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.
16
LIONHEART
However, Richard’s strategic intentions in summer 1190 are unclear. The Third Crusade had been launched to recover Jerusalem, but it is far from certain that this was the king’s first objective that August. He may well have been planning to use the port of Jaffa as a springboard for a direct advance on the Holy City. But a more oblique approach also presented itself; one that targeted the coastal city of Ascalon to the south, disrupting Saladin’s lines of communication with Egypt. Given the sultan’s reliance upon Egypt’s wealth and resources, this latter policy promised to cripple the Muslim military machine, opening the door to the eventual reconquest of Jerusalem, or, perhaps, to the seizure of the Nile Delta itself.
Of course, the lack of clarity surrounding Richard’s plans was, in part, a direct result of the king’s own deliberate evasiveness. It made perfect sense for him to conceal his strategy from Saladin, because this forced the sultan to dilute his resources by preparing for the defence of two cities rather than just one. Muslim sources certainly indicate that, to an extent, this ruse worked. By late August Saladin had heard rumours that the crusaders would march on Ascalon, but knew that once they reached Jaffa they could just as easily strike inland. Soberly informed by one of his generals that both Ascalon and Jerusalem would require garrisons of 20,000 men, the sultan eventually concluded that one of the two would have to be sacrificed.
In fact, it is quite possible that Richard had not yet settled upon a definitive goal. The bulk of his army might have had their eyes firmly fixed upon the Holy City, but he perhaps looked to retain a flexibility of approach, hoping to reach the intermediary objective of Jaffa and then decide. This might have seemed a sensible strategy at the time, but in truth the king was merely storing up problems for the future.
THE FINEST HOUR
Richard’s immediate intention was to march the armies of the Third Crusade–totalling between 10,000 and 15,000 men–down the coast of Palestine, at least as far as the port of Jaffa. But it was not territorial conquest, nor even the pursuit of battle, that dominated the Lionheart’s tactical outlook upon leaving the relative safety of Acre. Instead, survival was his guiding principle–the preservation of human manpower and military resources, to ensure that the crusading war machine reached Jaffa intact. This in itself presented enormous challenges. Richard knew that, while on the move, his army would be horribly vulnerable, subject to vicious, near-constant skirmishing attacks from enemy soldiers now baying with vengeful wrath for Frankish blood. He could also expect that Saladin would seek to lure the crusaders into open battle on ground of his choosing.
With all this in mind, it might at first glance be imagined that speed was the answer; that Richard’s best chance lay in prosecuting the eighty-one-mile march to Jaffa as quickly as possible in the hope of evading the enemy. After all, the ground could be covered in four to five days and the king was short of time. In fact, Richard resolved to advance from Acre at an incredibly measured, almost ponderous pace. Latin military logic of the day dictated that control was the key to a successful fighting march: troops needed rigidly to maintain a tightly packed formation, relying upon strength of numbers and the protection afforded by their armour to weather the storm of enemy charges and incessant missile attacks. Richard set out to take this theory to extreme limits.
Historians have lavished praise upon the Lionheart’s generalship in this phase of the expedition, describing the advance from Acre as ‘a classic demonstration of Frankish military tactics at their best’ and commending the crusaders’ ‘admirable discipline and self-control’. In many ways, this was Richard’s finest hour as a military commander. One of his greatest moments of genius was the formulation of a strategy coordinating the land march with the southward progress of his navy. With the eastern Mediterranean now firmly in Latin control, the king sought to maximise the utility of his fleet. An army engaged in a fighting march could ill afford the burden of a large baggage train, but equally could not risk running out of food and weapons. Thus, while the land force was to carry ten days’ supply of basic rations, made up of ‘biscuits and flour, wine and meat’, the vast bulk of the crusade’s martial resources were loaded on to transport ships known as ‘snacks’. These were to rendezvous with the march at four points along the coast–Haifa, Destroit, Caesarea and Jaffa–while more lightly stocked smaller boats would sail close to the shore, keeping pace with the army to offer near-constant support. One crusader wrote: ‘So it was said that they would journey in two armies, one travelling by land, one by sea, for no one could conquer Syria any other way as long as the Turks controlled it.’ Richard’s coastline-hugging route south also promised to offer his troops protection from enemy encirclement. Wherever possible, the crusaders would advance with soldiers on the right flank practically wading in the sea, thereby eliminating any possibility of attack on that front. By these measures Richard hoped to minimise the negative impact of marching through enemy territory. This sophisticated scheme was evidently the product of advanced planning and probably relied in part upon the Military Orders’ local knowledge. Success would depend upon the maintenance of martial discipline and in this regard Richard’s force of personality and unshakeable valour would be critical.
In spite of all of this, neither the Lionheart’s achievements nor the mechanistic precision of this march should be exaggerated. Even in this phase of the crusade Richard faced difficulties, a fact generally ignored by modern commentators. Indeed, his first problem–the actual commencement of the march–was nothing less than an embarrassment. One might expect that, as the expedition’s only remaining monarch, Richard’s authority would have been unquestioned; after all, he had even taken the trouble of paying potentially intractable French crusaders, like Hugh of Burgundy, to ensure their loyalty. Nevertheless, the English king had an inordinate amount of trouble actually convincing his fellow Franks to leave Acre.
The problem was that the port had become a comfortable, even enticing, refuge from the horrors of the holy war. Packed ‘so full of people that it could hardly hold them all’, the city had transformed into a fleshpot, offering up all manner of illicit pleasures. One crusader conceded that it ‘was delightful, with good wines and girls, some very beautiful’, with whom many Latin crusaders were ‘taking their foolish pleasure’. Under these conditions Richard had to work hard to educe obedience. On the day after his massacre of the Muslim captives, he established a staging post on the plains south-east of the port, just beyond the old crusader trenches. His most loyal followers accompanied him, but others were reluctant. One supporter admitted that the Lionheart had to resort to a mixture of flatter
y, prayer, bribery and force to amass a viable force, and even then many were still left in Acre. Indeed, throughout the first stage of the fighting march stragglers continued to join the main army. To begin with at least, the restrained pace of Richard’s advance–now so admired by military historians–seems primarily to have been adopted to allow these recruits to catch up.66
The march begins
The main army struck out south on Thursday 22 August 1191. To stamp out any residual ‘wantonness’ among his troops, Richard ordered that all women were to be left behind at Acre, although an exception was made for elderly female pilgrims who, it was said, ‘washed the clothes and heads [of the soldiers] and were as good as monkeys at getting rid of fleas’. For the first two days, Richard rode in the rearguard of his forces, ensuring the maintenance of order, but despite expectations only negligible resistance was met. Saladin, unsure of the Lionheart’s intentions and perhaps fearing a frontal attack on his camp at Saffaram, deployed only a token probing force at this stage. Having covered barely ten miles in two days, the crusaders crossed the Belus River and made camp, resting for the whole of 24 August, ‘wait[ing] for those of God’s people whom it was difficult to draw out of Acre’.67
Richard the Lionheart’s March from Acre to Jaffa (1191)
At dawn the next day Richard set out to cover the remaining distance to Haifa. The army was split into three divisions–the king taking the vanguard, a central body of English and Norman crusaders, and Hugh of Burgundy and the French bringing up the rear. For now, coordination between these groups was limited, but they were at least united by the sight of Richard’s royal standard aloft in the centre of the host. As the crusade inched south, so too did the king’s dragon banner at the army’s heart, affixed to a huge iron-clad flagpole, drawn on a wheeled wooden platform and protected by an elite guard. Visible to all, including the enemy (who likened it to ‘a huge beacon’), so long as it flew this totem signalled the Franks’ continued survival, helping men to hold their fear in check in the face of Muslim onslaught. That Sunday, such resolve would be sorely needed.
The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land Page 47
