God's War: A New History of the Crusades

these, nine died, the tenth only surviving after illness.⁷⁷ The preachers and propagandists knew what they were talking about. To become a crucesignatus was to invite the torments of the cross.

11. Europe and the Near East at the Time of the Third Crusade

13

To the Siege of Acre

While preaching and recruitment followed similar patterns across Christendom, the nature and timing of military and naval responses were determined by local circumstances. In 1188, William II of Sicily, unlike his northern fellow monarchs, was able to despatch a fleet to the east comprising about fifty ships and 200 knights under the resourceful admiral Margarit of Brindisi, soon nicknamed ‘Neptune’ or ‘king of the seas’.¹ Reinforced from Sicily in 1189, to Saladin’s irritation this squadron protected Tripoli and Antioch while maintaining a piratic patrol along the northern Syrian shore. However, the death of King William in November 1189 ended Sicilian aid with the recall of the admiral, whose next involvement with the holy war found him trying to defend Messina from Richard I’s crusaders in October 1190.

The other Italian maritime powers of Pisa, Genoa and Venice held commercial fleets in the Levant on permanent rotation. In March 1188, those in Alexandria were reputedly forced by the Egyptian authorities to take on board Frankish captives and refugees from the fall of Outremer before being allowed to leave port.² A Pisan fleet under Archbishop Ubaldo, a papal legate, embarked from the west at the end of 1188 and, after wintering in Sicily, provided support for Christian land operations in 1189. By 1190, a Genoese fleet was also assisting at the siege of Acre; in 1191 another was contracted to carry Philip II of France and his military entourage east. The retention of Tyre in 1187 proved crucial in providing such fleets with a base, although it is striking that the Venetians, who had held a third of Tyre since its capture in 1124, played an almost invisible role in the attempt to restore Outremer in 1188–92, perhaps because they initially feared their rights in Tyre had been overborne by the city’s saviour and protector in 1187–8, Conrad of Montferrat.

By contrast, recruits from the rest of western Christendom had to plan their transport from scratch, even where equipment and supplies were readily available, as with shipping around the North Sea. As a consequence, the Third Crusade constituted a series of distinct but associated expeditions that reached the Holy Land in irregular and uneven waves. Apart from the Sicilians and Pisans, some westerners, such as Geoffrey of Lusignan, King Guy’s brother, landed in Palestine and Syria in 1188 or early 1189. Substantial fleets from northern Europe only began to arrive in Palestine in the summer of 1189, followed over the next two years by a more or less constant stream of reinforcements, all, except for the vestigial German force in 1190, by sea. The largest armies were those organized by the monarchs of the west, Frederick Barbarossa, who set out by land in 1189, and Richard I and Philip II, who left together in 1190 using the sea route. The target was Acre. In July 1187, the city had capitulated to Saladin in two days; from August 1189 it took the Christians two years of hard pounding to regain it.³

THE SIEGE OF ACRE: CHRISTIAN REVIVAL 1188–90

By the winter of 1187–8, Frankish Outremer lay shattered at Saladin’s feet, the few remaining fortresses of the interior without hope of relief and the surviving ports vulnerable to assault, siege and naval blockade. Most were mopped up in the new campaign of 1188. Of the major Frankish cities, only Tripoli, Tyre and Antioch survived in Christian hands. Two of the last castles to hold out, Belvoir and Montreal, surrendered in January and May 1189, leaving Tortosa, Margat and Crac des Chevaliers in the county of Tripoli and, temporarily, Beaufort in northern Galilee outside Saladin’s grasp. Although Saladin commissioned works on the jihad, such as that by his future biographer Baha’ al-Din Ibn Shaddad in May 1188, and constantly reminded his coalition of followers of the transcendent significance of his conquests, his approach was pragmatic.⁴ At Antioch in September 1188 he agreed a truce with Bohemund III. On a military and political level he treated the remaining Frankish resisters as he would any other opponent. Confident in his overwhelming supremacy, Saladin was prepared to negotiate their surrender. If diplomacy failed, crushing force was at hand.

However, this strength was not absolute. Crucially, after failing to capture Tyre in July 1187 because of the unexpected arrival there of Conrad of Montferrat from Byzantium, Saladin was unable to press home the siege he began in November 1187. Accompanied only by a single ship’s company of knights, a few score at most, Conrad brought leadership, determination, energy and optimism to the defence of Tyre. Saladin’s move northwards at the start of 1188 left a vital Palestinian port in Christian hands, a haven for Frankish refugees and a base for the naval squadrons that were beginning to arrive from the west. Elsewhere, conquest and occupation were patchy. Each castle, town or city that chose to resist, even in the face of apparently certain defeat, presented a separate problem. The capture of one castle did not secure a region. While whole Frankish populations seemed to have been removed from cities such as Jerusalem and Acre, the fate of the rural Frankish population may have been less clear-cut. Some, like the Frankish woman encountered by the German pilgrim Thietmar at Montreal in 1217, may have stayed on as servile tenants or slaves.⁵ Where Frankish farmers had mixed with the local Syrian Christian peasantry, it is not inconceivable that some continued to work the land unmolested. Frankish administrative units may have survived the conquest intact. Certain settlements quickly resumed their previous legal identity after the Christian reconquest, as at Casal Imbert near Acre, restored in 1191. Whether or not pockets of Frankish settlers survived under the Muslim interregnum of 1187–91, the nature of the conquest did not require annihilation or complete deportation. Palestine was a long-settled land of many different communities, some ancient, some recent. The new Kurdish imperialists hardly altered that. Saladin’s conquest, despite the startling triumphs of 1187, belied the apocalyptic simplicity encouraged by his own and his enemies’ propagandists.

This was vividly illustrated by the fate of Beaufort.⁶ For four months from April 1189 Saladin, camped outside the castle, was persuaded not to attack by a series of negotiating ploys from its quick-witted, Arabic-speaking lord, Reynald of Sidon. Despite careful surveillance, Reynald managed to use the time to reinforce the castle’s defences. His repeated promises of surrender made to Saladin in Arabic were contradicted by his orders in French to his troops inside the castle to resist. The Franks’ move towards Acre in August 1189 caused Saladin to lift the siege, retaining Reynald as a captive. In April 1190, a new round of negotiations ended in the simultaneous surrender of the castle and release of Reynald. This pattern of threat and negotiation, coupled with Saladin’s habitual caution in committing his troops to action, marked the campaigns in 1187–9, during which he was happy to bargain surrenders of castles for safe-conducts and the release of prisoners. One unsympathetic observer, the Iraqi historian Ibn al-Athir, blamed this tactic for allowing the Franks to regroup.⁷ This reliance on negotiation not just brute force carried forward into Saladin’s handling of the Frankish reconquest from August 1189. Implicitly, the policy recognized that, however strategically victorious, only his or his generals’ local physical presence with their troops denied Franks space to manoeuvre. At least from the summer of 1188, small Frankish armed bands were able to travel between the northern enclaves of Antioch and Tripoli and Tyre despite Saladin’s continued operations further inland. Provided some of their outposts remained, Christian recovery was possible.

In Saladin’s essentially political rather than ideological or fanatical approach to his conquests lay both his success and his failure. The iconic, theatrical killing of Reynald of Chatillon after Hattin proved an exception to his usual dealings with important Frankish enemies and captives. While Christian resistance continued, Saladin pursued the traditional pre-1187 policy of accommodating Frankish nobles as prisoners and using their release for tangible, costless rewards. Thus Montreal was exchanged in May 1189 for Humphrey of Toron and Beaufort in 1190 for Reynald of Sidon. During his second attack on Tyre, in the last weeks of 1187, Saladin tried unsuccessfully to use old William of Montferrat as a bargaining chip to persuade his son Conrad to surrender the city. Less obvious were his reasons for releasing most of the surviving defeated Jerusalem leadership in the early summer of 1188, including King Guy, his brother, the Constable Aimery, and the Master of the Templars, Gerard of Ridefort. If he had hoped to undermine Conrad of Montferrat at Tyre or sow dissension in the thin Frankish ranks, he was not immediately rewarded. Gerard of Ridefort promptly led the successful defence of the Templars’ citadel at Tortosa in July 1188. Guy immediately repudiated the oath he had sworn to gain his freedom, by which he had promised to abandon the