WAR CRIMES AND ATROCITIES (True Crime) (5 page)

Richard The Lionheart Massacres The Hostages At Acre

22 August, 1191

News of the Battle of Hattin and the capitulation of the city of Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187 reached the Christian West within weeks. The shock of the dreadful news is said to have hastened the death of Pope Urban III. It galvanized the new popes, Gregory VIII (who lived only two months after his investiture) and Clement III into calling for the leaders of Western Christianity to set aside their differences and come together to save Christianity in the East from ‘the barbarians who thirst for Christian blood’.

In the Holy Roman Empire, Emperor Frederick Barbarossa began gathering together an army for the relief of the Holy Land that eventually numbered over 200,000 men. Henry II of England, who was also overlord of half France, and Philip II Augustus of France both began levying taxes in their countries to finance this third crusade mounted by Catholic Christianity in the past century.

Henry II died in October 1189, before his ‘Saladin tithe’, drawn from every subject, including the clergy, had been collected. It was left to his son, the tall, red-blonde, handsome and lionhearted Richard I, to collect the English contribution to the Third Crusade. Although Richard I was considered ‘a bad king, a bad son, a bad husband and a bad father’, he was a great soldier, and the main object of his life was a heartfelt desire to recover Jerusalem, the city of Christ’s Passion for Christendom. Among Europe’s Christian princes, Richard, while still Prince of Aquitaine, had been the first to fall to his knees and take the cross.

Once he became king of England, at the time the wealthiest and strongest nation in Europe, Richard carried out his father’s crusading intentions with ruthless vigour, turning all his tax-raising efforts to financing the crusade. He sold high church offices, earldoms and lordships, castles and manors, even whole towns to finance his crusade. Richard’s remark that he would have sold London if he could have found a buyer was not a joke. As for the Saladin tithe, it was levied for three years, and any parish that did not collect its full due was excommunicated.

Of the three most important rulers involved in the Third Crusade, Richard was the last to arrive in Palestine. Frederick Barbarossa, leading his huge army down through eastern Europe and into Turkey, died of a chill in Armenia in mid-1190 after bathing in the River Saleph. More than half his army turned back to Europe. Frederick of Swabia led a remnant of Barbarossa’s army down into Palestine, reaching there after Philip II Augustus of France, who had arrived in March 1191. After numerous adventures on land on the way, Richard went to the Middle East by sea, meeting up with Philip II Augustus at Messina in Sicily. There, the two kings completed the building up of the great fleet that would carry the crusaders to Palestine.

Philip II Augustus set off first, leaving Richard to get the main body of the fleet to the eastern Mediterranean. Unfortunately, a great storm scattered the mighty fleet and it took weeks to find all the ships and gather them together again. The three largest ships, carrying Richard’s betrothed, the Princess Berengeria, his sister Joanna and his English gold and treasure that were to finance the crusade, ended up on the island of Cyprus. When he caught up with them, Richard found that his gold and treasure had been snatched and his ships held in custody by the governor of the island, the son of the Byzantine emperor. Diplomacy availing him nothing, Richard, stormed ashore, rescued his betrothed and his sister, got back all his gold and treasure and, for good measure, wrested the island of Cyprus from the Byzantine Empire. This immensely useful bridgehead to Palestine remained in Latin Christian hands until 1571.

ENDING A STALEMATE

Once in the Holy Land, Richard and Philip found that the Christian position was not good. However, the fortress and port enclave of Tyre had remained firmly in the hands of the able Conrad of Montferrat. King Guy of Jerusalem, who was released from captivity by Saladin in the summer of 1188 – in the belief that he was a spent force – had managed to gather together the remnants of the army of the destroyed kingdom of Jerusalem and meld it into a force large enough to besiege the great city of Acre, eight leagues from Tyre. Acre had been one of the most prosperous merchant cities in the kingdom of Jerusalem and Saladin had made a point of taking it within days of the Battle of Hattin, setting up his court and celebrating Friday prayers in the city for the first time in 80 years.

When Philip II Augustus and Richard the Lionheart arrived in Palestine in 1191 the siege of Acre, which had been going on for nearly a year and a half, had reached a stalemate. The Christian army was not strong enough to storm Acre, and Saladin, himself in difficulties with rebellious Muslim leaders, was unable to gather together a force great enough to dislodge the Christians from their entrenched position in front of the city.

By early June 1191, Philip II Augustus and Richard, having agreed months before to divide between them any plunder won in Palestine, were with the Christian army at Acre, deeply involved in bringing the siege to a victorious conclusion. Richard personally directed the design, building and placement of new siege engines, including one that was said to be able to lob stones large enough to kill 12 men at a blow into the heart of Acre. At the same time, the walls of the town were mined; once tunnels were dug, the crusaders would fill them with combustible materials and set alight to them.

The Muslim garrison commanders in Acre knew they could not hold out much longer, unless Saladin could bring up many more fighting men to take on the by now greatly enlarged Christian army – which he could not do. Nor could he supply them with food and arms, for his ships could not get into the ports now that the Christian fleet had arrived and was guarding them.

Peace negotiations ended on 12 July, when the city’s leaders agreed terms with Conrad of Tyre that were favourable for the crusaders. In return for the lives of the citizens and garrison of Acre, the Christians were to receive the city and its contents, the harbour and its ships, several hundred prisoners, a large ransom and the relic of True Cross lost at the Battle of Hattin. Some 3,000 of Acre’s defenders were to remain as hostages to ensure these terms were met.

Philip II, desperate to leave the Holy Land and ignoring the pleas of his own military leaders and of Richard, set off for home at the end of July, escorted as far as Tyre by Conrad of Montferrat, to whom Philip gave his share of the plunder from the capture of Jerusalem, plus the prisoners he had been allotted. Richard the Lionheart was now in sole charge of affairs in Acre.

A MASSIVE SLAUGHTER

Saladin did not hand over the first part of the ransom payment and some prisoners until 11 August. By now, Richard had had plenty of time to consider the Christian position. The importance of maintaining the military advantage far outweighed, in his eyes, the size of the ransom the Christians might eventually get. Those 3,000 hostages were too many to be guarded and could not be allowed to be reabsorbed into Saladin’s forces. Richard decided to kill them.

He warned Saladin of his intentions, threatening to execute the hostages if the ransom, the relic of the True Cross, and those of Saladin’s warriors specifically named in the surrender terms were not produced immediately. Saladin stalled. On 22 August, Richard had 2,700 of the hostages tied together, brought out of the city and ranged alongside a large stage set up below the city walls. One by one, the hostages were taken up onto the stage, blindfolded and ordered to kneel. Men from Richard’s army beheaded them all, in full view of Saladin’s army, powerless to do anything to stop the slaughter.

According to the Norman minstrel, Ambroise, who accompanied the crusaders, the Christian soldiers delighted in butchery, for they saw it as revenge for the killing of so many Christian soldiers during the siege of Acre. Another chronicler relates how the bodies were disembowelled and a great many gold and silver coins were found in the entrails. The massacre at Acre was a reminder to Richard’s contemporaries that ‘lionheart’ could signify ferocity as well as bravery.

By the time Richard left the Holy Land in 1193, the standard of the cross flew over Acre and several stronghold towns along the coast to the south, largely through his efforts. Although the kingdom of Jerusalem was lost, those towns could have been a bridgehead for the recovery of Jerusalem from the infidel. They were not so used and Jerusalem was never regained by the Crusaders.

Richard the Lionheart and Saladin remain heroic figures to this day. A statue of Richard on horseback, sword raised high in the air, stands proudly in front of the Houses of Parliament in London. As recently as 1992 a statue of Saladin as victor of Hattin was erected in Damascus, capital of modern Syria and site of Saladin’s tomb. And because Saladin was born in Tikrit, where the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was also born, Hussein portrayed himself side by side with Saladin (despite Saladin’s Kurdish ancestry) on propaganda posters in the 1980s.

Edward Iii, Victorious At Crecy, Takes Calais From The French

1346–47

Almost from the day he became king of England at the age of 15 in 1337, Edward III began planning how he would wrest back from France the rich lands of Flanders that had been lost from England so soon after the death of William the Conqueror. He also began looking for ways of claiming his right to the throne of France, partly because this would ease the task of finding allies for his cause in northern Europe.

Before he sent his first troops across the English Channel to northern France in 1337, starting the Hundred Years War, Edward III had been carefully building up England’s fighting strength. He increased the output of his armoury in the Tower of London and encouraged archery and the use of the longbow, a weapon that his grandfather, Edward I, had first used in significant numbers. Later in Edward III’s reign, an Act of Parliament decreed that all able-bodied men between the ages of 16 and 60 must ‘learn and practise the art of shooting’ at the butts every Sunday and feast day.

Edward’s fame as a leader of men grew enormously in 1340 when he put himself in command of a 150-strong English fleet – the first true naval fleet created in England. It attacked and comprehensively destroyed a considerably larger French fleet at anchor in the harbour of Sluys. The longbowmen on the English ships caused havoc among the French crews, emphasizing their value as fighting men. This first, brilliant sea victory for England greatly impressed Europe, and Edward was even offered the title of Holy Roman emperor. He refused it.

BATTLE AT CRECY

By 1346, with the French fleet in the Channel much weakened, Edward III was ready personally to lead his army into battle in France. Accompanied by his 17-year-old son, Edward, the Black Prince, and many of the nobles of England, Edward crossed to France in July 1346 with a force of between 12,000 and 20,000 men (probably nearer the lesser than the greater number, historians believe).

In their march across northern France to Paris, in the early stages of which they captured the large Normandy town of Caen, Edward and his army had to fight many minor skirmishes and battles. By the time they eventually neared Paris, the army had been considerably weakened by heavy losses from disease as well as from fighting. With a large French army massing in front of them, Edward decided he must retreat northwards to the coast. Having crossed the Somme quite near its mouth, he halted in Ponthieu, near a village and forest called Crécy, where he turned to face his enemy.

The French army, made up mostly of heavily-armoured and beautifully caparisoned knights, mounted cavalry and Genoese crossbowmen, caught up with Edward and his depleted force on 25 August, 1346. The French should have won the ensuing battle. However, Edward III was too good an army commander, and his men were experienced. He drew up his army in two forward arrays of dismounted men and archers, with the Black Prince in charge of one of them, and with a third array slightly to the rear, which he himself commanded. Edward, mounted on his war horse and with the commander’s white staff in his hand, ordered the battle from the mound of a windmill overlooking the field of battle.

The French, confused by conflicting orders from King Philippe VI, went into battle late in the afternoon, virtually blinded by a heavy thunderstorm. Their crossbowmen, the strings of their bows so drenched by the rain that they could not be stretched to the bow, hardly shot a single bolt. They and the French infantry fell in their hundreds under the arrows from the English longbows. (Well used to rain, English longbowmen kept their bow strings dry under their helmets until needed, a habit that is supposed to be the origin of the expression ‘keep it under your hat’.)

During the rest of the day and long into the night that followed, the French made charge after charge against the English, only to be met by a hailstorm of arrows, and in each charge losing many men to the English archers. Many times, the English were desperately hard-pressed, the Black Prince himself often dangerously in the thick of the battle. Edward is famous for refusing to send aid to his son.

Send no more to me as long as my son is alive . . . suffer him this day to win his spurs; for if God be pleased I wish this day to be his, the honour thereof, and for them that be about him.

The day, and the Battle of Crécy, did belong to the English, and the honour of it to the Black Prince, who won his knight’s spurs at Crécy (they are still on his feet on his tomb in Canterbury Cathedral). Contemporary British reports claim that the French lost

11 princes, 1,200 knights and more than 10,000 foot soldiers at Crécy. However, the English dead totalled just 40. Edward III’s great victory at Crécy resounded through Europe.

Departing from the usual practice of medieval warfare, the English took few prisoners at Crécy. This may have been because they felt themselves to be too small in numbers to be able to oversee a large number of prisoners adequately, but it is surprising, given the ransom value of many of the French and the enormous cost of the war. Edward had already defaulted on his war loans in 1340, bankrupting two major Florentine banking houses in the process. Edward’s mild treatment of his enemy after Crécy stands in stark contrast to the actions he threatened to take against the town of Calais just a year later.

PLEAS FOR CLEMENCY

After Crécy, Edward led his army north to Calais, where his fleet was blockading the port, so that they could embark for England. But Calais was strongly fortified and well defended and Edward had to lay siege to the town until July 1347, before near-starvation caused its governor, Jean Vienne, to offer to surrender if Edward would spare the lives of Calais’ people.

Edward, enraged at having been hindered in France so long by the common people of a town, replied that he would accept the town’s surrender on condition that six of the town’s leading citizens, or burghers, came before him, heads and feet bared and with halters round their necks, and present to him the keys of the town on their knees. He would then take the keys and hang the burghers by the ropes around their necks.

Pleas for clemency from many English knights were brushed aside by Edward and it seemed as if the six burghers of Calais, who had offered themselves to save their town and its citizens, were doomed. Suddenly, Edward’s wife, Queen Phillipa, intervened. She knelt before her fierce husband and begged him, ‘in all humility, in the name of the Son of the Blessed Virgin Mary and by the love you have for me,’ to show mercy towards the men. Edward hesitated, then said that the men could live.

Had Edward III executed the burghers of Calais, men who in themselves posed no threat to the king or his army, it would have been an atrocious act indeed. The fact that it was a woman’s intervention that prevented the atrocity taking place gives added piquancy to the story.

As for the struggle between the English and the French, something far more dreadful than warfare put an end to their immediate differences. The bubonic plague, or the Black Death, hit southern France in 1347. By 1348, spreading like wildfire, the Black Death had reached England, possibly on a ship coming back to England after supplying Calais. It would be years before France and England, their populations dreadfully depleted, could think about making full-scale war again.

In 1350, Edward officially laid claim to the throne of France through his mother, Isabella, daughter of Philippe IV of France. It was a flimsy claim, since Salic Law banned women from inheriting the throne of France, but Edward gave it weight by quartering the arms of the king of France with the three golden lions on the arms of England, and by adopting his motto, ‘Dieu et mon droit’. Adopting St George as the patron saint of England was another clever move, since St George was the patron saint of all European knighthood.

The importance of the English victory at the Battle of Crécy lay much less in the fact that a large French army had been defeated than in the fact that victory at Crécy enabled Edward to secure Calais for the English. This gave England an opening to the rich manufacturing towns of Flanders, which were ready markets for English wool and cloth exports. No wonder that when England lost Calais, its last possession in France, two centuries later, Queen Mary Tudor said that, when she died, the word ‘Calais’ would be found engraved on her heart.