By late August 1179 Saladin was ready to launch a full-scale attack on Jacob’s Ford. On Saturday the 24th he began an assault-based siege, with the intention of breaking into the castle as rapidly as possible. There was no time for a lengthy encirclement, because the leper king was by now stationed nearby at Tiberias, on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, just half a day’s march to the south-west. As soon as news of the attack reached him the king would begin assembling a relief army, so the siege was effectively a race, in which the Muslims struggled to crack the stronghold’s defences before the Latins arrived. Taken together, contemporary written records and the archaeological evidence now being uncovered offer a vivid picture of what happened over the next five grim days. Saladin began by bombarding the fortress with arrows from east and west–hundreds of arrow heads have been recovered clustered on these fronts–looking to demoralise the Templar garrison. At the same time, specialist miners, probably from Syrian Aleppo, were sent to tunnel under the north-eastern corner of the walls, hoping to collapse the ramparts through the technique of sapping. A tunnel was quickly dug and packed full of wood, but once set alight it proved to be too small to cause a rupture in the walls above. In desperation, the sultan offered a gold dinar to each soldier carrying a goatskin of water from the river to extinguish the flames, and work then continued night and day to enlarge the mine. Meanwhile, Baldwin was preparing to march from Tiberias.

At dawn on 29 August the leper king set out with his host to relieve the fortress. Unbeknownst to him, at that same moment fires were being lit within Saladin’s expanded siege mine. Its wooden pit props duly burned and the passageway caved in, bringing down the walls above. Saladin later wrote that, as the flames spread, the castle resembled ‘a ship adrift in a sea of fire’. As his troops poured through the break in the walls desperate hand-to-hand combat ensued, while the garrison of elite Templar knights made a bloody, but ultimately futile last stand. In a last-ditch act of bravery the Templar garrison commander mounted his war horse and charged into the burning breach; one Muslim eyewitness later described how ‘he threw himself into a hole full of fire without fear of the intense heat and, from this brazier, he was immediately thrown into another–that of Hell’.

With the castle’s defences breached the Latin garrison was eventually overrun and a bloody sack followed. The human skeletal remains recently unearthed within the perimeter wall bear witness to the ferocity of the assault. One male skull showed evidence of three separate sword cuts, the last of which split the head, crushing the brain. Another had had his arm chopped off above the elbow before being dispatched. With much of the site now in flames, Saladin executed more than half of the garrison, amassing a mountain of plunder, including 1,000 coats of armour. By noon on that Thursday, racing northwards, Baldwin got his first despairing glimpse of smoke on the horizon–telltale evidence of the destruction at Jacob’s Ford. He was just six hours too late.

In the two weeks that followed, Saladin dismantled the castle of Jacob’s Ford, razing it to the ground stone by stone. Indeed, he later claimed to have ripped out the foundations with his own hands. Most of the Latin dead, along with their horses and mules, were thrown into the stronghold’s capacious cistern. This was a rather ill-advised policy, as soon after a ‘plague’ broke out, ravaging the Muslim army and claiming the life of ten of Saladin’s commanders. By mid-October, with his primary objective achieved, the sultan decided to abandon the seemingly cursed site, and Jacob’s Ford became an abandoned, forgotten ruin.⁴⁹

Saladin’s successes in summer 1179 broke the tide of Frankish martial momentum that had been building since Mont Gisard. The Latins’ attempt to seize the initiative in the Upper Jordan border zone and pressure Damascus was stymied. The sultan had protected his unification of Egypt and Syria. But the work of unifying Islam through the subjugation of Aleppo and Mosul remained incomplete.

11

THE SULTAN OF ISLAM

Although Saladin had achieved a series of victories against the Franks in 1179, in the early 1180s he returned to the business of empire building, devoting most of his energy and resources to consolidating his hold over Egypt and Damascus, and to extending his authority over the Muslims of Aleppo and Mosul. In spring 1180, with Syria suffering from the effects of continuing drought and famine, he agreed a two-year truce with the Latins–a pact which was evidently deemed to be advantageous to both sides, given that neither paid a monetary tribute to secure peace. This deal left Saladin free to tackle a range of issues within the Muslim world.

THE DRIVE TO DOMINATE

One of Saladin’s first priorities was to counteract the growing power and influence of Kilij Arslan II, the Seljuq sultan of Anatolia. Kilij Arslan had been in an assertive mood since crushing the Byzantines at Myriokephalon in 1176, and could himself claim, with some justification, to be the true rising champion of Islamic jihad. Saladin broadcast propaganda designed to discredit the Seljuq leader, arguing that he was an opponent of Muslim unity–Saladin even explained his own truce with the Jerusalemite Franks in 1180 to Baghdad by claiming that he could not deal simultaneously with the grave threats posed by Kilij Arslan and the Latin Christians. In summer 1180, Saladin left his nephew Farrukh-Shah in control of Damascus, and led troops into the north, securing alliances with a number of cities in the Upper Euphrates region in order to contain Kilij Arslan’s ambitions within Asia Minor. Saladin also used military pressure to force the latest Armenian ruler of Cilicia, Roupen III, to accept a non-aggression pact, effectively neutralising the Armenian Christians as opponents to Ayyubid expansion.

Around this time a series of deaths altered the political landscape. In 1180 the Byzantine Emperor Manuel Comnenus passed away, leaving behind him an eleven-year-old son and heir who, two years later, was supplanted by Manuel’s cousin, Andronicus Comnenus. This period was marked by a gradual decline in relations between the Greeks and the crusader states that served Saladin’s interests. In 1181 the Byzantines secured a peace treaty with the sultan, a first sign of their realignment towards neutrality in the Levant. Andronicus’ seizure of power in 1182 was then accompanied by a massacre of Latins living and trading in Constantinople and the new emperor made little effort to re-establish cooperative ties with Outremer.

Similar shifts took place in the East. In 1180 the Abbasid caliph and his vizier also died. Aware that this might herald a dangerous decline in the support he enjoyed in Baghdad, Saladin carefully cultivated links with the new Caliph al-Nasir. The Zangids suffered their own losses. In summer 1180 Saif al-Din of Mosul died and was succeeded by his younger brother, Izz al-Din. More significantly still, late 1181 saw the death from illness of Nur al-Din’s son and official heir, al-Salih, at the age of just nineteen. This event was of critical importance to Saladin’s future ambitions. In recent years, al-Salih had begun to emerge as a potentially formidable opponent, following Gumushtegin’s death as a result of court intrigue in Aleppo. As the figurehead of Zangid legitimacy, al-Salih represented the promise of dynastic continuity and enjoyed the abject loyalty of the Aleppan populace. Had he survived, al-Salih might have posed a serious challenge to Ayyubid ascendancy; at the very least, his continued presence would have weakened Saladin’s claim to be the sole, rightful champion of Islam, and probably put paid to the sultan’s hopes of absorbing northern Syria without open warfare. Although power in Aleppo soon passed to Saif al-Din’s elder brother, Imad al-Din Zangi of Sinjar, al-Salih’s demise nonetheless presented Saladin with a long-awaited opportunity to extend his power within the Muslim world.⁵⁰