Thus far the pilgrims had been journeying along the edge of a plain consisting chiefly of moors, marshes, and sand. Before them lay a tract of more wooded country, and also, it seems, a part of the coast-road so neglected and overgrown with brushwood as to be impassable for their heavy cavalry. It appears that in consequence they made their way up the left bank of the Dead River till they struck the inland road.[766] Here they were much nearer to the hills and to the enemy. But Saladin had no mind to risk a general engagement till he had collected all his forces on a battle-ground of his own choosing; and on that same Sept. 3 day he again removed his camp further south, into the midst of a great forest where he hoped to intercept the Christians on their way to the city which must be their next objective, Arsuf. His cavalry continued to hang about the Christian host[767] and harassed it incessantly on its march; yet the pilgrims plodded on, keeping in the same order as before, never breaking it except when the enemy’s attacks became so intolerable that the infantry had to open its ranks to let the cavalry pass through for a charge. On one of these occasions Richard was wounded in the left side by a Turkish javelin, but so slightly that the wound only inflamed his eagerness for the fight, and all day he was constantly driving off the assailants.[768] At nightfall they retired, and the host encamped near the “Salt River”—now the Nahr Iskanderuneh—which runs down to the 1191 plain from Shechem and falls into the sea seven or eight miles south of Caesarea. Here, again, they stayed two nights (September 3-5). The horses had suffered more severely than the men from the Turkish missiles; the badly wounded ones were now killed and sold by their owners to the men of lower rank for food; owing to the rush for them and the high prices charged there was much strife over this matter, till Richard checked it by proclaiming that he would give a live horse to any man who would make a present of a dead one to his poorer comrades in arms.[769]
From the Salt River a tract of wild wooded country called the Forest of Arsuf stretched southward for twelve miles or more. Saladin had taken up his position on a hill almost in the middle of it; here his foot-soldiers had rejoined him on the morning of September 4; and here, on the same day, he received a message from the Christian princes asking for a parley about terms of peace between him and the native Franks of the kingdom, “such as might enable those from over-sea to return to their homes.” They were Sept. 5 evidently becoming awake to the extreme difficulty of their enterprise; and the Sultan’s apparent reluctance to engage in a pitched battle may have raised hopes of a peaceful settlement with him. He, on his part, was glad of anything to delay their further advance till the Turcoman reinforcements which he was expecting had arrived; so a meeting took place between Richard and Safadin, with Humphry of Toron as interpreter, early on Thursday, September 5. Richard spoke first; at the mention of peace Safadin asked, “What conditions am I to propose to the Sultan in your name?” “One condition only,” answered Richard, “that you restore the whole land to us, and go back to your own country.” This brought the conference to an abrupt end; Safadin returned to his brother,[770] and the Christians set forward on their march through the Forest. They seem to have traversed it in a south-westerly direction which brought them back to the coast-road. A 1191 report had reached them that the enemy intended to set fire to the Forest “and make of it such a blaze that they would all be roasted”; but nothing of the kind took place; “no host ever had a better day’s march; they met with no hindrance at all”; they passed the “Hill of Arsuf”—seemingly the hill which Saladin was occupying—and came safely out on the plain, where they found a good camping-ground beside what they called “the River of the Cleft Rock” (Rochetaillie).[771] They soon learned why they had been thus left unmolested through the day’s march; Saladin was disposing his whole force—estimated by a scout at three hundred thousand men, while the Christians were only about a third of that number[772]—to give them battle as soon as they should emerge from the cover of the Forest into the open fields and cultivated land around Arsuf. It was therefore in very carefully planned array that they set forth again on Saturday, September 7.[773] The host was divided into five battalions; the vanguard consisted of the Templars; next came the Bretons and Angevins; then the Poitevins, who were placed under the command of King Guy; after these the Normans and English with the Standard; in the rear the troops of the Hospital. Every battalion was subdivided into two squadrons, one of horse, one of foot, which advanced parallel to each other; the duke of Burgundy and some picked followers rode up and down and round about the host to regulate and direct its movements according to what they saw of those of the Turks; and Count Henry of Champagne acted as special “side-guard” on the flank nearest to the hills, where he rode continually alongside of the foot-soldiers.[774]
Saladin, meanwhile, had rapidly disposed his forces so as to occupy the hills parallel with the Crusaders’ line of march from the River of the Cleft Rock to Arsuf. By the coast-road the distance between these two places is little more than four miles. Setting out probably at dawn, the Christian vanguard reached the outskirts of Arsuf before nine o’clock, and some of the footmen began to pitch the tents among the fields and gardens.[775] Then the Saracen archers swarmed down upon the flank of the advancing host, pouring on it an overwhelming shower of arrows.[776] It was, however, in the rear that Saladin hoped to deliver his most effectual blow. Here his line curved round from the hills towards the mouth of the river, so that, as a Frank writer says, the Christian rearguard, “packed together so closely that you could not have thrown an apple at it without hitting either a man or a horse,” filled the whole space between the sea-shore and the enemies.[777] Thus surrounded, the crossbowmen and archers in the rearguard struggled on for hours, constantly compelled to turn round and sometimes to march backwards, returning as best they could the continuous fire of missiles in their rear. At length it ceased, only to be succeeded by an attack at close quarters from another body of Turks with maces and swords, who fell upon the foot-soldiers of the Hospital in overwhelming force. Once already the Knights had sent a message to Richard, begging for leave to disperse their assailants by a charge, but it had been refused. Now the Grand Master himself spurred forward and urged the same request. “Be patient, good Master; one cannot be everywhere,” was the reply. Richard was determined not to risk a charge till he saw the fitting moment for a general one all along the line. It had been pre-arranged that when the charge was to take place, two trumpets should be sounded in the van, 1191 two in the centre, and two in the rear, so as to be heard above and distinguished from the din of the innumerable Turkish brass drums and other noisy instruments, and to let the three divisions of the host know their relative positions. At last the leaders decided that the moment had come, and the signal was about to be given, when the Marshal of the Hospital and a Norman knight, Baldwin le Caron,[778] burst through the ranks without waiting for it, and shouting “Saint George!” dashed into the midst of the enemy. The other knights at once turned their horses and followed the rash example. For a moment the whole rearguard was in confusion, and a great disaster seemed imminent; but Richard’s promptitude retrieved the day.[779] The trumpets were sounded so instantaneously that the Turks seem never to have discovered what had really precipitated the charge.[780] While Richard himself, “quicker than quarrel from crossbow,” spurred at the head of his picked followers to what had now become the van instead of the rear, and drove off its assailants—the Turkish right wing—with great slaughter,[781] the rest of the Frank cavalry charged the Turkish centre and left wing and put them both to headlong flight, also with heavy loss of life. Saladin’s secretary and friend, Bohadin, escaping from the rout of the centre, tried to rejoin first the left wing and then the right, but found each division in worse plight than the one he had quitted; and when he reached the reserve he found there only seventeen men remaining to guard the Standard, all the rest having been called up by the Sultan to support their comrades, and shared their fate. Saladin tried hard to rally the fugitives, and when the Franks, having also rallied to their Standard, re-formed their ranks and sought to continue their march, they were impeded by repeated attacks which they had to turn and repel. At last another charge, led by William des Barres and Richard on the famous Fauvel, which he had brought with him from 1191 Cyprus, drove the assailants and carried the pursuers right up into the hills. There the dangers of the unknown and difficult ground were too great for the Franks to venture on an engagement; they therefore withdrew from the pursuit, and proceeded along the lower ground till the whole host was encamped outside Arsuf,[782] Saladin making no further attempt to molest them. He had succeeded in collecting all that was left of his army; but his losses were very heavy, and they included several emirs, while among the Christian slain was only one man of distinction, James of Avesnes.[783] Richard’s assertion that the battle of Arsuf had cost Saladin more lives of noble Saracens than he had lost in any one day for the last forty years[784] may not be literally exact; but Bohadin does not attempt to minimize Sept. 7 the disaster or to disguise its effect on the survivors and on Saladin himself. “God alone knows what intense grief filled his heart. All our men were wounded, if not in their bodies, in their hearts.”[785]
That night Saladin pushed on as far as the Nahr el Aoudjeh, crossed it, and encamped on its southern bank.[786] This river is called by the Frank writers “the River of Arsuf,” but might have more fittingly taken its name from Joppa, for its mouth is seven miles south of the former place and only three miles north of the latter. It is formed by the union of three streams, one of which rises at the foot of the hills of Samaria, another in the valley which divides Mount Ephraim from the Judean range, and the third flows through the northernmost of the passes leading from the plain into the hill-country of Judah. The inland road through the plain crosses these three streams some three miles above their meeting-point, and a road branching off from the crossing-place runs alongside of the southernmost stream up the pass, and thence over the plateau to 1191 Jerusalem. Saladin appears to have thought that the Franks might march across the plain and attempt an advance Sun.,
Sept. 8 upon the Holy City by this route; next day he re-crossed the river and took up a position nearer to Arsuf, ready to intercept them.[787] They, however, had no such intention. They spent that Sunday at Arsuf, keeping the feast of our Lady’s Nativity, and burying their dead hero, James of Avesnes. On Monday the 9th they resumed their southward march,[788] pursued it steadily despite the provocations of the Saracen bowmen, and encamped that night on both sides of the river near its mouth. Hereupon Saladin, perceiving that their immediate objective was Joppa and that he could not prevent them from reaching it, let Tues.,
Sept. 10 them proceed thither unmolested and encamp next day outside its ruined walls (for, like Arsuf and the more northerly coast-towns, it had been evacuated and dismantled some time before),[789] while he with all his forces hurried to take up his position at Ramlah,[790] whence he could easily watch all the three possible routes of the Christians’ next advance. Two of these routes led—one through Ramlah itself—to Jerusalem; the third led coastwise to Egypt. Either of the two former Saladin might hope either to block or defend; but with the third it was otherwise. The plain south of the Nahr el Aoudjeh is much wider than further north: Joppa is ten miles from the foot of the hills; between Joppa and Ascalon the width of the plain varies from ten to eighteen miles. The character of the country, too, is different; instead of sand-dunes, marshland, moorland, and forest, the way lies through cornfields, palm-groves, villages and towns. It was thus not a place where the Saracen mode of warfare could be made effective against that of the Franks in a pitched battle; yet if the Franks decided to continue their march down the coast, nothing but defeat 1191 in a pitched battle could prevent them from laying siege to Ascalon.
Ascalon was a post of far greater importance than any other on the whole coast south of Acre. It was the key to Egypt, the only sea-port of any consequence between Joppa and Alexandria, the only fortified city, now that Caesarea was destroyed, on the whole length of the coast between Acre and the Egyptian frontier. To the Arabs Ascalon was “Syria’s Summit,” “Syria’s Bride.” Strong as were her walls, Saladin knew that the garrison within them was wholly inadequate for their defence, and that an attempt to reinforce it might lead to trouble with his army, owing to the unwillingness of men who had seen the fate of their brethren at Acre to incur the risk of a like destiny by shutting themselves up in another great fortress;[791] and he knew, too, that if the Franks did besiege the place, his troops would be unable to harass them from the hills as they had done at Acre, the hills opposite Ascalon being more than fifteen miles distant. He saw, in short, only one means of preventing Ascalon from falling into the hands of the Franks and becoming thenceforth as formidable a danger as it had been hitherto a valuable protection to his communications with Egypt. Giving out that he intended to concentrate all his forces on the preservation of Jerusalem, and commissioning his brother Safadin to keep watch on the movements of the enemy, he on Wednesday, September 11, left the main body of his troops at Ramlah under Safadin, and himself set out for Ascalon. He spent Thurs.,
Sept. 12 a sleepless night outside its walls, and declared next morning to Bohadin that he would rather lose all his sons—one of whom, El Afdal, was present—than pull out one stone of the place, but there was no alternative. Under his personal superintendence the town was cleared of its inhabitants, and the troops which he had brought with him, with every other available man, were set to destroy its fortifications. Ten days of incessant work, picking, digging, and burning, reduced “the Summit of Syria” to a heap of ruins.[792]
These operations were just beginning when Safadin, who Sept.
12-13 had transferred his headquarters to Jafna (called by the Arabs Yebnah and by the Franks Ibelin), on the coast-road, about thirteen miles south of Joppa, received from the Frank leaders some new overtures for a treaty.[793] Their object probably was to ascertain, if possible, something as to the plans and movements of their adversaries; and Safadin did his utmost to spin out the negotiations, his brother having charged him to detain the enemy at Joppa by every means he could devise till the Sultan’s work at Ascalon, which he was most anxious to keep secret from them, should be done.[794] The Franks were in no great haste to move; the rich orchards and vineyards and olive-yards round Joppa formed a delightful camping-ground; moreover, they must in any case wait till their fleet came into the harbour. Soon after its arrival some of the poor folk who had been turned out of Ascalon wandered into Joppa c. Sept.
20-22? and astonished the Crusaders by telling them what Saladin was doing. The tale seemed so incredible that Richard despatched Geoffrey de Lusignan and some others by sea to reconnoitre Ascalon and find out the truth. When these scouts confirmed the report of the refugees, a council was held to decide what should be done. Richard’s military instinct told him that the plan with which they had set out from Acre—the securing of the whole coast before they risked any attempt on the interior—was the only sound one. “The Turks are razing Ascalon; they dare not fight us. Let us go and recover it. All the world ought to hasten thither!” he pleaded. But the duke of Burgundy and the French party urged that the shortest route to the goal of their pilgrimage was the route which started not from Ascalon but from the place where they now were, and that Joppa should be rebuilt and made the base for an advance upon Jerusalem. Richard, feeling that anything 1191 was better than dissension within the host, yielded to their urgency. A tax was levied for the expense of the restoration of Joppa;[795] and on October 1 Richard wrote home: “Know ye that by God’s grace we hope to recover the Holy City within twenty days after Christmas, and then we will return to our own land.”[796]