For a time, it seemed as if this venture might bear fruit. In late summer 1177 a Greek fleet duly arrived at Acre, and this coincided with the advent in the Levant of Count Philip of Flanders, son of the committed crusader Thierry of Flanders, at the head of a large military contingent. Philip had taken the cross in 1175 in response to the ever more frequent and vocal appeals from the Latins of Outremer for new western European crusades to the Holy Land. Yet despite his good intentions, Philip’s expedition proved to be a fiasco. With final preparations afoot for an assault on Egypt, petty arguments broke out over who should have rights to the Nile region should it fall and, amid mutual recriminations, the projected campaign collapsed. Disgruntled and alienated, the Byzantine navy set sail for Constantinople. In September 1177 Count Philip joined forces with Raymond III of Tripoli, and together they spent the winter trying and failing to capture first Hama and then Harim. A real chance to disrupt, perhaps even to overrun, Saladin’s position in Egypt had been squandered. Having amassed a defensive force to counter the expected Christian invasion, the sultan suddenly found that he was no longer under threat.

CONFRONTATION

In late autumn 1177 Saladin initiated his first significant military campaign against the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem since Nur al-Din’s death. Despite the importance of this expedition–the sultan’s opening salvo in his self-appointed role as Islam’s new jihadi champion–his precise motives and objectives are somewhat opaque. In all probability the 1177 offensive was not planned as a full-scale invasion of Palestine, targeting the reconquest of Jerusalem, but was instead an opportunistic raid. With his armies already assembled to defend against an expected attack, Saladin seized the chance to make a practical affirmation of his commitment to the holy war, seeking to assert his own martial dominance over the Franks, while providing a counterweight to their northern Syrian attack.

Saladin marched out of Egypt at the head of more than 20,000 horsemen, setting up a forward command post at the frontier settlement of al-Arish. Leaving behind his heavy baggage, he moved north into Palestine, reaching Ascalon around 22 November. There he found an alarmed Baldwin IV. With much of his realm’s fighting manpower absent in the north alongside Philip of Flanders and Raymond III, the king had hurriedly mustered what troops he could at the coast. As one eastern Christian contemporary put it, ‘everyone despaired of the life of the sick king, already half dead, but he drew upon his courage and rode to meet Saladin’. Baldwin was joined by Reynald of Châtillon, his seneschal, Joscelin of Courtenay, a force of some 600 knights and a few thousand infantry, and the bishop of Bethlehem carrying the True Cross. This army made a brief show of confronting the Muslim advance, but, overwhelmingly outnumbered, the Franks soon withdrew behind the walls of Ascalon, leaving Saladin free to strike inland towards Judea.⁴⁶

The Battle of Mont Gisard

The sultan now made a fateful miscalculation. Seemingly adjudging that the Franks would remain cowed and contained within Ascalon, he allowed his forces to fan out, raiding Latin settlements such as Ramla and Lydda, leaving behind no effective network of scouts to monitor Baldwin’s movements. The young king, encouraged and aided by Reynald of Châtillon, was, however, in no mood to sit idly by as his realm was ravaged. Linking up with eighty Templar knights stationed at Gaza with their master, Odo of St Amand, Baldwin made the bold, perhaps even foolhardy decision to confront Saladin. As William of Tyre put it, ‘[the king] felt that it was wiser to try the dubious chances of battle with the enemy than to suffer his people to be exposed to rapine, fire and massacre’. This was a potentially deadly gamble.

On the afternoon of 25 November, the sultan was advancing to the east of Ibelin, with much of his army spread out across the surrounding coastal plain, when the Latin army made a sudden and unheralded appearance. Saladin’s remaining troops were just then engaged in fording a small river near the hill known as Mont Gisard. When Reynald of Châtillon unleashed a near-immediate heavy cavalry charge on their broken ranks, the sultan proved unable to organise any effective defence and his numerically superior force was soon thrown into retreat. One Muslim contemporary admitted that ‘the rout…was complete. One of the Franks charged Saladin and got close, almost reaching him, but the Frank was killed in front of him. The Franks crowded about him, so he departed in flight.’

While the sultan barely escaped the field, vicious fighting continued. Fleeing for their lives, his soldiers abandoned their armour and weapons, even as the Latins hunted them down, giving dogged pursuit for more than ten miles until nightfall finally offered the Muslims some respite. There were heavy casualties on both sides, for even the triumphant Christians suffered 1,100 fatalities, while a further 750 injured were later brought to the Hospital of St John in Jerusalem. But, while the exact scale of Muslim losses remains unclear, the severe psychological damage inflicted was unquestionable. Saladin was deeply humiliated at Mont Gisard. His close friend and adviser Isa was taken prisoner by the Franks and spent a number of years in captivity before eventually being ransomed for the massive sum of 60,000 gold dinars. The sultan was forced to scurry from the scene, the misery of his own journey back to Egypt compounded by ten successive days of unusually intense, chilling rainfall and the discovery that the often fickle Bedouins had sacked his camp at al-Arish. Having suffered food and water shortages, Saladin finally limped out of the Sinai in early December 1177, shaken and bedraggled.

The inescapable truth was that his own incautious negligence had exposed the army to defeat and that, as a consequence, his reputation for assured military leadership had been tarnished. In public, Saladin did his best to limit the damage, arguing in correspondence that the Latins had actually lost more men in the battle and accounting for the slow speed of his return to Cairo by explaining that ‘we carried the weak and the helpless and went slowly so that stragglers could [catch up]’. He also expended time and money rebuilding his army. Privately, however, Mont Gisard left its scars. Imad al-Din admitted that it had been ‘a disastrous event, a terrible catastrophe’, and, more than a decade later, the painful memory of this ‘terrible reverse’ endured, with the sultan acknowledging that it had been ‘a major defeat’.⁴⁷

The burden of blood

Any immediate prospect of avenging this injury was forced into the background by the need to address the festering issue of Turan-Shah’s ineptitude. Saladin returned to Damascus in April 1178, relieving his brother of the governorship, but was then forced into an embarrassing and intractable predicament. By way of compensation for his demotion, Turan-Shah demanded lordship of Baalbek–the richly endowed ancient Roman city of Lebanon, located in the fertile Biqa valley. The problem was that the sultan had already awarded these lands to Ibn al-Muqaddam in token of gratitude for his aid in negotiating Damascus’ surrender in 1174, and the emir was now understandably reluctant to relinquish his prize. The unravelling of this affair over the following months was revealing. On the one hand, it underscored a consistent problem that beset Saladin throughout his career. To build his ‘empire’, the sultan generally relied upon his family rather than selecting lieutenants on merit, but this trust sometimes proved to be ill-founded. Incompetent, unreliable and potentially even disloyal, figures like Turan-Shah were liabilities–capable of gravely damaging the grand dream of Ayyubid domination–yet time and again Saladin proved reluctant to turn against his blood relations. In seeking to resolve the Baalbek dilemma, the sultan also demonstrated that, to further his aims, he would willingly embrace devious and duplicitous politicking.