Sea of Faith

by Stephen O'Shea

  The Horns of Hattin stand on the cusp of a great tear in the fabric of the earth. The Syro-African Rift, which stretches from the Orontes Valley at Antioch all the way to Mozambique, yawns open on the other side the hill, offering a perspective usually associated only with Romantic engravings or cockpit windows. The land falls away into a void, leaving just a view—north toward Lebanon, beyond a screen of taller and taller ranges, the snow-capped height of Mount Hermon towers on the horizon; directly east of the Horns, the great three-hundred-meter-tall bluffs of the Golan rise in tawny majesty and the plateau itself can be seen stretching out to some indeterminate desert horizon. And between the Golan and Hattin, down steeply pitched grassy slopes interrupted by rocky chevrons forming themselves into cliffs, is the floor of the rift, here occupied by the Sea of Galilee, an expanse of the deepest blue 213 meters below the level of the oceans. From the Horns, high up on the parched basalt, the Sea of Galilee is an immodest presence—not only is its color at odds with the surrounding rust and pale green of the land and its vegetation, but its enormous, inexhaustible volume of water seems a calculated insult. Water, jealously hoarded on the upland, covers the rift valley floor, and a whim of geology allows the beholder at Hattin to take in the entire, maddening, vast expanse in a single glance. The crusaders would succumb to thirst in sight of a profligate display of precisely what they needed to save themselves. The men of Outremer were, indeed, beyond the sea.

  For the Latin army, the night spent west of Lubiya was agony. Under cover of darkness the Muslim forces crept into the valley to surround the encampment, creating an encirclement so tight, according to a chronicler, that not even a cat could slip through it. By the light of campfires visible to the Latins, Saladin's men ostentatiously poured streams of water onto the ground, to drive the thirst-crazed Christian to despair. A steady succession of camel trains from Tiberias brought the Muslim fighters goatskins filled with water along with thousands of arrows. These were loosed high into the blackness, to fall like deadly rain on the huddled mass of Latins, praying to the True Cross for some miracle to deliver them from doom the next day. The religious volunteers in Saladin's army, non-combatant mystics and jihad enthusiasts, had spent their time on the campaign collecting brushwood and dried grass. These great bundles they set alight, sending a choking pall over the Latin camp. A raging thirst, death falling randomly from the sky, a suffocating nimbus of throat-scorching smoke, and the constant shouts and singing from an enemy so close as to seem in their midst—the long hours of the sleepless night, alive with terrors, gradually sapped the fighting spirit of the thousands of men who had marched smartly out of Zippori the preceding day.

  The Horns of Hattin, seen from the west. King Guys last stand took place on the height to the right, which some identify as the site of the Sermon on the Mount.

  July 4, 1187, dawned hot and airless. Saladin's men had pulled back, allowing a gap through which the foe could proceed, vainly, toward Tiberias. The Latins marched eastward, the sun rising over the Horns of Hattin to shine directly in their faces. Smoke from the brush fires blanketed the route ahead. When the heat of the day had settled once again over the land, the Muslims increased their attacks on the rear and the flanks of the Christian columns, this time with unrelenting ferocity. King Guy and his men struggled over the Lubiya hill to the arid upland of Hattin, not so much running as stumbling through a gauntlet. The foot soldiers, exposed and protecting an ever-dwindling number of horses, could take no more. First singly, then in wild, disordered groups, they ran headlong from the columns, seeking a way out through the broiling heat and the eye-stinging haze to water and to safety. The only route open led to the Horns. They clambered up and away from the din of the battle to the summit ridge. From there, the Sea of Galilee glinted cruelly below them, but the perilous slope down to it was blocked by Saladin's army. A messenger from King Guy ordered his mutinous subjects back to the plain; instead they lay down on the ground, inert and helpless. One of their number explained, "We are not coming down because we are dying of thirst and we will not fight."

  Raymond of Tripoli exhorted the knights in the center to hold fast. He would smash through the Kurds on the left and create an opening in the gorge that runs near the northern horn down to the village of Hattin. His charge met no resistance; the disciplined formations of Taliq al-Din parted to let the desperate knights hurtle on through, then closed up behind them. Raymond and his men thundered down the steep cleft, unable to turn back and help their comrades. They were safe but dishonored; they spurred their mounts and picked their way through the highlands to the north back toward the Mediterranean. Before the year was out Raymond would be dead—of shame, said his enemies.

  Up on the plain, the knights were beset on all sides. Guy had set up his tent as a rallying point on the Horns. Repeatedly the Latins made desperate charges into the mass of their attackers, trying somehow to cleave a path through to Saladin himself. Taliq's horsemen lunged into the melee, smashing a way to the True Cross reliquary held aloft by the bishop of Acre. He died defending it, and Taliq carried it away in triumph. Saladin's fifteen-year-old son, al-Afdal, was at his father's side in these climactic moments:

  The Frankish king had retreated to the hill with his own band and from there he led a furious charge against the Moslems facing him, forcing them back upon my father. I saw that he was ashen pale and distraught, and he tugged at his beard as he went forward, crying: "Away with the Devil's lie." The Moslems turned to counterattack and drove the Franks back up the hill. When I saw the Franks retreating before the Moslems I cried out for joy: "We have beaten them!" But they returned to the charge with redoubled ardour and drove our army back towards my father. His response was the same as before, and the Franks retired back to the hill. Again I cried: "We have beaten them!" but my father turned to me and said: "Be silent; we shall not have beaten them until that tent falls!" As he spoke the royal tent fell and the Sultan dismounted and prostrated himself in thanks to God, weeping for joy.

  King Guy and his men collapsed from exhaustion. Saladin's envoys found them on the ground, panting from thirst, unable to go on, utterly spent. The great nobles of Outremer were helped to their feet and led down the slope covered with the dead and the dying. Saladin welcomed them into his tent. He extended a goblet of rose water, chilled by snow from Mount Hermon, to the king of Jerusalem. Guy took a long gulp, then passed the cup to Reynaud of Chatillon. The sultan peremptorily noted that he had not offered the drink to Reynaud. Custom held that hospitality implied clemency, and Saladin had made a vow about the raider of the Holy Places. He berated Reynaud for repeatedly breaking truces and offered to spare him if he converted to Islam. The old knight refused, truculent to the last. Saladin raised his sword and brought it down deep into Reynaud's shoulder. A bodyguard then lopped off his head. Guy fell to his knees, terrified, as the corpse was dragged out. Saladin reassured him, saying, "A king does not kill a king."

  All of the lay nobles were spared by a gracious Saladin. They would eventually be freed in exchange for great sums of money. One group—the warrior-monks—had no mercy shown to it. The Templars and Hospitalers ranked as the sultan's most redoubtable enemies, dedicated to permanent war against the Muslims. Past experience had shown that they refused to be ransomed and, if sold, made rebellious slaves. Alive and in captivity, the knights of the Temple and the Hospital would have been a burden. Saladin handed over the two hundred or so monks to their Muslim counterparts, at least in religious fervor—the noncombatant volunteers of his army who had answered the call to jihad. One by one the entire contingent of Templars and Hospitalers was beheaded, in killings often gruesomely botched by the amateur swordsmen from the mosques. Only Gerard of Ridefort, in many ways the architect of the disaster at Hattin, was allowed to live, in deference to his rank and with a view to using him as a bargaining chip in future campaigns. As for the thousands of ordinary soldiers on the losing side, they too kept their heads, but were henceforth condemned to a life of servitude. Shackled together,
the men of Outremer were led out of Galilee in a long and sorrowful column destined for the slave markets of Damascus. Their numbers soon caused a glut in the trade, triggering a sharp fall in prices. One man, it was said, was sold for a pair of sandals.

  The Kibbutz Lavi has not erected a monument to the battle—the hill called the Horns of Hattin, untouched and instantly recognizable, is monument enough. Down the cleft of land where Raymond of Tripoli charged, in the shadow of the northern horn, stands a large Druze seminary, brilliantly white, built around what is believed to be the tomb of Jethro, Moses' father-in-law. Beat-up old cars fill the parking lot, boys and girls run around the tables of a makeshift cafe. On the grassy flank of the southern horn, a promising stela turns out to be Christian, but unrelated to Outremer. On its face is a passage from the Gospel of Mark (3:13), in which Jesus calls the faithful to a mountain. The inscription shows that the parishioners of the Church of God of Prophecy, of Cleveland, Tennessee, believe Hattin to be the setting of the Sermon on the Mount. It is thus the Mount of Beatitudes. Still a minority view, the Horns have yet to supplant a height near Capharnum, on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee, as the Beatitudes bus stop for Christian pilgrims. Irony would be served if at Hattin the phrase "Blessed are the peacemakers" had first been uttered.

  If the mantle of peacemaker could be given to anyone connected to the abattoir of Hattin, the Muslim leader most deserved it. Saladin's actions immediately after his victory were remarkably conciliatory, his reputation for magnaminity growing so bright that some western bards later imagined a Christian mother or grandmother lurking somewhere in his genealogy. In the months following the battle, Saladin preferred accepting peaceful surrender to laying prolonged siege, and he scrupulously honored agreements of safe passage for those willing to quit their strongholds. Much of their Latin soldiery in slavery and their Jewish, Orthodox, and Muslim populations ready to revolt, the port cities of Outremer gave up with barely a whimper. Ascalon, Jaffa, Acre, and Sidon were quickly conquered, leaving only Tripoli and Tyre in Latin hands. Inland, in the Jebel Ansariye, the Hospitaler centers of Marqab and the Krak des Chevaliers were judged to be still too belligerent—no warrior-monk would place himself at Saladin's mercy after Hattin—to be taken without a lengthy and costly assault, although the citadel at Tartus and the Church of Our Lady of Tortosa came under attack.

  The eternal prize, the siren of jihad and crusade, fell after a brief siege in the closing days of September 1187. On Friday, October 2, or the twenty-seventh day of Rahab—the anniversary of the Prophet's Night Journey into the heavens—Saladin entered Jerusalem. The al-Haram al-Sharif was reclaimed for the faith, the large cross torn down from the roof of the Dome of the Rock and Nur al-Din's minbar installed within the al-Aqsa Mosque (where it would stand until August 21, 1969, when an insane Australian destroyed it with an incendiary bomb). The Christian impedimenta of Jerusalem were joyously dismantled.

  To the Latin populace cowering in fear of Muslim revenge for the atrocity of the First Crusade, Saladin proved notably indulgent, scoring a propaganda victory that still impresses. Under the terms of agreement negotiated by Balian of Ibelin (who had escaped Hattin), each Latin could ransom himself for a small payment, then take all his worldly possessions to Tyre, unmolested. For those too indigent to make the payment, the sultan and his brother opened their purses. Although Saladin's treasurers protested when they saw Eraclius and Madame la Patriarchesse, after paying their pittance, leave in wagons laden with sumptuous vestments and precious vessels, the sultan insisted that the bargain be kept. (He later gave Eraclius' palace to the Sufis.) Saladin invited the Orthodox Christians to remain in Jerusalem, handing over to them the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, from which they had been evicted by the Latins in 1099. The sanctuary, derisively called the Church of Refuse (based on an Arabic pun that changes "resurrection," al-qiyama, into "refuse," al-qumama), was deemed pointless to destroy, as Christians would always strive to visit the site, church or no church. The sultan also resettled Jews in Jerusalem, to which they had been barred after the local Jewish population had all perished in the First Crusade's sack of the city.

  For Outremer, Saladin's capture of Jerusalem and its kingdom compounded the catastrophe of Hattin. The Latin presence in the Levant was reduced to toeholds on the coast and a few isolated fortresses, almost entirely dependent on Europe for survival. The complex jigsaw of Outremer in Syria and Palestine had been shattered, the inland estates of the poulain aristocracy reverting to Muslim control. Armies assembled in France, Britain, and Germany would periodically take ship for the Levant, but their presence, and their occasional victories, proved ephemeral. King Richard Lionheart, in the storied Third Crusade against Saladin in the wake of Hattin, won back several Levantine ports but signally failed to capture Jerusalem. Less than a century later, the crusader king of France, Louis IX (later St. Louis), failed even more spectacularly in Egypt and then in Tunisia, dying in a futile attack on the Ifriqiyan coastline. In 1291, after generations of attrition, the last mainland holding of Outremer, Akko (St. Jean d'Acre), was abandoned following a ferocious siege. The crusaders of the Levant were gone, but not, by any means, the idea of crusading.

  As the victor at Hattin, Saladin gained a lasting place in the history of the sea of faith. Even so, the dynasty he founded—the Ayyubids (after ibn Ayyub, or "son of Job")—barely lasted eighty years, his brothers and nephews quickly transforming his empire into a quarrelsome patchwork that would have been familiar to Zengi. In Jerusalem today, the sultan's memory is muted. Near the pools of Bethesda, he makes a fleeting appearance at the crusader Church of St. Anne—yet another spot, like Zippori, said to be the home of Joachim and Anne, the parents of the Mary. The overrestored old chuch bears a twelfth-century inscription over its main portal proclaiming Saladin's conversion of the sanctuary into a madrasa. The vagaries of history have canceled that bequest; in the nineteenth century the Ottoman Turks gave it back to the French, their ally in the Crimean War. More lasting, and far noisier, is East Jerusalem's ever-busy Saladin Street, a Palestinian commercial thoroughfare that leaves the northern walls of the Old City from the Damascus Gate.

  The modern equestrian monument to Saladin in front of the Citadel of Damascus.

  It is in Damascus, the city of Straight Street, where Saladin is best remembered. Just outside the Umayyad Mosque stands the funerary pavilion dedicated to the great Kurd. He died in Damascus in 1193, a sultan but almost penniless, his fortune spent on good works. His medieval resting place—a richly sculpted wooden bier—now stands under glass, replaced by a marble sarcophagus donated by Germany, to coincide with the visit in 1898 of Kaiser Wilhelm II, then one among many vultures circling around the collapsing Ottoman dominion. Saladin thus has two graves, befitting his ambiguous place in historical memory; in a curiosity of posterity, he was long remembered more in the west than he was in Islamic countries. For the crusading period, Muslim literature and folktales preferred to celebrate the pious Nur al-Din as well as the scourge of later Levant Latins, Sultan Baybars of Egypt. European lionizing of Saladin as a paragon of chivalry—in Walter Scott's The Talisman, for example—gradually seeped into Muslim Arab memory, principally in the colonial period. Only then was he reclaimed as a Levantine Simon Bolivar, his role as liberator dovetailing nicely with nascent nationalisms.

  More recently, the morass of confessional politics in Israel and Palestine has given a further fillip to the cult of Saladin. His latest incarnation stands outside the walls of the old city's citadel, its weathered stones a testament to the successive civilizational layering that is characteristic of the Mediterranean world. There, in 1992, a Syrian sculptor, Abdallah al-Sayed, unveiled an oversize equestrian statue of Saladin, to mark the eight hundredth anniversary of his death in the city. On either side of the stern-faced sultan stand a Sufi swordsman and a spear-wielding infantryman. Sitting morosely near the animal's rear end are two saddened crusaders: King Guy holds a bag of money for his ransom; Reynaud of Chatillon stares at the groun
d, doomed. Saladin himself, astride a great mount charging forward, looks eerily like Charlemagne, as depicted before Paris's Notre Dame Cathedral. The sultan is riding west, toward the Golan. Modern Damascene sweethearts have their pictures taken in front of him.

  *Weirdly, given the scene he was supposed to have witnessed, Henry met his death by falling out of a window in Acre in 1197. At the time he was the king of Jerusalem.

  *An Arab-Syrian Gentleman & Warrior in the Period of the Crusades: Memoirs of Usamah ibn-Munqidh, trans. Philip K. Hitti (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 163—64. The qiblah (or qibla) is the direction of Mecca.

  *At the time he was known only as Yusuf, or Joseph.

  *Lesser—sometimes Little—Armenia, the southern Anatolian neighbor just to the north of the Latin states.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  LAS NAVAS DE TOLOSA 1212

  The deathblow to al-Andalus

  The Giralda of Seville nicely illustrates the fickleness of confessional allegiances around the medieval Mediterranean. A stately brick and tile minaret completed in the 1180s as proof of the permanence of Muslim rule in al-Andalus, it became, barely sixty years later, the bell tower of a Christian cathedral. In the sixteenth century a weathervane was placed atop the structure, crowned by a statue (giraldillo) to spin in the warm breezes blowing off the Guadalquivir. That adornment makes it the superior even of the Mezquita and the Ayasofya in evoking the encounter between Christianity and Islam. Not only does the Giralda display the displacement of one faith by another, but it suggests, thanks to its statue, the workings of chance in deciding which creed would come out a winner.