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Originally Posted by M.carter
In a documentary I saw in discovery channel a few years ago (probably 'battlefield') the episode was about hattin. The narrator said that before besiegin Tiberias, Saladin knew that he was going to draw the cusaders into open battle, and he asked his advisors to the best horse-archers around. They advised him to go with the bain-tayy tribe. When he sent his emmisarries, the bani-tayy demonstrated their horsemanship by hunting rabbits on horseback with bows/arrows! Saladins emmisarries paid their sheik five hundred gold dinars to reqruit almost three thousand of these horsemen for a few months, until the sultan releases them from his service. Now these were certainly not just hunters, but feirce warriors, as the bani-tayy was a beduoin tribe.
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Excellent ! Now we know about 1000 bedoin arabs being employed by Saladin. I suspected that there should've been some arab units in his army, and was quite flustrated by the absence of any mentioning of them in the sources I've seen. Now we have to deal with the rest of the army.