Royal diplomacy also had a practical impact upon the route taken by the expedition. Given the state of western naval technology in the 1140s, transporting the entire crusade to the Levant by ship may have been impractical. Nonetheless, Roger II offered to carry French troops eastwards, but in the end this was refused because of the tension between Sicily and Byzantium. As with the First Crusade, the vast bulk of the 1147 expedition set out to follow the land route to the Near East, past Constantinople and across Asia Minor. This was to have grave consequences.
One further question remained: how would two of Latin Christendom’s most powerful leaders interact with the rulers of the crusader states? Would Louis and Conrad allow themselves to be directed by a prince of Antioch, a count of Edessa, or even a king of Jerusalem? Or would the French and German monarchs pursue their own independent, and potentially conflicting, ambitions and agendas?
Notable as they were, the immediate to short-term effects of Louis’ and Conrad’s involvement in the 1146 to 1149 expedition paled in comparison to the wider historical significance of the union between crusading and medieval kingship. Both would be transformed by this intimate, often unsettling relationship over the decades and centuries to come. Outremer and western Christendom came to expect Europe’s sovereigns to champion the crusading cause, but future expeditions involving Latin monarchs were subject to the same possibilities and problems–afforded wealth, resources and manpower; yet hamstrung by disunity and hampered by a lack of shared goals. Crusades involving kings proved to be ponderous, even unreactive to the needs of the Near East, and were always capable of destabilising European politics. At the same time, the ideal of holy war began to influence the practice of kingship across the Latin West. Commitment to the crusading cause became an essential duty for Christian rulers, a pious obligation that served to confirm their martial qualities, but one that also had to be managed alongside the business of government.105
ON THE ROAD TO THE HOLY LAND
Now enjoying a greater degree of security in Rome, Pope Eugenius III came to Paris at Easter 1147 to oversee the final preparations for the Second Crusade. That April a group of around one hundred Templar knights also joined the French crusading army. On 11 June 1147 the pope, alongside his mentor Abbot Bernard, presided over a heavily stage-managed public ceremony, held at the grand royal Church of St Denis, a few miles north of Paris, at which Louis made a dramatic, ritualised departure for the Holy Land. This gathering encapsulated the new royal dimension of crusading, but also provides an authentic insight into the young king’s own burgeoning sense of personal piety. En route to the meeting at St Denis, Louis decided that he had to make an ‘impromptu’ two-hour tour of the local leper colony as a demonstration of his subservience to God, leaving both his glamorous wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and the pope literally waiting at the altar. The queen was said to have been ‘almost fainting from emotion and the heat’.
When Louis finally arrived at St Denis, hushed crowds of nobles, packed into the aisles, watched in awe as ‘he humbly prostrated himself on the ground and adored his patron saint, Denis’. The pope presented the king with his pilgrim staff and scrip (satchel), and Louis then raised the ancient Oriflame, believed to have been Charlemagne’s battle-standard, the very symbol of French monarchy. In one moment, this impassioned performance sent out a succession of powerful interlocking messages: crusading was a genuine act of Christian devotion; Louis was a truly regal king; and the Roman Church stood at the centre of the crusading movement.106
The main armies of the Second Crusade began their journeys to the Levant in early summer 1147. Their intention was to recreate the glories of the First Crusade, travelling east overland through Byzantium and Asia Minor. After the ceremony at St Denis, Louis led the French from Metz; having assembled his German forces at Regensburg, Conrad III had set out in May. These staggered departures appear to have been purposefully coordinated, perhaps as a result of plans laid at Châlons-sur-Marne, the aim being to allow both contingents to follow the same route to Constantinople–through Germany and Hungary–without exhausting local resources. But despite this early promise of cooperation, and all the carefully nurtured dreams of reliving past exploits and achievements, the attempt to reach the Holy Land proved to be an almost unmitigated disaster.
In large part this was due to a failure to collaborate effectively with the Byzantine Empire. Half a century earlier, Alexius I Comnenus had helped to trigger the First Crusade and then succeeded in harnessing its strength to reconquer western Asia Minor. In 1147, the position and perspective of his grandson, Emperor Manuel, differed considerably. Manuel had had no interest in summoning this new Latin expedition and actually stood to lose power and influence now that it was in motion. In the West, Conrad III’s absence freed Roger of Sicily to attack Greek territory, and the prospect of two vast Frankish armies marching through the empire, and past Constantinople itself, filled Manuel with dread. To the east, meanwhile, the new crusade looked set to revitalise Outremer, stemming the recent resurgence of Byzantine authority in northern Syria; a concern that was only exacerbated by King Louis VII’s familial connections to Prince Raymond of Antioch. For Manuel, the Second Crusade was a worrisome threat. As the Frankish armies approached the empire the emperor’s concerns deepened to such an extent that he decided to secure his eastern frontier by agreeing a temporary truce with Ma‘sud, the Seljuq sultan of Anatolia. To the Greeks this was a logical step that allowed Manuel to focus upon the thousands of Latin troops nearing his western borders. But, when they learned of the deal, many crusaders saw it as an act of treachery.
Problems began almost as soon as the Franks crossed the Danube and entered the empire. Conrad’s large, unwieldy army conducted an ill-disciplined march south-east through Philippopolis and Adrianople, punctuated by outbreaks of looting and skirmishing with Greek troops. Desperate to safeguard his capital, Manuel hurriedly ushered the Germans across the Bosphorus. Initially, the smaller French contingent’s advance progressed more peacefully, but, once camped outside Constantinople, the Franks became increasingly belligerent. News of Manuel’s pact with Ma‘sud was greeted with horror, derision and deep-seated mistrust. Godfrey, bishop of Langres, one of the crusade’s leading churchmen, even sought to incite a direct attack on Constantinople, a scheme which King Louis rejected. The emperor did supply the crusaders with guides, but even they seem to have rendered only limited assistance.
Lacking the full support of Byzantium, the Latins needed, above all, to unite their own forces against Islam once in Asia Minor. Unfortunately, coordination between the French and German contingents broke down in autumn 1147. Conrad unwisely elected to forge ahead without Louis in late October, marching out from his staging post at Nicaea into an arid, inhospitable landscape that was controlled only loosely by the Greeks. The plan was, once again, to follow a similar route to that taken by the First Crusaders, but the Seljuqs of Anatolia were better prepared than they had been in 1097. The German column, unaccustomed to Muslim battle tactics, soon fell foul of repeated harrying attacks from elusive, fast-moving bands of Turkish horsemen. Limping their way eastwards past Dorylaeum, with losses mounting and supplies dwindling, the crusaders finally decided to turn back. By the time they had retraced their steps to Nicaea in early November, thousands had perished and even King Conrad had been wounded. Morale was shattered. Many of the bedraggled survivors cut their losses and set out on the return journey to Germany.
Chastened, Conrad joined forces with the French, who by now had crossed the Bosphorus, to attempt a second advance. They successfully traced a different route south towards the ancient Roman metropolis of Ephesus, where the onset of illness forced the German king to remain behind. In late December, with rain and snow falling, Louis left the coast, leading his army along the Meander valley towards the Anatolian uplands. At first, military discipline held and early waves of Seljuq attacks were repulsed, but around 6 January 1148 the crusaders lost formation while trying to cross the imposing physical obstacle
of Mount Cadmus and suffered a searing Turkish assault. Losses were heavy and Louis himself was surrounded, narrowly avoiding capture by taking refuge in a tree. Shaken by the experience, the king now asked the force of Templar knights that had joined his army back in France to lead the survivors in a tightly controlled march south-east to the Greek-held port of Adalia–a decision illustrative both of the crusaders’ dire predicament and of the martial reputation already accrued by the Templar Order. Louis later sent a letter to the abbot of St Denis recalling these grim days: ‘There were constant ambushes from bandits, grave difficulties of travel, daily battles with the Turks…We ourselves were frequently in peril of our life; but thanks to God’s grace were freed from all these horrors and escaped.’ Exhausted and hungry, the French reached the coast around 20 January. Some thought was given to marching onwards, but eventually Louis decided to sail to Syria with a portion of his army. Those left behind were promised Byzantine support, but most died from starvation or were killed during Turkish attacks. The French king reached Antioch in March 1148. Meanwhile, having recuperated in Constantinople, Conrad likewise decided to complete his journey east by sea and sailed to Acre.
The Second Crusaders who took the land route to the Near East, proudly hoping to emulate the ‘heroism’ of their forebears, had been crushed; thousands were lost to combat, starvation and desertion. The expedition had been broken even before it reached the Holy Land. Many blamed the Greeks for this terrible reversal, levelling accusations of treachery and betrayal. But, although Manuel had indeed offered Louis and Conrad only limited support, it was the Latins’ own incaution in the face of heightened Turkish aggression that precipitated disaster. With both the Germans and French so roundly and ignominiously defeated, William of Tyre concluded that the crusaders’ once ‘glorious reputation [for] valour’ now lay in tatters. ‘Henceforward’, he wrote, ‘it was but a joke in the eyes of those unclean peoples to whom it had once been a terror.’ Louis and Conrad had finally reached the Levant; the question now was whether their greatly weakened forces could hope to achieve anything of substance and rekindle the crusading flame.107
II
THE RESPONSE OF ISLAM
7
MUSLIM REVIVAL
The half-century since the advent of the First Crusade had seen little sign of a united or determined Islamic response to the Christian conquest of the Holy Land. Jerusalem–the most sacred city in the Muslim world after Mecca and Medina–remained in Latin hands. And the elemental division between Sunni Iraq and Syria and Shi‘ite Egypt endured. Barring occasional Muslim victories, most notably at the Field of Blood in 1119, the early twelfth century had been dominated by Frankish expansion and aggression. But in the 1140s it seemed as if the tide might be shifting, as Zangi, the atabeg of Mosul and Aleppo, and his family (the Zangid dynasty) took up the torch of jihad.
ZANGI–THE CHAMPION OF ISLAM
Zangi’s capture of Edessa in 1144 was a triumph for Islam: what one Muslim chronicle described as ‘the victory of victories’. When his troops stormed the city on 24 December, the atabeg initially allowed them to pillage and slaughter at will. But after this first wave of violence, he enforced an approach that was, at least by his standards, relatively temperate. The Franks suffered–every man was butchered and all women taken into slavery–but the surviving eastern Christians were spared and permitted to remain in their homes. Likewise, Latin churches were destroyed, but their Armenian and Syriac counterparts left untouched. Similar care was taken to limit the amount of damage inflicted upon Edessa’s fortifications, and a rebuilding programme was undertaken immediately to repair weakened sections of the walls. Realising the strategic significance of his new acquisition, Zangi wished the city to remain habitable and defendable.
With Edessa in his possession, the atabeg could hope to unite a vast swathe of Syrian and Mesopotamian territory, stretching from Aleppo to Mosul. And for the Muslim world of the Near and Middle East, his startling achievement seemed to promise the dawn of a new era, one in which the Franks might be driven from the Levant. There can be no doubt that 1144 marked a turning point for Islam in the war for the Holy Land. Equally, it is clear that Zangi made energetic efforts to publicise his success as a blow struck by a zealous mujahid in the name of all Muslims.
Within Islamic culture, Arabic poetry had a long-established role in both influencing and reflecting public opinion. Muslim poets commonly composed works for public recitation, sometimes before massed crowds, mixing reportage and propaganda to comment upon current events. Poets who joined Zangi’s court, some of them Syrian refugees from Latin rule, authored works celebrating the atabeg’s achievements, casting him as the champion of a wider jihadi movement. Ibn al-Qaysarani (from Caesarea) stressed the need for Zangi to reconquer the whole of the Syrian coastline (the Sahil), arguing that this should be the holy war’s primary aim. ‘Tell the infidel rulers to surrender…all their territories’, he wrote, ‘for it is [Zangi’s] country.’ At the same time, this notion of pan-Levantine conquest was twinned with a more precise objective, one that possessed an immediate devotional focus–Jerusalem. Edessa lay hundreds of miles north of Palestine, but its capture was nonetheless presented as the first step on the path to the Holy City’s recovery. ‘If the conquest of Edessa is the high sea’, Ibn al-Qaysarani affirmed, ‘Jerusalem and the Sahil are its shore.’
Many Muslim contemporaries appear to have accepted this projection of the atabeg as a jihadi warrior. The Abbasid caliph in Baghdad now conferred upon him the grand titles ‘Auxiliary of the Commander of the Faithful, the Divinely Aided King’. Given that the Zangids were still, to an extent, outsiders–upstart Turkish warlords, with no innate right to rule over the established Arab and Persian hierarchies of the East–this caliphal endorsement helped to legitimate Zangi’s position. The idea that the atabeg’s career had somehow been building to this single achievement also gained currency. Even a chronicler based in rival Damascus declared that ‘Zangi had always coveted Edessa and watched for a chance to achieve his ambition. Edessa was never out of his thoughts or far from his mind.’ On the basis of his 1144 victory, later Islamic chroniclers labelled him a shahid, or martyr, an honour reserved for those who died ‘in the path of God’ engaging in the jihad.
This is not to suggest that Zangi recognised the political value of espousing the principles of holy war only after his sudden success at Edessa. An inscription dated to 1138, from a Damascene madrasa (religious school) patronised by the atabeg, already described him as ‘the fighter of jihad, the defender of the frontier, the tamer of the polytheists and the destroyer of heretics’, and the same titles were again used four years later in an Aleppan inscription. The events of 1144 allowed Zangi to emphasise and expand upon this facet of his career, but even then jihad against the Franks remained as one issue among many. Within his own lifetime, the atabeg sought, first and foremost, to present himself as a ruler of all Islam; an aspiration highlighted by his decision to employ an array of honorific titles tailored to the differing needs (and distinct tongues) of Mesopotamia, Syria and Diyar Bakr. In Arabic he was often styled as Imad al-Din Zangi (‘Zangi, the pillar of religion’), but in Persian he might present himself as ‘the guardian of the world’ or ‘the great king of Iran’, and in nomadic Turkish as ‘the falcon prince’.1
There is precious little evidence to suggest that Zangi prioritised jihad above all other concerns before, or even after, 1144. He did take steps to consolidate his hold over the county of Edessa in early 1145, seizing the town of Saruj from the Franks and defeating a Latin relief force that had assembled at Antioch. But before long, he was to be found once again fighting fellow Muslims in Iraq. By early 1146 it was whispered that Zangi was preparing for a new Syrian offensive. Construction of siege weaponry began and, while officially these were for the jihad, an Aleppan chronicler admitted that ‘some people thought that he was intending to attack Damascus’.
Zangi was now sixty-two and still in remarkably rude health. But on the night of 14
September 1146, during the siege of the Muslim fortress of Qalat Ja‘bar (on the banks of the Euphrates), he suffered a sudden and unexpected assault. The details of the terrible attack are murky. Zangi was said to have retained numerous watchful sentries to guard against assassination, but somehow they were bypassed, and the atabeg was set upon in his own bed. The assailant was later cast variously as a trusted eunuch, slave or soldier and, not surprisingly, rumours also circulated that the bloody deed had been instigated by Damascus. The truth will probably never be known. An attendant who found Zangi grievously wounded recounted the scene:
I went to him, while he was still alive. When he saw me, he thought that I was intending to kill him. He gestured to me with his index finger, appealing to me. I halted in awe of him and said, ‘My lord, who has done this to you?’ He was, however, unable to speak and died at that moment (God have mercy on him).2
For all his feral vitality and enduring ambition, the atabeg’s tumultuous career had been cut short. Zangi, lord of Mosul and Aleppo, conqueror of Edessa, lay dead.
The advent of Nur al-Din
Zangi’s demise was a squalid, brutal and ignominious affair. Amid the shock of the moment, even his relatives gave little thought to honouring the deceased; the atabeg’s corpse was buried without ceremony and ‘his stores of money and rich treasures were plundered’. Attention turned instead to the issues of power and succession.
Zangi’s heirs moved swiftly: his eldest son, Saif al-Din, seized Mosul–affirmation that Mesopotamia was still seen as the true cradle of Sunni Islam; the atabeg’s younger son, Nur al-Din Mahmud, meanwhile, travelled west to assume control of his father’s Syrian lands. This division of Zangid territory had notable consequences. Without direct interests in Iraq, Nur al-Din, the new emir of Aleppo, would be focused upon Levantine affairs, and thus perhaps better placed to pursue the jihad. At the same time, however, without access to the Fertile Crescent’s wealth and resources, the strength of his Syrian realm might wane.
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