It was a hot march, and the crusader army, with throats parched and eyes and noses full of the dust raised by their own feet and their horses’ hooves – was being harried in the rear by Saracen archers on horseback. Saladin’s intention was to cut the crusader column in half. A battle on the move was a well understood tactic in crusader warfare; provided the column of armoured knights and men-at-arms could stay together and march steadily to their objective, losses would be acceptably small. But Saladin’s tactic meant that the rear, marching under a near constant rain of arrows, was in danger of being left behind. To prevent this, the army chose to make camp for the night near low twin peaks known as the Horns of Hattin, having covered less than half the distance to Tiberias.
Early the next day, battle began between the closely surrounded Christian army and Saladin’s forces. The fighting was fierce. The Christian army was exhausted, outnumbered, lacked water and was fighting on unsuitable ground – the dry grass was torched by a Muslim soldier so that the Christian infantry gasped for breath. It was decisively beaten, though only after a last, heroic stand round a relic of the True Cross, which was brought to Palestine by the Franks and always carried into battle by the Christians.
King Guy, Gérard de Ridfort, Grand Master of the Templars, and Count Raynald of Chatillon were among the nobles captured. Only the contingent of men-at-arms led by Raymond of Tripoli escaped, retiring from the battle in good order. Their departure was actually aided by a wily tactic from the Muslim army, which instead of engaging the charging Christian soldiers, opened their ranks to allow them to pass through unopposed, then closed up again, thus cutting them off from the main army. Seeing that the battle was lost, Raymond led his force back to Tripoli.
Except for Raynald of Chatillon, whom Saladin regarded as a truce breaker, the lives of King Guy, the grand master and other nobles were spared. The rank and file of the kingdom of Jerusalem’s army, most of them highly trained and fanatically Christian Hospitallers and Templars, were not. Saladin ordered a mass killing of all the captured knights and fighting men, which he watched from a dais set up in front of the army, and which he forced the Grand Master of the Templars to watch, too. The killings were particularly ghastly, for they were assigned, not to professional fighting men well able to use a weapon, but to the many scholars, holy men and jihad enthusiasts who had flocked to Saladin’s standard. More often then not, it took such men several blows to sever the heads from their victims’ bodies.
This atrociously bloodthirsty annihilation of the army of Jerusalem, with its attendant loss of the relic of the True Cross, deeply shocked the Christian West. One of the best-known depictions of the Battle of Hattin was drawn by the 13th-century English monk, Matthew Paris of St Albans for his Chronica Majora. He illustrated the (fictional) moment when Saladin seizes the relic from the desperately clutching hands of King Guy, despite the efforts of the knights at the king’s side. Beneath the trampling hooves of the horses, the ground is strewn with the bodies, limbs and heads of the slain.
The city of Jerusalem capitulated on 2 October, 1187; Saladin had achieved his long-held goal, setting free ‘the mosque of al-Aqsa, to which Allah once led in the night his servant Muhammad’. Within a year the Christians had either lost or surrendered almost all their ports and castles in the kingdom of Jerusalem. As for the relic of the True Cross, tradition has it that Saladin ordered it to be buried under the entrance to the great mosque at Damascus, so that the feet of the faithful could tread on it as they went in to pray.
Richard the Lionheart Massacres the Hostages at Acre
News of the Battle of Hattin and the capitulation of the city of Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187 reached the Christian West within weeks. The shock of the dreadful news is said to have hastened the death of Pope Urban III. It galvanized the new popes, Gregory VIII (who lived only two months after his investiture) and Clement III into calling for the leaders of Western Christianity to set aside their differences and come together to save Christianity in the East from ‘the barbarians who thirst for Christian blood’.
In the Holy Roman Empire, Emperor Frederick Barbarossa began gathering together an army for the relief of the Holy Land that eventually numbered over 200,000 men. Henry II of England, who was also overlord of half France, and Philip II Augustus of France both began levying taxes in their countries to finance this third crusade mounted by Catholic Christianity in the past century.
Henry II died in October 1189, before his ‘Saladin tithe’, drawn from every subject, including the clergy, had been collected. It was left to his son, the tall, red-blonde, handsome and lionhearted Richard I, to collect the English contribution to the Third Crusade. Although Richard I was considered ‘a bad king, a bad son, a bad husband and a bad father’, he was a great soldier, and the main object of his life was a heartfelt desire to recover Jerusalem, the city of Christ’s Passion for Christendom. Among Europe’s Christian princes, Richard, while still Prince of Aquitaine, had been the first to fall to his knees and take the cross.
Once he became king of England, at the time the wealthiest and strongest nation in Europe, Richard carried out his father’s crusading intentions with ruthless vigour, turning all his tax-raising efforts to financing the crusade. He sold high church offices, earldoms and lordships, castles and manors, even whole towns to finance his crusade. Richard’s remark that he would have sold London if he could have found a buyer was not a joke. As for the Saladin tithe, it was levied for three years, and any parish that did not collect its full due was excommunicated.
Of the three most important rulers involved in the Third Crusade, Richard was the last to arrive in Palestine. Frederick Barbarossa, leading his huge army down through eastern Europe and into Turkey, died of a chill in Armenia in mid-1190 after bathing in the River Saleph. More than half his army turned back to Europe. Frederick of Swabia led a remnant of Barbarossa’s army down into Palestine, reaching there after Philip II Augustus of France, who had arrived in March 1191. After numerous adventures on land on the way, Richard went to the Middle East by sea, meeting up with Philip II Augustus at Messina in Sicily. There, the two kings completed the building up of the great fleet that would carry the crusaders to Palestine.
Philip II Augustus set off first, leaving Richard to get the main body of the fleet to the eastern Mediterranean. Unfortunately, a great storm scattered the mighty fleet and it took weeks to find all the ships and gather them together again. The three largest ships, carrying Richard’s betrothed, the Princess Berengeria, his sister Joanna and his English gold and treasure that were to finance the crusade, ended up on the island of Cyprus. When he caught up with them, Richard found that his gold and treasure had been snatched and his ships held in custody by the governor of the island, the son of the Byzantine emperor. Diplomacy availing him nothing, Richard, stormed ashore, rescued his betrothed and his sister, got back all his gold and treasure and, for good measure, wrested the island of Cyprus from the Byzantine Empire. This immensely useful bridgehead to Palestine remained in Latin Christian hands until 1571.
Once in the Holy Land, Richard and Philip found that the Christian position was not good. However, the fortress and port enclave of Tyre had remained firmly in the hands of the able Conrad of Montferrat. King Guy of Jerusalem, who was released from captivity by Saladin in the summer of 1188 – in the belief that he was a spent force – had managed to gather together the remnants of the army of the destroyed kingdom of Jerusalem and meld it into a force large enough to besiege the great city of Acre, eight leagues from Tyre. Acre had been one of the most prosperous merchant cities in the kingdom of Jerusalem and Saladin had made a point of taking it within days of the Battle of Hattin, setting up his court and celebrating Friday prayers in the city for the first time in 80 years.