Reynald was handsome, charming, adventurous, and stupid.
This either gave Saladin the excuse he’d been looking for or tried his patience for the last time. It was probably a little of both.
By 1187 Baldwin IV had died. His replacement was his sister, Sybilla, and her husband, Guy of Lusignan. Guy was another adventurer and not universally popular. He and his supporter, Templar Grand Master Gerard of Ridefort, had problems with Count Raymond of Tripoli that were serious enough for Raymond to make his own truce with Saladin.22 But, when Reynald absolutely refused to return the booty he had taken from the caravan, even though King Guy insisted, everyone knew that Saladin had the perfect reason to attack.
The result was the disastrous battle of the Horns of Hattin on July 4, 1187.23
Among the men captured at Hattin were King Guy, Master Gerard of Ridefort, a large number of Templars and Hospitallers, and Reynald de Chatillon. The worst loss to the Christians, though, was the True Cross, carried into battle in a gold reliquary.
Saladin had the important prisoners brought to his tent. He offered King Guy a cup of water. When the king had finished drinking, he handed the cup to Reynald. Saladin was furious. “This godless man did not have my permission to drink!” he roared. “And I will not save his life in that way.”24With that he took his sword and beheaded Reynald of Chatillon himself.25
It must have been very satisfying, if damaging to the carpets.
King Guy and Gerard of Ridefort were ransomed but the rest of the Templars and Hospitallers were also beheaded. “He had these particular men killed because they were the fiercest of all the Frankish warriors, and in this way he rid the Muslim people of them.”26
After this, Saladin was able to roll across the country practically unhindered. He took Acre on July 10, Ascalon on September 4. Although Queen Sybilla defended the city of Jerusalem as best she could, there were no more fighting men left. Saladin captured it on October 2, 1187. He allowed the people of the town to pay their own ransoms. The patriarch of Jerusalem asked the Hospitallers for thirty thousand bezants to cover the ransoms of seven thousand poor people. That was delivered, but some people were still unredeemed. The Templars, Hospitallers, and the burgesses of Jerusalem were asked to donate more and they did, “but they didn’t give as much as they should have.”27
Even the Christian chroniclers remarked on the generosity of Saladin and that of his family in their treatment of the people of Jerusalem. Saif al-Din, Saladin’s brother, asked for the freedom of one thousand more people and, on his own, Saladin freed thousands more.28However there were many who could not pay and they were sold as slaves.29 One Moslem chronicler relates the fate of the women of the city with delight. “How many well-guarded women were profaned, . . . and miserly women forced to yield themselves, and women who had been kept hidden stripped of their modesty, and serious women made ridiculous, . . . and virgins dishonoured and proud women deflowered . . . and untamed ones tamed and happy ones made to weep!”30
On all sides, it seems chivalry only goes so far.
Then Saladin set out to purify the city. “The Templars had built their living quarters against al-Aqsa, with storerooms and latrines and other necessary offices, taking up the area of al-Aqsa. This was all restored to its former state.”31
When Europe learned of the fall of Jerusalem the pope, Urban IV, is said to have died from the shock. Henry II of England and Philip II of France were convinced to call a truce in their constant battles and establish a tax, known as the Saladin tithe, to finance armies to retake the city.32
Eventually Frederick Barbarossa, the Holy Roman Emperor, Philip Augustus, king of France, and Richard the Lionheart, king of England, came to retake the Holy Land. In the chronicles of the Europeans, Saladin is a dangerous but magnanimous ruler. In the chronicles of the Moslems, Richard is a dangerous but cultivated ruler. Perhaps both sides felt that their respective heroes deserved a worthy opponent. Each seems to have been more respected by their enemies than their own side.
I have often heard and read that, when Richard was ill, Saladin was so gracious as to send his own doctor to the king. However, in going through the firsthand accounts from both sides, I haven’t found any reference to it. What I did find was a comment from Ba’ha al-Din that Richard asked Saladin for fruit and ice, as he craved them. The sultan “was supplying him with [these,] while intending to gain intelligence by the to-and-froing of the messengers.”33
Saladin was in his early fifties at the time of the crusade and his beard had turned white. Richard was in his early thirties and Philip some ten years younger. The sultan must have felt that he was going to war against schoolboys. Richard seems to have surprised him with his military and diplomatic skill. Reading through the chronicles, especially the interminable negotiating through envoys, interspersed with skirmishes, I get the impression that this was a contest between equals. Both men fought in the name of a religion that each believed in. They had the same rules and much the same battle tactics.
Whether they were gentlemen or barbarians is entirely a matter of opinion.
Eventually Saladin accepted a division of the country and allowed Christian pilgrims to come again to Jerusalem. He returned to Damascus to resume the governing of his far-flung territory. In late February 1193, he fell ill and, despite all the efforts of his doctors, died on March 3, at the age of fifty-five.34He left many children and grand-children, but his dynasty would only last three generations. Without his guiding influence, brothers and cousins would fight each other until they were overcome by the Mamluks, the equivalent of the palace guard of Egypt.
Saladin was such a grand figure that he was respected as well as feared in the West. Unlike the Templars, he was the subject of romance literature. By the fifteenth century, there were several stories about him, including how he had made a journey to France as a young man and had an affair with the queen of France.35
It seemed impossible to some that such a magnificent man could be totally from another culture. The author of the thirteenth-century romance “The Daughter of the Count of Pontieu” decided that he must have had some European ancestry. In the story, the heroine is kidnapped by a Saracen king who treats her well and by whom she has children. However, she longs to return to Christian lands and finally escapes. One of the children she leaves behind becomes the grandmother of the “chivalrous Saladin.”36Of course there is no truth to the story. But it does show how the legend of the “chivalrous Saladin” penetrated even in the lands of his enemies.
The legend survives to this day.
1Stanley Lane-Poole, Saladin and the Fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1898) p. 6.
2Baha’ al-Din Ibn Shaddad, The Rare and Excellent History of Saladin, tr. D. S. Richards (Ashgate, Aldershot, 2002) p. 17.
3Hans Eberhard Mayer, The Crusades (Oxford University Press, 1988; 2nd ed.) p. 121.
4Ba’ha al-Din, p. 17.
5Ibid., p. 18.
6Malcolm Barber, The New Knighthood (Cambridge University Press, 1994) p. 96.
7William of Tyre, Chronicon, ed. R. B. C. Huygens (Turnholt, 1986)19, 5-11, pp. 872-79. Banyas had been an Assassin town but they had turned it over to the Franks rather than let the Sunni have it.
8William of Tyre, 19, 25, p. 899.
9Ibid., 20, 5, p. 918.
10Ba’ha al-Din, p. 44.
11Ibid. They were always sending heads to Baghdad or Cairo. Don’t you wonder what they did with them all?
12Ibid., p. 45.
13 Ibid.
14Ibid., p. 20.
15William of Tyre, 20, 31, pp. 956-57.
16Mayer, p. 124.
17Ibid., p. 125.
18Ba’ha al-Din, p. 63.
19This story is in most histories of the crusades, as well as William of Tyre. One of the best summaries of his life is in René Grousset, Histoire des Croisades et du Royaume Franc de Jérusalem (Paris, 1935) p. 699ff. For more on Constance, see chapter 10, Melisande, Queen of Jerusalem .
/> 20Mayer, p. 115.
21Ba’ha al-Din, p. 37.
22Barber, p. 113.
23Please see the reference to the Third Crusade elsewhere in this book.
24Imad ad Din, in Arab Historians of the Crusades, tr. Francesco Gabrieli (Dorset, 1969) p. 124.
25Ibid. Ba’ha al-Din, p. 75, says that Saladin only cut off his arm and others finished him off. It turned out the same for Reynald.
26Ibid., p. 124. Other chroniclers agree that the members of the military orders were killed, but only this one gives a reason.
27Chronique d’Ernoul et de Bernard le Trésorier, ed. m. L. De Mas Latrie (Paris, 1871) p. 226, “et li Temples et le Hospitaus i donna; mais n’i donnerent mie tant come il deussent.”
28Ernoul, p. 228. This was written long after the event. It may or may not be true, but it does show that the West saw Saladin as a chivalrous man.
29Ibn al-Athir in Gabrieli, p. 163.
30Ibid.
31Ibid., p. 144.
32Mayer, pp. 139-40.
33Ba’ha al-Din, p. 228.
34Ibid., p. 244.
35Suzanne Duparc-Quioc, Le Cycle de La Croisade (Paris, 1955) pp. 170-205.
36La Fille du Comte de Pontieu (Paris: Société des Anciens Textes Français, 1923) p. 50, “ensi com verités tesmoingne, de cele fu nee le mere au courtois Salehadin.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Richard the Lionheart
He was lofty of stature, of shapely build, his hair halfway between red and yellow, his limbs straight and supple. His arms were somewhat long and, therefore, better fitted than those of most men to draw or wield a sword. He also had long legs in keeping with the character of his whole frame. . . . He far surpassed other men in courtesy and the greatness of his strength.”1
Richard I, count of Poitou and king of England, better known as “the Lionheart,” is another figure whose legend has obscured his real history. Like the Templars, Richard’s legend began in his own lifetime and continued to grow long after his death.
Richard was born at Oxford on September 8, 1157.2 His mother, Eleanor, was countess of Poitou and duchess of Aquitaine in her own right as well as having been queen of France before she became queen of England.3 His father, Henry Plantagenet, was descended through his mother, Matilda, from William the Conqueror and through his father, Geoffrey of Anjou, from the devil.4
The story is that a distant ancestress of Richard was Melusine, a demon in disguise who married a count of Anjou. She seemed perfectly normal except for a habit of leaving church halfway through the Mass. One day, suspicious vassals forced her to stay in the church for the consecration of the Host, at which point, she shrieked and vanished forever, leaving a startled husband and children behind. The Plantagenets always seemed very proud of her. However, this same story was told about a number of medieval families as well as being a popular theme in fiction so they were not unique in their fascinating ancestry.
Nevertheless, according to a contemporary, Richard was known to have said, “It’s not strange that, with such a family history, the children are always attacking their parents and each other for they all came from the devil and to the devil they will return.”5
But Richard also had strong ties to the early crusaders and to the Latin kingdoms. His great-grandfather Fulk of Anjou had started a second life as king of Jerusalem when he married Melisande, the heiress to the kingdom. And his mother’s uncle, Raymond of Poitiers, had done the same thing when he married the heiress of Antioch.6 And, of course, his mother Eleanor had scandalized half the continent with her adventures with her first husband, Louis VII of France, on the Second Crusade.
Richard was the third son of Henry and Eleanor. The first, William, had died as a baby. The second, Henry, was being groomed to be the next king of England. Richard was to inherit his mother’s lands. Therefore, he spent much of his time in Poitou and Aquitaine. This territory was not only larger than England, but much more prosperous and produced much better wine. I don’t blame Richard for being attached to it.
One often repeated story is that Richard passed less than a year of his life in England. That’s not exactly true. He spent less than a year in England as king. In his early years he went back and forth across the channel several times. His parents probably left him with his nanny, Hodierna, much of the time. She may have come from the Oxford area. He was certainly fond of her, and when he became king he gave her a large pension that allowed her to retire to Wiltshire in style.7
Like most of the Anglo-Norman nobility, Richard never learned to speak English. He did, however, learn to read and write French and Provençal and “was sufficiently well-educated in Latin to be able to crack a Latin joke at the expense of a less learned Archbishop of Canturbury.” 8
He became king in July 1189 at the age of thirty-two. His elder brother Henry had died. At the time Richard was at war with his father and not on great terms with his younger brothers, Geoffrey and John. His mother had been imprisoned by his father for several years as a result of her plots against him. Maybe there is something to the demon story.
The year before he assumed the throne, Richard had been one of the first to answer the summons of Pope Gregory VII for the Third Crusade. As king, he not only still had to fulfill this vow but also to honor that of his father, Henry II, who had also promised to go.9
But before that he went to Westminster for his official anointing and coronation. On September 13, 1189, he became Richard I of England. He then immediately set about collecting as much money as he could to finance his expedition to the Holy Land.10 “He put up for sale everything he had—offices, lordships, earldoms, sherriffdoms, castles towns, lands, the lot.”11 He was also able to collect the tax that Henry II had started, known as the “Saladin tithe,” which shows that the people of Europe knew who had taken Jerusalem from them. This was not always paid cheerfully, especially by the clergy, but Richard knew how to convince them. Both he and his father made the Templars his tithe collectors.12 This didn’t endear people to them.
The intense demand for money from the people of England, along with the usual crusading fervor, may have been responsible for an outbreak of violence against the Jews in England. It seems to have started when some Jews arrived at Richard’s coronation with gifts and were told they couldn’t come in. Women and Jews had not been invited. The crowd outside, who apparently also hadn’t been invited in, attacked the Jews, killing some of them. This led to a general riot in London. Jewish homes were ransacked and burned and many people murdered.13
Richard was not particularly pro-Jewish, but all the Jews of England were under the king’s special protection and had been since they first came to England in the time of William the Conqueror. They were also a great source of revenue. He was furious about the attacks and tried to stop the destruction but, over the next few months, the violence spread to other towns of England.
This culminated in a horrifying massacre on Friday, March 16, 1190, Shabbat ha-Gadol, during which 150 people were killed in the city of York when they took refuge in a tower there. The chronicler William of Newburgh lived nearby and reports, “And there were not lacking among the mob many clergymen, among whom a certain hermit seemed more vehement than the rest . . . frequently repeating with a loud voice that Christ’s enemies ought to be crushed.”14 The instigators seem to have been friends of the bishop of Durham, Richard Malebysse and William Percy. Richard saw that the men were fined and had their lands taken away.15No one seems to have offered to help the Jews rebuild.
By the time this happened, Richard had already left England.
On the way to the eastern Mediterranean as part of the Third Crusade, Richard decided to forge an alliance with Sancho VI, king of Navarre, and became engaged to his daughter, Berengaria.16 This immediately proved a problem with Philip II, king of France and Richard’s stepbrother. Richard had been engaged to Philip’s sister, Alix, for most of his life and Alix had been raised at the English court, effectively keeping her from meeting anyone new.
/>
The two kings met on Sicily and Philip was bought off. Queen Eleanor, who was in her late sixties at the time, brought Berengaria to Richard and they were married in Cyprus May 12, 1191. Richard seems to have spent most of the time before the wedding conquering the island. It later proved to be too much trouble to maintain so he sold it to the Templars.17 The Templars also found Cyprus difficult to hold and so it was passed on to Guy of Lusignan, the widowed husband of Sybilla, queen of Jerusalem.
King Philip and Richard finally arrived at the city of Acre, which had been taken by Saladin four years before. They joined the besiegers and, after a long and horrible winter, the city finally fell.18
Here two things happened that would come back to haunt Richard. The first was something that seemed minor at the time. Leopold,
RiChard the Lionheart takes ACre, from Les Grandes Chroniques de
France. Note that the other lords are not shown. (The British Library)
duke of Austria, had been fighting at Acre longer than the two kings. When the city fell, he had his standards raised along with those of Richard and Philip. Richard, believing that Leopold intended to take a third of the booty, had them torn down. He and Philip had already decided on a fifty-fifty split. Leopold was naturally offended by this and decided to take his soldiers and go home. With him, he took a grudge against Richard.19
The second thing was much more immediately damaging to Richard’s reputation. He had captured nearly three thousand Moslem citizens of Acre who were being held for a ransom of one hundred thousand bezants. At some point he decided that Saladin wasn’t going to pay. Richard wanted to leave Acre but couldn’t until the captives were got rid of. So one morning he took them outside the city and slaughtered them all.20Both the Arab and Christian chroniclers agree that this happened. The Arab chronicler states:
The Real History Behind the Templars Page 15