God's Armies

by Malcolm Lambert

  Mercenary, usurper, warrior against Muslims, Saladin as liberator of Jerusalem gained imperishable renown. The young man, who had learned by heart extracts from the 844 Arabic poems compiled in the ninth-century Hamasah of Abu Tammam, had come a long way from his wandering days as a Kurdish mercenary. Then, no doubt, he had occupied his mind reflecting on the ancient pre-Islamic world from which the poems sprang – a simpler world than that of the twelfth century, a desert society where riding skills, heroism in battle, the duty of hospitality to friend or foe, submission to fate, reigned supreme – repeating to himself words in what was, from the time of Muhammad, the language of angels. Now Saladin had himself become a worthy subject for praise and reached a position unthinkable at the start of his long, chequered career.

  His feat in cleansing Jerusalem from crusaders’ pollution and making it ready for the Last Judgement and the heavenly reward of just Muslims is commemorated in cursive script on gold mosaic in the Dome of the Rock, comparing him to Moses and poignantly citing sura 20 on the End of Time, verses often read at Muslim funerals.

  Jihad against the Franks came of age in the twelfth century and restored Jerusalem as a Muslim city and pilgrimage centre. Two Turks and a Kurd in their different ways brought this about. There were bogus, opportunistic jihadis, true mujahidin determined to secure Jerusalem, and a third form of jihad which emerged in the course of the century. The last was jihad against heresy, which led to the abolition of the Ismaili caliphate at Cairo in 1171, and would have been the achievement dearest to the heart of Nur al-Din.

  * Based on B. Z. Kedar ‘The Battle of Hattin Revisited’, in The Horns of Hattin (London, 1992), pp. 190–207, which shows there are too many conflicting sources to allow certainty to any narrative.

  7

  SALADIN AND THE

  LIONHEART

  Richard the Lionheart took the cross in November 1187, making his vow just as soon as the news of Hattin and the fall of Jerusalem reached the West. As a child of southern France, crusading was part of the air he breathed; the pilgrimage route to Compostela passed the great churches of the region, where pilgrims prayed at the shrines of their saints, recounted stories of atrocities inflicted on Christians by Muslims and talked of holy war against the Muslims of Spain. Warfare beyond the Pyrenees, which had once engaged French aristocrats merely in pursuit of booty, by Richard’s time had become a true crusading movement, and St James (Sant’Iago) of Compostela had become the patron of warfare for the cross under vow against the Moors.

  The familiar story of Roland’s heroic rearguard action against the Basques had been transmuted over time. The Basques had become Muslims and Charlemagne’s commander, Roland, a crusader. The episode became the subject of one of the finest and best-known chansons de geste, a prime example of epic vernacular literature, its themes widely illustrated in art and architecture. Roland himself lay in a tomb at Blaye on the Gironde river and his horn was reverently preserved in an abbey church at Bordeaux. This would have been familiar to the young Richard, who developed into a practised composer of chansons. Its concepts shaped his attitudes. Bertran de Born, a poet from the Limousin, though not always sympathetic to Richard, understood very well the driving force of his life. ‘Richard’, he said, ‘desires honour (pretz) more than any man, Christian or infidel. He seeks honour and success so intently that his reputation constantly grows and improves.’ Honour was to be earned most of all in battle in the Holy Land, and it was this which impelled him to make his crusading vow in 1187 at the earliest possible moment.

  When Richard went to take the cross from the archbishop of Tours in his cathedral, he would have been mindful of his great grandfather Fulk V of Anjou taking his vow as the chosen husband of Queen Melisende. He would have been conscious, too, of the spiritual benefits of going on crusade, of the indulgence for those who by papal decree were granted remission of their sins and delivered from the pains of hell; death on the battlefield opened the gates of heaven to the fallen who became martyrs and Richard was not lacking in belief. By the casual, volatile standards of a princely fighting man of his epoch, he was a devout man, aware of his transgressions. Contemporaries honoured Richard as the first leading aristocrat in the West to take the cross at this juncture.

  At the time Richard took the cross, he was in a state of suspicion and hostility towards his father, Henry, count of Anjou and king of England and would no doubt have been aware that, if he had followed correct procedure and asked his father’s permission, it would have been refused. When Henry in his court in Normandy heard the news, he shut himself away for several days, so great was his fear for his realms, as crusading would necessarily take Richard away for a very long time and his absence was likely to upset the balance of power within the kingdom of France.

  The Hazards of Aquitaine

  Fourteen years of marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine had produced only two daughters, so Louis VII had had his marriage annulled; disconcertingly, Eleanor made a dynastic union with Louis’s most powerful vassal and greatest rival, Henry, count of Anjou, eight weeks later. It was a disaster for Louis, compounded when Henry added to his sprawling Angevin Empire both the kingdom of England and the duchy of Normandy by inheritance from his mother, Matilda. Western France was thus in effect lost to Louis. He knew he could do nothing about it and made it into a joke, telling an English chronicler how the king of England ‘has men, horses, gold, silk, jewels, fruit, game and everything else. We in France have nothing but bread and wine and gaiety.’ It was said ‘merrily’, the chronicler reported, but the joke was nothing but the truth. Like any medieval alliance, Eleanor’s marriage to Henry was one of convenience to a man twelve years her junior, but it was remarkably fertile, issuing in eight children living into adulthood, of whom four were sons.

  Relations between Henry and Eleanor soured as Eleanor came to realise that the duchy of Aquitaine, the centre of her life and interests, was in danger of being subordinated to the Anglo-Norman and Angevin interests of her new husband. In a manner unusual in high aristocratic society, and which created shock among English clerical observers, she became actively hostile to Henry and incited her sons against him, plotting rebellion with the complicity of Louis VII. Henry, a skilled and resolute manoeuvrer of immense energy who deployed great revenues and was thus able at will to hire many professional mercenary soldiers, overpowered them all, forced Louis to make a truce, captured Eleanor, supposedly clad in male clothing and caused Richard to accept defeat and in 1174 prostrate himself in homage. Thereafter Richard devoted himself to warfare within Aquitaine against recalcitrant vassals of Henry, ravaging, skirmishing, castle-breaking and honing the military skills which he later deployed against Saladin in the Holy Land. These were shown in his siege of the apparently impregnable castle of Taillebourg on the River Charente in 1179, which revealed his characteristic blend of cool calculation and reckless personal courage in the tradition of Roland. It was the fruit of cunning following a close reconnaissance of his target. This built him an unrivalled reputation in Aquitaine and beyond.

  The art of war was Richard’s prime interest and occupation, in contrast to his elder brothers, who were in comparison dilettantes. Handsome and eloquent, yet addicted to tournaments, his elder brother was known as the Young King Henry because Henry crowned him king of England to secure the succession, but he lacked Richard’s decisiveness in war and diplomacy. Geoffrey was silver-tongued and a treacherous manoeuvrer rather than a warrior. Chance removed them both from the scene, as the young Henry succumbed to illness in 1183 and Geoffrey was trampled to death in a tournament in 1186. Eleanor remained in close captivity for a year, in effect a hostage for the good behaviour of Richard, who was his mother’s favourite son.

  Henry never let Eleanor out of his custody, whether close or open. At the end of her life she depicted herself on the walls of a chapel at Chinon going into exile as a captive, riding behind her husband towards England, looking back at her sons, but especially at Richard, to whom she had just given her falcon a
s a symbol of princely power. In him, pre-eminently the child of Aquitaine, she reposed her greatest hopes. Henry was enmeshed in his lifelong practice of deceiving his rivals. He saw his sons as such and they were constantly offered honours, castles and loot and then had them withdrawn. Richard finally became exasperated.

  The sense of honour which had led him to devote himself to Henry’s service was affronted when Henry insisted on treating him with deceit. He underestimated Richard’s resolute character and sense of honour and, ageing as he was, failed to notice that he had to deal with a new king of France, a formidable opponent. Louis had solved the problem of succession by entering into a third marriage one month after his second wife’s death in childbirth. This at last gave him a son. As a student in Paris, Gerald of Wales remembered the clamour of bells, the lighting of candles and the mass of bonfires, making him think the city had caught fire, as the citizens celebrated the birth of Louis’s son, who reigned as Philip II and is known to history as Philip Augustus, because ‘he enlarged the kingdom’. After his accession in 1180 he showed himself much more ruthless and cunning than Louis had ever been and adept at exploiting the divisions between Henry and his sons. If Richard went on crusade, it was very dangerous to Henry for Philip to stay behind.

  Events settled the problem. A groundswell of popular enthusiasm for capturing Jerusalem swept over France. Troubadours and preachers transfixed their hearers with searing images of Christ being hit in the face by an Arab and a mounted Saracen above the Holy Sepulchre, his horse urinating on the sacred site. Henry and Philip at Gisors in Normandy in 1188 were confronted by the stirring preaching of the archbishop of Tyre. In the face of all this Philip felt he had no alternative but to take the cross.

  Yet after Gisors there were considerable delays, as Henry still intrigued and Philip was moved by a deep hostility to the Angevins because of an ancient childhood betrothal of Richard to Alice, Philip’s sister, who for many years was in Henry’s household while disputes recurred over her dowry. Richard never did marry her, having a justified suspicion that she had been deflowered by Henry, but to be reconciled with Philip he professed himself ready to do so. They made peace, and Richard did homage to Philip. A sick man, Henry at his last Christmas court was deserted by many of his strongest supporters and died in July 1189. Richard came once to stand at his father’s corpse, then paid him no more reverence but moved at speed to put his stamp on Aquitaine, establishing his own distinctive resolutions of ancient problems of loyalty, then going on to his coronation in England.

  The taking of the cross by men who wished to follow him, the granting of money, the selling of offices, the adherence of leaders in society (including his archbishop of Canterbury and Ranulf Glanvill, his justiciar) ready to travel to the Holy Land, all followed easily from the spontaneous zeal for Jerusalem. The crusading movement was smeared yet again by the anti-Semitism that had followed the call ever since the days of Adémar of Chabannes and Raoul Glaber. Jews bringing gifts to the new king at his coronation banquet were set upon and killed; there were pogroms elsewhere and murder and betrayal at York, most poignantly as Jews who escaped their killers fled to the castle. Despairing of holding out, however, some killed themselves while others, believing in the promises that they and their families would be spared if they accepted baptism, came out only to be massacred. On returning to the continent, Richard made necessary appointments to secure his lands. He arranged a dynastic marriage for himself to Berengaria, daughter of King Sancho of Navarre, in order to secure the Pyrenean frontier against hostile moves by a rival, Raymond, count of Toulouse, while Richard crusaded.

  At the abbey church of Vézelay, associated with the thunderous power of St Bernard launching the Second Crusade, the two kings made their solemn compact on 4 July 1190, precisely three years after Hattin, agreeing to meet again at the deep-sea port of Messina for their voyage to Outremer. To take whole armies by sea, with all the difficulties of providing so many suitable vessels and allowing for provisions, water and fodder for horses, was without precedent. Philip and Richard brought vital prestige and manpower to reinforce the armed men who had spontaneously gone ahead, together providing a formidable threat to Saladin.

  Saladin Prepares for the Coming of the Crusaders

  Saladin’s position was like that of an amateur chess-player who seeks to remove as many of his opponents’ pieces from the chessboard as he possibly can before a Grand Master comes to take over play. He knew that his capture of Jerusalem would inevitably stimulate a major response in the West and the problems of raising money, troops, arms and transport would be bound to delay the arrival of substantial armies, as opposed to small contingents and freelances. So it was, and in the years 1188 to 1190 he took many pieces off the board. He and his brother al-Adil had effectively captured most of the Frankish coastland in the south before the fall of Jerusalem. Then, soon after conquering the Holy City, Saladin had moved to capture Tyre and taken the crucial action of neutralising Conrad of Montferrat. From 25 November onwards he bombarded the garrison with siege engines and pinned Conrad’s ships in harbour with galleys from Acre. But Tyre was always a tough nut to crack and Conrad had reinforced its defences. It all went wrong when a surprise early-morning sortie by the Franks from within the harbour knocked out five of the galleys and their crews, leaving too few to sustain the blockade. Saladin’s emirs became restive. Sweeping successes after Hattin had made them expect further victories. They knew Saladin’s financial weaknesses only too well and suspected that, as money ran out, he would turn to them to finance jihad. They wanted to go home. Finally the weather broke. On 1 January 1188 the sultan lifted the siege, released the emirs and went into winter quarters.

  So here he failed, but as weather improved in May 1188 he resumed operations, using a small force with a siege train to take as many ports and towns from the Franks in the north as he could within a limited time frame. He needed to keep his own armed men busy and have loot for his supporters, and was aware of the recommendations of Islamic military science for commanders after a major victory – attempt no long sieges, maintain momentum of action, give the impression of an irresistible force, wage war by psychology. The major advantages he had were the absence of any field force that had a good chance of bringing relief to the garrison and his own reputation for sticking to his word when he made a treaty. He took the port of Latakia and besieged or received the surrender of a series of strongpoints within the Principality of Antioch, isolating the great city itself but deciding not to attempt an attack on its formidable perimeter. Sahyun in a remote countryside fifteen miles from Antioch remained a menace so long as its garrison continued and blocked the route from the coast to the Orontes valley. Saladin took it in three days in July 1188, distracting the defendants with a fierce bombardment with mangonels across the ditch while another force broke in at a weak point in the perimeter behind. The garrison then fled to the Byzantine keep and sued for terms. Baha ad-Din related how, as Saladin’s men swept in, they ate the food the garrison had cooked for themselves. Saladin decided to settle a truce with Prince Bohemond III of Antioch who handed over Muslim prisoners and promised to surrender in eight months. Beirut had surrendered, so he had gained much of the vital coastline. Tripoli was too well defended, and at Tortosa he had only partial success, destroying its defences and burning the cathedral but being compelled to leave Gerard of Ridefort with his Templars in possession of a tower in the north-west corner of the city.

  It was at Tortosa that he made the momentous decision to fulfil his promise made before the fall of Jerusalem to release Guy of Lusignan. He extracted the promise from Guy that he would not bear arms against him and that he would go overseas. Guy had himself absolved from his oath, and joined up with his brother Geoffrey, freshly arrived from the west, together with other cavalrymen and troops from Tripoli which had become a refuge for released Frankish prisoners. He requested entry into Tyre. Conrad was not going to surrender his rich prize to a man who, he believed, had lost all right to call him
self king of Jerusalem and to hold command in Outremer. At first refused any chance to join Conrad’s force and wait in Tyre for a crusade from the west, Guy nonetheless prevailed, forcing a degree of acceptance from Conrad. He then surprised both Franks and Muslims by leading a force along the coast road, aided by friendly Pisan ships.

  Receiving intelligence of this strange and apparently foolhardy move, Saladin, still confident that he could eliminate it at leisure, cautiously shadowed Guy’s mini-army and allowed him to take up position in August 1189 outside Acre on a tell, an artificial hillock in the plain, half a mile to the east of the city which had been fortified and garrisoned by the Muslims.

  Guy had amassed a sizeable force and then in addition Pisans landed other troops on a beach south of Acre. Guy’s men set about harassing the city, while Saladin, with extensive forces spread out around it, was able to attack the besiegers and of course, encourage his own Muslim garrison. One surprise for the Muslims was the coming of ships with supplies and reinforcements: Danish, Flemish, Frisian, German. On 4 October a Christian attack went wrong and was beaten back with heavy losses. Corpses were piled high, and there was every prospect of pestilence, so Saladin withdrew some 7 miles to the south-east to escape contamination. Medical knowledge of the time had no understanding of the origins of disease but was aware of ‘miasma’ associated with corpses which could kill, and that bodies could contaminate water. This move gave the chance for Saladin’s opponents to reinforce their trenches, to build palisades and to make themselves much more dangerous in front of Acre. The scene was set for many months of debilitating warfare in which neither side could win. Whatever the reasons for Saladin’s release of Guy, it was a decision he lived to regret.