Read WAR CRIMES AND ATROCITIES (True Crime) for Free Online Page A

long day’s march to Tiberias – along a road where Saladin had blocked the few wells and springs and on which they could easily be ambushed. Instead they should wait until Saladin moved to country more suitable for fighting a cavalry battle. However, his advice was ignored. The crusader army, led by King Guy of Jerusalem and including the 130 Knights Templar, their attendant fighting men and their grand master, set off at dawn on 3 July, 1187. Saladin, given this news, was jubilant. He had noted just weeks before, if this crusader army could be destroyed, then Jerusalem would be his for the taking.
    It was a hot march, and the crusader army, with throats parched and eyes and noses full of the dust raised by their own feet and their horses’ hooves – was being harried in the rear by Saracen archers on horseback. Saladin’s intention was to cut the crusader column in half. A battle on the move was a well understood tactic in crusader warfare; provided the column of armoured knights and men-at-arms could stay together and march steadily to their objective, losses would be acceptably small. But Saladin’s tactic meant that the rear, marching under a near constant rain of arrows, was in danger of being left behind. To prevent this, the army chose to make camp for the night near low twin peaks known as the Horns of Hattin, having covered less than half the distance to Tiberias.
    Early the next day, battle began between the closely surrounded Christian army and Saladin’s forces. The fighting was fierce. The Christian army was exhausted, outnumbered, lacked water and was fighting on unsuitable ground – the dry grass was torched by a Muslim soldier so that the Christian infantry gasped for breath. It was decisively beaten, though only after a last, heroic stand round a relic of the True Cross, which was brought to Palestine by the Franks and always carried into battle by the Christians.
    King Guy, Gérard de Ridfort, Grand Master of the Templars, and Count Raynald of Chatillon were among the nobles captured. Only the contingent of men-at-arms led by Raymond of Tripoli escaped, retiring from the battle in good order. Their departure was actually aided by a wily tactic from the Muslim army, which instead of engaging the charging Christian soldiers, opened their ranks to allow them to pass through unopposed, then closed up again, thus cutting them off from the main army. Seeing that the battle was lost, Raymond led his force back to Tripoli.
    Except for Raynald of Chatillon, whom Saladin regarded as a truce breaker, the lives of King Guy, the grand master and other nobles were spared. The rank and file of the kingdom of Jerusalem’s army, most of them highly trained and fanatically Christian Hospitallers and Templars, were not. Saladin ordered a mass killing of all the captured knights and fighting men, which he watched from a dais set up in front of the army, and which he forced the Grand Master of the Templars to watch, too. The killings were particularly ghastly, for they were assigned, not to professional fighting men well able to use a weapon, but to the many scholars, holy men and jihad enthusiasts who had flocked to Saladin’s standard. More often then not, it took such men several blows to sever the heads from their victims’ bodies.
    This atrociously bloodthirsty annihilation of the army of Jerusalem, with its attendant loss of the relic of the True Cross, deeply shocked the Christian West. One of the best-known depictions of the Battle of Hattin was drawn by the 13th-century English monk, Matthew Paris of St Albans for his Chronica Majora . He illustrated the (fictional) moment when Saladin seizes the relic from the desperately clutching hands of King Guy, despite the efforts of the knights at the king’s side. Beneath the trampling hooves of the horses, the ground is strewn with the bodies, limbs and heads of the slain.
    The city of Jerusalem capitulated on 2 October, 1187; Saladin had achieved his long-held