A non-contemporary fresco (c. 1250) of a mounted camel rider representing al-Afdal Shahanshah, painted in the St. Michael's Cathedral of Tyre. Al-Afdal, the "Great Vizier" only led an army against the Crusaders in 1099, after the fall of Jerusalem, but it became the tradition to depict him as the genuine ruler and commander of Fatimid Egypt (with the Caliph usually depicted as a child under a regency).
It is hard to imagine that al-Afdal would go to war mounted on a camel, but the Frankish iconography was so affected by the ingrained image of the Arabic-speaking peoples of the Near East as camel riders (in comparison to the Turks, who are always depicted as barbarian-like horsemen) that it the very presence of the camel in the painting indicates that the person in question is an Arab (even though al-Afdal was an Armenian by ethnicity).
The Fatimid force led by
Shams al-Khilafa had abandoned the siege of Jerusalem because of a competition that rose between them and the Turkish warlords of Syria.
Al-Afdal Shahanshah, in the previous year, as part of the agreement with
Radwan of Aleppo, had accepted to partition the Levant after the Crusaders were destroyed: the Turks would have the northern half and the Jordan valley, but the littoral from Tyre to Gaza, and the interior all the way to the Sea of Galilee would be annexed to the Shiite Caliphate.
Thus, Shams al-Khilafa had orders to immediately seize Jerusalem, aware that the Fatimid navy would prosecute the naval campaigns to retake the coastal cities such as Caesarea and Jaffa. Then, after some time besieging Jerusalem, having triumphed over the Bavarians, the Berber lieutenant was startled to discover that Emir Tutush II intended to have Jerusalem annexed to the dominion of Damascus, in a thinly-disguised “master plan” to overthrown Radwan and install himself as the sole ruler of Syria, to Toghtekin’s mocking amusement (as by then Tutush little more than 10 years old). Shams al-Khilafa had the coolness to administer cautiously the situation, and remained in the siege operations while he awaited the return of the messengers he sent to Cairo to report to the Vizier. Then, in September 1109, he would receive a letter from his suzerain ordering him to leave the Turks to their own fate, and to dedicate himself to conquering the Levantine metropolises that had been usurped by the Latins.
Gaza fell after a quick siege – the local Toulousain castellan was a coward and a greedy creature, who sold the stronghold after receiving a bribe –, and Ascalon resisted, but not for long, while Caesarea and Jaffa outright refused to capitulate. The Egyptians successfully stormed Jaffa by sea, but their outnumbered marines in the same week were surprised during the night by a bunch of Palestinian Christian rioters and slaughtered in their own headquarters during the sleep. Afterwards, Haifa was also taken by force, but it was only sacked and then the Fatimids departed back to sea.
In October 1109, the news about Toghtekin and Baktash’s defeat in Jerusalem had already reached Gaza, from Turkish deserters escaping from Judaea and desperately seeking asylum in Egypt. Shams al-Khilafa, having seized Gaza and Ascalon, expected to see the Crusaders coming from the east any of these days, and, indeed, they came to do battle.
The Fatimid army greatly outnumbered the Frankish host, but the Berber commander had enough reason to fear an amphibious assault by the Rhōmaîoi now that the Fatimid fleet was no more – especially considering that neither Gaza nor Ascalon had seaside citadels, like Tyre and Acre – and he left some hundreds of his men to maintain these settlements, committing his main body of infantry to face the advancing Crusaders.
The sources usually point out that the Shiite Caliphate at the time could muster up to 30.000 or even 40.000 soldiers, numbers not so unreasonable considering its overall population, but in none of the conflicts against Jerusalem did they actually fielded such an immense army – likely due to the logistical, fiscal and even political constraints – and we can suppose that Shams al-Khilafa did not command even half of these figures, because, at the time, al-Afdal employed a few less than 6.000 men to protect Cairo and Fustat. With the catastrophic loss of the fleet at the hands of
Megas Doux John Doukas, al-Afdal had trouble in mustering some 8.000 Egyptian conscripts and Makurian mercenaries to reinforce the cities of the Nile Delta, expecting a Rhōmaîoi amphibious invasion, but he hardly face the unrelenting opposition of the nobles and bureaucrats that composed his privy council. They would day after day insist that keeping such a large force afield would burden the coffers of the state, and likely demand an increase in taxes and in drafts. The Great Vizier, however, could not even consider such unpopular measures, and thus became an easy scapegoat when the Caliphate's aristocracy sought to point culprits for the realm's mediocre performance in the war.
*****
The Berber general restrained himself from attacking Bohemond when he approached Ascalon, coming from Jerusalem, and sent by a few raiding companies to harass their column. To his surprise, however, the Franks were employing a company of Turcoman horse archers, as well as some divisions of Latin infantry archers. Shams al-Khilafa soon realized he had made a poor tactical decision, then, believing that the Latins would employ their shock cavalry as usual, and thus had deployed his own heavy infantry in tight-knit formations to resist and repel their inevitable charges; in a static position, however, they became easy prey for the mobile archers, and could hardly maintain formation and discipline under the constant barrages of arrows, while the Berber camel riders, who sought to flank the column, were soon expelled by the Frankish heavy cavalry. The Egyptians had formed their battle-line opposite to Ascalon’s circuit of walls, and due to their deployment – which sought to avoid an attack on their rearguard –, had little space to maneuver even if the ground was plain and featureless; Bohemond notice this, and kept his the heavy cavalry at bay, insisting on ranged attacks to exhaust the patience and morale of the increasingly desperate Egyptians. When he finally sensed the disturbances in the regimental formations, the Norman prince cried “
havoc” and unleashed his dogs of war. The timing was perfect: the immense line of the combined Egyptian, Berber, Arab, Syrian and Makurian fighters dissolved like a field of flowers struck by a tornado. Thousands of men, routed and pursued by numerically inferior force which suffered comparatively few casualties, and forced to run for their lives into the fortresses of Ascalon, with some scattered remnants escaping further into Gaza.
In spite of the tactical disaster, Shams al-Khilafa would persist in the war effort for various month afterwards, safe inside the walls of Gaza and Ascalon. Nevertheless, in Egypt itself, the word was that Allah was punishing their race for their impure and sinful way of life; it seemed a more convenient explanation than the one that became increasingly propagated in the streets and hostels of Cairo: that al-Afdal was not only a tyrant who had strangled the last vestiges of Caliphal power in the Shiite realm, but also a worthless and incompetent generalissimo.
The
Franj wanted to recapture Gaza and Ascalon, of course, but they were concerned about the strategic vulnerability of Galilee, a land that had been suffering greatly in that year due to the constant raids and depredations of the Aleppans, now that Radwan seemed comfortable with his headquarters in Nabatia. The self-proclaimed Sultan of Syria even had the nerve of attempting another siege of Tyre in late 1109, but the mere sight of the Norman cavalry that garrisoned the city made him cower in fear and recall his men, abandoning the field.
While in Galilee and Lebanon the war would degenerate into a series of skirmishes and raids and counteroffensives, the desertic outskirts of Gaza and Ascalon became the spot of an early form of trench warfare, as the Latin besiegers, lacking the will to storm the solid ramparts of Ascalon, manned by so many hundreds of men, created concentric circuits of trenches and ditches to protect from the harassment of the Egyptians. Soon, the besieged garrison wasted all of their arrows and darts, and the siege went into stalemate. Bohemond ordered the construction of a fortified camp in the road between Gaza and Ascalon, but it would hardly save them if the expected reinforcements came from Egypt.
*****
As the year of 1109 closed, with Jerusalem secure in Christian hands, the war lost its tempo.
Tutush II and Baktash had retreated to Damascus, while Toghtekin returned to the meager fiefs granted to him by Radwan in a desperate effort to raise money to ransom his captive son. The Artuqids were still at large in Galilee, but their lack of infantry made impossible for them to prosecute sieges, and, with the insistent counterattacks of the Franks, they lost patience and returned to Mesopotamia shortly thereafter, while the Ahlatshahs took advantage of the opportunity not only to raid the Jordan valley, but also to coerce and extort the cities of Beirut and Sidon, which now were again fearing the possibility of a Latin offensive, if Radwan were to abandon their cause.
Sökmen found an easy way to enlarge his treasure by demanding money in return for a promise of protection, and he and his cortege of barbarians were well received with fine gifts of silk and silver, and with sumptuous banquets in the palace of the Emir of Beirut, only to disappear in the next few days, barely disguising their laughter when they argued that they had established a camp further to the hills in the east. In the same day, the infuriated and dismayed ruler of that beautiful city, where the ruins of Roman Berytos were still upstanding, would discover about the deception, and again implore protection to the stagnated army of Aleppo.
According to his messengers who returned from Radwan’s improved palace in Nabatia (fashioned from a former
caravanserai), the so-called Sultan of Syria, of the great warlike kin of the Seljuks, was likely afflicted with a sort of madness; he would spend the days in a pitiful lethargy, disappearing for so long periods in his private chambers that the soldiers would believe he had either died or simply departed, while during some nights he would storm into the quarters of the rank and file, bare-chested and carrying his great gilded saber, screaming as if arguing with invisible ghosts, that Allah had commanded them to destroy the infidels and he would purge the world from their race. The episodes of hysteria became increasingly frequent, and the combined demoralization, reticence and boredom of the troops greatly increased the rate of desertions, which in turn forced the lieutenants to impose harsh punishments. Radwan had mustered an army numbering something between 5.000 and 8.000 men, but by now his headquarters in Nabatia had barely half of the figure. They would never actually see any direct action against the
Franj, excepting a few minor engagements near the
Nahr al-Kalb [
Dog River], a creek carved between gorges and rocky hills that served as border between Lebanon and Palestine.
The Franks, however, in spite of the reinforcements from Italy and from Rhōmanía, lacked enough manpower to project in an effort to simultaneously expel the Turco-Syrians from Lebanon – as the Latins feared that Radwan would be assisted in battle by the militias of Beirut, Tripoli and Sidon, possibly outnumbering them – and to destroy the Fatimids from southern Palestine. A large part of the Crusader army was committed to siege (or better, the containment) of the Egyptians in Ascalon and Gaza; and Bohemond, commanding a mobile strike-force of heavy cavalry which sought to cleanse Galilee from the Turcoman raiding companies, was ever ready to return to the main corps if any reinforcements came from Cairo, and a garrison of Occitans led by Raymond and his son Bertrand had been left to protect Jerusalem. They indeed expected that reinforcements would come from Egypt, but, unbeknownst to the Latins, al-Afdal had lost much of his courtly influence after the succession of disasters and became consumed by a feverous paranoia, seeing conspiracies everywhere, and effectively locked himself in his own palace in Cairo with a handful of bodyguards, while his sons, the courtiers and the eunuchs sought to secure the reins of the administration and to gain the influence of the Caliph, who, in spite of being politically insignificant, was still the keystone of the Fatimid regime. The Arabic nobles were dissatisfied and, perhaps scenting the coming of the Great Vizier’s downfall, withdrew the support to his regime, while the rank and file soldiery stationed in Lower Egypt grew demoralized and undisciplined, as the rumors spread that the Rhōmaîoi would invade from the Mediterranean with hundreds of thousands of veterans. It seems that while the Franks considered the Fatimids to be by far their greatest existential threat, the Egyptians themselves did not actually considered the Latins to be more than an inconvenient pest, and made no moves against them.
Another army had been consolidated under the leadership of
Duke William IX of Aquitaine, who was given the almost impossible task of guarding the passes between eastern Palestine and central Syria, so as to deter offensives coming from Damascus, as well as of controlling the Jordan valley, a corridor from whence the Turkish raiders used to come, and he thus went as far as the gardened outskirts of Damascus to raid farms and hamlets. Bohemond himself, with a minor party, sought to also contain Radwan in Nabatia, preventing the Syrians from going further south. With this awkward and overly defensive strategy, they intended to secure at least the heartland of Palestine against possible incursions from either of the three vulnerable borders of the realm. The stalemate would last for some grueling and exhausting months.
*****
The morale of the Latins was greatly elevated when the news arrived that Basileus Alexios had sent a large army from central Anatolia to besiege Aleppo itself shortly before the end of the cursed year of 1109. His veteran troops had been ferried from Attalea to Antioch to avoid crossing the Taurus range in the onset of winter, but even as the nights became very cold for the soldiers to remain afield, they were already encamped in a safe spot near Aleppo, from where they could be resupplied from Antioch, and initiated siege operations in the midst of January 1110. Aleppo would resist for some few months, and its downfall would generate a domino-effect in the rest of western Syria, fated to be reincorporated to Rhōmaîon suzerainty.
In the beginning of 1110, while a large Crusader army still besieged Ascalon and watched Gaza, Bohemond, having bolstered his army by conscripting even more Lebanese and Palestinian natives, merged his forces with that of William of Aquitaine and with a small company of knights led by Bertrand of Toulouse – notwithstanding the fact that Bertrand and William had once been blood enemies, almost ten years ago, in the dispute for William’s wife Phillipa for the throne of Toulouse – and together they marched with fortifying the region between the upper Jordan valley and the Lebanese coast of Tyre and Sidon. With Tyre itself and Tebnine remaining in Crusader hands, they controlled only a fringe of farmlands and mountainous valleys in southern Lebanon, but the local defenses were too porous and allowed for the easy passage of enemy armies. One particular spot troubled Bohemond: the
Qala'at al-Shaqif, a citadel upon a cliff overlooking the Litani River, and which would become known as “
Nautcastèl”, and which had been unsuccessfully besieged by Raymond some years before. The seated governor of Qala'at al-Shaqif,
Abu Bakr ibn Hassun, was an Arabic-Egyptian nobleman, who for most of his life had served under the Fatimids, but, since the collapse of their rule in Palestine, remained in Lebanon ruling in his own name as a warlord, terrorizing the neighboring towns into paying tribute, which came in form of cattle, food and nubile teens. A long time ago, he had realized that his own survival depended on the goodwill of the foreign conquerors who threaded through that turbulent spot of the Earth, and with Seljuks, it had not been different. Now, he only resolved to resist the Franks because they had made it all too clear that they would not allow him to remain as ruler. In the end, it was Qala'at al-Shaqif’s fate to fall by the Latin swords.
While the siege continued, with Bohemond content with awaiting for Abu Bakr’s petty thugs and the slaves they had conscripted to defend the ramparts to starve, the Aquitanian and Toulousain soldiers were employed in engineering works to erect some motte-and-bailey outposts near
Jisr al-Shugur, a village constructed near the ruins of the ancient site of
Seleucia ad Belum, and, further to the west, to overlook a valley not far from Tyre. Their work was speeded up by the presence of a Rhōmaîon engineer, Loukas of Attaleia, who had been sent by Manuel Boutoumites to assist the Franks.
The Franks expected that Radwan might come to rescue Abu Bakr ibn Hassun, in an effort to secure a rump state for himself in Lebanon now that his capital of Aleppo was assaulted by the Rhōmaîoi arms. To their surprise, however, the one that came to war was none other than Sökmen al-Qutbî of the Ahlatshahs. He had gone to Syria after campaigning in Palestine and then returned to Lebanon, invited by the
Sheikh of Zahlé, who pleaded him to become their suzerain now that Radwan proved to be a coward. Sökmen had little to gain in the exhausted lands that comprised his emirate, in the heartlands of ancient Armenia, now a depopulated no-man’s-land suffering by the constant wars between the Seljuk dynasts. Thus, Lebanon and Palestine, with its serene towns and fruitful vineyards became much more interesting grounds for his bloodthirsty lackeys to prey upon. Now, he could not be more surprised to see his rampaging path blocked by brand-new forts constructed with the finest Greek architecture. Having neither interest nor the means to besiege them, he was forced to harass the supply lines of the Frankish besiegers, but their fierce retaliation made him return to Zahlé and make no further incursions south.
Then, true to his mindset that it was better to be the vulture than the corpse, he turned against his former ally Radwan, who, after the storming of Aleppo in March 1110, had finally abandoned Nabatia and any other designs he might have in Lebanon, and returned to Homs with the demoralized remnant of his troops and retainers. Bohemond then abandoned the siege of Qala'at al-Shaqif when he heard that the Turco-Syrians had departed, and quickly moved into Nabatia. The city offered no resistance, and thus the backcountry of southern Lebanon was mostly secured, while northern Lebanon again fell to warlordism, with every insignificant clan chief proclaiming himself emir or accepting the suzerainty of more formidable rulers, such as the
Banu Ammar of Tripoli or the Sheik of Zahlé.
Sökmen al-Qutbî’s military career would end in that very year of 1110. After successive months of raids against the fractured Islamic polities in northern Lebanon, using Zahlé as a headquarters, he would be ambushed and destroyed by a Turcoman company led by none other than
Toghtekin, who had recently established himself as an independent ruler in
Baalbek, breaking his oaths to Radwan, his former Sultanate of Syria reduced to a compact network of fiefs and cities orbiting around Homs and Hamah, going as far as Tortosa [
Tartus]. Toghtekin, finally free from the shackles of the cursed Tutushids, eagerly campaigned to conquer for his own family an emirate in northern Lebanon, and, after coercing or persuading various towns and cities in the
Beqaa valley to accept his suzerainty, he dethroned the Sheik of Zahlé and forged an alliance with Beirut against both the Crusaders and the Qadi of Tripoli, who was taking advantage of the anarchy of the region to establish himself as the ruler over the littoral, annexing Byblos and Jbeil to his domain.
*****
Now, in July 1110, the coveted Nautcastèll had yet to surrender to the Crusaders led by Bohemond, but Abu Bakr ibn Hassun had exhausted his few men in desperate sorties against the besiegers – and those caught attempting to desert were submitted to gruesome tortures, and there were grim reports that after the horses and dogs had been consumed, the non-putrid dead became the banquets of the mad tyrant, who now claimed that he would be granted fiery wings by Allah to burn his enemies.
It would take some more weeks for the great fort to fall, but by then the Franks had turned their sights to securing the various towns and villages of Lebanon, now that Palestine itself had finally been purged from Turkish marauders. Their offensives put them in collision route with the quickly expanding emirate of Toghtekin, whilst both parties attempted to obtain control of the fertile Beqaa valley. The Christians, however, lacked the manpower to besiege and conquer the independent and formidable Lebanese metropolises, with a large part of their army still committed to the siege of Ascalon.
It seemed, indeed, that the war theater had more or less stabilized, and thus the Latins were more than eager to conclude a truce with the multitude of enemy nations that threatened their supposedly holy enterprise. The Lebanese cities were somewhat willing to negotiate, but the three envoys sent to Cairo to sue for peace would return to Jerusalem with only their decapitated heads in a casket, while Toghtekin, so consumed by the
jihadist rhetoric, refused any sort of settlement.
The Crusaders, having already been saved from the mouths of perdition by two miracles – the insurmountable hatred of the Muslim conquerors towards one another and the providential Rhōmaîon alliance – needed yet a
third miracle to preserve their newfound realm. In that month of July 1110, would this one miracle happen. While the Normans, Toulousains and Aquitanians campaigned in Lebanon, Bohemond hastily returned to Jerusalem, having received spectacular news. A vast host of cross-bearing soldiers had come from the farthest kingdom in the Christian realm, disembarking in Jaffa. They were led by
Sigurd Magnusson, the King of Norway.
____________________________________
Notes and comments: NOW we have the Norwegians you wanted.
Well, this chapter became larger than I expected, but we are nearing the conclusion of the "Jihad of 1109", now that the Crusaders can finally go from defensive to offensive.
