All Things Medieval

The Second Crusade consisted mainly of a huge expeditionary force led by the French King Louis VII and the German King Conrad III. Its story is one of great initial promise and high theater, ending in disappointment and disaster. It was also was the first time that reigning monarchs went on Crusade.

Pope Eugene III came to Paris, where Louis staged a dramatic Mass at the Cathedral of St. Denis. Louis prostrated himself on the floor before the Saint, committing himself to holy war, then immediately set out. Louis was not really a warrior; he had been the second son, devoted to the church. In his short reign, he had already been forced to lead knights against rebels, but he came away from that experience with a deep sense of guilt. (Not all imaginary: he had burnt down a church with a thousand people sheltered inside.) His chief purpose was pilgrimage, and his appointed regent was the Abbot who had mentored him, rather than a nobleman or relative. Normally, the regent would be the Queen, but in this case, his wife chose to come along on the adventure.

The German army set out first, with a time lag to allow the countryside to recover from provisioning them before the French army passed through. In this way, both came to Constantinople and set out across Anatolia. Emperor Manuel was on bad terms with the Germans, good terms with the French. Cooperation wasn’t very good. In any case, both the German and French armies were decimated by Turkish attacks as they crossed the plateau. In one assault, King Louis had to climb a rock or cliff, holding onto tree roots while using his sword as rear guard. Both kings arrived in Antioch alive, but their armies were very badly reduced.

The obvious next step was to proceed to Edessa, since its capture by Turks was the casus belli. But they didn’t. King Louis wanted to see Jerusalem first, and there, the high council met and chose to attack…Damascus. This was foolish in both political and military terms. It was a miserable failure, as well. The allied forces of Zengi’s son Nur ad-Din and the ruler of Damascus pushed back the remnants of the Crusader forces. Had they attacked Edessa, Damascus probably would have sat out the fight. And that’s the crucial point: this was the first time Europeans faced a united Turkish force. They underestimated how much difference it would make.

The Crusader lords criticized how the European kings had bungled the siege, while the Europeans said the Crusaders had given up too quickly. When King Conrad went down to Ascalon to have a try at that old target, the other kings did not join him. Bitter, Conrad set out for home, leaving many captured noblemen to be ransomed by their families as possible. King Louis and Queen Eleanor went home in separate ships and soon after, they divorced (via an annulment of the “oops I guess we were cousins” kind). Bernard of Clairvaux felt terrible about having encouraged this mess in the first place; among his writings is a formal apology to the Pope.

Edessa never recovered; Nur ad-Din massacred the Christian population of the city, leaving it largely empty. It dwindled in economic importance and eventually became a ruin.

The Fatimid dynasty always tried to combine pragmatic secular rule with idealistic religion. The Caliph/Imam was not only the war leader and ruler, he was also the holiest descendant of Ismail.

We’ve already seen one major split among Ismaili fanatics, when the Vizier Afdal promoted younger brother Musta’ali over heir apparent Nizar. During the 12th century, the Nizari Ismailis were mostly in Persia, trying to rebel against Baghdad’s Turkish rule. These Nizaris even took the radical step of composing their holy writings in Persian, not in Arabic.

But in 1132, another split began.

Most Muslims in Egypt accepted Musta’ali’s rule pragmatically, but some believed fervently that the choice of Musta’ali had also been idealistic and holy. When this Imam died, his son al-Amir became Imam after him, so all was still well. In 1130, the birth of an heir-apparent son named Tayyib was celebrated in Cairo. But in 1132, the Caliph-Imam was assassinated. The heir, Tayyib, was no more than two years old.

Hafiz, a half-brother to the dead Caliph, became Regent for baby Tayyib. This kind of plan usually worked out badly in those times. Within a short time, Hafiz declared himself Caliph-Imam, since he too was a son of the previous one. Vizier Afdal and everyone who had charge of baby Tayyib were suddenly assassinated. The Nizari Assassins were a convenient scapegoat, but it’s just as likely that Hafiz merely paid his own killing team. Tayyib vanished from history, first with a legend of being hidden like Moses in a basket, carried to a mosque for safe-keeping. Then, since he was the true Imam even at this young age, he went into “occultation,” the hidden state where true Imams await their future revealing.

Ismailis in Yemen never accepted Hafiz; they were partisans of Tayyib. This was the next big split among Shi’ites: Tayyibi and Hafizi. Hafizi partisans didn’t have a long run, though; the descendants of Hafiz definitely died out, without occultation or mystery, within a few generations. Remaining Hafizi believers made amends to the Tayyibis and just joined them. There is still a Tayyibi Ismaili Shi’ite sect in Yemen.

During the last years of the Hafizis in Cairo, their Vizier tried to solve the three-way power problem by allying with the Crusader Kingdoms against the growing power of Zengi and his heirs. It was the last stand for Arab rule. Turks and Kurds now held Baghdad, Damascus, and much of Persia; they were taking more and more of Anatolia. However much the last Hafizis might be rejected by Tayyibis and Nizaris, they were undisputed as descendants of Ismail, who was a descendant of Mohammed. If these last Fatimids, fractured by idealistic splits, could not hold onto power against the Turks and Kurds, Arab aristocracy was basically over.

Spoiler: As we know, Arab political power only revived in the 20th century, after the First World War, fittingly by means of another “Crusader” alliance. By then, Turkish power had gone through its own cycles of division and decay.

The Byzantine Empire was central to all of these events, but we often overlook their role in the Crusader kingdoms since the Franks were so often opposed to the Greeks. The Crusaders acted alone most of the time, after the initial invasion was over.

The Emperor who wrote to the Pope in the 1090’s was Alexios, who remained the ruler throughout the early Crusader kingdom years. Alexios died around the time the Knights Templars were established, during the reign of Baldwin II.

His son John had two older sisters (Anna is famous for having taken notes on the Crusaders), and as it so often went in Constantinople, his succession was not simple or assured. His mother Irene preferred Anna’s husband, a powerful general, over her own sons.  John stole his dying father’s ring and proclaimed himself Emperor John II in public, winning support from the city mob. His sister Anna’s history-writing seems to have been prompted by her surplus of free time after she and her husband were exiled.

John II is remember as The Good or even The Beautiful (ho kallos). He was very pious, and he set out to reverse Byzantium’s recent losses. First he married the Hungarian princess Piroska, renaming her “Irene” after his mother. They had eight children. He reconquered the Balkans and even his wife’s homeland of Hungary. He set out across Anatolia, putting the Turks on the defensive at last. He was never able to push the Danishmend Turks out of the northeast, but he regained control over many other provinces.

The Crusaders sometimes allied with him against Muslim Syria, but as always, they were very ambivalent about the Greek Emperor. In 1142, John announced to King Fulk that he intended to go on a “pilgrimage” to Jerusalem with several hundred of his closest armed friends. Fulk replied that he’d love to have them, but the land around Jerusalem was just so dry, the economy so poor, etc., he really thought that the retinue should be restricted to maybe a dozen. John lost interest, funnily enough.

John’s best friend and vizier was a Turkish boy captured at the siege of Nicaea, back at the start of the First Crusade. They grew up together, though the Turkish boy may have technically been his slave. In this period, with Mamluks ruling cities, slave and friend were not always rigid distinctions.

John’s last acts were an attempt to take back both Edessa and Antioch, which Byzantium had never conceded to the Franks. He died while hunting in Cilicia while he was preparing to besiege Antioch. He seems to have gotten an infected cut, and neglected it until it was too late.

John had two surviving sons, the older Isaac and the younger Manuel, and he chose Manuel to become Emperor, stating the Isaac was not fit by temperament. John’s Turkish best friend/vizier helped by leaving the deathbed quickly to arrest brother Isaac in Constantinople. When Manuel was proclaimed Emperor there, he decided it was okay to release Isaac, but he took the extra safety measure of dipping into the royal treasury to give every house-owner two gold pieces. The city’s citizenry (sometimes known as a mob) was usually the deciding factor in succession.

In the early years, Emperor Manuel looked like he could restore the lost glory of Byzantium. He is remembered as Manuel the Great (ὁ μέγας).

The Crusader prince of Antioch had to seek help from Manuel after Edessa fell, so within these first years, his influence extended to the very cities that the Crusaders had always refused to cede to Byzantium. The German king formed an alliance with Manuel, sealed by sending his queen’s sister to marry the Emperor. Her name was Bertha, but she had to be re-baptized in the Greek rites with a new name. As usual, she was now called Irene, the third Empress Irene in a row. There’s some record that she found the luxury and decadence of Constantinople a shock and never quite adjusted.

This was the period when the Second Crusade ran its course. Germany and Byzantium were allies to keep the Normans of Sicily from assaulting Greece and Albania again. They also worked together to try to win back Edessa from Zengi’s son Nur ad-Din. Manuel achieved a lot, winning back much territory….but in the end, it didn’t really matter. He’ll show up in Second and Third Crusade stories, and after his queen’s death he also married into the “Real Housewives of Outremer” drama of Baldwin’s daughters. But the Turks were on the ascendant and their momentum could only be checked for a short time.

The Komnenoi left another footnote: one of John’s sisters had a son, also John, who converted to Islam and married the Sultan’s daughter. The Sultan probably planned an invasion with this nephew at its head, but it didn’t happen. However, the Ottoman line claims descent from this couple.

The mass migration of Turks from Central Asia into the Middle East brought to an end the early and intermediate periods of Islam, when its main divisions were about theology or ideology. While individual Turks may have been as philosophical as anyone, as a group, they were after military domination and power. In a sense, they were at war with both Sunni and Shi’ite Islam: they adopted Sunni theology of course, since it was more pragmatic than Shi’ite, but they were not interested in its more esoteric or complicated forms, either. And they were implacable enemies of Shi’ites.

Central Asia’s steppe cultures were supremely oriented to survival. We’ll see this even more in the later rise of Genghis Khan. They had little or no theology of an afterlife, and their morality seems grounded in tribal loyalty, like the early Franks. If Socrates asked them what virtue means, they would reply “keeping your oath of loyalty to a lord.” There was no “brotherhood of man” sentiment; the enemies of the king were consigned to death, unless the king wanted them as slaves or allies. They weren’t looking for spiritual salvation. Islam was important to them as a unifying power base that gave them instant allies across the developed world (like Turkey joining NATO in our time).

The Crusades put pressure on the Muslim world; the First Crusade clearly only succeeded because Baghdad’s power had been so shattered by infighting and Turkish conquest. In order to repel the invaders, the Turks had to unite and re-create Baghdad’s former military might.

Zengi was one of the most successful Turkish lords during this time, and he had a colorful life. Zengi’s rise led directly to the establishment of Saladin as the later Crusaders’ arch adversary, because he became that one strong man who could start ruling more than one city at a time, uniting them into a real kingdom. Baghdad’s Sultan was always still king in name, at this time, so Zengi is known merely as an Atabeg or Governor.

Zengi’s father was beheaded for treason in Aleppo, but oddly, the child Zengi was not stigmatized for it. The governor of Mosul adopted him, and he remained a member of the Turkish aristocracy. In fact, he inherited Mosul from his adoptive father.

Zengi, as Atabeg of Mosul, quickly took over Aleppo as well in 1128. Sultan Mahmud (a Seljuk) recognized his rule and counted on his support against rebels, but after the Sultan’s death, a civil war broke out in which Zengi supported the losing side. Somehow, he held onto his power bases in Mosul and Aleppo as rival Caliphs and Sultans battled all around Baghdad and Damascus for the next five years.

In 1135, the ruler of Damascus offered to give the city to Zengi to save himself from internal plots, but (ironically or predictably) he was actually killed by order of his own mother before he could act. Zengi besieged Homs and Damascus by turns over the next few years, notably getting a Damascus fortress to surrender by promising safe passage—-and then killing them all. Damascus allied with King Fulk of Jerusalem, but Zengi bested him, too. At length, in 1138 Zengi found peace and true love by marrying the mother who had ordered her son killed. With this action, he became the ruler of Homs, but Damascus still escaped him.

1144 was a banner year for Zengi and a disaster for the Crusaders. Zengi besieged Edessa, capturing it on Christmas Eve. The first Crusader state to be established, Edessa was also the first to end. Zengi’s gate-crashing of Edessa was heard in Europe: the fall of a major Crusader city became the formal cause of an official Second Crusade.

Zengi didn’t live much longer. Somewhere along the line, he had enslaved a Frank, probably captured in battle against Fulk, but perhaps from some more roundabout way. He was very fond of his Frankish slave, whose name we know only in Turkish. He didn’t realize the Frank secretly hated him. One night, Zengi was very drunk, and the slave stabbed him to death. He ran to Damascus, thinking he would be welcomed, but instead the governor of Damascus arrested him. The slave was sent to Aleppo, where Zengi’s son Nur ad-Din executed him. And now the mini-empire was Nur ad-Din’s.

Zengi’s strategic significance can’t be lost in the colorful details. The Muslim Empire was always balancing regional and cultural powers against each other, and for a while now, Baghdad’s Middle Eastern-Mesopotamian power base had been too fractured to do any balancing. This left the ideologically radical Ismaili regime in Egypt freedom to range far, setting up Shi’ite communities in Baghdad’s back yard, while also venturing as far north as Jerusalem. The imbalance allowed the Crusaders an opportunity to slip in. If Zengi could unify the Mesopotamian power base, the region might return to its classic power struggles by pushing out the Europeans. After unifying just a few cities, he wiped out one Crusader County. What was next?