Michael S. Fulton

Contest for Egypt. The Collapse of the Fatimid Caliphate, the Ebb of Crusader Influence, and the Rise of Saladin

(Brill, 2022), 193pp. $142.00

Once the early crusaders had worn down the Fatimid Caliphate’s seaports, they faced little real danger from their Egyptian neighbour. From the middle of the twelfth century, however, Egypt’s reputation for wealth combined with the weakening Fatimids resulted in a ‘scramble for Egypt’ between the major powers of the eastern Mediterranean. Here Michael S. Fulton takes a close look at the campaigns during the 1160s and the first half of the 1170s to examine what each competing group was hoping to gain from their involvement and the details behind the politics and military activity. The book is composed of ten short chapters.

In the introduction, Fulton sets out the stakes and scope of the book. The primary intervention is not to provide a major revision of the period and events but rather to perform a re-examination and distill the conclusions into an accessible narrative. The main point here is that most previous scholarship has been written following sources that were aware of the eventual rise of Saladin, but here Fulton aims to set the actors and events in their own context. The first chapter introduces the Fatimids, and here Fulton is keen to stress the nature of political power in Egypt. Following a prolonged period of unrest in the late eleventh century, the vizier Badr al-Jamali patched the situation together but in doing so largely reduced the office of caliph to a symbolic role. From that point on viziers would rule Egypt, with the Fatimid dynasty in a secondary position, to the extent that Badr al-Jamali’s final successor as vizier even considered liquidating them entirely in the early 1130s. That did not transpire, but the vizierate was an unstable position, and Fulton leads his readers through its various holders until we get to the seizure of the position by Shawar in 1163, which precipitated the invasions of Egypt discussed in the rest of the book.

Fulton then switches over to the crusaders and Egypt. He notes that while the attendees of the First Crusade might have considered conquering Egypt, nothing ultimately came of that. The first time they pushed into Egypt was in 1118 on an expedition led by Baldwin I, but the king’s illness and eventual death ended any plans of conquest and the Franks did not return for the next four decades. The size of this expedition means that, as plausibly suggested by Fulton, it was a reconnaissance in force. Only in the late 1150s, as Fulton argues, does evidence appear to suggest that the Kingdom of Jerusalem under Baldwin III was once again seriously considering the matter of Egypt. A surviving charter promises a knight a fief in Egypt, and a couple of expeditions were dispatched. The size and importance of these incursions is unclear, but they seem to have been small. As Fulton notes, the chronology in the late 1150s and early 1160s is particularly difficult, a problem that also extends to Byzantium’s dealings with the crusaders. Baldwin’s brother and eventual successor Amalric may have led one of these expeditions, and in any case he was back in Egypt on another expedition after taking the throne in 1163. The cause of that incursion was the cancellation of the tribute that the Fatimids had been sending, possibly under Shawar. By the point that Amalric arrived in Egypt, Shawar had probably already been ousted, but he had not yet gone to seek aid in Syria. Fulton concludes the chapter with a short discussion of why the Frankish military system was unsuitable for conquering Egypt, despite the land’s political weakness. The Franks based their military operations around fortifications, but Egypt simply did not have very many for them to seize and occupy.

A short third chapter wheels back to Syria and introduces the Zankids and those around them who would come to play a significant role in the contest for Egypt. Fulton argues convincingly that Nur al-Din was not particularly keen on involvement with Egypt, whether in its internal politics or an alliance against the Franks. Rather, his focus was on internal matters, and thus it was with a lack of enthusiasm that he dispatched Shirkuh, his most trusted commander, to re-install Shawar as vizier in 1164. Here, now in the fourth chapter, is where the ‘contest’ properly begins. Upon the arrival of the Syrians, the caliph quickly turned on his vizier and Shawar regained his position. However, Shawar shortly allied with Amalric against Shirkuh. The combination of Frankish and Fatimid forces was sufficient to drive Shirkuh off, and he took the initial bribe and departed. At the same time, the battle of Harim took place in Syria. Fear of Byzantium kept Nur al-Din from exploiting the vacuum that the combination of his victory and away Amalric in Egypt had created. Fulton emphasizes here that even at this point nothing indicates that Amalric was keen on conquering Egypt, and that while he continued to reach out to the European polities for aid, it was Byzantium that he had to turn to in the realistic hope of gaining any support.

By 1167, Shirkuh had convinced Nur al-Din of his desire to return to Egypt and he was granted 2000 cavalry for the task. Fulton suggests that this intention to return might have been inspired by negotiations between Amalric and Byzantium. Amalric was unsuccessful in preventing Shirkuh from making his way to Egypt, and shortly thereafter the Franks set out as well, probably not in ostensible support of Shawar. Shirkuh again appears to be outmatched, and Fulton points out that the ‘battle’ at al-Babayn in March was tiny, and despite the Franks being defeated their losses likely did not exceed a hundred killed or captured. As Fulton points out, this is notable because despite Egypt’s reputation is a populated and wealthy land, this was the largest field battle there during the entire contest. Once again, Shirkuh withdrew from Egypt under treaty, and the year also witnessed ongoing negotiations with Byzantium.

The sixth chapter turns to the Frankish campaign against Egypt in 1168, in which Fulton seeks to explain why the Franks went at all. Up to 1167, the Franks do not seem to have had any real intention of seizing Egypt, but the alliance with Byzantium changed that and charter evidence starts to point to Amalric making grants of lands to be conquered. But then why attack a year in advance of the planned joint campaign? Surveying the scholarship, Fulton concludes that the campaign of 1169 has misled certain scholars into thinking that Amalric seriously thought he could conquer the Fatimids on his own and thus cut Byzantium out of their share of the conquests. Rather, it was all just a raid to extract tribute one last time before the combined Frankish-Byzantine attack of the following year closed the curtain on the Fatimids forever. This is a convincing explanation and serves to explain why Amalric’s ‘siege’ of Cairo was so half-hearted and why he retreated so quickly once the tribute had been paid. However, Amalric had not counted on Nur al-Din sending Shirkuh once again. This time, events proceeded differently: the caliph turned against Shawar, and let Shirkuh into the palace. Shirkuh died shortly thereafter, and was succeeded as vizier by his nephew, Saladin.

Fulton deals briefly with the joint Byzantine-Frankish campaign of 1169 in the seventh chapter. He makes a convincing general reconstruction of the planned partition of Egypt, with the Franks plausibly getting Cairo, Fustat, and Rosetta, and Byzantium taking Alexandria, Damietta, and Tinnis. This never came to be, of course, and the failure to take Damietta doomed the campaign. Saladin’s victory over the invaders further cemented his rule. Fulton devotes quite a bit of the remainder of the book to arguing that the rift between Saladin and Nur al-Din was largely exaggerated, even if Saladin legitimately seems to have feared being removed from power by his ostensible master. Nur al-Din seems to have been disappointed at the lack of revenues coming to Syria from Egypt, and Saladin in turn raided the Franks and avoided personally encountering Nur al-Din. Meanwhile, the fear of being surrounded ensured that Amalric kept up diplomacy with Byzantium. Nur al-Din’s death in 1174 solved the problem for Saladin, who then was able to leave Egypt freely and return to Syria.

Overall, this is a useful and careful study of the sequence of events that led to the fall of the Fatimids, establishment of the Ayyubids in Egypt, and the place of the Franks in all that. By taking each event on its own terms, Fulton sets them in an immediate context and is cautious about hindsight and later reinterpretations. As a result, Fulton makes a convincing argument for an evolving Egypt policy at the court of Amalric, as well as how Nur al-Din and Byzantium factored into this. While this plausible and sensible narrative is the book’s greatest strength, it is occasionally also its weakness: despite differing military systems, religions, and cultures, both the Franks and especially Saladin are ultimately driven by something akin to Realism, in which the power and security of polities forms the main interpretive framework. For example, one of the key contributions of this book is to separate the early career of Saladin from later legend. While Fulton accomplishes this, late in the book he suggests that after Nur al-Din’s death Saladin became a ruthless and cynical holy warrior intent on using the excuse of the need to fight the Franks as a reason to conquer other Sunni Muslims. The mental states of most historic personages are lost to us; those from the Middle Ages even more so. However, this is primarily a study of both how and why various east Mediterranean actors chose to become involved in Egypt – might they have believed in something? One might ask similar questions about the other polities involved – what role did the tribute in cash play in the Kingdom of Jerusalem? Why was Byzantium even involved, and what does their commitment to a second expedition despites the defeat at Myriokephalon in 1176 say about Byzantine priorities? What did Nur al-Din expect Shirkuh to do to the Fatimid state and caliph? Did Shawar hope that Egypt’s invaders would fall out amongst themselves, or was his room for maneuver more limited than it would seem? Fulton never set out to answer these questions, and raising them here should not be taken as critique but rather as an indication of how this book might usefully contribute to primitivist vs modernist debates on the foreign policies of medieval polities, as well as strategic culture in the era of the crusades. These questions aside, Fulton has accomplished an impressive study of a series of political and military engagements, which does much to provide an up-to-date overview of the campaigns that brought about the end of the Fatimid Caliphate, and eventually, to the crusader states themselves.

Lucas McMahon
University of Ottawa