A History of the Crusades-Vol 2 (25 page)

Having rescued the Count of Tripoli, Fulk moved
on to Antioch. There he learnt that Sawar had already successfully raided the
Edessene city of Turbessel and had assembled an army to use against Antioch.
After a cautious delay of several days Fulk advanced towards the Moslem camp at
Qinnasrin and made a surprise attack on it by night. He forced Sawar to retire
and to abandon his tents; but the victory was far from complete. In subsequent
skirmishes the Moslems annihilated several detachments of Franks. But Fulk made
a triumphant entry into Antioch before he returned to Palestine in the summer
of 1133. As soon as he was gone, Sawar’s raids on Christian territory
recommenced.

1135: Zengi
before Damascus

Apart from such frontier raids the year 1134
passed peaceably enough. Next year the Moslem world was weakened by
revolutions. In Egypt the Fatimid Caliph al-Hafiz had attempted to curb the
power of the vizierate by appointing his own son Hasan as vizier. But the young
man showed himself to be almost insanely ferocious. After forty emirs had been
beheaded on a trumpery charge, there was a revolt. The Caliph only saved
himself by poisoning his son and handing over the corpse to the rebels. He then
appointed as vizier an Armenian, Vahram, who was more interested in enriching
his friends and fellow-Christians than in aggressive action against the Franks.
Damascus was equally rendered impotent. Toghtekin’s son Buri died in 1132 and
was succeeded as atabeg by his son Ismail. Ismail’s rule began brilliantly with
the recapture of Banyas from the Franks and Baalbek and Hama from his rivals;
but soon he began to combine a tyrannous cruelty with oppressive taxation. His
behaviour provoked an attempt to murder him, which he punished with wholesale
executions, even walling up alive his own brother, Sawinj, on the faintest of
suspicions. Next, he planned the elimination of his father’s trusted
counsellor, Yusuf ibn Firuz. His mother, the dowager Princess Zumurrud, had
borne the death of her son Sawinj with equanimity; but Yusuf was her lover. She
plotted to save him. Ismail became aware that he was unsafe even in his own
palace. In alarm he wrote to his father’s old enemy Zengi, offering to become
his vassal if Zengi would maintain him in power. If he would not help him, then
Ismail would hand over Damascus to the Franks. It was inconvenient for Zengi to
leave Mosul with the Abbasid Caliph Mustarshid still unbeaten. But he could not
ignore the appeal. He received it too late. He crossed the Euphrates on 7
February; but six days previously Zumurrud had achieved the assassination of
Ismail and the succession of her younger son, Shihab ed-Din Mahmud. The new
atabeg, with the support of his people, gave a polite refusal to the envoys
that Zengi sent to him asking for his submission. When Zengi advanced on
Damascus, receiving the surrender of Hama as he came, he found the city in a
state of defence. His attempt to storm the walls failed. Soon supplies ran
short at his camp; and some of his troops deserted him. At that moment an
embassy reached him from the Caliph Mustarshid, courteously requesting him to
respect Damascene independence. Zengi gratefully accepted an excuse that
enabled him to retire without dishonour. Peace was made between Zengi and Mahmud;
and Zengi paid a state visit to Damascus. But Mahmud did not trust Zengi
sufficiently to pay a return visit; he sent his brother in his stead.

The episode, coinciding with the weakness of
Egypt, offered a rare opportunity for recovering Banyas and taking aggressive
action. But Fulk let the chance go by. Zengi, having extricated himself from
Damascus, employed his forces in an attack on Antiochene territory. While his
lieutenant Sawar threatened Turbessel, Aintab and Azaz, preventing a junction
between the armies of Antioch and Edessa, Zengi swept up past the fortresses of
the eastern frontier, Kafartab, Maarrat, Zerdana and Athareb, capturing them
one by one. Fortunately for the Franks, he was then obliged to return to Mosul;
but the frontier defences were lost.

These disasters brought Fulk again to the
north. He was still nominal regent of Antioch, but authority there was
represented by the venerable Patriarch Bernard. Bernard died in the early
summer. He had been an able statesman, energetic, firm and courageous, but
strict towards the Frankish nobility and intolerant towards the native
Christians. On his death the populace acclaimed as his successor the Latin
Bishop of Mamistra, Radulph of Domfront, who assumed the Patriarchal throne
without waiting for a canonical election. Radulph was a very different man,
handsome, despite a slight squint, a lover of pomp, open-handed and affable,
not well educated but an eloquent persuasive speaker, and, behind a gracious
facade, worldly, ambitious and sly. He had no wish to be dominated by the King
and the King’s men; so he opened negotiations with the dowager Princess Alice,
who was still living on her lands at Lattakieh. Alice saw her opportunity and
appealed to her sister Queen Melisende. Fulk arrived at Antioch in August for a
short visit. He did not feel strong enough to protest against Radulph’s
irregular election, and he could now refuse his wife nothing. Alice was allowed
to return to Antioch. Fulk remained regent, but the power was shared in an
uneasy alliance between the dowager and the Patriarch.

1136: Raymond of
Poitiers summoned to Antioch

Radulph soon quarrelled with his clergy; and
Alice was left mistress of the city. But her position was precarious. Her main
support came from the native Christian population. As her intrigues with Zengi
had shown, she had little regard for Frankish sentiment. She thought now of a
better scheme. At the end of 1135 she sent an envoy to Constantinople to offer
the hand of her daughter the Princess Constance to the Emperor’s younger son
Manuel. Her action may have been, as the horrified Crusaders declared, due to
the caprice of her ambition; but in fact it offered the best solution for the
preservation of northern Syria. The Greek element was strong in Antioch. The
Moslem menace was growing under Zengi; and the Empire was the only power strong
enough to check it. A vassal-state ruled under imperial suzerainty first by the
half-Armenian Alice and then jointly by a Byzantine prince and a Frankish
princess, might well have served to weld Greek and Frank together for the
defence of Christendom. But the Frankish nobles were aghast; and the Patriarch
Radulph saw himself displaced in favour of a hated Greek. It seems that during
his visit to Antioch King Fulk had been consulted by the barons about a
suitable husband for Constance. Now a messenger went secretly to him to say
that one must urgently be found. After reviewing all the French princes of his
acquaintance, Fulk decided upon the younger son of Duke William IX of
Aquitaine, Raymond of Poitiers, at present in England at the Court of King
Henry I, whose daughter had recently married Fulk’s son Geoffrey. A knight of
the Hospital, Gerard Jebarre, was sent to England to fetch him out. The
greatest secrecy was observed. Alice must know nothing; nor would it be safe
even to inform the Queen. Another danger lay in the hostility of King Roger of
Sicily, who had never forgiven the Kingdom of Jerusalem for the insult done to
his mother Adelaide and whose Mediterranean ambitions would never let him offer
free passage to a claimant for the hand of the greatest heiress in the East.
Gerard reached the English court, and Raymond accepted the proposal. But King
Roger learnt of the secret; for the Normans of England and of Sicily were
always in close touch with each other. He determined to arrest Raymond, who
could not find a ship for Syria except from a south Italian port. Raymond was
obliged to divide up his company and to disguise himself sometimes as a
pilgrim, sometimes as a merchant’s servant. He managed to slip through the
blockade, and in April 1136 he arrived at Antioch.

His arrival could not be kept hidden from
Alice. He therefore at once went to see the Patriarch. Radulph offered him help
on terms. Raymond must pay him homage and defer to him in everything. On
Raymond’s agreement Radulph demanded an audience with Alice to tell her that
the glamorous stranger had arrived as a candidate for her hand. The story was
convincing, for Raymond was aged thirty-seven, Alice was under thirty, and Constance
barely nine. Then, while Alice waited in her palace to receive her future
betrothed, Constance was kidnapped and taken to the cathedral, where the
Patriarch hastily wedded her to Raymond. Alice was defeated. Against the lawful
husband of the heiress a dowager had no rights. She retired once more to
Lattakieh, to remain there disconsolate for the remainder of her short
existence.

1136: War with
the Armenians

Raymond was in the prime of life. He was
handsome and of immense physical strength, not well educated, fond of gambling
and impetuous and at the same time indolent, but with a high reputation for
gallantry and for purity of conduct. His popularity soon awed the Patriarch,
whose troubles with his own clergy continued, and who found himself treated with
deference but in fact shorn of power. The nobles solidly supported Raymond; for
indeed the situation was too serious for them to do otherwise. The principality
was losing ground. Not only were the eastern defences gone. In the south, in
the Nosairi mountains, a Turcoman adventurer captured the castle of Bisikra’il
from its owner, Reynald Mazoir, in 1131, and early in 1136 he was with
difficulty prevented from taking Balatonos. Bisikra’il was recovered soon
afterwards. Farther to the south, where the Franks had acquired the castle of
Qadmus in 1129, in 1131 it passed back to the Moslem emir of Kahf, Saif ed-Din
ibn Amrun, who next year sold it to the Assassin leader Abu’l Fath. In 1135 the
Assassins bought Kahf itself from Saif ed-Din’s sons; and in the winter of 1136
they captured Khariba from the Franks. Cilicia had already been lost. In 1131,
soon after Bohemond II’s death, the Roupenian Prince Leo, protected in his rear
by an alliance with the Danishmend emir, descended into the plain and seized
the three cities of Mamistra, Tarsus and Adana. His brother and predecessor
Thoros had already a few years before ejected the small Byzantine garrisons
from Sis and Anazarbus, farther inland. In 1135 Leo captured Sarventikar, on
the slopes of the Amanus, from Baldwin, Lord of Marash. But the Armenian hold
over Cilicia was weak. Bandits found refuge there, and pirates hung about its
coasts.

The county of Edessa was no better off.
Timurtash the Ortoqid had recently annexed some of its territory in the east.
To the north the Armenian Prince of Gargar, Michael, unable to maintain himself
against the Turks, ceded his lands to Count Joscelin, who rashly handed them
over to Michael’s personal enemy Basil, brother of the Armenian Catholicus. A
civil war between the two Armenians broke out. Joscelin was obliged to garrison
Gargar himself, but could not prevent the countryside from being ravaged by
Armenians and Turks in turn. Sawar raided the district of Turbessel in 1135,
and in April 1136, about the time of Raymond of Poitiers’s arrival in the East,
his general, Afshin, not only broke his way through Antiochene territory to
Lattakieh in the south, burning and pillaging the villages as he passed, but
afterwards turned northward past Marash to Kaisun. The chief vassal of the
Count of Edessa, Baldwin, lord of Marash and Kaisun, was powerless to defend
his lands.

Raymond decided that his first action must be
to recover Cilicia. His rear must be protected before he could venture to
oppose Zengi. With King Fulk’s approval he marched with Baldwin of Marash
against the Roupenians. But the alliance was incomplete. Joscelin of Edessa,
though he was Fulk’s vassal and Baldwin’s suzerain, was also Leo’s nephew; and
his sympathies were with his uncle. The King of Jerusalem’s authority was no
longer sufficient to reunite the Frankish princes. With Joscelin’s help, Leo
drove back the Antiochene army. Triumphant, he agreed to have a personal
interview with Baldwin, who treacherously made him prisoner and sent him off to
captivity in Antioch. In Leo’s absence his three sons quarrelled. The eldest,
Constantine, was eventually captured and blinded by his brothers. But meanwhile
the Franks derived no profit. The Danishmend emir, Mohammed II ibn Ghazi,
invaded Cilicia, destroyed the harvests, then moved on into Baldwin’s lands,
which he ravaged as far as Kaisun. Shaken by these disasters, Leo bought his
freedom by offering to give up the Cilician cities to Raymond; but on his
return home he forgot his promise. A desultory war broke out again, till, early
in 1137, Joscelin patched up a truce between the combatants, who were terrified
by news from the north, news that showed Princess Alice not to have been so
foolish after all.

1137: Accession
of Raymond II of Tripoli

King Fulk had not been able to give any
practical aid to his friend Raymond. He had to face dangers nearer home. The
government of the young atabeg Mahmud of Damascus had been dominated by the
peaceful influence of his mother’s lover, Yusuf; but one spring evening, in
1136, as the atabeg was walking on the maidan with Yusuf and a mameluk
commander, Bazawash, the latter suddenly stabbed Yusuf to death and fled to his
regiment at Baalbek. From there he threatened to march on Damascus and depose
the atabeg, unless he was made chief minister. Mahmud yielded to his wishes. At
once the Damascenes took up an aggressive attitude against the Franks. Early
next year they invaded the County of Tripoli. The local Christians, who felt no
loyalty towards the Franks, guided them secretly through the passes of the
Lebanon into the coastal plain. Count Pons was taken by surprise. He came out
with his small army to meet them and was disastrously defeated. Pons himself,
who fled into the mountains, was betrayed to the Moslems by a Christian
peasant, and was instantly put to death. The Bishop of Tripoli, Gerard, who was
captured in the battle, was fortunately not recognized and was soon exchanged
as a man of no importance. Bazawash captured one or two frontier castles, but
did not venture to attack Tripoli itself. He soon retired to Damascus laden
with booty.