A History of the Crusades-Vol 2 (26 page)

Pons had ruled over Tripoli for twenty-five
years. He seems to have been a competent administrator but a feckless
politician, always anxious to throw off the suzerainty of the King of Jerusalem
but too weak to achieve independence. His son and successor, Raymond II, was of
a more passionate temperament. He was now aged twenty-two, and had recently
married Queen Melisende’s sister, Hodierna of Jerusalem, to whom he was
jealously devoted. His first act was to avenge his father’s death, not on the
mamelukes of Damascus, who were too powerful for him, but on the disloyal
Christians of the Lebanon. Marching on the villages suspected of helping the
enemy, he massacred all their men-folk and took the women and children to be
sold as slaves in Tripoli. His ruthlessness cowed the Lebanese, but it made
them no fonder of the Franks.

Bazawash’s activity was not to the liking of
Zengi. He was unwilling to attack the Franks with an independent and aggressive
Moslem state on his flank. At the end of June he marched on Homs, which was
held for the atabeg of Damascus by an elderly mameluke, Unur. For about a
fortnight Zengi lay before the city, when news came that a Frankish army from
Tripoli was approaching. Whatever Count Raymond’s intention may have been, his
move caused Zengi to raise the siege of Homs and turn on the Franks. As Raymond
retired before him, he advanced to besiege the great castle of Montferrand, on
the eastern slopes of the Nosairi hills, guarding the entrance to the Buqaia.
Meanwhile Raymond sent to Jerusalem to ask for help from King Fulk.

Fulk had just received an urgent appeal from
Antioch; but a Moslem threat to Tripoli could not be ignored. He hurried up
with all the men that he could collect to join Raymond, and together they made
a forced march round the Nosairi foothills to Montferrand. It was a difficult
journey; and their army soon was in a pitiable state. Zengi had moved away on
their approach, but, hearing of their condition, he returned and closed in
round them as they came out of the hills near to the castle. The weary Franks
were taken by surprise. They fought bravely, but the battle was soon over. Most
of the Christians lay dead on the field. Others, including the Count of
Tripoli, were taken prisoner, while Fulk with a small bodyguard escaped into
the fortress.

Before Zengi could move up to invest
Montferrand, the King sent messengers to the Patriarch of Jerusalem, to the
Count of Edessa and to the Prince of Antioch, begging for immediate help. All
three, ignoring other risks, answered his appeal; for the capture of the King
and all his chivalry might well mean the end of the kingdom. The Patriarch
William gathered together the rest of the militia left in Palestine, and led
it, with the Holy Cross at its head, up to Tripoli. Joscelin of Edessa,
forgetting his local worries, came down from the north, and on his way was joined
by Raymond of Antioch, who could ill afford at that moment to leave his
capital. Fortunately for Palestine, bared as it was of every fighting man, its
neighbours were not in the mood to be aggressive. Egypt was paralysed by a
palace revolution, which had replaced the Armenian vizier Vahram by a violent
anti-Christian, Ridwan ibn al-Walakshi, who was fully occupied in slaying his
predecessor’s friends and in quarrelling with the Caliph. The garrison of
Ascalon carried out a raid on Lydda, but no more.
The mameluke
Bazawash of Damascus was more dangerous; and as soon as the Patriarch had left
the country, he permitted himself to ravage it as far south as the open city of
Nablus, whose inhabitants he put to the sword. But he was too fearful of the
consequences to Damascus should Zengi enjoy too complete a victory to wish to
press the Franks very far.

1137
^:
The
Surrender of Montferrand

At the end of July the relieving force
assembled in the Buqaia. Meanwhile in Montferrand the King was growing
desperate. He was cut off from news of the outside world. His supplies were
running out; and day and night Zengi’s ten great mangonels pounded at the walls
of the castle. At last he sent a herald to Zengi to ask for his terms. To his
incredulous joy, Zengi demanded only the cession of Montferrand. The King might
go free with all his men. Moreover, the leading knights captured in the battle,
including the Count of Tripoli, should be set at liberty. No ransom would be
charged. Fulk accepted at once. Zengi kept to his engagement. Fulk and his
bodyguard were brought before Zengi, who treated them with every mark of honour
and presented the King with a sumptuous robe. Their comrades were restored to
them; and they were sent peaceably on their way. In the Buqaia they met the
relieving army, much nearer than they had thought. Some of them were vexed to
find that had they held out longer they might have been rescued; but the wiser
were glad to have escaped so lightly.

Indeed, Zengi’s forbearance has never ceased to
astonish historians. But Zengi knew what he was doing. Montferrand was no mean
prize. Its possession would prevent the Franks from penetrating into the upper
Orontes valley. It was also admirably situated to control Hama and the
Damascene city of Homs. To obtain it without further fighting was well worth
while; for he had no wish to risk a battle with the Frankish relieving force so
near to the frontiers of Damascus, whose rulers would at once take advantage of
any check that he might suffer. Moreover, like his Frankish enemies, he was
disquieted by news from the north.

CHAPTER III

THE CLAIMS OF
THE EMPEROR

‘Let not him
that is deceived trust in vanity: for vanity shall be his recompence.’
JOB
XV, 31

The news that had patched up a peace between
the Franks and the Armenians, that had made Prince Raymond loth to leave
Antioch, and that now induced Zengi to show mercy to his enemies was of a great
army marching into Cilicia, led in person by the Emperor John Comnenus. Ever
since the Emperor Alexius had failed to come to Antioch during the First
Crusade the politicians of the Frankish East had blandly ignored Byzantium.
Even though Bohemond’s attempt to invade the Empire from the west had utterly
failed, Alexius had been quite unable to secure that the terms of his treaty
with Bohemond were implemented. As the Franks in Antioch well knew, he was
distracted by cares nearer home.

The Later Days
of Alexius I

Theses cares endured for nearly thirty years.
There were intermittent wars on all the frontiers of the Empire. There were
Polovtsian invasions across the lower Danube, as in 1114 and 1121. There was
continual tension with the Hungarians on the middle Danube, which flared into
open war in 1128; the Hungarians invaded the Balkan peninsula as far as Sofia,
but were driven back and defeated in their own territory by the Emperor. The
Italian merchant cities periodically raided the Empire in order to extract
commercial privileges. Pisa obtained a favourable treaty in 1111; and Venice,
after four years of war, following on the Emperor John’s refusal to renew his
father’s concessions, recovered all its rights in 1126. The Normans of southern
Italy, cowed since Bohemond’s defeat at Dyrrhachium, became a menace once more
in 1127, when Roger II of Sicily annexed Apulia. Roger II, who assumed the
title of King in 1130, possessed to the full his family’s hatred of Byzantium,
though he loved to copy its methods and to patronize its arts. But his
ambitions were so vast that it was usually possible to find allies against him.
Not only did he seek to dominate Italy, but he claimed Antioch as the only
surviving representative in the male line of the House of Hauteville, and
Jerusalem itself in virtue of the treaty made by his mother Adelaide with
Baldwin I.

In Asia Minor there was no peace. During and
after the First Crusade Alexius had consolidated his hold over the western
third of the peninsula and over the northern and southern coasts; and had he
had only to deal with the Turkish princes he could have kept his possessions
intact. But groups of Turcomans were still seeping into the interior, where
they and their flocks multiplied; and inevitably they overflowed into the
coastal valleys, to seek a gentler climate and richer pastures. Their coming
inevitably destroyed the settled agricultural life of the Christians. Indeed,
the weaker the princes became, the more unruly and dangerous to the Empire were
their nomad subjects.

At the time of the Emperor Alexius’s death in
1118, Turkish Anatolia was divided between the Seldjuk Sultan Mas’ud, who
reigned from Konya over the southern centre of the peninsula, from the
Sangarius to the Taurus, and the Danishmend emir Ghazi II, whose lands
stretched from the Halys to the Euphrates. Between them they had absorbed and
eliminated the smaller emirates, except for Melitene in the east, where Mas’ud’s
youngest brother Toghrul reigned under the regency of his mother and her second
husband, the Ortoqid Balak. In spite of the Byzantine victory at Philomelion in
1115 and the subsequent attempted delineation of the frontier, the Turks had
during the following years recaptured Phrygian Laodicea and penetrated into the
Meander valley, and had cut off the road to Attalia. At the same time the
Danishmends were pressing westward into Paphlagonia. The Emperor Alexius was
planning a campaign to restore the Anatolian frontiers when his last illness
supervened.

1118: The
Accession of John Comnenus

The accession of the Emperor John brought new
vigour to Byzantium. John, whom his subjects called Kaloioannes, John the Good,
was one of those rare characters of whom no contemporary writer, with one
exception, had anything derogatory to say. The exception was his own sister.
Anna Comnena was the eldest of Alexius’s children. As a child she had been
betrothed to the young co-Emperor Constantine Ducas, to whom Alexius had
promised the eventual succession. His early death, which followed closely on
her brother’s birth, was a cruel blow to her ambitions; and she sought ever
afterwards to redress the injustice of Providence by persuading her father,
with her mother’s approval, to leave his throne to her husband, the Caesar
Nicephorus Bryennius. Even when the Emperor lay dying, devotedly nursed by his
wife and daughter, the two ladies punctuated their ministrations with demands
for John’s disinheritance. But Alexius had decided that his son must succeed
him. When John was admitted to bid him farewell, the dying man quietly passed
him his ring with the imperial seal, and John hurried from the death-bed, to
secure the gates of the palace. His promptness was rewarded. The army and the
senate acclaimed him at once as reigning Emperor; and the Patriarch hastily
endorsed their acclamation at a coronation ceremony in Saint Sophia. Anna and
the Empress-Mother were outwitted. But John feared lest their partisans should
make an attempt on his life. He even refused to attend his father’s funeral,
having good reason to believe that his murder was planned for the occasion. A
few days later Anna organized a plot to eliminate him, while he was staying at the
quiet suburban palace of Philopatium. But the plot had one grave weakness. It
was to place on the throne Nicephorus Bryennius; and he had no desire for the
throne. It was possibly he that warned the Emperor. John punished the
conspirators very lightly. The Empress-Mother Irene probably was not privy to
the plot, but retired nevertheless to a convent. Anna’s leading supporters had
their possessions confiscated, but many of them later received them back. Anna
herself was deprived of her possessions for awhile, and henceforward lived in
complete seclusion. Nicephorus went unpunished. Both he and his wife consoled
themselves for the loss of a crown by adopting the less exigent calling of
historian.

John was now secure. He was in his thirtieth
year, a small, thin man, dark-haired, dark-eyed and remarkably dark of
complexion. His tastes were austere; he did not share in the delight taken by
most of his family in literature and theological discussion. He was above all a
soldier, happier on campaigns than in the palace. But he was an able and just
administrator, and, despite his severity towards himself, generous to his
friends and to the poor and ready to appear himself in ceremonial splendour
should it be required. He was affectionate and forbearing to his family and
faithful to his wife, the Hungarian Princess Piriska, rechristened Irene; but
she, though she shared in his austerities and his charities, had little
influence over him. His only intimate friend was his Grand Domestic, a Turk
called Axuch, who had been taken prisoner as a boy at the capture of Nicaea in
1097 and had been brought up in the palace. John’s conception of his imperial
role was high. His father had left him a strong fleet, an army that was made up
from a medley of races but was well organized and well equipped and a treasury
that was full enough to permit an active policy. He wished not only to conserve
the Empire’s frontiers but to restore it to its ancient boundaries, and to
realize the imperial claims in northern Syria.

John began his first campaign against the Turks
in the spring of 1119. He marched down through Phrygia and recaptured Laodicea.
Urgent business then recalled him to Constantinople; but he returned a month
later to take Sozopolis and reopen the road to Attalia. While he himself
attacked the Seldjuks in the west, he had arranged for an attack on the
Danishmends in the east. Constantine Gabras, Duke of Trebizond, took advantage
of a quarrel between the emir Ghazi and his son-in-law, Ibn Mangu, a Turkish
princeling established at Taranaghi in Armenia, to take up arms in support of
the latter. But Ghazi, with Toghrul of Melitene as his ally, defeated and
captured Gabras; who had to pay thirty thousand dinars to ransom himself. A
timely dispute between Ghazi and Toghrul prevented the Turks from following up
their victory.