Jacob's Ford, 1179

The battle, stage by stage

1. October 1178 – August 1179

   A castle at the ford

   In October 1178 King Baldwin IV of Jerusalem and the Knights Templar began a castle on a low tell on the west bank of the upper Jordan, overlooking Jacob's Ford (Vadum Iacob) — the crossing of the main road from Damascus into Galilee, a day's march from Saladin's capital. William of Tyre calls it a square fortress of solid masonry of marvellous thickness, built in six months; Saladin reportedly offered 60,000 and then 100,000 dinars to have the work stopped, and was refused. The excavation shows it was still a building site: an outer curtain about 128 x 61 m with walls rising toward 10 m, a gate in the south wall, a postern on the east and one small tower, the inner vaults barely begun, tools and a heap of lime left where the workers stood. In April 1179 the king handed it to the Templars. In June, after Saladin's victory at Marj Ayyun (10 June), where the Templar Master Odo of Saint-Amand was captured, the castle was more exposed than ever.

2. 23–24 August 1179

   Saladin comes to the ford

   Saladin brings his field army south from the Banias district to the ford; chroniclers on both sides call it large but give no reliable figure. Imad al-Din says parties were sent into the Safad district to cut vine-poles and timber for palisades to shield the mangonels. Inside the castle, by the account of al-Qadi al-Fadil, were 80 knights with their squires, fifteen captains each with fifty men, artisans and about 100 Muslim captives — perhaps 1,500 people in all. King Baldwin was gathering an army at Tiberias, about half a day's march to the south.

3. Saturday 24 August 1179

   The outer compound falls

   Saladin's archers open the siege from both banks; hundreds of arrowheads have been found along the east and west fronts. On the first day the outer works were taken — Ibn al-Athir credits a commoner in a ragged tunic with being first onto the wall — and the defenders pulled back inside the curtain. To hold the entrances they lit fires behind the gates. The south gate faced the ford about 200 m away; the Jordan, here narrow and shallow, ran along the east side.

4. 25–28 August 1179

   Mining the north-east corner

   While the archers kept the defenders' heads down, Saladin's miners dug under the north-eastern corner of the wall (the excavated breach; some readers of Imad al-Din place the mine under a tower). By Sunday night they packed the gallery with timber and fired it, but the wall — reportedly some nine cubits thick — held. Saladin is said to have paid a gold dinar for every skin of water brought to douse the fire so the miners could go back in, widen the tunnel and fire it again.

5. Dawn, Thursday 29 August 1179

   The wall comes down

   At daybreak the props burned through and the north-eastern corner collapsed into the mine. Imad al-Din writes that the fire spread to the Franks' tents inside, and Saladin's troops poured through the breach. By al-Fadil's account the Templar commander threw himself into the flames rather than be taken. The excavators found skeletons of men killed in the fighting — a skull with three sword cuts, an arm severed above the elbow, wounds from arrows — along with dead horses and mules. Saladin had apostates and the bowmen among the prisoners put to death; about 1,000 mail coats were taken as plunder.

6. 29–30 August 1179

   Too late from Tiberias

   Baldwin's relief army had only just set out from Tiberias when the smoke rising over the ford told them the castle had fallen; the Latin sources blame slow muster and slow messages, and the king turned back (how far north he came is not recorded). Imad al-Din counts about 700 prisoners; many were killed on the road by volunteers before the rest reached Damascus. Figures differ — some modern accounts give about 800 dead and 700 captured.

7. September – mid-October 1179

   Pulling down the castle

   Saladin stayed to dismantle the walls stone by stone. The dead were thrown into the castle's cistern (never located; a pit about 4 m across has been found some 50 m north of the walls); in the late-summer heat disease broke out in his camp and reportedly killed ten of his emirs. A truce followed in 1180. The ruin was split by the 1202 earthquake — the north and south walls are offset by about 2 m along the Jordan fault — and from 1993 Ronnie Ellenblum's excavation (published by Kate Raphael, Israel Exploration Society, 2023) recovered the arrowheads, tools, coins and the bones of the garrison.