Burid Emirate of Damascus

What an atabeg was

Drafted from El-Azhari, Islamkundliche Untersuchungen 211 (1997)formation

When the Great Seljuk empire divided Syria among princes of the house in the 1090s, each young prince was given an atabeg: a senior military officer, generally a Turkish mamluk who had been bought as a boy and freed, appointed to command his army and to run his principality until he was old enough to do it himself. The word means something like father-lord. The institution was designed to keep a fragmenting empire in the family.

It did the opposite everywhere it was tried. Duqaq, the Seljuk prince of Damascus, died in 1104, and his atabeg Toghtekin — a freedman of Duqaq's father Tutush — did not hand the city to the heir. He took it, married the prince's mother, and founded a dynasty named for his son Buri.

Twelfth-century Syria produced that move four times over — Toghtekin at Damascus in 1104, Zangi at Mosul in 1127, Nur al-Din's officers after him, and finally Saladin taking Damascus from Nur al-Din's own heirs in 1174. The Burids are the first of them, and they make the pattern legible: an institution built so that a slave commander would hold a state in trust for a boy discovered, immediately, that a slave commander holding a state has no reason to give it back. It is the same mechanism the Bahriyya used in 1250 and the Ghaznavids used in 962, running one level of the hierarchy down.

For the region's record the arrival matters for a second reason. Toghtekin's army was a purchased Turkish askar. The Arab and Kurdish emirates that had held Syria and the Jazira before him — Mirdasid, Uqaylid, Marwanid — raised their horsemen through kinship, and none of them survived the century. With the Burids the slave soldiers come back to the Syrian capitals, and every state that governs Damascus or Cairo afterwards raises its army the same way — down to Muhammad Ali's massacre of the Cairo beys in 1811.

Paying the Franks

Drafted from El-Azhari, Islamkundliche Untersuchungen 211 (1997)expansion

Damascus spent most of the Burid half-century in some arrangement with the kingdom of Jerusalem: truces, joint patrols of the Hawran, a shared revenue agreement over the farmland between them, and for long stretches an annual tribute paid by the Muslim city to the Christian one.

The modern reflex is to read this as collaboration and the medieval reflex was to say so loudly, mostly from Aleppo. The Burid case was strategic and is not hard to state: the threat to Damascus's independence was never really the kingdom of Jerusalem, which wanted the frontier quiet and the tribute paid. It was the Turkish power in the north — first the Seljuk sultans, then Zangi of Mosul and Aleppo, who spent the 1130s and 1140s trying to take Damascus and was publicly the champion of the jihad while doing it. A city that could not beat Zangi alone allied with the only other power that also did not want Zangi in Damascus.

It is worth being exact about what that tribute was. It was not a revenue and it was not a defeat; it was a subsidy paid by the richest city in Syria to the Frankish kingdom next door, to keep a Muslim conqueror out of it, by a government that went on preaching against the Franks the whole time.

We know the period well because of one man. Ibn al-Qalanisi was a Damascene notable who twice served as ra'is of the city and kept a chronicle from 1056 to 1160 — the only continuous contemporary Arabic account of the First and Second Crusades written by someone who was there, in the city, in office. Almost everything known about the Burids passes through him. They are legible because a bureaucrat kept notes.

The year the city decided

Drafted from El-Azhari, Islamkundliche Untersuchungen 211 (1997)expansion

Taj al-Muluk Buri's vizier, al-Mazdaghani, brought the Nizari Isma'ilis into Damascus. They were given a house in the city and, in 1129, the frontier fortress of Banyas — the standard Nizari transaction, a stronghold in exchange for service, which was how the sect acquired territory everywhere it had any.

Damascus did not accept it. Al-Mazdaghani was killed at the citadel, and the population, led by the ahdath — the armed militia of the city quarters — hunted the Nizaris through the streets and killed them in numbers the chronicles put in the thousands. The Nizari commander at Banyas, seeing what was coming, handed the fortress to the Franks and left.

Three things follow, and they are the reason this is a turning point rather than an atrocity in a list. The emirate lost a frontier castle to the kingdom of Jerusalem without a siege. Isma'ili influence in Damascus ended permanently, and the Syrian Nizaris withdrew to the Jabal Bahra, where their castles were for the next century and a half. And it was demonstrated, in public, that the deciding power in Damascus was the city itself: an emir's vizier had made a policy, and the militia and the notables had reversed it by force in an afternoon.

Buri did not forget who had won. The Nizaris did not forget either, and in 1131 they sent two men who stabbed him. He died of the wounds the following year.

Unur, and four days in July

Drafted from El-Azhari, Islamkundliche Untersuchungen 211 (1997)peak

Mu'in al-Din Unur was not a Burid. He was another Turkish mamluk, atabeg to the last Burid emirs, and from about 1138 he was the government — which is the same relation to the Burids that Toghtekin had had to the Seljuks, one turn of the same wheel later. The Burid emirate's greatest years were run by somebody who was not a Burid.

His policy was his predecessors' policy carried out with more skill: keep Damascus out of Zangid hands by staying on terms with Jerusalem, and out of Frankish hands by being worth more independent. He held it against Zangi, and when Zangi was murdered in 1146 he held it against Nur al-Din.

Then in July 1148 the Second Crusade arrived. Louis VII and Conrad III had brought two royal armies east, achieved nothing in Anatolia, and at a council at Acre chose their target: not Aleppo, whose ruler was the counter-crusade, but Damascus, whose ruler was their ally and tributary. They camped in the orchards west of the city, moved to the eastern side where there was no water, and left after four days.

It is one of the more complete failures in the period and its consequence was exact. Unur, besieged by the power he had been paying, called Nur al-Din for help — and got it, at the price of an understanding. The Damascus–Jerusalem alignment that had preserved the emirate for forty years could not survive the Franks having besieged it. Unur died the following year. The city held out six more, with a Zangid army in the north, a Zangid marriage in the family, and no one left to balance against.

Four days

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

The Second Crusade came for Damascus, and the chronicler who wrote the best account of it was inside the walls.

The armies had wintered badly, lost men to disease and hunger, and quarrelled over where to go. They settled on Damascus, and Ibn al-Qalanisi says they were so confident of taking it that they had already planned out how the city's estates and districts would be divided.

Unur, who governed Damascus, prepared in the way a man does who knows what the ground is worth. He fortified the approaches, put guards on the roads and passes, cut off the supply routes to the enemy's likely camps, filled in the wells and effaced the watering places.

Saturday

The crusaders came on with something like fifty thousand horse and foot, and enough baggage, camels and cattle to swell the column beyond counting. They made for the usual camping ground south of the city, found no water there because the water had been taken away, and moved to al-Mizza because it was near a supply.

The Damascenes came out to meet them on Saturday 24 July 1148 — the regular troops, the town militia, volunteers, and the ghazis, the irregulars who went wherever there was fighting against the Franks.

They lost. The crusaders had the numbers and the equipment, took control of the water, spread through the orchards and camped in them, and then pushed up to the town and held a section of it that Qalanisi says no army ancient or modern had ever succeeded in holding.

Two men are named for that day, and neither is a soldier. Yusuf al-Findalawi, the Maliki jurist, was killed by the water near al-Rabwa because he stood in front of the Franks and would not fall back, in obedience — the chronicler says — to what God commands in his book. The ascetic Abd al-Rahman al-Halhuli died the same way.

The Franks spent the night cutting down the orchards and building stockades out of them, and the city spent it, in Qalanisi's phrase, discouraged and straitened in spirit through fear of what it had seen.

Sunday to Wednesday

They came out again on Sunday morning and this time the Damascenes had the better of it. Unur fought all day and, according to a man who was in the city, never wearied of it and never took a rest from it.

Meanwhile the letters had gone out. Turkmen cavalry and footmen kept arriving from the outlying districts. On Monday large numbers of bowmen came in from the Biqa'. By Tuesday the Damascenes were attacking the camp itself, shooting the stockades to pieces and stoning them, and the crusaders would not come out at all; not a man showed himself except a few skirmishers.

By then the townsmen and the villagers had worked out that there was money in it. They lay in wait along the roads for Franks who thought they were safe, killed the ones they caught, and brought the heads in to claim the reward. A great many heads were brought in.

Reports reached the crusader camp that Muslim armies were converging on them. They took counsel, decided there was no way out of the net they had walked into, and retreated in disorder at dawn on Wednesday.

Four days.

What it settled

The largest army Europe sent to Syria in the twelfth century besieged the largest Muslim city in Syria for four days and went home, and its own chroniclers spent the next century blaming each other for it.

For Damascus it was the peak and the beginning of the end at once. Unur had held the city, and he had held it with militia, volunteers, villagers and archers from the valley, against the allies with whom his government had spent twenty years buying peace. The policy of paying Jerusalem to keep the Zangids out did not survive the sight of Jerusalem's king in the orchards.

An envoy with a thousand men

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

The last Burid could not fight Nur al-Din and could not work with him, and Ibn al-Qalanisi — who lived in Damascus through all of it and had been the city's chief magistrate — records both failures at close range.

The campaign that dissolved

In the spring of 1153 Mujir al-Din was obliged to take his entire askar north and join Nur al-Din so that the two of them might support one another in the holy war. He set out in April and joined forces; an agreement was reached between them and all the commanders, the provincial amirs and the Turkmens, who had come with vast forces.

Nur al-Din had just stormed the castle of Afis. The Franks and Armenians in it were killed, the troops took a great quantity of money and captives, and the combined army moved on the frontier castle of Banyas, encamping before it in May at a moment when — the chronicler notes precisely — it was empty of its defenders and the opportunity of seizing it was there.

Then this:

They numbered approximately ten thousand horse and foot, and retired from Banyas in disorder before a single Frank had struck a blow at them or any Frankish troops had come up with them.

They regrouped at al-A'waj, resolved to renew the siege and take the place, and then reverted from that decision without cause or reason, and parted company. Mujir al-Din went back to Damascus with all his men safe. Nur al-Din went to Homs.

Ibn al-Qalanisi does not explain it because he cannot. What he is describing is an alliance in which neither party trusted the other enough to be second into a breach — and which therefore could not take an undefended castle with ten thousand men.

The embassy

Ten months later the pretence stopped.

In the spring of 1154 Shirkuh arrived at the outskirts of Damascus as Nur al-Din's envoy, and camped in the Marj with about a thousand troops.

An envoy with a thousand men is a siege wearing a diplomatic hat, and Damascus read it exactly that way: the chronicle says the action was resented and caused a feeling of hostility. Mujir al-Din would not go out to receive him and refused to associate with him. Letters went back and forth as circumstances required and produced neither concord nor any satisfactory arrangement.

Meanwhile the grain convoys were interrupted and the price of food rose.

That is the whole method, and it did not require a battle. A city that must eat was cut off by a force too small to storm it and too large to ignore, sent under a diplomatic description that made resisting it an act of aggression.

The last argument

What Nur al-Din had that Mujir al-Din could not answer was not the army. It was the accusation.

The Burids had bought survival for thirty years by paying tribute to the kingdom of Jerusalem and occasionally fighting alongside it, which had been a rational policy and had kept Damascus independent. By the 1150s it had become the single thing that could be said against them from any pulpit in Syria, and Nur al-Din — who had Aleppo, the northern army and the standing of the holy war — said it continuously.

Mujir al-Din's answer, when the pressure came, was to pay the Franks again, because it was the only card he had. It confirmed the charge.

In April 1154 Nur al-Din brought his own army up beside Shirkuh's, camped east of the city and attacked day after day. Damascene troops and armed bands came out and fought him, and went back in, and came out again.

Then the gates opened, and the chronicler — a Damascene official who had served the Burids his whole career — records the entry of the man who ended them as a relief: to the joy of all the people, because of their sufferings from famine, the high cost of food, and the fear of being besieged by the Franks.

The gates opened from inside

Drafted from El-Azhari, Islamkundliche Untersuchungen 211 (1997)end

Mujir al-Din Abaq, the last Burid, tried to hold the position after Unur and had nothing to hold it with. Nur al-Din had Aleppo, the northern Syrian army, the reputation of the jihad and the argument — true, and repeated in Damascus by preachers he was paying — that the Burids were the tributaries of the Franks. Abaq responded by paying tribute to the Franks again, which was the only card he had and confirmed the charge.

In April 1154 Nur al-Din brought his army to the walls, and the city opened. The sources describe a blockade that had cut the grain, a population that had been argued into it for six years, and a garrison that did not fight. Abaq was given Homs and later exchanged it for an estate near Baghdad, and lived. Damascus and Aleppo were under one ruler for the first time since the tenth century.

That unification is what everything afterwards runs on. It is what made Nur al-Din the counter-crusade rather than one more claimant; it is what Saladin took from his heirs twenty years later; and it is why the man who eventually recovered Jerusalem inherited Egypt and Syria together rather than having to win them separately. What happens in Syria between 1154 and 1250 runs through a gate opening in Damascus.

It is not a conquest, and the distinction is worth keeping. The Burids were not defeated. They were argued out of a city over six years by a neighbour with a better claim to be doing the right thing, and their own subjects agreed with him.

A rope and an axe

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

Nur al-Din took Damascus on Sunday 25 April 1154, and the man who wrote down how it happened was a Damascene official who had twice been head of the city.

He does not describe a conquest. He describes a building nobody was defending.

The approach

In January Shirkuh had arrived outside the city as Nur al-Din's envoy with a thousand men and camped in the meadow. The Burid ruler would not go out to receive him and refused to meet him; letters passed and settled nothing. The grain convoys were interrupted and the price of food went up.

Nur al-Din himself came in April, camped east of the city and attacked day after day. On the Sunday he mustered everything and came on early. The Damascene troops went out as usual and were pushed back until they were up against the wall by the Kaisan Gate.

And there was nobody on the wall. Through what Qalanisi calls the bad management of the authorities, not one soul was up there, troops or townsmen, apart from a negligible handful of Turks on one tower whose resistance could be discounted.

The rope

A foot soldier walked up to the wall. On the wall was a Jewish woman, who let down a rope. He climbed it, got a footing unnoticed and was followed by others. Nur al-Din's men planted a standard on the wall and shouted ya Mansur.

At that point, Qalanisi writes, the troops and the citizens stopped resisting — because of the affection they had for Nur al-Din, and his justice and his good reputation.

A woodcutter ran to the East Gate with his axe and broke the bolts. The gate came open, Nur al-Din's army walked in and went through the main streets at speed, and not one man opposed them. Then the Thomas Gate was opened too. Nur al-Din came in with his household officers to the joy of all the people, troops and soldiers alike — because they had been hungry, because food had been dear, and because they were afraid of being besieged by the Franks.

The last Burid fled.

What that is a picture of

A dynasty of Turkish atabegs had governed Damascus for fifty years by holding the citadel, paying the kingdom of Jerusalem to stay away, and keeping the militia on side. In the end the militia let the other man in.

The two people who actually opened the city are the ones to keep. Neither is a soldier, neither is named, and one of them is a Jewish woman who let a rope down to a besieger. A city changed hands because the people in it had decided which government they preferred, and the wall of Damascus turned out to be exactly as strong as their opinion of the men behind it.

Nothing was destroyed and nobody was punished. The Burids had been out-argued rather than defeated, and their own subjects were the ones who settled it.