Sea of Faith

by Stephen O'Shea

  With the Assuring of the dar al Islam, the undertaking of jihad became the initiative of local rulers rather than the caliphs. In the tenth century, a short-lived shia dynasty of Aleppo conducted repeated offensives against the Byzantines, its ardent declaration of jihad attracting volunteers—mujahadeen or ghazi—from all over the Middle East. But thereafter, the spark went out of Syrian Muslims, the fracturing of the Seljuk sultanate into backstabbing petty kingdoms hindering any collective action, beyond the merely expedient.

  The coming of the Franks and the establishment of Outremer did not immediately change matters. It was a clarion call only to the religious authorities. The success of the infidel, in their view, was the result of their own neglect of both the greater and the lesser jihad. Like the Byzantines after Yarmuk, the holy men of Islam saw the taking of Jerusalem as divine punishment. At different times in the early crusader period, two revivalists—one each from Damascus and Aleppo—traveled to Baghdad to rouse the nominal Muslim leadership from its diffidence. Yet the fervor inspired by their sermons proved to be a will-o'-the-wisp once up against the hard reality of local Syrian jealousies. Ridwan, the emir of Aleppo, closed the gates of his city to an army of would-be allies dispatched from al-Jazeera, who returned the favor by laying waste to the Aleppan countryside. In 1115, an even greater army, equally primed for jihad and this time composed of the best Seljuk fighters of Iraq, arrived in Syria to find the princes of the competing cities united, for once, in defending their land—but against the Seljuks. To deepen the insult, among those gathered at Damascus for the common effort were the armored knights of King Baldwin of Jerusalem, proof that jihad mattered little to the Muslim Syrian elite. Even after the first major setback for the Franks at the hands of the Muslims, the Field of Blood in 1119, the attempts of the qadi of Aleppo—the same man who had preached in Baghdad—to inaugurate a sustained jihad came to naught. For his pains at trying to instill zeal in the struggle against Christians and heretics, he was killed by the Assassins. So too, in fact, was the Damascene revivalist in Baghdad.

  In the end, military success encouraged jihad, not the other way around. By the middle of the 1120s, the cities of Mosul and Aleppo had become united into a single kingdom, awaiting only a forceful leader who could somehow improve the lot of Muslims in Syria, many of whom had been forced to recognize the suzerainty of—and therefore pay tribute to—the Christians of Outremer. The providential man was Imad al-Jahir Zengi, a hard-drinking warlord who ended his life a hero of Islam. Initially the governor of Basra (from which Sinan, the Old Man of the Mountain, hailed), Zengi had gained promotion by saving the Seljuk sultan from a palace revolt led by an Abbasid caliph unwilling to be a mere figurehead. One of the last of his family ever to attempt to reassert Arab control over the Turkish soldiery, Caliph al-Mustarshid was put back in his toothless place by Zengi in 1127, for which the grateful Seljuk sultan gave him the prize of Mosul and Aleppo. It was a fateful appointment for Outremer and Muslim Syria. In a career that spanned two decades, the merciless Zengi forged a disciplined army from his heretofore squabbling subjects and absorbed many of the smaller cities of the Orontes Valley into his dominion, all the while protecting himself from attack in Mesopotamia, which remained turbulent after al-Mustarshid's failed uprising. In one such rearguard action in 1132, at the town of Tikrit on the Tigris, Zengi's life was saved in the breach by a local Kurd, Najm al-Din Ayyub. Zengi later granted the man a fief in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon; there, Ayyub's son, known to history as Saladin, grew up.

  Zengi's exploits and atrocities came to be feared and celebrated throughout the Near East, although his greatest ambition, to become the master of Damascus, eluded him. Usamah ibn Munqidh, the bemused observer of the Franks, served as intermediary between Muslim Damascus and Christian Jerusalem. Thwarted at Damascus, Zengi turned his attentions elsewhere. Eventually, he made the move that would win him adulation: he attacked Edessa. Founded as the first crusader state in 1098 by Baldwin of Boulogne after the convenient murder of his adoptive father, Edessa fell to Zengi in 1144. For the Muslim east, the occasion caused rejoicing; for the Christian west, despair.

  On learning of the loss of Edessa, Bernard of Clairvaux sprang into action. More persuasive than the preachers of Damascus and Aleppo had been in Baghdad, he deployed his great gifts of oratory to call for a new crusade. After a stirring speech Bernard delivered in Vezelay, France, the exalted enthusiasm felt fifty years earlier swept through Europe again. "The villages and towns are deserted," he wrote with a hint of self-satisfaction. "You'd have difficulty finding one man for every seven women. Everywhere there are widows whose husbands are still alive." The French and German monarchs took the cross, agreeing to lead tens of thousands of armed pilgrims to victory. In 1147 the Second Crusade got under way.

  It was a fiasco. The Byzantines, then at war with Roger II of Sicily, gave little help to their Latin visitors, and even what advice they offered was disastrously ignored. Seeing cowardice in Byzantine counsels of caution about the Rum Seljuks, Emperor Conrad III of Germany brushed aside pleas to stick to the Greek-held coasts of Anatolia and struck out through the heart of the peninsula. Near Dorylaeum, halfway between Constantinople and Ankara, his army was massacred—and he barely escaped with his life, returning to the Bosporus to lick his wounds and avoid the smug glances of the Greek generals. King Louis VII of France, by contrast, had followed their advice, but his progression along the seashore became a nightmare of ambush and attrition. Louis was not the most stout-hearted of men—terrorized, he ceded command of his army to the Templars, an unprecedently public admission of regal incompetence. On the southern coast of Anatolia, his disarray had grown to such proportions that he eventually left the bulk of his men to fight their way overland by themselves. He took ship with his knights and their ladies and sailed to the safety of Antioch.

  The bedraggled crusaders found no respite. At Antioch, the French monarch and the assembled poulain grandees quarreled over what to do next. To poison matters further, Eleanor of Aquitaine, the young, beautiful, and very wealthy French queen who had insisted on joining the crusade, set tongues wagging in the city with the attentions she began lavishing on her dashing uncle, Raymond of Poitiers, the prince of Antioch. Hardly immune to the lure of courtship—his father was the first troubadour—Raymond reciprocated the affections of his niece. The spirited Eleanor had taken the measure of her husband Louis in the adversity of Anatolia and disliked what she had seen; she informed him that she would seek to have their marriage annulled. Humiliated, Louis dragged Eleanor away from Antioch after the decision was taken to go not to Edessa, or even to Aleppo, which Raymond had wisely suggested they attack, but to Tyre and Jerusalem, where further parleys would be held.

  The crusaders were frittering away a temporary advantage, for they had no monopoly on indignity. In 1146 Zengi had been stabbed to death in his bed by a eunuch fearful of being punished the next morning. (A drunken, half-asleep Zengi had threatened the eunuch after seeing him steal a sip from his wine goblet.) This touched off rounds of centrifugal maneuvering, as local lords tried to regain their independence in the absence of a strong leader. Zengi's second son, Nur al-Din, struggled to keepi his father's accomplishment intact. In time, Mosul, Aleppo, and Edessa came around to accept his leadership, but their allegiance was still fledgling, and thus susceptible to pressure. Raymond understood that if the crusaders could dislodge the party of Nur al-Din from one of these centers, Muslim Syria—indeed, the al-Jazeera area of upper Mesopotamia—might slide back into the chaos that served the purposes of Outremer.

  Conrad sailed from Constaninople with his few remaining knights and joined Louis in the Levant. The poulains, led by Raymond of Poitiers, insisted once again that they attack Aleppo or Edessa, in order to break up the dangerous Zengid confederacy. Once again advice was ignored. The two monarchs chose instead to attack Damascus—the only great city in Syria to have allied with the Latin kingdoms against Zengi. Such colossal wrongheadedness is difficult to understand, b
ut the city's proximity, wealth, renown, and perceived weakness may have played a role in making it a target. Dismissing doubts about the wisdom of assaulting the enemy of their enemy, the crusaders and the local Latins—who began to exhibit signs of defection from the holy cause—camped outside the eastern walls of Damascus in July 1148.

  The Damascenes, for their part, knew what to fear from an army of Franks new to the east: the sack of Jerusalem and the cannibalism at Ma'arat al-Numan would not have been forgotten. After putting up tough resistance for several days, they asked Nur al-Din for help, thus burying the hatchet with Aleppo. In one stroke, Louis and Conrad had brought about what the great Zengi had labored to achieve for twenty years: the union of Aleppo and Damascus (with Mosul and Edessa thrown in for good measure). The crusaders, on hearing that a large army had set out from Aleppo to relieve Damascus, lost their composure and fled central Syria, scrambling over the volcanic plain of Yarmuk to regroup in Galilee, near the height of Hattin. Within a few months of this undignified flight, the crusade leaders had set sail for Europe, their bold banners and cross-embossed gonfalons tucked between their legs.

  Not only had the debacle of the Second Crusade united Muslim Syria, it had also made a hero of a warrior who, had he been born in Europe, would have made an exemplary Templar. Nur al-Din accepted the permanent obeisance of Damascus in 1154. His name, meaning "Light of Religion," indicates that he was believed to be a servant of the greater jihad, leading an abstemious life that contrasted favorably, for the devout, with the wine-sodden mores that had been the norm in the courts of Syria. The long-scandalized religious authorities were delighted with him, especially after the new ruler allotted monies for the construction or refurbishment of mosques in the lands he controlled. Many of Nur al-Din's bequests still stand, magnificent structures in the old quarters of Aleppo, Ma'arat al-Numan, Hama, and Horns. Although hardheaded in his dealings with Outremer—he concluded several truces with the Latins—he was careful to couch his actions in the language of jihad and undermine his critics and rivals by sending out letters designed to be read from the minbars, or pulpits, throughout the dar al Islam. He had a sure touch for propaganda: as both his reputation and the groundswell for jihad grew, Nur al-Din had an exquisite wood and ivory minbar constructed at great expense. Its intended home, he made the world know, was the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.

  Cairo, the city founded by the Fatimids in 973 alongside the Fustat of Amr Ibn al As, had long since enveloped the elder settlement and sprawled and agglomerated into one of the great cities of the Mediterranean world. Its al-Azhar academy, thought to be the oldest university anywhere, has turned out a steady stream of religious scholars since its foundation in the late tenth century. Through the Geniza archive, a cache of medieval Jewish trading documents discovered in 1864, we know that commercial contacts thrived between Cairene merchants and a clientele stretching from Malaga to Samarkand. By the dawn of the twelfth century, upstart Cairo had definitively supplanted all other Muslim cities as the leading metropolis of the dar al Islam.

  The rulers of the city were the Fatimids, claimants to the descendance of Ali. As such, they were locked in a struggle for supremacy in Islam with the sunni Abbasids and their Seljuk masters. Just as Alp Arslan wanted to swoop south from Asia Minor to eradicate the shia, so too did the shia Fatimids dream of rolling up the Fertile Crescent and conquering sunni Baghdad. Around the year 1000 a charismatic and quite possibly mad caliph, al-Hakim, had gone so far as to transgress the injunctions of the Prophet. Not only did he arrogate for himself divine status (which lives on in the beliefs of the Druze sectaries of Islam), but he also overturned the notion that fellow monotheists, the People of the Book, should escape punishment. In the painful exception to convivencia that was al-Hakim's reign, Jews and Coptic Christians were persecuted with as much vigor as had been the practice in the old days of Heraclius and the Byzantine patriarchs. In Jerusalem, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was razed to the ground in 1009. (The basileus Constantine IX Monomachus subsidized the church's rebuilding three decades later.)

  The minbar of Nur al-Din in the al-Aqsa Mosque of Jerusalem. Installed by Saladin, it stood there until its destruction in 1969.

  More humane Muslim custom prevailed after al-Hakim's death, even if the institution of the caliphate had been irredeemably weakened. Successive viziers, many of Turkish and Armenian origin, wielded effective power, but their efforts at setting up behind-the-scenes dynasties for their descendants fell foul of caliphal loyalists, officers of the mamluk (slave) armies and rivals at court. When the Latin knights of the First Crusade arrived in Fatimid Palestine, like meteorites from a dimly understood galaxy beyond Byzantium, the Cairene leadership was caught unprepared. Possessed of a great fleet, Fatimid Egypt was unable to influence the course of the campaign and lost its moorings, literally, along the coast of the Levant to the Latins. Jerusalem was in Fatimid hands when it fell in 1099; their last haven on the Palestinian shoreline, Ascalon, was taken by the Latins in 1144.

  By the time Nur al-Din brought unity to Syria, the factionalism of the Egyptian ruling elites had become irreversible. What had not changed, however, was the country's great wealth. When a crusader embassy came calling at midcentury, "they were led past colonnades and fountains and gardens where the Court menageries and aviaries were kept, through hall after hall, heavy with hangings of silk and golden thread, studded with jewels, till at last a great golden curtain was raised to show the boy-Caliph seated veiled on his golden throne." That incomparable wealth lay there for the taking. The two enemies, Nur al-Din of Aleppo and Amalric, the new and capable king of Jerusalem, took their eyes off each other and looked at Cairo.

  To be fair, both had good reasons beyond mere cupidity to venture into Egypt. For Outremer, the legacy of the Second Crusade was bad enough—its neighbor, a newly united Syria, resounded with bloodcurdling cries to jihad; yet the prospect would be darker still were Nur al-Din to corral Egypt into his domain, thereby placing the Latin kingdoms between the pincers of a great Islamic state. From the opposite perspective, the ruler of Aleppo saw the advantage in having the obnoxious Franks trapped between two claws—Syria and Egypt—ready to snap shut. Further, the spies and informants of Zengi's son would have told him of the troubles within Outremer, of its lack of manpower and its squabbling barons and warrior-monks. To let the Franks somehow tap into the gift of the Nile, thereby gaining the wherewithal to place large armies in the field, would render the sacred duty of crushing them all the more difficult. And last, in Nur al-Din's sunni view, the Fatimids were an unholy heretical sect that deserved to be wiped from the face of the earth. For Nur al-Din, striving in the path of God necessarily led to Egypt.

  Thus, curiously, the lead-up to the great confrontation over Outremer occurred in neither Palestine nor Syria. Between 1163 and 1169, no fewer than three campaigns were launched in Egypt by the Syrians and the Latins. There was a strange parallel migration to these wars, the poulain knights and armed monks marching beyond Gaza and through the northern Sinai, their adversaries racing down the Jordan Valley and past the Dead Sea, then joining the southern route across the peninsula. At the outset the Latins found support in a Cairene court fearful of the Aleppan ascendancy. Long allies of the Byzantines in keeping the sea free from privateering, the Fatimid viziers practiced realpolitik and succeeded in allaying, for a time, any misgivings about treating with Christian powers. However, their diplomatic maneuvering did not survive Latin ferocity—in 1168 the army of Outremer stormed the town of Bilbays in the Nile Delta and murdered every one of its inhabitants, Copt and Muslim alike. This atrocity got Cairo off the fence. Unwilling to suffer a similar fate, the Cairenes initiated a scorched-earth policy, burning old Fustat and the surrounding suburbs in a conflagration, according to the chroniclers, that lasted two months. The Latins were no longer welcome.

  The beneficiaries of this surge of ill will were the Syrians, led by Shirkuh, brother of Ayyub, the Kurd who had saved Zengi at Tikrit. As Nur al-Din's champion i
n Syria, Shirkuh had conducted a series of skirmishes and sieges to chip away at the Latin presence there. In 1149 during the siege of an Antiochene fortress, Shirkuh had killed Raymond of Poitiers, the overly fond uncle of Eleanor of Aquitaine. (While resting in Sicily on the voyage home from the Second Crusade, Eleanor learned the distressing news that Raymond's skull, set in a silver case, had been sent to the caliph in Baghdad.) In the Syrian conquest of Egypt, a similar tie of kinship came into play: Shirkuh's nephew, and first lieutenant, was Ayyub's son, Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, or Saladin.* The old warrior relied on his young nephew in conducting coordinated operations far apart, many of these dependent on the use of carrier pigeons, a technology unknown to the Latins as they blundered from one missed opportunity to the next. When, in 1169, Shirkuh finally chased them from the Nile Delta, won the submission of the Cairenes, and surveyed the limitless vistas of personal wealth before him, he died—the victim of gorging himself at a feast.

  Saladin, aged thirty, succeeded his uncle as governor of Egypt. As a youth in Damascus and in Baalbek of the Bekaa Valley, a Muslim outpost in the shadow of the great ruins of pagan antiquity, he had proved himself to be studious both in the arts of war and in the pursuit of piety. His strength lay in combining the warrior ability of Zengi and the pious circumspection of Nur al-Din; his weakness, in not having a drop of their blood. He was a Kurd, an outsider, neither of the Turkish ruling classes nor of the native Arab populations. His master in Aleppo soon had reason to suspect him of overreaching his station in life. On two occasions after the fall of Egypt, Nur al-Din had gone on razzias in Palestine, and both times Saladin had refused to link up with him, once turning tail and scurrying back across the Sinai after being within less than a day's ride of the Syrian's army. Although letters full of placating flatteries invariably arrived in Aleppo to explain away these and other actions that might be deemed insubordinate, Nur al-Din had increasing reason to believe that his unassuming servant had outsize ambitions.