All Things Medieval

If the Children’s Crusade took place, the year was 1212. Whatever happened, that was the year. Pope Innocent III had been preaching Crusade, and more Crusade, for years. He was promoting the Spanish Crusade, the Crusade against the Cathars, and of course a new Crusade to the Holy Land (the 5th). Was it any wonder that an unauthorized Crusade might spring up in 1212?

It seems that something happened, but it’s unclear who was involved. Traditional legends say that two boys, one in France, one in Germany, began preaching Crusade to other children. Following their lead, bands of children swelled to crowds, a veritable unarmed army. Sure that their innocence would win where the sins of the adults had failed, they marched to the Mediterranean Sea and waited for it to miraculously open up. Then disaster took them as most were sold into slavery.

Contemporary historians are more cautious. Bands of unauthorized, unarmed (at best poorly armed) people did swarm like that in 1212, coming from France and Germany. But were they children? Or perhaps were they just swarms of paupers and beggars, who were also considered innocent like children? Did the two streams join and suffer one fate? Or were there two or more separate movements from these two places?

It seems most likely that all of these things were mostly true. Europe was becoming over-populated for its current economy, and there were some young men who could not find a good place in society. They were considered adults somewhere between 12 and 16, although in an apprenticing system they were not on their own until they were over 20. So probably we could call them children and adults, depending on how they’re seen. The leaders were shepherds, that is, rural workers in a marginal hill economy, not plowmen or vine-tenders in rich Burgundy. Their followers were probably similarly from poor, rural families that could not afford to settle sons in a town trade and could barely feed themselves. The diet of these European poor was mainly peas porridge, not the rich foods we think of as “European” now.

The young men picked up a religious vision in which they were not useless; in God’s kingdom they had value, and in this Crusade they could work miracles. In spirit, it was probably a lot like the popular movements of the 20th century in which people have gathered for the end of the world (or moved to Guyana). Many of the marchers believed they communicated specially with God or had miraculous powers. Town paupers joined the rural Crusaders as they passed through. They had nothing to lose.

The stream from Germany marched to Genoa, where they expected the sea to part. It did not, and some grew angry and felt cheated. However, many found work in the expanding shipping industry; Genoa was a good place for unemployed men to end up. The leader, Nicholas of Cologne, led a core band to Rome, where they met the Pope. The Pope blessed them but told them to return home. Exhausted by their travel over the Alps, few survived the walk back. Nicholas did not, but his father was held responsible by the furious families of other young men who died en route.

The stream from France first gathered around Paris, where the shepherd Stephan of Cloyes tried to deliver a letter from Jesus to the king. The people said that Stephan was working miracles, but the clerics at the University of Paris told the king to send them home. Stephan continued to preach as he made his way south toward the sea. Large bands of adults and adolescents followed him as far as they were able; the crowd grew and shrank, until finally thousands of them arrived in Marseilles. It’s not clear what happened in Marseilles. Probably many different things happened: some found passage on ships and later realized they were now slaves; some settled in Marseilles, some went home. The traditional story says that definitely they all became slaves; historians now question this conclusion.

Peter Raedts, a history professor in the Netherlands, made a detailed study of the original sources for the 1212 Crusade. In 1977, he published an article in the Journal of Medieval History that showed how thin its contemporary evidence was. Most sources gave a short passage about this Crusade, no more. Many sources that look contemporary to us were actually written 25 years later, so they were based on hearsay or distant memory. Apparently, the later the source, the more likely it is to say that children were involved.

Later sources may also be more likely to play up their being sold into slavery. Stories tend to grow in the telling. A single occurrence becomes a generality, and in the next telling it’s a universal. So in the end, we really don’t know. Europeans were still keeping records on parchment; it was in the next century that paper became widely available and regular people could start keeping journals and writing letters. Until then, if a king was not involved, we probably don’t know much about what happened.

During the Third Crusade’s years, power in Spain swung back in the Muslim direction, but by the time of the Fourth Crusade, the Christians were again ascendant. As in the Middle East, the key to not losing was to stop infighting and join a larger movement. Human nature being what it is, that was always harder than it sounds.

By 1194, there were five important Christian kingdoms: Portugal (based in Lisbon, prize of the Second Crusade), Leon, Castile, Navarre, and Aragon. Navarre was the smallest, but it was also set most securely in the Pyrenees. The language of these kingdoms was halfway between Spanish and French, in fact nearly identical to the language of Provence, home of the Cathars. There was minimal cultural barrier to French knights riding south to join these kingdoms’ Crusades, and the royal families on both sides of the mountains were tightly intermarried and related. Richard the Lion-Heart’s bride was from Navarre, and one of his sisters married the king of Castile.

In 1194, a truce between Castile and the Almohad king in Morocco expired. King Alfonso of Castile attacked Seville, with the help of the Order of Calatrava (Spain’s answer to the Knights of the Temple). The Almohad king, al-Mansur, brought a force from Africa to defend Muslim holdings, and the armies met at a field on the border of Castile. Alfonso had asked help from Leon and Aragon, but those reinforcements had not yet come.

Either king could have held back and just stayed out of reach, waiting. But King Alfonso did not wait, and in the battle, Castile lost badly. The losses were so severe that they abandoned the castles along their southern border. Toledo, the most important Christian capital of the time, was threatened.

Alfonso of Castile began building a stronger coalition and planning more carefully. Fifteen years passed, during which his southern border was never safe, and at any time, Muslims probably could have taken Toledo. But Alfonso’s luck held; the Almohads would generally rather go home to Morocco (much like the Franks wanting to go home from the Holy Land), so they made no determined effort. Finally the kings of Castile, Leon, Aragon, Navarre and Portugal agreed on a joint effort to drive the Almohads farther south. This was a diplomatic coup, since the Christian kingdoms were themselves often at war.

Matthew Paris, the English chronicler, claims that King John of England sent envoys to Morocco asking for military help against his rebellious barons—-in exchange for his own conversion to Islam. Likely? It’s a stretch. But if John’s envoys actually had some other message, then it’s just interesting that Matthew Paris thought the gossip he picked up about a conversion offer was plausible enough to report. Soon enough, John was forced to sign the Magna Carta on the battlefield.

In 1211, the Almohads captured Salvatierra Castle, which the Order of Calatrava had just built to replace the castles lost in the 1190s. Almohad gains were very bad news for the Christian towns along the southern border. To stop the Almohads from going further north, Pope Innocent III proclaimed a new Crusade. French knights who had missed the Holy Land voyages or couldn’t stomach fighting French villagers now came to join the combined Christian armies.

The story goes that a shepherd helped the Christian armies come through a pass in the Sierra Morena mountains, while the African army was off its guard, thinking the mountains impassable. The pass they used was actually a very ancient road in this region; there are prehistoric cave paintings in the Despeñaperros Canyon. I wonder if the shepherd knew multiple paths so that a large army could assemble on the other side fairly quickly, instead of trickling in, single file, over the course of a day. In any case, the shepherd marked the road with a cow’s skull and was rewarded with the hereditary title “Cabeza de Vaca” (Cow’s head). His descendant Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca made the title famous when he explored the New World.

The surprise attack worked, and the Almohad army was devastated. The Caliph escaped, but his survival in this case did not amount to success. In the next years, all of the Christian kingdoms pressed their advantage by seizing border cities, then cities farther and farther south. The original Castilian King Alfonso’s grandson Ferdinand took Cordoba in 1236 and Seville in 1248. In 1252, he was preparing to cross the Strait of Gibraltar, taking the battle to Morocco, but when he died these plans were abandoned. Still, talk about momentum! You can also see the Kingdom of Castile pulling ahead in the rivalry with other kingdoms. It was already moving into the position that it held two centuries later, when its Queen Isabella would merge Castile with Aragon for a united Spain.

Here’s a picture of the monument to the battle at Las Navas de Tolosa.

Saladin’s empire was split up among four sons, with his brother al-Adil receiving two important castles in Jordan. The oldest son was not a natural ruler. Uncle al-Adil had to broker peace among the brothers several times, until basically he just took over. Adil had been co-ruling with Saladin for years, so he had the most experience and connections. By 1200, Adil was formally the Sultan of Egypt, and his sons inherited after him.

There’s one interesting thing that happened while Saladin’s son was still ruling, before his death in 1198. Al-Aziz was the one Muslim ruler of Egypt who tried to tear down the idolatrous Pyramids! He decided to start with Pharaoh Menkaure, though it seems likely he didn’t know whose it was that he singled out. “Start with that one.” For eight months, a team tried to pull out stones. It seems likely that they were experienced at demolition, since Saladin’s men had destroyed many stone walls in Palestine and Syria. But when they came to Menkaure’s pyramid, they had little luck. It took about a day to remove one stone, and then the stone had to be cut in pieces to remove across the soft sand. When they gave up, they had made a vertical gouge in one side, but had not altered the structural integrity.

Adil’s son al-Kamil and two grandsons al-Adil II and as-Salih were the rest of the Ayyubid dynasty. By 1250, their rule had ended. Ayyubid extended family members were appointed to many regional ruling positions, and in turn they appointed friends and relatives to rule land grants called iqtas.

Saladin set out to make Egypt into a Sunni land again. He promoted Sunni institutions, but he also fired a large layer of Christians and Jews who had been working in government under the Fatimids. A lot of these were Armenians, promoted by Armenian viziers. But keeping Christians out of government was a bad long-term strategy, since a higher percentage of people who knew how to track the Nile’s flood cycle were Coptic (native Egyptian) Christians. So after Saladin’s capture of Jerusalem made his power secure, his government rehired Christian and Jewish scribes and officials.

Al-Kamil was long remembered by Copts as a good ruler. He ruled as a governor even before he became Sultan, so he got to know Egypt well. He chose to live permanently in Cairo and govern in a hands-on way. He became friends with priests and monks, too.

Wealthy Copts were secure enough to commission art and literature during al-Kamil’s reign. A team of painters created a large set of murals around the walls of the Chapel of St. Anthony, inside a monastery. Scholars wrote books to keep the Coptic language alive; it’s one of the few times when a very old language was being replaced but with time and interest in documenting it. They wrote dictionaries and grammars, and one book even had a rhyming story to teach Arabic speakers some Coptic words. Coptic was still spoken in the farming areas, but not in the cities outside of church.

During an easy time, there were conversions between Christianity and Islam in both directions. Egypt had two periods when harsh repression of Christians caused waves of mass conversion to Islam, but the Ayyubid period was not like that. Interestingly, one of the documented reasons to convert to Islam at this time was quite personal. A Christian monk had sworn to celibacy: if he slipped into sexual sin, one way out was to become a Muslim, who merely preferred that he marry the woman. But these converts had a hard time feeling good about what they’d done, and some converted back. This sort of case went before the Islamic Qadi (judge), and frequently they were given the death penalty, but not always. They always expected it and made their decision knowing what it meant.

One big issue for the Christian churches was that they had to get their appointments approved by the Muslim government. It was hard enough sometimes to agree on a Pope among themselves. During the first half of Ayyubid rule, there was a stalemate, and the church had no Pope. When Pope Cyril III was finally elected and approved by al-Kamil, many church offices had fallen vacant. Cyril sold some of the appointments for donations, a practice called “simony” and specifically forbidden. Cyril’s defense is that he was himself forced to pay a large fee (1000 silver dinars) to the Sultan to buy approval, and he was trying to make up that sum. Cyril was able to appeal to the Sultan (by then Kamil’s son) to preside over his trial, and the Sultan influenced the vote to be in his favor. It was always tempting for Christians, divided by sectarian allegiance (Armenians, Syrians, Greeks, Copts) or concerned about each other’s doctrine, to appeal to the Muslim ruler. And the Muslim rulers always stayed involved in church affairs this way.

Christians in Egypt always suffered when European Crusaders attacked Egyptian ports and fortresses. In our time, Muslims are all held responsible for terrorist attacks by radical Muslims; in that time, all Christians, especially the ones who answered to Constantinople, but also the native Copts, were held responsible for whatever the Franks did. In Syria, during the First Crusade, Christian Armenians had often helped deliver their cities to the Crusaders. In Egypt, during the later Crusades, they were very afraid that Christians would do the same. So during those times, the army more often tore down nearby churches to make fortifications. During those times, Christians were more likely to be fired from government jobs that required a 13th century security clearance.  There had already been a painful rift between Rome and Alexandria in the 6th century; now Egyptian Christians found themselves turning more and more anti-Rome (and anti-Constantinople) to prove that they had no sympathy with these invasions.

Al-Kamil’s sons were nothing like him, and their misrule ended the dynasty’s future. The longer-ruling one, Salih, invested in new buildings, particularly a new palace on Rawda Island in the Nile. In order to build this palace, he had to demolish a historic church that had only recently been repaired from flood damage under his father’s rule. He was a forbidding, severe man. Salih made up for losing support at home by importing more slave soldiers, with one key mistake: he brought in mostly Turkish mamluks, and this disturbed a previous balance of Turks and Kurds among their ranks. The Ayyubid family was mostly Kurdish. In theory, mamluks were loyal to whoever paid them, but in reality, Turkish mamluks were less inclined to support a Kurdish Sultan.

The Ayyubids will still be part of the next few Crusades, until 1250.

After the Fourth  Crusaders destroyed Constantinople in 1204, they set up a new government. It is known as the Latin Empire of Constantinople, but in Latin, it was Imperium Romaniae, so we could translate it as the Empire of Romania.  The Crusaders elected Baldwin Count of Flanders to become the new Emperor.

According to the treaty signed by all the Crusade leaders, the new Emperor Baldwin only controlled a quarter of the city. Venice controlled another 3/8, a section that included Hagia Sophia Basilica. The remaining 3/8 went to other Crusade leaders. Venice also gained control of 3/8 of the Empire, on paper.

In reality, Venice took over Crete and some other islands. The Crusaders divided Greek territory into states for vassal princes: a King of Thessalonica, Prince of Achaea (Greece), Duke of Athens, and Duke of the Archipelago. Boniface, who had met the Byzantine Prince in Germany, became King of Thessalonica. A knight named William of Champlitte became Prince of Achaea; he had to conquer it, but the only resistance was local. A knight named Otto de la Roche became Duke of Athens. You can see where the energy of the Fourth Crusade went; carving up their new territory in ways that had nothing to do with a Crusade.

The Greek nobles who had been ruling Constantinople established Empires in exile and kept struggling to retake territory. One family set up in nearby Nicaea, another in Epirus, another in Trebizond. These are known as the “Empires” of those three cities; all three rulers claimed the title.

Until 1261, when the Emperor in Nicaea finally reconquered the city, there were many battles and alliances as the Latins tried to hold on. Their new dynasty didn’t work out, and they never developed a loyal power base. Having to fight on two fronts, against Bulgaria and rebels in Greece, as well as the rival Greek Emperors around Turkey, they were spread too thin.

Thessalonica as a Crusader kingdom didn’t last beyond 1224. The Crusader states of Achaea and Athens lasted a surprising century. They weren’t reconquered by Greeks until about 1308. Through the 1300s, the titles were still passed down, along with some Italian ones like Prince of Taranto, as the minor royalty families merged and kept holding onto hope

A Latin Count of Salona hung onto power long enough to sell his county to the Knights of the Hospital, who lost it to the Turks in 1410.

The Duchy of Athens was conquered by a group of Catalan mercenaries paid by the Greek Emperor (now back in Constantinople, post 1261), but it became owned by a family in Florence, who ruled it until 1456, when Turks took it.

Venice ruled Crete until 1669, and the Ionian Islands until 1864, when they joined the modern state of Greece.

It’s a mixed history, sometimes with places conquered by Normans in Sicily blurring into the places taken by the Fourth Crusade. If you’re interested, research “Frankokratia” or “Latinokratia.”

Constantinople never fully recovered. With so much of its heartland Greek territory lost to Latins, and its eastern border constantly eaten away by Turks, it was ghost of its former strength when besieged by Ottoman Turks in 1453. It was still wealthy, but not as it had been before.

Let’s leave Jerusalem for a moment and take note of the burst of science and philosophy happening in Cordoba and Toledo at this time. Read more here about Maimonides, the Jewish scholar and physician who began his life in Andalusia and then became Saladin’s personal physician in Cairo.

During the time that Saladin was creating his empire in the east, a fierce sect of North Africans, the Almohads, had taken over most of western North Africa and much of Andalusia. They captured Seville in 1148 and Cordoba in 1149. They were battling back Christians in the north and the previous North African dynasty, the Almoravids, whom they pushed across the water to the Balearic Islands.

Normally, a North African conquest was not a big win for philosophy, but in this case, the second Almohad Caliph was a serious scholar. Abu Yakub Yusuf, ruling first from Marrakesh then from Seville after 1171, encouraged and protected scholars. This was important because for some time, there had been a power struggle between Muslims who believed that reason could grasp truth (and therefore favored scientific study) and those who considered elevation of reason a heresy against an unknowable Allah. The controversy began long before, under Abbasid Caliph al-Mamoun in the 9th century. In an empire that united church and state, the controversy put people in jeopardy of their lives.

But now, here in Cordoba, a new dynasty was choosing to suspend all such judgment and permit free thought and writing. Caliph Abu Yakub Yusuf also commissioned a statement of doctrine for Almohads, which was published in 1181. It began with the statement that, “It is by the necessity of reason that the existence of God, Praise Be To Him, is known.”

One of the scholars sheltered by the Caliph was Ibn Rushd, whose name passed to us via Spanish and Latin as “Averroes.” The Caliph and Ibn Rushd shared a love of Aristotle, whose works were not yet known in the Christian west but were widely available in Arabic. In 1179, Ibn Rushd was appointed Chief Judge in Seville and Cordoba, and he began writing a commentary on Aristotle. By 1195, when he fell out of favor after his Caliph’s death, he had written summaries, explanations, and original commentaries on all of Aristotle’s works except for The Politics, but also on Plato’s Republic. In the next century, Latin scholars translated his works and Aristotle’s, and Thomas Aquinas worked from those sources.

Averroes wrote his own philosophical works, and like all of the Muslim polymaths, he was also a physician who wrote summaries and commentaries of medical books. His work on the general principles of medicine was translated into Latin and became a standard textbook in Italian and French universities for the rest of the Middle Ages. In his original philosophical works, he argued for God’s existence with what we’d call an “Intelligent Design” argument.

Ibn Zuhr lived in Seville, the son of an aristocratic old Arab family. He became a physician, as had all of the men in his family for six generations. His life in Seville was interrupted by falling out of favor with the Almoravids, and he fled to Morocco, but when the Almohads conquered Seville, he moved back and began working again under the protection of Caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf. He, too, wrote many books; his name came to us through Spanish and Latin as Avenzoar.

Ibn Zuhr, or Avenzoar, wrote a companion volume to Averroes’ medical textbook. Of course, both men worked from the idea that bodies must be balanced with food, hot with cold, dry with wet, for health. All medical science at this time was based on Aristotle’s “four humors.” But in Kitab al-Taysir, he also described the Scabies mite, the smallest animal that could be seen without magnification, which would not be available for several more centuries. He also reported that he had practiced and perfected some surgical techniques by operating on animals, like giving a goat a tracheotomy. In other work, he suggested plastic surgery for ungainly facial features. Perhaps most remarkably of all, his daughter and grand-daughter became obstetricians.

Ibn al-Baitar was born after Ibn Zuhr’s death, and near the end of Ibn Rushd’s life, but in the same intellectual environment that they had helped to shape. He lived in Malaga and studied botany. Botany was a branch of herbal medicine, so he was collecting plants and cataloging them as to their use. He studied plants all over Spain, then moved south into Morocco. He collected plants there, and worked his way across North Africa through Tunis, Algeria and Libya. He traveled to Constantinople and its nearby Antalya region. He ended up back in Cairo, serving Saladin’s successors as their Chief Physician and herbalist. When he followed Sultan al-Kamil to Damascus, he was able to study the plants of Palestine and Syria, too.

Ibn al-Baitar’s major work was, of course, an encyclopedia of herbs. It compiled in alphabetical order all of the herbs known to the ancients, as well as another 400 discovered by Muslim doctors. Each entry told what he knew about the plant, and then provided citations from older writers, both Greek and Arabic. His second major work was an encyclopedia of medicine, which drew heavily from his herbal work.

Probably near the end of his life, Ibn al-Baitar described a new chemical that he called “Chinese snow.” It was saltpeter, the earliest explosive gunpowder. He died in 1248, just before gunpowder began to be produced in Europe and the Middle East. In 1270, another Arabic writer (Hasan al-Rammah) described how to make and purify saltpeter. That’s how it all began.

The weakness of the Crusades was always that its armies did not represent any immigration wave that actually wanted to come live in Palestine or Syria. Turkish migration was real, so its pressure on Anatolia and Syria never let up for long. But Europeans rarely wanted to leave Europe; they came with an eye on fame and fortune and there were always ties drawing them back. So it was with the Third Crusade, even more than with the First and Second ones.

The French king went home as soon as Acre had surrendered, but this set up problems for King Richard. The two kings had agreed both to go on Crusade because that way neither would invade behind the other’s back. It wasn’t long after Philip arrived in Paris that Richard began to receive reports that his younger brother John and the French king were plotting against him. His next year as the highest-ranking Crusader in the Holy Land must be seen with this fear always in the background, pressuring him to quit and go home.

Richard seems to have had a very good head for military operations, not just for single combats or tournaments (he was good at them, too). It was his strategic skill that kept the Third Crusade going at all. Having captured the port of Acre, the Crusaders needed to move on to a new target, probably Jerusalem.

But before they could approach Jerusalem, they would need to go many miles south along the coast. Saladin’s forces had systematically demolished all fortresses along that route, as well as all of the forts on the inland road from Jaffa to Jerusalem. His army also intended to attack Crusaders on the march. Even a short trip under these conditions was terribly hazardous, and the distance from Acre to Jaffa, then to Jerusalem, would take days or weeks.

Richard’s plan was to combine his two strengths into one unusual travel itinerary. He had a large force of fighting men (many French knights stayed on after their king went home), and he had a large navy. The navy was not large enough to move the army in one quick (and safe) trip, but it was large enough to carry most of their provisions. The army began to march as close to the coast as physically possible, sometimes along beaches. The navy moved reserve forces, supplies, and support staff within sight of the army, with planned stops every few days to resupply the marchers. Wounded or sick men were transferred to ships at those points, while others could catch up and join them.

Richard then marched with a steady pace that never wore his army out, stopping at good camping places. It was traditional military strategy to move very fast in a situation like this, and Saladin had prepared his own supply train for a rapid campaign. Saladin was also up against some time limits, because he still had not really unified support behind his leadership in Syria. The slower Richard’s pace, the more likely that some of Saladin’s Syrians would desert him.

They fought many skirmishes and one major pitched battle near Haifa, but ultimately, the Crusaders were too many and too well-supplied to be stopped. The plan worked.

Richard’s army finally occupied the torn-down ex-fortress of Jaffa, and the Crusaders generally set about rebuilding all of the walled towns and forts in the region. It took many months to achieve this goal. Gradually, they created a defensible strip between Jaffa and Tyre. In this way, the Kingdom of Jerusalem could technically claim that it still existed, though without Jerusalem and only as a strip of land along the coast.

But who was its King? In the early days of Acre’s capture, a council of the European kings had chosen Conrad Lord of Tyre, who was now married to little Isabella, as king. Guy of Lusignan bought Cyprus from the Templars (who had bought it from Richard) and set up lordship there. But King Conrad’s life was very short, as it turned out. Assassins killed him in an alley; they were probably Nizaris who were now taking the Latins seriously and also loosely working with Saladin.

The European leaders met again and selected the Count of Champagne, who was a widower, to marry Isabella this time. Isabella was actually pregnant with Conrad’s baby, so it was all kind of weird even for the Crusaders.

Ultimately (spoiler alert) the kingdom never really got back on its feet as such. Isabella’s baby was a girl named Maria, starting off a chain of young female heiresses who were married off as young as possible to try to produce a new heir, until finally they blended into an existing European royal house. It’s not really worth keeping track of them from this point on, although Europe did continue to call them royalty.

Now the Crusaders had a serious problem: their forces were energized for one task alone: to recapture Jerusalem. And yet Richard was absolutely certain that they could never succeed. He argued that with the difficulty of re-supply over the land route, the easy availability of military observations to Saladin, and the generally difficult terrain of the city, it was nothing but a futile, expensive suicide mission. Instead, Richard believed they must march south to take Ascalon and then continue attacking northern Egyptian cities, as the Baldwins had been doing. He led them to Ascalon, where they rebuilt the walls.

The Crusade hit a leadership crisis then. It was Richard’s time to lead; his march to Jaffa had been highly praised, and his personal courage was renowned all over the region. But he kept thinking perhaps he should go home, so he did not argue stridently in favor of assaulting Egypt. Other leaders moved to head to Jerusalem, twice. Both times, they turned back. The last feint at Jerusalem that suddenly turned back really just ended the Crusade.

What we know now shows just how important spy intelligence always is. That is, Saladin was on the point of abandoning the defense of Jerusalem to fall back to some surer stronghold like Damascus. Had the Crusaders kept marching, they would never have quit talking about the miracle of arriving in Jerusalem to find its troops gone and its gates barely defended. But in spite of their just having captured a baggage caravan from Egypt, Richard finally stopped halfway to Jerusalem and headed back to Ascalon. Perhaps the baggage capture was part of his reason: it had contained not only wheat but gold and silk, and this loot would fund a dignified exit and perhaps some profit.

Richard and Saladin both became very sick at the end of this campaign. Richard’s illness was acute and made him hardly able to settle truce terms with Saladin. Perhaps that’s why his terms were so easy. They gave back the newly rebuilt Ascalon! In the end, the only gain of the Third Crusade was that the Latins held a few coastal cities from Tyre to Jaffa, and pilgrims were permitted to see Jerusalem for a fee. Saladin’s illness came on more seriously as weeks passed, so that he died in Damascus the following year.

Richard recovered and headed to Europe—-where, famously, he was arrested by the Germans and held prisoner for a hefty ransom. The story about his minstrel, Blondel, seeking him from castle to castle is as factual as the tale of Frosty the Snowman, and in about the same way. Both were popular song-stories that took on a life of their own (so to speak!). Actually his location was well known, but it wasn’t practicable to rescue him, apart from paying the ransom.

Richard remained popular in English eyes because he did gain fame as a knight and war leader, which they valued. But his reign cost England very badly, between his military taxation and the raising of his ransom. The drains this dashing king put on his nation were part of the background of the Magna Carta that barons forced his brother to sign. Special taxes were limited to two occasions: the marriage of one daughter, the knighting of one son. They didn’t say “…and no Crusades,” but it looks that way to me. He left his mark.

The Crusader royal line had now devolved into a weak, chaotic state from which it never recovered. The leper king left two sisters, with the direction that European kings should decide between them. Although Jerusalem could no longer actually be ruled by either one, the European lords still all coveted the title. The “kingdom” of Jerusalem could go on.

Saladin granted Sibylla’s request to free her husband Guy of Lusignan. Guy and Sibylla sought refuge in Tyre, but Conrad refused to let them in. They literally camped outside the walls as they could, until an epidemic wiped out Sibylla and her daughters. Guy still claimed to be the King, but the faction against him forced young Isabella to divorce her husband and marry Conrad, the lord who now ruled Tyre. Conrad could now claim the same right to be king! Both were utter newcomers to the region, but in a time of chaos, that doesn’t matter much.

Even before the European kings started to arrive, Guy had already begun a siege of the port of Acre, using all of the refugee forces available. The King of Sicily had sent ships, and so did the Archbishop of Pisa. Other forces arrived, so that during 1189, knights from Flanders, France, Germany, Italy and even Armenia took part. Saladin’s army had tried to lift the siege, leading to a complicated battle in which first one side, then the other, had the upper hand. At one critical point, Frankish knights charged up the hill to where Saladin’s field camp stood. Slaves in the Muslim camp began doing their own looting and escaping, while the Frankish knights also got distracted and joined in. Muslim soldiers chased the slaves, German knights chased an escaping horse, and chaos reigned. In the end, the besieging army hung on, not exactly by winning, but by not budging from their trenches.

Saladin’s army completely encircled them on land, although he could not dislodge them. Reinforcements came from Mosul and Baghdad. But every month, a new contingent of eager Crusaders arrived. Every month, too, many of them died from tropical diseases to which they had little immunity. The two sides were built up at almost an even rate, each army growing to match the other.

Muslim records say that at one point, a fleet of Frankish prostitutes landed and set up camp on the beach. The Muslim historians laughed, but not only did their own men sometimes slip away to visit the French girls, those same girls became part of a beach-based, knife-wielding shore patrol. Muslim frogmen trying to take messages into the harbor of Acre had one more hazard.

The siege of Acre, lasting so long and involving so many men from all over Europe, served as a military training school. Both sides had similar technology, such as Greek fire, and both sides could use mechanical engines like catapults. Both sides had fleets of ships to support them. The advantage was now with one side, now with the other. Inside Acre, a craftsman from Damascus invented a variant of Greek fire, a new chemical formula, and burnt down the first round of Crusader siege engines. On the sea, the Europeans gained the advantage in a ferocious sea battle, allowing them to restrict food ships from arriving in Acre. Saladin snuck a few ships in with a plan of the sailors shaving their beards and dressing like Franks, flying Cross flags, and letting pigs run around on deck! (It worked.) On land, the Europeans dug trenches and heaped up earthworks so that in the next pitched field battle, they could resist a tremendous assault.

If the Europeans had been primitive by comparison with the “developed world” of the Near East during the First Crusade, their engineers and leading knights now had learned all the tricks. (And all of these devilish ways of slaughtering other human beings came straight back to bolster the dynastic wars of Europe.) The siege of Acre was a milestone in European military history.

King Philip of France arrived and his men began to build more siege engines. Then King Richard came from Cyprus with Guy, who had rushed to join him on the nearby island. Richard supported Guy’s right to be king, while Philip supported Conrad’s. The Crusader leadership was more divided than ever.

But meanwhile, the siege went on. Diseases continued to ravage both sides, but especially in the Frankish trenches. Among them, King Richard fell ill with something like scurvy and could only lead the troops from a litter. The mood on both sides grew more desperate and vicious. Corpses were used to fill moats and trenches; more corpses were used to pollute the rivers. More and more siege engines were built, and they included engineering advances. They could throw larger stones longer distances, because they had more leverage and speed. Large stones rained on Acre mercilessly. Towers and walls grew weak, mined from below and smashed from above. There was vicious hand to hand fighting at every point where the walls had begun to fall. It went on, day after day.

At length, the starving city sent word to Saladin that it was ready to negotiate terms of surrender. Surrender was accepted by the Franks, with provisional terms including the return of the True Cross relic. The fighting ended; Saladin’s army moved back a quarter mile. Christian forces occupied the city, and the Muslim garrison became hostages to the negotiation process.

Meanwhile, a disastrous thing happened: the King of France and Duke of Austria both went home, leaving Richard to handle it all. Both had very pressing matters in their kingdoms that they really had to attend. Richard was the supreme commander now, the highest ranking ruler.

Saladin began collecting the ransom money for Acre’s Muslim garrison prisoners, and the terms were negotiated back and forth. A first payment was made, and some Christian prisoners released, when suddenly Richard rejected the terms of the negotiation and asked for a complete list of prisoner names. Saladin didn’t produce a list immediately, and Richard decided that he was stalling for time, hoping a reinforcing army would arrive to restart the battles. This may have been true, but it was not in keeping with Saladin’s personal history for handling terms. It was, however, in keeping with Richard’s personal history for impatience.

King Richard held a mass execution of all Muslim prisoners, the whole garrison. European records state that there were about 2600 men executed. He even marched them up to the same hill where Saladin’s camp had once been pitched. The negotiation was over; there was nothing left to talk about, except for everyone in the region to marvel at the savagery of the English king. His execution order became the most famous event of Richard’s life. And Saladin executed all Christian prisoners in retaliation.