Tancred could have settled for this situation, allowing the status quo to be maintained, engendering the possibility of long-term coexistence. Instead, he chose the risks and potential rewards of continued expansion. In October 1110 he crossed the Belus Hills, prosecuting a taxing winter expedition that led to the capture of a string of settlements in the Jazr region (east of the Belus Hills), including al-Atharib and Zardana. This left barely twenty miles of open, undefended plains between the principality and Aleppo. Then, in the spring of 1111, he moved to apply a similar degree of pressure to the south, initiating construction of a new fortress on a hill close to Shaizar. To begin with, at least, Ridwan of Aleppo and the Muslim rulers of Shaizar, the Munqidh clan, responded to this aggression with conciliatory submission, offering tribute payments totalling 30,000 gold dinars in return for peace.

There was a well-established precedent for this form of financial exploitation. In eleventh-century Iberia, the Christian powers of the north had gradually come to dominate the fractured Muslim city-states of the south, establishing complex networks of annual tribute payments. This system famously culminated in the peaceful occupation of the peninsula’s long-lost capital, Toledo (central Spain), in 1085.

Tancred may well have harboured similar plans to reduce Aleppo and Shaizar to the point of collapse, but his policies had a dangerous edge. Apply too much pressure, demand overly exorbitant protection payments, and the quarry might be driven to risk retaliation. In the case of Aleppo, the mixture of intimidation and exploitation proved effective and culminated in a sustained period of submission. But in 1111, Tancred pressed Shaizar too far and the Munqidh clan readily allied with Maudud of Mosul when he led a second Abbasid army into Syria that September. Threatened with an invasion of the Summaq region, Tancred mustered every possible ounce of Antiochene manpower. He also called for aid from his fellow Latins and, despite the tensions which had recently divided their ranks, the armies of Jerusalem, Edessa and Tripoli assembled once more. This composite force took up a defensive position at Apamea, and by patiently holding its ground, blunted Maudud’s attempts to provoke a decisive battle and eventually forced his retreat.

Tancred once again had repulsed a threat to the principality’s survival, but any hopes of securing the conquest of either Aleppo or Shaizar came to nothing when, after years of tireless campaigning, his health failed him at the age of thirty-six. The early twelfth-century Armenian Christian historian Matthew of Edessa lavished elegiac praise upon Tancred when recording his death in December 1112, writing that ‘he was a saintly and pious man and had a kind and compassionate nature, manifesting concern for all the Christian faithful; moreover he exhibited a tremendous amount of humility in his dealings with people’. This panegyric conceals Tancred’s darker traits: his unquenchable hunger for advancement; his gift for political intrigue; and his willingness to betray or battle all around him in pursuit of power. It was these qualities, allied to his boundless dynamism, that lent Tancred his remarkable potency and enabled him to forge an enduring Frankish realm in northern Syria. If justice be done, history should regard Tancred, not his infamous uncle Bohemond, as the founder of the principality of Antioch.⁷⁰

OVERLORD OF OUTREMER (1113–18)

Tancred’s death came at a time of more general change in the shape and balance of power in the Near East, brought on by a mixture of dynastic succession and political intrigue. At Antioch itself, power passed to Tancred’s nephew, Roger of Salerno, son of the First Crusader Richard of Salerno. Roger was soon woven into the fabric of Frankish society as a series of high-level marriage alliances bound together the ruling elite of Outremer. This complex web of familial connections ushered in a new phase of heightened interdependence among the crusader states. Roger himself married the sister of Baldwin of Bourcq, count of Edessa, while Joscelin of Courtenay, lord of Tell Bashir, was wed to Roger’s sister. Bertrand of Toulouse’s death early in 1112 led to the accession of his youthful son, Pons, as count of Tripoli. He soon distanced himself from the traditional Toulousean policy of subservience to Byzantium and antipathy to Antioch and, at some point between 1113 and 1115, married Tancred’s widow, Cecilia of France. Pons remained a dependant of Jerusalem, but Cecilia’s dowry brought him a significant Antiochene lordship in the Ruj valley, one of only two southern approach routes to Antioch itself. The wider significance of these shifts in personnel and allegiance was twofold: on the one hand, they promised to engender a new era of Frankish cooperation in the face of external threats; on the other, they reopened old questions about the balance of power in Outremer and, most notably, the relationship between Antioch and Edessa.

Strength in unity

The bonds of Latin unity were soon tested by the ongoing threat of Iraqi invasion. In May 1113 Maudud of Mosul, now Baghdad’s foremost military commander, led a third Abbasid army into the Near East, and on this occasion he turned away from Syria to invade Palestine. The frequency and ferocity of Frankish raiding upon Damascene lands to the north and east of Galilee appear to have convinced Tughtegin that he must now turn his back on any form of enduring rapprochement with Jerusalem. In the last week of May he led a sizeable army to join Maudud, and together they marched into Galilee.

When news of this threat reached Baldwin I at Acre, he dispatched an urgent call for reinforcement to his new neighbours, Roger and Pons. The king now had a difficult decision to make. Should he wait for the full strength of the Frankish alliance to assemble, leaving Maudud and Tughtegin free to ravage the north-eastern reaches of the realm, or risk an immediate move to counter their incursion with only limited military resources? In mid-to late June he settled upon the second course of action. Baldwin’s precipitous behaviour was widely criticised by contemporaries–indeed, even his chaplain noted that the king was denounced by his allies for ‘rush[ing] against the enemy in a rash and disorderly manner without waiting for their advice and aid’–and Baldwin has been similarly condemned in modern historiography. In the king’s defence, he does not seem to have acted with the same damaging impetuosity shown in 1102. Details of events in the summer of 1113 are sketchy, but it would appear that Baldwin advanced from Acre to establish an advanced base from which to patrol Galilee and not with the express intention of confronting the enemy in pitched battle.

Unfortunately for the king, on 28 June his army was battered by a surprise attack. Normally so assiduous in his use of scouts and the garnering of intelligence, Baldwin appears to have camped near the al-Sennabra bridge, a crossing over the River Jordan just south of the Sea of Galilee, without realising that his foes were stationed nearby, across the eastern shore. When Muslim foragers discovered his position, Maudud and Tughtegin launched a lightning assault. Pouring across the bridge, they quickly overran the shocked Franks, killing 1,000 to 2,000 men, including some thirty knights. Baldwin himself fled in disgrace, losing his royal banner and his tent, key symbols of his regal authority.

Chastened, Baldwin retreated to the slopes of Mount Tabor, above Tiberias, where he was soon joined by the armies of Antioch and Tripoli. He now adopted a far more cautious strategy, holding his forces in this defensible position, policing the region but avoiding direct confrontation. For nearly four weeks the two sides remained in the area, testing one another’s resolve, but in the face of such a large Latin force Maudud and Tughtegin could not afford to march south en masse to Jerusalem and were only able to launch a series of wide-ranging raids. In August, the Muslim allies crossed back over the Jordan, leaving, in the words of one Damascene chronicler, ‘the enemy humbled, broken, defeated and dispirited’. As evidence of their triumph they sent a gift of plunder, Frankish prisoners and the heads of the Christian dead to the sultan in Baghdad. Baldwin had survived, albeit with considerable damage to his reputation.⁷¹