Aleppo by Burns Ross;

Author:Burns, Ross;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-12-10T16:00:00+00:00

Taking Antioch 1264–8

Figure 9.4 Mamluk Syria with major fortified positions

Access to fast intelligence soon showed its benefits when the king of Armenian Cilicia, Hethum, intruded on Aleppo’s territory with the support of Prince Bohemond of Antioch. It was a long time since Christians and Muslims had confronted each other in northern Syria but Hethum again felt emboldened, having made a cynical pact with the Rum Seljuks in Asia Minor. On this occasion, Baybars left it to his local amirs to handle the threat, which they soon despatched. Baybars set out for Aleppo three years later but a broken foot required him to return to Cairo. In 1268, he took up his Syrian plan again, initially to campaign against the Crusader County of Tripoli but then deciding to continue on to Antioch. It was payback time for the Prince of Antioch who had spurned all the tacit understandings between Aleppo and Cilicia to indulge in a pact with the Mongols.

In fact by now Antioch was barely a palimpsest of its former prestige – a small enclave city with virtually no contiguous territory and a falling population.12 Envoys from the city came out to negotiate terms for surrender but talks failed when they refused to consider an annual tribute (though they had been happy to pay one to the Mongols). The citizens of Antioch, however, proved to have no enthusiasm for a fight and the city fell to Baybars on the second day of siege (18 May 1268). Baybars sent his troops into the city and closed the gates after them. They were let loose to kill and loot at will. Baybars later wrote a gloating letter to Bohemond, absent in Tripoli, helpfully describing the scene which the Crusader prince had been unable to witness:

You would have seen your knights prostrate beneath the horses’ hooves, your houses stormed by pillagers and ransacked by looters, your wealth weighed by the quintal, your women sold four at a time and bought for a dinar of your own money! You would have seen your Muslim enemy trampling on the place where you celebrate the mass, cutting the throats of monks, priests and deacons upon the altars, bringing sudden death to the patriarchs and slavery to the royal princes. You would have seen fire running through your palaces, your dead burned in this world before going down to the fires of the next.13

After 170 years of manoeuvres, rivalry and conflict, it was over: Antioch, the great metropolis of the Roman East, was now destined to spend the next seven centuries as little more than a small rural town. Aleppo, by contrast, had won local supremacy, and would go on to use its status in the wider Islamic world to become a major trading and political centre. The 7 kilometres of Antioch’s walls, its Citadel looming from the heights and the constellation of castles, towers and cave-citadels that had dotted the countryside between the two long-standing rivals, began a long career as picturesque ruins. The most forlorn

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