Richard & John: Kings at War (32 page)

Suddenly Acre had an eleventh-hour reprieve when Richard went down with a serious illness, followed shortly by Philip. The chroniclers refer to the malady that struck down both kings as
Arnaldia
or
Leonardie
and speak of a fever that caused hair and nails to fall out, which has led some historians to mention scurvy or trench mouth. But Vincent’s disease or trench mouth is a fairly minor disease resulting from poor diet and lack of Vitamin C, and the same applies to scurvy. Since Richard had recently been living off the fat of the land in Cyprus, a land rich in meat and fruit, this diagnosis seems unlikely. It was probably either some form of the plague that had devastated the Christian armies at Acre or, in Richard’s case, a recurrence of a chronic illness that manifested itself in the form of pallor and swellings.
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Whatever the aetiology of the illness, by 28 June it had taken an acute form and Richard’s life was thought to be in danger. He spent his invalid days parleying with Saladin about a possible face-to-face meeting, both of them alone and without followers. At first Saladin brushed this aside, saying that kings who talked together could not afterwards fight one another. When Richard persisted with the idea, Saladin replied enigmatically: ‘He does not understand my language and I do not understand his.’ When Richard offered, through his envoy-interpreter, to send Saladin a gift of falcons and hunting dogs, in return for chickens, the Saracens began to suspect that the rumour that the English king was stricken with a serious illness were true, for the demand for chickens signified a concern for an invalid’s diet.
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By 6 July Richard was sufficiently on the mend to ask to be carried to the front line on a litter so that he could direct siege operations. By now he was anyway convinced that Saladin was stalling and playing for time. Two days earlier three of his envoys had been taken on a grand tour of the 7,000 cookshops and 1,000 baths that Saladin provided for his troops - a clear case, in Richard’s mind, of obfuscation of the issues through concentration on unnecessary detail. But in reality both sides were play-acting and shadow-boxing. As the Arab historian and eyewitness Baha al-Din rightly remarked: ‘The object of these frequent visits was to ascertain the state of our morale and we were induced to receive the enemy’s messages by the same motive that prompted them.’
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Once returned to health, Richard pressed the assault on Acre with even more vehemence. A major attempt on the city on 2 July forced Saladin to attack the crusader camp to relieve the pressure. The Christian kings responded by making Richard’s men responsible for warding off attacks from Saladin while the French concentrated on bringing Acre to its knees. Next day, Philip’s miners finally brought down a section of wall next to the Accursed Tower, but French troops, crossing sharp, piercing rubble, could advance only at a snail’s pace, which allowed the Saracens to regroup and beat them off with heavy losses.
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But it was a short-lived pyrrhic victory. By now Frankish numerical superiority was such that they could ‘spell’ their combat troops, resting one regiment while another attacked, yet the Arabs in Acre had no such luxury and had to fight non-stop. A garrison commander came out under a flag of truce to discuss surrender terms but Philip either acted in a high-handed manner or his interpreter portrayed him as doing so, for the commander ended by storming back to Acre in disgust. By 4 July the defenders were so desperate that they tried to cut their way out and link up with Saladin, but the crusaders were forewarned and nipped this attempt in the bud.
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Saladin refused to give up, though his situation was increasingly parlous. He had to deal with a mutiny when some of his regiments refused to continue with the futile assaults on the strongly-defended crusader camp and accused him of ruining Islam itself by his fanatical preoccupation with Acre. Others inside Acre were voting with their feet: on the night of 3 July three high-ranking emirs in the city simply panicked, deserted their posts and escaped in a small boat. Nevertheless, Saladin still retained his core of fanatics. Yet another French attack on the Accursed Tower on 7 July was thrown back with heavy losses, and the triumphant defenders sent a message to Saladin that they would fight to the death.
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Richard and the Pisans tried their hand at the Accursed Tower on 11 July, yet even they were beaten off, though coming very close to success. But this proved to be Acre’s last hurrah. As Baha al-Din expressed it: ‘The breach in the walls was now very large and they feared that every one of them would be put to the sword if the city were carried by storm.’ On 12 July Acre surrendered.
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The terms of surrender were precise and had been the subject of some agonised and protracted discussions even while the siege was in progress. The garrison commander who had been so brutally rebuffed by King Philip asked for the lives of the defenders to be spared, pointing out that quarter had always been granted to Franks in previous battles; obviously his nervousness was caused by Saladin’s brutality towards the Templars and Hospitallers after Hattin. This point was now conceded, provided the Acre men accepted Christian baptism, and the lives of all women and children were spared, on condition that Acre paid 200,000 dinars in ransom, and that Saladin released 1,500 Christian prisoners and two hundred named individuals and restored the Holy Cross.
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This was an improvement on Saladin’s previous ‘final offer’ which merely proposed a one-one exchange of garrison members for Christian captives, but it stopped short of the crusader ‘impossibilist’ demand that Saladin restore all the lost lands of Outremer. The Christian baptism proviso turned into farce when the released Arabs went through a nominal conversion, then joined Saladin and denounced their forced apostasy, after which Richard and Philip agreed it was pointless to continue with this charade.
¹⁹
Probably the break-through condition negotiated by Richard and Philip was that Saladin hand over the whole of his fleet at Acre, some seventy ships - an inference strengthened by the fact that the Egyptian crews intercepted at sea did not burn or scuttle their ships. By this action Saladin conceded that control of the Mediterranean would be totally Christian and that his attempt to contest Italian hegemony in the eastern areas of the sea was a mistake.
²⁰
Yet other chroniclers maintain that Saladin and the defenders of Acre were not in contact over the agreement of the final surrender terms and that these conditions - which he had no choice but to accept as a fait accompli - came as a severe shock to him. It is hard to see how Acre itself could have implemented the surrender of the intact Egyptian fleet without consulting Saladin but, under pretence of the need for ‘clarification’ Saladin asked for time in which to approve and ratify the hastily agreed terms. The clause whereby Conrad of Montferrat was to receive a commission of 10,000 dinars for his services as ‘mediator’ seems, however, to have been an ad hoc agreement between Conrad and the garrison.
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While Saladin considered what to do about these steep surrender terms, Richard and Philip pondered the military implications of their victory. Although the capture of Acre was a triumph of war by attrition, Christian siege engines had played a notable part in grinding down the opposition. By far the most successful artillery pieces were those brought by Richard from Sicily - as mentioned, he even brought his own high-density rocks from Cyprus for them to fire - and here again we see that perennial motif: Richard’s military genius.
²²
His ability to improvise is seen clearly in the way he snapped up the men from the French artillery crew dismissed by Philip because they had protested about low wages. On 17 June their replacements failed to prevent the gutting of the portable shields and armoured roofs on his siege engines; predictably Philip blamed this mishap on Richard’s ‘perfidy’. The hiring of the dismissed men was of a piece with Richard’s relentless ‘oneupmanship’ campaign against Philip: when recruiting mercenaries, Richard offered three gold pieces to anyone who would join his service.
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Richard’s sappers and miners were also much more successful in their undermining of the Accursed Tower than Philip’s men had been and again this may have been due to his instinct for human psychology, since he once more upstaged Philip by offering, at first one gold piece, then two, then three and finally four gold pieces for each stone extracted and brought back from the Tower.
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Richard knew how to use siege engines. He had studied the campaigns of the First Crusade, but in addition to this research he knew how to improvise and adapt to new conditions and fresh circumstances: hence his use of counterweight machines and counterweight and traction engines, which were much more effective than the traditional use of mangonels and trebuchets. Richard took his engines closer to the walls than earlier leaders like Henry of Champagne had done. In this position his men were much more vulnerable to missile fire from the garrison, to sudden sorties, sallies and counter-attack, and it is a tribute to his leadership that his men were prepared to follow him there. The contrast with Philip’s sacked siege engineers is marked. The most detailed recent study of the siege of Acre stresses the originality of Richard’s contribution. ‘Crusader poliorcetics at Acre involved techniques and machinery characteristic of twelfth-century operations
and also some which foreshadow developments for later periods
(italics mine) . . . the effectiveness of artillery at Acre anticipates developments in thirteenth-century poliorcetics . . . Heavy artillery was effective not only against Levantine cities, but also against less accessible positions and others less vulnerable to other methods of attack. In this regard, the siege of Acre can be seen as ushering in the great age of pre-gunpowder artillery in the West.’
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Politically Richard was less successful at Acre. As soon as Philip Augustus arrived, he recognised Conrad of Montferrat as king of Jerusalem. But Richard’s coming, with vastly superior forces, made the machiavellians among the crusaders (and there were plenty of those) go where the power was and worship the rising sun. Both the Genoese and Pisans immediately offered Richard their services. He accepted the Pisans but turned down the Genoese on the grounds that they had already pledged allegiance to Philip and Conrad. Geoffrey of Lusignan thereupon claimed the Crown for his brother and accused Conrad of treason; Conrad fled to Tyre on 25 June, fearing that Richard would arrest him.
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There was already bad blood between Richard and Philip over Conrad but, when Acre fell, the bad relations were exacerbated. On 13 July the city was divided - its stores, artillery, ships, wealth and prisoners - between the two kings, in accordance with the fifty-fifty agreement. So far, so good, but then Philip raised the issue of Cyprus. He demanded half of the island and half of all Richard had taken from there, pointing to the wording of the Messina protocol. Richard replied that the fifty-fifty provision clearly applied only to conquests in Outremer itself, not territories acquired on the way, and most authorities agree this is how the kings’ agreement should have been construed .
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But there was ambiguity in the idea of Philip’s having half of all that Richard acquired ‘on God’s service’. If Richard had planned the conquest of Cyprus, that premeditation alone should qualify as ‘on God’s service’, which was why Richard disingenuously claimed that the hostilities on the island were the purely contingent results of the shipwreck of his advance vessels. Even so, Richard said, he would share his Cyprus conquests with Philip if Philip in turn would share the rich lands of Artois, which he had inherited on 1 June when Count Philip of Flanders died at Acre, plus the lands bequeathed to him by the late castellan of St Omer.
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Even in the Holy Land the two kings still perceived the struggle for France as the key issue in international politics.

Worried that the Franco-Angevin factionalism was threatening to affect the outcome of the crusade itself, on 20 July Richard suggested to Philip that they issue a declaration of intent: both of them would remain in Outremer for three years or until Jerusalem was taken. Two days later Philip revealed his hand by answering that he intended to return to France forthwith, to safeguard his inheritance from Count Philip of Flanders. Many of his own nobles were aghast at this and pressed him to stay on.
²⁹
He replied that he would do so only if Richard agreed to apply the fifty-fifty rule to the Cyprus conquests. Richard refused adamantly. But now Conrad, deprived of the French king’s protection, was out on a limb. On 26 July he prostrated himself at Richard’s feet and craved pardon for the offences committed against Guy of Lusignan. Next day the two claimants to the throne of Jerusalem put their respective cases before the two kings and, on 28 July, Philip and Richard returned their verdict. Guy would remain king for his lifetime but on his death the Crown would pass indefeasibly to Conrad, Isabella and their heirs, regardless of whether Guy married again and had issue. The kingdom’s revenues would be split between the two claimants and Conrad would further be compensated with Tyre and - assuming they could be reconquered - Sidon and Beirut; to balance this, Guy was also granted the lordship of Jaffa in the south. Philip then merged the Conrad issue with the fifty-fifty arrangements by making over his half of Acre to Conrad.
³⁰
Having received his half of the Muslim prisoners, Philip set out for Tyre with Conrad, but first he swore a mighty oath that he would neither harm the king of England’s lands while he was away on crusade nor permit anyone else to do so and that he would regard an attack on the Angevin domains as an attack on his own realm.
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But already he was instructing his agents to spread the word that Richard was an unChristian liar: he had attacked a Christian island (Cyprus), insisted on completing its conquest before proceeding to Acre and, most of all, had needlessly attacked innocent co-religionists in Cyprus when he could have been killing Saracens in Outremer.
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