Richard & John: Kings at War (19 page)

The crusader states benefited from two great advantages. In the first place were the famous crusader castles that so bewitched T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia).
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Including walled cities, there were more than fifty of these. Although their military role has been overplayed - they could not stop invaders, for example, and their purely strategic importance was largely over by 1140 - they were important both administratively and economically. Administratively they formed the heartland of Outremer and were often the focus for settlement and colonisation projects, while economically they provided the force that allowed castellans to extract a surplus from the working population locally. It is difficult to separate civic and military or public and private aspects of the castles, but in purely military terms it can be said they usually performed a negative rather than positive function: they allowed Christians to counter-attack Muslim forces sortieing on raids from their own strongholds and they afforded a base providing water, supplies and - in case of defeat - protection; it was always wise to encounter an enemy near a friendly fortress.
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Finally, the best of the castles had a symbolic importance in that they betokened the indestructibility of Outremer. The great showpiece castle, supposedly impregnable, was Krak des Chevaliers (Hisn al-Akrad) in Syria.
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Here successive obstacles of fosse, outer and inner walls and three great towers acting as redoubts, formed an overlapping system of defence. The inner defences were much higher than the outer yet were close to them so that an enemy could be simultaneously engaged from both positions, while round towers, closely spaced at intervals from both lines of the wall, provided security from the flank. So formidable was Krak des Chevaliers that Saladin himself took one look at it and decided not even to try to besiege it.
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The other ‘secret weapon’ of the kingdom of Jerusalem was the two knightly orders that protected it: the Templars and the Hospitallers. The Hospitallers had developed from the hospices attached to a Benedictine monastery in Jerusalem in 1071, while the Templars were founded around 1119 to defend pilgrims travelling to the Holy Sepulchre. Having received papal recognition, the two orders added military roles to their functions, so that by the time of the Third Crusade they were the local backbone of the Christian armies in Outremer.
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The two obvious weaknesses of the Latin states were factionalism between the lords of the various castle-cities (especially Jersusalem, Antioch, Tripoli and Krak) and the fact that they ruled largely Muslim populations whose loyalty was suspect, especially in wartime.
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These disadvantages were played up by the rising star in the politics of the Middle East, Al-Malik al-Nasir Salah ed-Din Yusuf, known in the West as Saladin. Yusuf was the son of Najm-ad-Din, a Kurdish nobleman from northern Armenia, near Georgia. Najm-ad-Din migrated early in his career to Baghdad, the seat of the Abbasid caliphate, and was made constable of Takreet Castle on the River Tigris. Tradition said that Saladin was born on the very day in 1137 that Najm and his brother Shirkuh were disgraced and forced to relocate north in Mosul.
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After many adventures, Saladin had his early formation in Damascus, where his father was in the service of Zangi, formerly ruler of Mosul but now the lord of Syria. When Zangi died, the new prince of Damascus was his son Nur al-Din, the major influence on Saladin’s life, a man who had inherited Zangi’s anti-Frank zealotry.
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An ambitious Sunni, Nur al-Din set his sights on the detested Shiite caliphate of the Fatimids in Egypt and determined to destroy it; as commander of his armies he appointed Shirkuh, with his 26-year-old nephew Saladin as his aide. Nur al-Din’s decision to launch his troops against Egypt was a courageous one, for it meant crossing territory dominated by the crusader states, but his gamble paid off. Although Shirkuh had to fight no less than three major campaigns in six years, and could not finish off the enemy even by the great victories at Kawm-al-Rish in 1164 and Al-Babain in 1167, finally, in 1169, he was triumphant and Nur al-Din’s banner fluttered above the mosques in Cairo. The Egyptian campaign was the making of Saladin: a promising staff officer at the beginning of the war but a leader of men and Shirkuh’s heir apparent by the end, he had also whetted his appetite for anti-Crusader warfare. The Franks, knowing the threat that would come from a united Egypt and Syria, intervened on the side of the Egyptian Fatimids but lost the third and final round of the struggle against Shirkuh.
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Shirkuh’s triumph was actually too complete for Nur al-Din, for he had unwittingly raised up a rival in the new vizier of Egypt. Shortly afterwards he died, by poison it was rumoured, but maybe simply from obesity.
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The removal of Shirkuh anyway did Nur al-Din no good, for Saladin promptly replaced him as vizier, being both acclaimed by the Army and then rubber-stamped by the Fatimid caliph. Saladin was in a ticklish situation in Cairo for, as a Sunni, he recognised the supremacy of the Sunni caliphate of the Abbasids in Baghdad, but in Egypt he was working for the Fatimids, its enemy. Until 1172 he walked a tightrope, surviving Fatimid conspiracies by the old guard of defeated malcontents who were prepared to ally themselves with the Franks to bring Saladin down. Knowing Nur al-Din’s enthusiasm for
jihad
, he realised that to make Egypt subservient to Syria would simply give Nur the resources of Egypt for a Holy War against Jerusalem, so, while gradually suppressing the Fatimid caliphate, he did not immediately completely abolish it but used it as a pawn in his diplomatic struggle with the lord of Damascus.
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The game was supremely dangerous, and a serious Fatimid rebellion in Cairo had to be suppressed, but Saladin, convinced that the Egyptian economy was not strong enough to weather the demands of Nur’s anti-Crusader aims, continued to play both sides against the middle. When he at last formally reinstated the Abbasids in Egypt but would still not obey directives from Damascus, Nur al-Din lost patience and decided to attack. In vain did Saladin protest that to join Nur in
jihad
would simply expose Egypt to crusader counter-attacks. He added insult to injury by wasting Egypt’s substance, as Nur al-Din saw it, in campaigns in Nubia, Libya and Tunisia. War between Saladin and Nur was imminent when the lord of Damascus died suddenly in 1174.
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The death of Nur al-Din produced a political situation similar to that in Egypt on the eve of Shirkuh’s invasions, but with the roles of Egypt and Syria reversed. By 1175 Saladin was master of Damascus as well as Cairo. His political talents could scarcely be denied, for he had overcome the manifold problems that assailed Egypt in the late twelfth century: mob violence in Cairo and Alexandria, Norman naval attacks, revolts in Upper Egypt, famine and plague, even currency devaluations. He had risen to the top despite the underlying problems like the vicious Shia-Sunni conflict and the political fragmentation caused by the rise of the vizier class, independent of the caliphs to whom they paid nominal allegiance. The caliph-vizier divorce of ownership and control, as it were, also uncannily mirrored the situation in France, where more powerful Angevin rulers paid homage to less powerful feudal overlords. Now that he had established his power base in Egypt, harnessed its economic resources, its army and even its fleet, and integrated Egypt with Syria, Saladin had the scope to display his military talent. The situation faced by the Christian kingdom of Outremer was more serious than in its entire history, and the crisis was made worse by the absence of its normal allies. Ironically, in the very same year that the western emperor Frederick Barbarossa came to disaster at Legnano in Italy (1176), the eastern emperor Manuel sustained a stunning defeat at Iconium at the hands of the Saljuquids.
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The Christian kingdom of Jerusalem could no longer look to Byzantium for support. In contrast to the situation ten or fifteen years earlier, Syria and Egypt now had little to fear from Outremer, especially as Venice, Pisa and Genoa, putative crusader allies, were trading with Egypt after meeting commercial resistance in Byzantium. Additionally, king Almaric, erstwhile scourge of Egypt, died in 1174 and was succeeded by the 13-year-old Baldwin, Jerusalem’s leper king.
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Why, then, did it take a dozen years, between seizing power in Syria and 1187, before Saladin moved decisively against the Franks? In the first place, it took him that long to bring the whole of non-Christian Syria and Mesopotamia under his control. The long campaigns against the
atabegs
of Aleppo and Mosul occupied an unconscionable amount of his time and attention, even though Saladin made occasional forays against the Franks.
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It was estimated that after 1174 Saladin spent thirteen months fighting the Christian states but thirty-three in battles against his fellow-Muslims.
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All sections of his domains had specific grouses, with Egyptians in particular feeling that Saladin consistently neglected their interests in favour of Syria’s. Some of his own table-talk was scarcely helpful, as with the much-touted saying: ‘Egypt is a whore who has tried in vain to part me from my faithful wife, Syria.’
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But even Syrians felt resentful. Cynics said of him: ‘Saladin spent the revenues of Egypt to gain Syria, and the revenues of Syria to gain Mesopotamia.’
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He was vehemently criticised within the Islamic world for wasting so much time in campaigns against Muslim states rather than against the infidel - exactly the criticism successive popes had made of Henry II and the French kings. Doubtless Saladin hoped for quick victories against Aleppo and Mosul, but these constantly eluded him. Additionally, the Aleppo ruler trumped his ace by calling in the radical sect of Islamic hitmen - the Assassins - to deal with him. There was a contract out on Saladin in 1176 until he bribed the ‘Old Man of the Mountain’ (the Assassins’ leader) to desist, after which there was no more trouble with them.
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Yet another problem was the rising power of Qilijarslan, the Saljuquid sultan who defeated the Byzantines at Iconium and was now looking covetously at the Euphrates. Saladin and Qilijarslan confronted each other once, in 1178, but the Saljuquids thought better of battle and withdrew.
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Moreover, the Franks did not stand idly by while Saladin was thus preoccupied but raided into his territories. And Saladin was never entirely a free agent. He had to consult the interests of local warlords, who were apathetic about the idea of an anti-Christian
jihad
. Finally, there is the distinct possibility that Saladin himself was never that interested in Holy War, that his real preoccupation was a united Islam under a centralised Abbasid caliphate.
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During the years 1175-86 Saladin had many brushes with the crusaders. There were major skirmishes in 1177 and in 1179, when Saladin turned the screw by sending his fleet of 60 galleys and 20 transports on a raid along the coasts of Syria and Asia Minor which netted over a thousand prisoners. In 1183 Guy of Lusignan confronted Saladin with a Christian army, but both sides declined battle.
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In general in these years, Saladin was preoccupied with Mosul and Aleppo and responded only to direct provocation from the Franks. Everything changed in 1186 when Saladin broke the power of Mosul (Aleppo had fallen in 1183) and he was finally able to devote his full-time attention to the kingdom of Jerusalem. Saladin’s new bearing came at the worst possible moment for Outremer, deprived as it was of its traditional allies by the decline of Byzantine power and riven by factionalism.
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By the early 1180s three major figures had emerged on the Christian side. Baldwin IV, affected by leprosy, was gradually turning the kingdom over to Guy of Lusignan but there was considerable resentment about this, since Guy was a ‘new man’, an interloper in the eyes of ‘old Outremer’, an adventurer who had made his mark by marrying Sybilla, the widowed sister of the king of Jerusalem, in 1180. Temporarily Regent in 1184 but meeting stiff opposition, Guy got his big chance when Baldwin died of leprosy in 1185 and his infant heir the next year. Despite intense unpopularity, Guy manoeuvred his way to the throne and was crowned in 1186 - a Poitevin king. Quite apart from religious considerations, Henry II and Richard now had a more immediate interest in Jerusalem, for Guy was nominally their vassal as a Poitevin subject of Richard, and Sybilla, as a member of the junior branch of the house of Anjou, was a cousin.
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The two other figures were bitter enemies of Guy of Lusignan, though they could not have been more unlike. Raymond of Tripoli would have been a more popular choice as king of Jerusalem, and he and his many supporters continued to brood about this setback. One of the ‘old guard’ of the Latin kingdom, a wiry man of medium height with a hawk nose and dark complexion, Raymond was a great warrior but a wise, solomonic and magnanimous counsellor and a great ally and promoter of the Hospitallers. He had suffered imprisonment at the hands of the Muslims but had learned to admire them, spoke Arabic and advocated peaceful co-existence with the heathen. He married the widow of the lord of Tiberias, whose territory, on the shores of lake Galilee and containing the New Testament locations of Nazareth and Mount Tabor, was the most vulnerable fief in the whole of the kingdom of Jerusalem and the first target for any invasion from Arabic Syria.
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Mindful of this and resentful of Guy of Lusignan, Raymond established good relations with Saladin and even entered into a treaty of friendship with him. Utterly unlike Raymond in every way was the chief ‘hawk’ of the kingdom, Reginald (Reynald) of Châtillon, lord of Kerak, a classical crusader-adventurer from a minor family in northern France, who had come east in 1147 in search of wealth. Captured by Muslims in 1160, Reginald had spent fourteen years in captivity until ransomed for the enormous sum of 120,000 gold dinars. His years as a prisoner had left him with a fanatical, undying hatred of the Islamic world and all its works. Notorious for his cruelty, Reginald had been an eager warrior in the many clashes with Saladin in the period 1175-87. In 1182-83 his anti-Saladin zealotry bore fruit in a quixotic raid on the Red Sea, part of a grand design apparently conceived to sack Mecca and Medina and carry off the sacred black stone or Ka’aba. His piratical fleet was defeated by Saladin’s navy off Medina, but Reginald escaped to fight another day. Saladin, who was heavily criticised for allowing the infidel to penetrate so close to the holy cities of Islam, swore a mighty oath that he would capture and behead the lord of Kerak. A wise man might have sought conciliation, as Raymond of Tripoli did, but in 1187 Reginald compounded his ‘blasphemy’ by attacking and slaughtering Arab pilgrims as they passed Kerak; among those taken for ransom from the caravan was Saladin’s sister. Reginald had now insulted Saladin’s family as well as the Prophet.
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