Lionheart
Page 14
These gifts illustrate Richard’s inability to deal with John’s treacherous and deceitful nature. Time and again he forgave the brother who had turned his coat so publicly by deserting the father against whom he had no argument, for Henry II had repeatedly shown his youngest son every favour and even implied that he would succeed to the throne of England. As events were to tell, Richard would have done better to lock up his younger brother for the duration – for which there were precedents. His father had done exactly this with Eleanor after the rebellion of 1173–74 to prevent her causing him any further damage, and his great-grandfather Henry I had locked up his elder brother Robert Curthose for twenty-eight years after grabbing power following the death of William Rufus.
NOTES
1. Quoted in D. Boyd, Voices from the Dark Years (Thrupp: Sutton, 2007), pp. 157–8.
2. P.W. Hammond, Food and Feast in Medieval England (Thrupp: Sutton, 1998), p. 127.
3. Ibid, p. 119.
4. William of Newburgh, Historia Rerum Anglicarum, Vol 1, p. 346.
5. Benedict of Peterborough, Gesta Henrici, Vol 2, p. 98.
6. Ibid, Vol 2, p. 87.
7. Roger of Howden, Chronica, Vol 3, p. 28.
8. Ralf of Diceto, Radulfi de Diceto Opera Historica ed. W. Stubbs, Rolls Series No 68 (London: Longmans, 1876), Vol 2, p. 72; also Benedict of Peterborough, Gesta Henrici, Vol 2, p. 97.
9. Roger of Howden, Chronica, Vol 3, p. 27.
10. Benedict of Peterborough, Gesta Henrici, Vol 2, pp. 73, 75, 78.
11. Roger of Howden, Chronica, Vol 3, xxxiii.
Part 3:
The Crusader King
11
Death by the Sword, Death by Sickness, Death by Starvation
In the Holy Land, the dissension that was the curse of the crusader states continued. In the spring of 1188 William II of Sicily sent his ammiratus ammiratorum, or Grand Admiral Margaritus, with a fleet of sixty ships and 200 knights to control the sea lanes to and from the Holy Land and to protect the coastal cities against Saladin’s depredations. The Sicilians sided with Guy de Lusignan. On 6 April 1189 Archbishop Ubaldo Lanfranchi of Pisa – a great maritime power – arrived with a fleet of fifty-two ships. Being no friends of the Holy Roman Empire, in whose territory lay Conrad’s home territory of Montferrat, this contingent also sided with King Guy. This gave Guy the confidence to demand that Conrad cease his pretension to the throne of Jerusalem. The reply was again a resounding Non!
Guy again marched south, with the Sicilian and Pisan fleets sailing a parallel course just off the coast, to besiege Muslim-occupied Acre after setting up camp a mile from the walls on 28 August 1189, near the water supply of the River Belus, which flowed into the sea just south of Acre. The city itself, on the site of modern Akko, a mere fifteen miles south of what is now the Israel–Lebanon border, was garrisoned by 6,000 Muslims. On 15 October 1189 Saladin partially surrounded the crusader force, thereafter obliged to fight on two fronts. The dispute dragged on and cost so many lives because Acre was both an important commercial centre of the Levant and a key port for the resupply of the crusader states.1
Constructed on a peninsula jutting southward into the Gulf of Caiaphas (modern Haifa), Acre was protected to the south and west by the sea and a stout sea wall. The north-eastern and eastern walls barring access from the landward side were double and provided at strategic intervals with towers from which enfilading fire could be directed at enemy forces approaching the outer walls. One was called the Accursed Tower, in memory of all the men who had died there. There were two land-gates and two sea-gates opening on to the harbour and an outer anchorage. The walls, repaired and strengthened by Saladin after capturing the city, plus the natural advantages of the site, made Acre a very tough nut to crack.2 Protected by a decaying mole of Roman construction was a fortified harbour sheltered against all but offshore winds. The harbour entrance was blocked by a heavy chain between the Tower of Flies and another tower, which was lowered to allow friendly ships to enter and winched back up afterwards. The Tower of Flies, so called because it was the site of executions, where corpses attracted swarms of flies, also served as a lighthouse and a customs checkpoint under normal conditions.3
Early in September the Danish and Frisian crusaders arrived, but their performance in combat on land was unimpressive. They were therefore used to augment the naval blockade of Acre, by which Guy hoped to force a surrender when the supplies of food and arms in the city were exhausted. When news came of the death of William II of Sicily in November, the Sicilian contingent was called home by his successor, Tancred of Lecce.
Wrested from Byzantine rule in 902, the island had been a Muslim emirate until the Norman conquest in 1091. Its resulting population was a mixture of Christian, Muslim and Greek Orthodox. Although Joanna’s husband was known as ‘William the Good’, because he had been the first Western monarch to send aid to the beleaguered Latin Kingdom, he also spoke and wrote Arabic – and took his sexual pleasures in his harem of beautiful Christian and Muslim girls. Many of his counsellors had been Muslims and it was feared that they might take advantage of his death to mount an uprising under the banner of religion. In addition, the Sicilian possessions on the mainland were threatened from the north by forces of the Holy Roman Empire.
After the departure of the Sicilian contingent, troops in the siege camp were also augmented by a scattering of French and Flemish bishops and barons with their vassals. Additional reinforcements came from Tyre after Markgraf Louis III of Thuringia, a cousin of Conrad’s mother, arrived by sea and used his diplomatic skills to persuade Conrad to send troops to the siege of Acre – which he did, on condition that they were not placed under Guy’s command.4 In November the independent fleet of Londoners at last arrived, cock-a-hoop over their success against the Moors in Portugal.5
This piecemeal reinforcement and retirement from the fight by European contingents was a feature of the long ‘holy war’ that lasted two centuries, beginning with the First Crusade in 1095 and ending with the fall of the Latin states after the abortive Ninth Crusade in 1273. It mirrored Saladin’s difficulties in holding his army together for any length of time, composed as it was of knights and foot soldiers drawn from Syria, Mesopotamia, Egypt and Turkestan. They did not owe him any personal loyalty, but stayed fighting only as long as their own emirs could keep them in the field.
Conditions inside the walls of Acre, whose exact positions at the time of the siege cannot now be determined as the area has all been built over, were as grim as in any other besieged city. Food was in such short supply that the normally discarded offal such as entrails, heads and feet were all consumed. Christian prisoners in the city were executed, expelled and hanged from the walls, to reduce the number of useless mouths. Only a small number of healthy young male captives were kept alive to operate the siege engines driving off each crusader attack. Outside the walls, three massive wheeled towers were constructed by the besiegers, said to be 60 cubits or almost 100ft high and rolled close to the walls by muscle power. A huge battering ram with an iron head was also made. To foil the work of sappers and besiegers scaling ladders and in the towers, the defenders hurled great beams down on them, as well as boulders, pots of boiling water and Greek fire. At first, the Greek fire failed to burn the siege towers covered in dampened cowhide, but an improved formula was devised by a Damascene in the city, which did ignite the siege towers, forcing the men inside to run for their lives, pursued by showers of arrows. The man from Damascus refused payment, saying that he had done his work ‘for the love of God’.6
By the time Saladin attacked the siege camp outside Acre on 4 October 1189, Guy was nominally in command of 400 knights and 7,000 foot soldiers. The numbers in the other contingents are not known. In the ensuing battle, Christian losses were heavy, especially among the dedicated Templar knights, whose losses included their Grand Master Gerard de Ridefort, after an estimated 5,000 men of the Saracen garrison sallied out of the city and took in the rear the Christian forces engaged with Sala
din’s army. In the confused fighting Conrad was at one time surrounded by the enemy until rescued by Guy. Fighting was so intense and prolonged that Saladin’s chancellor reported to his master that he had counted 4,100 Frankish dead on the Christian right wing alone.7 However, Saladin lacked sufficient forces to consolidate this victory, resulting in a stalemate that lasted fifteen months, during which Conrad sailed north to Tyre and returned with dismantled siege engines that were immediately assembled and used to batter the city walls until destroyed during a sortie on 5 May 1190.
He later travelled north to escort the remnants of the German army arriving by land under Emperor Frederik Barbarossa’s son Frederik of Swabia. The rump of Barbarossa’s army, whittled away by battles en route in Syria and an epidemic in Antioch, arrived at Acre on 3 October.8 About this time Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury landed at Tyre and rode down to Acre at the head of Richard’s advance party. By the time it reached Acre, conditions in the blockaded city and the siege camp outside had become so unhealthy that Queen Sybilla’s two daughters had died. When their grieving mother also succumbed to the contamination of water from human and equine corpses, Guy’s claim to the throne of Jerusalem was extinguished, the title passing to Sybilla’s half-sister Isabella, but Guy refused to stand aside for her. Rank was no protection from illness: nobles and men-at-arms alike suffered scurvy, with painful lumps on limbs and faces and teeth falling out of bleeding gums. Life was little better for the men of Saladin’s relieving army; he himself suffered an outbreak of boils from waist to knee, which made sitting in the saddle agony for him.9
Nor were casualties and deaths from disease limited to humans. Numerous diseases such as glanders, infectious anaemia and equine venereal disease – the last usually fatal for stallions – were transmitted along the closely packed horse lines by droplet and fly bites, killing thousands of horses and making many others unfit for combat. In much the same way as modern warfare causes large numbers of armoured and transport vehicles to be written off, the crusaders lost thousands of horses to disease in addition to those wounded or killed in combat. The march to Jerusalem of the First Crusade was estimated to have cost the lives of 4,500 horses.10
Supplying the garrison with food and arms was a perpetual headache for Saladin, due to the harbour being blockaded by crusader ships. Among the ruses resorted to, according to the Muslim historian Baha al-Din, was loading one very large vessel in Beirut in June 1190 with all kinds of food and manning it with sailors dressed in Western style, who had also shaved off their beards, to look like Christians. Crosses were sewn into the sails and live pigs – forbidden to Muslims – were kept on deck. When stopped and challenged by the blockade, men on board replied in the lingua franca and pretended their ship was a French vessel heading for the beach by the siege camp, then making a successful dash for the safety of the harbour before they could be stopped. There, as Baha al-Din comments, ‘They were greeted with cries of joy, for hunger was stalking the city.’11
Count Henry II of Champagne, known to the Muslims as al-kond Herri, arrived in July 1190, bringing news that Philip Augustus and Richard – both of whom were his uncles12 – were at long last preparing to depart on crusade. By now the assembled barons had had enough of Guy as leader. To confer legitimacy on a universally acceptable replacement, a council of nobles decided to marry Conrad to 21-year-old Isabella. She was already married to the youthful Humphrey IV of Toron, formerly a captive of Saladin, who had released him without ransom, ostensibly because he spoke a fluent and elegant Arabic and was a naturally charming person. Humphrey’s marriage was annulled, his wishes in the matter being disregarded since he was considered ‘effeminate’ and not sufficiently aggressive for a crusader lord. The decision was endorsed by Isabella’s mother Maria Comnena, who was married to Balian of Ibelin, one of the seigneurs responsible for the disaster of Hattin. The senior prelates in the Holy Land being sick, it fell to papal legate Archbishop Lanfranchi and Bishop Philip of Beauvais to annul the marriage on 19 November 1190 and marry Isabella to Conrad on 24 November.
There is no record of her feelings at being wrested from a young and affectionate husband to be bedded by a hardened middle-aged warrior, who was intent on rapidly getting her pregnant so that he could look forward to being regent to an infant heir on the throne of Jerusalem. This was all done despite Conrad being known to be married, albeit under the Orthodox rite, to Princess Theodora, who was still alive. Furthermore, since Isabella’s half-sister had previously been married to her new bridegroom’s elder brother William Longsword the match was incestuous under canon law. It was indeed a tangled web to be woven in the middle of a total war! Conrad, having recently been wounded, the newly-weds departed from Acre to the relative safety of Tyre, so that he could convalesce. His potency clearly had not been affected by the wound, because Isabella gave birth to a daughter by him the following year.
Talk of wounds during the crusades perhaps gives a false idea today when most severe injuries in combat come from explosives. In medieval hand-to-hand combat, both knights and men-at-arms suffered injury from slashing blades, stab wounds and broken bones. The worst were those inflicted by cudgels and maces, especially of the ball-and-chain variety – the preferred weapon of Bishop Odo of Bayeux, half-brother of William the Conqueror. It has been said that his choice of weapon indicated great holiness, in that he simply stunned his adversaries, but this betrays a misunderstanding of the weapon and times: Odo’s probably spiked weapon crushed skulls and shattered ribs and limbs horribly, but enabled him to claim as a churchman that he was not shedding blood.
It was common for men to have lost fingers, ears and noses, to have permanently damaged legs and arms or to have scarred faces. Indeed, the nasal piece had been added to the basic helmet after thousands of men lost their noses in combat. Because the essence of hand-to-hand fighting was brute strength allied with trained reflexes, in the intervals between combat outside Acre men of all ranks would be seen hacking away at the pell, a stout post driven into the ground that had been used since Roman times to practise delivering a blow with all one’s strength and recovering control of the sword immediately afterwards to foil an opponent’s counter-strike. And no one could ever relax. The Norman trouvère and chronicler Ambroise, who travelled with the Third Crusade and was first to use the epithet ‘Lionheart’, reported an incident in which a knight squatting to relieve himself in the siege camp was surprised by a Turk on horseback. Warned by his comrades’ cries just in time, the knight grabbed a stone from the ground and killed the Turk with it, capturing his horse into the bargain.13
In addition to skirmishes, there were some major battles. On 11 October 1190 several thousand men of the garrison made a sortie from Acre, but were repulsed with heavy losses. On 31 October a flotilla of fifty Muslim galleys broke through the crusader blockade, with heavy losses on both sides. Their shallow draught enabled them to sail right into the silting-up port, bringing men, food and weapons to the besieged city, enabling the garrison to make another sortie on 11 November. An even larger fleet from Egypt reached the safety of Acre’s harbour on 26 December. In the siege camp, conditions were at their worst, with knights slaughtering their own horses for food and the common troops reduced to eating grass and weeds, just to put something in their stomachs. Shortage of food was made worse by the Pisan merchants, who controlled supplies, inflating prices to levels impossible for the ordinary crusader to pay: a handful of peas for a silver penny or a sack of corn for 100 or 200 gold coins.14 The common soldiers were so hungry that the bishop of Salisbury had some flogged for resorting to cannibalism, unable to afford the inflated prices where even the common fig sold at seven for 1 bezant.
There was in Europe a general prohibition on eating horsemeat because horses were considered noble animals and even poor people tried to avoid eating the flesh of animals that died. These and other prohibitions went by the board in the siege camp, where horses that had died of starvation were butchered to provide the only meat available, however tough, f
or many starving men.15 The arrival of supply ships laden with wine, oil and corn brought prices tumbling down, so that the same measure of corn which had been for sale at 200 bezants could now be bought for six.16 Taking advantage of the Christians’ poor physical condition and general demoralisation, on 13 February 1191 Saladin’s men managed to break through the siege lines and reach the city gates, which were kept open just long enough to allow a fresh garrison to replace the exhausted original force.
With the improved weather, a contingent of Rhinelanders commanded by Duke Leopold V of Austria arrived by ship from Venice. He then assumed command of the survivors of Barbarossa’s army, Frederik of Swabia having died the previous month. Leopold must have wondered into what hell he had brought his men, but can have had no idea how famous an insult was to make him, as captor of the king of England.
Conrad was nothing if not a trier. In February he attempted a seaborne invasion, but his attack on the Tower of Flies failed when a ship went aground on a reef. In March a fully laden corn ship arrived and off-loaded its cargo for the crusader camp. After others followed, bellies could again be filled, at a price. News that the kings of England and France were on their way with their armies caused Saladin to write to the Muslim rulers of North Africa and Spain for assistance, but he received little except polite replies.
NOTES
1. R. Gertwagen, ‘The Crusader Port of Acre: Layout and Problems of Maintenance’, in Autour de la Première Croissade, ed. M. Balard (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1996), p. 553.
2. Runciman, A History of the Crusades, pp. 23–4.
3. Gertwagen, ‘Port of Acre’, pp. 555, 559–60.
4. Runciman, A History of the Crusades, p. 25.
5. See Runciman, A History of the Crusades, p. 26 for a comparison of dates given in the various Christian and Muslim histories.