SOURCE: “The Encirclement” in The Crusade: The World’s Debate, Cassell and Company Ltd., 1937, pp. 255–85.

[In the following essay, Belloc analyzes Saladin's role in deciding the fate of the Christians in the Holy Land between the Second and Third Crusades. Belloc stresses that other scholars have made too much of Saladin's alleged respect for and fair treatment of his enemies.]

I

THE ENCIRCLEMENT

The attack of Europe upon the Asiatic is over and has failed. The rest of the story is but one thing. It is the mortal sickness and death of the Crusading State.

The breakdown of the expedition against Damascus, “The Defeat of the Second Crusade,” marks the outward visible manifestation of that inward ruin of the Christian Kingdom—the potential, impending ruin of it—which could be instinctively felt throughout the Holy Land ever since the fall of Edessa and even earlier: from the moment when the personality of Zengi had been thrown into the scales and when the unification of Moslem power against the now fated Christian effort had begun.

The retreat of the German Emperor and the French King to the coast, their departure just before the middle of the century, was a symbol that our high Western civilisation, pulsing higher year after year, was concentrated more and more upon its own life and would not nourish much longer the very difficult effort in the Orient.

From that day the whole character of the war was changed. The old episodes continued—the capture and the loss of strongholds, skirmishes and battles where victory falls to Islam or to Christendom, great men falling in disastrous fights, led away captive, ransomed again—all the refrain of all the Crusading time. But the direction has been reversed: and the Initiative. The tide is now on the ebb and racing out.

Before the fall of Edessa, the French action in Syria, based on the coast and fed from the sea, pointed inland and threatened further extension. After the fall of Edessa the minds of men were transformed. The confidence in further adventures disappeared, the fabric was shaken, and when, in that stifling Eastern night, the mixed host of half-breeds and of Western chivalry turned back from the orchards of Damascus, the whole spirit of the Holy War broke down. All now knew that Christendom in the Levant was on the defensive and all could feel that one issue dominated the future: whether, or rather when, the Mohammedan world of the Near East should achieve complete unity. By intrigue and policy that unity might be postponed. It might be delayed; it could not be avoided. When it fully appeared, when there was one Mohammedan command all around, Jerusalem was doomed.

Now whether Islam at the far end of the Mediterranean could achieve such unity or not depended on one thing: the linking up of Egypt with inland Syria, the linking up of Cairo and Bagdad, the putting of the wealthy and densely populated Nile delta and the tribute from the Upper Nile valley, under the same control as the revenues and government of Aleppo and of the Orontes and of Damascus and of Mesopotamia. The chance of life for the Frankish Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem depended on keeping apart the eastern from the western half of Islam, the country of the Euphrates and Orontes from the country of the Nile. The Kingdom of Jerusalem lay geographically between the two, the holding of the ports along the Syrian shore by the Christian power and the long belt of Crusading territory with its fortresses from the Dead Sea to the Lebanon and from the Lebanon northwards, physically separated the towns of the Orontes and the desert fringe, with great Damascus for its capital, and Mesopotamia, with its spiritual centre in Bagdad, from Egypt.

But of more importance than the physical situation was the spiritual situation. The spiritual head of Islam upon the Nile, the Caliph at Cairo, was Fatimite, irreconcilable with the orthodox Caliph to the east.

The whole business of the lifetime to come, the period between the Christian failure in front of Damascus in 1148 and the wiping out of the Christian power in 1187, lay in the struggle of the Moslem rulers of Syria to unite with themselves the wealth and the population of Egypt: the Christian kingship at Jerusalem could only live by preventing that annexation. Whenever Egypt—schismatic Egypt—should fall into the power of orthodox Islam, whenever the Nile should be governed by the same authority as Syria, it was certain that the end of the Crusading power had come. Though the sea-coast towns and the strip of Crusading territory physically intervened, it was possible for armies, and especially for native armies not too numerous, to turn the obstacle by the half-desert marches to the south of the Red Sea, and cross the neck of the Sinai peninsula. Spiritual unity having been achieved, physical unity would follow, and when physical unity was founded the Crusading State was encircled and could no longer permanently hold.

That encirclement ultimately took place. Moslem Syria and Moslem Egypt became one State under one control. The efforts of Christian Jerusalem and its feudatories to prevent such a coalescence failed, and when it had failed the end was clearly in sight. The Crusading State would be at the mercy of a surrounding Moslem world.

The stages of the disaster are clearly marked, and if we set them down here at the beginning of the story, that story will be the clearer.

The first stage is the unification of Syria.

Nureddin had not yet mastered Damascus. The city which withstood the Emperor and his Germans and Italians and the King of France and their armies was still an independent State; but after so great a peril, barely escaped, it was bound to take refuge with the main neighbouring Mohammedan power. That phase ended in 1154, when Nureddin rode in through the northern gate of the town, which acclaimed him and had not to be taken by force. It was just less than six years since Louis of France and Conrad of Germany had marched away.

There follow ten years in which the opponents, now eager Moslem, now anxious Christian, are watching each other with varied fortunes, ten years of balance, during which it is not certain whether Jerusalem will succeed in keeping Egypt free from Damascus or not. These ten years end in 1164, when the conquest of Egypt by Syria began. The Frankish influence was beaten back, Nureddin's officers commanded in Cairo; most important of all the schismatic Caliphate was suppressed, and in the great mosques the prayers were said no longer for the spiritual head of the Fatimites but only for the orthodox spiritual head, common now to Syria and Egypt alike. The King of Jerusalem, struggling for life, had lost the game. One common enemy lay all around. So ended the second ten years when, in 1174, Nureddin died.

With Nureddin's death comes the next phase, the mastery acquired by him who had been till then Nureddin's regent on the Nile, the man whose name will be associated for ever with the destruction of the Crusading power, Saladin.

On Nureddin's death Saladin proposes to make himself leader of all the newly united Syria. He succeeds in that effort, he becomes the master of the whole Mohammedan world in the Near East. It is a matter of a dozen years.

Then, all being accomplished, Saladin is free to strike the final blow and to achieve his great purpose. The whole power is concentrated in his hands, and against such power the desperate Kingdom of Jerusalem cannot stand. The decisive battle is fought at Hattin, right in the country wherein our religion arose, within sight of the Sea of Galilee, within a walk of Nazareth. At Hattin, in the summer of 1187, the Crusading State is killed in battle.

It is convenient to mark these steps by their place in the life of Saladin. He is a child of fifteen when his father Ayub (Job), Nureddin's right-hand man and Zengi's old captain, brings Nureddin into Damascus. He is a young man of twenty-five, still quite unknown, when the issue is joined on Egypt and Nureddin decides on the occupation of the Nile. He accompanies Nureddin's army, led by his uncle, and begins for the first time to show his strange quiet talent, and the good fortune to which he is predestined. He is a young man in his thirtieth year when he is given by Nureddin the command of Cairo itself. He is thirty-five years old when Nureddin dies. He is forty-seven when he has achieved complete rule, holding Mesopotamia with Syria and Egypt all in one hand. He is forty-eight when he wins his great victory over the last Christian army defending the Holy Places. Before he is fifty he has ridden in triumph through Jerusalem.

It behoves us, at the outset of that series, to understand what sort of man this was, he to whom such adventures happened.

Saladin was not of the type to which conform most great military leaders of history. Properly speaking, he did not achieve his results through the methods of a soldier so much as through the methods of a politician. He had in common with great soldiers of history two things only: First, his ambition seems to have arisen late and accidentally, aroused by unexpected original success; second, he acted in any crisis immediately. He decided on what he had to do and, having decided, moved at once—that quality never fails in those who achieve such things.

We must remember that, of a hundred decisions so taken and rapidly acted on, only a few bear fruit. The greater part lead to disaster and many more to nothingness. There was, therefore, a preponderant element of good luck in Saladin's achievement; also he was very cautious. He ran no risks.

Whether he should be accused of special cruelty it is difficult to say, so vilely cruel was the whole of his world. He was certainly quite indifferent to the sufferings of those whom he condemned to death and torture for the purposes of his policy.

He was, of course, fanatically anti-Christian: it is the character which has most recommended him to many of our modern historians. Islam always seems roused to a special anger against the organized religion of Christendom, but Saladin exceeded on this point. For him the Incarnation, the Priesthood, the Sacraments “polluted the air.”

Like all other fighting men in that mixed world, the mounted leaders on either side in that Twelfth Century, whether Western or Oriental, he took a certain pleasure in the ritual practice of chivalry. Too much has been made of his supposed respect for opponents of equal valour or of equal power. He would, like his predecessor, destroy them without mercy when they were within his grasp, and he would personally murder one against whom his personal passion was roused, as he murdered Reginald of Chatillon, his prisoner. But he was not a man whose common characteristic was either violence or the love of revenge. His common characteristics were, oddly enough, those of the scholar. His devotion to all the details of his religion was a scholarly devotion rather than anything else, and had not accident led him into such high places he would rather have spent his life among books and listening to disquisitions on theology than in the saddle; and as for the sword he used it little himself—not from lack of courage, but from a preference for overseeing and managing. Mere fighting appealed little to him, but he enjoyed arranging the fighting of others.

His salient mark was a knowledge of man, and he loved to exercise this talent to the full. He was perpetually seeking out motives, and usually finding them accurately enough. He would deceive with skill and wait patiently, even for years, to reap the harvest of an intrigue. Yet he did not plan his own advancement: rather did he use it as it came, because all men, finding in themselves an aptitude, will naturally desire to express it and apply it.

One may sum him up by saying that he was a man upon whom most certainly a great part was thrust by fate; not a man who had sought it but a man who, finding himself called upon to play that part, played it consistently and well. He owed much to birth and accident, the rest to calculation.

Without a doubt he was sincere in his religion, not only negatively in his hatred of Christian things, but positively in his simple and profound attachment to Islam. When he declared the Holy War it was a personal, unmixed emotion that drove him. He was in this a mixture of integrity and of its opposite. No man was readier, in the chief moments of his life, to betray a bond of loyalty, to supplant one who had raised him, to oust the heirs of his benefactor or to lure men to their destruction by pretended mercy. Yet he was genuine in praising adhesion to a pledged word and he proved his honesty at times by foregoing advantages which he might have gained by betrayal.

To the major doctrines which the Mohammedan heresy had retained from Catholicism—the majesty of One Omnipotent and Beneficent God, the equal rights of His human creatures, the nature and destiny of man's immortal Soul—he maintained a profound and unswerving attachment. He stood erect in the presence of Life and Death.

It was the question of Egypt—the all-importance to Jerusalem of keeping up the quarrel between Cairo and Damascus, the all-importance to Damascus of acquiring Cairo and welding all Levantine Islam into one body for the encirclement and destruction of the Crusaders—that was to bring Saladin on to the stage of the world. But this struggle for Egypt began long before he was heard of.

His father, Job (Ayub), a Kurd of old family and distinction, Zengi's chief man, had ridden out to join that leader on the very night the boy was born—in 1138, the year before the capture of Baalbek whereof Ayub was made Governor. It was not till fifteen years later, after the failure of the Second Crusade and the consequent recasting of all Syrian politics, that the Egyptian question grew urgent; and the first manifestation of its importance appears indirectly in the taking of Ascalon by the King of Jerusalem, Baldwin III.

When, in diplomacy or warfare, there is a force which you both desire to have upon your side and to prevent from joining your enemy, there are two ways of going to work. You may plan for an alliance binding that force to your own side by an agreement, which at the same time divorces it from your opponent; or you may intimidate, coerce, master to the best of your ability, the element whose junction with your enemy you dread and whose support for yourself you need.

These two policies are not exclusive one of the other. They may be, and often are, worked side by side. So it was with the Egyptian Caliphate and the Kingdom of Jerusalem after the crash of Edessa and the lamentable failure in front of Damascus. The Kingdom of Jerusalem was now on the defensive and would be henceforward in permanent peril of destruction at the hands of the rapidly uniting Syrian and Mohammedan power which Zengi had formed and his son, Nureddin, was continuing. It was vital to Jerusalem that Cairo should be, if possible, an ally; if not an ally, a sort of dependant; and at all costs that Cairo should not be absorbed by the power of Nureddin.

With that object Jerusalem might cajole, or coerce, or both. As a fact, after the first phase of intrigue, it turned to coercion. It ultimately failed in both. Cairo fell into the hands of Syria, and the encirclement of the Christian Kingdom was accomplished. But it was a matter of sixteen or seventeen years before the failure of Jerusalem in this all-important point was complete.

The first sign, then, of the necessary new policy was Baldwin III's capture of Ascalon. It may seem farfetched to ascribe that feat of arms to so deliberate a policy as that just described; but even if the motive were not yet fully conscious, it was certainly present.

The Crusading State had left Ascalon unconquered for a lifetime. Divisions among leaders, hesitation, occupation elsewhere, had all contributed to save the town. But it was not an accident that now that should be done which might have been done earlier. Earlier it was not vital. Now it was vital. Ascalon was one point on the Crusading sea-coast still remaining as a landing-place and stronghold in Mohammedan hands, and a Mohammedan-Egyptian garrison had held it uninterruptedly for all these years, after Gaza, and Jaffa, and Cæsarea, and Haifa and Acre, and Beyrouth, and Tripoli, and Tyre and Sidon, and Tortosa and Byblos and Latakia—all the string of ports and roadsteads along the shore—had long been in Christian hands.

Within four years of the great change Ascalon was seized at last. It was well fortified, the semi-circle of its walls crowned heights stretching from the sea to the sea again. The garrison was permanently reinforced from Egypt by water and fresh contingents and relays arrived every three months. Its past immunity made its Egyptian owners think it impregnable. In this they were quite deceived, as people commonly are when they go by past form in military matters.

Ascalon being thus mastered, was a warning on the part of the Crusading King to the heretic Caliph at Cairo that he must regard Jerusalem as his superior. He might ally himself with Jerusalem if he would, or he might expect attack and compulsory subjection, which would serve the purpose as well or better than formal alliance. But by Ascalon he was both intimidated and warned.

The very next year, 1154, Damascus which had so long cherished its independence and stood out against the growing rule of Zengi and his son—even during its great peril in 1148—gave way. The agent of this change was again Ayub. Partly by argument, partly by bribes he got the Damascenes to admit Nureddin and thenceforward all the Moslem eastern half of the Syrian corridor was in one command with the wealth and central position of its chief city in hands of Zengi's son. On the 25th of April, 1154, Ayub's chief and lord, Nureddin of Aleppo, rode, acclaimed, into Damascus.

The second step in the “encirclement” had been taken.

It is typical of the military inferiority of the Crusading State, after the great change of 1144-48, that it dared not for some years provoke Nureddin on the main Egyptian question by a direct challenge: it was content to levy toll from the rival generals of the Caliph at Cairo and to make this a symbol of vague suzerainty.

Ascalon had, indeed, been seized, and there was of course throughout the ten years between the fall of that city and active operations in Egypt any amount of border warfare with varying fortunes between the two powers: Christian at Jerusalem, Moslem at Damascus. But during all these ten years neither Baldwin III nor his brother Amaury (Almeric) who succeeded him in 1162 attempted actual invasion. There was something like permanent or intermittent anarchy in the Egyptian government, the Vizirs succeeding each other by plot and counter-plot, and murder. There was therefore recurrent opportunity for action by Jerusalem; yet none was taken until the year after Amaury's accession, that is, in 1163.

At the beginning of that year an Arab Vizir, who had worked his way up to the chief power under the Fatimite Caliphate after having been governor of upper Egypt, was attacked by a rival general and driven out of Cairo. He had only held power for just over six months.

The man thus driven out, the Arab Vizir, was called Shawar. He took refuge with Nureddin at Damascus and offered fantastic terms for his support against his supplanter. He said that after his success, should it come about, he would pay all the costs of the Syrian King's campaign and pledged a third of the huge Egyptian revenues as a regular tribute to be paid thenceforward—for it must be remembered how in all this business the wealth of Egypt, which was on a different scale from that of all the rest of the Near East, played almost as great a part in the ambitions and rivalries of the two competing powers, Crusading-Christian and Mohammedan-Syrian, as did its strategic value.

It must not be supposed that during all these years the various competing, murderous, local commanders under the heretic Caliphate of Cairo had not thought of appealing to Damascus; but hitherto Damascus had not moved. It would be time enough to move (thought Nureddin) when Jerusalem moved—if then. Each was watching the other, as rival powers today in Europe watch each other before venturing on actual hostilities. Moreover, Nureddin was growing older and dreaded the ambition of his own generals.

An approach to Egypt could only be made by Damascus through the desert land beyond the Dead Sea, south of the Crusading Kingdom, which former lay right on the flank of such an advance.

The new King of Jerusalem, Amaury, then, moved first. Shawar's successful rival, Dirgham by name, was recalcitrant over the payment of that tribute which the King of Jerusalem regularly demanded as the symbol of his vague claims to protect the Caliph at Cairo. With the failure of the tribute as a pretext the King of Jerusalem at once invaded. He was checked by the flooding of the Delta. But the check came at that very moment when Dirgham heard that Shawar, whom he had expelled, was pressing Nureddin to strike. The King of Jerusalem had already retired; he was followed by passionate repentant pleadings from Dirgham.

Before these pleadings could be of effect, Nureddin had decided on war, six months after his rival, the Christian King, had first acted. He was persuaded to do so, rather against his will, by Ayub and by Ayub's brother, Shirkuh. Nureddin sent an army round by the south of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, through the desert land and across the neck of the Sinai peninsula. That army he confided to Shirkuh. Now Shirkuh was the brother of that same Job or Ayub who had been governor of Baalbek for Nureddin and had negotiated Nureddin's triumphal entry into Damascus ten years before, Shirkuh therefore was the uncle of the young Saladin, now just past his twenty-fifth year: a modest, bookish lad whom no one had yet noted in connection with arms or indeed in any other fashion.

Later in life Saladin told in striking words the story of that chance summons into Egypt; how he hated going, having no sufficient equipage or position. How he only at last reluctantly obeyed the command of Nureddin himself, who bade him join his uncle without delay. [Or the second expedition. It matters not. The point is that Saladin did not seek his career but had it thrust upon him.]

Shirkuh then, took Saladin with him upon this expedition to Egypt which was to reinstate Shawar as Vizir, and with that setting forth, the story of Saladin begins.

Dirgham, hard pressed but not defeated, was turned upon by his own new subjects, thrown from his horse, and killed. Shawar, with the Damascene army at his back, was once more in power. It was the month of May, 1164.

Then came the habitual criss-cross of those purely personal intrigues among the rival Egyptian generals. Shawar, hoping to remain independent in spite of his ally, Shirkuh, being at the head of a conquering army, kept the Damascenes out of Cairo; or, at least, out of the fortifications. He refused to pay the sums of money he had promised. Shirkuh replied by occupying the eastern side of the Delta.

It is at this moment that Saladin first appears in an important position. His uncle Shirkuh gave him the command of the local occupation in this eastern province. Shawar appealed to the King of Jerusalem and Amaury marched against the Damascenes and their Egyptian entrenchments.

The thing ended in what was apparently a draw, but was really a preliminary defeat in this now open fighting for the possession of Egypt. Pressure having been put upon the far Damascene borders of Palestine by Nureddin, Amaury consented to a truce in Egypt. Shirkuh and his Syrian army, who were short of provision—they had been under a kind of siege at the hands of the Crusaders for three months—was ready enough for a temporary peace. The Syrian army went back to Damascus—but meanwhile Nureddin had taken the great castle at Banias, the Christian outpost against Damascus, and carried off as prisoners the Prince of Antioch and the Count of Tripoli as well.

That was towards the end of 1164. Three years later, Damascus, knowing its own power, once more took up the attack.

It is true that Nureddin again hesitated, but Shirkuh, feeling that his original expedition had been a success in spite of its inconclusive ending, pressed for a new campaign, and got his way. In the cold weather at the beginning of 1167, he made a desert march after a fashion in which the Mohammedans were ever superior to the Christians. It was only a small force of two thousand mounted men, but carefully chosen. It turned the Dead Sea, gave a wide berth to the Christian power on the north, appeared upon the Nile, crossed the river, well south of Cairo, and began moving against that capital. Amaury, hearing of the movement, had promptly followed.

Thenceforward, for two years and rather more, went on a ding-dong struggle for Egypt. It was a struggle in which the two parties, Damascus and Jerusalem, might have seemed to some onlooker equal, and are treated as equal by more than one modern writer who fails to grasp the general sweep and outline of the time. They were not equal, and could never again be equal, because every factor of number, of time, of climate, of blood, was telling increasingly against the now beleaguered Western and half-Western Christian force in the Holy Land.

These campaigns, led by Amaury the King of Jerusalem, the successor of Baldwin III lately dead, were really sorties. Nothing could have made them true campaigns with a chance of final victory but sufficient and sustained external aid—best of all, large and recurrent reinforcement from the vigorous chivalry of Western Europe, particularly of France. The French nobles were the kinsmen of the men who governed in the now fatally imperilled garrisons of the Holy Land. The French language was still the language of all those commanders; but the French moved not. Those great recurrent but widely separated expeditions which are called each individually a “Crusade,” needed strong news to launch them. For a lifetime there had been no such movement after the First, until the catastrophe of Edessa had stirred not only the French but the Germans to a Second—and we have seen how that ended.

Nothing short of the fall of Jerusalem could launch another such effort, and then, of course, it was too late.

The two years opened by an indecisive action, after which the French forces and the Egyptians with whom they were in alliance besieged Alexandria, which Saladin was to defend. The siege came to nothing. And once again (August, 1157) Damascus and Jerusalem consented to abandon the battle for the moment and leave Egypt to itself until they should return. Late in the next year (November, 1168), helped by the cold weather, the King of Jerusalem came back and this time the Caliph himself appealed to Nureddin at Damascus. Once more an army from Damascus set out. It was a small one, but it turned the King of Jerusalem's army, it entered Cairo, and the Christians went back to Palestine. For the second time they had retired before Shirkuh, but this time there was no truce—and no return. Shirkuh remained in Cairo as master. He died early the next year, and his death was the signal for the main opening of Saladin's career.

The Caliph, the Fatimite, the heretical Caliph, kept in fearful secluded pomp, a merely religious though still awful figure in his splendid palace, had taken Shirkuh, orthodox and emissary of Damascus, for his Vizir. Now that Shirkuh was dead, he, or rather his advisers, the clique within his palace (for the Cairene Caliph was quite young), chose Saladin to take his uncle's place, and to be Vizir in his turn. They chose him because Saladin “seemed to be unwarlike and easy to command.”

Now there was here an element which had appeared more than once in the brief life of this young man (he was only thirty!), the element of chance, and what is more, of chance which, though favourable, the favoured one neither desired nor sought for.

But it was part of the complex character of Saladin, a character so difficult to grasp and therefore of such interest to follow, that an unexpected or even undesired opportunity being put into his hands he could not but apply to it not only his industry, which was of the scholar's sort and therefore detailed and continuous, but also that most unscholarly quality, his cunning.

He made himself popular—it was a thing he did all his life, and a thing he was fitted to do. Having selected whom he should cow, he was ruthless; but with the undecided mass whose support he desired he was a smiling, generous, and even just, figure. His first act on this elevation (he was appointed Vizir by the Cairene Caliph at the end of March, 1169) was to add to the prayers in the Mosque the name of his real master. Those prayers were still said for the heretical Caliph, his chief and nominator, but there was added to them the name of the orthodox Nureddin.

His next act was to destroy the armed guard of black Sudanese, who were the sole defence of the Caliph. He knew that they were secretly hostile. He discovered they were plotting against him, and he tortured, beheaded and burnt them after defeat without mercy. There he showed again another side of his character, a calculated bloodthirstiness, which pierces time after time through his suave and sober bearing. Perhaps bloodthirstiness is not quite the word. There is no doubt he loved the suffering of enemies. But he loved to do nothing that was not calculated. He was determined that an act of terror should make future armed resistance impossible. And in this he was successful.

Amaury tried one more throw. The quite insufficient forces of Palestine were joined by the fleet of the Byzantine Christians. They besieged Damietta, which, with Alexandria, was the twin town commanding the mouths of the Nile. As with Alexandria the siege came to nothing. Most of the Byzantine fleet was wrecked. A counter-attack was the only fruit of this last serious effort on the part of the Crusading State to check the now almost perfect encirclement of which Saladin in Cairo was the symbol. Saladin raided against Gaza, and the whole year after Damietta was filled with his activity for pressing in upon the threatened Crusaders.

That was 1170. The following year a last decisive step was taken. In September, 1171, the prayer was called in the Mosques of Cairo for the Caliph of Bagdad—it was as though prayers in the name of the Pope had been ordered by the Government of Belfast.

But the thing had been long prepared; the wrestling out of sight between the new-come Damascene power and the old unwarlike Egyptian State—very wealthy but unfitted for arms—had wearied out the less virile party, and they accepted their fate. Within a week the poor young Fatimite Caliph was dead.

The religious revolution, which was the decisive battle in all this affair, which put one spiritual force in command of all local Islam, to the south and to the west, as well as to the east of the Holy Land, which was to put all the revenues and all the recruitment from the wealthy Delta and valley of the Nile to wealthy Damascus and Aleppo and wealthy Mesopotamia in one hand, was accomplished.

Some thought that Saladin, with his old father Ayub still by him, might, in his triumph, attempt to supplant Nureddin—who was still their lord. But cunning was still the strongest force, and time was a sufficient ally.

Saladin, moreover, had been unsuccessful in following out Nureddin's own orders to attack that master castle, Kerak in Moab, south of the Dead Sea, which still interfered with the roundabout, half-desert way between Cairo and Damascus; and next Ayub was thrown from his horse and killed outside the gate of Cairo. All this made for delay.

There was one last insurrection by the relics of the black troops and of native Egyptians; it was put down with the usual complement of barbarity—everyone was crucified. It had been subsidised from Jerusalem, and on its failure Jerusalem was too weak to move. There was an abortive assault on Alexandria by the King of Sicily, who learnt the news of the plot's failure too late, and meanwhile that thing had happened which had been so patiently awaited—on the 15th of May, 1174, Nureddin, after a short illness, was dead.

II

KINGSHIP

The doomed Kingdom of Jerusalem being now encircled, the next progress towards its destruction would be the gathering of that encirclement into one military command.

For those who admire craft in public affairs a perfect spectacle is presented by Saladin immediately upon his hearing of Nureddin's death. Nureddin had left a little son, eleven years of age, to continue the dynasty of his grandfather, the great Zengi. Saladin at once had coins struck in the image of that royal boy and had prayers said in his name, public prayers in the Mosque at Cairo, which ceremonial act was the recognition of royalty.

He did more. He sent a letter to confirm and to make permanent the record of his loyalty to the great house which had made his father Ayub and his uncle Shirkuh and himself.

This letter he despatched straight to Damascus. In it he blamed other magnates for having taken over the guardianship of the young King and affirmed his own special devotion, saying that he saw with pain how they had arbitrarily taken over guardianship of “My Master, my Master's son.” He went on to say that he, Saladin, was coming at once to do homage and to show his gratitude for the good things the boy's father had showered upon him.

Whereupon, dissension having arisen (as a matter of course) between Damascus and Aleppo, to which the young heir of Nureddin had been taken, he chose the best seven hundred out of his mounted men and made off across the desert fringe round by the south of Palestine, slipped through the widely separated posts and small thin garrisons of the Christians south of the Dead Sea, and rode into Damascus on the 27th of November, 1174.

He had come to break his word with that thoroughness and foresight which both belong to his inmost self.

To us of the West such hypocrisy is revolting; but then, we have difficulty in apprehending the Oriental mind.

Here let us note, in connection with that small column of seven hundred light-armed men on their light, swift Arab horses, what was one chief factor in all the success that lay before Saladin. He now possessed the permanent nucleus of an army. The troops whom he had maintained and drilled after regular fashion in Egypt had become, as it were, professional, and in that fluctuating fluid world of Islam such a solid kernel was of incalculable value.

It is something that appears fairly often throughout history in places and times where social habits and political institutions do not lend themselves to standing armies and trained bodies of soldiers. By having to maintain a prolonged uninterrupted effort a leader finds himself, without having perhaps at first intended it, possessed, at the end of some years, of a true army, a body of men steeped in the habits of military life and obedience: separate, increasingly superior in quality to the unorganised bodies, whether of civilians or of men temporarily armed, whom they have to meet. Of such a sort were Cromwell's cavalry regiments at the end of the Civil War, when the great Powers of Europe competed for his alliance. Of such a sort were the formations of the French Revolution within some few years of its outbreak; and especially after the campaign of Lombardy. Of such a sort now, in this late autumn of 1174, was the immediate command of Saladin.

He went forth at once to besiege Aleppo, and that young “My master, son of my old Master,” to whom he had been so devoted on paper a few weeks before. He did not immediately succeed, but he beat off the young heir's cousin, another grandson of Zengi, who commanded in Mosul to the east, and was lord of Mesopotamia. The combined troops of Mesopotamia and Aleppo attacked Saladin near Hama. His veterans cut the attackers to pieces.

After that victory Saladin went the whole hog, a thing he never did in all his life until he felt certain. After such a period of intrigue he declared himself King, had his name put into the prayers as sovereign and struck coins whereon the name Nureddin's son no longer appeared, but only his own, ‘Yussuf [Joseph], Ayub's son.”

Though he felt himself so far secure he was still on the defensive, with enemies all around. They had already made an attempt upon his life by that strange sect of dissenting fanatics, the “hashish eaters,” of whom we have made the word “assassin.” These men were a small group, Ismailite in tradition, who hated both orthodoxy and a strong government in any hand. They were half brigands, half a secret society. They had come from the north to fix themselves in the difficult mountain tangle lying between Antioch and Latakia: a country difficult to penetrate, even today. Their castles were built on the peaks of those hills, inaccessible, reputed impregnable. They sent out men to murder Saladin, and in an attempted campaign against them in their own wild country he failed altogether. His failure had one good result, it produced fine dæmonic legends. In order to account for the ill-success, those about him spread supernatural stories which have about them the flavour of the Arabian Nights.

He was opposed also by sundry in Damascus itself, but his trained troops were invincible and were so dreaded that he counted confidently on his future. That future seemed specially prepared for him and for that scheme of a final Holy War against the Christians and their Faith, which had begun vaguely to take shape in his mind.

What made him thus confident was the disaster that had fallen on Jerusalem and the Crusading State. Less than two months after Nureddin's death his rival, the Christian champion, King Amaury, had died—on the 11th of July, 1174. Like Nureddin, Amaury had left no heir but a child: a boy of thirteen who was called King under the title of Baldwin IV. During all those two years, therefore, which were filled by Saladin's seizure of Damascus and successive attempts upon Aleppo, the hazarded Christian realm between him and the sea was stricken in its vital element, the element of monarchy.

For not only was the new king a boy under regency and in peril of political chaos thereby, but the East had done its work upon him, and he was known to be already a leper.

As against the enormous numbers of Islam, the masters of the Crusading State, the French nobility and the merchants of the seaports—themselves hampered by Mohammedan subjects and functionaries—had one force which Islam has never had: the Roman conception of a State, and with it the Roman inheritance of a continuous single command; the great legacy of the Empire to us Europeans. It did not suffice.

Islam did, indeed, know monarchy in fits and starts. Zengi had been an example of that, and now Saladin was already another. When Islam thus produced an ephemeral local dynasty it enjoyed single command, but it never conceived the political idea of political continuity. Just as its religion was all-pervading, so its lay controls were personal and passing. Leaders in Islam, warriors whom others would follow, rose like a wave of the sea, and they or their descendants sank again as do waves. So it had been with Zengi, so it was to be with Saladin.

As against such instability the Western tradition had rooted a dynasty at Jerusalem. The poor sick lad now on the throne was the fifth in succession from that first Baldwin who had made the monarchy more than seventy years before. It was but a spiritual force to set against the overwhelming masses that could be gathered against it from all around. It was not sufficient to save the Crusading State, but such as it was, it was a strength sufficient to bolster up the few last years of the Cross in Jerusalem.

At the end of the following year, 1177, there fell an incident which shows at once what the dying Christian monarchy could still do with its still superior type of fighting man, the mounted knights at its orders, and how pressing the power of Saladin had become.

On the 25th of November, 1177, Saladin, with something like twelve thousand behind him, led a raid right up to the sea-coast, pointing at Ascalon. Outside the walls of Ascalon, to the east, the young leper King, vastly outnumbered, won a victory against the raiders from which Saladin barely escaped on a fast camel.

But the significance of that fight, of that local Christian success which bore no fruit, was not the irresistible charge of a few Christian knights affirming itself once more over the Orientals. It was rather the fact that Saladin should take it for granted that he might at will ride at the head of troops right up to the coast of the Mediterranean. In the next year he won a victory in his turn against the Christians outside Hama, notable for the massacre in cold blood (by Saladin's orders) of the Crusading prisoners. The year after, 1179, he again rode right up to the sea-coast at the head of an army, passing through northern Galilee unchecked, and menacing Sidon itself. In the fighting he took prisoner the chiefs, the masters of the military orders, the young leper King himself, and netted enormous ransoms—Baldwin alone paying over 150,000 Tyrian pieces of gold.

Not only could the Mohammedan now almost at will pass through the whole breadth of the Christian kingdom and come up to the shore, but the rapidly uniting kingdom of Saladin could bring up the fleet from Egypt, and, a couple of years later, he nearly captured Beyrouth, after bombardment from the sea by machines mounted on the decks of his ships.

The whole story, then, is of continual increasing, and soon to be intolerable, pressure; and the end might have come even then, five years before it did, had not Saladin been diverted for the time by threats of attack from the East. The ever-swirling Mohammedan world of armed horsemen, changeful in allegiance, prepared to attack him from Mesopotamia. He turned his back to Palestine and rode for the great rivers.

He did not take Mosul, but he cowed it, and he exchanged with it as against such places as he had seized during his Mesopotamian invasion, the, to him, all-important fortress of Aleppo. He rode into that town on the 12th of June, 1183. It was the crown of his long effort, and yet he had to wait somewhat before he could deliver the final blow. For though Mesopotamia had bowed before him he did not feel that he could yet use it as a recruiting field, nor even that he was fully safe for the future against attack therefrom. Once more he marched against Mosul, fell ill and was on the point of death. Once more he avoided direct attack upon the walls, but this time he had no fears for what was to come. All Mesopotamia accepted him for suzerain, and the ruler of Mosul was ready to follow him in war. Therefore, by the spring of 1186, things were ready for the last phase.

During this eastern diversion there had been a truce patched up with the Kingdom of Jerusalem. That truce is yet another proof of the relation between all that was left of Christian power and the now consolidated Mohammedan organisation around it.

There was indeed among the vassals of the poor dying young leper king only one man left whom Saladin feared as a fighter and who for the vigour of his temperament, the determination to keep up the resistance, was feared upon the other side. That man was the savage, but most capable, soldier, Reginald of Chatillon. Other barons the Moslem knew and respected as great fighters still. Hugh of Toron, the Constable, who had fallen where the Damascus road crosses the Upper Jordan, where now the frontier bridge is, at Jacob's Ford; or that unfortunate but valiant lover and knight, the Lord of Ramleh, Saladin took him prisoner, too, and thereupon showed his chivalry by pulling out the Christian noble's teeth until he was ready to promise a fantastic ransom. There was the Master of the Templars, whom perhaps Saladin hated most of all for wearing the Cross and for his monastic vows. But the man whom he feared most was still Reginald of Chatillon.

He was that Reginald who had come as quite a young man from the Loire valley, sailing out East on quest, and had enjoyed and suffered such astonishing adventures, committed so many atrocious crimes and fought like a lion in the Marches of the North. He was that Reginald who in youth had mastered and married the heiress of Antioch and had ruled there. He had fallen prisoner to the Moslem twenty-five years ago, and of those twenty-five had spent sixteen as a prisoner in Aleppo Castle. After his release, and now elderly as the lives of fighting men in Syria then went, he had married the heiress of the Trans-Jordanian barony and had become lord of the strongest castle, and the one most boldly fronting Saladin's power, the great Kerak of Moab, the stumbling-block on the roundabout way from Damascus to Egypt.

Saladin would have given his left hand for Kerak. He besieged it on its precipice, once and once again, bringing all his power against it and the strongest siege-train men had yet seen. But the twenty-foot walls of stone stood on their height in that wilderness and still defied him, and Reginald carried on there, the chief menace, or at least challenger: a man who had actually dared to attempt a raid on Mecca, and who refused to despair even now of the Christian power. But he should have despaired, had he used his reason, a thing so wild a man would never use save immediately and tactically in the field. For, indeed, there was already no hope, and once the Mesopotamian affair was settled, once Saladin's hands were fully free and all Syria, all Egypt, mobilisable at his command, the final blow would fall.

In the midst of all this the poor young leper king died. He had been holy as well as gallant, and, in the midst of his fearful trial, constant in gallantry as a soldier and in cares as a king. He was not twenty-five when they buried him on Golgotha, by the side of the kings his forerunners, and now was Jerusalem abandoned and lacking all guidance.

Baldwin IV, dying, had pointed out as his successor the little child his nephew, the son of his sister Sibyl, a boy of five years old. The little fellow died after a few months, and what authority was to be found? What command over the predestined victims of the Holy Land? Who could rally them now?

In feudal law, by all the customs of France and of the West, the tall, fine young knight, Guy of Lusignan, was heir; for he was the new husband of Sibyl, the niece of Baldwin III and the sister of the dead leper King; the mother of the child who had just died in his turn.

But the strict law of heredity, if such an idea may be said to have already crystallised as early as 1184, did not hold in the Holy Land as it did in Western Europe, for the Holy Land was under siege, and needed the best soldier it could find. All the Lusignans were of good blood and proper soldiers, but a better leader was Raymond of Tripoli, the third of that name to rule the vassal State of the mid-coast, the Phœnician shore.

Moreover (what was of the highest moment in such a crisis) Lusignan was a newcomer. That would not have mattered a generation earlier, but the Syrian-born nobility was beginning to have a national feeling of its own. The great bulk of the lords of castles and of land were for Raymond.

What turned the scale was the intense will-power and thrust of two men, the Master of the Templars and Reginald of Chatillon: the first as an enemy of Tripoli, a violent personal enemy, the second because he desired to be master, supported Guy. Guy was crowned, but crowned under the protection of Reginald, that is, of Kerak of Moab.

Raymond, persuading himself perhaps that it a was policy of a sort and a postponement of doom for the Christian kingdom, entered into a peace with Saladin upon his own initiative: a peace that might be called an alliance. Whereupon men called out treason upon him.

Against Guy, thus apparently isolated, Saladin still held his hand, but he was sending out his messengers to his vassals, his preparations were made, he only waited the occasion. Nor was occasion necessary to him. Yet occasion was afforded him: fortune gave him his excuse with both hands.

Sometime early in the year after Guy's coronation (or possibly a few days before the turn of the year), Reginald of Chatillon had issued from his stronghold and swooped, not for the first time, upon the caravan for Mecca, the largest and the richest of all. He held it to ransom prodigiously, and now the enemy could energise all his forces with moral indignation for the Holy War upon which he was determined, and the time for which was ripe.

The Lord of Kerak refused any compensation for his deed, though the King whom he had made begged him to yield. If he must go down, he would go down fighting. He said he was lord in his own house. The Count of Tripoli had made a truce with Saladin; he was free to do so if he willed; but Reginald thought nothing of such arrangements, and trusted them and Saladin not at all. Towards Easter, which fell in that year, 1187, on March 29th, Saladin, pleading virtue and honour and resenting in particular the detention of his sister by Reginald during that or some previous raid, mobilised all Islam from the Tigris to the Nile.

The spring days were full of the gathering. By the last week of June the Sultan could review a force of perhaps a hundred thousand men, such a force as none had seen since the First Crusade; and twelve thousand of them were fully-armed, mail-clad chiefs and leaders, corresponding to the knights of Christendom. In a crisis so mortal Raymond of Tripoli, who had a few weeks before allowed the entry and passage of Saladin's men through his lands, rallied to the common cause, whether from shame or from policy.

He, Reginald of Chatillon, the Master of the Templars, and the King, perhaps 1,000 knights, or at the most 1,200, some 15,000 to 20,000 all told with the footmen and mercenaries, began their concentration. By cutting to the bone all the garrisons and leaving walls almost defenceless, by spending all the money in the treasury of the Templars for the hire of Moslem troops as well as Christians, there may have been got together a fifth or a quarter in mere numbers of what Saladin was bringing against them; but in the decisive arm, the fully equipped mailed knights, they were only one to ten.