by Jeffrey Lee
Saladin then mounted a joint land and sea attack on Beirut, but was again driven off. Frustrated by the Franks on the field of battle, Saladin turned his attention back to his Muslim rivals. He made another attempt to subjugate the Zengids of Mosul. Although the Latin states were proving able to defend themselves, Saladin was contemptuous of their offensive potential. Pointedly he led his army eastwards across the Euphrates without bothering to conclude the normal truce with the Franks to protect his lands while away on campaign. This was even more humiliating for the Franks than the previous truce on equal terms, and was an ominous sign of their impotence.
In addition to his assessment of the Franks’ weakness, Saladin knew they would be receiving no more help from the Byzantine Empire. In a great riot, the populace of Constantinople had risen against the Latins living in the city and massacred them all: men, women and children. The glamorous tyrant Andronicus Comnenos seized power, annihilating the pro-Frankish lobby at court. Beyond the strategic implications for the Franks, Reynald would personally have been appalled by what followed. Andronicus had Reynald’s stepdaughter, the dowager empress Maria of Antioch, strangled. He added the sadistic twist of making her son, the emperor Alexius II, sign her death warrant. Soon afterwards Alexius was also murdered and Andronicus became sole emperor. The old lecher, who was aged about sixty-five, then married Alexius’ widow, Agnes, daughter of King Louis VII of France. She was only twelve years old.
In 1185, the cruel Andronicus was overthrown in his turn, literally being torn apart by the mob and his remains tossed onto a dungheap to be eaten by dogs. His successor as emperor, Isaac II Angelos, was no more sympathetic to the Franks. Instead he opened friendly diplomatic relations with the ever more powerful Saladin. The Franks could no longer look to Byzantium for aid. From now on, crusader relations with the Greeks would degenerate into open conflict and eventually to the sack of Constantinople itself by the Fourth Crusade in 1204.
Desperate for aid against the mighty sultan, the Zengids in Mosul and Aleppo again cut deals with the Franks. Mosul agreed to an eleven-year truce, an annual tribute and the release of all Frankish prisoners, but Saladin’s rivals could expect only scant assistance from the crusaders. Of all the Frankish leaders, only Reynald could be relied upon to truly challenge Saladin. And you could guarantee that he would do it in a dramatic and unique fashion. This time he excelled himself.
In the twelfth century there were thousands of tit-for-tat raids and skirmishes between Saracen and Frank. Most are forgotten or are mentioned as just another routine event. There were many truces breached, and most of these violations also passed without much comment. It is Reynald’s raids, and Reynald’s truce-breakings, that leave their imprint on history. The Prince of Kerak understood how to really hurt his enemy, and it is the unforgettable, dramatic nature of his violence that contributes to his image as somehow more savage and more bellicose than any of the other antagonists in these bloody wars.
The stage was set for the Lord of Kerak to unsettle once again the increasingly mighty sultan. For his next show, Reynald turned to a secret plan that he had nursed for a long while. Practical preparations had begun at least two years before, with the felling of great trees and the construction of a unique fleet of ships by the Dead Sea. Reynald was again taking aim at the Islamic holy places. It turns out that the Tayma raid served merely as a rehearsal, a reconnaissance in force for a campaign far more dramatic and, for the Muslims, even more appalling.
Reynald was about to do the unthinkable – something no other Christian leader had attempted before, or would dare to attempt again, something that would ignite forever the flame of jihad.
Port of Aydhab, Nubia, December 1182
Three strange ships came up steadily out of the east.
To the watchers on the desert shore it was clear that these were not the usual small jilab of the Red Sea, sewn together with coconut fibre and coated in shark-grease. These were lean ships of a different design, with ranks of oars beating, thrusting them towards the shore. And they were painted black as night.
Behind them came a straggling ragtag flotilla of assorted vessels.
In the boiling heat of the fly-blown, ramshackle port, ‘brackish of water and flaming of air’,6 pilgrims bound for Mecca, merchants from India, Arabia and Ethiopia, paused in their haggling and looked on with growing surprise. Even the local tribesmen, the Beja, naked except for their loincloths, observed the approach of this menacing fleet with unease.
As the mysterious ships pulled up to the quay, they yielded up even stranger apparitions – white men.
These spectral figures exploded out of the galleys like the wrath of God. They were sheathed in iron, bearing the mark of the cross. Naked swords gleamed in their hands. They were crusaders. Pirates. And their leader was Reynald de Chatillon.
No white man had ever been seen in these lands before. Beja, Indian and Arab alike fled in terror as the demonic invaders hacked their way through the reed and coral huts, looting and killing. They plundered spices and incense from Asia and Yemen, cloths and provisions from Egypt. Some boats they seized as prizes, including a ship full of returning pilgrims. They torched the rest, along with great piles of food prepared on the beaches as supplies for the Holy Cities.
While they loaded their ships with vast quantities of pearls, cinnamon, pepper, frankincense and saffron, a raiding party struck out west across the desert, along the trade route to the cities of the Nile Valley. Out in the endless sands the Franks met a caravan coming from the town of Qus. They plundered the goods and killed the merchants, leaving their bones to whiten in the desert sun amongst the sodom-apple plants.
Through the smoke of burning goods and vessels, the black ships sailed into the east, leaving behind them death, ruin and devastation. The Frankish devils were heading out across the Red Sea, making for Arabia and the coast of the Hejaz, land of Islam’s holiest sites – the city of the Kaaba, Mecca, and the city of the Prophet, Medina.
Reynald’s most audacious and shocking campaign was under way.
Chapter 15
SEA WOLF
Have you not considered how your Lord dealt with the companions of the elephant?
Did He not make their plan into misguidance?
And He sent against them birds in flocks,
Striking them with stones of hard clay,
And He made them like eaten straw.
Quran, sura 105
Reynald’s concept was one of remarkable temerity: to attack, by sea, the Hajj route and the Holy Cities of Islam. This is sacred ground, absolutely banned to non-Muslims even today. For infidel warriors to sully it would have been an indescribable sacrilege – as Reynald knew all too well.
The campaign began with an astonishing tactical coup, transporting a fleet of prefabricated warships to the Red Sea, where no Christian vessel had sailed in half a millennium since the foundation of Islam. Completed in great secrecy, it was a logistical feat of great complexity that took at least two years to prepare. Shipwrights had to be found, presumably in the coastal cities, and paid enough to lure them to Oultrejordan. The ships were constructed from the timber of Moab and tested on the Dead Sea. The craft had to be modular enough to be dismantled, carried on camels to Aila at the head of the Red Sea, then reassembled and relaunched. Sailors had to be hired to crew the fleet, and Arab pilots were needed – men who knew the treacherous Red Sea shoals and reefs. Hundreds of mercenaries had to be recruited, men without fear, prepared to voyage into an alien and hostile sea. Deals had to be struck with the Bedouin to transport the ships south across the desert. To prevent the plan coming to the attention of Saladin’s efficient espionage network, all involved had to be cowed and bribed to keep their mouths firmly shut.
Ernoul describes the project as one of exploration of the Red Sea, where ‘flows a river of paradise’:
On the shores of this sea, Prince Reynald built five galleys. Once they were ready, he launched them on the sea and crewed them with knights and sergeants an
d provisions to find out what peoples lived on this sea. Once they were equipped, they set off on the high seas, but from the moment they left, not a thing has been heard of them, and nobody knows what became of them.1
But while geographical knowledge was of course useful, it is hard to picture Reynald leading a voyage of discovery in search of a mythical river, or to broaden the sum of human knowledge. Reynald was a man of his time, yes, but like the sixteenth-century conquistadors who took the New World for Spain, in reality he was driven to brave the unknown by more tangible motives. Bernard Hamilton suggests that Reynald’s campaign was the southern thrust in a concerted Frankish attempt to undermine Saladin’s latest attack on Mosul. While Reynald attacked in the Red Sea, there were simultaneous raids against Bosra by Count Raymond and against Damascus by King Baldwin.2 Such a strategy may have helped justify the undertaking, but if these actions were coordinated, they had little effect. ‘They take villages while we take cities,’ commented Saladin of Baldwin’s raid into the territory around Damascus.
The only one of these attacks that mattered – the only one that is remembered to this day – was Reynald’s. The campaign certainly went beyond a mere raid, representing at the very least the next stage in the Lord of Kerak’s systematic attempt to disrupt the Hajj and embarrass Saladin, while hitting at his empire’s trade routes on land and sea.
In 1181, Reynald’s raid towards Tayma had cut the overland caravan and Hajj trail from Syria and Egypt to the Hejaz. In 1182, Reynald transferred his attention to the sea-lanes. First the Muslim fort at Aila was overwhelmed. This would have brought some satisfaction to the Lord of Oultrejordan, as Aila was officially part of his fief. Also the garrison at Aila was a base for incursions against his territory. Reynald’s galleys, painted an intimidating pirate black, were then reassembled on the Red Sea shore. Two ships stayed in the vicinity of Aila to blockade the nearby castle on the barren Ile de Graye. The other three galleys set off southwards down the narrow gulf between the rocky mountain walls of Sinai and Arabia. It is not clear whether Reynald stayed with the galleys in the Gulf of Aila or led the larger squadron southwards. Knowing Reynald, we can be sure that he was on board ship. He liked to lead from the front, in the thick of the action, and we cannot imagine him missing out on such an adventure, especially if it was the implementation of a long-gestated revenge.
The Red Sea, or the Sea of Qulzum to the Muslims, had long been free of Islam’s enemies. As a consequence, and as Reynald well knew, there was no Muslim navy to resist his piracy; there had been no need for one for 500 years. As they sailed south unopposed, Reynald’s buccaneers had the benefit of complete surprise. They took or sank Muslim merchantmen and pilgrim transports with impunity. At least sixteen Muslim ships were destroyed or captured and added to the pirate fleet. A motley band of knights, sergeants, mercenaries and Arab renegades, the corsairs headed first for the port of Aydhab. Since Reynald had cut the road leading from Egypt across Sinai, this godforsaken spot on the desolate Nubian coast had become the major point of departure for Egyptians making their pilgrimage. From there the leaky jilab, overloaded with pilgrims, made the risky crossing to Jeddah, the nearest port to Mecca. With his fleet, Reynald curtailed this sea traffic as surely as he had the overland trail the year before. As well as the ships taken on the high seas, during the sack of Aydhab, the Franks pillaged two vessels packed with merchandise from Yemen and a ship full of pilgrims.
And Aydhab was just the beginning. From the Nubian coast the black ships sailed east across the Red Sea to Arabia, guided by their Arab pilots. Some said they sailed as far as Aden and the Indian Ocean, looting as they went. The Franks then turned back northwards and plundered the ports along the Hejaz coast from Rabigh up to al-Hawra, setting up a base onshore and raiding across the coastal strip and even into the surrounding mountains towards Medina. The campaign seemed to confirm the fear generated by the previous year’s razzia that Reynald wanted to attack the tomb of the Prophet at Medina, perhaps with a view to removing his body. According to Ibn Jubayr, who passed through Aydhab just a few months after its sack by the crusaders:
Many infamous acts they committed, such as are unheard of in Islam, for no Rumi [Christian] had ever before come to that place. The worst, which shocks the ears for its impiousness and profanity, was their aim to enter the City of the Prophet – may God bless and preserve him – and remove him from the sacred tomb. This intent they spread abroad and let report of it run on their tongues.3
The unlikely plan was apparently to rebury the Prophet Muhammad in Christian territory and make money out of the Muslim pilgrims who would then come to visit the site. Reynald almost certainly planned nothing of the sort (though, as Lord of Hebron, he knew the value of pilgrim traffic to the grave of Abraham). Still the rumours and the news of infidel troops so close to the Holy Sanctuaries horrified the Islamic world, arousing apocalyptic fears that, in the words of the Qadi Al-Fadil, ‘The end of the world was nigh, that the portents were manifesting themselves and the earth was about to fall into darkness.’4
The attack recalled the ‘Year of the Elephant’ mentioned in the Quran, when in the sixth century AD, Abraha, the Christian ruler of Yemen, launched an assault on Mecca using war elephants. Earthly means of defence against Reynald’s unimaginable attack appeared to be non-existent, so Muslims prayed for God’s anger to fall upon Reynald’s Frankish devils and thwart their plans, just as it had on Abraha.*
In Cairo the startled authorities responded swiftly. The experienced admiral Husam al-Din Lu’lu’ (‘Pearl’) took a leaf out of Reynald’s book and transported ships in sections to the Red Sea. The Egyptian fleet first attacked and defeated the galleys blockading the Ile de Graye. Some of the Franks escaped into the wild ravines and wadis of Sinai and tried to make their way back through the desert, pursued by the fickle and rapacious Bedouin.† Lu’lu’ then sailed in search of the rest of Reynald’s pirates, catching up with them on the coast of the Hejaz at al-Hawra. Lu’lu’ found that most of the Franks had struck off along the trails leading across the mountains towards Medina, ‘guided by Arabs more impious and hypocritical than they’.5
Requisitioning horses from the local tribes, Lu’lu’ set off in desperate pursuit. His men attached purses of silver to their spears to win over the Bedouin guiding the Franks. In a bitterly earnest game of cat-and-mouse, the Muslims tracked and skirmished with the crusader raiding party through the desolate canyons and passes for five days. Eventually the Franks were cornered in a waterless valley just a day’s march from Medina. There was a sharp battle, which the far more numerous Muslim forces won. Some of the raiders may have fled into the mountains, but about 170 survivors negotiated terms with Lu’Lu’, surrendering on the promise that their lives would be spared. Lu’lu’ later claimed that he killed or captured all of the Franks. To those who were taken, Saladin would show no mercy. His vizier, the Qadi Al-Fadil, quoted the Quran:
The Unbelievers will be
Led to Hell in crowds.6
Reynald had struck too close to the bone. He had again all too successfully succeeded in wounding Saladin’s prestige, calling into question his credentials as protector of the Hajj. If it happened again, the sultan worried, ‘tongues in the east and west would blame us’. He could not risk further embarrassment. The world had to be ‘purged of their filth and the air of their breath’.7 The sultan ordered all the prisoners to be killed. His brother, Al-Adil, the governor of Egypt, questioned this command. His view was that under Islamic law, because the prisoners had been given quarter, their lives were now protected. According to Imad al-Din, Saladin overruled Al-Adil, justifying his action on the basis that these infidels now knew the Red Sea shipping lanes and the routes to the Holy Cities. They must be beheaded to the last man, so that:
There did not remain among them one sign of life, not even a single man who could tell of the escapade, or guide others, or have knowledge of the routes of the Red Sea, that inviolable barrier between the infidels and the Holy City.8
In any case, the sultan wrote to his brother:
The judgement of God on men like this is not a problem for scholars… let the decision to kill them be carried out… Their attack was an unparalleled enormity in the history of Islam.9
Reynald’s outrageous act remains unique as the only attack by non-believers on the Hejaz since the foundation of Islam. It is not surprising that this harrowing and traumatizing event brought its reaction in terms of jihad. More than 800 years later, the founder of Al-Qaida, Usama Bin Laden, declared war on America and its allies simply because of the presence of non-Muslim troops on Arabian soil. Reynald’s actual military threat to the Holy Places was sure to strike a chord with Muslims everywhere, swelling the number of volunteers for the jihad, and rousing passive and squabbling Islamic leaders to finally unite against the Franks. The Zengid emirs, recently allied with the crusaders, were ashamed to have allies who perpetrated such atrocities against Islam.
Long before angry jihadists targeted the citizens of Chicago with their cargo bombs in 2010, the first to suffer Muslim vengeance for Reynald’s raid were his captured pirates. Saladin’s orders were carried out in full. Two of the men were ritually sacrificed like animals, their throats slit in front of crowds of pilgrims during the Hajj at Mecca. The other raiders were publically beheaded in Cairo and other cities of Saladin’s dominions. Gruesomely, religious scholars acted as Saladin’s executioners. Their ineptitude with weapons prolonged the condemned men’s agonies. Ibn Jubayr saw some of the doomed Franks paraded through baying crowds in the streets of Alexandria, mounted on camels, ‘facing the tails and surrounded by timbal and horn’. It was a spectacle to ‘rend the heart with compassion and pity’.10