By the year 1114, the great game for Aleppo had been playing out for over a year.

Ever since the death of the city's Seljuk commander, Ridwan, in 1113,

Aleppo had been controlled by a court eunuch named Lulhu, yet coveted by the rival Turkic and

Frankish factions of the region. Yet these Levinstein powers weren't alone in their ambitions. Over to the

east in Baghdad, the increasingly revitalised Seljuk Sultanate also sought to extend its control over Aleppo,

as a means to regain in control over the entire region, from both his rebellious former subjects and the European newcomers.

By November, battle lines were drawn and preparations made for the next year.

Then, suddenly, on the 29th of November, before either side could do anything about it, the earth itself began to shake.

Steady movements gave way to a terrible cacophony of crunching stone and earth.

In places, the very ground itself seemed to open up and swallow those unfortunate enough to be standing nearby.

Those who were indoors suffered the most, being crushed under the heavy roofs of 12th century buildings.

Many of them left alone to die slow deaths underneath the rubble.

All it took was a few minutes. But when the smoke cleared, the entirety of northern Syria, from Antioch to Mimistra, and from Marash to Odessa, had been devastated.

Aleppo didn't just lie on political, societal and ethnic fault lines. It lay on seismic ones too.

And for the packed suburbs and heavy stone buildings of the region, this would prove to be a deadly

realisation. For people with no knowledge of plate tectonics, who viewed the world almost

entirely through a religious lens, it was an existential threat. It begged the question,

was God punishing them? And if so, what for? Muslim areas had been hit too, but by and large, the damage had been disproportionately

handed out to the increasingly beleaguered defenders of Antioch and Odessa, the two northernmost

crusader states, and the ones most harried by warfare over the past decade and more. To make matters

worse, as the latest Prince of Antioch, Roger of Salerno, began the unenviable task of assessing

the damage and working out which settlements needed his attention the most, he was informed

...