by Jeffrey Lee
To Saladin’s fury, the cursed Arnat, ringleader of the blasphemous raid, had escaped. If he had been with the lead flotilla at Rabigh, he must have escaped sometime before the final battle with Lu’Lu’, perhaps even when the Egyptian ships appeared, or sometime during the chase through the mountains. Reynald was back in Palestine by March 1183.
In his rage, Saladin swore that if Arnat ever fell into his power, he would kill him with his own hand.
* Abraha’s war elephants seemed irresistible as they approached Mecca, but Allah then sent birds to drive off the invaders by pelting them with pieces of baked clay. This story is an exegesis of Quranic sura 105.
† It is tempting to conjecture that one of these desperate Franks left behind the mysterious suit of crusader mail discovered in Sinai in the 1970s.
Kerak, Oultrejordan, 22 November 1183
The bells of Kerak’s church rang out, fading in the winter air down the great canyon that led to the Dead Sea. With the peals mixed the notes of harp, lyre and tambourine.
Prince Reynald knew how to throw a party and had gathered musicians, singers, jugglers and dancers, the finest entertainers and wandering minstrels from all over the Levant, for the wedding of his stepson Humphrey of Toron to Princess Isabella of Jerusalem. It was the social event of the year, and Kerak was brimming with illustrious guests from the leading families of Outremer.
The fortress was also full of livestock and provisions, great stockpiles of weapons, armed men – and fear.
Clouds of dust on the horizon had signalled the approach of a vast army. Hardly had the wedding vows been uttered when, outside the walls, the Muslim host was shuffling into position. Saladin had come to take his revenge on Prince Arnat. The defiant Reynald, for his part, was not going to let anything interfere with the festivities.
In one of the quaint chivalrous episodes that mark the life of Saladin, Reynald’s wife, Stephanie de Milly, sent messengers out to the sultan’s tent; they took Saladin ‘bread, wine, beef and lamb’ from her son’s wedding feast. The story goes that Stephanie reminded Saladin how he had carried her in his arms many times when he was a captive in the castle and she was a little girl. Saladin, moved by Stephanie’s gesture (and presumably overlooking the faux pas of the wine, unwelcome to an observant Muslim), asked the messengers to point out the nuptial chambers of the happy couple. He then ordered his men to bombard the fortress, but to leave the newlyweds’ tower unharmed.*
The initial assault was so ferocious that the fortified suburb was breached almost immediately. The citizens fled for the protection of the castle, Saladin’s men hot on their heels, killing everyone they caught. A knight called Yvain bravely held the single, slender bridge across the fosse, fighting off all-comers. Thanks to him, many townspeople crowded across and squeezed through the citadel’s only gate. Yvain, studded with arrows, was the last man in. The defenders dropped the portcullis and destroyed the bridge behind him.
That night, the castle, overflowing with non-combatants, shuddered as boulders launched by the sultan’s siege engines began to hammer into the north wall. Reynald ordered the beacon on the highest turret to be lit, summoning help from Jerusalem.
* Bernard Hamilton archly points out that this ‘chivalry’ made good commercial sense; the sultan would have been wary of hurting the two most valuable potential prisoners in the castle.
Chapter 16
THE LION AND THE WOLF
When the wolf caught the scent of the lion, he took refuge in his lair.
Abu Shama
At the top of a great ravine leading down to the Devil’s Sea, the fortress of Kerak loomed above the King’s Highway, the ancient road from Damascus to Arabia. Climbing to the top of the mighty bastion where the beacon burned, Reynald might just have been able to make out, on a clear night, the answering beacon flaring on the heights of Jerusalem.
If relief came, it would take time, but Reynald did not panic. He knew that Kerak would not succumb easily. Between the castle and the walled bourg or suburb to the north lay a daunting fosse sixty feet deep, hewn out of the solid rock. From the north wall, the castle stretched southwards along a steep ridge, dominated by high ramparts. There was no chance of being stormed from the east, where a smooth stone glacis clad the hillside, sloping down to the highway; or from the west, where the ground plummeted away in a great canyon to the depression of the Dead Sea, twenty miles away and more than 4,000 feet down. On the south side there was the added protection of another great trench, used as a moat and reservoir by the castle. Within the massive walls, above ground and beneath, were level upon level of chambers, passageways, armouries, chapels, storerooms and great halls large enough to provision and stable an army. All the cattle and sheep of the region had been gathered together as well. Because there was no room in the castle, these had been herded into the deep ditches around the walls. The fortress was all but impregnable. According to the Muslim besiegers looking at it from outside the walls, it was a forbidding prospect: ‘hard to climb and difficult to access from all sides’ – ‘perfectly fortified’.1 But it had its weaknesses.
The storming of the fortified bourg was a dangerous development. If it fell, an attacker could position artillery within range of the defences on the only feasible line of approach – from the north. Reynald had been determined to defend the suburb, and had forbidden the citizens from moving their families or their belongings into the castle. Not only were many of the inhabitants trapped and killed outside the castle when the Saracens stormed the town, but all their goods and provisions were lost as well. Commentators criticized Reynald for this decision, which the Estoire d’Eracles says he made because he was so valiant.
Once the suburb fell, Saladin immediately built seven huge mangonels. These siege engines began lobbing great slabs of stone over and through the north wall. Along with a constant rain of thousands of arrows, the besiegers drove the defenders into hiding and smashed great gaps in the defences. The garrison put up a vigorous resistance, but the great throng of wedding guests, entertainers and other civilians hampered their efforts. Still no relief force came from Jerusalem. Under cover of their barrage, the Muslims climbed down into the ditch and helped themselves to the castle’s beef – much to the defenders’ annoyance. The bombardment was so effective that, after almost two weeks, ‘neither trebuchet nor mangonel could achieve anything more’. The only barrier left was the redoubtable fosse.
Reynald could have been forgiven for fretting about the arrival of the relief, which had been delayed by political developments elsewhere. In his latest campaign against his Zengid foes, Saladin had again failed to capture Mosul, but he was steadily increasing his power. In mid-June 1183 came news the Franks had been dreading for the nine years since the death of Nur al-Din: Saladin had finally won control of Aleppo. He had taken it, relatively peacefully in the end, from the weak Zengid leader Imad al-Din, who accepted the meagre town of Sinjar in exchange. This coup completed Saladin’s encirclement of the crusader states. His empire now stretched from Libya to Mesopotamia. He had united the vast manpower and wealth of Egypt with the great Syrian cities of Aleppo and Damascus. The Muslim powers bordering his lands owed him allegiance, and had promised to send troops to fight the jihad. The Sunni caliph in Baghdad provided him with spiritual legitimacy. Byzantium was no longer a threat. It only remained for the sultan to finish off the pesky Frankish presence – an alien enclave in the middle of his territories, and a blot on the face of Dar al-Islam. As Saladin wrote in a letter, ‘Islam is now awake to drive away the phantom of unbelief.’2
First he settled affairs in the north. No doubt fully informed of Bohemond’s negotiating position by his treacherous consort, Sybille, Saladin concluded a four-year truce with Antioch. Then he turned his attention southwards. He gathered a huge army and, in September, attacked the Kingdom of Jerusalem once more. On learning of Saladin’s plans, the Franks (including Reynald and Raymond of Tripoli) had mustered at their favoured spot – the centrally located, well-protected and we
ll-watered wells of Sephora, in Galilee. Their mobilization was highly effective, funded by a startling and highly suspect innovation – an income tax. This was levied at 2 per cent on annual incomes of 100 bezants or more. Its promulgators naively hoped that this would be an emergency, one-off event and not a precedent for later generations. Forces marched to Sephora from all over the Latin East. The contingent from Oultrejordan was smaller than it should have been, however. Reynald’s stepson, Humphrey of Toron, was riding to join the host with the troops of Kerak and Mont Real when Muslim troops ambushed them en route from Nablus. They lost many dead and about a hundred men were taken prisoner.
All told, the Franks awaited Saladin’s invasion with a tremendous force of around 1,300 knights and 15,000 foot soldiers behind the True Cross. Aged men could not remember seeing an army so well equipped. It was the largest, costliest and best-armed host the Franks had put in the field since the Second Crusade. The fervent hope was that it would be used to deal Saladin a decisive blow. Unfortunately, its leader was not King Baldwin, or either of the most experienced and proven military leaders, Reynald or Raymond, both of them former regents. The army’s general was Guy de Lusignan.
Earlier in the year, while Reynald was leading his raid on the Red Sea, the twenty-one-year-old leper-king had again fallen gravely ill. When he recovered from his fever, he was clearly incapable of governing. He was blind and his limbs were useless; the leprosy was rotting away his hands and feet. Lying sick in Nazareth, with Saladin’s army advancing, King Baldwin had summoned his court and, in front of his mother, the patriarch and the barons of the realm, had appointed his brother-in-law Guy as regent of the kingdom. The nobles swore fealty to Guy, though many did so with great reluctance. The powerful faction led by Raymond and the Ibelins argued that Guy simply was not up to the job, and he was indeed an untried military commander. The chroniclers labour the fact that Guy was neither valiant (preux) nor wise (sage). In terms of chivalry, he was described in opposite terms to Reynald – he was just not an ideal knight. He was also, as William of Tyre repeatedly sniffed, ‘indiscreet’. The bumptious new regent did not help his own cause by glorying a little too much in his promotion.
A few years later, at the siege of Acre in 1189, Guy would prove a brave and effective soldier, but in this bewildering first command he was incapable of uniting the army’s competing factions. The campaign was dogged by logistical problems, quarrels, passivity and indecision. Guy moved the army forward to a base at the wells of Tubaniya, where arguments raged as to what strategy to adopt. Many wished to attack, but others pointed to the vastly more numerous Saracen forces waiting to encircle them and refused to fight. William of Tyre reported that ‘Simple people without experience of the malice of the leaders’3 could not understand why Guy did not attack. Some alleged cowardice amongst the leadership, others that Guy’s political enemies – Raymond and his faction – refused to give battle precisely because the magnificent Frankish army was likely to win, in which case Guy would get the credit. In the face of Frankish reticence, Saladin made great efforts to provoke a pitched battle. He set up camp just a mile from the Frankish lines, made probing attacks and sent out raiding parties, which scorched the surrounding area. To the great consternation of the rank and file, who desperately wanted to get at the enemy, Guy stayed put.
After more than a week camped in the face of the Frankish force, Saladin realized that he would not be able to force a battle. His army was suffering from hunger and, as always, the more impatient contingents were proving challenging to keep in the field, especially as nothing was happening. He retired in frustration across the Jordan, turning his thoughts again towards his greatest enemy, Reynald de Chatillon. The Frankish army dispersed and Reynald soon sped off with a force of knights to Kerak. He was about to host a royal wedding and, according to his scouts who reported on Saladin’s movements, he would have to withstand a siege as well.
The Franks’ defensive strategy may have been the wisest course of action. It preserved their field-army intact, and Saladin’s massive force had been forced to withdraw. It could have been seen as a victory for Guy, but in fact the regent was heavily criticized for not exploiting the mighty army at his disposal. He had simply been unable to work effectively with the other crusader leaders. His inactivity was viewed more as dithering indecision rather than as a decided strategy, and the muddled organization of the campaign also told against him. While hemmed in at Tubaniya, the army had almost run out of food, being rescued only by the ‘miraculous’ discovery that the wells were packed with fish.
Guy’s performance had clearly not impressed King Baldwin IV, and the regent soon alienated his monarch further. Baldwin decided that the sea air was better for his health, so he asked Guy to give him the port of Tyre in exchange for Jerusalem. Guy refused. As regent, he may have had good reason to say no; Tyre, with its busy port and impenetrable castle on an isthmus, was the strongest refuge in the kingdom and far more valuable than Jerusalem as a source of revenue. But snubbing the sick king went down very badly. At the prompting of Guy’s opponents, like Raymond of Tripoli, King Baldwin dismissed Guy from the regency and had his nephew Baldwin crowned as joint king. Unfortunately, this did not resolve succession issues; the leprous King Baldwin IV would not live much longer, and little King Baldwin V was only five years old.
Critically, Reynald was not present at this overthrow of his ally. He was trapped in his embattled fief, besieged by Saladin. When the relief force finally set off for Kerak, the leper-king himself was at its head.
At the approach of the Frankish army, Saladin was forced to raise the siege. From the ramparts of Kerak, the relieved defenders saw the Muslim troops pack up and leave, burning their siege engines behind them. Carried into the shattered fortress on a litter, the ailing King Baldwin provided Reynald with the funds and labour to patch up the damaged defences, while the detained wedding guests and entertainers at last moved on to their next engagements. Saladin marched back to Damascus, his troops raiding the territories around Nablus on the way. Once again he had nothing to show from a campaign against the polytheists.
In the summer of 1184 the sultan yet again summoned his troops to the jihad against Reynald. Forces came from Egypt, Damascus, Aleppo, Sinjar and Mosul. They surrounded Kerak on 23 August. According to Gregory the Priest, Reynald was prepared: he ‘went onto the mountain and he entered Kerak and he made it exceedingly strong’.4 But Saladin too was more prepared for this round of his struggle with the cursed Arnat. Determined to have his revenge, the sultan attacked with greater determination and ferocity. His men erected fourteen great mangonels to pummel the repaired defences. Backed by archers loosing thousands of arrows day and night, the bombardment was far more intense than the previous siege, as Abu Shama chronicled:
The arrogant towers collapse… the stones fall in waves on the summit of the towers and on the head of the evildoers; they strike the battlements and those who defend them. They go straight to their aim, and in killing the Franks, prove to them that they follow a false route. Not one of them can show his face without getting an arrow in the eye… we hold the enemy by the throat… our machines destroy the buildings. The rampart opposite them collapses with its turrets and walls. Pillars and foundations are overturned. If it was not for the barrier of the ditch, it would be easy to invade the place… because it is not an ordinary ditch, but very wide and deep, a terrifying natural ravine with sheer precipices and dreadful chasms.5
Saladin had learned from the previous siege and set out immediately to fill the ditch between the suburb and the castle. At first the hail of missiles from inside the castle made this impossible, but the Muslims built covered towers, palisades and walkways under which they could approach the ditch without danger. According to Ernoul, Saladin sent out a summons to ‘anyone who wanted to earn money, that for every basket full of earth, they would get one bezant’. This generous incentive lured plenty of enthusiastic volunteers and the ditch steadily filled around the clock, untroubled by th
e slings and arrows of the defenders:
Our men do not fear to congregate under the walls of the fortress even in broad daylight, as they do in the courtyards of Damascus during the great feast days. They are sheltered from harm and know with certainty that victory is theirs.6
Reynald ordered the garrison to erect a mangonel to attack Saladin’s siege engines, but the enemy’s bombardment was too heavy and too accurate. The carpenters abandoned their work and the machine was destroyed. Saladin’s army was on the verge of taking the city, and the Muslims knew it. Imad al-Din was certainly counting his chickens:
If relief does not come soon, the city will be taken, because the top of the towers are broken off, the crenellations smashed, the curtain walls decapitated, the siege engines broken, the roofs disembowelled, the ramparts cracked, the murder holes perforated. Victory is as inevitable as a foot on a leg.7
The defenders watched the mounting pile of earth with trepidation. So shallow did the ditch become that a chained Muslim prisoner managed to escape unharmed by leaping from the castle walls into the fosse.* Reynald was no doubt aware of Saladin’s vow to kill him if he was captured, so to him the inexorably growing mound filling the moat was as sure a sign of approaching doom as the advance of the vengeful Manuel through Cilicia in 1159. It was enough to oblige Reynald to hurry up the relief, as Ernoul relates:
