God's Wolf

by Jeffrey Lee

  In autumn 1161, with Melisende – repudiated and humiliated – fading away in a convent, her replacement, the Princess Maria, set sail from St Simeon for Constantinople, life as empress and, two turbulent decades later, a frightful death.

  This affair, which today may seem petty, was political dynamite in the twelfth century. Antioch’s gain was Tripoli’s loss. Count Raymond was left humiliated and embittered, his county sidelined for good. Meanwhile Antioch gained the protection of a close imperial alliance, and Reynald’s prestige was greatly enhanced. The most powerful man in the world, before whom Reynald had demeaned himself at Mamistra, was now his son-in-law.

  The scandal may also have had a terrible long-term impact on the crusader states, for though it is nowhere explicitly attested, Raymond’s anger at Manuel would have been matched by resentment of Reynald’s coup in marrying off his stepdaughter. It may not be a coincidence that the future dealings between the Count of Tripoli and Reynald de Chatillon would be almost exclusively hostile. In the end, Raymond would go to unheard-of – and fatal – lengths in opposition to Reynald’s policies, and the rivalry of these two ambitious, vengeful characters would come to dominate and destabilize the crusader states.

  In Syria, meanwhile, the peace of the emperor could not hold. Frank and Turk might both pay lip service to Byzantine supremacy, but they were enemies at heart. They soon returned to the perennial low-level frontier warfare. In the last months of 1161, that old bugbear, money, dictated Reynald’s actions again. His spies reported that excellent grazing conditions had brought innumerable herds of cattle, sheep and camels to the sprawling grasslands of the old county of Edessa. Most of the pastoralists happened to be Christians, but as the Armenians and the Cypriots had already learned, this meant nothing to Reynald. The peasants were now subjects of the Turks, so they and their animals were fair game. To the south, King Baldwin III had also taken advantage of the good pasturage along the desert fringes. He broke his truce with Nur al-Din to raid across the Jordan and returned laden with booty from unprotected nomads (Muslims in this case) and their flocks.

  In November, Reynald followed suit. He struck out for the Euphrates with a sizeable force, perhaps 120 cavalry and 500 foot soldiers. They fell upon the unsuspecting pastoralists, taking them completely by surprise. The haul of robes, riches and especially animals was beyond their wildest expectations. When the band of raiders turned for home ‘in great joy’, they drove ahead of them a vast, bellowing herd of four-legged loot.

  Nur al-Din’s governor of Aleppo was his ‘wet-nurse brother’** and trusted lieutenant, Majd al-Din. He reacted swiftly to news of Reynald’s incursion. While the troops of Antioch returned slowly south-westwards, impeded by their countless prizes, Majd al-Din was hot on their tail with a large force of Turkish cavalry. Guided by some of Reynald’s men they had captured, the Aleppans caught up with Reynald’s marauders near Marash. On 20 November, the Turks tried to lay an ambush, which was detected by Reynald’s scouts. Informed of Majd al-Din’s substantial force, Reynald halted his column for the night and carefully considered his next move.

  Reynald has been portrayed as impulsive and thoughtless, but while he was decisive by nature, he did take advice. He worked with his advisers to survive Manuel’s vengeance after Cyprus and, caught between Majd al-Din’s cavalry and the vast herds of livestock, he responsibly discussed the tactical options with his lieutenants. However, just because he took advice did not mean he always made the right decision.

  Round the campfires that evening, Reynald listened to two opposing plans: some of his men advised that they should abandon their spoils and make a run for it – the Turks, they said, would be satisfied with retrieving the livestock. Others argued that they should fight – it was unthinkable to surrender meekly such a vast booty. The Franks were outnumbered, yes, but they were better, fiercer fighters than the Muslims. With God’s help, they would prevail and return to Antioch with their lives and their wealth intact. The discussion was heated, and all parties had their say, but the decision that November night was Reynald’s alone.

  * They had shared a wet-nurse as infants.

  ** The name of this leading Byzantine family translates as ‘Short Stephen’.

  Near Marash, Anatolia, 23 November 1161

  A chorus of lowing, bleating, grunting beasts greeted the rising winter sun, glimmering through a haze of dust raised by thousands of shuffling hoofs.

  The knights and mounted sergeants cantered like drovers around the waking beasts, whipping and coaxing them into as tight a group as they could. Then the Frankish force drew up into battle formation. According to the Estoire d’Eracles, Reynald had chosen his strategy because he was ‘chivalrous and brave’. Unsurprisingly, he had decided to fight his way out.

  Calmly and methodically the Franks arranged their infantry into a defensive line and the horsemen into their well-drilled conrois, the fighting units of the Frankish cavalry, forming a screen between the Turks and the animals. Then, in a slow confusion of dust and noise, the unwieldy mass of sheep, cattle and camels shuffled off in the direction of Antioch, chivvied along by the line of mailed warriors.

  The Turks immediately made a ferocious attack, but Reynald’s men fought them off. Throughout the day, the Turks launched charge after charge, forcing vicious hand-to-hand combat with sword and mace. Each time the crusaders’ ‘stout resistance’ beat them back. Between charges the Turks harassed the Franks with showers of arrows, but Reynald’s strategy was vindicated as the animals and their Frankish escort edged inexorably forward.

  The Franks’ armour proved effective against the Turkish arrows, and the light Turkish cavalry, just as hampered by the crowds of beasts as the Franks were, could not overwhelm their well-disciplined adversaries at close quarters. For a long time the outcome hung in the balance. However, as the afternoon wore on, some of Reynald’s troops began to buckle under the relentless Turkish assault and lost their nerve. ‘Most hideously’, says the Estoire d’Eracles, they broke and ran. As soon as the Frankish defence lost its cohesion, the line crumbled. The Turks were able to get amongst the defenders and begin a terrible slaughter. The Franks, severely outnumbered, were doomed.

  Reynald tried to rally his men and plunged into the thickest of the fight, performing ‘prodigious feats of valour’,13 but too many of his troops had fled. He had the opportunity to cut his way out and escape, but chose instead to stand and fight to the end, refusing to abandon his remaining men. Eventually he too was cast down. Reynald de Chatillon, Prince of Antioch, was now at the mercy of his most bitter enemy.

  Chapter 9

  IN THE POWER OF NUR AL-DIN

  In punishment for his sins, the prince was forced to expiate in his own person all the crimes which he had committed. A captive, bound with the chains of the foe, he was led to Aleppo in most ignominious fashion, there to become, with his fellow captives, the sport of the infidels.

  William of Tyre

  But one day, when he had triumphed more gloriously than usual over the sons of dissidence, the Heavenly Potter, wishing to test the vessel that he had created for honour and glory, allowed him by a trick of false brethren to be captured by enemies and taken away to exile.

  Peter of Blois

  Reynald and the survivors of his band were made prisoners of war. It was a terrifying predicament for a crusader. The taking and ransoming of captives was an established commercial activity for the Franks and their enemies, but while Reynald was likely to be kept alive for a substantial ransom, his men were in far greater danger. Sergeants and common infantry were sometimes given a chance to name a price, but it was rare that a lowly soldier could command a ransom valuable enough to save his life. Ordinary captives might be kept alive for sale as slaves, but it was just as common for Muslim leaders, especially the more zealous – like Nur al-Din – simply to put them to death, sometimes with remarkable cruelty. Turcopoles, the crusaders’ native light cavalry, were seen as traitors and apostates by the Muslims and, if captured, were rout
inely massacred without a second thought. Even after death, the ordeal of a crusader was not over. The Turks liked to decapitate and collect the heads of the corpses, whether killed in battle or butchered afterwards. They would then be tied to their bridles or stuck on their spears. After one battle so many Franks were beheaded that it was said their heads arrived in Damascus ‘like watermelons’.

  In the fight near Marash in November 1161, of all Reynald’s men taken captive, only thirty of the more valuable knights were spared. All the other captives were killed in cold blood. Perhaps 400 Franks died in the battle and the ensuing massacre. The jubilant Turkish cavalry lopped off the heads of the dead and impaled the grisly trophies on their lances.

  The sight must have struck terror into the surviving Frankish prisoners. Reynald and his knights knew that their lives hung on the whim of Nur al-Din. Many crusaders had survived battles, only to suffer a worse fate later on. After an indecisive battle at Hab in 1119, the Turkish emirs, Ilghazi and Toghtekin, had initially spared a sizeable number of their Frankish captives, but this was just to keep them alive for a more grisly death at the hands of hysterical crowds in the streets of Aleppo. Ilghazi put a stop to the slaughter only when he realized how much ransom money he was losing. Often it was simply a matter of luck whether or not a captive survived. Sometimes Muslim leaders introduced cruel variations on this theme, such as encouraging religious men and civilian camp followers to execute captives. These eager but clumsy killers would prolong the victims’ death agonies, sawing and hacking at their bodies rather than ending their lives swiftly. The worst example of this was after the battle of Hattin in 1187, when Saladin gave all Templar and Hospitaller captives over to the Sufis and other religious men. Some of these civilians were so useless at their task that they had to be replaced halfway through.

  As a mighty lord, Reynald was as safe as could be. Only the most fanatical or most profligate victor could forgo the fortunes commanded by prestigious Frankish captives; Bohemond I, for instance, one of the most feared and renowned of all crusaders, had earned his captors the immense sum of 100,000 bezants. This was the equivalent of untold millions today – the value of the entire island of Cyprus.* But not even great lords could be certain of surviving captivity. In the aftermath of the Field of Blood, Robert the Leper was captured by the Turkish general Ilghazi and pledged a decent ransom of 10,000 gold bezants. This was not enough for Ilghazi, who sent his prisoner to the emir Toghtekin to see if he could frighten Robert into naming a higher price. Toghtekin was a friend and previous ally of Robert, but when the captive appeared, Toghtekin was drunk. The emir stood up, tucked his robe into his belt, drew his sword and decapitated Robert on the spot. Ilghazi later complained to Toghtekin that he had lost a big payday, and that he had only sent Robert over to him to be scared. Toghtekin replied, ‘I have no other way of scaring than this.’1

  And there were other tortures besides slavery or death that a prisoner had to fear. When he captured his mortal enemy, the bellicose Count Joscelin II of Edessa, Nur al-Din ignored all attempts to profit from what would have been a substantial ransom. Rather than releasing this dangerous warrior to make more trouble, he preferred to blind Joscelin and keep him chained in ghastly conditions. Joscelin died after nine years of hellish treatment in his hole.

  Reynald’s concern over his own fate would have been exacerbated by his knowledge that Nur al-Din was a religious zealot who put holy war before earthly profit. He was quite prepared to slaughter prisoners, as he did all those sent to him by his brother, Nusrat al-Din, after he destroyed a Frankish force near the town of Banyas. Such a slaughter was the act of a holy warrior on the infidel enemy – ‘a humiliation for them in the present life, and in that to come they shall have bitter chastisement’.

  So when Reynald and his men were brought into Aleppo in November 1161, their fate was still uncertain. Their experience as ‘sport of the infidels’ would have been appalling. In general, the citizens of Muslim towns did not treat Frankish captives well. Typical was the treatment of the Christian prisoners after Nur al-Din’s victory at Banyas in 1157, paraded beneath the bloody scalps of their dead comrades:

  They had set the Frankish horsemen in pairs upon camels, each pair accompanied by one of their standards unfurled, to which were attached a number of skins of their heads with their hair.2

  The foot soldiers were roped together in threes and fours. They were all then marched through the gloating, mocking crowds. It is likely that the citizens of Aleppo gave an equally horrible welcome to their greatest enemy, the fiendish ‘Prince Arnat’. Chained, wounded and filthy with the dust and sweat of combat, Reynald and his men were probably shaved, seated backwards on camels and accompanied by their broken standards and the decapitated heads of the slain. Nur al-Din’s men led their living trophies along streets lined by thousands of onlookers, through taunts, jeers, blows, showers of rubbish and faeces. For the proud Prince of Antioch it was a humiliation even more profound – and more perilous – than his submission to the emperor at Mamistra.

  Through the maze of Aleppo’s markets they wound their way to the city’s heart. There stood the great citadel on its vast mound, whose origins date back to prehistory. They passed through the mighty gatehouse, which no Frankish warrior had ever breached. And there, in the mighty fastness of Nur al-Din, Reynald’s story is plunged into darkness.

  * Richard the Lionheart later sold Cyprus to the Templars for the same price.

  The Citadel of Aleppo, 29 June 1170

  Reynald de Chatillon started his day as he had every day for just over eight years and seven months: in the dungeons of Nur al-Din.

  That day his routine was probably no different from normal. He may not even have known that it was a Monday, or that it was 29 June, the feast of St Peter and St Paul, the patron saints of Antioch. At about nine o’clock that summer morning, as the worshippers in the churches across Syria celebrated mass in honour of the apostles, their rituals – and Reynald’s routine – were violently interrupted.

  Suddenly the earth began to tremble.

  The walls of Reynald’s prison shook. The ground rocked like a ship on the sea. There was a roaring like heavy thunder from underground. Reynald was tossed from side to side.

  All over the ancient citadel of Aleppo, walls, towers, roofs and tunnels collapsed in clouds of debris. The sun appeared to rise and set all at once. The earth turned inside out, and from great cracks it vomited forth a black liquid, which poured down through the town.

  It was a ‘great and terrible earthquake, far more violent than any other within the memory of men now living’.3 The initial, devastating shock was followed by a series of severe after-tremors. After a long while the traumatized survivors, Reynald among them, rose fearfully to their feet, surprised and thankful to be alive. ‘Contrary to expectation,’ wrote Michael the Syrian, ‘we returned as from the grave, and then our eyes like those of a man who is woke up from sleep, began to shed tears and our tongues give praise.’

  The astonishing extent of the damage across all of Syria quickly became clear. ‘Strongly fortified cities dating from very early times were completely demolished. The inhabitants, caught in the ruins of their homes, were crushed to death.’ Homs, Hama, Shayzar, Antioch – Muslim and Christian cities alike – were affected. In Antioch the cathedral collapsed on the congregation, killing them all.

  In Aleppo thousands died, crushed by rubble or drowned in the deluge of liquefied mud. Nur al-Din’s capital was the worst hit of all the Muslim cities. ‘The quake destroyed it utterly and the survivors were totally terror-stricken. They were unable to shelter in their houses for fear of after-shocks.’ Michael the Syrian saw this as divine vengeance on Aleppo, because in the markets there they ‘sold Christians like beasts’.4

  The Frankish lords in captivity were all lucky to survive. Once he realized he was safe, Reynald might even have wondered for a split second whether the cataclysm had opened a road to his escape.

  It had not.

  As t
he cries of the wounded and the wails of the bereaved rose over the devastated city, Reynald remained trapped.

  Chapter 10

  YEARS OF DARKNESS

  Captives were most barbarously cast into foul prisons. And ransomed for excessive prices.

  Fulcher of Chartres

  Rearing up from the heart of the white city of Aleppo, the great limestone citadel rings a conical hill. The core of the hill is natural, but most of it is now a tel, a man-made mound, composed of layer upon layer of ancient cities, built, destroyed, covered by earth and then built on again, over millennia. It is said that Abraham grazed his flocks on the hill and dispensed their milk as alms.* The mound and the gigantic, sloping glacis below the walls are riddled with wells, secret passageways, caverns and dungeons. Some are as small as individual cells, while others are echoing caverns large enough to act as immense storehouses or communal prisons for dozens of prisoners. Reynald and his fellow captives were held in these pits in the bowels of the hill, so the earthquake of June 1170 would have been a terrifying experience. Their survival was a stroke of luck. In 1115, the Armenian Prince Constantine of Gargar, captured by the Franks, was a prisoner in the fortress of Samosata when he was ‘swallowed up’ by an earthquake.1