Fakhr al-Mulk, settled in Bagdhad, where violent demonstrations by visiting Aleppan citizens in February 1111 successfully persuaded Sultan Muhammed to dispatch an army against the Franks. A generation later, Zengi’s circle included the poets Ibn al-Qaysarani, from Caesarea (taken by the Franks in 1101), and another Tripoli refugee, Ibn Munir, both of whom urged their master to recapture Jerusalem after his capture of Edessa. Later in the century, fundamentalist emigres from Nablus made a suburb of Damascus a centre of holy war ideology and recruits. Articulate refugees goaded the public consciences of those who posed as leaders of the faithful with tangible results: in 1136 Zengi restored property in Ma ‘arrat al-Numan to its former residents or their heirs.7
Jihad rhetoric and action came partly in consequence of a religious revival, partly because it was good politics. The Shi’ite qadi (i.e. judge) of Aleppo, Ibn al-Khashshab, who organized resistance to Frankish attacks in 1118 and 1124, urged a principled stand against the infidel. During the campaign leading to the defeat of Roger of Antioch at the Field of Blood in 1119, Ibn al-Khashshab rode through the Muslim lines ‘spear in hand’ preaching the virtues of jihad, the novelty of such clerical interference causing some resentment. A generation later, such clerical cheer-leading would have seemed normal. Beleaguered Muslims in the front line naturally looked for aid from Baghdad, their appeals for military help deliberately couched in religious terms. The Aleppans’ protests of 1111 targeted Friday prayers in the sultans’ and caliph’s mosques, preventing the sermons and vandalizing pulpits, ritual symbols of political as well as spiritual power, in an overt challenge to authority. Sultan Muhammed reacted by sending Mawdud of Mosul to Syria for a second time. In 1129, faced by another Frankish threat, such tactics were repeated by Damascene merchants led by an Iranian fundamentalist preacher ‘Abd al-Wahhab al-Shirazi.8
The academic response anticipated the political. The jihad’s greater prominence in religious and political discourse operated within a Sunni revivalism originating in Iran and Iraq, initially stimulated by the fiercely orthodox Seljuk converts and the need to integrate the new Turkish rulers into Islamic culture. Heightened religious and moral commitment found tangible expression in art, architecture and literature. Twelfth- century Syria slid from its cultural backwater into the Islamic mainstream, supported by the patronage of rulers, often parvenus eager to demonstrate their spiritual credentials by endowing new orthodox Sunni schools or colleges. Such a seminary or madrasa acted as a focus for the mediation of the spiritual into the secular. From the 1130s, new religious schools proliferated throughout Syria; Nur al-Din himself founded half of the forty or so built in his reign (1146–74). Their often lavish endowments and rich architecture witnessed a new religious cultural energy in which jihad supplied one strand particularly relevant to Syrian experience. Between 1099 and 1146, the only surviving inscriptions on public buildings anywhere in the Muslim world mentioning jihad come from Syria, such as that on the tomb of Balak, ruler of Aleppo 1123–4 and captor of Joscelin I of Edessa and King Baldwin II: ‘sword of those who fight the Holy War, leader of the armies of the Muslims, vanquisher of the infidels and the polytheists’. Another Aleppo inscription, praising Zengi in 1142, is couched in almost identical terms: ‘tamer of the infidels and the polytheists, leaders of those who fight the holy war, helper of the armies, protector of the territory of the Muslims’, titles that repeat those in an inscription on a madrasa in Damascus dated December 1138.9
Public expressions of idealism reflected growing Muslim awareness of the Frankish threat. Frontier warfare, justified by the ideals of jihad, provided useful employment for Zengi’s nomadic Turcoman levies as well as security for his conquests, but a new intolerance sprang from fear. In the aftermath of the Frankish attack on Aleppo in the 1120s the city’s Christian churches were converted into mosques. A blueprint for ideology and action had existed for more than a generation. In 1105, at the great mosque in Damascus, a legal scholar al- Sulami (1039–1106) had given public readings from his Book of the Holy War (Kitab al-Jihad) in which he urged moral reform (i.e. the jihad al- akbar) within Islam as the necessary preparation for a military reconquest (jihad al- asghar). Although possibly prompted by the threat to Damascus trade routes posed by the loss of Acre (1104), al-Sulami adopted a broad vision, placing the Frankish invasion in the context of eleventh-century Christian advances in Sicily and Spain and blaming Muslim failure to resist on disunity. Fearful of further Frankish conquests, al-Sulami understood that ‘Jerusalem was the summit of their wishes’. Such calls for pan-Islamic solidarity were not confined to the pulpits and studies of the Fertile Crescent. At about the same time as al-Sulami was preaching religious solidarity and moral rearmament in Damascus, the Almoravid conqueror of al-Andalus, Muslim Spain, Yusuf Ibn Tashfin reputedly launched an armada of seventy ships to liberate Jerusalem, only to see it founder in Mediterranean storms.10
Al-Sulami’s message of political unity and spiritual purity was translated into a political programme as a matter of convenience as much as Faith by rulers eager to carve out empires in the ruins of Seljuk control of Syria. Sultan Muhammed’s commitment to holy war, which ceased with his last expeditionary force’s defeat by the Franks of Antioch at Tell Danith in 1115, focused on restoring authority over the Muslims in the region more than driving the Franks into the sea. Thereafter, domination of Muslim Syria revolved first around control of Aleppo, then, after 1128, Damascus, a contest in which the Franks played a vigorous and by no means isolated role. For all his jihad rhetoric and posturing, Zengi’s interests drew him eastwards, away from the Franks. However, to construct viable coalition armies, talk of jihad became an obligatory mask for the realpolitik of diplomacy; thus Zengi stressed the ‘obligation of holy war’ when raising his force to attack Edessa. As ruler of Aleppo without Mosul, Nur al-Din was forced to concentrate on Syria and so employ the language of holy war while lacking adequate economic and financial resources to conduct one. The reality of Muslim revival lay in greater political stability and direction of resources. But academics and religious leaders, with access to the courts, administration and ears of the rulers, provided a respectable ideology for the ambitions of the Zengids and their successors. While only a united Muslim northern Syria could sustain a jihad, religious ideas conditioned the political elites and their propaganda to accept that, regardless of temporary politicking and opportunist truces, the Franks were an eternal enemy to be expelled, by the mid-twelfth century a dimension to the language of politics no Syrian Muslim ruler could ignore. However, events, not ideas, served as the most effective recruiting officer for the jihad, most of all the abject failure of the Second Crusade.
THE CALL TO ARMS
News of the fall of Edessa filtered through to western Europe in the summer and autumn of 1145, arousing little particular alarm. The papal Curia was well informed of eastern affairs; there had been crises before, some leading to calls for action, as after 1119, some not. Papal involvement in Syrian politics was complicated by the need to consider Byzantine responses. By the mid-1140s, Byzantine overlordship over Antioch had been reluctantly admitted by Prince Raymond, who had renewed his homage to the new Greek emperor, Manuel I Comnenus, in 1145. An Antiochene appeal for western aid could have been regarded by Manuel as undermining his claims, especially as the head of Antioch’s delegation to the west, Bishop Hugh of Jubail, had a history of opposition to the Greeks. The new pope, Eugenius III, elected in February 1145, could not afford to alienate Byzantium given his complicated and precarious position in Italy. His predecessor, Lucius II, had been killed in street fighting in Rome, which remained barred to the new pope except briefly over Christmas 1145. The rivalry between King Conrad III of Germany and King Roger II of Sicily, a longstanding enemy of Byzantium, further complicated matters. According to Otto bishop of Freising, Conrad III’s half-brother, an eyewitness at the papal Curia during November and December 1145, two eastern embassies were negotiating with Eugenius at the time: Armenian bishops over possible ecclesiastical union with Rome and ambassadors from Antioch seeking help for Prince Raymond over disputes involving the ruling family. As both touched relations with Byzantium, Eugenius needed to be wary. As Otto of Freising described it, news of Edessa scarcely dominated discussions; it is likely Eugenius had heard the news already.11 It may be that the pope’s decision to issue a new call to arms, couched in terms of aid for ‘the eastern church’, which could be taken to include the Greeks, was partly designed to mitigate the appearance of provocative interference in a sensitive Byzantine sphere of influence, allowing Eugenius to assert his authority without jeopardizing his wider diplomatic interests.
Eugenius III’s bull Quantum praedecessores, dated from Vetralla on 1 December 1145, contained an unequivocal statement of papal jurisdiction, including the power to grant full remission of sins ‘by the authority given us by God’ and ‘by the authority of omnipotent God and that of the Blessed Peter the Prince of the Apostles conceded to us by God’.12 In describing the temporal and spiritual privileges in detail, the bull provided a model for future papal exhortations. Eugenius recalled the First Crusade and the establishment
