Crusades

Volume 16

Benjamin Z. Kedar, Jonathan Phillips, Nikolaos G. Chrissis

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138296855
• eBook ISBN: 9781351389044
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Crusades covers seven hundred years from the First Crusade (1095-1102) to the fall of Malta (1798) and draws together scholars working on theatres of war, their home fronts and settlements from the Baltic to Africa and from Spain to the Near East and on theology, law, literature, art, numismatics and economic, social, political and military history.

Routledge publishes this journal for The Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East. Particular attention is given to the publication of historical sources in all relevant languages - narrative, homiletic and documentary - in trustworthy editions, but studies and interpretative essays are welcomed too. Crusades also incorporates the Society's Bulletin.

Mediterranean Notables and the Politics of Survival in Islamic and Latin Syria: Two Geniza Documents on the Frankish Siege of Tripoli

Brendan Goldman

Johns Hopkins University
[email protected]

Abstract

Well over a hundred documents relating the experiences of Near Eastern people living, traveling and trading in the Frankish Levant – from the capture of Antioch in 1098 to the fall of Acre in 1291 – have survived in the Cairo Geniza. This article presents an edition, translation and discussion of one such document and a revision to the dating of a second one previously published by Moshe Gil. The two documents concern the period of the Franks’ successful campaign to seize the Syrian port of Tripoli in 1109. The first relays how the leader of the Palestinian Academy, Evyatar ha-Kohen b. Shelomo, petitioned the head of the Jews of Egypt, Mevorakh b. Se’adya, to deploy his ties to the Fatimid navy to rescue Evyatar and his family from the besieged port. The second details how Evyatar successfully escaped the Frankish sack of Tripoli and subsequently found refuge in Damascus. The article contends that these Geniza documents elucidate Syrian notables’ lived experience of conquest and strategies for survival that both Latin and Arabic chronicles had obscured. It suggests that further study of such Arabic documentary sources may provide additional insight into how these Near Easterners – whom chroniclers who served (and often were themselves) state elites often overlooked – experienced the crusades to the Holy Land.

Over the last two decades, scholars have published a series of compelling monographs and doctoral dissertations examining how Near Eastern people experienced and understood the Crusades.¹ These works have mainly drawn on literary and archaeological sources.² Narrative texts such as the Arabic chronicles of the period are retrospective accounts that privilege the worldview of military and state elites; they limit the questions that scholars can ask about the real-time experiences of other strata of Syrian society.³ The chroniclers generally relegate these other classes to an undifferentiated “townspeople” (ahl al-balad), who appear powerless to save themselves from a fate determined by greater men and God.⁴

The following, for instance, is how the Syrian chronicler Abū Yaʿlā Ḥamza ibn al-Qalānisī (d. 555/1160) describes events surrounding the Frankish siege of Tripoli in 502/1109. Ibn al-Qalānisī, like most contemporary Near Eastern chroniclers, was not only a historian, but also a member of the state elite: he served as the leader (raʾīs) of Damascus and the head of the chancery (ʿamīd dīwan al-rasāʾil).⁵ Ibn al-Qalānisī informs his readers that a group of Frankish nobles had been engaged in a political dispute but, when they resolved their differences, they joined together to attack Tripoli.⁶ The chronicler then relates:

When the townspeople [of Tripoli] (ahl al-balad) saw the [Frankish] army and warriors they were at a loss and were convinced of their (imminent) destruction. Their spirits were lowered to total despair at the delay of the Egyptian fleet (taʾakhkhur wuṣūl al-usṭūl al-miṣrī) at sea [with its] provisions and auxiliary troops. For the grain supplies of the fleet had been removed (uzīḥat ghallat al-usṭūl) and the direction of the wind kept the fleet at bay. Through this, what God, may He be exalted, had wanted concerning the implementation of the preordained decree was accomplished [i.e., Tripoli fell] (li-mā yurīd Allah tāʿaid min nafādh al-amr al-magḍīy) … [The Franks] took possession of the city by force … They captured its men and enslaved its women and children.⁷

In this passage, Ibn al-Qalānisī portrays Tripoli’s townspeople not as actors shaping their own fate, but as objects acted upon: an Egyptian fleet fails to resupply Tripoli in a timely manner; Mediterranean winds exacerbate the fleet’s delay; Tripoli’s downfall is predetermined, since God had foreordained it. The townspeople are made despondent, compelled to surrender and forced into slavery.

While recent scholarship has subjected such accounts to critical scrutiny, relatively few studies have examined Near Eastern documentary sources from this period – personal letters, legal documents, petitions, charity lists and responsa – that can flesh out human experiences obscured by narrative texts. Scholars have recently digitized contemporary Near Eastern documentation that will make these sources more accessible to future researchers.⁸ Sources like the two Geniza documents presented here take us beyond the chroniclers’ faceless ahl al-balad, elucidating the strategies that Syrian townspeople employed to protect their lives and their loved ones from the Frankish invaders.

Syrian Notables and Their Mediterranean Networks

Most of the authors of the documents that survive in the Cairo Geniza were members of the notable class: merchants, religious scholars, moneylenders, tax collectors, physicians and minor courtiers.⁹ This group is elided in Ibn al-Qalānisī’s ahl al-balad. Notables could be Sunni or Shiʿi Muslims, Qaraʾite or Rabbanite Jews, Armenian or Coptic Christians Often their professions required that they be itinerant and cultivate relationships with partners across the eastern Mediterranean – including associates who served the courts of Islamic states.¹⁰ They sustained their social and political networks through the exchange of letters relating to trade, religious matters and communal administration.¹¹ Well-connected notables did not hesitate to call upon the state to protect their interests and to intervene in inter- and intra-communal disputes.¹²

Notables like Evyatar ha-Kohen b. Shelomo, the head (gaʾon) of the Palestinian Academy (yeshivah), recognized that during times of war these connections could mean the difference between life and death. Evyatar learned this lesson firsthand. Military conflicts in Syria compelled him and his Academy to relocate three times over the course of four decades: first, from Jerusalem to Tyre (c.1073–c.1102); then, from Tyre to Tripoli (c.1102–1109); and, finally, from Tripoli to Damascus (c.1109–1200s). According to Moshe Gil and S. D. Goitein, the Academy’s leaders chose to move to these specific cities because they hosted prominent Jewish notables who maintained close relationships to local Muslim rulers.¹³ Gil and Goitein provided only circumstantial evidence for their theory, finding no documentation of how Evyatar employed his alliances to protect himself and his Academy from enemy armies.

The two documents presented here confirm Gil’s and Goitein’s suspicions about the rationale behind the Academy’s first two relocations by illustrating how Evyatar deployed his political alliances during the Academy’s third migration from Tripoli to Damascus. These sources reveal that Levantine notables like Evyatar were not simply the passive victims of the volatile politics of Islamic and Latin Syria. Instead, they were deft players of the political game, keenly aware of how they could utilize their social ties to save themselves from Frankish forces.

The Context: The Palestinian Academy and The Port Politics of Islamic Syria (1062–1109)

The ports of Islamic Syria were known for their fiercely independent politics.¹⁴ Starting in the 1060s, Tyre and Tripoli revolted against Fatimid rule, forming autonomous city-states under rebel gāḍīs.¹⁵ These successful rebellions took place at the same time as the Seljuq invasions of the Levant in the 1070s. The Seljuq advances precipitated an exodus of Jews, Christians and Muslims from the Syrian hinterland.¹⁶ Tyre accepted some of these refugees, including the leader of the Palestinian Academy, Eliyyahu b. Shelomo, his son, Evyatar and fellow members of their institution. Tyre not only took in Evyatar, but also the leading Shāfiʾī scholar of Syria, Abū l-Fatḥ Naṣr b. Ibrāhīm al-Maqdisī al-Nāblusī.¹⁷

Prior to this period, when Eliyyahu and his Academy had lived under Fatimid rule, the Fatimid state had granted him and his predecessors the right to appoint Jewish judges and communal leaders, to resolve intra-communal Jewish disputes, to organize drives to redeem captives and to confer titles of municipal leadership on Jewish notables across the Fatimid caliphate.¹⁸ The head of the Academy, in turn, relied on notables – courtiers, merchants and bankers, both Qarʾite and Rabbanite Jews – to enforce his rulings through state-sanctioned coercion and to defend his interests at the Fatimid court.¹⁹

Why, then, did Eliyyahu, a man who depended on ties to the Fatimid state, choose to move his Academy to Tyre, a port then mled by an anti-Fatimid gāḍī, Ibn abī Aqīl? Moshe Gil has argued that Eliyyahu chose Tyre because the city hosted wealthy Jewish merchants with close ties to the qāḍī. These elites and their Muslim allies could collectively protect the financial and political interests of the Academy and its leader.²⁰ Furthermore, Tyre was in relatively close proximity to the Holy Land, and the Palestinian Academy’s ties to it were one of the bases for its legitimacy in the medieval Jewish world.²¹ The port was also nearly impregnable, meaning the Seljuqs and other antagonists were unlikely to breach its walls.²²

Evyatar ha-Kohen (r. 1083–c.1112), Eliyyahu’s son and successor, affirmed his father’s decision to keep the Palestinian Academy in Tyre. In 1089, however, the Fatimids retook Tyre, only to see their victorious general, Munīr al-Dawlah al-Juyūshī, rebel against their rule and claim the port for himself. Subsequently, three different rebel factions ruled Tyre in turn over a period of eight years (1089–97).²³ Letters from the Geniza suggest that residen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Abbreviations
• Articles
• Reviews
• Guidelines for the Submission of Papers
• Membership Information