Lionheart (32 page)

In the Holy Land, many of the crusaders whom Richard had brought with him were dead from one cause or another, with the more prudent survivors already heading homeward, in many cases financially ruined and with their health broken. Enmeshment in the internecine politics of the Latin Kingdom weakened the military effect of those who remained, although both sides in the conflict had their fanatics. The
sufi
believed that dying in battle with the Christians gained them a ticket to paradise; what has been called ‘the cult of martyrdom’ in the Christian military orders likewise encouraged heroic, although militarily useless, self-sacrifice. By now even the Templars and Hospitallers, whose orders existed for no other reason than to protect pilgrims and fight the Saracen, were divided on the course to be followed.

The 10,000 troops left behind by Philip Augustus under the command of Duke Hugues III of Burgundy
¹⁶
were proving to be a mixed blessing because they had to be fed and equipped, for which Richard was relying on the arrival of the 200,000
bezants
that had been demanded for the ransom of the garrison of Acre, and of which Philip had renounced his share for this purpose. Richard repeatedly pressured Conrad to hand over to him Philip’s hostages, but Conrad refused to obey. On 11 August an instalment of one-third of the ransom and the exchange of prisoners was offered by Saladin, but Richard rejected this because a number of the named Christian nobles were not included in this first batch. On 13 August he threatened to behead all his hostages if the full ransom were not paid swiftly. To this, Saladin replied that he would then do the same and kill all his Christian captives.

In the third week of August Richard was again living in the camp outside Acre, the better to hustle preparations for the continuing campaign, but he was up against problems. As far as he was concerned, the whole army was now under his orders, but the rank-and-file protested that they had no clothes, arms, food or water, nor horses to ride and carry their baggage on the long trek south that he proposed as the next stage in the crusade. This forced him to purchase provisions and have them loaded onto the ships that were going to accompany the thousands of men on the march. He also had to hire all the archers locally available, who were not prepared to undertake another campaign without additional payment.

In between the negotiations over the prisoners, he and Saladin exchanged gifts and small courtesies, but tension was growing. According to the pro-Richard chroniclers, on 18 August it was rumoured that Saladin had summarily beheaded his Christian prisoners. That same day, Richard launched a savage assault on the Saracen force, in which his army suffered many casualties. On 20 August, suspecting that Saladin’s delay in paying the ransom was a ploy to prevent the crusading army from moving on to its next objective, he gave orders for 2,700 of the captives to be executed outside the walls of Acre, sparing only 300 important persons for later ransom.
¹⁷
Acting for the departed king of France, the duke of Burgundy did the same with all the captives entrusted to him, so that the vast majority of the soldiers of the garrison and about 300 wives and children were roped together in groups and, in open ground in full view of the Saracen encampment, attacked with swords, lances, clubs and stones, their bellies slit open before the bodies were burned, in case gold or jewels had been swallowed.
¹⁸

The scene is scarcely to be imagined: distraught parents forced to watch their children and friends killed before themselves being dragged forward to be slaughtered, the stink of blood, urine and excrement, the weeping and screams of terror and the blood-curdling groans of those not killed outright but beaten to death by executioners too exhausted to give them a clean end. Even for Richard’s soldiers, hardened by years of combat, it was tough work under the midsummer sun. Eighteen years later the Cistercian abbot Arnaud Amaury, who was leading the Albigensian ‘crusade’, was approached at the siege of Beziers by the mercenaries given the task of executing thousands of prisoners, and who pleaded with him to order an end to the killing because they were exhausted by the sheer effort of hacking and stabbing victim after victim. The lack of compunction, or any feeling of humanity on the part of the soldiers killing the garrison and civilians of Acre is summed up by the chronicler Ambroise, who refers to them as ‘these dogs who had shut themselves up in Acre and caused us so much harm’.
¹⁹
In despair, the Saracens attacked, hoping to stop the killing, but were beaten off.

N
OTES

1.
  Stubbs, W.,
Historical Introduction to the Rolls Series
(London: Longmans, 1902), p. 227.

2.
  Gerald of Wales,
De Vita Galfredi
, pp. 382, 387–93.

3.
  Roger of Howden,
Chronica
, Vol 3, p. 144.

4.
  Benedict of Peterborough,
Gesta Henrici
, Vol 2, p. 212.

5.
  Gerald of Wales,
De Vita Galfredi
, pp. 410–11.

6.
  Benedict of Peterborough,
Gesta Henrici,
Vol 2, p. 221.

7.
  Stubbs, W.,
Ralph of Diceto,
Opera Historica
, Rolls Series No. 68 (London: 1876), Vol 1, p. 419.

8.
  Ibid, p. 420.

9.
  Ibid, p. 431–2.

10.
  William of Newburgh,
Historia Rerum Anglicarum
, Vol 1, pp. 266–7.

11.
  The story of Mary, heavily pregnant with twins, travelling 60-plus miles across difficult terrain to Judean Bethlehem, was introduced into the gospels in spurious fulfilment of a prophecy by Ezekiel that the Messiah would be born of the House of David, i.e. in Judea.

12.
  Kelly,
Eleanor of Aquitaine
, p. 297.

13.
  Benedict of Peterborough,
Gesta Henrici
, Vol 2, p. 236.

14.
  Ibid.

15.
  Ralph of Diceto,
Opera Historica
, Vol 1, p. 434.

16.
  Richard, A.,
Histoire
, Vol 2, p. 214.

17.
  Ambroise,
Estoire de la guerre sainte
, p. 393.

18.
  Roger of Howden,
Chronica
, Vol 3, cxxxv.

19.
  Ambroise,
Estoire de la guerre sainte
, p. 394.

17

Blood on the Sand, Blood in the Mud

O
n 22 August, when the work of disposing of those thousands of mutilated corpses must still been have ongoing, Richard handed responsibility for the reconstruction and defence of Acre to Bertram III of Verdun, who had faithfully served Henry II as sheriff and justiciar in England and also played an important part in Henry’s conquest of Ireland. His co-castellan was Étienne de Longchamp, yet another brother of the bizarre bishop of Ely. Leaving them in charge of the city that had cost so many lives, he headed south towards Jaffa, the port he considered essential to a successful siege of Jerusalem and holding it afterwards – as did Saladin.

The progress of Richard’s army of some 20,000 men followed the coast around the bay of Acre in the direction of Caiaphas. Scouts brought news that Saladin’s main force was moving south further inland and no sooner had the long column of crusaders set out than Saracen skirmishers commanded by al-‘Adil attacked the left flank and rear – riding in close at intervals on their nimble Arab and Turkmene mounts to loose arrows and throw spears before wheeling away out of bow-shot in the hope of luring the crusaders into a trap. For the marching men, the worst thing was the harassing fire of arrows. Unlike the wooden longbows of European archers, which were too long and unwieldy for combat use by the rider of a galloping horse, the Saracens used shorter recurved composite bone-and-sinew bows. Their range was somewhat less than that of the longbow, but they were far easier to manage in the saddle, the rider using both hands to knock an arrow to the string and fire it while controlling his mount by the pressure of his knees, even when heading away in the famous Parthian shot. The speed at which he kept moving throughout made him a difficult target for return fire.

Aware that the column could be attacked in force at any moment, Richard formed the mass of men and horses in such a way that it could swiftly turn left and face any attack, which was bound to be coming from the landward side. He divided his cavalry into twelve formations of 100 knights, positioning the Hospitallers, commanded by Brother Garnier of Nablus, in the rear and the Templars in the lead of the column under Robert de Sablé, who had been elected their Grand Master because of his record fighting the Muslims in Spain and Portugal. For linguistic reasons, the various contingents with a common language were kept intact, using their own tongues as the language of command, as was done in previous crusades: Poitevins and Gascons followed the Templars, the Bretons followed them; then came the Anglo-Norman knights, and the Flemings under Jacques d’Avesnes riding just in front of the Hospitallers. Commanding the vanguard was Guy de Lusignan; Richard placed Hugues III of Burgundy in command of the rearguard and positioned himself in the centre, from where he could most easily control the whole column. The vulnerable baggage train was placed on the right flank between the main column and the seashore.

The landward flank was composed of crossbowmen and archers, whose job was to break up the Muslim raids before they came too close. It was for a situation like this that all those thousands of arrows had been shipped out from England, for it would have been too dangerous to send men to recover undamaged arrows, as was often done after a battle in Europe. Keeping station just offshore was the crusader fleet, providing supplies at overnight stops and evacuation and a semblance of care for the daily quotas of wounded.

In this complicated military exercise Richard was in his element, controlling his large army on the march at battle-readiness. A recurring problem was restraining any impulse among the knights, unused to such strict discipline, to ride off in pursuit of the skirmishers, whose attacks were particularly difficult to bear in the early morning, when the sun was in the crusaders’ eyes. Despite the legends of folk-hero archers like Robin Hood and William Tell, able to split a willow wand or transfix an apple at extreme range, the military use of longbows was to provide a barrage of simultaneously released arrows that came down on a closely packed body of advancing enemy troops, turning a heavy cavalry charge, for example, into a chaotic confusion of wounded, terrified, plunging horses. Hitting fast-moving individual Saracen riders with individual shots was far more difficult. Conversely, every Saracen arrow seemed to claim a victim in the close-packed ranks they were targeting.

The crusaders marched only in the relative cool between dawn and noon, before stopping at a source of clean water and setting up a well-guarded camp for the night so as to minimise the risk of heatstroke that claimed lives at Hattin. With the constant need to fend off raids by Al-‘Adil’s mounted archers, progress was slow: on some days they advanced barely a mile. At Caiaphas on the southern tip of the bay, they found the walls torn down and the inhabitants fled inland. From there onward, they travelled through a land of scorched earth, with fortresses and crops destroyed. One lightning attack by the Saracens in greater than usual force saw Hugues of Burgundy’s rearguard briefly isolated from the main force until Richard’s generalship and speed of reaction succeeded in hacking a way through to them. It was about this time that Guillaume des Barres so distinguished himself in combat that Richard forgave him their previous differences.
¹
The constant skirmishing attacks were not an end in themselves, but intended to wear down and, more importantly, slow down the army’s progress while Saladin took a longer route inland to set a trap into which Richard must march. At one point, al-‘Adil came under a flag of truce to parley, although whether this was a genuine negotiation or yet another delaying tactic is open to question.