Jerusalem

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  When the patriarch died, the queen mother Agnes passed over William, Archbishop of Tyre, and appointed Heraclius of Caesarea, said to be her lover. Favouring rich silks, glittering with jewellery and wafting on a cloud of expensive scent, this ecclesiastical gigolo kept a Nablusite draper’s wife, Paschia de Riveri, as his mistress. She now moved to Jerusalem, and even bore him a daughter: Jerusalemites called her Madame la Patriarchesse.

  The King would soon die. Agnes had to settle the succession.

  GUY: FLAWED HEIR

  Agnes therefore arranged a marriage between the king’s sister-heiress Sibylla and Guy of Lusignan, the attractive twenty-seven-year-old brother of her latest lover, the Constable of the Kingdom. Princess Sibylla, a young widow who had a son by her first marriage, was the only person who was delighted with the match. To most of the barons, her new husband seemed neither experienced nor high born enough to handle Jerusalem’s existential crisis. Guy, now Count of Jaffa and Ashkelon, was a well-born Poitevin baron, but he certainly lacked authority. He divided the kingdom just as it most needed to be united.

  Reynald of Kerak broke the truce by attacking the caravans of pilgrims en route to Mecca. There was no duty more sacred for a Muslim ruler than the protection of the haj. Saladin was incandescent. But Reynald next outfitted a fleet and raided down the Red Sea, landing on the coast nearest to Mecca and Medina. Taking the war to the enemy was an impressive but also dangerous game. Reynald was defeated on land and sea and Saladin ordered the throats of captured Frankish sailors to be cut in public outside Mecca. He then raised another army from his ever-expanding empire. As for Reynald, Saladin swore, in his own words, “to shed the blood of the tyrant of Kerak.”

  Baldwin, his “extremities diseased and damaged, unable to use hands and feet,” fell ill with a fever: he appointed Guy as regent, keeping Jerusalem as his royal fief.b Guy could not but glory in his rise, until in September 1183, Saladin invaded Galilee. Guy mustered 1,300 knights and 15,000 infantry near the fountain of Sephoria but either feared—or was unable—to attack Saladin, who finally marched way to attack the fortress of Kerak across the Jordan. Baldwin ordered the beacon lit on the Tower of David to signal Kerak that help was on its way. Valiantly, heartbreakingly, the leper-king—borne on a litter, blind, grotesque and decaying—led out his army to rescue Kerak.

  On his return, the king sacked Guy, appointed Raymond as regent and had his eight-year-old nephew, son of Sybilla, crowned as Baldwin V. After the coronation, the child was carried from the Sepulchre to the Temple on the shoulders of the tallest magnate, Balian of Ibelin. On 16 May 1185, Baldwin IV died aged twenty-three. But the new child-king Baldwin V reigned just a year, and was buried in an ornate sarcophagus depicting Christ flanked by angels and decorated with wetleaf acanthus.12

  Jerusalem needed an adult commander-in-chief. In Nablus, Raymond of Tripoli and the barons gathered to prevent Guy’s return, but in Jerusalem the throne belonged to Sibylla, now queen regnant—and she was married to the despised Guy. Sibylla persuaded Patriarch Heraclius to crown her, promising to divorce Guy and nominate another king. But during the coronation, she summoned Guy to be crowned as king beside her. She had outwitted everyone, but the new king and queen were unable to restrain Reynald of Kerak and the Master of the Templars, who were both spoiling for a fight with Saladin. Despite the truce, Reynald ambushed a haj caravan from Damascus, capturing Saladin’s own sister, mocking Muhammad and torturing his prisoners. Saladin appealed for compensation to King Guy, but Reynald refused to pay it.

  In May, Saladin’s son raided Galilee. The Templars and the Hospitallers recklessly attacked him, but they were slaughtered at the springs of Cresson, the Master of the Templars and three knights being the only ones to escape. This disaster brought temporary unity.

  KING GUY: TAKING THE BAIT

  On 27 June 1187, Saladin, at the head of an army of 30,000, marched on Tiberias, hoping to lure the Franks out and strike “a tremendous blow in the jihad.”

  King Guy mustered 12,000 knights and 15,000 infantry at Sephoria in Galilee, but, at a council in the red tent of the kings of Jerusalem, he agonized over the unpalatable alternatives facing him. Raymond of Tripoli urged restraint even though his wife was besieged in Tiberias. Reynald and the Master of the Templars responded by calling Raymond a traitor and demanded battle. Finally Guy took the bait. He led the army across the baking-hot Galilean hills for a day until, harassed by Saladin’s troops, overwhelmed by scorching heat and paralysed by thirst, he pitched camp on the volcanic plateau of the twin-peaked Horns of Hattin. They then went looking for water—but the well there was dry. “Ah Lord God,” said Raymond, “the war is over; we are dead men; the kingdom is finished.”

  When the Crusaders awoke on the morning of Saturday 4 July, they could hear prayers in the Muslim camp below. They were already thirsty in the summer heat. The Muslims lit the scrubland. Soon it was burning all around them.13

  a Leprosy was common. Indeed Jerusalem had its own Order of St. Lazarus for leprous knights. Leprosy is hard to catch: the child must have had months of contact, perhaps with a wetnurse suffering mild symptoms. The disease is caused by bacteria passed through droplets in sweat and touch. Baldwin’s adolescence triggered lepromatous leprosy. In the film Kingdom of Heaven he is shown wearing an iron mask to conceal his utterly ravaged, noseless face, but actually he refused to hide himself as king even as the disease consumed him.

  b It was now that William of Tyre “wearied by the sad disasters, in utter detestation of the present, resolved to abandon the pen and commit to the silence of the tomb the chronicle of events that can serve only to draw forth lamentations and tears. We lack the courage to continue. It is therefore time to hold our peace.” His Outremer chronicle survives, his Islamic history is lost. He argued with Patriarch Heraclius, who excommunicated him. William appealed to Rome but died just as he was leaving for Italy. Possibly he was poisoned. In 1184, Heraclius, bearing the keys of Jerusalem, toured England and France in a quest for an heir to the leper-king or at least more funds and knights. He tried to interest Henry II of England. Instead his youngest son John wanted to accept the throne of Jerusalem, but his father refused to let him. It is hard to imagine that John, later known as Softsword and one of England’s most inept kings, would have saved Jerusalem.

  CHAPTER 26

  Saladin

  1187–1189

  SALADIN: THE BATTLE

  Saladin did not sleep, but spent the night organizing his forces and supplies, positioning his two wings. He had surrounded the Franks. The Sultan of Egypt and Syria was determined not to waste this opportunity. His multinational army, with its contingents of Kurds, Arabs, Turks, Armenians and Sudanese, was an awesome sight, relished by Saladin’s excitable secretary, Imad al-Din:

  A swelling ocean of whinnying chargers, swords and cuirasses, iron-tipped lances like stars, crescent swords, Yemenite blades, yellow banners, standards red as anemones and coats of mail glittering like pools, swords polished white as streams of water, feathered bows blue as birds, helmets gleaming over slim curvetting chargers.

  At dawn, Saladin, commanding the centre on horseback, accompanied by his young son Afdal, and protected as always by his bodyguard of devoted Turkish mamluks (slave-soldiers), started his attack, showering the Franks with arrows and directing the charges of his cavaliers and horse-archers to keep the heavily armoured Franks at bay. For Guy, everything depended on maintaining the shield of infantry around his mounted knights; for Saladin, everything depended on separating them.

  As the Bishop of Acre raised the True Cross before the king, Guy’s army repelled the first charges, but soon the thirsty Frankish soldiers fled to higher ground, leaving the knights exposed. Guy’s knights launched their charges. As Raymond of Tripoli and Balian of Ibelin galloped towards the sultan’s forces, Saladin simply ordered his nephew Taki al-Din, commanding the right wing, to open his ranks: the Crusaders galloped through. But the Muslim ranks closed again, tightening the net. Their archers, mos
tly Armenians, picked off the Frankish horses with “clouds of arrows like locusts,” stranding the knights, and “their lions became hedgehogs.” On that “burningly hot day,” unhorsed and exposed, swollen-mouthed with thirst, tormented by the infernal brushwood, unsure of their leadership, Guy’s soldiers perished, fled or surrendered as his order of battle disintegrated.

  He retreated to one of the Horns and there pitched his red tent. His knights surrounded him for a last stand. “When the Frankish king had withdrawn to the hilltop,” recalled Saladin’s son Afdal, “his knights made a valiant charge and drove the Muslims back upon my father.” For a moment, it seemed as if Frankish courage would threaten Saladin himself. Afdal saw his father’s dismay: “He changed colour and pulled at his beard then rushed forward crying, ‘Give the devil the lie!’ ” at which the Muslims charged again, breaking the Crusaders, “who retreated up the hill. When I saw the Franks fleeing, I cried out with glee, ‘We’ve routed them!’ ” But “tortured by thirst,” they “charged again and drove our men back to where my father stood.” Saladin rallied his men, who broke Guy’s charge. “We’ve routed them,” cried Afdal again.

  “Be quiet,” snapped Saladin, pointing at the red tent. “We haven’t beaten them so long as that tent stands there!” At that moment, Afdal saw the tent overturned. The Bishop of Acre was killed, the True Cross was captured. Around the royal tent, Guy and his knights were so exhausted that they lay in their armour helpless on the ground. “Then my father dismounted,” said Afdal, “and bowed to the ground, giving thanks to God with tears of joy.”

  Saladin held court in the lobby of his resplendent tent, which was still being pitched as his amirs delivered their prisoners. Once the tent was up, he received the King of Jerusalem and Reynald of Kerak. Guy was so desiccated that Saladin offered him a glass of sherbet iced with the snows of Mount Hermon. The king slaked his thirst then handed it to Reynald at which Saladin said: “You’re the one who gave him the drink. I give him no drink.” Reynald was not offered the protection of Arab hospitality.

  Saladin rode out to congratulate his men and inspect the battlefield, with the “limbs of the fallen, naked on the field, scattered in pieces, lacerated and disjointed, dismembered, eyes gouged out, stomachs disembowelled, bodies cut in half,” the carnage of medieval battle. On his return, the sultan recalled Guy and Reynald. The king was left in the vestibule; Reynald taken inside: “God has given me victory over you,” said Saladin. “How often have you broken your oaths?”

  “This is how princes have always behaved,” replied the defiant Reynald.

  Saladin offered him Islam. Reynald refused disdainfully, at which the sultan sprang up, drew a scimitar and sliced off his arm at the shoulder. The guards finished him off. The headless Reynald was dragged feet first past Guy and thrown out at the tent door.

  The King of Jerusalem was led inside. “It’s not customary for kings to kill kings,” said Saladin, “but this man crossed the limits so he suffered what he suffered.”

  In the morning, Saladin bought all the 200 Templars and Hospitaller knights from his men, for fifty dinars each. The Christian warriors were offered conversion to Islam, but few accepted. Saladin called for volunteers from the Sufi mystics and Islamic scholars, to whom he gave the order to kill all the knights. Most begged for the privilege, though some appointed substitutes out of fear that they would be mocked for bungling the job. As Saladin watched from his dais, this messy and amateurish butchery now destroyed what remained of the might of Jerusalem. The bodies were left where they fell. Even a year later, the battlefield remained “covered with their bones.”

  Saladin sent the King of Jerusalem to Damascus along with the True Cross, hung impotently upside down on a lance, along with prisoners so plentiful that one of Saladin’s retainers saw “a single person holding a tent-rope pulling by himself thirty prisoners.” Frankish slaves cost just three dinars and one was bought for a shoe.14

  The sultan himself advanced to conquer the rest of Outremer, capturing the coastal cities of Sidon, Jaffa, Acre and Ashkelon but failing to take Tyre when the courageous Conrad, Marquis of Montferrat (whose brother had been briefly married to Sybilla), arrived just in time to rescue this key fortress-port. Instead, Saladin’s Egyptian viceroy, his brother, Safadin, advised him to go post-haste towards Jerusalem in case he fell ill before taking the Holy City: “If you die of a colic tonight, Jerusalem will stay in the hands of the Franks.”

  SALADIN’S SIEGE: SLAUGHTER OR SURRENDER?

  On Sunday 20 September 1187, Saladin surrounded Jerusalem, first setting up camp on the west outside the Tower of David then moving to the north-east, where Godfrey had stormed the walls.

  The city was crowded with refugees but there were only two knights left to fight under the patriarch and the two queens of Jerusalem, Sibylla and King Amaury’s widow Maria, now married to the magnate Balian of Ibelin. Heraclius could scarcely find fifty men to guard the walls. Fortunately Balian of Ibelin arrived, under Saladin’s safe-conduct, to rescue his wife Queen Maria and their children. Balian had promised Saladin not to fight, but now the Jerusalemites begged him to take command. Balian could not refuse and writing as one knight to another, he apologized to Saladin, who forgave this bad faith. The sultan even arranged an escort for Maria and the children. Giving them bejewelled robes and treating them to feasts, the sultan sat the children on his knees and began to weep, knowing they were seeing Jerusalem for the last time. “The things of this world are merely lent to us,” he mused.

  Baliana knighted every noble boy over sixteen and thirty bourgeois, armed every man, launching sorties. As Saladin started to attack, the women prayed at the Sepulchre, shaving their heads in penance, and monks and nuns paraded barefoot under the walls. By 29 September, Saladin’s sappers were undermining the wall. The Franks prepared to die as holy martyrs, but Heraclius discouraged them, saying that this would leave the women to be harem slaves. Syrian Christians, who resented the Latins, agreed to open the gates for Saladin. On the 30th, as the Muslim forces attacked the city, Balian visited Saladin to negotiate. The sultan’s flag was even raised on the walls, but his troops were repulsed.

  “We shall deal with you just as you dealt with the population of Jerusalem [in 1099] with murder and enslavement and other savageries,” Saladin told Balian.

  “Sultan,” replied Balian, “there are very many of us in the city. If we see death is inevitable, we shall kill our children and our wives, and pull down the Sanctuary of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque.”

  At this, Saladin agreed on terms. He graciously freed Queen Sibylla and even the widow of Reynald, but the rest of the Jerusalemites had to be either ransomed or sold into slavery.15

  SALADIN: THE MAN

  Saladin was never quite the liberal gentleman, superior in manners to the brutish Franks, portrayed by Western writers in the nineteenth century. But by the standards of medieval empire-builders he deserves his attractive reputation. When he gave one of his sons advice about how he had built an empire, he told him: “I have only achieved what I have by coaxing people. Hold no grudge against anyone for Death spares nobody. Take care in your relations with people.” Saladin did not look impressive and lacked vanity. When his silken robes were spattered by a courtier riding through a puddle in Jerusalem, Saladin just burst out laughing. He never forgot that the twists of fate that had brought him such success could just as easily be reversed. While his rise had been bloody, he disliked violence, advising his favourite son Zahir: “I warn you against shedding blood, indulging in it and making a habit of it, for blood never sleeps.” When Muslim raiders stole a baby from a Frankish woman, she crossed the lines to appeal to Saladin who, moved to tears, immediately had the baby found and returned it to its mother. On another occasion, when one of his sons asked to be allowed to kill some Frankish prisoners, he reprimanded him and refused, lest he get a taste for killing.

  Yusuf ibn Ayyub, son of a Kurdish soldier of fortune, was born in 1138 in Tikrit (today’s Iraq—Saddam Hussein
was also born there). His father and his uncle, Shirkuh, served Zangi and his son Nur al-Din. The boy grew up in Damascus, enjoying the life of wine, cards and girls. He played nocturnal polo by candlelight with Nur al-Din, who made him police chief of Damascus. He studied the Koran but also the pedigrees of horseflesh. In the struggle for Egypt, Nur al-Din despatched Shirkuh, who took along his nephew, Yusuf, now aged twenty-six.

  Together, leading a mere 2,000 foreign horsemen and overcoming desperate odds, this Kurdish uncle and nephew managed to steal Egypt from the armies of the Fatimids and Jerusalem. In January 1169, Yusuf, who took the honorific name Saladin,b assassinated the vizier whom his uncle then succeeded. But Shirkuh died of a heart attack. At thirty-one, Saladin became the last Fatimid vizier. In 1071, when the last caliph died, Saladin dismantled the Shiite caliphate in Egypt (which has remained Sunni ever since), and massacred the overmighty Sudanese guards in Cairo, while adding Mecca, Medina, Tunisia and Yemen to his growing realm.