ABSTRACT
On 4 July 1187, the army of the Latin Kingdom suffered a catastrophic defeat at the battle of Hattin. Most of the kingdom’s knights and nobles, including the king, were either killed or captured. During the summer and autumn of 1187 the now undefended cities and castles surrendered one after another to Saladin. Jerusalem was defended by Queen Sibylla, Patriarch Heraclius and Balian of Ibelin, the last having escaped from Hattin and managed to return to Jerusalem by way of Nablus. Since at the time there were only two knights in the city, Balian knighted those sons of knights who had reached the age of fifteen and in addition sons of the city’s patriciate. During Saladin’s siege of the city (20 September-20 October 1187) the most extraordinary rituals of penance took place in the city. Noble ladies undertook a rather peculiar ritual of penance: ‘they brought basins and placed them before Mount Calvary and filled them with cold water. Then they put their children in up to their chins, cut off their hair and threw it away.’1 The clergy led processions on the walls of the city, carrying the relic of the True Cross, which belonged to the Jacobite community, as the relic belonging to the crusaders had been lost at Hattin. When the great cross, which the crusaders had set up on the wall when they entered the city on 15 July 1099, fell down during one of Saladin’s attacks, it was considered as bad an omen as the capture of the relic of the True Cross at Hattin. But all these efforts were in vain. The city, lacking military force, capitulated on 20 October 1187 after a fortnight’s siege.2 During the negotiations between the defenders and Saladin over the terms of surrender, some of those in
1 L’Estoire, l.23, ch. 58, pp. 87-8. The Conquest of Jerusalem and the Third Crusade. Sources in Translation, trans. P.W. Edbury, Aldershot 1996, p. 59. 2 For these events see Prawer, Histoire du Royaume, vol. 1, pp. 641-80; Mayer, The Crusades (1972 edn), pp. 128-33. There is no study of the reaction to the fall. For some aspects see A. Cartellieri, Philipp II. August. König von Frankreich, Leipzig 1921-1922, pp. 39-83, 268-73; Prawer, Histoire du Royaume, vol. 2, pp. 22-34; Siberry, Criticism of Crusading, pp. 52-62, 81-5; Cole, ‘Christian Perceptions’, pp. 9-39. Y. Katzir’s article ‘The Conquests of Jerusalem’, pp. 103-13, does not deal, as the title suggests, with the Christian reaction to the fall of Jerusalem in 1187 but only with the Moslem reaction. For
Jerusalem, such as the anonymous author of Libellus de expugnatione Terrae Sanctae per Saladinum, opposed the capitulation, arguing: ‘Who has heard of such a thing, that a successor should pay to be expelled from his inheritance? ... Who can imagine such an act of wickedness as handing over to the Saracens the Sepulchre of the Resurrection of Christ, the most noble temple (Templum Domini), the most holy Mount Zion and other holy places of the Holy City? ... Did we ever hear of the Jews abandoning their Holy of Holies without bloodshed and heavy fighting, handing it over voluntarily? A curse upon those despicable merchants who of their free will are selling the Holy City and Christ!’ The poor, he reported, ‘preferred to die for Christ in the Holy City than to serve the impure and unclean Turks and Saracens in other parts of the Promised Land’.3
