The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land (55 page)

When the crusaders marched from the Rochetaille, soon after dawn, they were greeted by a menacing vision: there, where wooded hills ran down to the left edge of the plain, Saladin had arrayed the full strength of his army. Line upon line of troops stretched out before them, ‘piled up, like a thick hedge’. Facing around 30,000 Muslim warriors, many of them mounted, the Franks were now outnumbered at least two to one. Around 9 a.m. the first wave of 2,000 enemy skirmishers raced down towards them and fighting began. As the morning progressed, Saladin committed practically his entire force, holding back only an elite unit of some 1,000 of the Royal Guard to spearhead a targeted assault, should a break appear in the Latin formation. For hour after hour, with the blistering sun now beating down on them, the Christians marched on, pummelled by the incessant onslaught.

One crusader described the overwhelming cacophony of the battlefield–a jumble of troops ‘howling, shouting [and] baying’, enemy trumpeters and drummers pulsing the terrible rhythm of combat–so that ‘one could not have heard God thundering, such a racket was made’. The Muslims’ primary weapon was an aerial bombardment of appalling intensity: ‘never did rain or snow or hail falling in the heart of winter fall so densely as did the bolts which flew there and killed our horses’, recalled one eyewitness, remarking that armfuls of arrows could have been gathered there like corn cut in the fields. Also among the enemy were troops few crusaders had encountered: terrifying black Africans. A Latin eyewitness declared that ‘they were called “blacks”–this is the truth–[coming] from the wild land, hideous and blacker than soot…a people who were very quick and agile’.

The horror of the relentless assault that morning was almost unendurable.

King Richard’s priority through all this was to maintain troop discipline and keep his army moving forward in formation towards Arsuf. Any pause or break in the line would be lethal, but the temptation among his men to launch a counter-attack was nearly irresistible. A messenger raced up the line from the Hospitaller rearguard, begging for permission to retaliate, but the Lionheart refused. For now, at least, order held. It was a testament to the king’s force of will and charisma as a general that, for so long, his authority held in the face of such extraordinary pressure. The Christians were now ‘surrounded, like a flock of sheep in the jaws of wolves, so that they could see nothing but the sky and their wicked enemies on every side’. And yet, their advance continued.

With the Templar vanguard nearing the orchards of Arsuf, the master of the Hospitallers himself, Garnier of Nablus, rode forward to make a second petition to the king, bewailing the shame of inaction, but once again the king demurred. Crucially, Richard’s own letter of 1 October indicates that the front ranks of the march now reached the outskirts of Arsuf and began ‘setting up camp’, a fact confirmed by Baha al-Din, who wrote that ‘the first detachments of [the Christian] infantry reached the plantations of Arsuf’. This gives the lie to the notion that Richard was, throughout 7 September, harbouring some grander strategy; holding his forces in check only so that they could be unleashed in open battle. Just as it had been throughout the journey from Acre, his priority at Arsuf was security and survival. But with that objective so near to realisation, the Lionheart’s hand was forced.
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Looking back, Richard suddenly discovered that a crusader charge had begun. Without warning, two knights towards the rear–the marshal of the Hospitallers and Baldwin of Carew–had broken ranks. Driven by a mixture of anger, humiliation and bloodlust, ‘they burst out of the line [and], with horses at full gallop, charged the Turks’, screaming the name of St George. A ripple of realisation spread through the army and, within moments, thousands of crusaders had turned to follow their lead. The Hospitaller rearguard raced into battle. Then, as Richard watched in horror, Henry of Champagne, James of Avesnes and Robert, earl of Leicester, also committed the left flank and centre of the army to the charge.

This was the moment of decision. Richard may not have wanted battle, but with no hope of recalling his troops it was now upon him regardless. A failure to react would have been catastrophic, but the Lionheart showed no hesitation: ‘He spurred his horse to the gallop [riding] faster than a bolt from a crossbow’, leading his remaining forces with him. Not surprisingly, Ambroise’s supposed trumpet signal was never sounded.
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A scene of carnage now lay before the king. The first crusader charge had resulted in a chaotic bloodbath, as the shocked front ranks of Saladin’s army were routed and overrun. The injured were screaming, ‘while others, wallowing in their own blood, breathed their last. A very great number were but headless corpses trodden under foot by friend or foe regardless.’ But as Richard raced into the fray, the sultan rallied his troops and mounted a counter-attack. The king’s own contribution to the battle is unclear. Richard downplayed his own prowess, offering this terse account of the encounter in his letter to the abbot of Clairvaux:

Other Latin contemporaries, Ambroise among them, painted a more stirring scene of royal heroism, in which the Lionheart practically won the day single-handed:

Perhaps his martial gallantry did not reach so epic a scale, but Richard’s personal contribution may still have been the decisive factor that tipped the balance of the encounter. Time and again in the Middle Ages, warrior-kings, seen by their men in the thick of fighting, turned the tide of battle, assuring victory. Whatever the explanation, the Franks at Arsuf managed to repulse one, perhaps even two, Muslim counter-attacks. In the end, with most of his troops routed, Saladin was forced into a shameful retreat. Hotly pursued, he and the beleaguered remnants of his army melted into the surrounding forests, gifting the victory, such as it was, to the Christians.

The battle-weary Franks regrouped to limp into Arsuf, finally establishing a secure camp. Most collapsed in exhaustion, but as always there were some scavengers, ‘greedy for gain’, who were itching to pick over the dead and dying. As evening fell, they counted thirty-two Muslim emirs among the fallen, as well as some 700 enemy troops, most of whom had been slain in the first Latin charge. Meanwhile, at first count, Latin casualties appeared to be minimal.

That night, however, an unsettling rumour spread through the army. James of Avesnes, the respected crusader knight from Hainaut, was missing. At dawn the next day, a search party of Templars and Hospitallers scoured the battlefield, and eventually, there among the dead of Christendom and Islam, they located his mutilated corpse. It was said that, in the thick of the fray, his horse had fallen; thrown from his saddle, James had fought like a lion, but as the tide of the battle turned, his old comrade in arms, Count Robert of Dreux, had ignored his calls for aid. Abandoned, James made his last desperate stand, felling fifteen of the enemy, before being cut down. He was found, circled by Muslim dead, his ‘face so smeared with congealed blood that they could hardly recognise it until it had been washed with water’. With great reverence, his body was carried back to Arsuf and buried in a ceremony attended by King Richard and Guy of Lusignan. ‘Everyone wailed and wept and lamented over’ his death; the Third Crusade had lost one of its longest-standing and most renowned warriors.
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The significance of Arsuf

The Battle of Arsuf has long been regarded as a historic crusader triumph. In seeking to construct an image of Richard I as the monumental hero of the holy war, Ambroise presented this engagement as a critical setpiece confrontation between the Lionheart and Saladin–an encounter that Richard actively sought, and one in which he achieved a resounding victory. This account of Arsuf has been widely accepted and Richard’s success on 7 September 1191 has become one of the cornerstones of his martial reputation. Jean Flori, a recent biographer of the Lionheart, asserted that the battle revealed the king’s ‘skill in the “science of war”’, adding that it ‘was fought on Richard’s terms’, with the Angevin monarch having ‘already drawn up his army in battle order’.
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In truth, the reconstruction of medieval battles is a phenomenally imprecise business and Richard’s intentions cannot be defined with absolute certainty. On balance, though, the evidence makes it at least as likely that Richard did not want to fight a major battle at Arsuf. He may well have expected a Muslim attack on 7 September, but he seems to have remained focused upon his primary objective–reaching the proposed campsite at Arsuf and then continuing on to Jaffa. In the event, when the crusader rearguard broke ranks to launch an attack, the Lionheart’s swift, resolute and valiant response did avert disaster, ultimately securing an opportunistic, but morale-boosting, victory. Crucially, his generalship was reactive, not proactive.

At the time, King Richard did not claim to have planned the battle–that notion seems only to have taken hold in the aftermath of the Third Crusade–but his letter of 1 October did state that the Muslims were badly stung at Arsuf. It declared:

Arabic sources acknowledged that the Ayyubids suffered a damaging defeat at Arsuf. Baha al-Din, who witnessed the battle, recorded that many ‘met a martyr’s death’ and admitted that, although al-Adil and al-Afdal fought well, the latter was ‘shaken by this day’. In real terms, though, Muslim manpower losses were by no means decisive–Saladin had been beaten from the field, but the holy war would go on. Within days the sultan was writing to his ‘far-flung territories’ requesting reinforcements. The telling damage, just as at Acre, was psychological. As Saladin struggled to reimpose control over his armies, his ‘heart’ was said to be ‘full of feelings that God alone could know [and] the troops too were either wounded in the body or wounded in the heart’. The sultan’s correspondence from this period strove to present a positive account of events, declaring that Muslim attacks had slowed the Frankish advance to such an extent that they took seventeen days over a two-day journey and celebrating the slaying of ‘Sir Jak’ (James of Avesnes). Even so, the truth of the matter could hardly be concealed. Once again, Saladin had tried and failed to stop the Third Crusade in its tracks.
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On 9 September 1191 the Franks resumed their march, reaching the River Arsuf without much difficulty. The next day, Richard arrived outside the ruins of Jaffa–the walls of the port town having been demolished on Saladin’s orders in autumn 1190. Such was the devastation that the whole Latin army had to be quartered in the surrounding olive groves and gardens, but the crusaders rejoiced to find a great abundance of food, including grapes, figs, pomegranates and almonds. Before long, Christian ships began to arrive, ferrying supplies from Acre, and a defensible position was established on the Palestinian coast. Richard the Lionheart had led the Third Crusade to the brink of victory and Jerusalem now lay just over forty miles inland.

In late summer 1191 King Richard I of England prosecuted a remarkably controlled, ruthlessly efficient march south from Acre to Jaffa, subjecting Saladin to a humiliating, if not crushing, defeat along the way. Since his arrival in the Holy Land, the Lionheart had galvanised the Third Crusade; no longer mired and inert in the northern reaches of Palestine, the expedition now seemed poised on the threshold of victory. Success depended on momentum–only immediate and resolute action would preserve the brittle Frankish coalition and maintain pressure on a faltering enemy. But just when focused commitment to a clear military goal was needed, Richard hesitated.

DECISIONS AND DECEPTIONS

Around 12 September 1191, just a few days after reaching Jaffa, worrying reports from the south began filtering into the crusader camp. Saladin, it was said, had moved on Ascalon and even now was razing the Muslim-held port to the ground. With these rumours stirring up a mixture of incredulity, horror and suspicion, the king dispatched Geoffrey of Lusignan (who had now been appointed titular count of the region) and the trusted knight William of L’Estang to investigate. Sailing south, they soon caught sight of the city, and, as they drew closer, a scene of appalling devastation revealed itself. Ascalon was awash with flame and smoke, its terrified populace streaming away in forced evacuation while the sultan’s men swarmed over the port’s mighty defences, ripping wall and tower asunder.

This grave spectacle was the product of Saladin’s newly resolute approach to the war. Still smarting from his humiliating defeat at Arsuf, the sultan had assembled his counsellors at Ramla on 10 September to re-evaluate Ayyubid strategy. Having tried and failed to confront the crusaders head-on during their march south from Acre, Saladin decided to adopt a more defensive approach. If Richard could not be crushed in open battle, then drastic steps would be taken to halt his advance–a scorched-earth policy to hamper Frankish movement, involving the destruction of key fortresses. The critical target was Ascalon, southern Palestine’s main port and the stepping stone to Egypt. If the Franks captured the city intact then the Lionheart would have the perfect bridgehead from which to threaten Jerusalem and the Nile region. Saladin realised that he lacked the resources to fight a war on two fronts and, prioritising the protection of the Holy City, ordered that Ascalon’s walls be razed to the ground. This cannot have been an easy decision–the sultan was said to have remarked, ‘by God I would prefer to lose all my sons rather than demolish a single stone’–but it was necessary. Time was pressing, for if Richard marched on he might yet seize the port. Saladin therefore sent al-Adil to watch over the crusaders at Jaffa, and then raced south with al-Afdal to oversee the dreadful labour, driving his soldiers to work at a furious pace, day and night, fearful of the Lionheart’s arrival.
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When Geoffrey and William brought news of what they had seen to Jaffa, King Richard still had a chance to act. Throughout the late summer he had been deliberately evasive about his objectives, but now a definite decision had to be made. To the Lionheart, the choice seemed clear: the seizure of Ascalon was the logical next step for the crusade. As a general he recognised that, to date, the expedition’s achievements had been dependent upon naval superiority. While the crusade continued to hug the coastline, Latin domination of the Mediterranean could stave off isolation and annihilation by offering a lifeline of supply and reinforcement. So far, the Christians had not truly fought the Third Crusade in enemy territory; once they marched inland, the real battle would begin. Ascalon’s seizure and refortification promised to destabilise further Saladin’s hold over Palestine, creating a secure coastal enclave, while keeping Richard’s options open for an eventual assault on Jerusalem or Egypt.

Richard arrived in Jaffa apparently expecting that, as king and commander, his will would be obeyed; that the march south could continue, almost without pause. But he had made a serious miscalculation. As a species of war, the crusade was governed not merely by the dictates of military science, nor by notions of politics, diplomacy or economy. This was a mode of conflict underpinned by religious ideology–one that relied upon the overwhelming and imperative devotional allure of a target like Jerusalem to create unity of purpose within a disparate army. And for the vast majority of those within Richard’s amalgamated crusading host, marching south from Jaffa was tantamount to walking past the doorway to the Holy City.

At a council held outside Jaffa in mid-September 1191, the Lionheart was confronted by this reality. Despite his best efforts to press for an attack on Ascalon, a large number of Latin nobles resisted–among them Hugh of Burgundy and the French–arguing instead for the refortification of Jaffa and a more direct strike inland towards Jerusalem. In the end, as one crusader put it, ‘the loud voice of the people prevailed’ and a decision was made to stay put. Richard seems not to have recognised it at the time, but he had failed a critical test. The events at Jaffa exposed an ominous deficiency in his skills as a leader. The Lionheart had been well schooled in the affairs of war since childhood; since 1189 his skills and authority as a king had blossomed. But, as yet, he had not grasped the reality of crusading.

With the decision to halt at Jaffa, the crusade lost impetus. Work began to rebuild the port and its defences, even as Saladin completed Ascalon’s destruction. Crusaders, shattered by the horrors of the march from Acre, now basked in the sudden break in hostilities. Among the constant flow of supply ships, vessels packed with prostitutes soon began to appear. With their arrival, bemoaned one Christian eyewitness, the army was again polluted by ‘sin and filth, ugly deeds and lust’. As days turned to weeks, even the will to press on to the Holy City faltered and the expedition started to fragment. Some Franks actually sailed to Acre to enjoy more luxurious comforts, and eventually Richard had to travel north in person to goad these absentees back into action.
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On the road to Jerusalem

In the end, the Third Crusade remained stalled around Jaffa and its environs for the best part of seven weeks. This delay gave Saladin time to extend his scorched-earth strategy, demolishing the network of fortifications running from the coast inland to Jerusalem. Richard spent much of October 1191 reassembling his army and, only in the last days of that month, with the normal fighting season drawing to a close, did the expedition begin to advance on Jerusalem. It now faced a challenge unlike any encountered by previous crusades. Back in 1099, the First Crusaders had marched on the Holy City largely unopposed, and in their subsequent siege, arduous though it was, the Franks had encountered a relatively small, isolated enemy force. Now, almost a century later, the Latins could expect to meet far sterner resistance.

Saladin’s power may have weakened in the years since 1187, but he still possessed formidable military resources with which to harass and oppose every step of a Christian approach on the Holy City. And should the crusaders reach Jerusalem, its actual conquest presented manifold difficulties. Protected by a full garrison and stout physical fortifications, the city’s defences would be all but insurmountable, while any besieging army would undoubtedly face fierce counter-attacks from additional Muslim forces in the field. More troubling still was the issue of supply and reinforcement: once the Third Crusade left the coast behind, it would have to rely upon a fragile line of communication back to Jaffa; if broken, Richard and his men would face isolation and probably defeat.

The Lionheart’s primary aim in the autumn of 1191 was the forging of a reliable chain of logistical support running inland. The main road to Jerusalem crossed the coastal plain east of Jaffa, through Ramla to Latrun, before arcing north-east to Beit Nuba in the Judean foothills and then winding east up to the Holy City (although there were alternatives, such as the more northerly route via Lydda). In the course of the twelfth century, the Franks had built a string of fortresses to defend the approaches to Jerusalem. Many of these had been controlled by the Military Orders, but all had fallen to Islam after Hattin.

The Third Crusade:
Paths to Jerusalem

Saladin’s recent shift in strategy had left the road ahead of the crusaders in a state of desolation. Every major fortified site–including Lydda, Ramla and Latrun–had been dismantled. On 29 October Richard marched on to the plains east of Jaffa and began the painstakingly slow work of rebuilding a string of sites running inland, starting with two forts near Yasur. In military terms, the war now devolved into a series of skirmishes. Marshalling his forces at Ramla, Saladin sought to hound the Franks, impeding their construction efforts while avoiding full-scale confrontation. Once the advance on Jerusalem began, the Lionheart frequently threw himself into the thick of these running battles. In early November 1192, a routine foraging expedition went awry when a group of Templars were attacked and outnumbered. When the news reached him, the king rode to their aid without hesitation, accompanied by Andrew of Chauvigny and Robert, earl of Leicester. The Lionheart arrived ‘roaring’ with bloodlust, striking like a ‘thunderbolt’, and soon forced the Muslims to retreat.

Latin eyewitnesses suggest that some of the king’s companions actually questioned the wisdom of his actions that day. Chiding him for risking his life so readily, they protested that ‘if harm comes to you Christianity will be killed’. Richard was said to have been enraged: ‘The king’s colour changed. Then he said “I sent [these soldiers] here and asked them to go [and] if they die there without me then would [that] I never again bear the title of king.”’ This episode reveals the Lionheart’s determination to operate as a warrior-king in the front line of conflict, but it also suggests that, by this stage, he was taking risks that worried even his closest supporters. It is certainly true that there were real dangers involved in these skirmishes. Just a few weeks later, Andrew of Chauvigny broke his arm while skewering a Muslim opponent during a scuffle near Lydda.
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Talking to the enemy

Bold as Richard’s involvement might have been in these inland incursions, his martial offensive was just one facet of a combined strategy. Throughout the autumn and early winter of 1191 the king sought to use diplomacy alongside military threat, perhaps hoping that, when jointly wielded, these two weapons might bring Saladin to the point of submission, forestalling the need for a direct assault on Jerusalem.

In fact, the Lionheart had reopened channels of communication with the enemy just days after the Battle of Arsuf. Around 12 September he sent Humphrey of Toron, the disenfranchised former husband of Isabella, to request a renewal of discussions with al-Adil. Saladin acceded, giving his brother ‘permission to hold talks and the power to negotiate on his own initiative’. One of the sultan’s confidants explained that ‘[Saladin] thought the meetings were in our interest because he saw in the hearts of men that they were tired and disillusioned with the fighting, the hardship and the burden of debts that was on their backs’. In all probability, Saladin was also playing for time and seeking to garner information about the enemy.
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In the months to come, reliable intelligence proved to be a precious commodity, and spies seem to have infiltrated both camps. In late September 1191 Saladin narrowly averted a potentially disastrous leak when a group of eastern Christians travelling through the Judean hills were seized and searched. They were found to be carrying extremely sensitive documents–letters from the Ayyubid governor of Jerusalem to the sultan, detailing worrying shortages of grain, equipment and men within the Holy City–which they had intended to present to King Richard. Meanwhile, to furnish a regular supply of Frankish captives for interrogation, Saladin engaged 300 rather disreputable Bedouin thieves to carry out night-time prisoner snatches. For Latin and Muslim alike, however, knowledge of the enemy’s movements and intentions was always fallible. Saladin, for example, was apparently informed that Philip Augustus had died in October 1191. Perhaps more significantly, the Lionheart persistently overestimated Saladin’s military strength for much of the remainder of the crusade.

Throughout autumn and early winter 1191, Richard eagerly maintained a regular dialogue with al-Adil, and, to begin with at least, this contact seems to have been hidden from the Frankish armies. In part, the king must have been driven to negotiation by the rumour that Conrad of Montferrat had opened his own, independent, channel of diplomacy with Saladin. As always, the Lionheart’s willingness to discuss avenues to peace with the enemy did not indicate some pacifistic preference for the avoidance of conflict. Negotiation was a weapon of war: one that might beget a settlement when combined with a military offensive; one that would certainly bring vital intelligence; and, crucially in this phase of the crusade, one that offered an opportunity to sow dissension among the ranks of Islam.