Indeed, it was a time of many disasters. The barons remained at Nablus, while King Guy remained in Jerusalem. Within a few days Guy was thinking of attacking the barons, thus ending once and for all the dispute over the succession. Wiser counsel prevailed. Meanwhile Raymond of Tripoli was in correspondence with Saladin, and he succeeded in arranging a truce which applied to his own territories in Tripoli and the Galilee. It was a separate peace, and he would claim that it was absolutely necessary for the survival of his principalities. Guy assumed Raymond was in treacherous communication with the enemy.
In these ominous times, with Saladin building up his forces in a deliberate effort to bring about the destruction of the kingdom, with a king in
Jerusalem and a regent in Tiberias, a man was needed who could in some way unify the kingdom. But no such man appeared. Instead the Crusader princes so conducted themselves that the worst prevailed. At a time when a spark could have caused a war and it was incumbent on the Christians to prepare their forces carefully and patiently, a spirit of wild impatience was gripping their leaders, and they acted carelessly and intemperately. Reynald of Chatillon chose this particular moment to provoke a war with Saladin.
The hard-pressed Saladin had agreed to a truce with his archenemy Reynald, who agreed to exact customs dues from the travelers and pilgrims passing through his territory rather than order outright confiscation and the ransom of prisoners. But when, at the beginning of 1187, his spies reported that an especially large caravan was traveling from Cairo to Damascus, he was incapable of resisting the temptation to acquire booty. He laid an ambush, captured the entire convoy, threw the Muslims into his dungeons and all the wealth of the caravan into his storehouses.
When Saladin heard that the caravan had vanished into Reynald's possession, he sent a peremptory letter demanding their release. He received a curt refusal. Saladin appealed to King Guy, who seemed to realize the gravity of the situation and begged Reynald to surrender the captured caravan. Reynald rejected the appeal for the same reason that he had rejected an earlier appeal from Baldwin IV: it was not the king's business to give him orders. He regarded himself as beyond the law of Jerusalem. It was a fatal error.
In May 1187, Saladin again surrounded Kerak of Moab and ravaged all of Transjordan. Then he made plans for an attack on the Kingdom of Jerusalem, first asking for permission to enter the Galilee, this permission to be given by Raymond of Tripoli according to the treaty worked out between them. He asked that a column of seven thousand men be permitted to have free passage across the Galilee. The request was, in fact, a demand. Raymond demurred. He could not grant it because he would be acquiescing in the defeat of the kingdom; and he could not refuse it without endangering his own troops. He therefore resorted to negotiations, finally granting Saladin the right to make a show of strength across the Galilee with his troops, the demonstration to last for a single day from sunrise to sunset.
Saladin agreed to these terms. At this moment King Guy sent to Tiberias a delegation of high officials to ensure that Raymond would grant as little as possible to Saladin, but they failed to reach Tiberias in time.
Seven thousand of Saladin's troops, under the command of Saladin's son al-Afdal, entered the Galilee at dawn and departed at sunset without harming a single Christian living in the towns and villages of the Galilee. Yet the march of al-Afdal was full of menace, and far from peaceful. The Muslim army was near Nazareth, at the Springs of Cresson, when Gerard of Ridfort, at the head of a hundred and fifty men, including forty Templars
and ten Hospitallers, fell upon it. The Muslims, watering their horses, were taken by surprise, and at first Gerard's column did a good deal of damage. But there were seven thousand Muslims, and soon the Christian knights were lost in the vast crowd. The rash and impudent attack was doomed to failure. Of the hundred and fifty knights who charged down the hill, all except three were captured or slain. Gerard of Ridfort fled the battlefield. Wounded, he made his way to Nazareth, where he went into hiding. Later that day, Raymond of Tripoli, looking down from the walls of his castle at Tiberias, saw the seven thousand riding by. On the tips of their lances they carried the heads of the Templars and Hospitallers they had slain that morning.
Seeing those heads, Raymond realized that it was no longer possible to reach an understanding with Saladin. He was enraged when he learned about Gerard of Ridfort's attack on the Muslim army on a day of truce. Nor was it possible for him any longer to regard himself as regent. He rode to Saint Job, near Jenin, where King Guy received him. Raymond knelt before the king and was lifted up and given the kiss of peace. The king was well aware of the gravity of the situation, for Saladin was gathering an immense army “as numberless as the waves of the ocean” in the Hauran. Raymond and the king agreed to gather all their available forces at Sephoria, not far from the Springs of Cresson; this would be their staging area. Their combined armies totaled about fifteen hundred knights and perhaps twenty thousand infantry. They could almost feel the breath of Saladin's advancing horde on their faces.
The time for a decisive battle was at hand, and they were ready for it. There were experienced soldiers, with excellent battle equipment, and they had large sums of money including some sent by King Henry II of England in expiation for the murder of Thomas à Becket. Although nearly forty Templars had been killed at the Springs of Cresson, the remaining Templars in the kingdom could be massed into a formidable body of shock troops quite capable of carving up a Muslim army. Crusader morale was still high; they had a healthy fear of Saladin, but were not in awe of him; and most of them seem to have believed that Saladin and all his army could be pushed back into the Hauran.
Yet for the Christians one thing of incalculable importance was missing: the design of victory. Guy of Lusignan, King of Jerusalem, possessed no skill in warfare, and his adversary, Saladin, had more skill than anyone of his generation.
Saladin's purpose was clearly to march along the shores of the Sea of Galilee, take Tiberias, and then wage war against the king's army on grounds most favorable to himself. What he could not have anticipated was that the Christians would provide him with grounds as though they were bent on destroying themselves; nor could he have anticipated that
King Guy would be so lacking in generalship that he would commit errors that a six-year-old schoolboy would avoid.
Raymond of Tripoli, always astute, saw clearly that the coming battle should be waged on grounds favorable to the Christians, and that nothing was to be gained by marching to the Sea of Galilee to save Tiberias. It was now July, the hottest time of the year, when the lightly armed cavalry of Saladin had advantage over the armored knights of the kingdom. Their task, therefore, was to wear down Saladin's forces, avoid battle until the enemy was exhausted, and even then retain as defensive a posture as possible. No purpose would be served by fighting for Tiberias. The chronicler Ernoul tells us Raymond begged King Guy to let Tiberias be taken:
Tiberias is mine, and the Lady of Tiberias is my wife, and our children are in the castle together with all our possessions, and if it falls, no one will lose as much as 1.1 know that if the Saracens take it, they cannot hold it, and if they raze the walls, I shall build them up again. If they take my wife and my children and my possessions, I can ransom them back again. If they attack my city, I shall in time make it strong again. And to me there is more advantage that Tiberias be taken and destroyed and my wife and children and my possessions in enemy hands than that this entire land should be lost to us. For I know that if you go to the help of Tiberias, you will all be taken or killed, you and all your army. I shall tell you why. Between here and Tiberias there is no water except only a little spring called the Spring of Cresson, which cannot water a whole army. Your men and your horses will be dead of thirst before the multitudes of the Moslems have hemmed you in!
King Guy was impressed by the incontrovertible argument. Gerard of Ridfort, ever the apostle of violent and dangerous acts, cursed Raymond, but the barons were in agreement with him. It was nearly midnight; the council of war broke up.
Later that nightâit was the night of July 2-3, 1187âGerard went to the king's tent and convinced him that he must act now to save Tiberias. The count of Tripoli was plotting against the kingdom.
“Have no faith, Sire, in the count,” he said. “He is a traitor, and you know he has no love for you and wishes to dishonor you and take the kingdom from you!”
King Guy, who was likely to be influenced by the last man he spoke to, was appalled by the sudden allegation of Raymond's untrustworthiness. Gerard's arguments seemed conclusive. What should he do?
“Sire,” replied Gerard, “you should sound the alarm throughout the
army. Let everyone take up his place in battle formation and follow the banner of the Holy Cross!”
King Guy immediately ordered the trumpeters to sound the call to arms. The sleeping camp awoke; the barons hurried to the king's tent; they asked why there had been this sudden change of plans, and the king responded by saying that he alone was responsible and their task was to obey. There was no possibility of defying his order. Only Raymond was of sufficient stature to lead a mutiny, but he had no taste for it.
At dawn the army left Sephoria. The hot night was followed by a burning day. Raymond led the vanguard, the king led the center, Gerard of Ridfort led the rear guard. The army marched across the plain of Sephoria and then wound its way up the hills that guard the western shores of the Sea of Galilee. The hills, a thousand feet above sea level, were covered with burned scrub and wild grasses, with no trees to provide shade. There were no water-carts, and the men carried leather bottles filled with water; as the heat grew fiercer, the bottles grew lighter. For the armored knights, especially, the heat was almost unendurable.
The columns marched in silence, for the men were despondent. Soon after they set out, Muslim skirmishers attacked them, pouring arrows into their midst as soon as they were in bowshot, then racing away on their swift horses. While these skirmishers did little physical harm, they slowed up the march and wore down the Christians. From Sephoria to Tiberias is only about fifteen miles, as the crow flies, but it was perhaps ten miles longer by the road they traveled. The vanguard under Raymond of Tripoli reached the Horns of Hattin by midafternoon, seeing the blue lake below them. By this time the lightly armed Muslim cavalry was worrying the rear guard, which was forced to stand and fight the enemy. The Templars sent a message to King Guy, saying that they could go no further. The king ordered them to press on as quickly as possible, while the barons urged the king to order a forced march on Tiberias, which was burning, for Saladin had put the city to the flames.
Because the Templars in the rear guard were still fighting off the Muslim skirmishers, and because he felt it necessary to keep his army intact, the king ordered the army to halt for the night. They camped on the brow of a wavelike mountain overlooking the Sea of Galilee, between two slight eminences called the Horns of Hattin. In all that neighborhood there was no worse ground for fighting. They were in fact standing in the partly broken-down crater of an extinct volcano, strewn with bombs of black basalt, treacherous to men and horses, for these stones were hidden below the dry grasses. Hattin was a dried-up lava flow, an impossible terrain for heavily armed horsemen. They were flies stuck to the flypaper. Down below, the army of Saladin was deployed along the shores of the lake, waiting for them. Small columns of Muslim cavalry were climbing into the hills; stragglers were being picked off; scouts were reporting every movement
of the Christian army, but by nightfall, the Templars had beaten off the skirmishers and had joined the main army.
For the Christians it was a night of brooding terror. It was as though the day's journey had been designed to bring them closer to death. The night was nearly as hot as the day. From these heights they could see the lake glimmering in the starlight and the Muslims moving in the darkness below. Around the royal tent of red silk the guards kept watch on the king, who could not sleep. All the news that reached the tent was ominous.
During the night, Saladin moved up his men. Toward morning, when an easterly wind was blowing, a Muslim set fire to the dry grass, sending clouds of suffocating smoke into the Christian camp; and to the prayers of the Crusaders and the ululations of the Muslims, there was added the sinister crackling of grass. By dawn the Christians were surrounded on all sides by implacable Muslims thirsting to destroy them.
At dawn the Saracen archers attacked. The Christian infantry fought badly; they were dying of thirst and nearly uncontrollable in their desire to drink the water of the lake. When they saw the Muslims all around them, they raced to the top of a hill to escape from Muslim arrows and lances. King Guy ordered them to rejoin the cavalry, but they refused.
While the infantry behaved badly, the knights behaved heroically. They charged continually, wheeled back, resumed the charge. They hoped to break through the enemy lines. The Muslims were impressed by their extraordinary courage. They were at the limits of their strength, yet they fought on. Their thirst, their dry throats and parched tongues, already marked them for defeat, but they continued to fight with the energy of despair. Their desperate charges were like hammer blows that dented the encircling army but were never able to break through the encirclement.
The battle lasted all day, high up on the level ground between the Horns of Hattin, spilling over the slopes, reaching at times close to the lake. The wind changed; there were no more clouds of suffocating smoke from burning grass; and during the afternoon the battle seems to have slackened. The Muslims were cautious, conscious that the Christians possessed reserves of strength and might even now carve a passageway to the lake. According to Imad ed-Din, the mangled Christian army spent the night on the mountain, rejoicing because they had captured one of Saladin's emirs and struck off his head.