The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land (24 page)

For Turkish warlords like Zangi, the Near East (including Syria and Palestine) and the Middle East (particularly Iraq and Iran) were not of equal political value and significance. The
atabeg
’s career demonstrates that, in the first half of the twelfth century, the heartland of Sunni Islam remained in Mesopotamia. It was there, in cities such as Baghdad and Mosul, that the greatest wealth and power were to be won. For Zangi, and many of his contemporaries, the battle against the Franks in the west was almost akin to a frontier war and, as such, of only intermittent and tangential interest.

What is more, when the
atabeg
did concern himself with Levantine affairs, his primary objective proved not to be the eradication of the crusader states, but the conquest of Damascus. Through the 1130s, in between long periods of absence in Mesopotamia, Zangi made repeated attempts to push the sphere of Aleppan influence south towards this goal, seeking to absorb Muslim-held settlements like Hama, Homs and Baalbek that had become Damascene dependencies. Throughout Zangi showed a ready willingness to break vows, turn on allies and terrorise enemies in pursuit of his goals. In 1139 the ancient Roman city of Baalbek (in Lebanon’s fertile Biqa valley) was pummelled into submission after a scouring assault and finally surrendered on the promise that its troops would be spared. Intent upon sending a chillingly clear message to any Syrian Muslims resisting his authority, Zangi reneged on these terms and crucified Baalbek’s garrison to a man. Then, to ensure the city’s continued loyalty, he appointed another up-and-coming member of his entourage as its governor, the Kurdish warrior Ayyub ibn Shadi, a man whose family would come to increasing prominence in the course of the twelfth century.

During this same period, Zangi employed a mixture of diplomatic intrigue and overt military pressure in his dealings with Damascus itself, hoping to engineer the capital’s submission and eventual capture. His cause was only abetted by the chaotic, blood-drenched feuding that gripped the city for much of the 1130s. Despite the continued survival of the Burid dynasty in the form of a succession of feeble figureheads, real power in Damascus gradually devolved upon Unur–a Turcoman military commander who had served Tughtegin as a
mamluk
(slave soldier). It was he who now had to face the spectre of Zangid aggression. In the wake of Baalbek’s savage conquest, Zangi laid siege to Damascus in December 1139, maintaining a loose cordon and launching intermittent attacks over the next six months. Even the
atabeg
was reluctant to launch a full-strength assault against a city of such profound historical significance for Islam, hoping instead to slowly squeeze Damascus into submission.

Yet, as the noose tightened in 1140, Unur rejected calls for surrender. Rather than submit to Zangid domination, he turned to a non-Muslim power for aid, dispatching an ambassador to Jerusalem to seal a new alliance against Aleppo. In an audience with King Fulk, Zangi was portrayed as ‘a cruel enemy, equally dangerous to both [Latin Palestine and Damascus]’, and a munificent monthly tribute of 20,000 gold pieces was promised in return for Frankish assistance in combating this menace. In addition, Banyas (which had been retaken by the Muslims in 1132) would be ceded to Jerusalem.

Convinced both of the value of these extremely generous terms and of the benefits of forestalling Zangi’s conquest of Syria, Fulk led an army north to relieve Damascus. With his operations against the city stalled, this threat was enough to prompt the
atabeg
’s retreat. He returned to Mosul, once more turning his attention to Mesopotamian affairs.
⁹⁵

Zangi against the Franks

Throughout the 1130s Zangi showed little or no interest in the prosecution of an anti-Frankish
jihad
and any attacks launched against the Latins in this period were either almost incidental or related to his advance into southern Syria. The
atabeg
’s only notable offensive against Outremer came in July 1137, when he targeted the fortress of Barin (to the west of Hama and the Orontes). But even this campaign should not be misconstrued, because Zangi’s primary intention was to use Barin as a ready staging post for his aggression against Muslim Homs. The
atabeg
’s first concern was to further his southward expansion towards Damascus, not to deliver a mortal blow to the crusader states.

During the early 1140s Zangi focused almost exclusively on events east of the Euphrates, seeking to expand his power base in Iraq and to consolidate relations with the Seljuq sultan of Baghdad. From 1143 the
atabeg
was particularly concerned with subjugation of the Artuqid princes and minor Kurdish warlords to the north, in Diyar Bakr. Facing this aggression, one Artuqid, Qara Arslan of Hisn Kaifa, forged a pact with Joscelin II of Edessa (who succeeded his father in 1131), offering to relinquish territory to the Franks in return for aid. In autumn 1144, believing his county to be safe from attack, Joscelin duly led a large Edessene army to Qara Arslan’s assistance. This move, born of an imperfect appreciation of Zangi’s ambitions and capabilities, would have a profound impact upon Outremer’s history.

Soon after the count’s departure, the few troops that remained in Edessa alongside its Latin archbishop were stunned by Zangi’s arrival outside their walls. The
atabeg
had long valued precise, up-to-date intelligence, happily expending a small fortune to maintain an extensive network of spies and scouts across the Near and Middle East. He therefore learned almost immediately of Joscelin’s absence and the weakening of Edessa’s garrison. Sensing a rare, and probably unexpected, opportunity, Zangi switched targets from Diyar Bakr to the Frankish capital. His war band, already equipped with siege weaponry, reached the city by forced march in late November and immediately initiated a devastating investment. For the next four weeks the Christians within strove to endure incessant bombardment and repeated assaults by armoured towers and teams of sappers, but the defenders’ position was all but hopeless.

Learning of the attack, Joscelin II tried to assemble a relief force at Tell Bashir. Melisende responded immediately to his pleas for assistance, sending troops north, but, for reasons that remain unclear, Raymond of Antioch prevaricated. With the count still desperately trying to prepare a counter-strike, the dreadful news of Edessa’s fall arrived. On 24 December 1144, Zangi’s miners collapsed a huge section of the city’s towering fortifications. With Muslim troops flooding through the breach, the Christians fled in terror towards the citadel. Amid the resultant panic hundreds were crushed to death, the Latin archbishop among them, even as the
atabeg
’s soldiers set about their grisly work. One Armenian native of the city wrote that the Muslims ‘ruthlessly shed an enormous amount of blood, neither respecting the age of elderly people, nor taking pity on the innocent, lamb-like children’. Those few who reached the inner fortress held out for a further two days, but by 26 December the entire city was in the hands of Islam.

Zangi’s conquest of Edessa may have been largely opportunistic, but it was still an unmitigated catastrophe for the Franks. The strategic consequences alone were profoundly alarming. With its principal city lost, the surrounding Latin county stood on the brink of total ruination. Should this most northern of crusader states fall, contact and communication between the Muslim powers in Mesopotamia and Syria would become far more fluid and secure. In this context, the principality of Antioch’s future looked bleak indeed: its northern neighbour and ally transformed into an enemy; its rival, Aleppo, resurgent. The danger of a domino effect, in which weakness and vulnerability seeped southwards, bringing the successive collapse of each remaining Latin polity, was only too obvious. The Frankish chronicler William of Tyre reflected upon the ‘ominous disaster’ of 1144, observing that there was now a real prospect of the Muslim world ‘overrunning the entire East unchecked’.
*

The psychological impact of this event was perhaps even more significant. Never before had one of Outremer’s four great capitals fallen to Islam. Edessa, the first eastern city to be seized by the crusaders, had stood inviolate for almost half a century. Its sudden unheralded loss sent a tremor of fear and apprehension pulsing through the Latin Levant, severely undermining confidence and morale. Any lingering sense of Christian invincibility evaporated; the dream of Outremer–of a permanent, divinely wrought resettlement of the Holy Land–lay shattered. And, to make matters worse, Zangi, so long a looming threat, could be expected to capitalise upon his victory, galvanising Islam to ever greater efforts in the war for dominion of the Near East.

As this dire news filtered back to the West, the renowned Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux echoed these dreadful concerns, affirming in a letter that: ‘The earth is shaken because the Lord of heaven is losing his land…the enemy of the Cross has begun to lift his sacrilegious head there and to devastate with the sword that blessed land, that land of promise.’ Bernard warned that sacred Jerusalem, ‘the very city of the living God’, might itself be overrun. The only answer for the Latin East, indeed for western Christendom as a whole, was to launch a new crusade.
⁹⁶

Edessa’s downfall shocked the Levant. In 1145 Frankish and Armenian envoys travelled to Europe to broadcast the calamitous news, and to spell out the threat of annihilation now hanging over all the Christians of the Near East. In response, the Latin world launched a huge military expedition that has been dubbed the Second Crusade.
⁹⁷
For the first time western kings took up the fight and, in a great upsurge of recruitment, some 60,000 troops marched east to save Outremer. At the same time, the wars of the cross were borne into new theatres of conflict in Iberia and the Baltic. This was a massive and unprecedented explosion of crusade enthusiasm–outstripping even that witnessed after 1095. Could this fervour guarantee success? And how would the rebirth of Christian holy war affect the future history of the crusades?

EARLY TWELFTH-CENTURY CRUSADING

Latin Europe’s fervent reaction to the preaching of the Second Crusade can only be understood properly against a backdrop of earlier twelfth-century developments in crusading. The First Crusaders’ ‘miraculous’ conquest of the Holy Land in 1099 established a fragile Latin outpost in the Levant and seemed to provide conclusive proof that God endorsed this novel fusion of pilgrimage and warfare. Under the circumstances, one might expect the opening decades of the twelfth century to have been marked by a flood of ‘crusading’ activity, as western Europe rushed to embrace this extension of Christian holy war and to defend Outremer. This was not the case. The memory of the First Crusade certainly burned brightly, but the years leading to 1144 witnessed only a sporadic clutch of small-scale crusades. In part this was because many regarded the First Crusade as a singularly astonishing event that was essentially unrepeatable. Drawing upon centuries of hindsight, later historians identified the mass armed pilgrimage stimulated by Pope Urban II’s preaching in 1095 as the first of an ongoing succession of crusades and, thus, as the start of a crusading movement. But this ‘future’ was by no means apparent in the early twelfth century and the idea of crusading had yet to coalesce.

To some extent, this relative lack of enthusiasm and limited ideological refinement can be explained by mitigating factors. The papacy’s ability to harness and develop crusading was curtailed by a succession of crippling upheavals: the onset of a papal schism between 1124 and 1138 that saw the appointment of a number of alternative anti-popes; and the mounting pressure upon Rome from the rival powers of imperial Germany to the north and the emerging Norman kingdom of Sicily to the south. Some of these problems lingered at the time of the Second Crusade, and the pope was not even able to enter Rome in 1145. Similar convulsions afflicted the secular laity. Germany was racked by internal rivalry, with two dynasties, the Hohenstaufen and the Welfs, challenging for power. England, meanwhile, was unhinged by civil war during the tumultuous reign of King Stephen (1135–54), the son of the First Crusader Stephen of Blois. Under the Capetian dynasty, the French monarchy enjoyed greater stability, but only now was beginning to manifest its authority beyond the heartlands of royal territory centred on Paris.

One feature of crusade ideology may also have served to constrain recruitment. Preachers of the First Crusade may have played upon a sense of spiritual or social obligation to repatriate the Holy Land, but at an essential level the 1095 expedition resonated with Latin Christians because it was presented as an intensely personal devotional enterprise. Thousands took the cross seeking redemption of sin through the pursuit of holy war. Crusading was driven by religious devotion, but a self-serving form of devotion. Given the particularly arduous, dangerous, frightening and expensive nature of armed pilgrimages to the East, participation in a crusade represented an extreme path to salvation. For many, more obvious and immediate penitential activities–prayer, almsgiving, localised pilgrimage–were often preferable. The decades and centuries to come would prove that, in general, only seismic catastrophes married to forceful preaching and active involvement of the upper aristocracy could produce large-scale crusades.

This should not lead us to imagine that there were no crusades between 1101 and 1145. Some members of the Church, and of the laity, undoubtedly made sporadic attempts to replicate or imitate the First Crusade in this period, preaching or participating in ventures that included some, or all, of the features that would eventually become more stable elements in the make-up of a crusade: papal promulgation; the taking of a defined vow and the symbol of the cross; the promise of a spiritual reward (or indulgence) in return for military service. But, at the same time, the fundamental nature of crusading remained relatively fluid and ill defined. Basic questions such as who was empowered to invoke a crusade, what rewards could be offered to participants and against whom this form of sanctified warfare might be waged were left largely unresolved.

Two significant crusades to the Holy Land were launched in the 1120s, but while the Venetian crusade (1122–4) was certainly enacted by Pope Calixtus II, the Damascus expedition of 1129 appears to have been preached in Europe by Hugh of Payns with little or no papal involvement. In this same period, crusades were initiated in geographical regions outside the Levant and against enemies other than Near Eastern Muslims. Long established as a theatre of Muslim–Christian conflict, Iberia soon witnessed campaigns akin to crusades. The leader of a joint Catalan and Pisan offensive against the Balearic Islands (1113–15) bore the sign of the cross on his shoulder, while the pope offered a full remission of sins to all those who died in the 1118 Aragonese attack on Zaragoza. Calixtus II, who had been papal legate to Spain and was thus familiar with Iberian affairs, took a major step towards formalising the role of crusading on the peninsula. He issued a papal letter in April 1123 encouraging recruits to take a vow to fight in Catalonia with ‘the sign of the cross on their clothes’ in return for ‘the same remission of sins that we conceded to the defenders of the eastern Church’.

Non-Muslims were likewise targeted. Bohemond of Taranto’s crusade (1106–8) was waged against Christian Byzantium. In 1135 Pope Innocent II even sought to extend crusade privileges to those fighting against his political enemies, affirming that his allies would be granted ‘the same remission…which Pope Urban decreed at the council of Clermont for all who set out for Jerusalem to free the Christians’.

For all these references to the ‘remission of sins’ awarded to the First Crusaders, the actual formulation of the spiritual rewards being offered remained vague and equivocal. Questions that might trouble theologians and even warriors–Would participation remit all sins or only those confessed? Was martyrdom guaranteed to all those who died on crusade?–had yet to be answered definitively. It was Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux and supporter of the Templars, who dealt with one of the thorniest theological consequences of crusading. With the preaching of the First Crusade, the papacy had, in a sense, unwittingly opened Pandora’s Box. The call for a crusading army to manifest God’s divine will on earth might suggest that God actually needed man, and therefore could not be truly omnipotent–a train of thought that obviously had explosive potential. Bernard countered this problem with typical intellectual agility. He argued that God only pretended to be in need as an act of charity, deliberately engineering the threat to the Holy Land so that Christians could have another chance to tap into this new mode of spiritual purification. In one step the abbot defended the idea of crusading and promoted its devotional efficacy. Bernard would play a central role in the promulgation of the Second Crusade, but in the first instance the work of launching the expedition was undertaken by others.
⁹⁸

LAUNCHING THE SECOND CRUSADE

In 1145 the Levantine Christian petitions for European aid targeted both ecclesiastical and secular leaders. One recipient of the appeals was Pope Eugenius III, a former Cistercian monk and protégé of Bernard of Clairvaux, who had just ascended to the papal office that February. Eugenius’ situation was not ideal. From the start of his pontificate, the new pope was mired in a long-running dispute with the people of Rome over the secular governance of the city, and he was forced to live in exile. Even as Eugenius laid plans to launch a grand new crusade, he was forced to spend most of 1145 in Viterbo, some fifty miles north of the Lateran Palace.

Emissaries from Outremer also visited Louis VII, the Capetian monarch of France–one of the heartlands of crusade enthusiasm. Now in his mid-twenties, Louis had been crowned in 1137, bringing a lease of youthful vitality to the throne. He has often been described, rather blandly, as pious. In fact, Louis’ early reign had been marked by heated disputes with Rome over French ecclesiastical appointments and a caustic squabble with the count of Champagne. Pope Eugenius’ predecessor actually placed Capetian lands under papal interdict (temporarily excommunicating the entire realm). In 1143, at the height of the conflict with Champagne, Louis’ troops took the brutal step of burning to the ground a church in Vitry containing more than 1,000 people, an atrocity for which the king seems to have shown remorse. By 1145 the young king had been reconciled with the papacy, and his brand of fevered religious devotion possessed a penitential streak. Moved by the news of Edessa’s fate, he embraced enthusiastically the idea of leading an army to relieve the crusader states.

Eugenius III and Louis VII seem to have laid coordinated plans to initiate a crusade, but to begin with these fell flat. The papal curia (administrative court) drafted an encyclical (general letter of proclamation) announcing a new call to arms on 1 December 1145, but this did not reach Louis in time for his Christmas court at Bourges (in central France). When the monarch declared his intention to take the cross and wage war in the Holy Land, the response was muted. Eugenius III reissued his encyclical, in almost identical form, three months later, and its message was broadcast to much greater effect at a second Capetian assembly in Vézelay at Easter 1146. From that moment the spark of crusading passion was reignited and for the next year or more it burned its way across Europe. The pope’s official letter–conventionally known as
Quantum praedecessores
(the Latin words with which it began)–was essential to this process. Widely circulated throughout the Latin West between 1146 and 1147, recited at numerous public assemblies and mass rallies, it became the template for the preaching of the Second Crusade across Europe. The encyclical set out to fulfil two interlocking objectives: to define official papal thinking on the expedition, in particular specifying who, it was hoped, would participate and what privileges and rewards they would receive; and to stimulate recruitment by establishing the crusade’s causes and appeal.

Half a century earlier, Pope Urban II had initiated the First Crusade with his sermon at Clermont, but because no exact record of this speech survives, attempts to reconstruct his ideas and intentions involve a degree of speculation. In contrast, while the genesis of the Second Crusade cannot be traced to a single grand address, extant copies of
Quantum praedecessores
do allow us to explore the thinking behind the expedition and the manner in which it was promoted with far greater precision.

One striking fact is immediately apparent from Eugenius’ encyclical–the memory of the First Crusade was central to his vision of this new campaign. Seeking both to legitimate and to empower his own call to arms, the Pope made repeated references to the 1095 expedition. Eugenius stated that he was inspired to summon the Second Crusade by the example of ‘our predecessor of happy memory, Pope Urban’ and made it clear that the spiritual rewards now on offer were exactly the same as ‘those instituted by our aforesaid predecessor’. Some of the ideas employed by Urban at Clermont were likewise echoed. Eugenius took care to emphasise repeatedly that he had a divine mandate, ‘the authority given us by God’, to initiate this holy war. He also depicted the crusade as a just response to Muslim aggression: affirming that Edessa had been ‘taken by the enemies of the cross of Christ’ describing how clerics had been killed and saintly relics ‘trampled under the infidels’ feet’. These events were said to pose a ‘great danger [to] all Christianity’.

At the same time, the themes of recollection and past precedent were redeployed in
Quantum praedecessores
in a manner that was both innovative and extraordinarily effective. The Pope declared that Christians should be moved to take the cross by the memory of their forebears who had sacrificed ‘their own blood’ to liberate Jerusalem ‘from the filth of the pagans’. ‘Those things acquired by the efforts of your fathers [should be] vigorously defended by you’, he exhorted, for, if not, ‘the bravery of the fathers will have proved to be diminished in the sons.’ This potent imagery harnessed the collective memory of the First Crusade and sought to tap into notions of honour and familial obligation.

While explicitly projecting this new campaign as a recreation of the First Crusade, Eugenius’ encyclical actually adjusted or developed many of Urban II’s ideas. Enlisting the right type of crusaders (namely, those capable of fighting) in sufficient numbers had been an obvious problem from the start. The 1095 expedition was presented as a form of pilgrimage, but because this penitential practice was traditionally voluntary and open to all, the papacy found it difficult to restrict the number of non-combatant recruits–from women and children to monks and paupers. Crusades in the early twelfth century, meanwhile, had struggled to attract mass recruitment. By the 1140s there was an evident tension between the popular, ecstatic element of crusading and the increasing push towards prescribed definition and papal control. The Church would wrestle with this conundrum for decades to come, seeking to contain and direct enthusiasm without extinguishing fervour.
Quantum praedecessores
made a rather half-hearted attempt to address this issue, counselling that ‘those who are on God’s side and especially the more powerful and the nobles’ should join the crusade, but the difficulty of balancing selectivity and mass appeal remained largely unresolved.