As shown above, Tancred did not always live up to these crusading ideals. He attacked Christian towns and sometimes fought his coreligionists. Nonetheless, the crusading ideals were the values that permeated his world, and they put moral pressure on his behavior. Perhaps for him, the conviction that he was building a new Christian land that would help protect Jerusalem was the end that justified his choice of means.
By the time Tripoli fell in 1109, with the First Crusade now far behind them, the Franks of the Crusader States were looking increasingly secure, and they had both the money and the troops to defend themselves. Now, having consolidated their territories and having achieved a degree of security, they were in a position to focus their attention toward their enemies’ inland centers of power. Both Aleppo and Damascus lay only a short distance beyond their frontiers, and Aleppo in particular was ripe for conquest. The second phase of conquest could now proceed in earnest.
CHAPTER 2
RIDING THE STORM: SELJUK TURKS AND ARAB EMIRS
1111–1118
THE ADVENT OF the First Crusade had a profound effect on the Near East’s political ecosystem. The Turks especially had to confront the fact that the crusaders had inflicted the worst military reverses on their people in over a century, and the expanding Crusader States had the potential to drive them out of the Levantine region entirely. The Frankish threat to Aleppo was of special concern, because if the city should fall, Turkish authority across Syria and the Jazira could collapse entirely. For many Arab dynasties, however, as well as for many other peoples subjugated by the Turks, the rise of Frankish power was both an opportunity and a threat. Some took it as an opening to try to throw off their Turkish overlords; others found themselves trapped between two rival conquering powers.
Looking back from the year 1111, the conquest of Tripoli two years previously had been a major blow for the Arab emir of Shaizar, Sultan ibn Ali ibn Munqidh.1 Strengthened by Tripoli’s revenues and emboldened by their success, the Franks had substantially enhanced their position. This had immediate consequences for the Munqidh dynasty’s small territory, lying just south of the Antiochene border. Soon after Tripoli’s fall, Tancred had advanced assertively to the south, seizing the nearby towns of Banyas and Jabala. Antiochene troops had then begun to curve round Shaizar’s southern flank, conquering the castle of Hisn al-Akrad (known as “Krak des Chevaliers”). The Franks from Tripoli were also in a position to advance north toward Shaizar, and their forces attacked the town of Rafaniya, lying to the east of Hisn al-Akrad, in late 1109. Their attack failed, but for the Munqidhs the possibility of being squeezed between two major Frankish powers was ominously real. Such was their reach that the Franks could even draw revenue from Eastern Christian farmers living near the Munqidhs’ lands.2 Shaizar was starting to resemble a sand castle surrounded by an incoming tide.
Other neighboring Arab elites had recently sought accommodation with their Frankish conquerors, acknowledging the reality of their rising power. Jabala’s governor Fakhr al-Mulk (a former ruler of Tripoli) had recently agreed to hold his town in Tancred’s name, although he himself had traveled to join the Munqidhs at Shaizar soon afterward.3 For Sultan ibn Munqidh in 1111, the Franks were easily the closest threat to his small emirate.
This had not always been the case. In previous decades the Turks had nearly always been the greatest danger. When they burst into the region in the 1070s, creating widespread havoc and destruction, many Arab Muslim dynasties had been swept away by their relentless advance. The Turks had seized control across the land, setting up regional centers of power in formerly Arab cities. It was during that turbulent period that Sultan ibn Munqidh’s family had acquired Shaizar, becoming rulers of the town and its immediate hinterland in 1080. Shortly afterward, they too had been compelled to submit to Turkish authority, and in 1086 Sultan ibn Munqidh’s brother Nasr had preserved the family’s independence only by ceding vast swaths of territory to the Turkish sultan. The cost of this treaty had been colossal, but, unlike so many Arab dynasties in northern Syria, the Munqidhs had survived.4
In Arab eyes, the Turks were an object of both fear and scorn. Historically they had been viewed with the contempt that settled agricultural civilizations commonly held for their nomadic steppe neighbors. Turks were often depicted as barbaric, stupid, uncouth, and drunken. One irreverent story circulating at this time, one that seems to have been well-beloved among the Munqidhs, concerned the Turkish sultan Alp Arslan during his brief stint in Aleppo. It describes him drinking himself into a stupor one evening and then calling for the execution of the city’s Arab governor. An adviser tries to persuade him to relent but ends up being injured when his master hits him with a washbasin. The sultan’s wife then arrives and orders her husband to bed; the following morning she berates him for his conduct on the previous evening. The sultan supposedly denies all knowledge of the execution he had ordered.5 This derisive story, presenting the sultan as a gullible, brutal fool, is a stereotyped anecdote designed to poke fun at the Turks, even if it also tacitly accepts that the Turks were in charge.
The background to this tale was one of rising Turkish domination. The despised nomads from the steppe were now in power over the very people who used to sneer at them. Whereas previously the Arabs could deride the Turks overtly, now they mocked them covertly. However, there was another, shrewder, response to Turkish rule practiced by many subjugated Muslims during this time. Arab politicians, theologians, and courtiers endeavored to immerse their Turkish conquerors in their own religion and culture, encouraging them to embrace Islam and aspire toward Muslim role models. This approach will be explained in greater detail later, but it represented a strategy that was subtler than straightforward name-calling: if you can’t beat them, make them join you.
No sooner had the Arabs started to come to terms with their Turkish conquerors than the First Crusaders came bursting out of Anatolia, advancing into Syria in their countless legions. This was a delicate moment for the Munqidhs. Shaizar lay directly on the crusaders’ line of march, and the Franks posed a clear threat. Even so, the Munqidhs also recognized the inherent opportunity in the crusaders’ onslaught. By the conclusion of the siege of Antioch, the crusaders had demonstrated their ability to destroy the Turks’ main regional field armies, having beaten off four big forces in a little over a year, an unprecedented achievement. The Turks had suffered battlefield defeats before, most notably at the hands of the Fatimids, but never with such consistency. Emboldened, many subjugated peoples of the Near East saw an opportunity to resist their Turkish masters. Consequently, while the Franks were besieging Antioch, Sultan ibn Munqidh seized the moment and began to plot against Ridwan of Aleppo (the most powerful Turkish ruler in the region), giving refuge to Ridwan’s vizier, who had fallen out with his master.6
The Munqidhs were not the only Arab dynasty to take advantage of the sudden Turkish reverses during the First Crusade. Following the crusaders’ defeat of the Aleppan army during the siege of Antioch, the Arab Banu Kilab tribe (rulers of Aleppo before the Turks’ arrival) had risen up and plundered the Aleppan region, further weakening Turkish control.7 For a moment there had been a real chance that with the relentless cycle of crusader victories over the Turks, followed by a groundswell of rebellions instigated by Armenians, Arabs, and other groups against their former masters, Turkish dominance in northern Syria would be rolled back once and for all. Even distant Georgia—hundreds of miles to the northeast—felt the ripples created by this radical shift in the balance of power; the Turkish attacks, formerly an annual scourge, ceased abruptly and King David the Builder of Georgia felt able to halt his tribute payments.8
For these reasons, when the First Crusade reached the gates of Shaizar, the Munqidhs, like most of the Arab rulers in the region, had little interest in barring their passage. Shaizar was too small in any case to resist so large a force. Instead, their respective leaders met and agreed not to fight one another. Sultan ibn Munqidh also supplied the crusaders with food and gave them the op
portunity to purchase fresh horses.9 This was a prudent strategy, one that ensured Shaizar’s survival without hampering the crusaders in their efforts to overthrow the Turks.
Although they were cautiously friendly toward the Franks, the Munqidhs and the region’s other leading Arab Muslim dynasties seem to have viewed them with little more favor than they viewed the Turks. In former centuries, western Europe had been a backwater in comparison to the Islamic caliphate and had generated little curiosity among its elites. Some emirs in North Africa or distant al-Andalus (Islamic Iberia) had pillaged the coastline of southern Europe, and slaves had been transported in large numbers across the Mediterranean to work the great estates of North Africa, but Christendom had been too poor and weak to arouse much attention. The Franks and their fellows were generally considered—when they were considered at all—with slight curiosity or supercilious disdain. The advent of the Crusades, however, forced these peoples into closer contact, and the Arabs would come to learn a great deal more about the Franks (and vice versa) in the years to come.10
Rather as they had with the Turks, the Munqidhs responded to the Franks’ arrival by creating “funny” stories about their supposed foibles. The stories are generally contemptuous in tone, although they always acknowledge that the Franks were formidable opponents on the battlefield. A particular source of incredulity was the Franks’ willingness to permit their women—both those who had come to the East on crusade and those who had traveled from western Christendom to settle in the region—substantial personal freedoms. For example, it was noted with astonishment that if a Frankish married couple were walking along the road and another man came to speak to the wife, the husband would simply leave his wife to complete her conversation without a chaperone. The crudeness of Frankish medicine also horrified them.11
Although the Franks were often presented as stupid and ill-mannered by Arab Muslim authors, various surviving tales do also contain some indications of cross-cultural respect. Sultan ibn Munqidh’s nephew Usama ibn Munqidh portrays some individual Franks quite favorably, even as friends—particularly those who were more acclimatized to life in the Near East. Usama also described how he had once approached the king of Jerusalem demanding justice for an infraction he had suffered at the hands of a Frankish nobleman. After deliberation, the Christian court decided in Usama’s favor, and therefore against one of their own cadre, and concluded that he should receive reparation. This tale speaks of Usama’s confidence that a Frankish court would treat his case evenhandedly.12
Noninterference and negotiation had offered sensible ways for many Arab rulers to manage the passing of the First Crusade, but by 1111 the geopolitical situation had developed substantially. The Turks no longer posed the same level of threat to the Munqidhs in Shaizar, but now the Franks were hovering on the frontier. Admittedly, Ridwan, the Turkish ruler of nearby Aleppo, remained an ongoing source of danger, not least because of his strange friendship with the much-feared Assassins.
The name “Assassins” was a hostile term applied to a feared religious group known as the Nizaris.13 The Nizaris were the adherents of an Ismaili sect of Shia Islam, which had emerged only a short time before in Egypt and had many followers across northern Syria. They were famous for their use of murder as a political tool, and they were loathed by the Turks, whose leaders persecuted them. Ridwan of Aleppo was an exception to this rule. The vulnerabilities of his position in Aleppo—where he faced both Frankish attack and internal dissent—compelled him to work with the Assassins. In return, they were prepared to murder his enemies; Ridwan was rumored to have instigated at least one assassination of a nearby Arab ruler.14
Ridwan was a continual source of concern for the Munqidhs, but in 1111 the Franks were the greater menace. The recent fighting between Arabs and Turks had worked in the Franks’ favor. It had kept the Turks occupied while the Franks were vulnerable in the early years of the Crusader States. Now the Franks were firmly entrenched in the Levant and were expanding confidently. They had already launched a raid on Shaizar in 1108. More worryingly, two years earlier, the Arab ruler Khalaf ibn Mulaib, master of the neighboring town of Apamea, had been murdered by the Assassins, and his son had voluntarily offered the town to the Principality of Antioch. Tancred had responded swiftly, taking control and subsequently treating Khalaf’s sons with high honor, granting them lands and status within his principality.15
The basic dilemma that had confronted the surviving members of Khalaf’s family in 1106 was essentially the same as that facing the Munqidhs in 1111. They were trapped between two rival powers, the Franks and the Turks, and did not view either of them particularly favorably. In Apamea, events had forced the surviving members of the ruling family to take sides, and they had chosen the Franks. The Munqidhs, however, were determined to preserve their independence. This meant monitoring events closely, playing a weak hand with cunning, and judiciously deploying a mix of diplomacy, intrigue, and force to ensure that they were never caught on the losing side. This created a strange relationship between the Munqidhs and the Franks of Antioch, one that mixed moments of peace, courtesy, and friendship with times of intercultural misunderstanding, brutality, and slaughter.
Usama ibn Munqidh, Sultan’s nephew, captured this environment well in his account of a small encounter between the men of Shaizar and the men of Antioch. After the fighting Tancred and Sultan ibn Munqidh agreed to make peace, and, in the spirit of revived friendship, Tancred sent word to Sultan that he greatly admired one of the emir’s horses (whose performance he had presumably noted during their skirmish). Sultan courteously sent the horse as a gift to Tancred along with his representative, a young Kurd named Hasanun. Having arrived at the Franks’ court, Tancred chivalrously arranged some horse races against his own Frankish riders and Hasanun performed very well, winning the races. Tancred was so impressed by Hasanun’s horsemanship that he showered him with gifts. Hasanun responded by refusing the gifts, asking only for Tancred’s assurance that he would be spared if he was captured in battle. Sometime later, once fighting had resumed, Hasanun’s horse was wounded by a Frankish spear thrust. The animal bolted, throwing Hasanun, who was captured by the Franks. Tancred ordered that before he was ransomed, his right eye was to be gouged out to impede his fighting abilities. Hasanun, once a friendly emissary, was now a mutilated prisoner of war.
Had Tancred broken his promise of safe conduct? Usama thought possibly not. He noted that when Tancred had made his original arrangement with Hasanun, neither had fully understood the other’s language, and consequently their agreement may have been misinterpreted by both sides.16 This was a world where gifts and horse racing operated side by side with death and mutilation.
Now, however, in 1111, Shaizar’s future was balancing on a knife edge. In the spring Tancred arrived with his army and began to build a fortress in Shaizar’s immediate vicinity. His intention was plain. Using this newly constructed fortification as a base, he would cut off all supplies to the town and place it under blockade. This was a typical invasion strategy that the Franks had been using since the First Crusade. The construction of such a fort allowed an attacker to entrench himself at the very gates of an enemy stronghold and essentially strangle it into submission. Fortunately for Sultan ibn Munqidh, a new power had arrived in the region, one powerful enough to save them from this threat.17
The Munqidhs’ hopes of a rescue were founded on a major geopolitical shift that was shaping the political landscape across Syria: the Franks were closing in on Aleppo and its conquest seemed imminent. Though at first glance the prospect of the city’s overthrow might have offered little comfort to the Arab dynasties of the region, they soon realized that the Turkish sultan in Iraq was starting to take the prospect of losing Aleppo seriously. This created an opportunity for an alliance. A few months earlier a group of clerics and merchants from Aleppo had traveled to the Turkish sultan Mohammed’s court in Baghdad seeking aid. To make their point, they had approached the Turkish sultan while he was in his mosque. Weeping,
they had disrupted Friday prayers,18 and refused to be silent until Mohammed promised to send them aid.19 The sultan responded assertively, raising an army for Aleppo’s defense under the command of his lieutenant Mawdud of Mosul. Mawdud was an effective commander who was experienced at fighting the Franks. He had attacked Edessa only the year before on the sultan’s orders.
In 1111 Mawdud gathered a major force and set out for northern Syria. Learning of the army’s approach, Sultan ibn Munqidh seized his chance and wrote to Mawdud seeking aid against their common enemy. Initially his appeal seems to have been ignored. Instead, the great Turkish army launched its assault far to the north, briefly attacking Edessan territory before moving to Aleppo (as had been requested).
At this point, Mawdud probably expected Ridwan of Aleppo to march out and join him, but Ridwan refused to help. Nervous that Mawdud’s army would treat him like an enemy because of his alliance with the hated Assassins, and not wanting to violate a peace treaty he had with the Franks, Ridwan barred the gates. Ridwan’s actions set him at odds with a large chunk of the populace (including those who had made the appeal), so he closed the city and even decapitated one of his citizens whom he caught whistling on the city’s walls. In retribution for this betrayal, Mawdud’s army ravaged Aleppan territory, sacking the very lands they had come to assist.20
After this inglorious beginning to his campaign, some of Mawdud’s commanders began to return to their homelands, but Mawdud was still determined to attack the Franks. One Turkish commander suggested that Mawdud attempt to recapture Tripoli. This would have been a major blow against the emerging Frankish power, and it fitted well with Mawdud’s larger strategy.
The Field of Blood: The Battle for Aleppo and the Remaking of the Medieval Middle East Page 6