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the County of Tripoli and the County of Edessa (lost again to Islam in 1144).
    The main problem with this Christian presence in the Holy Land was that it was never much more than a token. Once a crusade was over, most of the knights and the fighting men returned to Europe, leaving small contingents to hold on in castles built to defend weak points. Some of these, such as Krak des Chevaliers, were massive, and virtually impregnable. The Christian fighting men, most of them belonging to two military orders, the Knights Hospitallers and the Knights Templars, stayed within them and made little attempt to persuade the local Muslim townsfolk and peasantry to convert to Christianity.
    The crusaders had been lucky when they first arrived in Syria and Palestine at the end of the 11th century because the Muslim leadership had been disunited and at loggerheads with one another. Encounters between crusaders and Muslims, although called battles, were usually quite small affairs, involving just half a dozen knights and their attendant soldiers on the Christian side. By the 1170s, however, things were very different. The Muslim powers in the region were reorganizing themselves and providing a much more united opposition to the crusaders. From the mid-1170s, this opposition was led by the formidable figure of Salah al-Din Yusuf, sultan of Egypt and Syria, and known as Saladin.
    Saladin was one of the most remarkable men of his age. Although untiring in his preaching of the jihad against the Christians, he was a patient, clever and far-sighted statesman and a humane, chivalrous warrior. ‘Abstain from the shedding of blood, for blood that is spilt never slumbers,’ he once said – this in an age when massacres were seen as just another element of warfare, or acceptable ‘collateral damage’, in modern terms.
    Saladin’s outwardly attractive personality led the Christian barons in Palestine to think that this was a man whom they could trust and come to terms with. They decided on a policy of appeasement, partly because it was obvious that Saladin was the most powerful Muslim leader they had faced, but also because his possessions surrounded them. On land, Saladin could attack them from the south and the east, while his Egyptian fleets could blockade their Mediterranean ports.
    The leader of the crusaders who advocated appeasement was Raymond, Count of Tripoli, who was regent for the king of Jerusalem, Baldwin the Leper, from 1174 to 1185. When Baldwin the Leper died without a son and heir in 1185, Count Raymond III expected to be made king in Baldwin’s place. However, his policies in the kingdom had been unpopular. He had made enemies, and a group of war-supporting barons chose Guy of Lusignan as king instead. Thus the first steps on the road to war with Saladin and his Muslim forces were taken.
     
    A BROKEN TRUCE
     
    In 1187, Raymond, Count of Tripoli, made some sort of agreement with Saladin, the precise terms of which have never been established. In giving Saladin’s army permission to cross the river Jordan into the district of Tiberias, Raymond said that he – and Saladin – had intended only that the Muslim peasantry was to be the object of Saladin’s attentions. The crusaders in their towns and castles were to be left wholly alone and certainly not attacked. But Gerard de Ridfort, Grand Master of the Templars, was in the area with some 130 Knights Templar. He had long been Raymond’s enemy, and chose to ignore the order to remain inside the crusaders’ castles and instead engaged the infidel intruders in battle. Saladin claimed that the truce, or whatever his agreement with Raymond had been, was broken and he laid siege to Tiberias. The crusaders, including Raymond, were forced into action.
    At this time, the crusader army of the kingdom of Jerusalem, one of the largest ever gathered together in Palestine, was established at al-Saffuriyah, about 32 km (20 miles) from Tiberias. Raymond advised the army not to make the