Convinced both of the value of these extremely generous terms and of the benefits of forestalling Zangi’s conquest of Syria, Fulk led an army north to relieve Damascus. With his operations against the city stalled, this threat was enough to prompt the atabeg’s retreat. He returned to Mosul, once more turning his attention to Mesopotamian affairs.⁹⁵

Zangi against the Franks

Throughout the 1130s Zangi showed little or no interest in the prosecution of an anti-Frankish jihad and any attacks launched against the Latins in this period were either almost incidental or related to his advance into southern Syria. The atabeg’s only notable offensive against Outremer came in July 1137, when he targeted the fortress of Barin (to the west of Hama and the Orontes). But even this campaign should not be misconstrued, because Zangi’s primary intention was to use Barin as a ready staging post for his aggression against Muslim Homs. The atabeg’s first concern was to further his southward expansion towards Damascus, not to deliver a mortal blow to the crusader states.

During the early 1140s Zangi focused almost exclusively on events east of the Euphrates, seeking to expand his power base in Iraq and to consolidate relations with the Seljuq sultan of Baghdad. From 1143 the atabeg was particularly concerned with subjugation of the Artuqid princes and minor Kurdish warlords to the north, in Diyar Bakr. Facing this aggression, one Artuqid, Qara Arslan of Hisn Kaifa, forged a pact with Joscelin II of Edessa (who succeeded his father in 1131), offering to relinquish territory to the Franks in return for aid. In autumn 1144, believing his county to be safe from attack, Joscelin duly led a large Edessene army to Qara Arslan’s assistance. This move, born of an imperfect appreciation of Zangi’s ambitions and capabilities, would have a profound impact upon Outremer’s history.

Soon after the count’s departure, the few troops that remained in Edessa alongside its Latin archbishop were stunned by Zangi’s arrival outside their walls. The atabeg had long valued precise, up-to-date intelligence, happily expending a small fortune to maintain an extensive network of spies and scouts across the Near and Middle East. He therefore learned almost immediately of Joscelin’s absence and the weakening of Edessa’s garrison. Sensing a rare, and probably unexpected, opportunity, Zangi switched targets from Diyar Bakr to the Frankish capital. His war band, already equipped with siege weaponry, reached the city by forced march in late November and immediately initiated a devastating investment. For the next four weeks the Christians within strove to endure incessant bombardment and repeated assaults by armoured towers and teams of sappers, but the defenders’ position was all but hopeless.

Learning of the attack, Joscelin II tried to assemble a relief force at Tell Bashir. Melisende responded immediately to his pleas for assistance, sending troops north, but, for reasons that remain unclear, Raymond of Antioch prevaricated. With the count still desperately trying to prepare a counter-strike, the dreadful news of Edessa’s fall arrived. On 24 December 1144, Zangi’s miners collapsed a huge section of the city’s towering fortifications. With Muslim troops flooding through the breach, the Christians fled in terror towards the citadel. Amid the resultant panic hundreds were crushed to death, the Latin archbishop among them, even as the atabeg’s soldiers set about their grisly work. One Armenian native of the city wrote that the Muslims ‘ruthlessly shed an enormous amount of blood, neither respecting the age of elderly people, nor taking pity on the innocent, lamb-like children’. Those few who reached the inner fortress held out for a further two days, but by 26 December the entire city was in the hands of Islam.

Zangi’s conquest of Edessa may have been largely opportunistic, but it was still an unmitigated catastrophe for the Franks. The strategic consequences alone were profoundly alarming. With its principal city lost, the surrounding Latin county stood on the brink of total ruination. Should this most northern of crusader states fall, contact and communication between the Muslim powers in Mesopotamia and Syria would become far more fluid and secure. In this context, the principality of Antioch’s future looked bleak indeed: its northern neighbour and ally transformed into an enemy; its rival, Aleppo, resurgent. The danger of a domino effect, in which weakness and vulnerability seeped southwards, bringing the successive collapse of each remaining Latin polity, was only too obvious. The Frankish chronicler William of Tyre reflected upon the ‘ominous disaster’ of 1144, observing that there was now a real prospect of the Muslim world ‘overrunning the entire East unchecked’.*

The psychological impact of this event was perhaps even more significant. Never before had one of Outremer’s four great capitals fallen to Islam. Edessa, the first eastern city to be seized by the crusaders, had stood inviolate for almost half a century. Its sudden unheralded loss sent a tremor of fear and apprehension pulsing through the Latin Levant, severely undermining confidence and morale. Any lingering sense of Christian invincibility evaporated; the dream of Outremer–of a permanent, divinely wrought resettlement of the Holy Land–lay shattered. And, to make matters worse, Zangi, so long a looming threat, could be expected to capitalise upon his victory, galvanising Islam to ever greater efforts in the war for dominion of the Near East.

As this dire news filtered back to the West, the renowned Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux echoed these dreadful concerns, affirming in a letter that: ‘The earth is shaken because the Lord of heaven is losing his land…the enemy of the Cross has begun to lift his sacrilegious head there and to devastate with the sword that blessed land, that land of promise.’ Bernard warned that sacred Jerusalem, ‘the very city of the living God’, might itself be overrun. The only answer for the Latin East, indeed for western Christendom as a whole, was to launch a new crusade.⁹⁶

6

CRUSADING REBORN

Edessa’s downfall shocked the Levant. In 1145 Frankish and Armenian envoys travelled to Europe to broadcast the calamitous news, and to spell out the threat of annihilation now hanging over all the Christians of the Near East. In response, the Latin world launched a huge military expedition that has been dubbed the Second Crusade.⁹⁷ For the first time western kings took up the fight and, in a great upsurge of recruitment, some 60,000 troops marched east to save Outremer. At the same time, the wars of the cross were borne into new theatres of conflict in Iberia and the Baltic. This was a massive and unprecedented explosion of crusade enthusiasm–outstripping even that witnessed after 1095. Could this fervour guarantee success? And how would the rebirth of Christian holy war affect the future history of the crusades?

EARLY TWELFTH-CENTURY CRUSADING

Latin Europe’s fervent reaction to the preaching of the Second Crusade can only be understood properly against a backdrop of earlier twelfth-century developments in crusading. The First Crusaders’ ‘miraculous’ conquest of the Holy Land in 1099 established a fragile Latin outpost in the Levant and seemed to provide conclusive proof that God endorsed this novel fusion of pilgrimage and warfare. Under the circumstances, one might expect the opening decades of the twelfth century to have been marked by a flood of ‘crusading’ activity, as western Europe rushed to embrace this extension of Christian holy war and to defend Outremer. This was not the case. The memory of the First Crusade certainly burned brightly, but the years leading to 1144 witnessed only a sporadic clutch of small-scale crusades. In part this was because many regarded the First Crusade as a singularly astonishing event that was essentially unrepeatable. Drawing upon centuries of hindsight, later historians identified the mass armed pilgrimage stimulated by Pope Urban II’s preaching in 1095 as the first of an ongoing succession of crusades and, thus, as the start of a crusading movement. But this ‘future’ was by no means apparent in the early twelfth century and the idea of crusading had yet to coalesce.