God's Battalions (23 page)

INTERLUDE

In the wake of the Second Crusade, there was a burst of castle-building in the kingdoms, most of the structures financed, and their construction supervised, by the knightly orders. In 1166 there were at least fifty main castles and citadels (a fortification inside a city’s walls) scattered across the kingdom of Jerusalem,
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and hundreds of crusader castles and defensive towers have been mapped by modern archeologists.
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They were very strongly built and based on European rather than Byzantine designs. Given that survey instruments did not exist, the castles are remarkably well sited, taking advantage of even slight elevations in the landscape. Many of them are within view of another castle, and it long was thought that signals were passed from one to the next. But there is little evidence of any signaling.
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Nor were the castles and towers designed as a defensive “line”: they were not a continuous wall.
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Instead, the castles were used to house military forces who would sally forth to fight an enemy in the field or, when too outnumbered, would wait secure behind their walls until a field army arrived to attack the enemy.

The failure of the Second Crusade to attempt to regain Edessa, and the abortive siege of Damascus, cost Countess Beatrice the remainder of the county of Edessa in 1150, soon after her husband, Joscelin, was taken captive. Having successfully defended her fortress at Turbessel against Muslim attack but aware that she could not withstand another onslaught that was bound to come, she received a message from the Byzantine emperor Manuel. He offered not to march to her defense, but to buy her remaining territory. After consulting with rulers of the other kingdoms, Beatrice agreed, although both she and the others “were loath to hand over territory to a hated Greek.”
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Manuel sent many bags of gold to the countess, who then turned over her fortresses to Byzantine troops, who proceeded to lose the entire territory to the Muslims a year later.

The losses in the north did not reflect military weakness of the kingdom of Jerusalem. Hence, in January 1153 King Baldwin III of Jerusalem led a powerful army south against the Egyptian stronghold of Ascalon. Known as the Bride of Syria, the city had long sheltered Muslim raiders who preyed upon pilgrims and Christian villages. Marching against Ascalon, Baldwin was accompanied by the Grand Masters of both the Templars and the Hospitallers and their best knights and sergeants. A long siege ensued. Then, in July, the Templars forced a breach in the wall. As too often happened, the Templars then crossed the line separating bravery from foolhardiness and, despite numbering only forty knights, refused reinforcements while they entered the city. When the Muslim defenders realized how few Templars were attacking them, they rallied, killed them all, secured the breach, and dangled the Templars’ corpses from the city walls.

But by mid-August the Muslims realized they could not hold out much longer. A surrender agreement was reached allowing all inhabitants of the city to leave in safety with all their movable goods—which they did. Lordship of the city was given to Baldwin’s brother, the Count of Jaffa, and the great mosque was consecrated as the Cathedral of Saint Paul. Baldwin III died in 1162 at age thirty-three; it was widely but probably erroneously believed that he had been poisoned by a Syrian physician. He was succeeded by his brother Amalric, Count of Jaffa and Ascalon.

Meanwhile, in Egypt the decadent Fatimid Caliphate had fallen apart. Nasr, the son of the vizier Abbas, murdered the caliph, and Abbas then murdered the caliph’s brothers and placed a five-year-old boy on the throne. When the army turned against them, father and son were forced to flee north, only to encounter Templars, who routed their escort—during which action Abbas was killed and Nasr was captured. The Templars sold Nasr back to the caliph’s court in Cairo for the huge sum of sixty thousand dinars, whereupon “the late Caliph’s four widows personally mutilated him.”
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Then he was hanged above the main city gate, and his remains dangled there for two years. In 1160 the boy caliph died and was succeeded by his nine-year-old cousin, and the constant court intrigues continued.

Seeing this confusion as an opportunity to secure his southern flank, in 1163 Amalric led an army into Egypt. He took Cairo and Alexandria but eventually became alarmed by troubles up north, particularly a threat to Tripoli, and signed a treaty designating that the Egyptians pay him an annual tribute of one hundred thousand pieces of gold. In 1167, Amalric led his army back into Egypt and laid siege to Alexandria. Again the Egyptians negotiated and agreed to a huge tribute payment, and again Amalric returned to Jerusalem. But the next year he attacked again, supported by the Knights Hospitallers. The Knights Templars, however, refused to march with him, saying Amalric’s cause had nothing to do with their mission. In October, Amalric’s army seized Bilbeis, just north of Cairo, and massacred or enslaved the inhabitants. This time the Egyptians paid him 2 million pieces of gold to leave. In 1169 Amalric came again, supported by a Byzantine fleet, and laid siege to Damietta, at the very mouth of the Nile. The siege was marred by conflict between Amalric and the Byzantines, which led to a truce between the Christian forces and the new sultan of Egypt, Salah ad-Din, known in the West as Saladin.

SALADIN AND THE FALL OF JERUSALEM

Saladin was a Kurd, the nephew of Shirkuh, who conquered Egypt in 1169 for the Fatimid ruler of Syria, Nur ad-Din, who campaigned many times against the crusader kingdoms. As a reward, Shirkuh was appointed vizier of Egypt, but he died after only two months in office, and Saladin succeeded him. Because Saladin was not yet quite thirty, his promotion did not sit well with many older veterans. But he smoothed over their discontents and soon was the real ruler of Egypt, although he remained careful to preserve the appearance of Nur ad-Din’s rule, even while he obviously went his own way. For example, in 1171 he suppressed the Egyptian Fatimids and united Egypt with the Abbasid Caliphate. In addition, Saladin refused to join Nur ad-Din in two invasions of the kingdom of Jerusalem—one in 1171 and a second in 1173, both of which were unsuccessful. Eventually Nur ad-Din realized he had an enemy in Egypt and in 1174 began assembling an army to march against Saladin. However, he developed an abscess and died at age fifty-nine. Although Nur ad-Din’s son was recognized as the legitimate heir to the throne, Saladin quickly married Nur ad-Din’s forty-five-year-old widow
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and seized the throne. Thus were Syria and Egypt brought under a single rule.

Although the continuing success of crusader forces against larger Muslim armies was remarkable, it also was contingent to some extent on Muslim disunity—there being obvious limits to the numerical odds that the Christians could overcome. Had the kingdoms been surrounded by a united enemy, not only would they have faced far larger invading armies, but they could have been threatened from all three land sides at once. When Saladin became sultan of Egypt, that eventually became his strategy.

Saladin’s chances of success were greatly increased by the incompetent leadership of Emperor Manuel, which brought disaster to the Byzantine army in 1176 when he led an expedition against Sultan Kilij Arslan’s capital of Iconium (Konya). Pursuing his Turkish enemies into a mountain pass at Myriokephalon, the emperor allowed his troops to get strung out along a narrow road. The Turks had hidden large forces above the road and suddenly attacked downhill, whereupon Manuel’s courage failed and he fled. When his troops broke ranks and tried to flee as well, the whole army was destroyed. “It would take many years to rebuild it; and indeed it was never rebuilt. There were enough troops left to defend the frontiers…But nevermore would the Emperor be able to march into Syria…Nor was anything left of his prestige.”
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Thus, Muslims facing the crusader kingdoms from the north no longer need worry about a threat to their rear from Constantinople. Worse yet, the Byzantines proceeded to conspire with Saladin against the kingdoms, as will be seen.

Meanwhile, following the death of Amalric in 1174 at the age of thirty-eight, his thirteen-year-old son was crowned as Baldwin IV, king of Jerusalem. Two years later he came of age and took control. Despite suffering from leprosy since boyhood, which soon made him unable to mount his horse unaided and afflicted him with rapidly failing sight, Baldwin lived far longer than expected and, in 1177, at Montgisard, led his far smaller army to a brilliant and bloody victory over a large Egyptian army led by Saladin, that being the latter’s first attack on the Christians. While Baldwin IV lived (he died in 1185), Saladin’s attempts against the kingdom continued to fail: he launched major efforts in 1183 and 1184.
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Initially, Saladin had much better luck against his Muslim neighbors. Soon after coming to power in Egypt, he seized the throne of Syria, taking Damascus in 1174. Later he conquered the former province of Edessa by taking Aleppo in 1183 and Mayyafariqin in 1185. The Christian kingdoms were now surrounded on three sides, with their backs to the Mediterranean Sea. This situation was noted at length by Archbishop William of Tyre in his
History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea,
written before Saladin began his attacks on the kingdoms: “In former times almost every [Muslim] city had its own ruler…not dependent on one another…who feared their own allies not less than the Christians [and] could not or would not readily unite to repulse the common danger or arm themselves for our destruction. But now…all the kingdoms adjacent to us have been brought under the power of one man.”
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Also in 1185, the Byzantine emperor initiated negotiations with Saladin, and after several years of talks and frequent exchanges of huge gifts, they signed a treaty to join forces against Western Christians in the Holy Land and any new Crusades.

Even so, the Christians were not in dire straits, still having a sizable field army of well-trained, well-armed troops, including Knights Templars and Hospitallers—altogether numbering perhaps twelve hundred knights and twenty thousand infantry. Given the qualitative differences, they should not have felt especially threatened when, in 1187, Saladin gathered an army of about thirty thousand in Syria to come against them.

In an effort to draw the Christians into battle at their disadvantage, Saladin sent some of his troops to attack the city of Tiberias. As expected, the outmanned residents withdrew into the city’s citadel, having dispatched messengers begging for help. Initially, the Christian leaders met in conference and decided against marching to the relief of Tiberias. But several sought out King Guy of Jerusalem later and convinced him to reverse that decision. So the next morning the Christian army began to march—constantly exposed to harassing strikes against its flanks and rear guard. It was an arid terrain, and soon the troops, and especially the horses, were suffering from thirst. By the next morning the suffering was acute, and the army headed for the nearest source of water at Hattin; Saladin’s main army was between them and Lake Tiberius, from which the Muslims had plentiful water.

Then, as the sun rose and with the wind at their backs, Saladin’s forces set fire to large collections of brush, and the smoke made it difficult for the Christians to keep track of their units. Soon the infantry began to break their formations and head for water, leaving the cavalry on their own. At this auspicious moment, Saladin’s troops charged against the disorganized Christians, and a brutal battle ensued. Several times thundering charges by the Christian knights nearly turned the tide, but eventually chaos reigned and the slaughter began. Thousands died in battle, and all of the Templars and Hospitallers taken captive were beheaded; the other captives were enslaved.

With the crusader field army destroyed, the kingdoms were at Saladin’s mercy and were quickly overrun. Most of the cities and fortresses surrendered without a fight, having few defenders. Jaffa did hold out and had to be taken by storm, which resulted in the entire population of survivors being sold into slavery. Within two months there remained only Tyre, Antioch, Tripoli, “a few isolated castles[,] and the Holy City of Jerusalem.”
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Jerusalem was crowded with refugees from other cities already fallen to the Muslims: “[f]or every man there were fifty women and children.”
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There were only two knights in Jerusalem. So, arms were distributed to every able-bodied man—although most knew little or nothing about how to use them. In late September, Saladin’s army arrived and surrounded the city. After several days of preparation the Muslims attacked the walls and met furious resistance from the tiny band of untrained defenders. Repeated attacks brought repeated failures, but after five days a breach had been made in the wall. Some of the Christian fighters wanted to charge out through the breach and fight to the death. But cooler heads prevailed, noting that only by surrender could they prevent all the women and children from becoming slaves. So they asked Saladin for surrender terms. He demanded a ransom of ten gold pieces for each man to be spared (with two women or ten children counted as one man). As for the poor, Saladin agreed to free seven thousand of them in return for thirty thousand besants.
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That left thousands without hope. If, in the end, there was no massacre, about half of the city’s Latin Christian residents were marched away to the slave markets.

There is an aspect of the fall of Jerusalem that is very seldom mentioned by historians. The Greek residents of the city, fully aware that an alliance was being formed between the Byzantine emperor and Saladin, “were ready to betray the city” by opening the gates. In return for their support, Saladin had all the Christian churches in the Holy Land converted from the Latin to the Greek Orthodox rite, in keeping with the treaty he signed in 1189 with Emperor Isaac.
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“GLORIFYING” SALADIN