Jerusalem: The Biography

1189–93

LIONHEART: CHIVALRY AND SLAUGHTER

On 4 July 1190, Richard the Lionheart, King of England, and Philip II Augustus, King of France, set out on the Third Crusade to liberate Jerusalem. The thirty-three-year-old Richard had just inherited his father Henry II’s Angevin empire – England and half of France. Possessed of abundant vitality, red-haired and athletic, he was as brash and extrovert as Saladin was patient and subtle. He was a man of his time, both a writer of saucy troubadour songs and a pious Christian who, overcome with his sinfulness, threw himself naked before his clergy and scourged himself with whips.

Eleanor of Aquitaine’s favourite son showed little interest in women, but the nineteenth-century claim that he was homosexual has been discredited. War was his real love and he ruthlessly squeezed the English to pay for his Crusade, joking, ‘I’d have sold London if there’d been a buyer.’ As England vibrated with Crusader revivalism,^* the Jews were targeted in the cull that culminated in the mass-suicide of York, the English Masada. By then, Richard had departed. He sailed for Jerusalem and wherever he landed he presented himself as the personification of the royal warrior. He always wore scarlet, the colour of war, and brandished a sword that he claimed was Excalibur. In Sicily, he rescued his sister, the widowed Queen Joanna, from the new king, and sacked Messina. When he reached Cyprus, ruled by a Byzantine prince, he simply conquered the island and then sailed for Acre with twenty-five galleys.

On 8 June 1191, Richard landed and joined the King of France at the siege, where bouts of fighting alternated with interludes of fraternizing between the camps. Saladin and his courtiers watched his arrival and were impressed with the ‘great pomp’ of ‘this mighty warrior’ and with his ‘passion for war’.

The battlefield had become a plague-ridden shanty encampment of royal marquees, filthy huts, soup kitchens, markets, bathhouses and brothels. That the prostitutes fascinated the Muslims is evident from the account of Imad, Saladin’s secretary, who visited Richard’s camp and exhausted even his reservoir of pornographic metaphors as he ogled these ‘singers and coquettes, tinted and painted, blue-eyed with fleshy thighs’, who ‘ plied a brisk trade, brought their silver anklets up to touch their golden earrings, invited swords to sheath, made javelins rise toward shields, gave birds a place to peck with their beaks, caught lizard after lizard in their holes, [and] guided pens to inkwells’.

If even Imad admitted that ‘a few foolish mamluks slipped away’ to sample these Frankish coquettes, many must have done so. Richard’s energy changed the nature of the war. Saladin was already ill; soon both the European kings fell sick too, but even on his sickbed Richard brandished a crossbow, firing bolts at the enemy camp while fleet after fleet delivered the cream of European knighthood.

Saladin, like ‘a bereft mother, on horseback urging people to perform their jihad duty’ was outmanned and outfought. After the early departure of the jealous Philip Augustus, Richard took command – ‘I rule and nobody rules me’ – but his forces too were suffering. He opened negotiations, Saladin sending his worldly but more aloof brother Safadin as his envoy, though these pragmatists were still shadow-boxing with everything to play for. They were evenly matched, each fielding 20,000 men, both struggling to impose their will on their insubordinate, troublesome grandees and polyglot armies.

Meanwhile Acre could hold out no longer and its governor started to negotiate surrender. ‘More affected than a distracted lovesick girl’, Saladin had little choice but to acquiesce in Acre’s capitulation, promising the return of the True Cross and the release of 1,500 prisoners. But his priority was to defend Jerusalem. He dragged his feet on the terms in order to encourage divisions among the Crusaders, save money and delay their campaign. But Lionheart meant business and called Saladin’s bluff.

On 20 August, he shepherded 3,000 bound Muslim prisoners on to the plain in view of Saladin’s army and then butchered the men, women and children. So much for the legend of chivalry. The horrified Saladin sent in his cavalry, but it was too late. Afterwards, he beheaded all Frankish prisoners who fell into his hands.

Five days later, Richard marched down the coast towards Jaffa, the port of Jerusalem, his army chanting ‘Sanctum Sepulchrum adjuva! Help us, Holy Sepulchre!’ On 7 September, Lionheart found Saladin and his army blocking the way at Arsuf. Richard’s challenge was to use massed infantry to exhaust Saladin’s waves of charging, curveting cavaliers and horse-archers until he could unleash the thundering power of his knights. Richard held back until a Hospitaller galloped forward. Then he led the full charge that smashed into the Muslims. Saladin desperately threw in his royal guard of mamluks – known as the Ring. Faced with a ‘complete rout’, the sultan withdrew just in time, his army ‘conserved for the protection of Jerusalem’. At one point, he was guarded by just seventeen men. Afterwards he was wrung out and too downhearted even to eat.

Saladin rode to Jerusalem to celebrate Ramadan and prepare her defences. Richard knew that while Saladin’s army and empire were intact, the Crusaders could not hold Jerusalem even if they captured her – which made it sensible to negotiate. ‘The Muslims and the Franks are done for,’ Richard wrote to Saladin, ‘the land is ruined at the hands of both sides. All we have to talk about is Jerusalem, the True Cross and these lands. Jerusalem is the centre of our worship which we shall never renounce.’ Saladin explained what al-Quds meant to the Muslims: ‘Jerusalem is ours just as much as yours. Indeed for us it is greater than it is for you, for it is where Our Prophet came on his Night Journey and the gathering place of the angels.’

Richard was willing to learn. Flexible and imaginative, he now proposed a compromise: his sister Joanna would marry Safadin. The Christians would get the coast and access to Jerusalem; the Muslims the hinterland, with Jerusalem the capital of King Safadin and Queen Joanna under Saladin’s sovereignty. Saladin agreed to this in order to draw out Richard but Joanna was indignant: ‘How could she possibly allow a Muslim to have carnal knowledge of her?’ Richard claimed it was a joke, and then told Safadin: ‘I shall marry you to my niece.’ Saladin was bemused: ‘Our best course is to fight on with the jihad – or die ourselves.’

On 31 October, Richard set off slowly towards Jerusalem while continuing to negotiate with the urbane Safadin. They met in magnificent tents, exchanged gifts and attended each other’s feasts. ‘We must have a foothold in Jerusalem,’ insisted Richard. When he was criticized for the negotiations by his French knights, he beheaded some Turkish prisoners and ghoulishly posed their heads around the camp.

At this fraught moment, Saladin received bad news: his dissolute nephew, Taki al-Din, who had been trying to build his own private empire, was dead. Saladin hid the letter, ordered his tent cleared, then ‘wept bitterly, choked by his tears’, before washing his face with rosewater and returning to the command: it was no time to show weakness. He inspected Jerusalem and her new Egyptian garrison.

On 23 December, Richard advanced to Le Thoron des Chevaliers (Latrun) where he, his wife and his sister celebrated Christmas in splendour. On 6 January 1192, amid rain, cold and mud, Richard had reached Bayt Nuba, 12 miles from the city. The French and English barons wanted Jerusalem at any cost but Richard tried to convince them that he did not have the men for a siege. Saladin waited in Jerusalem hoping that the rain and snow would discourage the Crusaders. On 13 January, Richard retreated.^*

It was stalemate. Saladin used fifty stonemasons and 2,000 Frankish prisoners to refortify Jerusalem, demolishing the higher floors of Our Mary of Jehoshaphat at the foot of the Mount of Olives and the Coenaculum on Mount Zion to provide the stones. Saladin, Safadin and their sons themselves worked on the walls.

Richard meanwhile captured and fortified Ashkelon, the gateway to Egypt, offering Saladin a partition of Jerusalem, with Muslims keeping the Haram and Tower of David. But these talks, almost comparable in complexity to those between Israelis and Palestinians in the twenty-first century, were in vain: both still hoped to possess Jerusalem totally. On 20 March, Safadin and his son Kamil visited Richard with an offer of access to the Sepulchre and the return of the True Cross: in the classic beau geste of chivalry, Lionheart dubbed young Kamil, girding him with the belt of knighthood.

Yet this theatre of chivalry was unpopular with the mutinous French knights, who demanded the immediate storming of Jerusalem. On 10 June Richard led them back to Bayt Nuba, where they proceeded to set up camp in the parching heat and for three weeks argued about what to do next. Richard relieved the tension by riding out on reconnaissance, at some point reaching Montjoie, where he dismounted to say his prayers but held up his shield to hide the glory of Jerusalem, supposedly saying, ‘Lord God, I pray thee not to let me see thy Holy City that I could not deliver from thine enemies!’

Lionheart employed spies in the sultan’s army who now informed him that one of Saladin’s princes was leading a caravan of reinforcements from Egypt. Richard, sporting Bedouin dress, led out 500 knights and 1,000 light cavalry, to ambush the Egyptians. He dispersed the troops, captured the caravan, bagging 3,000 camels and ample packhorses of supplies – enough perhaps to march on Jerusalem or Egypt. ‘This was grievous to Saladin’s heart,’ said his minister Ibn Shaddad, ‘but I tried to calm him.’ Within a fraught Jerusalem, Saladin was close to panic, his stress unbearable. He poisoned the wells around the city and positioned his meagre contingents under the command of his sons. His armies were inadequate and he anxiously recalled Safadin from Iraq.

On 2 July, he convened a council of war, but his amirs were just as unreliable as Richard’s barons. ‘The best thing we can do,’ said Ibn Shaddad, opening the meeting, ‘is assemble at the Dome of the Rock to prepare ourselves for death.’ Then there was silence, the amirs sitting so still it was ‘as though there were birds on their heads’. The council debated whether the leader should make a last stand within the city or avoid being trapped in a siege. The sultan himself knew that without his own presence his henchmen would soon surrender. Finally Saladin said, ‘You’re the army of Islam. Turn your reins away and they’ll roll up these lands like a scroll. It’s your responsibility – that’s why you’ve been funded by the treasury all these years.’ The amirs agreed to fight, but the next day they returned to say they feared a siege like that of Acre. Was it not better to fight outside the walls and at worst, temporarily lose Jerusalem? The generals insisted that Saladin or one of his sons had to stay in Jerusalem or else his Turks would fight his Kurds.

Saladin stayed – and his spies kept him well informed about Richard’s problems. As 15 July, the anniversary of the capture of Jerusalem in 1099, approached, the Crusaders discovered yet another fragment of the True Cross, a timely miracle which elated the ranks. But the French under the Duke of Burgundy and the Anglo-Angevins under Richard were almost at daggers drawn, taunting each other with silly slogans and filthy ditties. Richard, the troubadour, penned a jingle of his own.

Saladin was almost sick with the tension: on the night of Thursday 3 July, Ibn Shaddad was so worried that he prescribed the comfort of prayer: ‘We are in the most blessed place we could be on this day.’ At Friday prayers the sultan should make two ritual rakas, bows from the waist then two full prostrations. Saladin performed these rituals and openly wept. By nightfall, his spies reported that the Franks were packing up. On 4 July, Richard led the retreat.

Saladin was exuberant, riding out to meet his favourite son Zahir, kissing him between the eyes and escorting him into Jerusalem, where the prince stayed with his father in the palace of the Master of the Hospitallers. But both sides were exhausted: Richard was receiving reports that back in England his brother John was close to open rebellion. If he wished to save his lands, he needed to return home soon.

Encouraged by Richard’s problems, on 28 July Saladin sprang a surprise attack on Jaffa, which he swiftly captured after a bombardment by his mangonels. While Ibn Shaddad was negotiating the surrender, his son Zahir fell asleep on watch. Suddenly Richard the Lionheart appeared offshore in a scarlet-flagged galley. He had arrived just in time: some Franks were still holding out. Firing an arbalest crossbow, he waded on to the beach – ‘red haired, his tunic red, his banner red.’ Without even time to take off his waders and don his armour, wielding a Danish battleaxe, accompanied by just seventeen knights and a few hundred infantry, Richard managed to retake the town in a stupendous display of flamboyant shock-fighting.

Afterwards, he teased Saladin’s minister: ‘This sultan of yours is a great man [yet] how is it he departed merely because I arrived? I only had my seaboots on and not even my breastplate!’ Saladin and Safadin were said to have sent Arabian horses to Lionheart as a gift, but such chivalry was often a delaying tactic for they soon counter-attacked. Richard repulsed them and then challenged the Saracens to single combat. He galloped with his lance up and down the ranks – but there were no takers.

Saladin ordered another attack, but his amirs refused. He was so enraged that he considered a Zangi-style crucifixion of his mutinous generals. However, he calmed himself and then invited them to share some juicy apricots that had just arrived from Damascus.

The king and the sultan had fought themselves to a standstill. ‘You and we together are ruined,’ Richard confided to Saladin. As they negotiated, both the warlords collapsed, desperately ill, their resources and wills utterly exhausted.