Ridley Scott’s blockbuster epic
“Kingdom of Heaven” presents one of the worst distortions of history seen on any screen in recent years. Focusing on the fall of Jerusalem in AD1187, to Saladin’s Muslim armies, this anti-Christian, politically correct revisionism gets everything wrong.
Who Cares About Geography?
First of all, Scott’s
Kingdom of Heaven has its geography very wrong. We know that the film was shot in Spain and Morocco, and it shows. Most people should know that Jerusalem is
not in the middle of the Sahara Desert! Yet, in his film Jerusalem’s high walls are surrounded by sand dunes, without a tree, a bush or a blade of grass. The Mount of Olives, the Kidron Valley and the Valley of Hinnon are nowhere to be seen. Unlike the Crusaders who liberated Jerusalem in 1099, Saladin’s Army has no problem moving his siege engines and assault towers right up to the walls of Jerusalem, because Scott’s Jerusalem in
Kingdom of Heaven is not surrounded by valleys or ditches.
This film also boldly asserts that Messina was the seaport to the Holy Land. As Messina is on the Island of Sicily, one wonders why French crusaders would, or how they could, depart from there. In fact Genoa, Venice and Naples were the ports which crusaders set sail from.
This is a True Story – Only the Facts Have Been Changed
Kingdom of Heaven also distort history beyond all recognition. The
“hundred-year truce” between the Christian and Muslim armies is a figment of their imagination. The warfare throughout the 12
th Century was incessant.
The depiction of the Knight’s Templar as a band of religious fanatics trying to shatter the truce and provoke war with the Muslims by attacking caravans is a total fabrication. No Knight's Templar ever attacked any caravans. Attacking caravans is what the founder of Islam, Muhammad, engaged in regularly. As did his handpicked apostles, the Caliphas. The Knights Templar was formed primarily to protect travelers from the attacks of the Muslim army. In fact it was the slaughter of Christian pilgrims, by Muslim armies, in violation of earlier agreements of safe passage that precipitated the crusades in the first place.
The central figure of this film, Sir Balian of Ibelin, is a historical figure, who did in fact play a critical role in the defence of Jerusalem in 1187, but the filmscript distorts his character and role beyond all recognition. First of all, Balian of Ibelin was not a blacksmith, nor did his wife commit suicide, nor was he illegitimate, nor raised as a commoner. His father, Balian the Old (not Godfrey as in the movie), had three sons, all legitimate: Hugh, Baldwin and Balian. Balian of Ibelin never had to travel to the Holy Land, because he grew up as part of the nobility there. Balian of Ibelin was married to royalty long before the events portrayed in the film, and he was not at all romantically involved with the Princess Sybilla. (Although his brother, Baldwin, had some love interest in Sybilla).
In
Kingdom of Heaven, Balian is portrayed as questioning whether God exists, although according to the historical records it is clear that Balian was a dedicated Christian who took his faith very seriously. Nor did Balian desert the defence of the Holy Land following the fall of Jerusalem. Far from returning to France, Balian proceeded to Beirut in Lebanon which he helped fortify against Muslim invasion. He was present with Richard the Lionhearted at the signing of the peace with Saladin, which secured safe passage for Christian pilgrims and recognised crusader control over the 90 mile stretch of coastline from Tyre to Jaffa.
According to
Kingdom of Heaven, the real hero in the story is the famous Muslim general, Saladin (1138 – 1193). Although an exceptionally gifted military strategist and unusually chivalrous, the film has uncritically accepted, and embellished, the legends about Saladin beyond what the historical record would support. A Muslim Kurd, from Northern Iraq, Saladin was raised in a privileged family, and was very ambitious. At age 14 he joined his uncle’s military staff, and at 31 followed him to Egypt where his uncle was Grand Vizier. When his uncle died two months later, Saladin seized power, defeated competing Muslim leaders and started a dynasty which established Egypt as the major Muslim power in the Middle East.
Far from having war forced upon him, Saladin initiated the conflict by declaring a Jihad against the Christians. He swept throughout Palestine capturing more than 50 crusader castles in two years. At the battle of Hattin on 4 July 1187 Saladin’s army defeated the Christians on the shores of Lake Tiberius (the Sea of Galilee) – although in the film this battle is depicted as in waterless desert! Far from being the magnanimous victor depicted in modern legends and this film, Saladin was a ruthless general who had thousands of Christian prisoners beheaded in cold blood – including after the battle of Hattin.
That's not to say Balian was the epitome of piety. As a warrior, he could be ruthless if need called for it. Saladin's vow to kill the crusaders, their women, and children once he took Jerusalem drove Balian to an equally heartless solution. Muslim chronicler Ibn Al-Athir quotes Balian as such:
Know O Sultan, that there are very many of us in this city, God alone knows how many. At the moment we are fighting half-heartedly in the hope of saving our lives, hoping to be spared by you as you have spared others; this is because of our horror of death and our love of life. But if we see that death is inevitable, then by God we shall kill our children and our wives, burn our possessions, so as not to leave you with a dinar or a drachma or a single man or woman to enslave. When this is done, we shall pull down the Sanctuary of the Rock (today's Dome of the Rock) and the Masjid al-Aqsa and the other sacred places, slaughtering the Muslim prisoners we hold—5,000 of them—and killing every horse and animal we possess. Then we shall come out to fight you like men fighting for their lives, when each man, before he falls dead, kills his equals; we shall die with honor, or win a noble victory.
This hardly sounds like a Christian speaking. But Balian was also a crafty politician and probably hoped that such a threat would move Saladin to offer the crusaders more acceptable terms, as he in fact did.
In the film, Saladin is portrayed as being most gracious in allowing the defenders of Jerusalem safe passage. In fact after the negotiated surrender of Jerusalem, which the Patriarch of Jerusalem initiated, Saladin demanded that every man, women and child in Jerusalem pay a ransom for his or her freedom or face the grim prospect of Islamic slavery. In order to save the lives and liberty of the poor people who could not afford the heavy ransom demanded by Saladin, Balian paid out of his own resources the ransom required for those who could not afford it.
Twisted Theology
The theology in
Kingdom of Heaven is also all wrong. The film depicts some monk standing by the roadside repeating:
“To kill an infidel is not murder it is the path to heaven!” As any student of the Bible would be able to tell you, neither the concept nor those words appear anywhere in the Christian Bible. However, as any student of the Quran should be able to inform you, that is exactly what the Islamic doctrine of Jihad teaches.
At one point early in the film as Muslims bow in prayer towards Mecca, Balian comments:
“You allow them to pray?” A knight sneers and answers:
“As long as they pay their taxes!” In fact the crusaders never required any extra taxes of Muslims in order to allow them to pray. That is the Islamic doctrine and practice of Jizya. To this day Muslim governments require
Jizya – tribute taxes – of
dhimmi’s (Jews and Christians under their Islamic rule).
Before the crusaders march out to the disastrous battle of Hattin, the film has one knight declaring:
“The army of Jesus Christ cannot be beaten.” However, there is no such doctrine in the Bible, or in Christian theology. It is, in fact, Islamic dogma that no Muslim army can never be defeated by an infidel army. This Muhammad asserted on the authority of Allah himself. (Something which the recent defeats, of the Taliban, in Afghanistan, and Saddam Hussein’s Muslim military superpower of the Middle East, Iraq, by the Americans has precipitated a serious theological problem for Islamic scholars).
Insults to Intelligence
Quite aside from the factual errors in geography, the attributing of Islamic doctrine to the Christians, and the blatant distortion of history, the
Kingdom of Heaven is an insult to the intelligence of its viewers in terms of its preposterous script.
Here we are expected to believe that: Balian is grieving his wife’s death, yet he does not even attend to her burial; that Balian raised a commoner, trained only as a blacksmith, from France, could within days of arriving in Palestine be teaching the local people how to practice agriculture and dig wells in the desert; and that this blacksmith with no military training could know more about siege weapons and military strategy that all the knights and military professionals concentrated in the Holy Land put together! Just where would a blacksmith have learnt all about siege engines, trebuchets, cavalry tactics and defensive strategy?
The fictional, adulterous relationship depicted between Balian and Princess Sybilla strains all credibility. As does Balian’s presumed ethical objections against executing the venomous and bloodthirsty husband of his presumed adulterous interest! Apparently justice and the avoiding of a disastrous war were not as important as his adulterous affections.
Aside from the terrain around Jerusalem being so conveniently flat for the invading armies, the depicted firepower and range capabilities of the catapults and trebuchets are ridiculous. Steel cranes with three-inch titanium cables would have trouble sustaining the weight and strain with which these 12
th Century wooden and rope trebuchets were meant to have pulverized the thick walls of Jerusalem! The filmmakers of
Kingdom of Heaven try to make up for a lack of script and character development by overdosing on computer generated explosions and fictional firepower capabilities. (Actually maximum range for a 12
th Century catapult would have been 150 yards with a 300 pound rock).
And how can any viewer with a grasp of history or military tactics swallow the kind of tactics and strategy dished up in films like
Kingdom of Heaven? What soldiers throw their shields away just before engaging a massive assault by the enemy?! Apparently, Orlando Bloom wanted his long flowing locks to flow in the breeze, but seriously, what knight would throw his helmet away just before engaging in hand to hand combat?! Also, as any student of history and anthropology should be able to tell you, the crusaders did not burn the bodies of their dead. That was the practice of the Vikings, the ancient Greeks and the Hindus, but not of the Christians who buried their dead.
The ridiculous speech with its feel good
“why can’t we all just get along” drivel dished up by Orlando Bloom’s Balian on the walls of Jerusalem (while Saladin’s armies politely delay their attack until he has finished) may sound believable to some 21
st Century Humanist, but these were not the convictions or sentiments of any 12
th Century crusader. As for the pathetic egalitarian gesture of knighting everybody – without any training, testing or code of conduct – is so unhistorical, and so out of touch with reality, as to make one wonder what drugs the scriptwriter was on at the time.
Then there’s that shipwreck. To expect us to believe that the hero of the film could go down with the ship in high seas, and awake the next morning alive and well, on the shore – with the entire crew and every passenger, and every horse dead, and neatly deposited on the shore – is ludicrous. Especially that the only survivors of the shipwreck were the hero, and his horse! And of course, very conveniently, his father’s sword was not the kind of heavy sword that would sink to the bottom of the ocean, but was also neatly deposited next to this sole survivor!
The most hilariously idiotic of the film’s many historically stupid moments comes at the climax of the battle for Jerusalem in 1187 when Balian of Ibelin, the commander of the city’s Christian defenders, has a parley with the leader of its Muslim besiegers, Saladin, here invariably given his more authentic moniker, Salah al-Din. Nice that they insist on accuracy in something. Balian tells his adversary that he will surrender the city if the Muslim army will give its Christian inhabitants a safe-conduct to the sea, where they may take ship to return to Europe. The terrible alternative, Balian tells him, is that he will give the order for all the religious sites in the city to be destroyed: "Your holy places, ours — everything that drives men mad." It’s hard to imagine a more perfect example of Hollywood’s view of religion — or of a thought that would have been more unthinkable to the person supposedly uttering it.
Such words would have been sheer gibberish — evidence of madness themselves — in an age in which "religion" was inseparable from the culture. Another character says "I put no stock in religion" and generally speaking we are to understand that neither does anyone else who is in the least sympathetic here. The only true religious believers, at least on the Christian side, are thugs and murderers. But at the time of the Crusades "religion" wasn’t the optional Sunday-morning pastime it has since become. It was a matter of identity. For someone to say "I put no stock in religion" would have been as nonsensical as saying "I put no stock in being my father’s son." People’s religion wasn’t just what they believed, it was what they were. In other words, like so many movie-makers before them, Scott and Monahan have looked into the past and seen nothing but their own silly faces looking back at them.
Balian, the hero of the film is not only a proleptic liberal secularist, he’s also a humble blacksmith who becomes a knight overnight — or overknight, I guess, like Sir Ridley himself. A quick tap with a sword and a quick lesson in swordsmanship from his long-lost father, Godfrey, and Balian becomes the top knight among the Christians and in short order is given command of all the Christian armies. But though military science was very different in those days, it was no more to be picked up in a day or two — or a year or two — than it is today. The profession of knighthood was a highly skilled one and something that any effective fighter, let alone a commander, would have learned over many years and many battles.
Where the blacksmith turns out to be an expert soldier with little or no training, the experienced soldiers among the Christian knights, especially Balian’s archenemy Guy de Lusignan (Marton Csokas), are so stupid that they march off to do battle with the Saracens apparently unaware that they will need water. Like all the other examples of stupidity, this is presumably attributable to their religion. So, obviously, is the fact that Guy is so credulous that he thinks God will give him victory against a vastly superior Saracen enemy and without any special preparation just because he is a Christian. Of course the Christian knights are slaughtered. Even granting Sir Ridley his premiss that Guy and all the other Christians, especially the Templars — remember them from The Da Vinci Code? — are fools for believing at all, I’d like to see the historical warrant for supposing that any of them were as foolish as this.
Once all the knights are slaughtered or fled, Balian the overnight knight takes charge of the defense of Jerusalem by repeating his own experience and dubbing hundreds of knights at once from among the unmilitary rabble. "Will your making them knights make them better fighters?" asks the craven Bishop.
"Yes," says Balian, obviously an adherent of the Norman Vincent Peale, Power of Positive Thinking school of warfare himself. Well he ought to know.
Though all the knights who weren’t killed have left the city, they have apparently left behind all their armour, equipment and weaponry for the use of the overknights in its defense. Or perhaps Saladin shipped the dead knights’ kit back from the battlefield to give his enemies a sporting chance. It could happen! Obviously, Saladin is a decent guy, unlike the Christians. And when Balian, naked and on foot, defeats an Arab knight, armed and armored, on horseback he does so by urging him to "fight fair." The Arab knight then obligingly dismounts, though in the 12th century the idea of "fighting fair" would have been approximately as unfamiliar as that of agnostic religious tolerance. It just couldn’t have happened like that. Nor would any knight in his right mind have parted from his armor or weapons without being dead first. These were precious things, usually made for them personally. All knights knew that their lives depended on them, whether or not they were on a battlefield.
Equally improbably, Guy’s toothsome young wife Sibylla (Eva Green) openly despises him and gads about the countryside on her own in some very fetching clothes and make-up like something out of Sex and the City on horseback. Naturally she throws herself at hunky Balian. Later, in a snit because Balian has conscience pangs about killing Guy to marry his widow, she goes back to her husband and becomes Queen. But — and here comes a spoiler, folks, as if you couldn’t guess it for yourselves — she gives this all up for Balian in the end, returning with him to France and life as a humble blacksmith’s wife. When King Richard the Lion-Heart of England stops by his smithy on the way to the next futile Crusade, looking for the legendary Balian, he simply says: "I’m the blacksmith."
Easy come, easy go to the knighthood then. But he and Sibylla have obviously managed to hang on to some of the wealth from their days in power — she has a very chic fur cape, for instance — so it’s not as if the whole wealth thing is an issue here as it was, really (according to Jeremy Irons’s wise old Tiberias), for all the other crusaders. Why not stick with the pretty wife, add an extra wing to the house, be a rich blacksmith and let the quality, driven to madness by their incomprehensible religious delusions, get on with slaughtering each other without any help from him. Hell no, he won’t go. Does anyone suppose this to be a scenario likely or even a possibly to have taken place circa A.D. 1200?