ABSTRACT

Tiberias displays a complicated series of blunders—the neglect of commissariat arrangements, the choice of unsuitable ground, the imperfect reconnoitring of the enemy, and the fatal results of dividing the infantry and cavalry. Between the weary Crusaders and their goal lay the hills of Tiberias, a range rising to about one thousand feet above sea level: the northern point, Kurn-Hattin, is eleven hundred and ninety-one feet high. The crusading host lay in a semicircle round Acre, with the king's pavilion pitched on "Mount Turon", a low hill ninety feet high, which lies about fourteen hundred yards from the walls. Seeing the Egyptians clustering so thick around Mansourah, St. Louis resolved not to make any attempt to throw his army across the canal by means of his boats, but to build a solid causeway and so dam up the channel and cross on foot.