North of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, three other crusaders states had been established: the County of Tripoli, the Principality of Antioch and the County of Edessa. The later two entities proved extremely vulnerable and Edessa would be the first of the crusader states to fall.
The crusader presence in Edessa was not the outcome of conquest. Baldwin of Boulogne had been invited by a local warlord and arrived in Edessa with just 60 knights. Edessa was an ancient and wealthy city that at the time of the First Crusede rivaled Antioch and Aleppo in importance. When in 1098 the First Crusade
reached northern Syria, Edessa was in the hands of a Greek Christian warlord,
the most recent “strongman” in a long line of short-lived warlords, who came to
power by murder or popular acclaim ― only to lose favor rapidly and themselves be
murdered or flee. Thoros fearing the fate of his predecessors if he could not
fight off the ever present Turkish threat, sought help from the most recent
military force to arrive on the scene: the crusaders. MacEvitt suggests
convincingly that Thoros was making the same mistake that the Byzantine Emperor
Alexios I Comnenus had made, namely, of conflating crusaders with
Frankish/Norman mercenaries. Thoros wanted the evidently proven military man Baldwin of Boulogne to come fight his battles for him; he never really thought
he was inviting in a successor.
Baldwin, however, was not a mercenary. He rejected mere material gifts
such as gold, silver and horses, in a bid for something more important still:
power and control. When Thoros refused, Baldwin threatened to leave, and “the
people” (by which one presumes the chroniclers mean the elites) insisted that
Thoros give way. Thoros formally adopted Baldwin in a ceremony (telling) using
Armenian relics and customs. Baldwin’s career would certainly have been as short-lived
and as forgettable as that of the previous half-dozen “rulers” of Edessa, had
he not proved astonishingly adept at building alliances with surrounding
warlords, nobles and elites. That process started with the simple expedient of
leaving the Armenian administration of the city undisturbed. Baldwin also
adopted Armenian symbols and rituals, and he rapidly married into the Armenian
aristocracy as well.
When Baldwin of Boulogne was called away
to Jerusalem to take up his elder brother’s mantle, he invited his cousin Baldwin de Bourcq to
succeed him as ruler of Edessa. Baldwin II (as he was to be known in both Edessa and
Jerusalem) was quick to take the opportunity, and his eighteen-year rule in
Edessa truly established Frankish control over Edessa.
However, in 1112, the Principality
of Antioch passed to a minor heir still resident in the West, and the regency
was given to Roger of Solerno, the brother-in-law of King Baldwin II. Antioch had been under sustain attack from the
Seljuks since its inception, with incursions of greater or lesser strength recorded
almost yearly. Subscribing to the philosophy that the ‘best defense is a good
offense,’ Roger attacked at the first opportunity. His success in capturing a
number of key cities around Aleppo by 1119, however, provoked two powerful
Seljuk leaders, Tughtigin of Damascus and Il-Ghazi the ruler of Mardin, to form
an alliance aimed at his destruction.
The two
Seljuk leaders fielded a combined army estimated at 40,000 men. In response, Roger
called up all his own troops, including many native Armenians, and sent word to
Jerusalem that he was under threat. Thinking his own force of 700 knights, 500
turcopoles and 3,000 to 10,000 infantry, was sufficient, however, he opted not
to await reinforcements from Jerusalem. On 28 June 1119, Roger confronted his
enemies only to suffer a devastating defeat. The Frankish casualties were so
high that the battle has gone down in history simply as ‘the Field of Blood.’
Among the dead were Roger himself and virtually all his barons. In addition, Il-Ghazi
slaughtered 500 prisoners the day after the battle, increasing Frankish losses.
Il-Ghazi then began laying waste to the entire area with impunity; only the
city of Antioch, with its massive walls and 400 towers, was comparatively safe.
King Baldwin
hurried north to try to stabilize the situation. He personally assumed the
regency of the principality for the nine-year-old prince and prepared to
confront Il-Ghazi with troops from the remaining crusader states. This unified
Frankish force, however, failed to deliver a decisive knock-out blow. Although il-Ghazi
became more circumspect, his army was still intact when Baldwin returned to Jerusalem,
leaving the defense of Antioch in the hands of the neighbouring Count of
Edessa.
Three years
later, Joscelyn of Edessa blundered into a Saracen ambush and was taken captive
along with other leading nobles, leaving both Edessa and Antioch in a
precarious situation. Baldwin II again rushed north to defend the flank of his
kingdom, only to promptly be taken captive himself on 18 April 1123. It was
more than a year before he could negotiate a ransom. After his release, he
remained pre-occupied with the insecurity of the northern crusader states, although
his absence from his own kingdom cause growing resentment among the barons of
Jerusalem. Baldwin II ended up spending roughly 40 per cent of his reign in
Antioch and Edessa rather than Jerusalem — without solving the problems there.
The north
remained the Achilles heel of the crusader kingdoms for two reasons. First, the
Byzantines had never been reconciled to the loss of Antioch, which had been an
important part of their empire until only twelve years before the crusader
capture of the city. This culminated in a Byzantine attempt to seize the city by
force in 1138. The then Prince of Antioch, Raymond of Poitiers, only averted
disaster by doing homage to Constantinople for Antioch and agreeing to hold the
city as a vassal rather than an independent ruler. Second and more dangerous, the
north was threatened by the increasingly powerful Seljuk ruler Imad al-Din
Zengi of Mosul.
Zengi was an
exceptionally brutal and ambitious ruler who spent most of his career attacking
his fellow Muslims, which perhaps explains why Muslim chroniclers readily describe
him as ruthless and merciless. He seized Aleppo in 1128, took Homs in 1138 and repeatedly
laid siege to Damascus. To save himself from Zengi, the Sultan of Damascus turned
to the Franks for support, and the Franks obliged. Yet while this tactical
alliance between the Jerusalem and Damascus prevented the latter’s fall to Zengi,
it gave him an excuse (if he needed one) to attack the Franks.
In 1144,
taking advantage of Joscelyn II’s temporary absence, Zengi assaulted Edessa.
His army broke into the city on Christmas Eve and took the citadel two days
later. After the death of Zengi in September 1146, Count Joscelyn briefly
retook his city, only to be trapped between the citadel, still in Seljuk hands,
and a new army brought up by Zengi’s son Nur al-Din. The result was a massacre
of appalling proportions. Significantly, according to a contemporary Syrian
Christian account, those who fell into the hands of the Seljuks alive were not
merely killed but humiliated — forced to strip naked — and then tortured before
being killed. This was not simply the application of the ‘rules of war,’ but a
vindictive and cruel act, shocking to both Muslim and Christian contemporaries.
Altogether 30,000 Christians lost their lives in the Seljuk capture of Edessa,
while another 16,000 ended in slavery. Furthermore, the bodies of the slain
were left to rot, the wells poisoned, the defenses destroyed, the city abandoned
altogether. This tactic of not just killing and carrying off the inhabitants
but rendering a city indefensible and uninhabitable for the foreseeable future
foreshadows the tactics of the Mamluks more than a century later. Yet it was
exceptional and hugely shocking at this point in time.
This entry is partially based on an excerpt from Dr. Schrader's comprehensive study of the crusader states.
Dr.
Helena P. Schrader is also the author of six books set in the Holy Land
in the Era of the Crusades.
