Richard & John: Kings at War

by McLynn, Frank

  2. The Mediterranean and Palestine, showing Richard’s journey during the Crusade

  8

  ON 5 JUNE RICHARD and his knights, in company with Guy of Lusignan and his entourage, set sail from Famagusta for the short trip to the Asian mainland. He landed near the great castle of Margat and handed Isaac over to the Knights of St John. Continuing south, he was at Tyre next day, but the garrison, acting on orders from Conrad of Montferrat, refused him admission.1 On the final leg to Acre, Richard’s fleet intercepted a huge Muslim supply ship from Beirut, a massive three-masted red and yellow buss. It was packed with troops, said to number 350, and to have as cargo one hundred camel-loads of weapons, quantities of Greek fire in bottles, and two hundred poisonous snakes, which were to be used in the old Byzantine way as missiles to be hurled at the enemy from catapults.2 With a favourable wind this vessel should easily have been able to evade Richard’s twenty galleys but, as luck would have it, the wind dropped, allowing the crusaders to close with it. At first the Muslim ship inflicted losses through greater long-range missile power, but Richard urged on his men, they grappled, and soon the enemy vessel was sinking. The crusaders claimed the credit, but Muslim sources allege that the captain simply scuttled his craft once he saw that capture was inevitable.3 Out of a large ship’s complement, maybe three hundred men when we have scaled down the usual medieval exaggerations, only about thirty-five escaped drowning when Richard chivalrously plucked them from the waves. There is no doubt that this exploit lost nothing in the telling and was ‘talked up’ by the chroniclers, to the point where it is alleged that Acre would not have fallen if the ship had got through.4 Yet the psychological effect was undeniable. In his first action against the Saracens Richard had scored a victory and this augured well. Philip’s arrival two months earlier with an exiguous force had greatly encouraged the Muslims, and he had not made much of an impression thereafter, despite the ludicrous assertion of his propagandists that Acre would have fallen by his efforts alone had he not chivalrously decided to delay the final assault until Richard’s arrival.5 The plain truth is that Philip’s attack on the Accursed Tower was a failure, with the defenders managing to burn some of his siege engines. Even filling up the ditches on the city’s approaches cost the Christians dear, and they were reduced to throwing their dead into the fosse to make a more solid foundation. Philip as augur of ill-fortune seemed confirmed by a singular bad omen: his rare and magnificent white falcon, his pride and joy, flew away from him, ignored calls to return and perched defiantly on the walls of Acre.6

  Richard’s arrival at Acre on 8 June, with twenty-five ships, heartened the Frankish attackers and dismayed the Saracens. Since Arab historians say that each one of the vessels was ‘as big as a citadel’, scholars wonder whether he had not re-equipped his fleet in Cyprus and even built a new kind of ship, maybe something like the galleys of the fifteenth century.7 But the simple fact that he had secured a supply line to Cyprus, arrived with massive reinforcements, and won a naval battle into the bargain, pitched the Christians into euphoria. The night of 8-9 June saw the crusader camp a riot of celebration, as drunken soldiery danced dizzily by the light of flambeaux or flickering bonfires. The spirits of the Saracens drooped correspondingly.8 Yet Richard still awaited most of his transports carrying the siege engines, and for this reason declined the French king’s proposal that they launch a joint attack immediately. Sullenly Philip ordered the offensive anyway; Richard’s troops simply guarded the flanks and outer trenches against any Muslim counter-attack. As Richard had foreseen, the unilateral French assault failed, even though Geoffrey de Lusignan distinguished himself in the action and won a reputation as the finest knight in the field.9 Meanwhile Richard’s fleet intercepted a Saracen flotilla from Beirut bringing supplies and 700 fighting men; the destruction of these ships cast the Arabs further into despondency. There were ferocious attacks on Acre on 9, 14 and 18 June by Philip which petered out in the midday heat, but finally Richard’s siege engines and trebuchets arrived from Tyre, and the pressure on the city intensified. Richard even had a new kind of stone he had brought from Cyprus which did not shatter on impact and was thus a more lethal artillery. His tactics were twofold. While his offensive concentrated on demolishing the Accursed Tower by artillery bombardments and undermining, he aimed to demoralise the defenders by sheer attrition, since the crusaders now had superior numbers and equipment. By 24 June the Acre garrison was desperate and on the point of surrender.10

  Suddenly Acre had an eleventh-hour reprieve when Richard went down with a serious illness, followed shortly by Philip. The chroniclers refer to the malady that struck down both kings as Arnaldia or Leonardie and speak of a fever that caused hair and nails to fall out, which has led some historians to mention scurvy or trench mouth. But Vincent’s disease or trench mouth is a fairly minor disease resulting from poor diet and lack of Vitamin C, and the same applies to scurvy. Since Richard had recently been living off the fat of the land in Cyprus, a land rich in meat and fruit, this diagnosis seems unlikely. It was probably either some form of the plague that had devastated the Christian armies at Acre or, in Richard’s case, a recurrence of a chronic illness that manifested itself in the form of pallor and swellings.11 Whatever the aetiology of the illness, by 28 June it had taken an acute form and Richard’s life was thought to be in danger. He spent his invalid days parleying with Saladin about a possible face-to-face meeting, both of them alone and without followers. At first Saladin brushed this aside, saying that kings who talked together could not afterwards fight one another. When Richard persisted with the idea, Saladin replied enigmatically: ‘He does not understand my language and I do not understand his.’ When Richard offered, through his envoy-interpreter, to send Saladin a gift of falcons and hunting dogs, in return for chickens, the Saracens began to suspect that the rumour that the English king was stricken with a serious illness were true, for the demand for chickens signified a concern for an invalid’s diet.12 By 6 July Richard was sufficiently on the mend to ask to be carried to the front line on a litter so that he could direct siege operations. By now he was anyway convinced that Saladin was stalling and playing for time. Two days earlier three of his envoys had been taken on a grand tour of the 7,000 cookshops and 1,000 baths that Saladin provided for his troops - a clear case, in Richard’s mind, of obfuscation of the issues through concentration on unnecessary detail. But in reality both sides were play-acting and shadow-boxing. As the Arab historian and eyewitness Baha al-Din rightly remarked: ‘The object of these frequent visits was to ascertain the state of our morale and we were induced to receive the enemy’s messages by the same motive that prompted them.’13

  Once returned to health, Richard pressed the assault on Acre with even more vehemence. A major attempt on the city on 2 July forced Saladin to attack the crusader camp to relieve the pressure. The Christian kings responded by making Richard’s men responsible for warding off attacks from Saladin while the French concentrated on bringing Acre to its knees. Next day, Philip’s miners finally brought down a section of wall next to the Accursed Tower, but French troops, crossing sharp, piercing rubble, could advance only at a snail’s pace, which allowed the Saracens to regroup and beat them off with heavy losses.14 But it was a short-lived pyrrhic victory. By now Frankish numerical superiority was such that they could ‘spell’ their combat troops, resting one regiment while another attacked, yet the Arabs in Acre had no such luxury and had to fight non-stop. A garrison commander came out under a flag of truce to discuss surrender terms but Philip either acted in a high-handed manner or his interpreter portrayed him as doing so, for the commander ended by storming back to Acre in disgust. By 4 July the defenders were so desperate that they tried to cut their way out and link up with Saladin, but the crusaders were forewarned and nipped this attempt in the bud.15 Saladin refused to give up, though his situation was increasingly parlous. He had to deal with a mutiny when some of his regiments refused to continue with the futile assaults on the strongly-defended crusader camp
and accused him of ruining Islam itself by his fanatical preoccupation with Acre. Others inside Acre were voting with their feet: on the night of 3 July three high-ranking emirs in the city simply panicked, deserted their posts and escaped in a small boat. Nevertheless, Saladin still retained his core of fanatics. Yet another French attack on the Accursed Tower on 7 July was thrown back with heavy losses, and the triumphant defenders sent a message to Saladin that they would fight to the death. 16 Richard and the Pisans tried their hand at the Accursed Tower on 11 July, yet even they were beaten off, though coming very close to success. But this proved to be Acre’s last hurrah. As Baha al-Din expressed it: ‘The breach in the walls was now very large and they feared that every one of them would be put to the sword if the city were carried by storm.’ On 12 July Acre surrendered.17

  The terms of surrender were precise and had been the subject of some agonised and protracted discussions even while the siege was in progress. The garrison commander who had been so brutally rebuffed by King Philip asked for the lives of the defenders to be spared, pointing out that quarter had always been granted to Franks in previous battles; obviously his nervousness was caused by Saladin’s brutality towards the Templars and Hospitallers after Hattin. This point was now conceded, provided the Acre men accepted Christian baptism, and the lives of all women and children were spared, on condition that Acre paid 200,000 dinars in ransom, and that Saladin released 1,500 Christian prisoners and two hundred named individuals and restored the Holy Cross.18 This was an improvement on Saladin’s previous ‘final offer’ which merely proposed a one-one exchange of garrison members for Christian captives, but it stopped short of the crusader ‘impossibilist’ demand that Saladin restore all the lost lands of Outremer. The Christian baptism proviso turned into farce when the released Arabs went through a nominal conversion, then joined Saladin and denounced their forced apostasy, after which Richard and Philip agreed it was pointless to continue with this charade.19 Probably the break-through condition negotiated by Richard and Philip was that Saladin hand over the whole of his fleet at Acre, some seventy ships - an inference strengthened by the fact that the Egyptian crews intercepted at sea did not burn or scuttle their ships. By this action Saladin conceded that control of the Mediterranean would be totally Christian and that his attempt to contest Italian hegemony in the eastern areas of the sea was a mistake.20 Yet other chroniclers maintain that Saladin and the defenders of Acre were not in contact over the agreement of the final surrender terms and that these conditions - which he had no choice but to accept as a fait accompli - came as a severe shock to him. It is hard to see how Acre itself could have implemented the surrender of the intact Egyptian fleet without consulting Saladin but, under pretence of the need for ‘clarification’ Saladin asked for time in which to approve and ratify the hastily agreed terms. The clause whereby Conrad of Montferrat was to receive a commission of 10,000 dinars for his services as ‘mediator’ seems, however, to have been an ad hoc agreement between Conrad and the garrison.21

  While Saladin considered what to do about these steep surrender terms, Richard and Philip pondered the military implications of their victory. Although the capture of Acre was a triumph of war by attrition, Christian siege engines had played a notable part in grinding down the opposition. By far the most successful artillery pieces were those brought by Richard from Sicily - as mentioned, he even brought his own high-density rocks from Cyprus for them to fire - and here again we see that perennial motif: Richard’s military genius.22 His ability to improvise is seen clearly in the way he snapped up the men from the French artillery crew dismissed by Philip because they had protested about low wages. On 17 June their replacements failed to prevent the gutting of the portable shields and armoured roofs on his siege engines; predictably Philip blamed this mishap on Richard’s ‘perfidy’. The hiring of the dismissed men was of a piece with Richard’s relentless ‘oneupmanship’ campaign against Philip: when recruiting mercenaries, Richard offered three gold pieces to anyone who would join his service.23 Richard’s sappers and miners were also much more successful in their undermining of the Accursed Tower than Philip’s men had been and again this may have been due to his instinct for human psychology, since he once more upstaged Philip by offering, at first one gold piece, then two, then three and finally four gold pieces for each stone extracted and brought back from the Tower.24 Richard knew how to use siege engines. He had studied the campaigns of the First Crusade, but in addition to this research he knew how to improvise and adapt to new conditions and fresh circumstances: hence his use of counterweight machines and counterweight and traction engines, which were much more effective than the traditional use of mangonels and trebuchets. Richard took his engines closer to the walls than earlier leaders like Henry of Champagne had done. In this position his men were much more vulnerable to missile fire from the garrison, to sudden sorties, sallies and counter-attack, and it is a tribute to his leadership that his men were prepared to follow him there. The contrast with Philip’s sacked siege engineers is marked. The most detailed recent study of the siege of Acre stresses the originality of Richard’s contribution. ‘Crusader poliorcetics at Acre involved techniques and machinery characteristic of twelfth-century operations and also some which foreshadow developments for later periods (italics mine) . . . the effectiveness of artillery at Acre anticipates developments in thirteenth-century poliorcetics . . . Heavy artillery was effective not only against Levantine cities, but also against less accessible positions and others less vulnerable to other methods of attack. In this regard, the siege of Acre can be seen as ushering in the great age of pre-gunpowder artillery in the West.’25

  Politically Richard was less successful at Acre. As soon as Philip Augustus arrived, he recognised Conrad of Montferrat as king of Jerusalem. But Richard’s coming, with vastly superior forces, made the machiavellians among the crusaders (and there were plenty of those) go where the power was and worship the rising sun. Both the Genoese and Pisans immediately offered Richard their services. He accepted the Pisans but turned down the Genoese on the grounds that they had already pledged allegiance to Philip and Conrad. Geoffrey of Lusignan thereupon claimed the Crown for his brother and accused Conrad of treason; Conrad fled to Tyre on 25 June, fearing that Richard would arrest him.26 There was already bad blood between Richard and Philip over Conrad but, when Acre fell, the bad relations were exacerbated. On 13 July the city was divided - its stores, artillery, ships, wealth and prisoners - between the two kings, in accordance with the fifty-fifty agreement. So far, so good, but then Philip raised the issue of Cyprus. He demanded half of the island and half of all Richard had taken from there, pointing to the wording of the Messina protocol. Richard replied that the fifty-fifty provision clearly applied only to conquests in Outremer itself, not territories acquired on the way, and most authorities agree this is how the kings’ agreement should have been construed .27 But there was ambiguity in the idea of Philip’s having half of all that Richard acquired ‘on God’s service’. If Richard had planned the conquest of Cyprus, that premeditation alone should qualify as ‘on God’s service’, which was why Richard disingenuously claimed that the hostilities on the island were the purely contingent results of the shipwreck of his advance vessels. Even so, Richard said, he would share his Cyprus conquests with Philip if Philip in turn would share the rich lands of Artois, which he had inherited on 1 June when Count Philip of Flanders died at Acre, plus the lands bequeathed to him by the late castellan of St Omer.28 Even in the Holy Land the two kings still perceived the struggle for France as the key issue in international politics.