Download PDF | P. M. Holt - The crusader states and their neighbours, 1098-1291-Routledge (2004).
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INTRODUCTION
The region of the Near East that was profoundly affected by the
Crusades and the establishment of the Crusader states extended from Asia Minor in the north to the Nile valley in the south. Between these sub-regions lay the coast and hinterland of Syria-Palestine, which formed the actual site of the Crusader states. It is useful to sketch in outline these sectors of the region.
Asia Minor, or Anatolia, the peninsula lying south of the Black Sea, consists broadly of mountainous territory with lowlands towards the western coast and in the centre. The mountains become higher towards the east and the frontier of modern Turkey beyond Lake Van, and here are the headwaters of the Euphrates and Tigris. The lowlands are broken up by the courses of several rivers, among them the Menderes flowing into the Aegean, and the Sakarya and Kazil Irmak, both entering the Black Sea. In the south-east of the peninsula two large rivers, the Seyhan and Ceyhan, drain the Taurus and Anti-Taurus ranges, and enter the north-east corner of the Mediterranean. Important cities in the period of the Crusades were Smyrna (Turkish, Izmir) on the Aegean, Nicaea (Iznik) and Nicomedia (Izmid) in the north-west of the peninsula, Iconium (Konya) and Caesarea (Kayseri) in the interior, and Adana on the Seyhan.
While in the Crusading period Turkish was coming to supersede Greek as the principal language of Asia Minor, Arabic retained its almost universal predominance in the Nile valley and Syria-Palestine, despite a prolonged Turkish presence, especially in the latter sector. The geographical structure of Syria-Palestine is less complicated than that of Asia Minor. East of a coastal plain of varying width, the backbone of the territory is made up of an interrupted mountain chain running from north to south. Its northernmost block, the Amanus Mountains, is at the point of contact with Asia Minor, lying east of the Ceyhan and the gulf of Iskenderun. South of the gap formed by the outlet of the Orontes (Arabic, Nahr al-‘Asi) to the sea, with the city of Antioch (Antakiya; modern Turkish, Hatay) lying some 30 km inland, the mountains resume to form the background for the important port of Latakiya and several smaller harbours. Another gap, formed by al-Nahr al-Kabir, allows passage between coastal Tripoli (Tarabulus) and Hims in the interior, with the mountain block of Lebanon to the south.
The next gap is the outlet of the Leontes (Nahr al-Litant), lying between the coastal towns of Sidon and Tyre. Lower and more broken hills to the south cease at the great gap of the plain of Armageddon, the strategic importance of which in Near Eastern history gave rise to the apocalyptic expectation that it will be the site of mankind’s last battle. The plain connects the Jordan valley with the sea at Acre and Haifa, the latter lying below the projecting spur of Mount Carmel. The Judaean highlands, the setting for Jerusalem, continue southwards to merge with the desert of the Negev (al-Naqab) and the mountainous tip of the Sinai peninsula.
To the east of this highland chain lies a deep trough, which constitutes the most northerly part of the Great Rift Valley. It contains in succession the courses of the Orontes, Leontes and Jordan, followed by the expanse of the Dead Sea. Southwards beyond this it continues as the waterless depression of Wadi ‘Araba to reach the gulf of ‘Aqaba, the north-eastern arm of the Red Sea. The eastern bank of this trough presents less of a bastion in the north than does its western counterpart, although the ridge of Lebanon is confronted by Anti-Lebanon, and the highland country continues southwards. This territory is dominated by four cities that the Crusaders never captured: Aleppo and Damascus, the metropolis of the north and south respectively, linked by an ancient route passing through Hims on the Orontes and Hamah with its access to Tripoli and the sea.
West of the Sinai peninsula lies Egypt, the northernmost sector of the Nile valley. The country consists for the most part of a narrow cultivable strip along the river, supporting numerous villages and a few major towns, finally expanding into the fertile triangle of the Delta. This is delimited by the two branches of the Nile, which separate about 22 km below Cairo to reach the sea at Damietta to the east and Rosetta to the west. Westwards again of Rosetta is the historic port-city of Alexandria, which was the capital of Egypt before the Arab conquest in the seventh century. In the Crusading period the southern frontier of Egypt was the First Cataract of the Nile, with Aswan as the border town. South of this point, in territory now divided politically between Egypt and the Sudan, was Nubia, then consisting of two Christian kingdoms centred on the river.
The northern kingdom, Muqurra, had Old Dongola as its capital, and its southern border lay south of the confluence of the river Atbara with the Nile. Its northern borderlands had long been open to Arab raids and settlkement, and hence there was some degree of islamisation there. In the southern kingdom of “Alwa, which extended up the Blue and White Niles, the capital was Soba, not far from present-day Khartoum. Although a tenth-century envoy from Fatimid Egypt to Nubia speaks of a suburb of Soba inhabited by Muslims, these were probably merchants and their families. ‘Alwa was not yet vulnerable to Arab conquest and settlement.
The historical background
At the beginning of the eleventh century, which was some ten lunar years from the end of the fourth Muslim century, two great powers were established in Anatolia and the Nile valley respectively. Anatolia consisted politically of the Asian provinces of the Byzantine Empire. Its capital was Constantinople, across the Straits in Europe, where it also had provinces in Greece and the Balkans.
After the death in 1025 of Basil II, one of the greatest and most powerful Byzantine rulers, a period of decline set in. Under his feeble successors the state lacked effective control, while rivalry and factionalism developed between the civilian, court-centred aristocracy of the capital and the landed military nobles of the Anatolian provinces. From the latter group came two military emperors: Isaac I Comnenus (1057-9), who was driven to abdicate by an alliance of the Church and the civilian aristocracy; and Romanus IV Diogenes (1068-71), whose overthrow was a result of his defeat at the battle of Manzikert by a rising great power in the Near East, the Seljuks under their sultan, Alp Arslan. Only with the succession in 1081 of Alexius I Comnenus, a nephew of Isaac I, did the Byzantine Empire begin to regain strength.
Alexius was faced at the outset with a disastrous situation. During the ascendancy of the civilian aristocracy, the old military system based on the tenures of a free peasantry had decayed. Power in the provinces passed to the holders of great estates, while the imperial army became increasingly dependent on the recruitment of mercenaries, including Normans, English (after the battle of Hastings in 1066) and Turks. These last came from the Turcoman tribesmen, who had broken through the Byzantine frontier defences after the battle of Manzikert and flooded into the heart of Anatolia. Turkish emirs also established themselves at Smyrna (Izmir) and Nicaea (Iznik), which became the first capital of the Seljuk sultans of Rum (i.e. Asia Minor), Siileyman (d. 1085) and his son Kalic Arslan in 1092. These sultans and their descendants were a breakaway branch of the Great Seljuk dynasty to which Alp Arslan belonged.
Byzantium, the great power of the north, was confronted in this period by the great power of the south, the Fatimid caliphate. The Fatimid dynasty had its remote origin in an Arab faction (Arabic, sh7‘a) in early Islam, when the legitimacy of the caliphs to the headship of the Muslim community was challenged by rivals, who asserted that the rightful heads were ‘Ali, the Prophet’s cousin, and his heirs by his wife Fatima, the Prophet’s daughter. As time passed and the Muslim community became multi-ethnic, this political factionalism spread and hardened into religious schism supported by theological dogma. Thus the Shi‘a stood in permanent opposition to the majority of Muslims, the Sunni Muslims, who dominated a vast empire, which was ruled from 750 by the dynasty of the ‘Abbasid caliphs. They took their name from their ancestor, al-‘Abbas, the Prophet’s uncle.
The Shi‘a were however not all of one mind. Most of them traced the line of descent of their heads, the Infallible Imams, from ‘Ali to the twelfth Imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi, who disappeared from history in 940, and they held that he would reappear at the end of time to restore Islam. Twelver Shi‘ism became the state religion of Iran in the sixteenth century, as it is still today. A variant claim to legitimacy was made by a fringe group, the Isma‘ilis, in the tenth century. They ended the succession of Infallible Imams with the seventh, Ismail b. Ja‘far al-Sadiq, whence their name. As time went on they produced numerous sects, and one of these evolved into the Fatimid caliphate.
Its leader, ‘Ubaydallah, claimed descent from the Infallible Imams, and began a widespread propaganda against the ‘Abbasid caliphate. He finally established himself in North Africa, where he won acceptance and military support from Muslim Berber tribesmen. There in 910 he assumed the caliphal title of amir al-mu’minin, ‘Commander of the Faithful’, thereby asserting a claim to supersede the ‘Abbasid caliph and to rule over the entire Muslim community. In 969 Egypt was conquered by the Fatimid warriors, and the Caliph al-Mu‘izz, ‘Ubaydallah’s great-grandson, moved to Cairo, a new city that he was building to house his troops and be his capital, lying to the north of al-Fustat, the first major settlement of the Arabs in Egypt.
The long reign of the Caliph al-Mustansir (1036-94) occupied most of the eleventh century and ended a few years before the First Crusade. By this time the Fatimid dynasty had passed its zenith. The vigour of an autocratic regime depends largely upon the character and qualities of the autocrat, and Fatimid history was no exception. Al-Mustansir was a child of seven at his accession. Three ethnic military groups came to dominate the capital: Berbers, Turks and Blacks (Szdan) from the upper Nile valley. During his reign al-Mustansir accumulated a vast personal fortune, and he had a library of over a hundred thousand volumes.
The Turks looted his treasure and destroyed or dispersed the manuscripts. Famine was widespread and plague intervened. At last in 1073 the caliph sent for Badr al-Jamali, his governor of Acre, who had started his career as an Armenian slave. Badr came with his own Syrian troops, and as a military dictator restored order and prosperity to Egypt. Then in 1094 both he and al-Mustansir died. Badr was succeeded by his equally competent son, al-Afdal Shahanshah, and al-Mustansir was succeeded by another puppet-caliph, the 18-year-old al-Musta‘li, who reigned from 1094 to 1101, and was thus an insignificant witness of the irruption of the First Crusade into his nominal possessions.
Between the two powers of the Byzantines and the Fatimids lay the debatable land of Syria-Palestine, rendered by its geography and population structure both arduous to conquer and difficult to hold. The decline of the ‘Abbasid caliphate from the middle of the ninth century and the fragmentation of the Muslim empire had left it vulnerable to attack from without and a prey to instability within. In 969 the northern city of Antioch was retaken by the Byzantines after more than three centuries of Muslim rule. Held by them until 1084, it gave them a foothold and a sphere of interest in Syria. In the south the Fatimids sought to extend their control into Syria, following here the two dynasties of autonomous Turkish governors, the Tulunids and Ikhshidids, who had ruled Egypt during most of the century from 868 to 969. Jerusalem, a city of great importance to Muslims as well as Jews and Christians, passed under their rule.
They were confronted, as were the Fatimids after them, by a rival Isma‘ili sect which had its headquarters in al-Bahrayn, and are designated the Carmathians. The Carmathian forces in Syria were finally defeated in 978 by the Caliph al-‘Aziz (975-96), and withdrew after obtaining the promise of a large tribute payment. The ending of the Carmathian threat did not however mean that Fatimid control of southern Syria was easy. Beyond Tripoli their power was marginal, and as it declined the judges (gadis) they nominally appointed became autonomous rulers.
A feature of this period in Syria-Palestine was the emergence of Arab tribal leaders as rulers of territorial principalities. The first of these were the Hamdanids, a family belonging to the Taghlibi tribe, supposedly of North Arabian origin. Two brothers from this family, Nasir al-Dawla al-Hasan and Sayf al-Dawla ‘Ali, became autonomous amirs of Mosul and Aleppo respectively. The rule of the Mosul branch ended in 989, but the second Hamdanid amir of Aleppo, Sa‘d al-Din Sharif (967-91), maintained his position by playing off the Byzantines against the Fatimids, whose suzerainty he recognised in 986. Like other Syrian Arabs of the period, the Hamdanids were inclined to Shi‘ism. Under Sa‘d al-Din’s successor, Sa‘d al-Dawla Sa‘id (991-1002), the precarious balance of interests was upset in 1001 by the conclusion of peace between the Emperor Basil II (976-1025) and the Caliph al-Hakim (996-1021), and the Hamdanid dynasty of Aleppo was extinguished in 1004.
They were followed as rulers of Aleppo by Salih b. Mirdas and his successors, the Mirdasids, from 1024 to 1080, who also belonged to a tribe of North Arabian origin, the Kilab. More immediately troublesome to the Fatimids, since they were established in Palestine, were the Jarrahids, who belonged to the South Arabian tribe of Tayyi’. Unlike the Arab state-builders in Aleppo, they were a nomadic group. The high point of Jarrahid importance was at the beginning of the caliphate of al-Zahir in 1021, when their chief, Hassan b. Mufarrij, made a pact with Salih b. Mirdas and a third tribal leader, Sinan b. Sulayman of the Kalb. They agreed to partition Syria among themselves, Hassan taking Palestine, Salih holding Aleppo, and Sinan having Damascus.
A Fatimid army was sent out under a Turkish commander, Anustegin al-Duzbar1, who was defeated at Ascalon on the Palestinian border. Sinan died shortly afterwards, and the two remaining allies were defeated by Anustegin in 1029 at al-Uqhuwana near the Sea of Galilee, where Salih was killed. Hassan fled to seek Byzantine support in the north. He and his people remained as an irritant to Anustegin in proximity to Byzantine Antioch and Mirdasid Aleppo. The relations of the three powers were both tangled and unstable, and in 1038 Anustegin entered Aleppo.
With Anustegin’s death there in 1042 Fatimid power in Syria began to decline. The nomadic tribesmen of Palestine continued as before to ravage the settled lands, and in 1071 the Shi Fatimid government invited Atsiz, a Sunni Turcoman tribal chief, to deal with the troublemakers. He did so, went on to establish himself as ruler of the territory, and occupied Jerusalem. Fatimid attempts to oust him failed; he took Damascus in 1076, and unsuccessfully attacked Egypt itself in the following year. Atsiz now sought the help of Tutus, the brother of the Great Seljuk Sultan Malik-Shah. Tutus had Atsiz assassinated in 1079, and Jerusalem was then held by another Turcoman family, the Artukids, who were expelled by a Fatimid force under al-Afdal in 1098. A year later the city fell to the Crusaders.
The Turkish phenomenon
The pattern of military and political relations in the Near East was profoundly and lastingly changed during the eleventh century by the irruption and mutual confrontation of two new forces: the Seljuk Turks coming from Central Asia and the Frankish Crusaders from Western Europe. Turks had long been known in the Near East, and formed part of its permanent population. This had originally come about through the development of the Mamluk institution, a species of military slavery, which had arisen as early as the first century of Islam.
The great early expansion of the Muslim Arabs brought them into Transoxania, the territory beyond the river Oxus. This was the borderland of the Turks of Central Asia, and Muslim generals formed Turkish bodyguards from prisoners of war and men brought to them by slave-traders. In course of time such military households came to form a substantial component of Muslim armies. Entirely attached to their masters, these Mamluks were more loyal and dependable than freeborn Arab warriors, who were individuals with pride in their tribal traditions.
Preference for Turkish rather than Arab troops was clearly displayed when the ‘Abbasid Caliph al-Ma’mun (813-33) included large numbers of Turks in his army, and pursued what was effectively a systematic immigration policy by levying revenue from the eastern border provinces partly in slaves. Al-Mu‘tasim (833-42), his soldier brother and successor, continued to recruit Mamluk troops, and in 836 he transferred them en masse from the turbulent capital of Baghdad to a new city, 125 km north on the east bank of the Tigris. Samarra (officially Surra man rw i, ‘he who sees it is delighted’) consisted essentially of the caliph’s palace and the cantonments of his Turkish troops, but it inevitably superseded Baghdad as the administrative centre of the empire and continued so until the closing years of the ninth century.
By that time the ‘Abbasid caliphate was in decline, but Mamluk households sustained the provincial governors and local rulers who had usurped power in all parts of the empire. The two gubernatorial dynasties in Egypt which have already been mentioned, the Tulunids and the Ikhshidids, were both of Mamluk origin. Ahmad b. Tultin was said to be the son of a Turk who had been sent from Bukhara in the slavetribute to al-Ma’miun, and he went to Egypt as lieutenant-governor for his stepfather, a Turkish general. The Ikhshidids take their name from tkhshid, an ancient Iranian title for a ruler. It was conferred on a Turkish general, Muhammad b. Tughj, whose grandfather had entered ‘Abbasid service, and who was himself appointed governor of Egypt in 935.
Something must be said about the legal and social status of the Mamluks. The Arabic word mamluk, meaning something possessed, a chattel, is synonymous with a term of more general range, ‘abd, which means a slave. The servile condition into which a Mamluk was brought by capture in war or enslavement implied that he was a pagan but since acquisition resulted in his conversion to Islam, he obtained rights as a Muslim under Islamic law, which moreover favoured emancipation on the death of his master. His religious status was theoretically the same as that of any freeborn Muslim.
During the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt (1250-1517), the completion of military training was automatically accompanied by emancipation. Thus the designation of the Mamluk sultans as ‘the slave-sultans of Egypt’ (the title of a nineteenth-century history) is doubly inaccurate: when they were slaves, they were not sultans; when they were sultans, they were not slaves.
The political and social stability of the Near East, which had long been used to Turkish immigration and settlement by the Mamluks and their assimilated descendants, was violently shaken by the irruption into the region of free Turkish nomadic tribesmen, the Turcomans, spearheaded by the Muslim clan of Seljuk. Such westwards movements of Turkish groups formed part of Eurasian history, and were sometimes catastrophic in their effects.
The Huns were probably a Turkic people, whose devastating incursion into Europe culminated in the career of Attila (434-53). In the last quarter of the seventh century another Turkic group, the Bulgars, migrated from an earlier homeland west of the Sea of Azov and founded a state among the Slavs south of the lower Danube. This was Byzantine territory, and there were repeated wars between the two powers until the Bulgarian kingdom was overthrown and its land reannexed in 1018 by Basil Il, known as ‘Bulgaroctonus’, ‘the Bulgar-slayer’.
Bulgaria had however served a purpose as a buffer state against another Turkic people, the Pechenegs or Patzinaks, nomads in the country between the Danube and the Dnieper. They in their turn threatened the territory south of the Balkans, where they established themselves in 1048. They harassed the Balkans and menaced the Byzantine Empire until they were defeated by Alexius I Comnenus in 1091. The emperor had been supported by another group of Turkic nomads, the Uzes or western Oghuz, who had pushed into the Balkans in 1064, pressed on by yet other Turks, the Kumans or Kipchaks, who replaced them in the steppes of southern Russia.
More will be heard of the Kipchaks, from amongst whom were recruited the founders of the Mamluk sultanate in Egypt. Of greater immediate importance was the much larger group of the eastern Oghuz. Unlike the other Turkic tribal groups that have been mentioned, they did not make their way westwards through the steppes north of the Black Sea but by a southerly route through Iranian territory. This was to bring them ultimately to the shores of the Mediterranean and Aegean. Their migration was, as has been said, led and to some extent controlled by the clan of Seljuk. Seljuk, the eponymous founder, lived with his people on the lower Jaxartes or Syr Darya, where it flows into the Aral Sea. On the northern fringe of Transoxania, they were open to Islamic cultural influences, and were converted to Sunni Islam in the second half of the tenth century. Local politics, wars and alliances brought them southwards into Transoxania and Khurasan.
The process of building a state on the foundation of their nomad warriors began with Seljuk’s two grandsons, Tugrul Beg and Cagn Beg, who in 1040 succeeded in defeating the powerful Ghaznavid ruler, Mas‘iid, at the battle of Dandanqan, about 65 km from Merv in Khurasan. The Ghaznavids were themselves a dynasty of Turkish Mamluk origin, and the second ruler, the conqueror Mahmid of Ghazna (998-1030), left to his son Mas‘ud a realm extending from the south of the Caspian Sea through Khurasan and Afghanistan to the Punjab. His defeat at Dandanqan meant the loss of Khurasan to the Seljuks.
Leaving Cagr Beg in the east, Tugrul Beg advanced westwards with his Turcoman nomads as they followed the grazing. The centre and west of Iran were dominated by an Iranian clan, the Buyids or Buwayhids, who also controlled Iraq and ruled in the name of the ‘Abbasid caliph of Baghdad. This was an anomalous situation as the Buyids were Shi‘is, although not of the Isma‘ili sect from which the Fatimids had arisen. In 1055 the ‘Abbasid Caliph al-Qa’im summoned Tugrul Beg to liberate him from his Shi‘i protectors.
Buyid power collapsed, to be followed by Seljuk domination, and Tugrul Beg was formally awarded the title of sultan, in Arabic sultan, originally an abstract noun meaning power. He was indeed the power behind the caliph’s throne, and he now assumed the trappings of a Muslim ruler rather than the simple dignity of a Turkish tribal chief. The nomad warriors were supplemented, and increasingly replaced, by regular troops first obtained in Khurasan, and the Turcomans were left free to penetrate westwards into Byzantine Asia Minor and Arab Syria.
Tugrul Beg died in 1063, three years after his brother Cagri Beg. He was childless, and the rule over the unified Seljuk dominions passed to Cagri Beg’s son Alp Arslan, who reigned from 1063 to 1073. He was a resolute warrior and a powerful sultan like his uncle. In 1070 he organised an expedition against the Fatimids, and advanced into northern Syria. There he heard that he was threatened in the rear by the Emperor Romanus IV Diogenes, whom he confronted at Manzikert or Malasjird, north of Lake Van, and defeated in 1071. The subsequent crumbling of the Byzantine defences in the east facilitated the immigration of Turcoman tribesmen into Anatolia.
Alp Arslan died of a wound in 1073, and was succeeded by his son Malik-Shah. Perhaps to placate his brother Tutus, who was a possible rival, Malik-Shah conceded central and southern Syria-Palestine to him as an apanage. As ruler of this territory, Tutus killed the Turkish chief Atsiz, who, as mentioned earlier, was building up an independent principality around Jerusalem and Damascus. He extended his power into northern Syria by defeating and killing Sultan Siileyman of the Seljuks of Rim (to be mentioned shortly) in 1085. As a result of this development Malik-Shah came to Syria, where he confirmed Tutus in his apanage, but brought northern Syria under his own control by appointing governors to Antioch and Aleppo. Yagistyan, whom he installed in Antioch, was still there when the Crusaders arrived ten years later. Malik-Shah died in 1092, and in 1095 Tutus was killed in the ensuing succession struggle.
His apanage, now to all intents and purposes an independent Seljuk principality, was partitioned between his sons, Dokak in Damascus and Ridwan in Aleppo. Neither of them was completely master in his territory since both were overshadowed by their atabegs, Dokak by Tugtigin and Ridwan by Janah al-Dawla. It was customary in Turkish principalities for a ruler’s son to have an atabeg (literally, ‘father-prince’) as his tutor and guardian, who would become in effect the regent if the ruler died while his son was a minor. In these circumstances an atabeg sometimes legitimised his position by marrying the late ruler’s widow, and might in fact found a ruling dynasty.
Alp Arslan’s victory at Manzikert was the prelude to a process of state formation by two very different ethnic groups, the Turcomans of Asia Minor and the Armenians. Two principal families established themselves over the ‘Turcomans. One was a branch of the Seljuk clan, the descendants of a prince called Kutlumus, who had clashed with his kinsmen, the Great Seljuks, over the rule of succession to the sultanate. Stileyman, the son of Kutlumus, took a part in Byzantine factional struggles, set up his capital in the far north-west at Nicaea (Iznik), and was recognised as sultan of Ram.
He was killed in 1086 in battle with Tutus of Syria, and his young son, Kalic Arslan, became a hostage to Malik-Shah. On MalikShah’s death he succeeded in escaping to Iznik, where he was recognised as sultan. There was however a rival Turkish chief, Danismend, whose family emerged from obscurity on the eve of the First Crusade. Its territory lay in the northern parts of central Asia Minor, with Sivas, Tokat and Amasya among its cities. During the twelfth century the power of the Danismendids declined, and their lands were eventually absorbed into the Seljuk sultanate of Rum.
The Armenians’ original homeland, Greater Armenia, lay to the north of Lake Van in the vicinity of Mount Ararat. During the early eleventh century it was brought into the Byzantine Empire. Gagik II, the last king of Greater Armenia, was deprived of his realm and re-established in Cappadocia (eastern Anatolia), which led to an extensive Armenian migration to that region of the Empire. Armenian governors were appointed to the fortresses of the eastern Taurus and the cities that lay beyond.
There had long been Armenian migration into Cilicia, where afertile plain watered by the Tarsus Cayi (on which the city of Tarsus stands) and the rivers Seyhan and Ceyhan lies at the foot of the Taurus and the Anti-Taurus mountains to the west and north respectively. The eastern wall of Cilicia is the Amanus range. When the Byzantine defences were breached after Manzikert and the Turcomans spread over Cappadocia, there was a flood of migrants into Cilicia and further eastwards to the northern parts of Syria and Mesopotamia.
The same course of events gave independence to the former Byzantine Armenian governors, the most successful of whom, Philaretus, established a principality extending from Cilicia eastwards to Edessa beyond the Euphrates. On his death in 1085 his territories fell apart. After a brief period of Seljuk rule Edessa passed to one of Philaretus’s former Armenian officers named Toros. When the Crusaders established their states in Syria-Palestine, the bases were being laid for a new Armenian polity to their north, in what became known as Lesser Armenia.
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