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 called arnaldia 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 quarre
l 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 Ac
re’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
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