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BOOK II
:
RICHARD’S CRUSADE, 1189-1192
CHAPTER
VI
RICHARD
AND SALADIN
1192
The abandonment of the projected expedition to Ibelin was due to more causes than one. On the day of the
surrender of Darum Saladin had yielded to the
necessity strongly urged upon him by his emirs, of restoring peace and unity
within the borders of Islam as the essential preliminary to a renewal of the
“Holy” war, and had despatched Safadin with full powers to make whatever terms he might think good with his rebel
great-nephew El Mansour. The settlement thus made enabled the Sultan to call
out all his forces again for action against the Franks; and so prompt was the
response to his call that two important contingents, under the Emirs Bedr-ed-Din and Ezz-ed-Din,
reached Jerusalem on the last day of May, just as the Christian host was on its
march northward from Cassaba. Hearing that it was at
the parting of the roads between Ascalon and Ibelin, he despatched Ezz-ed-Din with the newly arrived forces to intercept it,
and an encounter in circumstances which would have been highly unfavourable to the Franks was only averted by the
promptitude with which their leaders, on discovering Ezz-ed-Din’s
approach, changed their plans and retired to Ascalon. Ibelin was a place worth securing; but its capture
was not essential to their present object; for the purpose of leading an army
to Jerusalem the Wady el Afranj was as valueless as the Wady el Hesy. When once a new
advance on Jerusalem was decided on, the matter of most urgent necessity was
the restoration of 1192 the host to its fullest possible strength. Some of the
French contingent were still at Acre. Thither Count Henry once more proceeded
from Ascalon to call these recalcitrants back to their duty, and also to collect any reinforcements that could be
obtained from Tyre, Tripoli, or elsewhere. Beit Nuba was appointed as the place where he and they
were to rejoin the main body. With the latter Richard on June 6 set out early
in the morning, and in a few hours was encamped before Blanchegarde.
From Blanchegarde three ways into the hill-country lay open. One was the valley of Elah (Wady es Sunt), which runs
almost due east from the place where the Crusaders now were. This way was not
attractive to invaders, because its continuation on the further side of the
central trench was very difficult for troops. North-eastward from Blanchegarde a. road ran along the border of the plain past
the mouth of the valley of Sorek (Wady es Surar) to Natroun, and
thence across the Shephelah to Beit Nuba. The valley of Sorek is the
most direct and the easiest of all the natural ways that lead up from the plain
to the mountains of Judah; but it had a great disadvantage. For an army
advancing through it there was no possible base on the coast nearer than Ascalon or Joppa, both of them more than twenty miles
distant from its western end. The only place within easy reach of it that could
be called a coasttown was Ibelin-Yebna,
and this was not a coast-town in the proper sense; it was four miles from the
sea and had no harbour. Of all the roads that led to
Jerusalem the best for the Crusaders was unquestionably the one which they had
chosen for their first attempt—the Beit Nuba road,
where they would have in their rear a safe double line of communication through Ramlah and Lydda with their original base at Joppa
and thence, by land and sea, with Acre. On June 9 they advanced to Natroun, and that night they intercepted a score of Turks
returning from a plundering raid on Joppa; six escaped, the other fourteen were
made prisoners. Next day Richard, with the men of his own domains moved on to
Castle Arnold, a place whose character is expressed in its modern Arabic name, Khurbet-el-Burj, “ruins of the
Bourg,” burh or fortress; it had been built by his great-grandfather,
King Fulk, on one of the highest hills in the Shephelah, about three and a half miles north-west of Beit Nuba, and commanded both the “way that goeth to Beth-horon” and the lower road along the foot of
the hills, from Lydda by Beit Nuba to Jerusalem.
Probably the Turks had dismantled it; Richard pitched his tents “on a high
place to the right.” He was joined by the rest of the army next day, when all
together proceeded to Beit Nuba and encamped there to
wait for Count Henry and his recruits.
On that same day Saladin, whose scouts kept
him well informed of all the enemy’s movements, held a council to decide what
course should be taken in view of their apparent intention to attempt the siege
of Jerusalem. It was settled that the defence of the
walls should be divided among the emirs, a certain portion being assigned to
each of them, and that the Sultan himself with the rest of his army should take
the field against the invaders. The latter part of this arrangement was,
however, not carried into effect : throughout the three weeks which the Franks
spent at Beit Nuba they never encountered Saladin,
and no general engagement took place, though there were, as Ambrose says, many
“adventures and skirmishes and discomfitures,” in several of which Richard was
personally engaged. One of these counterbalanced, within twenty-four hours, an
evil omen for the Franks with which, according to Bohadin,
their stay at Beit Nuba began—the falling of a convoy
from Joppa into a Turkish ambush on June 12. That night a scout sent out by
Richard returned from the hill of Gibeon—called by the Franks Montjoie, because
it was the place whence the earliest Crusaders had first seen the Holy
City—with tidings of another ambush which, he seems to have learned, was posted
near “the Fountain of Emmaus,” or Amwas, halfway
between Natroun and Beit Nuba,
and close to the point where the roads from Natroun and Ramlah meet. Before dawn Richard was in the
saddle; at daybreak he was at the Fountain; the Turks were caught at unawares,
twenty were slain, one was captured and his life spared because he was
Saladin’s herald; three camels, several fine Turcoman horses, and two good
mules laden with silk stuffs, aloes, and spicery, were the prize of the victor.
The rest of the party he chased over the hills till he overtook and slew one of
them, seemingly on the Mount of Joy itself, for according to Ambrose—who says
he had the story of the adventure from one who took part in it—he “saw
Jerusalem plainly before he turned back. During his absence from the camp it
had been assailed by a band of Turks, but they were driven back into the hills. An attempt of the enemies to intercept another caravan three or four days
later was equally unsuccessful, though the Turks killed a few Christians and
took some prisoners.
Meanwhile the lesser folk were growing tired
of waiting for Henry, and impatiently asking whether they were or were not
really going to Jerusalem this time. Some of the June French nobles urged
Richard to lead the host at once to Jerusalem and begin the siege. He refused.
He pointed out the risks which such a step would involve; he reminded them how
easy it would be for Saladin, who always knew all their movements, to swoop
down with his army into the plain in their rear and cut oh their supplies and
their communication with the sea, the circuit of the walls being too extensive
to admit of the division of so small a force as theirs into two bodies, one to
form the siege and the other to protect the besiegers and keep the ways clear
for convoys. He would not, he said, be the leader of such an undertaking,
because he had no mind to incur the blame for the disaster in which he believed
it would result. He knew well, he added, that both in Holy Land and in France
there were some persons who wished that he might wreck his reputation in some
such way, but he was not minded to satisfy their desire. Moreover, he and the
French were alike strangers in the land; it was not for them to take the
responsibility, but for the Military Orders and the feudataries of the realm. “Let them decide whether we are to attempt the siege, or to go
and take Babylon, or Beyrout, or Damascus. So shall
there be no discord amongst us.” The decision was committed to twenty umpires
representing every division of the host except the subjects of Richard : five
Templars, five Hospitaliers, five knights of Syria,
and five barons of France. The first fifteen gave their award for an expedition
against Babylon; but the French would not agree to this; they declared they
would go to Jerusalem and nowhere else. Richard did his utmost to restore
unity. He held out every possible inducement to the French to accept the Cairo
project: “See, my fleet lies at Acre, ready to carry all the baggage, equipments, and accoutrements, biscuits and flour; the host
would go all along by the shore and I would lead from here at my own charges
seven hundred knights and two thousand men-at-arms; no man of mine should be
lacking. But if they [that is, the French] will not do this, I am quite ready
to go to the siege of Jerusalem; only be it known that I will not be the leader
of the host; I will go in the company, as leader of my own men, but of no
others”. And forthwith he bade all his men assemble in the quarters of the Hospitaliers, “and arrange what help they would give to the
siege when they got to erusalem.”
Before this last order was fully carried out
an unexpected and most welcome diversion occurred. Saladin was now in daily
expectation of some troops from Egypt, for whose despatch he had given orders some time before with a warning that they must be specially
cautious when they approached the territory occupied by the Franks. These troops
waited at Belbeis for the assembling of a great caravan,
in company with which they finally set out for Jerusalem. All this was known to
Richard through his scouts, who were fully equal in efficiency to those of
Saladin; some of them were renegade Arabs; others were Syrian Christians, so
well disguised and speaking the “Saracen” tongue so perfectly as to be
indistinguishable from real Saracens. Three of these Syrian spies came into the
camp— seemingly on Sunday June 21—and bade the king mount and ride with his
men, and they would lead him to the great caravan that was coming up from
Egypt. Richard, in his joy, asked Hugh of Burgundy and the other Frenchmen to
join the expedition, and they did so, on condition of receiving a third part of
the spoil. With five hundred knights and men-at-arms the king rode by moonlight
to Blanchegarde and thence to Galatia, a town in the
plain, half way between Ascalon and Ibelin of the Hospital; there he was within easy reach of
both the coast-road and the inland road, and could also procure from Ascalon whatever supplies he needed, whether of fresh
horses or provisions. Saladin, as soon as he was informed of these
movements, despatched five hundred picked Turkish
soldiers under the emir Aslam to meet the force from Egypt and warn it of its
danger. He evidently expected that the Egyptians, knowing the coast
to be practically in the hands of the Franks, would come by the inner or
eastern road which after crossing the Wady Ghuzzeh divided into two branches, one passing over the
mountains by Hebron and Bethlehem, the other through the Shephelah across the Wady el Hesy and thence by Beit-Djibrin (Ibelin) to the valleys of Elah and Sorek. This latter route, being the easier and
shorter, was the one which the Egyptians would naturally take and which Aslam
took to meet them. His mission was to reach them, if possible, in the desert,
and guide them by the safer though more toilsome and lengthy way over the
mountain range. Riding as only Arabs (and possibly Richard on Fauvel) could ride, he and his party did meet them, late in
the evening, at what the Arabs called the Waters of Kuweilfeh and the Franks the Round Cistern. This was no doubt a well-known stage on the
road from Egypt and Mecca; its site is at the southern foot of the Shephelah, close to the opening from the central fosse into
the desert, and it would thus be the first watering-place for their beasts of
burden after passing the Wady Ghuzzeh and before entering the hill-country. Aslam was urgent that the ascent to
Hebron should be made that night; but the Egyptian commander, Felek-ed-Din, fearing lest the caravan should fail to keep
together in the darkness, decided to wait till morning. Meanwhile a native
Syrian scout had come to Richard at Galatia and told him that if he made haste
he might capture the caravan at the Round Cistern. Richard, conscious that
there was no real need to hurry—since he and his horsemen could easily overtake
the slow movements of a caravan—determined to verify the report before acting
on it. He accordingly sent out three more scouts, one a real Bedouin, the
others native Turcoples disguised in Bedouin attire,
to make a further reconnaissance in the evening. Meanwhile he and his troops
seem to have advanced to the head of the Wady el Hesy, which Aslam had crossed
shortly before them. Here the returning scouts met them with the news that not
only the caravan, but also the army from Egypt, was encamped at the Round
Cistern for the night. The king gave orders for all to mount and ride, and, as
they valued their honour, not to think of gain, but
devote all their energy to routing the Turkish soldiers. He took his usual post
in the van; the French formed the rearguard. By daybreak they were all close to
their destination, and were forming up for attack when another scout came to
warn them that their approach had been discovered and the caravan was on the
alert. Richard sent forward some archers, Turcoples,
and crossbowmen, to harass the enemies and impede their movements till he
could come up with his other troops. The caravan remained stationary; the
Moslem troops took up a sheltered position close to the hills and greeted their
assailants with a thick cloud of missiles “which fell on the ground like dew,”
but it was all in vain. “Those of our men who were reputed bravest,” confesses Bohadin, “were glad to save their lives by the fleetness of
their horses. It was long since Islam had had such a disgraceful defeat.”
Aslam, to the neglect of whose counsel the disaster was due, had before the
fight began withdrawn with his troops into the mountains. Thither the others
fled, chased by the Frank cavalry, while the infantry turned to secure the
caravan. Aslam, seeing the Christian forces thus divided, seized his
opportunity to send down by a side path a party of horsemen who attacked the
Christian foot; but the attack was beaten off, and the caravan surrendered. The
booty was immense; there were more than four thousand camels laden with
precious stores of the most varied kind, gold and silver, silks and purple
cloth, grain and flour, sugar and spices, tents, hides, arms of all sorts; the
horses and mules were “altogether beyond counting”; and besides all this, the
Egyptian contingent so eagerly awaited by Saladin had lost nearly two thousand
men and suffered a most ignominious defeat. “No tidings,” says Bohadin, “ever dealt a more grievous wound to the heart of
the, Sultan than those which were brought to him at the close of that day.”
Saladin at once prepared for the siege which
he now felt to be imminent. He ordered his captains to take up their appointed
positions round the walls and make all ready for their defence,
and he caused the brooks and pools round about the city to be polluted, the
wells filled up, and the cisterns destroyed, so as to leave the assailants no
means of obtaining water, for it would be impossible for them to dig new wells
in that rocky soil. When all these precautions were taken, however, he was
still very anxious; for he knew that among the Moslems, no less than among the
Christians, there was dissension as to the conduct of the war, and jealousy and
mutual distrust between the various nationalities of which his host was
composed; for although the Sultan’s subjects were all lumped together
indiscriminately by the Frank writers as “Turks” or “Saracens,” some of them
were in reality much less closely akin and much less alike in origin,
character, and habits, than were the men of England and France and Italy and
Germany. On the night of Wednesday July 1 he called his emirs to a solemn
council. By his desire Bohadin opened it with an
impassioned exhortation to all present to persevere in the war, and proposed
that they should all take an oath on the Sacred Stone of the Temple to hold
together till death. Saladin himself appealed to them as “the only lighting
force and sole stay of Islam,” on whom depended the safety of all Mussulmans
everywhere. They all pledged themselves to stand by him till death.
Next day, however, they held a meeting among
themselves, Thurs, and some of them there expressed their disapproval of the Sultan's
strategy in shutting up “the only fighting force and stay of Islam” at
Jerusalem; they believed it would result in the capture of the city and the
destruction of the army by a fate such as that of the garrison of Acre, and
thus bring the Mussulman dominion in Palestine to ruin, and that the wiser
course would be to risk a pitched battle, which if they were victorious would
shatter the enemy's power and enable the Moslems to recover all that they had
lost, while if they were defeated, they would indeed lose Jerusalem, but the
army of Islam would remain, and might hope to regain the city hereafter. These
criticisms were reported to Saladin, with a further warning that if he
persisted in his plan of defence, he must either
himself remain in the city or leave one of his family to take the command
there, as the Kurdish troops would not obey a Turkish emir nor the Turks a
Kurdish one. Personally he was willing to stay, but his friends would not
sanction a course which they felt might bring upon Islam a double disaster in
the loss of the city and the Sultan both at once. He and his devoted secretary
spent the whole night July 2 in deliberating and praying over the problems
suggested by this communication; on the Friday morning Bohadin July 3 advised his master to give up all attempts at finding a solution of them
and simply commit the direction of all his affairs to a higher Power. The
counsel was followed. That evening the officer in command of the Moslem
advanced guard sent word that “the whole army of the enemies” had—seemingly on
the preceding day—ridden out to the top of a hill, stationed itself there a
while, and then ridden back to its camp; he had sent out scouts to ascertain
what Sat., was going on. At daybreak next morning this announcement was
followed by another; the scouts had come in and reported that a great
discussion, lasting all night, had taken place among the Christian leaders, and
had ended at dawn in a decision to retreat.
The victors of Kuweilfeh seem to have reached Beit Nuba on June 30; they had
returned by easy stages by way of Ramlah, where they
found Count Henry with the troops which he had collected at Acre. At first the
camp was filled with rejoicing over the spoil, which Richard took care to
distribute fairly among all ranks of the host; but in a day or two the lesser
folk began to clamour for an immediate advance on
Jerusalem. The native umpires who a fortnight before had given their award
against the siege repeated the arguments which they had then used, laying
special stress on the impossibility of procuring water, now that all the
artificial stores of it for two miles round the city were known to have been
destroyed by the enemy, and at a season when every drop of moisture, except the
little fountain of Siloam, would be dried up by the heat of the Syrian
midsummer. There were also other difficulties. One which Richard had urged in
January—the numerical insufficiency of the host—does not seem to have been
appreciably lessened by the results of Count Henry’s recruiting expedition. The
worst difficulty of all was internal disunion. Hugh of Burgundy’s self-will and
his jealousy of Richard were shown more openly than ever now that his share of
the caravan spoils had made him independent of Richard’s bounty. He and his men
had long been in the habit, wherever the host went, of camping apart from their
fellow-Crusaders at night as if desirous to avoid their company; by day, when
they and the men of other nations had to associate together, there were
constant bickerings and altercations; and the duke
crowned all this mischief by “causing a song full of all vileness to be made
about the king, and this song was sung amid the host. Was the king
blameworthy,” asks the Norman poet chronicler, when he in return made a song
upon these people who were always thwarting and insulting him and truly no good
song could be sung about such outrageous folk.” According to one English
writer, Hugh even entered into a secret negotiation with Saladin, which the
vigilance of a scout enabled Richard to unmask, to the utter confusion of the
duke; but the details of the story are somewhat doubtful. Clearly, however,
there was no exaggeration in the report transmitted to Saladin from his
advanced guard as to dissensions in the Christian camp; and there is no reason
to doubt the correctness of Bohadin’s account—derived
likewise from the statements of a scout who was secretly present—of the final
council held on the night of Thursday-Friday, July 2-3. After much debate,
three hundred arbitrators were appointed from among the nobles and knights;
these three hundred delegated their powers to twelve others, and these twelve
chose three umpires, from whose decision there was to be no appeal. In the
morning the pilgrims were, for the second time when at a distance of little
more than four hours’ march from their goal, told that they must prepare for a
retreat. The disappointment was perhaps all the more keenly felt
because it followed closely not only upon the victory over the Egyptians, but
also upon two incidents which had heightened the religious fervour and thus encouraged the hopes of the Christian soldiers. Several relics of the
Holy Cross besides the famous one which had been lost at Hattin were preserved
in various places in Palestine, and had been hidden at the time of the Saracen
conquest to save them from falling into Infidel hands. A Syrian bishop who had
held the see of Lydda is said to have come with a great company of men and
women of his flock and presented one of these fragments to Richard shortly
after the host reached Beit Nuba. A little
later—seemingly just before Richard heard of the coming of the Egyptian
caravan—the abbot of Saint Elias, a monastery situated on the road from
Jerusalem to Bethlehem, came and told the king that he had a piece of the Cross
hidden in a place known only to himself, which Saladin, who knew the relic had
been secreted, had vainly tried to bribe him into revealing. Richard rode with
him to the place and brought the sacred treasure back, to the great joy of the
host. If we may trust an English writer who, though he did not take
part in the Crusade, had a special opportunity of obtaining information about
Richard’s personal share in it, a third fragment of the Holy Rood came into the
king’s hands under yet stranger circumstances, one of which may possibly have
had some influence on his conduct two months later. On the last night of the
army’s sojourn at Beit Nuba a monk brought him a
message from a certain hermit who dwelt on the “Mount of Saint Samuel”—that is, Nebi Samwil, the Arabic
name for what the Crusaders usually called the Montjoie—bidding him, in God’s
Name, come to him without delay. Richard arose, called up an escort of
horsemen, and rode to the place. The hermit was believed to have the spirit of
prophecy; he wore no clothes, and was covered only by his long unshorn hair and
beard. Richard, after gazing for a while in wonder at this strange-looking
personage, asked him what was his will. The hermit led his guest into an
oratory, removed a stone from the wall, and brought out a wooden cross “of a
cubit’s length” which he reverently handed to the king, telling him it was made
from the sacred Tree of Calvary. He added a prediction that the king would not
at this time succeed in winning the land, however hard he might strive for it;
and to demonstrate the reality of his own prophetic gift, he further foretold
his own death on that day week. Richard took him back to the camp to prove
whether his words would come true. Seven days afterwards the prophet died. Sixty years later, there was a
tradition in Palestine that on one occasion when the men of the Third Crusade,
on the point of marching upon the Holy City, were by the jealousies among their
leaders compelled to turn back, a knight in Richard’s service “cried out to
him, ‘Sire, sire, come here and I will show you Jerusalem.’ And when he heard
that, he cast his surcoat before his eyes all weeping, and said to our Lord :
Fair Lord God, I pray Thee that Thou suffer me not to behold Thy Holy City,
since I cannot deliver it from the hands of Thine enemies.” This incident, in
itself quite possible, is in Joinville’s report of the story placed in a
setting of which the details are certainly not historically accurate. If it really
occurred, its true place is most probably at the close of Richard’s nocturnal
visit to the Mount of S. Samuel, as the sunrise on July 4 lighted up the lower
slopes of the mountain-range of which that eminence was the crown, and revealed
the city on its coign of vantage at the south-eastern angle of 4 the plateau. A
few hours later the whole host was back at Ramlah.
The umpires at Beit Nuba had reasoned soundly from the premisses before them;
and those premisses were sound likewise, except in
one particular : the Franks did not—as we do from Bohadin—know
what was passing behind the scenes in the Saracen headquarters. They therefore
probably over-estimated the enemy’s powers of resistance. On the other hand,
there was a similar miscalculation on the Moslem side; Saladin’s anxiety and
alarm would scarcely have been so great had he realized how completely the
unity of the Christian host was broken. Even when fully assured that the Franks
had really withdrawn from the neighbourhood of
Jerusalem, he was still extremely uneasy, fearing they might now take up again
the project of an attempt on Cairo, and feeling by no means sanguine that they
might not, with the coast of Palestine in their possession and with the supply
of beasts of burden which they had recently acquired, bring it to a successful
issue. A new game of diplomacy now began. The first move in it was
made, on the morrow, if not on the very day, of the retirement from Beit Nuba, in the name of the king-elect of Jerusalem, Henry of
Champagne; but the Saracens at once recognized that the king-elect could be
nothing more than a cipher so long as he was uncrowned and his uncle was in the
land, and that the game was not worth playing with anyone except the
king-guardian. From him overtures for peace arrived on July 6, and negotiations
continued till the 19th. It is difficult to decide how far either the king or
the Sultan was in earnest. Richard made so many different proposals that they
cannot all have been seriously meant. He and Saladin alike seem to have been
really disposed to content themselves with a division of the land; each of them
hoping that the division would be merely temporary, and would serve as a
breathing-space enabling his own party to recover strength for a new effort. On
one point, however, both were equally determined not to give way. Saladin,
while agreeing that the Franks should keep the sea-coast, made it an essential
condition that Ascalon should be again dismantled.
This Richard persistently refused; so on July 19 the negotiations dropped, and
Saladin began to prepare again for war.
His rival was doing the like. By Richard’s
orders three hundred Knights of the Temple and Hospital had already gone from Casal Maen (whither he and the
host had retired on July 6) to Darum, dismantled that
fortress, and transferred its garrison to Ascalon to
reinforce the defences of “Syria’s Summit.” As soon
as the three hundred returned, the whole host proceeded to Joppa; here the sick
folk were left, and also some of the able-bodied for the greater security of
the place; the rest set out on July 21 or 22 for Acre, which they reached on
Sunday the 26th. The weary pilgrims of lower rank grew more dispirited at every
stage in this northward journey; Richard having given orders for the whole
fleet to accompany it, whence they inferred that he intended sailing for Europe
immediately. He had, however, another purpose. The Frank reconquest of the
coast of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem was still incomplete; the northernmost
seaport of the realm, Beyrout, was still in Moslem
hands. An attempt on Beyrout had been one of the
alternative schemes suggested by Richard before the final retirement from Beit Nuba. The place, though of less military importance than Tyre or Acre or Ascalon, was well
worth the winning; it had a good harbour, and its
loss would deprive the Moslems of their only remaining outlet on the sea
between Laodicea and the mouth of the Nile. As soon as Acre was reached,
Richard despatched seven galleys to make a
demonstration before Beyrout. On the morrow (Monday,
July 27) he took leave of the Knights of the Temple and Hospital—with whom he
had always acted in concert, and who probably undertook the control of the host
during his absence— and prepared to follow next day with the rest of the fleet.
But his plans were upset by an unexpected counterstroke on the part of
Saladin.
The
Sultan had been rejoined at Jerusalem on July
17 by his son Ed-Daher, who ruled at
Aleppo; and Safadin, recalled from Mesopotamia, was
close at hand with further reinforcements when on the 22nd, Saladin learned
that the Christian host had left Joppa and was on its way to Beyrout. He at once went to Beit Nuba to reconnoitre, leaving orders for all his troops to
follow him thither. Safadin joined him there next
day. By the 25th their united forces were on the old camping-ground of the
Franks between Lydda and Ramlah. On the 26th—the day
of Richard’s arrival at Acre—Saladin reconnoitred Joppa; before nightfall his men were around its walls, and on Monday 27th they
assaulted the town. After four days of furious fighting Saladin’s engines made,
on Friday the 31st, a breach through which his men swarmed into the town; it
was given over to pillage and slaughter, and the garrison in the citadel
promised to surrender, on terms arranged between them and the Sultan, if they
were not relieved before three o’clock on the morrow. They were in hourly
expectation of Richard’s return; for they had, as soon as the Moslem army came
in sight, despatched by sea an urgent message to
recall him from Acre. The message was delivered to Richard as he sat
in his tent on the evening of Tuesday July 28. He at once summoned the host to
go back with him to Joppa; but the French “declared they would not stir a foot
with him.” A number of Templars, Hospitaliers, and
other “good knights,” however, set off by land to the rescue, while Richard
with another party, comprising the rest of his own men and some Genoese and
Pisans, went on board the galleys. The land party on reaching Caesarea learned
that the road between that place and Arsuf was blocked by “ the son of the
Assassin ”; not daring to risk an encounter with forces of whose numbers they
knew nothing and of whose military repute all Syria stood in awe, they made no
attempt to proceed further. The ships were caught by a contrary wind off Haifa,
detained by it for three days, and so dispersed by its violence that only three
of them at last came in sight of Joppa, late in the evening of Friday the 31st,
and had to wait at a safe distance for the rest to overtake them, and also for
the light of day. One of the three carried Richard, chafing sorely
at all these hindrances : “God, have mercy! Why dost Thou keep me here, when I
am going in Thy service?” In the afternoon of that same Friday Saladin had
received from Acre a letter telling him that Richard had given up his intended
expedition against Beyrout and was hastening to the
relief of Joppa. The Sultan and his confidant Bohadin at once decided that the agreement with the garrison must be flung to the
winds, and an effort made to get the garrison out of the citadel before Richard
should arrive. Saladin spent some time in haranguing his troops and exhorting
them to storm it that evening; but they were worn out with the day’s fight, and
so sullenly unresponsive to his appeal that he dared not give it the form of a
command; and at last he and his staff withdrew for the night to their usual
quarters in the rear. At day-break they heard a trumpet-call, and learned that
the king’s ships were in sight. Saladin despatched Bohadin with orders to get into the citadel and get the
Franks out of it. With a body of troops Bohadin entered the town, went to the castle-gate, and bade the garrison come out. They
answered that they would do so, and began to make their preparations. The
morning wore on to noon, and still the relief party showed no sign of trying to
disembark. Richard in fact, while the garrison were waiting for him to land,
was waiting to ascertain what had become of them, for the shore was lined and
the town, to all appearance, filled with Mussulman troops, so that the whole
place, as seen from the sea, looked as if it were in the enemy’s hands. On the
other hand, it seems that only a small part of the fleet was as yet visible
from the castle-tower. The garrison therefore, growing hopeless of rescue,
yielded to Bohadin’s urgency and began to march out.
Forty-nine men, besides some women and some horses, thus came forth. As each
man passed through the gate he paid down the ransom appointed in the
capitulation, although the hour fixed for its fulfilment had not yet come; and
a Frankish version of the story adds that in some cases at least, as soon as
the money was paid, the payer’s head was struck off by the Turkish guards. Suddenly the procession stopped. The ships were spreading out in line and
becoming more distinguishable under the noon-tide sun; the Moslems could see
that there were at least thirty-five; the anxious watchers on the castle-tower
could probably see that there were more than fifty. The remaining men in the
citadel hastily put on their armour, made a sally,
and drove Bohadin and his followers out of the town.
They themselves, however, were quickly driven back, and the fighting became
fiercer and more confused than ever. Once more the garrison, in despair, sent
the Patriarch of Jerusalem (who chanced to be in Joppa when the siege began)
and a chaplain to renew their offer of submission to Saladin on the terms
originally proposed. Then another priest, after commending himself
to the Messiah as Bohadin says, leaped from the top
of the tower into the harbour. Falling in shallow
water, with soft sand beneath it, he was unharmed, and made his way to the
nearest galley, whence he was transported to that of the king. “Gentle king,”
said he, “the people who await you here are lost, unless God and you have compassion
on them.” “How!” cried Richard, “are any of them still living? Where are they?”
“Before the tower, awaiting their death.” Richard hesitated no longer. “God
sent us here to suffer death, if need be; shame to him who lags behind now!”
The royal galley, “painted all red, with a red canopy on the deck, and a red
flag,” shot forward; the king, without greaves or mail-shoes, sprang out, up to
his waist in the water, came first ashore, and dashed into the midst of the
Turks, cutting them down right and left. His shipmates followed close behind
him; the other vessels quickly came up, and each disembarked its freight of
men; and in little more than an hour the shore of the harbour was cleared of Turks. Bohadin, under whose eyes all
this had taken place, went round to Saladin’s tent in the rear and whispered
his tidings into the ear of the Sultan, who was writing (or dictating) a letter
for the Patriarch and the chaplain to take back to their friends in the
citadel. The envoys were present; Saladin detained them till some flying
Moslems passed the door of the tent. Then he placed the envoys under arrest,
and ordered his whole army to retreat to Yazour.
Meanwhile Richard, as soon as the harbour was cleared, had set his men to barricade it on the
land side with planks, barrels, pieces of old ships and boats, and other wood
hastily piled up to form a rampart behind which they could safely defy the
Saracens. He himself made his way “by a stair that led to the house of the
Templars” into the town, where he found a crowd of Saracens so busy pillaging
that they made no attempt to interfere when he caused his banners to be reared
on the walls as a signal to the Christians in the tower. These latter at once
sallied forth to meet him, and the Turks, thus caught at unawares between two
fires, were slaughtered wholesale. Then the victors turned towards the
retreating army of Saladin. The crossbowmen tried to overtake it with a volley
of arrows; the king galloped after it on a horse which he had found in Joppa;
but as this and two other horses, also found in the town, were the only ones he
possessed, he soon gave up the pursuit, and pitched his tents on the site
lately occupied by Saladin, in the open ground where the Frank host
had camped in the previous October, between Joppa and S. Habakkuk’s. No
sooner was Richard in his tent than several of Saladin’s emirs and favourite Mameluks went to visit
him; seemingly not as accredited envoys from the Sultan, but to ascertain
informally what was now the king’s attitude towards the question of peace. He
received them willingly, and sent a special invitation to the chamberlain Abu Bekr, who had previously acted as a medium of communication
between him and Safadin, to join the assembly. Abu Bekr found him talking over the recent fight in a tone half
serious, half bantering. “That Sultan of yours is truly admirable! But why did
he run away at my very landing? I did not come prepared to fight; I am still in
my boating-sandals! Why, in God’s Name, did he retreat, when I thought he could
not take Joppa in two months, and he took it in a couple of days!” Then he
turned to Abu Bekr and spoke seriously : “Greet the
Sultan from me, and beg him to let us have peace. My country needs me, and the
state of things in this land is bad alike for you and for us.” Saladin was
still close at hand, and twice in that night proposals and counter-proposals of
terms passed between the two sovereigns. Ascalon was
still the stumbling-block; neither of them would renounce his claim to it. To a
daring suggestion of Richard’s, that Saladin should enfeoff him after the
manner of the Franks with the counties of Ascalon and
Joppa, to hold by military service including, if required, the personal service
of the king himself—“of which,” he added, “you know the value”—Saladin returned
an answer in which Ascalon was not named at all. The
Sultan then followed his army to Yazour, and thence,
early next morning, went to Ramlah. Thither a
messenger from Richard followed him, and pressed for a definite cession of Ascalon. Saladin’s reply was given instantly and finally :
“It is impossible.”
That Sunday and the two following days were
spent by Richard and his men in repairing the walls of Joppa as well as they
could by piling up the stones without mortar or cement. On one of these three
days they were joined by Count Henry, who came from Caesarea in a galley; the
rest of the troops being still detained there by the ambushes of the Turks on
land and the lack of ships to convey them by sea. It was seemingly
to ascertain what chance there was of intercepting these troops, of whose
departure from Acre he had only just been made aware, that Saladin on the
Monday (August 4) moved northward as far as the banks of the Aoudjeh (the River of Arsuf). There, however, he further
learned that they were safe in Caesarea, and also that a not less important and
probably easier prey lay within his reach—King Richard and his little band, in
their unprotected tents in the fields outside Joppa. At nightfall he turned
back, hoping to surround Richard’s camp in the darkness and surprise it at
break of day. The first body of Moslem troops which approached the camp,
however, was discovered by a watchful Crusader who at once aroused the king.
Richard slipped his mail-coat over his night-gear, sprang bare-legged on
horseback, and with the few knights in his company—most of them dressed and
armed in a like hasty fashion—began to array his men. The Saracens,
finding they could not take him by surprise, sent a party to force an entrance
through the still uncompleted walls into the town, in order to deprive him of a
refuge there.
The scared townsfolk sent word to the king
that they were all lost, for a countless host of heathen were taking
possession of the city. Richard sternly silenced the messenger, swore to cut
off his head if he let anyone else hear the message, and went on with his
preparations for defence. Behind a low barricade
hastily made up of pieces of wood from the tents the tiny army was arrayed with
the utmost skill so as to leave in its ranks no opening for attack. Then the
king addressed his men, bidding them have no fear of the foe; he himself, he
added, would go and see what was taking place in the town. His knights numbered
some three or four score, but the horses only six. On these five of the knights
and a “hardy and valiant” German man-at-arms named Henry, bearing the king’s
banner, mounted, and with a few crossbowmen followed the king as
with lance and sword he forced his way into Joppa. He probably found its
Turkish invaders engaged, as he had found them before, in pillaging, and less numerous
than the messenger had represented, for he very soon drove them all out. After
ordering a detachment of the garrison to come down from the tower and guard the
town against further attack, he rode down to the shore, brought back thence
some townsfolk who had fled to the ships for refuge, and all the sailors except
just enough to take care of the ships, and with these reinforcements, in
addition to his gallant six, rejoined his little army in the field.
Saladin meanwhile had arrayed his host in
seven divisions. While the first of these was advancing to the
attack, the king issued his final orders. “Only keep your ranks unbroken—let
not the foes make their way in. If we stand thus firm against their first
onset, we may make light of the next, and by God's help we shall defeat them.
But if I see one of you, through fear, giving way or yielding ground or trying
to flee, I swear by Almighty God I will straightway cut off his head!”. So when
the first division of the Turks charged them the Christian ranks stood
immoveable and impenetrable. The attacking force fell back, baffled and amazed,
stood for a while within two spears’ length of them without any interchange of
hostilities except verbal ones, and then retired, grumbling, to its original
position. Richard burst out laughing : “Did not I tell you how it
would be? Now they have done their utmost; we have only to stand firm against
every fresh attempt, till by God’s help victory shall be ours.” As he ceased
speaking, another body of Turks came forth; they, too, fell back from the
living wall, now firmer than ever, and retired to their former station. This
process was repeated five or six times, while the day wore on “from prime
almost to nones.” The Arab historians relate that in one of the intervals between these
futile charges Richard rode alone, lance in hand, along the whole front of the
Moslem army, challenging it to fight, and not a man came forth to meet him;
according to one account, he ended by stopping his horse midway between the two
hosts, asking the Moslems for some food, and calmly dismounting to eat what
they gave him. It was not only the dread of him that held the enemies in check;
Saladin’s troops were thoroughly discontented with their ruler’s conduct of
this expedition to Joppa and with its failure to bring them either the success
or the booty which they had expected. In vain the Sultan rode up and down among
them, promising them splendid rewards for one more charge; his son Ed-Daher
sprang forward alone, only to be hastily called back by his father, for not
another man broke the stillness of the silent, motionless ranks. At last, it
seems, they yielded a sullen obedience to Saladin’s impassioned exhortations,
and made another attempt to advance. But this time a volley of arrows, with
which the crossbowmen had hitherto speeded their retirement, greeted them on
their approach, and under cover of this the king and his men charged.
“Brandishing his lance, and laying about him as if he had done nothing yet that
day,” Richard with his few mounted followers burst right through the Turkish
host and came out facing the rearguard. Looking round, he saw that the earl of
Leicester was unhorsed and in danger of capture; he at once rescued him and
helped him to remount. A crowd of Turks rushed at a banner which from its
device—a lion— they probably took for the king’s, but which seems to have been
really that of Ralf of Mauleon. Ralf was surrounded,
and was actually being led away by his captors when he, too, was rescued by his
sovereign. At another moment a large body of Turks closed in upon Richard, all
alone; but he laid about him with his sword, smiting off heads and limbs on
every side, till he had slain or disabled so many of his assailants that the
rest took to flight “as from the face of a furious lion.” His first sudden
irruption had thrown into confusion the whole array of Saladin’s host; and when
the guard which he had left in Joppa, seeing how matters were going, came out
to help their comrades, the Moslem defeat became a rout. At the close of the
long day’s fighting the victor returned “with arrows sticking out all over him
like the bristles of a hedgehog, and with his horse in the same plight.”
Saladin retired to Yazour, and on the following day
to Natroun.
The victory at Joppa was Richard’s crowning
exploit in Holy Land; and he himself very soon realized that it was to be his
last. Both in him and his men the tremendous physical and mental strain of
those five days was followed by a sudden breakdown which was aggravated by the
unhealthiness of their surroundings. The Turks when they evacuated Joppa had
not only left in its streets the bodies of those who had been slain in the
siege, but also slaughtered all the pigs in the town and interspersed the carcases with the human corpses, as an insult to the
Christians. No sanitary measures had been possible during the stress of the
succeeding days; the consequence of this state of things had therefore spread
beyond the walls on every side, and the king and his men, too much exhausted to
move far enough to escape from it, lay helpless and sick almost unto death.
Nevertheless, Richard’s next message to the Sultan was practically a defiance.
The envoy whom he had despatched on August 2 to
Saladin at Ramlah had proceeded thence on a further
mission to Safadin, who was then lying sick at
Gibeon, near Neby Samwil.
This envoy returned to Joppa on the 7th or 8th with a message from Safadin proposing a colloquy. He was accompanied by the
chamberlain Abu Bekr. Richard gave an audience to Abu Bekr outside the town and said to him : “How far am I
to put myself in the Sultan’s hand before he will deign to receive me? Truly, I
was very desirous of returning home; but now I have decided to stay through the
winter, and want no further conferences with you.” For nearly three weeks after
this, Saladin made no move of any kind; he was waiting for reinforcements. On
the 20th the long-desired contingent from Egypt at last arrived; and two days
later the forces of the lands beyond the Euphrates were brought up by the
Sultan’s once rebel great-nephew, El Mansour. Messengers still passed between
the two camps; Richard, exhausted by fever, asked Saladin for fruit and snow,
which the Sultan readily sent him; the friendly intercourse enabling each party
to learn how patters went with the other. Meanwhile Richard’s sickness was
increasing, and so were his anxieties. In vain he sent Count Henry back to
Caesarea to insist that the laggards there should come and help to hold the
land; they would not stir. Then he called Henry, the Templars, and the Hospitaliers around his bed, and begged that some of them
would take charge of Ascalon and others of Joppa, and
thus set him free to seek pure air and medical treatment at Acre, as the only
chance of restoring his health. “But they all declared they would not
undertake the custody of the fortresses without him; and they went out [of his
tent] without another word.” A
proclamation published throughout the coast-towns, calling upon all fit men to
come and serve under the king at his expense, brought a crowd of foot-soldiers,
but so few horsemen that he was compelled to reject them all, both horse and
foot, as useless for his purpose. As the conviction grew upon him that he must
either quit the country or die in it, he felt also that in either case, if he
left it in its present unsettled condition, the whole labour of the Crusade would be lost, and thus that a truce on almost any terms had
become a necessity for the realm’s sake as well as for his own. He therefore
asked that Abu Bekr might be sent to him once more.
Through this man the king intimated his willingness, if Saladin still
absolutely insisted on the restitution of Ascalon to
the Moslems, to accept a money indemnity for the expense which he had incurred
in fortifying the place, and to abide by the other conditions which he had
formerly agreed upon with Safadin.
On the morrow—Friday, August 28—Bedr-ed-din Dolderim, the emir in
command of the Moslem advanced guard, sent to ask the Sultan whether he might
accede to a request which had been made to him by five Frank officers, one of
them an intimate counsellor of Richard’s—probably the bishop of Salisbury,
Hubert Walter—for a parley. With Saladin’s consent the parley took place; and
the same night Bedr-ed-din in person reported to his
sovereign that, according to these men, Richard now consented to give up Ascalon unconditionally. Saladin refused to proceed further
without some security that on this point the king would not go back from his
word. Next day Bedr-ed-din announced that he had
received, by a sure hand, Richard’s pledge on the subject. Saladin then called
his council together and with them drew up the details of the partition of the
land. The king was to have Joppa and its dependent territory, except Ramlah, Lydda, Ibelin, Yebna, and Mirabel; also Acre, Haifa, Arsuf, and Caesarea,
with all their dependencies except Nazareth and Safforia.
These terms were drawn up in writing and carried back to Richard by an envoy
who came from him on the afternoon of Saturday, August 29, and returned to Joppa
with a Moslem colleague next day. Richard, when the terms were read to him,
denied that he had ever withdrawn his claim to compensation; but as “the
persons who had gone to Dolderim” all declared that
the thing was so, he answered : “If I did say it, I will not go back from my
word. Tell the Sultan I agree to these conditions; only I appeal to his
generosity, and acknowledge that if he grants me anything further, it will be
of his own bounty.” He then sent the envoys on to Safadin,
to beg that he would obtain from Saladin the cession of Ramlah.
Saladin was quite as anxious for a truce as
Richard could be. On the night of August 27 he had despatched several emirs on a reconnoitring expedition to
ascertain the chances of success in another attempt on Joppa, or, failing this,
a night attack on Ascalon. They came back to him at Ramlah with tidings that there were at Joppa scarcely three
hundred mounted troops, most of whom had only mules for chargers. Yet against
this small and ill-mounted force Saladin dared not pit his great army, because,
says Bohadin, he knew that his men were weakened and
wearied and longing for their homes, and he feared that they would refuse, as
they had refused once already at Joppa, to attack the foe, or would desert him
altogether. He therefore drew up his final terms on Monday, August 31. The
truce was to last for three years, beginning on Wednesday, September 22. Ramlah or Lydda was to be added to the king’s share of the
land, or even both places, unless he would be content with half of each; and Ascalon was to be dismantled again. All the Moslem
territories were to be included in the truce, and also the princes of Antioch
and Tripoli. When on September 1 the schedule was brought to Richard, he said
he was too ill to read it, but he added : “I have already confirmed the
agreement by giving my hand on it.” Count Henry and the other leaders were then
informed of its details, and accepted them all, including the proposed
partition of Lydda and Ramlah. Next day (Wednesday,
September 2) they and Saladin’s envoys all met in Richard’s tent. Richard again
confirmed the truce by giving his hand to the Moslems; they asked him for his
oath, but he explained that it was not customary in the West for a king to
swear on such occasions, and they accepted the explanation. The other Frank
leaders then took the usual oath, and several of them went back with the
Moslems to Saladin’s camp to witness his ratification of the treaty.
Immediately afterwards Richard despatched to Saladin a special message setting forth his
own purpose in making the truce. That purpose, he said, was first to revisit
his homelands and see how they did, and next, to collect there men and money
wherewith he hoped to return and to wrest from the Sultan the whole Land of
Jerusalem. Saladin answered in the spirit of true chivalry : if he were to lose the Land, he would rather it were won by
Richard than by any prince whom he had ever known.
The dismantling of Ascalon was a precaution on which Richard had insisted when he found himself compelled
to cede the place; if the Moslems must have it, they should at any rate be
unable to make any military use of it till they had had the expense and trouble
of rebuilding it again. The work of demolition was entrusted to the joint
superintendence of a party of Moslems and one of Franks, who all set out for Ascalon on September 5, and who were also to bring back its
Frankish garrison. As under the terms of the truce Christian pilgrims were to have free access to the Holy Sepulchre, the rest of the Franks at Joppa and many from
Acre and elsewhere now began crowding to Jerusalem to fulfil their vow of
pilgrimage. An English writer tells us that some of them urged the king to do
likewise; “but his lofty spirit would not suffer him to accept from the grace
of a heathen ruler a privilege which he had been unable to obtain as a gift of
God.” On the night of Tuesday, September 9, he set out on his northward
journey. Haifa, in its quiet, sheltered corner between the foot of Carmel and
the mouth of the Kishon, and with its outlook northward across the sea to Acre
at the opposite end of the bay, offered probably a better resting-place for an
invalid than Acre itself, to which it was near enough for medical aid to be
easily available. At Haifa the king stayed a while to recover his strength. Then he went on to Acre and completed his preparations for departure. He
ransomed William des Preaux, who had been made a
voluntary prisoner in his stead in September 1191, by exchanging for him ten
valuable Saracen captives. He called, by public proclamation, all
his creditors to come and claim whatever he owed them, that they might all be
paid in full, “and even overpaid, lest there should be any complaints or
disputes after he was gone about anything that they had lost through him.” He
had some months before made provision for the future of Cyprus, and also for
that of his earliest friend among the Franks in Holy Land, Guy of Lusignan, who
had so greatly helped him to conquer that island. He had conquered it not for
his own benefit, but for the benefit of the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem, to
which its preservation in friendly hands was a matter of great importance. He
at first agreed to make it over to the Order of the Temple for twenty-five
thousand marks; but this agreement came to nothing; and when Henry
of Champagne was chosen King of Jerusalem in April 1192, Richard made
substantial compensation to the displaced King Guy by giving him the island
realm of Cyprus. The grant was perhaps put into legal form during Richard’s
last days at Acre. The two queens sailed on Michaelmas day, the king on October 9.
The causes of the comparative failure of the
third Crusade have been much discussed; yet after following in detail the story
of that expedition one is led to marvel not at its so-called failure, but at
the extent of its success. The truce restored to the Christians, for the period
of its duration, the whole coast of Palestine from Haifa to Joppa, left the
southern remainder deprived of its chief stronghold, Ascalon,
and secured to the pilgrims the right of free and safe access to the holy
places of Jerusalem. If at its expiration Richard had been able to return—as he
hoped and intended—to take up again his task in Holy Land, he would have done
so with far other prospects of success than those with which he and his
followers had set out from Acre in 1190. Saladin himself regarded the position
of the Moslem power in Holy Land with grave misgiving. His own health was
failing, and he confessed to Bohadin his fears that
in case of his death the Franks would come forth from the strongholds which the
truce had placed in their hands, and once more become masters of the country.
It was to Richard that the measure of success gained by the Crusade was mainly
due; and this fact was fully recognized by the Moslems. A writer of the next
generation reports that “the fear of him was so constantly in the hearts and
on the lips of the Saracens that when their children cried they said to them,
“Be quiet! England is coming !” and when their horses started with affright,
they mocked at them saying,“ What is the matter? Is England in front of
us?” “England,” in the sense in which
they used the word—as representing England’s king —was destined never to
confront them again. But seven centuries later the attainment of the goal was
to be granted to “England” in another form, that of an army which, having set
out from what Richard had once proposed to secure as the fittest starting-point
for the purpose—Egypt— finally closed round the Holy City by ways in every one
of which it was almost literally treading in the footsteps of the Lion-Heart.
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