After a summer of failed diplomacy, Saladin moved on Baalbek in autumn 1178. According to Imad al-Din he began by ‘flatter[ing] Ibn al-Muqaddam, for all his age, like a baby’, but when this produced no result, the sultan blockaded the city throughout the coming winter. At the same time, Saladin initiated a programme of blatant propaganda to justify his intervention. Ibn al-Muqqadam was declared a dissident and variously accused in letters to Baghdad of employing an ineffective band of ‘ignorant scum’ to defend the frontier against the Franks, and later, of actually being in treacherous contact with these Christian enemies. By the following spring, the ‘rebel’ lord, his reputation blackened, had been ground into submission and a deal was brokered. Turan-Shah duly received his chosen reward of Baalbek, but even here his rule seems to have been incompetent and he was soon packed off to Egypt, where he died in 1180. Meanwhile, having bent to Saladin’s will, Ibn al-Muqaddam was welcomed back into the fold. Richly endowed with lands to the south of Antioch and Aleppo, he remained loyal to the sultan for the rest of his career.⁴⁸

The House of Sorrow

While still entangled in the Baalbek dispute, Saladin became aware of an alarming development in the border zone between Damascus and the kingdom of Jerusalem. Looking to capitalise upon the momentum gained by his victory at Mont Gisard, Baldwin IV had initiated a deeply threatening scheme, designed to bolster Palestine’s defences and destabilise Ayyubid dominion of Syria.

To appreciate the significance of these events, some sense of how frontiers functioned in the twelfth century is necessary. In common with most of the medieval world, Muslim and Frankish territory in the Levant was rarely divided by the literal equivalent of a modern border, but instead, roughly delineated by frontier zones–areas of overlapping political, military and economic influence, where neither side exerted full sovereignty. The positioning of these areas of contested control, akin to no-man’s-lands between realms, was often closely related to topographic/geographic features, be they mountains, rivers, dense forests or even deserts. And attempts by one polity to consolidate or extend influence in such a region could have profound bearing upon local stability and the overall balance of power between rivals.

In the early twelfth century, a case in point had been the Latin principality of Antioch’s expansion of its sphere of authority eastwards, beyond the natural frontier zone with Aleppo, the low-lying, rocky Belus Hills. This intensified threat to Aleppo’s survival ultimately prompted Muslim retaliation, culminating in the Battle of the Field of Blood in 1119. In the late 1170s a similar confrontation was looming between Baldwin IV and Saladin. During this period, the critical border zone between their respective realms lay to the north of the Sea of Galilee and broadly corresponded with the course of the Upper River Jordan. Previously, the epicentre of the struggle for dominance here had lain in the north-east, at the fortress settlement of Banyas. But once it fell to Nur al-Din in 1164, Latin influence east of the Jordan diminished, and the resultant status quo favoured Muslim Damascus.

In October 1178, Baldwin IV made a bold new play for pre-eminence in the Upper Jordan border zone. His target was not the reconquest of Banyas, but rather the construction of an entirely new fortification on the west bank of the Jordan, beside an ancient crossing known to the Franks as Jacob’s Ford and in Arabic as Bait al-Ahzan, the House of Sorrow (where, it was said, Jacob had mourned the supposed death of his son). With swamps upstream and rapids to the south, this ford was the only crossing of the Jordan for miles and, as such, acted as an important gateway between Latin Palestine and Muslim Syria, offering access to the fertile Terre de Sueth region. Crucially, Jacob’s Ford was also just one day’s march from Damascus.

Baldwin was hoping to tip the balance of regional power in favour of the Franks by building a major castle on this site. He was partnered by the Templars, who already held territory in northern Galilee, and together the crown and the order made a huge commitment to the project. Between October 1178 and April 1179 Baldwin actually moved his seat of government to the building site so as to be on hand as both supervisor and protector, setting up a mint to produce special coins with which to pay the massive workforce, and issuing royal charters on site.

This castle jeopardised Saladin’s burgeoning Ayyubid Empire because it promised to serve the Franks as both a defensive tool and an offensive weapon. Medieval strongholds could rarely, if ever, hope to seal or blockade a frontier entirely–attacking armies might march around a fortress or, with sufficient manpower and resources, eventually force their way past its defences. But castles did provide a relatively secure environment in which to station armed forces, and these troops might be deployed to harass and hamper any attempt at invasion by an enemy. The presence of a Templar fortress at Jacob’s Ford would certainly have inhibited the sultan’s ability to assault the Latin kingdom. Its garrison would also be in a position to raid Muslim territory, ransack trade caravans and threaten Damascus itself. And with his capital under threat, Saladin’s ambitious plans to extend his authority over Aleppo and Mesopotamia would likely falter. The danger posed by the fortress being built beside the Jordan, therefore, was impossible to ignore. Unfortunately, with his troops entrenched at Baalbek, a direct military strike on Jacob’s Ford was not really feasible, so initially the sultan sought to use bribery in place of brute force. He offered the Franks first 60,000 and then 100,000 dinars if they halted building work and abandoned the site. But, in spite of the fortune on offer, Baldwin and the Templars refused.

At first sight all the surviving written evidence seems to suggest that the castle at Jacob’s Ford had been finished by April 1179, when the leper king handed command of the stronghold to the Templars. William of Tyre certainly described it as ‘complete in all its parts’ after having seen it with his own eyes that spring. Muslim eyewitnesses also confirmed this fact, with one Arabic source describing its walls as ‘an impregnable rampart of stone and iron’. Until the 1990s, historians always assumed that this meant a fully fledged concentric castle–one with an inner and outer wall–had been built at Jacob’s Ford, making it an incredibly formidable fortress. But, in 1993, the Israeli scholar Ronnie Ellenblum rediscovered the location of this long-lost Frankish fortress. His ongoing archaeological investigation of the site, at the head of an international team of experts, has reshaped our understanding of events and the interpretation of the written sources. Excavations have proved conclusively that in 1179 Jacob’s Ford was not a concentric castle–in fact it had just one perimeter wall and a single tower, and was effectively still a building site. This suggests that to William of Tyre and his contemporaries a ‘complete’ fortress was one that was enclosed and defensible rather than fully formed, and that this particular stronghold was actually a work in progress.

Crucially for Saladin, this meant that Jacob’s Ford was still relatively vulnerable and from spring 1179 onwards, with Baalbek subdued, he returned to Damascus to address the problem of this fortress. The months that followed saw a series of inconclusive skirmishes, as both sides sought to size one another up. Saladin led an expeditionary force to test the strength of Jacob’s Ford, but soon retreated when one of his commanders was killed by a Templar arrow. Nonetheless, during two other engagements the sultan’s troops bested Baldwin’s forces in minor battles. In one, the king’s constable–his chief military adviser–was killed; in another, the Templar Master Odo of St Amand was taken captive along with 270 knights. These successes disrupted the Christians’ military command structure and went some way to redressing the Muslim humiliation at Mont Gisard. With the scales tipping back in Saladin’s favour, King Baldwin retreated to Jerusalem to regroup, while the sultan summoned reinforcements from northern Syria and Egypt.