Lionheart (34 page)

Perhaps Richard’s most desperate ploy in this time was to offer al-‘Adil the hand of his sister Joanna in marriage, with the idea that the couple could be crowned king and queen of Jerusalem, their progeny to found a new dynasty. Failing that, he offered him his niece Eleanor of Brittany, daughter of his brother Geoffrey, and therefore his chattel to dispose of as he wished. One wonders how Pope Celestine III could have given his blessing to either of these solutions. In any case, when Joanna heard of Richard’s plan to get himself off the hook by marrying her to a Muslim prince, her rejoinder was a categorical
No!
Throughout all this time, the intrigue between the factions supporting Guy and Conrad continued, as illustrated by the day when Humphrey of Toron, representing Richard and Guy, was conducting talks with the Saracens and was surprised to observe Conrad’s envoy Reynald of Sidon and Balian of Ibelin riding out from Jerusalem to go hawking with al-‘Adil like the best of friends.
¹⁵

By now there were problems with the remnants of the French contingent, who showed no interest in girding up their loins for an attack on Jerusalem when success would simply mean more kudos for the king of England. Even the locally born nobles and the Hospitallers and Templars, whose whole lives were dedicated to fighting in the Holy Land, had to admit that if they successfully besieged Jerusalem in the spring, they would be unable to hold it, since the slender supply and communication lines from Jaffa could be cut at any moment. It was known that few of the surviving crusaders had any intention of staying in Outremer when their overlords left, which meant that there would not be enough military presence to defend more than the handful of port cities on the coast. This meant in turn that it was out of the question to think of retaking the cordon of castles inland necessary for a defence in depth of the Latin states.

On 13 January 1192 the demoralised army turned tail and headed back to Ibelin. In the milder winter climate of the coastal plain, Richard led the army south to the razed fortress-city of Ashkelon, still an impressive ruin today. Aware of its strategic importance on the route to Egypt, he again incited the rank-and-file to labour on its reconstruction by the sight of their commander stripped off and apparently enjoying the unaccustomed exercise with them. No blandishments, however, nor Richard’s bully-boy threats to declare forfeit all Conrad of Montferrat’s possessions, could persuade the marquis to join the expedition to Ashkelon. This was probably because he knew from his own sources that the fortress would have to be razed again under the eventual agreement with Saladin – as indeed it was. Of all the energy and lives expended at Ashkelon the only benefit was the discovery of onion-like edible weeds growing in the surrounding countryside, christened shallots or échalottes in a corruption of the city’s name and brought back to enrich European cuisine to this day.

With the coming of spring, interest in fighting the Saracens took second place to the renewed internecine dispute between Guy de Lusignan and Conrad of Montferrat over who was the rightful king of Jerusalem. So many of the barons of the Latin states now supported the marquis of Montferrat that Richard had to accept the claim of Conrad, by whom Queen Isabella was pregnant and thus likely soon to present the kingdom with a legitimate heir or heiress. It was to compensate Guy that he sold Cyprus to him for a nominal sum, enabling him to style himself ‘king of Cyprus’. Count Henry of Champagne – who was Queen Eleanor’s grandson by her Capetian daughter Marie of Champagne and therefore the son of Richard’s half-sister – was despatched to Tyre to convey to Conrad of Montferrat the news that he was now the undisputed king of Jerusalem. A few days later, before he had been crowned, Conrad was attacked by two Hashashin and fatally stabbed in a street of Tyre. Conrad’s bodyguards killed one of the assassins; the other, under torture, confessed that the murder had been commissioned from his master, known as the Old Man of the Mountains, by none other than the king of England.

This left young Henry of Champagne as the compromise candidate for the throne. Within seven days of the murder, the widowed and pregnant Isabella was forcibly married to him, all of which implies that Conrad was a victim of crusader politics and not killed by Saladin’s orders, as was rumoured at the time. History, or at any rate the notoriously insular history taught in Britain, has been unkind to Conrad because he refused to knuckle under to Richard.

The latter, meanwhile, had been receiving, along with shipments of treasure for the campaign, news from the Plantagenet Empire to the effect that Philip’s forces were encroaching on to his territory in western France and Prince John was inciting rebellion among the stay-at-home barons in England. However, a more immediate pressure came at a council in Ashkelon on 24 May of the Outremer nobility who were determined to make one last attempt to recover Jerusalem, a project on which Richard could not turn his back. On 7 June the army marched out of Ashkelon, heading north via Ramallah to Qalandiya, from where there was a clear view of the Holy City, only 10 miles distant.

However, too long had been spent in political squabbles and debating the various military possibilities, during which time Saladin’s army had had the time to re-group. On 20 June at the wells of Kuwaifa in the barren land south-west of Jerusalem, crusader scouts observed a large Egyptian supply caravan en route to the city. Three days later, Richard attacked. With insufficient armed guards, the caravan was swiftly overcome and many of the merchants killed, the army returning to Beit Nuba with a false sense of triumph at the capture of so many supplies and some thousands of horses and camels.
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Otherwise, the expedition to Qalandiya was a failure. On 4 July Richard led the army back to Ramlah, rendezvousing there with Henry II of Champagne, styling himself ‘king of Jerusalem’. At this point, intelligence reached them of renewed dissension among the various nationalities making up Saladin’s garrison there. This seemed to indicate a fresh opportunity to attack and take the city, but Richard still held back.

Then, on 31 July came news that Saladin had outflanked the crusaders by attacking Jaffa and breaking into the lower town. Richard decided that the best course was not to attack from the landward side, but to hire a task force of fifty Pisan and Genoese galleys to transport eighty knights, 400 archers and some 2,000 Italian mercenaries with which to make a swift surprise attack from the sea while the main army followed the land route to rendezvous at Jaffa. Approaching land on 1 or 5 August in his galley painted red with a red awning over the deck and red sails, he saw Saracen banners fluttering from the ramparts of Jaffa and despaired – until a courageous priest took the risk of swimming out to the ships with the news that the survivors of the garrison had retreated into the citadel, where they were still holding out while representatives were negotiating with Saladin for a complete surrender.

Calling for a rapid decision and immediate action, this was possibly Richard’s finest hour. Giving the order to take advantage of the onshore wind to beach the ships, he defied the thin line of Saracen bowmen between the sea and the citadel by leaping into the water without even donning his armoured boots and physically led his knights into the attack under the cover of a barrage of arrows that drove Saladin’s men back from the beach. Although the sultan tried to continue the negotiations, a sudden flood of Saracens fleeing the city spoke louder than words and the Christian spokesmen swiftly disengaged to join in the general rout of the attackers, who fled en masse 5 miles inland to be safe from pursuit. They were right to flee. During the Muslim occupation of the lower town, all pigs had been slaughtered as unclean and thrown into pits. Richard ordered the Muslim rank-and-file prisoners to be slaughtered also and thrown in with the pig carcases as a final insult to their bodies.
¹⁷

On the following morning Saladin’s chancellor Abu-Bakr arrived to negotiate the ransom of noble captives and found the victorious king of England conversing jovially with some important Mamelukes taken prisoner at Acre. Abu-Bakr brought with him a message proposing new terms for a settlement: with Jaffa substantially damaged in the Muslim attack, Saladin considered that it would be acceptable for the crusader frontier to stop at the next city to the north, Kessariya. Without rejecting the offer, Richard said he would then hold Jaffa and Ashkelon as a vassal of Saladin. Not surprisingly, Abu-Bakr rejected this half-baked arrangement, which was bound to fail when Richard returned to Europe, if not before. Abu-Bakr was quite firm that Ashkelon must be given up. Richard refused. Once again, negotiations were broken off.
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Realising that the crusader army coming by land was still two or three days’ march away, Saladin therefore launched a pre-emptive strike on 5 August, against the small force camped outside the damaged walls of the city. By lucky chance, a Genoese mercenary leaving the camp at dawn to answer a call of nature saw the rising sun reflected off many polished steel spearheads in the distance. The alarm was given. Richard had only fifty-four knights fit to fight, with fifteen horses between them, and the 2,000 mercenaries, whom he disposed in pairs with an archer between each pair, their shields and spears at an angle to impale incoming horses driven into the ground in front of them. In front of these a
frise
of tent pegs was set out to trip the Saracens’ horses.

Saladin’s cavalry charged in seven waves of 1,000 men, but were driven off each time. This continued for several hours – not continuously, as in a modern mechanised battle, but with intervals for horses and men to get their breath back and regroup, each side trying to grab an advantage by attacking again before the enemy was ready. Some time after noon, sensing that the Saracens were beginning to flag, Richard ordered the greatest barrage of arrows yet full on to an incoming cavalry charge, causing great havoc. At that point, he led the spearmen into the
mêlée
, where his horse was killed under him. Saladin, who was watching on a nearby hill that gave him a good view of the whole battlefield, sent a groom in the next lull, leading two remounts for his enemy. An act of gallantry or a diversion? At the same time he executed a flanking manoeuvre that drove back the Italian mercenaries at the walls, until Richard rode up on his new mount and rallied them.

Wisely, Saladin decided as evening drew on that nothing was to be gained by prolonging the slaughter, and retreated to Jerusalem, leaving Richard master of Jaffa. The Holy City, however, was still in Muslim hands, so the minor victory was irrelevant to the ‘liberation’ of the city to which Richard never came closer than twice glimpsing its towers in the distance, each time hiding his eyes behind his shield in order not to gaze upon the city he was fated never to capture. Lest that be thought mere play-acting, it must be remembered that one side of his confusing character was seemingly devout, as when he told the abbot of La Sauve Majeure, now an imposing ruin some 12 miles south-east of Bordeaux, that the abbey was ‘dearer to me than my own eyeballs’.
¹⁹

N
OTES

1.
  Ambroise,
Estoire de la guerre sainte
, p. 404.

2.
  Ibid, p. 399.

3.
  Benedict of Peterborough,
Gesta Henrici
, Vol 2, pp. 191–2.

4.
  Quoted in D. Nicolle and C. Hook,
The Third Crusade 1191: Richard the Lionheart, Saladin and the Struggle for Jerusalem
(Botley: Osprey, 2006), p. 59.

5.
  Ambroise,
Estoire de la guerre sainte
, p. 399.

6.
  H. de Curzon,
La Règle du Temple
(Paris: Renouard, 1886), rule 610, quoted in Hyland,
The Medieval Warhorse
, p. 159.

7.
  
The Rule, Statutes and Customs of the Hospitallers 1099–1310
, ed. E.J. King (London: Methuen, 1934), pp. 141, 160.

8.
  Hyland, p. 162, quoting Beha ed-Din Abu el-Mehasan Yusuf,
Saladin; Or What Befell Sultan Yusuf (Salah Ed-Din) (1137
–
1193 A.D.)
, Palestine Pilgrims Text Society 13 (London: Billing & Sons, 1897) Part I, p. 395.

9.
  Ambroise,
Estoire de la guerre sainte
, pp. 404–5.

10.
  Ibid, p. 408.

11.
  Ibid, p. 409.