Maudud fatefully elected to spend early autumn in Damascus. Having attended Friday prayers with Tughtegin at the Grand Mosque on 2 October 1113, the Mosuli commander was walking through a courtyard when he was ambushed and mortally wounded by a lone attacker. The assailant was summarily decapitated and his corpse later burned, but neither his identity nor his motive was ever precisely ascertained. The suspicion was that he had been an adherent of a secretive Nizari sect. This splinter faction of the Isma‘ili branch of Shi‘a Islam, originally from north-eastern Persia, had begun to play a notable role in Near Eastern politics at the start of the twelfth century. With limited resources, they gained power and influence by murdering their enemies and, because it was rumoured that their adherents were addicted to hashish, a new word emerged to describe them–Assassins. During Ridwan ibn Tutush’s life they gained a significant foothold in Aleppo, but after his death in 1113 they were driven out of the city. The Assassins then found a new ally in Tughtegin, and for this reason the atabeg was suspected of having been complicit in Maudud’s assassination. The true extent of Tughtegin’s involvement is unclear, but the rumour alone was enough to isolate him from Baghdad and to promote a new rapprochement between Damascus and Jerusalem.⁷²

For the Franks, the crisis of 1113 proved beyond doubt the necessity for unified resistance to Muslim aggression; it also reaffirmed the wisdom of a cautious defensive strategy. Taken together, the events of 1111 and 1113 established a pattern of Latin military practice that was to persist for much of the twelfth century: in the face of a strong invading force, the Franks would unite; mustering at a defensible location, they would seek to police the threatened region and to disrupt the enemy’s freedom of movement, all while staunchly avoiding the unpredictability of open battle.

It was precisely this approach that Roger, prince of Antioch, adopted initially in 1115 when facing the first real threat of his reign. The only difference was that, on this occasion, he enjoyed the support not only of his Latin compatriots, but also of the Muslim potentates of Syria. With Aleppo now in a state of some disarray, the sultan of Baghdad saw an opportunity to take control of the city and thereby reassert his authority over the Near East. To this end, he sponsored a new expedition across the Euphrates, this time led by a Persian commander, Bursuq of Hamadan.

The prospect of such direct intervention prompted an unprecedented reaction from the feuding Muslim rulers of Syria. Tughtegin allied with his son-in-law, Il-ghazi of Mardin, the leading member of a Turcoman dynasty known as the Artuqids, who held sway over the Diyar Bakr region of the Upper Tigris River. Together, Tughtegin and Il-ghazi took temporary control of Aleppo and dispatched an embassy to Antioch to request peace talks. At first, Roger greeted this approach with some suspicion, but he was soon won over, perhaps by the entreaties of one of his leading vassals, Robert fitz-Fulk the Leper, who held a major lordship on the principality’s eastern frontier and had developed a close friendship with Tughtegin. A treaty of military cooperation was duly sealed early that summer and preparations for Bursuq’s invasion began.

Upon reaching Syria and discovering that Aleppo was now closed to him, Bursuq followed the example of Maudud of Mosul in 1111 and sought support from Shaizar for an attack on Antioch’s southern frontier. Roger, meanwhile, responded in kind by marching 2,000 troops to a holding position at Apamea, probably in the company of Baldwin II of Edessa. There the extraordinary pan-Levantine alliance assembled. Tughtegin, true to his word, joined Roger with some 10,000 men, while Baldwin I and Pons of Tripoli arrived later in August. These arrayed forces, so often themselves combatants, held their ground throughout the summer, successfully intermingling Latin and Muslim troops without apparent difficulty.

Facing such a sizeable and entrenched opposing force, Bursuq did his best to provoke open battle, sending skirmishers to harass the allied camp and leading raids into the Summaq plateau. It is testament to the difficulty of maintaining discipline in the face of such provocation that Roger threatened to blind anyone breaking ranks. The Latins, alongside their Damascene fellows, duly held to their position. Thwarted, Bursuq retreated from Shaizar and, with the danger to Syria now apparently passed, the grand coalition broke up.

Roger returned to Antioch, but in the first days of September Bursuq’s withdrawal was revealed as a ruse. Having fallen back towards Hama to await the dissolution of the defending army, he now circled around, cutting a swathe through the northern reaches of the Summaq. With the principality in real danger of being overrun, Roger found himself in an unsettling predicament, isolated from his allies. Only Baldwin of Edessa remained, having held troops in the principality throughout the summer as something akin to a client ruler of Antioch. Should Roger dutifully await the reassembly of the Latin–Muslim coalition, leaving Bursuq to roam the Syrian countryside with impunity, or risk swift, independent action? In essence, his dilemma replicated that faced by Baldwin I two years earlier and, in spite of the evident lessons of that encounter, on 12 September 1115 the prince of Antioch gathered his army at Rugia and marched to intercept the enemy. This was a rather foolhardy act of bravado. Leading some 500 to 700 knights and perhaps 2,000 to 3,000 infantry, he stood to be outnumbered by at least two to one. The Latins seem to have put their faith in an Antiochene relic of the True Cross carried in their midst by the bishop of Jabala and to have undertaken a series of purifying spiritual rites, but even so Roger must have recognised that he was gambling the future of Frankish Syria.

On this occasion it was the Christians who enjoyed the benefit of fortune and the sharper edge of military intelligence. Moving through the Ruj valley, Roger camped at Hab, all the while searching for signs of Bursuq’s army. On the morning of 14 September scouts brought news: the enemy was camped nearby in the valley of Sarmin, unaware of their approach. Roger launched a surprise attack, panicking the Muslims into a chaotic retreat on to the flanks of a nearby hill known as Tell Danith, where they were soon overrun. With Bursuq in full flight, Roger savoured a famous victory. So plentiful was the loot plundered from the captured Muslim camp that the triumphant prince needed three days to distribute it among his men. Roger had broken the rules of engagement and won; but in doing so he had set a worrying precedent for hot-headed impetuosity.⁷³

Baldwin of Boulogne’s last years

King Baldwin I reaffirmed his own propensity for audacious, even visionary, exploits later that same autumn. East, beyond the banks of the River Jordan and between the Dead Sea and the Red Sea, lay an arid, inhospitable and largely unpopulated region. Today it roughly conforms to the modern borders of Jordan; in the twelfth century it became known as Transjordan. Desolate as it might have been, it acted as an essential channel for trade and communication between Syria and the cities of Egypt and Arabia. Baldwin had already ventured into the area in 1107 and again in 1113 on limited, exploratory campaigns. Now, towards the end of 1115, he made a bold attempt to initiate Frankish colonisation of the area as a first step towards controlling trans-Levantine traffic. Marching with just 200 knights and 400 infantry to a tell-like outcrop known locally as Shobak, he constructed a makeshift castle christened Montreal, or the Royal Mountain. He then returned to the region the following year to establish the small outpost on the Red Sea coast at Aqaba. By these steps Baldwin began a process of territorial expansion that would benefit the kingdom in years to come.