God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  By the morning of 4 July, the Franks found themselves surrounded. Their only, slim chance of success lay in pressing on towards the fresh water of the Sea of Galilee in the hope of manoeuvring the enemy into a position where a concerted cavalry charge could be mounted. The Frankish vanguard under Raymond of Tripoli made an early attempt to break the stranglehold, but the Muslims merely opened ranks, allowing the count and his followers to escape, an act that confirmed for many Raymond’s treachery. Completely encircled, constantly harassed by scrub fires and hails of arrows, the Franks avoided total disintegration by establishing themselves on the Horns of Hattin, where the remains

  9. The Hattin Campaign, July 1187

  of an extinct volcano surrounded by the ruins of Iron Age and Bronze Age walls offered some protection. Here both cavalry and infantry made their last stand. As in the similar circumstances when the Antiochene army had been surrounded at the Field of Blood in 1119 and Inab in 1149, the outcome could hardly have been in doubt. Yet, even in extremis, the Christian knights refused to submit. At some point, elements of the rearguard under Reynald of Sidon and Balian of Ibelin, who had borne the brunt of attacks throughout the previous day’s march, managed to break out through the Muslim lines. During the withdrawal to the Horns, a Templar attack failed to disturb the surrounding cordon though lack of support. At the end of the battle, fighting exhaustion and despair, King Guy led at least two charges from his fortified base directed against Saladin’s personal bodyguard, his final throw to reverse the impending defeat. It was later reported that these attacks, even from so desperate a position, alarmed the sultan.51 Only when the remaining Frankish knights, having dismounted to defend the Horns on foot, were overwhelmed by thirst and fatigue as much as by their enemies, did the Muslims penetrate their final defences. Lack of water may have caused the collapse of horses as well as their riders, preventing further resistance. Guy and his knights were found slumped on the ground, unable to prolong the fight. Before these final moments, Frankish morale was destroyed by the capture of the relic of the True Cross and the death of its bearer, the bishop of Acre. This relic, discovered in the days after the capture of Jerusalem in July 1099, had regularly been carried into battle by the Jerusalem Franks as a totem of God’s support and promise of victory. Its loss, even more than the defeat itself, resonated throughout Christendom, raising the military disaster into a spiritual catastrophe.

  Perhaps one of the most surprising aspects of the annihilation of the Frankish host was the numbers of survivors from the highest ranks of the nobility amid the carnage of thousands. Among the Frankish lords on their way to captivity Saladin had ushered to his tent after the battle were King Guy, his brother Aimery, Humphrey of Toron, Reynald of Châtillon, Gerard of Ridefort and old William of Montferrat, effectively most of the governing clique. By contrast, 200 captured rank and file Templars and Hospitallers were butchered amateurishly, almost ceremonially by Muslim Sufis, while infantry survivors were herded off to slave markets across the Levant. Alone of the grandest prisoners, Reynald of Châtillon was executed, possibly by Saladin himself, after an elaborate charade in which the sultan expressly denied Reynald formal hospitality in the form of a drink that was offered round the other captives. The gesture was of revenge on an infidel aggressor who had dared to take war to the holy places of Arabia. The ritualistic manner of his killing as remembered by Saladin’s secretary, who was present, suggested this departure from normal practice followed the needs of propaganda rather than anger. Saladin was the most calculating of politicians. He needed a head. Reynald’s was the obvious victim. In western eyes, his death transformed this grizzled veteran of Outremer’s wars into a martyr whose fate was promenaded to encourage recruitment for the armies that hoped to reverse the decision of Hattin.52 Meanwhile, before leaving the battlefield, Saladin ordered a dome to be constructed to celebrate his victory; its foundations survive to this day. Less permanent testimony to the great battle presented itself to the historian Ibn al-Athir, who crossed the battlefield in 1188. Despite the ravages of weather, wild animals and carrion birds, he ‘saw the land all covered with bones, which could be seen even from a distance, lying in heaps or scattered around.’53

  The completeness of Saladin’s victory was soon apparent. The army destroyed at Hattin had denuded the rest of the kingdom’s defences. Saladin’s progress was cautious but triumphal. Beginning with the surrender of Tiberias on 5 July and Acre on 10 July, he mopped up most of the ports within weeks, including Sidon (29 July) and Beirut (6 August). Tyre survived, and then only because of the arrival from the west of Conrad of Montferrat, son of the captured William and uncle to the dead Baldwin V, in mid-July. Most of the castles and cities of the interior fell, with the exception of the great fortresses of Montréal, Kerak, Belvoir, Saphet and Belfort. Northern Outremer awaited its turn. On 4 September 1187, Ascalon surrendered after a stiff fight, followed by the remaining strongholds in southern Palestine. After negotiations that had seen the sultan enhance his reputation for magnanimity by allowing the Queen Dowager Maria safe conduct from Jerusalem to Tyre, on 20 September Saladin invested the Holy City.54 The garrison was commanded by Patriarch Heraclius, Balian of Ibelin, recently arrived from Tyre, and only two other knights. After a spirited show of resistance, and dramatic penances by the civilian population, the end came by negotiation. Saladin accepted payment for the release of most

  10. Saladin Captures Jerusalem, September–October 1187

  of the besieged Christians, a contrast with the events of July 1099 that he was not slow to point out. Jerusalem opened its gates on 2 October. Saladin milked the symbolism of his triumph. The cross the Franks had erected on the Dome of the Rock was cast down; the al-Aqsa mosque was restored and Nur al-Din’s pulpit from Aleppo installed; the precincts of the Haram al Sharif purified, the sultan and his family playing a conspicuous role; prominent Frankish religious buildings, such as the house of the patriarch and the church of St Anne, were converted into Islamic seminaries or schools. On 9 October, Friday prayers were resumed in the al-Aqsa. The Holy Sepulchre was spared, some said out of a pragmatic understanding of the importance of the site not the building for Christian pilgrimage, from which in the future the sultan could profit. However, the Latin clergy were expelled. Saladin had fulfilled his titles not just as victorious king, al-Malik al-Nasir, but as Restorer of the World and Faith, Salah al-Dunya wa’l-Din. It was the pinnacle of his career.

  News of Hattin reached the west by rumour, letter and messenger. While Saladin was gathering in the shattered remains of the kingdom, Joscius archbishop of Tyre set off to the west, arriving first in Sicily, where King William II immediately dispatched a fleet of about fifty ships with 200 knights.55 The disaster produced profound shock. Pope Urban III reputedly died on hearing of it. Even before the full extent of Saladin’s conquests became known, a response began to be organized. In November 1187, Richard count of Poitou, eldest surviving son of Henry II of England, became the first ruler north of the Alps to take the cross.56 In late October, the new pope, Gregory VIII, issued a bull, Audita Tremendi, authorizing a general expedition to the east and summarizing the privileges offered to those who took the cross. Gregory described the horrors of the battle of Hattin, ‘a great cause for mourning’, lingering over the Muslim atrocities and indicated the danger facing the Holy City itself; news of the fall of Jerusalem had not yet reached Italy. While laying most of the blame for the calamity on the sins of the Franks, the pope extended the burden of responsibility to include ‘the whole Christian people’. It was a Christian’s duty to repent past sins and restore past mistakes in the service of God and the recovery ‘of that land in which for our salvation truth arose from the earth’.57 After forty years of complacency, indifference and lip-service, Christendom’s response to Gregory’s call was overwhelming.

  12

  The Call of the Cross

  The response to the loss of Jerusalem and most of Outremer reinvented crusading. Central elements of later campaigns were intro
duced or confirmed: tightly organized preaching; crusade taxation, which allowed for more professional recruitment; transport by sea; and a widening strategic understanding of what was required to ensure the recovery of Jerusalem. Preachers and polemicists developed a sharper concentration on the flexible image of the cross, a banner of victory but also a badge of faith and sign of repentance. Extending the idea of communal penance contained in Gregory VIII’s bull Audita Tremendi, crusade publicists extrapolated the act of crusading into a clear general scheme of religious revivalism. This they associated with a firmer distinctive vocabulary of personal commitment mirrored in legally more explicit privileges of the crusader, the crucesignatus. Taking the cross now in theory clearly separated crusading from pilgrimage, even if surviving written liturgies and chroniclers retained the link. To the crusader’s special spiritual status coupled with the now customary privileges were joined precise and immediate secular benefits, such as exemption from the novel taxes levied to pay for the armies bound for the east. The experience of 1188–92 established in lay as well as ecclesiastical circles the technical name for participants in crusading even if it failed to discover an agreed term for the activity in which they were involved. Propagandists began to talk almost exclusively of ‘crucesignati’, a habit that soon found its way into chronicles, histories and government records. In the accounts of the English Exchequer, crusiatus appeared in 1188/9 and crucesignatus, for the first time, in 1191/2.1 Vernacular equivalents, such as the verbs croisier and croiser, began to appear in the poems of departing crusaders and within a generation croisié had become common when describing a crusader.2 While Jerusalem dominated the language of preparation for the campaigns in the east, the failure of the Palestine war of 1191–2 to restore the Holy City to Christian rule produced a subtle but significant shift in linguistic focus that shadowed military reality. Thereafter the iter Jerosolymitana gave place to the broader inclusive euphemisms of negotium Terrae Sanctae or even simply the negotium sanctum, the business of the Holy Land, the holy business.

  THE MESSAGE

  The effort to mobilize Christendom involved every available medium of communication in a carefully organized campaign. Although published in late October and early November 1187, only days after his accession, Gregory VIII’s Audita Tremendi had taken weeks of drafting since September when definite news of Hattin reached the papal Curia, then in Verona. Its release had awaited the arrival at the Curia, now moved to Ferrara, of Joscius archbishop of Tyre from Sicily, and been further delayed by the death of the already ailing Urban III on 20 October. The bull provided the basic ingredients of the appeal for action.3 Proceeding from an account of Saladin’s victory to a call for general Christian repentance, it emphasized the opportunity the crisis provided for the dutiful believers to follow in the path of the Maccabees and to serve the will of God. After the casus belli and the exhortation came the statement of the spiritual and temporal privileges, based on those declared by Eugenius III in 1145–6. With Audita Tremendi were sent other letters affirming papal and curial commitment and enjoining fasts and a seven-year truce on all Christian princes.

  By the time they issued Audita Tremendi, Gregory VIII and his advisors probably guessed it was assured an eager reception. With Archbishop Joscius would have come news of William II of Sicily’s plans to send a fleet to the Holy Land.4 Already western courts were full of rumours, backed by hard evidence from correspondents from Outremer and southern Europe that preceded the formal authorization of a new crusade. Richard of Poitou’s hasty and impulsive adoption of the cross at Tours in November 1187, without his father, Henry II’s, permission, almost certainly anticipated the arrival of the papal bull.5 While papal legates – Archbishop Joscius of Tyre to France and the former abbot of Clairvaux, Cardinal Henry of Albano, to Germany – accompanied the bull, by the end of the year preparations to receive the message they brought were in full swing. At an imperial diet at Strassburg in December, encouraged by the rhetoric of Bishop Henry of Strassburg, German lords had begun to take the cross, overcoming an initial wariness.6 At the Christmas 1187 court of Canute VI of Denmark at Odense, apparently surprise and shock both at what had happened and what was being proposed inhibited spontaneous response.7 On both the emotional and political levels, reassurance of the priority to be given any projected campaign was necessary. As elsewhere, many German lords were probably reluctant to make any move before they knew the intentions of their king-emperor, Frederick Barbarossa. Deference to rulers’ decisions characterized the reception of the papal call to arms. Given the financial and political implications, it was small wonder Richard of Poitou’s failure to wait for his father’s lead left the old king speechless.8

  Within weeks of the circulation and reception of the papal bull, the preaching campaign assumed coherent regional patterns. In Germany, after the Strassburg diet, it was spearheaded by Bishop Henry of Strassburg and Bishop Godfrey of Würzburg, whose eloquence helped create a mood of mass enthusiasm that culminated in a great assembly at Mainz on 27 March 1188. Billed by the papal legate Henry of Albano as a ‘curia Christi’, court of Christ, there Frederick received the cross. Subsidiary preaching tours were organized, such as the bishop of Strassburg’s journey to Hainault, Nesle, Louvain and Lille.9 A similarly rapid but controlled response was evoked in England and northern France. Before the end of 1187, Henry II had ordered the sequestration of the profits from the pilgrim trade at the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury in order, he claimed, to assist Jerusalem and ransom Christian captives.10 Political rivalries and resentments between Henry and Philip II of France were quickly if temporarily submerged. At Gisors in the Vexin, between Normandy and Philip’s royal lands, the two rulers took the cross on 21 January 1188 in the presence of Joscius of Tyre, less than three months after the papal bull. With them were most of the counts of northern France: Flanders, Blois, La Perche, Champagne, Dreux, Clermont, Beaumont, Soissons, Bar and Nevers (King Henry himself being duke of Normandy and count of Anjou, Maine and Touraine).11 By the time Frederick of Germany took the cross two months later, a carefully organized crusade preaching tour of Wales by Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury was approaching its fifth week. The preaching in Henry II’s lands in France and England had been organized at a conference at Le Mans in late January and Geddington, in Northamptonshire, on 11 February 1188, where sermons were delivered by the archbishop of Canterbury, who took the cross there, and his deputy, the bishop of Rochester. By the end of the month, Archbishop Baldwin was preparing his Welsh tour; the bishop of St Asaph may have already begun preaching.12 In France, Philip II managed to gather a large assembly to Paris, also on 27 March, mid-Lent, to discuss the crusade tax and related financial provisions for crusaders. By Easter 1188, coordinated preaching and recruitment campaigns, coupled in Angevin and Capetian lands with attempts to raise the crusade tax, were well established and credited with dramatic success in attracting tens of thousands of crucesignati, from Germany to the Atlantic.

  Central to the commitment of taking the cross was the concurrent resolution of outstanding internal and diplomatic problems. At Gisors, Henry II and Philip II agreed (only temporarily as it turned out) to shelve their territorial disputes. In Germany, the general peace was extended to Frederick’s opponents, such as the archbishop of Cologne, and the troublesome duke of Saxony, Henry the Lion, who was presented with a choice of accompanying the crusade all expenses paid or exile. Henry chose the latter. Under the possibly sincere guise of promoting the crusade, Henry II attempted to assert his authority over the Welsh princes, through Archbishop Baldwin’s tour, and, unsuccessfully, over Scotland, by trying to extract a contribution to the crusade tax. Despite an attached offer to settle a border dispute, the Scottish barons declined to treat Henry as their lord for crusade finance or anything else.13 For Philip II, no less important than ensuring that his uncontrollably powerful Angevin vassal Henry II accompanied him on any eastern expedition was the similar commitment of other great feudatories, such as the duke of Burgundy or the
counts of Flanders and Champagne. Philip, a calculating, cautious and resourceful opportunist who tended to wait on favourable events rather than risk grand gestures, needed to ensure that the bold undertaking of the crusade did nothing to limit his prospects of widening royal control within the French kingdom.

  Although across Christendom reactions to the call to arms were conditioned by considerations of material and political advantage, as one contemporary observed, ‘for the love of God, remission of sins and respect of the kings’, there can be no doubt the message produced strong psychological and religious responses.14 At its most straightforward, the effectiveness of the promotion of the crusade relied on two related elements. The shock of the loss of Jerusalem and the Holy Cross was heightened by the images of both being so familiar. Western audiences, primed by Scripture, liturgy, songs, popular stories, sculpture, stained glass, relics and the travellers’ tales of returning pilgrims, could easily feel personal engagement, involvement and hence responsibility, emotions crusade publicists took care to encourage. The enormous twelfth-century popularity of Jerusalem as a pilgrimage destination encouraged identification with the place that went beyond liturgical metaphors, biblical narratives or western images, models and imitations of the Holy Sepulchre. Acquaintance with the Christian history of the Holy City and particularly the True Cross was reflected in the adoption in the west in the twelfth century of the name Heraclius, commemorating the Byzantine emperor who in ad 630 restored to Jerusalem the fragment of the cross captured by the Persians, a highly relevant historical precedent after 1187.15 Confronted with Saladin’s alleged atrocities, engagement translated horror into guilt, anger and a sense of collective duty, sentiments propaganda sought to direct. The effect was registered throughout western Christendom in hundreds if not thousands of charters drawn up for departing crusaders by monks to whom they had given or mortgaged their property for the good of their souls and, usually, for some ready cash to allow them, as the documents explicitly state, to depart for Jerusalem.