The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land (50 page)

In one important regard, Saladin’s handling of the titanic struggle outside Acre was laudable. For the first time in the war for the Holy Land, he had refused to back away from a prolonged and entrenched military confrontation, showing dogged determination through one and a half years and two harsh winters. Yet, in spite of all the obstacles he faced, the sultan’s inability to crush the Christians between 1189 and 1191 must be harshly criticised. For he knew that all the Frankish might that had gathered before Acre, all the force of arms launched against its walls, were but tremors before the earthquake that would strike with the coming of the kings of England and France. And still Saladin lacked the will and vision to act. Now, with the gateway to the Holy Land ajar, Islam would have to face the full strength of Latin Christendom’s crusading wrath.

Sailing down the coast of Palestine on the morning of Saturday 8 June 1191, King Richard I of England gained his first glimpse of the terrible spectacle that was the siege of Acre. The towers and ramparts of the city itself came into view, then the swarmed ranks of tens of thousands of crusaders, drawn ‘from every Christian nation under heaven’, ‘the flower of the world’ encircling its prey. Finally, ‘he saw the slopes and the mountains, the valleys and the plains, covered with Turks and tents and men who had it in their hearts to harm Christianity’, with Saladin in their midst. Three and a half long years after taking the cross, Richard had at last reached the Holy Land. The Franks greeted his appearance with rapturous celebration. One member of his army wrote of the festivities that followed that evening:

Within Saladin’s camp, one of the sultan’s advisers recorded that ‘the accursed king of England came [with] great pomp, [at the head of] twenty-five galleys full of men, weapons and stores…he was wise and experienced and his coming had a dread and frightening impact on the hearts of the Muslims’. The Lionheart had arrived.
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JOURNEYING TO THE HOLY LAND

Richard had scored a notable victory even before he reached the Near East. The crusader armies of France and England sailed from Sicily in spring 1191. Philip II Augustus left Messina on 20 March and arrived in the Levant one month later. Richard I, meanwhile, headed for Crete on 10 April with a fleet that had grown to include more than 200 vessels. But after three days a gale blew around twenty-five of these ships off course to Cyprus–an island ruled since 1184 by the Byzantine Isaac Comnenus as an independent Greek territory. Among them was the craft carrying the Lionheart’s sister Joanne and his fiancée Berengaria. Three ships were wrecked off the island and those who made landfall were badly treated by the local population. Some attempt was also made to take the two Latin princesses captive as they waited at anchor near Limassol, on the south coast.

After arriving on Rhodes around 22 April King Richard learned of these events and decided to launch an immediate naval assault on Cyprus, despite its status as a Christian polity and his position as a crusader. The Lionheart made a daring beach landing at Limassol on 5 May and readily beat back Isaac’s troops, forcing the Greek to retreat to Famagusta on the eastern coast. During the lull in hostilities that followed, Richard and Berengaria were married in the chapel of St George in Limassol on 12 May.

Isaac then made half-hearted overtures towards peace, but Richard eventually sailed on to Famagusta, defeated the Greeks in battle for a second time and proceeded to subdue the entire island with remarkable efficiency. Isaac surrendered on 1 June and was promptly clapped in specially commissioned silver shackles (the Lionheart having promised not to place him in irons).

Richard thus began his crusading campaign with a major victory, albeit one scored against a fellow Christian territory. Cyprus’ conquest provided the Angevin army with a massive influx of wealth and resources. The king levied a fifty per cent tax on the Cypriot populace and then, a few weeks after his departure, sold the island to the Templars for 100,000 gold bezants (although he only ever received the initial down payment of 40,000). The island also served as a critical staging post throughout the crusade. In the longer term, the Latin occupation of Cyprus would prove to have a profound bearing upon the future history of the crusades and the crusader states.

In the midst of the Cyprus campaign, Richard received an embassy from Guy of Lusignan. The Lionheart, as count of Poitou, was the feudal overlord of the Lusignan dynasty and Guy now sought to capitalise upon this bond, begging Richard to lend him support in the power struggle with Conrad of Montferrat. News also began to arrive from Palestine, intimating that Philip Augustus was making real progress at Acre. According to one crusader, ‘when the [Angevin] king heard this, he gave a great and heartfelt sigh, [and said,] “God forbid that Acre should be won in my absence.”’ Stirred to action, the Lionheart left Cyprus on 5 June 1191 and, upon making landfall in Syria, had Isaac Comnenus interned in the Hospitaller castle of Marqab. Richard headed south, but was refused entry at Tyre by Conrad of Montferrat’s garrison and so sailed on to reach Acre on 8 June.
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THE IMPACT OF THE KINGS

Richard the Lionheart’s arrival, alongside that of Philip Augustus, transformed the Latins’ prospects. The advent of these two monarchs revitalised the crusade, bringing new vigour and determination to the investment of Acre, supplying an empowering injection of resources–financial, human and material–that promised to bring this fiercely contested siege to a victorious end.

The arrival of Philip Augustus

In one sense, the rumours that Richard heard on Cyprus were right: King Philip had made significant progress at Acre since his arrival on 20 April 1191. While noting that he reached the city with a modest fleet of just six ships, Baha al-Din conceded that the French monarch was ‘a great man and respected leader, one of their great kings to whom all present in the army would be obedient’. He came with much of the remaining might of the French nobility; men like the veteran crusader Count Philip of Flanders (who survived only to 1 June) and the proud and powerful Count Hugh of Burgundy. Although contemporary writers partisan to the Lionheart tended to downplay the French king’s achievements at Acre, in reality Philip immediately made his presence felt, working to intensify the military pressure on Acre’s garrison while consolidating the Frankish position.

Having ‘ordered his crossbowmen and archers to shoot continuously so that no one could show a finger above the walls of the city’, the king oversaw the erection of seven massive stone-throwing machines and the strengthening of the palisade surrounding the crusaders’ trenches. On 30 May, with his catapults ready for action, Philip initiated a determined bombardment campaign of such intensity that ‘stones rained on [Acre] night and day’, forcing Saladin to move his troops back to the front line. Reaching Tell al-Ayyadiya by 5 June, the sultan launched daily attacks on the Latin trenches, hoping to interrupt their aerial offensive, but nothing seems to have stilled the French siege engines. At the same time, the crusaders were preparing for a frontal ground assault, making renewed attempts to fill sections of Acre’s dry moat so that they could gain access to the walls. With the Franks throwing dead horses and even human remains into the ditch, the Muslim garrison was left with the desperate task of trying to empty the channel faster than the Latins could fill it. One Muslim witness described how the defenders were split into three groups: one ‘going down to the moat and cutting up corpses and horses to make them easy to carry’, another transporting this grisly burden to the sea and a third defending against Christian attack. It was said that ‘no stout-hearted man could endure’ such appalling work, ‘yet they were enduring it’, for now at least. One pro-French near-contemporary later observed that, with the momentum growing towards a Frankish assault, King Philip ‘could easily have taken the city had he wished’, but elected to wait for Richard’s arrival so that they could share in the victory. This may have been an exaggeration, and it is doubtful that Philip truly would have shown such forbearance, but it is all too easy, amidst the glare of the Lionheart’s legend, to forget that it was the Capetian and not the Angevin monarch who first breathed new, reinvigorating life into the Third Crusade.
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The Lionheart at Acre

Even so, Richard’s grand, drama-laden landfall at Acre on 8 June did serve to tip the balance of military power in the Latins’ favour. Comparing the two Christian monarchs, a Muslim eyewitness observed: ‘[The English king] had much experience of fighting and was intrepid in battle, and yet he was in their eyes below the king of France in royal status, although being richer and more renowned for martial skill and courage.’ The Lionheart arrived in the Near East with many of England’s and Normandy’s most powerful nobles–the likes of Robert IV, earl of Leicester, and Roger of Tosny–men who held major estates on both sides of the Channel. He was also accompanied by an inner circle of
familiares
, or household knights–fiercely loyal warriors like Andrew of Chauvigny.
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Richard came to the Holy Land with more men, far deeper financial reserves and a much larger navy than King Philip. Indeed, at the head of the twenty-five-ship-strong advance guard of his fleet, the English monarch managed to score his first military success against Saladin even before setting foot on the Levantine mainland. Sailing south from Tyre, en route to Acre, Richard came across a huge Muslim supply ship in the region of Sidon. This vessel had set out from Ayyubid-held Beirut, packed with seven emirs, 700 elite troops, food, weapons and many phials of Greek fire, as well as 200 ‘very deadly snakes’ which ‘[the Muslims] intended to let loose among the [Christian] army’. With a drop in the wind Richard managed to catch up to this craft and, seeing through its Muslim crew’s attempt to pass themselves off as Frenchmen, launched an attack. Facing fierce resistance, unable to board and capture the ship intact, Richard settled for ramming and sinking it to ensure that its precious cargo never reached the enemy. To capitalise fully upon the demoralising effect of this defeat, a single prisoner was later mutilated and sent into Acre bearing news of the disaster.

Upon reaching the siege, Richard set up his camp to the north of the city, Philip having taken up a position to the east. The Lionheart immediately set about assessing ‘how the city could be seized in the shortest time, what means, what cunning, what siege engines must be used’. But just as he was readying himself for war, barely a week after having set foot in the Holy Land, the king was unmanned by illness. In stark counterpoint to his naval triumph and the majesty of his arrival, Richard suddenly found himself confined to his tent for days by a scurvy-like affliction called
arnaldia
by contemporaries; soon his teeth and fingernails began to loosen and patches of his hair fell out. The humiliation must have been hard to bear, not least because sickness could so easily be interpreted as a sign of divine ill favour. In Saladin’s camp the king’s misery was seen as a blessing, because it ‘discouraged [the Franks] from making their attacks’. Yet even in a state of infirmity, Richard proved himself capable of advancing the crusaders’ cause.
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Showing a subtlety that might seem to belie his reputation for raw bellicosity, the English monarch immediately set about opening diplomatic channels of communication with Saladin. Experience in the West had taught the Lionheart that in the medieval world victory came to those who could marry the disciplines of politics and warfare. He showed absolutely no compunction in employing negotiation as a weapon in the struggle with the supposed ‘infidel’, although for now at least these contacts were kept secret from the crusader host. Richard began, even before the onset of his illness, by seeking a personal meeting with Saladin. An envoy was dispatched to request a parley, but the sultan responded with a courteous but firm rejection: ‘Kings do not meet unless an agreement has been reached’, he apparently replied; ‘it is not good for them to fight after meeting and eating together.’

Richard soon came back with a proposal for an exchange of gifts and, on 1 July, released a North African ‘whom they had captured a long time ago’ as a sign of goodwill. A little later, Saladin received a visit from three Angevin envoys requesting ‘fruit and ice’ for their king. Richard seems to have delighted in asking for such delicacies, possibly as part of a mischievous diplomatic game, perhaps to gauge how far he could push the boundaries of hospitality, but also because he simply seems to have developed a taste for the finer things of the Orient, most notably peaches and pears. Saladin, himself an acute practitioner of the diplomatic arts, had the three Franks taken on a tour of his army’s marketplace so that they might be dazzled by its spectacular array of shops, baths and supplies. Baha al-Din, who as part of Saladin’s inner circle was privy to these early exchanges, soberly observed that such embassies were really spying missions, designed to gauge the level of Muslim morale, and that they were accepted so as to gain the same intelligence from the enemy. Richard was not alone in seeking to negotiate with Islam at Acre. Philip Augustus held his own private talks with the commanders of the city’s garrison, although they similarly achieved little of substance. But the very fact that the two kings were competing in the field of diplomacy suggested that the ingrained rivalry that had so delayed their arrival in the Holy Land was still simmering.
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Rivalry or unity?

The initial signs upon Richard’s arrival at Acre had suggested that unity of purpose might overcome discord. Philip went in person to greet the Lionheart as he disembarked, with the two monarchs ‘showing each other every respect and deference’. The French king even held in check his anger at Richard’s marriage to Berengaria, the final seal on his own sister’s rejection. But cracks in the veneer of amity soon started to appear. Richard went out of his way to prove that his wealth exceeded that of his French counterpart, offering four gold bezants per month to ‘any knight, of any land, who wished to take his pay’ after Philip had tendered three. This may have smacked of pure, arrogant one-upmanship, but it had the very practical effect of further swelling the ranks of the Lionheart’s army, and thus ensuring that he held the balance of military power among the crusaders.
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