Who won the Battle of Hattin?
Saladin won a decisive victory at the Horns of Hattin on 4 July 1187, when his army trapped a thirst-crippled Crusader host in the dry hills of Galilee and destroyed it. The defeat shattered the field army of the Kingdom of Jerusalem and led within months to the fall of Jerusalem itself.2
In the burning summer of 1187, an army of Crusader knights marched out across the dry hills of Galilee, banners drooping in the heat, throats already thickening with thirst. Ahead of them, blocking the way to water, waited the host of Saladin, sultan of Egypt and Syria. Within two days the largest army the Christian states of the Holy Land could raise would be broken beneath two rocky hills known as the Horns of Hattin, and with it the Kingdom of Jerusalem itself.3
Background: a kingdom divided
The Kingdom of Jerusalem had been founded by the First Crusade almost ninety years earlier, but by the 1180s its court was split into rival factions. One gathered around Princess Sibyl, sister of the young king Baldwin IV, and her husband Guy of Lusignan, a newcomer to the East. The other was led by Raymond III, Count of Tripoli, who through his wife was also lord of Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee.4
Baldwin IV died in 1185, aged only 23, and the child king Baldwin V followed him in 1186. Sibyl's party then moved fast: it had Sibyl crowned, and she crowned Guy. Piotr Solecki, writing in Histmag, notes that Guy owed his throne above all to the Patriarch Heraclius and the Templars. Raymond refused to accept the new king and opened his own talks with Saladin, so that in the spring of 1187 the kingdom stood on the edge of civil war.5
Saladin, meanwhile, had done what no Muslim ruler had managed since the Crusaders arrived. From Egypt he had extended his rule over Muslim Syria, taking Aleppo in 1183, and in 1186 an agreement brought Mosul under his authority. The Crusader states were now ringed on land by a single power.6 › Saladin
The spark was struck by Raynald of Châtillon, lord of Kerak in the desert beyond the Jordan, who attacked a Muslim caravan in a time of truce, and gave Saladin his cause. That spring a large Muslim raiding force, allowed through Raymond's lands, destroyed a party of Templars it met on the way, a disaster that pushed the count into making his peace with Guy. In the words of the Arab historian Ibn al-Athir, Raymond took fright at the situation he had created and returned to the king.7
Armies and commanders
King Guy called out almost every fighting man in the kingdom. The army gathered first at Acre and then at the springs of Sepphoris, the Arab Saffuriya, a well-watered camp about 30 kilometers west of Tiberias, where it waited with the relic of the True Cross. Britannica puts it at perhaps 20,000 men with some 1,200 heavily armed horsemen. Solecki counts about 1,200 knights, an unknown number of Turcopole light cavalry and about 18,000 foot, between 15,000 and 20,000 in all, and notes that money sent by Henry II of England paid for many of the mercenaries.8
At the core of the army stood the military orders, the Templars under their Master, Gerard of Ridefort, and the Hospitallers, whom Saladin counted among the most dangerous fighters in the Christian ranks. Beside the king rode Raynald of Châtillon and, reconciled at last, Count Raymond.9
Saladin's army was larger. Britannica gives about 30,000 men, half of them light cavalry. Ibn al-Athir counted 12,000 regular horsemen, and Solecki, who sets out that figure unit by unit, reckons that with infantry and volunteers the sultan had well over 30,000. Saladin commanded the center himself, and his nephew Taqi al-Din led one of the wings.10
The sultan also had to decide how to use it. Most of his emirs, Ibn al-Athir records, advised him to avoid a pitched battle and wear the Franks down with raids. Saladin chose to stake everything on one great blow, saying that events do not turn out according to man's will and no one knows how much life is left to him.11
The battle in phases
The bait. Saladin crossed the Jordan at the end of June and camped at al-Uqhuwana, at the southern end of the Sea of Galilee. On 2 July, unable to draw the Franks away from their springs, he stormed the lower town of Tiberias in a single night. Raymond's wife and her children shut themselves in the citadel and held out. The siege had one purpose: to make the Christian army leave its water and come to him.12
The council. At Sepphoris the barons argued into the night. Ibn al-Athir gives Raymond the plainest speech: Tiberias was his and his wife's, Saladin could not keep the town for long, and he would rather lose it than the kingdom. Raynald accused him of taking the Muslims' side. According to Britannica, Raymond first persuaded the king to stay put, but late that night others, accusing the count of treason, talked Guy into marching; Solecki names the Templars as the loudest voices for war. Not every medieval writer saw it that way. Benjamin Kedar, the Israeli historian who re-examined the battle, points out that the Old French chronicles in the Ernoul tradition blame the disaster on Raymond's own bad advice during the march.13
The march, 3 July. The army set out early on 3 July into the dry uplands between Sepphoris and the lake. Saladin's mounted archers harried the column from morning on in a fierce heat, and about halfway to Tiberias the water ran out. That evening the exhausted army halted on the open plateau near the village of Lubiya, with Saladin's army close around it. The few local cisterns had been drained, and the men spent the night without water, surrounded.14
The night. In the Muslim camp the mood was the opposite. Ibn al-Athir describes the soldiers urging each other on through the dark. According to the chronicle of Ernoul, Saladin's men piled brushwood and dry grass around the Christian camp and set it alight, and had water brought up from the lake and poured out in full view of the thirsting enemy, a detail Solecki also reports.15
The morning, 4 July. At dawn the Franks tried to break through toward the Sea of Galilee and its water. Saladin placed himself across their path. The Muslim archers, wrote Ibn al-Athir, sent up clouds of arrows like swarms of locusts, killing many of the horses, and the smoke of the burning scrub blew into the Christians' faces. The infantry broke first. It fled up the slopes of the Horns and would not come down again, though the king and the bishops begged it to; without the foot soldiers' screen the knights could no longer fight as an army.16
Raymond's charge. Seeing the situation was hopeless, Count Raymond led a charge against the troops in front of him. Taqi al-Din, commanding there, had his ranks open to let the knights through, and then closed them again. Raymond, Reginald of Sidon, Balian of Ibelin and a few others escaped. Raymond rode not to Tiberias but to Tyre.17
Turning point: the fall of the king's tent
The rest of the army climbed after the infantry onto the Horns of Hattin, the twin peaks of an old volcano ringed by the ruined walls of a long-vanished Iron Age town. There, Ibn al-Athir says, they hoped to pitch their tents and defend themselves, but the Muslims pressed them so hard that only one tent went up, the king's. In the fighting the True Cross was taken, a blow that, as Kedar notes from the Muslim chroniclers, hurt the Franks more than the capture of their king. Guy held on with perhaps 500 knights.18
Saladin's son al-Afdal, at his father's side in the first battle he had ever seen, later told Ibn al-Athir what came next. Twice the knights on the hill charged down at the sultan himself and drove his men back; twice they were thrown back up the slope. Each time the boy cried that they had won, and each time his father silenced him: we shall not have beaten them until that tent falls
. As he spoke, the tent came down. Saladin dismounted and bowed to the ground in thanks, weeping.19
The knights, crazed with thirst, had dismounted and sat on the ground, and the Muslims took them where they sat. The prisoners included King Guy and his brother Aimery, Raynald of Châtillon, Humphrey of Toron, the lord of Jubail and the Master of the Temple. Ibn al-Athir, never a neutral witness, wrote that since the Franks first came to Palestine in 1098 they had never suffered such a defeat.20
Aftermath
That evening Saladin received the king and Raynald in his tent. The two main accounts differ in the detail. Ibn al-Athir says Guy was given iced water, drank and passed the cup to Raynald, and that Saladin declared the lord of Kerak had not been given leave to drink. The Frankish chronicle of Ernoul says Guy was offered a sweetened drink in a golden cup, and that Raynald refused it. Both agree on the end: Saladin reproached Raynald for his crimes and killed him with his own hand, then calmed the trembling king. Ibn al-Athir has him explain that he had twice sworn to kill the man, once for his attempt on Mecca and Medina, once for the caravan.21
Guy and the leading captives were sent to Damascus. The Templars and Hospitallers were treated differently. Saladin paid their captors for them, and some 200 were beheaded on his orders; of the knights of the orders, only their Master, Gerard of Ridefort, escaped execution.22
The next day Saladin returned to Tiberias, whose citadel surrendered; Raymond's wife was allowed to leave with her household. Then he turned to the coast. Acre opened its gates within days, and by September Saladin and his lieutenants held most of the kingdom's strongholds and nearly every port south of Tripoli except Tyre. Count Raymond reached Tripoli and died there not long afterward.23
Jerusalem, stripped of its fighting men, was defended by Balian of Ibelin, one of the few who had escaped Hattin. On 2 October 1187 the city capitulated on terms that let its people leave once they had paid a ransom. Tyre, which Saladin had left untaken, became the refuge of the Christians on the coast and the foothold from which the West would strike back.24 › Siege of Jerusalem, 1187
The news alerted Europe to the need for a new crusade. The Third Crusade brought King Richard the Lionheart east to face Saladin, and the Crusaders won back Acre and part of the coast, but they never permanently recovered Jerusalem.25 › Battle of Arsuf, 1191
Legacy and memory
For the Crusader East, Hattin was the catastrophe from which there was no full recovery. In one afternoon the kingdom lost its king, almost its whole army and its most sacred relic, and the conquests of the First Crusade were largely undone. Ibn al-Athir crossed the battlefield a year later and found it still covered with bones, lying in heaps or scattered across the hillsides.26
Saladin raised a domed monument of victory on the Horns. Only a few courses of its stones survived when the Israeli archaeologist Zvi Gal excavated on the summit as part of his survey of Lower Galilee, work that also uncovered the far older fortified town whose walls had sheltered the last of the Crusaders.27
Historians still argue over the road the army took and why. Kedar, comparing the yield of the springs along the way, argued that the small spring of Tur'an could never have watered so large a force, and that the Muslim writers were right that on the second morning the Franks were making for the lake.28
Visiting today
The Horns of Hattin rise above the village of Hittin, west of Tiberias. On the lower northeastern slope stands the shrine of Nabi Shu'ayb, whom tradition identifies with Jethro, the father-in-law of Moses. It is the holiest site of the Druze faith, and the community gathers there every April for its annual celebration.29
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