Jerusalem: The Biography

Few soldiers, few novelists have captured the excitement and fun of war like Usamah. To read him is to ride in the skirmishes of Holy War in the Kingdom of Jerusalem. He gloried in his battlefield anecdotes of derring-do, devil-may-care cavaliers, miraculous escapes, terrible deaths, and the exhilaration of wild charges, flashing steel, sweating horses and spurting blood. But he was also a philosopher of Fate and God’s mercy: ‘Even the smallest and most insignificant of things can lead to destruction. ’ Above all, both sides believed that, in Usamah’s words, ‘victory in war is from God alone.’ Religion was everything. Usamah’s highest praise for a friend was: ‘a genuine scholar, a real cavalier and a truly devout Muslim’.

Now the tranquillity of Melisende’s Jerusalem was suddenly shattered by an accident caused by the sport shared by both Muslim and Frank grandees.

STALEMATE

1142–1174

ZANGI: HUBRIS AND NEMESIS

When he was not fighting or reading, Usamah hunted deer, lions, wolves, hyenas with cheetahs, hawks and dogs – and in this, he was no different from Zangi or King Fulk, who hunted as often as they could. When Usamah and the Atabeg of Damascus visited Fulk, they admired a goshawk, so the king gave it to them as a present.

On 10 November 1142, soon after Usamah’s visit to Jerusalem, King Fulk was riding near Acre when he spotted a hare and, spurring his horse, gave chase. His saddle girth suddenly snapped and he was thrown. The saddle flew over his head and fractured his skull. He died three days later. The Jerusalemites marched out to escort Fulk’s cortège to burial in the Sepulchre. On Christmas Day, Melisende had her twelve-year-old son crowned as Baldwin III, but she was the real ruler. In an age dominated by men, she was a ‘woman of great wisdom’ who, writes William of Tyre, ‘had risen so far above the normal status of women that she dared undertake important measures, and ruled the kingdom with as much skill as her ancestors’.^*

At this bittersweet moment, disaster struck. In 1144, Zangi the Bloody captured Edessa, slaughtering Frankish men, enslaving Frankish women (though protecting Armenian Christians), and thereby destroying the first Crusader state and the cradle of the Jerusalem dynasty. The Islamic world was exultant. The Franks were not invincible and surely Jerusalem was next. ‘If Edessa is the high sea,’ wrote Ibn al-Qaysarani, ‘Jerusalem is the shore.’ The Abbasid caliph awarded Zangi the titles Ornament of Islam, Auxiliary of the Commander of the Believers, Divinely Aided King. Yet Zangi’s hard-drinking perversity caught up with him in his own boudoir.

At a siege in Iraq, a humiliated eunuch, perhaps one of those castrated for Zangi’s pleasure, crept into his heavily guarded tent and stabbed the drunken potentate in his bed, leaving him scarcely alive. A courtier found him bleeding, helplessly begging for his life: ‘He thought I was intending to kill him. He gestured to me with his index finger, appealing to me. I halted in awe of him and said, “My Lord, who’s done this to you?”’ There died the Falcon Prince.

His staff pillaged his belongings around the still-warm corpse and his two sons divided his lands: the younger of them, the twenty-eight-year-old Nur al-Din, tugged his father’s signet ring off his finger and seized the Syrian territories. Talented but less ferocious than his father, Nur al-Din intensified the jihad against the Franks. Shocked by the fall of Edessa, Melisende appealed to Pope Eugenius II, who called the Second Crusade.⁵

ELEANOR OF AQUITAINE AND KING LOUIS: SCANDAL AND DEFEAT

Louis VII, the saintly young King of France, accompanied by his wife Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine, and Conrad III, King of Germany, a veteran pilgrim, answered the pope’s call. But their German and French armies were mauled by the Turks as they crossed Anatolia. Louis VII only just made it to Antioch after a disastrous fighting march that must have been terrifying for Queen Eleanor, who lost much of her baggage – and any respect for her sanctimonious, inept husband.