic by rival dynasties, and the capital was now Baghdad. The Umayyad Mosque had been ruined by fire in 1069. But now the former capital was being resurrected by the Seljuks. A thousand scholars, teaching in two dozen madrasas, drew students from across the Islamic world. Religious students were sure of a good reception. ‘The door of the East is open, so enter it in peace, industrious youth,’ urged ibn Jubayr, ‘and seize the chance of undistracted study and seclusion before a wife and children cling to you and you gnash your teeth in regret at the time you lost.’ The Umayyad Mosque had been restored, complete with dome and golden mosaics. Other mosques provided help for travelling priests at public expense: ‘the needy stranger, so long as he has come for righteous purposes, will be cared for without being caused to blush.’ A superb hospital had been built some fifty years before, and a second would be built while he was there. They provided some of the best medical care in all Eurasia. Doctors made their rounds every morning, prescribing medicines and advising on diets, while officials kept records of patients, treatments and costs.
Ibn Jubayr was much impressed by the good manners of the citizens, though he found their cordiality a bit over the top. They walked with their hands folded behind their backs, in a show of humility and modesty, but shook hands with each other most warmly after prayers They
address each other as Lord or Sir, and use the expressions ‘Your servant’ and ‘Your excellency’. When one meets another, instead of giving the ordinary greeting, he says respectfully, ‘Here is your slave’, or ‘Here is your servant at your service’ . . . Their style of salutation is either a deep bow or a protestation, and you will see their necks in play, lifting and lowering, stretching and contracting . . . What odd people! If they treat each other in this way, reaching such an extravagance of epithets in their common intercourse, how do they address their sultans?
Many thought the place a paradise, or at least a reflection of the Quran’s words: ‘As for those that fear the Lord, they shall dwell in lofty chambers set about with running streams.’10 There was a story told of Muhammad according to which he hesitated at the gates of Damascus because, he said, he wanted to enter Paradise only once. ‘By Allah,’ wrote ibn Jubayr, echoing the anecdote, ‘they spoke truth who said: “If Paradise is on the earth, then Damascus without a doubt is in it”.’
Surah 39:20.
Yet now, during Saladin’s teenage years, this was a paradise under threat from its own factions. There was, anyway, distrust between the city’s Turkish rulers and the Arabic population. The Assassins held power for a few years in the 1120s. Nervous of their unpopularity, they did a deal with the king of Jerusalem, agreeing that they would hand over the city in exchange for a new base, Tyre. This would have antagonized the many Arab refugees from the Crusader states. Hearing of the plot, a new emir turned on the Assassins and had them killed or expelled. Ten years later, a young, greedy and oppressive sultan named Ismail, having survived an assassination attempt, began killing all suspected opponents, thus increasing hatred against him and feeding his own paranoia. In his crazed state, he decided to hand Damascus over to Zangi in exchange for protection. Ismail’s own mother, Zumurrud, put an end to the scheme by having him murdered and handing the throne to another son, who was in his turn murdered in unexplained circumstances. Zangi’s ambitions received a boost when the same Zumurrud agreed to marry him, mainly so that he could come and avenge the murder of her second son. Damascus, it seemed, would fall into his lap. But no: a new leader, Mu’in al-Din Unar, held his own by threatening to approach the Franks for help, which would in effect have made Damascus a Frankish protectorate. Zangi held back. And so, for a while, Damascus retained its precarious independence.
If the recapture of Edessa in 1144 had a powerful impact on Muslims, its impact on Christians was many times greater. The four Crusader states wrote demanding help from the French king, the Pope and the emperor of what would soon become the German-dominated Holy Roman Empire. As in the build-up to the First Crusade, each had good reason to respond. Louis VII, taking advantage of a population boom, was keen to unite his knights in a grand escapade; and France, after all, had been the driving force behind the First Crusade. The German emperor, Conrad III, was struggling to impose himself on his still-to-be-unified lands. And the new Pope, Eugenius III, needed a show of authority to overawe opponents trying to expel him. It was he who once again threw the mantle of religion over the venture, promising to pardon the sins of Crusaders and have anyone who died while campaigning declared a martyr.
He was eloquently backed by his friend, Bernard of Clairvaux, future saint and greatest orator of his day, so riveting that he was nicknamed ‘the Mellifluous Doctor’. He was at his most persuasive in Vézelay, north-east France, one of northern Europe’s greatest religious crossroads because it had what were claimed to be the bones of Mary Magdalene. For almost a century, since the Pope had confirmed that the bones were genuine, Vézelay’s superb hilltop abbey had drawn pilgrims from far afield, to adore the relics and to set off on the long road to the Spanish holy city of Santiago de Compostela. At Easter 1146 there gathered in Vézelay an immense crowd, including the French king, Louis VII, and his beautiful twenty-two-year-old wife, Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine – a province one-third the size of all France. Queen since the age of fifteen, she was already an icon, with another sixty years ahead of her, during which she would divorce Louis and marry England’s king, Henry II, making Aquitaine English.11 On a wooden platform built in a field, they knelt to hear Bernard bless the new Crusade. ‘Hasten then to expiate your sins by victories over the Infidels,’ he said. ‘Cursed be he who does not stain his sword with blood.’ They heard, and – to cries of ‘To Jerusalem! To Jerusalem!’ – vowed to take the Cross. And Bernard moved on to Cologne to preach the same message to Conrad, with equal success.
Which explains some oddities about modern Aquitaine, e.g. why the people of Pau still like fox-hunting.
Again, word spread across Europe that there would be transport, food, loot and women, all available with a clear conscience for those who survived, and the certainty of a place in Heaven for those who didn’t. How many responded to the call? Some medieval historians suggest 140,000, while Edward Gibbon, the great eighteenth-century historian of Rome’s decline and fall, proposed 400,000; both of which are nowadays dismissed as ludicrous. Frankly, no one knows how many. Or rather, as the Arab chronicler al-Athir put it, Allahu ’aalim (‘God alone knows’). Tens of thousands, certainly.
It all started well enough, in several different columns under the charismatic Bernard and two kings, Louis VII (plus Eleanor with a retinue of 300 chambermaids) and Conrad III. They were still in Europe when things began to go wrong. In early September 1147, the Germans were approaching Constantinople when they unwisely made camp between two dry river beds, which by chance flooded, drowning some of them and washing away many of their supplies. Arriving exhausted in Constantinople, they seemed more like vagabonds than soldiers. Meanwhile, the French were approaching overland and a Sicilian fleet was raiding Byzantine forts. The Byzantine emperor, Manuel I, decided to try to move the westerners along as fast as possible.
The Seljuks, well informed this time, set up roadblocks and ambushes. German and French leaders dithered. Armies divided, some taking coast roads, some heading inland, some travelling by boat.
Inland, halfway across the grasslands of what is today central Turkey, Conrad’s columns ran out of food and became targets for Turkish freebooters operating in Byzantine territory. Conrad decided on a retreat, which degenerated into a rout. Stragglers were picked off by Turkish arrows. Conrad himself was wounded. The survivors regrouped in Constantinople.
The newly arrived French set off along the coast, slowed by mountains and rivers, as well as lack of food and skirmishing Turks, and then, to cap it all, by winter weather. When the column – cavalry
in front, guarding the baggage, with the king in the rearguard – came to the Byzantine–Seljuk frontier at Honaz, disaster struck. Ahead was a grim landscape of forested valleys and bare hills, surging like a wrestler’s muscles and dominated by the great snowy shoulder of what was then Mount Cadmus and is now Mount Honaz. The road led over a 1,200-metre pass a few kilometres to the south of the mountain. Climbing it, the rearguard, commanded by the king, held back in defence, while the vanguard – among them Queen Eleanor – disobeyed orders and pulled away. This left the baggage-train toiling upwards, stretched out over several kilometres, defended front and rear but fatally vulnerable from the sides. The Turks – tough riders and good horseback archers – tore into the Crusaders. Louis, who had dressed as a common soldier, escaped only by climbing a cliff and hiding until it was safe. As the survivors straggled onwards, the Turks drove flocks ahead of the French, stripping the ice-bound countryside of the little pasture that remained. At the coast, Louis divided his army, sending some by land, some by sea to Antioch.
In Antioch, scandal compounded disaster. Eleanor was already fed up with her weak, ineffectual husband, with his bad decisions and his inability to maintain discipline. Coward, she could have said, without the guts to wear royal robes in battle; while he could well have blamed her for slowing progress with her baggage and army of servants. There was a fearful row; rumours of an affair between Eleanor and her admired uncle, Antioch’s ruler, Raymond; and disagreements over what should happen now.
Meanwhile, back in Constantinople, Conrad and his German force had recovered, thanks to much-delayed help from the Byzantine emperor, Manuel. His ships carried them south, into storms, which sank several and scattered the rest along the Palestinian coast. Conrad himself, his wounds healed, managed to reach Jerusalem. Here, at a meeting in April with Jerusalem’s king, Baldwin II, and its Patriarch, Fulcher, the three made a decision: to forget the original war aim, which was to retake Edessa, and instead assault Damascus. Why? No one knows for sure. Perhaps it was simply a greater prize. In any event, it was disastrous. King Louis, arriving in Antioch with the survivors of his horrible march across Turkey, insisted on a time-wasting round of religious rituals. It was not until June that the leaders could all meet and agree the new strategy – time enough for Unar in Damascus to prepare the city’s defences, stock up with food and send for reinforcements.
In July 1148 – the height of summer – the crusading forces gathered in Tiberias, on the Sea of Galilee, making an army of perhaps some 50,000 (though, as ever, very few figures are reliable), along with camels for the baggage and cattle which would be butchered to supply meat. Having reached the orchards and fields outside Damascus, the westerners seized land on either side of the Barada river. Muslim reinforcements poured in, peasants and warriors, Arabs, Turks and Kurds, villagers and townsmen, foot-soldiers and cavalry, and forced the Christians back. For three days the two sides skirmished, each losing men. Saladin, aged only eleven, would not have fought, but surely watched, and suffered, for one of those who died in action was his elder brother, Shahanshah.
Things were not going well for the Crusaders. On the third day, a bearded priest decided to inspire them by displaying crosses as if they were bits of the True Cross. He hung a cross round his neck, took two more in either hand, hung a fourth round the neck of a donkey and rode, Christ-like, to one of the gates, where he told the assembled army, ‘The Messiah has promised me that today I will wipe out this city.’ This was tempting fate. The gate opened, a Muslim force charged out, and one of the warriors ‘reached the priest, who was fighting in the front line, struck his head from his body and killed his ass too’.12
Francesco Gabrieli, Arab Historians of the Crusades, p. 63.
More Muslim troops were on their way, led by Zangi’s sons, Sayf and Nur al-Din. And Nur al-Din, remember, had a fine army, commanded by Saladin’s uncle, Shirkuh, who had trained an elite guard of 500 emancipated Turkish slaves. Short, fat, one-eyed, heavy-drinking – Shirkuh might have been no more than a caricature, a sort of medieval Slobodan Milošević; but he was also hard-fighting and utterly fearless, and happy to eat with his troops. His men adored him. The Crusaders, drained by the heat, knew they were in trouble, at risk of being caught between the city walls and an overwhelming force. They either had to pull back, or make an immediate assault – and succeed. They wasted a day probing the southern suburbs, where a large market and a cemetery provided open ground clear of gardens and orchards. But there was no source of food there, and no water except a polluted canal. Deciding that failure was better than death, the commanders ordered a retreat. Inspired by the sight, Muslim cavalry harassed them, swooping in with bows and swords, leaving uncounted corpses rotting in the countryside. ‘The air was poisoned by the exhalations of these bodies,’ wrote one eyewitness, ‘to the extent that in much of the land it was impossible to breathe.’13
Abu Shama, Book of the Two Gardens, excerpted in Receuil des historiens, pp. 58–9.
For the westerners there was nothing left but to scurry home, having achieved precisely nothing. Not that this dampened enthusiasm for crusading, which remained for western Christendom a divinely ordained duty. The disaster of the Second Crusade was quickly dismissed as the fault of local Christians for their disunity, or of Eleanor for her ungodly affair with her uncle, or of Bernard for backing the Crusade in the first place, or of the Byzantine emperor for failing to engage. Besides, said some, it was not all bad. Had not the Pope promised salvation to the dead? Had not sins been forgiven and souls saved? Only a few wondered whether God was on their side after all. All in all, the whole thing was best forgotten.
Behind them the Crusaders left Unar and Nur al-Din skirmishing with local Christians, extending their reach into Tripoli and Antioch, the city of Eleanor’s uncle. Nur al-Din, with Shirkuh and his well-trained army, beat Raymond in battle. Shirkuh is said to have personally killed him – quite possible, given his temper and violent habits. In any event, he cut off Raymond’s head and right hand and, as tradition demanded, sent them to the caliph in Baghdad in a silver box. Unar died a year later, leaving Damascus a fruit waiting to be plucked by Nur al-Din, always ambitious for Muslim unity on his own terms. He planned to take the city without a fight, a strategy that would stretch out over the next five years.
In June 1149, he surrounded the city, yet offered reassurance. ‘I have not pitched camp here in order to make war against you or to lay siege,’ he wrote to its leaders. ‘Only the many complaints of the Muslims have induced me to act in this way, for the peasants have been despoiled of their goods and separated from their children by the Franj, and they have no one to defend them.’ Only in this way could he be sure that the citizens of Damascus would trust him and not call for help from the Franks. It worked, or at least began to. From then on his name was mentioned in Friday prayers along with the caliph and the sultan, proof of his popularity.
A year later, in 1150, he returned, and urged the new ruler, a callow teenager called Abaq, to join him: ‘If you come over to my side with the army of Damascus, if we help each other to wage the jihad, my wish will be fulfilled.’ The boy-ruler held out, all the while maintaining links with the Franks as potential allies. Nur al-Din bided his time for a couple of years, preferring subversion to war, cultivating contacts inside Damascus, building distrust between governor and governed, especially the military officers. This was delicate work. The main go-between was none other than Ayyub, the discreet saviour and aide of Nur al-Din’s father. Saladin, by now fifteen, must have been aware of living in a world of intrigue.