Oblivious to this threat, an advance party of Zangid troops were shocked to see a large Christian army marching out of the foothills of the Ansariyah range. After a brief skirmish they were put to flight and raced back towards Nur al-Din’s main encampment, hotly pursued by the enemy. A Muslim chronicler later described how the two forces ‘arrived together’, so that, overcome by surprise, ‘the Muslims were unable to mount their horses and take up their weapons before the Franks were amongst them, killing and capturing many’. A Latin contemporary recorded that ‘[Nur al-Din’s] army was almost annihilated [while] the prince himself, in despair of his very life, fled in utter confusion. All the baggage and even his sword were abandoned. Barefooted and mounted on a beast of burden, he barely escaped capture.’ Muslim sources confirm the scale of this defeat and the ignominy of Nur al-Din’s retreat, adding that, in his desperation, he mounted a steed whose legs were still hobbled and was saved only by the bravery of one of his Kurds, who rushed in to sever the tether at the cost of his own life.

Stunned and humiliated, Nur al-Din scuttled back to Homs with a handful of survivors. The horror of this unheralded disaster seems to have left a scar on his psyche and the nature of his reaction over the coming months is revealing. Filled with rage and impassioned determination, he is said to have vowed: ‘By God, I shall not shelter under any roof until I avenge myself and Islam.’ We might suspect this to be pure invective, but it was followed by practical action. At significant cost, Nur al-Din paid for the replacement of all weapons, equipment and horses out of his own purse–a responsibility not usually shouldered by Muslim warlords–so that ‘the army was restored as if it had not suffered any defeat’. He also ordered that the lands of any slain soldiers be passed on to their families, rather than reverting to his control. Most strikingly, when the Franks sought, later that year, to agree a truce, the emir flatly refused.¹⁹

Nur al-Din now sought to build a coalition with the Muslims of Iraq and the Jazira, gathering a mighty army to prosecute a retaliatory attack on the Latins. Stories of his devout dedication to ‘fasting and praying’ spread through the Near East, and he also began actively recruiting the support of ascetics and holy men throughout Syria and Mesopotamia, urging them to publicise the Latins’ manifold crimes against Islam. The impetus of jihad was gathering pace.

By the following summer, Nur al-Din was ready to strike, and his strategic objectives were audacious. Numerical estimates of his forces have not survived, but we know that he was followed by troops from his own Syrian territories as well as those from the eastern cities of Mosul, Diyar Bakr, Hisn Kifr and Mardin. He must have been confident about the strength of his army, because he set out both to make territorial conquests and to lure the Christians into a decisive battle. Nur al-Din advanced on Harim, which had remained in Antiochene hands since 1158, laying siege to its citadel and initiating a bombardment campaign with siege engines. As he must have expected, the Franks soon sought to make a counter-attack. In early August 1164 an army probably in excess of 10,000 men, including some 600 knights, marched from Antioch under the command of Prince Bohemond III, Count Raymond III of Tripoli and Joscelin III of Courtenay, alongside Thoros of Armenia and the Greek governor of Cilicia.

At news of their approach, Nur al-Din marched his army to the nearby Latin-held settlement of Artah, on the Antiochene plain, hoping to draw his enemy further away from the security of Antioch. Then, on 11 August, when the Christian allies made a nervous feint towards Harim, he closed to engage their forces on open ground. As the battle began, Nur al-Din’s right flank made a feigned retreat, tempting the Latin knights into a hasty charge. Left isolated and vulnerable, the Christian infantry faced a ruinous assault and were swiftly overrun. With the tide of the battle moving in the Muslims’ favour, the mounted Frankish elite reversed their headlong advance, only to find themselves enveloped as Nur al-Din’s right wing halted its supposed flight to ‘[come] back on their heels’, and his centre turned to engage them at close quarters. An Arabic chronicle described how ‘[the Christians’] spirits sank and they saw that they were lost, left in the middle, surrounded on all sides by the Muslims’. Aghast, a Latin contemporary conceded that: ‘Overwhelmed and shattered by the swords of the enemy, [the Franks] were shamefully slain like victims before the altar…Regardless of honour all threw down their arms precipitately and ignominiously begged for life.’ Thoros fled the field, but ‘to save their lives even at the cost of shame and reproach’, Bohemond, Raymond and Joscelin all surrendered; ‘chained liked the lowest slaves, they were led ignominiously to Aleppo, where they were cast into prison and became the sport of the infidels’.

Nur al-Din’s victory was absolute, the revenge for Bouqia sweet. He had thrashed the Syrian Franks, reaping an unprecedented harvest of high-level captives. Within days he returned to Harim which, now cut off from all hope of reinforcement, promptly surrendered. From this time onwards the town would remain in Muslim hands, leaving the principality of Antioch cowering behind an eastern frontier that had been definitively driven back to the River Orontes. Just as in 1149, after his triumph at Inab, Nur al-Din chose not to target the city of Antioch itself. The chronicler Ibn al-Athir later explained that the emir was deterred by the strength of its citadel and, more revealingly, by his reluctance to provoke a counter-attack from Antioch’s overlord, Emperor Manuel, quoting Nur al-Din as saying, ‘To have Bohemond as a neighbour I find preferable to being a neighbour of the ruler of Constantinople.’ With this in mind, he soon agreed to release the young Antiochene prince in return for a hefty ransom; he refused, however, to give Raymond of Tripoli, Joscelin of Courtenay or his other princely prisoner, Reynald of Châtillon, their freedom.²⁰

In October 1164 Nur al-Din turned his attention to the southern frontier with Jerusalem. There the pivotal town of Banyas was vulnerable, because its lord, the Constable Humphrey of Toron, was in Egypt with the king of Jerusalem. The emir moved in with heavy siege weaponry and began an investment, deploying a combination of incessant bombardment and sapping to weaken the fortress and break the will of its small garrison. Bribes may also have been used to buy off Banyas’ commander. Within a few days, surrender on terms of safe conduct was secured and Nur al-Din installed his own well-supplied troops. Just as at Harim, the conquest of Banyas proved to be a permanent gain for Islam. The significance of this turning point in the regional balance of power was reflected in the punitive terms Nur al-Din now imposed on the Franks of Galilee–a share of the revenues of Tiberias and an annual tribute payment. Three years later, the emir followed up this success by destroying the Latin fortress at Chastel Neuf. This opened up a new corridor into Frankish Palestine, through the area of rolling hills known as Marj Ayun, between the Litani valley and the Upper Jordan. There could now be no question that Nur al-Din posed a real threat to Outremer.

THE DREAM OF JERUSALEM

Nur al-Din’s actions in the 1160s suggest that he had adopted a more determined and aggressive stance in his dealings with the Franks, embracing and promoting an active jihad against them. Ever since his occupation of Damascus in 1154, Nur al-Din had sponsored a monumental building programme within the city, rejuvenating and reaffirming its status as one of the Near East’s great centres of power and civilisation. This began almost immediately, with the construction of a new hospital, the Bimaristan–soon to become one of the world’s leading centres of medical science and treatment–and a luxurious bathhouse, the Hammam Nur al-Din, which remains largely unaltered and can be visited to this day.