Richard & John: Kings at War (33 page)

Philip’s withdrawal from the Third Crusade was highly controversial at the time and has been so ever since. His own nobles were disgusted and disillusioned with the decision and, of the great French magnates, only Peter of Nevers went back with him. The others, including the most powerful noble, Hugh, duke of Burgundy (who became commander of the French forces) and Richard’s old adversary William de Barres, stayed on in the Holy Land. There seems little doubt that pure pique at seeing himself outclassed, out-generalled and out-thought by Richard played a large part in Philip’s decision. As the chronicler Richard of Devizes put it, it was a case of the hammer tied to the tail of a cat.
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Philip and his propagandists immediately went into overdrive trying to explain the withdrawal, alleging that it was all really Richard’s fault. The French envoy to Pope Celestine III claimed that Richard had humiliated him by suborning his courtiers, knights and even his kinsmen, but he did not explain how Richard had managed this, and it was obvious that these Frenchmen had all stayed on to make it clear what they thought of Philip. To obfuscate all this, Philip and his chroniclers alleged, absurdly, that Philip had achieved more at Acre than Richard, that the Lionheart had done nothing at all, and had lain on his palliasse, ill, for most of the time. They insinuated that Richard had been systematically deceitful, uncooperative and treacherous towards Philip - in fact the reverse was the case. Other ‘reasons’ given for Philip’s withdrawal from the crusade were, sometimes confusingly, blended into a ‘grand slam’ argument: that Philip had been seriously ill; that Richard had been intriguing with Saladin behind his back (the ‘proof ’ was the exchange of gifts between Richard and Saladin); that Philip had left behind huge sums to finance the French contingent that stayed on at Acre; that he feared assassination (the later murder of Conrad was adduced as circumstantial evidence of the correctness of this fear).
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Most of these arguments are remarkably flimsy: Richard had been more ill than Philip; the exchange of gifts was a commonplace of chivalry; and in fact Philip left Hugh of Burgundy
nothing
in the way of money, so that Hugh had to borrow 5,000 marks from Richard. Philip’s most severe critics say that he cynically encouraged the cream of the French feudal nobility to remain in Palestine so that their position at home (and hence their potential threat to him) could be nullified, and that he always intended to break his oath to Richard and use the Lionheart’s absence in Outremer as a golden opportunity to seize Gisors and the Vexin and other disputed territories.
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Philip made a swift return to France. On 3 August he embarked at Tyre and travelled via Tripoli, Antioch, Rhodes, Crete, Corfu and Otranto to Rome. In Rome he met Pope Celestine III and then in Milan Emperor Henry VI. Crossing the Alps, he was back in Paris by 27 December 1191.
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Richard’s attitude is likely to have been ‘good riddance’ and he undoubtedly had a strong case to mount against the French king’s philippics (the pun is irresistible). But he showed far less diplomatic and political skill in his cavalier treatment of the other grandees who left Acre in Philip’s wake. In some cases, it was simply that they had backed the wrong horses - Philip and Conrad, instead of Richard and Guy - and Richard was less than magnanimous (arrogant, his enemies said) about their feelings and anxieties, with a certain triumphalism in evidence once Philip had left.
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But in the case of the senior German noble present he made a worse mistake and made a deadly enemy. Barbarossa’s second surviving son, Duke Frederick of Swabia, died at Acre in January 1191, leaving Leopold of Austria as the leading German crusader. Leopold was a proud and touchy man, who felt that his pedigree - he had family connections with the Hofenstaufen and Comneni dynasties and could thus boast of being related to both the western and the eastern emperors - was second to none. When Acre fell, Leopold had his standard carried into the city alongside Richard’s and Philip’s. Whether on Richard’s direct orders or simply with his tacit consent, the Anglo-Norman contingent seized these colours and trampled them in the dust.
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This was a mortal insult, but there was method behind Richard’s apparent madness. If the two kings had allowed Leopold’s standard to be displayed, this would be tantamount to admitting that he deserved a share in the booty, yet Philip and Richard greedily insisted on sharing everything between themselves.
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Leopold, together with many other nobles and barons who had been at the siege of Acre from the outset, felt that Richard and Philip were johnny-come-latelies, that they themselves had endured the agonies and travails of a siege that lasted almost two years, and yet the kings of France and England had so finessed their arrival at the eleventh hour that they now claimed to be the true victors. It was the parable of the vineyard with a vengeance. Huge discontent centred on this issue and on the perception of the two kings as being greedy, insensitive and ungrateful. Wittingly or unwittingly, Leopold made himself the focus for this discontent, and his resentment further smouldered as he fancied himself a worthy member of a triumvirate, like Lepidus ground down between an Octavian and a Mark Antony.
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Philip was just as truculent as Richard in rejecting the pleas of these lords for a share of the plunder. But, machiavellian as he was and a superior politician, he escaped censure on the issue; instead, the entire opprobrium fell on Richard. There was something about Richard’s swaggering public persona that alienated those outside his magic circle and, besides, lesser men do not like to acknowledge the superior talents of a military genius. Leopold too quit Acre in anger once Richard failed to indulge him. He departed for Germany, nursing a deep and abiding hatred of the Lionheart, and many of the frustrated and disappointed minor barons of Christendom went with him. Richard decisively lost the propaganda war for hearts and minds in Europe, for now both Philip and Leopold were riding through the continent, spreading the word that the king of England was a monster, a deceitful ingrate, a poisoner and assassin.
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The absent are always wrong, as the French proverb tells us, and Leopold and Philip’s tales lost nothing in the telling. Ambroise said that envy was merely the least of the evil visited on Richard because of his heroic feats on crusade.
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In Rome Philip falsely claimed that he had wanted to stay on in the Holy Land but that Richard had insisted on his departure. He then manipulated Pope Celestine III into absolving him and his followers from all oaths sworn in Palestine on the strength of their status as ‘Jerusalem pilgrims’. This meant that Philip could invade Richard’s domains without incurring the charge of being foresworn, or at least so Philip claimed, for Celestine made it clear that the overriding prescription still held good: that no Christian could invade the lands or harm the property of a lord who was still on crusade.
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Having maligned Richard to the Pope, Philip notched up a major triumph in his propaganda war against the Lionheart when he met emperor Henry VI in a summit conference at Milan. Initially suspicious, since Philip had been on good terms with his enemy Tancred in Sicily, the emperor allowed himself to be charmed and gulled. Whatever doubts he had about Philip’s version of Richard’s personality were dispelled by the complementary account he received from Leopold of Austria, which backed the French king in detail. Philip, who initially hoped simply to dupe Henry VI so that he could have safe passage through his dominions and over the Alps, lied about his relations with Tancred so successfully that he ended by securing a fully-fledged alliance with Henry.
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When Philip left for Tyre with Conrad at the beginning of August, he unaccountably took his half of the prisoners with him. Here is clear proof of Philip’s pique-driven bad faith, for this action was inexplicable except on the basis that he wished to complicate and muddy Richard’s negotiations with Saladin. There was no administrative or military reason for the removal of the French-owned prisoners, for Philip could easily have left them with Hugh of Burgundy, whom he had nominated as his military successor. Philip succeeded in his desire to vitiate the peace negotiations. After protracted discussions, on 2 August Richard accepted Saladin’s latest offer: that on the thirty-first day after the surrender of Acre he would deliver up the Holy Cross, all his Christian prisoners and one-half of the agreed ransom, i.e.100,000 dinars. But when the due date (11 August) came, Saladin insisted that all the Muslims taken at Acre be released, and hostages be given against the payment of the second instalment of the ransom. Failing that, Richard himself should give hostages, to be returned when all the money was paid and all the Muslim prisoners freed.
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Here Saladin was being disingenuous. The blunt truth was that, impoverished as he was, he could not even raise the first instalment of the money. But, hearing of Philip’s boorish behaviour with his half of the Muslim prisoners, he grasped at a straw and insisted that by not surrendering
all
the Muslim prisoners (knowing full well that half of them were at Tyre), it was Richard who was in breach of the agreed terms. Indignantly Richard lost patience with this blatant attempt to rewrite their agreement, seeing it (rightly) simply as a stalling tactic. Saladin’s defenders say he did not trust the Franks and feared that, once they received the first tranche of the cash, they would renege on the accord. Meanwhile Richard sent a delegation headed by Hubert Walter and Robert, count of Dreux, to fetch back the rest of the Muslim prisoners from Tyre.
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Whether primed by Philip or simply acting on his own account, Conrad refused to comply, adding the absurd demand that if he sent back Philip’s half of the captives he should in return receive half of the Holy Cross.
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Angry now with Conrad as well as Saladin, Richard sent a second delegation headed by Hugh, duke of Burgundy, to tell Conrad that if he did not obey orders, he himself would come to Tyre and finish off Conrad once and for all. On 12 August Burgundy duly returned to Acre with the prisoners, though Conrad did not accompany him.
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Richard reopened negotiations, but Saladin spun them out until 20 August. By then it was not just Richard who was angry.
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The other crusaders had had enough of Saladin’s obvious stalling and prevarication, clearly designed to frustrate and demoralise the Christians who were eager to march south. As nerves frayed, tempers snapped and military skirmishing became more frequent, with rumour and counter-rumour flitting through the Frankish encampment - such as the canard that 600 Christian prisoners in enemy hands had been poisoned - Richard faced a crisis of credibility and a test of his leadership.
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He could not allow Saladin to make a fool of him indefinitely. Suddenly, on 20 August, he took a decision. It seems doubtful that this was done in hot blood, despite the chroniclers’ constant stressing of the king’s anger and rage. Royal anger was a ritualistic, formulaic and almost ideological reaction in medieval society, denoting the metaphorical ‘feelings’ of the state; we may doubt that Richard was personally incensed.
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But military necessity, credibility and
raison d’état
all pointed in the same direction: he must call Saladin’s bluff. Accordingly, on the afternoon of the 20th he marched his soldiers into the middle of the plain of Acre, shepherded the 3,000 Muslim prisoners into their midst, and ordered the slaughter to begin.
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Furious Franks set upon the heathens with sword and lance, scything and butchering. Realising too late that he had overplayed his hand, Saladin ordered his army to attack but the attackers were held at bay in bitter, bloody fighting that went on to dusk. Overnight the Franks withdrew from this fresh Golgotha. When the Saracens inspected the human abattoir on the plain, they recognised many of their dear comrades but noted grimly that the great Arab magnates and the rich merchants of Acre had been spared. In revenge they slaughtered their own Christian prisoners, except those who would command a rich ransom or could still perform prodigies of labour as human workhorses.
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Richard’s killing of the Muslim prisoners has always been as controversial as the similar action by another military genius in the same land some six hundred years later. In February 1799 Napoleon at Jaffa had more than 3,000 prisoners executed by cold steel, and the uncanny parallels continue for, like Napoleon, Richard claimed that the main reason for the massacre was that he could not leave so many heathen prisoners - men whose parole of honour meant nothing - behind when he marched south, and that he did not have enough food to feed them.
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Modern historians have condemned Richard’s actions as barbarous and stupid - why, it is said, did he not accept Saladin’s hostages and release the hungry mouths which he would then not have to feed; he would still have had the Holy Cross and the money? Probably he calculated that Saladin would then welch on the deal and accept the slaughter of a small number of hostages rather than the 3,000 in Richard’s hands, so that he (Richard) would end up without the second instalment of the 200,000 dinars.
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Whatever the criticisms from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, contemporaries were more forgiving and accepted the killings as a necessity of war. Christian chroniclers regarded it as a natural and even necessary consequence of Saladin’s failure to keep to the surrender terms, and Ambroise stated it was a just requital for the many thousands of crusaders who died during the siege of Acre, to say nothing of the Hospitallers and Templars Saladin had butchered after the battle of Hattin.
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Baha al-Din conceded that Saladin had invented difficulties and prevaricated and that Richard was within his rights to consider the agreement broken. But he insisted that in that case Richard should have formally enslaved the prisoners and sold them to the highest bidder, not massacred them, and it is interesting that the Christian commentator Sicard of Cremona agreed with him on this point.
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Others simply thought that war was war, that it made no sense for Richard to spare men who might one day fight against him again. Still others stressed the wider connotations of ‘credibility’: it was not just that Richard had shown he was not a man to be trifled with, that he had regained the confidence of his troops by his ‘toughness’, but he had also sent a message to the garrisons of the coastal towns - Haifa, Caesarea, Arsuf, Jaffa, Gaza - that they should look for no quarter if they did not surrender.
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Whether intended or not, this message certainly made an impact on the Saracen garrisons, who did not stay to test the theory. Yet another view was that Saladin himself had lost caste by allowing such a disaster to befall his own people, so that his credibility took a nosedive. The crudest view was that Saladin had cold-bloodedly sacrificed his men so as not to have to pay the money (assuming he had it, which is doubtful) and, on a cynical cost-benefit analysis, saving 200,000 dinars may have meant more to him than the lives of 3,000 wretched of the earth (significantly all men of substance and influence survived the hecatomb of slaughter).
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