Richard & John: Kings at War

by McLynn, Frank

  Saladin threw more and more men into his bid to crack the crusader rearguard, and the pressure mounted intolerably, with the Hospitallers having to make their horses walk backwards to keep up with the column while they faced about to confront the attackers. This time the Grand Master of the Hospitallers galloped up to Richard to ask permission to charge, but again this was refused. Richard spoke enigmatically and, to the Hospitallers, maddeningly: ‘Put up with it, Master; no one can be everywhere at once.’87 The Hospitallers’ feeling was that it was the enemy that was everywhere, with horsemen charging and wheeling, performing pirouettes and braking turns in front of them. Some said, echoing Leonidas at Thermopylae, that the cloud of arrows was so dense it at least provided shelter from the blazing sun. All seemed chaos, with a deafening throb of drums and clashing of cymbals cutting through the shimmering heat. The Hospitallers, hard pressed at all points, sent several more despairing messages to Richard, begging to be allowed to charge the enemy, but each time Richard told them to hang on a bit longer until the Saracen horses were tired. The Hospitallers began to mutter among themselves that the king never intended to give the signal and that history would judge them cowards for submitting to this ordeal without making a fight of it. Finally they could stand it no longer and two of their principal knights, the marshal of the order and Baldwin Carew, snapped, broke cover and charged.88 At this the entire rearguard, both Hospitallers and French joined in, the infantry screen parting in wonder to allow the thunderous cavalcade to gallop past them. This was a critical moment. If this premature charge was not supported, the Hospitallers would soon be surrounded and cut off by the enemy. Scarcely missing a beat, Richard sized up the situation at once and ordered a general assault. Angevins and Poitevins joined the king and his knights in the headlong charge.89

  Richard, following his usual practice, steered his horse towards the thick of the fighting. Luck was with him, as many of the enemy had by chance dismounted to get a better aim with their bows; the crusaders knocked them to the ground, leaving them to be finished off by the infantry coming up fast behind them. Saladin’s men were taken by surprise. Having moments before had everything their own way, they now found themselves taking the brunt of the one thing they feared most: the sustained charge of heavily-mailed knights on destriers. Most of them buckled at once and many were cut down or threw themselves from the 80-foot cliffs to escape; there were even reports of panic-stricken Arabs climbing trees to escape the fury of the Franks.90 Rout for Saladin was averted only by a misunderstanding. The disciplined Norman and English troops, forming the reserve and clustered around the standard, tried to position themselves close to the king, but their movement temporarily confused the Angevins and Poitevins, who broke off the chase to rally round the flag. Saladin at once saw his chance and ordered a counter-attack, committing the crack troops of his household regiment.91 For a while there was intense fighting, but then Richard ordered another charge with his squadron. William de Barres led another, and the two fresh attacks finally broke the Saracens. As they withdrew, Richard led three more charges, pausing only at the edge of the woods in case Saladin had troops concealed there and was trying the feigned retreat ploy. The king then ensured that no small groups of knights were lured away to their doom in the excitement of the chase, for he knew this to be another favourite Saladin stratagem. He was left in possession of the field, where his men counted some 7,000 enemy dead; the Franks had lost barely one-tenth that number. The only notable killed on the crusader side was James of Avesnes, a celebrated French knight who was said to have killed fifteen Saracens before being surrounded and cut down.92

  The battle of Arsuf was a superb military achievement. Within three months in the Holy Land Richard had proved he had every talent: a master of siegecraft, tactics, strategy, logistics; an outstanding battlefield commander; and a man of personal bravery and charisma who could inspire courage, loyalty and admiration in his followers. Unsurprisingly the Saracens were depressed. Saladin was their greatest general, yet Richard had swatted him aside like a tiresome mosquito. The Muslims took to referring to him as Melek Richard (Richard the true king) and Ambroise reported their despondency, with one of Saladin’s emirs telling him bluntly that the western knights were unbeatable, and Saladin so depressed that he could scarcely eat.93 It already seemed to be the case that he could not defeat the Franks when they were entrenched, as at Acre. Now it transpired that he could not defeat them in mobile warfare either. Saladin took consolation from the fact that his defeat had not been a total rout, that there was factionalism among the crusaders (he was thinking particularly of Conrad), and that he might be able to outlast Richard in a war of attrition. It was essential to save face, so he made a point of challenging the crusader army with skirmishers when it got under way again on 9 September. To Zangi and his other emirs he declared that the Franks would never get to Jerusalem, as their column proceeded like a tortoise and had taken seventeen days over a journey his own army could have accomplished in two.94 Richard avoided all obvious triumphalism but evinced the true confidence of a man who knew his own worth and realised that he had scored a great victory. On 8 September he commended all who had performed so valiantly in the battle - the duke of Burgundy, Robert, earl of Leicester, Hugh de Gournai, William de Borris, Walkelin de Ferrers, Roger de Tosny, Robert, count of Dreux, William de Garlande, Drogo de Mello, Robert Trussbut and, especially, Henry, count of Champagne and William de Barres. On 8 September, together with King Guy, he attended the funeral of James d’Avesnes (whose body had been found on the battlefield) and received the plaudits of his captains.95 There could now be no serious doubt that Richard Coeur de Lion was both the greatest warrior in Christendom and the greatest that had been seen in the West for three hundred years.96

  9

  THE SARACENS MADE ONLY token resistance to the crusaders’ entry to Jaffa, by staging a half-hearted ambush by the River al-Awjah but then fading away after a brief skirmish. The contrast between the constant aggression before the battle of Arsuf and the caution afterwards suggests both that Saladin considered the occupation of Jaffa inevitable and that his men had little stomach for a fight. The Christian army took a day to plod over the remaining ground and began to enter the town on 10 September only to find it virtually demolished. They quickly made camp in the surrounding orchards and olive groves and began to unload supplies from the fleet, which arrived in the afternoon. Trying to read Richard’s intentions, Saladin thought that Ascalon rather than Jerusalem must be the next objective for a great military commander. Since he and his emirs did not have enough troops to defend both Ascalon and Jerusalem, the Saracen council took a decision that Ascalon should also be demolished, though a minority took the view that this was an act of arrant cowardice, a short-term measure dictated purely by the shaken morale of the rank and file after Arsuf.1 To the dismay of the inhabitants, the work commenced. Saladin hoped that he could get favourable peace terms if he surrendered the coast to the crusaders, thus avoiding a siege of Jerusalem, but was worried that Richard would learn of the destruction of Ascalon and hasten to prevent it. Hearing rumours to this effect, Richard sent Geoffrey of Lusignan, who had been named lord of Ascalon, to learn the truth. Coasting down by galley, Geoffrey observed the demolition and reported back.2 Richard called for an immediate march south to attack Saladin’s men, but the besetting sin of the Third Crusade at once manifested itself. In short, the crusaders were divided between those who were primarily religious pilgrims and those who stressed military realities. To Richard and the captains, Ascalon was the obvious target, but to the pilgrims it had to be Jerusalem, and at a meeting of the army council it was the devout party that carried the day. They argued that the obvious route to Jerusalem was inland from Jaffa, that Ascalon was an irrelevance. Richard argued eloquently that the crusader supply line would be in danger once they left the coast, since the Franks could no longer be supplied by sea, that a march to Ascalon was what Saladin feared most, and that it would keep him guessing, but he was overruled
and reluctantly acquiesced in the majority view.3

  Making the best of a bad decision but privately incensed that he was merely first among equals in an unwieldy coalition, Richard set the army to rebuilding the fortifications of Jaffa. Word came in that Saladin’s men had completed the destruction of Ascalon in ten days, so some rationalised the decision not to march south by alleging they would not have got there in time anyway. Saladin then set up a road block at Ramleh on the Jaffa-Jerusalem road and left a covering force under his brother Safadin at Ibelin, twenty miles south of Jaffa, with orders to harass the Franks at every turn. Next he returned to Jerusalem, put its defences in order and then, on 4 October, withdrew his army to Toron des Chevaliers (Latrun), ten miles beyond Ramleh and about halfway between Jerusalem and Jaffa.4 Richard meanwhile was concerned about the continuing baneful effect on his army of the whorehouses, stews and bordellos of Acre, which still housed hundreds of deserters, absentees and malingerers. He sent Guy of Lusignan north to round up these miscreants but he came back empty-handed. The Lionheart himself then lent a hand, stormed up to Acre and, with a mixture of threat and cajolery, fire-eating oratory and silver-tongued eloquence, half-coaxed and half-forced the reluctant soldiers to accompany him to Jaffa. One consequence was that most of the ladies of the night shifted the base of their operations to Jaffa too.5 Always energetic, always resourceful, Richard was almost too prodigal with his energies, for he habitually paid too little attention to his own security; indeed Saladin was later to pinpoint this as the English king’s worst fault. While out hawking on 29 September he was caught up in a skirmish with the Muslim advance guard and was nearly captured. The valiant knight William de Preaux called out that he was Melek Ric’ and was taken by the Saracens, while four other knights were slain when they placed themselves between their king and Saracen lances. Publicly criticised by the duke of Burgundy and others for his rashness in placing himself needlessly in peril, Richard shrugged off the criticisms and remained impenitent. He knew the value of impressing his men with his personal bravery and, besides, he liked fighting and liked spying out enemy positions for himself.6

  On 1 October Richard wrote a long letter to the abbot of Clairvaux, hoping to capture Jerusalem shortly after Christmas and depart from Palestine by Easter 1192. He did not expect a long siege of Jerusalem but knew from the Acre-Jaffa march that he would take a long time to reach the Holy City. With no fleet to resupply them, the crusaders would have to be meticulous in their logistics, advancing slowly, never pressing on until all problems of food, water and forage had been solved. But what worried the king was that he lacked the money and above all the personnel to make a conquest of Jerusalem stick. For this reason he told the abbot of Clairvaux that what was most needed was an influx of Christian souls; he asked the prelate to preach a new crusade that would bring Christians out in swarms, so that his conquests could be consolidated. Time was of the essence, for he, the duke of Burgundy and the count of Champagne would run out of money by next Easter.7 But some Lionheart experts think Richard was being disingenuous, that he was actually contemplating the conquest of Egypt. For this reason, although he had hitherto tended to support the Pisans, the allies of Guy of Lusignan, against the Genoese, who had been backed by Philip of France and Conrad, he now made overtures to the rulers of Genoa to entreat them to cooperate with Pisa and back his scheme for an amphibious attack on Egypt; as a sweetener he promised to pay half the expenses of the fleet from the moment it left port and pledged that Genoa would receive a share of the conquered lands proportionate to the size of the armada sent.8 Others again think that Richard was bluffing, that he wanted Saladin to think he really intended an outright conquest of Egypt, so that the enemy leader would come to terms. Certainly it is significant that two days after the sheaf of letters dispatched to Clairvaux, Genoa and Pisa Richard sent an envoy to Saladin at Ramleh.9

  Ostensibly Richard went up to Acre in early October to round up his reluctant and dissolute soldiers and to bring back Berengaria and Joan with him. But he was also concerned about the intrigues of Conrad of Montferrat, who had already put out feelers to Saladin suggesting an alliance: he would attack Acre while Richard was in the south and in return Saladin would give him Tyre and Sidon. Saladin did not trust Conrad and doubted his ability to deliver Tyre as promised - a suspicion that seemed confirmed when an apparently insouciant Richard returned from Acre on 13 October with a large fleet.10 Richard replied to Conrad’s intrigues by intensifying his own negotiations with Safadin (al-Adil). On 17 October Safadin sent his secretary Ibn an-Nahlal to Richard at Jaffa, and prolonged talks followed. Richard gave the secretary a message for Saladin, pointing out that the war was futile and cost too many lives. There were only two points at issue: Jerusalem and the Cross. ‘Jerusalem is for us an object of worship that we could not give up even if there were only one of us left . . . The Cross, which for you is simply a piece of wood of no value, is for us of enormous importance. If you will return it to us, we shall be able to make peace and rest from this endless labour.’11 He proposed that the land between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean, including Jerusalem, should be recognised as the Christian kingdom of Outremer. Saladin rejected this approach and replied: ‘Jerusalem is as much ours as yours. Indeed it is even more sacred to us than it is to you, for it is the place from which our Prophet made his ascent into heaven and the place where our community will gather on the day of judgement . . . As for the Cross, its possession is a good card in our hand and could not be surrendered except in exchange for something of outstanding value to Islam.’12

  Richard next proposed that Safadin should marry his sister Joan and that Saladin and Safadin should divide Palestine between them, with Safadin as the guarantor of a Christian presence in Outremer. Safadin accepted the idea with alacrity, asked for further details, and then sent them on to Saladin with another envoy, the historian Baha al-Din. The ‘further and better particulars’ contained the following: Safadin would marry Joan who would be established as queen at Jerusalem; Richard would cede to the Safadin-Joan dynasty Acre, Jaffa and Ascalon; Saladin would make over to Safadin all the lands between the River Jordan and the sea and recognise him as king of that country; the villages in the territory would belong to the Templars and the Hospitallers but Safadin and Joan would possess the castles; the Holy Cross would be handed over to the Christians; and all prisoners, both Muslim and Christian, would be freed; finally, the king of England would return to his own country.13 It is quite clear that Richard was trying to play Saladin’s duplicitous game with Conrad back at him and had struck the right psychological note by involving the ambitious Safadin. Saladin evidently considered these proposals chimerical but wanted to keep the ball in play so accepted them as a basis for further talks, though he told his intimates Richard’s proposals were either a joke or, if serious, would not be carried through. His scepticism seemed warranted when Saladin’s envoy arrived at Jaffa only to be told by Richard that his sister had exploded with anger when she heard the proposals; perhaps, he suggested, the only way around Joan’s categorical refusal to marry a heathen would be for Safadin to be baptised as a Christian.14 Saladin took the news calmly and left the draft treaty on the table as the basis for continuing talks. The farcical idea for Joan’s marriage aside, the proposals were not far from those eventually agreed almost a year later, but more blood had to be spilled before the great warriors would see sense and conclude a realistic peace.

  While the talks went on, the war of skirmish and counter-skirmish continued, with Richard forever itching to be in the fray, at the centre of the action. The Muslims alternated daylight attacks with night-time raids, using Arab irregulars in Saladin’s pay, men expert at murder, kidnap and horse-stealing. Scarcely a day passed without mayhem or manslaughter of some kind. On 31 October Richard left Jaffa and occupied the two ruined fortresses of Yasur, the ‘Castle of the Plains’ and the ‘Casal Moyen’ and began rebuilding them while throwing his men out on foraging raids and scrimmages. On 1 November, while ou
t riding near Ramleh, he saw some enemy scouts, charged straight at them, killed one, wounded a couple more and put the rest to flight; this was dangerous folly for a king and leader. On 6 November there was a sharp passage of arms at Ibn-Ibrak, two miles from Yasur, when the Templars, guarding a foraging party, ran into superior numbers and sent back a plea for help. Richard, supervising the reconstruction at the Casal Moyen, sent off the earl of Leicester and the count of St Pol with a company of knights, only for the so-called reinforcements to fall into an ambush which the Saracens had carefully baited with the initial attack on the Templars.15 Two separate detachments were in danger of annihilation and, when Richard exhorted his men to follow him, on the rescue, they cautioned him against, as it were, throwing good men after bad, for the two Christian parties were surely doomed; besides, the king himself was too valuable, for if he was slain the entire Crusade would collapse. Richard would have none of it. ‘When I sent them there and asked them to go, if they die there without me then would I never again bear the title of king.’16 Richard’s courageous intervention turned the tide, and the Saracens were put to flight. As Ambroise described it: ‘He kicked the flanks of his horse and gave him free rein and went off, faster than a sparrowhawk. Then he galloped in among the knights, right into the Saracen people, breaking through them with such impetus that if a thunderbolt had fallen there would have been no greater destruction of their people. He pierced the ranks and pursued them; he turned and trapped them, hewing off hands and arms and heads. They fled like beasts. Many of them were exhausted, many killed or taken. He chased them so far, following and pursuing them, until it was time to return.’17