The Glory of the Crusades (18 page)

240
Bernard, “
Epistolae
,” in
Sancti Bernardi Opera
, 8 vols., eds J. Leclercq and H. Rochais, (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1955–77), no. 363, p. 314. Quoted in Phillips,
Second Crusade
, 73.

241
Bernard of Clairvaux,
Letters
, ed. B. Scott James, 2nd ed. (Stroud: 1998), no. 391, 460–463, in Housley,
Fighting for the Cross,
33.

242
Bernard, “
Epistolae
,” Quoted in
Chronicles of the Crusades,
Hallam, 126.

243
Radulf preached at Cologne, Mainz, Worms, Speyer and Strasbourg.

244
Phillips,
The Second Crusade
, 87.

245
Ibid., 85.

246
Phillips,
The Second Crusade
, 28.

247
Vita Prima S. Bernardi
in Phillips,
The Second Crusade
, 95.

248
Phillips,
The Second Crusade
, 169.

249
Ibid., 174.

250
Niketas Choniates,
O City of Byzantium—The Annals of Niketas Choniates
, trans. H.J. Magoulias (Detroit: 1984), 39, in Phillips,
The
Second Crusade
, 206.

251
Tyerman,
God’s War
, 325.

252
Phillips,
The Second Crusade
, 62.

253
Ibid., 63.

254
Ibid.

255
Ibid., 126–127.

256
Grousset,
The Epic of the Crusades
, 118.

257
William of Tyre,
Chronicon
, ed. R.B.C. Huygens, 2 vols., CCCM 63, 63A (Turnhout: 1986), 755, in Phillips,
The
Second Crusade
, 211.

258
Ibn Jubayr,
The Travels of Ibn Jubayr
, trans. R.J.C. Broadhurst (London: 1952), 271–272. in Phillips,
The
Second Crusade
, 218.

259
Phillips,
The Second Crusade
, 220.

260
Die Urkunden Konrads III. Und seines Sohns Heinrich
, ed. F. Hausmann, MGH DD 9 (Vienna: 1969), 197, 357 Quoted in Phillips,
The
Second Crusade
, 222.

261
Phillips,
The Second Crusade
, 223–224.

262
Tyerman,
God’s War
, 335.

263
Ibid.

264
Madden,
The New Concise History of the Crusades
, 61.

265
Ibid.

266
Tyerman,
God’s War
, 336.

267
Rengers,
The 33 Doctors of the Church
, 294.

268
Bernard,
De Consideratione
, in Riley-Smith,
The Crusades
, 131.

269
Würzburg, chronicler in
Chronicles of the Crusades,
147.

270
Phillips,
The Second Crusade
, 278–279.

271
For criticism of Bernard, see Barron,
Catholicism
, 162.

272
Carroll,
The Glory of Christendom
, 75.

5

The Sultan and the Kings

[We want to fight] . . . until you see Jesus fleeing from Jerusalem.

Ibn Munir of Tripoli
273

We have heard things that make us tremble at the severity of the judgment that the divine hand has executed over the land of Jerusalem.

Pope Gregory VIII
274

The count of Poitou heard the devastating news and knew immediately what he had to do. The pope had once more called to arms the warriors of Christendom. The Holy City of Jerusalem had fallen into enemy hands; the Christians of the Latin East were in desperate need.

The count had plenty to keep him occupied at home, including incessant political intrigue. None of it mattered now. Christ’s patrimony was in peril, and the pope’s call moved this warrior to forget the cares of home to embrace the cross. The count made his way to Tours, and there in the city of St. Martin, in November of 1187, he took the vow to go on Crusade. He was determined to utilize all the means at his disposal to muster a formidable army motivated by one mission: the recovery of the Holy City.

Spiritually prepared and armed with the resources of the kingdom of England and his extensive holdings in Aquitaine, the thirty-two-year-old count was confident that his mission would be accomplished. In the summer of 1190, medieval Europe’s greatest military commander departed his home, not to see it again for the next four years. The time was at hand: Richard the Lion-Hearted was going to war.

Their Worst Fear—the Rise of Saladin

Less than thirty years after the failure of the Second Crusade, the Christians of the Latin East found themselves surrounded by a unified Islam whose ruler pursed a campaign of
jihad
to push them out of the Holy Land forever. William of Tyre, the historian of the Latin East, described the military and political situation of Outrémer with the ascendancy of the infamous Saladin:

[A]ll the kingdoms round about us obey one ruler, they do the will of one man, and at this command alone, however reluctantly, they are ready, as a unit, to take up arms for our injury. This Saladin . . . a man of humble antecedents and lowly station, now holds under his control all these kingdoms, for fortune has smiled too graciously upon him.
275

Saladin was a Kurd born in the town of Tikrit in modern-day Iraq—the same birthplace as Saddam Hussein. The man who would wreak havoc among the Christians in Outrémer was known as Yusuf Ibn Ayyub during his lifetime, but he became known in western literature and history as Saladin, from the Arabic title
Salah al-Din
(“Restorer of Religion).”
276
He was a pious and observant Muslim who fasted, slept on a rough mat, and gave generous alms to the poor. His spiritual practices were rooted in a desire to do the will of Allah and imitate the example of Mohammed and even exceed it, for “while he emulated the temperance he surpassed the chastity of his Arabian prophet.”
277

Saladin believed that God had chosen him to recapture the Holy City of Jerusalem. This conviction fueled a fierce commitment to
jihad
, as his biographer, Baha al-Din Ibn Shaddad commented:

The Holy War and the suffering involved in it weighed heavily on his heart and his whole being in every limb; he spoke of nothing else, thought only about equipment for the fight, was interested only in those who had taken up arms, had little sympathy with anyone who spoke of anything else or encouraged any other activity.
278

Collapse of the Fatimid Caliphate

Saladin began his rise to power and influence as an assistant to his uncle, Shirkuh, who was sent to Egypt by Nur al-Din in 1163. Shirkuh’s reign as Egyptian vizier was short—he died suddenly on March 23, 1169, after eating an “exceptionally rich meal.”
279
Saladin was appointed vizier in his place, but as the fifth vizier in six years his position seemed very tenuous. “His political position appeared hopelessly anomalous: an orthodox Sunni Kurd, nominally subject to a foreign overlord, sustained by a dwindling Turkish army from Syria, attempting to rule a large, unsubdued and populous country in the name of a Shi’ite caliph.”
280
Despite his weakened political position, Saladin engaged in a series of administrative reorganizations of Egyptian society and the army in order to undermine the existing institutions and eventually replace them with elements loyal to himself.
281

In June of 1171, Nur al-Din ordered Saladin to forbid mention of the Fatimid caliph’s name during Friday prayers in mosques; it was replaced with the name of the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad. Although this exchange of names seems a simple matter, it was a significant move that had far-reaching implications. In effect, this was the opening salvo in a fight to restore Sunni leadership to Egypt (a country where the majority of the population was Sunni) and replace the Shi’ite dominant Fatimid family.

On September 11, 1171, Saladin conducted a large military parade in Cairo in which 14,000 troops marched through the town in a demonstration of power and intimidation.
282
When the Fatimid family was subsequently placed under arrest, Saladin was firmly in control of Egypt but his ambition was far from sated. He sought nothing less than the complete unification of the Muslim world under his suzerainty. This goal required the conquest of the Muslim lands controlled by Nur al-Din and the territory occupied by the Crusader States.

Saladin began his unification of Muslim territory upon the death of Nur al-Din on May 15, 1174. Saladin marched to Nur al-Din’s capital at Damascus, conquered his city, and married his widow in a move designed to present himself as the successor to the great ruler. Two years later, the Abbasid caliph proclaimed Saladin the ruler of Egypt, Yemen, and Syria and ordered him to expel the Latin Christians from the Holy Land and recover Jerusalem.

Saladin is often portrayed in the West as a great general and military thinker. The reality is far different. He was “a cautious, at times nervous field commander, better at political intrigue, diplomacy, and military administration than the tactics of battle or the strategy of a campaign.”
283
His troops fought in the standard Turkish behavior of harassment with mounted archers charging enemy formations, feigning retreat and counter-charging in the hopes of separating the foot soldiers from the cavalry. In so doing, they lured the cavalry into a fight on open ground without the protection of their infantry where they could be picked off one by one by the archers. Saladin’s archers, much to the chagrin of Latin knights, specifically targeted enemy horses. This irritated western knights because “in the Western tradition of knightly warfare it was considered bad form, as well as financially stupid, to kill or injure an enemy’s horse.”
284
Saladin’s forces conducted harassment operations and raids against the Latin settlers eight total times in the 1170s and 1180s.