The Field of Blood: The Battle for Aleppo and the Remaking of the Medieval Middle East

by Nicholas Morton

  Bursuq, seeing that the usual strategy would not work, adopted a different approach. He pretended to withdraw, giving the impression that he had accepted defeat. His enemies fell for the deception and split up their forces, assuming the threat had passed. Tughtakin and Ilghazi returned to their homelands, Roger headed back to Antioch, and the other Frankish forces returned to Tripoli and Jerusalem. Once the main army had disbanded, Bursuq suddenly wheeled around and, in early September 1115, launched a new and vicious assault on the Antiochene frontier at Kafartab.31

  The siege of Kafartab was executed with the utmost speed. Whereas Frankish lords tended to carry out slow, grinding sieges supported by towers and catapults, seeking to climb over or destroy enemy walls, Turkish commanders preferred to tunnel under them. They employed specialists to carry out this dangerous work, most famously miners from the region of Khurasan, far to the east. Starting in Kafartab’s dry moat, the miners excavated under the walls. This was skilled work. First they cleared a large space under the ramparts, propping up the walls’ foundations with large wooden beams so the masonry would not fall on the diggers. When they had burrowed far enough under the wall, they filled the whole space with firewood and set it alight. The fire burned the supporting beams, causing the wall to collapse and creating a breach that the troops could assault.32

  Learning of the attack, Roger hurriedly regathered his troops, marshaling them, along with supporting Edessan contingents, at Rugia in preparation for meeting the sultan’s army. By this time, having taken Kafartab, Bursuq was besieging Zardana (another frontier stronghold).

  As Roger’s army moved against the Turks, his scouts reported that the enemy was unaware of their approach; Roger had the element of surprise. With this advantage, early on the morning of September 14, he led his army against the sultan’s forces. The Frankish horsemen were divided into different squadrons, and each formation was instructed to attack the enemy army at a different point with their lances couched (held under the arm, rather than raised above the head like a javelin). The cavalry launched themselves at their enemy, breaking their lances on first impact and then drawing their swords to engage in hand-to-hand combat. The Turks did not have time to form into squadrons and consequently were stampeded by the oncoming cavalry. The Turkish army panicked, and Bursuq himself only managed to survive his army’s rout by climbing a hill with his bodyguard, from which he was able to escape.33

  This battle, which came to be known as the Battle of Tell Danith, was a classic cavalry victory, of the kind that had made the Christian knights so feared during the First Crusade. Their strategy was to ensure that the full energy of their charge broke directly on an enemy formation, without giving enemy troops any opportunity to take evasive action. The knights could then plow through their foes, producing shock and disorder that would spread virally throughout the enemy ranks and rout any resistance before the opposing army could swamp the Franks with their overwhelming numbers.

  For the Franks, the Tell Danith campaign was a major victory, and their army returned to Antioch laden with their enemy’s riches; they were met at the city’s gates by a triumphal procession led by the patriarch. For Bursuq, it was a humiliation, and he felt deeply shamed by his defeat. He died the following year. For Syria’s Turkish warlords—Tughtakin and Ilghazi—the campaign had forced them to show their true colors. They had made it clear that they would side with the Franks if the sultan attempted to take control in Syria. The Turkish world was as divided as ever, and as Bursuq’s remaining forces fled back east, Tughtakin’s own troops harried the survivors.

  For Tughtakin of Damascus, this campaign had been a triumph of sorts, yet his opposition to the sultan had been too visible, and he worried about how his Turkish peers would respond. Rumors reached him that he had made many enemies in the sultan’s court, so in 1116 he set out for Iraq, sending magnificent gifts in advance of his arrival, and seeking to be reconciled to Sultan Mohammed. In the event, Mohammed proved tractable to Tughtakin’s overtures. Perhaps the Turkish sultan concluded that Syria was too distant and too complex to be subdued and that it was better to accept Tughtakin’s shallow display of loyalty than to reject him and drive him into permanent opposition.

  The 1115 campaign had been a disaster for the sultan’s army in many respects, and it had failed to take control in Aleppo. This was the second time the sultan had dispatched forces to support the city, and his armies had met resistance from the city’s rulers on both occasions.

  With the defeat of Bursuq’s army, the eunuch Lou Lou’s power in Aleppo grew steadily. He had already murdered Ridwan’s heir Alp Arslan and declared himself to be the atabeg (guardian of the prince) for another of Ridwan’s sons, the six-year-old Sultan Shah.34 By 1116 Lou Lou grew bold enough to leave his eyrie in the city’s citadel and begin to exercise power more publicly. This proved to be his undoing. One day Lou Lou set out to hold talks with the Banu Uqayl, a neighboring Arab dynasty that ruled the town of Qalat Jabar on the banks of the Euphrates. En route he paused, apparently to relieve himself, and was shot by his own troops.35

  With Lou Lou’s death, Aleppo imploded. His rule may not have been a showcase of moral rectitude, but he had nonetheless provided some semblance of order. In the months that followed, power slipped from hand to hand as internal factions squabbled among themselves. The city’s political fault lines were plain for all to see, and the major neighboring rulers began to ponder the idea of taking control for themselves. The first to try was the Turkish ruler of Rahba named Aqsunqur, a commander loyal to the Turkish sultan. Rumor had it that he had been responsible for Lou Lou’s murder, and certainly he advanced aggressively toward the city immediately afterward. His approach divided the populace. Some of Aleppo’s soldiers were keen to welcome him; others resisted his candidacy. These dissenters were not prepared to receive a ruler so closely connected to the sultan.

  In the event, the city shut its gates on Aqsunqur, but they now had to find a way to drive him away. Anxious about Aqsunqur’s imminent arrival, the Aleppans appealed first to the Turkmen leader Ilghazi, who did not immediately arrive, and then to the Franks, who briskly launched a massive raid into Aleppo’s eastern provinces and forced Aqsunqur to retire. Having been saved from the threat, the city made a treaty with the Franks in about 1117 granting them substantial rights to levy taxes on the city’s trade.

  The agreement might have stabilized matters except that soon afterward, in the summer of 1117, Ilghazi arrived outside the city’s gates, following up on his invitation. He was permitted to enter the city but found that the citadel’s garrison was prepared to resist him. He departed soon afterward, declaring that the city was unmanageable. By this stage there seems to have been a faction within Aleppo that strongly supported the idea of a Frankish takeover because soon after Ilghazi’s departure a joint Aleppan-Frankish force attacked Ilghazi’s town of Bales, to the east of Aleppo, in an attempt to drive him away.

  The contest for rulership of Aleppo was becoming a free-for-all, and soon another force arrived outside its walls, under the command of Tughtakin, ruler of Damascus. He hoped that the citizens would voluntarily admit him, given that he had fought alongside their warriors in the past. But the gates remained shut, perhaps because Aqsunqur was among Tughtakin’s entourage and the citizens may have feared that he would be imposed upon them as their new ruler. Instead, Aleppo again appealed to the Franks for military protection. Tughtakin departed soon afterward upon learning that the Kingdom of Jerusalem had invaded Damascene territory.

  By 1118 Aleppo was passing swiftly under Frankish hegemony. The city’s civic leaders regularly looked to Antioch for protection against the neighboring Turks, and they had already granted a large chunk of the city’s revenues to the Christian principality. As for the Franks, they were within a hair’s breadth of achieving a long-standing goal: control of Aleppo. Antioch’s position was now so strong that in the summer of 1118 Roger could lead a large force to support the Kingdom of Jerusalem against a Fatimid invasion, and rema
in near Ascalon for almost three months at the height of the campaigning season, with no fear that his enemies would take advantage of his absence. Even the Byzantines, their long-standing opponents, were changing their tactics in response to Antioch’s ever-increasing power. The principality was now too formidable for them to stage an armed overthrow, so instead they began to seek a marriage alliance, hoping to win Antioch by diplomatic means.36

  With his military strength, Roger’s forces could now range freely around Aleppo’s lands, striking far to the east of the city with impunity. The city was at their mercy, and the Franks were positioned to force its submission, transforming a protectorate into a possession. This would be a decisive event. Aleppo was the key to Syria. Financially, Aleppo’s ruler could call on its vast revenues, drawn from the city’s markets and the surrounding farmland. Strategically, the city and its satellite towns controlled many of the major crossings of the northern Euphrates, including most of the roads connecting the Levantine coast to the sultanate in Iraq. Militarily, possession of Aleppo and its hinterland would help isolate Damascus to the south, surrounding it on three sides with Frankish territory. At this point, with Aleppo so very nearly under Frankish control, a bookmaker would probably have offered favorable odds that the Franks would soon rule the entire region.

  In reflecting on this history of wars, treaties, friendships, and betrayals, it is striking how little the events of the early twelfth century resemble the commonly held view of the Crusades. This was no war of Christianity versus Islam, East versus West, Europe versus the Middle East. The reality was far more complex—and more interesting. In practice, the wars of this time were a conflagration of many different factions, with each group advancing agendas in which their leaders’ personal ambitions merged with the broader objectives of their kinsmen. The battle lines were rarely simple. The campaigns of the First Crusade and the wars of the early twelfth century include examples of Turks fighting Turks, Christians fighting Christians, Christians and Turks fighting other Christians and Turks, Christians and Turks fighting Arabs and Turks, and the list goes on. For many commanders, yesterday’s enemy might be today’s friend and might become tomorrow’s rival. If nothing else, this political world was no straightforward battle of “us” against “them.”

  Perhaps the most misleading interpretation of the crusades is the notion that it was a war between two rival religions, Christianity and Islam. There was, without doubt, a religious element to the conflict, yet the surviving sources from the period rapidly break down such a simplistic model. To begin, there were the Franks, newly arrived after their crusade to the East. The First Crusade was not a deliberately staged war against Islam. Most of the participants had set out knowing only that their opponents would be non-Christians of some kind, and even those who believed they were marching to fight “Saracens” knew virtually nothing about the Islamic religion. The crusaders’ overriding objective was to restore Jerusalem to Christian control, and to achieve that end, they had no objection to allying with the non-Christian powers of that region.

  This is not to say that they viewed Islam favorably or perceived Muslims to be their spiritual equals. They considered Islam to be a serious religious error.37 Nonetheless, their conviction that Islam was a false religion did not lead them to cut off all relations or to indiscriminately identify all Muslims as targets. Medieval Christianity imposed no such obligation (indeed, it stressed the need to reach out to nonbelievers to bring about their conversion), and Frankish rulers were not so foolish as to alienate a large proportion of their population, who represented a sizable chunk of their tax base. Consequently, they were fully prepared to work with their Muslim neighbors and subjects. However, the First Crusaders and their descendants were indeed intent on conquering the region in the name of Christendom. They did not intend to forcibly convert, kill, or expel all of its non-Christian inhabitants, but nonetheless they were determined to impose Christian rule. To this extent, there was a religious agenda.

  In addition, there were other Christian groups in the region, including the Armenians and Byzantines. The Byzantine Greeks in particular had a troubled relationship with the Franks, which occasionally broke into open conflict, particularly in their dealings with the Principality of Antioch. When Sultan Mohammed began to launch campaigns against the Franks in the 1110s, Muslim sources tell us that he received encouragement from the Christian emperor Alexius I Comnenus; the Franks were their common enemy, and religion was not the issue.38

  Identifying a distinctively “Muslim” side to this conflict is even more problematic. The Turks were the most powerful non-Christian force in the Near East, having conquered the area a few years previously. Yet their spiritual identity was in transition. Before their violent migrations into the Islamic caliphate during the eleventh century, the majority of these Turkish tribesmen would have been shamanistic in their core spirituality. Their beliefs might have incorporated some influences from Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, but these would then have formed hybrids with their traditional convictions. There seem to have been rather more adherents to Islam among those communities that were in close proximity to the Muslim world, but even here the picture was mixed.

  Later, once they had crossed into Islamic territory, the Turks do seem to have generally started to acquire Islamic beliefs and cultural practices (the classic tale of military conquerors being culturally conquered by the people they had subjugated). Even so, this was a long process. By the early twelfth century, the Turks were only midway through this transition, and many of their original shamanistic beliefs persisted for decades.

  These mixed religious allegiances were noted by the First Crusaders as they marched into Turk-controlled territory. Some observers commented that the Turks tended to grow beards and that they responded to the call to prayer in the towns under their control, both indications of a movement toward Islam. They also noticed that the Church of Saint Peter in Antioch had been turned into a mosque by its Turkish conquerors, who had then covered the statues with cement (reflecting the prohibition in Islam of depicting the human form in religious buildings).39

  These accounts of distinctively Islamic practices, however, were mixed with rather different reports. Some crusaders observed that the Turks buried their dead with valuable grave goods, including gold, clothing, and weapons.40 This practice was not Islamic and reflects the traditional beliefs of their former steppe way of life. Many writers, from multiple cultures, describe the Turks’ love of alcohol (prohibited by Islam), which also recalls their former nomadic lifestyle, in which fermented mare’s milk (qumiz) formed part of their staple diet.41 There are also reports of the Turks’ respect for astrology, again potentially a continuation from their former way of life, although such practices were popular in the Muslim world too, despite the attempts made by Islamic religious leaders to stamp them out.42

  Overall, the surviving clues to the Turks’ religious beliefs during this period are mixed and reflect a culture in transition. The Islamic, the Arabic, and the Persian were merging with the shamanistic and the Turkic and with the world of the steppe. The Turks themselves, having acquired dominion over much of the Islamic world, probably drew on whichever customs inspired or attracted them while rejecting those that conflicted with their basic cultural identity. As victors, it was for them to pick and choose.

  Such conquerors—like others before them—probably deemed it prudent to acculturate themselves to their subjects. The Turks were minority rulers governing a broad populace, and local support would be more forthcoming if they presented themselves as coreligionists. This pragmatic approach to spirituality is much in evidence during this period. Before the arrival of the First Crusade, while Ridwan (technically Sunni) was fighting his brother Duqaq, he courted aid from the Fatimids (Shia). In return for Fatimid assistance, Ridwan allowed the khutbah (the Friday sermon given in mosques) across much of his territory to name the Fatimid caliph, an important sign of submission.43 And there are reports that later, during the First Crusade
, certain unnamed Turkish commanders (possibly including Ridwan) offered to adopt Shia Islam in return for Fatimid assistance.44 Overall, there is every indication that many Turks of this period carried their beliefs lightly and were perfectly happy to adjust their religious affiliation for political expediency. With this in mind, the Franks’ wars against the Turks cannot easily be reduced to a simple battle between Christianity and Islam. The reality was much more complex.

  In addition, other Muslim groups participated in the events of this time: Assassins, Fatimids, Arab emirs, and Bedouin tribesmen. These communities, too, were far from uniform in their beliefs and culture, adhering to a variety of Islamic sects and relating to each other in different ways. Many groups feared the Assassins, and some were naturally aligned with the Fatimids.

  Ultimately, the Near East in the early twelfth century was an arena that drew in many different peoples. The groups discussed so far were the major players, but there were also many other communities, including Jews, Druze, Samaritans, Zoroastrians, and Coptic Christians. Each group had its own objectives.

  At times the conflict was fought along religious lines; much of the time it was not. More frequently, conflict was driven by political divisions. The sultan’s attempts to reassert control in northern Syria fall comfortably into this latter category; so, too, do the Byzantines’ efforts to reconquer Antioch. There were also instances of ethnic violence, with the Arabs and the Armenians seeking to rid themselves of the Turks. The mixing of these competing agendas and the chaos they created underpins the dramatic events of this time, creating a whirlpool of clashing interests that both drove some into conflict and created many extraordinary partnerships.45 As a contemporary Islamic author once lamented: “Today the world has been turned upside down; there is concord with the Franks and dispute with the Muslims.”46