God's War: A New History of the Crusades (66 page)

11. Europe and the Near East at the Time of the Third Crusade

13

To the Siege of Acre

While preaching and recruitment followed similar patterns across Christendom, the nature and timing of military and naval responses were determined by local circumstances. In 1188, William II of Sicily, unlike his northern fellow monarchs, was able to despatch a fleet to the east comprising about fifty ships and 200 knights under the resourceful admiral Margarit of Brindisi, soon nicknamed ‘Neptune’ or ‘king of the seas’.
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Reinforced from Sicily in 1189, to Saladin’s irritation this squadron protected Tripoli and Antioch while maintaining a piratic patrol along the northern Syrian shore. However, the death of King William in November 1189 ended Sicilian aid with the recall of the admiral, whose next involvement with the holy war found him trying to defend Messina from Richard I’s crusaders in October 1190.

The other Italian maritime powers of Pisa, Genoa and Venice held commercial fleets in the Levant on permanent rotation. In March 1188, those in Alexandria were reputedly forced by the Egyptian authorities to take on board Frankish captives and refugees from the fall of Outremer before being allowed to leave port.
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A Pisan fleet under Archbishop Ubaldo, a papal legate, embarked from the west at the end of 1188 and, after wintering in Sicily, provided support for Christian land operations in 1189. By 1190, a Genoese fleet was also assisting at the siege of Acre; in 1191 another was contracted to carry Philip II of France and his military entourage east. The retention of Tyre in 1187 proved crucial in providing such fleets with a base, although it is striking that the Venetians, who had held a third of Tyre since its capture in 1124, played an almost invisible role in the attempt to restore Outremer in 1188–92, perhaps because they initially feared their rights in Tyre had been overborne by the city’s saviour and protector in 1187–8, Conrad of Montferrat.

By contrast, recruits from the rest of western Christendom had to plan their transport from scratch, even where equipment and supplies were readily available, as with shipping around the North Sea. As a consequence, the Third Crusade constituted a series of distinct but associated expeditions that reached the Holy Land in irregular and uneven waves. Apart from the Sicilians and Pisans, some westerners, such as Geoffrey of Lusignan, King Guy’s brother, landed in Palestine and Syria in 1188 or early 1189. Substantial fleets from northern Europe only began to arrive in Palestine in the summer of 1189, followed over the next two years by a more or less constant stream of reinforcements, all, except for the vestigial German force in 1190, by sea. The largest armies were those organized by the monarchs of the west, Frederick Barbarossa, who set out by land in 1189, and Richard I and Philip II, who left together in 1190 using the sea route. The target was Acre. In July 1187, the city had capitulated to Saladin in two days; from August 1189 it took the Christians two years of hard pounding to regain it.
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THE SIEGE OF ACRE: CHRISTIAN REVIVAL 1188–90

By the winter of 1187–8, Frankish Outremer lay shattered at Saladin’s feet, the few remaining fortresses of the interior without hope of relief and the surviving ports vulnerable to assault, siege and naval blockade. Most were mopped up in the new campaign of 1188. Of the major Frankish cities, only Tripoli, Tyre and Antioch survived in Christian hands. Two of the last castles to hold out, Belvoir and Montréal, surrendered in January and May 1189, leaving Tortosa, Margat and Crac des Chevaliers in the county of Tripoli and, temporarily, Beaufort in northern Galilee outside Saladin’s grasp. Although Saladin commissioned works on the
jihad
, such as that by his future biographer Baha’ al-Din Ibn Shaddad in May 1188, and constantly reminded his coalition of followers of the transcendent significance of his conquests, his approach was pragmatic.
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At Antioch in September 1188 he agreed a truce with Bohemund III. On a military and political level he treated the remaining Frankish resisters as he would any other opponent. Confident in his
overwhelming supremacy, Saladin was prepared to negotiate their surrender. If diplomacy failed, crushing force was at hand.

However, this strength was not absolute. Crucially, after failing to capture Tyre in July 1187 because of the unexpected arrival there of Conrad of Montferrat from Byzantium, Saladin was unable to press home the siege he began in November 1187. Accompanied only by a single ship’s company of knights, a few score at most, Conrad brought leadership, determination, energy and optimism to the defence of Tyre. Saladin’s move northwards at the start of 1188 left a vital Palestinian port in Christian hands, a haven for Frankish refugees and a base for the naval squadrons that were beginning to arrive from the west. Elsewhere, conquest and occupation were patchy. Each castle, town or city that chose to resist, even in the face of apparently certain defeat, presented a separate problem. The capture of one castle did not secure a region. While whole Frankish populations seemed to have been removed from cities such as Jerusalem and Acre, the fate of the rural Frankish population may have been less clear-cut. Some, like the Frankish woman encountered by the German pilgrim Thietmar at Montréal in 1217, may have stayed on as servile tenants or slaves.
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Where Frankish farmers had mixed with the local Syrian Christian peasantry, it is not inconceivable that some continued to work the land unmolested. Frankish administrative units may have survived the conquest intact. Certain settlements quickly resumed their previous legal identity after the Christian reconquest, as at Casal Imbert near Acre, restored in 1191. Whether or not pockets of Frankish settlers survived under the Muslim interregnum of 1187–91, the nature of the conquest did not require annihilation or complete deportation. Palestine was a long-settled land of many different communities, some ancient, some recent. The new Kurdish imperialists hardly altered that. Saladin’s conquest, despite the startling triumphs of 1187, belied the apocalyptic simplicity encouraged by his own and his enemies’ propagandists.

This was vividly illustrated by the fate of Beaufort.
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For four months from April 1189 Saladin, camped outside the castle, was persuaded not to attack by a series of negotiating ploys from its quick-witted, Arabic-speaking lord, Reynald of Sidon. Despite careful surveillance, Reynald managed to use the time to reinforce the castle’s defences. His repeated promises of surrender made to Saladin in Arabic were contradicted by his orders in French to his troops inside the castle to
resist. The Franks’ move towards Acre in August 1189 caused Saladin to lift the siege, retaining Reynald as a captive. In April 1190, a new round of negotiations ended in the simultaneous surrender of the castle and release of Reynald. This pattern of threat and negotiation, coupled with Saladin’s habitual caution in committing his troops to action, marked the campaigns in 1187–9, during which he was happy to bargain surrenders of castles for safe-conducts and the release of prisoners. One unsympathetic observer, the Iraqi historian Ibn al-Athir, blamed this tactic for allowing the Franks to regroup.
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This reliance on negotiation not just brute force carried forward into Saladin’s handling of the Frankish reconquest from August 1189. Implicitly, the policy recognized that, however strategically victorious, only his or his generals’ local physical presence with their troops denied Franks space to manoeuvre. At least from the summer of 1188, small Frankish armed bands were able to travel between the northern enclaves of Antioch and Tripoli and Tyre despite Saladin’s continued operations further inland. Provided some of their outposts remained, Christian recovery was possible.

In Saladin’s essentially political rather than ideological or fanatical approach to his conquests lay both his success and his failure. The iconic, theatrical killing of Reynald of Châtillon after Hattin proved an exception to his usual dealings with important Frankish enemies and captives. While Christian resistance continued, Saladin pursued the traditional pre-1187 policy of accommodating Frankish nobles as prisoners and using their release for tangible, costless rewards. Thus Montréal was exchanged in May 1189 for Humphrey of Toron and Beaufort in 1190 for Reynald of Sidon. During his second attack on Tyre, in the last weeks of 1187, Saladin tried unsuccessfully to use old William of Montferrat as a bargaining chip to persuade his son Conrad to surrender the city. Less obvious were his reasons for releasing most of the surviving defeated Jerusalem leadership in the early summer of 1188, including King Guy, his brother, the Constable Aimery, and the Master of the Templars, Gerard of Ridefort. If he had hoped to undermine Conrad of Montferrat at Tyre or sow dissension in the thin Frankish ranks, he was not immediately rewarded. Gerard of Ridefort promptly led the successful defence of the Templars’ citadel at Tortosa in July 1188. Guy immediately repudiated the oath he had sworn to gain his freedom, by
which he had promised to abandon the struggle in Outremer. Initially, he did not attempt to challenge Conrad of Montferrat’s control of Tyre, preferring to reassemble his family and supporters at Antioch and Tripoli. One direct and possibly intended consequence of the stubbornness of the castle garrisons of the interior was that Saladin was distracted and his forces stretched. The Iraqi intellectual, diplomat and lawyer Baha’ al-Din Ibn Shaddad, who met Saladin and entered his service in the spring of 1188, has left a telling account of the sultan’s necessary restlessness simply to hold his newly created empire together let alone extinguish the embers of Frankish opposition.
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While he was attempting to reduce Beaufort in August 1189, Saladin received the startling news that King Guy was marching south, apparently intent of besieging Acre. The richest port on the Palestinian coast, after its surrender a few days after Hattin Saladin turned Acre into one of his main garrison towns and arms depots. The sultan’s eagerness to secure Beaufort delayed his response, allowing Guy to negotiate the awkward coastal march to begin what proved to be the start of the Christian counter-attack. It is often said that King Guy’s attack on Acre demonstrated, in Runciman’s phrase, ‘desperate foolhardiness’.
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Outnumbered, isolated and exposed, Guy’s force, perhaps only a few thousand strong in all, was pitted against a well-protected walled city defended by a substantial garrison probably larger than the initial besieging army. At Guy’s rear lay a hostile Christian rival, Conrad of Montferrat, controlling the only serviceable friendly port, and a significant, battle-hardened Ayyubid army under Saladin himself only a couple of days’ march away. Yet Guy’s attack on Acre may not have been so rash, surprising or unexpected. Both Arabic and western sources record the building-up of Frankish forces in and around Tyre and in the county of Tripoli in 1189. Skirmishing and raiding from Tyre increased in intensity. The gathering pace of reinforcements from the west, as well as the release of the Jerusalem leaders, demanded some form of action, if only to provide occupation for the growing crowds of arms-bearers congregating in Tyre and Tripoli. Saladin’s forces had been reduced to save money and ease the political tensions involved in maintaining a large coalition army in the field for long periods without plentiful new supplies of booty. Successful conquest left the sultan’s victorious army unable to plunder newly won territories now controlled by their own leaders. With their strength increasing, a Frankish advance was
inevitable. Early in July 1189, an attempted foray towards Sidon was repulsed after some sharp exchanges.

By this time, the military options of the Frankish leadership had become mired in political conflict. In the early spring of 1189, Guy led his small army south from Tripoli to Tyre to reclaim the last remnant of the kingdom he had lost two years before. Conrad of Montferrat refused to countenance Guy’s restoration and forbade his entry to Tyre. Conrad’s grounds, depending on the account followed, rested on a sort of right of conquest argument. He wrote to Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury of his achievements: ‘for the salvation of the Christian people… I have preserved and am preserving Tyre’, a fact ‘grievous and insupportable’ to Guy. Arabic sources have Conrad claiming regency in Tyre on behalf of the monarchs of the west, who would eventually settle all claims to kingship, an echo of the succession schemes floated in Jerusalem in 1184–5.
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Conrad could have learnt of these from the refugees who fled to Tyre after Hattin, including Raymond III of Tripoli, a central figure in the succession crisis of 1183–6 and the leading opponent of Guy. Although he died soon after, Raymond was still alive in Tyre in August 1187, weeks after Conrad’s arrival.

A king denied his kingdom, Guy decided to dig in outside Tyre, presumably in the hope of winning political adherents from the western crusaders, who were beginning to arrive in large numbers. However, after four months, he had made no progress against either Conrad or Saladin. His options were narrowing. Saladin’s army was besieging Beaufort, uncomfortably close to any assault on Sidon, as the raid of July 1189 demonstrated. To survive, let alone regain authority, Guy needed to take action. His lack of alternatives provided him with an opportunity when western reinforcements came on the spring passage from the west, notably the Pisans. Arriving in April under the papal legate Archbishop Ubaldo, they soon fell out with Conrad over competing rights in Tyre. With other western recruits and Outremer Franks alienated by Conrad, they joined Guy outside Tyre. Conrad may have underestimated the effect of the post-Hattin propaganda in the west. Instead of a rank failure, Guy was portrayed as one of the heroic defenders of the cross, a companion of the martyred Reynald of Châtillon. He was also the anointed king of Jerusalem and still married, happily it appeared, to the accepted heiress Sybil. The Templars, whose reputation remained high in the west, continued to give him their support, even though the Hospitallers sided with Conrad. By August 1189, with Saladin still distracted at Beaufort, Guy had amassed the core of a useful fighting force of a few hundred knights, some thousands of infantry and the Pisan fleet.