The Dream and the Tomb (41 page)

Richard had recovered his health and was flushed with victory. He proposed that the two kings make a vow to remain in the Holy Land for three years: time enough for them to destroy the armies of Islam. Philip, who was now suffering from dysentery, had no stomach for three years of campaigning, and there were urgent matters summoning him to France. He distrusted Richard's intentions and did not believe that the Holy Land could be conquered. When the bishop of Beauvais and the duke of Burgundy, who had brought Richard's plan to Philip, and had to listen to Philip's diatribes against Richard returned, Richard saw Philip's answer in their faces. He said, “It will be a shame and a disgrace for my lord if he goes away without having completed the business on which he came hither. But still, if he finds himself ailing, or in bad health, and is afraid lest he should die here, his will be done.” “And is afraid lest he should die here” contains more than a little malice, since it was the duty of a Crusader to die, if necessary, in the Holy Land.

Philip and Richard had to decide on many issues while there was still time. One of the more important issues concerned the King of Jerusalem. Which of the two contenders was the real king? Guy of Lusignan claimed the title by virtue of his marriage to Sybilla. Guy of Lusignan had led the Christian army to defeat on the Horns of Hattin, and had therefore, as some believed, forfeited the crown by his stupidity and ineptitude. Richard, remembering how well Guy of Lusignan had fought on Cyprus, was not inclined to believe that Hattin was entirely his fault. Conrad of Montferrat claimed the title by virtue of his marriage to Isabelle. Philip favored his claim because the marquis had fought with the French army before the walls of Acre. So they struck a balance. Guy of Lusignan was confirmed with the title, but was allowed to possess it only during his lifetime; after Guy's death Conrad would possess the title, and if he had a son by Isabelle, this son would in due course be crowned King of Jerusalem. Meanwhile Conrad was given the fiefs of Tyre, Sidon and Beirut, and the royal revenues would be shared equally between Guy and Conrad. In this way the pragmatic medieval mind resolved a problem that seemed almost beyond resolution.

At last, on July 31, Philip departed from Acre and made his way to Tyre where he found three Genoese galleys waiting to take him to Apulia. Wars were raging in France; he had excellent reasons for returning to his own country; Richard was glad to see him go.

As King of England, Richard carried little weight with the great body of
Frankish Crusaders. As Duke of Aquitaine, he carried a little more. As a man he was admired, worshipped, and feared. But it never occurred to him that Philip, however ungainly and maladroit, had an advantage he could never possess. Simply by being King of France, Philip was loved by the Frankish army.

At this time Leopold of Austria also left the Holy Land, unloved and unwanted. He had done too little to justify his existence there; he was quarrelsome and proud, and almost insanely jealous of the two kings who possessed the preponderance of power. Inside the walls of Acre the chief command went to the duke of Burgundy, who was closer to Richard than to Philip.

The kings, as usual, were remembered by the chroniclers. Sometimes, but very rarely, we hear of the exploits of the common soldiers. During the last clash with Saladin's forces, according to the Arab chronicler Baha ad-Din, an enormous Frank standing on a parapet drove off the Muslim attackers. He stood there, hurling stones with deadly accuracy, being helped by his fellows who handed him more stones as soon as one was aimed. He had received fifty wounds from arrows and stones thrown by the enemy. He was so covered with blood that he seemed to have turned scarlet, but he continued to throw stones to the very end. At last one of the Muslim officers was able to pitch a bottle of naphtha at him. It exploded, burning him alive.

The battle for Acre was, like all battles, ugly; but it possessed a special ugliness. The long siege reduced everyone to exhaustion and desperation. The Christians, hemmed in between the walls of Acre and the hills where Saladin's troops were waiting, forced to fight on two fronts simultaneously, became utterly merciless; and the Muslims inside the walls were equally merciless. On both sides the main body of the troops lived in misery and squalor. The prices of food on the Christian side are known. An egg cost a silver penny, which could also buy thirteen beans. A sack of grain cost exactly a hundred gold pieces. For ten copper pennies one could buy a stew of horse entrails. Strips of leather were shredded and boiled; a dead horse provided a hundred men with small feasts for a week. Bone meal, grasses, leaves, bark, earth were eaten. Soldiers died of starvation, scurvy, typhus, and the strange disease called
leonardie
, which reduced men to helpless lethargy. Saladin suffered from terrible boils from the waist downward, so that he could neither sleep nor rest; and one of the reasons why he did not attack the Christian camp may have been that he was too ill, and his army was too ill, to mount an attack. Corpses that lay unburied were devoured by rats or black clouds of flies settled on them; vultures and scavenging dogs were given splendid feasts. Scorching heat and rain, winter frosts and mud, made life nearly impossible. Like the Tafurs who had taken part in the siege of Antioch nearly a hundred years earlier, the majority of the Christian soldiers were living in total fear and squalor.
Even when they achieved victory, even when Acre surrendered, they were still starving, and only the knights received a few tidbits from the kings.

Richard announced that he was prepared to parlay with Saladin. He would return the prisoners in exchange for the True Cross, the Christian captives, and a large ransom. Saladin temporized. He sent costly presents and hoped to prolong the argument until fresh troops came up and a sudden descent on the Christian forces would decide the issue once and for all. Richard demanded that a list of important Christian captives should be supplied to him. Saladin possessed such a list but refused to supply it. The terms of surrender, which had been accepted by the garrison in Acre, seemed to Saladin to be merely the basis for an agreement to be arrived at later. Richard had set a time limit: the exchange of prisoners was to take place within a month. A month passed: the ransom money had not been received, the Christian prisoners had not been released; and though Christian ambassadors had been allowed to see the True Cross, which was hidden away in the treasury somewhere within Saladin's camp, its surrender had not taken place. Saladin was temporizing so obviously now that Richard lost all patience. He could not leave the prisoners in Acre and he could not take them with him to Jaffa, which lay seventy miles to the south. Jaffa was the seaport of Jerusalem, and would serve as a supply base for an attack on the Judaean hills. Richard decided that Saladin had no intention of keeping the agreement, and deserved exemplary punishment. On the morning of August 20, he ordered the killing of all the prisoners. He himself directed the massacre which took place a few miles from Acre on a hill called Ayyadieh. Richard's butchery was deliberately carried out in full view of the Muslim army. More than three thousand men, women, and children were killed on the hill of Ayyadieh. It was a remarkably clear summer day, and Saladin, from his field headquarters on the second range of hills, could see everything that was happening on Ayyadieh. He saw the parade of armored knights and thousands of infantrymen, and he saw the long train of Muslim prisoners bound together with ropes. Then he saw the flashing of swords and axes and lance heads, and the prisoners falling.

His army saw what he saw, and went charging down the hills, howling for revenge. But it was too late. The massacre had been conducted expeditiously; there were no survivors. Though the Muslims charged again and again, they were turned back. There came a rumor that many of the prisoners had swallowed gold coins, and while some of the Anglo-Normans were fighting off the Muslims, others were slitting open the bodies to find the gold. In the afternoon Richard simply abandoned the hill, and his army marched back in the direction of Acre. He had choreographed the massacre to the last detail. He was not surprised to hear that Saladin had made no effort to follow him.

Of all Richard's actions, the massacre was the most terrible. The portrait of the chivalrous Crusader king who behaved always with courtesy has no
foundation in fact: At Ayyadieh, he employed the tactics of terror in the modern way, with efficiency, cunning, and a sense of drama. Still, we should remember that massacre was the order of the day, and when the Saracens captured a fortress they were accustomed to massacring the captives, except for the leading knights, whose lives would be saved by the offer of a ransom. An unwritten code of war demanded that high officers on both sides were treated with courtesy and gentility, while the rest were treated like animals fit only for slaughter.

All that night the Muslim soldiers could be heard wailing over the headless corpses of the men, women, and children who had bravely withstood the siege of Acre for two years.

All hope of regaining the True Cross vanished after the massacre; it was rumored that Saladin, who had long been carrying it for safekeeping in his treasury, sent it to Damascus, where it was said to be buried under the portals of the chief mosque. The Christian prisoners held in Damascus were killed at Saladin's orders.

At dawn on August 24, Richard led his army out of Acre. Provisions for his troops, his siege engines, and the heavier instruments of war were carried by his ships, which sailed slowly, close to the shore.

THE army that moved along the coastal road to Jaffa was one of the most powerful the Crusaders had ever put in the field. It numbered about eighty-five thousand men, who were well armed and well equipped; but it was powerful mainly because it was under the protection of the fleet, because it was well organized, and because it was under the influence of a single well-wrought military mind. Richard and his general staff had thought out the problems of marching along the coastal road, knowing that an equally large Saracen army would be marching inland parallel to the Crusaders. There would be skirmishes and harassing attacks all along the way. There would be attempts to cut through the army, to separate its various parts, and to inflict damage where it was weakest. Richard, therefore, had to provide an order of march such that no part would be weaker than any other, and at the same time he had to arrange his troops so that they could take battle positions at a few moments' notice. In all this he succeeded brilliantly.

It is one of the few occasions when we can observe his mind working quietly and dispassionately. No doubt he had the assistance of the Templars, who were famous both for their daring and for their mastery of tactics. Since he had never previously traveled these roads, he relied on the experience of travelers, studied maps, and interrogated prisoners. His army was organized in twelve brigades and grouped in five divisions; each brigade included cavalry and infantry. They marched in three columns. On the right, near the seashore, were the pack animals and the human carriers, for there was never enough animal power and human beings could be made to carry enormous burdens. In the center rode the cavalry, and on the left the infantry. The Hospitallers and Templars formed the advance guard and rear guard. Richard rode up and down the lines as he pleased. The army had rested after the fall of Acre, and the men were in good spirits.

Baha ad-Din, the friend and chronicler of Saladin, watched Richard's
army from the high ground and could not conceal his admiration for its discipline and order. Here he is describing what he saw on August 31, 1191, when he took part in a hit-and-run attack by Saladin's light cavalry:

. . . the Moslems sent in volleys of arrows from all sides, deliberately trying to irritate the knights and force them to come out from behind the wall of infantry. But it was all in vain. The knights kept their temper admirably and went on their way without the least hurry, while their fleet sailed along the coast parallel with them until they arrived at their camping ground for the night.

They never marched a long stage, for they had to spare the foot-soldiers. Half of the infantry, when not actually engaged, carried the baggage and the tents, for there was a great lack of beasts of burden. It was impossible not to admire the patience shown by these people. They bore crushing fatigue, even though they had no proper military administration and derived no personal advantage. And so they finally pitched their camp on the farther side of the river of Caesarea.

Baha ad-Din's testimony to the solidity and fortitude of the Crusader army obviously reflects the opinion of Saladin, who had prepared what he hoped would be an ambush in which the entire army would be destroyed. Meanwhile, there were incessant skirmishes. By this time Saladin had acquired some Nubian troops, who, unarmed except for scimitars and shields, had a way of slipping into the camps at night and doing much damage. But the chief damage, as usual, came from the lightly armed cavalry, who swooped down whenever they saw an opportunity. Mostly they attacked the rear guard, where it was easier to pick off the lame, the halt, and the wounded.

The army marched only in the early hours of the morning, for about three hours. They seldom made more than eight or ten miles a day, and on alternate days they rested in camp. They encountered no fortresses, for Saladin had destroyed the fortifications of the captured towns and castles. The progress of this large, steady, well-oiled and relentless machine was so slow that it took nineteen days to cover the eighty miles between Acre and Jaffa. Once Jaffa had been fortified, the army would march inland and try to conquer Jerusalem.

At one time, the coastal road had been a great paved highway that allowed carts and chariots to drive quickly from Acre to Jaffa and beyond. Built by the Romans, paved with local stone from the hills, it had represented imperial power. Now it was lost under the burning white sand or appeared as little more than a track through the dry bush. The foot soldiers were scratched and torn by thorns, their faces were cut by the thick reed-forests
growing along the shore, or they fell up their knees in soft sand. Though there were no dangerous animals, there were dangerous insects. The Crusaders were attacked at night by tarantulas, which stung them and left a painful swelling. The knights could go to the doctors, who prepared sweet oils and balms that healed the swellings. The foot soldiers could not afford these unguents, but found a simpler way to deal with tarantulas. Someone discovered that tarantulas detested loud noises, and so they made the night miserable with the banging of drums, clashing of helmets, and the beating of basins, caldrons, and whatever metallic objects lay at hand. There was very little sleep during those nights when the tarantulas came out of the ground.