Shamed by this tragedy, which was much his doing, Raymond of Tripoli broke his treaty with Saladin and rode to Jerusalem where he made his peace with the king. The peril was far too great for Guy of Lusignan to do anything but welcome Raymond’s renewed loyalty to the kingdom, for at that moment Saladin was gathering a great armyjust over the frontier. Guy called every able-bodied man to arms at Acre, emptying the cities and castles of fighting men; at 12,000 strong, including 1200 mounted knights, the army was all that Outremer had to give. Against this Saladin had drawn on the Turkish and Kurdish occupiers of Egypt, Iraq and Syria, along with their Mameluke slave troops, and some Arabs too, for his invasion force of 18,000 men, and on 1 July 1187 he crossed the Jordan at Senabra where it issues from the southern end of the freshwater lake known as the Sea of Galilee.
On the following day, as Saladin was laying siege to Tiberias, the Crusader army settled in a good defensive position, well watered and with plenty of pasturage for the horses, fifteen miles to the west at Sephoria. The Templars and the Hospitallers were there, also Raymond, the count of Tripoli, and Raynald of Chatillon, Balian of Ibelin and many other lords with all their men, together with the bishop of Acre, who carried the True Cross, and the plan they had all agreed with the king was to wait, confident that Saladin could not hold his large army together in the parched countryside for very long during the heat of summer. But that evening a message arrived from Raymond’s wife Eschiva, the countess of Tripoli, telling how she was at Tiberias holding out against Saladin’s attack. King Guy held a council in his tent where many of the knights were moved by her desperate situation and wanted the army to march to her rescue. But Raymond rose and spoke, saying it would be foolhardy to abandon their present strong position and make a hazardous march through barren country in the fierce July heat.
‘Tiberias is my city and my wife is there’, spoke Raymond, according to the chronicle De Expugnatione Terrae Sanctae perSaladinum:
‘None of you is so fiercely attached, save to Christianity, as I am to the city. None of you is so desirous as I am to succour or aid Tiberias. We and the king, homver, should not move amy from mter, food and other necessities to lead such a multitude of men to death from solitude, hunger, thirst and scorching heat You are mil amre that since the heat is searing and the number of people is large, they could not survive half a day wthout an abundance of mter. Furthermore, they could not reach the enemy wthout suffering a great shortage of mter, accompanied by the destruction of men and of beasts. Stay, therefore, at this midmy point, close to food and mter, for certainly the Saracens have risen to such heights of pride that vhen they have taken the city, they wll not turn aside to left or right, but wll head straight through the vast solitude to us and challenge us to battle. Then our men, refreshed and filled wth bread and mter, wll cheerfully set out from camp for the fray. We and our horses wll be fresh; m wll be aided and protected by the Lord’s cross. Thus i/ie wll fight mightily against an unbelieving people m/?o wll be marled by thirst and m/?o wll have no place to refresh themselves. Thus you see that if in truth, the grace of Jesus Christ remains wth us, the enemies of Christ’s cross, before they can get to the sea or return to the river, wll be taken captive or else killed by smrd, by lance, or by thirst ’
By the time the council broke up at midnight it had resolved to remain at Sephoria. But Raymond’s earlier treaty with Saladin had created an atmosphere of bitterness and mistrust among some, and his motives were now suspect. Later that same night the Grand Master of the Templars, Gerard of Ridefort, came to the king’s tent and said that Raymond was a traitor and that to abandon Tiberias, which lay so close by, would be a stain on Guy’s honour, as it would be on the Templars’ own if they left unavenged the deaths of so many of their brothers at the Springs of Cresson. At this the king overturned the council’s decision and announced that the army would march at dawn.
There were two ways to Tiberias: the one Saladin had taken via Senabra along the shores of the Galilee lake, the other across the parched hill country to the north. Leaving the gardens of Sephoria behind in the morning of 3 July, the Christian army marched across the barren hills towards the climbing sun. The day was hot and airless, and the men and horses suffered terribly for there was no water along the road. Guy was at the centre of the column and the Templars brought up the rear. As Raymond of Tripoli held Galilee in fief from the king it was his prerogative to lead the way. This led some to find treachery in the choice of route, for the choice was his. There may have been treachery from some quarter, for Saladin quickly discovered the line of the Franks’ advance, warned, it was said, by several secular knights, and sent skirmishers to harass and weary the vanguard and rearguard with flights of arrows, while he himself marched his army the five miles from Tiberias to Hattin, a well-watered village amid broad pastures situated where the road across the hills descended towards the lake. By the afternoon the Christian army had reached the plateau above Hattin, and here Raymond said they should camp; there was water there, he thought, but the spring turned out to be dry. According to one version it was the Templars who said they could go no further and the king who made the decision to set up camp, causing Raymond to cry out, ‘Alas, Lord God, the battle is over! We have been betrayed unto death. The Kingdom is finished!’ Between the Franks and the village from where the ground fell away towards the lake rose a hill with two summits. It was called the Horns of Hattin.
There on the waterless plateau the Christian army spent the night, their misery made worse by the smoke and flames from the dry scrub on the hillside that the Muslims had set alight. Under cover of darkness, Saladin’s forces crept closer; any Franks who slipped away in search of water were killed; and by dawn the Christian army was surrounded on all sides. Soon after daybreak on 4 July 1187 Saladin attacked. Against him charged the Christian infantry desperate to break through his lines to reach water, but they were killed or driven back; so goes the account in one chronicle, but in another they simply ran away and refused to fight. By all accounts the knights put up a terrific fight and repeatedly checked Saladin’s cavalry attacks, but their real enemy was thirst and as their strength failed them their numbers were diminished.
The Templars and the Hospitallers gathered round the king and the True Cross where they were surrounded by the confusion and press of battle, the Expugnatione describing how the Christians were ‘jumbled together and mingled with the Turks’. It goes on to tell how the king, seeing that all was lost, cried out that those who could escape should do so before it was too late. At this Raymond of Tripoli and Balian of Ibelin with their men charged the enemy line, hoping to break through. ‘The speed of their horses in this confined space trampled down the Christians and made a kind of bridge, giving the riders a level path. In this manner they got out of that narrow place by fleeing over their own men, over the Turks, and over the cross.’ As they bore down on Saladin’s line, it opened and let them pass through, then closed again; they were the last to get away. Soon the battle was over. The True Cross fell to Muslim hands. King Guy and those around him gave way to exhaustion and were taken.
Saladin’s tent was set up on the battlefield, and here the king and his surviving barons were brought before their conqueror. Seating the king next to him, Saladin handed Guy a cup of water to slake his thirst. It also was a sign, for it was the custom that to give food or drink to a captive meant that his life was spared. But when Guy passed the water to Raynald of Chatillon, Saladin told the king, ‘bu gave the man the drink, not I.’ Then he turned angrily on
Raynald, reminding him of his brigandage and his raids down the Red Sea coast to the ports of Medina and Mecca, and accused him of blasphemy. When Saladin offered Raynald the choice between conversion to Islam and death, Raynald replied that it was Saladin who should convert to Christianity to avoid the eternal damnation that awaited unbelievers-at which Saladin struck off his head. The others were taken to captivity at Damascus where those who were worth a handsome ransom were treated well, the remainder sold into slavery.
Saladin was not so clement towards the miltary orders. Though Gerard of Ridefort, the Templars’ Grand Master, was among the prisoners taken to Damascus, the other monastic knights faced a different fate. Frankish nobles were ‘irresponsible, thoughtless, petty and covetous’, thought al-Hawari who wrote a military treatise for Saladin, qualities which allowed them to be manipulated to suit Saladin’s purposes; but the Templars and Hospitallers were dangerous because ‘they have great fervour in religion, paying no attention to the things of this world’. Two days after his victory, wrote his secretary Imad al-Din, who was an eyewitness to the event, Saladin ‘sought out the Templars and Hospitallers who had been captured and said: “I shall purify the land of these two impure races.” He assigned fifty dinar to every man who had taken one of them prisoner, and immediately the army brought fon/vard at least a hundred of them. He ordered that they should be beheaded, choosing to have them dead rather than in prison. With him was a whole band of scholars and Sufis and a certain number of devout men and ascetics; each begged to be allowed to kill one of them, and drew his sword and rolled back his sleeve. Saladin, his face joyful, was sitting on his dais; the unbelievers showed black despair.’
The Battle of the Chronicles
What really happened at the battles of the Springs of Cresson and of Hattin, and what happened at Saladin’s siege of Jerusalem? There are several sources; some are eyewitness accounts, some are worked up afterthe events they describe; all of them are biased, and they are often flatly contradictory. Reading them, it is possible to portray the Templars as rash and irresponsible or as defiant heroes; to see Raymond of Tripoli as a wise advisor ora traitor to the king; and to imagine Balian of Ibelin not as the bold defender of Jerusalem but as a collaborator with Saladin. Clearly there were two factions as Outremer was confronted by the crisis of Saladin’s onslaught, and that fact alone was a serious weakness.
One of the most important documents is the so-called Chronicle ofErnoul. In fact the entire chronicle is lost but a number of similar manuscripts seem to derive from a single original account by Ernoul, who was a squire to Balian of Ibelin. Some see Ernoul as an apologist for Balian, for people would wonder how he escaped unscathed from the battle of Hattin. Ernoul blames Raymond for having chosen the camping ground where the well turned out to be dry. But he also defends Raymond, as well as Balian, from breaking through the Muslim lines and escaping from the battlefield at Hattin, saying they were acting under the command of the king. Ernoul directs his strongest criticism at Gerard of Ridefort, the Grand Master of the Templars, for his recklessness at the Springs of Cresson and for urging the armyforward across the hot and waterless landscape towards the Horns of Hattin. This description of events puts in the most favourable light that faction in Outremerwho opposed the crowning of Guyof Lusignanas king.
In contrast, the anonymous De Expugnatione Terrae Sanctae per Saladinum shows admiration for the military orders while describing the flight from the battlefield at Hattin by Balian, Raymond and others in a none too flattering light. Nevertheless it is sympathetic to Raymond and presents him as a wise counsellor on the eve of battle, and it is very likely that its author was an Englishman who was one of Raymond’s men. The
Expugnatione also gives an eyewitness account of the siege of Jerusalem in which it manages to suggest the suspicion that Balian had been sent to the city by Saladin himself, his task to convince its inhabitants to arrive at a negotiated surrender.
Another work, the Itinerahum Regis Ricardi, was quite possibly based on a lost journal kept by an English Templar and rejects any criticism of the orders. Far from being rash, the actions of the Templar Grand Master Gerard of Ridefort showed him to be a man consistent in his refusal to compromise with the Muslims, but he was undermined by Raymond of Tripoli whom the Itinerarium blames for the disaster at Hattin, saying that he lured the army on because he had a secret deal with Saladin. This accusation of treachery against Raymond clears the king and the faction gathered round him of the blame for subsequently losing Jerusalem. On the Muslim side, an account by Saladin’s secretary Imad al-Din is authoritative; he was an eyewitness at the heart of events, but he knew little about the inner workings of the Franks.
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