The Glory of the Crusades

by Steve Weidenkopf

  Philip was ill and upset that Richard received most of the glory and recognition for ending the siege at Acre. He also desired to gain control of Richard’s land holdings in France, although before he left he had sworn that he would not do so upon his return.336 Philip was heavily criticized in France for leaving the Crusade, just as previous deserters had been. Although he stressed the illness he contracted at Acre as a main reason for his departure, this was not considered a legitimate excuse to leave the Crusade—to retreat from battle, yes, but not from a Crusade. The Crusade vow was a sacred oath that medieval people believed could not be easily ignored or left unfulfilled. Regardless of the reason for his departure, “Philip’s actions left a sour taste for generations.”337

  The March of the Lion-Hearted

  Less than a week after the massacre of Muslim prisoners, Richard ordered his army to leave Acre and march eighty miles to the port city of Jaffa. Controlling Jaffa was necessary for logistical supply before any assault on Jerusalem. Saladin’s army shadowed the Crusaders and repeatedly tried to harass them into an open battle. Richard countered by forming his army into a hollow formation in which the cavalry was placed inside a protective box of infantry on one side and the coast on the other.338

  This formation required strict discipline and coordination between cavalry and infantry. The Crusaders marched in three divisions with the Hospitallers in the rear and Templars in the vanguard, and the Mediterranean protecting their western flank. When the eastern flank of infantry grew weary from the harassing Muslims’ constant arrow barrage, a complicated maneuver of replacement occurred with forces marching along the coast.

  Richard’s fleet followed the progress of the army offshore, providing relief and supplies when needed. Although the Crusaders exhibited great endurance and discipline, the march was very slow, and there were many wounded from the Muslim attacks, including Richard. The situation could not continue without decisive action. Saladin needed to force a confrontation before Richard arrived at Jaffa. He decided to order a general attack outside the town of Arsuf.

  The Battle of Arsuf

  The Crusaders broke camp and began the march to Arsuf on the morning of September 7, 1191. It was an extremely hot day and Saladin hoped to utilize a familiar tactic of attacking at the end of the day when soldiers were “tired, thirsty, and eager to claim a good spot for their tent.”339 His light cavalry would harass the Crusader line in the hopes of provoking a disorganized counter-charge, which would allow Saladin’s archers to finish off Richard’s army. Richard’s plan was to withstand the archers’ volleys while maintaining ranks and, when the Muslims engaged for close combat on tired horses, he would order a mass cavalry charge and win the day. Saladin ordered the attack and the Muslims rode to battle with a deafening roar designed to strike fear in the hearts of the Crusaders.340

  The battle grew in intensity and the situation became desperate in the section commanded by Garnier de Naples, the grand master of the Hospitallers, who sent messengers to Richard requesting permission to order a charge to alleviate the Muslim pressure. Richard refused because he wanted to wait for the right moment and order a general charge across the line. The Muslim attacks began to take their toll, forcing Garnier to ride to Richard personally and request, once again, permission to charge. A second time Richard refused.

  Shortly thereafter, the Muslim infantry supporting the harassing cavalry broke contact, which allowed the Muslim cavalry to charge the Crusader ranks. Garnier was concerned they would break the Crusader line, so he ordered a counter-charge.

  The Hospitallers’ offensive attack was so sudden that the infantry on the left wing failed to move out of the way in the melee. Seeing the charge, Richard seized the opportunity and finally ordered the general cavalry charge.

  It was at the exact moment when Saladin’s forces were unprepared for it. Across the battlefield, many Muslim cavalry troops had dismounted to shoot arrows at the Crusaders. The general Crusader charge caught them unawares and unprepared to withstand such an onslaught. Muslim infantry and cavalry elements were smashed in the charge and fled in a disorganized retreat. Some Crusader units chased after the fleeing Muslims, but Richard ordered a halt in order to disengage and fall back in good order to Arsuf.

  Richard noted the great victory was achieved on the vigil of the Nativity of the Blessed Mother and gave thanks to God and to her intercession.341 Saladin never again risked open battle with a Crusader force under the command of Richard the Lion-Hearted.

  Richard’s Three Options

  After the Battle of Arsuf, Richard’s army continued their march and arrived at the port city of Jaffa to rest and resupply. At this point in the campaign, Richard realized he had three options.

  He could continue the march to Jerusalem, which was the main objective of the Crusade, but success depended on the defense of a long supply chain and a risky siege. The Crusaders could march to Ascalon instead of Jerusalem. Richard knew Saladin had destroyed the defensive works of the city and withdrawn his forces to defend Jerusalem, leaving Ascalon easily conquerable. Controlling the gateway to Egypt would divide Saladin’s empire in half, open a two-front war and put the Muslims squarely on the defensive. However, Richard knew the rank and file wanted to go to Jerusalem and were not interested in what they would see as a diversion to another city. His third option was to pursue some semblance of a diplomatic solution with Saladin, in the hope that he could negotiate the return of the Holy City. All of the options involved risk and reward, and none was clearly more favorable than another. So, Richard “pursued a game of two-handed chess … military action shadowing detailed negotiations.”342

  By January of 1192, Richard controlled the coastal plain between Jaffa and the Judean hills. Richard’s advance was now at a crossroads, and the Crusade leaders needed to determine their next move. The Hospitallers and Templars argued against an attack on Jerusalem because the supply line would be stretched too thin, and the Crusader force would suffer attacks from the besieged city and from Muslim forces trying to relieve pressure on it. The weather was terrible and conditions were not favorable for a siege. Richard recognized that even if his force liberated Jerusalem, his troops would eventually leave, and the native lords did not possess the manpower to withstand the inevitable Saladin counterattack. The nobles agreed that the only wise military course of action was to withdraw and march to Ascalon. So, “rash in battle, cautious in politics, but expert in military science, on 13 January Richard gave the order to withdraw.”343

  Although it was not the popular decision, Richard made his choice in order to keep his options open. In his mind, he was not abandoning Jerusalem, but biding time for a more advantageous opportunity to besiege the city. However, the rank and file did not view the withdrawal through the same lens. For them, the decision not to besiege Jerusalem was devastating.

  In early September 1192, Richard entered into a three-year truce with Saladin. The Treaty of Jaffa maintained Muslim control of Jerusalem, but allowed Christians free access to the city. Most of the Crusaders used the truce to fulfill their vows by going to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem before departing for home. Richard was not among them. He had sworn to restore Jerusalem to Christ, and would not visit it until he had done so. His decision may have illustrated his belief that the Crusade was not complete, but only suspended until he could return and finish it.344

  The Departure of Richard

  Richard departed for home from Acre on October 9. Despite the favorable treaty with Saladin, the objectives of the Crusade were not achieved, and his earlier promise to remain in the Holy Land until Easter 1193 had been broken. He decided to travel overland since winter weather in the Mediterranean made sea travel difficult. While traveling near Vienna in late December, he was captured by the forces of Duke Leopold V of Austria, who imprisoned him to avenge an insult at the siege of Acre in 1191. Leopold was also a close ally of the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI, who was not friendly with Richard. Leopold had every incentive to hold th
e king of England, and when given the opportunity, did so willingly.

  Eventually Leopold turned Richard over to Henry VI, who moved him to Worms where he was held for fourteen months until February 1194. Pope Celestine III (r. 1191–1198) excommunicated Henry VI for his incarceration of Richard, since the Church afforded Crusaders the protection and safety of their person and property. Richard was released after a ransom of 150,000 marks was paid (the equivalent of 65,000 pounds of pure silver, three times the annual income of the whole of England). The English people raised the ransom via taxes for the rest of Richard’s reign.345

  Richard had promised to remain in the Holy Land until Easter 1193, but left in the fall of 1192. Since Saladin died on March 4, 1193—three weeks before Easter—one of history’s most tempting “what if” questions can be asked of the Third Crusade. The idea of the Lion-Hearted commanding a potent Crusader military force against a Muslim world in disarray following the death of the great sultan leaves the historian imagining what might have been had the king of England kept his promise. Had Richard only stayed until Easter, it is likely that the Third Crusade would have been the most successful of all Crusades, and the entire history of the Crusading movement would have changed.

  Saladin’s Legacy

  The great sultan who united the Muslim world in Outrémer and whose conviction for jihad won great victories for Islam died as a result of a life filled with rigorous fasting and the hardships of years spent in the saddle. Saladin’s death left unfulfilled his life’s greatest desire: to carry the war to Europe and conquer Rome and Constantinople. Ibn Shaddad records Saladin saying in 1189 that once the “Franks” were kicked out of Outrémer he wanted “to set sail to their islands to pursue them there until there no longer remain on the face of the earth any who deny God.”346

  By any assessment, Saladin’s life was a success and his legacy reached far beyond the years after his death. He was “born the son of a displaced Kurdish mercenary in the service of Zengi of Mosul, he died the creator and ruler of an empire that embraced Iraq, Syria, Arabia, and Egypt, the effective overlord of the Fertile Crescent, a successful dynast whose arriviste family became the political masters of the Near East for over half a century.”347

  It is one of history’s great ironies, then, that Saladin became better known in the collective memory of Europe and Christendom than in the Islamic world. From the Third Crusade to the modern world, the name of Saladin in the West engendered a vision of the perfect knight, perhaps even a secret Christian who was a noble heathen, tolerant and the champion of freedom. This vision is far from the actual man and his exploits, but legend, once enshrined, is hard to remove.

  It was the Enlightenment that cemented the modern-day vision of Saladin among Westerners, with eighteenth-century writers building a false image of Saladin that persists to this day. Voltaire helped craft the image of the tolerant and noble heathen in a 1756 essay in which he contrasted the generosity of Saladin with the miserliness of Christian leaders.348 The myth of the tolerant and benevolent ruler, however, gives way to the reality that Egyptian Jews and Christians were treated better under the Fatimid caliphs, whom Saladin overthrew.

  Yet this myth of Saladin persists in the west and continues to shape the memory of the Crusades:

  [T]he reality and myth of Saladin epitomize the Western consciousness of Islam and the Middle East as a whole, shaped by centuries of received information, misinformation, and fantasy… . here was a Kurd who rose to power in a world dominated by Turks, a Sunni who used a Shi’ite caliphate to launch his rise to fame, a unifier of a world fragmented by religion, ethnicity, and even by the very landscape, a counter-crusader whose largest fan base has always resided in Christendom.349

  The Death of the Lion-Hearted

  Richard returned home from the Crusade after four years of illness, stress, victories, defeats, and a long imprisonment at the hands of the holy Roman emperor. His life and reign continued for another three years until he died on March 26, 1199. While besieging the castle of a rebel, Richard met his end in one of the most perplexing examples of literally lowering one’s guard.

  Inspecting the siege progress at twilight, Richard noticed on the ramparts of the castle a lone figure: a common soldier with a crossbow, whose only protection was a frying pan. Awed by the man’s audacity and courage, Richard lowered his shield and clapped in applause. Richard’s display of chivalrous acknowledgment did not impress the enemy soldier, who dropped his frying pan and let loose his bolt. The “extraordinarily well-aimed shot” hit Richard in the left shoulder.350 An unskilled surgeon attempted to remove the arrowhead, but the tissue damage from the surgery was extensive. Gangrene set into the wound.

  Knowing his end was near, the great monarch made preparations for his death. He pardoned the crossbowman (the pardon was ignored upon Richard’s death, and the soldier was flayed alive and hanged), confessed his sins, received the Sacrament of Extreme Unction, and died two weeks later at the age of forty-two.351 He left no children, and so the throne of England passed to his brother John, who became perhaps the worst monarch in English history.352

  The great Crusader who nearly succeeded against all odds in liberating Jerusalem was dead, but the Crusading movement was not. Several more major Crusades would launch in the future, and Christendom would see the rise of another ruler vigorously committed to the Crusade, who was more than a lion-hearted man: He was a saint.

  273 Ibn Munir of Tripoli was a Palestinian poet in the service of the Muslim ruler Nur al-Din. Ibn Munir of Tripoli, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives trans. C. Hillenbrand, (Edinburgh: 1999), 150, in Tyerman, God’s War, 344.

  274 Opening lines of Audita Tremendi.

  275 William of Tyre, A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea, trans. E.A. Babcock and A.C. Krey (New York: 1976, reprint of 1941 ed.), ii, 407–408 in Tyerman, God’s War, 343.

  276 Hannes Möhring, Saladin—The Sultan and His Times, 1138–1193, trans. David S. Bachrach, intro and preface Paul M. Cobb (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), xviii.

  277 Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch. LIX.

  278 Francesco Gabrieli, Arab Historians of the Crusades (Routledge: New York, 1969), 100 in Madden, The New Concise History of the Crusades, 69.

  279 Möhring, Saladin, 29.

  280 Tyerman, God’s War, 349.

  281 Möhring, Saladin, 31.

  282 Ibid., 36.

  283 Tyerman, God’s War, 353.

  284 David Nicolle, Hattin 1187—Saladin’s Greatest Victory (Oxford, UK: Osprey Publishing, 1993), 48.

  285 Tyerman, God’s War, 356.

  286 The apt description of the effects of Baldwin’s leprosy is found in Tyerman, God’s War, 356. The king, at times, was too sick to even stand, so he marched with his army while being carried on a litter.

  287 Madden, New Concise History of the Crusades, 72.

  288 Marriage was frequently used by medieval nobility as an avenue for power, and although the Church taught the indissolubility of the sacrament, the teaching was not always perfectly lived, especially during dynastic disputes.

  289 Tyerman, God’s War, 365.

  290 Nicolle, Hattin 1187, 56.

  291 Seward, The Monks of War, 53.

  292 Tyerman indicates Saladin had a 30,000-man army (God’s War, 368), whereas Seward believes it was 60,000 strong (The Monks of War, 53).

  293 Tyerman, God’s War, 368.

  294 Nicolle, Hattin 1187, 65.

  295 Ibid., 64.

  296 Ibid., 79.

  297 Ibn al-Athir in Seward, The Monks of War, 54.

  298 Nicolle, Hattin 1187, 79.

  299 Tyerman, God’s War, 371.

  300 Nicolle, Hattin 1187, 88.

  301 France, Western Warfare, 224.

  302 John France, “The Second Crusade—War Cruel and Unremitting”, in Crusades—The Illustrated History, ed. Thomas F. Madden (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2004), 76.

  303 Ibn al-Athir in Ma
alouf, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, 198. In Ridley Scott’s 2005 film, Kingdom of Heaven, Balian of Ibelin is the main character and is portrayed by Orlando Bloom. This historical scene of Balian staring down and threatening Saladin is ripe for a great on-screen portrayal. Unfortunately, the reality is watered down to fit the preconceived erroneous notions of the Crusades held by the director, producer, and writer. It was but one great opportunity lost in the film.

  304 Grousset, The Epic of the Crusades, 173.

  305 Möhring indicates 7,000–8,000 were sold (Saladin, 66). France in Madden’s Illustrated History of the Crusades provides a figure of 15,000 (p. 77).

  306 Möhring, Saladin, 67.

  307 Stark, God’s Battalions, 198.

  308 Gregory VIII, Audita Tremendi in Riley-Smith, The Crusades, 137.

  309 Tyerman, God’s War, 374.

  310 Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi, The Chronicle of the Third Crusade, trans. H. Nicholson, (Aldershot: 2001), 48, in Tyerman, God’s War, 396.

  311 Tyerman, God’s War, 398.

  312 David Nicolle, The Third Crusade 1191—Richard the Lionheart, Saladin and the Struggle for Jerusalem (Oxford, UK: Osprey Publishing, 2005), 43.

  313 There is some debate in academic circles over whether Isaac actually entered into the treaty. Riley-Smith (The Crusades, 139) and Madden (The New Concise History of the Crusades, 80) agree he did but Savva Neocleous in “The Byzantines and Saladin: Opponents of the Third Crusade?,” Crusades, vol. 9, The Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2010), 87–106, argues differently. Neocleous believes there was no formal alliance between Isaac and Saladin but rather an informal cooperation due to Isaac’s belief that Frederick’s real objective was Constantinople not Jerusalem. He writes, “[T]he purported Byzantine-Muslim collusion against the Third Crusade was a myth created by the Latins to make sense of Isaak’s efforts to destroy the Germans.” Regardless, the facts clearly show Isaac was an active antagonist of the Third Crusade, and his efforts clearly hindered German progress on the march.