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:
Great was the joy, clear was the night. I do not believe that any mother’s son ever saw or told of such elation as the army expressed over the king’s presence. Bells and trumpets all sounded. Fine songs and ballads were sung. All were full of hope. So many lights and candles [were lit] that it seemed to the Turks in the opposing army that the whole valley was ablaze.
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.45
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.46
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.47
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.48
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 calledarnaldia 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.49
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.50
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.51
The thorny issue of the kingdom of Jerusalem’s political future also served to perpetuate Angevin–Capetian rivalry. Ever since his disastrous defeat and capture at Hattin in 1187, Guy of Lusignan’s right to the throne of Jerusalem had been open to challenge. Conrad, marquis of Montferrat, stalwart defender of Tyre, saviour of the Latin East, appeared to many to be the natural choice for the throne. When Conrad refused Guy access to Tyre, after the king’s release from captivity, the dispute erupted into an open feud. The crisis then deepened in the early autumn of 1190 when Queen Sibylla (Baldwin IV’s sister) and her two infant daughters succumbed to illness while staying in the crusader camp outside Acre. Their deaths were a dire blow to Guy’s political security, removing as they did his only blood link to the throne of Jerusalem. With the legality of Guy’s right to the crown now open to question, much of the surviving nobility of the Latin kingdom decided to back Conrad.
In November 1190 a rather unsavoury political solution was engineered. The bloodline of the Jerusalemite throne now devolved upon Sibylla’s beautiful younger sister, Isabella, so a coalition of Guy’s enemies arranged for her to be married to Conrad. There were a few details to be ironed out before this union could be finalised. Rumour had it that at least one of Conrad’s two previous wives was still alive somewhere in the West. Worse still, Isabella already had a husband–Humphrey of Toron. Indeed, the couple were camped with the crusader army outside Acre. Abducted from her tent, browbeaten by her mother Maria Comnena into accepting a dubious annulment, Isabella finally acquiesced and was wed to Conrad. Decades later a papal commission would condemn their marriage as both bigamous and incestuous (because Isabella’s sister had once been married to Conrad’s brother) but for now the need for strong military leadership overruled the niceties of law. Conrad stopped short of having himself and Isabella crowned in Guy’s stead, retiring instead to Tyre, leaving the ‘king’s’ authority in tatters.
By the summer of 1191 the whole affair was in desperate need of resolution. Not surprisingly, Richard and Philip ended up backing different camps. As count of Poitou, the Lionheart was the overlord of the Lusignan family, so it was expected that Richard would lend his support to Guy, a fact confirmed when the latter came to Cyprus in May, supplicating himself before the king even before he arrived at Acre. Philip, meanwhile, promoted the interests of his relative Conrad, who had now returned to the siege. Outside Acre, on 7 May 1191, the French king acted as co-signatory to a charter–buying the support of the Venetians in return for trading privileges–in which Conrad boldly styled himself as ‘king elect’. With the Genoese already allied to the French and the Pisans bought out by Richard, a complex web of overlapping factions and interrelated disputes looked set to rip the Third Crusade apart. And yet, the flames of open conflict never really took hold. With Richard’s support, Geoffrey of Lusignan accused Conrad of treason in late June, but the marquis chose flight to Tyre over possible arrest and the quarrel was, for the moment, put to one side.52
In fact, despite the manifest tension and ill will between Richard and Philip, they managed to muster enough begrudging cooperation to ensure that progress was made on the military front. Throughout June and early July 1191 Angevin and Capetian troops coordinated and rotated their attacks–one force holding the trenches against Saladin while the other assaulted the city. Towards the end of June Philip became impatient with the delay caused by Richard’s continued illness and decided to mount his own frontal assault on Acre, an attack that enjoyed little success. But even on this occasion, Richard’s allies helped to defend the crusader camp, with Geoffrey of Lusignan alone killing ten Muslims with his battleaxe.
The crusaders’ siege strategy
With some 25,000 crusaders deployed around Acre by early summer 1191, Richard and Philip implemented a relatively coherent and coordinated assault-based siege strategy. Teams of sappers were deployed to dig mines beneath the city’s walls in the hope of collapsing its battlements, and intermittent attempts were also made to storm Acre’s walls through frontal assault. Through June, however, the battle plan of both monarchs centred upon the use of incessant aerial bombardment to shatter both Acre’s physical defences and its garrison’s psychological resistance. Together the Frankish kings circled the city with a mighty array of stone-throwing catapults. So dreadful a destructive force had never before been witnessed on the field of crusading conflict and the Acre campaign marked something of a shift in the practice of siege warfare.
Of course, bombardment had been a feature of siegecraft in these holy wars from the very start, with both attackers and defenders using various types of stone-throwing engines. Till now, though, the relative weakness of these machines had limited the size and weight of projectiles that could be launched and their effective range. Besiegers might thus use catapult fire to injure and demoralise an enemy garrison, but usually there was little hope that bombardment alone could demolish the walls or towers of a well-fortified target.
Richard I, and perhaps also Philip Augustus, seem to have brought more advanced forms of catapult technology to bear during the siege of Acre, employing machines capable of projecting larger missiles further and with greater accuracy. The increased tempo of aerial attack established by Philip was further intensified after Richard’s arrival, with more and more sections of Acre coming under near-continuous bombardment. By now the crusaders had christened the most powerful French catapult ‘Mal Voisine’, or ‘Bad Neighbour’, while nicknaming the Muslim stone-thrower that targeted it for counter-bombardment ‘Mal Cousine’, or ‘Bad Relation’. Time and again Acre’s garrison managed to damage ‘Bad Neighbour’, but Philip simply had it rebuilt, focusing its fire on the Cursed Tower in the city’s north-eastern corner. The Franks paid for another engine, which they called ‘God’s own catapult’, out of a communal fund–‘a priest, a man of great probity, always stood next to it’, noted one contemporary, ‘preaching and collecting money for its continual repair and for hiring people to gather stones for its ammunition’.
Among the stone-throwers operated by Richard’s men were two newly built machines ‘made with remarkable workmanship and materials’ that could propel the massive catapult stones that the king had brought from Messina. It was rumoured among the Franks that just one of these missiles killed twelve of Acre’s men and was later sent for inspection to Saladin, but this sounds like morale-boosting camp gossip and was not confirmed by Muslim witnesses. Another of the Lionheart’s machines possessed such power that it could throw a missile into the heart of the city to reach Butchers’ Row, a street which seems to have run clear down to the harbour.53
By late June the force of this intense crusader offensive was starting to tell. In Saladin’s camp one observer noted that the Franks’ ‘constant battering of the city walls’ meant that the battlements had begun to ‘shake’ and could be seen by the crusaders to be ‘tottering’. ‘The defenders in the city’, he wrote, ‘had become very weak and the noose around them very tight.’ Troop shortages inside Acre meant that soldiers could not be rotated on and off duty on a regular basis, and most were going without sleep for days and nights. Messages began to arrive in the sultan’s camp warning that the garrison, exhausted by the constant fighting, was faltering.
Saladin did what he could to relieve the pressure, launching regular counter-attacks on the Latin trenches. Throughout late spring and early summer the ranks of his army swelled as troops from around the empire returned to Acre. Indeed, at the end of June sizeable armies arrived from Mesopotamia and Egypt. But by then the crusaders were entrenched too firmly in their positions. From time to time Muslim raiding parties succeeded in breaking into the enemy camp–on one occasion they made a point of stealing the Franks’ cooking pots–but they were always beaten back. At night, Saladin tried using more furtive tactics. Stealthy thieves were tasked with slipping past the Latin pickets, where, once among the tents, they would select a victim. Baha al-Din described how ‘they seized men with ease by coming to them as they were sleeping, putting a knife to their throat, then waking them and saying through gestures, “If you speak, we shall cut your throat”’, leading them away to captivity and interrogation. But, ultimately, these rather desperate attempts to halt the Christian offensive and erode crusader morale failed. By the start of July it was clear that Acre was on the verge of collapse. Surveying the city’s defences from horseback, Saladin was said by one Muslim eyewitness to have been horrified: ‘Tears flowed from his eyes…as he looked towards Acre and saw the torment she was in.’ Badly shaken, ‘that day he consumed no food at all [but] merely drank some cups of a drink that his doctor advised him to take. [He was] overcome by tiredness, dejection and grief.’54
THE FATE OF ACRE
Around 2 July 1191 the crusaders adjusted their strategy. Having battered Acre to the brink of submission, they now sought to exploit the damage done to the city’s defences. The Cursed Tower had been weakened and a ten-metre length of nearby wall was beginning to crumble; to the north, a second major tower was close to collapse. With Latin sappers intensifying their efforts to undermine these targets, above ground the aerial barrage slackened and attention turned instead to the prosecution of a frontal assault, as the Franks set out ‘with great seriousness of purpose’ to break into Acre.
After the first day of these attacks Saladin received an urgent message from Qaragush and al-Mashtub stating that ‘tomorrow, if you do not do something for us, we will seek terms and surrender the city’. An eyewitness in the Muslim camp reported that ‘the sultan was devastated’. Appalled by this impending disaster, he ordered al-Adil to lead another frantic attack on the Christian camp on 3 July, but ‘the Frankish infantry stood behind their defences like a solid wall with their weapons, their crossbows, bolts and arrows’. At the same time, near the Cursed Tower, French sappers completed a tunnel. Once set alight, this wood-packed mine caved in, bringing down much of the parapet above it. Scores of Franks raced towards the ruined barrier with scaling ladders, while the Muslim garrison mounted the rubble, girding themselves for hand-to-hand combat.
The first Latin up a ladder was Aubery Clements, marshal of France, one of Philip’s leading knights. It was said later among the Christians’ forces that, before climbing the breach, Aubery had called out defiantly: ‘Either I shall die today, or God willing, I will enter Acre.’ Upon reaching the top, Aubery’s ladder collapsed beneath the weight of crusaders clamouring to follow him and the Frankish assault faltered. Suddenly isolated, Aubery was reported to have fought on alone with ‘exceptional valour’, leaving his stricken compatriots to watch from below as ‘the Turks surrounded and crushed him, stabbing him to death’. That at least was the crusaders’ version of events. Muslim witnesses testified that Aubery made a pathetic attempt to plead for his life, offering to arrange the withdrawal of the entire crusade, before being butchered by a zealous Kurd. The Latin attack may have foundered, but it had been a close-run affair, and the parlous state of Acre’s defences sent a ripple of fear and panic through the city. That night three emirs fled the city in small boats under cover of night; one of them made the mistake of seeking refuge in Saladin’s camp and was promptly thrown in irons. But in reality their actions merely reflected a truth that was now obvious to all: Acre was about to fall.55
The definitive breach came at the section of the northern defences targeted by Richard I. The ailing king, still too weak to walk, had taken to being carried to the front line on a regal stretcher, covered ‘in a great silken quilt’. Shooting from behind the protection of a siege screen, he picked off hapless Muslim troopers with his crossbow, among them one warrior who had ill-advisedly elected to don Aubery Clements’ armour. On 5 July his sappers torched another mine, toppling the northern tower and causing the partial disintegration of the adjoining walls. Just as at the Cursed Tower, the crusaders were now presented with a rubble-strewn fissure, through which it would be difficult to mount an overwhelming assault. Richard’s response demonstrated both his ingenuity and his appreciation of the base realities of war. Knowing, as one contemporary dryly observed, that ‘everyone is attracted by the smell of money’, the king offered two gold coins to anyone who could carry off a stone from the damaged wall. This was near-suicidal work: arrows and crossbow bolts had to be dodged, the Muslims’ furious hand-to-hand defence of the breach confronted. Yet many volunteered, particularly once the Lionheart raised the reward to three, and then four, gold coins. Despite the garrison’s best efforts, over the next five days Richard’s ploy bore fruit: by 11 July a substantial gap in the walls had been opened, albeit at great human and financial cost. Elsewhere, the crusaders’ catapults were again put into action, ratcheting up the pressure to such an extent that, in despair, some Muslims chose to jump from the walls to their deaths.56
Negotiation
With defeat now seemingly imminent and all but inevitable, the commanders of Acre’s garrison began exploring the option of surrender, even as intense fighting continued. The exact details and chronology of the city’s capitulation are confused. It is possible that al-Mashtub and Qaragush opened channels of negotiation as early as 4 July and it thus would be wrong to give Richard more credit than Philip for finally bringing the siege to a successful conclusion. It was the combined might of the Angevin and Capetian armies that ultimately pummelled Acre into submission. What is clear is that the garrison had reached the limits of its physical and psychological endurance. One crusader eyewitness summarised the Muslims’ predicament:
They were afraid of the miracle that they now beheld, how the whole world was coming [to] annihilate them; they saw their walls broken down, pierced and destroyed; they saw their people injured, killed and cut into pieces. [There] remained within the city 6,000…but they were not sufficient.
A Muslim in Saladin’s camp meanwhile observed, with stark clarity, that Acre’s garrison ‘looked death in the face’ that July. Fearing that they would be butchered to a man once the city was stormed, the Muslims chose submission and life. Around 6 July Richard and Philip gave permission for Muslim envoys to leave the city under a banner of safe conduct, so that they might discuss terms of surrender with Saladin, but no deal was agreed. The sultan was still nursing hopes that total defeat might be averted. A plan was hatched to break the garrison out of the city during the night, but the scheme was betrayed to the Christians by a renegade mamluk who defected from the Ayyubid army. Forewarned of the attack, the crusaders put extra guards on duty and, although Saladin’s troops spent the entire night under arms, no break in the Frankish lines could be found. At the same time, further Syrian reinforcements were arriving in the Muslim camp, exciting thoughts of a last-ditch counter-attack.
But in the crusader trenches Richard and Philip knew they had the upper hand. In the days that followed they adopted an iron-hard bargaining position, blankly refusing any offer that fell short of their ambitious demands. The precise nature of Saladin’s involvement in these negotiations is unclear. Muslim eyewitnesses took pains to distance him from the entire process, striving to maintain his aura of invincibility. It was even said that, upon receiving a draft of the final terms, the sultan ‘expressed his great disapproval’, but that his planned condemnation of any surrender was wrecked by Acre’s precipitous capitulation. Yet Christian contemporaries testified that Saladin ‘agreed to the surrender of the town when it could no longer be defended’, empowering its commanders to ‘make the best peace terms that they could’. It is certainly unlikely that the crusader kings would have pursued peace talks without firm assurances that the sultan would honour a finalised settlement.57
Surrender
In any event, on 12 July 1191 a deal was struck that concluded the siege of Acre. The city and all its contents were to be surrendered to the Franks, the lives of the Muslims within spared. The captive garrison would then be held hostage as guarantors against the fulfilment of further punitive terms: the payment of 200,000 gold dinars; the return of the relic of the True Cross captured at Hattin; and the release of some 1,500 Frankish prisoners ‘of common, unremarkable background’, as well as 100 to 200 named captives of rank. Concessions of such magnitude signalled a categorical victory for Latin Christendom.
After close to two years of embittered struggle, the battle for Acre ended not in a feral, blood-stained sack, but in sudden peace. With the truce agreed, a public crier was sent out among the crusader armies to announce an immediate end to hostilities, ordering that ‘no one should venture to do or say anything to insult or provoke any of the Turks; nor should they fire any more missiles at the walls or at any Turks they might happen to see on the ramparts’. A strange calm descended on the scene, as ‘the Christians watched with very curious eyes as those Turkish people wandered around on the top of the walls that day’. The city gates were at last thrown open and the garrison marched out to make their submission. Witnessing this spectacle, many crusaders were taken aback: the faceless enemy of recent months was revealed, not as a savage rabble, but as ‘men of admirable prowess [and] exceptional valour…unaltered by adversity, their expressions resolute’. Some Franks showed less equanimity, bemoaning the desecration of Acre’s ‘broken and defaced’ churches by this ‘accursed race’, but by and large the surrender passed without violent incident.58
Like their Muslim enemies, the soldiers of the Third Crusade had shown enormous resilience at Acre, tenaciously maintaining their siege through blistering heat and biting cold, facing hunger, disease and incessant battle. Thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands, perished in this endeavour–no accurate estimate of the overall number of dead is possible. Among the aristocracy, who are more readily traced, the losses were unprecedented: a patriarch, six archbishops and twelve bishops; some forty counts and 500 great nobles. The kings of England and France had not begun this struggle, but a good measure of the credit for bringing about its triumphant resolution was theirs. Before their arrival, the combatants had fought each other to a standstill. The resources and renewed vigour that Richard and Philip injected tipped the balance in the crusade’s favour. Ultimately, this was a victory that the two monarchs could, and did, claim as their own. With the city’s garrison disarmed, they moved in to claim their prize.
Back in the West, Richard and Philip had agreed to divide equally their conquests in the Holy Land. Their banners thus were jointly raised above Acre, with Richard occupying the royal palace and taking custody of al-Mashtub and half of the prisoners, while Philip acquired the Templars’ old quarters, along with Qaragush and the remaining captives. However, their acquisitiveness left little in the way of spoils for others. In a move to assert royal rights, Richard stripped from the walls a banner belonging to Duke Leopold V of Austria, a crusader who had arrived at Acre that April. This has often been cited by historians as evidence of the Lionheart’s hot-tempered, brutish nature, but this is to do him a disservice. Richard certainly lived to regret the ill feelings this episode engendered, but at the time his mind was on the robust defence of his inalienable rights and his treatment of Leopold received Philip’s tacit approval. There were pockets of disgruntlement among the crusaders about the pitiful share of the spoils received; but for much of the Frankish host, the taste of life, free for now from the threat of death, was sweet. They swept into Acre ‘with dancing and joy’, where, one Latin contemporary rather primly observed, they were ‘now free to enjoy themselves and be refreshed with much-desired rest’. In fact, before long most had lost themselves in the traditional soldierly recreations of drinking, gambling and whoring.59
The effect of Acre’s fall
Acre’s capture was by no means the end of the crusade, but it was a momentous step towards the reconquest of the Holy Land. In part this was because the port now could act as a beachhead for the armies of the Christian West, but this notion of Acre as the vital ‘gateway to Palestine’ should not be overplayed. Tyre, to the north, remained in Latin hands throughout and, had Acre not fallen, could have acted as a secondary foothold on the Levantine mainland. The real significance of Acre’s fall lay elsewhere.
Saladin’s Egyptian fleet, the jewel of his military arsenal, was moored within Acre’s sheltered inner harbour. So essential as a lifeline to the city, the bulk of the sultan’s navy–some seventy ships in all–had gradually been trapped within the encircled port as the siege progressed. The crusaders now took possession of this armada, vastly augmenting their own naval strength and, in a single blow, ending Saladin’s hopes of challenging Christian control of the Mediterranean. For the remainder of the Third Crusade the Franks would enjoy unquestioned supremacy at sea.
Acre’s capture also had less tangible effects. As a boost to Latin morale it was both timely and potentially energising. Perhaps now the crusaders could believe that the corner had been turned: that the horrors of 1187, of Hattin and Jerusalem’s fall, were behind them; that they might once again triumph in God’s war. The task of channelling this burgeoning confidence and conviction towards the conquest of the Holy City fell to Richard I and Philip Augustus.
In contrast, Saladin was confronted by an altogether more desolate reality. For twenty-one months he had dedicated himself to Acre’s preservation, marshalling the resources of his vast empire in pursuit of this one task. Always before in the jihad he had shown a reluctance to commit to the grinding attrition of siege warfare. But here, at Acre, he had made his stand. And, faced by the seemingly innumerable armies of the Third Crusade, the sultan had failed. At critical moments–most notably in autumn 1189 and summer 1190–his generalship had proved indecisive. Physically, he was weakened by repeated illness. Throughout the Acre campaign he struggled to muster sufficient manpower and resources, distracted by the demands of empire and the need to defend Syria against the Germans, battling all the while to galvanise a Muslim world wearied by long years of holy war.
In terms of loss of fighting manpower, even in terms of Acre’s strategic significance as a port, this reversal was far from decisive. But the damage done to Saladin’s martial reputation, to his image as the triumphant champion of Islam, was immeasurable. It was his aura of pious invincibility, so painstakingly cultivated, that had united Islam; the myth of Salah al-Din al-Nasir (the Defender), the idolised mujahid, that held his armies in the field. The cracks in that façade now ran deep. Surrounded by the ‘cries, moans, weeping and wailing’ of his shocked troops, Saladin ordered a general retreat to Saffaram, there to rebuild his reputation and contemplate revenge.60
THE ONE KING
Within days of Acre’s conquest, Richard the Lionheart’s role in the Third Crusade was transformed. He had left the West as a newly crowned king, one who exceeded Philip Augustus in age, wealth and military might, yet he still found himself operating partly in the Capetian monarch’s shadow. But in mid-July 1191, rumours began to spread that Philip was preparing to leave the Holy Land. On 22 July, after Richard had sought to issue a joint proclamation confirming that the two rulers would remain in the East for three years or until Jerusalem had been recovered, the French king came clean. With Acre conquered, he considered his crusading vow fulfilled and would now return to France with all haste. ‘God’s mercy! What a turnaround!’ wrote one crusader.
Unpicking the motives behind Philip’s shock decision is no simple matter, with contemporary testimony awash with contradiction and partisan polarisation. Different sources variously claimed that Philip was desperately ill; that Richard engineered a malicious rumour that the Capetian monarch’s son and heir had died back in Europe; or that the cowardly French king callously abandoned the crusade, leaving his armies penniless. In truth, one overriding consideration seems to have shaped Philip’s thinking: he was a king first and a crusader second. Holy war might be God’s work, and Philip was willing to play his part in the struggle, but his heart was always dedicated to the preservation, governance and enlargement of his realm. With this latter thought in mind, an obvious opportunity had presented itself. Count Philip of Flanders had died at Acre that June, leaving King Philip as heir to a portion of his county, the prosperous region of Artois. To press home this valuable claim, the French sovereign needed to be in western Europe. Quite reasonably, Philip prioritised the interests of his kingdom above those of the crusade.
Whatever the reality of Philip’s motivation, one thing was obvious. His departure was humiliating. Even some of Richard I’s harshest critics in Europe denounced the French king’s flight. To make matters worse, the vast majority of the French aristocracy chose to remain in the Holy Land, with only Philip of Nevers joining the sovereign’s exodus. Philip Augustus’ withdrawal may have garnered widespread condemnation among his contemporaries, prompting one modern commentator to declare that ‘his crusading record remained a permanent slur upon his reputation’, but this should not blind us to the fact that Philip did make a real contribution to the Third Crusade. Many were the kings of Latin Christendom who forswore their crusading oaths in this medieval age, never to set foot in Outremer–among them, Richard’s own father, the much-celebrated Henry II of England. Perhaps Philip did not weep, as one of his remaining supporters would have us believe, when his ship finally set sail into the west. But he had, nonetheless, advanced the cause of the holy war.61
For Richard I, the announcement of Philip’s imminent departure was, in most respects, a blessing. True, he would be left to shoulder the financial burden of the entire expedition, but his pockets were deep enough for that. With the French king gone, the Lionheart would at last have uncontested control of the crusade. And, as virtually the entire contingent of French crusaders would remain in the Levant, deputised under the command of Hugh of Burgundy, the Latin host would not be weakened. Presented with this opportunity to forge his legend in the grand theatre of holy war, Richard wasted no time in seizing the initiative.
He began by seeking the most favourable solution to the dispute over the kingdom of Jerusalem’s future. With Philip about to leave, a politically isolated Conrad of Montferrat was forced to make a begrudging submission to the English king on 26 July, agreeing to abide by the decision of a council of reconciliation that would inevitably favour Richard’s interests. Two days later the Angevin and Capetian monarchs proclaimed their settlement. Guy of Lusignan was to remain king for the duration of his life. The revenues of his realm would be shared with Conrad, and then, upon Guy’s death, the crown would pass to the marquis. Conrad, meanwhile, would be rewarded immediately with Tyre, Beirut and Sidon, to be held in hereditary right. Should both Guy and Conrad die, the kingdom would devolve upon Richard.
With this deal done, Richard turned to the one outstanding difficulty presented by Philip’s return to Europe. The two monarchs had taken such pains to set out on crusade together precisely because neither could trust the other not to invade their lands in their absence. Once the French king reached the Latin West, the Angevin world would be ominously exposed. Richard did his best to minimise the danger, convincing Philip to swear a detailed oath of peace on 29 July. In time-honoured manner, the Capetian king held a copy of the Gospels in one hand and touched saintly relics with the other, all to reinforce the sacred and binding nature of his promises. No attack on Angevin forces or lands would be made while Richard was still on crusade. Once the Lionheart returned to Europe, forty days’ warning would be given before the resumption of hostilities. As further confirmation, Hugh of Burgundy and Henry of Champagne were to act as guarantors of this agreement.
On 31 July 1191 Philip sailed north to Tyre with Conrad, taking with him half of Acre’s captive garrison, and a few days later the French king left the Holy Land and the Third Crusade. Oath or not, Richard remained deeply suspicious of Philip’s intentions, immediately dispatching a group of his most trusted followers to shadow the king on his return journey and deliver warning of his homecoming to England and beyond. A letter composed by Richard on 6 August to one of his leading English officials offers a glimpse of his state of mind at this point, his desire to capitalise upon Philip’s withdrawal playing alongside new fears:
Within fifteen days [of Acre’s fall] the king of France left us to return to his own land. We, however, place the love of God and His honour above our own and above the acquisition of many regions. We shall restore the [Latin kingdom] to its original condition as quickly as possible, and only then shall we return to our lands. But you may know for certain that we shall set sail next Lent.
Up to this point, Richard had been able to focus upon the prosecution of the Third Crusade. With Philip by his side he had enjoyed a degree of confidence about the security of his western realm. From now on, his concerns would mount–each day spent in the East was time gifted to his rival. Never again could the Lionheart afford to be so single-minded in the pursuit of the Holy Land’s recovery.62
IN COLD BLOOD
Richard’s first concern, now that he possessed sole command of the crusade, was to see the terms of Acre’s surrender fulfilled so that the reconquest of the Latin East might continue. With time now a burning issue, the maintenance of momentum became crucial. Barely two months of the normal fighting season remained, so a near-immediate march south would be necessary to achieve overall victory before the onset of winter. Richard needed a few weeks to rebuild Acre’s fortifications to ensure that the city would be defensible in his absence, but at the same time he began pressuring Saladin for a precise timetable for the implementation of the peace settlement’s terms.
Both sides now entered into a delicate, but potentially deadly, diplomatic dance. The sultan knew that, for Richard, speed was of the essence. But so long as the king still had thousands of prisoners and an immensely profitable treaty to cash in, he would effectively be immobilised. If negotiations could be strung out, the crusaders might even find themselves mired at Acre throughout that autumn and winter. The Lionheart, too, was clearly aware that his opponent would seek to employ just such delaying tactics. Both he and Saladin recognised that a game was being played; what they could not yet gauge was their adversary’s temperament. Would the rules be adhered to, indeed, were their respective rules the same? And what risks and sacrifices would the other be prepared to countenance?
For both parties, the dangers inherent in a miscalculation were grave. Richard stood to lose a considerable fortune in ransom, and to forgo the repatriation of more than 1,000 Latin captives and Outremer’s most revered relic. But more significantly, if he permitted postponement and procrastination to creep into proceedings, he risked the collapse of the entire crusade. For without forward progress, the expedition would surely founder under the weight of disunity, indolence and inertia. The equation confronting Saladin was perhaps simpler: the lives of some 3,000 captive Muslims balanced against the need to stifle the crusade.
The pact agreed on 12 July originally stipulated a timescale of thirty days for the fulfilment of terms. While Saladin showed a willingness to accommodate Frankish demands–allowing one group of Latin envoys to visit Damascus to inspect Christian prisoners and another to view the relic of the True Cross–he seemed equally determined to buy himself more time. Richard, inundated by delegations of silky-tongued, gift-laden Muslim negotiators, appeared to relent on 2 August. Even though his forces were nearly ready to move out of Acre, the Lionheart agreed to a compromise: the terms of the surrender would now be met in two to three instalments, the first of which would see the return of 1,600 Latin prisoners and the True Cross and the payment of half the money promised, 100,000 dinars. Saladin may well have read this as an indication that the English king could be manipulated, but if so he was badly mistaken. In fact, Richard had his own reasons for acceding to a short delay in proceedings–with Conrad of Montferrat stubbornly refusing to return Philip Augustus’ share of the Muslim captives, now ensconced at Tyre, the Lionheart was, for the moment, in no position to meet his end of the bargain.
By mid-August, however, this difficulty had been redressed, the marquis forced into line by Hugh of Burgundy and the captives returned. With everything in place Richard was now eager to proceed. From this point forward, the contemporary evidence for this episode becomes increasingly muddled, with both Latin and Muslim eyewitnesses peppering their accounts with mutual recrimination, clouding the exact details of events. It does appear, however, that Saladin misjudged his opponent. Modern commentators have often suggested that the sultan was having difficulty amassing the money and prisoners required, but this is not supported by contemporary Muslim testimony. It seems more likely that, with the deadline for the first instalment–12 August–now passed, he began deliberately to equivocate. To Richard’s evident disgust, Saladin’s negotiators now sought to insert new conditions into the deal, demanding that the entire garrison should be released upon settlement of the first instalment, with hostages exchanged as guarantors that the later payment of the remaining 100,000 dinars would be made. When the king responded with blunt refusal, an impasse was reached.
Settled in his camp at Saffaram, the sultan must have imagined that there was still room for negotiation, that Richard would tolerate further delay in the hope of an eventual resolution. He was wrong. On the afternoon of 20 August, Richard marched out of Acre in force, setting up a temporary camp beyond the old crusader trenches, on the plains of Acre. Watching from their vantage point on Tell al-Ayyadiya, Saladin’s advance guard was puzzled by this sudden flurry of activity. They withdrew to Tell Kaisan, dispatching an urgent message to the sultan. Richard then showed his hand. The bulk of Acre’s Muslim garrison–some 2,700 men–were marched out of the city, bound in ropes. Herded on to the open ground beyond the Frankish tents, they huddled, rank with fear and confusion. Were they to be released after all?
Then as one man, [the Franks] charged them, and with stabbings and blows with the sword they slew them in cold blood, while the Muslim advance guard watched, not knowing what to do.
Too late to intervene, Saladin’s troops mounted a counter-attack but were soon beaten off. With the sun setting, Richard turned back to Acre, leaving the ground stained red with blood and littered with butchered corpses. His message to the sultan possessed a stark clarity. This was how the Lionheart would play the game. This was the ruthless single-mindedness that he would bring to the war for the Holy Land.
No event in Richard’s career has elicited more controversy or criticism than this calculated carnage. Describing a search of the plain made by Muslim troops on the following morning, Saladin’s adviser Baha al-Din reflected on the event:
[They] found the martyrs where they had fallen and were able to recognise some of them. Great sorrow and distress overwhelmed them for the enemy had spared only men of standing and position or someone strong and able-bodied to labour on their building works. Various reasons were given for the massacre. It was said that they had killed them in revenge for their men who had been killed or that the king of England had decided to march to Ascalon to take control of it and did not think it wise to leave that number in his rear. God knows best.
Baha al-Din noted that the Lionheart ‘dealt treacherously towards the Muslim prisoners’, having received their surrender ‘on condition that they would be guaranteed their lives come what may’, at worst facing slavery should Saladin fail to pay their ransom. The sultan met the executions with a measure of shock and rage. Certainly, in the weeks that followed, he began ordering the summary execution of any crusader unfortunate enough to be captured. But equally, by 5 September, he had sanctioned the re-establishment of diplomatic contact with the English king and some members of his entourage went on to develop close, almost cordial, relations with Richard. On balance, they and Saladin seemed to have taken the whole grim episode for what it probably was: an act of military expediency, designed to convey a brutal, blunt statement of intent. More generally, the slaughter seems to have sent a tremor of fear and horror through Near Eastern Islam. Saladin recognised that, in the future, his garrisons might choose to abandon their posts rather than face a siege and possible capture. But even for Muslim contemporaries, the events of 20 August did not prompt the universal or unmitigated vilification of the English king. He remained both ‘the accursed man’ and ‘Melec Ric’, or ‘King Ric’, the spectacularly accomplished warrior and general. In time, the massacre took its place alongside other crusader atrocities, like the sack of Jerusalem in 1099, as a crime that did not, in reality, spark an unquenchable firestorm of hatred, but could be readily recalled in the interests of promoting jihad.63
Of course, Richard’s treatment of his prisoners also impacted upon his image within western Christendom, in some ways with a far more lasting and powerful effect. Calculated or otherwise, his actions could be presented as having contravened the terms agreed when Acre surrendered. Should Richard be seen to have broken his promise, he might be open to censure, the transgressor of popular notions regarding chivalry and honour. Fear of such criticism can be detected in the measured and carefully managed manner in which the king and his supporters sought to present the executions.
The dominant issue was justification. In Richard’s own letter to the abbot of Clairvaux, dated 1 October 1191, he stressed Saladin’s prevarication, explaining that because of this, ‘the time limit expired, and, as the pact which he had agreed with us was entirely made void, we quite properly had the Saracens that we had in our custody–about 2,600 of them–put to death’. Some Latin chroniclers likewise sought to shift blame on to the sultan–affirming that Saladin began killing his own Christian captives two days before Richard’s mass execution–and also explained that the Lionheart acted only after holding a council, and with the agreement of Hugh of Burgundy (who was now leading the French). Despite a few traces of censure in the West–the German chronicler ‘Ansbert’, for example, denounced the barbarity of Richard’s act–the English king seems to have escaped widespread condemnation.
Meanwhile, assessments by modern historians have fluctuated over time. Writing in the 1930s, when the general view of the Lionheart as a rash and intemperate monarch still held sway, René Grousset characterised the massacre as barbarous and stupid, concluding that Richard was moved to act by raw anger. More recently, John Gillingham’s forceful and hugely influential scholarship has done much to rejuvenate the king’s reputation. In Gillingham’s reconstruction of events at Acre, the Lionheart comes across as a calculating and clear-headed commander; one who recognised that the resources to feed and guard thousands of Muslim prisoners could not be spared, and thus made a reasoned decision, driven by military expediency.64
In truth, King Richard’s motives and mindset in August 1191 cannot be recovered with certainty. A logical explanation for his actions exists, but this in itself does not eliminate the possibility that he was moved by ire and impatience.