Thousands of Jerusalemites could not afford their ransom. They were led away into slavery and the harem. Balian paid 30,000 dinars to ransom 7,000 poor Jerusalemites, while the Sultan’s brother Safadin asked for a thousand unfortunates and freed them. Saladin gave five hundred each to Balian and to Patriarch Heraclius. The Muslims were shocked to see the latter pay his ten dinars and leave the city laden with carts of gold and carpets. ‘How many well-guarded women were profaned, nubile girls married, virgins dishonoured, proud women deflowered, lovely women’s red lips kissed, untamed ones tamed,’ recalled Saladin’s secretary Imad al-Din with a rather creepy glee. ‘How many noblemen took them as concubines, how many great ladies sold at low prices!’
Under the eyes of the sultan, the two columns of Christians looked back one last time and wept at the loss of Jerusalem, reflecting, ‘She who was named the mistress of other cities had become a slave and handmaid.’
On Friday 2 October, Saladin entered Jerusalem and ordered the Temple Mount, known to Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif, to be cleansed of the infidel. The Cross over the Dome of the Rock was thrown down to cries of ‘Allahu Akhbar’, dragged through the city and smashed, the Jesus paintings torn out, the cloisters north of the Dome demolished, the cubicles and apartments within the Aqsa removed. Saladin’s sister arrived from Damascus with a camel caravan of rosewater. The sultan himself and his nephew Taki personally scrubbed the courts of the Haram with rosewater, accompanied by a cleaning-party of princes and amirs. Saladin brought Nur al-Din’s carved wooden minbar from Aleppo and set it up in al-Aqsa Mosque where it remained for seven centuries.
The sultan did not so much destroy and rebuild as adapt and embroider, reusing the gorgeous spolia of the Crusaders with their foliate patterns, capitals and wetleaf acanthus; his own architecture is thus constructed with the very symbols of his enemies, which makes it hard to distinguish between the buildings of the Crusaders and Saladin.
Every respected member of the ulema, Muslim clergy and scholars, from Cairo to Baghdad, wanted to preach at Friday prayers, but Saladin chose the Qadi of Aleppo, giving him a black robe to wear: his sermon in al-Aqsa praised the fadail – the merits – of Islamic Jerusalem. Saladin himself had become the ‘light that shines in every dawn that brings darkness to the believers’ by ‘liberating the brother shrine of Mecca’. Saladin then walked to the Dome to pray in what he called ‘the jewel of the signet-ring of Islam’. Saladin’s love for Jerusalem was ‘as great as mountains’. His mission was to create an Islamic Jerusalem and he considered whether to destroy the Dungheap – the Holy Sepulchre. Some of his grandees called for its demolition, but he mused that the place would still remain holy whether or not the Church stood there. Citing Omar the Just, he closed the Church for only three days and then gave it to the Greek Orthodox. Overall, he tolerated most churches, but aimed to diminish the Christian Quarter’s non-Islamic character. Church bells were again banned. Instead, for hundreds of years right up until the nineteenth century, the muezzin held the monopoly of sound and the Christians announced prayers with the clack of wooden clappers and the clash of cymbals. He destroyed some churches outside the walls and commandeered many prominent Christian buildings for his own Salahiyya endowments – which still exist today.*
Saladin brought many Muslim scholars and mystics to the city; but Muslims alone could not repopulate Jerusalem, so he invited back many Armenians, who became a special community that endures today (they call themselves the Kaghakatsi); and many Jews – ‘the entire race of Ephraim’ – from Ashkelon, Yemen and Morocco.17
Saladin was exhausted but he reluctantly left Jerusalem to mop up the last Crusader fortresses. He took the great sea base of Acre. Yet he never finished off the Crusaders: he chivalrously released King Guy and failed to conquer Tyre, which left the Christians with a vital seaport from which to plan a counter-attack. Perhaps he underestimated the reaction of Christendom but the news of Jerusalem’s fall had shocked Europe, from kings and popes to knights and peasants, and mobilized a powerful new Crusade, the Third.
Saladin’s mistakes would cost him dear. In August 1189, King Guy appeared before Acre with a small force and proceeded to besiege the city. Saladin did not take Guy’s brave exploit too seriously but sent a contingent to swat his little army. Instead Guy fought Saladin’s men to a standstill and rallied the Crusader fightback. Saladin besieged Guy but Guy besieged Acre. When Saladin’s Egyptian fleet was defeated, Guy was joined by shiploads of German, English and Italian Crusaders. In Europe, the kings of England and France and the German Emperor took the Cross; fleets were being collected; armies mustered to join the battle for Acre. This was the start of a grindingly bloody two-year struggle, soon joined by the greatest kings of Europe who were determined to win back Jerusalem.
First came the Germans. When Saladin heard that the red-bearded Emperor Frederick Barbarossa was already marching to the Holy Land with a German army, he finally summoned his forces and called for a jihad. But then came better news.
In June 1190, Barbarossa drowned in a Cilician river; his son, Duke Frederick of Swabia, boiled the body and pickled it in vinegar, burying the flesh in Antioch. But he then marched to Acre with his army and his father’s bones which he planned to bury in Jerusalem. Barbarossa’s death played into the eschatalogical legend, that the Emperor of the Last Days was asleep, one day to rise again. The Duke of Swabia himself died of the plague outside Acre and the German Crusade was broken. But after many months of desperate fighting with thousands killed by the plague (including Heraclius the patriarch and Sibylla, Queen of Jerusalem),* Saladin received the bad news that the outstanding warrior of Christendom was on his way.
27
THE THIRD CRUSADE: SALADIN AND RICHARD
1189–93
LIONHEART: CHIVALRY AND SLAUGHTER
On 4 July 1190, Richard the Lionheart, King of England, and Philip II Augustus, King of France, set out on the Third Crusade to liberate Jerusalem. The thirty-three-year-old Richard had just inherited his father Henry II’s Angevin empire – England and half of France. Possessed of abundant vitality, red-haired and athletic, he was as brash and extrovert as Saladin was patient and subtle. He was a man of his time, both a writer of saucy troubadour songs and a pious Christian who, overcome with his sinfulness, threw himself naked before his clergy and scourged himself with whips.
Eleanor of Aquitaine’s favourite son showed little interest in women, but the nineteenth-century claim that he was homosexual has been discredited. War was his real love and he ruthlessly squeezed the English to pay for his Crusade, joking, ‘I’d have sold London if there’d been a buyer.’ As England vibrated with Crusader revivalism,* the Jews were targeted in the cull that culminated in the mass-suicide of York, the English Masada. By then, Richard had departed. He sailed for Jerusalem and wherever he landed he presented himself as the personification of the royal warrior. He always wore scarlet, the colour of war, and brandished a sword that he claimed was Excalibur. In Sicily, he rescued his sister, the widowed Queen Joanna, from the new king, and sacked Messina. When he reached Cyprus, ruled by a Byzantine prince, he simply conquered the island and then sailed for Acre with twenty-five galleys.
On 8 June 1191, Richard landed and joined the King of France at the siege, where bouts of fighting alternated with interludes of fraternizing between the camps. Saladin and his courtiers watched his arrival and were impressed with the ‘great pomp’ of ‘this mighty warrior’ and with his ‘passion for war’.
The battlefield had become a plague-ridden shanty encampment of royal marquees, filthy huts, soup kitchens, markets, bathhouses and brothels. That the prostitutes fascinated the Muslims is evident from the account of Imad, Saladin’s secretary, who visited Richard’s camp and exhausted even his reservoir of pornographic metaphors as he ogled these ‘singers and coquettes, tinted and painted, blue-eyed with fleshy thighs’, who ‘ plied a brisk trade, brought their silver anklets up to touch their golden earrings, invited swords to sheath, made javelins rise
toward shields, gave birds a place to peck with their beaks, caught lizard after lizard in their holes, [and] guided pens to inkwells’.
If even Imad admitted that ‘a few foolish mamluks slipped away’ to sample these Frankish coquettes, many must have done so. Richard’s energy changed the nature of the war. Saladin was already ill; soon both the European kings fell sick too, but even on his sickbed Richard brandished a crossbow, firing bolts at the enemy camp while fleet after fleet delivered the cream of European knighthood.
Saladin, like ‘a bereft mother, on horseback urging people to perform their jihad duty’ was outmanned and outfought. After the early departure of the jealous Philip Augustus, Richard took command – ‘I rule and nobody rules me’ – but his forces too were suffering. He opened negotiations, Saladin sending his worldly but more aloof brother Safadin as his envoy, though these pragmatists were still shadow-boxing with everything to play for. They were evenly matched, each fielding 20,000 men, both struggling to impose their will on their insubordinate, troublesome grandees and polyglot armies.
Meanwhile Acre could hold out no longer and its governor started to negotiate surrender. ‘More affected than a distracted lovesick girl’, Saladin had little choice but to acquiesce in Acre’s capitulation, promising the return of the True Cross and the release of 1,500 prisoners. But his priority was to defend Jerusalem. He dragged his feet on the terms in order to encourage divisions among the Crusaders, save money and delay their campaign. But Lionheart meant business and called Saladin’s bluff.
On 20 August, he shepherded 3,000 bound Muslim prisoners on to the plain in view of Saladin’s army and then butchered the men, women and children. So much for the legend of chivalry. The horrified Saladin sent in his cavalry, but it was too late. Afterwards, he beheaded all Frankish prisoners who fell into his hands.
Five days later, Richard marched down the coast towards Jaffa, the port of Jerusalem, his army chanting ‘Sanctum Sepulchrum adjuva! Help us, Holy Sepulchre!’ On 7 September, Lionheart found Saladin and his army blocking the way at Arsuf. Richard’s challenge was to use massed infantry to exhaust Saladin’s waves of charging, curveting cavaliers and horse-archers until he could unleash the thundering power of his knights. Richard held back until a Hospitaller galloped forward. Then he led the full charge that smashed into the Muslims. Saladin desperately threw in his royal guard of mamluks – known as the Ring. Faced with a ‘complete rout’, the sultan withdrew just in time, his army ‘conserved for the protection of Jerusalem’. At one point, he was guarded by just seventeen men. Afterwards he was wrung out and too downhearted even to eat.
Saladin rode to Jerusalem to celebrate Ramadan and prepare her defences. Richard knew that while Saladin’s army and empire were intact, the Crusaders could not hold Jerusalem even if they captured her – which made it sensible to negotiate. ‘The Muslims and the Franks are done for,’ Richard wrote to Saladin, ‘the land is ruined at the hands of both sides. All we have to talk about is Jerusalem, the True Cross and these lands. Jerusalem is the centre of our worship which we shall never renounce.’ Saladin explained what al-Quds meant to the Muslims: ‘Jerusalem is ours just as much as yours. Indeed for us it is greater than it is for you, for it is where Our Prophet came on his Night Journey and the gathering place of the angels.’
Richard was willing to learn. Flexible and imaginative, he now proposed a compromise: his sister Joanna would marry Safadin. The Christians would get the coast and access to Jerusalem; the Muslims the hinterland, with Jerusalem the capital of King Safadin and Queen Joanna under Saladin’s sovereignty. Saladin agreed to this in order to draw out Richard but Joanna was indignant: ‘How could she possibly allow a Muslim to have carnal knowledge of her?’ Richard claimed it was a joke, and then told Safadin: ‘I shall marry you to my niece.’ Saladin was bemused: ‘Our best course is to fight on with the jihad – or die ourselves.’
On 31 October, Richard set off slowly towards Jerusalem while continuing to negotiate with the urbane Safadin. They met in magnificent tents, exchanged gifts and attended each other’s feasts. ‘We must have a foothold in Jerusalem,’ insisted Richard. When he was criticized for the negotiations by his French knights, he beheaded some Turkish prisoners and ghoulishly posed their heads around the camp.
At this fraught moment, Saladin received bad news: his dissolute nephew, Taki al-Din, who had been trying to build his own private empire, was dead. Saladin hid the letter, ordered his tent cleared, then ‘wept bitterly, choked by his tears’, before washing his face with rosewater and returning to the command: it was no time to show weakness. He inspected Jerusalem and her new Egyptian garrison.
On 23 December, Richard advanced to Le Thoron des Chevaliers (Latrun) where he, his wife and his sister celebrated Christmas in splendour. On 6 January 1192, amid rain, cold and mud, Richard had reached Bayt Nuba, 12 miles from the city. The French and English barons wanted Jerusalem at any cost but Richard tried to convince them that he did not have the men for a siege. Saladin waited in Jerusalem hoping that the rain and snow would discourage the Crusaders. On 13 January, Richard retreated.*
It was stalemate. Saladin used fifty stonemasons and 2,000 Frankish prisoners to refortify Jerusalem, demolishing the higher floors of Our Mary of Jehoshaphat at the foot of the Mount of Olives and the Coenaculum on Mount Zion to provide the stones. Saladin, Safadin and their sons themselves worked on the walls.
Richard meanwhile captured and fortified Ashkelon, the gateway to Egypt, offering Saladin a partition of Jerusalem, with Muslims keeping the Haram and Tower of David. But these talks, almost comparable in complexity to those between Israelis and Palestinians in the twenty-first century, were in vain: both still hoped to possess Jerusalem totally. On 20 March, Safadin and his son Kamil visited Richard with an offer of access to the Sepulchre and the return of the True Cross: in the classic beau geste of chivalry, Lionheart dubbed young Kamil, girding him with the belt of knighthood.
Yet this theatre of chivalry was unpopular with the mutinous French knights, who demanded the immediate storming of Jerusalem. On 10 June Richard led them back to Bayt Nuba, where they proceeded to set up camp in the parching heat and for three weeks argued about what to do next. Richard relieved the tension by riding out on reconnaissance, at some point reaching Montjoie, where he dismounted to say his prayers but held up his shield to hide the glory of Jerusalem, supposedly saying, ‘Lord God, I pray thee not to let me see thy Holy City that I could not deliver from thine enemies!’
Lionheart employed spies in the sultan’s army who now informed him that one of Saladin’s princes was leading a caravan of reinforcements from Egypt. Richard, sporting Bedouin dress, led out 500 knights and 1,000 light cavalry, to ambush the Egyptians. He dispersed the troops, captured the caravan, bagging 3,000 camels and ample packhorses of supplies – enough perhaps to march on Jerusalem or Egypt. ‘This was grievous to Saladin’s heart,’ said his minister Ibn Shaddad, ‘but I tried to calm him.’ Within a fraught Jerusalem, Saladin was close to panic, his stress unbearable. He poisoned the wells around the city and positioned his meagre contingents under the command of his sons. His armies were inadequate and he anxiously recalled Safadin from Iraq.
On 2 July, he convened a council of war, but his amirs were just as unreliable as Richard’s barons. ‘The best thing we can do,’ said Ibn Shaddad, opening the meeting, ‘is assemble at the Dome of the Rock to prepare ourselves for death.’ Then there was silence, the amirs sitting so still it was ‘as though there were birds on their heads’. The council debated whether the leader should make a last stand within the city or avoid being trapped in a siege. The sultan himself knew that without his own presence his henchmen would soon surrender. Finally Saladin said, ‘You’re the army of Islam. Turn your reins away and they’ll roll up these lands like a scroll. It’s your responsibility – that’s why you’ve been funded by the treasury all these years.’ The amirs agreed to fight, but the next day they returned to say they feared a siege like that of Acre. Was it no
t better to fight outside the walls and at worst, temporarily lose Jerusalem? The generals insisted that Saladin or one of his sons had to stay in Jerusalem or else his Turks would fight his Kurds.
Saladin stayed – and his spies kept him well informed about Richard’s problems. As 15 July, the anniversary of the capture of Jerusalem in 1099, approached, the Crusaders discovered yet another fragment of the True Cross, a timely miracle which elated the ranks. But the French under the Duke of Burgundy and the Anglo-Angevins under Richard were almost at daggers drawn, taunting each other with silly slogans and filthy ditties. Richard, the troubadour, penned a jingle of his own.
Saladin was almost sick with the tension: on the night of Thursday 3 July, Ibn Shaddad was so worried that he prescribed the comfort of prayer: ‘We are in the most blessed place we could be on this day.’ At Friday prayers the sultan should make two ritual rakas, bows from the waist then two full prostrations. Saladin performed these rituals and openly wept. By nightfall, his spies reported that the Franks were packing up. On 4 July, Richard led the retreat.
Saladin was exuberant, riding out to meet his favourite son Zahir, kissing him between the eyes and escorting him into Jerusalem, where the prince stayed with his father in the palace of the Master of the Hospitallers. But both sides were exhausted: Richard was receiving reports that back in England his brother John was close to open rebellion. If he wished to save his lands, he needed to return home soon.