Holy Warriors (22 page)

Not everything worked in Saladin’s favor, however. In the summer of 1177 the arrival of a large crusading expedition under Count Philip of Flanders (following in the footsteps of the four expeditions made by his father, Count Thierry), resulted in a campaign in northern Syria. When Saladin saw the bulk of the Christian army heading away from Jerusalem he moved his own forces up from Cairo to the southern borders of the kingdom near Gaza. Baldwin IV had, unsurprisingly, been left behind, but it now fell to him “already half dead” as one writer commented, to draw upon his courage and to ride against the Muslims.
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Saladin was far too confident in his numerical superiority and failed to anticipate any active resistance from the Christians. He neglected to post sentries and when his men forded a stream near Montgisard the Frankish knights charged and destroyed the central section of the Muslim army. One of Saladin’s family was killed and the sultan himself only narrowly avoided being slain.
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While the Franks incurred losses themselves—perhaps as many as a thousand men died, and 750 were said to have been treated at the Hospital of Saint John in
Jerusalem—in terms of morale this provided a massive boost.
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News of the triumph reached the West and was widely circulated. Paradoxically, of course, this meant that it became even harder to convince Europeans to help the Holy Land—how could the settlers be so desperate for support if they had just won such a great victory?

As her brother performed heroics on the battlefield, Princess Sibylla’s period of mourning had come to an end. She had given birth to a baby boy, named Baldwin, but now it was necessary to find her a new husband and potential regent. The settlers turned to their ancestral homeland of France. In a letter to King Louis VII, the leper admitted his terrible infirmities and asked that a powerful French noble be sent to the Levant in order to take charge of the holy kingdom because “to be deprived of one’s limbs is of little help in carrying out the work of government . . . no one can heal me. It is not fitting that a hand so weak as mine should hold power when fear of Arab aggression daily presses upon the holy city and my sickness increases the enemy’s daring.”
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Baldwin tried to lead as best he could and his level of determination was astonishing: by now he could not climb onto a horse unaided and his limbs showed severe deformities.

Romance at the royal household soon brought forward another candidate to marry Sibylla. Guy of Lusignan, a young French knight, caught Sibylla’s eye and she set her heart on marrying him. Guy and Sibylla became lovers, yet the princess needed the approval of her brother, who insisted that it was his prerogative to choose the husband of the royal heiress. When the king discovered the affair he was furious and wanted to have Guy stoned to death, but the master of the Knights Templar and other nobles calmed him. In any case, the blossoming relationship could serve a political purpose as well. By coincidence, Raymond of Tripoli was marching toward the kingdom of Jerusalem, a move that seemed to presage a possible coup. His ally, Baldwin of Ibelin, had long admired the princess and was keen to marry her. When the king learned of Raymond’s approach he moved quickly to retain control over the situation and authorized the marriage between Guy and Sibylla. The wedding took place during Holy Week 1180, a breach of strict canon law and a sign that there was no wish to delay.
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Any threat to topple the king required Sibylla to be free to marry and now this possibility had been frustrated. A clear division in the Latin East was apparent with the powerful Ibelin clan lined up with Count Raymond in opposition to Baldwin, Agnes, Guy, and Patriarch Heraclius of Jerusalem.

The patriarch was a controversial character and much maligned by William of Tyre, largely because he envied Heraclius for securing the premier ecclesiastical position in the land. The latter seems to have been a rather worldly character, blessed with good looks and some considerable charm with women.
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He was known to have a mistress, Pasque, the wife of a draper whom he rewarded so richly that the man consented to the affair. After the cuckold died, Heraclius set up Pasque in a fine house and provided her with beautiful clothes and precious jewelry. As she passed by, people would exclaim “There goes the patriarch ess!” On one particularly excruciating occasion a messenger burst into a meeting of the High Court shouting, “Sir, patriarch, I bring you good news!” Heraclius assumed that this was something for the benefit of the kingdom and asked him to announce it: “The Lady Pasque has given birth to a daughter!” Not, perhaps, the forum in which a patriarch of Christ’s city would have wished such tidings to be broadcast.

The king’s leprosy was now acute and the possibility of abdication must have been raised. The High Court urged him to become reconciled to Count Raymond and the two men duly met. Some sense of Frankish unity—however temporary or shallow it turned out to be—was welcome, especially because one of their most important supporters, the Byzantine Empire, had become hostile. Manuel Comnenus, whose military might had done much to deter Muslim aggression, died in September 1180; William of Tyre described him as “a great-souled man of incomparable energy.”
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Within a couple of years, a backlash against Manuel’s pro-western policies produced a fiercely anti-Frankish stance in Constantinople.
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By mid-1182 the truce had expired and Saladin stepped up the jihad with an incursion toward Beirut. Stern resistance from the defenders and the prospect of a Frankish relief fleet prompted the sultan to withdraw, thus marking a second setback in succession; evidently the Christians were still highly formidable opponents. In fact, the Franks soon took to the offensive themselves. Prince Reynald of Antioch, now a member of the nobility of
Jerusalem through his marriage to the widowed heiress of Transjordan, planned a raid of breathtaking audacity. Reynald ordered the construction, in kit form, of five galleys which were transported by camel from Kerak down to the Gulf of Aqaba, reassembled, and then launched. Saladin suspected that the vessels would be used against the castle of Eilat and the routes across the Sinai Peninsula that linked his Egyptian and Syrian lands. While he was correct in the former belief, the latter was wrong—Reynald’s plan was far more daring: he directed his men down the Red Sea where no Christian ship had been seen for centuries and where, in consequence, there was no Muslim navy or coastal defenses.
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The Christian fleet was free to prey upon commercial and pilgrim traffic between Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula and could menace the holiest cities of Islam, Mecca and Medina, the birthplace and the burial place of the Prophet himself. As Ibn Jubayr, a contemporary Muslim, wrote, “it shocks the ears for its impiousness and profanity.”
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Such a move sharply compromised Saladin’s position as the defender of Islam. The fact that he was occupied fighting his fellow Muslims in northern Syria rather than protecting the haj pilgrimage route added to his embarrassment.

The Christians raided a town on the Egyptian coast, then crossed over the Red Sea and landed north of Jedda where they continued to cause havoc. Some locals feared this signified the approach of the Day of Judgment. Reynald was described as “the Elephant,” a reference to the name of an Abyssinian king who had led a Christian invasion of Mecca in 570.
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It was believed that he wanted to remove the Prophet’s body from his tomb in Medina and the locals sent urgent messages to Cairo. After a few weeks, al-Adil, Saladin’s brother (popularly known as Saphadin), managed to get ships of his own transported overland and they chased the Franks down to the Red Sea port of al-Hawa. The Christians were eventually cornered, forced to abandon ship and flee inland; unbowed, they headed toward Medina. Only a day from the holy city they were trapped in a waterless ravine and were either killed or surrendered. The 170 captives were sent throughout Saladin’s lands to be publicly executed—a clear contravention of Islamic law that directs the sparing of those who surrender voluntarily. So great was Saladin’s fury and embarrassment that he showed no mercy at all. Two of the men were dispatched to Mina, the place where animals are sacrificed in the course of the haj, and there they had their throats cut like sacrificial beasts.
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Prince Reynald, as the instigator of the plan, was the object
of Saladin’s greatest anger, however, and the sultan vowed to kill the author of such an affront to Islam.

By 1183 Baldwin’s health had started to decline further: he was blind, his hands and feet were severely damaged, and he had to be moved around in a litter. When the king was afflicted by a particularly bad fever he formally designated Guy as regent and asked all the nobles to swear homage to him, although he made his brother-in-law promise not to try to take the crown during his own lifetime. The Franks also faced financial problems: the pressure exerted by Saladin had taken a toll on the kingdom’s finances and in 1183 a variety of taxes were levied on all its inhabitants, regardless of race, tongue, creed, or sex, while the gold coinage issued by the crown was also much debased.
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The resources raised by such measures could be used to hire mercenaries, a contingency that became essential in the summer of 1183 when Saladin—emboldened by finally securing control over Aleppo—invaded. In the face of this crisis Guy summoned the entire military strength of the kingdom as well as enlisting any Italian merchants and western pilgrims who happened to be in the Levant. They marched to the Springs of Sapphoria in central Galilee and then proceeded to shadow the Muslim armies for two weeks before Saladin withdrew. Was this a success, in that the Christians lost no territory and hardly any men? Or was it a humiliation that the largest Frankish army yet assembled barely struck a blow in anger? William of Tyre commented that some nobles had been unwilling to offer Guy good advice because they feared that if he scored a great victory it would be impossible to unseat him. Guy was a victim of his own inexperience and the vicious political rivalry of the time. The ethos of such a militaristic society also counted against passivity, regardless of how effective a strategy it can be judged with hindsight. Criticism of Guy’s leadership reached a crescendo, and when Baldwin recovered his health he summoned the High Court of Jerusalem and dismissed his brother-in-law from the regency. By way of sealing his disapproval of Guy’s performance the king asked Raymond of Tripoli to lead the army and conduct public business when he was unfit to do so. To help define the succession he also had his five-year-old nephew crowned as his coruler, Baldwin V.
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In 1183 and 1184 Saladin returned to the offensive with two attempts on the huge castle of Kerak in Transjordan. The first of these sieges took place just after the marriage of Sibylla’s younger sister, Princess Isabella (aged twelve), and Humphrey of Toron. In one of the strange instances of chivalric
courtesy that—confusingly—lie alongside the rhetoric of holy war, the wedding party sent food down to the besiegers. In return, the couple were accorded the privilege of having the bridal suite exempted from bombardment for one night. More significantly, on both campaigns, the castle resisted Saladin’s attacks.
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Baldwin continued his effort to prevent Guy from taking power, although he worried that as Baldwin V’s stepfather he would exercise the regency again. A contemporary source explained that Guy had “neither the knowledge or ability to govern the kingdom.”
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King Baldwin turned to Raymond to fulfill this role, although the High Court insisted that the royal castles should be held by the Military Orders, a sign that some feared the count had his own designs on the crown. Raymond in turn insisted that someone other than he should be appointed the personal guardian of Baldwin V in case the child’s unexpected death could be blamed on him. Finally, and most intriguingly, it was agreed that if Baldwin V died, the succession—which would rest between Sibylla and Isabella—was to be determined by the joint decision of the pope and the rulers of France, England, and Germany. This, in theory at least, marked a startling surrender of authority by the nobles of Jerusalem and was a mark of how divided and seemingly bereft of self-regulation they perceived themselves to be. It reinforced their overt reliance on powerful western rulers for support as well as gesturing toward Christendom’s shared responsibility for the defense of the Holy Land.

This emotive issue had been raised by successive embassies to the West during the 1170s and early 1180s. Discouragingly, in 1181, Pope Alexander III had issued a crusade appeal that said: “the king [Baldwin IV] is not such a man as can rule that land, since he . . . is so severely afflicted by the just judgement of God, as we believe you are aware, that he is scarcely able to bear the continual torments of his body”—a crushing verdict on the settlers’ position.
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In 1184–85 the Franks dispatched the most senior ambassadors they had ever sent to Europe. Clearly the king could not make the journey himself but Patriarch Heraclius of Jerusalem and the masters of the Templars and Hospitallers formed a genuinely prestigious trio.
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The envoys
struggled over the Alps and moved northward to Paris where they offered King Philip II the keys of the walled city of Jerusalem and the Tower of David. This was an attempt to induce him to emulate the Emperor Charlemagne, the role model for all medieval monarchs, who accepted these symbols in the year 800 and took the city under his protection. In the perilous circumstances of 1185 Philip was well aware of the huge responsibilities this would entail and, given the fragility of his own power in France, he politely declined.

The envoys then crossed the English Channel to seek out King Henry II, who, as a man who had made previous promises to crusade and, as the closest living relative of Baldwin IV on the male side of his family, was the most logical target for the embassy. In late January 1185 they met him at Reading Abbey where Heraclius gave an impassioned sermon about the terrible danger in which Christ’s land found itself. He also offered Henry the keys to Jerusalem and the Tower of David, and while the king was said to have shown the objects great devotion he too avoided accepting them. Instead he called an assembly of the churchmen and nobles of England, as well as King William of Scotland, to the Hospitaller headquarters at Clerkenwell in March. Again Heraclius implored his audience to act but it seems that the nobles were unwilling to allow their monarch to leave his kingdom. While the patriarch could make a strong moral case for Henry to journey to the Levant, in reality the situation there was so complex and troubled that it was hardly an attractive proposition. The usual expressions of regret and promises of financial support followed and Heraclius convinced a few English nobles to commit themselves to a crusade, but the large-scale expedition he so desperately desired did not materialize. As an aside, in the weeks between the Reading and Clerkenwell assemblies, the patriarch also consecrated the Temple Church in London, familiar to a wider audience from its place in
The Da Vinci Code
. This circular chapel, designed as a copy of the Holy Sepulchre itself, was a clear signal of the Templars’ vocation and their wealth in being able to finance such a fine building.
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