bank of the lake, challenged, as they passed, the gates of Tiberias;
but, true to their compact, they shot no arrow, they threw no
javelin. They rode on up to Nazareth, where it slopes to the south on
the Galilean hills--Nazareth the chief point of their hatred. They
passed under the walls of the little town with insults, but with no
act of arms. They rode yet farther, fatiguing their light mounts,
until they could look down the hills across the great plain of
Esdraelon to the height of Carmel, and even to a glimpse of the sea.
They had ridden more than twenty miles deep into Galilee before the
leaders turned rein to reach their camp again down in the deep trench
of Jordan, to cross the river and to find their tents.
It was already late in the afternoon, but the sun still high in the
sky (and their terms therefore strictly kept) when, as they halted
their tired beasts near the lake shore under the hills before the
crossing of the river, they saw a strange sight.
Less than one hundred mounted men, heavily armoured as was the
fashion of the Franks, sitting their larger horses, already deployed
as though for battle, came over the last crest and began slowly
moving down the slope above them.
They watched the sight curiously. If this unknown band intended
battle, it was challenging odds of nearly a hundred to one. But why
had they appeared?
The brilliant summer day had been marked throughout by the silence of
all that countryside; by the absence not only of soldiery, but even
of peasants and their kine. This little line of isolated knights,
with nothing in support and no one near, might have seemed a mirage
for its futility. But it was real enough against the falling hillside
under the westering sun. Since so small, novel, unexpected a force
seemed to propose a challenge before the Moslem cavalry could cross
the Jordan, that large Saracen force deployed in turn on its small
tired horses, and awaited the charge. They took their favourite
formation of a shallow crescent--the universal tactic of their time
against the weight of a European charge. They drew back the centre
from the main blow, and trusted by numbers to develop in the wings.
So stood the hundredfold cavalry of the Mahommedans, expecting the
shock and their own inevitable victory.
Why had this small Christian force so appeared?
This is what had happened.
The King of Jerusalem had sent two great messengers to Count Raymond
of Tripoli. He desired, if it might be, to compose his quarrel. He
felt the coming of the storm.
These two messengers were the heads of the great military
orders--the Master of the Knights Templar and the Master of the
Hospital.
They had come so far upon their journey northward as Nazareth, and
lay there upon the night before Afdal’s ride. There, at Nazareth,
they had received the message which Raymond had sent round the whole
countryside, warning them against provoking Afdal, when that son of
Saladin should come outside the walls. Of these two men, one merits a
particular attention: the Master of the Temple. I have just written
of him.
He was a knight, French in speech, Gerard by name, doubtless from
Bideford, in Devon. A man of energy and even of violence, of ambition
in government, of great courage, too personal in hatred, and alive
with the splendid traditions of his Order in arms. He it was who had
most supported the young queen in Jerusalem, most helped to make
her husband the king, most thwarted the high claims of the Count of
Tripoli. All this must be remembered to understand what follows.
This man, Gerard, then, the Master of the Templars, was there in
Nazareth that afternoon of the 30th of April, upon the eve of Afdal’s
ride. And when he heard Count Raymond’s order, he took it--quite
wrongly--for treason.
_This_ is the note of the tragedy that was to come two months later.
_This_ is the evil thread running through all the story of our
disaster in the East--the legend of Raymond’s treason had taken root.
Raymond of Tripoli had preferred the political way to the direct.
He had parleyed with Saladin. And on that account he, by far the
greatest soldier of them all, lost direction, and, in spite of his
genius, saw Jerusalem and all Palestine go down.
Later he died of the shame.
The two Masters, I say, he of the Temple and he of the Hospital, had
received Raymond’s order--to keep quiet within walls. This is the
way they treated it. They sent at once to such knights of their two
societies as were within riding distance of the town. They gathered
less than one hundred. They harangued them in the market-place of
Nazareth, saying it was foul shame to stand unmounted and with the
sword sheathed while the Saracens rode unchallenged through the open
country, with their high minaret cries of insult and defiance. The
little group of knights was moved; for the whole spirit of their
foundation was to risk odds and to sacrifice themselves perpetually.
They cared nothing for numbers. With their footmen to serve them,
perhaps four hundred (and these seem to have straggled and to have
been left behind), they rode out before evening from the northern
gate of Nazareth, and so eastwards, following the retirement of
Afdal. Hence it was that Saladin’s son had seen them, as I have
described, suddenly appearing upon the fall of the hill above them,
a handful of armed men upon their larger horses, confronting a force
more than a hundred times their own.
The Templars and the Hospitallers charged. They were surrounded;
nearly all fell; but in the course of the _mêlée_ the execution they
did was so great that the day remained legendary with the enemy. One
especially, James (who came from Maille, in Touraine, and who was
among the last survivors), they thought (did the Saracens) to be
St. George himself upon a white horse; for in both armies there was
this superstition or vision as old as the battle of Konieh, that St.
George was to be seen leading the Christian ranks. His enemies stood
round the dead man with lifted hands, the dread of unseen things
upon them. They wiped the sweat and blood and dust from his face,
and carried him off like a relic, still thinking him something from
beyond this world.
When the slaughter was done, and all save, perhaps, some five or six
of that little band had fallen (some cut their way out, we know, for
we find them in the later battle), Afdal stuck Christian heads on
his lances in triumph and rode on, and, with his reduced thousands,
crossed Jordan just before the setting of the sun; and such was the
end of that day’s foray.
When the news of it came to Tiberias to Count Raymond, he saw at once
the enormity of the moment. In numbers insignificant, their action
should be forgiven as heroic; but the separate policy, the contempt
for his orders, the provocation offered by these few knights, would
surely set in movement that great machine, the rumbling of whose
wheels all the East was expecting. It was a challenge to Saladin, the
very challenge which Saladin thirsted for: and Raymond sweated to
delay catastrophe. The challenge had been given prematurely in spite
of him, and to the ruin of his plans. It could not now be undone.
Raymond of Tripoli forgot, in the common cause, the past and its
angers. He hurried south to Jerusalem. He was reconciled to Guy of
Lusignan. All the Christian knights became one body. The bravest and
most spirited of them all, the high-born adventurer Reginald, who
held the strong outpost, Kerak, on the south of the Dead Sea; who
had, in raid after raid, harassed the rich caravans of the desert;
who, with an amazing energy, had approached, in the height of summer,
the Red Sea itself (sending his ships in sections over the desert on
camels), and menaced the holy places of the enemy hundreds of miles
away--Reginald, whom Saladin hated with a personal hatred for his
fearlessness and his unbroken power, at whose castle only that winter
he had impotently shaken his spear: Reginald of Chatillon came riding
in. The garrisons were withdrawn from the towers of the sea-coast and
from the towns--from Askalon, from Gaza, from Acre, from Tyre. Two
thousand knights and barons, fully armed, were gathered together, and
such a full levy meant, with all their sergeants and their footmen,
a force of fifty thousand. They were more; for the Eurasians, called
“Turcopoles,” went with them lightly mounted--of no great service
save, perhaps, to observe.
A meeting-place was discussed. It was chosen, I think, by the advice
of Raymond (for once accepted by his peers), at a point over against
the only road whereby the host of Saladin could come--that is, in the
very heart of Galilee.
For Saladin, based on Damascus, must strike just to the north or just
to the south of the Lake of Tiberias, and almost certainly by the
main road south of it--the road that has seen unnumbered armies pass
since the beginning of human life upon those hills.
In the choice of this gathering-place, right in the heart of Galilee,
you have one of those curious marriages between the symbolic and the
real of which history is full. The place chosen (because even in the
height of summer it had ample water) was that of the village, the
plain, the wells of Sepphoris: which they call to-day “Seffurieh.”
What an arena for the great issue between the rival forces of the
world! Not four miles south over the hill was Nazareth; not four
miles east was Cana of Galilee. A day’s march beyond Nazareth, over
the valley which Nazareth commands, was Nain. The tradition of the
Transfiguration looked at them from Mount Tabor, and the plains
below had seen Saul creep by night to find the dead at Endor, and
had watched the rush of Barak from the mountain slopes against the
heathen, and had heard the song of Deborah. Far below them, in the
flat, ran the Kishon. A day’s walk to the east was the town of the
Magdalen, and the shores of that little inland sea round which is set
half the story of the Gospels.
Here to the Wells of Sepphoris they came, then, from all the points
of the Holy Land, riding in; and that great fragment of the True
Cross, the standard of the Crusades, was sent to be the heart of the
host in this last trial.
So they gathered.
Meanwhile the mighty instrument which threatened them was gathering
too. Saladin, who had earlier been south in the desert, in the dark
hills beyond the Dead Sea, had come back north. He had summoned
all his troops from as far as the Tigris, and the Orontes, and the
borders of Egypt. Twelve thousand of the knights alone--that is, of
men who held rank by what the Christians would have called “noble
tenure”--were in his muster; with, perhaps, six or seven or ten
times as many--an unknown multitude--of lesser soldiers eager for
“Allah’s road”; the holy business of uprooting the Nazarenes: that
is, ourselves; Europe; Christendom.
Saladin also had his gathering-place--Ashtaroth, on the great
pilgrims’ road in the Hauran, two days’ march east of Jordan, four
days’ from Damascus. Thence going a few miles northward (much to
where the station of Tesil now stands on the Damascus railway) he
reviewed that vast host of varied men.
It was a Friday, the holy day of the Moslem week, on which day the
great fanatic loved to begin an enterprise--Friday, the 26th of June,
1187, the fourteenth day of the month of Rabi-el-Aker, in the five
hundred and eighty-third year of the Hegira. On that same day, at the
hour of public prayer, he began his march, and, going far, encamped
his army that night where his son’s cavalry had stood two months
before in the plain to the east of Jordan, just south of the Sea of
Galilee.
There for a space he halted. His scouts and spies went cautiously
westward over the burnt fields and stubble of the blazing summer for
news, and brought back the numbers and names of this gathering of the
Christian host at the Wells of Sepphoris.
Saladin took counsel with his captains, and it was determined to
provoke immediate action, for the superiority of the Moslems was very
great.
Upon Monday, the 29th, the host crossed Jordan and entered Galilee,
camping immediately upon the hither bank, and making no true march
that day. But upon the 30th they advanced westward some seven miles
on to the higher land, and stood at Kefr Sabt, astride the direct way
between Nazareth and Tiberias, ten miles or so to the east of the
Christian camp at Sepphoris.
The Christian host did not move.
Saladin, by one of those actions in which a soldier compels or
provokes something military through something political, detached
a force to ruin Tiberias. It was Raymond’s capital of Galilee, and
there in the stronghold were Raymond’s wife and her children. Hoping
that such a provocation would compel a decision, the Sultan, leaving
a considerable force at Kefr Sabt, moved the mass of his troops
somewhat northward to cover with their camp the main road between
Sepphoris and Tiberias; while the third body, dispatched against
Tiberias itself, did their work. This second camp of his in Galilee
lay on the broad plateau south of a little village called HATTIN.
This plateau was the watershed between the gullies (dry at such a
season) which run down to the Mediterranean and the streams and
fountains fully supplied which take their short course eastward by a
fall of many hundred feet into the trench of the Jordan valley and
the Sea of Galilee. From Tiberias itself, and the shores of the lake,
Saladin’s camp stood but half an hour’s ride away, and meanwhile the
force he had detached (and led) to reduce Tiberias was burning the
town.
Raymond’s own wife was close besieged upon the rocky acropolis of
it, threatened every moment with disaster. She sent, as Saladin had
hoped she would send, entreaties to the Christian host that they
would march east at once and succour her and her garrison. It was she
(the daughter of the Lord of St. Omer) who had brought Galilee to
Raymond for her dower. Her four children were with her, and death was
upon them all.
It was upon Thursday, the 2nd of July, that her passionate letter
came in to the Christian camp, at vespers, in the late afternoon of
the day. In the great red tent of Guy, the King of Jerusalem, the
council was held.
It seemed a clear task to march at once to the relief of the capital;
a first day’s march and a battle upon the second should decide the
issue--and surely time pressed most urgently.
Then it was that Raymond himself rose in the crowded assembly, under
the red light that glared through the hangings of the pavilion, and
made a speech which all but changed the story of the world.
Those who had heard of him only by name crowded around Raymond to see
so famous a figure. What did they see?
A little, very thin man, scanty of hair, and that hair very flat
upon his head. He was dark, abstemious, spare, with brilliant,
piercing eyes; older than the run of those knights; a light weight
on horseback; hardly (to look at) a strong swordsman, but with the
just reputation of soldiership beyond any other man there. His French
words rose.
The moment he began to speak it was seen that his advice would run
counter to the universal counsel of those lords.
“I shall surprise you,” he said. “I shall prefer the interests of the
State to my own. My own country is overrun. It is my people who are
suffering death and slavery; my town that is in flames; my wife who
is besieged and crying for succour. Everything draws me to relieve
Tiberias, except my business as a Christian, which is to serve the
common cause at the cost of my own disaster.”
He bade them not attack but stand fast where they were, supplied with
ample water. Between them and Saladin’s position, south of Hattin, in
this brazen height of the summer, not a drop would be found in the
baked gullies. The infidel army covered all the springs and the lake
behind them. It was but ten miles, but those ten miles would spell
disaster. Let Tiberias go. The Sultan would be compelled to attack
very soon. _His_ then would be the fatigue, _his_ the thirst. And his
retirement, should he be checked, would be through a hostile country.
We even find, in the record of what is told of his speech, some hint
of stratagem. It may be that Raymond, with his clear eye for war,
had ready some force for watching the passages of the Jordan, and
threatening to cut off Saladin’s retirement.
So he spoke, as the evening lengthened, after the time of vespers,
upon that Thursday, the 2nd of July. No one believed him. Though none
said it in his presence, he felt it in the air around him that he was
already, in their legend, the traitor. Whatever he advised, their
minds conceived as the trick of something too astute for a loyal
man-at-arms. And when his advice had been given there was a murmur
and a rumour all round.
But as discussion followed and broadened, the older or more poised
men weighed fully what the Count of Tripoli had said. For a time, as
night approached, their argument was gaining, and the council was
perhaps dispersing (or had dispersed) with the determination to stand
fast and await the attack of Saladin. But after darkness had fallen,
whether in full council or alone, that man who thought himself the
counterpoise to Raymond, and who thoroughly believed in Raymond’s
treason, Gerard of Bideford, came to King Guy and urged and urged the
folly of listening to any plan coming from a man who, to the public
shame, had once bargained with Saladin.
The king, Guy of Lusignan, changed again, and perhaps his council
with him. At any rate, he was obeyed, Raymond’s advice neglected; and
at dawn the great host began its fatal march and fighting of Friday,
the 3rd of July, 1187.
At the head of the column rode Raymond himself and his immediate
vassals, the men of Galilee, and those from Tyre and the north, as
though to prove at once his discipline in what he now thought a lost
cause and his readiness to take the sacrifice. After, with the main
body trailing along the road of that upland, through the parched
fields, came King Guy himself and the guard round the fragment of
the True Cross; while the Knights Templar under their passionate
Devonshire leader, in part the cause of so much evil, and their
brethren, the Hospitallers, covered the train and baggage at the rear.
The sun rose, the heat immediately struck, and with it struck also
here and there, harassing the flanks of the column, forbidding the
army elbow room, appearing and disappearing through the thick dust,
the hornets of Saladin. Those light horsemen darted, skirmishing
on their rapid desert mounts, armed with the long light lance, and
pricking, as it were, and goading the cumbersome body, whose surface
alone as yet they could irritate, and which yet they could so gravely
impede.
The sun still rose; the heat increased; men straggled; there were
too frequent delays and uncommanded halts; blocks in the column.
And all the while the Saracen swarm grew and grew on either side,
almost encircling. Still the long column struggled forward. Before
noon began the complaint for water. Of all the gullies crossed in the
first slow dusty seven miles or so, not one had so much as a stagnant
pool between its hot stones. Such gourds as men had with them were
long ago consumed, and of other provisions of water for such a host
there was none, and could be none in those days.
They had passed by Cana of Galilee, they had come to the bare upland
plateau, where the air danced in the heat over the glaring limestone,
and the broad rough track of the earthen road was a fog of scorching
dust. It was the early afternoon. The still increasing masses of
enemy horse striking and turning again, shepherding in their enemy,
almost surrounded the Christians. Already some grave disorder was
appearing in that three miles or more of exhausted men. In a halt
deliberately called Raymond once more gave his last advice--once more
to be wasted. He told King Guy that there could be nothing ahead
but disaster for a force which had fallen so suddenly into such a
condition--a condition inevitable in attempting such a march through
such a country at such a season, and with such forces against such
a foe. Moreover, they were threatened with envelopment. One way out
remained, and only one. It was to wheel round to the right--that is,
south-eastward; to cut their way through to water that night in the
valley of the Fejjas brook, and with the morning, refreshed, to hold
the passages of the Jordan. Then let Saladin, if he will, come down
south against them. Short of breaking their defence, his retreat
was cut off, and his great host was ruined. Again Guy of Lusignan
hesitated. Perhaps Raymond’s plan would have won; but in the midst of
this deliberation, the harassing Mahommedan cavalry took on another
aspect, more severe than the last. They came on in full force. They
rode round the host. They not only cut into the flanks but into the
Knights Templar with their baggage to the rear, and the end of that
day of torture and thirst was spent up to nightfall in a full battle
against a perfect circle of foes. Many of the stragglers had already
fallen out in each episode of confusion, and had passed to death or
slavery. The now depleted, fainting column camped that night; still
an organized body, but terribly shaken and already doomed. It was a
night of agony and of alarm. Long before morning that army of the
Cross and Europe was already defeated.
All through the short darkness men implored and fought for water, and
could not obtain it. Upon so much agony worse came. The Saracens set
fire to the dry bushes of that limestone upland, and under a light
wind the smoke drove through the Christian camp. Raymond, in the van,
knew that the dice had fallen. “He called upon God the Lord, and said
that the realm was ruined.” It was so.
The dawn of the Saturday broke. Raymond, with the van, took horse,
and saw before him, dark against the sunrise, the strange twin saddle
peaks which they call the Horns of Hattin, the watch towers of that
land. At their foot stood deployed the main body of Saladin; the rest
of his followers were on either side. The envelopment was complete.
There, behind the Saracens, was water, food. The enemy fought
refreshed against ghosts of men.
Their armament was stronger too. All the Saracen munitionment was
carefully distributed for a certain victory. The camels, with their
loads of arrows, were ranged behind the archers, and there was a
great reserve as well. It is true that, had the Christian army
been by some miracle in condition for strong action, the Sultan’s
position was very perilous. He was right on the lake, with very
steep falling land only a few hundred yards behind him, and his only
road of retreat passed just behind the fronts of the two armies. If
those fronts shifted in his disfavour, if his light men broke at the
shock of the heavier Franks, that road would be cut. Whether the
unfavourable position weighed with him or no, whether he had fully
gauged the breakdown of what was now before him, we cannot tell.
He seems, up to the very end of the fight, to have had some doubt,
tugging nervously at his beard and saying, “It was not yet over!”
The historian, with both conditions before him, and knowing what
exhaustion now weighed upon the Christians, can have none.
It was again, though on a much larger scale, in that same formation
of a shallow crescent, that the heart of the Moslem force--that in
front of the head of the Christian host under Raymond--was drawn
up. It did not at once attack, perhaps depending upon the sun and
the heat as allies; and when it did so, it opened with a violent
discharge of arrows. The effect of this was clinched by a general
advance of the whole Mahommedan line at the charge. It caught and
gripped the Christian body, separated its units, reduced the battle
to a great mêlée, in which numbers, a better order, and--far more
important than everything else--_condition_, were wholly upon
the side of the enemy. There is no plan possible of this surging
business, for no scheme was necessary or attempted. It was a cutting
off of large isolated bodies, a cutting down of smaller ones, and
a quantity of hand-to-hand fighting between men refreshed and men
maddened by thirst; and for the most part the Christian infantry that
followed the Christian knights was already in the mood for surrender,
or even for accepting death.