When I was visiting Jerusalem, I used to go to al-Aqṣā mosque, where my Templar friends were staying. Along one side of the building was a small oratory in which the Franj had set up a church. The Templars placed this spot at my disposal that I might say my prayers. One day I entered, said Allāhu akbar, and was about to begin my prayer, when a man, a Franj, threw himself upon me, grabbed me, and turned me toward the east, saying, ‘Thus do we pray.’ The Templars rushed forward and led him away. I then set myself to prayer once more, but this same man, seizing upon a moment of inattention, threw himself upon me yet again, turned my face to the east, and repeated once more, ‘Thus do we pray.’ Once again the Templars intervened, led him away, and apologized to me, saying, ‘He is a foreigner. He has just arrived from the land of the Franj and he has never seen anyone pray without turning to face east.’ I answered that I had prayed enough and left, stunned by the behaviour of this demon who had been so enraged at seeing me pray while facing the direction of Mecca.
If the emir Usāmah did not hesitate to call the Templars ‘my friends’, it was because he believed that their barbarian mores were gradually being refined by contact with the Orient. Among the Franj, he explains, we find some people who have come to settle among us and who have cultivated the society of the Muslims. They are far superior to those who have freshly joined them in the territories they now occupy. He considered the incident in al-Aqṣā mosque ‘an instance of the vulgarity of the Franj’. And he mentioned others as well, gathered during his frequent visits to the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
I happened to be in Tiberias one day when the Franj were celebrating one of their holidays. The knights had come out of the city to engage in a jousting tournament. They brought with them two decrepit old women whom they stood at one end of the field; at the other end was a pig, hung suspended over a rock. The knights then organized a foot-race between the two old women. Each one advanced, escorted by a group of knights who obstructed her path. The old women stumbled, fell, and picked themselves up at almost every step, amid loud bursts of laughter from the spectators. Finally, one of the old women, the first to finish, took the pig as the prize for her victory.
An emir as well-educated and refined as Usāmah was unable to appreciate this burlesque Gallic humour. But his condescending pout shrivelled into a grimace of outright disgust when he witnessed what the Franj called justice.
In Nablus, he relates, I had the opportunity to witness a curious spectacle. Two men had to meet each other in individual combat. The cause of the fight was this: some brigands among the Muslims had invaded a neighbouring village, and a farmer was suspected of having acted as their guide. He ran away, but was soon forced to return, for King Fulk had imprisoned his children. ‘Treat me fairly’, the farmer had asked him, ‘and allow me to compete against my accuser.’ The king then told the lord who had been granted this village as a fiefdom, ‘Bring the man’s adversary here.’ The lord had selected a smith who worked in the village, telling him, ‘It is you who will fight this duel.’ The possessor of the fiefdom wanted to make sure that none of his peasants would be killed, for fear that his crops would suffer. I looked at this smith. He was a strong young man, but was constantly asking for something to drink, whether he was walking or sitting. As for the accused, he was a courageous old man who stood snapping his fingers in a gesture of defiance. The viscount, governor of Nablus, approached, gave each man a lance and shield, and had the spectators form a circle around them.
The struggle was joined. The old man forced the smith back, pressed him towards the crowd, and then returned to the centre of the arena. There was an exchange of blows so violent that the rivals seemed to form a single column of blood. The fight dragged on, despite the exhortations of the viscount, who was anxious to hasten its conclusion. ‘Faster’, he shouted at them. The old man was finally exhausted, and the smith, taking advantage of his experience in handling the hammer, dealt him a blow that knocked the old man down and caused him to lose his lance. He then leapt upon him and tried to dig his fingers into his eyes, but he could not manage it, for there was too much blood. The smith then rose and finished off his opponent with a thrust of his lance. A rope was immediately wound around the neck of the corpse, which was dragged to a gallows and hanged. In this example you may see what justice is among the Franj!
The emir’s indignation was quite genuine, for justice was a serious business among the Arabs in the twelfth century. The judges, or qāḍīs, were highly respected men who were obliged to adhere to a meticulous procedure fixed by the Koran, before rendering their verdict: first came indictment, then plea, then testimony. The ‘judgement of God’ to which the Occidentals often resorted seemed a macabre farce to the Arabs. The duel described by the chronicler was only one of the forms of trial by ordeal. The test of fire was another. There was also the water torture, which Usāmah described with horror.
A large cask had been set up and filled with water. The young man who was the object of suspicion was pinioned, suspended from a rope by his shoulder-blades, and plunged into the cask. If he was innocent, they said, he would sink into the water, and they would pull him out by the rope. If he was guilty, it would be impossible for him to sink into the water. When he was thrown into the cask, the unfortunate man made every effort to descend to the bottom, but he could not manage it, and thus had to submit to the rigours of their law, may God’s curse be upon them! He was then blinded by a red-hot silver awl.
The Syrian emir’s opinion of the ‘barbarians’ was hardly modified when he discussed their science. In the twelfth century the Franj lagged far behind the Arabs in all scientific and technical fields. But it was in medicine that the gap between the developed East and the primitive West was greatest. Usāmah observed the difference.
One day, he relates, the Frankish governor of Munaytra, in the Lebanese mountains, wrote to my uncle the sultan, emir of Shayzar, asking him to send a physician to treat several urgent cases. My uncle selected one of our Christian doctors, a man named Thābit. He was gone for just a few days, and then returned home. We were all very curious to know how he had been able to cure the patients so quickly, and we besieged him with questions. Thābit answered: ‘They brought before me a knight who had an abscess on his leg and a woman suffering from consumption. I made a plaster for the knight, and the swelling opened and improved. For the woman I prescribed a diet to revive her constitution.’ But a Frankish doctor then arrived and objected, ‘This man does not know how to care for them.’ And, addressing the knight, he asked him, ‘Which do you prefer, to live with one leg or die with two?’ When the patient answered that he preferred to live with just one leg, the physician ordered, ‘Bring me a strong knight with a well-sharpened battleaxe.’ The knight and the axe soon arrived. The Frankish doctor placed the man’s leg on a chopping block, telling the new arrival, ‘Strike a sharp blow to cut cleanly.’ Before my very eyes, the man struck an initial blow, but then, since the leg was still attached, he struck a second time. The marrow of the leg spurted out and the wounded man died that very instant. As for the woman, the Frankish doctor examined her and said, ‘She has a demon in her head who has fallen in love with her. Cut her hair.’ They cut her hair. The woman then began to eat their food again, with its garlic and mustard, which aggravated the consumption. Their doctor affirmed, ‘The devil himself must have entered her head.’ Then, grasping a razor, he cut an incision in the shape of a cross, exposed the bone of the skull, and rubbed it with salt. The woman died on the spot. I then asked, ‘Have you any further need of me?’ They said no, and I returned home, having learned much that I had never known about the medicine of the Franj.
Scandalized as he was by the ignorance of the Occidentals, Usāmah was even more deeply shocked by their morals: ‘The Franj’, he wrote, ‘have no sense of honour. If one of them is walking in the street with his wife and encounters another man, that man will take his wife’s hand and draw her aside and speak to her, while the husband stands waiting for them to finish their conversa
tion. If it lasts too long, he will leave her with her interlocutor and go off!’ The emir was troubled: ‘Imagine this contradiction! These people possess neither jealousy nor honour, whereas they are so courageous. Courage, however, comes only from one’s sense of honour and from contempt for that which is evil!’
The more he learned of their ways, the more wretched did Usāmah consider the Occidentals to be. He admired nothing about them except their martial qualities. One may thus readily understand that when one of the ‘friends’ he had made among them, a knight in King Fulk’s army, proposed to take Usāmah’s young son to Europe to initiate him in the rules of chivalry, the emir politely declined the invitation, muttering under his breath that he would prefer that his son go ‘to prison rather than to the land of the Franj’. Fraternization with these foreigners had its limits. Besides, the famous collaboration between Damascus and Jerusalem, which had afforded Usāmah the unexpected opportunity to get to know the Occidentals better, soon appeared as a brief interlude. A spectacular event would now rekindle all-out war against the occupier: on Saturday 23 September 1144 the city of Edessa, capital of the oldest of the four Frankish states of the Middle East, fell into the hands of the atabeg ‘Imād al-Dīn Zangī.
If the fall of Jerusalem in July 1099 marked the climax of the Frankish invasion and the fall of Tyre in July 1124 the completion of the phase of occupation, the reconquest of Edessa has gone down in history as the capstan of the Arab riposte to the invaders and the beginning of the long march to victory.
No one expected that the occupation would be challenged in such a striking manner. Admittedly, Edessa was no more than an outpost of the Frankish presence, but its counts had succeeded in thoroughly integrating themselves into local politics. The last Western ruler of this majority-Armenian city was Joscelin II, a short, bearded man with a prominent nose, protruding eyes, and a malformed body, a man who had never been known for his courage or wisdom. But he was not detested by his subjects, primarily because his mother was Armenian, and conditions in his realm did not seem at all critical. He and his neighbours indulged in routine raids which usually ended in truces.
But the situation changed dramatically in that autumn of 1144. A clever military manoeuvre by Zangī put an end to a half century of Frankish domination in this part of the Middle East, as he scored a victory that rocked powerful and humble alike, from Persia to the far-off country of the ‘Almān’ and served as a prelude to a fresh invasion led by the greatest kings of the Franj.
The most stirring account of the conquest of Edessa was bequeathed to us by an eyewitness, the Syrian bishop Abu’ l-Faraj Basil, who was directly involved in the events. His attitude during the battle graphically illustrates the tragedy of the Oriental Christian communities to which he belonged. Since his city was under attack, Abu’ l-Faraj actively participated in its defence; but at the same time, his sympathies were more with the Muslim army than with his Western ‘protectors’, whom he did not hold in high esteem.
Count Joscelin, he relates, had gone pillaging along the banks of the Euphrates. Zangī found out. On 30 November he arrived at the walls of Edessa. His troops were as numerous as the stars in the skies. All the fields around the city were filled with them. Tents were erected everywhere, and the atabeg pitched his own to the north of the city, facing the Gate of Hours, on a hill overlooking the Church of the Confessors.
Even though it lay in a valley, Edessa was a difficult city to take, for its powerful triangular walls were solidly anchored in the hills ringing the town. But, as Abu’l-Faraj explains, Joscelin had not left any troops behind. He had only shoemakers, weavers, silk merchants, tailors, and priests. It was therefore the Frankish bishop who took charge of the defence of the city, with the help of an Armenian prelate and the chronicler himself, who, however, favoured reaching some accommodation with the atabeg.
Zangī, he writes, constantly sent peace proposals to the besieged, telling them, ‘O, unfortunate people! You can see that all hope is lost. What do you want? What can you still expect? Have pity on yourselves, your women, your homes! Act now, that your city may not be devastated and emptied of its inhabitants!’ But there was no commander in the city capable of imposing his will. Zangī was answered with stupid rodomontade and insult.
When he saw that sappers were tunnelling under the ramparts, Abu’ l-Faraj suggested writing a letter to Zangī proposing a truce, and the Frankish bishop agreed. ‘The letter was written and read to the people, but a madman, a silk merchant, reached out, grabbed the letter, and tore it up.’ Nevertheless, Zangī reiterated: ‘If you desire a truce for several days, we will accord you one, to see whether you will receive any aid. If you do not, surrender and survive!’
But no help arrived. Although Joscelin had been alerted to the offensive against his capital, he did not dare match forces with the atabeg. He preferred to camp at Tel Bāshir, expecting that troops from Antioch or Jerusalem would come to his aid.
The Turks had now dismantled the foundations of the northern wall, and in their place had erected great quantities of wood, joists and beams. They filled the interstices with naphtha, animal fat, and sulphur, so fire would spread more easily and the wall would collapse. Then, on Zangī’s orders, the fire was started. The heralds of his camp gave the call to prepare for battle, telling the soldiers to rush in through the breach as soon as the wall collapsed, promising to allow them to pillage the city at will for three days. The fire caught in the naphtha and sulphur, and soon the wood and melted fat were in flames. The northerly wind was blowing the smoke towards the defenders. In spite of its great solidity, the wall tottered, then collapsed. After losing many troops passing through the breach, the Turks penetrated the city and began massacring people indiscriminately. About six thousand inhabitants perished on that day. Women, children, and young people fled to the upper citadel to escape the massacre. They found the gate barred—the fault of the bishop of the Franj, who had told the guards, ‘Do not open the gate unless you see my face!’ Groups of people climbed up in succession, trampling one another. It was a lamentable and horrifying spectacle: about five thousand people, perhaps more, died atrociously, twisted, suffocating, pressed together into a single, compact mass.
But Zangī intervened personally to halt the killing, and then dispatched his top lieutenant to see Abu’ l-Faraj. ‘Venerable Abu’ l-Faraj’, he said, ‘we want you to swear to us, on the cross and the New Testament, that you and your community will remain loyal. You know very well that this city was a thriving metropolis during the two hundred years that the Arabs governed it. Today, the Franj have occupied it for just fifty years, and already they have ruined it. Our master ‘Imād al-Dīn Zangī is prepared to treat you well. Live in peace, be secure under his authority, and pray for his life!’
In fact, Abu’l-Faraj continued, the Syrians and Armenians were brought out of the citadel, and they all returned to their homes safe and sound. Everything was taken from the Franj, however: gold, silver, holy vases, chalices, patens, ornamented crucifixes, and great quantities of jewels. The priests, nobles, and notables were taken aside, stripped of their robes, and led away in chains to Aleppo. Of the rest, the artisans were identified, and Zangī kept them as prisoners, setting each to work at his craft. All the other Franj, about a hundred men, were executed.
When news of the reconquest of Edessa spread, the Arab world was gripped with enthusiasm. The most ambitious projects were attributed to Zangī. The refugees from Palestine and the many coastal cities in the atabeg’s entourage had already begun to speak of the reconquest of Jerusalem, an objective that would soon become the rallying cry for resistance to the Franj.
The caliph lost no time in heaping prestigious titles upon the hero of the moment: al-malik al-manṣūr, ‘victorious king’; zaynat al-Islām, ‘ornament of Islam’; nāṣir amīr al-mu'mīn, ‘protector of the prince of the faithful’. Like all leaders of the time, Zangī proudly strung these various titles together, as symbols of his power. In a subtly satirical note, Ibn al-
Qalānisi asks readers of his chronicle to excuse him for writing merely ‘sultan’, ‘emir’, or ‘atabeg such and such’, without appending the full lists of titles. For, he explains, there had been such a proliferation of honorific titles since the tenth century that his text would have become unreadable had he tried to list them all. Discreetly lamenting the epoch of the first caliphs, who were content with the title ‘prince of the faithful’, superb in its simplicity, the Damascene chronicler cites a few examples to illustrate his point, Zangī himself among them. Ibn al-Qalānisi recalls that every time he mentions Zangī he ought, strictly speaking, to say:
The emir, the general, the great, the just, the aid of God, the triumphant, the unique, the pillar of religion, the cornerstone of Islam, ornament of Islam, protector of God’s creatures, associate of the dynasty, auxiliary of doctrine, grandeur of the nation, honour of kings, supporter of sultans, victor over the infidels, rebels, and atheists, commander of the Muslim armies, the victorious king, the king of princes, the sun of the deserving, emir of the two Iraqs and of Syria, conqueror of Iran, Bahlawan, Jihan Alp Inassaj Kotlogh Toghrulbeg atabeg Abū Sa‘īd Zangī Ibn Aq Sunqur, protector of the prince of the faithful.
Whatever their pompous character, at which the Damascene chronicler smiles irreverently, these titles nevertheless reflected the primordial place Zangī now held in the Arab world. The Franj trembled at the very mention of his name. Their disarray was all the greater in that King Fulk had died shortly before the fall of Edessa, leaving two children who were both minors. His wife, who assured the continuity of the crown, quickly sent emissaries to the land of the Franj to bring news of the disaster that had just befallen his people. In all their territories, Ibn al-Qalānisi writes, calls were issued for people to assemble for an assault on the land of Islam.