Nur al-Din’s death in May 1174 appeared to furnish Saladin with a perfect opportunity to emerge from the shadow of Zangid Syrian overlordship, allowing the lieutenant to become leader, assert his right to fully independent rule and assume the mantle of champion in Islam’s holy war against the Franks. It is only too easy to imagine the history of twelfth-century Near Eastern Islam as an era of linear progression; one in which a swelling tide of jihadi resurgence gathered pace under Zangi, Nur al-Din and, finally, Saladin–with the torch of leadership passing smoothly, and almost inevitably, from one Muslim ‘hero’ to another. This was certainly the impression fostered and energetically promoted by some Islamic contemporaries.
The central flaw in this admittedly alluring illusion is that Saladin was not proclaimed Nur al-Din’s heir in 1174. Instead, Nur al-Din left behind an eleven-year-old son, al-Salih, who he hoped would take up the reins of power. The great Syrian lord was also survived by an assortment of other blood relations who might seek to protect and perpetuate Zangid ascendancy in the Near and Middle East. As such there was, in reality, no natural or immediate path to advancement open to Saladin in 1174. Instead he was presented with choices: to prioritise his hold over the Nile region, constructing a largely self-contained Egyptian realm; or to seek to emulate, or even eclipse, Nur al-Din’s achievements, to become the premier Muslim leader in the Levant.
A HERO FOR ISLAM
Saladin embraced this latter objective with singular dedication and vigour. The fundamental question–similar to that asked of Nur al-Din–was why? Did Saladin seek power, forging a despotic, pan-Levantine Islamic Empire, to fulfil his own self-serving, personal ambition? Or was he driven by a higher cause, pursuing Muslim unification as a means to an end–the necessary precursor to success in the jihad against the Christian Franks? Some attempt to understand Saladin’s motives and mentality has to be made, not least because of his profound importance as a historical figure, particularly in Islamic culture. In the modern world, Saladin has come to be regarded as the supreme Muslim champion of the crusading age; an extraordinarily powerful talisman of the Islamic past, viewed by many as a revered hero. The task of stripping away the layers of legend, propaganda and bias to explore the reality of his career is thus particularly sensitive and demands scrupulous and assiduous care.
In relative terms, the contemporary sources for Saladin’s life are plentiful, but they are also problematic. A number of Muslim eyewitnesses wrote about his remarkable achievements, including two of his closest supporters–his secretary Imad al-Din al-Isfahani (from 1174) and his adviser Baha al-Din Ibn Shaddad (from 1188)–but both presented sanitised biographies of their master after the event. Their works are predicated upon the notion that Saladin was driven by heartfelt religious devotion to serve Islam and fight the Franks. According to Baha al-Din, Saladin’s spiritual conviction deepened after he assumed power over Egypt in 1169, forgoing ‘wine-drinking and turning his back on frivolity’, and from this point forward he was supposedly driven pious by ‘passion, constancy and zeal’. His commitment to the holy war was said to be absolute:
Saladin was very diligent and zealous for the jihad. If anyone were to swear that, since his embarking upon the jihad, he had not expended a single dinar or dirham on anything but the jihad or support for it, he would be telling the truth and true in his oath. Thejihad, his love and passion for it, had taken a mighty hold of his heart and all his being, so much so that he talked of nothing else [and] thought of nothing but the means to pursue it.
This highly favourable depiction is balanced, to some extent, by other evidence. The Iraqi chronicler Ibn al-Athir, a supporter of the rival Zangid dynasty, offered a more dispassionate view of Saladin. Manuscript copies also survive of the public and private correspondence written for Saladin by his scribe and confidant al-Fadil. This crucial (yet still relatively under-exploited) corpus of material offers valuable insights into Saladin’s thinking and his own widespread use of propaganda and interest in image creation.35
It is also imperative to contextualise any judgements about Saladin’s character and career. As a medieval ruler he operated within a violent and venomous political environment–to survive and advance it would have been virtually impossible for him always to act with pure-bred nobility, honour, justice and clemency. Indeed, few, if any, of history’s great rulers could claim such qualities, whatever age they lived in.
It is, in fact, evident that Saladin was not simply a bloodthirsty tyrant. In seeking to usurp power from Nur al-Din’s heirs, he could have followed the example set by Zangi, relying upon fear and brutality to amass and maintain power. Instead, Saladin chose to pursue policies that closely mimicked those of his former overlord, Nur al-Din–indeed, in this regard at least he could be said to have been Nur al-Din’s true successor. Saladin’s task in 1174 was essentially to recreate the achievements of the Zangids, but in reverse, subduing Damascus, Aleppo and Mosul. To do so he employed a cautious fusion of military might and adept political manipulation. And throughout he set great store by notions of legitimacy and just cause. This need for validation was amplified by Saladin’s social and ethnic background. What had been true for the Zangid Turks was doubly so for the Ayyubids as Kurdish mercenary warlords–all too easily they could be characterised as upstart outsiders in a Near and Middle Eastern world historically dominated by Arab and Persian Muslim ruling elites.
Throughout the 1170s and beyond, Saladin sought to legitimate his ascent to power and prominence by emphasising his roles as a defender of Islam and Sunni orthodoxy, and as the supposed servant of the Abbasid caliph of Baghdad. He also used the notion ofjihad to justify the need for Islamic unity under one ruler. Just as Pope Urban II had harnessed the power of a feared and threatening Muslim enemy to unite western Europe in support of the First Crusade, so Saladin proved only too willing to present the Levantine Franks as menacing and inimitable foes.
At the same time, he evidently aspired to extend his own power and to create an enduring dynasty. In the 1170s he began styling himself as a ‘sultan’ (king or ruler), a title reflective of autonomous authority. He was also busy siring a new generation of potential heirs. Few details survive of the numerous wives and slave girls who begat his children, but already in 1174, at the age of thirty-six, he had five sons, the eldest of whom, al-Afdal, was born in 1170.
IN NUR AL-DIN’S WAKE
From summer 1174 it was not just Saladin who looked to exploit the power vacuum left in the Near East by Nur al-Din’s demise. Members of the late emir’s court and extended family–the Zangid dynasty–sought to assert either their own independence or their right to act, in effect, as his successor. Within months, the Zangid realm, so patiently constructed over twenty-eight years, fractured almost beyond recognition, ushering a bewildering array of protagonists on to the stage.
To the east in Mesopotamia, two of Nur al-Din’s nephews held power–Saif al-Din in Mosul and Imad al-Din Zangi in nearby Sinjar. Both now began vying for control of territory west towards the Euphrates. In Syria, Nur al-Din’s young son, al-Salih, became a political pawn as various factions claimed to be his ‘protector’. The boy was eventually spirited away to Aleppo, where the eunuch Gumushtegin had emerged, through bloody intrigue, as the dominant force. Meanwhile, in Damascus a group of emirs, headed by the military commander Ibn al-Muqaddam, seized power. Not surprisingly, the Latins too saw a chance for action that summer. King Amalric’s primary objective was the reconquest of Banyas, the frontier settlement lost to Damascus a decade earlier. He laid siege to the town for two weeks, but the onset of ill health prevented him from pressing any advantage, and he agreed a truce with Ibn al-Muqaddam in return for a cash payment and the release of some Christian captives.
This urgent flurry of activity gripped Syria, but in Egypt Saladin bided his time. In midsummer a Sicilian fleet attacked Alexandria, while in Upper Egypt surviving Fatimid emirs tried to incite rebellion. These threats were readily repulsed, but Saladin still approached the issue of the succession to Nur al-Din’s realm with great caution. Overtly conscious of the need to counter accusations of despotic usurpation, Saladin forsook the blunt tools of invasion and violent suppression, instead employing guileful diplomacy against a backdrop of determined propaganda. One of his first acts was to write to al-Salih, declaring his own loyalty, affirming that the young ruler’s name had duly replaced that of Nur al-Din during the Friday prayer in Egypt, and that Saladin stood ready and willing as a ‘servant’ to defend al-Salih against his rivals. In another letter, the sultan proclaimed that he would fight ‘as a sword against [al-Salih’s] enemies’, warning that Syria was surrounded ‘on all sides’ by foes, such as the Franks, who had to be fought.
These two documents reveal that within weeks of Nur al-Din’s death Saladin was publicising the official agenda under which he would operate through much of the 1170s. In the years to come he sought, with almost unfailing tenacity, to extend his own personal authority over the shattered remnants of Nur al-Din’s realm. But always this grasping pursuit of power was veiled beneath the public avowal of twinned principles: that as al-Salih’s appointed guardian Saladin laboured tirelessly, and without regard for his own reward, to preserve Zangid authority; and that this drive towards Islamic unity was of paramount importance precisely because the Muslim world was engaged in a historic struggle with an implacable Christian foe, who even now retained possession of the sacred city of Jerusalem.36
Of course, many of the sultan’s contemporary opponents were only too aware that Saladin actually was trying to build his own empire, even if it was one constructed in the interests of jihad, and they were often willing to publicise their fears and accusations. Under these circumstances, Saladin relied upon the politics of fear to lend force to his programme of dissimulation. If matters proceeded peacefully in Syria, the sultan would have no excuse to intervene–somewhat ironically, in 1174 Saladin thus hoped that his rivals would act against al-Salih’s interests and that the Franks would go on the offensive.
The occupation of Damascus
Given his base of operations in Egypt, Saladin’s first objective in seeking to reconsolidate Nur al-Din’s dominions under his own rule had to be Damascus. Seizing upon Ibn al-Muqaddam’s decision to buy peace with the kingdom of Jerusalem at Banyas, the sultan now levelled allegations of weakness against the Damascene court, citing its failure to pursue the holy war as a probable cause to intervene in Syrian affairs. Nur al-Din’s former secretary, the Persian scribe and scholar Imad al-Din al-Isfahani, recorded the exchange of correspondence that followed. Ibn al-Muqaddam chided Saladin, writing, ‘let it not be said that you have designs upon the house of the one who established you [as] this does not befit your good character’. The sultan responded with a forceful assertion of his intentions:
We choose for Islam and its people only what will unite them, and for the [Zangid] house only what will preserve its root and its branches…I am in one valley and those who think evil of me are in another…If we had inclined to any other path, we would not have chosen the way of consultation and writing.
This was the message that Saladin wished to broadcast throughout Syria, but, stirring as his words may have been, they were unlikely to sway policy on their own. In all probability it was fear of a potential alliance between Mosul and Aleppo that, by summer’s end, prompted Ibn al-Muqaddam to side with Saladin, inviting him to come to the aid of Damascus. This was precisely the opportunity that the sultan had hoped for. Leaving his brother al-Adil to govern Egypt, Saladin marched into Syria in October 1174 equipped with two weapons: an army with which to overcome any pockets of resistance and, perhaps more importantly, tens of thousands of gold dinars to buy support. His entry into the ancient city on 28 October proved to be a peaceful affair.
One of Saladin’s contemporary biographers described the day, taking care to emphasise the sultan’s personal connection to Damascus, home of his youth, writing that ‘he went straight to his house and people flocked to him rejoicing’. His lavish largesse likewise was highlighted: ‘That same day he distributed huge sums of money to the people and showed himself pleased and delighted with the Damascenes, as they did with him. He went up into the citadel and his power was firmly established.’ To emphasise the orthodox quality and magnanimity of his rule, Saladin went to pray in the Grand Umayyad Mosque, ordered the immediate revocation of non-Koranic taxation and forbade looting. He later justified his occupation of the city as a step on the road to retaking Jerusalem, arguing that ‘to hold back from the holy war is a crime for which there can be no excuse’. But many remained unconvinced by Saladin’s claims–Jurdik, his former ally in Egypt, for one, sided with Aleppo. Even the Franks living in Palestine were aware of the incipient power struggle and one Latin contemporary noted that Saladin’s occupation of Damascus contravened ‘the loyalty he owed to his lord and master [al-Salih]’.37
Nonetheless, in the closing months of 1174, a number of Syria’s Muslim potentates decided to back Saladin–judging that this was their best chance of survival–and the sultan was able to extend his authority northwards in a series of largely bloodless campaigns, seizing control of Homs, Hama and Baalbek (where Ibn al-Muqaddam was duly rewarded for his support with a command). Once again, Saladin took great care to justify these conquests. After taking Homs he wrote in a public dispatch back to Egypt, ‘our move was not made in order to snatch a kingdom for ourselves, but to set up the standard of the holy war’. His opponents in Syria had, he argued, ‘become enemies, preventing the accomplishment of our purpose with regard to this war’. He also stressed that he had taken care not to damage the town of Homs itself, ‘knowing how close it was to the unbelievers’. However, a more personal letter, written around the same time to his nephew Farrukh-Shah (an increasingly prominent lieutenant), seems to offer a less gilded view of events. Here Saladin bluntly criticised the ‘feeble minds’ of Homs’ populace and acknowledged that cultivating his own reputation for justice and clemency was the ‘key to the lands’. He even managed to joke about his future prospects. His primary objective was now Aleppo, the name of which in Arabic (Halab) also means ‘milk’. Saladin forecast that city’s imminent fall, writing that ‘we have only to do the milking and Aleppo will be ours’.38
Stalking Aleppo
By the start of 1175, Saladin was certainly in a position to threaten Aleppo, but in spite of his rather bold prediction, that city proved to be an intractable obstacle, stalling the extension of his authority over all Syria for years to come. Aleppo’s formidable citadel and strong garrison meant that any attempt at an assault siege would require patience and extensive military resources. But even if successful, such a direct approach likely would lead to a protracted and bloody conflict–not a conquest that would sit comfortably alongside Saladin’s preferred image as a humble guardian of Islam. The sultan must have hoped that his opponents would give him grounds to attack the city, perhaps by abusing or even murdering al-Salih, but Gumushtegin was far too astute to make such an obvious blunder. The young Zangid heir, the seed of legitimacy, was more valuable alive as a puppet ruler within Aleppo. Indeed, Gumushtegin even persuaded the boy to deliver an emotive, tearful speech to the city’s populace, begging for their protection against Saladin’s tyranny.
To compound Saladin’s problems, the rulers of Aleppo and Mosul put aside their differences in order to unite against the threatening tide of Ayyubid rule. Over the next year and a half Saladin remained in Syria, prosecuting a succession of limited and largely inconclusive sieges of Aleppo and its satellite settlements. In April 1175, and then again a year later in April 1176, he met Aleppan–Mosuli forces in pitched battle, winning convincing victories on both occasions. These two confrontations enhanced the sultan’s burgeoning reputation as Islam’s leading general, while proving the marked superiority of his increasingly experienced Egyptian and Damascene armies. But in practical terms they proved indecisive. Convinced that lasting dominion of Syria could not be achieved when stained with Muslim blood, Saladin sought to limit the degree of actual inter-Muslim combat that took place, relying upon troop discipline rather than martial ferocity to prevail and curtailing any harrying of his retreating foes once they had been driven from the field. His opponents were thus permitted to lick their wounds and regroup.
By the summer of 1176 the combination of tempered military aggression and incessant propaganda seemed to have run its course. Gumushtegin remained in control of Aleppo, alongside al-Salih, while Saif al-Din continued to govern Mosul, but these allies were forced, by steps, to agree to some concessions. Saladin’s right to rule the Syrian territory he held to the south of Aleppo was acknowledged in May 1175, and this position was formalised subsequently by a caliphal diploma of investiture issued in Baghdad. When peace was settled in July 1176, Saladin recognised that he could no longer claim to be al-Salih’s sole legal guardian (although the sultan did continue to present himself as the Zangid’s servant), but by this point Aleppo had agreed, albeit in rather vague terms, to contribute troops to the holy war.
Throughout this period, Saladin had tried, with some success, to damage Gumushtegin’s and Saif al-Din’s reputations by repeatedly accusing them of negotiating with the Latins. Saladin often wrote to the caliph complaining that they had forged treacherous pacts with the Christians sealed by the exchange of prisoners. This echoed his condemnation of the submissive truce agreed with Jerusalem by Ibn al-Muqaddam in 1174. The sultan was trying to present his Syrian campaigns as a heartfelt, ideological struggle to unite Islam against a foreboding Frankish enemy. In fact, this was pure rhetorical invective, for Saladin himself agreed two truces with the Latins in this period.39
The Old Man of the Mountain
Saladin’s attempts to subdue Syria in the mid-1170s were complicated by entanglements with the Assassins. By this time the Syrian wing of this secretive order was firmly ensconced in the Ansariyah Mountains and was flourishing under the leadership of a formidable Iraqi, Rashid al-Din Sinan, popularly known as the Old Man of the Mountain. Ruling the order for close to three decades in the later twelfth century, Sinan’s reputation as a man of ‘subtle and brilliant intelligence’ gained wide currency among Muslims and Christians alike. William of Tyre believed that Sinan commanded the absolute loyalty and obedience of his followers, noting that ‘they regard nothing as too harsh or difficult and eagerly undertake even the most dangerous tasks at his command’.40
The Assassins were an embedded, independent and largely unpredictable force in Near Eastern affairs; and their chief weapon–political assassination–continued to prove highly effective. Saladin’s drive to dominate Syria, and more specifically his campaigns against Aleppo, brought him into the Assassins’ orbit. In early 1175, Sinan decided to target Saladin, probably at least in part on the prompting of the Aleppan ruler Gumushtegin. With the sultan stationed outside Aleppo, a group of thirteen knife-wielding Assassins managed to penetrate the heart of his camp and launch an assault. Saladin’s bodyguards came to his aid, cutting down one assailant even as he leapt to strike the sultan himself. Although the plot was foiled, there were still fatalities among the Salahiyya. Soon afterwards, Saladin wrote warning his nephew Farrukh-Shah to be watchful at all times, and before long it became standard practice to place the sultan’s own tents within a fortified and heavily guarded enclosure, isolated from the rest of the camp.
In spite of these precautions, the Assassins managed to strike again in May 1176. While Saladin was visiting one of his emir’s tents four Assassins attacked, and this time came perilously close to completing their murderous task. In the first sudden flurry of movement, the sultan was struck and only his armour saved him from a severe wound. Once again his men pounced on the killers, butchering them to a man, but Saladin was left bloodied by a cut to his cheek and badly shaken. From this point onwards, any members of his entourage whom he did not personally recognise were dismissed.
In August 1176 Saladin decided to deal with this troublesome threat. He laid siege to the major Assassin castle of Masyaf, but after less than a week he broke off the investment, retreating to Hama. The motive for the sultan’s departure and the details of any deal brokered with Sinan remain mysterious. A number of Muslim accounts repeat the story that, under the threat of an unwavering Assassin campaign to murder members of his Ayyubid family, Saladin agreed to a pact of mutual non-aggression with the Old Man. One Aleppan chronicler offered an even more chilling explanation, describing how the sultan was visited by Sinan’s envoy. Once searched for weapons, this messenger was granted an audience with Saladin, but insisted upon conferring with him in private. The sultan eventually agreed to dismiss all but his two most skilful and trusted bodyguards–men he regarded as his ‘own sons’.
The envoy then turned to the pair of guards and said: ‘If I ordered you in the name of my master to kill this sultan, would you do so?’ They answered yes, and drew their swords saying: ‘Command us as you wish.’ Saladin was astounded, and the messenger left, taking them with him. And thereafter Saladin inclined to make peace with [Sinan].41
The reality of this tale may be doubted–if the Assassins had indeed had agents so close to Saladin they surely would have succeeded in killing him in 1175 or 1176–but the story’s implicit message was accurate. It was all but impossible to protect oneself permanently from the Assassins. By whatever means, Saladin and Sinan evidently achieved some form of accommodation in 1176, because the sultan never again attacked the order’s mountain enclave and no further attempts were made on his life.
SALADIN’S AYYUBID REALM
In late summer 1176 Saladin brought almost two years of campaigning against Aleppo to an end. With a truce in place enshrining his possession of Damascus and the bulk of Syria, he willingly perpetuated the fiction of subservience to al-Salih. Across Saladin’s dominions, the young ruler’s name continued to appear on coinage and to be recited in Friday prayer. But the sultan did seek further to legitimise his own authority by marrying Nur al-Din’s widow Ismat, daughter of Unur, the long-dead ruler of Burid Damascus. This was, first and foremost, a political union, for her hand allowed Saladin to connect himself to that city’s two historic ruling dynasties, but real friendship, perhaps even love, seems to have blossomed between the couple.* By this time, the sultan had taken other steps to appropriate the machinery of Zangid government. Nur al-Din’s secretary, Imad al-Din al-Isfahani, was taken into service and, alongside al-Fadil, soon became one of the sultan’s closest confidants.
In September 1176 Saladin returned to Egypt. This move offered him something of a respite from the dangers and confrontations of recent months–he paused in Alexandria with his six-year-old son al-Afdal for three days in March 1177 to listen to tales of the Prophet Muhammad’s life–but it was also reflective of a new reality in the sultan’s life. Presiding over a realm that stretched from the Nile to the Syrian Orontes, he now faced all the practical difficulties attendant upon governing a geographically expansive kingdom in the medieval age. One overriding issue was communication. Facing the same problem, Nur al-Din had supplemented his network of horse-borne couriers and messengers with the extensive use of carrier pigeons, and Saladin now followed suit. He also maintained spies and scouts in Syria and Palestine to garner intelligence. Even so, no matter how they were transported, messages were always subject to possible enemy interception, and the sultan sometimes resorted to writing in code. A significant truth of living through this era, for Muslims and Christians alike, was that even within allied groups the transfer of information was hugely imprecise, while knowledge of enemy intentions and movements was often based upon pure guesswork. Ignorance, error and disinformation all served to shape decision making and, in the years to come, Saladin always struggled to maintain knowledge of events across the Muslim world, and to retain even a partial understanding of Frankish plans and actions. In this situation, al-Fadil’s and Imad al-Din’s roles as correspondents, communicators and propagandists were of paramount importance.
The union of Cairo and Damascus under Ayyubid rule also forced Saladin to embrace the use of lieutenants to govern in his absence. Throughout his career the sultan turned first to his blood relations to fill such posts, and sometimes this system of trusting his extended family worked well. In autumn 1176 he returned to find that his brother al-Adil and nephew Farrukh-Shah had governed Egypt with attentive prudence. In Syria, however, arrangements proved to be less satisfactory. Deputised as ruler of Damascus, Saladin’s elder brother Turan-Shah proved to be an incompetent liability. Given to excessive financial liberality–infamously accruing personal debts of some 200,000 gold dinars at his death–he was also fond of life’s more dissolute distractions. With Syria stricken by a protracted drought in the late 1170s, it gradually became clear that Turan-Shah would have to be replaced. By 1178 Saladin despairingly admitted that ‘one can overlook small faults and keep silent about minor matters, but where the whole land is eaten up…this shakes the pillars of Islam’.
The sultan enjoyed greater success in his attempts to balance the use of physical and financial resources across the lands he now commanded. In 1177 he prioritised the Nile region, strengthening the defences of Alexandria and Damietta and initiating the construction of a massive fortified wall to enclose both Cairo and its southern suburb Fustat. He also took the costly but far-sighted decision to rebuild Egypt’s once famous fleet. Some ship-building materials and sailors were brought in from Libya, but Saladin’s quest for the best timber soon led him to forge commercial links with Pisa and Genoa. This was just one example of mounting international trade in military materials, technology and even weaponry between Ayyubid Islam and the West that continued even as the holy war intensified. The sultan’s investment had striking strategic consequences, for within a few years he controlled a navy of sixty galleys and twenty transport vessels. Long bereft of any real power over mercantile and martial shipping in the Mediterranean, Near Eastern Islam could once again vie for control of the sea.42
THE LEPER KING
Just as Saladin was consolidating his hold over Egypt and Damascus, a new Latin king of Jerusalem was finding his feet. In 1174 King Amalric had broken off from the siege of Banyas complaining of illness. In fact, he had contracted an extreme case of dysentery and, by July, the thirty-eight-year-old sovereign lay dead. He was succeeded by his son, Baldwin IV, a young monarch whose reign would be shadowed by tragedy and ever-deepening crisis. Baldwin’s status at the moment of his precipitous elevation to the throne was peculiar. In 1163 Amalric had agreed, on the insistence of the High Court, to renounce his wife, Agnes of Courtenay (daughter of Count Joscelin II of Edessa), before assuming the crown of Jerusalem. The official grounds for the annulment of their marriage had been consanguinity–they were third cousins–but the underlying cause may have been suspicions that Agnes would seek to promote the interests of the now largely landless Courtenay clan in Palestine at the expense of the incumbent aristocracy. Amalric and Agnes had already produced two children, Baldwin and his elder sister Sibylla, and it was agreed that their legitimacy would be upheld, even though Amalric was soon remarried to the Byzantine princess Maria Comnena.
Baldwin IV’s childhood and minority
Just two years old in 1163, Baldwin grew up in a dislocated familial environment. His mother Agnes also remarried almost immediately and, being largely absent from court, played little or no part in Baldwin’s upbringing, while his stepmother Maria maintained a cool distance, more concerned to further the interests of her own offspring with Amalric. Even the infant Sibylla was effectively a stranger to the young prince, being brought up within the secluded walls of her aunt Yvetta’s convent at Bethany.
In the end, one of Baldwin’s closest childhood companions turned out to be the cleric and court historian William of Tyre. Appointed as tutor to the young prince around 1170, William was tasked to ‘train [the heir designate] in the formation of character as well as to instruct him in the knowledge of letters’ and a range of academic studies. William’s history of the Latin East offers a poignant and intimate character sketch of Baldwin as a boy. Bearing a marked physical resemblance to his father, even to the extent of mirroring the king’s gait in walking and his tone of voice, the prince was described as ‘a good-looking child for his age’, quick-witted, with an excellent memory, beloved of both learning and riding. Yet William also wrote with heart-rending honesty about a moment of dreadful revelation in Baldwin’s life.
One day, when he was nine years old and living in William’s household, the prince was playing with a group of noble-born boys. They were competing in a popular test of fortitude, ‘pinching each other on the arms and hands with their nails, as children often do’ to see who would cry out in pain. Despite their best efforts, no one was able to make Baldwin reveal the barest sign of discomfort. At first, it was assumed that this was simply a sign of his regal endurance, but William wrote:
When this had happened several times and I was told about it…I began to ask him questions [and] came to realise that half of his right arm and hand was dead, so that he could not feel pinching or even biting. I began to feel uneasy in my mind…his father was told, and after the doctors had been consulted, careful attempts were made to help him with poultices, ointments and even charms, but all in vain. For with the passage of time we came to understand more clearly that this marked the beginning of a more serious and totally incurable disease. It is impossible to refrain from tears when speaking of this great misfortune.43
Baldwin was, in fact, suffering from the early stages of leprosy. It is unlikely that a definite diagnosis was made at this point. The finest physicians were employed to oversee the prince’s care, including the Arab Christian Abu Sulaiman Dawud, and for the time being there seems to have been no further serious deterioration in his condition. So that Baldwin might still learn the quintessential knightly art of mounted warfare, Abu Sulaiman’s brother was appointed as the boy’s riding tutor. Trained to control a mount with his knees alone, leaving his working left arm free to wield a weapon, the prince became a remarkably skilful horseman.
Through the early 1170s Amalric sought a suitable husband for Princess Sibylla, hoping to secure the line of succession should an alternative to Baldwin prove necessary. But at the time of the king’s own unexpected death in 1174, no match for Sibylla had yet been found, and the only surviving child from his marriage to Maria Comnena was another girl, the infant Isabella. In July 1174 Prince Baldwin was far from an ideal candidate for the throne. Born of a union that had later been dissolved, he was just thirteen (and thus two years short of adulthood by the laws of the kingdom) and was known to be suffering from some form of debilitating illness. Nonetheless, the High Court agreed to his elevation, and Baldwin was duly crowned and anointed by the patriarch of Jerusalem in the Holy Sepulchre on 15 July, the auspicious anniversary of that city’s conquest by the First Crusaders.
Historians used to regard Baldwin IV’s reign as an almost unmitigated disaster for the Latin East. Just as Saladin rose to power, emerging from Egypt to unite the Muslim world, so it was argued, Frankish Palestine was brought to its knees by a feeble and sickly monarch. Baldwin was criticised for selfishly retaining the crown long after the point when he should have abdicated, and blamed for ushering in an era of embittered and injurious factionalism, as Outremer’s nobility schemed for power and influence.
The young king’s reputation has been rejuvenated somewhat in recent years, with new emphasis being placed on the burden he shouldered due to deteriorating health, on the relative vitality of his early reign and on his determined efforts both to defend the realm and to find a viable successor. One truth, however, remains inviolate. The crusader states had been racked frequently by succession crises, often most deleteriously when a ruler died suddenly through battle, injury or ill health. Baldwin’s case was different, and the damage wrought during his reign was deeper, precisely because he did not die. Lingering on the throne, often requiring executive authority to be wielded by a form of regent during bouts of extreme infirmity, the leper king’s faltering rule eventually left Jerusalem in a precarious and vulnerable state of limbo.44
For the first two years of his reign Baldwin was a minor, and much of the work of government was directed by one of his cousins, Count Raymond III of Tripoli, acting as regent. Now in his early thirties, Raymond only recently had been released after nine years in Muslim captivity and was thus something of an unknown quantity. A slightly built, somewhat diminutive figure of swarthy complexion and piercing gaze, the count’s stiff deportment was allied to a rather aloof demeanour. Cautious by nature, he nevertheless was driven by ambition, and his marriage to one of the kingdom’s most eligible heiresses, Princess Eschiva of Galilee, marked him out as Jerusalem’s greatest vassal. As regent, he adopted a conciliatory approach in dealing with the High Court and avoided direct confrontation with Saladin, agreeing terms of truce in 1175 during the sultan’s drive towards Aleppo.
Raymond’s overriding concern through these years was the succession, for soon after his coronation Baldwin IV’s health went into terrible decline. Perhaps aggravated by the onset of puberty, his leprosy developed into the most grievous lepromatous form, and soon the telltale signs of the disease were unmistakeable, as his ‘extremities and face were especially attacked, so that his faithful followers were moved with compassion when they looked at him’. In time, he would be left unable to walk, see, barely even to speak, but for now he was doomed to suffer a grim decline into physical disability, punctuated by bouts of severe, incapacitating illness. The social and religious stigma attached to leprosy was immense. Commonly perceived as a curse from God, indicative of divine disfavour, the disease was also believed to be extremely contagious, usually prompting the segregation of sufferers from society.45 Baldwin’s situation was deeply problematic–as a monarch he was vulnerable to criticism and unable to provide stable rule; and in dynastic terms he could not perpetuate the royal line, in part because contemporaries believed that sexual contact transmitted leprosy, but also because Baldwin’s affliction rendered him infertile.
In many ways, hopes for the future thus rested with Baldwin’s sister, Sibylla. Her youth and sheltered convent upbringing meant that she was not well positioned to follow in the footsteps of her grandmother Melisende by assuming regnal authority in her own right. Raymond of Tripoli thus busied himself with the ongoing search for a suitable husband for Sibylla. The candidate eventually chosen was William of Montferrat, a north Italian noble who was cousin to two of the most powerful monarchs in Europe, King Louis VII of France and the German Emperor Frederick Barbarossa (the nephew of the Second Crusader King Conrad III of Germany). Sibylla and William of Montferrat were married in late 1176, but in June 1177 he fell ill and died, leaving Sibylla a pregnant widow. She later gave birth to their son Baldwin (V) in either December 1177 or January 1178, and he became a potential heir to the Jerusalemite throne.
In the mid-1170s Raymond of Tripoli also supported William of Tyre’s career, overseeing his appointment as royal chancellor and then as archbishop of Tyre, and in part this may explain the broadly positive account of Raymond’s career in William’s chronicle. It was from this privileged position, at the centre of the Latin kingdom’s political and ecclesiastical hierarchies, that William observed and recorded Outremer’s history.
Baldwin IV’s early reign
In the summer of 1176 Baldwin IV reached his majority and Count Raymond’s regency came to an end. The young monarch threw himself into the business of kingship despite the gradual downgrading of his leprosy, and immediately made his mark. Overturning Raymond’s policy of diplomatic rapprochement, Baldwin refused to renew the truce with Damascus and in early August led a raiding party into Lebanon’s Biqa valley, defeating Turan-Shah in a minor engagement. This shift in policy towards Islam was accompanied by a decline in influence for the count of Tripoli and, during the remainder of the decade, Baldwin tended to look elsewhere for guidance and support. Now returned to court, his mother Agnes of Courtenay seems to have established a close relationship with her once estranged son. She certainly became a significant influence in his life and before long her brother Joscelin III was appointed as royal seneschal, the highest governmental office in the realm, with purview of the treasury and regal property. After long years in Muslim captivity, Joscelin had just been released by Gumushtegin of Aleppo as part of a deal to secure support from Frankish Antioch.
This same pact brought liberty for another noble destined to shape Jerusalem’s history, Reynald of Châtillon. He had been captured by Nur al-Din in 1161, when prince of Antioch, but much had changed during fifteen years of incarceration. The death of his wife Constance and the accession of his stepson Bohemond III in 1163 deprived Reynald of rule over the Syrian principality, but, at the same time, the wedding of his stepdaughter Maria of Antioch to the Byzantine emperor lent him an aura of prestige. He thus emerged from prison as a well-connected, battle-hardened veteran, albeit one who technically was landless. This anomaly was soon resolved by Reynald’s marriage, blessed by King Baldwin, to Stephanie of Milly, the lady of Transjordan, which brought him lordship of Kerak and Montreal and a position on the front line in the struggle with Saladin.
As a Syrian prince, Reynald had a reputation for untamed violence, garnered from his attack on Greek-held Cyprus and his infamous attempts, around 1154, to extort money from the Latin patriarch of Antioch, Aimery of Limoges. The unfortunate prelate was beaten, dragged to the citadel and forced to sit through an entire day beneath the blazing summer sun, with his bare skin smeared in honey to attract swarms of worrisome insects. In the late 1170s, however, Reynald became one of Baldwin’s most trusted allies, furnishing him with able support in the fields of war, diplomacy and politics.
With Egypt and Damascus united under Saladin and Baldwin IV’s health faltering, the Palestinian Franks made repeated but ultimately fruitless attempts to secure foreign aid. During the winter of 1176 to 1177 Reynald of Châtillon was sent as a royal envoy to Constantinople to negotiate a renewed alliance with the Greek Emperor Manuel Comnenus. In September 1176 the Byzantines had been roundly defeated at the Battle of Myriokephalon (in western Asia Minor) by the Seljuq sultan of Anatolia, Kilij Arslan II (who had succeeded Ma‘sud in 1156). In terms of manpower and territory, the losses inflicted upon the Greeks as a result of this reversal were relatively limited. But severe damage was done to Byzantine prestige in both Europe and the Levant, and Manuel spent much of the remainder of the decade retrenching his position. In the hope of reasserting Greek influence on the international stage, the emperor agreed to Reynald of Châtillon’s overture, promising to provide naval support for a new allied offensive against Ayyubid Egypt. In return, the Latin kingdom was to accept subject status as a Byzantine protectorate and an Orthodox Christian patriarch restored to power in Jerusalem.
For a time, it seemed as if this venture might bear fruit. In late summer 1177 a Greek fleet duly arrived at Acre, and this coincided with the advent in the Levant of Count Philip of Flanders, son of the committed crusader Thierry of Flanders, at the head of a large military contingent. Philip had taken the cross in 1175 in response to the ever more frequent and vocal appeals from the Latins of Outremer for new western European crusades to the Holy Land. Yet despite his good intentions, Philip’s expedition proved to be a fiasco. With final preparations afoot for an assault on Egypt, petty arguments broke out over who should have rights to the Nile region should it fall and, amid mutual recriminations, the projected campaign collapsed. Disgruntled and alienated, the Byzantine navy set sail for Constantinople. In September 1177 Count Philip joined forces with Raymond III of Tripoli, and together they spent the winter trying and failing to capture first Hama and then Harim. A real chance to disrupt, perhaps even to overrun, Saladin’s position in Egypt had been squandered. Having amassed a defensive force to counter the expected Christian invasion, the sultan suddenly found that he was no longer under threat.
CONFRONTATION
In late autumn 1177 Saladin initiated his first significant military campaign against the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem since Nur al-Din’s death. Despite the importance of this expedition–the sultan’s opening salvo in his self-appointed role as Islam’s new jihadichampion–his precise motives and objectives are somewhat opaque. In all probability the 1177 offensive was not planned as a full-scale invasion of Palestine, targeting the reconquest of Jerusalem, but was instead an opportunistic raid. With his armies already assembled to defend against an expected attack, Saladin seized the chance to make a practical affirmation of his commitment to the holy war, seeking to assert his own martial dominance over the Franks, while providing a counterweight to their northern Syrian attack.
Saladin marched out of Egypt at the head of more than 20,000 horsemen, setting up a forward command post at the frontier settlement of al-Arish. Leaving behind his heavy baggage, he moved north into Palestine, reaching Ascalon around 22 November. There he found an alarmed Baldwin IV. With much of his realm’s fighting manpower absent in the north alongside Philip of Flanders and Raymond III, the king had hurriedly mustered what troops he could at the coast. As one eastern Christian contemporary put it, ‘everyone despaired of the life of the sick king, already half dead, but he drew upon his courage and rode to meet Saladin’. Baldwin was joined by Reynald of Châtillon, his seneschal, Joscelin of Courtenay, a force of some 600 knights and a few thousand infantry, and the bishop of Bethlehem carrying the True Cross. This army made a brief show of confronting the Muslim advance, but, overwhelmingly outnumbered, the Franks soon withdrew behind the walls of Ascalon, leaving Saladin free to strike inland towards Judea.46
The Battle of Mont Gisard
The sultan now made a fateful miscalculation. Seemingly adjudging that the Franks would remain cowed and contained within Ascalon, he allowed his forces to fan out, raiding Latin settlements such as Ramla and Lydda, leaving behind no effective network of scouts to monitor Baldwin’s movements. The young king, encouraged and aided by Reynald of Châtillon, was, however, in no mood to sit idly by as his realm was ravaged. Linking up with eighty Templar knights stationed at Gaza with their master, Odo of St Amand, Baldwin made the bold, perhaps even foolhardy decision to confront Saladin. As William of Tyre put it, ‘[the king] felt that it was wiser to try the dubious chances of battle with the enemy than to suffer his people to be exposed to rapine, fire and massacre’. This was a potentially deadly gamble.
On the afternoon of 25 November, the sultan was advancing to the east of Ibelin, with much of his army spread out across the surrounding coastal plain, when the Latin army made a sudden and unheralded appearance. Saladin’s remaining troops were just then engaged in fording a small river near the hill known as Mont Gisard. When Reynald of Châtillon unleashed a near-immediate heavy cavalry charge on their broken ranks, the sultan proved unable to organise any effective defence and his numerically superior force was soon thrown into retreat. One Muslim contemporary admitted that ‘the rout…was complete. One of the Franks charged Saladin and got close, almost reaching him, but the Frank was killed in front of him. The Franks crowded about him, so he departed in flight.’
While the sultan barely escaped the field, vicious fighting continued. Fleeing for their lives, his soldiers abandoned their armour and weapons, even as the Latins hunted them down, giving dogged pursuit for more than ten miles until nightfall finally offered the Muslims some respite. There were heavy casualties on both sides, for even the triumphant Christians suffered 1,100 fatalities, while a further 750 injured were later brought to the Hospital of St John in Jerusalem. But, while the exact scale of Muslim losses remains unclear, the severe psychological damage inflicted was unquestionable. Saladin was deeply humiliated at Mont Gisard. His close friend and adviser Isa was taken prisoner by the Franks and spent a number of years in captivity before eventually being ransomed for the massive sum of 60,000 gold dinars. The sultan was forced to scurry from the scene, the misery of his own journey back to Egypt compounded by ten successive days of unusually intense, chilling rainfall and the discovery that the often fickle Bedouins had sacked his camp at al-Arish. Having suffered food and water shortages, Saladin finally limped out of the Sinai in early December 1177, shaken and bedraggled.
The inescapable truth was that his own incautious negligence had exposed the army to defeat and that, as a consequence, his reputation for assured military leadership had been tarnished. In public, Saladin did his best to limit the damage, arguing in correspondence that the Latins had actually lost more men in the battle and accounting for the slow speed of his return to Cairo by explaining that ‘we carried the weak and the helpless and went slowly so that stragglers could [catch up]’. He also expended time and money rebuilding his army. Privately, however, Mont Gisard left its scars. Imad al-Din admitted that it had been ‘a disastrous event, a terrible catastrophe’, and, more than a decade later, the painful memory of this ‘terrible reverse’ endured, with the sultan acknowledging that it had been ‘a major defeat’.47
The burden of blood
Any immediate prospect of avenging this injury was forced into the background by the need to address the festering issue of Turan-Shah’s ineptitude. Saladin returned to Damascus in April 1178, relieving his brother of the governorship, but was then forced into an embarrassing and intractable predicament. By way of compensation for his demotion, Turan-Shah demanded lordship of Baalbek–the richly endowed ancient Roman city of Lebanon, located in the fertile Biqa valley. The problem was that the sultan had already awarded these lands to Ibn al-Muqaddam in token of gratitude for his aid in negotiating Damascus’ surrender in 1174, and the emir was now understandably reluctant to relinquish his prize. The unravelling of this affair over the following months was revealing. On the one hand, it underscored a consistent problem that beset Saladin throughout his career. To build his ‘empire’, the sultan generally relied upon his family rather than selecting lieutenants on merit, but this trust sometimes proved to be ill-founded. Incompetent, unreliable and potentially even disloyal, figures like Turan-Shah were liabilities–capable of gravely damaging the grand dream of Ayyubid domination–yet time and again Saladin proved reluctant to turn against his blood relations. In seeking to resolve the Baalbek dilemma, the sultan also demonstrated that, to further his aims, he would willingly embrace devious and duplicitous politicking.
After a summer of failed diplomacy, Saladin moved on Baalbek in autumn 1178. According to Imad al-Din he began by ‘flatter[ing] Ibn al-Muqaddam, for all his age, like a baby’, but when this produced no result, the sultan blockaded the city throughout the coming winter. At the same time, Saladin initiated a programme of blatant propaganda to justify his intervention. Ibn al-Muqqadam was declared a dissident and variously accused in letters to Baghdad of employing an ineffective band of ‘ignorant scum’ to defend the frontier against the Franks, and later, of actually being in treacherous contact with these Christian enemies. By the following spring, the ‘rebel’ lord, his reputation blackened, had been ground into submission and a deal was brokered. Turan-Shah duly received his chosen reward of Baalbek, but even here his rule seems to have been incompetent and he was soon packed off to Egypt, where he died in 1180. Meanwhile, having bent to Saladin’s will, Ibn al-Muqaddam was welcomed back into the fold. Richly endowed with lands to the south of Antioch and Aleppo, he remained loyal to the sultan for the rest of his career.48
The House of Sorrow
While still entangled in the Baalbek dispute, Saladin became aware of an alarming development in the border zone between Damascus and the kingdom of Jerusalem. Looking to capitalise upon the momentum gained by his victory at Mont Gisard, Baldwin IV had initiated a deeply threatening scheme, designed to bolster Palestine’s defences and destabilise Ayyubid dominion of Syria.
To appreciate the significance of these events, some sense of how frontiers functioned in the twelfth century is necessary. In common with most of the medieval world, Muslim and Frankish territory in the Levant was rarely divided by the literal equivalent of a modern border, but instead, roughly delineated by frontier zones–areas of overlapping political, military and economic influence, where neither side exerted full sovereignty. The positioning of these areas of contested control, akin to no-man’s-lands between realms, was often closely related to topographic/geographic features, be they mountains, rivers, dense forests or even deserts. And attempts by one polity to consolidate or extend influence in such a region could have profound bearing upon local stability and the overall balance of power between rivals.
In the early twelfth century, a case in point had been the Latin principality of Antioch’s expansion of its sphere of authority eastwards, beyond the natural frontier zone with Aleppo, the low-lying, rocky Belus Hills. This intensified threat to Aleppo’s survival ultimately prompted Muslim retaliation, culminating in the Battle of the Field of Blood in 1119. In the late 1170s a similar confrontation was looming between Baldwin IV and Saladin. During this period, the critical border zone between their respective realms lay to the north of the Sea of Galilee and broadly corresponded with the course of the Upper River Jordan. Previously, the epicentre of the struggle for dominance here had lain in the north-east, at the fortress settlement of Banyas. But once it fell to Nur al-Din in 1164, Latin influence east of the Jordan diminished, and the resultant status quo favoured Muslim Damascus.
In October 1178, Baldwin IV made a bold new play for pre-eminence in the Upper Jordan border zone. His target was not the reconquest of Banyas, but rather the construction of an entirely new fortification on the west bank of the Jordan, beside an ancient crossing known to the Franks as Jacob’s Ford and in Arabic as Bait al-Ahzan, the House of Sorrow (where, it was said, Jacob had mourned the supposed death of his son). With swamps upstream and rapids to the south, this ford was the only crossing of the Jordan for miles and, as such, acted as an important gateway between Latin Palestine and Muslim Syria, offering access to the fertile Terre de Sueth region. Crucially, Jacob’s Ford was also just one day’s march from Damascus.
Baldwin was hoping to tip the balance of regional power in favour of the Franks by building a major castle on this site. He was partnered by the Templars, who already held territory in northern Galilee, and together the crown and the order made a huge commitment to the project. Between October 1178 and April 1179 Baldwin actually moved his seat of government to the building site so as to be on hand as both supervisor and protector, setting up a mint to produce special coins with which to pay the massive workforce, and issuing royal charters on site.
This castle jeopardised Saladin’s burgeoning Ayyubid Empire because it promised to serve the Franks as both a defensive tool and an offensive weapon. Medieval strongholds could rarely, if ever, hope to seal or blockade a frontier entirely–attacking armies might march around a fortress or, with sufficient manpower and resources, eventually force their way past its defences. But castles did provide a relatively secure environment in which to station armed forces, and these troops might be deployed to harass and hamper any attempt at invasion by an enemy. The presence of a Templar fortress at Jacob’s Ford would certainly have inhibited the sultan’s ability to assault the Latin kingdom. Its garrison would also be in a position to raid Muslim territory, ransack trade caravans and threaten Damascus itself. And with his capital under threat, Saladin’s ambitious plans to extend his authority over Aleppo and Mesopotamia would likely falter. The danger posed by the fortress being built beside the Jordan, therefore, was impossible to ignore. Unfortunately, with his troops entrenched at Baalbek, a direct military strike on Jacob’s Ford was not really feasible, so initially the sultan sought to use bribery in place of brute force. He offered the Franks first 60,000 and then 100,000 dinars if they halted building work and abandoned the site. But, in spite of the fortune on offer, Baldwin and the Templars refused.
At first sight all the surviving written evidence seems to suggest that the castle at Jacob’s Ford had been finished by April 1179, when the leper king handed command of the stronghold to the Templars. William of Tyre certainly described it as ‘complete in all its parts’ after having seen it with his own eyes that spring. Muslim eyewitnesses also confirmed this fact, with one Arabic source describing its walls as ‘an impregnable rampart of stone and iron’. Until the 1990s, historians always assumed that this meant a fully fledged concentric castle–one with an inner and outer wall–had been built at Jacob’s Ford, making it an incredibly formidable fortress. But, in 1993, the Israeli scholar Ronnie Ellenblum rediscovered the location of this long-lost Frankish fortress. His ongoing archaeological investigation of the site, at the head of an international team of experts, has reshaped our understanding of events and the interpretation of the written sources. Excavations have proved conclusively that in 1179 Jacob’s Ford was not a concentric castle–in fact it had just one perimeter wall and a single tower, and was effectively still a building site. This suggests that to William of Tyre and his contemporaries a ‘complete’ fortress was one that was enclosed and defensible rather than fully formed, and that this particular stronghold was actually a work in progress.
Crucially for Saladin, this meant that Jacob’s Ford was still relatively vulnerable and from spring 1179 onwards, with Baalbek subdued, he returned to Damascus to address the problem of this fortress. The months that followed saw a series of inconclusive skirmishes, as both sides sought to size one another up. Saladin led an expeditionary force to test the strength of Jacob’s Ford, but soon retreated when one of his commanders was killed by a Templar arrow. Nonetheless, during two other engagements the sultan’s troops bested Baldwin’s forces in minor battles. In one, the king’s constable–his chief military adviser–was killed; in another, the Templar Master Odo of St Amand was taken captive along with 270 knights. These successes disrupted the Christians’ military command structure and went some way to redressing the Muslim humiliation at Mont Gisard. With the scales tipping back in Saladin’s favour, King Baldwin retreated to Jerusalem to regroup, while the sultan summoned reinforcements from northern Syria and Egypt.
By late August 1179 Saladin was ready to launch a full-scale attack on Jacob’s Ford. On Saturday the 24th he began an assault-based siege, with the intention of breaking into the castle as rapidly as possible. There was no time for a lengthy encirclement, because the leper king was by now stationed nearby at Tiberias, on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, just half a day’s march to the south-west. As soon as news of the attack reached him the king would begin assembling a relief army, so the siege was effectively a race, in which the Muslims struggled to crack the stronghold’s defences before the Latins arrived. Taken together, contemporary written records and the archaeological evidence now being uncovered offer a vivid picture of what happened over the next five grim days. Saladin began by bombarding the fortress with arrows from east and west–hundreds of arrow heads have been recovered clustered on these fronts–looking to demoralise the Templar garrison. At the same time, specialist miners, probably from Syrian Aleppo, were sent to tunnel under the north-eastern corner of the walls, hoping to collapse the ramparts through the technique of sapping. A tunnel was quickly dug and packed full of wood, but once set alight it proved to be too small to cause a rupture in the walls above. In desperation, the sultan offered a gold dinar to each soldier carrying a goatskin of water from the river to extinguish the flames, and work then continued night and day to enlarge the mine. Meanwhile, Baldwin was preparing to march from Tiberias.
At dawn on 29 August the leper king set out with his host to relieve the fortress. Unbeknownst to him, at that same moment fires were being lit within Saladin’s expanded siege mine. Its wooden pit props duly burned and the passageway caved in, bringing down the walls above. Saladin later wrote that, as the flames spread, the castle resembled ‘a ship adrift in a sea of fire’. As his troops poured through the break in the walls desperate hand-to-hand combat ensued, while the garrison of elite Templar knights made a bloody, but ultimately futile last stand. In a last-ditch act of bravery the Templar garrison commander mounted his war horse and charged into the burning breach; one Muslim eyewitness later described how ‘he threw himself into a hole full of fire without fear of the intense heat and, from this brazier, he was immediately thrown into another–that of Hell’.
With the castle’s defences breached the Latin garrison was eventually overrun and a bloody sack followed. The human skeletal remains recently unearthed within the perimeter wall bear witness to the ferocity of the assault. One male skull showed evidence of three separate sword cuts, the last of which split the head, crushing the brain. Another had had his arm chopped off above the elbow before being dispatched. With much of the site now in flames, Saladin executed more than half of the garrison, amassing a mountain of plunder, including 1,000 coats of armour. By noon on that Thursday, racing northwards, Baldwin got his first despairing glimpse of smoke on the horizon–telltale evidence of the destruction at Jacob’s Ford. He was just six hours too late.
In the two weeks that followed, Saladin dismantled the castle of Jacob’s Ford, razing it to the ground stone by stone. Indeed, he later claimed to have ripped out the foundations with his own hands. Most of the Latin dead, along with their horses and mules, were thrown into the stronghold’s capacious cistern. This was a rather ill-advised policy, as soon after a ‘plague’ broke out, ravaging the Muslim army and claiming the life of ten of Saladin’s commanders. By mid-October, with his primary objective achieved, the sultan decided to abandon the seemingly cursed site, and Jacob’s Ford became an abandoned, forgotten ruin.49
Saladin’s successes in summer 1179 broke the tide of Frankish martial momentum that had been building since Mont Gisard. The Latins’ attempt to seize the initiative in the Upper Jordan border zone and pressure Damascus was stymied. The sultan had protected his unification of Egypt and Syria. But the work of unifying Islam through the subjugation of Aleppo and Mosul remained incomplete.