Philip was still only in direct control of a small part of Western Francia, so most of the banished Jews did not go far. But the decree uncovered another aspect of the young king’s personality. He was harshly inflexible in matters of religion, and his reign was marked by increasingly strict laws against swearing, blasphemy, gambling, and other church-condemned pastimes.
A year after the expulsion decree, Henry the Younger was struck by dysentery and died, aged twenty-seven. His widow Margaret—Philip II’s older half sister—had given him only one child, and the baby had died three days after birth.
Seeing another chance to replenish his treasury, Philip II demanded that Henry II of England return Margaret’s dowry to the French throne. This, naturally, led to an argument; and by 1186 the quarrel was sliding towards open war.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Saladin
Between 1171 and 1188,
Saladin seizes his master’s lands
and retakes Jerusalem
WHILE HIS MASTER Nur ad-Din celebrated the unification of the Muslim states from Edessa to Cairo, Saladin, the deputy governor of Egypt, began to close his own hands around his domain.
Saladin’s biographer ibn Shaddad, determined to paint his subject as the ideal Muslim ruler, gives us inadvertent glimpses of the real man: a devout believer, but also pragmatic, hardheaded, calculating. He studied his faith, but “his studies did not dig too deep” or lead him into unpopular theological controversy. He fasted during Ramadan, but his fasts “fell a little short” when the demands of war called him to be at his strongest. He never made the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca that would have taken him away from his restless realm: “He always intended and planned it,” ibn Shaddad explains, “[but] was prevented because of lack of time.” His desire to see Islam triumph was genuine: “In his love for the Jihad on the path of God he shunned his womenfolk, his children, his homeland, his home and all his pleasures, and for this world he was content to dwell in the shade of his tent with the winds blowing through it left and right.”1
But this did not eclipse his personal ambitions, as became very clear to Nur ad-Din in October of 1171. Saladin had invaded Crusader territory and laid siege to the southern castle of Montreal. He was close to forcing its surrender when Nur ad-Din approached from the opposite side. Rather than completing the conquest and handing the castle over, Saladin withdrew and allowed the Christian enemy to stay in place. Ibn al-Athir tells us that he was afraid to clear Nur ad-Din’s path to Egypt: “If Nur ad-Din comes to you here,” one of Saladin’s officers says, “. . . he will exercise his authority over you. . . . [I]f he wishes, he will dismiss you and you will be unable to resist.”
Saladin returned to Egypt and wrote to Nur ad-Din, excusing himself on the grounds that he feared a coup was developing in his absence. Nur ad-Din was not fooled. “His attitude towards him changed,” Ibn al-Athir writes, “and he resolved to enter Egypt and expel him.”2
But before Nur ad-Din could bring Saladin to heel, he was struck with quinsy: a throat abscess, caused by tonsillitis, which precipitated a massive infection and shut his body down. He died in Damascus, refusing treatment. (“A sixty-year-old,” he snapped at his doctor, “is not to be bled.”) He left his kingdom to his eleven-year-old son, al-Salih Ismail.3
Now Saladin took the offensive. He rode north and entered Damascus as al-Salih’s protector and guardian: “Aware that [Nur ad-Din’s] son was a child . . . incapable of taking on the defense of the lands against God’s enemies,” his biographer explains, “he made his preparations to march to Syria, since it is the cornerstone of Muslim territory.”4
For a year or so, Saladin acted as al-Salih’s general and regent. His presence in the boy’s kingdom was not a peaceful one; al-Salih himself appealed to his subjects to eject the usurper. (“This wicked man, who repudiates my father’s goodness to him, has come to take my lands,” he told the men of Aleppo, who obediently rebelled.) But Saladin’s Egyptian troops quelled revolt after revolt. After a victory against the combined armies of Aleppo and Mosul in April of 1175, Saladin decreed that his own name should be substituted for young al-Salih’s in the Friday prayers. No more coins were to be struck in al-Salih’s name. In May, the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad, which Saladin now controlled, prudently declared Saladin to be Sultan of Egypt and Syria; a letter sent to the caliph by Saladin’s secretary Qadi al-Fadil explained that only Saladin was strong enough to protect Nur ad-Din’s accomplishments, and that his “sole purpose” was to keep the Islamic cause unified and strong.5
The next few years saw Saladin doing just that. He married Nur ad-Din’s widow, some ten years his senior, and laid claim to his predecessor’s lands. He fought rebellious Muslim governors and encroaching Crusader armies; when politic, he made treaties with the Crusaders instead. He set up a formal Office of the Navy and channeled a good deal of revenue into building additional ships to bulk up the Egyptian fleet. In 1181, young al-Salih died of “colic,” a convenient name for stomach upset caused by natural or other means, and Saladin’s rule was no longer troubled by questions of legitimacy.6
He was now strong enough to face the Crusader kingdoms head on, provided that they did not all unify against him at the same time. And in 1187 he was given the chance he needed.
The year before, the king of Jerusalem—nine-year-old Baldwin V—had died. There was no clear successor to his crown; his mother, Sibylla, and his guardian, Raymond, ruler of Tripoli, both laid claim to Jerusalem. Leading Sibylla’s cause was a familiar old troublemaker: Raynald of Chatillon, once Prince of Antioch, newly out of his Aleppo dungeon cell, sixteen years older but still reckless, dishonest, and power hungry. He masterminded a plan to shut Raymond out of Jerusalem while Sibylla (and her deeply unpopular husband Guy) were crowned king and queen of the city.7
Raymond, incensed, went straight to Saladin and offered friendship in return for troops, intending to use Saladin’s men to break back into Jerusalem and claim its crown. Meanwhile, Raynald of Chatillon, who was incapable of getting along with anyone for long, fell out with Sibylla and Guy and stormed out of Jerusalem. In early 1187, he and his men attacked a large and wealthy caravan that was traveling from Syria to Egypt under Saladin’s protection. Raynald himself took “every last man” prisoner and stole the baggage. Saladin threatened to attack, if the men were not released and the goods restored. Queen Sibylla and King Guy, seeing the writing on the wall, ordered Raynald to make restitution; Raynald refused. (In response, Saladin vowed to kill Raynald “if he ever had him in his power.”) The Crusader alliance was fractured; Saladin’s time had come.8
“He wrote to all his lands,” Ibn al-Athir tells us, “summoning men to the Jihad. He wrote to Mosul, the Mesopotamian regions, Irbil and other places in the east, and to Egypt and all of Syria.” As this massive force gathered, Raymond and Raynald, realizing that catastrophe was unfolding over them, both hurried to Jerusalem with their armies.
The Crusader coalition, some twenty thousand men, gathered at Sephoria, a well-watered and provisioned city in the north of the Kingdom of Jerusalem; from there, they could block Saladin’s path to Jerusalem itself. But rather than facing them directly, Saladin—in command of nearly thirty thousand troops—moved sideways and sacked the city of Tiberias, trapping Raymond’s wife in the citadel with the surviving defenders. “His purpose in besieging Tiberias had only been that the Franks should leave their position,” writes Ibn al-Athir; between Sephoria and Tiberias, the land was bare, shelterless, and dry.9
After some argument, the Crusaders decided to cross the desert and relieve Tiberias. The early July sun roasted the Crusader army as it plodded along. The only cistern they came to was guarded by Saladin’s men. By the time they met Saladin, on the plain beneath the extinct volcano peaks known as the Horns of Hattin, soldiers and horses alike were nearly incapacitated by heat and thirst. The Battle of Hattin, fought on the morning of July 4, was a rout. Within six hours, says the French account of the battle, the Crusaders were slaughtered; Raymond escaped, but
Raynald of Chatillon, King Guy, and the commanding officers of both the Templar and the Hospitaller orders were taken prisoner.10
Saladin, ordering King Guy and Raynald of Chatillon brought into his own tent, offered the king (“near dead from thirst,” Ibn al-Athir says) a cold drink. Having drunk, Guy turned to Reynald and offered him the rest. The code of Muslim hospitality dictated that no host could kill a man who had drunk his water or eaten his food; Saladin at once said, “Not with my permission did this accursed man drink water and so gain my safe-conduct.” He rose, and beheaded Raynald with his own scimitar.11
After this, Saladin ordered the captured Templars and Hospitallers executed; their single-minded defense of the holy sites was too dangerous. But King Guy and the other officers who had surrendered were well fed and made comfortable in their imprisonment.
Saladin and his army marched on to Acre, arriving at the city’s walls a week later. Acre had almost no defenders left; they had all gone out to join the coalition at Sephoria. The city’s inhabitants, who had heard of Saladin’s mercy towards his captives, offered to surrender in return for safe-conduct. Saladin agreed; he then entered the city through the open gate and celebrated Friday prayers in the old Acre mosque, which had been transformed into a church and now was restored to its original purpose.
After this, most of the Holy Land was his. Ascalon surrendered, on the same terms, on September 4; the city of Jerusalem, on October 2, after Saladin had again guaranteed the safety of its Christian inhabitants, even allowing those who left the city to take their money and belongings with them. “On top of the Dome of the Rock was a great gilded cross,” writes Ibn al-Althir. “When the Muslims entered the city on the Friday, several men climbed to the top of the dome to displace the cross. When they did so and it fell, everyone in the city and outside, both Muslims and Franks, cried out as one. The Muslims shouted ‘God is great!‘ in joy while the Franks cried out in distress and pain.”12
22.1 The Conquests of Saladin
BACK IN WESTERN FRANCIA, the battling kings of France and England had arranged a parley for January of 1188 at Gisors, where a huge elm tree marked the border between Henry’s lands in Normandy and Philip’s royal domain.
22.2 Gisors
They had barely arrived when the Archbishop of Tyre asked for an audience. Tyre still held out against Saladin; the elderly archbishop had left the city in a galley with black-painted sails to bring the news to the west. Now he begged both kings to abandon their own hostilities and to take the cross in a third crusade. Pope Gregory VIII had already authorized the Crusade, issuing a call for a seven-year truce all throughout Europe so that kings and armies could pour their energies into recovering Jerusalem.13
Both Henry and Philip accepted the challenge. Hostilities were put on hold, and preparations began for the journey east. The seventy-year-old Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, announced his intentions to join as well. All of Europe seemed to be turning east.
“The news reached Saladin,” writes William of Tyre, “that the emperor of Germany, the king of France, and the king of England and all the high barons overseas had taken the cross to come against him. He was not at all pleased.”14
Chapter Twenty-Three
The Gempei War
In Japan, between 1179 and 1185,
the Taira clan is laid waste,
and the rule of the shoguns begins
IN THE TWO DECADES since the Heiji Disturbance, Taira Kiyomori had been steadily rising through the ranks of Japanese courtiers.
He was helped out by the Cloistered Emperor Go-Shirakawa, who needed the support of Kiyomori and his samurai to keep his power over the increasingly rebellious Emperor Nijo. With Go-Shirakawa’s support, Kiyomori became in turn a member of the State Council, Captain of the Palace Guards, Chief of the Central Police, and finally Prime Minister. His brother Yorimori became the Cloistered Emperor’s chancellor, his son Shigemori military commander of the capital city. When the Emperor Nijo died of a sudden illness at the age of twenty-two, Kiyomori arranged a marriage between his own daughter Tokuko and Nijo’s successor, the Emperor Takakura (Nijo’s younger half brother). The imperial offices were falling, one by one, under Taira control.1
Go-Shirakawa’s scheme to boost Taira power had succeeded too well, and by 1179 the Cloistered Emperor found power slipping from his hands. He needed to check Taira ambitions; and so he intervened sharply in Kiyomori’s affairs, confiscating land that Kiyomori had commandeered and returning it to its original Fujiwara and Minamoto rulers.
He believed that the time was ripe to bring the Taira crashing down, but he was wrong. Kiyomori could still raise a larger samurai force than any of his rivals; he marched thousands of Taira-loyal warriors into Kyoto, put Go-Shirakawa under house arrest, and then forced the young Emperor Takakura to abdicate in favor of Takakura’s baby son Antoku—Kiyomori’s own grandson.2
Taira Kiyomori now stood at the crest of his power. He was grandfather of the Emperor, master of the Cloistered Emperor, virtual ruler of Japan. His climb had taken over twenty years. “As Prime Minister,” the epic history Tales of the Heike tells us, “Kiyomori now held the entire realm within the four seas in the palm of his hand.” His ultimate victory lasted less than a year; and then he died, of a sudden severe fever, in March of 1181.3
Already, the backlash was building.
Its architect was one of the survivors of the Heiji Disturbance: Minamoto Yoritomo, son of the beheaded Yoshitomo. Thirteen at the time of the Disturbance, Yoritomo had been exiled by the victorious Kiyomori, rather than executed. The act of mercy had been a strategic error. In his banishment, says the Gukansho, Yoritomo “had been thinking deeply about world affairs.” He was now in his early thirties, and for two decades had been gathering allies and planning his revenge.4
He began in the southern cluster of volcanic islands known as the Izu Islands, where he had lived since his father’s death, and traveled up the eastern coast. This was traditionally Minamoto territory, and he was able to collect volunteers as he went. In a series of small battles—some defeats, but more victories—his army slowly gained strength, until he was able to establish himself strongly in the coastal city of Kamakura.
23.1 The Kamakura Shogunate
Meanwhile, Kiyomori’s son Munemori was gathering Taira adherents in Kyoto. But fourteen months of wretched weather—alternating drought and flooding, followed by a severe food shortage and then by plague—delayed the confrontation. So did the unexpected rise of a third party: Yoritomo’s cousin Yoshinaka, seven years his junior. An ambitious and skilled samurai who had lost his father in the Taira purges of 1159, Yoshinaka preferred to fight on his own account, rather than join his cousin’s campaign. He claimed the western city of Shinano for himself, and before long had accumulated an even larger following than Yoritomo.5
Munemori decided to tackle his biggest enemy first. Rather than marching directly against Yoritomo, he assembled a huge army—contemporary chronicles put it at a hundred thousand men—to drive forward against Yoshinaka.
Munemori was not a gifted strategist. He apparently believed that numbers would win the day, but his massive army was filled with press-ganged peasants, farmers, and woodcutters. When it approached Yoshinaka’s front, the Minamoto samurai stalled until nightfall by engaging the samurai of the imperial army in courteous traditional duels. As soon as dark fell, Yoshinaka ordered a herd of oxen, equipped with pine torches lashed onto their horns, driven straight at the enemy. Panicked, the inexperienced Kyoto army stampeded into a nearby narrow valley called Kurikara Pass, where the men were pinned down and slaughtered. “The mountain streams ran with their blood,” says the Tales of the Heike, “and the mount of their corpses was like a small hill.”6 Hearing of the defeat, the sitting emperor and his Taira adherents fled from Kyoto, and Yoshinaka marched straight there and occupied the city—where he was welcomed by the Cloistered Emperor Go-Shirakawa, who had been canny enough to switch allegiances and join the Minamoto cause.
The Battle of Kurikara had punctured Taira power, and over the next two years it deflated with astounding rapidity. From Kyoto, Yoshinaka pursued and destroyed as many Taira clan leaders as he could find; from his eastern headquarters, Yoritomo did the same. The five years of destruction between 1180 and 1185, the Gempei War, saw the almost complete destruction of the Taira by the Minamoto.
The culminating battle of the war took place on April 25, 1185, when a Taira fleet that carried the eight-year-old Emperor, Kiyomori’s grandson, and his grandmother, Kiyomori’s widow, was trapped at the strait of Dan-no-Ura and battered to pieces by the Minamoto navy, under the command of one of Yoritomo’s brothers. As the enemy closed in, the Emperor’s grandmother took her grandson in her arms and leapt from the ship. They were followed by their courtiers and by the defeated Taira samurai, dragged to the bottom by their armor.
Munemori, who had been responsible for the defeat at Kurikara Pass and had not managed to distinguish himself since, refused to jump until one of the Taira courtiers, embarrassed by his leader’s cowardice, pushed him off the side. He was a good swimmer, though, and one of the Minamoto boats fished him out of the water and took him prisoner. He was beheaded at Kamakura a few days later.
Later, one of the surviving members of his family remarked that Munemori’s disgraceful behavior wasn’t surprising; everyone in the clan knew that he wasn’t a real Taira. His mother had confided to them all, after the debacle of Kurikara, that she’d bought him from an umbrella seller as a baby.7
With the mass drownings, the history of the Taira in Japan came to an abrupt and utter end. Minamoto Yoritomo claimed the lordship of Japan, driving his cousin from Kyoto and taking for himself the prestigious title of utaisho, Commander of the Inner Palace Guards: a warrior’s title for a victorious fighter. Another of Go-Shirakawa’s grandsons, the three-year-old Go-Toba, was crowned Emperor. But Yoritomo controlled Japan’s fighting forces, and the Cloistered Emperor Go-Shirakawa, who had an unerring instinct for staying on the right side in a fight, recognized his rule. The struggle for power had ended as it began, with a toddler on the throne and power in the hands of others.8
The History of the Renaissance World: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Conquest of Constantinople Page 17