Homs

Homs or Emesa (mod. Hims, Syria) is a city situated on the eastern bank of the river Orontes in the center of a cultivated plain.

At the start of the crusading period, it was held by Ridwan, the ruler of Aleppo. Ridwan’s atabeg, Janah al-Dawla Husayn, made himself independent there in 1097. After his death in 1103 it passed under the control of the rulers of Damascus, although at times this control was only nominal. The city became a major Muslim military camp, supplying large numbers of troops, and was also used as an assembly point and a depot for weapons and siege equipment.

In 1138, after a number of attempts to subjugate it by force, ‘Imad al-Din Zangi received the city as part of a matrimonial alliance. Upon his death in 1144, Homs passed under the control of Mu‘in al-Din Unur of Damascus. In 1148 it proved to be a valuable rallying point for the Zangid troops assembling to oppose the Second Crusade. It came under the control of Nur al-Din in 1149 and of Saladin in 1175. The latter gave the city to his cousin, Nasir al-Din Muhammad, who founded the Asadi dynasty (named after Saladin’s uncle, Muhammad’s father, Asad al-Din Shirkuh). The Asadis ruled almost without interruption until 1262, after which the importance of the city declined. The great victory won by the Mamluk sultan Qalawun over the Mongols in 1281 was fought at Homs, but the city remained merely a minor governorship in the Mamluk sultanate until the Ottomans took over Syria in 1516.

-Niall Christie

Bibliography

Holt, Peter M., The Age of the Crusades (London: Longman, 1986).

Major, Balazs, “Al-Malik al-Mujahid, Ruler of Homs, and the Hospitallers (the Evidence in the Chronicle of Ibn Wash),” in The Crusades and the Military Orders: Expanding the Frontiers of Medieval Latin Christianity, ed. Zsolt Hunaydi and Jozsef Laszlovszky (Budapest: Central European University, Department of Medieval Studies, 2001), pp. 61-75.