God's War: A New History of the Crusades (67 page)

12. Syria at the Time of the Third Crusade

The timing of his advance south, an extremely risky manoeuvre if Saladin had decided to oppose it, may also have been dictated by events far from the Holy Land. News of the preparations in Europe circulated freely in the Christian camps at Tyre, brought by crusaders and in diplomatic correspondence. It was to take only five months for Saladin to learn of Frederick I’s departure from Germany in May 1189 from Byzantine sources via his son at Aleppo.
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A similar length of time would have been ample for Guy to have heard of the impending descent on the Levant of large fleets from northern Europe in the autumn passage. The German crusade would hardly serve Guy’s interests against those of an imperial vassal, Conrad of Montferrat, unless he had already reimposed his leadership in the field. The prospect of massive reinforcements may have helped persuade Guy that the dash for Acre was not as reckless as it at first seemed. The coincidence of timing is compelling. Guy established his camp outside Acre on 28 August 1189. Before the end of September, he had been joined by large squadrons from Denmark, Germany, Frisia, Flanders and England, as well as a substantial contingent of northern Frenchmen led by James of Avesnes, one of the nobles who had taken the cross with Henry II and Philip II at Gisors in January 1188.
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Even so, despite his following and the prospect of reinforcements, Guy’s was a desperate adventure that avoided destruction only because of Saladin’s characteristic caution. Since its capture in July 1187, the sultan had added to Acre’s defences and improved its harbour. He rejected the option of trying to stop Guy reaching Acre, preferring to rely on its walls and garrison resisting for long enough to permit his full force to assemble and trap the Christian army on the plain outside the city. Saladin reached Acre three days after Guy, by which time the Christians had tried to encircle the city, had launched an unsuccessful assault on the walls and had established a fortified base camp on a tell (or man-made hill) to the east of the city, the hill of Toron, or Tell al-Musallabin. Saladin quickly established contact with the Acre garrison and secured landward access to the city, but a frontal assault on the Christian camp on 15 September failed to dislodge or overrun it.

13. The Siege of Acre 1189

The key battle was fought on 4 October. Guy’s army had grown to more than 30,000 according to one Arabic estimate and now included, alongside the thousands of westerners, a reluctant Conrad of Montferrat and his supporters from Tyre, their presence showing that, politically at least, Guy’s gamble had paid off. Seeing the danger of allowing the Muslim field army to grow while the Acre garrison remained untouched, the Christians decided to try to destroy the sultan’s force or, at least, drive it off. A full-scale assault was launched on Saladin’s camp. After a fierce pitched battle with heavy casualties on both sides, including Gerard of Ridefort, the Christians were bloodily repulsed, but their camp stayed intact. Saladin’s confidant, Ibn Shaddad, claimed to have firm evidence that over 4,000 Christians had been killed on the left wing alone.
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The heaps of rotting corpses set off infection and disease in both camps. Despite the defeat, one Christian objective was achieved when, in mid-October, Saladin withdrew from front-line investment of the Christian positions to await more troops and a fleet from Egypt. The following weeks and months saw both sides receiving reinforcements, but with neither able to press home a decisive military advantage or dislodge the other, a grim stalemate ensued. The two armies dug in; the Christians, only partially encircling the city by land, were themselves partially surrounded by Saladin’s field army. A form of trench warfare began, the Franks constructing a great protective ditch and rampart around their camp. Frequent raids and close-combat skirmishes sparked across the no man’s lands between the camps and between the Christians and the city, with no advantage gained by anyone. With the arrival of Egyptian fleets from late October, the Christian hold of the sea was contested and placed in jeopardy.

The survival of the Christian force at Acre depended almost entirely on the appearance of fleets from the west. Only the large numbers of crusaders sustained a siege that developed into a struggle against disease and low morale as much as with the sapping attritional fighting. While fleets played significant if underreported roles in both the First and Second Crusades, the new enterprise, the great German host excepted, was overwhelmingly dependent on naval transport. For the shipwrights and sea captains from Norway to Dalmatia, the Third Crusade proved both a bonanza and a risk, their services in demand as never before but their payment and profits often a matter of dispute and at the mercy of the elements or the chances of war. The preponderance of sea transport,
the variety of vessels available, the certainty of planning and routes, the awareness of naval logistics, the distances covered and the accurate predictions of timing reflected the exponential growth in maritime activity and exchange around the coasts of Europe in the twelfth century. Of this, the traffic of crusading and pilgrimage formed only a part, at once symptom and stimulus. The local pride in these fleets was reflected by glowing accounts preserved by citizens of their home ports, such as London, Bremen or Cologne, as well as by the witnesses and chroniclers of the fighting in the Holy Land. Both demonstrated the large scale of engagement in crusading: these fleets carried thousands of men.

Western and Arabic sources leave no doubt as to the scale of the reinforcements. Christian sources recorded the arrival in early September 1189 of a fleet of Frisians and Danes in fifty cogs, large round cargo sailing ships capable of carrying companies of upwards of a hundred each, apparently commanded by some Danish nobles. The North Sea and Atlantic seaboard had been alive with crusade shipping since early in the year. Sixty ships, including four very large vessels, possibly ‘busses’ capable of carrying 150 crew and passengers provided by the city, had left Cologne in February 1189 with, it was optimistically suggested, 10,000 men. The Cologne squadron left Lisbon in late May or early June. Before sailing into the Mediterranean this fleet captured the small port of Albuferia in the Algarve, after which some of the Cologne crusaders cashed in their booty and returned home. By mid-September the remaining ships had reached Palestine.
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Their landfall was immediately followed by the arrival of a Flemish and northern French squadron, who may have sailed via Italy, under James of Avesnes. A nobleman with an enviable reputation for wisdom, integrity and chivalry, later elevated by his death at the battle of Arsuf in 1191 into an international hero, James apparently assumed leadership of the westerners in the Christian camp, perhaps by virtue of his close connection with the French royal court and his involvement in the discussions on the crusade between the kings of France and England and the count of Flanders early in 1188. By the end of September, these crusaders had been joined by the cousins of the French king, Peter count of Dreux, and his brother, Philip bishop of Beauvais, ‘a man more devoted to battles than books’; the French counts of Brienne and Bar and many lesser French magnates; contingents from the Anglo-Norman-Angevin realms with William Ferrers earl of Derby; and a smattering of
Flemish, Italian and Sicilian notables. Before reaching the siege in the last week of September, Louis III, landgrave of Thuringia, at the head of an imperial contingent drawn from Germany and Italy, had put in at Tyre, where he persuaded Conrad of Montferrat to swallow his opposition to Guy and join the Christian army at Acre. This German force earned the contempt of one compatriot, who complained that by taking the sea route rather than following Frederick Barbarossa overland, they had chosen ‘a short voyage that reduced the fear from enemy pagans’.
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Once established at Acre, Louis seems to have joined James of Avesnes as the dominant voices in the crusaders’ high command.

These fleets secured the Christian bridgehead at Acre at a high cost. Casualty rates assumed gruesome proportions. One contemporary tried to convey the losses by claiming that after two years at the siege, out of 12,000 who had arrived in the autumn of 1189, barely 100 survived. Small wonder that morale-boosting tales of heroic martyrdom were concocted for circulation in the camp to reassure those in daily fear and danger of death.
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The desperate and to modern audiences highly evocative nature of the warfare was vividly captured in an account almost certainly compiled by one who had been there, a crusader at Acre in 1191–12 if not before:

The Turks were a constant threat. While our people sweated away digging trenches, the Turks harassed them in relays incessantly from dawn to dusk. So while half were working the rest had to defend them against the Turkish assault… while the air was black with a pouring rain of darts and arrows beyond number or estimate… Many other future martyrs and confessors of the Faith came to shore and were joined to the number of the faithful. They really were martyrs: no small number of them died soon afterwards from the foul air, polluted with the stink of corpses, worn out by anxious nights spent on guard, and shattered by other hardships and needs. There was no rest, not even time to breathe. Our workers in the trench were pressed ceaselessly by the Turks who kept rushing down on them in unexpected assaults. The Turks reduced them to exasperation before the trench was eventually finished.
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The fleets of the autumn of 1189 were followed by possibly even more substantial forces over the following months. The largest of these, which may have reached Acre before the winter of 1189–90 but more likely only the next spring, comprised scores of ships from north Germany, the Rhineland, Flanders and England. One flotilla, including ships from
London as well as ports around the North Sea, mustered at Dartmouth in May 1189, where, following the precedent of 1147, they entered into a formal communal alliance before embarking for Lisbon on 18 May. Just over a week later, eleven ships that had embarked from Bremen on 23 April, possibly under their archbishop, after sailing down the English coast from Lowestoft, reached Dartmouth. The two fleets made a rendezvous at Lisbon on 4 July, the twenty-four ships of the Dartmouth commune having arrived on 29 June. Having missed the main German and Flemish force, of fifty-five ships, including the Cologne ships, by a month, this fleet of thirty-five or so ships was hired by the king of Portugal to help capture the port of Silves in the Algarve. Despite their naval supremacy and troops numbering perhaps 3,500, the siege lasted from 17 July until 6 September before the Muslim garrison surrendered. This delayed the fleet, which only left for Palestine on 20 September, passing the Straits of Gibraltar on 29 September before finding its way to Marseilles over the next month. Although associated in some accounts with the other northern European arrivals at Acre of the autumn of 1189, it is more likely that this fleet did not venture further in the winter months, reaching its destination the following spring.
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The campaign season of 1190 at Acre began with high expectations only to end in depression, disease and threatened disintegration. Both sides knew of the impending arrival of the great German host led by Frederick I. Saladin kept an especially wary eye on the emperor’s progress east. In October 1189, on hearing of Frederick’s departure the previous May, Saladin had despatched his new minister Ibn Shaddad to summon his allies from northern Syria and Iraq ‘for the
Jihad
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These new contingents reached Acre in May and June 1190, giving Saladin a marked if temporary advantage. The Christians, meanwhile, had consolidated their defensive position around the Tell of Toron. During the winter, food ran short, with control of the sea-lanes challenged by the Egyptian fleet. On land, despite continued skirmishing, stalemate prevailed, to the retrospective annoyance of some Muslim partisans. The Iraqi Ibn al-Athir, never one of the sultan’s unalloyed panegyrists, criticized Saladin’s failure to destroy the Christian defences while they were still being constructed. The well-informed Syrian Abu Shama alleged that the nobles on each side punctuated the desultory round of fighting by fraternizing with each other, exchanging views, even joining together
in singing and dancing. There was allegedly even a mock-combat staged between two boys from each side.
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This did not seem to curb the violence on the battlefield, but may have exacerbated the sense, apparent among the Christian rank and file, that their leaders were reluctant to risk their lives in combat. According to Saladin’s secretary, Imad al-Din, less exalted contacts were made at a carnal level, with Mamluks and other troops availing themselves of the opportunities afforded by the large red light district of the Christian camp. So intrigued or shocked was the scholarly and verbose Imad al-Din at the presence of these apparently highly skilled prostitutes that he was moved to pen an extended pornographic descant condemning their charms and erotic athleticism, achieving over twenty-five different metaphors for penetrative sex.
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