Ammarid Emirate of Tripoli

The judges take the city

Drafted from Wilson, Medieval Syria and the Onset of the Crusades: The Political World of Bilad al-Sham 1050-1128 (2023)formation

In the middle of the eleventh century the Fatimid state came apart. A famine and a currency collapse in Egypt under al-Mustansir, a Turkish and Berber soldiery fighting each other in Cairo, and a general withdrawal of Fatimid authority from Syria left the coastal cities to whoever was standing in them.

In Tripoli that was the qadi. The Banu Ammar were the city's judges, appointed under Fatimid authority to a Shi'i city they belonged to, and around 1070 they stopped remitting the revenue and began governing on their own account. There was no rising, no declaration and no battle. The office simply expanded until it was the state.

It is worth setting beside the other secessions of the period, because it does not look like any of them. The Tulunids and the Ikhshidids were military governors who kept their armies and stopped sending money. The Samanids were appointed governors who inherited an empire. The Banu Ammar were civilians — lawyers holding a religious office — and they went on naming the Fatimid caliph in the Friday prayer for decades after they had stopped obeying him, because the authority they had was the authority he had given them.

What they had instead of a tribe was money. Tripoli was the wealthiest port on that coast: sugar and silk from the plain behind it, and the customs of a first-rank Mediterranean harbour. So they hired their soldiers, which is what a state with a revenue and no manpower does. It worked for forty years and then it was the thing that killed them, because a bought army cannot be paid by a city that has lost its countryside.

The House of Knowledge

Drafted from Wilson, Medieval Syria and the Onset of the Crusades: The Political World of Bilad al-Sham 1050-1128 (2023)peak

The thing the Banu Ammar are remembered for is a library.

The Dar al-Ilm at Tripoli was founded by the family in the later eleventh century on the Fatimid model: an endowed institution with copyists on the payroll, open to scholars, collecting across the disciplines rather than only in law and hadith. A dynasty of judges spent its surplus on the one kind of institution judges understand, and it worked — the city became a place scholars in the eastern Mediterranean had reason to travel to.

The numbers nobody can use

Every later account gives a figure for the number of volumes, and the figures are enormous and wildly inconsistent with one another.

They are not competing measurements. They are a literary convention about destroyed libraries, of the kind that also attaches to Alexandria and to Cordoba, and the sensible thing is to notice that the tradition insists the collection was vast and to decline to say how vast. Picking one of the numbers, or splitting the difference, would produce a fact that nobody ever recorded.

How it ended, on three accounts

What is not in doubt is that the library existed, that it was among the notable collections of the Islamic Mediterranean, and that it did not survive 1109.

How it was lost is contested in the medieval sources and remains so. One line of report has the Franks burning it deliberately after the city fell. Another has it destroyed in the general sack, which was thorough. A third has it already broken up and dispersed during the seven years of blockade, when a besieged city was selling whatever could be sold.

The three accounts are not reconcilable and the question is probably not answerable. What they agree on is the date.

What a family of lawyers left

The Banu Ammar founded no religion, adapted no script, and no later state claimed to continue them. By the ordinary measures of influence they registered nothing at all.

They also endowed the most important research collection on that coast, in a city they had taken over by simply continuing to do their jobs after the government above them stopped functioning, and it was the most consequential thing they did. It is worth being clear that these two statements are about the same people, and that the second is the one a reader should keep.

The letters that did not work

Drafted from al-Qalanisi, The Damascus Chronicle of the Crusades (1932)contraction

Tripoli was besieged for seven years. Its lord spent most of that time writing to other Muslim rulers asking for an army, and Ibn al-Qalanisi — who was in Damascus, receiving some of those letters at second hand — records what came of it.

The sally that worked

It did not begin badly. In September 1104 Fakhr al-Mulk ibn Ammar went out of the city with his own askar and the town levies and attacked the castle Saint-Gilles had built facing Tripoli to blockade it.

The garrison was taken by surprise and killed. The place was plundered, set on fire and reduced to ruins, and Fakhr al-Mulk came back the same day with a great quantity of weapons, money, rich stuffs and silver.

A besieged city had destroyed its besiegers' fortress and looted it. On the strength of that alone Tripoli could reasonably expect to hold — if anyone came.

The letters

Nobody came, and the chronicle's account of why is a study in how a frontier gets abandoned by people who all sincerely mean to help.

Letters and envoys arrived constantly at Damascus from Fakhr al-Mulk, asking for aid against the Franks besieging his city, urging that every available soldier be sent to relieve his distress. The atabeg Zahir al-Din was seized by an illness at exactly that moment, grew worse, and became consumed with worry about what would happen to his own family, his men and his subjects if he died.

There were two amirs, Sukman ibn Ortuq and Jikirmish of Mosul, who had made a formal compact with each other to prosecute the holy war and aid the Muslims. Fakhr al-Mulk's letters reached them too, urging them to hurry. Zahir al-Din, meanwhile, was inviting Sukman to Damascus for a different reason — to nominate him as successor and hand him the defence of the city.

Everyone was corresponding. Everyone had prior business. The compact to fight the Franks existed, in writing, between men who were at that moment arranging the succession of a third city three hundred kilometres inland.

Going in person

By the spring of 1108 the situation had become critical — the siege, its length, the long watch for reinforcements, and what the chronicle calls the continued procrastination in sending assistance.

So Fakhr al-Mulk left. He went to Baghdad himself, to put the case to the caliph and the sultan in person.

He was received. Magnificent robes were bestowed on him by the caliph and by the sultan both. Then he came back to Damascus in early August 1108, stayed a few days, and set out with a troop of Damascene cavalry attached to his own — not to Tripoli, but to the port of Jabala, which gave him its allegiance.

He had gone to the centre of the Islamic world to ask for an army and had been given clothes.

What happened at home

While he was away, the people of Tripoli sent to al-Afdal in Egypt and asked the Fatimids for a governor — with ships, grain and provisions.

The governor came. Sharaf al-Dawla arrived by sea with the grain, established himself in the town, and then arrested every partisan and officer Fakhr al-Mulk had left behind. Their stores, his equipage and his furniture were put on ships and sent to Egypt.

The city did not fall to the Franks that year. It changed sides, to a different Muslim power, because that power sent food and the others sent letters.

Fakhr al-Mulk ibn Ammar was still alive, still lord of somewhere — Jabala, for a while — and no longer lord of Tripoli, which he had left in order to save it.

Seven years and a journey

Drafted from Barber, The Crusader States (2012)end

Raymond of Saint-Gilles arrived in 1102 and did not try to storm Tripoli. He built a castle on the hill above it — Mount Pilgrim, which Arabic writers call Qal'at Sanjil after him and which is still standing over the modern city — and occupied the plain. The city kept its walls, its harbour and its fleet, and lost everything that made those worth having. It was a blockade conducted at the pace of a lease.

Raymond died in 1105 with the siege unfinished. It went on.

By 1108 the last Ammarid had a city that could not feed itself and a bought army he could no longer pay, and the appeals for relief had produced ceremonial robes and no soldiers. Tripoli passed to a Fatimid governor who arrived by sea with grain while its own lord was away looking for help.

The Fatimids held it for a year. In July 1109 a Genoese fleet and Baldwin I of Jerusalem finished it.

What replaced the emirate was the County of Tripoli, and that is the sentence worth slowing down on. The Crusader states are usually written about as arrivals. They were also replacements, and the things they replaced were working states with judges, libraries, harbour dues and a foreign policy.

Fakhr al-Mulk never got back. He was given Jabala on the coast for a time, lost it, and ended his life in the Seljuk east as a pensioner of the sultan he had gone to ask for help.

Eight days

Drafted from al-Qalanisi, The Damascus Chronicle of the Crusades (1932)afterlife

Ibn al-Qalanisi was writing in Damascus while this was happening, and his account of the last two years of Tripoli is a record of help that was real, was promised, was dispatched, and arrived at the wrong place or the wrong time.

By 1108 the situation in the city was, in his words, critical: the siege had gone on too long, the watch for reinforcements had gone on too long, and the sending of assistance had been continually put off. Fakhr al-Mulk's own correspondence had already failed to move Damascus, so he went to Baghdad himself and put the case to the sultan directly.

The relief that went to Mosul instead

He was received with honour, and the sultan agreed to the request in full: a number of the great amirs were ordered to go back with him and relieve the city.

The instruction that decided the whole thing came inside the same order. The army detailed to go with him was to make a brief halt on the way, at Mosul, and take the city out of the hands of the amir holding it.

Nobody came to Tripoli. Fakhr al-Mulk was kept at the sultan's court until he lost patience, and at the end of August he went to Damascus instead. He had been away four months and the relief he had been granted had been folded into somebody else's quarrel over Mosul.

The fleet

While he was away a Fatimid governor arrived by sea and took over the defence. Egypt then did what Egypt was capable of doing when it chose to.

The fleet it sent was, Qalanisi says, the largest the Egyptians had ever dispatched, in numbers of men, of vessels, of equipment and of provisions: enough food, men and money to hold Tripoli for a year, and to reinforce the other coastal towns as well.

It reached Tyre on the eighth day after Tripoli fell.

The ships stayed on the coast a while and distributed the supplies among the other ports. The people of Tyre, Sidon and Beirut begged the fleet to remain, explaining their condition and their inability to fight the Franks on their own, and it could not stay; when the wind was right it sailed for Egypt.

What was left to be

Tripoli fell in July 1109 after seven years of blockade. Within the year the Franks had moved on to the next place and were negotiating with Damascus over who got what share of the Biqa' harvest.

Fakhr al-Mulk never came back. He was given Jabala on the coast for a time, lost that too, and ended as a pensioner in the Seljuk east, of the court he had travelled a thousand kilometres to ask for an army.

The judges of Tripoli had governed for thirty-nine years on money, diplomacy and the prestige of an office, without a tribe or an army of their own. All three worked until the moment when what was needed was soldiers standing in a particular place on a particular day, and then the whole structure came down in the space of eight days' sailing.