Download PDF | (History of Warfare) Michael S. Fulton - Contest for Egypt_ The Collapse of the Fatimid Caliphate, the Ebb of Crusader Influence, and the Rise of Saladin-BRILL (2022).
216 Pages
Preface
This episode of history first intrigued me when I was working on my MA; I was surprised to find that no recent study had been devoted to such a dynamic and frequently mentioned series of events. Now, well over a decade later, I have decided to take this challenge upon myself. In so doing, I am grateful for the constant support and advice offered by long-time colleague Heather Crowley and some very helpful words of wisdom furnished by Steve Tibble concerning the manuscript. Invaluable feedback was also provided by Niall Christie, whose support as my department head at Langara College I am doubly grateful for, and Peter Edbury, whose generosity I have benefitted from ever since my days in Cardiff. Some quite valuable final suggestions were provided by Nic Morton and John France, both of whom have also assisted me in different ways over the years. Further thanks are due to my family, to whom I owe so much for their support.
To make this study accessible to a wide audience, references have been kept to a minimum and an effort has been made to identify English translations of primary sources wherever possible, while notes also include editions of the original Latin for those who are interested. Names of historical figures have been anglicised in most instances, while Byzantine names have been transliterated using their Greek forms, rather than the Latin. Most Arabic names have been truncated to an easily recognizable form, and diacritical marks have not been used in order to make the text more approachable. The regional maps have been produced using QGIS. My aim throughout has been to produce a meaningful contribution to the study of this period, but in a manner that will encourage younger students and scholars; in essence, I have tried to write the book that I had hoped was available so many years ago.
M. S. Fulton Christmas 2021
Introduction
But concerning Egypt I will now speak at length, because nowhere are there so many marvellous things, nor in the whole world beside are there to be seen so many works of unspeakable greatness; therefore I shall say the more concerning Egypt. Herodotus ∵
In 1164, armies from Syria and Palestine converged on Egypt. This was the long-term result of decades of instability in the region. The immediate cause, however, can be attributed to a man named Shawar. In early 1163, Shawar had usurped a rival and become vizier of Egypt. Around six months later, he was forced out of office by another emir as the struggle for power continued.
On the run, Shawar made his way to Syria, where he sought the help of Nur al-Din, the powerful ruler of Damascus and Aleppo. Bolstered by the support he received from Nur al-Din, Shawar, accompanied by a Syrian army led by Shirkuh, one of Nur al-Din’s leading emirs, returned to Egypt in the spring of 1164 and was successfully reinstated as vizier. Back in charge, Shawar was reluctant to fulfil the promises that he had made to Nur al-Din and resented the continued presence of a foreign army in his domain. This led Shawar to offer the Franks of Palestine a large sum of money if they would rid Egypt of the Syrian force that had been responsible for returning him to power. To Shawar’s pleasure, the two expeditionary armies fought each other to a standstill over the following months and both withdrew from Egypt before the end of the year. Although Shawar achieved his immediate aim of regaining power in Egypt, the manner in which he did this would have dramatic costs and consequences in the years to follow. Both Shirkuh and Amalric, king of Jerusalem, had gained a first-hand appreciation of Egypt’s wealth and its weakness. After a respite of a couple years, the two men led armies back into Egypt. They clashed in 1167 and then again in 1168, continuing the three-way fight for control of Egypt, pitting Catholic Christians, Sunni Turks and Kurds, and the eclectic armies of Egypt, fighting in the name of a Shiʿite Ismaʿili caliphate, against each other. The campaign of 1168, although not the most active, proved decisive: the Syrian army would remain in Egypt; Shawar was killed shortly after Amalric’s departure; and Shirkuh replaced Shawar as vizier, only to die a matter of weeks later, leading to the succession of his nephew, Saladin. Far from being the end of the story, the Franks maintained their interest, launching an unsuccessful invasion in alliance with the Byzantines in 1169.
Not until the death of Nur al-Din in May 1174, followed by the death of Amalric two months later, did the contest come to an end. It was Saladin, as master of Egypt, who would ultimately step into the vacuum of power, forcibly establishing his rule over most of the lands once ruled by Nur al-Din and Amalric. The contest for Egypt is far from unknown to historians of the crusades and the medieval Middle East; however, it is traditionally approached in two quite opposing ways. On one hand, students of the crusades often use it to characterise Amalric’s reign, as does William of Tyre, the preeminent contemporary Frankish source for this period. Crusades scholars tend to devote more attention to Egypt when studying events of the thirteenth century, as both the Fifth and Seventh Crusades were directed there.
On the other hand, students of medieval Islamic history often view this period as a sort of prologue to the later career of Saladin, who established his initial base of power in Egypt before coming to dominate most of the Near East in the decades that followed. Once more, this approach is heavily influenced by the surviving contemporary sources, almost all of which were written following Saladin’s ascendance. But it is precisely because of the significance of this episode on the subsequent course of history that it should be examined more closely in its own right. To appreciate the context in which the contest for Egypt took place, it is prudent to be acquainted with the sources. Although there are a number of quite detailed narrative accounts, composed by men close to the events they detail, each has quite an obvious bias and interest in presenting certain figures in a particular light. It should also be added that each was aware of the conclusion of events before he had completed his account – all who wrote narrative histories of this episode, even those who may have begun their accounts while events were taking place, had the opportunity to revise their works, as all were completed years, if not decades, after 1174.
From a Frankish perspective, William of Tyre is the most valuable source. Born in the Latin East decades after the First Crusade and the establishment of the Latin principalities in the Levant, he gained a university education in Europe before returning to the Near East around 1166. He was appointed archdeacon of Tyre in 1167, by which point he appears to have come to the notice of Amalric. William was later appointed tutor to the king’s only son and heir, the future Baldwin IV, and it was William who first suspected that Baldwin might have leprosy.1 Following Amalric’s death, William was promoted to the archbishopric of Tyre and took on the mantle of royal chancellor, placing him in a position of considerable influence. It was at Amalric’s behest that William began work on his history, which he continued to compose into the 1180s. Although William concedes that Amalric was prone to greed, he nevertheless presents him as quite a positive character. Another obvious place of bias in William’s work relates to relations with the Byzantines. William was part of a delegation sent to Constantinople in 1168, which successfully negotiated an alliance with the Byzantine emperor, Manuel Komnenos.
Relations between the Franks and Byzantines became strained during the joint expedition against Egypt the following year, and William clearly withholds certain things, wishing to present neither side negatively. All other Frankish sources pale in comparison to William; however, some have a few additional insights to offer. These include the so-called Ernoul continuation of William’s history and the Eracles continuation and Old French translation. Distant contemporary European chroniclers, including the Englishmen William of Newburgh and Roger of Howden, offer a few original details in some places. James of Vitry, bishop of Acre in the early thirteenth century and author of a history of the crusades and Frankish presence in the Holy Land, provides a brief, and in places confused, account of the contest for Egypt. From a Muslim perspective, there is a similar source of paramount importance: al-Qadi al-Fadil. Arguably even more influential than William of Tyre in his own context, al-Qadi al-Fadil was born in Ascalon but travelled to Egypt where he entered the Fatimid chancery. It was said that he was so skilled at drawing up dispatches that clerks in Fustat intrigued against him. According to ʿUmara, another influential contemporary, it was during the vizierate of Ruzzik that al-Qadi al-Fadil was called to Cairo to work in the Office of the Army, where he then provided ʿUmara with a job.2 Having risen through the Fatimid administration and navigated the instability that accompanied the volatile struggle for power at the top, he then, with seemingly little difficulty, transitioned into the service of Shirkuh and Saladin.
He became one of Saladin’s closest officials and, following Saladin’s death in 1193, continued to serve the sultan’s sons until his own death in 1200. Although al-Qadi al-Fadil’s great history, the Mutajaddidat, has not survived, except in exerts found in the writings of later historians, many of his letters have been preserved. The influence of these on the generation of historians attached to Saladin was profound. Al-Qadi al-Fadil was very well informed of events around him, but was prone to exaggeration when writing of the exploits of his patrons; embellishments that can be traced through the subsequent historical record. Unfortunately, we have little of his earlier works relating to the campaigns prior to the end of 1168, no doubt in part because this is when he transferred his loyalties from the Fatimids to the Ayyubids. The Yemeni poet ʿUmara, mentioned above, was another important contemporary. First sent to Egypt as an envoy of the ruler of Mecca in the spring of 1155, his writing apparently impressed the caliph, al-Faʾiz, and the vizier, Talaʾiʿ ibn Ruzzik, before he left near the end of the year, travelling back to Mecca and then Yemen. He returned to Mecca and was again sent to Cairo in the second half of 1157, from which point he remained in Egypt. ʿUmara appears to have been socially gifted and politically flexible, composing poetry that praised the actions of successive viziers. Like al-Qadi al-Fadil, he was an adherent of Sunni Islam, which does not appear to have posed an obstacle to his success within the Fatimids’ Shiʿite caliphate. He was favoured by Ibn Ruzzik and his son, Ruzzik, and, along with al-Qadi al-Fadil, developed a close relationship with al-Kamil, the son of the man who would push the Banu Ruzzik from power, Shawar. Following this transition of authority, ʿUmara was quick to devote praise to Shawar.
A decade later, he survived another change of rulers when Shawar fell from power, quickly developing a friendship with Saladin’s brother, Turanshah. Ultimately, however, ʿUmara was implicated in a Fatimid plot against Saladin and was executed in 1174. ʿUmara’s poetry is his primary legacy, although he also penned a history of Yemen and a collection of anecdotes relating to the late Fatimid viziers. Unlike al-Qadi al-Fadil, with whom ʿUmara seems to have had some kind of a lingering feud or animosity, he was never able to endear himself to Saladin. ʿUmara, who was a Shafiʿi Sunni, like Saladin, and wrote poetry praising Saladin, also composed lines lamenting the fate of the Fatimids, which would certainly have turned some supporters of the new regime against him and given ammunition to his existing critics. Although he wrote quite favourably of al-Qadi al-Fadil in his work on the Egyptian viziers, the feud between the two men was such that ʿUmara denied the intervention of al-Qadi al-Fadil in the days leading up to his death, believing he would speak against him when in fact it was said that the qadi had good intentions and might have saved his life.3 Two men who would join Saladin’s service after 1174, and have been extremely influential in forging his later reputation with their celebratory histories, are ʿImad al-Din al-Isfahani and Bahaʾ al-Din ibn Shaddad.4 ʿImad al-Din was born in Isfahan in 1125. He studied in Baghdad before joining Nur al-Din’s chancery in Damascus, where he rose to a position of significance by the 1170s. He later entered Saladin’s service thanks to a recommendation from al-Qadi al-Fadil. Whereas al-Qadi al-Fadil typically remained in Egypt, administering the region on Saladin’s behalf, ʿImad al-Din became attached to Saladin, serving as his secretary and accompanying him on his travels. In this capacity, ʿImad al-Din became one of the most influential non-military figures in Saladin’s administration. As had briefly happened following Nur al-Din’s death, ʿImad al-Din’s fortunes declined with Saladin’s passing, though they would not recover before his own death in 1201.
Only sections of his semi-autobiographical al-Barq al-Shami have survived, although the entirety has been preserved in an abridged version composed by al-Bundari. This work had a profound influence on the accounts of many subsequent historians. His al-Fath al-Qussi, which focuses more specifically on Saladin’s capture of Jerusalem, has fortunately survived. Bahaʾ al-Din ibn Shaddad was born in Mosul in 1145 and, like al-Qadi al-Fadil and ʿImad al-Din, he was schooled in the Shafiʿi legal tradition. Of the three, he was the last to join Saladin’s service, doing so in 1188, while completing a pilgrimage. Under Saladin, Bahaʾ al-Din acted as a judge of the army and continued to serve Saladin’s descendants in Aleppo until his eventual death in 1234. Although his writing style is more deliberate and clear than that of ʿImad al-Din, typically shying away from sensational anecdotes, his biographical history of Saladin is clearly a celebratory work, in which we find certain exaggerations, many of which can be traced back to the writings of al-Qadi al-Fadil and ʿImad al-Din, on whose works he was forced to rely at times. Whereas al-Qadi al-Fadil was intimately acquainted with the context of the struggle for Egypt, and ʿImad al-Din, who was established in Damascus by 1167, would have had access to first-hand testimony of participants, Bahaʾ al-Din had little immediate exposure to this episode. His account instead places a unique importance on Saladin from the start (most accounts do not mention him until the campaign of 1167), while the whole episode is presented as a duality, reflecting the worldly ambitions of Shirkuh and the Franks in contrast to the humility and piety of Saladin. Overall, Bahaʾ al-Din provides relatively few original details relating to the contest for Egypt, even concerning those events in which Saladin played an important part. This is surprising considering Bahaʾ al-Din’s close relationship with Saladin – he, along with al-Qadi al-Fadil, was at Saladin’s bedside in Damascus when the sultan died in 1193. While al-Qadi al-Fadil, ʿImad al-Din and Bahaʾ al-Din all formed close relationships with Saladin, Ibn al-Athir did not.
Born in Mosul in 1160, Ibn al-Athir was slightly younger than the others and he was never drawn into Saladin’s service, although he may have accompanied Saladin’s army for a period around 1188. He was rather a servant of the Zankid dynasty, to which Nur al-Din belonged, and which Saladin ultimately usurped in Damascus and Aleppo. This personal distance led Ibn al-Athir to provide a different perspective and freed him from the propensity or obligation to shower Saladin with undue praise. Despite this, the influence of the others’ works is clearly apparent in both his grand history of the world and his local history of Mosul. His death followed that of Bahaʾ al-Din in the 1230s. As Yaacov Lev has observed, each of these authorities, our best sources from a Muslim perspective, are clearly biased in their accounts of the events in Egypt in the 1160s.5 While those close to Saladin had an obvious incentive to glorify his actions and memory, Ibn al-Athir may have done the opposite at times, painting Saladin’s motives as deceitful and even disloyal to Nur al-Din. To these principal Muslim sources can be added a number of others. Sections of the history of Ibn Abi Tayy, who composed his narrative in Aleppo in the early thirteenth century, have been preserved in the works of other historians. These include Abu Shama, who composed his celebratory work in praise of Nur al-Din and Saladin in the mid-thirteenth century. Although Abu Shama contributed relatively few original insights, his method of presenting extracts of multiple earlier accounts of events makes it easy to compare the works of others and has preserved sections of otherwise lost histories.
The slightly later biographical work of Ibn Khallikan relies heavily on the principal accounts, though it often includes details found elsewhere. Although more distant from the events of the 1160s, the works of two later Egyptian historians are also quite valuable. The great history of Ibn al-Furat, which was composed in the late fourteenth century, incorporates a number of unique perspectives and reports. Al-Maqrizi, born in 1364, was an enthusiast of Egyptian history and his numerous works on the history and geography of the region provide many helpful details. Beyond the Frankish and Muslim sources, there are a variety of Eastern Christian accounts. The Coptic History of the Patriarchs, apparently begun in the tenth century and continued by subsequent authorities, provides a detailed account of the affairs of Egypt and the struggle for power up to the 1160s, but is surprisingly unhelpful for the period of Frankish and Syrian intervention. Even the siege of Alexandria in 1167 receives only a brief mention. Indicative perhaps of the political environment in which it was written, there is no shortage of praise for Saladin. A quite different Coptic source is that of Abu’l-Makarim, whose survey provides insight into the finances of Egypt and the Coptic Church, and thus an idea of the prevalence of the Coptic community and the impacts of policies enacted under the late Fatimid and early Ayyubid regimes. More distant, Michael the Syrian and the later Anonymous Syriac Chronicle offer outsiders’ perspectives, as does the account of Bar Hebraeus.
Two near contemporary Byzantine sources, Niketas Choniates and John Kinnamos, provide critical Greek perspectives, indispensable when examining Byzantine actions and intentions from the late 1160s. From the other end of the Mediterranean, travellers from al-Andalus, including Ibn Jubayr, who passed through Egypt in the 1180s, and Benjamin of Tudela, who similarly spent some time in Egypt shortly after Saladin came to power, contribute interesting insights into life at the time, but little on the conflict that preceded their visits. As mentioned earlier, the nature of these sources has had a considerable influence in shaping scholarly interpretations, and more obviously approaches, to the contest for Egypt. Historians of the medieval Muslim world have primarily dealt with this period as an introduction to the career of Saladin – this is often presented as Saladin’s coming of age in a political sense. While the accounts of Saladin’s contemporary biographers allow scholars to easily compose reasonably seamless narrative stories of his career, there is the obvious issue of bias with which to contend. In 1969, when Islamic perspectives were still drastically underrepresented in the study of the crusades, the great Arabist, H. A. R. Gibb, might be forgiven for his celebratory assessment of the career of Saladin. In his words, of which Saladin’s contemporary biographers would have been proud, “The reign of Saladin is more than an episode in the history of the crusades. It is one of those rare and dramatic moments in human history when cynicism and disillusion, born of long experience of the selfish ambitions of princes, are for a brief period dislodged by moral determination and unity of purpose.”6 Writing three years later, Andrew Ehrenkreutz, in his far more comprehensive work on Saladin’s reign, offered a no less celebratory assessment; though far from a naive and virtuous victim of circumstance, Ehrenkreutz emphasised Saladin’s competence and ability. In his view, “without Saladin the first two Egyptian campaigns [those of 1164 and 1167] might have ended in disaster for Shirkuh; without Saladin’s participation in the third expedition [that of 1168] Shirkuh might not have achieved his triumph so easily.”
In short, “Saladin was a pragmatist pursuing power-oriented self-serving ambitions.”7 Two years before Gibb’s article appeared, Nikita Elisséeff published his great study of Nur al-Din, a large section of the second volume being devoted to the actions of the Syrian ruler’s deputies in Egypt. While there is no shortage of celebration devoted to the protagonist, a fairly comprehensive overview of the contest is provided. A new standard was introduced in 1982 by Malcolm Cameron Lyons and D. E. P. Jackson. Relying on a careful study of the sources, including many which had not been utilised by their predecessors, it presents a much more detailed, balanced and objective assessment of the events in Egypt during this period. Testament to its enduring value, Yaacov Lev’s 1991 study of the Fatimids essentially directs readers to Lyons and Jackson’s examination of events following the overthrow of Shawar in 1163. In his later biographical study of Saladin, published eight years later, Lev’s focus really starts from the point when Saladin became vizier in 1169. Most recently, Michael Brett’s 2017 study of the Fatimids, not unlike Lev’s, is comprehensive, though it devotes only seven pages to the final contest.8 Two non-English studies of Saladin were published in 2008, a year after Lev’s appeared. The first, by Hannes Möhring, has the stated objective of sharing the details of Saladin’s career with a broader German audience.9 The other was authored by Anne-Marie Eddé, who suggests there is little more to be learned regarding the period in question.
The events that marked the three successive Egyptian expeditions under Shirkuh’s command, between spring 1164 and early 1169, are well known and have been related many times.”10 The way she frames this conflict, between Nur al-Din’s quest for dominance on one hand and the Franks’ struggle for survival on the other, appears to reveal the strong influence of Elisséeff’s history of Nur al-Din. Most recently, Jonathan Phillips’ 2019 study of Saladin dedicates four short chapters to the period between 1163 and 1174.11 Phillips’ book is commendably accessible and it offers a nice summary of the contest. His ultimate objective, to highlight the legacy of Saladin, pulls focus towards tracing the rising influence of Nur al-Din and Saladin in the broader region.
Advancements in the study of this period from a Frankish perspective have been less dramatic. Rather than any lack of attention, this is because sources composed in Latin and vernacular European languages have received mainstream study for a much longer time. Gustave Schlumberger’s Campagnes du roi Amaury Ier de Jérusalem en Égypte, au XII siècle, published in 1906, was for a long time the preeminent work on the subject. Marshall W. Baldwin’s article on the reigns of Baldwin III and Amalric, appearing in the first volume of Kenneth Setton’s epic History of the Crusades (published 1969), became the new standard among works operating from the point of view of the Franks.12 Since then, scholarship has advanced, but contributions tend to come in quite specific articles or, as is more often the case, in larger books on the crusades, in which the contest typically forms the main subject in the chapter on the reign of Amalric – a few quite profound observations might be found in a chapter that otherwise sticks to the standard narrative. Necessitated by the exceptionally broad scope of such works, and accompanying restraints on space, very often a quite succinct version of events is provided, usually heavily reliant on the account of William of Tyre and the most accessible Muslim sources.13
The aim of this book is not to radically redefine what is known about this episode of history, but rather to offer a more focused study, one that is both balanced and accessible to students of this period. It will seek to provide a better understanding of the military actions of this conflict and the motives of those who ordered, led and reacted to them. The first three chapters will briefly introduce the background to the contest from Fatimid, Frankish and Syrian (Zankid/Ayyubid) perspectives. Each of the following four chapters will deal with a significant campaign of the 1160s and the events that followed. Another chapter is devoted to the uneasy period of the early 1170s, when much was still up in the air. This is followed by a chapter on the events of 1174, when the contest was effectively concluded, and a final chapter on the enduring significance of Egypt in the years and decades that followed. In short, an effort will be made to analyse events in their own immediate context: a focus will be placed on the contest itself, rather than its place in Saladin’s rise to power or the decline of the kingdom of Jerusalem. In this way, answers will be suggested for certain lingering questions, while some traditional assumptions will be challenged.
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