Towards the end of the fifth Crusade, in the year 1219, al-Mu'azzam, Saladin’s nephew, the Ayyubid sultan of Damascus, ordered the walls of Jerusalem to be razed. The Sultan’s intention was to reduce Jerusalem’s status as a military citadel. His decision was motivated by a fear that the city’s loss would result in a repeat of the first crusade’s bloodbath of 1099, and that its subsequent deployment as a crusader fortress would dominate the surrounding territories for years to come. He concluded that if he could not defend the city he also did not want to besiege it in the near the future.
His decree was a partial success in that razing the defences of the city really did reduce Jerusalem’s strategic and economic importance to the status of a mere village. However, as an anticipatory military intervention, al-Muazzam’s decision proved doubly unlucky in that it seems he took the road along which the world would not follow. His defensive stratagem, a play of anticipatory prevention which he fatally directed against the very nature of outcomes, took his forces down a dead end. And history, being capricious, refused to realise the world in accord with his stratagem. In anticipating al-Muazzam‘s move, history defended itself against his attempt to expropriate it, and thereby prevented his imagined alliance with time.
The Crusaders’ never reached Jerusalem. The fifth Crusade resulted in complete failure, it was cut off in Egypt by the Nile in flood, and dispersed in the Holy Land by sickness and deficiencies in the supply chain; finally it lost all momentum in the failed sieges of Jordan and Mount Tabor. Even so, the abject defeat of the Crusaders was not so much imposed as self-inflicted, and brought no special gain to the Ayyubid dynasty. Eventually, after another ten years or so, Jerusalem was ceded to Frederick II following the 6th Crusade in 1229.
In its deep repetitions, time will improvise endlessly unpredictable variations and permutations from out of the limited clashing together of things driven by eternal forces. Let he who has ears, Hear!
