WILLIAM OF TYRE: THE ROYAL TUTOR
King Amaury appointed William of Tyre as tutor to his son, Baldwin. William adored the prince:
The boy, then about nine, was committed to my care to be instructed in liberal studies. I devoted myself to my royal pupil. He was comely of appearance and continued to make progress in pursuit of letters and gave ever-increasing promise of developing a loveable disposition. He was an excellent horseman. His intellect was keen. He had a retentive memory.
‘Like his father,’ added William, ‘he eagerly listened to history and was well-disposed to follow good advice’ – William’s advice no doubt. The boy was playful and that was how his tutor discovered his plight.
He was playing with his companions when they began, as playful boys often do, to pinch each other’s arms and hands with their nails. But Baldwin endured it altogether too patiently as if he felt nothing. After this had occurred several times, it was reported to me. When I called him, I discovered that his right arm and hand were particularly numb. I began to be uneasy. The lad’s father [the king] was informed, physicians consulted. In the process of time, we recognized the early symptoms. It is impossible to refrain from tears.11
THE DISEASE OF BALDWIN IV
William’s delightful pupil was a leper* – and the heir to an embattled kingdom. On 15 May 1174, the strongman of Syria and Egypt, master-mind of the new jihad, Nur al-Din, died. Even William admired him as a ‘just prince and a religious man’.
King Amaury sped north to exploit Nur al-Din’s death, but on 11 July, he caught dysentery. He was just thirty-eight but, as Arab and Frankish doctors argued about remedies, he died in Jerusalem. The ‘loveable’ new king Baldwin IV excelled at his studies with William, but he had to endure a variety of treatments – blood-lettings, oil-rubs in ‘saracenic ointment’ and enemas. His health was supervised by an Arab doctor, Abu Sulayman Dawud, whose brother taught Baldwin to ride with one hand as the disease advanced.
It is hard to find a case of nobler courage and grace under fire than this doomed young king who was closely watched by his devoted tutor: ‘Day by day, his condition became worse, the extremities of his face were especially attacked so that his faithful followers were moved with compassion when they looked at him.’ He had been brought up apart from his mother but now the louche Agnes returned to support her son, always accompanying him on campaign. She unwisely placed the king in the hands of an arrogant minister who served as seneschal. When he was assassinated in Acre, Jerusalem politics began to assume the menace of a Mafia family in decline.
The king’s cousin Count Raymond III of Tripoli demanded the regency and restored stability, appointing the royal tutor, William, as chancellor. But the strategic nightmare that had always haunted Jerusalem now materialized: Saladin, strongman of Cairo, seized Damascus, gradually but steadily uniting Syria, Egypt, Yemen and much of Iraq into one powerful sultanate, encircling Jerusalem. Raymond of Tripoli, one of those urbane Levantine dynasts who spoke Arabic, bought time by agreeing a truce with Saladin. But it bought time for Saladin too.
Baldwin showed his mettle by raiding up into Syria and Lebanon, but during his frequent illnesses the magnates feuded around the sickbed. The Master of the Templars was increasingly insubordinate, while the Hospitallers were waging a private war against the patriarch, even firing arrows inside the Sepulchre. Meanwhile a new arrival, the veteran knight Reynald of Chatillon, Lord of Kerak and Outrejourdain, across the Jordan, was both asset and liability, radiating aggressive confidence and reckless swagger.
Saladin started to probe the kingdom, attacking Ashkelon and riding towards Jerusalem, whose citizens panicked and fled into the Tower of David. Ashkelon was about to fall when in late November 1177 the leper-king, Reynald and a few hundred knights attacked Saladin’s 26,000 troops at Montgisard, north-west of Jerusalem. Inspired by the presence of the True Cross and sightings of St George on the battlefield, Baldwin won a famous victory.
GRACE UNDER PRESSURE: VICTORY OF THE LEPER-KING
The leper-king returned in triumph while Saladin only just escaped on a camel. But the sultan was still master of Egypt and Syria, and he soon raised new armies.
In 1179, during a raid into Saladin’s Syria, Baldwin was ambushed, his horse bolted and he escaped thanks only to the courage of the old Constable of the Kingdom who gave his life to save the boy. Recovering with characteristic pluck, he again led his forces against Saladin’s raiders. Close to the Litani river, he was unhorsed and horribly exposed: his spreading paralysis prevented him mounting again. A knight had to carry him off the battlefield on his back. The young king could never marry – it was thought that leprosy could be passed sexually and now he could scarcely lead his armies. He expressed his personal distress – and the need for a strong new king from Europe – to Louis VII of France: ‘To be deprived of the use of one’s limbs is little help to one in carrying out the work of government. If only I could be cured of the disease of Naaman but I have found no Elisha to heal me. It’s not fitting that a hand so weak should hold power when Arab aggression presses upon the Holy City.’ The sicker the king, the hotter the fight for power. The king’s decline matched the political and moral rot. When Count Raymond of Tripoli and Prince Bohemond of Antioch rode towards the city with a cavalry squadron, the king angrily suspected a coup d’état, again buying time with a truce with Saladin.
When the patriarch died, the queen mother Agnes passed over William, Archbishop of Tyre, and appointed Heraclius of Caesarea, said to be her lover. Favouring rich silks, glittering with jewellery and wafting on a cloud of expensive scent, this ecclesiastical gigolo kept a Nablusite draper’s wife, Paschia de Riveri, as his mistress. She now moved to Jerusalem, and even bore him a daughter: Jerusalemites called her Madame la Patriarchesse.
The King would soon die. Agnes had to settle the succession.
GUY: FLAWED HEIR
Agnes therefore arranged a marriage between the king’s sister-heiress Sibylla and Guy of Lusignan, the attractive twenty-seven-year-old brother of her latest lover, the Constable of the Kingdom. Princess Sibylla, a young widow who had a son by her first marriage, was the only person who was delighted with the match. To most of the barons, her new husband seemed neither experienced nor high born enough to handle Jerusalem’s existential crisis. Guy, now Count of Jaffa and Ashkelon, was a well-born Poitevin baron, but he certainly lacked authority. He divided the kingdom just as it most needed to be united.
Reynald of Kerak broke the truce by attacking the caravans of pilgrims en route to Mecca. There was no duty more sacred for a Muslim ruler than the protection of the haj. Saladin was incandescent. But Reynald next outfitted a fleet and raided down the Red Sea, landing on the coast nearest to Mecca and Medina. Taking the war to the enemy was an impressive but also dangerous game. Reynald was defeated on land and sea and Saladin ordered the throats of captured Frankish sailors to be cut in public outside Mecca. He then raised another army from his ever-expanding empire. As for Reynald, Saladin swore, in his own words, ‘to shed the blood of the tyrant of Kerak’.
Baldwin, his ‘extremities diseased and damaged, unable to use hands and feet’, fell ill with a fever: he appointed Guy as regent, keeping Jerusalem as his royal fief.* Guy could not but glory in his rise, until in September 1183, Saladin invaded Galilee. Guy mustered 1,300 knights and 15,000 infantry near the fountain of Sephoria but either feared – or was unable – to attack Saladin, who finally marched way to attack the fortress of Kerak across the Jordan. Baldwin ordered the beacon lit on the Tower of David to signal Kerak that help was on its way. Valiantly, heartbreakingly, the leper-king – borne on a litter, blind, grotesque and decaying – led out his army to rescue Kerak.
On his return, the king sacked Guy, appointed Raymond as regent and had his eight-year-old nephew, son of Sybilla, crowned as Baldwin V. After the coronation, the child was carried from the Sepulchre to the Temple on the shoulders of the tallest magnate, Balian of Ibelin. On 16 May 1186, Baldwin IV died aged twenty-three. But the new child-king Baldwin V reigned just a year, buried in an ornate sarcophagus depicting Christ flanked by angels and decorated with wetleaf acanthus.12
Jerusalem needed an adult commander-in-chief. In Nablus, Raymond of Tripoli and the barons gathered to prevent Guy’s return, but in Jerusalem the throne belonged to Sibylla, now queen regnant – and she was married to the despised Guy. Sibylla persuaded Patriarch Heraclius to crown her, promising to divorce Guy and nominate another king. But during the coronation, she summoned Guy to be crowned as king beside her. She had outwitted everyone, but the new king and queen were unable to restrain Reynald of Kerak and the Master of the Templars, who were both spoiling for a fight with Saladin. Despite the truce, Reynald ambushed a haj caravan from Damascus, capturing Saladin’s own sister, mocking Muhammad and torturing his prisoners. Saladin appealed for compensation to King Guy, but Reynald refused to pay it.
In May, Saladin’s son raided Galilee. The Templars and the Hospitallers recklessly attacked him, but they were slaughtered at the springs of Cresson, the Master of the Templars and three knights being the only ones to escape. This disaster brought temporary unity.
KING GUY: TAKING THE BAIT
On 27 June 1187, Saladin, at the head of an army of 30,000, marched on Tiberias, hoping to lure the Franks out and strike ‘a tremendous blow in the jihad’.
King Guy mustered 12,000 knights and 15,000 infantry at Sephoria in Galilee, but, at a council in the red tent of the kings of Jerusalem, he agonized over the unpalatable alternatives facing him. Raymond of Tripoli urged restraint even though his wife was besieged in Tiberias. Reynald and the Master of the Templars responded by calling Raymond a traitor and demanded battle. Finally Guy took the bait. He led the army across the baking-hot Galilean hills for a day until, harassed by Saladin’s troops, overwhelmed by scorching heat and paralysed by thirst, he pitched camp on the volcanic plateau of the twin-peaked Horns of Hattin. They then went looking for water – but the well there was dry. ‘Ah Lord God,’ said Raymond, ‘the war is over; we are dead men; the kingdom is finished.’
When the Crusaders awoke on the morning of Saturday 4 July, they could hear prayers in the Muslim camp below. They were already thirsty in the summer heat. The Muslims lit the scrubland. Soon it was burning all around them.13