Richard the Lion Heart

by Kate Norgate

From Mount Taurus to the Gulf of Aden, from the river Tigris to the Mediterranean sea, and from the Arabian to the Libyan desert, Saladin was now master of everything except some fragments of territory in the north-west of Syria and one sea-port in Galilee. The first of these exceptions consisted of a small portion of the Latin principality of Antioch, including its capital city; south of this, a few fortified coast-towns—Markab, Tortosa, Tripoli; and east of these latter, the little settlement of Ismaïlite warriors who in their stronghold under the shelter of Mount Lebanon defied Franks and Turks alike, and acknowledged no ruler save their own chieftain, called by western chroniclers “the Old Man of the Mountain.” The one unconquered city in the Holy Land itself was Tyre.

The goal of the Crusade was, of course, Jerusalem. Ninety years before, when Islam was split up into a number of separate and rival states, all weakened and well-nigh exhausted by constant strife with each other, the First Crusaders had attained that goal by a victorious land march all the way from Antioch; but now all was changed, and it would have been sheer madness for their successors to dream of following in their steps. Now that the resources of Aleppo, Damascus, Bagdad, and Cairo were all at the command of one ruler, the acquisition of a base on the sea-coast in such a position that troops and supplies could be poured through it from the West direct into the Holy Land in safety and on a large scale (or what in the twelfth century was accounted such) was an almost indispensable preliminary to any practical attempt at the re-conquest of Jerusalem. Tyre, with its peninsular citadel facing the valley which leads round the foot of Lebanon into Coele-Syria, was somewhat too isolated as well as too far north for this purpose. But some twenty-five miles south of Tyre there was a fortified sea-port whose character and importance were summed up by an Arab writer, a few years before it fell into Saladin’s power, in one significant sentence: “Acre is the column on which the Frankish towns of Syria rest.”[643] Acre stood on the site of the ancient Ptolemaïs, at the northern extremity of the wide semicircular bay whose southern extremity is the point of Carmel, and which forms the only real break in the long straight coast-line of the Holy Land. Its harbour was the best—indeed, the only good one except Tyre and, perhaps, Ascalon—in the whole length of that coast-line. Under the Franks it was the chief landing-place for both pilgrims and traders from Europe; for it was the converging-point of all the main lines of communication between the West and Jerusalem, Mecca, Egypt, and Damascus. For the trade of Damascus it was practically the only available sea-port, being the only one to and from which access on the land side was not blocked by Mount Lebanon. “There,” says the Arab visitor quoted above, “put in the tall ships which float like mountains over the sea; it is the meeting-place of crafts and caravans, the place whither Mussulman and Christian merchants congregate from all quarters.”[644] To the natural advantages of the site were added fortifications which ranked among the mightiest of the many mighty productions of military architecture reared by the Frank settlers in Syria. The mouth of the harbour was guarded by a chain; a great tower rose on a tongue of land which ran out into the sea and sheltered the harbour to westward; the city lay partly on this peninsula and partly on the mainland, and was protected on the land side, to north and east, by strong walls and towers, and beyond these by a wide 1189 and deep fosse.[645] Saladin had taken the place in July 1187; he was fully alive to its importance, and it was strongly garrisoned and well provisioned when at the end of August 1189 King Guy of Jerusalem, having made his way down from Antioch, collecting forces as he went from among the natives of the land and the newly enlisted Crusaders who during the last year had been arriving in small parties at the few northern sea-ports still in Christian hands, set to 1189
Aug. work to begin the re-conquest of his kingdom by laying siege to Acre with about ten thousand men.[646]

It was a great venture of faith; and the faith was justified. Acre at once became the rallying-point for all the remaining forces of the realm and for the Crusaders who came pouring in from Europe during the next few months. Saladin on his part had immediately despatched a large army to occupy the hills which bordered the plain, some eight to ten miles wide, at the back of the town. The besiegers, in their entrenched camp outside the walls and fosse, found themselves practically besieged in their turn; and this double siege lasted, with many vicissitudes and very little real 1191 progress on either side, till the spring of 1191. By the middle of April, when Philip Augustus arrived, the Christian host was sufficiently numerous to maintain a complete blockade of the city by land and entire control over the harbour, and thus to prevent the entrance of men and provisions, either by land or by sea. They had, however, little prospect of winning the place except by starvation; for they could not venture on attempting to capture it by a general assault, because their own encampment was in constant danger from a great host of fresh troops which Saladin had brought up to occupy the surrounding country as soon as the winter was over. Thus on the evening of Saturday, June 8,[647] 1191 “the valiant king, the Lion-heart,[648] saw before him Acre with its towers, and the flower of the world’s people seated round about it, and beyond them the hill-peaks and the mountains and the valleys and the plains, covered with the tents of Saladin and Safadin and their troops, pressing hard on our Christian host.”[649]

Not the least of the disadvantages under which that host laboured was the lack of a commander-in-chief. Neither the character nor the circumstances of Guy were such as could enable him to retain that position after the influx from Europe had begun; and the supreme command of the siege therefore passed from one to another of the more influential leaders of the western contingents by a succession of temporary arrangements, intended only as makeshifts till the three sovereigns who were expected to take the joint leadership of the whole expedition should arrive. The greatest of these three, however, the Emperor Frederic Barbarossa, never arrived at all, having been accidentally drowned on the way in June 1190. After the main body of the French Crusaders reached Acre in July 1190, the chief command devolved upon their leader, Count Henry of Champagne, whose mother was half-sister to both Philip Augustus and Richard, and who was thus in some sense a representative of both the kings. Philip on his arrival devoted himself to setting up his military engines, of which he had brought a goodly store, in whatever places he deemed most advantageous, and according to one English chronicler, building a stone house for himself; but he declined to take any further action without his brother-sovereign.[650] Richard had no sooner passed from the clamorous welcome given him by the whole host as he landed, and the exchange of courteous greetings with Philip, than he plunged at once into practical matters.[651] Having learned that Philip was paying his followers three gold bezants apiece every month, June 8 he—seemingly that very night—issued a proclamation throughout the host offering four bezants a month to any 1191 knight, of any country, who would take service under him.[652] The consequence was that nearly all those who were free to dispose of themselves and their services “took him for their leader and their lord.”[653] Among the first to come forward for this purpose were the Genoese and the Pisans. He declined, however, the homage and fealty of the Genoese, because it was already pledged to Philip. The Pisans became his liegemen, and “he confirmed to them by his charter the customs which they were wont to have in the land of Jerusalem.”[654] It is highly significant that Richard could already, and seemingly without calling forth a protest or even a remark from anyone, make an assumption of authority in a realm of which he was neither ruler nor overlord. Scarcely less significant was the action of Henry of Champagne. Henry—so at least says an English chronicler—having come to the end of his own resources, had asked his uncle of France for a subsidy; Philip offered him a loan of a hundred marks, if he would pledge his county for their repayment. Henry then applied to his uncle of England, who at once gave him four thousand pounds and a supply of food for his men and his horses. Thenceforth June the troops of Champagne and their count served under Richard’s standard, and their own sovereign remained in command only of the strictly “French” followers who had come to Acre in his train.[655]

The wind which had brought Richard’s galleys swiftly to Acre on June 8 changed again before the slower vessels of his fleet could follow him, and until they arrived he had no engines of war.[656] But “Mategriffon” had been packed on one of the galleys; on the 10th it was set up, and by daybreak on the 11th his archers were looking down into Acre from the tall wooden tower, and “Kill-Greek” was ready to become “Kill-Turk.” Philip renewed his attacks on the “Accursed Tower,” the chief defence of the city on its June 11-14 eastern side; and all along the line of the walls stone-casters and miners set vigorously to work. Richard meanwhile 1191 “went about among the groups, instructing some, criticizing others, encouraging others; he seemed to be everywhere and at every man’s side, so that to him might fairly be ascribed whatsoever each man was doing.”[657] Within a day or two, however, he was prostrated by a strange illness, a kind of malarial fever which among other effects caused alopecia or loss of hair.[658] Much against his wishes, a general assault was nevertheless made under Philip’s orders on June 14. It failed, and so did another three or four days later.[659] Presently Philip was attacked by the same malady which had struck down Richard.[660] In Richard’s case it seems to have been complicated by his chronic trouble, ague;[661] and thus Philip was the first to recover. Richard occupied part of his time of enforced inactivity in an exchange of courtesies with Saladin. Each party was anxious for information as to the strength, or weakness, of the other; and the courtesies of chivalry, which were quite as familiar to the Moslem as to the Christian prince, were utilized by both for this purpose. Saladin appears to have opened communications by sending a gift of fruit to the two royal invalids. Richard was eager for a personal interview June 19-
July 21 with his courteous adversary; this Saladin refused, on the ground that “kings should not have speech with each other till terms of peace between them have been arranged”; he consented, however, to a meeting between his brother Safadin and the king, but when the time for it came Richard was still too ill to leave his tent. Richard next despatched to the Saracen camp a negro slave as a gift to the Sultan.[662] On the king’s part these proceedings were unwise, not in themselves, but because they were liable to be misconstrued by his fellow-Crusaders and to bring upon him the suspicions of the other princes in the host, and especially 1191 of Philip Augustus, with whom he was already at variance about a much more serious matter which practically depended upon their joint decision. This was nothing less than the disposal of the Crown of Jerusalem.

King Amalric, who died in 1174, had by his first wife a son, Baldwin, and a daughter, Sibyl; and by his second wife an infant daughter, Isabel. The first marriage had been dissolved on the ground of consanguinity; in strict law, therefore, Baldwin and Sibyl were illegitimate; Baldwin, however, became king without opposition, because he was the only male survivor of the royal house. But he was not yet fourteen, and he was a leper. In 1176, therefore, an attempt was made to provide for the succession by marrying his elder sister to a member of a distinguished family of Italian Crusaders, William of Montferrat. Within a year Sibyl was a widow; but she was also the mother of a son, and in 1183 this child was solemnly crowned and anointed king in his uncle’s lifetime. This precaution staved off the impending crisis for nearly three years, though the imminent prospect of a long royal minority in the existing political and military circumstances of Palestine was felt to be so alarming that the very Patriarch who had crowned the child became, only a few months later, eager to undo his own work and tried, but without success, to bring from Europe to the dying king and the distracted realm an adoptive male heir of full age in the person of one of the descendants of the first marriage of the Angevin Count Fulk V, whose second marriage had brought the crown of Jerusalem into the house of Anjou. Baldwin IV died before Heraclius returned from Europe, in the winter of 1184-5; in September 1186 little Baldwin V died also. Sibyl then claimed the crown in her own right, as the natural heiress at once of her child, her brother, and her father; the Templars, the Patriarch, and some of the nobles rallied round her at Jerusalem; the people acclaimed her as queen, and she was crowned in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre together with her second husband, Guy of Lusignan. Sibyl’s half-sister, Isabel, was now fifteen years old, and had been married three years. A party among the nobles had ever since King Amalric’s death 1191 been biding their time to bring Isabel forward as his only legitimate representative and heir. They tried to do so now; they failed, however, because her young husband, Humphry of Toron, and his step-father and guardian, Reginald of Châtillon, both adhered to Sibyl. But when the sickness which raged in the Christian camp before Acre in 1190 carried off first the two little daughters of Sibyl and Guy and then Sibyl herself, Isabel and her partisans found their opportunity. On the pretext that Isabel had been wedded to Humphry without her consent, the Patriarch declared her Nov. 24 1190 marriage void. Immediately afterwards she married the man who had long been Guy’s most implacable rival, Conrad of Montferrat, a younger brother of Sibyl’s first husband.

In four words the Norman poet-historian of the third Crusade has at once pronounced a rare and splendid panegyric on Guy of Lusignan as a man, and given us the clue to Guy’s failure as a statesman. “No king was endowed with better qualities save for one characteristic which he had: that he knew no evil. That,” adds the poet with a charming touch of perhaps unconscious irony, “is what men call simpleness.”[663] “Simpleness,” whether as a virtue or a failing, can certainly never have been laid to the credit or the charge of Conrad of Montferrat. He had in 1187 landed with a handful of followers at Tyre when it was literally on the eve of surrendering to Saladin, and had taken upon himself the command and defence of the place with such vigour that Saladin was compelled to raise the siege. An Arab historian called him “the mightiest devil of all the Franks”;[664] an English writer called him “a son of the piercing and crooked serpent.”[665] His valour and capability, together with the possession of Tyre, soon made him a 1191 personage of much greater importance than the titular king. In birth Conrad was much more than Guy’s equal; the marquisate of Montferrat, to which he succeeded in 1188, ranked among the chief principalities of the kingdom of Italy, and his mother was granddaughter to one emperor, sister to another, and aunt to a third; while Guy was merely the youngest of the five brothers of that Geoffrey of Lusignan who had been a ringleader in almost every Aquitanian revolt from 1167 onward, and who had finally, some months after Conrad’s arrival at Tyre, gone to expiate in Palestine the last and worst of his offences against Duke Richard. To avert civil strife, both parties agreed to submit the whole question of the Crown to the arbitration of the two western kings. Guy now laid before them a complaint that Conrad had “forcibly and unjustly taken from him” (probably during his absence in Cyprus) “the rights and revenues of the kingdom.” His brother Geoffrey appealed the marquis of disloyalty, perjury, and treason against the king of Jerusalem and the whole Christian host. Conrad for the moment avoided answering the appeal by slipping away to Tyre;[666] its prosecution was postponed, and with it the trial of the rival claims to the Crown; pending a decision, the royal dues and revenues of the market and port of Acre were sequestrated and entrusted to the Templars and Hospitaliers.[667]

The two arbitrators inclined opposite ways. Guy’s “simpleness” had led him aright when it pointed him, notwithstanding the previous hostile relations between his family and their overlord in Aquitaine, to Richard as his natural protector against the Italian claimant to his Crown. On the other hand, Conrad’s family connexions and his talents had secured for him the support of most of the other princes in the crusading host; the ceremony of marriage between him and Isabel had been performed by a French bishop, a near kinsman of King Philip.[668] Thus supported, 1191 he had, as we have seen, already ventured to set Richard at defiance by preventing him from entering Tyre; and he was now speedily[669] recalled to the camp by Philip, who at once openly “took him into familiarity and counsel.” According to one account it was at Conrad’s instigation that Philip laid claim to half the island of Cyprus and of the spoils which Richard had acquired there; the pretext for the claim being the agreement made at Messina. Richard answered that the said agreement related only to whatever he and Philip might acquire in the Holy Land; he offered, however, to satisfy Philip’s demand if Philip would in exchange grant him half the county of Flanders and of everything that had escheated to the French Crown by the recent death of the Flemish count. On this Philip dropped his claim and consented to a new arrangement whereby both kings explicitly promised to share equally whatever they should acquire in Palestine. This convention was confirmed by oaths and charters, and its fulfilment was safeguarded by a provision that all conquests and acquisitions made by either party should be placed under the charge of the two great Military Orders for safe custody and division.[670]

Meanwhile Richard’s fleet had arrived, bringing the rest of his followers[671] and his engines of war. These seem to have been mostly stone-casters and other missile engines worked at long range. Philip’s machines were chiefly engines of assault and battery, which had to be advanced close up to the walls, and were thus more exposed to damage and destruction by fire from the enemy. The most effectual work of all was that of the miners who had long been making their way under the walls and especially under the “Accursed Tower.”[672] The defences of Acre were now crumbling fast, and the fall of a long piece of wall close to that tower, on 1191 July 3,[673] coinciding with the failure of an attack made by Saladin and his brother on the Christian trenches,[674] was July 4 followed next morning by an offer from the garrison to surrender the place and all its contents if their own lives and liberty were spared.[675] The two kings, knowing that the garrison comprised—as a Moslem writer says—“the best emirs of the Sultan’s host and the bravest champions of Islam,”[676] refused the condition.[677] That night another attack on the Christians’ outer trench was successfully beaten off.[678] Then Richard, sick though he was, determined to try the effect of an assault on the city under his own personal direction. He caused a kind of moveable hurdle-shed, called by the French writers cercloie or circleie, to be brought up to the edge of the fosse; under cover of this shelter his crossbowmen could shoot at the tower; he himself, wrapped in a rich silken quilt, was carried forth and placed among them, “and many a bolt was shot by that skilful hand,” the Turks shooting back all the time.[679] All day long his stone-casters worked incessantly; so did his miners; at night the mine was fired, and their efforts were rewarded by the fall of some turrets and a great breach in the curtain wall.[680] Hereupon Richard sent a crier through the host to proclaim a reward for any man who would pull out a stone from a certain piece of wall close to the great tower. The offer met with a quick response from his own troops and the Pisans, and before the rest of the host had finished July 6 breakfast next morning they had nearly made an entrance into the city,[681] when the besieged again signified their desire to treat for peace.[682] Again the two emirs in command, Karakoush 1191 and Seiffeddin-el-Meshtoub,[683] came to speak with the kings, and again their offers were refused, seemingly on the understanding that the matter was to be referred to Saladin.[684]

Saladin’s headquarters were at Tell-Ayadiyeh, at the foot of the hills, some seven or eight miles east of Acre, on the direct road to Damascus. Twice within the last two days the besieged had warned the Sultan that unless he relieved them at once, they must surrender, with his consent or without it.[685] The two kings, knowing that his forces were unequal to coping with the united Christian host, were at the same time negotiating with him in the hope that the city might meanwhile fall into their hands; and he could only endeavour to stave off its surrender by spinning out the negotiations till the reinforcements which he was expecting should arrive.[686] No sooner, however, had these begun to come up than on July 8-10 he took the significant step of cutting down the vineyards and orchards around Acre and levelling most of the towns and smaller fortresses in the neighbourhood;[687] and on the 11th the besieged intimated their readiness to make peace “at the will of the Christian July 12 kings.” Next morning (12th), in a great assembly at the Templars’ quarters, the kings “by the counsel of the whole host” made an agreement with the two emirs.[688] Acre was to be surrendered immediately, and its garrison were to be kept by the Franks as hostages for the fulfilment of three conditions to which the emirs pledged themselves in Saladin’s name: the restoration of the Holy Cross, the release of sixteen hundred Christians who were prisoners in the Sultan’s hands, and the payment of two hundred thousand bezants (or, according to another account, dinars) to the kings and fourteen (or forty) thousand to Conrad “because the treaty 1191 had been made by his mediation.”[689] The emirs returned to the city; a herald proclaimed throughout the host that all molestation, injury, or insult to the Turks must cease at once; the gates were opened, the garrison, unarmed, were brought out[690] and placed under guard in the Christian camp,[691] and the kings sent representatives to take formal possession of Acre for them by planting their banners on its July 13 walls and towers.[692] Next day (July 13) they made an equal division of the city and all its contents, and also of the prisoners (or hostages), and then, seemingly, cast lots for the two halves. The royal palace fell to Richard’s share, the Templars’ house to Philip’s; but neither king appears to have taken up his abode in the city for several days. The prisoners were sent back into lodgings assigned to them within the walls, and the greater part of the host also found quarters there.[693]