Crusades

On the morning of July 3, 1187, an army of the Franks settled in Syria, descendents of the crusaders, set forth from the village of Saffariya toward the besieged fortress of Caesarea on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, some four hours' march away.1 The army, perhaps some twenty thousand men strong, comprised the bulk of the Western Christian military power in Syria. Modern estimates of the Christian force vary widely; the figure of twenty thousand comes from Marshall Baldwin. Amin Maalouf gives the Christian muster as a mere twelve thousand; Zoe Oldenbourg proposes upwards of thirty thousand. All agree that the total represented a general muster of all ablebodied men available to the Frankish cause.2*

Whatever the Christians' numbers, none reached Tiberias and few escaped death or capture. Their march was harassed and slowed by Turkish mounted bowmen in the Muslim army of Salahaddin alAibubi Yusuf, known in Western history as Saladin. By the end of the day, the Frankish army had reached only so far as the Horns of Hattin (or Hittin), a rise overlooking the Sea of Galilee.

The Franks made their camp at Hattin. There, through the night, they suffered from smoke blown over them from fires set to windward by the Muslim forces.3 By morning, heat, weariness, smoke, and inadequate provision made the Frankish soldiers ________

*All military manpower figures from this era must be treated with great caution. On the one hand, muster rolls m

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were not. Islam is not a monastic religion; while Sufi movements may have monklike followers, this is far from the Islamic mainstream. Islam teaches not isolation from ordinary life in pursuit of faith, but the living of life in faith. Saladin may thus have felt a shared humanity with Frankish knights who had their wives, families, and homes, that he did not feel with warrior monks. (Consider the way that Saladin ordered his mechanical artillery to avoid the newlywed couple at Krak.) In Saladin's eyes, and those of many other Muslims, the Hospitallers and Templars may have thus appeared as dangerous and unreasonable fanatics, not simply as men who by the circumstance of upbringing and belief were enemies. The campaign of Hattin and the events that led up to it encapsulate in miniature much of the cause of the ultimate Frankish defeat in Syria. The battle itself, as we have seen, should never have been fought in the first place. Caesarea was not even remotely a stronghold of such strategic importance that it had to be relieved at the risk of the whole Frankish army. The only major Frankish leader who had a personal concern with Caesarea was Raymond of Tripoli, whose fortress it was and he was prepared to abando

Category: History - C