Richard & John: Kings at War (36 page)

Making the best of a bad decision but privately incensed that he was merely first among equals in an unwieldy coalition, Richard set the army to rebuilding the fortifications of Jaffa. Word came in that Saladin’s men had completed the destruction of Ascalon in ten days, so some rationalised the decision not to march south by alleging they would not have got there in time anyway. Saladin then set up a road block at Ramleh on the Jaffa-Jerusalem road and left a covering force under his brother Safadin at Ibelin, twenty miles south of Jaffa, with orders to harass the Franks at every turn. Next he returned to Jerusalem, put its defences in order and then, on 4 October, withdrew his army to Toron des Chevaliers (Latrun), ten miles beyond Ramleh and about halfway between Jerusalem and Jaffa.
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Richard meanwhile was concerned about the continuing baneful effect on his army of the whorehouses, stews and bordellos of Acre, which still housed hundreds of deserters, absentees and malingerers. He sent Guy of Lusignan north to round up these miscreants but he came back empty-handed. The Lionheart himself then lent a hand, stormed up to Acre and, with a mixture of threat and cajolery, fire-eating oratory and silver-tongued eloquence, half-coaxed and half-forced the reluctant soldiers to accompany him to Jaffa. One consequence was that most of the ladies of the night shifted the base of their operations to Jaffa too.
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Always energetic, always resourceful, Richard was almost too prodigal with his energies, for he habitually paid too little attention to his own security; indeed Saladin was later to pinpoint this as the English king’s worst fault. While out hawking on 29 September he was caught up in a skirmish with the Muslim advance guard and was nearly captured. The valiant knight William de Preaux called out that he was Melek Ric’ and was taken by the Saracens, while four other knights were slain when they placed themselves between their king and Saracen lances. Publicly criticised by the duke of Burgundy and others for his rashness in placing himself needlessly in peril, Richard shrugged off the criticisms and remained impenitent. He knew the value of impressing his men with his personal bravery and, besides, he liked fighting and liked spying out enemy positions for himself.
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On 1 October Richard wrote a long letter to the abbot of Clairvaux, hoping to capture Jerusalem shortly after Christmas and depart from Palestine by Easter 1192. He did not expect a long siege of Jerusalem but knew from the Acre-Jaffa march that he would take a long time to reach the Holy City. With no fleet to resupply them, the crusaders would have to be meticulous in their logistics, advancing slowly, never pressing on until all problems of food, water and forage had been solved. But what worried the king was that he lacked the money and above all the personnel to make a conquest of Jerusalem stick. For this reason he told the abbot of Clairvaux that what was most needed was an influx of Christian souls; he asked the prelate to preach a new crusade that would bring Christians out in swarms, so that his conquests could be consolidated. Time was of the essence, for he, the duke of Burgundy and the count of Champagne would run out of money by next Easter.
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But some Lionheart experts think Richard was being disingenuous, that he was actually contemplating the conquest of Egypt. For this reason, although he had hitherto tended to support the Pisans, the allies of Guy of Lusignan, against the Genoese, who had been backed by Philip of France and Conrad, he now made overtures to the rulers of Genoa to entreat them to cooperate with Pisa and back his scheme for an amphibious attack on Egypt; as a sweetener he promised to pay half the expenses of the fleet from the moment it left port and pledged that Genoa would receive a share of the conquered lands proportionate to the size of the armada sent.
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Others again think that Richard was bluffing, that he wanted Saladin to think he really intended an outright conquest of Egypt, so that the enemy leader would come to terms. Certainly it is significant that two days after the sheaf of letters dispatched to Clairvaux, Genoa and Pisa Richard sent an envoy to Saladin at Ramleh.
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Ostensibly Richard went up to Acre in early October to round up his reluctant and dissolute soldiers and to bring back Berengaria and Joan with him. But he was also concerned about the intrigues of Conrad of Montferrat, who had already put out feelers to Saladin suggesting an alliance: he would attack Acre while Richard was in the south and in return Saladin would give him Tyre and Sidon. Saladin did not trust Conrad and doubted his ability to deliver Tyre as promised - a suspicion that seemed confirmed when an apparently insouciant Richard returned from Acre on 13 October with a large fleet.
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Richard replied to Conrad’s intrigues by intensifying his own negotiations with Safadin (al-Adil). On 17 October Safadin sent his secretary Ibn an-Nahlal to Richard at Jaffa, and prolonged talks followed. Richard gave the secretary a message for Saladin, pointing out that the war was futile and cost too many lives. There were only two points at issue: Jerusalem and the Cross. ‘Jerusalem is for us an object of worship that we could not give up even if there were only one of us left . . . The Cross, which for you is simply a piece of wood of no value, is for us of enormous importance. If you will return it to us, we shall be able to make peace and rest from this endless labour.’
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He proposed that the land between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean, including Jerusalem, should be recognised as the Christian kingdom of Outremer. Saladin rejected this approach and replied: ‘Jerusalem is as much ours as yours. Indeed it is even more sacred to us than it is to you, for it is the place from which our Prophet made his ascent into heaven and the place where our community will gather on the day of judgement . . . As for the Cross, its possession is a good card in our hand and could not be surrendered except in exchange for something of outstanding value to Islam.’
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Richard next proposed that Safadin should marry his sister Joan and that Saladin and Safadin should divide Palestine between them, with Safadin as the guarantor of a Christian presence in Outremer. Safadin accepted the idea with alacrity, asked for further details, and then sent them on to Saladin with another envoy, the historian Baha al-Din. The ‘further and better particulars’ contained the following: Safadin would marry Joan who would be established as queen at Jerusalem; Richard would cede to the Safadin-Joan dynasty Acre, Jaffa and Ascalon; Saladin would make over to Safadin all the lands between the River Jordan and the sea and recognise him as king of that country; the villages in the territory would belong to the Templars and the Hospitallers but Safadin and Joan would possess the castles; the Holy Cross would be handed over to the Christians; and all prisoners, both Muslim and Christian, would be freed; finally, the king of England would return to his own country.
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It is quite clear that Richard was trying to play Saladin’s duplicitous game with Conrad back at him and had struck the right psychological note by involving the ambitious Safadin. Saladin evidently considered these proposals chimerical but wanted to keep the ball in play so accepted them as a basis for further talks, though he told his intimates Richard’s proposals were either a joke or, if serious, would not be carried through. His scepticism seemed warranted when Saladin’s envoy arrived at Jaffa only to be told by Richard that his sister had exploded with anger when she heard the proposals; perhaps, he suggested, the only way around Joan’s categorical refusal to marry a heathen would be for Safadin to be baptised as a Christian.
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Saladin took the news calmly and left the draft treaty on the table as the basis for continuing talks. The farcical idea for Joan’s marriage aside, the proposals were not far from those eventually agreed almost a year later, but more blood had to be spilled before the great warriors would see sense and conclude a realistic peace.

While the talks went on, the war of skirmish and counter-skirmish continued, with Richard forever itching to be in the fray, at the centre of the action. The Muslims alternated daylight attacks with night-time raids, using Arab irregulars in Saladin’s pay, men expert at murder, kidnap and horse-stealing. Scarcely a day passed without mayhem or manslaughter of some kind. On 31 October Richard left Jaffa and occupied the two ruined fortresses of Yasur, the ‘Castle of the Plains’ and the ‘Casal Moyen’ and began rebuilding them while throwing his men out on foraging raids and scrimmages. On 1 November, while out riding near Ramleh, he saw some enemy scouts, charged straight at them, killed one, wounded a couple more and put the rest to flight; this was dangerous folly for a king and leader. On 6 November there was a sharp passage of arms at Ibn-Ibrak, two miles from Yasur, when the Templars, guarding a foraging party, ran into superior numbers and sent back a plea for help. Richard, supervising the reconstruction at the Casal Moyen, sent off the earl of Leicester and the count of St Pol with a company of knights, only for the so-called reinforcements to fall into an ambush which the Saracens had carefully baited with the initial attack on the Templars.
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Two separate detachments were in danger of annihilation and, when Richard exhorted his men to follow him, on the rescue, they cautioned him against, as it were, throwing good men after bad, for the two Christian parties were surely doomed; besides, the king himself was too valuable, for if he was slain the entire Crusade would collapse. Richard would have none of it. ‘When I sent them there and asked them to go, if they die there without me then would I never again bear the title of king.’
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Richard’s courageous intervention turned the tide, and the Saracens were put to flight. As Ambroise described it: ‘He kicked the flanks of his horse and gave him free rein and went off, faster than a sparrowhawk. Then he galloped in among the knights, right into the Saracen people, breaking through them with such impetus that if a thunderbolt had fallen there would have been no greater destruction of their people. He pierced the ranks and pursued them; he turned and trapped them, hewing off hands and arms and heads. They fled like beasts. Many of them were exhausted, many killed or taken. He chased them so far, following and pursuing them, until it was time to return.’
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Richard spent the rest of November in negotiation with Saladin’s envoys. He stressed that he had an ancestral claim to Outremer, since his kinfolk had originally conquered it, and was therefore obliged by considerations of family honour to hold out for the restoration of the kingdom and the payment of tribute from Egypt. The continuing talks led some Franks to mutter that the Lionheart was ‘soft on Islam’, and he took to returning from patrols with the severed heads of enemies as ‘proofs of toughness’. On 9 November he sent his ambassador and interpreter Humphrey de Toron to Saladin with the following message: ‘Your friendship and affection are dear to me. I told you that I would give these parts of Palestine to your brother, and I want you to be the judge between us in the division of land. But we must have a foothold in Jerusalem. I want you to make a division that will not bring down on your brother the wrath of the Muslims or on me the wrath of the Franks.’
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Richard was certainly dealing with thorny realities here. In many ways his statesmanship provided the basis for an agreement with Saladin, who was seriously worried about the morale of his troops and the decaying civic virtue in Egypt, as reported by his chief administrator Al-Fadil, who spoke of unparalleled vice, fornication, sodomy and perjury among all classes from the emirs downwards.
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But the relationship was poisoned by suspicion on both sides. Richard’s advisers constantly harped on the theme that Saladin was merely playing for time, and Saladin’s emirs likewise thought Richard untrustworthy. A further complication was that Conrad of Montferrat was still pressing Saladin for a treaty of alliance against Richard and his old rival Guy of Lusignan. His envoy Reynald of Sidon had an interview with Saladin on 9 November but was told crisply that Conrad would have to take the field openly against the crusaders if his proposal was to have any chance of success. Saladin put the rival proposals to his council on 11 November. The emirs decided that if it was to be peace, this could only be with Richard, since it seemed inherently implausible that Muslims and Christians could coexist peacefully in Palestine and they had no security against possible treachery by Conrad. If they had to choose between Richard’s ideas for the partition of Palestine or alliance with Conrad, a man who was both a former enemy and known to be routinely perfidious, then Richard and partition it should be.
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Saladin informed Richard that they should continue talks, since he now had the backing of his emirs. Richard at once introduced a new complication (or stalling device) by saying that Christian priests had been vociferously denouncing the idea of marrying Joan to Safadin; he therefore had to appeal over their heads to the Pope to approve the match, but it would take three months for his envoy to reach Rome, confer with the pontiff and then return. He then raised the possibility of marrying his niece to Saladin’s brother, if the Pope vetoed the union with Joan.
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Whether the idea was ever serious, either in Richard’s mind or as an objective possibility, remains problematical, although the best authorities are inclined to credit it as plausible.
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After mid-November 1191 there were few serious moves, either military or diplomatic, for the rest of the year. On 17 November Saladin went into winter quarters at Jerusalem and three weeks later Richard did the same at Ramleh. By now the weather had broken, so that both armies were sorely assailed by rain, snow, hailstorms, mud and slush. Food was soggy, salt pork rotted, clothes soaked, arms and armour rusting in the claggy wetness. By Christmas Saladin had disbanded his army and had no plans to campaign actively again until May the following year. Ambroise reported that the Muslims had decamped to the mountains and left the plains to the Christians.
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The bulk of the crusader army remained at Ramleh until the end of December, but on 23 December Richard moved his headquarters to Latrun, where he celebrated Christmas in his usual grand style, holding an improvised Yuletide court where the star attractions were the two queens and Guy de Lusignan. But it was impossible ever to relax completely, for skirmishing and raids by irregulars and guerrillas continued, including one Muslim probe at Tel es-Safi on 20 December when they nearly succeeded in capturing the Lionheart.
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The new year opened with more such probes and counterprobes. The Saracens managed to ambush a Christian caravan on 3 January but were themselves nearly caught in a counter-ambuscade planned by Richard (who was said to have lain in wait all night long), which inflicted considerable losses.
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Some time after Epiphany, probably on 11 January there was a meeting of the crusader army council to decide on the next step. Richard asked the Templar and Hospitaller leaders and the leaders of the Christian kingdom of Outremer to give their opinion on the feasibility of a siege of Jerusalem. They advised against it, on the grounds that a besieging army could be caught between the defending garrison and a relieving army and that the lines of communication to Jaffa would be too brittle. Besides, even if Jerusalem was taken, they did not have enough settlers to hang on to it; there would be a great influx of pilgrims in the short term, true, but having achieved their purpose, these people would go home to Europe. What was lacking was a core of Christians ready to live in the Holy City permanently and to defend it against all Muslim comers. Richard backed the case of the knightly orders by asking for a map of Jerusalem to be drawn. When presented, the map showed clearly that the Franks simply did not have enough troops to invest it properly, since the circumference of the city’s walls was so great; the defenders would easily be able to pierce the line of attackers stretched thinly around the walls.
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With ferocious weather to contend with as well, the crusaders faced mission impossible. Richard took the sense of the meeting and ordered a return to the coast, where he intended to rebuild Ascalon. The mood in the army was one of total dejection. The soldiers had been euphoric over the New Year, confident that they were proceeding to Jerusalem and had the equipment and supplies necessary to do the job. Richard’s orders cast them into profound gloom. The barrack-room lawyers among them argued that - hail, snow and flash-floods notwithstanding - the crusader army should press on, for were not the Saracens also at the mercy of the elements? Ambroise reported, with his usual hyperbole, that never since the beginning of time had there been an army so demoralised.
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