In the early hours of the morning the two forces converged. The Frankish infantry was arrayed in the rear, providing a place of retreat for the Frankish horsemen. Baldwin’s vanguard consisted of three waves of cavalry, with a further six cavalry squadrons deployed in the army’s center. On the right were the men of Tripoli, and on the left were Antioch’s barons.
Ilghazi’s strategy was standard. His troops had taken stations all around the Christian force, a noose around the Franks’ necks. This deployment denied his enemy any line of retreat and was intended to instill a sense of fear. The feeling of entrapment was only amplified by the incessant drumming that the Turks began all around the Frankish force at first light. As the summer sun began to rise, the Turks launched their first assault on the Christian army. These lunges were not attacks pressed home in earnest; rather, small companies rode up to the Frankish lines, fired a few volleys of arrows or threw javelins, and then wheeled away. At this early stage, the Turks focused their attention specifically on the Franks’ infantry rear guard, seeking to deny the knights a place to retreat. Their objective was to utterly annihilate the small Christian army.
The attacks continued until it became clear that the infantry was not going to break ranks, at which point the Turks attempted to use their overwhelming numbers in one colossal onrush intended to submerge and smother their foe. Their decision to seek close combat—not typically a Turkish strength—at such an early stage in the battle reflects their confidence that the Christians would simply be overwhelmed by the sheer mass of their army.
The Turkish charge almost worked. The infantry took heavy casualties, and three waves of knights were overwhelmed. Viewing the rising disorder, the archbishop of Caesarea, standing next to Jerusalem’s great standard, the cross of the Crucifixion, proclaimed God’s vengeance upon the Turks.76
The day was warming up. August temperatures in northern Syria would have been in the mid-nineties (mid-thirties centigrade), but the day of the battle is said to have been especially scorching. Knights fighting in layers of padding and armor, mounted on hot, sweating horses, were extremely vulnerable to heat exhaustion and dehydration, and many of their Turkish enemies are said to have collapsed during the fighting.77
It was only when the bulk of the Turkish army had engaged the infantry that Baldwin charged. He seems to have waited almost until the point of complete disaster before making a move, but his patience bore fruit. He wanted to be sure that the greater part of the enemy army had immobilized itself in the press of fighting men and could not scatter or flee from his charge. Then he struck, bulldozing through the enemy lines from vanguard to rear guard. The Turkish army was put to flight, and Baldwin soon found himself in possession of the battlefield.
The Second Battle of Tell Danith was not much of a victory, and most writers describe it as a bloody draw.78 The Christians took heavy casualties, and they suffered badly in several smaller skirmishes fought on the margins of the battlefield between scattered Frankish formations and retreating Turks. Even so, the Turks had been driven off, and Baldwin’s men now stood uncontested on the field of battle. This in itself was an exceptional achievement, especially given the extreme imbalance in numbers. Baldwin could now go back to Antioch to a rapturous reception. The city was safe, for the present, even if its ambition to seize Aleppo was in tatters.
In the wake of the battle, it was time for both sides to count the cost. For Ilghazi, the battle at Tell Danith took the shine off his earlier victory at the Field of Blood. He had not exactly been defeated, but despite the size of his army, he had not decisively crushed the principality either. He returned to Aleppo to find that the citizens had received mixed reports concerning the recent battle, some claiming the Turks had been routed, others proclaiming victory.79 To add to his troubles, there was murmuring that some of the city’s elites, who had suffered during Ilghazi’s ascension to power, were starting to plot against him.
To quiet such voices, Ilghazi immediately announced, less than truthfully, that he had won a second great victory, and to stress the point, he had his prisoners tortured and presented to the populace. The nobleman Robert Fitz-Fulk was decapitated by Tughtakin of Damascus, a former friend. His head was carried around Aleppo’s streets and presented at the houses of the rich, who were expected to show their appreciation by making gifts. Robert’s skull was later turned into a drinking vessel. Other prisoners had all their limbs cut off, and their torsos were thrown into public spaces. These were brutal acts of torture and death, but they had a clear political purpose. They sent an unmistakable message to the Aleppan people about Ilghazi’s strength, power, and ruthlessness. Through these events, Ilghazi and Tughtakin had been drinking heavily in their tents, which had been erected outside the city walls.80
Ilghazi’s actions unnerved some of the Islamic elites in his entourage. Both his conduct in war and some of the distinctive tortures he inflicted on his captives were characteristic of the central Asian steppe and would have seemed alien to a local religious leader. A later report by one of the Frankish prisoners is suggestive: Ilghazi had offered a qadi the opportunity to execute Arnulf, seneschal of Marash, but he had refused, seemingly troubled by what was going on, and had handed the blade to a nearby emir.81
Ilghazi’s acts may have worried those religious leaders who had accompanied the army, but to rulers and authorities in more distant parts of the sultanate, he was a hero. He had struck a decisive blow against the Franks, and his deeds in battle were celebrated (generally with the Field of Blood played up and the Second Battle of Tell Danith played down). Verses were created to commemorate his achievements, stressing that they should be understood as acts of holy war carried out by a devout holy warrior against the followers of Christianity:
The Koran rejoiced when you brought it victory.
The Gospel wept for the loss of its followers.82
Such ideas hardly bring Ilghazi’s actions and objectives into focus. He had scarcely fought the Franks before 1119, despite his long career, and he had even marched alongside them. He was formerly known among Armenians as being “very intimate friends” with Roger of Salerno.83 But after the Field of Blood, that did not matter. What mattered was that Ilghazi had just stepped into the halls of legend. Irrespective of his deeds in life, his memory would now be a potent symbol encapsulating the notion of defending Islam against the Franks, a symbol that could be used by Muslim scholars and courtiers to guide their partially converted Turkish masters to fully embrace and internalize an Islamic identity. As for Ilghazi himself, he had supplied the Aleppan people with some very explicit reasons to remain loyal to his cause.
On the other side of the border, the Franks were rediscovering their fighting spirit. Baldwin launched repeated raids to reassert Antioch’s position along its eastern margins, and he sent further forces to attack the Munqidhs, who had sided with Ilghazi immediately after the battle and had seized some neighboring towns.84 Baldwin also called upon his cousin Joscelin, lord of Tiberias, to take charge in Edessa. This combative nobleman swiftly assumed power and then launched a series of punishing raids on Aleppan territory, seeking to reassert Frankish dominance on its hinterland. Through his prompt action and gutsy conduct both at Tell Danith and during the following weeks, Baldwin II partially mitigated several of the deep injuries inflicted on the principality following the Field of Blood.85
These would have been comforting thoughts to Antioch’s remaining defenders, but they would not have obscured the severity of the Field of Blood’s impact. Antioch’s power was much reduced, and its former ambitions now had to be savagely curtailed. The Franks had formerly possessed a formidable army, made even more intimidating by its fearsome reputation. It had been a force strong enough to seriously contemplate the conquest (or, more probably, the political annexation) of Aleppo. But the Frankish tide that for many years had seemed likely to sweep across the entire region, carrying all before it, had been brought to an abrupt halt. Now Antioch’s army was shattered, and the agricultural estates th
at supplied the principality with the bulk of its resources had been thoroughly pillaged. Antioch’s war of conquest in the north was over. If the Frankish struggle for Aleppo was to continue, it could now only be carried out by King Baldwin II of Jerusalem. This too was a crucial change for the region. Before the battle, Antioch and Jerusalem had challenged one another for predominance; now that contest was finished. Jerusalem was in charge.86
In addition to its strategic consequences, the Battle of the Field of Blood dented Frankish self-confidence across the Latin East. In recent years, the rulers of the Crusader States seem to have felt comfortably self-sufficient, surviving on their own resources along with the seasonal influx of pilgrims and settlers. They rarely wrote to western Christendom seeking aid and were generally content to wage war without actively seeking additional reinforcements. After the battle, however, they began to write to western Europe in earnest urgently asking for help.87 The realization had clearly dawned on them that the momentum of their conquests was stalling and that their broader position was now vulnerable.
The Field of Blood also provoked an intense period of spiritual soul searching across Frankish lands. Victory and defeat on the battlefield were perceived not simply as a question of cavalry maneuvers and companies of spearmen; they were the will of God. What had the people of Antioch done to deserve such a catastrophe?
To answer that question, the Franks had to look to themselves, to their moral conduct. It was their vice that had raised the barriers between themselves and God, isolating them in the face of their enemies. Victory required righteous conduct, and it was common knowledge that the armies of the First Crusade had triumphed solely because their moral behavior had found favor in the eyes of God. In the aftermath of the Field of Blood, the Franks examined their recent actions and found them wanting. Their sins were numerous. They had turned away from abstinence and fasting to indulge in gluttony, allowing their stomachs to dictate to their heads. Some were known to have visited brothels and to have indulged in sexual sin. Others had handed themselves over to the love of money and had become entrapped in avaricious pursuits. Women in particular were thought to have shamed their people with their lustfulness, seeking to ornament their bodies rather than to work for the salvation of their souls. To make matters worse, God had warned his people of his rising displeasure, sending a plague of locusts to the region some time before, but no one had paid attention. The people of Antioch had paid more attention to another sign, an earthquake that had rippled through the region, but seemingly not enough. Antioch had sinned, and its people were well aware that only a fool ignores the will of God.88
Further south, in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, Baldwin II reached a similar conclusion, and in January 1120, soon after his return to his southern kingdom, he convened a council at the town of Nablus.89 Here the assembled nobles debated the fortunes of war, the plague of locusts, and the recent destruction of a large party of Frankish pilgrims as they visited the holy places. Clearly something needed to change if they were to regain favor in God’s sight. Consequently, they instituted a series of strict laws, borrowing from Byzantine models, that were specifically designed to improve the Frankish people’s moral behavior. These regulations specified tough penalties for adultery, sodomy, rape, and all sexual relations with Muslims. More remarkably, the council also permitted clerics to use weapons in their own defense (a major break with tradition).90 Another outcome of the council—and in part, therefore, of the Field of Blood—was the agreement by the assembled elites that a small band of dusty knights who served as pilgrim escorts should be given formal institutional recognition. This group would in time rise to become one of Christendom’s most powerful religious institutions: the Knights Templar.91
As the storms of war settled following the campaigns of 1119, several realities began to set in. Most obviously, Antioch had been crippled and would need sustained assistance in the coming years if it was to survive. This in itself was a major shock to the geopolitics of the Near East, whose rulers were accustomed to a bullish and expansionist Antioch. Now, suddenly and for the first time in more than a decade and a half of steady expansion, Antioch’s policies had been brought to an abrupt halt. The principality was at a dead stop and needed assistance. This support could only realistically be rendered by the Kingdom of Jerusalem, so it was fortunate for Antioch that Baldwin II was willing to focus his efforts on the principality’s needs.
Jerusalem had the resources and the manpower to sustain its northern cousin; its revenues and settler population had been growing steadily in recent years. Its major enemy, Fatimid Egypt, was in steep decline, and Baldwin II either ruled or could influence all four Crusader States: Jerusalem (his kingdom), Antioch (now under his protection), Edessa (his former territory whose ruler he had recently appointed), and Tripoli (subordinate to Jerusalem). He was determined to resume the struggle for northern Syria and regain the forward momentum that had been lost at the Field of Blood. Meanwhile, on the other side of the border, Aleppo may have found a strong, if brutal, defender, but Ilghazi had not taken up permanent residence in the city. He had returned home to Mardin. The city remained vulnerable. It would not be long before the fields of Syria would run with blood once again.
CHAPTER 4
FIELDS OF BLOOD
1120–1128
THE BATTLE OF the Field of Blood had been a major defeat for the Antiochene Franks, and the Christian advance across northern Syria was stalling. Antioch no longer possessed the resources to maintain its own frontiers, much less to keep up a war of expansion. Even so, the struggle for Aleppo was not over. Baldwin II of Jerusalem was bullish in his determination to seize the city, and he pursued this goal energetically in the years following the Field of Blood. His ambition was to regain the momentum of Antioch’s earlier rulers and push the frontier east. The fight would go on, but the obstacles barring the road to Aleppo were far greater than they had been. Before the Field of Blood, the city had almost been within their grasp, but now Aleppo had a powerful defender, and Baldwin would have to carry out his campaigns far from his own kingdom while simultaneously reconstructing the Principality of Antioch.
By August it was becoming clear that 1121 was going to be a bad year for Ilghazi. A few months earlier, he had received a cry for help from his Turkish peers to the north. The Georgians had been pushing into their territory, led by King David the Builder, and were threatening the city of Tbilisi. Although this frontier lay far from Ilghazi’s core lands in the Jazira, he had responded to their appeal and mustered his own forces to join the campaign. He had stomached enough inconclusive campaigning against the Franks in recent years and was looking for more promising prospects. Only the previous year he had launched an assault on Frankish Edessa and Antioch, but he had not achieved much. The Georgian campaign, on the other hand, raised new opportunities to score a major victory while loading his Turkmen’s saddlebags with Georgian loot. However, the campaign proved to be nothing but an embarrassment. The Turkish force engaged the Georgians in battle, but after initially forcing their opponent to retreat, they were soundly defeated. Thousands were killed, and later writers describe a landscape strewn with Turkish dead.1 Many more were captured, and Ilghazi was compelled to retire in disgrace.
The Georgian campaign had been bad enough, but it was only the start of Ilghazi’s nightmare year. On his return journey, news reached him that his son Shams al-Dawla, governor of Aleppo, had rebelled and executed Ilghazi’s lieutenants in the city. To make matters worse, even before Ilghazi had set out for Georgia, King Baldwin II had started to put Aleppo under renewed pressure. His attacks in the spring of 1121 had begun with a series of assaults on the frontier strongholds of al-Atharib and Zardana (both of which had been lost after the Field of Blood).2 Neither assault had been successful, but they had been sufficient to force Ilghazi to the negotiating table. To secure peace, so that he could depart for the Georgian border, he had made major concessions, allowing the Franks to claim taxes from Aleppan territory, even from suburb
s just outside the city’s walls. He had also promised to grant them control over several strongholds, including al-Atharib. Frustratingly, his garrison at al-Atharib had refused to hand over their fortress, jeopardizing the treaty. Then, in the summer, while Ilghazi was far away fighting the Georgians and his son Shams al-Dawla was in rebellion, Baldwin had attacked again, raiding across the land, reoccupying Zardana, seizing towns, and destroying crops. No one had been able to restrain him, and when Baldwin’s army appeared outside Aleppo’s gates, the Franks had defeated the small force that had sallied out from the city to drive him away.3
As Ilghazi returned to his homeland, his authority was hanging in the balance. Despite all that he had won in 1119, Aleppo was once again on the verge of slipping from his grasp. These were dangerous times, but he still had the advantage of a fearsome reputation, and his son was clearly worried by his father’s imminent reappearance. As Ilghazi’s surviving forces reached the Euphrates at Qalat Jabar and were preparing to set out on the final leg of their journey to Aleppo, Shams al-Dawla lost his nerve and attempted to make peace with his father. Ilghazi declared he was ready for this reconciliation, so when he reached Aleppo in November 1121, he found the gates standing open and his son ready to receive him. He could not leave the matter there. Ilghazi was clearly worried about the effect this family feud might have had upon the Aleppan people’s always-questionable loyalties, because he staged his arrival with great pomp, reminding them of his greatness.
He also slashed the city’s taxes for the second time since 1120 in an attempt to win the people’s support.4 At some point during this period he also began to establish favorable relations with the Assassins, just as his predecessor Ridwan had done, even though they were loathed by his Turkish counterparts. They were too powerful a faction to ignore. Then he punished the plotters surrounding his son, and the tortures he inflicted on their leaders were every bit as gory as the torments he had meted out to the captured Antiochene nobles after the Second Battle of Tell Danith. He tore out one conspirator’s tongue and gouged out his eyes. He blinded another and cut off his hands and feet. Other rebels had their eyes burned out and their hamstrings cut. These brutal disfigurements sent a message to future rebels. His son received far more lenient treatment. He was spared any physical punishment, although he fled to Damascus as soon as possible.5
The Field of Blood: The Battle for Aleppo and the Remaking of the Medieval Middle East Page 13
