Jerusalem. The Biography

charged again, breaking the Crusaders, ‘who retreated up the hill. When I saw the Franks fleeing, I cried out with glee, “We’ve routed them!”’ But ‘tortured by thirst’, they ‘charged again and drove our men back to where my father stood’. Saladin rallied his men, who broke Guy’s charge. ‘We’ve routed them,’ cried Afdal again.
    ‘Be quiet,’ snapped Saladin, pointing at the red tent. ‘We haven’t beaten them so long as that tent stands there!’ At that moment, Afdal saw the tent overturned. The Bishop of Acre was killed, the True Cross was captured. Around the royal tent, Guy and his knights were so exhausted that they lay in their armour helpless on the ground. ‘Then my father dismounted,’ said Afdal, ‘and bowed to the ground, giving thanks to God with tears of joy.’
    Saladin held court in the lobby of his resplendent tent, which was still being pitched as his amirs delivered their prisoners. Once the tent was up, he received the King of Jerusalem and Reynald of Kerak. Guy was so desiccated that Saladin offered him a glass of sherbet iced with the snows of Mount Hermon. The king slaked his thirst then handed it to Reynald at which Saladin said: ‘You’re the one who gave him the drink. I give him no drink.’ Reynald was not offered the protection of Arab hospitality.
    Saladin rode out to congratulate his men and inspect the battlefield, with the ‘limbs of the fallen, naked on the field, scattered in pieces, lacerated and disjointed, dismembered, eyes gouged out, stomachs dis-embowelled, bodies cut in half,’ the carnage of medieval battle. On his return, the sultan recalled Guy and Reynald. The king was left in the vestibule; Reynald taken inside: ‘God has given me victory over you,’ said Saladin. ‘How often have you broken your oaths?’
    ‘This is how princes have always behaved,’ replied the defiant Reynald.
    Saladin offered him Islam. Reynald refused disdainfully, at which the sultan sprang up, drew a scimitar and sliced off his arm at the shoulder. The guards finished him off. The headless Reynald was dragged feet first past Guy and thrown out at the tent door.
    The King of Jerusalem was led inside. ‘It’s not customary for kings tokill kings,’ said Saladin, ‘but this man crossed the limits so he suffered what he suffered.’
    In the morning, Saladin bought all the 200 Templars and Hospitaller knights from his men, for fifty dinars each. The Christian warriors were offered conversion to Islam, but few accepted. Saladin called for volunteers from the Sufi mystics and Islamic scholars, to whom he gave the order to kill all the knights. Most begged for the privilege, though some appointed substitutes out of fear that they would be mocked for bungling the job. As Saladin watched from his dais, this messy and amateurish butchery now destroyed what remained of the might of Jerusalem. The bodies were left where they fell. Even a year later, the battlefield remained ‘covered with their bones’.
    Saladin sent the King of Jerusalem to Damascus along with the True Cross, hung impotently upside down on a lance, along with prisoners so plentiful that one of Saladin’s retainers saw ‘a single person holding a tent-rope pulling by himself thirty prisoners’. Frankish slaves cost just three dinars and one was bought for a shoe. 14
    The sultan himself advanced to conquer the rest of Outremer, capturing the coastal cities of Sidon, Jaffa, Acre and Ashkelon but failing to take Tyre when the courageous Conrad, Marquis of Montferrat (whose brother had been briefly married to Sybilla) arrived just in time to rescue this key fortress-port. Instead, Saladin’s Egyptian viceroy, his brother, Safadin, advised him to go post-haste towards Jerusalem in case he fell ill before taking the Holy City: ‘If you die of a colic tonight, Jerusalem will stay in the hands of the Franks.’
    SALADIN’S SIEGE: SLAUGHTER OR SURRENDER?
     
    On Sunday 20 September 1187, Saladin surrounded Jerusalem, first setting up camp on the west outside the Tower of David then moving to the north-east, where Godfrey had stormed the walls.
    The city was crowded with refugees but there were only two knights left to fight under the patriarch and the two queens of Jerusalem, Sibylla and King Amaury’s widow Maria, now married to the magnate Balian of Ibelin. Heraclius could scarcely find fifty men to guard the walls. Fortunately Balian of Ibelin arrived, under Saladin’s safe-conduct, to rescue his