The battle of Mont Gisard was the first major armed showdown between Saladin and a Christian army and its timing was no accident. The kingdom of Jerusalem had been weakened in 1174 by the sudden death of King Amalric from dysentery he contracted during a siege at Banyas. The jolt caused by Amalric’s death was made very much more serious by his succession. His son, Baldwin, was thirteen years old. He was also suffering from leprosy—a grim, devastating disease that began with numbness in his limbs as a child and which would advance to cause him great pain, grotesque disfigurement, blindness and
...more
