Lionheart

by Douglas Boyd

  Perhaps Richard’s most desperate ploy in this time was to offer al-‘Adil the hand of his sister Joanna in marriage, with the idea that the couple could be crowned king and queen of Jerusalem, their progeny to found a new dynasty. Failing that, he offered him his niece Eleanor of Brittany, daughter of his brother Geoffrey, and therefore his chattel to dispose of as he wished. One wonders how Pope Celestine III could have given his blessing to either of these solutions. In any case, when Joanna heard of Richard’s plan to get himself off the hook by marrying her to a Muslim prince, her rejoinder was a categorical No! Throughout all this time, the intrigue between the factions supporting Guy and Conrad continued, as illustrated by the day when Humphrey of Toron, representing Richard and Guy, was conducting talks with the Saracens and was surprised to observe Conrad’s envoy Reynald of Sidon and Balian of Ibelin riding out from Jerusalem to go hawking with al-‘Adil like the best of friends.15

  By now there were problems with the remnants of the French contingent, who showed no interest in girding up their loins for an attack on Jerusalem when success would simply mean more kudos for the king of England. Even the locally born nobles and the Hospitallers and Templars, whose whole lives were dedicated to fighting in the Holy Land, had to admit that if they successfully besieged Jerusalem in the spring, they would be unable to hold it, since the slender supply and communication lines from Jaffa could be cut at any moment. It was known that few of the surviving crusaders had any intention of staying in Outremer when their overlords left, which meant that there would not be enough military presence to defend more than the handful of port cities on the coast. This meant in turn that it was out of the question to think of retaking the cordon of castles inland necessary for a defence in depth of the Latin states.

  On 13 January 1192 the demoralised army turned tail and headed back to Ibelin. In the milder winter climate of the coastal plain, Richard led the army south to the razed fortress-city of Ashkelon, still an impressive ruin today. Aware of its strategic importance on the route to Egypt, he again incited the rank-and-file to labour on its reconstruction by the sight of their commander stripped off and apparently enjoying the unaccustomed exercise with them. No blandishments, however, nor Richard’s bully-boy threats to declare forfeit all Conrad of Montferrat’s possessions, could persuade the marquis to join the expedition to Ashkelon. This was probably because he knew from his own sources that the fortress would have to be razed again under the eventual agreement with Saladin – as indeed it was. Of all the energy and lives expended at Ashkelon the only benefit was the discovery of onion-like edible weeds growing in the surrounding countryside, christened shallots or échalottes in a corruption of the city’s name and brought back to enrich European cuisine to this day.

  With the coming of spring, interest in fighting the Saracens took second place to the renewed internecine dispute between Guy de Lusignan and Conrad of Montferrat over who was the rightful king of Jerusalem. So many of the barons of the Latin states now supported the marquis of Montferrat that Richard had to accept the claim of Conrad, by whom Queen Isabella was pregnant and thus likely soon to present the kingdom with a legitimate heir or heiress. It was to compensate Guy that he sold Cyprus to him for a nominal sum, enabling him to style himself ‘king of Cyprus’. Count Henry of Champagne – who was Queen Eleanor’s grandson by her Capetian daughter Marie of Champagne and therefore the son of Richard’s half-sister – was despatched to Tyre to convey to Conrad of Montferrat the news that he was now the undisputed king of Jerusalem. A few days later, before he had been crowned, Conrad was attacked by two Hashashin and fatally stabbed in a street of Tyre. Conrad’s bodyguards killed one of the assassins; the other, under torture, confessed that the murder had been commissioned from his master, known as the Old Man of the Mountains, by none other than the king of England.

  This left young Henry of Champagne as the compromise candidate for the throne. Within seven days of the murder, the widowed and pregnant Isabella was forcibly married to him, all of which implies that Conrad was a victim of crusader politics and not killed by Saladin’s orders, as was rumoured at the time. History, or at any rate the notoriously insular history taught in Britain, has been unkind to Conrad because he refused to knuckle under to Richard.

  The latter, meanwhile, had been receiving, along with shipments of treasure for the campaign, news from the Plantagenet Empire to the effect that Philip’s forces were encroaching on to his territory in western France and Prince John was inciting rebellion among the stay-at-home barons in England. However, a more immediate pressure came at a council in Ashkelon on 24 May of the Outremer nobility who were determined to make one last attempt to recover Jerusalem, a project on which Richard could not turn his back. On 7 June the army marched out of Ashkelon, heading north via Ramallah to Qalandiya, from where there was a clear view of the Holy City, only 10 miles distant.

  However, too long had been spent in political squabbles and debating the various military possibilities, during which time Saladin’s army had had the time to re-group. On 20 June at the wells of Kuwaifa in the barren land south-west of Jerusalem, crusader scouts observed a large Egyptian supply caravan en route to the city. Three days later, Richard attacked. With insufficient armed guards, the caravan was swiftly overcome and many of the merchants killed, the army returning to Beit Nuba with a false sense of triumph at the capture of so many supplies and some thousands of horses and camels.16 Otherwise, the expedition to Qalandiya was a failure. On 4 July Richard led the army back to Ramlah, rendezvousing there with Henry II of Champagne, styling himself ‘king of Jerusalem’. At this point, intelligence reached them of renewed dissension among the various nationalities making up Saladin’s garrison there. This seemed to indicate a fresh opportunity to attack and take the city, but Richard still held back.

  Then, on 31 July came news that Saladin had outflanked the crusaders by attacking Jaffa and breaking into the lower town. Richard decided that the best course was not to attack from the landward side, but to hire a task force of fifty Pisan and Genoese galleys to transport eighty knights, 400 archers and some 2,000 Italian mercenaries with which to make a swift surprise attack from the sea while the main army followed the land route to rendezvous at Jaffa. Approaching land on 1 or 5 August in his galley painted red with a red awning over the deck and red sails, he saw Saracen banners fluttering from the ramparts of Jaffa and despaired – until a courageous priest took the risk of swimming out to the ships with the news that the survivors of the garrison had retreated into the citadel, where they were still holding out while representatives were negotiating with Saladin for a complete surrender.

  Calling for a rapid decision and immediate action, this was possibly Richard’s finest hour. Giving the order to take advantage of the onshore wind to beach the ships, he defied the thin line of Saracen bowmen between the sea and the citadel by leaping into the water without even donning his armoured boots and physically led his knights into the attack under the cover of a barrage of arrows that drove Saladin’s men back from the beach. Although the sultan tried to continue the negotiations, a sudden flood of Saracens fleeing the city spoke louder than words and the Christian spokesmen swiftly disengaged to join in the general rout of the attackers, who fled en masse 5 miles inland to be safe from pursuit. They were right to flee. During the Muslim occupation of the lower town, all pigs had been slaughtered as unclean and thrown into pits. Richard ordered the Muslim rank-and-file prisoners to be slaughtered also and thrown in with the pig carcases as a final insult to their bodies.17

  On the following morning Saladin’s chancellor Abu-Bakr arrived to negotiate the ransom of noble captives and found the victorious king of England conversing jovially with some important Mamelukes taken prisoner at Acre. Abu-Bakr brought with him a message proposing new terms for a settlement: with Jaffa substantially damaged in the Muslim attack, Saladin considered that it would be acceptable for the crusader frontier to stop at the next city to the north, Kessariya. Without rejecting the offer, Ri
chard said he would then hold Jaffa and Ashkelon as a vassal of Saladin. Not surprisingly, Abu-Bakr rejected this half-baked arrangement, which was bound to fail when Richard returned to Europe, if not before. Abu-Bakr was quite firm that Ashkelon must be given up. Richard refused. Once again, negotiations were broken off.18

  Realising that the crusader army coming by land was still two or three days’ march away, Saladin therefore launched a pre-emptive strike on 5 August, against the small force camped outside the damaged walls of the city. By lucky chance, a Genoese mercenary leaving the camp at dawn to answer a call of nature saw the rising sun reflected off many polished steel spearheads in the distance. The alarm was given. Richard had only fifty-four knights fit to fight, with fifteen horses between them, and the 2,000 mercenaries, whom he disposed in pairs with an archer between each pair, their shields and spears at an angle to impale incoming horses driven into the ground in front of them. In front of these a frise of tent pegs was set out to trip the Saracens’ horses.

  Saladin’s cavalry charged in seven waves of 1,000 men, but were driven off each time. This continued for several hours – not continuously, as in a modern mechanised battle, but with intervals for horses and men to get their breath back and regroup, each side trying to grab an advantage by attacking again before the enemy was ready. Some time after noon, sensing that the Saracens were beginning to flag, Richard ordered the greatest barrage of arrows yet full on to an incoming cavalry charge, causing great havoc. At that point, he led the spearmen into the mêlée, where his horse was killed under him. Saladin, who was watching on a nearby hill that gave him a good view of the whole battlefield, sent a groom in the next lull, leading two remounts for his enemy. An act of gallantry or a diversion? At the same time he executed a flanking manoeuvre that drove back the Italian mercenaries at the walls, until Richard rode up on his new mount and rallied them.

  Wisely, Saladin decided as evening drew on that nothing was to be gained by prolonging the slaughter, and retreated to Jerusalem, leaving Richard master of Jaffa. The Holy City, however, was still in Muslim hands, so the minor victory was irrelevant to the ‘liberation’ of the city to which Richard never came closer than twice glimpsing its towers in the distance, each time hiding his eyes behind his shield in order not to gaze upon the city he was fated never to capture. Lest that be thought mere play-acting, it must be remembered that one side of his confusing character was seemingly devout, as when he told the abbot of La Sauve Majeure, now an imposing ruin some 12 miles south-east of Bordeaux, that the abbey was ‘dearer to me than my own eyeballs’.19

  NOTES

  1. Ambroise, Estoire de la guerre sainte, p. 404.

  2. Ibid, p. 399.

  3. Benedict of Peterborough, Gesta Henrici, Vol 2, pp. 191–2.

  4. Quoted in D. Nicolle and C. Hook, The Third Crusade 1191: Richard the Lionheart, Saladin and the Struggle for Jerusalem (Botley: Osprey, 2006), p. 59.

  5. Ambroise, Estoire de la guerre sainte, p. 399.

  6. H. de Curzon, La Règle du Temple (Paris: Renouard, 1886), rule 610, quoted in Hyland, The Medieval Warhorse, p. 159.

  7. The Rule, Statutes and Customs of the Hospitallers 1099–1310, ed. E.J. King (London: Methuen, 1934), pp. 141, 160.

  8. Hyland, p. 162, quoting Beha ed-Din Abu el-Mehasan Yusuf, Saladin; Or What Befell Sultan Yusuf (Salah Ed-Din) (1137–1193 A.D.), Palestine Pilgrims Text Society 13 (London: Billing & Sons, 1897) Part I, p. 395.

  9. Ambroise, Estoire de la guerre sainte, pp. 404–5.

  10. Ibid, p. 408.

  11. Ibid, p. 409.

  12. Runciman, A History of the Crusades, Vol 4, p. 61.

  13. For these dates, see Stubbs’ footnote to p. 230 of Benedict of Peterborough, Gesta Henrici, Vol 2.

  14. Benedict of Peterborough, Gesta Henrici, Vol 1, p.70.

  15. Runciman, A History of the Crusades, Vol 4, p. 63 avers that this was Stephen of Turnham, but he is not known to have spoken Arabic.

  16. Runciman, A History of the Crusades, Vol 4, p. 68.

  17. Ambroise, Estoire de la guerre sainte, pp. 228, 413–14.

  18. Runciman, A History of the Crusades, Vol 4, p. 71.

  19. See De la Ville, La Sauve Majeure.

  Part 4:

  Riding to a Fall

  18

  The Cost of an Insult

  Shortly after the battle, Richard fell ill with fever yet again. After an embassy from Saladin repeated the former offer of terms, he countered with a letter to the man he called ‘my brother’ – al-‘Adil – pleading for his intercession so that Ashkelon might remain in crusader hands. Nothing came of this, partly because al-‘Adil was also ill with fever somewhere outside Jerusalem. With his customary gallantry, Saladin sent fresh fruit and baskets containing snow from Mount Hermon to cool Richard’s drinks, but would not yield over Ashkelon. Behind the pleasant gesture of respect for a worthy enemy was, as so often in warfare, the quest for intelligence. On this occasion, Saladin’s gift-bearer returned to Jerusalem with the news that Jaffa was garrisoned by only 300 knights who were, it was subsequently learned, mostly mounted on mules, their highly trained destriers having long since succumbed to the climate, tick bites and disease.1

  To Richard, the loss of Ashkelon seemed intolerable, for had he not personally laboured on the reconstruction of the walls there? Yet, among the poulains even the most fanatical Templars and Hospitallers had come to accept that his political and military problems at home demanded an early return. And what use was it, they asked, to have Ashkelon after Richard’s army departed? There would simply not be sufficient Christian knights in Outremer to hold one more fortress.

  Richard had boasted that victory would be his within twenty days of Christmas 1191. It was not until 28 August 1192 that an emissary brought Saladin’s final offer, which was enshrined in a treaty signed on 2 September 1192. The treaty declared Richard and Saladin to be allies, neither to raise the sword against the other for a period of three years, three months and three days.2 As a monarch, Richard refused to swear to uphold the treaty, but ordered Henry of Champagne, Balian of Ibelin and the Templar and Hospitaller masters to swear on his behalf. After Saladin put his name to the treaty the following day, the Third Crusade was formally ended – with victory, in the shape of the Holy City, firmly in Saracen hands.

  The terms allowed the Christians to keep the coastal strip, leaving Saladin to control the hinterland, with permission for unarmed travellers to pass through both Christian and Muslim territory and for pilgrims of any confession to travel to and from the holy places. A condition was that Ashkelon’s newly rebuilt walls be razed to the ground, as well as the castle at Daron, so large that it was described as having seventeen towers, which threatened the main land routes between Egypt and Syria, essential to Saladin’s dual realm both for political reasons and trade.3

  Richard’s prestige was at low ebb. He was widely suspected by the nobility of Outremer of Conrad’s murder and despised by the more bellicose knights and barons for not making one last attempt to take Jerusalem. Perhaps, as so often in similar circumstances, some of them dreamed of ‘a glorious death’. The works of the Roman poet Horace were well known in twelfth-century Europe, so many would have been able to quote his dulce et decorum est pro patria mori and, if it were sweet and proper to die for one’s country, how much more so for a Christian knight to ‘die for Jesus’?

  Despite Saladin’s gracious invitation for Richard to visit Jerusalem as his personal guest, the king of England considered that his crusading oath made it impossible for him to go there other than as liberator of the Holy City – a prospect that was now beyond the realms of possibility. The more important pilgrims who had no such inhibition were greeted personally by Saladin and invited to be his guests at table, the traditional sign of a Muslim lord’s protection. Bishop Hubert Walter of Salisbury, who had replaced the dead Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury as chief chaplain to the army and the principal negotiator with Saladin, and who had ably but hopelessly pressed the Christian
claims in negotiation, went with Ambroise in one party of pilgrims. Received by Saladin, they discussed the absent king of England, dutifully praised by Hubert Walter but considered by Saladin to be lacking wisdom and moderation.4

  On their return to Richard, the bishop and the poet described to their master how they had gazed with tears upon the hill of Calvary, the tomb of the Virgin and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, restored by Saladin to the Syrian priests. These sites, some of them disputed, had been approved by the Emperor Constantine’s mother St Helena when she visited Jerusalem in search of relics to bring back to Constantinople during the fourth century.

  With the arrival of the prior of Hereford, new intelligence reached Richard of Prince John’s plundering of the treasury and plotting with Philip Augustus’ support to gain the throne of England. In France, the unrest stirred up by John and Philip had spread as far as Toulouse and caused Seneschal Bertin of Aquitaine to invade Toulousain territory with Richard’s nephew Otto of Brunswick and Prince Sancho of Navarre, brother of Queen Berengaria. Their combined forces captured castles and towns, camping briefly just out of bowshot from the walls of Toulouse before heading north and west to ‘pacify’ the Auvergne and Angoulême.5

  Finally, Richard could not pretend that he was accomplishing anything in Outremer. Ten days after despatching Joanna and Berengaria to reach Sicily before the winter storms, at nightfall on 9 October the king who had arrived with a fleet of 200 ships boarded a lone galley, having insulted so many of his allies that he had to beg a bodyguard of Templars to accompany him in return for the Saladin tithe that Henry had paid to the order. There are several partial accounts by the chroniclers of the mysterious return journey that was to cost Richard’s subjects so dearly. In some it was alleged that Richard disguised himself as a Templar knight. According to Ralph of Coggeshall, Richard’s chaplain Anselm said later that they set out for Marseilles with Baldwin of Béthune and the Templars. After stopping in Cyprus for a few days, Corfu was reached three weeks after leaving Acre.6 Across the strait lay the friendly Norman port of Brindisi and the shortest overland route home, but this lay across territories of the German Emperor Henry Hohenstaufen, from whom no safe conduct was forthcoming for the king who had alienated him both by the treaty he had signed with Tancred in Messina and by the insult to his vassal Leopold of Austria at Acre.