On August 28, 1189, Guy commenced the siege of the strong maritime fortress of Ptolemais (St. Jean d'Acre). A fleet from Pisa had already joined the Sicilian one; in October there arrived twelve thousand Danes and Friesians, and in November a number of Flemings, under the Count of Avesnes, French knights under the Bishop of Beauvais, and Thuringians, under their landgrave, Louis. Saladin, roused from his inactivity by these events, hastened to the spot with his army, and in his turn surrounded the Christian camp, which lay in a wide semicircle round Ptolemais, and was defended by strong intrenchments within and without. It formed an iron ring round the besieged town, which Saladin, spite of all his efforts, could not break through. Each wing of the position rested upon the sea, and was thus certain of its supplies, and able to protect the landing of reinforcements, which continually arrived in constantly increasing numbers—Italians, French, English and Germans, Normans, and Swedes. "If on one day we killed ten," said the Arabs, "on the next, a hundred more arrived fresh from the West."
The fighting was incessant by land and by sea, against the town and against the Sultan's camp. Sometimes the Egyptian fleet drove the Christian ships far out to sea; and Saladin could then succor the garrison with provisions and fresh troops, till new Frankish squadrons again surrounded the harbor, and only a few intrepid divers could steal through between the hostile ships. On land, too, now one side and now the other was in danger. One day the Sultan scaled the Christian intrenchments, and advanced close to the walls of the city, before the Franks rallied sufficiently to drive him back by a desperate attack; but they soon took their revenge in a night sortie, when they attacked the Sultan in his very tent, and he narrowly escaped by rapid flight. Against the town their progress was very slow, as the garrison, under an able and energetic commander, Bohaeddin, showed itself resolute and indefatigable. One week passed after another, and the condition of the Franks became painfully complicated. They could go neither backward nor forward, they could make no impression on the walls; nor could they re-embark in the face of an active enemy. There was no choice but to conquer or die; so preparations were made for a long sojourn; wooden barracks, and for the princes even stone houses were built, and a new hostile town arose all around Ptolemais. In spite of this the winter brought innumerable hardships. In that small space more than a hundred thousand men were crowded together, with insufficient shelter, and uncertain supplies of wretched food; pestilential diseases soon broke out, which swept away thousands, and were intensified by the exhalations from the heaps of dead. Saladin retreated from their deadly vicinity to more airy quarters on the adjacent hills; his troops also suffered from the severe weather, but were far better supplied than the Christians with water, provisions, and other comforts, as the caravans from Cairo and Bagdad met in their camp, and numbers of merchants displayed in glittering booths all kinds of eastern wares.
It was an unexampled assemblage of the forces of two quarters of the world round one spot, unimportant in itself, and chosen almost by accident. Our own times have seen a counterpart to it in the siege of Sebastopol, which, though in a totally different form, was a new act in the same great struggle between the East and the West. Happily the western nations did not derive their warlike stimulus from religious sources, and they displayed, if not their military, at any rate, their moral superiority, in the most brilliant manner.
Although, in the fight around Ptolemais, the superiority was doubtless on Saladin's side, there was a moment in which Europe threatened to oppose to the mighty Sultan an antagonist as great as himself. In May, 1189, the emperor Frederick IX marched out of Ratisbon with his army for Syria. He had already ruled thirty-seven years over Germany and Italy, and his life had been one of war and labor, of small results, but growing fame. He was born a ruler in the highest sense of the word; he possessed all the attributes of power; bold yet cautious, courageous and enduring, energetic and methodical, he towered proudly above all who surrounded him, and had the highest conception of his princely calling. But his ideas were beyond his time, and while he tried to open the way for a distant future, he was made to feel the penalty of running counter to the inclination of the present generation. It seemed to him unbearable that the Emperor, who was extolled by all the world as the defender of the right and the fountain-head of law, should be forced to bow before unruly vassals or unlimited ecclesiastical power. He had, chiefly from the study of the Roman law, conceived the idea of a state complete within itself, and strong in the name of the common weal, a complete contrast to the existing condition of Europe, where all the monarchies were breaking up, and the crowned priest reigned supreme over a crowd of petty princes.
Under these circumstances he appeared foreshadowing modern thoughts deep in the Middle Ages, like a fresh mountain breeze, dispersing the incense-laden atmosphere of the time. This discrepancy caused the greatness and the misfortune of the mighty Emperor. The current of his time set full against him. When, as the representative of the State, he enforced obedience to the law, he appeared to some an impious offender against the Holy Church; to others, a tyrant trampling on the general freedom; and while conquering in a hundred fights, he was driven from one position after another by the force of opinion. But so commanding was the energy, so powerful the earnestness, and so inexhaustible the resources of his nature that he was as terrible to his foes on the last day as on the first, passionless and pitiless, never distorted by cruelty, and never melted by pity, an iron defender of his imperial rights.
We can only guess at the reasons which may have induced a sovereign of this stamp to leave a sphere of domestic activity for the fantastic wars of the crusades. Once, in the midst of his Italian feud, when the deeds of Alexander the Great were read aloud to him, he exclaimed: "Happy Alexander, who didst never see Italy! happy I had I never been in Asia!" Whether piety or love of fame ultimately decided him, he felt within himself the energy to take a great decision, and at once proceeded to action. The aged Emperor once more displayed in this last effort the fulness of his powerful and ever-youthful nature. For the first time during these wars, since the armed pilgrimages had begun, Europe beheld a spirit conscious of their true object, and capable of carrying it out. The army was smaller than any of the former ones, consisting of twenty thousand knights and fifty thousand squires and foot soldiers; but it was guided by one inflexible, indomitable will. With strict discipline, the imperial leader drove all disorderly and useless persons out of his camp; he was always the first to face every obstacle or danger, and showed himself equal to all the political or military difficulties of the expedition. The Greek empire had to be traversed first, whose Emperor, Isaac, had allied himself with Saladin; but at the sight of these formidable masses he shrank in terror from any hostile attempt, and hastened to transport the German army across into Asia Minor.
There they hoped for a friendly reception from the Emir of Iconium, who was reported to have a leaning toward Christianity; but in the mean time the old ruler had been dethroned by his sons, who opposed the Germans with a strong force. They were destined to feel the weight of the German arm. After their mounted bowmen had harassed the Christian troops for a time with a shower of arrows, the Emperor broke their line of battle, and scattered them by a sudden attack of cavalry in all directions, while at the same moment Frederick's son unexpectedly scaled the walls of their city. The crusaders then marched in triumph to Cilicia; the Armenians already yielded submissively to a cessation of hostilities; and far and wide throughout Turkish Syria went the dread of Frederick's irresistible arms. Even Saladin himself, who had boldly defied the disorderly attacks of the hundreds of thousands before Ptolemais, now lost all hope, and announced to his emirs his intention of quitting Syria on Frederick's arrival, and retreating across the Euphrates.
On this every highway in the country became alive, the emirs quitted their towns, and began to fly with their families, their goods, and chattels, and hope rose high in the Christian camp. This honor was reserved for the Emperor; that which no other Frankish sword could achieve he had done by the mere shadow of his approach; he had forced from Saladin a confession of inferiority. But he was not destined to see the realization of his endeavors here, any more than in Europe. His army had entered Cilicia, and was preparing to cross the rapid mountain stream of the Seleph. On June 10, 1190, they marched slowly across the narrow bridge, and the Emperor, impatient to get to the front, urged his horse into the stream, intending to swim to the opposite shore. The raging waters suddenly seized him, and hurried him away before the eyes of the people. When he was drawn out, far down the river, he was a corpse.
Boundless lamentations resounded throughout the army; the most brilliant ornament and sole hope of Christendom was gone; the troops arrived at Antioch in a state of the deepest dejection. From thence a number of the pilgrims returned home, scattered and discouraged, and a pestilence broke out among the rest, which was fatal to the greater number of them. It seemed, says a chronicler, "as though the members would not outlive their head." The Emperor's son, Duke Frederick of Swabia, reached the camp before Ptolemais with five thousand men, instituted there the Order of the Teutonic Knights—who were destined hereafter to found a splendid dominion on the distant shores of the German Ocean—and soon afterward followed his father to the grave.
The highest hopes were soon destroyed by this lamentable downfall. It seemed as if a stern fate had resolved to give the Christian world a distant view of the possibility of victory; the great Emperor might have secured it, but the generation which had not understood him was doomed to misery and defeat. A second winter, with the same fearful additions of hunger and sickness, came upon the camp before Ptolemais, and the measure of misfortune was filled by renewed and bitter quarrels among the Frankish princes. King Guy was as incompetent as ever, and so utterly mismanaged the Christian cause that the marquis Conrad of Montferrat indignantly opposed him. Queen Sibylla, by marriage with whom Guy had gained possession of the crown, died just at this juncture. Conrad instantly declared that Sibylla's sister Eliza was the only rightful heir, and, as he held every step toward advancement to be laudable, did not for a moment scruple to elope with her from her husband, to marry her himself, and to lay claim to the crown.