Even then they were in extreme peril, for but one way was open, for which they had no guide. Suddenly, a “knight appeared before the troop whom no one in the host knew. He sat a white horse, and carried a crimson banner, he wore a hauberk, whose sleeves came only to the elbow. He offered to guide them, and he put himself in front; he brought them to cool sweet springs; ... he made them sleep in comfortable and good places. And he so guided them that on the third day they came to the city of Gadre.”[122]
The mighty relic of the cross was taken and defiled by the Saracens at Hattin, where the Christians suffered a decisive defeat, caused by the impotence of the central administration at Jerusalem.
Reginald de Chatillon was the type of the twelfth century adventurer. He came to Palestine in the train of Louis the Pious, and he stayed there because he married a princess. He was a brave soldier, but greedy, violent, and rash, and his insubordination precipitated the catastrophe which led to the fall of the capital.
At the siege of Ascalon he so fascinated Constance, Princess of Antioch, widow of Raymond, that she persisted in marrying him, although she was sought by many of the greatest nobles, and he was only a knight. Her choice was disastrous. He had hardly entered on his government in the north before he quarrelled with the Greek emperor, who forced him to do penance with a rope about his neck. Afterward he was taken prisoner by Nour-ed-Din, who only liberated him after sixteen years, when his wife was dead. He soon married again, this time also another great heiress, Etiennette de Milly, Lady of Karak and Montréal, and, as her husband, Reginald became commander of the fortress of Karak to the east of the Dead Sea, which formed the defence against Egypt. But as the commander of so important a post, this reckless and rapacious adventurer defied the authority of his feudal superior, and by plundering caravans on the Damascus road so irritated Saladin that “in 1187 he burst, with a powerful army, into the Holy Land, made King Guy prisoner, and the Prince Reginald, whose head he cut off with his own hand.”[123]
Guy de Lusignan had been crowned at Jerusalem the year before Saladin’s invasion, and when war broke out he was at feud with the Count of Tripoli. The imminence of the common danger brought about some semblance of cohesion among the nobles, who agreed to put every available man in the field. The castles were stripped of their garrisons so that they were indefensible in case of reverse, and about fifty thousand troops were concentrated at Sepphoris in Galilee.
The contingents of the Temple and Hospital were well organized and well disciplined, but the army, as a whole, was rather a loose gathering of the retainers of thirty or forty independent chiefs, than a compact mass, subject to a single will, such as the Egyptian revenues enabled Saladin to put in the field.
Suddenly news came to Sepphoris, that the Saracens had poured through the pass of Banias and lay before Tiberias. Dissensions broke out at once, which Guy de Lusignan could not control. He was not a man of strong character, and had he been, he was only one among a dozen princes, any one of whom could quit the army and retire to his castle if he felt so disposed. The Count of Tripoli, who seems to have been the ablest soldier among the Franks, saw the folly of leaving water and marching across a burning country under a July sun, instead of waiting to be attacked. As he represented, he of all men was most interested in relieving Tiberias, for it was his town, and his wife was within the walls; yet such was the jealousy of him in the Latin camp that his advice was rejected, and an advance began on July 3, 1187.
Three miles from Tiberias the action opened by a furious attack on the rearguard, formed by the Temple and the Hospital. When they gave ground Guy lost heart and ordered a halt. The night which followed was frightful. The Moslems fired the dry undergrowth, and, amidst flames and smoke, the Franks lay till dawn, tormented by hunger and thirst, and exposed to clouds of arrows which the enemy poured in on them.
At dawn fighting began again, but the demoralized infantry fled to a hill, whence they refused to move. The Count of Tripoli, seeing the battle lost, cut his way out with a band of his followers, but Guy de Lusignan, Reginald de Chatillon, and a multitude of knights and nobles were captured. The orders were practically annihilated, the whole able-bodied population cut to pieces, and the holy cross, which had been borne before the host as an invincible engine of war, was seized and defiled on the mountain where Jesus taught his disciples to love their enemies.
Emmad-Eddin, an Arabic historian, has described the veneration of the Christians for their talisman, their adoration of it in peace, and their devotion to it in battles; and his words help a modern generation to conceive the shock its worshippers received when it betrayed its helplessness.