The Massacre at Ma'arra

Ma'arrat al-Nu'man was a modest walled market town of northern Syria, set among olive groves on the inland road between Antioch and the lands to the south, a place of ordinary people, of farmers, traders and scholars, and the home town of the celebrated blind poet and freethinker Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri, who had died there some sixty years before. In the late autumn of 1098, as the armies of the First Crusade pushed on southward from newly-taken Antioch toward Jerusalem, they came to Ma'arra and besieged it; the town, no great fortress, held out for a fortnight or so before the Franks broke in by means of a siege-tower in December 1098. There followed one of the most notorious atrocities of the whole Crusading enterprise: the Crusaders massacred the inhabitants, killing many thousands of the townspeople and sacking and burning the town. Worse still, in the grip of the terrible famine that afflicted the Crusader host that winter, some of the starving Franks resorted to eating the flesh of the slain Muslim dead, a horror recorded with shame by the Latin chroniclers themselves as well as by the Muslims. The massacre at Ma'arra left a deep and lasting scar in the memory of the Muslims of Syria, a byword for the savagery of the invasion and for the suffering it brought upon defenceless ordinary people, far from any field of honourable battle. This scene depicts the destruction of Ma'arra; it is framed soberly and with restraint, in keeping with the project's ethics any figure is anonymous and at a distance, and the violence is not graphically depicted.