The geopolitics of the region had changed substantially since the end of the First Crusade. Formerly Antioch had dominated the northern region and jockeyed for position against its southern rival, the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Now, following the debacle at the Field of Blood and given the southern kingdom’s sustained growth in recent years, Antioch was no match for Jerusalem. Nor could it compete with Zangi.68 Fortunately for Antioch, Zangi simply was not interested enough in the Frankish territories to stage a major campaign against them. Nevertheless, it is important to note that it was now Zangi’s disinterest, rather than Antioch’s military power, that ensured the principality’s survival; the balance of power had shifted permanently, and never again would the Franks of northern Syria be strong enough to seek hegemony over Syria.
Thus, with Zangi’s rise and Baldwin II’s strategic pivot south to face Damascus, a chapter was closing in the history of the crusader struggle for the Near East. Far from being a lucrative target for aspiring Frankish commanders, Aleppo was now to play its part in bringing about the destruction of the Crusader States.
CHAPTER 5
AFTERMATH
1128–1187
THE LENGTHY STRUGGLE for Aleppo represented the Franks’ first concerted effort to drive their frontiers inland by attempting the conquest of one of their enemy’s major centers of power. Their failure to achieve that goal stands as an important turning point in the history of the Crusader States, ending their expansionist wars of conquest in the north. Even so, the Franks’ ambition to seize an enemy capital persisted, and over the following decades, the Kingdom of Jerusalem made two further efforts to achieve this objective, setting its sights initially on Damascus and then on Cairo.
Like the earlier struggle for Aleppo, which had come to nothing, these two later campaigns to expand the Crusader States were similarly unsuccessful. Understanding the reasons for their failure will help to provide an answer to the broader question of why the Franks never succeeded in achieving their ambition to expand their territories inland and conquer the Near East.
To begin, however, it is worth considering the broader positon of Crusader States in about 1150.
Every year, as the northern world begins to sense the advent of autumn, tens of thousands of birds from across Europe and Russia take flight for the warmer climes of the south, cramming the skies. For the most part they prefer not to fly for long distances over the Mediterranean, so they are funneled over land bridges and narrow stretches of ocean that will take them to Africa: at Gibraltar in the west and along the shores of the Levant in the east. This was an annual event in the Crusader States, one in which, for a time, the natural world temporarily asserted its presence over the affairs of man. In some years the air was so filled with birds that one Armenian writer described their flying chevrons as doing battle for possession of the skies.1 Among the various migrating birds heading south was (and is) the white stork, which, having crossed Bulgaria and Asia Minor, traveled down the length of the Crusader States in mid-August, from Antioch in the north to the Kingdom of Jerusalem’s Egyptian border in the south. It is interesting to speculate about what the birds migrating south in the year 1150 would have seen.
Having crossed the immensity of Anatolia, these migrating storks would have approached the Principality of Antioch and seen in the distance a densely settled state protected by a string of powerful strongholds. The first barriers they encountered, however, would have been the Amanus range. This line of wooded slopes represented a natural frontier and was also home to several Armenian monasteries in the Black Mountain region that were built by pious founders who valued the isolation of this lofty wilderness. These sacred spaces of contemplation and prayer, along with others spread across the principality, played host to conversations and debates between western European monks and their Eastern Christian counterparts.2
Once they had passed beyond the Amanus, the storks would have entered the principality itself, a land of craggy ridges and broad valleys. There they would have seen the estates and farms of the Antiochene Franks, whose vineyards covered the hillsides and whose crops rippled along the valley floors. The Franks were intensive farmers and they had the good fortune to arrive during a period when the region was becoming more humid and therefore more fertile. They raised cereal crops and other foodstuffs as well as cotton, designed for export to southern Europe.3
Antioch itself rose majestically above the Orontes River; its fortifications, built by Emperor Justinian, ran up the valley side to a mighty citadel at the summit of Mount Silpius. This was one of the great cities of the classical world, founded in about 300 BC, and it was here that the name “Christian” was first coined. Antioch later became one of the patriarchates (the early Christian church established five patriarchates for its most important bishoprics). Its walls were over seven miles long, and within them were churches representing many branches of Christianity: Catholic, Armenian, Greek, or Syriac. The city was an intellectual center, and theologians and philosophers from many civilizations sought it out to exchange ideas, including an English thinker named Adelard of Bath.
Lying to the northeast of the city was the great lake of Antioch, whose banks were populated by Christian fishermen famous for catching vast quantities of eels, which were then exported by the thousands to neighboring states, where they were a much-coveted delicacy.4
To the southwest of Antioch was the small port of Saint Symeon lying next to the mouth of the Orontes River. In the other direction from Antioch, twenty miles to the east along the road to Aleppo, stood the embattled frontier fortress of Harim, surveying the landscape from the summit of its great mound.5 Further south was Antioch’s main port of Latakia, and beyond that were the coastal towns of Jabala and Tortosa and the frontiers of the County of Tripoli. The Franks intensively farmed the coastal strip south of Latakia, and the area contained a complex network of villages and estates. Many were centered on small, defensive towers, which dotted the region between the Mediterranean and the mountains inland.6
Soaring south, the storks would have crossed the highlands and the much-feared Alawite Mountains and the strongholds of the Assassins and then flown on to reach the fertile plains of the Homs Gap and the northern marches of the County of Tripoli. To their east was the great fortress of Krak des Chevaliers, draped with the proud banners of the Knights Hospitaller, protecting the county’s vulnerable frontier facing Homs. Then ahead, the land rose again toward the massif of Mount Lebanon and, at the gateway of the narrow strip of land sandwiched between the mountains and the sea, the bustling port city of Tripoli.
Tripoli itself would have been crammed with ships, some preparing to winter in the port, with perhaps a few hoping to slip out before the onset of the winter gales, bearing goods to Christendom brought overland to the city from as far afield as India and China. Many languages could be heard in this great emporium as Italian merchants rubbed shoulders with traders from distant lands. Other smaller vessels traversed the Levantine coast, hugging the shoreline, connecting the Crusader States and carrying passengers, trade goods, and soldiers. Surrounding Tripoli was a fertile strip, where rivers rushing down from the mountains passed through high-sided valleys and finally into fertile farmlands on the coastal plain.
Flying high over the coast road, heading south, the storks would then have crossed into the Kingdom of Jerusalem at the port of Beirut—famous for its glassware—and after passing over the large pine forest to the south of the town, would have found a flourishing rural society.7 Away from the frontier lands, the kingdom had been swelled by peace and constant construction. The Turks by this stage were a relatively distant threat to the kingdom’s heartlands, and many newly constructed buildings were only lightly fortified; they had no reason to anticipate serious attack.
As the Lebanese mountains faded away behind them, to be replaced by the rich and rolling hills of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, a pattern of estates emerged. Well planned and productive, they were proof that the Frankish settlers, generally from France, had s
wiftly adapted themselves to their new surroundings. The hill country of Galilee was often neatly terraced, and fields of vines and olives were watered by a complex system of irrigation channels. On the flatter land and on the coastal plain there were cereal crops—especially wheat and barley—and groves of fruit trees.8 Sugarcane was cultivated in large plantations, both for local consumption and for export. Western European markets had a sweet tooth but little local supply of sugar.9 They would pay a pretty price for it in Pisa, Genoa, or Marseilles, and an even greater one in London and Paris. The Franks of the Crusader States energetically set about growing and gathering sugarcane to supply this demand, transporting it to the great port cities so that it could be refined, molded, and dispatched to the West in trade.
The storks would have passed over a landscape of strongly built farmsteads, small villages, towers, and castles, all connected by a lattice of roads. The larger settlements were centered on small churches—often with thick walls, and which served as centers of worship and places of refuge. Such villages were often home to both Franks and Eastern Christians. Typically Franks settled among their coreligionists and rarely put down roots in those areas of the Latin East where the population was either predominantly Muslim or nomadic.10 For their part, rural Islamic communities tended to have little communication with their Frankish overlords, paying their taxes and generally being left undisturbed. When a Muslim traveler from Spain visited the Kingdom of Jerusalem in the 1180s, he was appalled by the relaxed relationship between the local Muslims and their Frankish overlords, observing with concern that in many respects they were at greater ease under the Christians than their coreligionists were under the Turks.11
Gliding down the coastline, the storks would have overflown the Kingdom of Jerusalem’s powerful northern ports. They would already have passed Tyre, conquered in 1124 and filled with traders, many from Venice. Tyre was famous for its textiles, for its glass, and for a purple dye extracted from sea snails. Further south was Acre, situated, like Tyre, on a promontory jutting into the sea. This was the commercial heart of the kingdom, and the city was polluted and overcrowded. The sea itself was slick with filth that drifted around the margins of this mercantile metropolis. On the city’s southern flank was its great harbor, where tens of great ark-like “round ships” could take shelter on a coastline that offered few havens to anxious seafarers. Within its walls, the city itself was permanently under construction, and houses rose three and four stories above its crowded streets.12 There were many churches and a mosque, primarily used by visiting Muslim merchants. Acre did not sleep. Even in times of war the volume of trade passing through its gates from Muslim territories and lands further east scarcely slackened.
This city, like many others, was characterized by a merging of many cultures and traditions. Both the Muslim call for prayer and the sound of church bells could be heard over its many courts. Muslims were allowed to practice their religion freely across the Crusader States, except in Jerusalem itself.13 For their part, the Franks frequented bathhouses, scarcely known in the West but a familiar sight in Islamic cities, and Muslims, Jews, and members of other religions bought goods and wares from the Italian merchants’ shops that lined the city’s streets.
Passing Acre, situated on the western margins of its great plain, filled with estates and bustling roads, the storks would then have soared up past Haifa and over the higher ground of Mount Carmel until they reached the coastlands around the port of Jaffa. This, the first harbor taken by the crusaders in the Holy Land, was a vital waypoint for the tens of thousands of pilgrims who traveled each year to reverence the places where Jesus had lived, died, and been resurrected. From Jaffa, the winding paths to Jerusalem, so perilous in the early years of the kingdom, had been made safe by the ceaseless labors of the Knights Templar and by the steady growth of the kingdom. Now the roads into the highlands to the east were full of pious groups on the last leg of their journey to Jerusalem. Small villages were strung out along the line of the road, containing arcades of shops selling food, trinkets, and the necessaries of life.14
Then there was Jerusalem, wreathed by the healthy air of the hill country and surrounded by orchards and vineyards. It presented a very different spectacle from the hubbub of the mercantile cities of the coast. There were traders and artisans here too, and many labored to serve the ongoing pilgrim traffic. Silversmiths and goldsmiths produced pilgrim badges and devotional items that could be reverently carried back to distant Lombardy, Champagne, and England by pilgrims who had spent years seeking the holy city. New public works catered to this spiritual traffic, among them a newly constructed covered market and sewage and drainage works.15 These were impressive structures, yet they were dwarfed by the churches. In recent years the city had flourished as masons labored to transform Jerusalem into a place of such beauty that pilgrims could—so it was hoped—glimpse the majesty of its spiritual significance. Splicing artistic influences and building techniques from the West, Armenia, Byzantium, and even the Islamic world, these churches were among the Crusader States’ greatest treasures and architectural achievements. Rising above the city’s towers and roofs was the Temple Mount, a holy site containing the Temple of the Lord (the Dome of the Rock), topped by its great golden cross, which stood beside the headquarters of the Knights Templar (the al-Aqsa Mosque). Just to the south of the city was Bethlehem, birthplace of Christ, whose great Church of the Nativity was another site of veneration, drawing visitors from regions as disparate as Ethiopia, Georgia, and Scandinavia. Its twelve copper bells, including one shaped like a mighty dragon, sounded out loudly across the land.16
After Jerusalem, the storks would have left the fertile lands of the north and passed into the desert, with the bitter waters of the Dead Sea lying just to the east, and beyond them the kingdom’s distant holdings across the River Jordan, dominated by their fortresses at Kerak and Montreal. The area directly south of Jerusalem had once all been frontier territory, long fought over by the crusaders and their Egyptian foes. For decades the Egyptians, operating out of their frontier city of Ascalon on the coast south of Jaffa, had posed a threat to the Franks’ control of Jerusalem. However, the menace of a Fatimid invasion had long receded, and in the 1130s the Kingdom of Jerusalem had created a trio of fortresses to blockade Ascalon. The southern frontier was looking increasingly secure, and Christian farmers and settlers were building new estates along the fertile strip between the desert and the sea. This was also Bedouin territory, and the Franks often cooperated with their nomadic neighbors, allowing them to graze their herds on the kingdom’s borders, and worked with them to patrol the kingdom’s southern marches. Nevertheless, they were unpredictable allies.
The white storks flying over the Levant were looking at a string of three Frankish territories that remained significant regional powers. Even so, for all their bustling ports, their mighty commercial revenues, the powerful military orders of the Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitaller, their fortresses and impressive army, storm clouds were hanging over the Crusader States. The northern defenses were crumbling, and the County of Edessa had fallen.
The Franks’ failure to conquer Aleppo had permanently ended their attempt to achieve supremacy across the Syrian region. Then, after 1128, with Aleppo firmly under Zangi’s control and pumping its resources into his (and not the Franks’) coffers, Zangi had assembled a colossal territorial bloc in Syria and the Jazira, making him the dominant power in the area. By the 1140s the Antiochene Franks fully recognized that they lacked the strength to challenge Zangi’s hegemony, and they made scarcely any attempt on Aleppan territory, aside from an occasional raiding expedition.17 As discussed in Chapter 4, Zangi was rarely interested in campaigning against the Franks, being more concerned with the ongoing disputes over the sultanate and the Jazira.18 Even so, in late 1144 Zangi launched a sudden major offensive against the County of Edessa, culminating in the conquest of the city of Edessa itself. This stunning blow came as a huge shock to the Franks, and it was the beginning of the
end for the county. In 1150 the county’s remaining Frankish inhabitants were evacuated. The first Crusader State had fallen.
By this time, Jerusalem was uncontested in its status as the predominant Christian power in the area. It was also the only Frankish country strong enough to wage offensive war against its major Turkish rivals with any hope of achieving significant, long-term advances. Two leading combatants were emerging: Zangi in the north and the Kingdom of Jerusalem in the south. The remaining smaller players steadily came to acknowledge this geopolitical reality by aligning themselves with one or the other, looking for sanctuary and protection. The smaller Frankish states, some Bedouin tribes, and occasionally the Armenians and the Assassins looked to Jerusalem. The smaller Turkish states, the Turkmen tribes, and some Arab dynasties looked to Zangi.
Although the Franks’ regional dominance was being increasingly contested, their aspiration to conquer a major inland city, and thereby to gain the upper hand, remained their overriding priority. The Frankish territories, strung out along hundreds of miles of the Levantine coastline, were perilously vulnerable to attack, and for the most part their lands penetrated only a short way inland. Their rulers recognized the fragility of their position and understood that this could not be accepted in the long term. Their survival depended on further expansion inland, so, with the failure of the war for Aleppo, Damascus steadily crystallized as their new target.
By the late 1140s, the Kingdom of Jerusalem had been trying to get hold of Damascus for years. Initially the Franks had hoped to conquer the city by force, so in 1126 and 1129 King Baldwin II staged two large-scale attacks on Damascene territory. There was also frequent fighting over the fertile Hawran region to the south of the city. Damascus depended on Hawran for its arable crops, so retaining it was vital to the city’s security. The Frankish assaults met with varying degrees of success, but on no occasion did Jerusalem get close enough to besiege Damascus’s walls.
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