‘The Franks, may God forsake them’: a Fatimid government document from 1109 about skirmishes in the Levant

This article offers an edition, translation, and analysis of a newly discovered Fatimid document preserved in the Cairo Geniza, a report by a Fatimid official in Tyre in the early summer of 1109, just before the Frankish conquest of Tripoli. The report was sent to Fatimid Cairo from a previously unknown intelligence-gathering bureau in Tyre called the majlis al-khidma. It captures a snapshot of the Fatimids’ struggle to maintain their tenuous grip on their Syrian territories amid multiple, converging challenges: the longstanding Frankish siege of Tripoli, feuding local clans, internal military dissent and defections among Levantine Muslims, with numerous people crossing enemy lines to serve Frankish interests. Besides the insights the document offers into the Fatimids’ attempts to hold off both local rebels against their authority and the Franks, it also represents a previously unknown genre: it lies along a spectrum between a formal government communiqué and an annalistic account of the kind on which a later chronicler could have relied. The surviving Arabic chronicles of the early crusades are by Sunnī partisans who do not represent the Fatimid perspective. Our document, therefore, offers a rare glimpse of what a Fatimid history of the early crusades might have looked like had one survived, as well as a compilation of eyewitness accounts of events that never made it into the surviving long-form sources.