The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land (54 page)

The crusaders continued wherever possible to cling to the coastline, maintaining even closer contact with the fleet. Elite, battle-hardened Templars and Hospitallers were given the crucial job of holding the van and rearguard, while the king and a central mass of mounted knights were screened on the exposed left flank by dense ranks of well-armoured infantry. A Muslim eyewitness who beheld the army a few days later described this latter unit as an impenetrable ‘wall’. Protected by ‘full-length, well-made chain mail’, all but invulnerable to light missile fire, ‘arrows were falling on them with no effect’, such that he saw ‘Franks with ten arrows fixed in their backs, pressing on in this fashion quite unconcerned’. These infantrymen might use bow and crossbow fire to deter skirmishers, but in the main they focused upon sustaining their inexorable advance unabated. Recognising that this shielding role would take an enormous physical and psychological toll, Richard split the infantry into two divisions, rotating them in and out of service, leaving the rested group to recuperate as they marched on the protected right, seaward, flank alongside the army’s lightened baggage train.
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Adopting this formation, the Christians left Haifa on 28 August, clear in the knowledge that they would, from this point on, face intense and unceasing harassment from Saladin’s troops. Richard now took great care to conserve his army’s energy, following each stage of the march with one or even two rest days. Muslim forces certainly trailed their every step, even picketing the Latins’ camps at night, all the while looking for any opportunity to crack their marching order. What remained unclear, however, was whether the sultan would attempt to challenge them in a full-scale pitched battle. Historians have consistently misjudged Saladin’s intentions in this regard, suggesting that he had from the start settled upon suitable ground to the south, near Arsuf. The richly detailed eyewitness testimony of Baha al-Din, who was with the sultan throughout this period, presents a very different picture. Saladin, it seems, was rather bewildered by Richard’s tactics. Taken aback by the king’s unexpected decision to take repeated rest days, the sultan misjudged the speed of the Frankish advance and therefore the length of time his own troops would have to stay in the field, prompting food shortages. For the moment, Saladin seemed to have been outplayed by the Lionheart, forced to adopt a reactive strategy shot through with desperation. Troops were indeed dispatched to stalk the Christians, but the sultan also began a rather frantic search for a suitable battlefield, personally reconnoitring the coastal route south, even assessing the vulnerability of the crusaders’ likely campsites. Throughout this period he was actively looking to stop the Latins in their tracks.

For eight days the crusaders made slow, gruelling progress. Advancing from the ruined fortification at Destroit to Caesarea on Friday 30 August, they began to falter under the beating summer sun. A Latin marching in the army described how:

The next day, en route to the grimly named Dead River, the Franks scored a notable success in the midst of a prolonged skirmish. Among the enemy on that day was Ayas the Tall, one of Saladin’s most celebrated and ferocious
mamluks
, laying waste to all before him with a massive lance. When a lucky blow brought down his horse, Ayas, weighed down by his armour, was overrun and butchered. Baha al-Din admitted that ‘the Muslims grieved for him greatly’, but, perhaps more importantly, the victory helped to buoy Christian morale. So too did the crusaders’ ritual each night of chanting en masse ‘Holy Sepulchre, help us’ before they settled down to snatch a few restless hours of sleep. But the undoubted key to their continued composure in the face of such unrelenting pressure was the presence of the Lionheart, unbending, ever ready to step into the fray, to bolster the line. Richard seems to have taken great care to monitor the mood of his men, seeking to ensure that he did not overstretch their endurance. By the start of September, with food shortages beginning to bite, arguments started breaking out. Infantrymen would swarm round the carcasses of ‘the fattest of the dead horses’ to have fallen during each day’s march, brawling over their flesh, to the disgust of the steeds’ knightly owners. The king interceded, proclaiming that he would replace any lost mount so long as the meat of the deceased animal was offered up to ‘worthy men-at-arms’. Grateful Franks ‘ate [the] horsemeat as if it were game. Flavoured with hunger rather than sauce, they thought it was delicious.’
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Of course, the benefits of Richard’s visible presence came at considerable risk. Marching on from the Dead River on 3 September, a ‘wild’ stretch of coastline forced the crusaders to turn inland for a time. Saladin had chosen this moment to seek battle, personally leading three divisions of troops against the crusaders’ massed ranks. Time and again the Muslims bombarded the Christians with arrows and then charged their lines. Baha al-Din watched the repeated attacks unfold:

The sultan emerged unscathed, but Richard was less fortunate. There, as always, in the thick of the fighting, the king was suddenly struck in the side by a crossbow bolt. Fortunately, he managed to stay in the saddle as combat raged on around him. This time he had been lucky: his armour had absorbed most of the impact and ‘he was not seriously hurt’. But the episode highlighted the immense, but necessary, risks he took as a medieval warrior-king
par excellence
. Had he fallen that day, the whole crusade might soon have collapsed. Equally, however, without his tangible, seemingly indestructible, presence in the front line, Frankish resistance would probably have buckled. As it was, both he and Saladin survived this first confrontation. By the end of the day a rather shell-shocked Christian army had reached the River of Reeds. As they made camp on its banks they seem to have been unaware that, just a mile or so upstream, the Muslims too were pitching their tents. Baha al-Din reflected with some irony that ‘we were drinking from the higher reaches while the enemy were drinking from the lower’.
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THE BATTLE OF ARSUF

Richard was now just twenty-five miles from Jaffa. Perilous and exhausting as the march had so far been, it had also proved a stunning success. But the king must have suspected that Saladin now would commit his every resource to halting the Frankish advance, for the loss of Jaffa would be a grave blow to Islam. The route ahead ran through the Forest of Arsuf to an obvious campsite beside the River Rochetaille, but beyond that a wide, sandy plain opened out before the small settlement of Arsuf itself was reached. Rumours were abroad in the Latin army that some sort of ambush or attack was imminent. Richard let his troops rest beside the River of Reeds on 4 September, but that evening he made a masterful move. The unpredictable pace of the crusader march had already sown seeds of confusion and doubt in Saladin’s mind, stifling his attempts to seize the initiative. Now the Lionheart played an unexpected and devious card, dispatching envoys to the Muslim advance guard to request peace talks with al-Adil.

The sultan had spent the day hurriedly scouting the forest and plain to the south, searching for a battlefield, before racing back north. Indeed, he moved with such haste that come nightfall many of his men were ‘left scattered amongst the woods’. Saladin was beginning to lose control of his army. When news of Richard’s request reached him that night he acceded, instructing his brother ‘to spin out the talks’. With time, the sultan might be able to marshal his forces and mount an offensive.

Once again, however, the king of England had comprehensively outmanoeuvred his opponent. Richard was in no mood for actual negotiation; instead he had called for a parley to mislead Saladin as to his own intentions and, perhaps, to garner some intelligence regarding Muslim plans and preparedness. The Lionheart duly met al-Adil at dawn on 5 September in a private audience, but their conversation was neither prolonged nor cordial. The king bluntly demanded the return of the Holy Land and Saladin’s retreat into Muslim territory. Unsurprisingly, al-Adil was outraged, but no sooner had the talks broken off than Richard ordered his army to advance into the Forest of Arsuf. Caught entirely flat-footed, the sultan was unable to respond, his troops left in disarray. Most crusaders still entered the forest in a state of anxiety, ‘for it was said that [the Muslims] would set light to it, causing such a great fire that the [Christian] army would be roasted’. But thanks to their leader’s skilful dissimulation, they passed through unhindered and unscathed to reach the Rochetaille. Richard rested his men on 6 September–taking this one last chance to draw breath before running the gauntlet to Arsuf and beyond. Saladin, meanwhile, held closed talks with al-Adil, furiously seeking a stratagem that might avert disaster.
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As he awoke on Saturday 7 September, the Lionheart must have known that the enemy would use the space afforded by the open plain ahead to mount another blistering assault. Perhaps he even sensed that the confrontation would be on a larger scale than that faced on 3 September. For the crusaders, that Saturday began as every day of the march had since leaving Haifa, with the rigorous structuring of troop formation. By this point the army contained some 15,000 men, of whom 1,000 to 2,000 were mounted knights. One crusader recorded that ‘Richard, the worthy king of England, who knew so much about war and the army, set out in his own way who should go in front and who behind’. The Templars, as usual, were to take the lead, while their Hospitaller brethren held the rear with a strong force of archers and crossbowmen. With a mixed group of Poitevins, Normans and English holding the centre and Henry of Champagne commanding the left, inland flank, Richard and Hugh of Burgundy were to lead a mobile reserve that could range throughout the army, reinforcing points of weakness as necessary. As always, a tightly ordered formation was paramount; indeed, it was said that the Franks left the banks of the Rochetaille ‘in such order, side by side and so close that any apple [thrown in their midst] could not have failed to strike man or beast’.

But according to the crusader Ambroise there was something different about that day’s preparations. In his account, the king was readying his troops not just for a fighting march, but for battle. Ambroise, who followed Richard east on crusade and later composed an epic Old French verse history of the expedition, depicted 7 September 1191 as a day of deliberate confrontation; a day of glory on an almost Homeric scale. His hero, the Lionheart, was shown making a conscious, proactive decision to challenge Saladin head-on. Perceiving with almost supernatural foresight ‘that they could not go forward without a battle’, the king planned to deploy the Christians’ most powerful weapon–the heavy cavalry charge–the moment the sultan overcommitted his forces. Timing was to be crucial, but with only the rudimentary medieval forms of battlefield communication available, Richard had to rely on an aural signal to initiate the attack. Ambroise described how ‘six trumpets [were] placed in three different places in the army, which would sound when they were to turn against the Turks’.

Ambroise’s account of Arsuf has been hugely influential: widely copied by contemporaries; often uncritically regurgitated by modern historians. The epic image of that Saturday morning on the coast of Palestine engendered by his depiction has long held sway: the resplendent crusader army beginning its march, primed, practically straining for the fight; like a nocked arrow, held quivering at full draw, ready for release. But detailed, colourful and alluring as Ambroise’s vision is, other eyewitness reports challenge his narrative. Chief among these is a letter–one that has been extraordinarily undervalued by historians–composed by King Richard I himself. This missive, effectively a dispatch from the front lines to Garnier of Rochefort, Cistercian abbot of Clairvaux, was written not, like Ambroise’s verse history, some six years later, but just three weeks after the Battle of Arsuf, on 1 October 1191. Its brief, almost passing description of events on 7 September, suggests that the Lionheart’s primary concern that day was to reach the relative safety of the orchards at Arsuf with his army intact and not to seek a definitive confrontation with Saladin.

In the age of the crusades pitched battles were extremely rare. The risks involved, the element of chance, meant that shrewd generals avoided open conflict at all costs unless in possession of overwhelming numerical superiority. Richard’s overall priority in this phase of the crusade was to reach Jaffa, and from there to threaten Ascalon and Jerusalem. To look for a decisive fight with Saladin when the sultan commanded equal, or perhaps even greater, military strength, and could chose his own ground, would have been tantamount to gambling the fate of the entire holy war on a dice roll. Perhaps the king did ready his men for battle at Arsuf, should it be thrust upon him–his letter does not say–but, even so, there is a significant, albeit subtle, difference between the preparation for conflict and its active pursuit.

For Saladin, in contrast, a decisive confrontation was all but essential. Facing the seemingly unstemmable Latin advance, he knew that without action he would be forced, in just a few days, to watch in abject impotence as the Lionheart reached Jaffa. Coming hard on the heels of Acre’s surrender, the strategic and political consequences would be horrendous, Islam’s hold over Palestine grievously destabilised, his own reputation as a
mujahid
gravely besmirched. The Franks must be stopped here, on the dusty plain of Arsuf. As Baha al-Din bluntly stated: ‘[The sultan had] every intention of bringing the enemy to pitched battle that day.’
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