They looked at him, a little shocked, but no one contradicted him.
“So Tripoli, Sidon, and Ibelin are the only barons of Jerusalem still free.”
“And Edessa.”
“Of course, how could I forget the brave Edessa!” Caesarea commented sarcastically. Edessa had never left Acre on account of his gout.
“There’s no point bickering among ourselves,” Aimery advised. “Let’s try to get some sleep.”
But all Humphrey saw when he tried to sleep were the Saracens surging forward and the gold reliquary with the True Cross toppling over into their bloodthirsty arms, as the Bishop of Acre’s partly dissected body sank down among the corpses of the canons of the Holy Sepulcher.
At some point his dreams started to mutate. He saw Oultrejourdain’s head talking to him, calling Humphrey all the names he’d called him as a boy, mocking him for his weakness. He saw Balian d’Ibelin striding towards him across a green field that was lush with fresh, soft grass, but when Humphrey started towards him, he turned his back and walked away. Humphrey ran after him. “Don’t leave me here! Take me home! Take me to Isabella,” he begged. Ibelin spun about, but suddenly he had the face of Oultrejourdain, blood running from his neck and coating his surcoat, and he sneered, “Afraid to be without your protectress, little boy?”
Humphrey almost dreamt of Isabella, but then she turned into the girl in the desert, only the men raping her were Saracens shouting “Allahu Akbar” and ululating in triumph as she screamed for them to stop. No, Humphrey could not sleep, and he was grateful for the dawn—until they were rounded up and dragged outside.
They were taken to a large square flanked by fine buildings, including an impressive mosque with three minarets. Here they were made to stand together, surrounded by a heavy escort of armed men. A huge crowd had already gathered, filling most of the square and even spilling into the side streets. Youths had climbed up on buildings for a better view. Soldiers were having difficulty keeping a space about two hundred by three hundred feet clear in the center.
“I don’t like this,” Hebron muttered, and no one voiced a contrary opinion.
Men in long white robes and turbans filed out of one of the beautiful buildings, which had an elaborate façade at right angles to the mosque. “Sufis,” Humphrey muttered, and the others looked at him. The most prominent of these men were quite old already, with long, straggling beards, but they were surrounded by twoscore or more younger men with bushy black beards and eyes burning with passion.
Opposite the Christian prisoners something was roiling the crowd, and it became clear that a large column of people was slowly forcing its way through the throng, squeezing the people already lining the route closer together. At last the head of this column emerged out of the crowd, and behind the leading emir and his lieutenants were men with shaved heads and beards.
“The Templars and Hospitallers!” King Guy exclaimed.
He was right. The men, shuffling forward with bound hands and feet, all wore the tattered and filthy surcoats of their respective orders: white with red crosses or black with white crosses. Their guards lined them up opposite the Sufis, making it easy for Humphrey to count them: there were four and a half rows of fifty men each, or something short of two hundred fifty surviving Knights of Christ.
The emir gestured for silence, and his lieutenants shouted for it. Gradually the crowd settled down and waited with craning necks and uneasy anticipation for the next act. The emir turned to face the captives from the military orders and raised his voice to speak in fluent French. “Christian captives, as the avowed enemies of Islam, you have earned death, for it is written that he who denies Allah and tries to destroy the community of the Faithful must themselves be destroyed.”
The crowd chanted their approval, dissolving into a chorus of “Death to the infidels! Death to the Unbelievers!” Eventually the emir silenced the crowd with his gestures, and the crowd again waited with bated breath.
The emir continued, “The Sultan Salah ad-Din, in his infinite mercy and profound wisdom, offers you a chance to save your lives. All you need do is embrace the True Faith.”
The nobles of Jerusalem looked at one another, and then back at the lines of Templars and Hospitallers. Humphrey couldn’t help wondering if they were going to be next.
“Is there not one of you who would save your soul as well as your body by accepting that your beliefs are infantile and it is time to embrace the Prophet?” the emir asked in a voice thick with mock kindness.
There was some stirring in the ranks of the Templars and Hospitallers—but it was more, or so Humphrey thought, a sigh of resignation. One or two of the knights dropped their heads, their lips moving in prayer. If their hands had not been bound, more than one man might have crossed himself.
“Are you all blind, deaf, and dumb?” the emir asked, in a voice pitched to the crowd and intended to drown out the murmurs of the condemned.
“We hear better than you!” a Hospitaller called out from the front rank, “for we hear the angels of heaven already.”
“You hear the demons of hell!” the emir sneered back.
From the second rank, some of the Templars started singing the “non nobis,” and William de Montferrat whispered in horror, “God in heaven, they are going to die unshriven! There’s not a priest anywhere.”
Meanwhile the emir turned and exchanged words with the leader of the Sufis, an old, white-haired man with a frail body, who nodded vigorously before he reverently grasped a sword handed to him by one of the emir’s men. The emir than turned back and pointed at the Hospitaller who had dared to speak up.
Two of the emir’s men grabbed the Hospitaller and brought him forward, forcing him to kneel at the emir’s feet. The Hospitaller did not struggle. He bowed his head and closed his eyes in preparation for death. But it wasn’t one of the soldiers that stepped forward to strike his head from his shoulders—it was the ancient Sufi.
The old man could hardly raise the heavy sword over his head. His arms were accustomed to writing, not fighting. He staggered as he tried to swing the sword down. The blade fell short of the Hospitaller’s neck and landed on his back instead. It knocked the bound prisoner forward onto his face and drew blood, but did not come close to killing him. The crowd shouted advice and encouragement as the Sufi raised the sword again and now hacked at the back of the Hospitaller’s neck. Blood was gushing all over the square, but the Hospitaller was still writhing in agony, his face covered in his own blood, as the Sufi made a third and then a fourth attempt to kill him. It was not until the fifth blow that the old Sufi at last hacked through the Hospitaller’s neck and was able to lift up the severed head to show the crowd. He was splattered with blood and grinning proudly.
The crowd went wild with delight, shouting with rising fervor: “God is great! God is great!” Humphrey vomited into the street.
The spectacle was now repeated, with each of the Sufis, one at a time, being given the “honor” of killing a bound and kneeling Christian prisoner as a reward for his devotion to Islam and Allah. Around them the spectators shouted encouragement to the scholars and teachers of the Koran, while others in the crowd took bets on how many blows it would take for them to kill each victim. Once or twice the show was halted so that the bodies could be dumped upon wagons pulled by oxen and the heads collected in burlap sacks while the swords were whetted. Half-starved stray dogs were already trying to lick up the blood running between the paving stones, and flies were swarming so thickly that the bystanders were plagued by them—particularly the steadily diminishing ranks of the Hospitallers and Templars, who with bound wrists could not bat them away.
The entire massacre took almost five hours, and by the end, the Templars and Hospitallers had to be dragged forward, not because of resistance but from debilitating shock and weakness. Many had soiled themselves with vomit or urine, and three actually ended up crawling on their bellies to the emir, praising Allah.
But three out of nearly two hundred fifty w
asn’t worth thinking about in Humphrey’s mind. Instead, he held in his memory the face of a knight too young to grow a proper beard, with a sunburned face and bright blond hair making up the tonsure encircling his peeling scalp. He must have come newly from the West, Humphrey calculated as the young man knelt in the blood of his brothers, and the stench of their bodies made him gag once or twice. Then he looked up at the Sufi, approaching with a sword that had been only inadequately wiped off after the last execution, and said in a voice loud enough for Humphrey to hear: “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.” And then he started reciting the Lord’s Prayer.
Humphrey and the other barons joined in with him, and they said it to the end, even after the young Hospitaller’s voice had been severed by the sword after the words, “Forgive us our trespasses.”
The very last of the fighting monks to be brought forward was Gerard de Ridefort. He no longer looked defiant, Humphrey thought, and he stumbled and then slipped in the blood. He would have fallen if the emir’s men had not held him upright. He was brought to the emir in the very middle of the square; a dozen bodies and severed heads still lay bleeding in the burning sun, the flies all over them.
A new hush fell on the crowd.
“Master de Ridefort,” the emir addressed him. “Now that you have seen where your pride and arrogance have led you, are you prepared to accept that your faith was misplaced? That you have prayed to idols and pieces of rubbish and ignored the call of Allah?”
Ridefort did not speak, but his head moved ever so slightly, from side to side.
“You persist in your folly?” the emir asked him as if astonished.
Ridefort nodded, swallowing visibly.
The emir shrugged. “So be it. You will rot in hell in your own time.”
The lead Sufi, the old man with the hawk-like nose, who had been leaning wearily on his sword (killing men was such hard work in the heat of the day), straightened and raised his sword. Clearly he felt it was his right to kill the head Templar, but the emir gestured for him to stand down. Instead, the emir pointed to the other Christian prisoners, and his men escorted Ridefort to them.
As he joined them, the other barons drew back in instinctive horror and disgust. They all knew that he was to blame for the debacle at Hattin and the slaughter they had just witnessed. They moved away from Ridefort, and in their eyes was contempt, but it was left to Guy de Lusignan to mutter, “On your head, Ridefort, on your head are all these souls.”
Ridefort started slightly and then looked squarely at King Guy. “They are martyrs for Christ. What could be a better end for them?”
“And all the other dead, wounded, and captured?” Aimery snarled.
“Ask your brother,” Ridefort answered; “he’s the King.”
“I’ll kill you!” Guy shouted furiously. “You were the one who told me to leave Sephorie! You were the one to urge me to ignore the advice of my barons! You! You are to blame for everything!”
Before Ridefort could answer, William de Montferrat stepped between them, hissing furiously: “Stop giving the Saracens a spectacle!”
The others looked around at the grinning guards and the curious crowd, while Aimery drew his brother away from Ridefort. Guy continued to swear, “I’ll kill him! I’ll kill him!”
Aimery answered, “Maybe, but not here and now.”
Nablus, July 7-12, 1187
Word of the disaster at Hattin seeped out across the Kingdom on the tongues of deserters and the smoke of burning villages. The former spoke of the mad decision to abandon the springs of Sephorie and clad themselves in the robes of prophets, claiming to be the only clear-sighted men in an army seized with collective blindness. The latter spoke only the irrefutable language of ominous and approaching danger.
Maria Zoë was not prepared to believe the word of deserters. Men who fled before a battle were neither men of good character nor the most knowledgeable about a battle’s outcome. Many an apparently lost battle had been won in the end. One had only to remember Montgisard.
Sir Constantine agreed in principle, but he was uneasy nevertheless. There was ample evidence from victualers and whores that the army had left Sephorie and marched toward Tiberias—and then it simply disappeared. That was impossible in high summer in the middle of Palestine. He decided to send riders to Nazareth and Tiberias to try to get more information.
Meanwhile refugees began streaming through Nablus, heading south. At first it was just a trickle, but the numbers increased steadily. Most of those passing through with carts crammed high with household goods and loaded pack animals could report only rumors. No one had actually seen anything, but they had heard that the Christian army had been annihilated. They had heard the King and the True Cross were captured. They had heard that Tiberias had fallen and Acre was under siege. The more people Sir Constantine questioned, the worse the stories became.
Maria Zoë still refused to believe the rumors. “These people have panicked,” she insisted. But Sir Constantine started to make preparations for their own withdrawal to someplace defensible.
It was three days after the scouts had been sent out that one returned in a state of nervous agitation. He galloped into the city on a near-foundered horse. He was unkempt, dirty, and wild-eyed. “They’ve slaughtered the whole army! There’s nothing left of it at all! Tens of thousands of corpses are rotting unshriven on the Horns of Hattin—feeding the vultures and the wild dogs!”
“Pull yourself together!” Sir Constantine ordered the youth of barely sixteen.
“I’m not exaggerating!” his young messenger shouted back, too agitated to respect authority. “I saw the vultures in the sky—more of them than you can imagine! They were like a swarm of gnats! And you could hear them screaming at one another!”
“Did you verify it was Christian and not Muslim dead?” Sir Constantine asked.
“You’re not listening to me!” the panicked young man shouted. “There is no Christian army! If anyone survived the slaughter, they have been taken away in chains—slaves! There are nothing but Christian corpses from Sephorie to Hattin!”
Sir Constantine dutifully reported this account (in more sober terms) to the Dowager Queen—but it was not until the other scouts returned the next day, reporting that Acre too had fallen, that he put his foot down and insisted that Maria Zoë withdraw to Jerusalem. “Nablus has no walls, my lady, and with the men we have, we cannot hold the citadel for long. Besides, without an army to relieve us, what would be the point?”
Maria Zoë gazed at him without answering. She was not blind or simple-minded. She had refused to accept that the rumors were correct, but that is not the same thing as dismissing them. She had spent every minute, when she was not actively engaged in doing something else, imagining and weighing the consequences. The very fact that there were no counter-rumors and no confusion, and the fact that Balian had not sent her any kind of message whatsoever, strongly suggested that the Christian defeat had indeed been devastating—and that Balian was dead or captured. Every time she thought of her husband, she said a prayer for his life. Yet even as she prayed, she recognized that survival alone might seem a poor substitute for heaven if he had lost a limb, been blinded, or otherwise crippled. So she prayed again, begging that he be of sound mind and body, and then forced herself to think beyond his condition to her children, her household, her people. She was not, therefore, unprepared for Sir Constantine’s announcement. She answered him: “My children are at Ibelin. We will go there.”
Sir Constantine cursed himself. He should have anticipated this reaction. “My lady,” he spoke as forcefully as he could. “The information we have suggests that there is absolutely no Christian force capable of deterring but less preventing Saracen actions. Salah ad-Din’s forces can move about the Kingdom at will—and that’s exactly what they’re doing. The only—I repeat, the only—defenses we have are the walls of our cities and castles.”
“Ibelin—”
“Is not defensible with the garrison
it has, and Master Shoreham knows that! Shoreham will do what we—and most of the burghers of the Kingdom—are doing: he will take your children to a more defensible place, either Jaffa or Ascalon.”
“Then we will join him at Ibelin and fall back to Jaffa with him,” Maria Zoë answered.
“My lady.” Sir Constantine paused, considered a more flowery, more diplomatic, more Greek response, and then opted for the brutal reality: “No.”
Maria Zoë started. She was not used to being contradicted by a subordinate.
Before she could reprimand him, Sir Constantine continued, “I cannot and will not risk the trip to Ibelin. We have far too little intelligence about where the Saracens are, but sufficient information to know that Salah ad-Din has more than enough troops to be able to divide his forces. If Acre has indeed fallen, as the rumors suggest, he has already cut the Kingdom in two, and he will then probably try to re-establish his lines of communication with Egypt. He is most likely to move south along the coast. It would be madness to run into his arms. Jerusalem, on the other hand, is unlikely to be threatened immediately, and it is by far our most defensible inland city. The brothers and sisters of the Hospital have already departed, taking the sick, destitute, and children with them to the safety of Jerusalem. If Christ has not completely abandoned us, it is the city we are most likely to hold—until relief comes from the West, if need be. I will escort you to Jerusalem—and nowhere else.”
They stared at one another. Maria Zoë very much wanted to say, “Then I will go without your escort,” but she didn’t dare. The truth was, she was afraid to ride across a kingdom in which there was no longer anyone to enforce order. She was afraid to ride straight into a Saracen patrol—or a pack of deserters—without an armed escort. A woman alone or with only a handful of servants would be prey for common thieves and brigands no less than for enemy. Instead, she appealed to Sir Constantine’s conscience. “And my children? Do you expect a mother to abandon her children?”
“No, I trust Master Shoreham to see to their safety as best he can—just as your lord husband did when he left his children in Master Shoreham’s care.”
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