by Dan Jones
The battle of Mont Gisard was the first major armed showdown between Saladin and a Christian army, and its timing was no accident. The kingdom of Jerusalem had been weakened in 1174 by the sudden death of King Amalric from the dysentery he contracted during a siege at Banyas. The jolt caused by Amalric’s death was made very much more serious by his succession: his son Baldwin IV was thirteen years old and suffering from leprosy – a grim, devastating disease that began with numbness in his limbs as a child and which would advance to cause him great pain, grotesque disfigurement, blindness and long periods of incapacity.
Leprosy was a relatively common curse of the Latin kingdom: so well known that the leper hospital situated just outside Jerusalem had been incorporated as the Order of St Lazarus in the 1140s. Its members had taken on military functions in the manner of the Hospitallers and Templars. But the only care that could be given to lepers was palliative, as over a period of years the bacteria numbed the sufferer’s extremities and secondary infections caused fingers, toes and parts of the face to rot, lesions to appear all over the body and the eyesight and respiratory system to fail. The only uncertainty was how long it would take the victim to die.
For three years Saladin watched the leper king Baldwin IV struggle to take control of his kingdom, while he himself secured his position as sultan of Syria and Egypt and manoeuvred against Nur al-Din’s partisans in Aleppo and Mosul. By 1177 he was ready to test the strength of the crusader states. In the late summer he assembled a large army in Egypt, marched into Frankish territory, bypassed a small Christian force scrambled to stall him at Ascalon, and advanced rapidly towards Jerusalem itself, burning homes and villages as he went. King Baldwin, sick and scarcely able to lead in person, was supported by a number of high-ranking Christian lords including the pugnacious former prince of Antioch, Reynald of Châtillon, whose decade and a half of captivity in Aleppo had only fostered an unbreakable desire to make war on the soldiers of Islam. In November 1177 Reynald had recruited Master Odo of St Amand and eighty Templar knights on the king’s behalf, and together they sallied out of Gaza on a mission to pursue Saladin’s massive army and force it out of the kingdom and back to Egypt by whatever means possible.
The Templars riding in battle formation were a formidable sight. Their original Latin Rule had by now been expanded with dozens more clauses composed in French, which spoke not to religious routine but to the hard business of fighting on the plains and mountain passes of Syria and Palestine. Templar hierarchy was strictly defined, with the master* supported by officers including the seneschal, who was his second-in-command, the marshal, who played a leading role when the Templars rode in the field, and regional commanders, or preceptors, with responsibility in individual cities or lands. The turcopolier was responsible for recruiting and organizing the Syrian-born light cavalry used as mercenary auxiliaries on campaign. The draper was a quartermaster, ensuring that the knights and sergeants were properly equipped with the weapons, armour, uniforms, bedding, camping equipment and everything else they needed in the field.
Discipline was valued above all else. The knights rode behind their piebald flag and their Rule laid out strict mandates for behaviour when they were in camp, riding in a column in the field or launching an attack. Templars were bound by their vow of obedience: to God, to the Rule and to their military superiors.
Templar knights were forbidden to load baggage or saddle their horses without an explicit order from the marshal. When any such order was given, the brothers were expected to respond with a brisk affirmative, ‘De par Dieu!’, meaning ‘On behalf of God!’, before doing their duty immediately. On the march the knights rode in columns while their squires walked in front, carrying their lances. On night marches the whole column proceeded in near-total silence, and even during daylight hours only very necessary discussions were permitted. Leaving one’s place in the column was discouraged. During combat, breaking ranks was utterly forbidden for any reason except to help a fellow brother whose life was in immediate peril. The brothers rode wordlessly and determinedly on to the battlefield, breaking their silence only when the trumpet blast ordering a charge was sounded: then they would ride together while singing Psalm 115:13
Not to us, Lord, not to us,
but to your name be the glory,
because of your love and faithfulness.
To scatter or flee in the face of danger was considered a disgrace. Any brother who did so would have his horse taken from him and would be marched back to camp on foot – a particularly humiliating punishment for a knight, since his whole martial identity rested on his horsemanship and ability in the saddle. Even a brother who was maimed to the point of incapacity was forbidden to leave his squadron without express permission from his commander. Retreat from the battlefield was prohibited until the army in which the Templars were fighting was defeated.
This willingness to be the last men standing was what made the Templars such a valuable component in any army assembled by the kings of Jerusalem. It was why the late Amalric had allowed them such latitude, despite the order’s defiance of his authority and policy. And it was why Amalric’s son, the leper king Baldwin IV, and Reynald of Châtillon took eighty of the Gaza Templars to Mont Gisard when Saladin’s armies were spotted there in the winter of 1177.
Judging by an account written by the thirteenth-century scholar and chronicler Abu Shama, Saladin’s army was not expecting much resistance from the Franks. The sultan allowed his soldiers to fan out across the countryside, pillaging villages rather than holding together. ‘Fortune was against them,’ noted Abu Shama grimly, and he was not mistaken.14 The Latin army, bearing before them the Jerusalem fragment of the True Cross – their most holy relic – appeared unexpectedly and bore down on the Muslims in the manner they knew best: the heavy cavalry charge, in which horsemen threw themselves headlong at the enemy with each mail-clad warrior deployed as fast and as hard as was possible. Performed properly, this was an awesome sight and Muslim armies were traditionally poor at defending against it. The Frankish knights were heavily outnumbered, but they came at Saladin’s men with righteous fury.
Abu Shama waxed poetic in his account of the Frankish charge: ‘agile as wolves, barking like dogs... they attacked en masse, like the burning of the flame’.15 They picked their moment beautifully, waiting for Saladin to attempt a tactical rearrangement of the troops he had close to hand: attacking with purpose at a moment of confusion.16 Nevertheless, a hard fight ensued. Saladin’s nephew and stalwart emir (or noble commander) Taqi al-Din ‘fought valiantly with the sword and the lance’, but around him men were falling by the hundred. ‘Many of his brave officers found martyrdom’, wrote Abu Shama, ‘and went to taste the joys of the eternal home.’17
Saladin fought surrounded by his elite personal bodyguard of Mamluks: slave soldiers abducted from the Asian steppe and raised as warriors from childhood, who wore yellow silk over their breastplates, matching the sultan’s battle dress of the same colour. ‘Always surrounding their lord, they endeavour with one accord to protect him from harm, and they cling to him even unto death,’ wrote William of Tyre.18 Like the Templars, these men were defined by their dedication to self-sacrifice, supreme martial training and refusal to leave the battlefield, even when faced with overwhelming defeat. ‘It often happens that while the rest make good their escape by flight, nearly all the Mamluks fall,’ wrote William of Tyre.19
Mont Gisard saw a great slaughter of Mamluks. Those who sought to flee the battlefield were chased for miles across treacherous marshland known as the Swamp of Starlings, flinging away their armour and weapons to make a faster escape. One hundred valuable breastplates were collected by the Frankish trophy-hunters who picked over the battle site after the fighting was done. Saladin escaped death but he was humiliated and suffered a miserable journey back to his base in Egypt, battered by vile winter weather, his men pining for their lost friends and abandoned food and drink, and his caravans robbed by Bedouin tribesmen on the road to Cairo. It was one of
the worst military defeats Saladin ever suffered, and it lived with him for many years: an indignity that demanded revenge.20
The eighty Templars of Gaza who fought at Mont Gisard shared in the glory of a bloody success, which the acting master of the Hospitallers reported as ‘a happy victory over an incalculable horde of Saracens’.21 Few knew that they had also contributed to the triumph by means of cunning of the first order. Two sons of Saladin’s nephew Taqi al-Din were present at the battle. One of them, Ahmad, ‘a very handsome youth’ who had only just come into a full beard, managed to shoot a Latin knight with an arrow but was killed shortly thereafter, attempting a second charge on enemy lines.22 The second, whom Abu Shama named as ‘Chahinchah’ had a rather more complicated story. Prior to the battle he was approached by an agent in Damascus who was secretly working for the Templars. This covert asset had managed to convince Chahinchah that in return for a pledge of allegiance King Baldwin was prepared to install him as ruler of Cairo in his great-uncle’s place.
Despite the obvious improbability that the leper king would be in a position to turn Saladin out of Egypt, let alone control its succession, this plot had proceeded some way and the Damascus agent had presented the dupe son with forged documents seeming to authorize his defection to the Christian side. Chahinchah had agreed to a personal meeting, but was led up the garden path; he was taken to a ‘solitary place’ and handed over to the Templars, who chained him up and took him away as a captive. He was held by the order for more than seven years and eventually used as leverage for the release of Christian prisoners from Saladin’s own dungeons. For all their well-publicized military competence, the Templars also brought sophisticated intelligence to the theatre of conflict. In 1177 they made use of both in helping to contain Saladin as he made his first serious probe into the Frankish kingdom.
But the sultan of Syria and Egypt was a not a man accustomed to swallowing defeat.
*
A new crusader castle was under construction on a hillside beyond the River Jordan, between Huleh and Lake Tiberias, in a place called Jacob’s Ford. Ground was struck in October 1178 on the order of the king of Jerusalem, and in the six months that followed foundations were dropped and walls ‘of marvellous thickness and adequate height’ had begun to emerge.23 The position of this new fortress was both strategic and divine: it was here that the Old Testament patriarch Jacob had stopped to divide his people into two bands, sent a message to his vengeful brother Esau, and wrestled with an angel of God who dislocated his hip.24 Muslims called it the Ford of Lamentations, and held it in just as much veneration as the Christians. To this ancient significance was added a more practical value: Jacob’s Ford was an important river crossing on the road linking Acre and Damascus, and was part of the much longer caravan route known as the Via Maris, connecting Egypt with Mesopotamia. It ultimately formed the critical central stage of a global trading artery running from China in the Far East to Morocco.
The pass at Jacob’s Ford was a troublesome spot, plagued by bandits and highwaymen, who launched lightning raids from their mountain hideout above the Zebulon Valley, robbing travellers and making the road near impassable without a military escort. The new castle would allow for a permanent protective garrison, securing the passage of pilgrims and traders through Christian Palestine. It also promised to provide security from potential attacks out of Damascus, which lay just a day’s march away – a particularly pressing need in the light of Saladin’s foray the previous year.
The castle at Jacob’s Ford was a joint project between the crown and the Order of the Temple. Throughout the winter of 1178–9 stonemasons worked on raising the walls, while patrols of Frankish soldiers defended the road and hillsides from bandits, ambushing and killing as many as they could. By April 1179 the castle was coming along: three-quarters of the foundations had been dug, a perimeter wall with five gates and a single tower built and an oven and water cistern installed. Workmen continued busily toiling with spades, hoes and wheelbarrows, shuttling back and forth between large piles of stone, lime and pebbles.25 As other parts of the kingdom were in need of attention, Baldwin IV returned to Jerusalem and handed the half-built fortress over to Odo of Saint Amand and the knights of the Temple to defend, complete, adapt and furnish.
There was plenty more work for them to oversee: a second, outer, perimeter wall was planned, as was a moat and gatehouses connecting two courtyards. Hundreds of workmen lived alongside the knights and sergeants who formed the military garrison: masons, architects, blacksmiths, sword-makers, armourers and Muslim prisoners, who were put to work as labourers.26 Some 1,500 men were camped around the fortress complex. The order was able to fund this huge operation, which included building as well as defending the finished castle, thanks to the financial rights it had been granted in the land around it. If the castle at Jacob’s Ford was not structurally complete, it was at least amply provided for and ready to begin serving its purpose.27
Within weeks of the raising of the piebald banner over the castle, its partial defences were tested. The construction could scarcely have been concealed from Saladin, who rightly viewed the fortress as a provocative attempt to shift the balance of power in the region between Christian Acre and Muslim Damascus, and a basic affront to religious propriety: the infidels were building on ground that was held sacred to all good Muslims. Almost as soon as King Baldwin and his entourage left Jacob’s Ford, Saladin brought an army to Banyas – well within striking distance of the castle – and in the laconic words of Ibn al-Athir, he ‘remained a while and dispatched raids into Frankish territory’.28 Ibn al-Athir heard that the sultan made an offer of 60,000 dinars for the castle to be demolished peacefully; the offer was rebuffed.29 So in the days leading up to Trinity Sunday, 27 May 1179, Saladin prepared to compel the Templars to abandon the castle by force.
According to William of Tyre, Saladin moved troops to the castle walls and ‘without intermission sent forth dense showers of arrows and harassed the besieged within its walls with repeated assaults’.30 This was an exploratory mission, and it ended after only a few days when a Templar called Renier of Mareuil shot an arrow from behind the dusty, unfinished battlements and managed to fatally wound one of Saladin’s most senior emirs. Saladin withdrew, but he did not stay away for long.
Realizing that they could not leave Odo and the Templars to defend the building site indefinitely, Baldwin’s council scrambled to get troops back to Jacob’s Ford via Tiberias. Marching through the countryside surrounding Banyas they could see smoke rising everywhere from villages burned by the sultan’s army: urgent action was needed.
On Sunday 9 June the king’s cavalry split from the foot soldiers accompanying them. The horsemen riding ahead of the rest of the army encountered a group of Saladin’s forces out on a plundering expedition and bested them in a skirmish. Both sides fell back. The Latin knights pursued the scattered plunderers for several miles, but before long they ran into Saladin himself, accompanied by a far more substantial body of men. Suddenly, fortunes were reversed: after a brief attempt to stand and fight, the Latins now found themselves fleeing for their lives. Some scattered into the mountains, others made for the nearby castle of Beaufort. King Baldwin IV, who was carried with the army, was helped to safety by his personal bodyguard, but around 270 Christian horsemen were captured and taken prisoner. Disastrously for the Templars, this included their master, Odo of Saint Amand.
Odo had spent time in prison before, having been locked up in Damascus in the days of Nur al-Din along with Bertrand of Blancfort. William of Tyre held him in particular contempt, deliberately misquoting the book of Job to describe him as ‘a wicked man, haughty and arrogant, in whose nostrils dwelt the spirit of fury’.31 Without being very specific about the nature of Odo’s mistakes, William blamed him for the rout and wrote that ‘many people laid at his door the loss and never-dying shame of this disaster’.32 In truth Odo was hardly alone in his failings. Ibn al-Athir noted that the other prisoners taken at Jacob’s Ford included Balia
n of Ibelin, ‘the highest-ranking Frank after the king’, as well as Hugh of Galilee, lord of Tiberias, the master of the Hospitallers ‘and other notorious knights and despots’. The prisoners were taken from the battlefield as Saladin returned to Banyas, many to face long and miserable spells awaiting ransom.
For Odo of Saint Amand, this was the last taste of freedom he would enjoy. ‘Within the year he died a captive in a squalid prison, mourned by no one’, wrote William of Tyre. The Persian scholar Imad al-Din was even less sympathetic: ‘the master of the Templars went from his prison cell to the dungeon of hell’.33 The order later reclaimed his body in exchange for a Muslim leader whom they were keeping prisoner. It was a sorry end for the eighth master of the order.
Imad al-Din recorded Saladin’s reaction when he first learned that a fortress was being built at Jacob’s Ford. The exact words are more likely a literary invention than direct reported speech, but they capture his characteristically matter-of-fact approach to wartime leadership:
To those who told him that the castle, when constructed, would control weak points on the Muslim frontier and make safe passage very difficult, Saladin replied ‘Let them finish and we will then go and destroy it from top to bottom so that no trace of it remains.’34
At the end of the summer of 1179 that is precisely what he set out to do.
Saladin’s men arrived from Banyas on Friday 24 August with all the tools for a siege. They brought trebuchets capable of battering the fortress with large stones, cut trees for timber and stripped vines from the ground to build protective shields to keep the trebuchet operators safe from crossbow bolts aimed from the castle walls.35 They also brought ladders, digging equipment and fire.
Knowing that reinforcements were likely to arrive quickly, Saladin planned for an attack that would last no more than a week. The siege began around 5 p.m. with a full-blooded assault on a barbican (a fortified outer gatehouse) close by the main castle walls. Professional soldiers were accompanied by enthusiastic hangers-on, who had joined up for excitement, booty, the glory of jihad or all three. According to Ibn al-Athir: