A second version of events has come down to us from the Assassins themselves. It is recounted in one of the few surviving writings of the sect, a narrative signed by one of their adherents, a certain Abū Firās, whose story runs as follows. Sinān was away from Maṣyāf when the fortress was besieged. He and two companions posted themselves on a neighbouring hill, from which Sinān observed the development of operations. Saladin then ordered his men to go and capture Sinān. A large detachment surrounded him, but when the soldiers tried to approach, their arms and legs were paralysed by a mysterious force. The ‘old man of the mountain’ then asked them to inform the sultan that he wanted to meet him personally and in private; the terrified soldiers ran to tell their master what had just happened. Saladin, suspecting that something was amiss, had lime and ashes spread around his tent to detect any footprints, and at nightfall he posted guards with torches to protect him. Suddenly, in the middle of the night, he awoke with a start, and barely glimpsed an unknown figure gliding out of his tent, a figure he believed to be Sinān himself. On the bed the mysterious visitor had left a poisoned cake and a piece of paper on which someone had written: You are in our power. Saladin is then said to have cried out, and his guards came running. They swore they had seen nothing. The next day, Saladin hurriedly lifted the siege and returned to Damascus.
This account is undoubtedly highly embellished, but it is a fact that Saladin reversed his policy toward the Assassins very suddenly. Despite his aversion for heretics of all varieties, he never again tried to threaten the territory of the Bāṭinis. On the contrary, he now sought to conciliate them, thus depriving his enemies, Muslim and Franj alike, of a precious auxiliary. The sultan had decided to make sure that he held all the trumps in the battle for control of Syria. It is true that for all practical purposes victory was his from the time of his conquest of Damascus. But the conflict nevertheless dragged on interminably. The many campaigns that had to be waged—against the Frankish states, against Aleppo, against Mosul, which was also ruled by a descendant of Zangī, and against various other princes of Jazīra and Asia Minor—were exhausting. Apart from all that, Saladin had to return to Cairo regularly to discourage intriguers and conspirators.
The situation began to be resolved only towards the end of 1181, when al-Ṣāliḥ suddenly died, possibly poisoned, at the age of eighteen. Ibn al-Athīr gives an emotional account of his last moments.
When his condition worsened, the physicians advised him to take a bit of wine. He told them: ‘I will not do so without advice from an ‘ālim.’ One of the leading doctors of law was then brought to his bedside and explained that religion authorized the use of wine as a medicine. Al-Ṣāliḥ asked: ‘And do you really think that if God has decided to end my life he will change his mind if he sees me drinking wine?’ The man of religion had to answer, No. ‘Then’, the dying man concluded, ‘I do not want to meet my creator with a forbidden drink in my stomach.’
Eighteen months later, on 18 June 1183, Saladin solemnly entered Aleppo. Egypt and Syria were now one, not merely in name, as during the reign of Nūr al-Dīn, but in fact, under the uncontested authority of the Ayyubid sovereign. Curiously, the emergence of this powerful Arab state whose pressure mounted daily did not induce the Franj to exhibit greater solidarity among themselves. On the contrary. As the king of Jerusalem, hideously deformed by leprosy, sank into impotence, two rival clans embarked on a power struggle. The first, which favoured coming to some arrangement with Saladin, was led by Raymond, the count of Tripoli. The spokesman for the second, extremist faction was Reynald of Châtillon, the former prince of Antioch.
Very dark, with a hawk-nose, fluent in Arabic, and an attentive reader of Islamic texts, Raymond could have passed for a Syrian emir but for his large stature, which betrayed his Western origins.
Among the Franj at that time, Ibn al-Athīr tells us, there was no wiser or more courageous man than the lord of Tripoli, Raymond Ibn Raymond al-Sanjīlī, a descendant of Saint-Gilles. But he was very ambitious, and desired to become king. He acted as regent for some time, but was soon deposed. So resentful was he that he wrote to Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn, aligned himself with him, and asked for his help in becoming king of the Franj. Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn was delighted at the request, and quickly freed a number of knights of Tripoli who had been imprisoned among the Muslims.
Saladin paid close attention to this discord. When Raymond’s ‘Oriental’ current seemed in the ascendancy in Jerusalem, he struck a conciliatory note. In 1184 Baldwin IV’s leprosy was in its final stages. His arms and legs had grown flaccid, his eyes dim. But he lacked neither courage nor common sense, and he had confidence in the count of Tripoli, who was striving to establish friendly relations with Saladin. The Andalusian traveller Ibn Jubayr, who visited Damascus that year, was surprised to find that in spite of the war, caravans travelled freely between Cairo and Damascus, passing through Franj territory. ‘The Christians’, he noted, ‘make the Muslims pay a tax, which is applied without abuses. The Christian merchants in turn pay duty on their merchandise when they pass through the territory of the Muslims. There is complete understanding between the two sides, and equity is respected. The men of war pursue their war, but the people remain at peace.’
Far from being in any hurry to put an end to this coexistence, Saladin indicated that he was prepared to go even further on the road to peace. In March 1185 the leprous king of Jerusalem died at the age of twenty-four, bequeathing the throne to his nephew Baldwin V, a six-year-old child. The regency went to the count of Tripoli, who, aware that he needed time to consolidate his power, quickly dispatched emissaries to Damascus to seek a truce. Although Saladin felt sure that he was now in a position to open the decisive battle with the Occidentals, he nevertheless demonstrated that he was not seeking a confrontation at any price. He agreed to a four-year truce.
But a year later, when the child-king died in August 1186, a struggle broke out for the post of regent. The mother of the young monarch, Ibn al-Athīr explains, had fallen in love with a man named Guy, a Franj recently arrived from the West. She married him, and when the child died, she gave the throne to her husband, summoning the patriarch, the priests, the monks, the Hospitallers, the Templars, and the barons and informing them that she had transferred power to Guy, to whom she then had them swear allegiance. Raymond refused; he preferred to reach an agreement with Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn. The Guy in question was King Guy of Lusignan, a handsome, dim-witted man completely devoid of political or military competence and always inclined to agree with the last person to whom he had spoken. In reality, he was no more than a puppet in the hands of the ‘hawks’, the leader of whom was old ‘Brins Arnat’, Reynald of Châtillon.
Following his Cypriot adventure and his exactions in northern Syria, Reynald had spent fifteen years in the prisons of Aleppo before being released in 1175 by the son of Nūr al-Dīn. His captivity had only aggravated his defects. More fanatical, greedy, and bloodthirsty than ever, Arnat aroused more hatred between the Arabs and Franj than had been caused by decades of war and massacres. After his release he had failed to retake Antioch, where his stepson Bohemond III now held the throne. He therefore settled in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, where he quickly married a young widow who presented him as a dowry with various territories lying east of the Jordan River, in particular the powerful fortresses of Karak and Shawbak. Having formed an alliance with the Templars and with many newly arrived knights, he enjoyed mounting influence at the court in Jerusalem, which only Raymond succeeded in counterbalancing for a time. Reynald sought to impose the same policy as that pursued by the first Frankish invaders: to fight relentlessly against the Arabs, to pillage and massacre without restraint, to conquer new territories. He regarded any conciliation, any compromise, as treason. He felt bound by no truce or agreement. In any event, he explained cynically, what was the value of an oath sworn to infidels?
In 1180 an agreement between Damascus and Jerusalem had guaranteed the free circulation of goods and persons in the region. A few m
onths later, a caravan of rich Arab merchants crossing the Syrian desert on its way to Mecca was attacked by Reynald, who confiscated all the merchandise. Saladin complained to Baldwin IV, who dared not punish his vassal. In the autumn of 1182 a more serious incident occurred: Arnat decided to raid Mecca itself. The expedition set out from Eilat, which was then a small Arab fishing village on the Gulf of Aqaba. Some Red Sea pirates guided the Franj along the coast; they attacked Yanbūḥ, the port servicing Medina, and then Rabīgh, not far from Mecca. Along the way Reynald sank a boat carrying Muslim pilgrims to Jidda. Everyone was taken by surprise, Ibn al-Athīr explains, for the people of these regions had never seen a Franj before, whether merchant or warrior. Drunk with success, the attackers took their time filling their ships with booty. Reynald then returned to his own territory, while his men spent many months plying the Red Sea. Saladin’s brother al-‘Ādil, who was governing Egypt in his brother’s absence, armed a fleet and sent it out against the pillagers, who were crushed. Some of them were taken to Mecca, where they were publicly beheaded, an exemplary punishment, the Mosul historian concludes, for those who had sought to violate the holy places. News of Reynald’s insane escapade spread throughout the Muslim world, where Arnat would henceforth symbolize everything most hideous about the Frankish enemy.
Saladin had responded by staging a few raids against Reynald’s territory, but in spite of his anger, the sultan remained magnanimous. In November 1183, for example, he had set up catapults around the citadel of Karak and was bombarding it with huge chunks of rock, when the defenders sent word that a princely marriage was being celebrated inside. Although the bride was Reynald’s step-daughter, Saladin asked the besieged in which pavilion the newlyweds would reside and then ordered his men to spare that sector.
Such gestures, alas, counted for nothing with Arnat. For a while he had been neutralized by the wise Raymond, but with the accession of King Guy in 1186, he was again able to lay down the law. A few weeks later, ignoring the truce that was to have remained in effect for another two and a half years, the prince swooped, like a bird of prey, on a large caravan of Arab pilgrims and merchants who were peacefully making their way to Mecca. He massacred all the armed men and led the rest of the troop into captivity in Karak. When some of them dared to remind Reynald of the truce, he told them defiantly: ‘Let your Muḥammad come and deliver you!’ When these words were reported to Saladin several weeks later, he swore that he would kill Arnat with his own hands.
For the time being, however, the sultan sought to temporize. He sent emissaries to Reynald asking that the captives be released and their property restored, in accordance with the terms of the truce. When the prince refused to receive them, the emissaries went to Jerusalem, where they were greeted by Guy. He professed to be shocked at the behaviour of his vassal but dared not risk a conflict with him. The ambassadors insisted: would the hostages of Prince Arnat continue to rot in the dungeons of Karak, in violation of all the agreements and oaths? The inept Guy washed his hands of the matter.
The truce was broken. Although Saladin was prepared to have honoured it for its full duration, he was not apprehensive at the resumption of hostilities. He dispatched messengers to the emirs of Egypt, Syria, Jazīra, and elsewhere announcing that the Franj had treacherously flouted their commitments, and he called upon his allies and vassals to unite all the forces at their command to take part in the jihād against the occupier. Thousands of cavalry and foot-soldiers converged on Damascus from all the lands of Islam. The city was inundated by a sea of waving banners, small camel-skin tents in which soldiers took shelter from the sun and rain, and vast royal pavilions of richly coloured fabric adorned with calligraphic verses from the Koran or poems.
While this mobilization proceeded, the Franj remained mired in their internecine quarrels. King Guy thought it a propitious moment to dispose of his rival Raymond, whom he accused of complicity with the Muslims. The army of Jerusalem prepared for an attack on Tiberias, a small city of Galilee belonging to the wife of the count of Tripoli. Alerted, the count went to see Saladin and proposed an alliance. Saladin accepted immediately and sent a detachment of troops to reinforce the Tiberias garrison. The Jerusalem army withdrew.
On 30 April 1187, as successive waves of Arab, Turkish, and Kurdish fighters continued to converge on Damascus, Saladin sent a messenger to Tiberias asking Raymond, in accordance with the agreement, to allow his scouts to make a reconnaissance tour of the coast of Lake Galilee. The count was embarrassed, but could not refuse. His only demands were that the Muslim soldiers be out of his territory by nightfall and that they promise not to attack his subjects or their property. To avoid any incidents, he warned all the surrounding localities that the Muslim troops would be passing through, and he asked the inhabitants to stay at home.
At dawn the next day, Friday the first of May, seven thousand cavalry under the command of one of Saladin’s lieutenants passed before the walls of Tiberius. That same night, as they retraced their steps on their return passage, they respected the count’s demands to the letter: they attacked neither village nor château, looted neither gold nor cattle, yet their passage was not without incident. By chance, the grand masters of the Templars and the Hospitallers happened to have been in one of the area’s fortresses the evening before, when Raymond’s messenger arrived to announce that a Muslim detachment would be passing through. The monk-soldiers pricked up their ears. They had no pact with the Saracens. Hastily gathering a few hundred knights and foot-soldiers, they decided to assault the Muslim cavalry near the village of Saffurīya, north of Nazareth. But the Franj were decimated in a matter of minutes. Only the grand master of the Templars managed to escape.
Frightened by this defeat, Ibn al-Athīr relates, the Franj sent their patriarch, priests, and monks, together with a large number of knights, to Raymond. They remonstrated bitterly with him about his alliance with Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn, saying: ‘You must surely have converted to Islam, otherwise you could never tolerate what has just happened. You would not have allowed Muslims to cross your territory, to massacre Templars and Hospitallers, to carry off prisoners, without doing anything to stop it!’ The count’s own soldiers, those of Tripoli and Tiberias, also chided him, and the patriarch threatened to excommunicate him and to annul his marriage. Raymond was unnerved by this pressure. He begged their pardon and repented. They forgave him, there was a reconciliation, and they asked him to place his troops at the disposal of the king and to join the battle against the Muslims. The count left with them. The Franj reassembled their troops, cavalry and foot-soldiers, near Acre, and then they marched, shuffling along, toward the village of Saffurīya.
In the Muslim camp, the debacle of these universally feared and detested military-religious orders gave a foretaste of victory. Emirs and soldiers alike would henceforth hasten to cross swords with the Franj. In June Saladin assembled all his troops midway between Damascus and Tiberias: twelve thousand cavalry paraded before him, not to mention the foot-soldiers and auxiliary volunteers. From the saddle of his charger, the sultan shouted the order of the day, soon re-echoed by thousands of excited voices: ‘Victory over God’s enemy!’
Saladin calmly analysed the situation for his general staff: ‘The opportunity now before us may well never arise again. In my view, the Muslim army must confront all the infidels in an organized battle. we must throw ourselves resolutely into the jihād before our troops disperse.’ The sultan wanted to prevent his vassals and allies returning home with their troops before the final victory was won, for the fighting season ended in the autumn. The Franj, however, were extremely cautious warriors. Would they not seek to avoid the battle once they saw how numerous and well-organized the Muslim forces were?
Saladin decided to lay a trap for them, praying to God that they would step into it. He headed for Tiberias, occupied the city in a single day, ordered many fires to be set, and laid siege to the citadel, which was occupied by the countess, wife of Raymond, and a handful of defenders. The Muslim army was quit
e capable of crushing all resistance, but the sultan restrained his men. The pressure had to be stepped up little by little. He pretended to prepare for the final assault while awaiting the enemy’s reaction.
When the Franj learned that Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn had occupied and set fire to Tiberias, Ibn al-Athīr relates, they met in council. Some proposed marching against the Muslims to fight them and prevent them from seizing the citadel. But Raymond intervened: ‘Tiberias belongs to me’, he said, ‘and it is my own wife who is besieged. But I would be ready to allow the citadel to be taken and to let my wife be captured if I could be sure that Saladin’s offensive would stop there; for, in God’s name I have seen many a Muslim army in the past, but none as numerous or as powerful as the one Saladin commands today. Let us therefore avoid a confrontation with him. We can always retake Tiberias later, and ransom our prisoners.’ But Prince Arnat, lord of Karak, said to him, ‘You are trying to frighten us with this talk of the strength of the Muslim forces simply because you like them and prefer their friendship. Otherwise you would not proffer such words. If you tell me that they are numerous, I answer: the fire is not daunted by the quantity of wood to burn.’ The count then said: ‘I am one of you. I will do as you wish, fight at your side, but you will see what will happen.’
Once again, the most extremist arguments had triumphed among the Franj.
Everything was ready for the battle. The army of Saladin was deployed in a fertile plain covered with fruit trees. Behind it was the fresh water of Lake Tiberias, fed by the Jordan River, while further on, toward the north-east, the majestic outline of the Golan Heights could be seen. Near the Muslim camp was a hill with two peaks, called ‘the horns of Ḥiṭṭīn’, after the village perched on its slopes.