by Douglas Boyd
Given a generous budget and another army or mercenaries, he was sent to push deep into French territory in central France, supported by another army nominally under John’s command and two more armies under Geoffrey the Bastard and the count of Aumale. The outcome was still in doubt when papal legates arrived to stop the widespread devastation such a war would have caused if allowed to continue. With threats of excommunication on all sides, a truce of two years was forced upon the two monarchs and Richard was ordered by his father to go to Paris and do homage to Philip for the county of Poitou. It was as if the transfer of power to Eleanor had never taken place.
Richard was delighted and in no hurry to return. Indeed, 23-year-old Philip spared no expense to entertain his now famous 31-year-old warrior vassal. Preferring to use cunning rather than force of arms, he updated Richard on Henry’s offers at their last meeting. With gossip being the favourite pastime of courtiers, it is unlikely that Richard learned anything new, but Philip assured him Henry intended to give the continental possessions to John, with the exception of Normandy, which would go to the eventual inheritor of the throne of England. As to Philip’s demands regarding Princess Alais, Henry had admitted that his young mistress had given birth to a son by him.
Court gossip in Paris was that Richard spent both day and night with his host, eating together, drinking from the same cup and sleeping in the same bed.4 When this news reached Henry, he ordered Richard to return – with the usual promises offered as bribes. Richard took no notice, but eventually left Philip, riding to Chinon and forcing Étienne de Marçay, the seneschal of Anjou, to remove from Henry’s treasury in the castle funds sufficient for Richard to re-fortify or build several fortresses, including a castle by the new town of St Rémy. Once again, Bertran de Born was stirring up trouble, in this case referring to Richard as ‘the duke who will be king’. This bout of independence did not last. Losing his nerve, Richard met Henry at Angers, publicly repented his recent conduct and swore that he was Henry’s liege man.5 His next act was hardly in keeping.
After news reached Europe of the capture of Jerusalem by the Saracens, Richard took the Cross without consulting his father, which infuriated Henry II. At last, Richard could see a great martial enterprise ahead of him, in which, it seemed, his father could do nothing to frustrate him without incurring the wrath of the Church. But first he had to restore order in Poitou, where Count Vulgrin of Angoulême, Geoffroy de Rancon and the de Lusignan family had captured several of his castles. In one combat, Geoffroy de Lusignan had even killed one of Richard’s household knights. With Richard at the head of a band of mercenaries, the result was yet again a winter of devastation and death in the south-west of France.6
NOTES
1. Richard, A., Histoire, Vol 2, p. 225.
2. Ibid.
3. Installed as count in 1195, he became Raymond VI, although some say two previous Raymonds had been missed out of the line of succession, making him properly Raymond VIII.
4. Richard, A., Histoire, Vol 2, p. 239.
5. Recueil, Vol 17, p. 23.
6. Ibid, Vol 17, p. 478.
8
The Hell of Hattin
For a man whose entire adolescent and adult life was devoted to warfare, it is ironic that the battle which was to launch Richard into history was one at which he was not even present – at a place in the middle of nowhere, known as Hattin.
In common with most other Western intrusions into the Middle East, historical and modern, the crusades achieved the opposite of their professed aim. It was one thing to capture Jerusalem by force of arms, but governing it and the hinterland long term proved beyond the succession of Latin kings because more and more of the early crusaders left Jerusalem to live in the temperate climate and relative safety of the coastal cities, or even to return to Europe if they had the means. According to Archbishop William of Tyre’s thirteenth-century Historia Rerum in Partibus Transmarinis Gestarum – The History of Things Done Overseas – the city ‘liberated’ by the First Crusade became so depopulated that there was scarcely a place where one could safely spend the night.
So many houses were abandoned that the owner of any dwelling unoccupied for a year and a day forfeited title to it, but that was not sufficient to keep enough able-bodied men in Jerusalem to man the walls and guard the gates, even counting the Knights Templar and Hospitallers.1 In desperation, King Baldwin I, who reigned 1100–18, invited the eastern-rite Christians living east of the River Jordan to settle in what became known as the Syrian Quarter of Jerusalem. A gradual repopulation from this and other sources created the problem of finding enough food, the importation of which was heavily taxed until Baldwin II rescinded the customs duty in 1120, allowing local Christians and Muslims to sell affordable food to the population. Two generations after the capture of Jerusalem John of Würzburg wrote a description of the Holy Land in the years 1160–70, noting with surprise that the Holy City was then populated by ‘Greeks, Bulgarians, Franks, Hungarians, Germans, Scots, Navarrese, Georgians, Armenians, Jacobites, Syrians, Nestorians, Indians, Egyptians, Copts, Capheturici, Maronites and very many others’.2 This heterogeneous population spoke, in addition to their native languages used in their own quarters of the city, the common tongue of lingua franca – a bastard French with many admixtures – for their daily dealings.
Although the immigrants brought the city back to life, there was no sense of the unity essential for a city largely surrounded by hostile peoples because each nationality in the city ruled itself according to its own traditions. Compounding the problem, the ruling knightly caste and nobility wasted much of its energy in incessant internecine struggles. It was this dissension that triggered the Second Crusade. The Latin states – referred to in Europe collectively as Outremer, or ‘Overseas’ – corresponded roughly to modern Israel plus parts of southern and coastal Lebanon and parts of Jordan. It comprised four baronies – the lordship of Krak or Montréal in the south, the county of Jaffa and Ashkelon on the coast, and the principalities of Galilee and Sidon in the north – and a royal domain of Jerusalem and Judea plus the cities of Tyre and Acre.
To the north lay the crusader buffer states of Tripoli, Antioch and Edessa, whose strategic function was to keep at bay the Muslim Seljuk Turks led by their atabeg Zengi. At Christmas 1144 Zengi’s forces took advantage of the festivities in the Christian city of Edessa, known as Rohais in the West, to breach the walls of the city, massacre 16,000 of its inhabitants and drive the rest off to the slave market at Aleppo.
Count Joscelin of Edessa was living in sybaritic luxury at his estate of Turbessel on the upper reaches of the Euphrates, and had been buying off the Muslim Turks for years. Zengi, a good strategist, had simply waited for the right moment to besiege Edessa, inhabited by peaceful Armenian and Syrian traders, at a time when it was defended only by a small corps of discontented mercenaries who had not been paid for a year. The Syrian bishop Abu al-Farraj declared that the walls of Edessa were mainly manned by ‘shoemakers, weavers, silk merchants, tailors and priests’.3
The nearest city from which help could have been dispatched to Edessa was Antioch, the coastal city less than 200 miles away whose Count Raymond was a great uncle of Richard. For personal reasons, he refused to get involved, although the fall of Edessa put his county next in line for Turkish attack. After that, the ‘domino theory’ so often cited in the Cold War postulated that the various cities and fortresses of the Latin Kingdom would fall one by one.
The fall of Edessa provoked crusading fever in Europe. Pope Eugenius III declared it the duty of every Christian man to fight for the continued existence of the crusader kingdom and Eleanor’s first husband, the devout Louis VII, answered the call. Many of his vassals were less than enthusiastic until Eugenius made them an offer they could not refuse by announcing that departing on the crusade conferred on each participant a total remission of sins. Since virtually every knight and noble had blood on his conscience, for which he ought to burn in hell, the fever peaked on Easter Day of 1146 at
Vézelay in Burgundy.
Avid for adventure, Eleanor donated her considerable riches to the cause and named her price, which was to come along for the greatest journey of a lifetime in defiance of the papal ban on women accompanying the crusaders, who were sworn to celibacy. But the reality of life in the Holy Land appalled most of the newcomers from Europe, who found Italian merchants making their fortunes there and a life of luxury and indulgence being lived in the Latin cities by the inhabitants they nicknamed les poulains. Meaning literally ‘the foals’ protected by their mares, it reflected their inability, after two generations of easy living in Outremer, to fight their own battles without help from Europe.
Without any real strategy agreed, the Second Crusade achieved nothing except huge loss of life on the outward journey and a failed attack on tolerant Damascus, whose ruler Mu’in al-Din Unar was the only Muslim leader to have signed a treaty of alliance with the Latin states.4 The abortive siege of his city weakened its defences and contributed to its subsequent capture by the Turks, giving them a stepping stone by which Syria could be politically and militarily united with Egypt. The precariousness of the situation was summed up by Bertrand de Blanquefort, Grand Master of the Templars, who foresaw that if any Muslim ruler managed to unite the realms of Syria and Egypt, it would spell the end of the crusader states, for the Holy City was coveted as a holy place not only by Christians and Jews but also by the followers of Mahomet.
Blanquefort’s prophecy came true on 18 June 1173 when such a leader entered Aleppo as conqueror. The slightly built and courteous al-Malik an-Nâsr Salâh al-Din Yûsuf became known in the West as Saladin. By the age of 36, after expanding his northern holdings with several other Syrian cities, Saladin’s political acumen and military skills succeeded in effecting the political and military union of Syria and Egypt that eluded Egyptian President Nasser with the collapse of his short-lived United Arab Republic in 1961. Saladin’s establishment of a solid power base on the shifting sands of Muslim politics merits a book to itself. In comparison with the political and military skills that won his rise to power and the consolidation of that position, the kings and other nobility of the Latin Kingdom were a rabble of short-sighted, squabbling opportunists.
He was of Kurdish origin, born in Tikrit, the town that was to produce Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein eight centuries later. Founder of the Ayyubid dynasty, named after his father Ayyub, Saladin became ruler of Egypt in 1169 and of Damascene Syria in 1174. In contemporary Christian accounts, he and his followers were called Saracens, a name said to derive from Sarah, the childless first wife of Abraham. It was she who drove Hagar, the younger wife who had borne Abraham’s son Ishmael, from their encampment and into the wilderness, which was the legendary cause of Muslims’ enmity for the Jews.
On 4 July 1187 the army of Jerusalem under King Guy de Lusignan and his vassals was soundly defeated at the horns of Hattin by a coalition of Muslim emirs – the title equates roughly with ‘colonel’ in modern usage – under the generalship of Saladin. Paradoxically, had anyone else been the Saracen commander at Hattin, it is possible that Richard I would never have distinguished himself among the early medieval kings of England because it was Saladin’s victory there that triggered the Third Crusade.
Although tensions had been building up for some time, the battle between the twin hills known as the Horns of Hattin midway between the re-fortified Greek city of Sepphoris, then known as Saffuriya, and the city of Tiberias on Lake Galilee was an all-or-nothing gamble by King Guy under the influence of his vassal Prince Renaud de Châtillon, whom the Muslims called ‘Brins Arnat’. He was well known to Saladin, having a history of breaking truces and attacking Muslim pilgrims in defiance of Baldwin and his successor King Guy, on one occasion attacking a caravan in which was travelling Saladin’s sister. In 1182 he committed the great folly of setting out to attack the holy city of Mecca. The only men of his expedition to reach their goal were prisoners taken there to be beheaded after Châtillon’s main body was driven off. After the politically weak and unintelligent King Guy assumed the crown of Jerusalem in 1186, he was unable to control the bellicose Renaud de Châtillon who, in flagrant breach of the 1180 treaty between Damascus and Jerusalem that permitted the free circulation of people and merchandise in the region, attacked a caravan of merchants, killed all those bearing arms and stole all their goods.
Saladin’s diplomatic requests that the prisoners be liberated and their goods returned in keeping with the treaty were ignored. He therefore summoned support from all over the dual realm to deal forcibly with ‘the Franj’, as all the crusaders were called because the majority of those who settled came from France.5 Similarly, the crusaders referred to Muslim fighters as Turks, no matter their ethnic origins. Saladin’s forces included pale-skinned Turks, swarthy Levantines and Egyptians and black Nubians. In June he was able to assemble a mixed force of 12,000 cavalry and about 20,000 foot soldiers midway between Damascus and Tiberias, a Herodian city lying on the western shore of Lake Galilee. This was a sizeable army for the times. Given the difficulties of command and control in battle conditions, Saladin’s method was to reward handsomely the various emirs who obeyed firm instructions to position their contingents before each battle exactly where he wanted them.
In retaliation, the bellicose Châtillon persuaded King Guy to assemble the largest Latin army seen for many years under the protection of a relic of the True Cross borne by the bishop of Acre, deputising for the patriarch Heraclius, who was ill in Jerusalem. The combined Christian forces totalled some 1,200 knights from Jerusalem and Tripoli and a handful from Antioch. Their numbers were doubled by locally recruited mercenary light cavalry and foot soldiers known as Turcopoles, who were paid partly with funds sent by Henry II to the Templars in token fulfilment of his oath to make the crusade. Knowing their movements, Saladin set a trap, sending a third of his forces to besiege Tiberias as a feint.6
As so often, there was fatal dissension among the crusader commanders before the battle, Count Raymond of Tripoli arguing that the Latin army should remain within the safety of Saffuriya’s defences for the time being and Châtillon pumping adrenalin as he incited King Guy to get to grips with Saladin and destroy his forces once and for all, despite the odds against that happening. The problem was that Guy was described by some as half-witted and certainly had neither the intelligence nor the authority to command obedience or be more than a puppet king.
The fortress-city of Tiberias belonged to Countess Eschiva, the wife of Count Raymond. After the city wall had been breached by Saladin’s sappers, she and her garrison forces withdrew within the walls of the citadel, which the Muslims set about undermining. When this news was received in Saffuriya on 2 July a council of war was held, Raymond accepting the loss of Tiberias as just one more move in the long drawn-out chess game of the Latin Kingdom – in which important prisoners were always ransomed and women often liberated as an act of courtesy. However, King Guy was unable to control the fighting talk of other nobles who wanted action at all costs – always a recipe for disaster. He was also subjected to what amounted to blackmail by Châtillon’s supporters and informed by Gérard de Ridefort, Grand Master of the Templars, that the support of his Order’s fanatical knights would be withdrawn if Guy backed down before Saladin.
Discretion was cast to the winds. There were two routes to Tiberias, but the southern one was blocked by Saladin’s forces, forcing the Franj onto the northern route, where all the water sources were either dry in midsummer or had been poisoned or blocked up by the Turks. On 3 July, when his scouts reported Guy’s forces setting out on the northern route, Saladin knew they had fallen into his trap. Harassed all the way by his mounted archers and with insatiable thirst weakening man and horse, the Latin army moved with increasing slowness through arid and inhospitable country.
As the vanguard came in sight of Tiberias towards nightfall, they could see in the valley below them the enticing waters of Lake Galilee, urgently needed by horse and man alike, but they also sa
w Saladin’s forces drawn up between them and the lake. With the army strung out over several miles, it was too late in the day for them, even had they been in much better fettle, to advance and cut their way through the besieging force to reach the lake shore. They therefore had to spend the night tormented by thirst and in no state to fight the next morning. Under cover of darkness, Saladin positioned a blocking force behind the Latins to cut off their retreat towards Saffuriya, and kept the rest of his army in positions north and south of Hattin.
Came the dawn and King Guy’s army rushed towards the lake, only to be caught in a classic pincer movement from north and south as they passed between the twin peaks. With the dry grass and brush fired upwind, their eyes blinded by smoke, the knights and foot soldiers fought desperately but were repeatedly cut down by Muslim attacks until only 150 parched and exhausted knights were still fit to fight around King Guy and Renaud de Châtillon. After they surrendered, Saladin invited King Guy to sit beside him in his pavilion. Suffering torments of thirst, Guy was given cool water to drink, but when Châtillon took the pitcher from Guy to slake his own thirst, Saladin upbraided him for repeatedly breaking his word. Since he had not given the water as a sign of hospitality to Châtillon – who was perfectly aware of Muslim etiquette, having been a prisoner in Aleppo for fifteen years – Saladin had no obligation to spare his life, and personally executed him.
Conflicting accounts claim that many of the Frankish forces fled the field of battle, but only 3,000 or so are actually recorded as having escaped with their lives. Among them was Count Raymond, who had led a desperate charge against Muslim cavalry between the main battle and the shore of Lake Galilee. Saladin’s nephew Taqi al-Din commanded his men to open formation so that the undisciplined Frankish horde could pass through, which it did, causing few casualties. Taqi al-Din then re-formed ranks, blocking any return for Raymond and his knights, who then rode off in frustration, heading for safety inside the walls of Tripoli.7
