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BOOK II
:
RICHARD’S CRUSADE, 1189-1192
CHAPTER IV
.
FROM ACRE TO JOPPA, 1191
Two main roads led southward from Acre. One
crossed the river Kishon at a point which on the map is about half way between
Nazareth and the sea, passed over the middle of Mount Carmel, and then along
the eastern side of the plain which lies between the coast and the
mountain-range of Samaria and Judea. Cross-paths through the defiles of this
range led from the road to the Holy Places of southern Palestine—Jerusalem,
Bethlehem, Hebron—and connected it with the great lines of communication
running through these places southward to Egypt and Mecca and northward up the
Jordan valley to Damascus; paths across the plain connected it with the other
great main road, which followed the coast-line all the way to the mouth of the
Nile. The inland route was the more direct way to Jerusalem; but for the
Crusaders the coast route was the safer, indeed the only safe one. The
reconquest of the land must begin with the reconquest of the seaboard towns.
Acre might serve as principal base for the whole expedition; but this was not
enough; before the Crusaders could venture into the interior of the land they
must make sure of being able to communicate with Cyprus and with Europe through
other ports besides Acre, and with Acre itself by sea as well as by land. They
must also endeavour to block at least one of the
enemy’s lines of communication with Egypt; and of these the most frequented and
important was the coast route, to which the entrance from Egypt, both by land
and sea, was commanded by the great fortress of Ascalon.
Thus the plan of campaign implied in the order issued on the night of August 20
was to regain, first and foremost, the whole seaboard of the Holy Land.
The fortifications of Acre had been carefully
repaired under Richard’s personal superintendence; and the other preparations
for departure were so far advanced that one day sufficed to complete them. The
two queens and the damsel of Cyprus were left in the palace, with the king’s
treasure, under suitable guard. Bertram de Verdon and Stephen de Longchamp were
appointed constables of the city. Every man in the host was bidden
to take with him food for ten days; the ships were already loaded up with the
rest of the stores, and their skippers were instructed to sail close along the
shore, ready to put in at intervals and supply the host with whatever it might
need. “Thus they were to go,” says one of the pilgrims, “in two bodies, one by
sea and one by land; for Syria could be reconquered from the Turks in no other
manner.” The total number of the Frank forces is reckoned by the same authority
at three hundred thousand. On Thursday August 22 they began to cross the “river
of Acre” (the Belus, or Nahr el Namein, which falls into the sea just below the city)
and pitch their tents between it and the sea. A large proportion of them,
however, had become already so demoralised by their
stay in the city, now once more filled with all the luxuries and temptations of
Eastern life, that they were very reluctant to leave it; and it was not till
the next day Friday that Richard succeeded in getting the greater part of the host
together in its new encampment, and himself followed it thither, having taken
his position in the rear to guard against possible attack from the Moslems. The
detachment at Keisan was, however, too small to
venture upon anything more than a harmless demonstration at a safe distance;
and it was altogether withdrawn next day, when Saladin, being now assured of
the route which the Franks intended to take, disposed his army on the hills
above Shefr’ Amm, ready to
attack them on their march along the shore. They seem not to have
started till Sunday, August 25. Richard led the vanguard; his English and
Norman followers had charge of the great standard which was surmounted by his
royal banner and was to serve as guide and rallying-point for the whole host.
The Frenchmen under the duke of Burgundy formed the rearguard. They soon found
themselves in difficulties. The roads of Palestine had been originally good
Roman ones; but by the closing years of the twelfth century even the highroads
had become in many places little more than trackways. The transport corps,
struggling through an awkward passage, fell into confusion; at the critical
moment the Saracens swooped down, cut them off from the rearguard, and drove
them towards the sea. One John FitzLuke spurred
forward and told Richard what had occurred; “and the king with his meinie galloped back at a great pace; he fell upon the
Turks like a thunderbolt—I know not how many he slew”; “and they fled before
him like the Philistines of old from the face of the Maccabee.” The Franks
reformed in order, and proceeded without further interruption till they found a
convenient camping-ground, seemingly near the mouth of the Kishon, whence a
short day’s march brought them to Cayphas, the modern
Haifa. Here they encamped for two days between the castle, which they found
deserted, and the sea. This first brief stage of their journey from Acre—it is
only about ten miles—had taught them at least one practical lesson : that on a
march along the burning sand of the Syrian coast in August superfluous baggage
was to be avoided. They therefore discarded everything that was not strictly
necessary. The fight on the way had also another good result; it had healed
Richard’s feud with William des Barres. William had fought with such valour that the king’s admiration had overcome his anger,
and the gallant Frenchman was received back into favour by the Lion-Heart.
On Tuesday August 27 the Crusaders set out
again, and wound their way unmolested round the point of Carmel to Capharnaum,
a distance of about eight miles; finding this place also deserted, they stopped
there to dine; and thence another march of four miles brought them to a spot
where in later days the Templars were to rear a famous fortress known as Athlit, or Pilgrims’ Castle, but which the earlier pilgrims
called the Casal (village) of the Straits—why, it is
hard to guess, for the distance from the shore to the foot of the Carmel range
increases all the way from Capharnaum southward, so that even from the north
the approach to Athlit is much less of a “strait”
than the pass which the host had just come through round the promontory. The site
indeed afforded an ample and convenient camping ground, and also a place where
the ships could put in. This they had been ordered to do, so the host waited
there two days to receive from them a fresh store of provisions. Meanwhile
Saladin had on the night of the 24th removed his headquarters from Shefr’ Amm to Kaimoun (the ancient Jokneam of Carmel), where the inland
road from Acre to the south crosses the Kishon. Next day he rode over Carmel on
a reconnoitring expedition to Mallaha,
“the Salt-pit” called by the Franks Merle. Returning on the 26th to Kaimoun, he there reviewed his army, and on the morrow led
it across the mountains to “the head of the river which runs by Caesarea”.
Caesarea lies, fifteen miles south of the Casal of
the Straits, midway between the mouths of two rivers which are five miles
apart. The northern one was called by the Crusaders the River of Crocodiles;
between its two principal springs passes the main road leading south from Kaimoun. In the next three days Saladin shifted his camp
three times among the hills above these springs. From these hills, or from the
last spur of Carmel, a little further south, he would see his first opportunity
of checking or hindering his enemy’s advance. The slopes of the Carmel range
were too steep to be practicable for his cavalry; it was doubtless for this
reason that Cayphas and Capharnaum had been
evacuated, and also that the fortifications of Caesarea had been dismantled. When
the Crusaders should reach Caesarea, however, they would be on the verge of
Sharon, “the Level,” on whose eastern border the comparatively low mountains of
Samaria rise by a gradual ascent, in terracelike ridges, broken by many easy
passes leading into the valleys and level spaces among the hills; while the
distance between mountains and sea, which round the promontory of Carmel is
only two hundred yards, is at the lower end of the Carmel range six miles. On
August 28 Richard advanced 1191 from Casal of the
Straits to Merle and spent the night on the ground where Saladin had been three
nights before. Next day the whole host followed, and with the king at its head
and the Knights of the Temple and Hospital forming the rearguard proceeded
towards Caesarea. By Richard’s orders all the sick had been transferred to the
ships; but even for the able-bodied the day’s march—some fifteen miles—was a
long, slow, and painful one over the burning sand in the heat of an August day
in Syria; not a few died by the way; and the outskirts of the host were
attacked by some skirmishing parties of Turks, who were, however, driven off by
Richard. The weary pilgrims camped that night on the bank of the River of
Crocodiles, and next day entered the ruins of Caesarea, which were evacuated at
their approach. Here on that evening or the next the ships came into port,
bringing further supplies and also some of the “lazy folk” from Acre, who in
response to an urgent summons sent to them by Richard had thus at length come
to rejoin their comrades in arms.
With these reinforcements the march was
resumed on Sunday, September 1. On the preceding day Saladin had taken up a
position on the hills whence he could, as soon as the Franks issued from
Caesarea, make it impossible for them to avoid an encounter. They had scarcely
set out when they were well nigh surrounded by his
light cavalry, and a shower of arrows fell upon them from all directions. But
his attack proved less effective than he had hoped, owing to the order of march
which the Crusaders had now adopted. The princes, knights, and mounted
men-at-arms advanced between two columns of infantry, of which one, marching on
their left—the side nearest to the hills and the enemy—“protected them”, says
an eyewitness, “as with a wall.” These foot-soldiers in their thick felt
jerkins and mailcoats recked little of the Turkish
arrows, while the heavier missiles which they hurled at their assailants in
return wrought execution on both horses and riders. On the other side of the
cavalry, along the sea-shore, marched another body of foot-soldiers who carried
the baggage, and, being safe from attack, were always comparatively fresh, and
ready to change places with their comrades on the exposed side when the latter
were worn out with fatigue or wounds. Of the cavalry thus enclosed, the van
consisted of the knights of the kingdom of Jerusalem under King Guy; the
rearguard was composed of the mounted troops of Galilee and others, including
no doubt the Military Orders; in the centre were the
king of England, the duke of Burgundy, and their followers, with the Standard
in their midst. Thus, slowly and cautiously, the host moved along; on this
first day it advanced only about two or three miles, to the “river of
Caesarea.” This seems to be what is now called the Nahr el Mefjir; the Crusaders
called it the Dead River, perhaps because the Turks—such at least is the
pilgrims’ account of the matter—had done their utmost to choke it up and
conceal its existence, so as to make it a trap for the strangers to fall into;
but the trap may have been the work of nature, for the stream appears to be the
same to which Bohadin gives the name of Nahr el Casseb,
river of reeds or rushes. The host reached this stream at Sept. 1 midday,
crossed it in safety, and pitched their tents on its southern bank : whereupon
the Turks retired, “for,” says Bohadin, “whenever
they were in camp, there was no hope of doing anything with them." That
afternoon Saladin shifted his headquarters to a place a little higher up on the
same river; and for two nights both parties remained Sept. in their respective
encampments, close to each other, but quiescent.
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. 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 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 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. At nightfall
they retired, and the host encamped near the Salt River —now the Nahr Iskanderuneh—which runs down
to the 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.
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 oversea to return to their homes.”
They were 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, 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 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 (Rodhetaillie).
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—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. 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.
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. Then the Saracen archers swarmed down upon the flank of the advancing
host, pouring on it an overwhelming shower of arrows. 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.
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, 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, 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. The trumpets were sounded
so instantaneously that the Turks seem never to have discovered what had really
precipitated the charge. 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, 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, reformed 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 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, 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.
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 may not
be literally exact; but Bohadin does not attempt to
minimize 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.”
That night Saladin pushed on as far as the Nahr el Aoudjeh,
crossed it, and encamped on its southern bank. 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 Jerusalem. Saladin appears to have thought that
the Franks might march across the plain and attempt an advance 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. 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, 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
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, while he with all his forces hurried to take up
his position at Ramlah, 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 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 seaport 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; 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 ii, left the main body of his troops at Ramlah under Safadin, and himself set out for Ascalon.
He spent 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.
These operations were just beginning when Safadin, who had transferred his headquarters to Jafna (called by the Arabs Yebnah and by the Franks Ibelin), on the coastroad,
about thirteen miles south of Joppa, received from the Frank leaders some new
overtures for a treaty. 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. 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 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 was better than dissension within the
host, yielded to their urgency. A tax was levied for the expense of the restoration
of Joppa; 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.”
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