by John Man
So he did what other commanders have done in similar circumstances: he mounted a trial raid, which would have the additional advantage of paying for itself and making a fat profit. In 1181, possibly in October to take advantage of the rainy-season grass, he led a raid to the pilgrim staging-post of Tayma, some 200 kilometres outside the borders of his territory, on the way to Medina. The details were not recorded, but he did attack a caravan of pilgrims, perhaps even reaching Tayma itself. Some said that he was really aiming for Medina, and that only a quick response by Farrukh-Shah, Saladin’s nephew and boss of Damascus and Baalbek, saved the day by raiding lands around Kerak, drawing Reynald back home. As Saladin himself wrote to the caliph in Baghdad, al-Nasir: ‘Thanks to the Almighty for giving us the chance to protect the Prophet’s tomb.’ True or not, Reynald returned home with rich pickings, and vital information. He now saw that he could not hope to lead a force overland all the way to Medina, let alone Mecca, and spread the sort of mayhem required. It would invite an immediate counter-attack, or highway robbery by the unruly Bedouin, or death by thirst, starvation or sunstroke. To attack pilgrims and get closer to the holy cities, best go by sea.
But his trial raid had unexpected consequences. Saladin complained to Baldwin that Reynald had broken the truce, and demanded compensation, with no effect, because the person who had to pay was Reynald and there was no chance of him doing any such thing. So Saladin arrested 1,500 Christian pilgrims who had arrived by ship in Egypt. He said he would release them only when he received compensation.
Ships were a problem, but not an insuperable one. To stand a chance of landing killer blows on the Muslim heartland, Reynald needed a significant force. Sources mention 300 men and five ships, not much for an army but a good size for an SAS-style raid. If true, the numbers suggest that the ships were so-called dromons, twelfth-century versions of Roman galleys, some 30 metres long, with a single bank of fifty oars, aided by a triangular lateen sail and weighing some 60 tonnes. Each would have carried fifty oarsmen and ten others. For this tricky operation, each ship would have been built in sections in Kerak and then loaded on to camels. A camel carries about 150–200 kilograms, so there must have been some 2,000 of them, hired from local Bedouin. Not exactly an undercover operation, but it would have been hard for any spy to guess what the purpose was. To launch the attack during the months of pilgrimage, between January and April 1183, the camels, with a military escort, were driven the 200 kilometres (8–10 days) across the desert to Eilat, along with teams of shipwrights. While the task-force isolated the castle of Eilat on its little island, the carpenters put the ships together (easily said, but not so easily done; it must have taken many days).
At this point, Reynald himself vanishes from the story. All we know is that he survived. It would have been out of character for such a bloodthirsty and fearless buccaneer to forgo an adventure without good reason. As it happens, there were several good reasons. Eilat had been taken back from the Franks by Saladin himself in 1170, using precisely the same tactic as Reynald’s: dismantling ships and carrying them to the Gulf of Aqaba by camel (though that was a paltry operation by comparison). Reynald would therefore have considered the castle rightfully his. With Saladin’s rise and the union of Syria and Egypt, the castle, which took up most of the island on which it stood, was – along with its well on the mainland nearby – in a key position to dominate the road joining the two regions. So he remained behind to seize the fortress. He was in no hurry. He kept two ships, which blockaded the island castle, preventing those inside from leaving to spread word of the assault, and also forbidding them access to the well on the mainland. Given time, the castle would surely fall into his lap.
One thousand kilometres – two to three weeks’ travel – later, as all sources agree, the other three ships landed in Aydhab, which no longer exists, but in the twelfth century was a thriving port on the western coast of the Red Sea and a popular point from which pilgrims crossed back and forth between southern Egypt and the two holy cities. Here the raiders gave vent to their hatred and bloodlust. They ‘cut the pilgrimage route and began to kill, plunder and take prisoners’. The locals, of course, had no idea that such a thing was possible, because ‘the presence of the Franks in that sea had never been known, and such extreme wickedness had never confronted a pilgrim . . . The weak became worried, and the worried became weak.’ While some raiders burned sixteen ships and seized a pilgrim vessel that had just arrived from Jeddah, others attacked a caravan coming from Qus, on the Nile 500 kilometres north.
Slowed by booty, prisoners and their own ignorance of currents and winds, the Franks then crossed the Red Sea – 300 kilometres, four or five days’ travel – to Rabigh, a little port where some of the pilgrim ferries landed, 150 kilometres north of Jeddah. Perhaps they were aiming for Jeddah itself, a much bigger place, and were blown off course. In any event, they moored their ships, landed and began to work their way inland.
It was now almost a month since the raid on Eilat. The news had travelled at the gallop to Saladin, who was in Harran, just north of today’s Turkey–Syria border. Off went orders to Cairo, to the admiral of the recently strengthened fleet, Husam al-Din Lu’lu’. From obscurity, Lu’lu’ now leaped to fame, mainly because our sources were eager to flatter the man one of them called ‘the gallant favourite, the bold lion, the unyielding charger, the man of unbounded generosity and unlimited hospitality’. He and a hastily gathered force transferred ships to Suez from Cairo (125 kilometres) and Alexandria – the business of carrying ships on camels was apparently a common tactic, because this is the third time it was recorded, without any description of how it was done. By now, Reynald had a head-start of six weeks. Sailing and rowing to Eilat (550 kilometres) took the best part of another week. There Lu’lu’ overpowered the two Frankish ships and headed for Aydhab (two weeks), where they ‘witnessed what the people had suffered’.
Locals pointed out the way the Franks had gone – they were, after all, in pursuit of pilgrims. Lu’lu’, whose crews were familiar with the sea and its winds, caught up with the raiders at Rabigh, where the pirates’ ships were soon taken, the Frankish crew killed or captured, the Muslim captives released, the booty returned.
Ashore, the remaining raiders fled inland, bribing local Bedouin ‘as impious as themselves’ to guide them to hiding places in the ravines that cut across the semi-desert lowlands behind the town. Over the next five days, Lu’lu’s men used the same tactics, carrying bags of money to out-bribe Bedouin horsemen and hunt down the pirates, killing some and capturing others. They returned to the coast with 170 prisoners, who were divided like booty between Mecca, Cairo and Alexandria, where the traveller ibn Jubayr saw them being paraded through the streets, mounted backwards on camels, to the beat of drums and blare of trumpets. None could be allowed to live, since they all now knew how vulnerable the Muslims were in the Red Sea. All were executed. Two of the leaders were sent to Mina, the ‘tent-city’ near Mecca, where they were sacrificed like animals.
What had the Franks been hoping to achieve? That was what puzzled the Muslim leaders, who read significance into where the Franks had been heading when they were captured – Medina, the city where Muhammad was buried. It was a natural conclusion, because this was the second time, apparently, that Reynald had aimed at Medina, to ‘seize, God forbid, the Holy Places. They wished to inflict upon the Arabian Peninsula the worst possible enormity.’ Which was what? The Islamic scholars leaped to the most dramatic conclusion possible. To paraphrase a source, Abd al-Latif, who knew all the main participants, they set out to dig up the grave of the Prophet, take his remains with them, display them, and then charge Muslims an access fee.
For Muslims, the reasoning was sound. The Christians, being (in Muslim eyes) dumb and devoted to nothing but evil, would naturally have chosen the ultimate target, the Prophet’s tomb, a plot that was then foiled by the brilliance and bravery of their admiral. The story, taken to these extremes, serves an Islamic agenda: to put Islam and its leaders
in the best light, the Christians in the worst.
But from the Christian point of view it makes no sense. Reynald was not that crazy. In fact, by all accounts he was highly intelligent, admired both for his ruthlessness and his skill in fighting, surviving and fighting again. He would not have backed, let alone taken part in, a mission that was not only suicidal, but which also had no chance of success, especially considering its size. You might take a small, fanatical group on a suicide raid – we have become used to such missions in recent years – but not a force of 300. So it is worth asking again: what was Reynald’s purpose?
For an answer, we should take into account his intelligence, his status, the wider context and the consequences. Saladin was in Syria, aiming to gain control of Aleppo, which would have completed the unification of an empire in which the Christian kingdoms would have been isolated and vulnerable. Anything that made his task more difficult would be welcome to all Christians. This was no self-serving, piratical raid. It could well have been a well-thought-out strike that accomplished everything it set out to do, namely slow Saladin’s rise to sole rule and give the impression that the pilgrims, trade and holy cities were open to attack. After all, the raiders did not first go towards them, but spent a month not doing so. Why? Because the whole idea is ludicrous. Even if they could have reached Medina unchallenged, over landscapes totally unknown to them; even if they could have entered the Prophet’s mosque: how could they have dug up his coffin? What would the local inhabitants have been doing? Not standing around watching. And having got the coffin out of the ground, what then? A quick transfer to a waiting camel and a 600-kilometre gallop to the border, unmolested? It was never an option.
But there was good reason to implant the fear of such an outcome, and also good reason for our five sources to make the most of it – to present Lu’lu’, and through him Saladin, as the saviour of Islam’s Holy Places, the defender of pilgrims, the agent of Allah’s vengeance on unbelievers.
Perhaps the Franks were hoping to secure a foothold on the coastline of the Arabian peninsula, planting a little Christian colony in the great sea of Islam. What then? Saladin had recently secured Yemen. His brother Tughtukin was still there when Reynald’s raiders entered the Red Sea. Their presence would have left him out on a limb, and vulnerable. The pilgrimage routes from the west would have been cut, with a loss of income to Egypt and a loss of Muslim morale. It would have disrupted the trade with India, which was vital to the Islamic economy. And of course if, as Muslims believed, the raiders had really been intent on digging up the Prophet’s coffin and carting it home, the impact on Islam, and on Saladin himself, would have been so catastrophic that no source dared examine the outcome: not charging for access, but using the body as a bargaining chip, which was how the Muslims used the ‘True Cross’. It would surely have been the best PR stunt in history, firing the imagination of Europe, attracting reinforcements, perhaps swinging the balance against Islam in the Holy Land for ever.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps there would have been unintended consequences. No act could have been better calculated to unite all Islam against the Christians. Perhaps, if the raiders had achieved their alleged aim, the Christians would have been chased out of the Holy Land a lot quicker.
What of Reynald, of whom we last heard arriving with his camel-caravan of dismantled ships on the bleak shores of Aqaba? His attempt to retake the castle of Eilat had failed, his ships were captured, his task-force all dead. But he had escaped, no one knows how. Perhaps it would not have been hard. Lu’lu’ was approaching by sea up the gulf. There were many camels to hand. Reynald could have chosen a few trusty comrades-in-arms and headed north, fast, without meeting any opposition, and arrived back in Kerak in less than a week, living to fight another day.
9
Build-up to the Show-down
REYNALD’S RAID MADE SALADIN ANXIOUS. IN A WAY, HE WAS responsible, because his absence fighting other Muslims had given Reynald his chance, leaving him open to the possible accusation that he cared more about his own interests than about defending Islam.
At this point, in early April 1183, Saladin received a letter from the caliph authorizing him to take Amida, today’s Diyarbakir in south-eastern Turkey, the richest and greatest city of the region known as al-Jazira (or Jazeera, ‘the Island’, from which today’s TV station takes its name), with a library said to be the finest in all Islam. With many names over the centuries of its existence, Amida was always labelled ‘the Black’ this or that, after the local dark basalt used in its buildings and its formidable walls. It was famous in Roman times for the great siege of AD 359, when the Persian army spent days attacking the city. The siege was described in detail by the Graeco-Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus, who took part. One part of his description conjures up an image of the hilltop castle:
In a remote part of the walls on the southern side, which looks down on the river Tigris, there was a tower rising to a lofty height, beneath which yawned rocks so precipitous that one could not look down without shuddering dizziness. From these rocks subterranean arches had been hollowed out, and skilfully made steps led through the roots of the mountain as far as the plateau on which the city stood, in order that water might be brought secretly from the channel of the river.
A thousand years later, it should still have been impregnable. In fact, it was being run on behalf of an aging emir by an unpopular and incompetent administrator, ibn Nisan, who didn’t even adopt the normal practice of paying civilians to join the ranks of his archers and infantry. So there was a good reason to take Amida – namely, in Imad al-Din’s words, ‘to free the place from Nisanid slavery’. Getting there was no simple matter – it is 500 kilometres from Damascus, a march of two weeks. Saladin arrived and spent three days recovering, then began a bombardment with mangonels, including a giant known as ‘the Examiner’ (al-Mufattish), with its 10-metre throwing arm and a counterweight of several tonnes of rock. Having cleared the walls of archers, infantry used scaling ladders to capture the outer walls, while the mangonels attacked the main walls from above and sappers attacked from below.
Under this assault, it took three days for the townspeople to see where their interests lay – which was not with the mean-minded ibn Nisan. At the end of April, abandoned by all, he surrendered, partly (as he said in a note to Saladin) because without servants he couldn’t even move his possessions to a place of safety. A foolish confession. Saladin sent men to ‘help’ him, with the result that 90 per cent of ibn Nisan’s treasure vanished, unrecorded except for items that survived to be listed in an inventory: 80,000 candles, a towerful of arrowheads, and over a million books (1,040,000 according to an account by ibn Abi Tayy).
The fall of Amida had an unexpected consequence. It seized the attention of the warlord of Mardin, an ancient town built on a steep hill 75 kilometres down the Tigris. Once again, restraint and generosity paid off. In exchange for getting his lands back, the warlord, il-Ghazi, agreed to send troops wherever Saladin wanted. Very soon, that would mean fighting against Mosul’s ruler, Izz al-Din, who was now checked at every turn and facing checkmate.
But, if Saladin was to go ahead and take Mosul, he needed authority from the caliph, al-Nasir, in the form of a written instruction known as a ‘diploma’. In letter after humble letter, he asked, argued, begged, persuaded. Egypt was his; Egyptian troops had helped take Amida; if he only had the caliph’s backing, Mosul would be his, and he was the only one capable of confronting the infidel, the enemies of the truth, because every other leader was busy eating, making money and playing polo; the only blows they exchanged were on the sports ground. The Mosulis were not to be trusted. They wanted the Seljuks to return. They stole money from orphans and places of worship. They were happy to cooperate with Franks and Assassins. They distracted him from the business of holy war. Give him Mosul, and he would retake Jerusalem in no time. Constantinople, Georgia, west Africa and Spain would follow, conquest after conquest ‘until the word of God is supreme and the Abbasid Caliphate h
as wiped the world clean.’ Islam united, from Spain to the Caucasus! With such a vision before him, how could the caliph refuse to sanction a small step into Mosul?
But all this had no effect. The caliph would not sanction the move, so Saladin decided to leave Mosul aside and focus on Aleppo. He set up camp there on 21 May. But Aleppo was as tough as Mosul and even trickier politically, because its ruler, Imad al-Din Zangi, was of the same family as the Zangi who had been an ally of Saladin’s father, and also nephew and son-in-law of Saladin’s mentor, Nur al-Din. Every day, thousands of citizens joined the soldiers in skirmishes outside the walls. Saladin faced the same problem as in Mosul. If there was no surrender, he could not mount a full-scale assault because, as he wrote, ‘they are, after all, the soldiers of the Holy War.’ There was no point sitting there, exposed, doing nothing, so he moved across Aleppo’s river, the Queig (Kuwaig), and started to build what looked like the beginning of a town – a statement that he was not going anywhere, a show of self-confidence designed to put pressure on both Zangi and the Franks.