In 1171 as the Fatimid caliph al-AdId lay dying, prayers rose from the mosques of Cairo, but not for the last of Egypt’s Shia rulers. Instead for Nur al-DIn’s puppet, the Sunni caliph In Baghdad. Notional Abbasid rule was reimposed on Egypt; in reality al-Adid was the last Arab ruler in the Middle East, and the once imperial Arabs were now governed by Turks and Kurds. Saladin continued in the office of vizier, supposedly ruling Egypt on behalf of Nur al-Din, but in effect ruling Egypt for himself. To consolidate his position, Saladin began constructing the Citadel of Cairo and extended the city walls. When Nur al-Din died in 1174 Saladin declared himself sultan in Egypt and rushed to seize Damascus. The Christians were now reaping the consequences of their failure to take Egypt; for the first time they were surrounded by a united Muslim power. Moreover the able Amalric had died in 1174 and was succeeded by his young son Baldwin IV, who suffered from leprosy.
By the end of 1177 Saladin was ready to strike, and in November he crossed the frontier from Egypt. The Templars summoned all their available knights to defend Gaza, but Saladin bypassed them for Ascalon. Raising what men at arms he could, Baldwin rushed to block him, and together with the True Cross and the commander of his army, Raynald of Chatillon, he managed to get inside the walls of Ascalon before Saladin arrived. But instead of attacking, Saladin left a small force to besiege Ascalon and marched towards an undefended Jersualem with 30,000 men, though the figure is probably exaggerated. Sending a message to the Templars, Baldwin told them to abandon Gaza and join him. When they came near, Baldwin broke out of Ascalon and chased after Saladin, marching north along the coast and then inland. On 25 November Saladin’s army was crossing a ravine at Montgisard near Ramleh close by the Jaffa-Jerusalem road when Baldwin and the Templars fell upon them, taking them by surprise. The king himself was in the vanguard, and Raynald of Chatillon and Balian of Ibelin helped on the victory, and some saw Saint George himself, whose church was nearby at Lydda, fighting by their side.
The Christian force comprised 450 knights, 80 of them Templars, and a few thousand infantry, and they lost about 1100 men. But they inflicted on Saladin’s forces an overwhelming defeat, killing 90 per cent of his army, Saladin himself only narrowly managing to escape back to Egypt where to cling to power he spread the lie that the Christians had lost the battle.
The battle of Montgisard had been a great victory and it saved the Kingdom of Jerusalem for the moment, but it did not alter the fundamental situation. Against the vast resources of Egypt on which Saladin could draw, the Franks were short of men and it was dangerous to risk their army on offensive operations. Had Baldwin the forces to pursue the enemy to Cairo or to make a sudden attack on Damascus, he might have destroyed Saladin with a crushing blow. Instead he decided to reinforce his defences along the Syrian frontier, and at the insistence of the Templars he built the castle of Chastellet to control a ford across the upper Jordan where Jacob of the Old Testament was said to have wrestled with the angel (Genesis 32:24). But lacking neither resources nor resolution, Saladin kept up the pressure on the Damascus front, laid siege to Chastellet in June 1179 and again in August 1179, succeeded in mining the castle walls, then executed its 700 defenders and razed it to the ground.
Faced with an extreme drought that was threatening harvests throughout Syria and Outremer, in May 1180 Baldwin and Saladin agreed a two-year truce. For Saladin this was convenient as it allowed him to pursue his siege of Aleppo, which was in the hands of Nur al-Din’s son. For Baldwin it bought time. And for Christian and Muslim traders the truce meant that they could pass freely through each other’s territory. But the treaty was broken the following year by Raynald of Chatillon, a bold and able soldier who was lord of Oultrejourdain, which lay astride Saladin’s line of communication between Cairo and Damascus. From his castle of Kerak he could see the rich Muslim caravans travelling to Medina and Mecca, and falling upon one of these, he made off with all its goods. Saladin complained to Baldwin and demanded compensation, but Raynald refused to make restitution. In 1182 Raynald took matters further when he launched a fleet of ships into the Gulf of Aqaba and down the Red Sea where they raided Egyptian and Arabian ports, including those of Mecca and Medina, until they were driven back by a naval force under the command of Saladin’s brother.
The concept of chivalry (the word derives from chevalier, the French for knight) arose in Western Europe in the century leading up to the First Crusade. A moral, religious and social code, chivalry emphasised the virtues of courage, service and honour. Combined with piety and faith, it found expression in the Crusades. Godfrey of Bouillon, the leader of the First Crusade, was widely seen as an exemplarof knightly virtues, and the chroniclers celebrated Baldwin, his brother and successor, for the chivalry he showed after capturing the wife of a Muslim prince and upon discovering she was pregnant immediately sending her back to her husband with every mark of respect.
Saladin came to admire the chivalrous code of the Frankish knights, and he acted with courtesy and sometimes clemency in return. There was the famous instance when he laid siege to Raymond of Chatillon’s castle of Kerak. A marriage was being celebrated within, and when Raymond’s wife sent trays of the festive meal to Saladin outside he tactfully inquired in which chamber the bridal couple were lodged so that he would not bombard them on their wedding night. For gestures such as these Saladin became a legend
Throughout Christendom, a worthy and honourable adversary-a phenomenon some naively explained by supposing that he must have had an English mother. In fact Saladin was following the precepts of Islam’s own version of chivalry called futuvmB, which roughly means nobility.
But in reality chivalrous relations were rarely the rule between the Crusaders and the Muslims. The massacre perpetrated by the Crusaders at the fall of Jerusalem in 1099 was disgraceful but it was hardly an exceptional event. Populations that did not surrender were marked down for death or slavery as Zengi showed when he captured Edessa in 1144 or as the Mamelukes would show when they stormed Acre in 1291 and beheaded every last person in the city. Not that surrender was a guarantee: the Mameluke Sultan Baybars, in spite of his oath, murdered nearly a thousand prisoners afterthe fall of Saphet in 1266.
Saladin could be ruthless, and in the interests of policy he did not shrink from bloodshed. He was a devout Muslim who abhorred free-thinkers, and though he made many friends among the Christians, he never doubted that their souls were doomed to damnation. His famous magnanimity lay partly in his humanity but was also a matter of calculation. He did not shrink from cruelty when it suited his policy of instilling fearand asserting his dominance over his adversaries. In Cairo he ordered the crucifixion of his Shia opponents, and he was not averse to mutilating and executing his captives, as after the battle of Hattin when he slaughtered his Hospitaller and Templar captives in cold blood. It seems to have been only the threat made by the Frankish defenders of Jerusalem in 1187 that they would destroyall the sacred places, everything atop the Temple Mount, that caused Saladin to prefer a negotiated surrender to his original intention of purifying the city with Christian blood.
World History
