The Glory of the Crusades (22 page)

Although it was not the popular decision, Richard made his choice in order to keep his options open. In his mind, he was not abandoning Jerusalem, but biding time for a more advantageous opportunity to besiege the city. However, the rank and file did not view the withdrawal through the same lens. For them, the decision not to besiege Jerusalem was devastating.

In early September 1192, Richard entered into a three-year truce with Saladin. The Treaty of Jaffa maintained Muslim control of Jerusalem, but allowed Christians free access to the city. Most of the Crusaders used the truce to fulfill their vows by going to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem before departing for home. Richard was not among them. He had sworn to restore Jerusalem to Christ, and would not visit it until he had done so. His decision may have illustrated his belief that the Crusade was not complete, but only suspended until he could return and finish it.
344

The Departure of Richard

Richard departed for home from Acre on October 9. Despite the favorable treaty with Saladin, the objectives of the Crusade were not achieved, and his earlier promise to remain in the Holy Land until Easter 1193 had been broken. He decided to travel overland since winter weather in the Mediterranean made sea travel difficult. While traveling near Vienna in late December, he was captured by the forces of Duke Leopold V of Austria, who imprisoned him to avenge an insult at the siege of Acre in 1191. Leopold was also a close ally of the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI, who was not friendly with Richard. Leopold had every incentive to hold the king of England, and when given the opportunity, did so willingly.

Eventually Leopold turned Richard over to Henry VI, who moved him to Worms where he was held for fourteen months until February 1194. Pope Celestine III (r. 1191–1198) excommunicated Henry VI for his incarceration of Richard, since the Church afforded Crusaders the protection and safety of their person and property. Richard was released after a ransom of 150,000 marks was paid (the equivalent of 65,000 pounds of pure silver, three times the annual income of the whole of England). The English people raised the ransom via taxes for the rest of Richard’s reign.
345

Richard had promised to remain in the Holy Land until Easter 1193, but left in the fall of 1192. Since Saladin died on March 4, 1193—three weeks before Easter—one of history’s most tempting “what if” questions can be asked of the Third Crusade. The idea of the Lion-Hearted commanding a potent Crusader military force against a Muslim world in disarray following the death of the great sultan leaves the historian imagining what might have been had the king of England kept his promise. Had Richard only stayed until Easter, it is likely that the Third Crusade would have been the most successful of all Crusades, and the entire history of the Crusading movement would have changed.

Saladin’s Legacy

The great sultan who united the Muslim world in Outrémer and whose conviction for
jihad
won great victories for Islam died as a result of a life filled with rigorous fasting and the hardships of years spent in the saddle. Saladin’s death left unfulfilled his life’s greatest desire: to carry the war to Europe and conquer Rome and Constantinople. Ibn Shaddad records Saladin saying in 1189 that once the “Franks” were kicked out of Outrémer he wanted “to set sail to their islands to pursue them there until there no longer remain on the face of the earth any who deny God.”
346

By any assessment, Saladin’s life was a success and his legacy reached far beyond the years after his death. He was “born the son of a displaced Kurdish mercenary in the service of Zengi of Mosul, he died the creator and ruler of an empire that embraced Iraq, Syria, Arabia, and Egypt, the effective overlord of the Fertile Crescent, a successful dynast whose arriviste family became the political masters of the Near East for over half a century.”
347

It is one of history’s great ironies, then, that Saladin became better known in the collective memory of Europe and Christendom than in the Islamic world. From the Third Crusade to the modern world, the name of Saladin in the West engendered a vision of the perfect knight, perhaps even a secret Christian who was a noble heathen, tolerant and the champion of freedom. This vision is far from the actual man and his exploits, but legend, once enshrined, is hard to remove.

It was the Enlightenment that cemented the modern-day vision of Saladin among Westerners, with eighteenth-century writers building a false image of Saladin that persists to this day. Voltaire helped craft the image of the tolerant and noble heathen in a 1756 essay in which he contrasted the generosity of Saladin with the miserliness of Christian leaders.
348
The myth of the tolerant and benevolent ruler, however, gives way to the reality that Egyptian Jews and Christians were treated better under the Fatimid caliphs, whom Saladin overthrew.

Yet this myth of Saladin persists in the west and continues to shape the memory of the Crusades:

[T]he reality and myth of Saladin epitomize the Western consciousness of Islam and the Middle East as a whole, shaped by centuries of received information, misinformation, and fantasy. . . . here was a Kurd who rose to power in a world dominated by Turks, a Sunni who used a Shi’ite caliphate to launch his rise to fame, a unifier of a world fragmented by religion, ethnicity, and even by the very landscape, a counter-crusader whose largest fan base has always resided in Christendom.
349

The Death of the Lion-Hearted

Richard returned home from the Crusade after four years of illness, stress, victories, defeats, and a long imprisonment at the hands of the holy Roman emperor. His life and reign continued for another three years until he died on March 26, 1199. While besieging the castle of a rebel, Richard met his end in one of the most perplexing examples of literally lowering one’s guard.

Inspecting the siege progress at twilight, Richard noticed on the ramparts of the castle a lone figure: a common soldier with a crossbow, whose only protection was a frying pan. Awed by the man’s audacity and courage, Richard lowered his shield and clapped in applause. Richard’s display of chivalrous acknowledgment did not impress the enemy soldier, who dropped his frying pan and let loose his bolt. The “extraordinarily well-aimed shot” hit Richard in the left shoulder.
350
An unskilled surgeon attempted to remove the arrowhead, but the tissue damage from the surgery was extensive. Gangrene set into the wound.

Knowing his end was near, the great monarch made preparations for his death. He pardoned the crossbowman (the pardon was ignored upon Richard’s death, and the soldier was flayed alive and hanged), confessed his sins, received the Sacrament of Extreme Unction, and died two weeks later at the age of forty-two.
351
He left no children, and so the throne of England passed to his brother John, who became perhaps the worst monarch in English history.
352

The great Crusader who nearly succeeded against all odds in liberating Jerusalem was dead, but the Crusading movement was not. Several more major Crusades would launch in the future, and Christendom would see the rise of another ruler vigorously committed to the Crusade, who was more than a lion-hearted man: He was a saint.

273
Ibn Munir of Tripoli was a Palestinian poet in the service of the Muslim ruler Nur al-Din. Ibn Munir of Tripoli,
The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives
trans. C. Hillenbrand, (Edinburgh: 1999), 150, in Tyerman,
God’s War,
344.

274
Opening lines of
Audita Tremendi.

275
William of Tyre,
A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea
, trans. E.A. Babcock and A.C. Krey (New York: 1976, reprint of 1941 ed.), ii, 407–408 in Tyerman,
God’s War
, 343.

276
Hannes Möhring,
Saladin—The Sultan and His Times, 1138–1193
, trans. David S. Bachrach, intro and preface Paul M. Cobb (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), xviii.

277
Edward Gibbon,
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, ch. LIX.

278
Francesco Gabrieli,
Arab Historians of the Crusades
(Routledge: New York, 1969), 100 in Madden,
The New Concise History of the Crusades
, 69.

279
Möhring,
Saladin
, 29.

280
Tyerman,
God’s War
, 349.

281
Möhring,
Saladin
, 31.

282
Ibid., 36.

283
Tyerman,
God’s War
, 353.

284
David Nicolle,
Hattin 1187—Saladin’s Greatest Victory
(Oxford, UK: Osprey Publishing, 1993), 48.

285
Tyerman,
God’s War
, 356.

286
The apt description of the effects of Baldwin’s leprosy is found in Tyerman,
God’s War
, 356. The king, at times, was too sick to even stand, so he marched with his army while being carried on a litter.

287
Madden,
New Concise History of the Crusades
, 72.

288
Marriage was frequently used by medieval nobility as an avenue for power, and although the Church taught the indissolubility of the sacrament, the teaching was not always perfectly lived, especially during dynastic disputes. 

289
Tyerman,
God’s War
, 365.

290
Nicolle,
Hattin 1187
, 56.

291
Seward,
The Monks of War
, 53.

292
Tyerman indicates Saladin had a 30,000-man army (
God’s War
, 368), whereas Seward believes it was 60,000 strong (
The Monks of War
, 53).

293
Tyerman,
God’s War
, 368.

294
Nicolle,
Hattin 1187
, 65.

295
Ibid., 64.

296
Ibid., 79.

297
Ibn al-Athir in Seward,
The Monks of War
, 54.

298
Nicolle,
Hattin 1187,
79.

299
Tyerman,
God’s War
, 371.

300
Nicolle,
Hattin 1187
, 88.

301
France,
Western Warfare
, 224.

302
John France, “The Second Crusade—War Cruel and Unremitting”, in
Crusades—The Illustrated History
, ed. Thomas F. Madden (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2004), 76.

303
Ibn al-Athir in Maalouf,
The Crusades Through Arab Eyes
, 198. In Ridley Scott’s 2005 film,
Kingdom of Heaven
, Balian of Ibelin is the main character and is portrayed by Orlando Bloom. This historical scene of Balian staring down and threatening Saladin is ripe for a great on-screen portrayal. Unfortunately, the reality is watered down to fit the preconceived erroneous notions of the Crusades held by the director, producer, and writer. It was but one great opportunity lost in the film.