Reaching Antioch that March, King Louis VII of France had quarrelled with Raymond of Antioch. Edessa’s recent devastation scuppered any lingering plans to attempt its immediate reconquest; instead Raymond advocated a campaign targeting Aleppo and Shaizar. The plan had considerable merit, offering an opportunity to strike against Zangid power while Nur al-Din was still consolidating his hold over northern Syria, but the French king rejected the scheme and promptly marched south to Palestine. The causes of Louis’ decision have long been debated. He may have been short of funds, concerned about King Conrad of Germany’s activities in the Latin kingdom, and keen to fulfil his own pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The heart of the matter, though, was probably a torrid scandal. Upon arriving in Antioch, Louis’ young charismatic wife Eleanor of Aquitaine had spent a great deal of time in the company of her uncle, Prince Raymond. Rumour spread that they had begun a passionate, incestuous affair. Humiliated and appalled, the French monarch was forced to drag his wife out of the city against her will, an act that soured their relationship beyond repair and put an end to any hopes of cooperation between Antioch and the crusaders.

With Conrad having arrived in the Holy Land that April, the French and German contingents regrouped in northern Palestine in early summer. On 24 June a joint Latin council of the leading crusaders and Jerusalem’s High Court was held near Acre to debate a future course of action, and Damascus was chosen as the new target. This decision was once viewed by scholars as an act of near-lunacy, given the Muslim city’s recent alliance with Frankish Palestine and its resistance to Zangid ascendancy. But this view has been rightly challenged on the grounds that Zangi’s death in 1146 reshaped the balance of power in Muslim Syria. Once Jerusalem’s docile pawn against Aleppo, by 1148 Damascus had become a far more threatening and aggressive neighbour. As such, its neutralisation and conquest were a reasonable objective and the city’s seizure might transform Outremer’s prospects for long-term survival.⁷

In midsummer 1148, the Christian kings of Europe and Jerusalem advanced to Banyas and then marched on Damascus. Unur did his best to prepare the city, strengthening defences and organising troops and militia. Requests for aid were dispatched to his Muslim neighbours, including the Zangids. On 24 July the Franks approached through the dense, richly irrigated orchards south-west of Damascus. These tightly packed copses, enclosed by low mud walls, stretched some five miles from the city’s suburbs. Traversable only via narrow lanes, they had long served as a first natural line of defence. The Muslims did their best to halt the Latin advance, launching skirmishing attacks and incessant arrow volleys from watchtowers and concealed vantage points amidst the trees, but the enemy pressed on.

By day’s end the Franks had established a camp on the open ground in front of the city, from where they had access to the waters of the Barada River. In contrast to the likes of Antioch and Jerusalem, Damascus possessed no great encircling fortifications, but was protected at most by a low outer wall and the crowded jumble of its outlying suburbs. With the Christians now waiting on its very outskirts, the metropolis seemed horribly vulnerable. Unur ordered the streets to be barricaded with huge wooden beams and piles of rubble and, to raise morale, a mass gathering was held in the Grand Umayyad Mosque. One of Damascus’ most sacred treasures, a revered copy of the Koran, once owned by the Caliph ‘Uthman (an early successor to Muhammad), was displayed to the throng ‘and the people sprinkled their heads with ashes and wept tears of supplication’.

For the next three days a desperate struggle was played out, as the Muslims battled to hold back the Franks, and both sides suffered heavy casualties in close, hard-fought combat. Reinforcements from the Biqa valley boosted Muslim resistance and, with the arrival of Nur al-Din and Saif al-Din anticipated, Unur played for time. He appears to have promised to renew tribute payments in return for an end to hostilities. Aware of the rivalries coursing beneath the surface of the Christian coalition, Unur also sought, rather deviously, to sow seeds of doubt and distrust. A message was apparently sent to the crusader kings warning of the Zangids’ approach, while a separate envoy contacted the Levantine Franks, pointing out that their alliance with the westerners would only culminate in the creation of a new adversary in the East, for ‘you know that, if they take Damascus, they will seize the coastal lands that you have in your hands’. The Christian ranks certainly seem to have been plagued by internal tensions, as Latin sources confirm that the Franks began arguing over who should have rights to the city if it fell.

Having made little progress and with doubts surfacing, the Franks held a council of war on the evening of 27 July. A somewhat panicked decision was made to move to the east of the city from where, it was believed, a direct attack might be more easily launched. In fact, this area of Damascus proved to be just as strongly defended, and the Christians now found themselves camped in an exposed, waterless position. Beneath the searing summer sun, their nerve broke. According to one Muslim eyewitness, ‘reports reached the Franks from several quarters of the rapid advance of the Islamic armies to engage in the holy war against them, and they became convinced of their own destruction and the imminence of disaster’. Latin sources murmur of treachery within the army, of pay-offs by Unur and heated recriminations on all sides. On 28 July, the coalition of crusaders and Levantine Franks began an appallingly humiliating retreat, harried by Damascene skirmishers as they fled. King Conrad later wrote that the Christians had ‘retreated in grief with the siege a failure’, while William of Tyre described the crusaders as being ‘covered with confusion and fear’. The French and German kings spoke of plans to launch a second, better-equipped assault against Damascus, or of a possible campaign against Fatimid Ascalon, but no action was taken on either count. Conrad set sail for Europe in September and, after visiting the holy sites, Louis followed his lead in spring 1149. With relief, one Muslim chronicler declared that ‘God saved the believers [in Damascus] from their evil.’⁸

As far as the Franks were concerned, the main Levantine thrust of the Second Crusade had ended in miserable defeat. After such grand, regal preparations, the Christians’ plans had come to naught and the very concept of Latin holy war was now brought into question. The consequences of this grave setback for the popularity and practice of crusading would be felt long into the future. Despite the protracted debate over the wisdom of the Franks’ decision to besiege Damascus, historians have tended to underplay the crusade’s impact upon Near Eastern Islam. On the surface, the balance of power appeared unchanged–Unur remained in control of Damascus; the Christians had been repelled. But at the critical moment of danger, the Damascenes had been forced to appeal to Aleppo and Mosul. For a brief moment in the mid-1140s, Unur had seemed capable of checking Zangid ascendancy; now, in the aftermath of the Second Crusade, he had to accept an increasingly subservient relationship with Nur al-Din.

The Latin attack on Damascus in 1148 also contributed to a hardening of anti-Frankish sentiment among the wider Damascene populace. Before long, Unur and the Burid ruling elite reopened diplomatic channels with the kingdom of Jerusalem, but local support for the policy of alliance with Palestine was now in terminal decline.

The county of Edessa dismembered

Aleppo had escaped the Second Crusade unscathed and, if anything, the Latin expedition had bolstered Nur al-Din’s position in northern Syria. Certainly the crusade had done nothing to reverse the Zangid gains achieved in the county of Edessa. In the years that followed, the scattered remnants of what had been the first crusader state were gradually picked over by Islam. Facing pressure from three fronts–as Nur al-Din, Ma‘sud of Konya and the Artuqids of Diyar Bakr all vied to seize Edessene territory–Count Joscelin II tried to buy a measure of security by agreeing a submissive truce with Aleppo. But when the count was captured in 1150, Nur al-Din paid scant notice of Joscelin’s supposed status as a client-ally; the Frank was thrown into prison (and possibly blinded) and remained in confinement until his death nine years later.