Richard & John: Kings at War (40 page)

For three days Richard himself, Henry of Champagne and the other great nobles laboured alongside the ordinary soldiers, trying to repair the walls of Jaffa. By midnight on 4 August the king and his comrades were just preparing to bed down in a makeshift camp outside the town. Alerted by his spies to the Lionheart’s vulnerability, Saladin prepared an elaborate commando raid. Picked Turkish and Mamluk veterans were earmarked as a snatch squad to seize Richard while he slept, and there would be a showy diversionary attack on the town meanwhile. The Saracens, however, were never as good as the Franks at irregular operations during the Third Crusade, and this time the scheme went wrong because the Turks and Mamluks could not agree among themselves which should form the infantry and which the cavalry. The grave delay caused by this contretemps meant that dawn was breaking when they finally made their kidnapping bid.
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A Genoese mercenary, answering a call of nature, by sheer chance detected the approach of the commandos and raised the alarm. Richard just had time to get his men into battle stations, though many were asleep or half-dressed when the first alarum went up. His defence formation was solid, with the front rank composed of kneeling men, each protected by his shield, with the butt of the lance on the ground and the shaft facing upwards like a sharpened stake. Behind this close-packed phalanx were archers, each with a bow positioned between the heads of the kneeling infantry. The archers worked in pairs, one loading and the other shooting, exchanging weapons all the time so that there was a continuous fire.
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Heavily outnumbered, this steel hedgehog broke up charge after charge from the foe, who became discouraged and began veering off into the town. After eight hours of this inconclusive fighting, the Franks sensed a faltering in the pulse of the Saracens and went over to the attack. Once again the Muslims broke and fled. Lovingly Ambroise registered the names of the aristocrats among the ‘happy few’ that stood with Richard that day: count Henry, the earl of Leicester, Bartholomew de Mortimer, Ralf de Mauleon, Andrew de Chauveney, Gerard de Furnival, Roger de Sacey, William de l’Etang, Hugh de Nevill and Henry Teuton.
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The crusaders claimed 700 enemy dead and 1,500 horses slain in the battle, for a handful of dead in their own ranks; they did, however, admit to large numbers of wounded. Contemporaries thought Richard’s victory at Jaffa miraculous and at this point in his career he definitively became a creature of legend as well as a figure in history. Baha al-Din testified that Richard rode the entire length of the Saracen army in full view of his foes, and not one of them dared to attack him. Ambroise reported that Safadin sent him two Arab steeds as a token of his admiration.
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Throughout the battle he was often only a hair’s breadth from defeat, but his energy, commitment and acumen saved the day. He seemed to be everywhere, both in the thick of the fighting and directing operations with a serene Olympian detachment. Richard possessed a clear aura of invincibility for whenever he was matched against Saladin - whether at the siege of Acre, in the mobile battle of Arsuf, attacking the caravan at Tel el-Hesi, or in the two very different battles of Jaffa - the Lionheart always emerged on top. Nonetheless, his victories were not miraculous and are rationally explicable. He was a military genius who was a master of every last one of the arts of war and he could enthuse his men by charisma and success, so that they felt themselves to be part of an ever-victorious army. It has been well said that the brilliant defence at Jaffa was the beginning of the legend of the ‘thin red line’ in the English army, the foundation of a spirit and ethos that would afterwards manifest itself at Crecy, Poitiers, Agincourt, Blenheim, Minden and Waterloo.
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The Saracen position, on the other hand, was disastrous. Saladin had briefly seemed to possess the same martial attributes as Richard after Hattin, but he was only an average captain and by 1192 increasingly plagued by factionalism, indiscipline, dissent and low morale in his army. Saladin rode off in a fury after hearing how badly his troops had behaved in battle, refusing to charge and ride down the Christian lines even though repeatedly urged to. After the second defeat at Jaffa there was nothing for it but further negotiations, for another attempt at battle might lead this badly mauled army to disintegrate from mass desertions.
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Predictably the talks again foundered on the immovable rock of Ascalon. Richard was desperate to return to Europe but he had to save face, for otherwise his enemies could say that all his successes in the field were a mere smokescreen to mask the essential utter failure of the Third Crusade. He tried bluff and sent a message to Saladin as follows: ‘How long am I to make advances to the Sultan that he will not accept? More than anything I used to be keen to return to my own country, but now that winter is here and the rain has begun, I have decided to remain.’
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The poker hand the Lionheart was playing was actually a double bluff, for he fell ill, perhaps not fortuitously after summoning the French to his side and learning from Henry of Champagne that they would not come and refused ever to serve under him again. Superstitious souls who spoke of divine anger liked to link this refusal to the sudden death of Hugh, duke of Burgundy, in Acre that very month.
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It did not take Saladin long to learn both of the French refusal and of Richard’s illness. His hopes rose, but he was chivalrous enough to reply to a request for peaches and pears from the English king by sending him groaning bowls of fruit, and snow with which to make a primitive fruit salad. Saladin’s spies further brought him news of despondency in the crusader camp and apparently shrinking numbers in Jaffa. Saladin thought the time was ripe for another attack and got his army on the march. But on 27 August he received another message from Richard, conveyed through the official envoy. Richard laid his cards on the table and virtually admitted that he needed a face-saver by asking what compensation the Sultan was prepared to offer him for the loss of Ascalon. Saladin immediately realised that Ascalon was not non-negotiable after all, that Richard might be prepared to give it up for a suitable consideration. The chance of getting rid of the Franks’s greatest asset was too tempting. He halted his army’s march and sent a secret envoy with fresh proposals. Yet even as he sought some way around the Ascalon problem, the weary Richard unilaterally decided he would give up the citadel without compensation.
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Perhaps it was his illness that led a drained Richard to make this crucial concession which has been so much criticised, then and now. Certainly he was still very ill at the end of August and seemed uncertain from day to day whether he had given up Ascalon without compensation or whether peace depended on the generosity of Saladin’s offer; there is circumstantial evidence that he was hallucinating and may not have been entirely clear about the day-to-day drift of events. At any rate Saladin pounced and after conferring with his emirs, declared that the following would produce an immediate peace: Ascalon would be demolished and not rebuilt until three years from the following Easter, 28 March 1193 (i.e. in 1196); the crusaders would be allowed to hold Jaffa and the coastal strip up to Acre without let or hindrance; there would be no fighting and both sides would be allowed to travel freely; and Christian pilgrims would be allowed to visit the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and trade in the Muslim territories.
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These terms were simply a recognition of necessity: long-term the crusader army would shrink while Saladin’s would augment; the French refused to lift a finger to help Richard while pharisaically condemning him for betrayal of the crusade; most of all, events in England called the Lionheart home; for all he knew, his brother John might already have usurped the kingdom. To save face, Richard sent a message to Saladin that this was merely a three-year truce, not a permanent peace, that when he had settled matters in the Angevin empire he could come again with a new army to try conclusions with the Sultan. Saladin accepted this gracefully in the idiom of a sporting wager and wrote back: ‘He entertained such an exalted opinion of King Richard’s honour, magnanimity and general excellence, that he would rather lose his dominions to him than to any king he had ever seen - always supposing that he was obliged to lose his dominions at all.’
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The peace was ratified and the rival rulers departed, Richard to Acre, Saladin to Jerusalem. Needless to say, Richard’s enemies converted a piece of
realpolitik
into a black legend of treachery and venality. French writers and chroniclers roundly asserted that Richard had been bribed to give up Ascalon, though more perceptive European observers saw clearly that there were no other realistic options in Palestine, that Ascalon would have been lost anyway sooner or later.
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A middle-of-the road faction pinned the blame for the ‘disaster’ on Richard’s illness, asserting that he was not
compos mentis
when he agreed to Saladin’s terms, that whereas Turks, Arabs and Mamluks could not defeat the Lionheart, the diseases of the Middle East had, thus depriving the crusaders by ill-luck of the prize they had secured by their martial prowess. There is some truth in this, for Richard was extremely ill, even close to death at times, and was too weak to do much more than be carried up to Acre.
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Some stated, more pragmatically, that Richard was running out of money and that his treasury was exhausted, not least through having to subvent the ungrateful and uncooperative French. Richard did not himself journey to Jerusalem, although many crusaders did take advantage of the pilgrimage offer made in the treaty. It was speculated that Richard wanted to lead by example, that if he went to the Holy City every last soldier would follow him, so how then could he ever raise ‘pilgrims’ for the intended Fourth Crusade?
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For precisely the same reasons, Saladin rejected Richard’s request that he apply a quota system on Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem and only allow in those he (Richard) approved. Saladin knew that a peaceful pilgrimage was in itself a disincentive for a Christian to serve in a crusading army again.
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But if Richard was machiavellian in this matter, he was an upright paladin elsewhere. Not only did he pay all his debts but he took the trouble to ransom William de Preaux, who had been captured in the ambush a year before, releasing ten Muslim lords in exchange.
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The peace formalities took a month to be tied up completely, since Henry of Champagne and the French lords, who took a pacific oath independently of Richard, demanded in turn that all the leading emirs, not just Saladin, should do the same. Then envoys were sent to Bohemond of Antioch and Muslim lords in far-flung locations. But finally there was nothing to stop Richard departing. The two queens Joan and Berengaria had sailed from Acre on 29 September and Richard followed in their wake two weeks later on 9 October.
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He had time to reflect ruefully that neither side in the Third Crusade had won and that each had fought the other to a standstill, with the crucial factors perhaps being Muslim numbers on one side and Frankish command of the sea on the other. Given the divided command, the intransigence of the French and the massive logistical problems Richard faced, the amazing thing was that he achieved as much as he did. Yet it is certain that the Lionheart’s exploits prolonged the life of the crusader states for another century.
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Lovers of drama will always regret that Richard and Saladin never met, but then neither did Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots or General Gordon and the Mahdi. Certainly no two captains of such prestige ever clashed again in the Middle East until Tamerlane’s fateful encounter with Bayazid on the field of Angora in 1402. Ironically, having repelled the Frankish invader, Saladin died very soon afterwards, on 4 March 1193, almost as though with the departure of Richard his life’s work was over. Alternatively one can speculate that it was the very stress of having to deal with the most brilliant Western commander in the entire period 1000-1300 that brought on his sudden death. Richard and Saladin had both on occasions acted with ruthless brutality, but their chivalric effusions and mutual admiration won the pagan many friends in Christendom, to the point where Dante included him in the pantheon of virtuous unbelievers in the
Inferno
, alongside Hector, Aeneas and Julius Caesar. It was Saladin’s fate to depart the vale of fears almost the moment Richard had departed. But Richard, having endured his lliad, was now to face his Odyssey.

10

ALTHOUGH BERENGARIA AND JOAN had an uneventful passage to Brindisi and then proceeded to Rome, Richard’s voyage had all the travails of Odysseus’s homeward journey. One of the great mysteries in Richard’s life, about which professional historians have been unaccountably silent, is exactly what happened to his crusading army at the end of the campaign in Outremer. The host that had terrorised Lisbon, laid waste Sicily and convulsed Cyprus, seems to have been no more, or else Richard could surely have cut a swathe with fire and sword through Europe just as he had on the outward journey. The inference is that losses in the Holy Land, more from disease than battle, must have been catastrophic; one estimate is that only one in twelve of those who had left England remained.
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But the mystery does not end there. What happened to Richard’s battle fleet? Ships cannot travel overland, as Richard now proposed to do, and in any case his manpower losses would not have enabled him to man them all. The only warranted conclusion is that Richard’s army by and large made its way back to England on a
sauve qui peut
basis, and that the warships, once beached in European ports, were simply abandoned. The central fact Richard had to contend with was that neither he nor his fleet could return via the Straits of Gibraltar. The great Arab geographer Edrisi had already cautioned the unwary about what awaited anyone foolhardy enough to venture into the Atlantic in winter, but the plain fact was that even if Richard had been prepared to take the risk of facing 60-foot waves in galleys that would be overwhelmed by waves one-quarter that height, medieval technology ruled out that possibility. East-flowing currents through the Straits were faster than the speed of any twelfth-century vessel plying in the opposite direction.
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For Richard’s troops, the outgoing voyage through the ‘Pillars of Hercules’ had been a one-way ticket in more senses than one.