Third Millennium Library
 

THE LIFE OF SALADIN AND THE FALL OF THE KINGDOM OF JERUSALEM

 

CHAPTER X.

TRUCES AND TREATIES.

1176-1181.

 

FOR six years there was peace between Saladin and the house of Zengy. Es-Salih remained at Aleppo in undisturbed enjoyment of what was left to him of his father's kingdom. The Atabeg of Mosul did not invite a repetition of the disasters at the Horns of Hamah and the Sultan's Mound. There was also a nominal truce with the King of Jerusalem, which Saladin had concluded in the summer of 1175, with the assistance of handsome presents and the mediation of Humphrey of Toron, with whom he probably maintained the friendly relation which dated from the time of his own knighthood. His object was to secure himself in the rear whilst he was occupied in the north. Treaties with the soldiers of the Cross, however, were worse than useless, so long as the doctrine prevailed in Christendom that no faith need be kept with the “infidel”; and scarcely had they concluded the pact of amity, when they began to ravage the beautiful valley of the Litany, burned the standing corn, set fire to the villages, and returned in triumph, laden with booty, and driving great flocks of stolen sheep and cattle.

The raids of the Franks, however, cannot have been very serious, or involved any loss of territory, for Saladin seems to have paid no attention to them. There was another power, independent both of the Franks and the Zengids, with which he was forced to deal. It was impossible to carry his life at the disposal of the Sheykh of the Assassins. Saladin accordingly determined to enter their country and destroy them root and branch. As soon as he had concluded his treaty of peace at Aleppo, and dismissed his Egyptian troops to recruit their strength at home, he marched with the rest of his army into the rocky passes of the Summak range, or Ansariya mountains, where the fanatics had their forts. He went into this gloomy region in August, and in August he came out; but the Old Man still ruled on his Mountain, and the Assassins were unconquered.

What happened is variously related. It is agreed that Saladin laid waste much of the country and that he set siege to Masyaf, the chief among the nine castles of the society — a veritable eagle's nest, perched on a scarcely accessible peak, and commanding a desolate ravine. It is equally certain that his siege artillery and storming parties made no impression on the rocky fortress. The divergence arises when the cause of his abrupt retreat is explained. The Moslem historians naturally put the best color on it and assert that Sinan obtained peace through the mediation of Saladin's uncle; but even by these apologists the humility of the Master's overture is considerably weakened by his accompanying threat of a wholesale murder of the Ayyubid family in the event of refusal. The story told by Sinan’s panegyrist is more probable, when divested of its supernatural absurdities. This story is as follows.

When Saladin laid siege to Masyaf, Sinan was absent, and the King’s summons to surrender reached him at a village near Kadamus. He told the messenger that he must have a personal interview with Saladin; and then, since access to Masyaf was blocked by the leaguer, he retired with only two companions to the top of a neighboring mountain, whence he looked down upon the siege and awaited the event. Saladin, believing that he had the arch-enemy in his power, sent a body of troops to surround him; but hostile soldiers and peaceful messengers were alike held back by a mysterious force which numbed their limbs. Such was the miraculous power of the holy Master, in whom his followers were taught to recognize a veritable incarnation of the Divine Reason.

1176] The Sheykh of the Mountain.

The awed reports of his baffled and perplexed envoys worked upon Saladin's fears. He remembered the two former attempts upon his life, and began to doubt whether anything human could save him from the supernatural agencies of this devil or saint. He had chalk and cinders strewed around his tent, to detect secret footsteps; his guards were supplied with link lights, and the night watches were frequently relieved. But unearthly terrors surrounded him, and his sleep was troubled. One night the watchers on the battlements of Masyaf perceived a spark like a glow-worm slowly gliding down the hill where the Master sat. It vanished among the tents of the Saracens. Presently Saladin awoke from his uneasy dreams to see a figure gliding out at the tent door. Looking round he noticed that the lamps had been displaced, and beside his bed lay some hot scones of the shape peculiar to the Assassins, with a leaf of paper on the top, pinned by a poisoned dagger. There were verses on the paper:

“By the Majesty of the Kingdom! what you possess will escape you, in spite of all, but victory remains to us: We acquaint you that we hold you and that we reserve you till your reckoning be paid”.

Saladin gave a great and terrible cry, and the guard and the officers rushed in. He showed them the scones, the dagger, the verses. The dread Master had been actually at his pillow: it was nothing short of a miracle. No one had heard a step or seen a living soul: there were footprints on the cinders — but they all pointed outwards. Then Saladin said: “I have seen him — and that is very different from hearing of him. Go to this man and ask him for a safe-conduct, and pray him not to punish me for my past errors”. A messenger went to seek Sinan< on the mountain; but the Master made answer that there could be no warranty for the King’s life so long as he continued the siege. Saladin therefore departed, in such haste that he even left his artillery behind him; and at the Bridge of Ibn-Munkidh he received a safe-conduct from the Master of the Assassins.

This is the narrative of a partisan and a visionary, but it may well be based upon fact. Sinan may actually have groped or bribed his way to Saladin's tent, and thus convinced him in person that no precautions could avail him against the knives of the secret society. The dread of assassination, joined to the impracticable character of the district and the strength of its fastnesses, may reasonably have induced the King to abandon his design of uprooting the abhorred sect; and if he could not wholly destroy them, the only prudent alternative was to make them his friends. As a political measure, moreover, the binding of the Master by ties of mutual toleration was a master-stroke. It cut away from the still disaffected Shiites in Egypt their hope of Sinan’s sinister support, and deprived the Crusaders of a secret weapon.

After leaving the mountains, Saladin returned to Damascus (25 August), dismissed his Syrians to their homes, left his brother, Turan Shah, the conqueror of the Yemen, in command in Syria, and taking with him only his personal followers, went to Cairo (22 September). He had been absent two years, and there was much to organize and superintend. He now was able to devote his energies to the fortification and reconstruction of the city which he had already designed. The walls were repaired, and their extensions were laid out, and the building of the Citadel was begun. The Moorish traveler, Ibn-Jubeyr, in 1183 saw Christian captives sawing stones and quarrying out the moat or fosse beneath the massive walls of the castle. It was reserved, however, for a nephew thirty years later to complete the fortifications which his famous uncle had planned, and at the present day, so often has the Citadel been remodeled by Mameluke Sultans, and finally by Mohammed Ali, that it is difficult to identify with precision any large part of the original defenses.

1177) Building the Citadel of Cairo.

The founder’s inscription, however, may still be read over the old “Gate of the Steps”, Bab al-Mudarraj, a dark mysterious portal in the west face of the original enceinte. It records how “the building of this splendid Citadel,—hard by Cairo the Guarded, on the terrace which adds use to beauty, and space to strength, for those who seek the shelter of his power,—was commanded by our Master the King,  “Strong to Aid”, “Honor of the World and the Faith”, “Father of the Conquering”, Yusuf son of Ayyub, Restorer of the Empire of the Caliph; with the direction of his brother and heir the Just King (al-Adil) Sayf-al-Din Abu-Bekr Mohammed, friend of the Commander of the Faithful; and under the management of the Emir of his Kingdom and Support of his Empire Karakushson of Abdallah, the slave of al-Melik en-Nasir, in the year 579 (or 1183-4 AD)”. The famous “Well of the Winding Stairs”, 280 feet deep, still called the Bir Yusuf, “Joseph's Well”, was certainly excavated in the solid rock by Karakush under Saladin’s orders; but the other buildings lately existing in the Citadel and called after his name really belonged to later times. The people of Egypt were accustomed to name public works after the famous Sultan. His memory, but not his act, is preserved in the long aqueduct of Cairo, and even in the great canal of Upper Egypt, still known as the “River of Joseph”, Bahr Yusuf, though it dates from the time of the Pharaohs. The chief public work, however, that he carried out, beyond Cairo itself, was the great bridge or dyke of Giza, which was built, like the Citadel, with stones from the pyramids, in 1183-4, and carried on forty arches along the border of the desert, seven miles from Cairo, and was intended to form an outwork of defense against an invasion of the Moors, which never happened.

Saladin remained at Cairo, occupied with these  improvements, building colleges like the Madrasa of the Swordmakers, and ordering the internal administration of his principal province, for a whole year, till November, 1177, when he set out upon a raid into Palestine. The Franks had lately forayed the Damascus country, and the pretence of a truce was no longer worth preserving. The Christians had now sent a large portion of their forces north to besiege  Harim, a fortress belonging to the King of Aleppo, and the south of Palestine was comparatively bare of defenders. The occasion was propitious, and Saladin marched gaily to Ascalon, “the Bride of Syria”. William of Tyre says that he heard, on careful inquiry, that the Saracens numbered 26,000 fighting men, of whom 8000 were Toassin or élite, including the bodyguard of a thousand Mamelukes in yellow tunics—Saladin’s color—and 18,000 were Caragholam (black slaves) of inferior rank—doubtless the old Egyptian heavy-armed infantry from the Sudan. Meeting with no opposition, they began to raid the country in perfect confidence, sacked and burned Ramla and Lydda, and dispersed over the land, even up to the gates of Jerusalem, in a joyous orgy of plunder and devastation.

1177. Defeat at Ramla

So secure were they in their strength that they treated the enemy with contempt, and allowed King Baldwin to get into Ascalon, and the Templars of Gaza to join him, without taking any precautions against a sudden attack. It is true the King of Jerusalem had only 375 knights to his back; but Saladin must have known by this time that 375 knights were not to be despised, especially when led by such warriors as Balian, Reginald of Sidon, Odo the Master of the Temple, and Joscelin the Seneschal, and encouraged by the presence of “the True Cross”, borne by the Bishop of Bethlehem. How it happened is not clear, but this much is certain, that on the 25th of November, 1177, in the absence of the greater part of his army, Saladin’s men were surprised at Tell Jezer, near Ramla, and before they could form up, the knights were hacking them down. At first the Sultan retired fighting, and tried to get his men into order of battle; but his bodyguard was cut to pieces around him, and he was himself all but taken prisoner. Seeing that the day was lost, he turned at last, and mounting a swift camel rode for his life. A remnant of his troops escaped with him, and throwing away armor and weapons, and leaving the wounded to their fate, fled under cover of night pell-mell to Egypt, where they arrived after great privations. Of the rest of the army that had marched so gleefully to the despoiling of the Holy Land, few survived. Famine, cold, and heavy rains completed what the sword began. Never had Saladin’s arms known such disaster.

Far from giving way to discouragement, however, the great captain, who had for once thrown away an army, hastened to collect another. Writing to his brother Turan Shah at Damascus, Saladin admits the desperate character of the battle, but is equal to quoting poetry on the subject — “I thought of thee”, he wrote (and Ibn-al-Athir saw the very letter)—“I thought of thee, amid the thrusting of their spears, While the straight browned blades quenched their thirst in our blood”—and adds “again and again we were on the verge of destruction; nor would God have delivered us save for some [future] duty”. In three months he was ready to meet the Franks again, and the spring of 1178 found him encamped under the walls of Emesa. Some skirmishes took place between his generals (who were also his kinsmen) and the Franks. The troops of Hamah won a victory over the enemy, and brought the spoils, together with many heads and prisoners, to Saladin, who ordered the captives to be beheaded. They were “infidels”, and they had been plundering and laying waste the lands of the Faithful. The rest of the year was spent in Syria, without any considerable action on either side. Saladin wintered at Damascus, and in the spring prepared to undo the latest maneuver of Baldwin.

1179. Jacob's Ford.  

The King of Jerusalem had followed up his triumph at Ramla by pushing forward towards the Saracens’ country and setting an outpost on the road to Damascus. There was a passage over the Jordan called “Jacob's Ford”, because here Jacob wrestled with the angel; it was also known as the “Ford of  Sorrows”; and here the King restored a fort which not only defended the passage of the river, but commanded the approach to the plain of Banias, the granary of Damascus, where rice and cotton fields and groves of lemon trees lay thick at the foot of the “Mount of Snow.” Hitherto this fertile plain had been divided in the friendliest manner between the Franks and Moslems, and a mighty oak tree marked the boundary between the two nations, whose flocks grazed side by side. Saladin had vainly offered first 6o,000 and finally 100.000 gold pieces to induce the King to abandon a project which was peculiarly offensive to the Saracens. He now resolved to raze the fortress to the ground. His nephew Ferrukh Shah had already won a success over the Franks by an ambuscade in April, 1179: he had caught King Baldwin with a scanty following in a rocky gorge near Belfort, and it was only the courage of the valiant Constable Humphrey of Toron that rescued his young sovereign from capture, at the cost of his own life. The loss of this gallant knight was a heavy blow to the Franks. “No words can describe Hun- fary”, says the Arab historian; “his name was a proverb for bravery and skill in war. He was indeed a plague let loose by God for the chastening of the Moslems”.

1179] Battle of Mergion

Following up this advantage, Saladin, who had now removed his headquarters to Banias, pushed forward, and in June again encountered the King of Jerusalem. For Baldwin, hearing that the Saracens were pillaging in the direction of Sidon, went forthwith to the rescue, burning to wipe out his late disgrace. Marching north by way of Safed and Toron, he ascended a height of the mountains to the village of Mesafa (‘the station’), whence he commanded a wide view, and beheld the camp of Saladin, as it were at his feet, spread out on the “Meadow of Springs” (Marj Oyun, Mergion). Hurrying down to the attack, his troops fell into disorder, the infantry dropped behind, and the army went into battle piece-meal. At first they had it all their own way and put part of the enemy to flight; but Odo at the head of his Templars rashly pursued the fugitives too far, and severed still further the already scattered forces of the Christians. Saladin, taking advantage of this, rallied his flying troops, and calling upon them for a great effort, made one of his furious charges. The enemy, who had thought the day won, were taken by surprise; and burdened by the spoils of the slain, had no time to form up. Many were killed or made prisoners, and the rest, escaping over the Litany river, sought refuge in the neighboring stronghold of Belfort; some did not stop till they reached Sidon. The victory was especially notable for the high rank of the prisoners. The Masters of the Hospital and the Temple, Raymond of Tripolis, Balian of Ibelin, Baldwin of Ramla, and Hugh of Tiberias, were among the seventy knights whom the Secretary Imad-al-Din counted as they stood in Saladin's tent. Baldwin obtained his liberty on paying a ransom of 150,000 Tyrian gold pieces and setting free a thousand Saracen prisoners; but when Saladin offered to exchange Odo for an emir who had been taken by the Franks, the Master—“a haughty, arrogant man, with the breath of fury in his nostrils, who feared not God nor respected man”—whose frantic fighting had been the wonder and the ruin of the day, replied proudly: “A Templar can give for his ransom nought but his belt and dagger”. Odo died in captivity: “he went from his prison to Hell”, says Abu-Shama.

The road was now clear to King Baldwin’s Folly, the Castle of Sorrows at Jacob’s Ford. On the 25th of August Saladin marched thither, and as soon as his pioneers had collected enough vine-poles to make screens for the sappers, he began the attack. At the first assault a man in the crowd, in a tattered shirt, sprang on to the outwork and began to engage the enemy on the curtain; others followed, and the outwork was won. The Franks, however, still defended the walls resolutely, in confident expectation of being relieved. The next morning the Saracens mined the wall, and made the mine deep and filled it with burning wood, and waited for the wall to fall. But they waited two days, the fire burning all the time, and still the wall stood firm, for it was nine cubits thick, not ordinary cubits neither, but carpenters' cubits half as long again; and the mine was but a third through it. Saladin saw that it was useless, and called for water: “Every man who brings me a skin of water, shall have a gold dinar”. Water was brought with such enthusiasm that the works were fairly flooded. Then the sappers returned and deepened the mine and pierced the wall, and put fire in again, and at last it fell on Thursday, the 30th of August, 1179. The Saracens poured in through the breach and took the castle by storm, and made prisoners of the defenders to the number of seven hundred, and set free the Moslem captives; but of the Franks, Saladin killed many and threw them down the castle well, and sent the rest to be imprisoned at Damascus. He remained on the spot till the Castle of Sorrows was razed level with the ground, and not a vestige of it remained. As Ali of Damascus, the clockmaker, sang: “How can we leave in the Patriarch's house those who break faith after they have sworn it? I admonish you sincerely—sincerity is part of religion—quit Jacob’s House, for Joseph is come”.

1180] Truce with the Franks.

When the King of Jerusalem at last arrived to raise the siege of his favorite castle, he found only heaps of stone blackened with fire. The Crusaders tried no more conclusions with Saladin that year. Their King's disease was increasing, and there was anxiety about the succession; a truce would be welcome. There was rest during the winter, indeed, which Saladin devoted to equipping a powerful navy to assist in the next expedition. His fleet of seventy vessels had done considerable execution in the autumn of 1179; harried the coast, and brought back a thousand Christian prisoners. This encouraged him to try combined action by sea and land. In the spring of 1180 he was once more in the parts about Safed, waiting for his fleet to arrive off the coast, before opening a vigorous campaign. Baldwin wisely chose the prudent course, and sent messengers to propose peace. Saladin was not sorry to agree, for droughts and bad harvests were seriously hampering his commissariat. In the summer he consented to a truce for two years by sea and land, for natives and new-comers alike, and it was confirmed by solemn oaths. For the Franks it was an humiliating concession: never before had they set seal to a treaty drawn up on equal terms which reserved no advantage for themselves. It was no wonder that their pride rebelled. The Count of Tripolis, no friend to the King, loudly denounced the compact; but a rapid raid of the Saracens upon his territory in May, and the appearance of Saladin's fleet off Tortosa, brought Raymond to reason. The Holy War ceased for a while.

There were other parties to the peace which now reigned over the Hither East, and the immediate cause of this widespread pacification was—a singing  girl. Nur-al-Din, Prince of Keyfa, had been given to wife a great lady, the daughter of Kilij Arslan, the Seljuk Sultan of Konia. Unhappily he did not treat her well, but bestowed his affections upon a singing girl of no family at all. The neglected wife appealed to her father, and Kilij Arslan declared war. By the treaty of Aleppo, Saladin had agreed to stand by his allies, among whom was the Prince of Keyfa. Moreover he had himself a quarrel with the Sultan of Konia concerning the fortress of Raaban on the northern marches, and blood had been spilt. He was therefore in no humour to hear of a punitive expedition against his ally. “Tell your master, in God's name”' he said to the Seljuk's envoy, “by my faith in two days I will march with my men into his capital and seize all his dominions”. So in his wrath he had come as far north as Raaban, where he was again met by the ambassador, this time with peaceful arguments. Saladin, seeing the situation, put pressure upon his amorous ally, and the quarrel was compounded by the summary dismissal of the singing girl. This happy result was followed by an expedition into Cilician or Lesser Armenia, as far as Mopsuestia (el-Massisa), to compel its king Rhupen to keep faith with the Turkmans who pastured in his territory and under his protection. After the destruction of the castle of al-Menakir, Rhupen submitted.

Saladin’s power had now made itself felt as far as Asia Minor; he was admittedly the chief of Saracen rulers from the Euphrates to the Nile, and was invited by other princes to act as arbiter in their disputes. This high position he used for a noble purpose, whatever motive urged him. He brought about a general peace, a Truga Dei, among all the peoples whom he could influence.

On the 2nd of October, 1180, he presided over a memorable Congress, on the banks of the Senja, near Sumeysat, at which the princes of Mesopotamia—Mosul, Jezira, Irbil, Keyfa, and Mardin—the Sultan of Konia, and the King of Armenia set their seals to a solemn pact, whereby they bound themselves on oath to keep peace one with another for the space of two years. For this time war was to be unknown within their borders, and a holy truce, a Magna Pax Saracenica, was to reign throughout the land. It was a great conception: but how it was observed will be seen.