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BOOK II
RICHARD’S CRUSADE
CHAPTER III
THE FALL OF ACRE
1190.
What brave chief shall head the forces
Where
the Red Cross Legions gather ?
From Mount Taurus to the Gulf of Aden, from the
river Tigris to the Mediterranean sea, and from the Arabian to the Libyan
desert, Saladin was now master of everything except some fragments of territory
in the north-west of Syria and one seaport in Galilee. The first of these
exceptions consisted of a small portion of the Latin principality of Antioch,
including its capital city; south of this, a few fortified coast-towns—Markab, Tortosa, Tripoli; and east of these latter, the little
settlement of Ismailite warriors who in their
stronghold under the shelter of Mount Lebanon defied Franks and Turks alike,
and acknowledged no ruler save their own chieftain, called by western
chroniclers “the Old Man of the Mountain.” The one unconquered city in the Holy
Land itself was Tyre.
The goal of the Crusade was, of course,
Jerusalem. Ninety years before, when Islam was split up into a number of
separate and rival states, all weakened and well-nigh exhausted by constant
strife with each other, the First Crusaders had attained that goal by a
victorious land march all the way from Antioch; but now all was changed, and it
would have been sheer madness for their successors to dream of following in
their steps. Now that the resources of Aleppo, Damascus, Bagdad, and Cairo were
all at the command of one ruler, the acquisition of a base on the sea-coast in
such a position that troops and supplies could be poured through it from the
West direct into the Holy Land in safety and on a large scale (or what in the
twelfth century was accounted such) was an almost indispensable preliminary to
any practical attempt at the reconquest of Jerusalem. Tyre,
with its peninsular citadel facing the valley which leads round the foot of
Lebanon into Coele-Syria, was somewhat too isolated as well as too far north
for this purpose. But some twenty-five miles south of Tyre there was a fortified sea-port whose character and importance were summed up by
an Arab writer, a few years before it fell into Saladin’s power, in one
significant sentence : “Acre is the column on which the Frankish towns of Syria
rest.” Acre stood on the site of the ancient Ptolemais, at the northern
extremity of the wide semicircular bay whose southern extremity is the point of
Carmel, and which forms the only real break in the long straight coast-line of
the Holy Land. Its harbour was the best—indeed, the
only good one except Tyre and, perhaps, Ascalon—in the whole length of that coast-line. Under the
Franks it was the chief landing-place for both pilgrims and traders from
Europe; for it was the converging-point of all the main lines of communication
between the West and Jerusalem, Mecca, Egypt, and Damascus. For the trade of
Damascus it was practically the only available sea-port, being the only one to
and from which access on the land side was not blocked by Mount Lebanon.
“There,” says the Arab visitor quoted above, “put in the tall ships which float
like mountains over the sea; it is the meeting-place of crafts and caravans,
the place whither Mussulman and Christian merchants congregate from all
quarters.” To the natural advantages of the site were added fortifications
which ranked among the mightiest of the many mighty productions of military
architecture reared by the Frank settlers in Syria. The mouth of the harbour was guarded by a chain; a great tower rose on a
tongue of land which ran out into the sea and sheltered the harbour to westward; the city lay partly on this peninsula and partly on the mainland,
and was protected on the land side, to north and east, by strong walls and towers,
and beyond these by a wide and deep fosse. Saladin had taken the place in July
1187; he was fully alive to its importance, and it was strongly garrisoned and
well provisioned when at the end of August 1189 King Guy of Jerusalem, having
made his way down from Antioch, collecting forces as he went from among the
natives of the land and the newly enlisted Crusaders who during the last year
had been arriving in small parties at the few northern sea-ports still in
Christian hands, set to work to begin the reconquest of his kingdom by laying
siege to Acre with about ten thousand men.
It was a great venture of faith; and the
faith was justified. Acre at once became the rallying-point for all the
remaining forces of the realm and for the Crusaders who came pouring in from
Europe during the next few months. Saladin on his part had immediately despatched a large army to occupy the hills which bordered
the plain, some eight to ten miles wide, at the back of the town. The
besiegers, in their entrenched camp outside the walls and fosse, found themselves
practically besieged in their turn; and this double siege lasted, with many
vicissitudes and very little real progress on either side, till the spring of
1191. By the middle of April, when Philip Augustus arrived, the Christian host
was sufficiently numerous to maintain a complete blockade of the city by land
and entire control over the harbour, and thus to
prevent the entrance of men and provisions, either by land or by sea. They had,
however, little prospect of winning the place except by starvation; for they
could not venture on attempting to capture it by a general assault, because
their own encampment was in constant danger from a great host of fresh troops
which Saladin had brought up to occupy the surrounding country as soon as the
winter was over. Thus on the evening of Saturday, June 8, “the valiant king,
the Lion-heart, saw before him Acre with its towers, and the flower of the
world’s people seated round about it, and beyond them the hill-peaks and the
mountains and the valleys and the plains, covered with the tents of Saladin and Safadin and their troops, pressing hard on our
Christian host.”
Not the least of the disadvantage under which
that host laboured was the lack of a
commander-in-chief. Neither the character nor the circumstances of Guy were
such as could enable him to retain that position after the influx from Europe
had begun; and the supreme command of the siege therefore passed from one to
another of the more influential leaders of the western contingents by a
succession of temporary arrangements, intended only as makeshifts till the
three sovereigns who were expected to take the joint leadership of the whole
expedition should arrive. The greatest of these three, however, the Emperor
Frederic Barbarossa, never arrived at all, having been accidentally drowned on
the way in June 1190. After the main body of the French Crusaders reached Acre
in July 1190, the chief command devolved upon their leader, Count Henry of
Champagne, whose mother was half-sister to both Philip Augustus and Richard,
and who was thus in some sense a representative of both the kings. Philip on
his arrival devoted himself to setting up his military engines, of which he had
brought a goodly store, in whatever places he deemed most advantageous, and
according to one English chronicler, building a stone house for himself; but he
declined to take any further action without his brother-sovereign. Richard had
no sooner passed from the clamorous welcome given him by the whole host as he landed,
and the exchange of courteous greetings with Philip, than he plunged at once
into practical matters. Having learned that Philip was paying his followers
three gold bezants apiece every month, he—seemingly that very night—issued a
proclamation throughout the host offering four bezants a month to any knight,
of any country, who would take service under him.
The consequence was that nearly all those who
were free to dispose of themselves and their services “took him for their
leader and their lord.” Among the first to come forward for this purpose were
the Genoese and the Pisans. He declined, however, the homage and fealty of the
Genoese, because it was already pledged to Philip. The Pisans became his
liegemen, and “he confirmed to them by his charter the customs which they were
wont to have in the land of Jerusalem.” It is highly significant that Richard
could already, and seemingly without calling forth a protest or even a remark
from anyone, make an assumption of authority in a realm of which he was neither
ruler nor overlord. Scarcely less significant was the action of Henry of
Champagne. Henry—so at least says an
English chronicler—having come to the end of his own resources, had asked his
uncle of France for a subsidy; Philip offered him a loan of a hundred marks, if
he would pledge his county for their repayment. Henry then applied to his uncle
of England, who at once gave him four thousand pounds and a supply of food for
his men and his horses. Thenceforth June the troops of Champagne and their count
served under Richard’s standard, and their own sovereign remained in command
only of the strictly “French followers
who had come to Acre in his train.
The wind which had brought Richard’s galleys
swiftly to Acre on June 8 changed again before the slower vessels of his fleet
could follow him, and until they arrived he had no engines of war. But “Mategriffon” had been packed on one of the galleys; on the 10th
it was set up, and by daybreak on the nth his archers were looking down into
Acre from the tall wooden tower, and “Kill-Greek” was ready to become
“Kill-Turk.” Philip renewed his attacks on the “Accursed Tower,” the chief defence of the city on its June eastern side; and all along
the line of the walls stone-casters and miners set vigorously to work. Richard
meanwhile went about among the groups, instructing some, criticizing others,
encouraging others; he seemed to be everywhere and at every man’s side, so that
to him might fairly be ascribed whatsoever each man was doing. Within
a day or two, however, he was prostrated by a strange illness, a kind of
malarial fever which among other effects caused alopecia or loss of hair. Much
against his wishes, a general assault was nevertheless made under Philip’s
orders on June 14. It failed, and so did another three or four days later.
Presently Philip was attacked by the same malady which had struck down Richard.
In Richard’s case it seems to have been complicated by his chronic trouble,
ague; and thus Philip was the first to
recover. Richard occupied part of his time of enforced inactivity in an
exchange of courtesies with Saladin. Each party was anxious for information as
to the strength, or weakness, of the other; and the courtesies of chivalry,
which were quite as familiar to the Moslem as to the Christian prince, were
utilized by both for this purpose. Saladin appears to have opened
communications by sending a gift of fruit to the two royal invalids. Richard
was eager for a personal interview with his courteous adversary; this Saladin
refused, June on the ground that kings should not have speech witheach other till terms of peace between them have been
arranged; he consented, however, to a meeting between his brother Safadin and the king, but when the time for it came Richard
was still too ill to leave his tent. Richard next despatched to the Saracen camp a negro slave as a gift to the Sultan. On the king’s part
these proceedings were unwise, not in themselves, but because they were liable
to be misconstrued by his fellow Crusaders and to bring upon him the suspicions
of the other princes in the host, and especially of Philip Augustus, with whom
he was already at variance about a much more serious matter which practically
depended upon their joint decision. This was nothing less than the disposal of
the Crown of Jerusalem.
King Amalric, who
died in 1174, had by his first wife a son, Baldwin, and a daughter, Sibyl; and
by his second wife an infant daughter, Isabel. The first marriage had been
dissolved on the ground of consanguinity; in strict law, therefore, Baldwin and
Sibyl were illegitimate; Baldwin, however, became king without opposition,
because he was the only male survivor of the royal house. But he was not yet
fourteen, and he was a leper. In 1176, therefore, an attempt was made to
provide for the succession by marrying his elder sister to a member of a
distinguished family of Italian Crusaders, William of Montferrat. Within a year
Sibyl was a widow; but she was also the mother of a son, and in 1183 this child
was solemnly crowned and anointed king in his uncle's lifetime. This precaution
staved off the impending crisis for nearly three years, though the imminent
prospect of a long royal minority in the existing political and military
circumstances of Palestine was felt to be so alarming that the very Patriarch
who had crowned the child became, only a few months later, eager to undo his
own work and tried, but without success, to bring from Europe to the dying king
and the distracted realm an adoptive male heir of full age in the person of one
of the descendants of the first marriage of the Angevin Count Fulk V, whose second marriage had brought the crown of
Jerusalem into the house of Anjou. Baldwin IV died before Heraclius returned
from Europe, in the winter of 1184-5; in September 1186 little Baldwin V died
also. Sibyl then claimed the crown in her own right, as the natural heiress at
once of her child, her brother, and her father; the Templars, the Patriarch,
and some of the nobles rallied round her at Jerusalem; the people acclaimed her
as queen, and she was crowned in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre together with her second husband, Guy of Lusignan. Sibyl’s half-sister, Isabel,
was now fifteen years old, and had been married three years. A party among the
nobles had ever since King Amalric’s death been
biding their time to bring Isabel forward as his only legitimate representative
and heir. They tried to do so now; they failed, however, because her young
husband, Henfrid of Toron,
and his step-father and guardian, Reginald of Chatillon, both adhered to Sibyl.
But when the sickness which raged in the Christian camp before Acre in 1190
carried off first the two little daughters of Sibyl and Guy and then Sibyl
herself, Isabel and her partisans found their opportunity. On the pretext that
Isabel had been wedded to Henfrid without her
consent, the Patriarch declared her marriage void. Immediately afterwards she
married the man who had
long been Guy’s most implacable rival, Conrad of Montferrat, a younger brother
of Sibyl’s first husband.
In four words the Norman poet-historian of
the third Crusade has at once pronounced a rare and splendid panegyric on Guy
of Lusignan as a man, and given us the clue to Guy’s failure as a statesman.
“No king was endowed with better qualities, save for one characteristic which
he had : that he knew no evil. That,” adds the poet with a charming touch of
perhaps unconscious irony, “is what men call simpleness.” “Simpleness,” whether
as a virtue or a failing, can certainly never have been laid to the credit or
the charge of Conrad of Montferrat. He had in 1187 landed with a handful of
followers at Tyre when it was literally on the eve of
surrendering to Saladin, and had taken upon himself the command and defence of the place with such vigour that Saladin was compelled to raise the siege. An Arab historian called him
“the mightiest devil of all the Franks”; an English writer called him “a son of
the piercing and crooked serpent.” His valour and
capability, together with the possession of Tyre,
soon made him a personage of much greater importance than the titular king. In
birth Conrad was much more than Guy’s equal; the marquisate of Montferrat, to
which he succeeded in 1188, ranked among the chief principalities of the
kingdom of Italy, and his mother was granddaughter to one emperor, sister to
another, and aunt to a third; while Guy was merely the youngest of the live
brothers of that Geoffrey of Lusignan who had been a ringleader in almost every
Aquitanian revolt from 1167 onward, and who had finally, some months after
Conrad’s arrival at Tyre, gone to expiate in
Palestine the last and worst of his offences against Duke Richard. To avert
civil strife, both parties agreed to submit the whole question of the Crown to
the arbitration of the two western kings. Guy now laid before them a complaint
that Conrad had forcibly and unjustly taken from him (probably during his
absence in Cyprus) the rights and revenues of the kingdom. His brother Geoffrey
appealed the marquis of disloyalty, perjury, and treason against the king of
Jerusalem and the whole Christian host. Conrad for the moment avoided answering
the appeal by slipping away to Tyre; its prosecution
was postponed, and with it the trial of the rival claims to the Crown; pending
a decision, the royal dues and revenues of the market and port of Acre were
sequestrated and entrusted to the Templars and Hospitaliers.
The two arbitrators inclined opposite ways.
Guy’s simpleness had led him aright when it pointed him, notwithstanding the
previous hostile relations between his family and their overlord in Aquitaine,
to Richard as his natural protector against the Italian claimant to his Crown.
On the other hand, Conrad’s family connexions and his
talents had secured for him the support of most of the other princes in the
crusading host; the ceremony of marriage between him and Isabel had been
performed by a French bishop, a near kinsman of King Philip. Thus supported, he
had, as we have seen, already ventured to set Richard at defiance by preventing
him from entering Tyre; and he was now speedily
recalled to the camp by Philip, who at once openly took him into familiarity
and counsel. According to one account it was at Conrad’s instigation that
Philip laid claim to half the island of Cyprus and of the spoils which Richard
had acquired there; the pretext for the claim being the agreement made at
Messina. Richard answered that the said agreement related only to whatever he
and Philip might acquire in the Holy Land; he offered, however, to satisfy
Philip’s demand if Philip would in exchange grant him half the county of
Flanders and of everything that had escheated to the French Crown by the recent
death of the Flemish count. On this Philip dropped his claim and consented to a
new arrangement whereby both kings explicitly promised to share equally whatever
they should acquire in Palestine. This convention was confirmed by oaths and
charters, and its fulfilment was safeguarded by a provision that all conquests
and acquisitions made by either party should be placed under the charge of the
two great Military Orders for safe custody and division.
Meanwhile Richard’s fleet had arrived,
bringing the rest of his followers and his engines of war. These seem to have
been mostly stone-casters and other missile engines worked at long range.
Philip’s machines were chiefly engines of assault and battery, which had to be
advanced close up to the walls, and were thus more exposed to damage and
destruction by fire from the enemy. The most effectual work of all was that of
the miners who had long been making their way under the walls and especially
under the “Accursed Tower.” The defences of Acre were
now crumbling fast, and the fall of a long piece of wall close to that tower,
on 1190 July 3, coinciding with the failure of an attack made by Saladin and
his brother on the Christian trenches, was followed next morning by an offer
from the garrison to surrender the place and all its contents if their own
lives and liberty were spared. The two kings, knowing that the garrison
comprised—as a Moslem writer says—“the best emirs of the Sultan’s host and the
bravest champions of Islam,” refused the condition. That night another attack
on the Christians’ outer trench was successfully beaten off. Then
Richard, sick though he was, determined to try the effect of an assault on the city
under his own personal direction. He caused a kind of moveable hurdle-shed,
called by the French writers cercloie or circleie, to be brought up to the edge of the fosse;
under cover of this shelter his crossbowmen could shoot at the tower; he himself,
wrapped in a rich silken quilt, was carried forth and placed among them, “and
many a bolt was shot by that skilful hand,” the Turks
shooting back all the time. All day long his stone-casters worked incessantly;
so did his miners; at night the mine was fired, and their efforts were rewarded
by the fall of some turrets and a great breach in the curtain wall. Hereupon
Richard sent a crier through the host to proclaim a reward for any man who
would pull out a stone from a certain piece of wall close to the great tower.
The offer met with a quick response from his own troops and the Pisans, and
before the rest of the host had finished breakfast next morning, July 6, they
had nearly made an entrance into the city, when the besieged again signified
their desire to treat for peace. Again the two emirs in command, Kara-koush and Seiffeddin-el-Meshtoub,
came to speak with the kings, and again
their offers were refused, seemingly on the understanding that the matter was
to be referred to Saladin.
Saladin’s headquarters were at Tell-Ayadiyeh, at the foot of the hills, some seven or eight
miles east of Acre, on the direct road to Damascus. Twice within the last two
days the besieged had warned the Sultan that unless he relieved them at once,
they must surrender, with his consent or without it. The two kings, knowing
that his forces were unequal to coping with the united Christian host, were at
the same time negotiating with him in the hope that the city might meanwhile
fall into their hands; and he could only endeavour to
stave off its surrender by spinning out the negotiations till the
reinforcements which he was expecting should arrive. No sooner, however, had
these begun to come up than on July 8 he took the significant step of cutting
down the vineyards and orchards around Acre and levelling most of the towns and
smaller fortresses in the neighbourhood; and on the 11th
the besieged intimated their readiness to make peace “at the will of the
Christian kings.” Next morning (12th), in a great assembly at the Julyiz Templars’ quarters, the kings by the counsel of the
whole host made an agreement with the two emirs. Acre was to be surrendered
immediately, and its garrison were to be kept by the Franks as hostages for the
fulfilment of three conditions to which the emirs pledged themselves in
Saladin’s name : the restoration of the Holy Cross, the release of sixteen
hundred Christians who were prisoners in the Sultan’s hands, and the payment of
two hundred thousand bezants (or, according to another account, dinars) to the
kings and fourteen (or forty) thousand to Conrad “because the treaty had been made by his mediation.” The emirs
returned to the city; a herald proclaimed throughout the host that all
molestation, injury, or insult to the Turks must cease at once; the gates were
opened, the garrison, unarmed, were brought out and placed under guard in the
Christian camp, and the kings sent representatives to take formal possession of
Acre for them by planting their banners on its walls and towers. Next
day (July 13) they made an equal division of the city and all its contents, and
also of the prisoners (or hostages), and then, seemingly, cast lots for the two
halves. The royal palace fell to Richard's share, the Templars’ house to
Philip’s; but neither king appears to have taken up his abode in the city for
several days. The prisoners were sent back into lodgings assigned to them
within the walls, and the greater part of the host also found quarters there.
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. 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 was about to send back a
flat refusal of his sanction to them when he saw the Frank banners on the
walls. After waiting two days in the hope of some movement which might give him
a chance of successfully attacking the 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. 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. 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; 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. Next day
(July 21) Richard with his wife and his sister took up his abode in the palace. 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 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.
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. 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 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 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 his folk.”
Next day Philip repeated his demand for half of Cyprus; which Richard again
refused. Three days later 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);
Richard granted it. 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, and according to one account the crown was
to remain with their heirs; 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. Meanwhile, the royal revenues
were to be divided equally between Conrad and Guy. Geoffrey de Lusignan and
Conrad were both confirmed in the fiefs which they actually held. On
the morrow Philip made over all that he had acquired in Acre to Conrad, and
again asked Richard’s leave to go home. 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. 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. 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 and placed, together with the French
troops who were to remain in Syria, under the command of the duke of Burgundy.
On July 31 or August 1 Philip and Conrad went, in two galleys lent to them by
Richard, to Tyre. There Philip procured
three Genoese galleys, and with these, on August 3, he sailed for Europe.
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—it
was now evident that he must be henceforth commander-in-chief of the whole
Crusade. He at once, after holding a council with the other princes, had all
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. 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. 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. 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; 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; and on the same evening a list of the Saracen
prisoners in Acre was brought to the Sultan. An 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 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 2—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 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. 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, 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. 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. G 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. He set out for Tyre on August 8, but did not get back with the prisoners
till the 12th. According to 1190 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. The discussion
seems to have ended for the time in a postponement of the “first term” (as Bohadin calls it) till August 20.
On the 14th Richard led his own troops out of
the city and pitched his tents near the enemy’s lines. A western 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
morrow, but failed to keep the tryst, and excused his failure Aug.16 by
declaring, “I did not come, because I could not fulfill the agreement which my
people had made with him.” The next two days seem to have been occupied in skirmishes in which the king took his full
share. 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 midday 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.
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. Bohadin,
whose computation is doubtless that of the Moslem troops who visited the place
of slaughter next morning, says more than three thousand.
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. 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. 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. 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 midday
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 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—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. 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. 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 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.
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.
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