Bible and Sword (11 page)

Yet he did not take Jerusalem. Why? The blocked-up cisterns, the heat and diseases, the difficulty of supplying the army, of adapting tactics used on the fertile fields of France to the hostile hills and deserts of Palestine, all these were encountered by the First Crusade. What they did not have to contend with, as Richard did, was a great general in command of the enemy. Saladin was on home ground, he could call on armies from all sides of Palestine, and he was not himself weakened by enemies at his rear. But what really defeated Richard was the divided purpose of his own allies, whose overriding concern was their mutual rivalries. Conrad, Marquis of Tyre, defected to the enemy. The French King pulled out, either because he could not stand being in the shadow of Richard’s glory or because he always intended to get home first and grab Richard’s French possessions. His defection was not an unmixed loss, for, as Saladin’s brother said, “Richard was hindered by the King of France like a cat with a hammer tied to his tail.”

The fifteen months from the fall of Acre in July 1191
to Richard’s departure in October 1192 was spent in pushing down the coast against repeated enemy raids until Jaffa, the base for the march against Jerusalem, could be reached; in pauses for negotiation; in side campaigns against Ascalon and Darum; and in two fruitless attempts to take the Holy City in the hills.

The southward march from Acre down the old Roman coast road depended on meeting the supply fleet at frequent intervals. Richard planned the march with great care. The army, consisting of five main corps of Templars, Bretons and Angevins, Boitevins, Normans, and English, and lastly Hospitallers, was divided into three longitudinal groups. Furthest inland marched the infantry, to protect the whole against the frequent ambushes of the enemy swooping down from the hills. In the middle were the cavalry; and nearest the sea was the heavy burdened baggage train. The royal standard of England, borne on a covered wagon drawn by four horses, moved in the center, but the King himself generally rode up and down inspecting arrangements and keeping order. Because of the heat he confined the march to the early morning, covering only eight or ten miles a day and resting over a full twenty-four hours every other day. The slow pace was necessitated by the midsummer heat, the weakened condition of the army, and the heavy loss of pack animals sustained at Acre; half the infantry had to carry the baggage and tents on their own backs, changing places with the fighting infantry for relief. For protection against the constant shower of arrows from the enemy the Crusaders wore thick felt cassocks over their mailed shirts, and Bohadin tells of the awe with which the Turks saw the Franks march along unharmed with five or ten arrows apiece sticking out from their backs. Under the burning rays of the sun many dropped dead from the heat, and others fainted and had to be transported by sea. At each evening’s halt a designated herald stood up in the midst of the host and cried out
“Sanctum Sepulchrum adjuva!”
(Help us, Holy Sepulchre!)
The host took up the cry, repeating it three times, stretching their arms to heaven, weeping copiously, and, according to IRR, deriving relief and refreshment from the ceremony.

As they crept down the coast they knew each day’s march brought them closer to the pitched battle that Saladin must launch if he were to stop them from reaching Jaffa. Advance cavalry units of the Turks pricked at the slow phalanx, trying to tease them into battle, it being Saladin’s strategy to divide and scatter the Christians over the plains where his rushing horsemen could cut them down. Richard was determined to keep a solid formation that would protect the supply wagons and force the Turks into battle at close quarters. Nerves were strung ever more tensely as they marched, each man sensing in his bones the silent gathering of vast hordes behind the hills. It took Richard’s sternest discipline to prevent the overtaut corps commanders from dashing out to engage the enemy prematurely.

At last, eleven miles above Jaffa, at a place called Arsuf the moment came. Unable to contain themselves, the Hospitallers broke ranks and charged the Turks. “King Richard,” says IRR, “on seeing his army in motion flew on his horse through the Hospitallers and broke into the Turkish infantry who were astonished at his blows and those of his men and gave way to the right and left.” But they regrouped and massed for a charge. “All over the face of the land you could see the well ordered bands of Turks, myriads of banners, of mailed men alone there appeared to be more than twenty thousand.… They swept down swifter than eagles, turning the air black with dust raised by their horses, howling their battle cries and sounding the blast of trumpets.” The King was wounded by a spear thrust in the left side, but the solid ranks of the infantry withstood the charge, kneeling on one knee with spears advanced while behind them the ballista, a dart-throwing engine on wheels, was brought into action. Although the battle raged
all day, the Turks never broke through, and at last they withdrew over ground slippery with blood and strewn with corpses.

Now the armies had met and tested each other’s strength in open combat. After this battle Saladin realized that he could not halt the Crusaders’ march; but by retreating and playing for time he could outstay them. He withdrew the garrisons from all the fortresses to the south even down to Ascalon, for he had no desire to leave each to be another Acre. Only Darum, the last stronghold on the way to Egypt, was left garrisoned; but Richard took it in a four days’ siege.

From this point on, when a united, all-out effort to take Jerusalem might well have succeeded, the Crusade began to fall apart. First the French insisted on remaining in Jaffa to fortify its walls and incidentally enjoy the luxuries of city life after the hardships of the field. When the insistence of the others finally prevailed and an attempt on Jerusalem was made at the New Year, the Duke of Burgundy retreated within sight of the city and ultimately took himself off altogether. Other groups fell away to return to Acre or to join the traitorous Conrad at Tyre. Even the Templars and Hospitallers counseled against taking Jerusalem lest they be left alone afterwards to fight the surrounding Turks. Richard himself, tormented ever since Philips’ desertion by the thought of what his rival and his brother John might be doing behind his back, was in a hurry to return to his kingdom lest there be no kingdom left to return to.

This worry and the growing realization that no united effort could probably ever be wrung from the divided army put him in the mood to end the war by a negotiated truce. Through the winter and into the spring of 1192 the conferences dragged on, with proposals and counterproposals concerning the possession of Jerusalem and the various coastal cities and Crusader’s castles and even including Richard’s absurd and cynical suggestion that his sister Joanna marry Saladin’s brother and that they rule Jerusalem
between them. The courteous and diplomatic Saladin kept the talks in progress by skilled speechcraft and a constant flow of gifts—a magnificent Spanish horse for Richard, a scarlet tent, fresh fruits or cooling snow brought from the mountains, seven camels richly caparisoned, and a skilled physician to minister to the King.

Meanwhile messengers from England with reports of John’s depredations up and down the kingdom implored Richard to return. He decided on a final effort for Jerusalem in June 1192; but again united councils could net be obtained, and bitterly the King gave up. As he turned back from the great goal for which so much effort, blood, and treasure had been vainly spent, a knight turned his steps to a hilltop from which the towers of Jerusalem could be seen. But Richard veiled his face with his cloak, saying: “Blessed Lord God, I pray thee not to let me see thy Holy City that I could not deliver from the hands of thy enemies.”

The futility of remaining in Palestine was now obvious. Richard was preparing to sail from Acre when news came that the Saracens had surrounded Jaffa, where a small force of Christians was holding out in imminent danger of death. It was almost as if the fates had taken a hand to amend the bitter humiliation of a brave man. For in the battle of Jaffa Richard performed such feats of arms and won such glory as rang on the tongues of all men. The memory of his exactions was dimmed by the reports of his valor, and when, three years later, Eleanor moved heaven and earth to raise the gigantic ransom demanded by Richard’s captor, Englishmen responded with every ounce of treasure, so great was their pride in the Lion-Hearted King.

IRR’s account of the relief of Jaffa, written perhaps that very night, seems almost to burst with pride and ecstasy in the battle and in the King’s mighty deeds. Richard, he says, interrupted all counsels of caution and exclaimed, “As God lives I will be with them and give them all the aid I can.” Already on board ship, he turned the helm southward, ran
his galley on the beach at Jaffa, and waded ashore, up to his middle in the waves at the head of a small landing party of but eighty knights and three hundred cross-bowmen.

Himself armed with an arbalest, which he soon exchanged for his “fierce sword,” he and his companions dashed forward against the Turks who covered the beach and soon pushed them back. After a terrific battle the town was taken and the Christian garrison saved, but the Turks, ashamed at having been put to rout by so small a number, sent in a new force to take Richard by surprise as he slept in his tent. A last-minute warning shout “To arms! to arms!” awoke the King.

“God of all virtues! Lives there a man who would not be shaken by such a sudden alarm?… Oh, who could fully relate the terrible attacks of the infidels? The Turks at first rushed on with horrid yells, hurling their javelins and shooting their arrows. The King ran along the ranks and exhorted every man to be firm and not to flinch. The Turks came on like a whirlwind again and again making the appearance of an attack, that our men might be induced to give way, and when they were close up they swerved their horses off in another direction. The King and his knights who were on horseback perceiving this, put spurs to their horses and charged into the middle of the enemy upsetting them right and left and piercing a large number through the body with their lances.… What a terrible combat was then waged! A multitude of Turks … rushed towards the royal standard of the lion for they would rather have slain the King than a thousand others.… But such was the energy of his courage that it seemed to rejoice at having found an occasion to display itself. His sword which shone like lightning cut down men and horses alike, cleaving them to the middle.”

All day he fought, and IRR tells how at times he wielded a sword in one hand and a lance in the other, how he carved a path for himself like a reaper with a sickle, how
he inspired such terror in the Turks as to create a panic among them in their rush to get out of his way, how he saw the noble Earl of Leicester fallen from his horse and fighting bravely on foot, how he spurred to him and replaced him on his horse, how he snatched Ralph de Maubon from the enemy and restored him to the army, how Saladin in the midst of battle sent him two fresh horses in honor of his courage, and how the King said he would accept any number of horses from an enemy worse than Saladin, so great was his need of them; how at last “the King, the fierce, the extraordinary King … returned safe and unhurt to his friends … his person stuck all over with javelins like a deer pierced by the hunters and the trappings of his horse were thickly covered with arrows.” And when Saladin asked his crestfallen warriors why they had not taken Melec Ric they answered: “In truth, my lord there never was such a knight since the beginning of the world … to engage with him is fatal and his deeds are beyond human nature.”

A three years’ armistice was now signed, leaving Jerusalem and the hill country to the Saracens but restoring the Church of the Sepulcher and the pilgrims’ right of free access to it to the Christians, who also retained the coastal plain and its ports from Tyre to Jaffa. Three parties of Crusaders went up to see the Holy City, but without Richard, who, if he could not go as conqueror, would not go at all. The Lion-Heart sailed away, but the legend of his might remained a byword among the Arabs. If a horse shied at a noise in the bushes, it was believed that the spirit of Melec Ric had frightened him, and a crying child was quieted by the admonition “Hush, England is coming!”

One effect of the Crusades on England was the upheavals in tenure caused by so many knights’ mortgaging their lands for cash to outfit themselves. The King was not the only one to go to extremes for money. One John de Camoys sold his wife and all her chattels. A certain Andrew Astley sold his whole state to the abbey of Combe in Warwickshire
for three hundred and twenty marks sterling. Others mortgaged their lands, usually to rich abbeys, for three or four or seven years, and if they survived the wars to return home, they were often too impoverished to redeem their property and were forced to spend out their lives as poor brethren in a monastery.

The sixteenth-century researches of Leland and Camden into monastery archives and local parish records turned up many facts about the Crusades. There was one Osborne Gifford who was excommunicated for abducting two nuns (one was apparently not enough) and as the price of absolution had to undertake a three years’ crusade in the Holy Land, during which he could wear no shirt or knight’s habit, nor could he ever in his life enter a nunnery again. Roger de Mowbray was a rarity who went twice to Palestine in the years of the Second Crusade and survived capture by the Saracens as well. Anyone so favored by fortune was sure to be made the subject of romantic adventures, and Roger was said to have intervened in a mortal combat between a dragon and a lion and, having slain the dragon, so won the gratitude of the lion that it followed him all the way home to England. His son Nigel went with Richard on the Third Crusade. Another made prisoner by the Saracens was Hugh de Hatton, who escaped after seven years’ captivity and made his way home in rags. Learning from a shepherd who did not recognize him that he had been given up for dead, Hugh entered his castle, to meet what welcome we do not know. The story leaves him at the threshold, another in the line of long-lost warriors who have been returning home incognito ever since Ulysses came back from Troy.