Lionheart

by Douglas Boyd

  Apparently, God was not willing. After Clément had climbed onto the damaged walls, his scaling ladder broke under the weight of the men following him, leaving him stranded alone, hacked to death by Saracens in full view of those below. Judged guilty of cowardice on this occasion for failing to go to the aid of the knights trapped between the walls, Conrad of Montferrat retired to Tyre in some opprobrium.

  Because it was a generally observed custom for the people of a city that surrendered to be granted their lives, though not much else, whereas death was the penalty for fighting to the bitter end, the defenders again sued for terms on 4 July, offering Richard and Philip the city and all the weapons and treasure therein if they would grant the defenders the right to leave cum vita et membris – with life and limb intact. To this the kings replied with their terms: the return of all the lands recaptured by the Saracens since the time of Philip’s father, Louis VII, during the Second Crusade, plus the return of the True Cross and the liberation of all Christian captives.14

  Saladin’s instructions to the garrison to hold out were at one point carried by a courier who swam under the blockading Christian ships at night. The following night his master launched an attack on the guards of the landward ditch in the hope that a mass sortie from the city could be made during this diversion. Roused from sleep, the crusaders rushed to the ditch, but the plan for the sortie was foiled by extra guards placed on it close to the walls, allegedly after a warning had been received from the mysterious archer-spy. The on-again off-again negotiations were complicated by the fact that there were three parties to the talks: the French and English kings in council with the other leaders of the national contingents; the garrison spokesmen; and Saladin’s envoys. The two last had different agendas.

  On 5 July and the following night Richard’s siege engines succeeded in making a huge breach in the walls, through which a new attack was launched, with the result that on 6 July a new request for parley was received from the city. This time three commanders came out and were allowed to go to Saladin for orders, telling him that the walls and towers were now falling down and a third of their men had been killed so that the city could no longer be defended.

  This produced an astonishing offer. Saladin proposed that the kings of England and France ally themselves with him for one year in a campaign beyond the Euphrates, and cede three named fortresses. In return, he would return to them the city of Jerusalem, the True Cross and all the disputed lands and places. Should the kings not be prepared to go with him, then he would accept instead one year’s service of 2,000 knights and 5,000 men-at-arms,15 the knights to be paid 46 bezants a month and the men 15 bezants a month – which was generous. There was even an assurance policy in the proposed deal: each Christian knight killed would be replaced by one of his knights and each man-at-arms killed would be replaced by one of his soldiers; all those taken prisoner would be ransomed. The negotiation came to nothing.

  On Sunday 7 July all was as before: while the Plantagenet army tended the landward ditch, the French launched a violent attack on a narrow breach at the Accursed Tower, which came to nothing and cost the lives of forty-one of Philip’s knights. On 8 July, possibly as a diversion, Saladin put the nearby city of Caiaphus to the sack, laying waste the land around it. That night, to the other horrors of the siege suffered by the people inside Acre was added a violent earthquake that shook the city to its foundations, causing many casualties and terrifying everyone. With no or few buildings in the crusader camp, no casualties were recorded there; on the contrary, many swore that they had seen a vision of the Virgin Mary that night, by which they had been promised a swift end to the siege.

  On 11 July Saladin demolished several nearby fortresses to make a wasteland for miles around Acre. Richard’s siege engines’ ceaseless battering of the walls having made a large breach, he sent in his army supported by Pisan allies, which led to a truce, the city begging terms again. On 12 July the surrender overtures led to an assembly in the Templars’ tent of both kings and all the bishops and barons in the combined crusader forces, with whom the Saracens finally agreed terms. They were to surrender the city of Acre with all the gold, silver, weapons and food in it and also all the galleys and other ships in the harbour, plus 300 Christian prisoners. Saladin also agreed to return the True Cross and liberate 1,500 Christian knights and 100 noble captives.16 As specific ransom for the garrison of 3,500 men and some 300 of their dependants a sum of 200,000 gold bezants was to be paid within forty days, although at least one chronicler believed the ransom money was to be paid in three monthly instalments. If the ransom were paid within the stipulated time, they would go free; if not, their lives would be at the mercy of the besiegers.17

  The kings then sent detachments into the city with orders to lock up 100 of the Saracen commanders under special guard, while the other captives were driven into an empty place. Conditions in the city must have been appalling after two years’ destruction of walls, towers and dwellings and thousands of people having been killed there. Within hours the kings received reports that some of the captives had managed to escape under cover of night, so the remainder were locked up more securely in cellars, while the few who accepted Christian baptism were allowed to go free – until reports were received that many of these had gone out to Saladin’s camp and there renounced their baptism. From that time on, baptism was denied the captives.

  Conrad of Montferrat had been recalled from Tyre at the request of Saladin to negotiate the surrender terms. The garrison disarmed, he entered the city with his banner and those of Philip and Richard, who claimed the royal palace as his quarters, Philip being allocated the former house of the Templars. The banners of other Christian leaders were also displayed on the battlements, as a sign not only of victory but also to mark their claims to the spoils of war while the artificers were still dismantling the petraries and other siege engines, which were then loaded onto the ships of the fleet for the next stage in the campaign.

  It was also a time for civilities. Richard, feeling magnanimous in victory to the enemy he considered a worthy opponent, sent fine harriers and falcons of his own as presents to Saladin, who responded with costly gifts in return, but on the same day the two European monarchs found themselves in a Byzantine maze of treachery, when representatives of the lord against whom Saladin had sought their aid arrived with seductive promises, should the kings bring their armies to help him defeat Saladin. Aware of what was going on, Saladin made a better offer. Neither was accepted. This was on 16 July while the bishops were busy reconsecrating the churches of Acre, some of which had been used as mosques.

  When Richard discovered that Leopold of Austria – whom he considered a mere honorary duke, although commanding the German contingent – had managed to find quarters as good as those of the king of England, he fell into a rage worthy of his father and had Leopold’s banner torn down from the battlements, hurled into the sewage-filled moat and trampled into the filth, as a sign that the Germans were not entitled to share in the spoils. Many of them had been there for up to two years and rightly considered that they deserved a fair share of the spoils. It was not only an ill-considered insult, but one that was to cost Richard’s subjects dearly. Many of the German knights actually sold everything except their personal weapons before abandoning the crusade for good and riding away to the north with Leopold, whose hatred of Richard embraced another insult to his family: Isaac Comnenus, still held in Margat Castle, was his mother’s first cousin.18

  It is likely that the members of the surrendered garrison were used as forced labour because the city must have been cleansed of some of the filth and rubble accumulated during the two-year siege by 21 July, when Richard moved into the royal palace with Joanna, Berengaria and Isaac Comnenus’ daughter. Outside the palace, all was not peace. Apart from the incessant in-fighting between the various contingents, the surviving Pisan and Genoese merchants and nobility who had been based there before the Muslims drove them out now demanded the return of property and premises they
claimed as formerly theirs. This hardly pleased exhausted, wounded and sick crusaders who had taken possession of those buildings after living so long in the appalling conditions of the siege camp. Conrad approached Philip on their behalf and it was left to him to negotiate the restitution of property, which strained even further his relations with the Plantagenet contingent and its king.19

  Philip had been ill for three months longer than Richard, and was worn out physically and mentally. He begged Richard to release him, not from his crusader’s vow – only the pope could do that – but from the undertaking agreed in France that neither king should return to Europe before the other. On 22 July a number of Philip’s barons, including the duke of Burgundy, came to Richard and begged him with tears in their eyes to advise them whether it was lawful to return to France with Philip or not. Strangely, because he was himself adept at the same sort of display when it suited him, he was moved by their entreaties. According to the chronicler, he said to these hardened warriors, ‘Nolite flere!’ Don’t cry!20

  On 28 July the squabbling continued, not only over the division of the spoils of the siege, but also over the future of the Latin Kingdom. Richard sneeringly agreed that Philip could leave, but would get no share in the eagerly awaited ransom money, on the grounds that it was for the continuation of the war, not for Philip’s royal purse. The continuing bone of contention between the two kings was the question of who was now the rightful king of Jerusalem. Richard upheld Guy and Philip stood firm on Conrad. A Byzantine compromise was reached, under which Guy could keep the title ‘king of Jerusalem’ and have the ports of Jaffa and Caesarea, while Conrad could keep Beirut, Sidon and Tyre and inherit Jerusalem on Guy’s death – assuming that Jerusalem could be retaken from the Saracens. At that time and in that place there was a joke about a man called Ali who became rich overnight by telling the sultan he could teach his favourite camel to talk in only three years. His friends said he was mad because no one can teach a camel to talk and that the sultan would chop off his head when the time was up and he had not taught the beast to say a single word. Unworried, Ali replied, ‘In three years, the camel may be dead, the sultan may be dead or I may be dead.’ There was something of that logic in the compromise over the throne of Jerusalem, given that, even during periods of truce, men and women of all ranks and ages in the Holy Land died suddenly from disease even more frequently than back home in Europe.

  Philip again demanded a half-share of Cyprus, in keeping with their agreement to share the spoils of the crusade equally, but Richard again refused. The personal antipathy between the kings had reached the point of no return. When Philip’s illness peaked with trench mouth causing his teeth to fall out of rotting gums, rumours circulated in the French camp that Richard had somehow poisoned him. To add to his troubles, Philip heard a malicious rumour started by Richard to the effect that his infant son and heir Prince Louis, known to have been ill, had died in Paris.21

  Sorting out the inheritance of Count Philip of Flanders, Theobald of Blois, Henry of Troyes, Stephen of Sancerre and the counts of Vendôme, Clermont and Perche, and many others of his magnates, was now a matter of priority for Philip Augustus. Duke Hugues III of Burgundy was shortly to be added to the list, so that it was afterwards said that the French king ‘had left the major barons of his father’s generation buried in the Syrian sands’.22 Such a depletion of the old aristocracy, loyal to the House of Capet, inevitably meant instability in France, which its king could not ignore.

  Another reason for Philip’s urgent desire to leave lay in rumours that Richard’s repeated contacts with the Saracens had included a deal for four of the Shi’ite extremists known as the Hashashin or Assassins to shadow his movements and murder him at some propitious moment. If the specific arguments between the two kings are relatively undocumented, Richard’s arrogant ability to insult most of the other leaders after Philip’s departure is a matter of record. In view of what later happened to Conrad of Montferrat, Philip’s fears of assassination were quite reasonable. Richard invoked the crusader’s oath not to return home before liberating Jerusalem in order to belittle Philip for breaking it, but that rings hollow today, since Richard himself later abandoned the crusade, leaving Jerusalem in Saracen hands.

  His problem was now that if Philip returned to France before him, the continental Plantagenet territories would be vulnerable to his incursions, no matter how strongly the Church protected a crusader’s property in his absence. He therefore made Philip swear a new oath, witnessed by the duke of Burgundy and the count of Champagne, that the House of Capet and its vassals would not invade Plantagenet territory until forty days after Richard’s return!

  Departing from Acre on 31 July, Philip left half his share of the spoils of the city to Conrad and gave to the ill-fated Hugues of Burgundy the command of his troops who elected to remain in the Holy Land, with some treasure and 5,000 marks for their upkeep. To Raymond of Antioch he sent 100 knights and 500 foot soldiers. Conrad departed with him, refusing to serve in an army now commanded solely by Richard and perhaps also because his own contacts with Saracens had given him reason to fear that a contract had been put out on his life. Three days after leaving Acre, Philip and his entourage set sail from Tyre for Europe in a fleet of fourteen Genoese galleys, using the anti-clockwise currents of the Mediterranean to port-hop from Tyre to Tripoli, Tripoli to Antioch, Antioch to Rhodes and Crete through the pirate-infested Aegean islands to Corfu, and across the Adriatic to Otranto or Brindisi on the south-eastern tip of Italy. There, safe conducts were obtained from Tancred of Lecce and the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI for them, as returning crusaders, to ride the length of Italy in peace. Stopping in Rome with the traces of his illness evident on his face and body, Philip was released from his crusader’s vow to liberate Jerusalem by Pope Celestine III,23 who also listened sympathetically to his complaints about Richard’s conduct.

  Yet Philip’s request to be allowed a dispensation from the Peace in order to seize the moment to right the wrongs of the Alais/Vexin/Flanders complex met with no such success, possibly because Eleanor on her stopover in Rome had briefed the pope on the Plantagenet reaction to any such move.24 Instead, Philip was warned that he would be excommunicated, should he ‘commit any evil’ to the lands and property of the king of England during the latter’s absence on crusade.25 From there northwards, the homeward journey was the same as for Queen Eleanor and Louis VII on their return from the Second Crusade. At Milan, Philip met the German Emperor Henry Hohenstaufen, who was settling scores with Tancred of Sicily and more than ready to listen to all the Franks’ tales discrediting the Sicilians. He was also related to both the insulted duke of Austria and the imprisoned king of Cyprus and his daughter, who was still held prisoner in Joanna’s household. However, the claim that he swore there and then to take personal revenge on Richard should he pass through any part of the Empire on his way home26 sounds like a later invention, for there was then no reason why Richard should set foot in Hohenstaufen’s domains.

  NOTES

  1. Benedict of Peterborough, Gesta Henrici, Vol 2, p. 168.

  2. Runciman, A History of the Crusades, p. 47.

  3. Maalouf, pp. 208–9

  4. Roger of Howden, Chronica, Vol 3, cxxxi.

  5. Bradbury, Philip Augustus, p. 89.

  6. See http//fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_de_Chastenay

  7. Maalouf, The Crusades, p. 290.

  8. P.D. Mitchell, E. Stern, and Y. Tepper, ‘Dysentery in the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem:

  An ELISA Analysis of Two Medieval Latrines in the City of Acre (Israel)’, Journal of Archeological Science Vol 35, issue 7, July 2008, pp. 1849–53.

  9. Maalouf, The Crusades, p. 210, quoting Baha al-Din.

  10. Benedict of Peterborough, Gesta Henrici, Vol 2, pp. 170–1; also Runciman, A History of the Crusades, p. 49.

  11. Benedict of Peterborough, Gesta Henrici, Vol 2, p. 172.

  12. Ambroise, Estoire de la guerre sainte, ed. G. Paris (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1897), p.
386.

  13. W. Stubbs, ed., Itinerarium Peregrinarum et Gesta Regis Ricardi, Rolls Series (London: Longmans, 1864), p. 223; Ambroise, Estoire de la guerre sainte, p. 386.

  14. Benedict of Peterborough, Gesta Henrici, Vol 2, p. 174.

  15. Some sources say 5,000 squires.

  16. The numbers vary in different accounts.

  17. Benedict of Peterborough, Gesta Henrici, Vol 2, p. 179.

  18. Ibid, Vol 2, p. 181; Runciman, A History of the Crusades, p. 51.

  19. Runciman, A History of the Crusades, p. 51.

  20. Benedict of Peterborough, Gesta Henrici, Vol 2, p. 184.

  21. Runciman, A History of the Crusades, p. 52.

  22. J.W. Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus: Foundations of French Royal Power in the Middle Ages (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), p. 80, quoted in Bradbury, Philip Augustus, p. 94. The Holy Land was also called Syria because it had formed part of the Roman province of Syria-Palestine.

  23. William of Newburgh, Historia Rerum Anglicarum, Vol 1, p. 358.

  24. Kelly, Eleanor of Aquitaine, p. 275.

  25. Benedict of Peterborough, Gesta Henrici, Vol 2, p. 229.

  26. Roger of Howden, Chronica, Vol 3, p. 167.

  16

  Exit Philip Augustus

  Richard, meanwhile, was receiving disturbing news with every despatch from Europe. In England, William Longchamp had made enemies at every level by his exactions to finance the absent king’s distant enterprise. His fellow bishops had only one thought on hearing that Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury had died on the crusade. Fearful that Longchamp’s intimacy with King Richard would see him raised from the see of Ely to supreme status as the new primate of all England,1 they found the moment to strike after Geoffrey the Bastard was consecrated at Tours and invested with the pallium of office.