The barons of Outremer could only watch hopefully the growing estrangement between Aleppo and Cairo. They had been beaten, soundly, on the Nile, and their plucky but defeated leader, Amalric of Jerusalem, had been succeeded on his demise from dysentery at age thirty-eight by a bright adolescent, Baldwin IV, who had the signal disadvantage of being a leper. The Latins were in no position to repel a concerted offensive. The counterbalance to Syrian jihad was definitively gone: in 1171 Saladin abolished the Fatimid caliphate and thereby extinguished the great shia dream of refashioning the Islamic umma. Worse yet, the Byzantines, the Latins' sometime allies, were permanently sidelined in 1178. After generations of careful stewardship under the Comnenan dynasty, the armies of Constantinople suffered a devastating defeat at the hands of the Rum Seljuks on a battlefield near Ankara known as Myriokephalon. The loser, Manuel Comnenus, compared the debacle to Manzikert—and this was indeed the last time the Byzantines would try to dislodge the Turks from Anatolia.
Given these great events—the end of the Fatimid counterpoise to Syria and the disappearance of the Byzantines in the east—the decade of the 1170s saw the Latins grow more and more isolated in the Levant. They knew that if Saladin and the Zengid ruler of Aleppo, Nur al-Din, could compose their differences, the Muslims would no doubt turn their attentions to Outremer. In the meantime the stonemasons got to work, strengthening the myriad fortresses of the three remaining Latin states—Jerusalem, Tripoli, Antioch—in anticipation of the coming storm.
They won a reprieve. When in 1174, at age fifty-eight, Nur al-Din expired unexpectedly from what is thought to have been angina, the discord between Saladin and the Zengids only worsened. Squabbling immediately broke out over who should be the regent of the Aleppan heir, al-Salih, an eleven-year-old surrounded by kinsmen resentful of Saladin's presumptions. The great Kurd quit Cairo to become master of Damascus, his proximity to his rivals only exacerbating the rift. The letter-writers in Damascus and Aleppo set to work wheedling out of the caliph in Baghdad, the titular head of sunni Islam, formal approval for their masters' claims of legitimacy. In the al-Jazeera the leader of Mosul and its dependencies came out forthrightly against Saladin, viewing him as a usurper unworthy of the dominion won by Zengi and Nur al-Din. As the partisans of jihad against the infidel wrung their hands in frustration, Saladin conducted campaigns in Mesopotamia and Anatolia, far away from the running sore of impiety that was Outremer. Once again Muslim fought Muslim, while truces were negotiated with the barbaric Franks. Nothing short of the grossest provocation would turn minds back to the holy duty of jihad.
Reynaud of Chatillon was a minor nobleman who came to the Levant with the Second Crusade. At its ignominious conclusion, Reynaud chose to stay on in Outremer rather than return to France, where, as a younger brother from a small fief in the Loire Valley, he could have expected little advancement. A tall and handsome man with reddish hair and an impressive bearing, the young Reynaud eventually turned the head of the princess of Antioch, the widow of Raymond of Poitiers. The courtship shocked Outremer. The princess, Constance, was one of the grandest ladies of the land—she was the great-granddaughter of Robert Guiscard—and by rights should have considered only the highest born of men as potential mates. Strong-willed and smitten, Constance shrugged off entreaties from bishop, king, and basileus to consider other suitors—she married her low-born lover in 1153, making a crusading pauper into a prince of Outremer. It was scandalous, William of Tyre remarked in his chronicle, that "a woman so eminent, so distinguished and powerful, who had been the wife of a very illustrious man, should stoop to marry an ordinary knight."
The new prince of Antioch wasted no time in making his mark. Disregarding the claims of its suzerain, the basileus Manuel Comnenus, Reynaud decided to seize peaceable and prosperous Byzantine Cyprus. To finance this adventure, he demanded money from the Latin patriarch of Antioch, who had opposed Constance's love match in the first place and made no secret of his contempt for the parvenu prince. Predictably, the prelate refused to countenance the scheme. By way of reply, Reynaud had him stripped, beaten to a pulp, covered with honey, and exposed to the sunshine of midday, to be tormented by insects. His mind concentrated, the patriarch opened his treasury, and soon Reynaud sailed to Cyprus, in the company of the Christian king of Cilician Armenia.*
Once in Cyprus Reynaud showed that he was a crusader of the old style: his army pillaged, raped, and murdered at will, unmindful of the awkward fact that the islanders were Christian. Reynaud rounded up all the Orthodox priests of Cyprus, cut off their noses, and then sent the mutilated men to Constantinople as a signal of defiance to the basileus. In no time he had offended the Latins, by torturing the patriarch of Antioch, and outraged the Byzantines, by laying waste to Cyprus. The Muslims would have to wait their turn: in 1160, while out in the hinterland of Antioch rustling livestock from Syrian Christians, Reynaud was captured by an armed detachment of Nur al-Din's men. He was thrown into a cell in Aleppo's great citadel, to languish for sixteen years, as no one offered to pay his ransom.
Reynaud's sojourn in the dungeons of Aleppo coincided with the Egyptian wars of Amalric and the ascent of Saladin. As the call to jihad rose outside the walls of his prison, Reynaud, now fluent in Arabic, would have come to know his enemy—and how to insult and wound Muslims deeply. He was released in 1175 or 1176, in the unsettled period when the Zengids of Aleppo, following the death of Nur al-Din, sought allies among the Latins to deflect the ambitions of Saladin.
Reynaud's wife, Princess Constance, had died two years after his capture, leaving Antioch to a son from her previous marriage. Reynaud therefore had to seek a position elsewhere. Sometime in the late 1170s he wooed and won yet another powerful widow, Stephanie of Milly, heiress to Hebron and the Outre-Jourdain, the Latin marchland south of the Dead Sea known in the Bible as Moab. A distant corner of Outremer, it was nonetheless of crucial significance: the main caravan routes from Syria to Egypt passed through the Outre-Jourdain, as did, every year, thousands of pilgrims making the hajj to Mecca. Its two castles, Kerak and Montreal, rivaled the Krak des Chevaliers and Marqab for massive impregnability. Now Reynaud of Chatillon was master of these fortresses, perched high above a valley frequented by treasure-laden travelers. Even for someone possessing scruples, the temptation would have been great.
Ibn Jubayr, the Andalusi traveler whom we encountered earlier admiring the Christian women of Palermo, noted that despite the hostility between Outremer and Syria, the caravan trade was sacrosanct: "The Christians impose a tax on the Muslims in their land which gives them full security; and likewise the Christian merchants pay a tax upon their goods in Muslim lands. Agreement exists between them, and there is equal treatment in all cases. The soldiers engage themselves in their war, while the people are at peace." In addition, the Latin kingdoms were, for once, in concord with their Muslim neighbors: drought and incipient famine had induced the knights to agree, in 1180, to an extended truce with Saladin, who was glad of the respite so that he could deal with opponents in Mesopotamia. Despite these glimmerings of civility, the new master of Kerak could not contain himself. In 1181 Reynaud rode down a column of pilgrims on the hajj, stripping them of all their possessions and hauling many of them into captivity. This was a flagrant breach of the truce, as an angered Saladin was quick to point out, but the king of Jerusalem, the increasingly leprous Baldwin, dared not take any punitive action against his fiery vassal.
The following year Reynaud outdid himself. He launched a fleet of five ships at Eilat, on the Gulf of Aqaba. Their destination was, incredibly, Mecca. The pirate flotilla burst into the Red Sea, plundering unsuspecting merchant and pilgrim vessels, raiding both the Arabian and African shores, and making stops to rob and rape hajj pilgrims inland. This insane razzia got to within a day's ride of Madina. Eventually a fleet sent by Saladin's brother arrived from Egypt to capture the perpetrators. They were subsequently beheaded, but the mastermind of the operation, Reynaud, remained untouched in the safety of Kerak.
I
n the mosques and madrasas of the dar al Islam there was stupefaction: first the Franks had taken Jerusalem; now they wanted to defile the holiest of holies, the cities of the Hijaz. Saladin, aware of the wave of anger sweeping his empire, turned his attentions from Syria and the al-Jazeera and marched on Palestine in 1183. The Latin forces, following the sage advice of Raymond of Tripoli, a poulain lord of the Saint-Gilles family of Toulouse, did not engage Saladin's great army. They took up a strong and fortified position and resisted the temptation to attack, even though the hotheads in the Latin ranks bayed for blood. Frustrated, Saladin eventually had his men head south to ravage the Outre-Jourdain and lay siege to Kerak, in the hope that the great castle might yield the most hated Frank of Outremer. Reynaud, however, was too well protected in his clifftop aerie—and by the time of Saladin's siege, he was not alone. The wedding celebrations of his stepdaughter to a baron of Palestine had brought the quarrelsome nobility of Outremer under his roof. As Saladin's siege engines pounded the fortifications, the festivities continued. Even given the enmity he felt for Reynaud, Saladin showed a sensibility here, as he would elsewhere, that won him a place in the annals of gallantry. On learning of the nuptials, Saladin asked where the newlyweds were to be lodged and consequently directed the fire of his catapults away from that section of the castle. When, at last, a relieving army of Latins arrived from Jerusalem, he beat his retreat.
Decorum nothwithstanding, a larger showdown was imminent. On the Muslim side, calls to put an end to the continuing scandal of internecine war became shrilly insistent. The Assassins, driven out of the cities of Syria to the Jebel Ansariye, had been an on-again, off-again threat to the coalescing unity of the region. In the 1160s, they temporarily sidelined themselves by embracing the radical millenarianism espoused by the leader of the sect in Persia. Declaring himself to be the hidden imam announcing the end of time, Hasan, the lord of Alamut, unilaterally abrogated the laws of Islam and ordered his followers to partake of pleasures theretofore denied, as they were now in the presence of the eternal. In Syria the order was enthusiastically obeyed, and for a time, according to one local historian, "the people . . . gave way to iniquity and debauchery, and called themselves 'the Pure.' Men and women mingled in drinking sessions [and] no man abstained from his sister or daughter."
Eventually, under Sinan's whip hand, the Assassins came to their senses and resumed their holy work of spreading terror. Saladin, as the new champion of sunni Islam, was naturally a target: after barely escaping assassination in 1175 and 1176, he took to wearing armor at all times and sleeping in a bed that rested on an elevated wooden tower. Saladin is believed to have finally come to an understanding with Sinan, as evidenced by the inexpicably abrupt way he lifted his siege of Masyaf, an Assassin castle that still guards the eastern approach to the Ansariye range. Why he opted for compromise with these decidedly unorthodox sectaries is recounted in a famous tale of the thirteenth-century Chronicle of Aleppo. The chronicler, Kemal al-Din, relates that one day Saladin received a visitor who claimed to be in possession of a message from Sinan that had to be delivered in private. Once the stranger was searched for hidden weapons, Saladin dismissed his courtiers, save for two mamluk bodyguards. The man insisted on seeing the sultan alone; Saladin refused.
He [the messenger] said: "Why do you not send away these two as you sent away the others?" Saladin replied: "I regard these as my own sons, and they and I are one." Then the messenger turned to the two Mamluks and said: "If I ordered you in the name of my master to kill this Sultan, would you do so?" They answered yes, and drew their swords, saying: "Command us as you wish." Sultan Saladin (God have mercy on him) was astounded, and the messenger left, taking them with him. And thereupon Saladin (God have mercy on him) inclined to make peace with him [Sinan] and enter into friendly relations with him.
Whatever the truth of that chilling anecdote, by the 1180s the Assassins had switched from terrifying Saladin to harassing his foes. Moreover, the harried Zengids at last caved in to the sunni consensus that the Kurdish usurper was the man to take the fight to the Christians. On the death of Nur al-Din's son, al-Salih, Aleppo submitted to Saladin, and in 1186 so too did Mosul. The Rum Seljuks had crushed the Byzantine Christians at Myriokephalon some ten years earlier; Saladin was beseeched to do the same with the Latins of Outremer.
As the sultan of the al-Jazeera, Syria, Egypt, the Hijaz, and Yemen weighed whether to risk his hard-won peace in a decisive battle with the Franks—with whom he had signed another four-year truce—Reynaud of Chatillon forced the matter. Toward the end of 1186, an enormous caravan traveling from Cairo to Damascus passed tantalizingly by his doorstep. In spite of the truce and the practice of tolls paid for safe passage, the lord of Kerak swooped down on the lightly guarded merchants and relieved them of all their precious wares. The travelers were then thrown into the dungeons of Kerak, destined for sale in the slave markets of Outremer. When the prisoners protested their innocence, Reynaud was reported to have said, "Let your Muhammad come and deliver you!" Saladin, on learning of this latest outrage, swore to kill Reynaud with his own hands. The threshold of the intolerable had at last been crossed. The following spring, from every corner of Saladin's empire, troops were summoned for jihad. They were to meet in southwestern Syria, on the plateau near the river Yarmuk.
Galilee. The pale hills and valleys of this corner of the Promised Land present a picture of peaceful village and sun-bleached pastorale. Appearances deceive, as this region has been at the epicenter of conflict for thousands of years, the overgrown ruin of Palestinian settlements vacated in 1948 just the latest remnants of turmoil. Indeed, an archaeological site in Lower Galilee, Megiddo, gave its name to Armageddon. Farther to the north and east stretches the Bet Netofa Valley, the most ample of the region, which leads from the coastal plain near Haifa and Akko (Acre) inland toward the Sea of Galilee. It too is a picture of rural calm, which belies its past role as the scene of a decisive, violent shock between Christianity and Islam.
At a height called the Horns of Hattin, Outremer met its Armageddon. From this hillock, within sight of the sparkling waters of the Sea of Galilee, the greatest knights of the Latin kingdoms were bested by Saladin—and by thirst. They no doubt thought their god had forsaken them, for the surrounding landscape was central to their Christian faith. Almost within shouting distance of Hattin, on a ridge closing off the southern side of the valley of Bet Netofa, stands the town of Nazareth, where their savior was supposed to have grown to manhood. Nearby, in what is now a suburb of Nazareth, rise the bell towers and minarets of Cana, known to Christians as the village where Jesus performed his first miracle by changing water into wine for a wedding party. On the broiling hot day of July 4, 1187, however, the Muslims celebrated a miracle and the Christians went thirsty.
The lord of Galilee at the time was Raymond of Tripoli, a great-great-grandson of Count Raymond of Toulouse, who had stormed Jerusalem in 1099. Respected for his wisdom (he had counseled the passive strategy to foil Saladin in 1183) yet a poulain of the type detested by newcomers from Europe, Raymond was on good terms with the sultan, with whom he conversed in Arabic, and on execrable terms with his fellow Christians. In the months leading up to the clash at Hattin, Raymond and his foes among the nobility of Outremer came to the brink of civil war, at precisely the moment of greatest peril.
The contentious issue was the throne of Jerusalem. In 1185, on the death of Baldwin IV of leprosy at age twenty-four, his seven-year-old nephew, Baldwin V, won approval from the nobility as the legitimate monarch—in theory, the barons of Outremer elected the king, although the custom of primogeniture had strengthened over time. Sickly, Baldwin V expired the following year. As regent of the kingdom, Raymond of Tripoli expected everyone to respect the agreement that had been hashed out on the boy's accession to the throne: his successor would be chosen by a board of arbitration formed of the pope, the Germanic emperor, and the kings of England and France. And surely he, Raymond, was best suited to take the reins of power. The Latins of
Outremer were all alone now: the disaster of Myriokephalon had eliminated their ally of last resort, the Byzantine Empire. Also, the Byzantines' Orthodox coreligionists in the Levant, having experienced eighty years of Latin discrimination and usurpation, were unlikely to come to the aid of Outremer. These perils—Muslim unity, Byzantine impotence, Orthodox hostility—made the need for a wise leader, such as Raymond of Tripoli, all the more pressing.
Such considerations did not interest Baldwin IV's widowed sister, Sibylla, the mother of the late boy-king. Sibylla came from a long line of strong-willed women to play a role in the affairs of Outremer. Given the fact that her brother (Baldwin IV) and son (Baldwin V) had both been monarchs, Sibylla not surprisingly wanted the vacated throne for herself and her husband, Guy of Lusignan. Guy's story is instructive of the mores of Outremer: having been urged to come to the Levant by his brother, who was the lover of Sibylla's mother, the dashing minor nobleman from France duly won Sibylla's affections and wed her in 1180. Less enamored of this handsome newcomer were the native Latins of Outremer, who saw him as a weak-willed westerner bereft of the tact and flexibility needed to deal with the Muslim enemy. Despite the unpopularity of her beloved Guy, Sibylla possessed the necessary guile to have her way: while the influential Raymond of Tripoli was away in Samaria, she staged a furtive coronation ceremony in Jerusalem.
Sea of Faith Page 22
