As king, one of Guy’s first steps was to buy time to restore some sense of order to the realm by renewing the treaty with Saladin until April 1187 in return for some 60,000 gold bezants. Guy was a divisive figure–Baldwin of Ibelin was so disgusted by his elevation that he gave up his lordship and moved to Antioch–and, as king, Guy’s policy of putting family members from Poitou into positions of power caused further unease. To deal with his most powerful enemy, Raymond of Tripoli, Guy seems to have hatched a plan to seize the lordship of Galilee by force. But in response, Raymond took the quite drastic step of seeking protection from Saladin himself. Muslim sources indicate that many of the sultan’s advisers were suspicious of this approach, but that Saladin rightly judged it to be an honest offer of alliance, the product of the desperate division that now afflicted the Franks. To the evident horror of many of his Latin contemporaries, Raymond welcomed Muslim troops into Tiberias, to bolster the town’s garrison, and gave Ayyubid forces licence to travel unhindered through his Galilean lands. At this worst moment, the count perpetrated an act of treason, engendering even greater disunity among the Christians.

Then, in the winter months of 1186 and 1187, Reynald of Châtillon, lord of Kerak, contravened the truce with the Ayyubids by attacking a Muslim caravan travelling through Transjordan on its way from Cairo to Damascus. His motives remain open to debate, but basic greed probably combined with a realisation that Saladin was building towards a major offensive to spur Reynald into action. Certainly in the weeks that followed he made no effort to repair relations, bluntly refusing the sultan’s demands for restitution of the stolen goods. Even without Reynald’s raid, Saladin would almost certainly have refused that spring to renew the truce with Frankish Palestine, so the once popular contention that the lord of Kerak effectively ignited the war to come should probably be discarded. Nonetheless, Reynald’s exploits did reinforce his status as the Muslim world’s abhorred enemy. They also provided Saladin with a clear cause for war further to inflame the heart of Islam.

TO THE HORNS OF HATTIN

In the spring of 1187 Saladin began to amass his forces for an invasion of Palestine. Drawing troops from Egypt, Syria, the Jazira and Diyar Bakr, he assembled a massive army, with some 12,000 professional cavalrymen at its heart, supported by around 30,000 volunteers. One Muslim eyewitness likened them to a pack of ‘old wolves [and] rending lions’, while the sultan himself described how the dust cloud raised when this swarming horde marched ‘dark[ened] the eye of the sun’. Marshalling such a huge force was a feat in itself–a muster point was appointed in the fertile Hauran region south of Damascus and, with soldiers coming from so far afield, the mobilisation took months to complete. The task was overseen by Saladin’s eldest son, al-Afdal, in his first major command role.⁶⁶

During the early stages of the 1187 campaign, Muslim strategy largely followed the pattern established by Ayyubid attacks in previous years. In April, the sultan marched into Transjordan to link up with forces advancing from North Africa, while prosecuting a series of punitive raids against Kerak and Montreal, including the widespread destruction of crops. But the Franks offered little or no reaction to this provocation. Meanwhile, on 1 May, al-Afdal participated in a combined reconnaissance and raiding mission across the Jordan, testing Tiberias’ defences while Keukburi led a mounted assault force of around seven thousand to scout the Franks’ own preferred muster point at Saffuriya. That night they were spotted by watchmen in Nazareth, and a small party of Templars and Hospitallers, then travelling through Galilee and led by the masters of both orders, decided to give battle. A bloody skirmish followed at the springs of Cresson. Vastly outnumbered, around 130 Latin knights and 300 infantry were killed or captured. The Templar Master Gerard of Ridefort was one of the few to escape, but his Hospitaller counterpart was among the dead. An early blow had been struck, buoying Muslim morale and denting Christian manpower. In the aftermath of this shocking defeat, with the overwhelming Ayyubid threat now impossible to ignore, King Guy and Raymond of Tripoli were begrudgingly reconciled, and the count broke off contact with Saladin.

In late May the sultan himself marched into the Hauran and, as the last troop contingents arrived, moved to the advance staging post of Ashtara, around a day’s march from the Sea of Galilee. He now was joined by Taqi al-Din, returned from northern Syria, where a series of vicious raids had forced the Frankish Prince Bohemond III to agree terms of truce that safeguarded Aleppo from attack. Throughout June, Saladin made his final plans and preparations, carefully drilling his troops and organising battle formations, so that his immense army might function with maximum discipline and efficiency. Three main contingents were formed, with the right and left flanks under Taqi al-Din and Keukburi respectively, and a central force under Saladin’s personal command. At last, on Friday 27 June 1187, the Muslims were ready for war. A crossing of the Jordan was made just south of the Sea of Galilee and the invasion of Palestine began.

In response to the terrible spectre of Islamic attack, King Guy had followed standard Frankish protocol, amassing the Christian army at Saffuriya. Given the unprecedented scale of Saladin’s forces, the king had taken the drastic step of issuing a general call to arms, gathering together practically every last scrap of available fighting manpower in Palestine and using money sent by King Henry II of England to the Holy Land (in lieu of actually crusading) to pay for further mercenary reinforcements. A member of the sultan’s entourage wrote that the Latins came ‘in numbers defying account or reckoning, numerous as pebbles, 50,000 or even more’, but, in reality, Guy probably pulled together around 1,200 knights and between 15,000 and 18,000 infantry and Turcopoles. This was one of the largest hosts ever assembled beneath the True Cross–the Franks’ totemic symbol of martial valour and spiritual devotion–but it was, nonetheless, heavily outnumbered by the Muslim horde. In mustering this army, the Christian king had also taken a considerable gamble, leaving Palestine’s fortresses garrisoned by the barest minimum of soldiers. Should this conflict end in a resounding Latin defeat, the kingdom of Jerusalem would stand all but undefended.⁶⁷

Saladin’s overriding objective was to achieve just such a decisive victory, drawing the Franks away from the safety of Saffuriya into a full-scale pitched battle on ground of his choosing. But all his experience of war with Jerusalem suggested that the enemy would not easily be goaded into a reckless advance. In the last days of June, the sultan climbed out of the Jordan valley into the Galilean uplands, camping in force at the small village of Kafr Sabt (about six miles south-west of Tiberias and ten miles east of Saffuriya), amidst an expansive landscape of broad plains and undulating hills, peppered with occasional rocky outcrops. He began by testing the enemy, dispatching raiding sorties to ravage the surrounding countryside, while personally reconnoitring Guy’s encampment from a distance. After a few days it became obvious that, as expected, a Latin reaction would only be elicited by bolder provocation.

On 2 July 1187, Saladin laid his trap, leading a dawn assault on the weakly defended town of Tiberias, where Christian resistance soon buckled. Only the citadel held out, proffering precarious refuge to Lady Eschiva, Raymond of Tripoli’s wife. This news raced back to Saffuriya (indeed, the sultan probably allowed Eschiva’s messengers to slip through) bearing entreaties for aid. Saladin’s hope was that the tidings of Tiberias’ stricken condition would force Guy’s hand. As evening fell, the sultan waited to see whether this bait would bring forth his quarry.