God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  Guy of Lusignan’s emergence as Baldwin’s probable heir did not prevent resistance to Saladin, who was now stretched between defence of his northern frontier against the Seljuks of Asia Minor, designs on Mosul and Aleppo, ambitions in Outremer and protection of the desert-land routes between Syria and Egypt. A two-year truce, 1180–82, ended with Saladin’s defeat at Le Forbelet in Galilee in July 1182, failure to take Beirut and the consolidation of Frankish control of the eastern bank of the river Yarmuk. To the south, Reynald of Châtillon disrupted not only Saladin’s material power but also the ideology of his political authority with a foray into the Arabian desert in 1181 and by sponsoring a prolonged raid along the Red Sea coast in 1182–3 that disrupted the annual haj. Saladin acknowledged the outrage by having two Frankish captives from the raiding fleet taken to Mecca itself where, at Mina outside the city, in front of crowds of pilgrims, they had their throats cut. Although of no lasting strategic impact, these raids alarmed the Muslim world, challenging Saladin’s pose as the Champion and Defender of Islam. No Christian fleet had sailed the Red Sea since the seventh century; the unfortunate captives were perhaps the first Christians to have set foot in Mecca since its capture by Muhammed in 629.41

  Reynald’s southern campaigns proved the first kingdom of Jerusalem’s final fling. In June 1183 Saladin finally occupied Aleppo. In August he turned his attention southwards to Jerusalem. The kingdom mobilized a large army, according to William of Tyre 1,300 cavalry and 15,000 infantry, numbers swelled by the census earlier in the year and mercenaries paid by the subsequent tax.42 The Christian army gathered at Sephoria in Galilee. The great magnates were attending the king at Nazareth when Baldwin fell seriously ill and was thought to be dying. He summoned the High Court to his sickbed and appointed Guy of Lusignan as regent. The regency was to be permanent, Baldwin retaining only the title of king, ownership of the Holy City itself and an annual pension of 10,000 gold pieces with a promise from Guy not to alienate royal treasure or lands during the king’s lifetime.

  Apart from initial skirmishes, the Galilee campaign in September and October 1183 saw no military engagement. The Christian army shadowed Saladin’s force as it manoeuvred in southern Galilee, but refused to confront the invaders, despite Muslim raids on Mt Tabor’s monasteries and threats to Nazareth. Unable to bring the Franks to battle and lacking the numerical superiority to launch an assault on their camp, Saladin withdrew to Damascus in early October. Tactically, the Franks had prevailed with the minimum of losses. However, many in the Jerusalem high command thought that strategically they had missed an opportunity to destroy Saladin’s army. Aggression had paid dividends in 1177 at Montgisard and in 1182 at Le Forbelet with far smaller forces at the Franks’ disposal. Moreover, it was the duty of Christian knights to protect holy sites such as Mt Tabor from Muslim desecration. In the eyes of some observers, admittedly hostile to Guy, the management of the campaign, despite its satisfactory if not triumphant outcome, left much to be desired. Some leaders had refused to cooperate with Guy. Tactical inertia, partly the result of this inability to command confidence and unity, had been matched by inadequate provisioning of food. Many saw Guy’s apparently supine performance as proof of his inability to lead. Four years later, memory of this perception proved fatal as the Franks, led once more by Guy, rejected the caution of 1183 only to be annihilated at the Horns of Hattin.

  Guy’s perceived shortcomings as a war leader were immediately compounded by his refusal to accede to King Baldwin’s request to exchange Jerusalem for Tyre. Support for the regent ebbed. In November 1183 Saladin began a siege of Kerak in Oultrejordain while the castle was hosting the marriage between Princess Isabella and Humphrey IV of Toron. Facing this fresh crisis, Baldwin engineered a palace revolution. Guy was stripped of the regency and a new succession was arranged excluding him, signalled by the coronation of his stepson, the five-year-old Baldwin, son of Sybil and her first husband William of Monteferrat. To prevent Guy’s return to power, moves were begun to annul his marriage to Sybil. Command of the relief army to Kerak was handed to Raymond of Tripoli accompanied by the now blind and partly paralysed king in a litter. After the siege had been relieved, Guy, joined by his wife Sybil, shut himself in his city of Ascalon, risking civil war by defying Baldwin’s attempts to strip him of his fiefs. The process of annulment also ran into the ground. But Guy’s hopes of rule seemed at an end.43

  When the king despatched the Patriarch Heraclius to Europe in the summer of 1184 to try to induce a western ruler, perhaps one of Baldwin’s Angevin cousins, to come east to assume the regency, the political landscape appeared transformed. The regent of the year before was persona non grata; civil war had narrowly been avoided; Guy and Sybil had effectively been excluded from the succession that now hung on the life of an increasingly infirm leper and a weak child. When the king suffered another relapse in the winter of 1184–5, Raymond of Tripoli resumed the regency he had vacated over eight years before, although under restrictive terms, with Joscelin of Courtenay acting as young Baldwin V’s guardian. Acknowledging the fragility of succession arrangements, the High Court agreed that Raymond would retain the regency for ten years unless the young Baldwin died, in which case the competing claims of Princesses Sybil and Isabella would be adjudicated by the pope, the emperor of Germany and the kings of France and England. The earlier scheme of trying to attract a western regent was abandoned. Heraclius had met with no success, not having anything to offer western rulers other than temporary command of a fragile monarchy, a fractious nobility and a menacing enemy. The 1184–5 mission foundered on Jerusalem’s traditional diplomatic conundrum. Outside assistance was sought but with political strings protecting the power of the local royal family and nobility, hardly an attractive proposition. Paradoxically, the new succession arrangements in 1185 merely confirmed Jerusalem’s insularity.

  The divisions within the ruling elite remained. Raymond held the regency, but Sybil was still married to Guy with her son, young Baldwin, in the custody of her uncle, Joscelin. Many suspected, possibly correctly, that Raymond still harboured designs on the throne while Princess Isabella’s party openly supported a settlement that denied the rights of Sybil and Guy. This time Baldwin IV did not recover. By 16 May 1185 he was dead.44 The crisis within Outremer deepened precisely at a moment of opportunity. Saladin spent the year from spring 1185 to 1186 occupied with his attempts to subdue Mosul and northern Iraq. In December 1185 he fell gravely ill. Out of action for three months, his life despaired of, Saladin’s empire seemed about to fall apart. However, before leaving for Iraq, the sultan had once more agreed a truce with Raymond of Tripoli. Consequently, the Franks did nothing to intervene, despite the arrival of a few crusaders in the wake of Heraclius’s embassy. The flaw in Raymond’s pacific policy was exposed when, on his recovery in March 1186, Saladin finally annexed Mosul.45 The encirclement described by William of Tyre was complete, and the Franks had done little to prevent it.

  The death of the eight-year-old Baldwin V at Acre in the summer of 1186 drove Jerusalem near to civil war. While Raymond assembled a general council of the kingdom’s barons and clergy at Nablus, perhaps hoping to be elected king himself, Sybil’s partisans gathered at the Holy City for the young king’s funeral. With Sybil were Guy, the masters of the military orders, Reynald of Châtillon, the Patriarch Heraclius and Baldwin V’s paternal grandfather, William III of Montferrat, a veteran of the Second Crusade who had retired to the east in 1185. After the obsequies, despite the objections of delegates from Nablus, they proceeded to choose Sybil as queen. There was less enthusiasm about Guy becoming king. Before she was crowned, Sybil promised to divorce Guy on three conditions; their children (all daughters) were to be declared legitimate; Guy was to remain count of Ascalon and Jaffa; and Sybil was to have a free choice of new husband. However, once crowned by the patriarch, Sybil promptly selected Guy. This coup cannot have entirely pleased her supporters, but Sybil had shown that, like her father and brother, she understood her rights, knew the law
and was prepared to impose her will.

  In any circumstances, Sybil’s election would have proved contentious given the twists in the plans for the royal succession over the previous decade. Her appointment of Guy as king and his consecration by Patriarch Heraclius displayed conjugal devotion but no political tact. Raymond of Tripoli’s assembly at Nablus included the other claimant, Isabella and her husband, Humphrey of Toron, with their supporters, the Ibelins. Barred from the Holy City when Sybil’s supporters barricaded the gates, they learnt of the coup through despatching a spy, a Jerusalem-born sergeant disguised as a Cistercian monk, who lurked in the precincts of the Holy Sepulchre to observe the double coronation. Once news reached Nablus, Raymond desperately proposed the assembled nobles crown Humphrey, but the young man refused to cooperate with a scheme that would have caused immediate civil war. With most of the other nobles at Nablus, Humphrey recognized that, with a king already crowned and consecrated, however hateful, they had little option but to acknowledge the fait accompli. He left for Jerusalem to pay homage to his new lord, thus ending any prospect of concerted resistance to Sybil’s coup. Most of the rest of the Nablus gathering soon followed. Only Baldwin of Ibelin and Raymond of Tripoli remained recalcitrant. At King Guy’s first meeting of the High Court, in a show of almost constitutional propriety, Baldwin refused homage and quit the kingdom for service in the principality of Antioch. By contrast, Raymond’s refusal to accept Guy provoked the king to threaten the count with military reprisal. Fearing an attack by Guy, Raymond showed his low level of statesmanship by concluding a personal deal with Saladin under which he accepted the sultan’s protection and a detachment of Muslim soldiers to strengthen his garrison at Tiberias. Whatever his feelings about Guy, however disappointed he was by having power once again, and probably for ever, dashed from his grasp, Raymond’s behaviour in 1186–7, as most unbiased sources agreed, was more than selfish. It was treason.46

  THE BATTLE OF HATTIN AND THE FALL OF JERUSALEM

  The general truce with Saladin was due to expire a week after Easter, 5 April 1187. It would not be renewed. Restored to health and in control of an empire that stretched from the Nile to the Tigris, Saladin could now fulfil his political jihad rhetoric by military action against the Franks. In Jerusalem, Guy and his Poitevin cronies hardly made themselves popular by flaunting their new power and cornering lucrative patronage. In the winter of 1186–7, Reynald of Châtillon, frustrated by the truce from contesting Saladin’s attempts to consolidate his position in the Transjordanian desert, launched a successful raid on a rich Egyptian caravan travelling to Damascus. Guy’s lack of political grip was exposed by his failure to force Reynald to provide compensation or restitution to the sultan. Such diplomatic exchanges between Saladin and the Franks confirm the picture left by a surprised Spanish Muslim visitor to Outremer in the autumn of 1184 who noted how trade flowed freely across the Muslim–Christian frontier despite the war. Although each side took prisoners and slaves, Muslims were not molested in Christian lands and vice versa.47 Such accommodation may have helped persuade Raymond of Tripoli, a veteran of long captivity in Aleppo, that he would find Saladin a benign protector against his Christian king. His miscalculation no less than his ambition proved fatal.

  When it became obvious that Saladin would launch an attack after the truce ended, King Guy realized he had to be reconciled with Raymond, whose control of Galilee was strategically vital. If, as it appeared, the count was prepared to allow access to Saladin’s forces, not only Galilee but the west bank of the Jordan and the coastal plain around Acre were exposed. While Saladin began hostilities in late April with an assault on Kerak, a delegation was sent by Guy to negotiate with Raymond at Tiberias. Their journey coincided with a raid into Galilee in 1 May 1187 by Saladin’s son al-Afdal, which was allowed free passage by Raymond in accordance with his treaty with the sultan. As the Muslim force, numbering perhaps 7,000, approached Nazareth, the locals appealed for aid to a contingent of the royal delegation led by Gerard of Ridefort, Master of the Temple, and Roger of Moulins, Master of the Hospital. Nazareth lay outside Raymond’s territories and therefore outside his truce. The Masters managed to assemble a scratch force from nearby castles of about ninety Templar and Hospitaller knights, forty local knights and perhaps 300 mounted sergeants. Although hopelessly outnumbered, this small army, using its only possible tactic, attacked the Muslims at the springs of Cresson. Despite fierce fighting, the Christians were massacred, only Gerard of Ridefort and three other of the knights escaping alive. In the inevitable recriminations that followed, it was alleged that the intemperate haste of Master Gerard, against the advice of his fellow commanders, had precipitated the battle. Given the appeal from Nazareth, it is hard to see what else the Templars and Hospitallers were to do without contradicting their calling. Militarily disastrous, the heroism at Cresson soon earnt the fallen knights the accolade of legend and martyrdom, their feats admiringly retold to inspire the endeavours of troops from the west during the long siege of Acre three years later. More immediately, the victorious Muslims withdrew across the frontier carrying the heads of their slaughtered foes on the ends of their spears.48

  While the disaster at Cresson on 1 May 1187 significantly weakened Jerusalem’s resources, it produced political unity. By allowing al-Afdal’s troops to cross his lands, Count Raymond could not avoid shouldering blame for the massacre. Even his own vassals and the local militia in his territories turned against him. In the days after Cresson a hasty reconciliation was patched together between Raymond and Guy, the count’s truce with Saladin repudiated and the Muslim garrison at Tiberias expelled. Despite the tensions that simmered on the surface of baronial cooperation with the king, in the following weeks Guy was able to muster all the available troops from the kingdom, as well as some from Tripoli and Antioch. The Frankish host, one of the largest ever assembled, numbered up to 20,000, including around 1,200 knights. The force that Saladin led into Frankish territory around the southern end of the Sea of Galilee on 27 June 1187 was probably 30,000 strong. While the Franks, as in 1183, mustered at the springs of Sephoria, Saladin sent scouting and scavenging parties across the hills to provoke the Christians to break camp and to identify suitable battlefields. He then tried to lure the Franks into battle by leading a detachment of his main force against Tiberias on 2 July. The town fell the same day, the garrison under Raymond of Tripoli’s wife, Eschiva of Galilee, withdrawing to the citadel to endure a siege. On hearing of this, the Frankish high command met in the camp at Sephoria on the evening of 2 July to decide how to respond. On their decision hung the future of nine decades of western European settlement in the Near East.49

  Later Frankish sources favourable to Count Raymond recorded that, after Raymond had persuaded King Guy to adopt the same tactics as four years earlier and refuse battle, the Master of the Temple late at night managed to change the king’s mind. Some Muslim accounts agree that Raymond urged the abandonment of Tiberias, which, he hoped, would lead to the dispersal of Saladin’s army, eager to return home safely with their booty, only to be contradicted by Reynald of Châtillon, who reminded the king of Raymond’s recent treachery and alliance with the enemy. Saladin’s secretary, Imad al-Din, by contrast, portrayed Raymond as taking the lead in persuading Guy to march out to relieve Tiberias.50 Whatever the immediate arguments and assessment of risks, Guy can hardly have avoided an unpleasant sense of déjà vu. In 1183, in similar circumstances, he had been vilified and hounded from office after failing to engage Saladin’s army even though he had kept the Frankish army intact and largely unscathed. Any advice he now received from political enemies, especially Raymond, must have appeared tainted. Aggression had served the Franks well in the past; Reynald of Châtillon was living proof of that. Sephoria lay just under twenty miles from Tiberias, just possible to reach in a day of forced march across the hilly terrain. If not, the substantial springs at Hattin, just over a dozen miles distant, offered refuge for a bivouac. The Frankish army was formidably large, with experience
d leaders and seasoned troops. Despite the subsequent verdicts of events, Guy’s decision during the night of 2–3 July to break camp and march to Tiberias may not then have appeared foolish or doomed. Two years later, when he led a tiny Christian army to begin the siege of Acre, an apparently far rasher decision led to ultimate success. However, in the Galilean hills in July 1187, once committed, Guy had no prospects of reinforcement and few of ordered retreat. His choice of battle consciously provoked a confrontation that would be decisive, whatever the outcome.

  The Franks left Sephoria early on 3 July, heading towards the small spring at Turan about a third of the way to Tiberias. Progress was slow and before nightfall stopped altogether. Saladin broke off his siege of Tiberias and organized his army to meet the advancing Franks. Once the springs at Turan had been passed, the Franks found themselves attacked from the right flank and rear. The sheer weight of Muslim numbers slowed the Franks until they reached Maskana on the western edge of the plateau that looked down on the Sea of Galilee. Here the leadership once more seemed at odds, whether to attempt to force their way eastwards down from the plateau to Tiberias that night, or to turn aside northwards to the large wells at the village of Hattin. In the end, they did neither, Guy ordering a halt at Maskana. The decision to camp for the night on the arid plateau with little or no water may have come from confusion and hesitancy. But Guy may have had no option. Enemy numbers harrying the army had slowed progress almost to a standstill, preventing it from reaching the springs at Hattin and threatening to turn a descent to the Sea of Galilee into a massacre or rout. The Franks do not seem to have successfully reconnoitred the enemy’s strength. If they had known how heavily the odds were stacked against them, the decision at Sephoria may have been different.