Holy Warriors (26 page)

The Christians were soon reinforced by a substantial fleet from northern Europe, as well as more Sicilians and Italians. The Templars and the Hospitallers sent in contingents, and even Conrad joined the battle—he could hardly let his rival take all the glory for himself. By early 1190 the two men were, in theory at least, reconciled when the marquis recognized Guy’s title, although he kept Tyre for himself. In spite of repeated Muslim attacks the Christians were now, literally, entrenched. They constructed palisades, fortifications, and all the necessary support networks to live and fight. The Germans set up a horse-driven milling machine; people planted herbs and
crops and markets began to operate. Similarly, the Muslim camps acquired the attributes of a permanent settlement such as marketplaces, cookhouses, and, so it was reported, one thousand baths, created by digging holes in the ground, lining them with clay, and filling them with hot water.
¹⁴

With the stream of newcomers helping to cushion any Frankish losses, conditions for the Muslims inside Acre began to deteriorate substantially. All the time the siege dragged on, Saladin had to maintain a credible army in the field. Naturally, he still retained a considerable residue of prestige from his achievements at Hattin and Jerusalem, but he continued to face an immense challenge in trying to control a diverse group of forces, some of whom were less than devoted to his leadership. Ibn Jubayr wrote of the sectarian tensions he witnessed within the Muslim Middle East in the mid-1180s as Saladin struggled to hold together his fragile coalition.
¹⁵
The majority were not professional soldiers and needed to return home at harvest time and to be paid. The victories of 1187 had provided large sums of money, but now Saladin was on the defensive, his sources of income in decline. Most worrying of all was the response of the West. The smaller waves of crusaders were troublesome enough: still to come were the forces of the three greatest Catholic monarchs of the day. The sultan knew the western armies were gathering strength and, eventually—inevitably—a potentially devastating response would descend upon him.

The first, and potentially the most powerful, of these campaigns was the crusade of Emperor Frederick. Frederick had thirty-six years’ experience as the ruler of the largest and wealthiest lands in Christendom. Known as Barbarossa on account of his close-cropped red beard, he was a veteran of the Second Crusade’s troubled march over Asia Minor and the failed siege of Damascus. Strangely, however, he chose to repeat a landward march. He could have commissioned a fleet from the Venetians (with whom he was on good terms) but decided to lead his forces of perhaps thirty thousand through Byzantium and across the Seljuk Empire. One source claimed Frederick feared a prophecy that he would die in water—something that would prove uncannily accurate, regardless of the route he selected.
¹⁶
The march through Hungary went according to plan but the Byzantine emperor, Isaac
Angelos, had an alliance with Saladin and tried to hinder the German advance. Frederick knew that he was militarily stronger than the Greeks and bullied the Byzantines into submission; thus he entered Seljuk lands in good order. By the late spring of 1190, however, he was finding the crossing of Asia Minor far harder. Arrangements for food supplies collapsed and the Turks constantly harassed the German crusaders. The Anatolian plateau was almost waterless and many of the knights’ horses died in this barren landscape; troop losses started to mount dramatically too. In mid-May the army reached the Seljuk capital of Iconium where, in spite of their weakened condition, the Germans took the city. The emperor negotiated proper supplies and then continued southward toward Christian Armenia. By this point, Saladin was feeling enormous trepidation.
¹⁷
The siege of Acre continued to soak up large numbers of his men, yet he needed to send troops northward to confront the imminent arrival of the Germans. The sultan tried hard to reinvigorate his people with the spirit of jihad and he looked to the caliph of Baghdad for further backing; on this occasion he was successful and the nobles of northern Syria and Iraq dispatched contingents to help resist the infidel.

Good fortune soon gave the sultan a vital boost: on June 10, 1190, Frederick tried to cross the River Saleph in southern Cilicia. He slipped and drowned; thus he died in water, as foretold. More seriously, this was a calamitous blow to the Christian cause. His death extinguished morale in the German crusade and many knights returned home. Some carried on to Acre but they had been grievously weakened by their ordeal in Asia Minor. The arrival of a figure possessing Frederick’s authority had the potential to end the siege of Acre and his unparalleled status would probably have prevented the political tensions that hampered relations between the French and English crusaders. As the sultan’s administrator, al-Fadil, perspicaciously observed: “if [Frederick] is broken, as it is said, then after him the unbelievers will be building on a shattered foundation.”
¹⁸
Saladin himself was hugely relieved to avoid a confrontation with the mighty Barbarossa.

For a short while at least, the sultan could breathe a little easier—it would be another year before the next wave of crusaders arrived. In the meantime
the siege of Acre dragged on; conditions over the winter of 1189–90 became so bad that the armies could not fight. Such close engagements inevitably saw long periods of inactivity and rather like the famous football match across the trenches between German and English troops in World War I, the adversaries in this holy war began to interact. Beha ad-Din wrote: “They got to know one another, in that both sides would converse and leave off fighting. At times people would sing and others dance, so familiar had they become over time, and then after a while they would revert to fighting.”
¹⁹

Starvation and disease were inevitable bedfellows of such grim conditions. People began to hoard food and the cost of the most basic provisions rocketed. The poor ate grass and herbs, horses were worth more dead than alive, and no part of the dead animal was left to waste; people who fell in battle were reckoned more fortunate than those who perished slowly by famine and illness. The only thing available in any reasonable quantity was wine, but those who overindulged were weakened even further. The wealthy organized collections for the less fortunate but it was the arrival of a grain ship that saved the day for the crusaders. In the winter of 1190 excessive rains prompted an epidemic of a tortured form: the soldiers’ limbs swelled up, people’s teeth fell out, and then they succumbed to an agonizing death. Large numbers of crusaders perished and among the most significant fatalities were Queen Sibylla and her young daughters. This tragedy reignited the succession issue because Guy was king only by right of marriage and the bloodline of the royal house now passed to Sibylla’s younger sister, Isabella. Conrad’s ambition to become king was ever more manifest—aside that is, from the inconvenient matters of his own earlier marriages to an Italian woman and Theodora Angelos of Byzantium, as well as the existence of Isabella’s husband, Humphrey lord of Toron. Humphrey had turned down a chance to become king in 1185 and his opponents taunted him for a stammer and his alleged effeminacy:

Conrad exploited the fact that Isabella and Humphrey had been betrothed when she was only eight and married at eleven; this was under the age of consent, which meant the union was therefore void. Conrad is said to
have abducted Isabella—described as a beautiful young woman with a pale face and black hair, devoted to her husband—and then bribed various churchmen to annul the marriage to Humphrey and to preside over the new union. Many of the ecclesiastical hierarchy were outraged—aside from the alleged abduction, Conrad was an adulterer, a bigamist; furthermore, the marriage was technically incestuous in canon law because Isabella’s sister had been wedded to Conrad’s brother, William Longsword. Guy, of course, continued to claim that he was the crowned king of Jerusalem: all of this meant that when Richard and Philip arrived in the Holy Land they would need to decide who was the rightful monarch.

Saladin, meanwhile, tried ever harder to dislodge the Christian army, aware that Acre was by far the best bridgehead for the crusaders. He repeatedly appealed for the support of his coreligionists and he urged the caliph of Baghdad to encourage people to help him: “In the presence of a clear danger, Muslims remain indifferent in giving aid to their comrades, yet those around us [the crusaders] are inflamed by zeal. The times are hard and demand tough, merciless men: this war is unlike other wars, it needs seasoned and brave troops . . . where are the Muslims? God forbid that they are abandoning Islam.”
²¹
The sultan certainly led by example, sharing in the privations of his troops and doing much to create his reputation for justice and generosity. While we must beware of the tendency of Saladin’s biographers to exaggerate their subject’s qualities, the basic principles of his behavior can be clearly recognized in the reports of Christian contemporaries too. In early April 1191 his men captured a group of Franks, including an extremely old man without a tooth left in his head. Saladin asked, through his interpreter, why he had come to the Levant at such an age: “to go on pilgrimage to the Sepulchre” came the reply. The sultan was so impressed with the man’s devotion that he gave him gifts, a horse, and freed him.
²²
Two months later—with the siege of Acre about to reach its denouement—a Christian woman was brought before him by the Muslim guards. Raiders had taken her three-month-old infant from the Frankish camp to sell at a slave market. The mother was understandably grief-stricken but the crusader princes mentioned Saladin’s mercy and advised her to ask for help. She explained the situation to the sultan, who ordered that the infant be found. He learned that it had been sold and so instructed the buyer to be refunded the purchase price and then handed the baby over to its mother.
Beha ad-Din watched as mother and baby were reunited—the whole of the sultan’s retinue wept for joy; mother and baby were then escorted back to the Christian camp.
²³

Back in the West, the main crusader armies were almost ready to set out. Philip had made a contract with the Genoese to transport his force of 650 knights to the Levant and he reached Sicily in September 1190. Part of Richard’s forces sailed directly to the Levant but the king and most of his troops went to Messina in Sicily where he would stay from September 1190 until April 1191. Appeals from the Holy Land begged Richard to get going but, in spite of the desperate situation at Acre, his thorough and cautious approach meant that he resolved other issues before continuing eastward. The time spent in Sicily allowed the king to gather even more money and resources and to organize his own marriage—although not in a way many had anticipated.

The contrast in the arrival of the two kings reveals much about their respective characters and the amount of money each had. Philip sailed in with no fanfare at all, but Richard arrived “with great ships and galleys, in such magnificence and to such a noise of trumpets and clarions that a tremor ran through all who were in the city. The king of France and his men and all the chief men, clergy and people of Messina stood on the shore, wondering at what they had seen and heard about the king of England and his power.”
²⁴
In theory, Philip was Richard’s overlord but reality seemed to demonstrate that the junior partner had a much greater profile and far more money—something that Muslim writers would also notice as the crusade wore on.
²⁵
It was, however, the issue of the English king’s marriage that created the greatest tension. Richard had been betrothed to Philip’s sister Alice since they were children. Now, however, Richard wished to secure the southern borders of Aquitaine and through the work of his mother, Eleanor, arranged to marry Berengaria of Navarre. Eleanor, by now in her late sixties, had a particularly close relationship with Richard. Aside from her son’s strategic aims, she also wished him to spurn Alice because she was the daughter, by a later marriage, of her first husband, Louis VII. Eleanor
duly traveled to Navarre to collect the bride and then escorted her to southern Italy to present her to the king. Once this was done, Eleanor returned to England to share the regency of the land with a senior churchman. Not content with rejecting Alice, Richard chose—rather crassly—to compound the insult to the French princess’s honor by claiming, almost certainly unfairly, that she had slept with his father, Henry II. So offensive was this rumor that, from this time onward, it practically crippled the Anglo–French relationship. In fact, it was deemed necessary to wait until Philip had departed from Sicily before it was safe to bring Berengaria over to Messina.

Richard had another specific aim during his stay in Sicily. Tancred of Lecce, who ruled the island, owed him a considerable sum of money from the dowry of Richard’s sister, Joan, wife of Tancred’s predecessor, William II (d. 1189). The Sicilian was unwilling to repay this and in response Richard stormed the capital city of Messina and flew his banners above the walls until Tancred complied. The two men then exchanged gifts to seal their goodwill. In the course of this diplomacy the king mentioned that he had with him Excalibur, the sword of King Arthur, the hero of medieval romances and celebrated king of Britain. It had been “found” by monks of Glastonbury Abbey and presumably Richard had brought it with him as a symbol of his own standing and self-image. Tancred admired the sword and asked if he could have it—Richard agreed and in return accepted four large transport ships and fifteen galleys.
²⁶
Such an unsentimental exchange of this talismanic item shows the Lionheart’s calculating, organizational streak and his determination to achieve victory.