A Fatimid Interoffice Memo about the Franks, May God Forsake Them
Marina Rustow, Alan Elbaum, and Paul M. Cobb
Deciphering Genizah documents is easier (and more fun) in a group, but it’s rare that you find the perfect group for the job.
Between 2021 and 2023, Alan Elbaum pieced together an epic join: T-S AS 129.149 + T-S Ar. 39.280 + T-S AS 116.11 + T-S NS 137.20 + T-S NS 207.44 + AIU I.C.73 + T-S NS 238.99 + T-S NS 244.84. These turn out to be eight fragments of a single Fatimid government memorandum reporting on battles with the Franks during the seven-year siege of Fatimid-ruled Tripoli in 1109, a decade after the Franks had taken Jerusalem from the Fatimids in the First Crusade.
It took us almost as many years to crack the document as it took the Franks to conquer Tripoli. The text was brutal to read – even with three sets of eyes plus the generous help of Mathew Barber, May Shaddel, and Naïm Vanthieghem. It was also difficult to put into context.
It was only as we continued to work on the text that we realized what was going on and how important it was. The document turns out to be a report written by a Fatimid official in Tyre in the early summer of 1109, two weeks before the Franks conquered Tripoli. The author was an official in the majlis al-khidma, a previously unknown intelligence-gathering bureau in Tyre responsible for reporting on local events to other government officials, probably in Cairo.
Tyre in this period was a Fatimid port of prime strategic importance. It had housed a Fatimid shipyard for more than a century, but it now became a command centre for Fatimid forces fighting the Franks, who were taking ports up and down the coast. It was from Tyre that the Fatimids sent ships to assist Acre in 1103; it was likewise from Tyre that the Fatimids attempted – and failed – to relieve Tripoli during the siege of 1102–9. Tyre would also provide safe harbour for Muslims fleeing the Fatimid defeat at al-Ramla in 1110.
Our report captures a snapshot of the Fatimids’ struggle to maintain their tenuous grip on the coast of the Levant, not to mention the hinterlands, as Tripoli was under siege. From our report, we learn of the multiple converging challenges they faced: not only the Frankish siege of Tripoli, now in its seventh year, but feuding local clans, defecting Fatimid soldiers, a lack of ready troops forcing them to recruit Bedouins, Syrian Muslims defecting to the Frankish side, and naval reinforcements sent to Tripoli but delayed by bad Mediterranean winds.
Because the report is in a previously unknown genre – somewhere between a formal communiqué and an annalistic account reminiscent of a chronicle – initially, we had no idea what we were looking at. To make matters worse, it repeatedly referred to “the frontier port, may it be protected” (Ar. al-thaghr al-maḥrūs) without identifying its name.
Finding the joins
Elbaum stumbled on part of the text in 2020. He was on a research fellowship leave from medical school, devoting a year to studying letters from the Cairo Geniza about illness and the experience of being ill.1 He had also recently started working as a researcher for the Princeton Geniza Lab tasked with adding descriptions to the Princeton Geniza Project (PGP) database and identifying new documentary fragments.
He soon got carried away and spent 20–30 hours per week trawling through Cambridge University Digital Library (CUDL) and Friedberg Genizah Project (FGP) images, adding and improving on many thousands of PGP entries. Rustow’s The Lost Archive had just been published, and Elbaum was thinking about the information that can be gleaned even from scraps of state documents. So he was excited to identify new Arabic documents and find new joins.2
Arabic documents were also the biggest gap in the PGP records: there were descriptions of plenty of Hebrew and Judaeo-Arabic material, but hardly anything for the Arabic-script documents that hadn’t already been published by Geoffrey Khan, Rustow or others.3
Elbaum then came across the CUDL entry for T-S AS 116.11: Recto: liturgical text in Hebrew. Verso: historical account in Arabic, referring to Ḍārib al-Dawla, his son and the Franks.
He then noticed the similarity of that fragment to T-S NS 137.20:
He checked the FGP joins suggestions for both fragments, found some good candidates for joins, then checked the joins suggestions for the new fragments. The joins suggestions algorithms led him to all but one of the eventual eight fragments of our document.
But, although the Arabic hand on each of the fragments seemed similar, they weren’t continuous joins, so it was impossible to confirm that they were part of a single document. That was where the Hebrew text on the versos came in: the document had been reused for a known text, a copy of a liturgical poem (a baqqaša) by Saʿadya Gaʾon (882–942) in a distinctive hand with full vocalization. That confirmed the joins and enabled the correct ordering of the Arabic rectos.
Elbaum then posted the joins to the Princeton Geniza Lab Slack workspace and to Facebook, asking everyone to be on the alert for further fragments. But even though he suspected the Arabic document on the recto was important, he couldn’t read all of it. He knew it mentioned the Franks (“may God forsake them”), but he would need help from others to decipher it and figure out the historical context.
He turned to Rustow, who confirmed that the document was a Fatimid government memorandum, but without standard formulaic phrases such as “the slave kisses the ground and reports … .” She knew they would get further faster if they invited Cobb to join them: palaeography is easier if you know what words you’re likely to find, so someone who knows the context – and in this case, the chronicles of the Crusades period – is essential. We began meeting semi-regularly to try to crack the text, but had to pause for two years while Elbaum completed the first two years of his medical residency.
Three ships heading to Jubayl
We returned to the text in early 2024. That was when Elbaum identified the final piece of the puzzle (so far – there are still several more fragments waiting to be found).
That fragment was T-S Ar.39.280, a purely serendipitous find Elbaum stumbled across as he was clicking through the digital images of the T-S Ar.39 folder.
We had just had a paleography session in which we were debating how to read line 4 of T-S AS 116.11:
We suspected the text was referring to the coastal town of Jabala. But, we couldn’t figure out why it seemed to mention “a ship from Jabala of the three.” Since most documentary Arabic texts are incompletely dotted or entirely undotted, no reading is certain until you have enough context to confirm it. We debated reading the phrase instead as a “total (jumla) of three ships,” but there was still no other evidence of three ships elsewhere in the document.
It was then that Elbaum came across T-S Ar.39.280, which turned out to join directly with both T-S AS 129.149 and T-S AS 116.11 and bridge the gap between them. This provided us with the missing context we needed. It turned out that three Frankish ships from Acre had set sail for Jubayl, and that the Fatimid forces on which the document was reporting had captured one of the three. It was then that we realized we had battles with Crusaders on our hands.
Somewhere along the way, through process of elimination, we realized that the “frontier port” had to be Tyre, one of the only ports the document doesn’t mention by name and a strategic location so central to Fatimid naval defenses that it would be surprising not to find it mentioned.
A Fatimid history of the Crusades
Historians of the Crusades have come to appreciate that they cannot gain a holistic understanding of these dramatic events without sources narrated from the Islamicate side.4 But the vast majority of the surviving Arabic sources for the Crusades are long-form literary sources such as chronicles, biographies and travelogues, and with a few exceptions, they are the work of Sunnī authors from the Seljuk, Ayyubid, and Mamluk sultanates who blame the Shīʿī Fatimids for losing the Levant to the Franks. Authors such as Ibn al-Qalānisī and Ibn al-Athīr strongly imply, moreover, that because the Fatimids were heretics who were insufficiently pious, despite occasional victories, they were not ultimately able to defend the Levant from Frankish attacks.
But where is the Fatimid point of view in all this? No Fatimid chronicles of the Crusades have survived. That was what immediately drew Cobb to the fragments Elbaum had found: they provide a Fatimid perspective on events in real time, and a document no less, rather than the usual literary narrative bound by the ideological conventions of Sunnī historical writing.
This wasn’t the first Fatimid state document about the Crusades to be identified. In 1993, Geoffrey Khan had published a Fatimid official report on battles with the Franks – like ours, a complex join reused for Hebrew poetry.5 But Khan’s document was different from ours in tone: it was written in a rather pompous register, announcing the writer’s bravery, since “the humiliation of his enemy is his heart's desire.” It relays the constant arrival of “good tidings” from his camp and reports on “the renewal of conquest, with victory hastening back.” There is no room in such a document for the admission of difficulty, let alone defeat.
The tone of our document is not nearly as triumphant – it is more like a cry for help from the front lines. The Fatimids were battling the Franks at sea and resisting the siege of Tripoli while managing feuding local clans in the Syrian hinterland, internal military dissent and defections to the Frankish side among Levantine Muslims, and meanwhile co-opting local clan leaders and routing out military spies.
Even when the Fatimids captured one of the three Frankish ships headed to Jubayl and took twenty-four prisoners from it, the report stated this in a matter-of-fact tone.
The report explained that an official named Ṣārim al-Dawla and his son had outfitted a galley in Tyre and set out with their men to intercept the Frankish convoy in the waters off of Sidon.6 Because there were civilian passengers – including women – aboard the Frankish ships, we deduced that they were attempting to transport Frankish subjects northward from Crusader-held Acre to Jubayl while circumventing the Fatimid-held ports of Tyre and Beirut on the way. This was a risky move, and, as it turned out, a miscalculation. “Not even one hour later,” the document reports, Ṣārim al-Dawla and his men “returned with one ship of the three, which they had seized from the waters of Sidon, containing twenty-four Frankish men, may God forsake them (ḵaḏala-hum Allāh), and ten women, including one Muslim woman known in the frontier city (Tyre). They threw the men into prison and the women into the courier station.” Surprise: among the Frankish civilians was a Muslim defector. Things were messier than one might think.
This was but one unfiltered glimpse of the complex mundane operations missing from the Sunnī and Frankish chronicles. Delightfully for Rustow, there was another such glimpse that included three of her favourite subjects rolled into one: taxation, corrupt officials, and Fatimid petitions.
One year earlier, in 1107–8, the Franks had attempted to take Tyre by siege. The Fatimids instead negotiated a treaty with the Franks, who agreed not to take the city in exchange for seven thousand dīnārs per year, a massive amount of tribute.7
Our document offers a telling detail about the tribute.8 Raising the tribute depended on taxing the inhabitants of Tyre, and the required amount was 1 dīnār per house, ½ dīnār per room, and ½ dīnār per shop. But Fatimid officials in Tyre were collecting fifty percent more and (presumably) pocketing the difference. In response to the injustice, Tyre’s inhabitants, according to our document, “wrote petitions and threw them into the markets, hung them up in the mosque, and cried out against the person in charge of collecting (the tribute) from them.” Even during wartime, Fatimid subjects were calling out corrupt officials and petitioning against unjust government extraction.
Rather than boasting about victories or covering up problems, then, the document sheds light on the challenges the Fatimids faced. Presumably the recipient of this report was an official in Cairo; the tone in the report is almost journalistic, with the reporter’s eye roving from the sea to the hinterlands. Suddenly we saw how the Fatimids managed the continual wartime crises by having a government bureau, the majlis al-khidma, convey information from the front lines as events unfolded.
An unknown genre of Fatimid state document
In fact, we found it slightly perplexing how dry the document was compared to Khan’s: it wastes no time with fluffy honorifics or ornate prose; there are no slaves kissing the ground as they relay information phrased so as make themselves look good. Rather, the document introduces each of its surviving eight sections in a manner otherwise unknown from the repertoire of Fatimid state documents: with some variant of the phrase “and on this day” (wa-fī hādhā l-yawm). It reads less like the report of a government official and more like a chronicle or other annalistic narrative, a formal convention as yet not found in Fatimid state documents.
This led us to suspect that our document represents not only a previously unknown genre of Fatimid state document, but a quasi-annalistic genre that might have furnished the raw material for a Fatimid chronicle of the Crusades—assuming such a thing at some point existed, even if none has survived for posterity.
History is written by the victors. The Fatimids eventually lost the entire coastal Levant to the Franks. By the time the Muslims reconquered Jerusalem in 1187, the Fatimids had ceased to exist: the dynasty fell in 1171. The Sunnī chroniclers report that when the Ayyubids abolished the Fatimid caliphate, they destroyed more than a million manuscripts from the Fatimid royal library. Perhaps chronicles of the Crusades were among them. Thanks to the Sunnī chroniclers, the Fatimids were remembered as the dynasty that lost the Levant to the Franks, while the Zengid, Ayyubid, and Mamluk sultanates were the victors who got it back.
Supplementing Arabic chronicles by Sunnī partisans, we now have a Fatimid perspective on the early Crusades – a rare glimpse of what a Fatimid history of the early Crusades might have looked like had one survived, as well as a rare eyewitness account of events that never made it into the long-form sources.
Not one document but a series
Our edition, translation and analysis of the document will appear this month in Crusades.9 But, we hope, it’s just the beginning of a larger project. Elbaum has also come across about a dozen additional Crusade-related Arabic documents, most, like this one, dating to the early twelfth century. Two mention King Baldwin (in Arabic, Bardawīl or Baghdawīl). A later report concerns a traitor probably during the Frankish siege of Damietta in 1169. While we had initially planned to publish the fragments in a single article, we soon realized that they would exceed its scope, so we are now planning to publish them in a book. It’s only a question of how long it will take us to decipher them.
Footnotes
1 Alan Elbaum, “‘The Fire in My Heart and the Pain in My Eyes’: Interdependence and Outburst in the Illness Letters of the Cairo Geniza,” Speculum 98 (2023): 122–63.
2 Marina Rustow, The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (Princeton University Press, 2020).
3 Geoffrey Khan, Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents from the Cambridge Genizah Collections (Cambridge University Press, 1993).
4 Amin Maalouf, The Crusades through Arab Eyes (Schocken, 1984); Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (Edinburgh University Press, 1999); Paul M. Cobb, The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades (Oxford University Press, 2014).
5 T-S 16.114 + T-S 24.57 + T-S AS 11.383 + T-S AS 146.195, doc. 111 in Khan, Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents.
6 T-S AS 116.11.
7 Ibn al-Qalānisī, Tārīkh Dimashq [History of Damascus], ed. S. Zakkār (Damascus, 1983), 255; Ibn al-Athīr, al-Kāmil fī l-tārīkh [The Complete Book of History], 13 vols. (Beirut, 1965–1967), 10: 455–6.
8 T-S NS 244.84.
9 Alan Elbaum, Marina Rustow, and Paul M. Cobb, “‘The Franks, May God Forsake Them’: A Fatimid Government Document from 1109 about Skirmishes in the Levant,” Crusades 26 (2026), in press.