The History of the Renaissance World (19 page)

But Ghana had barely entered written history before the kingdom fell on hard times. Almoravid troops invaded in 1076, hoping to seize control of the lucrative western trade route, and occupied the capital of Kumbi-Saleh; Ghana’s king, driven out, lost control first of the edges of his empire and then of its heartland. The Soninke began to migrate outwards from the enemy-controlled center, and Soninke nobles established their own small kingdoms in Ghana’s outer reaches.

One of these kingdoms was controlled by the Sosso clan of the Malinke tribe. Even before the fall of Kumbi-Saleh, the Sosso had resisted both Islam and royal control. Almoravid intervention allowed them to claim independence, and then to whip the surrounding clans into obedience. By 1180, the Sosso clan leader Diara Kante commanded enough troops to invade Kumbi-Saleh itself and drive the Almoravids out. In 1200, Diara Kante was succeeded by his son Sumanguru Kante, who took up both his crown and his sword.
¹⁵

In the next century, Sumanguru would prove to be a fierce opponent both of the slave trade and of Islam, foreshadowing, in his fears, the coming threats to Africa’s own ways.

*
Medieval African history is complicated by the multiple identities that any one African could claim. For the purposes of this narrative, I will use “people” to refer to a linguistic group (the Zaghawa people all spoke the same Saharan language; this is sometimes called “ethnicity” and sometimes “tribal identity”); “tribe” for a group united, however loosely, by blood relationships; “clan” for an individual family group; and “kingdom” for a political unit. A citizen of the Kanem kingdom might belong to either the Zaghawa or the Sao linguistic group, as well as having a separate tribal and clan identity. In African history, the term “tribe” is particularly difficult to define; it is used by different scholars to indicate blood relationship, political unity, linguistic unity, etc. In this history, it will always imply blood ties.

*
Benin’s early history is impossible to date with precision. Most reconstructions are based solely on the work of the Benin historian Jacob Egharevba, who collected the oral traditions and put them down in writing in the twentieth century—long, long after the fact. Stefan Eisenhofer provides a useful overview and discussion in “The Benin Kinglist/s: Some Questions of Chronology,”
History of Africa
24 (1997): 139–156.

Chapter Fifteen

The Last Fatimid Caliph

Between 1149 and 1171,
Nur ad-Din captures Egypt,
but Saladin rules it

T
HE HOLY WAR
was failing, but the
jihad
was gathering strength.

With most of Antioch’s territory in his hands, and the Crusaders out of his way, Nur ad-Din rode onwards to the coast and bathed himself in the Mediterranean. It was a symbolic baptism, first carried out by the Assyrian conqueror Sargon centuries before, meant to show that his dominance—now, the dominance of Islam—covered the entire land of Syria, all the way to the sea.
¹

In fact, he didn’t control all of Syria; the city of Antioch itself was still free of his control, as were both Damascus and Jerusalem. But Nur ad-Din was now, in the eyes of his coreligionists, the flowering of his father’s goal: the head of the
jihad
, the hope for the future of Islam’s unity, the narrow wedge that would bring the Prophet’s hope to the world. He was Champion of the Faith, his followers boasted: the Pillar of Islam, the Vanquisher of the Rebels.
²

15.1 The Conquests of Nur ad-Din

A few Muslims disagreed; Damascus remained aloof until 1154, when Nur ad-Din’s father-in-law was five years dead. Nur ad-Din’s brother-in-law was unable to hold the city against him. Finally annexing Damascus, Nur ad-Din held all of the land across the coast; his domain stretched from Edessa to the south of Syria.
*

But the Kingdom of Jerusalem resisted.

The weak child who had succeeded Fulk of Anjou was now twenty-four: Baldwin III of Jerusalem, Matilda’s half brother, clung to his place in the land where he had been born. His French father was long dead, his mother herself a foreigner by blood but a native by birth. He was defending the only world he had ever known; Nur ad-Din was trying to find a better one.

A series of misfortunes kept Nur ad-Din from throwing all of his strength against Jerusalem. The contemporary historian Ibn al-Qalanisi tells us that “continuous earthquakes and shocks” troubled Syria, destroying castles, citadels, and dwellings; Nur ad-Din, now transformed from a warrior to the ruler of a state, was obliged to put most of his energies into rebuilding and providing “solace to those . . . who had escaped with their lives.”
³
And then, in 1157, Nur ad-Din suddenly became ill. He was so sick that he divided his kingdom between his brothers and prepared to die.

Baldwin III took advantage of the lull to negotiate an alliance with the Byzantine emperor, Manuel I Comnenus; he sealed the alliance by marrying Manuel’s thirteen-year-old niece. Meanwhile, Nur ad-Din unexpectedly recovered, but remained weak. Uncertain of his future, he suspended hostilities to perform the sacred pilgrimage to Mecca; and, rather than face the combined armies of Jerusalem and Constantinople, he decided to negotiate a truce of his own with Manuel.

But despite his weakness, he outlived Baldwin III. Late in 1162, Baldwin too was struck with sudden illness. William of Tyre is certain that he was poisoned by a court enemy; whatever the cause, he was “seized with a fever and dysentery” and lingered for several months, fading in strength.
⁴
He died in February of 1163, childless, and his younger brother Amalric became king of Jerusalem.

Nur ad-Din declined to use the occasion to his advantage. “When it was suggested to Nur ad-Din,” writes William of Tyre, “that while we were occupied with the funeral ceremonies he might invade and lay waste the land of his enemies, he is said to have responded, ‘We should sympathize with their grief and in pity spare them.’ ” Nur ad-Din’s illness had changed him; the ruthlessness that had terrified his own men had faded.

Amalric I, now king of Jerusalem at the age of twenty-seven, immediately took steps to increase his own power. The alliance with Manuel I of Constantinople guaranteed him support to the north. To the east, Nur ad-Din was too strong for attack. The Mediterranean lay on the west. The only direction in which he could expand was south; and so he fixed his eyes on Egypt.

Crusaders had contemplated the conquest of Egypt for years; in fact, Baldwin III himself had made an expedition down to al-Arish, on the eastern edge of the Fatimid domain, and had returned to Jerusalem only when the Fatimids offered to pay him a yearly tribute. Amalric, claiming that the Fatimids had failed to pay up, assembled an attack force that would proceed south both by land and by sea. To bolster his navy, he recruited ten war galleys from the Pisans. In exchange, he gave Pisan merchants an outpost in Jerusalem: land of their own just above the harbor of Tyre.
⁶

In the face of the coming assault, the Fatimids sent north to Nur ad-Din, asking for reinforcements.

This began a merry-go-round of alliances that brought to mind the elastic allegiances that had followed the First Crusade. Nur ad-Din, not anxious to get involved in a long war in North Africa but unwilling to see Egypt go to his enemy, sent troops to support the Fatimid vizier Shawar (the vizier, not the teenaged caliph, held the real power in the Fatimid government). Amalric’s invasion was driven back; and Egypt remained Fatimid.
*

But the Fatimid vizier Shawar soon found that he had invited serpents into his garden. The captain of Nur ad-Din’s Turkish troops was a lifelong Kurdish officer named Shirkuh; he had served under Nur ad-Din’s father Zengi as well, and now he saw the chance to better himself. “By his deeds and possibly by his words,” William of Tyre writes, “he showed that he intended, if fortune favored him, to bring . . . that kingdom under his own power.”
⁷

Realizing that Shirkuh’s ambitions were a greater threat than the Crusader armies, Shawar reversed himself and sent an embassy to Amalric I, offering alliance and tribute payments if the Jerusalem armies would return to Egypt and help him fight against the Turks. Amalric, who had just returned to Jerusalem, about-faced with even greater alacrity and headed back down to Egypt; and together, the Muslim Fatimids and the Christians of Jerusalem drove Shirkuh out.

The victory gave Jerusalem control over a spit of land reaching down to the point of the Red Sea. But Shirkuh, returning to Nur ad-Din’s side, did not give up hope. “After his return from Egypt he continued to talk about the project of invading it,” says the
Chronicle of Ibn al-Athir
. “He was extremely eager to do this.” In late 1166, nearly three years after leaving Egypt, Shirkuh returned, with Nur ad-Din’s reluctant blessing, a full complement of Turkish troops, and his nephew Saladin to serve as his second-in-command.
⁸

Amalric and Shawar met Shirkuh in the Nile valley in March of 1167 and were defeated. Shirkuh took Alexandria and put Saladin in control of it; the Franks and Fatimids besieged the city, but Saladin held it. Finally, a joint embassy of Crusaders and Muslims proposed a cease-fire. They handed over a fair amount of cash, and in exchange, the Turkish invasion halted at Alexandria—for a time.

Amalric went back to Jerusalem, where he once again juggled his alliances. His experiences in Egypt had made it clear that he would never take Egypt without substantial help; and so he proposed to Manuel I that the armies of Jerusalem and Byzantium join together, march on Egypt, and drive out both Fatimids and Turks.
*

The joint invasion, like Amalric’s first two, was a disaster; and yet more fault lines appeared in the Muslim and Christian coalitions. The Byzantine-Crusader forces captured the eastern Egyptian city of Tanis in late 1168, but massive Turkish reinforcements arrived from Nur ad-Din, and the Fatimid leadership was divided. Part of the army supported Shawar in his fight against the Christians while others joined with the Christians to fight against the Turks.
⁹
The combined Christian army was forced to retreat.

Now Shawar had two problems to deal with: the inevitable return of the Christian army, and all the Turks who were occupying Egypt. He was popular with no one. His initial alliance with Jerusalem had angered many of the Egyptians, particularly those in Cairo, and his resistance to Shirkuh—now camped just outside of Fustat, on the outskirts of Cairo—had turned him into Nur ad-Din’s enemy. He contemplated inviting Shirkuh and his officers to a banquet, arresting them, and then recruiting their troops for himself, but his son threatened to tell Shirkuh of the plan unless he abandoned it: “That we should be killed as Muslims when the land is held by Islam,” he said, according to Ibn al-Athir, “is better than that we should be killed after the Franks have taken it; for it would only take their hearing that Shirkuh had been arrested to see the Franks’ return.”
¹⁰

So Shawar held his peace. On January 18, 1169, he rode to Shirkuh’s camp to discuss the future. On the way, he was met by Saladin and a small party of soldiers, who detoured him to the grave of the great ninth-century lawmaker Imam al-Shafi’i and murdered him.
¹¹