The Dream and the Tomb (44 page)

A LETTER FROM THE OLD MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN TO LEOPOLD, DUKE OF AUSTRIA, FROM THE CASTLE OF MASYAF, SEPTEMBER 1193.

MANY KINGS AND PRINCES beyond the seas have accused Richard, the king and master of England, of killing the Marquis. I swear by the God who reigns eternally and by the laws we obey, that he is not guilty of the crime. What really happened is the following: One of our brethren coming by ship from Salteleya was thrown by a tempest into the port of Tyre. The Marquis had him arrested and killed, and he took possession of the large sum of money the man was carrying. We sent envoys to the Marquis, asking that the money should be returned to us and that we should be given recompense for our brother's death. The Marquis blamed Renaud, lord of Sidon, for the man's death. We who care so much for our friends were able to learn the truth, and the truth was that the Marquis had killed him and taken the money.

We then sent a second envoy named Ewris, and the Marquis wanted to have him thrown into the sea, but we had friends who arranged for him to leave the city, and he came to us and he told us the true story. From that moment we decided to kill the Marquis. We sent two of our brethren to Tyre, and they killed him openly and as it were in the presence of all the people. This is how the Marquis met his death.

We declare to you that the lord Richard, King of England, had nothing whatsoever to do with this affair. Those who say otherwise have done much harm to him; there is no grounds for their accusation. Know that we shall never kill for money or for any kind of payment except when harm has been inflicted on us. Know, too, that this letter has been written in our residence, the castle of Masyaf, in the middle of September, in the fifth year of Pope Alexander.

Was it really an act of revenge? It is more likely that Conrad was killed for no reason except to spread terror, confusion, and doubt among the Crusaders. The act of terror was probably designed to make all the high officers of the kingdom aware that their lives were in the keeping of the Old Man of the Mountain and that he could destroy them whenever he wished. The assassination was a warning, a call to order.

The Crusaders missed the message, at least partly because Conrad's
death caused little lamentation. There followed a brief struggle for the succession, with the duke of Burgundy claiming the kingdom on behalf of the king of France; he demanded that Isabelle renounce all her rights and surrender Tyre to him and his army. It was an absurd demand, and she rejected it outright. She was pregnant by Conrad and would soon be delivered of a baby girl, her first-born. She was in no mood to renounce the throne. Tyre was her largest city; it was well defended and the duke of Burgundy, though quite capable of violent stratagems, was in no position to capture the city in defiance of Isabelle, Richard, and the captains of the Crusader army.

Help was at hand in the person of Count Henry of Champagne, the feudal lord of the wealthiest and most civilized province of France. He happened to have a talent for military command; he also happened to be a nephew of both Richard and King Philip. He was in Acre when he learned of the assassination of Conrad. He immediately set out for Tyre without the least intention of marrying the young widow but simply in order to be present as the representative of Richard, who was then fighting the Saracens in the region of Ramleh. The barons would meet; great decisions would have to be taken; and there was the funeral of Conrad to be held in the cathedral of Tyre.

But as he rode through Tyre decisions were being made for him. He was so young, so handsome, and held himself so well that the people acclaimed him and shouted that he should be the husband of Isabelle. It appears that he had never met the queen, and was startled by their sudden enthusiasm. When he did meet her, he was a little put off by the idea that she would soon be bearing Conrad's child; if a boy, this child would one day inherit the throne.

The thought had also occurred to Richard, who wondered whether Count Henry would accept her. Count Henry, as a dutiful nephew, sent messengers to Richard asking for advice, for the king was his liege lord and he would do nothing without his lord's permission. Richard was all for the marriage; so was Isabelle, who had fallen head over heels in love with Count Henry.

One day she came to him with a ceremonial offering: the keys of the city of Tyre. He accepted them, and they were married in the cathedral. The wedding took place on May 5, 1192. Exactly a week had elapsed since the assassination of Conrad.

Count Henry's first action was to secure all the castles and fortifications of the kingdom in his name and in the name of the queen. Although the chroniclers sometimes refer to him as King Henry of Jerusalem, he appears never to have been crowned. He ruled as Count of Champagne, or as Count-Palatine of Troyes, and as husband of the queen. He was one of those who preferred the substance of power to its gilded trappings.

Within a few days of the wedding he led his army back to Acre as the first step of a journey that would take him to Ascalon. We are told by Ambrose
that sixty thousand armed men marched out of Acre to greet him and the queen. In the Arab fashion, the citizens hung carpets and tapestries from their windows, and in every window and outside every house were censers burning incense. The people gave themselves up to feasting and celebrations, for in their eyes Count Henry had been granted to them by God to strengthen the kingdom.

While the wine flowed and flowers were pelted at the count and his pregnant bride, there were also indications of a new purposefulness among the barons and in the army. Count Henry's arrival in Acre was an affirmation of power, and a signal of Crusader intentions. It was a very solemn occasion and the priests accordingly took him in hand, led him to the cathedral, showed their most sacred relics to him, and bade him kneel before the jeweled Cross, which was then in their keeping, and kiss it, before permitting him to rest in the palace.

Henry's army advanced by slow stages to Ascalon, where they learned that Richard was attacking Daron with huge siege engines. The defenders held out bravely against the incessant battering by huge rocks, stones, and javelinlike rods that were catapulted into the air and fell with tremendous force inside the castle walls. After five days of this, the defenders offered to surrender. Richard was in an implacable mood and said they must surrender unconditionally. He dismissed any suggestion that they be allowed to leave Daron as free men. So they fought on. Richard sent sappers to mine the walls under one of the great towers. When the tower crumbled with a sound like an explosion, the defenders retreated into the citadel, and the Christians poured through the broken walls. The Saracens then experienced a bloodbath: their throats were slit, they were thrown down from high walls, they were beheaded or cut to pieces. Only a few were permitted to become slaves. Richard gave the castle to Henry of Champagne.

From time to time Richard still thought of conquering Jerusalem, though the prospect seemed to him increasingly difficult. It was not only that Saladin had strongly fortified the city, and had scoured the countryside to prevent the Christians from gaining any advantage from the terrain—trees had been cut down, the wells were poisoned—but Richard seemed, for the only time in his life, to be genuinely fearful, as though he sensed that Jerusalem would be his grave. On the morning of June 12, when he was hurrying with an escort after a Muslim patrol, he caught sight of the city in the distance and immediately lifted his shield to cover his eyes, saying that he would not gaze longer on the Holy City until he had conquered it.

A week later, hearing that a rich Muslim caravan was coming from Egypt, he decided to go in pursuit of it. Accompanied by the duke of Burgundy and five hundred knights, all wearing keffiyas to disguise themselves as Bedouin, he raced through the night in the direction of an oasis in the Negev desert, where his real Bedouin spies told him the caravan
had halted. The Mameluke guards, the camels, the unloaded merchandise, the cattle and the treasure, were all gathered around a watering place called the Round Tank. The guards were sleeping. It was one of the most pleasant sights he had ever seen, and on that warm night after a race across the sand dunes, the prospect of seizing so much wealth was exhilarating. At dawn he attacked. The Mameluke guards and the caraveners fled into the desert, leaving behind so much gold, silks, purple stuffs, copper bowls, Damascene armor, ivory chessmen, bales of sugar, and spices that Richard and his company scarcely knew what to do with it.

This was a triumph to gladden the heart of the Christian army, but there were no more triumphs of this kind. Richard decided to attack Beirut, which was in Muslim hands. In this way he hoped to extend the little strip of coastal territory still belonging to the Crusaders. Saladin watched his movements, and on the day Richard reached Acre, Saladin swooped out of Jerusalem and attacked Jaffa with a formidable army of three divisions. On the second day of the siege the wall near the Eastern Gate fell. When the Saracens advanced over the broken wall, they found garrison troops with the courage to fight an overwhelmingly superior enemy, but there was a limit to how long they could withstand the assault.

Urgent pleas for help had been sent to Richard in Acre. Right away, he sent the Templars and Hospitallers down the coastal road to Jaffa, filled some Genoese ships with his own troops, and took command of a fleet of fifty vessels. Off Mount Carmel, the fleet was becalmed for a few hours, filling Richard with impatience and even despair. But the wind rose, and at dawn on the following day the fleet stood off Jaffa.

It was characteristic of Richard that, no sooner was his flagship anchored, than he jumped overboard into waist-high water, his shield about his neck, his Danish battle-ax in his hand. His knights captured the seawall and spread havoc among the Muslims, who had spent the night looting the houses of Jaffa. The knights liberated the garrison troops; and their combined forces were sufficient to clear the Muslims out of Jaffa, and then to advance on Saladin's camp. Saladin fled as far as Assir. With only two thousand seaborne troops Richard had won Jaffa back from the Saracens.

However, with the aid of his spies, Saladin was able to keep a close watch on Richard who was camped outside the walls of Jaffa, indifferent to danger, very much at ease. Hoping to take Richard and all his camp by surprise, Saladin attacked. A Genoese sailor, wandering at night over the plain, saw the glint of armor and sounded the alarm. Richard mounted his horse, gave orders that the crossbowmen should be posted between the spearmen, and waited for the Muslims to advance. The Saracen cavalry charged, but could make no breach in the Crusader lines. The Christians counterattacked with such violence that the Muslims reeled back and became increasingly demoralized. The battle lasted all day. It was said that Saphadin, the brother of Saladin, observed that Richard was fighting on a
wretched horse long past its prime and sent him two magnificent Arab horses, “because it is wrong that a king should fight on foot.” Richard accepted the present gracefully and went on fighting until nightfall. During the night, Saladin's army slipped away.

A few days later, at Jaffa, Richard fell seriously ill. Saladin heard of his illness, and with Muslim courtesy, sent him peaches and sherbet cooled with the snows of Mount Hermon. Richard accepted the gift with his customary graciousness. He spoke of concluding a truce with Saladin, of one last effort to wrench Jerusalem from the Saracens, of sailing for England, which was threatened by his brother John and by King Philip of France. He spoke, too, of leaving the Holy Land and returning with a much larger force in 1193. He did, in fact, conclude a three-and-a-half-year truce with Saladin based on the present boundaries: the Christians retained the coastal zone from Jaffa to Tyre, the Saracens kept the rest. One important provision of the treaty gave the Christians permission to make pilgrimages to Jerusalem as they pleased.

A little more than a month after signing the treaty Richard left the Holy Land forever. He had performed many good deeds and given orders for many massacres; he had been by turns cruel, heartless, chivalrous, hot and cool; he had the strongest sword-arm in Christendom. He had shown himself by far the most courageous and, after Baldwin III, the most intelligent of the kings who held power in the Holy Land. He sailed from Haifa on October 9, 1192, still a sick man, weary of war, hoping to reach England by the quickest possible route. By misadventure he fell into the hands of Leopold of Austria and was kept in prison until he was ransomed for 150,000 marks. During the last five years of his life he waged war continuously in England and France, dying at last when besieging the castle of Châlus. We know him as Richard the Lion Heart. Richard was only forty-two years old when he died in 1199. He left no children, but for centuries after his death Arab children were told when they were naughty, “Be quiet, or England will come after you!”

Saladin died early in the morning of March 3, 1193, at the age of fifty-four. His death convulsed the Muslim East, for his heirs were his seventeen sons, who watched each other vigorously and fought among themselves. Most of them were voluptuaries and lacked their father's enthusiasm for poverty. In Saladin's possession at the time of his death were one Tyrian dinar and forty-seven silver dirhams: he had given all of his great fortune away.

Saladin lived on in memory and in legend, honored by Muslim and Crusader alike. His sword was buried with him, and the Muslims believed that he alone would enter Paradise with his sword in his hand. Dante wrote of him as a strange figure standing alone in the sunlight, a man apart:
E solo e da parte vidi il Saladino
. All agreed that he alone of the Muslim kings had been capable of forging the unity of Islam. With his death, Islam fell once more into its separate parts.

ONE day in November 1199, Thibault, the young count of Champagne, entertained friends at his castle in the Ardennes on the River Aisne. Tents were erected in the fields, there were tournaments and feasts, and guests came from all over Champagne, Blois, the lle-de-France, and Flanders, for the count was related to nearly all the noble families of the region. The chief guest was his cousin Louis, Count of Blois. Thibault was twenty-two years old, his cousin was five years older. Their maternal grandmother was Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, and their mothers were half sisters of King Philip and King Richard. Young, rich, possessing vast estates, with royal blood in their veins, they belonged to the
jeunesse dorée
of their time and could have lived out their lives with no more excitement than could be provided by hunting, jousting, and entertaining their friends.