Edessa
The Lion of Tiberias
Despite the great victory, once again the inherent weaknesses of both sides emerged in the wake of battle. He managed to capture one more major objective, Saruj, in January 1145, but then had to return to Mosul because of trouble there. By 1146, instead of attacking Turbessel and truly destroying the County of Edessa, he was marching on Damascus, ever his real prize.
Thus, internal divisions, and goals that included fighting the Christians but also included other goals, made it impossible for the forces of Islam to confront the forces of the West in anything approaches coherence. Oh, the tactics made short-term sense, true enough. Damascus was the last great danger to Zengi's power, had been a constant thorn in his side, and was now allied with Jerusalem making it even more dangerous. He had an opportunity in 1146 and he seized it. But just as the Christians would have been much more formidable had Antioch and Edessa and Jerusalem all fought as one, so too would Islam have been more effective had Cairo and Damascus and Mosul managed to unite. In another thirty years, Saladin would be proof of this.
Meanwhile, Zengi was marching on Damascus. On 14 September, one more weakness within Islam was revealed. Zengi was murdered.
The story is yet another of those lurid stories that has so fascinated people for centuries. Zengi was besieging Qalat Jabar, a minor fortress on the way to Damascus, where a petty lord was defying him. While in his camp, he caught a Frankish eunuch drinking wine from the atabeg's glass. He quarrelled with the with the man and upbraided him. The eunuch waited for Zengi to fall asleep, then took a dagger and stabbed him to death.
As soon as it learned of the atabeg's death, the army dissolved. The great danger to Damascus, and to the Crusader states, vanished as if it had never existed, and Islam would have to wait for the usual in-fighting until a new leader emerged. And, for their part, the Christians utterly failed to take advantage of the situation.
Conan and the Crusades
The title of this page is taken from a short story by Robert E. Howard, the man who invented Conan the Barbarian. He was a pulp writer of the 1920s and 1930s, writing in many different genres. Among his many stories are a curious sequence that includes two drawn from the Crusades. One is about Baibars, and the other is about Zengi, and its title is The Lion of Tiberias. It's typical Howard. The history is about half invented (he makes the Frank and the eunuch two different men) and the prose is as purple as you'd wish, and no one would mistake this for great literature. I mention it only to make the point that these crusading stories are so deeply embedded in our culture. They may seem to be forgotten, then they catch the imagination of a writer or film maker and they emerge again.