Lionheart (15 page)

Without any real strategy agreed, the Second Crusade achieved nothing except huge loss of life on the outward journey and a failed attack on tolerant Damascus, whose ruler Mu’in al-Din Unar was the only Muslim leader to have signed a treaty of alliance with the Latin states.
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The abortive siege of his city weakened its defences and contributed to its subsequent capture by the Turks, giving them a stepping stone by which Syria could be politically and militarily united with Egypt. The precariousness of the situation was summed up by Bertrand de Blanquefort, Grand Master of the Templars, who foresaw that if any Muslim ruler managed to unite the realms of Syria and Egypt, it would spell the end of the crusader states, for the Holy City was coveted as a holy place not only by Christians and Jews but also by the followers of Mahomet.

Blanquefort’s prophecy came true on 18 June 1173 when such a leader entered Aleppo as conqueror. The slightly built and courteous al-Malik an-Nâsr Salâh al-Din Yûsuf became known in the West as Saladin. By the age of 36, after expanding his northern holdings with several other Syrian cities, Saladin’s political acumen and military skills succeeded in effecting the political and military union of Syria and Egypt that eluded Egyptian President Nasser with the collapse of his short-lived United Arab Republic in 1961. Saladin’s establishment of a solid power base on the shifting sands of Muslim politics merits a book to itself. In comparison with the political and military skills that won his rise to power and the consolidation of that position, the kings and other nobility of the Latin Kingdom were a rabble of short-sighted, squabbling opportunists.

He was of Kurdish origin, born in Tikrit, the town that was to produce Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein eight centuries later. Founder of the Ayyubid dynasty, named after his father Ayyub, Saladin became ruler of Egypt in 1169 and of Damascene Syria in 1174. In contemporary Christian accounts, he and his followers were called Saracens, a name said to derive from Sarah, the childless first wife of Abraham. It was she who drove Hagar, the younger wife who had borne Abraham’s son Ishmael, from their encampment and into the wilderness, which was the legendary cause of Muslims’ enmity for the Jews.

On 4 July 1187 the army of Jerusalem under King Guy de Lusignan and his vassals was soundly defeated at the horns of Hattin by a coalition of Muslim emirs – the title equates roughly with ‘colonel’ in modern usage – under the generalship of Saladin. Paradoxically, had anyone else been the Saracen commander at Hattin, it is possible that Richard I would never have distinguished himself among the early medieval kings of England because it was Saladin’s victory there that triggered the Third Crusade.

Although tensions had been building up for some time, the battle between the twin hills known as the Horns of Hattin midway between the re-fortified Greek city of Sepphoris, then known as Saffuriya, and the city of Tiberias on Lake Galilee was an all-or-nothing gamble by King Guy under the influence of his vassal Prince Renaud de Châtillon, whom the Muslims called ‘Brins Arnat’. He was well known to Saladin, having a history of breaking truces and attacking Muslim pilgrims in defiance of Baldwin and his successor King Guy, on one occasion attacking a caravan in which was travelling Saladin’s sister. In 1182 he committed the great folly of setting out to attack the holy city of Mecca. The only men of his expedition to reach their goal were prisoners taken there to be beheaded after Châtillon’s main body was driven off. After the politically weak and unintelligent King Guy assumed the crown of Jerusalem in 1186, he was unable to control the bellicose Renaud de Châtillon who, in flagrant breach of the 1180 treaty between Damascus and Jerusalem that permitted the free circulation of people and merchandise in the region, attacked a caravan of merchants, killed all those bearing arms and stole all their goods.

Saladin’s diplomatic requests that the prisoners be liberated and their goods returned in keeping with the treaty were ignored. He therefore summoned support from all over the dual realm to deal forcibly with ‘the Franj’, as all the crusaders were called because the majority of those who settled came from France.
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Similarly, the crusaders referred to Muslim fighters as Turks, no matter their ethnic origins. Saladin’s forces included pale-skinned Turks, swarthy Levantines and Egyptians and black Nubians. In June he was able to assemble a mixed force of 12,000 cavalry and about 20,000 foot soldiers midway between Damascus and Tiberias, a Herodian city lying on the western shore of Lake Galilee. This was a sizeable army for the times. Given the difficulties of command and control in battle conditions, Saladin’s method was to reward handsomely the various emirs who obeyed firm instructions to position their contingents before each battle exactly where he wanted them.

In retaliation, the bellicose Châtillon persuaded King Guy to assemble the largest Latin army seen for many years under the protection of a relic of the True Cross borne by the bishop of Acre, deputising for the patriarch Heraclius, who was ill in Jerusalem. The combined Christian forces totalled some 1,200 knights from Jerusalem and Tripoli and a handful from Antioch. Their numbers were doubled by locally recruited mercenary light cavalry and foot soldiers known as Turcopoles, who were paid partly with funds sent by Henry II to the Templars in token fulfilment of his oath to make the crusade. Knowing their movements, Saladin set a trap, sending a third of his forces to besiege Tiberias as a feint.
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As so often, there was fatal dissension among the crusader commanders before the battle, Count Raymond of Tripoli arguing that the Latin army should remain within the safety of Saffuriya’s defences for the time being and Châtillon pumping adrenalin as he incited King Guy to get to grips with Saladin and destroy his forces once and for all, despite the odds against that happening. The problem was that Guy was described by some as half-witted and certainly had neither the intelligence nor the authority to command obedience or be more than a puppet king.

The fortress-city of Tiberias belonged to Countess Eschiva, the wife of Count Raymond. After the city wall had been breached by Saladin’s sappers, she and her garrison forces withdrew within the walls of the citadel, which the Muslims set about undermining. When this news was received in Saffuriya on 2 July a council of war was held, Raymond accepting the loss of Tiberias as just one more move in the long drawn-out chess game of the Latin Kingdom – in which important prisoners were always ransomed and women often liberated as an act of courtesy. However, King Guy was unable to control the fighting talk of other nobles who wanted action at all costs – always a recipe for disaster. He was also subjected to what amounted to blackmail by Châtillon’s supporters and informed by Gérard de Ridefort, Grand Master of the Templars, that the support of his Order’s fanatical knights would be withdrawn if Guy backed down before Saladin.

Discretion was cast to the winds. There were two routes to Tiberias, but the southern one was blocked by Saladin’s forces, forcing the Franj onto the northern route, where all the water sources were either dry in midsummer or had been poisoned or blocked up by the Turks. On 3 July, when his scouts reported Guy’s forces setting out on the northern route, Saladin knew they had fallen into his trap. Harassed all the way by his mounted archers and with insatiable thirst weakening man and horse, the Latin army moved with increasing slowness through arid and inhospitable country.

As the vanguard came in sight of Tiberias towards nightfall, they could see in the valley below them the enticing waters of Lake Galilee, urgently needed by horse and man alike, but they also saw Saladin’s forces drawn up between them and the lake. With the army strung out over several miles, it was too late in the day for them, even had they been in much better fettle, to advance and cut their way through the besieging force to reach the lake shore. They therefore had to spend the night tormented by thirst and in no state to fight the next morning. Under cover of darkness, Saladin positioned a blocking force behind the Latins to cut off their retreat towards Saffuriya, and kept the rest of his army in positions north and south of Hattin.

Came the dawn and King Guy’s army rushed towards the lake, only to be caught in a classic pincer movement from north and south as they passed between the twin peaks. With the dry grass and brush fired upwind, their eyes blinded by smoke, the knights and foot soldiers fought desperately but were repeatedly cut down by Muslim attacks until only 150 parched and exhausted knights were still fit to fight around King Guy and Renaud de Châtillon. After they surrendered, Saladin invited King Guy to sit beside him in his pavilion. Suffering torments of thirst, Guy was given cool water to drink, but when Châtillon took the pitcher from Guy to slake his own thirst, Saladin upbraided him for repeatedly breaking his word. Since he had not given the water as a sign of hospitality to Châtillon – who was perfectly aware of Muslim etiquette, having been a prisoner in Aleppo for fifteen years – Saladin had no obligation to spare his life, and personally executed him.

Conflicting accounts claim that many of the Frankish forces fled the field of battle, but only 3,000 or so are actually recorded as having escaped with their lives. Among them was Count Raymond, who had led a desperate charge against Muslim cavalry between the main battle and the shore of Lake Galilee. Saladin’s nephew Taqi al-Din commanded his men to open formation so that the undisciplined Frankish horde could pass through, which it did, causing few casualties. Taqi al-Din then re-formed ranks, blocking any return for Raymond and his knights, who then rode off in frustration, heading for safety inside the walls of Tripoli.
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For the noble prisoners at Hattin, ransom was their lot. For the rank-and-file, slavery lay ahead. For the Templar and Hospitaller knights taken prisoner, with the exception of their Grand Master, Saladin decreed immediate beheading because they were regarded as too dangerous to be kept for ransom, whereas Gérard de Ridefort was a valuable hostage, the price of whose eventual release was the key city of Gaza between Jerusalem and Egypt. The fragment of the alleged True Cross was carried off as a spoil of war to Damascus. Countess Eschiva surrendered the citadel of Tiberias on the following day and was, with Saladin’s customary gallantry, given an escort to take her children back to their father’s protection. As usual after a battle, some of Saladin’s forces abandoned the campaign and headed homeward after looting the fallen and taking their allotted number of slaves with them, but sufficient men remained for him to sweep through the Christian states carrying all before him and taking Acre, Nablus, Caesarea, Jaffa, Sidon, Beirut and the crusader fortress of Toron by mid-September.

The crusader states had been reduced to the three northern coastal cities: Tripoli, Antioch and Tyre, the last of which was saved after negotiations for surrender under siege had already begun by the chance arrival of the redoubtable Marquis Conrad of Montferrat, whose fief lay in the north-west of modern Italy. Known to the Muslims as al-Markish, Conrad was a handsome and polished, politically astute and physically brave military commander – the epitome of manly virtues, praised by the Occitan troubadour Peiról d’Auvérhna as
lo marques valens e pros
, or the valiant and worthy marquis. Conrad had fought for the Byzantine emperor Manuel I Comnenus against the Holy Roman Empire and also helped him to suppress a rebellion, for which he was rewarded with the hand of Manuel’s sister Theodora. However, so rampant were the murderous intrigues of the Byzantine court that he decided to try his luck in the Holy Land, where his father held the castle of St Elias. What happened to Theodora is uncertain because Conrad set sail for the Holy Land in July 1187 and arrived in Tyre aboard a Genoese merchant ship as a single man after discovering that Acre was in Muslim hands. Once installed in Tyre, he used a considerable fortune brought from Constantinople to strengthen the defences before Saladin returned for a second siege of the city in November.
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The city had been an island until Alexander the Great had a mole or causeway constructed between it and the mainland, against which currents built up sediment, turning it into an isthmus. Tyre was therefore easy to defend and difficult to attack by land after Conrad had strengthened the walls on the landward side. He also organised the Italian merchants long resident there on the lines of the newly emergent trading republics in Europe, a movement that he had resisted in his homeland. His refusal to surrender the city was unshaken even when his aged father, who was one of the captives taken at Hattin, was paraded outside the walls. Saladin offered rich rewards if Conrad would capitulate. Instead, Conrad aimed a crossbow at his father, saying he preferred to kill him himself rather than be intimidated. Intrigued by this lack of filial sentiment, Saladin permitted Conrad’s father to live and be ransomed the following year.
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There was a Saracen fleet offshore blockading the port. On 30 December 1187 Conrad’s ships sailed out of the harbour of Tyre and attacked the blockade ships, capturing some galleys and forcing others to beach so that their crews could flee on land. At the same time, Saladin launched a land attack, which was broken up by a sally in force from the city, led by Conrad. At this, Saladin burned his siege engines and some ships to stop them falling into crusader hands and withdrew to consolidate his hold on the southern crusader ports, which cut off the beleaguered city of Jerusalem from all hope of relief arriving from Europe by sea in the foreseeable future. Among the runaways from Hattin who had fled to the safety of Tyre was Balian of Ibelin,
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the lord of Ramlah, a sub-fief of the kingdom of Jerusalem. When he begged a safe conduct from Saladin to return to Jerusalem and escort his Byzantine wife Maria Comnena and their family to safety, permission was granted on condition that Balian swore not to take up arms again, nor to remain in Jerusalem for more than one day to settle his family affairs there.
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