In July 1148, the largest crusading army assembled in a generation marched on Damascus.
Not Aleppo, the power base of the man who had actually provoked the crusade. Not Edessa, the fallen city the crusade had been called to avenge. Damascus — the one major Muslim power in Syria that had a standing alliance with the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem.
Four days later the army was in retreat, the alliance was dead, and the crusader states had handed their enemies the unification they feared most. It remains one of the strangest strategic decisions of the medieval world, and the sources have been arguing about it for almost nine hundred years.
How They Got There
The Second Crusade began with a shock. In December 1144, Zengi, the atabeg of Mosul and Aleppo, took the crusader city of Edessa — the first of the crusader states to be carved out, and the first to fall. Europe had spent fifty years assuming the conquests of the First Crusade were permanent. Suddenly they weren't.
Pope Eugenius III issued a crusading bull; Bernard of Clairvaux — the most famous churchman in Europe — preached the campaign into existence. Two kings took the cross: Conrad III of Germany and Louis VII of France, who brought his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, along with him.
Then the armies had to get to the Holy Land, and the getting nearly destroyed them. Conrad's army was shattered by the Turks in Anatolia before Louis even caught up. The French army was mauled crossing the Anatolian mountains, losing men, horses, and baggage in ambush after ambush. What arrived in the Levant in 1148 was a fraction of what had left Europe — two humiliated kings and the remnants of two armies, badly needing a victory to justify the whole enterprise.
The Decision
On June 24, 1148, the leaders met at Palmarea, near Acre, with the barons of Jerusalem — the High Court of the kingdom, plus two visiting kings, in the largest crusader war council of the century. Zengi was dead by then, murdered in 1146; his son Nur ad-Din held Aleppo. Edessa, half-destroyed, was no longer worth retaking.
The council chose Damascus.
There was a case for it. Damascus was rich, close, and the gateway to the interior; in Christian hands it would split Muslim Syria in two. But there was a better case against it: Damascus, under its ruler Unur, was the one Muslim power that feared Nur ad-Din as much as the Franks did — and had allied with Jerusalem against Zengi for exactly that reason. The newcomers from Europe saw an infidel city. The barons who actually lived in the Levant had spent years cultivating it as a buffer state.
The newcomers won the argument.
Four Days
The army reached Damascus on July 24 and attacked from the west, through the Ghouta — the vast belt of orchards, walled gardens, and irrigation channels that surrounded the city like a second rampart. The fighting in the orchards was vicious, lane by lane and wall by wall, but by the end of the first day the crusaders held the orchard belt and its water, and were camped within sight of the city.
Damascus was close to panic. Unur barricaded the streets, armed the citizens, and sent riders begging Nur ad-Din for help — the exact outcome the old alliance had existed to prevent.
Then, on July 27, the crusade made its second inexplicable decision. The army abandoned the orchards — the cover, the water, the ground it had bled for — and moved to the plain southeast of the city, which offered a weaker stretch of wall and no water at all. The new position was indefensible for a besieger: open ground, high summer, nothing to drink, and Muslim relief armies reported on the road from the north.
The sources disagree on why. Some blamed treachery — bribes paid to local barons to move the army, in one version with coins that turned out to be counterfeit. Some blamed a dispute over who would rule Damascus once it fell, which convinced the local barons the siege wasn't worth winning. Some blamed simple bad counsel. Whatever the cause, the position was hopeless within a day, and everyone knew it.
On July 28, four days after it began, the siege was abandoned. The greatest crusading army of its generation walked home under harassment, having accomplished nothing.
What It Cost
The failure at Damascus was worse than a defeat; it was a self-inflicted one, and everyone could see it. The recriminations started immediately — the Europeans accused the local barons of treason, the locals accused the newcomers of wrecking a working foreign policy, and chroniclers on both sides of the religious line recorded the bitterness.
The strategic bill came due within a few years. The Damascus alliance was unrecoverable — the city's leaders had learned that a Frankish army would march on them the moment it was convenient. In 1154, Nur ad-Din took Damascus without a serious fight, uniting Muslim Syria under one ruler for the first time in the crusading era. The encirclement of the crusader states had begun; Saladin, who would finish it, entered Damascus that year as a teenager in Nur ad-Din's service.
Thirty-nine years after the siege, in 1187, an army launched from that united Syria destroyed the Kingdom of Jerusalem's field forces at Hattin and took the holy city itself.
The View From Inside the Walls
One more thing about that first day in the orchards. Damascus's real defenses were never primarily its walls. They were water and complexity — the Barada river channeled into a thousand irrigation cuts, the orchard belt no invader could cross quickly, the cisterns and conduits that let the city drink under siege while the besiegers' wells ran dry. The crusade lost the moment it walked away from the water; the men who understood that were not the kings in the war council but the engineers who had spent generations building the system.
Which is where my Book 6 lives. The Split Pomegranate opens in the Damascus of these years, and its protagonist, Eschiva bint Yehiel, is one of those engineers — a Jewish builder of the city's hidden water, guarding something older than the war on either side of the walls. The siege is history. What was under the city is the fiction.