Holy Warriors (23 page)

By the time Heraclius returned to the Levant, however, Baldwin IV had finally—mercifully—passed away: he was buried alongside his ancestors at the foot of Mount Calvary in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. While one might judge that he held on to power for too long, and that the combination of his unpredictable health and his desire to exercise authority caused serious inconsistencies in the government of the land, it is undeniable that his bravery
in confronting a horrific illness induced respect even among his enemies. Imad ad-Din wrote that “in spite of his infirmities they [the Franks] were loyal to him, they gave him every encouragement . . . being satisfied to have him as their ruler . . . they were concerned to keep him in office but paid no attention to his leprosy . . . he was obeyed by them . . . and saw that there was peace amongst them.”
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Both Saladin and Raymond of Tripoli wanted a truce and in the spring of 1185 settled upon a two-year arrangement. The sultan used this period to his advantage and in March 1186 he finally persuaded the ruler of Mosul to acknowledge him as overlord and to give him military help if required. His empire now consisted of Egypt, Syria, and the Jazira (northern Iraq today, including Mosul)—a vast series of lands, tenaciously assembled and maintained in a loose confederation by Saladin’s military strength, his persuasive diplomacy, and his repeated calls to jihad and reminders of the duty of good Muslims to evict the Christians from Jerusalem.

In the summer of 1186 Baldwin V died: he had been a sickly child for much of his life and his passing was hardly unexpected. Predictably there were rumors that Raymond now planned to take the throne for himself and he seemed to confirm such suspicions when he tried to gather together the majority of nobles at Nablus. It seems, however, that he had underestimated the level of support for Sibylla, and when a significant number of senior figures, including Prince Reynald and Patriarch Heraclius, assembled for Baldwin’s funeral it was this latter group that seized the initiative by backing Sibylla (rather than her younger sister, Isabella, or Count Raymond) as the next monarch. The main stumbling block was Guy, already cast aside by the leper king for his perceived lack of leadership ability. It seems that Sibylla was required to divorce Guy before she could become queen. With the connivance of Heraclius, she agreed to this, on the condition that she alone could select her new husband. Sibylla announced her divorce from Guy and then turned to the assembled nobles and said:

Her dumbstruck audience could only watch in silence as the queen placed the royal crown on Guy’s head. Her actions were within the letter of the agreement and this brilliant and breathtakingly audacious move carried the day. Queen Melisende would have delighted in her granddaughter’s political acumen and brazen determination to preserve power. This was also a very open show of her love and loyalty toward Guy. Roger of Wendover, an early-thirteenth-century English writer, was impressed: “A most praiseworthy woman, to be commended both for her modesty and for her courage. She so arranged matters that the kingdom obtained a ruler while she retained a husband.”
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But tensions between Guy’s men and the locals continued to emphasize his status as an outsider, and compromised his ability to draw the disparate factions together. After the coronation his Poitevin associates infuriated the people of Jerusalem by singing: “Despite the pulains, we shall have a Poitevin king”: pulain was a term to describe the second-and third-generation Frankish settlers in the Levant.
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Raymond and the Ibelins were furious at being outfoxed, and the count’s ambition drove him toward the Muslim camp. He struck a deal that allowed Saladin’s army to move through his Galilean lands if, in the future, the sultan would make him king. It almost beggars belief to register that one of the most powerful Frankish nobles was an ally of the leader of the jihad just under a year before the fall of Jerusalem. Quite how Raymond expected this arrangement to tally with Saladin’s principles of holy war was unclear. As the Aleppan writer Ibn al-Athir noted: “Thus their [the Franks’] unity was disrupted and their cohesion broken. This was one of the most important factors that brought about the conquest of their territories and the liberation of Jerusalem.”
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In the winter of 1186 Prince Reynald attacked a caravan crossing his territory in Transjordan, an act contrary to the ongoing truce.
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When he refused to compensate the Muslims, Saladin had an excuse to fight—not, by this stage, that he was going to do anything else. The pressure he had generated through the creation of his fragile coalition meant that nothing other than all-out holy war would satisfy his allies: if he failed to attack, then his confederation would undoubtedly disintegrate. His forces gathered at Damascus and once the truce had formally expired on April 5, 1187, the sultan began to launch a series of exploratory raids. Thanks to the foolhardy sense of honor of Gerard of Ridefort, master of the Templars, the Franks
soon suffered a major defeat. With a force of only 140 knights and against the advice of his colleagues whom he accused of cowardice, he rashly decided to engage a Muslim army of seven thousand. Only three Templars—including, ironically, Gerard—escaped, while other casualties included the master of the Hospitallers, Roger of Moulins. The Battle of Cresson is often overlooked because of the events at Hattin two months later, but the loss of over one hundred of the Christians’ finest troops, as well as one of their senior commanders, was a significant blow to morale and resources.
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Saladin’s aggression finally pushed Raymond of Tripoli into some form of homage—however superficial—to King Guy, and he duly expelled the Muslims from his lands. Ibn al-Athir noted that after the Battle of Cresson the count’s vassals had threatened to withdraw their allegiance to him if he failed to act.
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By the summer of 1187 both sides had gathered their men for battle.
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The Franks drew together almost the entire military strength of the kingdom of Jerusalem: the Military Orders put forward about six hundred knights while only skeleton garrisons remained in the towns and castles. The total Christian force probably numbered around sixteen thousand; Saladin held a worthwhile advantage with at least twenty thousand troops, of which perhaps twelve thousand were mounted. Once across the River Jordan the sultan presented the Franks with the same dilemma as four years previously—should they fight, taking an even greater risk given the lack of almost any other troops beyond the army in the field? Or should they repeat the strategy of 1183—shadow the Muslims and wait for their forces to break up? Count Raymond appeared to have more to lose than most because on July 2 Saladin’s army besieged his wife in the citadel of Tiberias. This carefully calculated test of chivalric resolve was designed to trigger Guy’s responsibilities to rescue the wife of his vassal, although at first the ruse seemed unlikely to succeed. The Franks, assembled at their customary muster point at the Springs of Sapphoria, held firm because to reach Tiberias required a twenty-mile march across an arid plateau in the height of the summer. Ibn al-Athir believed Raymond—ignoring the captivity of his wife—advocated inactivity; he claimed the count argued “If [Saladin]
takes Tiberias he will not be able to stay there and when he has left it and gone away we will retake it; for if he chooses to stay there he will be unable to keep his army together, for they will not put up for long with being kept away from their homes and families.”
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A council of war on July 2 confirmed this strategy and the camp went to sleep believing that they were to remain at Sapphoria. Late at night, however, Gerard of Ridefort sought a private audience with the king.

In the flickering candlelight of the royal tent, the master of the Templars, who had shown his rampant antipathy toward Islam at the Battle of Cresson three months previously, repeatedly urged the king to fight. He reminded Guy of what had happened the previous time he took a passive approach and that Raymond of Tripoli, the very man who now advocated caution, had been the beneficiary. While the king had been accused of cowardice in 1183 he could now rebut such claims in the most emphatic fashion possible. This discussion was not simply about strategy, however; underlying Gerard’s persuasive suggestions was a deep personal animosity toward Raymond. Back in the 1170s, when Gerard was a lay knight, the count had promised him a good marriage to the heiress of the castle of Botrun. Yet Raymond reneged on the agreement and gave her to a Pisan merchant in return for her weight in gold. Gerard was hugely insulted to be displaced by an Italian trader and stormed off to Jerusalem where he joined the Templars. Now, a decade later, at this time of crisis, he had a chance to face down his hated rival: “Sire [Guy], do not trust the advice of the count for he is a traitor, and you well know that he has no love for you and wants you to be put to shame and to lose the kingdom . . . let us move off immediately and go and defeat Saladin.”
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Guy vacillated: should he hold to the advice of his council and risk his reputation again, or should he change his mind and act boldly at the risk of losing the Holy Land? In the end it seems the psychological scars of his earlier humiliation were too deep to ignore and, in a dramatic volte-face, on the morning of July 3 the king commanded the heralds to sound the order to march. The nobles were both horrified and amazed; they asked on whose advice such a decision had been taken. Guy sharply rebuffed them and simply told them to obey him and get ready to move.

Under normal circumstances, the twenty miles from Sapphoria to Tiberias was a day’s hard march; the problem was that by breaking camp the Franks abandoned their only sure supply of water and then offered themselves
up as a very slow-moving target to the Muslim forces—in other words they surrendered the strategic initiative. The vanguard was Count Raymond, in the center was King Guy, and in the rear, the Knights Templar. The Christians advanced eastward and reached the springs of Turan about seven miles away. This seemed a good place to pause, but they pressed onward, a move that Saladin himself believed was fatal. In a letter written immediately after the battle he suggested that “the Devil seduced [Guy] into doing the opposite of what he had in mind and made to seem good to him what was not his real wish and intention. So he left the water and set out towards Tiberias . . . through pride and arrogance.”
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In fact, the springs at Turan were simply insufficient to sustain the Christian army and they had no choice but to keep going.

In contrast, to the south, Saladin was comfortably provisioned at the village of Kafr Sabt and now he utilized his superior numbers to divide his troops and sent some to seize Turan and prevent a Frankish retreat. At this point he had effectively surrounded the Christians: “they were as closely beset as in a noose, while still marching on as though being driven to a death that they could see before them, convinced of their doom and aware the following day they would be visiting their graves,” the contemporary writer Beha ad-Din grimly observed.
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The sultan dispatched some of his cavalry to crash into the Templars, a tactic that slowed up the entire march. Time and again Muslim mounted archers poured arrow fire into the Christian lines, yet the Franks dared not break ranks and charge for fear of losing any sense of order at all. It was no longer possible to reach Tiberias that day and Guy decided to camp overnight on the plateau. A few nearby cisterns offered a little water but the evening brought no real respite after the exertions of the march and the harrowing Muslim arrow fire. Imad ad-Din offered this excited description of the situation, first recapping the events of the day: “The day was hot, the [Frankish] people were on fire [with the heat], the midday sun shone with an incessant strength. The troops had drunk the contents of their water bottles and had nothing more. Night separated the two sides and cavalry barred both the roads. Islam passed the night face to face with unbelief, monotheism at war with Trinitarianism, the way of righteousness looking down on error, faith opposing polytheism. Meanwhile several circles of hell prepared themselves and several ranks of heaven congratulated themselves; Malik [the guardian of hell] waited and Ridwan [the guardian of heaven] rejoiced.”
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Saladin’s troops continued to enjoy plentiful supplies as camels carried barrels of water up from Lake Tiberias. They were boosted further by the delivery of four hundred loads of extra arrows intended to kill the remaining Frankish horses and to prevent the Christians from using their famed charge. Morale in Saladin’s camp soared—“they could smell victory in the air and . . . they became more aggressive and daring.” Dawn broke at around 4:30 on the morning of July 4 and, as the first fingers of light crept over the hills of eastern Galilee, the exhausted Christian soldiers stirred themselves for another day of torment.
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Guy’s doomed army soon set out, yet the Muslims did little to bother them, preferring to wait for the full heat of the day to sap their opponents’ strength even further. With the wind blowing toward the Christians Saladin commanded his men to set fire to the dry brush that lay close to the Frankish forces, thus parching their throats even more. Yet another level of distress was generated by the constant drumming and sounding of horns and bugles, a fearsome noise designed to add a sense of hopelessness and disorientation among their opponents.

Slowly the Franks trudged forward but now the Muslim horsemen grew ever closer. Saladin himself rode up and down his lines, encouraging and restraining his men as appropriate. His archers “sent up clouds of arrows like a swarm of locusts” and killed many of the Frankish horses, while the lightly armored Christian foot soldiers suffered heavy losses as they dragged their tired and dehydrated bodies eastward.
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Controversially, Count Raymond led his own men (around two hundred knights) in a charge toward the enemy lines only for the Muslims to open ranks and let him pass through to gallop down the hill away from the main plateau. Some felt this was further evidence of his friendship with Saladin; a more practical interpretation suggests that it made little sense to resist a group of men trying to flee—furthermore, given the lie of the land, they would hardly turn around and try to fight uphill back through the Muslim army. For those Christians that remained, Raymond’s escape was a further blow.