Mt. Cadmus. But by March Louis and a core group of his army were shipped to Antioch. By early April 1148 Conrad and the few surviving veteran contingents of his army, now rested and resupplied by a winter in Constantinople, arrived by sea at Acre. Still, the state of the invading forces caused Muslims in the Levant to breathe a collective sigh of relief: “Fresh reports of their losses and of the destruction of their numbers were constantly arriving . . . with the result that men were restored to some degree of tranquility of mind and began to gain some confidence in the failure of their enterprise, and their former distress and fear were alleviated in spite of the repeated reports of the activities of the Franks.”30 For the Muslims of Syria, those “activities” became worrisome soon enough. In light of Nur al-Din’s final conquest of Edessa and the general disarray of the newly arrived Frankish armies, the idea that the Franks could recapture Edessa was no longer a consideration. That said, the recent arrivals, even in their present condition, were just the thing to alleviate Jerusalem’s old concerns about Damascus, and so this city became the new goal of the campaign.31 When news of this new Frankish threat reached Unur in Damascus, he “set about making ready equipment and preparing to engage them and to counter their malice,” securing the approaches to the city, repairing fortifications, and blocking the wells in the countryside.32 And so it was that in July 1148 an army led by three kings—Louis of France, Conrad of Germany, and the young Baldwin III of Jerusalem—arrived before the walls of Damascus. They made quick work of the scattered resistance as they approached from the southwest, traversing the Ghuta oasis that surrounds Damascus, a landscape cluttered with orchards and fields and mud-brick enclosure walls and, in places, cut by multiple canals.33 Unur’s troops, including local volunteers and urban militias, stymied the Frankish advance as they tried to cross the Barada River near al-Rabwa, a hillock along the river due west of the city. As this spot was popularly identified as the place mentioned in the Qurʾan to which Mary and Jesus fled from the Massacre of the Innocents (23: 50), it was also redolent with Christian and Islamic associations. Muslim archers had the Franks temporarily pinned down. Eventually, however, Conrad and his men managed to smash their way through to the northern side of the Barada, and the Franks overwhelmed the Muslims there by sheer numbers. The Franks made camp there, quite close to the city walls, and began cutting down trees and destroying orchards to build fortifications. The fighting continued the next day and did not go well for the Muslims; among the 140
The Race for Paradise