Lionheart (20 page)

These gifts illustrate Richard’s inability to deal with John’s treacherous and deceitful nature. Time and again he forgave the brother who had turned his coat so publicly by deserting the father against whom he had no argument, for Henry II had repeatedly shown his youngest son every favour and even implied that he would succeed to the throne of England. As events were to tell, Richard would have done better to lock up his younger brother for the duration – for which there were precedents. His father had done exactly this with Eleanor after the rebellion of 1173–74 to prevent her causing him any further damage, and his great-grandfather Henry I had locked up his elder brother Robert Curthose for twenty-eight years after grabbing power following the death of William Rufus.

N
OTES

1.
  Quoted in D. Boyd,
Voices from the Dark Years
(Thrupp: Sutton, 2007), pp. 157–8.

2.
  P.W. Hammond,
Food and Feast in Medieval England
(Thrupp: Sutton, 1998), p. 127.

3.
  Ibid, p. 119.

4.
  William of Newburgh,
Historia Rerum Anglicarum
, Vol 1, p. 346.

5.
  Benedict of Peterborough,
Gesta Henrici
, Vol 2, p. 98.

6.
  Ibid, Vol 2, p. 87.

7.
  Roger of Howden,
Chronica
, Vol 3, p. 28.

8.
  Ralf of Diceto,
Radulfi de Diceto Opera Historica
ed. W. Stubbs, Rolls Series No 68 (London: Longmans, 1876), Vol 2, p. 72; also Benedict of Peterborough,
Gesta Henrici
, Vol 2, p. 97.

9.
  Roger of Howden,
Chronica
, Vol 3, p. 27.

10.
  Benedict of Peterborough,
Gesta Henrici
, Vol 2, pp. 73, 75, 78.

11.
  Roger of Howden,
Chronica
, Vol 3, xxxiii.

Part 3:

The Crusader King

11

Death by the Sword, Death by Sickness, Death by Starvation

I
n the Holy Land, the dissension that was the curse of the crusader states continued. In the spring of 1188 William II of Sicily sent his
ammiratus ammiratorum,
or Grand Admiral Margaritus, with a fleet of sixty ships and 200 knights to control the sea lanes to and from the Holy Land and to protect the coastal cities against Saladin’s depredations. The Sicilians sided with Guy de Lusignan. On 6 April 1189 Archbishop Ubaldo Lanfranchi of Pisa – a great maritime power – arrived with a fleet of fifty-two ships. Being no friends of the Holy Roman Empire, in whose territory lay Conrad’s home territory of Montferrat, this contingent also sided with King Guy. This gave Guy the confidence to demand that Conrad cease his pretension to the throne of Jerusalem. The reply was again a resounding
Non!

Guy again marched south, with the Sicilian and Pisan fleets sailing a parallel course just off the coast, to besiege Muslim-occupied Acre after setting up camp a mile from the walls on 28 August 1189, near the water supply of the River Belus, which flowed into the sea just south of Acre. The city itself, on the site of modern Akko, a mere fifteen miles south of what is now the Israel–Lebanon border, was garrisoned by 6,000 Muslims. On 15 October 1189 Saladin partially surrounded the crusader force, thereafter obliged to fight on two fronts. The dispute dragged on and cost so many lives because Acre was both an important commercial centre of the Levant and a key port for the resupply of the crusader states.
¹

Constructed on a peninsula jutting southward into the Gulf of Caiaphas (modern Haifa), Acre was protected to the south and west by the sea and a stout sea wall. The north-eastern and eastern walls barring access from the landward side were double and provided at strategic intervals with towers from which enfilading fire could be directed at enemy forces approaching the outer walls. One was called the Accursed Tower, in memory of all the men who had died there. There were two land-gates and two sea-gates opening on to the harbour and an outer anchorage. The walls, repaired and strengthened by Saladin after capturing the city, plus the natural advantages of the site, made Acre a very tough nut to crack.
²
Protected by a decaying mole of Roman construction was a fortified harbour sheltered against all but offshore winds. The harbour entrance was blocked by a heavy chain between the Tower of Flies and another tower, which was lowered to allow friendly ships to enter and winched back up afterwards. The Tower of Flies, so called because it was the site of executions, where corpses attracted swarms of flies, also served as a lighthouse and a customs checkpoint under normal conditions.
³

Early in September the Danish and Frisian crusaders arrived, but their performance in combat on land was unimpressive. They were therefore used to augment the naval blockade of Acre, by which Guy hoped to force a surrender when the supplies of food and arms in the city were exhausted. When news came of the death of William II of Sicily in November, the Sicilian contingent was called home by his successor, Tancred of Lecce.

Wrested from Byzantine rule in 902, the island had been a Muslim emirate until the Norman conquest in 1091. Its resulting population was a mixture of Christian, Muslim and Greek Orthodox. Although Joanna’s husband was known as ‘William the Good’, because he had been the first Western monarch to send aid to the beleaguered Latin Kingdom, he also spoke and wrote Arabic – and took his sexual pleasures in his harem of beautiful Christian and Muslim girls. Many of his counsellors had been Muslims and it was feared that they might take advantage of his death to mount an uprising under the banner of religion. In addition, the Sicilian possessions on the mainland were threatened from the north by forces of the Holy Roman Empire.

After the departure of the Sicilian contingent, troops in the siege camp were also augmented by a scattering of French and Flemish bishops and barons with their vassals. Additional reinforcements came from Tyre after Markgraf Louis III of Thuringia, a cousin of Conrad’s mother, arrived by sea and used his diplomatic skills to persuade Conrad to send troops to the siege of Acre – which he did, on condition that they were not placed under Guy’s command.
⁴
In November the independent fleet of Londoners at last arrived, cock-a-hoop over their success against the Moors in Portugal.
⁵

This piecemeal reinforcement and retirement from the fight by European contingents was a feature of the long ‘holy war’ that lasted two centuries, beginning with the First Crusade in 1095 and ending with the fall of the Latin states after the abortive Ninth Crusade in 1273. It mirrored Saladin’s difficulties in holding his army together for any length of time, composed as it was of knights and foot soldiers drawn from Syria, Mesopotamia, Egypt and Turkestan. They did not owe him any personal loyalty, but stayed fighting only as long as their own emirs could keep them in the field.

Conditions inside the walls of Acre, whose exact positions at the time of the siege cannot now be determined as the area has all been built over, were as grim as in any other besieged city. Food was in such short supply that the normally discarded offal such as entrails, heads and feet were all consumed. Christian prisoners in the city were executed, expelled and hanged from the walls, to reduce the number of useless mouths. Only a small number of healthy young male captives were kept alive to operate the siege engines driving off each crusader attack. Outside the walls, three massive wheeled towers were constructed by the besiegers, said to be 60 cubits or almost 100ft high and rolled close to the walls by muscle power. A huge battering ram with an iron head was also made. To foil the work of sappers and besiegers scaling ladders and in the towers, the defenders hurled great beams down on them, as well as boulders, pots of boiling water and Greek fire. At first, the Greek fire failed to burn the siege towers covered in dampened cowhide, but an improved formula was devised by a Damascene in the city, which did ignite the siege towers, forcing the men inside to run for their lives, pursued by showers of arrows. The man from Damascus refused payment, saying that he had done his work ‘for the love of God’.
⁶

By the time Saladin attacked the siege camp outside Acre on 4 October 1189, Guy was nominally in command of 400 knights and 7,000 foot soldiers. The numbers in the other contingents are not known. In the ensuing battle, Christian losses were heavy, especially among the dedicated Templar knights, whose losses included their Grand Master Gerard de Ridefort, after an estimated 5,000 men of the Saracen garrison sallied out of the city and took in the rear the Christian forces engaged with Saladin’s army. In the confused fighting Conrad was at one time surrounded by the enemy until rescued by Guy. Fighting was so intense and prolonged that Saladin’s chancellor reported to his master that he had counted 4,100 Frankish dead on the Christian right wing alone.
⁷
However, Saladin lacked sufficient forces to consolidate this victory, resulting in a stalemate that lasted fifteen months, during which Conrad sailed north to Tyre and returned with dismantled siege engines that were immediately assembled and used to batter the city walls until destroyed during a sortie on 5 May 1190.

He later travelled north to escort the remnants of the German army arriving by land under Emperor Frederik Barbarossa’s son Frederik of Swabia. The rump of Barbarossa’s army, whittled away by battles en route in Syria and an epidemic in Antioch, arrived at Acre on 3 October.
⁸
About this time Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury landed at Tyre and rode down to Acre at the head of Richard’s advance party. By the time it reached Acre, conditions in the blockaded city and the siege camp outside had become so unhealthy that Queen Sybilla’s two daughters had died. When their grieving mother also succumbed to the contamination of water from human and equine corpses, Guy’s claim to the throne of Jerusalem was extinguished, the title passing to Sybilla’s half-sister Isabella, but Guy refused to stand aside for her. Rank was no protection from illness: nobles and men-at-arms alike suffered scurvy, with painful lumps on limbs and faces and teeth falling out of bleeding gums. Life was little better for the men of Saladin’s relieving army; he himself suffered an outbreak of boils from waist to knee, which made sitting in the saddle agony for him.
⁹

Nor were casualties and deaths from disease limited to humans. Numerous diseases such as glanders, infectious anaemia and equine venereal disease – the last usually fatal for stallions – were transmitted along the closely packed horse lines by droplet and fly bites, killing thousands of horses and making many others unfit for combat. In much the same way as modern warfare causes large numbers of armoured and transport vehicles to be written off, the crusaders lost thousands of horses to disease in addition to those wounded or killed in combat. The march to Jerusalem of the First Crusade was estimated to have cost the lives of 4,500 horses.
¹⁰

Supplying the garrison with food and arms was a perpetual headache for Saladin, due to the harbour being blockaded by crusader ships. Among the ruses resorted to, according to the Muslim historian Baha al-Din, was loading one very large vessel in Beirut in June 1190 with all kinds of food and manning it with sailors dressed in Western style, who had also shaved off their beards, to look like Christians. Crosses were sewn into the sails and live pigs – forbidden to Muslims – were kept on deck. When stopped and challenged by the blockade, men on board replied in the
lingua franca
and pretended their ship was a French vessel heading for the beach by the siege camp, then making a successful dash for the safety of the harbour before they could be stopped. There, as Baha al-Din comments, ‘They were greeted with cries of joy, for hunger was stalking the city.’
¹¹

Count Henry II of Champagne, known to the Muslims as
al-kond Herri
, arrived in July 1190, bringing news that Philip Augustus and Richard – both of whom were his uncles
¹²
– were at long last preparing to depart on crusade. By now the assembled barons had had enough of Guy as leader. To confer legitimacy on a universally acceptable replacement, a council of nobles decided to marry Conrad to 21-year-old Isabella. She was already married to the youthful Humphrey IV of Toron, formerly a captive of Saladin, who had released him without ransom, ostensibly because he spoke a fluent and elegant Arabic and was a naturally charming person. Humphrey’s marriage was annulled, his wishes in the matter being disregarded since he was considered ‘effeminate’ and not sufficiently aggressive for a crusader lord. The decision was endorsed by Isabella’s mother Maria Comnena, who was married to Balian of Ibelin, one of the
seigneurs
responsible for the disaster of Hattin. The senior prelates in the Holy Land being sick, it fell to papal legate Archbishop Lanfranchi and Bishop Philip of Beauvais to annul the marriage on 19 November 1190 and marry Isabella to Conrad on 24 November.