News of the coming of a great army reached Unur, the atabeg of the Burid dynasty in Damascus. In the emergency he sent for help to Saif al-Din in Mosul and Nur al-Din in Aleppo, who readied their armies. In the city crowds came together in the Great Mosque, an immense structure dating from the eighth century with a mihrab whose ornament was one of the masterpieces of Muslim art of its day. Damascus had been the seat of the Umayyad caliphate and contained an object of great emotional significance, the blood-spattered Quran of the third caliph, Uthman. It was exposed to rouse the populace to resistance against the Frankish enemy. There were prayers for the safety of the city and repentance for sin, ashes thrown over their heads by supplicants for divine help. Two passionate elderly scholars chose the way of the martyr, shahid, deliberately riding out to be crushed under the hoofs of Christian cavalry. Their names have come down to us, one being given a tomb revered by pious inhabitants and visitors, with an inscription recording his martyrdom.
By this time, the Kurdish mercenary Najm al-Din Ayyub had become garrison commander under Unur. It is difficult not to believe that the spectacle of an aroused populace then began to change his attitudes and develop sympathy for jihad against the Franks.
It is clear that no one mind had analysed the tactics for the great incoming army and the hazards it might have to face once it had moved forward from the settlers’ strongpoint at Banyas to reach Damascus on 24 July. The army’s leaders seem to have staked all on a coup that would deliver the city into their hands in short order and not to have thought through the possible consequences should this not happen. They brought with them neither timber nor siege engines: Damascus had no massive fortifications comparable to Antioch but it still had walls to surmount.
The defence was determined. The army attacked the west of the city, where a mass of smallholdings divided the fertile orchards irrigated by a system of canals fed from the Barada river, and pushed through to the riverbank. Here was water aplenty for men and animals. The defence used the mud walls dividing the smallholdings to poke through lances held by soldiers invisible to the invaders and shot arrows on the advancing troops from watchtowers. Then, mysteriously, having fought so hard and broken through to the river, the crusading army apparently followed advice to switch the attack to the eastern side of the city, a waterless area with no orchards, on the plea that there was a low wall, easy to surmount. As they considered returning to the western side and its water supplies, the crusaders found their way blocked by defenders assembling palisades manned by archers. They felt unable to face them and the retreat was sounded at dawn on 28 July. It was extraordinary. After four days they had given up the siege and trailed back south, harassed by the Muslims and suffering heavy losses.
Once back at Jerusalem, morale understandably destroyed, the crusaders were unwilling to follow Conrad’s suggestion to win back prestige by attacking Ascalon, another strongpoint and port still in Muslim hands. He despaired and went home. Louis’s army went but he himself stayed on for another year as a resident pilgrim in Jerusalem before returning to his kingdom.
Why the advice to the crusade to switch their attack to the eastern side of Damascus was given remains mysterious. Had Unur, as atabeg of Damascus, promised hefty tribute to the Kingdom of Jerusalem if the attack held off? Did Jerusalem barons discreetly wreck the crusade by shifting the attack to an impossible location? The settlers lived in a different world from incoming crusaders – had so to live – a world of attack and counter-attack, of tribute-taking and Muslim alliances. They could see the attempt at a swift coup was doubtful and getting tribute instead was an attraction. An Islamic chronicler believed that the army’s leaders grew fearful of Saif al-Din and Nur al-Din with their armies ready to move on to the attack; the army had not scaled the walls and, left outside the city as in Edessa, would be caught in the classic nutcracker position between an undefeated garrison and an outside relieving force. Local commanders had come to believe in the vital importance of conserving military manpower. Incoming crusaders did not think in this way. The mass of troops, who had suffered much on the journey and lost so many friends and supporters, would play no games. They had come to fight a decisive action and would settle for nothing else and so went home.
Whatever the truth of the Second Crusade’s collapse, there was no doubt about its effects. It was generally believed that innocent crusaders coming from the West had been bamboozled and betrayed by settlers in the Crusader States and that belief inhibited action to come and help them in Outremer for decades after 1148. Clergy might appeal and talk about the vow to crusade and its celestial reward and St Bernard might reflect on the consequences of the sins of the West. It all had no effect.
Nur al-Din after the Failed Crusade
The battle over Damascus played into Nur al-Din’s hands. It discredited the Burids and Unur the atabeg as allies of King Fulk of Jerusalem. The climate of opinion began to change – jihad came back into fashion.
In 1108 the legist al-Sulami had thoughtfully argued the necessity for jihad to be revived and directed against the Franks, who should be expelled, and had pleaded for a return to Jerusalem as a Muslim holy city. Beginning his appeal in his suburban mosque in Damascus, he then transferred to the Great Mosque – but his entreaties fell on deaf ears. As the number of victims of Frankish aggression grew, there would be more audiences willing to hear sermons on jihad and to act on them. Forty years after al-Sulami, crowds in the Great Mosque cried out for jihad. Nur al-Din continued to have propagandists working for him and was the more inclined to encourage them to do so because, whereas Mosul had at its back rich agricultural land, Aleppo did not and it was prudent to make up for this by establishing volunteer supports. But he was not always consistent.
Nur al-Din the Man
Contrary to a widely accepted view, Nur al-Din did not take advantage of the problems of the Crusader States and drive on with jihad against the Franks in the aftermath of the Second Crusade but instead played a subtle game, cutting away at Antioch’s security by seizing two strongpoints at Harim and Apamea and killing Raymond of Poitiers in battle at Inab in 1149, a success hailed in verse by the poet Ibn al-Qayrasani as a jihadi triumph.
In fact, this was part of a set of moves designed not even to attempt to take Antioch but to emasculate the Christian city and fortress so as to prevent it giving help to Damascus when the time came for Nur al-Din to overrun the city and to establish a stranglehold on supply routes from the north for grain to feed its massive population. Damascus was his true objective all along. He proclaimed his will not to enter into conflict with Muslims but patrolled in the Hauran, the fertile lands which also fed Damascus, ostensibly to give protection against marauders to the Muslim peasants working in the fields. He imposed such discipline on his troops that they never succumbed to the temptation to forage at the peasants’ expense. At the same time he engaged in manoeuvres against Abaq of the Burid dynasty in Damascus, ruler after the illness and death of Unur, warning him of subversion against his authority within the city. Meanwhile he knew full well that jihadis on his side were at work influencing the population and arguing for Nur al-Din’s superior claims as a true Muslim campaigner and that Ayyub, in Abaq’s employment as a military leader, had a complicity with this.
In the winter of 1153–4 it all came to fruition as he began to stem the supply of grain from the north, leading to food shortages, and then sent Shirkuh from Aleppo to intimidate the city before arriving outside Damascus himself in April 1154. There was only token resistance: the city surrendered. Abaq was treated mercifully and compensated for his loss of power with land elsewhere. Ayyub, member of an ethnic group looked down on by both Turks and Arabs, had been a mercenary and had served a bewildering variety of employers as a soldier, but within Damascus he found a cause and became Nur al-Din’s loyal adherent. He was the one man whom Nur al-Din allowed to sit in his presence and it is easy to understand why – he had helped to bring the greatest city in Syria to his master’s camp.
Nur al-Di
n had fulfilled his father’s long-held ambition to take Damascus and had done so peacefully, without shedding Muslim blood. But it was not jihad. The mainline policy was that of a warlord like Zangi, and to Damascus he added other acquisitions at the expense of Muslims. There were great benefits to his capture of Damascus: he brought stability to the city, aided its economic life, engaged in building and was happy to witness a valuable increase in population under his rule. Nor was he immune to appeals for Muslim reform – provided they did not intrude on his central drive to extend his own power within the Islamic world. He would have liked to seize Mosul when his brother died and a child succeeded, but had to draw off. How far the extending of his own personal power was still the priority is demonstrated by the truces he established with Jerusalem in 1155 and 1156, the latter with the stipulation that tribute to the king of Jerusalem would be paid from Damascene revenues.
But later in the 1150s fortune turned against Nur al-Din. Byzantium threatened. Manuel Comnenus, who had succeeded his brother as emperor in 1143, turned his attention to the Crusader States and began to develop a policy of marriage alliances designed to create a common line of action against the menace of the Muslims and to recover ancient Byzantine territory. In 1159 the Emperor’s solemn entry into Antioch was a portent, as he rode in majesty, followed at a distance by Baldwin III without symbols of office, a clear sign of his subordination to the wealth and ancient authority of Byzantium. When Manuel prepared to use his army to assault Aleppo, Nur al-Din thought disaster had come. In the end he made a settlement with Manuel, who dropped his plans for attack in return for the freeing of crusader prisoners taken during the Second Crusade and a promise of support against the Seljuqs in Anatolia. Thus pragmatism and diplomacy prevailed over military action.
Failure to pursue jihad and become a genuine mujahidin nonetheless worked on Nur al-Din’s mind. He fell so seriously ill in October 1157 that he made a will. That illness recurred in 1158 and he felt God’s hand upon him in reproach for failure to pursue jihad and expel the Franks. While he was thus preoccupied, Baldwin had captured Ascalon, stopping the repeated pinprick attacks from the garrison and opening the means to fulfil Baldwin the Conqueror’s dream of pushing into Egypt and tapping her wealth. In 1157 Nur al-Din’s territory was afflicted by a massive earthquake and aftershocks, which damaged Muslim fortresses, walls and living quarters and forced him to expend wealth and energy in repairs. The Anti-ochenes revived their strength and recaptured Harim in 1158. Only a characteristic princely quarrel between Thierry of Flanders and the marauding Reynald of Châtillon (second husband of Constance, heiress to Antioch) saved Shaizar, the fortress of the ibn Munqidh, a Muslim clan on the Upper Orontes, from recapture by the Byzantines. Nur al-Din had never before undertaken the hajj; it was part of his growing spirituality and sorrow for past inactivity on jihad that he took time from pressing responsibilities in 1161 to do so.
A catastrophic defeat in the Bouqia valley in the north of the County of Tripoli, when he was surprised by a mass of Antiochene troops, forced Nur al-Din to reassess his aims and principles. He had narrowly escaped with his life on a donkey released by a Kurd, who had sacrificed his own life to cut the beast’s tether. The episode led him to undo the effects of this disaster, to compensate relatives of his troops who had been killed, to replace personally all the lost horses and equipment and to abandon compromise with the Franks in favour of total commitment to jihad.
He was encouraged by a major victory over a force of Christians near Artah in 1164, outmanoeuvring them, recapturing Harim and taking a rich haul of high-level captives to his prison at Aleppo. It was a prestige victory because of the surrenders and Nur al-Din chose not to release his victims, with the exception of a young prince of Antioch, ransomed because he wanted nothing to disturb Manuel Comnenus – better a weak Antioch, he calculated, than Manuel as neighbour. In Reynald of Châtillon he recognised a particularly dangerous antagonist and imprisoned him for sixteen years. He similarly confined Raymond, count of Tripoli, and Joscelin of Courtenay, of the disgraced line of Joscelin II of Edessa. In the following years he continued to drive on towards the south, next capturing Banyas and putting pressure on King Amalric, who was forced to defend on two fronts while still continuing to attempt to gain land or tribute from Egypt in the fashion set by Baldwin the Conqueror.
The drive down towards Egypt has often been misunderstood: Nur al-Din was not simply racing his opponent, the king of Jerusalem, to the supposedly rich pickings of Cairo but he was, above all, fulfilling the duty he had undertaken at the instigation of the Baghdad caliphate to destroy the Fatimid heresy. The importance to him of ensuring that orthodoxy utterly defeated the Ismaili heretics has been brought out by recent research. In fact, two targets for jihad had emerged – one against the Franks and the other against Islamic heresy. The first was precisely what had been sketched out by al-Sulami in Damascus: the total elimination of the Franks, destroying their churches and crosses, casting out their pollutions and restoring Jerusalem to its rightful place as a Muslim holy city. Late in his life he commissioned a beautiful symbol of his intention to recapture the city for Islam – a minbar carved by four local wood-carvers, erected in the great mosque at Aleppo and prepared to be re-erected in the al-Aqsa mosque when Jerusalem had returned to Islamic hands. It had on it a humble prayer of Nur al-Din, dated 1168, asking God to allow him to put it into the mosque.
Ecumenical Sunnism and the Battle against Heresy
In 1154 centuries of disunity between the two great cities of Aleppo and Damascus came to an end when Damascus opened its gates to Nur al-Din. It was clear that a single major power had come into being in the central Islamic lands and the Abbasid caliph al-Muqtafi responded to the new opportunity to carry forward the long battle of the Baghdad caliphate against the rival caliphate of Cairo and its Ismaili heresy. Here was a new instrument for the cause and the caliph accordingly required his vizier ibn Hubayra, a jurist and theologian, to write to Nur al-Din acquainting him with the need for action. Caliphs had the authority to grant land and so in the same year he issued a charter for Nur al-Din to have the rights to the Fatimid lands in Egypt and Palestine if he conquered them and returned them to the rightful allegiance and doctrine of the Abbasid caliph. Nur al-Din, a military man making his way in the fractured world of the atabegs, was developing a network of propagandists and literary supporters and, listening to his scholars, over time incorporated the struggle against the Fatimids into his jihad against the Franks.
In the 1160s the battle against the Fatimids and its heartland in Egypt became a major preoccupation, accompanying his growing commitment to Islamic prayer and ritual. Scholars who had assented to his jihad against the Franks gave a more enthusiastic response to the struggle against the dangerous errors of the Fatimids. Nur al-Din’s network of supporters in the Islamic world became formidable and aided his campaigning. Pleas of jihad could be used to disarm his opponents. It was difficult to oppose a leader who claimed that he was carrying out a jihad in accordance with the will of the Prophet and that opposition to him was tantamount to obstruction of the jihad itself. At the same time, as Nur al-Din assumed the garments of a Sufi, practised prayer and fasting and banished alcohol, music and dancing, to the dismay of his troops, he took on the role of the ideal Muslim ruler, rebuilding the walls of Medina, issuing coins with his name and the title the ‘just prince’, building hospitals, mosques, orphanages, Sufi cloisters and a House of Hadith Scholarship in Damascus which he attended in person.
Orthodoxy based on the doctrine of an uncreated Quran and an emphasis on the inscrutable will of an all-powerful God in the world He had created had become the basic tenets of the Baghdad caliphate. Beliefs were accepted bila kaif, without speculation, and accompanied by full adherence to the rites of Islam. This followed from the rejection of Mutazilism and was Baghdad’s weapon against the rival caliphate of Cairo, seen as heretical with its teaching about the infallibility of a correctly designated Fatimid caliph and his right to decr
ee doctrine. The ultimate vision was of a Muslim world both temporal and spiritual, united under the leadership of the Baghdad caliphate, securing Sunnism for Islam everywhere and putting down the Ismaili heresy for ever.
Part of the preparation for that ultimate victory was jama-l Sunnism, an ecumenical movement uniting in harmony the four main schools of Sunnis and even moderate Shiites untainted by doctrines of infallibility. Once the initially impoverished Fatimids had secured power in Egypt, they became formidable opponents and a special effort to overcome past dissensions of Sunni scholars was felt to be the right means of destroying the heresy. Thus the staffing of the madrasas – training places for judges, public officials and Islamic holy men – was key and so to a lesser degree were the khanqahs, which had grown up as convents for the instruction of Sufi mystics. Here were the centres of literacy and education in the Quran and law.
Looking back on the history of the jihad from his standpoint in the thirteenth century, Abu Shama recalled Nur al-Din intervening in a dispute between jurists over the choice of a new professor. Calling them in and addressing them via his spokesman in the citadel at Aleppo, he decreed that both rival candidates should be appointed and each should preside in his own madrasa. It was not quite the full ecumenism envisaged by the caliphs and viziers but it was a step in the right direction. In his early years, as he confirmed his power in Aleppo and suppressed the Shiites, Nur al-Din had done away with the deliberate sign of Shiite presence, the sectarian addition to the words of obligatory daily prayer ‘Come to the best of works: Muhammad and Ali are the best of men’. But later in his career he found reconciling formulae for inscriptions he commissioned in the Great Mosque at Damascus, mentioning with the Prophet both Ali and the Emigrant caliphs of the early years and even, in one case, including the murdered victims of the anti-Alid reaction.
God's Armies Page 15