Holy Warriors (24 page)

The Frankish advance had almost ground to a halt. The foot soldiers’ morale was all but broken and they decided to stop and make camp on a hill now known as the Horns of Hattin. This is the crater of an ancient volcano and it still stands proud and isolated on the bare and largely uninhabited plateau. Today, the discordant clank of distant sheep’s bells is the only sound to break the silence on this tough, barren landscape. With nothing else to disturb the scene one can pause and imagine the desperate struggle
played out below. To the east lie the glittering waters of Lake Tiberias—a tantalizing sight for the desperate Christian soldiers; the “Horns” are formed by the northern and southern sides of the crater, while the western edge of the rim is broken to leave a natural ramp down to the plateau. Back in 1187, the surviving foot soldiers struggled up to the crater where they must have found some shelter from the relentless Muslim bombardment—yet they probably realized as well that there was no chance of escape. Guy knew the knights needed to stay with the archers to have any protection for themselves and, with the king’s red tent at their center, the Christians prepared to play their last cards.

Given their desperate position the Franks had few options open to them—perhaps their best hope was to strike a single decisive blow. The remaining knights gathered together and twice hurled themselves down the slope toward the compact group of Muslim horsemen who guarded Saladin. The plan was to kill the sultan in the belief that if he died then the remainder of his forces would simply crumble away. It was a bold idea that came perilously close to success: certainly the troops around Saladin suffered heavy losses; the sultan himself was said to have been pale with worry and anxiously tugging at his beard. On both occasions, however, the Muslims rallied and forced the Christians back up the hill. After the second of these counterattacks most of the knights were reduced to fighting on foot while their exertions had only increased their thirst. Down the hill, Saladin’s son watched his men surge into the crater. He turned to his father and shouted, “We have beaten them!” Ibn al-Athir reported Saladin’s curt response: “‘Be quiet! We have not beaten them until that tent falls.’ As he spoke Guy’s tent crumpled. The sultan dismounted, prostrated himself in thanks to God Almighty and wept for joy.”
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The Christian cause was broken; Guy himself was taken soon after, as was the True Cross, a huge gold and jeweled object that contained the wood upon which it was believed that Christ was crucified. The spiritual importance of this as the talisman of the Christian army was something clearly understood by the Muslims: “In their [the Franks’] eyes, its capture was more important than the loss of the king; it was the worst thing that happened to them on the field of battle because that cross was irreplaceable . . . its veneration was their prescribed duty . . . they fainted at its appearance . . . they gave their blood for it. So when the Great Cross was taken, great was the calamity that befell them and their vigour disappeared.”
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In the aftermath of the battle Saladin could at last extract vengeance on
Prince Reynald.
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The sultan ordered King Guy and the prince to be brought before him. Exhausted and thirsty the two disheveled warriors knelt at his feet. Saladin gave Guy a cup of cool, refreshing iced julep water—this was a sign of safe conduct and the king gratefully took it and drank. When the king moved to pass the cup to Reynald, Saladin rebuked him and said that he had not offered a drink to the prince. He then gave Reynald the choice of converting to Islam or facing death: apostasy was never an option and the prince declined the proposal, thereby sealing his own fate. The sultan had not forgotten the insult of Reynald’s attack on Medina, nor his raid on the pilgrim caravan, and he struck out with a terrible blow from his scimitar. Some claimed that Reynald died from this, other sources suggest that it severed an arm and Saladin’s bodyguards rushed forward to hack the mortally wounded man to death. In any event, this marked the end of one of the foremost Frankish nobles, a man of mercurial temperament, great military skill, but also unremitting brutality. To some in the West he was viewed as a true martyr and a text titled the
Passio Reginaldi (The Passion of Reynald)
was written to lament his death and to urge revenge for his loss.
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The captured Templars and Hospitallers fared little better. As the bitterest enemies of Islam and as a religious order who would never convert or pay ransoms, they were doomed. Herded together for a mass execution, their death was especially grisly because Saladin summoned his Sufi holy men to perform the task. These individuals were unaccustomed to wielding blades and so the wretched event became even more prolonged than necessary. Piles of bones were said to have remained visible for years afterward. The other prisoners—nobles, knights, and foot soldiers alike—were shackled together, thirty to a single rope. For the wealthy there was the prospect of ransom, for the others it was the slave auctions of the Middle East, although with such a glut on the market the sellers complained bitterly about low prices. Saladin, meanwhile, sent out messages to proclaim his success and he memorialized his achievement by ordering the construction of a Dome of Victory on the site of the battle.
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The kingdom of Jerusalem now paid heavily for committing so many of its resources to the field at Hattin: the land lay almost defenseless. Saladin’s
armies swept through the Christian territories and within weeks the majority of settlements had fallen to his men. Only Tyre, Kerak, Tripoli, Antioch, and a few northern castles held out. Jerusalem itself, the ultimate prize, awaited the sultan. “Islam wooed Jerusalem . . . making heard above the cry of grief from the [Dome of the] Rock . . . the reply . . . to bring the exiled faith back to her own country and dwelling place and to drive away from the al-Aqsa those whom God drove away with his curse. Saladin marched forward to take up the reins of Jerusalem that now hung loose, to silence the Christian clappers and allow the muezzin to be heard again . . . to purify Jerusalem of the pollution of those races, of the filth of the dregs of humanity.”
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The few remaining Frankish knights gathered for the final defense of the holy city. Given the enormous disparities between the two armies the Christians knew full well that the situation was hopeless, but out of duty and desperation they had to make a stand. Patriarch Heraclius, Balian of Ibelin (Baldwin’s brother), and Queen Sibylla led the resistance in a city crowded with refugees from across the Latin East. The leadership ordered the walls to be strengthened and catapults were constructed to help in the fight.

The siege began in late September and for five days the Muslims circled the city looking for a weak spot. They fixed on the northernmost section—ironically at exactly the same point the First Crusaders had broken in eighty-eight years earlier. Fierce exchanges of arrow and artillery fire followed and both sides suffered heavy losses as the Franks made a series of sallies. So extreme was the situation inside Jerusalem that Heraclius actually preached a crusade and formally offered the remission of all sins to those who helped to resist the attack. Strictly speaking, only the pope or his authorized agents could launch a crusade, but in these circumstances the patriarch felt little need to follow protocol.
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Frankish women cut off their children’s hair and priests and nuns processed barefoot around the shrines of Jerusalem to try to convince God to save them, but to no avail.

Soon the Muslims seized the outer defenses and a special shield wall enabled archers to set up a continuous rain of arrow fire; meanwhile, a group of sappers began to mine the walls. At this point the defenders realized that all was lost and they started to parley. A delegation was sent to ask Saladin for terms, but interestingly—and in complete contrast to the sultan’s general reputation for mercy—he reacted angrily and shouted: “I will treat you only as you treated the inhabitants when you conquered it in [1099], by
killing, enslaving and requiting evil with evil.”
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Balian requested a personal audience with Saladin but he met with the same uncompromising response. Perhaps expecting this, he set out an alternative proposal to the sultan: if the Christians were not granted their lives, then he swore that they would kill their wives and children, destroy all their property, slaughter the five thousand Muslim prisoners in their hands, and then dismantle the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque stone by stone. They would then sally out and fight with nothing at all to lose to kill as many Muslims as possible. In other words, Saladin would have to pay such a high price to avenge the atrocities of the First Crusade that his own achievement would be irrevocably stained, and the holy places of Islam destroyed.

The leading emirs advised the sultan to offer terms—everyone to be ransomed within forty days or to be treated as a slave. Men would be freed for ten dinars, women for five, and children for two. Balian offered 30,000 dinars on behalf of all the poor and this was accepted. A treaty was sealed and the keys to the city were carried out—at last, Saladin had achieved his great ambition.
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On October 2, 1187, the emir made his formal entry into Jerusalem—by a wonderful coincidence this was also the anniversary of the Prophet’s Night Journey from Jerusalem into heaven—a cause for even greater celebration. As the city surrendered to his army and the banners of Islam flew proudly over the battlements, Saladin could reflect on the thirteen hard years that he had spent entreating his fellow Muslims to follow the jihad and reclaim Jerusalem for their faith. Once his troops entered the city a small group quickly headed for the Dome of the Rock, on top of which stood a large golden cross. They scrambled to the top of the dome and toppled the cross to the ground, shouting: “God is great!” Truly this moment symbolized the triumph of Islam.
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To emphasize his victory Saladin had the cross, which was made of copper coated with gold, sent to the caliph of Baghdad, who, in turn, demonstrated his contempt for Christianity by burying it beneath the threshold of the Bab al-Nuri Mosque in Baghdad in order that his people could tread upon it as a sign of disrespect.
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The sultan’s holy men purified the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque (the former headquarters of the Templars) with rose water and a week after the conquest they held Friday prayers. A Damascene preacher, Ibn al-Zaki, won a competition (each competitor had sent in a manuscript of their sermon) to have the honor of giving the first sermon in the al-Aqsa Mosque. He had foreseen the reconquest of Jerusalem ten years before and,
dressed in a fine black robe given to him by the sultan, he delivered a powerful piece of oratory. Ibn al-Zaki reminded his audience of the centrality of Jerusalem to Islam as the dwelling place of Abraham, the location for the Prophet’s ascent to heaven, the first direction of prayer for Muslims, and as the place where mankind will assemble on the Day of Judgment. He compared Saladin’s victory to that of the Prophet himself at the Battle of Badr (624) and mentioned the presence of angels, seen in 1187 and reported in 624 as well. He reminded his listeners that the victory was God’s doing, not their own, and he encouraged them to stay firm in their jihad. Saladin himself—described as “the champion and protector of God’s holy land”—thoroughly approved of the call for Muslims to stay united for the sake of Jerusalem.
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The sultan commanded that Nur ad-Din’s great pulpit be brought from Aleppo and installed in its proper place. The workmanship of this object was praised by everyone who saw it, and it stood in situ until 1969 when an arsonist destroyed it.
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Patriarch Heraclius was allowed to leave Jerusalem as a free man; moreover, he was permitted to take many of the riches of his church with him. Some of Saladin’s advisers suggested that the sultan should have kept these treasures but he took only the statutory ten dinars. Queen Sibylla was treated courteously and permitted to travel with her retinue to see King Guy in prison at Nablus. Ibn al-Athir recorded that sixty thousand men were present in Jerusalem and that most gave the ransom or were covered under Balian’s payment. In the end, the sixteen thousand Frankish men, women, and children who could not offer anything were made captive. The local Christians were, however, allowed to stay and keep their houses as long as they paid the customary tribute levied on non-Muslims.

Notwithstanding his earlier determination to kill the defenders of Jerusalem, once he had taken the city Saladin exhibited the courtesy for which he is famed. This particular anecdote is from a Christian source, so there is no danger it was fabricated by one of the sultan’s own literary admirers.
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A group of women and daughters of men killed or captured at Hattin came to the sultan and begged him to tell them which of their menfolk were still alive and in captivity. Saladin ordered an inquiry and, once he had discovered who had survived, he ordered the husbands or fathers of the womenfolk in his presence to be released. To those who were not so fortunate
he gave gifts and riches according to their station and “they praised God and man for the kindness and honour Saladin had shown them.”
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As a backdrop to the sultan’s victory lay one certainty: the Christian world would respond with a new crusade. A chance event gave that campaign a vital starting point: only one port of real consequence had escaped Saladin’s conquests—Tyre. In August 1187 Conrad of Montferrat, a younger brother of William Longsword, Queen Sibylla’s first husband, landed there with a few companions. Conrad was ignorant of the fall of Jerusalem and Saladin’s rapid conquests, yet his arrival gave the knights in Tyre a glimmer of hope and they prevented the Muslims from taking the last remaining maritime outlet in the kingdom. Some have criticized Saladin for his decision to seize Jerusalem before he had secured the strategically crucial coastline. In reality, however, the presence of the marquis at Tyre was purely coincidental and even then he might well have been defeated. In the event, thanks to Conrad, the Christians preserved the most tenuous handhold imaginable and—crucially—a bridgehead for the next crusade.