God's War: A New History of the Crusades (77 page)

To resolve the issue, Richard skilfully used his authority as the undoubted commander-in-chief to convene a supposedly objective committee to decide on whether to attack Jerusalem or pursue Richard’s preferred southern Palestine policy of threatening Egypt. The composition of the committee guaranteed the result of its deliberations: five Templars, five Hospitallers, five Jerusalem barons and five Frenchmen. All except the French were well known to favour caution and, thus, the Egyptian policy. By excluding any of his own vassals Richard could be seen to be acting impartially, but on the side he exerted heavy pressure and moral blackmail. The committee opted for withdrawal. Even so, doubt prevailed until the last moment before, on 4 July, Richard ordered a general retreat to the coast. Disappointment inadequately describes the bitterness recorded even by writers sympathetic to Richard. Saladin watched the disconsolate and acrimonious march down to the plain. It turned out to be a decisive moment. The next hostile western European army to come as close to Jerusalem as Richard’s crusaders was led by General Edmund Allenby in December 1917.

Any semblance of Christian unity now collapsed. Blame was freely flung about, the retreat costing Richard’s reputation dear. The remaining French left in disgust, refusing to follow an Egyptian scheme. In any case, this much-promoted plan was increasingly revealed as at best impractical and at worst wishful thinking. Richard lacked the men, money or ships and was eager to return to the west to save his dominions from the rapacity of John and Philip II. A policy of raids on the Nile Delta or hopes of exploiting possible divisions within the Ayyubid empire after Saladin’s death belonged to a hypothetical future not the circumstances of the summer of 1192. Immediately, the strategic and diplomatic options became clearer. Saladin was safe in Jerusalem: Richard in Ascalon and Jaffa. Richard, directly or through Henry of Champagne as lord of the Jerusalemite Franks, was openly pushing for a quick settlement. He now admitted total victory was beyond his reach. He also judged that Saladin too was in trouble: ‘you and we together are ruined’.
⁴⁷
Claims to Jerusalem were abandoned. New, ingenious ideas for partition
were proposed, even a post-crusade military alliance. However, Saladin demanded the demolition of Ascalon as the price for any agreement. The balance of power in southern Palestine had to be shifted if either side were to agree to what both desired, the end of the war.

In late July, Richard returned to Acre ostensibly to plan an attack on Beirut in an attempt to lure Saladin away from the new Christian bases in southern Palestine. In Richard’s absence, Saladin launched a surprise attack on Jaffa. If he could take the port, the whole Christian position in the region would be seriously undermined if not destroyed, their conquests split, their shipping vulnerable and the precariousness of Richard’s position exposed. The Turks would reap huge and immediate diplomatic as well as military advantage. The stalemate would be broken. This fifth, final crisis of the Palestine war would determine its outcome.

The Turks began their assault on 28 July. By 31 July, their mangonels and sappers had destroyed whole sections of the walls. The modest garrison agreed to surrender the town, withdrawing to the citadel while Jaffa was sacked. That night, as the garrison prepared to evacuate the citadel under the supervision of Saladin’s agent, Ibn Shaddad himself, Richard appeared offshore with a small fleet. He had learnt of Jaffa’s plight just three days earlier. A relief column hurriedly despatched from Acre under Henry of Champagne had been stopped at Ceasarea. However, despite contrary winds, the king’s flotilla arrived while most of the citadel still remained in Christian hands. On 1 August, after some confusion over whether the Turks had already occupied the citadel, Richard, heavily outnumbered, launched his famous attack, being one of the first to wade ashore from his boats at the head of his small army. Shock, surprise and the power of his crack force gave Richard a highly improbable, if dramatic, victory. Ibn Shaddad, who watched Richard lead his men through the breakers, was impressed: ‘He was red-haired, his tunic was red and his banner was red, as was his device.’
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More significantly, after clearing out the astonished and alarmed Turks from both the citadel and town, Richard consolidated his hold by repulsing a concerted Muslim surprise counter-attack begun on the night of 4/5 August that literally caught Richard and his companions with their breeches down.
⁴⁹
This victory against heavy odds – apparently Richard had only seventeen knights and a few hundred infantry – infuriated Saladin, who must have recognized its importance. The fighting at Jaffa
secured more than Richard’s legendary status as a warrior and general. It restored the strategic stalemate. Richard could not take Jerusalem; Saladin could not drive him from southern Palestine. While Saladin’s assault on Jaffa had been brilliantly opportunist, its failure dealt deep psychological as well as military blows. Negotiation became the only option for both sides who increasingly resembled tiring heavyweight boxers slugging it out while dropping from injury and fatigue.

Richard’s exertions at Jaffa proved almost more fatal than the weapons of the Turks. His health had been wretched ever since Acre. He now fell dangerously ill. To this was added the growing alarm that his possessions in France were in danger of being lost to the conspiracy between John and Philip II. Urgency to reach agreement transcended all other considerations. With his physical and political energy sapped, Richard capitulated to Saladin’s insistence on the demolition of the walls of Ascalon he had spent so much time and effort constructing only a few months earlier. That obstacle removed, agreement soon followed; the Treaty of Jaffa was formally sworn on 2 September. In return for a three-year truce, which included Antioch and Tripoli, Palestine was to be partitioned. The Christians were to retain their conquests of Acre, Jaffa and the intervening coast; the walls of Ascalon were to be demolished; the coastal plain around Ramla and Lydda was to become a condominium. Freedom of access was guaranteed to members of each faith across the other’s territories.
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Specifically, Christian pilgrims were permitted to visit the Holy Sepulchre unmolested. With a mixture of excitement and understandable unease at the presence of so many Turkish soldiers, many crusaders fulfilled their vows and visited the Holy Places before returning to Europe. Hubert Walter bishop of Salisbury, who led one of the three parties of crusaders to go up to Jerusalem, was even entertained by Saladin, a reminder of the courtly manner in which the diplomatic aspects of what otherwise had been a desperate and bloody conflict had been conducted. Bishop Hubert was shown the relic of the True Cross, which had been a significant omission from the final treaty, and discussed Richard’s qualities with the sultan. More practically, Hubert extracted from Saladin a promise to allow a skeleton staff of Latin clergy to officiate at the Holy Sepulchre, at the church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and the church of the Annunciation in Nazareth. Either from genuine conviction or as a face-saving device, or both, Richard declined the opportunity to fulfil his vows at the Holy Sepulchre,
deliberately leaving open the prospect of a return. Thus, he never met Saladin except in the legends and romances that began to be concocted within a few years. The crusade was at an end.

Richard sailed from Acre on 9 October not, as he may have hoped, to a hero’s welcome, nor, as he may have feared, to a political crisis. Instead he found himself in a German prison for over thirteen months. After shipwreck near Venice, he was apprehended at Vienna on 21 December by his enemy Leopold of Austria when trying to find a way back incognito to Normandy and England. A few weeks later he was handed over to Henry VI of Germany, in whose custody he remained until February 1194. It was a remarkable fate for the most famous Christian warrior of his time and provided, as had so many of the events since news of Hattin first reached the west in the autumn of 1187, much food for moralists’ judgementalism. Ironies and bitter chance had coursed the Third Crusade, this final act not least. Earlier in 1192, Richard had vowed to remain in the east until the spring passage of 1193.
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If he had, he would have been on hand when, on 4 March 1193, Saladin died in Damascus.

Contemporary responses to the Third Crusade were as equivocal as its outcome. None questioned the heroism; many seemed to have doubted both the cost and the achievement. A vociferous apologist for the expedition and of Richard as its leader, Ambroise, possibly a Third Crusade veteran himself, acknowledged the criticism:

Yet many people ill-informed
Said in their foolishness that naught
Of good in Syria was wrought,
Since they won not Jerusalem.
⁵²

He also admitted the crushing casualties, from disease as much as battle. On the day the Treaty of Jaffa was sworn, Balian of Ibelin told Ibn Shaddad that he reckoned that perhaps as many as 20 per cent of crusaders had died in battle, but many more through illness or drowning. He thought that less than 50 per cent of the total Christian force survived, an impression, if not numbers, confirmed by western sources. William of Newburgh, writing shortly afterwards in northern England, pitched the losses at over 75 per cent: ‘not a quarter returned home’.
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One stock justification of the discrepancy between sacrifice and tangible
success was to emphasize, as did William and Ambroise, the celestial ‘other Jerusalem’ these victims had won.
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Not all were convinced. Before the expeditions had even departed some sceptics, with a certain logic, had argued that God ‘could avenge himself without all these soldiers having to cross the sea’.
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After 1192, God’s purpose seemed more clouded than ever. Even if the theology remained unchallenged and human sin lay behind terrestrial failure, the loss of so many invited the charge of waste. Introducing a long list of notable casualties of the crusade, Gilbert of Mons squared this circle of blame by wondering at the extremes of sin that could have resulted in so many fine princes and knights from all parts of Christendom achieving so little: ‘they recovered only the city of Acre’.
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In fact, on the material side of the crusade’s balance sheet, the capture of Acre proved a major triumph, providing the otherwise ateliotic restored kingdom of Jerusalem with a commercial centre of international importance. The effective conquest of significant parts of the coastal plain allowed for the establishment of a territorial state that, with further additions in the decade after 1192, lasted intact until the 1260s, a modest but not the most insignificant player in the increasingly desperate contest for control of the Fertile Crescent from the Persian Gulf to the Nile Valley. The Third Crusade cast a long shadow over the future. The incorporation of Cyprus into Christian Outremer provided a new base and source of wealth and aristocratic opportunity. The Treaty of Jaffa of 1192 acted as a model for future diplomacy. For most of the next seventy years truces determined the relations between the Christian rulers of mainland Outremer and their Muslim neighbours, only unreflective or partisan westerners regarding the practice as irreligious. Every significant crusade that reached the Levant between 1192 and 1254 either sought or was forced to accept treaties with the infidel. The experience of the Third Crusade enshrined the understanding of the significance of sea-power to Christian prospects in the eastern Mediterranean. No new expeditions went by land for another 200 years. Richard’s Egypt strategy quickly became orthodoxy. Partly this resulted from the most glaring failure of the Third Crusade, Jerusalem. The arguments of Richard and his apologists that the key to the Holy City lay in Cairo seemed to have been persuasive. The continued Muslim occupation of Jerusalem supplied another lasting legacy. Unlike in the years 1099–1187, the Holy Land stood as a permanent, unavoidable
criticism of Christian sin or disobedience, keeping the
negotium Terrae Sanctae
at the centre of religious politics and devotional populism for more than another century. Perhaps in that sense, those who argued for the spiritual success of the Third Crusade were right. The limited temporal achievement in Palestine paled beside the effect on the spiritual landscape of western Christendom.

The Fourth Crusade

15

‘Ehud’s Sharpened Sword’
¹

Two decades after Richard I left the Holy Land in 1192, James of Vitry, prominent preacher, intellectual, monastic patron and ecclesiastical insider, future bishop of Acre and cardinal, was drumming up support for a new expedition to the east. His message was simple and uncomfortable. As long as Jerusalem remained under infidel occupation, all faithful Christians had an unavoidable moral duty to help regain Christ’s patrimony, in the same way that vassals were legally obliged to help their secular lords, except that God’s service transcended law and offered eternal rewards. The task was clear. But, he asked, where now was the zeal of the Old Testament heroes Mattathias, the Maccabees, Phinehas, Shamgar or Samson? ‘Where is Ehud’s sharpened sword?’
²

By this time, during the preaching of the Fifth Crusade after 1213, such rhetoric was standard. It reflected in detail the theology of James’s master, Pope Innocent III, which gave a new precision to a universal concept that equated service to God with crusading. For Innocent, the trials of the Old Testament Israelite heroes were of contemporary relevance not just oratorical resonance. ‘Wounds that do not respond to the healing of poultices must be lanced with a blade.’ Fighting for God was the ‘servant’s service’ to his Lord, a test of faith ‘as gold in a furnace’ which determined salvation or damnation, not just for warriors but for all Christians. For Innocent the crusader was ‘following the Lord’, his ‘service to Jesus Christ’ regarded in quasi-liturgical as well as feudal terms. It was imperative that all Christians were able to join this ‘war of the Lord’. In his great crusade encyclical
Quia Maior
of 1213, Innocent tellingly refashioned the central crusading text from Matthew 16:24: ‘If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me’: ‘To put it more plainly: “If anyone wishes to follow me
to the crown
, let him also follow me
into battle, which is now proposed as a test for all men
.”’
³
The elevation of the Holy Land war into the epitome of Christian devotion rested on the unique plenary indulgences offered to participants, access to which Innocent wished to extend to non-combatants. In turn, this depended on the emotional and psychological pull of the Holy Land, a place where God ‘accomplished the universal sacrament of our redemption’,
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a sanctified space that provided inspiration on all four levels of contemporary scriptural exegesis: literal, the site of the historical events of the Old and especially New Testaments; allegorical, as a representation of the Church Militant; moral (or tropological), a metaphor of the inner life and struggle of the soul; and mystical, an image of paradise.