Saladin
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Defeat and Victory: The Tide on the Turn
OUR HERO WAS NOT ALWAYS A HERO. SOMETIMES HE MADE mistakes, covered up and deceived. One such occasion happened in 1177.
In November of that year, trouble loomed from northern Syria, where Philip, Count of Flanders, landed at Acre, backed by seventy ships sent by Emperor Manuel, apparently threatening an invasion of Egypt. Saladin led some 26,000 troops out of Egypt, both to counter Philip and because Jerusalem itself seemed vulnerable. With the death of its king, Amalric, in 1174 it had been inherited by the thirteen-year-old Baldwin IV, a sickly lad, whose problem was identified by the historian William of Tyre, his tutor. At first, as a nine-year-old, the boy was a pleasure to teach: good-looking, lovable, an excellent horseman, good memory, loved to talk, respectful, keen intellect, well disposed to follow good advice. But then,
he was playing one day with his companions of noble rank, when they began, as playful boys often do, to pinch each others’ arms and hands with their nails. The other boys gave evidence of pain by their outcries, but Baldwin, although his comrades did not spare him, endured it altogether too patiently, as if he felt nothing . . . when I called him and began to inquire what it meant, I discovered that his right arm and hand were partially numb, so that he did not feel pinching or biting in the least. I began to be uneasy . . . physicians were consulted. Repeated fomentations, oil rubs, and even poisonous remedies were employed without result in the attempt to help him. For, as we recognized in the process of time, these were the premonitory symptoms of a most serious and incurable disease which later became plainly apparent. It is impossible to refrain from tears while speaking of this great misfortune. For, as he began to reach years of maturity, it was evident that he was suffering from the terrible disease of leprosy.
No one thought he would amount to anything. But he was a boy of character. As the disease began to eat away at his limbs and face, he emerged as a leader, luckily, because it turned out that Philip of Flanders was more interested in making good marriages for two young cousins than in waging war; he was also keen to indulge in gambling, banquets, baths and drunken debauches, according to William of Tyre. There would be no help against Saladin for Baldwin from that quarter. But there was help nevertheless, from the man who was about to turn a religious war into a deeply personal conflict that will run through our story almost to the end.
Re-enter at this point our anti-hero, Reynald de Châtillon. Emerging from captivity in Aleppo in 1176, he found his wife had died and his two children had been spirited away to Constantinople in preparation for royal marriages. He wasted no time in rebuilding his career. Eager for any action that would give him Muslims to kill, he offered his services to Baldwin the Leper, whose advisers knew exactly how to set him up. If he married a certain young widow, Stephanie (Etiennette), he would become master of her castle, inherited from her husband (Miles de Plancy, assassinated in Acre in 1174).
It was the castle that mattered, not the widow. Kerak (Karak today)33 had been built thirty years previously, a day’s ride east of the Dead Sea inside today’s Jordan, commanding a vaguely defined area, Oultrejourdain, Outre- (in modern French) or Trans-Jordan, also known by the Biblical name of Moab. It ran from the Dead Sea for 200 kilometres across the Negev desert to Eilat and the Gulf of Aqaba, even (since there was no border) down to St Catherine’s Monastery in the middle of Sinai. All around was desolation: saw-edged mountain ranges, waterless ravines, bare rock, scrub and sand, all sun-scorched under cloudless skies. But through the desert and past Kerak ran the road south. This crag of a place, with its 80-metre entrance tunnel and walls thick enough to resist the battering of catapults, was the key to the road linking Damascus and Mecca, able to control (that is, raid, rob and tax) camel-trains of traders and pilgrims.
It has several spellings, including Crac and Krak. The word derives from the Syriac karkha, a town. Not to be confused with the even more impressive Krak des Chevaliers, 200 kilometres to the north, in Syria, just over today’s Lebanese border. The French also knew it by the name of its nearby predecessor castle, Montréal, or Mount Royal.
So Reynald was no sooner free than he became a combination of king, warlord and robber-baron, complete with castle, state and income. As Schlumberger puts it, here was an addict of adventure, fighting and pillage, with ‘an implacable Islamophobia nurtured by sixteen years of humiliation and torture at the hands of his jailers.’ He was the loosest of all loose cannons, just the man to help a leprous teenage king stop Saladin in his tracks.
Baldwin, guided by Reynald, rushed to defend his southern outpost, Ascalon, from Saladin. His 500 knights were just in time to secure the fortress, but such a small body of men would not risk attacking Saladin, who simply ignored Ascalon and marched straight past, on towards Jerusalem. Perhaps unaware that his young and diseased opponent had an extremely dangerous commander, Saladin let his troops remove their armour and scatter across the countryside to pillage the locals. Baldwin sent an urgent message 20 kilometres south to the Knights Templar in Gaza, of whom there were eighty under another dangerous commander, the Grandmaster Odo de St Amand. The Templars were so called because their founder in 1118 had rooms for himself and a few others in a wing of the royal palace, the former al-Aqsa mosque, in Jerusalem’s Temple area. The order, led by rich knights, owed allegiance only to the Pope to keep the roads to Jerusalem free of bandits for pilgrims. Their commander, Grandmaster Odo, or Eudes, was, in the opinion of his fellow Christian William of Tyre, ‘a wicked man, haughty and arrogant, in whose nostrils dwelt the spirit of fury, one who neither feared God nor revered man’, which makes him sound as loose a cannon as Reynald. In a way he was, because, as a servant of the Pope, he might choose not to answer a cry for help from young Baldwin. This time he did help. On 25 November 1177, a Friday, the two Christian forces, just 375 of them,34 galloped out of Ascalon along the coast, outflanking Saladin’s scattered army.
According to William of Tyre, but surely a huge underestimation. As a Christian, he may well have understated the Christians’ army to emphasize the significance of the ‘Life-giving Cross’.
No one is sure where they found Saladin; somewhere just north of Ascalon, it seems. William of Tyre calls it ‘Mons Gisard’ (though the spelling varies), and it is often given as ‘Mont Gisard’, but the name has dropped from use and its location has never been identified. Muslims call the battle after nearby Ramla.
As those of Saladin’s force who heard the warning call of trumpets struggled to re-arm and reform, the Christians took heart in the face of overwhelming odds. As Archbishop Albert of Bethlehem held aloft the True Cross, they charged. Usually, Saladin’s force would have allowed charging cavalry through and attacked from the sides. But in this case his troops were in no position to do anything much, because they had no line of retreat. They ran. Saladin was hustled away by his bodyguards, identified by yellow silk over their armour. Many, in their haste to escape, threw away their arms, armour and packs, many of which were picked up by their pursuers. ‘For 12 miles and more, during this entire flight, the foe was mercilessly slaughtered,’ wrote William, ‘nor would any of their number have survived, had not the swift descent of night rescued them.’
It wasn’t over. The next few days were bitterly cold. As the Christians headed back to Jerusalem, the Muslim survivors fleeing into Sinai – Saladin among them, on a camel – ran out of water. Many horses died. Lacking guides, the men wandered hopelessly, until Saladin’s secretary, camping clear of the battle, hired Bedouin to launch a rescue operation. It took Saladin two weeks to get back to Cairo. All told, some 2,000 Muslims had been killed.
Saladin did what leaders do when handling bad news: he spun events for all he was worth, sending camel-messengers racing ahead to forestall rumours of the catastrophe and to tell Cairo that he was alive and well. Imad al-Din, deputy to his secretary and sometimes called Saladin’s chancellor, wasn’t fooled. ‘I rode out to listen to what they had to say and hear how God had given victor
y to the Muslims. But I heard them saying “Good news! The Sultan and his family are safe and arriving with spoils” . . . They would not be giving good news of his safety unless there had been a defeat.’ Saladin refused to admit any such thing. The Franks had lost many more than the Muslims, he wrote to an unnamed emir. Please read this letter to your officers and tell them to thank God the army was safe. God’s grace had guided the survivors through waterless deserts . . . no great name had been lost . . . only beasts had died of thirst . . . the army had re-formed. Saladin went further: ‘The people said that it was a defeat, but through the blessing of the Caliphate it was a victory.’
Well, no, it wasn’t. It was a catastrophe, and everyone knew it. Within days, the pigeon-post had spread the news across all Egypt. A later scribe recalled a piece of ancient wisdom: that detectable lies should be avoided in reports of defeats.35 Saladin would have known nothing of the great Chinese strategist Sun Tzu (Sun Zi in pinyin), author of The Art of War, but experience had now taught him the truth of the Sun Tzu aphorism: avoid battle unless victory is assured.
How could victory be assured? By focusing not on battles, but on the bases in which they were prepared – the castles.
Ahmad al-Qalqashandi (1355/6–1418), quoted in Lyons and Jackson, Saladin, p. 126.
Refusal to accept defeat is a ploy adopted by leaders devoted to victory against the odds. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. It worked for Churchill when Hitler dominated most of Europe in 1941, but it didn’t work for Hitler after Stalingrad in 1942. One hopes that morality plays a part, but often it doesn’t. Stalin rallied his nation in the face of defeat. Genghis Khan took on and destroyed the world of Islam, superior to his in almost every way, because he was able to inspire his people. Are you a brilliant, charismatic leader with once-more-unto-the-breach persistence? Or an egomaniac squandering resources and lives? Time, events and a good dose of hindsight will tell.
In this case, Saladin had both a vision – of Islamic unity to drive out the Crusaders – and the means, in the form of a strong economy, if it could be used properly. He rebuilt, reorganized and replaced lost personnel, equipment and animals. Within four months, he had made good his losses and returned to Syria.
Syria was in disarray. Saladin’s brother, Turanshah, was making a mess of running Damascus, preferring (in William of Tyre’s words) to ‘plunge into the sea of his own pleasures’ and pay off the Christians rather than fight them. Mosul and Baalbek were under their own warlords. Aleppo was torn by intrigues. Its vizier had been killed by Assassins and his rival, Gumushtegin, accused of complicity, tortured to death. The Franks, spotting signs of weakness, launched an abortive raid on Hama. All of this happened in November 1177, coinciding with Saladin’s defeat at Mont Gisard. All in all, as William noted, it was ‘a calamitous month’, with more bad things to come: the death of Saladin’s uncle Shihab al-Din in Hama, and the city of Harim, 60 kilometres west of Aleppo, besieged through the winter, until the Franks were scared away by Saladin’s return to northern Syria in March 1178.
For those who like their history presented in clear narrative, the next few years are difficult, because there is no clarity, no narrative leading up to a final, decisive confrontation. After Mont Gisard, Saladin would be very careful about taking on the Christians in open battle. So, as in a football match or a game of chess, everyone knew what they wanted, but there was a lot of groundwork before anything could be achieved. Both sides sought openings that would allow an all-out attack. Little happened, but a few incidents are worth telling for they set the scene for the great battle to come, at Hattin in 1187.
As always, the first problem Saladin faced was establishing his authority over his fellow Muslims before turning on his real enemy, the Franks. In early 1179 a challenge arose in northern Syria in the form of the Turkish sultan of Rum, which occupied what is now eastern Turkey, north of a rather vague frontier with Syria. This Seljuk sultan, Qilij-Arslan, was a Muslim, of course, but he also had claims on bits of Syria, partly because he needed possessions to hand on to his many sons (eleven eventually, though at this stage Qilij was still only twenty-three). Saladin had to get rid of him. Luckily, Saladin was good at choosing lieutenants who were reliable, because many of them were his brothers and cousins and nephews. His closest aide, Taqi al-Din, was the son of Saladin’s half-brother. Taqi had been with Saladin in Egypt and had proved his loyalty many times. At the battle of Mont Gisard, he had lost a son. Now Saladin gave him the task of seeing off the Seljuk sultan, which he did with a task-force of 1,000 horsemen, who surprised Qilij and his much larger force and drove them back over the border.
Saladin had based himself in Damascus, his ability to raise more troops limited by famine. Never mind, he wrote to the caliph, the spring of 1180, God willing, would see the capture of Jerusalem. It was a consummation devoutly to be wished, yet endlessly postponed.
Then came one particular siege that marked a turning point. This was another of those places the significance of which leaders were well aware. The undefended site was the only ford over the Jordan between its source and the Sea of Galilee, which made it a key to the grain-rich area north of Lake Tiberias. The area is still a key today, because it is on the western edge of the Golan Heights, seized by Israel in 1948 and deemed crucial to its security. So crucial was the area to the Christians in Jerusalem, and so badly defended, that, as soon as it became known that Saladin had returned from Egypt to Damascus, Baldwin the Leper was approached by the Knights Templar, who as protectors of pilgrims took particular care of the bathing places in the Jordan, including this ford.
It had both strategic and historical importance, for it was the spot where Israel acquired its name. The book of Genesis tells the story (Chapter 32, verses 24–8). The patriarch Jacob, travelling to Canaan, was left alone overnight, ‘and there wrestled a man with him, until the breaking of the day.’ The unnamed man apparently dislocates Jacob’s hip, or as the Authorized Version puts it, ‘the hollow of Jacob’s thigh was out of joint’. The man asks Jacob’s name and then says, ‘Thy name shall be no more called Jacob, but Israel’, possibly meaning ‘El [an ancient name of God] prevails’, which is why the man continues, ‘for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed’. The incident in which Israel gets its name is obviously important, but the Bible offers no help in understanding it. Who is the man? In folklore, he becomes an angel or even a pre-incarnation of Christ. Whatever the explanation, it was here, at this crossing point on the Jordan, that Jacob wrestled, giving the place its name, Jacob’s Ford.36 Now Odo, Grandmaster of the Knights Templar, pressurized the eighteen-year-old King Baldwin to fortify Jacob’s Ford by providing it with a castle.
Vadum Iacob, as it is in Latin. Other names are Chastellet, Bait al-Ahzan (‘House of Grief’), Ateret and Yarda, after a village that vanished when Israel took the area in 1948. I fear another story is waiting to be told.
It was not a straightforward decision, because the obvious site for the castle, a hill 3 kilometres from the river, was actually in Muslim territory.
Or was it? What sort of a frontier was this? The question opens up an interesting theoretical point, though in this case the point was also practical. We live today in a world of nation-states with borders that are made real in all sorts of ways, like lines on maps and fences and border controls and passports that allow passage from one side to the other. But before all those things existed, how real were borders? Of course landowners of any kind, from simple farmers to rulers of vast estates, defined their own borders, usually with reference to natural features, like rivers, mountains, rocks and deserts. In modern times, nation-states have often claimed these features as ‘natural’ frontiers, as if they were God-given. Victor Hugo, French poet and nationalist, did so: ‘The Rhine . . . has been accorded a special role by Divine Providence.’ Americans did the same: it was their ‘manifest destiny’ to rule ‘from sea to shining sea’.37 But in Saladin’s time, in a world of nomadic herders and civil strife and
invasions, there were no nation-states and no borders in the modern sense. There were barriers like Hadrian’s Wall and Offa’s Dyke, but they were not the same as frontiers or borders. Today’s maps neatly demarcate the Kingdom of Jerusalem from Syria, Syria from Rum and Byzantium, but on the ground there was nothing to tell that you had moved from one to another. The Jordan was a possible natural border; except that no one treated it as such. Your sense of identity did not involve loyalty to a nation-state with nicely demarcated borders. If you asked an ‘ordinary person’, supposing you could find such a creature, ‘What is your identity?’ the answer would have to refer to a landscape, a religion, a city, a clan, an occupation, a leader.
Such nonsense. What of the Rhône? And the Rockies? Would not they make ‘natural frontiers’? Of course they would; but that did not suit nineteenth-century nationalist agendas.
A castle at Jacob’s Ford would in effect create a frontier by grabbing land, policing it with a small army and barring Saladin from following this route to Jerusalem. Baldwin complied, taking charge in person. Work started in October 1178, in a frantic race against time. Indeed the whole short life of Jacob’s Ford was frantic, from conception and creation to occupation and destruction. It would have been the largest castle of its day in the whole eastern Mediterranean, and it might have lasted for centuries. As things turned out, its life was all over in eleven months, perhaps the shortest of any castle ever.
Yet it had a strange after-life, firstly because its sudden death and complete abandonment turned it into a treasure trove for modern archaeologists,38 headed by Ronnie Ellenblum and his team from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who excavated the site in 1997–8; secondly because, by pure chance, it sits right on a tectonic fault-line, and in 1202 an earthquake split it down the middle. This event has nothing to do with Saladin, but geologists love it, because the earthquake shifted most of Arabia north, taking one half of the castle with it, by an amount exactly revealed by the offset in the walls – 1.6 metres. This allows them to explain the forces involved39 (7.6 on the Richter scale). Today, archaeologists and geologists have revealed startling details about the way the earth shifts beneath it, and about those who fought and died there in 1178–9.