Hotel Tiberias: A Tale of Two Grandfathers. Sebastian Hope
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brilliant campaign against the Crusader states in 1187 and 1188 whose success had prompted the Third Crusade in the first place.
In July 1187, Salah al-Din had won a battle over the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem at the Horns of Hattin so decisive that by December all its former territory was under his control, with the exception of the port of Tyre. When the next campaigning season came round in May of 1188 he was preparing an attack against the two remaining Crusader states, the County of Tripoli and the Principality of Antioch. His efforts were concentrated on the latter, since, realising his success against Jerusalem would bring a renewed Christian invasion, he was attempting to block the route across Asia Minor taken by all the previous crusading armies. It was this swift campaign in particular that formed the subject of Shan’s thesis. For Hackett the study became a lesson in military planning, in how to keep a large force in the field and use it to best effect against static positions, as well as an historical analysis of contemporary sources. He hoped it would make him a better soldier.
To travel from Cairo to Damascus by train, changing at Haifa onto the Samakh spur of the Hejaz Railway, was an easier proposition in 1934 than it is today. Unfortunately, Hackett’s first impressions of the Holy Land, unlike those of many before him, of crossing the Jordan and climbing up the Yarmuk Valley to Dera’a, are not recorded; no diary of the journey has been found. From Damascus a road continued north to Homs where it met the road to the coast, an ancient trade route that runs through the gap between the Lebanon and al-Nusayriyah ranges. The riches of Asia reached the Mediterranean along this route and made wealthy the ports of Trablus and Tartus (Tripoli and Tortosa of the Crusaders). It was the route that Salah al-Din took in July 1188, in the shadow of the strongest Crusader castle in the Levant, Krac des Chevaliers. Its own impregnability could not stop Salah al-Din picking off its outlying defences and passing on to lay siege to Tortosa. Dated photograph captions put Hackett in Tortosa late in April 1935.
As is to be expected in a scholarly thesis, there is little in the way of personal material in the paper, but there is much that is characteristic of its author. Hackett’s notes suggest his first recourse was to the Mediterranean Pilot and its geographical detail, as though reconnoitring the coast for an invasion of his own. From this work he gleaned such essential facts as the depth of the Orontes at its mouth and the mean annual rainfall of Jaffa. Yet one piece of information did make it into the final analysis. The Pilot identifies a spring that rises offshore in the bay below Markab castle, causing an area of disturbed water. Hackett uses this feature, mentioned in the chronicles, to locate the closest point to the shore accessible to the Sicilian fleet from Tripoli and demonstrate that the road between the sea and the castle’s outposts, along which Salah al-Din had to pass, was indeed within their bowshot; ibn al-Athir records the rapid construction of breastworks from which to return fire. Elsewhere, a military eye is cast over ibn al-Athir’s account of the fall of Saône castle at the end of July 1188, an account which conflicts with that of the other Arab chronicler, Baha al-Din. Hackett resolves the uncertainty by establishing the only place where a direct assault on the walls could have been successful and so fixes the position of Salah al-Din’s key battery: ‘For the actual emplacement, I selected a slight levelling out of the forward slope of the ravine, a little below the highest point, and experiments conducted with the aid of three small Arab boys convinced me that it was well within mangonel range.’ One assumes the boys were armed with slings or the like.
The same acuity is brought to bear on the castles of Bakas-Shogr, Bourzey, Darbsak and Baghras and their fall to Salah al-Din, but Hackett shows his tactical appreciation of the campaign nowhere more than in his analysis of the Kurdish commander’s supply problems. His examiners were prompted to remark that he had ‘to some extent rediscovered Saladin’s lines of communication … Mr Hackett’s work, though short, is a remarkably good example of the critical discussion of literary evidence in the light of field work.’ It was not until 1937 that he received their verdict.
In his IWM recordings Hackett offers some insight into why it was so delayed and so brief. ‘I wrote this up in my spare time,’ he claims, ‘without missing, I may say, a single party or a single chukka of polo. It was rewarded by the Regius Professor’s observation on it … that “this is a model … of what such a work should be.”’ Hackett remembers the exact words used by the examiners forty-two years previously. It is a fact he does not need to embellish, but there is a hint of broidery in his recollection of ‘spending a lot of time on a mule up and down the Orontes Valley living with Arabs’. It was in truth no more than a week and maybe as few as two days actually on a mule, yet the experience obviously made an impression on the 24-year-old that lasted longer. During more than a year in Egypt he had never been in contact with local people so intimately and for so long. One can easily imagine him caught up in the romance of the journey. He could not have kept himself from thinking, as he rode through the Syrian wilderness, that he had glimpsed what Lawrence had experienced in Arabia. Spring stood on the threshold of summer as they rode beside the marshes of the valley floor from Bourzey to Apamea. His companions and other people met along the way can be seen occasionally in his photographs, a young man with a hawk on his wrist, another wearing a bandoleer of rounds for his old rifle. At night he would have sat with them around the fire wrestling with the local form of Arabic and hunks of mutton. As for Lawrence, by then T.E. Shaw, he died in a motorcycle accident two weeks after Hackett reached Apamea.
Parties and polo were not the only things that kept Shan from writing his thesis. No sooner had the regiment returned to Cairo in October 1935 from their summer camp than the Italians invaded Abyssinia. Britain and Italy stood on the brink of war.
On a steep-sided spur overlooking the road to Antioch stand the remains of Baghras castle, which once guarded the southern approach to the Beylen Pass. In its shadow, an old man in a bobble hat was leading his pony loaded with field tools up the rough path behind the village, through the almond orchards and olive groves towards the scrubby hills beyond. The sound of hooves on stone, the clanking of metal on metal passed, an echo of ancient sieges, and quiet returned, the breeze making the poppies sway, rustling through the stunted trees growing out of the castle wall, a lark celebrating the bright air. Lizards basked on the fallen stones in the uppermost court, overgrown with bramble and dog rose, the castle’s only remaining defenders.
It is everything a ruined castle should be, a perfect place for the village boys to play. They scramble up the slope below the walls and edge along their base, slipping through a breach into the long lower gallery where horses and livestock were once stabled. A rock fall at the far end provides a ramp to the next level, a dim vaulted chamber whose furthest window frames a bank of poppies drifting down from the upper court. There, between the Knight’s Hall and the Templar Chapel, the fiercest fighting takes place, the victors mounting the ruined ramparts and frightening themselves at the sheer drop into the ravine below.
The Beylen Pass is the natural route for any southbound army to take across the Amanus Mountains. Alexander the Great marched through in pursuit of the Persian King Darius; Roman legions followed some two hundred and fifty years later. They called the pass ‘Pilae Syriae’, the Pillars of Syria, and it was probably they who built the first fortification at Baghras. The Byzantines strengthened the position as the armies of Islam moved northwards in the seventh century; it came to stand on the border of the two empires. When the Crusaders took Antioch in 1098 they built up its defences and much of what remains today dates from the twelfth century, despite subsequent sieges and occupations. While its design is Norman, Hackett concluded from the use of small roughly shaped sets its construction was probably executed by Armenian masons. Its defence, and that of Darbsak, the stronghold on the pass’s northern flank, was entrusted to the Knights Templar. Through the summer of 1188 the garrison watched the line of low hills to the south-east for signs of Salah al-Din’s approach.
Standing in the Templar Chapel under a barrel vault that has stood for nine hundred years it is easy to think that not much has changed since Hackett visited on 1 May 1935, but his photographs show that the process of dilapidation has continued in the meantime. They show a sturdy aqueduct that is no longer to be seen bridging the defensive ditch cut through the spur; the stones