God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  The tangible result of royal participation was early demonstrated in Sicily. To William II’s rapid action in sending a fleet to the Holy Land in 1188 some attributed the survival of the remaining Christian outposts. Yet despite his display of formal grief and mourning on hearing of the catastrophe of Hattin, William did not take the cross. Although he may have discussed a joint enterprise with his brother-in-law Henry II, William seemed not to have organized his nobility for the crusade. By his death, in November 1189, no firm undertakings had been reached by the king or his nobles. In the ensuing power struggle, his eventual successor, his dwarfish illegitimate cousin Tancred of Lecce, recalled the Sicilian fleet from the Levant. The only residual Sicilian involvement in the crusade lay in William’s lavish, if perhaps fanciful, bequest to Henry II of grain, wine, money, gold plate and a hundred galleys equipped for two years. This may have represented what William imagined he would contribute to the crusade. In the event his legacy provided a source of conflict and an opportunity for extortion for Richard I when he arrived in Sicily in the autumn of 1190.65 The contrast between the Sicilian experience and that of Henry II’s Angevin lands was sharp. Even if dissipated in the succession war of 1188–9, by the time of his own death in July 1189, Henry’s preparations had raised men and money. Perhaps more importantly, they had committed large sections of the nobility on both sides of the English Channel to the crusade through the collective action of taking the cross. His successor Richard was one of them. Continued Angevin royal and noble interest assured sustained dedication to the crusade. Without the king’s lead, the movement would have lost cohesion and drive, as happened in Sicily.

  The depth of Angevin engagement was impressive.66 The inner circle of recruits was drawn from the political and administrative elite; representatives of the higher clergy, led by Archbishop Baldwin and Justiciar Glanvill’s nephew, Hubert Walter bishop of Salisbury; powerful nobles such as the earls of Leicester and Ferrers, Nigel of Mowbray and Richard of Clare; former sheriffs, such as Roger Glanvill; ministers, such as Roger’s brother, the Justiciar Ranulf, whose sacking in 1189 allowed him to fulfil his vow; royal friends, agents, household officials and government bureaucrats, a number of whom, including Gerald of Wales and the future Justiciar Geoffrey FitzPeter, had their vows absolved unfulfilled. Compared with France or Germany the list of great magnates is short, a reflection of the political structure of the Angevin regime but also a matter of chance; a number of English earldoms had lapsed; others were held by minors. The core of the Angevin recruitment centred on the king’s court. Beyond the immediate circle of royal patronage or acquaintance, the characteristic crucesignati were local aristocrats, knights and gentry, many with close links to the higher nobility. Fifty-nine crucesignati named in the government financial records as exempt from a levy to pay for defence against the Welsh were men of substance from across the whole kingdom, from Sussex to Yorkshire, Wiltshire to Suffolk. For convenience, such knights tended to travel in groups based on tenurial, political, geographic or family association. The collective enthusiasm of taking the cross could persist in action. According to one Yorkshire observer, the massacres of Jews during Lent 1190 at King’s Lynn, Stamford and York were led by bands of young crusaders acting together. No less than the followers of the great, local networks survived from recruitment to campaign. At the siege of Acre in 1191, the royal judge and chronicler Roger, the parson of Howden near the Humber in the East Riding of Yorkshire, found a group of fellow countrymen from the region of his parish: John of Hessle, Richard and Berengar of Legsby, the parson of Croxby, Robert the Huntsman of Pontefract.

  Urban as well as rural associations lent structure to recruitment in England as in the rest of western Europe. Ships from London formed a distinct part of the large north European fleet that assembled at Dartmouth in May 1189, taking Silves in Portugal from the Moors that September. The next year at least one ship carrying eighty Londoners followed. These were led by figures from the city’s merchant oligarchy, such as Geoffrey the Goldsmith and William FitzOsbert, nicknamed Longbeard, as well as members of the chapter and clergy of St Paul’s cathedral. A further source of unity lay in the adoption by these citizens of Thomas Becket, a fellow Londoner, as their patron saint, an illustration of how crusading fed off wider streams of contemporary spirituality. The leading role of beneficed secular clergy among the Londoners was mirrored elsewhere. According to some sources, even monks caught crusade fever, in contradiction of their vows: ‘a great number went from the cloister to camp, threw off their cowls, donned mail shirts, and became knights of Christ in a new sense, replacing alms with arms’.67

  While clerics, beyond their important morale-building religious duties, could expect to act as scribes, accountants, secretaries even quartermasters, the bulk of recruitment was aimed at those, like the 3,000 Welsh recruits described by Gerald of Wales, ‘highly skilled in the use of the spear and the arrow, most experienced in military matters and only too keen to attack the enemies of our faith at the first opportunity’.68 The appeal was not restricted to warriors; many crucesignati were artisans: blacksmiths, skinners, tanners, cobblers, tailors, millers, butchers, vintners, potters and bakers, who could, in theory at least, usefully ply their trades on crusade. They were probably joined by genuine non-combatants, pilgrims, but their numbers may not have been overwhelming, especially given the emphasis on professional troops in an attempt to avoid the mistakes of the Second Crusade, where non-combatants had allegedly compromised military efficiency. A final group of recruits were women. The ordinances for the crusade restricted female recruitment to old washerwomen, who doubled as delousers for the troops, ‘as good as apes for picking fleas’.69 However, these provisions were ignored. Women fought at Acre, to the admiration of western sources and the fascinated horror of Arabic ones. In a list of forty-seven Cornish recruits there were at least four crucesignatae.70

  Although England is possibly the best-documented region of Europe for the preparations for the Third Crusade, the pattern revealed there is matched elsewhere, for example in Normandy. If royal authority and money were less pervasive in Capetian France or Hohenstaufen Germany, the role played by the monarchs was just as important. In France, Philip II taking the cross at Gisors in January 1188 provided the cue for almost all the higher nobility of his kingdom to follow suit, their decisions eased as both Philip’s Angevin rivals, Henry II and Richard of Poitou, later Richard I, had also signed up. In addition to the counts of Flanders, Blois, Perche, Champagne, Dreux, Clermont, Beaumont, Soissons, Bar and Nevers, who took the cross with the king, other crucesignati included the duke of Burgundy and the count of Sancerre. The only significant magnate not to take the cross was Count Raymond V of Toulouse. (Despite his close family ties with the county of Tripoli, Raymond, whose father had died suddenly and some said suspiciously in Palestine during the Second Crusade, was old – dying in 1194 after ruling for forty-six years – and beset by rivalries with Richard of Poitou and the problem of heresy in his dominions.) Lords such as the counts of Flanders, Burgundy and Champagne were effectively autonomous princes. At Gisors this was recognized when it was agreed that followers of Philip II should wear red crosses; those of Henry II, white; and those of the count of Flanders, green.71 Recruitment followed regional power. All across France from Hainault to Poitou, Normandy to the Dauphiné lords and knights took the cross and began making provisions for departure. Although narrative sources emphasize the role of Richard I and his Anglo-French followers, charter evidence indicates that the contribution from the rest of France may have outstripped it. Whole regions lost their lords. Across the frontier in Limburg, the absence of Duke Henry III and his two sons removed any check to civil unrest and local violence.72

  The same story was told in the German lands stretching from Flanders to Austria, the Baltic to the Alps. The lead was given by Frederick Barbarossa: ‘by his own example he inspired all the young men to fight for Christ’.73 The urgency and thoroughness of his preparations stimulated recruitment, whic
h, as in 1146–7, constituted the active dimension of the establishment of a general peace under which disputes were settled or postponed, as crusade privileges not only advantaged the crucesignati but obliged non-crusaders to respect their rights and property. By May 1189, when the great German army mustered at Regensburg on the Danube, Frederick and his second son, Frederick duke of Swabia, had been joined by seven bishops, an abbot, the duke of Dalmatia, the count of Holland and over twenty counts and margraves from all corners of the Reich, from the Low Countries, to Swabia, from Bavaria to Saxony. At much the same time, other German crucesignati left by sea, including the counts of Guelders and Altenburg and the landgrave of Thuringia, who was accompanied by a large military household. In the land army, with the magnates marched ‘the dreaded and orderly array of ministeriales and chosen knights’.74 Ministeriales were a particularly German social group, technically unfree but materially and culturally indistinguishable from free knights. The first to take the cross in Alsace from the local bishop of Strassburg had been ‘a certain powerful and active knight called Siegfried, one of count Albert of Dagsburg’s ministeriales’.75 Such bonds lent further unity to the army. As in England, urban crusaders played a prominent role. Citizens from Metz accompanied the land army. Eleven ships from Bremen and four from Cologne joined the expeditionary fleets in 1189, which attracted support from Denmark and Frisia as well as the Rhineland, the Low Countries and England. The Cologne flotilla apparently carried as many as 1,500 men and supplies for three years.76

  These patterns of recruitment across Europe are striking for two reasons; their scale and their cause. The emotions of those who took the cross mixed devotion, anger, adventure, peer-group pressure, escapism, and the insistence of social superiors and employers. The success in mobilizing such huge armies from such a large area testifies to the coherence of the appeal as much as to the efficiency of organization. That organization depended heavily on the leaders, especially the kings. Subsequent disappointments and failures should not colour perceptions of the impulses that raised these massive armies in the first place. One overwhelming emotion for any crucesignatus, notable for the prominence it held in crusade sermons, was fear; fear of pain, hardship, alien surroundings, physical torment and likely death. Leopold V duke of Austria sailed from Venice in the autumn of 1190. After wintering in Zara in the Adriatic, he arrived at Acre the following spring. His personal following was modest. A contemporary German chronicler of the Third Crusade named ten chief companions. Of these, nine died, the tenth only surviving after illness.77 The preachers and propagandists knew what they were talking about. To become a crucesignatus was to invite the torments of the cross.

  11. Europe and the Near East at the Time of the Third Crusade

  13

  To the Siege of Acre

  While preaching and recruitment followed similar patterns across Christendom, the nature and timing of military and naval responses were determined by local circumstances. In 1188, William II of Sicily, unlike his northern fellow monarchs, was able to despatch a fleet to the east comprising about fifty ships and 200 knights under the resourceful admiral Margarit of Brindisi, soon nicknamed ‘Neptune’ or ‘king of the seas’.1 Reinforced from Sicily in 1189, to Saladin’s irritation this squadron protected Tripoli and Antioch while maintaining a piratic patrol along the northern Syrian shore. However, the death of King William in November 1189 ended Sicilian aid with the recall of the admiral, whose next involvement with the holy war found him trying to defend Messina from Richard I’s crusaders in October 1190.

  The other Italian maritime powers of Pisa, Genoa and Venice held commercial fleets in the Levant on permanent rotation. In March 1188, those in Alexandria were reputedly forced by the Egyptian authorities to take on board Frankish captives and refugees from the fall of Outremer before being allowed to leave port.2 A Pisan fleet under Archbishop Ubaldo, a papal legate, embarked from the west at the end of 1188 and, after wintering in Sicily, provided support for Christian land operations in 1189. By 1190, a Genoese fleet was also assisting at the siege of Acre; in 1191 another was contracted to carry Philip II of France and his military entourage east. The retention of Tyre in 1187 proved crucial in providing such fleets with a base, although it is striking that the Venetians, who had held a third of Tyre since its capture in 1124, played an almost invisible role in the attempt to restore Outremer in 1188–92, perhaps because they initially feared their rights in Tyre had been overborne by the city’s saviour and protector in 1187–8, Conrad of Montferrat.

  By contrast, recruits from the rest of western Christendom had to plan their transport from scratch, even where equipment and supplies were readily available, as with shipping around the North Sea. As a consequence, the Third Crusade constituted a series of distinct but associated expeditions that reached the Holy Land in irregular and uneven waves. Apart from the Sicilians and Pisans, some westerners, such as Geoffrey of Lusignan, King Guy’s brother, landed in Palestine and Syria in 1188 or early 1189. Substantial fleets from northern Europe only began to arrive in Palestine in the summer of 1189, followed over the next two years by a more or less constant stream of reinforcements, all, except for the vestigial German force in 1190, by sea. The largest armies were those organized by the monarchs of the west, Frederick Barbarossa, who set out by land in 1189, and Richard I and Philip II, who left together in 1190 using the sea route. The target was Acre. In July 1187, the city had capitulated to Saladin in two days; from August 1189 it took the Christians two years of hard pounding to regain it.3

  THE SIEGE OF ACRE: CHRISTIAN REVIVAL 1188–90

  By the winter of 1187–8, Frankish Outremer lay shattered at Saladin’s feet, the few remaining fortresses of the interior without hope of relief and the surviving ports vulnerable to assault, siege and naval blockade. Most were mopped up in the new campaign of 1188. Of the major Frankish cities, only Tripoli, Tyre and Antioch survived in Christian hands. Two of the last castles to hold out, Belvoir and Montréal, surrendered in January and May 1189, leaving Tortosa, Margat and Crac des Chevaliers in the county of Tripoli and, temporarily, Beaufort in northern Galilee outside Saladin’s grasp. Although Saladin commissioned works on the jihad, such as that by his future biographer Baha’ al-Din Ibn Shaddad in May 1188, and constantly reminded his coalition of followers of the transcendent significance of his conquests, his approach was pragmatic.4 At Antioch in September 1188 he agreed a truce with Bohemund III. On a military and political level he treated the remaining Frankish resisters as he would any other opponent. Confident in his overwhelming supremacy, Saladin was prepared to negotiate their surrender. If diplomacy failed, crushing force was at hand.

  However, this strength was not absolute. Crucially, after failing to capture Tyre in July 1187 because of the unexpected arrival there of Conrad of Montferrat from Byzantium, Saladin was unable to press home the siege he began in November 1187. Accompanied only by a single ship’s company of knights, a few score at most, Conrad brought leadership, determination, energy and optimism to the defence of Tyre. Saladin’s move northwards at the start of 1188 left a vital Palestinian port in Christian hands, a haven for Frankish refugees and a base for the naval squadrons that were beginning to arrive from the west. Elsewhere, conquest and occupation were patchy. Each castle, town or city that chose to resist, even in the face of apparently certain defeat, presented a separate problem. The capture of one castle did not secure a region. While whole Frankish populations seemed to have been removed from cities such as Jerusalem and Acre, the fate of the rural Frankish population may have been less clear-cut. Some, like the Frankish woman encountered by the German pilgrim Thietmar at Montréal in 1217, may have stayed on as servile tenants or slaves.5 Where Frankish farmers had mixed with the local Syrian Christian peasantry, it is not inconceivable that some continued to work the land unmolested. Frankish administrative units may have survived the conquest intact. Certain settlements quickly resumed their previous legal identity after the Christian reconquest, as at Casal Imbert near
Acre, restored in 1191. Whether or not pockets of Frankish settlers survived under the Muslim interregnum of 1187–91, the nature of the conquest did not require annihilation or complete deportation. Palestine was a long-settled land of many different communities, some ancient, some recent. The new Kurdish imperialists hardly altered that. Saladin’s conquest, despite the startling triumphs of 1187, belied the apocalyptic simplicity encouraged by his own and his enemies’ propagandists.

  This was vividly illustrated by the fate of Beaufort.6 For four months from April 1189 Saladin, camped outside the castle, was persuaded not to attack by a series of negotiating ploys from its quick-witted, Arabic-speaking lord, Reynald of Sidon. Despite careful surveillance, Reynald managed to use the time to reinforce the castle’s defences. His repeated promises of surrender made to Saladin in Arabic were contradicted by his orders in French to his troops inside the castle to resist. The Franks’ move towards Acre in August 1189 caused Saladin to lift the siege, retaining Reynald as a captive. In April 1190, a new round of negotiations ended in the simultaneous surrender of the castle and release of Reynald. This pattern of threat and negotiation, coupled with Saladin’s habitual caution in committing his troops to action, marked the campaigns in 1187–9, during which he was happy to bargain surrenders of castles for safe-conducts and the release of prisoners. One unsympathetic observer, the Iraqi historian Ibn al-Athir, blamed this tactic for allowing the Franks to regroup.7 This reliance on negotiation not just brute force carried forward into Saladin’s handling of the Frankish reconquest from August 1189. Implicitly, the policy recognized that, however strategically victorious, only his or his generals’ local physical presence with their troops denied Franks space to manoeuvre. At least from the summer of 1188, small Frankish armed bands were able to travel between the northern enclaves of Antioch and Tripoli and Tyre despite Saladin’s continued operations further inland. Provided some of their outposts remained, Christian recovery was possible.