favour of Berengaria, was exacerbated at almost every turn. Richard received the allegiance of the Pisans; their competitors, the Genoese, supported Philip. The French king’s demands for half of Cyprus under the terms of the Vezelay agreement were brushed aside. While Philip hired knights at three gold coins a month, Richard offered four. When the count of Flanders died, it was Richard not Philip who acquired his siege engines. Each king attempted to negotiate separately with Saladin over surrender terms for Acre. This partly grew out of their respective support for the opposing claimants to the Jerusalem throne. Philip had formed a close alliance with Conrad of Montferrat, while Richard promoted the interests of Guy of Lusignan, once his vassal in Poitou. Guy, with a small army, had already campaigned with Richard in Cyprus. It says much for Philip’s political weakness and Richard’s practical dominance that, in spite of the French king having the favour of a majority of the important local Outremer barons and with most of the crusade leaders being his vassals, Conrad’s succession remained blocked. Such rivalry at times endangered the military operations, as one side or the other failed to coordinate attacks, which consequently failed. The cumulative effect of this rancour fatally undermined Philip’s commitment to the enterprise. A flavour of the bitterness of the kings’ relations was captured in a nasty little story that circulated in Outremer some years later. This had Richard telling a sick Philip that his only son, Louis, had died. He hoped Philip would die of shock and grief. In fact, Louis was not dead at all. But, the story went on, Philip was so shaken that he immediately arranged to return to the west.6
Above all, Philip may have resented the personal dominance Richard asserted as soon as he reached Acre. With the most treasure and probably the largest number of troops in his pay, Richard was a veteran of proven ability and success. The seizure of Messina and conquest of Cyprus had merely confirmed his reputation, which he delighted in playing up to. He had embarked on crusade with what he claimed to be Excalibur, King Arthur’s sword. A useful prop, he traded it for transport ships and galleys with Tancred of Sicily. The gorgeous apparel, prancing steed, glittering saddle and gold- and silver-decorated sword with which he greeted Isaac Comnenus outside Limassol on 1 May was carefully designed to show ‘he was an exceptional knight’.7 Such visual pyrotechnics proclaimed a direct propagandist message readily understood by observers. When Richard landed at Acre on 8 June, the strenuous celebrations included recitations of stories of ancient heroes ‘as an incitement to modern people to imitate them’. Richard deliberately presented himself as just such an epic warrior, perhaps even in his lifetime earning the nickname ‘c?ur de lion’.8 In all that he did, even if not always successful, Richard was formidable, in politics, in administration, in battle, in public relations and in diplomacy.
Throughout the Third Crusade, Richard’s political objective was unequivocal: the restoration of Outremer, and especially the kingdom of Jerusalem, at least to its pre-Hattin extent. However, within days of landing, Richard opened channels of negotiation with Saladin, primarily though the sultan’s brother al-Adil. These he never entirely closed during his seventeen-month stay in the Holy Land. His conduct at Acre and after showed willingness to fight and to kill, but also to talk and to reach accommodation. As in the west, Richard used force as a means to an end. If Saladin could be threatened or intimidated into granting Richard’s demands, then battles and sieges were not necessary for their own sake. However, if Saladin refused terms, then Richard was prepared to force them from him. This elaborate and often delicate diplomatic dance, performed to the accompaniment of hard military campaigning, characterized the Palestine war of 1191–12, setting a precedent for subsequent crusades in the east. The struggle for advantage between Richard and Saladin was dominated by the mounting military and political problems each faced, yet it was far from the crude slogging match between enemies blind to each other’s interests or character that some portrayals of crusading, including those by contemporaries, imply. Richard was not alone in seeking a negotiated settlement; according to one eyewitness, Philip was involved in the early approaches to Saladin.9 However, according to Ibn Shaddad, who was also there, the policy proved controversial, at least before Acre fell, meeting with opposition from other Christian leaders. This was hardly surprising as, at the time, the events of the Third Crusade were depicted spiritually as a test of religious faith and temporally as a global contest, infidel Asia and Africa ranged against Christian Europe, the siege of Acre a new Trojan War. According to Ibn Shaddad, Richard brushed aside any criticism in typical style: ‘The reins of power are entrusted to me. I rule and nobody rules me.’10
The negotiations, which began on 17 June, probed each side’s aims and vulnerability. Gifts were exchanged and initial bargaining positions staked out. Roger of Howden shrewdly identified Saladin’s irreducible insistence on retaining Jerusalem and Transjordan, the one the propaganda totem of his empire, the other the vital land bridge that held its Syrian and Egyptian halves together. However, Richard saw no need to compromise when the military situation increasingly favoured him, with the Christian siege machines maintaining an incessant bombardment of Acre’s walls. Saladin’s attacks and scorched earth policy failed to impede progress. Christian optimism was sustained by the traditional accompaniment of divine visions and stories of individual heroism. More prosaically, with neatly judged psychology, Richard offered to pay for every stone removed from the city walls, starting at two gold coins each but rising to four, a popular move with soldiers ‘as greedy for glory as for gain’.11 By extending his hiring of mercenaries, Richard was adding cohesion and direction to the siege. With no let-up in the attacks, it soon became apparent to the garrison commanders that they were facing an unpleasant but unavoidable choice: surrender or death. Saladin was reluctant, but his commanders in Acre capitulated on 12 July. The terms agreed, apparently negotiated mainly though the mediation of Conrad of Montferrat, spared the lives of the defenders, their wives and children, in return for a ransom of 200,000 dinars, the release of over 1,500 Christian prisoners, and the return of the relic of the True Cross taken at Hattin. Conrad received a hefty negotiating fee of 10,000 dinars. The entire contents of Acre, Saladin’s main armaments depot in the Holy Land, with provisions, artillery and perhaps as many as seventy galleys, were handed over to the Christians. The loss of much of his navy was as damaging militarily to Saladin as the fall of the city was to his prestige, Ibn Shaddad remembering that he ‘was more affected than a bereft mother or a distracted lovesick girl’.12 Now Saladin could only withdraw, prevaricate over the details of the surrender agreement and wait on events, perhaps hoping, not unreasonably, that in victory Christian rivalries would re-emerge to undermine their hard-won success.
If so, he almost had his wish. As the two kings set about dividing Acre between them, those in the army attached to neither protested. Despite their contribution to the siege, they were to receive nothing. Duke Leopold of Austria seems to have felt especially aggrieved that his claims to a share of the booty had been brusquely rejected. Some said that, on Richard’s orders, Leopold’s banner had been thrown down after the entry into Acre to signal the denial of his claim to the spoils. Leopold and others left the Holy Land in disgust.13 Although Richard received most of the blame for this policy, both kings clearly agreed to it. It fulfilled the assumptions that lay beneath the Vezelay accord and, more widely, recognized the special position of authority the barons of Jerusalem had for years been prepared to afford western monarchs in the Holy Land. As it was, both kings displayed a sense of this responsibility by sending help to Antioch. However, this unity proved deceptive. As Richard laconically wrote a few weeks later to his unpopular chancellor and viceroy in England, William Longchamp bishop of Ely, ‘within fifteen days the king of France left us to return to his own land’.14
Even Philip II’s most ardent apologists found his sudden abandonment of the crusade hard to justify. It was easy to explain. The death of Philip of Flanders at Acre on 1 June activated a series of rearrangements to the lordships of the territories between the royal lands around Paris and the county of Flanders, which were vital to Capetian security. Philip stood to gain the strategically and economically important region of Artois and be able to manipulate the contested Flemish succession to his material advantage. But he needed to be present to ensure the process went smoothly. His own health, fears for that of his infant son, the need for him to find a new wife as well as the persistent humiliations, real or imagined, he had to endure from Richard added to Philip’s conviction that he must return home immediately. His departure, especially as he left most of his troops behind, may not have displeased Richard unduly as it consolidated his control over the enterprise.
The speed with which Philip acted after the fall of Acre suggests he had already made up his mind but, with characteristic circumspection, had successfully concealed his intention, not least from his own allies, particularly Conrad of Montferrat, whose prospects were closely bound up with the French king’s presence and support. Having already declined to commit himself to remaining in the Holy Land for three years or until Jerusalem was captured, on 22 July Philip announced his decision to leave. This went down very badly with most of his followers. But when a hardly serious request to be given half of Cyprus in return for a commitment to stay was refused by Richard, the die was cast. On 28 July, after a two-day hearing on the merits of the claims of Guy and Conrad to the throne of Jerusalem, the two kings announced a compromise that reflected Richard’s ascendancy. Guy was to remain king for life, but the succession would devolve after his death on Conrad and Isabella and their heirs. The revenues of the kingdom were to be divided equally between Guy and Conrad, while the latter was granted a lordship in the north based on Tyre. To balance this, Guy’s brother Geoffrey was to receive the county of Jaffa and Ascalon if and when it
