ZANGI–THE CHAMPION OF ISLAM

Zangi’s capture of Edessa in 1144 was a triumph for Islam: what one Muslim chronicle described as ‘the victory of victories’. When his troops stormed the city on 24 December, the atabeg initially allowed them to pillage and slaughter at will. But after this first wave of violence, he enforced an approach that was, at least by his standards, relatively temperate. The Franks suffered–every man was butchered and all women taken into slavery–but the surviving eastern Christians were spared and permitted to remain in their homes. Likewise, Latin churches were destroyed, but their Armenian and Syriac counterparts left untouched. Similar care was taken to limit the amount of damage inflicted upon Edessa’s fortifications, and a rebuilding programme was undertaken immediately to repair weakened sections of the walls. Realising the strategic significance of his new acquisition, Zangi wished the city to remain habitable and defendable.

With Edessa in his possession, the atabeg could hope to unite a vast swathe of Syrian and Mesopotamian territory, stretching from Aleppo to Mosul. And for the Muslim world of the Near and Middle East, his startling achievement seemed to promise the dawn of a new era, one in which the Franks might be driven from the Levant. There can be no doubt that 1144 marked a turning point for Islam in the war for the Holy Land. Equally, it is clear that Zangi made energetic efforts to publicise his success as a blow struck by a zealous mujahid in the name of all Muslims.

Within Islamic culture, Arabic poetry had a long-established role in both influencing and reflecting public opinion. Muslim poets commonly composed works for public recitation, sometimes before massed crowds, mixing reportage and propaganda to comment upon current events. Poets who joined Zangi’s court, some of them Syrian refugees from Latin rule, authored works celebrating the atabeg’s achievements, casting him as the champion of a wider jihadi movement. Ibn al-Qaysarani (from Caesarea) stressed the need for Zangi to reconquer the whole of the Syrian coastline (the Sahil), arguing that this should be the holy war’s primary aim. ‘Tell the infidel rulers to surrender…all their territories’, he wrote, ‘for it is [Zangi’s] country.’ At the same time, this notion of pan-Levantine conquest was twinned with a more precise objective, one that possessed an immediate devotional focus–Jerusalem. Edessa lay hundreds of miles north of Palestine, but its capture was nonetheless presented as the first step on the path to the Holy City’s recovery. ‘If the conquest of Edessa is the high sea’, Ibn al-Qaysarani affirmed, ‘Jerusalem and the Sahil are its shore.’

Many Muslim contemporaries appear to have accepted this projection of the atabeg as a jihadi warrior. The Abbasid caliph in Baghdad now conferred upon him the grand titles ‘Auxiliary of the Commander of the Faithful, the Divinely Aided King’. Given that the Zangids were still, to an extent, outsiders–upstart Turkish warlords, with no innate right to rule over the established Arab and Persian hierarchies of the East–this caliphal endorsement helped to legitimate Zangi’s position. The idea that the atabeg’s career had somehow been building to this single achievement also gained currency. Even a chronicler based in rival Damascus declared that ‘Zangi had always coveted Edessa and watched for a chance to achieve his ambition. Edessa was never out of his thoughts or far from his mind.’ On the basis of his 1144 victory, later Islamic chroniclers labelled him a shahid, or martyr, an honour reserved for those who died ‘in the path of God’ engaging in the jihad.

This is not to suggest that Zangi recognised the political value of espousing the principles of holy war only after his sudden success at Edessa. An inscription dated to 1138, from a Damascene madrasa (religious school) patronised by the atabeg, already described him as ‘the fighter of jihad, the defender of the frontier, the tamer of the polytheists and the destroyer of heretics’, and the same titles were again used four years later in an Aleppan inscription. The events of 1144 allowed Zangi to emphasise and expand upon this facet of his career, but even then jihad against the Franks remained as one issue among many. Within his own lifetime, the atabeg sought, first and foremost, to present himself as a ruler of all Islam; an aspiration highlighted by his decision to employ an array of honorific titles tailored to the differing needs (and distinct tongues) of Mesopotamia, Syria and Diyar Bakr. In Arabic he was often styled as Imad al-Din Zangi (‘Zangi, the pillar of religion’), but in Persian he might present himself as ‘the guardian of the world’ or ‘the great king of Iran’, and in nomadic Turkish as ‘the falcon prince’.¹

There is precious little evidence to suggest that Zangi prioritised jihad above all other concerns before, or even after, 1144. He did take steps to consolidate his hold over the county of Edessa in early 1145, seizing the town of Saruj from the Franks and defeating a Latin relief force that had assembled at Antioch. But before long, he was to be found once again fighting fellow Muslims in Iraq. By early 1146 it was whispered that Zangi was preparing for a new Syrian offensive. Construction of siege weaponry began and, while officially these were for the jihad, an Aleppan chronicler admitted that ‘some people thought that he was intending to attack Damascus’.

Zangi was now sixty-two and still in remarkably rude health. But on the night of 14 September 1146, during the siege of the Muslim fortress of Qalat Ja‘bar (on the banks of the Euphrates), he suffered a sudden and unexpected assault. The details of the terrible attack are murky. Zangi was said to have retained numerous watchful sentries to guard against assassination, but somehow they were bypassed, and the atabeg was set upon in his own bed. The assailant was later cast variously as a trusted eunuch, slave or soldier and, not surprisingly, rumours also circulated that the bloody deed had been instigated by Damascus. The truth will probably never be known. An attendant who found Zangi grievously wounded recounted the scene:

I went to him, while he was still alive. When he saw me, he thought that 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 has done this to you?’ He was, however, unable to speak and died at that moment (God have mercy on him).²

For all his feral vitality and enduring ambition, the atabeg’s tumultuous career had been cut short. Zangi, lord of Mosul and Aleppo, conqueror of Edessa, lay dead.

The advent of Nur al-Din

Zangi’s demise was a squalid, brutal and ignominious affair. Amid the shock of the moment, even his relatives gave little thought to honouring the deceased; the atabeg’s corpse was buried without ceremony and ‘his stores of money and rich treasures were plundered’. Attention turned instead to the issues of power and succession.

Zangi’s heirs moved swiftly: his eldest son, Saif al-Din, seized Mosul–affirmation that Mesopotamia was still seen as the true cradle of Sunni Islam; the atabeg’s younger son, Nur al-Din Mahmud, meanwhile, travelled west to assume control of his father’s Syrian lands. This division of Zangid territory had notable consequences. Without direct interests in Iraq, Nur al-Din, the new emir of Aleppo, would be focused upon Levantine affairs, and thus perhaps better placed to pursue the jihad. At the same time, however, without access to the Fertile Crescent’s wealth and resources, the strength of his Syrian realm might wane.