Saladin

by John Man

  A month after the fall of Jerusalem, duty called. Several fortresses held out, among them Kerak. Tyre was the outstanding problem. But Tyre, set on a peninsula linked to the mainland by a causeway, was hard to besiege. Its causeway was cut across by a ditch and ship-based bowmen could stitch it with arrows. The city needed a blockade of Muslim ships, but there were only ten of them. The balance of forces had changed. The city was well led (by Conrad), well defended, and well manned by refugees from Jerusalem, while Saladin’s forces were scattered between conquered cities. Victory demanded inspiration, a new fleet and death-defying assaults. Instead, morale washed away with December’s rain. Saladin’s money was running out. The troops just wanted to go home.

  To cap it all, from the caliph in Baghdad came a depressing reaction to the retaking of Jerusalem. Saladin’s successes had made the caliph nervous. An empire based on Syria was all very well. But if that empire spread south and east, across Iraq, why, pretty soon the caliph himself would be in Saladin’s pocket. The caliph’s advisers wondered out loud if Saladin had ambitions to overturn the Abbasid dynasty. It happened that Imad al-Din’s brother, Taj, was in the caliph’s service, so he was sent off to find out Saladin’s intentions, bearing a letter in which the caliph responded to Saladin’s triumphs with petty carping about sectarian disputes, overly generous welcomes to men who had fled Iraq, and the usurpation of the caliph’s title (al-Nasir, ‘the Victor’, the full title being al-Nasir li-Din Allah, ‘the Victor for the Religion of God’). He finished by blaming Saladin for consorting with unreliable elements, like Turkmens and Kurds, on the caliph’s borders, ‘causing their feet to slip and blunting their resolution’, which was as good as implying he was a rebel himself. To save Islam for the caliph, recapture Jerusalem, be praised by all – then this. It hurt. Usurping his title? ‘By God!’ he told Taj, ‘I did neither choose it nor usurp it. It was given to me by Caliph al-Mustadi after I had destroyed his Ismaili enemies!’ Some advised an angry reply. But Saladin kept a cool head. The caliph, he said, was too great to allow for harsh words.

  The blockade of Tyre, inadequate since it started in July, became ever more so. At the end of December 1187, five of Saladin’s ten ships were captured in a dawn raid by a dozen of Conrad’s ships, along with their crews and commanders. Saladin ordered the other five to safety in Beirut, but Christian ships pursued them, and the Muslims simply jumped over-board and swam ashore or beached their ships and ran away. That was the end of his attempt to take Tyre.

  Impotence capped by humiliation: this was the end of Saladin’s run of victories. Failure spotlit the problems of his leadership. The caliph’s antipathy was mirrored by the reluctance of north African leaders to rally behind him. There were those who worried that his generosity smacked of weakness. In brief: he had more nobility than common sense. Al-Athir – from Mosul, always reluctant to follow Saladin – complained that ‘he never evinced real firmness. He would lay siege to a city, but if the defenders resisted for some time, he would give up and abandon the siege. Now, a monarch must never act in this way.’ Look at the results of his generosity. Enemy soldiers had been allowed to leave Acre, Ascalon and Jerusalem to seek refuge in Tyre, and as a result, well, ‘ought we not to say that in a sense it was Salah al-Din himself who organized the defence of Tyre against his own army?’

  He had a point. Tyre remained a Christian outpost, awaiting help from Europe, and Europe was preparing its response.

  12

  The Third Crusade: The Gathering Storm

  ALMOST INSTANTLY, RELATIVELY SPEAKING, ALL EUROPE KNEW about the disaster of Hattin, and rallied.

  In September 1187, with Jerusalem under attack, its Patriarch, Heraclius, had written to Pope Urban III, lamenting and begging: ‘Alas, alas, O Reverend Father, that the Holy Land, the inheritance of the Crucified, should be given into the hands of pagans . . . Unless your Fatherhood shall have stirred all the princes of the west to bring aid speedily to the Holy Land, we despair.’

  Soon after Jerusalem’s fall, Joscius, archbishop of Tyre, set off in a black-sailed ship, bearing appeals for aid, including propaganda drawings of the horses of Saladin’s army stabled and urinating in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. His first stop was Sicily, where King William II dressed himself in penitential sackcloth at the news and promised a fleet, which by chance was on duty near Cyprus. The next stop for Joscius was Rome, where his tale shocked Pope Urban, already a sick man, to death. His successor, Gregory VIII, wrote to all Europe’s leaders urging everyone to repent, take up the Cross, fast, abstain and hand over all their worldly goods to Rome for protection. He died two months later (of a fever, after just fifty-seven days on the papal throne). Joscius went to France, where Richard, Count of Poitou, eldest son of Henry II of England, had already vowed to go on Crusade. In January 1188 Joscius met with Henry himself and Henry’s long-time enemy Philip II of France, among others. So powerfully did he speak that the old enemies made peace and promised to back the Crusade, thus setting one of four stages – Anglo-French, German, Sicilian (William’s fleet) and Muslim – all of which acted and interacted at once.

  Help was coming, wrote Henry to Amaury, the aging, scholarly Patriarch of Antioch (the one who had been vilely treated by Reynald of Châtillon). Well, yes and no. In England, Henry promulgated the ‘Saladin Tithe’ to pay for the Crusade, a ‘tithe’ being 10 per cent on revenues and movable properties. Anyone who joined the Crusade was exempt from the tithe altogether, and many did, for objections led to imprisonment and/or excommunication. The tax was the largest ever collected in England and in English territories in France. Collecting it was not easy, because England and its French possessions were torn apart, like Henry’s family, by strife between Henry and his son, Richard, who was in alliance with the French king, Philip. The fighting drove Henry into an early grave in summer 1189. Richard, now king, took over the task of collection. He sold estates, offices (by firing officials and then auctioning their posts), virtually anything he could lay his hands on to add cash to the Saladin Tithe. After more delays, he met Philip in France in July 1190 to set out on their joint adventure.

  But the delays meant that Richard and Philip were not the first of the land forces to move. A contingent was already under way from the Holy Roman Empire, the 600 or so un-Roman and not very holy entities – from duchies and princedoms to pocket- handkerchief estates – that would one day evolve into Germany and several of its neighbours. Emperor Frederick I, known as Barbarossa (Red Beard), had pretensions to make himself a new caesar. Indeed it was he who added the ‘Holy’ to what had been the Roman Empire in the West (as opposed to Constantine’s one in the East). With imperial restoration in mind, he had himself crowned emperor in Rome and spent much of his life trying, and failing, to seize Italy. So in the end he won a reputation not as conqueror but as the unifier of Germany, working with, rather than against, the German princes. In his old age, he became a passionate Crusader. In response to Gregory’s letter urging a new Crusade, Frederick convened a congress, the Diet of Mainz, at Easter 1188. To wild excitement caused by a reading of Gregory’s letter, Frederick, a grizzled sixty-eight-year-old, ‘took the Cross’, along with his son, another Frederick.

  The response was astonishing: many other noblemen and thousands of ordinary men, perhaps 50,000, were keen to go, for glory, for loot, for the forgiveness of sins. This gave the commanders a problem. The easiest route was by sea, via northern Italy. But there were not ships enough to carry such a crowd such a distance. So most of the troops – not all, because a few nobles did take the sea route – went overland, through Hungary (picking up 2,000 Hungarian fighting men) and south-eastern Europe, to Constantinople, and onwards across present-day Turkey. That route presented another problem: the Byzantine emperor, Isaac II Angelus, although a Christian, detested his western co-religionists so much that he had allied himself to Saladin. The Crusaders would (perhaps) have to fight their way through Christians in order to fight Muslims.

  The German force was more migr
ation than advance, including an archbishop, eight bishops, three margraves, twenty-nine counts, and tens of thousands of troops – more than enough, as it turned out, to cow the Byzantine emperor, who, under threat of attack, let the Germans rendezvous with Italian ships to carry them across the Bosporus and set them on their way southwards, skirting the territory of the Seljuks (Anatolia, today’s eastern Turkey).

  The Seljuks, being Turkish Muslims, were real enemies, harassing Frederick’s army for 400 kilometres in bitter conditions, this being the new year of 1190. As al-Athir says, the Turks would ‘kill anyone who became isolated and steal what they could. It was wintertime and the cold in those lands can be intense and the snow deep.’ A rare victory at Iconium (today’s Konya) scattered the Seljuks and reinvigorated the Christians.

  Then fate took a hand. Having negotiated a truce with the Turks, the Germans were on the very edge of Christian territory, on the road which for almost two millennia led along the Göksu river (known as the Calycadnus in the ancient world), which cuts through limestone gorges down from highlands to the town of Silifke (then Seleucia). Now it was summer, brutally hot, and the old emperor had been on the road for months. According to conflicting stories, he came to the river where the road crossed from the east bank to the west57 and decided either to refresh himself or to walk his horse across instead of using the crowded bridge. Either way, his horse slipped, Frederick fell, his armour weighed him down, and he was swept to his death. Some officers retrieved his body and put it in a barrel of vinegar to preserve it for the rest of the Crusade.

  Perhaps where the road crosses the 100-metre-wide river today, about 15 kilometres north of Silifke.

  It is on the leader and his vision that a noble cause depends. With the emperor’s death, the German army lost its head, and its inspiration. His son, young Frederick, Duke of Swabia, was no match for his father. Some of his princes headed home, others went south to the coast and hired ships to take them to the Holy Land. The troops were hungry, sick, demoralized – ‘as if they had been exhumed from their graves’, as al-Athir put it – and far too happy to reach Christian Antioch. Here Prince Bohemond fed them for two months. By the end of August, one of Europe’s greatest arrays had been reduced in number and spirit to a pampered rabble unwilling to face more hardship, and without even the symbol of a leader, for vinegar is not a good preservative. Frederick’s rotting flesh was boiled from his bones and given a hasty burial, while the disarticulated skeleton was kept for burial in Jerusalem, thus ensuring that part of him would reside for ever in the Holy City. That at least was the hope of his heir, young Frederick of Swabia, as he proceeded by sea from Antioch to Tyre.

  In Palestine, meanwhile, Saladin had had to face the problem of the principal surviving Christian enclaves, Tyre first and foremost. All attempts to take it – a blockade by ships, assaults with mangonels – had failed. Saladin turned to politics in an attempt to ensure that the Christians remained at each other’s throats.

  King Guy, his prisoner in Nablus since Hattin, was his main asset and, as king, he was more the leader than Conrad in Tyre. So in July 1188, Saladin set him free, along with ten high-ranking followers, in exchange for a promise that he would never, ever take up arms against Muslims again. Guy rejoined his queen, Sibylla, in Tripoli – but promptly forswore his oath, or rather got a priest to release him from it on the grounds that an oath should not be kept if it endangered religion.

  He then marched to Tyre and demanded to be received as king. Conrad refused to admit him. ‘The very fact that I have preserved and am preserving Tyre,’ he wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘is grievous and insupportable to Guy of Lusignan’, whom he disdained as ‘the former king’. He said he would hold the place pending the arrival of the Crusaders from Europe. Guy returned unhappily to Tripoli. The two main Christian enclaves (and several smaller ones) remained separate but intact. They were down, but not yet out.

  Help came to the Christians in early 1189, in the form of ships from both Pisa and Sicily, and more would surely follow. On this slight foundation, Guy, who had risked all and lost at Hattin, took another high-risk decision. He left Tripoli to besiege Muslim-held Acre. Well repaired, well provisioned and well garrisoned, it was no easy target. Guy settled in for the long haul – for a two-year siege, as things turned out, which would become the central event of the Third Crusade. In fact, it would quickly evolve into a double siege – the Muslim population inside Acre; the Christians outside the walls, supplied by sea; and hemming them in Saladin’s land army, with his ships occasionally breaking through the Christian fleet to keep the city alive.

  13

  Acre

  MORE AID BEGAN TO TRICKLE IN TO THE CHRISTIANS. WITH counts, margraves and bishops by the dozen, ships by the score and sailors by the hundred, Acre was solidly blockaded.

  All this took Saladin by surprise. He broke off attacks on lesser fortresses to set up camp near Guy, and on 3 October prepared for battle. Placing himself in the centre of the line, he had his two sons al-Afdal and al-Zafir on his right, then the Mosulis, those from Diyarbakir (under their lord, Qutb al-Din Suqman, who was only fifteen), his nephew Husam al-Din, a contingent from Damascus and, as his anchor, Taqi al-Din; on the left were contingents from Kurdistan, Sinjar, Gökbüri’s men and mamluks. After brief advances and retreats as both sides probed for weaknesses, the Franks saw that Saladin had sent troops from his centre to support Taqi al-Din – failing to understand that Taqi was making a planned retreat to draw the Franks on. Saladin’s order exposed the inexperienced Diyarbakiris. A Frankish charge broke them, drove many into headlong flight and inspired servants to loot their masters’ tents, convincing many Muslims that the Christians were victorious. That was what many Christians believed, too. It was very nearly true. A bunch of them started to pillage Muslim tents, and were close to Saladin’s – almost close enough to cut it down and create panic among the Muslims – when they saw they were in trouble. Having charged through the centre, they risked being cut off from left and right, and paused.

  Something changed. Those who analyse battles know about this moment, when, for some apparently inexplicable reason, one side senses victory or the other defeat. Perhaps it was leadership. Saladin, galloping back and forth in a very un-general-like fashion, yelled at five of his knights, who re-formed the centre and, magically, as a flock or herd will respond to an unseen signal, the tide of battle turned. Perhaps it was the sight of a riderless horse pursued by a few Christians in apparent flight, as recorded by some eyewitnesses. Perhaps it was down to Saladin’s boldness, or the Christian knight Adrienne of Brienne, who galloped back and forth, yelling exhortations, only to be cut down, a symbol of defeat instead of victory.

  Whatever seized them, the Franks became sheep in confused retreat, and easy victims. Some 6,000 were killed, according to Baha al-Din, though estimates like this should be taken with pinches of salt. But there is no reason to doubt his next statement, that the Muslims threw bodies into the little river58 on which the Christians depended. ‘The river flowed with blood, dead bodies and grease for more than eight days,’ wrote the anonymous author of the Continuation, ‘so that the people of the host could not drink the water.’

  Then known to Christians as the Belus or Belos, now the (Hebrew) Na’aman.

  A great victory, but not one on which Saladin could build. His own troops had been robbed and others had fled. Some goods were recovered, piled up in front of Saladin’s tent, and returned to their owners, but that took time. Help for the Christians was flowing into Acre from the ships offshore, with more apparently to come from Frederick Barbarossa – reports spoke of 200,000 troops or more, enough to make all Muslims quail, for they were weary, the horses saddle-sore and Saladin himself drained of energy, borderline sick. There could be no follow-up attack on the city. In mid-October, Saladin pulled his army back to reconsider his options.

  That winter of 1189–90 there were few options on either side except more of the same: more reinforcements – includin
g a fleet of fifty Christian ships, which caused Saladin to remark, ‘By God, it seems to me that the Franks have gone mad and built their towers on the sea’; occasional breakthroughs, now by Christian ships, now by Muslim ones; skirmishes here, duels there; much sickness in both camps, Guy’s wife, Queen Sibylla, and their two daughters being among the victims. For weeks, famine stalked the Franks; troops ate grass, bare bones and their own horses. Both sides – Muslims in Acre surrounded by Franks, who were surrounded by Saladin’s Muslims – settled into a dismal stalemate, enlivened, believe it or not, by parties thrown by knights and emirs for each other, and Saladin’s everlasting generosity to Christian prisoners. The Crusaders were as much their own enemies as Saladin’s, being torn by a dispute over the kingship: King Guy, already weak, was king only because his now-dead wife had made him so; Conrad would be better, but would have to marry Sibylla’s already-married sister, Isabella, to have a claim. So Conrad had her marriage annulled on the grounds that she had been underage when she was married (eleven, actually). Her ‘cowardly and effeminate’ husband, Humphrey of Toron, failed to object, and Conrad would marry her in November 1190, with no great effect, because Guy refused to abdicate.

  Come the spring of 1190, both sides mounted further attacks, with no breakthroughs. The Franks, who had no expertise with mining, somehow managed to hire a team of renegade miners from Aleppo, to no effect, because they could not get close enough to Acre’s walls to mount a successful operation. The Franks used wood brought in by sea to build siege-towers, which the Muslims sent up in flames, thanks to a coppersmith from Damascus who devised a way of tossing Greek fire (naphtha) with a mangonel. One battle in July 1190 led to an astonishing discovery. After one failed Christian assault, which left bodies littered across the battlefield, Saladin’s aides, Baha al-Din and Imad al-Din, rode out together to examine the dead. To their astonishment, as Baha al-Din recorded, ‘I noticed the bodies of two women. Someone told me that he had seen four women engaged in the fight, of whom two were made prisoners.’