Lionheart (16 page)

Once inside the walls, Balian was released from this oath by the patriarch Heraclius – on the dubious grounds that an oath given to a non-Christian was invalid – so that he could organise some sort of defence with the slender means available. Word of this reached Saladin via a deputation from the city that rejected the sultan’s proposals for a negotiated surrender. Despite the broken promise, Saladin nevertheless provided an escort for Balian’s family to safety in Tripoli while Balian himself set about organising some sort of defence with a force totalling only fourteen knights, the city having been stripped of the pride of its knighthood by Guy’s failed gamble at Hattin. In desperation, Balian knighted sixty squires and other young men and stocked the city, whose normal population was swollen by thousands of refugees from the surrounding countryside, with all the provisions that could be found in the surrounding countryside.

After Jerusalem was surrounded on 20 September it was immediately obvious that Balian’s inadequate forces had no hope of sustaining a long siege. Medieval Jerusalem was no fortress constructed on military lines, but a large city that had been defended by several thousand armed insurgents when besieged by Vespasian’s son Titus at the end of the Jewish Revolt in 70
CE
. Against that, Balian had less than 100 knights, including those newly dubbed and inexperienced, plus some Hospitallers and Templars. To buy time, he conducted negotiations through a dubious spokesman: Yusuf Batit was a Byzantine Orthodox priest understandably resentful of the repression of his church under the Catholic rulers of Jerusalem and hoping for far better treatment from the Saracens. In fact, his congregation acted as a kind of fifth column
intra muros
for Saladin.

Like other wise generals, Saladin preferred accepting the surrender of a besieged city to the rigours and destruction of a prolonged siege, but Balian and his supporters refused to submit. With the Saracen army encamped on relatively level terrain within easy distance of the Damascus gate on the north wall of the city – surrounded by broken ground on the other sides – skirmishes began, each advance of the besiegers met by sorties from the city. In a re-run of the Roman investment of Jerusalem eleven centuries earlier, siege towers were constructed by the Saracens and rolled up to the walls but driven back each time. After six days of skirmishes in which the besiegers suffered higher casualties than the defenders, Saladin moved his main camp to the Mount of Olives above the site of the
gat shemanim
or olive press revered by Christians as the Garden of Gethsemane where Christ was arrested. Although opposite the eastern wall of the city, in which there were two gates, the new camp was protected from sorties by the steep-sided valley of the Kidron stream, across which any sortie by Balian’s much reduced forces would have to come.

After three further days of ceaseless assaults on the north wall by siege artillery whose operators were protected by a barrage of arrows and crossbow bolts that kept the defenders off the walls, a sap was fired and the Muslims attempted to force an entrance through the resultant breach. According to William of Tyre, the clergy led a barefoot procession around the walls, emulating that of the priests with the First Crusade in 1099. In desperation, children and adults did penance for their sins but ‘God was not listening’. At the end of September, while skirmishing continued, Balian led an embassy to Saladin to plead for the surrender terms he had previously refused. Saladin granted terms in order to avoid a repeat of the senseless massacre by the men of the First Crusade who killed all the inhabitants of the city when they captured it in 1099.

Ransom was initially set at 20
bezants
¹²
for a man, 10 for a woman and 5 for a child, with the destitute majority of the 20,000 people inside the walls to be sold into the cruel fate of slavery. The vaults of the Templars, however, still held some of the treasure sent by Henry II, although this had been seriously depleted by payment of the mercenaries who had failed to win the day at Hattin. Continued negotiations that illustrate Saladin’s goodwill and patience led to a renegotiation of the terms, the ransom being reduced to 10
bezants
for a man, 5 for a woman and 1
bezant
for a child. Since this was still beyond the combined resources of the Christians, Saladin proposed that 100,000
bezants
would suffice.

This was eventually reduced still further to 50,000
bezants
for 7,000 people and eventually 30,000 bezants, two women or ten children counting as one person. On 2 October Balian symbolically surrendered the keys to the crucial fortress known as the Tower of David. He and Heraclius offered themselves as hostages for the freedom of the unransomed, but this was refused, although they were allowed to ransom many poor people with their own money. The ransom for some others was paid by Saladin and his brother Saphadin in an act of charity. A buyer’s market then ensued, with householders selling their property to Jews and Syrian Christians, who were allowed to remain unmolested in the city.

The fortunate thousands began the long journey to the coast and safety, as they thought, in Christian Tyre or Tripoli, the first two convoys being escorted by Hospitaller and Templar knights and the last convoy under the leadership of Balian and the patriarch, who was permitted to take with him many religious treasures and relics. The value of these scandalised Saladin’s treasurers, who maintained that the ransomed prisoners should be permitted to remove only their personal property, but Saladin ordered them to let the priests go with their treasure, so that his generosity would bear fruit in the future.
¹³
At the coast, the mass of refugees separated, those believing that safety lay in Egypt heading south in the hope of finding a port where an Italian merchant ship might take them back to Europe. The thousands heading north up the coast to the cities still held by their coreligionists met a sad fate when refused entry to Tripoli as ‘useless mouths’ who would consume hoarded food in the event of a renewed siege, and then robbed outside the walls of that city of most of the possessions they had managed to carry with them from their homes. Those healthy enough and strong enough continued along the pilgrimage route to Antioch and the relative safety of Byzantium.

Inside Jerusalem Latin-rite priests who had been permitted to stay in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre – as the Jews had been allowed to retain their synagogues – were there surprised to find a few unarmed Christian pilgrims from Europe arriving unmolested among the Muslim and Jewish pilgrims under the tolerance granted to ‘people of the Book’. Saladin meanwhile satisfied the hunger of his troops for loot and a share-out of the ransom money before consolidating his victories by capturing several crusader fortresses of the interior.

Saladin freed the exiled king of Jerusalem in the summer of 1188 and returned him to Queen Sybilla at Tripoli, together with ten other noble prisoners who had promised to leave the Holy Land and return to France, never again bearing arms against the Saracens. At the same time, the old Marquis of Montferrat was restored to his son in Tyre. Considering the number of Latin nobles who had broken such vows in the past, it is unlikely that Saladin placed any credit in Guy’s promise, and far more likely that he released him and his followers with the intention of exploiting the antagonism between Guy and Conrad to divide the Frankish forces in the Holy Land.

N
OTES

1.
  E.A. Babcock & A.C. Krey,
A History of Deeds Done beyond the Sea
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), Vol 1, pp. 409, 507.

2.
  John of Würzburg,
A Description of the Holy Land 1160–1170 by John of Würzburg
, ed. A. Stewart (New York: Palestine Pilgrim’s Text Society, 1971), Vol 5, pp. 40–1, 69.

3.
  A. Maalouf,
The Crusades through Arab Eyes
, trans. Jon Rothschild (London: Al Saqi Books, 1984), p. 134.

4.
  Ibid, pp. 147–50.

5.
  H. Yule and A.C. Burnell,
Hobson-Jobson – The Anglo-Indian Dictionary
replica of 1886 edition (Ware: Wordsworth, 1996), pp. 352–3 explains, ‘They call Franchi [
sic
] all the Christians of these parts from Romania westward.’ (Pegliotti, 1340) and
non a Francia sed a Franquia
– ‘not from France, but from the land of the Franks’. (Marignolli, 1350).

6.
  Maalouf,
The Crusades
, pp. 185–91.

7.
  For a fuller account of the battle, see G. Hindley,
Saladin
(London: Constable, 1976), pp. 125–30.

8.
  Runciman,
A History of the Crusades
, p. 18.

9.
  Hindley,
Saladin
, pp. 134–5.

10.
  
Yibna
in Arabic;
Yavne
in Hebrew. On the coastal plain near Jaffa, the crusader castle was built there in 1141.

11.
  Maalouf,
The Crusades
, pp. 188–97.

12.
  The
bezant
was a Byzantine gold coin widely accepted as currency in Mediterranean countries.

13.
  Maalouf,
The Crusades
, pp. 198–200.

9

The Call of Destiny

T
hus far in Richard’s life there was little to distinguish him from any number of European princes and barons of the time, incessantly squabbling at much cost of life and misery over taxes, treasure and territory supposedly once held by their forebears or due to them through the marriage alliances in which their female relatives had been exchanged, effectively as hostages required to bear children to their new owners – or simply through envy and greed.

Confirmation of the fall of Jerusalem was carried to Europe by Bishop Joscius of Tyre as well as some returning pilgrims and the more fortunate refugees from Jerusalem, but was anticipated by Pope Gregory VIII, who issued the papal bull
audita tremendi
¹
on
29 October 1187 in response to the disaster at Hattin in July. The kingdom of France was now ruled by Louis’ very different son Philip Augustus, known as Philip One-Eye on account of an albugo or opaque patch making the other eye sightless. His first response, which matched that of the Plantagenet Empire, was the levying of a Saladin tithe – a tax of 10 per cent of all incomes and moveable property, with the exemption of a knight’s weapons, armour and horses, the clergy’s vestments and Church treasures. It was to be collected not by the usual officials and tax farmers but by bishops and their subordinates in holy orders and the unlettered priests who lived among the population. In theory, this was to prevent the money raised simply being swallowed up in the general expenses of the state and ensure that it was kept intact to finance a new crusade that would recapture Jerusalem – although at least one collector, a Templar knight named Gilbert of Hoxton, stole the money he had collected.

It was called the Saladin tithe to deflect onto the conqueror of most of the Latin states the opprobrium associated with this additional tax burden, but was nevertheless widely resented in the Plantagenet domains both in France and England. To encourage those who could not or would not pay, a tax exemption was granted to every man who swore an oath to join the new crusade. Many took advantage of this and the attendant advantages: deferment of repayment of any debts until their return from the Holy Land and protection of their property by the Church’s power of excommunication during their absence. What the common people made of the pope’s ordinance that Wednesdays and Saturdays be meatless days, in addition to which he and his cardinals would fast on Mondays too, defies imagination since they subsisted mainly on soup, rough bread and porridge of one kind or another all the time.