THE LIFE OF SALADIN AND THE FALL OF THE KINGDOM OF JERUSALEM

CHAPTER IV.

THE FALL OF EDESSA.

1127-1144.

ZENGY'S historical importance rests not upon his benefactions to Mosul and its dependencies, but upon his championship of Islam against the Crusaders, at a time when the Mohammedan cause seemed desperate. The Turkoman chiefs of Mesopotamia were disunited and as prone to fight each other as to  go on the Path of God, and they were in nowise disposed to follow the leadership of the new governor of Mosul. The whole country was parceled out in military fiefs, corresponding to Zengy’s own tenure, each with a number of vassals, and among the great feudatories were some of old standing and renown. The Artukid princes had been settled at the castles of Keyfa and Mardin since the beginning of the century. The two sons of Ortuk, Sukman and Il-Ghazy, had been famous in their raids upon the Franks; and the latter had held the high office of warden of Baghdad. No leader so far had inspired half the terror in the Christian ranks that this truculent Turkoman had aroused. From his mountain fastness he had raided northern Syria; and when Aleppo put itself under his protection, he marched to the relief of the city at the head of three thousand horse and nine thousand foot, and storming the hill of Ifrin, where the Franks were strongly posted, he won a signal victory, in which Roger of Antioch was slain. Il-Ghazy died in 1122,—the very year of Zengy’s first appointment,— but his son Timurtash succeeded to his eyry at Maridin and afterwards to Aleppo; and though he was an easy-going prince, who preferred a quiet life, he was not likely to forget what was due to his father's son—at least, until he had received a lesson in deportment.

A more powerful and energetic leader of the Artukids was his cousin David, who had succeeded to the castle of Keyfa in 1108, and became the most renowned chief in all Diyar-Bekr. When he sent one of his arrows round among the Turkmans, everybody girded his loins in delighted anticipation of the fray, and soon twenty thousand men mustered under his banners. Such a prince was not disposed to resign the first place to a new-comer, and Zengy soon found that he had to reckon with David before he could venture into wider fields. Diyar-Bekr must be subdued or disarmed, or he could never safely advance into Syria without fear of a flank attack. His first move was against the town of Jazirah-ibn-Umar, which had recently shaken oflf the yoke of Mosul; he took his army across the Tigris, some swimming, some in boats, and, aided by treacherous inhabitants, entered the town just in time; for the next day there was a spate to the height of a man, and the river became impassable. From Jazirah (=Jezira) he marched against Nisibin, once a famous capital, from whose conquest Trajan derived his title of Parthicus. It was now one of the Artukid cities, and Zengy won it by an unworthy artifice; he caught one of the enemy's carrier-pigeons, which commonly served as messengers in Mesopotamia and Syria, and substituted a false message, which procured the immediate surrender of Nisibin, quickly imitated by Sinjar.

1128] Zengy advances Westwards.

Here a fresh danger awaited him. The cities commanding the upper course of the Euphrates, Edessa, Saruj, Bira, etc., formed outposts of the Christians, and, in the hands of Joscelin de Courtenay, their garrisons were a corps d'élite. They could not be left safely in the rear without precautions. Zengy met the difficulty by arranging an armistice with Joscelin, who was probably glad enough to postpone a struggle with so formidable an adversary; and the Atabeg was left free to advance into Syria. He was engaged in establishing order in his new territories when he received an appeal from Aleppo for deliverance from the exactions of the Franks. It was the very opportunity he was seeking. He straightway crossed the Euphrates (1128), passed through Manbij, and was welcomed with thanksgivings at Aleppo. The only Syrian lord who had been able to make any head against the Crusaders was Tughtigin, the Atabeg of Damascus; and he was just dead. In the very nick of time, Zengy, now “the Syrian” par excellence, came to take his place and to champion the despairing Moslems against the infidels.

Master of Aleppo, Zengy stayed more than a year in northern Syria, doing as much mischief as possible to the Christians. Armed with the Sultan's letters-patent as Governor of all the Western Provinces, he laid siege to the strong castle of Atharib (the Cerep of the Franks), a day's journey from Aleppo, to which it had long been a standing menace. Its garrison was full of picked warriors, and from its position and the mettle of its defenders it was one of the most formidable of the Latin strongholds.

For a long time Zengy's furious assaults were steadily repulsed, but he drew his lines closer and never lost heart. The besieged were in sore straits, and King Baldwin at Jerusalem held a council of war, whether or not he should advance to their relief. Some thought it a trifling matter and made sure that the Saracens would beat a retreat, as they had been used to do of late; but one of the council, “a devil to know”, says the chronicler, saw something more serious in Zengy's movements: “A blaze will follow these sparks”, said he, “and there is flame under this smoke. Is not this the young lion who left his spoor at Tiberias?”  A melancholy incident marred his arrival. Turning over the treasury and wardrobe of the governors of Aleppo he chanced to light upon a bloody tunic. It was the very coat in which his father had been executed; and the wife who stood by his side was a grand- daughter of the Seljuk Tutush who had ordered the deed. In uncontrollable aversion Zengy put her aside, and in spite of her entreaties and the remonstrances of the judge she was sternly divorced.

1130. Battle of Atharib.

Baldwin finally resolved to relieve the beleaguered city, and marched “with his horsemen and foot, his banners and crosses, his princes, knights, and counts”, to meet the lion of Tiberias. Zengy’s counselors advised a retreat to Aleppo, but he would none of their counsel: “Let us put our trust in God, and meet them, tide well or ill”. Instead of waiting for the relieving army, he went forth to the encounter, and a furious battle ensued. Zengy at the head of his men charged the enemy again and again, shouting the words of the Prophet, “Take a taste of Hell!”. The Crusaders were utterly routed: “the swords of God were sheathed in the necks of his foes”, and few indeed escaped to tell of the field of shambles. They turned to fly, but what could avail when “the bottle was hung on the peg, and the locust had ended its song?” No quarter was given; the “Martyr” plunged through a sea of blood, cleaving heads and laying bones bare, till the field was covered with mangled corpses and severed limbs. Only those escaped who hid under the heaps of slain, or “mounted the camel of night”.

Deprived of its last hope, Atharib was taken by assault, its fortifications razed, and its garrison enslaved or put to the sword, — the piles of their bones could be seen for years. Thus was the terror of Cerep abated. The loss was not all on one side, however, and Zengy was anxious to get his wounded home and give his men rest. After making terms with the neighboring fortress of Harim, he returned to Mosul in 1130, the most famous leader in Islam. His deeds were bruited over the land, and his name became a proverb for valor and ferocity. The “Sanguineus” the Christians wrote his name, and he had signed it in blood on the field of Atharib.

Four years Zengy rested from the Holy War. He had much to occupy him at Mosul, in maintaining his supremacy over the neighboring chiefs; and the death of his sovereign the Sultan in 1131 brought about another war for the Seljuk succession, in which Zengy took his share. It was in this campaign that he encountered the defeat from Qaraja the Cup-bearer which sent him and his army flying pell-mell to the Tigris, where the ferry-boats of the governor of Tekrit saved them from destruction. The Caliph sought to profit by this reverse and to pay off old scores against the Atabeg; but his siege of Mosul in 1133 was literally circumvented by Zengy, who completely surrounded the besiegers, and after three months of futile attack his Holiness retired. The eastern horizon being once more serene, the Atabeg turned his eyes again to Syria. To wage the Jihad with success, it was essential to have possession of Damascus, the heart of Syria, yet now little better than an outpost of the Franks. Damascus must be his, — and then, massing the armies of Syria and the “Island”, he would drive the “dogs of Christians” into the sea.

1137] Mont Ferrand.

It was a dream destined never to be realized by the dreamer, though it came to pass after his death. His first attempt in 1135 was successfully repulsed. Then the able statesman who governed Damascus in the name of a series of nominal lords, Muin-al-din Anar (the Ainardus of the Latin chroniclers), took the only possible measure to defeat Zengy's design, and he made common cause with the Franks. The Crusaders themselves stood in no little dread of the furious champion of Islam, and were glad to aid Damascus in checking his advance. When Zengy again arrived in Syria in the summer of 1137 he found the Franks on the side of Anar, and his first act was to drive them, along with the King of Jerusalem, into the castle of Barin (Mont Ferrand).

The Arab historians describe the fortress as “high as the crest of Orion, loftier than the mountain-peaks”, the giddy summit of which was unattainable by the weary-winged birds; and the Franks held it impregnable. Nevertheless, after Zengy’s mangonels had played upon its walls, Mont Ferrand was forced to lower its flag. (A mangonel or stone-sling was a machine for throwing stones worked by means of twisted ropes. The other chief siege-engine of the day, the catapult (balista), resembled a huge arbalest or crossbow). The Atabeg presented King Fulk— “ab hoste satis humane tractatus”  as William of Tyre admits—with a robe of ceremony, and the exhausted and dispirited garrison was suffered to march out with the honours of war.

This unwonted clemency was the result of common prudence. Zengy had learned that strong reinforcements from Europe were landing in Syria, and hastily patching up a truce with Damascus he retreated to Mosul. In fact a formidable combination was gathering for his discomfiture. The Emperor John Comnenus brought an army into Syria, and was joined not only by the Crusading states, but by the Moslem lord of Damascus and its dependencies. John began by exchanging friendly embassies with Zengy, and we read of gifts of falcons and hunting-leopards, and a treaty that guaranteed the immunities of Aleppo. But such facts were not worth their parchment in days when Christian ecclesiastics laid down the rule that an oath to an infidel was null and void. The Emperor next took Bizaa and Kafar Tab, and then laid siege to Shayzar, Osama's family fortress on the Orontes, in April, 1138. Zengy was summoned to the rescue, and pressed on with forced marches. Though not strong enough to drive the enemy from their position on the heights, his harassing skirmishes, the rumored advance of David of Keyfa, together with some skilful diplomacy and the passing of hard cash, changed the imperial mind, already disgusted at the indifference and frivolity of the Latin princes; for on the twenty-fourth day of the siege “the Dog of the Romans” departed, abandoning his siege-train, including eighteen huge mangonels, which Zengy instantly appropriated. “It was thus”, quoth Ibn-al-Athir, that “God sufficed the faithful in the fight”.

1139. Damascus Allies with the Franks

The Emperor's interposition had proved futile; but the understanding between Damascus and Jerusalem held good. In vain Zengy tried to conciliate the rulers of the Syrian capital by marrying the Lady Emerald (Zumurrud Khanum), the widowed mother of the reigning lord, and giving his own daughter to the emir himself. The young man was murdered soon after, and everything had to be begun over again. Nothing could tempt or intimidate Anar, the real ruler of the city, not even the savage execution of the garrison of Baalbek —his personal fief— after it had surrendered in October, 1139, to Zengy's solemn pledge of safe-conduct on the Koran and the Triple Divorce. This treacherous butchery only strengthened the alliance with the Christians, which was now cemented by a formal treaty, whereby Anar agreed to pay the King of Jerusalem a monthly subsidy of 20,000 gold pieces and to give him Banias, if he would aid in taking it from Zengy and driving him out of the land. The town was duly taken by the strange allies, but Zengy saved them from the trouble of carrying out the last part of the agreement by himself withdrawing his army from Syria. Leaving Saladin's father as warden of Baalbek in reward for long and tried services, he once more left Damascus unsubdued, and returned to Mosul.

The resistance of Damascus defeated Zengy’s plans in Syria. He now developed an attack upon the Crusaders from a different quarter. Repulsed in the south, he would swoop upon them from the mountains of the north. His preparations were deliberate. He protected his rear and flank by overawing the Kurds, seizing Shahrzur and Ashib (which he rebuilt and named after himself el-Imadiya, Amadia, as it is called to this day), and allying himself by marriage with the Shah of Armenia. Then he gradually advanced towards the enemy. One after the other, the towns of Diyar-Bekr fell into his hands, until his army lay before the strong walls of Amid, to which he began to lay siege for no juster cause than the Arab adage, “The sword is a better title-deed than parchments”. But Amid was not his objective; his eyes were elsewhere; and as the Eastern chronicler says, he “but coquetted with Amid to conceal his desire for Edessa”.

So long as his old antagonist, Joscelin de Courtenay, had held the famous episcopal city, Callirrhoe of the sweet waters, Zengy had not dared to approach it. The restless Count had been a terror throughout Diyar-Bekr and Syria: a very “devil amongst unbelievers”, the Mohammedan annalist called him; and Edessa had been the strongest outpost of the Christian state. But Joscelin was dead, and a second and very different Joscelin sat in his seat. Valiant like his father, but only by fitful impulses, ordinarily sluggish and pleasure-seeking, Joscelin II preferred the comfortable ease of his fief at Tell Bashir (Turbessel) to the rigors of the hill-country, and Zengy's ruse of a siege of Amid was quite enough to determine the Count to go away to his pleasant Syrian estate. His Latin followers were nothing loth to follow his example, and Edessa was left to the care of Chaldee and Armenian merchants, unskilled in arms, who relied upon the protection of mercenaries whose pay was often a year or more in arrears. With such defenders the strongest walls were little worth.  

1144. Siege of Edessa

Zengy’s opportunity had come, and when the city lay deserted by its lord and the picked Crusading chivalry, he suddenly raised the siege of Amid and advanced upon Edessa with a vast array. He first summoned the garrison to surrender, being loth to injure so queenly a city: but when they refused —mindful, no doubt, of the fate of Baalbek— he took counsel with the Koran, and obtaining a favorable augury, gave the order for the siege. He had brought mangonels and skilled sappers, and covered the approaches of the engineers with a devastating bombardment and incessant assaults, till the besieged realized the words of the Koran, “The earth, all spacious as it is, became too strait for them”. An Arab poet sang of him:

He rides in a billow of horsemen,

they roll o'er the earth like a flood;

His spears flash speech to the foeman

incarnadined tongues of blood.

Dark as the night is his beauty,

but his brow has a morning light ;

Mercy he uses at pleasure,

but not in the stress of the fight:

Heart to the Heart of his host,

and wings to its Wings, is his might.

After repeated storming parties had been sent in vain, the engineers at last brought their mines, stuffed with burning faggots, up to the walls. Zengy himself inspected the trenches, and then said, “Let no man sup with me tonight unless he will ride with me into Edessa in the morning”. After a month's siege, a breach of over one hundred ells was made, and the Turkman troops poured into the devoted city (23 December, 1144). They were mad with the intoxication of victory, and burning to avenge the thousand insults which the lords of Edessa had forced down Moslem throats; now was the time to blot out in blood the raids and massacres, the sacking and burning, which had made the knights of Baldwin and Joscelin a terror throughout the country side. In their first fury they spared nothing: “they murder the widow and the strangers and put the fatherless to death”; crosses were overturned, monks and priests cut down, everything destroyed and trampled underfoot, save only the girls like gazelles, the youths fit for slaves, and the treasures of the merchants. It was ruthless, but did not the Koran picture righteous punishments such as this? “Even such was the heavy hand of thy Lord God, which He laid on the cities that had wrought wickedness: of a surety His grip is deadly, fearsome!”

Then Zengy himself entered the city, and was amazed at its beauty and stateliness, and grieved that it should suffer at his hands. He stopped the soldiery in their destructive rage, and made them give up their prisoners, the youths and girls like gazelles, and the treasure and goods they had taken. He restored the inhabitants —all that was left of them— to their homes, that the city might recover its prosperity, and he spared no pains to undo the mischief he had begun.

Edessa, in the words of the Arabic historian, was “the conquest of conquests”: the stoutest prop of the Latin Kingdom was uprooted; Saruj and the other satellites of the great city immediately surrendered; and the valley of the Euphrates was finally freed from the oppression of the infidel. Truth is come and Falsehood vanished away  was proclaimed through the length and breadth of the land; for Islam had triumphed. The victory was the common talk of the civilized world, and people delighted to relate strange portents of the wonderful event. Far away, a holy man, who afflicted his body with abstinence and rigor, came forth one day from his cell with a face transfigured with joy, and said to the people: “One of the brethren has told me that Zengy has taken Edessa this day”. After a time, some of the men who had fought in the siege chanced to come to his retreat: “O master”, said they, “we knew that we should triumph, from the moment that we saw thee standing on the ramparts and shouting the battle-cry, Allah Akbar”. The saint denied that he had been at Edessa, but they all swore with great earnestness that they had recognized him on the wall.

Still more strange were the words of the pious Moslem sage at Palermo, over whom King Roger of Sicily was exulting in respect of some recent successes of his troops over the Saracens: “Where was your Prophet”, he asked, “that he came not to the aid of his Faithful?” The sage made answer: “He was helping in the conquest of Edessa!” The courtiers burst into laughter, but the king sternly checked them: the words impressed him strangely. Soon afterwards they were only too clearly explained.

The great Atabeg did not long survive his crowning triumph. The next two years were spent, no doubt, in organizing his new dominions, for he never returned to Mosul. In furtherance of his schemes of Syrian empire, he was actively besieging Castle Jaabar, hard by the Euphrates, in 1146, when one night as he was sleeping, being heavy with wine, some of his slaves stole into his tent and began drinking what was left. The noise roused Zengy, who roundly abused the fellows, and then fell asleep again. It seems that the men dreaded the punishment that was certain to follow in the morning; but the Atabeg was often so cruel a master that little was needed to drive them to desperation, even if the governor of the besieged fortress had not offered them blood-money. They plucked up heart and stabbed him as he lay. The eunuch Yaruktash gave the fatal blow, and then all three turned and fled into the castle. When the alarm was raised, the great Emir was in the very article of death. One who was present told how he had found his master still breathing:

“On seeing me he thought I had come to give him the final stroke, and he raised a piteous finger, as though praying for mercy. I stopped short, crying out, O my master, who hath done this?  But he had no strength to answer, and that instant he breathed his last”. (14 September, 1146) .

Death of Zengy

So died Imad-al-Din Zengy, “King of Emirs”, “Pillar of the Faith”, at the age of sixty-two, by the sword which he had used without mercy — his great ambition unsatisfied, his goal unattained. As he lay there stark, treacherously slain by men who had eaten at his table, none regarded him; his sons and hench-men were all eager to claim their inheritance, or secure the favor of his successor; the army, paralyzed by the crime and the loss, disbanded in dismay; and the man who had led them and fed them, and conquered a kingdom with them, was left alone in his cold tent. It was reserved for strangers from Raqqa to compose his limbs and bury him hard by on the field of Siffin, where so many of the Faithful had fallen five hundred years before. In calmer times, his sons built a dome over the grave, and admiring chroniclers called him hero and “Martyr”. It even fell to a saint of those days to see him in a vision, his face all glorified with peace, and to ask him concerning his state:

— “How hath God treated thee?”

— “With forgiveness”.

 — “For what cause ?”

— “Because of Edessa”.

Meantime the Crusaders punned on the tragic end of “Sanguin”  in their doggerel Latin:

“Quam bonus eventus! fit sanguine sanguinolentus

Vir homicida reus nomine Sanguineus”,

But they rejoiced too soon. Zengy indeed was dead, but he had done a work that all the princes in Christendom could not undo, and he left in his son Nur-al-din, and his follower Saladin, leaders who knew how to crown the task he had begun. Forty years after the great Atabeg’s death, the Holy Land belonged to Saladin, and Jerusalem had fallen again into the keeping of the Moslems, who have held it to this day.