July 4, 1187 — Christendom’s Darkest Day
Saladin takes Jerusalem, the True Cross, and hundreds of Christian heads...
Centuries before it was remembered as the American day of Independence, July 4 was remembered as one of the most consequential days in the perennial war between Islam and Christendom — and as a disaster for the latter.
Here is that important story.
Soon after liberating the ancient Christian city of Antioch from Muslim oppression, the First Crusaders also managed to realize their primary goal: to re-take Jerusalem from Islam (1099).
At that time, there were very few Muslim calls to jihad (only one is known, and it quickly fell on deaf ears). After all, in the preceding decades, and thanks to Sunni and Shia infighting, local Muslim populations were hardly unused to such invasions and conquests.
In Muslim historian Ibn al-Athir’s words, “While the Franks—Allah damn them!—were conquering and settling in a part of the territories of Islam, the rulers and armies of Islam were fighting among themselves, causing discord and disunity among their people and weakening their power to combat the enemy.”
In this chaos, the pure doctrine of jihad—warfare against infidels—was lost to the average Muslim, who watched and suffered as Muslim empires and sects collided.
It was only during the rule of Imad al-Din Zengi (d.1146)—a particularly ruthless Turkish warlord—and even more so under his son and successor, Nur al-Din (r. 1146-1174), that the old duty of jihad was resuscitated, and madrasas, mosques, and Sufi orders—all devoted to propagandizing the virtues of jihad and martyrdom—were founded. Contemporary literature makes clear that Islamic zeal (or, in modern parlance, “radicalization”) reached a fever pitch during their reigns.
It was in this context that a Kurd from Tikrit emerged on the scene: Salah al-Din—the “Righteousness of Islam,” or Saladin (b. 1137)—formerly one of Nur al-Din’s viziers. Saladin conquered Fatimid (Shia) Egypt in 1171. On Nur al-Din’s death, he quickly moved and added more Muslim territories—Damascus and Aleppo—to his growing empire, thereby realizing the crusaders’ worst fear: a united Islamic front.
According to his biographer, Baha’ al-Din, Saladin was a pious Muslim. He loved hearing Koran recitals, prayed punctually, and “hated philosophers, heretics, and materialists and all opponents of the sharia.” Above all else, Saladin was a devotee of jihad:
The sacred works [Koran, hadith, etc.] are full of passages referring to the jihad. Saladin was more assiduous and zealous in this than in anything else. . . . [H]e spoke of nothing else [but jihad], thought only about equipment for the fight, was interested only in those who had taken up arms, had little sympathy with anyone who spoke of anything else or encouraged any other activity.
By the spring of 1186, Saladin’s empire had so grown that he felt the time was right for a final showdown: “We should confront all the enemy’s forces with all the forces of Islam,” he told a subordinate.
Before long, the crusader kingdoms had to marshal all their forces to meet him, near Nazareth in the summer of 1187. Although Saladin had more men—approximately 30,000, half of whom were light cavalry and many of whom were slave-soldiers—the Christians, under the leadership of King Guy, had assembled the largest army since their capture of Jerusalem, consisting of some 20,000 knights, including 1,200 heavy cavalry.
Aware that a head-on assault against this wall of steel was futile, Saladin withdrew his forces, went to and besieged the nearby crusader kingdom of Tiberias. Between the crusader army and the besieged city lay some twenty miles of stony, parched land—with no natural water sources or wells. Nonetheless, on July 3, the crusaders set out to relieve Tiberias.
Looking “like mountains on the march,” a Muslim chronicler remarked that the “hardened warriors” moved “as fast as if they were always going downhill,” despite being “loaded down with the apparel of war.”
On learning that the crusaders had fallen for his trap, Saladin rubbed his hands with glee: “This, indeed, is what we wished for most!” He immediately dispatched his light cavalry to harry the crusaders. King Guy hurried the march: the real battle—and water—lay in Tiberias; but when swarms of Muslim archers bogged down his rear force, the king ordered the entire army to halt and fight near a parched and ominous double-hill formation, known as the Horns of Hattin.
“This was on a burningly hot day,” writes a Muslim, “while they themselves were burning with wrath.” According to Ernoul, a European squire who was present:
As soon as they [Franks] were encamped, Saladin ordered all his men to collect brushwood, dry grass, stubble and anything else with which they could light fires, and make barriers which he had made all round the Christians. They soon did this, and the fires burned vigorously and the smoke from the fires was great; and this, together with the heat of the sun above them caused them discomfort and great harm. . . . When the fires were lit and the smoke was great, the Saracens surrounded the host and shot their darts through the smoke and so wounded and killed men and horses.
This continued into nightfall. No one slept; from the surrounding darkness, the Muslims, who by now “had lost their first fear of the enemy and were in high spirits,” made a great din. “They could smell victory in the air, and the more they saw of the unexpectedly low morale of the Franks the more aggressive and daring they became.” Out of the smoke-filled gloom and into the crusader camp came volley after volley of arrows, accompanied by cries of “Allahu Akbar” and triumphant iterations of the shahada, the Islamic declaration of faith.
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