With Egypt and Damascus united under Saladin and Baldwin IV’s health faltering, the Palestinian Franks made repeated but ultimately fruitless attempts to secure foreign aid. During the winter of 1176 to 1177 Reynald of Châtillon was sent as a royal envoy to Constantinople to negotiate a renewed alliance with the Greek Emperor Manuel Comnenus. In September 1176 the Byzantines had been roundly defeated at the Battle of Myriokephalon (in western Asia Minor) by the Seljuq sultan of Anatolia, Kilij Arslan II (who had succeeded Ma‘sud in 1156). In terms of manpower and territory, the losses inflicted upon the Greeks as a result of this reversal were relatively limited. But severe damage was done to Byzantine prestige in both Europe and the Levant, and Manuel spent much of the remainder of the decade retrenching his position. In the hope of reasserting Greek influence on the international stage, the emperor agreed to Reynald of Châtillon’s overture, promising to provide naval support for a new allied offensive against Ayyubid Egypt. In return, the Latin kingdom was to accept subject status as a Byzantine protectorate and an Orthodox Christian patriarch restored to power in Jerusalem.
For a time, it seemed as if this venture might bear fruit. In late summer 1177 a Greek fleet duly arrived at Acre, and this coincided with the advent in the Levant of Count Philip of Flanders, son of the committed crusader Thierry of Flanders, at the head of a large military contingent. Philip had taken the cross in 1175 in response to the ever more frequent and vocal appeals from the Latins of Outremer for new western European crusades to the Holy Land. Yet despite his good intentions, Philip’s expedition proved to be a fiasco. With final preparations afoot for an assault on Egypt, petty arguments broke out over who should have rights to the Nile region should it fall and, amid mutual recriminations, the projected campaign collapsed. Disgruntled and alienated, the Byzantine navy set sail for Constantinople. In September 1177 Count Philip joined forces with Raymond III of Tripoli, and together they spent the winter trying and failing to capture first Hama and then Harim. A real chance to disrupt, perhaps even to overrun, Saladin’s position in Egypt had been squandered. Having amassed a defensive force to counter the expected Christian invasion, the sultan suddenly found that he was no longer under threat.
CONFRONTATION
In late autumn 1177 Saladin initiated his first significant military campaign against the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem since Nur al-Din’s death. Despite the importance of this expedition–the sultan’s opening salvo in his self-appointed role as Islam’s new jihadi champion–his precise motives and objectives are somewhat opaque. In all probability the 1177 offensive was not planned as a full-scale invasion of Palestine, targeting the reconquest of Jerusalem, but was instead an opportunistic raid. With his armies already assembled to defend against an expected attack, Saladin seized the chance to make a practical affirmation of his commitment to the holy war, seeking to assert his own martial dominance over the Franks, while providing a counterweight to their northern Syrian attack.
Saladin marched out of Egypt at the head of more than 20,000 horsemen, setting up a forward command post at the frontier settlement of al-Arish. Leaving behind his heavy baggage, he moved north into Palestine, reaching Ascalon around 22 November. There he found an alarmed Baldwin IV. With much of his realm’s fighting manpower absent in the north alongside Philip of Flanders and Raymond III, the king had hurriedly mustered what troops he could at the coast. As one eastern Christian contemporary put it, ‘everyone despaired of the life of the sick king, already half dead, but he drew upon his courage and rode to meet Saladin’. Baldwin was joined by Reynald of Châtillon, his seneschal, Joscelin of Courtenay, a force of some 600 knights and a few thousand infantry, and the bishop of Bethlehem carrying the True Cross. This army made a brief show of confronting the Muslim advance, but, overwhelmingly outnumbered, the Franks soon withdrew behind the walls of Ascalon, leaving Saladin free to strike inland towards Judea.46
The Battle of Mont Gisard
The sultan now made a fateful miscalculation. Seemingly adjudging that the Franks would remain cowed and contained within Ascalon, he allowed his forces to fan out, raiding Latin settlements such as Ramla and Lydda, leaving behind no effective network of scouts to monitor Baldwin’s movements. The young king, encouraged and aided by Reynald of Châtillon, was, however, in no mood to sit idly by as his realm was ravaged. Linking up with eighty Templar knights stationed at Gaza with their master, Odo of St Amand, Baldwin made the bold, perhaps even foolhardy decision to confront Saladin. As William of Tyre put it, ‘[the king] felt that it was wiser to try the dubious chances of battle with the enemy than to suffer his people to be exposed to rapine, fire and massacre’. This was a potentially deadly gamble.
On the afternoon of 25 November, the sultan was advancing to the east of Ibelin, with much of his army spread out across the surrounding coastal plain, when the Latin army made a sudden and unheralded appearance. Saladin’s remaining troops were just then engaged in fording a small river near the hill known as Mont Gisard. When Reynald of Châtillon unleashed a near-immediate heavy cavalry charge on their broken ranks, the sultan proved unable to organise any effective defence and his numerically superior force was soon thrown into retreat. One Muslim contemporary admitted that ‘the rout…was complete. One of the Franks charged Saladin and got close, almost reaching him, but the Frank was killed in front of him. The Franks crowded about him, so he departed in flight.’
While the sultan barely escaped the field, vicious fighting continued. Fleeing for their lives, his soldiers abandoned their armour and weapons, even as the Latins hunted them down, giving dogged pursuit for more than ten miles until nightfall finally offered the Muslims some respite. There were heavy casualties on both sides, for even the triumphant Christians suffered 1,100 fatalities, while a further 750 injured were later brought to the Hospital of St John in Jerusalem. But, while the exact scale of Muslim losses remains unclear, the severe psychological damage inflicted was unquestionable. Saladin was deeply humiliated at Mont Gisard. His close friend and adviser Isa was taken prisoner by the Franks and spent a number of years in captivity before eventually being ransomed for the massive sum of 60,000 gold dinars. The sultan was forced to scurry from the scene, the misery of his own journey back to Egypt compounded by ten successive days of unusually intense, chilling rainfall and the discovery that the often fickle Bedouins had sacked his camp at al-Arish. Having suffered food and water shortages, Saladin finally limped out of the Sinai in early December 1177, shaken and bedraggled.
The inescapable truth was that his own incautious negligence had exposed the army to defeat and that, as a consequence, his reputation for assured military leadership had been tarnished. In public, Saladin did his best to limit the damage, arguing in correspondence that the Latins had actually lost more men in the battle and accounting for the slow speed of his return to Cairo by explaining that ‘we carried the weak and the helpless and went slowly so that stragglers could [catch up]’. He also expended time and money rebuilding his army. Privately, however, Mont Gisard left its scars. Imad al-Din admitted that it had been ‘a disastrous event, a terrible catastrophe’, and, more than a decade later, the painful memory of this ‘terrible reverse’ endured, with the sultan acknowledging that it had been ‘a major defeat’.47
The burden of blood
Any immediate prospect of avenging this injury was forced into the background by the need to address the festering issue of Turan-Shah’s ineptitude. Saladin returned to Damascus in April 1178, relieving his brother of the governorship, but was then forced into an embarrassing and intractable predicament. By way of compensation for his demotion, Turan-Shah demanded lordship of Baalbek–the richly endowed ancient Roman city of Lebanon, located in the fertile Biqa valley. The problem was that the sultan had already awarded these lands to Ibn al-Muqaddam in token of gratitude for his aid in negotiating Damascus’ surrender in 1174, and the emir was now understandably reluctant to relinquish his prize. The unravelling of this affair over the following months was revealing. On
the one hand, it underscored a consistent problem that beset Saladin throughout his career. To build his ‘empire’, the sultan generally relied upon his family rather than selecting lieutenants on merit, but this trust sometimes proved to be ill-founded. Incompetent, unreliable and potentially even disloyal, figures like Turan-Shah were liabilities–capable of gravely damaging the grand dream of Ayyubid domination–yet time and again Saladin proved reluctant to turn against his blood relations. In seeking to resolve the Baalbek dilemma, the sultan also demonstrated that, to further his aims, he would willingly embrace devious and duplicitous politicking.
After a summer of failed diplomacy, Saladin moved on Baalbek in autumn 1178. According to Imad al-Din he began by ‘flatter[ing] Ibn al-Muqaddam, for all his age, like a baby’, but when this produced no result, the sultan blockaded the city throughout the coming winter. At the same time, Saladin initiated a programme of blatant propaganda to justify his intervention. Ibn al-Muqqadam was declared a dissident and variously accused in letters to Baghdad of employing an ineffective band of ‘ignorant scum’ to defend the frontier against the Franks, and later, of actually being in treacherous contact with these Christian enemies. By the following spring, the ‘rebel’ lord, his reputation blackened, had been ground into submission and a deal was brokered. Turan-Shah duly received his chosen reward of Baalbek, but even here his rule seems to have been incompetent and he was soon packed off to Egypt, where he died in 1180. Meanwhile, having bent to Saladin’s will, Ibn al-Muqaddam was welcomed back into the fold. Richly endowed with lands to the south of Antioch and Aleppo, he remained loyal to the sultan for the rest of his career.48
The House of Sorrow
While still entangled in the Baalbek dispute, Saladin became aware of an alarming development in the border zone between Damascus and the kingdom of Jerusalem. Looking to capitalise upon the momentum gained by his victory at Mont Gisard, Baldwin IV had initiated a deeply threatening scheme, designed to bolster Palestine’s defences and destabilise Ayyubid dominion of Syria.
To appreciate the significance of these events, some sense of how frontiers functioned in the twelfth century is necessary. In common with most of the medieval world, Muslim and Frankish territory in the Levant was rarely divided by the literal equivalent of a modern border, but instead, roughly delineated by frontier zones–areas of overlapping political, military and economic influence, where neither side exerted full sovereignty. The positioning of these areas of contested control, akin to no-man’s-lands between realms, was often closely related to topographic/geographic features, be they mountains, rivers, dense forests or even deserts. And attempts by one polity to consolidate or extend influence in such a region could have profound bearing upon local stability and the overall balance of power between rivals.
In the early twelfth century, a case in point had been the Latin principality of Antioch’s expansion of its sphere of authority eastwards, beyond the natural frontier zone with Aleppo, the low-lying, rocky Belus Hills. This intensified threat to Aleppo’s survival ultimately prompted Muslim retaliation, culminating in the Battle of the Field of Blood in 1119. In the late 1170s a similar confrontation was looming between Baldwin IV and Saladin. During this period, the critical border zone between their respective realms lay to the north of the Sea of Galilee and broadly corresponded with the course of the Upper River Jordan. Previously, the epicentre of the struggle for dominance here had lain in the north-east, at the fortress settlement of Banyas. But once it fell to Nur al-Din in 1164, Latin influence east of the Jordan diminished, and the resultant status quo favoured Muslim Damascus.
In October 1178, Baldwin IV made a bold new play for pre-eminence in the Upper Jordan border zone. His target was not the reconquest of Banyas, but rather the construction of an entirely new fortification on the west bank of the Jordan, beside an ancient crossing known to the Franks as Jacob’s Ford and in Arabic as Bait al-Ahzan, the House of Sorrow (where, it was said, Jacob had mourned the supposed death of his son). With swamps upstream and rapids to the south, this ford was the only crossing of the Jordan for miles and, as such, acted as an important gateway between Latin Palestine and Muslim Syria, offering access to the fertile Terre de Sueth region. Crucially, Jacob’s Ford was also just one day’s march from Damascus.
Baldwin was hoping to tip the balance of regional power in favour of the Franks by building a major castle on this site. He was partnered by the Templars, who already held territory in northern Galilee, and together the crown and the order made a huge commitment to the project. Between October 1178 and April 1179 Baldwin actually moved his seat of government to the building site so as to be on hand as both supervisor and protector, setting up a mint to produce special coins with which to pay the massive workforce, and issuing royal charters on site.
This castle jeopardised Saladin’s burgeoning Ayyubid Empire because it promised to serve the Franks as both a defensive tool and an offensive weapon. Medieval strongholds could rarely, if ever, hope to seal or blockade a frontier entirely–attacking armies might march around a fortress or, with sufficient manpower and resources, eventually force their way past its defences. But castles did provide a relatively secure environment in which to station armed forces, and these troops might be deployed to harass and hamper any attempt at invasion by an enemy. The presence of a Templar fortress at Jacob’s Ford would certainly have inhibited the sultan’s ability to assault the Latin kingdom. Its garrison would also be in a position to raid Muslim territory, ransack trade caravans and threaten Damascus itself. And with his capital under threat, Saladin’s ambitious plans to extend his authority over Aleppo and Mesopotamia would likely falter. The danger posed by the fortress being built beside the Jordan, therefore, was impossible to ignore. Unfortunately, with his troops entrenched at Baalbek, a direct military strike on Jacob’s Ford was not really feasible, so initially the sultan sought to use bribery in place of brute force. He offered the Franks first 60,000 and then 100,000 dinars if they halted building work and abandoned the site. But, in spite of the fortune on offer, Baldwin and the Templars refused.
At first sight all the surviving written evidence seems to suggest that the castle at Jacob’s Ford had been finished by April 1179, when the leper king handed command of the stronghold to the Templars. William of Tyre certainly described it as ‘complete in all its parts’ after having seen it with his own eyes that spring. Muslim eyewitnesses also confirmed this fact, with one Arabic source describing its walls as ‘an impregnable rampart of stone and iron’. Until the 1990s, historians always assumed that this meant a fully fledged concentric castle–one with an inner and outer wall–had been built at Jacob’s Ford, making it an incredibly formidable fortress. But, in 1993, the Israeli scholar Ronnie Ellenblum rediscovered the location of this long-lost Frankish fortress. His ongoing archaeological investigation of the site, at the head of an international team of experts, has reshaped our understanding of events and the interpretation of the written sources. Excavations have proved conclusively that in 1179 Jacob’s Ford was not a concentric castle–in fact it had just one perimeter wall and a single tower, and was effectively still a building site. This suggests that to William of Tyre and his contemporaries a ‘complete’ fortress was one that was enclosed and defensible rather than fully formed, and that this particular stronghold was actually a work in progress.
Crucially for Saladin, this meant that Jacob’s Ford was still relatively vulnerable and from spring 1179 onwards, with Baalbek subdued, he returned to Damascus to address the problem of this fortress. The months that followed saw a series of inconclusive skirmishes, as both sides sought to size one another up. Saladin led an expeditionary force to test the strength of Jacob’s Ford, but soon retreated when one of his commanders was killed by a Templar arrow. Nonetheless, during two other engagements the sultan’s troops bested Baldwin’s forces in minor battles. In one, the king’s constable–his chief military adviser–was killed; in another, the Templar Master Odo of St Amand was taken captive along
with 270 knights. These successes disrupted the Christians’ military command structure and went some way to redressing the Muslim humiliation at Mont Gisard. With the scales tipping back in Saladin’s favour, King Baldwin retreated to Jerusalem to regroup, while the sultan summoned reinforcements from northern Syria and Egypt.
By late August 1179 Saladin was ready to launch a full-scale attack on Jacob’s Ford. On Saturday the 24th he began an assault-based siege, with the intention of breaking into the castle as rapidly as possible. There was no time for a lengthy encirclement, because the leper king was by now stationed nearby at Tiberias, on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, just half a day’s march to the south-west. As soon as news of the attack reached him the king would begin assembling a relief army, so the siege was effectively a race, in which the Muslims struggled to crack the stronghold’s defences before the Latins arrived. Taken together, contemporary written records and the archaeological evidence now being uncovered offer a vivid picture of what happened over the next five grim days. Saladin began by bombarding the fortress with arrows from east and west–hundreds of arrow heads have been recovered clustered on these fronts–looking to demoralise the Templar garrison. At the same time, specialist miners, probably from Syrian Aleppo, were sent to tunnel under the north-eastern corner of the walls, hoping to collapse the ramparts through the technique of sapping. A tunnel was quickly dug and packed full of wood, but once set alight it proved to be too small to cause a rupture in the walls above. In desperation, the sultan offered a gold dinar to each soldier carrying a goatskin of water from the river to extinguish the flames, and work then continued night and day to enlarge the mine. Meanwhile, Baldwin was preparing to march from Tiberias.
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