Iftikhar ad-Dawla

Iftikhar ad-Dawla was the Fatimid governor of Jerusalem when the First Crusade arrived, and he is one of the few defenders of a stormed medieval city to have negotiated his own way out of it. Jerusalem had been taken from the Seljuks by the Fatimids of Egypt only the year before, in 1098, which meant the garrison was newly installed and the city's Muslim rulers had just made themselves enemies of the other Muslim power that might have relieved them. He prepared as well as anyone could: he expelled the Christian population, poisoned or blocked the wells outside the walls, and gathered the flocks and the timber inside. The crusaders arrived in June 1099 with perhaps 13,000 men, no water and no siege engines, and might have failed entirely had Genoese ships not reached Jaffa with tools and carpenters. Two towers were built and moved against the walls, and the northern wall was carried on 15 July. What followed was a massacre that shocked even sources sympathetic to the crusade, running through the Jewish quarter and the Aqsa compound over two days. Iftikhar held the Tower of David, the strongest point in the city, and surrendered it to Raymond of Toulouse in exchange for safe conduct for himself and his bodyguard to Ascalon. Raymond kept the bargain. He carried the news to Egypt, and the Fatimid army he brought back was beaten at Ascalon a month later. His safe conduct is close to the only recorded mercy of that week, and it was a transaction rather than a kindness: Raymond wanted the citadel intact, and taking it by assault would have cost him men and possibly the tower. Nothing else is known of him after Egypt.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history