by Jeffrey Lee
A more hyperbolic account is that of Peter of Blois. His version is steeped in religious rhetoric and is based, he claims, on reports from eyewitnesses, including the constable, Amalric de Lusignan:
The servants of Satan, swift to spill blood, hung on the words of the tyrant [Saladin] and that son of eternal death pronounced sentence of death on the sons and heirs of heavenly life, saying ‘This man [Reynald], who has dared to blaspheme against the glory of my majesty, I will kill with my own hand; the others will be taken from here and all who do not deny Christ will be executed. ’
But when the tempestuous whirlwind broke upon the prince it was clear what sort of man he was: his face did not pale, his blood did not freeze, his hair did not stand on end, his voice did not stick in his throat, his body did not tremble, nor was his mind disturbed; his intellect and memory were not affected but, intrepid and serene, he lost none of his customary dignity.
The most illustrious prince was thrown to the ground and, while he lay supine with his eyes raised and fixed on heaven, the tyrant, with his right foot on Reynald’s sacred chest, thrust his sword into his throat as he spoke the name of Christ that was always in his heart and on his tongue.4
The killing of Reynald was a remarkable event, and is the only example during the crusades of a ruler openly executing such a prominent enemy. While princes died in the heat of battle, and rulers like Saladin were targeted with assassination attempts, executing the opposition’s leaders was unheard of, as Saladin himself confirmed with his comment ‘A prince does not kill a prince.’ Muslim historians were as amazed as the Franks, and Saladin’s propagandists went to great lengths to justify it.
Imad al-Din was fascinated by the killing, which he witnessed. He ‘did not cease to investigate the reason for it’ until he learned of the oath that the Qadi al-Fadil had made Saladin swear back in 1186, when the sultan was still severely ill. Islamic law holds that prisoners who surrender should be spared. It is in this context of subsequent justifications of the cold-blooded murder of Reynald that the stories about his wicked truce violations and oath-breaking emerge.
Christian historians certainly saw much more behind Reynald’s death than truce-breaking. For Michael the Syrian, Reynald was killed through fear and envy of his notable qualities:
Now Reynald was an old man who was experienced in wars, and there was no limit to his strength and courage, and he was held in great fear by the Arabs.5
And the anonymous Frankish chronicler of the Third Crusade wrote that:
The tyrant [Saladin] either because of his fury or deferring to the excellence of such a great man, cut off the distinguished and aged head with his own hand6
If there was any doubt about the fear and awe Reynald inspired in his Muslim foe, Saladin himself dispelled it. After the battle of Hattin he wrote to the caliph in Baghdad that he had:
Sworn to shed the blood of the tyrant of Kerak, a man who afflicted the lands of Islam with death and captivity and who had fought previous battles [with the Muslims]. His loss was the greatest blow suffered by the unbelievers.7
The sultan himself confirmed what Reynald’s story makes clear: the Lord of Kerak was the most effective enemy of the Muslims in the Levant and the most prominent Frankish leader. According to a man who should know, of all the blows dealt to the Franks at Hattin – the massacre of their fighting strength, the capture of King Guy himself – the greatest single blow to the crusader cause was the death of Reynald de Chatillon. As Saladin repeatedly states in his letters of this period, Reynald was the real ‘King of the Infidels’.
The victors revelled in the death of their most-hated enemy. One of Imad al-Din’s poems runs:
Noble and pure sword, which cut the head of the Prince and struck the most infamous of the unbelievers!
His head when falling was bathed in its own blood, like a frog diving into a swamp
Troubled by his perfidy, he lashed out like a wild beast, but to the assaults of a traitor, death is the only response.8
Saladin killed Reynald partly out of revenge – revenge for the depredations he had made on caravans; revenge for his blasphemous, humiliating attacks on the holy cities and the Hajj routes; revenge as well, perhaps, for the devastating defeat at Mont Gisard, which had smarted with the sultan for more than a decade. Above all, Saladin killed Reynald because he was too dangerous to keep alive. The other leaders could profitably be spared and ransomed. Reynald had to die.
Similarly, in a massacre of nightmarish barbarity, Saladin ordered the death of all the Templar and Hospitaller knights in captivity. This was not because they had violated any oaths, but just as Reynald was the most dangerous and resolute of the Frankish leaders, so the knights of the Military Orders were the Franks’ most effective soldiers. As Ibn al-Athir explains:
He singled these out for execution because they were the fiercest fighters of all the Franks. He wished the Muslims to be rid of their wickedness9
Christian writers understood this too, explaining that Saladin ‘decided to have them utterly exterminated because he knew that they surpassed all others in battle’.10 These helpless, shackled prisoners were slaughtered in another of Saladin’s sadistic free-for-alls. Every one of the warrior monks was scrupulously offered his life if he converted to Islam, but very few took that option. Blades were then handed to the Sufis, Qadis and other Islamic cadres who marched with the jihad. Imad al-Din watched as they rolled up their sleeves and ineptly set about their gruesome task:
The swords of some of them cut perfectly, they were congratulated; the blades of others were clumsy and blunt, they were excused; others were simply ridiculous and they had to be replaced.11
Saladin, Imad al-Din tells us, watched the gory spectacle with a beaming face. The sultan was surprised by the extent of his triumph, which was unprecedented and complete:
God, the Almighty and Glorious had given the sultan the royalty and power to achieve what no other king had been able to achieve… Never, since the Franks occupied the Syrian littoral, had the Muslims slaked their thirst for vengeance as they did on the day of Hattin12
Seeing the number of dead, you would not believe that there could be any prisoners. Seeing the prisoners, you could not believe that anyone could have been killed.13
To commemorate his extraordinary victory, Saladin built a mosque on top of one of the Horns of Hattin.
The battle was indeed a catastrophe for the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The strategy of engaging Saladin in a decisive confrontation, which Reynald had advocated, had failed disastrously. So many men were killed that the plain was carpeted with their corpses. According to the ecstatic Imad al-Din:
The dead were left abandoned in the ravines and on the hills… and their stench was the perfume of glory… the fate inflicted on their chiefs taught me a wise lesson: I saw heads flung far from their lifeless bodies, eyes crushed in their sockets I saw dirt-covered bodies from which the beauty had been torn by the talons of birds of prey, their members sliced off in combat and scattered in the dust, naked, ripped, shredded, quartered, skulls crushed, throats gashed, ribs broken, heads cut off, feet amputated, noses mutilated…14
There were many thousands of prisoners too, tied together and led away in droves. Of the proud Frankish nobles there remained:
Only arrogant lords caught like beasts, only fettered chiefs led on a leash, kings reduced to servitude, evildoers unmasked, free men reduced to slavery, impostors delivered to the righteous.15
There was not enough tent rope to secure them all. So common were Frankish slaves after the battle that a whole family was sold for the price of a pair of sandals.*
There they were, humiliated these insolent ones, naked these rebels, captive these possessors of thrones They stumbled, these egotists Counts were nothing more than hunted game, knights became food for wild beasts, precious existences were sold for a small sum16.
The booty, the prisoners and disembodied heads by the bushel were paraded through Damascus, along with Reynald’s remains and the Tru
e Cross, desecrated and brought in upside-down. The Templars and Hospitallers who had been taken as captives to Damascus were beheaded in the streets.
Ironically, the vast treasure donated by Henry II had proved to be a fatal gift. It was only this great wealth that had enabled Guy to hire soldiers out of all the castles. Fortresses and cities across the kingdom had been emptied as volunteers signed up, eager for a bit of extra pay. After Hattin, weakened garrisons across the land, with no relieving army on the horizon, surrendered one by one. The citadel of Tiberias capitulated the day after the battle. Nazareth, Haifa and Caesarea were taken soon afterwards and their populations killed or enslaved. The great port of Acre surrendered without a fight. Jaffa resisted and was taken by storm, with great slaughter. Jerusalem, under the command of Balian of Ibelin, fought fiercely, but eventually the defenders negotiated terms. Saladin reclaimed the city for Islam on 2 October 1187.
Reynald’s last defeat had cost Christendom the Holy City and the entire Kingdom of Jerusalem. His generalship and aggressive stance may well have postponed the doom of the Latin Kingdom in the years before Hattin, but as the power behind the throne of Jerusalem when it fell, Reynald must bear some responsibility for the catastrophe. However, growing Islamic power in the region spelled the end of the crusader states sooner or later. And while Reynald did make mistakes, they are not the ones traditionally ascribed to him – that he broke truces or was too aggressive, or too uncomprehending of the realities of the East. No, Reynald’s true failure was his inability to reconcile or decisively defeat Raymond of Tripoli and his party. Perhaps for the good of the kingdom he should have stepped back and let his rivals take control, but the same could be said of Raymond.
When Raymond made his show of contrition and rejoined Frankish ranks just before Hattin, Reynald could not bring himself to forgive and forget. He remained openly suspicious and hostile. This antagonism may well have contributed to the terrible defeat, but when you look at Count Raymond’s actions before and during the battle, you can’t help wondering if Reynald was right all along. In the final reckoning, it was Raymond who lusted after the throne; Raymond who rebelled and allied with Saladin; Raymond who deserted the crusader army at a critical point and condemned it to defeat.
Ever since Urban’s speech at Clermont in 1095, the crusading movement had been driven by the goal of capturing and defending Christianity’s holiest places. Their loss was the ultimate calamity. Just as the sack of Edessa some forty years before had led to the Second Crusade and spurred Reynald to take the cross, so the fall of Jerusalem shocked and horrified Christendom, inspiring a revival of crusading zeal. Launched in 1189, the Third Crusade was led by the greatest rulers in Western Europe: Emperor Frederick Barbarossa of Germany, King Philip of France and the indomitable Plantagenet King of England, Richard the Lionheart.
With rumours of a new crusade on the horizon, the elated but exhausted Saladin made strenuous efforts to evict the dogged remnants of the Frankish colonies. Soon only a few isolated outposts remained in Frankish hands: on the coast, Tyre, protected by its isthmus, and the city of Antioch, most of whose men had not been at Hattin. Raymond did manage to secure the port of Tripoli, and in the mountains of the county not even Saladin dared challenge the mighty Krak des Chevaliers. In Oultrejordan, Reynald’s citadels of Kerak and Mont Real also held out.
Here we see the shadow that Reynald continued to cast on events after his death. Unlike the rest of the kingdom’s barons, Reynald had left his castles well manned enough to withstand a siege. He had also left them motivated to resist, despite their hopeless situation. The defenders were reduced to eating cats and dogs, but even when the Lady of Oultrejordan, Stephanie de Milly, asked the garrison of Kerak to surrender (Saladin had promised to release her son, Humphrey, in return), they refused. Only starvation eventually obliged Kerak to surrender in November 1188. Mont Real held out even longer, not yielding until May 1189. On both occasions the defenders were allowed to leave unmolested and made their way to Frankish territory at Tyre.
When the main contingents of the Third Crusade finally arrived in Outremer in 1191, the Emperor Frederick had drowned on the way and King Philip of France proved weak and quarrelsome. Richard the Lionheart was the crusade’s true leader and it was he who fought a titanic struggle with Saladin for the Holy Land. The Franks reconquered much of the littoral, where they would rule for another hundred years, but despite defeating Saladin in a series of battles, Richard could not take Jerusalem. Every subsequent crusade in the East would have the recapture of Jerusalem as its goal, but apart from a short interlude in the thirteenth century,** Jerusalem would remain in Muslim hands until the British, under General Allenby, took the city from the dying Ottoman Empire during the First World War.
Raymond III did not survive to greet the Third Crusade. Initially he might have given thanks for his escape from Hattin and taken some satisfaction at the downfall of his rivals, but he soon changed his mind, as the enormity of what he had done sank in. Whether it was due to calculated treachery or simple cowardice, Raymond was bitterly aware of the impact his desertion had on the outcome of the battle. He may have also regretted the relentless ambition that had led him into alliances with the enemy and had fatally undermined the unity of the Frankish kingdom. Count Raymond of Tripoli died just months after Hattin – of guilt and shame, it was said.
It is odd, given Raymond’s alliance with the Franks’ greatest enemy, Saladin, that modern historians have focused the blame on Reynald for the loss of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Abd al-Rahman Azzam’s view is typical: ‘It can be fairly said that it would have been better for the fate of the Latin Kingdom had he remained in a dungeon in Aleppo.’17
For Zoé Oldenbourg, if Reynald had been ‘Saladin’s paid agent’, he could not have been more effective in precipitating Frankish problems. In fact Reynald fought tirelessly and loyally to maintain the Latin Kingdom, while it was Raymond of Tripoli who did more than anyone to destroy it, actually becoming in the process a ‘paid agent’ of Saladin.
Raymond’s ally, Balian of Ibelin – called cruel, fickle and faithless by one chronicler of the Third Crusade – continued to play a controversial role amongst the Franks of Outremer. He remained a determined critic of Guy de Lusignan and became a supporter of Guy’s rival, Conrad of Montferrat, for the throne. In 1191 Conrad replaced Guy, who was compensated with the island of Cyprus. There he became the first of a Lusignan dynasty that would last almost three centuries.
In the years after Hattin, Reynald de Chatillon’s family maintained his legacy of crusading zeal. When Saladin attacked Tripoli in 1188, new crusaders from the West appeared to reinforce the city. Ironically, given Reynald’s feud with the Count of Tripoli, one of these crusaders was the Burgundian noble Hervé de Donzy, probably Reynald’s nephew. Among the defenders he was ‘before them in renown’ and ‘he lent timely assistance to the land’.18 Later, Hervé was to be found fighting at Acre as well. In the next century, Reynald’s grandson, King Andrew II of Hungary, sustained the crusading tradition. He was one of the leaders of the Fifth Crusade in 1213. Perhaps he had been brought up on heroic tales of his crusading forebear.
Two years after Reynald’s death, when King Richard I was riding to Vézelay to launch his crusade, he made a stop at Donzy. Was this a call of respect on the family of Reynald de Chatillon? Certainly, while Richard was entertained in Donzy, the memory of the great warrior would have been toasted. It is very possible that his epic deeds were sung.
Modern writers have tended to forget just how heroic Reynald’s reputation once was. Zoé Oldenbourg claims that, when he died, Reynald ‘made his solemn entry into the pantheon of hell, from which it occurred to no Latin historian to rescue him’. This was not the case. Reynald’s memory was very much alive for the chroniclers of the Third Crusade, such as the anonymous author of the Itinerarium Perigrinorum and his main source, the crusader prose-poet Ambroise, who wrote of Reynald’s ‘great excellence’. Other surviving tributes to Reynald include tha
t of the monk Robert of Auxerre, who called Reynald, ‘A man of wise counsel and good sense, lover of honesty, brave fighter against the Turks and loyal defender of the Christians.’19
Reynald even had a would-be hagiographer, the prominent cleric Peter of Blois, Archdeacon of Bath, who served at the Norman court in Sicily and at the Plantagenet court in England. Peter’s tract is called Passio Reginaldi Principis olim Antiocheni, ‘The Passion of Reynald, one-time Prince of Antioch’. Written in 1188, the work was aimed at encouraging men to join the Third Crusade. It portrayed Reynald’s execution by Saladin as the ‘passion’ of a holy martyr.
At the time, the fate of Reynald, the Templars and the Hospitallers after Hattin was commonly seen as martyrdom. All of them bravely refused to abjure their faith, and the Templars are depicted as competing with each other to be the first to seek glorious death. After the mass murder, it was believed that ‘A ray of celestial light shone down clearly on the bodies of the holy martyrs during the three following nights as they lay unburied.’20
The Passio Reginaldi, focusing on Reynald, goes even further, providing an example of how ‘The sacrifice demanded of the faithful soldier of Christ is distilled into a vision of glory.’21 According to Peter of Blois, Reynald’s life was not one of brutality, greed and selfish indulgence, but of saintly moderation and Christian virtue:
For he was most strenuous in arms, most firm in faith in Christ, most serene of face, full of reverence in his actions, patient in hope, profuse in his charity.22
