The Battle of Hattin & Its Aftermath

            In the 1180s Saladin consolidated his position in Syria. His next target was the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which he began to raid regularly, using large armies.   He could not easily take the great castles, except a couple on the borders.  But he could wear down the Franks by disruption and destruction.

            The Christians, under the leadership of King Guy, found this situation harder and harder to endure.  In July 1187 they assembled all their military forces at Acre, and prepared to march to relieve the castle of Tiberias.  Marching cross country in mid summer in Palestine is a very bad idea, one opposed by many in the Frankish court, including the lord of Tiberias, who insisted that it would be better to let his wife and castle be captured.  Nevertheless, the largest army the Kingdom of Jerusalem had ever assembled marched off on July 3, along a waterless road, trying to reach the Sea of Tiberias.  The Muslims harassed them and slowed them down.  They were stopped short, and forced to camp on the Horns of Hattin, looking down at the Sea of Galilee that they could not reach.

            Muslims choked them with grass fires.  A few knights broke through the Muslim lines but they could not save the army behind them.  On July 4 the Jerusalem army was annihilated.  King Guy was a prisoner. Saladin himself personally beheaded the renegade southern lord, Raynauld of Châtillon, and he made the Muslim scholars of his court execute each one of the captured Templars and Hospitallers.  The true cross was paraded upside down in Damascus.  Thousands of soldiers were sold on the slave markets.

            Saladin had a reputation for keeping his word, and this now proved helpful.  Garrison commanders, knowing that the kingdom had no army left, were inclined to surrender and trust Saladin’s promises to allow them to retreat to the coast.  Great cities surrendered one by one, as their lords asked them to surrender in return for their freedom.  King Guy got his freedom for surrendering Ascalon.

            Several months later Saladin took his troops to Jerusalem, which under Balian of Ibelin, who, despite having only two knights, would not surrender.  Saladin promised a general slaughter to avenge the one inflicted on the Muslim defenders by the First Crusade when it took Jerusalem by storm.  The defenders fought hard for a couple of weeks, and would not give up even after the wall was breached, They promised that, unless Saladin granted the citizens of Jerusalem safety, they would destroy all the Muslim shrines of Jerusalem, and then would kill as many Muslims as they could in a final battle.  So Saladin agreed to let them ransom themselves and take their personal property to the coast. When the cross went down on the Dome of the rock and the crescent went up, Muslims cheered and Christians cried.

But 20,000 or so of the Jerusalem Christians could not be ransomed, and many were sold into slavery.  Muslims historians offer gloating accounts about the women who were sold to be wives or slaves. 

            It took Saladin a year to mop up all the forts.  He marched up the coast toward the other crusader states, and conquered everything except Antioch, Tripoli, and two Templar and one Hospitaller castles.

In the Kingdom of Jerusalem itself, the only place which had not surrendered was the City of Tyre (in today's Lebanon).  It had a great defensive situation.  But the main reason it was spared was that a dilatory crusader, the Italian nobleman Conrad of Montferrat, arrived there just as its surrender was being negotiated.  His older brother had been that William of Montferrat who had been the father of Baldwin V, and Conrad had served at the Byzantine court with distinction.  When he arrived in the Kingdom, he had first sailed into Acre, saw Saladin's black flag flying there, and quickly turned around and headed up to Tyre. He reached Tyre before it could surrender, recognized that it was militarily probably defensible, and saw that it could be a potential landing base for a new crusade.  So he convinced the citizens to let him take over its defense.

            Saladin should have completely conquered the Kingdom before he disbanded his army, but the Christians seemed to have been destroyed.  He thought that the final mopping up could wait.  He knew that the Kingdom of Jerusalem still had no good leader.  No one except Sybilla had ever liked King Guy, and the catastrophe at Hattin and the surrender of Ascalon had not enhanced his prestige.  Nevertheless, once he was released, he went to Tyre and asked for the city, claiming it because it was what was left of his kingdom.  Conrad refused, saying that he was holding Tyre in trust for a future crusade.  Guy went off to Tripoli, then came back to Tyre, where he camped outside the walls, vulnerable to Muslim attack and an embarrassment to Conrad.

In 1189 Guy did something totally unexpected.  He took his few knights, marched down the coast, and laid siege to Acre.  This was ridiculous.  Its Muslim garrison was more than twice the size of Guy’s force (a successful siege usually needs about three times as many attackers as there are defenders).  And Saladin had a huge potential Muslim relieving army in Syria.  So at the end of 1189, the last pitiful forces of the Kingdom of Jerusalem were hunkered down at Tyre and in an earthwork outside of Acre.  Their only hope was a new crusade.