The Christians raided a town on the Egyptian coast, then crossed over the Red Sea and landed north of Jedda where they continued to cause havoc. Some locals feared this signified the approach of the Day of Judgment. Reynald was described as “the Elephant,” a reference to the name of an Abyssinian king who had led a Christian invasion of Mecca in 570.49 It was believed that he wanted to remove the Prophet’s body from his tomb in Medina and the locals sent urgent messages to Cairo. After a few weeks, al-Adil, Saladin’s brother (popularly known as Saphadin), managed to get ships of his own transported overland and they chased the Franks down to the Red Sea port of al-Hawa. The Christians were eventually cornered, forced to abandon ship and flee inland; unbowed, they headed toward Medina. Only a day from the holy city they were trapped in a waterless ravine and were either killed or surrendered. The 170 captives were sent throughout Saladin’s lands to be publicly executed—a clear contravention of Islamic law that directs the sparing of those who surrender voluntarily. So great was Saladin’s fury and embarrassment that he showed no mercy at all. Two of the men were dispatched to Mina, the place where animals are sacrificed in the course of the haj, and there they had their throats cut like sacrificial beasts.50 Prince Reynald, as the instigator of the plan, was the object of Saladin’s greatest anger, however, and the sultan vowed to kill the author of such an affront to Islam.
By 1183 Baldwin’s health had started to decline further: he was blind, his hands and feet were severely damaged, and he had to be moved around in a litter. When the king was afflicted by a particularly bad fever he formally designated Guy as regent and asked all the nobles to swear homage to him, although he made his brother-in-law promise not to try to take the crown during his own lifetime. The Franks also faced financial problems: the pressure exerted by Saladin had taken a toll on the kingdom’s finances and in 1183 a variety of taxes were levied on all its inhabitants, regardless of race, tongue, creed, or sex, while the gold coinage issued by the crown was also much debased.51 The resources raised by such measures could be used to hire mercenaries, a contingency that became essential in the summer of 1183 when Saladin—emboldened by finally securing control over Aleppo—invaded. In the face of this crisis Guy summoned the entire military strength of the kingdom as well as enlisting any Italian merchants and western pilgrims who happened to be in the Levant. They marched to the Springs of Sapphoria in central Galilee and then proceeded to shadow the Muslim armies for two weeks before Saladin withdrew. Was this a success, in that the Christians lost no territory and hardly any men? Or was it a humiliation that the largest Frankish army yet assembled barely struck a blow in anger? William of Tyre commented that some nobles had been unwilling to offer Guy good advice because they feared that if he scored a great victory it would be impossible to unseat him. Guy was a victim of his own inexperience and the vicious political rivalry of the time. The ethos of such a militaristic society also counted against passivity, regardless of how effective a strategy it can be judged with hindsight. Criticism of Guy’s leadership reached a crescendo, and when Baldwin recovered his health he summoned the High Court of Jerusalem and dismissed his brother-in-law from the regency. By way of sealing his disapproval of Guy’s performance the king asked Raymond of Tripoli to lead the army and conduct public business when he was unfit to do so. To help define the succession he also had his five-year-old nephew crowned as his coruler, Baldwin V.52
In 1183 and 1184 Saladin returned to the offensive with two attempts on the huge castle of Kerak in Transjordan. The first of these sieges took place just after the marriage of Sibylla’s younger sister, Princess Isabella (aged twelve), and Humphrey of Toron. In one of the strange instances of chivalric courtesy that—confusingly—lie alongside the rhetoric of holy war, the wedding party sent food down to the besiegers. In return, the couple were accorded the privilege of having the bridal suite exempted from bombardment for one night. More significantly, on both campaigns, the castle resisted Saladin’s attacks.53
THE FINAL DESCENT INTO WAR
Baldwin continued his effort to prevent Guy from taking power, although he worried that as Baldwin V’s stepfather he would exercise the regency again. A contemporary source explained that Guy had “neither the knowledge or ability to govern the kingdom.”54 King Baldwin turned to Raymond to fulfill this role, although the High Court insisted that the royal castles should be held by the Military Orders, a sign that some feared the count had his own designs on the crown. Raymond in turn insisted that someone other than he should be appointed the personal guardian of Baldwin V in case the child’s unexpected death could be blamed on him. Finally, and most intriguingly, it was agreed that if Baldwin V died, the succession—which would rest between Sibylla and Isabella—was to be determined by the joint decision of the pope and the rulers of France, England, and Germany. This, in theory at least, marked a startling surrender of authority by the nobles of Jerusalem and was a mark of how divided and seemingly bereft of self-regulation they perceived themselves to be. It reinforced their overt reliance on powerful western rulers for support as well as gesturing toward Christendom’s shared responsibility for the defense of the Holy Land.
This emotive issue had been raised by successive embassies to the West during the 1170s and early 1180s. Discouragingly, in 1181, Pope Alexander III had issued a crusade appeal that said: “the king [Baldwin IV] is not such a man as can rule that land, since he . . . is so severely afflicted by the just judgement of God, as we believe you are aware, that he is scarcely able to bear the continual torments of his body”—a crushing verdict on the settlers’ position.55 In 1184–85 the Franks dispatched the most senior ambassadors they had ever sent to Europe. Clearly the king could not make the journey himself but Patriarch Heraclius of Jerusalem and the masters of the Templars and Hospitallers formed a genuinely prestigious trio.56 The envoys struggled over the Alps and moved northward to Paris where they offered King Philip II the keys of the walled city of Jerusalem and the Tower of David. This was an attempt to induce him to emulate the Emperor Charlemagne, the role model for all medieval monarchs, who accepted these symbols in the year 800 and took the city under his protection. In the perilous circumstances of 1185 Philip was well aware of the huge responsibilities this would entail and, given the fragility of his own power in France, he politely declined.
The envoys then crossed the English Channel to seek out King Henry II, who, as a man who had made previous promises to crusade and, as the closest living relative of Baldwin IV on the male side of his family, was the most logical target for the embassy. In late January 1185 they met him at Reading Abbey where Heraclius gave an impassioned sermon about the terrible danger in which Christ’s land found itself. He also offered Henry the keys to Jerusalem and the Tower of David, and while the king was said to have shown the objects great devotion he too avoided accepting them. Instead he called an assembly of the churchmen and nobles of England, as well as King William of Scotland, to the Hospitaller headquarters at Clerkenwell in March. Again Heraclius implored his audience to act but it seems that the nobles were unwilling to allow their monarch to leave his kingdom. While the patriarch could make a strong moral case for Henry to journey to the Levant, in reality the situation there was so complex and troubled that it was hardly an attractive proposition. The usual expressions of regret and promises of financial support followed and Heraclius convinced a few English nobles to commit themselves to a crusade, but the large-scale expedition he so desperately desired did not materialize. As an aside, in the weeks between the Reading and Clerkenwell assemblies, the patriarch also consecrated the Temple Church in London, familiar to a wider audience from its place in The Da Vinci Code. This circular chapel, designed as a copy of the Holy Sepulchre itself, was a clear signal of the Templars’ vocation and their wealth in being able to finance such a fine building.57
By the time Heraclius returned to the Levant, however, Baldwin IV had finally—mercifully—passed away: he was buried alongside his ancestors at the foot of Mount Calvary i
n the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. While one might judge that he held on to power for too long, and that the combination of his unpredictable health and his desire to exercise authority caused serious inconsistencies in the government of the land, it is undeniable that his bravery in confronting a horrific illness induced respect even among his enemies. Imad ad-Din wrote that “in spite of his infirmities they [the Franks] were loyal to him, they gave him every encouragement . . . being satisfied to have him as their ruler . . . they were concerned to keep him in office but paid no attention to his leprosy . . . he was obeyed by them . . . and saw that there was peace amongst them.”58
Both Saladin and Raymond of Tripoli wanted a truce and in the spring of 1185 settled upon a two-year arrangement. The sultan used this period to his advantage and in March 1186 he finally persuaded the ruler of Mosul to acknowledge him as overlord and to give him military help if required. His empire now consisted of Egypt, Syria, and the Jazira (northern Iraq today, including Mosul)—a vast series of lands, tenaciously assembled and maintained in a loose confederation by Saladin’s military strength, his persuasive diplomacy, and his repeated calls to jihad and reminders of the duty of good Muslims to evict the Christians from Jerusalem.
In the summer of 1186 Baldwin V died: he had been a sickly child for much of his life and his passing was hardly unexpected. Predictably there were rumors that Raymond now planned to take the throne for himself and he seemed to confirm such suspicions when he tried to gather together the majority of nobles at Nablus. It seems, however, that he had underestimated the level of support for Sibylla, and when a significant number of senior figures, including Prince Reynald and Patriarch Heraclius, assembled for Baldwin’s funeral it was this latter group that seized the initiative by backing Sibylla (rather than her younger sister, Isabella, or Count Raymond) as the next monarch. The main stumbling block was Guy, already cast aside by the leper king for his perceived lack of leadership ability. It seems that Sibylla was required to divorce Guy before she could become queen. With the connivance of Heraclius, she agreed to this, on the condition that she alone could select her new husband. Sibylla announced her divorce from Guy and then turned to the assembled nobles and said:
I, Sibylla, choose as king and husband, my husband: Guy of Lusignan who was my husband. I know him to be a man of prowess and honour, well able, with God’s aid, to rule his people. I know too that while he is alive I can have no other husband for, as the Scripture says, “Those whom God has joined together, let no man put asunder.”59
Her dumbstruck audience could only watch in silence as the queen placed the royal crown on Guy’s head. Her actions were within the letter of the agreement and this brilliant and breathtakingly audacious move carried the day. Queen Melisende would have delighted in her granddaughter’s political acumen and brazen determination to preserve power. This was also a very open show of her love and loyalty toward Guy. Roger of Wendover, an early-thirteenth-century English writer, was impressed: “A most praiseworthy woman, to be commended both for her modesty and for her courage. She so arranged matters that the kingdom obtained a ruler while she retained a husband.”60 But tensions between Guy’s men and the locals continued to emphasize his status as an outsider, and compromised his ability to draw the disparate factions together. After the coronation his Poitevin associates infuriated the people of Jerusalem by singing: “Despite the pulains, we shall have a Poitevin king”: pulain was a term to describe the second-and third-generation Frankish settlers in the Levant.61
Raymond and the Ibelins were furious at being outfoxed, and the count’s ambition drove him toward the Muslim camp. He struck a deal that allowed Saladin’s army to move through his Galilean lands if, in the future, the sultan would make him king. It almost beggars belief to register that one of the most powerful Frankish nobles was an ally of the leader of the jihad just under a year before the fall of Jerusalem. Quite how Raymond expected this arrangement to tally with Saladin’s principles of holy war was unclear. As the Aleppan writer Ibn al-Athir noted: “Thus their [the Franks’] unity was disrupted and their cohesion broken. This was one of the most important factors that brought about the conquest of their territories and the liberation of Jerusalem.”62
In the winter of 1186 Prince Reynald attacked a caravan crossing his territory in Transjordan, an act contrary to the ongoing truce.63 When he refused to compensate the Muslims, Saladin had an excuse to fight—not, by this stage, that he was going to do anything else. The pressure he had generated through the creation of his fragile coalition meant that nothing other than all-out holy war would satisfy his allies: if he failed to attack, then his confederation would undoubtedly disintegrate. His forces gathered at Damascus and once the truce had formally expired on April 5, 1187, the sultan began to launch a series of exploratory raids. Thanks to the foolhardy sense of honor of Gerard of Ridefort, master of the Templars, the Franks soon suffered a major defeat. With a force of only 140 knights and against the advice of his colleagues whom he accused of cowardice, he rashly decided to engage a Muslim army of seven thousand. Only three Templars—including, ironically, Gerard—escaped, while other casualties included the master of the Hospitallers, Roger of Moulins. The Battle of Cresson is often overlooked because of the events at Hattin two months later, but the loss of over one hundred of the Christians’ finest troops, as well as one of their senior commanders, was a significant blow to morale and resources.64 Saladin’s aggression finally pushed Raymond of Tripoli into some form of homage—however superficial—to King Guy, and he duly expelled the Muslims from his lands. Ibn al-Athir noted that after the Battle of Cresson the count’s vassals had threatened to withdraw their allegiance to him if he failed to act.65
THE BATTLE OF HATTIN, JULY 1187
By the summer of 1187 both sides had gathered their men for battle.66 The Franks drew together almost the entire military strength of the kingdom of Jerusalem: the Military Orders put forward about six hundred knights while only skeleton garrisons remained in the towns and castles. The total Christian force probably numbered around sixteen thousand; Saladin held a worthwhile advantage with at least twenty thousand troops, of which perhaps twelve thousand were mounted. Once across the River Jordan the sultan presented the Franks with the same dilemma as four years previously—should they fight, taking an even greater risk given the lack of almost any other troops beyond the army in the field? Or should they repeat the strategy of 1183—shadow the Muslims and wait for their forces to break up? Count Raymond appeared to have more to lose than most because on July 2 Saladin’s army besieged his wife in the citadel of Tiberias. This carefully calculated test of chivalric resolve was designed to trigger Guy’s responsibilities to rescue the wife of his vassal, although at first the ruse seemed unlikely to succeed. The Franks, assembled at their customary muster point at the Springs of Sapphoria, held firm because to reach Tiberias required a twenty-mile march across an arid plateau in the height of the summer. Ibn al-Athir believed Raymond—ignoring the captivity of his wife—advocated inactivity; he claimed the count argued “If [Saladin] takes Tiberias he will not be able to stay there and when he has left it and gone away we will retake it; for if he chooses to stay there he will be unable to keep his army together, for they will not put up for long with being kept away from their homes and families.”67 A council of war on July 2 confirmed this strategy and the camp went to sleep believing that they were to remain at Sapphoria. Late at night, however, Gerard of Ridefort sought a private audience with the king.
In the flickering candlelight of the royal tent, the master of the Templars, who had shown his rampant antipathy toward Islam at the Battle of Cresson three months previously, repeatedly urged the king to fight. He reminded Guy of what had happened the previous time he took a passive approach and that Raymond of Tripoli, the very man who now advocated caution, had been the beneficiary. While the king had been accused of cowardice in 1183 he could now rebut such claims in the most emphatic fashion possible. This discussion was not simply about
strategy, however; underlying Gerard’s persuasive suggestions was a deep personal animosity toward Raymond. Back in the 1170s, when Gerard was a lay knight, the count had promised him a good marriage to the heiress of the castle of Botrun. Yet Raymond reneged on the agreement and gave her to a Pisan merchant in return for her weight in gold. Gerard was hugely insulted to be displaced by an Italian trader and stormed off to Jerusalem where he joined the Templars. Now, a decade later, at this time of crisis, he had a chance to face down his hated rival: “Sire [Guy], do not trust the advice of the count for he is a traitor, and you well know that he has no love for you and wants you to be put to shame and to lose the kingdom . . . let us move off immediately and go and defeat Saladin.”68
Guy vacillated: should he hold to the advice of his council and risk his reputation again, or should he change his mind and act boldly at the risk of losing the Holy Land? In the end it seems the psychological scars of his earlier humiliation were too deep to ignore and, in a dramatic volte-face, on the morning of July 3 the king commanded the heralds to sound the order to march. The nobles were both horrified and amazed; they asked on whose advice such a decision had been taken. Guy sharply rebuffed them and simply told them to obey him and get ready to move.
Under normal circumstances, the twenty miles from Sapphoria to Tiberias was a day’s hard march; the problem was that by breaking camp the Franks abandoned their only sure supply of water and then offered themselves up as a very slow-moving target to the Muslim forces—in other words they surrendered the strategic initiative. The vanguard was Count Raymond, in the center was King Guy, and in the rear, the Knights Templar. The Christians advanced eastward and reached the springs of Turan about seven miles away. This seemed a good place to pause, but they pressed onward, a move that Saladin himself believed was fatal. In a letter written immediately after the battle he suggested that “the Devil seduced [Guy] into doing the opposite of what he had in mind and made to seem good to him what was not his real wish and intention. So he left the water and set out towards Tiberias . . . through pride and arrogance.”69 In fact, the springs at Turan were simply insufficient to sustain the Christian army and they had no choice but to keep going.
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