by John Man
Saladin still made no move, delayed for two more months first by a campaign to crush another pro-Fatimid revolt in the south, and then by his concern for legitimacy. Ideally he wanted the support of the caliph in Baghdad. But then out of the blue Damascus gave him the backing he needed. By popular request, the governor asked him to take over the city.
He set off, leaving Egypt in the competent hands of his brother al-Adil, and confident of success because he carried with him large sums of money to convince others to join him, there being nothing quite so convincing as cash. He was so confident that he brought only 700 cavalry, sure that others would join him en route. They did, by the hundred, so that his journey turned into a triumph. As his secretary al-Fadil said, he spent the wealth of Egypt on the conquest of Syria, and so, in Saladin’s own words, ‘we dawned on the people like light in the darkness.’
He entered Damascus at the end of November. As with all effective leaders, he knew the benefit of symbolic gestures. He prayed in the great Umayyad Mosque, then went on to his father’s old house, where he had lived as a teenager, a statement that he was retaking what was rightfully his. But the key was cash – some from Cairo, some from the city treasury; he re-opened the markets, cancelled an unpopular tax, took no revenge on officials resentful at their loss of power, and insisted, once again, that he was in the service of Nur al-Din. All this, he said, was in the noble cause of holy war and the retaking of Jerusalem, nothing at all to do with greed or personal ambition, perish the thought. He himself would be the guardian of his former master’s young son, to ‘direct his affairs and set straight what had gone awry’.
But Damascus was not all Syria. In Mosul, Edessa, Aleppo, Hama, Baalbek and Homs there were those who accused Saladin of treason and a lust for power. He marched to each in turn, with an army swollen by new recruits to over 7,000 horsemen and uncounted infantry. Most places surrendered at the mere sight of his force (though in Homs the citadel remained untaken for another three months, when it was battered into submission by catapults). Aleppo, his main target, proved a tougher nut. It was under its emir, Gumushtegin, regent to Nur al-Din’s heir, eleven-year-old al-Salih. The boy was brought out to address the crowds and won them over by appealing for protection, even breaking down in tears in the middle of his speech.
While outside the walls, Saladin had a lucky escape. This was in January 1175, and as he wrote in a letter to his nephew Farrukh-Shah, they were camping in tents that did not keep out the winter rain, with fires that did not keep out the cold. Gumushtegin, fearing a long siege, had written to the head of the Assassins, Sinan, promising riches if he could arrange for Saladin’s murder. Sinan had reasons of his own to eliminate Saladin – the anti-Shi’ite, the would-be unifier of Islam under the Sunnis, the man who had re-introduced the name of the hated Abbasid caliph into the Friday prayers. A group of thirteen managed to infiltrate the camp, but were recognized by an officer, who by chance owned a castle close to the Assassins’ main base. The officer, Khumartegin, challenged them. In the fight that followed, he and several others died, including all the Assassins. Be on guard, Saladin told his nephew, day and night, at rest or travelling, and employ only those of guaranteed loyalty, for ‘the knives have been distributed’ and money paid to the Assassins. Saladin, unhurt, never forgot his debt to Khumartegin; fourteen years later, he gave a newly conquered fortress to the officer’s son.23
Gumushtegin, prime mover in this plot, came to a bad end. Al-Salih, Nur al-Din’s young heir, had him arrested in 1177. He was hung by his feet outside his fortress, plunged into vinegar and lime, squeezed between planks and strangled with a bow string.
Aleppo and Mosul, the capitals of Zangi’s divided empire, remained independent under Nur al-Din’s two nephews, Qutb and Sayf. Skirmish followed skirmish. Negotiations between Turks, Arabs and Franks continued. Fortresses were seized, then returned in temporary peace settlements. Carrier-pigeons flew back and forth with offers and counter-offers. All this whipped up a froth of events without any firm conclusion, until on 13 April 1175 Saladin met Sayf and Gumushtegin, briefly united in an uncertain alliance, 8 kilometres north of Hama, near a hill with a double summit called the Horns of Hama. What happened next was so fast that no details of the battle exist. Indeed, it was hardly a battle. Perhaps there had been bribery, or treachery, or just a failure of nerve. Anyway, the Zangid troops simply fled in a cloud of dust. As Saladin wrote, he broke the enemy like glass, without the loss of a single life.
That suited him perfectly. The key element in Saladin’s campaign was his forbearance. Since he was aiming to unite Syria with a view to wider unity, his current enemies would one day be his allies, so he was careful never to be vindictive, holding back his troops from indiscriminate slaughter, sparing fugitives and the wounded, releasing prisoners, employing soldiers who wished to defect. The Aleppans asked for peace, and Saladin agreed. Better restraint than a long and bloody assault.
A month later, the caliph al-Mustadi himself acknowledged Saladin as master of almost the whole region – the rest of Syria, Egypt, the Mahgreb (most of the rest of north Africa), Nubia, western Arabia, Palestine – everywhere except al-Salih’s domain around Baghdad. Not that the caliph, though nominal head of all Islam, really controlled such a vast territory. As Hitti writes, he ‘gave away what was in reality not his to give, but what was flattering to him not to refuse’.24 Saladin, blessed by Islam’s highest religious authority, kitted out with black flags and honorific robes, now had the legitimacy he needed. All he had to do was get everyone else to acknowledge him.
Philip Hitti, History of the Arabs, p. 646.
He consolidated his rule in Damascus for almost a year. His third brother, al-Adil, came to support him from Egypt, another (Turanshah) from Yemen. An uneasy peace held the three main players – Saladin in Damascus, Qutb in Aleppo and Sayf in Mosul – in check. In early 1176, Sayf moved, marching from Mosul towards Aleppo. Saladin countered, completing his move with an exhausting two-day advance to a hill named Tell Sultan (Tall as-Sultan), 37 kilometres south-west of Aleppo. Sayf’s staff advised an immediate attack, but Sayf shrugged: ‘Why should we fight that outsider right now? Tomorrow morning we will get all of them anyhow.’ A mistake. Perhaps the scouts had underestimated Saladin’s reinforcements, out of sight behind Tell Sultan. Next morning, an uncoordinated charge by Sayf’s army gave Saladin his chance. He led a counter-charge, scattered the opposition and drove the Aleppo–Mosul troops from their camp, which Saladin’s men found to be ‘more like a tavern, with all its wines, guitars, lutes, bands, singers and singing girls’, plus a collection of doves, nightingales and parrots. Again, Saladin was magnanimous in victory. He returned most of the treasure, allowed his enemies to seek sanctuary in Aleppo, ‘naked, bare-foot and impoverished’. He told Sayf to go back to playing with his birds; they would help him avoid dangerous situations in the future. Captured enemy officers were treated politely, then freed. It was like a duel between friendly rivals, with Saladin careful not to deal a knock-out blow in the certainty that one day his rivals would be his allies in the true battle still to come, the jihad against the Franks.
Unwilling to undertake an all-out assault on Aleppo, Saladin set about strangling the city by tightening the noose on outlying defences and communications. May 1176 found him besieging Azaz, a castle on an artificial mound 35 kilometres north of Aleppo, when again the Assassins tried to get him. Four of them, disguised as bodyguards – a serious breach of security – attacked him while he was watching the action, but, as often with extremists, it was a high-risk venture that virtually guaranteed their own deaths. Saladin was wearing armour and a helmet at the time, and his guards were close by. One of the assailants managed to throw Saladin to the ground and wound him on the cheek before a guard seized the blade of the knife, cutting his fingers to the bone. Another officer killed the Assassin, with the knife still held by both men. Two of the Assassins fell to other officers. The fourth escaped, only to be pursued and cut to pieces in the surrounding camp.
It was only a scratch, Saladin wrote to a brother, ‘with some few drops of blood, nothing to cause distress’, but the affair left him so shaken that he had his tent surrounded by a fence and took to sleeping in a wooden tower.
This was too close for comfort. Several leaders, both Muslim and Christian, had fallen victim to the Assassins, and several had had narrow escapes (including Nur al-Din). To allow such people to operate was to risk disaster.
Azaz fell a month later, and Saladin closed in on Aleppo, crammed with refugees who had fled Saladin’s troops following the battle of Tell Sultan. But the city was clearly not going to surrender. Expenses built, and the troops were restless. After two weeks, the two sides started peace talks, exchanging proposals, blaming each other for delay, hypocrisy and other sorts of small-scale bad behaviour. The long and the short of it was that Saladin’s generous treatment of his opponents had done nothing to undermine support for al-Salih. At the end of July, Saladin called off the siege. All the rivals agreed a peace treaty. Saladin dropped his claim to become al-Salih’s guardian, handed back Azaz, agreed that all of northern Syria would belong to al-Salih, and turned to the greater threat: the Assassins in their Syrian enclave.
The Assassins had been in the area since the 1130s, acquiring eight fortresses in all, one of which was the tenth-century Byzantine castle of Masyaf – stronghold of the Assassin leader Sinan – built on top of a rocky pinnacle. Today, it is a tourist attraction, or was before civil war broke out in 2012. It is a formidable-looking place, a 170-metre-long oval of walls, towers and barbicans, springing from a core of rock. Inside, it is a maze of rooms, stairways and tunnels on two overlapping levels that circle the hill and a third that caps it. For invaders, it would have been a nightmare, because stairs and corridors divide and swoop and double back, blunting attacks and making places for defenders to hide and counterattack. One room has a ‘murder-hole’ cut through the ceiling, so that defenders can shoot down on to attackers breaking in below. Hewn out of the rocky foundations are three interlinked water cisterns that could hold some 400,000 litres, enough to sustain 1,000 people for six months. All of this, and more, is revealed in a detailed guide funded by today’s philanthropic Ismaili leader, the Aga Khan,25 whose foundation was busy restoring the castle before the present troubles.
Haytham Hasan, The Citadel of Masyaf.
Perhaps Saladin knew some of the details from spies, in which case he must have seen he would be in for a long siege. Catapults started to batter down the walls, but would never have blasted open the warren of rooms quarried from the rock beneath. On the other hand, Sinan was surrounded. If the siege was long enough, he would run out of food and water. But if he was forced to capitulate, who knew what terrible revenge these fanatics might unleash in years to come?
In brief: yet another stalemate. Both sides needed a way out. Within days, discussions were opened through one of Saladin’s uncles, Shihab al-Din (one source says Sinan threatened him with death if he didn’t initiate talks). How it happened and what was agreed, no one knows. But all sources agree that the siege had been going on for only a week when there was a truce, which lasted. For seventeen years, the Assassins left Saladin alone to beat first his Muslim foes then the Christians. And that allowed Saladin to leave Sinan free to plan other assassinations from the castle that could never have been taken in the first place.
A secret accord? Possibly. Anyway, it was a quick and pragmatic outcome, because Saladin was now able to secure what Nur al-Din had won. In Damascus, to which he returned for just twelve days, he married Nur al-Din’s widow, Ismat (not little al-Salih’s mother, who was a concubine), and gave his sister Rabia to Ismat’s brother, forging two links between his family and Nur al-Din’s, and very obviously claiming his legacy. Ismat was fortyish, and his fifth wife, and the match was purely political, but it turned out well. There would be no children – in any case he already had at least seven children from various other wives and concubines – but she was a generous-hearted woman to whom Saladin remained attached for the rest of his life.
Officially, he was still al-Malik, the King. But from now on his supporters started calling him Sultan Salah al-Din – ‘Righteousness of the Faith’ – giving us the name by which he would soon be famous: Saladin. But really the previous two years had not given him what he had hoped for: Nur’s inheritance. Southern Syria was not enough. He had spent the whole time scrapping with his co-religionists and no time at all fighting his real enemies, the Franks. The money he had brought with him from Cairo had been spent, his high hopes reduced to dust – literally, for to cap it all, the rains failed, threatening his men with drought. He could do nothing more in Syria.
So at the end of October he made the twelve-day journey back to Cairo, where he would spend the next year, until the end of 1177. There, flush once again with taxes raised locally, he busied himself with projects to strengthen his own fiefdom. His major undertaking was to enclose two separate townships, Cairo and its suburb Fustat, behind one wall, a vast project that would take thirty years to complete. Secondly, he added to the defences of Damietta, Tanis and Alexandria. And thirdly, he started a crash programme to expand his fleet to sixty galleys and twenty transports, back to its strength under the Fatimids. There were also non-military projects: a law college in Alexandria; the abolition of a toll paid by pilgrims crossing the Red Sea on their way to Mecca, with due compensation paid to Mecca itself for loss of income – an astute PR move that made him popular all along the pilgrim routes, and also made him in effect Mecca’s patron. Both civilian and military projects served his overarching mission – to take Aleppo at last, bring all Syria under his rule and finally unify Syria and Egypt under Sunni rule, and then, as he wrote to his brother Turanshah in Syria, ‘Our only object in this life . . . is to fight against the infidels.’
Little did he know that Aleppo was so nervous of his advances that they had approached their supposed enemies, the Crusaders, for help. As a sweetener, the Aleppans had agreed to release a number of Frankish prisoners, among them the man who would become Saladin’s most bitter enemy. He had just emerged from sixteen years in prison and had offered his fiercely anti-Muslim services to Jerusalem’s young and sickly king.
6
Enter the Villain
THE VILLAIN IN QUESTION IS REYNALD, WHOSE STORY IS SO interwoven with Saladin’s that we have to go back over twenty years, relating events which explain why Saladin despised him. If Saladin is our chivalric and generous hero, Reynald is the opposite, his appalling behaviour making a background against which Saladin’s virtues stand out more clearly.
He called himself ‘de Châtillon’. There are thirty-three Châtillons in France. Scholars used to argue about which one Reynald26 came from. Now most agree that he was from one of no great significance on the river Loing, a tributary of the Seine in the middle of France. Nothing else is known of his early years, except that he arrived with the Second Crusade in 1147, when he was in his early twenties, apparently hungry for loot, blood and power. As far as Muslims were concerned, he was a nasty piece of work, the worst of Crusaders, as al-Athir called him: ‘one of the greatest and wickedest of the Franks, the most hostile to the Muslims and the most dangerous of them.’ Also, as we shall see, he was brutal, deceitful, vengeful and shameless, quite capable of grovelling in the face of a superior one moment and stabbing him in the back the next.
His name had various spellings in different languages: Renaud, Rainalt, Reginald. The Muslims called him ‘Brins Arnat’, a corruption of Prince Renaud.
Yet there must have been something more to him. Few villains are irredeemably monstrous. A later chapter will look at an adventure that suggests he was as much swashbuckler as thug. His biographer, Gustave Schlumberger, a Frenchman writing in the 1890s, spoke of him as a hero: ‘One of the boldest and one of the most extraordinary warriors of the Crusades, one of those iron men of the east . . . who would have figured among the demi-gods if he had been born in ancient times.’ There’s a hint of admiration in the
Muslim judgement, a hint of disapproval in the Christian praise. He was, no doubt, a man who radiated danger. He must also have had piratical charm, because soon after his arrival he won the affection of the twenty-six-year-old princess of Antioch, Constance.
Antioch was in Christian eyes second only to Jerusalem itself in wealth, size, strength and significance – St Peter its first Patriarch, St Paul a citizen. Once upon a time it had been Asia’s greatest city. Earthquakes and the Arab conquest had reduced it; but it still had its vast Roman and Byzantine walls, which ran from the Orontes river in a crenellated semicircle up and along the ridge of Mount Silpius, climbing peaks and leaping valleys like a miniature Great Wall of China. Four hundred towers ranged away on either side of a citadel, which looked down on the city 330 metres below. Inside the walls, the city – single-storey houses forming garden-courtyards, churches, monasteries, bazaars and pasture land – covered a plain 4 kilometres across. As Schlumberger puts it, the nearby port of St Symeon (today’s Samandaq) was the gateway through which poured ‘a picturesque and gaudy mixture of people’ who turned Antioch into a seething commercial centre. Any invader from the north had to take Antioch and its surrounding territory if he hoped to move on southwards.
Having seized it from the Turks in 1098, its Christian rulers owed vague allegiance to the Byzantine emperor, Manuel, since it was on his southern frontier. But they also depended on the Christian king in Jerusalem, for reasons of faith and family. How these relationships worked out depended on unpredictable changes in the balance between half a dozen powers great and small, with a myriad twists and turns. Our guides through this historical labyrinth are the personalities, starting with Constance.