by Jeffrey Lee
Thus those who thought they had escaped from us fell into [the Bedouin’s] hands as prey, so that the prophecy seemed to be fulfilled which says, ‘that which the locust hath left, hath the canker-worm eaten.’2
Saladin himself, having only just escaped the battlefield unscathed, barely evaded the Bedouin’s clutches. He made it back to Egypt on a camel, with just a small group of retainers.
The battle is usually quickly passed over in modern histories, but Mont Gisard in November 1177 was perhaps the greatest victory won by a Frankish army in the history of crusading in the Levant. It certainly ranks with the decisive battles at Doryleum and Antioch during the First Crusade. To look at it from another point of view, a Frankish defeat on this scale would have precipitated the fall of the kingdom. Even where the impact of the battle is pointed out, it is routine for historians to give all the credit for the triumph to the brave boy-king Baldwin and to gloss over the fact that Reynald was the victorious general. Some contemporary historians were guilty of this as well. Typically, William of Tyre minimizes Reynald’s contribution, just as he passed over Reynald’s deeds at Ascalon in 1153. Describing the battle of Mont Gisard, the usually thorough historian simply mentions Reynald’s presence as the leading lay baron, but cannot stretch to praising his political rival. Luckily we have Muslim and other Christian sources to confirm Reynald’s role. Ernoul says simply: ‘It was Reynald, Lord of Kerak, who fought with the greatest prowess in the battle of Mont Gisard.’3 Baha al-Din, Saladin’s biographer, confirms that: ‘The commander of the Franks was Prince Reynald, who had recently been ransomed at Aleppo.’4
Not much of this campaign fits with the received caricature of Reynald. His appointment as general for loyalty and steadfastness, his prudent tactics at Ascalon, his clever decision to march up the coast and surprise the enemy – none of it matches the image of the irresponsible robber baron. One act does fit: the final, all-or-nothing battle against the odds. But Reynald was well versed in warfare. He knew how to even the game in his favour; knew the capability of his troops and that of his enemy. On this occasion, with an inspired, unified force, well led and fighting with rage and determination, Reynald took the hard choice to fight. A defeat would have meant annihilation and the loss of the kingdom. Reynald won.
The Lord of Kerak did not deliver a painless triumph. Mont Gisard was a costly victory for the Franks. Casualties were heavy in their ranks as well, sustained mainly in the bitter mêlée against the staunch divisions of Saladin’s yellow-clad Mamluk bodyguard under Taqi al-Din, whose son was killed in the struggle. The crusader dead numbered more than 1,000 men. The Knights Hospitaller in Jerusalem took in 750 wounded. Still, King Baldwin returned to Jerusalem in triumph, laden with the spoils of war. To commemorate the victory on St Catherine’s Day, Baldwin later built a monastery on the site, called ‘St Catherine of the Battlefield’.
Although Saladin’s propagandists tried to minimize the damage, the defeat was a major setback and a profound humiliation for the sultan. According to Michael the Syrian, ‘[Saladin] was covered in shame… he put on robes of mourning, shut himself in a room and imposed on himself several days in the dark, as penance’.5
Almost a decade would pass before Saladin could win a victory great enough to erase the ignominy of Mont Gisard. The battle was also the first of many occasions on which he had cause to regret the presence of Reynald de Chatillon in his enemy’s ranks. Neither man knew it then, but Mont Gisard was the beginning of a monumental struggle to the death. Just as Reynald’s contest with Raymond dominated the Franks’ internal politics, so his confrontation with Saladin would frame Christian–Muslim relations for the next decade. At Mont Gisard, Reynald announced his reappearance on the military stage in the most stunning fashion.
It was a great victory, but even in their triumph the Franks may have seen fateful signs. Despite the obliteration of Saladin’s army, the resources of Egypt – in riches and manpower – were limitless, and the defeat had hardly dented the Muslim forces of Syria. While the crusaders did not have the military resources to follow up their victory, within months Saladin’s armies were up and moving again. For the Franks to deal a knockout blow against their Muslim enemies was virtually impossible, but to survive they had to keep fighting. Their task was to reduce Saladin’s resources and at all costs prevent his complete domination of Syria as well as Egypt.
In this strategic battle, Reynald and his fief of Oultrejordan would form the front line.
Chapter 13
LORD OF LA GRANDE BERRIE
Kerak is the anxiety that blocks the throat, the dust that obscures sight, the obstacle that strangles hopes and lies in ambush to overcome heroic resistance. This fortress is a wolf placed in this valley by fortune.
Al-Qadi al-Fadil
Raids are our agriculture.
Bedouin proverb
In the wake of the battle of Mont Gisard in November 1177, Reynald’s reputation was stratospheric. There is no doubt that he continued to play a leading role in the affairs of the kingdom, and he was present in all the major confrontations involving the army of Jerusalem. But beyond that, the chroniclers are quiet as to his exact whereabouts. Presumably whenever the young king’s health recovered enough for him to take day-to-day charge of events, the need for an executive regent faded and Reynald would repair to his domains in Oultrejordan. In his new frontline fief, as in Antioch, he would spend more time in armour than in his court finery.
The strategic importance of Oultrejordan to the Kingdom of Jerusalem far outweighed its feudal obligations. King Baldwin I had recognized its value in the earliest days of the Latin Kingdom and had laid the foundations of the fiefdom in a series of daring and far-reaching raids into the unknown. He made his first crossing of the Jordan River in 1101, and in 1107 evicted a Turkish army from the ancient Nabatean city of Petra. In 1116 he campaigned far out across La Grande Berrie, the great southern desert, and captured Aila (the modern Eilat or Aqaba), the port at the tip of the Red Sea and a staging post on the desert trail between Egypt, Syria and Arabia.
To dominate these vast territories, the Franks built lonely outposts in the void. Reynald’s tours of his far-flung dominions would have included the oasis of woods and crops at Shawbak, where Baldwin founded Oultrejordan’s first castle, the imposing Crac de Mont Real, in 1115. A day’s ride south lay the imposing ruins of Petra, where a stone castle was erected on a steepling crag at Li Vaux Moise, the Valley of Moses. The castle was perched on the edge of a precipitous chasm, reachable only by a narrow bridge to a gateway hollowed from the rose-red rock itself. Nearby were other small castles such as Al-Habis and, further south looking over the Wadi Araba, the fort of Hormuz.
The greatest stronghold of Oultrejordan was further to the north, at the top of a canyon running down to the Dead Sea. The capital of the biblical Moabites, it was called Petra Deserti, ‘Rock of the Desert’, or Crac de Moab, ‘Fortress of Moab’. The Muslims called it the ‘Castle of the Raven’. Most commonly, in view of its incomparable might, it was known simply as Kerak, meaning ‘Fortress’. The Muslim traveller Ibn Battuta described it as:
one of the most marvellous, impregnable and celebrated of fortresses. It is surrounded on all sides by the riverbed and has but one gate, the entrance to which is hewn in the living rock.1
Construction of Kerak had begun under the Frankish knight Pagan the Butler in 1142. Successive lords had added to its defences, and by the time Reynald became its master in the late twelfth century, Kerak was one of the most powerful fortresses on earth. It was the final element in the domination of the biblical lands of Idumea and Moab. In his vast fief and stupendous fastnesses, the Lord of Kerak was effectively an independent ruler in his domain, something Reynald would have appreciated. His High Court was the final authority, from which there was no appeal. As early as 1177 he was signing charters in his fief using his own name, without mentioning his wife Stephanie: Ego Raynaldus, quondam Antiochaie princeps et nunc, per Dei Gratiam, Hebronensis et Montis Regalis
Princeps (‘I, Reynald, onetime Prince of Antioch and now, by the grace of God, Prince of Hebron and Mont Real’). Like a king in his realm, Reynald was lord in his, by the grace of God. It was also the first time that a Lord of Oultrejordan styled himself as ‘Prince’. Reynald would accept no step down from the status he had enjoyed in Antioch.
And though Oultrejordan could not compete with the delights of the ancient metropolis, Reynald would still live in greater splendour than a monarch in the rough and ready West. The great castles were princely residences and administrative centres as well as military bases. They had bathhouses, gracious chapels, luxurious bedchambers and grand public rooms hung with damask and tapestry, decorated with painted ceilings, bright murals and intricate carvings in marble and polished wood. Carpets covered the floors, and the sumptuous meals of the lords of Kerak, rich with rare spices, were served on platters of precious metal and porcelain from China. The Franks – both men and women – wore robes of silk embroidered with golden thread and hung with gems.
Outside the castles, the desert brooded. Enemies lurked in the endless wastes, and wolves, hyenas and lions prowled. In winter it was cold, and snow swept the high ground and drifted deep in the barren canyons plunging to the Dead Sea. In summer the burning khamsin winds buffeted the walls. Still, in the region of Kerak and Shawbak, this was wealthy country. Planted with grapes and olives, the land was ‘pleasant, healthy and very fertile in wheat, wine and oil’. There were fruitful cornfields and cane plantations producing the famous ‘sugar of Kerak’, which was exported as syrup or crystal.2 Kerak also controlled the ‘Sea of the Devil’ – the Dead Sea – with its saltpans and its rich trade in asphalt. The asphalt, known as ‘the stone of Moses’, bubbled to the surface in vast floating blocks. ‘The people gather it and sell it to all cities and countries round,’ recorded the Persian traveller Nasir-i-Khusrow. Its main uses were for waterproofing, medicaments and fuel. ‘When you light this rock,’ wrote the thirteenth-century Syrian geographer al-Dimashqi, ‘it burns like wood.’
The most productive revenue-generator was the passing caravan traffic of merchants and pilgrims. Some of these caravans could be huge, numbering thousands of camels.* The caravans were there to trade with, to be tolled or, as any self-respecting frontier baron like Reynald would have appreciated, to be raided. In every case, the Lord of Oultrejordan had to compete, or cooperate, with the Bedouin, the true lords of these desert lands. Tribes like the Banu Fuhayd and the Banu Ubayy may have been Muslim in name, but they owed allegiance to no earthly power and preyed on Christian and Muslim alike. As the State of Israel was to do 800 years later, the Franks struck up a good relationship with the Bedouin. The kings of Jerusalem co-opted the nomads as allies, giving them rights to extensive grazing lands in the Negev desert in the south of the kingdom. Just as he had proved able to work with the different native communities in Antioch, Reynald de Chatillon did the same in Oultrejordan. Again belying his unjustified reputation as an unadapted and incomprehending newcomer, he built up an effective alliance with the Bedouin, who proved to be useful spies, guides and auxiliaries. Saladin and his allies despised these opportunistic Muslim tribesmen as traitors. Saladin’s secretary, Imad al-Din, complained that:
He [Reynald] had with him a troop of people without shame, a disgrace to our religion. They lived around the route to the Hejaz, and for them the pilgrimage was nothing but a metaphor.3
Reynald may even have travelled into the wilderness of Sinai. This biblical landscape also, in theory, fell under the rule of the Lord of Oultrejordan, though in reality it was no-man’s-land. He may well have visited the great Monastery of St Catherine at the foot of Mount Sinai itself. Completing the tour of his vast domains, he would have taken in the Lordship of Hebron, west of the Jordan in the Judean hills. This prestigious territory had been added to the fief of Oultrejordan as another recognition of Reynald’s stature. Here, in the town of Hebron itself, the crusaders had raised a great church on ancient Herodian foundations of gargantuan limestone blocks. Beneath the church were caves containing the venerated tombs of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, along with their wives. This holy site attracted thriving and profitable pilgrim traffic.
For Saladin, the wedge of Frankish territory jutting east of the Jordan and down across the desert was always an irritation and sometimes a serious strategic problem. Reynald’s fief throttled trade, cut communication between Egypt and Syria, hampered the movements of Muslim armies and made the pilgrim route to western Arabia and the Muslim holy cities in the Hejaz impassable or, at least, very costly. As Saladin’s biographer, Baha al-Din, recorded, Oultrejordan was:
an obstacle on the route of everyone travelling to Egypt. No caravan was able to get through unless he [Saladin] went out in person to convey it through the enemy’s lands.4
Reynald’s men could intercept Saladin’s couriers, and any travel between Egypt and Syria risked attack by the Franks. In oases and in ravines like al-Jafr and Muwailih, they would lie in wait for any prey that took their fancy. In 1154, for instance, the Egyptian vizier Al-Abbas had fled across the desert with a vast hoard of treasure. The Franks ambushed him at the oasis of Muwailih, killing Abbas along with one of his sons and stealing all his wealth. Usama Ibn Munqidh, travelling with the vizier, managed to escape, but having eluded the Franks, he almost fell into the clutches of the Bedouin Banu Fuhayd, who killed any stragglers they could find. To avoid the Frankish depredations, many Egyptian pilgrims now took the risky crossing of the Red Sea from the port of Aydhab to the Hejaz. Coming from Syria, pilgrims and military expeditions had to take the longer route via the Darb al-Hajj, the pilgrim road across the desert fringes, or move even further out into the deep desert along a line of remote oases.
This was the key fief that the king had assigned to the noble most likely to keep his foot on the Muslims’ throat – Reynald de Chatillon. From now on, unlike during the first part of his career, Reynald fought exclusively against Muslims. The modern historian of Baldwin IV’s reign, Bernard Hamilton, suggests this was because of a change in his mentality in prison, making him a more responsible member of the crusading fraternity, focused on the common good rather than his own quarrels. It also fits with Professor Carole Hillenbrand’s contention that Reynald developed a ‘profound and settled hatred’ for Islam while in prison. However, the great change between Reynald’s wars before and after his imprisonment can best be explained by geography. As Prince of Antioch, he had to maintain the principality against Armenians and Byzantines as well as Muslims. He fought them all. Later, as Seigneur of Oultrejordan, his task was to protect his fief and impede communications between Egypt and Syria. Here all his enemies were Muslim. He fought them all, too. One thing he was prepared to do in Antioch, which he would not do in Kerak, was bow to a more powerful enemy. Reynald subjected himself to the suzerainty of the Christian emperor of Byzantium. He would never do the same to the Muslim sultan of Syria and Egypt. On the contrary, whatever danger it exposed him to, Reynald would do anything he could to make Saladin’s life more difficult.
With Reynald in situ, the Franks in Oultrejordan would only become more of a menace to Saladin’s plans. Under the predatory Reynald, wrote the Qadi Al-Fadil, the castles of Kerak and Mont Real were like wild beasts: ‘There was not a day which passed when they did not devour the flesh of men or drink their blood.’ Given its importance, this territory was subject to repeated invasions by Muslim powers. Nur al-Din had attacked Kerak in 1170. Saladin had captured Aila in 1171 and attacked Kerak as early as 1172, aiming to ‘widen and improve the road so that the regions might be in contact with one another, and to make things easier for travellers’.5 With the bellicose Reynald as lord, many more attacks were to come.
In April 1178, Saladin moved to Syria with a substantial army, using the longer desert route. Reynald was unable to impede his progress, but once Saladin had passed by, Reynald struck at the Saracen desert fort of Qalat Guindi. This guarded the oasis one marching stage before Aila on the trail from Egypt.6 Though
the attack failed, it showed Reynald’s more militant intent and was one of the few aggressive military actions by the Franks in 1178, which was on the whole a peaceful year in the Levant. Saladin was unwilling to risk another defeat on the battlefield, and the Franks too preferred to lick their wounds and repair their fortresses, including the walls of Jerusalem, which had been found so wanting when menaced by Saladin’s invasion.
In the spring of 1179, King Baldwin IV had recovered sufficiently from his illness to raid the herds of Damascus near Banyas. Surprised by the Turks, the king managed to escape, but in a blow to the kingdom, the revered constable Humphrey II of Toron was killed. In a coup for Reynald’s faction, Amalric de Lusignan was appointed constable in his stead. He was one of the leading Poitevin knights at court, and reputedly a lover of Queen Agnes. Soon afterwards Saladin won another sharp encounter at Marj Ayyun. Once more the young leper-king barely got away. Unhorsed during the battle, Baldwin was incapable of remounting by himself. A knight had to carry him to safety on piggyback. Baldwin was again becoming very ill. As he wrote to King Louis VII:
To be deprived of the use of one’s limbs is of little help to one in carrying on the work of government. If I could be cured of the disease of Naaman, I would wash seven times in the Jordan.7
Baldwin asked Louis VII to choose one of his great French barons to marry his sister Sybilla and take over the kingdom. The crusaders’ preference was Hugh of Burgundy. Baldwin was now so ill that he expressed a wish to abdicate in Hugh’s favour. But Hugh never came. Sybilla meanwhile had borne her dead husband, William of Montferrat, a posthumous son, also called Baldwin. Officially he was heir to the leper-king’s throne, but as he was still an infant, the succession remained very much in the balance.