It had always been the custom in Aleppo for people to gather in small groups to hold lively discussions of the dangers threatening them at critical moments in their history. The notables would get together in the great mosque, sitting cross-legged on the red carpets, sometimes in the courtyard, in the shade of the minaret that overlooked the ochre-coloured houses of the city. The merchants would meet during the day, along the old colonnaded avenue built by the Romans, which ran across Aleppo from west to east, from the Gate of Antioch to the forbidden quarter of the citadel, where the sullen Riḍwān resided. This major artery had long been closed to wagons and processions. The roadway had been taken over by hundreds of little booths in which cloth, amber, trinkets, dates, pistachio nuts, and condiments were amassed. The avenue and its neighbouring alleyways were covered with a wooden ceiling to protect passers-by from sun and rain; at the intersections, it rose up into high stucco domes. At the corners of the alleys, especially those leading to the souks of the makers of straw mats, the blacksmiths, and the sellers of wood for heating, the Aleppans would gossip before the many low-class eating houses. Amidst a persistent odour of boiling oil, grilled meat, and spices, these places offered meals at moderate prices: chunks of grilled mutton, doughnuts, lentils. Families of modest means would buy their food ready-made in the souks; only the rich cooked at home. Not far from the food stalls, the characteristic tinkle of the sharab sellers could be heard; these cold drinks of concentrated fruit the Franj would later borrow from the Arabs in liquid and frozen forms, calling them ‘sirops’ and ‘sorbets’.
In the afternoon people of all walks of life would meet in the ḥammām, or public bath, that special meeting place where one cleansed oneself before the sunset prayer. As night fell, the citizens would desert the centre of Aleppo to return to their own quarters, away from drunken soldiers. There too, news and rumours would circulate, passed on by men and women alike, and ideas would wend their way through the city. Anger, enthusiasm, discouragement would daily stir this hive, which had buzzed in just this way for more than three millennia.
Ibn al-Khashāb was the most respected man in the quarters of Aleppo. Born of a family of rich wood-merchants, he played a primordial role in the administration of the city. As a Shi‘i qāḍī he enjoyed great religious and moral authority; he was responsible for resolving disputes involving the people and property of his community, the largest in Aleppo. In addition, he was a ra’īs, or chief of the city, which made him simultaneously provost of the merchants, representative of the interests of the population before the king, and commandant of the urban militia.
But Ibn al-Khashāb’s activities went beyond the already wide competence of his official functions. Ever since the arrival of the Franj, he had, through his numerous coterie, encouraged a patriotic and pietistic current of public opinion that demanded a firmer attitude against the invaders. He was not afraid to tell King Riḍwān what he thought of his conciliatory, even servile, policy. When Tancred obliged the Seljuk monarch to affix a cross to the minaret of the great mosque, the qāḍī organized a riot and had the crucifix transferred to the Sainte Helène Cathedral. Since then, Riḍwān had avoided any conflict with the irascible qāḍī. Entrenched in the citadel with his harem and bodyguard, with his own mosque, his own source of water, and his grassy race-course, the Turkish king preferred to spare the sensibilities of his subjects. So long as his own authority was not challenged, he tolerated public opinion.
In 1111, however, Ibn al-Khashāb turned up at the citadel to tell Riḍwān once again of the citizens’ extreme discontent. The faithful, he explained, were scandalized at having to pay tribute to infidels implanted in the land of Islam, and the merchants’ businesses had been in peril ever since the intolerable prince of Antioch had seized control of all the routes from Aleppo to the Mediterranean, for he was holding caravans to ransom. Since the city could no longer defend itself with its own resources, the qāḍī proposed that a delegation of Sunni and Shi‘i notables, merchants and men of religion, be sent to Baghdad to seek the aid of Sultan Muḥammad. Riḍwān had no desire to involve his Seljuk cousin in the affairs of his kingdom. He still preferred to deal with Tancred. But in view of the futility of all missions hitherto dispatched to the ‘Abbasid capital, he felt that the least risky course of action would be to accede to his subjects’ request.
In this he was mistaken. Against all expectations, the Baghdad demonstrations of February 1111 produced just the effect sought by Ibn al-Khashāb. The sultan, who had just been informed of the fall of Saida and the treaty imposed on the Aleppans, felt growing unease at the ambitions of the Franj. Yielding to Ibn al-Khashāb’s entreaties, he ordered the latest in the line of governors of Mosul, the emir Mawdūd, to march without delay at the head of a powerful army and to rescue Aleppo. When Ibn al-Khashāb returned to Aleppo and informed Riḍwān of the success of his mission, the king pretended to rejoice, while praying that nothing would come of it. He even informed his cousin of his eagerness to participate in the jihād at his side. But in July, when he was told that the sultan’s troops were actually approaching the city, he could no longer conceal his consternation. He ordered the gates of the city to be barricaded, arrested Ibn al-Khashāb and his major supporters, and imprisoned them in the citadel. The Turkish soldiers were ordered to patrol the residential quarters day and night to prevent any contact between the populace and the ‘enemy’. The sequel of events was to justify Riḍwān’s volte-face, at least in part. Deprived of the supplies the king was supposed to procure for them, the sultan’s troops took their revenge by savagely plundering the environs of Aleppo. Then, following dissension between Mawdūd and the other emirs, the army disintegrated without fighting a single battle.
Mawdūd returned to Syria two years later, under orders from the sultan to assemble all the Muslim princes, except Riḍwān, against the Franj. Since Aleppo was off limits to him, he quite naturally established his general headquarters in Damascus, that other great city, in preparation for a large-scale offensive against the Kingdom of Jerusalem. His host, the atabeg Tughtigin, pretended to be thrilled by the honour that the sultan’s envoy had thus bestowed upon him, but in fact he was as terrified as Riḍwān had been. He feared that Mawdūd sought only to take over his capital, and resented the emir’s every deed as a threat to his own future.
On 2 October 1113, the Damascene chronicler tells us, the emir Mawdūd left his camp, situated near the Gate of Iron, one of the eight entrances to the city. He walked, as he did every day, to the Umayyad mosque, in the company of the lame atabeg.
When the prayer was over and Mawdūd had performed several supplementary devotions, they both departed, Tughtigin walking ahead out of respect for the emir. They were surrounded by soldiers, guards, and militiamen bearing arms of all varieties; the slender sabres, sharp épées, scimitars, and unsheathed daggers gave an impression of thick undergrowth. All around them, crowds pressed forward to admire their arsenal and their magnificence. When they reached the courtyard of the mosque, a man emerged from the crowd and approached the emir Mawdūd as if to pray God on his behalf and to ask ạlms of him. Suddenly he seized the belt of his mantle and struck him twice with his dagger, just above the navel. The atabeg Tughtigin took a few steps backwards, and his companions quickly surrounded him. As for Mawdūd, who never lost his head, he walked as far as the north gate of the mosque and then collapsed. A surgeon was summoned and managed to suture some of the wounds, but the emir died several hours later, may God have mercy upon him!
Who killed the governor of Mosul on the very eve of his offensive against the Franj? Tughtigin lost no time in accusing Riḍwān and his friends of the Assassins sect. But most contemporaries believed that no one but the master of Damascus himself could have armed the killer. According to Ibn al-Athīr, King Baldwin was so shocked by the murder that he sent Tughtigin a particularly contemptuous message: A nation that kills its leader in the house of its God deserves to be annihilated. As for Sultan Muḥammad, he howled with rage when he
learned of the death of his lieutenant. He considered the heinous crime a personal insult, and he decided to bring all the Syrian leaders into line once and for all, those of Aleppo as well as those of Damascus. He raised an army of several tens of thousands of soldiers commanded by the best officers of the Seljuk clan and curtly ordered all the Muslim princes to join it in its sacred duty of waging jihād against the Franj.
When the sultan’s powerful expedition arrived in central Syria in the spring of 1115, a great surprise awaited it. Baldwin of Jerusalem and Tughtigin of Damascus stood side by side, supported not only by their own troops but also by those of Antioch, Aleppo, and Tripoli. The princes of Syria, Muslims and Franj alike, felt equally threatened by the sultan, and they had decided to join forces. Within several months, the Seljuk army was forced shamefully to withdraw. Muḥammad swore that never again would he concern himself with the Frankish problem. He kept his word.
While the Muslim princes were thus offering fresh evidence of their utter irresponsibility, two Arab cities demonstrated, in the space of a few months, that it was nevertheless still possible to resist the foreign occupation. With the surrender of Saida in December 1110 the Franj were masters of the entire littoral, the sāḥil, from Sinai in the south to ‘the land of the son of the Armenian’, north of Antioch. With the exception, however, of two coastal enclaves: Ascalon and Tyre. Encouraged by his successive victories, Baldwin decided to settle their fate without delay. The Ascalon region was noted for the cultivation of reddish onions, called ‘ascalonians’, a word the Franj distorted into échalote (shallot). But its real importance was military, for it served as the assembly point for Egyptian troops during every attempted expedition against the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
In 1111 Baldwin paraded his army before the walls of the city. Shams al-Khalīfa (‘Sun of the Caliphate’), the Fatimid governor of Ascalon—more inclined to commerce than to war, was Ibn al-Qalānisi’s judgement of him—was terrified by the Occidentals’ show of force. Without offering any resistance whatsoever, he agreed to pay them a tribute of seven thousand dinars. The Palestinian population of the city, humiliated by this unexpected capitulation, sent emissaries to Cairo to ask that the governor be removed. Upon learning this, and fearing that the vizier al-Afḍal meant to chastise him for his cowardice, Shams al-Khalīfa tried to ward off that eventuality by expelling the Egyptian functionaries and placing himself squarely under the protection of the Franj. Baldwin sent him three hundred men, who took charge of the citadel of Ascalon.
Though scandalized, the inhabitants did not lose heart. Secret meetings were held in the mosques. Plots were hatched, until one day in July 1111, as Shams al-Khalīfa was leaving the grounds of his residence on horseback, a group of conspirators attacked him, riddling his body with dagger-strokes. That was the signal for revolt. Armed citizens, joined by Berber soldiers of the governor’s guard, threw themselves against the citadel. The Frankish warriors were hunted down in the towers and along the walls. None of Baldwin’s three hundred men survived. The city was to escape domination by the Franj for another forty years.
Seeking revenge for his humiliation at the hands of the Ascalon rebels, Baldwin turned against Tyre, the ancient Phoenician city from which Prince Cadmus, brother of Europa (who was to give her name to the continent of the Franj), had set out to spread the alphabet throughout the Mediterranean. The impressive walls of Tyre still recalled its glorious history. The city was surrounded on three sides by the sea, and only a narrow coastal road built by Alexander the Great linked it to the mainland. Reputed to be impregnable, in 1111 it was home to a large number of refugees from the recently occupied territories. Their role in the defence of the city was primordial, as Ibn al-Qalānisi, whose account is clearly based on first-hand testimony, reports.
The Franj had erected a mobile tower to which they affixed a battering-ram of redoubtable force. The walls were shaken, some of the stones crumbled, and the besieged found themselves on the brink of disaster. It was then that a sailor from Tripoli, who was acquainted with metallurgy and had some experience in the affairs of war, undertook to manufacture iron grapnels designed to grip the battering-ram from the top and sides, by means of ropes held by the defenders. The latter then pulled so vigorously that the wooden tower was wrenched off balance. On several occasions, the Franj had to break their own battering-ram to prevent the tower from collapsing.
Renewing their attempts, the attackers succeeded in drawing their tower near the walls and fortifications, which they then proceeded to hammer with a new battering-ram sixty cubits long, whose head was a chunk of cast iron weighing more than twenty pounds. But the Tripolitanian sailor did not give up.
With the aid of several skilfully installed joists, the Damascene chronicler continues, he had jars of excrement and rubbish raised high and poured over the Franj. Choked by the odours enveloping them, the latter could no longer handle their battering-ram properly. The sailor then had grape baskets and large straw trunks filled with oil, bitumen, firewood, resin, and the bark of reeds. After setting them on fire, he tilted them onto the Franj tower. The top of the tower burst into flames, and as the Franj hurried to extinguish the blaze with vinegar and water, the Tripolitanian quickly hurled other baskets filled with boiling oil to feed the flames. Fire now swept through the whole upper part of the tower and spread little by little to the lower levels, feeding on the wood of which the structure was made.
Unable to bring the fire under control, the attackers finally evacuated the tower and fled. The defenders took advantage of the situation to make a sortie, seizing a large number of abandoned weapons.
When they saw this, Ibn al-Qalānisi concludes triumphantly, the Franj lost heart and beat a retreat, after setting fire to the barracks they had erected in their camp.
It was the twelfth of April 1112. After 132 days of siege, the population of Tyre had inflicted a stinging defeat on the Franj.
After the Baghdad riots, the Ascalon insurrection, and the resistance in Tyre, a wind of revolt began to surge through the region. A growing number of Arabs felt an equally intense hatred for the invaders and for the majority of the Muslim leaders, whom they accused of negligence or even treason. In Aleppo more than elsewhere, this attitude soon went beyond a mere change of mood. Under the leadership of the qāḍī Ibn al-Khashāb, the citizens decided to take their fate into their own hands. They chose their own leaders and forced them to carry out the policy they wanted.
Admittedly, many defeats, many disappointments, were yet to come. The expansion of the Franj was not over, and their arrogance knew no bounds. But from this point on, a ground swell would slowly rise, beginning in the streets of Aleppo. Little by little it would inundate the Arab East, eventually carrying to power just, courageous, and devoted men who would be capable of reconquering the lost territory.
Before that, however, Aleppo was to pass through the most erratic period of its long history. At the end of November 1113 Ibn al-Khashāb learned that Riḍwān lay seriously ill at his palace in the citadel. He gathered his friends together and told them to prepare for action. The king died on 10 December. As soon as the news was known, groups of armed militiamen fanned through the quarters of the city, occupied the major buildings, and seized many of Riḍwān’s supporters, notably the adherents of the Assassins sect, who were immediately put to death for their collaboration with the Frankish enemy.
The qāḍī’s aim was not to seize power himself but to make an impression on the new king, Alp Arslan, the son of Riḍwān, so as to induce him to follow a policy different from that of his father. At first this young man of sixteen, who stuttered so badly that he was nicknamed ‘the Mute’, seemed to endorse the militant stance of Ibn al-Khashāb. With unconcealed delight, he had all Riḍwān’s collaborators arrested and beheaded forthwith. The qāḍī became uneasy. He urged the young monarch not to subject the city to a bloodbath but simply to punish the traitors so as to set an example. But Alp Arslan paid him no heed. He executed two of his own brothers, several
officers, a few servants, and in general anyone to whom he took a dislike. Little by little, the citizenry realized the horrible truth: the king was mad! The best available source dealing with this period is the chronicle by Kamāl al-Dīn, an Aleppan author-diplomat, written a century after the events but based on the testimony of contemporaries.
One day, he recounts, Alp Arslan assembled some emirs and notables and took them to visit a sort of cellar dug into the citadel. Once they were inside, he asked them, ‘What would you say if I had all your heads cut off right here?’
‘We are slaves subject to your majesty’s orders’, answered one of the unfortunates, pretending to consider the threat a good joke.
And it was thus, in fact, that they escaped death.
It was not long before the demented young king was being given a wide berth. Only one man still dared to approach him, his eunuch Lu'lu', ‘Pearls’. But finally he too began to fear for his life. In September 1114 he killed his sleeping master and installed another of Riḍwān’s sons, aged six, on the throne.
Aleppo was sinking deeper into anarchy day by day. While uncontrollable groups of slaves and soldiers cut one another to pieces in the citadel, armed citizens patrolled the streets of the city to protect themselves against marauders. During this initial period, the Franj of Antioch did not seek to take advantage of the chaos paralysing Aleppo. Tancred had died a year before Riḍwān, and his successor Sir Roger, whom Kamāl al-Dīn calls Sirjal, lacked sufficient self-assurance to engage in action of any real scope. But the respite was of brief duration. In 1116 Roger of Antioch, now sure of his control over all the routes to Aleppo, occupied the major fortresses ringing the city one after another. In the absence of any resistance, he even managed to impose a tax on every Muslim pilgrim leaving for Mecca.