The Fall of Tripoli

Tripoli (Tarabulus), a rich and cultured port on the Levantine coast beneath the mountains of Lebanon, was in the early twelfth century a flourishing city of merchants and scholars, ruled by the Banu Ammar, a local dynasty sprung from its chief judges, who held it as a virtually independent lordship under the distant suzerainty of the Fatimids of Egypt. The city was famed above all for its learning, and for the Dar al-Ilm, the House of Knowledge, a great public library and academy that the Banu Ammar had founded and that was said to hold an enormous collection of books, one of the celebrated libraries of the Muslim world. When the armies of the First Crusade and their successors pressed down the coast after 1098, Tripoli became a chief target; the Franks built a siege-castle on a hill before the walls (the Mount Pilgrim) and blockaded the city for some years, while the Banu Ammar appealed in vain for help to the Muslim powers, who were divided and slow. A relief fleet sent at last from Fatimid Egypt arrived too late, delayed past the hour of the city's need. In 1109 Tripoli fell and was sacked, and a Frankish County of Tripoli was founded on the coast. In the sack the great library, the Dar al-Ilm, was destroyed, its vast store of books burned or scattered, a loss to learning that the chroniclers mourned and that is remembered alongside the later destruction of the books of Baghdad as among the cultural calamities that befell the Muslim world. The fall of Tripoli, like the loss of Antioch, was a blow made possible above all by the failure of relief and the disunity of the Muslim princes. This scene depicts the siege and fall of Tripoli; in keeping with the project's ethics any figure is anonymous and at a distance, and the violence is not graphically shown.