Richard & John: Kings at War (35 page)

Tuesday 27 August found the crusader army toiling along the 12-mile route to Athlit. They headed west on the old Roman road which took them round the foot of Mount Carmel and then south, protected this time on the left flank by the steepness of the hills. Pausing at midday at Caphamum, already demolished by the Saracens, and exhausted after a morning of hacking through thick undergrowth, they pressed on after a short meal break to the so-called Castle of the Narrow Ways at Athlit, arriving in the late afternoon. Resting for three nights and two days, the crusaders were resupplied by sea. On Friday 30 August they set out on the longest stretch so far - 13 miles to Merla.
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Already men were dropping dead from the heat and, in addition, the Saracens chanced an attack. Richard led a charge to clear the way and, as so often before in such circumstances, came within an ace of being captured. Ambroise suggested that the king was nearly taken because apathy, lethargy and exhaustion were consuming the army.
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At Merla Richard encamped on the so-called River of the Crocodiles, then pressed on next day to Caesarea. This was the worst day’s march so far, the heat exceeded anything yet experienced, and many men dropped dead in their tracks from sunstroke. When they camped that night, ships arrived from Acre with further supplies and reinforcements to replace the dead, in the shape of the ‘lazy folk’ who had tried to avoid service and clung on in the brothels of Acre.
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On 1 September the army moved on another three miles to the Dead River. Again the Saracens harassed them and in one furious skirmish one of their emirs, Ayas Estoi (Ayaz the Tall) was killed.
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Buoyed by this minor success, the Franks were then depressed on arrival at the Dead River to find the watercourse almost invisible under a dense matting of reeds and rushes, which they construed as camouflage devised by the Saracens - but for what end no one bothered to explain. In the stress of the march even natural phenomena were being interpreted as sinister manifestations by the enemy.
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On Tuesday 3 September the crusader army found the going so impenetrable that the troops diverted inland to find a road running parallel to the coast. Here the Saracens launched a heavy attack, and the Templars lost a large number of horses in the scrimmage, as did another group under the Count of St Pol; Richard, heading a rescue mission, was slightly wounded by a crossbow bolt. The attacks continued throughout the seven-mile march to the night’s bivouac at the Salt River and, to add to the difficulties, food was again discovered to be running short. With the men ravenously hungry, the price of meat from the day’s dead horses was rocketing. Morale was plummeting, so Richard announced that if his knights killed horses and gave them to the troops for food, he would make good the loss from his own stock of horses.
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It was doubtless to play for time and gain a breathing space that he opened negotiations with Saladin on the afternoon of the fourth, while the army rested. Next morning at 3 a.m. the army moved out for the 10-mile trek to the River Rochetaille while Richard went to a rendezvous with Saladin’s brother Safadin, taking Humphrey of Toron with him as interpreter to discuss peace terms. The meeting broke up quickly without agreement: Saladin himself was simply stalling and had told his brother to try to spin the negotiations out until reinforcements came up, but Richard announced peremptorily that his terms were nothing less than the return of the whole Latin kingdom thus far conquered, which gave Safadin nothing to talk about, still less an excuse to prevaricate. Meanwhile the crusaders toiled through the forest of Arsuf, anxious because of rumours that the Saracens intended to set light to the forest and consume them in a hecatomb of fire as they marched.
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Nothing happened but, when they emerged into the open, they found the enemy drawn up ready for battle. The crusaders pitched camp on the north bank of the River Rochetaille, in sight of the campfires of the enemy. The tense night of 6-7 September, with battle certain the next day, has been compared by some to the English armies before Agincourt in 1415 and Waterloo in 1815, also within sight of the enemy, and there is the additional consideration that Saladin, like Wellington in 1815, had selected his battleground some time before.
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The plateau of Arsuf overlooks a natural harbour guarded by sandstone cliffs. On the morning of 7 September the army moved out cautiously, crossed the river, and followed the coast road, aiming to reach the town of Arsuf by midday. Richard laid his plans well, with his usual three columns, that with the baggage nearest the beach, the cavalry in the centre and on the left a dense infantry screen commanded by Count Henry of Champagne. In the van were the Templars, next came the Bretons, Angevins and Poitevins, followed by the fourth division in the centre comprising the English and Normans guarding Richard’s dragon standard. Behind them came the French and, bringing up the rear in the position of maximum danger, were the Hospitallers. The troops were drawn up in such a tight formation that, as Ambroise relates, it was impossible to throw an apple into the ranks without hitting a man or horse.
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Saladin brought up a vast force of 25,000 men to track them, and Richard and the duke of Burgundy rode up and down the line of march, checking for the merest flicker from the Saracens. Standing orders were that no knights should charge until Richard gave the signal, which was to be a simultaneous blast on six trumpets scattered along the column in two pairs. It was 9 a.m. when Saladin made his move. He launched a determined assault on the rearguard, deluging it with showers of arrows so that once again the foot soldiers bristled with shafts, their padded
gambesons
or protective tunics looking like pincushions.
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The job of the valiant infantrymen was to absorb the enemy’s arrows, always keeping them out of range of the valuable and vulnerable cavalry horses. Even so, horse losses began to mount, the heat was becoming unbearable, and the Hospitallers made the first of their many requests that day to Richard to be allowed to charge. He refused.

Saladin threw more and more men into his bid to crack the crusader rearguard, and the pressure mounted intolerably, with the Hospitallers having to make their horses walk backwards to keep up with the column while they faced about to confront the attackers. This time the Grand Master of the Hospitallers galloped up to Richard to ask permission to charge, but again this was refused. Richard spoke enigmatically and, to the Hospitallers, maddeningly: ‘Put up with it, Master; no one can be everywhere at once.’
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The Hospitallers’ feeling was that it was the enemy that was everywhere, with horsemen charging and wheeling, performing pirouettes and braking turns in front of them. Some said, echoing Leonidas at Thermopylae, that the cloud of arrows was so dense it at least provided shelter from the blazing sun. All seemed chaos, with a deafening throb of drums and clashing of cymbals cutting through the shimmering heat. The Hospitallers, hard pressed at all points, sent several more despairing messages to Richard, begging to be allowed to charge the enemy, but each time Richard told them to hang on a bit longer until the Saracen horses were tired. The Hospitallers began to mutter among themselves that the king never intended to give the signal and that history would judge them cowards for submitting to this ordeal without making a fight of it. Finally they could stand it no longer and two of their principal knights, the marshal of the order and Baldwin Carew, snapped, broke cover and charged.
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At this the entire rearguard, both Hospitallers and French joined in, the infantry screen parting in wonder to allow the thunderous cavalcade to gallop past them. This was a critical moment. If this premature charge was not supported, the Hospitallers would soon be surrounded and cut off by the enemy. Scarcely missing a beat, Richard sized up the situation at once and ordered a general assault. Angevins and Poitevins joined the king and his knights in the headlong charge.
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Richard, following his usual practice, steered his horse towards the thick of the fighting. Luck was with him, as many of the enemy had by chance dismounted to get a better aim with their bows; the crusaders knocked them to the ground, leaving them to be finished off by the infantry coming up fast behind them. Saladin’s men were taken by surprise. Having moments before had everything their own way, they now found themselves taking the brunt of the one thing they feared most: the sustained charge of heavily-mailed knights on destriers. Most of them buckled at once and many were cut down or threw themselves from the 80-foot cliffs to escape; there were even reports of panic-stricken Arabs climbing trees to escape the fury of the Franks.
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Rout for Saladin was averted only by a misunderstanding. The disciplined Norman and English troops, forming the reserve and clustered around the standard, tried to position themselves close to the king, but their movement temporarily confused the Angevins and Poitevins, who broke off the chase to rally round the flag. Saladin at once saw his chance and ordered a counter-attack, committing the crack troops of his household regiment.
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For a while there was intense fighting, but then Richard ordered another charge with his squadron. William de Barres led another, and the two fresh attacks finally broke the Saracens. As they withdrew, Richard led three more charges, pausing only at the edge of the woods in case Saladin had troops concealed there and was trying the feigned retreat ploy. The king then ensured that no small groups of knights were lured away to their doom in the excitement of the chase, for he knew this to be another favourite Saladin stratagem. He was left in possession of the field, where his men counted some 7,000 enemy dead; the Franks had lost barely one-tenth that number. The only notable killed on the crusader side was James of Avesnes, a celebrated French knight who was said to have killed fifteen Saracens before being surrounded and cut down.
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The battle of Arsuf was a superb military achievement. Within three months in the Holy Land Richard had proved he had every talent: a master of siegecraft, tactics, strategy, logistics; an outstanding battlefield commander; and a man of personal bravery and charisma who could inspire courage, loyalty and admiration in his followers. Unsurprisingly the Saracens were depressed. Saladin was their greatest general, yet Richard had swatted him aside like a tiresome mosquito. The Muslims took to referring to him as Melek Richard (Richard the true king) and Ambroise reported their despondency, with one of Saladin’s emirs telling him bluntly that the western knights were unbeatable, and Saladin so depressed that he could scarcely eat.
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It already seemed to be the case that he could not defeat the Franks when they were entrenched, as at Acre. Now it transpired that he could not defeat them in mobile warfare either. Saladin took consolation from the fact that his defeat had not been a total rout, that there was factionalism among the crusaders (he was thinking particularly of Conrad), and that he might be able to outlast Richard in a war of attrition. It was essential to save face, so he made a point of challenging the crusader army with skirmishers when it got under way again on 9 September. To Zangi and his other emirs he declared that the Franks would never get to Jerusalem, as their column proceeded like a tortoise and had taken seventeen days over a journey his own army could have accomplished in two.
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Richard avoided all obvious triumphalism but evinced the true confidence of a man who knew his own worth and realised that he had scored a great victory. On 8 September he commended all who had performed so valiantly in the battle - the duke of Burgundy, Robert, earl of Leicester, Hugh de Gournai, William de Borris, Walkelin de Ferrers, Roger de Tosny, Robert, count of Dreux, William de Garlande, Drogo de Mello, Robert Trussbut and, especially, Henry, count of Champagne and William de Barres. On 8 September, together with King Guy, he attended the funeral of James d’Avesnes (whose body had been found on the battlefield) and received the plaudits of his captains.
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There could now be no serious doubt that Richard Coeur de Lion was both the greatest warrior in Christendom and the greatest that had been seen in the West for three hundred years.
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9

THE SARACENS MADE ONLY token resistance to the crusaders’ entry to Jaffa, by staging a half-hearted ambush by the River al-Awjah but then fading away after a brief skirmish. The contrast between the constant aggression before the battle of Arsuf and the caution afterwards suggests both that Saladin considered the occupation of Jaffa inevitable and that his men had little stomach for a fight. The Christian army took a day to plod over the remaining ground and began to enter the town on 10 September only to find it virtually demolished. They quickly made camp in the surrounding orchards and olive groves and began to unload supplies from the fleet, which arrived in the afternoon. Trying to read Richard’s intentions, Saladin thought that Ascalon rather than Jerusalem must be the next objective for a great military commander. Since he and his emirs did not have enough troops to defend both Ascalon and Jerusalem, the Saracen council took a decision that Ascalon should also be demolished, though a minority took the view that this was an act of arrant cowardice, a short-term measure dictated purely by the shaken morale of the rank and file after Arsuf.
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To the dismay of the inhabitants, the work commenced. Saladin hoped that he could get favourable peace terms if he surrendered the coast to the crusaders, thus avoiding a siege of Jerusalem, but was worried that Richard would learn of the destruction of Ascalon and hasten to prevent it. Hearing rumours to this effect, Richard sent Geoffrey of Lusignan, who had been named lord of Ascalon, to learn the truth. Coasting down by galley, Geoffrey observed the demolition and reported back.
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Richard called for an immediate march south to attack Saladin’s men, but the besetting sin of the Third Crusade at once manifested itself. In short, the crusaders were divided between those who were primarily religious pilgrims and those who stressed military realities. To Richard and the captains, Ascalon was the obvious target, but to the pilgrims it had to be Jerusalem, and at a meeting of the army council it was the devout party that carried the day. They argued that the obvious route to Jerusalem was inland from Jaffa, that Ascalon was an irrelevance. Richard argued eloquently that the crusader supply line would be in danger once they left the coast, since the Franks could no longer be supplied by sea, that a march to Ascalon was what Saladin feared most, and that it would keep him guessing, but he was overruled and reluctantly acquiesced in the majority view.
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