Fall of Edessa

The County of Edessa, founded in 1098 by Baldwin of Boulogne during the First Crusade, was the first, the northernmost and the weakest of the crusader states: half of it, including the capital, lay east of the Euphrates, far from the sea, among Muslim neighbours. In 1143 the Byzantine emperor John II Komnenos and King Fulk of Jerusalem both died, and Count Joscelin II, at odds with the rulers of Antioch and Tripoli, was left without powerful allies. In the autumn of 1144 he marched out with almost his entire army to help the Artuqid Kara Arslan of Diyarbakır against Aleppo. Zengi, atabeg of Mosul and Aleppo, hurried north and on 28 November laid siege to the almost undefended city.

The defence was led by three churchmen — the Latin archbishop Hugh, the Armenian bishop John and the Syriac (Jacobite) bishop Basil bar Shumna. Joscelin waited at Turbessel for help; Queen Melisende sent an army from Jerusalem, while Raymond of Poitiers, prince of Antioch, ignored the appeal. Zengi's sappers undermined the walls, and on 24 December a stretch of wall near the Gate of the Hours collapsed. His troops poured in; thousands were cut down or trampled to death in the panic as people fled towards the citadel, Archbishop Hugh among them. Zengi halted the massacre: the Latin prisoners were executed, but the native Christians were spared, and when the citadel surrendered on 26 December Bishop Basil was recognised as head of the Christian population.

The Muslim world hailed Zengi as a defender of the faith; the poet Ibn al-Qaysarani celebrated the victory, and later Muslim chroniclers saw in it the beginning of the holy war against the crusader states. Zengi himself was murdered by a slave in September 1146. Joscelin then retook the town, but not the citadel, and in November Zengi's son Nur ad-Din drove him out; the fleeing Armenians were massacred and the survivors enslaved. The Armenian poet Nerses Shnorhali, the future catholicos Nerses IV, mourned the city in his Lament on Edessa. News of the fall reached the West with an embassy from Antioch that included Bishop Hugh of Jabala; at the papal court in Viterbo he also told of a Christian king of the East, 'Prester John', who had defeated the Persians — an echo, as Robert Silverberg and others suggest, of the Qara Khitai victory over the Seljuks at Qatwan in 1141. On 1 December 1145 Pope Eugene III issued the bull Quantum praedecessores calling for the Second Crusade, but the armies of Louis VII and Conrad III never even tried to recover Edessa, and the rest of the county was lost by 1150.