Текст книги "The Crusades. The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land"

Автор книги: Thomas Asbridge

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The Assassins were an embedded, independent and largely unpredictable force in Near Eastern affairs; and their chief weapon–political assassination–continued to prove highly effective. Saladin’s drive to dominate Syria, and more specifically his campaigns against Aleppo, brought him into the Assassins’ orbit. In early 1175, Sinan decided to target Saladin, probably at least in part on the prompting of the Aleppan ruler Gumushtegin. With the sultan stationed outside Aleppo, a group of thirteen knife-wielding Assassins managed to penetrate the heart of his camp and launch an assault. Saladin’s bodyguards came to his aid, cutting down one assailant even as he leapt to strike the sultan himself. Although the plot was foiled, there were still fatalities among the Salahiyya. Soon afterwards, Saladin wrote warning his nephew Farrukh-Shah to be watchful at all times, and before long it became standard practice to place the sultan’s own tents within a fortified and heavily guarded enclosure, isolated from the rest of the camp.

In spite of these precautions, the Assassins managed to strike again in May 1176. While Saladin was visiting one of his emir’s tents four Assassins attacked, and this time came perilously close to completing their murderous task. In the first sudden flurry of movement, the sultan was struck and only his armour saved him from a severe wound. Once again his men pounced on the killers, butchering them to a man, but Saladin was left bloodied by a cut to his cheek and badly shaken. From this point onwards, any members of his entourage whom he did not personally recognise were dismissed.

In August 1176 Saladin decided to deal with this troublesome threat. He laid siege to the major Assassin castle of Masyaf, but after less than a week he broke off the investment, retreating to Hama. The motive for the sultan’s departure and the details of any deal brokered with Sinan remain mysterious. A number of Muslim accounts repeat the story that, under the threat of an unwavering Assassin campaign to murder members of his Ayyubid family, Saladin agreed to a pact of mutual non-aggression with the Old Man. One Aleppan chronicler offered an even more chilling explanation, describing how the sultan was visited by Sinan’s envoy. Once searched for weapons, this messenger was granted an audience with Saladin, but insisted upon conferring with him in private. The sultan eventually agreed to dismiss all but his two most skilful and trusted bodyguards–men he regarded as his ‘own sons’.

The envoy then turned to the pair of guards and said: ‘If I ordered you in the name of my master to kill this sultan, would you do so?’ They answered yes, and drew their swords saying: ‘Command us as you wish.’ Saladin was astounded, and the messenger left, taking them with him. And thereafter Saladin inclined to make peace with [Sinan].⁴¹

The reality of this tale may be doubted–if the Assassins had indeed had agents so close to Saladin they surely would have succeeded in killing him in 1175 or 1176–but the story’s implicit message was accurate. It was all but impossible to protect oneself permanently from the Assassins. By whatever means, Saladin and Sinan evidently achieved some form of accommodation in 1176, because the sultan never again attacked the order’s mountain enclave and no further attempts were made on his life.

SALADIN’S AYYUBID REALM

In late summer 1176 Saladin brought almost two years of campaigning against Aleppo to an end. With a truce in place enshrining his possession of Damascus and the bulk of Syria, he willingly perpetuated the fiction of subservience to al-Salih. Across Saladin’s dominions, the young ruler’s name continued to appear on coinage and to be recited in Friday prayer. But the sultan did seek further to legitimise his own authority by marrying Nur al-Din’s widow Ismat, daughter of Unur, the long-dead ruler of Burid Damascus. This was, first and foremost, a political union, for her hand allowed Saladin to connect himself to that city’s two historic ruling dynasties, but real friendship, perhaps even love, seems to have blossomed between the couple.* By this time, the sultan had taken other steps to appropriate the machinery of Zangid government. Nur al-Din’s secretary, Imad al-Din al-Isfahani, was taken into service and, alongside al-Fadil, soon became one of the sultan’s closest confidants.

In September 1176 Saladin returned to Egypt. This move offered him something of a respite from the dangers and confrontations of recent months–he paused in Alexandria with his six-year-old son al-Afdal for three days in March 1177 to listen to tales of the Prophet Muhammad’s life–but it was also reflective of a new reality in the sultan’s life. Presiding over a realm that stretched from the Nile to the Syrian Orontes, he now faced all the practical difficulties attendant upon governing a geographically expansive kingdom in the medieval age. One overriding issue was communication. Facing the same problem, Nur al-Din had supplemented his network of horse-borne couriers and messengers with the extensive use of carrier pigeons, and Saladin now followed suit. He also maintained spies and scouts in Syria and Palestine to garner intelligence. Even so, no matter how they were transported, messages were always subject to possible enemy interception, and the sultan sometimes resorted to writing in code. A significant truth of living through this era, for Muslims and Christians alike, was that even within allied groups the transfer of information was hugely imprecise, while knowledge of enemy intentions and movements was often based upon pure guesswork. Ignorance, error and disinformation all served to shape decision making and, in the years to come, Saladin always struggled to maintain knowledge of events across the Muslim world, and to retain even a partial understanding of Frankish plans and actions. In this situation, al-Fadil’s and Imad al-Din’s roles as correspondents, communicators and propagandists were of paramount importance.

The union of Cairo and Damascus under Ayyubid rule also forced Saladin to embrace the use of lieutenants to govern in his absence. Throughout his career the sultan turned first to his blood relations to fill such posts, and sometimes this system of trusting his extended family worked well. In autumn 1176 he returned to find that his brother al-Adil and nephew Farrukh-Shah had governed Egypt with attentive prudence. In Syria, however, arrangements proved to be less satisfactory. Deputised as ruler of Damascus, Saladin’s elder brother Turan-Shah proved to be an incompetent liability. Given to excessive financial liberality–infamously accruing personal debts of some 200,000 gold dinars at his death–he was also fond of life’s more dissolute distractions. With Syria stricken by a protracted drought in the late 1170s, it gradually became clear that Turan-Shah would have to be replaced. By 1178 Saladin despairingly admitted that ‘one can overlook small faults and keep silent about minor matters, but where the whole land is eaten up…this shakes the pillars of Islam’.

The sultan enjoyed greater success in his attempts to balance the use of physical and financial resources across the lands he now commanded. In 1177 he prioritised the Nile region, strengthening the defences of Alexandria and Damietta and initiating the construction of a massive fortified wall to enclose both Cairo and its southern suburb Fustat. He also took the costly but far-sighted decision to rebuild Egypt’s once famous fleet. Some ship-building materials and sailors were brought in from Libya, but Saladin’s quest for the best timber soon led him to forge commercial links with Pisa and Genoa. This was just one example of mounting international trade in military materials, technology and even weaponry between Ayyubid Islam and the West that continued even as the holy war intensified. The sultan’s investment had striking strategic consequences, for within a few years he controlled a navy of sixty galleys and twenty transport vessels. Long bereft of any real power over mercantile and martial shipping in the Mediterranean, Near Eastern Islam could once again vie for control of the sea.⁴²

THE LEPER KING

Just as Saladin was consolidating his hold over Egypt and Damascus, a new Latin king of Jerusalem was finding his feet. In 1174 King Amalric had broken off from the siege of Banyas complaining of illness. In fact, he had contracted an extreme case of dysentery and, by July, the thirty-eight-year-old sovereign lay dead. He was succeeded by his son, Baldwin IV, a young monarch whose reign would be shadowed by tragedy and ever-deepening crisis. Baldwin’s status at the moment of his precipitous elevation to the throne was peculiar. In 1163 Amalric had agreed, on the insistence of the High Court, to renounce his wife, Agnes of Courtenay (daughter of Count Joscelin II of Edessa), before assuming the crown of Jerusalem. The official grounds for the annulment of their marriage had been consanguinity–they were third cousins–but the underlying cause may have been suspicions that Agnes would seek to promote the interests of the now largely landless Courtenay clan in Palestine at the expense of the incumbent aristocracy. Amalric and Agnes had already produced two children, Baldwin and his elder sister Sibylla, and it was agreed that their legitimacy would be upheld, even though Amalric was soon remarried to the Byzantine princess Maria Comnena.

Baldwin IV’s childhood and minority

Just two years old in 1163, Baldwin grew up in a dislocated familial environment. His mother Agnes also remarried almost immediately and, being largely absent from court, played little or no part in Baldwin’s upbringing, while his stepmother Maria maintained a cool distance, more concerned to further the interests of her own offspring with Amalric. Even the infant Sibylla was effectively a stranger to the young prince, being brought up within the secluded walls of her aunt Yvetta’s convent at Bethany.

In the end, one of Baldwin’s closest childhood companions turned out to be the cleric and court historian William of Tyre. Appointed as tutor to the young prince around 1170, William was tasked to ‘train [the heir designate] in the formation of character as well as to instruct him in the knowledge of letters’ and a range of academic studies. William’s history of the Latin East offers a poignant and intimate character sketch of Baldwin as a boy. Bearing a marked physical resemblance to his father, even to the extent of mirroring the king’s gait in walking and his tone of voice, the prince was described as ‘a good-looking child for his age’, quick-witted, with an excellent memory, beloved of both learning and riding. Yet William also wrote with heart-rending honesty about a moment of dreadful revelation in Baldwin’s life.

One day, when he was nine years old and living in William’s household, the prince was playing with a group of noble-born boys. They were competing in a popular test of fortitude, ‘pinching each other on the arms and hands with their nails, as children often do’ to see who would cry out in pain. Despite their best efforts, no one was able to make Baldwin reveal the barest sign of discomfort. At first, it was assumed that this was simply a sign of his regal endurance, but William wrote:

When this had happened several times and I was told about it…I began to ask him questions [and] came to realise that half of his right arm and hand was dead, so that he could not feel pinching or even biting. I began to feel uneasy in my mind…his father was told, and after the doctors had been consulted, careful attempts were made to help him with poultices, ointments and even charms, but all in vain. For with the passage of time we came to understand more clearly that this marked the beginning of a more serious and totally incurable disease. It is impossible to refrain from tears when speaking of this great misfortune.⁴³

Baldwin was, in fact, suffering from the early stages of leprosy. It is unlikely that a definite diagnosis was made at this point. The finest physicians were employed to oversee the prince’s care, including the Arab Christian Abu Sulaiman Dawud, and for the time being there seems to have been no further serious deterioration in his condition. So that Baldwin might still learn the quintessential knightly art of mounted warfare, Abu Sulaiman’s brother was appointed as the boy’s riding tutor. Trained to control a mount with his knees alone, leaving his working left arm free to wield a weapon, the prince became a remarkably skilful horseman.

Through the early 1170s Amalric sought a suitable husband for Princess Sibylla, hoping to secure the line of succession should an alternative to Baldwin prove necessary. But at the time of the king’s own unexpected death in 1174, no match for Sibylla had yet been found, and the only surviving child from his marriage to Maria Comnena was another girl, the infant Isabella. In July 1174 Prince Baldwin was far from an ideal candidate for the throne. Born of a union that had later been dissolved, he was just thirteen (and thus two years short of adulthood by the laws of the kingdom) and was known to be suffering from some form of debilitating illness. Nonetheless, the High Court agreed to his elevation, and Baldwin was duly crowned and anointed by the patriarch of Jerusalem in the Holy Sepulchre on 15 July, the auspicious anniversary of that city’s conquest by the First Crusaders.

Historians used to regard Baldwin IV’s reign as an almost unmitigated disaster for the Latin East. Just as Saladin rose to power, emerging from Egypt to unite the Muslim world, so it was argued, Frankish Palestine was brought to its knees by a feeble and sickly monarch. Baldwin was criticised for selfishly retaining the crown long after the point when he should have abdicated, and blamed for ushering in an era of embittered and injurious factionalism, as Outremer’s nobility schemed for power and influence.

The young king’s reputation has been rejuvenated somewhat in recent years, with new emphasis being placed on the burden he shouldered due to deteriorating health, on the relative vitality of his early reign and on his determined efforts both to defend the realm and to find a viable successor. One truth, however, remains inviolate. The crusader states had been racked frequently by succession crises, often most deleteriously when a ruler died suddenly through battle, injury or ill health. Baldwin’s case was different, and the damage wrought during his reign was deeper, precisely because he did not die. Lingering on the throne, often requiring executive authority to be wielded by a form of regent during bouts of extreme infirmity, the leper king’s faltering rule eventually left Jerusalem in a precarious and vulnerable state of limbo.⁴⁴

For the first two years of his reign Baldwin was a minor, and much of the work of government was directed by one of his cousins, Count Raymond III of Tripoli, acting as regent. Now in his early thirties, Raymond only recently had been released after nine years in Muslim captivity and was thus something of an unknown quantity. A slightly built, somewhat diminutive figure of swarthy complexion and piercing gaze, the count’s stiff deportment was allied to a rather aloof demeanour. Cautious by nature, he nevertheless was driven by ambition, and his marriage to one of the kingdom’s most eligible heiresses, Princess Eschiva of Galilee, marked him out as Jerusalem’s greatest vassal. As regent, he adopted a conciliatory approach in dealing with the High Court and avoided direct confrontation with Saladin, agreeing terms of truce in 1175 during the sultan’s drive towards Aleppo.

Raymond’s overriding concern through these years was the succession, for soon after his coronation Baldwin IV’s health went into terrible decline. Perhaps aggravated by the onset of puberty, his leprosy developed into the most grievous lepromatous form, and soon the telltale signs of the disease were unmistakeable, as his ‘extremities and face were especially attacked, so that his faithful followers were moved with compassion when they looked at him’. In time, he would be left unable to walk, see, barely even to speak, but for now he was doomed to suffer a grim decline into physical disability, punctuated by bouts of severe, incapacitating illness. The social and religious stigma attached to leprosy was immense. Commonly perceived as a curse from God, indicative of divine disfavour, the disease was also believed to be extremely contagious, usually prompting the segregation of sufferers from society.⁴⁵ Baldwin’s situation was deeply problematic–as a monarch he was vulnerable to criticism and unable to provide stable rule; and in dynastic terms he could not perpetuate the royal line, in part because contemporaries believed that sexual contact transmitted leprosy, but also because Baldwin’s affliction rendered him infertile.

In many ways, hopes for the future thus rested with Baldwin’s sister, Sibylla. Her youth and sheltered convent upbringing meant that she was not well positioned to follow in the footsteps of her grandmother Melisende by assuming regnal authority in her own right. Raymond of Tripoli thus busied himself with the ongoing search for a suitable husband for Sibylla. The candidate eventually chosen was William of Montferrat, a north Italian noble who was cousin to two of the most powerful monarchs in Europe, King Louis VII of France and the German Emperor Frederick Barbarossa (the nephew of the Second Crusader King Conrad III of Germany). Sibylla and William of Montferrat were married in late 1176, but in June 1177 he fell ill and died, leaving Sibylla a pregnant widow. She later gave birth to their son Baldwin (V) in either December 1177 or January 1178, and he became a potential heir to the Jerusalemite throne.

In the mid-1170s Raymond of Tripoli also supported William of Tyre’s career, overseeing his appointment as royal chancellor and then as archbishop of Tyre, and in part this may explain the broadly positive account of Raymond’s career in William’s chronicle. It was from this privileged position, at the centre of the Latin kingdom’s political and ecclesiastical hierarchies, that William observed and recorded Outremer’s history.

Baldwin IV’s early reign

In the summer of 1176 Baldwin IV reached his majority and Count Raymond’s regency came to an end. The young monarch threw himself into the business of kingship despite the gradual downgrading of his leprosy, and immediately made his mark. Overturning Raymond’s policy of diplomatic rapprochement, Baldwin refused to renew the truce with Damascus and in early August led a raiding party into Lebanon’s Biqa valley, defeating Turan-Shah in a minor engagement. This shift in policy towards Islam was accompanied by a decline in influence for the count of Tripoli and, during the remainder of the decade, Baldwin tended to look elsewhere for guidance and support. Now returned to court, his mother Agnes of Courtenay seems to have established a close relationship with her once estranged son. She certainly became a significant influence in his life and before long her brother Joscelin III was appointed as royal seneschal, the highest governmental office in the realm, with purview of the treasury and regal property. After long years in Muslim captivity, Joscelin had just been released by Gumushtegin of Aleppo as part of a deal to secure support from Frankish Antioch.

This same pact brought liberty for another noble destined to shape Jerusalem’s history, Reynald of Châtillon. He had been captured by Nur al-Din in 1161, when prince of Antioch, but much had changed during fifteen years of incarceration. The death of his wife Constance and the accession of his stepson Bohemond III in 1163 deprived Reynald of rule over the Syrian principality, but, at the same time, the wedding of his stepdaughter Maria of Antioch to the Byzantine emperor lent him an aura of prestige. He thus emerged from prison as a well-connected, battle-hardened veteran, albeit one who technically was landless. This anomaly was soon resolved by Reynald’s marriage, blessed by King Baldwin, to Stephanie of Milly, the lady of Transjordan, which brought him lordship of Kerak and Montreal and a position on the front line in the struggle with Saladin.

As a Syrian prince, Reynald had a reputation for untamed violence, garnered from his attack on Greek-held Cyprus and his infamous attempts, around 1154, to extort money from the Latin patriarch of Antioch, Aimery of Limoges. The unfortunate prelate was beaten, dragged to the citadel and forced to sit through an entire day beneath the blazing summer sun, with his bare skin smeared in honey to attract swarms of worrisome insects. In the late 1170s, however, Reynald became one of Baldwin’s most trusted allies, furnishing him with able support in the fields of war, diplomacy and politics.

With Egypt and Damascus united under Saladin and Baldwin IV’s health faltering, the Palestinian Franks made repeated but ultimately fruitless attempts to secure foreign aid. During the winter of 1176 to 1177 Reynald of Châtillon was sent as a royal envoy to Constantinople to negotiate a renewed alliance with the Greek Emperor Manuel Comnenus. In September 1176 the Byzantines had been roundly defeated at the Battle of Myriokephalon (in western Asia Minor) by the Seljuq sultan of Anatolia, Kilij Arslan II (who had succeeded Ma‘sud in 1156). In terms of manpower and territory, the losses inflicted upon the Greeks as a result of this reversal were relatively limited. But severe damage was done to Byzantine prestige in both Europe and the Levant, and Manuel spent much of the remainder of the decade retrenching his position. In the hope of reasserting Greek influence on the international stage, the emperor agreed to Reynald of Châtillon’s overture, promising to provide naval support for a new allied offensive against Ayyubid Egypt. In return, the Latin kingdom was to accept subject status as a Byzantine protectorate and an Orthodox Christian patriarch restored to power in Jerusalem.

For a time, it seemed as if this venture might bear fruit. In late summer 1177 a Greek fleet duly arrived at Acre, and this coincided with the advent in the Levant of Count Philip of Flanders, son of the committed crusader Thierry of Flanders, at the head of a large military contingent. Philip had taken the cross in 1175 in response to the ever more frequent and vocal appeals from the Latins of Outremer for new western European crusades to the Holy Land. Yet despite his good intentions, Philip’s expedition proved to be a fiasco. With final preparations afoot for an assault on Egypt, petty arguments broke out over who should have rights to the Nile region should it fall and, amid mutual recriminations, the projected campaign collapsed. Disgruntled and alienated, the Byzantine navy set sail for Constantinople. In September 1177 Count Philip joined forces with Raymond III of Tripoli, and together they spent the winter trying and failing to capture first Hama and then Harim. A real chance to disrupt, perhaps even to overrun, Saladin’s position in Egypt had been squandered. Having amassed a defensive force to counter the expected Christian invasion, the sultan suddenly found that he was no longer under threat.

CONFRONTATION

In late autumn 1177 Saladin initiated his first significant military campaign against the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem since Nur al-Din’s death. Despite the importance of this expedition–the sultan’s opening salvo in his self-appointed role as Islam’s new jihadi champion–his precise motives and objectives are somewhat opaque. In all probability the 1177 offensive was not planned as a full-scale invasion of Palestine, targeting the reconquest of Jerusalem, but was instead an opportunistic raid. With his armies already assembled to defend against an expected attack, Saladin seized the chance to make a practical affirmation of his commitment to the holy war, seeking to assert his own martial dominance over the Franks, while providing a counterweight to their northern Syrian attack.

Saladin marched out of Egypt at the head of more than 20,000 horsemen, setting up a forward command post at the frontier settlement of al-Arish. Leaving behind his heavy baggage, he moved north into Palestine, reaching Ascalon around 22 November. There he found an alarmed Baldwin IV. With much of his realm’s fighting manpower absent in the north alongside Philip of Flanders and Raymond III, the king had hurriedly mustered what troops he could at the coast. As one eastern Christian contemporary put it, ‘everyone despaired of the life of the sick king, already half dead, but he drew upon his courage and rode to meet Saladin’. Baldwin was joined by Reynald of Châtillon, his seneschal, Joscelin of Courtenay, a force of some 600 knights and a few thousand infantry, and the bishop of Bethlehem carrying the True Cross. This army made a brief show of confronting the Muslim advance, but, overwhelmingly outnumbered, the Franks soon withdrew behind the walls of Ascalon, leaving Saladin free to strike inland towards Judea.⁴⁶

The Battle of Mont Gisard

The sultan now made a fateful miscalculation. Seemingly adjudging that the Franks would remain cowed and contained within Ascalon, he allowed his forces to fan out, raiding Latin settlements such as Ramla and Lydda, leaving behind no effective network of scouts to monitor Baldwin’s movements. The young king, encouraged and aided by Reynald of Châtillon, was, however, in no mood to sit idly by as his realm was ravaged. Linking up with eighty Templar knights stationed at Gaza with their master, Odo of St Amand, Baldwin made the bold, perhaps even foolhardy decision to confront Saladin. As William of Tyre put it, ‘[the king] felt that it was wiser to try the dubious chances of battle with the enemy than to suffer his people to be exposed to rapine, fire and massacre’. This was a potentially deadly gamble.

On the afternoon of 25 November, the sultan was advancing to the east of Ibelin, with much of his army spread out across the surrounding coastal plain, when the Latin army made a sudden and unheralded appearance. Saladin’s remaining troops were just then engaged in fording a small river near the hill known as Mont Gisard. When Reynald of Châtillon unleashed a near-immediate heavy cavalry charge on their broken ranks, the sultan proved unable to organise any effective defence and his numerically superior force was soon thrown into retreat. One Muslim contemporary admitted that ‘the rout…was complete. One of the Franks charged Saladin and got close, almost reaching him, but the Frank was killed in front of him. The Franks crowded about him, so he departed in flight.’

While the sultan barely escaped the field, vicious fighting continued. Fleeing for their lives, his soldiers abandoned their armour and weapons, even as the Latins hunted them down, giving dogged pursuit for more than ten miles until nightfall finally offered the Muslims some respite. There were heavy casualties on both sides, for even the triumphant Christians suffered 1,100 fatalities, while a further 750 injured were later brought to the Hospital of St John in Jerusalem. But, while the exact scale of Muslim losses remains unclear, the severe psychological damage inflicted was unquestionable. Saladin was deeply humiliated at Mont Gisard. His close friend and adviser Isa was taken prisoner by the Franks and spent a number of years in captivity before eventually being ransomed for the massive sum of 60,000 gold dinars. The sultan was forced to scurry from the scene, the misery of his own journey back to Egypt compounded by ten successive days of unusually intense, chilling rainfall and the discovery that the often fickle Bedouins had sacked his camp at al-Arish. Having suffered food and water shortages, Saladin finally limped out of the Sinai in early December 1177, shaken and bedraggled.

The inescapable truth was that his own incautious negligence had exposed the army to defeat and that, as a consequence, his reputation for assured military leadership had been tarnished. In public, Saladin did his best to limit the damage, arguing in correspondence that the Latins had actually lost more men in the battle and accounting for the slow speed of his return to Cairo by explaining that ‘we carried the weak and the helpless and went slowly so that stragglers could [catch up]’. He also expended time and money rebuilding his army. Privately, however, Mont Gisard left its scars. Imad al-Din admitted that it had been ‘a disastrous event, a terrible catastrophe’, and, more than a decade later, the painful memory of this ‘terrible reverse’ endured, with the sultan acknowledging that it had been ‘a major defeat’.⁴⁷

The burden of blood

Any immediate prospect of avenging this injury was forced into the background by the need to address the festering issue of Turan-Shah’s ineptitude. Saladin returned to Damascus in April 1178, relieving his brother of the governorship, but was then forced into an embarrassing and intractable predicament. By way of compensation for his demotion, Turan-Shah demanded lordship of Baalbek–the richly endowed ancient Roman city of Lebanon, located in the fertile Biqa valley. The problem was that the sultan had already awarded these lands to Ibn al-Muqaddam in token of gratitude for his aid in negotiating Damascus’ surrender in 1174, and the emir was now understandably reluctant to relinquish his prize. The unravelling of this affair over the following months was revealing. On the one hand, it underscored a consistent problem that beset Saladin throughout his career. To build his ‘empire’, the sultan generally relied upon his family rather than selecting lieutenants on merit, but this trust sometimes proved to be ill-founded. Incompetent, unreliable and potentially even disloyal, figures like Turan-Shah were liabilities–capable of gravely damaging the grand dream of Ayyubid domination–yet time and again Saladin proved reluctant to turn against his blood relations. In seeking to resolve the Baalbek dilemma, the sultan also demonstrated that, to further his aims, he would willingly embrace devious and duplicitous politicking.