Ismā‘īl was trapped in a vicious circle. Every execution augmented his fear of fresh vengeance, and he ordered yet other death sentences in an effort to protect himself. When he realized that things could not go on much longer, he decided to hand his city over to Zangī and to withdraw to the Sarkhad fortress. Now, for years the people of Damascus had heartily detested the ruler of Aleppo. Their hatred dated back to the end of 1129, when Zangī had written to Būri inviting him to take part in an expedition against the Franj. The lord of Damascus had quickly agreed, and dispatched five hundred cavalry commanded by his best officers and accompanied by his own son, the unfortunate Sawinj. After greeting them respectfully, Zangī had disarmed and imprisoned them all, informing Būri that if he ever dared oppose him, the lives of the hostages would be in danger. It was not until two years later that Sawinj was released.
In 1135 the Damascenes still remembered this betrayal, and when the city’s dignitaries got wind of Ismā‘īl’s designs, they resolved to oppose them by any means necessary. Meetings of the emirs, notables, and principal slaves were held; they all wanted to save both their lives and their city. A group of conspirators decided to explain the situation to Ismā‘īl’s mother, the princess Zumurrud, ‘Emerald’.
She was horrified at what she heard, the chronicler of Damascus reports. She summoned her son and upbraided him severely. Her desire to do good, her profound religious sentiments, and her intelligence then led her to conceive a way to extirpate the evil at its roots and to redress the situation of Damascus and its inhabitants. She pored over the affair just as a man of good sense and experience would have done, examining things lucidly. She could find no remedy for the maleficence of her son except to dispose of him and thus to put an end to the mounting disorder for which he was responsible.
The execution of her plan was not long in coming.
The princess now thought of nothing else but this project. She waited for a time when her son would be alone, without slaves or squires, and ordered his servants to cut him down mercilessly. She herself showed neither compassion nor sorrow. She then had the corpse carried somewhere in the palace where it was sure to be discovered. Everyone rejoiced at the fall of Ismā‘īl. They thanked God, praising and offering prayers for the princess.
Did Zumurrud have her own son killed to prevent him from handing Damascus over to Zangī? It is doubtful, for three years later the princess would marry this same Zangī, and would actually implore him to occupy her city. Nor would she have acted to avenge Sawinj, who was the son of another of Būri’s wives. Probably then, we must accept the explanation offered by Ibn al-Athīr: Zumurrud was the mistress of Ismā‘īl’s chief adviser, and when she learned that her son planned to kill her lover, and perhaps to punish her as well, she decided to take action.
Whatever her real motives, the princess robbed her future husband of an easy conquest, for on 30 January 1135, the day Ismā‘īl was assassinated, Zangī was already on his way to Damascus. A week later, when his army crossed the Euphrates, Zumurrud installed Maḥmūd, another of her sons, on the throne, and the populace prepared to resist Zangī actively. The atabeg, unaware of the death of Ismā‘īl, sent representatives to Damascus to examine the modalities of capitulation. They were politely received, of course, but were not told of the latest developments. Furious, Zangī refused to turn back. He set up camp north-east of the city and instructed his scouts to find out where and how he could attack. But he soon realized that the defenders were determined to fight to the bitter end. They were led by one Mu‘īn al-Dīn ‘Unar, a wily and stubborn Turkish officer and old comrade-in-arms of Tughtigin who was to be a thorn in Zangī’s side more than once in years to come. After several skirmishes, the atabeg decided to seek a compromise. As a face-saving gesture, the leader of the besieged city paid him homage and recognized his suzerainty, which remained, however, purely nominal.
The atabeg left Damascus in the middle of March. To raise the morale of his troops, who had found this useless campaign trying, he immediately led them north and, with stunning alacrity, seized four Frankish strongholds, among them the infamous Ma‘arra. In spite of these exploits, his prestige was tarnished. Not until two years later was he able, through a striking action, to bury the memory of his setback at Damascus. Paradoxically, Mu‘īn al-Dīn ‘Unar was to be, unwittingly, the man who offered Zangī the opportunity to redeem himself.
7
An Emir Among Barbarians
In June 1137 Zangī arrived, with an impressive array of siege machinery, in the vineyards surrounding Homs, the principal city of central Syria and traditionally an object of contention between Aleppo and Damascus. At the time, the Damascenes controlled it; indeed, the governor of the city was none other than old Mu‘īn al-Dīn ‘Unar. When he saw the catapults and mangonels being set up by his enemy, Mu‘īn al-Dīn realized that he would be unable to resist for long. He arranged to send word to the Franj that he planned to capitulate. The knights of Tripoli, who had no desire to see Zangī establish a base a mere two days’ march from their city, set out to meet him. ‘Unar’s stratagem met with complete success: fearing that he might be forced to fight on two fronts, the atabeg concluded a hasty truce with his old enemy and turned against the Franj. He decided to lay siege to their most powerful fortress in the region, Bārin. The uneasy knights of Tripoli called upon King Fulk of Jerusalem to come to their rescue, and he hastened to join them with his army. Thus it was that the first important battle between Zangī and the Franj took place before the walls of Bārin, in a cultivated, terraced valley. It is perhaps surprising that this was the first such engagement, for the atabeg had been ruler of Aleppo for more than nine years.
The battle was brief but decisive. Within a few hours the Occidentals, exhausted by their long forced march, were crushed by overwhelming numbers and were cut to pieces. Only the king and a few members of his entourage managed to take refuge in the fortress. Fulk had just enough time to send a message to Jerusalem appealing for reinforcements when, as Ibn al-Athīr relates, Zangī cut off all communications, allowing no news to filter through; the besieged no longer knew what was happening in their country, so strict was the control of the routes.
Such a blockade would have had no effect whatever on the Arabs. For centuries they had used carrier-pigeons to convey messages from town to town. Every army on the march carried pigeons that had been raised in various Muslim cities and strongholds. They had been trained always to return to their nests of origin. It was therefore enough to scribble a message, roll it up, attach it to a pigeon’s leg, and release the bird, which would then fly, much faster than the swiftest charger, to announce victory, defeat, or the death of a prince, to call for assistance or to encourage resistance among a beleaguered garrison. As the Arab mobilization against the Franj became better organized, a regular pigeon-post service was established between Damascus, Cairo, Aleppo, and other cities, the state even paying salaries to the people in charge of raising and training these birds.
In fact, it was during their stay in the Orient that the Franj were initiated into the art of raising and training carrier-pigeons, which would later become something of a fad in their home countries. At the time of the siege of Bārin, however, they knew nothing of this means of communication, whereas Zangī was able to take advantage of it. The atabeg began by stepping up the pressure on the besieged, but then, after bitter negotiations, he offered them advantageous terms of surrender: they would hand over the fortress and pay fifty thousand dinars; in exchange, he would let them leave in peace. Fulk and his men surrendered and fled at a gallop, delighted to have got off so lightly. Shortly after leaving Bārin, they encountered the bulk of the reinforcements that were coming to their aid, and they regretted their decision, but it was too late. This had happened, according to Ibn al-Athīr, only because the Franj had been completely cut off from the outside world.
Zangī was especially pleased with his resolution of the Bārin affair, for he had just received some particularly alarming news:
the Byzantine emperor John II Comnenus, who had succeeded his father Alexius in 1118, was en route to northern Syria with tens of thousands of men. As soon as Fulk departed Bārin, the atabeg leapt on his mount and rushed to Aleppo. This city, a special target of the Rūm in the past, was seething. In anticipation of an attack, the citizens had begun to empty the trenches around the city walls. (In peacetime people had the bad habit of dumping their rubbish in them.) But emissaries of the basileus soon arrived to reassure Zangī: their objective was not Aleppo but Antioch, the Frankish city to which the Rūm had always laid claim. Indeed the atabeg soon learned, not without satisfaction, that Antioch was already under siege, being bombarded with catapults. Leaving the Christians to their own disputes, Zangī turned back to besiege Homs, where ‘Unar continued to hold out against him.
Rūm and Franj, however, reconciled their differences more quickly than expected. To placate the basileus, the Occidentals promised to restore Antioch to Constantinople, while in return John Comnenus promised to deliver several Muslim cities of Syria to them. A new war of conquest was launched in March 1138. The emperor’s lieutenants were two Frankish commanders, Joscelin II, the new count of Edessa, and a knight by the name of Raymond, who had just taken charge of the principality of Antioch by marrying Constance, the eight-year-old daughter of Bohemond II and Alix.
In April the allies laid siege to Shayzar, bringing eighteen catapults and mangonels into the battle. The old emir Sultan Ibn Munqidh, who had been governor of the city even before the start of the Frankish invasion, scarcely seemed capable of resisting the joint forces of the Rūm and the Franj. According to Ibn al-Athīr, the allies selected Shayzar as their target because they hoped that Zangī would not bother to defend with any vigour a city that did not belong to him. They did not know the man. The Turk organized and directed the resistance pesonally. In fact, the battle of Shayzar was an occasion for him to display his admirable qualities as a man of state more clearly than ever.
In just a few weeks he turned the entire Middle East upside down. After dispatching messengers to Anatolia, where they convinced the successors of Danishmend to attack Byzantine territory, he sent agitators to Baghdad to organize a riot similar to that which Ibn al-Khashāb had fomented in 1111, thus forcing Sultan Mas‘ūd to send troops to Shayzar. He then wrote to all the emirs of Syria and Jazīra calling upon them, with appropriate accompanying threats, to commit all their forces to driving back this new invasion. The army of the atabeg himself, far less numerous than that of the enemy, avoided any frontal attack and instead started to harass the enemy. Meanwhile Zangī initiated an intense correspondence with the basileus and the Frankish commanders. He ‘informed’ the emperor—and this was in fact true—that his allies feared him and were impatiently awaiting his departure from Syria. He then sent messages to the Franj, in particular to Joscelin of Edessa and Raymond of Antioch: Do you not understand, he asked them, that if the Rūm occupied a single stronghold in Syria, they would soon seize all your cities? He dispatched numerous agents, most of them Christians of Syria, to mingle among the rank-and-file Byzantines and Franj. Their task was to spread demoralizing rumours about the approach of gigantic armies coming to the rescue from Persia, Iraq, and Anatolia.
This propaganda had its effect, especially among the Franj. While the basileus, wearing his golden helmet, personally directed the firing of the catapults, the lords of Edessa and Antioch sat in their tents and played interminable games of dice. This pastime, popular back in Pharaonic Egypt, was equally widespread throughout East and West in the twelfth century. The Arabs called it al-zahr, a word the Franj adopted to designate not the game itself, but chance (hasard).
It was a resounding victory for Zangī. The atabeg now appeared as a saviour throughout the Arab world, where the alliance of the Rūm and the Franj had caused great dread. Naturally, he was now determined to use his prestige to seek a quick solution to a number of problems that had been gnawing at him, in the first place the question of Homs. At the end of May, as soon as the battle of Shayzar ended, Zangī reached a curious agreement with Damascus. He would marry the princess Zumurrud and receive the city of Homs as a dowry. Three months later, the mother who had murdered her own son arrived with an entourage to join formally with her new husband. Guests at the ceremony included representatives of the sultan and of the caliphs of Baghdad and Cairo, and even ambassadors sent by the Rūm, who, having experienced Zangī’s displeasure, had decided to maintain more friendly relations with him.
Now that he had become master of Mosul, Aleppo, and all of central Syria, the atabeg set himself the objective of taking Damascus too, with the aid of his new wife. He hoped that she would be able to convince her son Maḥmūd to hand over his capital without a fight. The princess hesitated, stalled. Once he found that he could not rely on her, Zangī abandoned her. But in July 1139, while in Ḥarrān, he received an urgent message from Zumurrud: Maḥmūd had just been assassinated, stabbed to death in his bed by three of his slaves. The princess begged her husband to march on Damascus without delay to take the city and punish her son’s murderers. The atabeg set out immediately. Although not indifferent to the tears of his wife, he mainly believed that the death of Maḥmūd could be used finally to unite all Syria under his authority.
That was to reckon without the immortal ‘Unar, who had returned to Damascus after the cession of Homs and had taken personal charge of the city’s affairs upon the death of Maḥmūd. Expecting an offensive by Zangī, Mu‘īn al-Dīn quickly worked out a secret plan to deal with it. For the moment, however, he left the plan in abeyance and saw to the city’s defence.
Zangī did not march directly on the city he coveted. He began by attacking the ancient Roman town of Baalbek, the only agglomeration of any importance still held by the Damascenes. His intention was to encircle the Syrian metropolis and simultaneously to demoralize its defenders. In August he set up fourteen mangonels around Baalbek, which he then pounded relentlessly, hoping that he would be able to take the city in just a few days and then begin the siege of Damascus before summer was out. Baalbek itself capitulated with little resistance, but the defenders of the citadel, built with stones taken from an ancient temple of the Phoenician god Baal, held out for two long months. Zangī became so irritated that, when the garrison finally surrendered at the end of October after being assured that their lives would be spared, he ordered the crucifixion of thirty-seven fighters and had the commander burned alive. This act of savagery, meant to convince the Damascenes that any resistance would amount to suicide, had just the opposite effect. Solidly united behind ‘Unar, the population of the Syrian metropolis was more determined than ever to fight to the end. In any case, it would soon be winter, and Zangī could not contemplate any serious attack before spring. ‘Unar would use these few months of respite to perfect his secret plan.
In April 1140, as the atabeg stepped up his pressure and prepared for a general attack, ‘Unar decided that the time had come to implement his plan: he would ask the army of the Franj, under the command of King Fulk, to come to the rescue of Damascus. This was not to be a one-off operation, but the inauguration of a proper treaty of alliance that would last beyond the death of Zangī.
Indeed, back in 1138, ‘Unar had sent his friend the chronicler Usāmah Ibn Munqidh to Jerusalem to explore the possibility of Franco-Damascene collaboration against the master of Aleppo. Well received by the Franj, Usāmah had worked out the principles of an accord. Once embassies were established, the chronicler returned to the holy city at the beginning of 1140, carrying detailed proposals with him: the Frankish army would force Zangī to withdraw from the vicinity of Damascus; the forces of the two states would unite in the event of any fresh danger; Mu‘īn al-Dīn would pay twenty thousand dinars to defray military expenses; finally, a joint expedition would be mounted, under ‘Unar’s command, to occupy the fortress of Baniyās, which had recently fallen into the hands of one of Zangī’s vassals, and to restore it to the king of Jerusalem. As a demonstration of goo
d faith, the Damascenes would send the Franj hostages selected from the families of major city dignitaries.
In practice, all this amounted to living under a Frankish protectorate, but the population of the Syrian metropolis was resigned to it. Frightened by the atabeg’s brutal methods, they unanimously approved the treaty negotiated by ‘Unar, whose policy proved undeniably effective. Fearing that he would be caught in a pincer movement, Zangī withdrew to Baalbek, which he entrusted as a fiefdom to a reliable man, Ayyūb, father of Saladin. He then headed north with his army, promising Ayyūb that he would soon return to avenge this setback. After the departure of the atabeg, ‘Unar occupied Baniyās and handed it over to the Franj, in accordance with the terms of the treaty. He then made an official visit to the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
Usāmah, who had become the leading Damascene specialist on Frankish affairs, went with him. Fortunately for us, this emirchronicler did more than simply participate in diplomatic negotiations. He had an inquisitive mind and was a keen observer who left us unforgettable testimony about mores and daily life during the time of the Franj.