Chapter 2 - Alliances and Treaties between Christians and Muslims

Summary

In October 1244, an enormous army assembled outside Damascus, the largest urban area in southern Syria. This force was composed of troops from both that Muslim city and from the Frankish Kingdom of Jerusalem, whose capital at the time was the coastal city of Acre. An eyewitness, the local Muslim preacher and writer Sibt Ibn al-Jawzi, provides the following description of what happened to members of the Muslim army:

Crosses were above their heads and priests with the battalions were making the sign of the cross over the Muslims and offering them the sacrament. In their hand were chalices and drinking vessels from which they gave them to drink….. As for the [Muslim] lord of Homs….he began to weep, saying “I knew when we departed under the crosses of the Franks that we would not prosper.”

This combined Franco-Muslim army was the product of an alliance between the Ayyubids of Damascus and the Franks of Jerusalem in the face of a double threat to both of them: the Ayyubids of Egypt and the Khwarazmians, a group of nomads from the east who had fled westward in the face of the Mongol onslaught. The culmination of this episode was the battle of La Forbie (known in Arabic as Harbiyya), in which the Franco-Muslim alliance was crushed by the allied Egyptians and Khwarazmians.

Sibt Ibn al-Jawzi's words suggest the indignation that he felt at seeing the troops of his own city battle other Muslims alongside the detested, infidel, enemy Franks. Yet, as he would have known well as a historian, such a situation was hardly unprecedented, for Muslims and Franks had been forging strategic alliances with and fighting alongside each other ever since the arrival of the latter in the eastern Mediterranean in the late eleventh century. Indeed, such an alliance had been suggested by a group of Muslims as early as the siege of Antioch, during the First Crusade. In this case, according to the eyewitness Latin chronicler Raymond of Aguilers, an embassy from the Fatimid rulers of Egypt travelled to northern Syria and proposed to the Franks an alliance against the Turks, who had conquered the majority of formerly Fatimid lands in Syria in the second half of the eleventh century.