On June 29, a disastrous battle at Inab, near Antioch, saw an army under Prince Raymond of Antioch obliterated by forces led by Zengi’s son Nur al-Din, the atabeg of Aleppo. Raymond was a controversial character, to say the least. Since traveling from Poitiers to claim Antioch by marriage to its nine-year-old heiress, he had fallen out with the king of Sicily, the Byzantine emperor and Antioch’s patriarch. He was rumored to have seriously offended Louis VII by behaving rather too chivalrously toward Louis’s wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who happened to be his niece.
