Saladin

by John Man

  Summarized in Ronnie Ellenblum, Crusader Castles and Modern Histories. It is on a fault-line that is part of the Dead Sea Transform, a complex of faults that makes the whole region look like a cracked mirror on geological maps. It is hard to analyse, so for geologists Vadum Iacob is treasure. ‘Deformation of a human habitat by transform-related shear has not been previously documented’ (Ellenblum et al., Geology, April 1998). Another quake in 1759 added 0.5 metres to the sideways shift. Details online at vadumiacob.huji.ac.il, which has a full bibliography.

  It was obvious to the king and his engineers when they arrived on site that the 1,500 workers might not be able to complete the castle – inner wall, outer wall, gates, moat – in time to defend themselves against Saladin. Their priority was security, which they needed as fast as possible. So the first task for the carpenters and stonecutters (at least 100 being Muslim captives) was to build from the inside outwards, starting with an inner wall, which would shield a force big enough to stop Saladin’s advance. There was another reason for speed. Everything had to be carried in – wagons, oxen, food for the troops, grain, tools, all guarded by crossbowmen and other fighters, and all paid for by the king and the Templars with no hope of income from booty. Time was money, and speed saved both.

  That demanded improvisation. Designers must have complained that they were being forced to work with one arm tied behind their backs. Normally, there would have been one or two gates. But ox-wagons piled with stones, timber and refuse would create bottlenecks. So the architects had to allow for five gates, though doing so left the place harder to defend. On a base of cobbles, the workforce laid out ashlar blocks as foundations for 20,000 dressed stones for the walls, carried from the stonemasons’ workshop by mules (as is suggested by the damage done to the bones unearthed by Ellenblum). The inner walls, 4 metres thick, made a rectangle 150 metres long and 60 metres wide – almost half a kilometre all the way around. Excavated earth was dumped outside the wall, which meant that the second wall, if there was ever time to build it, would stand higher than the first. Mounds of earth stored water, and waterlogged earth put pressure on walls. So the designers had to (a) get as much rock as possible, which took time, wagons, and manpower; and (b) make good drainage, which meant covering the raised earth with a layer of clay, and that too had to be dug and carried in. Every castle designer knew that to hold off sieges you needed towers. No time for those. Or for any buildings inside, except for a single stone vault. And they planned a moat, but that could be built only after the outer wall was finished. Better a bad castle than no castle or an unfinished good one. By the following spring, the castle had walls 10 metres high – what would have become the inner walls, given more time.

  The spring campaigning season opened with a skirmish. Saladin received a report that some Franks were on the Golan Heights in pursuit of unguarded flocks. In fact, they were from Jacob’s Ford, and were led by Baldwin himself, for his men could do with the food. A force of 1,000 Muslims was nearby, some 30 kilometres from Jacob’s Ford and 60 from Damascus. The Muslims, under Saladin’s nephew Farrukh-Shah, went looking for the raiders overnight, surprised them at dawn, chased most of them off with volleys of arrows, and took some prisoners, among them the wicked, haughty and arrogant Templar commander Odo de St Amand.

  At this unexpected success, a message was sent by pigeon to summon Saladin. As always, pigeon-post was so routine that no one commented on it, but here is evidence that there was a minor industry in Damascus, as in all cities, devoted to pigeon-rearing – cotes of pigeons bred to return to base, and taken out on every patrol so that reports, sent off in duplicate or triplicate in case a bird was lost in flight, could be received within an hour or two.

  So Saladin was out there the following day, by which time someone unnamed had provided an eyewitness account of what had happened: King Baldwin fleeing for his life, many deaths, many knights wounded, one of Baldwin’s aides so seriously hurt that he died later. And they had Odo himself, who was soon thrown into ‘a squalid prison’, as William of Tyre put it, where he died a few months later ‘mourned by no one’.

  A dry winter had become a dry spring. With little new grass for horses, Saladin could not import fresh cavalry from Egypt; could not therefore mount his promised assault on Jerusalem.

  All this took place on Muslim territory, just over the Frankish ‘border’. This suggested a very odd but original idea to Saladin. Sieges are expensive operations. Did they really have to go through with this one? What if he came to terms with Baldwin? At a stroke, that would make the castle redundant. All that labour and expense would be for no purpose. Why not short-circuit the whole business? So in May 1179, just after Baldwin fled, Saladin made an extraordinary offer. How about making peace and agreeing a deal? He would buy Jacob’s Ford castle, and save everyone time, money and lives. The Templars in charge took the idea seriously. The border, such as it was, would return to its previous peaceful state, and the Templars would get their money back. It could work, they said, if they were reimbursed the building costs. Saladin offered 60,000 dinars. No, sorry, came the reply, the 20,000 stones cost 4 dinars each. That was 80,000 right there, not taking into account the costs of the garrison, workers, food, etc., etc. So Saladin raised his offer to 100,000 dinars. Still no deal. In a way, it is not surprising, because had it gone through Saladin would have acquired a nice new – though unfinished – castle and a slab of territory. Both sides backed off. When armies prepare for action, minds are made up: it becomes harder to make peace than war.

  A sort of trial assault took place a few days later, but Saladin pulled back, seeing he could not take the castle before it received reinforcements from Jerusalem. Then all was quiet for three months, while both sides prepared for something more serious. Saladin arrived again from Damascus on Friday, 23 August, and again he was in a hurry to conclude the siege before Baldwin mustered an army in Tiberias, 23 kilometres to the south, and sent it to drive him off. Collecting his force would take Baldwin four days, the march a couple more. Saladin had a week at most.

  In his camp on the east bank of the Jordan, almost within artillery range of the castle, Saladin had the beams with which his engineers could have put together trebuchets; but that would take time, with no guarantee that the giant machines could batter a hole in the walls fast enough. So, with the Franks locked inside the castle and with bowmen all around making them keep their heads down, Saladin set his sappers to work. Undermining had been the normal tactic for decades, so the sappers were expert at their job, digging themselves below ground under the protection of their cross-bowmen, setting wooden pillars and a roof, as in a coal mine. They dug in relays, round the clock, for three days. By the morning of Tuesday, the 27th, they were 10 metres into the hillside, right under the wall.

  They stuffed their tunnel with wood, set it on fire, and stood back.

  The fire blazed, everyone watched and waited, each side with opposite hopes.

  Nothing happened.

  The wall held.

  Three days to go before the Frankish army arrived, with consequences that would probably be disastrous for Saladin, if the catastrophe of Mont Gisard was anything to go by.

  Without a moment to lose, Saladin had to get his sappers to dig further. But the tunnel was full of flaming embers. There was no time to wait for the flames to die and the ashes to cool, so he ordered them to be doused with water, promising an astonishing one dinar for every skinful of water poured on the flames. Imad al-Din witnessed all this: ‘I saw the men bringing skins full of water, and when the tunnel was flooded with water, the fire was extinguished and the sappers could renew their efforts.’ Meanwhile, in the castle above, the Franks were taking precautions, building a wooden wall to block the hole that would appear if the stone one collapsed.

  The following day, Wednesday, the sappers scooped out the water and ashes and mud, and that same night dug deeper, adding a crucial few metres to their work, before once again stuffing the tunnel with wood and setting it alight to burn for
the rest of the night.

  At sunrise on Thursday morning, 29 August, the flaming roof of the tunnel burned through to the cobble foundations, which tumbled into the hole below. The wall cracked and fell, to wild applause from the Muslims. Moreover, the flames spread to the temporary wooden wall, fanned by a hot, dry wind. It was all over for those inside. Seeing this, the Frankish commander, unnamed in the sources, astounded Muslims gathering at the breach by leaping from a remaining section of wall into the flames. The Christian forces in Tiberias saw the cloud, and knew there was no point in going.

  The Franks sent a message asking for surrender terms, but Saladin – not always as generous as portrayed – refused. The Muslims burst through the gap, killed 800 defenders and took another 700 prisoners. Some of the skeletons were rediscovered by Ronnie Ellenblum’s team of archaeologists in their ten years of work, some with skulls and other bones chipped by swords and others with the heads of the arrows that killed them lying alongside. Of the survivors, Saladin interrogated many personally, pulling aside for execution Muslims who had converted to Christianity and crossbowmen who had been the scourge of the Muslim assault force. The 100 captured Muslim stonemasons were brought back on side. Among the booty taken were 1,000 suits of armour and ‘100,000 weapons’ (hard to believe, from a defence force of 1,500; over sixty weapons apiece sounds excessive). The survivors were marched off to Damascus into captivity.

  Then the victors completed the job of destruction. Among the victims were three horses, six mules and a donkey, killed by random arrows during the attack, then collected along with human bodies and thrown into a stone vault, which seems to have been deliberately destroyed. All remained buried and untouched by predators, weather or human scavengers until Ellenblum and his team dug them up. There were a lot of other bodies, some of which were tossed into the water-cistern. Not a good idea, because this was late August and within three days the bodies were a health hazard. Saladin ordered his men out. They were back in Damascus by mid-September, just three weeks after their arrival at Jacob’s Ford.

  Taking the castle was a turning point. It was the first time in many years that the Muslims had captured a Frankish castle. Their success proved a point – that castles were only useful as bases for field armies. True, the Crusaders could retreat into them and be safe for a while. But not for ever. Once they were in, the open mobility of their attackers became the key to victory. If Muslims worked towards a final battle out in the open, they could destroy the Crusaders.

  The tide of war was turning.

  But it had not quite turned. The whole region was seething. Imagine it as a nightmarish snooker table, with iron balls that are magnets of different strengths and sizes. If you listed them all, there would be dozens. Here are some: Egypt and Syria, Syria’s major cities, their rivals for leadership, the Franks in Jerusalem, the other Frankish enclaves, rogue Frankish commanders, Frankish rivals for power, Frankish marriages (Frankish politics being a universe on its own), Bedouin desert-dwellers, Byzantium, the Seljuk Turks of Rum, the caliph in Baghdad, Saladin’s own family, and off at the far end of the table a scattering of European rulers and nobles – all these and more governed by the whim or calculation of individuals, all affecting each other by their moves, repelling, attracting, sticking together in perverse alliances, cannoning off each other in a multiplicity of effects, and sometimes vanishing for ever into a side-pocket labelled ‘Death’ or ‘Defeat’. Saladin was not yet the master-player. All he could do for the moment was wait, watch, and hope for an alignment that would favour him.

  For three years, from late 1179 to late 1182, very little favoured him. The Nile’s annual flood had failed. The people suffered, yet the rich flaunted their wealth. An emir celebrated the circumcision of his sons with 700 slaughtered sheep. In Baghdad, the caliph al-Mustadi died, and so did his vizier, perhaps murdered. There were rumours of a coming invasion from Europe, another Crusade. Turanshah, Saladin’s older brother in charge of Damascus, was a problem. He was generous to the point of foolishness and had run up severe debts. Damascus could not be left in his charge. Saladin gave him a new task, to bring back from Syria many Egyptian soldiers recovering from wounds or exhaustion after their crushing defeat at Mont Gisard. It seems the move, or perhaps the shock of demotion, was too much, for in Alexandria Turanshah went on living high, squandering cash on ‘buffoons and panders’, as a satirical poet said. He developed severe intestinal problems. He would be dead within the year.

  Fortunately for Saladin, very little favoured the Christians either. Baldwin’s leprosy was getting worse and the Franks started talking about a successor. No help came from Europe, and there would be none from Byzantium either, because Emperor Manuel was dying and his empire was bankrupt from foreign adventures and a terrible defeat at the hands of the Turkish Seljuks. It was then torn by intrigues and mysterious deaths and a massacre (when the Greeks of Constantinople turned on the Latins). The several Christian statelets tried to strengthen themselves through marriages proposed, debated, abandoned or made. Every proposal, negotiation, engagement, marriage, love affair and death added to the chaos.

  As an example, follow one of the elements, the princess named Sibylla, daughter of Jerusalem’s king Amalric, sister of Baldwin the Leper, and Jerusalem’s future queen. Because of her brother’s condition, it was vital she produce an heir. So she was married at sixteen and had just fallen pregnant when her husband died of malaria. That left her with a son, but no husband. Envoys sent off all over Europe failed to find a replacement, until at last a French baron,

  Hugh of Burgundy, raised a hope that he would sail in to become heir to Jerusalem’s throne; which he might have done had not Sibylla fallen for Baldwin – not, of course, the leprous Baldwin her brother, but another one, of Ibelin (a castle in today’s Yavne, between Jaffa and Ascalon); but then this Baldwin was captured by Saladin, which put him out of the running, until he was released owing a large ransom, at which point Sibylla refused him anyway because of the debt, a rejection that inspired Baldwin to go to Emperor Manuel in Constantinople to pay it; only to find that on his return Sibylla had fallen in love again, this time with a ‘weak and foolish’ boy named Guy, to the fury of the Palestinian barons who would have him as their king when Sibylla’s brother died if the marriage took place; which it did at Easter 1180.

  These were not circumstances in which either side wished to wage war. In May 1180, Baldwin the Leper requested a truce, and Saladin agreed. You might think this was a move that benefited everyone. But there was one man who was extremely put out. The truce turned out to be another of those events with unexpected consequences, which would turn Saladin’s war against the Christians into something intensely personal.

  8

  Reynald’s Raid

  THE PROTAGONIST OF THIS NEXT PART OF THE STORY IS, OF course, Reynald, at his most excessive, for his idea was to strike at the very heart of Islam, perhaps even the holy cities of Mecca and Medina (on which more later). ‘Only one man,’ as historian Alex Mallett puts it,40 ‘had the audacity, temerity, and insanity (or possibly genius)’ not simply to dream up something so crazy, but then to act on it, resulting in ‘one of the most extraordinary episodes in the history of the Crusades’.

  Alex Mallet, ‘A trip down the Red Sea with Reynald of Châtillon’; see Bibliography.

  No one knows for sure what Reynald’s plan was, because he was not there at the end and everyone else was killed. All we have as evidence are reports written by five different sources, all of which mention rumours and surmises about Reynald’s intentions and how bad things might have been without the successful intervention of the Egyptian fleet.

  So here is what actually happened, as near as it can be gleaned from the letters that describe it.41

  The letters are by Imad al-Din, Saladin’s secretary, and Qadi al-Fadil, his vizier in Egypt. Another account was left by the great traveller ibn Jubayr. Both ibn al-Athir and Sibt b. al-Jawzi edited the accounts, and added snippets of their own. Additional details
are in the biographies of the admiral who ended the raid, Lu’lu’.

  The truce made by Saladin and Baldwin in May 1180 frustrated Reynald, who was eager to pillage Muslims, especially those who could now in theory cross his territory in peace. He had the idea of mounting a raid into the Red Sea to attack what was then the Hejaz and is now the western coastal strip of Saudi Arabia, a narrow plain backed by rugged, barren mountains. This is the original heart of Islam, containing its holiest city, Mecca (Muhammad’s birthplace and where he started to write the Quran), and its second holiest, Medina (where the Prophet is buried). The Red Sea was liquid Islam, virtually sacrosanct, never penetrated by Europeans since the Romans were there 1,000 years previously, long before Islam came into existence. Strategically, the planned raid was a brilliant idea, because if even halfway successful it would both shatter Saladin’s claim to be the true defender of Islam and restore sagging Christian morale. And, of course, Reynald had the prime location from which to launch such a raid: Kerak, his newly acquired castle, 200 kilometres north of the Red Sea port of Eilat.

  It took him the next two years to prepare. It was not immediately obvious how best to mount such a raid. The most direct way was overland. If you made the journey today, it would take you 180 kilometres to the Saudi border, then – if you wished to penetrate to the heart of Islam – another 600 to Medina and 1,000 to Mecca. So to inflict the sort of damage Reynald dreamed of, he would have to take a body of men on a round trip of 1,600 kilometres to Medina and back, or, if he was really ambitious, 2,400 to Mecca. The journey itself, though over desert, was not the main problem; it was, after all, routine for pilgrims and it was not hard to buy the help of local Bedouin as guides. The problem was one of military logistics. He might get through with a small group, not drawing attention to themselves. But what good was a small group when the time came for action? Yet the bigger the group, the bigger the risk and the more support would be needed in terms of camels and food and finance. What he needed was experience and information on which to base a decision. And cash, because whatever his decision it was bound to be expensive.