i66 A HISTORY OF THE CRUSADES I 
 
 
crusaders found them under the command of their own leaders, Toros, Gabriel,
and Kogh ~asil. And the decline of the Turkish power in the south allowed
Egypt, which had been reorganized by the vizirs Badr al-Jarnali and al-Af~al,
to regain the ports, though the intervention of the crusaders was required
to induce them to retake Jerusalem itself from the sons of Artuk, who had
died in 1091.18 
 
 The Syria to which the crusaders were to come was thus, of all Islamic regions,
the least capable of resistance. The loss of the coastal strip would add
to its impotence. It was in upper Mesopotamia, to which it was bound geographically
and which had already so often absorbed it politically, that it must find
help. As in proportion to the increase of Frankish power such help became
more urgent, and as Diyar-Bakr and Mosul had meanwhile become stable local
states, it became more and more inevitable that Aleppo at least would rely
on their aid and hence come under their sway. The history of the first three
decades after the First Crusade was to confirm this conclusion. But it was
an irregular process, for these helpers themselves were sometimes paralyzed
by the internecine wars of Iraq and Iran, or when this was not the case were
arrayed against each other. In any event the Syrians could not view without
distrust these "orientals" whom they suspected of aspiring to replace them.
This fear was so strong that, as will be seen, it was to lead the Moslems
of Syria to ally themselves on occasion with the new Syrians, which in a
sense the Franks were to become, against those very foes whom they had on
previous occasions summoned for help against them.'9 
 Unexpected as it may appear to the westerner, it must be clearly realized
that the crusades did not produce much of an impression on the Islamic world
in general. In the traditions of the Turkomans of Anatolia almost no trace
was left by the crossing of the Frankish army. Of what importance was it,
in fact, to the nomads that they had been roughly handled in regions of which
they had promptly regained control, or that they had lost some towns outside
their grazing area? Moreover, at first the crusade was considered as related
to those earlier Byzantine expeditions, ephemeral and limited to territories
traditionally accustomed to frequent changes of masters, incompletely converted
to Islam, distant from Baghdad and Cairo, and negligible since 
 18 On the Egyptian capture of Jerusalem see also above, chapter III, p.
95; on the Armenians see below, chapter IX, p. 299. 
 19 C. Cahen, La Syrie du nord, and P. K. Hitti, History of Syria (London,
1951), passim; H. A. R. Gibb, The Damascus Chronicle of the Crusades, introduction.