God's War: A New History of the Crusades

campaign. Writing home from Constantinople in late February, Conrad still looked forward to recapturing Edessa.⁵⁰ Yet after Nur al-Din had destroyed its fortifications and massacred its Christian inhabitants late in 1146, reconquest became impractical and futile. The realistic choices lay between a northern foray to reinforce the Euphrates frontier and attack Aleppo; an assault, as in 1129, against Damascus, until recently a close ally of Jerusalem but since 1146/7 uneasily allied to Nur al-Din, its lands already a target for the Jerusalemites in 1147; and, finally, an attack on Ascalon, the last port on the coast of Syria and Palestine still in Muslim hands, a base for piracy and Egyptian raids that, since the 1130s, had been circled by fortified Christian settlements designed by King Fulk to neutralize its threat. Each posed military challenges and political complications.

With Edessa no longer apparently an option, the northern strategy appeared less attractive to the westerners. Most of them had sailed to ports in the kingdom of Jerusalem to the south of the frontier with Nur al- Din of Aleppo, the main opponent in any northern campaign. For all of them, fulfilling their vows at the Holy Sepulchre appeared of paramount importance, the first objective of the recently arrived crusaders: Otto of Freising, King Conrad, the Lisbon veterans. Even Alfonso-Jordan of Toulouse, in spite of his close and potentially disruptive interests in Tripoli, after landing at Acre immediately marched south towards Jerusalem, dying suddenly at Caesarea amid rumours of poison implicating his cousin Count Raymond II of Tripoli. Of all the possible schemes, William of Tyre acutely noted, ‘the hopes of the king and people of Jerusalem seemed most likely to be realised’ because of the devotion to the Holy Places and the presence of Conrad.⁵¹ Despite his landfall at Antioch, even Louis of France appeared more determined to visit Jerusalem than contemplate military action in northern Syria, rendering redundant an embassy led by Patriarch Fulk of Jerusalem to persuade him south. Some assumed piety drew him to the Holy Sepulchre; others noted that he had fallen out badly with the prince of Antioch; later gossip ascribed this demarche to one of the greatest sex scandals of the age, an alleged affair between Louis’s wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and her uncle, Raymond of Antioch. The evidence for this is suggestive but inconclusive and coloured by the hindsight of the royal couple’s divorce in 1152.⁵² Whether guilty of impropriety or not, Eleanor seems to have tried to persuade Louis to adopt Raymond’s plan for a joint attack on Aleppo, and her husband equally clearly rejected the policy. Despite later lurid speculation and insinuation, Louis’s reasons may have been based on strategic assessment not sexual jealousy. His army was ill equipped for siege warfare, lacking the footsloggers so vital, as Lisbon confirmed, in sapping, building and protecting siege engines, or providing cover for the knights. While relations between Antioch and Byzantium had soured Louis’s diplomacy with Manuel, any gains effected with Prince Raymond would almost certainly be claimed by the Greeks and would raise the awkward question of the French oaths of October 1147 and January/February 1148. Louis may also have realized that, with the other contingents not interested in a northern campaign, Christian success, dependent on numbers, dictated uniting the western armies. From Louis’s decision to march away from Antioch flowed the ultimately failed policy of the crusade; more widely the westerners’ failure to confront directly the growing power of Nur al-Din led indirectly to the death of Prince Raymond at the battle of Inab in 1149, the capture of Joscelin II of Edessa and the subsequent evacuation of the remains of the county of Edessa in 1150.

With the northern campaign excluded, attention settled on the two southern options, especially as the suspicious death of the count of Toulouse and the continued presence of his disgruntled bastard son, Bertrand, excluded any interest Raymond of Tripoli may have harboured for western assistance on his frontiers, for example an attack on Homs, later taken by Nur al-Din in 1149. By the time Louis had completed his pilgrimage to Jerusalem in June, Conrad had already agreed with the teenaged Baldwin III, Patriarch Fulk and his recent hosts, the Templars, to take Damascus. Even before he left Constantinople, Conrad had announced his intention to raise a new army once he reached Outremer; now he did so, perhaps with Greek money, dipping into the pool of potential recruits arrived from the west, almost certainly including the Lisbon veterans, many of whom came from imperial lands in eastern Flanders and the Rhineland.⁵³ On campaign, this new army was to fight efficiently together under Conrad, suggesting its construction had not been entirely random. Its presence certainly lent strength to Conrad’s negotiating position.

A council of western leaders and the local baronage was convened at Acre around 24 June, perhaps after a preliminary meeting of Louis and Conrad between Acre and Tyre.⁵⁴ After what were remembered as heated arguments, the decision was reached to attack Damascus. The political context for this decision influenced the military rationale. The crusaders had stumbled on a major local constitutional clash, soon to bubble into civil war, between young Baldwin III and his mother, Queen Melisende, who, since her husband’s death in 1143, had, as a crowned queen regnant, exercised power on her own behalf, increasingly jealous of her son’s attempts to establish his authority. For Baldwin, a military adventure would emphasize his role as a field commander, a position denied his mother. When considering the target to attack, Baldwin and his supporters may have preferred Damascus to Ascalon, as the fall of the latter could have benefited the king’s younger brother, Amalric, later count of Jaffa, a close ally of his mother, by providing an obvious fief for him to be given. More generally, despite later recriminations and modern surprise, the choice of Damascus suited the moment. The Franks had attacked it in 1126 and 1129; the treaty of the 1140s had recently collapsed; the capture of the city would not only secure fertile land and a major trading centre, the chief Syrian entrepot in the commerce that fuelled the ports of Acre and Tyre, but would provide the Christians with the natural frontier of the desert and tilt the balance of power in Syria heavily in their favour and against Nur al-Din of Aleppo, forcing other Muslim rulers in the region to adopt at the least a more accommodating attitude. For a generation, rulers of Jerusalem had tried to control Damascus alternately by alliance or conquest. With Nur al-Din inheriting his father’s ambitions to annexe the city, the attempt in 1148 conformed to traditional Jerusalem policy of asserting its interests. It also did not preclude a subsequent attack on Ascalon.

The tactics of the Christian army indicated a calculation that Damascus would either quickly surrender or succumb without much resistance. Mustering at Tiberias in mid-July, the invasion force reached Damascus in a few days, arriving on 24 July. The speed of march suggests that, although accompanied by a large baggage train and herds of livestock, the Christians had not prepared siege engines, relying on local timber from the orchards surrounding the city to fortify the camp they established to the west of the city after brushing aside the Damascene army. They also appeared to have carried limited rations with them, as food became short after only a few days of the siege. The plan appeared to be to terrify the defenders into submission or to take Damascus by rapid assault rather than to mount a prolonged investment, which, despite the numbers in the besieging forces, put by one eyewitness at 50,000, would be almost impossible given the size of the city.⁵⁵ In the event, after only two days’ hard skirmishing, with no surrender imminent, the Christians moved to the less well-defended eastern suburbs on 27 July, ostensibly in search of a less well-fortified area to attack. Here, the tactics are hard to fathom. With the new position lacking cover or water, the Christians allowed themselves no time to prepare even the simplest siege engines or missile throwers, as any delay could now prove fatal. In the absence of an immediate assault, options disappeared. The defenders had reclaimed and fortified the orchards and previous camp on the west side of the city; the morale of the citizens had revived after the initial shock; and news came in of large Muslim relief armies led by Nur al-Din of Aleppo and his brother Sayf al-Din of Mosul closing on the city from the north. The retreat was sounded at dawn on 28 July, the march back to Palestine attended by constant Muslim harrying and heavy casualties.

The inevitable decision to withdraw derived from unavoidable immediate circumstance. Contemporaries and later writers, both Christian and Muslim, sought more human, accountable agencies than mischance to explain the greatest humiliation of Latin arms in the Near East, worse than any defeat in that the Christian army remained intact. Immediately there were accusations of betrayal. Conrad wrote darkly but vaguely to his regent, Wibald of Corvey, of treachery lying behind the advice to transfer the army from the west to east side of Damascus. A generation later, William of Tyre repeated the rumours that elements in the Jerusalem baronage had been bribed by the Damascenes to engineer a withdrawal. The historian Ibn al-Athir (1160–1233) reported that the governor of Damascus, Mu’in al-Din Unur, had written to Syrian Frankish leaders arguing that they were risking uniting their Muslim neighbours against them for no advantage, as the western leaders intended to keep the city for themselves, an idea echoed in William of Tyre’s account of how at the beginning of the siege Thierry of Flanders extracted promises from Conrad, Louis and Baldwin, as well as some Jerusalem barons, that he would be granted Damascus when it fell. Three decades later, some veterans identified Raymond of Antioch as the culprit, driven by vengeful spite into persuading local barons to sabotage Louis of France’s ambitions. There were rumours concerning the involvement of the military orders. Otto of Freising, a participant in the debate at Acre in June 1148, more generally attributed the Damascus debacle to royal pride, a moralistic view repeated across Christendom in the years ahead.⁵⁶