Muslim Fortresses in the Levant: Between Crusaders and Mongols (11 page)

This statement will be examined in the following pages, as it does not quite fit the results of the research conducted on the four selected Ayyubid fortresses in this particular region.

The advances in siege warfare, both in sapping techniques and in the construction of heavy siege machines,
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achieved by the Muslims since the early decades of the twelfth century, gave their armies a lead that thereafter the Franks never managed to match throughout their stay in the Levant.
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Their successes in siege warfare during the first Crusade belonged to the past. During the late 1160s the ability of the Frankish armies to carry out successful full-scale sieges was rather doubtful.

The five sieges initiated by the Franks in the 1160s during their invasions of Egypt (Bilbeis in 1164 and 1168, Alexandria in 1167,
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Cairo in 1168
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and Damietta in 1169
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) illustrate the beginning of this decline. With the exception of the second siege of Bilbeis that lasted a day, the siege of Alexandria lasted almost four months while that of Cairo stretched over two months. In both cases the Crusader army capitulated and retreated. Marshall devotes a lengthy discussion to the siege methods used by the Franks since the late twelfth century. His summary and conclusions show the relatively few sieges initiated by the Franks and their relatively few successes. The length of the siege is an important factor: whereas the Frankish sieges tended to last weeks, often months, and in a few cases well over a year; Ayyubid and later Mamluk sieges were short and tended to last a few weeks
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and sometimes only days. The difference in length was due mainly to the Franks’ endemic shortage of manpower.
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This was pat of the reason, although even when the Christian forces outnumbered the Muslim, as was the case in the sieges of Alexandria (1167) and Mount Tabor (1217), their superior numbers did not give them the expected advantages.

At Mount Tabor the siege ended after seventeen days, when the Christian army decided to retreat and return to Acre under cover of night.
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A year later the Franks laid siege to Damietta (1218–19). They eventually took the city, but the siege lasted
18 months (
616/May 1218–November 1219) and ended only after the garrison and population ran out of food.
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In 1250 the Muslim garrison at
and the Ayyubid armies camped outside the town walls witnessed one of the largest Christian armies ever put in the field, and yet the Crusaders could not organize logistics or control, and use their forces in a way that would lead to victory.
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The size of the fortress and the strength of its garrison did not make much difference. The Christian forces could not manage to take even relatively small fortresses such as
(1177–8), or, almost a hundred years later, Qāqūn (1271) which was attacked by Prince Edward, later King Edward I of England.

It appears that at the same time that the Franks reached their most formidable achievements in military architecture, during the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries,
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their armies slowly began to decline in the field of siege warfare. This gradual change had a strong and long-term impact on the design and development of the Ayyubid fortresses as well as on later fortresses that were conquered and rebuilt by the Mamluks.

A different way of looking at these gradual developments and shifts in military capabilities is to examine the evolutionary theories developed in order to explain the arms race between and within species. Most arms races are asymmetric, in contrast to a symmetrical race in which both sides constantly improve. In any arms race, whenever one side produces a new adaptation it may enjoy a period of grace before the other side comes up with a suitable reply.
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But adaptations are costly, as they often come at the expense of certain capabilities in other fields.
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This may partly explain the Frankish loss of capabilities in the field of siege warfare while they were concentrating on improving their military architecture.

Arms races may end in three different ways: (1) they may simply continue; (2) both sides can reach an equilibrium; (3) one side may be driven to extinction.
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The third possibility fits that of our historical scene.

Returning to the matter at hand, it has often been suggested that fortresses in the Levant developed in a linear way, always advancing and improving. But if we maintain that military architecture is an ongoing dialogue between two or more opponents, then the decline of the military capabilities of one side will bring about an almost immediate change in the architectural development of all sides involved in the dialogue. And so while the Franks were determined to invest a great deal of thought, time and funds in improving their fortifications throughout the Levant during the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the Ayyubid rulers who built strongholds in regions that came into conflict with the Franks planned them with regard to the decline in siege warfare capabilities among the Franks.

Enemies of the Ayyubid sultanate and potential besiegers

Throughout most of the Ayyubid period the wellbeing of the Sultanate was mainly threatened by the Franks and by feuds among members of the Ayyubid house. The Frankish armies belonging to the king, the high-ranking nobility and the Military Orders were reinforced only when a new Crusade successfully completed the journey to the Latin kingdom and on the few occasions when independent European rulers
responded to the frequent requests for military aid and sent soldiers to join the Frankish army on a permanent basis.
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Other than the Franks, internal feuds that at times developed into what could be described as full scale wars among various factions and members of the Ayyubid family plagued the Sultanate soon after
death (589/1193). The founding of
is a good example of a fortress built as a result of such internal family disputes. On a few rare occasions members of the Ayyubid family joined forces with the Franks against their own kin; such an alliance was formed between the German emperor Frederick II and al-Malik al-Kāmil, the Sultan of Egypt (d. 635/1237). It was this alliance that probably brought about the construction of
.
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Bedouin tribes that harassed and threatened local governors and the sedentary population were at times a problem serious enough to justify the construction of a fortress accommodating a large well-equipped garrison able to maintain law and order in the region. It is more than likely that the local tribe of the
was the main reason for the building of
, and not the Frankish strongholds in southern Jordan as suggested by Johns.
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Ibn
describes the tribal feuds of the
that had become a threat to the safety of the region and the local governors.
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According to al-Qalqashandī they simply ignored the local Ayyubid governors. It was only after the fortress was built that the tribe began to acknowledge Ayyubid rule.
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In order to prevent the
from interfering with the construction, the amir
, who supervised the building, convinced the tribe that the fortress would protect them from the Franks.
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