minbar from Aleppo in the al-Aqsa mosque as his predecessor had intended. Also following Nur al-Din’s example, he paid especial attention to relations with the caliphs of Baghdad, whose formal recognition could lend a veneer of respectability to his conquests. In 1175 he won investiture by Caliph al-Mustadi of Egypt, Yemen, future conquests and Syria except for Aleppo, although opposition from the last great Abbasid caliph, al-Nasir (1180–1225), thwarted his designs on Mosul in 1182. Saladin peppered the court in Baghdad with flattering correspondence implying he acted as the caliph’s servant, not least the newsletter he despatched to al-Nasir a few days after the victory over the Franks at Hattin in July 1187, which dripped formal obeisance to the caliph’s superior authority.22 Religious duty refined political imperative. Ibn Shaddad recorded a conversation with Saladin on the coast road between Ascalon and Acre one stormy day in 1189 during which the sultan declared his eagerness, once all the Franks had finally been expelled from Outremer, ‘to set sail to their islands to pursue them there until there no longer remain on the face of the earth any who deny God’.23 Wrapped in this rhetorical hyperbole lay the imperative of his system of patronage, loyalty and discipline; each conquest had to be followed by another.
The problem for the sultan’s apologists was that before 1187 Saladin’s military energies were primarily directed against fellow Muslims. For all his glamour as a conqueror of Egypt, Syria and Palestine, Saladin proved a cautious, at times nervous, field commander, better at political intrigue, diplomacy and military administration than the tactics of battle or the strategy of campaign. His successes at Damascus (1154), Aleppo (1183) and Mosul (1186) came through the application of political coercion and diplomacy, not brutal assault. Christian armies defeated him at Montgisard in 1177, Forbelet in 1182, Arsuf in 1191 and Jaffa in 1192. Indecision cost him Tyre and Antioch in 1187–8. His failure to snuff out the paltry Christian army in the early stages of the siege of Acre in 1189 remains hard to explain. Diplomacy rather than combat allowed him to withstand the Third Crusade, as it had ensured his alliance with the caliph, neutralized the Seljuks of Asia Minor and sown division in the kingdom of Jerusalem with his treaty with Raymond III of Tripoli in 1185–7. This preference for political arts cannot be ascribed to a lack of military experience or personal squeamishness; the massacres of the Sudan in 1169 and the butchery of the Templars and Hospitallers after Hattin give that the lie. What distinguished Saladin, as William of Tyre sensed, was a highly developed opportunism sustained by an unsentimental appreciation of how to achieve ends through blandishment rather than force, coupled with considerable skill at managing administrative systems and people. Even so, for all his qualities as a politician, Saladin’s triumph over the Franks was eased by debilitating forces within Outremer for which he could claim no responsibility.
THE DECLINE OF THE KINGDOM OF JERUSALEM 1174–87
From the third quarter of the twelfth century, political society in Outremer, in western eyes prosperous, extravagant, self-absorbed, fractious and corrupt, suffered a cumulative crisis only partly the fault of its leaders. In the north, the principality of Antioch had been reduced by Nur al-Din to the coastal strip west of the Orontes. In the kingdom of Jerusalem, as has been seen, political stability was increasingly frayed by the rapid succession as monarchs of a possible bigamist (Amalric), a leper (Baldwin IV), a child (Baldwin V) and a woman (Sybil) with an unpopular arriviste husband (Guy). Protected by a series of truces with Saladin, appearances of wealth and power, noticed by Christian and Muslim travellers in the 1170s and 1180s, concealed and encouraged self-indulgent factional politicking. From 1174 to 1186 constant jockeying for control of the regency, the ill and infant kings or royal patronage diverted attention from the more intractable problems of defence and finance.
Although revenues from commerce, especially from the port of Acre, were buoyant, the incomes of the king and his greater barons seemed increasingly inadequate to meet expenditure, especially on defence. Across the kingdom there was a move towards castles and fiefs within lordships being acquired by wealthy ecclesiastical corporations, such as the Canons of the Holy Sepulchre and, especially, the military orders of the Templars and Hospitallers. These could draw on wide networks of resources from Outremer and estates in western Europe. In the lordship of Caesarea, by 1187, perhaps as much as 55 per cent of landed property was in religious hands, the bulk of it owned by the military orders. In the frontier lordship of Galilee, all the major castles except Tiberias itself seem to have been in the hands of the Templars or Hospitallers by 1168.24 If secular lordships were withering, sustained by money fiefs rather than land, the crown retained considerable powers of patronage and wide sources of revenue, including custom and harbour dues, taxes on Muslims and pilgrims, profits from minting coin as well as from the royal demesne, including the farming-out of proceeds from local industries, such as sugar production. However, with no new lands being conquered, the demands of patronage denied the crown much scope for increasing its ordinary income. The 1167 invasion of Egypt required a special 10 per cent income tax on those who declined to join the expedition, agreed at an assembly at Nablus that apparently included representatives of ‘the people’ as well as the clerical and lay magnates.25 In 1183, a comprehensive survey of landholdings in the kingdom was conducted (a census) to provide a basis for a new assessment of military obligation. According to the well-informed William of Tyre, chancellor of the kingdom at the time, faced with the prospect of greater pressure from Saladin, ‘the king and the barons were reduced to such a desperate state of need that their revenues were entirely insufficient to provide for the necessary outlay’, leading them to agree to a new national war tax on all inhabitants, regardless of language, race, religion or sex. This process of land census followed by fiscal imposition is reminiscent of the Domesday Survey of 1086 in England. The nature of the tax, 2 per cent on income above 100 besants as well as 1 per cent on land worth more than 100 besants, with a graded hearth tax below that, echoed that of 1166 and in part presaged the Saladin Tithe of 1188 and thirteenth-century English parliamentary taxation in the west, not least in the explicit element of consent described by William of Tyre: ‘by the common consent of all the nobles, both secular and ecclesiastical, and by the assent of the people of the kingdom of Jerusalem… for the common good of the realm’.26 This was parliamentary language.
The underlying problems were not just financial. Despite the de facto overlordship of the king of Jerusalem, Outremer’s disjointed authority (Antioch, Tripoli and Jerusalem) militated against coherent strategic planning along the whole of the Christian frontier, although the rise of the military orders may have acted as a compensating balance to this fissiparous tendency. More damaging in the circumstances of the 1170s and 1180s was the heavy political, administrative and military reliance on the person of the ruler. The severely disabled leper King Baldwin IV was forced to preside in person over his administration and meetings of his council and to attend campaigns and battles even if he had to be strapped to his horse or carried in a litter. Whenever he tried to relinquish the increasingly intolerable burden for a partly paralysed, nearly blind invalid, whose physical disintegration caused him to shun company, he found he could not. William of Tyre’s heroic Baldwin was trapped in a political system, fragile in its narrowness, vulnerable to internal faction as to external attack.27
In contrast with the system of consultative assemblies on display in 1167 and 1183, this lack of executive institutional sophistication matched limited military resources. An incomplete list of obligations from c.1180 indicated 675 knights owing to the king, which might represent about 700 in full, with service from churches, monasteries and towns, in the form of sergeants, potentially adding c.5,000 troops, as well as the military orders, perhaps another 700 knights and, crucially, bodies of mercenaries, such as Turcopoles or Bedouin.28 In theory, to these more or less trained troops could be added the levee en masse in times of emergency. Yet, as the campaign of 1187 revealed, raising the full complement of armed forces left vital castles and cities defenceless; the castle of Le Feve in Galilee was emptied of defenders during the preliminaries to Hattin and the city of Jerusalem contained just two knights by the time Saladin began his siege in October 1187.29 Any supplement of mercenaries required funds, which the kings and barons seemed increasingly to lack, in 1187 having to plunder the treasure deposited in Jerusalem by Henry II of England in expiation for his involvement in the murder of Thomas Becket in 1170. Yet it was lack of manpower not cash that posed the greatest threat. Small wonder that the refusal of western rulers to commit troops to Outremer in 1184–5 left Patriarch Heraclius ‘much distressed’.30
Despite containing Muslim pressure, increasing political dysfunction corroded Jerusalem’s unity of policy and purpose. The origins of the problems can be traced to the reign of Amalric. In 1163, the new king was forced at repudiate his wife, Agnes of Courtenay, sister of Joscelin III of Courtenay, heir to the lost county of Edessa. The stated grounds for the divorce were consanguinity, but some have argued that when Amalric and Agnes married in 1157, she was already married to Hugh of Ibelin, to whom she returned as wife after her separation from Amalric.31 Whatever the truth of the royal marriage, its annulment revealed a ruling elite that
