The Lionheart continued to cultivate a close relationship with al-Adil through the remainder of his time in the Holy Land. The king also made efforts to befriend and influence other leading members of Saladin’s inner circle. These included the Kurdish warlord Saif al-Din al-Mashtub, who had commanded the Muslim garrison at Acre, and the Turcoman commander Badr al-Din Dildirim. Both men actively promoted Richard’s interests during the prolonged negotiations through the summer of 1192 that finally brought the Third Crusade to a conclusion and acted as guarantors of the subsequent Treaty of Jaffa, finalized on 2 September.
Not all of King Richard’s efforts in the realm of diplomacy ended in success or advantage, however. Indeed, his most infamous act during the entire crusade resulted from a breakdown in negotiations. When the port city of Acre surrendered to the crusaders on 12 July 1191, Richard and Philip Augustus took around 3,000 surviving members of its Muslim garrison captive. The deal struck to secure Acre’s capitulation specified that these prisoners would only be freed in exchange for a cash payment of 200,000 gold dinars, the return of the sacred relic of the True Cross captured at Hattin and the release of a sizeable number of Christians currently languishing in Muslim captivity, including 1,500 Franks ‘of common, unremarkable background’ and around 200 named men of rank. Saladin would have just one month to fulfil these punitive terms.16
Ten days later, King Philip suddenly announced his intention to depart for Western Europe and the sole responsibility for leading the crusade fell to Richard. From this point onwards, time became an essential component of the Lionheart’s calculations. Once his Capetian rival reached France, there was every chance he would try to invade Angevin territory or lure John into a damaging conspiracy. Each passing day spent in the Holy Land only increased the possibility that when Richard did eventually return home he would find his realm in ruins. The Lionheart was also conscious of the changing seasons. In the midst of full summer, it might be possible to press on with the campaign, prosecuting an invasion of Palestine and even a direct assault on Jerusalem. But if the expedition stalled at Acre, the onset of autumn and winter would severely impede any offensive.
With these considerations in mind, Richard had to weigh the need for action against his desire to see the Acre agreement discharged. Needless to say, Saladin must also have been only too conscious of what was at stake, and plagued by imponderable questions. What level of delay might Richard tolerate? Were 3,000 Muslim lives worth more than the chance to stop the crusade in its tracks? Embassies shuttled between the two camps through late July and into August, but at this early stage in the campaign there was still a high degree of uncertainty and suspicion at play. Each protagonist was yet to gain a clear sense of the other’s temperament. Negotiations eventually broke down when Saladin began to equivocate over terms of payment, and the original deadline of 12 August passed without any resolution. It may be that the sultan was struggling to gather the money and captives required, but it is equally possible that he simply imagined he could safely string Richard along for a few more weeks. If that was his calculation, then he made a dreadful error of judgement.
On the afternoon of 20 August 1191, the Lionheart marched out on to the plains of Acre, leading some 2,700 prisoners – the bulk of the city’s Muslim garrison – all bound in ropes. There, beneath the waning summer sun, he ordered his troops to butcher them to a man in cold blood, and then returned to the port, leaving the ground littered with mutilated corpses. Of all Richard’s deeds, this massacre is perhaps the most controversial: a chilling act of slaughter that in the modern era would be classed as a war crime. Some historians have condemned it out of hand as base barbarism – a product of the Lionheart’s brutish nature. Others have seen Richard’s supposedly intemperate nature at work, arguing that blind rage or impatient fury lay behind the killings. To properly assess the king’s actions, however, they must be judged within their medieval context.
A number of significant details emerge from the twelfth-and thirteenth-century accounts of the massacre. Predictably, the view from within Saladin’s camp was condemnatory. One Muslim eyewitness described Richard as an ‘accursed man’, observing that the slaughter was the cause of ‘great sorrow and distress’. But the same chronicler went on to seek a rational explanation for the Lionheart’s decision, noting that the Angevin king acted only after he saw that ‘the sultan hesitated’ to fulfil the terms of the surrender agreement, and theorizing that Richard may have been moved to eliminate most of the garrison because he ‘did not think it wise to leave that number [of Muslim prisoners] in his rear’ when marching on into Palestine.17
Perhaps the most surprising feature of much of the contemporary Western evidence for these events is that it seems utterly unconcerned to defend the Lionheart against possible accusations of senseless or excessive brutality. If the king’s behaviour were to be impugned, it was not on grounds of savagery, but because he might be accused of breaking a promise of safe conduct to captives – a dishonourable act that contravened chivalric custom. Richard’s own description of the massacre, preserved in a letter dated 1 October 1191, strove to protect his reputation by explaining that when ‘the time-limit [for reparations] expired … the pact which [Saladin] had agreed was entirely made void’. As a result, ‘we quite properly had the Saracens that we had in custody … put to death’. It would appear that what mattered above all to the Lionheart was his reputation.18
On balance, it seems unlikely that the Acre massacre was prompted by an uncontrolled fit of anger, not least because the carnage was far from indiscriminate, with all of the high-ranking Muslim captives spared in expectation of their eventual ransom. The killing was, in all likelihood, carefully premeditated – a sudden and terrible eruption of expedient violence, calculated to send Saladin a stark message of intent and to permit the crusade to progress. Even amid the endemic violence of the medieval world, and in the setting of a crusade, such a large-scale execution of captives was unusual. None the less, contemporary reactions to the event should not be exaggerated. In the immediate aftermath of the massacre, Saladin put a small number of Frankish prisoners to death, but the channels of diplomatic contact between the Latin and Muslim camps were reopened within just sixteen days.
Richard brought unrivalled resources, military expertise and an edge of icy resolve to the crusade. How then can his failure to achieve full victory – through Jerusalem’s reconquest and the recovery of the True Cross – be explained? To some extent, the crusade’s outcome was all but predetermined by the nature of the enemy he faced and the challenge he confronted. In terms of age and constitution, Saladin may have been past his best, but he remained a formidable opponent: resolute in his determination to defend the territorial gains made in the wake of his historic victory at Hattin; shrewd in his appreciation of what it might take to achieve lasting victory in the war for dominion of the Holy Land. The sultan had been unable to forestall the loss of Acre and was soundly outplayed by the Lionheart during the crusaders’ fighting march south to Jaffa. But in the face of these reversals, Saladin was wise enough to profoundly reshape Ayyubid strategy.
On 10 September 1191 – just three days after his humiliating defeat at the Battle of Arsuf – Saladin convened a council of war. Surrounded by his closest advisers, the sultan unveiled his new plan. If the Franks could not be stopped by direct attack, then the Muslims would shift on to the defensive, seeking to hamper, and ultimately halt, their advance. The sultan now resolved to play a waiting game, clear in the knowledge that one day soon King Richard and his crusaders would have to return to the West. In line with this policy, Saladin immediately took drastic steps to impede the Franks. On the routes inland, linking Jaffa to Jerusalem, every castle and fortified settlement was dismantled so that they could not be occupied and exploited by the Lionheart’s troops. The same radical ‘scorched-earth’ approach was extended to the town of Ascalon, around thirty miles south of Jaffa. This strategically vital port – the stepping stone to Ayyubid Egypt – was likely t
o be Richard’s next target. Should it fall into his hands, the king would be in a position to threaten both the Nile Delta and the Holy City. Saladin therefore took the painful but necessary decision to raze Ascalon’s defences to the ground, with al-Adil deputized to oversee the hurried demolition.
For the best part of the next year, Saladin withdrew the bulk of his army into Jerusalem and largely avoided direct armed confrontation with the Franks. He had rightly calculated that, in a protracted military campaign, the odds favoured the army fighting on home ground. The challenge for Richard, waging a war far from the Angevin realm, on the very fringes of Western Christian influence, was inevitably greater. Assiduous as his preparations had been, there was a limit to the wealth, material resources and manpower that he could deploy in the Levant. If the Lionheart failed to break the Ayyubid army or storm Jerusalem, at some point he would be forced to return home all but empty-handed. This meant that the odds were stacked in Saladin’s favour: he could fall back on a defensive strategy, while Richard would be forced to attack.
For all his skill as a general, it is also the case that King Richard struggled to master the art of crusader warfare. The armies who engaged in these Christian holy wars were, in some particular respects, distinct from other military forces. The heartfelt religious devotion that seems to have underpinned the motives of so many crusaders – their dreams of assured salvation and heavenly reward once Jerusalem was recaptured – could fuel ecstatic enthusiasm, empowering these troops with extraordinary resilience and near-feral ferocity. Time and again, crusader forces campaigning in the Levant proved able to endure untold hardship and horror, and showed a willingness to countenance terrible risks in pursuit of victory. The example had been set at the end of the eleventh century, when the First Crusaders survived the tortuous eight-month siege of Antioch and then gambled everything on a headlong march towards the Holy City, and the memory of their deeds still lingered in the minds of Richard’s troops.
Crusader armies were capable of staggering – and sometimes dark – deeds, and could overcome otherwise insurmountable odds. But they also were difficult to command and control. Through the course of the Third Crusade, King Richard I began to hone his already impressive skills as a military leader, but he also came to discover, much to his frustration, that many of the normal rules governing the conduct of war did not apply to a crusade.
In mid September 1191, after the successful march from Acre to Jaffa, the Lionheart looked to identify the expedition’s next target. With the fighting season drawing to a close, the wisest course of action – in strictly strategic terms – was probably to mount a raiding campaign into Egypt. Inflicting damage on the economic heartland of the Ayyubid realm would rob Saladin of much-needed wealth and material resources, and might even drive the sultan to the negotiating table. But although the precepts of military science indicated this as a preferred course of action, the bulk of Richard’s crusading army simply refused to participate in this attack, regarding it as an unnecessary diversion. They had not travelled across the face of the known world to battle on the Nile – their eyes were firmly fixed on the goal of reaching Jerusalem, and from their encampment at Jaffa the Holy City lay little more than thirty miles inland. The Lionheart relented and, through autumn and on into winter, began building towards an advance on Jerusalem. The fortresses destroyed by the Ayyubids were painstakingly rebuilt, defensible lines of supply and support carefully established.
By December 1191, the Latins’ incremental incursion into the Judean uplands had brought them as far as the small settlement of Beit Nuba, just twelve miles from Jerusalem. The weather was appalling, with driving rain and freezing temperatures, yet by all accounts troop morale was high. One Latin chronicler noted that the crusaders ‘had an indescribable yearning to see the Holy City and complete their pilgrimage’, while another eyewitness recalled that ‘no-one was angry or sad … everywhere was joy and happiness and [everyone] said together “God, now we are going on the right way, guided by Your grace” ’.19
These soldiers believed they were about to realize their cherished goal of launching a direct assault on Jerusalem, but Richard I’s inland march was not what it seemed. In fact, the best evidence suggests that the Lionheart never actually intended to attempt a winter siege of the Holy City. His plan seems to have been to mount a combined military and diplomatic offensive, using a build-up of troops in the Judean Hills to apply pressure while angling for a favourable negotiated settlement. Under normal conditions, a stratagem of this type made perfect sense, but in the midst of a crusade it proved to be a disastrous mistake. When it became apparent, in the first days of 1192, that no progress was being made, the Angevin king announced his intention to retreat back to the Mediterranean coast. This decision had a catastrophic impact on Christian morale. Even contemporary chroniclers who traditionally supported Richard admitted that ‘not since God created time was there ever seen an army so dejected and so depressed’.20
Fatal damage had been done to the expedition’s overall prospects for success, but the Lionheart went on to compound this error by agreeing to prosecute another half-hearted advance on Jerusalem in the early summer of 1192, once again reaching Beit Nuba on 10 June. By this point his grip over the crusade was faltering and, wracked by concerns about John’s treacherous behaviour in Europe, Richard was desperate to return home. Arguments raged within the Frankish camp, but the king – counselling that the sheer scale of the Holy City’s defences rendered any assault futile – eventually got his way. On 4 July 1192, precisely five years after the Battle of Hattin, the soldiers of the Third Crusade began their second retreat from Jerusalem.
King Richard’s failure to harness and direct the power of his crusading force contributed to the campaign’s final outcome. The strategic wisdom of his decision-making continues to be debated. Some have contended that even if the Holy City could somehow have been captured it could never be held, because the Franks did not control the surrounding network of fortresses and lacked the requisite manpower to resist an Ayyubid counter-attack. On these grounds, it is argued that the Lionheart made the right choice in January 1192 and again in July that same year.21
Given the limits of Richard’s knowledge, this is probably an appropriate assessment. But with the benefit of hindsight and, more importantly, access to eyewitness reports from inside Saladin’s camp, it is apparent that the Lionheart might in fact have been able to lead the Third Crusade to victory. The sultan’s strategy of largely avoiding direct military engagement with the Franks had kept his forces out of harm’s way, but the resultant inaction placed significant strain on his Muslim coalition. Questions were asked about Saladin’s leadership; allies became more reluctant to contribute to the jihad. And, after five years of extended campaigning, even some of the sultan’s own exhausted troops were showing signs of disillusionment.
Problems were already apparent in December 1191, when Saladin was able to garrison Jerusalem with only a relatively small force. By the following summer, the Ayyubids were approaching the point of collapse. The crusaders’ second advance on the Holy City caused a scouring crisis of confidence, with everyone inside Jerusalem – Saladin included – expecting that a direct assault was imminent. One well-placed Muslim eyewitness reported that, on the evening of 2 July, the sultan assembled his inner circle of advisers and lieutenants. After a long and heated debate, a shocking conclusion was reached: for his own safety, Saladin would abandon the Holy City, leaving behind only a token force. The next day, as preparations began for the withdrawal, the sultan was seen openly weeping as he led Friday prayer in the Aqsa Mosque.22 Less than twenty-four hours later, the crusaders began their retreat from Beit Nuba. Had Richard but known of the turmoil in the enemy camp and Saladin’s plan to quit the field, he might have pressed on to seize Jerusalem. Such a setback could well have shattered the sultan’s already faltering hold over the Muslim alliance, plunging Near Eastern Islam into disarray and enabling the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem to be reconstituted.
As it was, the Holy City remained in Muslim hands.
In the aftermath of the second withdrawal from Beit Nuba, negotiations to secure an end to hostilities began in earnest. Through the summer both sides continued to jockey for position. Having received an influx of reinforcements from northern Syria, Saladin launched his short-lived campaign to snatch back Jaffa. With that assault thwarted, Richard briefly appeared to be in the ascendant, but in mid August the king once again fell gravely ill with a debilitating fever. Confined to his bed, the Lionheart could do nothing but agree to a peace.
By the terms of the Treaty of Jaffa, finalized on 2 September 1192, the two sides agreed to a three-year truce. Saladin retained possession of Jerusalem, but granted unarmed Christian pilgrims access to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. For their part, the Franks held on to the narrow strip of coastal territory running north from Jaffa to Tyre that had been conquered during the crusade.fn3 This precious foothold formed the basis of a new Latin kingdom – with Acre as its capital – that would survive for almost a hundred years.
Once he was well enough to travel, Richard I began to plan for his departure. The Third Crusade was far from an abject failure, but ultimately the Lionheart had been denied the outright victory he craved. On 9 October 1192, sixteen months after he first arrived in the Levant, the Angevin king set sail for Europe. As the long journey began, he is said to have looked backed one last time upon the Holy Land, offering up a prayer that he might one day return to complete the work of reconquest.23 Ironically, his opponent and nemesis died just five months later. Exhausted by years of war and the hard-fought struggle to retain Jerusalem, Saladin passed away on 3 March 1193 at the age of fifty-five. By the time news of the great sultan’s demise reached the West, however, King Richard was confined in a German prison.
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