The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land
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Modern historians have sought, with varying degrees of success, to reach beyond this panegyric to reconstruct an authentic vision of Nur al-Din, producing wildly divergent images. A central feature of this process has been the attempt to pinpoint a moment of transformation or spiritual epiphany in the emir’s life, after which he assumed the mantle of the mujahid.11 In the context of the crusades, two interlocking issues are imperative. Nur al-Din spent a fair portion of his life fighting against fellow Muslims–but was he acting for the greater good, unifying Islam in preparation for jihad, or was holy war simply a convenient veil behind which to construct a Zangid empire? And did Nur al-Din start out as an ambitious, self-serving Turkish warlord, only (at some point) to experience a deepening of his religious conviction and a quickening of his desire to prosecute the holy war? In part, these questions can be resolved by tracing the path of Nur al-Din’s career–examining when and why he fought against the Latins; and assessing his dealings with the Sunni Muslims of Syria, the Shi‘ite Fatimids of Egypt and the Greeks of Byzantium.
THE BATTLE OF INAB
In the summer of 1149 Nur al-Din launched an offensive against the Christian principality of Antioch, seeking to consolidate his burgeoning authority over northern Syria. Since late 1148 his troops had clashed with Antiochene forces in a number of small-scale encounters, but the results had been inconclusive. In June 1149, Nur al-Din capitalised upon the recent rapprochement with Unur of Damascus by calling for reinforcements, assembling a formidable invasion army, spearheaded by 6,000 mounted warriors. Historians have made little effort to understand the Aleppan ruler’s motivations, assuming that he was simply seeking a confrontation with Prince Raymond of Antioch. But just like his predecessor Il-ghazi in 1119, Nur al-Din’s actions probably had a more defined strategic purpose.
In 1149, Nur al-Din set out to conquer two Latin outposts–Harim and Apamea. The fortress town of Harim stood on the western fringe of the Belus Hills, in a commanding position overlooking the Antiochene plains. Just twelve miles from Antioch itself, Harim had been in Latin hands since the time of the First Crusade. The Belus range had long played a role in the struggle between Aleppo and the principality. Earlier in the twelfth century, when Antioch was in the ascendant, the Franks had occupied territory to the east of these craggy hills, offering a direct threat to Aleppan security. First Il-ghazi, and then Zangi, pushed them back, re-establishing a border that followed the natural barrier of the Belus. But Nur al-Din was not content with this state of equilibrium. He sought to capture Harim and gain a foothold beyond the barrier of the Belus range, thereby undermining the defensive integrity of Antioch’s eastern frontier.
Nur al-Din also targeted Apamea, on the southern edge of the Summaq plateau. In the past, Antiochene dominion over the Summaq threatened the main routes of communication between Aleppo and Damascus, but Zangi had recaptured much of this area in the late 1130s. By 1149 the Franks retained only a meagre corridor of territory, hugging the Orontes valley south to the increasingly lonely outpost at Apamea. Nur al-Din’s primary objective in 1149 seems have been the conquest of this fortified settlement, eradicating the lingering Latin presence in the Summaq region. Recent attempts to directly overrun Apamea, perched upon a lofty ancient earthen tell, had failed. Switching tack, Nur al-Din now sought to isolate the town–severing its main line of communication with Antioch by taking control of the ash-Shogur Bridge across the Orontes.
In June he advanced into this vicinity and began operations by laying siege to the small fort of Inab. When this news reached Antioch, Prince Raymond reacted swiftly, perhaps even impetuously. Later Latin tradition held that he set off immediately to relieve Inab, ‘without waiting for the escort of his cavalry, [hurrying] rashly to that place’, but this may have been something of an exaggeration because a Muslim contemporary based in Damascus reckoned that the Franks arrived with 4,000 knights and 1,000 infantry. Raymond’s force also included a contingent of Assassins, led by his Kurdish Muslim ally, ‘Ali ibn Wafa. Nur al-Din responded to the Antiochenes’ approach on 28 June with caution, retreating from Inab to assess his enemy’s strength, but his eyes were open for any chance to launch a counter-attack, and just such an opportunity soon presented itself.
Arriving in the environs of Inab, Raymond rather optimistically assumed that he had frightened off Nur al-Din’s forces and successfully secured the region. He elected to camp that night on the open plain rather than withdraw to a place of safety–a fatal error. Having actually moved off only a short distance, Nur al-Din gathered intelligence of the Frankish numbers and their exposed position and immediately retraced his steps under the cover of night. As dawn broke on 29 June 1149 the Latins awoke to find themselves surrounded. Sensing that a famous victory was now within his grasp, the lord of Aleppo wasted no time in pressing the advantage, ‘storm[ing] the camp as if he were besieging a city’ in the words of one Christian. According to the Damascus Chronicle, Prince Raymond vainly sought to rally his men and mount a defence, ‘but the Muslims split up into detachments which attacked them from various directions and swarmed over them’. Vicious hand-to-hand fighting ensued and, as the winds picked up, dust clouded the air, adding to the confusion. Outnumbered and encircled, the Franks soon buckled, but even as swathes of his troops fled the field, Raymond held his ground, fighting on to the end. One contemporary Arabic text described how ‘the swords of Islam had the final word [and] when the haze dispersed [the Christians] lay upon the ground prostrate and dirt-befouled’.
The Muslims had prevailed and the full extent of their triumph became clear when Nur al-Din’s men began combing the battlefield. There the Antiochene ruler Raymond ‘was found stretched out amongst his guard and his knights; he was recognised and his head cut off and carried to Nur al-Din, who rewarded the bearer of it with a handsome gift’. It was rumoured that the prince had been cut down by a sword blow from the Kurdish warlord Shirkuh. Nur al-Din apparently had the Frank’s head sealed within a silver trophy case and dispatched to Baghdad to celebrate the defeat of an enemy who, according to the Muslims, had ‘acquired special repute by the dread which he inspired, his great severity and excessive ferocity’. Latin sources confirm that Raymond’s corpse was decapitated, adding the grisly but practical observation that, when the Antiochenes finally returned to recover his mutilated body, it could only be identified by ‘certain marks and scars’.12
The significance of the Battle of Inab in 1149 paralleled that of the Field of Blood thirty years earlier. The Frankish principality was again deprived of a potent ruler and, with no obvious adult male heir apparent, left leaderless and vulnerable. Nur al-Din was now in a dominant position, but his actions after Inab are revealing. Crucially, he made no determined attempt to subjugate Antioch itself, but instead sent a large portion of his army south to Apamea. Nur al-Din led the remainder of his troops on the principality’s capital, but after a brief siege agreed to leave the city inviolate in return for a sizeable tribute payment of gold and treasure. Travelling to the coast, he took the symbolic step of bathing in the Mediterranean–a gesture affirming that Islamic power now stretched west to the sea.
The real work of conquest began around mid-July, with an assault on Harim. With its Latin garrison weakened after Inab, the town fell swiftly and steps immediately were taken to bolster its defences. Towards the end of that same month, Nur al-Din marched south to Apamea. Cut off from Antioch, with no hope of rescue, the Franks stationed there surrendered in return for a promise that their lives would be spared.
Like Il-ghazi in 1119, Nur al-Din had capitalised upon his defeat of the Antiochenes to achieve focused strategic goals–in this case, the neutralisation of Antioch and the assertion of Aleppan dominion over the lands east of the Orontes. He also forsook a potential opportunity to capture Antioch, perhaps in part because he lacked the manpower and material resources to overwhelm that city’s immense fortifications and knew that Frankish reinforcements would arrive soon from Palestine. Certainly in 1119 and again in 1149 Antioc
h’s conquest was not prioritised as an objective.
In spite of these evident similarities, the Battle of Inab was not a simple rerun of the Field of Blood. In 1119 King Baldwin II of Jerusalem had rushed to the principality’s aid and, over the following years, recouped its territorial losses. His grandson, King Baldwin III, likewise travelled north to Syria in summer 1149, but proved unable to fully revive Antioch’s fortunes. Apamea was never recovered and a brief attempt to retake Harim failed. With Nur al-Din’s soldiers ensconced within striking distance of its capital, the principality’s ability to threaten Aleppo was severely curtailed. Later that summer the Latins were pressed into a humiliating treaty with Nur al-Din that, by confirming Aleppan rights over the Summaq plateau and the territory east of the Belus Hills, tacitly acknowledged Antioch’s emasculation.
Nur al-Din’s underlying motivations and intentions in 1149 also differed fundamentally from those of Il-ghazi and this, in itself, exposes a deeper truth about the shifting balance of power in Syria. The Field of Blood had been an expression of Antiochene and Aleppan rivalry, a last-ditch attempt to stem the sweeping tide of Frankish territorial expansion eastwards. In stark contrast, and despite initial appearances, the campaign that culminated in the Battle of Inab was actually driven by inter-Muslim enmity. Nur al-Din set out to occupy Apamea not to stave off Frankish aggression, but rather to open a clear and unchallenged route south from Aleppo to his real target, the Burid-held city of Damascus. Driven back beyond the Orontes, the Antiochenes would be in no position to interfere in this greater game.
Generations of modern historians have misconstrued the causes and significance of Inab, some even maintaining that this victory marked the vital moment of transformation for Nur al-Din into a dedicated jihadi warrior. To be sure, the lord of Aleppo celebrated his success against the Christians. One Muslim chronicler observed that ‘the poets made much praise of Nur al-Din in congratulation for this victory, as the killing of [Prince Raymond] had a great effect on both sides’, and went on to quote this verse by Ibn al-Qaysarani:
Your swords have produced in the Franks a shaking
Which makes the hearts of Rome beat fast.
You have struck their chief a crushing blow with them
Which has destroyed his backbone and brought the crosses low.
You have cleansed the enemy’s land of their blood
In a cleansing that has made every sword polluted.
But to accept this propaganda at face value is to ignore the reality of Nur al-Din’s strategic focus in 1149: Damascus. Future events would demonstrate that he was wholly content to leave Antioch in the faltering grip of the Franks because, neutralised as a threat in the theatre of Levantine conflict, the Latin principality served as a useful buffer state between Aleppo and Greek Byzantium. In fact, in these early years of his rule, Nur al-Din’s overriding concern was the conquest of Damascus.
Events in August 1149 initially seemed to offer Nur al-Din the perfect opportunity to increase his influence within Muslim Syria. After dining on a particularly hearty meal, his sometime ally and rival Unur of Damascus was ‘seized by a loosening of the bowels’ which developed into a debilitating bout of dysentery. By the end of the month Unur was dead and Damascus plunged into a chaotic power struggle. But any hopes of capitalising upon this misfortune evaporated when news arrived of a second death, this time of Nur al-Din’s elder brother, Saif al-Din, on 6 September. Rushing to Iraq, Nur al-Din briefly sought to stake a claim to Mosul, but was eventually begrudgingly reconciled with his younger sibling, the heir designate Qutb al-Din Maudud. For now a chance to take control of Damascus had been missed. Faltering Burid rule endured in the city, but it would not be long before Nur al-Din’s gaze once again turned south of Aleppo.13
THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS
In 1150 Latin Outremer was beset by adversity. Arguably there had never been a more propitious moment for the lords of Near Eastern Islam–and for Nur al-Din in particular–to strike at the heart of the crusader states, sweeping the Franks into the Mediterranean. The Christians had suffered, in swift succession, the Second Crusade’s failure, defeat at Inab and the county of Edessa’s dissolution. After 1149 their difficulties only deepened. Panicked calls to western Europe for a new crusade were made, but with recent humiliation fresh in the memory, they went unanswered. In Antioch, Prince Raymond’s sudden death prompted yet another succession crisis because his son and heir, Bohemond III, was only five years old, and his widow Constance forcefully rejected her cousin King Baldwin III of Jerusalem’s plans to marry her off to a suitor of his choosing. Like her mother Alice before her, Constance sought to control her own fate, but this left the principality without an incumbent male military commander for four years and saddled Baldwin III with oversight of Antioch. The young king’s responsibilities were multiplied even further in 1152 by the murder of Raymond II of Tripoli by a band of Assassins. As the count’s son and namesake, Raymond III, was just twelve years old, Baldwin was again forced to assume the mantle of guardian.
Still only in his early twenties, Baldwin III of Jerusalem was now charged with the rule of all three of the surviving crusader states. To make matters worse his relationship with his mother Melisende was crumbling. Together they had exercised joint rule of Jerusalem since 1145 (when the boy king reached his majority at the age of fifteen), and in the beginning the queen’s wisdom and experience had been a welcome source of security and continuity. But as Baldwin grew into adulthood, his mother’s presence at his side began to feel more stifling than reassuring. Melisende, for her part, had no intention of relinquishing power and still enjoyed widespread support within the realm. From 1149 onwards, relations between the two co-rulers soured, and by 1152 Latin Palestine was almost torn asunder by civil war. Ultimately, Baldwin was forced to drive Melisende from her lands in Nablus and then to actually besiege the queen in the Holy City itself to force her abdication and assert his own right to independent rule.
In spite of the endemic weakness of his supposed enemy, Nur al-Din did little to pursue directly the interests of the jihad against the Christians. Instead, he continued to direct the bulk of his energy and resources towards the seizure of Damascus. Those seeking to promote Nur al-Din as a hero of Islamic holy war–from medieval Muslim chroniclers to modern historians–have argued that this dogged focus upon the subjection of Syria was but a means to an end; that only by preventing Damascus from falling into Christian hands and uniting Islam could the lord of Aleppo eventually hope to achieve victory in the greater struggle against the Franks.14 Zangi had long eyed the prize of Damascus, but was often drawn away by the affairs of Mesopotamia. For the next five years, Nur al-Din pursued this quarry with greater determination, bringing a nuanced array of tactics to bear. His father’s primary weapons had always been intimidation and fear. He had butchered the populace of Baalbek after promising to spare their lives if they surrendered, in the vain hope of terrifying Damascus into submission. Nur al-Din had perhaps learned the lesson of this failure. He adopted a new approach, concerning himself with the battle for hearts and minds, as well as the force of arms.
Power in Damascus now lay in the hands of another member of the faltering Burid dynasty, Abaq, and his inner circle of advisers, but their grip over the city was far from secure. In April 1150 Nur al-Din responded to news of Latin incursions into the Hauran, the frontier zone between Jerusalem and Damascus, by calling upon Abaq to join him in repelling the Franks. Nur al-Din then marched his own army into southern Syria, advancing beyond Baalbek. Just as he had expected, Abaq prevaricated with ‘specious arguments and dissimulation’, while simultaneously dispatching envoys to forge a new pact with King Baldwin III.
Now camped north of Damascus, Nur al-Din took great care to ensure the continued discipline of his troops, preventing them ‘from plundering and doing injury in the villages’, even as he ratcheted up the diplomatic pressure on Abaq. Messages arrived in Damascus chiding the Burid ruler for turning to the Franks and for paying them tribute mo
nies stolen from ‘the poor and weak among [the Damascenes]’. Nur al-Din assured Abaq that he had no intention of attacking the city, but rather that he had been endowed by Allah with power and resources ‘in order to bring help to the Muslims and to engage in the holy war against the polytheists’–to which Abaq replied bluntly that ‘there is nothing between us except the sword’. Nur al-Din’s firm but restrained approach seems, nonetheless, to have borne fruit, as public opinion inside Damascus began to turn in his favour. One Muslim resident even noted that ‘prayers were continually being offered up for him by the people of Damascus’.
Nur al-Din backed away from this initial exchange, having made only relatively meagre gains. For all his brave posturing, Abaq eventually agreed to a renewed truce with Aleppo, officially acknowledging Nur al-Din as suzerain and ordering his name to be recited from the pulpit during Friday prayer and placed on Damascene coins. Symbolic as these gestures may have been, the piecemeal work of subduing Damascus with a minimum of bloodshed had begun. Over the next few years Nur al-Din maintained diplomatic and military pressure on the Burids while still seeking to avoid a direct assault on their city. His ‘scrupulous aversion to the slaying of Muslims’ continued to be noted by those living in Damascus, and by 1151 many were rejecting Abaq’s calls to muster against the Aleppans.
Around this time, Shirkuh ibn Shadi’s brother, Ayyub, began to act as Nur al-Din’s agent within the city. Ayyub had transferred allegiance to the Burid dynasty in 1146, but he now decided, with familiar political flexibility, to return to the Zangid fold, becoming a valuable voice of support within the Damascene court, while also winning over the local militias. By slow steps, Nur al-Din was transforming Damascus into a client-state. In October 1151 Abaq actually travelled north to Aleppo to declare his loyalty, tacitly acknowledging subjection in the hope of staving off full conquest. Nur al-Din merely used this as an excuse to employ even more devious and divisive propaganda–repeatedly writing, in the guise of a concerned overlord, to warn Abaq that various members of his own Damascene court were contacting Aleppo to plot Damascus’ surrender.