Saladin

by John Man

  Infantrymen dragged slow and thirsty feet up the northern hill, refusing orders to rejoin the battle, leaving Guy and the cavalry in a melee around the True Cross and its retinue of two bishops and their acolytes. Now the cavalry too retreated uphill, and found no relief. The pools were either dry or too scanty for an army, and the walls too low50 for a defence. Guy had his red tent pitched to provide a focal point. Cavalry surrounded him, but to no great effect. Muslim cavalry advanced up the only gentle slope, engaged, and all became confusion. Some must have cut their way through to the True Cross, held aloft by the Bishop of Acre until he was killed, when it was seized briefly by the Bishop of Sidon, until it was snatched from his grasp. ‘The seizure of it was one of their greatest misfortunes,’ wrote al-Athir, ‘after which they were sure they were doomed to death and destruction.’

  They are still visible today in low light.

  It was not yet over. Saladin’s oldest son, seventeen-year-old Al-Afdal, taking part in his first battle, was with his father, watching on horseback, probably from the gentle slopes between the two hills. He described what happened to al-Athir. The surviving Christian horsemen rallied and charged downhill, forcing the Muslims back to where father and son stood. He glanced at his father, and saw that Saladin had turned pale at the possibility of defeat. He tugged at his beard nervously, then shouted, ‘Satan must not win!’ or ‘Away with the Devil’s lies!’ (Translations vary.) Inspired, the Muslims returned to the assault up the hill. Al-Afdal’s account continued:

  When I saw them retreating with the Muslims in pursuit, I cried out in joy: ‘We have beaten them.’ But the Franks charged again as they had done before, and drove the Muslims up to my father. He did what he had done before, and the Muslims turned back against them and forced them up the hill. I cried again, ‘We have beaten them.’ My father rounded on me and said: ‘Be quiet! We have not beaten them until that tent falls.’ As he was speaking to me, the tent fell [its ropes cut].

  Saladin moved forward as the fighting died. The surviving Christian knights dismounted and collapsed on the ground, awaiting whatever fate was coming. King Guy, too, was on the ground beside his fallen tent, utterly exhausted, with hardly the strength to hand over his sword. The sultan dismounted and prostrated himself in a prayer of thanks, weeping for joy. He then remounted and made his way back to his own tent, while his officers gathered prisoners from among the body-strewn battleground, so many of both, said al-Afdal, that ‘to see the dead, you would not think there could have been any prisoners; and to see the prisoners, you would not think there could have been any dead.’ Imad al-Din said he saw thirty or forty prisoners bound by the same rope and led by a single horseman. Elsewhere, 100 or 200 were overseen by a few guards.

  Prayer tents were set up, prayers said, messengers sent out to spread the good news. Then Saladin, seated on a blanket-covered divan in his huge, cool pavilion, ordered the top Christian leaders to be brought to him, a dozen or more, including King Guy and Reynald of Châtillon. Imad al-Din recorded the drama that followed, as did several other chroniclers. Details vary; this account is a composite.

  Saladin is seated, surrounded by aides, with a few empty chairs. First to enter is King Guy, hardly able to stand with exhaustion, his head lolling as if he were drunk. Saladin indicates the chair beside him, and the king collapses on to it. Reynald comes in, and is seated next to Guy. By tradition, a prisoner who is offered refreshment is spared, but nothing is offered yet. Perhaps Saladin wishes to test his captives to see if they could be more useful alive than dead. It is on his archenemy, Reynald, that Saladin focuses first, addressing him through an interpreter.

  ‘How many times have you sworn an oath and then violated it?’ he says. ‘How many times have you signed an agreement that you have never respected?’

  Saladin the victor can afford to be magnanimous, even to a man he has sworn to kill. Perhaps even now he is prepared to show the generosity that he knows would win over enemies. But Reynald, who in other circumstances has shown an ability to act the penitent, does not know that Saladin has sworn to kill him. Perhaps even now the right form of words might save his life. But he is too foolish, or headstrong, or arrogant to resist a smart answer.

  ‘Kings have always acted thus. I did nothing more.’

  To equate his own actions with Saladin’s is no way to win sympathy. Besides, Reynald is not a king. That is enough to tilt the balance against him. But Saladin is restrained. He turns to Guy, murmurs ‘reassuring words’, orders an aide to bring some iced water –

  (Yes, iced water. There was a regular supply of snow from high in the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon mountains, where peaks are snow-covered for most of, and sometimes all, the year round. It was packed into containers, which camels carried as far as Cairo, a month-long journey of 600 kilometres. That July, a mere two or three days from the point of origin, merchants would have been well aware of the potential market among the officers on both sides, whoever emerged victorious.)

  – and offers it to Guy, a gesture of further reassurance.

  Guy drinks; but then, perhaps ignorant of Arabic tradition, or made stupid by exhaustion, he hands the cup to Reynald. Saladin does not move to prevent him. Reynald takes the cup and drains it, which must take a few seconds, time enough for Saladin to see a pretext for what he is about to do. He says to the interpreter, ‘Tell the king: it is you who have given him to drink,’ meaning that since he himself has not handed the water to Reynald, he no longer has an obligation to preserve his life.

  There is a pause. The two Christians are led out, surely appalled by the sultan’s ominous words. Saladin himself leaves the tent, remounts and rides out briefly to see how the army is recovering in the wake of the battle. Standards and flags are brought to his tent. When he returns, he doesn’t hesitate. He orders Reynald to be brought in and tells him about his twice-made vow to kill him. According to one source, he offers Reynald the chance to convert to Islam, and upon his refusal,

  he advanced towards him, sword in hand, and struck him between the neck and shoulder-blade. When Arnat [as the Muslims called him] fell, he [Saladin, or more likely his aides] cut off his head and dragged the body by its feet past the king, who began to tremble. Seeing him thus upset, the Sultan said to him in a reassuring tone: ‘This man was killed only because of his maleficence and his perfidy.’

  According to another source, he also tells Guy he can stop trembling: ‘Kings do not kill kings, but he had overstepped the limit.’51

  There are several versions of what happened, all with the same outcome. One copy of Ernoul’s Continuation has Saladin asking Reynald: ‘If you had me in your prison, what would you do with me?’ ‘With God’s help,’ the prisoner replies, ‘I would cut your head off.’ Saladin: ‘Well, you are in my prison, and yet you reply with arrogance.’ He then runs him through, and his aides cut off Reynald’s head.

  His bloody deed was apparently a source of pride, because Reynald’s head was sent on tour, being shown off in all the main cities controlled by Saladin. But this has bothered Islamic commentators. It is not good form to slay helpless captives. There are two defences. Firstly, Islamic law authorizes the beheading of a prisoner who refuses to convert, because he remains a threat to the Muslim community. Secondly, Saladin had an oath to fulfil. As he himself wrote to the caliph, ‘the servant [i.e. he himself] had sworn to shed the blood of the tyrant of Kerak.’ The business with the water was nothing but a pretext. Any excuse would have done.

  Reynald was not the only one. Many Templars and Hospitallers had been taken prisoner, along with ‘Turcopoles’, Turkish or mixed-race mercenaries recruited locally by the Franks as mounted archers and considered traitors by the Muslims. According to one historian,52 there were some 200 of them. Saladin gave their captors 50 dinars a head, and offered them all a chance to convert to Islam. Some did, becoming perfectly good Muslims, according to Imad al-Din. The rest would have been kept alive if they were worth anything in ransom money; but they weren’t, so they were offere
d for execution to volunteers who did the job as Saladin looked on ‘with a glad face’. A grim business, as recorded by Imad al-Din: ‘There were some whose strength gave out, so they backed out and were excused; there were others who did not hit strongly enough and were laughed at by the crowds and had to be replaced by others’, suggesting images of half-severed heads and gruesome sounds, ‘but there were some who revealed their noble descent in administering their blows.’ One who escaped execution was Gerard of Ridefort, Grand Master of the Templars. He would fetch a good ransom, so he was spared.

  The polymath historian, poet and scientist ibn Wasil (1208–98).

  There were other prisoners, ordinary soldiers by the hundred, who in normal circumstances would be sold off as slaves. But the circumstances were not normal. There were so many captives that the price of slaves collapsed to 3 dinars a head, and in one case a Christian slave fetched a pair of sandals.

  And what of the True Cross, the taking of which was for Christians ‘a graver matter than the taking of the king’, as Imad al-Din put it? It was tied upside down on a spear and two days later paraded through the streets of Damascus, as proof of its uselessness as a talisman and as an insulting rejection of the tale – not of Jesus himself, revered in Islam as a great man, but of his resurrection.

  How many died that summer’s day? Saladin claimed 40,000, others 30,000, while the numbers of those who escaped ranged from 200 to 3,000, most of them fleeing to Tyre. Of the 1,200 knights, about 1,000 died. Of the common soldiers, no one knew the numbers then, no one knows them now. Saladin had a monument built on the summit of Hattin’s Horns,53 but no one buried, or even counted, the decaying corpses that lay scattered across the site for months, or the bones that remained for years. Whatever the numbers, the truth was that the Frankish army was destroyed, and with it the possibility of defending Jerusalem.

  ‘The Dome of Victory’ was short-lived. Thirty years later, it was an untended ruin.

  Days later (perhaps a couple of weeks, if the stench was anything to go by), Imad al-Din wandered over the battleground, recorded a litany of horrors, and rejoiced. Bodies were scattered across the hillsides and over the valley:

  Everywhere around Hattin stank of corpses . . . I saw heads tossed far from lifeless corpses; eyes dug from sockets; bodies sullied with dust, disfigured by birds of prey; limbs mutilated during battle and scattered, bare, torn to shreds, lying unattached, skulls split open, feet cut off, mutilated noses, extremities detached from bodies, empty eyes, opened stomachs, contorted mouths, open foreheads with liquid pupils, necks wrung, inanimate and shattered bits and pieces, as still and stiff as the rocks around them.

  But what sweet smell of victory arose from this charnelhouse! What vengeful flames swirled around those bodies! How this hideous sight made hearts rejoice! . . . How many arrogant lords were hunted down, how many leaders were leashed, how many kings enchained!

  Later, he and many other poets turned the victory into verses, spreading the news across all Islam. Here is Imad’s contribution (in my English translation of Schlumberger’s French. Imad was a good poet; the nineteenth-century French is not bad; by the time it reaches modern English in my translation, it’s a disaster as poetry but still captures Imad’s sentiments):

  O day of Hattin! The bravest faces were darkened and the sun was veiled by clouds of dust:

  You saw the leader of the Infidels humiliated, his brow sullied with mud and his pride cast down.

  Noble and pure sword, which cut off the prince’s head and struck faithlessness in its vilest form.

  In falling, this head bathed itself in its own blood, like a frog plunging into a pond.

  Driven by treachery, he raged like a wild beast; but to the onslaughts of a traitor death was the only answer.

  The Sultan ordered swords drawn from scabbards, and the impious blood they spilled clothed their blades with purple robes.

  He it was whose blade plunged in the blood of a people who had always immersed themselves in faithlessness.

  Struck by death and captivity, they fell, and their impious rule was cleansed of all its blemishes.

  11

  Retaking the Holy City

  HAVING CAMPED AT THE BATTLE SITE THAT NIGHT, SALADIN led his force to Tiberias, where Raymond’s wife saw that resistance was useless. She surrendered, allowing Saladin to act the chivalrous victor and let her keep all her possessions and followers. He could afford a little tactical chivalry, because he now had strategy to consider. Sometime, a new army would arrive from the west. Should he go for Jerusalem, his main objective? Or take the ten cities that guarded 550 kilometres of coast, and forestall any Christian reinforcements? He chose to seal the coast. With those ports gone, the inland castles could be surrounded one by one and starved into surrender.

  Speed was vital. Acre, 40 kilometres from Hattin, was the kingdom of Jerusalem’s second richest and most densely populated city. Standing on a peninsula overlooking a well-sheltered sandy bay, it was protected in the north and east by great walls that met at a fort known as the Cursed Tower. It was the hub of trade between Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Italy – for Genoa, Venice and Pisa controlled several sections – with a mass of houses, churches, warehouses and shops. Food, cloth, hemp, copper, iron, spices, incense, medicines, perfumes, silk, sugar – all flowed in from the region, from Arabia, from the east. ‘Its roads and streets are choked by the press of men,’ wrote the traveller ibn Jubayr. Muslims and Christians shared both markets and shrines.

  Acre was a walkover – a display in battle order produced instant surrender, followed by a typical display of imprudent generosity, imprudent because so much was pillaged and wasted. The town was handed to Saladin’s son al-Afdal, who distributed much of it and its contents to his followers: the Templars’ property to Diya, the sugar refinery to Taqi (who pillaged it), and a house to his secretary, Imad al-Din. It was not just the top people who benefited. Some 4,000 Muslim prisoners were freed to return to their homes.

  Other inland towns, villages, castles and roads fell in days, because there was no one to defend them or no defence mounted: Nazareth, Sepphoris, Tabor, Sebaste, Nablus. Then on the coast south of Acre, Haifa and Arsuf surrendered, Caesarea put up only a brief resistance. Al-Adil, Saladin’s brother, approached from Egypt, mopping up southern cities. Jaffa was taken by force. Its Christian inhabitants were sent to the slave markets and harems of Aleppo, where al-Athir brought a girl carrying a one-year-old baby, weeping because, as she said, ‘I had six brothers, all of whom were killed, as well as a husband and two sisters, and I do not know what happened to them.’

  Tyre, with a hard core of survivors from Hattin, would be a challenge, the more so because it had just acquired a new leader, Conrad of Montferrat (in northern Italy), cousin of kings, rich, handsome, intellectual, experienced in Europe’s wars and civil wars, and about to play a major role in what followed. Now in his mid-thirties, he was at the height of his considerable powers and beauty: ‘Comely in life’s springtime, exceptional and peerless in manly courage and intelligence, and in the flower of his body’s strength’, according to one chronicler. Another made him a paragon: vigorous, astute, amiable, virtuous, wise, multilingual, politically smart. He had been intending to join his crusading father, William, in Jerusalem, but William was one of those captured at the battle of Hattin. Conrad could not have heard the news as his ship approached Acre, but noticed something was wrong – no bell to announce the ship’s arrival, no Franks coming out to meet him, the reason being that the city had just been handed over to Saladin’s son al-Afdal and was in the process of being looted. A Muslim port official arrived to find out more about the new arrival. Conrad welcomed him, pretending to be nothing but a merchant, and learned what was happening. So did the official. Each bid the other a courteous farewell, the official returning to raise the alarm, Conrad putting back out to sea and finding a safe haven in Tyre, which, as it happened, was desperate for strong leadership. He was greeted as a hero come by happy chance to rescue the c
ity in its hour of need, and to provide perhaps a foothold for some future Crusade.

  Tyre could be taken only after much else had been secured. So Saladin ignored it, turning instead on Tyre’s forward bastion, Toron – which he took after a seven-day siege – and Sidon, 40 kilometres to the north, where he arrived on 29 July 1187 to receive immediate surrender. Next day he was another 40 kilometres further on, at Beirut, which capitulated a week later. The only difficulty was administrative: Imad al-Din fell ill, and no scribe could draw up the surrender terms. Eventually Imad al-Din dictated them from his sick-bed – ‘the minds of the healthy men were sick,’ he wrote, ‘but mine was not’ – before retiring to Damascus for two months to recuperate. Jebail,54 30 kilometres north of Beirut, fell into Saladin’s lap because its master, Hugh Embriaco, had been captured at Hattin and ransomed himself by handing over his city. The town, close to the Kingdom of Jerusalem’s northern border, marked Saladin’s high-tide mark in the north.

  Jbail, Jubail or Jubayl: also known from ancient times by its Greek name Byblos.

  Jebail fell on 4 August. Less than three weeks later, on the 23rd, Saladin was back in Ascalon, 300 kilometres south, which is about as fast as an army can move – some 15 kilometres a day. He brought along his two chief captives, the Grand Master of the Templars, Gerard, and King Guy, who was given the task of negotiating the city’s surrender, with himself as the main bargaining chip:

  So he went and called the burgesses of the city, for there were no knights there, and said to them, ‘Sirs, Saladin has said that if I will surrender the city to him he will let me go. It would not be right for such a fine city to be surrendered for just one man, so if you think you can hold Ascalon for the benefit of the Christians and for Christendom do not surrender it. But if you do not think you can hold it, I beg you to surrender it and deliver me from captivity.’