Bible and Sword: England and Palestine From the Bronze Age to Balfour

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Within four months, having scraped in every penny that was loose or could be pried loose, he was gone, taking with him the most able and loyal ministers, including Archbishop Baldwin, and his father’s prime minister, Ranulf Glanville, both of whom were to die in Palestine, as well as the new justiciar, Hubert Walter. His father, shrewder by far, would have left men he could trust behind to hold things together until his return, but Richard never thought of that. It was a fatal mistake, for if his last year in Palestine had not been punctuated by reports of John’s usurpation and his purpose had not been weakened by an agony of indecision whether to go or to stay, he might have taken Jerusalem after all.

  Theoretically each knight who joined the ranks was responsible for equipping himself and whatever number of squires and foot soldiers went in his personal train. But Richard, though he may have had no head for governing, was not an irresponsible soldier, and his enormous appetite for money was for the sole purpose of ensuring that he could equip, supply, and maintain an efficient force far from home over the period of a year or more that would win him the victory over Saladin he dreamed of. That he may also have had it in mind to make a greater show of pomp and power than the haughty Philip and Duke Leopold of Austria is not unlikely. But above all he was determined not to repeat the disastrous experience of the earlier overland expeditions, which, by attempting to live off the land, had antagonized the populace along their way and had to fight their way through, losing thousands by battle and starvation before they ever reached Palestine. Richard wanted no taste of the scorched-earth policy of the Turks; but it required vast funds to transport an army by sea, feeding it the while. The Pipe Rolls of the time reveal the methodical planning that went into assembling the fleet. The Sheriff of London, Henry of Cornhill, for example, renders an account of how some five thousand pounds received from the king’s constable was spent:

  This of course represented only a small part of the whole. Richard also requisitioned “from every city in England two palfreys and two additional sumpter horses [pack animals] and from every manor of the King’s own one palfrey and one sumpter horse.”

  More than a year was spent in France and Sicily recruiting more men and ships and reaching a settlement with Philip out of the two kings’ mutual mistrust. It continued to gall the French King that wherever they went Richard dazzled all eyes. Who could but admire the tall figure whom IRR describes, clad in a rose-colored surplice embroidered in solid silver crescents, on his auburn hair a hat of scarlet embroidered with many-colored birds and beasts, at his side a gold-handled sword in a scabbard of woven gold? Indeed, he seemed the very mirror of chivalry as he vaulted astride a faultless Spanish charger wearing a gold bridle, trappings of gold and scarlet spangles, and a saddle chased with two golden lions.

  In the spring of 1191 the entire army and fleet was assembled. After requisitioning additional galleys plus two years’ supply of wheat, barley, and wine and his sister Queen Joanna’s gold plate, Richard was ready for departure in April, Philip having gone on ahead in March. It was an imposing array of two hundred and nineteen ships, the greatest naval force men of that day had ever witnessed, that set sail with banners flying and trumpets sounding across the Mediterranean for Palestine. In the fleet were thirty-nine war galleys, long and slender fighting vessels powered by two tiers of oars; twenty-four huge “busses” or naves maximae with three tiers of oars, which carried forty knights, forty foot soldiers, and forty horses with all their equipment and a year’s provisions for men and beasts; and one hundred fifty-six smaller vessels carrying half the complement of the busses. They sailed in a wedge formation of eight squadrons with three ships in the front row and sixty in the last, so arranged that a man’s shout could be heard from ship to ship and a trumpet’s call from squadron to squadron. In the lead sailed Joanna and Berengaria, whom the Queen Mother had brought to Messina for Richard to marry, although he did not get around to celebrating the wedding till they stopped off in Cyprus. The King in his “Esnecche” guarded the rear.

  How many sailed with Richard on that grand and tragic venture? Medieval chroniclers have an exasperating disregard for figures and are forever speaking in terms of “multitudes” and “countless” numbers, or asking rhetorically “Who can count them?” or giving up utterly with the all-embracing generalization that there was not a man of influence and renown who was not there. IRR puts ten thousand in Richard’s force at the capture of Messina, a figure that fits the known complements of two hundred odd vessels. In addition Archbishop Baldwin sailed independently with a small force of two hundred knights and three hundred foot soldiers, and an unknown number of English mariners joined the fleet of Norsemen and Flemings, totaling twelve thousand according to contemporary records, that had gone to the relief of the Latin kingdom early in 1189, before Richard was king.

  No figures exist at all for the population of England at this time. But demographic experts have figured the population at about two million in the decade of Richard’s crusade. This would mean, if one assumes that between ten and twenty thousand English took part at some time in the Third Crusade, that approximately one out of a hundred men at the highest or one out of two hundred at the lowest went to Palestine. According to “an owlde Roule … of noblemens armes and knights as weare with K. R. I. at ye siege of Acor (Acre)” every county of England supplied men for Richard’s ranks, and many came from Wales. A very large proportion never returned. IRR mentions among the casualties of the combined armies during the first two winters in Palestine six archbishops and patriarchs, twelve bishops, forty counts, five hundred noblemen, a “vast” number of clergy, and his usual “innumerable multitude” of others. Most died of illness in the festering camp before Acre. In the fierce battles that followed after Richard took the city and went on to challenge Saladin’s might, many were captured and killed by the enemy. A true figure for the combined army is impossible to arrive at, because groups of Crusaders from every part of Europe had been coming ever since the fall of Jerusalem. Some stayed, some died, some went home; and the number mustered from the local Christian forces of Antioch, Tyre, and the other principalities shifted with the intrigues of their leaders.

  Perhaps the estimate of Bohadin, Saladin’s chronicler, which put the Christian army before Acre at five thousand knights and one hundred thousand foot soldiers is as near the truth as any. Its proportion of one horseman to twenty foot is reasonable, although the higher losses among the foot reduced the proportion at the end more nearly to one in ten or even one in five. Certainly over half the Christian force was lost by the time the Third Crusade was over. At the very last battle before Richard’s departure, when he ordered every man who could fight to follow him, he could muster, according to IRR, only five hundred knights and two thousand shieldbearers whose lords had perished. When at last he sailed for home it was in a single galley that could not have carried more than fifty souls, though admittedly others had gone on ahead.

  To attempt a guess at what proportion of England’s population saw service in Palestine, given the general lack of reliable figures, is foolhardy. All one can say is that fewer than one per cent went, of whom only a fraction ever came home.

  When Richard arrived in Palestine in June the Third Crusade was bogged down outside the walls of Acre in a futile siege that had already lasted a year. If the besieged were badly off, so were the besiegers, cut off from the rest of the country, sunk in the squalor and disease of the overcrowded camp, reduced to eating their own horses that had died of starvation or paying fortunes in gold for the carcass of a stray cat. Unable to storm the city or to give up the siege, dulled by debauchery with the hordes of camp followers, the Crusaders had lapsed into a rank and static misery that still seems to smell in the pages of the chroniclers.

  Even the arrival in March 1191 of the French under Philip with fresh supplies did not succeed in stimulating the camp to more than half-hearted activity that quickly subsided. Not until the arrival of Richard, who had stopped to conquer and tax Cyprus on the w
ay, was the camp finally galvanized into full-scale action. Richard reached Acre in June, and within four weeks the city, which had withstood nine battles and a hundred skirmishes in nearly three years’ siege, capitulated. This is not to say that the victory was Richard’s alone, but without his fierce spirit beating them on to the last ounce of effort the Crusaders would never have breached the walls. Though bedridden and shaking from the quartan ague (malaria) almost from the moment of his arrival, Richard directed the battle from his litter, and when the Christians fell back again and again under the hail of darts and arrows from the Turks he had himself carried to the front on a mattress, from which his great voice thundered and goaded the soldiers to a last and successful attempt.

  A truce and exchange of prisoners was arranged with Saladin, of which the conditions were to be fulfilled at stated intervals over a three months’ period. But when Saladin kept delaying the fulfillment of his part Richard without compunction slaughtered more than two thousand Moslem prisoners. This ruthless act, which appalled even his own army, has provoked shudders of horror and righteous indignation among latter-day historians. Ever since they have discovered that Richard was not entirely the preux chevalier of romance and chivalry that his reputation supposed, the pseudo-Strachey school has been at him with open claws, tearing apart what is left of his reputation. The author of IRR, who worshipped the King, said he had the valor of Hector, the magnanimity of Achilles, the liberality of Titus, the eloquence of Nestor, and the prudence of Ulysses; that he was the equal of Alexander and not inferior to Roland. But later historians tend to picture him rather as a remorseless, kindless villain. He was probably not a pleasant or a lovable character; none of the Plantagenets were. But a great soldier and a great commander he certainly was. He possessed that one quality without which nothing else in a commander counts: the determination to win. To this everything else—mercy, moderation, tact—was sacrificed. The avarice that so horrifies his critics was not simple greed: it was a quartermaster’s greed for his army. His massacre of the prisoners was not simple cruelty, but a deliberate reminder to Saladin to keep faith with the terms agreed to, which that great opponent understood and respected. The English King was in fact the only Frank Saladin had any respect for, and he once said: “If I should be fated to lose the Holy Land, I had rather lose it to Melec Ric than to any other.”

  Yet he did not take Jerusalem. Why? The blocked-up cisterns, the heat and diseases, the difficulty of supplying the army, of adapting tactics used on the fertile fields of France to the hostile hills and deserts of Palestine, all these were encountered by the First Crusade. What they did not have to contend with, as Richard did, was a great general in command of the enemy. Saladin was on home ground, he could call on armies from all sides of Palestine, and he was not himself weakened by enemies at his rear. But what really defeated Richard was the divided purpose of his own allies, whose overriding concern was their mutual rivalries. Conrad, Marquis of Tyre, defected to the enemy. The French King pulled out, either because he could not stand being in the shadow of Richard’s glory or because he always intended to get home first and grab Richard’s French possessions. His defection was not an unmixed loss, for, as Saladin’s brother said, “Richard was hindered by the King of France like a cat with a hammer tied to his tail.”

  The fifteen months from the fall of Acre in July 1191 to Richard’s departure in October 1192 was spent in pushing down the coast against repeated enemy raids until Jaffa, the base for the march against Jerusalem, could be reached; in pauses for negotiation; in side campaigns against Ascalon and Darum; and in two fruitless attempts to take the Holy City in the hills.

  The southward march from Acre down the old Roman coast road depended on meeting the supply fleet at frequent intervals. Richard planned the march with great care. The army, consisting of five main corps of Templars, Bretons and Angevins, Boitevins, Normans, and English, and lastly Hospitallers, was divided into three longitudinal groups. Furthest inland marched the infantry, to protect the whole against the frequent ambushes of the enemy swooping down from the hills. In the middle were the cavalry; and nearest the sea was the heavy burdened baggage train. The royal standard of England, borne on a covered wagon drawn by four horses, moved in the center, but the King himself generally rode up and down inspecting arrangements and keeping order. Because of the heat he confined the march to the early morning, covering only eight or ten miles a day and resting over a full twenty-four hours every other day. The slow pace was necessitated by the midsummer heat, the weakened condition of the army, and the heavy loss of pack animals sustained at Acre; half the infantry had to carry the baggage and tents on their own backs, changing places with the fighting infantry for relief. For protection against the constant shower of arrows from the enemy the Crusaders wore thick felt cassocks over their mailed shirts, and Bohadin tells of the awe with which the Turks saw the Franks march along unharmed with five or ten arrows apiece sticking out from their backs. Under the burning rays of the sun many dropped dead from the heat, and others fainted and had to be transported by sea. At each evening’s halt a designated herald stood up in the midst of the host and cried out “Sanctum Sepulchrum adjuva!” (Help us, Holy Sepulchre!) The host took up the cry, repeating it three times, stretching their arms to heaven, weeping copiously, and, according to IRR, deriving relief and refreshment from the ceremony.

  As they crept down the coast they knew each day’s march brought them closer to the pitched battle that Saladin must launch if he were to stop them from reaching Jaffa. Advance cavalry units of the Turks pricked at the slow phalanx, trying to tease them into battle, it being Saladin’s strategy to divide and scatter the Christians over the plains where his rushing horsemen could cut them down. Richard was determined to keep a solid formation that would protect the supply wagons and force the Turks into battle at close quarters. Nerves were strung ever more tensely as they marched, each man sensing in his bones the silent gathering of vast hordes behind the hills. It took Richard’s sternest discipline to prevent the overtaut corps commanders from dashing out to engage the enemy prematurely.

  At last, eleven miles above Jaffa, at a place called Arsuf the moment came. Unable to contain themselves, the Hospitallers broke ranks and charged the Turks. “King Richard,” says IRR, “on seeing his army in motion flew on his horse through the Hospitallers and broke into the Turkish infantry who were astonished at his blows and those of his men and gave way to the right and left.” But they regrouped and massed for a charge. “All over the face of the land you could see the well ordered bands of Turks, myriads of banners, of mailed men alone there appeared to be more than twenty thousand.… They swept down swifter than eagles, turning the air black with dust raised by their horses, howling their battle cries and sounding the blast of trumpets.” The King was wounded by a spear thrust in the left side, but the solid ranks of the infantry withstood the charge, kneeling on one knee with spears advanced while behind them the ballista, a dart-throwing engine on wheels, was brought into action. Although the battle raged all day, the Turks never broke through, and at last they withdrew over ground slippery with blood and strewn with corpses.

  Now the armies had met and tested each other’s strength in open combat. After this battle Saladin realized that he could not halt the Crusaders’ march; but by retreating and playing for time he could outstay them. He withdrew the garrisons from all the fortresses to the south even down to Ascalon, for he had no desire to leave each to be another Acre. Only Darum, the last stronghold on the way to Egypt, was left garrisoned; but Richard took it in a four days’ siege.

  From this point on, when a united, all-out effort to take Jerusalem might well have succeeded, the Crusade began to fall apart. First the French insisted on remaining in Jaffa to fortify its walls and incidentally enjoy the luxuries of city life after the hardships of the field. When the insistence of the others finally prevailed and an attempt on Jerusalem was made at the New Year, the Duke of Burgundy retreated within sight of the city and ul
timately took himself off altogether. Other groups fell away to return to Acre or to join the traitorous Conrad at Tyre. Even the Templars and Hospitallers counseled against taking Jerusalem lest they be left alone afterwards to fight the surrounding Turks. Richard himself, tormented ever since Philips’ desertion by the thought of what his rival and his brother John might be doing behind his back, was in a hurry to return to his kingdom lest there be no kingdom left to return to.