Years later, al-Afdal described how he watched alongside his father, in dread, as twice the Franks launched driving, heavy charges over the saddle of the Horns, spurring their horses directly towards them. On the first occasion they were barely held back, and the prince turned to see that his father ‘was overcome by grief…his complexion pale’. Another eyewitness described the fearful damage inflicted upon the Latins when they were turned back to the Horns, as the pursuing Muslims’ ‘pliant lances danced [and] were fed on entrails’ and their ‘sword blades sucked away their lives and scattered them on the hillsides’. Even so, as al-Afdal recalled:

The Franks regrouped and charged again as before, driving the Muslims back to my father [but we] forced them to retreat once more to the hill. I shouted, ‘We have beaten them!’ but my father rounded on me and said, ‘Be quiet! We have not beaten them until that tent falls.’ As he was speaking to me, the tent fell. The sultan dismounted, prostrated himself in thanks to God Almighty and wept for joy.

With the king’s position overrun, the True Cross was captured and the last shreds of Christian resistance crumbled. Guy and all the Latin kingdom’s nobles, bar those few who had escaped, were taken prisoner, along with thousands of Frankish survivors. Still thousands more had been slain.⁷¹

As the clamour of battle subsided, Saladin sat in the entryway to his palatial campaign tent–much of which was still being hurriedly erected–to receive and review his most important captives. Convention suggested that they be treated with honour and, in time, perhaps ransomed, but the sultan called forth two in particular for a personal audience: his adversary, the king of Jerusalem; and his avowed enemy, Reynald of Châtillon. With the pair seated beside him, Saladin turned to Guy, ‘who was dying from thirst and shaking with fear like a drunkard’, graciously proffering a golden chalice filled with iced julep. The king supped deeply upon this rejuvenating elixir, but when he passed the cup to Reynald, the sultan interjected, calmly affirming through an interpreter: ‘You did not have my permission to give him drink, and so that gift does not imply his safety at my hand.’ For, by Arab tradition, the act of offering a guest sustenance was tantamount to a promise of protection. According to a Muslim contemporary, Saladin now turned to Reynald, ‘berat[ing] him for his sins and…treacherous deeds’. When the Frank staunchly refused an offer to convert to Islam, the sultan ‘rose to face him and struck off his head…After he was killed and dragged away, [Guy] trembled with fear, but Saladin calmed his terrors’, assuring him that he would not suffer a similar fate, and the king of Jerusalem was led away into captivity.⁷²

The sultan’s personal secretary, Imad al-Din, summoned forth all his powers of evocation to depict the scene he witnessed as dusk fell over Galilee that evening. ‘The sultan’, he wrote, ‘encamped on the plain of Tiberias like a lion in the desert or the moon in its full splendour’, while ‘the dead were scattered over the mountains and valleys, lying immobile on their sides. Hattin shrugged off their carcasses, and the perfume of victory was thick with the stench of them.’ Picking his way across a battlefield that ‘had become a sea of blood’, its dust ‘stained red’, Imad al-Din witnessed the full horror of the carnage enacted that day.

I passed by them and saw the limbs of the fallen cast naked on the field of combat, scattered in pieces over the site of the encounter, lacerated and disjointed, with heads cracked open, throats split, spines broken, necks shattered, feet in pieces, noses mutilated, extremities torn off, members dismembered, parts shredded.

Even two years later, when an Iraqi Muslim passed by the battle scene, the bones of the dead ‘some of them heaped up and others scattered about’ could be seen from afar.

On 4 July 1187, the field army of Frankish Palestine was crushed. The seizure of the True Cross dealt a crippling blow to Christian morale across the Near East. Imad al-Din proclaimed that ‘the cross was a prize without equal, for it was the supreme object of their faith’, and he believed that ‘its capture was for them more important than the loss of the king and was the gravest blow they sustained in that battle’. The relic was fixed, upside down, to a lance and carried to Damascus.⁷³

So many Latin captives were taken that the markets of Syria were flooded and the price of slaves dropped to three gold dinars. With the exception of Reynald of Châtillon, the only prisoners to be executed were the warriors of the Military Orders. These deadly Frankish ‘firebrands’ were deemed too dangerous to be left alive and were known to be largely worthless as hostages because they usually refused to seek ransom for their release. According to Imad al-Din, ‘Saladin, his face joyful, was sitting on his dais’ on 6 July, when some 100 to 200 Templars and Hospitallers were assembled before him. A handful accepted a final offer of conversion to Islam; the rest were set upon by a ragged band of ‘scholars and Sufis…devout men and ascetics’, unused to acts of violence. Imad al-Din looked on as the murder began.

There were some who slashed and cut cleanly, and were thanked for it; some who refused and failed to act, and were excused; some who made fools of themselves, and others took their places…I saw how [they] killed unbelief to give life to Islam and destroyed polytheism to build monotheism.

Saladin’s victory over the forces of Latin Christendom had been absolute. Just six days later he wrote a letter reliving his achievement, affirming that ‘the gleam of God’s sword has terrified the polytheists’ and ‘the domain of Islam has expanded’. ‘It was’, he asserted, ‘a day of grace, on which the wolf and the vulture kept company, while death and captivity followed in turns’ a moment when ‘dawn [broke] on the night of unbelief’. In time, he erected a triumphal Dome on the Horns of Hattin, the faint, ruined outline of which can still be seen to this day.⁷⁴

THE FALL OF THE CROSS

In the aftermath of the triumph at Hattin, the door stood open to further Muslim success. The huge loss of Christian manpower on 4 July left the kingdom of Jerusalem in a state of extreme vulnerability, because its cities, towns and fortresses had been all but stripped of their garrisons. Nevertheless, the immense advantage for Islam might still have been squandered had Saladin not demonstrated such focused determination and been in a position to draw upon so deep a well of resources. As it was, through that summer, Frankish Palestine collapsed with barely a whimper.

Tiberias capitulated almost immediately and, within less than a week, Acre–Outremer’s economic hub–had likewise surrendered. In the weeks and months that followed, Saladin directed most of his efforts to sweeping up Palestine’s coastal settlements and ports, and from north to south the likes of Beirut, Sidon, Haifa, Caesarea and Arsuf fell in short order. Meanwhile, the sultan’s brother, al-Adil, who had been alerted immediately after Hattin, swept north from Egypt to seize the vital port of Jaffa, even as other sorties won further successes inland. Ascalon offered stiffer resistance, but by September even that port had been forced into submission, and the fall of Darum, Gaza, Ramla and Lydda followed. Even the Templars eventually gave up their fortress at Latrun, in the Judean foothills en route to Jerusalem, in return for the release of their master, Gerard of Ridefort.