The council at
Jerusalem decides to attack Damascus. After the First Crusade in 1096 AD set up
Christian kingdoms all along the coast of Israel and Lebanon, of course the
Fatimid caliphs who had ruled that area before were very upset. By 1144, a
Mamluk general, Imad-ed-din Zangi, had managed to unite enough Turks and Arabs
in his army to attack the Christian kingdoms. Zangi did not take Jerusalem, but
he did take the Syrian city of Edessa nearby.
In Europe, people were very upset to learn that the Turks
had taken Edessa. The Pope ordered Bernard of Clairvaux (in France) to preach a
second crusade to take it back and defeat Zangi. The young king of France,
Louis VII, agreed to go, along with the queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine. So did
Conrad III of Germany, the Holy Roman Emperor. At this time Louis was 23 years
old and Eleanor was 22. Conrad was 51 years old.
From beginning to end, though, this crusade was not
successful. Most of Conrad's soldiers were killed as they marched through
Turkey. When Louis and Conrad reached Jerusalem, they decided to attack
Damascus, which would have made up for the loss of Edessa. But their attack on
Damascus failed, and the kings and queens went home in disgust.
The Turkish atabeg (Prince Father) Imad al-Din Zangi became
ruler of Aleppo and Mosul in 1128 following the murder of his predecessor by
the Assassin sect. Zangi was in all respects a remarkable leader. He was a
gifted soldier, not unusual for Turkish princes of the day, but also a gifted
politician. He kept his troops and their commanders under a severe discipline,
and in the field, lived under the same conditions. Zangi led his troops from the
front, in the tradition of the Turkish warrior caste. He was among the first
Turkish rulers in Syria to attempt real government—his predecessors had been
mere warlords who treated their Syrian lands to looting and rapine.
Zangi ruled in the midst of internecine Muslim warfare. His
early years saw a series of confusing and vicious struggles as he sought to
consolidate power in Syria. He dared not challenge the Christians at this time,
but so remarkable was his character, that in 1130, Alix, the daughter of Bohemund
II, king of Jerusalem, offered him an alliance against her own father! This he
declined, as it would have made an impossible alliance for him, and he had too
many concerns in his own lands.
During a Seljuq quarrel for the succession of the throne in
1133, Zangi marched on Baghdad. Ambushed en route, he was assisted by an enemy—
a Kurdish officer named Ayyub. In years to come, Zangi would remember this
noble gesture and help Ayyub’s son to his first position of authority. This man
would become the scourge of the crusader kingdoms—Saladin. In 1135, Zangi was
nearly made ruler of Damascus, the principal city of Syria, but intrigues
continued to hold him back. In 1137, he marched on Homs in central Syria,
intending to take it as a steppingstone to Damascus. Caliph Unar, who ruled the
city, craftily called upon the Knights Templar to aid him in his defense and
then, as the Christian army approached, offered to assist Zangi in the
destruction of the infidels. This Zangi did. In June 1137, the Templar army was
trapped in the fortress of Barin by Zangi’s forces and forced to surrender.
After the battle, however, Unar renounced his allegiance and Zangi besieged
Homs, which he could not take because a combined crusader-Byzantine army was
besieging his city of Shayzar. Fearing the loss of this vital city, he withdrew
his army and broke the siege.
This Byzantine-crusader alliance could have been serious to
the Muslim-dominated Middle East. It was, in fact, the only time that the
crusaders acted as the pawns of the old empire, and had the Frankish vitality
been combined with the empire’s organization, the results for Syria could have
been fatal. Zangi responded with propaganda to tear the two allies
apart—warning the Byzantines of the huge army that he was gathering and warning
the Franks of Byzantine designs against their own newly conquered lands. He
swept the enemy away, more with guile than arms, but this victory made him the
preeminent man of Syria. In May 1138, he was offered a wedding alliance to
princess Zumurrud of Damascus and received Homs as her dowry. It was supposed
that her son Mahmud would then turn Damascus over to his new father-in-law.
However, despite the agreement, Mahmud refused to turn the city over to Zangi.
In July 1139 Mahmud was murdered, but before Zangi could take control of the
city, the old Caliph Unar—Zangi’s ally and enemy at Homs—seized control and
began plotting a new alliance with the crusaders. Thus Zangi was stalled again,
more by the clever old Caliph Unar, a master of the political game, than by the
crusaders.
Unable to cement his control of Syria, Zangi turned his
attention north and in 1144 retook the kingdom of Edessa, the first of the
crusader states to be captured and the first to fall. It was also Zangi’s last
great achievement, for a servant murdered him in 1146. His kingdom fell apart,
and his son Nur-al-Din was left with only Aleppo.
Zangi’s life was not dedicated to the destruction of the
crusaders, but to the acquisition of personal power. At his death, his realms
dissolved into the hands of various strongmen, and his son was left with a
sliver of his father’s power. But Nur-al-Din, a man very different from his
father, would decisively change the balance of power in the Middle East. An
austere man, more at home in the library than on the battlefield, the new ruler
of Aleppo would fight the Franks with his own wisdom, and others’ swords.
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