Saturday, July 4, 1187: Mid-afternoon to Evening

On the lower western slopes of the Horns of Hattin and in the shallow valley beyond, the final disintegration of the Crusader army has begun. The sudden disappearance of Count Raymond and his men, who were swallowed up by the earth as abruptly as a rabbit disappearing down a hole, leaves the rest of the Christian army dumbfounded. Many of its men already nursed suspicions about the Count's fidelity, and after the astonishing scene they have just witnessed, it is hardly surprising that men begin shouting "Treason!" and "We are betrayed!" This cry is soon taken up by the Count's enemies Reynald de Chatillon and Gerard de Ridfort, the Master of the Templars, who desperately need a scapegoat to divert attention from their own responsibility for the disaster now enveloping the Crusader army.

All but surrounded, with their Moslem enemies pressing them on every side except from the mountain itself, exhausted by the heat and lack of water, confused by the smoke and the spreading grass fires and the maddened horses and the hellish sounds – the frenetic pounding of the Mameluke kettledrums, the full-throated shouts of "Allah Akbar!" from the exultant Saracen infantry, and the weak, pathetic appeals of their wounded comrades for water – the Christian army's discipline begins to collapse. The infantry of the vanguard and center divisions, massed in support of Count Raymond's break-out attempt, drift to the east once they realize there will be no escape along the road to Magdala. Seeking refuge from the volleys of arrows, the grass fires, and further attacks by Taki al-Din's division, they climb the slopes of the low mountain and form a defensive circuit around the northern Horn, the nearer and lower of its eminences, sheltering in part behind a rubble wall surviving from some Bronze Age settlement. From here, the exhausted Christian infantry can look east down the gorge known as Wadi Hammam to the tranquil waters of the Sea of Galilee five miles away. But they know they will never get there. Just below them are masses of triumphant Saracen infantry and cavalry who have closed in from the north and south to surround the mountain on all sides.

A messenger sent by King Guy urgently begs the demoralized mass of infantry to come back and help him defend the position he has established on the western slopes of Hattin. But the dispirited men on the northern Horn no longer have any respect for the King, whose leadership has placed them in this desperate position. They brusquely dismiss his messenger, saying: "We are not coming down because we are dying of thirst, and we will not fight." In another sign of the army's disintegrating morale, six knights and a number of serjeants from Raymond of Tripoli's contingent, all of whom have lost their mounts, give themselves up to the Saracens. Half-crazed by thirst, they beg their captors to put an end to their suffering and that of their surviving comrades by putting them quickly to death.[1]

On the western slopes of Hattin, around the three tents erected earlier on King Guy's orders, the Christians' defensive perimeter is shrinking under the constant pressure of Kukbari's, Saladin's, and Taki al-Din's relentless attacks. The showers of arrows are coming thicker and faster now, and the Saracen missiles take a greater toll at this short range. Rufinus, the Bishop of Acre, is mortally wounded by an arrow in the chest, despite the coat of mail he has worn under his ecclesiastical robes. The Bishop of Lydda takes over the safekeeping of the fragment of the True Cross. The Crusaders defend this precious relic, enshrined in a casing of gold richly adorned with jewels and pearls, as desperately as later generations of soldiers will fight to save their regimental colors.

By now, most of the knights have lost their horses and are fighting on foot. King Guy recognizes that he must try and pull the two broken wings of his army together for mutual support. He orders the royal tent to be taken down and re-erected at the top of the mountain, and directs the knights and surviving infantry of the center division to retreat to a new position atop the more defensible southern Horn.

As the burgundy-colored royal tent collapses and the men of his bodyguard begin folding it up, King Guy spurs his horse through the smoke, dust and plunging arrows to the edge of the Crusader defensive perimeter, where the surviving knights and infantry of the rear division are massed around Balian of Ibelin and Reynald Garnier, Lord of Sidon. Balian leans over amidst the smoke and chaos of battle to hear the King's command. The Lord of Nablus has been a staunch political opponent of Guy's, and Balian rues the King's disastrous misjudgments, but this is no time for recriminations. The King has fought as courageously today as anyone in the Christian ranks, and now he makes it clear to Balian that he will stay with his dying army to the end. With sweat streaking his dust-caked, blood-spattered face, the King explains that he and the knights from the central division and the surviving infantry will fall back to the southern Horn and fight on as long as they can. Balian is to take those mounted knights of the rear guard who still have their horses and attempt to break out of the constricting ring while there remains some possibility of escape.

The Lord of Nablus initially resists this command: "No, we will stay and fight with you. Whatever end may come, it shall come for all of us together." But Guy shakes his head; today, at least, there is a painful maturity in his eyes that Balian has never seen before. "Your attack is necessary to cover our retreat . . . ." The King stops, coughing. "You must give us enough time to get the wounded up the hill." He wipes the sweat from his forehead, then looks at Balian and adds quietly, "Besides, someone has to organize the resistance in Jerusalem and the coastal cities, and send word to the Pope and the kings of the West. I must stay here with the men who obeyed my commands. May God go with you." The King turns his horse away into the smoke. A few moments later, Balian catches a last brief glimpse of Guy a short distance away, directing the start of the final retreat up to the southern Horn.

Balian orders his surviving infantry to join the King. Looking into their haggard faces and hopeless eyes, he finds it the hardest order he will give today. Then he gathers his groom Ernoul, the remainder of the knights of Nablus, Reynald Garnier and the survivors of his command, and a handful of Templars around him, and he explains what they must do. "You must keep together," he tells them. "And at all costs, keep going. Stop for nothing, and for no one." The men can see their comrades starting their retreat up the slope. It is obvious to all of them that this is their last chance to escape from the trap. They nod their understanding, form their horses into a tightly-packed wedge, unsheath their swords, and then, with the loudest war-cries they can manage, spur their mounts down the western slope of Hattin into the shallow valley.

Their horses pick up speed heading downhill, so the Christians have some momentum behind them as they bear down on the ranks of the Emir Kukbari's horsemen. This time, the Moslem ranks do not open before the Crusaders' onslaught: instead, the Saracens brace themselves to meet and contain the Christian charge. Seconds later, the wedge of mounted Crusaders slams into the Saracen line with an explosive crash. Then everything is pandemonium: struggling men, rearing horses, swirling dust, a cacophony of steel striking steel. Men are struck down on both sides, but the Crusaders remember Balian's orders and keep urging their horses forward. The Crusader wedge re-solidifies after the first impact, slowly penetrating deeper and deeper as the Moslem lines yield under its pressure, until its leading elements thrust past the last Saracen horsemen and once again break into the open. The Christian knights scatter the poorly equipped and untrained muttawiya who have pressed up behind the Moslem horsemen, and then they find themselves in the clear and riding as fast as their exhausted horses can carry them for Sephoria. Even with their exhausted horses, it takes them only a few hours to retrace the ten-plus miles covered by the Christian army in its disastrous march the previous day. They reach Sephoria before sunset. Here, they pause briefly to water their horses and refresh themselves at the springs south of the crossroads hamlet, with its squat box of a castle and a church dedicated to the mother of the Virgin Mary atop a low hill. But they cannot tarry long, and soon they are back on the road, riding hard for Acre and Tyre.

Behind them, on the summit and slopes of Hattin, the battle's last act has begun. Some five hundred knights, hundreds of serjeants, and an unknown number of infantry are now concentrated on the twin summits of Hattin, with the King's burgundy tent re-erected in the low saddle between the horns. Most of the knights have lost their horses by now, but the King rallies those who are still mounted for two final charges against the onrushing masses of Saladin's and Kukbari's divisions. Both Christian charges are pressed home with great courage, and the first penetrates to just below the point where Saladin and his son al-Afdal are watching the battle from the low eastern ridge. But the Sultan personally rallies his men, and each of the Crusader attacks are thrown back with further losses of men and horses.

Then the end comes. Taki al-Din launches a concentric attack against the demoralized Crusader infantry on the northern Horn, even sending his men up a steep track leading to the summit from the precipitous eastern flank of the hill. The masses of white-robed Saracens sweep over the Christian defenders like surf engulfing a sandbar at high tide. The butchery of the exhausted Crusader infantry is appalling, but many men are also taken alive to face a hard future as slaves of the Moslems.

On the southern Horn, almost all of the horses are dead now. The remaining knights, many of them wounded and all of them so exhausted from thirst, heat and battle that they can barely lift their swords, prepare themselves for the end. The Saracens, exultant, close in and overwhelm them from all sides. The King's tent falls. The elaborately jeweled casing of the True Cross is seized by Moslem infantry who despise it as an object of Christian idolatry. The King and his surviving knights are seized and bound, their captors confidently expecting a lucrative ransom. The Arab historian Ibn al-Athir, who provides the best account of the battle from the Moslem side, will later record that "The number of dead and captured was so large that those who saw the slain could not believe that anyone had been taken alive, and those who saw the prisoners could not believe that any had been killed."

Aside from Count Raymond, Balian of Ibelin, and Reynald Garnier, Lord of Sidon and Beaufort, almost all the high nobility of the Kingdom of Jerusalem are now prisoners of the triumphant Moslem army. In addition to King Guy, the roster of captives includes the Constable Amalric of Lusignan, Guy's elder brother; Reynald de Chatillon, lord of Oultrejourdain; Humphrey IV of Toron, husband of the Princess Isabella, Queen Sibylla's half-sister; Gerard de Ridfort, the hot-headed Grand Master of the Temple, whose ill counsel to the King at Sephoria was directly responsible for the disaster; the Bishop of Lydda; Hugh, Lord of Jebail and Plivano, Lord of Botrun (the latter being the same rich Pisan whose purchase of an heiress's hand thirteen years earlier triggered the bitter rift between Count Raymond and Gerard de Ridfort); and the aged William, Marquis of Montferrat, whose sons Ranier, Conrad, and Boniface played such varied roles in the history of Byzantium between 1180 and 1207.[2]

When the fighting ended, King Guy and the other ranking prisoners were escorted to Saladin's tent, where he received them with great courtesy. He seated King Guy at the place of honor beside him, and, seeing the King's terrible thirst, offered him a silver goblet of rose-water, cooled with ice from the summit of Mount Hermon. Guy drank deeply of it, then handed the goblet to Reynald de Chatillon, who was seated next to him. Seeing this, Saladin's countenance abruptly darkened, and he said sharply to his interpreter, "Tell the King that he gave that man drink, not I." By Arab tradition, giving food or drink to a captive meant that his life was safe, and Saladin intended to grant Reynald no such dispensation. He turned on the man the Moslems knew as Prince Arnat of Kerak, denouncing him as godless and faithless to his oaths and reciting the litany of his crimes – his piracy in the Red Sea, which included the drowning of a shipload of Moslem pilgrims; his attempted attack upon Mecca and Medina; and his repeated assaults on caravans of merchants or pilgrims in violations of truces agreed upon by his own lord, the King of Jerusalem. According to the Arab historian Imad ad-Din, Reynald replied coldly, "This is how kings have always behaved; I have only followed the path of custom." Saladin, enraged, ordered him to stand, and then drew his sword and sliced off Reynald's head in full view of the other Christian prisoners.

King Guy trembled openly, assuming that he would be next, but Saladin reassured him. "A king does not kill a king," he explained, "but that man's perfidy and insolence went too far. Twice I have sworn to kill that man when I had him in my power: once when he tried to attack Mecca and Medina, and again when he broke the truce to capture the caravan." The Sultan then ordered that none of the remaining lay barons should be harmed, but that all should be treated with the respect and courtesy appropriate to their rank while they were captives. Those of the Christians' Turcopole mounted archers who were taken prisoner met a less generous fate. Converts from Islam, they were considered apostates who had taken up arms against the True Faith. They were all killed on the field.

And there was one other group that was exempt from Saladin's mercy: the captured members of the monastic military Orders, the Templars and the Hospitallers. The Sultan considered these Christian warriors to be fanatical killers and war criminals, much as the Russians during the Second World War looked upon the troops of Hitler's SS. Saladin determined that Gerard de Ridfort, the Grand Master of the Temple, should be held for ransom, but two days later he commanded that all of the other military monks found among the prisoners would be put to death. Lest any of his men be tempted to hide any of their prisoners in hopes of securing a profitable ransom, Saladin offered fifty Egyptian dinars from his own treasury for each Templar or Hospitaller who was brought before him. This inducement soon had the desired effect, producing more than two hundred military knights who had been taken prisoner in the final stage of the battle. At Saladin's command, all of them were butchered by fanatical Moslem sufis who had joined his army. The Sultan also sent word to his commander in Damascus that he should kill any members of the military Orders whom might already have been carried back there by their captors, and this was done.

The Moslem dead received an honorable burial, probably in large mass graves near the village of Hattin. Saladin also erected a trophy -- the Qubbat al-Nasir, or "Dome of Victory" -- atop the southern Horn. The Christian dead were left behind on the battlefield, prey to scavengers and the scouring effects of the elements. A year later, the Arab historian Ibn al-Athir, a member of Saladin's retinue, rode past the melancholy eminences overlooking the lake where Jesus had preached and gone "fishing for men." He found the landscape still littered with the whitened bones of thousands of fallen Christians, "which could be seen even from a distance, lying in heaps or scattered around."

At most, perhaps 200 knights and something less than 3,000 other men of the Crusader army managed to escape from the fatal field of Hattin. We are told that the Templars alone lost 230 knights – a number that, combined with the 90 other knights of the Order who had fallen two months earlier at the Springs of Cresson, virtually annihilated its central Chapter in the Holy Land.

The English historian Steven Runciman provides a crisp summing-up of the significance of the Battle of Hattin:

"The Christians of the East had suffered disasters before. Their Kings and Princes had been captured before; but their captors then had been petty lordlings, out for some petty advantage. On the Horns of Hattin the greatest army that the kingdom had ever assembled was annihilated. The Holy Cross was lost. And the victor was lord of the whole Moslem world."

[Author's Note: I have taken some dramatic license in imagining what might have been said between Count Raymond and his men after they cut their way out of the encirclement. The same is true of the conversation between King Guy and Balian of Ibelin, and of Balian's final instructions to his men. Something along these lines must have been said, but the sources do not report the words that were actually used. Otherwise, all direct quotes appear in one or another of the accounts of the battle.]

Notes:

[1] Some Christian accounts of the battle suggest that these men deserted to Saladin on the morning of July 4, before the start of the fighting, and gave him encouraging intelligence about the desperate condition of the Christian army. But their actual words to their Arab captors make it more likely that their desertion occurred after the escape of Count Raymond and his remaining mounted knights. It seems probable that these men had already lost their horses and thus were prevented from making their escape with their comrades. Once their lord had fled the field, they were no longer bound to continue to fight. This story demonstrates the degree to which the Count of Tripoli's past truce with Saladin and the circumstances of his escape from the battle made it easy for many Christians (who were eager to find some scapegoat other than King Guy and his reckless advisers) to believe the worst of Raymond and his men.

[2] The great stature of the family of Montferrat in late twelfth-century Europe is demonstrated by the marital record of the Marquis William's four sons. His eldest, William Long-Sword, came to the Holy Land in the fall of 1176 and married Princess Sibylla, the half-sister of the doomed leper King, Baldwin IV. In view of the young king's terrible illness, it was assumed that William would ultimately succeed to the throne. But William, like many newcomers to the Kingdom of Jerusalem, was killed off by malaria less than a year after his arrival, opening the way for the widowed Sibylla's disastrous marriage to Guy de Lusignan three years later.

The Marquis's youngest son, Ranier of Montferrat, married the porphyrogenita Maria, the daughter of the Byzantine Emperor Manuel I Comnenus, in the winter of 1180. But he died two years later, apparently poisoned along with his wife by one of the eunuchs of his household staff at the behest of the ambitious Regent, Andronicus Comnenus.

Conrad of Montferrat, one of William's two middle sons, married Theodora, a sister of the Byzantine Emperor Isaac II Angelus, in 1187, but soon deserted her and continued on to the Holy Land after he was implicated in a murder. His spirited defense of Tyre in the summer and fall of 1187 made him popular with the anti-Lusignan party, and he was married off to Princess Isabella and selected as King of Acre in the spring of 1192. Shortly before his coronation, however, he was murdered by two members of the Order of the Assassins.

The last of the Montferrat sons, Boniface, succeeded to his father's principality in the plains of northern Italy, but he shared his family's strong interest in the Holy Land. In 1201, he became one of the leaders of the Fourth Crusade. After the Crusade was diverted to Constantinople and conquered the city in April 1204, Boniface married Margaret of Hungary, the widow of his onetime brother-in-law Isaac II Angelus, and established a kingdom for himself centered around Thessalonica in northern Greece. Three years later, the last of the four brothers Montferrat was killed in a skirmish with the Bulgarians.

Principal Sources:

Meron Benvenisti, The Crusaders in the Holy Land (1976) at 206-07 (describing the Crusader castle and church of St. Anne at Sephoria)

Francesco Gabrieli, Arab Historians of the Crusades (1984) at 118-37 [including the accounts of Ibn al-Athir and Imad ad-Din]

David Nicolle, Hattin 1187: Saladin's Greatest Victory (1993) [Osprey Campaign Series] at 65-79 (excellent maps and photographs of the battlefield)

Jonathan Riley-Smith, ed., Atlas of the Crusades (1991), at 43, 52-53, 60-61

Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, Volume 2: The Kingdom of Jerusalem (1951), at 458-60 & 486-90 (Appendix II)

R.C. Smail, Crusading Warfare (1097-1193) (1956), at 189-97; see also 88-137 (discussing the military system of the Crusader armies)