The Strategy of Saladin 3: The View from Jerusalem (1150s-1185)

 

The Strategy of Saladin 3

The View from Jerusalem (1150s-1185)

 

Introduction

Hi, and welcome to Strategy Stuff. In the last video, we detailed how Saladin secured Egypt and conquered Syria, before committing to Holy War against the Crusader States. In 1187, this culminated in his decisive victory at Hattin, the surrender of Jerusalem, and the near-conquest of the Crusader Levant.

While Hattin and its aftermath demonstrated Saladin’s military and strategic competence, it was, above all, the end result of a decade of Crusader failure, both strategically and politically. We must therefore shift perspective temporarily towards them, and see why they failed so utterly to stop Saladin.

The Defense of Jerusalem, 1150s-1180s

Ever since the First Crusade, the key strategic problem the Crusader States faced was: how to defend their minority rule over their limited territory, when their Muslim foes often surrounded and out-resourced them?

One answer came at the military level, where the Crusaders developed a template based around the castle and the field army. In the event of an invasion, castles would stall and weaken the enemy army, buying time for the Crusaders to mobilize their field army. This field army would then march out and, with their castles in support, face down the enemy, who would now have to choose between: either accepting battle under bad odds, or else retreat. Usually, they chose the latter.

A key point to note here is that: both castle and field army needed the other’s support to be useful. A castle without a relieving army would be easily bypassed; a field army without castles would be exposed to the full strength of the Muslim army. This meant that field armies, in particular, needed to choose their battles carefully; they especially should not venture brazenly beyond castle range and offer battle in the open. A field army in such circumstances risked total annihilation, which in turn would cause large numbers of castles – and their associated territories – to fall into Muslim hands.

This Crusader military template worked well, even against Saladin. Many of his attacks against the Kingdom of Jerusalem ended up with his army stuck before a castle, and eventually retreating due to the incoming field army or simple lack of supplies. Saladin never found a counter to the template: he tried outwitting it once in 1177, when he bypassed the castles of southern Jerusalem in a bid to eliminate the mobilizing Crusader field army. He ended up in an even bigger failure, as the castle garrisons sallied out, crushed his overstretched army, and forced him into a harrowing retreat.

With the military template, the Crusaders could avoid being overrun by large Muslim forces, at least in the short-term. The template was of less help in the medium-term, however, especially against a strategy of attrition: if the Muslims constantly invaded, the Crusaders would have to constantly raise field armies. And since the Muslims had more resources, the Crusaders would go bankrupt first; and at that point, even the military template wouldn’t save the Levant.

To deal with this, the Crusaders therefore needed another answer, this time at the strategic level: they needed to find a ‘protector’, meaning an ally that could either deter the Muslims, or replenish Crusader resources. But there was an inherent tension within the concept: any state powerful enough to protect the Crusaders would also be powerful enough to dominate them and interfere with the cherished autonomy of the local nobility.

As a result, unlike at the military level, the Crusaders ultimately failed to agree on a suitable strategic protector. The ideal ones were always the powerful yet distant kingdoms of Western Europe: but starting in the 1150s, France and Angevin England began a decades-long struggle against each other, leaving few resources for the Levant. By the 1160s Byzantium had become the new protectors, but their constant interference in local affairs made them hated by the nobility.

Then, in 1174, just as Saladin began conquering Syria, the underage Baldwin IV became King of Jerusalem, requiring a noble regent to manage affairs. The role soon fell to the great lord Raymond of Tripoli who, like his peers, disliked and soon rejected Byzantium. Raymond believed he had a perfect replacement: the Holy Roman Empire of Friedrich ‘Barbarossa’, who at this time had just re-conquered Northern Italy and, through it, gained a Mediterranean link to the Levant.

It proved to be a poor decision. The HRE was opposed by Jerusalem’s traditional allies: Byzantium, Sicily and even the Pope, and Raymond’s defection caused them to suspend support just when it was needed against Saladin. Even worse, Barbarossa was soon ejected from Italy and lost all ability to protect Jerusalem. So as soon as Baldwin IV came of age, he reversed Raymond’s policy and returned to Byzantium, even while he hoped for Western Europe to assume the role.

Jerusalem’s strategic situation would have been strong with a reliable protector in support, as shown in the ‘Flanders Crusade’ of 1177. By this time, Saladin had conquered southern Syria, and was in stalemate with Aleppo and Mosul. Sensing opportunity, Jerusalem secured Byzantine help for another invasion of Egypt, and their forces were further bolstered by the arrival of Western Europeans led by the Count of Flanders. Greatly threatened, Saladin left Syria to defend Egypt.

Had Jerusalem and its protectors kept up this pressure, Saladin would probably have remained in Egypt, extending the Muslim disunity so key to the Crusaders’ survival. Instead, the Flanders Crusade showed why Jerusalem never found reliable protectors. Despite being under Byzantium’s protection, once Flanders arrived Baldwin asked him to take over the government. Flanders instead demanded rule over Egypt, which Baldwin rejected as an unacceptable intrusion into his authority. Raymond then redirected Flanders to attack Aleppo, successfully canceling the Egyptian invasion. The whole episode achieved nothing, except further dampening any desire to help the Crusaders: Byzantium saw them as completely treacherous, while Western Europe saw them as completely ungrateful.

By the 1180s, the Crusaders were essentially left alone: the French and Angevin struggle intensified, while Byzantium turned xenophobic and then fell into civil war. Without a protector in support, Jerusalem’s resources would be stretched thin against Saladin: between 1180 and 87, it mobilized its full military population 4 times, repeatedly requisitioned property and sold privileges, and even experimented with a form of income tax. In desperation, it also began to beg for peace: first, by dropping the demand for Muslims to pay tribute; then later, paying its own tribute to Saladin.

 

The Disputes of Jerusalem, 1176-85

The Crusaders’ strategic failure contributed to their political failure, as the worsening environment encouraged intrigue and unilateral action. Furthermore, King Baldwin’s infamous leprosy meant that he was both frequently incapacitated, and likely to die while his nephew, as heir, was still a baby. That meant that anybody acting as Baldwin’s regent would rule Jerusalem for the next decade or more.

Recognizing this, Baldwin’s father had given the regency to a trusted ally, but this man was soon assassinated, and in his place came Raymond of Tripoli, the greatest lord in Jerusalem. Rumors soon swirled that Raymond had designs on the throne: but his policy failures soon became a stumbling-block. Raymond had justifiably failed to stop Saladin from conquering the political vacuum of Syria, and had also unjustifiably failed in the pivot to the HRE; this was too much failure for him to lead Jerusalem.

So in 1176, Baldwin ended Raymond’s regency and immediately reversed his policies. Ironically, he could do this thanks to a few ex-prisoners of war, whose release from Aleppo was one of Raymond’s major achievements. Nevertheless, these fallen nobles realized that their only shot at power lay in supporting the King – and they were right, with Baldwin rewarding one of their leaders, the infamous Reynald de Chatillon, with the fiefdom of Oultrejourdain, instantly making him as powerful as Raymond.

Hungry for land and worried about Muslim consolidation, Baldwin’s ‘new men’ advocated renewed aggression against Saladin. One result was the aforementioned Flanders Crusade; Reynald also invaded the Sinai to try and bisect Saladin’s empire, while Baldwin built a castle to permanently threaten Damascus. But without a protector, these efforts were eventually overwhelmed by Saladin.

Baldwin’s failures emboldened his political opponents. In 1180, Raymond led an army to Jerusalem’s borders, intending to regain power. He would do this by forcing a marriage upon Baldwin’s widowed sister Sibylla, whose son was heir to the throne. If Sibylla married Raymond’s ally, Baldwin would have no choice but to designate this husband – and Raymond’s faction – as the future regent.

In a panic, Baldwin swiftly married Sibylla off to one of his ‘new men’: Guy de Lusignan. Given the circumstances, it wasn’t a bad choice: Guy had military experience, and crucially, as an ex-vassal of the Angevins, he stood a good chance of getting the King of England’s protection. Just to be safe, Baldwin also married off his other sister, Isabella, to Reynald’s stepson: thus foiled, Raymond returned to Tripoli, where he began a tense standoff against the King.

Baldwin was focused elsewhere, as the unexpected death of Aleppo’s ruler in 1181 now threatened to bring northern Syria under Saladin’s rule. A desire to prevent this likely motivated Reynald’s infamous Arabian raids, where his mercenaries invaded the Red Sea and even threatened Islam’s Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina. It worked to an extent, as Saladin urgently redeployed away from Aleppo, allowing Mosul to take over the city. But by 1183, Mosul had failed, Aleppo was in Saladin’s hands, and the Muslims could now pay the Crusaders back with interest.

Saladin now invaded northern Jerusalem, prompting Raymond to hastily reconcile with an incapacitated Baldwin. Guy, as stepfather to the heir, was then designated regent, and took command of the field army. He followed the Crusader military template to a T: for a month, he cautiously faced down Saladin’s army, refusing to venture beyond the support range of his castles, even as Saladin staged provocative raids on holy sites. Eventually, the Muslims ran out of supplies and again retreated.

As far as invasions went, this had not been a terrible outcome for Jerusalem. But Raymond’s faction nevertheless used it to severely criticize Guy’s leadership. They blamed him for not immediately attacking and thus letting Saladin raid, which was a pure bad-faith argument that went against everything in the Crusader military template. A better argument might have noted that Jerusalem didn’t have the resources to continuously mobilize against Saladin; and that sooner or later, Guy would have to risk battle, or else let Saladin bleed the Kingdom into inevitable defeat.

In any case, the final straw came when Guy rejected Baldwin’s demand to return a few valuable fiefdoms. In a rage, Baldwin purged Guy from the regency, made Raymond the new regent, and demanded Sibylla divorce her husband. In response, Guy and Sibylla fled to southern Jerusalem, where they began yet another tense standoff. After 6 months of this, Baldwin’s health failed and he died.

Baldwin’s death left the Crusaders more strategically isolated and politically divided than they had ever been. His dutifulness in the face of leprosy was impressive, and by this time there were no easy fixes for Jerusalem’s strategic failures. But Baldwin’s political U-turns violated one of the key responsibilities of a ruler, which was to hand over a stable order to his successor. This failure would set the stage for the imminent disaster at Hattin.

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