The reckoning came on July 3–4, when Saladin lured the hapless and widely disliked king Guy I of Jerusalem, and an army comprising almost the entire military force of Guy’s kingdom, out to the twin peaks of an extinct volcano known as the Horns of Hattin, near the Sea of Galilee. Once there Saladin’s men cut off Guy’s army from any water source, set fire to the brush and scrub of the hot, parched landscape, and then rode them down. In the course of a cataclysmic battle, the crusader army was annihilated, Guy was captured, and the True Cross—the most precious relic in the Christian world—was
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