The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land (19 page)

Antioch’s submission had not been formalised and, in the years to come, the principality would make renewed attempts to assert its independence. Throughout the early decades of the twelfth century this secular power struggle was also mirrored by a protracted and embittered squabble over ecclesiastical jurisdiction between the Latin patriarchs of Antioch and Jerusalem. Nonetheless, in 1110 King Baldwin had, for the time being at least, affirmed his own personal authority and established Jerusalem’s position as the pre-eminent secular power in Outremer.
⁶⁸

Tancred’s legacy

In spite of the political setbacks of 1109 and 1110, the closing years of Tancred’s life proved to be a triumph. With unabated vigour he pushed the principality’s frontiers to the limit and subdued his Muslim neighbours, fighting for months on end almost without pause. In this period, Tancred confronted a significant strategic quandary that has been largely ignored by modern historians. For Tancred, as for all medieval military commanders, topography was a key consideration. By 1110 the principality had expanded its borders to two natural boundaries. To the east, on the frontier between Antioch and Aleppo, Frankish power now extended to the foot of the Belus Hills, a craggy spine of arid, low-altitude fells. To the south, towards Muslim Shaizar, the principality stretched to the edge of the Summaq plateau and to the Orontes River valley. As it stood, the physical barriers running along these two border zones offered both Latin Antioch and its Muslim neighbours a relatively equal balance of power and security.
⁶⁹

Tancred could have settled for this situation, allowing the status quo to be maintained, engendering the possibility of long-term coexistence. Instead, he chose the risks and potential rewards of continued expansion. In October 1110 he crossed the Belus Hills, prosecuting a taxing winter expedition that led to the capture of a string of settlements in the Jazr region (east of the Belus Hills), including al-Atharib and Zardana. This left barely twenty miles of open, undefended plains between the principality and Aleppo. Then, in the spring of 1111, he moved to apply a similar degree of pressure to the south, initiating construction of a new fortress on a hill close to Shaizar. To begin with, at least, Ridwan of Aleppo and the Muslim rulers of Shaizar, the Munqidh clan, responded to this aggression with conciliatory submission, offering tribute payments totalling 30,000 gold dinars in return for peace.

There was a well-established precedent for this form of financial exploitation. In eleventh-century Iberia, the Christian powers of the north had gradually come to dominate the fractured Muslim city-states of the south, establishing complex networks of annual tribute payments. This system famously culminated in the peaceful occupation of the peninsula’s long-lost capital, Toledo (central Spain), in 1085.

Tancred may well have harboured similar plans to reduce Aleppo and Shaizar to the point of collapse, but his policies had a dangerous edge. Apply too much pressure, demand overly exorbitant protection payments, and the quarry might be driven to risk retaliation. In the case of Aleppo, the mixture of intimidation and exploitation proved effective and culminated in a sustained period of submission. But in 1111, Tancred pressed Shaizar too far and the Munqidh clan readily allied with Maudud of Mosul when he led a second Abbasid army into Syria that September. Threatened with an invasion of the Summaq region, Tancred mustered every possible ounce of Antiochene manpower. He also called for aid from his fellow Latins and, despite the tensions which had recently divided their ranks, the armies of Jerusalem, Edessa and Tripoli assembled once more. This composite force took up a defensive position at Apamea, and by patiently holding its ground, blunted Maudud’s attempts to provoke a decisive battle and eventually forced his retreat.

Tancred once again had repulsed a threat to the principality’s survival, but any hopes of securing the conquest of either Aleppo or Shaizar came to nothing when, after years of tireless campaigning, his health failed him at the age of thirty-six. The early twelfth-century Armenian Christian historian Matthew of Edessa lavished elegiac praise upon Tancred when recording his death in December 1112, writing that ‘he was a saintly and pious man and had a kind and compassionate nature, manifesting concern for all the Christian faithful; moreover he exhibited a tremendous amount of humility in his dealings with people’. This panegyric conceals Tancred’s darker traits: his unquenchable hunger for advancement; his gift for political intrigue; and his willingness to betray or battle all around him in pursuit of power. It was these qualities, allied to his boundless dynamism, that lent Tancred his remarkable potency and enabled him to forge an enduring Frankish realm in northern Syria. If justice be done, history should regard Tancred, not his infamous uncle Bohemond, as the founder of the principality of Antioch.
⁷⁰

OVERLORD OF OUTREMER (1113–18)

Tancred’s death came at a time of more general change in the shape and balance of power in the Near East, brought on by a mixture of dynastic succession and political intrigue. At Antioch itself, power passed to Tancred’s nephew, Roger of Salerno, son of the First Crusader Richard of Salerno. Roger was soon woven into the fabric of Frankish society as a series of high-level marriage alliances bound together the ruling elite of Outremer. This complex web of familial connections ushered in a new phase of heightened interdependence among the crusader states. Roger himself married the sister of Baldwin of Bourcq, count of Edessa, while Joscelin of Courtenay, lord of Tell Bashir, was wed to Roger’s sister. Bertrand of Toulouse’s death early in 1112 led to the accession of his youthful son, Pons, as count of Tripoli. He soon distanced himself from the traditional Toulousean policy of subservience to Byzantium and antipathy to Antioch and, at some point between 1113 and 1115, married Tancred’s widow, Cecilia of France. Pons remained a dependant of Jerusalem, but Cecilia’s dowry brought him a significant Antiochene lordship in the Ruj valley, one of only two southern approach routes to Antioch itself. The wider significance of these shifts in personnel and allegiance was twofold: on the one hand, they promised to engender a new era of Frankish cooperation in the face of external threats; on the other, they reopened old questions about the balance of power in Outremer and, most notably, the relationship between Antioch and Edessa.

Strength in unity

The bonds of Latin unity were soon tested by the ongoing threat of Iraqi invasion. In May 1113 Maudud of Mosul, now Baghdad’s foremost military commander, led a third Abbasid army into the Near East, and on this occasion he turned away from Syria to invade Palestine. The frequency and ferocity of Frankish raiding upon Damascene lands to the north and east of Galilee appear to have convinced Tughtegin that he must now turn his back on any form of enduring rapprochement with Jerusalem. In the last week of May he led a sizeable army to join Maudud, and together they marched into Galilee.

When news of this threat reached Baldwin I at Acre, he dispatched an urgent call for reinforcement to his new neighbours, Roger and Pons. The king now had a difficult decision to make. Should he wait for the full strength of the Frankish alliance to assemble, leaving Maudud and Tughtegin free to ravage the north-eastern reaches of the realm, or risk an immediate move to counter their incursion with only limited military resources? In mid-to late June he settled upon the second course of action. Baldwin’s precipitous behaviour was widely criticised by contemporaries–indeed, even his chaplain noted that the king was denounced by his allies for ‘rush[ing] against the enemy in a rash and disorderly manner without waiting for their advice and aid’–and Baldwin has been similarly condemned in modern historiography. In the king’s defence, he does not seem to have acted with the same damaging impetuosity shown in 1102. Details of events in the summer of 1113 are sketchy, but it would appear that Baldwin advanced from Acre to establish an advanced base from which to patrol Galilee and not with the express intention of confronting the enemy in pitched battle.

Unfortunately for the king, on 28 June his army was battered by a surprise attack. Normally so assiduous in his use of scouts and the garnering of intelligence, Baldwin appears to have camped near the al-Sennabra bridge, a crossing over the River Jordan just south of the Sea of Galilee, without realising that his foes were stationed nearby, across the eastern shore. When Muslim foragers discovered his position, Maudud and Tughtegin launched a lightning assault. Pouring across the bridge, they quickly overran the shocked Franks, killing 1,000 to 2,000 men, including some thirty knights. Baldwin himself fled in disgrace, losing his royal banner and his tent, key symbols of his regal authority.

Chastened, Baldwin retreated to the slopes of Mount Tabor, above Tiberias, where he was soon joined by the armies of Antioch and Tripoli. He now adopted a far more cautious strategy, holding his forces in this defensible position, policing the region but avoiding direct confrontation. For nearly four weeks the two sides remained in the area, testing one another’s resolve, but in the face of such a large Latin force Maudud and Tughtegin could not afford to march south en masse to Jerusalem and were only able to launch a series of wide-ranging raids. In August, the Muslim allies crossed back over the Jordan, leaving, in the words of one Damascene chronicler, ‘the enemy humbled, broken, defeated and dispirited’. As evidence of their triumph they sent a gift of plunder, Frankish prisoners and the heads of the Christian dead to the sultan in Baghdad. Baldwin had survived, albeit with considerable damage to his reputation.
⁷¹

Maudud fatefully elected to spend early autumn in Damascus. Having attended Friday prayers with Tughtegin at the Grand Mosque on 2 October 1113, the Mosuli commander was walking through a courtyard when he was ambushed and mortally wounded by a lone attacker. The assailant was summarily decapitated and his corpse later burned, but neither his identity nor his motive was ever precisely ascertained. The suspicion was that he had been an adherent of a secretive Nizari sect. This splinter faction of the Isma‘ili branch of Shi‘a Islam, originally from north-eastern Persia, had begun to play a notable role in Near Eastern politics at the start of the twelfth century. With limited resources, they gained power and influence by murdering their enemies and, because it was rumoured that their adherents were addicted to hashish, a new word emerged to describe them–Assassins. During Ridwan ibn Tutush’s life they gained a significant foothold in Aleppo, but after his death in 1113 they were driven out of the city. The Assassins then found a new ally in Tughtegin, and for this reason the
atabeg
was suspected of having been complicit in Maudud’s assassination. The true extent of Tughtegin’s involvement is unclear, but the rumour alone was enough to isolate him from Baghdad and to promote a new rapprochement between Damascus and Jerusalem.
⁷²

For the Franks, the crisis of 1113 proved beyond doubt the necessity for unified resistance to Muslim aggression; it also reaffirmed the wisdom of a cautious defensive strategy. Taken together, the events of 1111 and 1113 established a pattern of Latin military practice that was to persist for much of the twelfth century: in the face of a strong invading force, the Franks would unite; mustering at a defensible location, they would seek to police the threatened region and to disrupt the enemy’s freedom of movement, all while staunchly avoiding the unpredictability of open battle.

It was precisely this approach that Roger, prince of Antioch, adopted initially in 1115 when facing the first real threat of his reign. The only difference was that, on this occasion, he enjoyed the support not only of his Latin compatriots, but also of the Muslim potentates of Syria. With Aleppo now in a state of some disarray, the sultan of Baghdad saw an opportunity to take control of the city and thereby reassert his authority over the Near East. To this end, he sponsored a new expedition across the Euphrates, this time led by a Persian commander, Bursuq of Hamadan.

The prospect of such direct intervention prompted an unprecedented reaction from the feuding Muslim rulers of Syria. Tughtegin allied with his son-in-law, Il-ghazi of Mardin, the leading member of a Turcoman dynasty known as the Artuqids, who held sway over the Diyar Bakr region of the Upper Tigris River. Together, Tughtegin and Il-ghazi took temporary control of Aleppo and dispatched an embassy to Antioch to request peace talks. At first, Roger greeted this approach with some suspicion, but he was soon won over, perhaps by the entreaties of one of his leading vassals, Robert fitz-Fulk the Leper, who held a major lordship on the principality’s eastern frontier and had developed a close friendship with Tughtegin. A treaty of military cooperation was duly sealed early that summer and preparations for Bursuq’s invasion began.

Upon reaching Syria and discovering that Aleppo was now closed to him, Bursuq followed the example of Maudud of Mosul in 1111 and sought support from Shaizar for an attack on Antioch’s southern frontier. Roger, meanwhile, responded in kind by marching 2,000 troops to a holding position at Apamea, probably in the company of Baldwin II of Edessa. There the extraordinary pan-Levantine alliance assembled. Tughtegin, true to his word, joined Roger with some 10,000 men, while Baldwin I and Pons of Tripoli arrived later in August. These arrayed forces, so often themselves combatants, held their ground throughout the summer, successfully intermingling Latin and Muslim troops without apparent difficulty.

Facing such a sizeable and entrenched opposing force, Bursuq did his best to provoke open battle, sending skirmishers to harass the allied camp and leading raids into the Summaq plateau. It is testament to the difficulty of maintaining discipline in the face of such provocation that Roger threatened to blind anyone breaking ranks. The Latins, alongside their Damascene fellows, duly held to their position. Thwarted, Bursuq retreated from Shaizar and, with the danger to Syria now apparently passed, the grand coalition broke up.