46 A Short History of the Middle East
that of the West; but their influence on the history of the Middle
East itself is much more restricted. The cultural contribution
which the Crusader settlers In the Levant could make was com-
paratively slight, except in the field of military architecture and
tactics; and their presence in the Levant for two centuries was
detrimental to it, in that their final expulsion was accompanied by
the destruction of such important cities as Antioch, Tripoli, and
Akka. The psychological impact of their invasion on the Muslim
world was much smaller than might be supposed. While the
Christian minorities in the Levant welcomed the Franks and gave
them valuable help, the petty Muslim princes of Syria, impressed
by their warlike prowess, preferred to pay them tribute rather than
to resist. Appeals for help to the feeble Abbasid caliph in Baghdad
were ignored. The centre of Seljuk authority was now in Isfahan,
six weeks' journey from the Levant coast in those days; and the
Seljuk sultan paid no heed to such distant alarms. The Crusaders
were unable to consolidate their position more deeply than some
fifty miles inland from the coast, and never occupied such strategic
Muslim cities as Aleppo or Damascus. They were not, therefore,
regarded for some time as a dangerous enemy to Islam, and no
general jihad was declared against them. Instead they became a
factor in the internecine intrigues and petty wars of the Muslim
principalities, the parties to which had no aversion from making
alliances with the Crusaders against their own coreligionaries.
Hence for the first thirty years the Crusaders had matters much
their own way, and succeeded by their expansion across the Jordan
in cutting the communications between Fatirnid Egypt and Mus-
lim Syria. Then, however, they found themselves threatened by the
Turkish atabeg (prince) of Mosul, whose ambitions for territorial
aggrandizement found the exposed Crusader County of Edessa in
1144 an easier victim than his Muslim neighbours. As the Fatimld
dynasty was now fast degenerating, the contest between the
Crusaders and the Atabegs resolved itself from 1154 onwards,
when the Atabegs had occupied Damascus, into a struggle for the
possession of Egypt. This was won by the Atabegs, whose Kurdish
commander became the master of the Nile Valley in 1169. Two
years later his nephew, the famous Saladin (Salah ud»DIn al
Ayyubi), deposed the last feeble Fatimid and reigned as Sultan in
his stead. Asserting his independence of the Atabegs, he made him-
self by 1183 ruler of a kingdom comprising Egypt and inland Syria,