|
Islamic – Byzantine
The Zangids (Atabegs) of Aleppo
Nur al din
Mahmud ibn Zangi – 541-569 A.H. / 1146-1173 A.D.
Bronze Fals 24mm (4.20
grams)
Reference: Mitchiner (World of Islam), 1132
Two Byzantine
figures standing; traces of Greek inscription between them; Arabic around.
Jesus Christ standing facing; traces of Greek beside; Arabic around.
You are bidding on the exact item pictured, provided with a Certificate of
Authenticity and Lifetime Guarantee of Authenticity.
 Jesus
(7-2 BC to AD 30-33), also referred to as Jesus of Nazareth or Jesus Christ,
is the central figure of Christianity, whom the teachings of most Christian
denominations hold to be the Son of God. Christians believe Jesus is the
awaited Messiah (or Christ, the Anointed One) of the Old Testament.
Virtually all modern scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed
historically, and historians consider the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark
and Luke) to be the best sources for investigating the historical Jesus.
Most scholars agree that Jesus was a Galilean, Jewish rabbi who preached his
message orally, was baptized by John the Baptist, and was crucified by the
order of the Roman Prefect Pontius Pilate. In the current mainstream view,
Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher and the founder of a renewal movement
within Judaism, although some prominent scholars argue that he was not
apocalyptic. After Jesus’ death, his followers believed he was resurrected,
and the community they formed eventually became the Christian church. The
widely used calendar era, abbreviated as “AD” from the Latin “Anno Domini”
(“in the year of our Lord”) or sometimes as “CE”, is based on the birth of
Jesus.
 Christians
believe that Jesus has a “unique significance” in the world. Christian
doctrines include the beliefs that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
was born of a virgin named Mary, performed miracles, founded the Church,
died by crucifixion as a sacrifice to achieve atonement, rose from the dead,
and ascended into Heaven, whence he will return. Most Christians believe
Jesus enables humans to be reconciled to God, and will judge the dead either
before or after their bodily resurrection, an event tied to the Second
Coming of Jesus in Christian eschatology; though some believe Jesus’s role
as savior has more existential or societal concerns than the afterlife, and
a few notable theologians have suggested that Jesus will bring about a
universal reconciliation. The great majority of Christians worship Jesus as
the incarnation of God the Son, the second of three persons of a Divine
Trinity. A few Christian groups reject Trinitarianism, wholly or partly, as
non-scriptural.
In Islam, Jesus (commonly transliterated as Isa) is
considered one of God’s important prophets and the Messiah, second in
importance only to Muhammad. To Muslims, Jesus was a bringer of scripture
and was born of a virgin, but was not the Son of God. According to the
Quran, Jesus was not crucified but was physically raised into Heaven by God.
Judaism rejects the belief that Jesus was the awaited Messiah, arguing that
he did not fulfill the Messianic prophecies in the Tanakh.
he
Zengid or Zangid dynasty was a Muslim dynasty of Oghuz Turk
origin, which ruled parts of the Levant and Upper Mesopotamia on behalf of
the Seljuk Empire.
History
The dynasty was founded by Imad
ad-Din Zengi, who became the Seljuk Atabeg (governor) of Mosul in 1127. He
quickly became the chief Turkish potentate in Northern Syria and Iraq,
taking Aleppo from the squabbling Artuqids in 1128 and capturing the County
of Edessa from the Crusaders in 1144. This latter feat made Zengi a hero in
the Muslim world, but he was assassinated by a slave two years later, in
1146.
On Zengi’s death, his territories were divided, with Mosul and
his lands in Iraq going to his eldest son Saif ad-Din Ghazi I, and Aleppo
and Edessa falling to his second son, Nur ad-Din, atabeg of Aleppo. Nur
ad-Din proved to be as competent as his father. In 1149 he defeated Raymond
of Poitiers, Prince of Antioch, at the battle of Inab, and the next year
conquered the remnants of the County of Edessa west of the Euphrates. In
1154 he capped off these successes by his capture of Damascus from the Burid
dynasty that ruled it.
Now ruling from Damascus, Nur ad-Din’s success
continued. Another Prince of Antioch, Raynald of Châtillon was captured, and
the territories of the Principality of Antioch were greatly reduced. In the
1160s, Nur ad-Din’s attention was mostly held by a competition with the King
of Jerusalem, Amalric of Jerusalem, for control of the Fatimid Caliphate.
Ultimately, Nur ed-Din’s Kurdish general Shirkuh was successful in
conquering Fatimid Egypt in 1169, but Shirkuh’s nephew and successor as
Governor of Egypt, Saladin, eventually rejected Nur ad-Din’s control.
Nur ad-Din was preparing to invade Egypt to bring Saladin under control when
he unexpectedly died in 1174. His son and successor As-Salih Ismail al-Malik
was only a child, and was forced to flee to Aleppo, which he ruled until
1181, when he was murdered and replaced by his relation, the Atabeg of
Mosul. Saladin conquered Aleppo two years later, ending Zengid rule in
Syria.
Zengid princes continued to rule in Northern Iraq well into the
13th century, ruling Mosul until 1234; their rule did not come finally to an
end until 1250.
Nūr ad-Dīn Abū al-Qāsim Maḥmūd ibn ʿImād ad-Dīn
Zengī (February 1118 – 15 May 1174), often shortened to his laqab
Nur ad-Din (Arabic: نور الدين, “Light of the Faith”), was a member of
the Turkish Zengid dynasty which ruled the Syrian province of the Seljuk
Empire. He reigned from 1146 to 1174.
The war against the Crusaders
Nur ad-Din was the second son of Imad ad-Din Zengi, the Turkic atabeg
of Aleppo and Mosul, who was a devoted enemy of the crusader presence in
Syria. After the assassination of his father in 1146, Nur ad-Din and his
older brother Saif ad-Din Ghazi I divided the kingdom between themselves,
with Nur ad-Din governing Aleppo and Saif ad-Din Ghazi establishing himself
in Mosul. The border between the two new kingdoms was formed by the Nahr
al-Khabur River. Almost as soon as he began his rule, Nur ad-Din attacked
the Principality of Antioch, seizing several castles in the north of Syria,
while at the same time he defeated an attempt by Joscelin II to recover the
County of Edessa, which had been conquered by Zengi in 1144. (See Siege of
Edessa.) In 1146, Nur ad-Din massacred the entire Christian population of
the city and destroyed its fortifications, in punishment for assisting
Joscelin in this attempt. Although according to Thomas Asbridge, the women
and children of Edessa were enslaved. He secured his hold on Antioch after
crushing Raymond of Poitiers at the Battle of Inab in 1149, even presenting
to the caliph, Raymond’s severed head and arms.
Nur ad-Din sought to
make alliances with his Muslim neighbours in northern Iraq and Syria in
order to strengthen the Muslim front against their crusader enemies. In 1147
he signed a bilateral treaty with Mu’in ad-Din Unur, governor of Damascus;
as part of this agreement, he also married Mu’in ad-Din’s daughter Ismat
ad-Din Khatun. Together Mu’in ad-Din and Nur ad-Din besieged the cities of
Bosra (see Battle of Bosra) and Salkhad, which had been captured by a
rebellious vassal of Mu’in ad-Din named Altuntash, but Mu’in ad-Din was
always suspicious of Nur ad-Din’s intentions and did not want to offend his
former crusader allies in Jerusalem, who had helped defend Damascus against
Zengi. To reassure Mu’in ad-Din, Nur ad-Din curtailed his stay in Damascus
and turned instead towards the Principality of Antioch, where he was able to
seize Artah, Kafar Latha, Basarfut, and Balat.
In 1148, the Second
Crusade arrived in Syria, led by Louis VII of France and Conrad III of
Germany. Nur ad-Din’s victories and the crusaders’ losses in Asia Minor
however had made the recovery of Edessa – their original goal – practically
impossible. Given that Aleppo was too far off from Jerusalem for an attack
and Damascus, recently allied with the Kingdom of Jerusalem against Zengi,
had entered into an alliance with Nur ad-Din, the crusaders decided to
attack Damascus, the conquest of which would preclude a combination of
Jerusalem’s enemies. Mu’in ad-Din reluctantly called for help from Nur
ad-Din, but the crusader siege collapsed after only four days.
Nur
ad-Din took advantage of the failure of the crusade to prepare another
attack against Antioch. In 1149, he launched an offensive against the
territories dominated by the castle of Harim, situated on the eastern bank
of the Orontes, after which he besieged the castle of Inab. The Prince of
Antioch, Raymond of Poitiers, quickly came to the aid of the besieged
citadel. The Muslim army destroyed the crusader army at the Battle of Inab,
during which Raymond was killed. Raymond’s head was sent to Nur ad-Din, who
sent it along to the caliph in Baghdad. Nur ad-Din marched all the way to
the coast and expressed his dominance of Syria by symbolically bathing in
the Mediterranean. He did not, however, attack Antioch itself; he was
content with capturing all Antiochene territory east of the Orontes and
leaving a rump state around the city, which in any case soon fell under the
suzerainty of the Byzantine Empire. In 1150, he defeated Joscelin II for a
final time, after allying with the Seljuk Sultan of Rüm, Mas’ud (whose
daughter he also married). Joscelin was blinded and died in his prison in
Aleppo in 1159. In the Battle of Aintab, Nur ad-Din tried but failed to
prevent King Baldwin III of Jerusalem’s evacuation of the Latin Christian
residents of Turbessel. In 1152 Nur ad-Din briefly captured Tortosa after
the assassination of Raymond II of Tripoli.
Unification of the
Sultanate
It was Nur ad-Din’s dream to unite the various Muslim
forces between the Euphrates and the Nile to make a common front against the
crusaders. In 1149 Saif ad-Din Ghazi died, and a younger brother, Qutb
ad-Din Mawdud, succeeded him. Qutb ad-Din recognized Nur ad-Din as overlord
of Mosul, so that the major cities of Mosul and Aleppo were united under one
man. Damascus was all that remained as an obstacle to the unification of
Syria.
After the failure of the Second Crusade, Mu’in ad-Din had
renewed his treaty with the crusaders, and after his death in 1149 his
successor Mujir ad-Din followed the same policy. In 1150 and 1151 Nur ad-Din
besieged the city, but retreated each time with no success, aside from empty
recognition of his suzerainty. When Ascalon was captured by the crusaders in
1153, Mujir ad-Din forbade Nur ad-Din from travelling across his territory.
Mujir ad-Din, however, was a weaker ruler than his predecessor, and he also
agreed to pay an annual tribute to the crusaders in exchange for their
protection. The growing weakness of Damascus under Mujir ad-Din allowed Nur
ad-Din to overthrow him in 1154, with help from the population of the city.
Damascus was annexed to Zengid territory, and all of Syria was unified under
the authority of Nur ad-Din, from Edessa in the north to the Hauran in the
south. He was cautious not to attack Jerusalem right away, and even
continued to send the yearly tribute established by Mujir ad-Din; meanwhile
he briefly became involved in affairs to the north of Mosul, where a
succession dispute in the Sultanate of Rum threatened Edessa and other
cities.
In 1157 Nur ad-Din besieged the Knights Hospitaller in the
crusader fortress of Banias, routed a relief army from Jerusalem led by King
Baldwin III, and captured Grand Master Bertrand de Blanquefort. However, he
fell ill that year and the crusaders were given a brief respite from his
attacks. In 1159 the Byzantine emperor Manuel I Comnenus arrived to assert
his authority in Antioch, and the crusaders hoped he would send an
expedition against Aleppo. However, Nur ad-Din sent ambassadors and
negotiated an alliance with the emperor against the Seljuks, much to the
crusaders’ dismay. Nur ad-Din, along with the Danishmends of eastern
Anatolia, attacked the Seljuk sultan Kilij Arslan II from the east the next
year, while Manuel attacked from the west. Later in 1160, Nur ad-Din
captured the Prince of Antioch, Raynald of Châtillon after a raid in the
Anti-Taurus mountains; Raynald remained in captivity for the next sixteen
years. By 1162, with Antioch under nominal Byzantine control and the
crusader states further south powerless to make any further attacks on
Syria, Nur ad-Din made a pilgrimage to Mecca. Soon after he returned, he
learned of the death of King Baldwin III of Jerusalem, and out of respect
for such a formidable opponent he refrained from attacking the crusader
kingdom: William of Tyre reports that Nur ad-Din said “We should sympathize
with their grief and in pity spare them, because they have lost a prince
such as the rest of the world does not possess today.”
The problem of
Egypt
Main article: Crusader invasion of Egypt
As there was now
nothing the crusaders could do in Syria, they were forced to look to the
south if they wanted to expand their territory. The capture of Ascalon had
already succeeded in cutting off Egypt from Syria, and Egypt had been
politically weakened by a series of very young Fatimid caliphs. By 1163, the
caliph was the young al-Adid, but the country was ruled by the vizier
Shawar. That year, Shawar was overthrown by Dirgham; soon afterwards, the
King of Jerusalem, Amalric I, led an offensive against Egypt, on the pretext
that the Fatimids were not paying the tribute they had promised to pay
during the reign of Baldwin III. This campaign failed and he was forced to
return to Jerusalem, but it provoked Nur ad-Din to lead a campaign of his
own against the crusaders in Syria in order to turn their attention away
from Egypt. His attack on Tripoli was unsuccessful, but he was soon visited
by the exiled Shawar, who begged him to send an army and restore him to the
vizierate. Nur ad-Din did not want to spare his own army for a defense of
Egypt, but his Kurdish general Shirkuh convinced him to invade in 1164. In
response, Dirgham allied with Amalric, but the king could not mobilize in
time to save him. Dirgham was killed during Shirkuh’s invasion and Shawar
was restored as vizier.
Shawar immediately expelled Shirkuh and allied
with Amalric, who arrived to besiege Shirkuh at Bilbeis. Shirkuh agreed to
abandon Egypt when Amalric was forced to return home, after Nur ad-Din
attacked Antioch and besieged the castle of Harenc. There, Nur ad-Din routed
the combined armies of Antioch and Tripoli, but refused to attack Antioch
itself, fearing reprisals from the Byzantines. Instead he besieged and
captured Banias, and for the next two years continually raided the frontiers
of the crusader states. In 1166 Shirkuh was sent again to Egypt. Amalric
followed him at the beginning of 1167, and a formal treaty was established
between Amalric and Shawar, with the nominal support of the caliph. The
crusaders occupied Alexandria and Cairo and made Egypt a tributary state,
but Amalric could not hold the country while Nur ad-Din still held Syria,
and he was forced to return to Jerusalem.
In 1168 Amalric sought an
alliance with Emperor Manuel and invaded Egypt once more. Shawar’s son
Khalil had had enough, and with support from Caliph al-Adil requested help
from Nur ad-Din and Shirkuh. At the beginning of 1169 Shirkuh arrived and
the crusaders once more were forced to retreat. This time Nur ad-Din gained
full control of Egypt. Shawar was executed and Shirkuh was named vizier of
the newly conquered territory, later succeeded by his nephew Saladin. One
last invasion of Egypt was launched by Amalric and Manuel, but it was
disorganized and came to nothing.
Domes of Nur al-Din Mahmud’s madrasa complex in Damascus (his burial place)
Death and succession
During this time Nur ad-Din was busy in the
north, fighting the Ortoqids, and in 1170 he had to settle a dispute between
his nephews when his brother Qutb ad-Din died. After conquering Egypt, Nur
ad-Din believed that he had accomplished his goal of uniting the Muslim
states, but Saladin did not wish to be subject to his authority. He did not
participate in the invasions led by Nur ad-Din against Jerusalem in 1171 and
1173, hoping that the crusader kingdom would act as a buffer state between
Egypt and Syria. Nur ad-Din realized that he had created a dangerous
opponent in Saladin, and the two rulers assembled their armies for what
seemed to be the inevitable war.
However, when Nur ad-Din was on the
verge of invading Egypt, he was seized by a fever due to complications from
a peritonsillar abscess. He died at the age of 59 on 15 May 1174 in the
Citadel of Damascus. He was initially buried there, before being reburied in
the Nur al-Din Madrasa. His young son As-Salih Ismail al-Malik became his
legitimate heir, and Saladin declared himself his vassal, although he really
planned to unify Syria and Egypt under his own rule. He married Nur ad-Din’s
widow, defeated the other claimants to the throne and took power in Syria in
1185, finally realizing Nur ad-Din’s dream.
Legacy
According
to William of Tyre, although Nur ad-Din was “a mighty persecutor of the
Christian name and faith,” he was also “a just prince, valiant and wise, and
according to the traditions of his race, a religious man.” Nur ad-Din was
especially religious after his illness and his pilgrimage. He considered the
crusaders foreigners in Muslim territory, who had come to Outremer to
plunder the land and profane its sacred places. Nevertheless, he tolerated
the Christians who lived under his authority, aside from the Armenians of
Edessa and regarded the Emperor Manuel with deep respect. In contrast to Nur
ad-Din’s respectful reaction to the death of Baldwin III, Amalric I
immediately besieged Banias upon learning of the emir’s death, and extorted
a vast amount of money from his widow.
Nur ad-Din also constructed
universities and mosques in all the cities he controlled. These universities
were principally concerned with teaching the Qur’an and Hadith. Nur ad-Din
himself enjoyed to have specialists read to him from the Hadith, and his
professors even awarded him a diploma in Hadith narration. He had free
hospitals constructed in his cities as well, and built caravanserais on the
roads for travellers and pilgrims. He held court several times a week so
that people could seek justice from him against his generals, governors, or
other employees who had committed some crime. In the Muslim world he remains
a legendary figure of military courage, piety, and modesty. Sir Steven
Runciman said that he loved, above all else, justice.
The Damascene
chronicler Ibn al-Qalanisi generally speaks of Nur ad-Din in majestic terms,
although he himself died in 1160, and unfortunately did not witness the
later events of Nur ad-Din’s reign.
|
