TRIAL AND TRIUMPH
From the spring of 1163 onwards, however, Nur al-Din’s perception of his own role within the war for the Holy Land seems to have altered, prompting a deepening of his commitment to the cause. In May the emir led a raiding party into the county of Tripoli’s northern reaches, making camp in the Bouqia valley–the broad plain between the Ansariyah Mountains to the north and Mount Lebanon to the south. News of his whereabouts spread, and the Franks of Antioch, recently reinforced by a group of pilgrims from Aquitaine and by Greek soldiers, decided to launch an attack under the command of the Templar Gilbert of Lacy.
Oblivious to this threat, an advance party of Zangid troops were shocked to see a large Christian army marching out of the foothills of the Ansariyah range. After a brief skirmish they were put to flight and raced back towards Nur al-Din’s main encampment, hotly pursued by the enemy. A Muslim chronicler later described how the two forces ‘arrived together’, so that, overcome by surprise, ‘the Muslims were unable to mount their horses and take up their weapons before the Franks were amongst them, killing and capturing many’. A Latin contemporary recorded that ‘[Nur al-Din’s] army was almost annihilated [while] the prince himself, in despair of his very life, fled in utter confusion. All the baggage and even his sword were abandoned. Barefooted and mounted on a beast of burden, he barely escaped capture.’ Muslim sources confirm the scale of this defeat and the ignominy of Nur al-Din’s retreat, adding that, in his desperation, he mounted a steed whose legs were still hobbled and was saved only by the bravery of one of his Kurds, who rushed in to sever the tether at the cost of his own life.
Stunned and humiliated, Nur al-Din scuttled back to Homs with a handful of survivors. The horror of this unheralded disaster seems to have left a scar on his psyche and the nature of his reaction over the coming months is revealing. Filled with rage and impassioned determination, he is said to have vowed: ‘By God, I shall not shelter under any roof until I avenge myself and Islam.’ We might suspect this to be pure invective, but it was followed by practical action. At significant cost, Nur al-Din paid for the replacement of all weapons, equipment and horses out of his own purse–a responsibility not usually shouldered by Muslim warlords–so that ‘the army was restored as if it had not suffered any defeat’. He also ordered that the lands of any slain soldiers be passed on to their families, rather than reverting to his control. Most strikingly, when the Franks sought, later that year, to agree a truce, the emir flatly refused.19
Nur al-Din now sought to build a coalition with the Muslims of Iraq and the Jazira, gathering a mighty army to prosecute a retaliatory attack on the Latins. Stories of his devout dedication to ‘fasting and praying’ spread through the Near East, and he also began actively recruiting the support of ascetics and holy men throughout Syria and Mesopotamia, urging them to publicise the Latins’ manifold crimes against Islam. The impetus of jihad was gathering pace.
By the following summer, Nur al-Din was ready to strike, and his strategic objectives were audacious. Numerical estimates of his forces have not survived, but we know that he was followed by troops from his own Syrian territories as well as those from the eastern cities of Mosul, Diyar Bakr, Hisn Kifr and Mardin. He must have been confident about the strength of his army, because he set out both to make territorial conquests and to lure the Christians into a decisive battle. Nur al-Din advanced on Harim, which had remained in Antiochene hands since 1158, laying siege to its citadel and initiating a bombardment campaign with siege engines. As he must have expected, the Franks soon sought to make a counter-attack. In early August 1164 an army probably in excess of 10,000 men, including some 600 knights, marched from Antioch under the command of Prince Bohemond III, Count Raymond III of Tripoli and Joscelin III of Courtenay, alongside Thoros of Armenia and the Greek governor of Cilicia.
At news of their approach, Nur al-Din marched his army to the nearby Latin-held settlement of Artah, on the Antiochene plain, hoping to draw his enemy further away from the security of Antioch. Then, on 11 August, when the Christian allies made a nervous feint towards Harim, he closed to engage their forces on open ground. As the battle began, Nur al-Din’s right flank made a feigned retreat, tempting the Latin knights into a hasty charge. Left isolated and vulnerable, the Christian infantry faced a ruinous assault and were swiftly overrun. With the tide of the battle moving in the Muslims’ favour, the mounted Frankish elite reversed their headlong advance, only to find themselves enveloped as Nur al-Din’s right wing halted its supposed flight to ‘[come] back on their heels’, and his centre turned to engage them at close quarters. An Arabic chronicle described how ‘[the Christians’] spirits sank and they saw that they were lost, left in the middle, surrounded on all sides by the Muslims’. Aghast, a Latin contemporary conceded that: ‘Overwhelmed and shattered by the swords of the enemy, [the Franks] were shamefully slain like victims before the altar…Regardless of honour all threw down their arms precipitately and ignominiously begged for life.’ Thoros fled the field, but ‘to save their lives even at the cost of shame and reproach’, Bohemond, Raymond and Joscelin all surrendered; ‘chained liked the lowest slaves, they were led ignominiously to Aleppo, where they were cast into prison and became the sport of the infidels’.
Nur al-Din’s victory was absolute, the revenge for Bouqia sweet. He had thrashed the Syrian Franks, reaping an unprecedented harvest of high-level captives. Within days he returned to Harim which, now cut off from all hope of reinforcement, promptly surrendered. From this time onwards the town would remain in Muslim hands, leaving the principality of Antioch cowering behind an eastern frontier that had been definitively driven back to the River Orontes. Just as in 1149, after his triumph at Inab, Nur al-Din chose not to target the city of Antioch itself. The chronicler Ibn al-Athir later explained that the emir was deterred by the strength of its citadel and, more revealingly, by his reluctance to provoke a counter-attack from Antioch’s overlord, Emperor Manuel, quoting Nur al-Din as saying, ‘To have Bohemond as a neighbour I find preferable to being a neighbour of the ruler of Constantinople.’ With this in mind, he soon agreed to release the young Antiochene prince in return for a hefty ransom; he refused, however, to give Raymond of Tripoli, Joscelin of Courtenay or his other princely prisoner, Reynald of Châtillon, their freedom.20
In October 1164 Nur al-Din turned his attention to the southern frontier with Jerusalem. There the pivotal town of Banyas was vulnerable, because its lord, the Constable Humphrey of Toron, was in Egypt with the king of Jerusalem. The emir moved in with heavy siege weaponry and began an investment, deploying a combination of incessant bombardment and sapping to weaken the fortress and break the will of its small garrison. Bribes may also have been used to buy off Banyas’ commander. Within a few days, surrender on terms of safe conduct was secured and Nur al-Din installed his own well-supplied troops. Just as at Harim, the conquest of Banyas proved to be a permanent gain for Islam. The significance of this turning point in the regional balance of power was reflected in the punitive terms Nur al-Din now imposed on the Franks of Galilee–a share of the revenues of Tiberias and an annual tribute payment. Three years later, the emir followed up this success by destroying the Latin fortress at Chastel Neuf. This opened up a new corridor into Frankish Palestine, through the area of rolling hills known as Marj Ayun, between the Litani valley and the Upper Jordan. There could now be no question that Nur al-Din posed a real threat to Outremer.
THE DREAM OF JERUSALEM
Nur al-Din’s actions in the 1160s suggest that he had adopted a more determined and aggressive stance in his dealings with the Franks, embracing and promoting an active jihad against them. Ever since his occupation of Damascus in 1154, Nur al-Din had sponsored a monumental building programme within the city, rejuvenating and reaffirming its status as one of the Near East’s great centres of power and civilisation. This began almost immediately, with the construction of a new hospital, the Bimaristan–soon to become one of the world’s leading centres of medical science and tr
eatment–and a luxurious bathhouse, the Hammam Nur al-Din, which remains largely unaltered and can be visited to this day.
From the late 1150s onwards, however, these public works seem to have been increasingly imbued with a devotional dimension; one inspired by and/or designed to aver Nur al-Din’s deepening sense of personal piety and his preoccupation with Sunni orthodoxy. In 1163 he financed the building of a new House of Justice, where he later sat for two days each week to hear the grievances of his subjects. This was followed by the construction of the Dar al-hadith al-Nuriyya–a new centre dedicated to the study of the life and traditions associated with Muhammad–headed by Nur al-Din’s close friend, the renowned scholar Ibn ‘Asakir, which the emir attended in person.
To promote Damascus as a hub of Sunni Islam, Nur al-Din built a new suburb, to the west of the city, to house pilgrims en route to Mecca, and in 1159 he founded the town of al-Salihiyya, just over one mile to the north, to shelter refugees from Palestine. Nur al-Din’s Damascene court soon drew in experts in the fields of governance, law and warfare from across the Muslim world. Among them was the Persian intellectual Imad al-Din al-Isfahani, who would later write some of the most illuminating and lyrical Arabic histories of this era. Educated in Baghdad, he joined the emir as a katib (secretary/scholar) in 1167, later describing his new patron as ‘the most chaste, pious, sagacious, pure and virtuous of kings’.
Throughout this period, Nur al-Din projected an image of himself as a devoted Muslim, the reviver of Sunni law and orthodoxy. Revealingly, the most potent and portable propaganda tool available to Nur al-Din–the coins he issued–bore the inscription ‘The Just King’. From the early 1160s, however, he appears to have placed greater emphasis upon the role of jihad in his rule, proclaiming his virtues as a heroic mujahid in inscriptions adorning public monuments. The pre-eminent position of Jerusalem within the framework of jihad ideology also began to crystallise in this period. The emir’s colleague Ibn ‘Asakir helped to revitalise the tradition of writing texts extolling the Holy City’s virtues and took to reciting these works to large public gatherings in Damascus. Poets in Nur al-Din’s court composed widely disseminated works stressing the need not only to attack the Latins but also to reconquer Islam’s third city. One wrote encouraging his patron to wage war on the Franks ‘until you see Jesus fleeing from Jerusalem’. Ibn al-Qaysarani, who had also served Zangi, announced his wish that ‘the city of Jerusalem be purified by the shedding of blood’, proclaiming that ‘Nur al-Din is as strong as ever and the iron of his lance is directed at the Aqsa.’ The emir himself wrote to the caliph in Baghdad of his desire ‘to banish the worshippers of the Cross from the Aqsa mosque’.
One further piece of evidence attests to Jerusalem’s increasingly central role, both within the ideology propagated by Nur al-Din and, perhaps, within his own heartfelt ambitions. In 1168–9, he commissioned the master carpenter al-Akharini to carve a fabulously ornate minbar (wooden pulpit) that the emir hoped to place in the Aqsa mosque once the Holy City was retaken. Some years later, the Iberian Muslim traveller Ibn Jubayr remarked on the pulpit’s extraordinary beauty when he passed through the Levant, asserting that its grandeur was unrivalled in the medieval world. This minbar was undoubtedly intended as a potent and public declaration of intent, emblazoned as it was with the description of the emir as ‘the fighter of jihad in His path, the one who defends [the frontiers] against the enemies of His religion, the just king, Nur al-Din, the pillar of Islam and the Muslims, the dispenser of justice’. Yet, in some respects, it must in addition be viewed as an intensely personal, almost humble, offering to God, for it was also inscribed with the simple, emotive appeal: ‘May He grant conquest to [Nur al-Din] and at his own hands.’ Upon its completion, the emir installed the pulpit in Aleppo’s Great Mosque, where, according to Imad al-Din, it lay ‘sheathed like a sword in the scabbard’, awaiting the day of victory, when Nur al-Din might achieve the dream of Jerusalem’s recovery.21
How then should Nur al-Din be regarded? Do his attacks on the Franks after the humiliation at Bouqia and his dissemination of jihad ideology prove that he was possessed by an unequivocal commitment to holy war? Can the emir’s own words, recorded in the Damascus Chronicle, be taken at face value? He was said to have declared:
I seek nothing but the good of the Muslims and to make war against the Franks…[If] we aid one another in waging the holy war, and matters are arranged harmoniously and with a single eye to the good, my desire and purpose will be fully achieved.22
There was a marked difference between Nur al-Din’s approach and focus in the 1140s and his activities in the 1160s. Comparison with the methods and achievements of his father Zangi is striking. But question marks and caveats remain. Given the context, and the complexities of human nature, any expectation of a singular solution–in which Nur al-Din was either wholly dedicated to jihad or purely self-serving–is surely flawed. Just as the Christian First Crusaders appear to have been moved by a mixture of piety and greed, Nur al-Din may well have recognised the political and military value of championing a religious cause, while still being impelled by authentic devotion. As upstart Turkish warlords in a Near and Middle Eastern world still underpinned by Arab and Persian elites, the Zangids’ need for social, religious and political legitimation must have been pressing.
In the course of the twelfth century the notion of a rebirth of Islamic jihad took hold in the Levant, and this process accelerated almost exponentially during Nur al-Din’s career. In 1105, when the Damascene preacher al-Sulami extolled the virtues of holy war, few responded. By the late 1160s the atmosphere in Damascus and Aleppo was transformed–Nur al-Din may well have cultivated and inspired this fervour; at the very least, he understood that a message emphasising the spiritual dimension of the struggles against Sunni Islam’s enemies now would find a receptive audience.
9
THE WEALTH OF EGYPT
For much of the 1160s the conflict between Zangid Islam and the Levantine Franks centred on Egypt, as both powers tried to assert control over the Nile region. In strategic terms, dominion of Egypt might allow Nur al-Din effectively to encircle Outremer–with control of Aleppo and Damascus secured, the addition of Cairo could shift the balance of power in the Near East irrevocably in his favour. The division between Sunni Syria and Shi‘ite Egypt had long undermined any hope of a concerted drive to defeat the Latins. If that rift was somehow overcome, Islam would stand united for the first time since the coming of the crusades.
The Nile’s fabulous wealth was also alluring. The great river’s annual August flood bestowed enormous fertility upon the arable land along its banks throughout the Nile Delta. In a good year, Egypt enjoyed an abundant agricultural surplus and, by association, bounteous tax revenues. The region likewise benefited from burgeoning trade between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, because the critical land route linking the two crossed Egypt. Popular with Italian and Byzantine merchants, the Nile region became one of the world’s leading commercial hubs.
MEDIEVAL EGYPT
Egypt often is characterised as having been a Muslim territory in the age of the crusades, but this is a misleading simplification. The region was conquered in 641 CE during the first wave of Arab Islamic expansion, but the Arab ruling elite was largely concentrated in two centres: the port city of Alexandria, founded by Alexander the Great some 1,500 years earlier; and the new settlement of Fustat, established by the Arabs at the head of the Nile Delta. Elsewhere, Egypt’s indigenous Coptic Christian population predominated. Over the centuries the Copts were Arabised in a cultural sense, for example taking on the Arabic language, but their adoption of the Islamic faith was far more gradual. Even in the twelfth century this Coptic Christian rural underclass remained.
From 969 Egypt was ruled by the Shi‘ite Fatimid dynasty, who broke free from the Sunni Abbasid rulers of Baghdad. The Fatimids built a formidable navy, with which they came to dominate Mediterranean shipping. They also constructed a new capital city north of Fustat, wh
ich they named Cairo (meaning ‘the Conqueror’), and established a rival Shi‘ite caliph (‘successor’ to the Muslim Prophet Muhammad), challenging the universal authority of the Sunni caliph in Baghdad. By the twelfth century the walled city of Cairo was the political heart of Egypt. Here, two fabulously opulent, labyrinthine caliphal palaces stood as testament to the limitless wealth of the Fatimids–housing exotic menageries and hordes of court eunuchs. The city was also home to the tenth-century al-Azhar mosque, renowned as a centre of Islamic scholasticism and theological study, while at the end of a canal running to the Nile, on the small island of Roda, was the Nilometer, a carefully calibrated structure that allowed the great river’s flood to be measured precisely and, therefore, the harvest predicted.
Cairo became the seat of Fatimid power, but ancient Alexandria retained its status as the focal point of Egypt’s economy into the crusading era. Located on the Mediterranean coast to the west of the Nile Delta, possessed of the great wonder that was Pharos’ Lighthouse, this port was perfectly positioned to exploit the trade in luxury goods such as spices and silks flowing from Asia, through the Red Sea and on to Europe. One Latin then living in Palestine observed that ‘people from the East and the West flock to Alexandria, and it is a public market for both worlds’.
By the time of the crusades the ability of Fatimid caliphs to exercise real power over the Nile region had dwindled and, for the most part, Egypt was governed by the caliph’s chief administrator, his vizier. After the death of the Vizier al-Afdal in 1121, however, this political system faltered and Cairo was soon gripped by intrigue. A noxious cycle of dissolute conspiracy, unbridled brutality and murder brought Fatimid Egypt to its knees. As one Muslim chronicler observed, ‘in Egypt the vizierate was the prize of whoever was the strongest. The caliphs were kept behind the veil and viziers were the de facto rulers…It was rare for anyone to come to office except by fighting and killing and similar means.’ Beset by political instability, the Nile region fell into decline, and the once great Fatimid fleet was left to decay. Against this backdrop of endemic weakness it was no wonder that the ruling powers of Syria and Palestine began to regard Egypt as a prime target.23
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