These prisoners—the late garrison of Acre—were, by the terms of capitulation, to be detained till the relic of the Cross, the stipulated number of Christian captives, and the indemnity, should all be delivered up by Saladin; then they were to depart free with their personal property and their wives and children.[694] The fulfilment of the conditions on which their release depended was obviously beyond the control of the officers who had made the agreement. Those officers were understood by the Christians to be acting with Saladin’s authorization, but it appears that this was not the fact; according to Saladin’s friend and biographer Bohadin, they communicated the terms to the Sultan and then acted upon them without waiting for his reply, and he 1191 was about to send back a flat refusal of his sanction to them when he saw the Frank banners on the walls.[695] After waiting two days in the hope of some movement which might give him a chance of successfully attacking the July 14 Christian camp, he on the 14th removed his headquarters from Ayadiyeh to Shefr’ Amm, a village in the plain, ten miles south-east of Acre.[696] Thence he sent a messenger to inquire what were the terms on which the surrender had been made, and the date fixed for their fulfilment. On the same day three envoys came from Acre to speak with him about the Christian prisoners to be released and the money to be paid; he gave them an honourable reception, and sent them on to Damascus, that they might inspect the prisoners there.[697] Thus he, implicitly if not explicitly, committed himself to the conditions which had been accepted in his name.
Friendly embassies continued to pass between the two camps;[698] but within the Christian camp there were dissensions. First the Crusaders who had been at the siege before the kings arrived—some of them ever since its beginning—claimed a share of the spoil, and threatened to desert if it were not given to them. The kings put them off with a promise. Then Richard proposed that he, the king of France, and all the men of their respective armies should bind themselves by oath not to leave the Holy Land for three years unless the whole of it should before the end of that time be surrendered by Saladin. Philip, however, refused to take such an oath.[699] Next day (July 21) Richard with his wife and his sister took up his abode in the palace.[700] It may have been either on his entry into the city on this occasion or on an earlier visit of inspection that in passing through the streets he noticed on one of the towers a banner 1191 which he did not recognize, and asked to whom it belonged. It was that of Duke Leopold of Austria, by whom the tower had been taken. The king ordered the banner to be pulled down and trodden in the mire, and further vented his wrath in insulting words addressed to Leopold himself.[701] He seems to have acted under the impulsion of one of those fits of unreasonable fury which were part of his Angevin heritage and by which every member of the Angevin house was liable to be occasionally goaded into blunders as well as into crimes. Blunder and wrong were united in this case, and were to be dearly paid for at a later time; for the moment, Leopold was only one of a number of crusading princes and nobles who chafed under Richard’s control. In spite of all the arrangements for an equal division of authority between the kings it was inevitable that the supreme command should fall to Richard, not only because he had the greatest number of troops, but also because Philip made no attempt to assert himself openly with regard to anything except the division of the spoils.[702] This last was in fact the only matter connected with the Crusade which had any real interest for Philip. His one aim was to get back to his own realm, that he might, first, secure for himself the heritage of the lately deceased count of Flanders, and next, make whatever profit could possibly be made out of the absence of the duke of Normandy and Aquitaine. His difficulty was to abandon the expedition without disgracing himself in the eyes of all Christendom. Four of July 22 his barons went to the palace on the day after Richard took up his abode there, with a message of which they seem to have been so ashamed that they could not utter it for tears till Richard helped them by anticipating its tenour—the king 1191 of France wanted his counsel and assent for returning home. Philip, according to these envoys, said that unless he speedily left Syria he would die. “If he leaves undone the work for which he came hither,” answered Richard, “he will bring shame and everlasting contempt upon himself and upon France; so he will not go by my counsel. But if he must needs either go or die, let him do what best pleases him and July 23 his folk.” Next day Philip repeated his demand for half of Cyprus; which Richard again refused. Three days later July 26 Conrad of Montferrat, on Philip’s advice, came and threw himself at Richard’s feet and “asked his pardon” (seemingly for the insult to which the king had been subjected at Tyre); July 27 Richard granted it.[703] On the following day the plea of Conrad against Guy was tried in the presence of both the western kings. Conrad claimed the kingdom in right of his so-called wife, Isabel; Guy, as having been made king, and done nothing to forfeit his crown. Both put themselves on the judgement of the two western sovereigns and the prelates and nobles of the host. Judgement was given on the morrow (July 28) in the palace of Richard. Guy was to be king for life; if he died before Conrad and Isabel they were to succeed him,[704] and according to one account the crown was to remain with their heirs;[705] according to another account, if Guy, Conrad, and Isabel should all die while Richard was in Holy Land, Richard—evidently as being head of the house of which the Angevin kings of Jerusalem were a younger branch—was to dispose of the realm at his will.[706] Meanwhile, the royal revenues were to be divided equally between Conrad and Guy.[707] Geoffrey de Lusignan and Conrad were both confirmed in the fiefs which they actually held.[708] On the morrow Philip made over all that he had acquired in Acre to Conrad, and again asked Richard’s 1191 leave to go home.[709] Richard is said to have been so dismayed that he offered Philip a half share of everything he had gathered together for the Crusade—gold, silver, provisions, arms, horses, ships—if he would abandon his project; but it was in vain.[710] All that the English king could do was to insist on the French one taking a solemn oath not to invade the Angevin lands or work any mischief against their owner while the latter was on pilgrimage, nor without forty days’ notice after his return. The oath was sworn, and the duke of Burgundy, the count of Champagne, and some other French nobles stood surety for its fulfilment.[711] Each of the kings then detached from his troops a hundred knights and five hundred men-at-arms and sent them to Bohemond of Antioch for the defence of his city and principality; Richard furnished his share of this contingent with money enough to pay its expenses up to the following Easter, and added a gift of five “large ships” laden with horses, arms and food. Finally, the French king’s share of the prisoners was separated from Richard’s[712] and placed, together with the French troops who were to remain in Syria, under the command of the duke of Burgundy.[713] On July 31 or August 1 Philip and Conrad went, in two galleys lent to them by Richard, to Tyre.[714] There Philip procured three Genoese galleys, and with these, on August 3, he sailed for Europe.[715]
However much the lesser chieftains and their followers might resent the supremacy of Richard—and if we may believe a German report, the Germans and some of the Italians did resent it so fiercely that they would have set upon him openly with their weapons had not the Templars intervened[716]—it was now evident that he must be henceforth commander-in-chief of the whole Crusade. He at 1191 once, after holding a council with the other princes, had all Aug. 1-3 his ships loaded up with provisions for man and beast and with his military engines, and issued an order that all the Crusaders should make ready to follow him, with their arms and horses, to Ascalon. He also “made all the archers of the host come before him and gave them good wages.”[717] It was of course impossible to leave Acre till the treaty with Saladin was carried into effect; and this was becoming a matter of considerable anxiety. From July 14 to August 2 frequent communications had passed between Saladin and the kings.[718] An English writer of the time says that Saladin offered them the whole kingdom of Jerusalem except one fortress (Krak of Moab, or Montreal) if they would lend him two thousand knights and five thousand men-at-arms for a twelvemonth to help him against the Mussulman enemies in his rear, the sons of Nureddin the lord of Mosul.[719] Such a proposal, if made at all, could hardly be taken or expected to be taken seriously, and can only have been a device for spinning out negotiations and gaining time. A modification of one detail of the treaty was, however, granted to the Sultan. The period originally allowed him for the delivery of the Cross, the Christian captives, and the money seems to have been one month from the day of the surrender of Acre;[720] but this was soon perceived to be impracticable. On July 24 the Frank envoys who had gone to inspect their imprisoned fellow-Christians at Damascus returned with four whom they had picked out for release;[721] and on the same evening a list of the Saracen prisoners in Acre was brought to the Sultan. On August 2 envoys from Acre came to him to ascertain whether the Cross was still in his camp or had been sent away to Bagdad. When satisfied on this point by ocular demonstration, they told him that the kings accepted his proposal to deliver all that was specified in the treaty by three monthly instalments. The first instalment was to comprise more than 1191 two-thirds of the total; it was to consist of the Cross, the whole stipulated number of Christian captives, and half the money payment. The term for its delivery was to be August 11[722]—an ingeniously equitable arrangement for both parties, since, the duration of the Mohammedan calendar month differing from that of the western peoples, the period from the surrender of Acre would be a month and a day[723] according to the reckoning of the Moslems whose part in the treaty must be the most difficult and lengthy of accomplishment, and one day less than a month according to the reckoning of the Franks, who had most to gain by a speedy fulfilment of the conditions.[724] Richard presently grew uneasy as to the possibility of fulfilling the Franks’ side of the compact on the appointed day; for Philip, after formally giving the charge of his share of the prisoners to the duke of Burgundy,[725] had carried them, or at least the most important and valuable of them, away with him to Tyre and left them there in the custody of Conrad.[726] On August 5 Richard despatched envoys to Tyre to request that Conrad would at once return to Acre and bring these prisoners with him. Conrad flatly refused. Richard’s Aug. 6 first impulse, when his envoys came back next day, was to go and bring the marquis to submission by force. But Conrad was a dangerous person to quarrel with, owing to his position as heir to the Crown, and still more because, as master of Tyre, he could stop the coming of provisions for the host; he was in fact already doing this again, as he had done in the earlier days of the siege. Hugh of Burgundy therefore undertook the task of inducing Conrad to give up the prisoners to him as the representative of their proper owner, Philip.[727] He set out for Tyre on August 8, but did 1191 not get back with the prisoners till the 12th.[728] According to the letter of the treaty, however—at least, according to the Franks’ understanding of it—the presence of all the Saracen prisoners on the 11th was not really necessary; for their release was to be conditional on, and should therefore have been preceded by, Saladin’s fulfilment of his part of the bargain. On the 11th therefore Richard called upon Saladin to do what he had promised for that day. Saladin replied that he would do so only on one of two conditions: either that the Franks should at once release the captive garrison of Acre, in which case he would give other hostages for the completion of his payments; or that the Franks should give him hostages to keep till the garrison were set free. The Franks rejected both these propositions, offering instead, in return for what was now due from the Sultan, to give a solemn oath that the prisoners should be restored to him; but this he, having no confidence in their good faith, would not accept.[729] The discussion seems to have ended for the time in a postponement of the “first term” (as Bohadin calls it) till August 20.[730]
On the 14th Richard led his own troops out of the city and pitched his tents near the enemy’s lines. A western Aug. 15 writer tells us that next day Saladin begged for a further prolongation of the term, which Richard sternly refused; Saladin then asked for a colloquy with Richard on the Aug. 16 morrow, but failed to keep the tryst, and excused his failure by declaring, “I did not come, because I could not fulfill the agreement which my people had made with him.”[731] The next two days seem to have been occupied in 1191 skirmishes in which the king took his full share.[732] Aug. 20 Saladin’s advanced guard had now been withdrawn from Ayadiyeh to another height, Keisan, some two miles further south. On the morning of the 20th—the day finally fixed for the expiration of the “first term”—Richard sent his tents to the pits at the foot of the hill which the Saracens had quitted. Noon passed without a word or sign from Saladin. After mid-day the watchers on Keisan saw Richard come out on horseback with what to them looked like “the whole Frankish host” into the middle of the plain between Keisan and Ayadiyeh. They at once sent word to the Sultan, and were anxiously awaiting instructions and reinforcements from him when they saw the Moslem prisoners, bound with cords, led forth into the midst of the host and instantly slaughtered with swords and spears. Saladin’s reinforcements came too late to do anything except unite with the troops at Keisan in a futile, though gallant, effort to avenge the massacre by an attack so fierce and persistent that it was not beaten off till nightfall.[733]
The victims of this wholesale execution comprised the entire Moslem garrison of Acre except a few persons of distinction who were specially reserved for ransom. Richard himself stated the number of the slain to be about two thousand six hundred.[734] Bohadin, whose computation is doubtless that of the Moslem troops who visited the place of slaughter next morning, says “more than three thousand.”[735] 1191 This writer, whose narrative we have been following, and who was Saladin’s confidential secretary and constant companion, says that in this matter “the English king, seeing all the delays interposed by the Sultan to the execution of the treaty, acted perfidiously with regard to his Mussulman prisoners.” This charge of perfidy is based upon a clause which occurs only in the same writer’s account of the terms of the capitulation of Acre; according to him, the garrison were thereby promised that in any case their lives should be spared; if the Sultan failed to do his part of the agreement, their fate was to be slavery.[736] The Frank writers know nothing of this stipulation. Two of them distinctly assert that the promise of life to the garrison was made conditional on Saladin’s fulfilment of the bargain.[737] Another says they were to go out free and unharmed if the agreement were carried out within the term, but if not, they were to be at the mercy of the kings for their limbs and lives.[738] The others simply speak of them as hostages. If the Frankish version of this matter be the correct one, then the persistent “delays interposed by the Sultan to the execution of the treaty” had unquestionably, on the principles universally recognised by both Franks and Saracens, rendered the lives of these hostages legally forfeit at mid-day on August 20. Bohadin’s admission about the “delays” is practically an acknowledgement that they would have been so but for the special promise which he alleges to have been made to these men. Even if that promise were given, indeed, a 1191 feudal lawyer might have made out a case for Richard and his colleagues in the war-council, on the plea that the moment the garrison became legally slaves, they became, as such, the absolute property of their masters, to be kept alive or slain at their masters’ will; and a Mussulman lawyer might have had even more difficulty than a Christian one in finding an answer to such a plea. It is, however, quite possible that the treaty—drawn up as it was, in haste, in two different languages, between parties who could only hold communication through interpreters[739]—may have been honestly understood by the Moslems in one sense and by the Christians in another. As for Richard’s personal responsibility in the matter, Bohadin certainly exaggerates it. The other princes of the Crusade clearly concurred in the determination of the hostages’ fate.[740] The cruelty of such wholesale slaughter shocked neither their moral sense nor that of their contemporaries; the chroniclers of the time all record the massacre without a word or a hint of reprobation; one at least who was himself in the host openly rejoices over it as a just vengeance for the Crusaders slain during the siege by the crossbows of the garrison.[741] With the leaders every other consideration would probably be outweighed by a military one. Until these prisoners were disposed of in some safe way, the Crusade must be at a standstill. They could not be left in Acre or anywhere else without a guard far more numerous than it was possible to spare from the main enterprise. Saladin’s conduct 1191 had extinguished the hope of disposing of them by exchange. The only sure way was to follow an example set by him, though on a much smaller scale, four years before, when he put to death all the Templars and Hospitaliers who had been captured in the battle of Hattin.[742] So the deed was done; and that same night a herald proclaimed throughout the host that on the morrow all must be ready to set out for Ascalon.[743]
CHAPTER IV
FROM ACRE TO JOPPA
1191
Lignum Crucis, Signum Ducis,
Sequitur exercitus,
Quod non cessit, sed praecessit