So great was the confusion that two Frankish escapees from the battle actually declared a defeat upon reaching Jaffa, ‘saying that the king and all his men were dead’. With about 500 Fatimid troops riding on the port, Baldwin’s traumatised queen (then residing in Jaffa) quickly dispatched a messenger north to Antioch by ship, begging Tancred to bring aid. Luckily for the Franks, the people of Jaffa rejected any notion of an immediate surrender, and the very next day King Baldwin, having camped at the battlefield as a statement of victory, arrived on the coast. At first sight, the remaining Fatimid soldiers outside Jaffa thought the approaching army was their own and happily rode out in greeting; realising their mistake and the grave reversal of fortune that must have occurred, they fled. A second messenger was immediately sent north to declare the king alive and victorious.59
Through a mixture of strategic resolution and good fortune, Baldwin had prevailed against the odds, but any sense of triumph or security was to be short-lived. Egypt’s abundant wealth meant that al-Afdal had the resources to mount a second invasion of Palestine almost immediately. With the coming of spring in 1102 and the start of the new fighting season, another Fatimid army gathered at Ascalon, this time under the command of al-Afdal’s son, Sharaf al-Ma‘ali. In May the Egyptians marched once again on Ramla, skirmishing with the fifteen knights guarding its small fortified tower and raiding the nearby Church of St George at Lydda.
Baldwin I was, at this point, at Jaffa, seeing off the last members of the ill-fated 1101 crusade who had recently celebrated Easter in Jerusalem. William of Aquitaine managed to take ship to the West, but Stephen of Blois, Count Stephen of Burgundy and many others were less fortunate: having set sail, they encountered unfavourable winds and were forced to turn back. They were beside the king, therefore, when rumours of this latest Egyptian offensive arrived around 17 May. Baldwin now made the most calamitous decision of his life. Believing that the news from Ramla heralded the presence of a small Fatimid expeditionary force rather than a full-scale field army, he rashly elected to prosecute a speedy retaliatory attack. In the company of his own household and a clutch of crusaders–including the two Stephens, Hugh of Lusignan and Conrad, constable of Germany–he rode from Jaffa, seemingly brimful with confidence. His force contained a mere 200 knights and no infantry.
Once on the plains of Ramla the full might of the Egyptian army came into view and Baldwin realised the terrible reality of his miscalculation. Facing thousands of Muslim troops (one estimate put them at 20,000), the Franks now had no hope of victory and precious little chance of survival. Sharaf al-Ma‘ali rushed to engage the king’s tiny force the moment it was spotted. Baldwin attempted to mount a valiant charge, but the odds were hopeless; quickly surrounded, the carnage began. Within minutes the bulk of his force had been slain. Among the dead were the First Crusader Stabelo, once Godfrey of Bouillon’s chamberlain, and the 1101 crusader Gerbod of Windeke. Amid the confusion, another veteran of the First Crusade, Roger of Rozoy, managed to break through with a small group of men and race back towards Jaffa. Meanwhile, with the enemy closing in for the kill, Baldwin beat a fighting retreat to Ramla with a handful of survivors, taking meagre sanctuary in its fortified tower.
That evening, Baldwin found himself in a desperate predicament. Knowing full well that dawn would bring a crushing Fatimid assault and certain death or capture, he made what must have been a tortured decision: to abandon his army and seek escape under cover of night. In the company of five of his most faithful and fearsome retainers he stole out of the encircled fort, probably in some form of disguise and via a small postern gate, but he was soon challenged by Muslim troops. In the darkness a bloody, chaotic mêlée began. According to one contemporary, a Frankish knight named Robert ‘went to the front with drawn sword, mowing down the [enemy] to right and left’ but he momentarily lost hold of his weapon and was quickly overwhelmed. As another two of his companions fell, Baldwin fled, borne away astride his swift horse, Gazelle. He now had with him a single surviving follower, Hugh of Brulis (of whom there is no further record).
The Egyptians quickly launched a frantic hunt for the fugitive monarch. Sensing that he was only moments away from capture, the king sought sanctuary and concealment in an overgrown thicket of canes, but his pursuers set light to the undergrowth. Baldwin barely managed to escape, suffering minor burns in the process. He spent the next two days on the run, in fear of his life. Bewildered, short of food and water, he first tried to find a way through the wild Judean foothills to Jerusalem, but retreated at the sight of numerous Fatimid patrols combing the area. On 19 May 1102 he turned north-west to the coast and eventually found his way to Arsuf and a modicum of safety. Throughout this period Baldwin must have been plagued by feelings of humiliation and doubt; he had no way of knowing what fate had befallen his abandoned comrades at Ramla, nor whether Jaffa or even the Holy City might have capitulated in his absence. It is testament to the physical and psychological trauma of the preceding days that, once at Arsuf, his first concern was to eat, drink and sleep. As one Latin contemporary observed, ‘this was required by the human side of his nature’.
The next day brought better fortune. Hugh of Falchenberg, lord of Tiberias, arrived at Arsuf with eighty knights, having heard of the Egyptian assault. Commandeering an English pirate ship anchored nearby, the king sailed south towards Jaffa, while Hugh marched south along the coastline. Baldwin found Jaffa in a parlous state, besieged on land by Sharaf al-Ma‘ali’s forces and at sea by an Egyptian fleet of thirty vessels, come north from Ascalon. Boldly flying his royal banner from his own ship to bring heart to Jaffa’s garrison, the king narrowly evaded the Fatimid flotilla to reach the harbour. Once on land, the news he encountered was grim indeed.
Jaffa had come close to capitulation. Unsure of the king’s whereabouts and the fate of his army at Ramla, and surrounded on all sides, the port’s populace were already in desperate straits. But then Sharaf al-Ma‘ali employed a devious tactic. In life, Gerbod of Windeke had apparently borne a passing resemblance to the king. The Muslims now mutilated his corpse, cutting off his head and legs and, having dressed these grisly remains in the purple of royalty, paraded them before Jaffa’s walls, declaiming Baldwin’s death and demanding immediate surrender. Many, including the queen, who once again found herself ensconced in Jaffa, were taken in by this ruse, and began planning to flee the port by ship. It was at this very moment that Baldwin’s ship appeared from the north. The king’s timely arrival buoyed morale and seems to have shaken Sharaf’s resolve. The bulk of the Fatimid army now retreated some distance towards Ascalon, apparently to prepare siege machinery for a full-scale assault, but this gave the Franks an invaluable breathing space within which to regroup.
Baldwin had arrived in time to save Jaffa, but he was too late to intervene in the events at Ramla. On the morning after his escape, Muslim troops stormed Ramla’s town walls and moved in to surround the fortified tower which now held the remnants of Baldwin’s force. The Fatimids began an intense assault siege of this rudimentary structure, undermining its walls and setting fires to smoke out its occupants. By 19 May the trapped Franks were in a hopeless predicament; abandoned by the king, confronting defeat, they chose, in the words of one Latin contemporary, ‘to be destroyed while defending honourably [rather] than to choke and die a wretched death’. Charging from the tower, they mounted a suicidal last stand and were promptly butchered almost to a man. One of the few to survive was Conrad of Germany, who fought with such ferocity, cutting down any who came within sword length, that in the end he was left standing, ringed by the dead and dying. Awestruck, the Fatimid troops offered him the chance to surrender on the promise that he would be spared and taken as a captive to Egypt. Conrad left behind him many who were less fortunate, among them Stephen of Blois, whose death at Ramla finally put to rest the shame of his cowardice at Antioch four years earlier.
The disaster at Ramla proved to be the low point in Frankish fortunes that year. At the start of June 1102 Baldwin rallie
d troops from across the kingdom, including a contingent from Jerusalem bearing the True Cross. His forces were also boosted by the arrival of a sizeable pilgrim fleet. Now in command of a full field army, Baldwin launched an immediate counter-attack on the ill-prepared Egyptians. Sharaf’s indecisive generalship had already sewn the seeds of discontent among the Fatimids; in the face of this sudden Frankish assault, they were soon routed. The number of Muslim fatalities was limited and the pickings after the battle were rather paltry–some camels and asses–but the ‘crusader’ kingdom had, nonetheless, been saved.60
Between Egypt and Damascus
In these fragile, formative years the Latins of Jerusalem were extremely fortunate that no alliance existed between Shi‘ite Egypt and the great Sunni Syrian power of Damascus. Had Baldwin faced such a combined threat in 1101 or 1102, the meagre resources of his kingdom might have been overwhelmed. As it was, Duqaq of Damascus pursued a subdued policy of détente with Frankish Palestine for the remainder of his life. Stung by the memory of defeat at the Dog River, content to allow the Christians to block Fatimid ambitions in the Holy Land, Duqaq maintained a stance of neutrality. But with his premature death in 1104 at the age of just twenty-one, Damascus was to adopt a new policy.
After a brief but ugly contest, Duqaq’s leading lieutenant, the Atabeg* Tughtegin, took control of the city. As husband to Duqaq’s scheming widowed mother, Safwat, he had long waited in the wings; indeed, it was even rumoured that Duqaq’s untimely demise had been the result of poisoning organised by Tughtegin himself. Now, the atabeg’s gift for devious political intrigue and his casual, at times chillingly capricious, attitude to brutality propelled him into power. In 1105 the atabeg accepted a renewed overture for military cooperation from Egypt. Fortunately for the Franks, however, this unprecedented Sunni–Shi‘ite coalition had its limits. Perhaps still harbouring doubts about his new allies, Tughtegin stopped short of organising a full-scale Damascene invasion of Palestine. Instead, he contributed a force of 1,500 archers when al-Afdal sent a third army, under another of his sons, north to Ascalon in the summer of 1105.
With an Egyptian fleet also harrying Jaffa, Baldwin I recognised that the port would soon be besieged and his realm once again destabilised. Stealing the initiative, he summoned the patriarch of Jerusalem and the True Cross and moved to engage the Fatimid army head-on near Ramla. On this occasion he commanded around 500 knights and 2,000 infantry, but even so they must have been significantly outnumbered. For the third time in four years, however, Egyptian martial indiscipline allowed Baldwin to rout his enemy and secure a narrow victory. The casualties on both sides were roughly equal, but the encounter nonetheless had a ruinous effect on Fatimid morale. The Muslim ruler of Ascalon was slain in the battle; Baldwin ordered the emir’s decapitation and then had his severed head taken to Jaffa and brandished before the Egyptian fleet to encourage their hasty departure.
Egypt continued to threaten Frankish Palestine, but al-Afdal launched no further large-scale offensives and certainly never achieved significant success. For the moment Damascus had been partially neutralised. Tughtegin adopted a more nuanced, predominantly non-aggressive approach to his dealings with Jerusalem. He was certainly not averse to defending Damascene interests with force when he considered them to be under threat, and he also prosecuted frequent punitive raids into Christian territory. But at the same time he agreed a succession of limited-term pacts with Baldwin, primarily directed at easing the path of mutually beneficial trade between Syria and Palestine.
The most enduring consequence of these dealings was the formulation of a partial armistice (confirmed by written treaty) around 1109. This remarkable accord related to the region east of the Sea of Galilee–known by the Franks as the Terre de Sueth (or Black Lands) because of its dark basalt soil–centred on the fertile arable lands of the Hauran, and extending north into the Golan Heights and south of the Yarmuk River. Baldwin and Tughtegin agreed to establish what in essence was a partially demilitarised zone in this area, allowing Muslim and Christian farmers to cooperate in the exploitation of the land. The produce of the Terre de Sueth was then split into three parts, with one portion retained by the resident peasants and the remainder divided between Jerusalem and Damascus. This arrangement remained in place for much of the twelfth century.61
In the first five years of his reign, however, King Baldwin’s own survival, and arguably that of his entire realm, had been in doubt. Only through flashes of gifted leadership and the good fortune of Muslim disunity and Fatimid martial ineptitude had the Latins prevailed.
LATIN SYRIA IN CRISIS (1101–8)
In the first chill months of 1105, Tancred, the celebrated veteran of the First Crusade, had every reason to despair. He found himself in command of the Latin principality of Antioch at a time when that newborn realm seemed in its death throes. Six months earlier, the Franks’ reputation for invincibility had been shattered when Antioch’s army suffered a frightening and humiliating defeat at the hands of Islam. In response, Tancred’s famed uncle, and Antioch’s supposed prince, Bohemond, had fled the Levant, stripping the city of its resources even as he rushed to set sail for the West. With the principality crumbling before him, beset by rebellion and invasion on every front, Tancred faced the spectre of ruination. Seven years earlier, he had witnessed first hand the horror of Antioch’s siege and the terrible cost of its seizure by the crusade. Now, it seemed, the faltering Frankish enclave created by that conquest was doomed to collapse.
Little, if any, of the blame for this crisis could be laid at Tancred’s feet. In the spring of 1101 he had travelled north from Palestine to act as Antioch’s regent after Bohemond’s imprisonment. In the two years that followed Tancred quickly restored a sense of stability and security to the principality, demonstrating both vigour and competence. Shortly before his capture, Bohemond had allowed the fertile plains of Cilicia, north-west of Antioch, to slip out of his grasp. Hoping for greater autonomy, the region’s Armenian Christian population had switched allegiance to the Byzantine Empire, but Tancred beat them back into submission with a brief but vicious campaign. Not content simply to recoup his uncle’s losses, Tancred then sought to expand the principality. Like the kingdom of Jerusalem, Antioch needed to control the ports of the eastern Mediterranean seaboard, but Latakia, home to Syria’s best natural harbour, remained in Greek hands despite Bohemond’s intermittent efforts. After a protracted siege, however, the town fell to Tancred in 1103.
Tancred seems to have relished the new-found opportunities and authority his position offered; certainly he made no effort to orchestrate the speedy release of his uncle. This task was instead taken up by Bohemond’s recent ecclesiastical appointee, Patriarch Bernard, and by Baldwin of Bourcq, now count of Edessa. Together they set about amassing the vast ransom demanded by Bohemond’s captor, the Danishmendid emir–100,000 gold pieces. The Armenian Kogh Vasil, lord of two cities in the Upper Euphrates, gave one-tenth of this sum in return for promises of alliance, but in the words of one rather scandalised eastern Christian contemporary, ‘Tancred gave nothing.’ Eventually, in May 1103, Bohemond was freed. The consequences for Tancred were galling; not only did he have to hand over the reins of power in Antioch, he was also compelled to relinquish his own conquests in Cilicia and Latakia.62
The Battle of Harran (1104)
With his own liberty and authority restored, Bohemond sought to build upon his friendship with Count Baldwin II of Edessa. Over the next twelve months the two united in a series of campaigns designed to subdue the territory between Antioch and Edessa and to isolate and harass Aleppo. It was probably with the latter goal in mind that they launched an expedition east of the Euphrates in spring 1104. Dominion over this region would have secured the county of Edessa’s southern frontier while hampering Aleppan communication with Mesopotamia. As it was, they encountered fierce opposition from a sizeable Muslim army, led by the Seljuq Turkish rulers of Mosul and Mardin.
Battle was joined on the plains south of Harran ar
ound 7 May. Bohemond and Tancred held the right flank, while Baldwin II commanded Edessa’s forces on the left, alongside his cousin Joscelin of Courtenay (a well-connected northern French aristocrat who arrived in the Levant after 1101 and had received a lordship centred on the major fortress town of Tell Bashir). In the fighting that followed, the Edessene troops became detached from the rest of the army–overcommitting to a charge, they fell foul of a ferocious counter-attack and were routed. Baldwin and Joscelin were taken captive as thousands of their compatriots were killed or imprisoned. Bohemond and Tancred led a chastened retreat towards Edessa, where the latter was left in charge of defending the city.
Harran was a shocking reversal for the Franks. Battlefield losses through casualties and captivity were significant, but the greatest damage was psychological. This defeat shifted the balance of power and confidence in the northern reaches of the Levant; it now dawned on the indigenous peoples of Syria that the Latins were not, after all, indomitable. A near-contemporary Muslim writing in Damascus reflected that ‘[Harran] was a great and unparalleled victory…it discouraged the Franks, diminished their numbers and broke their power of offence, while the hearts of the Muslims were strengthened.’ In fact, Muslims, Greeks and Armenians all seized the opportunity to turn the tide in their favour, and it was Antioch, not Edessa, that suffered most. The Byzantines reoccupied Cilicia and Latakia, although the latter’s citadel may have remained in Frankish hands. To the south-east the towns of the Summaq region expelled their Latin garrisons, turning to Aleppo for leadership. In a final indignity, the strategically critical town of Artah followed suit soon after. Guardian of the main Roman road inland, lying barely one day’s march north-east of Antioch, Artah was regarded by contemporaries as the city’s ‘shield’. By the late summer of 1104, the principality had been decimated; all that remained of this once burgeoning realm was a small nucleus of territory around Antioch itself.63
The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land Page 14
