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Battle of Hattin
The setting
Horns of Hattin, near Tiberias, Galilee (in present-day Israel)
An arid Galilean plateau dominated by the twin-peaked extinct volcano known as the Horns of Hattin; dry grassland with no water source along the Crusader line of march in high summer.
Reveal the outcome
Recorded sideAyyubid Sultanate (Saladin)
Recorded resultdecisive victory
Decisive Ayyubid victory; the Crusader field army was destroyed and King Guy of Lusignan captured.
How the atlas explains it
Saladin won at Hattin in the planning, not the melee. He besieged Tiberias as bait - Raymond of Tripoli's own wife was trapped in its citadel - to lure the Crusader relief army off the watered ground at the springs of Saffuriya and out across the arid, waterless plateau that lay between Saffuriya and the Sea of Galilee. Once King Guy took the bait and marched, Saladin's horse-archers swarmed the column, cut it off from every well, and set the dry summer grass alight so that heat, smoke, and raging thirst broke armored men and horses in the July sun. By the time the dehydrated, disordered army was penned on the twin hills of the Horns of Hattin, thirst and the land had already done the killing; the final assault only finished a force that could no longer charge, hold formation, or reach the water it could see glittering below. He turned the Crusaders' one great asset, the heavy-cavalry shock charge, into dead weight.
What followed
Destroyed the field army of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, leaving the Crusader states defenseless; Jerusalem fell to Saladin within months, which triggered the Third Crusade.