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BOOK II
:
RICHARD’S CRUSADE, 1189-1192
CHAPTER V.
THE ADVANCE ON JERUSALEM
, 1191-1192.
While Richard was building, Saladin was pulling
down. Having razed Ascalon, he on September 23
rejoined his main force at Jafna, thence returned
with it next day to Ramlah, and set his men to raze
the citadel of this latter place and the great fortified church of S. George at
the neighbouring town of Lydda. On the 25th he left
his army at Ramlah under Safadin to complete this work and watch the enemy, while he went to see with his own
eyes the state of the defences of Jerusalem and take
measures for securing their efficiency. On the 30th he returned to Ramlah. To Richard this abandonment of all attempt to hold
the country seemed like the conduct of “a man bereft of all counsel, and of all
hope of succour”; but Richard himself was not without
secret misgivings as to the ultimate success of the Crusade. On the same day on
which he wrote—probably to one of his ministers, for communication to his
subjects in general—the letter declaring his hope that Jerusalem would be won
by the middle of January, he wrote also a letter to the abbot of Clairvaux
which reveals more clearly the actual condition of affairs and the king’s real
expectations as to their future course. He thought there was good hope that the
whole “heritage of the Lord” would be speedily recovered; indeed, part of it
was recovered already. But in the recovering of that part he had, as he truly
said, borne the burden and heat of the day and exhausted not only his money but
also his health and strength, so that he felt he could not stay in Syria beyond
Easter; and the other western leaders, having spent all they had, would return
to their homes unless fresh supplies of men, money, and other necessaries were
sent out from Europe to enable them to remain. He therefore besought the abbot
to stir up princes and peoples by his preaching, and induce them to make
provision for the safety and defence, after Easter,
of the Lord's heritage, “which”, he said, “by God's grace we shall have fully
won by that time”.
A nearer future than Easter had a share in
Richard’s secret anxieties. All these weeks ships had been plying to and fro between Joppa and Acre, too many of them bringing from
the northern city visitors who were not merely useless but undesirable, and
carrying back thither lukewarm Crusaders who preferred its pleasures and
indulgences to the hard work of the Holy War; whereby the host was considerably
diminished in numbers. The extent of the leakage seems to have been made fully
apparent to the princes when at the end of September they removed their troops
from the gardens to a new encampment somewhat further out, near the Casal of S. Habakkuk. King Guy was commissioned to go to
Acre and bring the truants back; and while awaiting their return Richard,
probably to keep the enemy inactive, sent on October 3 a messenger to Safadin to propose a renewal of the suspended negotiations.
A few days earlier, Saladin had received from Conrad of Montferrat overtures
for an alliance; Conrad offered to make peace with the Moslems, break openly
with the Franks, and recover Acre for the former, if they would give him Sidon
and Beyrout. Saladin was quite willing to agree to
these terms—“for”, says Bohadin, “the marquis
was a most terrible adversary to us”—but not to grant Conrad’s demand that the
Sultan should pledge himself by oath to the cession of the two seaports, till
Conrad should first have proved his sincerity by attacking his
fellow-Christians at Acre and releasing his Moslem prisoners at Tyre.
On October 4 Saladin, finding that at Ramlah he could not get enough fodder for his horses and
camels, owing to his foragers being too much exposed to attacks from the enemy,
removed his army some eight or nine miles southeastward into the hills, close
to a place whose character is expressed in one form of its name, Natroun, “post of observation.” The Franks called the place Toron of the Knights; “toron”
meaning height or mount, and the knights being those of the Temple, who had
built on its summit a tower of great strength overlooking two of the roads to
Jerusalem. This tower Saladin at once began to pull down; like the other
strongholds which he had demolished, it was useless to him for present
purposes, and could be of value only to his enemies, should the site fall into
their hands. Four days later Safadin, whom he had
left at Ramlah in command of the advanced guard, sent
him word that Richard, having discovered Conrad’s dealings with the Sultan, had
sailed for Acre in order to put a stop to them by making friends with the
marquis. There was, however, another reason for the king’s visit to Acre. The
loiterers there were so slow to move at the bidding of Guy that it was clearly
necessary to bring a stronger influence to bear upon them. Richard’s
exhortations took such effect that within a fortnight he was back at Joppa
accompanied not only by the two queens, whom he established there with their
attendants, but also by so “much people” that the host seemed to have become
more numerous than ever. It took another fortnight to clear out of
Acre and convey by sea to the new base the remaining stragglers and the stores
needed for a fresh advance. During this enforced delay the host was
once at least very near losing its commander-in-chief. Richard, having ridden
out with a very small escort partly to exercise his hawks, partly to look out
for an opportunity of surprising the Turks, was himself surprised by some of
them when he had stopped to rest and fallen asleep. Awaking just in time, he
sprang to horse and drove them off, but they led him into an ambush, and he was
only saved from capture by the devotion of William des Preaux,
who concentrated the attention of the enemies on himself by shouting,
“Saracens, I am Melee”—that is, the king—and was seized and hurried away
accordingly, while the real king escaped. The whole host was aghast when the adventure
became known, and some of Richard’s friends upbraided him for his rashness and
implored him, for the sake of the cause to which his safety was so important,
never again to expose himself thus without sufficient escort; but it was all in
vain. “In every conflict he delighted in being the first to attack and the last
to return.”
Meanwhile Richard had, immediately on his
return to Joppa, renewed his friendly intercourse with Safadin by sending him a beautiful horse as a present. A few days later an envoy from Safadin came, by the king’s desire, to meet him at Yazour, some four miles from Joppa on the road to Ramlah, to receive his proposals for a treaty. Of these
proposals the Moslem envoy carried back two sets, one for direct transmission
to the Sultan, the other intended primarily for Safadin’s personal consideration. To Saladin the king wrote that, with Franks and Moslems
alike perishing and the country ruined, the war had gone far enough; the only
matters in dispute were the Holy City, the Cross, and the limits of the two
realms, Christian and Mussulman. Their claim to Jerusalem, as the most sacred
seat of their Faith, the Christians could not renounce so long as there was one
man of them left alive. Of the country they claimed restitution, up to the
western bank of the Jordan. As for the Cross, “seeing that to the Moslems it is
but a piece of wood,” Saladin might well give it back to those who accounted it
a sacred treasure; and thus should there be for both parties peace and rest
from their labours. Saladin at once decisively
refused all three conditions. To Safadin the king had
proposed another scheme: that Safadin should take
Queen Joan of Sicily to wife, and reign over the land jointly with her, she
holding Jerusalem as her royal seat, Richard endowing her with Acre, Joppa, and Ascalon (which he accounted his own conquests), the
Sultan giving the Holy Cross to the Christians, and all the places which he
held in the Sahel or Maritime Plain to his brother and declaring him
king of the land. With these terms Safadin appeared
well pleased, and Saladin, when they were laid before him, answered immediately
and emphatically, “Yes! yes! yes!”—“being,” says Bohadin who was present and who knew him well enough to read his thoughts, “persuaded
that the king would never really sanction such a thing, and proposed it only in
trickery and play.” His persuasion was justified; when on October 23 an envoy
from the Sultan and his brother again came to the Christian camp, he was sent
back with a message that when the king had told his sister of the marriage
proposed for her, she had become “furious with indignation and wrath,” and
sworn by all she held sacred that she would never submit to it; whereupon her
brother had promised to bring, if he could, Safadin to accept Christianity. All this was of course mere diplomacy to wile away the time till the host was ready for a further
advance; and on the 27th Saladin received tidings that the enemy was preparing
to leave Joppa. Next day the Sultan returned to Ramla.
On the 29th he sent some troops to surprise the Christian camp, but they were
driven off and put to flight. On the 30th Richard, “wandering about in the
plain towards Ramlah,” espied a reconnoitring party of Saracens, attacked them without hesitation, slew several of them and
scattered the rest. On the 31st, having completed his arrangements for the
security of Joppa, he led the host on the first stage of its advance towards
Jerusalem.
The stage was a very short one—only two
miles, to Yazour, or as the Franks called it, the Casal of the Plains. This place and Casal Maen, which seems to have been the Frankish name for
Beit Dejan, about two miles further to the southeast,
had been Frankish strongholds, recently dismantled by the Saracens; it was
important that they should be restored in order to secure the command of the
road leading from Joppa into the hills. Richard undertook the restoration of Casal Maen, and the Templars that
of Casal des Plains; the host lay encamped between
the two places for a fortnight while the work was in progress. The Turks did
their utmost to hinder it by sending out skirmishing parties. One of these,
having been put to flight, was pursued by Richard so far that before he turned
back he actually saw Ramlah and the Sultan’s army
there. Another day a foraging party protected by a small escort of Templars was
suddenly surrounded by a numerous body of Turks at “Bombrac,”
properly Ibn Ibrak or Beni Berak,
about two miles from Casal Maen.
On learning their peril Richard, who was busy superintending the works at Casal Maen, sent some knights to
the rescue and quickly followed in person. When he reached the spot the
position of the little band looked so hopeless and the enemy’s numbers so
overwhelming that his companions besought him to retire, “for,” said they, “if
mischief should befall you, there would be an end of Christendom!” “I sent
those men here; if they die without me, may I never again be called king was”,
his reply. Setting spurs to his horse and giving him the rein, he burst “like lightning”
into the enemy’s ranks, and laid about him so furiously that they all either
fled “like beasts,” or were slain or made prisoners. Such is the Frankish
version of this encounter; Bohadin, however,
describes it as a success for the Saracens, and makes no mention of Richard’s
presence.
That evening Richard sent a messenger to Safadin, complaining of these attacks as breaches of their
friendly relations, and again asking him for a personal interview. Three days
before, Reginald of Sidon had come to Saladin from Tyre with a renewal of Conrad’s proposal of an alliance against the Crusaders. As
before, Saladin gave equal encouragement to both parties. On the 8th Safadin and Richard met in a large tent set up for the
purpose “between the Casal of the Temple and that of
Josaphat”; each brought with him “all such gifts as princes are wont to give to
one another,” and the special delicacies in food and drink most esteemed among
his own people, for the delectation of the other. Safadin crowned the entertainment by introducing a singing girl, and Richard professed
himself greatly pleased with the Saracen mode of singing. The rest of the day
was spent in talk, and they parted with a mutual promise of fast friendship and
a renewed request from Richard that Safadin would
procure for him an interview with the Sultan. Saladin refused to meet him,
giving the same reason as on a previous occasion. Meanwhile Reginald was in the
Sultan’s camp, splendidly lodged in a tent filled with every oriental luxury,
treated with marked courtesy, and sometimes accompanying Safadin when that prince rode out to reconnoitre the
Christian host. Saladin himself inclined to accept the offers of Conrad. “If we
make peace with the western Franks,” he said privately to Bohadin,
“it will never be a secure one; if I were to die, it would be very difficult to
get our army together again, and before this could be done all the forces of
our foes would have united. It were wiser to fight on till we have either
expelled them from our coasts or died in the attempt.” Richard, however,
anxious to prevent an alliance between Saladin and Conrad which would
undoubtedly have been fraught with grave peril to the Christian cause, twice
renewed his proposals in a modified form, each time lowering his demands and
offering fresh concessions; so when on November Saladin laid the propositions
of the marquis and those of the king before a council of his emirs, they
declared in favour of the latter. Saladin yielded to
their opinion. But Richard had reserved for himself a way of escape. “The whole
Christian community,” he said, “is blaming me for proposing to wed my sister
to a Mussulman without leave from the Pope. I will therefore send an envoy to
him, and in six months I shall have his answer. If he consents, well; if not, I
will give you my brother’s daughter, in which case the Pope’s sanction will not
be needed.” To this Saladin replied : “If the alliance is to be made, let it be
made on the original terms; I will not go back from my word; but if that
marriage fail, we want no other.” Thus the matter remained in abeyance for
several months. On the day (November 15) on which he sent this last rejoinder
Saladin again retired from Ramlah to the neighbourhood of Natroun; and
shortly afterwards the Christian host advanced from its encampment between the
two restored Casals into the plain between Ramlah and
Lydda. Here they pitched their tents and waited for reinforcements and
supplies.
The rank and file were naturally puzzled and
scandalized by Richard's diplomatic dealings with the Infidels, which seemed to
them unlawful, and of which they neither understood the purpose nor knew the
real character. The Frank chroniclers excuse him as a simple-minded Christian
duped by the cunning of the Saracens. He cleared himself in the eyes of his
accusers in a fashion of his own. “Right and left the enemies came swarming
about the camp; and the king met them and gave practical proof of his loyalty
to God and Christendom, for several times he shewed in the host the many Turks’
heads that he had cut off.”
Besides the enemy, the Crusaders had now
another obstacle to contend with—the climate. The “former rains,” or heavy
showers which open the agricultural year in Palestine, would begin about the
time when the host left Joppa, at the end of October, and continue through
November; these would be followed by a season of constantly increasing rainfall
lasting throughout the next three months. This great rain “pursued the soldiers
of the Cross,” as one of them says, till it drove them to take what shelter
they could find within the ruins of Ramlah and Lydda.
Here they remained “in great discomfort and difficulties” till the end of
December or beginning of January. Saladin held them in check by remaining in
his camp near Natroun till December 12; then he
withdrew to Jerusalem and disbanded his army for the rest of the winter,
trusting for the defence of Judea to the guerilla
troops who still remained among the hills, to the weather, and above all, to
the physical character of the country. The Christian host was now on the edge
of the Shephelah, or Lowlands of Judea, so called in
distinction from the “Hills” proper, the loftier central range, or ridge, which
forms the backbone of the land, and on whose eastern side lie Jerusalem and
Bethlehem. The low, soft chalk-hills of the Shephelah are not a range; they lie in groups and clusters interspersed with level
spaces, and valleys opening into the plain on the west, and falling on the east
into the long, deep trench which runs between the “Lowlands” and the
“Highlands” like—as a modern writer says—“a great fosse planted along the
ramparts of Judea”. At the mouth of the northernmost of these cross
valleys—Joshua’s Valley of Ajalon—Lydda and Ramlah were frontier towns of the Shephelah and the maritime plain. Along this vale or over the low hills on each side of
it, and through the narrow defiles which at its other end penetrate the central
range, ran the most direct lines of communication between the Holy City and the
coast. One of these was the old “way that goeth to
Beth-horon” from Gibeon on the plateau above
Jerusalem. This road led to Joppa through Lydda; so did another which crossed
the fosse some three miles south of the first. The two were linked together by
a cross-road which ran on south-westward to the ancient Nicopolis—called Amwas by the Arabs and Emmaus by the Franks—and then
divided into two branches, one going southward by Natroun,
the other to Joppa through Ramlah. This latter way
seems to have been in general use since the eighth century, when the first
Moslem conquerors overthrew Lydda and founded Ramlah to supersede it. The First Crusaders had marched by the road from Ramlah to Emmaus and thence to Beth-horon,
Gibeon, and Jerusalem, without opposition. Richard resolved to try how far he
could follow in their steps; but he knew he could not expect such good fortune
as theirs, for the Shephelah was still full of what
one Frank writer calls “the outside Turkish army,” that is, the troops whom
Saladin had left to keep guard and to prowl about among the hills, in
contradistinction to the “inner” force which was with him at Jerusalem. In this
district of tumbled hill and dale, moorland, glen, and torrentbed, of chalky
slopes and limestone boulders covered with thick scrub and brushwood that sheltered
caves and hiding places innumerable, these light-armed Saracen horsemen were
at home, and had every advantage for the guerilla warfare in which they
excelled; and the ease and rapidity with which they could move about through
the intricacies of the hills enabled them to swoop down suddenly from the most
unexpected quarters, with fatal effect, upon foraging or reconnoitring parties and convoys. One chronicler says that when the bulk of the host sought
shelter in Lydda and Ramlah, the count of Saint-Pol
betook himself to “the Casal of the Baths”; which
seems to represent a place now called Umm-el-Hummum, about twelve miles north-east of Lydda. If this
statement be correct, the count’s object may perhaps have been to act as an
advanced guard on that side of the host and keep watch against a possible
gathering of the Saracens in force on the lower slopes of the hills of
Samaria—especially at Mirabel, or as the Saracens called it Mejdel Yaba, which was close to Umm-el-Hummum and one of the few castles which Saladin had not
caused to be evacuated—and their descent thence on the Christians at Lydda. It
is at any rate probable that Richard’s purpose was to render some such service
as this in another direction, towards the south and south-east of Ramlah, when on December 22 or 23 he removed his own
headquarters to the “Post of Observation,” Natroun,
which Saladin had quitted ten days before. On that day, however, a convoy from
Joppa was intercepted by the enemy; and similar mishaps occurred several times
in the ensuing week. To this unsatisfactory state of affairs the leaders,
having now fully ascertained that Saladin and his main army had really “taken
to the Mountains” properly so-called—the mountain-wall which shelters Jerusalem
from the world—“and left the champaign to us” boldly decided to put an end by
advancing to the foot of the said mountains, where they told their followers
they would find a resting-place and be able to get food for themselves.
The advance was ordered for January 3, 1992.
Some of the Saracen guerilla bands which were constantly scouring the country
between Joppa and the hills had apparently discovered that a movement was in
contemplation, but were uncertain as to its object; they spent the night of the
32nd lying hid near Casal des Plains and at daybreak
dashed forward in the direction which the host was about to take; probably they
hoped to lie hidden while it passed, and fall at unawares on the rearguard or
the slow-moving baggage-train. Richard, however, knew of their lying in wait,
and had himself, with Geoffrey de Lusignan, been lying in wait for them all the
preceding night at the Casal of the Baths; a locality
where, seeing that it was quite as far (in a different direction) from Lydda as
their own lurking-place and double that distance from his known headquarters at Natroun, they were not likely to suspect his
presence. While they were hurrying up from the west, he was spurring to meet
them from the north, the very opposite quarter to that where they doubtless
supposed him to be; and scarcely had they pounced upon and slain two
men-at-arms who went forth alone in advance of the host, when the unexpected
apparition of a banner which they well knew to be the king’s, and a figure
whose bearing and headlong onset were equally unmistakeable,
threw them into utter confusion. Most of them fled in the very direction whence
Richard had come, towards Mirabel; probably hoping to escape pursuit among the
hills. Richard, who was mounted on Fauvel, dashed
after them and unhorsed two before any of his own followers could rejoin him;
some twenty others were slain or brought back prisoners to the Christian camp.
A march of ten miles brought the host to Beit Nuba, on a level space of high ground close to the
northern end of the natural fosse which lies between the Shephelah and the mountain range. The hearts of the pilgrims “were glad with the hope
that they were going to the Sepulchre”; but “their
bodies were ill at ease” for the Syrian winter was now at its worst, and in
their present exposed encampment there was no shelter from its ravages. Stormy
wind and tempest, torrential rain and hail, beat down or tore up the tents; armour rusted, clothes rotted, biscuits and bacon were so
soaked that they became putrid; horses died, men sickened; and in less than a
week “the wise Templars, the brave Hospitaliers, and
the men of the land” came to the conclusion that under the existing
circumstances an attempt to besiege Jerusalem could lead to nothing but
disaster. They told Richard that if the city were invested its besiegers would
be between two fires, Saladin breaking forth upon them from within and the
outside Turkish army cutting them off
from communication with the coast and depriving them of supplies. The men who
spoke thus knew well that it was vain to dream of existing by foraging on the
barren, rocky tableland which forms the summit of the Judean mountain-range,
and that the host, if it got there at all, would probably starve long before
the defenders of the city, which Saladin was sure to have victualled for a
siege, and which it would hardly be possible to blockade so completely as to
cut it off from all means of obtaining further provisions. Nor was this all.
Supposing—these counsellors urged—that the city were taken, its capture would
be useless unless it could be at once filled with troops capable of holding it
permanently; and this would be no easy matter, for the western pilgrims, who
formed the bulk of the host, would return to their home-lands as soon as their
pilgrimage was accomplished, and thus when they were gone all that had been won
would be lost again. Hereupon the western leaders called a council of war at Natroun; they may have retired there on purpose to be well
away from the rest of the army while discussing the matter. However this may be,
they asked “the wise folk who were born in the land” what course they would
recommend under existing circumstances. The Templars and Hospitaliers at once answered that what they would advise was not to proceed towards
Jerusalem at present, but to refortify and occupy Ascalon,
so as to obtain some control over the transit of provisions from the great
Saracen storehouse, Cairo, to the Holy City. An Arab historian gives, very
likely from the report of some spy who overheard the proceedings of the
council, a curious account of the way in which the final decision was reached.
Richard, he says, asked to see a plan of Jerusalem, that he might judge for
himself of the force of the arguments put forward by the Knights. They drew a
plan for him; and when he thoroughly understood the character of the site and
surroundings of the city, he pronounced them such as to make the city, in his
opinion, virtually impregnable “so long”—thus the Arab reports the words of the
western king—“as Saladin lives and the Moslems are united.” Before the middle
of January the host was back at Ramlah.
Whether Richard’s verdict on the prospects of
the Crusade was really quite so
pessimistic as Ibn Alathyr represents may be doubted.
The scheme now proposed by the Military Orders and accepted by the king was
simply a reversion to the original plan of campaign with which they had all set
out from Acre, and from which Saladin’s seeming panic after Arsuf had tempted
them to diverge; and there can be little doubt that the divergence was unwise.
The Frank pilgrim-chroniclers, sharing and voicing the disappointment of the
rank and file, declare indeed that the retirement from Beit Nuba was a blunder, and that if their leaders had but known the evil plight—due,
like their own, to the weather— of Saladin and his men at Jerusalem, the city
might, “without doubt,” have been taken easily. But those who spoke thus could
have no real knowledge as to the state of affairs in Jerusalem, and their
version of it finds no countenance in the pages of Bohadin,
who was there, and who may fairly be trusted on the subject, since he makes no
mystery about the Sultan’s perils and alarms on other occasions. The picture
drawn by the very same Frankish chroniclers of the condition in which the host,
“doleful and down-hearted,” marched back to Ramlah shows that it was quite unfit to attempt an invasion of the hill-country. Men
and beasts were alike worn out with weakness and fever, caused by the wet and
cold, and many of the “lesser folk,” sick and helpless, would have been left
behind but for King Richard, who caused them to be sought out and brought away
in safety. Among the French Crusaders discontent took the form of
wholesale desertion. Some went to Joppa; of these, some stayed there, and
others sailed back to Acre, “where living was not dear,” sarcastically observes
the Norman poet; some joined the marquis at Tyre,
whither he had long been trying to entice them; the duke of Burgundy himself
went off in dudgeon with his followers to Casal of
the Plains. Extremely angry, but nothing daunted, Richard and the faithful
remnant of the host set out on January 19 by a road which, crossing the plain
from Ramlah, brought them back at Ibelin to the main road along the coast. The ten miles’ march through mud and mire to Ibelin was a sufficiently hard day’s work; but “that day
was nothing compared to the next,” when nearly double that distance had to be
covered, on a road where men and horses were constantly sinking into swamps,
and beneath a ceaseless downpour of rain, hail and snow; and when at length
they arrived before Ascalon, they could only make
their way into the place by clambering over heaps of broken wall, and find a
partial shelter among the ruins within.
Ascalon stood amid what the poet-pilgrim Ambrose emphatically
calls “a very good country”; but the stormy season, and the uncertainty as to
how many armed enemies might be still lurking around, made this practically
useless for foraging purposes; and the harbour was a
dangerous one, the sea being often so rough that no ship could ride in it. This
was the case for a week after the arrival of the Crusaders, who were thus
limited to what little food they had brought with them—much of the stores with
which they started from Ramlah having been lost in
the swamps on the way—till by a change in the weather the transports coming
from Joppa to meet them were enabled to land their supplies. Scarcely was this
done, however, when the storms rose again, and barges and galleys and “all our
beautiful smacks” were dashed to pieces and some of the sailors drowned.
Richard caused all the wood that drifted ashore to be collected and employed
for the construction of some galleys, which he destined for his own use; “but,”
adds Ambrose, “it was not to be.” Towards Candlemas he sent a message to the
French, exhorting them to restore the unity of the host by coming to rejoin
their brethren and take counsel with them as to what should be done next. They
answered that they would come, and would continue with him till Easter (April
5), on condition that if they then wished to depart, he would give them safe
conduct by land to Acre or Tyre. To this he agreed;
whereupon they came, and—the worst of the winter’s rages having now subsided—
the reunited host by common consent set to work to rebuild Ascalon.
The task was no light one; it was said that the fortifications had originally
included no less than fifty-three great towers, all now almost levelled with
the ground. Most of the nobles were by this time too short of money to be able
to hire workmen; so knights, men-at-arms, squires, clerks, and laymen of all
ranks set themselves to make a clearance of the ruins, with such a will that
soon they were astonished at their own success. As the rebuilding, however,
required more skilled labour than theirs, Richard took
the direction of it upon himself, and not only caused the greater part of it to
be performed at his expense, but also made good whatever was lacking of labour and of the money to pay for it in the parts assigned
to the charge of others. The English chronicler of the Crusade says the king
wrought at the building with his own hands, and we can well believe the story.
Saladin was about this time doing the same thing at Jerusalem.
Another small point of resemblance between
the two sovereigns was a preference for doing their own scouting. One morning
Richard, with a handful of picked knights, rode out from Ascalon to reconnoitre Darum. This
castle, built by the late King Amalric on the site of
an earlier fortification, had been the extreme south-western outpost of the
Latin kingdom of Jerusalem; it lay three or four miles south of the point where
the coast-road crosses a watercourse which the historians of the Crusade called
the Torrent or River of Egypt, because above that point it was in fact, in Amalric’s and Richard’s days and long afterwards, the
boundary between Syria and Egypt. Now that both these countries were under
Moslem rule, Darum was the first halting-place in
Syria for the caravans which brought supplies from “Babylon”—that is, Cairo—to
Jerusalem. It chanced that when Richard drew near the place, a thousand
Christian prisoners whom the Sultan was sending to Cairo under the charge of
some of his household guards had just arrived there. At the sight of the king’s
banner the escort, doubtless thinking the whole host from Ascalon was upon them, left the prisoners and sought shelter for themselves in the
castle; but before they could reach it some were slain and twenty captured by
Richard and his men. Thus, says Ambrose, “God delivered His people who were
appointed to death, by sending King Richard to take the place of Saint Leonard,
the liberator of captives.”
Some of the Christians, Frank and Syrian,
thus rescued made, no doubt, a welcome addition to the diminished numbers of
the host. Richard had several times already sent letters or messages to the
marquis, calling on him to come and rejoin the Crusade and render the military
service due to the Crown of Jerusalem for the fiefs which he held of it. Conrad
at first took no notice of these appeals; to another and more urgent summons he
finally answered that he would not set foot in the camp till he had had a
personal interview elsewhere with the king of England. Richard seemingly felt
it necessary to overlook his insolence and consent to a meeting at Casal Imbert, half-way between Acre and Tyre.
But meanwhile a new trouble arose.
Philip of France had gone home in August 1191
without leaving his lieutenant in Palestine, the duke of Burgundy, any money
for the pay of the French soldiers, counting for that purpose on the share due
to him of the bezants which the two kings then expected to receive in a few
weeks from Saladin. When this expectation had become hopeless, Hugh asked
Richard for a loan, and Richard, to avoid losing the French troops altogether, lent
him five thousand marks. This sum was exhausted long before February
1192; the French troops clamoured for their dues;
Hugh asked Richard for another loan. This Richard refused. High words passed,
and the duke, with the greater part of the Frenchmen, straightway departed to
Acre. There they found the Pisans and Genoese at strife. Pending the recovery
of Jerusalem, Acre served as temporary capital of the kingdom, and there
accordingly King Guy seems to have remained since his return thither in
September. His authority was upheld by the Pisans, who from the outset of the
Crusade had attached themselves to Richard; the Genoese, having done homage to
Philip Augustus, favoured the marquis, and were
intriguing to put him in possession of the city. A skirmish between these two
parties seems to have been going on when the French arrived; they took to their
arms, whereupon the Pisans set themselves to bar their way; the duke’s horse
was killed under him; then the Pisans rushed back into the city and shut the
gates against him and his men. At this juncture Conrad, in response to the
invitation of the Genoese, arrived by sea with his forces. The Pisans “took to
the mangonels and stone-casters” and thus kept him off for three days while
they sent to call Richard to the rescue. Their messenger found the king at
Caesarea, on his way to the projected meeting with Conrad. A hasty ride brought
him to Acre at dead of night, and when the marquis knew that the king had come,
nothing could hold him there, but he went with all speed back to Tyre, whither Burgundy and the French were gone already.
On the morrow Richard called together the
people of the city and made peace among them. Soon afterwards the meeting with
Conrad at Casal Imbert took place, but without any
practical result. Next, Richard demanded repayment of the loan which he had
made to the duke of Burgundy six months before. Hugh acquitted himself of the
debt by assigning to the king the most valuable of Philip’s Saracen prisoners,
who were still in Conrad’s custody at Tyre; but he
made no sign of rejoining the Crusade. Such a state of affairs threatened ruin
to the whole enterprise, and after long and anxious deliberation in his own
mind Richard took private counsel with the “elders and wise men of the land” as
to what had best be done. They gave their judgement that the marquis had
forfeited his rights under the settlement of July 1191, and should be deprived
of the revenues then assigned to him in the kingdom.
It was doubtless to keep some sort of watch
upon Conrad that Richard remained at Acre till the end of March. During
the latter part of his stay there he was again engaged in negotiations with
Saladin. When a messenger arrived at Jerusalem with a request that Safadin might be sent to confer with the king, nothing was
known there of the Crusaders’ advance to Ascalon;
Richard was believed by the Sultan to have placed his troops in winter quarters
at Joppa and gone back thence straight to Acre. Saladin bade his brother go by
way of the Jordan valley and Mount Tabor, collect the troops of those parts in
readiness for a renewal of hostilities, and then—as usual—go and hear Richard’s
proposals, and if they were not acceptable, drag out negotiations till the
whole Saracen army had had time to re-assemble. A note was given him containing
the utmost concessions that Saladin was willing to make. They were these : an
equal division of the land; the Cross to be given back; the Christians to have
priests in the church of the Holy Sepulchre, and
pilgrims to have access to it, provided they went unarmed. “He was,” says Bohadin, “driven to offer these terms, by the general
weariness of long-continued warfare, by a load of debt, and by the long
absence of his followers from their homes; for there were many who never left
him, and who dared not ask for leave.”
Safadin set out on March 20. At Keisan he was met by March Humphry of Toron with a message
to this effect : “The division of the land is agreed upon already; but we must
have the whole of the Holy City except the Temple of the Rock,” otherwise
called the Mosque of Omar. This message Safadin transmitted to his brother, and the Sultan’s council—so Bohadin says—actually thought its terms near enough to their own to be “quite
acceptable.” Safadin’s first messenger, however, was
followed by another who reached Jerusalem on the 27th with tidings that Richard
had gone back to Joppa. If it be true that Richard knighted Safadin’s son on Palm Sunday, March 29, at Acre, the
announcement must have been slightly premature; but by the time that Safadin himself returned to Jerusalem, on April 1, Richard
was certainly back at Ascalon
The king was much chafed and troubled in
mind; for Holy Week was begun, and he knew that Conrad and Hugh had been urging
the French who were still at Ascalon to join them at Tyre, and that his promise of a safe-conduct to those who
wished to depart at Easter for home would in all likelihood be immediately
claimed by every one of them; and so it was, on Wednesday, April 1. He gave
them an escort, and when they set out next day himself rode a little way with
them, weeping, and beseeching them to stay with him at his expense, and so keep
together; but they would not. Finding his efforts useless, he returned to Ascalon and sent off a messenger in haste to Acre bidding
his officers in charge of that city not to admit the French within its walls.
This desertion of more than seven hundred of the finest chivalry of Christendom
was a grievous loss to the host. Richard did what he could to comfort and
encourage the faithful remnant by holding on Easter Day (April 5) a great court
outside Ascalon; his tents were thrown open to all
comers, and furnished with abundance of meat and drink and everything that
could be procured to enhance the magnificence of the feast. Next day he set
everybody to work again on the fortifications, taking upon himself the
responsibility and the expense of completing the portions which the French had
left unfinished.
The season of the latter rains was now almost
over, and both Christians and Saracens had to lay their plans for a new
campaign. The former had already, while Richard was at Acre, profited by the
improvement in the weather to make two brilliant raids, one on March 27 from
Joppa across the plain to Mirabel, where they seem to have intercepted a rich
caravan, for they slew thirty Turks and brought back fifty prisoners besides a
number of cattle and booty said to have been worth two thousand eight hundred
bezants; the other from Ascalon next day, when all
men who had horses rode out by the southern road to capture a prey of which the
scouts had told them; and they did well this time, for those who were there
reported that they went right into Egypt, four leagues beyond Darum, and they brought back great troops of horses, asses,
camels, oxen, and sheep, besides near two hundred prisoners, men, women, and
children. Saladin heard of it, and promptly despatched some troops to intercept the raiders on their way back, but they were too quick
for him. Saladin’s wisest policy clearly was to collect his forces
and remain with them in his present position till he saw what his enemies would
do.
Richard as usual began by reconnoitring in person. His first attempt to ascertain the defences of Darum had been cut short by the necessity of
bringing to the camp, or despatching in safety to
their homes, the Christians towards whom he had acted the part of S. Leonard.
On Easter Tuesday (April 7) he set out again in the same direction; that day he
viewed Gaza, where also there seems to have been a Moslem garrison, and on the
Wednesday went on April and perambulated Darum to see
on which side it could be most easily assaulted. Its garrison vainly hurled at
him missiles which failed to reach their aim and insults in a tongue which he
did not understand.
A few days later there came to Ascalon a messenger from England with tidings which filled
the whole host with dismay. He brought letters from the justiciars beseeching
the king to return at once, as John was trying, with a considerable prospect of
success, to make himself master of the realm. Richard called the barons
together and set forth the matter fully to them. He added that if he should be,
as he feared, obliged to depart from Syria, he would leave three hundred
knights and two thousand men-at-arms to continue serving there at his expense;
and he asked his own followers to let him know who among them wished to go with
him, and who wished to stay, for he would put no constraint upon any man. The
barons, after holding a consultation among themselves, came back and told him
frankly that unless he appointed as lord over the land someone who had a
knowledge of war, and to whom all, no matter whence they came, could adhere,
every one of them would leave the country and set out for home. Richard at once
asked them which they would have of the only two possible kings—Guy or Conrad.
“And all of them, great and small, knelt down before him and prayed that he
would make the marquis their lord, for this was the most helpful and useful
thing for the realm.” Some of them had hitherto been bitter against the
marquis, and these Richard upbraided for their sudden change of front; but when
fully assured all were now unanimous in their choice he gave it his assent, and
ordered that an honourable escort should go to fetch
the king-elect and the French, and thus all should be reunited.
As head of the royal house of Jerusalem,
guardian of the realm, and commander-in-chief of the crusading host, Richard
would not have been justified in withholding his assent from the course of
action thus unanimously recommended by both the native and the western
Crusaders. Their decision was probably the wisest possible under the
circumstances. Although Conrad had done more than any other man (except
possibly Philip Augustus) to sow dissension among the Christian forces, he was
nevertheless the leader who, when Richard was gone, would divide them the
least; for when once he was acknowledged as their chief, it would be his own
interest to keep them together and to further the object of their enterprise to
the utmost of his power; he was, unquestionably, by far the most capable and
energetic, next to Richard, of all the princes of the Crusade; and his
so-called wife and their infant daughter were the sole surviving
representatives of the royal house of Jerusalem. The crowned king, Guy, had no
following of his own, and it seems quite clear that he had, tacitly at least,
resigned all claim to authority in the realm as well as in the host; so that no
disloyalty to him was involved in Richard’s assent to the election of a new
sovereign. Count Henry of Champagne and three other envoys of rank carried the
great news to Tyre; Conrad and all the folk there
were delighted, and began to prepare for immediate return to the host at Ascalon. But before any of them had set out, the
situation was suddenly changed again; on April 28 the marquis was assassinated.
The murderers were caught red-handed, and, of course, promptly put to death. At
Saladin’s court they were reported to have declared that they had been hired by
Richard to commit the crime. Saladin, with whom Conrad had been in negotiation
for several weeks past, had at the time an agent in Tyre from whom this report was derived; and if it did not actually originate with
Conrad’s friends and allies at Tyre, its circulation
among Richard’s enemies and rivals and its transmission to Europe were
certainly encouraged by them. A few years later, however, one Moslem historian
gave a very different account of the matter : Ibn Alathyr says the men were hired by Saladin to kill Richard if they could, or, failing
him, Conrad, and that they chose the latter alternative as the easier of the
two. This story is probably worthless except as an illustration of the
importance of both king and marquis in Saracen eyes. The best confutation of
the other tale lies in the simple fact that Conrad’s death could not be of the
slightest profit to Richard, but, on the contrary, upset all his plans for his
own return to Europe. The Norman pilgrim-poet of the Crusade tells us that the
men who stabbed Conrad were “Assassins” not only in the modern conventional
sense of the word, but also in its original and etymological sense; by their
own confession, they were Hashashin, that is,
followers of the “Old Man of the Mountain,” and acted under his orders. This
is confirmed by two of our best English authorities, and by the French
historians who lived and wrote in the Holy Land; one of the earliest of these
latter says that “some people” reported the murderers to have been hired by
Richard, “but,” he adds, “this was not a bit true”; while another states that
the deed was done to avenge certain other Ismailites whom the marquis had caused to be first robbed and then drowned.
This story is at any rate more intrinsically
probable than either Ibn Alathyr’s or that which was
accepted at Saladin’s court and sent to Europe by Conrad’s friends; indeed, the
relations between these latter and Richard during the rest of their stay in the
Holy Land seem hardly compatible with a real belief on their part in Richard’s
guilt.
There were now some ten thousand Frenchmen,
under Hugh of Burgundy and other barons, lodging in tents outside Tyre. As soon as Conrad was buried these barons called upon
Isabel to surrender the city to them to hold in trust for the king of France.
She boldly answered that “when the king returned, she would willingly surrender
it to him, unless before that time it had another lord.” The closing words of
this answer were a scarcely veiled announcement of her resolve to assert her
independence as queen by right of inheritance and bring in a new claimant to
the lordship of the land by taking another consort; and it is scarcely possible
to avoid a suspicion that she had already made her choice. Count Henry had gone
back from Tyre as far as Acre; there he received the
news of Conrad’s death. He at once returned to Tyre;
and when the people saw him, they straightway elected him as sent by God to be
their ruler and lord, and prayed him to accept the crown and wed its heiress,
the widow of the marquis. He answered that he must first ascertain how his
uncle King Richard would regard the project. When Richard heard the whole of
the strange story, he brooded over it for a long while; at last he said to
Henry’s messengers : “Sirs, I should greatly wish that my nephew might be king,
if it please God, when the land shall be conquered; but not that he wed the marchioness,
whom the marquis took from her rightful lord and lived with in such wise that
if Count Henry trusts my counsel he will not take her in marriage. But let him
accept the kingship, and I will give him in demesne Acre and its port-dues, Tyre, Joppa, and jurisdiction over all the conquered land.
And then tell him to come back to the host and bring the Frenchmen with him, as
quickly as he can, for I want to go and take Darum—if
the Turks dare wait there for me”.
It is strange that Richard did not see how
impracticable was his advice. The first half of the scheme proposed by the
barons at Tyre was futile without the other half. The
kingdom of Jerusalem was sold, beyond redemption, into the hand of a woman.
Isabel’s hour had come; she was now, beyond all question, the “right heir” of
all the land. Henry of Champagne, nephew to both Richard and Philip, constant
companion and faithful follower of the one, yet loyal homager of the
other, was exceptionally qualified to become a sovereign round whom all parties
could rally, and a healer of their divisions; but these qualifications must
prove useless if Isabel should give him a rival by choosing another consort.
His election would be of no avail for himself or for the realm unless he took
the queen with the crown. The barons at Tyre were
urgent that he should do so; he hesitated from fear of Richard’s displeasure,
but his personal inclination seconded their arguments. Finally Isabel herself
brought him the keys of the city; a priest was hurriedly fetched, and there and
then, on May 5, the couple were wedded. The king-elect sent representatives to
Acre, Joppa, and elsewhere, to take seisin of the royal rights, and summoned
his men to join him for an expedition against Darum.
During Henry’s absence from the host Richard
had been scouring the country round Ascalon in a
series of bold excursions, made sometimes almost alone, and from which he
always returned “bringing ten or a dozen, or a score, or may be thirty,
Saracens’ heads, and some live Saracens besides.” Another object of these
expeditions probably was to reconnoitre the inner
border of the plain, and endeavour to find out what
were the possibilities of penetrating by some way, other than the vale of Ajalon and its
ramifications, through the Shephelah and across the
trench and the mountain-rampart of Judea. The most direct way up from the plain
to Jerusalem was by the next valley south of Ajalon,
the Wady es Surar (Valley
of Sorek); but if this were to be attempted, the base
for the attempt must be some place further north than Ascalon.
The entrance to the third main inlet into the Shephelah,
the Vale of Elah or Wady es
Sunt, was guarded by a great castle set on a height called by the Arabs Tell es Safiyeh, “the Bright Hill,” and by the Franks (who in
earlier days had built the castle) Blanchegarde; both
names being derived from the nature of the site, a solitary chalk-hill whose
gleaming sides were plainly visible from Ascalon,
seventeen miles away, while the tower on its summit commanded a wide view over
the surrounding plain, as well as of Ascalon itself, and
also of the roads leading northward to Natroun and I
southward to Ibelin of the Hospital and Hebron. Once already—in
December, from Ramlah—Richard had set out to explore
the neighbourhood of Blanchegarde,
but had I turned back again without reaching the place. When on April 22 he led
his troops to attack it, he found it deserted; the Turkish garrison had fled at
his approach. He seems to have left there in their stead the whole force that
he had taken with him, and returned to Ascalon quite
alone, for on the way back he nearly lost his life in an encounter with a wild
boar in which he was evidently single-handed. Six days later—the day of
Conrad’s death—Roger de Glanville, whom Richard had left in command of the
newly won fortress, made a daring reconnaissance through the Vale of Elah, up the steep mountain-pass which meets it on the
other side of the central valley, across the plateau, and past the very gates
of Jerusalem, and returned in triumph with a few stray Saracens whom he had
captured. On the following day the king, riding somewhere “between Blanchegarde and Gaza,” came upon eight Saracens of whom he
slew three and captured the other five. On the night of May 1 he was at Furbia, near the coast, between Ascalon and Gaza ; here some Turks tried to surprise him asleep at early morn, but he
was the first of his little band to awake and went forth straight from bed, stopping for nothing but his sword and shield, to meet the
assailants; four were slain, seven made prisoners; “the rest fled before his
face.” It must have been either between these two exploits or directly after
the latter of them that Count Henry’s messengers met the king “in the plains of Ramlah, spurring across the open country in pursuit
of a band of Turks who were fleeing before him.” His restlessness was probably
increased by the disturbed state of his mind. Envoys from his own dominions
were arriving one after another with contradictory letters and messages, some
giving alarming accounts of the state of affairs there, some assuring him that
all was well; some beseeching him to come home, some exhorting him to continue
the sacred task in which he was engaged; all deepening his perplexities till
he knew not which to believe or how to act. One point alone stood out clear
before him. Now that Ascalon was lost to the Moslems,
its place as the key of Egypt, the base and storehouse which sheltered troops
and supplies from the Nile valley for transmission to Jerusalem and the other
fortresses still held by the Moslems in Syria, had been taken by Darum. Before Richard could bring himself to quit the
country, and also before Saladin’s army reassembled, Darum must be won for Christendom.
There was no time to lose. The rains were
quite over; summer was beginning; and Saladin’s host would have been at its
full strength again ere now but for some troubles in the northern part of his
dominions. His nephew Taki-ed-Din, the lord of Hamath and Edessa, had died in
October 1191 leaving a son, El Mansour, who was inclined to rebel against
Saladin’s supremacy. On May 14 or 15 the Sultan despatched his own son El Afdal to seize El Mansour’s lands; but
the diplomatist of the family, Safadin, fearing that
this quarrel would imperil the “Holy” War, was pleading hard for a pacific
settlement. Knowing all this, Richard determined not to wait for Henry. He had
his stone-casters packed on shipboard and sent them down towards Darum by sea; he hired men-at-arms to increase the forces
at Ascalon; some he distributed in the strong places
round about to guard the roads; then he set out with only the troops of his own
domains, and on Sunday, May 17, this little band pitched their tents before Darum, a fortress with seventeen “fine strong towers and
turrets,” besides a keep of great height and strength built against a solid
rock which formed one side of it, while the other sides were of squared stone
and surrounded by a deep fosse. Being too few to encircle such a place, the
adventurers encamped all together a little way off to wait for their machines
and consider on which side they could use them to the best advantage. The
Turkish garrison thought scorn of such an insignificant looking force, and rode
forth and made a feint of provoking them to fight, but failing to move them,
withdrew into the castle and shut the gates. That night or next day the ships
arrived with the engines of war; “and,” says an eyewitness, “we saw the
valiant king of England himself, and the nobles who were his companions, all
sweating under the burden of the various parts of the stone-casters, which
they, like packhorses, carried on their shoulders near a mile across the sand.”
The pieces were soon put together and the machines at work, one manned by the
Normans of the party, another by the Poitevins, a
third probably by the Englishmen; this last the king took under his own special
command, and he directed its discharge solely against the keep; a mangonel set
up there by the Turks was speedily destroyed by it. All three machines were
kept in ceaseless action day and night. Meanwhile the walls were being
undermined; and wherever they began to fall they were set on fire by some men
of Aleppo skilled in wall-breaking, whom Richard had hired during the siege of
Acre and now brought with him to Darum. On the fourth
day of the siege (Friday, May 22), when the castle gate had been shattered by
Richard’s stone-caster and set on fire, the garrison offered to surrender on
condition that their lives and those of their families should be spared. Richard refused the condition and bade them defend themselves as best they
could. The stone-casters worked more vigorously than ever; presently one of the
undermined towers fell with a crash. The assailants rushed through the breach;
some sixty Turks were slain; the rest fled into the keep, and when they saw the
Christian banners waving all over the outer bailey and the Frank knights and
men-at-arms beginning to scale the keep itself, they “gave themselves up to
King Richard as his captives and slaves.” He kept them securely guarded in the
tower for the night; next morning they were brought out, “and their hands tied
behind their backs so tightly that they roared with pain.” There were three
hundred men; and there were also some women and children in the place, and, moreover,
forty Christian prisoners.
The conquest of the seaboard was complete;
the last fortress on the coast was in Christian hands; and Richard and his men
were the more delighted with their success because they had won it unaided,
before their French comrades rejoined them. Count Henry and his followers had
ridden at full speed, but they came spurring up just too late. Uncle and nephew
met with joyful greetings and mutual congratulations, and Richard publicly made
over his prize to Henry as a kind of first-fruits of the realm. It was
Whitsun-Eve; so all rested where they were on the festival day. On the Monday
the castle was given in charge to constables appointed by Henry, and the rest
of the party set out northward. Henry and his men went straight on to Ascalon; Richard and his company stopped at Furbia, where it seems the king expected to
receive the report of a scout whom he had sent to reconnoitre the approach to the southernmost of the cross-valleys leading from the plain to
the mountains—the Wady el Hesy, “valley of the wells,” which opens from the Shephelah about twelve miles east of Furbia and meets the central trench about eight miles west of Hebron. The scout came
and reported that Caysac, 1192 the emir whom Saladin
had placed in charge of that district, was at the “ Castle of Figtrees ” with more than a thousand men, making the castle
ready for defence against the Christians. Richard at
once called out the host from Ascalon to follow him;
they set out from Furbia on May 27 and advanced up
the Wady el Hesy to a place which they called the Canebrake of
Starlings; its Arabic name was Cassaba, meaning “ the
Reeds”. On the morrow they set out at sunrise and proceeded to the
Castle of Figtrees, but found in it only two Turks;
the rest had fled in haste at tidings of their approach. The Christians
therefore returned to Cassaba. They were less
fortunate in an expedition which they seem to have made next day, against
another fortress in the same neighbourhood; one
Moslem historian says the garrison came out and worsted them in fight; another,
that they were surprised within the castle; and both assert that one of their
chief captains or nobles was slain.
While the host lay thus at the Canebrake of
Starlings there came to the king another messenger from England, his
vice-chancellor, John of Alençon, with such an alarming account of the state
of affairs in both England and Normandy that after much anxious thought he told
the other princes and barons that he really must and would go home. They
hereupon held a council among themselves, and promptly answered this
announcement by another: whatever he might do or say, wherever he might go,
they all would proceed forthwith to Jerusalem. Someone who was present at their
council carried a report of its outcome to the pilgrims of lower rank, and they
danced for joy till past midnight; there was no man high or low, young or old,
who was not wild with delight, except the king himself; but he went to bed in
a feverish state of perturbation and perplexity; for he knew that unless he
went home he was like to lose his lands, yet it was virtually impossible for
him to withdraw from the Crusade in the face of this unanimous resolve. How the
resolve should be carried into effect, was the next question. The Christians
had now secured the entrances to three of the five natural openings from the
plain into the hill-country. There was clearly nothing to be gained by
proceeding further up the Wady el Hesy. From their present encampment they could easily
reach one of the two openings which they had not yet approached, the Wady el Afranj.
At the western end of this valley, on the borderline of the Shephelah and the plain—at the foot of the hills, where the
fields begin, as William of Tyre describes it—stood a
fortress with a town or village clustering round it, called by the Arabs Beit-Djibrin and by the Franks Ibelin of the Hospital; the latter title, derived from its owners the Knights of Saint
John, being added to distinguish it from the other Ibelin,
on the coast further north. Its site was probably that of the ancient Eleutheropolis, and it was a central point whence roads
radiated in all directions, to Gaza, to Hebron, to Blanchegarde and Toron of the Knights (Natroun),
to Bethlehem and Jerusalem. When— probably on June 1—the host left the
Canebrake of Starlings, its destination was apparently understood to be Ibelin. The pilgrims seem to have proceeded along the
border of the plain to a point—probably Galatia—whence a road ran eastward to Ibelin and westward to Ascalon. Here they halted and spent two or three days, “suffering a fierce
persecution and strange martyrdom” from swarms of minute flies which stung them
in every exposed part with such poisonous effect that “they all looked like
lepers,” but buoyed up above all troubles by their confident hope of reaching
Jerusalem at last. One alone sat gloomily in his tent apart, absorbed in
ceaseless thought; and that one was the king.
As Richard sat thus one day he saw a chaplain
from his own land, William of Poitiers, walking up and down before the open
door of the tent, and weeping bitterly. This man longed to remonstrate with his
sovereign for proposing to desert the Holy Land in its present perilous
condition; but he lacked a fitting opportunity, and was afraid to use one when
it came. Richard called him in and said : “For what are you weeping? By the
fealty that you owe me, tell me truth at once.” “Sire,” answered the priest
through his tears, “I will not tell you till you have promised not to be wroth with me.” Richard gave his word on oath that he would
bear him no grudge. Then William spoke with the impassioned and abundant
eloquence of the south. He bade the king call to mind how all his past career
had been a series of exploits and successes so remarkable as to be manifestly
due to the special grace and protection of Heaven; his early triumphs, when
only count of Poitou, over hostile neighbours and Brabantine hordes far outnumbering his little forces; his
peaceful and undisputed succession to the throne; his almost instantaneous victory
over the Griffons at Messina; his rapid conquest of Cyprus; his providential
encounter with the Saracen ship whose freight, had it reached Acre, might have
saved that city for Islam; his timely arrival at Acre, and the prominent share
which he had had in effecting its surrender; his recovery from the sickness of
which so many other Crusaders had died; the deliverance of the prisoners at Darum, and the speedy capture of that fortress, whereof he
had been the chosen instrument; and his own deliverance from the Turks who had
nearly captured him in his sleep. “Remember how God has given thee such great honour that no king of thy age ever had so few mishaps —how
often He has helped thee, and how He helps thee still. He has done such great
things for thee that thou needest fear neither king
nor baron. Remember all this, O king, and guard this land whereof He has made
thee protector! for He placed it wholly in thy keeping when the other king
turned back; and all men, great and small, to whom thy honour is dear, say that if thou, who wert wont to be a father and brother to the
Christian cause, shouldst forsake it now, thou wilt
have betrayed it to death.”
To all this Richard listened without speaking
a word, and when the priest’s discourse was ended he made no comment or reply.
But he pondered over it; “and his thoughts were enlightened.’’ Next day (June
4) the host was led westward, and by the hour of nones found itself once more in the fields around Ascalon.
Everybody took this to mean that the king intended to set out for Europe at
once. Instead, he told his nephew and the other nobles that “for no other
concern or need, no messenger and no tidings, nor for any earthly quarrel,
would he depart from them or quit the land before next Easter.” Then he called
for his herald Philip, and bade him proclaim throughout Ascalon,
in God’s Name, that the king had with his own lips promised to stay in the land
till Easter, and that all men were to make themselves ready with whatsoever
means God had given them, for they were going to Jerusalem to besiege it
straightway.
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