Jerusalem. The Biography

surely Jerusalem was next. ‘If Edessa is the high sea,’ wrote Ibn al-Qaysarani, ‘Jerusalem is the shore.’ The Abbasid caliph awarded Zangithe titles Ornament of Islam, Auxiliary of the Commander of the Believers, Divinely Aided King. Yet Zangi’s hard-drinking perversity caught up with him in his own boudoir.
    At a siege in Iraq, a humiliated eunuch, perhaps one of those castrated for Zangi’s pleasure, crept into his heavily guarded tent and stabbed the drunken potentate in his bed, leaving him scarcely alive. A courtier found him bleeding, helplessly begging for his life: ‘He thought 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’s done this to you?”’ There died the Falcon Prince.
    His staff pillaged his belongings around the still-warm corpse and his two sons divided his lands: the younger of them, the twenty-eight-year-old Nur al-Din, tugged his father’s signet ring off his finger and seized the Syrian territories. Talented but less ferocious than his father, Nur al-Din intensified the jihad against the Franks. Shocked by the fall of Edessa, Melisende appealed to Pope Eugenius II, who called the Second Crusade. 5
    ELEANOR OF AQUITAINE AND KING LOUIS: SCANDAL AND DEFEAT
     
    Louis VII, the saintly young King of France, accompanied by his wife Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine, and Conrad III, King of Germany, a veteran pilgrim, answered the pope’s call. But their German and French armies were mauled by the Turks as they crossed Anatolia. Louis VII only just made it to Antioch after a disastrous fighting march that must have been terrifying for Queen Eleanor, who lost much of her baggage – and any respect for her sanctimonious, inept husband.
    Prince Raymond of Antioch urged Louis to help him to capture Aleppo but Louis was determined to make his pilgrimage to Jerusalem first. The worldly Raymond was Eleanor’s uncle and ‘the handsomest of princes’. After the miserable journey, Eleanor ‘disregarded her marriage vows and was unfaithful to her husband’, according to William of Tyre. Her husband was puppyishly besotted with her, but regarded sex, even in marriage, as indulgent. No wonder Eleanor called him ‘more monk than man’. Yet Eleanor, acutely intelligent, dark-haired, dark-eyed and curvaceous, was the richest heiress in Europe, brought up at the sensual Aquitanian court. Priestly chroniclers claimed that the blood of sin coursed through her veins because her grandfather was William the Troubadour, a promiscuous warrior-poet, while her grandmother on theother side was her grandfather’s mistress, nicknamed La Dangereuse. This came about because the Troubadour had facilitated his access to La Dangereuse by marrying her daughter to his son.
    Whether Eleanor and Raymond committed adultery or not, their behaviour was provocative enough to humiliate the husband and launch an international scandal. The King of France solved his marital problem by kidnapping Eleanor and heading off to join the German king who had arrived in Jerusalem. When Louis and Eleanor approached the city, ‘all the clergy and people went out to meet him’ and escort him to the Sepulchre ‘to the accompaniment of hymns and chants’. The French couple stayed along with Conrad in the Temple of Solomon, but Eleanor must have been carefully watched by the French courtiers. She was stranded there for months.
    On 24 June 1148, Melisende and her son Baldwin III called a council at Acre that approved the target of the Crusade: Damascus. The city had recently been Jerusalem’s ally, but it was still a sensible target because it would only be a matter of time before it fell to Nur al-Din. On 23 July, the kings of Jerusalem, France and Germany fought their way into the orchards on the west side of Damascus but two days later mysteriously moved camp to the east. Four days after that, the Crusade fell apart and the three kings ignominiously retreated.
    Unur, Atabeg of Damascus, may have bribed the Jerusalemite barons, convincing them that the Western Crusaders wanted the prize for themselves. Such duplicitous venality was all too credible but, more likely, the Crusaders simply learned that Nur al-Din, Zangi’s son, was advancing with a relief army. Now Jerusalem wilted under the strain of this disaster. Conrad sailed home; Louis, bathing in ascetic penitence, stayed to celebrate Easter in the Holy City. They could not leave fast