Chapter 10
At the beginning of 1187, ‘Saladin wrote to all the provinces to call them to arms in the Holy War’; troops were called up from Egypt and the Syrian cities, and the lords of Mosul and the other cities of al-Jazirah. Among them was Gökböri of Edessa and Harran; the ill-feeling between him and Saladin, whatever may have been its cause, was obviously long forgotten: Gökböri had received both his lordships back. During the middle of April the army left Damascus, marching due south for Ra’s al-Ma’. Here they were joined by numerous Syrian contingents and al-Afdal was left to continue the muster. His instructions were to dispatch the incoming detachments on harrying raids in Christian territories and particularly to probe the situation in Galilee where Count Raymond of Tripoli, lord of the principality through his wife Eschiva, was still on terms of alliance with Saladin.
It seems obvious that Saladin was developing a major strategical plan aimed at the destruction of the Christian army and the conquest of Jerusalem. Because the crucial victory, when it came in July, depended to some extent on Christian errors, some of Saladin’s modern critics have proposed that his success was due as much to good luck as good judgement. They suggest that the massive forces were intended for nothing more than a large-scale razzia. The developments of the spring and summer give the lie to such theorising.
The coming campaign posed two related strategic problems. Saladin could not hope to take the cities and fortresses on which the kingdom of Jerusalem rested unless he first destroyed the army in the field. But long experience had taught that the Franks, if well led and well disciplined, were virtually indestructible unless taken by surprise or at some other disadvantage. From this it followed that the second problem was to manoeuvre them into a situation in which they were forced into mistakes. It will become quite clear that Saladin fully understood the issues involved. The sheer size of the military forces that were building up in the Hauran would not guarantee success, they would have to be handled with cunning and the psychology of war exploited to the full.
Here Saladin held an important card. His dealings with Count Raymond had already considerably weakened the Christian cause with mutual recrimination and suspicions. Now King Guy had gone so far as to summon the army of the kingdom to meet him at Nazareth with a view to forcing Raymond’s submission before the Muslim attacks really began. Guy was his declared enemy; Saladin his only friend but the ambiguity of Raymond’s position was heightened when, at the end of April, he received an envoy from al-Afdal. He was not prepared for what was to come. As one ally to another, al-Afdal blandly requested permission to send a force of 7,000 horsemen through Galilee. The purpose and destination do not seem to have been discussed; all that was asked for was a safe conduct for what amounted to a small army.
Raymond’s dilemma was acute. Well-informed sources in the Muslim camp believed that the objective of al-Afdal’s expedition was the hinterland of Acre itself, and Raymond can hardly have failed to make a similar deduction. Many Christians had already classed him as a traitor, if he collaborated in such a project his reputation would be blackened indelibly. Yet he could not afford to abandon the Saladin connection completely until Guy’s threat on his southern frontier had lifted. He proposed a compromise. The 7,000 could go through on condition they harmed neither town nor peasants and that they crossed the Jordan after dawn and returned by the same ford before nightfall.
The fact that al-Afdal was content with these terms confirms the suspicion that Saladin’s objective was diplomatic rather than military. The Acre rumour is reported by Ibn-al-Athir, who was not with the northern army at the time, and it seems that Saladin was wishing to probe his ally’s reliability and test how far he would commit himself. However, al-Afdal made full use of the opportunity for his staff to survey and reconnoitre the theatre of the coming campaign. The expedition was led by Gökböri, commander of the contingents from al-Jazirah, and the commanders of the Aleppan and Damascus troops. Thanks to Raymond’s embarrassed cooperation the Islamic forces were able to ride over the country between Tiberias and Saffuriyah – the traditional assembly point for the Frankish army when faced with invasion in the north of the kingdom.
Unexpectedly it also gave them the chance to liquidate a force of Hospitaller and Templar knights. To avoid a breach of the truce by his own people, Raymond had dispatched messengers throughout the principality to warn of the march by the Saracens. What he did not know was that King Guy had finally agreed to moderates’ advice to seek a settlement with him and that an embassy was already in the principality on its way up to Tiberias. It was led by Balian of Ibelin, and with him was Roger des Moulins, grand master of the Hospitallers, and Gerard de Ridefort, grand master of the Templars. He was not the man to let infidels ride unmolested through Christian territory. On hearing the news on the evening of 30 April he at once ordered all the Templars in the neighbourhood to come to his standard. With other knights who joined the colours they made up a force of close on 150. The next day they rode out in search of the enemy, Roger protesting but shamed into the absurd adventure by the taunts of his fellow grand master. The Muslim horsemen were watering their horses near to Saffuriyah, when to their astonishment they found themselves under attack from a mere handful of Christian knights. Joyfully they prepared themselves for this bonus battle which quickly became a massacre. Only three of the knights survived, among them Grand Master Gerard. The blond head of Roger des Moulins was among those borne back in triumph on the lances of the Saracen troopers.
The main army greeted the news with jubilation. When he heard it Saladin was on the road south to deal another blow at the Christians. News had come through that Raynald was going to attack pilgrims (moving up the Mecca road) and then return to bar the Egyptian army from joining up with the Syrians. The situation was almost a carbon copy of 1183 and 1184. Once again a caravan escorting prestigious travellers – this time Saladin’s sister and her son – was obliged to run the mailed gauntlet of Raynald, poised between the two halves of the Muslim empire. Once again there were important manoeuvres pending. Then it had been an exchange of posts by high officials, now it was a military campaign which could not be allowed to go off at half cock. The Egyptian contingent was vital; for the moment it was more important to neutralise Raynald at the least possible cost than crush him. But this time the Muslim forces were very much larger. It was enough for Saladin to march south without even laying siege to al-Karak to persuade Raynald to leave the caravan alone. Once it was out of the area Saladin marched, systematically ravaging Raynald’s territories.
At the end of May he moved back northwards and in June set up his standard at al-‘Ashtara, some twenty miles nearer the Christian frontier than Ra’s al-Ma’, where the main muster had now been completed. The enemy too was closing ranks. Shocked by the disaster at Saffuriyah, Raymond had come to terms with the king and was now with the army. It was the biggest in living memory, some said the biggest that the Franks had ever put in the field. But that gathering round Saladin’s standard was bigger and, because of late arrivals, growing. In the third week of June he held a general review and gave his officers a detailed briefing. The duties of the coming campaign were explained and duties allotted; the words of command were run through a final time to ensure as far as possible against misunderstandings in the field, among a force drawn from widely scattered regions and different traditions of service. Each emir was given a specific post and ordered strictly to stick to it and the three senior commands were appointed. Taqi-ad-Din on the right wing, Gökböri on the left, and Saladin himself in command of the centre. The review finished, he next paid out the bounties which he had had to promise to various commanders to persuade them to come on the campaign.
At last the army was ready and, on Friday, 26 June, Saladin moved out of al-‘Ashtara towards the ford of Senabra, just south of Lake Tiberias. He pitched camp at al-Uqhuwanah. ‘The vast sea of his army surrounded the lake. The ship-like tents rode at anchor and the battalions flooded in, wave upon wave. A second sky of dust spread out in which swords and iron-tipped lances rose like stars.’ Here they rested for five days while the scouts brought back the news that the Franks were indeed mustering at their usual base of Saffuriyah, where only a few weeks before the Muslim high command had taken the opportunity of checking the lie of the land at first hand. In 1183 the Franks had not been lured into battle on unfavourable terrain, even by Saladin’s capture of Baisan – clearly a bigger inducement would have to be found. The objective was Tiberias.
On 1 July the army crossed the Jordan. The main force was sent on a few miles to the north-west with orders to camp at Kafr Sabt and from there to monitor the Franks’ movements. ‘If they tried to reach Tiberias, the Muslims were to set out immediately to attack them. Saladin went to Tiberias with his personal guard and his most faithful troops.’ The town soon fell but the Countess Eschiva and the garrison left behind by Raymond withdrew into the citadel. From there she got a message to the royal army begging the king to relieve the siege that Saladin was laying to the citadel. The day was Thursday, the date 2 July. The campaign was barely forty-eight hours old and the bird seemed ready to come to the lure.
Tiberias lies about fifteen miles due east of Saffuriyah, though the most level road, curving to the north, stretched the distance to some twenty miles – the limit of a day’s march. This road lay across an arid upland plain and then descended to the lake about a mile to the north of the town. An alternative route bent to the south-east, leading to the southernmost tip of the lake and thence northwards up its coast. Again the distance was about twenty miles, and this road, though not so good, was well watered. But with Saladin’s main force straddled across the south-east route at Kafr Sabt, it was not even an option to the Christians. If they were to relieve Tiberias they would have to face a long day’s march under enemy action across waterless uplands in the heat of a Syrian mid-summer. By the capture of Tiberias, by the placing of his forces, and by blocking up the few wells and springs along the northern road, Saladin had done all in his power to force on the Christians that all-important mistake. Now he could only wait on the decision of the high command at Saffuriyah.
The council of war, which was to decide the fate of the Christians in the Holy City, began early in the evening of 2 July. The arguments against the relief of Tiberias ran roughly as follows. Saladin could not destroy the army where it was at Saffuriyah but stood a good chance of doing so on the march. Thus inaction would keep the army in being, and since the Muslim army usually broke up of its own accord at the end of the campaigning season the loss of Tiberias could be seen as only a short-term matter. If, flushed with his success there, Saladin should decide to attack, then it would be his troops and not the Christians who would be fighting under the handicaps of heat and thirst with no safe base to fall back on. Up on the exposed plateau the army would be inviting destruction. If it were lost then so would be the whole kingdom. Better to lose Tiberias. The majority of the commanders urged prudence, and they were headed by Raymond, although Tiberias lay in his wife’s domain and it was she who, as commander, had begged for support. Raymond pointed out that even if the garrison were taken prisoner they could easily be ransomed in due course.
But the arguments on the other side were equally compelling, and it was these that Saladin must have been depending upon. He knew that the two fire-eaters, Gerard de Ridefort and Raynald, were with the army and both had been humiliated by his activities of recent months. When the council broke up just before midnight on the 2nd, it was with the king’s agreement to follow the Raymond line and stay at Saffuriyah. But Gerard and Raynald stayed behind in the king’s tent to persuade him to reverse that decision. They had some cogent points to put. They reminded Guy that three years before he had been in command of another great army which had refused battle to Saladin at the Springs of Goliath and that subsequently he had been charged with cowardice and deprived of his position as regent. Then he had followed similar cautious advice from Raymond, and it had been Raymond who had replaced him as regent. Furthermore, they argued, Raymond had been treacherously allied with the enemy until only weeks before and the result of that alliance had been the slaughter of more than a hundred knights. If the king, commanding the biggest army yet put in the field, refused the chance of destroying the enemy on the advice of a traitor then, said Gerard, the continuing loyalty of the Order of the Temple could not be guaranteed. One can only admire the skill with which Saladin had combined military and diplomatic manoeuvres during the foregoing months to open still further the divisions within the enemy councils so that the crucial error of judgement was virtually forced.
But there was another point which must surely have influenced Guy’s decision to attempt the relief of Tiberias. The party of Raymond had argued that as the campaigning season came to an end the Muslim army would melt away. Now while it was true that the troops and emirs of al-Jazirah would certainly return to their distant bases, the Aleppan and Damascene troops and much of the Egyptian force would stay. Saladin would have ample forces to hold Tiberias over the winter. Guy must have asked himself what exactly the army was for if it could not prevent one of the kingdom’s major cities falling to the enemy. If Tiberias could fall, which would be the next town to go and how long could the integrity of the state survive such encroachments? At dawn on Friday the 3rd, the army emerged from the security of Saffuriyah to begin its fateful last march. Saladin’s jubilant reaction, reported by Baha’-ad-Din, fully supports the assumption that the whole 1187 campaign had been carefully calculated to the final grand objective, the recapture of Jerusalem. He told his secretary that this development ‘confirmed that his decision, based on his earlier judgement, had been accurate’, and continued,’ “If they are defeated, killed and captured, Tiberias and all Palestine will have no one left to defend them and impede our conquest.”’
Once it had been decided to march at all, it was crucial that the Christians reach the shores of Lake Tiberias in a single day’s march. The second blow to Christian hopes came when Saladin succeeded in forcing the army to a halt in the evening of the 3rd. The morning had begun blazing hot and dry, and within hours of leaving the trees and gardens of Saffuriyah the Franks ‘were suffering greatly from thirst’. A thick dust cloud choked the parched throats and caked on the sweaty skins of the labouring troops. Soon the Saracen army moving up from Kafr Sabt made contact and their horse archers poured an almost unbroken stream of arrows into the enemy. Their men and horses gasping for water, and under constant attacks on flanks and rear, the Christians’ progress was slowed to a crawl. A running battle like this was one of the classic manoeuvres of crusading warfare – the Christian tactic was to maintain a steady march for its objective; the Muslim aim was of course to force the enemy to a standstill or break his column. Ahead of Guy and his troops Saladin and the army of Tiberias barred the way to the lake and made ready to check any attempt by the vanguard to charge. But it was the constant attacks in their rear that eventually forced the Christians to halt. The army was in danger of losing touch with the rearguard and Guy made camp near Lubya a mile or two from a low peaked hill known locally as the Horns of Hattin. The Franks had covered barely ten miles.
Surrounded by the misery of their wounded and dying they spent a fearful and demoralising night punctuated by jubilant shouts of the chant – ‘God is great; there is no God but God’ – from every quarter of the enemy camp. Ibn-al-Athir tells us that the Muslims ‘had lost their first fear of the Franks. They could smell the victory in the air and the more they saw of the unexpectedly low morale of the Franks the more aggressive and daring they became.’ While all this was going on Saladin ordered up reserves of arrows and checked troop placements. By dawn the Christians were completely surrounded, so tightly ‘that not an ant could have got out.’ The battle opened with a charge led by Saladin. Although weakened and demoralised by thirst, the knights put up a furious resistance and Saladin ordered the archers to begin firing. The Christian infantry abandoned all formation and attempted a wild breakthrough towards the waters of Lake Tiberias which lay shimmering in the distance. A prairie fire, started by a volunteer in the Muslim army, added its scorching smoke to their miseries. Most were cut down or taken prisoner. In a desperate attempt to break out Raymond, acting apparently on the orders of the king to open a way through the Muslim ranks for the rest of the army, led a charge against the wing commanded by Taqi-ad-Din. But Saladin’s nephew was not willing to risk the breakup of his formation in a mêlée with the heavily armed enemy, and opened his ranks to let the knights thunder through ineffectually. Looking back up the hill Raymond could see that the remnant of the army was in a hopeless plight, he also realised that he could not break back through the reformed ranks of Taqi-ad-Din’s force. He and his men rode away to Tripoli.
Hoping perhaps that the Muslim ranks would open to any determined attack, other groups of Frankish knights mounted a series of charges which almost dislodged the Muslims from their positions in spite of their numbers. But they were steadily driven back leaving their dead behind them. ‘The Muslims wheeled around them like a circle about its diameter’; inexorably that diameter was contracting. Guy and a party of a few hundred made their way up the hill to the Horns of Hattin and there they pitched the king’s red tent for a last gallant stand.
It is apparent from the asides in their chronicles that Ibn-al-Athir, Baha’-ad-Din and ‘Imad-ad-Din were mightily impressed by the Frankish knights. Now Guy, Gerard and Raynald, and the knights with them, showed the superb fighting qualities that had so often saved the kingdom from disaster and which had always forced Saladin to treat the Christian army with respect. The final stages of the battle are described for us in the words of his son al-Afdal, fighting in his first major engagement, as reported by Ibn al-Athir:
I was at my father Saladin’s side during the battle, the first that I saw with my own eyes. The Frankish king had retreated to the hill with his band and from there he led a furious charge against the Muslims facing him, forcing them back upon my father. I saw that he was alarmed and distraught, and he tugged at his beard as he went forward crying: ‘Give the Devil the lie!’ The Muslims turned to the counter-attack and drove the Franks back up the hill. When I saw the Franks retreating before the Muslim I cried out for joy: ‘We have defeated them!’ But they returned to the charge with undiminished ardour and drove our army back toward my father. His response was the same as before, and the Franks retired back to the hill. Again I cried: ‘We have beaten them!’ but my father turned to me and said: ‘Hold your peace; we shall not have beaten them until that tent falls!’ As he spoke the tent fell, and the Sultan dismounted and prostrated himself in thanks to God, weeping for joy.
The fact that these last charges were aimed at Saladin’s position indicates that this was a tactical bid to win a last-moment victory and not a suicide last stand. In a council of war immediately before the battle a knight called John, who had served as a mercenary in Turkish armies, had advised that the best way to victory against these motley forces was to attack the commander-in-chief. If his section could be routed the whole battle was as good as won. The idea of a Christian mercenary in service with the Turks, which may sound oddly in our ears, would not have surprised Frank or Muslim. It is just one more instance of how the high-flown passions behind the rhetoric of crusade and jihad were often served by men with purely professional interests in warfare. In fact Sir John’s sound advice nearly saved the day for Guy and his friends. A forlorn hope it certainly was, but from the intent and far from confident way in which Saladin followed the closing stages of the battle we can sense how well he knew the dour determination of his enemy and doubted the drive of his own troops.
By late afternoon, when the last grand gesture was made, it is possible that fatigue had finally finished the fighting spirit of the Christians. When their tent was at last overrun the king and his knights were found sitting and lying on the ground, totally exhausted. Their resolve had been finally broken by the loss of the True Cross. Taken into the battle as a standard by the bishop of Acre, it fell to the troops of Taqi-ad-Din and the bishop was killed.
‘Stumbling like drunken men’, the king and his companions were led before Saladin in fetters. To understand what was to happen it is important to remember the feud between Saladin and Raynald and also the fact that Guy was a recent arrival from Europe. The two were ordered to sit together and then Saladin began to berate Raynald as an oath-breaker. He replied coolly enough through the interpreter: ‘This is how kings have always behaved; I have only followed the path of custom.’ The other prisoners were not so calm. The king, who after hours of exhausting battle had lost his kingdom and the most prized relic of Christendom, was shaking, it appeared with fear, more probably from delayed shock. He appealed for a drink and Saladin affably ordered snow-cooled water to be brought. Guy passed the cup on to Raynald when he had drunk his fill. Immediately Saladin intervened. ‘Tell the count,’ he said, ‘that you gave him that drink without permission from me. He has not received food or drink at my hand and so he cannot claim the protection of my house.’ With this he left the pavilion to supervise the return of the army to its camp stations and the pitching of his own tent, and also ‘to let Raynald roast at the fire of his own fear’.
Returning in the evening he entered the tent housing the prisoners and at once summoned Raynald to stand before him; then and there Saladin felled him with a blow which caught him on the shoulder. A guard struck off the head and the corpse was dragged out by the heels. Guy, already exhausted physically and emotionally, assumed this was the beginning of a general killing. His European background made it impossible for him to accept that the lord of the infidels could be a man of his word. Saladin tried to set his mind at rest after this macabre episode of rough justice. ‘Twice have I sworn to kill that man when I had him in my power; once when he tried to attack Mecca and Medina and again when he broke the truce to capture the caravan.’ Guy and his other noble companions were spared, and were in due course released – even the grand master of the Temple.
But the lesser knights of the order were not so fortunate. Their devotion and rigorous military training made them the most feared of the Christian troops and, with uncharacteristic coldbloodedness, Saladin ordered the slaughter of the hundred or so Templars and Hospitallers among the prisoners. Seated on a dais before the whole army he watched as the band of scholars, sufis and ascetics who had flocked enthusiastically to the army when jihad the was proclaimed and who had begged to be allowed to kill one of the knights, carried out the ceremonial killing. The day after the victory at Hattin the Countess Eschiva formally surrendered the citadel of Tiberias and was sent under Saladin’s safe conduct to Tripoli.
It was the first of many capitulations. Hattin had cracked the defences of the kingdom wide open and castellans and city governors throughout the country knew this to be so. Saladin moved fast, to pick the fruits of victory while the Christian morale was at its lowest ebb. Acre, commanded by Joscelin of Courtenay, seneschal of the kingdom, was the first objective. On 10 July the place capitulated on condition that the lives of the citizens were spared; the majority of the Christian merchants marched out with their household possessions under the safe conduct but they left behind warehouses crammed with stocks of silks and metals, jewels and arms. As the streams of refugees marched through the city gates Saladin celebrated public prayers in the mosque: the first Friday prayers to be held in the city since the infidel Franks first invaded Islam. Saladin, who loved to begin his campaigns and if possible fight his battles on the Muslim’s Holy Day, found his victory the sweeter for being on a Friday, but the rest of the surrenders that summer could not always be timed so conveniently – they happened too fast. His commanders systematically took the submissions of the towns and castles of Galilee. Nazareth, Saffuriyah itself, Haifa, Caesarea fell without a fight, Nablus played a two-day masquerade of resistance, and the castle at Toron held out for a fortnight before yielding on 26 July to a force led by Saladin. Meanwhile, the Egyptian army under al-Adil had taken Jaffa by storm and sent its people into slavery to be sold in the markets of Aleppo. Beirut, Sidon, Jubail and many other places followed, so that by the end of August in the whole kingdom the Christians held only Tyre, Ascalon, Gaza and Jerusalem, apart from a few castles. To the south al-Karak and ash-Shaubak were still held for the Cross, yet after a bitter long siege they too eventually fell. It seemed that, short of a miracle or massive help from Europe, the collapse of the Christian adventure in Palestine was only a matter of time, and a fairly short time at that. Two events and two men combined to falsify this prediction.
It was exactly forty years since the last European intervention had ended in the disastrous Second Crusade, and though there had been appeals for help fairly regularly since that time nothing had come of them. In August 1187 Saladin would have needed a sophisticated intelligence network in Europe, combined with the skills of prophecy, to foresee the advent of the Third Crusade and the military genius of Richard of England. Nor could he have predicted the arrival of Conrad of Montferrat at the port of Tyre in mid-July.
A closer look at the crowded days which followed Hattin shows him building on the victory systematically and thoroughly. At the Field of Blood nearly seventy years before, the victory had been wasted; Il-Ghazi had been content to feast his triumph at Aleppo and send boastful dispatches to the caliph and others. By contrast Saladin was hard at work the next day. The battle was fought on a Saturday. Sunday was occupied with Countess Eschiva’s surrender of the citadel at Tiberias. Next, officers and squadrons had to be detailed off to begin the quicksilver conquests already sketched. Yet on Wednesday Saladin and the bulk of his army were pitching camp before the walls of Acre, a good two days’ march from Tiberias. The speed with which Seneschal de Courtenay conceded the town must have surprised Saladin; it certainly angered the townspeople who rioted in protest. Nevertheless, within two days the place was handed over and the Muslim troops were soon avidly dividing the spoils. The commanders had received bounties which lured them to the war before the campaign at al-Ashtara, but the common soldiery too expected war to be profitable. The field of Hattin had yielded little, but the bursting warehouses of Acre were a different matter – little serious fighting could be expected from the army for some days. However, Saladin still had work to do: he opened negotiations for the surrender of Tyre.
The ancient city stood on an island joined to the mainland by a narrow sandy spit which was crossed at the landward side by a massive wall. Even the weakest defence could hold it against assault from the shore. It had fallen to the Franks in 1124 only after six months of blockade by sea and land. Saladin knew he had to win the place as soon as was convenient, he also had no time for a long-drawn-out siege. Both for personal and political reasons Jerusalem must be higher on the agenda, but after the success at Acre, he felt confident that Tyre would capitulate quickly. His confidence was well founded. Negotiations moved rapidly and the commander took delivery of the yellow banners of Saladin which were to be flown on the city walls at the handing-over ceremony. Yet when, a few days later, Saladin and his official party arrived for that ceremony they found the gates closed against them. The near-miracle needed to save the town had happened in the person of Conrad of Montferrat.
He had arrived from Constantinople, a fugitive from justice and quite ignorant of Saladin’s victory. He sailed into Acre harbour on 14 July and was a little puzzled that the ship’s arrival was not greeted in the usual way. Soon he learnt that the place had just fallen to the Muslims and that Tyre was the nearest port still in Christian hands, Conrad made good his escape from Acre and headed north. In Tyre he agreed to take over the defence of the place on condition he was accepted as absolute lord there. The citizens and refugees crowded in the town agreed, the former commander left that night, and the town’s walls were soon manned.
Saladin made no attempt to force the assault, nor to lay a siege, There was little reason he should. There were still important places, above all Jerusalem, to be taken. Tyre, strong as its defences were, would eventually be reduced when the army and Egyptian fleet could be jointly mobilised. Among the prisoners at Hattin had been Conrad’s father, the aged marquis of Montferrat. Saladin paraded him before the walls of the town and threatened to kill him if it was not surrendered. Conrad refused to trade a Christian city for a single knight, even though it be his father. Nonplussed by such unfilial piety, Saladin spared the old man’s life and moved on.
Elsewhere his hostages proved more useful. Jubail surrendered on the orders of its lord, who was then released. At Gaza the Templar garrison, obliged by the rules of the order to obey the grand master in all things, handed the citadel over to Saladin when he brought Gerard de Ridefort before the walls to order the capitulation. Ascalon, however, refused even when Gerard and the king himself first ordered and then begged the commander to give in. A fortnight of brave defence cost Saladin the lives of two of his emirs, and involved al-Adil and the Egyptian army. But Ascalon too was forced into surrender. Despite their resistance the people and garrison were granted honourable terms and allowed to leave the town in peace. It had been the same all over the conquered land. Saladin’s clemency did much to win him the chivalrous reputation that soon surrounded his name in the West. It also encouraged the rapid collapse of the Christian establishment. With virtually the whole kingdom in his hands after two months of campaigning, the time had come to redeem the great pledge of the jihad. The army turned its joyous face to Jerusalem.
An intriguing sidelight on the fall of Jerusalem is the connection Saladin established early in the siege with the Orthodox Christians in the city. It seems they were preparing to open one of the gates for his troops but were forestalled by events. It was natural for Saladin’s secret service to enlist the Orthodox whose hatred of the Latin authorities made them a natural fifth column. His dealings with the Emperor Isaac were on an altogether different plane. The two had been friendly since 1185 when it had been agreed that Saladin would transfer Church government in Palestine to Constantinople. Accordingly, soon after the fall of Jerusalem he handed over control of Christian affairs to the Byzantine patriarch, though not before he had sent a triumphant embassy to announce his victory at the imperial capital. It carried rich gifts, among them an elephant, jars of precious balsam, a thousand Turkish horses and rare spices. The emperor housed the envoys in one of the magnificent palaces at the centre of the city. When they returned they brought with them, as reciprocal presentations, part of the vast armoury Isaac had captured from the Sicilian invasion army some months before, as well as robes of honour for Saladin and his sons together with a crown.
It was typical of the shrewd diplomacy of Byzantium to mix the practical with the flattering, and also entirely typical to fit the present to the recipient. While in the Byzantine world the crown was the classic symbol of kingship, among the princes of Islam the most coveted distinction was a robe of honour from the hands of the caliph. It was usually accompanied by some honorific title or administrative appointment, and it was precisely such an honorific that Isaac hoped now to confer. His predecessor had demanded Saladin’s homage, without success; rather more subtly, Isaac hoped now to bribe him into submission with a kingdom. ‘I send you this [crown],’ he wrote, ‘because in my opinion you are and shall be rightfully a king, with my assistance and God willing.’ No doubt Yusuf ibn-Aiyub Salah-ad-Din, al-Malik al-Nasir, king of Syria, ruler of Egypt, lord of Damascus and Aleppo and suzerain of Mosul, was amused by the pretension of the emperor of Greece and parts of Anatolia. But they remained good friends and at a full court held outside Acre on 6 January 1188 attended by his sons, nobles and officials of his court, and the ambassadors of the Greeks, Saladin reaffirmed the treaty.
He must have looked on this glittering assembly as some compensation for two disastrous months that had led up to it. After the triumph of Jerusalem, Saladin had confidently sent his army north to Tyre to finish off a resistance that was becoming irritating. In July he had not been ready to devote the time needed to take the city; now in November he was to find that the situation had changed radically. The city teemed with the refugees – merchants and nobles – Saladin had sent there from the fortresses and towns he had taken during the summer. This clemency had certainly encouraged many of the surrenders during those months. Perhaps Saladin had also assumed that when the time was ripe he could persuade the refugees, conveniently now concentrated in a single port, to embark en masse for the West. He was to be disillusioned. Conrad of Montferrat proved to be ‘a devil incarnate in his ability to govern and defend a town and a man of extraordinary courage’, and during the three months in which Saladin had been rounding off his conquests Conrad had been building up the already impressive defences of Tyre, and firing the demoralised population to resistance. He knew that without help from Europe he would have to surrender eventually, but luck and initiative had brought him the lordship of a rich town and he was not going to be dislodged easily. In fact he was confident of European intervention – he believed that the loss of Jerusalem would stir his generation as deeply as Edessa had their forebears. The archbishop of Tyre was already in the West preaching the cause and in the meantime Conrad would hold out.
When, in mid-November, Saladin joined his army at Tyre, his heart must have sunk. His crushing superiority in manpower was now virtually useless. Even if the wall and the new ditch that stretched in front of it from the sea were overrun, his troops would have to fight step by step up the narrow causeway and could easily be held by a fraction of their numbers. Galleys were at station either side of the isthmus, armed with ballistas and archers, so that the army ‘was under constant attack not only from the citizens in front but also from their flanks.’ On his side Saladin brought up no fewer than seventeen ballistas to play on the wall and the town day and night, and divided his troops into companies to keep up a twenty-four-hour action.
The other commanders with the army included Saladin’s sons al-Afdal and az-Zahir, his brother al-Adil with the Egyptian contingent, and his nephew Taqi-ad-Din. But the key to the situation was a squadron of ten Egyptian galleys which had been called up from Acre. When, late in December, the Franks put these out of action by a boldly pressed surprise attack, the whole operation came to a halt. For Saladin to have held the army together as long as this was something of an achievement. Before Hattin, Raymond had advised inaction precisely because experience had taught that Muslim armies broke up of their own accord with the advance of winter. Saladin’s victories in the Muslim world were too fresh in his commanders’ memories for them to risk outright insubordination, but now, with the possibility of a winter-long campaign ahead of him, Saladin had to call a war council if only in the interests of ‘participation’. The feeling of the meeting was clearly against him, though the decision rested with him.
Against continuing the siege it was argued that losses had been heavy, that the troops were exhausted and they were discontented with the long-drawn-out campaign and with the shortage of supplies. ‘Let us go away and rest during the cold winter and take up the fight again in the spring.’ Behind this specious reasoning, according to Ibn-al-Athir, the emirs concealed the fear that if they stayed on station Saladin would force them to contribute funds to the war effort. The war chest was indeed empty. With the bounties paid at the beginning of the campaign and booty from six months’ successful war, which had gone straight into their coffers, the emirs had made good profits. It was no part of their plan to use them to finance a Holy War which only extended the power and influence of the greatest man in Syria. Now Saladin had nothing to offer but a hard cold winter siege with no promise of victory or money. He must have sensed that to leave the business unfinished would be a mistake, but his commanders were obviously unwilling to continue. He hesitated. Seeing his uncertainty, the opposition emirs, again according to Ibn-al-Athir, deliberately sabotaged the war effort – ignoring or misinterpreting orders and eventually refusing to fight, arguing that there was too much discontent in the ranks. ‘So’, says the historian quite simply, ‘Saladin was forced to go.’ Pro-Zengid in sympathy, Ibn-al-Athir stresses the failure to take Tyre and blames Saladin exclusively. But he is honest enough to record the kind of obstruction that sometimes faced him when success began to flag. No doubt the fickle enthusiasm of his troops and officers explains in part why he avoided long-drawn-out sieges and major battles except on his own terms. 1187 had been a year of sweet victory and tremendous achievements. The kingdom of Jerusalem had been rubbed off the map and the third of Islam’s Holy Cities was back in the Faith. But during the remaining years of his life Saladin and his armies would have to put the months of easy triumph behind them and struggle to hold what had been won. Those Byzantine ambassadors attending the brilliant court of Acre in January 1188 brought news that gave a disturbing glimpse of the clouds that lay in the future.
It seemed Europe was mobilising. But Saladin had also to face hostility from Baghdad. Successor to the heretical Fatimid rulers in Cairo, his name was even mentioned in Friday prayers in the great mosque of Mecca: enemies had whispered he intended to displace Caliph al-Nasir. In February 1188 Hajj the great from Damascus, led by Ibn al-Muqaddam in honour of Saladin as thanksgiving to Allah for the liberation of Jerusalem, came to blows with the Hajj from Baghdad outside Mecca, over a matter of precedence. Al-Nasir complained bitterly. He already resented Saladin’s use of the honorific al-Nasir, which he claimed as his exclusive right; he even challenged the Kurd’s claim to be the conqueror of Jerusalem, on the grounds that it had been taken in the name of the caliph, and so by the caliph himself. Saladin reacted with indignation, telling the envoy to his face that Jerusalem had fallen to his own army under his own banners – his official written response was more emollient. As he prepared to lead the fight against the Infidel once again, Islam’s champion deferred to the leader of the Faithful.