struggle in Outremer. Initially, he did not attempt to challenge Conrad of Montferrat’s control of Tyre, preferring to reassemble his family and supporters at Antioch and Tripoli. One direct and possibly intended consequence of the stubbornness of the castle garrisons of the interior was that Saladin was distracted and his forces stretched. The Iraqi intellectual, diplomat and lawyer Baha’ al-Din Ibn Shaddad, who met Saladin and entered his service in the spring of 1188, has left a telling account of the sultan’s necessary restlessness simply to hold his newly created empire together let alone extinguish the embers of Frankish opposition.8
While he was attempting to reduce Beaufort in August 1189, Saladin received the startling news that King Guy was marching south, apparently intent of besieging Acre. The richest port on the Palestinian coast, after its surrender a few days after Hattin Saladin turned Acre into one of his main garrison towns and arms depots. The sultan’s eagerness to secure Beaufort delayed his response, allowing Guy to negotiate the awkward coastal march to begin what proved to be the start of the Christian counter-attack. It is often said that King Guy’s attack on Acre demonstrated, in Runciman’s phrase, ‘desperate foolhardiness’.9 Outnumbered, isolated and exposed, Guy’s force, perhaps only a few thousand strong in all, was pitted against a well-protected walled city defended by a substantial garrison probably larger than the initial besieging army. At Guy’s rear lay a hostile Christian rival, Conrad of Montferrat, controlling the only serviceable friendly port, and a significant, battle-hardened Ayyubid army under Saladin himself only a couple of days’ march away. Yet Guy’s attack on Acre may not have been so rash, surprising or unexpected. Both Arabic and western sources record the building-up of Frankish forces in and around Tyre and in the county of Tripoli in 1189. Skirmishing and raiding from Tyre increased in intensity. The gathering pace of reinforcements from the west, as well as the release of the Jerusalem leaders, demanded some form of action, if only to provide occupation for the growing crowds of arms-bearers congregating in Tyre and Tripoli. Saladin’s forces had been reduced to save money and ease the political tensions involved in maintaining a large coalition army in the field for long periods without plentiful new supplies of booty. Successful conquest left the sultan’s victorious army unable to plunder newly won territories now controlled by their own leaders. With their strength increasing, a Frankish advance was inevitable. Early in July 1189, an attempted foray towards Sidon was repulsed after some sharp exchanges.
By this time, the military options of the Frankish leadership had become mired in political conflict. In the early spring of 1189, Guy led his small army south from Tripoli to Tyre to reclaim the last remnant of the kingdom he had lost two years before. Conrad of Montferrat refused to countenance Guy’s restoration and forbade his entry to Tyre. Conrad’s grounds, depending on the account followed, rested on a sort of right of conquest argument. He wrote to Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury of his achievements: ‘for the salvation of the Christian people… I have preserved and am preserving Tyre’, a fact ‘grievous and insupportable’ to Guy. Arabic sources have Conrad claiming regency in Tyre on behalf of the monarchs of the west, who would eventually settle all claims to kingship, an echo of the succession schemes floated in Jerusalem in 1184–5.10 Conrad could have learnt of these from the refugees who fled to Tyre after Hattin, including Raymond III of Tripoli, a central figure in the succession crisis of 1183–6 and the leading opponent of Guy. Although he died soon after, Raymond was still alive in Tyre in August 1187, weeks after Conrad’s arrival.
A king denied his kingdom, Guy decided to dig in outside Tyre, presumably in the hope of winning political adherents from the western crusaders, who were beginning to arrive in large numbers. However, after four months, he had made no progress against either Conrad or Saladin. His options were narrowing. Saladin’s army was besieging Beaufort, uncomfortably close to any assault on Sidon, as the raid of July 1189 demonstrated. To survive, let alone regain authority, Guy needed to take action. His lack of alternatives provided him with an opportunity when western reinforcements came on the spring passage from the west, notably the Pisans. Arriving in April under the papal legate Archbishop Ubaldo, they soon fell out with Conrad over competing rights in Tyre. With other western recruits and Outremer Franks alienated by Conrad, they joined Guy outside Tyre. Conrad may have underestimated the effect of the post-Hattin propaganda in the west. Instead of a rank failure, Guy was portrayed as one of the heroic defenders of the cross, a companion of the martyred Reynald of Chatillon. He was also the anointed king of Jerusalem and still married, happily it appeared, to the accepted heiress Sybil. The Templars, whose reputation remained high in the west, continued to give him their support, even though the Hospitallers sided with Conrad. By August 1189, with Saladin still distracted at Beaufort, Guy had amassed the core of a useful fighting force of a few hundred knights, some thousands of infantry and the Pisan fleet.
12. Syria at the Time of the Third Crusade
The timing of his advance south, an extremely risky manoeuvre if Saladin had decided to oppose it, may also have been dictated by events far from the Holy Land. News of the preparations in Europe circulated freely in the Christian camps at Tyre, brought by crusaders and in diplomatic correspondence. It was to take only five months for Saladin to learn of Frederick I’s departure from Germany in May 1189 from Byzantine sources via his son at Aleppo.11 A similar length of time would have been ample for Guy to have heard of the impending descent on the Levant of large fleets from northern Europe in the autumn passage. The German crusade would hardly serve Guy’s interests against those of an imperial vassal, Conrad of Montferrat, unless he had already reimposed his leadership in the field. The prospect of massive reinforcements may have helped persuade Guy that the dash for Acre was not as reckless as it at first seemed. The coincidence of timing is compelling. Guy established his camp outside Acre on 28 August 1189. Before the end of September, he had been joined by large squadrons from Denmark, Germany, Frisia, Flanders and England, as well as a substantial contingent of northern Frenchmen led by James of Avesnes, one of the nobles who had taken the cross with Henry II and Philip II at Gisors in January 1188.12
Even so, despite his following and the prospect of reinforcements, Guy’s was a desperate adventure that avoided destruction only because of Saladin’s characteristic caution. Since its capture in July 1187, the sultan had added to Acre’s defences and improved its harbour. He rejected the option of trying to stop Guy reaching Acre, preferring to rely on its walls and garrison resisting for long enough to permit his full force to assemble and trap the Christian army on the plain outside the city. Saladin reached Acre three days after Guy, by which time the Christians had tried to encircle the city, had launched an unsuccessful assault on the walls and had established a fortified base camp on a tell (or man-made hill) to the east of the city, the hill of Toron, or Tell al-Musallabin. Saladin quickly established contact with the Acre garrison and secured landward access to the city, but a frontal assault on the Christian camp on 15 September failed to dislodge or overrun it.
13. The Siege of Acre 1189
The key battle was fought on 4 October. Guy’s army had grown to more than 30,000 according to one Arabic estimate and now included, alongside the thousands of westerners, a reluctant Conrad of Montferrat and his supporters from Tyre, their presence showing that, politically at least, Guy’s gamble had paid off. Seeing the danger of allowing the Muslim field army to grow while the Acre garrison remained untouched, the Christians decided to try to destroy the sultan’s force or, at least, drive it off. A full-scale assault was launched on Saladin’s camp. After a fierce pitched battle with heavy casualties on both sides, including Gerard of Ridefort, the Christians were bloodily repulsed, but their camp stayed intact. Saladin’s confidant, Ibn Shaddad, claimed to have firm evidence that over 4,000 Christians had been killed on the left wing alone.13 The heaps of rotting corpses set off infection and disease in both camps. Despite the defeat, one Christian objective was achieved when, in mid- October, Saladin withdrew from front-line investment of the Christian positions to await more troops and a fleet from Egypt. The following weeks and months saw both sides receiving reinforcements, but with neither able to press home a decisive military advantage or dislodge the other, a grim stalemate ensued. The two armies dug in; the Christians, only partially encircling the city by land, were themselves partially surrounded by Saladin’s field army. A form of trench warfare began, the Franks constructing a great protective ditch and rampart around their camp. Frequent raids and close-combat skirmishes sparked across the no man’s lands between the camps and between the Christians and the city, with no advantage gained by anyone. With the arrival of Egyptian fleets from late October, the Christian hold of the sea was contested and placed in jeopardy.
The survival of the Christian force at Acre depended almost entirely on the appearance of fleets from the west. Only the large numbers of crusaders sustained a siege that developed into a struggle against disease and low morale as much as with the sapping attritional fighting. While fleets played significant if underreported roles in both the First and Second Crusades, the new enterprise, the great German host excepted, was overwhelmingly
