God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  Already talking of an assault on Egypt, Baldwin eagerly embraced a Byzantine alliance. In 1161 Manuel demonstrated his effective influence by installing Constance as ruler in Antioch after Reynald’s capture, rather than her son Bohemund III. Some historians have argued that the Jerusalem kings’ abandonment of northern Outremer represented a fatal error, allowing Nur al-Din’s authority in the region to grow unchecked. Yet it is hard to see how Baldwin or his successor, Amalric, could have continued to act as arbiters of Antioch without conflict with Byzantium. At the height of Latin Jerusalem’s power, Egypt must have seemed an almost irresistible source of ready wealth to compensate for declining revenues from the royal demesne. Nur al-Din’s involvement in Egypt was reluctant and not bound to prevail. War at a distance from his Syrian bases was costly. Egyptian politicians were antipathetic to Syrian interference. Any invasion from Syria had to be launched across the desert no man’s land between the Negev and northern Arabia, under the scrutiny of Frankish outposts and Bedouin spies. In such circumstances, Frankish engagement in the internal affairs of Egypt was neither capricious nor doomed; given the implosion of the Fatimid regime it was probably unavoidable.

  If the reordering of alliances and policy by the Franks and their Muslim neighbours in the 1150s characterized the first phase of the process of encirclement described by William of Tyre, the second revolved around the battle for Egypt, which the Franks lost, providing Nur al-Din’s erstwhile Kurdish mercenary commander Saladin with the power base from which to create a new Near Eastern empire. During the 1150s, order within the Fatimid caliphate collapsed, with power and the viziership contested by a succession of provincial governors. Taking advantage of this, Baldwin III, fresh from conquering Ascalon, extracted tribute from one of the warring factions and toyed with an invasion, plans for which he discussed with Manuel I in 1159. In 1163, Egypt descended into anarchy, three viziers succeeding each other in a matter of months, the third of whom, the former chamberlain Dirgham, refusing payment of the Frankish tribute while his ousted predecessor Shawar sought help from Nur al-Din. The new king of Jerusalem, the fleshy but energetic Amalric, intervened to exclude Nur al-Din, gain booty and consolidate his rule at home.

  Amalric’s first invasion, in September 1163, was only repulsed when the Egyptians breached the dykes in the Nile Delta near Bilbeis, about halfway upstream from the sea towards Cairo. The following year, Dirgham was killed and Shawar was restored by Nur al-Din’s Kurdish mercenary general Asad al-Din Shirkuh, only for the restored vizier to switch sides and call for Frankish help. Nur al-Din’s change of policy in 1164 from neutrality to reluctant engagement reflected a dependence on his Kurdish generals and their corps of mamluks, professional slave warriors whose loyalties rested with their commanders rather than to any nominal political overlord. Shirkuh regarded an Egyptian invasion as an opportunity to establish independent power of his own, the enterprise becoming a family business as he took with him his nephew as second-in-command, Yusuf Ibn Ayyub, better known as Salah al-Din or Saladin (1137–93). This ambition may have been detected by Shirkuh’s protégé Shawar, prompting his invitation to the Franks. Certainly, during this first invasion, Shirkuh took careful stock of Egyptian resources and the potential for the establishment of an Ayyubid kingdom.

  The Frankish campaign in Egypt of August to October 1164, largely taken up with a siege of Bilbeis, ended when both Amalric and Shirkuh agreed to evacuate the country. Amalric’s apparent advantage in Egypt had been undermined by an attack on Antioch by Nur al-Din and his victory at Artah, about twenty miles east of the city, where Bohemund III of Antioch and Raymond III of Tripoli were both captured. However, Shirkuh, lacking reinforcements because of this war in northern Syria, could not maintain his position against a hostile local regime and its Frankish allies. Both protagonists left Egypt in 1164, their appetites for conquest far from satiated. By late 1166, Shirkuh’s plans for conquering Egypt had attracted the support of the caliph in Baghdad and acquiescence of Nur al-Din. This new invasion had been anticipated by Shawar, who once more called in the aid of the Franks, the two armies arriving more or less simultaneously, in January 1167. The fighting penetrated deep into Egypt beyond the Delta and south of Cairo, where, at al-Babayn in Middle Egypt, Amalric suffered a severe defeat at the hands of Shirkuh’s army in March. Despite this and the Franks’ failure to dislodge Saladin from Alexandria, the subsequent stalemate led to another evacuation of Egypt by both Franks and Syrians in August, leaving Shawar in power with a Frankish representative resident with troops in Cairo and an increase in the Jerusalem tribute. The scope and intensity of the war of 1167 suggest that Amalric was determined at least to establish a protectorate over Egypt, if only to prevent it falling into the hands of Nur al-Din or Shirkuh, while the latter’s intentions to annexe the country were now clear.

  The crisis of the Egyptian wars came in the winter of 1168–9. Amalric attacked in October 1168, apparently intent on the conquest of Egypt, although he refused to wait for Byzantine naval assistance and lacked the support of the Templars. Amalric may have feared Shirkuh would conquer Egypt first. As it was, the Frankish advance forced the shifty but resilient Shawar into another precarious diplomatic somersault, accepting help from Shirkuh, whom he had double-crossed in 1164. After capturing and brutally sacking Bibleis, Amalric besieged Cairo. However, failing to provoke a decisive battle, the Franks were compelled to withdraw empty-handed in January 1169, leaving the field open for Shirkuh. On 18 January, Shawar, his nimble footwork at last failing, was assassinated by the Kurdish generals ostensibly on the orders of the teenaged Fatimid caliph al-Adid. Shirkuh succeeded to the viziership. However, on 22 March 1169, he succumbed to age, over three decades in the saddle, recent exertion and a longstanding heart condition exacerbated by over-indulgence, a taste for ‘rich meats’ and obesity (in contrast to his porcine rival, King Amalric, whose weight represented a cruel reward for moderation in food and drink).12 Despite the reservations of more senior Turkish commanders in the army, Saladin replaced him.

  Initially, Saladin’s tenure appeared insecure, the fifth vizier in six years. His personal military entourage was outnumbered by the Turkish contingents from Syria, many of whom returned north with their disgruntled emirs after his accession. His remaining forces, a few thousand, were dwarfed by the Fatimid armies, especially by the 30,000 black infantry troops, the Sudan. His political position appeared hopelessly anomalous: an orthodox Sunni Kurd, nominally subject to a foreign overlord, sustained by a dwindling Turkish army from Syria, attempting to rule a large, unsubdued and populous country in the name of a Shi’ite caliph. Yet within a year he had destroyed the Black Sudan and repulsed a dangerous assault by land and sea by a combined Frankish-Greek amphibious force at Damietta. With the failure of this, Amalric’s fifth invasion of Egypt in six years, and despite an attack on Alexandria by a Sicilian fleet in 1174 and the planned Byzantine naval assault of 1177, the Franks’ gamble, legitimate in conception, skilfully funded by an unscrupulous monarch but bungled in execution and myopic in long-term strategic assessment, had failed, handing a major advantage to their enemies.

  In 1170, Saladin went on to the offensive, capturing Gaza and Aila on the Red Sea from the Franks, harrying the remnants of the Sudan and extending his hold on Arabia and Yemen. Although further policing operations in Egypt and Yemen were necessary, Saladin’s power was secured, not least by his careful creation of his own military corps, or askar, the Salahiyya, and grants of revenues (iqta) to his followers, especially his immediate family. His father, Naim al-Din Ayyub (d. 1173), received huge income from the Delta and its ports. In concert with Nur al-Din’s policy of overt religious orthodoxy, in September 1171, on the death of the Fatimid caliph al-Adid, Saladin had the name of the Sunni Abbasid caliph of Baghdad al-Mustadi (1170–80) inserted into Friday prayers.13 After 202 years, the Fatimid caliphate of Cairo was at an end, an achievement of religious unity for which Saladin, the reluctant executor of Nur al-Din’s wishes, subsequently took credit. Whil
e the new sultan of Egypt consolidated control of the southern periphery of his empire, Nur al-Din began to prepare against this upstart. Twice, in 1171 and 1173, Saladin had withdrawn from joint expeditions against the Franks in Transjordan. Open war seemed imminent when, ‘in the midst of preparations’ to invade Egypt, Nur al-Din died suddenly of a heart attack in Damascus on 15 May 1174.14 On 11 July King Amalric, after a prolonged fever, died in Jerusalem aged thirty-eight. By the end of October, Saladin had entered Damascus. The third, final stage of William of Tyre’s encirclement was about to begin.

  The career of al-Malik al-Nasir Salah al-Dunya wa’l-Din Abu’l Muzaffar Yusuf Ibn Ayyub Ibn Shadi al-Kurdi, known to westerners during his lifetime and ever since as Saladin, epitomized the fluidity and the opportunities of Near Eastern politics in the twelfth century.15 Born the son of a displaced Kurdish mercenary in the service of Zengi of Mosul, he died the creator and ruler of an empire that embraced Iraq, Syria, Arabia and Egypt, the effective overlord of the Fertile Crescent, a successful dynast whose arriviste family became the political masters of the Near East for over half a century. His legend, carefully fashioned by members of his entourage after his death, received unlikely promotion by Christian authors in the west. Saladin’s reputation as a noble adversary of honour, chivalry, clemency and justice, invented in the immediate aftermath of the Third Crusade (1188–92), became a staple image of crusading from the vernacular cycles of crusade epics and romances of the thirteenth century into the pulp history of the twenty-first. Such was the admiration he inspired in western commentators that they paid him the ultimate compliment of imagining he had received the belt of knighthood from a Frankish knight, identified by a writer during the Palestine war of 1191–2 as Humphrey II of Toron, constable of Jerusalem (d. 1179).16 Such fictions of Saladin’s chivalry were enshrined in verse and the visual arts across western Europe; in the early 1250s, for example, he appeared jousting with Richard I in wall paintings and tiles decorating new apartments of Richard’s nephew, King Henry III of England.17

  What struck western contemporaries most was Saladin’s generosity, a quality admired equally by his contemporaries the German poet Walter von der Vogelweide (c.1170–1230) and the French, possibly Norman versifier of the story of the Third Crusade, Ambroise, who remarked within a few years of Saladin’s death that ‘in the world there was no court where he enjoyed not good report’.18 Ironically, such admiration for the stereotype ‘good pagan’, as Saladin appears in Dante’s Inferno beside Hector, Aeneas and Julius Caesar, was not universally shared by thirteenth-century Arabic writers. Saladin and his family had made too many enemies. The Iraqi Izz al-Din Ibn al-Athir’s extensive history of the Muslim world, while recognizing Saladin’s achievements, questioned the image and propaganda. The famous magnanimity at Jerusalem in 1187, when Saladin allowed the helpless Franks safe conduct out of the city, was tempered by Ibn al-Athir’s claim that the sultan’s initial instinct was to exact full revenge for the Franks’ atrocities of 1099. According to Ibn al-Athir, Nur al-Din detected in Saladin a reluctance to fight the Franks ‘as he should’, his own emirs urging him to engage the Franks in battle at Hattin in 1187: ‘because in the East people are cursing us, saying that we no longer fight the infidels but have begun to fight Muslims instead’.19 Although his fame hardly dimmed in the west, bizarrely finding new life during and after the Enlightenment as a rational and civilized figure in juxtaposition to credulous barbaric crusaders, from the fourteenth to the late nineteenth century Saladin’s repute in Islamic and Near Eastern memory paled beside that of Nur al-Din and the great Mamluk sultan of Egypt Baibars (1260–77).

  The reflections of Saladin’s emirs in Ibn al-Athir’s account of the Hattin campaign go to the heart of Saladin’s politics and reputation. Between 1174 and 1186, Saladin completed the encirclement of Outremer observed by William of Tyre, who probably died in 1186. Through a mixture of force and diplomacy, Saladin gradually asserted his control over Syria and the Jazira, beginning with Damascus in 1174. He was not greeted with unalloyed enthusiasm. His control over most of Syria was hard won between 1174 and 1176. Aleppo was annexed only in 1183 and Mosul in 1186. Attacks on the Franks were sporadic and rare; success modest. Defeated in a skirmish in southern Palestine in 1177 (known to the Franks as the battle of Montgisard) and at Forbelet in Galilee in 1182, he captured Jacob’s Ford in northern Galilee in 1179 and the waterless island of Ruad in 1180. In 1182 Beirut withstood a sea-borne attack, and a large prospective invasion following the taking of Aleppo in 1183 stalled when the Jerusalem army refused battle. In practical terms, war with the Franks appeared secondary to securing Nur al-Din’s inheritance. For most of the period 1174–87 truces prevailed, the final assault on Outremer only coming when other opportunities for expansion had been exhausted. Saladin’s power depended on his ability to reward followers and allies with revenues and lucrative offices. Any slackening of this rich stream of patronage threatened his authority over his mamluks, his own family members placed in command of his conquests and those non-Ayyubids, including some reconciled Zengid princes, who expected reward for subservience. Consequently, territorial expansion provided both the object and the sustenance for Saladin’s policies.

  Nur al-Din’s legacy also included championing orthodox religion and the jihad. Saladin cultivated these with determination, whether, as his panegyrists insisted, out of private conviction, or from public convenience, or both, is not now possible to judge. As a parvenu Kurd, seeking to rule a largely Turkish aristocratic military elite that had once been his employer, Saladin needed the legitimacy the jihad could bestow. Already before Nur al-Din’s death, he could boast the deposition of the heretic Fatimids and at every stage of his career he presented himself in the image of a Koranic leader. Prepared to crucify Islamic heretics, Saladin’s public orthodoxy attracted the hostile attentions of the Assassins, the suicide killers of their day, until, after surviving two attempts on his life, Saladin arrived at a peaceful accommodation with their leader in the Lebanon, Rashid al-Din Sinan (1169–93), the Franks’ ‘Old Man of the Mountains’.20 Public displays of religious devotion and personal piety featured prominently in Saladin’s style as ruler, conveying important political messages. The ritual cleansing of the Dome of the Rock and its surroundings performed in person with other members of his family during the physical de-Christianizing of Jerusalem in 1187 demonstrated the status of the Ayyubids as the new protectors as well as rulers of Islam.21

  Such propagandist posing occupied a central place in the biographical eulogies by Saladin’s secretary Imad al-Din al-Isfahani and his friend and official Baha’ al-Din Ibn Shaddad. It also played a pivotal role in his actual political behaviour. To emphasize his loyalty to the jihad, he placed Nur al-Din’s minbar from Aleppo in the al-Aqsa mosque as his predecessor had intended. Also following Nur al-Din’s example, he paid especial attention to relations with the caliphs of Baghdad, whose formal recognition could lend a veneer of respectability to his conquests. In 1175 he won investiture by Caliph al-Mustadi of Egypt, Yemen, future conquests and Syria except for Aleppo, although opposition from the last great Abbasid caliph, al-Nasir (1180–1225), thwarted his designs on Mosul in 1182. Saladin peppered the court in Baghdad with flattering correspondence implying he acted as the caliph’s servant, not least the newsletter he despatched to al-Nasir a few days after the victory over the Franks at Hattin in July 1187, which dripped formal obeisance to the caliph’s superior authority.22 Religious duty refined political imperative. Ibn Shaddad recorded a conversation with Saladin on the coast road between Ascalon and Acre one stormy day in 1189 during which the sultan declared his eagerness, once all the Franks had finally been expelled from Outremer, ‘to set sail to their islands to pursue them there until there no longer remain on the face of the earth any who deny God’.23 Wrapped in this rhetorical hyperbole lay the imperative of his system of patronage, loyalty and discipline; each conquest had to be followed by another.

  The problem for the sultan’s apologists wa
s that before 1187 Saladin’s military energies were primarily directed against fellow Muslims. For all his glamour as a conqueror of Egypt, Syria and Palestine, Saladin proved a cautious, at times nervous, field commander, better at political intrigue, diplomacy and military administration than the tactics of battle or the strategy of campaign. His successes at Damascus (1154), Aleppo (1183) and Mosul (1186) came through the application of political coercion and diplomacy, not brutal assault. Christian armies defeated him at Montgisard in 1177, Forbelet in 1182, Arsuf in 1191 and Jaffa in 1192. Indecision cost him Tyre and Antioch in 1187–8. His failure to snuff out the paltry Christian army in the early stages of the siege of Acre in 1189 remains hard to explain. Diplomacy rather than combat allowed him to withstand the Third Crusade, as it had ensured his alliance with the caliph, neutralized the Seljuks of Asia Minor and sown division in the kingdom of Jerusalem with his treaty with Raymond III of Tripoli in 1185–7. This preference for political arts cannot be ascribed to a lack of military experience or personal squeamishness; the massacres of the Sudan in 1169 and the butchery of the Templars and Hospitallers after Hattin give that the lie. What distinguished Saladin, as William of Tyre sensed, was a highly developed opportunism sustained by an unsentimental appreciation of how to achieve ends through blandishment rather than force, coupled with considerable skill at managing administrative systems and people. Even so, for all his qualities as a politician, Saladin’s triumph over the Franks was eased by debilitating forces within Outremer for which he could claim no responsibility.