Richard & John: Kings at War (30 page)

Isaac and his remaining forces were now confined to the castles of Buffavento, Kantara and St Hilarion in the mountains of northern Cyprus, playing a waiting game, hoping that Richard would depart for Outremer and allow them to reconquer the island. Hopes rose higher when it was learned that Richard was ill and detained in Nicosia. But when Guy of Lusignan captured the coastal stronghold of Kyrenia, eleven miles north of Nicosia, and Isaac’s 14-year-old daughter, the ‘emperor’ lost heart and was consumed with grief.
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Even while he digested this news, he learned that Richard had recovered from his illness and was now in possession of Buffavento Castle. Isaac fled to an abbey on Cape San Andrea, and pondered his dwindling options, but his love for his daughter proved to be the human frailty in this otherwise supremely unattractive man. On 1 June 1190 he surrendered, making only one condition: that he should not be put in irons. Richard fulfilled the letter of the agreement: he had Isaac bound in silver chains.
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Isaac was lucky, as the usual penalty for failure in such circumstances in Byzantine culture was blinding or mutilation. Richard’s campaign had been another brilliant feat of military organisation and imagination. Jealous rivals tried to belittle his achievement, and Saladin had it bruited about that Cyprus had fallen to treachery, but the truth was that Richard had proved himself a master of both strategy and amphibious operations.
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His conquest brought him further wealth and resources, not just in the form of booty and confiscated property but from the swingeing 50 per cent tax he levied on every Cypriot. Securing the granaries and vineyards of Cyprus meant that the crusader army at Acre would never go short of food and supplies; news of Richard’s victory visibly enhanced morale among the besiegers there. It is overwhelmingly probable that Richard always intended to conquer the island, but to his contemporaries he kept up the pretence that he had turned aside there by accident, simply to pick up survivors of the Good Friday storm, and that it was merely Isaac’s cruel treatment of his shipwrecked sailors that had led to hostilities.
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To ensure that there would be no revival of Isaac’s faction, Richard imposed an Angevin administration backed by garrisons. Robert of Thornham and Richard de Canville became co-governors of the island (Richard always liked to divide power in this way, as his plans for the justiciarship in England in 1190 showed) while Ralf Fitzgodfrey became the personal jailer of the deposed Isaac. The ex-emperor languished in the crusader castle of Margat and, when released in 1193, spent the rest of his unhappy life warring against the Byzantine emperor Alexius III.
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A decree was issued that Cypriot culture should henceforth be western, and that all beards should be shaved off. Disappointed that unrest continued in the island - for Isaac’s cousin raised a revolt which was suppressed only when Robert of Thornham defeated the rebels and hanged their leader - and that Thornham seemed unable to temper main force with diplomacy, Richard sold Cyprus to the Templars for 100,000 dinars in Saracen money. This involved him in further trouble, as Philip of France then claimed a half-share under the fifty-fifty rule - though it seems he never got it.
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Richard’s critics then and now alleged that the sale of Cyprus was of a piece with his famous jest that he would have sold London to the highest bidder; in other words, it showed a man obsessed with short-term expediency and with no long view like that of his father or Philip of France who would throw away hard-won imperial possessions on a whim. Most of this criticism is once again the fallacy of viewing Richard through the prism of Victorian imperialism or, at least, from an exclusively English standpoint. In twelfth-century terms, Cyprus was not an appanage of some mythical empire but simply a strategic and logistical necessity in the reconquest of the Holy Land. Ambroise put the contemporary view explicitly: ‘the king of England conquered all this in the service of God and to take His land’.
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The critics, however, could scarcely fault Richard’s treatment of Isaac’s daughter. This girl, said to be ‘most beautiful’ but of unknown name (possibly it was Beatrice) became lady-in-waiting and constant companion to Joan and Berengaria. She accompanied them back to Italy and Normandy after the crusade and later became the fourth wife of Raymond of Toulouse and, later, Thierry, count of Flanders.
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Richard now prepared to sail to Acre. He had been receiving intelligence on the protracted siege, now nearly two years old, on a weekly basis ever since Guy of Lusignan made his daring and, many said, suicidal thrust towards the city in August 1189. Not strong enough to attack Jerusalem, Guy saw the psychological advantage in attacking Outremer’s second city, a wealthy polyglot city which combined Byzantine pretensions with a high murder rate and, not coincidentally, the most thriving sexual trade and brothel culture in the Middle East.
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But it was a tough nut for any besieger to crack. Triangular in shape, the city was protected on two sides by the sea while on the third, landward side there was a striation of defences: a double wall, towers a stone’s throw apart, and a honeycomb of ditches and barbicans. The most vulnerable spot was the salient at the north-eastern corner of the city, where the walls came together at a right angle. Here a high tower had been built which the Franks called the Accursed Tower - because Judas Iscariot’s thirty pieces of silver had allegedly been minted there. The walls gave Acre all-round protection, but they excluded the suburb of Montmusard in the north-west.
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But the city’s best known landmark was the forty-foot stone turret known as the Tower of Flies, which protected the seaward entrance to the city at the end of the breakwater. Supposedly the Devil’s tower - because Beelzebub is the Lord of Flies - it had really acquired its name from earlier times when, a place of human sacrifice, it attracted clouds of bluebottle flies. The inner and outer harbour, with capacity for hundreds of ships, lay just to the west of the Tower of Flies. When Guy of Lusignan arrived with his army in August 1189, he had made his base on a hill due east of Acre called Le Toron; from there Christian siege engines were deployed especially against the Accursed Tower and the damaged walls on this side. Across the neck of the peninsula on which Acre was sited they dug an immense trench to protect themselves from counter-attack by Saladin. He in turn pitched his camp east of Mount Carmel at Jebel el Kharruba, which afforded a view over the peninsula.
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The campaign settled into a pattern. Guy and his crusaders attempted a close blockade of Acre while fending off attacks from Saladin. The Franks immediately attacked the city on 29 August 1189 but had to fight two serious pitched battles against Saladin in the middle of September and the beginning of October. Saladin had the better of the two encounters, in the second of which the Templar leader Gérard de Rideford was killed, but found himself unable to follow up his advantage and score a knockout blow against the Franks, as his men scattered to plunder. The Franks responded by building a double line of trenches across the peninsula, isolating their encampment from both city and hinterland. By November Saladin went into winter quarters, contenting himself with a contemptuous surprise raid on the Christians’ brothels and wine shops in December.
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Winter saw a general de facto ceasefire and little naval activity either, since conventional opinion in the twelfth century held that the Mediterranean was too dangerous for shipping between November and March. Nonetheless, an enterprising Egyptian admiral managed to bring fifty galleys to Acre over Christmas 1189, significantly reinforcing the Muslim garrison and bringing new heart to the beleaguered defenders. The war in this period tended to be a Homeric contest of individual heroes or a saga of freak and unusual occurrences: the miraculous survival of a Christian sergeant hit in the breast by a crossbow bolt which struck a metallic charm instead of flesh; the Arab defender of Acre who stood high on the wall to urinate on a crucifix and was transfixed with an arrow; the Christian squatting to defecate who was attacked by a Turk in mid-motion but still managed to kill his assailant with a stone; the single combat in which a Welsh archer defeated a Parthian counterpart who attempted treachery. Then there was the Arab captain who breached the Franks’ naval blockade by posing as a Christian, complete with a shaved beard and a plethora of crosses and even displaying carcasses of pork on his vessel to ‘prove’ he was not a Muslim.
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More realistic, and established from unimpeachable sources, were the accounts of Saladin’s spy system. He maintained constant contact with the garrison in Acre in two main ways: by carrier pigeon and by expert swimmers who could brave the Mediterranean, swim in a huge loop and make landfall by the walls; some of these daredevils even carried pay for the soldiers in the garrison.
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For much of 1190 Saladin had been on the defensive, fearing the advent of Frederick Barbarossa and his host of Germans. In some ways his apprehension about the advancing Holy Roman Emperor was the least of his problems. The crusaders had many advantages, principally that they controlled the sea lanes, could therefore be provisioned from Italy, and were constantly being reinforced by new drafts from Europe. The first fresh troops on the scene were Italian, for Venice, and especially Genoa and Pisa, sent large contingents. Saladin’s conquest of Palestine had threatened the Italian maritime republics with disaster, since much of their trade was with the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, and the Italian motivation for the crusades was overwhelmingly economic. A Pisan fleet of 50-60 ships had reached Tyre in early 1189 and was merely the harbinger of many more to come.
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On the other hand, the crusaders were able to blockade Acre from the sea, even though this was only partially effective, and naval reinforcements from Egypt got through on four major occasions (June, September, October and December 1190).
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On his own side, Saladin, heading a coalition, was beset by myriad problems. His chieftains insisted that their troops rest after every fifty days of campaigning so that he could not follow up on his victories; there were too many anti-Saladin intrigues by rival factions and too many desertions by troops disappointed by too few opportunities for plunder. The Zangids - followers of Zangi - were an important element in Saladin’s army but they held him at arm’s length and, when they departed for Mosul and Aleppo in the winter, he could not be entirely sure they would return in the spring. Even Saladin’s kinsmen were often too busy asserting their feudal rights to turn up for battle. His hopes for assistance from other Arab princes were in vain. The Caliph was uninterested in Saladin’s
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and, when he sent a promissory note for 20,000 dinars instead of the money itself, Saladin was so enraged that he sent it back to Baghdad. Similarly, he had petitioned the Almohads in North Africa to try to cut the crusader supply line between the West and Acre but they made no reply. One of the Saljuquid princes of Persia actually responded to his pleas for help by asking for help himself, against one of his own rivals, and an emir of Anatolia did the same.
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In April 1190 the crusaders began their spring offensive by wheeling out three huge mobile siege towers, so lofty that the attackers on the top could see into Acre. Each tower dominated the walls, was armoured with rope against artillery and swathed in vinegar-soaked hides against incendiaries. Each tower had a complement of five hundred men, including archers and auxiliaries. At first Acre’s defenders could make no impression on these leviathans and contemplated surrender. Yet a coppersmith from Damascus refined the naphtha which had hitherto failed against the towers, adding a combustible mixture of gunpowder to the fiery brew; this new weapon succeeded in destroying the towers on 5 May 1190.
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Meanwhile Zangi and the other emirs began trickling back and Saladin, heartened by the death of Barbarossa at this point, began planning a summer offensive to relieve the city. But first, on 14 June, there was a spectacular sea-battle when twenty-five Egyptian galleys were engaged by the Frankish fleet; the crusaders had the better of the fight, but enough Muslim ships got through to Acre to stiffen morale there.
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On 25 July Saladin finally launched his land forces against the enemy and again achieved a technical victory but, as in the engagement the previous October, was not able to follow up his success because of the indiscipline of his troops. The Franks took severe losses in this battle but these were almost immediately repaired when Henry of Champagne arrived with reinforcements three days later; truly Saladin was involved in a hydra’s head operation.
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Henry was given command of operations and opted for a strategy of battering rams, with crews protected by an iron roof. The defenders’ new naphtha-based combustible mixture proved just as deadly against the rams as the towers, and by October this line of attack too was abandoned.
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Yet still fresh influxes of crusaders appeared. At the beginning of 1190 a huge detachment of Flemish crusaders led by James of Avesnes had joined the Christian host, together with a fleet of fifty Danish and Frisians with whom they had linked up in Messina.
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In September it was the turn of the duke of Swabia, Frederick Barbarossa’s son. Although the Germans were no longer formidable, and their great expedition had imploded after the freak death of Barbarossa, even after all the disasters in Asia Minor, Swabia still commanded 5,000 men. Met by Conrad of Montferrat at Tripoli, by late September the duke of Swabia was at Tyre, eager to pour his legions into the fray.
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